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?

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