Article

Philosophy and Social Criticism

2018, Vol. 44(5) 528–549
Rescuing politics from ª The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0191453717730875
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Mouffe on affectivity and
the place of ethics

Alexandra Morrison
Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, USA

Abstract
Both Judith Butler and Chantal Mouffe challenge liberal conceptions of politics based on their
ontological descriptions of the political. Mouffe argues that the failure of liberalism to grasp the
agonistic character of political life means that properly political conflicts get translated into moral
terms. Mouffe thinks that the way to correct our “post-political” problems (like alt-right move-
ments) is to avoid translating political conflicts into a moral register. I challenge Mouffe’s separation
of ethics and politics by invoking Butler’s more nuanced account of the ethical sphere. I demon-
strate that Mouffe does not consider that there are different orders of moral claims (for example,
the claims that others have on us to treat them with justice and dignity, claims that at least
implicitly demand not to be weighed in terms of economic or political utility); nor does Mouffe
consider that there are different orders of affect, some of which cannot be simply opposed to
rationality.

Keywords
politics, feminist, ethics, agonism, hegemony, performativity, Mouffe, Butler

“And here, in all of these cases, the dissociation between ethical and political is not only
impracticable, but is it not by accident that it is not; yet on the other hand, this does not mean
that the one is dissolved in the other.” – J. Derrida1

Corresponding author:
Alexandra Morrison, Humanities Department, Michigan Technological University, 1400 Townsend Drive, 3rd
Floor Walker Building, Houghton, MI 49931-1295, USA.
Email: lamorris@mtu.edu
Morrison 529

Introduction
Recent anti-essentialist feminist political philosophy challenges us to think about what
kinds of practices and institutional arrangements might sustain a radically democratic
politics. Liberalism’s impotence in the face of the recent global upsurge in alt-right
populist and anti-democratic movements motivates us to return to the work of Judith
Butler and Chantal Mouffe who both challenge liberalism and attempt to address its
flaws. Both figures start by questioning the implicit philosophical assumptions about
subjectivity that dominate political liberalism in all its forms from classical to neoliberal
technocratic.2 Of course, their critiques of the universal, rational, and neutralized subject
of conventional liberal democracy are not new. Mouffe herself notes that “ . . . all the
innovative currents of this century . . . have, from very diverse standpoints, criticized the
idea of a universal human nature, of a universal canon of rationality through which that
human nature could be known, as well as the traditional conception of truth.”3 Despite
the ubiquity of these critiques reading Butler and Mouffe together reveals that while
these thinkers converge in many ways, in one very important respect they differ. This
difference concerns the relation between ethics and politics and this difference, I will
argue, is critically important to be able to respond to the current global crises with,
potentially, just forms of counter-hegemonic politics.4
I will begin by revealing the ways in which Butler and Mouffe’s philosophical
critiques of liberalism are consonant. The foundations for their critiques roughly con-
verge with their descriptions of the discursive material practices through which identities
are formed. I will develop this point at length since it demonstrates that they describe the
ontological basis of their respective positions in very similar terms. Indeed, both Butler
and Mouffe recognize that the failure to appreciate the temporal and precarious character
of political ontology has led to decisions in the ontic realm, in everyday politics, that are
blithely authoritarian and anti-democratic. Ultimately, for both thinkers the liberal insis-
tence on the rational subject amounts to a relinquishing of the political. Despite this
general similarity, only for Butler does this foreclosure of the political mark a simulta-
neous foreclosure of the ethical. Mouffe argues instead that it is primarily the intrusion of
ethics into the realm of politics that has pushed western democracies into their current
crises.
I will argue that Mouffe’s divergence from Butler on the relation between ethics and
politics can be traced back to Mouffe’s limited, arguably reductionist, account of the
ethical that often conflates the ethical with a conventional understanding of morality,
what one might describe as a more or less explicit set of norms that regulate action. I will
argue that Mouffe’s reduction of ethics to moral judgments and norms neglects the
possibility that there are different orders of moral claims some of which issue from
within the political terrain and others that are more properly described as issuing from
a “supra-political” realm. I will argue that this particular oversight is related to another,
namely, that Mouffe does not consider that there are also different orders of affect, some
of which are not accurately characterized as merely natural “passions” or “libidinal
investments.”5
Butler’s careful consideration of the lived body, so central to twentieth century
phenomenological research, enables her to consider a species of affect, one that we
530 Philosophy and Social Criticism 44(5)

might call an “ethical affect.” This more nuanced consideration of affect, along with her
engagement with “postmodern” ethical thought reveals an understanding of ethics that is
not a covert appeal to a non-negotiable system of moral norms but rather a call to be
attentive to the unconditional character of certain kinds of ethical demands. So, despite
the fact that both Butler and Mouffe agree that liberalism’s focus on rationality occludes
the importance of affect, Mouffe’s thematization of affect in naturalized and psycholo-
gical terms keeps her from recognizing the ways in which the prioritization of the
political over the ethical is untenable and, in fact, falls short of the emancipatory poten-
tial of “radical democracy.”6 It is my contention that we need ways to sort out different
kinds of ethical claims without falling into moral absolutism or by simply reducing the
real ethical tensions that emerge in political life into matters of utilitarian technocratic
political management.

Politics and identity formation

Mouffe’s seminal work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, published in 1985 and co-
authored with Ernesto Laclau, lays out the notion of hegemonic articulation in the
political sphere in which the Gramscian notion of “hegemony” is the “central category
of political analysis” and which emphasizes political and ideological relations over
economic and class structures.7 Hegemony describes the ontological character of “the
political,” which is distinguished from the realm of “politics” understood as “the ensem-
ble of practices and institutions whose aim it is to organize human existence.”8 Mouffe
takes from Carl Schmitt this distinction between the domain of politics, which names the
empirical specificity of political decisions, actions and institutions and the realm of “the
political” which denotes the “essence” of politics. As Mouffe clarifies, “ . . . we could,
borrowing the vocabulary of Heidegger, say that politics refers to the ‘ontic’ level while
‘the political’ has to do with the ‘ontological’ one. This means that the ontic has to do
with the manifold practices of conventional politics, while the ontological concerns the
very way in which society is instituted.”9 Mouffe understands hegemony as guaranteeing
the constitutive contingency and radical instability of “the political.” Since hegemony
describes the way in which political relations form social objectivities through acts of
power and these acts are dispersed, in Foucauldian fashion, throughout and across
identities and practices, acts of re-articulation perpetually risk displacing the centrality
of the hegemonic force from within. Hegemonic articulation then, describes how “ . . . a
particular social force assumes the representation of a totality that is radically incom-
mensurable with it.”10 Hegemony is the process by which a particular identity comes to
signify, and thus to act as a representative of, a plurality of identities and so serves as an
unstable signifier or provisional universal. Since this pseudo-universal cannot possibly
represent all, any hegemonic political force, be it social democratic, neo-liberal, or
fascist, takes hold as the force that it is by its effects and practices emerging in what
Mouffe and Laclau call “operations of displacement.” The centrality of hegemonic
articulation depends upon the very disintegration of a clear distinction between what
is part and parcel of the hegemonic identity and what stands outside of it, since it is itself
the immanent process of unification and differentiation (identify-formation) that is
always underway in the political sphere. As Mouffe puts it:
Morrison 531

