The political theology of populism and the case of the Front National

Abstract

In this article, we investigate the political theology of populism and look at the case of the Front National (FN). Considering the writings of Carl Schmitt and Ernesto Laclau, we trace the logical core of Schmitt’s political theology and show how it is integrated into theories of the political and Laclau’s theory of populism. We argue that the theologico-political core of populism is the simultaneous disavowal and imposition of mediation and that this stance leads to an increasing formalism. Looking at the discourse of the FN on the notion of laïcité, we find that this theologico-political structure explains how the party is able to link traditionally left- and right-wing motives in its discourse. Finally, we show how in FN’s discourse, the formalist tendency of populism, which Laclau has theoretically explicated, has become overt and must be understood as part of politics, not as a universal and tran-historical logic of the political. This suggests, we argue pace Laclau, that we ought to consider both the discourse of FN and the theoretical concepts of the political or of populism, as results of one of the same historical processes which has led them to affirm their common and uninterrogated assumption: the theologico-political principle and its disavowal of the possibility of metaphysical and political mediation.

Keywords

Carl Schmitt Ernesto Laclau Front National Marine Le Pen philosophy political theology political theory populism the political

Introduction

The recent resurgence of populism, particularly since the financial crisis of 2008, has led to an increasing interest in theories of populism. Yet to date, little work has been done on the political theology of populism.¹ This article argues that populism as a reconstructed ideal of the political in a neo-liberal age represents the natural limit point of political theology in the tradition of Carl Schmitt. Additionally, it seeks to develop further an insight presented in a pair of articles co-written by Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti.² They argue that there is an implicit agreement between some forms of populism and technocracy in their disavowal of mediation. According to them, populism and technocracy equally exhibit some degree of scepticism about the possibility of mediatory positions between identity and difference, between the universal and the particular or between the one and the many. Drawing on these insights, we investigate the denial of mediation within the Front National (FN) by discussing how this denial functions as part of a theologico-political structure. In so doing, however, we raise some critical questions about theories of the political in the tradition of Schmitt and Laclau.

In the first part of this article, we outline Schmitt’s political theology and his concept of the political. We argue that it is premised on the paradox of the rational impossibility, yet political necessity, of a mediation between universal and particular terms, and thus between the body politic and concrete identities; the political community cannot be constructed out of a plurality of social identities, and power cannot be mediated through institutions and associations in the middle. Instead, political unity depends on a sovereign ‘decision’ which functions analogous to the place of the divine in theological conceptions of order. This political theology led Schmitt to an emphasis on the importance of myth as the origin of the political – a point of reference that sustains a political unity that cannot arise from a negotiation or mediation of particular interests and identities. In the second part, we show how the theory of populism developed by Ernesto Laclau exhibits a radicalization of Schmitt’s political theology. Laclau’s theory of the empty signifier depends on a Schmittian concept of the political which emphasizes the construction of a political community in antagonistic opposition to an enemy, yet radicalizes its formalist tendency. Laclau’s theory of the empty signifier of the political community (‘the people’) evacuates every conceptual concept which would give the political community a substantial meaning and reduces it, in formalist fashion, to the construction of unity through a shared antagonism. In Laclau’s theory of populism, we find, again, the rejection of any real mediation between identity and difference as well as between the universal and the particular. Finally, in the third part of this article, we apply our theoretical considerations by attending to the discourse of FN. We venture that the recent use of the notion of laïcité, that is, secularity, in the discourse of FN exhibits an affirmation of the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of mediation. As a renewed defence of the Republic against ‘communitarianism’ – that is, the affirmation of substantial forms of associations which would mediate power between the State and the individual – FN’s discourse on laïcité represents a convergence between traditionally left- and right-wing traditions in France precisely through an increased emphasis on the shared theologico-political structure of these traditions. More importantly, in this discourse, the formalist tendency characterizing the theologico-political structure of populism is radicalized to the point where the very content of FN’s political symbols becomes identical with the formal function these play in the discourse. Finally, we will argue that while this development confirms the usefulness of Laclau’s theoretical analysis of populism, it also suggests the limits of the latter. For the radicalization of formalism, and the explicit expression of the theologico-political structure means that what is, for Schmitt and Laclau, a theory of the political, now must be analysed as a result of politics – as the result of specific historical developments and decision. We conclude, then, with a suggestion that the historical origins of the assumptions about mediation in the theologico-political structure of populism should be reinvestigated.

Carl Schmitt’s political theology

The meaning and importance of political theology in the work of the legal theorist Carl Schmitt is a subject of much dispute which we will not address in any detail.³ Instead, we will begin with sketching our own minimal definition of what we take to be the conceptual core of his political theology, taken as an anticipation of Laclau’s work. One of the central theses of Schmitt’s book Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922) was that

[a]ll significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development […] but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.⁴

This claim oscillates between the normative and the descriptive, and one may interpret it as a normative statement about the necessary structure for the appropriate conceptualization of ‘true’ political sovereignty or simply as the foundation for the recognition of structural similarities between specific political concepts and their theological analogues. For our purposes, we will take as our guiding principle the normative interpretation, which includes the descriptive. We will also emphasize the structural – as opposed to historical – definition of political theology. Read in this light, we maintain that Schmitt presents the political as characterized by a certain conceptual structure which is analogous with certain theological expressions of the ‘metaphysical image’ of an epoch of a society.⁵ This structure, which forms the kernel of Schmittian political theology, is a configuration of order in which mediation is denied, yet enforced through an imposition of homogenous identity. We will unpack this claim in some detail by looking at two key historical contexts to which Schmitt was responding.

