Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?

Social Research, Fall, 1999 by Chantal Mouffe

To take this responsibility seriously requires that we give up the dream of a rational consensus as well as the fantasy that we could escape from our human form of life. In our desire for a total grasp, says Wittgenstein, "We have got on the slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground" (1958, p. 46e).

Wittgenstein, however, is not the only one to destroy the very ground of the deliberative model. Another way of revealing the inadequacy of the Habermasian approach is by problematizing the very possibility of the notion of the "ideal speech situation" conceived as the asymptotic ideal of intersubjective communication free of constraints, where the participants arrive at consensus by means of rational argumentation. This can be done, following the lead of Slavoy Zizek, through Lacan. Indeed a Lacanian approach reveals how discourse itself in its fundamental structure is authoritarian since out of the free-floating dispersion of signifiers, it is only through the intervention of a master signifier that a consistent field of meaning can emerge. As Zizek shows (1992, chapter 3), for Lacan the status of the master signifier, the signifier of symbolic authority founded only on itself (in its own act of enunciation) is strictly trascendental: the gesture that "distorts" a symbolic field, that "curves" its space by introducing a non-founded violence in stricto sensu correlative to its very establishment. This means that if we were to substract from a discursive field its distortion, the field would disintegrate, "de-quilt." Lacan undermines in that way the very basis of Habermasian view, according to which the inherent pragmatic presuppositions of discourse are non-authoritarian, since they imply the idea of a communication free of constraint where only rational argumentation counts.

What those two different types of critique bring to the fore is that, far from being merely empirical, or epistemological, the obstacles to the realization of the ideal speech situation are ontological. Indeed, the impediments to the free and unconstrained public deliberation of all on matters of common concern is a conceptual impossibility because, without those so-called impediments, no communication, no deliberation could ever take place. We therefore have to conclude that the very conditions of possibility of

deliberation constitute at the same time the conditions of impossibility of the ideal speech situation. There is absolutely no justification for attributing a special privilege in this respect to a so-called "moral point of view" governed by impartiality and where an impartial assessment of what is in the general interest could be reached.

An Alternative to Deliberative Democracy

I want to stress that what is really at stake in the critique of "deliberative democracy" that I am proposing here is the need to acknowledge the dimension of power and antagonism and their ineradicable character. By, postulating the availability of public sphere where power and antagonism would have been eliminated and where a rational consensus would have been realized, this model of democratic politics denies the central role in politics of the conflictual dimension and its crucial role in the formation of collective identities. This is why it is unable to provide an adequate model of democratic politics.