Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left is a collaborative book by the political theorists Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek published in 2000. Background, structure and themes 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 (and similarities), they decided to produce a book in which all three would contribute three essays each, with the authors' respective 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 each, with points of dispute and lines of argumentation 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" (137), with each writer accusing the other two of being too abstract and formalist in relation to the declared themes of contingency, hegemony, and universality. At the heart of these themes is a desire to address the question of particularism and political emancipation. For example, while Žižek holds the notion of capitalism as a structure that enables various particular political claims, Butler and Laclau stress that all politics can be conceptualized in terms of a hegemonic struggle, which rejects the notion of any primary structure, such as capitalism or patriarchy. Points of dispute between Butler and Laclau The Lacanian Real. In the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, "the Real" is regarded as the limit of representation. Laclau draws upon this concept of the Real to justify his claim that political identities are incomplete. Butler criticizes this because, according to them, it elevates the Lacanian Real into a transcendental, ahistorical category. However, Laclau's response to Butler on this point is that the Lacanian Real introduces a radical disjunction into our idea of history - something which puts the whole idea of a concept being "ahistorical" radically into question (66). In other words, for Lacan, there is no continuity to history and, therefore, there can be no stable "ahistorical" concepts. Political Struggles and Identity. Butler disputes Laclau's claim that competing political groups can form a "chain of equivalence" around a common lack (i.e. the incompleteness of their political identity). They argue that Laclau has no reason to assume that groups on the Left base their struggles on "identity".