Prasanta Chakravarty - Populism and Its Limits: After Articulation

Perhaps the most effective way to counter populism, and its assault on popular sovereignty is to produce scholarship that determinedly reverses its sleights of handits reduction of complex social fields to the brute opposition of the people versus the elite or empathy versus objectification; or that puts back the histories of the present that populism systemically erases. But this sparkling collectionone of the most imaginative engagements with the topic to datedoes more: it undertakes the painstaking task of rethinking the political itself, of envisioning forms of inclusive participation that can foster relationality, open contestation and even transformation.

Jean Comaroff, Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies, Harvard University

As populism has turned into a debased token in our everyday political discourse, so has theorizing about it often descended into platitude or polemic. This probing, multi-faceted and sophisticated collection succeeds in revitalizing the question of populism as a problem for thought and practice. Impressively ranging across political philosophy, cultural theory and psychoanalysis, Populism and Its Limits excavates hitherto neglected facets of the antagonistic and affective politics of the people while critically displacing a debate that has often been limited by its exclusive reference to the Western hemisphere.

Alberto Toscano, Co-Director, Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought and Reader in Critical Theory, Goldsmiths, University of London

This volume fills a gap in the literature on populism by bringing in the Indian perspectivewithout confining the analysis to India-centric case studies. On the contrary, this is a comprehensive study of this -ism from a theoretical, comparative and empirical point of view. A very timely and systematic must-read that shows that populism and authoritarianism have clear affinities!

Christophe Jaffrelot, Professor, Kings India Institute and CNRS Senior Research Fellow, SciencesPo, Centre de Recherches Internationales (CERI)

In recent years, there has been a great deal of superficial discussion of populism but not so much deep thinking. Happily, this book offers serious and original intellectual engagement. Its questions are of the utmost importance for both politics and political theory. Its focus is on India but not as a special case. It integrates what is happening in and to the worlds largest democracy into a more global discussion of this populist moment.

Craig Calhoun, Former Director and Centennial Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics; University Professor of Social Sciences, Arizona State University; Senior Advisor, Berggruen Institute; Professorial Chair, College dEtudes Moniales, Paris

POPULISM AND ITS LIMITS

POPULISM AND ITS LIMITS

After Articulation

Edited by

Prasanta Chakravarty

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First published in India 2021

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The weapon of the republic is the Terror, the strength of the republic is virtuevirtue because without it terror is corruptible, and terror because without it virtue is powerless.

Georg Buchner, Dantons Death

The crowd really is a spectacle of natureif one may apply this term to social conditions. A street, a conflagration, or a traffic accident assembles people who are not defined along class lines. They present themselves as concrete gatherings, but socially they remain abstract. Their models are the customers who, each acting in his private interest, gather at the market around their common cause.

Walter Benjamin, The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire

There are two great obstacles to developing a knowledge of affairsshame, which throws a smoke over the understanding, and fear, which, once danger has been sighted, dissuades from going through with an exploit. Folly, with a grand gesture, frees us from both. Never to feel shame, to dare anythingfew mortals know to what further blessings these will carry us!

Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly

CONTENTS

Prasanta Chakravarty

One can neither understand who is talking nor what he is talking about. Everything expands and contracts like a diseased serpent that falls apart as it vainly essays to make its coils. All is entangled in inextricable verbal knots, and one has to agree with Plautus: Here no one can understand anything except the Sybil. Whats the point of this verbal witchcraft?

St. Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum I

Populism is its own measure. It suggests that all communicationpolitical and otherwisehinges upon the existential confrontation between the people and the elite or the pluralist or the powerful. There are people and then there are anti-people. As such, populism appears to be the very condition that constitutes the crisis of parliamentary/discursive democracy and its modes of functioning. Seen from the other side, by means of championing petulance and noise, populism seems to be fomenting a crisis for the very possibilities of advanced and nuanced cultural and discursive exchange among human beings as such. What does this unmediated assertion of the sovereignty of the people imply? How and when do fugitives turn into hunters? What does a constant heightening of non-ideological but antagonistic polarization in the socius mean for human lives and relationships, as well as for a political and cultural imagination? If populism is the unleashing of the general will, who claims to speak in the name of the people and to what aim? What does populism have to offer to the constituency of people once it accomplishes the task of upending its antagonists?

Our concern is more to do with the distinction that he marks: between