In this article, I highlight what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (re)conceptualisation of the plurality within identities implies for justice and education. Laclau and Mouffe (re)theorise the plurality of identities by framing and understanding identities within the wider theoretical context of discourse analysis and radical Democracy. I argue that the significance of this specific (re)theorisation of the plurality within identities for justice and education has not yet been tackled by the related educational-philosophical scholarship, not even by that which focuses on (...) Laclau and Mouffe. As a first step, I provide a brief overview of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory and their approach to Democracy. Then, I show that, in their wider framework, one of the things that meaningfully connect discourse theory with radical Democracy is the theorisation of the plurality within identities. Finally, I suggest that acknowledging the plurality within any identity may offer important tools for expanding the scope of educational justice and for promoting justice in education. Amongst other things, by theoretically recognising the plurality and multi-dimensionality of collective identities, we obtain better insight into the pitfalls of homogenising identities and of cultivating reductive outlooks on identities in and through education, and encourage students’ critical thinking and self-reflective stances toward subjectivities. (shrink)

Slavoj Žižek's philosophy spans over more than three decades, which is confirmed by the numerous books he published since the late 1980s. Since his thinking about the idea of logos is no exception, this article focuses on what can be termed Žižek's early philosophy, and especially that depicted in his The sublime object of ideology (1989) and The metastases of enjoyment (1994). Whilst the former underlines the psychological aspects of the logos, the latter focuses more on theories about being, as (...) well as on theological considerations. This is why, three uses of the logos were identified in Žižek's thought: psychological, ontological and theological, all three with a clear focus on the human being as conceived in modern thought, which for Žižek seems to be utterly opposed to traditional thinking about man and his relationship with God. It is clear from Žižek that whilst the notion of God does appear in this thought, it only refers to the human being which encapsulates the essence of Žižek's philosophy to the point that the logos itself is a fundamental feature of the human being's material existence in the natural world. Regardless of whether the logos points to psychology, ontology or divinity (theology), it always emerges as an idea which centres on the human being, with a special interest in how it exists as well as how it works in the world. (shrink)

The recent rise of the far-right ‘Alternative für Deutschland’ (AfD) in Germany has puzzled researchers. How did demands around cultural homogeneity and the need to be protected from ‘dangerous’ immigrants become acceptable in the mainstream when previously they were not? Crucially, understanding political change is paramount for discourse theorist Ernesto Laclau, who considers ‘demands’ as pivotal for the construction of political identities. Yet, the notion is underdeveloped in his writings. I discuss the aporias in Laclau’s understanding of demands and probe (...) how far we can take Laclau in theoretically accounting for the emergence of demands. The concepts of horizon and dislocation are most helpful in this regard. I then utilise those concepts to analyse demand emergence in the ‘Leitkultur’ (leading culture) debate. I show how the horizon on which these demands are inscripted changed over the years, with a culturalistic discourse becoming dominant. There, following a dislocatory public debate of a non-fiction bestseller by career bureaucrat Thilo Sarrazin, integration was increasingly framed as problematic and foreigners needing to shed unintegratable parts of their own culture to assimilate to a German Leitkultur. I argue that acts of mainstreaming like these allowed the AfD to make their formerly radical demands seem credible. (shrink)

This article scrutinises the ontological nature of democracy and the implications that different ontological assumptions might have for educational practice. To achieve this, we use Karen Barad’s notion of diffraction to read John Dewey’s, Ernesto Laclau’s and Barad’s theoretical insights through one another. Our starting point is Dewey’s famous sentence that ‘democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living’ (2001, p. 91). Based on this, we pose two questions. Firstly, we ask, ‘How (...) can we understand democracy as a mode of associated living?’ We explore Dewey’s quotation first, then fold in Laclau’s conflictual understanding of democracy, followed by Barad’s agential realist notion of intra-action. Secondly, we ask, ‘What are the educational consequences of these ontological understandings?’ Here, we make three assertions: (a) democracy and education could be understood as emerging together involving entanglements that cut across micro-macro levels of scale; (b) democratic processes always contain exclusions carrying risks for educators and (c) ‘living’ needs to trouble the well-worn human/non-human binary and consider wider naturalcultural phenomena. (shrink)

This paper seeks to bring John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy of democratic education and the public into dialogue with Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populism. Recognizing populism as an integral aspect of democracy, rather than as its antithesis, the purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical account of populism as being of educational relevance in two respects. First, it argues that the populist logic specifies a set of formal elements by which democratic education could operate as a collective enterprise. Second, (...) it asserts that the notion of populism supplements any congenial understanding of democratic education by bringing political demands, conflicts and affects to the fore. Finally, the paper discusses the risks and possibilities inherent in visualizing populism as an educational modus. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSocial constructionism, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory in particular, are well-known for their anti-essentialist understanding of identity. Hence these discourses have theoretically been utilized for understanding social identity construction and for deconstructing identities. However, I claim that social constructionism and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory may have the as yet non-theorized operation of detecting and combating wholesale indictments of identities. This operation helps us diagnose how ethnic identity and affect become incriminated as supposedly inextricably intertwined with racism, (...) chauvinism and related pathologies. Yet interestingly, instead of unveiling and critiquing the new hegemony of blanket indictment of ethnic identity/affect, social constructionism and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory have been used to incriminate identity as such. The present article interprets Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory against the grain to chastise the tendency to declare ethnic identity/affect as the new enemy. It shows how such new, hegemonic incrimination aspires to fill the empty signifier of peaceful coexistence with otherness, yet runs the risk of effacing otherness. The article concludes with an example of a reconstructive alternative. (shrink)