Democracy on the couch

Why call it the ‘symptomatic’ approach? Let us briefly lay democracy on the analyst’s couch, and examine how Arditi’s reading of the Freudian concept of the symptom explains this peculiar label. In Freudian psychoanalytical theory, the symptom can be understood as something that covers or stands in for an unsatisfied demand or something that has gone wrong in our lives. It acts to repress a trauma that is so upsetting that we are unable to deal with it in any satisfactory manner. Yet these issues that are pushed away and covered up still remain formally internal - the act of repression attempts to exclude or displace the ailment, but it has nowhere properly external to go, and thus remains part of the system. In this sense, Freud sees symptoms as a kind of paradoxical ‘internal foreign territory’: “symptoms are derived from the repressed, they are, as it were, its representatives before the ego; but the repressed is foreign territory to the ego - internal foreign territory - just as reality (if you will forgive the unusual expression) is external foreign territory” (Freud 1964: 57).

Drawing out the political implications of this concept, Arditi reads populism as a kind of internal foreign territory of democratic politics:

Like the Freudian symptom, which designates something internal whose repression makes it appear as foreign to the ego even when it returns once and again, populism as an internal periphery designates political phenomena that develop on the edges or more turbulent regions of democratic politics. They are frowned upon as improper behaviour for good procedural democrats, yet they reappear continually enough to be seen as part of democratic politics (2007: 75).

In other words, populism is an unavoidable part of democratic politics - but it is not an obvious part. By being located at the ‘edges’ of democracy, we can understand why it recurrently appears in the political landscape, but at the same time, why it is marginalized in political thought. The notion of internal foreign territory further reveals that the markers we use to delineate ‘proper’ and ‘valid’ forms of politics and administration - what is easily measurable, certain and therefore ‘rational’ - from forms of political practice (like populism) which are messy, passionate and thus ‘irrational’ are far less clear-cut than we may initially think.

Indeed, such a view of populism makes a clear break from another medical metaphor used to characterise populism in the theoretical literature that relies on this rational/irrational dichotomy. Influenced by the social psychology of the late nineteenth century, in which ‘the people’ as the crowd or masses are considered an unruly remainder of ‘politics as such’, this popular conceptualisation of populism posits it as a pathology of democracy - that is, an anomaly or abnormality that only occurs as a result of particular social decay or disease (Akkerman 2003; Taggart 2002). Populism is thus seen as a return to archaic principles, and is viewed as a scourge on the political landscape that threatens democracy and the ‘normal’ operation of the system. As such, the response is that populism must be defeated in order to return the liberal-democratic landscape to its ‘natural’ state. While such a position explains the very real and valid concerns that people have about the effect that certain forms of populism can have on the social fabric of their societies, the conceptual framework is fundamentally misguided. As Meny and Surel (2002: 3) point out, “a pathology is meaningful only by comparison with a situation defined as normal, a definition which in this case is, to say the least, problematic”. Democracy obviously does not have a ‘normal’ operation, and its values, institutions and procedures are constantly changing and contingent on the various social, political and geographical vicissitudes that characterise history. More in line with Arditi’s symptomatic reading, Mudde (2008) has recently suggested that instead of viewing populism as a ‘normal pathology’ that emerges in the cracks of democracy, perhaps we should move to viewing it as ‘pathological normalcy’ - that is, rather than populism being an ‘outside’ of mainstream democracy, populism actually represents the radicalization of mainstream views, and is thus an inextricable part of democratic politics.

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