This means that any social objectivity is ultimately political and that it has to show the traces
of exclusion which governs its constitution—what we have called, following Derrida, its
“constitutive outside.” By affirming that an object has inscribed, in its very being, some-
thing other than itself and that as a result everything is constructed as difference, the notion
of the “constitutive outside” reveals that being cannot be conceived as pure “presence” or
“objectivity.” This is decisive, for if the “constitutive outside” is present within the inside as
its always real possibility, then the inside itself becomes a purely contingent and reversible
arrangement (in other words, the hegemonic arrangement cannot claim any other source of
validity than the power base on which it is grounded) . . . . This way of posing the problem
indicates that power should not be conceived as an external relation obtaining between two
pre-constituted identities, but rather as constituting the identities themselves.11

So we see that for Mouffe “power is never foundational;” the categories of classical
political analysis that make reference to a unified source of power, all “fronts,”
“centers,” “concentrations,” “autonomies,” and “sovereignties,” must be understood as
being radically contingent.12 Which means that no hegemony ever has “ . . . absolute
validity in the sense of defining a space or structural moment which could not, in its
turn, be subverted.”13 However, this also means that identity formation always forms a
pair and this is why Mouffe takes, again from Schmitt, the notion, supported by the logic
of identity, that the creation of a “we” can only ever take hold if there is a simultaneous
demarcation of a “they.”14 Mouffe also embraces Schmitt’s related claim that the con-
stantly shifting nature of the political and social realms gives rise to the ever-present
possibility of antagonism. In his 1932 book, The Concept of the Political, Schmitt writes:

The enemy is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general. He is
also not the private adversary whom one hates. An enemy exists only when, at least
potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy
is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity
of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship.15

Schmidt’s claim here is that it is only through the establishment of enmity between
collectivities, principally between nations, that there comes to be “a public” and only by
virtue of there being a public can there be politics. In terms of the logic of identity it is
not controversial to claim that a collectivity can only establish its own identity by virtue
of identifying another contrasting collectivity outside, as Other. For instance, Ferdinand
de Saussure argued that within a referential system there is the necessary positing of a
distinguishing reference in order to establish an identity. Nevertheless, it is somewhat
less clear that the Other against whom a collectivity defines itself must necessarily be an
enemy.16 Mouffe’s position is slightly different than Schmitt’s though. While she defi-
nitely agrees that antagonism is ineradicable, because she understands it as a natural
force essential to human beings, she does not think that these passions make politics
possible. For her, it is the aim of politics to steer these passions away from violent
antagonisms into a more controllable agonism. As Mouffe argues, “ . . . politics consists
in domesticating hostility and in trying to defuse the potential antagonism that exists in
human relations . . . not how to arrive at a consensus without exclusion . . . [Politics aims]
532 Philosophy and Social Criticism 44(5)

at the creation of unity in a context of conflict and diversity; it is always concerned with
the creation of an ‘us’ by the determination of a ‘them.’”17 So while Mouffe agrees with
Schmitt that “antagonism is inherent in human relations,” that “[r]eciprocity and hostility
cannot be dissociated and we have to realize that the social order will always be threat-
ened by violence,” she does not insist that this antagonism must be expressed.18 In a
recent interview Mouffe insists:

I argue that to be able to envisage liberal pluralist democracy in an adequate way, we have
first to acknowledge the ineradicability of antagonism and the impossibility of reaching an
inclusive rational consensus in politics. We also need to grasp the process of formation of
political identities and the crucial role played by affects in this process. I use the term
“passions” to refer to the affective dimension which is at play in collective forms of
identification, a dimension which contemporary political theory has been at pains to elim-
inate from democratic politics. In my view the main shortcomings of liberal democratic
political theory proceed from its rationalism and individualism.19

So we see that Mouffe holds that for politics to be effective “the passions” must be
domesticated in such a way that their existence is not denied, but must nevertheless be
compatible with democratic pluralism. In this mitigated, “us” versus “them” relation, the
conflicting parties no longer want to destroy each other but are content to confront them
as adversaries rather than as morally “evil” others. The parties in conflict are able to treat
the conflict as “properly political” and Mouffe takes this to be “the very condition of a
vibrant democracy.”20
Judith Butler’s characterization of the formation of political and social identities in
terms of the notions of performativity and iterability shares with Mouffe the claim that
the possibility of violence is always open.21 According to Butler, since social relations
and subjectivity are never static one must accept “ . . . that the prospects for aggression
pervade social life.”22 Despite this obvious similarity, Butler’s position is importantly
different. First of all, Butler does not identify Mouffe’s concern that aiming for consen-
sus leads to the homogenization of identities and eventual de-politicization. Instead of
thinking that retaining agonism will stave off de-politicization, Butler highlights the
importance of the struggle against violence even in the face of its acknowledged
ineradicability.
According to Butler, whose philosophical inquiry into the constitution of identity
began famously with a focus on the constitution of gender identity in her 1990 Gender
Trouble, performativity is the manner in which gender identity or any identity for that
matter, comes into and sustains materialization. However, the materialization of identity
can only be understood as the operation of social norms and political institutions over
time and as such is the effect of power. For example, against those who argue that sex is a
“natural” or biological category and gender is the specifically socially constructed
interpretation of that natural object, Butler argues, like Mouffe, that there are no pre-
existing identities prior to the immanent process of materialization:

In this sense, what constitutes the fixity of the body, its contours, its movements, will be
fully material, but materiality will be rethought as the effect of power, as power’s most
Morrison 533

productive effect. And there will be no way to understand “gender” as a cultural construct
which is imposed upon the surface of matter, understood either as “the body” or its given
sex. Rather, once “sex” itself is understood in its normativity, the materiality of the body
will not be thinkable apart from the materialization of that regulatory norm. “Sex” is thus,
not simply what one has, or a static description of what one is: it will be one of the norms by
which the “one” becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain
of cultural intelligibility.23

So we see that Butler also understands political power, not as an imposition that acts
upon and against pre-constituted or “ready-made” subjectivities but rather is the very
force that constitutes those identities. Performativity is not the expression of some
naturally inhering characteristic, whether it be sex or rationality, as if either of these
could be the objectively present “substantial core” that is “prior to the various acts,
postures, and gestures” by which it is known.24 This means that performativity cannot
be conceived as a role that one “puts on” for public consumption.25 To interpret perfor-
mativity as if it were some sort of “bluff” would again suggest that there is some true
underlying substantive core of identity that one chooses to disguise which is precisely
what Butler’s ontological description of performative citationality or iterability denies.26
This underscoring of the temporal aspect of performativity, that is, its iterability,
means that norms do not function deterministically.27 First, because any repetition is
singular, it is performed by someone in a particular historical, geographical and cultural
situation, their repetition of the norm will be enacted in a particular “style” and thus, will,
in whatever way, be innovative. Second, since norms are only effective insofar as they
are enacted by collectivities they cannot be conceived as perfect rules existing some-
where outside of the political performative field. Norms do not then operate as unam-
biguous rules for behavior nor are they capable of being perfectly imitated. For this
reason Butler also argues:

