___________________________________

___________________________________

Politics and Passions: the Stakes of Democracy

Chantal Mouffe Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster (London)
The development of the new means of communication and the overwhelming presence of the media
in all realms of life represent a challenge for
democratic politics. In this presentation I want to
argue that such a challenge can only be grasped and
met by discarding the rationalist perspective
dominant in liberal democratic political thought.
Indeed, such a perspective impedes us from
acknowledging the nature of the political struggle
and the centrality of symbols in the construction of
political identities. As the recent growth of rightwing populist movements testifies, new political
identities are currently being created and there is no
doubt that the media are playing an important role
in their diffusion. It would be a serious mistake
however to present the media as the main culprit,
and to see such movements as a consequence of
`media politics'. The success of those movements
would not be possible without a political rhetoric
that managed to mobilize a wide range of signifiers.
Had it not been able to articulate those signifiers
into a chain of equivalence against the existing
order, right-wing populism could not have made
such important inroads in several European
countries.
From a theoretical point of view, what this
reveals is the utter irrelevance of the rationalist
approach to politics and the importance of the socalled `post-modern approach'. It shows that,
despite what authors like Habermas pretend, the
critique of Enlightenment rationalism does not
constitute a threat to the modern democratic
project. On the contrary, it is only by taking
account of such a critique that it is possible to
defend and deepen democratic institutions. If there
is anything that endangers democracy nowadays, it
is precisely the rationalist approach, because it is
blind to the nature of the political and denies the
central role that passions play in the field of
politics. Only by drawing out all the implications of

the critique of essentialism will it be possible to

understand the process of construction of collective
political identities and their discursive mode of
articulation.
The question of identity
I submit that while rationalism has always constituted an obstacle to understanding the nature of the
political, in the age of the media its shortcomings
impede us from understanding the profound
transformations taking place in the political realm.
Today we are witnessing a profound transformation
of the political frontiers that have existed since the
end of the second World War and the dynamics of
those transformations can only be grasped by a
political theory that understands the different ways
in which subjectivity is discursively constructed.
Hence the crucial importance for a democratic
political theory of coming to terms with the critique
of rationalism that has characterized the most
innovative currents of twentieth-century thought.
One of the fundamental advances of such a
critique has been the break with the category of the
subject as a rational transparent entity able to
convey a homogeneous meaning on the total field
of her conduct by being the source of her actions.
Psychoanalysis has shown that, far from being
organized around the transparency of an ego,
personality is structured on a number of levels
which lie outside the consciousness and rationality
of the agents. It has therefore discredited the idea of
the necessarily unified character of the subject.
Freud's central claim is that the human mind is
necessarily subject to division between two
systems, one of which is not and cannot be
conscious. The self-mastery of the subject a
central theme of modern philosophy is precisely
what can never be reached. Following Freud, and
expanding his insight, Lacan has shown the

_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 7 (2000)2-3, p.146

___________________________________

plurality of registers the Symbolic, the Real and

the Imaginary that penetrate any identity, and the
place of the subject as the place of the lack which,
though represented within the structure, is the
empty place that at the same time subverts and is
the condition of the constitution of any identity.
The history of the subject is the history of her
identifications and there is no concealed identity to
be rescued beyond the latter. Because there is a lack
of identity, the subject will always attempt to fill
out its constitutive lack by means of identification,
by identifying itself with what Lacan call a `mastersignifier'. Only in that way can it secure its place in
the symbolic network. There is, then, a double
movement. On the one hand, a movement of
decentring which prevents the fixation of a set of
positions around a preconstituted point. On the
other hand, and as a result of this essential nonfixation, the opposite movement: the institution of
nodal points, partial fixations which limit the flux
of the signified under the signifier. But the dialectic
of non-fixation/fixation is possible only because
fixation is not pregiven, because no centre of
subjectivity precedes the subject's identifications.
I can only refer here to certain aspects of that
critique of rationalism, but it is clear that it takes
many other forms. For instance, in the philosophy
of language of the later Wittgenstein, we also find a
critique of the rationalist conception of the subject
that indicates that the latter cannot be the source of
linguistic meanings, since it is through participation
in different languages games that the world is
disclosed to us. We encounter the same idea in
Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics in the thesis
that there exists a fundamental unity between
thought, language and the world, and that it is
within language that the horizon of our present is
constituted. A similar critique of the centrality of
the subject in modern metaphysics, and of its
unitary character, can be found in different forms in
several authors from the tradition of American
Pragmatism. It constitutes one of the points of
convergence among the most important
contemporary philosophical trends.

