From Democratic Simulacrum To The Fabulation of The People: Minority Populism

FROM DEMOCRATIC SIMULACRUM TO THE FABULATION OF
THE PEOPLE: MINORITY POPULISM

Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc
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Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc, « Du simulacre démocratique à la fabulation du peuple : le populisme
minoritaire », Actuel Marx 2013/2 (No 54), p. 71-85.
DOI 10.3917/amx.054.0071
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Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc, « Du simulacre démocratique à la fabulation du peuple : le populisme
minoritaire », Actuel Marx 2013/2 (No 54), p. 71-85.
DOI 10.3917/amx.054.0071
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PRESENTATION SPECIAL REPORT INTERVENTIONS CURRENT DEBATE REVIEWS
FROM DEMOCRATIC SIMULACRUM

TO THE FABULATION OF THE
PEOPLE: MINORITY POPULISM
Guillaume SIBERTIN-BLANC
The question of populism posed by contemporary European circum-
stances is often considered at two levels. The first lays claim to the socio-
political analysis of mass movements, movements that are simultaneously
concentrated by parties and identified with leaders, but sufficiently dif-
fuse in their base to blur boundaries, whether they be sociological, eco-

nomic, cultural, based on a “traditional” electoral group, and so forth,
and which, in their “resurgence,” have caused some concern. They would
be thus unique to the present moment, but also a repetition that con-
nects our current reality with other moments, differentiated both in time
and space. The second level is related to a discursive analysis and, at an
ideological level, instead examines the abundant use of the word “pop- I
ulist” to qualify (and more often to disqualify) a movement, party, or
political leader. It is also used to describe their speeches as well as the
refusals they express or the claims they make. These two approaches are
not exclusive, but they lead our thinking in two different directions, ones
that can even be considered diametrically opposed.1 The possible point
in common between these two approaches that will be discussed in this
article involves not so much the way that “populism” (the concept or the
word) is dealt with directly, but rather the indeterminacy that weighs both
on the analysis of what it is and on the use of the word. This often-com-
mented-on relative indeterminacy requires that populism be interpreted,
from both perspectives, as the sign for something else. In addition, it is a
sign that “indeterminates” that to which it is referring, blurs its bound-
aries, and corrupts the principles and criteria for identifying it. Thus,
current populism presents us with a Platonic test. What has been called
“neopopulism” is a sign of something else, but it also makes it unclear
what this something else is and what makes it distinct; it is not simply
the symptom of a state of democracy (of its situational “failure” or of its
1. To present two extremes: on the one side, the contributions gathered in Pierre-André Taguieff, ed., Le Retour du populisme. Un
défi pour les démocraties européennes (Paris: Encyclopædia Universalis, 2004); on the other, Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy,
trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2014) [La Haine de la démocratie (Paris: La Fabrique, 2005), 79–106]; Rancière, “Une Passion
d’en haut,” Lignes 34 (February 2011): 119–123; Rancière, “L’Introuvable populisme,” in Qu’est-ce qu’un peuple?, ed. Alain Badiou
et al. (Paris: La Fabrique, 2013), 13–143.
POPULISM/COUNTER-POPULISM
G. SIBERTIN-BLANC, From Democratic Simulacrum to the Fabulation of the People: Minority Populism
structural “incompleteness,”2 of its possible “perversions” or its recog-

nized “crisis”), but a simulacrum of democracy itself (of the principle of
popular sovereignty, of the expression of the “masses,” and so forth), that
is, its best imitator and its worst sophist, dramatically contaminating the
selective test of those that seek to use it.3
Yet by comparing several ways of interpreting this simulacrum, that
is, of trying to reduce and master its indeterminacy, the second move I
am attempting to make is to relate these ideas to what is, in a certain
respect, its opposite, or what could be called “metapopulism.” This is not
only in the sense that the criticism of populism is limited to using pop-
ulist language, but in the sense that its apparent other (the democratic
institution, state of law, representative government) also presents the
paradox of a “state populism,” which, as is becoming increasingly clear,

is an antipopular populism. I will investigate its construction based on
the contradictions of what Deleuze and Guattari identified as a well-or-
dered, shared-majority/minority (or “majority consensus”) governmen-
_ tality. This identification led to what would be analyzed, beginning in the
1980s, as a “postdemocratic” or “postpolitical democracy.” Based on this,
II I would offer the hypothesis that the task of criticizing populism can only
_ be done based on its politicization, both in theory and in practice, that is,
by considering it as an entirely separate political form and by problema-
tizing the balance of power found within it. I will thus at least leave open
the question concerning the “democratization of populism” that could
divide it from within. This all takes place in a current economic situation
where, perhaps, it may no longer be possible to criticize populism only
extrinsically.
FROM DEMOCRATIC SIMULACRUM TO METAPOPULISM

