TENSIONS BETWEEN BIOPOLITICS AND RADICAL DEMOCRACY: control, government and constitutionalism

Abstract

The contemporary answers to juridical-political problems can be divided into two blocks: the pessimistic diagnoses that emphasize the inevitable subjection to power and the wages for institutional mobilizations. For analytical purposes, this paper enlisted two theoretical perspectives that summarize each of them, respectively: biopolitics and radical democracy. With this approach, we sought to answer to what extent is it possible to think of an theoretical perspective that avoids the pure subjection or pure institutional adequacy standpoints? To answer this question, we adopted a theoretical framework based on the conceptual construction of a politics of affections, by bibliographic comparisons and inferences. We concluded that, although there is no definitive response to the issue of democratic decomposition, a politics of affections allows approaches to problems that would not be possible by the points of view of biopolitical subjection and
institutionalist radical democracy.