The work of Jacques Lacan is second only to Freud in its impact on psychoanalysis. Yannis Stavrakakis clearly examines Lacan's challenging views on time, history, language, alterity, desire and sexuality from a political standpoint. It is the first book to provide an overview of the social and political implications of Lacan's work as a whole for students coming to Lacan for the first time. The first part of _Lacan and the Political_ offers a straightforward and systematic assessment of the importance (...) of Lacan's categories and theoretical constructions for concrete political analysis. The second half of the book applies Lacanian theory to specific examples of widely discussed political issues, such as Green ideology, the question of democracy and the hegemony of advertising in contemporary culture. (shrink)

This article focuses on two issues involved in the formation and political trajectory of populist representations within political antagonism. First, it explores the role of crisis in the articulation of populist discourse. This problematic is far from new within theories of populism but has recently taken a new turn. We thus purport to reconsider the way populism and crisis are related, mapping the different modalities this relation can take and advancing further their theorization from the point of view of a (...) discursive theory of the political, drawing primarily on the Essex School perspective initially developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Second, this will involve focusing on the antagonistic language games developed around populist representations, something that has not attracted equal attention. Highlighting the need to study anti-populism together with populism, focusing on their mutual constitution, we will test the ensuing theoretical framework in an analysis of SYRIZA, a recent and, as a result, under-researched example of egalitarian, inclusionary populism emerging within the European crisis landscape. (shrink)

Two recent books on populism represent more than any other the new mainstream in populism studies. Through a reconstruction of the main arguments advanced by Jan-Werner Müller, on the one hand, and Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, on the other, this article aims to highlight both the significant accomplishments as well as the main limitations of this orientation. Special attention is given to the way in which the two projects deal with the relationship between populism and democracy. In this (...) respect, substantial differences emerge between them, largely due to the different scope of each intervention: Müller articulates a polemical argument, while Mudde and Kaltwasser seem to encompass a more nuanced research agenda. And yet, despite all their differences, the two books share a common definitional basis when they identify moralization and moralism as the kernel of populist ideology. It is here, however, that the shaky basis of the new mainstream is revealed. Apart from betraying substantive continuities with a discredited Cold War pluralism, this moralistic stress seems ultimately inadequate to function as the central criterion for the differential identification of populism. (shrink)

Introduction: Locating the Lacanian left -- Antinomies of creativity : Lacan and Castoriadis on social construction and the political -- Laclau with Lacan on jouissance : negotiating the affective limits of discourse -- Žižek's 'perversions' : the lure of Antigone and the fetishism of the act -- Excursus on Badiou -- What sticks? : from symbolic power to jouissance -- Enjoying the nation : a success story? -- Lack of passion : European identity revisited -- The consumerist 'politics of jouissance' (...) and the fantasy of advertising -- Democracy in post-democratic times. (shrink)

Throughout the last two decades, discussions around “post-hegemony” have stimulated exchanges around different theorizations of “hegemony” and their limits – not only the one by Antonio Gramsci, but also the predominantly discursive reformulation put forward by Laclau & Mouffe. Very recently, a new article by Peter Thomas on post-hegemony (2020) is triggering new debates on the issue. In this paper, Thomas’s contribution is, first, presented and discussed. In the second section, certain issues that have been recently raised from a post-hegemonic (...) perspective vis-à-vis Thomas’s intervention and beyond are thematized. These two exercises provide an opportunity to clarify further, by way of conclusion, certain issues at stake in the ensuing debate from an Essex School perspective. (shrink)

