ABSTRACT
Democracy has become an exemplary case of the loss of the power to signify: representing both supreme political virtue and the only means of achieving the common good, it grew so fraught that it was no longer capable of generating any problematic or serving any heuristic purpose. All that goes on now is marginal debate about the differences between various democratic systems and sensibilities. In this context, it may be useful to meditate on the two abstract but empirically dense topologies that have shaped our understanding of a demos and its limits that have long been in tension in European aspirations for democracy: the demos within state and international law, and the demos enacted through economic practices that seem to be more difficult than ever to contain within jurisdictions of state and international law. Privacy is undoubtedly one of the key values embodied in the more overtly liberal forms of democratic politics.
