Abstract

The paper aims at showing the potential of a phenomenologically informed approach for the contemporary debate on democracy. While the role of affectivity has recently been reconsidered in social and political theory on various levels, the phenomenological insights into the affective side of subject- as well as community-formation can offer a precious tool for methodological refinements, so the argument. Inversely, the paper suggests that these analyses on subjectivity and inter-subjectivity should be enlarged so as to include what often remained a blind spot of phenomenology: the political dimension. The paper sets off to rehabilitate a concept – being concerned – that was at the center of conceptions of democratic legitimacy before being removed from it. Against the ‘juridization’ of concernedness and its limits (Habermas), the point is to show how, by drawing on the descriptive resources offered by Husserl, Levinas, Waldenfels, and Esposito, concernedness becomes relevant for re-describing the emergence of individual and collective political agents. The shared response to an initial experience of being concerned opens up an alternative account of democratic processes that, venturing beyond issues of legitimacy or sovereignty, outlines the perspective of a radical democracy out of shared concern.