The arché of democracy, Plato ironises, lies in its being ‘the choice of God’. If democracy, power of the demos, is ‘of God’, its strength lies in the peculiar idea of ruling by sortition or, otherwise said, the ‘drawing of lots’ – this arché is thus also an-archic. Taking Plato’s irony and thereby this idea seriously, we find that Athenian democracy reveals some key stakes of a general democratic logic, one that is, moreover, practicable today. Crucially, understanding it also helps to make clear why the inventors of our current system of government conceived it as anti–democratic. They called it the representative system of government. This system, today identified with democracy plain and simple, is paradoxically also said to going through a profound crisis of representation, to be suffering a ‘democratic deficit’. To move beyond this apparent paradox, another an-archic ‘God-like’ intervention is required. This talk aims to lay down some conceptual markers of this democratic logic relative to current struggles.
Steven Corcoran is editor of The Badiou Dictionary and has edited/translated around 20 works, including Conditions, Polemics and The Idea of Communism (with others) by Alain Badiou, Dissensus, Hatred of Democracy and The Edges of Fiction by Jacques Rancière, and Alienation and Freedom by Frantz Fanon.