. . . if one considers a “formation” through gender norms or indeed racial norms, those
norms act productively to establish (or disestablish) certain kinds of subjects not only in
the past but in a way that is reiterated through time. It is not possible, in this sense, to narrate
the beginning of the productive action of such norms (though we can, fictionally, posit such
beginnings, and often with great interest), and we can, I suppose, try to date the place and
time when a certain formation was said to be accomplished (but I would wager that such a
chronology is invariably in bad faith). . . . the temporarily of our lives [is] bound up with the
continuing action of norms, the continuing action of the past in the present, and so the
impossibility of marking the origin and end of a gender formation as such.28

Butler argues that the persistency and iterability of performative gestures occludes
the recognition of that performative constitution. Of course Mouffe also insists that the
distinction between the political and the social is “essentially unstable” and that the
social, what is often assumed to be “natural” is the result of the sedimentation of political
decisions enacted over time. Mouffe writes, “what is at a given moment considered as
the ‘natural’ order—jointly with the ‘common sense’ that accompanies it—is the result
of sedimented practices; it is never the manifestation of a deeper objectivity exterior to
534 Philosophy and Social Criticism 44(5)

the practices that bring it into being.”29 So we find that, for the most part, Mouffe and
Butler agree on the ontological description of the field of the political, namely that flux
and constant reconfiguration of power is its irreducible feature. And both would also
agree that norms are part of the realm of politics, being established through the myriad
contingent decisions made over time. As for the place of ethics in particular, as opposed
to simple normativity, we will discuss this in the fourth and final sections. Now we will
turn to a brief consideration of their respective critiques of liberal politics.

Liberalism: The improperly political

In several, if not most, of Mouffe’s recent interviews and books she argues, on the basis
of this radical contingency of the political coupled with the “inherent antagonism” of
human relations that a democratic society should aim to be an arena open to conflict. She
argues that liberal democratic approaches that instead aim for consensus are incapable of
addressing the challenges posed by pluralism. For instance, referring to the violent riots
in the suburbs of Paris in 2005, Mouffe tells us that the young rioters had so thoroughly
lost faith in the political system that they did not even bother to articulate their demands
and desires. She writes, “I think this can be explained by the fact that no discourse was
available for them to politically articulate their anger. It could only be expressed through
violence.”30 On the other hand, when liberalism does not lead to a situation that culmi-
nates in violence there is “ . . . too much emphasis on consensus, together with aversion
towards confrontations, [which] leads to apathy and to a disaffection with political
participation.”31 According to Mouffe this is mainly due to the fact that liberal theories
are dominated by an individualistic, universalistic, and rationalistic framework that
assumes a pre-given, pre-political rational subjectivity. This stance implicitly rejects the
ontological nature of the political; denies that its own particular interpretation of
“universal reason” necessarily excludes others; and fails to recognize that the prioritiza-
tion of specifically rational discourse occludes affect, which is a central feature of
politics.
In one of her many criticisms of rationalist approaches Mouffe cites John Rawl’s
claim that individual citizens must be prepared to demonstrate why certain institutions
are unjust or injurious. She argues that this position implicitly assumes that whenever a
citizen is unable, for whatever reason, to give what is deemed an adequate account the
“conversation about justice is over.”32 And yet, in her own proposed agonistic pluralism
Mouffe concedes that in this “properly political” realm not all antagonisms are capable
of being transformed into agonisms. There are demands, she insists, that must be
excluded “ . . . because they cannot be part of the conflictual consensus that provides the
symbolic space in which the opponents recognize themselves as legitimate adver-
saries.”33 So despite Mouffe’s critique of Rawl’s shutting down of dialogue her own
claim that the establishment of “frontiers” and borders is absolutely necessary is not in
principle different. Again Mouffe stresses that “[a] truly political approach requires
dealing with the limits of pluralism.”34 For Mouffe, not only is a rational, universal,
and pluralist liberal discourse a logical and ontological impossibility, but terrorism and
alt-right movements have, in general, been fomented by politics that claim legitimacy by
insisting on its own inherent rationality.35 This inherent rationality is sometimes argued
Morrison 535

for by appealing to what Mouffe takes to be an indefensible Enlightenment epistemo-

logical perspective, like when Habermas argues that “ . . . universalist forms of morality
and law [are] the expression of an irreversible collective process of learning, and that
[rejecting] this implies a rejection of modernity undermining the very foundations of
democracy’s existence.”36 Other figures, like Richard Rorty argue that neo-liberalism’s
inherent rationality is demonstrated by its ability to realize economic progress, as Mouffe
summarizes:

. . . Rorty’s “postmodern bourgeois liberalism” could serve as another example of the liberal
negation of the political in its antagonistic dimension. . . . For Rorty, [politics] is something
to be debated about in banal, familiar terms. It is a matter of pragmatic, short-term reforms
and compromises and democracy is basically a question of people becoming “nicer” to each
other and behaving in a more tolerant way. . . . letting an increasing number of people count
as members of our moral and conversational “we” . . . thanks to economic growth and the
right kind of “sentimental” education . . . 37

The most pressing problem with liberalism for Mouffe is the persistence of the
belief in the possibility of rational consensus despite the fact that “ . . . the gulf
between the popular classes and the wealthy is growing”; that “people feel like they
are not being represented by the dominant parties”; and that the “working and
middle classes have lost social and economic rights.”38 Mouffe sees liberal progres-
sives’ optimism regarding globalization as utterly naı̈ve based as it is on the myth of
the inevitable emergence of a consensual democracy that will eventually result in
absolute harmony.
Mouffe argues that the current inability to think politically can be attributed to the
failure to appreciate that there is a distinction between the political in its ontological
dimension from the ontic facts of politics.39 However, as Mouffe herself admits, simply
recognizing that there is an ontological structuring of social identities still leaves the
precise character of that structure open for debate. And as we touched on earlier, it is not
necessary to assume that relations to the other will always be antagonistic simply
because the ontological field is in flux.40 Many commentators take Mouffe to be saying
that antagonism, in the strong sense of a struggle between enemies, is the unavoidable
foundation of political life.41 And indeed there are many moments in her work that
strongly suggest Mouffe essentializes antagonism. In a recent interview Mouffe insists
emphasizes that “the antagonistic dimension does not disappear in an agonistic relation”
implying that antagonism could be some sort of substantive core existing or inhering
prior to the actions, habits and gestures through which that affect shows itself.42 Matthias
Fritsch argues that this position reveals how Mouffe unwittingly combines non-
essentialist philosophical approaches, namely post-structuralism and deconstruction,
with Schmitt’s essentialist “political anthropology.”43 The problem with this inadvertent
essentializing is not just a matter of inconsistency, it means that for Mouffe affect is little
more than a natural force for a “proper politics” to manage. As I will make clear in the
next two sections, this assumption about the nature and role of affect—that it is a natural
force, a mere mechanism that needs to be tamed by politics—closes us to the potentially
transformative character of affect.
536 Philosophy and Social Criticism 44(5)

