The Democratic Promise engages Slavoj Zizek's psychoanalytic and cultural reading of politics
and terror Jacques Rancière's concept of the partition of the sensible Alain Badiou's ethics
and politics and Jacques Derrida's thoughts on philosophy in a time of terror in order to
radically rethink politics in and through aesthetics as analogies of political subjectivity.
This book interrogates the a priori rights of an individual as universally declared and what
these mean in terms of human agency. By revisiting the philosophical writings of the Western
continental tradition through the eyes of contemporary political thinkers it not only delves
into the current debate on democracy but also investigates the connection between
exceptionality and democracy. Constance Goh asserts here that inter-national or intra-national
conflicts persist despite the global emphasis on cultural diversity and consideration because
of the politics of recognition. The Democratic Promise also examines the media politics of
China and Tibet's fraught relations so as to argue that Derrida's democracy-to-come
necessitates an-other principle an extra-normative tolerance he calls «hostipitality » a host
(un)intentionally transporting a singular other via the vehicle of aesthetics.
