1. Introduction
As 2025 draws to a close, so does the anniversary of two of Ernesto Laclau's main works: Marking forty years since the publication of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and twenty years since On Populist Reason, it is timely to take stock of the trajectories, tensions, and renewed orientations of populism research inspired by the Essex School. Across political theory and empirical research alike, Laclau's work continues to provoke debate – particularly, as a set of conceptual tools for thinking through the instability of political identities, the contingency of social orders, and the conditions of democratic struggle. Among the numerous events organized worldwide to commemorate these anniversaries, the workshop "Reimagining Emancipatory Politics. Hegemony, Populism, and Political Strategy Today", held at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki from 1 to 3 October 2025, stood out as one of the most ambitious and theoretically engaged gatherings.
Organized as the 9th Annual Workshop of the Political Studies Association's Populism Specialist Group, the event brought together scholars working across political theory, philosophy, political sociology, and cultural studies. Rather than offering a mere celebratory reaffirmation of the Essex School, the workshop was both a commemoration and a critical re-engagement, taking form as an open-ended inquiry into the possibilities and limits of Laclau and his collaborators' conceptual vocabulary for emancipatory politics under contemporary conditions of democratic fatigue, authoritarian challenges, digital mediation, and ecological crisis. Across three days of panels and two major keynote lectures – delivered by Judith Butler and Yannis Stavrakakis –, participants repeatedly returned to a shared concern: how emancipatory politics can be articulated today under conditions of fragmentation, affective polarization, and institutional exhaustion.
2. Mapping Contemporary Populism Research in the Spirit of the Essex School
The panels of the workshop offered a dense and multifaceted mapping of contemporary populism research inspired by discourse theory. Rather than converging on a single research agenda, the contributions collectively delineated a field marked by thematic expansion, methodological diversification, and increasing reflexivity about its own conceptual foundations. What nevertheless provided a common horizon was a sustained engagement with articulation, antagonism, affect, and the contingent constitution of political subjects – core elements of the Laclauian legacy.
A first cluster of papers revisited the definition, operationalization, and empirical measurement of populism, engaging critically with dominant approaches in the field. Several contributions addressed the minimal criteria of populism – people-centrism and anti-elitism – while interrogating how these dimensions are identified, measured, and interpreted across different contexts, media, and temporalities. Importantly, quantitative and computational approaches were explicitly reframed through a discourse-theoretical lens, emphasizing that coding practices, corpus construction, and analytical categories are themselves discursive interventions, presupposing contested understandings of "the people", "the elite", and political antagonism. This line of inquiry reflected a broader trend within Essex-inspired research: the attempt to render discourse-theoretical concepts empirically productive without transforming them into rigid variables or losing sight of contingency and context.
Another thematic axis concerned affect, enjoyment, and performativity as constitutive dimensions of populist politics. Numerous contributions explored how populist identification is sustained through practices that exceed rational persuasion, including humour, irony, spectacle, ritual, and visual performance. Drawing on psychoanalysis, affect theory, and cultural studies, presenters examined how populist discourse negotiates undecidability, authenticity, and transgression, often mobilizing enjoyment as a resource of legitimacy. These discussions extended Laclau's emphasis on affective investment by foregrounding enjoyment not as a secondary supplement to meaning, but as a structuring force in political articulation. At the same time, they highlighted the fragility of performative strategies, emphasizing the risks of misfires, resignifications, and unintended exclusions inherent in all attempts at hegemonic intervention.
Environmental politics constituted a particularly vibrant area of engagement. Multiple contributions analysed how sustainability, climate change, and "net zero" function as empty or floating signifiers within populist discourses across the ideological spectrum. Far-right ecological narratives, left-populist climate imaginaries, and anti-populist technocratic framings were examined as competing hegemonic projects. These debates demonstrated the relevance of discourse theory for understanding ecological conflicts not merely as policy disputes, but as struggles over temporality, responsibility, and collective futures.
