This interview is based on Sebastián Ronderos and Emmy Eklundh’s article ‘Does populism challenge the status quo? Understanding transgression and subversion in contemporary politics’
Ronderos, S., & Eklundh, E. (2026). Does populism challenge the status quo? Understanding transgression and subversion in contemporary politics. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481261468033.
This interview was conducted by Alex Yates.
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In this paper, you demonstrate how political actions that feel transgressive can, actually, reinforce the status quo. How should we understand this paradox?
The paradox largely disappears once we stop imagining norms as fences: either we obey them or we knock them down. Norms also organise enjoyment. They shape what feels forbidden, desirable, outrageous, even pleasurable, and sometimes we become attached to a norm precisely through practices which seem to suspend it. The thrill of doing what you have been told you must not do, or what you have internalised yourself as a taboo, requires the sense prohibition; remove the limit and part of the pleasure disappears with it. Norm and transgressive enjoyment are, in this sense, co-constitutive rather than simply opposed. Here we turn against much scholarship and debate on transgression, which seems to believe that it is always challenging the status quo.
Psychoanalysis pushes this further with one of its strangest and most instructive claims: we enjoy our symptoms. There is often an unauthorised pleasure lodged in the very thing we say we want to destroy, and that pleasure binds us to what we oppose. Adorno and Horkheimer saw this in the anti-Semite, who condemns the Jew as excessive and theatrical yet rehearses those very traits with visible pleasure in the act of denunciation. Our point here is that without attending to the contradictory dynamics of our libidinal attachments we might call something radical when it, affectively speaking, is reinforcing the norm.
Our argument is not that transgression is politically irrelevant. We cannot think society without it, let alone the attachments which give way to social bonds. But if we do not question the libidinal foundations of political performances and social practices, we risk reinvesting our own analytic energy in the very thrills that sustain the status quo, while paying too little attention to other processes unfolding around us that do bear subversive potential. Transgression has no automatic emancipatory politics built into it. Sometimes the most spectacular rebellion is one of the ways an existing order keeps its hold.
You discuss how contemporary populist formations have often upheld the status quo, rather than challenging it. What have been some of the key stumbling blocks which have prevented left-wing populism, in particular, from being subversive?
Populism studies has rightly debated how to distinguish emancipatory from reactionary forms of transgression. Distinguishing transgression from subversion is our way of giving that debate its libidinal foundations. One danger is assuming that because a politics comes from the left, with values openly declared to stand for social inclusion, its transgressions are somehow more likely to be subversive. This is a temptation we want to resist. The political question is not who breaks the rule, but what happens to the structure of attachment that made the rule powerful in the first place.
Take Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias declaring on radio that ‘feminist men fuck better’. It is provocative and unmistakably taboo-breaking. Yet the provocation still revolves around a familiar masculine fantasy: the virile leader whose political credentials are partly certified through sexual desirability. The content changes, feminism is affirmed, but the libidinal coordinates of masculinity prove remarkably resilient. Jean-Luc Mélenchon presents a different problem. His 2017 strategy tried to take signifiers associated with the right, particularly the nation, and rearticulate them towards a progressive project. But signifiers do not arrive empty of affective history. As Reid Kleinberg has shown, you can change the programme attached to ‘the nation’ without dislodging the chauvinist fantasy through which some audiences already enjoy it. We want to stress that, while co-constitutive, fom and force are not the same. So we would put the stumbling block this way: certain leftist forms, and norm-breaking practices, can and often do revitalise the affective mediation of our attachments with existing social norms, and these norms are often situated within a reactionary landscape.
Rosa Parks helps us see the difference. Her refusal certainly violated a legally-enforced racial norm, but its force did not derive from the spectacle of breaking a taboo. There is something stubbornly ordinary about the gesture: the demand that she stand simply ceased to be obvious, and the rule suddenly appeared contingent, as something that could be refused. That is closer to what we mean by subversion. It need not be louder or more scandalous than transgression; often it is less spectacular and perhaps because of it it sustains less scholarly attention. Transgression makes the limit exciting. Subversion makes the limit lose its necessity. We speak of transgression and subversion as different logics, which of course get entangled in inpure ways in our social life.
In your previous co-authored work, you have highlighted how antagonism — the ‘us’ vs ‘them’ dynamics which are constitutive of political identities — need not be directed against an enemy but can, instead, be about overcoming a past version of ourselves. How does this distinction between internally and externally directed antagonism relate to discussions around subversion and transgression?
The two distinctions are related, but we should resist mapping them onto each other one-to-one. External antagonism can be part of subversive politics, and internal antagonism does not automatically make a politics progressive, or emancipatory or otherwise. What matters, again, is what happens at the level of our attachments.
A great deal of reactionary politics gives antagonism a reassuringly external form: someone – the migrant, the elite, the ‘woke’ institution – has taken something from us, and removing the obstacle promises to restore our wholeness. Psychoanalysis calls this the fantasy of stolen enjoyment, and transgression fits very comfortably within it. We can insult elites, storm institutions, delight in saying the supposedly unsayable, all while leaving the fantasy untouched. The reactionary politics of Trump excels at this – they break the law to reinforce the racial-capitalist order. Transgression may make it more pleasurable, for that matter. Internally directed antagonism introduces a different possibility. If what has to be overcome is also something in us – our habits, inherited identities, previous modes of enjoyment – then politics can no longer be organised solely around recovering something stolen. The subject itself has to change. That comes much closer to what we mean by subversion, and to the psychoanalytic idea of traversing the fantasy.
The climate movement makes this vivid. Big Oil can of course be named as an adversary, with excellent reasons. But ecological politics becomes more demanding when the carbon-intensive way of life under challenge is recognised as something ‘we’ ourselves have participated in and often enjoyed. Part of what has to disappear is a version of ourselves. This is also why subversion rarely feels like triumphant liberation: it registers as disorientation, a slow migration of enjoyment towards new objects, solidarities, and ways of living together. It does not mean ceasing to enjoy, for there is no social life without enjoyment; it means learning to enjoy differently. The deepest political transformation may occur when the question ceases to be ‘who stole our enjoyment?’ and becomes ‘why are we still attached to enjoying in this way?’
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Dr Sebastián Ronderos is an FNRS Postdoctoral Researcher at the Université de Namur and Research Affiliate at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, and Professor of Political and Social Theory at FGV/EAESP in Brazil. His research advances an affect-based discourse theory to examine reactionary and radical politics, analyzing how affective investments and performative practices shape political identification across Latin America and Europe. His FNRS-funded project pioneers an audience-centred methodology, integrating collaborative ethnography, focus groups, and visual performance analysis. This work illuminates why certain figures and practices capture the political imagination, foregrounding the active role of publics in co-producing contemporary social meaning.
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 Europe’s Populist Condition (Bristol University Press 2026) as well as 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).
Sebastián and Emmy are members of the RPRN
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