Taking the democratic subject seriously

Abstract

This article has two objectives. The first is to examine the post‐Marxist concept of the democratic subject, which I argue requires criticism and revision if it is to be coherently integrated into the post‐Marxist theory of democracy itself. The second is to examine the national–democratic project as proposed by the ANC and its allies in terms of this conceptual analysis of the democratic subject. It is argued that a ‘democratic turn’ has occurred in the national democratic project, but that national democratic subjectivity is still caught up in a fantasy of absolute political truth and closure, which interrupts its democratic practice.

Keywords:

• national democracy
• post‐Marxism
• democratic subject
• ideology
• fantasy

Notes

1. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Theory Seminar, WISER, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, March 2007; the Symposium on Cosmopolitan Citizenship, Human Sciences Research Council, 18–19 April 2007; the College of the Human Sciences, Walter and Albertina Sisulu Heritage and Knowledge Unit, University of South Africa, Pretoria, 24 May 2007.

2. The National Democracy project has never gone off the South African political agenda. Thus, Saki Macozoma and Philip Dexter, supporters of the ANC breakaway party Congress of the People (COPE), are careful not to put it in question (see Moipone et al. 2009, Dexter 2009). However, as Karima Brown (2008, p. 7) points out, the time has come for its conceptual renewal: ‘the challenge for all the factions of the ANC is to retheorise the national–democratic revolution. Post‐apartheid South Africa needs a new theory of revolution’.

3. See, inter alia, Helen Zille (2007) and John Kane‐Berman (2009). The democratic subject is thus able to distance itself from its identity, but not in the manner of either Jean‐Paul Sartre's absolute spontaneity or Slavoj Zizek's ‘wiping of the slate clean’. See Hudson (2006) for a discussion of the above conceptions of the subject.

4. This account is closer to what Bruno Bosteels refers to as ‘Laclau's cleaner’ deconstructive version of ‘structural causality’ (2006, p. 130) than to Zizek's, which focuses on ‘the obscene passionate enjoyment – the dark underside or nightly obverse of the lack in the symbolic order’ (Bosteels 2006, p. 130).

5. Fantasy and ideology overlap here: fantasy captures the subject's taking up of a determinate subject position and ideology the interpellation of the subject into just such a fantasmatic subject position (see Althusser 2001, Zizek 2006a).

6. See, for example, Lawrence (2009).

7. Subsequent to his ‘Leninist turn’, Zizek (2006b, pp. 54, 117, 359 and 2007a, pp. xi, xxvi) now derides those who take seriously legitimation by actual expressions of popular will by characterising them as waiting for the go‐ahead from the big Other. The authentic act, for Zizek, legitimises itself, rather than invoking any ‘higher authority’, even that of the people.

But what gets elided here is the conception of democracy as an attempt to institutionalise the lack of the big Other. To be sure, there are several ways of responding to this lack – Zizek's ‘Act’ is one, democracy is another; in the case of the latter this recognition of lack involves identifying the popular will as the source of the legitimacy of social objectivity via its enunciation by (sufficiently) equal and free citizens. The post‐Marxist conception of the democratic subject does not thus condemn it as an obsession with the ‘politics of lack’, a paralysis induced by its recognition of the impossibility of ‘society’: the democratic subject constructs social objectivity, it just does so in a way that inscribes contingency in social objectivity itself. The democratic moment (of dissolution–reconstitution) is an attempt to stage the real of the social – to get as close to it as possible without inducing the catastrophic collapse of social objectivity. Of course, the democratic process can be naturalised and become a way of stopping recognition of lack – but Zizek seems to be aiming higher, at democratic process per se (Butler and Stephens 2006).

Zizek's (latest) criticism of democracy as ‘the ultimate guarantee for those who are aware there is no guarantee’ (2006b, p. 359) misses its mark. Its target is not the democratic subject that has distanced itself from a longing for plenitude, but a semi‐democratic subject that has not. Zizek's ‘democratic’ subject has managed to twist democracy into just another warrant from the big Other. All that is going on here is that ‘emptiness’ now occupies the place of the Thing, the Absolute, instead of History or the Proletariat, but with the same guarantee and subjective relief (Zizek 2007b, p. 7).

