Populisme de gauche et conscience noire: Race, histoire et pluralisme après Laclau et Mouffe

Continuing from their joint work in the 1980s, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe both started developing a new theory of populism in the early 2000s. This paper defines it as a double ontology of politics, which includes both enmity — the dissociative dimension of the political-and deliberation — the associative dimension. In order to distinguish their approach from right-wing populism, Laclau and Mouffe resort to uncompromising anti-essentialism which casts history out of the construction of the political subject. Doing so, they assimilate consistent anti-colonial and anti-racist movements to conservatism and reaction. These confusions originate in insufficient problematization of the racial question and anti-racism activism, that the authors often invoke but never analyze properly. These shortcomings require a reformulation of left-wing populism of which the question of pluralism could provide the starting point.