A dramatic and necessary rethinking of the meaning of Democracy Democratic Anarchy grapples with an uncomfortable but obvious truth inimical to democracy: both aesthetics and politics depend on the structuring antagonism of inclusion and exclusion. Yet in Democratic Anarchy, Matthew Scully asks, how can "the people" be represented in a way that acknowledges what remains unrepresentable? What would it mean to face up to the constitutive exclusions that haunt U.S. democracy and its anxious fantasies of equality? Synthesizing a broad range of theoretical traditions and interlocutors-including Lacan, Ranciere, Edelman, and Hartman-Democratic Anarchy polemically declares that there has never been, nor can there ever be, a realized democracy in the U.S. because democracy always depends on the hierarchical institution of a formal order by one part of the population over another. Engaging with an expansive corpus of American literature and art (Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louis Zukofsky, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nari Ward, Ocean Vuong, and Safiya Sinclair), Democratic Anarchy argues that many liberal concepts and institutions are in fact structurally opposed to democratic equality because they depend on regulating what can appear and in what form. By focusing on works that disrupt this regulatory impulse, Scully shows how rhetorical strategies of interruption, excess, and disorder figure the anarchic equality that inegalitarian fantasies of democracy disavow. Democratic Anarchy develops a rigorous theory of equality that refuses to repeat the inequalities against which it positions itself, and it does so by turning to moments of resistance-both aesthetic and political-inaugurated by the equality that inheres in and antagonizes the order of things.
Matthew Scully is Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of Lausanne. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including the Journal of Modern Literature, Diacritics, African American Review, American Literature, Critical Inquiry, and Postmodern Culture.
Introduction: Democracy's Death Drive 1 Part I: Democratic Aesthetics 1 The Genres of Democracy: Romance, Sentiment, and the Slave Narrative 39 2 Parataxis and Metalepsis, or Figures of Democratic Equality 71 Part II: Aestheticidal Resistance 3 A Poetics of Dissensus: Migrant, Citizen, and the Catachresis of Identity 113 4 Against Representation, or Utopia After All 147 Coda: Disavowal and Figural Annihilation 179 Acknowledgments 183 Notes 187 Bibliography 239 Index 261
All readers of Scully. . . will find their certainties questioned, their convictions probed, and should relish seeing their favorite literary touchstones re-illuminated in the strobe light of political relevance and political impotence.-- "Anglia: Journal of English Philology" Drawing on the work of Jacques Ranciere in particular, Democratic Anarchy offers a compelling theory of democracy and an incisive critique of consensus politics in the United States. Its sharp rhetorical readings of diverse examples of US literature draw out a vision of radical equality beyond the limits of representation.---Christian P. Haines, author of A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons
