ABSTRACT
Radical democracy tries to tackle the question of democracy at its root. Before attempting to tackle the question of how the people can realize democratic deliberation, it asks: How is the people constituted in the interplay of inclusion and exclusion? To answer this question, this paper first presents Hannah Arendt as a radical democratic thinker. Her phenomenological approach allows us to understand the constitution of what she calls the “common world” as the result of a political struggle for visibility and a voice. Following Miranda Fricker, I then argue that this struggle seeks epistemic power in order to challenge the phenomena of epistemic silence and epistemic ignorance. The paper concludes by examining the political actions of Black Lives Matter as a political struggle that seeks to counter epistemic power through direct action.
