Thesis title: L’istituzione della democrazia. Ontologia, politica e critica nel dibattito tra Abensour, Castoriadis, Gauchet e Lefort (1971 – 1995)
This research is dedicated to the definition of the problem of democracy in the thought of Miguel Abensour, Cornelius Castoriadis, Marcel Gauchet and Claude Lefort. The research hypothesis is that, in the milieu of the French anti-totalitarian political and thought movement, around the two journals ‘Textures’ and “Libre” (with which all these authors collaborated) and later outside them, a pole of debate took shape, held together by the intention of proposing a reflection on democracy different from that produced by Marxism and liberalism, which revolves around the ontological category of ‘institution’. The simultaneously historical and theoretical rethinking of democracy that this group of authors proposes is aimed at rethinking the question of emancipation in the light of the debate on totalitarianism and the critique of Marxism. At the same time, it is an attempt to lay the foundations for a new critical thinking and a re-reading of modernity. To achieve this, the authors' thinking moves on several levels, articulating an ontological-political reflection with an interpretation of modernity, the critique of bureaucracy with a reflection on the sovereignty of the people. The research follows this layering, investigating it along three axes: ontology, institution(s) and politics, critique. The first chapter aims to define the field of research, as well as to identify the roots of the issue in the existentialist phenomenology's reception of Marxism and the “left-wing” critique of Stalinism. The second chapter addresses the social-political ontologies that emerge from Castoriadis' and Lefort's reflections. The third gets to the heart of the definition of democracy, showing how the questions addressed so far allow for a reformulation of the political problems of the democratic tradition. The fourth investigates the critical scope of this debate, which presents several fronts: an idea of democracy as an inherently critical institution, the binomial democracy - totalitarianism as the antinomy proper to modernity, the attempt to rethink a critique of capitalism in the season in which this critique enters into crisis. Although Abensour and Gauchet's reflections continued fruitfully in the following years, the focus of the research is on the time span 1971 - 1995: from the publication of the first issue of “Textures” to the beginning of the great strikes against the “Juppé plan”, which opened a new political season for the French left, moving beyond the problems of anti-totalitarianism.