Dead Against Consensus
The Thinking of Chantal Mouffe

She has become a sought-after speaker in the art world. The ideas of Chantal Mouffe, a French-speaking Belgian political philosopher working in London, do not reveal her as being much of a proponent of the Dutch ‘polder model’. Her position is that people must dare to have passionately different opinions, for this is the best building block for democracy. Mouffe’s theory is increasingly being seen as a universally ap-plicable model for liberating politics from the stranglehold of consensus thinking. The issue is whether art can do justice to her intentions.