Laclau's aside

You seem to remember a time when Brooklyn had a culture that revolved around something other than strollers, foodblogs, and incipient fascism. If asked, you say you prefer the earlier work of Ana Peru (Peru Ana). Perhaps you even think that Philosophy is something more than intellectual therapy, for example, the study of what is and what constitutes the good life. But you’re starting to feel conservative and jaded, stuck in the rut of reading and writing, your only fuel the written records of the Mighty Dead.

Then you hear a talk about something familiar but, strangely, it is new. I had this experience Thursday night when Ernesto Laclau and Katherine Mouffe spoke at NYU. Exiled to a Comp Lit conference from their native realm of truth, Laclau spoke on political antagonism and Mouffe on “the subject as a trace of an other that exceeds representation.” It would be too much to reconstruct or even summarize what was said. What struck me was a comment Laclau made that was really not much more than an aside.

Laclau said that, against Kant, Hegel returned to a negative, Platonic conception of matter. The point, which is in some sense completely obvious, had never struck me before. But if one accepts the kind of account attributed to Plato by Aristotle (e.g. ‘matter as privation’ at Metaphysics A.6) or looks closely at the Hericlitean themes in some of the dialogues (e.g. the divided line in the Republic or Diotima’s speech in the Symposium), then Laclau’s attribution makes a great deal of sense. Was this recovery the same crucial move that propelled Hegel beyond Kantianism?