One of the primary targets of Schmitt’s work was the formalist legal theory of liberal jurists like Hans Kelsen.⁶ Kelsen’s ‘pure theory of law’, inspired by the philosophy of the Neo-Kantian tradition, defined the object of jurisprudence as objective legal norms which have their validity in a realm separate from the world of sociological, political, and natural facts.⁷ Within the confines of his legal theory, Kelsen identified the State with the totality of a legal order of norms.⁸ He, thereby, excluded any consideration of the ‘politics’ of the application of laws and risked a reduction of the activity of the State to a completely formal procedure by means of which laws were applied to relevant circumstances. This was the object of Schmitt’s attack: Any discussion of the State must involve a consideration of how legal norms are applied in concrete cases, since every

legal thought brings a legal idea, which in its purity can never become reality, into another aggregate condition and adds an element that cannot be derived either from the content of the legal idea or from the content of a general positive legal norm that is to be applied.⁹

It is impossible to prescribe by referring to a formal procedure or rational logic, how one should traverse the gap between the legal idea, or norm, and the concrete case to which it applies. The seemingly marginal difficulty caused by this gap in fact exposes some of the central presuppositions of Schmitt’s thought. Importantly, as we will spell out in the following, his argument involves a radical denial of the possibility of mediation. For this reason, Schmitt did not reject the clear conceptual separation of formal idea and concrete case which forms the basis of Kelsen’s theory. Instead, his point was that the radical dichotomy – the lack of rational mediation or relation – between universal terms and particular cases, which he also affirmed, must be addressed by legal and political theory. Already in his Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen (1914), Schmitt had argued that between ‘every concrete case and abstract reality there is an unsurmountable chasm [Kluft], which cannot be closed through any gradual transition’.¹⁰ In his political theory at this point, then, the State formed the realizing midpoint between abstract law and concrete individuals.¹¹ This rudimentary analysis of Schmitt’s early work pinpoints the focal point of his political theology: the question of political theology arises the very moment one realizes that some sovereign person or entity must mediate between two incommensurable terms. The political, like the theological, deals with terms that are wholly distinct, yet which must be brought together. In this early work, Schmitt argued that the State preserves unity and order by imposing it in a way that cannot be explicated in rational or procedural terms. Only a personal decision can, therefore, bridge the gap between legal norm and concrete reality. Personal means ‘subjective’ as opposed to objective, in the sense that it is impossible to translate a decision or judgement in question to the application of a procedure or plan which may be repeated and universalized. This decision implies that a theory of the State must deal with the problem of sovereignty: ‘[s]overeign is he who decides on the exception’.¹²

For Schmitt, this almost philosophical dispute about political and legal theory was necessary in the light of the crises of the Weimar Republic caused by the impotence of its liberal parliamentary democracy which prioritized a politics of compromise and formal agreement across diverse interests instead of substantial political unity and hard decisions.¹³ More broadly, Schmitt was opposing what he took to be the long tradition of the liberal bourgeoisie, which had, since its origins after the absolutist regimes reduced politics to never-ending discussions and had avoided the fact that someone has to decide so as to preserve political order.¹⁴ Schmitt, therefore, wrote Political Theology as response to a liberal culture that had, he thought, reduced politics to procedure because it did not acknowledge that the impossibility of rationally mediating between formal laws and concrete individuals requires a sovereign decision to impose a stable and unified political order from above.

The other historical context that informed Schmitt’s discussion of political theology was the Catholic counter-revolutionary tradition. In the final chapter of Political Theology, Schmitt considered, largely in positive terms, thinkers such as Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald and Donoso Cortés, noting how they insisted on the political decision in face of the liberal revolutionary tradition.¹⁵ The main insight of these philosophers was that the everlasting conversations of the bourgeoisie would never produce the sort of political and social stability they desired. These philosophers of theocracy, dictatorship and fascism were, therefore, thinkers of strict dichotomies of the ‘either/or’.¹⁶ The counter-revolutionaries were concerned with the loss of social cohesion after the French Revolution, particularly due to, some thought, the rejection of the religious ‘glue’ that kept society together. In this context, we may note that the experience of the loss of social fabric caused by the Revolution also led to a particular brand of republican or socialist–associationist theory – espoused by the Saint-Simonians, as well as Philippe-Joseph-Benjamin Buchez, Pierre Leroux and others – according to which social-political stability could only be achieved, given the presence of an organic mediation throughout a social hierarchy.¹⁷ But this is not the tradition to which Schmitt is referring. For the counter-revolutionaries he discusses did not face directly the undertaking of understanding in rational terms how non-coercive and organic mediation and harmony among social, religious and political identities would be possible after the loss of the hierarchies and estates of the ancien régime, but rather insisted on the construction and imposition of political unity and hierarchy by means of a sovereign decision. Thus, if the associationists or early social theorists and the counter-revolutionaries from de Maistre to Charles Maurras equally drew attention to the importance of social cohesion and a hierarchical ordering of society, the latter nonetheless took a somewhat different approach to the matter. Whereas the associationists variously theorized the latently present corpus mysticum, the ‘mystical body’ which represented a possible religious–social bond that, if recognized, would allow for complex mediations between the individual and the State, the latter, despite the insistence on the futility of human construction, took a more constructivist approach and found it necessary to impose order, emphasizing the importance of the sovereign demand for sacrifice and ability to punish disordering transgressions.¹⁸ Viewed in the light of the counter-revolutionary sources of Schmitt’s political theology, we see that he follows this tradition in denying any form of rational explanation or symbolic representation of intermediary stages of the social hierarchy. The possibility of associations in the middle – between the homogenous unity of the State and individuals – is foreclosed, or even seen as a possible threat to political unity.

This brief outline of Schmitt’s political theology should serve to highlight the particular structure which, for him, forms the tertium quid between theological and political concepts of the State. Thus, we might see how, prior to the discussions of the specific analogies – like those of the king’s two bodies – we can identify the primary ‘structure’ which make these analogies possible. The fundamental tenet of Schmitt’s political theology is that the political decision ought to create order, identity and unity in a situation in which mediation is broken and impossible and that this structural situation forms the ground for plurality of concrete analogies between political and theological concepts. This structure is readily evident in Schmitt’s most explicit discussion of his understanding of the political in his The Concept of the Political (1927).¹⁹ Before moving on to Laclau’s theory of populism, we will briefly look at some moments of his theory of the political which will be of relevance for our discussion of Laclau and the FN.

