Social division is constitutive and cannot be explained by any positive ground
Evidence
If the Real is conceived not as an rJf«t of a deeper ground but as operating in the very terrain of constitution of the social. its forms of appearance - antagonism, dislocation - cannot be reduced to a positive ground explaining them. This is what is involved in the idea - central to my argument - that social division is constitutive. — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 604
Categorization
- DEFINE: Specifies how the Lacanian Real translates into social-political analysis: antagonism is constitutive, not grounded.
- recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
- XREF: connects to: The constitutive outside makes alterity both possible and impossible for identity; Every consensus stabilizes irreducible chaos, and permanent stability would end politics — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 586; The economic level cannot by itself determine other social levels (+7 more)
Broader Connections
- Real social unities must be conceptually dissolved into dualities that never fully capture them
#corroborates(0.85) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 3605 - The subject’s unity is an effect of social configuration, not a premise
#corroborates(0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 333 - Full autonomy of social levels cannot capture a social formation’s complex unity
#corroborates(0.80) - Full autonomy of levels fails to explain complex social formation unity.
#corroborates(0.80) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 623 - Marxism reads social formations as overdetermined unities with relatively autonomous levels
#corroborates(0.80) - The economic level cannot by itself determine other social levels
#corroborates(0.75) - Social formations are complex unities structured in dominance, not determined by a single cause
#corroborates(0.75) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 38 - No subject occupies a neutral position in the social order
#corroborates(0.70)