Reflections on Democracy and Contingency I: Nietzschean Democracy

Abstract: First mid-length reflection in a small series. I collect some of my early thoughts on democracy, contingency, and myth; I argue for a definition of democratic aesthetics and offer some reflections on what I take to be some of the essential characteristics of a radical “Nietzschean” democracy.

What is democracy? It is hardly a political regime and even less a program; it is a unique engendering of the political—less a seed and more a soil. It is an aesthetic-existential relation to reality—a particular and highly-resilient human uptake of the contingent and unknown. What it constitutes, at core, is a “machinery of life”: a type of self-ordering pragmatism that forever spills outward and out of itself; a type of lived rendering, full of contradiction and pregnant with self-undermining tendencies; a type of cauldron for nascent life-worlds to germinate and be born. Whitman, James, Schmitt, Hesse—each in turn penetrated to the core of the problem and disclosed the essential non-form of democracy—or rather the all-form, the mold-cast that is capable of embracing virtually any form and absorbing it fully. Democracy is, in short, the technology most suited to the creation and care of the human world-home.

In this light, the democratic myth is structurally an open myth. If all myths arise from the yearning for meaning against the reality of contradictions, then it is democracy that holds a privileged philosophical status in the pantheon of governmental models.  And isn’t this the implicit claim? Of all possible worlds in which I could inhabit, having only one life, I would choose a democratic one—so is the assumption of all political regimes, but felt in a unique manner viz. the individual citizen of a democratic state. If I were to adopt a Heideggerian framework and argue that the primary contradiction to which “myth” responds is the fact that I exist and the fact I will die, than we may metaphysically generalize this into equivalent, though broader, terms: the same tension that exists between the singular and the general as an existential problem is elected, through democracy, into an explicitly political arena. The enduring popularity of democracy is in part derived, I think, from its unique position to politicize the most essential division of our existential quandary. That is, while difficult to articulate but still analytically relevant, the sense, among democrats, that democracy participates in the economy of “truth” (taken as homeness, as happiness, as conformity to the “nature of things”—a capricious category, no doubt) may be demonstrated to have traditional metaphysical origins, separating the legitimacy of the democratic model from its authoritarian counterparts not only in terms of self-interest and self-legislation, but in a language that takes seriously the philosophical sophistication—and political import—of a logically coherent model. In this light, the signature of democracy is written into the nature of reality; where other regime-types saw only to fashion “dykes and embankments” against the floods of contingency, democracy fashioned an ark. If the “nature of things” may be reduced fundamentally to my “otherness” from the external world and the changeability of both, then relegating this into the political realm as the division between self and citizen necessarily discloses the space in which political realism develops as a practical discourse. Only after the self-interest of man became economically—and therefore academically—relevant could the real business of strategy begin; and so we are unwitting Marxists, at least in this sense.

Thus it is the same openness which characterizes the dynamism of my existential contradiction which democracy appropriates into an explicitly political modality. I define freedom as: being at home in the world. Or: I am most free when I feel the most at home. Democracy uniquely responds to this profound need of freedom and homeness. It is under this auspice that Lefort’s notion of the openness of democracy, paralleled by such theorists as Nancy and Esposito, assumes its greatest relevance.[1] The claim is now familiar: the “always arriving” status of the democratic promise hollows out the propensity for democracy to favor any particular factional program over others. Democracy is necessarily without content; it is the ever-moving vehicle that adds voice here, listens there, but never settles. Returning to Koselleck, we might say that the “experience” of democracy must always exceed its “expectation”: the radical effervescence of democratic substance means the impossibility of determining, conclusively, “the” definition of democratic politics. Democracy thus places a premium on experience in an effort to maximize freedom—it denies the very threshold of the “book,” as Michael Oakeshott would say, and opens the arena for a new type of political judgment. The fact of democracy’s “empty center” invites a multitude of strategies, programs, campaigns and parties that all vie for a position in a non-extant locality. To the extent that this locality forever recedes into the horizon of futurity, political judgment becomes the economic coin in the perennial competition of democratic politics: the creative impulses to convert hearts and minds is in permanent agitation, and in fact ascends into an institutional constellation, wherein the “polyarchical” conditions of democratic interests—Dahl’s great reaction to Madison—foment into factionalized interests here only to dissolve into so many special interests over there.

