In this hugely influential book, Laclau and Mouffe examine the workings of hegemony and contemporary social struggles, and their significance for democratic theory. With the emergence of new social and political identities, and the frequent attacks on Left theory for its essentialist underpinnings, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy remains as relevant as ever, positing a much-needed antidote against ‘Third Way’ attempts to overcome the antagonism between Left and Right.

Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary is the first full-length overview of the important work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Anna Marie Smith clearly shows how Laclau and Mouffe's work has brought Gramscian, poststructuralist and psychoanalytic perspectives to revitalize traditional political theory. With clarity and insight, she shows how they have constructed a highly effective theory of identity formation and power relations that carefully draws from the criticism of political theory from postmodern anti-foundationalist political theory.

Packaging messages from different times and places, combining cognitive stimuli that would not otherwise be found together, journalists work discursively on various dimensions of distance to make the reality they construct and present more relevant and emotionally engaging for the audience. The present article makes a claim that such journalistic ‘work on distance’ and the resulting impression of ‘co-presence’ are central to the potential of television news discourse to affect cognitive–affective attitudes of the audience. The process of reducing the distance (...) is discussed under the term proximization and linked to the semiotic properties of the medium itself and to the news, understood both as a process and as a product. The data analysed come from the CNN news coverage of the Horn of Africa crisis in 2011. (shrink)

Tolerance is generally regarded as an unqualified achievement of the modern West. Emerging in early modern Europe to defuse violent religious conflict and reduce persecution, tolerance today is hailed as a key to decreasing conflict across a wide range of other dividing lines-- cultural, racial, ethnic, and sexual. But, as political theorist Wendy Brown argues in Regulating Aversion, tolerance also has dark and troubling undercurrents. Dislike, disapproval, and regulation lurk at the heart of tolerance. To tolerate is not to affirm (...) but to conditionally allow what is unwanted or deviant. And, although presented as an alternative to violence, tolerance can play a part in justifying violence--dramatically so in the war in Iraq and the War on Terror. Wielded, especially since 9/11, as a way of distinguishing a civilized West from a barbaric Islam, tolerance is paradoxically underwriting Western imperialism. Brown's analysis of the history and contemporary life of tolerance reveals it in a startlingly unfamiliar guise. Heavy with norms and consolidating the dominance of the powerful, tolerance sustains the abjection of the tolerated and equates the intolerant with the barbaric. Examining the operation of tolerance in contexts as different as the War on Terror, campaigns for gay rights, and the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance, Brown traces the operation of tolerance in contemporary struggles over identity, citizenship, and civilization. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe present paper analyses the anti-immigration discourse in Poland in terms of Proximization Theory. PT [Cap, P.. Towards the proximization model of the analysis of legitimization in political discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 40, 17–41; Cap, P.. Axiological aspects of proximization. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 392–407; Cap, P.. Proximization: The pragmatics of symbolic distance crossing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Cap, P.. The language of fear: Communicating threat in public discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; among others] is a cognitive-critical model that accounts for the (...) ways in which the discursive construction of closeness and remoteness can be manipulated in the political sphere and bound up with fear, security and conflict. It reveals how top public actors construe closeness of an external threat, to claim leadership and solicit legitimization of preventive measures to offset the effects of the threat. The present paper applies PT in the domain of state political discourse in today’s Poland, outlining strategies whereby anti-immigration stance and policies are legitimized by discursively constructed fear appeals and other coercion patterns. It demonstrates how the ‘emerging’, ‘growing’, ‘gathering’ threats – physical as well as ideological – are construed by the Polish right-wing government, who thus claim their right to oppose EU immigration agreements and pursue strict anti-immigration measures. (shrink)