Interview

Politics and the unconscious An interview with Ernesto Laclau

Jason Glynosa and Yannis Stavrakakisb,*
a

Department of Government, University of Essex, Colchester, UK.

School of Political Sciences, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. E-mail: yanstavr@yahoo.co.uk

*Corresponding author.

Subjectivity (2010) 3, 231244. doi:10.1057/sub.2010.12

Introduction: Psychoanalysis and Politics

Ernesto, you have often stated that the focus of your work is primarily theoretical, contributing specifically to what you call a political ontology. It is also clear, however, that you dont view doing theory as a purely speculative enterprise. This is evident, for example, in your claim that theoretical work ought to be informed by the experience we derive in our concrete practices and case studies. In this context it may be helpful, by way of introduction, to get an initial reaction from you to a set of preliminary questions. To start with, how would you relate your current research to the present historical conjuncture, a conjuncture marked by the emerging dominance of Hugo Chavez in S. America, the election of Barack Obama in the United States, the global financial crisis and economic recession, the urgency of avoiding the fate of (or adapting to) global warming? You have remarked how your involvement in 1960s Argentinian politics presented you with your first lessons in poststructuralism (see the series of interviews included in Laclau, 1990). We wonder what theoretical lessons you think we can draw from the current conjuncture. EL: I think that the present conjuncture which is more than a conjuncture, it marks the transition to an entirely new historical period is characterized, first of all, by the crisis of the neo-liberal model of world economic order, which dominated during the 1980s and 1990s, and was epitomized by the

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so-called Washington consensus. It is clear that we are advancing towards a different world order, a multi-polar one, in which new actors will occupy a central role in the historical arena. In the next 20 years we are going to see the access already visible in its initial stages of countries such as China, India and Brazil to the status of world powers. It is in that context that we have to assess the Obama phenomenon in the United States, emerging from the ashes left over by the Bush years. It is not very clear how we are going to get out of this world economic mess, but we know very well how we got into it, namely, as a result of the politics of de-regulation, which was at the core of the neo-liberal project and which led us to the edge of a catastrophe. As for Latin America, the main countries of the continent are reacting against neo-liberalism and de-regulation and are developing models of growth in which state intervention plays a much more significant role. This can be seen not only in the Venezuela of Chavez, but also in the Brazil of Lula, in the Argentina of the Kirchners, the Bolivia of Evo Morales and the Ecuador of Correa. The defeat of the US Latin American politics was already visible in the meeting of American presidents in Mar del Plata (Argentina) a few years ago, in which the Bush proposal of constituting a unified economic space covering both North and South America was defeated following the opposition of the main Latin American countries. What are the theoretical consequences that one can derive from these new developments? There are many, but perhaps the most important one is that the idea of the economy as a unified space, dominated by its own endogenous logic, has experienced an ultimate collapse, which is now more visible than ever before. What do you consider to be the central appeal of psychoanalysis when addressing these sorts of issues? In particular, what significance do you attach to the category of the unconscious in thinking about the hurly-burly of social and political practice, but also for contemporary political theory and analysis? For example, at an initial and quite general level we wonder how you would relate the concept of the unconscious to the domain of political ontology generally, and to the category of hegemony more specifically? EL: I have already spoken in extenso about this issue throughout my work, and I dont think it would make much sense regurgitating here what everybody knows are my thoughts about it. However, I would like to add one important thing: for me, the unconscious is neither a set of underlying categories entering ` into various combinatorial arrangements a la Levi-Strauss nor does it ` refer to the pre-existing symbolic forms of a collective unconscious a la Jung. It is always the result of a process of overdetermination, as Freud already knew. This process has its own internal laws, but they do not lead back to any a priori fixed meanings, to any predetermined origins. On the contrary, the formation of relatively stable configurations of meaning is always the
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result of partial fixations, constituting in each case a unique trajectory. This applies to both individual and collective processes. In politics, for example, the constitution of a hegemonic formation depends entirely on a contingent fixation through overdetermination which assigns to particular signifiers a central role in structuring a discursive field. This is the reason why I see a clear link between the theory of hegemony and psychoanalytic theory, located in the central role of overdetermination in both psychic and collective processes. Of course, the idea that there are things which escape conscious thought and control is something that has been around for a long time and there have been many attempts in the past as well as the present to record and better understand such phenomena. Can you say a few more words about why you appeal to a specifically psychoanalytic understanding of such phenomena, and why you appeal to a Freudo-Lacanian strand of this tradition in particular? EL: You have, indeed, many competitors to the Freudian/Lacanian theory of the unconscious. There are, on the one hand, those theories that reduce the unconscious to a residue of irrationality as rational-choice theories do; and, on the other hand, all those that attempt to delineate a strict, syntagmatic grammar of the workings of the unconscious. I have mentioned only two examples but, obviously, many others could be brought to the fore. Why have I adopted in my work a Freudian/Lacanian approach rather than any of the other available alternatives? For a start, this is a decision clearly related to my attempt to break with essentialism, which, in the political field, conceives politics as an epiphenomenon or a superstructure, as the mere phenomenal expression of some underlying structure or laws the latter being either the mode of production (in a traditional leftist discourse), globalization (in a neo-liberal discourse), or anything else capable of playing this role. In opposition to all such essentialisms, the core of my philosophical project consisted in asserting the centrality of the political moment in the constitution of the social and, as a result, in highlighting the constitutive character in the transcendental sense of the term of the category of antagonism. And this applies to the economic level of society as well as to any other level. Thus, the notion of hegemonic formation tends, in my analysis, to take the central role previously occupied by the category of mode of production. From this point of view, the Freudian approach, together with its Lacanian reformulation, provided crucial tools for the development of what I was trying to think at the political level, from an anti-essentialist perspective: apart from the logic of overdetermination, it highlighted the logic of the signifier, of the partial fixation of meaning through the intervention of points de capiton nodal points in the vocabulary of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy a whole ontology of lack and desire, to name just a few.
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Discourse and Affect

