Abstract

Abstract:

This article argues that Ernesto Laclau's On Populist Reason offers an important but ultimately flawed resource for understanding the culture of contemporary social-movement populism, highlighting the need for a post-Kantian critique of the politics of judgment that can explain the resistance to traditional forms of political representation (such as group leadership and demands) in progressive protest culture. I show how Laclau's incorporation of a theory of representational closure drawn from Freud's group psychology leads him astray of his own best insights into the limits of cognitively oriented politics, setting him in tension with the ateleological horizontalism of contemporary movements. The work of Laclau's key interlocutor, Claude Lefort, though criticized by Laclau for defining democracy only negatively, in truth offers a more compelling account of the means by which democracy might act in the name of, rather than despite, its own unrepresentability.

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