Description
Sparked by recent political events and a sharp increase in the academic production on the theme, a novel literature on populism is emerging within International Relations. Besides failing to engage critically with, and build on, extant accounts of populism in germane disciplines, this new scholarship fundamentally lacks an adequate overarching theoretical framework capable of guiding empirical research. After discussing and identifying Ernesto Laclau’s theoretical framework as the best suited alternative to come to grips with the phenomenon under analysis, this paper embarks upon a critical investigation of it. In particular, it argues that the Laclauian framework falls short of properly theorising affect and temporality within populist politics. The paper hence draws together insights from the “affective” and “temporal turns” in IR with the aim of bolstering the formulation of a more nuanced and analytically powerful theory of populism. First, it advances (a) a theorisation of affect as economic and (b) an analytical overture towards identity discourses and narratives that are able to complement Laclau’s account of the ‘form’ of affect, with one of its ‘force’. Second, the paper turns to ‘timing theory’ and its relational ontology to compensate for Laclau’s lack of engagement with populism’s temporal dimension. As a result, time is offered as a theoretically nuanced hermeneutical tool capable of strengthening the analysis of the popular subject’s positionality – hence shedding some valuable light on both the processes of identity constitution and antagonistic structuration of the social. These theoretical propositions are corroborated empirically through the example of Berlusconi’s government.
