Norval, Aletta. “Theorizing hegemony: between deconstruction and psychoanalysis.” Radical Democracy: Politics between abundance and lack. eds. Tonder, Lars. and Lasse Thomassen. Manchester UP. 2005. 86-102.
The passage from undecidability to the decision is thought of as an act of politics through and through. Refusing to ground the decision in an ethical moment, Laclau posits a conception of it based on power.
For Laclau, a decision taken in a terrain of structural undecidables means:
1) that the decision is self-grounding;
2) that it consists in ‘repressing possible alternatives that are not carried out’;
3) that it is internally split (this/a decision), emphasising the interplay between the universal and the particular in teh production of any hegemonic discourse.
The terrain of the decision, on this account, is the terrain of the political proper: there is nothing in the dislocated terrain that determines the decision. If it did, it would not be decision proper.
Laclau says:
A true decision escapes always what any rule can hope to subsume under itself … in that case, the decision has to be grounded in its singularity. now, that singularity cannot bring through the back door what it has excluded from the main entrance — i.e., the universality of the rule. It is simply left to its own singularity. It is because or that, as Kierkegaard put it, the moment of the decision is the moment of madness (93).
Thus for Laclau, to take a decision ‘is like impersonating God’, since this act cannot be explained in terms of any underlying rational mediation. This moment of the decision is then, simultaneously, that of the subject. .. the ‘lack is precisely the locus of the subject, whose relation with the structure takes place through various processes of identification‘. For the deepening of the theorisatioin of the subject, Laclau turns to Lacan rather than to Derrida.