Seven Essays on Populism

Critical South

The publication of this series is supported by the

International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs
funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Series editors: Natalia Brizuela and Leticia Sabsay

Leonor Arfuch, Memory and Autobiography

Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia, Seven Essays on Populism
Aimé Césaire, Resolutely Black
Bolívar Echeverría, Modernity and “Whiteness”
Celso Furtado, The Myth of Economic Development
Eduardo Grüner, The Haitian Revolution
Karima Lazali, Colonia Trauma
María Pia López, Not One Less
Pablo Oyarzun, Doing Justice
Néstor Perlongher, Plebeian Prose
Nelly Richard, Eruptions of Memory
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa
Tendayi Sithole, The Black Register
Seven Essays on Populism
For a Renewed Theoretical Perspective

Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia

Translated by George Ciccariello-Maher

polity
Copyright © Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia, 2021

This English edition © 2021 by Polity Press

Excerpt from the article “The Populist Challenge to Liberal Democracy” by William
Galston, Journal of Democracy 29:2 (2018), 5–19. © 2018 National Endowment for
Democracy and the Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of Johns
Hopkins University Press.

Excerpt from the article “How populist uprisings could bring down liberal democracy”
by Yascha Mounk, The Guardian, March 2018 © Guardian News & Media Ltd 2020.
Reprinted with permission of The Guardian.

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Names: Biglieri, Paula, author. | Cadahia, Luciana, 1982- author.

Title: Seven essays on populism : for a renewed theoretical perspective /
  Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia ; translated by George
  Ciccariello-Maher.
Description: English Edition. | Medford : Polity Press, 2021. | Series:
  Critical South | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
  Summary: “A critical exploration of the meaning and potential of
  populism in contemporary political thought”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020027959 (print) | LCCN 2020027960 (ebook) | ISBN
  9781509542208 (Hardback) | ISBN 9781509542215 (Paperback) | ISBN
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Subjects: LCSH: Populism.
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Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973) is one of the most prominent representatives of Latin

American modernism and one of the most renowned artists in Brazil. Her work
Abaporu, 1928, inspired the Anthropophagic Movement in the plastic arts. To learn
more: www.tarsiladoamaral.com.br.

Her work Operários, 1933, is featured on the cover of this book and was created
during the social phase of the artist’s work, after she returned from Russia.
 Contents

Foreword – Wendy Brown vii

Introduction xxii

Essay 1 The Secret of Populism 1

Essay 2 Neither Left nor Right: Populism without

Apology 20

Essay 3 Against Neoliberal Fascism: From Sacrificial

Identity to Egalitarian Singularity 41

Essay 4 Profaning the Public: The Plebeian

Dimension of Republican Populism 62

Essay 5 Toward an Internationalist Populism 76

Essay 6 The Absent Cause of Populist Militancy 100

Essay 7 We Populists are Feminists 115

Notes 133
Bibliography 152
Index 165
Stand up, you who know how to feel and do not
suffer the painful frigidity of academics.

Jorge Eliécer Gaitán

 Foreword
Wendy Brown

Democracies are generally thought to die at the barrel of a gun,

in coups and revolutions. These days, however, they are more
likely to be strangled slowly in the name of the people.
The Economist, August 2019

... leftist populism is a profound error. It has no chance of

matching the populist appeal of the right, and it dangerously
validates some of the right’s arguments.
Tony Blair, The New York Times, March 2017

There can no longer be any doubt that we are going through a

populist moment. The question is whether this populist moment
will turn into a populist age – and cast the very survival of liberal
democracy in doubt.
Yascha Mounk, The Guardian, March 2018

The People vs. Democracy

Title of Yascha Mounk’s 2018 book

When populists distinguish between the “people” and the “elite,”

they depict each of these groups as homogeneous. Populism is
the enemy of pluralism, and thus of modern democracy.
William Galston, “The Populist Challenge to
Liberal Democracy”1
viii Foreword

Mainstream political discourse today, both scholarly and

journalistic, equates populism with hard-right mobiliza-
tions animated by zealous passion born of resentment and
led by irresponsible demagogues. Populism is presumed
anti-liberal in every sense of the word, as well as disdainful
of Constitutionalism, universalism, limited state power,
and democratic institutions. The discourse also holds
populism responsible for bringing to power authoritarian,
ethno-nationalist regimes around the globe, threatening
the disintegration of the European Union and endangering
the civilizing and civilized reign of liberal democratic
values. It is figured as rightist in essence, or, as the case of
Venezuela is believed to demonstrate, as inevitably turning
autocratic or despotic.2 It is cast as embodying a simplistic
and binaristic worldview, feeding on economic and cultural
vulnerability, and rejecting facticity, truth, and expertise,
as well as inclusion, pluralism, and tolerance.3 It is ugly to
the core.
This vilification of populism is not unique to the present
moment. Rather, Biglieri and Cadahia teach us in this rich
and erudite work, populism has always been in disrepute.
This is true in Europe where right-wing populism requires
no modifier, and left or democratic populism are oxymorons.
It is true in the United States, notwithstanding its rich
history of populist rebellion against control of local and
national government by financial elites. It is true in Latin
America, where populism is associated with Peronism and
socialism, neoliberalism and Chavismo. Populism, Biglieri
and Cadahia remind us, has been disparaged by liberals and
Marxists, globalists and institutionalists, social engineers
and free-marketeers, oligarchic republicans and egalitarian
social democrats, colonial managers and their postco-
lonial elite successors. It has been charged with deviating
from true class struggle, symptomizing mal-development
or failure to modernize, expressing social-psychic primi-
tivism or regression to the mob, rebelling against democratic
constraints and institutions, assaulting liberal universalism
and inclusion, abhorring cosmopolitanism and globalism,
and rebuffing expert and technical knowledge.
 Foreword ix

As the malignancies discursively associated with populism

proliferate and diversify, how might we read this overdeter-
mined outrage and see what it unwillingly confesses? Perhaps,
Biglieri and Cadahia declare, populism’s threatening force
carries an emancipatory secret, “the secret of the people”
(1). Perhaps the horror of populism carries a horror of the
people, especially of a politics of the people, the power of the
people, real democracy. This is the suspicion that animates
Seven Essays on Populism, a work situated in the history
and politics of Latin America but fashioned from a richly
international theoretical arsenal. This suspicion fuels the
authors’ twofold bid to defend populism against all comers
and to address populism’s internal challenges – its potential
complicity with neoliberalism, exclusionary nationalisms,
authoritarian leaders, mob affect, machismo, and more.
Thus, a book that begins by cleaning centuries of mud from
its object develops by helping that object meet contemporary
political challenges. Biglieri and Cadahia want to redeem
populism, to be sure, but also to contribute to its theoretical
and political development for 21st-century “militant” left
struggles.4
A theoretical orientation and apparatus are immensely
helpful when undertaking a task of this magnitude. Theory
helps to parse the sloppy ways the term has been bandied
about, and to diagnose the hyperbole and the metonymic
slide between its pejorative associations –“the aesthetically
ugly, the morally evil, a lack of civic culture, contempt for
institutions, [rife with] demagoguery, and irrationality” (4).
Theory permits critical analysis of populism’s identification
with historical backwardness and “regression,” revealing the
conceits of modernity, modernization theory, and Orientalism
on which this identification draws (5). Theory permits an
exposé of the philosophical premises and political frames
of liberal and left critiques of populism. Above all, theory
permits Biglieri and Cadahia to formulate what they term 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.
x Foreword

Biglieri and Cadahia are rigorous and imaginative theorists

in their own right. They are also dedicated students of philos-
opher Ernesto Laclau, whom they identify as the first and
most important contemporary thinker to lift populism from
the dirt and make it central to rethinking the nature of “the
political.” Through his own writing and the collaborative
academic sites he helped to create in Essex and Buenos Aires,
Laclau bore down on the “excess” that populism is always
accused of generating to discover logics in that excess that
precisely challenge the logics of liberalism and, later, neolib-
eralism. Populism, Laclau showed, challenges the liberal
logics by which citizenship is always imagined individualized,
power is imagined appropriately institutionalized, problems
are imagined isolated from one another, and democratic
popular sovereignty is reduced to voting and representation.
Populism contests each of these as it brings into being “the
people” in place of the citizen or voter; a “frontier” of
contest between the people and the elite in place of isolated
social problems; a “populist rupture” in place of referral of
problems to institutions; and a counter-hegemonic struggle
for a different order in place of popular sovereignty identified
with parliamentary democracy.
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 desig-
nated as social and economic. Populism permits extension
of democratic critiques and democratic demands to those
subjected or excluded across a range of identities and experi-
ences. Populism rejects both the (Marxist) reduction of
oppression to class and the (liberal) reduction of exclusion or
inequality to absent rights.
Let us take this more slowly. Far from being inherently
right-wing reaction, for Laclau populism comprises a set of
 Foreword xi

logics, a set of principles and a set of critiques. Above all,

for Laclau, populism reveals “the ontology of the political.”
By this, Laclau does not mean that populist content is the
Ur spirit of politics, its ultimate truth and meaning. Nor
does he mean that either populism or the political have fixed
foundations or essential elements. On the contrary, Laclau’s
insistence on populism’s revelation of the ontology of the
political is relentlessly postfoundational; it corresponds to the
absence of foundations and essences in political life. Far from
being found in God, nature, reason or axioms of history, all
political claims and formations are created, generated from
militancy aspiring to hegemony. And populism’s subject, “the
people,” is itself an empty signifier – articulated, rather than
found or given, and irreducible to any specific population.
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.
For Laclau, then, far from being a fallen form of politics,
“populism is the royal road to understanding something about
the ontological constitution of the political as such” (2005a:
67). We might also put this the other way around. Through
the lens of populism, we can see just how profoundly anti-
political much of Western political life and political theory
has been. From Platonism and Marxism through liberalism
and neoliberalism, most theory and practice aims at taming,
xii Foreword

reducing or disavowing the qualities of the political overtly

expressed in populism – antagonism, rhetoric, constituted
identity, indeterminacy and, above all, the power of the
people. Most political theory and practice in the Western
tradition has aimed at extinguishing these elements and
instead identified “management of community [as] the concern
of an administrative power whose source of legitimacy is a
proper knowledge of what a ‘good’ community is” (2005a:
x). Exceptions to this anti-political orientation are few and
rare. There is Machiavelli, with his subtle appreciation of
political drama, effect and affect, of invented formations and
alliances, and his recognition that the health of republics,
far from being endangered by popular “tumults,” is secured
by them. There is Tocqueville, writing in the democratic (as
opposed to oligarchic) republican tradition, who grasped the
value for democracy – along with the messiness – of culti-
vating an energized people ambitious to share political power
for purposes beyond pursuit of individual or class interests.
And there is Gramsci, that ardent student of Machiavelli and
not only Marx, who theorized the importance of actively
linking popular struggles to articulate a new hegemonic bloc.
Today, there are also left Schmittians, Deleuzians, and radical
democrats, but they hold a tellingly small place in contem-
porary political theory, where liberal approaches reiterate
the long tradition of attempting to expunge from politics
contingency, fabrication, rhetoric, antagonism, agonism, and
the popular – all that constitutes the political from a populist
perspective.
Biglieri and Cadahia broadly endorse Laclau’s identifi-
cation of populism with the ontology of the political. They
focus especially on the aspect of this identification that
features the transformation of different social antagonisms
into allied political ones. As a politics that is explicitly
made not born, a politics that does not express these social
antagonisms directly and individually but, rather, actively
(militantly) crafts them into a hegemonic formation opposing
powerlessness to power, populism invents a new dividing
line and the identities on both sides of it: “the underdog”
versus the “power” in Laclau’s words, “the people versus
 Foreword xiii

the enemies of the people” in those of Biglieri and Cadahia

(16). Here, they pursue Laclau’s alertness to populism’s
unique alchemical capacity to transform segmented, siloed,
or what he called differential demands into an equivalential
relation with one another. This is the transformation that
de-individuates these demands, developing instead a political
frontier between the people and the power, a frontier that
in turn opens new political possibilities and imaginaries.
This is the alchemy that permits a critical perspective on
and challenge to the discourse, organization, and arrange-
ments, not merely the distributions, of the status quo. This
is an alchemy that explodes the limits of the interest group
pluralism of liberalism and the class politics of Marxism
while remaining legible to and in present discourses. Therein
lies populism’s deep immediate radical potential.
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 substan-
tively 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).
In the United States, the best recent exemplar of the
populist alchemy Biglieri and Cadahia are theorizing is not
the white Americans constituting Trump’s base of support in
2016, but the 99% of the Occupy Movement earlier in the
decade. The 99% comprised all sectors of labor, people of
color, the indebted, the indigenous, the unbanked, the undoc-
umented, the unhoused, the under-educated, the overcharged,
the poor, working, and middle classes. The 99% was not a
class, an identity or even an intentional coalition. Nor
xiv Foreword

was its opposition only the state, the bosses, the bankers,
the corporations or the rich. Rather, the 99% designated
a people excluded, exploited, bilked, and disenfranchized;
the “power” it opposed was the plutocrats. The 99% and
the 1% identified the losers and winners of neoliberalism,
privatization, financialization, and government bailouts in
the aftermath of the 2008–9 financial crisis. The 99%
included democracy itself and the well-being of the planet;
the 1% extended to the Supreme Court majority and the
international Davos crowd.5 Everything plundered, devalued
or made precarious by capitalist plutocracy was linked in the
aspirational hegemonic bloc of the 99%.
If Laclau’s bold move to identify populism with the
political is troubled by the difficulty of stipulating the
political, he surely succeeds in recovering populism from
its derogatory associations to reveal its insurrectionary and
radical democratic potential. However, more still is needed to
unfasten it decisively from right-wing popular mobilizations
supporting authoritarian leaders or regimes, and especially
from ethno-nationalism and fascism. This unfastening is the
key aim of Biglieri and Cadahia’s work. To achieve it, they
carefully elaborate and dismantle the premises undergirding
mainstream and left anti-populist critiques, including those
of Eric Fassin, Slavoj Žižek, and Maurizio Lazzarato. They
also critically analyze the claims of closer allies – Chantal
Mouffe, Oliver Marchart and Yannis Stavrakakis – that
populism may take right-wing forms but is equally available
to left, emancipatory, another-world-is-possible democratic
demands. Going a remarkable step further, Biglieri and
Cadahia argue that populism is only left, only radically
democratic, only anti-authoritarian, only the final and full
realization of equality, liberty, universality, and community.
Populism, they argue, is the emancipatory revolutionary
theory and practice for our time. Conversely, what pundits
call “populism” ought to be called by its true name: fascism.
Only left populism is populism, all other movements
in the name of “the people” are fascist – how is such a
claim possible? How, especially, can it be developed from a
Laclauian formulation of populism in which “the people” is
 Foreword xv

an empty signifier – always rhetorically designated, always

a part representing the whole, always brought into being
through articulations in every sense of the word? And how
does this argument square with the worldwide eruption of
what almost everyone calls authoritarian populism? How
can these reactionary formations be purged from the populist
treasure chest, and how is left populism purged of its
persistent flirtation with non-democratic 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.
Right-wing popular formations, by contrast, suppress
difference to make and assert the “one people.” Right-wing
formations make identity and equality dependent on
suppression of difference internally, and exclusion of
difference externally (38). Here drawing on Bataille, Biglieri
and Cadahia insist that what distinguishes populism from
right-wing popular movements is the latter’s fantasy of the
homogeneity that signifies both “the commensurability of
elements and [political] awareness of this commensurability”
(39). Commensurability of elements and the unity and oneness
it achieves depend on identifying equality with sameness and
inequality with difference. Because it “involves the violence
of trying to dissolve the play of difference–equivalence into
a broader identity … a self-transparent people,” it is an
xvi Foreword

essentially repressive and violent formulation and formation

(39). To return to Laclau’s terms, the commensurability
of elements, and the equality and unity staged through
this commensurability, is fundamentally at odds with the
equivalential logic or premise of populism. The right-wing
“fantasy of the one-people that contains the longing for a
life without problems or antagonisms within the tranquility
of a homogeneous social space” cannot tolerate the “consti-
tutive differences of the articulatory logic of populism” (39).
Then, Biglieri and Cadahia wonder, “should we continue to
call it populism, especially when the classic term ‘fascism’
exists?” (39). Their answer is definitive. What the pundits
call authoritarian populism is no populism at 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.
By now, the reader’s curiosity is piqued – how do they
do it? – but also likely suspicious about the grandness, even
grandiosity, of the project. It is one thing to redeem populism
from ignorant punditry, anxious liberalism, colonial and
modernization frames, or condemnations by unreconstructed
Marxists. It is another to make populism so righteous, so
complete, always landing on the correct square of every
contemporary political challenge. Have Biglieri and Cadahia
perhaps offered a new political theology, a political form
both perfect in itself and inherently insulated from all that
might compromise or sully it? If the political domain is
open in signification, composition and direction, if it has no
historical necessity and is rife with contingency, how and why
would or could populist uprisings have such perfection and
immunity? If the domain of politics is a realm of contingency,
“without guarantees,” open to eruptions and alterations – if
empty signifiers like “the people,” “freedom” or “feminism”
 Foreword xvii

can chime with many possible meanings – what does it mean

to arrest this openness, these slides, with arguments about
populism’s inherent ideational logics? Indeed, what does
it mean to bring logics to this realm at all? Or to insist on
populism’s insulation from dark forces through its logics?
How can any political paradigm or formation be secured from
imbrications with violence? Or escape the re-significations or
inversions produced by genealogical fusions and transmog-
rifications? How do theoretical stipulations secure an object
in a domain that does not submit to them? Or, to shift the
register from Foucault and Gramsci to Weber, if the domain
of the political is where ends and means have no necessary
relation, and where certain political means easily overwhelm
or subdue the ends they are adduced to serve, what protects
populism against these things?
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?
Still, we would do well to remember that most political
concepts invite something of this kind from their partisans,
both inside and outside political theory. Hence the many
textual and activist efforts to redeem liberalism from its
corruscation by neoliberalism, by right-wing libertarianism or
by authoritarians. Or to distinguish democracy from market
democracy, social democracy or even liberal democracy.
Or to distinguish true communism from its repressive state
form, or preserve feminism from its bourgeois or imperialist
mode. From the protest chant, “this is what democracy looks
like!” to scholarly identification of democracy with anti-
populist norms and institutions by Levitsky and Ziblatt, to
insistence on democracy’s agonistic nature by Mouffe, and
its fugitive nature by Wolin, there is relentless normative
xviii Foreword

stipulation of concepts in political theory and practice. That

is what we do with open concepts, with sliding signification,
when, as Stuart Hall reminds us, efforts to arrest that slide
are at the heart of political struggle. If these are routine
practices in politically invested political theory, even – and,
perhaps, especially – in genres cloaking themselves in analytic
objectivity yet deeply invested in liberalism, why deny this
cleansing and redemption for populism? Especially if we
remember the founding frame of Biglieri and Cadahia’s work
– namely, that such a cleansing and redemption of populism
is symptomatically refused by all who fear the power of the
people, the politics of the people.
Let us try the question differently then. Readers would be
counseled to ask not whether Biglieri and Cadahia’s formu-
lations 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.
To answer this question, two others must be posed. Can
a political paradigm, form or ideal be defended or protected
on the basis of theoretical logics imputed to it? And can the
deficiencies or vulnerabilities of political forms, paradigms
or ideals be resolved at the level of theory? The first queries
both whether such logics exist at all – whether, indeed,
political forms have logics once they are on the ground of
the real, rather than the theoretical – and whether political
life unfolds in accord with them. The second queries whether
political theory, notwithstanding its power to illuminate both
the deficiencies and potentials of political life, nonetheless
remains distinct from the living topos that it maps. This is
not a retort to radical ideals by realpolitik – the latter, too,
perpetuates a myth about transhistorical political logics.
Rather, the problem is one articulated by Max Weber in
his challenge to adopting conventional ethics for political
 Foreword xix

life – whether those bound to particular convictions such as

Christian virtue or non-violence, or to a particular end state,
such as socialism or neoliberalism. For Weber, the problem
with both “an ethic of conviction” and “an ethic of absolute
ends” is that they ignore the distinctive ethical irrationality of
the political realm. By this he does not mean that the realm is
inherently immoral, but that actions motivated by one set of
intentions potentially unleash effects at odds with those inten-
tions, and may even violate them. Principles and paradigms
of the Good, once they have entered political life, do not stay
with their authorial intentions; politics is a theatre in which
motivations are not decisive and have no ethical relationship
to effects. For Weber, this does not mean jettisoning ethics
but developing an ethical orientation appropriate to a sphere
constituted by action, power and contingency, and shadowed
continuously by the potential effects of violence. He identifies
this orientation as “an ethic of responsibility.” Attempting an
ethical orientation in political life means being responsible
for the effects of one’s actions in a contingent, unpredictable
sphere – not treating unintended consequences as external to
one’s ethics. This is as true of individuals as it is of projects:
neither can rest on purity of motives or adherence to the
theoretical premises or logics. One cannot say: “Because
my motivation is emancipation, and I have theoretically
purified populism of all non-emancipatory elements, then
anti-democratic, authoritarian, nationalist or other chauvin-
istic elements are no part of the populism I affirm and help
create.” Theory and the logics it articulates can never clean
the hands of actors or pave the course of actual events in
political life.
Foucault approaches this problem a bit differently when
discussing the absence of a distinctive governmental ration-
ality in socialism, and the tendency to look to a “text” for the
answer to this absence:

[I]f we are so strongly inclined to put to socialism this indiscreet

question of truth that we never address to liberalism – “Are you
true or are you false?” – it is precisely because socialism lacks
an intrinsic governmental rationality, and because it replaces
this essential, and still not overcome [absence of] an internal
xx Foreword

governmental rationality, with the relationship of conformity to

a text. The relationship of conformity to a text, or to a series of
texts, is charged with concealing this absence of governmental
rationality. A way of reading and interpreting is advanced that
must found socialism and indicate the very limits and possi-
bilities of its potential action, whereas what it really needs is to
define for itself its way of doing things and its way of governing.
I think the importance of the text in socialism is commensurate
with the lacuna constituted by the absence of a socialist art of
government. (2010: 93–4)

Beyond the specific problematic of socialism, it seems to me,

Foucault here offers a warning against seeking a theoretical
substitute for the “arts of government,” the form of governing
reason and specific instruments of power, that are part of
any regime. Whether borrowed or sui generis, they will be
employed and deployed. This problem, especially the effort to
discover theoretical or textual substitutions for rationalities
and techniques of governing, bears differently on political
populism as a political form than it does on socialism as an
economic one, but it is no less significant for this difference.
We of the meaning-making and theory-building species
also generate world-making forces (religious, cultural,
economic, social, political, technological) that escape
our grasp and steering capacity. The combination yields
a persistent temptation to attempt re-mastery of these
forces with our intellects. Political theorists are especially
vulnerable to trying to conquer with theory the elements of
action, violence, rhetoric, staging, and contingency consti-
tutive of the political. This conceit afflicts formal modelers,
analytic philosophers, and left theorists alike. We persis-
tently confuse theoretical entailments for political logics,
political logics for political truths, and political truths for
politics tout court. How might we escape this room of
distorting mirrors while persisting in the intellectual work
of theorizing political life?
These large questions do not answer whether Biglieri and
Cadahia have offered a persuasive account of populism.
They do query whether their brilliant defense of populism
rests on theoretical moves that illuminate political life yet
 Foreword xxi

are not identical with it. I write this at a time of two ground-
shifting popular movements in the United States: one brought
Donald Trump to power in 2016, and continues to support
his neo-fascist “leadership” along with licensing political and
social expressions of every kind of supremacism: patriarchal,
white, heterosexual, nativist (but not Native), nationalist,
and wealth-based. The other, ignited by the George Floyd
chapter in the long American history of anti-black policing,
vigilantism, and incarceration, has generated sustained anti-
racist protests across America and the world. As they demand
racial justice, and attack existing institutions for failing to
yield it, these protests express the metamorphosis of a social
antagonism into a political formation, one in which the
People oppose the Power, which Biglieri and Cadahia identify
with populism. Broadening well beyond those immediately
affected, the uprisings have brought nearly every sector in
every region of America to the streets, and may have dealt
the final blow to the Trump regime. They embody the trans-
formative possibilities of popular resistance and long-term as
well as spontaneous organizing, and they are igniting a new
political imaginary, one in which entrenched injustices of the
status quo spur rather than limit the making of a radically
different future.
 Introduction

The book that the reader has in their hands does not aim
to be a handbook offering basic and definitive definitions of
populism and politics. Nor does it claim to be an academic
book in the standard sense of the term, since it does not
attempt to reinforce the imaginaries of objectivity or value-
neutrality associated with academic work. In contrast to
these two attitudes, this book is an avowedly militant one in
which we embrace our political position as a way of taking
responsibility for our own subjective involvement. Moreover,
we believe that the crux of honesty and rigor in intellectual
work lies precisely here: in being explicit about our locus of
enunciation and putting it to the test. If we engage in this
provocative gesture to foster debate around a term, especially
one as controversial as populism, it is because we have
something to say. And what we say comes from our experi-
ences as women, as academics, as Latin Americans, and as
political militants traversed by the various antagonisms that,
between populism and neoliberalism, have emerged and
continue to exist in our region. However, and despite the
specific position from which we speak, we do not intend to
produce a knowledge that is merely particular, as if our double
condition as women and as Latin American means that we
can only speak to local and specific problems. Very much to
 Introduction xxiii

the contrary, our commitment is to attempt to grasp what is

universalizable – in the sense of a situated universalism – in
the problems, challenges, and responses offered by a locus
of enunciation like Latin America within the emancipatory
production of knowledge in the Global South and Global
North. We are convinced that epistemic decolonization also
involves understanding that local problems demand global
solutions through the construction of egalitarian academic
spaces for debating transformative ideas.
That said, it is worth noting that, when we began to
work on populism, the political context in Latin America
was broadly favorable to anti-neoliberal, egalitarian, and
inclusive discourses geared toward the expansion of rights.
The Social Democratic Party (PSD) in Portugal had also been
reinvented; experiences like those of SYRIZA, Podemos,
and La France Insoumise were born; and a curious popular
liberalism had been reactivated in the cases of Jeremy
Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, who were fighting for plebeian
and egalitarian alternatives in Europe and North America.
But since then, and as our research on populism moved
forward, the political situation took a major step backward.
The ebb of populist experiences in Latin America brought
with it the rise of neoliberal governments that not only
sought virulently to disarm the egalitarian accomplishments
of populism, but also targeted the fundamental premises of
the rule of law and democratic coexistence. Latin America
has become a political laboratory for testing out different
forms of post-democratic life for the capitalism of the future.
This translates into disarming our institutional structure
through the irresponsible acquisition of foreign debt to the
International Monetary Fund or private investment funds,
the acceleration of paradoxically democratic soft coups,1 the
judicial persecution and imprisonment of popular leaders
through rigged proceedings, political experiments based on
dehistoricization, new age philosophies, and social coaching,
and the alarming rise in the systematic murder of social
activists. Regarding soft coups, it is worth highlighting
the recent coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia during
the most recent presidential elections in 2019, and the
xxiv Introduction

institutional coup perpetrated against Brazilian President

Dilma Rousseff in 2016. The latter strategy was accompanied
by the imprisonment of Lula Da Silva through a corrupt
judicial proceeding, and the murder of feminist and lesbian
social leader and Rio de Janeiro city councilor Marielle
Franco – all amplified by the electoral victory that brought
an overtly racist, homophobic, and misogynistic leader such
as Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency. But we should also
mention the opacity of the judicial proceedings that led to
the imprisonment of indigenous social leader Milagro Sala in
the Jujuy Province of Argentina in 2016, and the systematic
persecution of figures such as Cristina Fernández de Kirchner
in Argentina and Rafael Correa in Ecuador as soon as their
presidential terms had ended.2 However, this judicialization
and criminalization of politics has also crossed the border
to countries not considered populist. We could point to the
reactivation of far-right and guerrilla positions in Colombia
– bordering an exhausted Venezuela – through the rejection
of the peace referendum; the election of far-right leader Iván
Duque; the resumption of the murder of social movement
leaders; the judicial persecution of popular political leaders
such as Gustavo Petro, Francia Márquez, and Ángela María
Robledo; and the rearmament of guerrillas, faced with a lack
of protection and the murder of demobilized ex-guerrillas.3
Winds have also shifted in Europe. At the same time
that SYRIZA, Podemos, and La France Insoumise showed
their limitations and came up against difficulties beginning
in 2018, xenophobic and racist discourses were on the rise.
Thus, strong electoral performances by the likes of Marine Le
Pen in France in 2017 and governments of Viktor Orbán in
Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey were joined
by Matteo Salvini in Italy and the emergence of the Vox party
in Spain. All of these represent agendas seeking, on the one
hand, to roll back the collective accomplishments of feminism,
of black, indigenous, and LGBTI+ communities and, on the
other, to uphold traditional values like
​​ the family, property,
and the irresponsible exploitation of nature. To this, we must
also add Donald Trump’s victory in the United States and
his resolute determination to embrace this same agenda, to
 Introduction xxv

once again intervene in Latin American politics, to humiliate

the European Union, and to declare a trade war on China.
Although these examples do not exhaust the ways in which
various reactionary or borderline reactionary positions have
gained ground globally, they serve to illustrate the context in
which our work and our theoretical–political concerns have
unfolded. In any case, and in parallel to these advances by
the right, we have also seen the victory of Alberto Fernández
in Argentina; the reactivation of the progressive wing of the
Citizens’ Revolution in Ecuador; the persistence of Humane
Colombia’s pact for life, peace, and the environment; the
consolidation of women like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the
United States and Francia Márquez in Colombia; the silent
success of the Portuguese government and the pact between
Podemos and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE)
in Europe; the victory of Andrés Manuel López Obrador
in Mexico; and the regional consolidation of a powerful
popular feminist movement known as Not One Less.
Now, the current global scenario that we just described
demands that we take up a series of questions not contem-
plated in classical debates on populist theory. We refer to
debates on the opposition between left-wing and right-
wing populisms and their relationship with neo-fascism, the
emancipatory nature (or lack thereof) of populist projects,
their ability to provide a true and lasting alternative to
neoliberalism, the link between populism and institutions
from the perspective of a popular and emancipatory state, the
intersection between populism and plebeian republicanism,
the potential for international populist solidarity, and, above
all, the need for a fruitful dialogue between populism and
popular feminist movements that are confronting patriarchal
forms of power, property, and collective sacrifice. Toward
this end, we found it much more suggestive to write seven
theses on populism – each addressing a specific problem or
position – rather than attempting to establish a unified and
free-standing corpus. So the reader is not obligated to follow
a specific reading order but can instead approach each of
the theses independently, according to a web of concrete
problems in each case. This is, therefore, an open book,
xxvi Introduction

whose subterranean connections between different sections,

far from being exhausted by a unitary reading, make room
for the uncertainty that each problem poses and the hope that
the reader will be able to connect these problems according
to their particular interests.
On the other hand, we should note that this book is also the
result of a process of collective experience and organization.
We could perhaps say that it has been weaving together
ever since those initial investigations into populism that we
each undertook alongside other researchers, leading to the
publication of a groundbreaking book about Kirchnerist
populism,4 a study of the relationship between populism and
republicanism,5 and its incorporation into contemporary
philosophical, political, and historical debates from different
contexts.6 But, above all, we must mention that this militant
project would not have been possible without the field of
study opened up by Ernesto Laclau’s epistemic turn and
later contributions by Chantal Mouffe and Jorge Alemán.
Nor would it have been possible without the establishment
of spaces such as the Ernesto Laclau Open Seminar at the
Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos
Aires (UBA), the various projects and open discussion spaces
at FLACSO-Ecuador, and the Theorising Transnational
Populist Politics project funded by the British Academy.7
All of these spaces not only allowed the two of us to
think together, but also brought together an extraordinary
group of colleagues from different continents, both from the
politically engaged academic community and from political
life. Among them, we would like to thank Sofía Argüello,
Javier Balsa, Luis Blengino, Ricardo Camargo Brito, Manuel
Canelas, Germán Cano, Volkan Çıdam, Valeria Coronel,
Mark Devenney, Allan Dreyer-Hansen, José Enrique Emma
López, Íñigio Errejón, José Figueroa, Jorge Foa Torres,
Javier Franzé, Zeynep Gambetti, Adoración Guamán, Julio
Guanche, Gustavo Guille, Jenny Gunnarsson-Payne, Griselda
Gutiérrez, Emma Ingala, María Cecilia Ipar, Andy Knott,
Jorge Lago, Anthony Leaker, Juan Pablo Lichtmajer, Oliver
Marchart, Sammuele Mazzolini, Emilia Palonen, Gloria
Perelló, German Primera Villamizar, Clara Ramas, Franklin
 Introduction xxvii

Ramírez, Eduardo Rinesi, Anayra Santory, Ian Sinclair,

Yannis Stavrakakis, Soledad Stoessel, Ailynn Torres Santana,
José Luis Villacañas, and Clare Woodford, among others.
These are the kinds of friends that politics and the academy
give you when you share concerns, convictions, and the same
way of understanding the importance of ethical-political
commitment in all knowledge production. Likewise, we
cannot fail to mention our infinite debt to Judith Butler,
Penelope Deutscher, and their working group for having
invited us to form part of the International Consortium of
Critical Theory Programs,8 one of the few truly democratizing
consortia genuinely concerned with establishing an egali-
tarian, solidaristic, and fruitful dialogue between knowledge
production in the Global South and in the Global North.
And within this Consortium, we would particularly like to
thank Rosaura Martínez Ruíz, Gisela Catanzaro, Natalia
Brizuela, and Leticia Sabsay for having suggested, reviewed,
and unconditionally supported the writing of this book. But
there are four names that we cannot avoid repeating and to
whom we owe particular thanks for generously reading and
contributing to this volume: Gloria Perelló, Valeria Coronel,
Juan Cárdenas, and Luis Blengino. So, while we wrote this
book between March and December of 2019, we can say
that the gestation of this work in time and space far exceeds
the momentary frenzy in which it was written, and which
involved working jointly at a distance, texts shared by email,
opinions transferred through WhatsApp messages, discus-
sions carried out through voice memos, and long virtual
conversations between Bogotá and Buenos Aires.
Finally, we would like to point out that the title we have
chosen for this book is not insignificant, but instead repre-
sents a nod to the irreverent creativity and heterodoxy of
Latin American critical thinking, a tradition of which we feel
we are a part, if only through the humble evocation of José
Carlos Mariátegui’s illuminating Seven Interpretive Essays
on Peruvian Reality.

Bogotá and Buenos Aires, December 2019

 Essay 1
The Secret of Populism

The returns of populism

“Populism” is an insistent word, one that returns to us every
time we try to store it away in the chest (arcón) of disused
terms in the political lexicon. As we know, a chest can serve
as a coffin or a jewelry box; it can bury a corpse or guard
a treasure. Or perhaps it can be both things at once, and
what dies is capable of guarding a secret to be deciphered
in our present. Let’s not forget that the etymology of arcón
is related to the arcane, meaning a secret or a mystery, i.e.
something that remains closed and hidden. We could ask
ourselves what it is about populism that remains hidden,
or the secret of why it returns to the field of politics every
time its death is announced. We might even wonder why
there is so much interest in declaring its death and what the
unspoken fear is that hides away its existence. As the word
itself indicates, populism expresses a tendency or movement
toward the popular, an adjective indicating that which
refers to the people. So populism, as the storage chest of the
political, holds the secret of the people. And perhaps that
is the secret of its strength and its condemnation – perhaps
that’s why it divides the social field and lays bare antagonistic
struggle through the establishment of a frontier between
2 The Secret of Populism

those on top and those on the bottom. If populism returns, if

populism persists despite attempts to lock it away and make
it disappear, this is most likely because those on the bottom
resist domination by those on top, because those on top never
cease to perpetuate mechanisms for the dispossession and
exclusion of those on the bottom. Perhaps populism is the
chest that those on the bottom store within their bodies and
their memory every time they have the opportunity to contest
the oligarchic meaning of the republic, because, in the end,
populism can be understood as the way in which plebeians
fight for the res publica, that public thing that oligarchies
want to preserve as a treasure for themselves.
That’s why, when the Washington Consensus1 overwhelm-
ingly shrank the terrain of political intervention in the late
1990s and early 2000s, the populist secret made a comeback
in Latin America. Of course, this was initially considered an
isolated anachronism, or merely an atavistic vice specific to
peripheral countries and without broader global significance.
But the rapid spread of populist governments across much of
Latin America, and the subsequent appearance of populist
leaders, movements, and governments in Europe and the
United States, have again granted the term a prominent
role in public debates and international discussion forums
on the inter-regional level. In this context, the proliferation
of political formations characterized as populist since the
beginning of the twenty-first century has led different authors
– even those with political positions as different as Chantal
Mouffe (2018) and Éric Fassin (2018b) – to argue that we
are experiencing a “populist moment.” While these authors
limit their analyis to the case of Western Europe, we can
clearly also extend such a diagnosis to other latitudes. It only
takes a brief review of the present or the recent past for an
entire list of political experiences characterized as populist
to come to light quickly. If, by the “populist moment” in
Western Europe, we include the most well-known cases
such as DiEM25, SYRIZA, and Golden Dawn in Greece,
Podemos and Vox in Spain, Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson,
and Nigel Farage in England, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc
Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise in France, Matteo Salvini
 The Secret of Populism 3

and the Five Star Movement in Italy, we could also refer

to cases like Sweden Democrats led by Jimmie Åkesson,
Víktor Orbán in Hungary, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland,
Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey,
and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. And if we move over
to the Americas, in the North we find Andrés Manuel López
Obrador in Mexico and Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders
in the United States; in South America, we have many
examples, including the governments of Nicolás Maduro in
Venezuela, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and the recent adminis-
trations of Evo Morales in Bolivia, Lula Da Silva and Dilma
Rousseff also in Brazil, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and Néstor
Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina,
among others.
Moreover, if we look retrospectively and extend our
inquiry to approximately the last 100 years of political life
on a global scale, we can see that this “populist moment”
was preceded by at least two others. We can locate a first
“populist moment” in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, a
period marked by the Russian Narodniki agrarian movement
and the People’s Party of rural movements in the southern
USA, both traditionally considered to be pioneering examples
of populism. We can locate the second populist moment in
the period marked by the great movements that emerged
in Latin America in the mid twentieth century (whose
most paradigmatic cases, although not the only ones, were
Varguism in Brazil, Peronism in Argentina, and Cardenism
in Mexico). But, if we pay close attention to the intervals
between these two moments, we can also find various
political experiences that were classified as populist. For
example, the astonishingly succesful Boulangist movement
in France, the cases of early Ibañism in Chile, Yrigoyenism
in Argentina, the Fort Copacabana revolt and the Prestes
Column in Brazil (antecedents of Getulio Vargas’ Estado
Novo), and Kemalism in Turkey. We could also add the
Revolutionary Nationalist Movement in Bolivia, Velasquism
in Ecuador, Gaitanism in Colombia, Nasserism in Egypt,
the experience of Tito in Yugoslavia, and Mao Tse-Tung’s
“Long March” in China. We could even include the cases of
4 The Secret of Populism

Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru and Muammar al-Gaddafi in

Libya.
This whole enumeration of moments and experiences
that have been classified as populist allows us to see that
these have included both right-wing and left-wing forma-
tions, peasant and urban movements, and liberal-democratic,
socialist, and authoritarian political regimes in the so-called
“core” or “developed countries” as well as in the “periphery”
or “developing countries.” It seems as though this hetero-
geneous list could be extended indefinitely in an endless
dissemination of examples, with moments marked by a
greater concentration of cases. Perhaps we should, therefore,
ask ourselves whether it is useful to continue thinking about
populism simply in terms of “populist moments,” or whether
we need instead another sort of distinction that will help us
better grasp that secret of populism that seems to spread
across different geographies and historical moments. Along
these lines, defining populism turns out to be difficult, given
the variety and breadth of cases falling under that name, and
this task only becomes more difficult given the well-known
prejudice and disdain with which the subject is treated in the
literature. If anything has thrown the debate on populism
into the fray, it is its pervasively negative charge. Populism
is immediately associated with the aesthetically ugly, the
morally evil, a lack of civic culture, contempt for institu-
tions, demagoguery, and irrationality. It has been described
as a perversion or a pathology, accused of always containing
proto-fascism, of being a fraud, a hoax, or a deviation. But
in order to better differentiate between the various levels
on which this disdain toward populism functions, we need
to distinguish between three perspectives regarding its use:
mediatic, empirical, and ontological.
We speak of a mediatic perspective because, at present,
the word “populism” is usually used uncritically to group
together all political experiences that don’t fit within the
model of liberal market democracy. So much so that, in
2016, the Foundation of Urgent Spanish – sponsored by the
news agency EFE and BBVA bank – declared “populism”
to be the word of the year (Martín, 2016). But the problem
 The Secret of Populism 5

with this usage is that it encourages us to form a knee-jerk

common sense that is more interested in generating immediate
aversion to those processes deemed populist than in under-
standing the specificity of the phenomenon. It generates a
series of confusions around the word’s use that unfortunately
permeate academia and hinder efforts to understand the
different evolutions of populism and the rationality specific
to it. With regard to this use of populism, then, we need
to distinguish between the mediatically constructed sponta-
neous and pejorative dimension and the situational strength
of populism as an experience that transcends the classic
aspects and spatialities of populism.
The empirical perspective, in turn, sets out from the
practical study of concrete political experiences characterized
by: (a) a break with oligarchic and elitist states; (b) a very
specific type of modernity; and (c) a linkage between the
popular and state power (Germani, 2019). One character-
istic of this kind of approach is that, despite focusing on
the strictly empirical dimension of populism, it has led to a
series of prejudices that conditioned its findings regarding
populist experiences. Regardless of the author in question,
the common denominator is the assumption that populism
represents an unsatisfactory deviation. The particularity of
this approach, then, is that populism never acquires the status
of a political concept capable of serving as an explanatory
paradigm – instead becoming an unsatisfactory response
to a purported European model delineating the horizon of
progress for any kind of democracy.
It was not until Ernesto Laclau’s intervention, in his famous
text “Toward a Theory of Populism” (Laclau, 1977), that
“historical studies of populism” became a “general theory
of populism” (Laclau, 2005a). This meant, on the one hand,
abandoning the assumption that populism represents a failed
historical form in peripheral countries and, on the other hand,
understanding populism as a political logic that coincides
with a form of radical democracy (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985)
– in other words, to grant populism the dignity of a theory
and to turn it into a political ontology for theorizing political
articulations in general (Laclau, 2005a). Thus, and without
6 The Secret of Populism

wanting to simplify things, we can say that it is Laclau who

introduces the ontological approach to populism, thanks to
the astuteness of taking a term traditionally used to explain
Latin American backwardness and elevating it into a form
of political thought. Far from considering populism an
imperfection, Laclau instead wondered if it wasn’t time to
stop comparing ourselves to supposed models – of which
populism could only be a lesser copy – and begin to theoreti-
cally build the logic of populism itself.

