The Liberal Roots of Populism: A Critique of Laclau

[...] Laclau, in his analysis, fails to recognize the verisimilitude of neoliberalism as a more coherent direction for his own Lacanian premises, as a social organization that is governed by an anthropological base quite similar to the one he wants to provide for the political construction of "the people." [...] if we concede that the present work arises from a discursive and symbolic elaboration where we place affections, desires, processes, and images that can increase the probability of a circulation of objects a-employed- in conjunction with them for the resolution of drives; if we accept this indissoluble synthesis of work and cultural industry, in which elements of the work of the myth are embedded, proposing supplies increasingly diverse and useful for the prediction of demands; then we must admit that there is a closer institution of the truth of the subject in market-enterprise than in the "technification" of a rhetoric directed to offer a disciplined and sublimated object a, governable in its social performance.