‘When I see what democracy is…’
Bleak liberalism in a French court
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Despite extensive writing about liberalism in anthropology, liberal subjects and publics remain strangely elusive as objects of ethnographic enquiry. Anthropologists have mostly studied liberalism in light of new forms that supersede and reconfigure it, or in light of the marginalised subjects it excludes. These approaches have produced useful critical insights, but they have left liberal publics and subjects themselves hanging in a zone of ethnographic indistinction, front and centre of the picture as objects of critique, and yet persistently out of ethnographic focus. Liberalism itself features in the end as little more than a mirage, a constitutive impossibility: a practice that is abstract, a place of no place, an impersonal form of personhood. This paper explores the limits of these approaches by considering different possible readings of an ethnographic setting in which ‘the liberal public sphere’ is imagined, challenged and policed: a courtroom in Paris that specialises in press law. The paper suggests one potential way out of the ethnographic elusiveness of liberalism, by taking seriously the ways in which the impossibility of liberal ideals is already critically acknowledged by (and written into) the practices, institutions and forms of subjectivity that nevertheless seek to orient towards them.