Kraniauskas, Rhetorics of Populism. Laclau

8/9/2019 Kraniauskas, Rhetorics of Populism. Laclau

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Rhetorics of populism

Ernesto Laclau, 19352014

John Kraniauskas

The publication of Ernesto Laclaus The RhetoricalFoundations of Society, only weeks after his death in

April 2014, confirms his status as one of the fore-most contemporary political theorists of the Left.*

Since the 1980s, his influence has been extraordinary,particularly in the UK and Latin America: rethink-ing democratic leftist politics during and after theThatcher era, in the former, and providing theoreticallegitimacy to the recent neo-populist pink tide, inthe latter. On the occasion of his death, the Argentinepresident Cristina Kirchner insisted that Laclau hadthree virtues: he thought, did so with great intel-ligence, and in open conflict with the paradigmsissuing from the centres of world power. The latepresident of Venezuela, Hugo Chvez, also reportedlyconsulted On Populist Reason (2005), and perhaps even

discovered a discreet outline of his portrait there.In common with Politics and Ideology in Marxist

Theory (1977), New Reflections on the Revolution of OurTime (1990) and Emancipation(s) (1996), The RhetoricalFoundations is an in-between work of conceptuallabour; a collection of essays announcing a morefinished monograph to come, of the kind repre-sented by Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towardsa Radical Democratic Politics (1985), co-written with

Chantal Mouffe, and the more recent On PopulistReason, in which Laclau systematically set outhis now paradigmatic versions of the concepts ofhegemony and populism. Most of these essayshave been included in collections already publishedin Argentina: Misticismo, retrica y poltica (2002)

and Debates y combates: por un nuevo horizonte dela poltica (2008); whilst all but one of them havebeen published in English before. The exception,Antagonism, Subjectivity and Politics (2012), is the

most recent. It was published originally in Spanishin the Buenos Aires-based journal Debates y Combate,created and directed by Laclau himself in 2011. Afterhis retirement, Laclau spent a considerable amount

of time in the city commenting on and participat-ing in the politics of the region. It is one of fouressays in the book written after the publication ofOn Populist Reason. The others are: Why Construct-ing a People is the Main Task of Radical Politics(a response to Slavoj ieks unearthly criticisms ofOn Populist Reason; Laclau refers to his Martianiza-tion of politics, in which their different Lacans Gramscian and Hegelian, respectively are foughtout); Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy (a criticalengagement with the work of Georgio Agamben inwhich the latters constitutive but unilateral notion

of the sovereign ban is transformed, via the idea ofa two-sided mutual ban, into constitutive radicalantagonism Laclau is thinking through revolutionhere); and Articulation and the Limits of Metaphor,to which I return in some detail below.

Rhetorical Foundations thus looks back to themaking of On Populist Reasonas well as forward to themaking of something new. Indeed, its essays experi-ment with ideas either already fairly well unpacked

in On Populist Reason or, like the importance forpolitics of rhetorical figuration, only suggested there.The four most recent essays are Laclaus now-finalcontributions to an ongoing project, announcedin the Introduction to Rhetorical Foundations, ofproducing a rhetoricized political ontology of the

social out of his previous account of political reasonqua populism; that is, as grounded in the kind ofpolitical antagonism and hegemonic articulationemerging from rejected political demands (populist

* Ernesto Laclau, The Rhetorical Foundations of Society, Verso, London and New York, 2014. 256 pp., 60.00 hb., 16.99 pb.,978 1 78168 171 8 hb., 978 1 78168 170 1 pb. Page references to this edition appear in brackets within the main text.


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antagonism) that institute new, democratized, socialformations (hegemony); as most radically, perhaps in different ways with the recent Chvez and EvoMorales governments of Venezuela and Bolivia; bestconceived, here, as national-democratic revolutions.Inso far as Laclaus final book seeks to rhetoricize suchantagonisms and hegemonic articulations further

(further than, for example, the psycho-semiotic ideaof an empty signifier already developed by Laclaurequires), from the point of view of his now sadlytruncated philosophical project to produce an ontol-ogy, it is these essays especially Antagonism andArticulation that constitute the volumes mostimportant contributions.

