Dispossession: The Performative in the Political

Hande Lara Sever

For this response I’ll be concentrating on chapter 14 as Athanasiou and Butler give very good examples representing how capitalist democracy lacks plurality. Athanasiou says “New political collectives, such as the Indignados of Spain, the Outraged of Greece and Occupy Wall Street in the United States seek to reclaim democracy from capitalism and corporate power.” The protests organized by these collectives faced severe police brutality and crack down, and as a result the homogeneous accumulation of wealth among the very few continues and neoliberal politics continue to disadvantage masses and leave them voiceless. Mouffe states that for an inclusive democracy the legitimation of conflict and division is necessary for the assertion of equal liberty for all.Thus according to Mouffe’s argument these happen because an inclusive democracy is not integrated and rather governments function with corporate interest. “When the Outraged in Athens planned a symbolic encirclement of the Parliament House to stop a five year austerity plan, the police pre-emptively enclosed the parliament in an ironclad fortification in order to thwart the protesters.” This is a very interesting example as it literally shows how the parliament that is supposed to represent people’s will is eliticized and is unable to represent public interest and this failure is protected with police power in order to continue being a functional state according to Rawls. The austerity measures that are imposed on Greece is considered as the universal rational consensus by the European Union and Greek people who revolted against these measures are often represented as “irrational” and “unreasonable”. As a result both the European Parliament and the Greek Parliament fails to overcome the problem because of the elimination of legitimate dissent. As Iris Young stated in Polity and Group Difference “In a society where some groups are privileged while others are oppressed insisting that as citizens persons should leave behind their particular affiliations and experiences to adopt a general point of view serves only to reinforce that privilege; for the perspectives and interests of the privileged will tend to dominate this unified public, marginalizing or silencing those of other groups.” As a result what we see in Europe today is the reinforcement of privilege through austerity measures.