Introduction

When collective protest develops in the streets and occupied squares, it becomes not simply a demand for democracy addressed to the disputed power but an affirmation of democracy effectively implemented. —Jacques Rancière As another cycle of collective protest reverberated around the globe in recent years, crowds again took to the streets and public squares of cities from Santiago to Beirut, from Hong Kong to Baghdad, claiming their elected representatives do not, in fact, represent them. In the United States, the largest protest movement in its history—the Movement for Black Lives—drew between fifteen to twenty-six million people into the streets of hundreds of different cities and towns, and did so in the middle of a global pandemic’s demand for social distancing. The local grievances which triggered these uprisings vary widely—an increase in the price of public transportation, a tax on a popular messaging service, a revised extradition law, searing examples of racist police violence—but all express dismay and disgust at the economic and political inequalities of the existing system of representative government and a common demand to return political power to the people themselves. “Our government is a government of thugs!” “Chile woke up!” “There are no rioters, only a tyrannical regime!” The figurative space opened up by a widespread crisis of democratic legitimacy once again filled the streets with multitudes banging pots and pans, occupying public buildings and squares, building barricades, and throwing improvised dance parties celebrating the coming fall of the regime. Amid the proliferation of ever-new technologies enabling virtual forms of assembly, political participation, and “preference ...

Tocqueville’s Religious Terror

One of the central ironies of Alexis de Tocqueville’s political thought was that the democratic era that promised to bring conscious human agency to an equal mankind, freeing human beings from their bondage to tradition and their submission to the sacred, actually threatened them with unprecedented forms of domination. Tocqueville’s sense of “religious terror” is engendered from the spectacle of everyone being “driven willy-nilly along the same road” and having “joined the common cause, some despite themselves, others unwittingly, like blind instruments in the hands of God.” “Religious terror” is both a symptom and a diagnosis of his concern with the deflated status of individual agency in democratic contexts, and with the related eclipse of the political by the social question. This chapter explores this dimension of Tocqueville’s thought and its relation to his denial of such agency to any collective actor, to deny heroism, and its associated grandeur, to the popular will.

The Living Image of the People

The transition from royal to popular sovereignty during the age of democratic revolutions entailed not only the reorganization of institutions of governance and norms of political legitimacy, but also a dramatic and less-examined transformation in the iconography of political power and rule. Drawing on a wide range of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century visual sources, this chapter examines the pressures of popular visualization that accompanied the victorious appearance of popular sovereignty at key moments of its emergence, and how competing strategies of imaging popular will were implicated in different conceptions of popular agency and power. The chapter is focused on the emergence of “the living image of the people,” the idea that collective assemblies, crowds, and mass protests were no longer understood as mere factious riots or seditious rebellions, but instead as living manifestations of the people’s authority, sublime expressions of the vitality and significance of popular will.

Popular Manifestation

While contemporary democratic theory has explored the paradoxes of peoplehood and the dilemmas of authorization and legality that follow from them, this chapter focuses on a related but conceptually distinct problem: the question of how popular sovereignty’s authorizing entity, the people, publicly appears, how it makes itself tangible to the senses, how the people takes shape as a collective actor when no formal rules and procedures for identifying popular will exist, or when these rules and procedures are so deeply contested as to be effectively deauthorized. This chapter examines how this issue emerges in the work of two seminal theorists of modern democracy who have written extensively on the French Revolution—Carl Schmitt and Claude Lefort—only to be redirected from the aesthetic-political problem of manifestation to the political theological problem of incarnation.

Afterword

Jacques Rancière’s democratic theory affirms not only an an-archic antifoundationalism, but also an everyday theory of political subjectivization and democratic appearance, through which “the power of the people” is “re-enacted ceaselessly by political subjects that challenge the police distribution of parts, places or competences, and that re-stage the anarchic foundation of the political.” This afterword focuses on Rancière’s conceptualization of the relationship between democracy as a politics without arche, and the singular acts of political subjectivization and democratic appearance that bring this contingency to light and enact it on the public stage. I turn first to Rancière’s work and then to an examination of a series of images created by the contemporary artist Glenn Ligon that critically engage with the Nation of Islam’s 1995 Million Man March. Ligon’s work provides an occasion for thinking in more historically and aesthetically detailed ways about the forms of everyday political speech and action that Rancière’s work brings into view as distinctive modes of democratic appearance.

Delightful Horror

Edmund Burke remains one of the great theorists of the aesthetic dimensions of political life, and this chapter focuses on his account of the sublime production of political authority. Burke’s theory of the sublime identifies an instinctive “delight” that human beings take in their own subordination: it is an affective device for naturalizing order and rank in human society and the psychological foundation of such distinctive Burkean formulations as “proud submission” and “dignified obedience.” However, the French Revolution, and its enthusiastic reception by British radicals during the 1790s, occasioned a revision of Burke’s political aesthetics, whereby the sublime was no longer associated with astonishment, novelty, and ennobling disorientation, but with the gravity of an historical inheritance transmitted across time by the ancient constitution. Burke’s antirevolutionary writings mark a transition in his thinking from a political aesthetics of sublime transcendence to one of historical immanence.

The Poetics of the Barricade

This chapter examines the most widely disseminated iconography and symbolism of the popular will during the age of democratic revolution: the poetics of the barricade. While the insurgent barricade dates back to the sixteenth century as a defensive tactic against the forces of state repression, it was only during the nineteenth century that it acquired its distinctly modern and democratic association with popular constituent power. After the July Revolution of 1830, the barricade spread rapidly throughout Europe as a symbolic condensation of revolutionary upheaval. This chapter examines the insurgent barricade as a space that enabled a distinctive form of political subjectivization in emergent democratic contexts, one that not only materialized the boundary of the political—the defining opposition between the people and the state—but that simultaneously enacted a self-organizing manifestation of popular will. The insurgent barricade is the site of the tangible formation of a collective intention.

Rousseau’s Silent Assemblies

This chapter examines the centrality of popular assemblies to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of popular sovereignty by taking seriously the role they play in “maintaining sovereign authority,” which can only be done by sustaining or reenacting the source of that authority: the living body of the people themselves. Rousseau’s sovereign assemblies are often taken to be the clearest expression of his investment in what Jacques Derrida called a “metaphysics of presence.” Even as Rousseau’s sovereign assemblies provide the foundation of collective self-rule, however, the occasion through which the people’s will is expressed as law, they also serve an underappreciated ritual function, giving reenacted form and continuity to the very people whose will is expressed through them. The assembly form is the necessary—and necessarily hidden—supplement from which the people’s seemingly unmediated will is derived. The sovereign assembly is at once the source of the people’s collective autonomy, and the heteronomic support which provides its ongoing conditions of possibility.