In Antagonism, Subjectivity and Politics Laclau

returns to arguments he has rehearsed previouslyin which he opposes Lucio Collettis Kantian notionof real opposition to Hegelian-Marxist dialec-

tical contradiction so as to produce a version ofantagonism, developed in his account of populism,consonant with the version of non-dialectizablehegemonic articulation developed in Hegemony andSocialist Strategy. He does so now, though, through abrief reflection on Heideggers notion of ontologicaldifference, seeking so as to fold it back into hisversion of hegemony to think through how thegap between Being and beings may be bridged asan anti-foundational foundation. The latter is anew departure for Laclau, but since it remains only

slightly developed as a feature of a possible politicalontology (and since Laclau repeatedly displays a realability at producing versions that fit quite neatly intohis own developing conceptual schemas), in whatfollows I concentrate on the politics of rhetoricalfiguration. This has the additional advantage offacilitating a general review of his political theoryas it stands today.

Rhetoric

The performativity of language has been centralto Laclaus political theory since the 1970s: first,as interpellation, and more recently in On Popu-

list Reason as what might be best described as aperformative principle of hegemonization the

affective process through which heterogeneous par-ticulars (political demands) are gathered together(the logic of equivalence) under another (nowbecome an empty signifier), and quasi-universalizedas collective will: no populism without affectiveinvestment in partial objects. The key shift in the

understanding of this semiotic process of politicalsignification from interpellation to performative

hegemonization is not linguistic as such, however,but psychoanalytic or, rather, it is a question of thepsycho-affective dimensions of verbal communica-tion: [a]ffect is not something which exists on itsown, independently of language; it constitutes itselfonly through the differential cathexes of a signifyingchain. In this regard, On Populist Reason presents

its account of the making of the populist politicalsubject as a bottom-up investment of enthusiasmin an affective particularity (cathexis), rather thana top-down summons into being by the symbolicorder, as it was in Laclaus earlier work on fascismand populism in Politics and Ideology. In this sense,it suggests a democratization of the process, writtenfrom the perspective of brothers and mothers

rather than fathers, the little other rather thanthe big Other. The work of Jacques Lacan is, ofcourse, central to both processes of subject produc-

tion, the shift in its deployment by Laclau away fromAlthussers well-known concept of interpel lationproducing, in his view, an identification between thepartial logics of the objet petit a (that little bit of theReal or maternal other that makes its presencefelt within the symbolic order), on the one hand,and Gramscis notion of hegemony (also grounded,according to Laclau, in a logics of particularities), onthe other.In Laclaus words:

The logic of the objet petit a and the hegemonic

logic are not just similar: they are simply iden-tical. .. The only possible totalizing horizon isgiven by a partiality (the hegemonic force) whichassumes the representation of a mythic totality [animpossible, utopian reconciliation that is evokedby the now embodied empty signifier conceivedas a singularity rather than a universality JK]. InLacanian terms: an object is elevated to the dignityof the Thing.

This means, translated back into Laclaus Gramscian,that a particular interest becomes a general one, that

is, hegemonic: its productive (and affective) ideologi-cal mechanics are now formalized and explained.

For its part, language itself as signifying chainis not merely a neutral medium of communicationeither; it rather bends and is bent by ideology inenunciation. As the place in which politics and thedrives meet in the affective production of subjects however constitutively unstable (subject of enuncia-tion/subject of enunciated) language has a crucialrole to play in Laclaus proposed rhetoricized ontol-ogy. Rhetoric is both pedagogy into the practical art

of persuasion, as well as knowledge of languagesfigures and tropes, its shaping power. This is Laclaus


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new object of analysis. Indeed, his evocation in Rhe-torical Foundations of Grard Genettes structuralistanalysis of Marcel Prousts narrative suggests animportant overlap of the political and the literary inthe idea of rhetoric, which Roland Barthes referred toas the empire of signs. Laclaus main point is thatfrom the point of view of the making of collective

will they are all politics, affect, rhetoric made outof and/or deploy the same matter: discourse, words.As with Lacans version of psychoanalysis, Laclau,

also following in the footsteps of Roman Jakobsonslinguistic studies of aphasia, centres his reflectionson the rhetorical figures of metonymy verbal dis-placements along a syntagmatic axis of contiguouscombination and metaphor verbal displacements

along a paradigmatic axis of substitution that struc-ture speech, and the ways in which one interruptsand disturbs the other as in aphasic disturbances (58).

