Democracy in your face

Abstract

Liberal ideology posits itself as the triumph of reason and the end of history, an elastic present capable of shrinking reality to a necessary truth that is situated in the presence of universals that are non-historical but that found history, that are outside of language but create all language. Every single ethical problem in liberalism is reduced to a fact-finding validation of its basic myths. The function of its universals is to show ideology as non- ideological, as the “essence” that marks the inside and the outside of the normative. The economy of power of said universals is founded on a circular and auto-referential logic. When such logic is undermined, one grasps that the limit of knowledge is at the heart of the object and that the sacred Western object is fashioned by a finite subject and his or her infinite struggle with Self and Other. Liberal formalism finds its most acute symptom in the Kelsenian “Grundnorm”, in which the repression of the subject is guaranteed by the “presupposed” completeness of the object brought upon by a shallow and one-dimensional link that utterly mistakes “the principle of order” for the order itself; this is the root of all liberal hardship. Original power does not arise from any universal ontological structure. If we take democracy literally, in its most radical and constitutive meaning, and articulate it with the understanding of the subject as the split through which reality appears, the result is that the Kelsenian “presupposition” is wiped off in a single stroke and the political space is reopened for the political subject.

Key words: liberalism, universals, rational mythology, “Grundnorm”, political ontology, sovereignty, democracy, people, political subject.