Democracy in Transicion

This dissertation approaches the Spanish transicion, from Franco's death in 1975 until the socialist party's election in 1982, as terrain on which to map out a transition to democracy in postmodernity---how democracy is imagined and materialized in politics and culture---and examine political possibilities of opposition in such a historical situation. In politics and culture, different forms of democracy came to be: a liberal democracy resulting from a transition away from opposition towards consensual negotiation; and, in culture, understood as a symbolic space of emancipation, representations of national reconciliation and identity were displaced by representations of the social order's contingency and identities excluded from it. However, because of lingering inequalities and freedoms in postmodernity, I ask how both forms, culture and politics, might allow for political possibility and future democratic change. I draw upon Badiou, Ranciere, and Castoriadis to question democracy, historically and ideologically.