As you know, in the field of social and political analysis there have been recent calls to refocus our attention on the affective dimension of discourse, fearing that this dimension was too often eclipsed on account of the enthusiastic attention paid to the symbolic dimension of discourse. Indeed, an increasingly prominent theme in your own work concerns precisely the place of affect in discourse. Of course, the place of affect in discourse is a theme that interested Lacan too, even if his concern was primarily clinical, resulting in his theory of the four discourses. In fact, this affective dimension and its relation to discourse can be approached also from the point of view of the unconscious. The unconscious is structured like a language is one of Lacans well-known phrases, drawing inspiration primarily from the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Not content, however, to remain at the level of structure or form, Lacan also attributes to the unconscious a certain force, noting how it insists through a kind of compulsion to repeat. Putting it in these terms, of course, allows us to draw out the resonances more clearly with your own work, specifically on the respective roles you appear to attribute to the disciplines of rhetoric and psychoanalysis. In The Laclau Reader, for example, you acknowledge that something of the order of hegemony and rhetoric takes place which could not be explained without the mediating role of affect. In the same text you contrast the form of a discourse with its force: [W]hat rhetoric can explain is the form that an overdetermining investment takes, but not the force that explains the investment as such and its perdurability. Here something else has to be brought into the picture. Any overdetermination requires not only metaphorical condensations but also cathectic investments. That is, something belonging to the order of affect has a primary role in discursively constructing the social. Freud already knew it: the social link is a libidinal link. And affect y is not something added to signification, but something consubstantial with it. So if I see rhetoric as ontologically primary in explaining the operations inhering in and the forms taken by the hegemonic construction of society, I see psychoanalysis as the only valid road to explain the drives behind such construction I see it, indeed, as the only fruitful approach to the understanding of human reality. (Laclau, 2004, p: 326) This passage appears to do several interesting things, among them to ascribe ontological primacy to rhetoric, but also to suggest that the relationship between affect and signification is not a simple additive one. We wonder to what extent you would agree that there has been such a shift of emphasis in social and political theory? And if so, what are the benefits and
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drawbacks of such a shift? What do you think are the sorts of issues and problems that it can help us address? Does such an analytical shift signal also a more political and/or critical shift? How are all these developments registered in your own work? EL: Let me say, to start with, that I do not think there is such a shift from the symbolic to the affective dimension of discourse in my work, because I do not accept, in the first place, the separation between the two, which would be the only terrain making such a shift intelligible. There is, of course, an extreme structuralism for which only the symbolic counts, and for which this symbolic is conceived as a ground whose laws are to be enacted in all factual instantiations. But this is not the way in which the symbolic has been conceived in psychoanalysis. Even Saussure made a distinction between the syntagmatic pole of language, whose combinations could be sufficiently grasped by mere reference to certain syntactic rules, and an associative (paradigmatic) pole, whose substitutions are not governed by such rules. It is precisely in this world of substitutions where the unconscious operates, and where the work of affect has to be located. An extreme formalist such as Hjelmslev wanted to submit even the paradigmatic pole of language to syntactic (that is, symbolic) rules; but his attempt was less than successful. So the work of the unconscious on affect has to be traced back to the substitutions constituting the paradigmatic pole of language. The important point is that without this paradigmatic pole there would be no language; so that even the constitution of the symbolic as such requires the operation of affect and the unconscious. Affect is not something external, added to the symbolic, but an internal component of it. Affect is not some vague emotion external to signification, for it can only constitute itself on the basis of overdetermining a signifying chain. In the discourse of the rat man that I mention in the text to which you refer, the signifier rat is so affectively overcharged because it evokes overdetermines a plurality of currents of unconscious thoughts money, sex, the father, and so on. So