1. The Democratic Emblem
1. The corresponding passage will be found in The Republic book 8, 561d. The version supplied here is from the complete hypertranslation of The Republic into French on which I am presently engaged, for publication at the end of 2010. Its aim is to show that Plato is one of our foremost contemporaries. This passage in my translation is taken from chapter 7, “Critique of the Four Precommunist Politics.” I naturally dispense with the division of The Republic into ten books, an irrelevant piece of textual fiddling perpetrated long after Plato by one or several Alexandrian grammarians.
2. Permanent Scandal
1. New York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853.
2. See Enzo Traverso, Le Totalitarisme: Le XXe siècle en debat (Paris: Seuil, 2001).
3. Leon Trotski, Staline (Paris: Grasset, 1948).
4. Jacques Rancière, La Haine de la Democratie (Paris: La Fabrique, 2005), p. 44. English translation: Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (New York: Verso, 2006).
5. Pierre Rosanvallon, La légitimité démocratique (Paris: Seuil, 2008), p. 317. See also Emmanuel Todd, Après la démocratie (Paris: Gallimard, 2008). Nicholas Sarkozy was elected president of the French Republic in May 2007. For Todd, Sarkozy is not the real problem, only the symptom of a “general wobbliness of democracy” resulting from the “disappearance of a powerful and stable shared belief system, religious in origin and anchored in localities.” As opposed to the empty space postulated by Lefort, Todd thinks that democracy is not viable in the absence of roots and traditions, and that it needs to be rooted once more, even at the risk of arousing identitarian mythologies, national or cultural. One asks: where, in a world of borderless financial flows and fiscal paradises, would you like democracy to be “rooted,” M. Todd? And how do you keep this quest for origins and roots from degenerating into a cult of blood and ancestry?
6. Raymond Aron, Introduction à la philosophie politique: Démocratie et Révolution (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1997), p. 36.
7. Miguel Abensour, La Démocratie contre l’État (Paris: PUF, 1997).
8. Carl Schmitt, Parlementarisme et démocratie (Paris: Seuil, 1988).
9. Alain Badiou, De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? (Paris: Lignes, 2007), p. 42.
10. Badiou, De quoi Sarkozy, p. 122.
11. Alain Badiou, “May 68 puissance 4,” in À Babord, April 2008.
12. Badiou, De quoi Sarkozy, p. 134.
13. See Luciano Canfora, La Démocratie: Histoire d’une idéologie (Paris: Seuil, 2007).
14. Rancière, La Haine de la Democratie, pp. 103–105.
15. Jacques Rancière, Au bord du politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 1998), p. 13.
16. La Philosophie déplacée, Colloque de Cerisy (Paris: Horlieu, 2006).
17. Cited in Daniel Bensaïd, ed., Politiquement incorrects: Entretiens pour le XXIe siècle (Paris: Textuel, 2008).
18. Agnès Heller and Ferencz Feher, Marxisme et démocratie (Paris: Maspero, 1981), pp. 127, 237, 301.
19. See Isabelle Garo, L’Idéologie ou la pensée embarquée (Paris: La Fabrique, 2009).
20. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Le Contrat social (Paris: Aubier, 1943), p. 187.
21. Louis de Saint-Just, “Institutions républicaines,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), p. 1087.
22. Ibid., p. 1091.
23. Cornelius Castoriadis, L’Institution imaginaire de la societé (Paris: Seuil, 1999), p. 161.
24. Ibid., p. 319.
25. Claude Lefort, Le Temps présent (Paris: Belin, 2007), p. 635.
26. Walter Lippmann, Le Fantôme du public (Paris: Demopolis, 2008), p. 39.
27. Ibid., p. 143.
28. Rancière, La Haine de la Democratie, p. 60.
29. Lefort, Le Temps présent, p. 478.
30. Alexandra Kollontaï, L’Opposition ouvrière (Paris: Seuil, 1974), p. 50.
31. See Oskar Anweilher, Serge Bricianer, and Pierre Broué, Les Soviets en Russie 1905–1921 (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).
32. See Canfora, La Démocratie.
33. Rancière, La Haine de la Democratie, p. 57.
34. Jacques Rancière, Le Philsophe et ses pauvres (Paris: Champs-Flammarion, 2006), p. 204.
35. Lefort, Le Temps présent, p. 941.
36. Pierre Bourdieu, Propos sur le champ politique (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyons, 2000), p. 71.
37. Simone Weil, Note sur la suppression générale des partis politiques, preface by André Breton (Paris: Climats, 2006). First published by Éditions de la table ronde in 1950, seven months after the author’s death.
38. Ibid., p. 35.
39. Ibid., p. 61. In his preface, André Breton tries to attenuate this statement by replacing “suppression” with “banishment” (mise au ban). This he depicts not as an immediate legislative act but as a historic process, the outcome of “a long enterprise of collective disillusionment” just as protracted as the hypothetical withering away of the State, politics, and law. But what to do in the meantime?