Modernization, class struggle, and the

constitutive dimension of the political
In this essay, we are going to set aside the mediatic
perspective and focus on the tensions between the empirical
and ontological approaches to populism. This will help us
better understand, on the one hand, the different lines of
inquiry in play around the populist question, and, on the
other, how this transition from strictly empirical studies to
the ontological plane took place. For us, the lines of inquiry
along which the question of populism is theorized include:
the problem of modernization in Latin America, the viability
of the class struggle, and the constitutive dimension of the
political. The first includes those works emerging from the
general framework offered by modernization theory and
comparative politics, predominant in the United States after
the end of the Second World War. Standing out among these
is the pioneering work of the Italian-Argentine Gino Germani
(1968 [1956]), who understood populism as an anomalous
path for transitioning from a traditional or “backward”
society to a modern one. In other words, he linked populism
to a specific phase of social development in modernizing
countries. Through an analysis of the case of Argentina in
the 1930s and 1940s – i.e. Peronism – Germani argued that
the process of rapid industrialization and urbanization had
created masses that were available for political action, and
whose “early” intervention into politics disrupted the proper
transition toward modernization, and thereby also eroded
 The Secret of Populism 7

the institutionally appropriate forms of liberal democracy.

He thus considered populist experiences to be the expression
of an irrational relic preventing Latin American countries
from following the path of European or American models
of social change (i.e. a process of increasing social differen-
tiation, specialization, and complexity, alongside a working
class politicized through the organization of liberal political
parties). All this led Germani to characterize populism as a
phenomenon outside and hostile to representative democracy,
which necessarily gave rise to authoritarian personalities.
Years later, Torcuato Di Tella (1965), a disciple of Germani,
would analyze the populist aspect of Peronism in terms of the
establishment of a relationship between “displaced elites”
and “available masses.” The “displaced elites” (composed
of intellectuals not belonging to the working class, and who
instead originated in different social sectors such as the army,
the clergy, sectors of the bourgeoisie, or lower-middle-class
professionals) had a social status that did not correspond
to their expectations. Meanwhile, the “available masses”
(comprising peasants and urban workers) were easy to lead
insofar as they were dazzled by access to the city, public
schools, and the media. Thus, the “available masses” – eager
to participate in politics and achieve upward social mobility
– joined forces with the “displaced elites” to give shape to
populism, defined as a political movement with significant
popular support in which non-working-class elites with an
anti-status-quo ideology also participated.
If Germani and Di Tella’s sociological approach turned
populism into an anomaly that, of course, should be avoided,
or at least corrected, this was due precisely to the fact that
their works took on the perspective and categorical frame-
works of mid-twentieth-century modernization theory and
comparative politics. In other words, they studied populism
according to a series of external criteria and assessments with
serious limitations when it came to understanding specific
logics produced from the Global South. These frameworks
were based on the assumption that there existed a predom-
inant pattern for modern society, toward which those societies
characterized as traditional or backward should aspire and
8 The Secret of Populism

assimilate, bit by bit. This was therefore a hierarchical assim-

ilation, since it was based on the idea that the Global North
represented the only possible model for modernity, while
simultaneously accepting its purported economic, political,
and cultural superiority. From this perspective, modern
societies were identified with the United States and Europe
and were characterized as secular, adaptable to rapid change,
cosmopolitan, and with a complex division of labor and a
working class whose political culture was linked to liberal-
democratic parties. Meanwhile, traditional societies were
identified with Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and were
described as religious – or even superstitious – conservative,
closed, passive, economically and socially simple, and lacking
a civic culture that would enable the development of liberal
democracy. The only valid and possible way to achieve true
modernity was to follow the trajectory of modern societies.2
Years later, Bertrand Badie and Guy Hermet (1993), despite
their efforts to renovate comparative politics, did not manage
to avoid the prejudices through which populist strategies had
been traditionally analyzed. They argued that populist strat-
egies, located historically and geographically in South America
and Mexico – and to a lesser degree in mid-twentieth-century
Asia and North Africa – “result from the reinterpretation
of clientelist appeals with a plebiscitary, statist, and almost
always dictatorial perspective” (1990: 203).3 To arrive at this
conclusion, they distinguished populism from both fascism
and the “European Bonapartist phenomenon,” insisting that
what sets the former apart is “lower support from the middle
classes and the internal orientation of its nationalism,” as
well as “an exaltation of the plebeian that Bonapartism only
expresses with prudence or reticence” (1990: 202). At the
same time, they allowed themselves to reproduce a series of
stereotypes about those countries they understood as tradi-
tional, to the point of affirming, in the case of Latin America,
things like the following: (a) the predominance of a system
of large landholdings (latifundios) that makes clientelism a
“nearly consubstantial” element of these societies; (b) that
populism develops in a “context of clear state weakness …
and the oligarchic privatization of power”; and (c) that “the
 The Secret of Populism 9

runaway urbanism affecting Latin American countries since

1918 and Near Eastern countries since 1951 is not, as it was
in Europe, the result of industrialization” (1990: 202). These
affirmations allowed them, in turn, to conclude that Latin
America would not be ready for a true social transformation,
and, by extension, that populism is an imposture blocking
such transformation. More than anything, this is because
the populist strategy consists of “pampering and privileging
that small group of workers so that it does not fall into the
temptation of revolutionary radicalism while at the same
time reinvigorating the system of domination that guarantees
what is most essential, i.e., the stability of traditional control
in rural areas” (1990: 203). We could say that the most
current contributions to this updated trajectory in sociology
and political science are those of Carlos de la Torre (2000)
who, in addition to reiterating prejudices about populism,
adds the element of a populist technocracy, anchored above
all in the experience of the Rafael Correa government (2013).
We could say that the second line of enquiry – research on
populism from the perspective of class conflict – has woven
together diagnoses that share at least one element with the
first group described above (see Rinesi and Muraca, 2010;
Cadahia, 2017).4 The classic position, which emerges above
all from a more orthodox Marxist tradition, argues that
populism is the expression of a cross-class alliance that did
not conform to the expected parameters of the class struggle.
Populism was thus considered a kind of double deviation
from an expected pattern. On the one hand, because the
working class lost sight of its own fundamental and histori-
cally assigned task – the anti-capitalist struggle – and, on the
other, because the workers diluted their role as social agents
of their class into a diffuse entity like “the people.” Albeit
with different nuances, this argument runs throughout those
traditional class analyses according to which populism was
indistinguishable from Bonapartism5 or inseparable from
fascism, the latter being especially prevalent in works focused
on the cases of Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s.
Subsequently, Miguel Murmis and Juan Carlos Portantiero
(1971), proponents of democratic socialism in Latin America,
10 The Secret of Populism

presented a more sophisticated reading and argued that

populism, far from betraying a sort of irrationality or delirium
among the working class, was instead an expression of its
pragmatism. While they assumed that populism represented
a hegemonic project not of the working class, but of small
business owners and the state bureaucracy, they recognized
that it allowed the working class to make a series of demands
about the distribution of income and the extension of their
rights along multiple parameters. In some sense, this was a
question of the dialogue between populism and socialism
that defined the context for certain debates in Latin America
in the 1980s. In the classic text “The National-Popular and
Actually Existing Populisms,” Portantiero and Emilio de
Ípola sought to determine the central arguments according
to which populism was considered antithetical to socialism,
explicitly distancing themselves from Laclau and establishing
a series of dichotomous divisions between both traditions.
They therefore identified populism as a homogeneous, hierar-
chical, and statist movement, and socialism as pluralistic,
horizontal, and democratic (De Ípola and Portantiero, 1981),
but the central point of their argument was that populism
was not a deviation, but a betrayal, of the popular cause.
This was based on the idea that the crisis of oligarchic states
in Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century had
created the conditions for a truly plebeian national-popular
movement to emerge and transform society, but populism
was responsible for absorbing these national-popular forces
and even transforming them into national-statist forces tied
to capitalism. It was this confluence with the state and
capitalism that prevented these authors from embracing
the emancipatory dimension of populism that Laclau was
upholding at the time (De Ípola and Portantiero, 1981).
Along similar lines – albeit several years later and without
being aware of the work of these authors – Slavoj Žižek
would again take up the Marxist critique of populism, this
time filtered through psychoanalysis (2009). But instead
of focusing on the dangers of the state capturing the
national-popular, Žižek emphasizes populism’s supposedly
proto-fascist tendency, which externalizes the constitutive
 The Secret of Populism 11

fracture of the subject onto an other. In this sense, the people

of populism is always a “unified people” insofar as it needs
an enemy to antagonize. In any case, Žižek returns to the
traditional elements of the Marxist criticism of populism by
once again associating it with fascism, and painting it as a
hoax that distances the working class from its own definitive
historical objective: to destroy the capitalist system.
On this point, we could say that, if there’s one thing that
modernization theory, comparative politics, and classical
Marxism have in common, it is that they all understand
populism as a deviation to be eradicated, albeit with one
subtle but important difference. While the two first traditions
assume that populism is a form of political organization
that threatens individual liberty, the division of powers, and
parliamentary democracy (De la Torre, 2013; De la Torre
and Peruzzotti, 2008), the third, by contrast, understands
populist practices as capturing emancipatory popular forces,
subjecting them to the game of state power, and containing
them within the logic of capitalism (De Ípola and Portantiero,
1981).
Now, it is within the third line of enquiry – the constitutive
dimension of the political – that the pejorative interpretation
of populism begins to be undermined and the foundations
will be laid to think about its ontological dimension,6 i.e.
to what extent populism becomes a logic constitutive of the
political itself – not a deviation from it – and how this logic
articulates material forms of social being. On the one hand,
we could mention those authors who have worked through
the relationship between populism and democracy, and two
fundamental works in particular – those of Peter Worsley
(1969) and Margaret Canovan (1999) – that introduced the
novelty of not seeing populism as a threat to democracy or
as some kind of deviation. For Worsley, populism showed
how representative democracy had reduced participation
to a merely formal matter, and, consequently, rescued the
value of participation over institutional procedures. In this
sense, he believed that the properly populist relationship
between the leader and the people refers to a general idea of​​
participation that should not be considered an authoritarian
12 The Secret of Populism

defect a priori, without taking into account the context of its

emergence. Canovan, for her part, reinforced this argument
when she insisted that populism is a constitutive dimension
of democracy that emerges in the ineradicable gap that every
liberal democratic regime has between its two faces: the
redemptive and the pragmatic. It is also merely a form that
implies an appeal to the people against the dominant power
structures, the content of which will depend on the context
in which it is mobilized.
On the other hand, there are those authors who have
interrogated the relationship between populism and repub-
licanism – i.e., those who link populism to the republican
tradition. Here we could cite the work of Eduardo Rinesi
(2015), who believes that populism “is not only conflict
and the crisis of all instituted powers, but also closure,
hegemony, order, institutionality” (2015: 91). Moreover,
Rinesi assumes that, even if he were to choose to accentuate
(like Laclau) populism’s antagonistic element, this would
not nullify his thesis regarding the relationship between
populism and republicanism, since there is a long tradition
that emphasizes the conflictual and ruptural dimension of
the republic. Because the res publica is always conflictual at
some point, populism and republicanism maintain a complex
bond of co-belonging where they cultivate shared elements
(institutionalism and rupturism). Hence, we must reject the
belief that populism is merely “the other” of institutions
that it will always threaten. The positions of Valeria Coronel
and Luciana Cadahia (2018) move along these same lines,
highlighting the importance of exploring what types of
institutions populism generates, without losing sight of, on
the one hand, the fact that it aims to build a state that can
account for the irruption of the popular masses into politics,
and, on the other, its intrinsically democratic dimension,
insofar as “populism is one of the few political experiences
that keeps the figure of an empowered people alive” (2018:
77). It is along these lines that Coronel and Cadahia find the
argument allowing them to support the same political thesis
as Laclau – namely, that populism can acquire an emanci-
patory dimension.
 The Secret of Populism 13

In turn, we find debates about whether populism is a

strictly emancipatory experience or whether, to the contrary,
it is necessary to distinguish between left-wing and right-
wing populisms. Among those who defend the distinction
is Mouffe (2018), who proposes the construction of a
left-wing populism as a valid political strategy for Western
European democracies. Her main interest is to show how
this strategy would open up the possibility of expanding
democracy (by defending equality and popular sovereignty,
constitutive elements of any democracy) in the context of a
crisis of neoliberal hegemony and the emergence of authori-
tarian and anti-democratic right-wing populisms. Against
this distinction, we find the thoughts of Jorge Alemán (2014,
2016, 2019), for whom this distinction makes no sense, and
who instead reclaims the deeply emancipatory nature of
populist legacies. It is within these debates about the consti-
tutive dimension of the political that the ontological question
of populism will emerge, allowing us to lay out the central
thesis of this essay.

Populism as ontology of the political

Once we have reconstructed the most significant traditions
and problems through which populism has been theorized
from the Global South, we can return to the question posed
at the beginning of this essay: should we continue to speak
in terms of a populist moment with left-wing and right-wing
strategies, assuming that populism is a sort of malleable
form capable of adapting to very different political projects?
Or would it be more advisable to delve more deeply into
the idea that populism is not susceptible to just any kind
of politics? Along these lines, it would be one thing to
study populism as a merely conjunctural strategy – which is
totally legitimate in terms of militancy – and another thing
entirely to approach the conjuncture through its ontological
dimension.
As we all know, it was Laclau (2005a, 2005b) who intro-
duced the discussion in these terms, and the importance of his
14 The Secret of Populism

work on populism can be summarized in how he managed

to grant populism the status of a political category in its
own right. Moreover, this achievement was framed within a
broader objective that, according to Laclau himself, consti-
tuted “a unique project: reclaiming the political initiative,
which from my theoretical perspective means making politics
thinkable again” (Laclau, 2008: 12). Thus, it was not simply
about reclaiming a historically stigmatized term, but about
showing us how – thanks to this term – politics could become
thinkable once more. Indeed, Laclau’s entire theoretical
development since kicking off the post-Marxist approach
alongside Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
(1985) can be read in this sense. His proposal for a discourse
analysis of the theory of hegemony and antagonism that he
began to elaborate with Mouffe, his reformulation of the
concepts of reactivation and sedimentation, his later notions
of dislocation, heterogeneity, people, and leader can all be
understood within the same double movement: in both an
ontological and political key. In the first case, it can be read
as an attempt to return politics to its fundamental position,
and, in the second, as an insistence on the political effort
to operationalize emancipation. It should be emphasized
that populism acquires a fundamental position through this
double movement and becomes “a way of constructing the
political” (2005a: xi).
Without exhausting the complexity of Laclau’s approach,
we could say that his conception of populism involved taking
up a Latin American debate and tying it to a series of concepts
from other traditions in order to shape his view of the
political. This meant theorizing populism through two logics:
the logic of difference and the logic of equivalence. Although
both are embedded within every social structure, Laclau
sought to privilege the logic of equivalence in populism. If
differential logic is characterized by segmenting demands and
satisfying them one-by-one, equivalential logic, by contrast,
begins to articulate 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
 The Secret of Populism 15

status quo). It is this frontier that shapes the antagonism of

the social, an antagonism that is no less than the symbolic
articulation of a condition of exclusion (Retamozo and
Stoessel, 2014). Or, in the terms laid out at the beginning of
this essay, it is the clarification of the conflict through which
those on the bottom reveal themselves in the face of exclusion
and dispossession by those on top. Thus, equivalential logic
– because the demands are experienced as an unsatisfiable
lack – organizes a hegemonic relationship overdetermined
by an empty signifier that is identified either with one of the
demands or with the figure of a leader. The other crucial
aspect is that, for Laclau, this way of building hegemony
around an empty signifier and through an equivalential chain
can be taken up as a democratic project – i.e. as a way to
radicalize democracy in terms of a hegemonic project for
social equality.
Now, this belief that populism can be simply identified
with the political provoked angry debates, even among
those academics trained at the Essex School of Discourse
Analysis that Laclau founded. Benjamín Arditi (2003, 2005)
has argued that Laclau’s theory was redundant and lacked
conceptual specificity, since he deployed three semantically
overlapping terms – hegemony, politics, and populism –
which has only brought more confusion to the concept of
populism. Oliver Marchart (2018), on the other hand, has
pointed out that Laclau’s best argument was precisely that
populism is not simply another political expression that,
after adequate conceptual clarification, can be added to the
list of political formations: “Because populism is not simply
a form of politics among others. In encapsulating political
rationality tout court, it enables us to catch a glimpse of the
nature of the political. Populism is the clearest expression of
the logic of antagonism, which, in turn, is the defining feature
of the political” (Marchart, 2018: 23).
Thus, if populism is the political form that responds
directly to “the logic of antagonism,” it turns out to be its
fundamental form, since, for Marchart, antagonism is the
very name of the political insofar as it is precisely its defining
feature. In other texts, Biglieri and Guille (Biglieri, 2007;
16 The Secret of Populism

Biglieri and Guille, 2017) similarly reject the idea of a​​ mere
semantic overlap and pose the idea of the mutual contami-
nation of the terms constituting the antagonism. While this is
close to Marchart’s position, there is an important difference:
the antagonism must be constructed politically in order to
gain existence. In other words: we need a symbolic-imaginary
construction that takes it into account, so we cannot simply
speak, as Marchart does, of a “logic of antagonism,” since
antagonism only exists through its effects on hegemony and
the logics constituting it (equivalence and difference). In other
words, there is a hegemonic way of “doing” politics through
antagonism, without which the latter would have no way of
being expressed.
With regard to our argument, we pick up on the role
of antagonism and the mutual contamination of populism
and politics, which allows us to argue that every populist
articulation necessarily implies a hegemonic articulation and,
as such, is traversed by logics of equivalence and difference
that generate frontier effects in the acting out of some antag-
onism.7 These two logics – which cannot be joined together
in a coherently unified way – and their border effects, are
constitutive of politics and populism, hence their mutual
contamination. Thus, once we have introduced the notion
of contamination, we know that this cancels out the possi-
bility of delimiting conceptual areas in a pure and pristine
way. But it is still possible to establish certain features of
the concept of populism that we will be working with in the
following essays, namely: (a) the experience of a lack; (b) the
inscription of that lack as a demand; (c) the primacy of the
logic of equivalence over the logic of difference, giving rise to
the subjectivity called the “people” (the plebs that claims to
be the only legitimate populus – i.e., that part claiming repre-
sentation of the whole); (d) the antagonistic dichotomization
of social space into two overdetermined loci of enunciation
– the people versus the enemies of the people; and (e) the
emergence of a leader.
The main consequence of all this is that we can no longer
think of politics as immune to the emergence of populism,
and much less strive for its definitive elimination. Populism
 The Secret of Populism 17

contaminates politics, is inscribed in politics itself, and

thereby also in the people and its leaders. In any case, we
can either have non-populist hegemonic articulations that
are established on the basis of a variety of antagonisms,
in the absence of a decisive leader naming a people – or
we can have political formations that privilege the logic of
difference and an institutionalized absorption of demands.
But we should not lose sight of the fact that there is always
the possibility that the multiplicity of antagonisms, at some
point, becomes simplified around two chains of equivalence
(the people versus their enemies) dichotomously dividing the
social space.
So, once we grasp the idea that populism draws upon
those elements that are the very condition of politics, we
can see why Laclau argued that the populist gesture is “the
royal road to understanding something about the ontological
constitution of the political as such” (2005a: 67). It is feasible
to say that a particular political articulation can be disar-
ticulated, a specific people and its leader can be defeated
politically, but populism as an ontology of the political is
ineradicable. That is, in an ontic sense, and as an articulation
linked to a specific form of political expression in a specific
context, populism can come to an end, but, in a fundamental
sense, linked to the very ontology of politics, populism is
simply ineliminable.
Thus, Laclau’s entire goal in “making politics thinkable
again” was directly tied to his effort to rescue populism from
the marginal and stigmatized place to which it had been
relegated. Rescuing populism also means rescuing politics,
because contempt for the former necessarily involved a
biased and reductionist reading of the latter. De-stigmatizing
populism within the theoretical field means simultaneously
transforming the way the ontological dimension of the
political is understood. It is therefore no longer a question of
rescuing populism from the storage chest in which some want
to lock it away, but rather of showing that populism is itself
a chest that contains a series of secrets to be deciphered. And
that meant, in the first place, deconstructing the contemptible
place to which, according to Laclau, populism had been
18 The Secret of Populism

relegated by predominant approaches to philosophy and the

social sciences. In Laclau’s own words:

Because of the suspicion, which I have had for a long time,

that in the dismissal of populism far more is involved than the
relegation of a peripheral set of phenomena to the margins of
social explanation. What is involved in such a disdainful rejection
is, I think, the dismissal of politics tout court, and the assertion
that the management of community is the concern of an adminis-
trative power whose source of legitimacy is a proper knowledge
of what a “good” community is. This has been, throughout the
centuries, the discourse of “political philosophy,” first instituted
by Plato. “Populism” was always linked to a dangerous excess,
which puts the clear-cut moulds of a rational community into
question. So my task, as I conceived it, was to bring to light the
specific logics inherent in that excess, and to argue that, far from
corresponding to marginal phenomena, they are inscribed in the
actual working of any communitarian space. (Laclau, 2005a: x)

So, Laclau not only sought to bring together a series of

political phenomena that had been relegated to the fringes
of social explanation, but, moreover, revealed the epistemic
violence of an entire tradition of thought that had turned
political work and explanation into the privilege of “experts.”
Populism, as praxis, became a dangerous excess because it
came to question and disrupt “the clear-cut moulds” of a
certain kind of political philosophy. And this turn, therefore,
involved studying populism from within, from its own
organizational logics. All of which contributed to finding in
populism a singular way of theorizing the being of the social.
Hence the controversial statement by Laclau and Mouffe,
in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, that “society does not
exist” (1985: 26). This statement brought many criticisms
that, in our opinion, owed to a deep misunder­ standing
of what these authors were proposing within the field of
political thought. By saying that society does not exist, they
deactivated obsolete, positivist views of society and intro-
duced into the social the idea of lack,
​​ i.e. the lack of being
– or being as lack. This new way of reading the being of the
social helps us understand that the political is nothing more
than working through the constitutive negativity of that lack
 The Secret of Populism 19

– a way of working on the social through a logic articulating

this constitutive lack. What political theories, currents, and
traditions cannot tolerate is not the deviation that populism
engenders, but the ontological indeterminacy into which it
throws us. Thus, the secret of the constitutive uncertainty
and indeterminacy of being that Laclau’s populism reveals,
and which is symbolized in the heart of the political field,
can be read today as the unconfessed inverse of those who
needed to declare its death. What many could not bear
was precisely the paradoxical nature of political work that
populism revealed – namely, the impossibility of the social
as a condition of possibility for political praxis, a praxis far
removed from rational procedure and normativity and closer
to the plebeian forms through which Latin America has built
the social from the political. The ontological dimension that
Laclau opens up, then, frees us from the stigma associated
with the “failed” character of Latin American politics, and
offers us the possibility of discovering in that failure not a
deviation to correct but an ontological indeterminacy to
work through. And it is on the basis of this ontological
opening of populism that we are going to take up the
challenge of working through a series of key issues that
Laclau left entirely unexplored, and that our present moment
demands that we confront in all of their radicalism.
 Essay 2
Neither Left nor Right:
Populism without Apology

Populism, left and right?

In the previous essay, we argued that populism cannot
be limited to a mere political strategy, but that it must be
understood in its ineradicably ontological dimension. Once
we assume that populism is constitutive of the ontological
character of the political, it is no longer easy to simply
continue to uphold the ontic distinction between left-wing
and right-wing populisms. This distinction is only plausible
if we see populism as merely a political strategy. For this
reason, in this section we will explore in greater detail the
difficulties of maintaining only the strategic dimension of
populism, i.e. all that is lost by subjecting it to a merely
conjunctural plane, and even more so when the conjuncture
in question is that of Europe.
As we indicated in the first essay, one of the authors who
works most rigorously on the distinction between left-wing
and right-wing populisms is Chantal Mouffe. In her latest
book, For a Left Populism (2018), Mouffe considers this
distinction to be necessary due to the partisan nature of
politics, i.e. the fact that every hegemonic link – constitutive
of populism and politics – responds to a contingent and
non-essentialist interaction among particularities contending
 Neither Left nor Right 21

for access to a structuring position. In this way, the ability

of a particular social force – a particularity – to become
hegemonic does not guarantee that force a definitive victory,
and will always be partial, precarious, and negotiable.1 It is
therefore on the basis of this partisan nature of politics that
Mouffe interprets the current Western European conjuncture
as a return of the political in the guise of a “populist moment”
that can turn either to the left or to the right. According to
her diagnosis, and given the advantages that the right seems
to have over the left in Europe, Mouffe considers it a priority
for the left to embrace its populist dimension and begin to
compete with the right over certain signifiers. Put differently,
Mouffe thinks it is urgent to begin to interpellate those who
vote for right-wing populisms, since, in the absence of an
irreducible identitarian essentialism, those same voters could
be summoned by a call from the left. The hypothesis under-
lying Mouffe’s proposition is that the forms of exclusion
propitiated by the post-political ethos of recent decades – i.e.
the disaffection provoked by European social democracies in
their retreat toward a supposedly apolitical center, far from
the slogans of the left and right – diverted many social sectors
affected by neoliberalism toward right-wing populism. Along
these lines, the author adds that many demands articulated
by right-wing populism cannot be absorbed by that same
neoliberal system, and could even be understood as having
a democratic character. So, if right-wing populism was able
to break with the post-political ethos of European social
democracy and open up an alternative that allowed them
to win the votes of vast social sectors, now it is left-wing
populism’s turn to do the same in pursuit of an egalitarian
social justice that provides a true alternative to neoliberalism.
Mouffe’s partisan stance (according to which every
particularity is drawn toward assuming a structuring univer-
salist role) and her anti-essentialism (according to which
no demand is inherently left-wing or right-wing) provide
her starting point for theorizing the possibility of building
right-wing or left-wing hegemonic articulations around the
same signifiers (for example: homeland, state, people, anti-
neoliberalism, etc.). Therefore, the political orientation of
22 Neither Left nor Right

those elements (or, more precisely, of any element) depends

on a broader political articulation. Thus, the wager of her
latest book is to call for disarming right-wing populisms,
snatching away the democratic demands that they articulate,
and, above all, those elements (like the state, the homeland,
etc.) that the right has appropriated and which function as
their nodal points, to instead endow them with truly emanci-
patory meanings.
It is interesting to specify that the distinction between
left-wing and right-wing populisms is one of Mouffe’s
original contributions. While Laclau argued that the political
orientation a particular populism can acquire depends on the
correlation of forces in a given context, he never claimed that
this orientation should be based on the left/right distinction,
nor did he establish the fundamental features for establishing
a binary distinction in those terms. Mouffe, by contrast,
when determining the content of her distinction, favors
an ontic classification of populism. This is because, after
diagnosing the return of the political in Western Europe
in the form of a populist moment, she tells us that, while
left-wing populism must reinforce a democratizing position
that defends equality and social justice, right-wing populism
defends authoritarian, racist, and xenophobic positions that
are contrary to any egalitarian aspirations (Mouffe, 2018:
17–24). So, in the contest between right-wing and left-wing
populisms, it is the very construction of a people that is at
play, and what is at play in their orientation on the left or
the right is the question of affects. Or, to put it another way,
the type of people constructed will depend on the affects
mobilized, with the possibility that some affects are oriented
toward reactionary elements and others toward emanci-
patory elements. We should clarify, however, that Mouffe’s
idea of the left differs from classic categories of social class,
and even focuses on the need to articulate a heterogeneity of
demands that are not necessarily anchored in class categories.
So far, we have elaborated the main arguments Mouffe
deploys to establish the strategic distinction between left and
right populisms in Europe. It is true she is dealing with a very
interesting conjunctural position that has generated many
 Neither Left nor Right 23

European examples, including La France Insoumise under

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the progressive wing of the Labour
Party under Jeremy Corbyn, and Podemos in Spain. But we
also believe that this conjunctural position runs the risk of,
on the one hand, neglecting the evolution of populist experi-
ences in Latin America – where the right/left distinction has
not interpellated us in the same way as in Europe – and, on
the other hand, abandoning the ontological dimension of
populism and the way the logic of the political is articulated.
If we stop to ask whether populism’s logic of political
articulation is (or is not) constitutively emancipatory,
Mouffe’s position would lead us to respond in the negative,
since populism would operate as a mere form that is open
to any type of content. But this would be negative not only
for Mouffe, but also for most of the authors trained at the
Essex School, many of whom agree with Mouffe’s inter-
pretation that populism can take on both right-wing and
left-wing political orientations. Marchart, for example, takes
this for granted when he states that ‘other demands might
change sides and become articulated with political forces
and discourses of completely different, perhaps opposite
provenance. This is what happened in the case of current
right-wing forms of populism where demagogues of the
political right effectively managed to integrate leftist demands
for social security and the defence of the welfare state into
their xenophobic discourse’ (2018: 118).
For his part, Yannis Stavrakakis (2017) also accepts the
flexibility of populist political orientations when he argues
that:

This perspective highlights the emancipatory potential of

certain populist discourses in representing excluded groups
and facilitating social incorporation and democratic represen-
tation against oppressive and unaccountable power structures.
At the same time, it remains alert to the fact that, due to the
irreducible impurity of every relation of representation, due to
the sliding capacity of signification, even genuine popular griev-
ances and demands can end-up being represented by illiberal and
anti-democratic forces or becoming hostages of authoritarian
institutional dynamics. (2017: 528–9)
24 Neither Left nor Right

So it becomes necessary to make explicit the divergent

evolutions of populist theory in different loci of enunciation.
If the left/right distinction seems unavoidable in the case of
Europe, we need to ask why this is not the case for Latin
America. Or perhaps to ask ourselves whether we can offer
reflections on populism from the Latin American locus of
enunciation that might disrupt some of those arguments
constructed from Europe.

Is all populism right-wing?

Just as the authors mentioned above are suspicious of the
constitutively emancipatory dimension of populism and reassert
the left/right distinction, there are other authors like Éric Fassin
(2018a, 2018b), Slavoj Žižek (2009), and Maurizio Lazzarato
(2019) who reject the distinction but for reasons completely
opposed to those we will discuss below. According to these
authors, the left should not fall into the populist “temptation”
because to do so would bring with it nothing but the worst
right-wing authoritarian elements. These authors warn us
that populism contains the fantasy of the “one-people” – the
people understood as a self-enclosed identity, or a homoge-
neity that blocks the emergence of differences. Žižek believes
this because, as we mentioned in the first essay, he connects
populism directly to fascism, insofar as populism always
needs “to be supplemented by the pseudo-concreteness of a
figure that is selected as the enemy, the singular agent behind
all the threats to the people” (2009: 280). From this point of
view, populism displaces and unleashes the constitutive antag-
onism of the social onto a positive entity, which becomes the
repository of frustrations to be eliminated, thereby preventing
justice from prevailing within the people. The consequences
are obvious for Žižek: populism always fails in the attempt.
Populism is merciless toward an enemy or outsider that needs
to be eliminated, thereby losing sight of the primordial battle
that everyone on the left should be eager to fight: the fight
against capitalism itself, rather than, for example, getting
sidetracked by financial speculators.
 Neither Left nor Right 25

For his part, Fassin warns us against the fascist seduction

involved in populism’s claim to embody the people in a
“totalizing we,” which would aim to dissolve minoritarian
plurality into a popular unity (2018a: 9). Moreover, the
author adds, populism is motivated by sad passions that
have nothing to do with the passions motivating the left: a
“great resentment” against minorities based on “the idea
that there are others who are benefiting instead of me; if I am
not benefiting it is their fault. And that same impotent rage
becomes enjoyment … of playing the victim” (2018a: 39).
But it should be noted that the resentment Fassin speaks of is
not that of the “losers of neoliberal globalization,” as Mouffe
(2018: 21) describes voters of the populist far right:

but of those who, whatever their success or their failure, insist

that others, who can’t hold a candle to themselves, are doing
better than they are. It is in these terms that we can understand
the rage against minorities and women, but also against those on
“benefits”: right-wing populism detests nothing so much as the
undeserving poor, those poor people who deserve nothing more
than what they have, or rather who don’t even deserve that. Or
their rage against the fools of the left, those with degrees and the
arrogance of not realizing that the cultural capital that benefits
them only has value in their own eyes. In other words, those
who have lost their courage without losing their pride. (Fassin,
2018a: 36–7)

In that sense, Fassin offers us an impoverished and reduc-

tionist reading of resentment, even displaying a contempt for
popular sectors and a profound incapacity to feel empathy for
the exclusion they suffer under neoliberalism. What’s more,
he considers that the resentment fostered by the one-people
of populism can be (and is) compatible with neoliberalism.
Thus, the author adds, populists’ fundamental battle is
against minorities, not against neoliberalism. The case of
Trump is proof: his sexist, racist, and xenophobic populism
guarantees “neoliberalism’s popular success” (2018a: 25),
and, regardless, his electorate has been defined primarily in
terms of a (sexist, racist, and xenophobic) cultural battle,
with little concern for Trump’s economic policy.
26 Neither Left nor Right

