Didier Eribon vs. ‘The People’—A Critique of Chantal Mouffe’s Left Populism

Abstract

In this article, I develop a critique of Chantal Mouffe’s leftist populism and its construction of ‘the people’ against an opposed ‘them’, from a perspective informed by the thought of Didier Eribon. I draw on both his public interventions and his theoretical work, employing his concepts of return, society as verdict, and his two principles of critical thinking to question the desirability of crafting ‘the people’ in the first place. I contend that Eribon’s critique renders Mouffe’s proposal problematic on three accounts. First, her approach is too politically volatile; its instability leaves it devoid of a critical analysis of the differences between concrete social positions, struggles, and subjectivities within ‘the people’. Consequently, the political becomes merely a function of the social. Yet, the social and its determining power remain mostly unaddressed by her framework. Second, its simplistic opposition of an overly generalised ‘the people’ against ‘the oligarchy’ is susceptible to right-wing populist appropriations. Third, for a shot at hegemony and a general appeal, it eclipses plurality and dissensus within ‘the people’. In contrast, Eribon encourages a connection between the social and the political by suggesting that a self-critical analysis be mutually intertwined with social analysis. Instead of merely mobilising affects, they must be critically interrogated. Instead of summoning ‘the people’, a return to their respective genesis must be attempted. Unless both principles of critical thinking, the insights of return, and societal verdicts are deployed to come to terms with the social determinisms at hand, the ‘people’s’ mobilisation against an opposed ‘them’ risks sacrificing pluralism and equality alike and neglecting the criteria of the desirability of specific changes in favour of a “whatever it costs” attempt at hegemony.

1. Introduction

In the wake of the growing support for populist right-wing parties across Europe and the US, re-opening the question of who makes up the democratic ‘we’ and who it ought to encompass, new debates on populism, its strategies, and the category of ‘the people’ have emerged. An especially prominent voice in such discourses is Chantal Mouffe, who conceptually establishes such a ‘people’ through political articulation, hoping to save democracy from a neoliberal hegemony.

Mouffe is known for her post-Marxist Gramscian political work, which she developed in collaboration with Ernesto Laclau. She has long pleaded for a populist movement from the left. Her thoughts were instructive for several political movements, e.g., ‘Podemos’ in Spain, ‘La France Insoumise’ in France, and ‘Syriza’ in Greece.

While criticising hegemonic, deliberative, and liberal paradigms of democracy for misidentifying the dimension of the political as an actual clash of different world views, she insists that the surge of right-wing populists is due to a disappearance of actual leftist alternatives.

She has an (ant)agonistic account of politics, i.e., she sees politics as a realm of dissent and conflict through which consensus is achieved via competition. Appropriately, for her, democratic politics is not about including everyone but about creating clear us/them distinctions, out of which arises an in-group, out-group dynamic that mobilises and stabilises a democratic ‘we’ against an opposed ‘them’. Such a democratic ‘we’ is then necessarily exclusive, and while these exclusions are always up for challenge, they are considered vital for shoring up the political identity of individual parties.

Naturally, such an engaged and pointed plea for a left populism has been criticised from multiple perspectives. While some attack it at the root, criticising her ontology as incongruent, others take issue with the fact that there is a ‘them’ excluded from the democratic ‘we’. Still, others criticise populism as anti-pluralist per se, and yet more, highlight the shortcomings of left populism in power.

Yet, Mouffe tries to sidestep the classic charge of anti-pluralism by insisting on the necessity of crafting a democratic ‘we’ instead of uncovering it as the true people. She holds that her account is pluralist and anti-essentialist; it succeeds in creating ‘the people’ by crafting social chains of equivalence that stress the need to forge a collective will among different political claims. The democratic ‘we’, then, is not a concrete entity but a general category that includes everyone dissatisfied with the status quo. Yet, as a rhetorical device, it is purposely generalised to appeal to and refer to people of all strands of life through political articulation.

Didier Eribon, while not having written extensively on left populism, has provided commentary and analysis on the subject in various interviews and public discussions among academics. In his contributions to these discussions, he has conceptualised a different critique of left populism, calling into question its appropriateness for democratic aims and a pluralist image of society. The main focus of his critique lies not so much on the exclusion of an oppositional ‘them’ but rather on the generality of ‘the people’ constructed as a democratic ‘we’. Connecting his political interventions with the introspective sociological analysis he conducts in ‘La societée comme verdict’ and ‘Principes d’une pensée critique’1, I further examine the thinking that problematises the desirability of crafting ‘the people’. While Eribon shares Mouffe’s goal of furthering possibilities of dissent, pluralism, and challenging neoliberal hegemony, his critique shows that her strategic deployment of a left populism and the creation of a democratic ‘we’ are the wrong means to those ends.

To make that case, I will first briefly expound upon Mouffe’s political theory and her plea for a left populism. Afterwards, I mention a couple of criticisms raised against Mouffe. In a third step, I engage with Eribon’s theory and its influences and give an account of his concepts of society as verdict, return and his two principles of critical thinking. Next, I discuss agreements and disagreements between Mouffe and Eribon which will serve as a preliminary section to the last one. There, I present a threefold Eribonian critique of Mouffe’s left populism and her conceptualisation of the democratic ‘we’. To this end, I connect his political interventions with his theoretical notions of return, society as verdict, and the two principles of critical thinking. I then argue that the problem in socially constructing a people is the abstractness and generalisation of categorising. Furthermore, Mouffe’s anti-essentialism leads her to neglect the dimension of critical self-analysis, as well as the societal and historical forces that create individual subjects. Without the insight stemming from these dimensions, it is hard to undo oppression. This deficiency renders Mouffe’s project undesirable by making the strategic opposition of ‘the people’ against ‘the oligarchy’ too general to be fruitful for the struggles at hand.

2. Mouffe’s Left Populism, the Us/Them Distinction, and the Democratic We

Mouffe understands her political theory as being at the service of social movements and activists who strive to end the neoliberal hegemony and gain hegemony themselves. For that purpose, she advocates for a left populism that establishes us/them distinctions that oppose ‘the people’ as a democratic ‘we’ against ‘the elites’, ‘la casta’ or ‘the oligarchy’: a ‘them’ [1,2]2. According to Mouffe, such an us/them distinction is the condition sine qua non for politics. This is why, regarding the social movements on the left, one of her main points is the differentiation of agonistic dissociative forms of assembly from associative ones. While associative assemblies shy away from conflict and prefer a consensual notion of politics, she maintains that the dissociative assemblies start from an antagonistic notion of the political [3]. Antagonisms are conflicts of interest that cannot be reconciled through rational debate but are, by definition, irreconcilable [4]. Yet, the antagonist is an enemy with whom there cannot be peaceful coexistence. She derives this notion of antagonism from Carl Schmitt. Antagonists are enemies that do not share any common ground. Schmitt states that any kind of ‘we’ is constructed against a ‘them’, resulting in an us/them dichotomy. Like Schmitt, Mouffe makes these antagonisms out to be “constitutive of the political” [5] (p. 16). Any shared sense of identity must always stabilise itself against an outside them [6,7].

To have a democracy, there needs to be a way to deal with these antagonistic conflicts in a democratic manner. For Mouffe, it is not a solution to do away with antagonisms because, on the one hand, antagonisms are ever-lurking and cannot be eradicated. On the other, attempting to do away with antagonisms would result in a post-political world within which neoliberalism, through its tight grip of hegemony, would depoliticise conflicts and extinguish real alternatives [1]. To overcome the crisis of liberal democracies, which she attributes to a rational obliviousness concerning a hegemonic understanding of politics, namely the aggregative and deliberative models that neglect the affective and agonistic dimension of politics represented in the third-way policies of labour in the 1990s [5], she pleads to think “with Schmitt against Schmitt” [4] (p. 138). Her solution is to tame antagonisms into agonism. Mouffe does this because she, on the one hand, follows Schmitt’s ontology of the political as conflict. Yet, on the other hand, she understands that enemies who deem each other fit for annihilation cannot live together peacefully in a democracy. Since conflict is vital for the political realm, doing away with the conflictual dimension entirely is not an option. Consequently, she pleads to transform enemies into legitimate adversaries who struggle against one another via peaceful methods [1].