This turn to experience is at the core of the democratic promise, both in its permanent open-endedness as well as its tendency to self-closure. Experience tells us, as Yeats suggests in three words what three volumes couldn’t say, that “things fall apart”—people, societies, worldviews, myths, and so on. Politically, it was Spengler who developed this doctrine into his quasi-poetic and organic analogies of “culture.” Nevertheless, this “falling apart,” while situated as the existential basis of democratic politics, is simultaneously its fabricated endgame: the contradictory terms made to congeal within the democratic myth—the autonomy of the self, and the legitimacy of the common good—exist as two magnets of the same pole pushed together. The force that binds requires constant adjustment—and, though we may come close (at times) to close the gap entirely, our efforts are always asymptotic and prone to undoing. This adjustment, however, cannot be worked out abstractly before its actual manifestation in a concrete situation; democratic political judgment thus attends to deep experience as its primary political modality, while expectation transforms from claims over the stability—and hence knowability—of the democratic center into a robust politics of persuasion, aimed at creating an imagined future rather than merely prophesizing its inevitability. To this end, the “openness” of democratic judgment is not unlike Kant’s notion of aesthetic judgment or Barthes’ notion of the structural text: one can never fully adjudicate beforehand what will constitute the democratic manifestation. Democracy can only justify itself aesthetically; it can justify itself aesthetically only through the act. A relevant point of further consideration here is Wittgenstein on rule following.

But to return to the point at hand: the openness at the heart of democracy’s empty center invites the everlasting competition of meanings to fill that center. Chantal Mouffe and Laclau’s versions of agonistic democracy here come to the fore, as does Arendt’s celebration of novelty alongside Whitehead’s pragmatic uptake. Jefferson also comes to mind here with his principle that “the world belongs to the living”—does the adoption of this principle necessitate a certain type-of levelling? Or: can we imagine a tradition of persistent novelty? Yes, and this is in part the identity of democracy viz. contingency; Weber on charisma and its diffusion into institutions. The problem here is not to create the apparatus capable of ensuring immortality; it is to do so against the persistence of the novel and new. The question then becomes indicative of a profound need: how to ensure that novelty does not interrupt the promise of immortality. Here might be the fulcrum of conservatism viz. Burke and Oakeshott. Conservatism becomes something like: “…and with me, so too are you preserved; with me, so too do you enter the halls of eternity.” Nietzsche on “yes-saying” and “no-saying”: to say yes is to say to something/someone: I sanction your immortality. I am reminded here of the game of Go and the “art of life and death” and Bataille on the general economy.

But to the problem of this radical openness: to the extent that all the discourses locked in competition interact differently with one another individually, followers of given comprehensive existentialisms must cultivate ingenious and imaginative ways to persuade their fellow citizens. With the ultimate objective being the promise of democratic (e.g. non-coercive, non-arbitrary—what Skinner defines as “liberal” following Hobbes) conversion, the rest is so much open game: the exercise of political judgment is maximized as a daily affair, in which collisions amidst unique discourses are multiplied and staged in terms of persuasive strategies of myth-making. What is the question to which conversion and the democratic myth is the answer? We might answer: can democracy have ‘teeth’ without devolving into tyranny? We might further answer: yes, it can.

The same chain that links democracy to political realism in the exposure of the Lefortian open is what binds political judgment to the democratic myth in a substantial and formative manner. At stake is something like the augmentation of aggregate societal affect, where, by dint of my passionate commitment to my own truth, the performances I design and stage in the effort to convert others will demand a genuine and enduring form of fervent identification. As the same is true for others, the universality of myth-making emerges as each creatively tries to convert each; never am I more committed to participation than when it involves the realization of my subscribed truth. In the open competition of mythic narratives, the most persuasive discourses are set to win out; whether through rhetoric, reason, appeals to self-interest, or some combination, competing discourses strive daily for men’s souls.[2] Here are laid bare the democratic architectonics of something like Renan’s “daily plebiscite.”

