An entirely empty signifier yields fragile popular unity held by leader love alone

Evidence

At this point, however, it is necessary to introduce some distinctions. The role of Pope that Perón attributed to himself (which so neatly evokes Lacan’s notion of ‘master-signifier’) could be conceived in various ways. In the first place, it could be seen as a centre of equivalential irradiation which, however, does not entirely lose the particularity of its original content. To go back to a previous example: the demands of Solidarność became the rallying point of equivalential associations vaster than themselves, but they were still linked to a certain programmatic content – it was precisely that contact which made it possible to maintain a certain coherence between the particularities integrating the chain (the lower semi-circles in our first diagram; see p. 130 above). But there is another possibility: that the tendentially empty signifier becomes entirely empty, in which case the links in the equivalential chain do not need to cohere with each other at all: the most contradictory contents can be assembled, as long as the subordination of them all to the empty signifier remains. To go back to Freud: this would be the extreme situation in which love for the father is the only link between the brothers. The political consequence is that the unity of a ‘people’ constituted this way is extremely fragile. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 430

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Seizing power destroys the ambiguity that sustained a leader’s unifying role — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 437; A people fails to emerge under both excessive difference and total equivalence — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 392; Longer equivalential chains make the enemy’s identity less stable. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 454 (+1 more)