Laclau believes there is no such thing as a solid and immutable base on which social practices-and the identities that exert influence on these practices-can be sustained. Social practices are contingent discursive performances that take place in an inconsistent symbolic order-that is, a symbolic order that is not firmly grounded and therefore can be questioned and profoundly changed. That said, Laclau seems to inadvertently contradict himself in one crucial point of his theorization. By making the idea of demand the basic unit of analysis, Laclau seems to attribute a noyau dur to the demands, that is, a solid particular content that can adapt to different discourses but which at its core resists change.The main aim of this article is to decompose Laclau's idea of demand to allow for a fruitful interpretation of his work.To do so, I will refer to Jacques Lacan's conceptualization of demand and its constitutive parts. It is not by chance that Lacan is raised here. Laclau himself has increasingly relied on Lacanian categories as pillars of his political reflections since as far back as 1985. Yet, although Lacan had a lot to say about the idea of demand, Laclau never indicated how psychoanalysis could influence this concept. I am now trying to fill this gap in a productive way, complementing Laclau's theory. Through Lacan, I argue that demands-even if only in their noyau dur-cannot be taken as the basic unit of analysis but rather as contingent discursive constructions providing an avatar for desire.The article is structured into three parts. In the first, I argue that Laclau's treatment of demands as the basic unit of analysis ends up distancing him from his post-foundationalist and anti-essentialist approach toward discourse by relying on a pre-existing noyau dur of demands that would not change in different discursive articulations. In the second part, I return to Jacques Lacan's conceptualization of demand to show how demands are symbolic constructions that hide desire and that one should not confuse a fantasmatic object that is demanded with the desire that sustains this demand. In the third part, I explore the political consequences of this insight for empirical, normative, and ethical analysis. I conclude that, by questioning the status of demands as the basic unit of analysis and stressing the role of desire in political mobilization, one can reach an understanding of a broader set of political phenomena, reframe political strategies, and learn more about democratic and anti-democratic movements. Moreover, it strengthens Laclau's framework by offering a reading of his later references to the psychoanalytic concept of sublimation as a democratic answer to escape the metonymy of desire.
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