The Rhetorical Foundations Of Society

By Ernesto Laclau

The essays collected in this volume develop the theoretical perspective initiated in Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy in three main directions. First, by exploring the specificity of social antagonisms and answering the question ‘What is an antagonistic relation?’, an issue which has become increasingly crucial in our globalized world, where the proliferation of conflicts and points of rupture is eroding their links to the social subjects postulated by classical social analysis. This leads the author to a second line of questioning: what is the ontological terrain that allows us to conceive the nature of social relations in our heterogeneous world, a task that he addresses with theoretical instruments coming from analytical philosophy and from the phenomenological and structuralist traditions. Finally, central to the argument of the book is the basic role attributed to rhetorical movements – metaphor, metonymy, catachresis – in shaping the ‘non-foundational’ grounds of society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: May 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781781682180

Ernesto Laclau

Ernesto Laclau (1935-2014) was Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Government, University of Essex, and Distinguished Professor for Humanities and Rhetorical Studies at Northwestern University. He was the author of, amongst other works, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (with Chantal Mouffe); New Reflections of the Revolution of Our Time; The Populist Reason; Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (with Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek); and Emancipation(s).