Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe—Giorgio Agamben: Political Rupture and Social Antagonism

The relation between Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and Giorgio Agamben is defined by a shared rejection of power as a coherent, self-grounding order and by sharply different accounts of what follows from that instability. Agamben’s hope is for a radical interruption of the circle linking law and violence; Laclau and Mouffe warn that a final break promising a reconciled society denies the enduring conditions of political struggle. The contrast is not simply between revolution and reform: it concerns whether emancipation can escape antagonism without reproducing domination in a new form.

A Shared Diagnosis of Power

Both approaches begin from the inconsistency of power. In Agamben’s account, legal authority is caught in a vicious circle with violence: the law’s order depends on force, even as it distinguishes itself from force. He nevertheless holds open the possibility of breaking that circle through an act of divine violence, a radical exit from the established relation between law and coercion.

Laclau and Mouffe also treat political order as unable to close over its own contradictions, but they do not regard this instability as a temporary defect that a decisive rupture could abolish. Antagonism and struggle for hegemony are constitutive of politics, not residues that disappear once the right break has been made. Their disagreement with Agamben therefore concerns the political meaning of the same structural inconsistency: it is, for him, an opening toward an outside; for them, a condition that political action must continue to negotiate.

Rupture and the Limits of Reconciliation

Laclau and Mouffe reject the promise of a radical cut after which basic social antagonism would be dissolved and a self-transparent, nonalienated society would arrive. They argue that this promise disavows both the political as a space of contest and the finitude of human existence. In their view, attempts to realize such a leap risk ending in totalitarian disaster. Political change must instead address particular problems against the background of an irreducible global deadlock; it cannot make that deadlock vanish once and for all.

This position does not amount to abandoning universality. For Laclau and Mouffe, universality is both necessary and impossible as a fully settled, uncontested truth. It exists as an open form that particular political forces can fill with particular content through hegemonic struggle. The universal thus remains politically consequential, but no group can embody it without remainder or permanently end the contest over its meaning.

Agamben’s alternative is presented through his account of limbo. Drawing on Saint Thomas Aquinas’s answer about unbaptized children who die without knowledge of sin or God, he describes a condition of privation without awareness of deprivation: the inhabitants of limbo do not suffer from the absence of the supreme good. Agamben treats this existence, outside guilt and justice, as a model of redemption and of a simply human life after the last day. The contrast with Laclau and Mouffe is clear: his model imagines release from the order of guilt and law, while their account insists that political life cannot be purified of antagonism through a final passage into reconciliation.

The Utopian Tension in Both Positions

The comparison also qualifies the opposition. Laclau and Mouffe’s insistence on accepting contingency and antagonism may itself imply a utopian horizon: political struggle conducted without any remaining essentialism, with all sides fully recognizing the contingent character of their projects. Their theory resists a final resolution, yet the ideal of such complete recognition can appear as its own imagined limit.

Agamben’s position has a corresponding difficulty. If contemporary biopolitics has closed the space of political struggle and democratic-emancipatory movements are rendered meaningless, then waiting for a miraculous eruption of divine violence can become a posture of complacency. The hope of an outside to the law–violence circle may suspend the question of what political action can do before that rupture arrives. The two positions are therefore not free of the tensions they expose in one another: Laclau and Mouffe risk relying on an ideal of fully acknowledged contingency, while Agamben risks making redemption depend on an exceptional break.

Political Stakes: Law, Violence, and Rights

The stakes of this disagreement become visible in the relation between public law and the violence that sustains it. Political power is not identical with the direct exercise of violence, yet it cannot be treated as wholly separate from violence either. Command structures in institutions such as the army, church, and school may appear nonpolitical, while still embodying political struggles and decisions. This account reinforces the difficulty of imagining a clean separation between law and force—the very difficulty at the center of Agamben’s diagnosis.

Humanitarian intervention provides another context for the dispute’s political stakes. An intervention framed as a purely antipolitical defense of innocent individuals can advance specific political and economic arrangements while foreclosing collective projects of social transformation. The distinction between universal human rights and the rights attached to citizenship is likewise unstable: people deprived of political membership can be reduced to bare life, precisely when they seem to remain human beings in general. These examples do not erase the difference between the two approaches. They show why a proposed escape from the law–violence order and a politics that accepts enduring antagonism must both answer how power operates in concrete institutions, and how claims of universality can avoid concealing the exclusions on which political orders depend.

Significance of the Contrast

The relation between Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and Giorgio Agamben is thus a dispute over the horizon of political emancipation. Agamben’s redemptive break promises an exit from the circle of law and violence; Laclau and Mouffe regard the promise of a final exit from antagonism as politically dangerous, because it can turn the desire for reconciliation into a justification for suppressing conflict. Yet their own commitment to an ongoing politics of contingency faces the question of whether it can describe a viable political practice without quietly imagining a perfected form of that practice. The comparison leaves no simple choice between rupture and endless contest. It makes the unresolved relation between emancipation, power, and social antagonism the central problem both positions must confront.