The Flesh which is not One

MARGARITA PALACIOS; MARTIN PLOT

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Palgrave Macmillan

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2020 vol. 25 p. 36 - 54

1088-0763

IntroductionIn her For a Left Populism (2018) Chantal Mouffe rightly claims that welive a ?populist moment?. In her view, this moment is characterized by ?theemergence of manifold resistances against a politico-economic system that isincreasingly perceived  as being controlledby privileged  elites who are deaf to thedemands  of other groups  in society? (Mouffe, 2018, p. 18). Hersuggestion is to capture this unrest and re-articulate the emergence of ?thepeople? from within a leftist imaginary. Different from an institutionalanalysis in relation to the supposed ?failure? of political institutions toabsorb unfulfilled demands, in what follows, we would like to pursue adifferent line of argument and claim that populism more than showing a failure,shows the ?success? of a particular type of epistemology.  As we know, the Brexit vote aimed primarilyto eliminate free movement from Europe to the UK. In the same way, Trump?spromised and delivered  open repressionat migrants arriving to the USA/Mexico border,  together with  Austria?s plans to ?clamp down? on refugeesand the refusal of Hungary, Czech Republic and Poland  to refugee quotas, show a very relevantantagonistic logic.  Indeed it is fair tosay that we live within a grammar where material and symbolic borders and theexclusion they secure are seen as preconditions for meaning, identity formationand social order. We will call this grammar the epistemology of the ?One?, agrammar that has some of its powerful roots in Kantian-Lacanian psychoanalysis.