Democratic government and ambivalence

Abstract

Borrowing from Echeverria’s Baroque modernity, this article investigates the relevance of sequential and dissymmetric
modernities as starting point to quest the possibility of rethinking radical practices of governance for a democratic
society. Ambivalence in this sense is proposed as a counterpoint to the centrality of equivalence in the protestant and realist modernity. This contraposition allows to question the oppositional separation between use and exchange value,
a shift especially significant to think the complexity of urban life and governance where the circuits of monetarian and social value permanently overlap and compose among themselves. Building upon both the crisis of an unitarian conception of modernity and the explosion of equivalence as resolving term for the contradictions of contemporary social dynamics, I propose a dialogue between the rationale of the Sumak Kawsay and the contemporary debate about postcolonial governance in India to explore what means to think “radical democratic governance” as a practice to empower society in learning how not to be governed. The ambivalence of a project like this, that situate the governing
bodies in the impossible task of dissolving their own Power, configures the dynamic of constituent power as a permanent
process of interaction among the destitution of the existing forms of governance and the institution of new democratic
and provisional “governing” bodies.