The Politics of Lack
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-856X.2004.00139.x |
| Date | 01 May 2004 |
| Author | Andrew Robinson |
| Published date | 01 May 2004 |
| Subject Matter | Original Article |
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B J P I R : 2 0 0 4 V O L 6 , 2 5 9 – 2 6 9
The Politics of Lack
Andrew Robinson
Books reviewed
Badiou, Alain (2001) Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London: Verso,
224 pp. ISBN 1-859-84435-9.
Butler, Judith, Laclau, Ernesto and i
Zˇ zˇek, Slavoj (2000) Contingency, Hegemony,
Universality. London: Verso, 335 pp. ISBN 1-859-84278-X.
Mouffe, Chantal (2000) The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso, 192 pp. ISBN
1-859-84279-8.
Stavrakakis, Yannis (1999) Lacan and the Political. London: Routledge, 208 pp. ISBN
0-415-17187-3.
i
Zˇ zˇek, Slavoj and Lenin, V. I. (2002) Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin
from 1917. London: Verso, 350 pp. ISBN 1-859-84661-0.
An approach to politics drawn from Lacanian psychoanalysis is becoming increas-
ingly popular of late among theorists who consider themselves ‘critical’ and/or
‘radical’. In Britain, its popularity is expressed in the work of the ‘Essex School’ of
discourse analysis and its growing influence in international relations and feminist
theory. Indeed, this approach to theorising politics is today perhaps second in influ-
ence only to analytical liberalism. Because of certain stylistic elements and certain
problems surrounding the reception of continental theory in Britain and America,
the existence of a distinct Lacanian paradigm is often overlooked. It is either sub-
sumed under the broad and frequently abused category of ‘post-modernism’ or
fragmented between different authors and schools. There are, however, sufficient
similarities between the books under review here to suggest that they belong to a
single approach, sufficiently similar to each other and sufficiently different from
other varieties of post-structuralism to qualify as a distinct paradigm (with the
exceptions, to be clarified later, of Lenin and Butler).
The guiding theme in the work of i
Zˇ zˇek, Badiou, Laclau, Mouffe and Stavrakakis
is the idea of ‘constitutive lack’. This basic idea refers to a first principle or zero-
point of ‘the human condition’ or (in the case of the Essex School) of social life
which is asserted at a high level of generality, as ontology or ‘social ontology’.
Rather than being treated as a contingent phenomenon, lack is turned into some-
thing akin to an essence, which can be used to explain social phenomena. The
authors have different names for the basic element of lack and there are subtle dif-
ferences in their uses of the concept, but they all take approaches traceable to
Lacan’s thesis that existence is constructed around the repression of a fundamen-
tal, unrepresentable and impossible negativity.
© Political Studies Association, 2004. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road,
Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
260
A N D R E W R O B I N S O N
In Lacan’s vocabulary, reproduced most explicitly by i
Zˇ zˇek, this impossible element,
the ‘Lacanian Real’, renders any kind of social fullness or completeness a pipe
dream; the Real necessarily returns to haunt every symbolic order. The social order,
or the Symbolic, constructs an illusion of completeness, but it is able to do so only
on the basis of the symbolic exclusion and psychological repression of the always-
returning Real. This exclusion is carried out through the device of a master-
signifier, a particular symbolic element which ‘quilts the field’ of discourse and
reality by positing a particular element in discourse as universal. It thereby iden-
tifies some other discursive element with the Real, and the exclusion of this
element sustains the possibility of a stable symbolic edifice. As Badiou expresses it,
‘[a]t least one real element must exist ... that the truth cannot force’ (2001, 85),
and, as Stavrakakis adds, the Real is ‘inherent in human experience’ (1999, 87).
The repression of the Real is necessary for every symbolic edifice, but, since the
Real is itself ‘impossible’ and must remain out of reach, there is for Lacanians no
way to avoid establishing a symbolic order. Lacanian politics therefore arises on
the basis of assumptions of the inevitability of a recurring structure of discourse, a
structure which is reactive, exclusionary and founded on negativity. This structure
is reworked and articulated in various ways by different political Lacanians. In
Badiou’s work, for instance, the symbolic order is the order of ‘opinion’, polite
everyday discourse and normal science. Every such symbolic system is haunted by
a void which is its Real. For Laclau and Mouffe, political stability requires the con-
struction of a political order, but this order is necessarily haunted by the constitu-
tivity of antagonism, so that every political order must be established through
exclusion and violence. Mouffe’s latest book remains firmly within this agenda,
declaring that antagonism as a dimension of social life is ‘ineradicable’ (2000, 21).
i
Zˇ zˇek similarly declares that there must always be social exclusion and what he
calls ‘enemies of the people’ (in Butler, Laclau and i
Zˇ zˇek 2000, 92). It is this neces-
sity of antagonism, and the resultant impossibility of ‘spontaneous’ self-awareness,
that provides the theoretical basis for i
Zˇ zˇek’s celebration of the imposition of
control by a state and a party (2002, 187, 259).
For Lacanians, the return of the Real is always a disruptive, almost revolutionary
event which shatters the entire social totality constructed around its exclusion.
Every social order, therefore, has a single touchy ‘nodal point’ which it must main-
tain, or else it will collapse. Since the exclusion of a Real element is supposed to
be necessary, Lacanians urge that one reconcile oneself to the inevitability of lack.
Lacanian politics is therefore about coming to terms with violence, exclusion and
antagonism, not about resolving or removing these. The acceptance of lack takes
the form of an Act or Event, in which the myth of subjective completeness is
rejected and the incompleteness of the self is embraced.
The primary ethical imperative in Lacanian politics is to ‘accept’ the primacy of
antagonism, i.e. the central ontological claim of the Lacanian edifice itself. Mouffe,
for instance, demands that one accept ‘an element of hostility among human
beings’ as something akin to a fact of human nature (2000, 130–132). She attacks
deconstructive and dialogical approaches to ethics for being ‘unable to come to
terms with “the political” in its antagonistic dimension’. Such approaches lack ‘a
proper reflection on the moment of “decision” which characterises the field of
T H E P O L I T I C S O F L A C K
261
politics’ and which necessarily ‘entail[s] an element of force and violence’ (ibid.,
129–130). Mouffe’s alternative involves a politics which ‘acknowledges the real
nature of [the] frontiers [of the social] and the forms of exclusion that they entail
instead of trying to disguise them under the veil of rationality or morality’ (ibid.,
105). She celebrates democracy, but her version of democracy depends on ‘the pos-
sibility of drawing a frontier between “us” and “them” ’ and ‘always entails rela-
tions of inclusion–exclusion’ (ibid., 43). The derivation of such views is unclear
from the text, but seems to be that, since everyone needs a master-signifier as an
element in their psyche, and since such a signifier arises through the machinations
of ‘the political’, therefore the exclusionary and violent operations of coercive state
apparatuses must be accepted as an absolute necessity for any kind of social life.
This is Hobbesian statism updated for a post-modern era.
As should by now be clear, the central claims of Lacanian theory are ontological
rather than political. Indeed, since Lacan’s work...
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