The indeterminacy of populism seems to be sufficiently complex so
as to need to be dealt with in different ways. First, it is doubtful that
producers of political and media declarations would be able provide the
exact semantic content for the term they use so complacently. We also
know that political science is equally uncertain concerning this concept:
it combines very disparate aspects, refers to very diverse historical par-
ticularities, and assumes very heterogeneous ideological content, sociol-
ogies, and institutional forms. We may also think that its indeterminacy
exists not only in the word and its uses, or in the way it is conceived and
2. Pierre Rosanvallon, “Penser le populisme,” La Vie des Idées, September 27, 2011. Accessed at http://www.laviedesidees.fr/
Penser-lepopulisme.html. See Yves Surel and Yves Mény, Par le peuple, pour le peuple, le populisme et les démocraties (Paris:
Fayard, 2000) (which develops the idea of a “functional populism” as the permanent implementation of “the incompleteness and
dynamics belonging to democracy”).
3. See the Deleuzian rewriting of the “resistance of simulacra” to Platonic participation as “selective test” (Gilles Deleuze,
Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: The Athlone Press, 1994), 60–70).
understood, but in the thing itself. In the end, we may doubt that pop-
ulism is really an object or a substantial political form at all. Could it not
just be a question of “style,” without having an ideological consistency
of its own (that is able to dress any kind of ideology in its demagogism)?
Could it be purely rhetorical, without a specific political or institutional
content (that could serve either “government populisms” or “populisms
of denunciation”)? Or is it perhaps a fleeting movement of protestation,
rather than a movement with specific claims and transformations? Or is
it instead a kind of mass enthusiasm, without an enlightened political
consciousness? Finally, it may be a symptom of a political crisis within a
historical “transition.”4 The suspicion, then, is that it may be both epis-
temological and ideological, and circulate between its inconsistency as
a concept and as a phenomenon, between the uncertainty of populism

as an object of knowledge and the worry populism presents as a “real
movement.” It is as if the threats it poses to democracy increase because
of the uncertainty surrounding what it is exactly, or even of whether it is
anything at all. _
But at this point, everything becomes upended, because in this sus-
picion that populism is not political, there is a greater apprehension III
that it represents a contradictory antipolitical politics. It is not then just _
“lacking” in content (ideological, programmatic, and so forth), but is
fed by the confusion that makes it impossible to decide upon its con-
tent (due to its “heterogeneous” natures, ideological mixtures, and “sim-
plistic” view of problems and solutions). It is not simply “lacking” in
a viable institutional program, but it rejects such an objective due to a
fanatical negativity. In addition to being the symptom of a crisis, it is
also the passionate adherence to its symptom, which threatens to make
the “crisis” interminable due to the fact that it claims to resolve it imme-
diately, by suppressing any “mediation,” in the institutional or temporal
sense of the word. In this regard, for example, it has been suggested that a
defining “criterion” of populism is “a relationship to time in direct oppo-
sition to the normal time of politics, which is regulated by the long term
because of the impossibility of responding to all demands at once as well
as the need to slowly manage their being placed on the agenda of priority
actions.”5 Put another way, it is a temptation to deny the incompleteness
that would create the symbolic and institutional condition of democ-
racy (the “emptiness” or the structural indeterminacy of the subject of
4. The following are the common distinctions: the “classic” populisms (in Russia in the nineteenth century, in the United States at
the turn of the century, in Latin America in the 1930s) of rural communities resisting the shift towards an industrial and urban capi-
talism; the “neopopulism” of the urban middle class panicked by the downgrade in class during the shift towards a “postindustrial”
capitalism,” and so forth. Tronti presents this perspective in his recent article on populism: Mario Tronti, “Peuple,” Lignes 41 (May
2013): 147–148.
5. Guy Hermet, “Permanences et mutations du populisme,” Critique 776–777 (January–February 2012): 72–73.
power) and its dynamic (the irresolvable tensions between unity and plu-
ralism, between popular sovereignty and state of law, and so forth), which
populism would express in the negative, that is, by canceling them out.
What is interesting in these suggestions is that, in seeking to define the
newness of “neopopulism,” they have felt the need to take up the old
criticism that Edmund Burke had already directed towards the “political
metaphysics” of the French republican revolutionaries on the one hand,
and on the other the Lefortian analysis of totalitarianism as an internal
perversion of the political and symbolic institution of social affairs that is
part of democratic societies.6 All that remains is to give a final twist to the
challenges presented by this turbulent simulacrum: populism could be
considered as an antipolitics through excess and dangerously unrealistic
due to the fact it is too realistic. By insisting on realizing the fiction of

