Chantal Mouffe retraces the
path coming into appearance after Schmitt’s intervention concept of the
political. As it could easily be remembered, the concept of the political, in
Schmitt’s point of view, is an approach to the conceptualisation of the state
as a realm of contradiction and enmity. It means not the durability of the Freund
und Feind grouping, but rather legitimisation the political decisions and
the changeability of any relations between political entities. Thus, it should
strictly be conceived as the existential and essential threat of any political
entity, a threat which might end up with the annihilation of that political
entity. Mouffe, in her On the Political, begins with the inquiry on the
democracy in ‘post-political’ vision. As she (2005, p. 1) depicts, “The ‘free
world’ has triumphed over communism and, with the weakening of collective
identities, a world ‘without enemies’ is now possible. Partisan conflicts are a
thing of the past and consensus can now be obtained through dialogue.” This is
the post-political vision and Mouffe tries to challenge this. In this sense,
what we intend is to make clear Mouffe’s point of view in this challenge. While
doing so, she takes the political science as the empirical field of politics,
and, political theory as the realm of the political. As a result, we do no
doubt understand that Mouffe uses politics as the concept ‘ontic’ in which vast
majority of conventional practices occurs, and, that she evaluates the
political as the concept ‘ontological’ referring to the way in which society
founds itself. We do not hesitate over that those concepts are mainly based on
Heidegger’s distinction between the ontic and the ontological. The political,
thus, implies the dimension of antagonism in democracy, whereas the politics
represents the practices and institutions of society as the ontic, in our way
to intuit and understand of the Absolute, does. At the same time, Mouffe, as a
thinker who is, to some extent, retracing Schmitt’s path, asserts that
understanding the political as a concept needs not to be put as a space of
freedom and public deliberation, as Hannah Arendt did before, but to be located
on the land of power, conflict and antagonism. Thus, Arendt’s positioning seems
to be rooted in liberalism’s vantage point. As it should sharply be inferred,
liberalism does directly negate the political in its antagonistic dimension
which is obviously expected to be the level of conflict and contradiction. As a
result, according to Mouffe (2005, p. 11), “… for Schmitt, the criteria of the
political, its differentia specifica, is the friend/enemy
discrimination. It deals with the formation of a ‘we’ as opposed to a ‘they’
and is always concerned with collective forms of identification; it has to do
with conflict and antagonism and is therefore the realm of decision, not free
discussion. The political, as he puts it, ‘can be understood only in the
context of the friend/enemy grouping, regardless of the aspects which this
possibility implies for morality, aesthetics and economics.” In this context, Schmitt’s
view, as opposed to both the liberal and Arendt’s view, is the rejection of an
empty realm of the political. Henceforth, what Mouffe basically strives to
consider is two main liberal paradigms called the aggregative and deliberative.
The first one is about maximisation of individuals’ interests which finds
itself in an instrumental way by which it can be considered as rationalisation
of the domain of politics borrowing its concepts from economics. The latter is
based on the alleged link between morality and politics, on communicative
rationality. Those mean both annihilation of the contradiction and refusal of
demand of difference in the sphere of politics.
According to Mouffe
(2005, p. 14), “What I propose to do then is to think ‘with Schmitt against
Schmitt’, using his critique of liberal individualism and rationalism to
propose a new understanding of liberal democratic politics instead of following
Schmitt in rejecting it.” ‘With Schmitt against Schmitt’ refers to that Mouffe
is prone to think of the political as a possibility in democracy. Thus, she
takes the Freund-Feind grouping as the beginning point of her
investigation of the possibility of democracy, and then, focuses basically on
the moderation of the antagonism. By doing so, she propounds the concept of
agonism as an alternative to antagonism. “To postulate the ineradicability of
antagonism, while affirming at the same time the possibility of democratic
pluralism, one has to argue contra Schmitt that those two assertions do
not negate each other.” (Mouffe, 2005, p. 19). Consequently, she seeks for a
‘tamed’ antagonism which, according to our view, is not a real difference
between alleged oppositions anymore.
Mouffe puts ‘the
adversary’, as a crucial condition, into democratic politics. This kind of
intervention can only mean that she puts another ‘supplement’ between liberal
thought and Schmitt’s theory of the political, that she intercalates ‘the
adversary’ between liberalism’s competitor and Schmitt’s enemy (Feind).
Even if Mouffe thinks of the adversary as a means to sublimate the political as
the realm of antagonism, at the end of the day, it is nothing but the
elimination of real difference occurring in antagonism. That is for sure that
she does utterly benefit from the concept of hegemony by asserting its twofold
structure as constitutive and contingent; however, it is inadequate in regard
to highlighting the difference between oppositions.
Reference
Mouffe, C., (2005), On the
Political, New York: Routledge.
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