Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
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is never the result of an underlying necessity, however, it follows<br />
that every hegemony is susceptible to counter-hegemonic practices.<br />
In brief, if things could always be different, it can always be claimed<br />
that things should be different. Everything can become the object of<br />
political struggle.<br />
However, this positive consequence hangs together with a less<br />
positive one. If we accept this ontological position, we also have to<br />
accept that an all-inclusive, fixed system of meaning is impossible.<br />
There can be no meaning or identity without excluding something.<br />
Every identity meets in the end a limit which can no longer be grasped<br />
in a meaningful way. What lies beyond the limit is fundamentally<br />
threatening towards what lies inside. But if we start speaking about<br />
collective identities, this implies the following:<br />
“we are always dealing with the creation of a ‘we’ which can exist only by<br />
the demarcation of a ‘they’… [and] [s]ince all forms of political identities<br />
entail a we/they distinction, this means that the possibility of emergence<br />
of antagonism can never be eliminated. It is therefore an illusion to believe<br />
in a society from which antagonism would have been eradicated.” [10]<br />
This quotation from Mouffe points to the impossibility of society as<br />
such. Society becomes impossible in the sense that there will always be<br />
a ‘they’, something that cannot be included but that necessarily must<br />
be excluded. This impossibility of society makes every society political.<br />
But every society can institute the political in different ways. The<br />
concrete way in which antagonism is dealt with in particular societies<br />
is what Mouffe calls politics. Let us now look at how democracies deal<br />
with antagonism.<br />
93<br />
DEMOCRACY, HOPE<br />
AND NIHILISM<br />
Thomas Decreus<br />
Democratic politics and hope<br />
A democratic regime differs from other regimes in the way that it recognizes<br />
its own contingency as well as the antagonistic nature of the social.<br />
The latter is even cultivated by institutionalizing a space for contestation<br />
10<br />
Mouffe (2005) 15, 16.