Signifying the enemy: How the commonsense repudiation of 'woke' sutures far right metapolitics to the mainstream

This thesis analyses woke as a signifier in culture-war discourse, theorising it as a technology for the domestication of political antagonism, abnormalisation of social justice politics, and organisation of an anti-woke identity. Rejecting that woke operates as a descriptive term applied to a pre-given politics, the thesis approaches it as constitutive in its capacity to collapse heterogeneous grievances into a single intelligible threat. Drawing on post-foundational discourse and critical theory, the study finds that woke signifies the surplus taken as producing the expansive range of effects organised under the signifier, often objectified as an ideological virus. The analysis brings together Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s concept of antagonism and logic of equivalence with Slavoj Žižek’s theory of ideology, fantasy, obstacle, and his account of signification. Through this lens, woke is analysed as a diagnosis which renders discrete political, cultural, and institutional phenomena commensurable, enabling opposition to cohere despite the absence of shared positive commitments. Anti-woke discourse is shown to operate through a logic of symptom and totality, whereby particular deviations from a standard are taken as evidence of a pervasive hegemonic condition. Woke is situated at the intersection of two trajectories: a metapolitical culture-war tradition of categorising opposition as a deviant ideology, and the signifier’s own genealogy from a Black vernacular marker of political awakening to a pejorative index of false consciousness. The pejoration of woke is argued to invert its epistemic claim, transforming attentiveness to domination into perceptual perversion. Analysis proceeds through close textual reading of high-visibility YouTube videos, treated as discursive artefacts illustrative of how anti-woke discourse is organised. The study demonstrates that woke functions as a fantasmatic obstacle through which standard right-wing and conservative commitments cohere as resistance, sustaining fantasies of social closure without requiring agreement on the content of the post-woke order.