The Power of the People

2020 ◽  
pp. 166-182
Author(s):  
Ari Hirvonen ◽  
Susanna Lindroos-Hovinheimo

In this chapter Hirvonen and Lindroos-Hovinheimo argue that the revolutionary power of constituent power and popular sovereignty are relevant conditions of radical emancipatory and egalitarian politics. How the people become the people – and what makes the people in its becoming – are relevant questions in modern democracy. The article considers the power of the people as a theoretical idea and political possibility. It brings together the older tradition of political philosophy with contemporary theory by discussing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas together with those of Jacques Rancière, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Alain Badiou.

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 819-834
Author(s):  
Michael Gorup

Lynch mobs regularly called on the language of popular sovereignty in their efforts to authorize lynchings, arguing that, as representatives of the people, they retained the right to wield public violence against persons they deemed beyond the protections of due process. Despite political theorists’ renewed interest in popular sovereignty, scholars have not accounted for this sordid history in their genealogies of modern democracy and popular constituent power. I remedy this omission, arguing that spectacle lynchings—ones that occurred in front of large crowds, sometimes numbering in the thousands—operated as public rituals of racialized people-making. In the wake of Reconstruction, when the boundaries of the polity were deeply contested, spectacle lynchings played a constitutive role in affirming and circulating the notion that the sovereign people were white, and that African Americans were their social subordinates.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (20) ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego Lock Farina

Publicada originalmente na coleção “La philosophie en effet”, da prestigiada editora Galilée, na França em 2015, com o título Demande. Philosophie, littérature, a coletânea de textos de Jean-Luc Nancy, inédita enquanto tal e organizada por Ginette Michaud, professora da Universidade de Montreal, chega ao Brasil devido à iniciativa em parceria entre a editora da UFSC e a editora Argos, da Unochapecó. Nancy (1940-), professor emérito da Universidade de Estrasburgo, é certamente um dos filósofos mais conceituados no universo acadêmico atual, ao lado de Alain Badiou, Hélène Cixous, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben e Jacques Rancière. Seu destaque se dá sobretudo em função das contribuições acerca do político e da democracia, da obra em conjunto com Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, de seus escritos sobre Jacques Derrida e da preocupação constante em relacionar a arte de maneira geral com o pensamento filosófico. Sua produção, entretanto, é ainda pouquíssimo traduzida no Brasil. Na tarefa de suprir essa falta, Demanda: Literatura e Filosofia (365 p.) reúne textos de 1977 a 2015, disponíveis até então somente em periódicos ou resultantes de conferências e entrevistas, dando mostras da trajetória do autor no que concerne o debate entre o aproveitamento da literatura e do modo singular (a singularidade para Nancy é sempre uma singularidade plural) com que ela convoca a filosofia para um pensamento conjunto, crítico e afectante a respeito da vida, da atividade política e dos sentidos nas suas concepções mais amplas.


Author(s):  
Gabriel Rockhill

This chapter turns to the work of Jacques Rancière, who has, perhaps more than any other prominent living philosopher, extended the historical and historiographical work of Foucault by proposing an archeology of aesthetics, with a particular concern for its relationship to the history of politics. In doing so, however, he has stalwartly refused to provide a genealogical account of the emergence of aesthetics, which appeared at more or less the same time as modern democracy. This chapter thereby sets as its task a critical reassessment of the genealogical limitations of Rancière’s account of the historical relationship between art and politics. It is in this light that it advances an alternative account of historical causality by examining the variable conjuncture of determinants that contributed to the emergence of what Rancière calls the aesthetic regime of art.


2021 ◽  
pp. 15-47
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Bennington

The difficult relation of politics and philosophy has most often been negotiated with reference to the distinction between the bios theōrētikos and the bios politiōs. It is argued that this opposition is unstable from Aristotle onwards, and that effects of that instability can be read throughout the tradition, through Kant and Hegel, up to and including Hannah Arendt and John Rawls, Jacques Ranciere, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben and Hardt & Negri. The instability of that distinction calls for a deconstructive rather than a dialectical understanding of difference.


