Over the course of three decades, vocabularies of radical democracy have pressed their stamp on democratic thought. Trading on the intuition that there is more to democracy than elections, they have generated critical insights into the important role that practices of pluralisation and critique play in bettering institutional politics. As a result, few would today deny the radical democratic contribution to democratic thought. What many might question, however, is its continuing traction. The article probes this question, focusing on the nuanced (...) place of democracy in contemporary radical work. It grapples with the difficulties that this poses for radical democrats, and it suggests that a way of overcoming these difficulties – that threaten to undermine the coherence of radical democracy – is to rethink and reconstruct the distinctiveness of its vocabulary. The article attempts such a reconstruction. It develops the idea of the promissory rule of the many, and it discusses the ways that this idea rejuvenates broader democratic thought. (shrink)

This article develops a comparative and recursive approach to political ontology by drawing on the ontological turn in anthropology. It claims that if ontological commitments define reality, then the use of ontology by recent pluralist political theorists must undercut pluralism. By charting contemporary anthropology’s rereading of structuralism as part of a plural understanding of ontology, it will be shown that any political ontology places limits on the political, and thus cannot exhaust political experience. This position will be established through an (...) analysis of the role of Claude Lévi-Strauss in the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and a comparison with the political ontology represented by perspectivism and potential affinity. Anthropology’s lesson for political theory is that ontology cannot simply be revised and treated in the singular, but that political ontologies must be analysed comparatively to reveal the shortcomings of, and recursively alter, one’s own political frame of reference. (shrink)

The article seeks to advance the debate on Islam and secularism, not by thinking of secularism in terms of whether there is or should be state neutrality toward religion, but rather by proposing that we think in terms of a state neutrality that is anchored in pluralism to-come. The latter is not a future pluralism that will one day arrive but is rather characterized by a structural promise of openness to futurity which thus exposes us to absolute surprise simultaneously of (...) the best and the worst in plurality, the one never coming without opening the possibility of the other. The analysis is developed via a critical examination of the presuppositions of Abdullahi A. An-Na‘im’s book, Islam and the Secular State, supplemented with key ideas from Jacques Derrida’s political philosophy. I specifically propose to shift the debate on the question of Islam and state neutrality in two ways. First, I propose that instead of thinking in terms of secularism and its mechanism – civic reason – for sustaining pluralism in heterogeneous societies, we think in terms of a secularity and a civic reason, both of which presuppose a pluralism to-come. Second, I propose that we think not simply in terms of actual pluralism but rather in terms of an autoimmune pluralism. (shrink)