(Download) "Towards a Critique of Political Democracy (Report)" by Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Towards a Critique of Political Democracy (Report)
- Author : Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 192 KB
Description
A word of warning: my argument will involve a deconstruction of the theme of democracy. I will seek to clear the field of the conceptual debris that has accumulated around the idea and practice of democracy, so that our discussion can then take up--in a more constructive and also more programmatic manner--the identification of further directions of inquiry, especially in what concerns that crucial passage represented by the construction of the subject. I believe that the moment has really come to undertake a critique of democracy. These moments always come. They come when the objective conditions of the matter at hand meet with the subjective dispositions of the one who confronts and analyses it. A trajectory of thought has developed on this terrain, which I believe is today capable of grasping the crisis of an entire practical and conceptual apparatus. That is because when we say democracy we say this: institution plus theory; constitution and doctrine. A very powerful bond was established among these terms, what we could even call a knot. This knot does not just bind together socio-political structure and strong traditions of thought (those of democracy are always robust intellectual traditions, even if the current drift in the practice of democracy suggests the presence of a weak terrain); it is internal to the practical structures and the traditions of thought themselves. That is because within democracy, within its history, we find knotted together a practice of domination and a project of liberation--they always present themselves together, they are co-present. In some periods (periods of crisis, states of exception) these two dimensions are in conflict. In others (such as in the contemporary situation, which is a state of normality, or at least that is the way I read it) they are integrated. And these two dimensions--practice of domination and project of liberation--are not two faces; they are the single face, a Janus bifrons, of democracy. Depending on the way that the balance of forces between the top and the bottom of society is established, articulated, and constituted, sometimes one is more visible than the other. I think that at this juncture the balance of forces is so weighed to one side--the side hostile to us--that we can only see a single face. This is the reason why democracy is no longer the best of the worst; it is the only thing there is. That is, there is nothing else outside it.