Intellectuals and Democracy: Ambivalence, Sovereignty, Translation

Abstract

Nothing is so distinctive of our historical moment as the fervor with which intellectuals on both the right and the left of the political spectrum champion democracy as a touchstone for political virtue and a goal of political activism. Yet, I believe that if intellectuals would be completely frank, they are far more ambivalent about democracy than they will admit. Simon During, for one, makes his reservations clear. He argues in Against Democracy that the virtues of democracy and its worthiness as a goal are increasingly difficult to discern or defend.¹ But in most public discourse, democracy has become globally compulsory and nearly universal in precisely the degree to which it fails to oppose the impositions and depredations of the neoliberal state capitalism with which it is increasingly identified, and which continue to erode the lives of communities, those social organisms upon which democracy ultimately depends. As Jean-Luc Nancy puts it at the beginning of The Inoperative Community, “a kind of broadly pervasive democratic consensus seems to make us forget that ‘democracy,’ more and more frequently, serves only to assure a play of economic and technical forces that no politics today subjects to any end other than that of its own expansion.”² The absence of alternatives to the current play of economic and technological forces makes the promises of democracy seem hollow. We have long assumed that the intellectual’s critique of the existing order contributes to the definition of more positive alternatives.