Jean-Luc Nancy's rethinking of democracy unfolds from a twofold conviction: first, from the belief that the term itself has become somewhat of a common place, and to such an extent that the word itself has effectively dissolved any problematic character and possibility of an authentic questioning as to its senses. ‘When it is taken for granted in every discourse that “democracy” is the only kind of political regime deemed acceptable by a humanity that has come of age, that has been emancipated, and that has no other end than itself then the very idea of democracy loses its luster, becomes murky, and leaves us perplexed.’ Nancy reminds us that the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century have come out of such democracy, and that one should therefore not ignore the ‘traps’ or ‘monsters’ that lurk behind this murkiness; further, he claims that democracy has lost most of its power of signification. With respect to this ‘nonsignifying word democracy’, Nancy explains: ‘Is it at all meaningful to call oneself a “democrat”? Manifestly, one may and should answer both “no, it's quite meaningless, since it is no longer possible to call oneself anything else”, and “yes, of course, given that equality, justice, and liberty are under threat from plutocracies, technocracies, and mafiocracies wherever we look”. Democracy has become an exemplary case of the loss of the power to signify.’ Incapable of ‘generating any problematic or serving any heuristic purpose’, democracy then ‘means everything– politics, ethics, law, civilization– and nothing’. This loss of significance gives a task for thought, namely, ‘to stop letting common sense pullulate with free-floating incoherencies the way it does now and force democratic nonsignificance to stand trial in the court of reason’. It thus becomes a matter of rethinking the senses of democracy, and of re-engaging what is at stake with this term.

The second conviction pursued by Nancy is that it is not a matter of simply understanding democracy in its traditional exhausted sense, as a political regime among others, but first and foremost as an ontological fact. Nancy insists principally on this point: democracy is not, first and foremost, a political form. It must rather be approached in its ontological scope– Nancy even uses the term ‘metaphysical’– and not primarily as a political reality. As he states in The Truth of Democracy: ‘Democracy is first of all a metaphysics and only afterwards a politics.’