Authors

Discussion

In the Spring of 1968, people in Czechoslovakia expressed a high level of trust in “socialism” as well as in many political representatives of the Party and the State; notably in the new First Secretary Alexander Dubček, whose smiling portrait became a symbol of “socialism with a human face”. However, the newfound alliance between the people and the political leaders dwelled in an apparent paradox, as many of the latter had belonged among long-time representatives of the Party’s hegemonic rule. To understand the conundrum of the sudden popular appeal and, in this vein, shed light on the thus far underexplored dimension of the so-called Prague Spring, the paper focuses on the political style (Moffitt, 2016) adopted by political leaders. The paper first employs Ernesto Laclau’s discourse theory (Laclau, 2005) to capture the pivotal period as a discursively constructed dislocatory moment of “the political”. Second, it draws on a post-Laclauian stylistic-performative approach (Aiolfi, 2022; Casullo, 2021) to analyse performances displayed by prominent Party representatives in public and depicted by uncensored media (e.g., public meetings with the Communist youth, the 1968 May Day parade, TV interviews). The paper argues that to face the above-stated paradox, political representatives embraced a transgressive performative style, allowing them to perform a closeness to the people while retaining their superior position on the political scene.