Interview with Matteo De Toffoli: Limits, frontiers, antagonism

Matteo De Toffoli explains how his Journal of Language and Politics article, 'Limits, frontiers, antagonism: Discursive topography in (and beyond) Laclau and Mouffe', emerged as a way for him to make sense of key discourse-theoretical concepts, and he hopes it can do the same for others!

Photo by Parrish Freeman on Unsplash

Until one day, when the puzzle was finally complete (or at least clear enough), I asked myself: why not try to put all this material in order, and save my fellow scholars some trouble?

Why did you decide to write this piece?

Actually, the piece sort of wrote itself. When I began my PhD course, in 2019, I knew little to nothing about post-structuralist discourse theory, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe were two political thinkers I had vaguely heard of. Therefore, I had no easy time when I initially stumbled into Hegemony and Socialist Strategy – a fascinating book indeed, but so intricate! In order to make some sense among discourses, floating signifiers, antagonism, equivalence, hegemony and so forth I began piling pages and pages of notes and diagrams. And every time something fell into place, the squaring of the circle always pushed me one step further: to the following writings of Laclau and Mouffe, back to Saussure and Althusser, into the works of discourse theory’s critics and scholars. Until one day, when the puzzle was finally complete (or at least clear enough), I asked myself: why not try to put all this material in order, and save my fellow scholars some trouble?

What are the key takeaways?

If I succeeded in my goal, I would see the main value of the article in its capacity to clarify the key theoretical nodes of discourse theory. From paragraph to paragraph, I have tried to guide the reader through their initial formulation in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, as well as their evolution and refinements from 1985 onwards. After all, the paper was born as an attempt at answering the questions that I asked myself while reading Laclau and Mouffe, and that any other newcomer probably would.

More generally, the article also covers the development of discourse theory from a different angle than the usual: not as a primarily and eminently political theory, but as an attempt – though clearly oriented to political reality – to formulate a general theory of signification. That is to say: I did not focus on notions such as populism, radical democracy or the primacy of the political, but on the theoretical conditions of possibility that allowed Laclau and Mouffe to conceive of those in a peculiar way.

This is particularly true for the protagonist of the story: antagonism, a concept widely mistrusted and misunderstood both on in the political and the scientific domain. Far from discussing its ordinary meaning or empirical manifestation, I decided to follow its genesis and development on a conceptual level. In this way I could bracket its fame of violent or hostile action, and rather rethink of it in a different fashion: as a tool for questioning historically determined structures of meaning and re-igniting the contingency underlying any (alleged) necessity.

Where do you plan to go next in your research?

While I remain fascinated by the theoretical edifice built by Laclau and Mouffe, I am increasingly shifting my focus towards its application to empirical research, especially in combination with corpus linguistics. For instance, I employed the concepts of discourse, antagonism, and empty signifiers to interpret the results of a content analysis of Italian narratives surrounding the phenomenon of post-truth (the subject of my doctoral dissertation and the book I am currently working on).

In the future, I plan to continue exploring the practical side of discourse theory, its potential connections with other research methods and application to new case studies. Topic-wise, I am particularly interested in bringing to the fore the political dimension of some debates that are commonly considered as exclusively or predominantly epistemic (disinformation, fake news, conspiracy theories), especially by considering their connections with populism, anti-populism, and technocracy.