Philip Goldstein’s essay does an excellent job at tracing the main tenets and evolution of Laclau and Mouffe’s respective bodies of work. Rather than going through the finer details of Goldstein’s demonstration, I would like to focus on some of the aporias in Laclau and Mouffe’s political theory, particularly as they relate to ideology and resistance.

Despite agreeing with them on a number of points, I will argue that Laclau and Mouffe’s theorisation of ideology and resistance does not provide us with a satisfactory conception of subjectivity, critique and political strategy. More generally, their iconoclastic brand of post-Marxism, even as it has evolved and adapted over time, points to the enduring and seemingly unbridgeable gap between poststructuralism and Marxist critical theory. On the surface, this critique, and the debate that flows from it, looks rather tired and passé. Recent strands of thought like new materialism are explicit in their willingness to move beyond such disputes. Even for those that continue to identify as poststructuralists or Marxists, inter-theoretical debates are few and far between and scholarly communities are increasingly insular and homogenised. Indeed, the attempt to synthesise or least take seriously the challenge of French theorists like Foucault and Derrida to the universalising and determinist features of Modernity and therefore Marxism, bravely attempted by intellectual stalwarts like Laclau and Mouffe, seems to have faded out of view, especially outside political and cultural theory. If this enterprise seems fraught at the theoretical level, one cannot but recognise that, from a practical standpoint, hesitation between horizontality (Prentoulis and Thomassen, 2013) and verticality or identity and class still infuses debates within sociopolitical movements. Since the representations, demands and actions of these movements are surely important concerns for social theorists, perhaps intractable philosophical debates about agency and structure, discourse and materiality, universal norms and value relativism are here to stay, even if there is little hope that these will be resolved or superseded any time soon.

Let us start with Laclau’s conception of ideology, which has ramifications on a whole range of issues. For Laclau, the ‘critique of ideology’ is made difficult, if not impossible by the fact that there is no extra-discursive standpoint from which we can judge whether there is some distortion at work in individual or popular consciousness.