Speaker
Description
This paper advances the claim that crisis should not be understood as a mere contingent disruption of stable orders but, rather, as a constitutive recurrence of the sociopolitical field. Drawing on the interdisciplinary theoretical framework elaborated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the paper aims to show how the discursive – and, therefore, necessarily incomplete and plural – nature of both reality and identity turns crisis into an ever-present condition of politics.
Like Lefort, Laclau and Mouffe invest the political with inextricable undecidability, following the French revolution and the advent of democracy. Given this undecidability, politics becomes, for the two philosophers, a space for constructing contending readings of events which, while existing independently from discourse, can only acquire meaning(s) and intelligibility through it. In other terms, for Laclau and Mouffe, discourse is not a mere descriptor, but a constructor.
Spaces of identification, the alternative discursive articulations which struggle to hegemonize meaning incessantly shape and reshape identity and reality, reflecting that conflict and crisis are engraved into their very fiber. Identity thus becomes identification and reality, an imperfect attempt to seize the Real.
Crisis emerges whenever hegemonic articulations lose legitimacy. Yet, as we will show, crisis is not to be assessed as purely destructive. It is also constructive, as it enables the resignification of meaning, the renegotiation of boundaries and the reconfiguration of identities.
| Keywords | poststructuralist discourse theory, hegemonic articulation, identification, boundary, resignification |
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| ic.rus86@gmal.com |