Schmitt is concerned – in a way that has now become a common among theorists concerned with ‘the political’²⁰ – with distinguishing political relations from other relations and avoid a reduction of the political to other fields such as the social, the economic or the religious.²¹ According to Schmitt, the particularity of the political relation, which was implicit in his insistence on the decision, consists in the way it distinguishes between friend and enemy.²² The political is defined by the creation of this absolute distinction between a community of friends and its enemy, which ‘denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation’.²³ This definition of the political is intended to exclude liberalism’s reduction of the enemy to an economic competitor or a debating partner.²⁴ The political distinction cannot be situated or located within an economic or social space, and that creates the political community as such. The political refers to ‘the most intense and extreme antagonism’ and the very identity of the political community is constituted by this antagonism.²⁵ For this reason, internal conflicts and divisions within a particular society are primarily a source of threat for the political community. Should a social, economic or religious community rise to the level at which its members are willing to die to save it in the face of its enemies, it has already turned into a political entity.²⁶

For Schmitt, then, internal divisions and excessive social plurality threaten the homogenous unity of the political community.²⁷ The notion of an antagonism between friend and enemy – the complete rejection of mediation between inside and outside – is closely connected with and depended upon the denial of any form of intermediation between individuals and the political community as such. The stability and identity of the political community is not established through the negotiation of social identities or interests, but rather through a common opposition to the enemy. We may, finally, explore these issues with reference to an argument about the unity of the demos in his The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923), which he wrote in the time between the two above-mentioned works. Here, Schmitt defends his own theory as the only account of how a true democracy would be possible. The problem with democracy is that it is concerned with the rule of the people; yet, social and economic groups are always ‘sociologically and psychologically heterogeneous’.²⁸ While democracy seems to entail the identity of the rulers and the ruled, and thus the construction of a homogenous people, every democratic vote involves at least some outvoted minority which causes a split within the people that prevents the unity construction. The problem is that

[i]n democracy the citizen even agrees to the law that is against his own will, for the law is the General Will and, in turn, the will of the free citizen. Thus a citizen never really gives his consent to a specific content but rather in abstracto to the result that evolves out of the general will, and he votes only so that the votes out of which one can know this general will can be calculated.²⁹

Schmitt is drawing attention to how a democracy, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau also argued, requires a strict homogenous identity of the sovereign will and the people, precisely because it denies representation or mediation. This denial of representation results in the construction of a notion of a general will that equivocates between the All and the Whole, between each and every one and everyone as a unified people.³⁰ The general will is not a partial or imperfect representation of the will of the people. It is, in fact, not a representation at all. As a strict identity of the ruler and the ruled, the general will hovers between the people as a sum of individuals and as a unified whole, yet is characterized as the pure presence of the sovereign people. Should this democratic identity be achieved, Schmitt argues, each citizen must give his or her consent in an abstract fashion to what the general will is.

Democratic identity is achieved by the construction of a homogenous ‘substance’ and, consequently, the eradication of heterogeneity.³¹ Because democracy requires an identity of the rulers and the ruled, it depends on a homogenous equality determined by a distinguishing mark shared by all the citizens. This may ‘be found in certain physical and moral qualities, for example, in civic virtue, in arete, the classical democracy of vertus (vertu)’.³² A shared ‘substance’ with which everyone is identified replaces a unity based on shifting numbers or the negotiation of interests. Thus, Schmitt’s argument for the theory of the homogenous substance – which lends itself so easily to racist exploitation on biological or ethnic grounds – stems out of the conviction that the negotiation, representation and complex mediation of a plurality identities, demands and interests is impossible.

It is imperative to recognize how this problem of mediation is not only equivalent to, but structurally identical with, the problem of the application of an abstract law to a concrete case, which motivated his discussion in Political Theology. The point of identity is found in the claim that there is no mediation between a universal and a particular term – for example, between the people as a whole and the individual or abstract law and concrete case – which means that, rationally, the universal must impose itself on the particular or the particular aporetically resist the universal. That is why democratic unity requires a moment of sacrifice, and indeed why a political community arises when individuals are willing to sacrifice themselves.³³ The particularity of the particular must be sacrificed for it to conform with the universal. This moment of sacrifice is the reason why the distinction between the friend and enemy is so essential: The homogenous substance of the people may only be important enough for the citizens to sacrifice their particular identities if it is set in an antagonistic relationship with an enemy. Otherwise, the demos as the identity of the people will carry little weight and fail to unify the heterogeneous social reality of the nation.

Only a sovereign decision may achieve a true unity and democratic identity: it is the task of sovereignty to sustain a myth – as with Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan³⁴ – with which the people may be identified and which defines its distinctive ‘substance’. Considering his definition of the political, we see that his appropriation of democracy and rejection of liberalism depends on a mythical construction of a common ‘substance’ to the people which may never ‘bubble up’ from the impure symbols, identities and practices of a concrete social context. The people as a unity and identity must be constructed from above.

But whence the ‘content’ of this myth? With this question, we touch upon a central difficulty with Schmitt’s political theology; despite his charge that the liberal tradition has avoided the political by turning to procedure and formalism, he never saw the inherent formalism of his own approach, as John P. McCormick has argued.³⁵ For once one has argued that one needs to impose from above the myth of a unified and substantial demos, the content of that myth is rendered irrelevant. Pitting myth against formal technological reason, Schmitt does not acknowledge his own technique of the mythological. On the basis of this interpretation, we may move on to Laclau. We have defined the structure of Schmittian political theology as a politics in which mediation is impossible, yet imposed from above. Now we see that this act of imposition is necessarily formal, in the sense that the content of the specific unity thus created is irrelevant. In the next section, we will argue that because Laclau follows Schmitt’s political theology, he only intensifies the formalism of the latter and shows how populism may be taken as the limit point of Schmittian political theology.

Ernesto Laclau’s political theology of populism

In cooperation with Chantal Mouffe, the Argentinian theorist Ernesto Laclau has developed a theory of the political which, for the latter, is most clearly expressed in the logic of populist politics. His theory of the political is, therefore, a theory of populism. Perhaps, one could say that, for Laclau, the political can only be formulated and defended as a form of populism. As we saw in the previous section, the theory of the political was characterized by an aporetic theologico-political structure of denial and affirmation of mediation, and this structure is equally evident in Laclau’s theory of populism. In the following, we will see how Laclau’s theory of populism only increases the importance of this structure, and, for this reason, we may read this theory of populism as the clearest theoretical expression and development of Schmittian political theology.

For Laclau, the foundation of ‘populist reason’ is the recognition that mediation of identities or communities is theoretically impossible but actually necessary. As we will see, this conviction leads Laclau to an even more extreme form of political theology than that of Schmitt, wherein the myth of substantial unity is replaced with a theology of pure naming, of an empty signifier which signifies a mediation that can never materialize.

