“Pasiones”, identidades colectivas y deliberación: los retos planteados por la democracia agonística - “Passions”, Collective Identities and Deliberation: The Challenges Posed by Agonistic Democracy

Theorists of agonistic democracy assume that the deliberative ideal fails to consider seriously enough the role of passions and collective identities in public life. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct this critique as formulated by Chantal Mouffe, and clarify the drawbacks that make it ultimately futile. More precisely, it will be argued that such a critique presupposes an unsatisfactory notion of reason. Furthermore, it is built upon some anthropologically pessimistic assumptions that, in the final analysis, are theoretically abstruse.