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The following paper was presented at the Eighth Annual Telos Conference, held on February 15–16, 2014, in New York City. Kierkegaard is the first to call modern Christians “pagans.” If Augustine’s critique of the Physicalists in the City of God was the last critique of ancient pagan time, Kierkegaard’s critique of our present “abstract infinity” is the first critique of modern pagan time. Augustine and Kierkegaard are like bookends on the complex sacred time of the Middle Ages. The following paper was presented at the Eighth Annual Telos Conference, held on February 15–16, 2014, in New York City. Don’t forget: the Eighth Annual Telos Conference will be held this upcoming weekend, February 15–16, 2014, in New York City. Registration is now closed, but if you are still interested in attending the conference, please RSVP to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. Please note that some of the talks are limited to registered attendees only. Additional details about the conference, as well as the complete conference program, are available at the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website. We look forward to seeing you this weekend! The Difficulty of Democracy: Diagnoses and Prognoses In spite of its advantages as an ideal form of government, democracy has proven to be remarkably difficult to establish and to maintain in reality. While it remained a rare exception for much of human history, its spread in the modern world has not had the character of a triumphant march but rather of a tortured path dominated by failed attempts, transformations into dictatorship, and degenerations into civil war. Even the most successful cases, Great Britain, France, and the United States, were marked by a concurrence of the rise of democratic institutions with an imperialist expansion that created a de facto hierarchy of citizens and non-citizens familiar also in ancient Athens. The purpose of the Eighth Annual Telos conference will be to analyze the key characteristics of democracy in order to determine, first, the precise advantages and disadvantages of this form of government in comparison to alternatives, second, the reasons for its rarity and volatility, and, third, the factors that are essential for its stability. We welcome paper submissions that address issues such as classical and modern theories of democracy, case studies of successful or failed democracies around the world, antinomies and conflicts within established democracies, revolutionary movements as progenitors of democracy, degeneration of democracies into other forms of government, the importance of culture and representation for founding and maintaining democracy, and the economic requirements and consequences of democracy. Please send an abstract and short c.v. to dtpan@uci.edu by August 31, 2013. |
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Two french communist authors recently devoted a book to an attempt at the systematic demolishment of the logic of democracy. What makes their gesture interesting is that their critique of democracy is made in the very name of autonomy, equality, and emancipation, that is, of the very principles that democracy is supposed to promote and uphold. One usually knows how to react to attacks on democracy coming from the other side, from those who ground their arguments in a celebration of some sort of hierarchy principle, those who deduce the political from an ontology of violence, or aim at naturalizing orders and political differences. In those cases there is usually not much to be said at all, because anti-democratic arguments are usually not recognized as belonging to the same conversation as democratic ones: when they are actually heard, anti-democratic arguments are usually subject to different logics of validation, enunciation and justification than democratic ones. This is for instance what the notion of extremism generally does: to locate a voice or an argument outside of the recognized universe of discourse, and hence somehow deprived of an equal standing, possibly subject to some version of the old Jacobin motto: “there shall be no freedom for the enemies of freedom.” The paradox is interesting in itself, because it betrays the presence of a certain politics of thought and speech that is already at work way before we get to discuss in a rational process the truths of political forms, and yet has substantial effects on what is heard (and not heard) in the supposedly transparent sphere of public discourse. It also forces us to recognize the recurring, foundational role of the limit, of the gesture that at the same time opens up and delimits the space of what is possible and what is acceptable, which is often overlooked or simplified in the context of democratic theory. 
