Esse est audiri: liminal ignorance, discursive hegemony, and the silence-driven crisis of liberal democracy

This article examines the role of ignorance and silencing in the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy. It argues that the contradiction between inclusive norms and exclusionary practices is constitutive of liberal-democratic orders under conditions of liberal discursive dominance, and reconstructs the mechanism through which this contradiction is transformed into resentment, anti-elitist mobilisation, populist articulation, and, ultimately, hostility toward freedom itself. The argument distinguishes between ignorance as a perceptual-cognitive condition of not-knowing, filtering, and disavowal, and silencing as a discursive condition in which audibility, uptake, and recognition are asymmetrically distributed. Drawing on a synthetic reconstruction of political theory, discourse analysis, social theory, and anthropology, the article shows how liberal hegemony—sustained by epistemic violence and by the unequal regulation of legitimacy, attention, and response—disrupts the discursive order of dignity while continuing to speak in the name of equal voice. To conceptualise this process, it introduces the notion of discursive potlatch: an unequal economy of hearing, acknowledgement, and response in which corrupted elites monopolise the power to confer or withhold discursive existence. Developed through discussions of hegemony, liminality, and mimetic recognition, and illustrated by cases concerning legal discourse, counter-publics, post-socialist transformation, and digital influencer culture, the article argues that populism is not an external aberration but one possible eruption of the injuries structurally generated by liberal-democratic discourse itself.