Abstract

This paper aims at elucidating the present strength of the social and political ideas one can draw from Wittgenstein’ later work, rooting in it his conception of the subjectivity of language and of the speakers’ authority and voice; of the I and the us. The article uses the concept of forms of life – understood, following Stanley Cavell and Veena Das, not only in the social sense but also in the natural sense, as life forms. – in order to rearticulate the natural and conventional and to perceive, as Cavell puts it, “the mutual implication of the natural and the social” in the constitution of us – and in a renewed, ordinary conception of democracy.