This daily plebiscite is uniquely veridical when operationalized politically. That is, the great contest of democratic politics—the exploration of the democratic myth—involves the staging and restaging of truth, where the battle is conducted as the conflict of meaning vs. meaning, the total war of comprehensive existentialisms. Foucault and Hobbes emerge as premier theoriests here: I argue for a definition of the political in which “the political” is the arena of literal truth-making. Behind this stands the conviction of man not just as homo faber but more specifically as factorem veritatis—the maker and supplier of truth. That this truth is well-met by reality or not—well, as Augustine pragmatically announces, securus judicat orbis terrarium.

But even in this context of competing truth-makers, if we take that what I owe myself is above all truth, then what I owe another is equally so. To the extent that I exist within a comprehensive doctrine, I may expect others to have them as a practical fact of my democratic belonging; my moral commitment to my own comprehensive doctrine emerges twofold: 1. in accepting the conditions of what I “owe” another that I have traced above; and 2. in my persistent staging/disclosing of my beliefs. (One could even say that 1 is predicated on 2—that is, I owe it to myself to owe it to another…). Thus, though there is reasonable pluralism (taken as a practical condition of liberal society, “like it or not”), there is no longer the need/room for translation, taken as the currency of the Rawlsian “proviso” and the Habermasian theory of religion in the public sphere.[3] Behind all this is the conviction that every ideology, conscientiously or ignorantly, sustains itself by an evangelical orientation toward the greater/outside world.[4]

What I imagine here is a dramatization—and further strengthening—of civic solidarity through small-scale stagings between individuals in the public sphere. The purpose is not merely to produce social cohesion as a subset of stability, but to explore what it might mean to make living in tandem an experiment in living well, e.g. as infused with meanings reflective of our individual comprehensive existentialisms. Schiller’s aesthetic state of freedom is perhaps the most developed model here. What I owe another is truth, and so far as I have found it, it is my duty to persuade; hence, what I really owe another is perfectibility, in terms of both my own and theirs. Mutual perfectibility, measured aesthetically, might be the standard of this “growth-oriented” (see Dewey, Whitehead) liberalism.

To win in the field of democratic competition is to taste effervescent glory—prone to the same paralyzing stagnations that compromise the Machiavellian prince, but prone, too, of reanimation so long as there are ears to listen, eyes to witness and tongues to profess. Democracy’s relation to contingency means: there is no such thing as permanence, only resilience.[5] The center, by definition, cannot hold. Democracy is the unprecedented blast of the existentially protean; it exists so long as this universe harbors the ultimate changeability of things.

Adopting this model into the language of Wolin, for instance, we might argue that the purpose of the democratic state is the consistent criterion of maximizing and routinizing “fugitive” moments, spaces in which the animate interactions of citizens may organically compound and flourish, and arenas in which the exercise of political judgment sketched above becomes a feasible and meaningful public activity—all developed against the affective identification with tangible localities. Tocqueville’s innumerable daily interactions are made purposeful and collective through something like a Dewey-inspired notion of inquiry.

For Wolin especially, what institutionalization accomplishes is the erasure of a type of participation vital to democracy. Thus, while democracy requires institutionalization, so too does this requirement enervate and contribute to apathy.[6] To the extent that one is robbed of access to this type of activity/participation, so too is one robbed of the exercise of political imagination unique to democracy, and, in turn, barred access from the paideia of political judgment. The same structural thesis rests behind Brown’s treatment of neoliberalism: the entrepreneurial logics that seep into the everyday institutionalize apathy on a pathological and pandemic level.

A snag arises here, though, when we relate Wolin back to someone like Tocqueville. If Tocqueville and Wolin both would agree that there exists some positive feedback loop between participation and democratic health/stability (Wolin obviously relegates this to the exception, while Tocqueville sees this as the norm), then the major difference between the two thinkers might be in their treatment of conventions—that is, Tocqueville treats conventions as contributing to the robustness of the democratic order, while Wolin seems to associate them as an institutional form, and thus democratically enervating.[7] The question, it seems, is how to equalize care in the myth-making playing field such that political judgment doesn’t become a mere proxy for domination—how to institutionally secure the possibility of institutional breaks and refoundations. Derrida on repetition. Are we here, as Rousseau suggests, to force the freedom of participants? But how is this to be achieved?

