Intersticios (Dec 2018)
Sacrifice, laughter and democracy. Essay on processes of subjetivation in contemporary democracies
Abstract
What social sensitivity do the current democracies produce and sustain? Our hypothesis, without pretension to originality, affirms that "democracy" is not just an institutionalized space of participation to express and resolve conflicts in society through the application of social engineering and government techniques. It is also a way of understanding and organizing social sensibility, that is, a historical mode of production of desires, passions and emotions that, according to the processes and subjects, can justify the relations of domination or interpellate them. The dispute over democracy is then also a dispute over sensitivity: place and time where the body that we are is put into play, the first materiality capable of lubricating the resignation to the given or enhancing desires for emancipation. Apparently, such tension underlies all institutions, beyond their "quality to govern" and their degrees of sedimentation in society. Weighing the link between democracy and social sensitivity supposes, among other tasks, asking what desires underlie in the social plexus, what they laugh at, with what they enjoy and what sacrifices societies allow. That is, to ask how certain desires justify or criticize sacrificialist logics and discourses in everyday life.