Judith Butler’s critique of liberalism also begins with the ontological character of “the
political” but this does not lead her to neglect the ontology of the subject. These two
ontologies are necessarily intertwined since singular identities are generated within the
precarity of the political terrain. However, shifting focus to identity formation means that
Butler is able to bring critical issues into view that Mouffe does not consider since
Mouffe exclusively hones in on identities qua collectivities—identities qua “us’s” and
“we’s.” Clearly these same collectivities are also always simultaneously singular “I’s.”
So while it is true that it is only within the terrain of the political that singular identities
get worked out, the ontological shape of the political cannot capture the ontological
character of the singular identity in its entirety. Singularities are the primary sites of
vulnerability and precarity and the ethical is, for Butler, tied to exposure to precarity.
Singularities are also, after all, the unique sites of iteration and re-iteration of hegemonic
structures and as such are the potential sites of counter-hegemonic practices. Because
Butler thinks through the ways in which embodiment and temporality shape individuals
her thought is in a special position to thematize the sites of potential political transfor-
mation. In an insightful essay on Spinoza’s ethics, Butler takes up an idea central to her
thought that is also important for the argument I am making here. It is the idea that the
body establishes “ . . . a singularity that cannot be relinquished in the name of a greater
totality, whether it be a conception of a common life or a political understanding of
civitas, or, indeed, of the multitude.”44 I will address this issue in the final section but for
now I will turn back to Butler’s most common critique of liberalism.
Like Mouffe, Butler challenges rationalism and individualism, without losing sight of
the fact that the performative and historical mode of identity formation means that we
remain intimately bound to the structures we subvert. Butler argues that “ . . . without the
horizon and instruments of liberalism, I cannot want at all, that what I call my desire is so
bound up with these categories that without them I may find myself not desiring at all
(and so not find myself at all).”45 Butler is attentive to the all-pervasive character of
hegemonic power already underway fashioning its own apologists and critics alike. As
Butler puts it, “None of us know who precisely we will ‘be’ under regimes of ontology
that we struggle against or seek to displace.”46 Thus, it is not the case that one could
simply make a decision to subvert hegemony, and yet this doesn’t mean that the subject
is entirely “a fiction” either. And so we find Butler taking issue with the liberal tendency
to deny this ambiguous structure of identity formation, a denial often camouflaged as an
ethical challenge to a supposed “post-modern relativism” but which functions more
accurately as an “authoritarian ruse” Butler argues:47

To claim that politics requires a stable subject is to claim that there can be no political
opposition to that claim. Indeed, that claim implies that a critique of the subject cannot be a
politically informed critique but, rather, an act which puts into jeopardy politics as such. To
require the subject means to foreclose the domain of the political, and that foreclosure,
installed analytically as an essential feature of the political, enforces the boundaries of the
domain of the political in such a way that that enforcement is protected from political
scrutiny. The act which unilaterally establishes the domain of the political functions, then,
as an authoritarian ruse by which political contest over the status of the subject is summarily
silenced.48
Morrison 537

For Butler, the acknowledgement of “the matrix of relations that forms the subject”
would require the subsequent acknowledgement that that this matrix “is not an integrated
and harmonious network, but a field of potential disharmony, antagonism, and con-
test.”49 It is clear that both Butler and Mouffe understand the denial of the instability
of this matrix as an implicit disavowal of the political. However, only for Butler does this
refusal to recognize the flux of the field of the political mark a simultaneous refusal of
the ethical. The implication is that for Butler the boundary between “the political” and
“the ethical” is indeterminate or undecidable. Whereas, for Mouffe, morality is seen to
be an unacceptable intrusion into the political that threatens it with anti-political
antagonisms.

Mouffe’s prioritization of the political

Mouffe argues with a pointed urgency that we must strive to keep ethics separate from
politics. However, Mouffe’s framing of what constitutes the ethical is very narrow. For
the most part when she speaks of morality she limits its sense to the “common morality”
understood as the culturally sedimented norms and codes. In On the Political, Mouffe
addresses this uncritical “common morality” ubiquitous throughout culture as it plays
out in the context of liberal academia:

I see the refusal of many democratic theorists to engage with Schmitt’s thought on moral
grounds as typical of the moralistic tendency which is characteristic of the post-political
Zeitgeist. In fact, the critique of such a tendency is at the core of my reflection . . . . What is
happening is that nowadays the political is played out in the moral register. In other words, it
still consists in a we/they discrimination, but the we/they, instead of being defined with
political categories, is now established in moral terms. In place of a struggle between “right
and left” we are faced with a struggle between “right and wrong” . . . the confrontation is
visualized as a moral one between good and evil.50

Mouffe argues that moralization describes a milieu in which disagreement is framed

as a matter of “good vs. evil” and that this situation is the mark of our post-political age.
Once one views one’s opponent as an “evil doer” the possibilities for a productive
agonistic debate are precluded from the outset. This seems rather obvious. However, a
different problem with this sort of “moralization” that Mouffe does not address is that it
really is only covertly “post-political.” As Mathias Thaler rightly argues, “Moralization
serves both the implementation and the concealment of political interests” or rather “it
serves the implementation of political interests by concealing them.”51 So this moraliza-
tion is rather a way of appealing to an “outside,” to some supposed universal good
external to the domain of politics, a “higher” or more “natural” order that ostensibly
settles the debate once and for all. And yet, if and when the debate gets settled (although
never once and for all) it can only ever be settled in the realm of politics. So to call this
covert recourse to “a beyond the political” a marker of a “post-political” age is not quite
accurate, since those who get to settle the argument in this manner nevertheless do so
very squarely within the political realm.
538 Philosophy and Social Criticism 44(5)

Mouffe describes the motivation for this moralization of the political sphere in psy-
chological and ontic terms. While she appeals to an ontological description of the subject
as a “constitutive lack” that she finds in Derrida, Mouffe nonetheless argues that the
subject necessarily responds to this “lack” by desiring fixity, the stabilization of its
identity.52 Mouffe argues that in a move to avoid getting lost in the contingency of its
performative iterations the subject longs to establish its “presence.” So, in order to gird
itself against this lack of a stable identity the subject achieves a sort of chimerical
stability by identifying with a group, with a “we.” Mouffe argues:

Because there is a lack of identity, the subject will always attempt to fill out its constitutive
lack by means of identification, by identifying itself with what Lacan calls a “master-
signifier.” Only in that way can it secure its place in the symbolic network. There is, then,
a double movement. On the one hand, a movement of decentring which prevents the fixation
of a set of positions around a pre-constituted point. On the other hand, and as a result of this
essential non-fixation, the opposite movement: the institution of nodal points, partial fixa-
tions which limit the flux of the signified under the signifier. But the dialectic of non-
fixation/fixation is possible only because fixation is not pre-given, because no center of
subjectivity precedes the subject’s identifications.”53

