What, if anything, do the ‘square’ protests and ‘occupy’ movements of 2011 bring to contemporary democratic theory? And how can we, as political theorists, analyse their discourse and do justice to it? We address these questions through an analysis of the Greek and Spanish protest movements of the spring and summer of 2011, the so-called aganaktismenoi and indignados. We trace the centrality of the critique of representation and politics as usual as well as the ideas about horizontality and autonomy in (...) the protesters’ discourse. These ideas are not only important to their critique of the contemporary liberal democratic regimes in the two countries, but also important to the way in which the protesters organise themselves. Nonetheless, as we shall argue, the protesters are caught within a tension between horizontality and verticality, between autonomy and hegemony, or between moving beyond representation and accepting representational structures. Given this tension, we examine how the protesters negotiate it in three key areas: politics, representation and organisation. Drawing on Jacques Rancière, we further argue that the protesters can be seen as making a claim to equal voice. This is what Rancière refers to as politics proper, and the question is then whether such a politics is possible without falling back into traditional forms of politics. (shrink)

In this dissertation I explore the conceptual relationship between equality and resistance in political philosophy. Through examination of the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, John Dewey, and Jacques Rancière, I formulate a position called Fractured Social Holism. This is a problematic that attempts to articulate core issues at stake in the debates surrounding the purposes, meanings, and possibilities for politics. Through Fractured Social Holism I articulate a theory of equality that emphasizes the communities upon which societys institutions intend to (...) distribute equality, arguing that resistance on the part of a populationgroup opposition, formal or informal, to some element of the societal status quoconceptually grounds equality and its distribution by articulating its very possibilities. My central questionHow is equality constituted?focuses on the community itself in order to shift agency from institutions that distribute equality to those who demand it. It emphasizes the active role of the people in the constitution of a community of equals, as well as the fact that the very notion of the people is what is at stake in that constitution; popular resistance challenges the very meaning and content of any given people. I understand equality in the broadest possible sense, in terms of the opportunity of each and all within society to participate in dictating the terms of their public engagement with that society and with others within it. I argue for the possibility of resistance within egalitarian community in Rousseau, the limits of what that resistance in egalitarian society looks like in Marx, how egalitarian communities can organize themselves in Dewey, and how subjectivity relates to mechanisms of resistance and political action within society in Rancière. These historical interpretations and the conceptual framework they engender provide a novel means of thinking about issues of paramount importance in contemporary political philosophy, including pluralism, oppression and domination, and the purposes and meaning of politics, remaining true to a normative vision of equality while insisting on the necessity of the peoples resistance to the status quo in the name of a re-imagined vision of social harmony. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende dar respuesta a toda esa crítica que sostiene que Hannah Arendt es una pensadora política con nostalgia de la pólis. Desde esta perspectiva, no resulta muy difícil concluir, no sólo que el pensamiento de Arendt es irrelevante en relación con los problemas contemporáneos; sino que estamos ante una auténtica reaccionaria cuando se trata de analizar las grandes cuestiones de las democracias representativas. Aquí se entiende que esta lectura es errónea y parcial y también que la obra sobre (...) la que dicha interpretación se articula, La condición humana, debe ser estudiada de un modo mucho más sutil; que pasaría por un diálogo múltiple y complejo con la tradición filosófico-política. A tal fin, se hace una breve exposición, no tanto de su dependencia con Heidegger, cuanto de su “conversación radical” con él. Esta conversación arroja mucha luz sobre el proyecto filosófico de Hannah Arendt en su conjunto. En segundo lugar, en este trabajo se postula que Homero ofrece una perspectiva inmejorable a la hora de analizar lo que Miguel Abensour ha denominado “una concepción política del heroísmo.” De manera más específica, la tesis que aquí se defiende es que la Ilíada, y particularmente el catálogo de las naves del Canto II, podrían ser interpretados como el origen del concepto arendtiano de pluralidad. (shrink)

This paper examines Honig’s use of Rancière in her book ‘Democracy and the Foreigner’. In seeking to clarify the benefits of ‘foreignness’ for democratic politics it raises the concern that Honig does not acknowledge the ways in which her own democratic cosmopolitanism may be more akin to Rancière’s police than politics. By challenging Honig’s assertion that democracy is usually read as a romance with the suggestion that it is more commonly read as a horror, I unpick the interstices of Honig’s (...) and Rancière’s work to separate foreignness from democratic cosmopolitanism. Instead, although I posit democratic cosmopolitanism’s potential as a police more conducive to politics I also suggest that the particular salience of Honig’s ‘foreigner’ figure is that it supplements Rancièrian politics, demonstrating a praxis of ‘looking anew’ at our ordinary social practices. By making these seem strange to us, we can discover a new critical perspective from which to question and subvert, thereby furthering the potential of Rancièrian democratic politics. (shrink)