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Democracy De-realized

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Homi K. Bhabha
Homi K. Bhabha*
Affiliation:
Harvard University

Abstract

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In times of crisis, when democracies are under threat, our lessons of justice and equality are best learnt from those who are marginalized or oppressed. There could be hope for democracy if responses to the attacks of September 11, for example, were characterized not by blind revenge but by democratic solidarity. To think of democracy in terms of non-realized ideals does not adequately challenge the failures of its promises. ‘Not to respond’ is often a strategic necessity for democratic discourse, which recognizes failure as part of its evolutionist and utopian narrative. The internal dialectic of the unrealized finds in the negative instance of failure a strange moral coherence. Thus it is proposed to consider democracy as something de- realized rather than unrealized. The term ‘de-realized’ places the democratic experience at a distance, in a context not of its making, in order to de-familiarize it and to block its natural or normative reference. The idea is to see the potential of democracy in translation or in an extraterritorial sense. Democracy's potential lies not in its failure but in its frailty.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , February 2003 , pp. 27 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2003

References

Notes

1. ‘For an Ethics of Discomfort’, in Politics of Truth, ed. S. Lotringer, New York, Semiotext(e) 1997.

2. This text is an abridged version of the talk ‘ The Art of Democracy’ presented by Homi K. Bhabha at the first session of the 11th platform of Documenta at the House of World Cultures (Berlin) on 9th October 2001 on the subject Democracy Unrealized.

3. John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, New Press 2000, p. 217.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., p. 216.

6. Ibid., p. 221.

7. David Forgacs, The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916-1935, New York University Press 2000, p. 353.

8. Alan Sekula, Fish Story, Dusseldorf, Richter/Rotterdam, The Center 1995.

9. Larry Lessig, Code and other Laws of Cyberspace, New York, Basic Books 1999.

10. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents, New York, New Press 1998.

11. D. Forgacs, op. cit., p. 337.

12. D. Forgacs, op. cit., p. 351.

13. Claude Lefort, The Political Form of Modern Society, Cambridge, Polity Press 1986.

14. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, London and New York, Routledge 1971.

15. Derek Walcott, ‘Another Life’, Collected Poems, 1948-1984, London, Faber and Faber 1986.

16. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press 1958.

17. Ibid.