Concepts, singularity and nation-ness: ‘Becoming-democratic’ and the question of the political

This chapter examines the role of conceptualisation in keeping alive the transformative capacities of democracy. In that relation, it engages with an exploration of the nature of the ‘concept’, as a simultaneously philosophical and political necessity, and what factors affect acts of conceptualisation in the constitution of concepts. With such an approach the chapter therefore attempts, among other things, to examine the following concerns: If philosophy is the creation of concepts, then what can such creative potential offer in the (re-)thinking of politics? In other words, how acts of conceptualisation bring together philosophy and politics? What is at stake within majoritarian structures that attempt to limit the mobility of conceptualisation in terms of certain exclusionary tendencies? With the aim of examining such concerns, the chapter re-turns to Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? to look for, as a cautious …