Ironies and catachreses
The logic of populism or the idea of communism?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52610/rhs.v27i85.88Keywords:
Populism, Slavoj Žižek, Ernesto Laclau, Democracy, Irony, CatachresisAbstract
This article takes its starting point in the shift in how democracy is understood within Scandinavian rhetorical studies, where an agonistic or an antagonistic perspective has come to surpass a previously dominating consensus-oriented notion of democracy. The article investigates how this transformation might influence the rhetorical analysis of populism since it can no longer be dismissed as purely anti-democratic. The article approaches this question through a reading of two thinkers of the antagonism, Slavoj Žižek and Ernesto Laclau, and their discussion concerning populism. Through examples gathered from the rhetorical transformation of Swedish Conservative Party Moderaterna, the article aims to extract, out of Žižek’s and Laclau’s respective work, two different perspectives
on how to understand the rhetoricity constitutive of an anta -
gonistic ontology of the political. By focusing on the choice
between catachresis and irony, a rhetorical tradition committed
to thinking the antagonism can develop two opposing views on
how populism relates to democracy
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