linguistic meaning as constructed through relations of difference within a chain.

Difference has come to stand, in a broad range of modern social theory, as the exemplar of this approach to language and as the mark of a rejection of absolute meaning or, as Laclau and Mouffe put it here, of 'ultimate fixity' of meaning. At this point in their argument they quote Derrida's generalization of the concept of discourse, in Writing and Difference, as an approach that is 'coincident with that of our text'. Derrida writes:

This was the moment [he gives as temporal examples the works of Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger] when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a centre or origin, everything became discourse -- provided we can agree on this word -- that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely. ³⁵

Hence, for Laclau and Mouffe, a discourse is 'constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a centre', and they describe the 'privileged discursive points of this partial fixation' as nodal points, with reference to Lacan's point de capiton (privileged signifiers that fix meaning in a chain). ³⁶

As far as the impossibility of society is concerned, we can see in Laclau and Mouffe's perspective a very close and powerful fusing of Lacan and Derrida. The images and metaphors cut across the divisions of psychoanalytic, philosophical and political fields, and the guiding principle is the analysis of a tension between the always-already (indeed, essentially) split and decentred, be it the Lacanian psyche or signification in Derrida, and the 'suturing' hegemonic project of coherence. Thus Laclau and Mouffe conclude that 'If the social does not manage to fix itself in the intelligible and instituted forms of a society, the social only exists, however, as an effort to construct that impossible object.' ³⁷ 'Society' is the impossible object of the operations of the social, just as, we might say, the Jacobin imaginary' figured as an empty and illusory prospect for the operations of the political.

If, in their constitution of 'society' as an impossibility, Laclau and Mouffe draw on the ideas of other post-structuralist thinkers such as Derrida and Lacan, it will be conceded even by their sternest critics that

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