The cultural collective diversity in sustained-tension: an overview from Mouffe’s agonist democracy

Abstract

This article is part of a broader reflection (in progress) which mobilizes different concepts from various disciplines (philosophy, sociology, political science) to advance the understanding of the issues involved in the collective ethno-racial identity in the so-called democratic states of law. In the first part of this article, I introduce Chantal Mouffe’s concept of agonistic (heard as antagonism) and explain why it is necessary to offer an agonistic space within democracy, within the theoretical discourse around democracy. In the second part, I use the notion of agonistic as a theoretical way from which I build the notion of sustained tension to refer to the constant and latent situation of conflict that goes along with any political process. I introduce this notion as a conceptual tool to name and analyze the situation of conflict that surrounds the existence of cultural plurality within contemporary societies, including Latin-American ones. In this article, I question the idea, broadly spread, that the democratic and discursive dialogue could allow to overcome conflicts by way of institutionalizing collective ethno-racial identities (through ‘’affirmative action” policies). This article thus invites to think to what extent this idea contributes to the social peace desired by successive governments.