Politics of silence : aporias and temporality of the political

Abstract

My thesis investigates how Habermasian deliberative democracies are prone to create zones of silence. Legislation for Habermas, which is a speech-act, relies on the communicative power of sovereignty, but his theory disregards emergent agendas, new subjects, and disruptive acts and speeches of the political. It thus reduces speech of new political subjects to silence. Liberal deliberative democracies are grounded in the political authority granted by the people's presence in the law-making process. The rule of law is equated to the sovereignty of self-rule that constitutes the legitimizing ground of norms. However, "the people" is not only a constitutive but also a constituted power. Their presence and self need to be constituted to be agreeable and represented via speech that makes them recognizable by the law. One of the aporias I am interested in is the paradox of normativity: while subjects may speak to authorize the norms, speech constitutes subjects authorized to make norms, and norms subjectify people authorized to speak. I argue that the people emerge, act and become socio-politically present before speech legitimizes the emergence by a representation. The people are the source of the very law they violate. I aim to answer the following question: If a wrong by the law occurs within this closed circuit of normativity, can one talk against the norms that give one the authority to talk? I argue that the wrong occurs as the law, bent on security from risk, overcoming of alienation and hostility, and unpredictability only recognizes and authorizes what it constitutes. The wrong consists of self-rule, i.e. sovereignty. Lyotard's Differend, Ranciere's disagreement and Butler's disruption and finally disidentification may remind us that the unsayable is the political word to come, that a silent presence may present a better hope of living together than the policed sayable. Our present engages in a violent encounter with the unsayable that at the present takes the representative form of a material silence, i.e. the matter of the community. How is the social bond to be conceived? What are the material conditions of responsiveness to those who are silenced by sovereignty? This presence that wishes-to-say is thus first encountered as the visibility of an unrecognizable embodiment, as the bodily presence of those who do not have the authority to speak. In offering their visibility, they ask "Will you hear my story?," and in speaking they demand an ethical wish to hear the unsayable, i.e. what could not make sense by the political rationality of their time, viz. the principles that materialize the community. Thus they also demand a speech-act that identifies and recognize them and poetic creativity to sense the meaning in their senseless, unrecognizable presence and traces of the unsayable in the already-heard. I try to answer the following questions: How is recognition to be understood in this context? What is the demand to be recognized? Finally, I will argue that the silent presence of those who demand recognition address us to a future community. Thus the basic political speech-act is futural. Show more