Política, afetos e conflito: um ensaio sobre dilemas da democracia contemporânea

Abstract

The present monograph offers an examination of the relationships between politics, emotions, and democratic disputes in our time. It unfolds in two main parts with the aim of addressing a problem: how does the democratic landscape today affect and is affected by the passions of individuals in the political realm? To do this, we initially investigate how the concept of the political is treated by different authors, such as Pierre Rosanvallon, Claude Lefort, and Chantal Mouffe, each of whom understands it in their own way as a sphere of conflict. Afterward, emotions, according to Baruch de Spinoza's understanding, are studied to comprehend the impact of the passions and desires of individuals on the political scene, with the main support of Vladimir Safatle, Lynn Hunt, and Luis Alberto Warat. This section is concluded by presenting the theoretical dispute between deliberative democracy and agonistic democracy, where we will see the encounters and disagreements of passions and conflict in each of the philosophical and jurisprudential traditions, represented primarily by John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and Chantal Mouffe. The second part of the work is a consequence of what we were able to build in the first part: having understood the concepts and their relationships, we will focus on understanding the [slightly more practical but still theoretical] implications that studying emotions and politics has in contemporary times. To do this, we will explore how the politics of disarray, as presented by Gonçal Mayos as a scenario of political and social disorientation experienced by the population, can produce vulnerable individuals facing political polarization and in what ways this can be a risk to democracy. Then, we will investigate which emotions are capable of rescuing individuals from this state of political helplessness with the support of Marilena Chauí's theories, drawing on Spinoza. Finally, we will devote ourselves to reflecting on what new democratic forms we should consider to surpass the struggle between the theories of deliberative democracy and agonistic democracy, which we do based on Cristina Lafont and Roberto Mangabeira Unger.