Hegemony as War of Contents

Hegemony as War of Contents, drawn from Laclau and Mouffe's (1985) formulation and deployed in this context, refers to the claim that political power is not secured through abstract institutional force alone but through the colonization of affective and libidinal investments — the "contents" of love, desire, and intersubjective attachment — that give hegemony its lived, bodily grip. The argument, as the passage presents it, is that power takes form in our love: the institution of the hegemonic order is reproduced not through ideology in its purely symbolic or cognitive dimension, but through the erotic-collective ties that bind subjects to particular configurations of the social. On this reading, hegemony is a "war" because these libidinal contents are always contestable — they are never fully sutured to one political formation but are permanently at stake, perpetually being fought over between competing claims on the subject's passion.

The concept intervenes specifically in the question of what a revolutionary or emancipatory politics would require. If hegemony operates through love — through the passionate investments subjects make in their (inter)subjectivities — then to challenge hegemony is not merely to correct beliefs or redistribute resources, but to "defraud" those hegemonic investments, to redirect or hollow out the erotic charge that sustains capitalist social relations. This positions authentic revolutionary love at the "abject" site of a Universal/Particular/Abject triad: neither the liberal-humanitarian love that smooths over antagonism nor the fascist passion that fuses the particular community into a deadly whole, but a form of collective eros that subverts the libidinal economy from within. The concept thus synthesizes Laclau and Mouffe's hegemony theory with a broadly Lacanian account of jouissance and interpellation, insisting that any politics must reckon with the affective-erotic dimension of subject-formation.

This concept appears in todd-mcgowan-sheila-kunkle-lacan-and-contemporary-film-other-press-2004, where the overarching project is to read film through Lacanian categories in order to illuminate the political stakes of desire, ideology, and subjectivity. "Hegemony as War of Contents" sits at the intersection of several canonical concepts whose syntheses we have been given. It is most directly an extension of Ideology as theorized in the Lacanian tradition: where ideology operates not merely at the level of false belief but through fantasy, surplus-enjoyment, and the libidinal bribe, this concept specifies the terrain on which ideological struggle is fought — namely, love and intersubjective passion. The concept also directly engages Interpellation: if interpellation is the process by which subjects are called into their ideological positions, "Hegemony as War of Contents" names the affective-erotic substance that makes interpellation stick, and equally what must be contested to make it fail. The invocation of "defrauding" hegemonic investments resonates with the logic of the traversal of Fantasy — not accepting the frame that Fantasy provides for desire, but exposing and undermining it.

The cross-references to Jouissance and Alienation are also structurally load-bearing. Alienation establishes that subjects are always already bound to an Other they did not choose; "Hegemony as War of Contents" asks which political formation gets to occupy that Other's position and fill it with libidinal content. Jouissance supplies the account of why hegemony is so tenacious: what is at stake is not belief but bodily satisfaction, the surplus-enjoyment extracted from one's attachments. The further cross-references to Narcissism, Neighbour, and Particularism (though their full syntheses are not supplied here) point toward the text's concern with the dangerous enjoyment of the Other and the dialectic of particular community versus universal solidarity — precisely the axis on which the Universal/Particular/Abject triad of the passage is organized.

Lacan and Contemporary FilmTodd McGowan & Sheila Kunkle (eds.) · 2004 (page unknown)

Laclau and Mouffe's (1985) notion that hegemony is a 'war of contents': since the institution of power takes form in our love, it is our task as lovers to defraud the hegemonic investments in our (inter)subjectivities

The phrase "defraud the hegemonic investments in our (inter)subjectivities" is theoretically dense because "investments" names libidinal cathexis — the affective-erotic charge that hegemony deposits in subjects — while "defraud" implies not a frontal overthrow but a tactical hollowing-out or misdirection of that charge from within; and "(inter)subjectivities" insists that this battle is fought at the level of the relational, embodied subject, not at the level of abstract political structures.