Political Passion in Psychoanalytically oriented Populism Theory. The MAGA-movement, Trump´s cabinet appointments and its inherent controversies as an illustration of the Essex-school´s radical notion of political affectivity.

This paper intends to contribute to debates on nature and definition of the relation between populism and political passions. As the western political imaginary exhibits what Gramsci called a „crisis of authority“ - as we deal with politicization and contestation of many previously unquestioned social facts and configurations - traditional explanative models used to map social reality seem to reach their breaking point in analyzing precisely this relation in question. Compare here the problematics of the "uneducated voter", qua trope or practice of attributing an irrational, easily excitable, manipulated "false consciousness" to i.e. minoritarian identities interpellated by populist discourses (see i.e. how media and academia refer to Amish, Latino, Afro-american minorities that come to identify with the MAGA-movement). The research question animating this paper will hence be phrased along the lines of „Why mainstream notions of political passion cannot adequately explain the ideological resilience of populist movements and tropes?“ and "Can we outline a theory of affects that does not deprive social actors of their "agency" or "subjectivity"?". Conversely we claim that to do so will necessitate instead of commonly employed descriptivist or conceptualist approaches (to affectivity and its role in the constitution of the „social link“), psychoanalytically informed ones that factor in the self-subversive nature of what Jacques Lacan calls „surplus-enjoyment“ (plus-de-jouir). We will therefore argue against mainstream approaches like Cas Mudde´s, Ostiguy´s and others on this topic, generally from the Essexian re-imagination of populism(studies), and specifically for what Ernesto Laclau called „psychoanalytically oriented political theory“ (Laclau 2010). Here we argue against the analytic perspective of a supposed neutrality of a generic observer shared by many mainstream approaches, and for the Lacanian notion of subjectivity at stake in Laclau´s notion of populism. For this purpose we investigate case-examples of the MAGA-movement´s ideological resilience, affective investment and/in its (for many puzzling) appeal for/to minoritarian positions, groups etc.. We will thus try to make palpable what Laclau calls the radical tension between the „singularity of the leader´s name“ and the „heterogeneity of the popular demands“ to explain this affective „glue“ between essentially incommensurable, heterogeneous and even antagonistic positions, identities etc.. Here we circumscribe a beyond of (political) pleasure and self-identification at stake in the interpellation of empty signifiers like „Trump“, „MAGA“, „America First“ and so on. The aim of the research is to contribute to the effort of establishing Essexian populism theory as a more visible and viable alternative to current mainstream approaches that often exhibit an anti-populist stance towards populism and phenomena of counter-hegemonic social movements.