Drapieżcze tożsamości i populistyczna „communitas”
Predatory Identities and the Populist “Communitas”

The Immunitarian Construction of Community in Right-Wing Populist Discourses

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this article is to describe the predatory dimension of populist discourses and the mechanism of constructing the community they convey. The author, inspired by Appadurai’s concept of predatory identities, analyses selected theoretical concepts from populism studies to show that predation is a fundamental feature of right-wing populism, driving the process of producing “the people” as a political community and creating a particular national-democratic-political subject through the construction and exclusion of “foreign bodies.” This predation is driven by various tensions, both on the vertical (people–elite) and horizontal (us–them) axes. The description of these areas of division enables the author to define populism as an immunising discourse based on complex dialectical processes that create a selectively inclusive, positive social identity that responds to the needs of individuals in the post-social world.

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