I waited a couple of days before sitting in front of my laptop and trying to organize the combination of feelings that had been invading me since I left Tunis and the 2013 World Social Forum. It was my first time, and, as every first experience, I had charged it...

By the end of Friday, we will be half-way through our ESRC seminar series 'The Public Life of Private Law'. The programme for our second seminar is here. The focus of the second seminar will be on the uses of private law in seeking reparations for 'human rights...

Celikates & Jansen: Let us start with a gen­eral ques­tion about the cur­rent state of demo­cracy. In your con­tri­bu­tion to the book Demo­cracy in What State you write: ‘Ber­lusconi and Bush, Der­rida and Balibar, Italian com­mun­ists and Hamas — we are all demo­crats now’. There seem to be two pos­sible responses to this dia­gnosis of an exal­ted dis­course of demo­cracy that seems to accom­pany, and even to be func­tion­ally inter­twined with, the mul­tiple pro­cesses of de-​democratization that you also describe in this art­icle that we wit­ness in our soci­ety: either we could give up the word demo­cracy because, being hijacked by its enemies, it no longer func­tions as a crit­ical and eman­cip­at­ory altern­at­ive, (it has become a ‘neo­lib­eral fantasy’ as Jodi Dean has argued), and to look for other con­cepts, e.g. com­mun­ism. So that’s one pos­sible reac­tion. The other reac­tion would be to fight for the word and to insist on the gap between a rad­ical under­stand­ing of demo­cracy and its lib­eral demo­cratic, low-​intensity state-​form mani­fest­a­tions, and to emphas­ize how demo­cracy is inter­twined with rup­ture, oppos­i­tion, res­ist­ance. Could you sketch your pos­i­tion in this debate?