









































In ordinary language, it is not very common to 
speak about ‘the political.’1 However, to distinguish 
between the political and politics opens up an 
important alley for reflection. I am not the first nor 
the only one to make this distinction. A variety of 
political theorists do the same, but with different 
remit. Some theorists envisage the political as a space 
of freedom and public deliberation. This we call the 
associative view of the political. Others understand 
it as a space of power and conflict, which we call 
the dissociative view. My understanding belongs 
to this second perspective. With the term ‘the 
political,’ I refer to the dimension of antagonism, 
which, I argue, is constitutive of human societies. 
Politics is the set of practices and institutions 
through which a certain order is created. This 
order organizes human coexistence in a context of 
conflict. According to the dissociative perspective, 
political questions always require decision making 
to choose between conflicting alternatives. And, 
contrary to the dominant view under neoliberalism 
today, those political decisions cannot be reduced 
to technical issues which can be solved by experts.       
In neoliberal societies, there is an incapacity to 
think politically. In this article, I will reflect upon 
the issue of public space and the potential of artistic 
practices in the context of conflict and antagonism.

1. The Political
To a great extent the contemporary incapacity 

to think politically is not only caused by the 
uncontested hegemony of neoliberalism, but also 
by liberalism in general. With “liberalism,” I do 
not mean “economic liberalism,” which is the basis 

On the Political, Public Space and the 
Possibility of a Critical Architecture

Chantal Mouffe



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of capitalism, nor “political liberalism,” as a set of political institutions, I 
refer here to the philosophical discourse, which has got many variances, 
some more progressive than others. Though there is no common essence, 
there is a multiplicity of what we could call, using an expression of 
Ludwig Wittgenstein, family resemblance. Save a few exceptions, the 
dominant tendency in liberal thought is characterised by a rationalist and 
individualist approach, which, in my view, is not able to adequately grasp 
the pluralistic nature of the social world with the conflicts that pluralism 
entails—conflicts for which there is no rational solution. The typical liberal 
understanding of pluralism is that we live in a world in which there are 
many perspectives, many values, and different beliefs. However, through 
serious deliberations and rational negotiations, these different perspectives 
can constitute harmonious and non-conflictual perspectives. This type 
of liberalism negates the political in its antagonistic dimension. One of 
its main tenets is a belief in the possibility of universal consensus, which 
can be established through strict rational reasoning. But to acknowledge 
the antagonism of the political underscores the inescapable moment of 
decision. I use ‘decision’ here in the Derridean sense. As Derrida insisted, to 
decide is always to decide in an undecidable terrain. A decision made after 
calculation, is not a decision at all. Decision-making in an undecidable 
terrain means choosing between alternatives that cannot be resolved 
through rational reasoning. The antagonism of the political reveals the 
limits of any rational consensus, and therefore is antithetical to the liberal 
vision.

When examining the different perspectives existing within contemporary 
liberal political thought, we can distinguish two main paradigms. The 
first is called the aggregative paradigm. There is a confluence with the 
associative view of the political, but it is not exactly the same. The 
aggregative view envisages politics as the establishment of a compromise 
between competing forces in society. Individual participants are portrayed 
as rational beings, driven by the maximization of their own interest. This 
is an instrumental understanding of acting; (it is) market ideology applied 
to the domain of politics. The instrumental view easily apprehends politics 
through economics and is often dominant in political science departments, 
for instance in the broadly accepted rational choice theory. 

The second paradigm is dominant within philosophical discourses, 
and is often called the deliberative paradigm. Two of their representatives 
are John Rawls in the United States and Jürgen Habermas in Germany. 
They somehow developed their views in reaction to the instrumentalist 
model. Their argument is that there is more to politics than just the 
search for personal interests. Instead of an instrumental rationality, they 



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propose a communicative rationality, believing that 
it is possible to create a rational moral consensus 
by means of free discussion. In this case, politics is 
not apprehended through economics, but through 
ethics or morality. What these views leave aside 
through their rationalist approach is precisely what, 
to me, is the specificity of politics: the fact that in 
politics we are always dealing with a “we” as opposed 
to a “them.” This does not mean that antagonism is 
always present, but it is an ever-present possibility.