As we approach Laclau, we must emphasize a crucial aspect of his attempt to define a concept of the political. To assert that there is such a concept of the political is to maintain that there is some relation that is irreducibly political and that cannot be reduced to economic, social or religious realities. According to David William Bates, the political, as defined by the tradition of which Schmitt and Laclau take part, is a

certain form of intensity that is always parasitic in relation to historically concrete human communities, whatever their particular orientation and organizing principle. The political was, as Schmitt avowed, an existential concept. By that he meant it involved the logic of existence governing human groupings, not the content or form of those groupings. This is what I take to be the most important dimension of the political as an autonomous sphere – not its autonomy per se but its character as a certain logical principle that must be embedded within some true form of human life, even if it is not wholly defined by that form of life.³⁶

Because there is no way in which to demarcate a particular empirical arrangement or relation as autonomously political without entangling the political in non-political realities, the concept of the political must be defined on the level of existence, that is, ontologically. In philosophical terms, the concept of the political suggests a political ontology, not an ontic theory of political realities. That is why we can trace theologico-political structure of Laclau’s concept of the political in his most fundamental stance on the problem of mediation, that is, with the problem of the ontological relation. His analysis of populism does not arise from an empirical generalization; there is no path from empirical analysis to the level ‘logic of existence’ on which the concept of the political operates.³⁷ We are, therefore, concerned with a particular ontological or metaphysical position, with its own genealogical history. As Elías José Palti has argued, the very idea of a concept of the political depends on a radical shift in metaphysical presumptions, a shift which might traced back to the baroque period.³⁸ At the origin of the concept of the political lies a metaphysical presumption about the ‘simultaneous necessity and impossibility of choosing between antonymic terms’. In unpacking Laclau’s theory of the political and of populism, we must, therefore, begin with a consideration of his ontological presumptions about the possibility of mediation.

Laclau accepts some of the fundamental tenets of the post-structuralist and Lacanian traditions. He asserts that discourse is constitutive of objectivity as such and agrees, therefore, with the (post)structuralist effacement of universal or transcendental conditions for objectivity.³⁹ Furthermore, following Ferdinand de Saussure, he claims that language is constituted through relational differences, so that there is no irreducibly positive moment, only a series of differences that make an object or a sign what it is. However, Laclau is more of a post-structuralist than Saussure, because he denies any possibility of a constitutive whole within which the play of differences takes place.⁴⁰ The identity of a thing or the meaning of a word is founded upon a differentiation from other things and words; yet this is a differentiation whose completion is endlessly deferred. Paradoxically, then, the otherness of others functions simultaneously as the condition for and obstacle to the constitution of one’s identity; their difference may only be determined through further differences, and thus heralds nothing but the deferral of the completion of one’s own identity.

The social space must also be viewed as an open space of differences, which provides no ground for a stable identity. As Lacalu and Mouffe argued in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:

We must, therefore, consider the openness of the social as the constitutive ground or ‘negative essence’ of the existing and the diverse ‘social orders’ as precarious and ultimately failed attempts to domesticate the field of differences. Accordingly, the multiformity of the social cannot be apprehended through a system of mediations, nor the ‘social order’ understood as an underlying principle.⁴¹

The social space functions as a ‘negative’ essence precisely in the sense of denying individuals a fixed or stable identity. Thus, Laclau’s theory affirms the ‘precarious character of every identity and the impossibility of fixing the sense of the “elements” in any ultimate literality’.⁴² The assumption is that the social is like any discursive field in that it is impossible to fully articulate a totality in which an identity may be completely fixed:

If we accept […] that a discursive totality never exists in the form of a simply given and delimited positivity, the relational logic will be incomplete and pierced by contingency. […] Both the identities and the relations lose their necessary character. As a systematic structural ensemble, the relations are unable to absorb the identities; but as the identities are purely relational, this is but another way of saying that there is no identity which can be fully constituted.⁴³

A fixed identity requires a relational mediation of differences within an articulated totality. No such complete articulation is possible, which means that every description of an identity, including all the relations on which it is based, will be halted by some contingency or exteriority which prevents its completeness.

This post-structuralist account of identity assumes that mediation is broken on a fundamental level. For any particular thing, agent or locality to be what it is, to return to itself, it is incumbent upon it to make a detour through the universal. The detour can only be completed by reaching the universal as such, that is, the totality within which it, the particular, is placed. But this is a trip with no return. Metaphysically speaking, we are dealing with the same commitment which we found in Schmitt’s work. In the essay ‘Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity’, summing up a romp through the history of Western metaphysics, Laclau writes:

This whole story is apparently leading to an inevitable conclusion: the chasm between the universal and the particular is unbridgeable – which is the same as saying that the universal is no more than a particular that at some moment has become dominant, that there is no way of reaching a reconciled society.⁴⁴

Thus, Laclau affirms the same ‘chasm’ between the universal and the particular as Schmitt did. Nonetheless, it does not follow that there are no identities or that all meaning has been evacuated due to the endlessly deferred arrival of the competed totality. Instead, because no completed totality is given and because there is no indisputable universal horizon within which identities may be fully formed, identities are partially constituted and stabilized with reference to certain moments in the discursive space that only function as a totality. We will unpack this in the following.

Laclau has provided a ‘differential’ logic according to which identities are constituted through their differential positions, yet only incompletely so due to the open infinitude of the differential space. Mediation is necessary but impossible. Left at this level, however, one could not explain how identities are formed at all. Laclau’s theory, therefore, supplements the theory of the failed mediation of the differential logic with another logic of identification and subjectivity construction. The lack of a stable totality means that subjectivity is constituted by the selection of something within the differential field, which is given the role of the missing totality:

The key term for understanding this process of construction is the psychoanalytic category of identification, with its explicit assertion of a lack at the root of any identity: one needs to identify with something because there is an originary and insurmountable lack of identity.⁴⁵

A subject that cannot find its place in a particular social context – whether it be a family, a nation or the global world – can regain its stability through a process of identification through which something else is determined as a totality. If Laclau’s analysis of the differential logic of the social space led to the conclusion that mediation is necessary, but impossible, the point is now that mediation is impossible, yet necessary. That is, given that mediation is ineluctably and ontologically broken, it may only be achieved through an active construction and imposition.

We now turn to the final step in our account of Laclau’s theory of the political, which completes the analogy with Schmitt’s political theology. A mediation between the universal and the particular is impossible, Laclau argues. However, he does not affirm a radical particularism, which would simply be to sanction the world as it is, since any affirmation of a particular identity or group affirms the social-political context within which it is differentially constituted.⁴⁶ Instead, mediation must be effected and imposed, despite its impossibility. In Laclau’s words:

[T]he impossibility of their logically being brought together finds its correlate/reverse in their need to be brought together as an actual fact. This is the point at which, in my work, I have insisted that the points of identification which lead to this non-logical-being-put-together requires us to escape the strictly conceptual sphere and to enter a nominal one.⁴⁷

This insight grounds Laclau’s theory of populism, as we will now see. This theory corresponds to what we discussed above as the process of identification and exhibits the form of reasoning as we saw evidenced in Schmitt.

