In her 2015 book Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler emphasizes the disjunction between the political form of democracy and the principle of popular sovereignty. It is important to keep them apart, she insists, in order to understand how “expressions of the popular will can call into question a particular political form,” thereby creating flashpoints in which “political orders deemed democratic are brought into crisis by an assembled or orchestrated collective that claims to be the popular will” (2). Although Butler focuses on the present and recent past, she ranges backward and forward in time, exploring and connecting recurrent tensions in democratic theory. For “the issue is at once ancient and timely,” she reminds us. In the wake of the eighteenth-century revolutions, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and other early theorists of democracy worried over “whether democratic state structures could survive unbridled expressions of popular sovereignty”; they “feared ‘the mob’” even as they affirmed the significance of “expressions of the popular will” (1). In an introduction and six chapters based on the Mary Flexner lectures she delivered at Bryn Mawr as well as other recent talks, Butler makes an important contribution to debates over democracy and popular sovereignty by theorizing how “acting in concert can be an embodied form of

中文翻译：

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想象“感性的民主”：超越共和主义、自由主义和文学

朱迪思·巴特勒 (Judith Butler) 在 2015 年出版的《集会表演理论笔记》一书中强调了民主的政治形式与人民主权原则之间的脱节。她坚持认为，重要的是将它们分开，以了解“民众意志的表达如何能够质疑特定的政治形式”，从而创造“被视为民主的政治秩序被集会或精心策划的集体，声称是民意”（2）。尽管巴特勒专注于现在和最近的过去，但她在时间上前后不一，探索并连接了民主理论中反复出现的紧张局势。因为“这个问题既古老又及时，”她提醒我们。在 18 世纪的革命之后，埃德蒙·伯克、亚历克西斯·德·托克维尔、和其他早期的民主理论家担心“民主的国家结构能否在人民主权的肆无忌惮的表达中幸存下来”；他们“害怕‘暴民’”，即使他们肯定“表达民意”的重要性（1）。在基于玛丽·弗莱克斯纳 (Mary Flexner) 在布林莫尔 (Bryn Mawr) 发表的演讲以及最近的其他演讲的介绍和六章中，巴特勒通过理论化“一致行动如何可以成为一种体现形式”，为关于民主和人民主权的辩论做出了重要贡献。