Democracy in dark times

a critical reading of John Rawls's political liberalism in the philosophical perspective of Giorgio Agamben

Abstract

This article aims to develop an analysis of John Rawls' proposition about a political conception of justice as fairness in order to base an idea of liberal society well ordered from the thought of Giorgio Agamben. In this way, we will try to present a critical reading of legal-political liberalism by reaffirming the exception as a rule. This observation calls into question the very structure of the liberal proposal, since it conceals the hidden matrix of sovereign power, the relation of exception in its primordial character - which demarcates the power of life and life (nude). In this way, we intend to draw some differentiations between both proposals, emphasizing that the exercise of (re)thinking the politics that comes to question the concepts still in force in the configuration of the western political community that is intended to be democratic, such as: sovereignty, citizenship, human rights, social contract.

Keywords: Rawls. Liberalism. Agamben. Bare life. Coming politics.