Beyond Populist Borders: Embodiment and the People in Laclau's Political Ontology

Taking as a point of departure Ernesto Laclau's proposition that populism exposes the logic of the political, I explore how articulation and embodiment work in On Populist Reason. I argue that Laclau's model of meaning making set limits to the understanding of politics that are primarily embodied, such as those involving popular mobilizations, but also nationalist investments in border making. Ultimately, I propose some complementary keys for bridging his theory with questions of embodiment to account for the bodily dimension through which many antagonisms are currently mobilized as well as the uses of the body for making democratic claims.