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:
“...I knew I wanted to be permanently self-supporting and I vaguely thought I might work somewhere in the realm of ideas. I felt that I had within me an undeveloped fount of ideas. I did not know exactly what my ideas were, but whatever they were I wanted to convert people to them.”
—Rheta Childe Dorr (1866–1948)
“The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
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The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.”
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“How marvellous it all is! Built not by saints and angels, but the work of men’s hands; cemented with men’s honest blood and with a world of tears, welded by the best brains of centuries past; not without the taint and reproach incidental to all human work, but constructed on the whole with pure and splendid purpose. Human, and yet not wholly human—for the most heedless and the most cynical must see the finger of the Divine.”
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