The Ontology of Democracy

Abstract

Kavanagh continuedfrom previous page fought according to the logic of their namesake, a financial instrument that enables investors to leverage limited means to large effects. The War on Terror is waged according to an arbitrageur's mentality, where one makes a killing by identifying and exploiting areas of relative advantage before moving on to the next "transaction." Martin charges that this form of leveraged hegemony is characterized by a "potent indifference" that is historically out of step with previous imperial endeavors. "Shock and awe is the cure for those impatient with power but destined to wield it," he notes. The goal ofAmerican intervention is the liberation of subject peoples, liberation from repressive regimes (Iraq's Baathist tyranny, Afghanistan's Taliban) to be sure, but liberation along the lines of "the freedom of capital to circulate in financial markets." Am Empire of Indifference recounts how the paternalism of development was replaced by the expectation ofcolonial self-management—one need only think of the oft-voiced frustration with the inability ofIraqi troops to "stand up" so thatAmericans can "stand down." The "hit-and-run" occupation is premised on divesting itself of any and all commitments , both in terms of America's responsibility to its imperial charges and in terms of the Iraqi government's relation to its own people. The radical freedom that results is currently indistinguishable from civil war. Matt Kavanagh recently completed his doctoral dissertation on contemporary American fiction at McGiIl University. It is a study ofmarket melodramas , neoliberal novels, and capitalist realism. He lives in Toronto. The Ontology of Democracy Neil Balan Hatred of Democracy Jacques Rancière Verso http://www.versobooks.com 106 pages; cloth, $23.95 Virtue and Terror Maximilien Robespierre Introduced by Slavoj Zizek Texts Selected by Jean Ducange Translated by John Howe Verso http://www.versobooks.com 160 pages; paper, $14.95 Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Zizek agree: within the narrow band of economically dominant post-industrial States, democracy and politics are hollowed -out shells whose potential promises now find little in the way of actualization. With Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's, Multitude (2004), predictions regarding the efficacy ofglobally-oriented solidarity and the idealized political multitude now three years along, democracy and politics in the "core" polities of North America and Europe remain defunct and deficient, slowly disappearing. Structurally, things look grim. Global capitalism hegemonically integrates disparate resources and different communities under the sign of the "free-market" in an age of limitless capital accumulation . Ongoing and intensifying ecological catastrophe ensues and proliferates in increasingly spectacular ways. The continued disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan unfolds in unintended ways, despite the widely perceived policy relief supposedly brought by a change of the "democratically-elected" guard in the US Congress. Remarkably, total failure and collapse is avoided, revealing societies built on perpetual war and military neoliberalism, where the ideology of humanism is continuously deployed to export democracy by force. And, not without irony, there is a shrinking gap in so-called liberal democracies between the oligarchies of State power and the diminishing sphere of civil society. If this is a familiar diagnosis for some, both Rancière and Zizek suggest that this knowledge is exactly the problem: a polite, tolerant, and accommodating intelligentsia conservatively resting on its symbolically valued laurels as dissent continues to be effectively pacified and the politics-as-usual prevails. In two concise offerings, Rancière and Zizek attend to the ontology of democracy and politics, attempting with urgency to resuscitate these concepts and incite some sort of response by their readers— scholars, academics, intellectual elites, and cultural commentators. Critically assessing the limits ofdemocracy, both interventions emphasize the strict relation between democracy and politics at time when this relation is continually obfuscated and made the object of derision, fear, and hatred by both the socially conservative Right and the resistance-minded, progressive Left. In different ways, these books are challenges, directed to those with the symbolic power and cultural authority to mobilize dissent beyond the mere rhetoric of "resistance" so as to induce— or initiate, at least—some kind ofprotracted opposition to the shape ofmilitary-driven foreign policy and the creation of political and social alternatives. Rancière's Hatred of Democracy...