It has become increasingly commonplace among radical democratic theorists of all hues to contend that civil society is a preferable, even superior, site of democratic political activity to the state. Tied into the assertion that democracy is a fugitive condition that persistently defies realization, politics in civil society is seen as more conducive to the openness that sustains democracy than is the reifying politics of the state. In particular, civil society’s apparently infinite capacity to renew meaning, identity, and politics in counter-hegemonic ways is seen to have precisely the capacity necessary to sustain the process of political renewal that underscores democracy. Characterized as it is by plural strategies of contestation, resistance, denaturalization and opposition, and with its multiple sites of action, civil society, so it is claimed, nourishes and deepens the promise of democracy (to borrow from Derrida)‘to come.’There are, of course, many issues raised by these assumptions: what are the exact connections between contingency, openness and democracy? Is the state always and only a limiting or subordinating site for democratic political activity? What impact do the power relations that structure civil society have on the interactions that take place there? Under what conditions do they stifle rather than enable democratization? Which actions in civil society constitute specifically democratic political actions and which may be seen to be counter or anti-democratic? Clearly I could not answer all of these questions in a single paper. My aim, therefore, is more modest: I will look at one specific arena of democratic activity associated with civil society, the politics of resignification. By the politics of resignification, I mean, politics apprehended (in part) as the capacity to recite language oppositionally so that hegemonic terms take on alternative, counter-hegemonic meanings. My purpose in this paper will be to consider how resignification operates and what the historical conditions of possibility may be that summon its democratizing potential. In order to do so, I will engage critically with the ideas of Judith Butler. Although my interventions will occasionally take issue with some of Butler’s deductions and conclusions, my overall purpose is not to dismiss her account of democratic resignification but to add to it by intensifying the focus on what might be conceived of as the conditions of possibility for effective resistance. My aim is not to develop a set of universal and de-historicized criteria governing resistance. It is to show that insurgent acts (like hegemonic acts) are underpinned by conventions that sediment over time. I thus seek to counter a certain lack of historicity in Butler’s account of resignification, caused by her emphasis on the philosophical presuppositions of the linguistic theory she deploys.