Being Social Democratically with Jean-Luc Nancy at the Gezi Park Protests

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Morin, Marie-Eve

• Introduction: Nancy engages with democracy most explicitly in his little book The Truth of Democracy, the publication of which marks the 40th anniversary of May ’68. At the beginning of the eponymous essay, ‘The Truth of Democracy,’ Nancy identifies as the ‘real singularity’ of May ’68 a certain disappointment with democracy itself, whose triumphal recovery after World War II failed to live up to its promises. Nancy calls it a ‘scarcely visible but insistent disappointment, the nagging sense that we had never recovered something whose triumphant return seemed to have been announced by the end of the Second World War, namely, democracy.’ The target of the May ’68 uprisings was, according to Nancy, a ‘kind of managerial democracy,’ or what he calls elsewhere ecotechnics: the management of production, exchange, and growth of the world, now understood as the global oikos. While the polis was supposed to be the place of the production of a ‘more-than-life’ or a ‘good life’ beyond the mere satisfaction of needs, it is now reduced to a global, all-encompassing oikos, the management of which not only reproduces life, but also produces wealth.

• Date created

  2015

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Nancy, Jean-Luc
  • Book chapter
  • Democracy

• Type of Item

  Chapter

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3SX64Q8H

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International