To make such a struggle possible, an us/them distinction must be established between a democratic ‘we’ on the inside and a ‘them’ on the outside [4,5]. This creates a space that keeps the enemies outside and allows for an agonistic conflict amongst adversaries rather than antagonistic enemies on the inside. This space is designated by a common subscription to ethico-political values. Mouffe states that in the liberal-democratic setting prevalent in the West, these values are freedom and human rights, inherited from the liberal tradition, and equality and popular sovereignty of the demos, stemming from the democratic tradition [5,6]. While all adversaries must adhere to these principles, they radically differ in their interpretation of these values and how they are to be realised. The current realisation is the hegemonic interpretation, which stabilises and orders the political field. Any status quo, however, can then again be challenged. Consequently, the ethico-political “conflictual consensus” [4] (p. xii) provides a common framework within which the agonists struggle over hegemony and must work to become sovereign in order to assert their own interpretation of (liberal) democracy. To that end, adversaries constitute themselves against one another through agonistic “us/them distinction[s]” [4] (p. 6). Hence, the conflictual consensus provides the basis for a common ground, which liberals in the Habermasian tradition find in the co-originality of private and public autonomy [8]. Yet, while Mouffe criticises this as an unpolitical understanding that tries to do away with the irresolvable tension between the two traditions that have been articulated together in liberal democracy, merely positing them as in alignment [6], Mouffe’s relativist position conveniently leaves out how the conflictual consensus is derived or arrived at by people, but merely assumes and demands allegiance to it. She states that to work properly, “procedures always involve substantial ethical commitments […i.e.,] a form of ethos” [6] (p. 69). Here, her argument seems guilty of the very problem she accuses the liberals of having, namely, morally bypassing the political nature when they assume norms.

Assuming such a consensus, for Mouffe, is about gaining hegemony over the understanding of the contingently co-articulated principles at hand. To gain hegemony, they try to bring about the “construction of a ‘people’ through a “chain of equivalence” [1] (p. 36), forming a collective will that still respects the particularity of the different claims, united in that struggle against the adversarial ‘them’. Here, it is important to pay attention to the fact that, in contradiction to a right-wing populism that understands ‘the people’ in ethno-nationalist terms, Mouffe’s approach understands itself to be anti-essentialist in that “’the people’ is not an empirical referent but a discursive political construction” [1] (p. 34); it “cannot be apprehended by sociological categories” [1] (p. 34). They are constituted as ‘the people’ only by virtue of a political articulation that tries to form a hegemonic constellation in uniting different subjective positionalities under one through a chain of equivalence against a ‘them’, against ‘the oligarchy’ or any group that is made to represent the current hegemony [9]. Any group, for Mouffe, can only be constituted against a constitutive outside.3 Such a constitutive outside requires an effective referent, one that anchors the political struggle in something visible and real and, thereby, creates an energetic chain of equivalence that binds the group. This becomes clear when she—albeit lauding them for naming Wall Street as their enemy—criticises the slogan of the ‘Occupy’ movement: “We are the 99%” [4] (p. 116). Such an articulation did allude to a pre-existing ‘we’ not created through political articulation and suggested the achievability of societal harmony once the 1% was gone [4]. She deems them not sufficiently attuned to the antagonisms in society. To do so, ‘the people’ need to be demarcated from ‘them’, and such opposition must continue if a liberal understanding of democracy is to be avoided.

Therein also lies the reason why democracy and the demos are necessarily bounded by concrete exclusion, for a boundless demos could not constitute itself as a democratic ‘we’ against an outside ‘them’ anymore. That is why the demos must be limited and some borders established [6]. While following Schmitt when it comes to the necessity of exclusion and the us/them distinction, which separates equals on the inside and relegates the unequal to the outside, she rejects that the ‘we’ requires homogeneity but opts for commonality instead [6].

At the same time, it is impossible to reach a rational consensus that grounds a ‘we’ “that would not have a corresponding ‘they’. This is impossible because the very condition for the constitution of a ‘we’ is the demarcation of a ‘they’” [1] (p. 45). Hence, while the liberal tradition of human rights has a tendency for universalisation, the democratic one, with its insistence on popular sovereignty, keeps it limited. For Mouffe, the latter ultimately takes the driver’s seat since without it, there would be no politics anymore. Consequently, the democratic principle understood as equality and popular sovereignty entails the right of the demos to decide about its own limits and thereby overrule liberal urges for inclusion [6]. Nevertheless, the co-articulation with the liberal tradition allows us to challenge these limits. To struggle agonistically is to conjoin forces into an agonistic democratic ‘we’ that confronts ‘them’ to gain sovereignty and take over hegemony [4,5,6].

To this end, Mouffe urges us to engage in a left populism. In this sense, populism is to be understood as a logic of politics, a “discursive strategy of construction of the political frontier between ‘the people’ and ‘the oligarchy’” [1] (p. 11), rather than designating a concrete political program. Populism aims to mobilise ‘the people’ as a counter-hegemonic force in a “transversal way, with the aim of creating a popular majority independent of previous political affiliations” [1] (p. 43).

While Mouffe does believe that the old left-right distinction is not fit anymore to create and mobilise a democratic ‘we’, she nevertheless qualifies her populism as ‘left’ to take into account that there is also a right-wing populism that talks of ‘the people’, too [1]. To be able to mobilise, however, she maintains that populism must pay attention to national or regional libidinal investments, that is to say, people’s drives and desires as understood by the psychoanalytic tradition, while also fostering common affection that is aimed to connect to people’s common sense. To this end, populism ought to connect to people’s everyday needs, arising from how they feel and experience themselves and engage with their “aspects of popular experience” [1] (p. 40).

Furthermore, Mouffe’s populism should not be taken as aligned with direct democracy but with representation. The political articulation that forges a collective common will is either provided by a “specific democratic demand” [1] (p. 37), which is elevated as the symbol for the whole democratic struggle, or through the figure of the leader. While trying to tone down criticisms of the reliance on a leader by acknowledging that there can be downsides to such a stance, she reasserts that “a collective will cannot be constructed without some form of crystallisation of common affects, and affective bonds with a charismatic leader can play an important role in this process.” [1] (p. 38)4.

In conclusion, Mouffe provides a theoretically informed plea for left populism, which she claims is the best way to revive democracy and the political as a confrontation between ‘the people’ and its constitutive outside. She is committed to the belief that one ought not to do theory that remains detached from these political realities. Instead, a good theory inclines one to activity and offers strategic instruction for social movements framed by a realistic analysis of hegemony and agonism [4].

In the next section, I bring in some criticisms of populism in general and Mouffe’s left populism specifically made in the academic literature. After that, I will start to engage with Eribon’s thought.

3. Critiques of Mouffe’s Left Populism

Mouffe’s political theory has been criticised in manifold ways. Before developing Eribon’s critique of the democratic ‘we’, drawing from his work and public interventions, I will briefly overview a couple of concerns.

First, there is a line of critique problematising Mouffe’s ontological claims, rendering any consensus impossible for locating irreconcilable antagonism as the ground of being. For example, Eva Erman and Andrew Knobs insist that the possibility of a transition from antagonism to agonism is not compelling, citing reasons rooted in Mouffe’s own antagonistic ontology. Enemies that do not share any symbolic space could not conceive of themselves as enemies in the first place, for this would imply a common basis of mutual recognition [10,11]. Hence, in some sense, even antagonism needs a constitutive outside to constitute itself, which would be commonality or consensus.

In a similar vein, Arash Abizadeh has shown that the necessity of a constitutive outside for the construction of self is not compelling when transposed onto the level of collective subjects. This is because a collective subject can recognise itself due to its inner plurality. Furthermore, he insists that defining a group without resorting to a constitutive outside that takes the form of enmity is possible. He gives the example of humanity, which can define itself against non-human entities and not out of enmity [12]. Roskamm queries that Mouffe transposes the Derridian notion of différance connected to the idea of the constitutive outside, which resides on a conceptual ontological level, onto the ontic level and thereby unnecessarily concretises it in a Schmittian fashion [13]. Fritsch shows that this stems from Mouffe’s neglect of Derrida’s construction of Schmitt’s existential notion of enmity that, in the end, relies on an enemy that is given [14]5.

Followers of a deliberative paradigm have highlighted that Mouffe misconstrued the role consensus plays in their political theory; they suggest that consensus should not be understood as something that has been or could be achieved but exists instead as a regulative idea [15,16,17]6. Yet, Mouffe has acknowledged what she has deemed a shift in Habermas’ understanding of the role of consensus—but still asserts that his notion of politics remains too rationalistic [6].

Another criticism has been that Mouffe’s populism has hardly delivered its promise of strengthening liberal democracy through a crystallisation of common affects by identification with a leader figure. Didier Fassin has noted that while Mouffe has called for a Latin Americanisation of European politics in the past, the references to strong leftist leaders there have been omitted recently for their problematic association with cases of corruption, clientelism, and suppression of the free press. Still, Fassin acknowledges that the pink tide in Latin America has proven beneficial for including groups excluded from politics prior. Yet, like others, he sees the stress on vertical representation with a strong leader as prone to authoritarianism [18,19]. Mouffe recognises that many, especially on the left, take issue with leader figures because such figures could come with negative effects. She counters these reservations by drawing attention to the fact that there are hardly any successful social movements without a leader figure and that nothing was reliant on how the relationship between the leader and ‘the people’ they represent was established. After all, a leader could also be understood as a “primus inter pares” [1] (p. 38). Mouffe is interested in, and succeeds at, having a positive, real-life impact with her theory; however, her pointing out that empirical authoritarianism is not an essential feature of the theory of populism is not the most convincing defence.

