ABSTRACT
Ernesto Laclau has opened up a new horizon in understanding the concept of the political in a totalitarian system that constantly depoliticises the whole aspect of life and treats all problems merely as administrative, bureaucratic and technocratic issues. Totalitarianism reduces the term ‘politics’ merely to ‘political interest’, which means that achieving these interests is different and determined in advance and separated from its possible articulation among competing discourses. Therefore, according to this reasoning, the specific characteristics of the political arena, namely conflicts, antagonisms, power relations, forms of subordination and repression,, disappear from the equation. According to Laclau, the political can be understood only through the logic of populism. Laclau viewed populism as the best way to understand the ontological formation of the political. Laclau’s thought originated from his dissatisfaction with the sociological perspective, which considers a group only as a base unit of its social existence before its political construction or incorporates the political subject and political construction into the functionalist or structuralist paradigm in the social. He viewed populism from three perspectives: psychoanalysis, linguistic (rhetoric) and politics (hegemony). Laclau concluded that popular subjectivity can only be formed based on the creation of an empty signifier in a discursive way.