2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 5-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikos Papastergiadis

Jacques Rancière is one of the central figures in the contemporary debates on aesthetics and politics. This introduction maps the shift of focus in Rancière’s writing from political theory to contemporary art practice and also traces the enduring interest in ideas on equality and creativity. It situates Rancière’s rich body of writing in relation to key theorists such as the philosopher Alain Badiou, art historian Terry Smith and anthropologist George E. Marcus. I argue that Rancière offers a distinctive approach in this broad field by clarifying the specificity of the artist’s task in the production of critical and creative transformation, or what he calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’. In conclusion, I complement Rancière’s invocation to break out of the oppositional paradigm in which the political and aesthetic are usually confined by outlining some further methodological techniques for addressing contemporary art.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Hollendung

To what extent can political theories adequately address the dangers that may accompany the political? This monograph is less concerned with the emancipative potential of the political, but rather with its downsides. Drawing on the concept of precarity, as defined in sociology and the May Day movement, it calls into question the ideas of sovereignty and autonomy using the theories of Judith Butler. The book systematises the controversy on what ‘the political’ is. Subsequently, it defines ‘political precarity’ in accordance with the ideas of Hannah Arendt, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou. These theories are complementary and conflicting in several respects and they mutually point out each other’s weaknesses. However, Hollendung identifies an innovative understanding of the precarious by intertwining these ideas.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Colon-Rios

© The Author 2016. Rousseau has always had an uncertain relationship with the theory of constituent power. On the one hand, his distrust of political representation and support for popular sovereignty seem consistent with the idea of the people as a legally unlimited constitution-maker. On the other hand, if, from those views about representation and sovereignty, it follows that Rousseau is a proponent of direct democracy, then there seems to be no place in his thought for a theory that presupposes, above all, a separation between those who exercise a delegated authority (eg legislators) and those who possess an original constitution-making power (the people). In a legal order in which all laws must be directly made by the people, such a separation is absent: the constituent and the legislative body are one and the same. It is therefore not surprising that Rousseau's name is largely absent from contemporary literature on constituent power. In this article, however, I will show that once Rousseau's particular conception of law, as well as his distinction between sovereignty and government, are properly understood, one finds in his work not only the first major formulation of the theory of constituent power, but also a careful exploration of its implications for actual constitutional practice.


2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Swyngedouw

Die Polis ist tot, es lebe die kreative Stadt! Während die Stadt, zumindest in Teilen des städtischen Raums, blüht und gedeiht, scheint die Polis im idealisierten griechischen Sinn dem Untergang geweiht; in diesem Verständnis ist sie der Ort der öffentlichen politischen Auseinandersetzung und demokratischen Unterhandlung und somit eine Stätte (oft radikaler) Abweichung und Unstimmigkeit, an der die politische Subjektivierung buchstäblich ihren Platz hat. Diese Figur einer entpolitisierten (oder postpolitischen und postdemokratischen) Stadt im Spätkapitalismus bildet das Leitmotiv des vorliegenden Beitrags. Ich lehne mich dabei an Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek, Chantal Mouffe, Mustafa Dikeç, Alain Badiou und andere Kritiker jenes zynischen Radikalismus an, der dafür gesorgt hat, dass eine kritische Theorie und eine radikale politische Praxis ohnmächtig und unfruchtbar vor jenen entpolitisierenden Gesten stehen, die in der polizeilichen Ordnung des zeitgenössischen neoliberalen Spätkapitalismus als Stadtentwicklungspolitik [urban policy] und städtische Politik [urban politics] gelten. Ziel meiner Intervention ist es, das Politische wieder in den Mittelpunkt der zeitgenössischen Debatten über das Urbane zu stellen. [...]


2012 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gisele Trudel

ABSTRACT The political philosophy of Jacques Rancière, with its concepts of aesthetics, dissensus and subjectivation, enables the analysis of the relation to matter perceived as waste. Is it possible to transform the latter by means of a technological art practice?RÉSUMÉ La philosophie politique de Jacques Rancière, avec ses concepts d’esthétique, de dissensus et de subjectivation, permet d’analyser la relation à la matière considérée comme déchet. Ce dernier peut-il être transformé avec une pratique artistique technologique?


2017 ◽  
pp. 236-245
Author(s):  
Marcelo Topuzian

El trabajo revisa las modalidades actuales de las relaciones entre teoría literaria y crítica. Parte de una revisión histórica de los vínculos y disidencias entre teoría y estudios culturales, para analizar luego los modos de inserción de aquella en la investigación literaria del presente. Frente a este racconto se revisa también la historia de la teoría en tanto conceptualización de la especificación de la literatura (y del arte) a partir de la idea de un medio absolutamente propio, y su compromiso con una ontología que privilegia el acceso a los textos como lectura. Un repaso de los cuestionamientos de Jacques Rancière al supuesto modernismo de la inestética de Alain Badiou permite revisar el estatuto de la crítica en el estudio de la literatura y proponer un panorama de los impulsos «a–críticos» en las humanidades contemporáneas, que incluye la rehabilitación del afecto, de los datos cuantitativos y la «larga duración», el trabajo sobre los nuevos medios y, sobre todo, una exploración de las posibles con­ secuencias en este campo de un reciente «giro realista» en el pensamiento contemporáneo.


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