The Rhetorical Foundations of Society.

• Date: 01 January 2015
• Author: Glasson, Benjamin

The Rhetorical Foundations of Society

Ernesto Laclau

London; New York: Verso, 2014, 229 pp.

ISBN 9781781681718. $122.37.

Paperback ISBN 9781781681701. $34.65.

Ernesto Laclau passed away in April 2014 at the age of 70, just as this volume was in preparation. Professor of Political Theory at the University of Essex, Laclau formed the Centre for Theoretical Studies in the Humanities and the Social Sciences and was the leading figure in the Essex School of discourse analysis. The distinctive discourse theory he and Chantal Mouffe developed combines strands of Wittgensteinian post-analytical philosophy, post-Husserlian hermeneutics, Derridean deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis. It is this unique blend of influences--which converge around the contingency of the social, the linguistic construction of subjectivity and the discursive operations that try to ground a foundation within a reality without ground mediated through a radicalised notion of Gramsci's hegemony, that they brought to bear on the vestiges of Marxian essentialism.

While this is a collection of previously published essays, it has been carefully curated. There are extended engagements with questions of ethics and normativity, God, rhetoric theory and the thought of Giorgio Agamben. The volume is welcome not only for the range...