Hatred of Democracy

Jacques Rancière, Steve Corcoran

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781781681503
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781685136
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

In this vehement defence of democracy, Jacques Ranci?re explodes the complacency of Western politicians who pride themselves as the defenders of political freedom. As America and its allies use their military might in the misguided attempt to export a desiccated version democracy, and reactionary strands in mainstream political opinion abandon civil liberties, Ranci?re argues that true democracy-government by all-is held in profound contempt by the new ruling class. In a compelling and timely analysis, Hatred of Democracy rethinks the subversive power of the democratic ideal.

1

From Victorious Democracy to Criminal Democracy

‘Democracy Stirs In The Middle East’: with this title a magazine that carries the flame of economic neoliberalism celebrated some months ago the success of the elections in Iraq and the anti-Syrian demonstrations in Beirut.³ Only this praise of victorious democracy was accompanied by commentaries specifying the nature and limits of this democracy. Democracy triumphed, we were told, despite protests by idealists for whom democracy consists in the government of the people by the people, and so cannot be brought to a people by the force of arms. Hence, it triumphed when seen from a realistic point of view, that is, one that separates out the practical benefits from the utopia of the government of the people by the people. But the lesson addressed to the idealists also urged us to be consistent in our realism. Democracy has triumphed, but one must understand the meaning of this triumph: bringing democracy to another people does not simply mean bringing it the beneficial effects of a constitutional State, elections and a free press. It also means bringing it disorder.

One will recall the statement issued by the American Secretary of Defense concerning the pillaging that occurred after the fall of Saddam Hussein. We have, he basically said, brought freedom to the Iraqis. And yet, freedom also means the freedom to do wrong. This statement is not merely a circumstantial witticism. It is part of a broader logic that can be reconstituted from its disjoined elements: it is because democracy is not the idyll of the government of the people by the people, but the disorder of passions eager for satisfaction, that it can, and even must, be introduced from outside by the armed might of a superpower, meaning not only a State disposing of disproportionate military power, but more generally the power to master democratic disorder.

The commentaries attending these expeditions devoted to spreading democracy throughout the world remind us then of older arguments which (but in a far less triumphal tone) invoked democracy’s irresistible expansion. In effect, they merely paraphrase the accounts that were presented thirty years ago at the Trilateral Commission, pointing up what was then called the crisis of democracy.⁴

Democracy stirs in the wake of American armies, in spite of those idealists who protest in the name of peoples’ rights to self-determination. Thirty years ago, the aforementioned report accused the same kind of idealists – those ‘value-oriented intellectuals’ who fuel a culture of opposition and an excess of democratic activity – of being as disastrous to the authority of the public interest [la chose publique] as they were to the pragmatic actions of those ‘policy-oriented intellectuals’. Democracy stirs, but disorder stirs with it; the looters in Baghdad, who took advantage of their new democratic freedoms to procure more personal belongings at the expense of common property, evoked, in their slightly primitive manner, one of the major arguments that was used thirty years ago to demonstrate the ‘crisis’ of democracy: democracy, said the report writers, signifies the irresistible growth of demands that put pressure on governments, lead to a decline in authority, and cause individuals and groups to become refractory to the discipline and sacrifices required for the common good.

As such, the arguments used to back up the military campaigns devoted to the worldwide rise of democracy reveal the paradox concealed by the dominant usage of the word today. In these arguments democracy would appear to have two adversaries. On the one hand, it is opposed to a clearly identified enemy – arbitrary government, government without limits – which, depending on the moment, is referred to either as tyranny, dictatorship, or totalitarianism. But this self-evident opposition conceals another, more intimate, one. A good democratic government is one capable of controlling the evil quite simply called democratic life.

Such was the demonstration developed throughout The Crisis of Democracy: what provokes the crisis is nothing other than the intensity of democratic life. But this intensity and its subsequent danger have two facets: on the one hand, ‘democratic life’ would seem to be identical to the ‘anarchic’ principle that affirms the power of the people, whose extreme consequences the United States and other Western States experienced throughout the 1960s and 1970s: persistent militant contestation in all domains of State activity; undermining of the principles of good government, of the respect for public authorities, of the knowledge of experts, and of the know-how of pragmatists.

The remedy for this excess of democratic vitality has, if we can take Aristotle’s word for it, been known since Pisistratus.⁵ It consists in redirecting the feverish energy activated on the public stage toward other ends, in sending it on a search for material prosperity, private happiness and social bonds. Alas! the right solution immediately revealed its flipside: diminishing excessive political energy, and promoting the quest for individual happiness and social relations, meant promoting a vitality of private life and forms of social interaction that led to heightened expectations and escalating demands. And these, of course, had in turn a twofold effect: they rendered citizens insouciant to the public good and undermined the authority of governments summoned to respond to the spiralling demands emanating from society.

