Table Of Content

Thinking Antagonism 55881166__MMaarrcchhaarrtt..iinndddd ii 2288//0066//1188 44::1166 PPMM 55881166__MMaarrcchhaarrtt..iinndddd iiii 2288//0066//1188 44::1166 PPMM Thinking Antagonism Political Ontology after Laclau Oliver Marchart 55881166__MMaarrcchhaarrtt..iinndddd iiiiii 2288//0066//1188 44::1166 PPMM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Oliver Marchart, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 1330 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 1332 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1331 2 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 1333 6 (epub) The right of Oliver Marchart to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 55881166__MMaarrcchhaarrtt..iinndddd iivv 2288//0066//1188 44::1166 PPMM Contents List of Abbreviations vii Introduction: What is Antagonism? 1 1. ‘What’s Going on with Being?’: Laclau and the Return of Political Ontology 8 Part I Thinking the Political 2. Marx on the Beach: An Intellectual History of Antagonism 37 3. Beyond the ‘War Hypothesis’: Polemology in Foucault, Stiegler and Loraux 63 Part II Thinking Politics 4. The Restless Nature of the Social: On the Micro-Confl ictuality of Everyday Life 87 5. Politics and the Popular: Protest and Culture in Laclau’s Theory of Populism 109 6. On Minimal Politics: Conditions of Acting Politically 129 Part III Politicising Thought 7. The Final Name of Being: Thinking as Refl ective Intervention 157 55881166__MMaarrcchhaarrtt..iinndddd vv 2288//0066//1188 44::1166 PPMM Thinking Antagonism 8. Being as Acting: The Primacy of Politics and the Politics of Thought 181 Conclusion: Ostinato Rigore, or, the Ethics of Intellectual Engagement 206 Notes 218 Bibliography 241 Index 255 vi 55881166__MMaarrcchhaarrtt..iinndddd vvii 2288//0066//1188 44::1166 PPMM Abbreviations E Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s), London: Verso, 1996. HSS Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso, 1985. NR Ernesto Laclau, New Refl ections on the Revolution of Our Time, London: Verso, 1990. PR Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, London: Verso, 2005. RFS Ernesto Laclau, The Rhetorical Foundations of Society, London: Verso, 2014. vii 55881166__MMaarrcchhaarrtt..iinndddd vviiii 2288//0066//1188 44::1166 PPMM 55881166__MMaarrcchhaarrtt..iinndddd vviiiiii 2288//0066//1188 44::1166 PPMM Introduction: What is Antagonism? Every thinker, as Heidegger used to say, follows the line of a single thought. What he forgot to mention was that no thought belongs to a single thinker. Ideas are not born from the depths of a self-enclosed mind. They always come from somewhere else, from a place ‘out there’: an intellectual tradition, an academic teacher, a school of thought, a social movement, an academic or non-academic discus- sion, a reading that turned out decisive, or simply an inspirational moment in a conversation. Intellectual work, rather than being a solitary endeavour, is a collaborative one. If there is originality in intellectual work, it is originality without determinable origin. For this reason, ideas are never the property of an individual. It is impossible to ‘own’ an idea – which is but an ideological fantasy rooted in the capitalist system of property ownership. Ideas can only be disowned – in a movement described in this book as one of self- implication – as they emerge from, and return to, an a-subjective, collective effort that cuts across temporal and geographical barriers. One of these ideas bears the name ‘antagonism’. This concept, which rings the bell of confl ictuality but is not equivalent to conventional notions of ‘confl ict’, ‘struggle’ or ‘war’, has an extended history. Antagonism is the name that was given to the phenomenon of social negativity in the tradition of German Idealism, Early Romanticism and Marxism. It was carried for- ward by the Heideggerian Hegelians of the fi rst half of the twenti- eth century, among them Kojève, Sartre and Lacan. This concept was born from a collective inquiry that reaches back more than two hundred years, but it was in the work of Ernesto Laclau, ini- tially in his path-breaking book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (HSS), co-written with Chantal Mouffe, that ‘antagonism’ found 1 55881166__MMaarrcchhaarrtt..iinndddd 11 2288//0066//1188 44::1166 PPMM