Another drawback of the rationalism of liberalism 
is that it is not able to acknowledge the crucial role 
played by what I call passions in politics. I refer here 
to the affective dimension, which is central to the 
constitution of any collective form of identification. 
Political identification is always collective, and this 
implies an affective dimension. Liberalism, with its 
methodological individualism, is not able to grasp 
the specificity of the political, the collective and the 
affective.

In my work, I argue that only when we 
acknowledge the political in its antagonistic 
dimension, can we pose the central question for 
democratic politics. This is not to question how to 
negotiate a compromise, or what kind of procedure is 
needed to reach a rational, fully inclusive consensus. 
It is impossible to establish a consensus without 
exclusion. Therefore, despite what many liberals 
want us to believe, the specificity of democratic 
politics is not to overcome this “we/them” 
opposition, but how to construct this opposition to 
be compatible with the recognition of pluralism. In 
order to answer this question, I use the notion of 
the “constitutive outside,” a term proposed by the 
American philosopher Henry Staten in his book 
Wittgenstein and Derrida.2 He uses this term to refer 
to a number of terms that are developed by Jacques 
Derrida, like Derrida’s notions of supplement, 
trace, and différance. The aim of those notions is 
to highlight the fact that the creation of an identity 
always implies the establishment of difference. This 

     THE 
ANTAGONISM 

OF THE POLITICAL 
REVEALS THE 

LIMITS OF ANY 
RATIONAL 

CONSENSUS, AND 
THEREFORE IS 
ANTITHETICAL 

TO THE LIBERAL 
VISION.

“

”



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difference is moreover often constructed on the basis of a hierarchy, for 
instance man/woman, black/white. This view is based on Ferdinand de 
Saussure’s claim that every identity is relational, and acknowledges that 
the affirmation of a difference is the precondition for the existence of any 
identity. In other words, the perception of something other that constitutes 
its exterior is the precondition of existence of an identity. If we accept this, 
and apply it to the field of politics, we can understand that the constitution 
of the “we” is what politics is about and that politics cannot exist without 
the determination of a “them.” The identity of a “we” needs to have a 
constitutive outside, a “them.” But this does not mean that such a relation 
is necessarily antagonistic. 

In politics we thus deal with collective identities on the basis of “we/
them.” Those differences can simply be a pure difference. To give an 
example: “we,” the French, need to have a “them,” the German. Or “we,” 
the Catholic, and “them,” the Protestant or the Muslim. This is not 
necessarily a relation of antagonism. But under certain conditions, this 
“we/them,” can become an antagonism, and can be constructed on the 
basis of friend and enemy. This happens, for instance, when the “them” 
is perceived as questioning the identity of the “we,” thus threatening its 
existence. From that moment on, any form of “we/them” relation, being 
from religious, ethnic, economic, or other origin, becomes antagonistic. An 
example that I often give to my students is the disintegration of Yugoslavia. 
The Slovenian, the Bosnian, the Croat and the Serb were not enemies, 
but in certain circumstances, such as those in the death of Tito and the 
coming to power of Milošević, who tried to establish Serbian supremacy, 
they began to see each other as enemies. Their relationship became 
antagonistic. This is important to realize, the ever-present possibility that 
“we/them” relations become antagonistic.  

Upon that remark, I would like to stress that identities are always a 
result of processes of identification. Identities, as Freud claims, can never 
be completely fixed, Therefore, we are never confronted with “we/them” 
opposition that expresses essentialist pre-existing identities. This is an 
important point to stress, since the “them” represent the condition of 
possibility of the “we,” as I argued above. This means that the constitution 
of a specific “we” always depends on the type of “them” from which it 
is differentiated. The crucial point is that this allows us to envisage the 
possibility of a different type of “we/them” relation according to the way 
the “them” is constructed. 