if affect is an internal component of signification, signification is also an internal component of affect. In that sense, I wouldnt say that there is a shift from emphasizing the symbolic dimension of discourse to a new emphasis on its affective dimension. I would rather say that there is a shift from emphasizing the syntagmatic/syntactic (as it happened during the heyday of structuralism), to emphasizing the role of the paradigmatic dimension, and that the necessary effect of this shift has been paying increasing attention to the unconscious and the affective aspects of signification. Famously, Jakobson sought to transform our understanding of rhetoric by making the tropes of metaphor and metonymy foundational of all other tropes. You have spoken about this yourself, especially in connection with the notion of catachresis. We would like to know how you would like to see the discipline of rhetoric being used in social and political analysis. Do you see its role primarily
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in terms of the array of rhetorical tropes it appears to furnish scholars? If so, what role would you give particular tropes in the domain of critical political analysis? The category of hegemony, for example, has sometimes been thought in terms of metaphor, sometimes in terms of metonymy. What would you say are the advantages and disadvantages of adopting one or the other perspective, and, indeed, what other sorts of tropes might be brought to bear in thinking about similar questions having to do with identity, democracy, and so on? EL: First of all, the centrality of rhetoric for social and political analysis comes from the fact that social and political spaces are discursively constructed, and that the rhetorical is inherent to discourse. You have mentioned catachresis, and here I would like to add a qualification. Catachresis is not, strictly speaking, a particular figure of language among many, but an index of figurality as such. We have catachresis whenever we use a figural term, which cannot be replaced by a literal one (as when we speak of the leg of a table). Now, all figural expression adds some new meaning to what a literal term (when it exists) is capable of expressing, so that any figure is, to some extent, catachrestical. As for the opposition metaphor/metonymy, which, as you have pointed out, is central for Jakobsons analysis, such a centrality results from the fact that the distinction itself is anchored in language. Rhetoric, for Jakobson, is not, as it had been for a long time, a heteroclite catalogue of figures, but reveals a basic structure grounded in the opposition metaphor/metonymy. This basic distinction was, in turn, based on the structure of language, that is, the organization around the two poles that we discussed earlier. So this same dichotomy is found at different levels of human reality: at the level of language it refers to the distinction between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic poles; at the level of rhetoric, to that between metonymy and metaphor; in psychoanalysis, it corresponds to the duality displacement/condensation; and in politics, to that between difference and equivalence. It is because of this that hegemony, as the central category of political analysis, has to take into account both the poles or dimensions we are talking about. In my work I have attempted to show that in the socialist tradition there have been cases of overemphasizing the metaphoric moment of equivalence over the differentiality of metonymic positions (as in the work of Sorel); but there has also been the opposite tendency: to present the revolutionary sequence in terms of frozen metonymic positions without any role for metaphorical contaminations (as in Leninism). The hegemonic logic, on the contrary, goes beyond these unilateralizations and understands the political as the constituting moment of a space within which the tension metaphor/ metonymy is never finally resolved. Reading the work of Gramsci from this perspective would make it possible to deepen the analysis of all the subtleties of this constitutive tension.
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On what basis is it useful to address questions of ontological primacy, and how should the relationship between symbolic and affective dimensions feature in such a discussion? EL: An ontological discourse is one concerning being qua being. The way an ontology is conceived will be the determining factor deciding how all other philosophical categories emerge. For Plato, the basic ontological category was that of eidos, for Aristotle, substance, to take just a couple of examples. To move to a contemporary approach, for Alain Badiou the One is not, so multiplicity is the primary ontological terrain. From there he moves to his mathematical ontology. In my case, while I agree with Badiou that the One is not, I do not think that there is mere multiplicity either but, instead, failed unicity. This leads to a different type of ontological approach, one in which the primary