___________________________________

Critique of rationalism and politics

The consequences of the critique of rationalism for
politics become particularly relevant when such
critique is articulated with the Gramscian
conception of hegemony, as we attempted to do in
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.1 One of the main
theses of the book is that social objectivity is
constituted through acts of power. This means that
any social objectivity is ultimately political and that
it has to show the traces of exclusion which
governs its constitution what we have called,
following Derrida, its `constitutive outside'. By
affirming that an object has inscribed, in its very
being, something other than itself and that as a
result everything is constructed as difference, the
notion of the `constitutive outside' reveals that
being cannot be conceived as pure 'presence' or
'objectivity'. This is decisive, for if the 'constitutive
outside' is present within the inside as its always
real possibility, then the inside itself becomes a
purely contingent and reversible arrangement (in
other words, the hegemonic arrangement cannot
claim any other source of validity than the power
base on which it is grounded). The point of
convergence or rather mutual collapse
between objectivity and power is what we have
called `hegemony'. This way of posing the problem
indicates that power should not be conceived as an
external relation obtaining between two preconstituted identities, but rather as constituting the
identities themselves. The structure of possibility of
any objective order, which is revealed by its
hegemonic nature, is shown in the forms assumed
by the subversion of the sign (i.e., of the relation
signifer/signified). For instance, the signifier
`democracy' is very different when fixed to a
certain signified in a discourse that articulates it as
`anti-communism' than when it is fixed to another
signified in a discourse that makes it the focus point
of all the struggle against opression. As there is no
common ground between those conflicting articulations, there is no way of subsuming them under a
deeper objectivity which would reveal its true and
deeper essence.

_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 7 (2000)2-3, p.147

___________________________________

These considerations have far-reaching implications for political theory and they explain why
the logic of the constitution of the social cannot be
grasped within the objectivism and essentialism
dominant in the social sciences and liberal thought.
The consequences for politics are particularly
pertinent with regard to apprehending the process
of constructing political identities. For instance,
according to such a perspective, political practice in
a democratic society does not consist in defending
the rights of preconstituted identities, but rather in
constituting those identities themselves in a
precarious and always vulnerable field. This shows
that what is taken as `common sense' at a given
moment is always the result of hegemonic
articulations, i.e., the establishment of nodal points
that partially fix the meaning of a signifying chain.
Attempts to arrest the flow of differences and
construct a centre are always precarious and
unstable because they take place in a field crisscrossed by antagonisms. Therefore, there is always
the possibility of subverting the order created by a
particular discourse by disarticulating its elements
and by establishing another mode of articulation.
This is indeed what is happening today with respect
to the relation that has been established, since the
end of the second World War, between democracy,
communism and fascism. The traditional frontiers
have collapsed and we are witnessing different
attempts at rearticulation. With advances in the
means of communication, this critique of
essentialism has become crucial for envisaging
democratic politics because the increasing role of
the media has created an extended terrain for the
hegemonic struggle.
By limiting themselves to calls for reason,
moderation and consensus, many democratic
parties are showing their lack of understanding of
the functioning of political logic. They do not
understand the need to counter their adversaries by
mobilizing affects and passions in a progressive
direction. What they do not realize is that a
democratic politics needs to have a real purchase on
people's desires and fantasies and that, instead of
opposing interests to sentiments and reason to

___________________________________

passions, it should offer principles of identification

which represent a real challenge to the ones
promoted by the right. This is not to say that reason
and rational argument should disappear from
politics but that their role must be re-thought. For
instance, the sterile oposition between rhetoric and
logic must be discarded in favour of a new
conception of argumentation that takes into account
the nature of hegemonic articulatory practices.
Once it is granted that identities are never
already given and that what is taken as `identity' is
always the result of a process of identification a
process taking place through a multiplicity of
discourses the struggle for hegemony appears in
all its complexity. Indeed, it coincides with the
whole realm of `culture' in all its diverse manifestations from the `highest' to the `lowest'. It is
through cultural practices that symbolic forms of
identification are elaborated and with the incredible
development of the media they are now very
widely available. The terrain for hegemonic articulation has thereby been greatly enlarged and the
tasks of politics have become much more complex.
To be sure, hegemony has always been crucial in
democratic politics, but its conditions of exercise
have been profoundly transformed by the current
proliferation of the sites of identification and the
growth of the means of communication. The two
conditions of a hegemonic articulation are the
presence of antagonistic forces and the instability
of frontiers which separate them: hegemony
requires the presence of a vast area of floating
elements and the possibility of their articulation in
opposing camps. This, however, is precisely what
is unthinkable within a rationalistic framework,
which relies on an implicit ontology that conceives
being under the form of presence and envisages
objectivity as belonging to the things themselves.
For an agonistic pluralism
In order to begin delineating an alternative to the
rationalist approach I propose to distinguish between `the political' and `politics'. By `the political',
I refer to the dimension of hostility and antagonism