Since all forms of political identities entail a “we/them” distinction, 
this means that the possibility of emergence of antagonism can never 
be eliminated. I thus assert that the political belongs to our ontological 



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condition. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 
Ernesto Laclau and I argue that next to the concept 
of antagonism, there is another concept which 
is crucial to address the political: the concept of 
hegemony.3 To acknowledge the dimension of the 
political, the ever-present possibility of antagonism, 
requires coming to terms with the lack of a final 
ground and the undecidability that pervades every 
order. It requires recognizing what we call the 
hegemonic nature of every kind of social order. 
Every society is the product of a series of practices 
which attempt to establish an order in a specific 
context. But this context is always contingent. 
It is important to realise that according to such a 
conception, society cannot be seen as the unfolding 
of a logic that will be exterior to itself, whatever 
the source of this logic will be — the forces of 
production for Marx, nor the development of the 
spirit for Hegel. Every order is the temporary and 
precarious articulation of contingent practices. This 
means that things could always have been otherwise 
and that every order is predicated on the exclusion 
of other possibilities. To acknowledge this can also 
be called political: it is always the expression of a 
particular structure of power relations. There are 
always other possibilities that have been repressed, 
but that can also be reactivated. Every hegemonic 
order is susceptible to being challenged by counter-
hegemonic practices, practices that will attempt to 
disarticulate the existing order, to install another 
form of hegemony. This is what the agonistic 
struggle is about: the struggle between hegemonies.

The political is linked to those acts of hegemonic 
institution, and in this sense can be differentiated 
from the social. This distinction between the social 
and political is important. These two domains are 
two different ways of looking at the same thing. The 
social is the basis of ‘sedimented practices’, referring 
to practices that conceal the act of the contingent 
political institution. These practices appear as if 
they were self-grounded. Or to put it differently, 

     THIS DOES 
NOT MEAN THAT 
ANTAGONISM IS 

ALWAYS PRESENT, 
BUT IT IS AN 

EVER-PRESENT 
POSSIBILITY.

“

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we take these practices for granted. There is a need for such sedimented 
practices, as you cannot have everything in perpetual flux. The social and 
the political have the status of what Martin Heidegger called ‘existentials,’ 
which are the necessary forms of societal life. 

2. On Public Spaces
Once the ever-present possibility of antagonism is acknowledged, one 

can understand why one of the main tasks of democratic politics consists in 
defusing the potential antagonism that exists in social relations. A society 
cannot exist in constant flux or civil war. There is a need for some form of 
stability. If we accept that this stability cannot be achieved by transcending 
the “we/them” relation, but only by constructing it in a different way, then 
the following question arises: what could constitute a tame relation, a 
sublimated form of antagonism? What form of “we/them” will this imply? 
Or to put it differently, how could conflict be accepted as legitimate and 
take a form that does not destroy the political association? This requires 
that some kind of common bond exists between the parties in conflict 
so that they will not treat their opponents as enemies to be eradicated. 
That would be a form of civil war, because they will see their demands 
as illegitimate. This is precisely what happens in an antagonistic enemy 
relation. However, the opponents cannot be seen simply as competitors 
whose interests can be dealt with either through negotiation, the aggregative 
conception, or reconciled by deliberation (the deliberative view). In that 
case, the antagonistic element will simply have been eliminated.  The two 
solutions offered by liberalism are not adequate, precisely because they do 
not recognise the inevitable dimension of antagonism and the fact of the 
hegemonic conception of society. If we thus want to acknowledge on one 
side the inevitability of the antagonistic dimension, while on the other 
allowing for the possibility of its sublimation, of its taming, we need to 
envisage a third type of relation. And this is the type of relation that I have 
proposed to call agonism. 

Antagonism is a “we/them” relation in which the two sides are enemies, 
wherein these two sides do not share any common ground. There is no 
symbolic space among them. Agonism is also a “we/them” relation with 
conflicting parties. However, with agonism, although acknowledging that 
there is no rational solution to their conflict, the two sides recognise the 
legitimacy of their opponents. They are adversaries, not enemies. This means 
that when in conflict, they see themself as belonging to the same political 
association. They are sharing a common symbolic space and it is within this 
space that the conflict takes place. What exists among them is a conflictual 
consensus. They have different interpretations of the shared political values. 



