Political Withdrawal: The Affective Foundation of Disengagement and its Consequences for Democracies
The political is commonly understood to necessarily involve forms of engagement, whether by exercising one’s democratic right to vote, or more broadly by behaving as an “engaged citizen”. Correspondingly, disengagement is cast as the political’s antithesis: a symptom of apathy, alienation, or disillusionment. Yet this dichotomy overlooks the complexity of withdrawal as a political and affective gesture, and in viewing the political as constituted only by engagement, we limit our ability to theorise democratic life.
My project begins from a simple observation: widespread approaches to democracy from the perspective of engagement obfuscate the lived political reality of the vast majority of the population. Namely, that it is primarily characterised not by engagement, but by withdrawal; that democracy relies not merely on engagement but its negation. Taking the crisis of democracies as a point of departure, the project traces and characterises withdrawal across multiple registers of political life. From voter abstention and boycotts to exhaustion and individual refusal, gestures of withdrawal across the macro and micro spheres of politics function as important moments of analysis. Rather than dismissing these gestures as the erosion of political will, the project reads them as meaningful responses to democratic conditions – as forms of being and sensing within the political realm.
Three central questions guide the inquiry: What is political withdrawal? What are the affective and sensorial components of withdrawal within democratic structures and lifeforms? What role does withdrawal play in sustaining or redefining democratic life? Ultimately, the project demonstrates that withdrawal, far from being the absence of politics, constitutes a foundational structure of democratic experience.
