Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

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