Summary Of Judith Butler's Radical Democracy

This paper seeks to substantiate the thesis that Judith Butler’s subversive thinking constitutes a radicalization of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffes’s radical democracy. Although it is not always readily accepted that there is a significant connection between Butler and Laclau-Mouffes’s thought we should not ignore the strong subterranean ties between them. Furthermore, I will claim that Butler is a radical democrat and that she develops her conceptualisation of radical democracy in part out of a criticial examination with the work of Laclau and Mouffe’s, particularly Mouffe’s. The radical democracy, which represents a conception of politics in which all identities are accepted and their ambiguities are rejected by rejecting the idea that

So liberal democracy is much more than a solely regime about how people live together. The difference between liberal democracy and ancient democracy stands for not size but for nature. Pluralism is the key notion to notice the difference between two distinct democracies. Pluralism means that “the end of substantive idea of good life” . What Mouffe means is that people are no more trying to achieve good life because this idea eventually comes to terms with united type of community. Pluralism is not just a fact like John Rawls mentioned earlier in his conceptualisation of overlapping consensus . On the contrary Mouffe thinks that pluralism is an axiological principle that we should embrace. She draws a line between extreme forms of pluralism which is incompatible with the democracy that she defends. She points out that a typical liberal pluralism misses the core of the politics, the political because it tries to make all the antagonisms disappear by reaching the consensus. In my opinion this conceptualisation of Mouffe is open to criticize because she does not define exact type of pluralism and this unclearness of definition creates an empty space in her theory of democracy. After pluralism, there two more important notions which are needed to mentioned in order to understand what Mouffe’s conceptualisation of democracy. Power and antagonism and