„Das wird man ja wohl noch sagen dürfen“: Rhetorik und Poetik der populistischen Phrase

Schaffrick, Matthias

doi:10.1515/9783110568561-005

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…, the common understanding of what can, and should, be object of public debate ( Lessenich, 2019 ). Populisms work on shifting these limits, too, in transgressive statements that foreseeably provoke outcries and excitement because they question the common ground of public discourse ( Schaffrick, 2019 , 79–80). However, their aim of shifting the limits of what can be said in public is not to widen the scope of voices and perspectives that are to be heard and considered, but to dismiss those that do not concur.…”

Section: Populist Reciprocitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Staging enmity: reading populist productions of shame with Jelinek’s On the Royal Road

Prade-Weiss¹

2023

Open Res Europe

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Background: Populism is often perceived as a shamelessly loud segment of political discourse. However, Jelinek’s play On the Royal Road, written on the occasion of Trump’s 2016 election as US president, suggests that populism leads to societal silencing. Jelinek’s text expounds that when a society’s public sphere is marked by ubiquitous enmity against an imagined “we”, grounded in antagonism, then the possibility of speaking to one another disappears, because speaking to one another is based on the willingness to give one’s counterpart space and listen to them. In a public discourse that stages enmity, the counterpart vanishes. Therefore, populism, loud as it is, leads to the silencing of whole communities insofar as they are left with nothing in common but enmity. Method: Critical discourse analysis is used to contextualise close readings of select passages of Jelinek’s play with recent social sciences and humanities research on global populisms to highlight what literary language and the dramatic form can contribute to understanding populism. Results: The silencing populisms entail is fed, in large part, by a dynamics linking the interpersonal emotion of shame to its discursive exploitation in shamelessness and shaming: populist voices transgress rules of democratic debate in the public sphere to elicit outrage by mainstream politics, media, and civil society, which often retort populist shamelessness by shaming populist actors. The audience excitement populist leaders and supporters generate is an important factor in normalizing the emotional, moralizing populist polarization of “us” versus “them” that undermines differentiated discussion and a dispute of arguments. Conclusion: While media and research commonly suggest that with the populist reduction of politics to a spectacle, citizens become a passive audience, the article expounds that audiences play a key role in the production of populist enmity. This insight offers an alley to counteract populism.

show abstract

Section: Populist Reciprocitymentioning

confidence: 99%