ABSTRACT
This chapter starts by critically discussing three general lines of thought about populism: the sociology of modernization, the class struggle perspective, and a democracy-based analysis. Second, it focuses on the psychoanalytic turn to demonstrate how it opened up a new, significant, and illuminating avenue of research with regard to populism. To achieve this aim, the argument leans mainly on Ernesto Laclau’s theoretical contribution, whose work instead of approaching populism from a predetermined model of rationality, expanded our idea of rationality by using psychoanalytic categories to highlight the logics that constitute populist configurations. Laclau initially took psychoanalysis only in its rhetorical dimension, but later, his rhetorical model of the logics of equivalence and difference was enriched by an elaboration of the affective dimension in three ways: (1) Laclau assumed Freud’s thesis of the libido; (2) he equated the logic of the objet petit a with the logic of hegemony; and (3) he introduced the notion of social heterogeneity, which may be compared with Lacan’s surplus-jouissance. Third, the chapter illustrates, through an account of the relevant work of supporters such as Jorge Alemán and detractors such as Slavoj Žižek, how this expanded social rationality schema activated an intense debate within psychoanalytic political theory.
