Catachresis of politics. Ernesto Laclau and deconstruction

Abstract

After remembering Derrida’s emphasis on the metaphor in Lenin, we show the importance that Gramsci gives to metaphor as a political operation, which is radicalized by the deconstruction of the distinction between proper and figurative sense that constitutes the metaphysical discourse about metaphor. While Laclau uses that idea to think the autonomy of the political decision against any ethic that could determinate its decision in the name of any exteriority, Derrida insists in the opening to what cannot be represented and claims for the necessary and impossible translation in a political gesture haunted by ethics.