ERNESTO LACLAUizedanomie. The initial situation to which ‘‘order’’ is opposed is the experience of
deprivation, finitude, and facticity. Now, once this experience takes place at different
points in the social fabric, all of them will be lived as equivalent to each other because,
beyond their differences, all of them will point toward a common situation of dislocation
and incompletion. So fullness as the positive reverse of this situation of constitutive lack
is that which would bring about the completion of the community. Here, however, a
second dimension comes to the fore. We know that a relation of equivalence weakens
differential meaning: if we must concentrate on what all differences have in common
(which is that to which the equivalence points), we must move in the direction of a
‘‘beyond’’ of all differences that will be tendentially empty. ‘‘Order’’ cannot have a partic-
ular content, given that it is the simple reverse of all situations lived as disordered. Like
mystical fullness, political fullness needs to be named in terms deprived, as much as
possible, of any positive content. Where the two start diverging is at the point at which
mysticism will deploy all kinds of strategies to have the ultimately unavoidable positivity
of content reduced to a minimum, whereas a hegemonic practice will make that ultimate
impossibility its raison d’eˆtre: far from increasing the gap between fullness and differential
content, it will make of a certain particular content the very name of the fullness. ‘‘Market
economy,’’ for instance, will be presented in some discourses as theonlycontent that can
bring about the fullness of the community and, as such, as the very name of that fullness.
At that point, however, a third dimension comes into operation. We pointed out earlier
that the condition of an equivalential relation is that differential meanings, although
weakened, do not disappear, and that they put limits to the possibility of an indefinite
expansion of the chain of equivalences. Now these limits are obviously more important
in a political discourse than in a mystical one, given that the former tries to establish a
stable articulation between fullness and difference. Oncemarket economyhas become, in
a discourse, the name of the fullness of the community, some equivalences will become
possible while some others will be more or less permanently excluded. This situation is
certainly not fixed, for discursive configurations are submitted to deforming pressures—
some equivalences, for instance, can change the meaning ofmarket—but the decisive
point is that, if the function of representing the fullness deforms the particular content
which assumes that function, that particular content reacts by limiting the indeterminacy
of the equivalential chain.
My second example concerns ethics. There has been a lot of discussion in recent
years about the consequences, for moral engagement, of ‘‘postmodernity’’ and, in a more
general sense, of the critique of philosophical essentialism. Does not the questioning of
an absolute ground deprive moral commitments of any foundation? If everything is con-
tingent, if there is no ‘‘categorical imperative’’ that would constitute a bedrock of moral-
ity, aren’t we left with a situation in which ‘‘everything goes’’ and, consequently, with
moral indifference and the impossibility of discriminating between ethical and unethical
actions? Let us see what the theoretical preconditions of this conclusion are. I think that
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