ABSTRACT
The chapter analyses what the author calls “mourning populism” based on Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populist reason, Carl Schmitt’s idea of the political, and Freud’s thoughts on group psychology and mourning. The author follows Laclau in his observation that populism has its own logic, a transcultural approach that can, in principle, be applied to any content. Laclau’s concept of populism is strictly formal; its definition relates exclusively to a specific mode of articulation, independent of the actual contents. If we ask to what extent any given movement could be populist, it is argued, we come up with two ideal extremes of the continuum of political practices: (1) an institutionalist discourse dominated by a pure logic of difference, and (2) a populist discourse, in which the logic of equivalence operates unchallenged. Where the former would lead to a society so dominated by administration and by the individualisation of social demands that no politics would be possible, the latter would involve such a dissolution of social links that the notion of “social demand” would lose any meaning, and the image of society would be that of a “crowd” or “mass”. The author follows Laclau in his observation that populism has its own logic, a transcultural approach that may, in principle, be applied to any content, while arguing for the need to also 64analyse the cultural context specific to a given country to understand its specific embodiment of populism. “If the English are preoccupied with the weather”, he states, “the Poles are with suffering.” Polish populism, it is argued, performs best when exploiting a trauma—the partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century, the uneven war in the twentieth century, the genocide of the Polish intelligentsia in Katyń 1940, the Warsaw Uprising, or the Smolensk tragedy of 10 April 2010.