Another prominent cluster focused on the problem of institutionalization and its limits in emancipatory and populist projects. Rather than treating institutionalization as either a necessary endpoint or a betrayal of radical politics, contributors conceptualized it as a contingent and ambivalent moment of hegemonic struggle. Institutions were understood as sedimented discursive formations that stabilize power relations while remaining, in principle, open to rearticulation. At the same time, participants emphasized the risks of institutional incorporation, including depoliticization, routinization, and the neutralization of antagonism. Against this backdrop, discussions turned to the possibility of counter-institutions: provisional and hybrid organizational forms that seek to reconfigure institutional logics without fully dissolving into them. Such counter-institutions – ranging from plebeian models of representation to movement–party articulations – were framed as fragile sites of contestation, capable of temporarily sustaining emancipatory politics while preserving the openness and incompleteness central to a discourse-theoretical understanding of hegemony.
Questions of organization, leadership, and institutionalization formed another key thread running through the workshop. Several panels addressed populist parties, movement-party relations, and intra-party democracy, focusing on the tension between horizontality and verticality. Instead of reproducing normative critiques that equate leadership with authoritarianism, contributors explored leadership as a relational and representational problem: who represents whom, through which practices, and under what conditions of accountability? Drawing on Weberian sociology, democratic theory, and discourse analysis, these discussions examined how populist leadership oscillates between authoritative and authoritarian forms, and how identification processes shape both its emancipatory potential and its dangers.
Closely related, several panels addressed authoritarianism and anti-populism as discursive formations in their own right. Rather than conflating populism with authoritarianism, contributors emphasized the need for analytically distinct, yet relational accounts. Authoritarianism was conceptualized as a set of practices and discourses centred on closure, authority, and the exclusion of deviance, while anti-populism emerged as a hegemonic response that often pathologizes popular demands and depoliticizes conflict. This relational perspective underscored that populism, authoritarianism, and anti-populism should be analysed as interconnected moments within broader hegemonic struggles.
3. Judith Butler: Fantasy in Emancipation – Psychosocial Dimensions of Contemporary Authoritarianism
Against this backdrop, the two keynote lectures each offered a distinct but complementary reflection on the conditions, possibilities, and risks of emancipatory politics today. Judith Butler's keynote lecture deepened and radicalized many of the workshop's recurring themes by foregrounding the psychosocial infrastructures of hegemony and authoritarianism. Butler focused on the organization of fantasy and affect as a central dimension of political power. Drawing on Gramsci, Freud, Laplanche, and Žižek, they argued that authoritarian projects cannot be understood solely in terms of ideology, interests, or institutional arrangements; rather, they depend on the successful orchestration of phantasmatic investments that bind subjects to power.
Central to Butler's argument was Gramsci's notion of hegemony as a fragile and contested interplay of consensus and coercion. Revisiting Gramsci's reflections on Machiavelli and the "modern prince", Butler emphasized that leadership operates through a condensation of dispersed social energies into representative figures. Leaders are not sovereign sources of power but sites in which power appears embodied. Yet this embodiment is always precarious, since power can disperse as easily as it can be condensed. Authoritarian figures thus rely on mimetic forms of seduction that promise unity, restoration, and protection, even as they mobilize fear and aggression. Butler introduced the concept of "phantasmatic syntax" to capture how fantasies organize desire, fear, and anxiety in rule-governed ways. Drawing on Laplanche and Susan Isaacs, they distinguished between conscious fantasies (such as daydreams) and unconscious phantasies (in the Freudian sense of unconscious mental content that can become conscious), highlighting their bodily and affective dimensions. Political fantasies, Butler argued, are not merely cognitive illusions but lived structures that shape how subjects experience belonging, loss, and aggression. In this sense, consensus is never simply rational agreement; it is sustained through affective attachments that can include pleasure in destruction, cruelty, and exclusion.
This framework allowed Butler to analyze contemporary authoritarian movements – such as MAGA politics in the United States or neoliberal-authoritarian experiments elsewhere – as sites of fascist passion. They stressed that participation in these movements is often marked not by passive subjugation but by active enjoyment. The spectacle of executive power, the dismantling of institutions, and the humiliation of perceived enemies generate forms of jouissance that bind subjects to authoritarian projects. Importantly, Butler warned against reducing these dynamics to irrationality or manipulation; they are structured and sustained through specific discursive articulations. Crucially, they also addressed the dangers of inadvertently reproducing right-wing phantasmatic syntax within ostensibly democratic or progressive responses. Butler argued that when liberal or left actors accept the framing of the right – and thus (at least strategically) adopting a more deprecatory stance on "gender" – they risk reinforcing the very fantasies they seek to oppose. Emancipatory politics, Butler insisted, cannot rely on mere inversion or moral denunciation; it requires processes of disarticulation that loosen toxic chains of equivalence and open them to rearticulation.
