Abstract

Abstract:

Although Ernesto Laclau argues that heterogeneity is at the core of homogeneity, my claim is that his account ultimately pulverizes it. In his work, heterogeneity either becomes colonized (invisible and disavowed), or it becomes excluded (highly visible, penalized and anxiety provoking). Laclau's uncritical deployment of Kantian inspired Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, I argue, lead him to not only theorize heterogeneity as racialized/feminine excess that needs to be excluded for meaning to emerge, but also, to conceptualize populism as the performative homogenizing production of the (phallic) signifier of the "one." My paper stresses the epistemological, conceptual and political problems of such formulation.

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