In a paper entitled “From Pinochet to Bolsonaro and

Back Again,”2 Maurizio Lazzarato (2019) has diagnosed a
new wave of fascism, racism, and sexism on a global scale
(whose most recent episode is Bolsonaro’s election in Brazil),
directly connected to the birth of neoliberalism in Chile
under the Pinochet government. In dealing with the Brazilian
case, Lazzarato detects this connection between fascism and
neoliberalism as having emerged through populism, which
demonstrates the perversion he is trying to denounce. The
populist government of Lula Da Silva and the Workers’
Party (PT) was perverse to the extent that it was a great
implementer of neoliberal policies under the banner of wealth
distribution. On the one hand, it basically transformed the
poor into debtors, since, by seeking to reduce poverty and
improve the conditions of the working class and proletarians,
it did little more than incorporate them into the financial
mechanisms and financialization of their lifestyle. And, on the
other hand, the Lula government reconfigured the state and
its functions according to the basic terms of the neoliberal
program: a strong state that guarantees the operation of the
free market economy.
Lazzarato’s political conclusion is that the application
and subsequent failure of these policies led to the electoral
victory of the fascist Bolsonaro, replicating the situation of
the initial imposition of neoliberalism that, on a global scale,
first occurred in Latin America. An accumulation of frustra-
tions gave rise to the fascist temptation. Big capital’s strategy
in Brazil, threatened as it was by the 2008 financial crisis,
was the same as in Chile in 1973: to reconfigure an alliance
with large agricultural producers, businessmen, the military,
and religious groups (Catholic priests in the case of Chile,
evangelicals in Brazil), all of which gave rise to the fascist
revanchism of elites and the white upper middle classes,
whose class hatred toward President Lula (and, we could also
add, Dilma Rousseff) was also fueled, among other things,
by inclusive policies for black university students and labor
regulations for domestic workers. To all this, according to
Lazzarato, we should add the role played by the frustration
of the poor and of workers, because a micro-credit policy
 Neither Left nor Right 27

like that implemented by the PT ended up creating the condi-

tions for a micro-political fascism centered on the figure of
the unsatisfied individual consumer. This was because, on the
one hand, it configured indebted subjects, vulnerable to the
fear and anguish of finding their everyday lives financialized,
producing a depoliticizing individualism and a superficial
consumerism that was insufficient to roll back an unequal
social and productive structure. And, on the other hand,
because it fueled the consumer logic of buying all kinds of
durable goods (cellphones, televisions, etc.) at the expense
of basic issues like access to drinking water, sewers, paving
roads, or opening schools and hospitals. Thus, the massive
demonstrations in 2013 against the Rousseff government
were an expression of this frustration, anger, and disap-
pointment with the PT project that cleared the way for
fascism. In short, for Lazzarato, Lula’s (and Rousseff’s)
populism bears the most blame for the rise of the fascist
Bolsonaro.
At this point, we could pose a series of questions to all
of these authors who reject the emancipatory possibilities of
populism and identify it with the right, with neoliberalism,
and with fascism. Regarding Žižek’s position, one might ask
whether it is possible to confront a political struggle against
the “system as such” and avoid the antagonism that emerges
when specific interests are threatened, forcing us to face
concrete enemies. For example, is it possible to fight against
financial capitalism – or capitalism as such – without antago-
nizing the flesh-and-blood financial speculators themselves?
Is it possible to engage in a “universal struggle” without
passing through a particular one? In some sense, to suggest
that populism is entangled with a particular is to accuse
populism of “positivizing” antagonism, since the positive
moment occurs when I identify an adversary and constitute
myself in opposition to them. Along these lines, Žižek
suggests that such an operation would be an externalization
of my own self-negativity, since I would be projecting onto
the other a fracture or lack that is within myself. While it
is clear that Žižek seeks to weaken populism by accusing it
of positivizing the antagonism, we might ask ourselves how
28 Neither Left nor Right

effective this strategy is. Is it not possible to assume that this

form of positivization exists, and still continue to think that
populism is necessary? When Žižek counterposes the figure
of self-negativity as something prior to the struggle against
an adversary, he is also setting out from a positivized way
of theorizing antagonism – namely, my self-negativity. The
fallacy of his argument is that it makes us believe that identi-
fying the negative moment with the self-negativity of the
subject is a way of “escaping” positivity and recuperating
radical antagonism. The criticism that Žižek seems to aim at
populism could also be applied to his own strategy.
It’s one thing to say subjects trick themselves into believing
that the eradication of the other would mean the consum-
mation of their identity, and a different thing entirely to
assume that their political identity – the type of identity we are
discussing here – is constructed in relation to what it opposes:
the adversary. If we pay attention to how actually existing
political struggles work, Žižek’s critique seems strange. When
a social movement or collective takes to the streets, it does
not believe that the accomplishment of a demand means the
full realization of its identity. It simply needs this accom-
plishment in order to be able to realize a part of itself that
has been denied. According to Žižek, our position would
entail “the positivation of our negative relation to the other
[the master],” while he believes that the real question has to
do with the “positivation of our own … negative relationship
towards ourselves” (Žižek, 1990: 253). But is it not precisely
in the experience of my negative relationship with the other
that I find that I am something different from “myself?” We
could say that it is in the experience of resistance that social
fabric is built, that forms of articulation that escape the
mere positivization of our negative relation to something are
consolidated.
On the other hand, a political actor knows themselves by
being other things at once, acting in other spheres where they
need to solve other problems having to do with the consti-
tution of their identity. Obviously, political struggle does not
seek the “physical” elimination of the adversary, but rather
the transformation of the position they occupy within a given
 Neither Left nor Right 29

relation of forces. And success means not only the dissolution

of the adversary’s position of power, but also of mine as
well, since my position will also be transformed by the new
situation. What is most disheartening about Žižek’s strategy
is that, according to the logic that the slave “yields to the
desire of the master,” we could reject any protest or collective
grievance, since we could always resort to the argument
that, in the face of discontent, the individuals in question
are merely externalizing onto another – the master – their
own lack, that negativity through which they feel something
preventing them from being themselves. Would this imply
that the history of class struggles – within which Žižek
claims to position himself – has been nothing but yielding to
the desire of the master? In the final instance, we could say
that the experience of my own flaw is translatable through
an outside understood as a set of biographical, historical,
traumatic, and collective sedimentations that are reactivated
within me to cope with this constitutive flaw, with politics
being the way of externalizing the flaw and working through
it – no longer through a solitary “self-satisfying” withdrawal,
but instead through collective, plebeian praxis.
As far as Fassin’s position is concerned, he seems to
reproduce a sort of essentialism and a fixation insofar as he
anchors a series of passions in the fascist/populist right from
which the left would seem to be exempt. Are there passions
that are exclusive to the right, and others exclusive to the
left? Do resentment and rage only suit the right, and does
indignation only suit the left? If we effectively maintain that
“resentment does not turn into rebellion, just as indignation
does not turn into bitterness” (Fassin, 2018a: 39), we risk
falling into the naïveté of believing that the left is always
noble, always good, and incapable of harboring sad passions
in its heart. To do so would be to reproduce those purist
clichés that Mouffe herself sought to question by proposing
the indeterminacy of signifiers and the partisan nature of
politics. As we have said above, even if signifiers like the
homeland or the nation are sedimented within right-wing
discourse in Western Europe, nothing prevents them from
being reactivated at a certain moment and under specific
30 Neither Left nor Right

circumstances, and contested by political positions with other

ideological orientations.
Finally, and with regard to Lazzarato’s position, we
believe it is fair to ask: if it is true, as he argues, that populism
is a fraud clothed in wealth redistribution, while in reality
facilitating neoliberal policies, then why have neoliberal
elites devoted all their effort and wealth to combating and
displacing populist governments not only from Brazil, but
from Latin America as a whole? Why have neoliberal elites
unleashed persecution against populist leaders once they
have left office? Curiously, Lazzarato cites the case of Lula
as a paradigmatic example of populist deception: is he
aware that Lula has been jailed under an absolutely dubious
judicial proceeding typical of the logic of “lawfare?”3 Does
he know that something similar is happening in Argentina
with Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, or in Ecuador with
Rafael Correa – both also subject to judicial proceedings that
lack due process? Why are neoliberal elites – now that these
populist leaders have left government – doing everything
they can to prevent them from returning to political power?
Perhaps lodged within Lazzarato’s text is a set of prejudices
among the enlightened left toward the material importance
of populism for popular sectors. Lazzarato is alarmed that
Lula’s populism favors consumption by the poor before
managing to meet their needs for health centers, schools,
sewers, and drinking water, as if this were still more proof
that populism is a scam that does not aim to resolve the
true needs of the dispossessed. But, without minimizing the
importance of public policy in providing basic services to
the community, why should the possibility of popular sectors
accessing durable goods always be deferred? Is access to
consumption not a social achievement?
As Latin American intellectuals, we find it very problematic
every time a European intellectual – who enjoys guaranteed
access to consumption – questions those experiences through
which broad popular masses have the opportunity to access
levels of consumption that neoliberalism denies them over and
over again. Why does a Parisian intellectual know better than
those most excluded themselves how they should rationally
 Neither Left nor Right 31

rank their own priorities, what kind of goods they should

have access to, and where they should circulate given the
position they occupy within the social order? This is why, so
often, we hear scandalized complaints about how populist
leaders simply gain the support of those most excluded by
fraudulently promising a level of consumption that is not
appropriate to them, as if this was either a vote of fools
who allow themselves to be tricked or irrational people who
don’t know how to vote for the good of the community. As
if the educated sectors or the middle class do know! It seems
then that what is truly scandalous and unacceptable to some
enlightened elites is for the popular classes to enjoy themselves.
Paradoxically, this critique is compatible with the neoliberal
critique of populism in one aspect. Suffice to mention state-
ments by two senior officials from the neoliberal government
of Mauricio Macri in Argentina, who, after the departure
of the Kirchner government in 2015, followed the same
sort of reasoning as Lazzarato.4 One example was that of
Javier González Fraga, appointed President of the Bank of
the Nation, who came to argue that: “You made an average
employee believe that their average salary was enough to
buy cellphones, plasma-screen TVs, cars, motorcycles, and
to take trips abroad. That was an illusion. That was not
normal.”5 The other comes from Vice-President Gabriela
Michetti, who said that “The most difficult thing for us is to
get through the moment when you leave populism and leave
the fantasy of an important and enormous lie – telling people
that they would be able to live this way forever because we
have the resources for that.”6 Therefore, the concern we want
to raise here points at the heart of a certain tradition of leftist
thinking that, as we saw in the example of Lazzarato, makes
arguments that end up being secretly complicit with the right-
wing sensibility in the region.

Just populism
So far, we have critically developed the arguments of those
who either appeal to the distinction between right-wing
32 Neither Left nor Right

and left-wing populisms or reject this distinction to support

the idea that all populism is inherently right-wing. It then
remains for us to think through what populism might mean
without the stigmas associated with the right and with
authoritarianism. Along these lines, we find thinkers like
Jorge Alemán (2016), who, like Žižek, thinks through the
lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis and takes a relatively critical
position toward Laclau’s work. Alemán agrees with Laclau
when he argues that populism is the alternative to neolib-
eralism, but distances himself from Laclau when he argues
that neoliberalism does not respond to hegemonic logic.
To support this second statement, he turns to the notion
of capitalist discourse developed by Jacques Lacan.7 The
peculiarity of capitalist discourse, Alemán tells us, is that it
functions as a “counter-discourse” that seeks to appear to
itself without any internal division and seeks to eliminate
the possibility of imagining anything outside of itself. In
turn, it promotes two movements that are, at first sight,
contradictory: it closes inward on itself – in the sense that it
continues its repetition and elimination of differences – and it
expands limitlessly by closing off any idea of ​​an outside. This
is to such a degree that Alemán even suggests that capitalist
discourse functions as a commodity that attempts to cover
completely the entire symbolic universe. And this action is
possible, Alemán adds, because it attacks precisely what is
proper to the subject – namely, its constitutive flaw, the flaw
that functions as the condition of possibility for the subject to
exist through it. This is how capitalist discourse blocks consti-
tutive dislocation and prevents the irruption of the subject.
Or, put another way, what the Argentinean thinker is trying
to tell us is that capitalist discourse is configured in such a
way that it prevents the irruption of anything other than its
own reproduction. In turn, this characteristic of capitalist
discourse allows Alemán to account for the functioning
of neoliberalism in the present, since it behaves like “an
acephalic force which expands limitlessly until the last limit
of life. This is precisely the novelty of neoliberalism: the
capacity to produce new subjectivities configured according
to a corporate, managerial, and competitive paradigm of
 Neither Left nor Right 33

existence itself” (Alemán, 2016: 15). So, while neoliberalism

presents itself as a rationality in search of maximum freedom
that seeks to promote a diversity of subjectivities, what it
brings about is the opposite: the oppression of blocking
the constitutive flaw in the structure, of avoiding any inter-
ruption, and of nullifying differences. Its incessant repetition
always brings us back to the same place in the unlimited
circuit of commodities.
On the other hand, Alemán also warns us that the most
sinister aspect of neoliberalism is that it is the first regime
in history that tries to unify two different dimensions of the
symbolic order of language. It seeks to crush together into
a single plane both the structural-ontological dimension
of language with respect to the constitution of the subject
(through which the living being is captured by language
and turned into a subject even before being born and after
death) and the socio-historical dimension of any order (the
contingent discursive configurations of every period). While
these two dimensions (ontological and socio-historical)
appear as mixed, they follow different logics. The first
implies an ineliminable dependency, whereas the second is
a socio-historical construct susceptible to transformation. In
this sense, the specificity of neoliberalism lies in this attempt
to “accomplish the first symbolic dependence, affecting both
bodies and the capture by the word of the living being in
its structural dependency” (Alemán, 2016: 14). It seeks
ultimately to unify the socio-historical with the ontological
and to suppress the latter – i.e. to suppress the constitutive
flaw or dislocation on which we depend on the ontological
level, and which functions as condition of possibility for the
socio-historical level. The great danger of neoliberalism, then,
is its attempt to colonize the ontological dimension from
which neoliberalism itself – as a socio-historical formation
– emerged, and all to prevent socio-historical alternatives
to capitalist discourse from emerging on the ontological
level. If neoliberalism were to accomplish this unification,
Alemán tells us, it would have consummated the most perfect
of crimes, in the sense that structural dependence – the
symbolic identification that allows the subject to be part of
34 Neither Left nor Right

a transgenerational chain – would be devastated. In short,

whereas structural dependence is the condition of possibility
for shared historical legacies, the neoliberal regime attempts
to “produce a ‘new man’ made from its own present,
unclaimed by any symbolic cause or legacy, and which is
as precarious, ‘liquid,’ fluid, and volatile as the commodity
itself” (Alemán, 2016: 14).
Having arrived at this point, Alemán agrees with Laclau,
since any attempt to block constitutive lack (or what Laclau
calls dislocation) is a commitment to totalization. The only
difference is that, while Laclau theorizes this lack within
the very being of the social, Alemán instead locates it in
the subject. But what is clear is that, for both, any attempt
to block that lack, whether on the order of the subject or
the order of the social, is a totalizing movement. And the
reason for this is very simple: because differences can only
exist thanks to this constitutive lack. So, filling this lack
(or dislocation) means blocking the differences and hetero-
geneity that constitute us as subjects or social beings. And
any attempt at totalization brings only oppression, because
any effort to annul dislocation is an attempt to block “the
source of freedom” (Laclau, 1990: 76).8 If this structural
gap is considered a source of freedom, it is because it
contains no structural determinations for the subject (hence
it is the source of freedom and, therefore, the moment of
decision beyond structure). By contrast, capitalist discourse,
in its neoliberal modality, proposes to make the subject’s
experience impossible by contiguously connecting every place
and reducing every difference to its commodity circuit. Thus,
faced with this limitless neoliberal circuit with no possible
interruption, Alemán, like Laclau, argues that hegemony –
and particularly its populist version – limits that circuit, or
at least seeks to install a circuit-breaker that would allow
the establishment of border effects through the articulation
of elements that never nullify difference and that assume the
“impossibility of society.” Further, hegemony rejects neolib-
eralism’s totalizing efforts by functioning as an arrangement
that tolerates the flaw, that allows the irruption of the subject
and the emergence of subjectivities that escape the totalizing
 Neither Left nor Right 35

emplacement of neoliberalism. This is why neoliberalism

hates hegemonic articulations and any thought of emanci-
pation (Alemán, 2016: 17–19). Consequently, populism:

is not a renunciation of the radicalism of revolutionary trans-

formation, it is more radical still, because in a materialist way
it admits the impasses and impossibilities that appear when
the part that is excluded and unrepresented by the system
seeks to establish itself as a hegemonic alternative to the
dominant power … The people [El pueblo] begins when the
category “people [gente]” is revealed to be a purely biopolitical
construct. Meanwhile, the pueblo is as strange and singular as
the subject itself in its mortal, sexed, and speaking becoming.
The pueblo is an unstable equivalence constituted by differences
that never unify or represent the whole. However, the fragility
and contingency of its origin is the only thing that saves it
from television, experts, programmers, accounting, etc. But it
is only from within the most intimate folds of the mechanisms
of neoliberal domination that the popular subject can arrive.
(Alemán, 2016: 21)

If we follow Alemán’s words rigorously, the people of

populism is not a unity understood as a self-enclosed identity
that expels differences. On the contrary, this people is possible
thanks to its constitutive heterogeneity and the possibility of
expressing itself through differences that are (equivalen-
tially) articulated in an unstable way. Thus, it is possible to
conclude that the people built through populism is diametri-
cally opposed to the totalizing one-people that Fassin, Žižek,
and Lazzarato accuse it of being. Furthermore, this people
is not configured as a negation of the constitutive flaw, but
thanks to it, such that this way of building the flawed and
limited identity of the people can only be emancipatory.

Populism without apology

It seems that at this point we confront a dilemma that requires
us to make a decision. In the case of Mouffe, Marchart, and
Stavrakakis, it seems that two types of people can be built
through populism: one authoritarian and exclusionary, the
36 Neither Left nor Right

other emancipatory and egalitarian. In the case of Fassin,

Žižek, and Lazzarato, on the other hand, populism always
builds the kind of one-people that any leftist project should
avoid. And, finally, Alemán suggests that the people of
populism is constitutively emancipatory. Let’s try to delve a
little deeper into the first position, since our concern is the
following: does the construction of two different types of
people take place within populism, or should we theorize
this tension along other axes? Along these lines, the question
that we wish to ask, and which has not been explored so far,
is whether the kind of people built by what this first position
would call right-wing populism is not instead fascism. In
this sense, it is possible that the return of the political of
which Mouffe speaks should perhaps be understood not as a
populist moment, but instead as a tension between populism
and fascism, as two different ways of building the people and
mobilizing shared affects.
Now, we think that, in order to move forward with this
concern and to try to find a satisfactory answer, it becomes
urgent to approach it through the question of equality.
Mouffe tells us that right-wing populisms “do not address
the demand for equality and they construct a ‘people’ that
excludes numerous categories, usually immigrants, seen as a
threat to the identity and prosperity of the nation” (2018: 24).
In other words, equality is no concern for the populist right,
but only for those left-wing populisms that make equality
their defining feature, since there is an axis between equality
and inclusion that makes a populism democratic, that leads
it to work in pursuit of social justice, and that ultimately
defines it as being on the left. Coronel and Cadahia (2018)
also take equality as a necessary attribute for populism to
acquire an emancipatory political orientation and avoid the
reactionary dimension of the popular. They emphasize that
we build this equality as long as we direct our antagonism
against “those on top” and not against “those alongside us”
– i.e. when a hegemonic link is produced through an articu-
lation among those on the bottom that allows them to build
antagonism against those on top. Coronel and Cadahia call
this type of hegemonic relation common to all emancipatory
 Neither Left nor Right 37

populism a “plebeian link” (Coronel and Cadahia, 2018:

77–8).
Like these authors, Stavrakakis tries to theorize the speci-
ficity of this egalitarian hegemonic link, finding that it
emerges when the dichotomization of social space occurs
vertically (those on top / those on the bottom, high/low),
which distinguishes it from exclusionary populisms that
dichotomize social space horizontally (insiders/outsiders).
The latter is what is usually referred to as far-right (or
exclusionary) populism, which is, according to the author,
the product of xenophobic nationalist ideologies with “only
peripheral and/or secondary populist elements” (2017: 530).
For Stavrakakis, exclusionary populisms can only possess
secondarily populist elements because, while the people
functions as a fluid empty signifier in inclusive populism,
in exclusionary populism “the people” refers back to a
transcendental, spectral signified, like the nation or the race.
We would, thus, be in the presence of what Derrideans call
“transcendental signifieds” – i.e. reference points that seek to
fix meaning once and for all (Stavrakakis, 2017: 530). Thus,
Stavrakakis, who takes the distinction between inclusionary
and exclusionary populisms from Cas Mudde and Cristóbal
Rovira Kaltwasser (2013), after filtering it through Laclau
and Mouffe’s discourse analysis, warns us that it is essential
to distinguish populisms from nationalisms – giving the latter
a pejorative and identitarian charge:

In populist discourses proper, then, apart from being located at

the core of the discursive articulation, “the people” operates as
an empty signifier, as a signifier without signified, so to speak.
… In this sense, whereas (predominantly inclusionary) populist
discourses potentially expand the chain of significations associated
with “the people” – even including immigrants – (predominantly
exclusionary) nationalist uses of “the people” attempt to arrest
and limit this fluidity. … At the same time, in spatial terms,
populism proper is structured around a vertical, down/up or
high/low axis that refers to power, status and hierarchical socio-
cultural positioning …, while nationalist or national-populist
discourses prioritize a horizontal arrangement fashioned along
the lines of nationalist out-grouping. (Stavrakakis, 2017: 530)
38 Neither Left nor Right

At this point, we would like to return to the concern with

which we began this section, namely: if there is such a thing as
populism “proper,” then why continue to refer to derivative
formations – i.e. so-called “exclusionary populism,” “right-
wing populism,” or “nationalist populism” – as populism
at all? Unlike Mouffe, we argue that, from the perspective
of its constitutive structure, all populism – if we follow
Laclau’s (2005a) argument – is traversed and shaped by an
egalitarian logic insofar as it privileges a logic of equiva-
lence, i.e. a logic that articulates different demands that
become equivalent with one another without being elimi-
nated. We know from Laclau that the people is the political
subjectivity of populism, and that the possibility of a people
emerging depends on, among other things, the existence of
“equivalence relations hegemonically represented through
empty signifiers” (2005a: 156). And, from his work with
Mouffe (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985), we also know that
chains of equivalence are articulated not because the particu-
larities constituting them have a shared goal, but because
the elements involved are defined negatively, i.e. as differ-
ences. Their particular demands are extremely diverse, but
nevertheless their claims become equivalent to one another
vis-à-vis those excluded. In any case, if we can say that two
or more elements become equivalent to one another – that is,
they become equal – it is because they are different from each
other. In Mouffe’s own words: “a relation of equivalence is
not one in which all differences collapse into identity but in
which differences are still active” (2018: 63).
The question then inevitably arises: where does the
difference between the left and the right lie if both respond
to a privileging of equivalential logic insofar as they establish
a people? Our argument is that the distinction lies in how
they treat equality – i.e. how they manage differences and
how they organize these vis-à-vis equivalence. While the
populism we have called emancipatory organizes differences
through articulation – meaning that it doesn’t suppress the
constitutive heterogeneity of those differences – right-wing
populism instead organizes these through homogeneity. We
could say, then, that right-wing populism seeks to impose
 Neither Left nor Right 39

equality through a uniform and dominant standard that

eliminates constitutive heterogeneity in favor of uniform
homogeneity – the one-people – since from this perspective
notions of equality and difference are incompatible with one
another. This is why equality is confused with the identi-
tarian through the homogenization of differences among
those who are part of the people, a dynamic that Georges
Bataille described as follows in “The Psychological Structure
of Fascism” (1985 [1933]: 137–8): “Homogeneity signifies
here the commensurability of elements and the awareness
of this commensurability: human relations are sustained
by a reduction to fixed rules based on the consciousness of
the possible identity of delineable persons and situations;
in principle, all violence is excluded from this course of
existence.”
In other words, it is about the aspiration to eliminate
differences from “those alongside us,” accommodating them
within a decoded space in order to establish a social configu-
ration that is full, completely occupied, flat, transparent, and,
ergo, free of potholes, flaws, fissures, antagonisms, or hetero-
geneities, in which the fantasy of the one-people can finally
circulate. This fantasy may seek to establish itself on the basis
of various elements (race, nation, religion, heteronormativity,
etc.), but, in any case, it involves the violence of trying to
dissolve the play of difference–equivalence into a broader
identity. A self-transparent people. This is the fantasy of
the one-people that contains the longing for a life without
problems or antagonisms within the tranquility of a homoge-
neous social space, where all differences are located in a fully
legible space, in pursuit of an equality posed in identitarian
terms. If this way of constructing the people is not capable
of “tolerating” the constitutive differences of the articulatory
logic of populism, should we continue to call it populism,
especially when the classic term “fascism” exists? How could
it be both ontologically and strategically correct to conflate
fascism with a populist form of popular construction? Along
these lines, it therefore seems much more radical for us to
defend the position that the identitarian logic of what has
been called “right-wing populism” is in reality a reactivation
40 Neither Left nor Right

of fascism, in Europe and Latin America alike. For populism,

unlike fascism, equality does not entail any attempt to
eliminate differences through homogenization. Quite to the
contrary, populism supports and sustains differences insofar
as it is established on the basis of the constitutive antago-
nisms of any social space and built upon the articulation
of the most diverse heterogeneities, playing with the always
irresolvable tension between particularism and universalism,
difference and equivalence. In any case, the delineating of
the antagonistic border against “those on top” encodes the
desire that it not always be the same people who die: the
poor, the plebeians, minorities, “the disposable ones” as they
are called in Colombia, and the “little black heads” and “the
shirtless” in Argentina. And it indicates an alertness to the
fact, moreover, that someone else can always link up with
this extensive chain of equivalent differences.
Wouldn’t “right-wing” populisms fit directly under the
label of fascism – or, more precisely, neo-fascism or post-
fascism – inasmuch as they attempt to homogenize differences,
and moreover have shown their ability to conveniently
establish an alliance with neoliberalism? If the answer is yes,
then the distinction between “left-wing” and “right-wing”
populism or “inclusionary” and “exclusionary” populism
loses its meaning. Let’s just use “populism” as a synonym
for left-wing populisms or inclusionary populisms without
having to apologize, without having to clarify with adjectives.
We will leave the rest for neo-fascism or post-fascism, i.e. a
political formation characterized not by the nostalgic, point-
by-point emulation of the fascist experiences of the 1920s
and 1930s, but which has the particularity of combining
an identitarian and immunitarian logic with neoliberalism.9
Thus, the list of political formations named as populist in the
previous essay can be narrowed down. Neither Trump nor Le
Pen, nor Farage, nor Vox, nor the Golden Dawn, nor Orbán,
nor Erdoğan, nor Bolsonaro are populists. The only label
that fits them is neoliberal fascism. But the debate around
neoliberalism remains to be tackled in the next essay.
 Essay 3
Against Neoliberal Fascism:
From Sacrificial Identity to
Egalitarian Singularity

Is populism a form of neoliberalism?

One of the arguments used by populism’s detractors, like
Žižek (2009) and Fassin (2018a), to insist that populism is
right-wing is the belief that there is a perverse link between
populism and neoliberalism. This claim has opened up
a very interesting debate between those who argue that
populism represents a continuity of neoliberalism, and those
who argue the opposite – namely, that populism can be
understood as an alternative to neoliberalism. Those of us
who take up the second position know that there are two
questions at play in these debates that need to be developed
in greater depth: on the one hand, to show that populism
is not neoliberal, and, on the other, to explain populism’s
emancipatory wager.
In the previous essays, we formulated two important
assertions about populism that we would like to take up
again, since they will help guide our reflections on the link
between populism and neoliberalism. In the first essay, we
assumed that populism could not be reduced to a political
moment or strategy, and that it had to be grasped in its
ontological dimension – i.e. as constitutive of the political.
This allowed us to delve more deeply into the type of
42 Against Neoliberal Fascism

articulation of the political that it gives rise to, and the

way that difference and identity function when configuring
the people. In the second essay, we explained all the diffi-
culties associated with the difference between left and right
populism. We distanced ourselves from this distinction and
showed that the logic of political articulation of so-called
“right-wing populism” does not function in the same way
as the political articulation of “left-wing populism.” While
the former configures the unity of the people through a
mechanism of identitarian exclusion – by showing that an
external element threatens identity – the latter, on the other
hand, builds upon articulations that tolerate difference. In
other words, when configuring the people, there is a very
important difference between a reactionary identity that
seeks to expel those elements that threaten that self-enclosed
unity, and an identity embraced as something to be built
on the basis of constitutive difference and its ontological
indeterminacy. That’s why, once these distinctions have
been elaborated, we prefer to replace the term “right-wing
populism” with “fascism,” and even to insist that the
debates around left and right do not help us to discover the
ontology of populism. So that what goes by the name of
left-wing populism we’d rather just call populism, plain and
simple.
Having made these clarifications, we are in a better
position to explain why populism can function as an alter-
native to neoliberalism. Toward that end, in this essay we
begin by collecting arguments from different currents of
thought that maintain the belief that there is a perverse
linkage between the two, and explaining why we consider
this interpretation to be wrong. In particular, we build
upon arguments formulated by parts of the European
democratic left, Latin American autonomist thought, and
republican democratic philosophy in Latin America and
Spain. With these critiques collected, we will introduce
arguments for why we consider populism an emancipatory
alternative to neoliberalism, which in turn will imply clari-
fying how we understand neoliberalism and why it differs
from populism.
 Against Neoliberal Fascism 43

The prejudices of the liberal,

anti-communist left
With regard to the first current, which poses a link between
populism and neoliberalism, we would like to return to and
explore a little bit more arguments that we have already
mentioned, by the French sociologist Éric Fassin in his book,
whose Spanish edition (2018a) was titled Left-Wing Populism
and Neoliberalism (original French title: Populisme: le grand
ressentiment). The argument of his book is very simple, as
we have mentioned in previous essays, focusing more than
anything on the European setting and arguing for the need
to reactivate a democratic left that keeps its distance from
populism. Fassin believes that the democracy for sexual and
ethnic minorities that he hopes to promote from the left
could be threatened by populism’s idea of the ​​ people. For
him, populism confuses democracy with a unitary image
of the people – the one-people – that dissolves the multiple
dimensions of minorities into a restrictive popular unity. He
even goes so far as to believe that the danger of populism
is that the logic of majorities could come to overshadow
minorities, understood as the only ones capable of changing
how we understand the people and turning it into a plural
and democratic public. This is why he prefers to abandon the
idea of ​​a people and, instead, to speak in terms of publics,
which would allow us to avoid becoming trapped within an
image of the people as the representation of a given reality,
and to embrace it as a plural and diverse construct. He
therefore concludes that what is at stake as an alternative to
neoliberalism for the left is not the people but democracy,
and that this should be promoted by an agenda to the left of
the populist left.
Engaging in politics through the people is something that
Fassin leaves to right-wing populism, assuming that the
left has nothing to do with the people, above all because
the people identified with right-wing populism cannot
be reappropriated by the left. The pessimistic thesis that
presumes the immobility of people’s political perceptions
44 Against Neoliberal Fascism

– as if human beings fall “naturally” to the right or the

left – is problematic, but this is precisely Fassin’s starting
point for theorizing the link between neoliberalism and
populism. He begins by saying that populism was born in
response to the crisis of social democratic neoliberalism,
but that, as a result, it does not offer any alternative. In this
regard, he proposes the thesis that populism’s anti-elitism
is not necessarily opposed to neoliberalism, but to develop
this argument he focuses on what he considers right-wing
populism. Taking Trump’s link to his electoral base as his
example, Fassin attempts to show that this relationship
does not emerge through a rejection of neoliberalism, but
through shared xenophobic and racist values. And, in turn,
the image of Trump as a successful businessman who knows
how to maneuver in a competitive world is key to the success
with which his voters identify. So the people that Trumpean
populism alludes to is not that of the multitude, but of white
men with neoliberal values.
The first thing we could say here is that Fassin excludes
from his argument any reflection on why what he calls
left-wing populism is also neoliberal, thereby leaving his
argument truncated and limited to the experiences of the
right. He only faintly alludes to the fact that left-wing
populism would not be an effective weapon against neolib-
eralism because “repatriating populism to the left will not
bring the desired electoral results” (Fassin, 2018a: 39). This
quote shows something very problematic, since right-wing
populism is assumed to be prior to its left-wing variant, as if
the left had to convince a racist, xenophobic, and neoliberal
people of something different. The other drawback of this
interpretation is that it leaves aside the form of articulating
the political that we maintain throughout this book – namely,
that populism assumes neither a preordained identity nor a
mechanism of identitarian exclusion. That’s why we insist
that what Fassin understands as right-wing populism we
would call fascism. By giving his argument this twist, we can
only say that Fassin invites us to think that fascism is related
to neoliberalism, but he would not have anything to tell us
about populism as we understand it in this book. Instead,
 Against Neoliberal Fascism 45

he has left it entirely unanalyzed by reducing it to an unsuc-

cessful electoral strategy.
Fassin leaves similarly unexplained the mechanisms by
which people come to identify as fascist, xenophobic, or even
patriarchal. The major difference between his argument and
ours is that all of these identifications operate as the way
people negotiate their dissatisfaction and constitutive lack.1
In other words, we don’t think that people are naturally
xenophobic, racist, or patriarchal and seek to harm others –
which would be an inverted romanticization of the people.
On the contrary, we argue that all these exclusionary logics
are a way of symbolizing the constitutive wound and flaw of
the social, identifying this flaw itself with a hatred toward
the other. And it is this understanding of the complexity
of political subjects that allows us to understand that it is
not so much a question of “changing the people,” as Fassin
suggests with a strangely elitist (and even unconfessedly anti-
communist) wink – it is about changing with the people.

Autonomism: the opium of the people

From the perspective of certain representatives of Latin
American autonomism, by contrast, the link between neolib-
eralism and populism is posed in different terms, and the
emphasis placed on the role of progressive populist experi-
ences in different countries in the region. If we turn to the
theses of Maristella Svampa and Massimo Modonesi, in
their co-authored article entitled “Post-progressivism and
Emancipatory Horizons in Latin America” (2016), we see
that they reject out of hand the idea that 21st-century
populisms can be considered post-neoliberal. In this sense,
they assume that the opposition between populism and
neoliberalism is a false one that responds to a binary repre-
sentation of reality, one that leaves out the role of social
movements in emancipatory processes. By bringing in this
third actor, the authors attempt, on the one hand, to break
the link between populism and social movements – to the
point of positioning them as antagonistic political forces
46 Against Neoliberal Fascism

– and, on the other hand, to locate progressivism and neolib-

eralism on the same side. In other words, they consider social
movements to be the only genuine and truly emancipatory
force, and progressivism to be a unique neoliberal force,
but one nevertheless aligned with capitalist dispossession.
To support this argument, Svampa and Modonesi take the
position that it was the social movements of the late 1990s
that made possible a scenario of creative resistance and alter-
natives to neoliberalism. According to them, these types of
plebeian struggles were anti-state and opposed to the logic
of unions and political parties, and it was thanks to these
struggles, they add, that progressive political parties were
able to win elections and impose their new governing agenda.
So these authors insist that plebeian irruptions were used,
co-opted, and betrayed by progressivism’s institutionalist
and developmentalist agenda. We share with these authors
the assertion that social movements helped set the stage
for the emergence of progressive parties, but we would add
that the consolidation of that force also depended on the
acute crisis that neoliberalism was undergoing. All of which
opened up a moment of reactivation that called into question
the sedimented practices – and, with them, the legitimacy
– of traditional parties, and the institutional arrangements
of liberal democracy. Otherwise, we would not be able
to understand why, in countries not considered populist
(in Central America, Colombia and Peru, to name just
two examples), social movements which did not experience
this alleged co-optation by populism failed to articulate
themselves as a force capable of defeating neoliberalism. It
should also be noted that in many cases, social movements
themselves invaded the state and began to create alternative
institutional dynamics. In other words, it would be a mistake
to establish a static dichotomy between social movements on
the one hand and institutions on the other, as if there were
no porous experiences through which they mutually contam-
inate one another. In this way, a synergy is created within
the state between institutional logic and political militancy
that transforms how the state operates and produces new
“organizational logics” (Perelmiter, 2016).
 Against Neoliberal Fascism 47

This is why – here distancing ourselves from Svampa and

Modonesi – we find it difficult to assume that the triumph
of progressivism meant a betrayal of plebeian forces. We
find it more accurate to think that, in reality, the triumph
of populism has meant access for plebeian forces to the
state as an inscription surface for emancipatory popular
demands. Assuming that these forces are present only in
social movements means completely neglecting the mode of
political articulation of populist parties, their link with grass-
roots organizations, and, above all, the plebeian origin of
leaders like Evo Morales or Lula Da Silva who later became
presidents. But let’s weave these arguments more finely.
For Svampa and Modonesi, the plebeian irruption of the
1990s was characterized by the creation of new horizons
for thinking about social relations and emancipation. While
these were multiple, motley, and contradictory experiences,
they were characterized by complaints against the stripping
of fundamental rights, a profound questioning of party and
union logics, and the attempt to formulate a demand for
autonomy that would allow the socialization of power and
the resignification of natural resources. This new “militant
ethos” – as Svampa and Modonesi call it – made it possible
to overcome the subaltern condition of the poor, to create
a demand for emancipatory autonomy, and to build a
new form of territoriality. Thus, the revolutionary socialist
paradigm of the 1960s and 1970s was displaced by a new
form of popular organization – one that rejected the logic of
“seizing” state power. This questioning of classic modes of
plebeian power, these authors insist, allowed for the creation
of non-bureaucratic, horizontal, and democratic forms of
plebeian social relations.
However, Svampa and Modonesi argue that the emergence
of progressive governments perverted this entire process, to
the point of transforming plebeian strength into populist
power and emancipatory social transformation into a
Caesarist passive revolution. Populism, therefore, represents
a sort of decisionist power that disarticulated movements
from below and extended the logic of neoliberalism in three
key aspects. First, by continuing its developmentalist and
48 Against Neoliberal Fascism

extractivist agenda; second, because it was incapable of

transforming the economic model or successfully combatting
social inequalities; and third, because it returned to the statist
logic that social movements had sought to distance themselves
from. And this is the case for Svampa and Modonesi
because the co-optation of the plebeian meant replacing
a horizontal logic with the verticalism of the party, and
replacing autonomy and self-determination with hegemony
and statism, so that the only agenda social movements
could have maintained in the face of populist governments
was the demand for territoriality against neo-extractivism.
Therefore, the authors conclude, it would be a mistake
to try to defend progressive processes in the region –
which ultimately represent a continuation of neoliberalism
– and the task is instead to reactivate the new demands and
organiz­ational forms of social movements, and to propose
an agenda that moves beyond 21st-century populism and
contributes to the creation of a post-progressive and truly
emancipatory scenario. The interesting thing about these
criticisms is that, despite wanting to disassociate themselves
from the revolutionary socialist paradigm of the 1960s and
1970s, they reiterate some of the classic socialist critiques
of populism. Therefore, before reflecting on the authors’
arguments, it seems important for us to show which aspects
of those debates they reiterate.
We could say that the place autonomism assigns to social
movements is equivalent to the place socialism assigns to the
national-popular collective will. In the classic 1981 text by De
Ípola and Portantiero, “The National-Popular and Actually
Existing Populisms” – to which Svampa and Modonesi give
a nod when they call one section of their article “the drifts
of actually existing progressivisms” – the tensions between
socialism and populism are sharply expressed.2 In a very
synthetic way, we could say that for De Ípola and Portantiero
populism and socialism share the desire to build a hegemonic,
national-popular project that provides an alternative to the
nation-form of oligarchic states. Along these lines, and after
the crisis of the oligarchic state-form in the early twentieth
century, they add that populism had the opportunity to
 Against Neoliberal Fascism 49

organize that plebeian national-popular force in order to

consolidate a social transformation. But populists betrayed
that possibility when they turned the national-popular into
the national-statist, configuring a verticalist, homogeneous,
and anti-democratic form of power, at the same time that
they missed the opportunity provided by the crisis for a
new recomposition of the state. If we look closely enough,
Svampa and Modonesi are offering very similar arguments,
since they also emphasize the recomposition of the state by
progressive institutionality, and the betrayal of the plebeian
irruption through Caesarist mechanisms.
If the populisms of the first half of the twentieth century
were understood as a betrayal of the popular collective will,
those of the early twenty-first century, from the autonomist
perspective, represent a betrayal of social movements. Or,
to put it differently, the plebeian transformation of social
movements was reified by the populist form; the demand
for autonomy subordinated by state interpellation; and the
search for emancipation reduced to a decisionist, verti-
calist, and charismatic Caesarism or passive revolution.
With these coordinates sketched out, the state is identified
with oppression, verticalism, and de-democratization, while
social movements are identified with emancipation, horizon-
tality, and democracy. The question that can be asked here
is why the expansion of rights that populism fosters cannot
be read as a form of autonomy in terms of a people’s own
capacity for self-determination through the use of law, a
form of autonomy that would contribute – even if formu-
lated from above – to emancipation (the possibility for the
self-realization of our capacities), horizontality (we all enjoy
equal rights), and democratization (the expansion of popular
power).
Does the fact that a measure is taken from above neces-
sarily mean that it subalternizes plebeian sectors? Why is it
that autonomists cannot understand social victories, often
achieved through the articulation of the state and social
movements – like the media and same-sex marriage laws
in Argentina, the nationalization of water in Bolivia, or
the regulation of domestic workers in Ecuador3 – as steps
50 Against Neoliberal Fascism

toward self-determination and emancipation from particular

forms of popular oppression (Stoessel, 2014)? Are these
not the demands of social movements when they call for
free university education or land regulation to avoid forced
displacement? Are the interpellations of social movements not
a way of demanding more institutionality, and the presence
of the state in places that it has not historically reached?
If one of the peculiarities of neoliberalism is how it
distorts the meaning of democracy and increases the distance
between popular sectors and access to rights and institutions,
it might be extremely useful to ask whether 21st-century
populism has helped to reconfigure this link. It is clear that
populism has often failed to live up to this synergy between
popular demands and the expansion of rights, but making
the link between these demands and the state the epitome of
oppression will not help us advance one iota toward under-
standing actually existing forms of social emancipation, and
much less the possibilities that this articulation opens up for
continuing to radicalize democracy in our region. Perhaps
more attention needs to be paid to the forms this return takes
and the types of institutional displacement that each populist
return produces throughout the course of Latin American
history.
The argument for the “populist betrayal of the people”
only makes sense if we set out from one premise: that the
people and the state are two antagonistic and self-contained
social products. If the state is assumed to be a sort of
monolithic and self-contained power, an immutable universal
form destined to oppress by its very nature, then it would
make sense to think of the people as its antithesis. But if we
instead understand it to be a porous and antagonistic social
product in which different political forces strive to shape it
and determine its institutional configuration and modes of
accumulation and distribution, then it is more difficult to
simply embrace this dichotomy without further ado. Is there
not perhaps in this crisis and recomposition of the state the
reiteration of a founding act of law exercised through popular
desecration? In this sense, it is more interesting to reverse the
question and wonder about the type of theological movement
 Against Neoliberal Fascism 51

that authorizes us to imagine national being “liberated” from

state “alienation” and recuperated by the “people.” It is as
if autonomism, through the unconfessed persistence of a sort
of essentialist nostalgia, came to heal the communal wound
caused by the emergence of the state. It could be said that this
is the form of liberation that populism calls into question,
since there is no such thing as a “national essence” that the
“state” hijacks for private purposes, and nor is there such a
thing as a people, given as a prior reality, awaiting liberation.
If there is one thing that populism helps us to understand, it is
that the state does not have to be a form of alienation, strictly
speaking, but can instead become a way of articulating the
popular. The confusion lies in believing that every form of
articulation is a mode of alienation that oppresses a given
materiality.
Here we see how the underlying problem is none other
than the illusion of immediacy – i.e. the assumption that
there is something unarticulated (or unmediated) that is
stolen from the people, and that the key to emancipation lay
in its spontaneous return. If the oligarchic state was the elitist
expression of a particular state-form, that does not mean that
every state-form is reducible to the same. It was the oligarchy
that made the state the property of the few, so why not think
that it might be the act of popular desecration that trans-
forms institutions into a space for the nobodies to express
their antagonisms. This is where we find populism’s greatest
innovation: to risk building a state-form that can account
for the irruption of the people into politics. And we want to
emphasize the word “risk” because, beyond the fact that it is
impossible to translate fully the moment of popular irruption
into an institutional arrangement, populism takes the risk of
“working with” the antagonism that this irruption implies.
That is why we wonder whether it is not possible to speak
of a populist institutionality that coincides with neither the
oligarchic state nor the European liberal-conservative state.
And we believe that Latin American political thought today
is still trapped in the impossibility of answering this question.
What we have done so far has been to deactivate the opposi-
tional relation that autonomism poses between plebeian
52 Against Neoliberal Fascism

forces and progressivism, and between social movements

and the state, so that it becomes possible to think of these
as the same form of articulating the popular in two different
instances, albeit not one that is without tensions, limitations,
and contradictions. Therefore, to say that progressivism is an
extension of neoliberalism is to completely overlook the way
that populism articulates political subjects.
Now, there is one aspect that we have not yet mentioned
and that is how the territorial demands of urban and peasant
social movements have been processed. In this sense, Svampa
and Modonesi’s critiques of extractivism are completely
accurate and expose very well one of the Gordian knots
of contemporary populism, namely: thinking through a
different relationship to nature. However, despite insisting
that progressivism is neo-extractivist, these authors do not
offer a satisfactory definition with which we could establish
a debate.
Two other autonomist authors – in this case, Verónica
Gago and Sandro Mezzadra, in their 2015 article “For
a Critique of the Extractive Operations of Capital” – do
offer an interesting definition, about which we could say
a few words. First – and here differing from Svampa and
Modonesi – they do not reduce the notion of extractivism to
the operation of extracting raw materials, but rather extend
it to other types of operations, like the extractive logic of
algorithms in social networks, or a sort of “digital mining”
whereby young people play for the accumulation of points
or virtual goods that are then sold on the market. So, extrac-
tivism exists as much financially and digitally as it does in the
extraction of inert materials and in the workforce, which, in
addition to a sort of neoliberal governmentality, also implies
a complex and heterogeneous form of social cooperation
(Gago and Mezzadra, 2015: 43). By showing this complicity
between the financial and the social, these authors attempt
to slip in the hypothesis that Latin American populist
governments have done nothing but encourage this form of
extractive articulation.
From our perspective, and despite agreeing on many of the
drawbacks of extractivism, it seems like a serious mistake to
 Against Neoliberal Fascism 53

think that the populist form of articulation is identical to the

extractive logic woven between the financial and the social.
The point is that criticizing extractivist logic does not have
to mean we must diametrically oppose populism, as Svampa,
Gago, Modonesi, and Mezzadra seem to think. Isn’t it more
constructive to examine how populist logic could radicalize
an alternative to neoliberal extractive logic and foster other
kinds of subjectification? So, marking the limit of a political
experience – an actually existing experience – should not
lead us to automatically dismiss its ontological possibilities,4
especially if that ontology, as we have shown in the first
two essays, gives us the tools to formulate an alternative to
neoliberal ontology.5 We believe, as we have been insisting
throughout this book, that there is a radical difference
between populist forms of subjectification and neoliberal
forms of subjection. To fail to recognize the role that the
political plays in the construction of both subjectivities is
to miss an opportunity to theorize an alternative through
the very materiality of the existing. We believe that at the
heart of the extractivist problem is the sacrificial logic that
organizes and sustains it. So, as we will show toward the end
of this essay, it is necessary to explore further what is at stake
in sacrificial ontology, in order to better understand why
populism does not reproduce it as a foundational structure
of the political.

