Lorenzo Buti

This article develops an account of the ideological function of the democratic political scene in contemporary liberal democracies. It does so by confronting Claude Lefort's theory of democracy with a structuralist Marxist perspective. According to Lefort, democracies institutionalise a political scene that symbolically acknowledges that a society's future perpetually remains undecided. Despite this key insight, Lefort exclusive emphasis on the symbolic acknowledgement of contingency blocks us from distinguishing between meaningful conflict with tangible stakes and a limited, managed or market-conforming democracy. In contrast, Althusser and Poulantzas foreground the state's structural imperative to reproduce capitalist social relations. By taking into account both democracy's ‘show’ and its ‘machinery’, I argue that the meanings generated by the construction of the political scene are also always ideological: the symbolic acknowledgement of an open-ended future can serve as an ideological cover that dissimulates the reality of the reproduction of capitalist social relations.

This article uncovers an internal tension within theories of agonistic democracy. On the one hand, as radical pluralists, agonistic democrats want to institute a ‘symmetrical’ political scene where different identities can struggle on an equally legitimate basis. On the other hand, they often normatively prioritize the struggles of oppressed groups against domination. In response, this article proposes to collapse any strict distinction between pluralism and social relations of domination. The result is a move from agonistic to insurgent democracy, where insurgent struggles against domination give the central impetus to any democracy. To do so, it turns to the writings of Étienne Balibar, who argues that most, if not all, symmetrical political conflict is built on asymmetrical forms of domination or oppression. This leads us to develop an account of democratic conflict that is incessantly asymmetrical. Finally, this article suggests an alternative way of rescuing the political principle of pluralism cherished by agonistic democrats. Balibar’s writings on the ‘ideology of the dominated’ show that every insurgent struggle expresses itself ideologically, which harbours the risk of obscuring other forms of domination. Therefore, democracy is not only kept alive by insurgent movements, it requires that the latter democratize themselves by maintaining a permanent openness to alternative calls against domination or oppression.

The aim of this paper is to theorize insurgent political action on the basis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. It reconstructs a Sartrean model of insurgency that prioritizes an insurgent group’s capacity for situated inventions. It argues that, similar to Fanon, Sartre theorized that groups that struggle against oppression and exploitation constantly invent novel conditions that steer society in unforeseeable directions. However, these inventions of insurgent action are never absolutely contingent but always take place in concrete situations which never cease to condition them. This paper analyses two concrete factors which condition the inventions of insurgent action: the seriality from which the group arises and to which it always threatens to return, and the actions of hostile groups. Taken together, this paper claims that Sartre provides a coherent and innovative account of insurgent political action.