Folding this structure into his analysis, hegemony,according to Laclau, is produced through a logic ofequivalence in which distinct but coexisting strug-gles for example, anti-racism and wage demands are recombined and identified with the same politi-cal actor for example, a trade union such thatthe relation of contiguity will start to shade intoone of analogy, the metonymy into a metaphor andsubstituted.

In this rhetorical displacement of one axis (thesyntagmatic) into another (the paradigmatic), heter-

ogeneous corporate demands anti-racism, on theone hand; improved wages, on the other becomepartially de-particularized as they are both increas-ingly linked with trade union activism, which, ontaking on both demands, is itself also transformedpolitically into more than just a representative oflabour or class interests. A new people thus beginsto emerge, according to Laclau, articulating morethan corporate demands (the contiguous differ-ences he associates with the figure of metonymy),

as they fuse (through metaphoric substitution) intohegemonic ones. In this way the empty signifier ofsuch equivalence the names of Hugo Chvez orGeneral Pern, for example becomes the locus ofpopulist political attachment: a surface of affective

inscription become the subject of political change.The relation of language (understood rhetorically)and politics (understood as hegemonic) thus becomesone of identity in Laclaus account, in so far as eachalso shares in the partial affective logics of the objetpetit a: rhetorical mechanisms, he concludes, con-

stitute the anatomy of the social world.The desirecalled politics is structured like a language.

Laclau evokes Genettes analysis of metonymy andmetaphor in Proust in order to consolidate his quasi-literary rhetorical turn in a poststructuralist direc-tion. Rather than constituting a binary opposition,their distinct axes are considered as continuous andco-present (as suggested by Jakobsons analysis ofaphasic disturbances, which, however, Laclau trans-

forms back into the norm and, indeed, a condition ofmeaning). In this sense, Laclaus poststructuralistversion of rhetorical signification, however anchoredin the founding tropes of metonymy and metaphor,may be more akin to Barthess and Jacques Derridasnotions of text and writing than to, for example,structuralisms utterance; standing to the latter asan example of its philosophical comprehension and

the elaboration of its consequences, in the form ofsomething like a tropological translational grammar.This translational rhetorical relay of affects into poli-

tics through language, and back, is what appears to benew in The Rhetorical Foundations, although its telos hegemony remains the same as in Hegemony andSocialist Strategy and On Populist Reason. Accordingto Genette, only the mutual crossing of a metonymicnet and a metaphoric chain ensures the coherence,the necessary cohesion of text. More,

[w]ithout metaphor Proust says, there are notrue memories without metonymy, there is nochaining of memories, no history, no novel. For it ismetaphor that retrieves lost Time, but it is meton-ymy that reanimates it, that puts it back in move-ment. So here, only here through metaphor butwithin metonymy it is here that the Narrative(Rcit) begins. (545)

Here too, then, with the figural production of nar-rative and the writerly undoing of the oppositionbetween metonymy and metaphor Laclaus ownpolitical rhetoric of the social also begins.

It is the figure of catachresis, however, that specifi-cally grounds the translational textual mechanics of

Laclaus rhetorical turn and his desire to produce arhetorical ontology of the social that is inherentlypolitical. Catachresis describes the action of theempty signifier, the point of convergence and trans-lation of metonymic difference in equivalence and

its metaphoric projection as narrative in Proust,according to Genette, but as hegemony in Gramsci,according to Laclau. As he proceeds to build hisrhetorical ontology, however, the figure of catachresisis made to bear a considerable conceptual burden, forit equally grounds signification as such. The linch-

pin of Laclaus theoretical invention, catachresis isits master trope: like metaphor, it too is a figure


