Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

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