The Politics of Impossibility: A Socio-Symbolic Analysis of Society, the Subject, Identification, and Ideology

Abstract

The present study seeks to explain why every discursive articulation of society must fail both to constitute itself as a closed totality and to fully symbolize and give meaning to individual subjects. It further seeks to explain how this symmetrical lack in society and the social agent contributes to our understanding of the multiple and flexible structures of ideological (dis)identification. This model of society and the subject will draw primarily from the discourse-theoretical analytics developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and extended by others. Often referred to by the terms "discourse theory" or "hegemony theory," this body of work applies semiotics, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and post-Gramscian Marxism to contemporary social struggles. The present study also draws significantly from Lacanian psychoanalysis and from those theorists (notably Yannis Stavrakakis and Slavoj Zizek) who have begun to articulate a distinctively Lacanian political theory.