40. Ibid., p. 65.
41. Karl Marx, Sur la question juive (Paris: La Fabrique, 2006), p. 44.
3. “We Are All Democrats Now … ”
1. Great brands, Patrick Ruffini reminds us, “evoke feelings that have virtually zero connection to product attributes and specifications.” This is as true of Nike and BMW as it was of Obama during the most recent U.S. election, http://www.patrickruffini.com, February 13, 2008.
2. There is no work on this subject superior to Sheldon S. Wolin’s Democracy Inc. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
3. For a more extended account of the deep de-democratizing effects of neoliberal rationality, see my Les Habits neufs de la politique: Neoliberalisme et neoconservatisme, introduction by Laurent Jeanpierre (Paris: Les Prairies Ordinaires, 2007).
4. See Michel Foucault on governmentalization of the state in “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–76, trans. D. Macey (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003).
5. This expansion is, in part, the issue of well-meaning activists who spy prospects for “winning” in the courts even though democracy may be an inadvertent casualty of their success.
6. See Gordon Silverstein, Law’s Allure: How Law Shapes, Constrains, Saves and Kills Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and “Law as Politics/Politics as Law,” a dissertation in progress by Jack Jackson, Political Science Department, University of California, Berkeley.
7. See my “Porous Sovereignty, Walled Democracy,” forthcoming in La Revue internationale des livres et des idées.
8. Indeed, this is the premise that even Hobbes struggles to gratify in his fabulous semantic ruses with authors, authorship, and authority, through which he manages to make us author the absolutism of the state which dominates us.
9. Sheldon Wolin formulates this matter a little differently, arguing that only what he calls “fugitive democracy” is possible, episodic expressions by the people of their rightful title. See the final chapters of both Politics and Vision, expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) and Democracy, Inc. for Wolin’s development of this notion.
10. For fuller development of this point, see my “Sovereign Hesitations,” in Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac, eds., Derrida and the Time of the Political (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), and “The Return of the Repressed: Sovereignty, Capital, Theology” in David Campbell and Morton Schoolman, eds., The New Pluralism: William Connolly and the Contemporary Global Condition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
11. For a fuller discussion of post-Marxist philosophers pursuing the possibility of resubordinating the economic to a democratic political sphere, see my “The Return of the Repressed.”
12. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (New York: Beacon, 1964).
5. Democracies Against Democracy
1. Jacques Rancière, La haine de la démocratie (Paris: La Fabrique, 2005); English translation: Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (New York: Verso, 2006).
2. Jacques Rancière, La mésentente: Politique et philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1995); English translation: Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
6. Democracy for Sale
1. Auguste Blanqui, letter to Maillard, June 6, 1852, in Maintenant, il faut des armes (Paris: La Fabrique, 2006), pp. 172–186. Translations from the French, unless otherwise noted, are my own; translations of Rimbaud are taken from Paul Schmidt’s Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works (New York: Harper and Row, 1976) and have been in some cases slightly modified.
2. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing blog, October 26, 2007.
3. Interview, RTL, June 9, 2008.
4. Le Monde, June 7, 2008.
5. As reported by the Canard Enchaîné and quoted in the Irish Times, June 20, 2008.
6. Bosco, Bantry County Cork Eire, http://my.telegraph.co.uk.
7. France Inter, June 24, 2008.
8. Institutions, June 13, 2008.
9. Irish Times, June 14, 2008.
10. Deutsche Welle, June 15, 2008.
11. Cited in Dominique Guillemin and Laurent Daure, “L’Introuvable souverainété de l’Union européene,” L’Action Républicaine, July 3, 2008, http://action-republicaine.over-blog.com/archive-07–3-2008.html.
12. See Frédéric Bas, “La ‘majorité silencieuse’ ou la bataille de l’opinion en mai-juin 1968,” in P. Artières and M. Zancarini-Fournel, eds., 68: Une histoire collective (Paris: Découverte, 2008), pp. 359–366.
13. See Sheldon Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” in Constellations 1 (1994): 11–25.
14. See Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991; see also Josiah Ober, “The Original Meaning of ‘Democracy’: Capacity to Do Things, Not Majority Rule,” Constellations 15 (2008): 1–9.
15. Immanuel Wallerstein, “Democracy, Capitalism and Transformation,” lecture at Documenta 11, Vienna, March 16, 2001.
16. See Jean Dubois, Le Vocabulaire politique et social en France de 1869 à 1872 (Paris: Larousse, 1962).
17. See Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1988; rpt. Verso, 2008); see also Fredric Jameson, “Rimbaud and the Spatial Text,” in Tak-Wai Wong and M. A. Abbas, eds., Rewriting Literary History (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1984).
18. Maxime Vuillaume, Mes Cahiers rouges au temps de la commune (Arles: Actes Sud, 1998), pp. 68–69.
19. Luciano Canfora, Democracy in Europe (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), p. 120.
20. Rimbaud, cited by Ernest Delahaye in Arthur Rimbaud, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Rolland de Renéville et Jules Mouquet (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), p. 745.
21. Harry Truman, January 20, 1949: “We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.”
22. See Canfora, Democracy in Europe, pp. 214–252.