_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 7 (2000)2-3, p.148

___________________________________

that is an ever present possibility in all human

society, antagonism that can take many different
forms and emerge in diverse social relations.
`Politics', on the other hand, refers to the ensemble
of practices, discourses and institutions which seek
to establish a certain order and organize human
coexistence in conditions that are always
potentially conflictual because they are affected by
the dimension of `the political'. This conception
which attempts to keep together the two meanings
that are present in the idea of politics `polemos'
and `polis' is crucial for a democratic politics.
Indeed, it is only when we acknowledge this
dimension of `the political', and understand that
`politics' consists in domesticating hostility and in
trying to defuse the potential antagonism that exists
in human relations, that we can pose what I
consider to be the fundamental question for
democratic politics. This question, contrary to what
the rationalists claim, is not how to arrive at a
rational consensus reached without exclusion; in
other words, it does not consist in trying to
construct an `us' that would not have a
corresponding `them'. This is impossible because
the very condition of constituting an `us' is the
demarcation of a `them'. What is the real issue is
how to establish the us/them distinction in a way
that is compatible with pluralist democracy. In the
realm of politics, this requires that the `other' not be
seen as an enemy to be destroyed, but as an
`adversary' whose ideas we are going to struggle
with but whose right to defend those ideas we will
not put into question. We could say that the aim of
democratic politics is to transform an `antagonism'
into an `agonism'. Envisaged from this perspective
of what I have proposed to call `agonistic
pluralism'2, the prime task of democratic politics is
not to eliminate passions or to relegate them to the
private sphere in order to establish a rational
consensus in the public sphere. Rather, it is to
`tame' those passions by mobilizing them towards
democratic designs. It is necessary to understand
that far from jeopardizing democracy, agonistic
confrontation is in fact its very condition of
possibility. To be sure, pluralist democracy

___________________________________

demands consensus on a set of common ethicopolitical principles, but it also calls for the
expression of dissent and the institutions through
which conflicts can be manifested. This is why its
survival depends on the possibility of forming
collective political identities around clearly
differentiated positions and the choice among real
alternatives. When the agonistic dynamics of
pluralism is hindered because of a lack of
democratic identities to identify with, the ground is
laid for various forms of politics articulated around
essentialist identities of a nationalist, religious or
ethnic type and for the multiplication of
confrontations over non-negotiable moral values.
Far from attempting to erase the traces of power
and exclusion, pluralist democratic politics needs to
bring them to the fore, to make them visible so that
they can enter the terrain of contestation. And the
fact that this must be envisaged as an unending
process should not be cause for despair on the
contrary. In a pluralist democracy, divisions and
conflicts are not to be seen as disturbances that
unfortunately cannot be eliminated or as empirical
impediments that render impossible the full
realization of a good constituted by a harmony that
we cannot reach because we will never be
completely able to coincide with our rational
universal self. In a democratic polity, conflicts and
confrontations, far from being signs of
imperfection, are the guarantee that democracy is
alive and inhabited by pluralism.
This is why we should be suspicious of the
current tendency to celebrate the `end of politics' or
to advocate a politics of consensus, a `third way'
supposedly replacing an old-fashioned confrontational politics of Left and Right. A well
functioning democracy calls for a vibrant clash of
democratic political positions. Instead of relinquishing Left and Right as outdated, we should
redefine these notions in order to give a new
impulse to democracy. Antagonisms can take many
forms and it is illusory to believe that they could be
eradicated. It is therefore preferable to give them a
political outlet within a pluralistic democratic
system offering possibilities of identification

_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 7 (2000)2-3, p.149

___________________________________

around real alternatives.

I submit that it is in the context of the absence of
an agonistic democratic public sphere that we
should understand the increasing influence of rightwing populism. Indeed, in many countries they are
the only parties that oppose the consensus at the
centre between the main governing parties. Thanks
to skilful populist rhetoric, they have managed to
present themselves as anti-Establishment forces,
representing the will of the people and claiming to
be the only guarantors of popular sovereignty. Such
a situation would not have been possible had more
real political choices been available within the
traditional democratic spectrum.

___________________________________

To make room for dissent and foster the institutions in which it can be manifested is vital for
democracy. We need to give up the very idea that
there could come a time when society is `wellordered'. Herein lies the superiority of the agonistic
approach which acknowledges the real nature of
political frontiers and the forms of exclusion that
they entail, instead of trying to disguise them under
the veil of rationality or morality. By warning us
against the illusion that a fully achieved consensus
could ever be instantiated, it forces us to keep the
democratic contestation alive. Coming to terms
with the hegemonic nature of social relations and
identities, it can contribute to subverting the ever
present temptation that exists in democracies to
naturalize its frontiers and essentialize its identities.
It can therefore better accomodate the multiplicity
of voices that a pluralist society encompasses and
the complexity of its struggles.

Notes
1.Ernesto LACLAU, Chantal MOUFFE, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London,
Verso, 1985.
2.I have developed this perspective in The Return of the Political. London, Verso, 1993 and The Democratic Paradox.
London, Verso 2000.

_______________________________________________________________________________________
Ethical Perspectives 7 (2000)2-3, p.150