Политика радикалне демократије Шантал Муф
Chantalle Mouffe’s Politics of Radical Democracy

Summary/Abstract: In this article the author critically reflects upon contemporary democratic theory of Chantal Mouffe – outlined in works such as The Democratic Paradox, The Return of the Political and Hegemony and Socialist Strategy – most notably focusing on her conception of radical democracy as politics of agonism vs. antagonism. In the first part of the essay, the issue of the paradoxical nature of contemporary liberal democracy is placed forward, as well as the theoretical and practical question about the establishment of the so-called consensual politics of the centre and “third way” politics which undertook the name of “social-democracy”. Mouffe rightly emphasizes the difference between two philosophical, historical and political traditions, namely, between the principle of popular sovereignty, on the one hand, and the idea of human and individual rights on the other, concluding that their encounter has been a matter of historical contingency. In this light, the concept of the democratic paradox is articulated, first of all, as the mutual exclusion of these principles among themselves. In the second part of the article, through Mouffe’s dialogue with authors such as Schmitt, Rawls, Habermas and Wittgenstein, the relations between power and pluralism i.e., between otherness and conflict are addressed – with the focus on the idea of conflict as the nature of politics itself. Rethinking the difference between the concept of the political and the concept of politics, the author analyzes Mouffe’s suggestion about substituting the concept of the enemy with the concept of the adversary, which results from her concern as how the role of power and violence can be both reduced and institutionalized. It is argued that the philosophically inspiring and multi-level discourse of hegemony that Mouffe presents nonetheless faces itself with structural problems i.e., that perpetual insistence on affirmation of the liberal-democratic framework annuals the very idea of politics of difference as well as of democracy as such in a self-contradictory manner. Most notably, while Mouffe’s position was conceptualized in a way of a deconstructive and/or poststructural anti-essentialism, it ends up precisely as a totalizing comprehension, that is, in an almost metaphysical grounding of “the other of the same”, as well as in exclusion, and all this in the name of “common ground” which leads political passion in a new “democratic design”. This “design”, however, is one of an anthropological pessimism coming from a perspective of a bellum omnium contra omnes. Moreover, such exclusion, in an act of political decision, rejects original political and social otherness, irreducible difference, divergent interpretations and irreplaceable plurality i.e., the whole field of the “constitutive outside” as the core of democracy and the political per se.

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