Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues On The Left (CHU) is a collaborative book written by the political theorists

Political philosophy

Political philosophy is the study of such topics as liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what, if anything, makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it...

 Judith Butler

Judith Butler

Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley.Butler received her Ph.D...

, Ernesto Laclau

Ernesto Laclau

Ernesto Laclau is an Argentine political theorist often described as post-Marxist.He studied History in Buenos Aires, graduating from the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires in 1964, and received a PhD from Essex University in 1977.Since the 1970s he has been Professor of Political Theory at the...

 and Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, critical theorist working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis....

 and published in 2000.

Background, structure and themes

Over the course of the 1990s, Butler, Laclau and Žižek found themselves engaging with each other's work in their own books. In order to focus more closely on their theoretical differences, they decided to produce a book in which all three would write three essays each, with the authors' second and third essays responding to the points of dispute raised by the earlier essays. In this way, the book is structured in three 'cycles' of three essays, with points of dispute and lines of argumentation being developed, passed back and forward and so on.

At one point in the exchange, Butler refers to the exercise as an unintentional "comedy of formalisms" (CHU, p. 137), with each writer accusing the other two of being too abstract and formalist in relation to the declared themes of contingency, hegemony

Hegemony

Hegemony is an indirect form of imperial dominance in which the hegemon rules sub-ordinate states by the implied means of power rather than direct military force. In Ancient Greece , hegemony denoted the politico–military dominance of a city-state over other city-states...

 and universality

Universality (philosophy)

In philosophy, universalism is a doctrine or school claiming universal facts can be discovered and is therefore understood as being in opposition to relativism. In certain religions, universality is the quality ascribed to an entity whose existence is consistent throughout the universe...

. At the heart of these themes is a desire to address the question of particularism

Political particularism

Political particularism is the ability of policymakers to further their careers by appealing to narrow interests rather than the wider interests of the country...

 and political emancipation. While Zizek holds the notion of capitalism as a structure that enables various particular political claims, Butler and Laclau stress that all politics can be conceptualized in terms of a hegemonic struggle, which rejects the notion of any primary structure, such as capitalism or patriarchy.

Points of dispute between Butler and Laclau

• The Lacanian Real. In the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan
  Jacques Lacan
  Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...
  
  , "the Real
  The Real
  The Real refers to that which is authentic, the unchangeable truth in reference both to being/the Self and the external dimension of experience, also referred to as the infinite and absolute - as opposed to a reality based on sense perception and the material order.-In psychoanalysis:The Real is a...
  
  " is regarded as the limit of representation. Laclau draws upon this concept of the Real to justify his claim that political identities are incomplete. Butler criticizes this because, according to her, it elevates the Lacanian Real into a transcendental, ahistorical category. However, Laclau's response to Butler on this point is that the Lacanian Real introduces a radical disjunction into our idea of history - something which puts the whole idea of a concept being "ahistorical" radically into question (CHU, p. 66). In other words, for Lacan, there is no continuity to history and, therefore, there can be no stable "ahistorical" concepts.

• Political Struggles and Identity. Butler disputes Laclau's claim that competing political groups can form a "chain of equivalence" around a common lack (i.e. the incompleteness of their political identity). She argues that Laclau has no reason to assume that groups on the Left base their struggles on "identity". For this reason, Butler argues for a politics of translation between political groups struggling for liberation, in which groups reformulate their demands in the act of translating these demands into ones which can be placed coherently alongside the demands of other groups. (CHU, p. 168)

• Citation and Parodic Performance. Butler claims that gender
  Gender
  Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...
  
   codes such as fashion and physical movements can be self-consciously parodied
  Parody
  A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
  
   in such a way that they weaken those codes - a project which she believes is important to feminist liberation. However, Laclau believes that Butler's use of the word "parody" in this context is overly-playful and restricts feminist politics to less confrontational modes of political resistance.

Points of dispute between Laclau and Žižek

• Is Capitalism The "Only Game In Town"? Žižek's main argument against Laclau is that capitalism can accommodate all the demands of identity politics
  Identity politics
  Identity politics are political arguments that focus upon the self interest and perspectives of self-identified social interest groups and ways in which people's politics may be shaped by aspects of their identity through race, class, religion, sexual orientation or traditional dominance...
  
  , and still continue to economically exploit those who identify with the newly-liberated group. For instance, feminists might rejoice at equal pay, yet - from Žižek's point-of-view - this only serves to encourage women's participation in capitalist economics. Žižek accuses Laclau of accepting the idea that "capitalism is now the only game in town" (CHU, p. 95).

• Is Universality Fleeting Or Impossible? Laclau claims that true political universality is impossible. However, for Laclau, this does not mean that we should abandon any attempt at political universality (as some poststructuralists might urge). Instead, Laclau argues that Leftists have to include this certain failure to achieve universality in their strategies - hence the title of his most successful book (co-written with Chantal Mouffe
  Chantal Mouffe
  Chantal Mouffe is a Belgian political theorist.-Work:Chantal Mouffe studied at Louvain, Paris and Essex and has worked in many universities throughout the world . She has also held visiting positions at Harvard, Cornell, Princeton and the CNRS...
  
  ) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
  Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
  Written in English in 1985 by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is a work of political theory in the post-Marxist tradition...
  
  (1985). However, Žižek claims that universality is possible, although it is fleeting. Žižek believes that once the Left accept the impossibility of universality (as Laclau does), they will have given up all hope of ever over-throwing capitalism. In that sense, Žižek's stand on universality is equally as strategic as Laclau's.

Points of dispute between Butler and Žižek

• Who Is The True Formalist? Butler accuses Žižek of being a Hegelian formalist on the basis that he appears to simply apply his Hegelian metaphysics to culture, whereas Butler herself is interested in the idea of performativity
  Performativity
  Performativity is an interdisciplinary term often used to name the capacity of speech and language in particular, as well as other non-verbal forms of expressive action, to intervene in the course of human events. The term derives from the work in speech act theory originated by the analytic...
  
   as a cultural ritual. Thus, Butler thinks that Žižek is uninterested in the specificity of the examples he uses to illustrate his points and that he really only chooses examples which will illustrate and serve his own argument. In turn, Žižek accuses Butler of being a Kantian formalist because, in his view, gender performativity is an empty formalist structure which is filled out by contingent cultural practices.

• Lacanian Sexual Difference. Following the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan, Žižek claims that sexual difference functions as an "empty" difference onto which all other subsequent differences are projected. Thus, during infancy, a child only enters the semiotic world of language once it has accepted the existence of sexual difference (which remains an "empty" difference because the pre-lingual infant cannot fill it out with any positive content). Against this view (and in defence of her thesis that gender is performatively enacted), Butler argues that, in order to be approached this way, the concept of sexual difference in Lacanian theory must be "emptied out" of positive content, such as the biological difference between males and females.

Bibliographical information

• Butler, J. Laclau, E. and Žižek, S. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues On The Left (London and New York: Verso, 2000).