Ambivalent Representations and Fragile Boundaries: Heroes, Victims, Perpetrators

Abstract

The public sphere takes center stage not only in Habermasian accounts of democracy. There are, indeed, very few alternative arenas for the construction of what Rousseau termed la volonté générale. La volonté générale as well as its carrier, the demos, are, however, ridden by a seemingly insurmountable conceptual problem: they are invisible, they cannot be measured, and they transcend any finite account of their elements. The demos cannot be reduced to a limited number of its citizens and la volonté générale cannot be reduced to a fixed number of decisions with respect to a fixed number of issues. Both are intransparent and porous notions; any definition of them can be challenged, contested, and rejected. They share this essential intransparency with other references to identity —collective or personal — or to the ‘sacred’ in a Durkheimian phrasing. References to identity or subjectivity are ‘empty signifiers’ in the Levistraussian phrasing, but they come along with an utmost certainty about the existence of the signified entity. We are almost absolutely certain that the demos exists as we are absolutely sure that we as individual persons have an enduring identity. This enduring personal or collective identity allows us to refer to responsibility and guilt beyond the limited range of historical situations and of legal constitutions. Democracy is not to be reduced to electoral procedures and the rule of law; instead it is an idea of sovereignty, and the sovereign pouvoir constituant has to be conceived as independent from any particular person or law.