In this chapter I argue that for Nancy, the political and the prepolitical are bound by a mutual constitutive principle, what Nancy calls the ‘sense’ of democracy. This sense is the source of democracy's meaning– and for Nancy, it is not anything stable. Nancy submits that we are coming to the end of an age in which meaning has been supported by given, traditional principles. Today meaning can no longer be referred to a beyond– for instance, the familiar principles of God, Man, History, Science, Law, Value. The destruction of the community's relation to this beyond leads to shock and disappointment, but for Nancy, in the midst of this shock, democracy as politics and government nonetheless remains as a source of meaning. However, the principle of democracy undergoes a mutation and needs to be rethought. Democracy can no longer rely on the traditional beyond for its ideals, even its ideal of freedom. This is because the modern subject continually affirms the unlimited freedom of what Nancy calls an extremity, a freedom that even exceeds our own-most uniqueness of difference, that forges invention, creates new ideals and dreams, that cannot be tied to a given principle. Behind new ideals there is, then, a threat of destruction of such ideals: it is the loss of the beyond that opens the way for forging ideals, and positing new ideals that seem to be fixed or given, threatens to return us to a beyond that removes freedom. In the midst of shock, in the freedom of democracy, meaning comes back to us only in the ‘loss of the power to signify’.

Nancy's reflection on the political value of freedom depends upon understanding not so much whether or not there is freedom that belongs to some verifiable order, but rather how and why we can say that meaning comes back to us in the freedom of democracy, despite the loss of the power to signify. Since the freedom of democracy cannot refer to any traditional beyond, and thus cannot be part of any axiomatic ontology, meaning must come back through something evental that, by its very occurrence, haunts the political and returns as the political's own pre-political condition. As Nancy puts it, the ‘possible meaning or sense of democracy’ stems from ‘little more than a minimal argument or schematic protocol’ that neither requires nor allows an axiomatic ontology.