Mario Feit is Associate Professor of Political Theory at Georgia State University. His research areas are in modern and democratic political theory. In particular, Dr. Feit writes about political dimensions of time. He is working on a book manuscript on Democratic Impatience, which recuperates impatience as a democratic virtue and temporality. This work engages the Book of Job, Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, and literatures of social acceleration. His current research builds on his book Democratic Anxieties: Same-Sex Marriage, Death, and Citizenship (Lexington, 2011), which employs another time horizon – mortality – to think about democratic inclusion. Address: Department of Political Science Georgia State University Atlanta, GA 30303-2514, USA
Given the increasing acceleration of social life, some theorists detect a crisis of democracy. Af... more Given the increasing acceleration of social life, some theorists detect a crisis of democracy. After all, democratic decisions take time. I engage Iris Young, Nadia Urbinati and Sheldon Wolin, who stand in for deliberative, representative and radical approaches to democracy. I argue that the opposition between anti-democratic speed and democratic slowness is not borne out by these approaches; there is a greater complexity to the way in which we should theorize the temporality of democracy. To begin with, Young's approach depends on a rupture in time, namely on individuals who respond to the immediacy of personal narrative or emotionalizing rhetoric, and thereby overcome long-term socialization and experiences. While Urbinati praises Condorcet for the political processes he devises that encourage slowness, the image of political temporality that emerges is one of multiple deliberative processes that are going on simultaneously. While each process may be slow on its own terms, the...
ABSTRACT This article challenges democratic theorists’ disregard for democratic impatience by sho... more ABSTRACT This article challenges democratic theorists’ disregard for democratic impatience by showing that the Book of Job not only defends impatience but that it intimates the merits of democratic impatience. Job is impatient along four dimensions that should speak to democratic theorists: he refuses to suffer, identifies his suffering as unjust, seeks to hold arbitrary power accountable, and recognizes patience’s irrationality in the face of injustice. Critically, I demonstrate that Job remains impatient in his mind, and thus does not abandon impatience – not even in an epilogue designed to stifle his impatient voice. While Job’s impatience is justified, it is not yet democratic, for it reneges on broader democratic claims, is not shared, and is undermined by his social privilege. I thus turn to Job’s wife – who is “Everywoman” both in a feminist and more generally democratic sense – to more fully develop a concept of democratic impatience.
This article shows that Thomas Paine’s political theory defends what I call generational democrac... more This article shows that Thomas Paine’s political theory defends what I call generational democracy. Paine takes human mortality as a starting point to flesh out a conception of democracy that affirms the agency of the living. Generational democracy empowers the living to act as constitutional authors. The self-ennobling dimension of constitutional authorship and democratic socialization ensures a people capable of improving constitutions in ways that enhance democratic agency. The strengthening of democratic agency is also central to Paine’s right to welfare, which redresses legacies of economic injustice by creating substantial equality between generations. Welfare rights enhance the agency of the living by providing for economic opportunity and by securing agency in the face of impending death. Generational democracy achieves intergenerational justice and care for the future precisely because it focuses on enhancing the democratic agency of the living generation.
This essay challenges Sheldon Wolin’s critique of social acceleration in order to recuperate impa... more This essay challenges Sheldon Wolin’s critique of social acceleration in order to recuperate impatience for democracy and political theory. First, I argue that patience and impatience offer a more productive temporal framework of analysis. Second, I demonstrate that impatience is an implicit demotic virtue, which changes democracy’s relation to social acceleration. Third, I illustrate the continued viability of patient theorizing by showing how Wolin revises an initially rash understanding of political time due to critical interlocutors. Finally, I flesh out a positive impatience within Wolin’s approach to political theory. Impatient theorizing results from and is commensurate with demotic impatience.
