Hegemony and antagonism. Discursive theory in the face or existing antagonisms.

La teoría discursiva ante los antagonismos realmente existentes

Abstract

Abstrac

The objective of this article is to outline a critical reading of the discursive theory of hegemony, elaborated by Ernesto Laclau, before the scenario of crisis of the current late capitalism and remergence of the antagonisms, labor, environmental, communicative, political and ideological that put in question some of the nuclei of the post-Marxist proposal. The object of this analysis will be the agonistic formulation of discursive antagonism in the Theory of hegemony.   We start from placing the contribution of the discusive theory of hegemony to a critique of economic determinism on the part of Marxist thought, which reduces political subjectivity to a regularity of a structural nature. To this vision is put before a conceptualization of hegemony sustained in an ontology of discourse where all reality is an articulation of meanings. From which individuals are subjective from various positions of subject. Identities and demands that contextually define antagonism as an ontology of the social. However, such conceptualization is based on a preposition of radical contingency to the material character of antagonism as a social process of limit of political subjectivity.  From this point the discursive notion of hegemony denies any exteriority to the discursive relationship, starting from a limited critique of Marxist political economics and its implications for a notion of antagonism as a locus of political subjectivity. The criticism of economic and classist determinism brings implicit the denial of the material process of alienation characteristic of the labor-capital relationship that sustains the constitution of the political in the current late capitalism. This is from a formal use of the Derridian paradigm of deconstruction that does not refer to the condition of otherness of any discursive relationship. Having these elements as a basis, we will assess how the discursive formulation of antagonism is violated before the symptoms of exhaustion of the late neoliberal capitalism, whose effects on the exploitation of the body, the other and the environment signals the crisis of its limits.

Keywords: Hegemony. Antagonism. Discourse.