What Does Democracy Feel Like? Form, Function, Affect, and the Materiality of the Sign

Abstract

What does democracy feel like? This question can hardly be considered unimportant, given the centrality to so much political thought of ideas of sentiment, feeling, and passion. From Aristotle to Žižek, the tradition of “western” philosophy has been well aware that processes of political affiliation, disaffiliation, and decision could never be understood simply in terms of a disembodied logic or an abstract rationality. “Discourse theory” (which for the purpose of this chapter will be taken to refer in a precise way to the work of Laclau and Mouffe and their immediate followers) has always been informed heavily by psychoanalysis’ emphasis on the irreducibility of the unconscious and on the porous boundary between rational cognition and somatic systems of pleasure and pain, and so clearly does not stand outside of that lineage in this regard. And yet it is difficult to know where we would look within discourse theory or indeed within much of a wider psychoanalytical tradition, for tools with which to begin to address this question.