itics both memorializes human uniqueness and preserves community, “democratic citizenship at its ... more itics both memorializes human uniqueness and preserves community, “democratic citizenship at its very core for Arendt is about death transcendence” (p. 96). So long as stories remain, immortality does not require sexual reproduction but politics and the power that flows from it. For Feit, however, Arendt’s critique excludes all forms of sexuality from politics, and we must therefore look further. Nietzsche rejects Arendt’s determination to separate citizenship and sexuality. Like Rousseau, he connects sexual and cultural reproduction, but in unusual terms. His protagonist “Zarathustra becomes pregnant with new ideas as a result of withdrawing into a feminine space—solitude— which indicates that a ‘lesbian’ reproductivity is at work here.” Moreover, the affinity that biologically unrelated individuals have for these ideas makes them Zarathustra’s descendants (p. 126). Because many individuals will not accept death as a part of life as it is, they attend to those who promise immortality. This promise, however, ironically contains a death wish within itself as individuals valorize the otherworldly over actual life. Biological reproduction to counter life’s finitude produces “a culture of death in the effort to combat death” (p. 131). Children may constitute a legacy, but for Nietzsche, these “children” may also include ideas to which the thinker gives birth. The thinker then functions as a father who disseminates his ideas in the hope that they take root and grow. Good citizenship for Nietzsche includes reproduction, but involves “his queering of reproductive and kinship metaphors” (p. 156) at the expense of heteronormativity. Therefore, he implicitly promotes pluralist citizenship. For Feit, Arendt is a more promising resource for democratic citizenship than is Rousseau. The action that begets political immortality is open to all, whereas sexual reproduction may not be. Arendt is limited, however, by the fact that only a minority of actors achieve political immortality. For Nietzsche, on the other hand, words and deeds are central to one’s living identity, regardless of whether their memory persists after death. A lesson exists here for queer culture, Feit suggests. Queer critics of same-sex marriage fear that it will cause queer culture to disappear. The individuals who constitute this culture, however, should not look to citizenship as a means of death transcendence. Instead, they should engage in self-creation, or should speak and act to fulfill their own identities, regardless of any possible legacy for other generations. As citizens and self-creators, heterosexuals and gays may be equally sterile if they fail to value this sort of activity. If death awareness impels us “to engage our morality in an ethically productive way” (p. 177), however, democratic citizenship may become less anxious and both more pluralist and more vibrant. Democratic Anxieties is a provocative contribution to scholarship concerning sexuality and politics, pluralism, and democratic citizenship. Feit builds on a tradition in political theory that focuses on the tension between the claims of the family and the claims of citizenship. This tradition is well exemplified in Susan Moller Okin’s critique of Rousseau (Women in Western Political Thought, 1979). The first tension is between the impulses of the natural individual and the requirements of citizenship as illustrated by Rousseau’s protagonist Emile. An additional tension is that between intimate love and the welfare of larger entities, whether nation or humanity. Finally, tension exists between the demands of the family and those of the ideal republic. Like Okin’s, Feit’s analysis of Rousseau suggests that an exclusive focus on sexual reproduction can draw citizens away from living out their citizenship. Although biological offspring perpetuate the collective sovereign, death anxiety and a desire for immortality may feed this focus at the expense of the development of one’s living identity as both individual and citizen. It also excludes those to whom sexual reproduction is not open. In Emile, moreover, the education of Sophie as the ideal wife in the patriarchal family shows that women—and others thus inculcated— are primed to prioritize intimate love and family over the claims of the wider world and of citizenship. Arendt pushes to the opposite extreme on Feit’s interpretation, excluding the private or what she terms “the social” from citizenship altogether. Nietzsche, on the other hand, fruitfully combines private and public, individual and citizen. On Feit’s metaphorical interpretation, Nietzsche teaches us that through self-creation, all may engage with the world productively, whatever their sexuality. In the final section of his last chapter, Feit engages with Judith Butler’s examination of responses in the United States to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as these bear on a possible democratizing effect of death awareness. Although I understand the connection…
This article challenges democratic theorists' disregard for democratic impatience by showing that... more This article challenges democratic theorists' disregard for democratic impatience by showing that the Book of Job not only defends impatience but that it intimates the merits of democratic impatience. Job is impatient along four dimensions that should speak to democratic theorists: he refuses to suffer, identifies his suffering as unjust, seeks to hold arbitrary power accountable, and recognizes patience's irrationality in the face of injustice. Critically, I demonstrate that Job remains impatient in his mind, and thus does not abandon impatience – not even in an epilogue designed to stifle his impatient voice. While Job's impatience is justified, it is not yet democratic, for it reneges on broader democratic claims, is not shared, and is undermined by his social privilege. I thus turn to Job's wife – who is " Everywoman " both in a feminist and more generally democratic sense – to more fully develop a concept of democratic impatience.