In a similar, yet more theoretical vein, Jan-Werner Müller has charged populism with an inherent anti-pluralism that is prone to authoritarianism for its exclusionary effects towards the ‘them’ [20] to which it denies the claim to be part of the “real’ people” [21] (p. 4). Some have charged Müller’s liberal approach with moralism and said that he, in turn, tries to discard populism as a legitimate political player on moral grounds. Thereby, Müller does as the populists do, taking part in the same practice of delegitimising political opponents (albeit on moral or juridical terms) [22].

Furthermore, such a liberal moralising approach conveniently forgoes a political analysis of the roots and causes of populism [23]. Müller concedes that moralism is not sufficient to come to terms with populism theoretically and politically but maintains that while an analysis was desirable, it would not affect the problematic effects of populism [24]. While Mouffe finds no mention in his latest book ‘Democracy Rules,’ he does engage more with the deficits of political institutions, such as inequality, a lack of alternatives, and democratic societies that give rise to populism in the first place. Yet, he points out that the danger that us/them divisions pose to equal rights for political opponents are prone to “destroying democratic institutions” [25] (p. 39f.). Apart from that, Müller reaffirms his stance that both liberty and equality are key principles of democracy [25].

Nadia Urbinati makes a case that populism does away with mediating institutions, is fundamentally at odds with constitutionalism, and exaggerates the democratic majority principle into majoritarianism. She criticises it for substituting a pars pro parte logic for the pars pro toto logic of representative government [26]. Furthermore, she contends that the us/them binary is simplistic and does not account for cross-cutting cleavages7. Additionally, she argues that not only is the notion of the ‘us’ extremely vague and underdetermined, but that neither Mouffe nor Laclau’s concept of ‘the people’ has “any grounding in social structure” [26] (p. 44). In a similar vein as Müller and Cohen, she states that “liberal democracy is a pleonasm and illiberal democracy […] an oxymoron” [26] (p. 18). Combining empirical and theoretical concerns, Jean L. Cohen draws attention to the possibility of populist actors establishing authoritarian rule rather than just hegemony and urges that limits be put in place to protect the rights of counter-hegemonic groups, which might be infringed [27]. In her latest work, she and Andrew Arato sustain that point by arguing that populism tends to strive toward a hybrid between a democratic and an authoritarian regime. They also argue that populism is severely at odds with constitutionalism and, therefore, rights. They elegantly show how Mouffe herself cannot uphold her distinction between a liberal and a democratic logic; a dead-end in which her commitment to Schmittianism has led her to. “[S]he advises us to endorse liberal logic because it enables challenges to the forms of exclusion inherent in democracy—challenges made by those subject to the law of the demos and demanding full inclusion as equal citizens. So, equality now shifts over to liberalism’s side” [28] (p.143). Moreover, they problematise that Mouffe’s populism does away with any political content in favour of identity politics that is only about who belongs to the people [28]. Finally, they make an argument against the fundamental “instability of a name like ‘the people’” [28] (p. 12), a vague name that allows shifts from one political side to another.

A last strand of criticism comes from Lois McNay and Michael Rustin. The former has criticised the hegemonic, radical democratic approach as socially weightless in that its binaries of us/them and inclusion/exclusion fail to pay tribute to the complexity of the social and its dynamics that include phenomena such as domination or of a structural nature which are irreducible to exclusion or hegemony. The Marxist theorist Rustin has provided a similar line of criticism, claiming that the absence of any material analysis renders the post-Marxist approach an idealist voluntarism [29,30]. Urbinati passes the same judgment of “voluntarism” [26] (p. 169). On the contrary, Meiksin-Wood and Hart charge the post-Marxist account with replacing a materialist determinism with a linguistic one [31,32]8. McNay holds that while Mouffe “acknowledges the entrenched nature of many identities, talking in passing of how it is important to comprehend processes of over-determination and ‘the complex dynamic of complicity and resistance which underlies the practices which… identity is implicated [in]” [29] (p. 82), her anti-essentialist theoretical framework cannot fully address this, and instead draws analogies between the contingency of signification and the contingency of socio-cultural formations.

Indeed, Mouffe remains too vague, general, and abstract regarding the determinant power of the social. This likely results from her wanting to defend the political as located on the ontological sphere, untouched by the ontic sphere of the social. This shows when she insists that ‘the people’ are created only through political articulation, do not exist prior to it, and cannot be apprehended by sociological categories. At the same time, she nods to the anticipated critique when she says that this implies on the other hand:

working with notions from the ‘common sense’, it should address people in a manner able to reach their affects. It has to be congruent with the values and the identities of those that it seeks to interpellate and must connect with the aspects of popular experience. To resonate with the problems people encounter in their daily lives, it needs to start from where they are and how they feel, offering them a vision of the future that gives them hope, instead of remaining in the register of denunciation [1] (p. 40)

Yet, simultaneously, she maintains that these people can only be brought about as ‘the people’ through the designation of an outside enemy. Sticking with her Schmitt reading, she insists that the necessary boundary to be drawn between us and them can be established in all kinds of ways. It is important only that it be established. However, unlike for Schmitt, for Mouffe, the identities are ultimately not given, for they are a product of hegemonic articulation and subject to further political articulation [6]. To ultimately resort to existing social identities as a starting point, as Schmitt does, would be to institute the “distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ […as] not really politically” [6] (p. 54) but as merely recognising “already-existing borders” [6] (p. 54). It seems Mouffe wants to have it both ways: to be considered as acknowledging the social and, at the same time, have the political set apart from it. Eribon, as we shall see, makes a similar argument and uses it to problematise the construction of ‘the people’.

Therefore, I will now turn to Eribon, who, as a radical democrat, shares many of Mouffe’s ideas, but also McNay’s focus on the structures of the social and their effects on people. Furthermore, we shall see that Eribon’s critique echoes many of the points of contention just mentioned. Partly, it is Eribon’s own self-analysis as an analysis of the effects that society inflicted upon him that leads him to reject populism.

4. Eribon’s Theory: Social Verdicts, Return, and the Principles of Critical Thinking

In this section, I will give a rough account of Eribon’s theoretical work, which is also a work on the self, and introduce his concepts of social verdicts, return, and his two principles of critical thinking. In the next section, I will bring them into conversation with Mouffe to condense his disagreements and contentions into a critique of left populism.

In ‘Retour à Reims’ (Return to Reims), he shows in great openness how the demands of homosexuality, his working-class background, and his transformation into a Parisian intellectual have shaped his self-understanding—and for a long time blocked it, as well [33]. This work, which details these experiences in a sociological, philosophical, and literary way, has found great resonance and has been deemed original for its interdisciplinary nature. It has been credited for providing both phenomenological accounts of Eribon’s own experiences and literary examples, and a connection to sociological and philosophical considerations [34]. His stress lies on a democratic thinking informed by sociological categories, which is aligned with critique and critically analyses the self and society. Although Eribon’s experience certainly informs his understanding of society, democracy, and his stance on the democratic ‘we’, this explanation would not do justice to Eribon’s position. Eribon connects these two aspects not just to give an account of his life and self-understanding but also to use them as a lens to study society and its effects on subjectivity, thereby combining an auto-analysis with an analysis of society [34,35,36]9. In his book ‘La societée comme verdict’ (Society as verdict), he aims to provide a more theoretical account of how subjects form and are always embedded within a spatial and temporal context governed by social norms and verdicts that precede and sometimes exceed a life. Therefore, his account is informed by a theory that takes self-analysis as a starting point for analysing society and its effects on the self.

Although his books unmistakably reveal Eribon’s personal touch, the influences of his long-time academic mentor, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, are clearly recognisable. Eribon himself makes this explicit at the beginning of ‘La societée comme verdict’ and credits Bourdieu with having given him “a key to understanding who I was and what was going on in my social existence” [35] (p. 47)10 and shares that his book as a “self-analytical and socio-analytical approach, would not have existed” [35] (p. 45)11 without the framework Bourdieu had laid out. After all, just as that of his disciples, Bourdieu’s theory focuses on the interplay between individual agency and social structures. In it, his concept of habitus, which refers to the internalisation of dispositions, and his concept of field, which refers to a site of social struggle, play a key role [37,38]. With them, Bourdieu shows that social structures and conditions, such as family upbringing, imposed gender roles, class belonging, and so on, get internalised by actors shaping their behaviour and how they feel. Through this inscription of social verdicts in the habitus, people become “complicit in their own subjection” [39] (p. 88)12. This account has been charged with determinism, which is incapable of explaining social change, since people just reproduced their social position [40,41].

