In Defence of the Political
The Crisis of Democracy and the Return of the People
from the Perspective of Foucault and Rancière
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Publication date: 2012-10-01
Polish Sociological Review 2012;179(3):331-348
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ABSTRACT
Taking as his point of departure the London Tottenham riots, a product of a mob lacking political
consciousness and postulates, the author strives to identify the fundamental deadlock (aporia) confronting
western parliamentary democracy.Nowadays, collective phenomena are analyzed within a moral-economic
frameworkwhich reduces the perspective on society to a sumof individuals. This contradiction is responsible
for the reductionism which is leading the latest theories of social and political philosophy to the conclusion
that we have reached “the end of politics” and are venturing into the “postpolitical era.” According to this
author, rather than describing the essence of the problem, these terms are merely skimming the discursive
problem. If, as Foucault would have it, discourse is always a specific practice, the aforementioned reductionism
can also be approached as a political strategy. Therefore, in order to grasp the “political” as a feature of
the situation in which the people are participants, rather than in substantial terms, the author discusses the
theory of development of the modern political subject within the framework of Michel Foucault’s liberal
“government” paradigm and Jacques Rancière’s theory of democracy as a proper political element. Drawing
upon these two thinkers, he sketches the genealogy of contemporary liberal democracy, stigmatized by
the increasing rift between the people’s political activity and the managerial class’s apolitical reproduction.