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Description of  A Lacanian Conception of Populism (The Lines of the Symbolic in Psychoanalysis Series)

A Lacanian Conception of Populism takes issue with traditional theories of populism, which seek to equate populism with hegemony, arguing that these are not only different but even incompatible logics. Timothy Appleton contends that one of the main differences between populism and hegemony has to do with the social totality: while hegemony absolutises it, populism eviscerates it, setting in its place an (apparently paradoxical) dispersion of singular instances of the people. The book considers the work of Laclau, Badiou, iek and Rancire, before arriving at a novel conceptualisation that Appleton dubs the populism of singularities. In the second half of the book, the author draws out the consequences of this concept for contemporary political theory: the question of how to define left and right the question of popular enthusiasm and affect truth versus post-truth the question of leadership populism and nationalism and the relation between populism and political parties. Read more