Psychoanalysis k – Sam Franz – rks seniors Cover Letter

Particular

27.The universal is the site of political contestation – an over-focus on the particular eschews political change

Laclau argues that the universal should be understood not in the traditional sense of grand teleological narratives that have the effect of marginalizing numerous groups of people by offering a single legitimate vision of society but as the “empty ground” of democratic politics. Universal concepts can still offer a way to understand contemporary politics if we accept that the time-honored political concepts that every society generates (“democracy,” “justice,” “the people,” and so on) are themselves sites of political contestation. Rather than seeing these notions as values that have an extradiscursive referent, such notions are, Laclau proposes, ambiguous sites of inscription on which different forces attempt to ascribe their own particular meaning. As he (I996: 35) explains, “If democracy is possible, it is because the universal has no necessary body and no necessary content; different groups, instead, compete between themselves to temporarily give to their particularisms a function of universal representation. Society generates a whole vocabulary of empty signifiers whose temporary signifieds are the result of a political competition.” When the political Right, for example, de- fines “freedom” as opposing the welfare state and state intervention in the market, this means that this political movement has defined the “universal” idea of freedom in a particular way that has nothing to do with any intrinsic meaning of freedom but rather in terms of a chain of other signifiers that goes unspoken whenever freedom is uttered. Filling in “freedom’s” lack of meaning is precisely what it means to succeed in solidifying common sense; to “hegemonize something is exactly to carry out this filling function” (Laclau I996: 44). Thus, the categories of the universal and the particular still retain their usefulness for political analysis, albeit in a much different (that is, nonfoundational) manner than traditional philosophy would have them. Yet every filling-in of an empty content of a societal nodal point is always precarious. No hegemonization is ever finished since there is no extradiscursive foundation that hegemonic discourses hook up to express or reflect. In this sense, hegemony is the attempt to articulate a part (a particular meaning) as embodying the whole (the universal values of a society .35