Populism as transitional object?

We now turn to the third theoretical tradition that seeks to
establish a link between populism and neoliberalism. We
refer to the proposals of a specific republican philosophical
tradition interested in populism, which are expressed very
rigorously by José Luis Villacañas in his book Populism
(2015).6 What is interesting about Villacañas’ inquiries is
that, unlike the other authors mentioned above, he proposes
an ontological examination of populism, republicanism, and
neoliberalism. Through a discussion of the link between
populism and republicanism, he tells us that “Republicanism
54 Against Neoliberal Fascism

shares some aspects with populism, but above all it is an

autonomous, ancient, and respectable political tradition, in
relation to which populism represents an enormous simpli-
fication” (Villacañas, 2015: 119). This tension – but not
opposition – that Villacañas establishes between the two
traditions is due to the fact that “there would be great
solidarity between neoliberalism, which destroys the very
foundations of a socio-political republicanism centered on
public institutions, and populism which attempts an urgent
solution” (Villacañas, 2015: 119).
While this diagnosis is designed more for the European
than the Latin American case – especially if we remember
that populism has been one mode of building institutions
in Latin America – the truth is that he poses a highly
original connection between the two traditions. By consid-
ering populism to be a sort of “emergency brake” for
neoliberalism, he merely makes clear the internal link to it,
a connection that contemporary populist experiences have
not been able to reflect on in all its radicalism and, as a
result, they show signs of exhaustion today.7 In this sense,
Villacañas opens the door for us to start thinking about
populism in its epochal dimension and to wonder about
populism’s temporalization – in a more philosophical than
historicist register – based on its own contradictions and in
connection to what it seeks to distance itself from. Thanks to
this dimension opened by Villacañas, we can ask ourselves:
why does populism fail, beyond its mode of articulating
the political, to create an epochal common sense – or what
Gramsci would call a historical bloc – that provides an alter-
native to neoliberalism?
But the author adds another important point in his book,
a sort of constitutive ambiguity of populism, when he says
that, just as populism is allied with neoliberalism, the same
can be said of republicanism. There is, thus, a sort of virtuous
link between populism and republicanism, understood as an
alternative to neoliberalism. However, once he makes this
suggestion, once he raises this epochal opening, the author
chooses to understand this link in transitory terms, as if
populism were that transitory experience, that necessary but
 Against Neoliberal Fascism 55

disposable step that helps us take the leap towards a civic

republicanism (Villacañas, 2015: 111–20). But, from the
Latin American perspective, it is very difficult to understand
populism as a merely transitory experience, especially if we
understand it to be one of the few political experiences that
has continued to expand the rights of the majority against the
dispossession of rights by neoliberal institutionality. In other
words, populism has functioned in Latin America as a form
of plebeian republicanism, and so trying to think of it as a
transitory device would mean neglecting how much populism
has shaped our republics from a popular perspective.

Populism: antithesis of neoliberalism

So far we have done nothing more than to show how each of
the currents mentioned above (liberal left, autonomist, and
republican) have understood the link between populism and
neoliberalism, but we have said little ourselves about how we
understand the latter. So it becomes necessary to pause and
think about what we are talking about when we use the word
“neoliberalism.” This exercise will help us explain much
better why we think populism is not just another expression
of neoliberalism, and that it even carries a secret alternative
within itself. It should also be noted that, when we speak of
neoliberalism, we mean it as an expression of capitalism – i.e.
as an ethos configuring a specific way of life in the repro-
duction of capital.
To expand upon these ideas, we will focus on Michel
Foucault and Wendy Brown’s research on neoliberalism,
since they point in the direction that we are interested in
exploring. In his classic text The Birth of Biopolitics (2010),
Foucault defines neoliberalism as a practical response to the
crisis of the art of liberal governance, which impacts two
levels at the same time: forms of government and processes
of subjectification. Regarding the first aspect, neoliberalism
functions as a specific art of government, whose mode of
acting is characterized by a transformation of state rationality
in which the economy begins to be the creator of public law
56 Against Neoliberal Fascism

(Foucault, 2010: 84). Foucault will establish a very important

distinction between the statist, disciplinary rationality of
modernity and the neoliberal rationality of government today
(Foucault, 2010: 75–100). The main aspect that we hope
to stress has to do with the role of the law in each type of
practical rationality or governmental form. While, in the first
case, law operated as an external limitation that provided
a basis for determining what was prohibited and permitted
within a government, in the second, an economic self-
limitation arises from within the very practice of government
that is accompanied by an “anti-statism, or state-phobia”
(Foucault, 2010: 76). This will entail a transformation in
forms of statehood, since the focal point is no longer a law
or a right establishing what is forbidden and what is allowed,
but instead comes to be located in consensus and practical
interest (Foucault, 2010: 84–5). Thus, consensus, as a form
of governmentality, displaces the legitimacy given by the law
and begins to function as the new mechanism of state legiti-
mation (Foucault, 2010: 84). The legitimacy of neoliberal
states therefore does not depend on using law and institu-
tions well in a republican sense, but on the ability to reach
consensus and agreement on issues of economic interest.
Although Foucault does not put it this way, we could say that
the neoliberal state ceases to conceive of subjects as citizens
with rights within a res publica, and begins to understand
them instead as individuals with private interests in the
market.
This new approach implies a transformation in the
production of subjectivity, since Foucault tells us that the
logic of free and self-interested profit-maximizing behavior
extends to all spheres of human life. This is why, with regard
to the second aspect, the immediate effect on processes of
subjectification was the emergence of Homo economicus as
the interface between this new form of governmentality and
the individual (Foucault, 2010: 225–6). Foucault will show
that, within neoliberal rationality, Homo economicus is not
a partner in the exchange and consumption of commodities,
so that the classic image of the individual consumer fails to
reflect the historical mutation that this new rationality entails
 Against Neoliberal Fascism 57

within individuals. On the contrary, this Homo economicus,

as an individual who obeys their own self-interest, is an
“entrepreneur of himself,” a producer of capital through
his own strength (Foucault, 2010: 215–33). And becoming
an entrepreneur of oneself produces nothing but, as Brown
suggests in her interpretation of Foucault, a vicious circle
of obedience to one’s own self-interest and the demand to
produce infinite value in the reproduction of one’s own life
(Brown, 2017: 310).
Although Brown follows the lines set out by Foucault
regarding neoliberalism, she will identify two major limita-
tions that allow her to offer a more specific and complex
elaboration of the phenomenon. First, she criticizes Foucault
for understanding individual self-interest as the starting point
for analyzing neoliberal practices. According to Brown, it
is a mistake to think that self-interest “captures the ethos
or subjectivity of the contemporary neoliberal subject,”
since hiding behind this statement is a certain essentialism
that leads to the uncritical assumption that the nature of
the individual consists of “self-interested actions” and that
the expansion of this self-interest is the foundation of the
neoliberal ethos (Brown, 2017: 83). Brown criticizes this
belief because, for her, the figure of the individual – or the
narrative around how Homo economicus functions – does
not coincide with what really occurs in neoliberal practices.
In this sense, the neoliberal individual “is so profoundly
integrated into and hence subordinated to the supervening
goal of macroeconomic growth that its own well-being is
easily sacrificed to these larger purposes” (Brown, 2017: 83).
In other words, to take the self-interest of Homo economicus
as our starting point is to lose sight of the role that the
economy and the state have in the construction of this figure,
and the sacrificial dimension of this supposedly free choice.
So what really takes place is a “governance of responsibilized
citizens” that forces the individual to embrace their role as
a “self-investor” and a “self-provider” at the service of the
“health of the economy” and of “morality of the state”
(Brown, 2017: 84). Thus, the belief that, in neoliberalism,
each individual pursues and intensifies their private interest is
58 Against Neoliberal Fascism

one that “is made, not born, and operates in a context replete
with risk, contingency, and potentially violent changes,
from burst bubbles and capital or currency meltdowns to
wholesale industry dissolution” (Brown, 2017: 84).
The second limitation that Brown identifies is that it is an
error to believe that Homo politicus is simply displaced by
Homo economicus. In this sense, she believes that Foucault
lost sight of the political dimension and limited himself to the
interaction between the individual and the market – or at best
the heterogeneous dimension of the subject as both a legal and
economic subject. She even criticizes him for having reduced
the notion of sovereignty to the coercive role of the state
and neglecting the idea of popular
​​ sovereignty configured
during the French and American revolutions – namely, as
something that is built and circulates between people (Brown,
2017: 86). In other words, Foucault focused too much on
the individualizing role of neoliberalism and neglected the
collective dimension of each of these aspects, and so Brown
will pay attention to a double aspect neglected by Foucault.
On the one hand, she is interested in the collective dimension
of this new form of rationality – i.e. what happens to the
demos of democracy, to the collective will, and to popular
sovereignty in this whole process of the individual isolation
of responsibility and the massification of these individual-
izing effects. And, on the other, she is interested in studying
the Homo politicus that survives and resists, thereby making
possible alternative forms of subjectification and democracy.
Having reached this point, our goal is to rescue from
Foucault and Brown the idea that neoliberalism is an epochal
ethos organized around certain practices of government, and
that these practices tend to organize a particular economistic
link of the subject to itself and others, and between the
state and citizens. However, we are going to steer clear of
Foucault’s characterization of Homo economicus and remain
closer to Brown’s clarifications, meaning that we are going
to assume that Homo economicus as human capital, far
from representing the expansion of private interest, instead
represents individual sacrifice to the health of markets. And,
in turn, we are going to pick up from Brown the idea that,
 Against Neoliberal Fascism 59

despite the power of neoliberalism, there exists a Homo

politicus fighting for alternative forms of subjectification and
government beyond neoliberalism. Along these lines, and
in the face of the neoliberal subjective emplacement given
in terms of Homo economicus, we ask ourselves whether
populism represents an example of the survival of Homo
politicus that might even counteract the sacrificial logic of
neoliberalism.
We are interested in exploring Brown’s notion of sacrifice,
since it helps us to think through whether the sacrificial
dimension of neoliberalism is not merely a novel reiteration
of the sacrificial logic of fascism. As we saw in Essay 2,
fascism believes that, in order to govern and guarantee
order, it needs to rebuild the lost unity of the community,
and that this loss, in turn, was caused by the intrusion of an
external presence that threatens it from within. The other –
whether immigrant, peasant, indigenous, black, woman, gay,
lesbian, or trans – functions as a unity-disturbing element
and is therefore culpable for preventing the community from
becoming transparent to itself. In this way, fascism plays with
the fantasy of being able to achieve the one-people, a people
without antagonisms or differences, where the elimination
of that threatening figure both exempts the community from
guilt and debt while restoring its lost fullness. With this
fantasy, the other becomes the sacrificial object allowing for
the restoration of the community, and sacrificing the other
thus becomes the only action that will guarantee the desired
recomposition of the disrupted order.
Now, under neoliberal practices, blame is displaced.
Culpability for this impossible fullness is no longer located in
the other, but in oneself. We could say that if, under fascism,
blame and debt require collective work to identify a sacrificial
subject – those who prevent the community from “being fully
itself” – under neoliberalism, by contrast, that guilt and debt
is privatized. Neoliberal subjectivity and its purported econo-
mization of every last corner of life would seem to coincide
with the religious gesture of making every individual solely
responsible for all the ills that afflict them. Therefore, the
illusory search for the recomposition of lost unity no longer
60 Against Neoliberal Fascism

comes from the community, but from the individual itself. In

other words, the new sacrificial object is no longer the other
but oneself, or that part of oneself that, by not allowing
us to experience ourselves as complete, must be expelled
through very precise practices indicated by the market. And
so the subject will be submerged in the obligation – constant,
because it is always unsuccessful – to remedy his own lack,
to carry out those practices of the self that would allow it to
recompose the desired self-identity.
While it is true that populism interpellates every individual
as the subject of a lack – the experience of a lack that gives
rise to the inscription of a demand – and that in this, as
Villacañas warned, it would seem to coincide with neolib-
eralism, the big difference is that this lack does not function
as a mechanism for economistic interpellation. In other
words, it does not turn this lack into an ethic of responsi-
bility forcing every individual to position themselves as an
entrepreneur of their own life, to try to rid themselves of
this constitutive incompleteness. On the contrary, in populist
logic, lack does not function as a tool for exploiting the labor
power of every individual, but instead becomes a collective
political demand – i.e. the constitutive lack or incompleteness
that each subject discovers in their singularity becomes the
condition of possibility for building a world with others.
Thus, popular or political demands do not seek satisfaction
on an individual level, but instead serve as a detour that
transforms the private practices of every individual – a figure
constructed by liberalism and neoliberalism – into practices
of the collective political subject that is the people. And this
collective possibility reactivates imaginaries associated with
the popular will or popular sovereignty – all those imagi-
naries that neoliberalism wants to make disappear behind the
figure of Homo economicus.
Regarding the link between the state and subjects,
populism helps us reactivate the idea that it is possible to
process political demands constructed at the popular level
through the state. The state is therefore not reduced to a
mere manager of market health, but, instead, by embracing
the inherently political dimension of the state’s role, populism
 Against Neoliberal Fascism 61

tries to keep alive democratic imaginaries of social justice,

equality, and political freedom. And here we would go
beyond Brown, because populist institutions, in addition to
keeping Homo politicus alive, seem to articulate a novel link
between the popular, law, and institutions, a link that takes
the form of popular resistance to neoliberalism. All of which
seems to lead us to a new problem: namely, the republican
dimension of populism – i.e. trying to understand what type
of republic this form of political articulation would be able
to construct.
 Essay 4
Profaning the Public:
The Plebeian Dimension of
Republican Populism

Is populism anti-institutionalist?
Thinking about the republican dimension of populism means
reversing one of the most deeply rooted prejudices in the field of
contemporary political thought: the insistence that populism
is the antithesis of institutions and the law. Furthermore, this
claim is often accompanied by the accusation that populism
is responsible for destroying institutions by replacing them
with the decisionist figure of a demagogic and manipu-
lative leader.1 A Manichean opposition is thereby created
between the purely decisional (leader) and purely institu-
tional (procedure) dimensions, as if the decisional scope of
populism constitutively excludes the institutional dimension
of republics.
In this essay, we hope to show how abstract these kinds of
statements are, since, if we pay attention to actually existing
populisms, we can confirm the coexistence of different types
of institutional experiences and decision-making instances.
As a result, establishing an external relationship between
the decision and the institutions a priori does not help us
understand the real link between the two. This implies
moving beyond anti-institutionalist readings of populism
– and even beyond Laclau himself, since by placing more
 Profaning the Public 63

emphasis on the instituent dimension of populism (the

ruptural moment outside institutions), Laclau relegates the
instituted dimension (when populism reaches institutions) to
the background.2 What happens if we begin to think that the
ruptural (or instituent) logic of populism might be capable
of instituting other forms of institutionality? What type of
institutions would these be? Could we speak of alternative
institutional forms to neoliberalism?
Before exploring these questions, we need to delve more
deeply into anti-institutionalist readings of populism in order
to show their difficulties. In this regard, the distinction between
the ontic and ontological dimensions of populism mentioned
in Essays 1 and 2 can now help us to better understand the
issue. Most ontic studies of populism are more interested in
determining the “populist content” of particular historical
experiences in their political conjunctures than in examining
the assumptions on which theories of populism are based.
The problem is that this approach combines the descriptive
and the normative levels in a confused way (Ionescu and
Gellner, 1970), attempting to study “concrete” examples of
populism in order to determine, on the level of the given, a
series of characteristics that should be normatively applicable
to all cases.
The ambivalence of this attitude lies in the fact that,
although it is based on the assumption that the given repre-
sents a privileged locus for constructing an explanatory
model, a series of presuppositions determines how this
analysis will be carried out. As a result, a comprehensive
evaluative model for dealing with the “populist fact” already
invisibly exists. We could say that this way of thinking about
populism, although it does not extend to all cases, inherits
the prejudices of positivism – namely: making the “facts” a
neutral space that invisibilizes the political position of those
configuring the very way of describing the thing, and thereby
constructing those facts themselves. At the end of the day,
it seems like the goal is to create a “catalogue” of populist
practices to then “apply” to a given reality to see whether
it meets the pre-established requirements. Thus, the anti-
institutional character of populism preemptively established
64 Profaning the Public

by most studies functions as a constitutive a priori, waiting to

be demonstrated in all cases studied within the empirical field.
What is not always problematized here is what kind of role
and what characteristics institutions are expected to fulfill
such that we could say that populism is incapable of incorpo-
rating them. The insistence that populism is anti-institutional
by nature therefore conceals an absolute vagueness about
how we understand institutions and what would make
them legitimate or illegitimate. In other words, the locus of
enunciation that preemptively determines how we should
understand institutions is invisibilized.
From an ontological point of view, there also seems to be
some difficulty in thinking about the institutional dimension
of populism. The first thing to be rescued here is the need to
think more about how populist logic is articulated than about
its empirical content. This doesn’t mean neglecting the ontic
dimension, but it does mean being aware of its dependence
on the ontological. Now, while Laclau was one of the first
thinkers to raise this difference, he has not given us enough
tools to think ontologically about the institutional aspect
of populism, which often leaves us trapped in the liberal
perspective of procedural democracy or in political apathy,
according to which institutions are a procedural mechanism
in the hands of experts, far from the conflict, leadership,
passions, and affections of political life. That is why it is
important to explore what happens to the logic of political
articulation in the experience of populist governmentality,
especially when it is traversed by affects and leadership.
The first question we can ask is: does the role of affects
and leadership necessarily entail an absence of rationality
or citizenship and a contempt for institutions? Or is it the
lens we are looking through that makes us believe this? And
even if we go further and think about why so many reject
this insistence on the role of affects and leaders, we find that
these two dimensions reveal not only the conflictive nature of
politics, but also the fact that the political nature of institu-
tions is associated with an incalculable excess.
It therefore seems necessary for us to to highlight the
political position that gives rise to and sustains these false
 Profaning the Public 65

dichotomies, and which reacts against the conflictive

dimension of the social. Mouffe is one of the contem-
porary thinkers who has sought most lucidly to untangle
this knot of prejudice. Her early reflections on ideology
(Mouffe, 1991: 167–227) and later writings on democracy
(1993) clearly indicate the role of affects in the construction
of hegemonic identifications and projects in democracies.
Following Mouffe, we can easily detect an entire consensual
matrix (which we will call liberal) behind the rejection or
pejorative understanding of populism, which runs the risk
of embracing post-political discourse when thinking about
institutions.
On the other hand, since populist theory is an exercise
that renders visible the decision inherent in political praxis,
it highlights the narrow-mindedness of political scientists
who reduce democratic institutions to two variables: the
vote of citizens and the procedure of experts. This simplified
view of institutions as a rule to be followed according to
a series of previously regulated procedures means that
any decision-making dimension is considered an affront
to democracy. It therefore seems important to warn that
populist practices, far from rejecting institutions and the
democratic game, take them up in a more complex way –
namely, by drawing attention to the decisional and affective
dimension of political praxis (whether within or outside the
institutions), thereby undermining the lofty vision of those
who prioritize the consensual and procedural dimension of
democracy.
If populist theory allows us to understand one thing it
is that the moment of decision is ineradicable, something
that post-political discourse, through a restricted view of
institutions, reason, and pluralism, seeks to conceal.3 What
is troubling is: why would making this decisional and
conflictive element clear entail institutional weakness? Would
the automation of institutional procedure be healthier? And
isn’t procedure an invisibilized form of decision anyway?
Hasn’t the crisis of European social democracy been the
best proof of the fallacy on which the belief in a procedural
democracy allegedly indifferent to decisionism was based?
66 Profaning the Public

Doesn’t this crisis reflect the entire chain of arbitrariness

decided in the name of procedural democracies?

Ruptural institutionality
Once we have interrogated the arguments for populism
being anti-institutionalist, we can assert that a non-liberal
view of institutions can help us conceptualize populist insti-
tutionality, by abandoning the straitjacket through which
contemporary forms of institutionality tend to be theorized.
But it also forces us to understand two things: on the one
hand, that ontic studies offering some tools for thinking
through the relationship between institutions and populism
– associated, above all, with sociology – lose sight of the fact
that the process of institutionalization must be understood
through the link between the demands of social organizations
and the state. Neglecting this link between social demands
and the state undermines what findings can be made vis-à-vis
populist institutionality, while leaning toward a negative
reading of the purportedly authoritarian or anti-democratic
role populism grants to institutions (Germani, 2019; Zanatta,
2005). And, on the other hand, we need to understand that
those ontological theorizations linking the democratizing role
of populism to its antagonistic and ruptural dimension tend
to emphasize the organizational capacity of social mobili-
zation rooted exclusively outside institutions.
To escape this impasse, we need to reconsider the almost
mechanical identification of institutions with “those on top”
(differential logic) and populism with “those on the bottom”
(logic of equivalence) (Laclau, 2005a: 80–2). Let’s not forget
that Laclau identifies differential logic with the status quo
and the satisfaction of demands through institutional proce-
dures, encouraging the idea that the institutional sphere is
not connected to the logical equivalence of populist articu-
lation. If we consider the problems posed on both the ontic
and ontological levels, we can say that we are facing a
theoretical dilemma. On the one hand, we have sociological
studies dedicated to thinking through populist institutional
 Profaning the Public 67

experiences in terms of anti-democratic authoritarianism,

and on the other hand, we have democratizing theoriza-
tions of populism from an anti-institutional perspective. The
challenge is to theorize a democratic populist institutionality.
Toward this end, we consider the possibility of a populist
institutionality built by “those on the bottom” in terms of a
type of institutional articulation that has been little explored
up to this point – namely, as the institution of rights (and their
respective popular uses). This is the kind of articulation that
has characterized the governments of Cristina Fernández de
Kirchner (2007–15), Rafael Correa (2008–17), Evo Morales
(2006–19), and Lula da Silva (2003–10). It is a type of articu-
lation that allows us to theorize a linkage between popular
demands and institutions that, even though it might have
a decisional aspect, escapes the logic of anti-institutional
immediacy. This instance makes intelligible a form of articu-
lation between political leaders and popular demands that
takes as its object of inquiry the egalitarian aspect of insti-
tutions (Coronel and Cadahia, 2018). According to this
framework, institutions (the state) should not be understood
as a mechanism that segments and orders demands for their
individual satisfaction, but rather as one that incorporates
the contentious dimension of equivalential logic to compete
with those on top for these same (oligarchic or popular) state
forms. In other words, the state (and institutions) become
another antagonistic space in the dispute between those on
the bottom and those on top. At the same time, this forces
us to reconsider a series of issues having to do with social
mobilization, institutions, and the link between the two.
It is very common to understand social mobilization
through its capacity to come together around a “dissatis-
faction” and to configure it as a popular demand. Research
on social movements has emphasized how a social link is
positivized (the demand) out of a negativity (the failure of
the state). But if it is a populist government that takes up the
demand (or even helps to build it) and introduces it antago-
nistically into the institutions until it becomes a right, would
we be simply talking about a differential logic in Laclauian
terms? Or would it be another specific kind of differential
68 Profaning the Public

logic that has not yet been elaborated with the rigor the case
demands? Doesn’t the practical logic of populism bring to the
fore the decisional, antagonistic, and contentious dimension
inherent in all institutional practices? For all these reasons,
it might be time to abandon the liberal perspective – which
assumes that institutions are the antithesis of decisionism and
conflict – and delve more deeply into that other tradition that
has thought about institutions differently. We refer to the old
legacy of republicanism.

Plebeian republicanism
Although the tradition of republican thought can refer
back to the Greeks (Bertomeu, 2015), we are interested in
setting out from contemporary debates, and specifically
those related to the link between conflict, institutions, and
freedom. Without wanting to simplify the discussion, we
could say that there exists a tension within studies on repub-
licanism that rests on a bifurcation between a liberal and a
popular republicanism (Domènech, 2004). The first seeks
to combine the premises of classical liberalism – methodo-
logical individualism, the division of powers, and negative
freedom – with a reflection on republican institutions and
how they might serve to guarantee these principles. This
type of link tries to focus on the consensual dimension of
institutions and abandons a feature that will be key for the
other route: conflict and the forms of organization associated
with popular sovereignty. From this perspective, conflict is
therefore experienced as a flaw or weakness of institutions
and democracy, and its existence as a sign of their deterio-
ration. Hence one of the best representatives of this view,
Philip Petit (1999), has promoted deliberative republicanism
in order to be able to dialogically discern between arbitrary
and non-arbitrary interventions by institutions – i.e. to be
able to determine consensually when a state should intervene
to guarantee the republican freedom of its citizens, and when
it should not. Populism, as an experience that builds power
through conflict, would be seen by this liberal republican
 Profaning the Public 69

current as the antithesis of any institutional project. But if we

focus on those investigations that identify republicanism with
popular power, it is possible to establish a fruitful encounter
with populism.
We distance ourselves from liberal republicanism since it
tends to understand republicanism as a means to dissolve
antagonism, assuming that the freedom of citizens is accom-
plished through consensus and conflict resolution. Against this
view, we are interested in rescuing, on the one hand, the inter-
pretations of the “Atlantic republican tradition” popularized
by the Cambridge School’s reading of Machiavelli’s (2003)
Florentine republicanism, and, on the other, the “conti-
nental republicanism” distinguished by Althusser and Negri
through the republicanism of Spinoza and Marx (Negri,
1999, 2000, 2008, 2013; Althusser, 2006, 2011). This is
because the Atlantic and continental traditions share the
assumption that it is not so much a question of eradicating
conflict as one of the possibility of managing it through insti-
tutions and democracy (Rinesi and Muraca, 2010: 63–6).
The first current allows us to see that, since Machiavelli
– who maintained that there exist in every society “two
diverse humors, that of the people and that of the great”
(Machiavelli, 1996: 16) – conflict has functioned as a means
to achieve the freedom of citizens (Skinner, 1978, 1981), and
even to help improve the laws and institutions that guarantee
that freedom and allow its expansion (cf. Rinesi and Muraca,
2010: 65). The second current, for its part, helps us to think
about how social antagonisms allow for a transformation of
society toward an equality that would promote true freedom.
Now, in both Latin America and Spain, academics like Julia
Bertomeu (2015), Eduardo Rinesi (2015, 2018; Rinesi and
Muraca, 2010), Ailynn Torres Santana (2018), Julio Guanche
(2018), Valeria Coronel and Luciana Cadahia (2018),
Daniel Raventós (2005), and Antoni Domènech (2004),
have inherited these Atlantic and continental approaches
and are revitalizing research on republicanism through an
underexplored aspect: its plebeian dimension. Within these
new studies, we can distinguish between, on the one hand,
research aimed at establishing a link between socialism and
70 Profaning the Public

republicanism, and, on the other, those studies seeking to

connect republicanism to populism, without ignoring the
pioneering nature of socialist research. But, above all, there is
a clear need to distinguish between two kinds of republic: an
oligarchic and aristocratic republic versus a democratic and
plebeian one (Bertomeu, 2015; Rinesi, 2018). As the scholar
of republicanism Julia Bertomeu suggests: “Republicanism
is an ancient tradition, deeply rooted in the classical ancient
Mediterranean, and commonly and rightly associated with
the names Ephialtes, Pericles, Protagoras, and Democritus
(in its democratic-plebeian form) and those of Aristotle and
Cicero (in its anti-democratic form)” (2015). In the modern
world, Bertomeu adds, it also reappears in these same two
variants: a democratic one (which seeks the universalization
of republican freedom and the consequent inclusion of the
poor majority as citizens) and an anti-democratic one (which
seeks to exclude from civic and political life those who live
by their hands, granting a monopoly on political power to
wealthy property-owners).
If we follow the thread of Bertomeu’s argument, it is
difficult to speak of republicanism “plain and simple,” and
not just any form of republicanism would be desirable in
and of itself. Through these two counterposed genealogies
of republicanism, both Bertomeu and Antoni Domènech
– another scholar of the link between republicanism and
socialism – point out that what distinguishes the two is the
role assigned to property and law. Anti-democratic republi-
canism, these authors tell us, seeks to configure a republic
that consists of a small number of property-owners, in which
the law would play a dual role: as a mechanism to preserve
the privileges of a minority, while at the same time dispos-
sessing the majority. In this way, the alleged universalizability
of republican freedom would be deceptive, since only those
whose material conditions of existence are guaranteed would
be able to enjoy it. Those without access to property, by
contrast, are relegated to formal freedom not guaranteed by
the republic.
Furthermore, from this perspective, institutions function
as a mechanism to perpetuate dispossession and inequality
 Profaning the Public 71

(Bertomeu, 2005; Domènech, 2004; Raventós, 2005). When

we think of the systematic deaths of social movement leaders
fighting to preserve their territories in places like Colombia,
Brazil, Mexico, and Central America,4 we can observe more
clearly the operation of this kind of anti-democratic repub-
licanism. These leaders fight for the use of their lands
(properties) and are assassinated through para-state alliances5
to strip them of these lands and, in some cases, turn them
over to transnational corporations. This clear exercise of
land dispossession also entails a dispossession of citizenship
by the state, guaranteeing the privilege of property to a small
few and depriving the majority of their right and freedom
to make use of the land. On the other hand, these authors
help us think about the link with property that this type
of republicanism promotes. In his 2004 book The Eclipse
of Fraternity, Antoni Domènech tells us that, although
modernity involved the destruction of feudalism’s patriarchal
and paternalistic way of life, it nevertheless maintained the
property bond of the feudal lord within the domestic sphere
– namely, a bond of absolute authority. This meant that,
while in the public sphere each property-owner would be a
free citizen of the republic, in the private sphere, by contrast,
he would be master of all that he took as his own: his lands,
workers, wife, and children. Or, in other words, patriarchy
was eliminated in equal treatment vis-à-vis other citizens as
property-owners, but preserved in domestic relations toward
the dispossessed (worker, woman, indigenous, black, etc.).
Democratic or popular republicanism, on the other hand,
would indeed seek to universalize republican freedom, since,
as Bertomeu and Domènech help us to see, this form of
republicanism cannot be understood without the problem
of equality. In other words, if we are all equal, there is no
way to justify inequality within a republic, and, similarly, the
law and institutions cannot be understood as the property
and privilege of the few, but as mechanisms for expanding
the rights of the majority. It is thus assumed that, in a
republic, we are all citizens, and therefore that mechanisms
of inequality and dispossession should be fought by the state
and the law. Along these lines, we could wonder whether or
72 Profaning the Public

not populist experiences in Latin America have been a way

of extending the law, institutions, and freedom to historically
excluded sectors that for a long time have been demanding
the right to have rights (Rinesi, 2015).

Toward a republican populism?