According to Laclau, since no totality or discursive whole will arise out of the myriad of differences within the social field, some particular difference in that field must be singled out in order to function as a stand-in for that missing totality. For Laclau, a populist movement exhibiting the logic of the political begins with a series of social-political demands that are frustrated by the current social condition in which they are formulated.⁴⁸ Briefly stated, when a sociopolitical system is unable to satisfy the demands of its agents, there may be a growing realization that this system does not provide the ‘totality’ within which such demands may be satisfied. However, although these demands vary widely in nature, so much so that there is no universal concept or general representation which may unite these demands, they may nonetheless be unified in a different way. One of the particular demands may come to stand in for all the other demands and thus create a ‘chain of equivalences’. In this case, a new kind of identity is created, not with reference to a differential context, but through the unifying function of the demand that stands in for the lack caused by the missing totality in the differential context. Importantly, this chain of equivalences depends on a logic of antagonism. The demand that unites a series of other demands can only function in this way if it is set in opposition to an antagonistic force.⁴⁹ Thus, we arrive at the three central moments of the ‘logic’ of populism: first, ‘the formation of an internal antagonistic frontier separating the “people” from power’; second, ‘an equivalential articulation of demands making the emergence of the “people” possible’; and third, ‘the unification of these various demands – whose equivalence, up to that point, had not gone beyond a feeling of vague solidarity – into a stable system of signification’.⁵⁰

The resemblance with Schmitt’s concept of the political should be clear. Given that it is impossible to arrive at stable order and unity by means of the differential context of the social, one must construct a demos whose unifying function depends in its entirely on the common opposition to an enemy. For this reason, as we saw, the definitional content of this people or the specific demand that creates the chain of equivalent demands is entirely irrelevant. It is no surprise, then, that Laclau theorizes the function of the specific demand as that of an ‘empty signifier’.⁵¹

The theory of the empty signifier is a consequence of the radical disavowal of mediation. However, because mediation is nonetheless necessary, lest there be ‘no signification and no identity’, populist reason acknowledges that ‘one difference, without ceasing to be a particular difference, assumes the representation of an incommensurable totality’.⁵² This difference unites without representation, that is, it unifies a series of radically different social identities and demands without establishing any conceptual identity or link between these identities and itself. What it does, however, is to signify the totality that is lacking, which is why it is called an ‘empty signifier’. The structure of political theology is clearly present in this theory: the empty signifier is an incarnation, a mediation of the finite and the infinite, in the sense that a finite difference (the particular demand) embodies the divine infinity (the absent fullness).⁵³ This empty signifier, which functions as a ‘hegemonic force’ in the social field, ‘has to present its own particularity as the incarnation of an empty universality that transcends it’.⁵⁴ With this theory, Laclau has pushed Schmittian political theology to its radical conclusion. The ‘incarnational’ structure of an impossible mediation, in which different social actors are impossibly unified as a common people and an absent totality is impossibly identified with a finite particularity, involves a move from the ‘conceptual’ to the ‘nominal’.⁵⁵ Laclau compares his theory of the empty signifier to the project of naming God.⁵⁶ The reduction of theological language to pure naming – to pure reference without description – is the consequence of the radical rejection of mediation between the infinite and the finite. If we are to speak in a context where there is no analogy between word (‘God’/’people’) and thing (the divine being/the true demos), one must postulate the possibility of the purely nominal, that is, a pure name without any description or conceptual content. It follows, then, that Laclau has gone one step further than Schmitt, insofar as he has affirmed the absolute irrelevance of the conceptual content of the point of democratic unity. For, unlike Schmitt, Laclau admits that the conceptual ‘content’ of the particular demand is in no way the ‘substance’ of the people, but functions rather as the aporetic incarnation of this substance, or more precisely as a sign of this missing substance. In this theory, the people arises by gathering around a name, an empty signifier which refers to a fullness and a mediation of identities, peoples and demands which can never take place. The transcendent political unity is not a myth but a name in principle conceptually and symbolically vacuous. Whereas, for Schmitt, the antagonistic relationship was necessary to enforce and impossible mediation and thus provide a real political substance or universal, for Laclau, the antagonistic relationship merely sustains a formal unity among actors all longing for an absent universal.

A formalist and functionalist theory of the political is the upshot of Schmittian political theology, and that is why Laclau identifies the theory of the political with the theory of populism.⁵⁷ Although the empty signifier is supposed to represent an absolute fullness, it is functionally reduced to its ability to gather sufficient unity among various interests through the production of a common enemy. In every case, the enemy is constructed to represent the force that precludes the requisite totality and mediation for stable identities and organic political communities. We may, therefore, come to see the paradox of this form of political theology and the resulting populism: it depends on the construction of an enemy that represents the impossibility of mediation which the theory has already assumed through its post-structuralist ontology. It should be clear, then, that just as technological and formalistic reason haunted Schmitt’s theory of the political, what Laclau has in common with the ‘global capitalism’ and technocrats he resents is precisely what he holds most dear: the ontological commitment that mediation is impossible.⁵⁸

In the following, we extend this theoretical inquiry with an analysis of the recent populist rhetoric of the French right-wing party FN, with particular reference to its use of the notion of laïcité. We will come to see how this same paradox haunts its discourse: although the political impetus is a resentment at the liberal and technocratic elite for eroding social cohesion and French identities, its populist alternative denies mediation at every turn. For this reason, it categorically excludes its own success and reduces its political aim to the impossible hope of a homogenous Republic.

The case of the FN

The discourse of the FN draws upon a long tradition of French political culture characterized by the denial of mediation and the demand for homogeneity – a logic we have now characterized as the general theologico-political structure as defined by Schmitt. Before we deal with the populism of FN, we will briefly revisit moments of the French political tradition since the Revolution and attend to the ways in which the two-fold theologico-political structure defined above is evidenced on both the left and the right.

