Kalyvas - Politics of Autonoy and the Challenge of Deliberation

< Habermas <
- Against relativism of disenchanted world
- Discourse principle - extracts inescapable presuppostions of speech -> rational and universal principles to est. norm. superiority of del.dem.
- Principle of Democratic Legitimacy -> Political translation / sublimated form of ideal speech situation

< Castoriadis >
- quasi-transcendental biological formation
- Reduces 'ought' to 'is'
- Deterministic / reductionist grip of ensemblistic-identiary ontology
- Turn to natural ground - secure extrasocial basis

< Habermas
- Pol. Aut. - rational testing of validity of norms, not their creation
- Focus on opinion-formation -> conception of democracy is decisionless
- H' DD - heteronomous rep. lib. oligarchy
- Reason rules over will, pol. system over public sphere

Decisionism

< Schmitt <
- Sovereign decision cannot be juridically explained
- Grounds both norm and order
- An absolute beginning out of normative nothingness

< Weber <
- Decision as the experience of the impossible - the striving to achieve the impossible

* Dem. should be seen as the collective experience of a struggle to reach the impossible fullness of autonomy.

Castoriadis
<< Incompleteness of dem., arbitrariness, contingency
- tragic regime
- Regime of historical risk
< No use of decisionism -> Kairos
- Part of a theory of political freedom and collective autonomy
<< Power of multitude to shatter the inst. structures of heteronomy and dom IN effective will of the actual political subjects
<< If radical rupture is possible - > because we will it
<< No rigid foundation of anything
- NOT arbitrary
- ' Will to autonomy' - aspiration that surpasses peculiarities of personal const.
- will -  the possibility for a human being to make the results of reflective processes enter into the relays that condition acts
- will - the reflexive dimension of what we as imaging beings are
- will -  a reflective capacity to intervene in one's own self-constitution
- will -  sensitive intentional redirection, thought gester of ordering and shaping
- dem. will - explicit self-inst. of society - moment of rational will-formaiton
- Occurs after process of confrontation of views, clarification, elaboration
- without such preparation, mystification and negation of dem.
- dem. will -  associated with original imagination, creative capacities for radical ruptures and ontological genesis
- will of the human being is also imagination - positing as an entity that which is not
- ontological creation
- instituting will - cannot be conditioned or constrained by existing legal system
- Source of instituted society - maintains itself out of const.power
< Dem. decisionism - sovereign collectivity as a whole has power to inst. society
- not thru command and domination
- creative instituting associative power of positing new laws, rules, values

Politics
Castoriadis
<< the explicit and reflecitve struggle among competing collecitve entities over the appropriation of greater amounts of the creative form-giving power to intervene in areas of social life open to modification and the inst. of their particular values
Habermas
< theory of continuity, incremental change
Castoriadis
< focus on discontinuities, ruptures, radical transfomations
< dem. as the regime in which individuals participate in creation of insts. and significations that best facilitate individual autonomy, effective particiatpion
<< Liberal states - procedures designed/deployed to protect strutures of domination
<< propose a different set of procedural arrangements which allow for consolidation of dem. identity thru effective particiation