The Affective Side of Political Identities. Pragmatism, Populism, and European Social Theory

The problem of the constitution of political identities has been gaining growing attention during the last few years. This growing interest is strictly related to the emergence of new political phenomena, especially those kinds of phenomena which are usually labelled as “populist movements”. In the present paper we intend to critically discuss one of the most well-known and discussed theories of populism, namely Ernesto Laclau's theory, with respect to a specific issue, that is the role played by affective processes in the articulation of political demands. Specifically, we aim at providing an alternative to Laclau’s idea according to which affections are external to the articulatory process of social demands and political identities. While explicitly acknowledging the importance of the affective side of political processes, Laclau claims that affective processes accompany externally the process of political articulation, which he conceives as a purely rhetorical one. In order to develop an alternative to this view, we will draw resources both from American pragmatism – especially John Dewey and Charles S. Peirce – and from European contemporary sociology and social theory – i.e. Émile Durkheim, Axel Honneth and Hans Joas. Specifically, we will develop the idea according to which the constitution of social and political identities consists also of the process of articulation of a shared, vague, affective experience, and that political identities are constituted through an interplay between the affective and the cognitive dimensions of human conduct.