<p>While processes of individualization/personalization have been widely associated with neoliberalism in the West and beyond, a growing body of critical social theory – and, more recently, anthropological theory – has begun to consider populism and conspiracy theory (CT) as an interruption of the neoliberal predicament, a rupture in which collective life reasserts itself against the alienating processes of abstraction, atomization, and fragmentation. Drawing on ethnographic evidence from the Italian 5 Star Movement, the article challenges this vision and suggests instead that current forms of populism and CT, at least in the West, are consistent with state and societal transformations imposed by the neoliberal order. Populism, CT, and neoliberalism push for the removal of “class” as a frame for collective action and wage a fierce attack on state institutions, claiming that they should be as lean as possible. These pressures on class and the state have triggered a new mode of identification with the political that I term the “personalization of political relations”. This mode is also responsible for the forms of embodiment, social reductionism, intensification of affects, and “disintermediation” that we currently find in both populism and CT. This article, and the research on which it is based, received funding from the European research Council, which. awarded a consolidator grant for the project “PACT Populism and Conspiracy Theory” (grant agreement nº865202). The author has no competing financial or non-financial interests. Is the “Flesh of Populism” Truly Collective? Embodiment and Personalization as the (Neoliberal) Nexus between Populism and Conspiracy Theory.</p>