Work
Chantal Mouffe studied at Louvain, Paris and Essex and has worked in many universities throughout the world (in Europe, North America and Latin America). She has also held visiting positions at Harvard, Cornell, Princeton and the CNRS (Paris). During the 1989-1995 period she served as Programme Director at the College International de Philosophie in Paris. She currently holds a professorship at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster in the United Kingdom, where she directs the Centre for the Study of Democracy.
She is best known for her contribution to the development – jointly with Ernesto Laclau, with whom she co-authored Hegemony and Socialist Strategy - of the so-called Essex School of discourse analysis, a type of post-marxist political inquiry drawing on Gramsci, post-structuralism and theories of identity, and redefining Left politics in terms of radical democracy.
A prominent critic of ‘deliberative democracy’, (especially in its Rawlsian and Habermasian versions) she also known for her critical use of the work of Carl Schmitt, mainly the concept of ‘the political’, in proposing a radicalization of modern democracy – what she calls ‘agonistic pluralism’. She has recently developed an interest in highlighting the radical potential of artistic practices.
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“The Battle of Waterloo is a work of art with tension and drama with its unceasing change from hope to fear and back again, change which suddenly dissolves into a moment of extreme catastrophe, a model tragedy because the fate of Europe was determined within this individual fate.”
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