Arendtian Sardines. A failed attempt at participatory democracy

Abstract

On the afternoon of November 14^th, 2019, an unprecedented event occurred in the Italian city of Bologna. Against the discriminatory policies of former Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini, four very different people, represented by Mattia Sartori, began to sing in Piazza Santo Stefano. Within a few hours, this single chant became a call that grew into a crowd of six thousand people. In a couple of days, the new political phenomenon of the 6000Sardines spread throughout the country. Journalists across Italy described it as a “joyful,” “hopeful,” and communal event that was “moved by feelings of humanity” (Pucciarelli et al., 2019).

It is no coincidence that in the same period, Adriana Cavarero, using Arendt’s idea of natality, defined democracy as a public arena based on the exaltation of the surging character of action and as a political space characterized by its detachment from fixed institutions (Cavarero, 2019). The 6000Sardines are a perfect example of this new Arendtian paradigm. A group of young people singing and dancing together, without any political affiliation, inherently anti-fascist (6000Sardines, 2020), free to exist as a plurality that thrives on the sheer power of their physical presence in the streets (Butler, 2015), animated by a simple desire for public happiness (Guaraldo, 2018b).

Nevertheless, the nascent democracy of these “Arendtian sardines,” as I will try to suggest, tragically failed to take the necessary step of organizing their spontaneity (Flores D’Arcais, 2019). As a result of their anti-institutional choices, the Sardines struggled to find a place in the sea of real politics. Being always on the border between an unformed political action and the denial of a constitutive moment, they lost their initiative power. After a phenomenological description of the 6000Sardines movement as a failed attempt at participatory politics, I want to make clear that the defeat of this democratic action was due to a lack of constituency.

Taking seriously the Arendtian challenge to ground a new body politic based on the mutual coexistence of the dual nature of action, I will present democracy as an irreducible tension between the plural act of “manyness” which is constitutively dynamic and potentially limitless, and the internal bonds that any founding act presupposes (Ricœur, 1997). Thanks to a critical perspective on the question of beginning in Arendt’s philosophy, as presented in On Revolution and The Life of the Mind (Arendt, 1963; 1978), I will attempt to elucidate this space of appearance as situated on both ontological configurations (Arendt, 1963). This internal duality, which represents the circular nature of politics between power and authority (Guaraldo, 2018a; Esposito, 1996, 2021), allows power to flourish in a founded political order that does not suppress freedom, but it also never leaves action to run out in an endless anarchic process, since we know, thanks to the lesson of the 6000Sardines, that any democratic space of appearance cannot survive without the political institution of liberty (Keenan, 1994; Vatter, 2000).