Abstract
Ernesto Laclau’s theory of hegemony interprets in a peculiar way two central concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis: the signifier and the real. Laclau maintains that signifiers are per se tendentially empty and that there is some constituting impossibility in every social system, that is, some real in the Lacanian sense. This paper levels two criticisms at this interpretation. Firstly, Lacan never employs the concept “empty signifier”: His definition of the signifier as that which represents a subject—and his enjoyment—for another signifier contradicts this emptiness. Secondly, in the place of the impossible, Lacan puts enjoyment. The main political consequence of these two considerations is that the theory of hegemony is mistaken when focusing on the rhetorical debate and forgets that individual political inclinations are based mainly on their enjoyment.
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Notes
“The argument I have developed is that, at this point, there is the possibility that one difference, without ceasing to be a particular difference, assumes the representation of an incommensurable totality. In that way, its body is split between the particularity, which it still is, and the more universal signification of which it is the bearer. This operation of taking up, by a particularity, of an incommensurable universal signification is what I have called hegemony” (Laclau 2005, p. 70).
“Since the construction of ‘the people’ is the political act par excellence—as opposed to pure administration within a stable institutional framework—the sine qua non requirements of the political are the constitution of antagonistic frontiers within the social and the appeal to new subjects of social change […]” (Laclau 2005, p. 154).
“This operation of taking up, by a particularity, of an incommensurable universal signification is what I have called hegemony. In addition, given that this embodies totality or universality is, as we have seen, an impossible object, the hegemonic identity becomes something of the order of an empty signifier, its own particularity embodying an unachievable fullness. With this it should be clear that the category of totality cannot be eradicated but that, as a failed totality, it is a horizon and not a ground” (Laclau 2005, p. 70–71).
“But if what we are talking about are the limits of a signifying system, it is clear that those limits cannot be themselves signified, but have to show themselves as the interruption or breakdown of the process of signification” (Laclau 1996, p. 37).
In Laclau’s words, “but have to show themselves as the interruption or breakdown of the process of signification” (Laclau 1996, p. 37).
“But a system constituted through radical exclusion interrupts this play of the differential logic: what is excluded from the system, far from being something positive, is the simple principle of positivity pure being. This already announces the possibility of an empty signifier—that is a signifier of the pure cancellation of all difference” (Laclau 1996, p. 38).
“For the phallus is a signifier, a signifier whose function, in the intra-subjective economy of the analysis lifts the veil perhaps from the function it performed in the mysteries. For it is the signifier intended to designate as a whole the effects of the signified, in that the signifier conditions them by its presence as a signifier” (Lacan 1977, p. 285).
That’s why empty signifiers are only tendentially and not completely empty: “There is not, strictly speaking, a signifier which is truly empty, but one which is only tendentially so” (Butler et al. 2000, p. 304). “This, as we have seen, leads to one of the demands stepping in and becoming the signifier of the whole chain—a tendentially empty signifier” (Laclau 2005, p. 131).
“The non-transparency of the representative to the represented, the irreducible autonomy of the signifier vis-à-vis the signified, is the condition of a hegemony which structures the social from its very ground and is not the epiphenomenal expression of a transcendental signified which would submit the signifier to its own predetermined movements. This 'liberation' of the signifier vis-à-vis the signified—the very precondition of hegemony—is what the Lacanian bar attempts to express” (Laclau 2000, p. 66).
“As we can see, there is a mutual contamination here between the abstract and the concrete, because: (a) which signifiers will fulfill this function of empty universal representation depends on each social or historical context; (b) the degree to which this process of emptying takes place is also contextually dependent (less so in highly institutionalized contexts, more so in contexts of ‘organic crises', etc.)” (Butler et al. 2000, p. 193).
“Precisely because the community as such is not a purely differential space of an objective identity but an absent fullness, it cannot have any form of representation of its own, and has to borrow the latter from some entity constituted within the equivalent space—in the same way as gold is a particular use value which assumes, as well, the function of representing value in general. This emptying of a particular signifier of its particular, differential signified is, as we saw, what makes possible the emergence of ‘empty' signifiers as the signifiers of a lack, of an absent totality” (Laclau 1996, p. 42).
Laclau’s Greek disciple, Yannis Stavrakakis, goes on this path (Stavrakis 1999; 2007), considering that the main contribution of Lacanian psychoanalysis to a left politics is not forgetting this impossibility. In our opinion, Lacanian Psychoanalysis has much more to offer, for example, a much more fundamental critic of capitalism (Lacan 1978b).
"Although the Lacanian Real was not originally an attempt to think hegemonic displacements, I do not see in it anything which goes against the concept of the latter” (Butler et al. 2000, p. 185).
“And then there is meaning, which always refers to meaning. Of course, the signifier may be caught up therein as soon as you give it a meaning, as soon as you create another signifier as signifier, something in this function of meaning. This is the reason why it is possible to speak of language. But the signifier-signified division will always reproduce itself. There is no doubt that meaning is by nature imaginary. Meaning is, like the imaginary, always in the end evanescent, for it is tightly bound to what interests you, that is, to that in which you are ensnared” (Lacan 1993, p. 56). We try to use always English published translations. When we do not have it, the translations are ours and we quoted French official editions.
