Dialectic and social heterogeneity in Ernesto Laclau

Abstract

The present article aims to examine critically Laclau’s claim that the trend toward social heterogenization revokes the Dialectic, or, more specifically, the clear and strict line of demarcation between what falls within the Dialectic and what falls outside of it. Polemicizing with the assumption of this reading, I argue that the appearance of a radical heterogeneity rather exposes the undecidability of relations between the Dialectic and what is a heterogeneity. To undergo the experience of this relation means not only to confront something that dislocates the Dialectic, but also what makes it what it is. The concrete determination of this limit relation is precisely what is at stake in the populist construction of the people, the political articulation of a popular identity. Against this backdrop, I argue that it is not so much Laclau as Agamben who opens the possibility to think about a heterogeneity non-dialectically.