Recent discussions about the affective dimension of democracy have said too little about the way in which disempowered citizens can sustain their struggles in the face of adversity. This article develops a theory about democratic resilience by turning to the theory of aggression and play of Donald Winnicott. Drawing on Winnicott, I argue that resilience depends on a capacity to mourn, a capacity for dissent and a capacity to invent new techniques for interaction. Yet, in contrast to Winnicott, I investigate how resilience is transformed by the specific rules and techniques that constitute democratic struggles. This allows us to see that the cultivation of resilience in democratic struggles is irreducible to family dynamics while also highlighting how such struggles can undermine democratic resilience by developing rigid attachments to strategies of resilience. Finally, I turn to the question of how democratic struggles might undo a tendency to rigidity.