the people, it suppresses the symbolic function of the name of the people
by acting out the fantasy of a “full” people in reality. Its indeterminacy is
nothing but the reverse of the “democratic indeterminacy” it is so intent
_ on preventing. By short-circuiting political representativity as well as the
space for the discursive and institutional implementation of this sym-
IV bolic fiction, an excessive literalness would remove any metaphoric or
_ metonymic meaning. Populism, then, is not a perversion of democracy
as some claim, but its psychosis: its pathology is that the word is taken
for the thing itself.7
These interpretations seem entirely disconnected from the current
economic situation. The appeal to a “normal political period” in order to
slowly deal with overly impatient popular demands seems to require, in
light of the policies imposed throughout Europe, an act of faith that not
even the most providential of demagogues would want to make. These
interpretations especially negate the fact that the current urgency sur-
rounding the populist question is found not only in the development of
violently xenophobic nationalist movements (the fact that they are “pop-
ulist” unfortunately changes nothing with regard to the problem), or in
the “crisis” of liberal democracies and its representative institutions, but
also in the development of a paradoxical populism that is not a symptom
but a way of governing. This is an institutional populism or, to emphasize
again the oxymoron, an antipopular state populism. Rancière showed this
very clearly. In the summary that currently seems to be aimed at popu-
list denunciation—the combination of “a style of communication that
directly addresses the people beyond its representatives and influential
people,” “the affirmation that governments and leading elites are more
6. Along this line, see, for example, Pierre Rosanvallon’s remarks that are both explicit and prudent in “Penser le populisme,” 5.
7. See the “three-fold populist simplification” according to Rosanvallon, “Penser le populisme,” 6–8.
concerned with their own interests rather than the public,” and “a rhet-
oric of identity that expresses a fear and rejection of foreigners”8—there
is no required relationship that “analytically” links one of these traits to
the other two. In addition, each of them can be found to a certain degree
in the discourse of the “government parties,” who apparently respect
representative institutions and the general interest. And the short-circu-
iting of political representation is also what executive powers do when
they govern by decree, dictate the legislative agenda to legislatures, and
docilely align themselves with supranational decisions that are imposed
outside of any control or popular legitimacy. This occurs even in cases
where governments oppose such decisions with an “antisystem” message,
a message that is supposed to satisfy the electorate, who are subjected to
demagogy when charisma fails.

Obviously state populism does not present itself as populist. It has to
be metapopulist, similar to what has been called “metaracism” or “metan-
ationalism.”9 In analyzing the current forms of state racism at play within
French legislation on immigration over the last two decades, Rancière _
summarizes the discursive sequence as follows:
V
There are problems of delinquency and various nui- _
sances caused by immigrants and the undocumented that
may provoke racism if we fail to enforce good order. These
delinquencies and nuisances must therefore be submitted
to the universality of law so they do not create racist distur-
bances. It’s a game that has been played, on the left and the
right, since the Pasqua-Méhaignerie laws of 1993. It con-
sists in opposing the universal logic of the rational state to
popular passions, in order to give the state’s racist policies a
certificate of antiracism.10
In short, the state has to be slightly racist to avoid having a lot of

people give in to the desire to be completely racist, and in the end, it is
better to regulate popular xenophobia with xenophobic legislation rather
than let it go unhindered. It is only when the “privileged” are decried that
this state populism becomes integrated, and this more directly reveals its
affinity with the destruction of the social state and the establishment of
the contemporary neoliberal “nonstate state.” This has greatly mobilized
a certain representation of social rights, not as conquests of collective and
8. Rancière, La Haine de la démocratie, 80.

9. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject (New York: Verso, 1999), 397.
10. Jacques Rancière, “Racism: A Passion from Above,” trans. Jonathon Collerson. Accessed March 12, 2014 at http://mrzine.
monthlyreview.org/2010/ranciere230910.html. [Translator’s Note: Translation amended.]
labor struggles—“the social state” itself as “condensate of the relation of

power” (Poulantzas)—but as “benefits” graciously offered by the state to
encourage a period of healthy growth. This then leads to the possibility
that these rights can be presented not as rights, but as privileges from
which the popular classes will profit. Also, through the collusion of the
two targets traditionally charged with idleness—the wasps of the rentier
aristocracy and the proletarian loafers—the most disadvantaged can thus
be defined as “profiteers” who benefit from social services and protections
as unwarranted “advantages:” the social state becomes the ancien régime
of “postdemocratic” modernity. This rhetoric is rather crude, to be sure,
but it has the iniquitous effect of presenting the loss of social rights and
the social insurance system not only as a requirement of “accounting”
(possibly accompanied by the usual justification of having to convince

the beneficiaries of the superiority of work over laziness), but also, as a
fair measure for ensuring the equality of the people, the elimination of the
“benefits” that make this people, who are always decidedly too lazy and
_ privileged, unequal with the rest of society.
VI THE BECOMING-MINOR OF THE PEOPLE

_ AND MAJORITARIAN STRATEGY
With this in mind, the analyses of Deleuze and Guattari are inter-
esting in that they make several assertions that help to account for the
establishment of this paradoxical antipopular state populism, at the same
time that there was an increase, during the 1970s, in opinions concerning
the “majoritarian strategy”11 (or, in Laclau’s terms, of a “constitutive pop-
ulism” with a counterhegemonic strategy). This crisis, which Deleuze
expresses repeatedly in several books as “the people is missing,” comes at
the point where two historical and political processes cross and become
interlinked:
a/ The development of a governmentality by “majoritarian con-
sensus,” which Deleuze and Guattari understood to be not merely the
processes regulating class conflicts, which the structures of the social state
that emerged in the postwar compromise created, but also the efface-
ment of the forms of conflict they reveal through processes that satisfy
the “postdemocratic” liberal utopia.12 This utopia involves the mutual
management of social and economic allocations in order to guarantee
the effacement not only of the people, but even of what it is missing—
including the “elimination of its name,” says Rancière. He says that “the
11. I am borrowing this distinction between majoritarian strategy and minoritarian strategy from Étienne Balibar, Violence et civilité
(Paris: Galilée, 2010), 176–190.
12. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota,
1999), 101–102.
declared state of emptiness or disintegration is just as much a state of