Yet, such arguments have been countered, amongst other reasons, with reference to the fact that Bourdieu was not making up determining forces of societal institutions but discovering, analysing, and problematising them in his empirical studies [42]. Neither Bourdieu nor Eribon would subscribe to a denial of agency tout court. Instead, they maintained that action was not impossible but dependent upon a social self-reflection that unveiled the societal and habitual reproduction of power structures through educational institutions. Since both Bourdieu and Eribon came from a working-class background, on top of which Eribon was marked by his homosexuality, they have both managed to escape the future that the laws of social reproduction would have suggested for them. This makes them class defectors and, as such, bearers of a cleft habitus, one that perpetually keeps one strange to both the milieu one has left and the milieu one has transitioned to. Torn between both worlds, they “never see themselves merely as participants in everyday social activities, but must always observe them from a distance” [43] (p. 239)13.

The work with Bourdieu has caused Eribon to subscribe to what he himself calls critical and “deterministic thinking” [44]14. Such thought, however, does not deny that things could be otherwise, as a philosophical deployment of determinism might suggest. Rather, he uses it in a sociological fashion to sensitise us to the structural forces that predestine(d) us to be allocated to certain social positions, e.g., our class, gender, etc. He aims to overcome these determinisms by exposing their hidden power as oppressive social and historical forces through an analysis of how we and our conditions came about, showing them to be historically contingent [44]. This genealogical aspect of his project also reflects the influence of his second major inspiration, Foucault. Eribon explains that both Bourdieu15 and Foucault have dealt with topics that affected them personally and conducted work about and on themselves and their own lives [35,44,45,46]16. And just as Bourdieu helped him overcome his social shame, Foucault did the same for his “sexual shame” [35] (p. 77)17. The latter insisted that critique was the means to de-subjugation, which needed to be informed by genealogy, i.e., the “patient method that gives shape to the impatience of liberty” [35] (p. 184)18. Such a critique can separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think. [Such work] done at the limits of ourselves must, on the one hand, open up a realm of historical inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the test of […] contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take [47] (p. 46).

Therefore, what centrally informs Eribon’s work is his conviction that an analysis of the determinisms as an inquiry into our conditioned existence is the only path to emancipation. And so, one could say that the word Foucault used to describe his own method, which Eribon cites approvingly, is the goal of Eribon´s as well: “reflected disobedience” [35] (p. 184)19. Only those who understand the forces that subject and produce us have a shot at escaping them.

What decisively distinguishes Eribon’s theory from Mouffe’s is exactly that critical analysis of societal determinisms and subjugating mechanisms, which, as McNay and Rustin noted already, is absent or remains too superficial in Mouffe’s theory of the political [29,30] which Eribon sees as especially troublesome in the construction of ‘the people’. Eribon’s method to understand the self is the return he conducts in ‘Retour a Reims’. However, there is no “return without reflection” [35] (p. 10)20. The two are pervaded with uncertainty and complexity. This is because the one that returns is never identical to the one that originally left. To claim otherwise would be to insist that leaving and having been gone would not have an impact on shaping one’s identity [35]. Therefore, the one who returns can never return fully but instead conducts a “honto-analyse” [35] (p. 12)21. This phrase refers to an incompletable quest to analyse what has been suppressed or forgotten because of the shame felt due to society’s verdicts. This is a never-ending quest, rendering any return unfinishable. For Eribon, this return entailed the recognition of the shame he felt for his homosexuality, the one he felt as a “class defector” [35] (p. 25)22 for the milieu of his origin, and the shame he felt upon return for the ignominy that led him to deny his family and his past [33,48]. However, these insights only become available once one attempts the impossible return. Therefore, a return is always a reflection of one’s becoming, making partially explicit how much one has suppressed or forgotten to fit in.

However, like Mouffe, Eribon rejects an essentialist understanding of identity. Here, Eribon follows Bourdieu again in understanding the different judgments and verdicts society passes over people—especially minorities—all too often as insults, shaping them and conditioning their habitus in instilling in them a sense of vulnerability and fear [33,36]. This, in turn, causes them to hide their stigma. Such an existence marked by domination, exclusion, and shame means “to be socially and psychologically constituted by this privation […] that from an early age, while getting to know oneself and the world, one is produced and at the same time subjected to the insidious violence of norms and normality” [44] (p. 179)23.

This troubles the return, forcing one to come to terms with what, and possibly who, one is, was, has become, or could have been and become in two ways. Firstly, while shame can be an indicator of suppression from within for living a distorted life, it is also the driver of suppressing and forgetting parts of one’s past in the first place. Hence, “honto-analyse”. Secondly, the history of the verdicts that society passes over us precedes our birth. This means that to understand the history of ourselves and how we have come to respond to society’s verdicts, we must return to the history of the particular insult. Eribon writes:

Every encounter between two people contains the entire history of social structures, established hierarchies, and the modes of domination they institute… The present of each of us is strongly dependent on an individual past, which in turn depends on a collective and impersonal past: that of the social order and the violence it contains [35] (p. 38f.)24.

To understand our subjectivity, it must be considered that people are always shaped by both a personal past and the past of the social order that determines them. Consequently, an attempt to return as a coming to terms with our subjectivity presupposes us to go back beyond our administratively confirmed birthday. It requires us to track ourselves back genealogically to those birthdays, which represent the coming into being of the structures and categorical hierarchies imposed on us today. In this context, Eribon refers to the Algerian writer Assia Djebar. As a product of the geographical, political, and social circumstances of colonialism, the foundations of which were laid in 1842, she suggested that her birthday ought to be dated to that instead of 1915, when, as a baby, she first saw the light of day [35]. Tracing one’s birthday(s) back in this manner contributes to the analysis of society through a genealogically and sociologically informed introspection. Yet, even if our own shameful becoming would not make us grow strangers to our past selves, such a return is condemned to remain partial. Eribon explains:

Through the LGBT movement, I developed a perception of my past, in which I was a gay kid. Through it, I have inscribed myself in a gay history. […] Over it, I forgot (not really forgot but at least socially and politically repressed), that I was also another kid. A working-class kid. […] a kid that however, does not live on in any discourse, in any theoretical category since Marxism virtually disappeared from the French intellectual scene. When was I born in this respect? [44] (p. 52f.)25

After all, if the argument is taken seriously, society bestows upon us a plethora of possible birthdays with its manifold ways of disciplining and determining us with categories and insults. So many, in fact, that it is no surprise that they are often forgotten.

For Mouffe, however, such a forgetting would not be a big problem since her focus lies on mobilisation. If, for example, a gay man like Eribon forgets that he is also shaped by his working-class background, he can still be mobilised as a gay man to join ‘the people’ in the struggle against hegemony. For Eribon, whose personal and academic context taught him about the importance of paying attention to the different forces that determine and verdicts that plague us, therein lies a problem. The understanding of different temporalities sustains Eribon’s scepticism of bringing different claims together properly since not only are we often in denial of our own age(s) but definitely would be overwhelmed with the countless birthdays of our vis-à-vis. That is why Eribon highlights the importance of coming to terms with the inner heterogeneity within groups and people, the singularity of each claim, and, most explicitly, the genesis of their respective different subjectivities with their temporalities.

Now, through Eribon’s analysis of society as the verdict, we understand that, for him, the irreconcilability of conflicts rooted in antagonism, even if only for the airtime of one’s claim, is a reality. We will always be hard-pressed and spoilt for choice when asked to give an account of our plural selves, of our story. Inevitably, aspects will be forgotten, lost even, only to bother us later, possibly accompanied by shame. Shame, stigma, and internalised inferiority are not just the result of exclusion but of domination and social structures that are enacted on a daily basis. They may render certain groups and individuals invisible and others mute. Their demands are unlikely to be the priority on the agenda of ‘the people’ [33,35,49]. Due to their social position, they are unlikely to start a social movement to rise up in order to challenge hegemony. While they might be included in ‘the people’, they will likely lack the self-assurance to assert their own agenda and push their own agonistic us/them distinction. Instead of forgoing the social in favour of the political, Eribon examines the social structures and subjectivities and how they condition people to be un/susceptible to populism.

