Abstract:
This article traces the sociological conditions for the articulation of political subjectivities in post-1989 Bulgaria from the perspective of Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populism. Firstly, it starts from proposing a general understanding for the conditions of various instances of antiauthoritarian subjectifications. Secondly, I move to my main assertion: the post-2001 collapse of the empty signifiers, that were enabling the constitution of stable (liberal) subjectivities, produced peculiar floating signifiers that are opening a space for the convergence between liberalism and authoritarianism. The latter, far from being some kind of a new populist threat to democracy, marks a crisis of the 1990s populisms.