saturation of the community by the detailed counting of its parts and
the specular relationship whereby each part engages with the whole.”13
It is in this “postdemocratic democracy” that the majority/minorities
distinction plays a central role. Deleuze and Guattari remind us that,
while an appeal to consensus always lays claim to a “majoritarian fact,”
this fact can only be sustained by a state of domination that is able to
create a hegemony out of a normative system that constitutes the “abnor-
malities” itself, which it then selects and discriminates against unequally.
This consensus is thus immediately caught in a tension. On the one
hand, it eliminates the very possibility of any conflict, whose instances
of political representation organize this “normalization” by neutralizing,
in the interest of an apparent majority, any opposing partiality.14 On the

other hand, it correspondingly multiplies the number of minoritarian
“statuses” that are simultaneously said to be abnormal in relation to the
“majoritarian fact” and are thus unequally recognized as “subsystems.”
These differential games of inclusion and exclusion located below con- _
flictual thresholds enable the national-capitalist state to maintain the ini-
tiative of “class ruptures.” They themselves thus become ways to “select VII
the integratable elements.”15 Hence the reference to Mario Tronti, and _
to the “strategy of refusal” as the only subtraction able to reconstitute an
opposing partiality.16
b/ But this configuration becomes that much more unstable in that it
continues to be overdetermined by a second process. This process reflects
Deleuze and Guattari’s perception, at the end of the 1970s, that capi-
talist globalization was becoming repolarized as the period of self-cen-
tered growth of Western states and the struggles of decolonization was
coming to an end, along with the hegemonization of capitalist govern-
mentalities, in their division and their social-liberal and neoliberal com-
plementarity.17 I will simply mention two major correlated aspects. The
first involves the destruction of the “centrality of labor” (the “subtraction
of the axioms of employment”). In this regard, the transformations in the
organic composition of capital and labor processes, and the deregulatory
policies concerning the condition of wages which served to stabilize the
13. Rancière, Disagreement, 114 (and Rancière, by adding that such an “equivalence of emptiness and fullness” can only have the
effect of an absolutizing of what cannot be made political of the imaginary other: Rancière, Disagreement, 115–119).
14. On this leitmotif, see for example Gilles Deleuze, “Un Manifeste de moins,” in Superpositions, by Carmelo Bene and Gilles
Deleuze (Paris: Minuit, 1979), 121–122ff.
15. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987), 468–469.
16. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 472.
17. Regarding this bipolarization, its conceptualization in terms of “adjunctions” and “subtractions of axioms,” and the way in which
it connects the geopolitical map of contemporary states and the distribution of “primitive” and “enlarged” techniques of accumula-
tion, see Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc, Politique et État chez Deleuze et Guattari. Essai sur le matérialisme historico-machinique (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 2013), 174–188, 205–214.
postwar compromise, “released” “‘masses’ of the population [who] are

abandoned to erratic work (subcontracting, temporary work, or work in
the underground economy), and their official subsistence is assured only
by State allocations and wages subject to interruption.”18 But it was the
corollary of a greater process involving the movement of the location of
capital that changed the unequal distribution of primitive accumulation
procedures within globally expanding accumulation, or rather, that rein-
cluded them in the historical center of capitalist accumulation, such that
it could even be said in certain respects that the periph-
ery and the center exchange determinations: a deterritori-
alization of the center, a decoding of the center in relation
to national and territorial aggregates, cause the peripheral

formations to become true centers of investment, while the
central formations peripheralize. . . . The more the world-
wide axiomatic installs high industry and highly industrial-
_ ized agriculture at the periphery, provisionally reserving for
the center so-called postindustrial activities . . . , the more
VIII it installs peripheral zones of underdevelopment inside the
_ center, internal Third Worlds, internal Souths.19
The effects of such a process are clearly very critical. This is first
because of the ambiguity of this “internal” periphery. These are minor-
itized populations and territories, unequally integrated into “subsystems”
by the more or less insecure recognition of statuses. Or they were purely
and simply relegated to being “outside the system,” to the condition of an
overpopulation that is almost absolute. But they could also be peoples or
states, as the financial crisis affirmed by precipitating and radicalizing the
hierarchical structure of internal domination between European states.20
The “minor,” in its traditional legal sense, currently recognizes itself as the
one who does not “know” how “to manage” its public debt. Many dispa-
rate but convergent elements thus have to be brought together to justify
the guardianship of such a child-people: the disqualification of elected
representatives; the subjugation of the government to “experts” and deci-
sion makers without any popular legitimacy; the infantilization of the
population with a mix of guilt and lack of responsibility; the combina-
tion of class racism and “European,” “eastern,” or “southern” “racism;”
the pinning of inabilities one after the other on “structural delays” and
18. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 469.
19. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 468–469. See Étienne Balibar’s formulation of this “generalized colonial hypothe-
sis,” or of an interior recolonization by capitalism of its own “center,” Violence et civilité, 140ff.
20. See Étienne Balibar, “Réflexions sur la crise européenne en cours,” Transeuropéennes, July 28, 2010, http://www.transeurop-
eennes.eu/fr/articles/227/Reflexions_sur_la_crise_europeenne_en_cours.
“cultural archaisms;” and so forth. Clearly, “the situation seems inextri-

