Seven Essays on Populism. Paula Biglieri

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Название Seven Essays on Populism
Автор произведения Paula Biglieri
Жанр Афоризмы и цитаты
Серия
Издательство Афоризмы и цитаты
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781509542222



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the logics – rather than only the empirics – of populism, and thus disrupts the casual epistemological positivism fueling much of its opposition and securing the intellectual confidence of its enemies.

      For Laclau, these challenges to liberal political logics do not mean that populism is anti-democratic or assaults democracy. Rather, populism radicalizes expectations of and forms for democracy as it explodes liberal democratic fictions of institutional (and linguistic) neutrality and depoliticized social problems. Far from attacking democracy, populism for Laclau (and his sometimes co-author Chantal Mouffe) entails democracy’s radicalization and its dissemination beyond the formally political to domains conventionally designated as social and economic. Populism permits extension of democratic critiques and democratic demands to those subjected or excluded across a range of identities and experiences. Populism rejects both the (Marxist) reduction of oppression to class and the (liberal) reduction of exclusion or inequality to absent rights.

      Populism’s status as the ontology of the political, then, correlates populism’s alleged “shiftiness” with the lack of foundations, fixed significations, and strict referents in the political. Thus, Laclau retorts to the charges that populism comprises vague, affective, and rhetorical discourse: “instead of counter-posing ‘vagueness’ to a mature political logic … we should start asking ourselves … ‘is not the “vagueness” of populist discourses the consequence of social reality itself being, in some situations, vague and undetermined?’” (Laclau, 2005a: 17). Instead of condemning populism’s “rhetorical excesses” and simplifications, he suggests, populism reveals rhetoric as fundamental to political life and at the heart of the constitution of political identities (2005a: 18–19). Instead of treating the eruption of politicized social demands as a dangerous disruption to liberal democratic norms – as a political malady – populism reveals social antagonisms as at the basis of all politics.

      As they pursue this line of thinking, populism emerges not merely as a but the political form capable of challenging liberal individualization and depoliticization in the present. As it releases interests and identities from their silos, it substantively links – without dissolving – these identities to form a counter-hegemony that indicts the status quo and opposes the political power securing it. Populism reconfigures the excluded and dispossessed as articulating “different demands with one another until achieving an equivalential chain capable of challenging the status quo and establishing a frontier between those on the bottom (the articulated people) and those on top (the status quo)” (14). The “people” or the “plebs,” previously discounted, fragmented, and separated from each other, at once claim representation of the whole and politicize their exclusion (16).