Democracy of the Civil Dead: The Blind Trade in Citizenship

Abstract

Liberal democratic citizenship has mutated into a ‘blind trade’ with a trajectory towards civil death, under which, in the name of democracy, citizens are expected to relinquish more rights and participatory possibilities in return for unguaranteed security, spectacles, and unspecified political, and economic ‘goods’ and ‘protections’. ‘Civil death’, the legislative deprivation of civil rights, is spreading beyond the bounds of contractarian logic and into the rights of (non-criminal) citizens. It is conceivable that citizens will find themselves without any meaningful political and civil rights, inhabiting a ‘democracy of the civil dead’. Rather than attempting to refine or redefine the contractarian approach or, to return to a classical Greek model of democracy, this paper draws on Agamben, Arendt, Nancy and Derrida in order to pose the possibility of the presence of ‘denizens’ who, in rejecting citizenship and the enclosure of rights and obligations inscribed in it, take up an overtly political position of exposure which opens up the state to contestation and the possibility of a democracy worthy of the name.