Subversive Imaginaries: Performing the Other

Abstract

Chantal Mouffe identifies the ‘real challenge facing democratic politics’ in the twenty-first century as ‘not how to overcome the we/they relation but how to envisage forms of construction of we/they compatible with a pluralistic order’ (2005: 115). For Mouffe, that constant tension of inclusion and exclusion, of opposing viewpoints acknowledged and debated, implied in the notion of the people in a democracy is exactly what keeps democratic politics alive. ‘This “agonistic pluralism” is constitutive of modern democracy and, rather than seeing it as a threat, we should realize that it represents the very condition of existence of such democracy’, argues Mouffe (1993: 4). The pluralism debate is often framed in terms of we/they, insider/outsider, or citizen/other identity conflicts. In their pioneering work on radical democracy, Laclau and Mouffe stated that ‘the presence of the “Other” prevents me from being totally myself’ (1985: 125). Mouffe develops these ideas further in The Democratic Paradox where she uses Derrida’s concept of the ‘constitutive outside’ to clarify the significance of the we/they conflict and the resulting democratic antagonisms. Something outside, she explains, is not outside a ‘concrete content’, but rather it challenges the ‘concreteness’ itself. It is not just a case of opposites, but rather an indeterminacy of both leading to agonistic tensions.KeywordsPublic SpaceDemocratic PoliticsWalk AwayRadical DemocracyStreet TheatreThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.