Event overview
A seminar by Dr Maria Aristodemou, organised by the Unit of Global Justice, Department of Sociology
My paper will suggest a Lacanian analysis of the concept of democracy by taking a clinical case and the events in Greece last summer as illustrations. Its argument will be that while we pay lip-service to democracy in the imaginary, and are all too accustomed with the limitations of democracy in the symbolic, when democracy in the real threatens to appear, politicians, if not the electorate, flee in panic. What prompts such panic? My argument is that the flight is caused, not by the anxiety of losing democracy, but the anxiety of finding it. When we are at risk of finding, not the usual decaffeinated democracy (that is, democracy with its obscene core safely subtracted), but democracy with its disturbing substance still intact, we are likely, as the events in Greece showed last summer, to flee: and we flee because democracy in the real, democracy with the caffeine still left in it, hurts.
Dr Maria Aristodemou is Reader in Law, Literature and Psychoanalysis at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Seminar organised by the Unit of Global Justice, Department of Sociology.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Dec 2015 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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