During the Revolution, the Rousseauan Jacobins under the leadership of Maximilien Robespierre insisted on the necessity of a homogenous democratic unity. For the social contract to be democratic, the people needed to be ‘one and indivisible’, and even a single dissident would be a challenger to the volonté générale.⁵⁹ Throughout the 19th century, the fascination with an undivided people persisted, as manifested through the reigns of Napoleon I (1804–1814) and III (1852–1870), both of whom claimed to represent the unified voice of the people by arguing in Schmittian fashion that a strong leadership was the very condition for a successful democracy.⁶⁰ It should nevertheless be noted that the popular election in 1848 of the latter, a rather uncharismatic candidate who bore little resemblance with his late uncle, has been deemed as an example of the unattractiveness of parliamentary democracy.

The demand for homogenous unity went hand in hand with opposition to the imperfect mediations of parliamentary democracy, as evidenced during the Third Republic (1870–1940) by General Boulanger and the Boulangist movement on the one hand and by conservative monarchism on the other hand.⁶¹ Similarly, the frustration with the Fourth Republic’s (1946–1958) failure to resolve the Algerian crisis was channelled by Pierre Poujade’s anti-parliamentarism, an anti-Semitic politician who criticized the Rome-Treaty and claimed to be the representative for small business-owners.⁶² Finally, the creation of the Fifth Republic in 1958 was meant to solve the inefficiency of the Third and Fourth Republic by expanding the power of the executive branch, and thus carried on in some sense the Bonapartist agenda.⁶³

The persistence of anti-parliamentarism in modern French history is intimately connected to a disbelief, shared both by the left and the right, in the possibility of mediating social, political or cultural pluralities. As we shall see presently, although the denial of mediation was articulated in different contexts and dealt with in conflicting manners, there are clearly analogous structures to be found.

The leftist republican tradition primarily articulated its denial of mediation through the frame of civic unity and virtue. The Jacobin tradition insisted that the unity of the Republic depended on a civic education to develop the vertu of the citizens as make them confirm with the required political identity.⁶⁴ Consequently, during the Third Republic, the republicans developed a republican school in order to educate citizens according to the ideas of the Enlightenment. The republicans claimed that reason was the same for all human beings, which mean that, if trained properly, all educated and virtuous citizens would necessarily agree on political decisions if they acted altruistically and rationally.⁶⁵ Accordingly, the realization of republican reason meant that the particular (citizen) and the universal (general will) would coincide and that there would be no need for mediation. In their private lives, citizens could live freely as individuals, since the demand for homogeneity only applied to the political realm, and not the private.⁶⁶ Only a process of education and imposition could close the gap and sustain a ‘general’ unity, that, inspired by the Augustinian heritage of the French theological tradition, occupied ‘a place midway between particularity and universality’.⁶⁷ One should not, however, take this reference to a place in between to imply that the republican tradition affirmed mediation. The point was rather that because such middles were deemed unthinkable, this point between particularity and universality, between the people as a sum of individual and the people as a whole, had to be approximated through education and enforcement.

The counter-revolutionary tradition of the right has been equally sceptical of mediation but tried to close the gap and construct homogeneity by other means. In place of the the volonté générale of the left, the right has tended to insist on a strong leader which could capture the spirit of the people. Instead of a political construction, this unity of spirit is often guaranteed by an ethnic and cultural homogenous population. This ideological direction is best exemplified by the aforementioned Charles Maurras:

The nation is not the universality or the majority of the adult individuals who at a given moment resides within the borders of the country. The nation is the people organised in families, in corporations, in counties, in the countryside, unified by the traditional customs in solidarity with the past and future generations, so as to create a nationality, and a fatherland.⁶⁸

Maurras championed a Schmittian distinction between friend and enemy and stressed the importance of the national myth as a means to create the illusion of a people united of a common ancestry, religion, culture and language and thoroughly mistrusted the individualism of the republicans. As there were no way to construct unity out of a social plurality, the people only had significance as an ethnically homogenous whole, and parliamentary democracy could never achieve true representation for a people of diverse interests. ‘The republican individualism’ of the governing elite, he thought, only served a small minority of the population: the elite themselves, and the enemies of the people, the Jews. We see, then, that the construction of an enemy was of the highest importance for the right, given its disbelief in the possibility of social-political mediation. The strategy of pinpointing an enemy had been developed by Edmond Drumont, the editor of La France juive in the 1880s. By blaming all the deficiencies of the Third Republic on the Jews, Drumont managed to unite ‘anti-Semitism, counter-revolutionary thought, the Catholic tradition and a populist anticapitalism with a socialist tendency’.⁶⁹ Maurras described, following Drumont, this strategic use of anti-Semitism in the following manner:

Everything seemed impossible, or frightfully difficult, without this providential anti-Semitism. Because of it, everything arranged itself, evened itself off, and was simplified. If one was not anti-Semitic of patriotic will, one became so from a simple sense of opportunism.⁷⁰

Drumont and Maurras’ almost pragmatic anti-Semitism exemplifies the formalism of a right-wing populism: Although they claimed that ethnic and cultural unity was the only source of stability and cohesion, such a unity would ultimately have to be constructed politically through an antagonistic relationship with an enemy.

We see, then, that all the twofold structure of the theologico-political analogy was present in the French political traditions. In each case, the denial of the possibility of any mediation between the universal and the individual was replaced by a process of construction of and approximation to a homogenous unity. Whether through civic education or the designation of an antagonist, the structure of the theologico-political was clearly present in the attempt to unify a plurality in the face of the impossibility of mediation. As Cas Mudde has noted, the populist rejection of parliamentary democracy provides a link between the left and the right:

In an often implicitly Rousseauian fashion, populists argue that political parties corrupt the link between leaders and supporters, create artificial divisions within the homogeneous people, and put their own interests above those of the people.⁷¹

With this brief romp through French political history in mind, we will now present a reading of the discourse of FN around the principle of laïcité, that is, of secularity. Especially after Marine Le Pen took control over the party after her father, FN’s use of the doctrine reveals an increasing convergence of the traditions of the right and the left. Although there are substantial variations within Le Pen’s discourse, her remarks about laïcité reveal a further intensification of the theologico-political structure we have seen so far.⁷² Laclau said that the enemy is selected as the one who prohibits one’s identity and that a particular demand may function as an empty signifier which sustains a chain of equivalences. He used the theory of the empty signifier to distinguish between the conceptual and nominal, form and content, meaning and function, so as to show how populist rhetoric may functionally create unity without mediating differences on a conceptual level. However, this theory follows the philosophical distinction between the ontic and the ontological, or actually existing politics and the concept of the political. In this way, Laclau finds structural identities among numerous historical examples of politics set in wildly different discursive contexts and with varied political contents, precisely because the logic of the political has to do with form and function, not with content. In the following, however, we will see how FN’s stance on laïcité reveals how even the specific content of the representation of the enemy begins to take the bare form of those who believe in mediations of the middle, and how, the representation of the ‘people’ at times tends to be identified with those who are willing to sacrifice their particular identities for the universal. Through this distinction, the party aims at uniting the technocratic elite and the Muslim immigrants as the antagonist of an otherwise homogenous ‘French people’. The theoretical consequence of this is that the theoretical and of Laclau’s populist theory is explicitly expressed in actual political discourse. This development, we suggest, invites an investigation of the political context of populism in a way that challenges the strict division between the ontic and ontological in Laclau’s theory.

