Abstract
How may democracy manifest itself? Miguel Abensour replies that the manifestation/combination of the demos as well as of its political self-concretisation is and should remain one ‘particular moment’ – towards which the life of any democratic people tends. Marx turns not the state but just democracy into the moment and telos, ‘toward which all modern political forms are tending’, as Abensour further demonstrates (p. 49). Whereas Hegel would have treated democracy as one among several forms of power, each of which develops into the state and into its independence and unity, Marx refuses to believe that democratic power could ever bind itself to this state's ‘abstract logic’ of self-unification. The power of the demos, instead, appears to Marx as a concrete medium. This power appears while conjuring away ‘political alienation’ – through the people's ‘threefold status of principle, subject and end’ (pp. 56–8).
Democracy's manifestation/combination must never be abstracted into unity: it must remain ecstatic without subjecting itself to the (Hegelian) mystification of any final moment of reconciliation (p. 69). Democracy can thus disappear in terms of the state's end-state, yet may remain present as purpose and principle. Democracy cannot be positivised in terms of ‘objective reality’, yet remains subject to the demos and its many practical ideals (p. 61). The people may well objectify their democratic principles but, as opposed to being in a monarchy or in civil society, will have to do this both ‘in and through’ their own political state (p. 54). By thus causing a stir, or by generating a Machiavellian moment, the people's state (democracy) will negate its own tendency towards unity and objectivity.
Abensour's book offers not only a fine commentary on the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right by Marx. It also alludes to political anthropology, to Clastres, it anticipates Deleuze, and is therefore extraordinarily germane to theorists of democratic foundations. Abensour helps such theorists argue why the constituent elements of democracy are not simply momentary events and radical actions, since the elements of democracy additionally contain these events and these actions themselves, to prevent ‘the revolution’ from swerving (p. 96). ‘The people’ is more than the process of constituent action; ‘the people’ is conflict and conflict prevention as well. In the relation between the people's concrete process of self-constituency, when understood as a practice, and the state's constitutional system, as implied by that practice, Abensour recognises the complexity of political negations.