Walter Benjamin invites us to think language in a radically different way: not as a neutral medium of communication, but as something living, something creative. For him, language is not exclusively human: everything that exists speaks. It may do so through gesture, through form, or simply through presence. In short, everything expresses itself. Humanity occupies a distinctive position within this field: human beings do not merely speak, they are capable of naming – and in naming, they bring the world into being.

Act of Creation

Benjamin therefore reads the Book of Genesis as a moment of linguistic philosophy: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Gen. 1:3). In the Gospel of John, this linguistic act is rendered even more explicit: “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1). The Word is the point of origin of all things. Naming, then, is not simply descriptive; it is world-making (Benjamin 1977, 140-157). In other words, naming draws things out of the unnameable and installs them within reality.

With this thought in mind, we can also reconsider our institutions. Institutions, too, speak. They name and determine, often through legal, technocratic, or policy-oriented language. They decide what counts as reality: who counts, what counts, what constitutes a risk, and what – or who – may be deemed a problem. In this way, institutions become active producers of a particular order through language. They speak the world into form; they order by naming.

Institutional naming is always driven by a tendency towards monopolisation. And where such naming assumes monopolistic positions, the linguistic act becomes violent – as does the order it produces (Bourdieu 1991, 105-159; Benjamin 1977, 179-203).

At that point, demonstration becomes not merely legitimate but necessary. Not so much in terms of content, but as a struggle against the monopoly on language itself. Demonstration is not a disruption of order; it is the formation of another order. For that reason, demonstration is political through and through, as the French philosopher Jacques Rancière argues: “Politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a share for those who have no share” (Rancière 1995, 27). Demonstration is the act through which people reclaim language, rename the world, and thereby create a different reality in opposition to the power that presents itself as truth.

That the Black Lives Matter movement employed a different language from the outset is therefore no incidental stylistic choice or communication strategy; it touches the very core of what political action is. Through this new vocabulary, an opinion is not merely added to an existing public debate. Rather, the very conditions of that debate are intervened in. This language fractures a dominant, institutional grammar – one in which violence is juridified (“incident,” “excess,” “proportionate force”), racialisation is neutralised (“neutral enforcement,” “objective risk assessment”), and structural inequality is reduced to individual deviation. By using different words, what can be seen, said, and heard is shifted at its foundations (Rancière 2000, 13).

This act of linguistic appropriation is creation in action. And that is what we call activism.

Sometimes this takes the form of paint thrown onto a work of art; sometimes of placards bearing uncomfortable messages on a national day of remembrance. Sometimes even of slogans that are harsh, unwelcome, or morally objectionable. Yet such expressions all testify to the persistence of a democratic will to will: to the existence of people who insist on expressing themselves and refuse to submit to the language of legal dossiers and policy frameworks. For that reason, as a jurist, I oppose the primacy of a purely legal defence of the right to demonstrate. Not because such a defence is unimportant, but because it is fundamentally inadequate – and can only ever be so.

Dissensus

In public debates on protest and demonstration, one repeatedly hears the call to respect the right to demonstrate – on the grounds, for example, that it is enshrined in Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights (freedom of assembly and association), numerous international treaties, and in case law of the European Court of Human Rights. This is a defence strategy that many demonstrators themselves also deploy. And yet it remains insufficient.

Legal language transforms demonstration into a permitted form of expression within the existing order – the order of procedures, conditions, and permits – whereas protest is directed precisely against that order of permissions. Protest does not merely seek to speak; it seeks to rename. It is thus an act of re-politicisation, rendering visible what remains hidden and audible what would otherwise go unheard.

In this context, Jacques Rancière speaks of dissensus (mésentente). Dissensus is not so much a conflict between opinions as a conflict over what constitutes a conflict in the first place. In other words, it concerns disagreement that does not fit within existing boundaries but calls those boundaries themselves into question. Dissensus concerns who is allowed to speak, what counts, and who counts (Rancière 1995, 8-10).

A demonstration recognised only as a bureaucratically authorised form loses precisely this political force. It becomes an administrative object – a permitted event, without real threat, without real meaning, merely a symbolically sanctioned deviation. The question, then, is not so much why people protest, but why they do so so little. While authority-designed and controlled space increasingly intrudes upon everyday life as “abstract space,” to use Henri Lefebvre’s term, broad resistance to this intrusion remains strikingly absent. Politics is thereby displaced from concrete, shared experience into abstract images and words, flattening conflict before it can even appear on the street (Lefebvre 1991, 51).

Across many countries, the right to demonstrate is currently under pressure as part of a so-called “resilience agenda.” What this agenda defends is not a living democracy but a showcase democracy: tightly organised, neatly labelled, full of symbolic gestures, yet devoid of genuine dynamism. It presents an order without the possibility of real conflict – as a site of pure deliberation, purified of contestation (Mouffe 2005, 3). This rhetoric, which presents itself as a defence of democracy, in reality constrains its foundations. The so-called defence primarily produces exclusion: demonstrators cause a problem, therefore they have a problem, therefore they are a problem. A causal chain is established between these three.

