HUMAN AFFAIRS 25, 127–130, 2015 DOI: 10.

1515/humaff-2015-0011

INTRODUCTORY:
RADICAL DEMOCRACY AND REPRESENTATION

JAN BÍBA, ĽUBICA KOBOVÁ

Since the nineteen eighties it has been as if political-theoretical debates were inescapably
framed by the dualism of communitarianism and liberalism. However, the publication of
Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) initiated growing interest in
the concept of radical democracy, which was introduced as a leftist counter-reaction to the
upsurge of conservatism in the eighties. “The task for the Left,” Laclau and Mouffe stated,
“[…] cannot be to renounce liberal-democratic ideology, but on the contrary, to deepen and
expand it in the direction of radical and plural democracy” (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001/1985,
p. 176). Since then, radical democratic theory has become an important theoretical response
to the challenges of liberal democracies as it aimed to interpret anew the logics following
on from two principles of liberal democracies—equality and liberty—and their various
articulations (Mouffe, 2000). Increasingly the concept of agon (contest) and the understanding
of democracy as the never-ending contestation of political actors, principles, procedures—
agonism—came to be identified with the radical democratic approach. Radical and agonistic
democracy is defended by its proponents on various grounds: pragmatic (agonism prevents
the eruption of antagonisms endangering the integrity of political communities), strategic
(agonism overcomes social exclusion and inequality), or on the basis of the belief in agon as
a means of the free expression of different identities also (see Schaap, 2009). After its initial
focus on ontology and developing new—at times even antinomical—ontological imaginaries
(see Tonder & Thomassen, 2005), radical democratic theorists became intensely preoccupied
with democratic identities, subjectivities and institutions as they emerge in actual politics.
The four articles in the symposium “Radical Democracy and Representation” are a
selection of papers that were originally presented at an “Ontologies of Radical Democracy”
workshop that was organized by the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Arts of the
Charles University in Prague on 17th October 20141. The main theme of the workshop was

1
The workshop was organized as part of a “Research and Methods in Political Theory” project (VS 33/
2014), with the support of the Developmental Grant of the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University Prague.

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© Institute for Research in Social Communication, Slovak Academy of Sciences
the relationship between the ontological and ontic aspects of radical democratic theory and
practice. It is often claimed that theorists of radical democracy focus almost exclusively on
the ontological moment of the institution of a political regime and leave the field of everyday
radical democratic politics under-theorized (see e.g. Norval, 2007). Hence, the main task of
the workshop was to develop our understanding of different radical democratic ontologies
and the potential they open up for everyday radical democratic practices in terms of the
possibility of a democratization of representation and agonism.
Discussions of radical democracy primarily contest the notion of politics as a field of
the mere governance of elements that are present and transparent in society. The concept of
political difference introduces a split between politics and the political, a division between
politics understood as a standard operation of a political regime and the moments of its
founding or institutionalization. In her paper “On the Notion of the Political in Feminist
Theory” Ľubica Kobová explores the conceptual achievements of feminist theorists who
developed conceptualizations of the notion of the political in democratic theory. Building on
Zerilli’s (2005) critique of feminist ontic politics, that is, the identification of feminism either
with the management of social welfare issues or with the essentialist agent of feminism
(women), Kobová thinks of the turn to the political in feminist theory as a protracted process
whose framework has not been thoroughly built yet. However, there are various contributions
by feminist political theorists that assume the contingency of politics as their starting point.
Besides Butler’s (1992) pivotal theorization of the foundations of politics as always being
contingent foundations, the article further explores feminist appropriations of the abyssal
model of Hannah Arendt’s politics. Arendt’s intertwined concepts of (collective) political
action and freedom celebrate and politicize the potential of human beings for creation and
world-building (and as such the potential to interrupt the workings of the machinery of ontic
politics) as well as interpret one of the radical-democratic principles (that is, liberty).
The thinking about the political and ontological dimensions of radical democratic
theory, however, should be translated into our everyday democratic practices that need to be
understood and developed in the direction of radical democracy. One of the key moments of
this shift of perspective is the concept of representation that is the main focus of next three
papers. However, let us begin with a note of caution here: the concept of representation
is usually viewed with deep distrust in democratic theory. In fact, many of the dominant
approaches in contemporary democratic thought (participatory, deliberative and radical
democracy) have their origin in criticism of the actual performance of existing representative
democracies. Representation is seen by many democratic theorists—at least from the time of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau—as something connected with the rule of elites, something destined
to curb the popular will or even as something utterly undemocratic.
However, we have witnessed a recent renewal of interest in representation that is
connected to “the representative turn” in democratic theory. Many scholars suggest that
even though existing representative democracies are oligarchic regimes ruled by elites,
this is not necessarily the whole story. Proponents of the representative turn argue that our
common understanding of representation that connects it with an electoral mechanism
that is supposed—more-or-less faithfully—to reproduce the will of the constituency in
representative bodies such as a parliament is too narrow. They suggest that we extend our
understanding of representation to include non-electoral forms of representation, the role

