Theory & Event

Towards the conclusion of Jason Frank's new book, The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly, the author slyly inserts a hermeneutic guideline that gives the reader a key to understanding the book in their hands, and also the kind of political theory that Frank is doing. In discussing what he calls the "historically and aesthetically situated democratic theorizing" of Jacques Ranciere, Frank recommends that Ranciere's work should be approached as an "inspiring exemplar" instead of an "object of exegesis," which only provokes "rigidifying commentary on his 'theory'" (182–3). The description fits Frank's own work as well, insofar as it offers a series of images, ideas, and interpretations that do not synthesize into a grand theoretical statement as much as they unsettle operating assumptions within contemporary democratic theory. The task of political theory, on this reading, is less to settle debates about the meaning(s) of political life and more to illuminate unexplored themes and subjects, in order to provoke a broader sense of political or civic imagination. With this guideline in view, the reader is better able to assess the strengths and shortcomings of Frank's contribution, without getting caught up on the presence or absence of a particular "theory."

Frank's work is aesthetically situated because it focuses on the fascination, excitement, and revulsion that accompanied the history of popular uprisings or mass revolt in modern democracies. Frank's book is historically situated in the five decades after the French Revolution of 1789, a time when ideas (or illusions) of democratic sovereignty and practices of popular uprising or occupation were strongly linked together. While these are lively issues in our own time, Frank largely limits his analysis historically and geographically to France during this time period, as reflected in the era's philosophy and literature including the works of Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Victor Hugo, among others.

Frank's explicit task is to "excavate the lost radicalism of democracy" as represented by the street politics of popular uprisings, which have been largely ignored or shunned in contemporary democratic theory (xii). In doing so Frank connects himself with radical democracy, a post-Marxist approach to contemporary democratic politics that aims to correct the perceived economic determinism of orthodox Marxism by "recovering the political." Radical democracy is associated with the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, although Frank is critical of what he calls the "semiotic fundamentalism" of Laclau and as such desires to reorient radical democracy towards a "resistant kernel of concrete materialism" that he locates in "the aesthetics of peoplehood" (xii). Through such a reorientation, political theorists might address some critical [End Page 215] blind spots of contemporary democratic theory—namely, the lack of attention to the "aesthetic contours of democratic representation" and the "surprisingly persistent power of the politics of popular assembly" (xiii).

These blind spots are particularly problematic in our current age of popular tumult, mass protest, conspiracy, and a reactionary politics hyper-attuned to an (exclusive) aesthetics of national belonging. Democratic theory seemingly has few resources for appreciating these phenomena beyond various flavors of anxiety or romanticism.¹ Frank, by contrast, refuses to provide an authoritative interpretation of mass politics, instead viewing the latter as an aesthetic object or practice that ultimately resists, troubles, and exceeds the work of political judgment.

Frank's key term for viewing popular assembly as an aesthetic object is the "democratic sublime" (14). While the word sublime often carries connotations of beauty or grandeur, there is an aspect of the sublime that is inherently obscured, inaccessible, or rapturous—with all the dark connotations of the latter term. The sublime poses questions about "the limits of experience," by rupturing the categories through which mundane life operates (14). The sublime, in short, is a kind of transgression, a not-fully-legible experience of something that exceeds human capacities for knowledge, utilization, or representation. The democratic sublime speaks to the way that, for Frank, "the people" are precisely such a transgressive...