Challenges of Stabilization of Religious Democracy and Significational Suspension

Religious democracy is among contemporary concepts coined by Iranian society in the encounter with the serious and effective fault-line of tradition-modernity. In fact, this concept is the longstanding demand of the Iranian subject for the combination of tradition and religion, on the one hand, and, contemporaneousness and demand of the people, on the other hand. Religious democracy is the intellectual innovation of Iranian subject for the renovation or transition from this fault-line. The issues related to this combination have preoccupied the mind of the Iranian subject for about two centuries and are still on the anvil. It seems that with the victory of the Islamic Revolution, the collapse of the authoritarian regime and establishment of the Islamic Republic, parts of this longstanding demand were materialized. But, its stabilization and consolidation has not occurred yet and has faced certain challenges. Some thinkers opine that the reason for the lack of stabilization is structural, while others consider the agents responsible for this issue. Attempts have been made in this article to study these challenges through Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory and method. The hypothesis of this research is that the main challenge in stabilization of religious democracy more than being related to the lack of economic and political structures, or the reasons connected to agents and policymaking of the social elites, pertains to the cognitive-perceptive realm of a discourse. In other words, religious democracy, as one of the central signifiers of the discourse of the Islamic Republic, is still in the stage of finding the signified. This lack of signified hegemony will also cause bewilderment in the realm of structure and agent.