Seven notes on democracy
(These notes share a common thread that could be described as a crossing between Lacan and Lefort. I didn’t intend it that way, but while preparing some thoughts for a recent talk on democracy, I realized my writing kept circling around those two references. From Lacan, the notion of constitutive lack. From Lefort, the idea of democracy as a regime in which the place of power remains empty. Together, they suggest that democracy is defined precisely by sustaining incompleteness as a structural condition.)
I. Democracy as a form of subjectivation
The democratic subject inhabits a social fabric marked by differences, tensions, and disagreements. And democracy, as Lefort reminds us, is characterized by the fact that the place of power is empty—no one can occupy it once and for all. Read this way, and in line with Lacan’s notion of structural lack, democracy—like the subject—does not falter because it is incomplete; it is grounded, rather, in the very impossibility of closure.
Democracy therefore exceeds institutions and procedures. It is also about producing subjects capable of living with incompleteness and sustaining dissent without erasing it.
II. Democracy and incompleteness
Democracy is always open, always unfinished. That is precisely what makes it both uncomfortable and powerful.
This openness generates unease. Living with what remains unresolved is never easy. Hence democracy is constantly haunted by fantasies of unity: authoritarianism as full closure, technocracy as total knowledge.
If the state is a montage that organizes the social, democracy is the staging of that incompleteness.
III. Democracy and fantasy
Democracy is not something that “exists” in a pure state. It operates more as a regulative idea (in a Kantian sense) or as a necessary fantasy: a horizon that orients practice but is never fully realized.
What we actually find is:
Democracy-as-reality: what we see in practice, with its distortions, routines, technocratic or clientelist captures. Always partial, contradictory, traversed by power.
Democracy-as-fantasy: the scene where the promise of equality and openness takes shape. It does not exist empirically as a totality, but it operates at the level of subjectivation.
There is never “the” democracy—only a struggle to sustain the void against forces that seek to fill it.
To say that “democracy does not exist” is not to call it an illusion. Its strength lies precisely in not existing as a full object. Because it never appears as complete, it compels itself to be recreated again and again in practices, institutions, and conflicts.
By refusing to promise total unity, democracy installs the fantasy of a shared incompleteness. It is singular in that it organizes the fantasmatic struggle in a specific way: institutionalizing lack and allowing conflict to be expressed within a framework of nonviolence.
IV. Democracy and violence
Democratic frameworks guarantee a space in which political struggle can unfold without annihilating the adversary. Under authoritarianism, conflict is resolved through elimination. Under technocracy, through neutralization.
The singularity of democracy lies in sustaining dissent under conditions of nonviolence—accepting that politics is struggle, but not war. Precisely because this framework is never guaranteed (it can always degrade, collapse, or turn violent), democracy is a fragile wager: a fantasy re-enacted each time conflict resists sliding into extermination and is instead processed through political dispute.
V. Democracy and capitalism
Democracy requires subjects who recognize each other as equals in a shared space, even amid disagreement. Capitalism, by contrast, produces subjects as competitors—caught up in accumulation, debt, and consumption.
Democracy slows things down; capitalism accelerates and closes. That speed corrodes democratic patience.
While democracy restrains direct political violence, capitalism introduces economic and social violence: exclusion, precarity, inequality. This undermines the material basis of democracy: what kind of political equality is possible under extreme social inequality?
In the face of such unease, authoritarian or technocratic exits appear, shutting down the democratic framework (“stop politicizing, we need order/efficiency”).
Democracy insists as a horizon of openness, yet its difficulties arise because it unfolds within a capitalist order that structurally undermines it. Capitalism offers fantasies of self-sufficiency, immediate gratification, unlimited performance. Here it collides with democracy: while democracy requires subjects who can live with lack, capitalism offers objects that promise to cover it over.
VI. Captured democracy
Democracy is not necessarily “the best response” in every context, but it is the most demanding, because it wagers on sustaining lack without turning it into forced unity. That wager, however, is fragile and often appears degraded—particularly under the pressure of capitalism.
Liberal-capitalist democracy presents itself as synonymous with democracy (though, as noted, this is democracy-as-reality, not democracy-as-fantasy). In practice, it is overdetermined by the logic of the market: consumer individuals, citizenship reduced to periodic voting, politics reduced to management. A historical form of democracy which, once captured by that logic, loses part of its capacity to sustain lack (every democracy-as-reality can be more or less captured by logics that erode its openness).
This is not, then, a moralizing diagnosis. The point is to distinguish between democracy as a horizon of the unfinished, and its liberal-capitalist form—functional to the market.
VII. Democracy and psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis shares a structural affinity with democracy.
In analysis, too, there is no ultimate truth and no final closure. That is what links it to democracy understood as a framework of the unfinished: both refuse closure.
The analyst opens a space where words take shape—without imposing a truth or erasing the analysand. There the subject comes to accept that not everything can be said, that there is no “Other of the Other,” that life is traversed by lack. That is also what democracy requires: subjects who can live with disagreement without demanding an absolute resolution.
Psychoanalysis unsettles, displaces, insists on what does not fit. That makes it “democratic” in a deep sense—not institutional but structural. A micro-political model of the same logic that democracy enacts at the macro level.
It is no accident, then, that Lefort and Lacan echo each other. Just as the subject is marked by the impossibility of completion, democracy is defined by the impossibility of power being embodied in a single figure. Both analysis and democracy institute a space in which lack itself becomes a condition.
Appendix. Democratic contingency
Both Lacan and Lefort are inscribed in a European tradition. Lacan thinks subjectivity through psychoanalysis, while Lefort conceives democracy as the “empty place of power” within the framework of the European modern experience (with 1789 as a decisive moment). There is a strong Western imprint here. The idea of incompleteness, of emptiness, of power that cannot be fully embodied, is tied to a political history (the end of absolute monarchy, secularization) and to a philosophical tradition (from medieval nominalism to modern humanism). In this sense, democracy as conceptualized by Lefort can be seen as a Western invention, with its architecture of rights, representation, and institutions.
The question, then, is whether there is a “democratic universal” or whether democracy is a historically particular regime. A Lefortian hypothesis would be that democracy is a Western particularity that nevertheless reveals a universal problem: no society can ever fully close the void of power. The Chinese Communist Party, for instance, presents itself as the historical continuity of a meritocratic-Confucian (non-liberal) model in which power is conceived as embodied in the Party, and ultimately in the figure of the leader. Yet even in systems of concentrated power, the void returns—in the form of internal tensions, bureaucratic struggles, or repressed protests. In other words, lack never disappears; it is only managed with different resources.
Thus, democracy is a historical, Western, and contingent way of organizing the void—not the only one. Its singularity lies in refusing to deny incompleteness, turning it instead into the very principle of politics.
— E.