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of judgement that enables citizens to influence governmental decisions in times between
elections and—last but not least—the constitutive aspect of representation, the fact that a
representative constitutes the represented (see e.g. Näsström, 2011). All these topics are in
turn discussed in the following papers.
Jan Bíba in his paper entitled “Symbolic Representation and the Paradox of Responsive
Performativity” deals with the constitutive aspect of representation. He claims that there
is a contradiction between the constitutive or performative aspect of representation and
the demand of responsiveness that is usually supposed to make representation democratic.
Drawing on a deconstructive reading of Hanna Pitkin’s notion of symbolic representation
(Pitkin, 1972), Bíba nevertheless comes to the conclusion that the impossibility of
reconciling responsiveness and performativity could be paradoxically seen as something
that could actually make representative democracy more democratic. Following Garsten and
Lefort he also suggests that in the search for a deepening of representative democracy we
should concentrate more on sustaining the gap between representative and the represented
than closing it as this gap allows us to criticize and challenge all (false) claims to represent
the people.
Markéta Mottlová in her paper “Gender Quotas and the Problem with Descriptive
Representation” also poses questions on the insufficiency of electoral representation and its
constitutive aspect. Mottlová focuses on the relationship between descriptive representation
and gender quotas. She claims that attempts to defend gender quotas on the basis of
descriptive representation are seriously hampered by the fact that the concept of descriptive
representation presupposes that the represented share some essence or a quality that must be
reproduced in the representative body. Mottlová claims that while in the case of women it
would be impossible to find such an essence or quality; it does not necessarily mean that we
have to give up on gender quotas. She suggests that the anti-essentialist defence of gender
quotas could be developed using Iris Young’s concept of gender as seriality (Young, 1994).
The problem of non-electoral representation is also taken up by Jana Vargovčíková in her
paper “Professional Lobbyists as Representative Claim-Makers: The Cases of Poland and
The Czech Republic”. Vargovčíková is concerned with the question of the utilization of the
symbolic potential of political representation for non-electoral representatives. Drawing on
Michael Saward’s notion of representation as claim making (Saward, 2010), Vargovčíková
suggests that lobbyists exploit the symbolic potential of political representation in their
attempts to gain legitimacy for the involvement of private actors in public decision-making.
She bases her thesis on field research on lobbyists in Poland and the Czech Republic.
The contributions in this symposium document a variety of approaches in recent
democratic theory: the revision of radical-democratic political ontologies (via theorization
of the notions of contingency in Kobová’s paper and performativity in Bíba’s paper),
the constitution of identities and subjectivities of political actors (for instance, women
in Mottlová’s paper and lobbyists in Vargovčíková’s paper) as well as the contested
understanding of representation (in Bíba’s, Mottlová’s and Vargovčíková’s articles). Mottlová
and Kobová tackle the objection of foundationalism that is often raised against feminism
and that reduces feminism’s potential for establishing alliances or hegemonic links with
other democratic actors. It could be pointed out that the postfoundationalist notion of
gender as seriality that Mottlová explores with regard to the representative claim of women

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(building on Young’s concept) could be further productively developed with regard to
other essentialized identity categories. It will be of great interest to follow further how the
identities of the emergent political actors—lobbyists—closely studied in Vargovčíková’s
paper develop given the expected regulation of their activities in the near future and what role
they will play in democratic imaginaries. The problem of distinguishing between democratic
and undemocratic forms of representation (which can be theorized via the responsiveness
or unresponsiveness between the representative and the represented) as discussed in Bíba’s
paper presents an urgent issue that democratic societies need to deal with now.

References
Butler, J. (1992). Contingent foundations. Feminism and the question of “postmodernism”. In J. Butler
& J. W. Scott (Eds.), Feminists theorize the political (pp. 3-21). London & New York: Routledge.
Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (2001/1985). Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic
politics (2nd ed.). London & New York: Verso.
Mouffe, C. (2000). The democratic paradox. London & New York: Verso.
Näsström, S. (2011). Where is the representative turn going? European Journal of Political Theory,
10(4), 501-510.
Norval, A. J. (2007). Aversive democracy: Inheritance and originality in the democratic tradition. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Pitkin, H. (1972). The concept of representation. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.
Saward, M. (2010). The representative claim. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schaap, A. (Ed.). (2009). Law and agonistic politics. Farnham & Burlington: Ashgate.
T nder, L., & Thomassen, L. (Eds.). (2005). Radical democracy: Politics between abundance and lack.
Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press.
Young, I. M. (1994). Gender as Seriality. Thinking about Women as a Social Collective. Signs,19(3),
713-738.
Zerilli, L. M. G. (2005). Feminism and the abyss of freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Department of Political Science,

Faculty of Arts, Charles University,
U Kříže 8,
158 00 Praha 5, Czech Republic
E-mail: jan.biba@ff.cuni.cz

Department of Gender Studies,

Faculty of Humanities, Charles University,
José Martího 31,
162 52 Praha 6, Czech Republic
E-mail: lubakoba@gmail.com

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