Agonismo e contingenza. La radicaldemocrazia nel pensiero di Chantal Mouffe

The doctoral thesis focuses on the theory of radical democracy elaborated from Chantal Mouffe since 1985 with her work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, which was written in collaboration with Ernesto Laclau. At the beginning a categorization between the “consensual” and the “conflictual” trains of thought was proposed, the first aiming to the institution of new structures of participative or deliberative democracy (J. Cohen, A. Fung, D. Lummis, J. P. McCormick, E. Screpanti), the latter identifying political dissent as the basic cornerstone of democracy (W. Connolly, B. Honig, E. Laclau, C. Lefort, C. Mouffe, J. Rancière, S. Wolin, Y. Stavrakakis). The first two chapters define the founding elements of the political ontology as structured by Mouffe and Laclau examining in depth the references to marxist, post-structuralist and lacanian theories in their 1985 work (with special attention to the concepts of articulation, overdetermination, subject as lack, antagonism and hegemony). At this point we start to deal with the author’s political proposal, whom want to create a radical imaginary found from the awareness of contingency, the awareness that every single social order is unstable, therefore able to promote the diffusion of the conditions of social equity. The third chapter focuses the attention on the later evolutions of Mouffe's theory: borrowing from Carl Schmitt the friend/enemy dichotomy as the criteria of the political, the authoress defines the public sphere as a decision making and conflictual space, characterized and defined from the impossibility of an absolute and wholesome reconciliation between the social parties. The task of a radical politics is to come to a form of democratic “agonism” by the institution of a symbolic common place, which is a set of procedures (the democratic “rules of the game”) promoting the conversion of the enemy in a “legitimate adversary”, soothing the social antagonism. The last part of the work analyzes the outcomes of the lacking acknowledgment of the political antagonism: the raising of “post-politic” visions (such as cosmopolitanism) – felt by the authoress as attempts to downclass the politics to a set of rational and impartial techniques – and the ascent of xenophobic and populist parties able to funnel negatively the political passions of the citizens in always new we/them polarizations.