Vladimir Safatle

Among the majors topics of the debate on radical politics, we find today a social diagnosis that insists that our liberal democracies are in the process of emptying popular sovereignty. According such diagnosis, we would increasingly be moving towards a democracy without demos, in the sense of a political experience that preserves the institutional appearance of a democracy while limiting the scope of choices and decisions endorsed by popular sovereignty. It should be noted that we are not just talking about a gradual shift of real decisions out of the forums controlled by democratic representation. Forums that would be silenced by the action of economic agents hegemonic within the processes of material reproduction of neoliberal capitalism. We are also talking about a colonization of political representatives by the limits imposed by economic power and their form of naturalizing specific social organizations. In this context, insisting that we move towards a democracy without demos would be a claim for a shift in the process of deliberation to instances and dynamics capable of being better controlled by popular sovereignty. Economic power hangs over the heads of the population and the task of critical thinking would be to insist on the necessary return of democratic power to its true source. Hence the concept of "people," "popular sovereignty," and "democratic deliberation" should shift to the center of our current concerns. However, I would like to stress, even if this may sounds initially paradoxical, that the recovery of the demos will not be exactly the responsible for strengthening our democracies. For until today, the very concept of demos has been bound by metaphysical presuppositions that are little discussed. Presuppositions that are linked to a modality of the exercise of power and force that should be the true object of criticism. The basic assumption I would like to make is: there is no point in discussing the ways and the need to shift the true center of deliberations on modes of social governance if the very concept of "deliberation" is not criticized. There is a transformation in the concept of deliberation with its correlates (consent, voluntary action, internal cause) that must be the true condition for a social transformation with its emergence of new political subjects. This transformation could better explain us Aristotle understood the deliberation (bouleusis) concerned with what depends on our will to be realized. We don't deliberate, for example, on the solstices or on the sunrise. We deliberate on what can be done in various ways, on what is undetermined. For this reason, deliberation will be defined as the rational search for the means to an end. Because it is a rational search for the means, deliberation is the most typical exercise of the representative capacity of consciousness. For better to deliberate I should submit all features of the experience to the representation. It is only through this strategy that the decision can be formed, with its non-violent consent. In a way, this scheme has remained as the foundation of the understanding of emancipated political action. That is, political emancipation would be linked to the ability of the subjects to deliberate in view of the decision, taking distance from all that is involuntary, non-consented, non-represented and moved by an external causality. However, I would like to affirm that perhaps true social transformation is not only linked to the empowerment of previously vulnerable and invisible subjects, that is, to the displacement of the capacity for deliberation and decision by the hands of

What must be thought here, then, is this inconceivable and unknowable thing, a freedom that would no longer be the power of a subject, a freedom without autonomy, a heteronomy without servitude, in short, something like a passive decision. We would thus have to rethink the philosophemes of the decision, of that foundational couple activity and passivity, as well as potentiality and actuality2. I would like to accept the challenge proposed by Jacques Derrida in Rogue: two essays on reason for thinking what appears to us as inconceivable and unknowable, namely, a freedom without autonomy, a heteronomy without servitude. It seems to me necessary to discuss the reason for proposing such a change in our hegemonic conception of freedom, exposing its political and moral impact. In particular, we must explore the practical potential that opens up when we reconfigure one of the normative foundations of our way of life. Let us note how such a challenge is imposed on Derrida. At the beginning of his book, which is a political reflection about the democracy and its contemporary impasses, Derrida starts from a precise strategy: if we want to understand what is at stake in the possibilities inherent to democracy, we must try to understand what kind of krátos, of force, of domain, it implies. There is an exercise of force that is proper to democracy. But which kind of force is this one, and especially what this force is able to produce, which is its own grammar? These questions are not just related to the field of political philosophy, as it might seem. We are not just talking about forms of government when we ask about the kind of force that is presupposed by the "force of people" proper to democracy. In fact, we are talking about ways of constitute agents socially recognized as subjects. Every subject is endowed with an agency, this agency presupposes, in turn, some form of force, a specific dynamics of decision and exercise whose configuration must be the object of analysis. Democracy implies, in its normative horizon, a certain form of agent and agency, but what kind of agent we are here dealing with? What is the subject of democracy and, above all, which are its naturalized metaphysical presuppositions? These issues gain importance in a historical context, such as ours, in which skepticism about democracy grows up. I would say that, in his own way, Derrida's text, written more than ten years ago, is a possible elaboration on such skepticism. For we should ask ourselves if all forms of skepticism about democracy are the same. Are all forms of such skepticism regressions tied to fear, frustration, and resentment toward social transformations and economic impasses inherent in the development of what we often call democratic societies? Or some forms of skepticism about democracy are self-criticisms that aim to liberate democracy from metaphysical presuppositions that would be the true source of its present limits, presuppositions mainly perpetuated in its liberal tradition? Should we say that fight for democracy today is possible only on the condition that we are able to criticize its metaphysical