°America is Waiting
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …
If a consideration of privelige occupies the thoughts of North American progressives, by contrast the principle that has sometimes preoccupied radical politics in Italy (and perhaps, in other versions, radical politics elsewhere) is non credere di avere diritti – don’t believe you have rights.
Where the first seeks to comphrend the existence of asymetrical power relations in a society that declares its – albeit promissory – exemption from inherited inequalities, the second offers a reconsideration of the proposition of the ‘promise corrupted’ as the really-existing bind of the complex theology of democracy.
We, in flesh and blood, must put ourselves in the place of the missing guarantee, of the justice which is yet to be done, of the truth which is yet to be known. – Liberia delle Donne di Milano, Non credere du avere dei diritti. (Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier. 1987)
If this becomes suggestive of a critique of the Derridean ‘to come’ – at least as its more liberal (Americanised?) expressions slip into an acqueiscence to infinite deferal, and indifference – it nevertheless remains alert to what a politics without ground would oblige, which is to say: a different sense of the political. In other words: not the presumption of individual equalisation or presumptuousness of privelige that is assumed, or might be anguished over in any encounter, but the insistence that each encounter, each tie or relation, requires decision – requires politics as decision and discernment –, without the transcendental guarantee, promise and alibi of right.
Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people. […] The people reign in the American political world as the Deity does in the universe. They are the cause and the aim of all things; everything comes from them, and everything is absorbed in them. […] the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity; the more complete this uniformity is, the more insupportable the sight of such a difference becomes. – Democracy in America.
But while Democracy in America is remarkable for its attention to democracy as theology, or the discussion of the constitution of public homogeneity and privatised difference which immunises the political body from difference, among other things, it is no less significant for its apparently paradoxical formulations: ‘democratic despotism’, ‘tyranny of the majority’, the uniformity of sentiment that democracy generates, etc.
Here, and contrary to those who read Democracy in America through the concept of ‘lack’, Tocqueville does what few commentators on democracy have been prepared to do before and since – that is: to refuse the propensity to define democracy in Platonic terms, as the pure Idea, subsequently contaminated. This deference to democracy as Idea is nothing less than the destinal conviction that, throughout the 20th century, will exhaust every sense of freedom. Mario Tronti, in ‘Politica e destino‘:
In the past fifty years, according to those who see the problem from the point of view of radical democracy or the critique of democracy, democracy has either been corrupted or completed. I believe that it has been completed.
In “Heiress at Twilight”, Ida Dominijanni recalls a moment of intersection between two threads of post-1968 politics in Italy, the politics of difference and Operaismo, as it travelled through the writings of Luisa Muraro, Carla Lonzi, Mario Tronti, among others. Converging around a critique of “the homogenizing power of equality and the totalizing drive of identity” that democracy is, this critique recalls the seemingly paradoxical formulations of Tocqueville’s and reposes them on the terrain of difference, strategy and encounter. Here, liberal indifference, as well as Schmittian idealisations of difference, give way to an understanding of politics as bodily, sensory, affective and sensible, the polis as street - tangere enim et tangi, nisi corpus, nulla potest res (for nothing but body is capable of touching or of being touched).
And so, as Muraro argued, paraphrased by Dominijanni:
The democratic states of the late 20th century responded to the explosion of difference in the 1970s with the strategy of ‘obsessive parity’.
Similarly and before this, Lonzi:
Equality is what is offered as legal rights to colonized people. […] The world of equality is the world of legalized oppression and one-dimensionality. – Sputiamo su Hegel (1971)
As an aside: To what extent are the history of struggles represented as if they are always engaged in the project of the democratic telos?
In any case, Tocqueville’s ‘paradoxical’ understanding of democracy suggests less a set of contraries – tyranny - democracy, homogeneity - diversity – that might be worked out as the temporal unfolding of one or other idealised pole – the either/or – than the existence, as democracy, of both the abstract, ‘empty’ equality of the citizen and the substantive identity of the the people. [+]
Dominijanni:
It is not only a matter of the denunciation and criticism of the false neutrality of the individual and the demos, but also of the exposure of and attack on the heart of the identitarian root of democracy. (Sexual) difference is not an element that can be expansively included in democracy. It is rather the explosive and unhinging element. If the democratic order constructs itself on an identitarian base and consolidates and globalizes itself through the assimilationist and homogenizing valence of equality, difference is the element that disorders this double base by unhinging it. If, in the democratic order, the identitarian root and assimilationist and homogenizing valence of equality suffocate human and political freedom, decomposing them in the liberty of the (neutral) citizen assured by rights (that are ‘precious to live together with others but poor for existing in a way that begins with oneself’), difference is the refounding element of freedom or, to put it another way, the category with which to rethink the subject. The semantics of freedom and the grammar of difference touch each other in the central and crucial political project of the present, which is called ‘for the critique of democracy.’
[xposted]
