Anker’s insightful review poses three interrelated lines of questioning to The Democratic Sublime, dealing with popular sovereignty, the senses, and January 6. I will briefly respond to each.

The book examines a political problematic that appeared during the age of democratic revolutions, and that has haunted the history of popular sovereignty ever since. It centers around democracy’s enigmatic subject—the people—and the familiar contestations that emerged around both who the people are, and the less familiar conflicts around how this new sovereign form would be made tangibly manifest—how the people publicly appears and acts. I call this the politico-aesthetic problem of popular manifestation.

Focusing first on “Rousseau’s Silent Assemblies,” Anker asks whether the scenes of collective self-absorption that I explore there might be better understood as instances of sovereignty confounded rather than sovereign manifestation. “What is a collective will,” she asks, “if it doesn’t ultimately determine, or govern, or articulate a will?” Without getting into questions of Rousseau interpretation, or the conceptual puzzle of “collective will,” I would emphasize that the book’s larger argument, and its particular engagement with Rousseau, excavates popular manifestation as a recurring and irresolvable dilemma of democratic politics. The popular assembly of the democratic sublime instantiates the bodying forth of the people while also pointing to a collective capacity beyond any particular instantiation; it emerges from within and unsettles the claims of popular sovereignty. Anker’s first line of questioning, in other words, parallels the central concern of the book, including its critique of a decisionistic political theology of sovereignty, but she points its irresolution in a different direction of theoretical inquiry, toward a deeper engagement with the varied sensorium of collective life.

Anker’s second provocation to reflect more deeply on how “gestural practices” and “nondiscursive” attunements can orient a collective to a common purpose is rich with possibility. Both of our books are arguments for—and hopefully demonstrations of—the productivity of political aesthetics for democratic theory. But in her book and her review Anker pushes beyond my focus on sublime spectacles of collective self-regard and the insurgent murmuring of the barricades to address the more deeply embodied and funky registers of smell, touch, and taste. This line of questioning suggests intriguing continuities and discontinuities between our books. I do, however, question the adequacy of the aesthetics of the sublime, in its philosophical and political specificity, to Anker’s “intense fermentations of collectivity.” Rather than deepening our understanding of the democratic sublime, the aesthetic registers Anker emphasizes may point instead to its limitations in accounting for the full range of the democratic sensorium.

Which leads to Anker’s final question: “Was the Capitol Riot sublime?” January 6 was presented by many of its participants as their “1776 moment.” They chanted “we, the people” as well as “hang Mike Pence,” and some of the most iconic images of that terrible day—the “QAnon shaman” on the Senate Dais, the maced protester tearfully pronouncing “it’s a revolution”—demonstrate the tenuousness of the line between the sublime and the ridiculous. Insurgent claims of popular sovereignty in the United States—and their collective manifestations in crowds, demonstrations, and gatherings of the people-out-of-doors—have a long history of violent entanglement with white settler heteropatriarchal domination. They have worked to both challenge and vivify that history. But this fact does not leave us bereft of resources for judging and condemning these assembled claims to popular authority. Exploring, as I have done, how this problematic emerged within the modern history of popular sovereignty, and demonstrating why it continues to persist as a problem, does not leave us without resources for confronting it. We are not plunged into a normative abyss of groundless decision, but draw on all kinds of norms, guidelines, rules, and principles when making such judgments. It need not be the role of democratic theory to provide a formally articulated criteria for making the distinction between domination and emancipation, which is not to say it can’t help us more clearly see the relevant questions.