Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

as an act also counts for political action. Despite the impossibility of
utopia, every political act is inextricably connected with hope and
hope with political action. Hope and political action presuppose each
other. Even within a nihilistic context, there remains a fundamental
connection between action and hope. Nihilism can destroy religious
or metaphysical imaginaries, but cannot destroy hope as such:
“We can do away with the teleological and eschatological dimensions, we
can even do away with all the actual contents of the historical messianisms,
but what we cannot do away with is the ‘promise’ because it is inscribed
in the structure of all experience.” [25]
In my view, the threat of nihilism can only be overcome if hope is
inscribed in the structure of experience as such. If that is the case, we
can state that hope is ‘the country at which humanity is always landing’,
and explain why hope is indeed ineradicable despite a nihilistic
universe. Only if we connect hope with the conditions of experience
can we start to make sense of concepts like ‘democracy to come’ – a
model of democracy that Mouffe often refers to in order to illustrate
the impossible possibility of democracy. [26]
Yet not all of the problems are thereby solved. Although we cannot
strictly distinguish between longing and writing or between political
action and hope, it remains legitimate to ask what initiates hope and
political action. Why write in the first place? Why undertake political
action? What counts for writing in this case also counts for political
action. Orpheus’ singing found its origin in the experience of a lack
called Eurydice. Writing starts with the experience of a lack. The same
holds for political action. [27] The experience of lack, however, is never
enough. The demand of being free from oppression does not necessarily
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DEMOCRACY, HOPE
AND NIHILISM
Thomas Decreus
25
Laclau (1996) 75.
26
Mouffe (2009) 136.
27
This position is related to what Laclau states in On Populist Reason. To understand the
becoming of a populistic front, Laclau states, one must not focus on an existing populist
front but understand the grieves and demands from which it started to exist. Those
demands are always the result of experiencing a lack, a shortage, an injustice, etc. And
as populism is, according to Laclau, a central political logic – one of the most important
ways of constituting the social – it can be claimed that the experience of a lack is the
central feature in starting up political action. Laclau (2007) 73.