What is called “resilience” is, at its core, nothing more than fear of losing control – and that fear is made politically productive. The demonstrator becomes a suspect. The activist becomes a potential extremist. Public space becomes a risk zone. And anyone who enters it without permission suddenly finds themselves outside the law, thereby opening the door to police violence without consequence. This may appear to be a malfunction of the system, but in fact it lies at the heart of its operation: not the act itself, but the potential to act becomes decisive; the danger is not empirical, but purely potential.

In the terms of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, the demonstrator thus appears as a figure of “bare life”: formally present within the legal order, yet materially stripped of its protective force (Agamben 1998, 1-12).

Floating Signifier

The resilience agenda, incidentally, emerges from my own field: an academic discourse that has been developed in recent years around the theme of “militant” or “resilient democracy,” particularly by constitutional lawyers and legal philosophers (e.g., Müller 2011; Rijpkema 2018; Sajó & Uitz 2017). The idea is that democracy must not only guarantee freedoms, but also actively defend itself against forces that might undermine it. What began as a well-intentioned academic exercise is now at risk of being translated, with a heavy hand, into repressive policy.

In the hands of a government that openly displays authoritarian tendencies, the right to demonstrate is transformed from a fundamental right into a matter for debate. This applies in particular to left-wing protests that cause friction: motorway blockades, campus occupations, or pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Anything that challenges the order is neutralised as “public disorder” – substantive struggle is avoided. An unintended constitutional own goal.

What militant democracy was originally meant to signify in constitutional law and legal philosophy has, in essence, become irrelevant. It has turned into a floating signifier: it still simulates the idea of democratic defence, but no longer fulfils that function in practice (Lévi-Strauss 1950, 43-44). Indeed, political philosophers Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe describe the dubious success of such floating signifiers as follows: “those limits [of democracy] are given by a new possibility which arises in the very terrain of democracy: the logic of totalitarianism” (Laclau & Mouffe 2001, 186).

What remains of militant democracy, then, is an empty shell, a symbolic fiction circulating within academic and political discourse, while democracy itself is hollowed out. At best, it resembles the image of a bullied democracy sent on a self-defence course. The French theologian Jacques Ellul wrote in L’Illusion politique(1965, 224):

Democracy cannot be defended, for it is neither a capital city, nor a fortress, nor a magical formula (for example, a constitutional one). Democracy must be willed by every citizen. Democracy must be embodied by every citizen. The moment we adopt the comforting idea of a given, already-acquired democracy, everything is lost. On the contrary, one must understand that democracy today can be nothing other than will, conquest, and creation. One must recognise that it is precisely the opposite of the natural and historical slope: opposed to our laziness, our blindness, our love of comfort and tranquillity; […]

Ellul’s insight is that democracy consists in the will of every citizen to will something. Slogans on the streets, bodies on the motorway, students occupying a university – these are all forms of that embodiment. One important argument that follows from this, according to the political philosopher Judith Butler, is that it matters that bodies gather, and that the political meanings produced by demonstrations are not merely written or spoken: “Silent gatherings, including vigils or funerals, often signify in excess of any particular written or vocalized account of what they are about” (Butler 2015, 8).

Neurosis

By the way, is the will to will really harmed by demonstrators who sit on roads, throw paint at artworks, shout discriminatory slogans, or even behave like vandals? Politics may brand such demonstrations as “damage” to democracy, but the opposite is true. However badly a demonstration may spiral out of control, it shows – like no other civic manifestation – that citizens do, in fact, want to want. The restriction of the right to demonstrate is therefore a solution to a non-existent political problem – or at least a non-existent democratic one. This is precisely what Ellul described as political illusion.

If a solution is proposed for a non-existent problem, one might accuse politics of wastefulness. But the issue runs deeper. The presumed effect of restricting demonstrations is not merely a political illusion; it is also the seed of a new problem. When citizens do not feel heard by their government – or when the possibility of being heard is curtailed in the name of “defending democracy” – protests will only become more intense and more aggressive. The riots during the COVID period already offered a glimpse of this. With such a defence, one almost comes to hope that politics would neglect democracy instead.

The erosion of the right to demonstrate does not arise solely from illusion; it is also a structurally ineffective and even counterproductive way of dealing with supposed problems.

The illusion of resilience is therefore not an innocent mistake, but the symptom of a deeper repression: a government that refuses to confront its own inability to live with contradiction and conflict projects that incapacity onto its citizens. What presents itself as concern for safety, order, and manageability functions as a compulsive defence mechanism aimed at neutralising what is experienced as threatening. As with any neurotic repetition, this fixation does not resolve the conflict, but rather entrenches and displaces it (Žižek 2008, 16).

Democracy is thus not undermined from without, but turns against itself – not as a deviation from its normative ideal, but as a structural mechanism in which it denies its own constitutive openness (Žižek 2008, 118).

And that is precisely why the time has come to stop taking militant democracy seriously as a political project; let it rest as an academic exercise of a bygone era. It is not a protection of freedom, but an attempt at discipline. Demonstrating in a democracy is not a right granted by authority, but a potential always claimed by citizens. It is time to refuse the discourse of militant democracy and to recognise it for what it truly is: at best, a political illusion; at worst – and more realistically – a neurosis.

Bio: Bart Jansen is a legal philosophy scholar affiliated with the Faculty of Law at the University of Amsterdam. His research engages political theology, semiology, posthuman studies, and legal philosophy.

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