he recommends a possible confluence of post-Marxism and psychoanalysis 'around the logic of the signifier as a logic of unevenness and dislocation'. ⁶¹ What Laclau does not mention at this point, however, is that this reading of psychoanalysis requires us to ignore not just half but almost all of 'psychoanalysis', and take up a strictly Lacanian interpretation. For about 90 per cent of psychoanalysis is burdened with a leaden weight of essentialism and it is, in fact, only the Lacanian reworking of the theory that has stripped it of these positivities. Hence it could be more appropriate to be discussing a confluence of 'post-psychoanalysis' with post-Marxism.

At this point we might turn to Charles Jencks's useful comment on 'the paradoxical dualism' that the hybrid term 'postmodernism' entails: it is, he writes, at one and the same time the continuation of modernism and its transcendence. ⁶² So it is with Laclau and Mouffe, whose work in some respects remains locked inside a Marxist framework and in others breaks out into an altogether different philosophical frame of reference. And if you conclude that the 'axioms' of Marxism, particularly with regard to the relationships between class, ideology and political discourse, are not self-evidently true in the contemporary world, then their challenge to Marxism's class essentialism will represent a considerable cracking indeed, collapse -- of the Marxist model.

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