Liberte, diversite, co-autorite: Towards a late modern praxis of radical representative democratic corporealpolitiks

Abstract

A critical reflection on the democratic relationship between corporeality, recognition, representation and democratic togetherness, this doctoral thesis follows in the tradition of practical philosophy (Iris Marion Young, Bonnie Honig, Philip Pettit, James Tully) to explore and deconstruct the contemporary challenges of late modern democracy in the face of demands by indigenous peoples, minority nations and various intra-national (nonterritorial) groups for effective enjoyment of democratic self-government. An underlying assumption of this thesis is that the emancipatory potential of liberal equality as a political ideal, although rhetorically onmipresent within Anglo-American democracies, has been exhausted and in fact redeployed in ways that diminish the capacity of minorized members of the political community to advocate for their liberty and to protect themselves against domination and oppression from within democratic institutions themselves. Cross-pollinating the insights of diversity feminism and republicanism, this thesis proposes alternative epistemological foundations of representative democracy to expose the political nature of various struggles of/over the interlocking conditions of late modern political corporealization. Specifically, it re-constructs a late modern convention of self-representation as co-authority that is grounded in an anti-essentialist and performative conception of political subjectivity (diversity feminism), and an agonic and institutional conception of political liberty and self-government (republican liberty). These alternative foundations (diversity, liberty, and co-authority) lay the nonnative groundwork for democratic institutional reforms aimed at the re-construction of a late modern praxis of radical representative democratic corporealpolitiks that presumes the necessity of heterogeneous institutional outlets of contestation that performatively politicize and democratize asymmetrical power relations between historically minorized/dominant corporealities. Positing the critical interdependence of personal freedom and collective freedom as realized democratically through free institutions and practices, the thesis advances a democratic defense of guaranteed thresholds of institutional self-representation for a broader diversity of late modern struggles of/over corporealization that liberalism has often excluded as apolitical or pre-political . Albeit in nonnative solidarity with inter-national struggles for democratic self-determination, it probes the specificities of intra-national minorities inflected by the corporealpolitiks of sex, gender, race, religion, ethnicity, mother tongue, and disability, given that their "right to exit" the political association is both epistemologically and practically absent.