For some time now, distinct efforts have been made to put
the debates on populism and republicanism within the same
constellation. One of the first authors to establish this recon-
ciliation was Carlos Vilas, who in 2009 ventured to describe
populism as “a kind of practical republicanism insofar as it
raises the flag of the primacy of the interests and the well-
being of the whole (people, nation, homeland) over and
above private interests and privileges, and is expressed in the
institutionalization of a wide range of social and economic
rights and public regulations” (2009).6 But it is Eduardo
Rinesi who has made a stronger claim by declaring that Latin
American populism is the form through which republicanism
has developed in Latin America (Rinesi and Muraca, 2010:
59–76).
When wondering about the antagonistic nature of
populism, Rinesi tells us, alongside Muraca, that this is
because “the word people [pueblo] defines a particular
collective subject, the identity of the poor, and its ‘consen-
sualist,’ organicist, and harmonizing component (which is
often reproached by critics on the ‘left’),” but that it is
also associated “with the fact that the same word ‘people’
also defines a universal collective subject, the identity of
all members of the social body as a whole” (Rinesi and
Muraca, 2010: 64). The people thereby reveals an excess,
its irresolvable tension as both a “part” and “the whole.”
However, Rinesi tells us, it would be deceptive to believe that
this tension is located within the people, since it is through
this word that we arrive at the heart of politics itself, given
that “there is politics precisely because this tension exists
(that tension and that pretension: the [pre]tension of a part
that wants to be the whole and the simultaneous affirmation
 Profaning the Public 73

of a whole – which moreover has the same name as that

pretentious part – that denies that part, and any part, the
right to such a pretension)” (65).
Rinesi, citing Lefort, discovers this form of conflict – this
irreducible antagonism that produces a fundamental division
within the social – in the classic republicanism of authors like
Machiavelli (Rinesi and Muraca, 2010: 65). Furthermore,
Rinesi warns, republican freedom and institutions originate
– and gain their permanence – thanks to disunity, conflict,
and social division:

Thus the republic exists because, thanks to institutions and

laws, there exists a field, a terrain, a common horizon, a space
that, so to speak, belongs to everyone, that is universal. But at
the same time a republic only exists … when this common field
is a field … of battle: a field where we encounter (in the double
sense of coming together and confronting) the conflicting desires,
interests, and values of different social sectors, of the different
particularities that, in an irremediably conflictive way, constitute
the social body. (Rinesi and Muraca, 2010: 66)

It is on the basis of this reading that Rinesi opens up

the question of whether “it would not be a worthwhile
theoretical exercise to try to think these two theoretical and
political traditions – republicanism and populism – together,
to articulate their categories (which are not so different) and
their logics (which are the same)” (Rinesi and Muraca, 2010:
73). If we pay attention to the game that he proposes to us,
we can understand that this conflictual reading leads him to a
bold interpretation: namely, to consider republican questions
like “the common good,” “public happiness,” and “justice”
to be chimeras – in light of the inherently conflictual nature
of the “thing,” the res publica – and to what extent this
litigious dimension is precisely what keeps institutions and
freedom alive (Rinesi and Muraca, 2010: 73).
On the basis of Rinesi’s proposal to think of populism and
republicanism jointly, it seems interesting to begin speaking
in terms of a republican populism as the antithesis of neolib-
eralism, as a way of naming one of the ways that plebeian
republicanism has been taking shape in Latin America. This
74 Profaning the Public

entails understanding the republican dimension of populism

within the broader temporal arc of the democratic revolu-
tions in Latin America and the Caribbean, since this gesture
of uniting citizenship and plebeian struggles represents a part
of the contentious history of our continent (James, 2001;
Sanders, 2004; Lasso, 2007).
Therefore, populism should be theorized from Global South
academic institutions in accordance with historiographic
and political science research that seeks to draw attention
to a history of popular institutionality that runs parallel to
the official story of the oligarchic and exclusionary nation-
states inherited from colonial rule. As if Latin American and
Caribbean independence secretly inaugurated two forms of
institutionality and citizenship, two ways of thinking about
the role of the state and the law, two competing historical
forces split between the construction of an unequal and elitist
society and an egalitarian popular society. Understood this
way, then, contemporary populism could be thought of as
the attempt to reactivate that old democratic revolutionary
legacy today, through the constituent assemblies of the Andes
and the populisms of the Southern Cone.
We are referring to that old legacy set into motion
beginning with the Haitian Revolution and the profoundly
transgressive gesture of saying, on a continent dominated
by slavery and colonialism, that: “All citizens, from now
on, shall be known by the generic denomination of blacks”
(Article 14 of the Haitian Constitution of 1805). That is to
say, when black slaves became conscious of the fact that they
too had the right to have rights, and, even more so, when
they assumed that, that it was their responsibility to univer-
salize the secret of plebeian republics: that there can be no
truly republican freedom if it is not possible to build equality.
So, faced with the conception of property that perpetuates
links of inequality within oligarchic and anti-democratic
republicanism, our legacies of plebeian republicanism instead
seek to destroy and desecrate the last remnant of patriarchal
property: the belief that the property relation legitimizes
some type of dominion – and thereby dispossession – over
nature, oneself, and others. If nobody can claim the right to
 Profaning the Public 75

possess and dispossess others as they please, it is because the

res publica, far from being the exclusive dominion of some, is
instead a social bond that we build among everyone, through
an egalitarian commitment.
 Essay 5
Toward an Internationalist
Populism

The beautiful souls of pure causes

It is very common to find in academic spaces an almost
immediate aversion to the link that populism builds between
the figure of the people and that of the leader. One of the
most common arguments, stemming from both the liberal
and autonomist socialist traditions, consists of warning us
about the identitarian nationalisms that are forged around
this relationship. While we showed in Essays 2 and 3 that the
logic of political articulation that populism proposes does not
give shape to the identitarian danger that many warn about,
we still need to develop more precisely the question of nation-
alism that seems to nest within the link between the people
and the leader – more than anything because this feature of
populism could function as its own limit, as a kind of border
preventing it from building an internationalist alternative
beyond the narrow and closed circle of the state. So it seems
important, first of all, for us to try to understand better how
this relationship is configured and how unfounded many of
the prejudices associated with it are, and, second, to show
what kind of ​​a nation populism allows us to think and why
it is able to maintain – against what the detractors say – an
internationalist openness.
 Toward an Internationalist Populism 77

The first thing to note is that the figure of the leader should
not be limited to a head of state, as critics of populism often
see it, but should instead be taken up in a broader sense to
include those we have called social movement or territorial
leaders in Latin America and the Caribbean. Figures like
Berta Cáceres in Honduras, Francia Márquez in Colombia,
Marielle Franco in Brazil, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael
Correa in Ecuador, Gustavo Petro in Colombia, and Cristina
Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina – to name a few contem-
porary examples – are part of a long tradition of building
popular leadership in Latin America and the Caribbean.1
This broadening of the meaning of the word “leader” allows
us to move away from the old Eurocentric imaginary fixated
on hackneyed figures like Napoleon, Hitler, and Mussolini,
while helping us to think about the question of Latin
American leadership according to its own logic and without
preconceptions forged in other latitudes.
It is not insignificant to recall the historical disdain that
even authors like Marx displayed for the complex figure of
Simón Bolívar. Nor should we forget that, once the experi-
ences of European totalitarianism had ended, a belief was
projected – as if through a sort of upside-down mirror – that
dictators of all political stripes are actually manufactured in
peripheral countries and not in old Europe. Isn’t the famous
genre of the Latin American dictator novel2 one of the most
consolidated forms of European colonialism, and of the
blindness of certain political positions that prevents popular
power built on the basis of plebeian leadership from being
legible? We could ask ourselves whether the animosity toward
Latin American and Caribbean leaders does not rest on some
archetypes specific to the European colonial mentality, which
finds it incredibly difficult to grant any sort of rationality and
political possibility to these types of figures that have always
oscillated between social mobilization and political parties.
Furthermore, some of the figures who have become heads of
state, like Evo Morales, built their leadership thanks to their
participation in a social or territorial movement.3
By broadening the idea of the leader, the historical perse-
cution of political and social leaders in Latin America
78 Toward an Internationalist Populism

thereby becomes clearer, a phenomenon spanning from the

systematic planning of murders – as occurs in Central
America, Colombia, and Brazil – to judicial persecution,
juridical coups, and imprisonment – as has been occurring
in Ecuador, Argentina, and Brazil. Oligarchies can no longer
resort to the civilian–military coups of the 1950s, 1960s, and
1970s, but are now capable of generating the same effects
from within the juridical logic of the rule of law. Or, put
another way, the Latin American right can now systemati-
cally murder and persecute leaders without interrupting the
democratic narrative.
Therefore, the first question we would like to ask those
in the academy who feel such hostility toward these leaders
is the following: what do they think motivates this perse-
cution, and don’t they find it to be a major coincidence that,
when a political, social, or territorial leader becomes critical
of neoliberalism, persecution, smears, and, in the worst
cases, imprisonment or death almost automatically come
into play? Now it is we who wonder what kind of secret
power these leaders must personify in their flesh that makes
them so unbearable for the current world order? And we also
broaden this concern by daring to ask what role the academy
plays when professors – from their comfortable offices, and
distant from political praxis – disdainfully observe or reject
the actions of a leader, reproducing in their assessment all the
stereotypes historically associated with Eurocentric epistemic
colonialism.
Let’s dig a little deeper into this prejudice to understand
more thoroughly what kind of threat the figure of the leader
must pose to the health of a republic. Here we find a return
to the old metaphysical opposition between the idea and
the body. The idea, or the regulatory ideal – if we put it in
modern terms – functions as a sort of uncontaminated ideal
archetype that finds contemporary expression in categories
like “correct institutional procedure,” “technocratic values,”
“the rule of law,” and “the common will.” In all these cases,
the same symptom operates: namely, the belief that there
is a kind of order beyond the decisional instance – i.e. an
order that depends not on the singular corporality of the
 Toward an Internationalist Populism 79

one making a decision, but on an abstract force operating

outside of any singularity. This is how we can understand
abstract ideas like neutral
​​ institutions (liberalism), effective
market procedure (technocracy), and the harmonious sum of
all singular wills (autonomist socialism). The problem with
these beliefs is that they seem to share the same ontology:
the existence of a non-contingent order, an order that exists
outside of our here-and-now, so that any singular incar-
nation – any corporality that takes up that order – does
nothing but contaminate it, betray it, and stain the purity
of its origin.
Now, this diffuse defense of autonomy (or of some abstract
idea of the common or social good) seems to take for granted
the existence of a superiority of ideals that are themselves
beyond or above the flesh of any person who leads. Any
political formation – which prides itself on being effec-
tively rational and rigorously consistent – instead of having
a preponderant leader, should instead uphold an idea in
that place, e.g. the concept of social democracy, socialism,
or communism, etc. Thus, a proper and serious political
formation would be defined by being bound together by a
concept – likely institutionalized in a political party or some
kind of political or social organization – with members
following this or that idea, independent of leadership.
The presence of a leader, the mere possibility that a
political project might be embodied in a corporality traversed
by time and its finitude, seems to set off all the alarm bells.
On the one hand, this is because, when a leader linked to
a people emerges hoisting the banner of an emancipatory
political project, for many it immediately evokes the specter
of terror. These alarm bells are rung in proportion to the
fear that every collective project perched upon this link will
always contain in its most intimate folds the possibility of
unleashing authoritarianism, or, in the worst of cases, totali-
tarian horror. If the relationship of political projects among
peoples remains under the influence of a leader, then every-
thing would be in the hands of the moods or sympathies of
the moment, setting aside the durability and stability afforded
by building upon abstract principles.
80 Toward an Internationalist Populism

The real trap – the unconfessed secret behind these views

that make the leader into an extremely dangerous figure – is
the belief that there is something to preserve and an order
to follow. Believing that this exists, therefore, they fear that
an individual might want to appropriate this secret and
convince the people that this abstract idea or regulatory
ideal can live in their own finite body. However, according
to the theory of populism that we are trying to develop
here, there is no such thing as an ideal to “preserve” against
the betrayal by a leader, but rather this leader is the failed
personification of the irreplaceable, of what could be but is
not yet. The leader is the figure who, through their corpo-
rality, positivizes popular articulations that are rooted in the
radically contingent, negative, and indeterminate nature of
social being.
Despite the antipathy that the figure of the leader generates,
in this regard we follow Mouffe’s position that “it is very
difficult to find examples of important political movements
without prominent leaders” (2018: 70). What’s more, we
could add that even those experiences, historical or theoretical,
that sought to capture concretely, or think through, mecha-
nisms for achieving the greatest possible horizontality had to
appeal to a leader at some point. And this is as old as the very
idea of the West, whose Athenian democracy in its golden age
had a leader of the stature of Pericles (c.495–429 bc). So we
are going to leave aside for a moment the prejudices around
the relationship between people and leader, and work more
carefully through the secret of this link as seen through the
lenses of populist theory.

The people and its leader

When thinking about the people, it becomes essential to
pause over two conceptual distinctions that detractors of
populism often confuse. In the first place, it is fundamental
not to conflate the people of populism with the Freudian mass
or group. Second, it is important not to conflate the Freudian
group with the primal horde, because this confusion is what
 Toward an Internationalist Populism 81

has led many to analogize the populist leader to the father of

the primal horde, to understand the leader – erroneously –
through the Freudian metaphor of Totem and Taboo (1990a
[1913–14]).4
Let’s begin with the conceptual distinction between the
Freudian group and the people. When Laclau (2005a) revisited
the key texts on mass psychology, he found that these were
based on two assumptions, from which the phenomenon of
the masses was then constructed as an aberration. We refer
in the first place to the assumption that the normal/patho-
logical binary pair corresponds to the opposition between
rational forms of social organization and mass phenomena,
associating the former with the normal and the latter with the
pathological. And, second, that the rationality/irrationality
pair corresponds to the contrast between the individual and
the group, binding irrationality to group formations. These
highly popular binary oppositions – for example, in works
by Gustave Le Bon (1896) and Hippolyte Taine (1878) –
were not destabilized until Freud’s theoretical intervention,
which, according to Laclau, produced “the most radical
breakthrough which had so far been accomplished in mass
psychology” (2005a: 52).
Freud, in a deconstructive gesture already present at the
beginning of his book Group Psychology and the Analysis
of the Ego (1990 [1920–2]), rejected the sharp separation
between individual psychology and social psychology, since
the other is always a constitutive element of the psychic
apparatus. So he proposed that the individual/group tandem
should not be treated as an exclusive relationship between
opposite poles, but as a complex relationship, insofar as the
social always cuts across the constitution of subjectivity.5
Laclau followed this gesture in order to relativize accusations
that populism is irrational or pathological, and accom-
panied the traces left by Freud to develop his notion of the
people, but he did so without thereby connecting it to the
notion of the group. Laclau – like Freud – set aside the idea
of ​​suggestion or manipulation to explain group unity, and
placed affect and the libidinal bond in a decisive position
for grasping the nature of the social bond. In any case, “the
82 Toward an Internationalist Populism

social bond would be a libidinal bond; as such, it relates to

everything that concerns ‘love’” (Laclau, 2005a: 53).
Let’s keep in mind that, in order to study groups, and thus
to be able to establish how the libidinal bond operates in
collective phenomena, Freud took as paradigmatic the type
of group that is highly organized, durable, artificial, and has
a leader. He drew two conclusions from his work on the
cases of the church and the army: first, that each individual
has a double libidinal bond, with the leader on the one hand,
and with other members of the group on the other. Second,
that what is essential about the group and what provides its
unity is affect. And that, in this double bond, the libidinal
tie to the leader is essential, so much so that the bond falls
apart in the absence of that tie. This is the case because, in
characterizing the two directions of the libidinal bond, Freud
showed that the bond between members of the group should
be understood in terms of identification. Among the different
types of identification, Freud refers to the promotion of a link
born of sharing a quality with a person who is not the object
of sexual drives, and in the case of the group this shared
quality is love for the leader.6 In turn, Freud indicates that
the link between each group member and the leader should
be understood in terms of idealization or being in love (the
lover transfers a considerable part of the narcissistic libido
to the loved object; by locating the object in the place of the
ideal, the lover affectively invests in the object as he did with
his own ego in the narcissistic phase).
Now, this is where Laclau takes a detour that allows him
to establish a distinction between the mass or group and the
people, through a two-step argument: first following Freud,
and then distancing himself. First, Laclau finds another form
of social aggregation in Freud’s own text that is distinct from
that involved in the case of the group with a leader – i.e. the
double directionality of the libidinal bond. This is the form
of grouping that “by means of too much ‘organization’” can
“acquire secondarily the characteristics of an individual”
(1990 [1920–2]: 80).7 Second, distancing himself from
Freud, Laclau asserted that these two ways of establishing
a group (the group with a leader, and an organization)
 Toward an Internationalist Populism 83

do not correspond to two different types of groups (as

Freud argued) but to two logics of aggregation present in
the constitution of all social groups. This conclusion was
crucial for grasping populism, because then Laclau could
insist that the people should never be understood as a social
aggregation that is bound together solely by a libidinal
investment (identification and idealization), but that it also
entails organization.
From there, a first distinction between group and people
arises. The populist people is not a political articulation
composed of merely libidinal ties, but is also made up of
organizations. We insist that the people is not only made up
of love for the leader and identification among its members:
it is also composed of a variety of organizations. The people
includes unions, political parties, and the most diverse forms
of social movements (social clubs, neighborhood associa-
tions, human rights organizations, student centers, groups
chaired by village priests, LGBT+ and feminist groupings,
etc.). Therefore, the people cannot be understood as an undif-
ferentiated mass of individuals held together purely by the
libidinal tie. The people is never the same as soccer fans, an
angry mob, or a sum of individuals who have fallen under the
hypnotic influence of a captivating leader.
Strangely, there is an image that is usually pointed
to as irrefutable proof by those who defend the identity
between the Freudian group and the people, which from
our perspective seems to prove entirely the opposite. We
refer to photos of the populist plazas of Kirchnerism that
on numerous occasions brought the leader and her people
together at the geographic heart of Argentina’s great political
rallies – the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires – between 2007
and 2015. If we pay close attention, we see how President
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner walks into a plaza that is full
of people, but also overflowing with innumerable different
insignia referring to the variety of organizations present, and
with banners testifying to membership in, or sympathy for,
different organizations. This practice of public expression,
which is absolutely widespread in Argentina, shows that,
far from an undifferentiated mass under the influence of a
84 Toward an Internationalist Populism

leader who manipulates it at will, we instead witness in these

political rallies the constitution of a people that manifests
and articulates itself in pursuit of a series of demands through
a variety of organizations.
We can also refer to another, less well-known image:
the presence of the Colombian people at the scene of Jorge
Eliecer Gaitán’s murder. The assassination, the confirmation
by the people of their leader’s absence, and their power-
lessness to convert their demands into state policy all laid
the foundations for extending the struggle through popular
organizing outside the institutions. This gave rise to one of
Colombia’s most controversial moments: the April 9, 1948
Bogotazo, and the subsequent conformation of the liberal
guerrillas of Marquetalia (today the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia – FARC).
A second fundamental distinction between the group
and the people is that, while in the Freudian schema the
group articulates psychic instances, in Laclau’s schema the
people articulates demands. And we must not forget that the
inscription of a demand presupposes a complexity in which
the desire of the subjects is implicated. Following Lacan,
Laclau takes the demand to be an operation in two parts
that are bound together: need and desire.8 The people is thus
a political subjectivity constituted through the articulation of
different equivalent demands that are bound together in an
empty signifier, or a demand capable of containing the others
(the name of the leader).
With these two distinctions in mind, we can say that the
people implies the construction of a complex web connecting
the equivalence of demands in relation to a leader and the
absorption of those same demands through organization,
i.e. institutionalized forms of absorption. It is thus worth
returning at this point to the widespread idea that populism
can only exist as such in a position of opposition, as an
expression of anti-status-quo sentiment that only promotes
the destabilization of the established order, the disruption of
institutionalized forms of exchange. Perhaps what underlies
this type of interpretation of populism is an ignorance of the
organizational dimension of constituting the people. In this
 Toward an Internationalist Populism 85

regard, we have already argued the opposite in Essay 4: that

populism goes beyond the mere moment of rupture – it also
generates institutions and creates the republic. So it is not
simply about understanding populism only in its antagonistic
aspect, because, from the outset, the people is also made up
of a fabric of institutions.
But there is still a third aspect that we should mention
when distinguishing the group from the people. Let’s return
for a moment to the theorization of the libidinal tie central
to constituting the Freudian group. Following Biglieri and
Perelló (2012), we can see how Laclau rescues from Freud’s
work the argument that he developed in the sections of
Group Psychology entitled “A Differentiating Grade in the
Ego” and “Postscript.” There, Laclau finds Freud arguing the
thesis that the libidinal bond between group members and
the leader is not only one of being in love or idealization, but
also one of identification. In other words, the link with the
leader is also endowed with the same type of libidinal bond
that operates between peers, i.e. other group members. This
aspect is key, because what we can immediately deduce is
that the leader is always in pari materia vis-à-vis the led, a
primus inter pares. Indeed, if in addition to being in love, the
led maintain a bond of identification with the leader, what
Freud is proposing – and with which Laclau absolutely agrees
– is that the leader and followers share some element (other
than sexual drives) that puts them in a position of parity and
enables a mutual bond.
Hence, if the libidinal bond between the followers and
the leader has a double dimension (being in love and identi-
fication), the prospect of a purely narcissistic leader is ruled
out. Laclau puts it as follows: “as he participates in that
very substance of the community which makes identification
possible, his identity is split: he is the father, but also one of
the brothers” (2005a: 59). And with this he reinforces the
idea that the populist leader can never be the narcissistic
despotic father who is of the classic imaginary, because, as
his link with his followers is forged both by being in love
and by identification, his right to lead is based on a shared
trait or element that group members recognize as outstanding
86 Toward an Internationalist Populism

in him. Thus, the leader is always responsible to and held

accountable by the community:

since his right to rule is based on the recognition by other

group members of a feature of the leader which he shares, in a
particularly pronounced way, with all of them, the leader is, to
a considerable extent, accountable to the community. The need
for leadership could still be there – for structural reasons that
Freud does not really explore, but to which we shall return in
a moment – but it is a far more democratic leadership than the
one involved in the notion of the narcissistic despot. We are, in
fact, not far away from that peculiar combination of consensus
and coercion that Gramsci called hegemony. (Laclau, 2005a: 60)

This leaves us at the gates of our second clarification: the

leader of the people is not analogous to the narcissistic father
of the primal horde. Often, the populist leader is equated
with the father of the horde that Freud uses as a metaphor
in Totem and Taboo (1990a [1913–14]). Those making this
comparison think of an absolute leader who captures for
himself all the enjoyment that others ultimately lack. But
those making this analogy lose sight of the fact that the
father of the horde corresponds to a logical moment prior to
social constitution, so it is clear that he cannot be the same as
whoever occupies the place of the leader within an established
social formation. In any case, in Totem and Taboo, Freud
depicts the origin of culture; the authoritarian father of the
primal horde had to be killed and devoured by the brothers in
order to give rise to the constitution of society and to recon-
figure leadership as precisely a place and therefore able to be
occupied by one of the brothers. Therefore, once the leader’s
place has been established as such, whoever hopes to occupy
that place will always be one of the brothers, a primus inter
pares who will always be in the place of the father but who
will never be the father. Furthermore, whoever occupies that
place will always do so under the threat of being killed by
the others.
Having established these two conceptual clarifications
that distinguish the people from both the group or mass and
the primal horde, it is undeniable that the leader occupies
 Toward an Internationalist Populism 87

a fundamental place in any populist articulation. The first

question that helps us to address this importance can be
found if we follow the outline left by Laclau when he states
that we cannot understand the place of the leader merely as
an empty and neutral space. There is something else there
to explore, of course, if we do not want our analysis to be
trapped in the formalism implied by the institutionalization
of the leader’s place (say, for example, the legal dimension
and the procedural aspects of democracy, which are, of
course, also extremely important). If we also hope to take
into account the notion of politeia in its full breadth as “a
community’s whole political way of life, where constitu-
tional arrangements represent only a formal crystallization”
(Laclau, 2005a: 169) – to which we could add Mouffe’s
(1993) argument that this notion also entails the formation
of political subjectivities – we must bear in mind that the
place of the leader is never unaffected by the antagonisms
that historically shaped it, by the elements articulated there
by the people, and by who occupies it now and the traces
carved by those who occupied it previously. There is a
mutual contamination between the person occupying the
place of the leader and the very nature of that place.
This contamination is due, on the one hand, to the fact
that each new antagonistic setting means inscribing new
marks that make that place of the leader always – at some
point – a different place. In other words, the place of the
leader bears the mark of the populist plebs (the hegemonic
force) that arrogates for itself the representation of the
populus. And, on the other hand, it will bear the mark of the
person who, through their very body, sets the political articu-
lations of a given context into motion. Someone needs to
embody the will of the people, the assembly of the people, the
idea, the concept, or the goal. The second issue that tells us
about the importance of the leader in populism is associated
with the name of the leader and the performative aspect of
naming. Laclau refers to the singularity that the name of the
leader imprints on the people: “an assemblage of heteroge-
neous elements kept equivalentially together only by a name
is, however, necessarily a singularity” (2005a: 100). He also
88 Toward an Internationalist Populism

tells us that the name of the leader becomes the foundation

of equivalence, since “[i]n this way, almost imperceptibly,
the equivalential logic leads to singularity, and singularity to
identification of the unity of the group with the name of the
leader” (2005a: 100). Therefore, beyond the centrality that
leadership acquires for populism, this is never about a merely
individual will that disposes of things as it pleases, gaining
more or less autocratic features depending on the case.
Rather, it is that the name of the populist leader expresses
the singularity of a people embodied in the singularity of a
body. Once this name becomes the name of the people itself,
we can say that we are witnessing the expression of a political
subjectivity, a corporality, and a discursive context capable
of accounting for the crystallization of a unique political
moment traversed by specific antagonisms and demands that
are inscribed in historical legacies and shared traditions.
By naming the people, the leader names a collective
construct that goes far beyond their own person and opens
up to the possibility of a future that does not yet exist. The
people far exceeds the leader, to the extent that the latter
will never be able to dominate or manipulate at will what
that people generates. The proper name goes far beyond the
person embodying leadership, to the point that the one does
not coincide with the other. Here it is worth bringing up as an
example the words delivered by Hugo Chávez Frías in several
of his speeches, since they reflect the wisdom of the populist
leader regarding his place:

Chávez you are no longer Chávez. You are a people. Chávez

became a people. As the great Colombian leader Gaitán once said,
I am no longer truly me, I am no longer me, I am a people and you
– this is how I feel – I feel embodied in you. As I said and I will
say again: you, Venezuelan girl, are also Chávez. You, Venezuelan
boy, are also Chávez. You are also Chávez, worker, grandmother,
grandfather. You are also Chávez, Venezuelan child, you too are
Chávez. Chávez truly became a people. (Hugo Chávez Frías,
Barcelona, Anzoátegui, Venezuela, campaign speech)9

Chávez (the person/character) and Chavismo do not

coincide with one another. Furthermore, it is not that the
 Toward an Internationalist Populism 89

people is incarnated in the leader’s individuality (narcissistic

love), but rather that the people uses the name of the leader
– thanks to them offering up their body – to personify its
own historical strength. This is not about a leader projecting
his individuality onto the people, but a people reactivating
its historical strength through the body of the leader. In
other words, the leader belongs to the people (and not the
other way around). If the name of the leader becomes an
inscription surface for various claims and antagonisms, this is
precisely because it no longer belongs only to the person who
embodies it. This allows us to realize that the leader does not
manipulate and shape the “masses” to their every fancy and
whim as an extension of their limitless enjoyment or private
passions. Rather, on the contrary, the leader makes their
body available for the construction of a popular historical
force – i.e. a national-popular project.
We now arrive at the second point that we would like to
work through in this essay: the problem of the national in
terms of the national-popular, since this idea would seem to
be tied to identitarianism and to represent an insurmountable
barrier to building an internationalist project. To do so,
therefore, we will attempt to explain better what we under-
stand by “the national” and why we believe it should not be
associated with identitarianism.

Toward an internationalist populism

There is a long tradition in Latin American debates that is
not well known in Europe and the United States, and which
clearly distinguishes between two ideas of the nation. The
first of these is built “from above” by Latin American oligar-
chies. While coinciding with the emergence of independent
republics, this idea of the nation internalizes all of the cultur-
alist remnants of colonialism, promoting – despite its avowed
cosmopolitan liberalism – the separation and isolation of
peoples. This is, therefore, an idea of ​​the nation that tends to
invisibilize and impede the cultural and political production
by oppressed subjects, reproducing the framework of colonial
90 Toward an Internationalist Populism

contempt for and the exclusion of the people from the

construction of the national ethos. The second, on the other
hand, is the idea of a nation constructed “from below,” by
those subjects historically excluded from the other national
narrative. This idea inherits the entire imaginary of popular
struggles and transformations that have unfolded from the
conquest to the present day.
While the first idea of the nation received the name of
nationalism (or the oligarchic nation), the second has instead
been called the national-popular. However, there is a debate
(that we discussed in Essay 3) between those who identify
nationalism with the figure of the state and who therefore
assume that any idea of the nation-state threatens and betrays
the national-popular, and those of us, who, on the contrary,
believe that these two national forces (the oligarchic and
the popular) are capable of generating different state-forms.
Thus, to this very day we can find an irresolvable tension
between elitist and popular configurations of the nation-state.
This genealogy first emerges in Latin America with
José Carlos Mariátegui’s proposals in Peru in the 1920s
(Mariátegui, 1971) and the early reception of Antonio
Gramsci in Argentina, beginning in 1947.10 Contemporaries
who nevertheless missed the opportunity to get to know each
other’s most relevant intellectual work,11 Mariátegui and
Gramsci both understood that the emergence of the national-
popular entailed the construction of a hegemonic project for
popular emancipation in countries where the heterogeneity
of the social meant the absence of a homogeneous political
subject (the working class) or indigenous subject (a particular
ethnic group). Thus, Mariátegui and Gramsci both knew
that any social transformation must be connected to a motor
force articulating the constitutive heterogeneity of the social
and shaping it into a popular will. And that motor force
could not be built outside the register of feeling – hence,
the careful attention both thinkers gave to the old romantic
problem of the link between politics and aesthetics.12 It is
no coincidence that both thinkers would work through the
problem of the national-popular through the question of
literature in peripheral countries.13
 Toward an Internationalist Populism 91

What is interesting about all this is that, for both thinkers,

national-popular projects did not exclude the possibility
of constituting internationalist solidarity among oppressed
subjects – they were its condition of possibility. Or, in other
words, it was the possibility of embracing their condition as
oppressed that could awaken solidarity among those finding
themselves in a similar situation. So, concrete struggles
against local oppressions would give rise to a universal form
of solidarity and emancipation. Even Mariátegui goes so far as
to say that “[t]he boundaries between nationalism and inter-
nationalism are not yet well clarified,” and that “[e]lements
of one [nationalism or internationalism] sometimes inter-
twine, with elements of the other.” Furthermore, he argued
that “[e]vidence shows that national realities are not neces-
sarily in conflict with international realities,” but that the
problem of the national arises from “[t]he inability to
understand and acknowledge this second and higher reality
[which] is a simple myopia, a functional limitation. Dated,
mechanical forms of intelligence employed in former national
perspectives are incapable of understanding the new, vast,
complex international perspective. They reject and deny
it because they cannot adapt to it.” To which he adds:
“nationalism is valid as a claim, but not as a negation”
(2011 [1924]: 259–60). Therefore, it is local struggles for
emancipation that, Mariátegui continues, “weave a dense
network of international solidarity that prepares the future of
humanity” (Mariátegui, 2010 [1923]: 240). These passages
from Mariátegui allow us to corroborate the idea that, in
contrast to reactionary or identitarian nationalisms, it is
possible to discover affirmative (or national-popular) nation-
alisms capable of giving shape to a local subject that can
contribute to universal emancipation. To borrow a term
formulated by Colombian thinker José Figueroa, we are
speaking of a situated universality, not a formal and abstract
universalism that seeks to mold each of our cultures like a
straitjacket, but rather a local creation that expresses, in its
own concreteness, a possible future for humanity.14
While it’s true that the tradition of populist thought is
best recognized in its Gramscian legacy, it would not be a
92 Toward an Internationalist Populism

bad idea to begin to reclaim Mariátegui’s work, since both

traditions shape the historical field of inquiry through which
we can understand the emergence of populist theory. This
displacement allows us to grant the populist link between
the leader and the people a broader temporal arc of Latin
American debates, helping to further complicate the already
problematic link between the national and the international.
What should be emphasized here is that, if identitarian
nationalisms promote identitarian closure and do not allow
for heterogeneity, popular tradition instead sets out from
that constitutive heterogeneity as an ineradicable element of
the national-popular ethos. Rooted in an idea of the nation
born from the injustice of exclusion, it carries within itself
the secret of an openness toward the other, an openness
that tends toward the inclusion of the excluded. Regarding
the specific case of populism, critics therefore often confuse
national causes – inherited from the national-popular – with
the exclusionary nationalism characteristic of oligarchies.
Either because populism refers to the nation-state or because
it configures the people in relation to a leader, the vast
majority of works on the subject have taken for granted that
populism is incompatible with internationalism.
However, the lack of research on populism’s international
or transnational dimension (we use these interchangeably
because, as we will show later, the distinction is problematic)
has begun to improve, however slightly. We see proof of this
incipient interest in the subject in two recently published
articles – one from the team led by Yannis Stavrakakis,
and the other from Luis Blengino.15 As to the first, De
Cleen, Moffitt, Panayotu, and Stavrakakis (2019) explore
the notion of transnational populism through Laclau and
Mouffe’s discourse theory and a case study of the Democracy
in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25). They propose two
conceptual distinctions. On the one hand, they distinguish
between populism and nationalism, believing that the key
distinction lies in the basic structure determining each. While,
in terms of spatial metaphors, nationalist discourse “consists
of the horizontal in/out distinction between members
and non-members of the nation,” populist discourse “is
 Toward an Internationalist Populism 93

structured around a vertical, down/up axis that refers to

power, status, and hierarchical socio-cultural and/or socio-
economic positioning” (De Cleen et al., 2019: 6–7).
On the other hand, they distinguish international populism
from transnational populism. International populism is where
populists represent peoples – in the plural – as (national)
particularities that cooperate strategically and temporarily
with respect to certain international affairs in a kind of
“marriage of convenience” (as with the latest wave of Latin
American populism when leaders sought to coordinate the
creation of the Bank of the South, or groups within the
European Parliament such as Europe of Freedom and Direct
Democracy, and Europe of Nations and Freedom). These are
“cases where populists relying on nation-based conceptions
of ‘the people’ temporarily enter into alliances with other
‘national’ populists within an international setting” (De
Cleen et al., 2019: 8). Transnational populism, by contrast,
points toward building a people – in the singular – that
transcends national borders and seeks to go beyond the
conjunctural necessities and particularities of each separate
people-nation. If international populism is still anchored
in the people-nation, transnational populism aims to forge
a transnational people that precisely transcends particular
national locations. Transnational populism, moreover, always
maintains the populist element of a dichotomizing discourse
whereby a transnational people “is discursively constructed
as a large powerless group through opposition to ‘the elite’
conceived as a small and illegitimately powerful group” (De
Cleen et al., 2019: 8).
These authors argue that the DiEM25 represents – in
the contemporary political context – the best example of
transnational populism, thus defined. The key to DiEM25
lay in its strategy of establishing a transnational people. The
authors describe how DiEM25 was born in response to the
experience of SYRIZA’s populism in Greece, and fundamen-
tally how its capitulation to the “Troika”16 – especially after
the 2015 referendum – was an affront to democracy insofar
as it exposed the anti-democratic structure of the European
Union. Faced with the failure of populism on the national
94 Toward an Internationalist Populism

level, the authors argue that DiEM25 represents a trans-

national strategy for democratizing Europe, and that, from
the beginning, it acquired the populist element of dichoto-
mizing discourse by establishing an antagonistic frontier
between the people – “those on the bottom” – and the elite.
And its transnational character was also present from the
beginning insofar as it sought to build a people beyond the
national level to stand up to a “global elite” comprising
supranational institutions, transnational corporations, etc.
However, and despite this transnational commitment, the
authors do not refrain from noting the inescapable presence
of the national component. The equivalential chain of trans-
national populism anchored in the signifier “democracy”
pushed DiEM25’s discursive structure to bring together
demands for the democratization of the European Union
with demands for the restoration of popular sovereignty at
the regional, national, and local levels. In any case, DiEM25
had to embrace this connection and uphold “transnational
democracy as a condition for democracy on any of the lower
levels” (De Cleen et al., 2019: 14).
From our perspective, this suggestive analysis fails to
clarify two aspects: on the one hand, the place of the
leader, which is key to any definition of populism, since,
apart from mentioning Yanis Varoufakis, it tells us nothing
about the place of the leader within a transnational populist
articulation. On the other hand, the distinction between
international populism and transnational populism becomes
problematic at one point. If international populism entails
merely bringing peoples together as national particular-
ities defined as “those on the bottom,” and transnational
populism also implies the construction of a people from
below, but one which “surpasses the boundaries of the
nation-state,” doesn’t this approach somehow understand
the universal as unmediated by particularities? Would this
transnational people be a people uncontaminated by national
particularities? In fact, in this case study, the authors note
tensions within DiEM25 in this regard when they point out
that “its move towards the transnational is not total, and the
national remains crucial to its demands for democracy” (De
 Toward an Internationalist Populism 95

Cleen et al., 2019: 17). Perhaps the appearance of DiEM25

in national elections should be understood as proof that
(national) particularities are ineradicable in the conformation
of a transnational people.17 In any case, Laclau and Mouffe’s
perspective helps us to see that such a “total” movement
toward the transnational, completely detached from any
national particularity, will always be impossible.
In the second text we mentioned at the outset of this
section – that of Blengino – we find the opposite thesis –
namely, that it is only through the affirmation of (national)
particularities that a populist internationalism can be built.
Hence the paradox that it is impossible to sustain an
international populism without (populist) nationalisms. Luis
Blengino (2019) arrives at this conclusion when he takes
up Foucault and Laclau to make a counter-diagnosis of the
present, where the transnational dimension of populism
occupies a fundamental position. His text originates in
opposition to Slavoj Žižek’s diagnosis18 of the present,
in which he does not hesitate to criticize populism and
to belittle recent populist experiences in South America.
According to Žižek’s diagnosis, the current contest between
self-regulated financial globalization and the xenophobic
neo-fascist reaction will result in a model of capitalism that
is as efficient as it is authoritarian. This is the great threat
that Latin American populisms were helpless against, since
populism “is ‘an opium of the people’ at best, as in the case
of Kirchnerism, and fascism at worst, i.e. ‘a combination of
left and right’ with the goal of changing something so that
nothing changes, as in Peronism” (Blengino, 2019). Against
these arguments, Blengino proposes rescuing the geopolitical
aspect of Foucault’s history of governmentality, which is
what is lacking in the theoretical-political wager of Laclau’s
populism. It is thus a question of adding the variable of
anti-imperialism – understood as an abstract and imposing
universalism – to make an accurate diagnosis of the times and
to put into perspective the Latin American populist experi-
ences that Žižek so confusedly mentions.
By introducing the variable of anti-imperialism, Blengino
encourages us to distinguish between two types of populism:
96 Toward an Internationalist Populism

populisms of the global core (which seek to maintain or

reinforce a position of privilege within the world-system)
and the anti-imperialist populisms of the global periphery
(which seek to change their position within the world-
system). This distinction, moreover, also corresponds to the
dividing line between reactionary populisms – supported by
nationalist and xenophobic authoritarianism – and emanci-
patory populisms, whose distinctive characteristic is their
transnational dimension. Hence, for peripheral/emancipatory
populisms, there is no possibility of successfully emerging
from their antagonism with local oligarchies if they don’t
embrace the international context as their framework for
struggle. The antagonism that peripheral/emancipatory
populisms embody vis-à-vis local oligarchies may in principle
appear simply in terms of internal politics, but it is neces-
sarily linked to a struggle that transcends national borders,
since it presumes “a problem of international politics, of
confrontation with the power-structure of the world-system
that local oligarchies rely upon” (Blengino, 2019).
With these theoretical elements in hand, Blengino shifts his
argument toward Latin American cases, arguing that Peronist
populism represents a counter-conduct movement, the main
victim of the genocide perpetrated by the last military dicta-
torship that installed a neoliberal regime in Argentina.19 Far
from being accurately characterized as fascism – as Žižek so
flippantly claims – Peronism is a populist, statist, and nation-
alist articulation, and is therefore at the same time necessarily
internationalist. In any case, Blengino insists that it is a
political formation anchored in a popular nationalism – not
a xenophobic or racist nationalism – whose central discursive
elements include the fight for political sovereignty, economic
independence, and social justice, objectives that “cannot be
achieved from the periphery of the world-system in isolation.
That’s why Peronist nationalism is essentially transnational.
It is inseparable from regional integration and the articu-
lation of peoples (through the singularity of every nation)
and markets to stand up as a geopolitical region against
the imperial regime of neoliberal globalization” (Blengino,
2019).
 Toward an Internationalist Populism 97

Thus, Blengino turns Žižek’s own arguments against him.

