Abstract
Before it even begins, we must note that populism is not a novel feature of socio-political dynamics. It is indispensable to note that the history of Europe has been full of ideas with more or less similar manifest appearances.
Some of them are nationalism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia (Derrida, 1994:100). Therefore, populism is not disruptive to the reality, its callidity stems from a somewhat more sophisticated and camouflaged hegemonistic tendencies when compared with predecessors.
Through the lenses of poststructuralist theory, this paper aims to answer the question: what are the blind lays that enabled populism to be perceived as rational by employing a set of irrational practices? This research has twofold relevance. First, it covers a scantly treated academic debate on the underlying logic of populism which stands behind the explicit acts.
Second, by debunking its functionality, the road is being paved for different pragmatic applications in order to stop the proliferation of populist myths. Our quest starts with Karl Schmitt and his work "The Concept of the Political" where the common enemy is defined as public (1932: 42-55).
Since populism is based on homogenization of certain socio-political actors against a public enemy which can be as big as the whole world, we claim that populism cannot exist without the confirmation of the Other. This divine relational ontology enables us to pinpoint the three main blind lays of populism.
In order to elaborate upon populism, we first need to aporetically counterpose the People and the people, or quite appropriately Dasein and Das Man (Heidegger, 1962). Namely, populism, at least nominally, speaks at once to the People and is not on speaking terms with the so-called establishment.
Yet, by means of this exclusion, the promise of populism becomes unattainable. In an intriguing interpretation of Plato, Rancière explains this through the concept of demos, bluntly definable as the populace qua a political unit: "[...] the demos, or people, is at the same time the name of a community and the name for its division" (1992: 64).
While addressing us all from an apparently neutral position, populism can thus easily be proved to crumble in front of its own implementation: as soon as it dares to keep its promise, to speak to the People, it shaves off one its fragment and materializes as both a multitude and its excess; as the new plebs versus its rogues; as at once a demagogy and democracy; as populus versus demos (Derrida, 2003). The primordial legislator is thus inherently divided.
Second, populism amounts to an incomplete revolution pertinent to both the (radical) Left and the (radical) Right. Whereas subversion has originally been pertinent to the left side of the ideological scale, populism is the agent which has made the two overlap.
Political elites know how to use both notions. Regardless of their position, populists exploit the Latin proverb divide et impera in their very calls for unity and turn individuals into the abstract and ultimately legiferating population.
In this way, populism and population form a vicious circle of influence which is ultimately characterized by at least some form of hegemony and domination. As a revolution which devours its own children, populism yields to the very forces it opposes.
Finally, populism is not only phantomatic and recurrent, but one must also address the populist upheaval of Kantian ideals of international community and perpetual peace. Namely, however embedded in vernacularity, populism quite counterintuitively aims at ubiquitous, vehicular and global character (Müller, 2016: 49).
Hence, here as well, populism ends up reproducing its very enemy, subtly upheld and recognized as valid: this adversary is barely visible, prone to sudden appearances and populism threatens it not that much with the demolition of its global agenda, but rather with its supplantation. Taken together, the transnational population of and for populists longs for its own oecumene.
Precisely this is the ultimate message of Eduardo Bolsonaro's tweet for Matteo Salvini over the relatively recent Cesare Battisti's arrest: "A present is on its way".