Every consensus stabilizes irreducible chaos, and permanent stability would end politics
Evidence
Undecidability, he says. is not a moment to be traversed or overcome, and conflicts of duty are interminable. … It is in that sense that deconstruction can be said to be ‘hypcrpoliticizing’. Politicization never ceases because undecidability continues to inhabit the decision. Every consensus appears as a stabilization of something essentially unstable and chaotic. Chaos and instability are irreducible, but this is at once a risk and a chance, since continual stability would mean the end of politics and ethics. — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 586
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: Conflation of descriptive undecidability with normative political value — the strongest formulation yet of why the constitutive outside cannot be dialectically overcome.
- XREF: connects to: Social division is constitutive and cannot be explained by any positive ground — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 604; Subtracting distortion from a discursive field would cause the field to disintegrate — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 596; Democratic consensus is always the crystallization of hegemonic power relations, never neutral agreement — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 223 (+7 more)
Broader Connections
- Free economic participation generates a permanent political consensus among its agents.
#contradicts(0.85) — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 550 - Polities cannot function without shared consensus, even autocratic ones
#complicates(0.80) — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1158 - Stabilized politics make direct legacy influence fade into structure
#expands(0.80) — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 135 - A republic’s stability rests on assurance that all will respect shared rules.
#qualifies(0.75) — Adelin-Costin Dumitru, Forging the Resistive Republic, 18 - Anarchy can generate social cohesion which effective government destroys
#corroborates(0.75) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1908