Eribon’s perspective orients itself toward the self and the social conditions that shape and distort it to analyse what obstructs political mobilisation. However, therein, Eribon reminds us, too, that our choice is limited by our actual experience and our position in society. Not just anything is possible through the right political articulation. To that end, he draws on the example of Paul Nizan, whose studies were made possible only because his working-class father managed to become a bourgeois. As a Marxist, Nizan becomes alienated from his own position as an intellectual in society as well as that of his father, whom he sees as a class traitor. Consequently, Nizan tries to inscribe himself into the category of the workers, accusing the bourgeoisie of understanding and being concerned with poetry but not revolutions and poverty. Eribon writes: “One must question the ‘we’ in which Nizan believes he can inscribe himself in through a decisive act.” [35] (p. 149)26. Eribon continues that while one may inscribe oneself into a history by virtue of the employment of such a ‘we’, the impossibility of becoming one of the workers that his ancestors were remains [35]. Hence, we cannot “will” ourselves into any kind of ‘we’ because past societal verdicts cannot be retrospectively overturned. Unlike Mouffe, whom McNay confronts with the lack of explanatory power of her theory of the social as the merely ossified results of always precarious hegemonic political articulations concerning the persistence of social structures [29], Eribon accounts for them in recognising the mechanisms at play in the social through an analysis of what was internalised in the subjectivities. He conducts an analysis of shame and other emotions rather than considering them a mere resource for the mobilisation of affect. Thereby, he manages to escape Rustin’s charge of voluntarism on the one hand and Jörke’s of mere moralisation of populism on the other. The social position conditions, situates, and disciplines actors who internalise their powerlessness in a specific habitus [35].

However, one should not infer from this that Eribon sees people solely as infinite hostages of their verdicts. While it is true that the return can never be concluded, there is the aim—even if it is an unattainable one—of emancipation. Altering Beauvoir’s famous quote in a way that stays true to her spirit, he writes that “[o]ne is born a woman or a man, and the practice of emancipation—an impossible and unattainable emancipation—consists in trying to become one as little as possible, i.e., in striving to counteract the reproduction of assigned identities.” [35] (p. 52)27. To have a shot at emancipation, Eribon suggests undertaking a critique that analyses and, therein, uncovers our limitations as determined by our social position to tackle it.

In his book ‘Principes d’une pensée critique’, Eribon presents us with two principles of critical thinking that are not only instructive for his self-analysis but also useful in his break with Mouffe. The first one is the principle of determinism. The second one is the principle of immanence. Together, they gain their critical force to reject the given and make realistically conceivable another society and self only in a reciprocally supportive combination. The principle of determinism holds that “critical thinking is necessarily a way of thinking that sets itself the task of analysing the underlying power of the historical and social determinisms that shape individual and collective existences” [44] (p. 8)28. The principle of immanence holds that “critical thinking is necessarily a thinking that understands the power of determinisms as entirely historical and social” [44] (p. 8)29. While both principles point to the power of determinisms—which should, as noted above, not be understood as making resistance impossible but as conditioning us fully in the absence of critical insight and resistance—they each emphasise a different and indispensable aspect of critical thinking.

The first principle allows us to understand ourselves and society as effects of a hegemonic order; we are the internalisation of society’s verdicts and social structures. In a Bourdieusian vein, this reveals how social injustices may outlive their institution through an inscription in our habitus and, therefore, our very being; the principle of determinism sensitises us to analyse agency’s limits. In a Foucauldian fashion, it cautions us not to mistake ourselves as free from restraint but to stay aware of the power structures that condition us. The principle of determinism deals with the force of the social verdicts, which is the habitus in Bourdieusian terms, and our produced subjectivity that always entails a Foucauldian subjugation.

The principle of immanence, in turn, strips these effects of their assumed necessity in highlighting their contingency. It is the genealogical return that makes explicit that the verdict does not follow an inescapable logic or a higher truth but that, at some point, it was passed and therefore introduced as a force into a society that did not exist prior. Therefore, it is the first principle that reveals us and the world we live in as conditioned and situated within societal structures; the second brings about the possibility of resisting and refusing the verdicts while possibly changing them. Without the principle of determinism, we would be oblivious to the forces at play that cause the reproduction of identities and roles assigned to us. Hence, an analysis of the causal linkage between social and historical forces and our individual and collective existences is necessary to understand the factors determining our subjectivity and social position. Without the principle of immanence, on the other hand, emancipation would be inconceivable. After all, one would attribute a necessity to the societal verdicts, becoming their hostages, eternally bound by the past. Critical thinking, with its two pillars, refuses “final justifications and is self-referential” [44] (p. 153)30. In assigning the causes for reality to the social rather than the psychological and natural, it counters the individuation of responsibility; therein lies a politicisation, which he shares with Mouffe.

Therefore, the two principles of critical thinking provide us with the tools to denaturalise ourselves and society in a critically informed way. To attempt to emancipate ourselves from societal verdicts and empower each other to political action is vital for democratic politics. With Eribon, we could say: to democratise is to denaturalise [44]. He equates emancipation from societal verdicts to democracy. Consequently, a democratic ‘we’ then must be at the service of emancipation, which requires us to attempt a return, to understand who we are genealogically, and how ‘we’ became what ‘we’ are only through a “plural, sectorial, and local approach” [44] (p. 17)31. That approach, Eribon stresses, is about “diagnoses and ontologies (Plural!) of ourselves” [44] (p. 17)32. Arguing against Foucault’s and Sartre’s idea of an open collective struggle, he contends that the “specific can never be reduced to the general or the total.” [44] (p. 55)33. I now turn to the agreements and disagreements between Eribon and Mouffe, resulting in some points of contention that will after that be condensed into an Eribonian critique of left populism in Section 6.

5. Eribon and Mouffe: Agreements on Aims, Disagreements on Means

Eribon has once said that he and Mouffe “agree on everything, but we do disagree on everything too” [49] (73’). While some of their commonalities and differences have already become apparent, I will briefly outline a few of them in order to then move to Eribon’s critique. Both Eribon and Mouffe consider themselves radical democrats and, therefore, share a lot of assumptions and positions. While his work provides no explicit ontological framework, for he rejects the idea of a unified ontology for the sake of their plurality, he shares the notion of antagonism and dissent that cannot be finally pacified in harmony, for it would risk the eclipse of plurality [35,44,49]. As already mentioned, they both reject an essentialist conception of identity. Furthermore, Eribon also shares Mouffe’s critique of an orthodox Marxist point of view, which assumes an objective class interest that will necessarily assert itself in the mind of those who share a class position within the economy. Political alliances need to be forged through the experience of solidarity and common life forms, a precondition of which is some sort of political mobilisation, the basis of which has broken away with neoliberal hegemony [33]. Hence, he fully agrees with Mouffe that a re-politicisation of society is in order and is aligned with a notion of democracy that brings about a critique of hegemony, which, for him, entails a critique of society. That is why both have criticised the neoliberal course of French president Emmanuel Macron, which they ultimately make out to be at the service of the far-right Rassemblement National. In response to this, both have supported the far-left party La France Insoumise, albeit Eribon has sharply criticised its populist-nationalist course and the personal cult around Mélenchon [50,51].

Hence, there are also divergences. They likely stem from the different theoretical environments and subjectivities they bring to the table, respectively. Mouffe is a political theorist who, together with Laclau, tried to provide a heterodox alternative to Marxist orthodoxy in order to mobilise and include social movements concerned with reviving the political and mobilising for the political left. They were trying to provide a way out of theoretical gridlock at a time when theorists and activists alike were astonished by the absence of revolution. Eribon’s view is informed by critical sociology and shaped by the French academic debates about determinism, the limits of (political) agency and the issue of an insidious continuation of injustice through its internalisation in our very subjectivity. Therefore, while Mouffe’s focus is on theoretically demonstrating the possibility of political change and mass mobilisation, Eribon’s lies on an analysis of the factors and dynamics that passivate subjects, cause them harm, hinder emancipatory politics, and may doom mobilisation for more justice to a contribution to perpetuating inequalities.

Primarily, then, considering their commonalities, their divergence lies less in their aim and more in Eribon’s different focus on both the experienced injustice entailed by the status quo and the toll Eribon believes Mouffe’s requirement for a democratic ‘we’ may take. Mouffe wants to overcome neoliberal hegemony to change the general situation. In contrast, Eribon inquires concretely what such a course would entail for the particular groups.

It is first and foremost the notion of ‘the people’ that leads to his rejection of populism as a strategy of the left, “even in the eminently sophisticated and seductive version proposed by my friend Chantal Mouffe” [52] (p. 11) To illustrate his reservations, Eribon gives the example of the French working-class milieu he was brought up in and explains that it was a democratic ‘we’ of the left that had turned from a working-class ‘we’ into a nationalist ‘we’. He infers that “’we’ and ‘them’ are not categories of politics that we can rely on, without interrogating them” [49] (63’). He believes and even wrote in the guestbook of Syriza and Podemos, that “every populism opens up the space of discourse towards the right” [53] (p. 2)34. Therefore, he agrees with the assessment of Urbinati, Arato and Cohen [26,28]. Consequently, Eribon rejects the project of left populism for the practical generality and theoretical aloofness it introduces through the category of ‘the people’. He sees it as dangerously uncritical and, therefore, at odds with a democratic project [49,54].