So, confronting democratic vitality took the form of a double bind that can be succinctly put: either democratic life signified a large amount of popular participation in discussing public affairs, and it was a bad thing; or it stood for a form of social life that turned energies toward individual satisfaction, and it was a bad thing. Hence, good democracy must be that form of government and social life capable of controlling the double excess of collective activity and individual withdrawal inherent to democratic life.

Such is the standard form by which experts state the democratic paradox: as a social and political form of life, democracy is the reign of excess. This excess signifies the ruin of democratic government and must therefore be repressed by it. This squaring of the circle would once have excited the ingenuity of constitutional artists. But such an art is no longer highly thought of today. Governments get on perfectly well without it. For them, the fact that democracies are ‘ungovernable’ is abundant proof of the need they have to be governed, and that is all the legitimation they need for the care they put into governing them. But the virtues of governmental empiricism are hardly capable of convincing anyone except those who govern. Intellectuals have need of other fare, especially on this side of the Atlantic, and especially in France, where they are at once at one remove from power and excluded from its exercise. For them an empirical paradox cannot be dealt with by the arms of governmental bricolage. They see in it a consequence of some original vice, some perversion at the very heart of civilization, and they apply themselves to tracking down its principle. For them, then, the aim is to unravel the ambiguity of a name, to make ‘democracy’ no longer the common name of an evil and the good that cures it, but the sole name for an evil that corrupts us all.

While the American army was working toward democratic expansion in Iraq, a book was published in France that put the question of democracy in the Middle East under a wholly different light. It was called Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique [The Criminal Inclinations of Democratic Europe]. In it the author, Jean-Claude Milner,⁶ developed, in a subtle and condensed analysis, a thesis as simple as it is radical. The present crime of European democracy is that it calls for peace in the Middle East, in other words, for a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Such a peace could mean only one thing, the destruction of Israel. European democracies have pushed for peace between the conflicting sides to resolve the Israeli problem. However, European democratic peace itself was the result of nothing less than the extermination of the European Jews. A Europe unified in peace and democracy was rendered possible after 1945 for a single reason: because, due to the Nazi genocide’s success, the European territory found itself rid of the people that formed the obstacle to realizing its dream, namely, the Jews. A Europe without borders means in effect dissolving politics, which always concerns limited totalities, into that society whose principle is on the contrary limitlessness. Modern democracy signifies the destruction of political limits by means of the law of limitlessness proper to modern society. This will to go beyond all limits is at once served and exemplified by that modern invention par excellence, technology. It culminates today in the desire to do away, by means of genetic manipulation and artificial insemination, with the very laws of sexual reproduction and affiliation. European democracy is the mode of society that bears that desire. In order to achieve its goal, according to Milner, it had to get rid of the people for whom the principle of existence itself is that of kinship and transmission, the people bearing the name that points to this principle, that is the people bearing the name of Jew. Such is precisely, he says, what the genocide brought Europe, thanks to an invention homogeneous to the principle of democratic society, the technical invention of the gas chamber. Democratic Europe, he concludes, is born in genocide, and it pursues the task in its desire to subject the Jewish State to the conditions it lays down for peace, conditions for the extermination of the Jews.

There are many ways to consider this argumentation. One can oppose to its radicality the rationality of common sense and of historical accuracy by asking, for example, if it is really so very easy, without recourse to a ruse of reason or a providential teleology of history, to conceive the Nazi regime as an agent of the triumph of European democracy. Conversely, one can analyse its internal coherence by interrogating the core of the author’s thought, being a theory of the name that is articulated on the Lacanian triad of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real.⁷ I shall take a third path: one that consists in probing the kernel of the argument not according to its extravagance with regard to common sense nor its conformity to the conceptual network of the author’s thought, but from the point of view of the common landscape that this singular argument enables us to reconstitute, from what it allows us to perceive of the displacement that the term democracy has, in two decades, undergone within dominant intellectual opinion.

