“Communism” as an empty signifier in the rhetoric of Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS) party in Poland

Abstract

The thesis is going to utilize discursive approach and Essex school of discourse analysis and analyse the discourse of Polish populist far-right leaders. The main hypothesis is that in the Polish political discourse, due to certain historical premises and state policies (especially in the area of memory and remembrance) the far-right in their discourse utilize the concept of communism\anticommunism as an empty signifier. I will analyse the speeches of the most prominent PiS members and trace the following markers to prove that it is indeed an empty signifier: Lack of Fixed Meaning, Polysemy, Contextual Dependency, Ideological Investment, Shifting or Contested Meanings, Ambiguity and Indeterminacy.