Žižek’s defense of non-racist nationalism can be seen – very
much despite his intentions – as the pillar of an internationalist
populism, since it is “an authentic nationalism [that] consists
precisely in admitting its own limits” (Blengino, 2019). The
concrete Latin American experience of a decade of populism
– with projects like the Union of South American Nations
(UNASUR) or the Mercosur Parliament (PARLASUR) – took
transnational populism from being a helpless utopia and gave
it the status of a heterotopia. In any case, we can add that,
aside from the neoliberal counter-reaction, this materiali-
zation of an alternative form of internationalism to neoliberal
globalization cannot be taken as a failure. Although we
disagree with the distinction that Blengino proposes between
the two types of populism, we believe that the reflections he
raises coincide with the historical field of inquiry pertaining to
Latin American debates: between a (self-enclosed) oligarchic
nation and an (open and internationalist) national-popular
nation.
Now, what these two articles show – despite what we
have shown to be their differences – is that populism, with
its leaders and its peoples, can be perfectly compatible with
a transnational project. The populist leader could only be
thought of as an impediment if we understand them (wrongly,
as we have already shown) to be a despotic narcissist, and the
people could only represent an obstacle to the articulation
of a transnational populism if it is taken to be a closed unit
forged from an irreducibly identitarian principle. But if we
maintain, on the one hand, that the people is an unstable
articulation of demands that depends on its constitutive
heterogeneity, and, on the other, that the leader is both
responsible to the people and expresses the historical strength
of that people, then other possibilities open up.
If those held responsible for the experience of a lack
are the same among various “peoples,” solidarity between
demands can extend far beyond national boundaries. Hence,
discursive dichotomization through the establishment of an
antagonistic frontier between “those on the bottom” and
“those on top” can slide beyond national boundaries, giving
98 Toward an Internationalist Populism

rise to an equivalence between peoples – an international

populism. This is why the crises caused by neoliberal policies
that led to the collapse of countries like Argentina in 2001,
Bolivia from 2003 to 2005, and Ecuador in 2005, awakened
internationalist solidarity to the point that those involved –
on the basis of their own local demands – understood the
various supranational organizations of neoliberalism, large
corporations, and the United States government as the consti-
tutive outside against which they needed to unify. This was
the context that enabled the arrival of populist governments
across Latin America, and their subsequent alliance that,
among other things – at the Summit of the Americas in Mar
del Plata, Argentina, in 2005 – defeated President George W.
Bush’s goal of imposing the Free Trade Area of the Americas
(FTAA) and allowed for the creation of PARLASUR in 2005
and UNASUR in 2008.20 Similarly, De Cleen et al. (2019)
have shown how the equivalence of demands anchored in the
signifier “democracy” has given rise in the European context
– after what was interpreted as SYRIZA’s surrender of the
populist project in Greece – to the populism of DiEM25,
whose stated objective is to build a transnational people.
Furthermore, what is interesting to note here is that trans-
nationalism can be found throughout the political structures
generated by alliances between populist governments and the
formation of populist party structures that transcend national
borders. But Latin America also shows that transnationalism
can emerge on the level of popular organizations. We pointed
out above that the people of populism is overflowing with
organizations, and those organizations have often deployed
their practices of solidarity on the transnational level. Let’s
take as examples the dissemination of the Cuban adult literacy
method (“Yes I can”) by way of various social, union, and
political organizations; ongoing encounters between populist
militants from different countries; and public demonstrations
across different countries against attempted coups, and in
support of the governments of Bolivia in 2008 and Ecuador
in 2010. The same goes for leaders: Latin American populists
have shown that leadership can transcend borders, not only
in the massive events held by Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales
 Toward an Internationalist Populism 99

in different countries across the region, but also in Dilma

Rousseff’s rallies outside Brazil to protest against the suspi-
cious imprisonment of Lula and to reject Bolsonaro’s fascism.
This is not exclusive to avowedly populist countries, since
here we could add two emblematic cases led by women and
taken up elsewhere for the building of popular power. On
the one hand, the example of American Congresswoman
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who, through the institutions,
is proposing a Green New Deal in the face of the climate
crisis that is leading to the worst forecasts worldwide in the
coming decades. Through this pact, Ocasio-Cortez proposes
rethinking existing productive relations, and the need to
produce clean energy, from a popular and universalist
perspective. The other example is that of Francia Márquez,
a Colombian land activist (and winner of the Goldman
Environmental Prize) who promotes a reconceptualization
of the link between territory and the law. While this new
link is understood through the struggles of black commu-
nities, it reflects something universal that disrupts the way
that neoliberalism understands the relationship to territory,
an extractive relation of control that tends to invisibilize
the political and subjective construction of any territorial
imaginary. Through these examples, then, we can conclude
that it is local struggles, embodied in their leaders and articu-
lated through the popular, that awaken ties of solidarity on
the international level and promote new social bonds for
contemplating alternative forms of humanity in the current
crisis.
 Essay 6
The Absent Cause of Populist
Militancy

Post-foundationalism and the absence of

guarantees
In the previous essay, we discussed in detail why the Freudian
group or primal horde should not be confused with the
people, and the decisive role that leadership plays in the
construction of populism. We were able to establish how the
leader – beyond whatever preponderance they might accrue
– can never exist without a people, which in turn is only
instituted through a process of organization. In other words,
the emergence of the populist leader does not occur without
the people and the people does not become such without the
intervention of social movements, unions, political parties –
without militancy.
In this section we are going to develop our reflections
on populist militancy, understood as a new militant ethos
suited to a post-foundational era.1 The first question that
arises is this: what does it mean to think about militancy
in our present? It implies understanding, on the one hand,
that our moment is organized according to a neoliberal
ethos that seeks to consummate what Jorge Alemán has
called “the perfect crime”:2 the construction of a subjective
emplacement that seeks to reduce us to human capital by
 The Absent Cause of Populist Militancy 101

displacing Homo politicus, in order to definitively enthrone

Homo economicus.3 And, on the other hand, it means
understanding that this epochal experience can no longer
be reversed through the classic schemas of the left.4 Here
the question of emancipation that we have been addressing
in previous essays returns from another angle. Ultimately,
it is a question of thinking about how to build a militant
emancipatory ethic when it is no longer possible to embrace
the starting point of the traditional left, a subjective position
built through an accumulation of certainties and inferences of
meaning that became inevitable to us.
If it is no longer possible to begin from the premise
that there exist certain foundations that determine a
priori who is the primary protagonist of the emancipatory
struggle and the legitimate dimensions that this struggle
must contemplate, it becomes urgent to ask ourselves
what logics can dictate militant actions. In turn, we are
interested in showing that taking on the challenge of
abandoning a position based on certain immovable founda-
tional principles does not necessarily imply falling into
the negative opposite and plunging into the most extreme
anti-foundationalism. In other words, it is not necessary
to assume a radical destruction of the world’s foundations
that would force us to succumb to the proposals of the
most nihilistic or skeptical partisans of postmodernity.
We therefore reject the subjective belief of postmodernism
that “it’s all the same,” in which the assumption of a more
radical relativism would lead us to think that “anything can
be anything else.” Or, in other words, we are interested in
insisting that it is precisely in the acceptance of the lack of
foundations and privileged subjects for change that the key
to a new militant ethic lies.
Toward this end, it is possible to lay other foundations for
a militant subjective position, since, once we have accepted
the foundational character of the political (as we argued in
Essay 1) and the idea of an interplay between the political
and politics – which involves shaping reality as such – we find
ourselves on the post-foundational terrain that we analyzed
in Essay 1 through the contributions of Oliver Marchart
102 The Absent Cause of Populist Militancy

(2007, 2018). This means assuming, following Marchart,

that we are not in the presence of a foundation in the sense
of an essence underlying the existing order, which functions
as an intelligibility principle capable of explaining the totality
in a full, coherent, and clearly defined way. But nor are we
faced with the absolute absence of some sort of bond that
would prevent the establishment of any meaning, norms, or
consistency. So we are faced with neither a foundation nor
an anti-foundation, since we distance ourselves from both
those positions that involve the idea of ​​an absolute closure
and those that presuppose a complete opening to the most
radical relativism. Every order, every sedimented form of
objectivity, totality, or subjectivity, is always politically
constituted, precarious, and sutured insofar as it consists of
networks of hegemonic relationships established through acts
of institution.
The idea that we move on a post-foundational terrain
can also be put in other terms – namely, that we move on
the terrain of neither pure necessity nor pure contingency.
Gloria Perelló, in an article entitled “Cause, Need, and
Contingency: Some Political Implications” (2017), inves-
tigates from a psychoanalytic perspective the place of
contingency, particularly in Ernesto Laclau’s later writings,
arguing that, in both Laclau and Lacan, contingency and
necessity are not understood as opposites. On the contrary,
they are understood in a type of relationship that breaks
with the traditional opposition that establishes dualistic
boundaries framing these concepts. Furthermore, she
clarifies that neither author maintains the primacy of the
logic of contingency over the logic of necessity. In any case,
contingency cuts across necessity, so that to argue that it
is no longer the logic of necessity that exclusively governs
political action is not to say that political intervention is at
the mercy of “pure” contingency. It is no longer a question
of falling back onto these logics in their pure forms, but it
is instead imperative to reconsider how they relate to one
another. In our view, this is the terrain that allows us to
begin to think about the implications of militant populist
intervention.
 The Absent Cause of Populist Militancy 103

Neither the cemetery nor the madhouse

Laclau liked to cite the words of Jorge Abelardo Ramos5
– an Argentinean political leader alongside whom he had
organized in his youth – who said that “society never
polarizes between the madhouse and the cemetery.”6 This
metaphor serves to illustrate the impossibility of inhabiting
pure and completely opposite poles, and Laclau cited it to
explain the impossibility of finding ourselves in a situation of
pure reactivation or pure sedimentation, full antagonism or
full institutionality, or of complete contingency or complete
necessity. It is to the extent that we cannot establish an
equilibrium between the two components of these binary
pairs, a sort of continuum where the exact midpoint between
two poles could be found (if this were the case, we would
continue to be anchored in an understanding that accepts the
possibility of fullness), that Laclau was forced to specify his
concept of contingency.
Perelló (2017) reminds us that Laclau and Mouffe (1985)
argued that contingency permeates the realm of necessity,
and that the latter can no longer be understood as an under-
lying principle dictating the structuring of social identities.
In discursive terms, this means understanding that there
is no “literal” foundation that determines meaning within
a system of relational differences, or, in social terms, that
“necessity only exists as a partial effort to limit contingency”
(Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 114).7 However, it is in a later
text, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (1990),
that Laclau takes on the task of differentiating contingency
from accident and chance. Perelló identifies a series of steps
that Laclau deploys in his argument in order to establish
this difference. In the first place, alongside Aristotle, Laclau
distinguishes the essence of the accident. Second, with the
support of arguments from Christianity, contingency gains
a specificity within the general field of the accident. Third,
Laclau arrives at his own concept of contingency – namely,
as an experience linked to the limitation of being (in line with
the definition he had presented alongside Mouffe in 1985,
104 The Absent Cause of Populist Militancy

of antagonism as the limit of all objectivity). And fourth, he

radicalizes his notion of antagonism by introducing the idea
of dislocation.
If we briefly develop Laclau’s (1990) arguments, we find
that, in the first instance, he maintains that contingency is not
equivalent to accident, but that it instead possesses a speci-
ficity within the general field of accidentality.8 According
to classical philosophy, there are no necessary causal deter-
minations for the accident, but chance intervenes in an
indeterminate way. Hence, the accident, given its indeter-
minacy, is not part of being – i.e. it cannot be integrated into
being since being is necessary, determinate, and knowable.
While the rational apprehension of the object implies grasping
its essence, the accident, on the other hand, corresponds to
something indeterminate and unknowable in the object.
Second, Laclau finds in Christianity a treatment of the
accident that leads him to delimit the idea of contin-
gency within the more general field of accidentality. In the
presence of the Christian God – the only necessary being, in
which contingency and necessity coincide – all other beings,
products of ex nihilo creation by the almighty divinity, are
contingent and finite. They are contingent because that is
how beings “whose essence does not entail its existence” are
defined (Laclau, 1990: 19), and contingency thus comes to
refer to an existence that does not find in itself the principle
of its necessity. They are finite because they exist at an
immeasurable distance from their creator and are “suscep-
tible to a radical annihilation and essentially vulnerable as a
result. The identity of finite beings is a threatened identity. In
this way, a dimension of negativity penetrates and is latent in
any objectivity” (Laclau, 1990: 19).
In this way, and with the argument in hand that negativity
permeates all objectivity, Laclau takes his third argumentative
step to maintain that, unlike mere accident, contingency is
linked to the experience of the limitation of being. Thus,
from his perspective, this established that the social does not
have a positive and objective character, since contingency –
which is a sort of negativity – is constitutive of objectivity.
Translated to the socio-political level: contingency implies
 The Absent Cause of Populist Militancy 105

that a social identity can only be constituted on the basis of

an antagonistic force – which threatens and affirms it at the
same time – not through determinations that are necessary
in relation to a totality, and thus antagonism reveals the
contingent and limited character of all identity. In any case,
antagonism as the condition of existence for a totality refers
to “[t]his link between the blocking and simultaneous affir-
mation of an identity [that] we call ‘contingency,’ which
introduces an element of radical undecidability into the
structure of objectivity” (Laclau, 1990: 21).
Finally, he introduces the notion of dislocation. Laclau
insists that every being is dislocated in itself, since it is
traversed by a constitutive gap that prevents it from closing
in on itself as a full sameness. In other words, structural
dislocation is the lack that enables the irruption of that not
contemplated by the given order of possibilities, thereby
forcing us to be free: “I am condemned to be free, not
because I have no structural identity as the existentialists
assert, but because I have failed structural identity” (Laclau,
1990: 44). He establishes dislocation as the place of the
subject because it is the moment of decision beyond struc-
tural determinations, a contingent decision made on the basis
of an undecidable structure. This entails a radicalization of
the notion of antagonism, insofar as, as a function of dislo-
cation, it was established as a way of “making something”
from the irruption of the subject opened up by that same
structural lack – or, put differently, antagonism is the form
that “makes” what arises from dislocation into a political
matter.
With these elements in hand, Perelló (2017) connects them
to the distinction between tuché and automaton raised by
Lacan in his exploration of accidental causes in Aristotle.9
She tells us that Lacan presents the tuché and automaton as
two accidental forms of repetition (two forms of repetition
as effects of non-necessary causes). The automaton refers to
the automatic functioning of the chain of signifiers without
the intervention of the subject, understood as that which
does not stop writing itself wrongly. The tuché, on the other
hand, alludes to the encounter with the real, that which
106 The Absent Cause of Populist Militancy

has no place within the web of signification, the unassimi-

lable of trauma. While we can refer the automaton back to
chance – without the intervention of the subject – the tuché,
translated as fortune (or misfortune), cannot be associated
with pure chance since it exists on the order of an encounter,
the encounter of chance with the intention of the subject or,
in other words, the moment of decision on an undecidable
terrain. So, contingency should be understood through the
tuché, and not through the automaton.
This is how Perelló (2017) argues that contingency – on
the socio-political terrain – implies that a socio-political
subjectivity is not constituted by necessary or automatic
determinations in relation to a totality, but through the contin-
gency that results from an encounter between chance and
the subject’s decision on an undecidable terrain. Obviously,
understood in this way, the socio-political subjectivity that
arises from that encounter will not be determined by the
structure of already available options, nor will it be an ex
nihilo creation, the absolute indeterminacy of a pure and
complete foundational act. Rather, the socio-political subjec-
tivity that emerges from that encounter will be an antagonistic
response to the experience of a lack, beyond structural deter-
minations but falling short of radical indeterminacy.
We have paused to think through the nature of contin-
gency because it gives us a standard for understanding what
constitutes a difference, what antagonism consists of, and
when a reactivation becomes politicized. It is only when
what is reactivated gains an antagonistic character that the
political subjectivity that is constituted has the possibility of
eliminating the status quo. Therefore, it can sometimes be
the case that a moment of reactivation is converted into pure
accident or mere chance insofar as it does not give shape to
anything on the order of the political. This can occur because
no antagonism is constituted and, ultimately, no subjectivity
is forged that is capable of initiating a political struggle to
transform the sedimented order. Since it may well happen
that what emerges from dislocation is not experienced as a
lack and not registered as an antagonism, but simply passes,
fades away – is understood, for example, as mere fate, or
 The Absent Cause of Populist Militancy 107

attributed to natural causes or divine will. Something very

different happens, on the other hand, if that moment of
reactivation meets intentionality, a subjective intervention
that forges an antagonism and gives rise to a political subjec-
tivity, a militant task seeking to antagonistically shake up the
sedimented order.
While we follow Marchart (2007, 2018) when he says that
this is always a question of partial foundations, a constant
process of foundation and de-foundation, we find it necessary
to complement this with Perelló’s arguments (2017), since
that constant interplay of foundation and de-foundation
is governed neither by accident nor by chance, but by the
contingency that results from the intersection of chance
and intentionality – i.e. from the moment of decision on an
undecidable terrain. It is here that we argue that populism,
leadership, and militancy come into play. A new type of
militancy means that those who are willing to engage in
antagonistic struggles are alert to structural dislocation, i.e.
that chance finds them prepared for the subject to emerge,
available to be traversed by contingency, which interrupts
impossibility precisely insofar as it pushes the limits of
the possible. Populist militancy means going beyond the
merely programmatic; it means taking responsibility for
the incalculable; it means, quite simply, being guided by an
(emancipatory) desire with no guarantees. A popular revolt
can lead to an emancipatory outcome, but it can also end in
reactionary closure. The lack of guarantees thus demands this
type of militancy since it would be difficult for the sedimen-
tation that follows from a moment of reactivation to gain an
emancipatory tenor without this kind of militant subjective
position. The outcome of an antagonistic struggle could
imply victory or defeat for militant political struggle, but the
status quo could hardly be transformed in an emancipatory
direction without that struggle.
Let’s take two examples, the first being the reactivation
of sedimented practices that brought about the “cycle of
rebellion”10 in Bolivia between 2000 and 2005. The first
question we can ask is whether this social transformation
would have taken place without the intervention and synergy
108 The Absent Cause of Populist Militancy

of the leadership of Evo Morales with the militant organiza-

tions of coca farmers, when Morales’ famous phrase “Now is
the Time” became a political rallying-cry and precipitated the
antagonistic struggle in moments that shook the neoliberal
status quo. Our answer is no. It was precisely the intention-
ality of the coca farmers’ antagonistic struggle that made the
difference. The other example is Spain’s 15-M Movement,
which emerged in 2011,11 and which many understand as
a moment of reactivation without intentionality. But it was
not until the emergence of Podemos that this experience
configured a political subjectivity and a militant task that
allowed the movement to take the next step beyond the
merely reactive moment of rejecting the austerity policies
of Mariano Rajoy’s Popular Party government. Podemos
introduced a hitherto absent militant ethic that transformed
Spain’s political order – no one in the political sphere
emerged unscathed by Podemos’ intervention.
Locating ourselves in the post-foundational field implies
assuming the subjective responsibility of a militancy toward
the real nucleus of impossibility. This encapsulates the
militant questions that we will address in what follows.

The three militant questions

The differences between the experiences of Bolivia’s Movement
for Socialism (MAS)12 and Podemos help us to shift toward a
first problematic aspect of militancy. As we mentioned above,
the Bolivian experience was shaped from the beginning by a
synergy between popular organizing and the leadership of
Evo Morales. The Spanish experience, by contrast, witnessed
other nuances, since the 15-M was born first and Podemos
leadership – in the figure of Pablo Iglesias – only emerged
later. All of which refers us to the debate about the instituent
practices that should (or should not) follow a moment of
reactivation.
Podemos was the instituted expression of the instituent
irruption of 15-M. At a time when Podemos seems to have
entered into an irreversible process of liquefaction, many
 The Absent Cause of Populist Militancy 109

scholars attempting to explain the causes of this failure

long for that moment of instituent enthusiasm, as though
some original purity had been betrayed by the subsequent
institutional creation. Here, then, we find some leverage
for those intensifying criticisms that argue that any attempt
to institutionally translate a moment of reactivation means
from the outset its capture and perversion by the force of
routine in the already instituted field. We refer to those who
reject a priori any hegemonic attempt to build a people and
seek to remain faithful to an idea of the event;
​​ those who
see in any instituted experience a betrayal of the instituent
moment; those who see parliamentary representation, access
to executive power, or any link with state logics as unfaithful
to the instituent act of the multitude.
Obviously, the latter are susceptible to easy condemnation
due to the mere fact that no attempt at institutionali-
zation can fully absorb the moment of reactivation. And we
should also bear in mind that, while the moment of reacti-
vation is attractive due to its temporal dislocation that calls
into question sedimented practices, suspends routines, and
thus entails a disassociation from certain positions, militant
intervention that seeks to account for that reactivation,
by contrast, entails the discomfort, disappointment, and
displeasure brought on by the reframing that attempting to
remain inevitably causes.13 A political subjectivity that seeks
to embrace reactivation will involve initiating antagonisms,
creating frontier effects, routinizing practices, and generating
forms of institutionalization that – despite our best efforts
– will always fail in their attempt to perfectly contain the
moment of reactivation. However, the paradox that arises
here is that, without this second moment of institutionalizing
effort, we cannot create new sedimented practices or give
any (emancipatory) meaning to the moment of reactivation.
And this is the same paradox that traverses militancy: how to
achieve a form of institutionalization that can accommodate
the moment of reactivation? Or, put another way: how can
we ensure that the routinization of militant practices does
not block the emergence of the subject? The answer lies in
a type of militancy that is cognizant of the fact that there is
110 The Absent Cause of Populist Militancy

no form of institutionalization – whether a political party,

social movement, union, circle,14 etc. – that can resolve
the moment of reactivation once and for all. If we do not
embrace this kind of subjective position, militancy runs the
risk of domesticating everything that is new and reducing it
to organizational logic.
If we return to the example of Podemos, we see that, once
the populist hypothesis proposed by Íñigo Errejón – the
party’s number 2 – had been abandoned, the narrative of the
trenches developed, bringing with it an identitarian retreat
that conflated the moment of reactivation with an organi-
zational logic. Pablo Iglesias embraced this discourse after
his break with Errejón, and in light of the need to give the
party he was leading a political orientation. Thus, he opted
for a quick reading of Gramsci’s concept of trench warfare
to adopt a position of retreat to within civil society, and to
define “the working class” as the subject his party repre-
sented. He thereby determined the identity of his militants
and, having secured that nucleus that did not question his
militant leadership, he began the phase of pacts and negotia-
tions to occupy quotas of power within the institutions. This
entailed two things. On the one hand, it consolidated the idea
of ​​a previously determined political subject, thereby reacti-
vating all the imagery associated with conventional forms of
class struggle. And, on the other hand, all protest against this
recourse to identitarianism and posing reactivation through
difference was deactivated and its participants expelled from
the movement through a discretionary measure that pulled
them out from the roots. In other words, the moment of
political negotiation that allowed for maintaining differences
while building the people was blocked. So, instead of letting
tensions live and seeking the path of political negotiation,
Podemos embraced the classic logic of the left – namely, to
embrace a predetermined subject and cause, and to expel
anyone putting these at risk.
It is here that the advantage of populist militancy might
lie: insofar as it is not established a priori or ever fully deter-
mined who can be part of the people, what its institutional
forms should be, the dimensions that the antagonistic struggle
 The Absent Cause of Populist Militancy 111

should take, or who its enemies should be, etc., it always has
the possibility of trying to keep something of that moment
of reactivation alive. The people, by not being something
given, functions as a precarious articulation of equivalences
that requires both organization and reactivation at the same
time. In other words, while it requires a structure to guide its
militant practices, to offer arguments to support its positions
in debates, and to establish lines of political action, the
people is never a finished subject, it is not the result of an
arithmetic sum or the product of an electoral majority, and
it is not reducible to a sociologically determined group. The
people is a contingent political construct that is not always
present, and therefore, if populist militancy is to keep it alive
once it has emerged, it can never block the irruption of the
subject (or the moment of reactivation).
When we argue that radical contingency implies traversing
necessity, we return to the idea that sedimentation never
manages to fully domesticate reactivation and, vice versa,
that reactivation never means the complete tabula rasa
elimination of sedimented practices. Every political inter-
vention – no matter how radically innovative – always
takes place on an established hegemonic terrain. And here
we find another problem that populist militancy faces: it
operates from the outset on enemy terrain. Thus, while
populist militancy confronts the challenge of maintaining
openness within its organizations, it also simultaneously
collides with and embodies its antagonisms in a discursive
field established by neoliberalism. The question at this point
is: could this possibly be different? From our perspective, the
answer is no. But this is precisely what is so often neglected
by those who criticize populist experiences, rejecting them
through the accusation that, in practice, they take refuge in
capitalist parliamentarism, reinforce the neoliberal subjec-
tivity of a class of consumers and/or debtors (who ultimately
end up becoming their gravediggers), or reproduce a form
of capitalism that is unable to transform the extractivist
matrix.15 When we say that no intervention takes place as
a pure act that creates something new and uncontaminated,
we are ultimately saying that any irruption of the subject
112 The Absent Cause of Populist Militancy

and new subjectivity thereby created intervenes on already

partially sedimented terrain. Hence, also, the tension between
its antagonistic power and its limits, because what would it
be like to intervene politically from a pure and uncontami-
nated exteriority?
In turn, although it embodies antagonisms within a
discursive field imposed by the enemy, we can nevertheless
insist that the people and its militants represent an excess
that becomes unassimilable, because populism by definition
overflows certain nodal points of neoliberal subjectivity.
If the populist gesture is a collective, egalitarian, political
excess, then it contradicts the logic of the Homo economicus
of human capital (Brown, 2017). The people and its militancy
have equality inscribed in their very form, an egalitarian
excess that subverts neoliberal norms of meritocracy, the
difference between winners and losers, and the inequality
that competition between human capital entails. The people
and its militancy also imply a collective excess because
they presuppose a bond with the other that transcends the
isolated, individual responsibility of the entrepreneur-of-
the-self in which neoliberal rationality traps us. It is worth
mentioning that, in moments like these, the people and its
militancy interrupt the solipsistic enjoyment that neoliberal
capitalism proposes.
The people and its militancy also carry the political in
their own emergence. They stage politics and make it newly
thinkable by bringing it up to date through mobilizations,
assemblies, the occupation of various spaces (streets, squares,
factories, universities, etc.), thereby relaunching the public
over the private, the collective over the individual, and
destabilizing the neoliberal attempt to cancel Homo politicus
by recapturing the exercise of popular sovereignty. In this
sense, we can say that the people and populist militancy in
the neoliberal context revive the duality that Bataille (1985
[1933]) found in the nature of the sovereign. A sovereign is
not only the one who exercises the power to dominate, it is
also the one who stands up as radically other in the face of
the homogenizing forces of the social order – be it the useless,
the incalculable, or the immeasurable.16 Hence, against
 The Absent Cause of Populist Militancy 113

the homogenizing onslaught of neoliberal subjectivity, the

emancipatory opening of untameable and unconquerable
popular excess arises.
Finally, let’s return to the antagonisms that militants
embody: can we say – for the reasons explained above –
that the emancipatory power of the people boils down to
militancy? The answer is still paradoxical: the people implies
the simultaneous experience of emancipatory possibility and
impossibility. If it is a matter of understanding emancipation
in singular and unilateral terms, as a future horizon that
is accomplished once and for all, then this is impossible.
But this impossibility does not prevent militant struggle for
partial and plural emancipations. If, according to the classical
left, militant actions were directed by a principle of determi-
nation, as a necessary cause, and with an objective that was
also defined a priori, from a post-foundational perspective,
on the other hand, populist militancy can be understood
through the idea of the “absent cause.”
Let’s turn to the arguments developed by Biglieri and Perelló
in their book The Uses of Psychoanalysis in Ernesto Laclau’s
Theory of Hegemony (2012), and discuss the Lacanian
concept of “absent cause” in its double-sense. An absent
cause is, on the one hand, a cause that must be defended or
a cause that must be won, and, on the other hand, a cause as
a principle or foundation that produces effects.17 In the first
case, when a cause is taken up as something to defend or
to win, it will always be a failure since it can never be fully
realized as such. And, in the second case, when the cause is
understood as a principle or a foundation, it will always be a
lost cause insofar as it is absent. Contrary to what academic
or scientific knowledge suggests – i.e. that, if the cause is
removed, its effects disappear – in the case of the lost cause,
we hold that there are effects precisely because these effects
only occur in the absence of the cause – that is, we are dealing
with an absent cause. In this way, the double-sense of the
absent or lost cause means that we have neither starting
points nor finish lines, because there are no foundations from
which to begin or derive ultimate meaning, nor objectives
established a priori to be fully achieved.
114 The Absent Cause of Populist Militancy

The “lost cause” – as a function of the impossible – does

not imply helplessness, paralysis, or resignation, but is instead
an experience that aims “to turn the absent foundation into a
cause” (Alemán, 2009: 14). In any case, in the presence of the
“lost cause,” something will always be lacking, something
will always be in excess – in other words, there will always
be an insistent “real”: “What doesn’t stop not being written”
(Lacan, 1999 [1972–3]: 59). Finally, this implies being aware
that it is the lack of guarantees that evokes a militant call
to get involved in political struggles. It calls on us to adopt
an ethical position because, since nothing is guaranteed in
advance, since we don’t know what results political struggles
can produce, and since there is no guarantee that the rights
we have won today will continue to exist tomorrow, we
must become militants. It is the militant call from the impos-
sible that prevents us from sinking into the resignation of
helplessness and urges us to adopt the subjective responsi-
bility of building a people against the neoliberal night.
 Essay 7
We Populists are Feminists

Let’s imagine the future

It is very difficult today to regain our enthusiasm for images
of a world that doesn’t yet exist. Our reference points for
emancipations to come are completely shot through with our
past, and more precisely with those imaginaries that have
shaped the idea of who we are today. But we often forget to
problematize what kind of relationship we want to establish
with a past that promised emancipation and that demarcates
the political forms of our contemporary sensibility. We tend
to reproduce an overly spontaneist relationship that swings
back and forth from enthusiasm to failure, in a vicious
oscillation between the nostalgic vindication of worn-out
images and the sudden disenchantment of the impossibility
of returning to them. Furthermore, it seems that this sponta-
neist circularity ends up being complicit with the neoliberal
ethos, as if it were cultivating our sensory intelligence to
the point of leaving it trapped in a total immobility that
forecloses on any idea of ​​the future. Isn’t the most sponta-
neous and paradoxically durable image of our present
precisely the absence of a future? Beyond this lack of imagi-
nation, we even find with bewilderment that the reactionary
powers of the present have managed to recycle those same
116 We Populists are Feminists

emancipatory images, turning them into affective pastiches

and mobilizing popular sectors toward their own reactionary
ends. All this leads us to wonder whether we have forgotten
how to imagine the future, or whether we are witnessing a
still undeciphered transformation in our relationship with
the past, with images, and with our sensibility. This question
is not about evading reality, but instead getting right to the
heart of the existing, i.e. pointing to a series of images from
the past or signs that, forging against the conventional ethos
of the left, help us to connect differently to our canceled
futures.
Along these lines, it seems to us that both the figure of
the feminine (that has been problematized, reappropriated,
and interrogated by feminist struggles)1 and the figure of the
popular (constructed through populism) can give us clues
for imagining that which does not yet exist.2 Thus, we echo
Nancy Fraser’s warning, in her prologue to A Feminism of
the 99% (2018), that “feminism is just one social movement,
and needs to coordinate its claims and proposals with the rest
of the movements, which should also move in the direction
of 99%. We should not forcibly insist that the feminist
movement is the privileged position for political action or the
new historical subject of emancipation. Feminism is essential,
but it has to be part of something bigger, an even broader
political project” (Fraser, 2018: xii). But we also agree with
what black feminism has been warning for several years,
fully aware of the need to connect different emancipatory
struggles capable of breaking the oppressions of class, race,
and gender at the same time (Carneiro, 2000; Curiel, 2016).
On the other hand, we are indebted to a certain tradition
of Latin American feminism that has been thinking about
the need to reconnect militancy, the popular field and the
possibility of an anti-neoliberal feminist state (Álvarez, 1998;
Gargallo, 2006; Femenías, 2007; Carosio, 2009; Matos and
Paradis, 2013; Rivera Berruz, 2018). But it seems that, when
we try to theorize feminism alongside populism, something
collides, since it is difficult to imagine them together as part
of the same political struggle, creating a rift that weakens the
emancipatory force of both parts (Cadahia, 2019).
 We Populists are Feminists 117

If we wonder about the missed encounters between

feminism and populism, it seems to us that, in the case
of feminism, this rejection comes from certain feminist
traditions in both Latin America (autonomist, communi-
tarian, and/or Spinozist feminisms)3 and Europe (feminisms
grounded in theories of difference)4 that expel antagonism
(and therefore negativity) when it comes to forging their own
political project.5 In fact, in her most recent book Feminist
International (2020: 200), Verónica Gago counterposes
populist articulation to feminist dynamics and assumes that
“feminist struggles present an anti-neoliberal perspective
capable of going beyond populist political articulation.”
In order to sustain this opposition, Gago identifies feminist
struggles with the true autonomy of grassroots assembly
dynamics and grants these an affirmative and expansive
power [as potencia] that would overflow the articulatory
ambitions of populist theory. Furthermore, she identifies
assemblies with the popular-community level, in order to
contrast these with what she understands as the popular-
abstract framework of populism, and to critique the latter
from within the feminist tradition.6
In the case of populism, on the other hand, the problem
lies in certain barriers to theorizing the feminization of the
popular7 and the role of the political category of care in the
construction of the people.8 In other words, this is a question
of the difficulties that the popular field often confronts
when it relegates feminist demands to being a second-order
problem. Or, in terms of the problem of care: when priority
is given to the contradictions between the social production
of value (labor) and capital, and the types of exploitation
generated by the contradiction between the social repro-
duction of life (care) and capital are omitted. But what
happens if, instead of widening the gap between feminism
and populism – as Gago’s text would seem to do – we instead
try to dissolve this disagreement and begin to explore a link
between antagonism and care?
Now, before developing our hypotheses on this
disagreement and offering a possible alternative connection,
we would like to explain a bit better what we are going
118 We Populists are Feminists

to focus on to carry out this task. To do so, we would

like to delve into the sensory dimension, or the role that
sense plays in the construction of these two simultaneously
theoretical and practical approaches. For this, we would like
to assemble some ideas from Carlo Ginzburg (2013) that
can help us to foster a perhaps underexplored disposition
toward images that, following Ginzburg, we would like to
call the evidential paradigm. According to Ginzburg, the
evidential paradigm is a vestige of ancient hunting practices
like reading footprints, a practice that has allowed for the
building of all narration and configuration of meaning on
the basis of the absent prey (or thing). As an illustration of
this practice, Ginzburg turns to the old eastern fable Zadig,
since it tells the story of three brothers who are able to recon-
struct, through a series of clues, an animal they had never
seen: the camel. Thus, the evidential paradigm is sustained
on the basis of something that, since it cannot be experienced
directly, strangely requires the exercise of our sensibility and
intelligence to put the imagination to work. Ginzburg adds
that this evidential exercise allows us to construct rhetorical
images or figures that we cannot find delimited in the
sedimented space of social reality, such that “the fact that the
rhetorical figures on which the language of venatic deduction
still rest … are traceable to the narrative axis of metonymy”
(Ginzburg, 2013: 93).
Unlike the positivist paradigm, which assumes that things
are what they are and each object coincides with itself in a
game of truth by correspondence, the evidential paradigm
seems to suggest that things are not what they are since the
thing cannot coincide with itself. So, in his text, Ginzburg
goes on to identify this paradigm with the ancestral medical
knowledge of body reading, Sherlock Holmes detective
novels, Freudian psychoanalysis, and, in a certain sense,
Morelli’s study of art history – disciplines or practices whose
object of knowledge escapes the mechanism of conventional
representation. We can only refer to the thing through its
effects: its symptoms, evidence, and footprints. Recall that
this paradigm functions as a way of knowing from the
place of not-knowing, from conjectural knowledge. In other
 We Populists are Feminists 119

words, it is experienced through clues that allow for the

articulation of affects and intelligence in the very production
of knowledge. Ginzburg not only identifies this knowledge
with disciplines of formal knowledge, however, but goes
on to say that the evidential paradigm “can be found
throughout the entire world, with no limits of geography,
history, ethnicity, sex, or class … it is the property of …
hunters; of sailors; of women. It binds the human animal
closely to other animal species” (Ginzburg, 2013: 113).
Through this quote, we can see that he is referring to a
conjectural, plebeian knowledge that neither seeks nor
offers a finished picture of reality – one based on the sensory
experience that sets different planes of what we have come
to call the human into motion.
But we can also see that there is something plebeian
and feminine9 operating in this form of knowledge, a way
of inhabiting not knowing, conjecture, and uncertainty
that fosters a series of sensory connections still to be
explored in all their radicalism. Furthermore, perhaps the
question to which Ginzburg’s entire proposal points, and
which he seems to demarcate without fully explaining,
is the following: what kind of rigor – understood as a
form of decipherment that makes an opening toward
the future legible – does this form of thinking histori-
cally associated with the feminine and plebeian suggest?
Regardless, continuing to explore this possibility means
taking up, as noted above, a series of theoretical difficulties
in linking the feminine to the popular in a populist key, as
if the problems of feminism were on one side and those of
populism on the other. Therefore, in order to promote an
articulation between both traditions, it seems essential to
do two things. On the one hand, to ask ourselves whether
it is possible to embrace antagonism through post-Marxist
feminism,10 and, on the other, to ask whether it is feasible
to discover a form of care within populism. We believe that
the basis of this missed encounter can be found in feminist
claims that block antagonism (and negativity), and populist
proposals that deny the role of care and the feminization
of politics.
120 We Populists are Feminists

