Politics and Passions
2021
First Published
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In 2009, the artist Anna Ostoya created a booklet with textual collages using an essay by the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, ‘Politics and Passions: The Stakes of Democracy’ (2002). In the essay, Mouffe critiqued the then-dominant ‘beyond left and right’ politics of neoliberalism and warned of its dangers – the rise of right-wing populist parties. Fascinated by Mouffe’s strikingly prophetic ideas, as well as her bold call to fight the status quo in order to radicalise democracy and to prevent violence, Ostoya returned to the booklet in 2019. She composed for it a series of portraits based on sketches of people on the New York City subway and on reproductions of her paintings and collages from the preceding decade. She also conducted a conversation with Mouffe about the politics of the last forty years, about the contemporary moment and about art, which is included in this publication.
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Authors
Chantal Mouffe
Author · 12 books
Chantal Mouffe is a Belgian political theorist. She holds a professorship at the University of Westminster in the United Kingdom. She is best known as co-author of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy with Ernesto Laclau. Their thoughts are usually described as post-Marxism as they were both politically active in the social and student movements of the 1960s including working class and new social movements (notably second-wave feminism in Mouffe's case). They rejected Marxist economic determinism and the notion of class struggle being the single crucial antagonism in society. Instead they urged for radical democracy of agonistic pluralism where all antagonisms could be expressed. In their opinion, ‘...there is no possibility of society without antagonism’; indeed, without the forces that articulate a vision of society, it could not exist.
