Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
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Let me illustrate this with a remark made by Mark Devenney. [15]<br />
According Devenney, Mouffe’s model of agonistic democracy can be<br />
compared with the marxist notion of a ‘permanent revolution’. But the<br />
big difference with Marx and other authors who used the concept of<br />
‘permanent revolution’, of course, is that for these authors the notion<br />
of permanent revolution was framed by the grand emancipatory<br />
story of Marxism – the kind of story that can no longer be accepted<br />
if we underwrite the political-ontological framework of Laclau and<br />
Mouffe. But what is left then? What is left is the pure notion of a<br />
permanent revolution without any possible end point. Such an end<br />
point is ontologically impossible because it would be equivalent to a<br />
signifying system which <strong>do</strong>es not exclude. But this leaves us not only<br />
with a revolution without a purpose, but also a whole history we cannot<br />
make sense of.<br />
In the political ontology of Laclau and Mouffe, history is without<br />
purpose and thus without hope. The antagonism is unavoidable and<br />
forms part of our human condition. Every victory and every change<br />
is always partial and in the end <strong>do</strong>omed to fail. There is no exit. The<br />
revolution is necessarily permanent. History itself rests without meaning<br />
and it appears as an accumulation of rubble and needless bloodshed.<br />
On the question of the ‘why’ after all this, the answer can only<br />
be silence. The historical-philosophical position towards which the<br />
political ontology of Laclau and Mouffe leads is nihilism: there is no<br />
transcendent order which gives us a mainstay for our lives, no eternal<br />
truths and no absolute good or evil. As Nietzsche already noticed, once<br />
people realize this, they suffer from a kind of split mind:<br />
97<br />
DEMOCRACY, HOPE<br />
AND NIHILISM<br />
Thomas Decreus<br />
“But as soon as man finds out how that world [of truth, SC] is fabricated<br />
solely from psychological needs, and how he has absolutely no right to it, the<br />
last form of nihilism comes into being: it includes disbelief in any metaphysical<br />
world and forbids itself any belief in a true world. Having reached this<br />
standpoint, one grants the reality of becoming as the only reality, forbids<br />
oneself every clandestine access to afterworlds and false divinities – but<br />
cannot endure this world though one <strong>do</strong>es not want to deny it.” [16]<br />
15<br />
Devenney (2009) 135.<br />
16<br />
Quote taken from Critchley (2004) 9.