Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Doing Justice to the Other
- 1 Blind Spots and Insights: Between Deliberation and Agonism
- 2 A More Expansive Conception of Deliberation
- 3 Arguments and Hearing Something New
- 4 The Possibility of Political Thought and the Experience of Undecidability
- 5 The Demands of Deconstruction
- 6 The Democratic Venture
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - The Democratic Venture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Doing Justice to the Other
- 1 Blind Spots and Insights: Between Deliberation and Agonism
- 2 A More Expansive Conception of Deliberation
- 3 Arguments and Hearing Something New
- 4 The Possibility of Political Thought and the Experience of Undecidability
- 5 The Demands of Deconstruction
- 6 The Democratic Venture
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Does the deconstructive account of democracy leave any hope for the possibility of realising a just constitutional regime? The account of democratic pervertibility does not seem promising. And as Rawls notes (in an echo of Kant), without this hope one may wonder whether life is worth living. In this final chapter I attempt to avoid that despairing position. I shall do so by discussing decon-structive and deliberative approaches to constitutional democracy, and, in particular, how each addresses its alleged paradoxical nature. I begin by revisiting the deconstructive account of democracy that left us in what seemed like a hopeless position at the end of the last chapter. I argue that Derrida's account of democracy presupposes constitutional safeguards that, in principle, check the pervertibility he identifies. I support this by discussing Derrida's response to what he takes to be an exemplary case of such pervertibility– the cancellation of elections in Algeria in 1992. While pervertibility cannot be eliminated, I argue that deconstruction demands that we pursue the least perverting perversion (see Chapter 5). My second step is to bring the deconstructive and deliberative understandings of constitutional democracy into conversation. Here I identify an area of overlap and a key difference. The former is their shared historical understanding of democratic legitimacy. The latter is their approach to the indeterminacy of democratic constitution-making. Deliberative approaches present a dialectical story of self-correcting learning processes, while the deconstructive approach points to the ‘non-dialectizable’ indeterminacy of that process. The latter picture emerges from the antinomic understanding of the ‘im-possibility’ of doing justice to the other developed in Chapters 4 and 5. This is something deliberativists need to consider if they are to avoid slipping into a self-congratulatory narrative. As a final step, I point to glimpses of a less confident, more vigilant, deliberative approach, and the possibility of a deliberative-deconstructive dialogue in terms of their shared hope in the perfectibility of democracy and the promise this contains for doing justice to the other in their otherness. I end the chapter by pointing to current empirical research that not only gives hope for dialogue, but also gives encouragement for praxis.
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- Information
- Deliberative Theory and DeconstructionA Democratic Venture, pp. 231 - 274Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020