categories will not be mathematical but linguistic. Failed unicity means that you do not have unicity conceived as a ground, but you do not have a fully fledged multiplicity either. One does not do away with the category of the One entirely, in the sense that the failure of the One in constituting itself as ground does not lead to its disappearance; unicity remains but with a twist, acquiring the status of a simulacrum. This means, in my view, that totality, unicity, is not a ground but a horizon, the latter being understood as the cathectic investment which gives to it a centrality fully exceeding its ontic identity. This cathectic investment is exactly the point in which affect enters the scene. The important point is to realize that without this cathectic (affective) investment in an object (which is what we call hegemony) there will not be a symbolic order either. So the affective, the cathectic investment, is not the other of the symbolic but its very precondition. How would the relationship between the symbolic and affective dimensions play out in relation to your theory of populism? For in your book Populist Reason it appears that we need to distinguish populisms not only at the level of discursive structure but also at the level of the intensity or force, that is, the nature of the investment leaders and followers exhibit in their identifications (Laclau, 2005). EL: Let me make something clear. This is not a question of differentiating the various populisms from each other first in terms of their discursive structure and then at the level of their intensity or force. Without this intensity or force (that is, without cathectic investment) there would be no discursive structure in the first place. The distinction whose pertinence, however, remains, is that between cases in which the cathectic investment in the hegemonic object is so overwhelming that a whole symbolic order becomes totally dependent on that object, and cases in which the symbolic order is more immanent and self-sustained and, consequently, the cathectic investment in the hegemonic object is weaker. In Group Psychology Freud analyzed this question in terms of the differential distances between the ego and the ego ideal (Freud, 1991).
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The problem, in terms of political analysis is, obviously, to determine the degrees of either institutionalism or populism characteristic of a given hegemonic formation. Finding a satisfactory conceptualization of the relationship between signifier and jouissance presented Lacan with a towering theoretical challenge that he apparently never felt he came to terms with in a satisfactory way (see, for example, Miller, 2000). You have argued that the dimension of affect, libidinal investment and jouissance (here treated as interchangeable) was always already implicit in your understanding of discourse. Nevertheless, it seems that some theoretical elaboration is still called for in order to develop fully the implications of this insight. We wonder, therefore, what exact direction this effort should take. For example, in your reply to our JLS article you seem to want to question y the idea that here we are really dealing with two sides (what we are calling here symbolic and affective dimensions of discourse) (Laclau, 2003: p. 282). You have reiterated this view a number of times. We would entirely agree with you that the two sides are intimately connected, but it seems to us that one needs to focus on the distinctive character of each in addition to the constitutive interimplication of affect and representation, signifier and jouissance (this is something evident in both the Freudian and the Lacanian corpus). In the absence of such theoretical and analytical effort, it would be difficult to differentiate between discourses that successfully offer up objects of affective investment and those that do not. In other words, our worry is that to downplay the distinctive character of these two registers, to view them as simply coextensive, may lead to the bizarre conclusion that all discourses are equally cathected (or equally significant from the point of view of affective investment). The crucial question here is how to theorize the affective dimension in a way that would not only avoid a kind of psychologizing emotionology which would reduce affects to a series of pre-existing dispositions, but also avoid the temptation to collapse the affective dimension into the symbolic dimension. EL: I have already touched on this question as far as populism is concerned, but let me add a couple of further points since the way you have just formulated it, shows that your discourse remains, to some extent, prisoner of a dualism which creates an obstacle to its own development. As I hope I have made clear, the distinction between affect (cathectic investment) and the symbolic is for me intra- and not extra-discursive. In that sense, it is impossible for all discourses or all the parts of a discursive formation to be evenly cathected. In Freudian terms that would mean that the distance between ego and ego ideal would altogether disappear. Or, in terms of political analysis, that an institutional moment would prove so successful that no room would be left for any populist cathexis. It would be like the full realization of the Saint-Simonian dream of a transition from the government of men to the administration of things. Nobody is,
