Scielo RSS http://www.scielo.org.za/rss.php?pid=2415-047920220003&lang=en vol. 54 num. SPE lang. en http://www.scielo.org.za/img/en/fbpelogp.gif http://www.scielo.org.za http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2415-04792022000300001&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2415-04792022000300002&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en This paper addresses the relationship between populism and constitutional courts, with reference to the Latin American context. By means of a genealogical reconstruction of the ideas of populism and institucionalidad, we study how the debate on judicial activism has been taken up by populist politics. We introduce a theoretical model that sees in contemporary forms of populism a strategy to reparadoxify the legal system, denying courts the ability to protect the organisational autonomy of the judiciary. This is of interest because, in the last 30 years, the courts have represented a new field for the creation of democratic legitimacy, allowing minority groups to defend their political agendas through fundamental rights litigation. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2415-04792022000300003&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en The socio-political context in Serbia is oversaturated with ideologically charged resources utilised in the construction of populist identities, such as the semiotic network around the concept of 'fascism'. The practices of signifying a 'fascist' threat have become more complex with the surge of multimodal digital platforms. The media combine various expressive repertoires in materialising the multiplicity of meaning. Thus, social semiotics serve as a fitting theoretical starting point. One of the objectives of the research is to identify the plurality of discourses floating around the constructed 'fascist' constellation. In this research, content published on the websites of Serbian daily newspapers Danas and Informer is examined. The label 'fascist' functions as an exclusionary strategy in both instances; however, there are differences in portraying 'fascist' actors and institutional responses to its destructive potential. Moreover, respective styles and presentations of information, such as tabloidisation, are used to further legitimise the reality of the 'fascist' threat. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2415-04792022000300004&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en This paper builds upon the arguments advanced by Johnson and Frombgen in "Race and the Emergence of Populist Nationalism in the United States" (2009). Johnson and Frombgen made three central arguments: that the US is two nations, not one; that racial attitudes are central to each national identity, and that social movements of a populist character have critically shaped each national identity. They then offered a typology of left and right national identities, each of which had been shaped by populist social movements. This paper seeks to revisit the two nations thesis in the era of Donald Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left. Following Johnson and Frombgen, it employs the Gramscian theory of hegemony to analyse both populisms, the overarching nationalisms associated with them, and the place of race within each national identity. It goes on to examine the tensions within both traditional and progressive nationalism between the mainstream and populist hegemonic projects regarding the American nation. Thus, a typology revising Johnson and Frombgen's is also offered. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2415-04792022000300005&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en This paper provides an argument for the need to reconceptualise ecocritical concepts that have naively been regarded as central, and thus global, scholarly concepts. Focusing in particular on ecofascism, the paper argues that if forms of ecocriticism are to be explored in a Global South context, certain concepts associated with ecofascism and anti-progress in the Global North, such as nostalgia, need to be revisited. Such an attempt is made in this paper by introducing the concept of solastalgia to explain the intense dis-ease experienced by a loss of place (caused by, for instance, environmental destruction), and the consequent necessity for different kinds of responses and actions. By situating this study within the paradigm of critical ecosemiotics, focus is placed on the significance of locality (rather than globality) in understanding the relationship between nature and culture, and thereby re-addressing Western ecofascist critique. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2415-04792022000300006&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en After his commitment to the eventually failed defence of segregation in the United States during the 1960s, political scientist A. James Gregor (19292019) created an extensive oeuvre on the history of Fascism and its ideology. While personally remaining an éminence grise, his ideo-centric approach proved influential in international academic discussions. He helped foster an approach centred on the representation of ideological aspects of Fascism at the expense of the critical analysis of other historical elements, thus obscuring Fascism's societal roots. Moreover, Gregor's definition of Fascism, intrinsically linked to his understanding of a developmental dictatorship, blurs the line between colonialism and anticolonial struggles. In his works on Fascism in the Global South, written during the Cold War, Gregor does not find developmental regimes akin to the Mussolini dictatorship among the largely proWestern right-wing authoritarianisms that emerged in the Tricont, but rather within the largely left-wing national liberation fronts and the political systems they built up. This peculiar verdict is linked to Gregor's own apologia of historical Italian Fascism and more recent right-wing dictatorships in the so-called Third World, like, for instance, the Apartheid regime, and to his simultaneous denigration of anticolonial struggle as it was pursued i.a. by the anti-Apartheid movement. Through a critique of ideology which delineates and analyses Gregor's argument evolving around these themes, this article contests his political compass in his search for Fascism in a historical-critical manner and offers an alternative proposition on how to identify the historical and contemporary role of far-right politics in the world system of capitalism. