Dēmokratia's Possible Disconnection

Untimely Antiquity, Temporal Outsideness, and Historical Futures of Politics

Bibliographic Data

ID4495413
AuthorsAlexandra Lianeri (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume62
Issue2
Pages177-202
Publication date2023-06-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory and Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2656 • E-ISSN: 1468-2303
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/hith.12301
OpenAlexW4372346108
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited15

This article discusses notions of possible disconnection in the post-1990s political present that are formulated as untimely articulations of the ancient Greek democratic past and of the concept of dēmokratia. These are modalities of transition that foreground political futurity as emanating neither from anticipation of evental change to come nor from abstract utopianism. Rather, dēmokratia's projected break with the present and presentism is grounded in transtemporal confrontations and routes of historical memory. These are engagements with antiquity that take hold of and refigure the relation among past, present, and future politics, as well as the inside and outside of democracy, at a horizon of Nachleben (afterlife) that sustains no fixed beginning or end. I discuss these temporalities as disconnective in a sense that differs from historical futures opened up by technoscientific or anthropocenic prospects. Dēmokratia challenges the self-narration of present democracy as a project of the future by positing modalities of outsideness, repotentialization of the past, and interweaving of times and political languages in non-narrative terms. The outcome is a form of futurity that opens up the possibility of imagining not only a novel political subject and community but also a logic of their emergence that enables both to be incessantly reconfigured. Dēmokratia's possible disconnection works against a sense of lost political futurity, but it needs to be recognized as grounded in a state of loss, insofar as political domination may also be built into future democratic principles. For this reason, it invites a reflexive problematic about the representability and translatability of disconnective political futures and communities

Aesthetics · Art · Democracy · Disconnection · Epistemology · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Presentism · Sociology · State (computer science · Temporalities · Contemporary and Historical Greek Studies · Religion and Society Interactions · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory · History · Law · Philosophy

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