Lyotard and the crisis of Democracy: Aesthetics and Politics

Abstract

The crisis of democracy is an indisputable fact of our present. In part, however, this crisis is also a problem of interpretation because, from the modern origins of philosophy and political theory, democracy has been thought from the ideas of unity and consensus: unity of a people and basic political consensus containing the differences that are conveyed through the multiplicity of parties within the rule of law. This model is the one that does not fit with the experience of the present. I propose a change of model finding inspiration on the thought of Jean-François Lyotard accepting the primacy of insurmountable differences and understanding some aspects of politics in some similarities with aesthetics. Lyotard turned to the Kant of the Critique of the Power of Judgement to analyze some of these similarities and to approach, as Hannah Arendt did, although otherwise, the political judgment to the aesthetic judgment.