Skip to main content

ETHNOS_APP

Home • Search • Journals • List 0

Political Grammars

The Unconscious Foundations of Modern Democracy

Bibliographic Data

ID23515552
AuthorsDavide Tarizzo
Year2021
Publication date2021-04-06
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenuePolitical Grammars (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherStanford University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1515/9781503615328
OpenAlexW4250330188
ISBN9781503615328
LanguageEN
Citations received3

Do we need to be a "people," populus , in order to embrace democracy and live together in peace? If so, what is a populus ? Is it by definition a nation? What exactly do we mean by nationality? In this book, Davide Tarizzo takes up the problem of modern democratic, liberal peoples—how to define them, how to explain their invariance over time, and how to differentiate one people from another. Specifically, Tarizzo proposes that Jacques Lacan's theory of the subject enables us to clearly distinguish between the notion of personal identity and the notion of subjectivity, and that this very distinction is critical to understanding the nature of nations whose sense of nationhood does not rest on any self-evident identity or pre-existent cultural or ethnic homogeneity between individuals. Developing an argument about the birth and rise of modern peoples that draws on the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789 as examples, Tarizzo introduces the concept of "political grammar"—a phrase that denotes the conditions of political subjectification that enable the enunciation of an emergent "we." Democracy, Tarizzo argues, flourishes when the opening between subjectivity and identity is maintained. And in fact, as he compellingly demonstrates, depending on the political grammar at work, democracy can be productively perceived as a process of never-ending recovery from a lack of clear national identity.

Aesthetics · Democracy · Epistemology · Identity (music) · Political science · Political subjectivity · Politics · Sociology · Subjectivity · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Political theory and Gramsci · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

  • Unprecedented, Extrajudicial, Carceral

    Open Access•L Gilmore•a/b Auto/Biography Studies•2025

  • Democracy and the Unconscious

    Ali Aslam, David W Mcivor et al.•Polity•2024

  • Wittgenstein, Lacan and the ‘Toothache

    Dario Alparone, Valentina Lucia La Rosa•The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic…•2021

Unique citing works3
Citations per year0,6
Citation span2021 - 2025 (5)
Citation velocityrecent
Highly citedNo
Citation typesNeutral: 3

Tools

Open DOILibgen
Ethnos_APP • Open Source Project • MIT License • Frontend v2.0.0 • Privacy and Cookies • API Documentation: api.ethnos.app/docs • API Source Code: GitHub • DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17049435 • Frontend Source Code: GitHub • DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17050053 • cruz.rio.br • Expectantes Misericordiae