ABSTRACT
The chapter identifies the “crisis” of contemporary democracy with the problem of its governance, where the idea of government is synonymous with the effective control of democratic phenomena. Drawing on Plato's term “theatrocracy”, in which the theatre and its audience describe the unruly nature of democratic forms of life, it examines how anti-democratic discourses came to frame democracy as “dangerous play”. The problem of democratic government is tracked through Schiller's notion of “play”, where it constitutes the site of a paradox: Play is a means to achieve human emancipation, but it is also a tool of moral instruction designed to reconcile the demos to government. To escape that paradox, the essay argues that the solution to the contemporary democratic crisis is not more government, but less government – and more “play”. It concludes by proposing three “theatrical ideas” that might be useful in reconstructing democratic engagement, where politics becomes the site for a radical “politics of rehearsal”, producing an affective, agonistic and playful democracy.