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obviously, asserting such absurdities. To assert that the distinction between affect and the symbolic is intra- and not extra-discursive is perfectly compatible with sustaining that some elements of a discursive formation may be highly cathected while others are not; that there is within the discursive field a certain combined and uneven development. What is being denied is the idea that, at some point, you are dangerously bordering that this unevenness in cathectic investment should be explained by the action of a force fully outside the discursive field. Such a view would restore a radical opposition between the discursive and the extra-discursive which is not only incompatible with my own approach but also, I think, with basic premises of Lacanian theory. What about the Lacanian Real then? The real seems to reveal the limits of discourse. In this context, we would also like to ask what role you see the category of fantasy playing here. After all, fantasy appears precisely to be a category which seeks to articulate the symbolic and affective dimensions of discourse, but also to negotiate our relation with the limits of discourse. One way to approach this is to ask how you would conceptualize the relationship between rhetoric and fantasy? Some might say that the appeal of both these categories is underpinned by the recognition that the symbolic and affective dimensions of discourse are not only equally important but that they require each other to be effective. Nevertheless, while the appeal to rhetoric appears to acknowledge this insight, it does not appear to offer a theoretical articulation of these dimensions in the way that fantasy does. Would you agree? EL: Fantasy is a Lacanian category, which I have not used, although, as you know, a great deal of the terrain that notion covers is present in my work through other conceptual avenues. So rather than embarking into some form of complex comparative exegesis, let me approach this problem by relating the psychoanalytic insights including the status of the Lacanian Real with rhetoric. First of all, I think it is necessary to avoid using the symbolic as a synonym of the discursive, something that in some of your formulations you are on the brink of doing. The real in the Lacanian sense, for instance, is not part of the symbolic; it is, on the contrary, what the symbolic cannot master. Yet, it is definitively discursive, for it produces distortions within the symbolic. So it has some form of discursive inscription. These are, for reasons that we have already discussed, both signifying and affective inscriptions. Cathectic investments leave discursive traces symptoms, for instance, require forms of discursive visibility (repetitions, distortions, and so on). Now, the systematic study of these distortions is, for me, precisely the task of a psychoanalytically oriented rhetoric. According to Cicero, we use terms in a figural sense because there are more objects in the world to be named than the arsenal of words comprising our language. We know today that this asymmetry is not a mere empirical failure of language; on the contrary, it is constitutive of it. One speaks in order to say something that is essentially unsayable. So both
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the symbolic and the real inhabit the discursive field. Although it is not something that I have done myself, I suspect that it would be a highly rewarding enterprise to enrich the category of fantasy using the conceptual tools provided by rhetoric. Finally, how would an emphasis upon the affective dimension of discourse (concerning both subject and object) shape our understanding and significance of the contrast you draw between immanence, transcendence and failed transcendence? EL: Transcendence, in the classical sense of the term, names the defining feature of an absolute ground and, as such, does not require any affective dimension in the process of its self-posing. The same thing can be said about radical immanentism. In transcendent conceptions of the ground, the affective dimension is confined to the feeling of finitude, of the absolute distance between the ground and the finite being. Echoes of this feeling can be found even in immanentist conceptions for instance, in Spinozas amor Dei intellectualis. This changes with the notion of a failed transcendence, because here the notion of a radical investment is transferred to the very ground of objectivity or, to put it in slightly different terms, the separation between signification and affect is no longer possible: the investment itself becomes the source and precondition of signification.