Feminism without identitarian closure

For some time now, an interesting political debate has been
emerging about the need to feminize politics through the
sphere of care (Carosio, 2009).11 Along these lines, it would
be useful not only to ask ourselves about the connection
between this new locus of political enunciation and the
survival of Ginzburg’s plebeian evidential paradigm, but
also to investigate where the irruption of this locus leads us
– i.e. how it helps us to decipher the popular field. For this
reason, we need to think more precisely about the scope of
this demand, and to examine more carefully the drive to close
conflicts, and the meaning that lay behind this possibility.
Seen this way, there is a danger of turning the feminization
of politics into an ethic of care that, by politicizing what has
historically been called “domestic,” runs the risk of turning
the “domestic” – the sphere of reproduction of social life –
into the only possible horizon of the political. At the same
time, this would seem to emphasize a non-conflictual form of
politics, as if conflict and rupture fall on the masculine side,
and reconciliation and closure of antagonisms fall broadly
on the feminine side. Doesn’t the search for an affirmation of
one’s existence without taking on the negativity of confronting
what we oppose run the risk of killing politics and thereby
blocking the meaning that this unique form of emancipatory
struggle brought about? Is it possible to formulate an idea of​​
care that incorporates populist antagonism?
We believe that to do so we need to interrogate three
assumptions that are found, on the one hand, at the heart
of the communitarian perspective of some Latin American
feminisms, and, on the other, in the ontological wager that
authors like Gago deploy to read new feminist dynamics
in terms of an affirmative power that expands from within
itself without the need for negativity (antagonisms).12 These
assumptions are: autonomism, the illusion of immediacy,
and the belief in corporeality as the opposite of power.13
Regarding the first point, there is a belief that any appeal to
the state or representational forms serves as a mechanism for
 We Populists are Feminists 121

co-opting the immanence of emancipatory struggles, making

necessary the practice of self-management without any insti-
tutional or representative mechanism. The second point,
which is associated with the first, consists of believing that
certain locations exist prior to any articulation, places that
owe their existence only to themselves and that, therefore,
enjoy a privileged role in social transformation. In turn,
by virtue of not being articulated through classic forms of
politics, these locations are positioned as the opposite of
power. Finally, this location prior to any articulation and
free from state co-optation is none other than the body and
the affects, as expressed through their multiple affirmative
differences (without constitutive negativity), and any attempt
to articulate these within a unity would merely ensnare them
in the traps of power.
In this sense, it is important to note that the question of
care tied to this philosophy of affirmative power brings to
light an old problem of modern philosophy – namely, the
problem of community. Recall that the emergence of the
figure of the individual – understood as a disintegrating
force vis-à-vis the undifferentiated unity of the community –
generated a classic tension between individual freedom and
the dissolution of the social fabric, which translated into a
threat of disintegration for the community. Faced with this,
different kinds of responses emerged that oscillated between
nostalgia for a lost unity, attempts to rebuild it, acceptance
of the era of individualism, and a transformation of the
meaning of that community.
We could say that the contemporary translation of this
problem seems to be understood as an unconfessed gender
dichotomy: namely, the feminine as the locus for the recovery
of communal meaning and the possibility of life in common –
through care or the affective and expansive bringing together
of bodies – and the masculine as the disaggregating element,
through the perpetuation of antagonism, power, and the
hierarchy of the social. The major drawback of approaching
care through the perspective of the assembly (Gago, 2020)
or the community (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2018) rests on the
fact that this affirmative expansion – immanently from itself
122 We Populists are Feminists

and for itself – does not explain how these articulations are
produced, or to what extent they are indebted to the internal
conflict that organizes them, and, above all, shows a lack of
solidarity and political imagination toward other instances of
political struggle. It is as if they repeat the naïveté of believing
in privileged subjects of emancipation and that some forms
of political struggle are outmoded – as if unions or the state
were mere vestiges of the past – and, most complicatedly,
that the contamination of their struggles by other subjects
or cases would be detrimental to true emancipation. Doesn’t
this run the risk of assuming the completeness of a subject –
feminism – which jeopardizes the indeterminacy and lack of
guarantees characteristic of political militancy?
Faced with this, it seems to us that the task is not so much
to discover privileged locations (or subjects) of social transfor-
mation but, instead, following Fraser, to reinvent in political
praxis the distinction between the reproduction (care) of
life and the production (labor) of social value, without
sacrificing either the emancipatory horizon or the social
protection that a populist and feminist reading of institutions
can offer (Fraser, 2016: 117). In our opinion, the problem
does not lie in the idea of care itself but in the autonomist
matrix – in both its communitarianism and its affirmative
ontology – through which this question has been theorized.
In this sense, it seems possible to reflect on the political role
of care through a different matrix that takes antagonism as
its starting point and does not assume the politicization of
the domestic or communal as the only possible horizon for
the political. To do so, the notion of perseverance proposed
by Joan Copjec, and the ethics of the not-all raised from the
Lacanian left by authors like Jorge Alemán, can help us give
shape to this connection.
In her book Imagine There’s No Woman (2002), Copjec
distinguishes between two types of drives: fixation and
perseverance. She explores these drives through the tragic
figures of Creon and Antigone, identifying the former with
fixation and the latter with perseverance. The first drive
takes place out of the belief that a totality – or a lost object
– can be restored. In turn, the satisfaction experienced by
 We Populists are Feminists 123

working on the thing depends on an idea of ​​the good that

organizes actions from the outside and prescribes the form
of enjoyment. In other words, Creon believes that there is an
idea of the
​​ good to follow (the thing seen from the outside)
that can be embodied in the figure of the state and preemp-
tively delimited by an identification between his discourse
and the law. This sets out from the idea that action comes to
fulfill an end (the idea of ​​the good) and that the actions of the
state – insofar as they follow this idea – will be able to restore
a lost identity (the fullness of the community). The problem,
Copjec warns us, is that since “the thing” cannot be restored,
since the idealization of the good collides with the reality of
our drives, the responsibility for that lack of closure is placed
on another (Antigone).
Thus, enjoyment comes to be structured as a plus that is
achieved between the idealization of the demand and what is
actually obtained, i.e. through the difference that organizes
my action in terms of a dissatisfaction experienced between
the idea of the
​​ good and the reality of things. Thus, Creon is
“driven by an idealization of the difference between the satis-
faction demanded and that which can be achieved through
work” (Copjec, 2002: 46). That is to say, he is driven by
a superego (the idea of the ​​ good) that maintains him in a
constant state of dissatisfaction, and his fixation revolves
around the fact that something has been lost due to the
appearance of Antigone (the feminine) on the scene. In other
words, he becomes obsessed and works toward the idea of​​
preserving the state – protecting the public thing (res publica)
from Antigone – which makes his fixation coincide with the
lost thing with which it identifies. Such is his obsession that it
makes him indifferent to “available objects” – i.e. everything
that seems to violate his idealization of the state.
Antigone’s work around her desire, by contrast, “is driven
by the satisfaction afforded by her love for her brother, which
provides the pressure or tension necessary to act” (Copjec,
2002: 46), and it is this action in relation to her drive that is
given the name perseverance. Here, action is not stimulated
by the idealization of and fixation on the good, but by a
loving bond that is built through desire and determines the
124 We Populists are Feminists

autonomy of action and the possibility of short-circuiting

unequal dependence on the field of the other – the locus of
masculine enunciation. So it is through perseverance that we
open ourselves up to “acting in conformity with the real of
desire” (Copjec, 2002: 45), without first projecting an idea of​​
the good that should govern the subject.
With Copjec, we can affirm that Creon identifies with the
public Thing and believes that he can exhaust with his own
voice everything that it has to tell us. By having faith in his
exclusive path into public life, he became convinced of his
exclusive right to the Thing itself and trusted that it would
only be expressed through a masculine voice. But the thing
(thus fixed) is only a fossil – it has nothing to tell us aside
from the empty echo of what has been self-expressed unilat-
erally (and naturalized) as a masculine voice. If we absolve the
Thing from itself and identify with it, the thing itself would
be dead. Unlike Creon, Antigone does not identify with the
Thing because she knows that it is irreplaceable – her brother
is what he is. At most, she dares to say that thing publicly, to
tell the public that there is something irreducible (in law, in
the state, in public life) that cannot be replaced by the very
act of naming it. As an action, perseverance protects us from
identifying our voice with the law, on both the masculine and
feminine sides. After all, Antigone represents a movement
that points beyond our fixations and preserves, from within
the storage chest of our desires, that which cannot be substi-
tuted – but only sublimated.
What is interesting here is that, while the drive of fixation
antagonizes through the belief that there is a good to follow,
assuming that the political is articulated from the outside and
through an idea of the law,
​​ the drive of perseverance antago-
nizes through the need to construct a loving bond, a way of
building the common through the irreducible. On the terrain
of the feminization of politics and the breach that places the
masculine and the feminine into tension with one another,
if we totalize the masculine as something to be eradicated
through the feminine, with the feminine speaking from itself
and for itself, we would be fixed into the same masculine
procedure as Creon – namely, the masculine as that totality
 We Populists are Feminists 125

that comes to be destroyed by my totalized exceptionality: a

double-totalization that is now being built from the opposite
pole of those who have been historically oppressed. On the
other hand, if we understand antagonism through the drive
of perseverance, the feminization of politics can be associated
with the construction of an antagonism through a de-totalized
loving bond. In this direction, the ethic of the not-all is the
possibility of thinking about feminism as a disruption of the
logic of the totality, short-circuiting the biologization of the
feminine and masculine as man and woman.
This logic, inherited from psychoanalysis, and which has
come to be called the not-all, embraces the indeterminacy of
reality – the non-existence of previously constituted identities
– as the starting point for thought, while understanding the
ontological dimension of the feminine and the masculine
without reducing these to the factical binary existence of men
and women. Hence the importance, as Judith Butler showed
in her book Gender Trouble, of the need to problematize the
dangers of the identitarian mechanisms particular to feminist
struggles that could end up reinforcing the positions assigned
by the patriarchy (Butler, 1990). Isn’t one of the great contri-
butions of feminism the insistence that the reified distinction
between men and women is the result of the totalizing logic
of the masculine?
There are, therefore, two positions we could take toward
the masculine: one that assumes the existence of two
completely separate sexes, as if the identity of each sex had its
own self-determined existence. Thus, the elimination of one
(the male) means the freedom of the other (the female). The
other view focuses instead on the problem of love (between
female and male) and invites us to interrogate the classic
“masculine” dichotomy of the feminine and the masculine.
Or, in other words, it helps us understand that it is the
masculine locus of enunciation that has tended to create a
totalizing and biologistic (positivized) separation between the
two sexes (Irigaray, 1985b; Braidotti, 2002). To embrace the
logic of the first argument – i.e. that the masculine is by its
very nature something to reject and destroy – means nothing
other than reproducing what we thought we were fighting.
126 We Populists are Feminists

From the other perspective, the female, the feminine, and

the masculine are not previously existing realities – totalities
– but two mutually contaminated modes of naming the
antagonism that constitutes us as subjects. Or, as Žižek says,
it is the recognition that my “identity is thwarted from within
by the other” (Žižek, 2013: 771), and that the one – female –
and the other – male – are nothing but ways of expressing the
inconsistency of the de-totalized reality of masculine closure,
which allows us to understand the body in a debiologized
way that is configured by the tension between these two loci
of enunciation.
If there is something truly revolutionary in the feminine
– that socio-historical form expelled from the masculine
field – if there is something that capitalism fails to capture
from it, it is the detotalization of female desire toward the
masculine, but also the detotalization of the place of female
desire when it assumes its own right to materialize in public
life. From this other side of desire, then, female and male
are not understood as a simple “opposition” – typical of
masculine discourse – but as selves contaminated from within
by the other of the self,14 whose perseverance continues to
work on and shape the feminine and masculine on the basis
of difference and processes of identification not idealized by
the masculine perspective. Thus, if heteropatriarchal desire
represents a totalizing and identitarian retreat from the word,
politics, and reason, female desire by contrast brings to light
the constitutive difference that organizes them from within.
But we would like to problematize a certain fixation that
seems to be present in Copjec’s ontology of sexual difference
and that could be seen as a sort of inherited patriarchal
remnant at the heart of psychoanalytic theory itself. In
“Theoretical Problems, Political Problems,” Paula Biglieri
and Gloria Perelló (2019) wonder what happens to thought
when we assume, on the one hand, that patriarchy is one of
the oldest forms of socio-historic domination, and, on the
other, that “the socio-historical order informs those categories
through which we theorize the ontological.” This question
allows them to formulate the idea that, since theoretical
categories are produced in a specific socio-historical context,
 We Populists are Feminists 127

they cannot escape it. In the authors’ words: “these categories

are ‘contaminated’ with ontic content because that is the only
way they can they be inscribed within the dominant discourse
of the time” (Biglieri and Perelló, 2019). This allows them
to go a step further and ask to what extent the ontological
categories of psychoanalysis are contaminated by patriarchy?
And, therefore, how can we “rethink theoretical formula-
tions in a symbolic universe that incorporates the new modes
of social organization resulting from the achievement of
equal rights in recent years” (Biglieri and Perelló, 2019)?
Here, the feminine point of view, or the feminization of the
political, would perform a double operation: from the ontic
perspective, it is the materially existing force that allows us
to short-circuit from within the master’s totalizing discourse
embodied in the figure of the dominant, white, heterosexual
man. But, from the ontological perspective, it is a catacretic
figure used to think when names fail (and based on the very
acknowledgment of this constitutive failure).

Populist feminism (or the antagonism of care)

Now we find ourselves on the other side of the problem that
we raised at the beginning of this essay – namely, how to
radicalize populism through feminism. Recall that in Essay
2 we rejected the distinction between left-wing populism and
right-wing populism, and we offered in turn an interpretation
of why we believe that populism is an emancipatory and anti-
fascist form of political articulation. What remains for us to
explore is whether that form of building the popular, that
way of configuring a failed image of the people, is capable
of being established through the problems of contemporary
feminism. For this, we will think about two current images:
the Not One Less movement, and Cristina Fernández de
Kirchner’s phrase that “The Homeland is the Other.”15
The signifier Not One Less is an expression that began
to take shape in the streets to demand an end to the
deaths of women through gendered violence. It was then
extended to a rejection of structural adjustment policies
128 We Populists are Feminists

and expanded into a global defense of the decriminalization

of voluntary abortion. One of its best-known slogans has
been: “Contraceptives to not abort. Legal abortion to not
die.” In principle, we could consider this a specific demand
that concerns a particular group – women – such that
some theorists of critical and emancipatory thought might
consider it secondary to the rest of the demands inscribed
within the popular field. But what happens if we begin to
think of this demand as one that concerns the very configu-
ration of what we understand to be the popular field, and
thereby as having the power to articulate and overdetermine
other demands?
The first thing to note is that, out of all the expressions of
materially existing struggles in the streets, Not One Less is the
one with the greatest ability to cross national borders. While
born as a popular movement in Argentina, it quickly spread
to different Latin American countries and to other continents
of the world, becoming an internationalist signifier with the
power to call together different types of massive popular
demonstrations. Along with other feminist movements, it
even called into question the depoliticized status quo that had
for decades celebrated March 8 as “International Women’s
Day,” seemingly reducing it to an empty celebration of
women’s place in society. Against this depoliticizing process,
Not One Less has managed to reconnect with the history
of past strikes through which women collectively protested
against forms of capitalist oppression and, in turn, exposed
their unequal role in society with respect to men. All of which
today gives us a massive, global, historical image of living
resistance and struggles against patriarchy.
Put in populist terms, the 8M (8 March) strike expresses
the ability to organize an antagonistic image or configuration
of society divided between those who seek to maintain this
form of oppression and those of us who seek to destroy it. But,
still more, it allows us to understand that femicides, austerity
policies against women, and the rejection of legal abortion
are not simply capricious attacks against a particular group,
but represent the very limit of patriarchy as a dominant social
relationship: the social reproduction of life. It is, in short,
 We Populists are Feminists 129

a specific kind of social relationship in which those called

women and those called men occupy an unequal position.
And that inequality is reiterated in the popular field and in
its organization forms when it comes to fighting for terrain
against those on top, such that unions and plebeian social
and political movements have been predominantly male
spaces, despite the fact that forms of exploitation have been
shared by this “strategic” gender division. This does not mean
simply discarding those historic forms of struggle led by men,
but admitting that “gender” inequality has permeated the
structure of the popular field itself. And, above all, it means
also admitting that it was from within this same field that the
current socio-historic power of feminism became imaginable.
So, the interpellative power that feminism enjoys right now
already represents a restructuring of the symbolic register of
the popular field, and therefore a reconfiguration of how the
antagonistic division of the social between the elites and the
people is produced. And this is despite the failed strategies
by some elites to appropriate feminist discourse and reduce
it to competition for jobs and the redistribution of power in
the labor market.

Feminist populism (or the homeland is

the other)
Now that it is clear that feminist struggles should be
considered a matter of first-order importance within the
construction of the popular camp, let’s explore a bit more
the link between populism and care. To do so, we are going
to begin with that bond of love that we mentioned in the
previous section in relation to Antigone, and that we would
now like to return to through the signifier “The Homeland
is the Other.” In our understanding, this signifier functions
as the external limit of fascism. We know it is very difficult
to think about the term “love” today, since, while this is a
word that never ceases to circulate, it is also true that it has
lost its collective character, retreating into the private and
individual sphere. But we must not forget how important
130 We Populists are Feminists

this term became in the face of the tragic modern experience

of lost totality. If we retrospectively read the use thinkers
like Hegel have made of this word, we find that love is a
way of confronting what one opposes, since the other, far
from something to be eliminated, is conceived through
the interplay of self-preservation and self-cancellation, i.e.
knowing oneself in the other. Doesn’t the emancipatory drive
of populism reactivate this old problem of love and return it
to the collective sphere?
Let’s delve a little deeper into the articulatory logic of
populism through the question of love. This means starting
not from the idea of a ​​ previously given identity, but from
the possibility of building a collective we (self) through
the other of the self. In fascism, the “self” can only exist,
on the one hand, through its negation and rejection of the
other and, on the other hand, as something previously
given. Therefore, fascism is a work of the self where what
is opposed is the other to be destroyed, because this is the
only way to achieve the completeness of being. From this
perspective, working through opposition means dominating
and destroying that which has been conceived as “the
other.” The relationship to the self is therefore understood
as a relation of property, as the possession of oneself, of
things, and of others. My identity is constituted through
an idea of domination.
​​ I exist insofar as I dominate, and
the other threatens to dominate me. The emancipatory
structure of populism’s logic of articulation, on the other
hand, proposes a different self-relation, a different labor of
the self, a different way of working through opposition. We
would even dare to say that it is affirmed through a care for
the self as the other of the self.
We believe that we can find the key to this idea of care
as the other of the self in Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s
phrase, “The Homeland is the Other.” This phrase allows us
to see that the other is the irreducible element that constitutes
our self without suppressing it, and so we need to take care of
that irreducible element that constitutes us. The other crafts
(but does not fix) our identity, configures a we affirmed as the
future, as what is to come through equality. In other words, it
 We Populists are Feminists 131

is a double operation of tolerating differences and building a

shared equality. Opposition is therefore not against the other,
but against that form of identity that seeks to destroy the
irreducible (or heterogeneous) through the configuration of
inequality and exclusion. It is not about destroying the other
but about destroying a position that prevents the existence of
the other (the heterogeneous), what is to come. It antagonizes
that power that seeks to assert itself as domination of the
self. Emancipatory populism opposes and seeks to destroy
the position that tries to eliminate what – from the totalizing
point of view – is considered other, i.e. peasants, indigenous
people, women, LGBTI+ people, etc.
And this is how we find the fundamental difference between
the notion of care proposed through an autonomist matrix
and the notion of care explored through a populist matrix.
If the first sets out from an affirmative power (potencia) that
does not need to produce articulations for the construction
of the political – since its potencia gives itself form through
its constitutive immanence and its confidence in affirmative
completeness – the second, on the other hand, assumes that
care is a constant labor of opposition (negativity); and that
the challenge is not so much to renounce working with
negativity (as affirmative ontology seems to do) as it is to
work through this opposition (negativity) differently. That
is, to develop a form of work that is not articulated through
domination of the other but instead embraces the other of
the self as that polemos that must be cared for in order for
things to flourish.
It is possible that this type of political articulation, these
new images encouraged by a populist feminism, are the best
way to destroy patriarchy and the form of property and
domination associated with it, and the beginning of a new
kind of social relationship that transforms the conception
of property as domination. This is a labor of the self that
begins to move away from the extractive logic of surplus
value and exploitation. This is why, faced with patriarchal
domination, populist feminism could give shape evidentially
to a form of common usage for those of us who believe
that we have nothing in common, those who embrace the
132 We Populists are Feminists

constitutive irreducibility of every singularity as the secret

that allows us to imagine an egalitarian and republican life
with others. This is probably a form of feminism that is yet to
be explored within a populism that perseveres and that, like
an irreducible secret, cannot be sacrificed.
 Notes

Foreword
1 www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-​populist-​challenge-
to-liberal-democracy.
2 “How Does Populism Turn Authoritarian? Venezuela Is a
Case in Point”: www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/world/americas/​
venezuela-populism-authoritarianism.html, www.theatlantic.​
com/​international/archive/2017/06/venezuela-populism-fail/
525321.
3 See Stephan Hahn, summarizing William Galston’s view, in “The
Populist Specter,” The Nation, January 28 – February 4, 2019:
www.thenation.com/article/archive/mounk-​ g alston-deneen-
eichengreen-the-populist-specter.
4 “Militant” is an important part of Biglieri and Cadahia’s
political theoretical vocabulary. The term translates awkwardly
into English, especially American English, where it signifies
dogmatic and aggressive and hardened political views and
a tendency toward extreme, sometimes violent, actions. By
contrast, in French, Spanish, and Italian, its meaning is
closer to political engagement as part of a cause, or what
Biglieri and Cadahia call collective belonging. In fact, they
insist, an emancipatory populist militant has precisely to be
non-dogmatic. It would be, they wrote in an email to me,
“someone who escapes dogmatism, someone who defends
some principles and belongs to a collective formation or
organization but, at the same time, is never fully captured by
134 Notes to pp. xiv–xxiv

those principles, collective formation and organization. That is

to say, someone who is always open to the new, to the critique,
to the event.”
5 Occupy, it is important to remember, began as a protest against
Citizens United, the 2011 Supreme Court decision delivering the
coup de grâce to electoral democracy by lifting restrictions on
corporate financing of campaigns.

Introduction
1 These soft coups began in 2009 with the removal of Manuel
Zelaya in Honduras, followed by coups against Fernando
Lugo in Paraguay in 2012, Dilma Rousseff in 2016, and Evo
Morales in 2019. And we consider these to be “paradoxically”
democratic coups for two reasons. In the first place, because
they do not break with the institutional order in the old style of
the civilian–military coups of the second half of the twentieth
century in Latin America, which explicitly suspended the rule of
law and functioned through a permanent state of exception with
an alternative juridical order. And, in the second place, because
juridical–mediatic complicity creates the fiction of a procedure
regulated within the rules of the institutional game.
2 For the Latin American right, it has become common practice to
persecute judicially popular political leaders once their mandates
have ended. This persecution has been called “lawfare” and
consists of establishing a link of complicity between some
sectors of the judicial branch, corporate–media power, and
right-wing presidents. This complicity consists of creating
mediatic–judicial cases without any proof or constitutional
guarantees whatsoever, through which misleading corruption
charges are filed. These cases are managed and tried by judges
allied with the mediatic–judicial apparatus, with the goal of
damaging the leader’s image nationally and internationally and
preventing their return to electoral politics.
3 Recall that, in Colombia, during the second term of Juan
Manuel Santos, a peace agreement was signed between one of
Latin America’s oldest guerrilla organizations (the FARC) and
the Colombian government. This peace agreement meant the
end of the armed struggle, the disarming of guerrillas, their
transition into a political party, and a pact to carry out a series
of key reforms for the country. However, after the victory of
far-right leader Iván Duque in the most recent elections, the
peace process suffered a setback at the hands of the current
 Notes to pp. xxvi–9 135

government, which has translated into the suspension of the

process and the return of the logic of war.
4 Biglieri and Perelló (2007).
5 Coronel and Cadahia (2018).
6 Cadahia, Coronel, Valeria, and Ramírez (2018).
7 This project was financed by the British Academy, led by Mark
Devenney and Paula Biglieri, and carried out by the Centre for
Applied Philosophy, Politics, and Ethics at the University of
Brighton, and the Ernesto Laclau Open Seminar at the Faculty
of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires.
8 The Consortium is co-directed by Professor Judith Butler
(University of California–Berkeley) and Professor Penelope
Deutscher (Northwestern University). See https://criticaltheory-
consortium.org.

Essay 1  The Secret of Populism

1 At the beginning of the 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
the English economist John Williamson drafted the first formu-
lation of the “Washington Consensus,” which initially took
the form of a series of neoliberal recommendations but soon
became a menu of demands required of developing countries.
This “consensus” would come to be the guiding axis for
policies imparted by the political-economic-intellectual complex
comprising the US Federal Administration and Treasury and
international financial organs (the International Monetary
Fund, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, etc.).
2 The various forms of modernization theory and comparative
politics and culture (informed by authors such as Gabriel
Almond and followers like Seymour M. Lipset, etc.) argued
that: “The transition from one society to another is moreover
inscribed on a continuum that does not allow for profound
ruptures. To the contrary, this evolution emerges gradually
and progressively and entails the existence of improvement and
progress (in positivist terms) between both extremes of said
continuum” (Zapata, 1990: 172).
3 Badie and Hermet refer to the three traditional Latin American
cases of Juan D. Perón in Argentina, Getulio Vargas in Brazil,
and Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, to which they add the examples
of Kemal Ataturk in Turkey, Nasser in Egypt, Bourguiba in
Tunisia, and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.
4 In Essay 4, we will return in more detail to the relationship
between populism and republicanism.
136 Notes to pp. 9–30

5 The category of Bonapartism (which is interchangeable with

Caesarism) has a long pedigree in Marxist research. In general
terms, it was used to work through the autonomy or heter-
onomy of politics vis-à-vis the economic dimension. For
example, Karl Marx himself used it in the Eighteenth Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte (1869) to analyze the dictatorship of Louis
Napoléon, and Friedrich Engels made use of it to address the
Bismarck period in The Role of Force in History (1887).
6 We will develop this idea later.
7 According to Laclau and Mouffe (1985), a hegemonic articu-
lation presupposes the operation of two opposing logics on
the same terrain: the logic of equivalence and the logic of
difference. Chains of equivalence do not come together because
their particularities have a shared objective, since the implicated
elements are defined negatively, as differences. Their particular
interests are extremely diverse, but their demands are never-
theless equivalent vis-à-vis an excluded element. That is to say,
the logic of equivalence interrupts the logic of difference insofar
as the elements are equivalent to one another with respect to
what is excluded. This chain of equivalences unifies around a
signifier or element that represents them, which is nothing other
than one of these particularities that has assumed representation
of the totality, insofar as it becomes emptied of its particular
characteristics. This hegemonizing particularity functions as
an empty signifier – and, the emptier it is, the more elements
can enter into equivalency in the chain vis-à-vis the excluded
element.

Essay 2  Neither Left nor Right: Populism

without Apology
1 This particular element – which turns out to be an empty
signifier – assumes such representation because it is overde-
termined and condenses the greatest number of associative
chains in a given social order. This is why representation in
a hegemonic articulation is constitutively distorted and takes
place amid a tense negotiation between the particular and the
universal.
2 This paper was presented at the conference “Fascism? Populism?
Democracy?” organized by the International Consortium of
Critical Theory Programs at the University of Brighton, and has
not yet been published, so we are only able to cite the transcript.
3 In the Introduction, note 2, we described the functioning of this
 Notes to pp. 31–49 137

practice of judicial – and therefore political – persecution that

has been called “lawfare.”
4 Mauricio Macri governed Argentina between 2015 and 2019
thanks to an alliance among different right-wing sectors. In
2019, and with the backing of this same alliance, he failed in
his reelection attempt and was defeated in the first round by
the populist ticket made up of Alberto Fernández and Cristina
Fernández de Kirchner.
5 See www.lanacion.com.ar/1903034-gonzalez-fraga-le-hicieron-
creer-al-empleado-medio-que-podia-comprarse-plasmas-y-
viajar-al-exterior, consulted 21/05/2019.
6 See www.ambito.com/841192-les-hicieron-creer-que-podian-
vivir-de-esa-forma-eternamente.
7 Lacan introduces the notion of capitalist discourse in his 1953
“Rome Speech” (“The Function and Field of Speech and
Language in Psychoanalysis”).
8 Laclau writes: “Dislocation is the source of freedom. But this
is not the freedom of a subject with a positive identity – in
which case it would just be a structural locus; rather it is merely
the freedom of a structural fault which can only construct an
identity through acts of identification” (1990: 60).
9 We will address this link between fascism and neoliberalism in
greater detail in the next essay.

Essay 3  Against Neoliberal Fascism: From

Sacrificial Identity to Egalitarian Singularity
1 We refer here to the notion of constitutive lack of both the social
being and the subject, which we discussed in detail through
Laclau and Alemán in the previous essay.
2 In the first essay, we put forward a critique of this text.
3 The Audiovisual Communication Services Law (known as
the Media Law) was enacted in 2011 during the government
of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and entailed the attempt
to standardize the functioning and distribution of audio-
visual media licenses in Argentina. This meant repealing the
old existing law from the last civilian–military dictatorship,
which encouraged the accumulation of licenses in the hands
of small groups and distorted the social meaning of commu-
nication in terms of rights. The Equal Marriage Law was also
enacted during the Fernández de Kirchner government in 2010,
making Argentina the first Latin American country to recognize
same-sex marriage. The nationalization of water in Bolivia was
138 Notes to pp. 53–71

one of the rallying cries of the constituent process that Evo

Morales sponsored after winning his first election, and meant
putting an end to water privatization strategies in Bolivia. Along
these lines, the new Political Constitution of the Plurinational
State, approved by referendum in January 2009, incorporated a
new conception of water, understood as a common good and a
fundamental human right. Beginning in 2008, the government
of Rafael Correa supported labor regulation for domestic
workers in Ecuador in light of the precarity, informality, and
exploitation they experienced. One of the most important
measures consisted of requiring employers to register their
workers for social security.
4 While in Essays 1 and 2 we developed our understanding of the
ontological dimension of populism, it’s worth mentioning that
what interests us here is to underline two things: its indeter-
minacy and its equivalential function.
5 We will return in more detail to this question in the last section
of this essay.
6 In the next essay, we will analyze in more detail the question
of populism and its link to republicanism. In this section, we
are only interested in laying out the arguments according to
which some republican authors formulate a proximity between
populism and republicanism.
7 We refer to the limits of populism for interpellating the middle
classes and shaping a political subject beyond the demand for
consumer goods.

Essay 4  Profaning the Public: The Plebeian

Dimension of Republican Populism
1 In Essay 5, we will return to the debate on the role of the leader
from a psychoanalytic perspective.
2 Institutional logic appears in Laclau’s work through what he
calls the logic of difference, which always functions inseparably
from the logic of equivalence. Likewise, we can find it in the
very constitution of the populist people insofar as it is traversed
by organizations. But we will address this last aspect in the next
essay (see also Essay 1).
3 We will return to a discussion of the decision, but from a
psychoanalytic angle, in Essay 6.
4 Among the most emblematic cases, we could emphasize
the murders of Berta Cáceres and Lesbia Yaneth Urquía in
Honduras, and Marielle Franco in Brazil, or the exponential
 Notes to pp. 71–88 139

growth of such killings in places like Colombia where, in a

single year (2018), 266 social movement and territorial leaders
were assassinated.
5 By “para-state alliances,” we refer to links between state powers
and organized crime (paramilitaries, drug cartels, etc.).
6 We are grateful for this citation to the Cuban historian and
theorist Julio Guanche, who is also carrying out detailed
research on republicanism and populism in 1930s Cuba.

Essay 5  Toward an Internationalist Populism

1 It’s worth mentioning that, as we write this book, Berta Cáceres
and Marielle Franco have been assassinated, Rafael Correa is in
exile in Brussels, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Gustavo
Petro are experiencing all kinds of mediatic and judicial perse-
cution in their countries, and Francia Márquez has suffered an
attempt on her life that nearly killed her.
2 See Augusto Monterroso’s (2013) critique of Mario Vargas
Llosa, who personally took on the task of editing a collective
volume on the danger of authoritarian leadership in Latin
America. Although the book project was cut short, Vargas Llosa
was one of the main Latin American intellectuals to dissas-
sociate the figure of the authoritarian leader from Europe and
identify it with Latin America.
3 We will return to this point in Essay 6.
4 On this point, we follow the detailed analysis of Laclau’s use of
Freud’s texts in Biglieri and Perelló (2012).
5 Freud announces the idea of destabilizing the normal/patho-
logical binary in the very title of his text The Psychopathology
of Everyday Life (1989b [1901]).
6 Freud mentions three different types of identification: the first
with the father, the second with the love-object, and the third
that we find in the mutual link between members of the group.
7 When Freud makes this argument, he is responding to those
who argue that, by joining the group, subjects lose the charac-
teristics of an individual (rationality, etc.).
8 “It is the articulations of demands that make the difference.
Demands stage what is not considered in the Freudian schema
(or at least what was not systematically considered by Freud) –
need and desire. From a Lacanian perspective these two orders
configure the notion of demand” (Biglieri and Perelló, 2016:
24).
9 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmIwRGInWDc.
140 Notes to pp. 90–93

10 Gramsci was read and translated in Argentina, beginning in

1947.
11 It’s worth pointing out that, in the 1920s, José Carlos Mariátegui
traveled to Italy and would be very influenced by intel-
lectual debates there, reading several important authors of the
moment, such as Piero Gobetti, Benedetto Croce, and Georges
Sorel. They would all help him think through the problem
of aesthetics within revolutionary processes, and would also
help him to arrive at similar theses to those developed by
Antonio Gramsci in Prison Notebooks on the problem of
the national-popular and the possibilities for Marxisms in
peripheral countries. While Mariátegui didn’t have the oppor-
tunity to discover these similarities between his thought and
Gramsci’s, since the Notebooks were only published after his
death, there are indications that Mariátegui was indeed aware
of Gramsci’s journalistic work, since, as an assiduous reader
of the journal founded by Gramsci and Terracini, L’Ordine
Nuovo, he would come to say, in a note written for the
newspaper El Tiempo, that the journal’s founders were “two of
the party’s most notable intellectuals: Terracini and Gramsci”
(Mariátegui, 1921).
12 One thing that we should keep in mind has to do with the diffi-
culties populist thought has in addressing aesthetic problems.
13 In Mariátegui’s case, this is found in “Literature on Trial,” the
last of his Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1971),
and, in Gramsci’s case, in a compendium of texts included in the
Prison Notebooks, which would be given the name “Literature
and National Life” (1998).
14 The concept of “situated universalism” is being developed by the
Colombian anthropologist José Figueroa within the framework
of the project “Situated Universalism: Radical Liberalism,
Afro-Descendency, and Nation in Cuba and Ecuador.” While
these works have not yet been published, we have had access to
them through conversations and unpublished manuscripts. For
more information on his work, see: www.calas.lat/es/content/
jose-antonio-figueroa.
15 We could also include here the research project “Theorising
Transnational Politics,” financed by the British Academy and
carried out by the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics, and
Ethics (CAPPE) at the University of Brighton and the Ernesto
Laclau Open Seminar in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters
of the University of Buenos Aires, between 2015 and 2018.
16 Recall that the “Troika” is the popular (and pejorative) name
for the trident of supranational institutions made up of the
 Notes to pp. 95–98 141

European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the

International Monetary Fund.
17 We refer to the MeRA25, the Greek European Realistic
Disobedience Front, and Germany’s Demokratie in Europa.
In fact, in the July 2019 election in which SYRIZA was
defeated, several MeRA25 deputies entered the Greek national
parliament, among them Yanis Varoufakis.
18 See the interview with Žižek in Diario Perfil (2018).
19 The last civilian–military dictatorship in Argentina was in
power from 1976 to 1983, leaving 30,000 disappeared.
20 UNASUR’s importance as an alternative international space
in the region led it to be one of the first targets attacked and
dismantled by the neoliberal governments of Mauricio Macri
in Argentina, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Lenin Moreno in
Ecuador. Bear in mind that UNASUR was constituted by 12
nations (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador,
Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, and Venezuela).
It declared as its formal aim: “the constitution of a space for
cultural, economic, and socio-political integration with respect
for the particularities of every nation,” and it claimed as its
main challenge “to eradicate socio-economic inequality, to
achieve social inclusion and citizen participation, to strengthen
democracy, and to reduce imbalances while respecting the
sovereignty and independence of every state.” UNASUR turned
out to be an active and successful space for the egalitarian
participation of the different countries involved. The decision
to build political spaces that excluded the United States, and
its unconditional ally Canada, weakened the position of the
US in the region and allowed for the emergence of a dynamic
among member countries guided by notions of horizontality,
independence, sovereignty, and the equality of peoples. To
give an example: UNASUR played a central role in stopping
the 2008 civilian coup d’état threatening Evo Morales in
Bolivia. The urgent meeting of UNASUR presidents gathered
in Santiago de Chile to strongly back Morales stated in the
Declaration of La Moneda that: “They emphatically reject
and will not recognize any situation that would entail an
attempted civilian coup, an interruption of the institutional
order, or any situation that would compromise the territorial
integrity of Bolivia” (Página 12, 17/09/2008, www.pagina12.
com.ar/diario/elmundo/subnotas/111740-35328-2008-09-17.
html). UNASUR’s intervention isolated the insurrection against
the central government by right-wing governors of Bolivia’s
Media Luna (or Half Moon), the richest part of the country,
142 Notes to pp. 100–104

leaving them without any support in the region. Moreover, this

first effective political action positioned UNASUR as the main
political organization in the region, in which political issues
could be resolved without the intervention of the US. It is worth
noting that, with regard to Bolivia, the US openly harassed the
populist government of the moment – for example, endorsing
the insurrection by right-wing governors, and including the
country on the “blacklist” of countries that weren’t doing
enough to fight drug trafficking.

Essay 6  The Absent Cause of Populist

Militancy
1 We refer here to the concept elaborated by Oliver Marchart
in his book Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political
Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (2007), and the
precise use of the term will be explained later.
2 We are alluding here to Jorge Alemán’s Capitalism: The Perfect
Crime or Emancipation (2019), where he utilizes the metaphor
of the “perfect crime” to present his hypothesis that neolib-
eralism is the first historical regime that seeks to capture the
subject in its structural dimension. We developed this hypothesis
in Essay 2.
3 We elaborated the development of this concept in Essay 3,
following Foucault and Brown.
4 We will explain what we mean by “classic schemas of the left”
in what follows.
5 Jorge Abelardo Ramos (Buenos Aires, 1921–94) was a politician,
intellectual, and journalist, and a founder of the National Left,
the political current that Laclau was a member of during his
youth in Argentina. Among Ramos’ most oustanding works
was Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Argentina (2006
[1957]) – originally published in 1957 and then republished and
reformulated on several occasions – and History of the Latin
American Nation (2011 [1968]) in 1968.
6 See www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1-85297-2007-05-21.
html.
7 Through New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time
(Laclau, 1990), we can equate the notions of necessity and
sedimentation and argue that the latter is nothing more than an
always partial and failed attempt to limit reactivation.
8 This distinction sets out from the idea of accidentality – derived
 Notes to pp. 105–109 143

from Aristotle’s Metaphysics – which refers to those character-

istics of an object that do not relate to its essence.
9 Lacan discusses the tuché and automaton in his 1964 Seminar
(1998 [1964]).
10 “Cycle of rebellion” refers to the period characterized by an
expansion of social demands and antagonisms that various
neoliberal governments were incapable of domesticating.
Marked by a constant repression of indigenous coca farmers
and any kind of social protest, the cycle of rebellion gave rise
to what Álvaro García Linera (2008) – Vice-President of the
Plurinational State of Bolivia from 2006 to 2019 – defined as a
popular indigenous articulation. The coca farmers – who resisted
attempts to eradicate the coca leaf and relocate their commu-
nities – established an equivalential chain with a diversity of
demands tied to the “defense of natural resources.” In fact, these
demands were presented as a matter of “national sovereignty.”
Thus, defending the coca leaf meant defending ancestral tradi-
tions; defending water against privatization and rate increases
in Cochabamba meant defending national health (in what was
known as the “water war”); the massive blockade of La Paz led
by Felipe Quispe – who would later become an opponent of Evo
Morales – demanding free access to land, water, and the coca
leaf, and opposing the export of gas to the US for a pittance
(the “gas war”) meant defending natural resources against
foreign plunder; and the demand for a constituent assembly
meant fighting for a new constitution that would protect natural
resources and recognize indigenous peoples, etc.
11 The 15-M, or Indignados Movement, began with the irruption
of protest on May 15, 2011, in Madrid, but quickly spread
across Spain. It began when a group of protesters decided to
camp out in the Puerta del Sol, quickly becoming massive.
While the demands were diverse, they centered on the idea
that “they do not represent us” and expressed a generalized
rejection of the political establishment – consisting basically of
the Popular Party (PP) and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party
(PSOE) – and the financial establishment, i.e. the banks.
12 The MAS (Movement for Socialism) is the political party of the
coca farmers’ unions.
13 Here it is interesting to specify that “dislocation is the very
form of temporality. And temporality must be conceived as the
exact opposite of space. The ‘spatialization’ of an event consists
of eliminating its temporality” (Laclau, 1990: 41). That is to
say, while the effort to endure brings the deadening effect of a
routine that seeks to reduce all variation to an invariant nucleus
144 Notes to pp. 110–116

(space is the field of structural repetition), time, on the contrary,

is an event that is irreducible to those elements pre-established
by the structure.
14 The “circles” were the organizational form that Podemos gave
rise to, and were groups governed basically by horizontality
and participation, in which different people converge according
to their interests. There were two types of circles: territorially
anchored circles, and thematic circles based on programmatic
field or professional interest. These circles enjoyed autonomy as
long as they respected the general principles sketched out by the
Citizens’ Assembly. Moreover, any person – even without being
a member of Podemos – was authorized to start a circle and gain
“active” status to achieve official recognition.
15 In Essays 2 and 3, we commented on a whole series of these
kinds of critiques.
16 We owe this reading of Bataille to Oliver Marchart (2006).
17 Lacan discusses the notion of the absent cause in the 1964 text
“Presence of the Analyst” (1998 [1964]: 123–35).