In this contribution to Xavier Marquez's Democratic Moments volume I argue that Thomas Paine's de... more In this contribution to Xavier Marquez's Democratic Moments volume I argue that Thomas Paine's democratic theory rests on democratic contempt, and that such democratic contempt can be even vital for improving contemporary democracies.
The intensifying speed-up of contemporary economic, social and political life troubles democratic... more The intensifying speed-up of contemporary economic, social and political life troubles democratic theorists because they assume that democracy depends on patience. This article turns to Martin Luther King, Jr. to challenge democratic theory’s temporal bias. I argue that King demonstrates that impatience, too, is a democratic virtue. Building on impatient knowledge, democratic impatience aides in overcoming undemocratic legacies, fosters democratic subjectivity and agency, ensures political accountability, and creates a more inclusive practice of democratic belonging. I fur- thermore show that King reveals the temporal sophistication of democratic impatience, thereby contradicting the prevailing interpretation of self-defeating instantaneousness. In particular, democratic impatience’s temporal origins of centuries of injustice, human mortality, and the context of social acceleration provide a mature impetus for demo- cratic action. Moreover, democratic impatience persists over time. On the one hand, it does so because injustice persists. On the other hand, democratic impatience contains within itself a subordinate operational patience. In other words, democratic impatience is always already somewhat ‘patient.’ King’s democratic impatience therefore not only redresses democratic theory’s shortcomings, but it also generates a renewed sense of democratic possibility in our age, as democratic impatience is well suited to help us in redressing the crises and injustices deepened or generated by social acceleration.
This article shows that Thomas Paine’s political theory defends what I call generational democrac... more This article shows that Thomas Paine’s political theory defends what I call generational democracy. Paine takes human mortality as a starting point to flesh out a conception of democracy that affirms the agency of the living. Generational democracy empowers the living to act as constitutional authors. The self-ennobling dimension of constitutional authorship and democratic socialization ensures a people capable of improving constitutions in ways that enhance democratic agency. The strengthening of democratic agency is also central to Paine’s right to welfare, which redresses legacies of economic injustice by creating substantial equality between generations. Welfare rights enhance the agency of the living by providing for economic opportunity and by securing agency in the face of impending death. Generational democracy achieves intergenerational justice and care for the future precisely because it focuses on enhancing the democratic agency of the living generation.
This essay challenges Sheldon Wolin’s critique of social acceleration in order to recuperate impa... more This essay challenges Sheldon Wolin’s critique of social acceleration in order to recuperate impatience for democracy and political theory. First, I argue that patience and impatience offer a more productive temporal framework of analysis. Second, I demonstrate that impatience is an implicit demotic virtue, which changes democracy’s relation to social acceleration. Third, I illustrate the continued viability of patient theorizing by showing how Wolin revises an initially rash understanding of political time due to critical interlocutors. Finally, I flesh out a positive impatience within Wolin’s approach to political theory. Impatient theorizing results from and is commensurate with demotic impatience.
Given the increasing acceleration of social life, some theorists detect a crisis of democracy. Af... more Given the increasing acceleration of social life, some theorists detect a crisis of democracy. After all, democratic decisions take time. I engage Iris Young, Nadia Urbinati and Sheldon Wolin, who stand in for deliberative, representative and radical approaches to democracy. I argue that the opposition between anti-democratic speed and democratic slowness is not borne out by these approaches; there is a greater complexity to the way in which we should theorize the temporality of democracy. To begin with, Young's approach depends on a rupture in time, namely on individuals who respond to the immediacy of personal narrative or emotionalizing rhetoric, and thereby overcome long-term socialization and experiences. While Urbinati praises Condorcet for the political processes he devises that encourage slowness, the image of political temporality that emerges is one of multiple deliberative processes that are going on simultaneously. While each process may be slow on its own terms, the...
