What every democracy needs is to take shape: reflections on Judith Butler’s performative theory of assembly

Abstract

The article examines the contributions of the studies so far developed by American philosopher Judith Butler to democratic theory, whose horizons gain color and form in assemble principle of appeal to the politician. In order to do so, it will first try to understand the fundamental precepts of her intellectual framework, which inevitably permeate the notions of performativity, precariousness and dispossession. Then, we will dwell on the reverberations of the right to appear in the management of life, delimiting the spatiality of political action at the intersections of the public, the private, and even the confined and the virtual. Finally, the text will go into the details of the so-called performative theory of assembly, a butlerian proposal that equates in its reflections the coefficients of freedom of assembly, public space and popular sovereignty, so as to provide the directives of kinetics of the dispossessed.