Affective grammars and the crisis of mediation: the weakening of democracy by direct contact between State and society

Abstract

Successive democratic crises have sparked countless debates about the dynamics of democracy in contemporary societies, particularly regarding how to interpret such a modern institution. In Brazil, the works of Rodrigo Nunes (2022; 2023) and Letícia Cesarino (2022) are notable for their consideration of the authoritarianism that has emerged from what has been called a "crisis," and how it has been driven by affective grammars disseminated through digital media. In parallel, movements have emerged within the social sciences to revisit Durkheimian political thought to understand the political and moral dilemmas of our present time. Thus, our work intends to utilize one of Durkheim’s political writings, specifically Lectures on Sociology (2019 [1950]), as an attempt to encompass the crisis of modern democracy in dialogue with current diagnoses. In this way, we hope to make a unique contribution to the debate on the dilemmas of our time concerning the democratic crisis.