Empty signifier(s)

Building on structuralist theories of language Laclau wants to convince us that in language there exist "empty signifiers". These are not signifiers without signifieds, which would not be signifiers at all, but signifiers which signify the constitutive impossibility of signifying. If - so Laclau argues - all identities in language are differential identities then the signifying of the borders of signifying would imply a distinction between language and non-language, would become another distinction and therefore part of language. But, as Hegel noted, to think the borders of a phenomenon is to go beyond these borders - and the signifying of the borders of language is therefore a signifying beyond the field of language - so there is an inherent impossibility of closure of language as a system, which is expressed in empty signifiers. There are a couple problems with such a formulation. First of all Saussure never claimed that all of language is based on purely differential identity, merely the signifier (the only identity the word "dog" has is that it is neither "god" nor "hog" nor "drag" nor "empiricism" ...) and even in this form the argument is problematic, as Plato had already shown in Kratylos (and as Poe demonstrated in the onomatopoeic lines: "A silken, sad uncertain rustling"). To top it of Saussure's "la langue" is an abstraction, a system of language that the linguist constructs, not an empirically existing system. It is already a concept, abstracted from the origins of language in mimesis (that the Greek alphabet was in its most archaic form mimetic bears testimony to that, so do the many instances of hieroglyphic writing). If there is an inherent impossibility of signifying to fully constitute itself, it is an impossibility the linguist, not the speaker faces. To add to the confusion Laclau has been unable to give a satisfactory example of an empty signifier. His examples include "emancipation" and "democracy", but these are merely contested and ambiguous concepts, they are by far not "empty".

The solution of the riddle of the empty signifier is provided by Adorno. In his lectures on Ontology and dialectics he also comes upon the inherent impossibility of signifying. But for him it is not a problem of the linguist, he sees this inherent impossibility in the fact that the concept, which is an abstraction, can never fully grasp, can never fully represent, or signify, its object. In Kant this impossibility is pushed aside in the idea of the infinitely heterogeneous "Ding an sich" - and the price he has to pay is that the object and the subject are radically sundered, objects becoming merely the infinitely malleable raw material for mind to work with - Hegel on the other hand relegates the problem to totality. But it was Heidegger who tried to solve the problem with reference to an empty signifier. As Adorno argues in his lectures, the concept of Being is at once the ultimate concept, aiming to signify everything - nuomena as well as phaenomena - thereby erasing the distance between concept and object, but at the same time it is the ultimate anti-concept, beacause as the highest form of abstraction it is the least able to signify anything particular. The concept of being is the empty signifier. Laclau erroneously talks about empty signifiers in the plural and he has an instinctive understanding of the matter, because the examples he gives are very much abstract. What he fails to see is that his examples represent only a move toward the empty signifier, the signifier signifying the limits of signification, which is to be found only at the highest level of abstraction in the concept of Being as Heidegger formulated it. But the limits of signification are not inherent to language as a sytem, they spring from the relationship between subject and object (Laclau's philosophy knows neither), the grinding of mind on matter, which it can never fully grasp. It is no wonder then that Laclau in a lecture he had on Saturday here in Ljubljana, tried to erase both nuomena and the Frankfurt school from the history of modern philosophy.