Politics as construction of the unthinkable

In: Journal of language and politics, Band 20, Heft 1, S. 10-21

Abstract

Abstract
This article is the English translation of a text originally published by Ernesto Laclau in French in 1981 as part of the
proceedings of the colloquium Materialités Discursives held in Nanterre on 24–26 April 1980. In this text, Ernesto Laclau reflects on the
subject of hegemony as a discursively constructed phenomenon. Building on research on the discursive construction of the acceptability of
popular front politics in 1935 during the Seventh Congress of the Komintern, the author proposes a number of broader arguments on the notion
of antagonism and on some of the problems related to the Marxist conception of totality.