BINGO! DEMOCRACY!

Traditionally, it had been obvious not to hear as language what came out of the mouths of the majority of human beings, like slaves, women, workers, colonised peoples, and instead to hear only cries of hunger, rage, or pain, in order to deny them the quality of political beings.
In 500 BC, during the first Plebeian secession, a sort of general strike of the roman working class, the Patricians, the roman upper class, refused to establish a treaty with the Plebeians because to make a treaty meant giving one’s word: since the Plebeians were believed not to possess human speech, they could not give what they did not have.
To the Patricians, Plebeians would express themselves with a sort of noisy squawking who was barely a speech ; like a baby crying because of hunger or angst, or a dog’s bark ; in no case, this animal language could be a vector of intelligence. In order to deal with the Plebeians, patricians had first to admit that they could actually speak.
And this required a brand new perception of the political order, where a worker had affairs in common with a noble citizen and a voice to argue on these common affairs.

Nothing can be deduced from some human common property, because the “common” is always contested at the most immediate level. So deducing the existence of a common political world from the comprehension of language can never be natural.
As the french philosopher Jacques Rancière reminds us : « Egalitarian effects occur only through a forcing, that is, the instituting of a quarrel that challenges the incorporated, perceptible evidence of an inegalitarian logic. This quarrel is politics.
Indeed, that is what is implied by the word "democracy". The name needs to retain all its polemical force. » It was invented not by democrats as a rallying cry but by their adversaries as a term of mocking.
Democracy meant the power of the people with nothing, the speech of the speechless, those who were not really speaking beings.
« Greek and Trojan leaders alike denounced the same scandal: that men of the demos – men who were part of the indistinct collection of the hoi polloi, literally "people beyond count" – took the liberty of speaking. »

The word « demos » designates those who are outside the count, those who cannot assert any title over common affairs. Democracy, then, is « the specific power of those who have no common title to exercise power. [...] Democracy is the disrupting of all logics of entitled domination. » Politics is not the general art of governing human assemblies according to any universal human principle, such as language or conscience. It is the accident that interrupts the logic by which those who have a title to govern dominate.

Thus, a democratic regime can be defined by its ability to embrace disagreement and dissensus coming from the speechless, to acknowledge the legitimacy of their dispute, and the fact that no orientation — governing derives from the greek kubernao, to steer a ship — should be given to a society as long as oppositions and resistance haven’t been engaged in the public debate. Democracy is the place of constructive and meaningful conflict, an ongoing struggle rather than a fixed state or a goal. A true democracy should strengthen from dissensus rather neutralizing it in favor of arguable consensus.