While this is a possible response to the instability of the performative character of

identity it is strange that Mouffe treats it as if it is the only possible response, as if the
constitutive lack conferred upon us by our finitude renders our affective responses
mechanistically determined. Surely, it is an accident of history that human precarity is
interpreted as something to be, and capable of being, overcome. Mouffe tends to
describe affect exclusively as the passionate force that binds me to a “we.” Insofar
as this is an attempt to resist the constitutive contingency and radical undecidability of
the political, it implicitly treats affect as reducible to a “non-rational” or at least
dissimulative element in decision. And so, while Mouffe recognizes the importance
of affect for political life, if my response to my constitutive lack is necessarily to treat it
as something disturbing to be avoided by fleeing into the familiar stability of a ready-
made identity then affect is really just some natural “irrational” force in need of being
harnessed by the political. More worrisome than this is that if affect were reducible to a
psychological mechanism it would not be site or experience that could potentially
motivate counter-hegemonic practices. In which case Mouffe’s critique of rational-
ism’s forgetting of affect, its giving it a status wholly inferior to reason, seems some-
what disingenuous.
Might there be another possible response to this sense of fragility and exposure?
Namely, could there be a response that would allow, even to some small degree, the
destabilization of identity that would hinder or forestall the identification with a “we”?
Indeed, it is this sort of response that Butler, following Heidegger and Derrida, associates
with the very possibility of ethics and it is why I am arguing that certain affects may
correspond with an exposure to the ethical. This response, one that Mouffe does not
consider because she avoids thinking of affect in the singular, Butler describes as a
singular exposure to an incommensurable otherness that opens for us an approach to
“ethics that has ‘anxiety’ rather than conviction as its condition.”54
Morrison 539

Before we discuss Butler’s insights on the relation of ethics and affectivity I want to
reiterate that Mouffe’s most common description of the ethical order is of a kind of
dogmatic adherence to non-negotiable moral norms. Certainly it is easy to agree with
Mouffe’s claim that bringing conflicts into the political register and out of the language
of moral absolutism is important. However, this narrow characterization of morality is
inadequate to the full range of what we mean when we refer to the ethical.55 Occasionally
Mouffe admits that an agonistic pluralist politics nevertheless requires a necessary
agreement on “ . . . a set of shared ethico-political principles, usually spelled out in a
constitution and embodied in a legal framework.”56 However, I would argue that even
this description of shared moral norms worked out in the context of everyday political
negotiations does not exhaust the scope of the ethical. It seems that the very problem
Mouffe diagnoses in liberalism, the seeming incapability of its adherents to grasp the
difference between “the political” in its ontological structure and the particular everyday
decisions of “politics” on an ontic level, is the very same problem that I am diagnosing in
Mouffe’s work with respect to the ethical. Morality qua normative order is precisely a
description of the ontic realm of politics—the decisions that over time become the laws
of human action in a particular community. On the other hand, the ontological structure
of ethics is not captured by the notion of normativity and it is this non-normative thinking
about ethics that has been a particular concern to continental philosophers since
Heidegger.
In a section of her 2013 book Agonistics entitled “Ethics or Politics” Mouffe notes
that she is well “ . . . aware that the current zeitgeist is not favorable” to . . . [her] under-
standing of “the political” and complains that “ . . . the tendency to envisage [the polit-
ical] in ethical terms is much more popular.”57 Mouffe maintains contra Badiou, whose
position she takes to be exemplary of the “ethical turn” in continental political thought,
that a “ . . . rigorous ethics of the unconditional is clearly at odds with the field of politics,
which always deals with the conditional.”58 Mouffe claims that thinking of the uncondi-
tional is a political “dead end,” incapable of envisaging the nature of radical politics,
since the “ . . . domain of politics is not and cannot be the domain of the unconditional
because it requires making decisions in an undecidable terrain.”59
Mouffe characterizes an “unconditional” ethics as one that finds its justification
outside of the contingent world of politics in “a higher order presented as the only
legitimate one.”60 Mouffe’s objection to an ethics of the unconditional is based on the
assumption that it is an appeal to a normative order external to the field of the
political that will shut down the democratic space. It is peculiar that Mouffe here
misconstrues what lies behind the insistence on the distinctive “unconditional” char-
acter of the ethical in much of contemporary continental philosophy since elsewhere
Mouffe suggests that she is open to thinking about ethics in line with the contempo-
rary continental philosophical tradition. Mouffe even appeals to Derrida’s notion of
“undecidability” which is the word Derrida uses to describe the tension between the
unconditional character of the ethical demand that lies in the “supra-political” realm
and the conditional domain in which one must respond to that demand. However,
Mouffe seems to employ the term in an idiosyncratic way suggesting that undecid-
ability simply indicates that since there is no ethical law to which we can appeal to
justify our decisions that we should aim to be “properly political” as opposed to being
540 Philosophy and Social Criticism 44(5)

ethical. The passage to which I am referring comes in the final chapter of The
Democratic Paradox where Mouffe writes:

The vocabulary of those who defend the “ethical” perspective comes from a diversity of
philosophical sources: Levinas, Arendt, Heidegger, or even Nietzsche, and there are sig-
nificant differences among them: but what is missing in all of them—as in the deliberative
approach—is a proper reflection on the moment of “decision” which characterizes the field
of politics. This has serious consequences, since it is precisely those decisions—which are
always taken in an undecidable terrain—which structure hegemonic relations. They entail
an element of force and violence that can never be eliminated and cannot be adequately
apprehended through the language of ethics or morality. We need a reflection of the political
proper.61

This is a peculiar passage since Derrida, Heidegger, Arendt, and Nietzsche, would all
at least agree that there is no universal ethical law, if not also that violence cannot be
eliminated from the political. Despite this general agreement it does not follow that any
of these figures, especially Heidegger and Derrida, would agree with her claim that the
political should (and could) be prioritized over the ethical. What these thinkers mean by
“ethicality” or responsibility is neither common morality nor any sort of appeal to a
universal.62 Indeed, for Derrida, and I focus on Derrida since Mouffe is using language
particular to him, the notion of undecidability is tied to the very possibility of ethics.
What is undecidable as François Raffoul puts it:

For Derrida, “undecidable” does not mean the impossibility of decision, for on the
contrary the undecidable is the condition for decision in the sense that for him there
is no decision and no responsibility without a confrontation with the undecidable. That is
to say, with the impossible. A decision must decide without rules to follow . . . and this is
why it is each time (the singularity of an “each time”) a decision as an event. A decision
occurs as an event without rules . . . [t]he absence of rules throws decision into the
undecidable. Ethical responsibility is thus a matter of invention, and not the application
of a rule.63

