A Messianic Life Can Be Lived Rightly: Democracy contra the Capitalist-Sovereign Order

Abstract

Liberal democracy is far from being the ideal form of democracy. In liberal democracies, every aspect of the individual’s life is heteronomous to the forces of the state and capitalism. From biopolitics to necropolitics, the cycle of people’s lives in contemporary liberal democracies is administered and controlled constantly, from beginning to end. This essay examines the works of Giorgio Agamben, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin to find an inspiration for a radical form of democracy. After engaging with the three intellectuals, the essay proposes a different conception of democracy as a possible form of messianic life/existence that interrupts the predominant flow of life. This possible democratic life/existence deactivates and suspends the structures of domination in the contemporary world, i.e. the laws of sovereignty and capital. The essay starts by providing a critique of liberal democracy and exemplifies the impossibility of a genuine democracy in this form of governance by using Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, Agamben’s bare life, and Adorno’s administered society. After this critique, the essay conceptualizes a democratic state of existence to potentially negate the domination of the status quo through Adorno’s philosophical reflection on the “wrong life”, Agamben’s ideas (particularly his messianism and form of life), and Benjamin’s messianic politics.

Keywords

• democracy
• sovereignty
• capitalism
• biopolitics
• necropolitics
• messianism