This article explores different theoretical and political dimensions of voice in democratic theory. Drawing on recent developments in political theory, ranging form James Bohman’s work on the movement from demos to demoi in transnational politics, to William Connolly’s writings on pluralization, it develops a critical account of the emphasis within conventional pluralism on the representation of extant identities. Instead, it foregrounds the need to engage with emerging identities, demands, and claims that fall outside the parameters of dominant discursive orders. Building (...) on the works of Rancie`re and Cavell, it highlights the importance of an analytical engagement with the emergence and articulation of new struggles and voices*the processes through which inchoate demands are given political expression*so as to counter the ongoing possibilities of domination, understood here as a ‘deprivation of voice.’ The article develops an account of the centrality of the category of responsiveness to such claims and demands for democratic theory, especially in relation to a range of democratic struggles in our contemporary world. In so doing, it contributes to a growing body of work that questions the taken for granted character and status of the institutional forms of liberal democaracy. Keywords: pluralism; demoi; Connolly; Rancie`re; responsiveness; deprivation of voice; domination; Cavell; democratic subjectivity; demands; claim-making (Published: 4 December 2009) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 2, No. 4, 2009, pp. 297320. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v2i4.2118. (shrink)

No Current Hegelian theories of recognition assume a concept of the subject as always being available for harming. This emphasis placed on vulnerability, whose validity is not being called into question as such here, leave a certain number of elements on the nature of the harm threatening the person expecting recognition unclarified, especially the fact that it cannot be perpetrated without the victim being aware. At the same time, it fails to address the nature of the relationship of recognition, omitting (...) from consideration the exercise of power and the mechanisms inherent to this relationship. These omissions, as I show, cause a particular dimension of recognition-driven struggles to be neglected, a dimension which I will refer to as the politics of exit. (shrink)