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of substitution, a misnaming that neverthelessnames an empty place, the unnameable limits ofsignification (as well as the Real in psychoanalyticterms). In this sense, the empty signifier marks themoment of significations necessary closure (essen-tial for meaning to take place at all), in which themeaningless condition of meaning what might

here be referred to as the logic of diffrance isstalled and represented. For this reason, according toLaclau, catachresis is inherent to the figural as such,describing the way in which the empty signifier,metonymically a particular among differing-and-deferring particulars, is split at the same moment itmetaphorically (mis)represents the whole: it is thisdouble role, Laclau adds, that is at the root of all

tropological displacement (645). Having previouslyset out the populist conditions of the political quahegemonic articulation and institution of the social

in On Populist Reason, now, as such conditions arefolded into an account of catachrestical significa-tion, a politicized rhetoricity becomes for Laclaucoterminous with the very structure of objectivity equivalent to the social production of meaning thatis, to the very fabric of social life (65). Rhetoric, inother words, becomes all-encompassing (subjectiviz-ing) affective performance and (objectivizing) action,reconfiguring the social.Laclau does not, quite, con-ceptually produce a semiotic idealism so much as arhetorical materialism of the subject grounded in the

tropological that is, figural dynamics of language:centred on the futural now of political action, in sofar as it is also a theory of collective will, it resemblesa voluntarism of sorts. This is mainly because of itsscant attention to the critique of political economy:to the equivalential logic (and digitalized rhetorics?)of capital, for example, as it informs discourse vianew technologies of communication and representa-tion. This has not always been the case.

PopulismMore often than not, Laclau builds his analysesthrough a critical engagement with Marxist tradi-tions, the touchstone historically and theoretically ofhis work. Apart from presenting itself as a rhetorical

development of Gramscis theory of hegemony, reflec-tions on the work of Lenin, Trotsky and Sorel assymptomatic of problems to be overcome are crucialto Laclaus thought, and they continue to pervade allof the essays in The Rhetorical Foundations, as they dohis previous volumes, especially Hegemony and Social-

ist Strategy. All three of these thinkers are, in otherwords, anti-hegemonic thinkers, who nevertheless

symptomatize the political and theoretical neces-sity of hegemony. Rhetorically, according to Laclau,Sorels reflections on the myth of the general strikeas revolutionary form are contentless, producing oneof the purest examples of an empty signifier.This is because the particular contents of any specificstruggle or strike are to all intents and purposes

irrelevant to the myth of the strike itself. We arefaced, according to Laclau, with a pure metaphoricalreaggregation which is not interrupted by any meto-nymical plurality it contains, in other words, noreal demands; thus the revolutionary break does notproceed through equivalence but through absoluteidentity, leaving all particularity and each actualstrike untouched (73).

In other words, Sorels general strike is puremetaphor. Leninism, in contrast, inhibits metaphori-zation in its insistence on metonymic particularity

that is, on class identities (bourgeois, peasant, butmost importantly proletariat) and their supposedlyparticular historical tasks. Even with the clear rec-ognition that a weak bourgeoisie in Russia couldnot carry these tasks through, and that they weretherefore to be taken up by the working class (astheorized, for example, in Trotskys account of per-manent revolution),

Leninist strategy was designed to prevent theexceptional task from becoming the site of the

construction of a new subjectivity. The class natureof the proletariat had to remain unchanged.

The Leninist stress on the metonymics of classthus inhibits the possibility of the process of meta-phorization associated with the production of theall-important empty signifier for Laclau. This isbecause it would involve the partial emptying out ofproletarian identity that is, its de-universalization in favour of the emergence of a new hegemonic possibly even working-class-led version of a people.

Despite Leninisms recognition of the anomaly ofRussian history with regard to conventional Marxistaccounts, the metonymic subversion of the differen-tial space of Marxist teleology the administrativezero-degree of rhetoricity characterizing Second

International Marxism based, according to Laclau, onMarxs explanation of the course of history throughstages in the 1859 Preface (that old chestnut!) has toremain visible, to the point of making impossible themovement towards its metaphorical telos: evolution-ary socialism (745).

It is this combination of uneven development inhistory, on the one hand, and its political effects


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at the level of the identity of the subjects of socialtransformation, on the other, that constitutes thecore of Laclaus critical concerns arguably from itsbeginnings, and certainly at its end. In this context,Gramscis concepts of hegemony and collectivewill provide the partial logics of equivalence thatpotentially transcend the political disturbances

of metonymy by over-metaphorization (Sorel) andmetaphor by over-metonymization (Leninism) inthe name (empty signifier) of the popular demo-cratic. Furthermore, it is this ability of Gramscis,theoretically and politically to incorporate questionsof uneven development (passive revolution, wars ofposition and manoeuvre, the Southern Question which undo Marxisms traditional historicism and

political teleology) into his conceptualization of poli-tics that Laclau identifies with that is, Gramscisfamous account of the Bolshevik Revolution as a

revolution against Capital. Such questions, associ-ated with the historical experience of imperialismand dependency, are indeed the key to the continuityof Laclaus thought.

