Sawyer Seminar: "Populism as Political Theology"

The current global populist wave is often narrated as a ‘crisis of representation.’ This means not just that some segments of the electorate don’t feel adequately represented, but that they reject representation as such in favour of an immediate presencing of the collective body of the people. This hunger for immediate participation, this assertion of the collective flesh, is then in its turn typically dismissed as regressively theological: at best a dubious aestheticization of politics, at worst a slide into fascism.

But is this a false choice? Can the populist critique of representation yield a different take on contemporary politics? This talk is an invitation to reanimate the grounds of critical theory via anthropological understandings of shared substance and ‘occult’ motifs of efficacious resonance.