-why does the left continue to appeal to democracy? Is democracy, as Slavoj Zizek asks, the ultimate horizon of political thought?1 Is reiterating the ideological message of communicative capitalism the best the left can do in the face of neoliberal hegemony and the collapse of socialism? Is democracy the fallback position for left politics, all that remains of our wounded and diminished political aspirations? Or does the hope its evocation promises mark instead a pervasive left despair?
Real existing constitutional democracies privilege the wealthy. AB they install, extend, and protect neoliberal capitalism, they exclude, exploit, and oppress the poor, all the while promising that everybody wins. The present value of democracy relies on positing crucial determinants of our lives and conditions outside the frame of contestation in a kind of"no-go zone: These suppositions regarding growth, investment, and profit are politically of-limits, so it's no wonder that the wealthy and privileged evoke democracy as a political ideal. It can't hurt them. The expansion and intensification of networked communications technologies that was supposed to enhance democratic participation integrates and consolidates communicative capitalism. Nevertheless, the left continues to present our political ho<sub>p</sub>es as aspirations to democracy.
Despite democracy's inability to represent justice in the wake of political submission to a brutalized, financialized, pun;shing global market, left political and cultural theorists appeal to arrangements that can be filed in, substantialized, by fundamentalisms, nationalisms, populisms, and conservatisms diametrically opposed to social justice and economic equality. Caling for democracy, leftists fail to emphasize the divisions necessary for politics, divisions that should lead us to organize against the interests of corporations and their stockholders, against the values of fundamentalists and indiVidualists, and on behalf of collectivist arrangements designed to redistribute benefits and opportunities more equitably. With this plea, leftists proceed as if democracy were the solution to contemporary political problems rather than symptomatic of them, rather than the name of the impasse in which we find ourselves.
Concerned with how continued adherence to democracy absorbs and incorporates hope so as to lodge politics in a field of already given possibilities, I consider here three current invocations of democracy: democracy as radical ideal, democracy as political practice, and democracy as theoretical justification for rule. These three invocations are primary ways democracy is figured today. In appealing to democracy, left political theory remains trapped in the terms and suppositions conditioning these invocations, terms and suppositions that I analyze by drawing upon Zizek's elaboration ofLacan's four discourses.
76
THREE