POPULISM WITHOUT ADJECTIVES, OR, POLITICS BETWEEN HISTORY AND ONTOLOGY.

Seven Essays on Populism: For a Renewed Theoretical Perspective, written by the duo of Argentine philosophers Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia, is an audacious, lucid, and urgent book. It is also a text traversed by an unresolved tension between two approaches: a first, ontological approach, indebted not only to Martin Heidegger's thinking of ontological difference but also to the mobilisation of this difference in political theory in the work of Ernesto Laclau and Jorge Alemán; and a radically different, historical or conjunctural approach, for which the authors find inspiration in the evidential or indexical paradigm of Carlo Ginzburg. This review discusses the advantages and shortcomings of these two approaches, reading Biglieri and Cadahia's book, as it were, against itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]