A similar question confronted Tocqueville, who importantly notes in Democracy in America: “I was wondering how, in our time, the idea of rights can be taught to men in order to insert it, so to speak, into their sensual experience.”[8] Tocqueville’s answer is deeply illuminating. On the one hand, Tocqueville shifts the political focus from the juridical to the socio-cultural, finding in the customs, mores and religion of the American tradition the true seeds of its enduring harmony. This shift located the true “meat” of politics not in the formalized processes of elite law-making, but in the everyday practices of individual citizens. “An American gains his knowledge of the laws,” Tocqueville writes, “from his participation in legislation: he becomes educated about the formalities of government from governing. The great work of society is performed daily beneath his gaze and, so to speak, in his grasp.”[9]

It is in this daily confrontation with the processes of self-rule that the animate properties of democratic affect are set into motion. My passionate commitment to self-rule, mediated through tangible mores (especially religion), creates a positive feedback loop of participation and identification: “Equality offers daily an abundance of modest pleasures to every single man. The charms of equality are felt the whole time and are within the reach of all; the noblest hearts appreciate them and the commonest souls delight in them. The passion engendered by equality must, therefore, be both vigorous and widespread.”[10] The affective sinews of democratic belonging, as a result of the manufactured context of daily interaction among citizens, points to the ambiguous—though crucial—component of democratic animation. It is in compounding collisions among citizens, in producing contexts in which their consistent interactions trace the normal pulse of banal affairs, that democracy draws its first real breaths. Behind the individual citizen’s embeddedness in the processes and life of society, the importance of movement looms as the real vitality of democratic identification: the recluse, by contrast, is the bane of democracy. To this end, the real value of deliberative politics is less the procedural terms they impose and more the simple fact that its mobilizes face-to-face interactions in the public sphere; the persistent encounter with the “other” chastens both myths, and ultimately provides an aesthetic rather than a deliberative resource. I am here reminded of Burke’s important observation, which elaborates the local character of this Tocquevillian belonging: “There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-informed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”[11]

Custom, in Tocqueville’s sense,[12] is the true fund of the state’s myth-making capacity, and where the power of democratic reinvigoration necessarily lies. While someone like Robert Dahl explicitly rejects the Rousseauian conception of the “general will,” it is ironically his turn to custom in the elaboration of the concept of “polyarchy,” for instance, that opens the backdoor for Rousseau to return. If all is illusion, and we need illusion—then: how to systematize and legitimize illusion democratically? How to provide equal access to illusion? Socrates on the noble lie, Pitkin on representation. What would a collective but conscientious self-made lie look like? The irony here would be to create something of a chimera: a Nietzschean collectivity that accepts and its fully aware of its own rhetorical will-to-power/mythmaking capacity—a collectivity that is not at civil war with itself [Socrates], a collectivity that lives in good-conscience and directs its mythmaking ends to its own vital energies and systemic growth. Again, the irony of linking Socrates to Nietzsche dialectically is not lost on me; it is an irony that sublimates into the greater insight that it constitutes a simultaneous fulfillment and rejection of the Nietzschean creed.

That is, cast in terms of mythmaking that I am here exploring, the model of polyarchy invites the legitimation of individual mythmaking through the total intersubjectification of mythmaking itself. That is, each individual is animated as a potential site of persuasion, where he or she exercises political judgment as a creative invocation of converting others. Insofar all have the power to convert and be convert, the conditions of equal opportunity hold. The real problem of something like the Citizens United court decision is therefore cast in terms of scarce political resources of attention, wonder and persuasion. To this end, I am reminded of Dolf Sternberger’s constitutional patriotism, and I would further argue that the state must possess a monopoly on awe/glory. If in some sense we authorize the state to both make and preserve our citizenship/subjectivity (as long as the proceduralism thereby conforms to what we have deemed “legitimate” democratic standards), then part of that legitimated program must include means by which social integration is not only sustained, but by which the forces that challenge it—e.g. non-state controlled awe/glory—are themselves quarantined and checked by the same rooted policy that initially forged the social bond/civic solidarity. That today the task of government is less to “govern” and more to “manage,” part of that management is the image of the state—its performance—in relation to its citizenry. This we may call the state’s own version of “self-branding”: to the extent that the state performs according to constitutional constraints, it may perform to the utmost of its ability to magnify, augment and multiply the points of democratic affect and enchantment.[13] Fundamentally, the state is to citizen as performer is to audience.[14] The sieve of nationalism selectively dips into the Lethean stream; it is not so much the necessity to forget that is essential to nationalism as it is the art of selective remembrance. That is, it is Anderson’s alteration of Renan’s premise—that it is not so much whether we forget or remember, but that we do so in ways conducive to a sense of our “oneness”[15]—that more fully explains the relation between a nation’s history (invented or otherwise) and its immediate commitment to social integration. It is this image the state is required to judiciously and rigorously manage, and it is again the state’s identity—portrayed as a function of its unique constitutional essentials—that is grounded in its ability to monopolize the means of affect, e.g. not in the construction of this or that particular myth, but in the procedural terms by which myths shall be made and circulated writ large.

