This interview is based on Emmy Eklundh and Sebastián Ronderos’s article ‘Studying affect through discourse theory: Towards a methodology of practice‘ published in The Journal of Language and Politics (2025).
The interview was conducted by Alex Yates.
Why should people interesting in understanding the reactionary moment read your article?
Reactionary movements, just like other movements, express their politics in a variety of ways. However, the methods that we use to analyse them are very much focussed on text and language. We believe that this is limiting our understanding of these movements, and we want to place a larger emphasis on non-text-based methods. In the article, we offer the reader four principles to follow. First, we have to move beyond words and look also at other signifiers, such as music, art, video etc. Second, we cannot only count things to assess their importance – intensities must be taken into consideration too. It is different to set fire to yourself as a form of protest than to write a petition – not everything is quantifiable. Third, we want to turn the focus to policy. We find that many studies on reactionary movements look only at what they say, not at what they do. With so many reactionary politicians in power, policy is a central area of concern, and policy studies have to occupy a firm place in the study of reactionary movements. We use two examples to demonstrate how this can be done, the Just Stop Oil movement in the UK and the rise of Javier Milei in Argentina.
What role do affect and fantasy play in our current conjuncture?
Our fourth methodological principle contends that fantasy is a cipher that we must use to understand the creation of any political identity. Importantly, fantasy enables us to understand not only that we engage with different signifiers (such as the People or the Nation) but how we engage with them. Ultimately, we argue that for signifiers to be politically effective, they need affective investment, and this investment is connected to enjoyment. However, it is not the case that we only get enjoyment out of signifiers, they can also represent a theft of enjoyment, which is common in for instance how migration is depicted in mainstream media. Fantasy enables us to understand why some signifiers are more popular than others.
The article argues that many studies on political identities do not sufficiently recognise this, and that we need better tools to account for why some narratives and discourses gain such large traction – thinking of signifiers as needing phantasmatic investment is an excellent way to gain a deeper understanding. Importantly, it also points to the fact that truth is not the determining factor here: a fantasy does not need to be true to be politically effective.
The focus on fantasy has strong repercussions for the study of reactionary politics. If we consider enjoyment to be crucial to the construction of political identities, we must also reconsider the concept of antagonism. While this is often assumed to be something ‘external’ to political subjects, such as ‘migrants’ or the ‘elite’ we contend that the antagonist could also be closer to home. It could be our former selves or our future selves that steal our enjoyment in the present. As such, reactionary movements must be posited not only against an external ‘Other’ but also the ‘Other’ within.
‘Identities’ and ‘identity politics’ have become favoured straw men on the right, how should we understand them?
This article is very firmly convinced that all politics is identity politics. After all, most contemporary reactionary political parties or movements seem supremely concerned with their identities (think only of the arguments made by JD Vance in his ‘Hillbilly elegy’). Therefore, to label identity politics as woke is a big mistake since we are all doing it.
For us, the very definition of politics is the contention over how different political identities are conceptualised and legitimised. What is considered a valid identity and what is not? This is where politics happens.
This does not mean that the fantasy of identity politics cannot be mobilised for reactionary purposes. As mentioned above, something does not have to be true for it to be politically salient. For instance, reactionary movements have been working overtime to deny legitimacy to some political identities, such as the trans community or ‘illegal’ immigrants: they are simply not recognised as valid actors.
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Dr Emmy Eklundh is a Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University. She is interested in populist parties and movements, particularly on the left. She is the author of Emotions, Protest, Democracy: Collective Identities in Contemporary Spain (Routledge 2019) and the editor of the volumes Politics of Anxiety and The Populist Manifesto (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017 and 2020). Her next monograph entitled Europe’s Populist Condition will be published by Bristol University Press in 2025.
Dr. Sebastián Ronderos is a Colombian and Spanish professor of Politics at the Getulio Vargas Foundation. Grounded in a post-Marxist, Lacanian-inspired discourse theory approach, Dr. Ronderos’s research operates at the intersection of rhetoric and policy. Specifically, his work delves into the discourses and practices through which political identities are (dis)articulated, examining their normative, ideological, and institutional impacts. His research contributes to various fields, including reactionary politics, populism studies, political participation, theories of democracy and ideology, and communication studies.
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