'Presentist democracy is without a people and without nation. Rather than regimes of borders and migration, its borders are sexism and racism, homo- and transphobia, colonialism and extractivism.'
In the midst of the crises and threats to liberal democracy, Isabell Lorey develops a democracy in the present tense; one which breaks open political certainties and linear concepts of progress and growth. Her queer feminist political theory formulates a fundamental critique of masculinist concepts of the people, representation, institutions, and the multitude. In doing so, she unfolds an original concept of a presentist democracy based on care and interrelatedness, on the irreducibility of responsibilities-one which cannot be conceived of without social movements' past struggles and current practices.

Isabell Lorey is a political theorist and a Queer Studies Professor at the Academy of Media Arts (KHM) in Cologne and works for transversal texts (transversal.at), the publication platform of the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (eipcp). She is the author of several books, including State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious.