28

The political impotence to which citizens in Western democracies are reduced is fundamentally the result of a conception of citizenship limited to the exercise of power (pouvoir, potestas). This conception is a trap, because it necessarily leads to considering the majority of citizens as incapable of exercising their political rights, and it renders all attempts to mobilise or fight against current neoliberal policies, however unpopular they may be, futile. Conceiving, on the contrary, citizenship as puissance (potentia), that is as the deployment and development, in action, of political capacities, allows us to understand the importance of emancipatory movements such as the #MeeToo movement or associative citizen mobilisations in the current pandemic crisis. However, power (pouvoir, potestas) and puissance (potentia) should not be opposed in the process of democracy: any social or political institution presupposes a distribution of power (pouvoir, potestas), as soon as a multitude is organised. Political action cannot therefore ignore the question of reforming our republican institutions, otherwise it will be as powerless as traditional protest movements. Between power (pouvoir, potestas) and puissance (potentia) there is the realm of the imagination that inspires all political institutions. To this end, the principles of convivialism can be a fertile source of inspiration to extend the paths offered by various current experiments in the democratisation of our institutions and free our minds to liberate our lives and make us politically creative.