them to say that 'absolute fixity' of meaning (and absolute non-fixity) is not possible? A complication with their argument is that, as well as carrying its own considerable weight, it deploys concepts drawn from other theorists whose import to Laclau and Mouffe's argument will be differentially understood by readers. I propose to look at two key concepts of this type, as a way into Laclau and Mouffe's argument: suture and difference.

Suture is a term whose current theoretical use is drawn from Lacanian psychoanalysis and has been developed, as Laclau and Mouffe describe, ³² in semiotic film theory. Conventionally, in English, meaning 'stitch', the term suture is rendered by the Oxford English Dictionary as 'the joining of the lips of a wound', and this original surgical meaning is given a neat and modern gloss in Landry and Maclean's remark that 'a "suture" marks the absence of a former identity, as when cut flesh heals but leaves a scar marking difference'. ³³ Laclau and Mouffe present us with a body politic whose skin is permanently split open, necessitating ceaseless duty in the emergency room for the surgeons of hegemony whose fate it is to try and close, temporarily and with difficulty, the gaps. (This patient never makes it to the recovery ward.) Their reference to Stephen Heath's account of suture stresses a 'double movement' -between on the one hand a Lacanian 'I' whose hallmark is division and lack, and on the other hand the simultaneous possibility of coherence or 'filling-in' of that lack. Their application of the concept of suture to the field of politics carries with it an idea that Derrida's work on deconstruction has made influential: the traces of the old cannot be destroyed but remain as sedimentary deposits -- even, and indeed especially, where the new is trying hardest to exclude the old. (Deconstruction being the method of uncovering these buried traces.) Thus Laclau and Mouffe say: 'Hegemonic practices are suturing in so far as their field of operation is determined by the openness of the social, by the ultimately unfixed character of every signifier. This original lack is precisely what the hegemonic practices try to fill in.' They conclude that the closure implied in the idea of a totally sutured society is impossible. ³⁴

The 'ultimate fixity of meaning' is, explain Laclau and Mouffe, a proposition that has been challenged by a powerful strand of philosophical thought 'from Heidegger to Wittgenstein' and, most importantly perhaps for our purposes, by the post-structuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida. This is not the moment to attempt a summary of his views, but one might usefully refer here to Derrida's overarching insistence on meaning as positional rather than absolute. Derrida has elaborated a theory of language as the infinite 'play of signifiers', and of

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