ABSTRACT
Orientational metaphors operate at basic levels of understanding and practice and in minute detail by working simultaneously on the individual body and on the body politics. The proliferation and clustering of terms make up a reservoir of signification which can be drawn on by otherwise very different positions. Right-left has been an organising political orientation and has proved particularly suitable for parliamentary democracy, stretching from its origin as a seating principle in parliament to becoming a matrix of political identification and democratic politics. Translations or substitutions between terms show an equivalential logic that sutures political identities, positions them in relation to each other and aims at becoming hegemonic poles of identification and self-description. A democratic ideology would be one based on the political symbolic order and concerned with asserting the primacy of public political reasoning when addressing the common concerns.
