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HENT DE VRIES

Time, hisEmancipation(s), and his illuminating contributions to the collective volume
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, co-authored by
Judith Butler and Slavoj Zˇizˇek.^108 His recentThe Populist Reasonpursues this agenda
further.^109 These studies, as indicated in the programmatic description of the book series
Phronesis, edited by Laclau since 1989, are all motivated by the philosophical critique of
‘‘essentialism’’ and based on the assumption that ‘‘the most important trends in contem-
porary theory—deconstruction, psychoanalysis, the philosophy of language initiated by
the later Wittgenstein and post-Heideggerian hermeneutics—are the necessary conditions
for understanding the widening of social struggles characteristic of the present stage of
democratic politics, and for formulating a new vision for the Left in terms of radical and
plural democracy.’’^110
In the present volume, we reproduce Laclau’s seminal essay ‘‘On the Divine Names
of God,’’ which, in a concise and elegant tour de force, formalizes the irreducibility of
difference in the constitution of the political with a central insight of mysticism (whether
dualist, monist, pantheist, Jewish, Christian, or even Buddhist and, more indirectly,
Hindu, and perhaps—although Laclau doesn’t say so—Islamic). By way of a powerful
rereading of Pseudo-Dionysius and Meister Eckart, the essay elaborates the systematic
parallel between Laclau’s own assessment of the meaning of ‘‘empty signifiers’’ for a the-
ory of hegemony and the tradition of the divine names. The observed formal, rather than
historical, analogies can be seen as ‘‘the expression, in mystical garb, of something belong-
ing to the general structure of all possible experience.’’ With their oblique and indirect
gesturing toward some ‘‘transcendens,’’ they signal an ontological predicament, which
Laclau formulates as follows: ‘‘Finitude involves the experience of fullness, of the sublime,
as that which is radically lacking—and is, in that sense, a necessary beyond.’’ Historically
and systematically speaking, the significance of mystical discourse is the fact that, ‘‘by
radicalizing that ‘beyond,’ it has shown the essential finitude that is constitutive of all
experience.’’ This, however, is not all, for Laclau goes on to point out that ‘‘its historical
limit has been, in most cases, its having surrendered to the temptation of giving a positive
content to the ‘beyond’—the positive content being dictated not by mystical experience
itself but by the religious persuasion of the mystic’’ (pp. 143–44).
These heterodox traditions enable our attempts to understand the political in its
ontological dimensions and the concrete-material politics of present-day engagement and
ethics (or militancy). Just as mysticism, in Laclau’s reconstruction, indefatigably insists
that ‘‘the name of God, if we are not going to soil His sublime reality (and our experience
of it), has to be an empty signifier, a signifier to which no signified can be attached’’ (p.
142), so also an ontology of the political and of politics, here of the collective-revolution-
ary will, must realize that it aims at ‘‘hegemony.’’ This means that any particular claim,
any ‘‘content,’’ must be seen against the foil of deprivation, finitude, and facticity, and
hence as the positive reverse of a lack, that is to say, as assuming merely the function of
incarnating an absent fullness (and, therefore, not being that elusive presence itself ).

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