Postdemocracy

Badiou on Voting

The inspiration for this site was the lack of philosophical reflections on the failures of democracy. It seemed as if everyone, regardless of political position, blindly accepted the language of ‘promoting democracy’ - to such a degree that when the neo-cons hijacked this discourse to justify wars of aggression only feeble attempts were made to distinguish “our” democracy from “their” democracy. Of course it didn’t work, we were still using the same language!

When we say “democracy” we often think “voting”. Yet, even after the failure of voting to oust Bush from the Presidency and, more significantly, the failure of voting to offer us a candidate who differed radically from the positions of Bush, we still blindly support voting as the chief tool of carrying out democracy. Perhaps, then, an attack on voting is a logical first step for the post-democracy project to take. So it seems appropriate to open this website with an essay by one of the leading living philosophers concerning the mechanism of voting: “Philosophical considerations of the very singular custom of voting: an analysis based on recent ballots in France” by Alain Badiou.