cable because the axiomatic never ceases to create all of these problems,
while at the same time its axioms, even multiplied, deny it the means
of resolving them,” and “the opposition between the axiomatic and the
flows it does not succeed in mastering becomes all the more accentuat-
ed.”21 These are seen as “nondenumerable” or “undecidable” sets, which
makes governmentality based on the split between majority and minor-
ities increasingly untenable. In effect, this governmentality has to deal
with not only the minoritarian statuses which it must itself increase, but
also with the fact that the methods of subjectivization and identification
that are supposed to match them tend themselves to become less and less
identifiable, or to become increasingly more difficult to assign to unam-
biguous “characteristics.”22
From this, then, comes the separation—essential to the minoritarian
strategy of Deleuze and Guattari—between “the minority” as “state” and
the becoming-minor as a process whereby “states,” either majoritarian or
minoritarian, become indistinguishable from one another. Or to say it _
in the opposite way: “A minority already begins to be normalized when
it is closed in upon itself, and is described as being part of the good IX
old days (it is thus made a subcomponent of the majority).” Yet this _
normalization must then pass through increasingly brutal stages during
which its identity is summoned and questioned. The more that minori-
ties (according to the topical phrasings of A Thousand Plateaus) become
“imperceptible” because they are “everybody,” the more there is the need
for additional visible stigmatization and segregation to identify them in
order to set them apart and make them “denumerable.” But this is also
true in that this minoritarian multiplicity, in its quantitative and qualita-
tive tendency (minorities become “masses” and therefore “undecidable”),
correspondingly implies that “the majority” itself becomes unassignable
and almost empty. This happens to such a degree that “at this point,
everything is reversed”23 (a reversal determined by historical circumstances,
and not simply one that is logical), and the majority becomes “Nobody.”
These are the two correlated aspects of “undecidable propositions” or of
“nondenumerable sets.” On the one hand, the “majoritarian fact,” which
is supposed to follow from a hegemonic state, tends to become the fact
of nobody, causing the majority to become a pure signifier devoid of
the “oligarchic State of law,”24 or an empty reference to an apparently
omnipotent technocracy that “would impose the necessary economic
21. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 468–469.
22. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 471–472 (“The axiomatic manipulates only denumerable sets, even infinite ones,
whereas the minorities constitute ‘fuzzy,’ nondenumerable, nonaxiomizable sets,” 470).
23. Gilles Deleuze, “Philosophie et minorité,” Critique 369 (February 1978): 154–155.
24. Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, 79ff.
redeployment from above.”25 The majority itself thus tends, by a kind

of catachresis with its first legal meaning, to be treated like a minoritas
placed under the protective or authoritarian guardianship (therefore,
despotic in the traditional sense of the word) of the national-capitalistic
state, when this state is not itself under the guardianship of an even more
despotic supranational “governance.” On the other hand, minorities do
not participate in the becoming-minor that affects both the normative
coordinates of the majority and the minoritarian identities. In other
words, the fact that the “minoritarian” tends to become the “becom-
ing-minoritarian of everybody” means it is becoming less and less pos-
sible to define who are the minorities,26 and that at best (this is the same
movement to the limit made by Deleuze and Guattari), the minoritarian
can only be defined as the set of transformations that undefine these iden-
tifications (“what is proper to the minority is to assert the power of the
nondenumerable”).
Finally this double movement—in which the majority tends to
_ become “nobody,” and the minoritarian to be the “becoming of every-
body”—results in transforming the forms of alterity, or more precisely,
X according to Deleuze and Guattari, in inscribing it within an irreducible
_ ambiguity between the political enemy and the impolitic anomie. While
the polarization of economic conditions, social statuses, symbolic affili-
ations or identities, and territorial belongings are becoming less able to
be superimposed upon one another, this ambiguity can only be resolved
by a forcing expressed by the figure (which is itself essentially duplici-
tous) of an impolitic enemy. It is an absolutized enemy, “theologized,”
as the threat to a “civilizational” identity that appeals to a “macropolitics
of security;” but it is also any enemy, “molecularized,” unspecified, one
that is essentially movable due to the instrumentalization of a “micropo-
litics of insecurity.”27 These are the two modalities of antipopular state
populism and they are interconnected. These are also the two modalities
for the destruction of the people: “Everyone lays claim to the people, in
the name of majoritarian language, but where is the people? ‘The people
is what is lacking.’”28 But it is lacking for two related reasons. First, its
effacement has been orchestrated by the management of the majoritarian
consensus, and second, this management is unable to maintain the fic-
tion of that majority. It then becomes an empty referent around which
are arranged a suprapolitical identity to be “defended” and any minorities
focusing on an infrapolitical microfascism.
25. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “May 1968 Did Not Take Place,” in Two Regimes of Madness, ed. David Lapoujade, trans.
Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 233–236.
26. Compare with Étienne Balibar, La Crainte des masses (Paris: Galilée, 1997), 426–430 and 451–452.
27. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 216 and 536.
28. Deleuze, “Un Manifeste de moins,” 126.
THE DIVISION WITHIN POPULISM, THE STORYTELLING

