This paper analyzes the relations between public space, language, and democracy. It describes how dissensus, democratic citizenship, domination, and political speech are linked together in contemporary French political philosophy, referring in particular to Jacques Rancière, Miguel Abensour, Alain Badiou and Claude Lefort. Hannah Arendt's political thought represents a theoretical frame or reference for most of these authors, who relate to her work in different, and often discrepant, ways.

This article explains how the issue of inclusion is central to Habermas’s theory of democracy and how it is deeply rooted in his conception of a political public sphere. After recalling Habermas’s views on the public sphere, I present and discuss various objections raised by other critical theorists: Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth and Iris Marion Young. These criticisms insist on the paradoxically excluding effects of a conception of democracy that promotes civic participation in the public (...) debate. Negt, Kluge and Fraser develop a Marxist line of analysis that question who can participate in the public sphere. Honneth and Young criticize in various ways the excluding effect of argumentation: are unargumentative speeches excluded from the public debate? I show how Habermas’s model can provide some responses to these various objections by drawing inspiration from his treatment of the gap between religious and post-metaphysical world views. (shrink)

RESUMO O presente artigo apresenta a crítica arendtiana à differentia specifica. Mostra-se aqui que o procedimento de definir ser humano por meio da differentia specifica constitui um dos elementos totalitários que Arendt afirma existir na tradição. Em um percurso que vai do projeto de pesquisa elaborado por Arendt, em 1952, às primeiras páginas de A condição humana, o artigo mostra como o problema da differentia specifica se vincula a Marx e Heidegger e termina oferecendo a Arendt a possibilidade de elaborar (...) de maneira nova e mais profunda a sua crítica ao totalitarismo. ABSTRACT This article shows Hannah Arendt’s critique of differentia specifica. I claim here that the traditional procedure of defining human being through his differentia specifica regarding other animals is one of the totalitarian elements of tradition, as states Arendt. Starting with the research project written by Arendt in 1952 and finishing at the first pages of The Human Condition, I intend to show how the problem of differentia specifica is related to Marx and Heidegger, and opens to Arendt the possibility to elaborate a brand new and deeper way to fight totalitarianism. (shrink)

This article aims to expose three ways how the facts of the Commune of Paris has had effect of event in the theoretical work of three authors: Guyau, Badiou and Abensour. For Guyau, present in the facts, it meant the absolute transformation towards a post-foundational and de-normativized thought. For Badiou, the Commune, in addition to be an event in itself, the realization of a form of philosophy based on ontological foundations resulting from the transformation of mathematics in recent centuries. And (...) for Abensour it is evident that this absence of foundations that contemporary philosophy holds is concretized in a way of understanding politics and politics as a way of life in which humans articulate permanent and mutable conventions of organization. (shrink)