Thus, the paradox of the undecidable is that my encounter with the ethical is an
exposure to the unconditional. No appeal, for instance, could relieve me of the demand
that I respect you. I can’t say, “Yes I respect you, but I’m busy right now.” And yet, I
must perform or embody that respect in a world that places very real conditions upon my
ability to respond appropriately to the demand. So, far from Mouffe’s characterization of
the ethical perspective “widespread among some ‘postmodern’ thinkers” as a naı̈ve
liberal and utopian view that “democratic politics should be envisaged as an endless
conversation in which one should constantly try to enter into dialogical relation with the
‘Other’.” Ethics in postmodern thought is not simply some sentimental “openness to the
other” but an attempt to understand and articulate the difficulty of both the experience of
a genuine ethical demand and the impossibility of responding to that demand.64 Which is
why for Derrida, ethics is so “terrible” because ethical “negotiation does not negotiate
with negotiable things.”65
Morrison 541

The intertwining of ethics and politics: Ethical affect

While Butler’s understanding of ethics arguably rests upon the notion of the
“unconditional;” she too does not invoke this language in order to ground her claims
in any “higher” or “more legitimate” order. Rather for Butler, as for Derrida,
“ethics” is “unconditional” in the sense that ethical experience involves an intima-
tion of one’s answerability to demands that are in some sense incalculable. It is the
experience of a kind of event, of the sheer coming of a future that is always
incommensurable with the terms of the present (as political order, as universal
reason, as law, etc.). The political sphere is conditioned, but announced within it
are claims which are unconditioned, ethical demands that put political arrangements
into question. “Undecidability” is not the indecision that arises when we ask our-
selves whether we will either lower taxes or make education more accessible, but
rather an unconditional ethical claim demands that we do not just treat it in terms of
calculable questions of economics or other political expediencies. And yet, our only
way to respond to it is in the realm of the political, that is, what is “undecidable” or
indeed as Derrida says, what is “terrible” about it. We are forced to respond to it as
if it were a mere political decision all the while knowing that it is not, and yet once
we have responded to it, it will have been a mere political decision. Undecidability
in the Derridean sense then is the incommensurability between the demand and how
we are able to respond to the demand. This is why the ethical is always at play in
the political and also why Mouffe cannot simply make a rule to keep ethics out of
politics for the good of politics. The radical contingency of the event, or the arrival
of the other, means that, on the one hand, it demands decisions of us within the
conditioned sphere of politics, but, on the other hand, those decisions will never be
known to be adequate to the occasion. It is this exposure to an unconditional or
incommensurable otherness that Butler describes what I will call an “ethical
affect”—the affect of “anxiety.” Butler writes:

What I have been exploring here . . . .is a set of approaches to ethics that honor desire,
without collapsing into the egomaniacal defense of what is one’s own, of ownership, and
that honor the death drive, without letting it emerge as violence to oneself or to another.
These are the makings of an ethics under pressure, one that would be constituted as a
struggle and one that has “anxiety” rather than conviction as its condition.66

Butler insists that this approach to thinking ethics challenges the assumption that
“doing ethics” is primarily about securing our sense of making “the correct” political
decisions. In this respect, we might want to take issue with Mouffe’s characterization of
affective life as simply something to be trained and managed. Recall that one of
Mouffe’s most common complaints regarding the forgetting of affect in liberal ration-
alist approaches to politics is that they forget that they “ . . . need to counter their adver-
saries by mobilizing affects and passions in a progressive direction.”67 While this may be
useful practical advice in the sphere of politics it does not capture what continental
philosophers, including Butler, are getting at when they talk about the undecidability
of the ethical.
542 Philosophy and Social Criticism 44(5)

In Mouffe’s thinking, affect is understood in political terms. As I have already

discussed, affect is the force behind the assertion of identities and the various claims
of interest groups. Mouffe suggests, often in an almost Hobbesian way, that politics is
intrinsically antagonistic because human passions are “the driving force in the political
field.”68 Invoking a psychoanalytic account of affect to account for the process of group
identification Mouffe argues that “ . . . a collective identity, a ‘we’, is the result of a
passionate affective investment that creates a strong identification among members of
a community.”69 I would like to suggest that this account of desire, one that inscribes
affect fully within the economy of the political sphere, as the force behind the claims of
competing interests misses the importance of a different kind of affective exposure, an
utterly unmanageable affect, for the possibility of personal and political transformation.
Butler’s description of an “ethics of anxiety” reveals this other order of affective life,
one that is not opposed to the political, but rather is at once partly transcendent to it, a
“supra-political” affect, and partly constitutive of it. Rather than being a passionate
investment in a collective identity, it is an exposure to a “lack” or otherness at the heart
of my singular existence revealing my essential ontological exposure and fundamental
lack. The allure of aligning with a collective of identity is that it confers upon the
individual a kind of stability or “immortality power” presumably because the collective,
greater than the mere sum of its parts, may continue on after the individual is gone.70 It is
not surprising then that many philosophers have suggested that it is only when our
collective identifications break down that we are exposed to our finitude in radical
way.71 According to Butler this form of responsiveness (responsibility) to alterity (to
the un-anticipatable coming of the future) also “ . . . implies a dispossession of the
egological.”72 One cannot help to hear echoes of Heidegger’s description in Being and
Time of an exposure to finitude that is a complete dissolution of meaning singular or
collective. Butler similarly insists that any sort of identity reassurance is “easily dis-
placed by anxiety” and suggests that this affect is “ethical” in the sense that it is able to
open us to the possibility of being and responding otherwise.73 It is primarily the unfor-
eseeable future that opens the space of ethics and the possibility of the transformation of
my socially determined identity. Butler explains:

I am trying to underscore that something impinges on us without our being able to anticipate
or prepare for it in advance, and this means that we are in such moments affronted by
something that is beyond our will, not of our making, that comes to us from the outside, as
an imposition but also as an ethical demand . . . . These ethical obligations . . . do not require
our consent and neither are they the result of contracts or agreements into which any of us
have deliberately entered.74