Laïcité was originally an anticlerical and primarily republican principle, especially centred around the republican education of the people through public schools. The principle grew out of a hotly contested religious debate between clericals and anticlericals during the Third Republic.⁷³ Whereas the Catholic right sought to preserve the role of the Church and Christian doctrine in the public school system, the republican left wanted an non-religious school. Republicans defending laïcité could claim that the principle was by no means anti-religious, since, constraining religion to private conviction, the question was not about banning it, but how to prevent it from threatening the unity of the Republic.⁷⁴ The point of laïcité was thus to expunge differences and submit individuals to the Republic, which could only happen by clearing up the ‘middle’ so as to prevent particular allegiances from trumping the allegiance owed to the Republic. According to a French politician of this period, the Republic cannot tolerate the ‘alienation of the liberty of conscience of an individual for the benefit of any authority whatsoever, be it spiritual or temporal’.⁷⁵ A Catholic education was, therefore, considered a danger for the Republic, and in the 1880s, a non-religious moral and civic education was put in place.

Only recently did laïcité become an important principle for FN. Jean-Marie Le Pen espoused a populism focused on the ethnic homogeneity, economic liberalism and deregulation. Although he made a turn towards economic nationalism and corporatism throughout the 1990s, the FN seldom approached the republican tradition under his watch. The protection of French culture or economy was, therefore, rarely articulated in republican terms by the party. To a certain extent, Marine Le Pen follows in her father’s footsteps by pointing to the importance of language, traditions and religion for national unity and stability.⁷⁶ Nevertheless, Marine Le Pen has taken the FN in a republican direction, particularly when speaking of laïcité and Islam. For Le Pen, her defence of laïcité makes her the true defender of the republican tradition. Thus, she argues that her opposition to Muslim immigration follows directly from her republicanism.⁷⁷ Under her direction, the FN has sought to prohibit the wearing of ostentatious religious signs in private enterprises and for users of public services such as public transport, measures that by far exceed the proposals of the left.⁷⁸

Although laïcité has traditionally been a republican and leftist doctrine, its implicit theologico-political structure has allowed Le Pen to reappropriate it in her populist discourse. The main motivation behind this discourse is the exclusion of the Muslim as the antagonist of the French people. In a Laclauian manner, the FN projects the Muslim as the enemy which supports the process of identification through the empty signifier of the ‘people’. However, it is a significant aspect of this discourse that the notion of the Muslim as a threat to the French nation, culture and identity is linked to the technocratic elite by the means of a logic that is explicitly stated. In the rhetorical reservoir of the FN, the mainstream left and right parties are characterized as essentially identical. Often they are even explicitly linked through the abbreviation UMPS (union pour un mouvement populaire [UMP] and parti socialiste [PS]).⁷⁹ The FN argues that all other parties support minority interests, be it those of the financial elite, the transnational companies, the European Union or immigrants – particularly Muslims. Thus, the technocratic elite and the Muslim immigrant are rendered equivalent by means of their common fragmentation of homogenous unity and often denounced in tandem, by being designated as ‘communautarians’:

In France, one has, to summarize, a right, or maybe also a duty to live differently than the French, with different codes, different mores, different traditions; different laws. Our elites have organized and encouraged this by giving in to all the communitarian demands, while justifying and anticipating them, sometimes enthusiastically, as this could give them some electoral gains in due course.⁸⁰

Both the political elite and the Muslims serve their own interests while abandoning those of the united ‘French people’. According to Marine Le Pen, this causes a democratic problem:

We want to implement a politics based on the restoring of order of the nation-state by a recovered sovereignty, a revitalisation of democracy by the participation of citizens in questions that concern them, and by a protective and efficient State that serves the national community, that guarantees laïcité and the prosperity of the freedoms. […] Therefore, we must restore the nation, and save it from the arbitrary, from the feudalities of communitarianism, from the illegitimate technocrats.⁸¹

The communitarians are the true enemy of the French nation, characterized by their affirmation of communities ‘between’ the State and the citizen, between the universal and the particular. In Marine Le Pen’s rhetoric, Muslims are communitarians in the sense that they put their religious beliefs over the needs of the French people as a whole. In other words, the Muslims put the laws of their religion over the laws of the Republic, or as Marine Le Pen describes it: ‘Laïcité is not fully consistent with or natural for Islam, as Islam confuses the spiritual and the temporal’.⁸² Hence, the FN frequently returns to the trope that the ‘particular interests’ of Muslims are a danger to the Republic, as they will eventually try to impose these on the French People: ‘[…] today, substitutional menus and substitutional holidays, […] tomorrow, substitutional law, substitutional culture […]’.⁸³ Moreover, the technocratic elite supports Muslims in this cause, while disregarding the will of the French people, supposedly because ‘they feel ashamed’ of the French history and of French values.⁸⁴

In this discourse, the Muslim becomes the primary example of a group which refuses to sacrifice their personal faith and opt for the homogeneity of the nation. However, the enemy in the most general sense is the communitarian, the dangerous believer in the associations and communities of the middle. Thus, the fundamental logic of FN’s doctrine of laïcité is expressed in the proposition they want to add to the Constitution: ‘The Republic recognises no communities’.⁸⁵ The significant development here is not the functional role notions such as the Muslim play in their discourse, but rather that the function or logic has surfaced and become a central part of the content of that discourse. With their explicit attack on communitarians, FN, reminiscent of Schmitt, has made it clear that if the gap between the State and the individual is filled with a significant social or political plurality, there can be no unity. This impression is reinforced by the fact that the FN supports direct democracy combined with a stronger executive power.⁸⁶ The only way to insert a real democracy deprived of the special interests of the corrupt and communitarian technocratic elite is to make the executive and the people ‘one’.

