the context of the impossibility of 'society', and of the proposition that the social is always an attempt at suture rather than a complete closure. In more general terms, however, Laclau and Mouffe are in harmony with a strand of modern philosophy that might go under the headings of a celebration of negativity, a certain nihilism, a delight in destruction/deconstruction, an emphasis on meaninglessness. All these currents can be found, as is mentioned in the book, in modern European philosophy, from Sartre's existentialism to the more 'negative' side of the phenomenological tradition, in Heidegger, Nietzsche and parts of Wittgenstein. In this sense, contemporary post-structuralism has a long history in twentieth-century European philosophy, and this is the context in which we need to read Laclau and Mouffe. What is unique to them is the project of a rigorous re-engagement or rereading of the Marxist tradition of political thought through the lens of these ideas.

At the heart of their project is a recognition that Marxism delivers some elements of this 'negative' world-view, but is, in contrast, by and large what Timpanaro has called 'triumphalist' in its orientation. Marxism was born of a confident moment, indeed an imperialist one, and it speaks that 'Victorian' sense of conquest of the natural world in Marx's founding ideas about human nature and human labour. ⁵⁸ As Laclau puts it: 'it would be absurd to deny that this dimension of mastery/ transparency/rationalism is present in Marxism'. Rather disarmingly, Laclau, in summarizing the 'negative' dimension of Marxism that he finds inspiring (negativity, struggle, antagonism, opacity, ideology, the gap between the real and the sensual), comments that for this reading to be possible, one has to ignore at least half of Marx's work. ⁵⁹ It is for this reason that Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is 'post- Marxist'. Laclau, in the slightly later article from which I am now quoting, sees the negative dimension as the founding one: 'it [the moment of negativity] shone for just a brief moment in theoretical discourse, only to dissolve an instant later into the full positivity which reabsorbed it -- positivity of history and society as totalisations of their partial processes, the positivity of the subject -- the social classes -- as agents of history'. ⁶⁰ Laclau's tone is elegiac here, and indeed he goes on to cite Stalin as the end point of the affirmation of positivity in Marxism.

There can be no doubt that the critique of 'positivity' and the critique of essentialist thought, which are applied by Laclau and Mouffe to Marxism, are aspects of a broader challenge to a wide variety of thought. The article to which I have just referred is, in fact, a consideration by Laclau of points of comparison between this 'reading' of Marxism (now 'post-Marxism') and psychoanalysis. Here, Laclau offers some links between the Laclau/ Mouffe conception of hegemony (dislocation, the attempt at suture) and a Lacanian notion of 'lack', and

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