Theorising the present, theorising beyond the present

In ‘From domination to emancipation and freedom’, Gulshan Khan puts Ernesto Laclau’s work – particularly aspects of it that concern domination, subordination and oppression – in dialogue with a somewhat unconventional partner, namely the neo-republican political theorist Philip Pettit. This is a fruitful approach that allows Khan to bring out some particular strengths in Laclau’s theorising on these matters. Initially framed as a conversation between two equal partners, it should be noted that Khan uses Pettit more as a vehicle for bringing out particular qualities in Laclau’s work, rather than strictly comparing the two or putting them in dialogue on an equal footing. Indeed, as Khan soon admits, examining ‘the limits of Pettit’s perspective also helps to foreground the strengths of Laclau’s theory’, and I would suggest that this is the main point of the chapter, in contrast to the ‘vice versa’ aspired to. The points of similarity and difference chosen to focus on in the chapter strike me as correlating well with areas particularly central to Laclau’s work and with questions Pettit has less to say about. I would suspect that this relative silence on the part of Pettit has more to do with the two theorists’ different ambitions, rather than reflecting the general ‘superiority’ of Laclau’s theory over Pettit’s. As long as one does not read the chapter as a strict comparison and is aware that the conversation is to some degree ‘rigged’ in favour of Laclau, this is not a problem. Instead, Khan usefully employs Pettit’s work to shed light on some of the particularities of Laclau’s work, pertaining specifically but not solely to the relation between domination, emancipation and freedom.

The discussion of Pettit’s reading of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and the way this is contrasted with a suggested Laclauean reading of the same play, is illuminating in several ways. Khan uses it to illustrate the limits of the neo-republican notion of freedom as non-domination with regard to understanding structural power. Arguing that the methodological individualism inherent in Pettit’s approach effectively makes it impossible for him to ‘adequately account for structural domination’, Khan contrasts this incapacity with Laclau’s elaborated theorising of the relation between structure and agency.