Lucha Obrera

To understand the development of Laclaus thoughthistorically, it is important to return to Politics andIdeology another Janus-faced, in-between work ofconceptual labour, and perhaps his most important.For, unlike Rhetorical Foundations, it is quite visibly,

in retrospect, a work of transition. It looks forwardto the generalization of populism as the conditionof, first, a hegemonized and, second, a rhetoricizedconception of politics, as well as to his voyage, orwriting, out of Marxism with his partner ChantalMouffe. However, it also looks further back toLaclaus earlier writings as an economic historianand political militant in Argentina during the 1960s(before his move to the UK to complete his studies,encouraged by Eric Hobsbawm).

This uncollected work consists mainly of shortnewspaper editorials for the weekly newspaper LuchaObrera ( Workers Struggle) of the more or less Trotsky-ist Partido Socialista de la Izquierda Nacional (PSIN Socialist Party of the National Left), which he

edited, along with a few short essays for the PSINstheoretical journal Izquierda Nacional, and one ortwo articles in more academic journals. It revealsLaclaus early concern for the conceptualization ofhistory, for the question of periodization from theperspective of uneven development, for history as

an academic discipline, and for the conditions ofproper political thought and strategy. In Historical

Consciousness and Petty-Bourgeois Leftism, forexample, a short article written for IzquierdaNacional, he fulminates against the petite bourgeoi-sie for its lack of a sense of time, both historical andpolitical an epistemological topic he would pursuein Politics and Ideology as an Althusserian concernfor science and the correct specification of regional

concepts of the political and economic instancesof the social the pursuit, in other words, of classstruggle at the level of theory).

Just as 1 May is the international day of theworking class, 17 October is the defining date of theArgentine proletariat. So writes Laclau in an editorialfor Lucha Obrera, dated 15 October 1963. At the timeof writing, he was making several important points at

once. He reminds his readers, for example, that Per-onism had been banned as a political movement sincethe overthrow of General Perns democratic govern-

ment in 1955, delegitimizing all governments in theyears since. In the 1960s, Laclau was a reportedlycharismatic student leader at the University ofBuenos Aires, as well as a militant in the PSIN. ThePSIN shared with an emerging New Left focused onnational politics in the wake of the Cuban Revolutionan interest in the particular configuration of Argen-tina as an agrarian capitalist nation without a bour-geoisie (that is, as configured by a passive bourgeoisrevolution), or at least the absence of a modernizingone (uninterested, that is, in the development of the

forces of production).In other words, Argentina and the rest of Latin

America in this regard was defined by a similarset of historical anomalies as Russia had been. However, the Peronist movement, emerging out ofa process of dependent (import-substitution) indus-trialization from the 1930s on, produced a real shiftin this situation. This was another of the issuesLaclaus editorials in Lucha Obrera sought to bringto its readers attention: with Peronism an organ-

ized industrial working class makes its presence feltin the political sphere, urbanizing, democratizingand thus transforming it completely. (Eva Pern wasfundamental in this regard mobilizing plebeianaffect, for example although Laclau very rarely

mentions her.)With the historic appearance of an industria l

proletariat, in other words, the historically non-synchronous appeared to have been synchronizedin PSINs still developmentalist perspective, bring-ing socialism into Argentinas political horizon.

From the point of view of the PSIN, all revolution-ary politics was thus necessarily informed by the


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experience of populism, and indeed their politicalplatform and immediate tasks consisted in ananti-nationalist and socialist extension (specifically,the demand for a popular workers governmentthroughout Latin America) of Peronisms own pop-ulism: economic independence, political sovereigntyand social justice. Peronism thus feeds Marxist

politics an order that, over time, Laclau willreverse, maintaining a commitment to Marxism,but principally as a resource to theoretically negate,and to feed the generalization of populism to thepolitical as such.

