O lugar vazio: a crise de imaginário da democracia moderna

Abstract

The thesis departs from the discursive omnipresence of crisis in order to requalify it as a semantic and symbolic operator, rather than merely as a diagnosis of institutional dysfunction. I argue that, in modernity, crisis primarily manifests a disanchoring of the symbolic bond that renders the common world opaque; for this reason, it is also an occasion for resymbolization. The argument unfolds in three movements. First, drawing on Reinhart Koselleck, I reconstruct the historical-semantic genealogy of “crisis” and its transition from a decisional episode to a structural condition of modernity, articulating the disjunction between experience and expectation. Above all, however, the aim is to recompose the concept of crisis so as to think of it as a moment of re-creation. Next, with Cornelius Castoriadis and Charles Taylor (in dialogue with Benedict Anderson), the concept of the social imaginary is mobilized in support of a critique of the pasteurization of creative thought in the conception of possible worlds, as well as in the capacity of such imaginaries to diffuse themselves through practices sustained by shared moral values. In Pierre Rosanvallon, democracy is analyzed as an unstable historical and symbolic figure, whose forms of legitimation, representation, and popular presence have been transformed from the French Revolution to contemporary configurations. Rosanvallon insists that democracy is an open history, constituted by experiments, displacements, and recompositions of legitimacy, even if only provisionally. Crisis, in this sense, signals the erosion of the temporary agreement that once stabilized imaginaries, meanings, and practices. In this work, the understanding of crisis as an extraordinary or exceptional event is set aside, and crisis is instead conceived as a recurring and structural moment of social reflexivity, in which the tensions, indeterminacies, and disputes constitutive of modernity become visible. It is also an opportunity for an original and genuinely new symbolic reconfiguration, capable of orienting, engaging, and propelling a shared collective action. Although it offers no guarantees, the thesis defends a constitutive and creative symbolic position of democracy, indeterminate and open to the possibility of imagining possible worlds.