In Defense of Lost Causes by Slavoj Zizek

Author:Slavoj Zizek
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781844674909
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2013-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

The two emptinesses are simply not comparable: the emptiness of the “people” is the emptiness of the hegemonic signifier which totalizes the chain of equivalences, that is, whose particular content is “transubstantiated” into an embodiment of the social whole, while the emptiness of the place of power is a distance which renders every empirical bearer of power “deficient,” contingent and temporary.

The conclusion to be drawn is that populism (in the manner we have supplemented Laclau’s definition of it) is not the only mode of existence of the excess of antagonism over the institutional-democratic framework of regulated agonistic struggle: not only the (now defunct) communist revolutionary organizations, but also the widescale phenomena of non-institutionalized social and political protest, from the student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s to later anti-war protests and the more recent anti-globalization movement, cannot be properly called “populist.” Exemplary is here the case of the anti-segregation movement in the US in the late 1950s and early 1960s, epitomized by the name of Martin Luther King: although it endeavored to articulate a demand that was not properly met within the existing democratic institutions, it cannot be called populist in any meaningful sense of the term—the way it led the struggle and constituted its opponent was simply not “populist.” A more general remark should be made here about the single-issue popular movements, for example, the “tax revolts” in the US: although they function in a populist manner, mobilizing the people around a demand which is not met by the democratic institutions, they do not seem to rely on a complex chain of equivalences, but remain focused on one singular demand.

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