Seven Essays on Populism. Paula Biglieri
Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу Seven Essays on Populism - Paula Biglieri страница 7

Название: Seven Essays on Populism

Автор: Paula Biglieri

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Афоризмы и цитаты

Серия:

isbn: 9781509542222

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ practices, especially given its connection to strong leaders and uncompromising demands?

      The arguments Biglieri and Cadahia develop for this claim depend upon but exceed Laclau’s. For Biglieri and Cadahia, the equivalential relation that Laclau establishes as constitutive of a populist formation is sustained only when equality is achieved through heterogeneity, through embrace rather than expulsion or erasure of differences. They cite Jorge Alemán: “The pueblo is an unstable equivalence constituted by differences that never unify or represent the whole” (2016: 21). The people, they insist, is brought into being not through unification or homogenized difference but only through antagonism to the elite or dominant power. If heterogeneity is constitutive of a populist formation, then only by sustaining it does populism remain populism; only by sustaining it does “the people” remain an emancipatory formulation that insists on equality and justice for all.

      Having ripped away populism from right-wing popular formations, two projects remain. One is to unthread populism from its potential solicitude toward, and imbrication with, neoliberalism, nationalism, authoritarian leadership, state centrism, anti-institutionalism, and naturalism. The other is to connect populism decisively to socialism, feminism, radical democracy, popular sovereignty, international solidarity, ethics, and a politics of care. This is what Biglieri and Cadahia do across the last five essays of the book.

      In short, have Biglieri and Cadahia not gone too far, over-played the hand they meant to win? Have they not pressed past their compelling redemption of the potential of left populism to insist that populism alone holds the promise of an emancipatory politics in the twenty-first century? Is there, perhaps, a confession of illegitimate desire here? A desire for populism to be not only “the royal road to understanding the political,” as Laclau argued, but the royal road to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in politics … and, hence, beyond the political after all?

      Let us try the question differently then. Readers would be counseled to ask not whether Biglieri and Cadahia’s formulations of populism’s inherently emancipatory force squares with “actually existing populism” (a historical–empirical question), or whether their identification of populism with the Good fully squares with a theory of the political foregrounding absent foundations, contingency and empty or floating signifiers. Rather, let us ask only whether Biglieri and Cadahia, as politically engaged political theorists, have developed a persuasive political theory of populism’s inherent and possible qualities, logics, limits, and potentials.