OF THE PEOPLE, AND MINORITARIAN STRATEGY
In this double relationship, we can see that the problem is not so
much that the “people is what is lacking,” but that this lack becomes
impracticable so long as the people is identified with the majority, and
the majority identifies itself with the empty point of interpellation in
whose name an authoritarian government functions as it disaffiliates the
minoritized peoples. This situation, however, at the time when Deleuze
and Guattari were first trying to analyze it, must have seemed suffi-
ciently contradictory in order for this “lack” to continue to appear as
such. In other words, the name of the people, or its fiction as a symbolic
operator of struggles for emancipation, would again become available
in some way, even if in very ambiguous conditions. On the one hand,

Deleuze would always defend the idea that in such a situation, the fic-
tion of the people could only be brought back into play from a minor-
itarian perspective, requiring an internal twisting of the expression of
emancipation: it always involves “leaving the state of the minority,” but _
not to enter into another state (the majority), but to gain an autonomy
that is entirely involved in the intransitive process of that leaving itself, XI
“between” the major and minor states. In places where liberal govern- _
mentalities claimed to realize democracy by actualizing the people as
a majority, that is, by annulling the people as a fiction, any struggle
for emancipation can only pass through an act of “creation through
storytelling” as the “invention of a future people.” In other words, it
involves the performance of a nonexistent people as a potentiality whose
current conditions are not given, but concerning which no Messianism
seems able to announce its future arrival.29 This is the correlate of an
analysis of the historical circumstances, and not the result of a purely
theoretical choice or a speculative deduction. On the other hand, no
“minoritarian strategy” can fail to recognize—in an economic situation
where the oligarchic power centers have decidedly hardened both at
the state/national level and the supranational level of the governance of
the “Troika”—that the majoritarian strategy has rediscovered its most
pressing need. This leads to the construction of an antagonistic par-
tiality that unites a counterhegemony by reactivating the master-sig-
nifiers of popular sovereignty, unconditioned equality, and solidarity,
and by collectively embodying them. Yet it should be noted here that
such a majoritarian strategy, if it is to have any chance of producing
significant change in the balance of power, will need to pass through
populist forms and moments, even though nothing in these forms or
29. See Igor Krtolica, “Art et politique mineurs chez Gilles Deleuze. L’impossibilité d’agir et le peuple manquant dans le cinéma,”
Silène (December 2010), http://www.revue-silene.comf/index.php?sp=comm&comm_id=25.
moments can guarantee a priori any move toward emancipation.30 From

this point of view, generic definitions of populism, in terms of “style” or
“rhetoric” mentioned earlier, are even less satisfying in that they avoid
the following crucial fact: differences in ideological platform, in mili-
tant and organizational practices, in relation to the institutions and the
perception of the European space, and last but not least, in the class
content of the political and economic transformations called upon by
various mass movements, do not create a content that leaves an invari-
able “populist form” unchanged. Instead, they create discrepancies that
allow populism only to be approached as a political dynamic subject to
conflictual tendencies, thereby forming a space full of internal struggles
that may adjust its direction and democratize it from within.31 In short,
the problem is not to exorcize the populist simulacrum; on the contrary,

it may be to consider populism as a political form in the full sense of
the term. This would in any case be the best reason to recognize that,
just like any other political form, it cannot render itself immune to its
_ own reactionary tendencies simply by justifying its cause or the goal of
its struggle. The minoritarian problematic thus has to be reimagined
XII from within.
_ Expressing it in this way at least allows us to question the constitution
of a populism of division, not only of the people against the “elites” or
the “oligarchy” (any populism inscribes itself discursively in this divide,
and refers to an “enemy of the people”), but also of one that is able to
divide populism itself. To divide populism first means to undo the nation-
al-populist synthesis which, in the same “antisystem” discourse, discredits
the ruling elites, rejects any institutional mediation other than a “puri-
fied” state community, and links these to xenophobic nationalism and its
“internal extension” into intra-European racism. But this struggle cannot
be disassociated from several tasks. a/ It implies unlinking the affirmation
of the sovereignty of the people from the idea of national belonging, and,
therefore, replacing unconditioned equality or the fact that anybody is
politically capable as the only condition for participating in ruling. This
dimension of intensive universality of “anybody” or of whoever is exactly
what can be found at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s minoritarian
strategy. This intensive universality is not given but must instead be
constructed by specific operations and subjectivized by specific experi-
ments. For example, “to tell a story [fabuler] of a future people” specif-
ically involves causing the political fiction of a people to work against
30. See Étienne Balibar’s suggestion regarding the need for a “European populism,” and the points concerning this expression he
invented after the fact: “Europe: crise et fin?” (May 2010), http://blogs.mediapart.fr/blog/etienne-balibar/240510/europe-crise-et-fin;
and Balibar, “Réflexions sur la crise européenne en cours”.
31. See Balibar, “Réflexions sur la crise européenne en cours;” and Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc “De l’hégémonie sans classe à la
politique comme représentation (la ‘construction du peuple’ selon Laclau),” Tumultes 40 (June 2013): 275–295.
identifications recognized objectively and subjectively as “real” (social,

