Ideology as blocked mourning: Greek national identity in times of economic crisis and austerity

This article approaches the 2010-2014 economic crisis in Greece from the perspective of loss and mourning, critically exploring what questions and insights this provokes. We argue first that the rhetoric of mainstream political and media elites has been instrumental in framing responses to the Greek economic crisis in patriotic terms, a frame subsequently adopted by groups from across the entire political spectrum, whether part of the establishment or not. We then draw on discourse theory and psychoanalysis to argue that attachments to the dominant austerity and anti-austerity responses to the crisis can be understood-at least in part-in terms of a failure (or not) to properly articulate and thus mourn the nationalist-inflected loss associated with economic dislocation. We sketch out two ideological pathways in the discourses of austerity and anti-austerity, which we designate as symptomatic of ‘blocked mourning’: a melancholic pathway that seeks to contain loss through self-blame; and a pathway of ressentiment that seeks to contain loss by attributing its cause to a series of ‘others’. We argue that blocked mourning bears a direct relation to the ideological grip of the austerity and anti-austerity discourses, and that we can better appreciate the character and strength of their affective pull by drawing out the fantasmatic aspects of the narratives expressing Greek national and economic identity. Conversely, we argue that a critique of ideology can be understood in terms of the preconditions for mourning, whose satisfaction would make possible a less invested relation to the fantasmatic guarantees underpinning the austerity/ anti-austerity narratives. In this view, a critique of ideology proceeds by bringing to light those factors that could facilitate a more open and deliberative articulation of loss, so as to transform and pluralize collective responses to the economic crisis

Critical fantasy studies

Many scholars have drawn attention to the affective power that aspects of discourse and practice exert in our social and political life. Fantasy is a concept that, like structures of feeling, rhetoric, myth, metaphor, and utopia, has generated illuminating explanatory and interpretive insights with which to better understand the operation of this power. In this piece I argue that there are distinctive virtues in affirming the value of the category of fantasy, from a theoretical point of view. Importantly, however, I also argue that the qualification ‘critical’ in Critical Fantasy Studies captures something about how such studies can draw out the normative, ideological, and politico-strategic implications of psychoanalytic insights and observations, and thus become part of a broader enterprise in critical theoretical and empirical research

Microfoundationalist Reconciliation: The Fundamental Fantasy of Neoclassical Economics—Some Reflections on Yahya Madra’s Late Neoclassical Economics

Using neoclassical thought as his entry point, Yahya M. Madra offers a vital prolegomenon to a recalibrated critical political economy. Madra’s reinterpretation of the economic field pivots around what he calls the theoretical-humanist problematic, suggesting that an ontologically inflected recharacterization of economic thought is essential to any serious development of progressive alternatives to dominant mainstream forms of political economy. After outlining the constituent elements of theoretical humanism and some of Madra’s key conceptual moves, this essay explores several analytical, normative, and ideological implications of such a redrawing of the boundaries of economic thought. Madra’s intervention opens up at least three lines of inquiry regarding the theoretical-humanist problematic: the relative amplitude of tensions internal to different economic approaches in its orbit, including their capacities to resist or escape its gravitational pull; how it circumscribes the scope of concrete, normative visions; and how everyday practices and identifications reinforce or depart from related ideological fantasies underpinning it

‘Two for joy’: Towards a better understanding of free associative methods as sites of transference in empirical research

This paper explores the relation between transference and free association in the production of data in sociological and social research. Drawing on Laplanche’s notion of the analyst as a provocation for the transference and Lacan’s understanding of the analyst as cause of desire, we map transference as a condition for free association and theorise an ‘enigma of participation’ in research. We develop these ideas through a discussion of two astonishing moments in recent research interviews. We propose that free associative interviews can be understood as sites of transference that help us to glimpse the unconscious in social and political discourse and offer insights into the (im)possibilities of subjective change

Anti-populist fantasies: interrogating Veja's discursive constructions, from Lula to Bolsonaro