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2415-04792022000300007&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en Traditionalism's most influential contemporary revival, Dugin's Eurasianism, is routinely characterised as being of the radical Right. The Decoloniality theory of Quijano, Mignolo and Ndlovu-Gatsheni, on the other hand, with its intellectual roots in Marxist dependency theory, presents itself as on the progressive Left. Yet, despite their different intellectual genealogies and drastically different reputations, both theoretical approaches have converged on a position with troubling practical consequences: epistemic ethnonationalism, the doctrine that which beliefs one should adopt and which concepts one should employ are determined by which ethnos/ethnie one belongs to. Both approaches deplore acceptance of Western beliefs and employment of Western concepts outside the West, both turn to existential phenomenology to ground their ethnorelativism, and both have influenced contemporary politics. I assess the theoretical underpinnings of both approaches, and argue that if neo-Traditionalism is to be classified as a Rightist body of thought, then Decoloniality theory ought also to be. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2415-04792022000300008&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en The continuing rise of right-wing populisms and fascism across the globe, mobilised by various factors such as the use of social technologies and the weaponisation of nationalism, xenophobia, sexism and racism - to name a few - provokes important questions in terms of resistance. Moreover, given that the lines between the new populisms and fascism are becoming increasingly nebulous, it is imperative that we at least attempt to better understand the conditions - including the more hauntological, which is to say historically and structurally invisibilised - from which algorithmic governmentality and its corollary, recursive conduct, are born. On that account, I unpack two understandings of fascism, first tracing it macropolitically through the work of Hannah Arendt and, thereafter, looking at its more micropolitical and libidinal aspects vis-à-vis the work of Deleuze and Guattari. I do so because it is my contention that there is a historical correlation between Arendt's theorisation of a generalised espionage and our contemporary surveillance systems, as well as between Deleuze and Guattari's theorisation of desire and the harnessing of affect through machine learning methods and their deployment via social media platforms, all of which aid the propagation of certain forms of populism - and even fascism. This is what I call algopopulism: algorithmically aided politics that transforms the 'we' into the 'they' through what can be thought of as recursive conduct or the digital exercise of power and its structuring of the field of possible action and thought. In turn, I link this to Stiegler's understanding of negative sublimation, a paralysis of the human spirit which occurs due to, among other things, the generalised proletarianisation of knowledge, ultimately provoking the short-circuiting of processes of transindividuation. Finally, I offer some notes on resistance. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2415-04792022000300009&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en Majoritarian regimes use perfectly legal and democratically uncensurable strategies to subordinate dissenters and unpopular minorities with the consent of their electorally significant mass of supporters. The anxieties ensuing from democratic subordination can be mitigated only through democratically workable participative cultural productions, the Hegelian concept of Bildung of the subordinated, recognised as legitimate by civil society and as uncensurable by the majoritarian state. Employing the illustrative case of Indian Muslims and Hegel's master-servant dialectic, this paper argues that the fragile essence of democracy itself must be understood in terms of the dialectical relation between the citizen's particularities and the state's universality. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2415-04792022000300010&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en The current paper explores the existential motivation for the formation of extremist echo chambers through a phenomenological analysis. We advance two claims. Firstly, following Ortega y Gasset, that virtuality is a constant framework for experience. And secondly, following Merleau-Ponty, that there is persistent embodiment in online spaces. On this account virtuality is a permanent feature of embodiment, existing prior to technological intervention while at the same time being modifiable by technological artefacts. Understanding virtuality in this way allows us to analyse the existential phenomenological characteristics of extremist echo chambers online. We argue that due to the persistence of embodiment throughout, and the restructuring of the virtual axes of experience, such online spaces can and do influence political praxis in offline spaces. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2415-04792022000300011&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en The current paper explores the existential motivation for the formation of extremist echo chambers through a phenomenological analysis. We advance two claims. Firstly, following Ortega y Gasset, that virtuality is a constant framework for experience. And secondly, following Merleau-Ponty, that there is persistent embodiment in online spaces. On this account virtuality is a permanent feature of embodiment, existing prior to technological intervention while at the same time being modifiable by technological artefacts. Understanding virtuality in this way allows us to analyse the existential phenomenological characteristics of extremist echo chambers online. We argue that due to the persistence of embodiment throughout, and the restructuring of the virtual axes of experience, such online spaces can and do influence political praxis in offline spaces. http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2415-04792022000300012&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en The current paper explores the existential motivation for the formation of extremist echo chambers through a phenomenological analysis. We advance two claims. Firstly, following Ortega y Gasset, that virtuality is a constant framework for experience. And secondly, following Merleau-Ponty, that there is persistent embodiment in online spaces. On this account virtuality is a permanent feature of embodiment, existing prior to technological intervention while at the same time being modifiable by technological artefacts. Understanding virtuality in this way allows us to analyse the existential phenomenological characteristics of extremist echo chambers online. We argue that due to the persistence of embodiment throughout, and the restructuring of the virtual axes of experience, such online spaces can and do influence political praxis in offline spaces.