Deconstructing Political Concepts

Abstract

What does it mean to think deconstructively about political concepts? In this paper, I show that deconstruction offers a distinct approach to political concepts that can help us understand how political concepts are constituted. Simplifying, we may say that concepts are signifiers. However, even if we cannot think of concepts as the expressions of essences, we cannot reduce a concept to a word or to a name either. We, therefore, need a different way of accounting for the conceptuality - ideality, unity, universality - of concepts. I suggest an approach that combines Jacques Derrida's deconstruction with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's theory of hegemony. From Derrida, I take the notion of iterability as a way to account for how concepts are constituted through repetition, which nonetheless introduces a constitutive element of alteration and, therefore, openness. This leads me to identify two approaches to concepts in Derrida's work: one where he invents new (quasi-)concepts such as iterability; and one where concepts are extended in a tension between conditionality and unconditionality, as is for instance the case with his writings on hospitality. If concepts are signifiers, I suggest that conceptual analysis must be discourse analysis. Here I follow Laclau and Mouffe's theory of hegemony, and I suggest that we can understand the formation of political concepts as a hegemonic struggle over the articulation of concepts such as hegemony, rights and sovereignty. I show how Laclau and Mouffe's notions of nodal points, empty signifiers, antagonism and chains of equivalence are helpful building blocks for the deconstructive accounting of how political concepts are constituted.