Just as the enemy has become explicitly identified with the notion of a dangerous ‘middle’, the convergence of right-wing ethno-nationalism and left-wing republican nationalism in their discourse about laïcité has led to a tendency towards the identification of the content of the people with the functional logic of the construction of this very people. The ambiguity of these conflicting traditions is evident in Marine Le Pens statements about the right to citizenships. Effectively, Le Pen asserts that there are two different ways of becoming French: ‘You must inherit it, or you must merit it’.⁸⁷ Whereas inheritance is connected to the nationalist ideas of bloodlines, traditions and cultural perseverance, the concept of a merited citizenship at times skews the very notion of the French identity. This is evident when Le Pen presents the requirements to be fulfilled for an immigrant to become truly French:

This is the true meaning of the nation, which exceeds the determination of origins, of religion or of culture, in a synthesis which forms a different birth, a different faith, a different culture. This is the experience of all those generations that conquered the right to be French by effort, work, and blood. Over time, and because they wanted it. The French grandeur is that of all these men and women who are ready to place France first – before all other dependencies and ties and all other attachments. This national imperative is the contrary of a closure. It is vital for a transmission over time between those who made us who we are, and those who we will give the possibility of being French.⁸⁸

In other words, when Le Pen seeks to integrate her ethnonationalist heritage with the republican tradition, the sacrificial logic of the theologico-political structure reappears: French citizenship is open to those who are willing to make the sacrifice to leave behind their cultural, religious or national affiliations. Thus, the tautology ‘France for the French’ gains a real significance precisely through the notion that the French are those who put France first:

Generations of Italian, polish, Spanish and Portuguese immigrants, all gave themselves the means to truly assimilate into French society. […] Yes, I know, it is difficult to abandon one’s maternal language! That it is difficult to leave behinds the costumes of one’s country and adopt those of the nation that welcomes you! That it is sometimes hard for the believer not to be able to express his religion in the public sphere, when the country that has accepted you is a laïc country ! […] But this was the sacred rule of the French assimilation, and that is the rule which we never must derogate!⁸⁹

The problems of immigration and the notion of the French identity are connected through a discourse whose formal function has become its content. Laïcité functions as a means to unite the mainstream left and right and the Muslim immigrant to one quintessential antagonist, against whom the FN becomes the only alternative. Thus, it provides the party’s often changing and seemingly vacuous rhetoric with a clear discursive opponent.

The republican turn in FN’s discourse after Marine Le Pen took over the leadership of the party, as evidenced by her remarks about laïcité, represents perhaps a further step in the story of the theologico-political structure identified by Schmitt. This structure was one of a denial of mediation, yet an imposition of unity in its place. As we have argued, this denial of mediation involved a formalist tendency: when the people has to be constructed through a sovereign ‘decision’ or as the hegemony of an empty signifier in the social field, form and content is separated in the sense that the particular content of the ‘people’ is irrelevant to its political function. Our brief discussion of FN’s discourse and its background in right wing and left wing of the French political history evidenced a further step in the formalist direction, one that paradoxically challenges the formalism of both Schmitt and Laclau’s theories. We saw that ethnonationalist and republican concerns were combined in their discourse about laïcité. This was made possible by an increasing emphasis on the theologico-political structure implicit in this principle. Thus, the very content of the political construction becomes its form, as the enemy is associated with mediation and the French people identified as those who are willing to give up their particular identities for their French identity. It follows from this development, however, that there are limits to an analysis of populist rhetoric which is based on a strict separation between the politics and the political. For FN’s discourse evidences moments when the theologico-political structure of the concept of the political, and of Laclau’s theory of populism, has become politics. That is, it makes little sense to say that FN’s designation of an enemy is an arbitrary substitution for the resentment due to the impossibility of mediation, when this impossibility as such is explicitly referred to in the content of its discourse. It similarly makes little sense to explain its usage of the notion of the ‘people’ as an empty signifier, when its conceptual concept is those who are willing to sacrifice their identities for the nation.

Conclusion

In this article, we have uncovered some of the relationships between the concept of the political, theories of populism and political theology. We argued that both Schmitt’s concept of the political and Laclau’s theory of populism exhibited what we defined as the structure of political theology, namely, that two terms that cannot be conceptually mediated, nonetheless, have to be brought together. The Schmittian theologico-political structure is based on the assumption of the impossibility of mediation, and this assumption forms both Schmitt’s and Laclau’s theories. In fact, this assumption is the reason for the strict demarcation between the politics and the political, between the contingency of ontic-empirical political negotiation and the ontological theory of the political. However, our analysis of the discourse of FN highlighted a development not accounted for by Laclau’s theory of populism. This theory has been used to analyse populist movements both on the left and right, precisely because it is an ahistorical and formalist theory. But our analysis of FN’s discourse showed that what was, for Schmitt as for Laclau, a theoretical construction on the level of the political, has become part of an actual political discourse. Perhaps, then, one could suggest that the ‘ontological’ structure has been revealed in the ontic, that is, that the concept of the political has become ‘incarnate’ in an actual political movement. In saying this, we do not mean to mythologize a theoretical debate but to suggest something much more mundane: that there might be reasons to doubt the assumptions of Schmittian political theology and the theoretical formalism to which it leads, and thus that the theories of Schmitt and Laclau may be genealogically located in the same historical narrative as FN’s discourse – as moments in story of political and theoretical discourses that assert the brokenness of mediation. Laclau’s theories are more relevant than ever, but perhaps this is so not because they express a truly transhistorical and quasi-ontological concept of the political, but rather because Laclau’s theories are effects of the historical and political contingencies and decisions that also determine the populist movements of our time. Put in different terms, having found that the Schmittian theologico-political structure is explicitly avowed in FN’s discourse, we suggest that one should investigate the social, political and intellectual conditions that lead to this. Such an investigation would immediately lead us revisit to the shared history – most immediately the French political and intellectual history – which has equally formed Marine Le Pen’s, Schmitt’s and Laclau’s theologico-political convictions. It invites, in short, an investigation of the discourses around and constructions of the possibility of political mediation.

Footnotes

Authors' note

Ragnar M. Bergem is now affiliated with MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society, Oslo, Norway.

ORCID iD

Ragnar M. Bergem