“Our starting point, the point we keep coming back to, since we shall always be at the starting point, is that every real signifier is, as such, a signifier that signifies nothing.
Experience proves it—the more the signifier signifies nothing, the more indestructible it is” (Lacan 1993, p. 172).
“I have already situated the course of the signifier or of concrete discourse, for example, in a sort of parallel superposition with the course of the signified, in which and as which the continuity of lived experience is presented, the flux of drives in a subject, and between subjects.
---------------------------------------------- signifier
---------------------------------------------- signified
This representation is all the more valuable in that nothing can be conceived, not only of speech, or of language, but of the phenomena present in analysis, unless one admits the essential possibility of perpetual glissades of the signified under the signifier, and of the signifier over the signified. Nothing in analytic experience can be explained except by this fundamental schema” (Lacan 1994, p. 43–44; our translation).
“The signifier, being something quite different [from the sign], represents a subject for another signifier” (Lacan 1978a, p. 157).
“[…] this object ought to be conceived by us as the cause of desire, and, to take up my metaphor of a little while ago, the object is behind desire” (Lacan 2004, p. 120).
“It is a question of this privileged object, discovered by analysis, of that object whose very reality is purely topological, of that object around which the drive moves, of that object that rises in a bump, like the wooden darning egg in the material which, in analysis, you are darning—the objet a” (Lacan 1978a, p. 257).
“Here now is where what Lacan contributes comes in: it concerns this repetition, this identification of enjoyment. Here, I borrow from Freud’s text the function of the unary trait to give it a sense that is not highlighted there, namely, the simplest form of mark, namely, what is, properly speaking, the origin of the signifier” (Lacan 2000, p. 52).
“[…] a hegemonic totalization requires a radical investment—that is, one that is not determinable a priori—and engagement in signifying games that are very different from purely conceptual apprehension. As we shall see, the affective dimension plays a central role here” (Laclau 2005, p. 71). “The conclusion is clear: the complexes which we call ‘discursive or hegemonic formations,’ which articulate differential and equivalential logics, would be unintelligible without the affective component. (This is a further proof—were one still needed—of the inanity of dismissing emotional populist attachments in the name of an uncontaminated rationality.)” (Laclau 2005, p. 111).
“I put forward the quasi-algebraic formula, which has the air of being almost too transparent, too concrete—the real, or what is perceived as such, is what resists symbolization absolutely” (Lacan 1953–54, p. 66). “This method would bring us here to the question of the possible, and the impossible is not necessarily the contrary of the possible, or, since the opposite of the possible is certainly the real, we would be lead to define the real as the impossible” (Lacan 1978a, p. 167).
“For it is clear that without some positivation of the negative, without some presence of the Real with in symbolization, we would have a purely inert negative condition without any discursive effect and consequently without any possible historical influence. This positivation of the negative is what I have called the production of tendentially empty signifiers, which is the very condition of politics and political change” (Butler et al. 2000, p. 185).
“Perhaps what we described as the central place, as the intimate exterior or ‘extimacy,’ that is the Thing […]” (Lacan 2004, p. 139).
Lacan (2001).
Lacan introduces for the first time the schema in his Seminar II, lesson XIX, May 25th 1955 (Lacan 1988, p. 284).
“The capital barred O/means the following: in O—that is not a being but the locus of the word, the locus, where reposes, in a developed form, or in a undeveloped form, the totality of the system of signifiers, namely of a language—something is missing. This something, which is lacking to it can be only a signifier, which explains the S. The signifier which is lacking to it at the level of the Other, this is the formula which gives its most radical value to this S(A/). This is, as I might say, the great secret of psychoanalysis. The great secret is—there is no Other of the Other” (Lacan 2013, p. 353; our translation).
Deleuze and Guattari formulate a similar distinction in Capitalism and Schizophrenics by separating between preconscious (group, social class) and unconscious investments: “It is not a question of ideology. There is an unconscious libidinal investment of the social field that coexists, but does not necessarily coincide, with the preconscious investments, or with what the preconscious investments ‘ought to be.’ That is why, when subjects, individuals, or groups act manifestly counter to their class interests […] it is not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled. It is not an ideological problem […] It is a problem of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure” (Deleuze and Guattari 2000, p. 104).
“The surplus enjoying appeared, in my last talks, in a function of homology with the Marxist surplus value. To say Homology, clearly means, that their relation is not one of analogy” (Lacan 2006, p. 45).
“[…] it works like a charm, it couldn’t work better, but it just works too fast, it consummates, it consummates so well that it is consumed” (Lacan 1978b, p. 48; our translation).
See the prohibition of burkini in France beaches (Dearden 2016).
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This paper was written during the research project entitled “Social suffering and victim condition: epistemic, social and political dimensions” financed by the Spanish national Plan of Scientific and Technological Research (FFI2015-69733-P).
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Conde Soto, F. Subject, enjoyment, hegemony: a discussion of Ernesto Laclau’s interpretation of empty signifiers and the real as impossible in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Cont Philos Rev 53, 197–208 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-020-09497-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-020-09497-7