Description
One key way to understanding democracy and democratic politics is through the notion of the sovereignty of the people, but what does this phrase refer to? Whilst many theorists approach this as a legalistic formula to be filled in and defined, an alternative post-foundationalist approach leads us to celebrate its overdetermination as its productive strength. The identity of the democratic sovereign people is not a literal identity but an aesthetic operation which operates on and transforms democracy understood as a regime or a form of state sovereign power. This operation both opens a gap in our common sense, at the same time as it proposes a new way to fill it in – both legitimating and opposing democratic state sovereign power as it does so. Far from a problem to be solved, the lack of agreement over the definition of the people is the key to its success. As such, trying to use a different term ‘demos’ to split the term ‘the people’, whilst understandable, is misguided and risks furthering the cause of the very politics it seeks to oppose since it weakens and undermines the doubling that needs to take place for democratic politics to occur. It inadvertently fuels the critics of democracy who discredit the name of the people in favour of a proper or pure democracy – to be defined and delimited in advance.This intervention will draw on Rancière and Lefort to insist that the art of democratic politics requires the invention and exploitation of differing definitions of the people for democracy - something that needs to be conjured and reconjured using aesthetic strategies which play on the senses, via absurd and disorienting experiences that, in making it impossible to continue as normal, force us to transform our world. Rather than demos versus the people, if democracy is to defend itself from the current onslaught of authoritarian politics, we must beware of any claim that the demos can rescue the people from itself. We must refuse to relinquish the democratic people to right-wing and authoritarian politics. We must maintain that demos means people and people means demos, and thus insist that the people are, and always will be, at the heart of democracy.
| Period | 3 Jun 2026 |
|---|---|
| Event title | The People vs the Demos: : rethinking the democratic collective in populist times |
| Event type | Workshop |
| Location | Brighton, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |