ABSTRACT
Populism might come across as a characteristic feature of postmodern politics, but it is also an atypical chapter of political theology. Populism seems to work precisely because of its inherent limits. Laclau's and Mouffe's populism is as much a theory of politics as a proposal for post-essentialist antagonism. By evoking the people, populism links up with this decisive passage of the modern democratic tradition, which is a theological-political passage in the Schmittian sense and thus serving as the substitution of worldly “political transcendence” emerging on the level of immanence for sacral transcendence that is, in itself, “transcendent”. The people of contemporary populism are impacted by the effects of neoliberalism but they represent reactivity, the re-emergence of unresolvable issues, which global financial capitalism would like to consider definitively overcome but instead leaves ungoverned.
