Several Theses Toward a Logic of Political Demand
Abstract
This article focuses on the concept of demand, understood as a fundamental political speech act. We can discern that “demanding” speech, and thus political speech in general, has been in a situation of crisis in recent decades. This article demonstrates the linguistic-pragmatic properties of the demand and the specificities of its political functioning, in particular that the demand is a “weak” performative act, which does not occur at the moment of its “utterance.” Demand is here considered to be the main link between political speech and action. The article proposes the concept of the “almost-impossible” as a fundamental modality for emancipatory politics and sketches out some coordinates for future research in this area.
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