Laclau, Ernesto (1935–)

Ernesto Laclau is a political theorist who works with Marxist theory and poststructuralist thought. For this reason, Laclau is often described as—and describes himself as—post-Marxist. Laclau studied at the University of Buenos Aires and Oxford prior to [Page 819]receiving his doctorate from the University of Essex. He is currently a professor of political theory at Essex and has been a guest lecturer at universities throughout the world.

Laclau's most important work is Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, which he wrote with Chantal Mouffe. This book proposes a number of ways of revitalizing the emancipatory politics of Marxism in light of poststructural theories that reject such Marxist tenets as Hegelian dialectics and the project of universality. Laclau and Mouffe propose that it is necessary for contemporary politics on the left to actively construct a new hegemony, a term that they adopt from the writing of Antonio Gramsci. Such a socialist hegemony needs to articulate itself in a discursive field that recognizes the contingency of any political decision. That is, since any political decision is, ultimately, reversible and not predetermined, it is possible to build an alternative to the neoliberal politics that Laclau and Mouffe see as characterizing the contemporary era. Hegel's model of dialectics, upon which Marxist theory relies, is inadequate to this task because it treats political relations as objective ones, whereas Laclau and Mouffe see politics as a subjective field. As a result of this subjectivity, the strict universality that Marx envisioned for communism is impossible. However, universality is also necessary to the creation of a socialist hegemony. This universality, though, is to be conceptualized as a specifically political universality. Because this polity is social, such a universality is able to account for the anti-racist, anti-sexist, and otherwise anti-oppressive agendas of the new social movements. The goal of this post-Marxist construction, state Laclau and Mouffe, is a form of radical democracy.

Laclau has continually returned to the project of the hegemony in his later writings, which have sought to establish the interconnections between Marxism and poststructuralism, especially the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and the poststructural ethics of Jacques Derrida. Recent collaborations with cultural theorists on the left such as Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler have explored the problems of contingency and undecidability, as well as that of creating equivalence between social struggles as one means of arriving at political universality. Laclau's writing is intensely focused on the ethics and means of fostering emancipation in the contemporary world, making his theories central to the continual vitality of Marxist thought.