Entre a democracia e a verdade: Laclau e o populismo

This essay aims to problematize the theory of populism by Ernesto Laclau (1935-2014) in the face of the frequent caricature of the term that ends up reducing it to a kind of generalized threat to the political field. Laclau delimits the democratic terrain in which a non-essentialist construction of the political as populism is inscribed using, for this purpose, rhetorical tools. In this sense, the relation between populism and democracy will be approached in two ways: first, considering the mostrecent interpretations by Nadia Urbinati (2019) and Pierre Rosanvallon (2020), and then, based on the concept of “parresía”, present in the two last courses by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France.Rhetoric appears as a constitutive characteristic of “bad parresía” and, at the same time, as the possibility offered by Laclau of the inscription of the people and the social as coherent objects. In this context, we will try to explain how populism, situated between democracy and truth, can beconsidered synonymous with “bad parresía” and what are the reflexes of this characterization in Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populism.