Populisme post-œdipien et démocratie néo-libérale. Le cas italien

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Post-Oedipian Populism and Neoliberal Democracy: The Case of ItalyIn this article Ida Dominjanni, a political essayist who was herself a candidate in the recent Italian parliamentary elections, analyses the causes and meaning of the victory of populist forces over the official reformism, which had been loudly promoted. She offers a genealogy of three successive populist formations, each of which added new instruments of communication and slogans to the earlier ones, within the framework of a general critique of the corruption of the political “caste”, and which repeatedly took advantage of the structural weaknesses of the reformist left, against the backdrop of an ongoing crisis of political parties. By way of a critical discussion of Ernesto Laclau’s influential theory of populism as a “discursive construction of the people”, she illustrates an ontological and political transition from the logic of desiring subjects, subject to the Law, to one of consuming individuals, a shift whose concomitant is the transition from charismatic leadership to the power of transgressive leaders (like Berlusconi and Grillo) drawing on televised images or the control of “egalitarian” discussions on the internet. The passage from representative democracy to the mediatization of politics, characteristic of neoliberalism, would thus seem irreversible, and, in any case, it calls for a realistic assessment.