The Misguided Search for the Political: Social Weightlessness in Radical Democratic Theory

ISBN-13: 9780745662626 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 224 str.

Lois McNay

Opis

There has been a lively debate amongst political theorists about whether certain liberal concepts of democracy are so idealized that they lack relevance to 'real' politics. Echoing these debates, Lois McNay examines in this book some theories of radical democracy and argues that they too tend to rely on troubling abstractions - or what she terms 'socially weightless' thinking. They often propose ideas of the political that are so far removed from the logic of everyday practice that, ultimately, their supposed emancipatory potential is thrown into question.

Radical democrats frequently maintain that what distinguishes their ideas of the political from others is the fundamental concern with unmasking and challenging unrecognized forms of inequality and domination that distort everyday life. But this supposed attentiveness to power is undermined by the invocation of rarefied models of political action that treat agency as an unproblematic given and overlook certain features of the embodied experience of oppression. The tendency of radical democrats to define democratic agency in terms of dynamics of perpetual flux, mobility and agonism passes over too swiftly the way in which objective structures of oppression are often taken into the body as subjective dispositions, leaving individuals with the feeling that they are unable to do little more than endure a state of affairs beyond their control.

Drawing on the work of Adorno, Bourdieu and Honneth, amongst others, McNay argues that in order to make good the critique of power, radical democratic theory should attend more closely to a phenomenology of negative social experience and what it can reveal about the social conditions necessary for effective political agency.

There has been a lively debate amongst political theorists about whether certain liberal concepts of democracy are so idealized that they lack relevance to ‘real’ politics.

Recenzje

"McNay offers an insightful and persuasive critique of the social weightlessness of contemporary theories of radical democracy and an impassioned plea for grounding democratic theory in an account power, domination, and embodied social suffering. The Misguided Search for the Political is a radical critique of radical democratic theory, and an important new work from a provocative and original critical theorist."
Amy Allen, Professor of Philosophy and Women′s and Gender Studies, Dartmouth College

"The book can be considered a success, as an incisive piece of critical theory but also thanks to the accessible prose as a critical introduction to the different radical democratic theories."
Political Studies Review

Spis treści

Acknowledgements vi

Introduction 1

1 Suffering and Social Weightlessness 28

2 The Unbearable Lightness of Theory: Mouffe s Dissociative Agonism 67

3 Freedom beyond the Subject: Feminism, Agency and Agonism 98

4 All or Nothing: Rancière s Ruptural Agonism 132

5 Pluralism and Practice: The Existential Agonism of Connolly and Tully 168

Conclusion: Political Theory as Critique: Reconsidering the Negative 207

Notes 220

References 226

Index 241

O autorze

Lois McNay is Professor of the Theory of Politics and Tutor in Politics at Somerville College, University of Oxford.