Event: WIPSS Online Seminar: Affect and Politics: The Case of Brexit
Date: 27 May 2021
Time: 18:30
Registration: (ZOOM) Online Event
Speaker: Raylene Abdilla, Phd Student, Institute for European Studies
WIPSS - Convened by Prof. Peter Mayo, Dr Michael Briguglio, Mr Francois Zammit
Traditionally, political subjects have been assumed to be fully rational, calculative subjects able to clearly determine their preferences and express them in a democratic context. Although such assumptions are still widely integrated in political science, alternative ways of analysing political phenomena have been developed.
Such alternative ways take issue with this ‘rationalistic’ approach to political analysis, and argue that affect is an important element in the study of political phenomena, particularly in the way collective identities form in an antagonistic fashion. This talk embraces the latter view and draws on the discourse theoretical work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe on populism to analyse the populist discourse adopted by the ‘leave’ camp during the Brexit referendum campaign of 2016. During this campaign, the ‘leave’ camp was successful in tapping into the affects of the people and constructing an antagonistic frontier between the British ‘people’ and the European Union (EU) as the ‘enemy of the people’.
By drawing on Jason Glynos and David Howarth’s notion of ‘logics of critical explanation’, this talk analyses how populist actors appealed to logics of fantasy, or what Jacques Lacan calls jouissance, to tap into the people’s imaginary of a ‘lost great nation’ which is being impeded by the workings of its enemy – the EU. This approach sheds light on how the study of affect can illuminate contemporary analysis of social movements and political analysis.
Bio-note
Raylene Abdilla is a PhD student with the Institute for European Studies at the University of Malta. Her research interests include European integration and politics, populism, and post structuralist discourse theory.
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