Cigdem Cidam

In 2013, Gezi Park housed perhaps the most significant democratic
protest of the Turkish Republic’s history. The Gezi protests have
drawn the attention of many democratic theorists since then. What
is surprising about these theorists’ commentaries on Gezi is that in
none of them is it possible to find an account of political practices
that enabled actors with such different interests and worldviews to act
in concert during this moment of popular action. This article argues
that to attend fully to the unique features of events such as Gezi, we
need to develop an alternative conceptualization of democratic action
that brings to light such mediatory political practices. To develop that
alternative, I turn to Aristotle and creatively appropriate his notion of
“political friendship.” Interpreted as an ethico-political notion, which
refers to a set of mediating practices, political friendship becomes a
rich conceptual resource that lays bare the dynamics of democratic
popular action.

This essay focuses on the works of two contemporary democratic thinkers, Jacques Rancière and Antonio Negri, who are commonly considered to be “theorists of the event” and frequently cited side by side. In this essay, I challenge this categorization by highlighting significant differences between these two theorists’ seemingly similar accounts. My argument is that Rancière and Negri have developed their radically different conceptions of democratic action in response to two political questions, which first confronted them in the aftermath of May 1968: What is the role of intellectuals in emancipatory struggles? And who is the subject of revolutionary politics?