“Politics is Nothing but Medicine on a Larger Scale”. Gendered Medical Regimes of Truth and the Crisis of Democracy

We currently experience a deep crisis of democracy in Europe: juridification of politics, crisis of representation, authoritarization of politics and declining voter turnout are key elements. The paper interprets this crisis as a structural crisis: It is a result from conceptualizing democracy as “consensus democracy” (Rancière 1999 ): from conceptualizing the demos as entity and the coherent self-representation of the consensual will of the demos in the state as aim of democracy. In antagonistic societies, such a democracy necessarily is based on exclusions and restrictions of the political because ‘the people’ can only become an entity by ignoring social antagonisms and by excluding all issues from the political that cannot lead to consensus and to an entity. The paper offers some explanations how such an intrinsically non-democratic concept of democracy could have turned into the ideal democracy in the 19th century and can still shape our current democracy. I link political theory to history of science and argue that in the genealogy of the ‘consensus democracy’ medical regimes of truth about the body, health and pathologies played a crucial role. From a feminist perspective I highlight how the powerful constructions of ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’ were deployed to produce and legitimate these regimes of truths about the body and, as a consequence, about the political, political representation and ‘the people’. By analysing German medical discourses (physiology and sexual sciences) from the 19th century I aim to illustrate how the hegemonic understanding of democracy is based not only on gendered and racialised exclusions of people but also on a phantasm of the demos as a healthy, harmonic body that is normalized through white, androcentric epistemologies.