Essay 7  We Populists are Feminists

1 There exists a fruitful debate between theorists of sexual
difference (Irigaray, Cixous, Clément), anti-sexual difference
(Plaza, Wittig, and Delphy), queer and gender theorists (cf.
Braidotti and Butler, 1994: 27–61; Butler, 1990), and Lacanian
feminists (Copjec, 2002), about whether it is or is not possible
to use expressions like “feminine” or “woman.” With regard
to the first current, authors like Luce Irigaray (1993, 1985b)
and Rosi Braidotti (2004, 2002) embrace the need to inhabit
these terms as a paradox, and to grant them a non-essentialist
usage not determined a priori. That is to say, they see the
need to consider these words as the name given to a form
of exclusion, and thus to determine whether, through this
exclusion, a “female feminism” is feasible as a political,
historical, contingent, and non-essentialist project open to
the multiplicity of forms for being and existing in society
(Braidotti, 1991). With regard to the second current, thinkers
like Monique Plaza and Monique Wittig believe that these
categories associated with sexual difference become too essen-
tialist, since they lend themselves to an ahistoric or apolitical
interpretation of problems, and reintroduce the symmetrical
binary of male/female (Braidotti and Butler, 1994: 48). The
third current, echoing the second, also believes that these terms
 Note to p. 116 145

retain a metaphysical aftertaste traversed by an essentialist

“heterosexual matrix” from which authors like Judith Butler
and Paul Preciado seek to distance themselves (Butler, 1990:
35; Preciado, 2002).
Within these three currents (sexual difference, anti-sexual
difference, and queer and gender theory), the question emerges
in two fundamental, but not unique, ways. The first question
asks whether the use of expressions like “feminine” or “woman”
implies the reactivation of an essentialism. The second, by
contrast, is a question about the problem of desire, whose
tension fluctuates according to whether we are dealing with
a heterosexual tradition (sexual difference), lesbian tradition
(gender theory), or whether these are two different tradi-
tions for naming female homosexuality (Braidotti and Butler,
1994: 47–8). If it is the first, then, lesbian desire would be
independent of female desire and the category of woman should
be dissolved. But if it is the second, then lesbian desire functions
on a continuum of female sexuality. With regard to Lacanian
feminists, we could say that they distance themselves from all
of the currents mentioned above in two fundamental aspects:
the negative character of desire, and the place assigned to the
feminine in Lacan’s theory.
Now, it seems to us that terms like “feminine” or “woman”
are completely obsolete if we understand them as a mere datum,
a biological fact, or an ahistorical metaphysical essence that
would establish in an essentialist way a society divided between
“men” and “women” – with an entire series of historical associ-
ations assigned to each gender. However, if we think about “the
feminine” and “the woman” from within the debates that we
just mentioned, we find contradictory positions and the debate
is far from over. Even more so, this debate is not resolved if
we take into consideration the uses assigned to these words
by feminist authors of sexual difference, Lacanian feminism,
or even the use given in the contemporary political experi-
ences of Latin American feminism in which our own militancy
is inscribed. In this sense, it seems interesting to follow some
reflections by Braidotti and Joan Scott (although we do not
share their Derridean and Deleuzian ontological assumptions
about affirmative difference), who believe that “it is not by
willful self-naming that we shall find the exit from the prison-
house of phallogocentric language” (Braidotti and Butler, 1994:
51). That’s why renouncing the use of expressions like “woman”
and “feminine” – and looking for other categories to theorize
these problems – does not entail an automatic transformation
146 Note to p. 116

of the material structures of power with which those old names

were associated (Scott, 1986).
Moreover, we would add, sophisticated debates often occur
within academia that wind up distancing themselves from the
sphere of concrete political struggles, and the terms that these
same struggles use to express their discontent and to seek social
transformation. We share with Braidotti the idea that this
attitude of renouncing certain words can lead to a kind of naïve
voluntarism of naming – as if, by naming things differently,
we were already creating the new and pushing back oppressive
logics – that, paradoxically, reactivates the worst remnants of
the omnipotence of theories of consciousness. As if the choice
to name ourselves differently would free us automatically from
the socio-historic ties that escape to the level of consciousness,
and we would be able to control – through the mere act of
naming – the being of our subjectivity. This doesn’t mean that
there isn’t a defiance in beginning to name things differently and
expressing the experimental and performative on the order of
being, but this experimental game doesn’t need to come at the
expense of those who continue to use terms like “woman” or
“female,” and nor does it imply that these expressions retain a
patriarchal metaphysics. Perhaps the problem lies in believing
that the name exhausts our entire identity, and that once we
name things differently it is possible to recuperate the purity of
one’s being. Perhaps the secret of emancipation is not so much
about assigning the “correct name” as it is about theoretical
movements that support our contaminated and non-totalizing
use of words to name the world.
We prefer to play with expressions in an attempt to
distrust these very words, to the point of encouraging dirty
contaminations. So “changes in the deep structures of identity
require socio-symbolic interventions that go beyond willful
self-naming,” i.e. assuming that “unconscious processes are
trans-historical and consequently require time to be changed
was not supposed to mean that we can step outside or beside
the unconscious by making a counter-move towards ‘historical
or social reality.’ It rather means that to make effective political
choices we must come to terms with the specific temporality of
the unconscious” (Braidotti and Butler, 1994: 51). This is why,
Braidotti adds, it can be interesting to embrace the paradox of
feminine identity as something that “needs to be both claimed
and deconstructed” (51), with the objective of understanding
the “feminine” and the “woman” as a situated knowledge
or a “politics of location.” And undoing the essentialist and
 Notes to pp. 116–117 147

oppressive dimensions of these terms can come at the same time

through claiming them affirmatively as a project within a force
field, i.e. as a symbolic and political “position” (42). On the
one hand, this is because using expressions like “woman” and
“feminine” does not need to mean that all women are the same
or that we are referring mechanically to a naturalized identity.
And, on the other hand, because it can serve as a platform for
political action by and for women, no longer understood as the
name of a previously given identity but as a relational position
to be built collectively. In other words, it is a subject-position,
in the political and militant sense, that takes on both historic
sedimentation and, at the same time, the contingency and
indeterminacy characteristic of all transformative practice.
2 We choose the figures of the feminine and the popular because
we are interested in emphasizing several questions. In the
first place, and following Braidotti, these can function as
“conceptual personae” in a scene, which – without denying the
existence of other personae – “illuminate … aspects of one’s
practice which were blind spots before” and that are “materially
embedded” in the subject (Braidotti, 2002: 13). In the second
place, we choose them because these figures express a consti-
tutive paradox whose contradictory character does not seek to
be “overcome” but simply worked through differently. In other
words, the feminine and the popular express both a locus of
(historically sedimented) oppression and a political position (an
emancipatory possibility). And in the third place, these figures,
by having the peculiarity of setting into motion both intelligence
and feeling, are capable of affecting us in such a way as to
mobilize us for political action.
3 It should be noted that feminism in Latin America has its own
evolution, so much so that it is characterized by four moments
or waves whose genealogies do not coincide with either
European or North American feminism (Rivera Berruz, 2018).
The colonial experience and the condition of periphery within
the geopolitical scenario has marked a singular drift in both
feminist thought and praxis in Latin America. In this regard, the
1980s and 1990s marked a turning point in the feminist field
that eventually divided itself between institutionalist feminists,
militant feminists, and autonomous feminists. The first trend
was associated with the figure of professional feminists linked
to institutional work within international organizations and
NGOs in the period of the neoliberal states. The other two
trends, on the other hand, were more associated with grassroots
work with social movements. However, while militant feminists
148 Notes to p. 117

did not renounce their left-wing political parties or unions,

the autonomous feminists, on the other hand, considered it a
priority to create an autonomous women’s movement regardless
of political orientation or affiliation (Gargallo, 2006). Parallel to
this was the need to demonstrate the specificity of black feminism
(Carneiro, 2000; Gonzalez, 2015; Curiel, 2016, 2007), lesbian
feminism (Espinosa Miñoso, 2011), and indigenous feminism
(Bastian Duarte, 2012; Rivera Berruz, 2018; Rivera Cusicanqui,
2018), whose forms of emancipation had to deal with a number
of issues that classical feminism had not yet raised. Currently,
there seems to be a new reorganization of the feminist field
that involves two highly relevant issues. On the one hand is the
need to articulate the plurality of Latin American feminisms
(autonomist, militant, black, indigenous, lesbian, queer) with
other struggles of the popular field (class and race), and, on the
other, the need to rethink what type of link has been brewing
between the state and feminism, outside the consensual logic of
the neoliberal model. This is where we place our bet– namely,
on the question of how to think about a feminism within the
popular field, and its capacity to shape a popular and feminist
state. This approach would resonate with the work of feminists
such as Sueli Carneiro (2000), María Luisa Femenías (2007),
Sonia Álvarez (1998), Alba Carosio (2009), and Marlise Matos
and Clarisse Paradise (2013), among others.
4 Braidotti expresses this critique of negativity by feminists of
difference very well when she rejects the role that the concept
plays for Butler and Žižek. According to the author, the role
of negativity leads to a sort of melancholy that would become
incapable of advocating for social transformation (Braidotti,
2002: 52–64). We reject this equation of negativity with
stagnant melancholy. We don’t believe that this is to be found
in Butler’s ethical proposal, and that, like Butler, authors like
Laclau help us to theorize emancipation precisely through the
constitutive negativity or gap of the subject (or social being).
5 We believe that this rejection of antagonism and negativity is
deeply rooted in both European difference feminism and Latin
American autonomist feminism. As to the first, we refer to
feminist proposals anchored in the theory of difference, l’écriture
féminine, and some renewals of queer and gender theory that
embrace ontological difference in its constitutively affirmative
dimension, without passing through the play of negativity. The
most important representatives of this approach include authors
like Luce Irigaray, Rosi Braidotti, and Paul Preciado, who pick
up from Deleuzian and/or Derridean approaches to thinking
 Notes to p. 117 149

difference from within the self and beyond the negativity of

either the dialectic of difference and identity, or aspects of
the Lacanian legacy (Irigaray, 1985b; Braidotti, 2004, 2002;
Preciado, 2016).
By “autonomist feminism,” we refer to those post-Marxist
feminist approaches that take from authors like Hardt, Negri,
and Deleuze a contemporary re-reading of power (potencia),
desire, and the common in Spinoza, in order to theorize emanci-
pation, and also those authors who work on the question
of communitarian feminism as an alternative to the colonial
legacy from the perspective of decolonial theory. With regard to
the post-Marxist current, we find authors like Verónica Gago
(2017, 2020), who takes up ideas of power (potencia), desire,
and life in common from the perspective of an affirmative
ontology that rejects any vestige of theoretical negativity [in
Spanish, and in autonomist literature in particular, we find a
bifurcation between poder as “power-over” and potencia as a
more essentially positive “power-to” – Trans.].
With regard to postcolonial feminism, we find the work
of María Lugones (2011), Rita Segato (2013), Silvia Rivera
Cusicanqui (2018), Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar (2017), and
María Galindo (2004). Both post-Marxist and communitarian
feminisms tend to establish a whole series of oppositions that
would seem to define the privileged locations for emancipation
ahead of time. Thus the state, representation, political parties,
the figure of the leader, and confrontation tend to fall on the
side of abstraction and patriarchy, while life in common,
immanence, new forms of feminist organizing, and the body
fall on the side of emancipatory feminism. It is possible that this
convergence between European difference feminism and Latin
American autonomist feminism results from their affirmative
conception of desire, which moves away from the view of desire
as negativity typical of the Hegelian, Lacanian, and even the
populist traditions.
6 Here Gago reiterates a whole series of prejudices typical of
Latin American autonomism, which we analyzed in Essay 3.
7 By the feminization of the popular, we refer to three things:
in the first place, the need for leadership figures put forth by
women; in the second place, the need to build imaginaries and
rituals on the basis of the desires of those who have historically
occupied the “position” of women; and, in the third place, the
role that women have played in staging the capitalist contra-
diction of social reproduction that is historically associated with
care work (Fraser, 2016).
150 Notes to pp. 117–120

8 While an extensive bibliography exists on the problem of care

and the various approaches to it (Vega Solís, 2009, 2015),
what interests us here is to focus on the idea of the crisis of
care proposed by Nancy Fraser in her article “Contradictions
of Capitalism and Care” (2016). Along these lines, we take up
the distinction between social reproduction (care work) and
the social production of value (labor) as two ways of experi-
encing the social contradiction of capital within capitalism’s
financialized phase. In the historical distribution of gender
roles, the former has been associated with women, and the
latter with men. According to Fraser, in the current phase of
financialized capitalism, we are witnessing a “crisis of care”
because this dimension of reproduction seeks to be invisibilized
as a first-order political problem (women have entered the labor
market, the state does not offer social protection, and care work
is relegated to a precarious and informal labor market among
popular sectors).
9 It is worth noting that this view of knowledge has many
resonances with Adrienne Rich’s (1994) proposal in the 1980s
for a “politics of location,” which was later taken up by
Braidotti. For Braidotti, “The politics of location means that the
thinking, the theoretical process, is not abstract, universalized,
objective, and detached, but rather that it is situated in the
contingency of one’s experience and as such it is a necessarily
partial exercise. In other words, one’s intellectual vision is not
a disembodied mental activity; rather, it is closely connected to
one’s place of enunciation, i.e., where one is actually speaking
from” (Braidotti, 1991: 160).
10 We refer to the possibility of a post-Marxist feminism that,
instead of being inscribed in an affirmative ontology of power
[potencia], is taken up from the tradition of theorizing negativity.
11 We refer to various debates that have emerged within
progressive political organizations, between Latin American
and European writers. For more on this debate, we recommend
the collective book A Feminism of the 99% (2018), and the
article by Clara Serra Sánchez, Justa Montero, Xulio Ferreiro,
Ángela Rodríguez-Pam, and Silvia López Gil, “Feminización
de la política” (2016), as well as the view of the crisis of care
that Nancy Fraser proposes in her article “Contradictions of
Capitalism and Care” (2016). But we also recommend recov-
ering a series of classic debates in Latin American feminism
that considered an emancipatory link between care and institu-
tions, by authors such as Marta Lamas, Luisa Femenías, Sueli
Carneiro, Lélia Gonzalez, and Sonia Álvarez, synthesized by
 Notes to pp. 120–127 151

Alba Carosio in her text “Latin American feminism: ethical

imperative for emancipation” (Carosio, 2009).
12 We refer here to the affirmative communitarian feminisms and
post-Marxist feminisms mentioned above.
13 While we discussed these assumptions in Essay 3 in our explo-
ration of the limits of autonomism, here we are interested in
briefly returning to these problems from the perspective of the
feminism that we hope to explore.
14 To say “the other of the self” is not to say “the other of the
same,” but nor is it, as feminists of sexual difference would
argue, “the other of the other.”
15 The first Not One Less march took place on June 3, 2015,
simultaneously across different cities in Argentina, although
its epicenter was in the Plaza del Congreso in Buenos Aires.
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner used the phrase “The Homeland
is the Other” in 2013 in a speech referring to solidarity actions
by populist militants in the face of serious flooding in the city of
La Plata in Buenos Aires province.
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 Index

15-M Movement, 108, 143n11 ontology of the political,

xii–xiii
abortion, 127–8 perseverance, 125
“absent cause,” 113–14 “plebian link,” 36–7
affects, 64, 65, 121 positivization of, 27–8
affirmative power, 121, 131 republicanism, 69
Africa, 8 anti-foundationalism, 101
Åkesson, Jimmie, 3 Antigone, 122–4
Alemán, Jorge, xv, xxvi, 13, anti-imperialism, 95–6
32–5, 36, 100–1, 122, anti-institutionalism, 62–6, 67
142n2 Arditi, Benjamin, 15
alienation, 51 Argentina, xxv, 3, 40, 77, 96
Althusser, Louis, 69 dictatorship, 141n19
Alvarado, Juan Velasco, 3–4 Gramsci, 90
antagonisms, xi, xxi, 15–16, media and same-sex marriage
40, 51 laws, 49, 137n3
care, 120, 122 modernization, 6–7
contingency, 103–5, 106–7 National Left, 142n5
dislocation, 105, 107 neoliberalism, 31, 98
feminism, 119, 128, 129, Not One Less movement,
148n5 127, 151n15
internationalism, 96 persecution of leaders, xxiv,
leaders, 87, 89 30, 78
logic of equivalence, 14–15 political rallies, 83–4
militancy, 111, 112, 113 right-wing alliance, 137n4
multiplicity of, 17 UNASUR, 141n20
166 Index

Aristotle, 70, 103, 105, 143n8 UNASUR, 141n20

Asia, 8 Brown, Wendy, vii–xxi, 55,
Atlantic republic tradition, 69 57–9, 61
authoritarianism, viii, xv, xvi, Bush, George W., 98
35–6, 96 Butler, Judith, 125, 145n1,
Germani, 7 146n1, 148n4
institutions, 66–7
leaders, ix, 79 Cáceras, Berta, 77, 138n4,
right-wing populism, 13, 22 139n1
automaton, 105–6 Cadahia, Luciana, 12, 36–7, 69
autonomism, 42, 45–53, 79, Canovan, Margaret, 11–12
120, 122, 131, 149n5–n6 capitalism, 10, 95, 111, 126
capitalist discourse, 32, 34,
Badie, Bertrand, 8, 135n3 137n7
Bataille, Georges, 39, 112 crisis of care, 150n8
Bertomeu, Julia, 69, 70, 71 dispossession, 46
Biglieri, Paula, 15–16, 85, 113, fight against, 24
126–7 financial, 27
Blair, Tony, vii Latin America, xxiii
Blengino, Luis, 92, 95–7 Marxist critique of populism,
Bolívar, Simón, 77 11
Bolivia, 3, 77 neoliberalism, 55, 112
coup, xxiii oppression, 128
“cycle of rebellion,” 107–8, women, 149n7
143n10 care, xvi, 117, 119, 120,
Movement for Socialism, 108 121–2, 129–32, 150n8,
nationalization of water, 49, 150n11
137n3 Caribbean, 74, 77
neoliberalism, 98 Central America, 71, 78
public demonstrations, 98 Chávez Frías, Hugo, 88, 98–9
UNASUR, 141n20 Chavismo, viii
Bolsonaro, Jair, xxiv, 3, 26, 27, Chile, 3
40, 99, 141n20 China, xxv, 3, 26
Bonapartism, 8, 9, 136n5 Christianity, 103, 104
Braidotti, Rosi, 144n1, 145n1, citizenship, x, 74
146n1, 147n2, 148n4–n5, civil liberties, vii
150n9 class
Brazil, 3, 26–7, 77, 99 class struggle, viii, 6, 9, 29
anti-democratic feminism, 116
republicanism, 71 Marxism, xiii
coup, xxiii–xxiv Mouffe, 22
neoliberal elites, 30 oppression, x
persecution of leaders, 78, see also working class
138n4 clientelism, 8
 Index 167

Colombia, xxv, 3, 40, 77, 99 fear of populism, ix

anti-democratic ideals, 79
republicanism, 71 left-wing populism, 13
peace agreement, 134n3 Mouffe, 65
persecution/murder of neoliberalism, 50
leaders, xxiv, 78, 84, Occupy Movement, xiii
139n4 populism as constituent of,
social movements, 46 11–12
colonialism, 77, 78, 89–90 populism as threat to, 11
commensurability of elements, procedural, 64, 65–6, 87
39 radical, xvi, 5, 15
communism, xvii, 79 republicanism, 68, 69, 70
communitarianism, 120, 122, social movements, 49
149n5 Tocqueville, xii
community, xii, 18, 59, 121 transnational populism, 94
comparative politics, 6, 7, 8, 11 UNASUR, 141n20
conflict, 69, 73 Democracy in Europe
consumption, 30–1 Movement 2025
contingency, 102, 103–7, 111 (DiEM25), 2, 92, 93–5, 98
Copjec, Joan, 122–4, 126 difference, xiii, 35, 40
Corbyn, Jeremy, xxiii, 2, 23 logic of, 14, 16, 17, 66,
Coronel, Valeria, 12, 36–7, 69 67–8, 136n7, 138n2
Correa, Rafael, 3, 9, 77 Mouffe, 38
institutional articulation, 67 one-people fantasy, xv–xvi, 39
labor regulation, 138n3 Podemos, 110
persecution of, xxiv, 30, tolerance of, 42, 130–1
139n1 dislocation, 34, 104, 105,
coups, xxiii–xxiv, 134n1 106–7, 137n8, 143n13
Creon, 122–4 dispossession, 46, 71, 74–5
Croce, Benedetto, 140n11 Di Tella, Torcuato, 7
Cuba, 98, 139n6 Domènech, Antoni, 69, 70, 71
“cycle of rebellion,” 107–8, drives, 122–5
143n10 Duque, Iván, xxiv, 134n3
Duterte, Rodrigo, 3
De Cleen, Benjamin, 92–5, 98
decolonization, xxiii Ecuador, xxv, 3, 77
De Ípola, Emilio, 10, 48 labor regulation, 49, 138n3
De la Torre, Carlos, 9 neoliberalism, 98
democracy, vii, x, xvi–xvii persecution of leaders, xxiv,
Athenian, 80 30, 78
demos, 58 public demonstrations, 98
DiEM25, 98 UNASUR, 141n20
empirical perspective, 5 egalitarianism, xxiii, 35–6,
Fassin, 43 131–2
168 Index

egalitarianism (cont.) leaders, 87–8

hegemonic link, 37 the people, 84
left-wing populism, 21 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, xxiv,
logic of equivalence, 38 3, 40
res publica, 73–5 Errejón, Íñigo, 110
Egypt, 3 Essex School of Discourse
elections, vii Analysis, 15, 23
elites ethics, xvi, xix
Brazil, 26 ethno-nationalism, viii, xiv
displaced, 7 Europe, xxiv, 2
feminist discourse, 129 crisis of democracy, 65
neoliberal, 30 democratic left, 42
transnational populism, 93, 94 dictators, 77
view of popular classes, 31 DiEM25, 2, 92, 93–5, 98
emancipation, xviii, xix, 12–13, empirical perspective, 5
35–6 fascism, 39–40
appeal to the state, 120–1 feminism, 117, 148n5,
feminism, 149n5 149n5
images, 115–16 international populism, 93
Laclau, 10, 14 left-wing and right-wing
logic of political articulation, populism, vii–viii, 21,
23 22–3, 24, 29–30
Marxism, 11 modernity, 8
militancy, 101, 107, 113 European Union, viii, xxiv–xxv
naming, 146n1 evidential paradigm, 118–19,
negativity, 148n4 120
neoliberal opposition to, 35 exclusion, ix, x–xi, 21, 35–6,
the other, 131 37, 38, 42, 92, 131
“plebeian link,” 36–7 extractivism, 52–3, 111
privileged subjects of, 122
social movements, 49 Farage, Nigel, 2, 40
social victories, 49–50 fascism, xiv–xv, 8, 95, 129
transnational populism, 96 Brazil, 26–7
universal, 91 Fassin, 44–5
empirical perspective, 4, 5, 6 new wave of, 26
Engels, Friedrich, 136n5 Peronism, 96
equality, xv, 40, 130–1 populism associated with, 9,
imaginaries of, 60–1 10–11, 24–5
left-wing populism, 22, 36 right-wing populism, xvi, 36,
republicanism, 69, 71, 74 39–40, 42, 44
equivalence, xiii, 14–15, 16, sacrificial logic, 59
17, 38–9, 136n7 the self, 130
institutions, 67 Fassin, Éric, xiv, 2, 24–5, 29,
international populism, 97–8 35–6, 41, 43–5
 Index 169

feminine, the 119, 121, 124–6, Global South, xxiii, xxvii, 13,
144n1, 147n2 74
feminism, xvi–xviii, xxiv, xxv, Gobetti, Piero, 140n11
116–17, 119–32 Golden Dawn, 2, 40
autonomist, 149n5 governmentality, 52, 56, 64, 95
debates, 150n11 governmental rationality,
as empty signifier, xvi xix–xx
evolution of, 147n3 Gramsci, Antonio, xii, xvii, 54,
negativity, 148n4–n5, 86, 90–1, 110, 140n11,
150n10 140n13
sexual difference, 125–6, Greece, 2, 93, 98, 141n17
144n1, 151n14 groups, 80–3
Fernández, Alberto, xxv, 137n4 Guanche, Julio Cesar, 69,
Figueroa, José, 91, 140n14 139n6
financial crisis, xiv, 26 Guille, Gustavo, 15–16
fixation, 122–3, 124 Gutiérrez Aguilar, Raquel,
Floyd, George, xxi 149n5
Foucault, Michel, xvii, xix–xx,
55–7, 58, 95 Haiti, 74
Fraga, Javier, González, 31 Hall, Stuart, xviii
France, 2, 3, 23 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Franco, Marielle, xxiv, 77, Friedrich, 130
138n4, 139n1 hegemony, xi, 12, 86
Fraser, Nancy, 116, 122, Alemán, 34–5
150n8, 150n11 antagonism, 16
freedom autonomism, 48
dislocation, 34 Laclau, 14, 15
as empty signifier, xvi militancy, 111
imaginaries of, 60–1 Mouffe, 20–1
republicanism, 69, 70, 73, 74 neoliberal, 13
Freud, Sigmund, 80–1, 82–3, “plebeian link,” 36–7
85, 86, 139n5–n8 Hermet, Guy, 8, 135n3
“The Homeland is the Other,”
al-Gaddafi, Muammar, 3–4 129, 130–1, 151n15
Gago, Verónica, 52, 53, 117, Homo economicus, 56–8, 60,
120, 149n5–n6 100–1, 112
Gaitán, Eliecer, 84, 88 homogeneity, xv–xvi, 24, 38–9,
Galindo, María, 149n5 40
Galston, William, vii homophobia, xxiv
gender, 116, 121, 128–9 Homo politicus, 58–9, 61,
Germani, Gino, 6–7 100–1, 112
Germany, 9 Honduras, 77, 134n1, 138n4
Ginzburg, Carlo, 118–19, 120 horde, primal, 80–1, 86
Global North, xxiii, xxvii, 8 Hungary, xxiv, 3
170 Index

identification, 82, 83, 85, Kichner, Néstor, 3

137n8, 139n6 Kirchner, Cristina Fernández
identitarianism, 37, 89 de, 3, 77, 137n3, 137n4
exclusion, 42, 44 “The Homeland is the
feminism, 125 Other,” 130–1, 151n15
homogeneity, 39 institutional articulation, 67
nationalisms, 76, 92 persecution of, xxiv, 30,
neo-fascism, 40 139n1
Podemos, 110 political rallies, 83
transnational populism, 97 knowledge, 118–19
identity, xiii, 28, 35
contingency, 104–5 Lacan, Jacques, 32, 102,
exclusionary populism, 42 105, 114, 137n7, 143n9,
feminine, 146n1, 147n1 144n17, 145n1
the other, 130–1 lack, 16, 18–19, 34, 45, 60,
right-wing populism, xv 106
self-naming, 146n1 Laclau, Ernesto, x–xiii, xiv–xv,
ideology, 65 xvii, xxvi
Iglesias, Pablo, 108–9, 110 Alemán comparison, 32, 34
industrialization, 8–9 commensurability of
inequality, x–xi, 70–1, 112, elements, xvi
128–9, 131, 141n20 contingency, 102, 103–5
institutions, x, 12, 46, 54, 61, demands, 84
84–5 discourse analysis, 37
anti-institutionalism, 62–6, 67 discourse theory, 92
institutionalization, 109–10 dislocation, 34, 105, 137n8,
neutral, 79 143n13
republicanism, 70–1, 73 emancipation, 10, 12, 14,
ruptural institutionality, 66–8 148n4
interest group pluralism, xiii groups, 81–3, 85
internationalism, 76, 89, 91–9 institutions, 62–3
International Monetary Fund, leaders, 85–6, 87–8
xxiii left-wing and right-wing
international populism, 93, 94, populism, 22
95, 97–8 logic of difference, 66,
Irigaray, Luce, 144n1, 148n5 136n7, 138n2
Italy, xxiv, 2–3, 9 logic of equivalence, 38,
136n7
Johnson, Boris, 2 National Left, 142n5
judicial proceedings, xxiii, xxiv, ontological perspective, 5–6,
30, 134n2 13–19, 64
transnational populism, 95
Kaczyński, Jarosłav, 3 La France Insoumise, xxiii,
Kaltwasser, Cristóbal Rovira, 37 xxiv, 2, 23
 Index 171

land dispossession, 71 transnational populism, 97

language, 33 Le Bon, Gustave, 81
Latin America, viii, xxii–xxiii left-wing populism, xiv–xv,
anti-imperialism, 95 20–4, 40, 42
autonomist thought, 42, Blair, vii
45–53 equality, 36
critical thinking, xxvii logic of equivalence, 38–9
evolution of populism, 23, Mouffe, 13
24 neoliberalism, 44
extractivism, 52 signifiers, 29–30
fascism, 39–40 legitimacy, 56
feminism, 116–17, 120, Le Pen, Marine, xxiv, 2, 40
147n3, 148n5, 149n5, Levitsky, Steven, xvii
150n11 LGBTI+ people, xxiv, 83, 131
Germani, 6–7 liberal democracy, vii–viii, xvii
institutions, 54 Germani, 6–7
international populism, 93 Laclau, x
leaders, 77–8, 98–9 populism as threat to, vii
modernization, 6 sedimented practices, 46
the nation, 89 traditional societies, 8
neoliberal elites, 30 see also democracy
Not One Less movement, liberalism, x, xii, xvii
xxv, 127–8 cosmopolitan, 89
ontology of the political, 19 Foucault on, xix–xx
persecution of leaders, 134n2 individuals, 60
political thought, 51 institutions, 68, 79
republicanism, 42, 55, 69, interest group pluralism, xiii
72–4 liberal republicanism, 68–9
return of populism, 2 libidinal bonds, 81–3, 85
second populist movement, 3 Libya, 3–4
socialism, 10 Linera, Álvaro García, 143n10
traditional societies, 8 logics of populism, ix, xi, xvii,
transnational populism, 97, xvii, 11, 16
98 emancipation, 23
urbanism, 8–9 institutions, 63
law, 70, 74, 99, 124 Laclau, 14–15, 18
Lazzarato, Maurizio, xiv, 24, ontological perspective, 5–6
26–7, 30–1, 35–6 see also difference;
leaders, 16, 64, 76–80, 98–9 equivalence
anti-institutionalism, 62 López Obrador, Andrés
persecution of, xxiv, 30, 78, Manuel, xxv, 3
134n2, 139n1 “lost cause,” 113–14
relation with the people, love, 82, 85, 89, 123, 125,
80–9, 100 129–30
172 Index

Lugo, Fernando, 134n1 Moffitt, Benjamin, 92–5

Lugones, María, 149n5 Morales, Evo, 3, 77, 98–9,
Lula Da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 143n10
xxiv, 3, 26, 27, 30, 47, coup against, xxiii, 134n1
67, 99 “cycle of rebellion,” 107–8
institutional articulation, 67
Machiavelli, Niccolò, xii, 69, nationalization of water,
73 138n3
Macri, Mauricio, 31, 137n4, plebeian origins, 47
141n20 UNASUR, 141n20
Maduro, Nicolás, 3 Moreno, Lenin, 141n20
Mao Tse-Tung, 3 Mouffe, Chantal, x, xxvi, 2, 35
Marchart, Oliver, xiv, 15–16, affects, 65
23, 35, 101–2, 107, contingency, 103
142n1, 144n16 democracy, xvii
Mariátegui, José Carlos, xxvii, discourse analysis, 37
90–2, 140n11–n13 discourse theory, 92
Márquez, Francia, xxiv, xxv, far right voters, 25
77, 99, 139n1 indeterminacy of signifiers,
Marx, Karl, xii, 69, 77, 136n5 29
Marxism, x–xi, xii leaders, 80
Bonapartism, 136n5 left-wing and right-wing
class politics, xiii, 9 populism, xiv, 13, 20–3,
critique of populism, vii–viii, 36
xvi, 10–11 logic of equivalence, 38,
masculine, the 121, 124–6 136n7
mass psychology, 81–2 political subjectivities, 87
media, vii, 49, 137n3 post-Marxist approach, 14
mediatic perspective, 4 society, 18
Mélenchon, Jean-Luc, 2, 23 transnational populism, 95
Mercosur Parliament Mounk, Yascha, vii
(PARLASUR), 97, 98 Mudde, Cas, 37
Mexico, xxv, 3, 8, 71 Muraca, Matías, 72, 73
Mezzadra, Sandro, 52, 53 murders, xxiii, xxiv, 78, 84,
Michetti, Gabriela, 31 138n4
militancy, 100–2, 107, 108–14, Murmis, Miguel, 9–10
116, 133n4
minorities, 25, 43 naming, 146n1
misogyny, xxiv nation, the, 89–90, 92
modernity, ix, 8, 56 nationalism, ix, xvi, xxi, 8, 90,
modernization theory, ix, 6–8, 91
11, 135n2 authoritarianism, 96
Modonesi, Massimo, 45–8, 49, identitarian, 76, 92
52, 53 non-racist, 97
 Index 173

Peronism, 96 oligarchy, 48, 51, 78, 92, 96

populism distinction, 92–3 one-people fantasy, xv–xvi, 39,
right-wing populism, 37, 38 59
national-popular projects, 90–1 ontic studies, 63, 66
negativity, 27–8, 104, 120, ontological perspective, 4, 5–6,
131, 148n4, 148n5, 11, 23
150n10 feminization of the political,
Negri, Antonio, 69 127
neo-fascism, xxv, 40, 95 institutions, 63, 64
neoliberalism, viii, ix, xii, xvi, ontology of the political, xi–
xvii, 41–61, 100–1 xiii, 13–19, 20, 41–2
Alemán, 32–5 oppression, x–xi, 34, 49–50,
autonomism, 45–6, 47–8 91, 116, 128
Brazil, 26 Orbán, Viktor, xxiv, 3, 40
crises, 98 Orientalism, ix
critique of populism, 31 other, the, 59, 92, 129, 130–1,
discursive field, 111 151n14
elites, 30
ethic of conviction, xix Panayotu, Panos, 92–5
globalization, 96, 97 Paraguay, 134n1
hegemony, 13 patriarchy, xxi, xxv, 45, 71,
Latin America, xxiii 125–9, 131, 149n5
logics of, ix people, the, ix, xiii, xxi, 16,
populism as antithesis of, 35–6
55–61 Alemán, 35
populism as transitional as contingent political
object, 53–5 construct, 111
progressivism, 52 as empty signifier, xi, xv, xvi,
resentment, 25 37
right-wing populism, 21, 40 leaders, 80–9, 100
subjection, 53 logic of equivalence, 38
subjectivity, 112–13 militancy, 111, 112
territory, 99 power of, xii, xviii
Washington Consensus, Rinesi, 72–3
135n1 Perelló, Gloria, 85, 102, 103,
winners and losers, xiv 105–7, 113, 126–7
Not One Less movement, xxv, Pericles, 80
127–8, 151n15 Peronism, viii, 3, 6, 7, 95, 96
persecution of leaders, xxiv, 30,
objectivity, 104, 105 78, 134n2, 139n1
Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, perseverance, 122, 123–5, 126
xxv, 99 Peru, 3–4, 46, 90
Occupy Movement, xiii–xiv, Petit, Philip, 68
134n5 Petro, Gustavo, xxiv, 77, 139n1
174 Index

Philippines, 3 Quispe, Felipe, 143n10

Pinochet, Augusto, 26
Plato, 18 race, xxi, 116
Platonism, xi racism, xxiv, 22, 25, 26, 44, 45
Plaza, Monique, 144n1 Rajoy, Mariano, 108
“plebeian link,” 36–7 rallies, 83–4, 98–9
Podemos, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, 2, Ramos, Jorge Abelardo, 103,
23, 108–9, 110, 144n14 142n5
Poland, 3 Raventós, Daniel, 69
political, the, xvii, 11, 101 reactivation, 46, 109–11
being of the social, 18–19 realpolitik, xviii
constitutive dimension, 6 regression, viii–ix
feminization of, 127 relativism, 101, 102
Laclau, x–xiii, xiv, 14 republicanism, 12, 42, 53–5,
militancy, 112 61, 131–2
Mouffe, 21 anti-institutionalism, 62
ontology of the, x–xiii, plebeian, 68–72
13–19, 20, 41–2 republican populism, 72–5
political rallies, 83–4, 98–9 resentment, 25, 29
politics, 16–17, 101 responsibility, xix, 59–60
feminization of, 119, 120, rhetoric, xi, xii, xx
124–5, 127 Rich, Adrienne, 150n9
non-conflictual, 120 rights, x–xi
Weber, xviii expansion of, xxiii, 49, 50,
populism, defining, 4–5 71
Portantiero, Juan Carlos, 9–10, institution of, 67
48 right to have, 71–2
Portugal, xxiii, xxv right-wing populism, viii, xiv,
positivism, ix–x, 18, 63, 118 13, 20–3, 24–31, 42
positivization, 27–8 Blair, vii
post-fascism, 40 commensurability of
post-Marxist feminism, 149n5, elements, xv
150n10 exclusionary, 37, 38
postmodernism, 101 as fascism, xvi, 36, 39–40,
power, xii–xiii, xviii, xxi, 121, 42, 44
131, 149n5 Fassin, 43, 44
praxis, 19, 29, 65 homogeneity, 38–9
Preciado, Paul, 145n1, 148n5 Rinesi, Eduardo, 12, 69, 72–3
primal horde, 80–1, 86 Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia,
primitivism, viii–ix 149n5
progressivism, 45–6, 47, 51–2 Robledo, Ángela María, xxiv
property, 70, 71, 74, 131 Rousseff, Dilma, xxiii–xxiv, 3,
psychoanalysis, 125, 126–7 26, 27, 99, 134n1
Putin, Vladimir, 3 Russia, 3
 Index 175

sacrificial logic, 53, 59–60 republicanism, 42, 69

Sala, Milagro, xxiv Spinoza, Benedict de, 69, 149n5
Salvini, Matteo, xxiv, 2–3 state, 48–9, 50–2, 60–1, 74,
Sanders, Bernie, xxiii 120–1
Santos, Juan Manuel, 134n3 Creon and Antigone, 123
Scott, Joan, 145n1 feminism, 149n5
Segato, Rita, 149n5 institutions, 67
self, 130, 131, 151n14 rationality, 55–6
self-determination, 48, 49–50 Stavrakakis, Yannis, xiv, 23,
self-interest, 56–7 35, 37, 92–5
self-negativity, 27–8 subjectification, 53, 55, 56,
sexism, 25, 26 58–9
sexual difference, 125–6, supremacism, xxi
144n1, 151n14 Svampa, Maristella, 45–8, 49,
singularity, 87–8, 131–2 52, 53
slavery, 74 Sweden, 3
social, the 18–19 SYRIZA, xxiii, xxiv, 2, 93, 98,
socialism, viii, xvi 141n17
autonomist, 79
ethic of conviction, xix Taine, Hippolyte, 81
Foucault on, xix–xx technocracy, 79
ideals, 79 territory, 99
identitarian nationalisms, 76 theory, ix–x, xviii–xix, xx
Latin America, 10 Tocqueville, Alexis de, xii
populism comparison, 48–9 Torres Santana, Ailynn, 69
republicanism, 69–70 totalitarianism, 77, 79
revolutionary, 47, 48 transnational populism, 93–5,
social justice, 21, 22, 36, 60–1 96, 97
social mobilization, 66, 67 Trump, Donald, xiii, xxi, xxiv–
social movements, 28, 83 xxv, 3, 25, 40, 44
autonomism, 45–50, 51–2 tuché, 105–6
feminism, 147n3 Turkey, xxiv, 3
leaders, 77
solidarity, xvi, 91, 97, 98, 99 Union of South American
Sorel, Georges, 140n11 Nations (UNASUR), 97,
sovereignty 98, 141n20
left-wing populism, 13 United Kingdom, 2, 23
Peronism, 96 United States, viii, 2, 98, 99
popular, x, xvi, 58, 60, 68, harassment of Bolivia,
94, 112 142n20
Spain modernity, 8
15-M Movement, 108, 143n11 modernization theory, 6
Podemos, xxiv, xxv, 2, 23, Occupy Movement, xiii–xiv
108–9, 110, 144n14 racial justice, xxi
176 Index

United States (cont.) 127–9, 131, 144n1,

Trump, xiii, xxi, xxiv–xxv, 3, 149n7, 150n8
25, 40, 44 see also feminism
UNASUR, 141n20 working class, 9–10, 110
urbanism, 8–9 Worsley, Peter, 11–12
Urquía, Lesbia Yaneth, 138n4 xenophobia, xxiv, 25
authoritarianism, 96
Vargas Llosa, Mario, 139n2 Fassin, 44, 45
Varoufakis, Yanis, 94, 141n17 neo-fascism, 95
Venezuela, viii, 3, 88 right-wing populism, 22, 23,
Vilas, Carlos, 72 37
Villacañas, José Luis, 53–5,
60 Yugoslavia, 3
violence, xix, xx, 39, 127
voting, x Zapata, Francisco, 135n2
Vox party, xxiv, 2, 40 Zelaya, Manuel, 134n1
Ziblatt, Daniel, xvii
Washington Consensus, 2, Žižek, Slavoj, 27–9, 35–6, 96–7
135n1 Alemán comparison, 32
wealth redistribution, 30 critique of populism, xiv,
Weber, Max, xvii, xviii 10–11, 95
Williamson, John, 135n1 identity, 126
Wittig, Monique, 144n1 left/right distinction, 24
Wolin, Sheldon, xvii negativity, 148n4
women, xxii, xxv, 25, 99, neoliberalism, 41
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