Author Archives: Stephanie DeGooyer

About Stephanie DeGooyer

Assistant professor of English at Willamette University. She has published articles on eighteenth-century literature and philosophy. Her current book project, The Sorrows of Anybody: Radical Sympathy and Eighteenth-Century Fiction, investigates the relationship between the exaggerated mode of sentimentality and the politics of radical equality associated with Romanticism.

DEMOCRACY, GIVE OR TAKE?

June 2, 2014 by and
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In 2007, the King of Bhutan “gave” democracy to his people. Using this story as a point of departure, this article interrogates the complicated humanitarian notion of democracy as a gift in thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, Claude Lefort, and Jacques Rancière. After bringing out the paradoxes in the King of Bhutan’s abdication, DeGooyer speculates to what degree a protest against the Bhutanese state might model a new formulation of democracy, one that cannot be reduced to a consensualist scheme of sovereign sacrifice. While DeGooyer concludes that we cannot fully abandon an economy of rights as “giving and taking,” a new discussion of the rhetorical structure of rights emerges. Continue reading →