Populism and Its Limits by Prasanta Chakravarty;

Author:Prasanta Chakravarty;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

As such, to ‘become-minor’ or to ‘become-revolutionary’ is to ‘become-Ephesian’. It is a matter of knowing and seeking out the many Hermodors, not to banish but to ‘disrupt and transform’.

Notes

1 According to Bonnie Honig, the problem with the idea of consensus is its tendency to exclude voices or leave ‘remainders’ (Honig 1993, 5).

2 A useful point of comparison is Sandel’s (1982) critique of Rawls and his ‘original position’.

3 In a recently published interview with Iñigo Errejón (2016), she repeats these arguments almost verbatim: ‘To me it’s a consequence of neoliberalism, and that is why it’s accurate to say that we are living in ‘post-democratic’ societies. Furthermore, the consensus at the centre that we discussed previously has contributed to the discrediting of left-wing politics’ (Errejón and Mouffe 2016b, 119).

4 Mouffe acknowledges as much in an earlier essay:

An important part of my argument will be of a theoretical nature because I am convinced that in order to understand the appeal of right-wing populist discourse, it is necessary to question the rationalist and individualist tenets which inform the main trends of democratic political theory. (Mouffe 2005a, 51)

5 Although Mouffe occasionally makes statements that appear to claim that ‘the agonistic tension between the liberal and democratic principles … has been eliminated’ as a result of neoliberal hegemony (Mouffe 2018, 16), I have chosen to overlook them as they are inconsistent with the ontological premise that the agon never ceases to exist in ‘the political’ (Mouffe 2013, 2). One must presume that such statements have been aims for hyperbolic appeal rather than theoretical consistency.

6 While older theories of democracy and politics, in general, were conceived in relation to absolutes (‘the good life’), the emphasis on pluralism as a ‘social fact’ and as a sign of the ‘dissolution of the markers of certainty’ is a discovery of the liberal-democratic model (Mouffe 1996, 246). It is, however, the failure to account for this ‘fact’ that Mouffe and other agonists bemoan. Though I have drawn chiefly from the works of Mouffe to substantiate my arguments, it must be noted that agonists such as Connolly and Honig tend to disagree with her on the specific nature of an agonistic democracy. Nevertheless, the critical objective of all their works is to theorize a model of pluralism that does not exclude or negate differences through collective abstractions.

7 In Democracy, Power and the Political (2005), Mouffe writes that only ‘when différance is construed as the condition of possibility of being’ can a truly pluralist idea of democracy ever be realized (Mouffe 1996, 246). Variants of this idea lie at the heart of all her works.

8 William Connolly refers to this idea as ‘agonistic respect’ (Connolly 1991, 14).

9 Objectivity is impossible, Mouffe argues, because we already find ourselves in a social order conditioned by hegemony. The social is ‘constituted by sedimented hegemonic practices’ and is the ‘battlefield where hegemonic practices confront each other without hope of a final solution’ (Mouffe 2007).

10 Right-populist movements often tend to bring up a perceived historical oversight or a form of racial/ethnic essentialism to advance their demands for justice and equality.

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