Such, nevertheless, is the historical experience ofpopulism, and its relation to Marxism, that Laclau

starts from and develops in Politics and Ideology:beginning with a concern for ideological form andstructural overdetermination within contexts of crisis(in the footsteps of Althusser), he gives the theory of

permanent revolution a populist twist incorporat-ing democratic revolution or popular democraticinterpellation (state-and-people relations of domina-tion) into class struggle (bourgeoisie-and-proletariatrelations of production) so as to construct a theoryof double articulation. An attempt to overcome class

reductionism whilst maintaining the relations ofproduction as a social determination, it suggested

an important theoretical advance. Read from theperspective of Hegemony and Socialist Strategys muchtrumpeted post-Marxism, however, Laclaus classicalessay Towards a Theory of Populism, with whichPolitics and Ideology concludes, provides the theo-retical space for its subsequent theoretical redevelop-ment through a discursivist reconfiguration of the

Gramscian concept of hegemony in which relationsof domination and democratic demands (politicsand ideology) definitively decentre and displacerelations of production and class struggle (economicstructure).

Towards a Theory of Populism was primarilyinfluential as the starting point for Stuart Hallsaccount of Thatcherism as a form of authoritarian

populism. Indeed, Laclaus Althusserian approachto populism presented it as a contribution to thetheory of ideology, conceived regionally, as a rela-

tively autonomous instance of the social . This bringsus to what is left behind in Politics and Ideology, assymptomatized in its compositional structure: if itsconcluding chapter, Towards a Theory of Populism,looks forward to the ideas formalization as a condi-tion of the political and, now, rhetorical institutionof the social, its first chapter looks back to Laclausinterests in the history and periodization of eco-nomic structures as evident in the title of the volumesfirst chapter: Feudalism and Capitalism in LatinAmerica. This is a critique of Andre Gunder Franks

account of the history of capitalism in the regiondefined, however, as a system of circulation, ratherthan as a mode of productionwith its defining formof surplus appropriation.

For Frank, Latin America had, since its colonialinclusion within a world mercantile order, alwaysbeen capitalist and never feudal as such. This is theconceptual site of their disagreement. NeverthelessLaclau agrees with Franks critique of post-ThirdInternational accounts of Latin America anchored in

a dualist thesis, and whose political conclusion wasCommunist support for modernizing bourgeoisies tocomplete their historical tasks. For his part, Laclaurather looks to a more complex analysis of coexistingmodes of production subordinated to an overarching

capitalist economic system producing the kind ofhistorical anomalies described above in both Russiaand Argentina.

It is this insistence on the analysis of the specifi-cities of distinct experiences of capital that wanesin Laclaus final essays in Politics and Ideology,

including Towards a Theory of Populism. This is awaning of the economic that arguably also informs


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Halls subsequent analysis of Thatcherism. Feudal-ism and Capitalism has a sister essay written byLaclau, published in 1969: Modes of Production,Economic Systems and Surplus Population: An His-torical Approximation to the Argentine and ChileanCases. It rehearses similar critical and theoreti-cal issues and contains most of the criticisms of

Gunder Frank made in Capitalism and Feudalism.The difference lies in its detailed analysis andtheoretical account of surplus population, a termLaclau counterposes to instrumentalist deploymentsof Marxs idea of a reserve army of labour (a topicwhose importance has been reiterated recently byFredric Jameson in his Representing Capital). Thepoint is that Laclau produces his concept from a

critical engagement with the historical anomaliesproduced by the articulation of different modes ofproduction within an overarching capitalist system.

This other essay, however, is not included in Politicsand Ideology. This is arguably because it had bythen (1977) already begun, definitively, to belong toLaclaus intellectual past. Ironically, this waning ofeconomic history in Laclaus work tends to erase thevery historical conditions of his continuous criticalconcern for, and focus on, supposedly anomalousforms such as populism.

Notes 1. Laclaus essay on Paul de Man, The Politics of Rhetoric,

originally published in 2001, already rehearsed some ofthese new rhetorical ideas. 2. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and

Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics,Verso, London and New York, 1999, pp. 1227.

3. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, Verso, London andNew York, 2005, p. 116 . As I have suggested in my reviewof On Populist Reason: Seen from the point of view of thepresent, this is Laclaus intellectual project: the translationof populism into politics via hegemony. See JohnKraniauskas, Critique of Pure Politics, Radical Philosophy136, MarchApril 2006, p. 48.