This displacement is recapitulated in Milner’s book through the conjunction of two theses: the first radically opposes the name of Jew to that of democracy; the second turns that opposition into a divide between two humanities: on the one hand, a humanity faithful to the principle of kinship; on the other, a humanity forgetful of that principle in its pursuit of the ideal of self-generation, which is just as much an ideal of self-destruction. The Jew and democracy are in radical opposition. This thesis marks the overturning that has occurred of what structured the dominant perception of democracy at the time of the Six-Day War and the Sinai War. At that time, Israel was paid tribute for being a democracy. It was held up as a society that was governed by a State assuring both individual freedom and the participation of the greatest number in public life. The Declaration of Human Rights was viewed as the charter that epitomized this delicate balancing of the collectivity and guarantees of individual freedom. The contrary of democracy at the time was referred to as totalitarianism. The dominant discourse designated States as totalitarian if, in the name of the power of the collective, they denied both individuals’ rights and constitutional forms of collective expression: free elections, and the freedom of expression and association. The term totalitarianism was reserved for designating the principle of that twofold denial. A total State was a State that suppressed the duality of State and society, extending the sphere of its exercise to the totality of collective life. Nazism and Communism were construed as the two paradigms of totalitarianism, founded on notions that claimed to transcend any separation between State and society, those of race and of class respectively. The Nazi State was considered, then, from the point of view it had itself proclaimed, that of being a State founded on race. Hence, the genocide of the Jews was regarded as the realization of the desire this State proclaimed to eliminate a race seen as degenerate and as bearing degeneracy.

Milner’s book proposes the exact reversal of this once dominant belief: henceforth the virtue of Israel is that it signifies the contrary of the principle of democracy; the concept of totalitarianism is divested of any use; and the Nazi regime and its politics of any specificity. There is a very simple reason for this: the properties that were formerly attributed to totalitarianism, conceived as the State devouring society, have quite simply become the properties of democracy, conceived as society devouring the State. If Hitler, whose major concern was not to spread democracy, can be seen as the providential agent of that expansion, this is because what the antidemocrats of today refer to as democracy is the same thing that yesterday’s zealots of ‘liberal democracy’ referred to as totalitarianism: the same thing turned upside down. What was only recently denounced as the State principle of a closed totality is now denounced as the social principle of limitlessness. This principle called democracy has become the englobing principle of modernity viewed as an historical and global totality to which the sole name of Jew stands in opposition as the principle of maintaining the human tradition. The American thinker of the ‘crisis of democracy’ might still oppose (as pertinent to the ‘clash of civilizations’) Western and Christian democracy to an Islam synonymous with the despotic Orient.⁸ The French thinker of democratic crime, for his part, proposes a radicalized version of the war of civilizations, opposing democracy, Christianity and Islam, all merged together, to the sole Jewish exception.

We can, then, in a first analysis, circle in on the principle of this new antidemocratic discourse. The portrait it traces of democracy comprises traits that until quite recently were attributed to totalitarianism. Drawing up this portrait, then, implies a process of disfiguration: as if the concept of totalitarianism, forged for the purpose of the Cold War, and having lost its function, can be disassembled and its traits recomposed to remake the portrait of democracy, i.e., the thing that was its alleged contrary. We can reconstruct the stages of this process of defiguration and recomposition. It began at the start of the 1980s with a first operation that called into question the two sides of the opposition. The terrain on which this operation was played out was that of the reconsideration of the revolutionary heritage of democracy. The role played by Francois Furet’s work Interpreting the French Revolution, published in 1978, has often been underlined. But the double thrust of the operation he performed has scarcely been noticed. To put the Terror again at the heart of the democratic revolution amounted, at the most visible level, to breaking the opposition that had structured the dominant opposition. Totalitarianism and democracy, Furet taught us, are not really opposed. The reign of Stalinist terror was already anticipated in the reign of revolutionary terror. And further, revolutionary terror had not at all derailed the Revolution; it was consubstantial with its project – it was a necessity inherent to the very essence of the democratic revolution.

Deducing Stalinist terror from French revolutionary terror was not in itself a new thing. This analysis had already been integrated into the classic opposition pitting liberal parliamentary democracy against a radical egalitarian democracy that sacrificed the rights of individuals to the religion of the collective and the blind fury of the hordes. A renewed denunciation of terrorist democracy seemed, then, to entail conceiving a new basis for a pragmatic and liberal democracy finally delivered from the revolutionary fantasies of the collective body.

But this simple reading omits the double thrust of the operation. For the critique of the Terror has a twofold basis. The critique known as liberal – which arraigns the totalitarian rigours of equality before the wise republic of individual liberties and parliamentary representation – was from the beginning subordinated to a totally different critique, one for which the sin of the revolution was not its collectivism, but, on the contrary, its individualism. On this view, the French Revolution was terroristic not for having refused to recognize the rights of individuals; it was terroristic for having consecrated them. Initiated by the theoreticians of the counter-revolution in the wake of the French Revolution, relayed by utopian socialists in the first half of the nineteenth century, consecrated at the end of the same century by the young science of sociology, this first reading can be stated as follows: the Revolution was the consequence of Enlightenment thinking and of its first principle – the ‘Protestant’ doctrine that elevates the judgement of isolated individuals to the level of structures and collective...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 From Victorious Democracy to Criminal Democracy
• 2 Politics, or the Lost Shepherd
• 3 Democracy, Republic, Representation
• 4 The Rationality of a Hatred
• Notes