INTRODUCTIONIn all of this Laclau is above all interested in how the mysticmodus loquendiand
modus agendi(to use de Certeau’s terminology) is governed by a remarkable paradox:
‘‘mystical experience does not lead to an actualseparationfrom things and daily pursuits
but, on the contrary, to a special way of joining them, so that we can see in any of them
a manifestation of God’s presence’’ (p. 141). Laclau simply asks how this can done. The
answer refers to a formal logic of (nontautological, nonsynonymous) equivalences and
substitutions—as, in the logic of divine names, God is neither this nor that nor yet some-
thing else in particular—that forms the backbone of ‘‘hegemony’’ and the universal and
that Laclau has sought indefatigably to systematize and refine in a host of publications.
Concretely, it means something both dauntingly complex and surprisingly simple, that
‘‘Essential detachment and actual involvement are the two sides of the same coin....
Paradoxically, it is the detached nature of what is invested in a particular action, its purely
contingent link to it, that guarantees that involvement in that action will be a serious
one’’ (pp. 141–42).
In politics, Laclau takes the perspective of finitude, contingency, and facticity. He
demarcates it from a specifically Spinozist view, that is to say, from the perspectivesub
specie aeternitatis(no longer a perspective really, but a ‘‘view from nowhere,’’ as Thomas
Nagel called it—or a view from ‘‘everywhere,’’ to vary the same ‘position’). To this, Laclau
opposes a seeming obvious insight, echoing Kantorowicz, though at a certain distance:
‘‘historical life takes place in a terrain that is less than eternity. If the experience of...
the dual movement ‘materialization of God’ and a ‘deification of the concrete’ is to live
up to its two sides, neither the absolute nor the particular can find a final peace with each
other’’ (p. 147).
In our understanding of the political and of politics—indeed, of the politics of the
everyday—this implies the necessity of ‘‘keeping open the two sides of this paradox: an
absolute that can only be actualized by being something less than itself, and a particularity
whose only destiny is to be the incarnation of a ‘sublimity’ that transcends its own body’’
(p. 147). The very evocation of ‘‘Oneness,’’ that is to say, of ‘‘unity’’ and ‘‘simplicity,’’ is
therefore no more than a necessary illusion. And so, we must assume, are its political
equivalents. No positive present fullness is to be had or hoped and strived for. Every claim
requires (and ipso facto is) its (own) disclaimer, and yet it is only the series of fundamen-
tally ‘‘equivalent’’ claims and counter-claims, together with their disclaimers, that makes
the political—in its process no less than its idea, not to mention ideal—possible and
necessary as such.
The parallel with apophatic discourse suggests itself once more: ‘‘while the mystical
experience underlies an ineffable fullness that we call ‘God,’ that name—God—is part of
a discursive network that cannot be reduced to this experience’’ (or to which that experi-
ence cannot be reduced; p. 142). Mutatis mutandis, the same would hold true for the
political and its general concepts (democracy, but also the revolutionary, the people).
Both would be doomed—and blessed—by their inevitable ‘‘irreverences.’’ Political idola-
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