That this proceduralism may assume the form and function of a singular “myth” or program only demonstrates how democracy grounds its abstract meta-role in a serviceable political technology, e.g. institutionalizes itself, at any given point in time. This, then, is to be the principle business of the liberal state: its performance may be reduced to the multiplication of sites of myth-making where, daily, individual citizens may stage their own performances to one another, exercising regular political judgment. Held within constitutional limits, this means that the state ought to retain a monopoly over the means of affect: it may permit an infinite series of myths to explore the deeper trenches of its own myth (e.g. the compatibility between individual citizen and general good), but insofar as it remains democratic, so too must the democratic myth persist.

What occurs here is less a declaration of a stable identity and more a commitment to a group of practices that spell out a promise to come (Lefort): its arrival signaling utopia, and operating adjacent to Koselleck’s notion of the Christian’s claim to eschatological knowledge. Its fulfilment must forever remain at the margin/horizon, out of arms reach by all but in principle acquireable by any. Democracy is democracy fully-realized just as much at its birth as it is at its death; or: true democracy is just as happy to die, possesses a unique ars moriendi, as it is to live, as it possesses techne directed toward bios.

But to pursue this question of solidification: are institutions/conventions necessarily enervating? Wolin’s analysis of 5th century Athens, particularly in the institution of a system of lots, seems to suggest that certain institutionalized practices may preserve, at least in part, the spirit of the political outside its realization in the moment of exception.[16] Per what I have claimed above regarding the nature of quotidian conversion, what is required if the political is to remain an active democratic force is a daily reminder, like therapy conducted as part of the banal scaffolding of daily life. Ironically, the survival of the political is predicated on its ability to encode the very institutionalization and enervation that otherwise threatens it, to routinize—to borrow from Dunn—the moments that spill well beyond the routine.

I conclude by noting that “institutionalization” may constitute only the myth as well. Or: here is an example of the type-of comprehensive doctrine I am concerned with finding the essence of; I now turn to reproduce Shakov’s conversation with Stravrogin over Russian nationalism in Dostoevsky’s Demons. Nowhere has the myth of the nation been so poeticized and aestheticized: this is, in my opinion, the truest expression of political mythmaking Western literature has yet to produce: “Not one nation,” Shatov begins,

has ever set itself up on the principles of science and reason; there has never been an example of it, unless perhaps only for a moment, out of foolishness….Reason and science always, now, and from the beginning of the ages, have performed only a secondary and auxiliary task in the life of nations; and so they will to the end of the ages. Nations are formed and moved by another ruling and dominating force, whose origin is unknown and inexplicable. This force is the force of the unquenchable desire to get to the end, while at the same time denying the end. It is the force of a ceaseless and tireless confirmation of its own being and a denial of death….The aim of all movements of nations, of every nation and in every period of its existence, is solely the seeking for God, its own God, entirely its own, and faith in him as the only true one. God is the synthetic person of the whole nation, taken from its beginning and to its end. It has never yet happened that all or many nations have had one common God, but each has always had a separate one. It is a sign of a nation’s extinction when there begin to be gods in common. When there are gods in common, they die along with the belief in them and with the nations themselves. The stronger the nation, the more particular its God….Reason has never been able to define evil and good, or even to separate evil from good, if only approximately; on the contrary, it has always confused them, shamefully and pitifully; and science has offered the solution of the fist….The nation is the body of God. Any nation is a nation only as long as it has its own particular God and rules out all other gods in the world with no conciliation; as long as it believes that through its God it will be victorious and will drive all other gods from the world. Thus all have believed from the beginning of time, all great nations at least, all that were marked out to any extent, all that have stood at the head of mankind….If a great nation does not believe that the truth is in it alone (precisely in it alone, and that exclusively), if it does not believe that it alone is able and called to resurrect and save everyone with its truth, then it at once ceases to be a great nation, and at once turns into ethnographic material and not a great nation. A truly great nation can never be reconciled with a secondary role in mankind, or even with a primary, but inevitably and exclusively with the first. Any that loses this faith is no longer a nation.[1]

