Brown reads the postmodern politics of identity based on the wrongs committed to specific groups (the sex—gender—race trinity) as an expression of the ambiguous relationship with the liberal-democratic egalitarian framework of human rights: one feels betrayed by it (with regard to women, blacks, gays … the universalist liberal rhetoric did not deliver, it masks continuous exclusion and exploitation), while nonetheless remaining deeply attached to these very ideals. In a refined analysis, Brown demonstrates how the sense of moral outrage emerges in order to find a precarious compromise between a host of inconsistent and opposed attitudes (sadism and masochism, attachment and rejection, blaming the other and feeling one’s own guilt). She reads moralizing politics “not only as a sign of stubborn clinging to a certain equation of truth with powerlessness, or as the acting out of an injured will, but as a symptom of a broken historical narrative to which we have not yet forged alternatives.”8 “It is when the telos of the good vanishes but the yearning for it remains that morality appears to devolve into moralism in politics.”9 After the disintegration of the grand, all-encompassing, leftist narratives of progress, when political activity dissolved into a multitude of identity issues, the excess over these particular struggles can only find an outlet in impotent moralistic outrage.
However, Brown takes here a crucial step further and pushes all the paradoxes of democracy to the end, more radically than Chantal Mouffe did with her “democratic paradox.” Already with Spinoza and Tocqueville, it became clear that democracy is in itself inchoate—empty, lacking a firm principle—it needs anti-democratic content to fill in its form; as such, it really is constitutively “formal.” This anti-democratic content is provided by philosophy, ideology, theory—no wonder that most of the great philosophers, from Plato to Heidegger, were mistrustful of democracy, if not directly anti-democratic:
What if democratic politics, the most untheoretical of all political forms, paradoxically requires theory, requires an antithesis to itself in both the form and substance of theory, if it is to satisfy its ambition to produce a free and egalitarian order?10
Brown deploys all the paradoxes from this fact that “democracy requires for its health a nondemocratic element”: a democracy needs a permanent influx of anti-democratic self-questioning in order to remain a living democracy—the cure for democracy’s ills is homoeopathic in form:
If, as the musings of Spinoza and Tocqueville suggest, democracies tend towards cathexis onto principles antithetical to democracy, then critical scrutiny of these principles and of the political formations animated by them is crucial to the project of refounding or recovering democracy.11
Brown defines the tension between politics and theory as the tension between the political necessity to fix meaning, to “suture” textual drift in a formal principle which can only guide us in action, and theory’s permanent “deconstruction” which cannot ever be recuperated in a new positive program:
Among human practices, politics is peculiarly untheoretical because the bids for power that constitute it are necessarily at odds with the theoretical project of opening up meaning, of “making meaning slide,” in Stuart Hall’s words. Discursive power functions by concealing the terms of its fabrication and hence its malleability and contingency; discourse fixes meaning by naturalizing it, or else ceases to have sway in a discourse. This fixing or naturalizing of meanings is the necessary idiom in which politics takes place. Even the politics of deconstructive displacement implicates such normativity, at least provisionally.12
Theoretical analyses which unearth the contingent and inconsistent nature and lack of ultimate foundation of all normative constructs and political projects, “are anti-political endeavors insofar as each destabilizes meaning without proposing alternative codes or institutions. Yet each may also be essential in sustaining an existing democratic regime by rejuvenating it.”13 It is thus as if Brown is proposing a kind of Kantian “critique of deconstructive (anti-democratic) reason,” distinguishing between its legitimate and illegitimate use: it is legitimate to use it as a negatively regulative corrective, a provocation, and so on, but it is illegitimate to use it as a constitutive principle to be directly applied to reality as a political program or project. Brown discerns the same ambiguous link in the relationship between state and people: in the same way that democracy needs anti-democracy to rejuvenate itself, the state needs the people’s resistance to rejuvenate itself:
Only through the state are the people constituted as a people; only in resistance to the state do the people remain a people. Thus, just as democracy requires antidemocratic critique in order to remain democratic, so too the democratic state may require democratic resistance rather than fealty if it is not to become the death of democracy. Similarly, democracy may require theory’s provision of unliveable critiques and unreachable ideals.14
Here, however, in this parallel between the two couples of democracy/anti-democracy and state/people, Brown’s argumentation becomes caught up in a strange symptomal dynamic of reversals: while democracy needs anti-democratic critique to remain alive, to shake its false certainties, the democratic state needs the democratic resistance of the people, not anti-democratic resistance. Does Brown not confound here two (or, rather, a whole series of) resistances to the democratic state: the anti-democratic “elitist” theoreticians’ resistance (Plato—Nietzsche—Heidegger), and popular-democratic resistance against the insufficiently democratic character of the state? Furthermore, is not each of these two kinds of resistance accompanied by its dark shadowy double: brutal cynical elitism that justifies those in power; the violent outbursts of the rabble? And what if the two join hands, what if we have anti-democratic resistance of the people themselves (“authoritarian populism”)?
Furthermore, does Brown not dismiss all too lightly anti-democratic theorists such as Nietzsche as proposing “unliveable” critiques of democracy? How do we respond to the coming-about of a regime that endeavors to “live” them, such as Nazism? Is it not too simple to relieve Nietzsche of responsibility by claiming that the Nazis distorted his thought? Of course they did, but so did Stalinism distort Marx, for every theory changes (is “betrayed”) in its practico-political application, and the Hegelian point to be made here is that, in such cases, the “truth” is not simply on the side of theory—what if the attempt to actualize a theory renders visible the objective content of this theory, concealed from the gaze of the theorist itself?
The weakness of Brown’s description is perhaps that she locates the undemocratic ingredient that keeps democracy alive only in the “crazy” theoreticians questioning its foundations from “unliveable” premises—but what about the very real undemocratic elements that sustain democracy? Does therein not reside the major premise of Foucault’s (Brown’s major reference) analyses of modern power: democratic power has to be sustained by a complex network of controlling and regulating mechanisms? In his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, T.S. Eliot, that archetypal “noble conservative,” convincingly argued that a strong aristocratic class is a necessary ingredient of a feasible democracy: the highest cultural values can only thrive if they are transmitted through a complex and continuous familial and group background. So when Brown claims that “democracy requires antidemocratic critique in order to remain democratic,” a liberal conservative would deeply agree in their warnings against “deMOREcracy”: there should be a tension in the opposition between the state and democracy, a state should not simply be dissolved in democracy, it should retain the excess of unconditional power over the people, the firm rule of law, to prevent its own dissolution. If the state, democratic though it may be, is not sustained by this specter of the unconditional exercise of power, it does not have the authority to function: power is, by definition, in excess, or else it is not power.
The question here is: who is supplementing whom? Is democracy a supplement to fundamentally non-democratic state power, or is undemocratic theory a supplement to democracy? At what point is the predicate inverted with the subject? Furthermore, apropos “stopping the sliding of meaning,” does non-democratic theory as a rule not articulate its horror at democracy precisely because it perceives it as too “sophistic” (for Plato …), too involved in the sliding of meaning, so that theory, far from reproaching