Disagreement without reconciliation: Democracy, equality and the public realm

Nancy Fraser claims that the public sphere did not live up to the assumption of strict equality envisioned by Arendt and Habermas. She also believes that socioeconomic equality is a necessary condition for a truly democratic public realm. This is problematic not because equality is an unworthy goal but because it ties its pursuit to classical narratives of emancipation and hence to an ethos of reconciliation, at least implicitly. I argue instead that public space is structured around an ethos of polemicization and propose two criteria to frame its relation with equality. One is that public space comes into being through a polemic about the status of the given. This polemic tests the boundary between public and private and very often reconfigures it. The other criterion is that equality is always a contested equality to come. This is not because it takes the shape of a delayed presence - of an ideal equality that is simply not-yet-here - but because it can never find a resting point: the question of equality opens up whenever there is an attempt to verify it.