4. On Populist Reason, p. 111. 5. Here is registered Laclaus intellectual closeness to iek

as evidenced previously in New Reflections as well as his

subsequent distance. 6. On Populist Reason, p. 116. See also Jacques Lacan, The

Ethics of Psychoanalysis 19591960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,trans. Dennis Porter, Routledge, London, 1999.

7. Roland Barthes, Lancienne rhtorique, Communications16, 1970, pp. 172223.

8. On Populist Reason, p. 109. 9. Both are army men, suggesting a relation between pop-

ulism and the military and war that is worth exploring.See, for example, Len Rozitchner, Pern: entre la sangre yel tiempo, Centro Editor de Amrica Latina, Buenos Aires,1985.

10. On Populist Reason, p. 110.11. Just as in On Populist Reasonhe transforms populism from

being considered a political exception to its norm.

12. Peter Osborne, The Postconceptual Condition, RadicalPhilosophy184, March/April 2014, p. 26.

13. This brings to mind Fredric Jamesons working out ofstructuralism attempting to dynamize Algirdas J. Greimassactants and semiotic rectangles; one important differencebeing Jamesons insistence on post-Hegelian contradictionversus, as noted above, Laclaus insistence on a Kantian realantagonism.

14. What remains to be done in his conceptualization of arhetorical ontology beyond such a semiotics is, however

despite Laclaus brief allusions to Husserl and Heidegger its specifically philosophical and metacritical production.15. Conciencia Histrica e Izquierdismo Pequeoburgus,

Izquierda Nacional 6 (segunda poca), April 1964, pp.1317 Laclau was the director of the journal at hispoint in time. (All translations from the Spanish are myown.) See also Notas sobre la Historia de Mentalidades,Desarrollo Econmico, vol. 3, nos 12, AprilSeptember 1963,pp. 30312; and The Specificity of the Political, Politics andIdeology in Marxist Theory, Verso, London, 1979, pp. 5179.A good overview of Laclaus early work as a historian maybe found in Martn Bergel, Mariana Canavese and CeciliaTossounian, Prctica poltica e insercin acadmica en lahistoriografa del joven Laclau, Polticas de la memoria5,Summer 200405, pp. 14958.

16. 17 October 1945 is the day workers occupied the streetsof the bourgeois centre of Buenos Aires to protest theimprisonment of Pern by the military junta throughwhich he had come to power: through the creation of newtrade unions and welfare reforms he had, in their eyes,become too powerful. Other topics tackled by Laclau inhis editorials include: the new middle class, education,PSINs immediate tasks, the possibility of another militarycoup (which indeed took place in 1966), the building of arevolutionary party in Argentina. I am referring to editorialswritten between 1963 and 1965.

17. Laclau briefly mentions the importance of Peronism for histhought in the Introduction to The Rhetorical Foundations.

18 One might almost say, along with Jos Carlos Mariteguisaccount of the development of capital ism in Peru, that el

feudo hizo el burgo: bourgeois society was imposed byfeudal landowners.

19. See John Kraniauskas, The Cinematic State: Eva Pern asthe Image of Peronism,Verksted9: ISMS: RecuperatingPolitical Radicality in Contemporary Art II Populism andGenre, Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Oslo, 2008,pp. 2746.

20. For example, the front page of Lucha Obreraof 14January1963 refers to the PSINs four aims.

21. In Politics and Ideologythe notion of articulation refers tothe moment of non-dialectical synthesis or totalization later, in On Populist Reasonan equivalential articulationof demands emerging in the wake of popular conflictconstituted as political antagonism later the foundationof an internal frontier separating the people from power.

On Populist Reason, p. 74.22. Modos de produccin, sistemas econmicos y poblacin

excedente: aproximacin histrica a los casos argentino ychileno, Revista Latinoamericana de Sociologa5, Asuncin,1969, pp. 276315.

23. In the Introduct ion to Politics and Ideology, Laclau makesan important allusion in this regard, which he does notsubsequently conceptually develop in his work: thesystem of connotative articulations in which the provincialEurocentrism of the Second and Third International hadencapsulated Marxist theoretical concepts (p. 12). This isan idea most obviously taken up recently by subalternisthistorians such as Dipesh Chakrabarty. It may evenconstitute a kind of political unconscious at work in Laclauswriting.


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Documents

Kraniauskas, Rhetorics of Populism. Laclau