So, for Butler, we find that the ethical is linked to affect and specifically to anxiety
because it is a function of the exposure to the incalculable or unconditioned. Despite the
fact that this exposure is specifically to the incalculable, it nevertheless always requires
decisions of individuals.
The logic of openness to the future is primarily explained in Butler’s concept of
citationality or iterability. To be open to the future is to constantly re-enact one’s identity
as a response to the event of what is happening here and now, but this means that any
Morrison 543

identity is constitutively at risk, that is, any identity is radically contingent. There is a
paradox here: the event, the sheer coming of the future, is the interruption of the present,
it is, as I have said, incommensurable with the terms of the political status quo. But, at the
same time, it requires us to do something, to enact decisions, to configure the legal-
political-institutional order in a way that would be adequate to what is happening. So, to
put it in a kind of formula, the singularity and unconditionality of the event requires, but
also refuses, its inscription in a universal horizon of law, politics, etc. Thus the political
order, its identities, institutions, must be constantly re-inscribed. The point here is that
political life is characterized by a kind of felt tension. On the one hand, we are faced with
decisions about laws, sovereignty, power, institutions, etc. in relation to competing
demands, conflicting interests. But, on the other hand, we are also exposed to demands
that don’t admit of any political solution, that seem to put in question the whole logic of
our political life, demands that are irreducibly singular, or that issue from singularities,
and that don’t find any politically justifiable response. Those who would turn to religious
or moral language are in a sense responding to such demands even if their responses
sometimes close down the possibility of genuinely political action and discourse. The
point, says Butler, is that the response to these problems must grapple with the real
conditions of political life. We must not, she says, “engage in the fantasy of transcending
power altogether” rather, we must think of ourselves as being responsible, in the face of
the unconditional demand, for “replaying power” and “restaging it again and again in
new and productive ways.”75
What Butler makes clear is that the contingency of political life is a function of
temporality as it is affectively lived out by embodied singular beings. To be open to a
future is to live in a present structured according to categories and meanings, norms and
laws but at the same time to be open to a future that is always incalculable. Reason,
universality, law, norm is the result of responding, the result of the process of re-
inscription. Which means that the establishment of law, normativity, political order,
sovereignty can only ever be as a response to that which would threaten it—disorder,
contingency, singularity, affect. So we can see that Butler’s position involves a wholly
different conception of affect than does Mouffe’s account of affect outside the realm of
the “properly political.” For Butler, reason is dependent on its other—the contingency of
events whose coming, and whose manifold effects, are felt as anxiety or desire. Reason is
reason, in Butler’s thinking, only because it is ceaselessly exposed to the coming of that
to which it must respond, but which it cannot master or encompass. Desire, eros, anxiety,
then, are constituents of reason rather than simply antagonistic counter-forces.
I’ve been thinking of a very contemporary example that is perhaps also illustrative
concerning the so-called refugee “crisis” as it has been experienced in Europe over the
past couple of years, especially in connection with the devastating war in Syria. In July
2015 Angela Merkel was speaking at a school and was addressed by a Palestinian child
who spoke of the fact that her family would likely be deported. She spoke of her desire to
go to university to live a full life like her friends. Merkel started to respond to the girl
explaining that there were thousands of children like her in Lebanese refugee camps,
thousands of claims to be answered, and said that Germany “could not manage.” The girl
began to cry and Merkel stopped mid-sentence and rushed over to try to comfort her.
I don’t want to over-interpret this one incident but it seems significant that a month later,
544 Philosophy and Social Criticism 44(5)

in August, 2015, Merkel uttered her famous “Wir Schaffen das” inaugurating her policy
of admitting large numbers of refugees for which she has paid a big political price,
especially after a series of terror attacks that were seized upon by the far-right. Never-
theless, she has continued to stand by this “open door” policy. The point here is not to
hold Merkel up as a moral hero, it’s just to say that Mouffe’s language of political
conflict—of conflicting claims and interests, of calculation and measuring—is not
always adequate to the unconditional ethical realities that politics has to face. And there
is a way which “Wir Schaffen das” addresses a reality that does not have a political
solution and yet nevertheless requires action. The action taken will always be insuffi-
cient, and yet, one must have a sense that this inevitable insufficiency is no grounds for
complacency or resignation. Butler’s “ethics of anxiety” or “ethics under pressure” thus
descriptively captures an aspect of political life to which I think Mouffe’s agonistics, and
her prioritizing of the political over the ethical, is not adequate.76
To conclude, I think Mouffe and Butler are both raising issues critical for political
thought. They both offer powerful descriptions of the experience of the tensions of
political life and the way in which politics is an ontologically generative milieu in which
identities are formed and reformed. Consequently, they both offer powerful criticisms of
various kinds of appeals to extra-political grounds as justifications, legitimations, or
alibis for political action or non-action. In this they also both challenge naturalistic or
reductionist accounts of identities.
But in the end, I think that Mouffe’s narrow characterization of both affectivity and
ethics betrays that she does not think contingency radically enough because in order to
do this we must, like Butler, think through “the sensuous conditions of being sensed and
sensing.”77 In Mouffe’s desire to distance herself from the “unitary subject” of tradi-
tional liberal political philosophies she has not taken the time to think through the
implications of embodied subjectivity and these include the freedom of my desire and
affect in the face of my experience of my finitude and fragility. On the surface it would
seem that Mouffe understands the singular-plural character of embodied subjectivity
when she writes passages like this one arguing: “ . . . we are in fact always multiple and
contradictory subjects . . . constructed by a variety of discourses and precariously and
temporality sutured at the intersection of those subjection-positions.”78 However, for
Mouffe the importance of postmodern critique for fashioning a political philosophy is
that it is “aimed at making a new form of individuality that would be truly plural and
democratic.”79 But we must insist, at the risk of being repetitive, that this truly plural
subject is always also a desiring, touching, uniquely placed subject. And developing
counter hegemonic practices, to quote phenomenologist James Mensch, requires a
“paradigm that would allow us to understand the different forms of violence (physical,
social, and cultural) as aspects of a unified phenomenon.” In order to build such a
paradigm Mensch insists that we must remember “that the activities and experiences
that underlie all our sense-making activities presupposed the body.”80 In her thematiza-
tion of the ethics of anxiety Butler reveals that she fully understands this need.
Finally, an agonistic politics, if it is going to be a real response to our current political
crises, must be more than just the back and forth of various interest groups. Butler asks us
to think about politics and the “supra-political” to challenge the kind of calculation
characteristic of neoliberalism with its demands for deregulation of markets and for
Morrison 545

austerity like cut backs in the public sector, shrinking social services, temporary low-
wage jobs—and the erosion of labor protections. And paradoxically, it is Butler’s insis-
tence on the limits of politics and the distinctively unconditional and ethical character of
those unconditional limits that is most adequate to these urgent political insights.