Hegemony, Politics, Critique

This leads us to explore more precisely what implications the above thoughts carry for a theory of hegemony, for politics, and for questions of critique. In particular, if hegemony is to be thought as a function of both representation and affect, what avenues do you see as potentially productive in theorizing this relation from the point of view of political analysis and critique generally, and in relation to radical democracy and political economy in particular? EL: At this point, I would like to say a few words concerning representation. If we consider representation as the transmission of a meaning constituted at some level of society to a different level, the link signification/affect is broken: signification would be established from the very beginning, and its transference to the new level would not require any kind of investment. So hegemony would be unnecessary. Or, to put it in different terms: the cycle of representation would take place entirely within the symbolic order, without being shortcircuited by any real. If, however, representation is not such a transparent process but requires the construction of something new, in that case representation would require cathectic investments, the essential link between signification and affect would be restored, and representation would become a central component of any hegemonic operation. And this applies to the sphere
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of political economy as much as to the other spheres of society. Gone are the days in which the economy was conceived as a self-defined universe, governed by its own endogenous laws. It is difficult to avoid bringing up Slavoj Zizek in this context, and this in the full knowledge that relations between you have gone through both highs and lows. At first, judging from his own writings, one would tend to think that Zizek was persuaded by the radical democratic project you had put forward with Chantal Mouffe and that he was devoted to developing its links with Lacanian theory. He has himself noted how Hegemony helped forge a productive link between Lacanian psychoanalysis and critical political theory (Zizek, 1989). This, however, did not last. It was to be replaced by a more Leninist phase in which the focus on a radicalization of democracy is replaced by a politics of the anti-capitalist act. His major objection seems to be that radical democracy limits itself to an awareness of contingency, which although useful in certain circumstances, but clearly misleading in others is, in any case, insufficient to ground a progressive politics. What would be your position on this issue? EL: About Zizeks own intellectual evolution, it is obviously to him that one should address such a question. But as far as his appreciation of my own work is concerned, I can only say that, with hindsight, he does not seem to have ever understood what we mean by radical democracy. In a recent intervention he takes Yannis Stavrakakis to task because, as he argues, Stavrakakis has not realized that my political perspective has changed, that while in my earlier work I spoke of radical democracy, now I defend populism (Zizek, 2008). And he says that in order to add a note of approval of my supposedly new stand. What Zizek does not realize is that, for me, the kind of populism that I defend is a form of radical democracy. There is radical democracy whenever there is a widening of popular interventions in the public sphere on the basis of the expansion of equivalential chains of democratic demands around a hegemonic popular core. And this can take place within the most divergent institutional frameworks, not all of which are going to be liberal-democratic in the usual sense of the term. That is why, in my view, the present populist Latin American regimes to which we have referred at the beginning of this interview are clearly radical democratic; but as radical democratic I would also consider the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, Maos Long March, the Intifada, the Algerian revolution and the various 1968 mobilizations both in America and in Europe. To say that a movement cannot be radically democratic, because it is populist, does not make any sense, as long as one accepts the meaning I have given to these terms. As for the contingency resulting from the fragility of the equivalential chains, I think it should be evident to everybody that no particular demand has inscribed within itself, as its manifest destiny, what it will hegemonically fix as the meaning of a particular equivalential chain. So in this
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area, all kinds of combinations and perversions are possible. Zizek himself has recognized this fact several times, so I cannot really understand all the fuss he is making around this issue. Zizek goes on to make more explicit his disagreement with what he has described as the formalist element in your work. Of course, as it turns out, his problem is not so much with formalism as such but with a particular omission he diagnoses in your version of formalism. Consider the following quote: Where is my problem? Maybe my biggest disagreement with Laclau is the following: I admire him very much when, as a true philosopher, he tries to define notions at a logical, transcendental level y Now, the problem I have with his work, and with Badiou and others, is the following: why dont they admit that what Marx called critique of political economy is also not simply positive economics, that there is in commodity fetishism, in the whole logic of surplus, what Laclau would call a purely formal, transcendental dimension? In other words, what I find a little bit suspicious is this denigration of