ABSTRACT This article challenges democratic theorists’ disregard for democratic impatience by sho... more ABSTRACT This article challenges democratic theorists’ disregard for democratic impatience by showing that the Book of Job not only defends impatience but that it intimates the merits of democratic impatience. Job is impatient along four dimensions that should speak to democratic theorists: he refuses to suffer, identifies his suffering as unjust, seeks to hold arbitrary power accountable, and recognizes patience’s irrationality in the face of injustice. Critically, I demonstrate that Job remains impatient in his mind, and thus does not abandon impatience – not even in an epilogue designed to stifle his impatient voice. While Job’s impatience is justified, it is not yet democratic, for it reneges on broader democratic claims, is not shared, and is undermined by his social privilege. I thus turn to Job’s wife – who is “Everywoman” both in a feminist and more generally democratic sense – to more fully develop a concept of democratic impatience.
This article shows that Thomas Paine’s political theory defends what I call generational democrac... more This article shows that Thomas Paine’s political theory defends what I call generational democracy. Paine takes human mortality as a starting point to flesh out a conception of democracy that affirms the agency of the living. Generational democracy empowers the living to act as constitutional authors. The self-ennobling dimension of constitutional authorship and democratic socialization ensures a people capable of improving constitutions in ways that enhance democratic agency. The strengthening of democratic agency is also central to Paine’s right to welfare, which redresses legacies of economic injustice by creating substantial equality between generations. Welfare rights enhance the agency of the living by providing for economic opportunity and by securing agency in the face of impending death. Generational democracy achieves intergenerational justice and care for the future precisely because it focuses on enhancing the democratic agency of the living generation.
This essay challenges Sheldon Wolin’s critique of social acceleration in order to recuperate impa... more This essay challenges Sheldon Wolin’s critique of social acceleration in order to recuperate impatience for democracy and political theory. First, I argue that patience and impatience offer a more productive temporal framework of analysis. Second, I demonstrate that impatience is an implicit demotic virtue, which changes democracy’s relation to social acceleration. Third, I illustrate the continued viability of patient theorizing by showing how Wolin revises an initially rash understanding of political time due to critical interlocutors. Finally, I flesh out a positive impatience within Wolin’s approach to political theory. Impatient theorizing results from and is commensurate with demotic impatience.
itics both memorializes human uniqueness and preserves community, “democratic citizenship at its ... more itics both memorializes human uniqueness and preserves community, “democratic citizenship at its very core for Arendt is about death transcendence” (p. 96). So long as stories remain, immortality does not require sexual reproduction but politics and the power that flows from it. For Feit, however, Arendt’s critique excludes all forms of sexuality from politics, and we must therefore look further. Nietzsche rejects Arendt’s determination to separate citizenship and sexuality. Like Rousseau, he connects sexual and cultural reproduction, but in unusual terms. His protagonist “Zarathustra becomes pregnant with new ideas as a result of withdrawing into a feminine space—solitude— which indicates that a ‘lesbian’ reproductivity is at work here.” Moreover, the affinity that biologically unrelated individuals have for these ideas makes them Zarathustra’s descendants (p. 126). Because many individuals will not accept death as a part of life as it is, they attend to those who promise immortality. This promise, however, ironically contains a death wish within itself as individuals valorize the otherworldly over actual life. Biological reproduction to counter life’s finitude produces “a culture of death in the effort to combat death” (p. 131). Children may constitute a legacy, but for Nietzsche, these “children” may also include ideas to which the thinker gives birth. The thinker then functions as a father who disseminates his ideas in the hope that they take root and grow. Good citizenship for Nietzsche includes reproduction, but involves “his queering of reproductive and kinship metaphors” (p. 156) at the expense of heteronormativity. Therefore, he implicitly promotes pluralist citizenship. For Feit, Arendt is a more promising resource for democratic citizenship than is Rousseau. The action that begets political immortality is open to all, whereas sexual reproduction may not be. Arendt is limited, however, by the fact that only a minority of actors achieve political immortality. For Nietzsche, on the other hand, words and deeds are central to one’s living identity, regardless of whether their memory persists after death. A lesson exists here for queer culture, Feit suggests. Queer critics of same-sex marriage fear that it will cause queer culture to disappear. The individuals who constitute this culture, however, should not look to citizenship as a means of death transcendence. Instead, they should engage in self-creation, or should speak and act to fulfill their own identities, regardless of any possible legacy for other generations. As citizens and self-creators, heterosexuals