Jacques Bidet
Traduzione di Elena Borghetti
Université Paris-Nanterre (jacques.bidet@parisnanterre.fr; ORCID: 0000-0002-5622- 0390).
Chantal Mouffe
Ernesto Laclau’s Visions and Chantal Mouffe’s Stratagems
Abstract: Populism is considered here as a political form characterized by a direct relationship between a people and its leader. In this sense, there can be right-wing or left-wing populism. The latter is marked, according to the case, by an anti-capitalist or anti-colonialist orientation. In both authors, it is confronting a power concentrated in the heights of finance and technocracy. In Laclau’s prospective, political action is understood as a rhetorical action since rhetoric is supposed to be the very essence of society. In Mouffe’s work, the point is to bring together all the demands for equality, whether they are based on class, gender or other inequalities. But social structure is assumed as a random set, resulting from antagonistic projects that seek to impose their hegemony. Consequently, social relations are interpreted in a rhetorical prism that only a leader can bring to unity by providing a discourse supposedly able to establish equivalence between these different popular demands, relying on the national affects they share in common. This approach, which makes class relations disappear, drives the author away from the socialist perspective that was her own in the beginning.
Keywords: Populism; Leader; Rhetoric; Hegemony; Equivalence; Equality; People; Affects.