Paulina Tambakaki, Grieving Democracy: Navigating the Loss of Affect – Edinburgh University Press, May 2025

Explores how grief can help to negotiate our loss of affect for liberal democracy

• Develops a timely diagnosis of the sources of contemporary discontent with democracy
• Rereads the literature on mourning to develop a novel account of grief – as an experience and a response to affective loss, rather than an ontological condition
• Brings together scholarship from a range of disciplinary areas – democratic theory, philosophy, feminist theory, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis
• Critically engages with feminist discussions of vulnerability and care to show their importance for democratic thinking
• Draws on examples from art and culture to illustrate how grief can be relevant to democratic politics

The book proposes that loss of affect for liberal democracy is a key problem today, in need of closer analysis. Manifested in an unprecedent suspicion of democratic governments, a readiness to elect authoritarian rulers, and a rise in reactionary politics, loss of affect pertains to the way that citizens experience democracy – their growing disinvestment from the democratic form of rule. It raises worrying questions, about the survival of democratic values into the twenty-first century, that democratic theorists often tend to either ignore or exaggerate. To navigate these questions, the book argues that grief can be a useful political resource. Understood as a response to loss, grief engages the imagination, opening the way to another, perhaps more caring, experience of democracy. To illuminate the nature of this experience, the book draws on feminist scholarship and work on contemporary culture, where grief and affect intersect.