Elements of Anti-Islam Populism: Critiquing Geert Wilders’ Politics of Offense with Marcuse and Adorno

Abstract

In this article, I analyze a rhetorical and affective phenomenon that lies at the heart of the political performances of Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders: giving and taking offense. Engaging with speech act theory and with adaptations of psychoanalysis in critical theory, I develop a critique of Wilders’ presentation of his politics as a politics of sovereignty, demonstrating how his rhetoric of giving and taking offense shapes a populist self in antagonistic opposition to a Muslim other and to a liberal, “politically correct” elite. Rejecting Wilders’ Schmittian claim that his rhetoric of offense simply lends voice to the sovereign Dutch people, I argue that the theories of repressive desublimation in Herbert Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” and in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s “Elements of Anti-Semitism” suggest productive directions for interpreting the affective structure of Wilders’ anti-Islam politics of offense, his racist humor, and his propaganda video Fitna.