Contingency, Hegemony, Universality

Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues On The Left (CHU) is a collaborative book written by the political theorists Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek and published in 2000. Over the course of the 1990s, Butler, Laclau and Žižek found themselves engaging with each other's work in their own books. In order to focus more closely on their theoretical differences, they decided to produce a book in which all three woul... more

Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues On The Left (CHU) is a collaborative book written by the political theorists Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek and published in 2000. Over the course of the 1990s, Butler, Laclau and Žižek found themselves engaging with each other's work in their own books. In order to focus more closely on their theoretical differences, they decided to produce a book in which all three would write three essays each, with the authors' second and third essays responding to the points of dispute raised by the earlier essays. In this way, the book is structured in three 'cycles' of three essays, with points of dispute and lines of argumentation being developed, passed back and forward and so on. At one point in the exchange, Butler refers to the exercise as an unintentional "comedy of formalisms" (CHU, p. 137), with each writer accusing the other two of being too abstract and formalist in relation to the declared themes of... less