8. Is the democratic subject divided between its commitment to its particular project and its commitment to democratic emptiness, that is the rules of the democratic institutionalisation of this ‘emptiness’ at the heart of the social?

No, because the democratic subject by definition invests only in objects that have respect for the real and the other inscribed in them as central to their identity. The democratic subject is thus constitutively open to the claims of the other. It identifies with, and aspires to the realisation of only those objects which recognise themselves as particular, that is which acknowledge that they do not immediately embody the ‘real impossible sovereign’ (Zizek 1989, p. 147). Only those objects, that is to say, which acknowledge this irreducible gap between the real and symbolic dimensions of the social are possible objects of democratic passion. Such objects, furthermore, conform to the rules of the democratic identification (on the basis of citizen equality and freedom and via elections) of the popular will, to the democratic identification of the particular project occupying the place of the universal. So, the distinction between particular object and democracy begins to collapse from the side of the particular object itself. Similarly, looking at things from the side of the rules, once again the distinction begins to crumble. We need to be careful, in other words, not to reify the rules of democracy and give them an existence outside any instantiation – it is only insofar as determinate objects allow their access to the universal to be governed by such rules that these latter are effective. In other words, they only exist insofar as determinate objects consider conformity as internal to their identities. Such determinate objects or projects cannot thus be opposed to democratic ‘emptiness’ because this exists via them.

An empirical subject which is (only) semi‐democratic may invest in objects because of the fullness they promise – because of their absent fullness – but precisely to this extent such a subject is semi‐democratic: it is caught between two constructions of its object – not between its object and democracy; on the one hand, it longs through it for fullness; on the other, it also aspires to maintain open the question of the social and wants its object to conform to the rules of the ‘institutionalisation’ of this question, of this openness.

9. This conception of the democratic subject might, in view of its endorsement of popular sovereignty, seem to belong to what Simon Critchley calls ‘the autonomy orthodoxy’ (2007, p. 93). However, the identity of the people is precisely not that of autarkic self‐sufficiency and the notion of autonomy at work here is, therefore, also not essentialist. See Critchley (2007, pp. 36, 85).

10. See Van Niekerk (2006) for an interesting discussion of this issue.

11. Consider the national democratic subject from the point of view of a possible tension between it and the exigencies of democracy. In other words, is the National Democracy subject, on the fully democratic construal of this latter, open to a tension between its commitment to the National Democracy project (understood as involving the deracialisation of access to goods and opportunities) and its commitment to the democratic constitution of power? No, because in its self‐understanding it doesn't separate the two, that is the National Democracy project, as occupying the place of the universal, derives its legitimacy from democratic elections – the dimension of respect for the real and the other is built into the very identity of the National Democracy project – on the democratic construal of this latter. Respect for emptiness and desire for National Democratic Revolution are inseparable in this conception of the National Democracy project. On this conception, to recapitulate, the National Democratic Revolution is recognised as a particular project, which ipso facto has no a priori right to occupy the place of the universal: it does not claim directly and immediately to be or to embody ‘the real impossible sovereign’ (Zizek 1989, p. 147) – rather, it acknowledges that other, particular projects can legitimately contest the place of power. So a fully democratic subject cannot be split by its commitment to its particular object and democracy.

An empirical subject may, of course, consider its project as the object of a possible fullness – without at the same time totally letting go of its identity qua democratic subject. This would fall under what has been described above as ‘semi‐democratic’ subject. This has been proposed as dominant in South Africa today, which means that empirically National Democracy subjects are (still) attached to a metanarrative of the nation which ‘interrupts’ their democratic practice. But this latter, at the same time, is not a mere instrument of cynical subjectivity (cf. supra).

12. It isn't really a question of whether democracy in South Africa will or will not survive its current travails – it is more a matter of conceptually determining the post‐1994 articulation of democracy with the National Democracy project: is this better characterised as ‘semi’ or ‘pseudo’ democratic? More importantly, it is a matter of holding the National Democracy project up to the strictures of other post‐Marxist conceptions of democratic subjectivity: just what would the concept of a democratic national subject look like and what, finally, has been the specific post‐1994 balance between democratic openness and national democratic closure? The possibility exists that it hasn't been anything more than a cynical exercise of pseudo‐democratic posturing, par excellence. But in this case, too, we cannot avoid going through the concept, that is we still need a conceptual determination to take the measure of the empirical.