The lecture concluded with a call to reclaim key signifiers – such as freedom and equality – from authoritarian capture. Butler emphasized that emancipatory politics must generate its own incitements and fantasies, rather than offering weakened replicas of right-wing mobilizations. This involves recognizing interdependence, mourning losses without succumbing to melancholic aggression, and crafting solidaristic imaginaries capable of sustaining democratic attachments.
4. Yannis Stavrakakis: Conditions and Limitations of Emancipatory Populism in Laclau and Mouffe
Yannis Stavrakakis' keynote provided a systematic reconstruction of emancipatory populism within the intellectual legacy of Laclau and Mouffe's work. Explicitly linking Hegemony and Socialist Strategy with On Populist Reason, Stavrakakis traced Laclau's movement from early engagements with populism to a comprehensive theory of hegemony and back again. This trajectory, he argued, reflects a sustained attempt to grapple with the problem of collective agency under conditions of contingency and social division.
A central concern of the lecture was the pejorative use of "populism" in both academic and public discourse. Stavrakakis emphasized that moralizing conceptions of populism often naturalize historically contingent power relations and obscure the democratic stakes of popular mobilization. Against this backdrop, he called for a self-reflexive populism research that examines not only populist movements but also discourses about populism and anti-populism as hegemonic practices in their own right. At the core of Stavrakakis' argument was Laclau's discursive conception of populism as a performative practice that constructs "the people" through chains of equivalence opposing a powerless many to a powerful few. This construction is always partial and marked by negativity; it relies on weak universals and empty signifiers that can never fully suture social division. Yet it is precisely this incompleteness that enables populism to function as a democratic strategy under conditions of crisis.
Stavrakakis further argued that emancipatory populism is not a paradox but part of a long historical canon of democratic and egalitarian struggles, ranging from the "Popular Fronts" of the 1930s to Latin American populisms and even late Marx's engagement with Russian populism. At the same time, he emphasized the limitations and risks of populist strategies, proposing to understand populism as a "transitional object": a necessary but ultimately perishable form of political attachment that can facilitate democratic transformation without promising final reconciliation.
By situating populism within a broader theory of discourse, performativity, and negativity, Stavrakakis' lecture synthesized many of the workshop's central debates. It reaffirmed that populism, understood discursively, remains indispensable for radical democracy as long as collective identity and popular sovereignty structure political life. Far from being a moment that can be overcome, populism is a process coextensive with democracy itself – a risky, impure, yet unavoidable choreography of emancipation.
5. Conclusion: Reimagining Emancipatory Politics at the Close of the "Laclau Year"
As the "Laclau Year" comes to an end, the Thessaloniki workshop provided a timely and nuanced assessment of the legacy of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and On Populist Reason and reaffirmed that the Essex School remains a living intellectual tradition – one that continues to offer critical resources for thinking through the possibilities and limits of emancipation in an age marked by rising authoritarianism, ecological crisis, and democratic uncertainty.
The workshop made clear that populism, understood through a discourse-theoretical lens, cannot be reduced to a pathology, a style, or a deviation from democratic normality. Instead, it appears as a recurrent and structurally conditioned response to crises of representation, one that operates through affective investment, performative articulation, and the contingent construction of collective subjects. At the same time, the panels repeatedly underscored the ambivalence of populist strategies: their emancipatory potential is inseparable from risks of exclusion, closure, and authoritarian capture. Read together, the workshop contributions suggest that reimagining emancipatory politics today requires neither abandoning populism nor embracing it uncritically. Instead, it calls for a sustained engagement with the discursive, affective, and organizational conditions under which popular demands are articulated, unified, and transformed. In this sense, the populist moment is not over – because it was never a moment to begin with, but an ongoing process coextensive with democracy itself.
Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.