Notes
1. Derrida (2002, 306).
2. Mouffe addresses European right-wing populism and its relation to post-political liberalism in
her On the Political (2005). In recent interviews with both Mouffe and Butler they discuss the
alt-right upswing in the United States of America. See Shahid (2016) and Soloveitchik (2016).
3. Mouffe (1993, 74).
4. This dialogue that I am initiating between Butler and Mouffe does not reproduce the dialogue
between Ernesto Laclau and Simon Critchley in the early 2000s because their particular
disagreement about ethics concerns Critchley’s insistence that Laclau grounds his thinking
of the political in a Levinasian ethical injunction. See Critchley (1999, 2004). Martin Häg-
glund sums up Critchley’s position thus: “For Critchley, however, there must be something
that governs undecidability in order to secure the distinction between the democratic and the
non-democratic. . . . Now, the deconstructive point is precisely that there is no such guarantee
for what is democratic and nondemocratic.” See Hägglund (2008, 186). As we will see, the
tension between Butler and Mouffe concerns their different conceptions of affect and how this
in particular changes the way they think about ethics and its relation to the political.
5. Mouffe (2005a, 26).
6. Mouffe explains that what makes her agonistic approach “radical” is that it aims to transform
existing power relations and to establish a new hegemony. Mouffe adds, “To be sure, it is not
the revolutionary politics of the Jacobin type, but neither is it the liberal one of competing
interests within a neutral terrain or the discursive formation of a democratic consensus.” See
Mouffe (2005a, 52).
7. For Gramsci’s influence on Mouffe see especially Laclau and Mouffe (2001) and Mouffe
(1979).
8. Mouffe (2013, xii).
9. Mouffe (2005a, 8).
10. Laclau and Mouffe (2001, x).
11. Mouffe (2000).
12. Laclau and Mouffe (2001,144).
13. Laclau and Mouffe (2001,142–3).
14. Mouffe (2005a, 14–18).
15. Schmitt (2007, 28).
16. Fritsch argues that the characterization of the Other as necessarily an enemy in Schmitt and
Mouffe involves an illegitimate “slide from possibility to eventually to the actually of war and
physical killing” (see Fritsch 2008, 188).
17. Mouffe (2005b, 101).
18. Mouffe (2005b, 101, 131). Fritsch argues that both Schmitt and Mouffe make an illegitimate
move from the possibility to the necessity of antagonism. As for Mouffe’s essentializing of
antagonism, in her defense, she seems to waiver. Fritsch argues that Mouffe “ . . . inadvertently
combines the non-essentialist approach informed by post-structuralism and deconstruction
546 Philosophy and Social Criticism 44(5)

with the essentialism of what Schmitt himself calls a political anthropology” and essentialism
that follows from Schmitt’s rather “Hobbesian premise that . . . any political theory that does
not begin with the assumption that man is evil cannot be genuine.” See Fritsch (2008, 184–8).
19. See Martin (2013, 229).
20. Mouffe (2013, 7).
21. The concept of iterability and citationality is present in Butler’s work from as early as Gender
Trouble, where Butler argues “ . . . signification is not a founding act, but rather is a regulated
process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the
production of substantializing effects. . . . [I]t is only within the practices of repetitive signify-
ing that a subversion of identity becomes possible.” See Butler (2011). Some commentators
insist that Butler’s “early formulation of performativity founder on the determinism/voluntar-
ism divide” while only her later work employs iterability. For example, see Allen (1998).
22. Butler (2007, 186).
23. Butler (1993, xii).
24. Butler (1988, 528).
25. Butler (1988, 528).
26. Mouffe’s notion of hegemonic articulation should also disallow claims about any sort of
“substantive core” including claims about an essential affective core. We will address this
inconsistency shortly.
27. See footnote 20 above.
28. Butler (2007, 182).
29. Mouffe (2005a, 18).
30. Mouffe (2013, 121).
31. Mouffe (2013, 7).
32. Mouffe (1999, 750). Mouffe is referring to Stanley Cavell’s critique of Rawls in Cavell (1990,
xxxviii).
33. Mouffe (2013, 13).
34. Mouffe (2013, 14).
35. Mouffe most often bases her argument against liberalism’s self-privileging on Lacan’s notion
of the “master signifier” and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. For her the upshot 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 are 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 delibera-
tion constitute at the same time the conditions of the impossibility of the ideal speech
situation.” See Mouffe (1999, 751–2).
36. Mouffe (1993, 9–10).
37. Mouffe (2005a, 88).
38. Shahid (2016).
39. Mouffe (2005a, 9).
40. Fritsch argues that the “constitutive outside” should not be thought in terms of antagonism but
rather in terms of différance. See Fritsch (2008).
41. See Thaler (2010) and Fritsch (2008).
42. See Martin (2013, 231).
Morrison 547

43. See Fritsch (2008, 184) and Schmitt (2007, 60).

44. Butler (2015a, 67).
45. Butler and Athanasiou (2013, 77).
46. Butler and Athanasiou (2013, 67).
47. See Benhabib (1995) and Nussbaum (1999).
48. Butler (1995, 4).
49. Butler (2015b, 9).
50. Mouffe (2005a, 5).
51. Thaler (2010, 791).
52. The notion of a constitutive lack originates in Heidegger’s Todesanalytik in Being and Time
where he reveals that the essential finitude of Dasein, the temporality of its existence, means
that Dasein is constituted by a lack: “The ahead-of-itself,” as an item in the structure of care,
tells us unambiguously that in Dasein there is always something still outstanding, which, as a
potentiality-for-Being for Dasein itself, has not yet become “actual.” It is essential to the basic
constitution of Dasein that there is constantly something still to be settled. Such a lack of
totality signifies that there is something still outstanding in one’s potentiality-for-Being”
(BT279/SZ236).
53. Mouffe (2000).
54. Butler (2015b, 85).
55. Mouffe (2013, 7).
56. Mouffe (2005a, 122). See also Mouffe (1999, 756).
57. Mouffe (2013, 15).
58. Mouffe (2013, 17).
59. Mouffe (2013, 17).
60. Mouffe (2013, 17).
61. Mouffe (2005b, 129–30).
62. See Derrida (1971).
63. Raffoul (2010).
64. Mouffe (2005b, 129).
65. Derrida (2002, 310).
66. Butler (2015b, 85).
67. Mouffe (2000).
68. Mouffe (2013, 6). In the Leviathan Hobbes writes that the natural passions are essentially
antagonistic: “For the laws of nature (as justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and (in sum) doing to
others as we would be done to) of themselves, without the terror of some power to cause them
to be observed, are contrary to our natural passions, that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge,
and the like.” See Hobbes (1994, 106).
69. Hobbes (1994, 46–7).
70. See Becker (1997).
71. See Heidegger’s Being and Time, especially Part I, Section VI, { 40 The Fundamental
Attunement of Anxiety as an Eminent Disclosedness of Dasein.
72. Butler (2012, 136).
73. Butler (1988, 528).
74. Butler (2012, 135).
75. Olson and Worsham (2000, 741).
548 Philosophy and Social Criticism 44(5)

76. In a recent interview Butler was asked the following question: “Is Angela Merkel’s ‘Will-
kommenskultur’ an expression of this kind of ethics you envision?” Butler responded, “Yes. I
think I see it in two different stages. On the one hand, what we call hospitality or ‘Wilk-
ommenskultur,’ is extremely important. I also think that accords with international law and
asylum law. And we can see it in places like Hungary, that are closing their borders and
refusing all ‘Willkommenskultur.’ Germany is debating the question, ‘What are the limits of
hospitality?’ I think, however, there is a second step, which is: Asking who we are, who the
Germans are now. When we speak about hospitality, it is always this ‘we’ that extends
hospitality to ‘them.’ But once ‘they’ are inside, who is now the ‘we’? Does that ‘we’ change?
Are they then part of the ‘we’? Full inclusion means accepting—and affirming—a racially and
ethnically diverse Germany.” See Soloveitchik (2016).
77. Butler (2015b, 11).
78. Mouffe and Holdengräber (1989, 44).
79. Mouffe and Holdengräber (1989, 44).
80. Mensch (2008, 4–5).

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