In this paper we draw on the concept of fantasy and the principles of political discourse theory to develop an analytical framework for the study of Veja's anti-populist discourse. As one of Brazil's most influential publications in elite policy-making circles, Veja exerts considerable influence over the way populist politics is portrayed and understood. By tracking the signifiers ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ in the pages of this weekly magazine, our study affirms the distinctive virtues of adopting a psychoanalytically-informed perspective on political antagonism and ideology, treating fantasy as a core concept in the study of polarizing discourses generally and discourses about populism in particular. Far from remaining above the fray in its opposition to the discourses of both Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (and the Workers’ Party) and Jair Bolsonaro (and the Social Liberal Party), our critical fantasy study shows how Veja's pronouncements were both ideologically invested and normatively inflected

Beyond populism studies

Populism’ has become ever more ubiquitous in political analysis, to the extent that ‘populism studies’ appears on course to establishing itself as a field of research in its own right. This article warns about the dangers of such a development. Taking a discourse theoretical approach as our starting point – but also critically engaging with this tradition’s contribution to the hype about populism – we suggest that ‘populism studies’ (and the preoccupation with populism this field embodies) risks reifying populism by focusing on populism as a phenomenon ‘as such’, and through an over-reliance on the concept of populism to approach that phenomenon. This, we argue, hampers a nuanced and contextualized understanding of the exact role populism plays in different populist politics. This is not a call for abandoning the concept of populism altogether, but a call for de-centring the concept and for moving beyond academia’s ‘populist moment’

Critical Fantasy Studies: neoliberalism, education and identification. An interview with Jason Glynos

Interview with Professor Jason Glynos, co-director of the Center for Ideology and Discourse Analysis (CIDA) at the University of Essex, UK, conducted by professors Joanildo Burity (FUNDAJ) and Gustavo Gilson Oliveira (UFPE). The interview explores the contours, the conceptual framework and the analytic strategies being developed in relation to the so-called Critical Fantasy Studies’ field, associated with his recent work. It seeks to investigate, above all, how these concepts and strategies have contributed and may further contribute to broadening our understanding and deepening our analysis of the spread of neoliberal logics and the emergence of “new” conservative logics in the contemporary social and political scene, particularly in the field of education

Logics, discourse theory and methods Advances, challenges and ways forward

Logics of Critical Explanation proposed a methodological approach that could render the insights of Poststructuralist Discourse Theory (PDT) and post-Marxist political theory more conducive to critical empirical research. It also offered a language with which to counter positivist tendencies to colonize the space of methods and research strategies, showing how PDT could facilitate both explanatory and critical endeavours. Since its publication in 2007, a number of studies have applied the logics framework to empirical cases, while critically engaging with its methodological and theoretical arguments. The main purpose of this article is to evaluate some of these developments, and to set out some future challenges faced by this research programme

Critical research on populism: Nine rules of engagement

This article formulates precise questions and ‘rules of engagement’ designed to advance our understanding of the role populism can and should play in the present political conjuncture, with potentially significant implications for critical management and organization studies and beyond. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau and others working within the post-Marxist discourse theory tradition, we defend a concept of populism understood as a form of reason that centres around a claim to represent ‘the people’, discursively constructed as an underdog in opposition to an illegitimate ‘elite’. A formal discursive approach to populism brings with it important advantages. For example, it establishes that a populist logic can be invoked to further very different political goals, from radical left to right, or from progressive to regressive. It sharpens too our grasp of important issues that are otherwise conflated and obfuscated. For instance, it helps us separate out the nativist and populist dimensions in the discourses of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), Trump or the Front National (FN). Our approach to populism, however, also points to the need to engage with the rhetoric about populism, a largely ignored area of critical research. In approaching populism as signifier, not only as a concept, we stress the added need to focus on the uses of the term ‘populism’ itself: how it is invoked, by whom, and to what purpose and effect. This, we argue, requires that we pay more systematic attention to anti-populism and ‘populist hype’, and reflect upon academia’s own relation to populism and anti-populism