Las estrechas conexiones empíricas y las afinidades conceptuales entre el populismo y el nacionalismo han llevado a una superposición generalizada pero engañosa entre los conceptos de populismo y nacionalismo en los debates académicos, en el periodismo y en la retórica política. A pesar de la evidente importancia de las conexiones entre el nacionalismo y el populismo, sus relaciones conceptuales y empíricas han recibido una atención bastante limitada. Basándonos en la tradición teórico-discursivo post-estructuralista asociada a Laclau y Mouffe y la Escuela (...) de Essex de análisis del discurso, este artículo trata el populismo y el nacionalismo como formas distintas de construir discursivamente y de reclamar representar al “pueblo” como “los de abajo” y como nación, respectivamente. Las diferencias entre ambos conceptos también se pueden identificar y resaltar desde una perspectiva espacial u orientacional, al mirar la arquitectura del populismo y el nacionalismo como si se estructurase en torno a un eje abajo/arriba y un dentro/fuera respectivamente. Sobre la base de este marco, sugerimos que la coincidencia del populismo y el nacionalismo pueden estudiarse fructíferamente a través del prisma de la articulación. Una vez más, un enfoque en la arquitectura discursiva permite comprender cómo distintos proyectos políticos construyen diferentes discursos al conectar los componentes básicos del populismo y el nacionalismo de maneras particulares. La última parte del artículo ilustra los beneficios del enfoque teórico-discursivo al estudiar la articulación del populismo y el nacionalismo en el rechazo excluyente y nacionalista de la derecha populista radical de la diversidad étnico-cultural y en las críticas de la política supranacional y multinacional encontradas tanto en la izquierda como en la derecha. (shrink)

Los recientes movimientos y partidos igualitarios en Europa, por no mencionar el fenómeno Corbyn en el Reino Unido, han puesto radicalmente en duda la asociación materializada entre el populismo y la extrema derecha en el contexto europeo. SYRIZA ha sido el primero de estos partidos en mostrar esta tendencia y asumir el poder. En este trabajo, el caso griego se utiliza para ilustrar las premisas teóricas básicas, las orientaciones metodológicas, las innovaciones conceptuales y las percepciones analíticas de un enfoque discursivo (...) de la investigación sobre el populismo. Así, se hace especial hincapié en la arquitectura del discurso de SYRIZA; en el papel de la crisis en su articulación; en los juegos lingüísticos polarizados que influyen en su trayectoria. En consecuencia, exploramos si “el pueblo” funciona como el principal punto nodal en el discurso de SYRIZA dentro de una representación antagónica del espacio político; hasta qué punto la crisis —como dislocación sistémica— desencadena y, simultáneamente —como construcción performativa— es producida por el discurso populista; si tal construcción tiene lugar dentro de una cultura política polarizada marcada por la frontera mutuamente establecida entre discursos populistas y antipopulistas. Nuestro análisis abarca tanto el desempeño de SYRIZA en la oposición como su trayectoria en el poder. (shrink)

It is one of the paradoxes of our age that the 'success' of democracy in Eastern Europe and South Africa is coupled with grave disappointment in the 'birth places' of modern democracy. This dis appointment is partly due to the irreducible ambiguity entailed in democratic institutional arrangements. Democracy, in fact, is founded on this ambiguity. It attempts to construct social unity on the basis of recognizing the lack around which the social field is always structured. In that sense the source (...) of the disappointment caused by democracy is of an ethical status. It is the antithesis between the ambiguity of democracy and a still hegemonic ethics of harmony. Any aspiration, however, to eliminate the ambiguity of democracy ignores the innovative logic of democratic politics. If the ethics of harmony lead to a de-democratization of democracy, what a radical democratic project needs today is an ethical basis of a totally different nature. Here, the ethics of psychoanalysis, as formulated in the Lacanian tradition, can be of great help. Key Words: democracy • ethics • harmony • Lacan • psychoanalysis. (shrink)

In a recent article published in Theory, Culture & Society Michael Billig proposed a formal, rhetorical method of evaluating Lacanian theory, applying it in a critical reading of Lacan’s early work on the ‘mirror stage’. What is crucially at stake in this reading is Lacan’s citation practices: indeed, Lacan is credited with significant omissions. Central among them is the ‘repression’ of the work of the French psychologist Henri Wallon in Lacan’s article on the ‘mirror stage’. Furthermore, it is also argued (...) that such omissions have been instrumental in the creation and reproduction of a whole Lacan mythology, which is supposedly uncritically accepted by Lacanian scholars. What this note attempts is a brief assessment of this critical method and of its conclusions. Is Lacan’s ‘repression’ of Wallon as straightforward as it seems? What criteria should be employed in evaluating Lacan’s complex citation practices? Is the assumed complicity of Lacanian scholars in Lacan’s mythologization really representative of the current status of Lacanian bibliography? Billig’s own repressions seem to cast serious doubts on the validity of his proposed method of evaluating Lacan. But his critique does open a much-needed debate on issues of intellectual debt and repression, and on the relation between psychoanalysis and academic discourse. (shrink)