Examining the Conflictual Political: Alternative Agonisms for Democratic Designs

Democratic theory struggles to understand the conflictual quality of the democratic experience.Agonist literature has better achieved this recognition, founding democracy on a political dimension that is irreducibly conflictual.Yet, the study of agonist thinkers has often excluded much of the diversity in agonistic thought.Further, widely-accepted models such as deliberative democracy have ignored conflict, pointing the field towards unity and peace by rational deliberation.Therefore, this thesis reapproaches agonist literature, presenting three cases of 'alternative agonists', to examine what the agonistic tradition still can offer to the perils of democracy.This thesis contributes to the discourse on democratic conflict by engaging with Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, and Claude Lefort who each offer a definition of the political that rests in conflict.It argues that a comparative analysis of their writings reveals unique meanings of the 'conflictual political' that impact the way we think and do democracy.It offers new potentials for understanding the fundamental meaning of democracy. Meney 6Antonio Floridia points out, the "deliberative turn" of the late 20 th -century -which can be traced to Habermas and John Rawls -and its ideas of communicative action and discourse ethics were adopted by many within and without the discipline.8 The problem that many of these models address stems from the stated desire to ignore or remove conflict from politics by positioning moral -or in some cases, economic -concerns as the core issue of democratic politics.9 Beyond warning of the conflicts of plurality that democracy tends towards, models like deliberative democracy aim to make the issue of conflict secondary.They adopt the idea that conflict can be solved by rational deliberation and an ideal speech situation, as it relies on a "so-called "moral point of view" 10 governed by impartiality and where an impartial assessment of what is in the general interest could be reached."11 Habermas is but an exemplary case of this larger problem in democratic theory that is wellidentified in deliberative models.Habermas aligns with iterations of deliberative democracy that aim to "[improve] the quality of democracy" where traditional definitions have failed.12 His presentation of deliberative democracy, like much of the theory since the 1970s, sought to solve the political conflicts of plurality.In The Inclusion of the Other, published in 1998, Habermas points to a "conceptual dichotomy" between "liberalism" and "republicanism" (or "democracy") that he claims is incapable of addressing these struggles.13 The difference of interests and value-8 Antonio Floridia."The Origins of the Deliberative Turn" from The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, ed.

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