Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

and discussion. [11] In this characterization of democracy, Mouffe and
Laclau draw from Claude Lefort. For Lefort, modern democracy differs
from the Ancient Regime in the way the former recognizes that society
can no longer be thought as a unity. In the Ancient Regime, the King
brought unity. He was the mediator between a transcendent order
and society. As such, he functioned as the foundation of Knowledge,
Power and Law. In a democracy, this foundation disappears. Instead
of a foundation, there is a constant debate about what can be accepted
as truth, how law can be grounded and how power can be legitimate.
Democracy is a never-ending search, a discussion or even a conflict in
which every victory is temporary and every certainty disappears. The
fundamental difference between democracy and other regimes lies not
in the fact that it is contingent and characterized by conflicts, because
that characterizes every political order, but in the public recognition
and cultivation of contingency and conflict:
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“What is specific and valuable about modern democracy is that, when
properly understood, it creates a space in which […] confrontation is
kept open, power relations are always put into question and no victory
can be final. However, such an ‘agonistic’ democracy requires accepting
that conflict and division are inherent to politics and that there is no place
where reconciliation could be definitively achieved as the full actualization
of ‘the people’.” [12]
Starting from this description of democracy, it should become clear
that democracy manifests itself as an impossible possibility. Indeed,
the moment we can manage contestation in a perfect way, we can
no longer speak of contestation, and democracy would be lost. Real
plurality requires that we never fully agree with each other. A perfect
democracy is a contradiction in terms. As Mouffe puts it:
“To imagine that pluralist democracy could ever be perfectly instantiated
is to transform it into a self-refuting ideal, since the condition of possibility
11
When an antagonism is ‘institutionalized’ it means that it has become an agonism. That
is why, from now on, we will mostly be speaking about an agonistic democracy. For details
concerning the difference between antagonism and agonism, cf. Mouffe (2005) 31.
12
Mouffe (2009)15-16.