Imagining “Sensate Democracy”: Beyond Republicanism, Liberalism, and the Literary

Abstract

In her 2015 book Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler emphasizes the disjunction between the political form of democracy and the principle of popular sovereignty. It is important to keep them apart, she insists, in order to understand how “expressions of the popular will can call into question a particular political form,” thereby creating flashpoints in which “political orders deemed democratic are brought into crisis by an assembled or orchestrated collective that claims to be the popular will” (2). Although Butler focuses on the present and recent past, she ranges backward and forward in time, exploring and connecting recurrent tensions in democratic theory. For “the issue is at once ancient and timely,” she reminds us. In the wake of the eighteenth-century revolutions, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and other early theorists of democracy worried over “whether democratic state structures could survive unbridled expressions of popular sovereignty”; they “feared ‘the mob’” even as they affirmed the significance of “expressions of the popular will” (1). In an introduction and six chapters based on the Mary Flexner lectures she delivered at Bryn Mawr as well as other recent talks, Butler makes an important contribution to debates over democracy and popular sovereignty by theorizing how “acting in concert can be an embodied form of calling into!!...!! question the inchoate and powerful dimensions of reigning notions of the political” (9). To that end, she centers the collective, performative dimensions of political struggles and the bodily acts that animate social movements. Calling attention to how today many demonstrations and movements “take precarity as their galvanizing condition” precisely through “the social modality of the body (9, 153), Butler provocatively suggests that the “republican ideal is yet to give way to a broader understanding of sensate democracy” (207).