Interestingly, his critique does not put the stress on the exclusion of the ‘them’ as a possible pitfall into injustice, as so many of populism’s critics do [18,20,25,26,27], but on the lack of criticality and the domination implied in the forging of a (democratic) ‘we’ itself. The problem he sees with establishing a single binary between ‘the people’ and ‘the oligarchy’ is that it, even if only at times, eclipses the differences among those lumped together within ‘the people’, probably to the detriment of some of them. Therein, he can be understood as radicalising the notion of agonism, pointing to the irreconcilable tensions between different groups and social movements that must be offset or deemed selectively unimportant for the sake of gaining hegemony. That implies, however, that a certain plurality gets lost, if not theoretically in abstraction, at least practically in the generalisations that the too-broad term of ‘the people’ entails. Referencing de Beauvoir, he brings up the example of women to illustrate his point. She asked why it was that, for a long time, women have not said ‘we’ and formed a political subject. Eribon holds that the question of why some groups will not understand themselves as such and do not conceive of themselves as a relevant political subject is central to a critical analysis. He continues following Beauvoir: “The workers say we, black people in the US say we, Jews have been saying we for a long time” [35,49] (48’, 182f.), that is, they took their discourses into their own hands and formed a collective subject [44]. Beauvoir observes that the reason why women seem to accept and endure their subjugation to the male gaze, living under a male discourse, is because women felt closer to other categories of suppression. For example, working women would identify more with workers’ rights than with women’s. Eribon builds on this, stating that it is possible to alter the socio-political perception in order to introduce a new category in light of antagonistic struggle. Yet, the problem is that each category requires their own us/them distinction. It cannot be added to the ones in place already without causing some antagonistic trouble, for each claim tries to establish its own us/them distinction as the dominant, hegemonic one [49,54].

Additionally, the groups formed, even around just one category, are seldom homogeneous and united in their claims, such as the feminist movement towards trans people or sex work [33]. Consequently, Eribon radicalises the antagonisms and argues that any formed ’we’ must at least partially eradicate the singularity of its members. Therefore, aligning different claims into a democratic ‘we’ in the form of a chain of equivalence among them comes at the price of marginalisation for some. Here again, their different foci come to the fore. While for Eribon, the return to the birth of the social verdicts is necessary to understand the kind of change that is possible and desirable, for Mouffe, it is of secondary importance whether some returns are forgotten as long as ‘the people’ are mobilised. This mobilisation, which might be called a taming of the (ant)agonisms within, does not leave their respective particularity and singularity intact. Since no group category is fully true to its parts, Eribon’s critique of categories such as ‘the people’ is not directed against categories per se but against their deliberate openness to generalisation. While a loss of individual particularity holds true for any formed group, it becomes truly problematic when it disconnects from the particularities it claims to represent. This threatens to happen when theoretical abstraction is unrestrained, resulting in particularities so estranged from their supposed category that they are rendered unsubstantial, immaterial, and, in turn, susceptible to being eclipsed by the general. Therein, a general category formed through abstraction from particularities deemed insignificant at some point becomes so general that its referent is rendered volatile, even arbitrary35. As Eribon points out, however, to come to terms with the desirability of change and action, a return would be in order. Such a return requires a sectoral approach that considers the different particularities and temporalities. These, however, are lost when a category comes to eclipse or replace another particular aspect and loses its connection with the particularities it was abstracted from [49,54]. If, e.g., workers, women, and queer people started to understand themselves as ‘the people’ instead, they would possibly lose sight of the particularities of their struggles, an understanding of which could prove vital to perceive the faithfulness of the actions to their particular struggle conducted in their name (the name of ‘the people’). The more general a category is in scope and appeal, the higher the risk of one group being able to take advantage of the resulting volatility and vulnerability and co-opt it by taking over hegemony unnoticed. Eribon’s argument is similar to Urbinati’s. According to her, populism functions not as a pars pro toto logic but as a pars pro parte logic which “declares the part to embody the whole” [26] (p. 178). Instead of diagnosing this pars pro parte regarding the relationship of ‘us’ and ‘them’, Eribon argues that those in the in-group of a general category are in danger of their particularities being eclipsed by one of its parts as well. Still, this process may go unnoticed due to the first abstract and then general character of the category [35,49].

Categories such as ‘the people’ or a democratic ‘we’ are so general—therein lies their rhetorical and strategic appeal—that they get detached from a social analysis of how the subjectivity of the members of the group was produced36. The connection to the struggles they purport to uphold is all too easily discarded, consequently rendering the asserted commonality of the different people they rhetorically include a dangerous mythologisation [49,50]. Within a general category, an analysis of the struggles’ specificity and the concrete experiences of submission within gets lost in the name of a broad mobilisation. Such an analysis of the subjectivities is necessary, however, to understand where an appropriate path of resistance may lead. Mobilising and thereby creating ‘the people’ against neoliberal hegemony, however, leaves the door open for people, who, for example, demand redistribution or popular sovereignty on the one hand, but call liberal minority rights the fig leaf of neoliberalism or harbour nationalist notions of belonging on the other. Then the common is not common, but a category that simultaneously includes and subjects or eclipses some of its parts. “The people against the caste includes the right-wing and the left-wing people” [54] (18’–19’). This may result in someone, e.g., Eribon as a gay man being part of ‘the people’ with people who deny his rights or a Jewish person being part of ‘the people’ with antisemites who essentialise them as a member of the contested oligarchy. Eribon proclaims: “I do not want to be ‘the people’ with these people” [49] (78’). For many minorities, popular sovereignty is less vital than the liberal rights that protect them. Eribon would caution that for many deemed ‘the people’ a deepening of the democratic tradition to the detriment of the liberal one, as Mouffe urges, is, once one analyses their social position, hardly a desirable prospect37.

Therefore, Eribon is critical of the notion of ‘the people’ or the democratic ‘we’, pointing to a shared identity as commonality and popular sovereignty that characterise Mouffe’s notion of democracy. He sees them as complicit in injustice as an eclipse of particularity within. Instead, his notion of democracy insists on critical thinking and an analysis of society and self, which complicates simple distinctions and reveals heterogeneity and singularity. While he shares Mouffe’s emancipatory ends of fostering pluralism and dissent, he does not share her means, for he sees them at odds with the mission. Left populism eschews critical analysis of the plurality of social struggle in favour of its mobilisation as ‘the people’.

All of this informs Eribon’s disagreement with Mouffe. An understanding of democracy as emancipation through critique and self-critique has to be critical of both, drawing a sharp us/them distinction and creating ‘the people’. Mouffe holds these binaries as indispensable for political mobilisation and establishing lines of conflict. On the contrary, Eribon takes issue with them, for in his estimation, they do not do justice to the social reality and stand in the way of analysing the complex machinations of self and society rather than fostering it.

Firstly, those produced and subjected through exclusion by insult as well as those not belonging to a collective ‘them’, but individually adding up to a ‘them’, have—like Eribon—experienced the harm of these distinctions [55]. Hence, there is reason to be reluctant about taking part in one’s own exclusion and/or domination through reaffirming a certain binary in merely declaring the ‘them’ the better ‘we’. Secondly, people can become fixed up in an oppositional identity as a result of others’ goal to “draw a line and protect it” [44] (p. 228)38 to keep them out, since—as Eribon notes: “the norm constitutes itself just as much through that, which it excludes, as to that, which it includes, and it establishes and stabilises itself in ever-new acts of exclusion” [44] (p. 226)39. To accept being cast as an opposition in this struggle strengthens the norm since it reaffirms the exclusive distinctions and prevents the forming of an emancipated individual by perpetually reintegrating it, if only at times, yet countlessly, for the sake of political struggle, in the collective’s unequally shared commonality [44,48]. Thirdly, relegating the problems to an outside ‘them’ bestows us with a false self-certainty that possibly overlooks what needs to be excluded within ourselves to uphold such a distinction. Exclusion and domination regularly go unquestioned, for they engrain themselves into the self-understanding of the excluded as well as the included, the dominators as well as the dominated “resulting in a high improbability of the absence of the absent getting noticed” [44] (p. 149)40. The danger, then, is that the self-understanding of ‘the people’ understands too little. That is why it is not only not enough but possibly counter-productive to foster common affects and mobilise them as ‘the people’. Mouffe’s anti-essentialism, which in its application is certainly more radical than Eribon’s, risks reducing the conditioning power of the social to a precarious political articulation, which can be overcome through a thorough re-articulation, thereby leaving issues of internalisation and different temporalities unaddressed. Thus, ‘the people’ get equipped with the second principle of critical thinking, the principle of immanence, insisting on the contingency of the social order, while the first principle of critical thinking, the principle of determinism, which could account for people’s genesis, is neglected. To be clear, Mouffe would not take issue with the principle of determinism. After all, she made clear that subjectivities are the product of political articulation, whether it is a hegemonic or a counter-hegemonic one [1]. Yet, when it comes to her left populism, she has little to say about how the different particularities, temporalities, and subjectivities are taken into account and how political action ought to be conducted to pay justice to this plurality [1]. She merely insists that they need to form a common will and that due to the chain of equivalence, the plurality of all will remain intact [1]. Partly, this is because, as a radical democrat, she is understandably reluctant to prescribe any kind of program, for doing so would be the task of the movements engaged themselves. This hands-off approach, however, practically privileges antagonism for its own sake. Such a mobilisation of whoever shows up when summoned as ‘the people’ amounts to an endorsement of the principle of immanence without the patient genealogical work that comes only with its co-articulation with the principle of determinism41. From an Eribonian perspective, with his considerations about the necessity for careful social analysis and return, there is naturally reasonable doubt against such an endeavour. It risks losing people within and without ‘the people’ and leaving them hostage to the societal verdicts and their internalisation in the habitus (Bourdieu) and subjectivity (Foucault), for they will not be mobilised as swiftly. While they might all struggle against the current hegemony—for a lack of analysis of the concrete nature of the imbrication of self and society, for a lack of insight, therefore, into what actually is to be denaturalised, which would require the application of both principles together—it is not clear what it is, that for them concretely, it would be worth fighting for. To clarify the Eribonian case, I will now condense his concepts and his disagreements with Mouffe into a threefold critique of ‘the people’ of left populism.

