Beyond the Social Principle: Psychoanalysis and Radical Democracy

The human race has found its destiny in self-destruction.

The hatred of the Other is the hatred of our own excess of enjoyment.

In their effort to diminish the structural rigidity of Althusserian Marxism and the humanist legacies of cultural materialism, theorists of “radical democracy,” such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, have repeatedly declared that society—understood as the harmonious coexistence of diverse individuals and groups—is “impossible” (Hegemony 112, 122, 143, 156; New Reflections 91-92). Laclau and Mouffe's theory of “the impossibility of society” circumvents various problems in Marx and Engels's “organic utilitarian” model (Gewirth 10-11), which aims to render happiness the psychic result of social harmony and class equanimity. In part three of The German Ideology (1846), for instance, Marx and Engels argued:

Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible…. [Within] the illusory community, in which individuals have up till now combined, … [the] right to the undisturbed enjoyment, upon certain conditions, of fortuity and chance has … been called personal freedom …. With the community of revolutionary proletarians on the other hand, who take their conditions of existence and those of all members of society under their control, it is just the reverse; it is as individuals that the individuals participate in it. It is just this combination of individuals (assuming the advanced stage of modern productive forces, of course) which puts the conditions of the free development and movement of individuals under their control. (74-75)1

Noting this model's reliance on illusory notions of national harmony,2 and its limited account of group relations, Laclau and Mouffe produced a model of “radical democracy” that avoids many of Marx and Engels's conceptual blindspots (Hegemony 23, 26-27).3 In place of Marx and Eng