Faculty Publication: Associate Professor of Political Science Joel Schlosser
Authors: Ali Aslam, David McIvor, and Joel Schlosser
Source: Polity, Volume 56, Issue1, Page 40-64, DOI10.1086/727908
Publication Type: Journal Article
Abstract: This essay examines the relationship between democracy and the unconscious. It does so by understanding democracy through the repressed desire for shared power by a collective actor that has episodically realized itself, in ways that haunt political languages, practices, and aspirations. Democratic flourishing rests upon erotic practices through which the demos transgressively transforms politics by embracing what we refer to as democratic narcissism. Democratic decline and impasse are symptomatic of repressed desires for power that have required the people's abjection rather than coalescing into a self-affirming narcissism of the demos.