The souls of nations and the souls of individuals are here taken in mirrored tandem. To diffuse this sentiment into the very sensory and lived framework of democratic life is to democratize mythmaking twofold: on the one hand, opening up the creation of the myth to any and all; on the other hand, opening the myth infinitely unto the discovery of its own possibilities. It is only when each man can become his own God, and believe in this god-status fully, that a Nietzschean Democracy might be realized. What forms this all will take cannot be anticipated—it can only be judged.

[1] Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, pp. 250-252

[1] See Claude LeFort, “The Question of Democracy,” p. 16: “Democracy thus proves to be the historical society par excellence, a society which, in its very form, welcomes and preserves indeterminacy and which proves a remarkable contrast with totalitarianism which, because it is constructed under the slogan of creating a new man, claims to understand the law of its organization and development, and which, in the modern world, secretly designates itself as a society without history.” See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Truth of Democracy, p. 14: “If democracy has a sense, it would be that of having available to it no identifiable authority proceeding form a place or impetus other than those of a desire—of a will, an awaiting, a thought—where what is expressed and recognized is a true possibility of being all together, all and each one among all.” See Roberto Esposito, Communitas, p. 7: “The community isn’t a mode of being, much less a ‘making’ of the individual subject. It isn’t the subject’s expansion or multiplication but its exposure to what interrupts the closing and turns it inside out: a dizziness, a syncope, a spasm in the continuity of the subject.”

[2] It is important to develop this in the light of Arendt’s notion of the political.

[3] I have argued against Habermas’s theory of religion more explicitly elsewhere. Importantly, I would here add: Translation is merely a tactic of the dominant secular discourse to legitimate its authority.

[4] Indeed, one of the great historical ironies might be how it was the counter-intuitive lack of open evangelicalism that first ensured the survival of the Christian religion and further solidified its later status as the evangelical enterprise. See Ramsay MaMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire: AD. 100-400.

[5] See Philip Pettit,

[6] See Sheldon Wolin, Norm and Form, p. 36

[7] The romantics, particularly Coleridge, harbored the early modern form of this position. To pursue later: Coleridge’s conventional stasis—what institutionalization does is rob one of a type of participation vital to democracy. [Coleridge’s static conventional ocean: freedom, as I am trying to define it, is a counterdistinction to habit: Peirce, James, Dewey.]

[8] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 278

[9] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 356

[10] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 586

[11] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 68

[12] See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 361: “Thus, of all Americans, it is especially the customs of Americans of the United States which make them capable of supporting a democratic government; and it is customs again that cause the various Anglo-American democracies to be more or less orderly and prosperous.”

[13] To this end, see Jane Bennett’s The Enchantment of Modern Life for a particularly apt contribution.

[14] Both Arendt and Goffman are vital here. While it would be silly to define nations as “cynical teams” in Goffman’s sense, Goffman nevertheless points to the micro-tools of performance that I think may be reproduced on a more macro-level of analysis qua the state rather than individuals. And it is Arendt’s focus on the problem of “audience” that connects well with Goffman’s analysis. Quoting Richard Barnet, Arendt notes how “the ‘war became a disaster because the National Security Managers misjudged each audience.” Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics,” p. 19. For further reflection, compare this observation to Arendt’s use of audience and its relation to judgment viz. her reading of Kant.

[15] See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 206; in referring to Braudel’s morbid charts: “From Braudel’s remorselessly accumulating cemeteries, the nation’s biography snatches, against the going mortality rate, exemplary suicides, poignant martyrdoms, assassinations, executions, wars, and holocausts. But, to serve the narrative purpose, these violent deaths must be remembered/forgotten as ‘our own.’”

[16] See Sheldon Wolin, “Transgression, Equality, and Voice”