We should also ask whether the screening of the film is really intended to inspire democratic debate. Are pro-torture, anti-Islamists expected and encouraged to attend? Is this an opportunity for Christian conservatives to explain the benefits of Fox News or try to organize those at the screening to evict anti-American tenured radicals from the university? Since the answer to these questions is obviously no, the appeal to democracy seems disingenuous, a way of avoiding the true, partisan position of the protestors, of masking the fact that their appeal is actually ruptured by an excess of power or desire that they can't fully acknowledge. The organizers of the film viewing don't really want an inclusive conversation. They want organized political resistance, but they don't say this directly. Instead, they appeal to democracy, shielding themselves from taking responsibility for the divisiveness of politics.
Ultimately, insofar as the protestors address their demands to a master and fail to assume their own claim to power, they end up reinforcing rather than subverting the master's authority.16 They don't confront Bush as an equal in political debate. They issue demands that he can accept and reject from the very position of the master their demands presuppose. This issuing of demands, moreover, installs Bush into the position of master. Instead of screening a movie and demanding democt:acy, the protestors could acknowledge the division between their position and that of the government.;\_and at least half of American citizens at the time-: and work toward building a militant countermovement or joining with existing movements. They could refuse to play by the apparent rules of American political discourse and eschew the legitimizing shelter of the term democracy.
If democracy is missing in the Middle East and Bush is the instrument through �hich it can be provided, his discourse is perverse and his position of enunciation that of the pervert.17 Despite the demands of the hysterics, Bush is not a master. Or diferently put, the demands of the hysterics demonstrate the way the position of the master is always that of a fraud. His words fail to coincide with his position. And here, to an extent, Gutmann and Thompson are not wrong to emphasize the importance of continued questioning and argument for democracy. Such questions and arguments can expose the fact the master is not a master; his authority is a result of his position. It is relational rather than absolute.
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THREE