The enemy within: The dangers of Chantal Mouffe’s figure of the adversary to the democratic task of agonistic planning

Abstract

Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism calls for the mediation of antagonism. In planning theory, increasingly influential agonistic planning theory has taken inspiration from Mouffe’s neo-Schmittian radical democratic theory and promoted as its democratic task the transformation of antagonistic relation between friends and enemies into agonistic ones between adversaries. To accomplish this democratic task, however, I argue that it is not enough to transform antagonism into agonism and that agonism must also be prevented from transforming into antagonism. To this end, I first consider how Carl Schmitt’s formulation of the political as the friend–enemy concept is presupposed in his understanding of the state and is linked directly to his decisionist theory of sovereignty. Transforming antagonism into agonism could thus potentially compromise the effectiveness of sovereign decisions and the unity of social order, and I argue that the mediation of antagonism should be considered to involve the mediation between friends and enemies as well as the mediation between chaos and order. Yet the Mouffean figure of the adversary cannot adequately address the latter. With Bauman and Norval, I draw attention to Zygmunt Bauman’s figure of the stranger in the mediation between chaos and order and, with Sandercock, to a possible complementarity between Mouffe-inspired agonistic planning theory and Sandercock’s postmodern therapeutic planning theory. This complementarity is then examined through a number of empirical planning literature on agonistic and therapeutic planning practices, and I conclude by calling for the recognition of both the Mouffean figure of the adversary and Bauman’s figure of the stranger in implementing the democratic task of agonistic planning theory.