cultural, ethnic), as a kind of transfer that includes the becoming of an
“other” as power of disidentification of self.32 These “minor alliances”
or “double-becomings” are then the very conquest of an intensive uni-
versality, or the way in which a “consciousness of minority as becom-
ing-universal” of “everybody” begins to subjectivize the political ability
of “anybody.” b/ It also involves untying the question of the European
Union’s exit (a central question, but one that opposes the different polit-
ical Lefts of Europe, as much in relation to its short-term feasibility as to
its repercussions over the longer term, within each country where it is on
the agenda), and the question of solidarity between the peoples resisting
their scheduled, deliberately imposed elimination, which is increasingly
applied in an authoritarian way. This means struggling against European

racism that combines Europe’s “southern question” and its “eastern ques-
tion” with the processes of internal colonization and peripheralization.
But this may again be a reason to reimagine the problems of a minori-
tarian strategy, in a disjunctive relationship included in the majoritarian _
strategy itself. The more neoliberal and social-liberal governmentalities are
driven to adopt authoritarian procedures, the more the populist vector of XIII
an alternative hegemonic strategy should paradoxically include—except _
to internally crush any dynamic of radical democratization—a minori-
tarian strategy that is able to combat the attempt to make national and
populist elements equivalent and thereby transform the enemy of the
European people into any enemy (Roma and elites, Greeks and markets,
immigrants and financial oligarchy, and so forth.).
Such tasks point to more than an extrinsic critique of populism and
indicate a counterpopulism, that is, an internal minoritization of its
function. With Deleuze himself, traces of this “minoritarian populism”
can be found: the systematic critique of “representation” as a tool used
to normalize and neutralize any antagonistic boundary, in the name of
a “storytelling function of the poor;” or else the oft-debated critique of
spokespersons, or the questioning function of the political organization
and of its leaders and intellectual “elites.”33 But becoming-minoritarian,
like mass becoming, shifts the oppositions in which these criticisms
are traditionally located. When Deleuze calls for an “antirepresentative
function,” it is certainly not to return to a fantasy that fuses together
an immediate full body (this is a real opposition, but entirely internal
32. On the theory of “double-becomings,” see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 291–298; and on its relation to a “story-
telling function of the poor,” see Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: The
Athlone Press, 1989), 215–225.
33. Deleuze’s major text on the function of intellectuals that today would be called “subaltern,” remains the one on Third World
filmmakers: Cinema 2. The Time-Image, 147ff, and 234ff. Unfortunately, it is never read in this way (see especially the way in which
it is misunderstood in Gayatri Spivak’s critique during her famous presentation, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”).
to the majoritarian strategy). When he contests the claims of “speaking

for,” this does not impose any excessive idealization of the open spon-
taneity of subalterns.34 In fact, for Deleuze, the problem of “speaking
‘for’” the dominated (and thus to make them more visible than they
might otherwise have been, but at the risk of their being unheard by
again supplanting their “place”) has always been very secondary com-
pared to what he considers the much more urgent problem of knowing
how “to speak ‘through’” them, or how they themselves make the intel-
lectual, theoretician, or artist speak (or write, or paint, or film) when
they forego their enunciative independence, and make these ones study
the specific stylistic operations that caused this political alteration to
be heard within the dominant form of expression (for example, the
interest in the handling of free indirect discourse to the detriment of

self-referential forms of enunciation). More generally, the problem is,
in each case, to make space for experimental spaces able to produce ana-
lytical and critical effects concerning discursive, intellectual, and affec-
_ tive semiotizations that would constitute a collective agent, “People.”
The fact that Deleuze sought them primarily in artistic practices also
XIV reminds us that, while majoritarian populism has to realize the people,
_ make it a reality (or in analytic terms, provide an imaginary consistency
to its symbolic fiction), it necessarily requires resources we could gen-
erally call “aesthetic,” that cannot be reduced to the idealization of the
“popular,” but that must in one way or another give a presence to this
denied people.35 Only the countertendency of a minoritarian populism
can be satisfied with derealizing the “cultural,” “ethnic” people seeking
an identity, in the name of a democratic fiction that is apparently
already available. What Deleuze calls telling the story of the fiction of
the people, does not simply mean to implement the symbolic operator
of the dispute (fiction is the name given to the political ability of those
“without ability”); it is this act of challenging the “model of truth” that
continues to uphold the fiction itself. The model of the truth of the fic-
tion of the people remains, willingly or unwillingly, the national-state
institution, and as long as the model of truth is not affected, “fiction
is inseparable from a ‘reverence’ which presents it as true.”36 To call
for a story telling of the political fiction of the people, rather than an
abstract negation of its representation, is to problematize the fact that it
34. A comparable simplification caused Ranajit Guha’s thesis regarding an “autonomy of the subaltern consciousness” to be accused
of being “populist” (Jacques Pouchepadass, “Les Subaltern studies ou la critique postcoloniale de la modernité,” L’Homme 156
(October–December 2000): 161–185).
35. People have often pointed to a characteristic of populism, which connects its artistic and literary movement to its political
meaning, its idealization of the “good people” to “pure” morals, as to a healthy, robust body. We should also not forget the equally
systematic “pathologization” that minoritized or “subalternized” people have been and continue to be subjected to, as Gramsci
already emphasized (Cahiers de prison, 25, § 1, French trans. R. Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 305).
36. Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, 150.
has been forced to be implemented beyond national-state frameworks,