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What is at stake in agonistic struggle is in fact the 
very configuration of power relations around which 
a given society is structured. It is a struggle between 
opposing hegemonic projects, which cannot be 
reconciled rationally. The antagonistic dimension is 
always present, it is a real confrontation, but one 
which is played out under regulated conditions by 
democratic procedures. The agonistic conception of 
democracy acknowledges the contingent character 
of the hegemonic political-economic articulation, 
which informs a specific configuration of a society 
at a given moment. This is a precarious and 
pragmatic construction, which can be disarticulated 
and transformed as a result of the agonistic struggle 
among the adversaries. Contrary to the values of 
the liberal model, the agonistic approach recognises 
that society is always politically instituted. It never 
forgets that the terrain in which the hegemonic 
intervention takes place is necessarily the outcome 
of previous hegemonic practices. This is why the 
agonistic model denies the possibility of a non-
adversarial democratic politics and criticises those 
who, by ignoring this dimension of the political, 
reduce politics to a set of supposedly technical moves 
and neutral procedures. Unfortunately, the latter is 
the dominant view in the neoliberal hegemonic, as 
I stated previously.

The most important consequence of the 
agonistic model of democracy for the issue of 
public space is that this conception challenges the 
widespread notions that inform most liberal visions, 
wherein public space is regarded as the terrain 
where consensus could possibly be reached. For the 
agonistic model, public spaces are the battlefields 
where different hegemonic projects are confronted 
without any possibility of a final reconciliation. In 
this view, we are not dealing with one single public 
space. According to the hegemonic approach, public 
spaces are always plural. The agonistic confrontation 
takes place in a multiplicity of discursive surfaces. 
The second important point I want to make is that 

    FOR THE 
AGONISTIC MODEL, 

PUBLIC SPACES 
ARE THE 

BATTLEFIELDS 
WHERE DIFFERENT 

HEGEMONIC 
PROJECTS ARE 
CONFRONTED 
WITHOUT ANY 

POSSIBILITY 
OF A FINAL 

RECONCILIATION.

“

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while there is no underlying principle of unity, no predetermined centre 
to this diversity of spaces, there always exist diverse forms of articulation 
amongst them. We are not faced with the dispersion envisaged by some 
modernist thinkers. This is, for instance, the big difference between our 
approach and the one of Michel Foucault. Many parts of our previously 
mentioned book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy are influenced by 
Foucault, such as the conception of power. But we part company with 
Foucault when he asserts the pure multiplicity of public spaces. We argue, 
on the contrary, that public spaces are always hegemonically structured. 
Given the fact that hegemony results from the specific articulation of a 
diversity of spaces, this means that the hegemonic struggle always consists 
in the attempt to create a different form of articulation. 

This not only differentiates our view from Foucault’s, it is also 
differentiated from Jürgen Habermas’s view, who reflected a lot about 
the political public space. When he envisages a public sphere, Habermas 
presents it as a place where deliberation aiming at the rational consensus 
takes place. To be sure, Habermas accepts that it is improbable that such a 
consensus could effectively be reached, given the limitation of social life. He 
therefore presents this consensus, this ideal situation of communication, 
as a regulative idea. I would argue that this is, though slightly different, 
fundamentally the same conception. According to the perspective that I 
am advocating, the impediments to Habermas’s ideal speech situation are 
not empirical. For Habermas, we would never be able to reach it, because 
we will never be able to completely coincide with our rational self, to leave 
aside all our particularities. The impediments are therefore empirical. To 
me, however, those impediments are not empirical, they are ontological. 
And the rational consensus that Habermas presents as a regulative idea is, 
in my view, a conceptual impossibility. 

