Democracy in the Political Present

Amidst the crises and threats to liberal democracy, Isabell Lorey develops a democracy in the political present that bursts open political certainties as well as linear ideas about progress and growth.

With her queer-feminist political theory she formulates a fundamental criticism of masculinist conceptions of the people, representation, institution and multitude. And she develops an original concept of presentist democracy that is based on care and connectedness, on the irreducibility of responsibilities – and that is unthinkable without past struggles and current practices of social movement. When queer-feminist care practices and a black and queer understanding of debt are foregrounded, democracy emerges in present tense.

Democracy in the Political Present is a radical intervention into the masculinist political theory of liberal democracy where bourgeois ideas of time are confronted with a new conception of the present. With reference to the political philosophy of thinkers such as Rousseau, Derrida, Benjamin, Foucault and Negri and practices of contemporary social movements a queer-feminist form of presentist democracy develops, which proceeds from care and connectedness.

»This book is an assembly – a collection of voices from Germany and Spain, Italy, England, France and every country – a colourful and strong intersection of proposals in search for a (transnational and non-identitarian) democracy of the multitude and of difference, of truth and the joy of life.« Antonio Negri, co-author of Empire

»Weaving and unweaving the political philosophy of Rousseau, Derrida, Benjamin, Foucault and Negri, Isabell Lorey assembles a constellation of debates around keywords: democracy, time, sovereignty, commune. She does so in order to systematize the discontinuous struggles that inhabit these words, the possible futures that their meanings open up, and to place them at the disposal of a queer-feminist theory that locates the strike as one of its inspirational practices. Thus an ›infinitive present‹ opens up as a time of becoming, defined by the encounter of bodies, which expands the present through processes of indeterminate differentiation. By highlighting the non-democratic foundations of democracy one by one, the definition of a ›Presentist Democracy‹ emerges. This is woven out of care and debt: collective care and the debts of assuming relations of interdependence. This book is a tool for continuing to nourish the desire to change everything« Verónica Gago

»In careful and imaginative consideration of the brutal tensions of a liberal democratic ideal poised between imminent collapse and infinite adaptability, Isabell Lorey conceives an alternative in the present tense, broadening and deepening the now with fierce urgency. Democracy in the Political Present is feminist political theory of and for our time.« Fred Moten

»Insightfully weaving together the best of European political philosophy (from Rousseau to Negri, from Benjamin to Foucault), queer-feminist thinking about care and debt, and the practices of radical democracy that occupy the streets and the squares in recurring waves, Isabell Lorey convokes a democracy in present tense that is up to the challenges of these turbulent times. Not to be missed.« Marta Malo, member of Precarias a la deriva Engaging

»... [Lorey] offers an elaborate sketch of a form of political organisation that has hitherto been neglected as well as a scathing critique of the representationalist paradigm that needs to be taken into account whenever inclusion is spoken of too frivolously.« Julius Schwarzwälder, LSE Review of Books
 

»Democracy in the Political Present […] is a veritable godsend.« Jens-Christian Rabe, Süddeutsche Zeitung