How Is Architecture Political?: Engaging Chantal Mouffe

Chantal Mouffe has transformed the contemporary understanding of politics through her re-reading of political theory inspired by anti-foundationalist philosophy-based on Saussure’s linguistics, Freud’s psychoanalysis and Derrida’s deconstruction. Her writings have challenged the centrist, post-political ideology of the 1990s and presciently diagnosed the emergence of right-wing populism seen today with Trump and Brexit. For Mouffe, such populism is the result of the failed centrist conception of politics reduced to technical management. She has called for a ＂return to politics＂ on the view that social antagonisms cannot be reconciled but must be channeled into an agonistic form of institutionally stabilized struggle.

Joseph Bedford is Assistant Professor of History and Theory at Virginia Tech, USA. He holds a PhD from Princeton University, degrees from Cambridge University and the Cooper Union, and is the founding editor of Attention: The Audio Journal for Architecture and The Architecture Exchange, a platform for theoretical exchange in architecture.

Chantal Mouffe is one of the world’s leading contemporary political theorists, and director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster. She has also held visiting positions at Harvard, Cornell, Princeton and the CNRS. She is the author of the seminal post-Marxist manifesto, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, (1985) and recent books Agonistics: Thinking The World Politically (2013), On the Political (2005) and The Return of the Political (1993)