Democracy is established as a generally uncontested ideal, while regimes inspired by this form of government fall under constant criticism. Hence, the steady erosion of confidence in representatives that has become one of the major political issues of our time. Amidst these challenges, the paradox remains that while citizens are less likely to make the trip to the ballot box, the world is far from entering a phase of general political apathy. Demonstrations and activism abound in the streets, in cities across the globe and on the internet. Pierre Rosanvallon analyses the mechanisms used to register a citizen's expression of confidence or distrust, and then focuses on the role that distrust plays in democracy from both a historical and theoretical perspective. This radical shift in perspective uncovers a series of practices - surveillance, prevention, and judgement - through which society corrects and exerts pressure.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.Duke University Press and Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Poetics Today.If, in speaking of a woman, it is impossible to say what she isfor to do so would risk abolishing her differencemight matters not stand differently with respect to the mother, motherhood being the sole function of the "other sex" to which we may confidently attribute existence? Yet here, too, we are caught in a paradox. To begin with, we live in a civilization in which the consecrated (religious or secular) representation of femininity is subsumed under maternity. Under close examination, however, this maternity turns out to be an adult (male and female) fantasy of a lost continent: what is involved, moreover, is not so much an idealized primitive mother as an idealization of theunlocalizablerelationship between her and us, an idealization of primary narcissism. When feminists call for a new representation of femininity, they seem to identify maternity with this idealized misapprehension; and feminism, because it rejects this image and its abuses, sidesteps the real experience that this fantasy obscures. As a result, maternity is repudiated or denied by some avant-garde feminists, while its traditional representations are wittingly or unwittingly accepted by the "broad mass" of women and men. FLASHan instant of timeChristianity is no doubt the or a tineless dream; atoms most sophisticated symbolic conswollen beyond measure, atoms struct in which femininity, to of -a bond, a vision, a shiver, a the extent that it figures therein still shapeless embryo, unname-and it does so constantlyis able. Epiphanies. Photos of what confined within the limits of * This essay first appeared, under the title "Herethique de l'amour," in Tel Quel, no. 74

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