Avoiding Deliberative Democracy?: Micropolitics, Manipulation, and the Public Sphere

This article examines the critique of deliberative democracy leveled by William Connolly. Drawing on both recent findings in cognitive science as well on Gilles Deleuze’s cosmological pluralism, Connolly argues that deliberative democracy, and the contemporary left more generally, is guilty of intellectualism for overlooking the embodied, visceral register of political judgment. Going back to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, this article reconstructs the working assumptions of Connolly’s critique and argues that it unwittingly leads to an indefensible embrace of manipulation. Against his micropolitics of visceral manipulation, I propose an alternative route for realizing Connolly’s politics of agonistic negotiation in the form of a critical theory of the public sphere.