http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3906-6712
![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Laclau introduces three preconditions of populism: the formation of an antagonistic frontier separating the ‘people’ from the enemy; an equivalential articulation of demands; and the unification of social demands into a stable system of signification. I show that with Trump’s and Putin’s populism these preconditions change. An antagonistic frontier became perforated with double interpretation of the enemy. Dichotomy ‘we’ versus the ‘other’ is traversed by the division of the signification of the ‘other’ into the external and internal part as regards the signification of the community. An equivalential articulation of demands transforms into the paralogical chain that establishes cleavages in semantic relations among communities. There are mere ‘opening bids’ among communities without universal dimension as a result of hegemonization of a particular demand. The unification of social demands which has followed the hegemonical logic in Laclau’s account of populism turns into an allegorical unification that keeps being separated from all particular demands in order to maintain their paralogical chain. These transformations can be seen as the preconditions of metapopulism that is found in-between democracy with the particularized logic and populism with the hegemonized one.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Michael Hauser is a researcher in the Department of Contemporary Continental Philosophy at the Philosophical Institute of the Czech Academy of Science. He is the author of the books (available in Czech): Adorno: Modernity and Negativity (2005); Prolegomenon to Philosophy of the Present (2007); Humanism Is Not Enough: Interview with Slavoj Žižek (2008); Capitalism as Zombie (2012); Roads out Postmodernism: A Philosophical Reflection on a Time of Transition (2012).
ORCID
Michael Hauser http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3906-6712
Notes
1 See the inconsistencies in Trump’s messages in the list of 141 distinct shifts on 23 major issues. This list tracks only views he has publicly stated since he announced his candidacy on 16 June 2015. Available at http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/full-list-donald-trump-s-rapidly-changing-policy-positions-n547801. For his inconsistency in right/left orientation on economic issues, see: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/08/a-shortlist-of-economic-issues-on-which-donald-trump-sounds-more-like-a-democrat-than-a-republican/. Trump’s emphasis on anti-immigration policy and rhetoric is combined with some left-leaning economic positions; for example, protecting social security, and supporting infrastructure spending and trade protection (Tesler Citation2016).
2 93% of Republicans say that is a very/somewhat important goal for US immigration policy to prevent unqualified immigrants from receiving the governmental benefits, but simultaneously 40% of Republicans support the government taking in civilian refugees who are trying to escape war and violence. Available at http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/06/less-than-half-the-public-views-border-wall-as-an-important-goal-for-u-s-immigration-policy/.
3 Torben Lütjen, a German political scientist who has been studying liberal and conservative enclaves in Wisconsin, states: ‘America has split into closed and radically separated enclaves that follow their own constructions of reality.’ Available at http://archive.jsonline.com/news/opinion/as-people-sort-themselves-consequences-for-democracy-dq818lu-184769081.html/. Yochai Benkler of Harvard University wrote that individuals with shared interests are far more likely to find each other or converge around a source of information online than offline.
When information and opinions are shared only within groups of likeminded participants […], they tend to reinforce each other’s views and beliefs without engaging with alternative views or seeing the concerns and critiques of others. This makes each view more extreme in its own direction and increases the distance between positions taken by opposing camps. (Benkler Citation2006, 235)
4 Dugin’s Eurasianism is a doctrine combining national conservativism with a ‘passionate desire for true changes that consist in the creating of Eurasian super-state which would renew heroism and religious faith. Dugin’s fundamental principle is the common enemy: the rejection of Atlanticism, strategic control of the USA, and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us.
5 Cf. Laclau’s depiction of the equivalential chain in the diagram of populism (Laclau Citation2005a, 130).
6 Slavoj Žižek shows that a hysterical moment is bound up with each act of signification, since the constitution of meaning that is supposed to be the result of attempts to be perceived by the other who, however, does not then produce a message which would correspond with the expectation. This moment of frustration provokes a self-referentiality of meaning which contains retroactivity. A purely self-referential signifying form alludes to a meaning-to-come (Citation1993, 77–78).
7 Jameson maintains that the return and the revival of allegory, in our time, can be characterized by a general sensitivity
to breaks and discontinuities, to the heterogeneous (not merely in works of arts), to Difference rather than Identity, to gaps and holes rather than seamless webs and triumphant narrative progressions, to social differentiation rather than to Society as such and its ‘totality’. (Jameson Citation1991, 167)