which would circumscribe its very possibility:
It is not only to eliminate the fiction, but to free it from

the model of truth that fills it, and find instead the pure
and simple storytelling function that opposes this model.
The opposite of fiction is not the real, the truth that is
always that of the masters or the colonizers. Rather, it is the
storytelling function of the poor.37
It could then be that the European people—that other necessary fic-

tion, but one that is always subject to a model of truth that makes it diffi-
cult to practice, and, therefore, that other “people that is lacking”—finds

itself in a situation close to the character in the “cinema of minorities”
who had the difficult task of storytelling as Deleuze conceived it twenty
years ago:
_
The character must first of all be real if he is to affirm
fiction as a power and not as a model: he has to start to XV
tell stories in order to affirm himself all the more as real _
and not fictional. The character is continually becoming
another, and is no longer separable from this becoming
which merges with a people.38 ■
Guillaume SIBERTIN-BLANC is university lecturer at Université de Toulouse-Jean Jaurès.

His work focuses on French philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century, in its relations
with the humanities and changes in political thought. His publications include Philosophie poli-
tique XIX–XXe siècles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009), Deleuze et l’Anti-Œdipe. La
production du désir (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010), and La Politique et l’État chez
Deleuze et Guattari (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013).
ABSTRACT
This article begins with a discussion of the frequently noted indeterminate nature of the notion or
concept of populism, and even of its effective reality, and offers a symmetrical inquiry examining
the current radicalization of a paradoxical “antipopular state populism.” With this in mind, the
aim is, therefore, to reread the analyses put forward by Deleuze and Guattari of the contradictory
processes affecting the forms of “governmentality” by looking at the idea of “majority consensus.”

These forms have since come to be qualified as “postdemocratic” or “postpolitical.” This leads the
author to reconsider the terms of a “minority strategy” within a larger hypothesis, one which is,
however, determined by the current European situation. According to this hypothesis, the task
involved in the critique of populism can only be realized by looking at the concept’s internal politi-
cization. This occurs in other works in which populism is rethought as a full-fledged political form
requiring a problematization of power relations and of which it can be the site. This will address,
at least as an open question, the issue of the “democratization of populism,” which could possibly
split the notion from within. This split occurs when populism cannot simply be dealt with by
critiquing the notion extrinsically.
_
XVI
_

From Democratic Simulacrum To The Fabulation of The People: Minority Populism

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FROM DEMOCRATIC SIMULACRUM TO THE FABULATION OF

THE PEOPLE: MINORITY POPULISM

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FROM DEMOCRATIC SIMULACRUM

fuse in their base to blur boundaries, whether they be sociological, eco-

structural “incompleteness,”2 of its possible “perversions” or its recog-

paradox of a “state populism,” which, as is becoming increasingly clear,

FROM DEMOCRATIC SIMULACRUM TO METAPOPULISM

a concept and as a phenomenon, between the uncertainty of populism

due to the fact it is too realistic. By insisting on realizing the fiction of

demagogy when charisma fails.

In short, the state has to be slightly racist to avoid having a lot of

8. Rancière, La Haine de la démocratie, 80.

labor struggles—“the social state” itself as “condensate of the relation of

(possibly accompanied by the usual justification of having to convince

VI THE BECOMING-MINOR OF THE PEOPLE

declared state of emptiness or disintegration is just as much a state of

in the interest of an apparent majority, any opposing partiality.14 On the

postwar compromise, “released” “‘masses’ of the population [who] are

to national and territorial aggregates, cause the peripheral

“cultural archaisms;” and so forth. Clearly, “the situation seems inextri-

redeployment from above.”25 The majority itself thus tends, by a kind

THE DIVISION WITHIN POPULISM, THE STORYTELLING

in some way, even if in very ambiguous conditions. On the one hand,

moments can guarantee a priori any move toward emancipation.30 From

the problem is not to exorcize the populist simulacrum; on the contrary,

identifications recognized objectively and subjectively as “real” (social,

applied in an authoritarian way. This means struggling against European

to the majoritarian strategy). When he contests the claims of “speaking

interest in the handling of free indirect discourse to the detriment of

has been forced to be implemented beyond national-state frameworks,

It is not only to eliminate the fiction, but to free it from

It could then be that the European people—that other necessary fic-

cult to practice, and, therefore, that other “people that is lacking”—finds

Guillaume SIBERTIN-BLANC is university lecturer at Université de Toulouse-Jean Jaurès.

37. Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, 150.

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