DEMOCRACIA RADICAL, EDUCAÇÃO E DIFERENÇA: NA CONTRACORRENTE DAS POLÍTICAS NEOLIBERAIS E NEOCONSERVADORAS

Abstract

This article analyzes the movements produced in contemporary times of hegemony of neoliberal and neoconservative policies in the global social, political and economic field, which also generates strong impacts on education. Based on this prerogative, we seek to broaden the debate about the theoretical production that outlines the conception of democracy involved with and in democratic education. It is intended to foster thinking around possible articulations between democracy, education and difference, from the operationalization of concepts elaborated by Laclau, Mouffe and Butler. It is argued that, in view of the taking and ascension to state power by neoliberal and neoconservative governments in the global scenario, it is necessary to think about the political plot beyond the universalisms arising from modernity that outline a conception and democratic practice based on the bourgeois liberal idealof popular sovereignty and representativeness based on the delegation of power from society to the State. Based on the concepts of radical democracy and difference, it is understood that the alliance between neoliberals and neoconservatives stems from a game of equivalences unable to contemplate the plurality of demands in dispute in the contemporary scenario. It is the discursive production of democracy as a discursive totality which, in fact, is partial, precarious and contingent. Demands that become dissatisfied begin to form the constitutive exterior of the alliance forged between neoliberals and neoconservatives. Thinking, therefore, of a radical democracy articulated to education requires operating with and by difference, that is, open to the different demands that, in the game of political disputes, remain as constitutive exterior of the hegemonic project. This is because radical democracy allows us to understand and create other chains of equivalences that can project and compete more forcefully against hegemonic struggles.