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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Famous quotes containing the word work:
“While I do not think it was so intended I have always been of the opinion that this turned out to be much the best for me. I had no national experience. What I have ever been able to do has been the result of first learning how to do it. I am not gifted with intuition. I need not only hard work but experience to be ready to solve problems. The Presidents who have gone to Washington without first having held some national office have been at great disadvantage.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)
“Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.... Of all things of thought, poetry is the closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art ...”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)