6. Eribon vs. ‘The People’—The Dangerous Volatility of General Categories

The problem of neglecting the principle of determinism is intensified through the generality of concepts such as the ‘democratic ‘we’’ or ‘the people’ vs. ‘the oligarchy’. Instead of a targeted mobilisation that wins orientation from experience and concrete struggles, it articulates a catch-all notion that includes people whose interests are in an (ant)agonistic relationship with one another. Antisemites, racists, and homophobes alike may also feel addressed by the name of ‘the people’ and their struggle against ‘the elite’/’the oligarchy’/’the ruling class’. They belong to those groups that Eribon, for political reasons, does not want to be ‘the people’ with [49]. Furthermore, for the sake of successfully holding the democratic ‘we’ together through chains of equivalences against ‘the caste’, the emergent hegemony within inevitably prioritises certain struggles over others in installing a primary distinction—e.g., the priority of strengthening the democratic tradition of popular sovereignty against the liberal one, which is hardly beneficial to all members of social movements—between a general category of ‘the people’ against ‘the oligarchy’ that has an appeal to the left and the extreme right alike [33,49,54,56]. Mouffe herself elaborates:

The central problem with this celebration of ‘the common’, which is found, albeit in different forms, in the work of many other theorists is that, by postulating a conception of multiplicity that is free from negativity and antagonism, it does not make room for the recognition of the necessarily hegemonic nature of the social order [1] (p. 31).

Yet, drawing on Eribon, we could say that is exactly what is done by summoning ‘the people’ into existence through a political articulation. Mouffe, time and time again, insists that nobody must give up their plural positionalities and that it is an anti-essential notion of ‘the people’. However, applying the two principles of critical thinking, return, and society as verdict, as well as her own understanding of hegemony to that point, it becomes conceivable that the hegemony within the counter-hegemony of the democratic ‘we,’ alias ‘the people,’ will, in turn, produce ossification and social identities that inscribe themselves in particular subjectivities. It utters its own societal verdicts within and without to stabilise what aims at becoming the hegemonic bloc. Therefore, Eribon applies Mouffe’s analysis of hegemony and antagonism to her own populist project and charges it with an ignorance towards the power of social determinisms that would trouble a simple binary of ‘the people’ vs. ‘the oligarchy’. While both Mouffe and Eribon criticise the slogan of ‘Occupy’ “we are the 99%” [1] as uncritically suggesting a harmony in reach, Eribon also charges it as a mystification. The same applies, however, to the populist slogans of ‘the people’/‘the nation’/‘the democratic we’ against ‘the oligarchy’, ‘the elite’ or ‘the establishment’ that Mouffe so energetically advocates [1]. They suggest a commonality of struggle that is bound to come with a false self-certainty that puts critical self-analysis to a halt and leaves domination within ‘the people’ unscrutinised in temporarily eclipsing differences within.

Thus, Eribon’s critique of ‘the people’ is threefold. First, the generality of the concept forgoes a critical social analysis of respective temporalities and social conditions of different struggles and their subjectivities. Thereby, it risks forgetting particular subjectivities in favour of a catch-all notion of ‘the people’ and ‘their’ counter-hegemonic project. It leaves Mouffe’s anti-essentialist approach to rush too quickly from an analysis of the genesis of subjectivities and the proper means for undoing (internalised) oppression to a mere counter-hegemonic mobilisation. Therein, it will uncritically rely on social identities that it claims to be independent of by virtue of creating ‘the people’ from the sublime realm of the political through political articulation and, at the same time, blur their traces. This is the pitfall of a merely strategic populism that is more interested in creating majorities than coming to terms with the social limitations and particularities of the different struggles. It risks the faithfulness to the causes for the generality of its rhetorical appeal. Eribon argues that ‘the people’ are a myth. “What exists is the population. ‘The people’ is a political construct. I agree with that. But the problem lies in the fact that this discursive political construct replaces other possible and previous constructs“ [54] (11’–12’) that were important before and are vital to understand what structural and political shifts are going on. These more concrete constructs he suggests, such as ‘class’ or the LGBTQ* movement, would be more resistant to generalisation and therefore to an appropriation both by people who pretend to have a claim to be representative of ‘the people’ even when they are a well-off minority, such as the PhD students engaged in ‘nuit debout’ or ‘Occupy!’ [49], and by the right, which engages in the rhetoric of us/them binaries, inciting ‘the people’ every day [49,50,53].

This segues to the second aspect. In its lofty concept, which Mouffe lauds as a “transversal” [1] (p. 42) approach, the question of who belongs to ‘the people’ is offset because most people understand themselves as part of ‘the people’. That is why she finds this empty signifier particularly promising. This, however, leaves room for people from the left to the far right to join said category and opens the possibility for the right wing to use the forged affects of us/them distinctions. Eribon gives the example of obvious right-wingers and people with antisemitic posters taking part in protests of La France Insoumise against ‘the elites’ and asks how that is possible. “They justify it”, he proceeds, “this is ‘the people’ demonstrating together united, building the very notion of the people” [49] (118’). Therein, Eribon sees the danger of losing the distinction between left and right in terms of rhetoric and slogans [50,51,54]. It includes those that Eribon (and presumably Mouffe) would not want to be ‘the people’ with. Mouffe’s qualification of her populism as a left populism will do little to mitigate that problem when the stress lies on the binary between ‘the people’ and ‘the oligarchy,’ which are slogans used daily by LePen [51] and the popular sovereignty, which all too often invites nationalist sentiments [57,58,59].

Third, the notion of ‘the people’ eclipses inner difference and its us/them binary uncritically excludes what it wants to relegate to the outside ‘them’, as illustrated in Eribon’s example of calling gay rights the fig leaf of neoliberalism.

Eribon maintains that real critique always implicates its subject. The structures and practices that pass the societal verdict are embodied, performed, and lived [44], which is why self-analysis as self-critique provides a striking criticism of society. The self-assertion in a democratic ‘we’, or as ‘the people’, risks bringing the return to a halt as well. This is because, on the one hand, these names are vague and general enough for people not to recognise them as misnomers, and on the other hand, in the urgency to coalesce for a dominant claim, there is no time to pay attention to the different temporalities. Next to the importance of overthrowing neoliberal hegemony through an assertion of ‘the people’ against ‘the oligarchy’ and its albeit unknowing supporters, a critical reflection on the different ontologies of us and how their determining power is possibly undone respectively loses priority. Eribon proposes that only an analysis of the manifold mechanisms and structure of oppression can help us resist oppression and insists that “[d]ivergence undoes or will undo the convergence that we believed or hoped we could establish. I do not think it is imaginable or even desirable to overcome these aporias.” [35] (p. 197)42.

Mouffe agrees with this quote and upholds the inconclusiveness of the demos as the inconclusiveness of ‘the people’ constituted by the us/them distinction. It is true that because such a distinction between us and them is eminently political, it can always be redrawn. However, from the Eribonian standpoint, this possibility of redrawing the boundaries will do little to alleviate domination and exclusion if it forgoes the social analysis and self-critique required to examine the possibilities of undoing the social verdicts. It will forfeit Foucault’s patient work of genealogy and of finding out what change is desirable in favour of the impatience of freedom that revels in their newfound certainty of being part of ‘the people’. Furthermore, if the verdicts that produce and subjectivise the very people who have a say in the drawing of these distinctions go unanalysed and unquestioned, exclusion and domination will reproduce themselves in new hegemonies or under the guise of a counter-hegemony alike. This renders Mouffe’s pitting of groups against one another in us/them distinctions an unaddressed function of the social. For Mouffe, ‘the oligarchy’ and ‘the people’ are strategic tools for mobilisation and do not ex ante denote specific groups. Therein, the strategy may lose its concrete goal. ‘The people’ as a name means everybody who shows up against ‘the oligarchy’. ‘The oligarchy’ as a name includes everyone who does not join the struggle and instead supports the hegemony. While Mouffe pleads for a democratic ‘we’ in the name of ‘the people’ against those who currently have the hegemony in democracy, Eribon pleads for an inconclusiveness of critique as a critical analysis of social and self that enables an informed critique of the hegemony and the harm it inflicts [44]. Since Eribon knows from his own experience that names may stick, if not as names called then as internalised verdicts, he will likely not be convinced that the lip service of the inconclusiveness of the demos is enough to legitimise the names hurled at each other. The names of today will outlive the struggles that mobilised them. They get internalised, necessitating a return at a later time when the corresponding struggles might already be yesterday’s news.

