Identification and Aesthetic Transgression in Populism: Toward a Queer Theory of Sublimation

Abstract

This article rethinks the notion of identification in populism by linking psychoanalysis, aesthetics and queer theory. Against the widespread view that identification necessarily entails blindness or submission to authority, it proposes an emancipatory mode grounded in transgression, vulnerability, and openness to alterity. Conceiving populism as aesthetic transgression – a disruption of the boundaries of visibility – it revisits Freud and Lacan’s reflections on mass psychology and sublimation, while drawing on Arendt’s idea of aesthetic judgment and queer theory’s attention to indeterminacy and openness. Without denying the persistence of reactionary identifications that idealize authority, the article argues that sublimation, unlike idealization, sustains democratic plurality by keeping collective identifications open and incomplete. In this perspective, certain forms of populist identification may assume a queer or sublimatory dimension, fostering receptivity to difference and ethical decentering rather than closure – thus illuminating how aesthetic experience can underwrite more radically democratic relations to others.