discoursology

31 December 2008

Totality as a horizon

Filed under: discourse theory — Tags: , , — discoursology @ 14:06

The most recent issue of World Picture includes an interview with Ernesto Laclau. He says, inter alia:

I don’t think that the notion of totality should be repudiated but, rather, that its theoretical status has to be redefined: totality is not for me a ground but a horizon; it is a type of closure which is not incompatible with the heterogeneity of its internal elements.

Laclau also clarifies once more that where deconstruction is a theory of undecidability, hegemony is a theory of decision (the decisions taken in an undecidable terrain). What interests me most — given my current grappling with the fruitfulness of Lacan for discourse analysis — is his next comment:

In my work I have argued that the logic of the objet a in Lacan’s conception and the hegemonic logic show a profound homology, even if in one case that logic has been established through a psychoanalytic reflection and, in the other, through a politico-theoretical field.

World Picture appears twice annually,
edited by Brian Price, John David Rhodes
and Meghan Sutherland.


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