My idea of agonistic public space also differs from Hannah Arendt’s. 
In my view, the main problem with Arendt’s understanding of agonism is, 
to put it in a nutshell, that it is an agonism without antagonism. Arendt 
puts a great emphasis on plurality and insists that politics deals with the 
community and reciprocity of human beings which are different from 
one another. This is essential to her view. But she never acknowledges 
that this plurality is at the origin of antagonistic conflicts. According to 
Arendt, to think politically is to develop the ability to see things from a 
multiplicity of perspectives. In a reference to Immanuel Kant, in her book 
Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, she refers to his idea of enlarged 
thought.4 For Arendt, this idea is a model of political practices, which 
testifies that her conception of pluralism is in fact inscribed in the horizon 
of an intersubjective agreement. What Arendt looks for in Kant’s doctrine 



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of aesthetic judgment is in fact a procedure for 
ascertaining intersubjective agreement in the public 
space. This is why I will argue that while significant 
differences in their respective approaches exist, 
Arendt and Habermas both end up envisaging the 
public space as one free from antagonism. Both 
belong to the associative conception of politics, 
which is distinct from the dissociative conception 
of politics that I advocate.

3. On Artistic Practices and the Possibility of a Critical 
Architecture
So far, I have argued that by bringing to the 

fore the discursive character of the social and the 
multiplicity of discursive practices through which 
our world is constructed, the hegemonic approach is 
particularly fruitful when it comes to apprehending 
the relation between art and politics. This relation 
should not be envisaged in terms of two separate 
constituted fields, art on one side, politics on the 
other, between which a relation will need to be 
established. According to this approach there is an 
aesthetic dimension in the political and a political 
dimension in art. Indeed, from the point of view 
of the theory of hegemony, artistic and cultural 
practices play a role in the constitution and the 
maintenance of a given symbolic order, as well as 
in challenging this hegemonic order. And this is 
why artistic and cultural practices necessarily have 
a political dimension. This is why I have suggested 
that it is not useful to make a distinction between 
political and non-political art. I therefore prefer to 
speak about critical art. Identifying the critical to 
the political implies that all artistic practices that 
are not critical are not political either. But, as said, 
there is a political dimension in all forms of art. The 
importance of the hegemonic approach for critical 
art is that it highlights the fact that the construction 
of a hegemony is not limited to the traditional 
political institutions, but that it also takes place in 
a multiplicity of spaces, which are usually called 

    IT IS NOT 
USEFUL 

TO MAKE A 
DISTINCTION 

BETWEEN 
POLITICAL AND 
NON-POLITICAL 

ART. 

“

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civil society. This is where, as Antonio Gramsci has shown, a particular 
conception of the world is established and a specific understanding of 
reality is defined—what he calls the common sense. This common sense 
provides the terrain in which specific forms of subjectivity are constructed. 
Gramsci insists that the domain of culture plays a crucial role there, as it 
is one of the terrains where common sense is built and subjectivities are 
created.

This hegemonic approach reveals that artistic practices constitute an 
important terrain for the construction of political identities. It allows 
us to grasp the decisive role that those practices could also play in the 
counter-hegemonic struggle, because they contribute to the emergence 
of new forms of subjectivity. An important dimension of the counter-
hegemonic struggle is indeed the transformation of the common sense as 
the space where specific forms of subjectivity are constructed. From this 
perspective, critical art is constituted by a manifold of artistic practices 
that are going to contribute to question the dominant hegemony. The 
objective is a transformation of political identities through the creation of 
new practices, new language games, that will mobilize affects in a way that 
allows for the disarticulation of the framework in which current forms of 
identification are taking place. As such, artistic practices allow other forms 
of identification to emerge.

