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Document Details :

Title: De uiterste limieten van de democratische verdeeldheid
Subtitle: Over democratie, conflict en geweld in het werk van Chantal Mouffe en Étienne Balibar
Author(s): BOONEN, Christiaan
Journal: Tijdschrift voor Filosofie
Volume: 80    Issue: 4   Date: 2018   
Pages: 637-670
DOI: 10.2143/TVF.80.4.3286091

Abstract :
This article’s guiding thesis is that the theory of radical democratic citizenship is built on a tense fusion of a radical and conflictual element on the one hand, and a democratic element on the other. As radical democrats, these philosophers point to conflict’s intimate relation to both emancipation and democracy. But as radical democrats they also propose different methods that prevent conflict from breaking up the polis, which is the common ground that makes democratic conflict possible in the first place. I look at two radical democrats’ ways of dealing with this tension: Chantal Mouffe and Étienne Balibar. My claim is that the former ends up overemphasizing the danger of division in her later democratic works and is therefore unable to account for the more intense forms of democratic resistance (such as riots). In the work of Balibar, however, we find a way to address this tension.

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