The critique and struggle against hegemony that Eribon asks for necessitates a political articulation as well, but one that does not eclipse difference and concreteness in abstraction and generality but is informed by social analysis, the return to individual and collective experiences, and the aim to undo the societal verdicts and their internalisation. He does this with his concept of seriality which follows the forming of a group. Suppression that is experienced by many people but in an isolated fashion shows itself only, once a group has come together and analysed itself in exchange, and discovered a seriality. “In that sense, a group could be understood to precede seriality” [44] (p. 125)43 which is only revealed and therefore determined as a reality retrospectively through mobilisation [44]. The difference then is that for Eribon there is an outside reality of suppression that needs to be discovered through politicisation and listening to one another’s experiences. While many different groups are conceivable, which could then help to unveil different kinds of serialities, there is a limit to them and their political articulation, for it is not entirely free-floating. In Eribon’s understanding of political mobilisation, the groups root themselves ex post in their common experience that existed ex ante on the individual level and do not co-opt as many people as possible to have as big an impact against hegemony whatever it costs. It aims both to return and then to politicise multiple subjectivities and their problems, not to fulfil an empty goal such as gaining hegemony for its own sake44. Such an endeavour, which focuses on the genesis of multiple subjectivities with their plural ontologies, however, troubles the felt certainties that generalised us-them distinctions and the mobilisation of affects bestow upon us. Toward the end of his book on critical thinking he asserts:

It is not for any of us to decide what is desirable for others in these matters. And it is up to all of us to make what is considered desirable by others possible and accessible. It is therefore a matter of erasing the boundaries that deny individuals access to what they want to be and continuing to exclude them not only from what already exists, […] but also from all that does not yet exist and which from now on seems possible or will one day seem possible without us being able to foresee it [44] (p. 209)45.

Eribon’s notion of democracy is rather one of a struggle for universal and equal rights informed by determinist thinking and pushed for by constant (self-)critiques [44]. It is not about popular sovereignty sought for by either side of the us/them binary. Nor is it about one ‘plural’ struggle, for there is reason to suggest that such would be plural in name only, but always of multiple plural struggles fighting against all forms of subjugation, all forms of exclusion, and all forms of domination, respectively. Hence, Eribon wants to end neoliberal hegemony, but unlike Mouffe, he does not seem as keen on establishing a new one. The indispensability of (ant)agonistic political struggles must be continuously uncovered, supported, and informed by critical thinking and societal analysis that combines both an analysis of the determining forces and different societal verdicts with their internalisations and the possibilities of undoing them through multiple returns. While the fostering of solidarity and understanding between different struggles will be indispensable, the summoning of ‘the people’ will not be necessary.

7. Conclusions

In this article, I have used the work of Didier Eribon to develop a critique of Chantal Mouffe’s left populism and its aim of setting up a political frontier between ‘the people’ and ‘the oligarchy’. While Eribon probably shares both the criticisms made against Chantal Mouffe’s theory as well as the substantial aims of her populism, he provides a different critique than the classic one of the exclusions implied in having a ‘them’ functioning as the constitutive outside of a ‘we’. Instead, Eribon takes issue with the construction of a democratic ‘we’/‘the people’ itself. His criticism connects well to that of critical theorists Lois McNay and Micheal Rustin, who charge Mouffe’s approach with social weightlessness and voluntarism, respectively. Eribon directs such a critique specifically to Mouffe’s notion of ‘the people’ as being too general in appeal and, therefore, losing grip with the real-life struggles of people. Consequently, he calls it a dangerous myth.

Partly, her choice of the broad notion of ‘the people’ stems from her goal to mobilise as many people as possible through a transversal way that understands people’s social identities in an anti-essentialist fashion. ‘The people’ are not a real entity but created through political articulation. One shortcoming of such a privileging of political articulation that separates ‘the people’ from sociological categories is that it does not engage in an actual critical analysis of self and society. It sees them as mere ossifications of a hegemonic political articulation that is, however, always fragile. Thereby, it risks uncritically inheriting (while at the same time remaking) the social identities instead of critically interrogating them and addressing their genesis by analysing their respective temporalities and ontologies in order to undo them. It prioritises collective mobilisation in the urge to overthrow hegemony over critical self-analysis, resulting in plurality within taking the backseat. Thereby, Mouffe, in her activist call for left populism, can be read to unduly privilege—not theoretically but practically—the principle of immanence over the principle of determinism, even though, for a critical account, one cannot have one without the other.

Furthermore, said abstraction invites a simplification of the plurality of the different subjectivities of the people within ‘the people’. The strategic employment of such a transversal approach to mobilise a counter-hegemony renders ‘the people’ too general and inclusive a category, bringing together groups who do not, in fact, share an endurance of seriality. Insisting that ‘we’ and ‘them’ are highly volatile categories that the left cannot rely on, Eribon radicalises Mouffe’s notion of (ant)agonism. He does so in applying it not only to the us/them distinction, without which dissent is silenced and post-politics established, but to Mouffe’s democratic ‘we’ itself. The general concept of ‘the people’ is fit to summon left- and right-wingers alike, therefore risking acceptance of plurality within and obfuscating the boundary between the two. Eribon’s notions of return, society as verdict, and his two principles of critical thinking, which are informed by the theories of Bourdieu and Foucault and locate him at the crossroads of sociology, history, and philosophy, can provide such an analysis of different subjectivities and thereby account for the problems of internalisation of inferiority and structural impediments connected to exclusion and domination that plague Mouffe’s approach. While Mouffe’s theory of (ant)agonism could integrate Eribon’s concept of the imbrication of self and society through society as verdict and the two principles of critical thinking, these considerate concepts stand in stark contrast to her embrace of a left populism for the reasons noted above. ‘The people’, an Eribonian critique shows, is too general, rendering it politically volatile, and therefore not critically informed enough by an analysis of the mechanisms of the social to benefit the concrete democratic struggles for plurality and equality.

Yet, while an Eribonian critique has been developed that could help trouble the desirability of a left populism differently, it has—due to the limited scope of this article—not been possible to discuss the shortcomings of Eribon’s own approach and possible rebuttals of Mouffe. Accordingly, a lot of pressing questions are still to be posed and examined in greater detail, such as whether the parties on the left that mobilised “an electorate that had stopped voting” [52] (p. 1) were successful because of their populist strategy and transversal appeal or because they dared to stand for leftist policies that represented an actual alternative to the courant normal; about whether more concrete categories informed by social analysis are more inviting to critical self-analysis than abstract, generalised ones; about whether Eribon’s notion of a politics of generosity, that envisions people helping each other to realise their goals, is compatible with his (ant)agonistic view of politics; and many more. These questions are central to determining which alternatives are at hand. While Eribon has vocally rejected Mouffe’s left populism and sharply criticised Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s summoning of ‘the people’ from all kinds of stages, always within a sea of the national Tricolore flags, Eribon has supported him in the 2022 elections over his adversaries, nevertheless. Mélenchon came in third place after the neoliberal Macron and the right-wing Le Pen. In the recent European elections of June 9th, the Rassemblement National became France’s strongest force, while La France Insoumise fell back to fourth place. By now, the left coalitions around NUPES in France and Podemos in Spain have experienced secession and have faced party-internal critique for their leader-oriented personalistic style of politics, and Syriza is not doing well either [60,61,62,63,64]. Eribon believes that left populism will benefit the right later on. The right-wing parties in Spain, France, and Greece are alive and well. Whether that is due to left populism, however, is hard to prove. Back in 2017, Eribon already objected that the connection of different struggles through a left populist construction of ‘the people’ has hardly any durability and, therefore, failed [54]. Mouffe replied with her Beckettian motto: “fail again, fail better” [2] (34’). Refreshingly brisk and confident as such a motto may be, it leaves open whether a left populism (or a theory thereof) has the theoretical resources to put itself and its categories into question, whether ‘the people’ constructed are too big to fail, and finally, whether there is room for the badly needed (self)critical return as social analysis in the face of the urge to struggle once more.