virtues. In this sense, in response to Habermas’s claim that he is an anti-
Enlightenment thinker, Derrida aYrms his belief in perfectibility and pro-
gress (Derrida 2001 a, 100 ).
3DemocracytoCome
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
The fact that the post-structuralist philosophers do not provide explicit
theoretical support for the institutions of liberal democracy does not
mean that they deplore them or that they renounce the egalitarian values
on which they rest. Rather, these values and institutions are presupposed in
order to concentrate attention on the conditions under which limits to their
application may be overcome. Consider Philippe Mengue’s objection that
Deleuzian micropolitics is anti-democratic, because it is distinguished from
the majoritarian politics of the public sphere and because the privileged
outcome is not the determination of the majority will but a ‘‘becoming-
minoritarian’’ that implies diVerentiating oneself from the majority. Mengue
argues that this is not properly a theory of politics because it does not seek to
theorize or render legitimate the institutions required to constitute a properly
political society, such as the necessary space for debate and free political
action. While he is undoubtedly correct to point to the absence of any
Deleuzian theory of public political reason, this is no reason to suppose a
fundamental antipathy towards democratic politics. Deleuze’s criticisms of
the present social and political order rely on egalitarian principles and his call
for resistance to the present state of liberal democratic government is ad-
vanced in the name of a becoming-democratic that implies a more extensive
application of those principles (Patton 2005 a, 2005 b).
Moreover, one of the distinctive features of democratic politics is that
even the fundamental convictions expressed in its laws and institutions are
open to change: examples might include the extension of basic political
rights to include those formerly excluded, or the moral values expressed in
the protection of a right to life alongside the denial of a right to die. Among
the conditions of such change are subterranean shifts in the attitudes,
sensibilities, and beliefs of individuals and populations. It follows that
what Deleuze and Guattari call the micropolitical sphere is a no less
132 paul patton