La desubjetivación del dêmos: pérdida del coraje político y olvido del acontecimiento democrático

The article analyzes the crisis of Athenian democracy in the late fifth century BC. The concept of desubjectivation is proposed to understand the loss by the people of their ability to decide, after a situation in which the people had been the main political agent. Furthermore, the notion of desubjectivation is linked to what happens with the name of Ephialtes, which allows understanding the effects of democratic event in the decades after his performance, as well as the exhaustion of popular politics in the last decade of the fifth century. The mutation by which the cycle of radical democracy comes to an end is a situation where the functioning of Athenian assembly, that is, the space in which the people had exercised until then their political sovereignty, produces its own exhaustion as a procedure of popular political subjectivation.