It is worth indicating that there are different answers to the question 
of what critical art is. In fact, it is important to acknowledge that not all 
conceptions of radical politics envisage the criticality of artistic practices 
in the same way. We can, I would like to argue, roughly distinguish two 
main strategies to visualize radical politics, one that I have in my book 
Agonistics called ‘engagement with’ and the other ‘desertion from.’5  
The second one, which is promoted by thinkers like Michael Hardt and 
Antonio Negri and their followers, reject any engagement with the state 
and all existing institutions. In their recent work, Hardt and Negri have 
moved a bit from that view, but most of their followers have not. The 
strategy that they advocate is one of exodus, that calls for the desertion of 
the places of power, which is justified by the claim that under the current 
condition of cognitive capitalism, exodus is the only form of resistance to 
the domination of bio-power. Desertion should include the institutions 
of the art world, which they see as totally instrumentalized by the creative 
industries. The art world has become complicit with capitalism, and thus 
can no longer provide a site of resistance. 

Against this view of radical politics in terms of exodus, the strategy 
that the hegemonic approach advocates, is one that, again borrowing 
a term from Gramsci, we call a “war of positions.” It does not consist 



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in withdrawing from existing institutions, but 
by engaging with them in order to bring about a 
profound transformation in the way they function. 
This war of positions targets the nodal points 
around which neoliberal hegemony is established, 
disarticulating the key discourses and practices 
through which neoliberal hegemony is sustained 
and reproduced. It thus consists of the diversity 
of counter-hegemonic practices and interventions, 
which operates in a multiplicity of domains: 
economic, legal, political, and cultural. The domain 
of culture plays a crucial role in this war of positions, 
because this is the space where the common sense 
is established and subjectivities are constructed. 
Critical artistic and cultural practices can contribute 
to the fostering of an agonistic confrontation by 
making visible what the dominant consensus tends 
to obscure and obliterate. This permits challenges to 
the existing hegemony. I want to insist that this can 
be done in a diversity of ways, in a multiplicity of 
interventions and in active engagement with a wide 
range of institutions in a variety of spaces. There 
are many terrains in which artistic and cultural 
practices can unsettle the established common sense 
and contribute to the emergence of new forms of 
subjectivity. 

But what about architecture? Can it be critical 
as well? Recognizing the role of cultural artistic 
practices in the construction of a hegemony 
contributes to vizualising the role that architectural 
practices could play in the construction, 
reproduction, and transformation of a hegemony. 
The possibility of a critical architecture starts with 
the acknowledgment that the social is always 
discursively constructed and that architecture 
also has a political dimension. However, it is one 
thing to recognize its political dimension, another 
to determine whether this political dimension is 
critical. As I have stated previously, the political 
does not equate with the critical. Once we can 
recognize the political dimension of architecture, 

   THE POSSIBILITY 
OF A CRITICAL 

ARCHITECTURE 
STARTS WITH THE 

ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
THAT THE SOCIAL 

IS ALWAYS 
DISCURSIVELY 

CONSTRUCTED 
AND THAT 

ARCHITECTURE 
ALSO HAS A 

POLITICAL 
DIMENSION.  

“

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we can follow different strategies to guide this political dimension. What 
strategy will then orient us in a critical direction? The strategy that Laclau 
and I advocated in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the strategy that 
I still advocate in my book, For a Left Populism, is a strategy of critical 
engagement with institutions in order to transform them.6 This is a matter 
of both the disarticulation of a given hegemony, as well as the importance 
of creating something new. A critical approach always consists of a double 
movement, of disarticulation and rearticulation. 

It seems to me that this strategy of “engagement with” is particularly 
suited to critical architectural practices. Moreover, I cannot really think 
of architectural practices that correspond to a strategy of exodus. In 
architecture, one is always, it seems to me, dealing with presentation, 
construction, and mediation, and those are precisely the things that the 
exodus strategy rejects. 

Endnotes
1. This article is a lightly edited transcript of Chantal Mouffe’s keynote 

lecture at the 5th Biennial Conference of the International Society of 
the Philosophy of Architecture (ISPA), held via Zoom at Monte Verita, 
Ascona, Switzerland, on July 4th, 2021.

2. Henri Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Lincoln: University of 
Nebraska Press, 1986).

3. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: 
Towards Radical Democratic Politics (London/New York: Verso, 2001). 

4. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald 
Beiner (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).

5. Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics. Thinking the World Politically (London/
New York: Verso, 2013).

6. Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018).