political economy. (Zizek, 2004, p. 295 ) How would you respond to this comment at a general level? EL: I do not think that you will find in my work even a single denigratory reference to political economy and I do not think that you will find it in the work of Badiou either. This charge has its only source in Zizeks febrile imagination. What you will definitely find in my work is the assertion that the economic level of society is not a self-contained entity operating as an infrastructure; that the coherence it reaches is, as with everything else, hegemonically constructed; and that capitalist relations of production are the locus of a multiplicity of antagonisms and democratic demands, so that an expansive radical democratic hegemony obviously needs to be extended to the economic sphere. What is, however, symptomatic of the way in which Zizek attempts to introduce political economy into his discourse, is that he appeals to the notion of commodity fetishism. Now, everybody has realized a long time ago that commodity fetishism is a blind spot in Maxs theorization. It is a remainder of Hegelianism, centred as it is in the notion of alienation. But if alienation in its Hegelian sense is accepted, all the central categories of Lacanian theorization fall away. This is the main problem with Zizeks approach: that the very insightful remarks he frequently offers do not cohere into a rigorous orientation because of the eclecticism of their component elements. In several places you have argued for the essential interpenetration of the descriptive and normative aspects of discourse, baptizing this the
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descriptive-normative complex. But you have also argued that this descriptivenormative dimension is orthogonal to the ethical dimension of discourse. There are thus two sets of distinctions at play here. First there is the descriptivenormative distinction, and then there is the distinction between the descriptivenormative complex, on the one hand, and the ethical as such. There are a series of questions which arise for us here. First, how do you see the relationship between these two distinctions? How might this relationship be cashed out as a function of the symbolic and affective dimensions of discourse? Are there no conditions under which the descriptive-normative dimension begins to contaminate the ethical dimension? And if so, with what implications for political analysis and critique? EL: My distinction between the descriptive/normative complex and the ethical is grounded on the role that the notion of empty signifier plays in my approach. As I have frequently argued, at a most general level the fullness of the community, what makes all the communitarian elements cohere into a whole, is an object which is, simultaneously, impossible and necessary. This double condition impossibility and necessity is expressed through the semantic presence of words without concrete contents and through their relation to other words which have such a content, in terms which can only be conceived as radical investment. If I say, for instance, socialism is justice, I am not equating two concepts with precise contents of their own, but I am attributing to the precise contents of one of them (socialism) the undefined positive value of another (justice). How is justice conceived here then? Justice is the pure reverse of situations experienced as unjust. I do not know what a just arrangement would be, but I know it would be something negating and reversing my present predicament. It is the presence of an absence. So when I identify justice with socialism, I am, on the one hand, attaching that absence to a concrete presence that starts to function as its incarnation the ethical acquires, through this investment a concrete content; but, on the other hand, and simultaneously, that concrete content acquires an ethical dimension that it would not have had otherwise. The notion of radical investment (with its double dimension, signifying and affective), which has been with us from the beginning of our exchange, thus acquires a new dimension: an ethical dimension. As for the question concerning contamination, everything depends on what is understood by this term. If it refers to a total fusion or collapse of the one onto the other, the answer is no. But if it marks a tension by which none of the two dimensions can entirely absorb the other, a tension revealing the relation to each other as an asymptotic movement, the answer is positive. Thank you very much. EL: Thank you.

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About the Interviewee

Ernesto Laclau is Emeritus Professor of Political Theory at the University of Essex, Colchester, UK.

References
Freud, S. (1991) Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. Translated by J. Strachey. Civilization, Society and Religion, (Penguin Freud Library, 12) London: Penguin, pp. 91178. Laclau, E. (1990) New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. London: Verso. Laclau, E. (2003) Discourse and jouissance: A reply to Glynos and Stavrakakis. Journal for Lacanian Studies 1(2): 278285. Laclau, E. (2004) Glimpsing the future: A reply. In: S. Critchley and O. Marchart (eds.) Laclau: A Critical Reader. London: Routledge. Laclau, E. (2005) On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Miller, J.-A. (2000) Paradigms of Jouissance. Lacanian Ink 12: 1047. Zizek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. Zizek, S. (2004) Psychoanalysis, theory and politics: Yannis Stavrakakis interviews Slavoj Zizek. Journal for Lacanian Studies 2(2): 285305. Zizek, S. (2008) In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso.

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