The publication of Ernesto Laclau’s The Rhetorical Foundations of Society, only weeks after his death in April 2014, confirms his status as one of the foremost contemporary political theorists of the Left.* Since the 1980s, his influence has been extraordinary, particularly in the UK and Latin America: rethinking democratic leftist politics during and after the Thatcher era, in the former, and providing theoretical legitimacy to the recent neo-populist ‘pink tide’, in the latter. On the occasion of his death, the Argentine president Cristina Kirchner insisted that Laclau ‘had three virtues: he thought, did so with great intelligence, and in open conflict with the paradigms issuing from the centres of world power’. The late president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, also reportedly consulted On Populist Reason (2005), and perhaps even discovered a discreet outline of his portrait there.

In common with Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977), New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (1990) and Emancipation(s) (1996), The Rhetorical Foundations is an in-between work of conceptual labour; a collection of essays announcing a more ‘finished’ monograph to come, of the kind represented by Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985), co-written with Chantal Mouffe, and the more recent On Populist Reason, in which Laclau systematically set out his now paradigmatic versions of the concepts of ‘hegemony’ and ‘populism’. Most of these essays have been included in collections already published in Argentina: Misticismo, retórica y política (2002) and Debates y combates: por un nuevo horizonte de la política (2008); whilst all but one of them have been published in English before. The exception, ‘Antagonism, Subjectivity and Politics’ (2012), is the most recent. It was published originally in Spanish in the Buenos Aires-based journal Debates y Combate, created and directed by Laclau himself in 2011. After his retirement, Laclau spent a considerable amount of time in the city commenting on and participating in the politics of the region. It is one of four essays in the book written after the publication of On Populist Reason. The others are: ‘Why Constructing a “People” is the Main Task of Radical Politics’ (a response to Slavoj Žižek’s ‘unearthly’ criticisms of On Populist Reason; Laclau refers to his ‘Martianization’ of politics, in which their different Lacans – Gramscian and Hegelian, respectively – are fought out); ‘Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy’ (a critical engagement with the work of Georgio Agamben in which the latter’s constitutive but unilateral notion of the ‘sovereign ban’ is transformed, via the idea of a two-sided ‘mutual’ ban, into constitutive ‘radical antagonism’ – Laclau is thinking through revolution here); and ‘Articulation and the Limits of Metaphor’, to which I return in some detail below.

Rhetorical Foundations thus looks back to the making of On Populist Reason as well as forward to the making of something new. Indeed, its essays experiment with ideas either already fairly well unpacked in On Populist Reason or, like the importance for politics of rhetorical figuration, only suggested there. The four most recent essays are Laclau’s now-final contributions to an ongoing project, announced in the ‘Introduction’ to Rhetorical Foundations, of producing a rhetoricized political ontology of the social out of his previous account of political reason qua populism; that is, as grounded in the kind of political antagonism and hegemonic articulation emerging from rejected political demands (populist antagonism) that institute new, democratized, social formations (hegemony); as most radically, perhaps – in different ways – with the recent Chávez and Evo Morales governments of Venezuela and Bolivia; best conceived, here, as national-democratic revolutions.In so far as Laclau’s final book seeks to ‘rhetoricize’ such antagonisms and hegemonic articulations further (further than, for example, the psycho-semiotic idea of an ‘empty signifier’ already developed by Laclau requires), from the point of view of his now sadly truncated philosophical project to produce an ontology, it is these essays – especially ‘Antagonism’ and ‘Articulation’ – that constitute the volume’s most important contributions.1

In ‘Antagonism, Subjectivity and Politics’ Laclau returns to arguments he has rehearsed previously in which he opposes Lucio Colletti’s Kantian notion of ‘real opposition’ to Hegelian-Marxist ‘dialectical contradiction’ so as to produce a version of antagonism, developed in his account of populism, consonant with the version of non-dialectizable hegemonic …