and gays may be equally sterile if they fail to value this sort of activity. If death awareness impels us “to engage our morality in an ethically productive way” (p. 177), however, democratic citizenship may become less anxious and both more pluralist and more vibrant. Democratic Anxieties is a provocative contribution to scholarship concerning sexuality and politics, pluralism, and democratic citizenship. Feit builds on a tradition in political theory that focuses on the tension between the claims of the family and the claims of citizenship. This tradition is well exemplified in Susan Moller Okin’s critique of Rousseau (Women in Western Political Thought, 1979). The first tension is between the impulses of the natural individual and the requirements of citizenship as illustrated by Rousseau’s protagonist Emile. An additional tension is that between intimate love and the welfare of larger entities, whether nation or humanity. Finally, tension exists between the demands of the family and those of the ideal republic. Like Okin’s, Feit’s analysis of Rousseau suggests that an exclusive focus on sexual reproduction can draw citizens away from living out their citizenship. Although biological offspring perpetuate the collective sovereign, death anxiety and a desire for immortality may feed this focus at the expense of the development of one’s living identity as both individual and citizen. It also excludes those to whom sexual reproduction is not open. In Emile, moreover, the education of Sophie as the ideal wife in the patriarchal family shows that women—and others thus inculcated— are primed to prioritize intimate love and family over the claims of the wider world and of citizenship. Arendt pushes to the opposite extreme on Feit’s interpretation, excluding the private or what she terms “the social” from citizenship altogether. Nietzsche, on the other hand, fruitfully combines private and public, individual and citizen. On Feit’s metaphorical interpretation, Nietzsche teaches us that through self-creation, all may engage with the world productively, whatever their sexuality. In the final section of his last chapter, Feit engages with Judith Butler’s examination of responses in the United States to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as these bear on a possible democratizing effect of death awareness. Although I understand the connection…
This article challenges democratic theorists' disregard for democratic impatience by showing that... more This article challenges democratic theorists' disregard for democratic impatience by showing that the Book of Job not only defends impatience but that it intimates the merits of democratic impatience. Job is impatient along four dimensions that should speak to democratic theorists: he refuses to suffer, identifies his suffering as unjust, seeks to hold arbitrary power accountable, and recognizes patience's irrationality in the face of injustice. Critically, I demonstrate that Job remains impatient in his mind, and thus does not abandon impatience – not even in an epilogue designed to stifle his impatient voice. While Job's impatience is justified, it is not yet democratic, for it reneges on broader democratic claims, is not shared, and is undermined by his social privilege. I thus turn to Job's wife – who is " Everywoman " both in a feminist and more generally democratic sense – to more fully develop a concept of democratic impatience.
In this contribution to Xavier Marquez's Democratic Moments volume I argue that Thomas Paine's de... more In this contribution to Xavier Marquez's Democratic Moments volume I argue that Thomas Paine's democratic theory rests on democratic contempt, and that such democratic contempt can be even vital for improving contemporary democracies.
The intensifying speed-up of contemporary economic, social and political life troubles democratic... more The intensifying speed-up of contemporary economic, social and political life troubles democratic theorists because they assume that democracy depends on patience. This article turns to Martin Luther King, Jr. to challenge democratic theory’s temporal bias. I argue that King demonstrates that impatience, too, is a democratic virtue. Building on impatient knowledge, democratic impatience aides in overcoming undemocratic legacies, fosters democratic subjectivity and agency, ensures political accountability, and creates a more inclusive practice of democratic belonging. I fur- thermore show that King reveals the temporal sophistication of democratic impatience, thereby contradicting the prevailing interpretation of self-defeating instantaneousness. In particular, democratic impatience’s temporal origins of centuries of injustice, human mortality, and the context of social acceleration provide a mature impetus for demo- cratic action. Moreover, democratic impatience persists over time. On the one hand, it does so because injustice persists. On the other hand, democratic impatience contains within itself a subordinate operational patience. In other words, democratic impatience is always already somewhat ‘patient.’ King’s democratic impatience therefore not only redresses democratic theory’s shortcomings, but it also generates a renewed sense of democratic possibility in our age, as democratic impatience is well suited to help us in redressing the crises and injustices deepened or generated by social acceleration.
This article shows that Thomas Paine’s political theory defends what I call generational democrac... more This article shows that Thomas Paine’s political theory defends what I call generational democracy. Paine takes human mortality as a starting point to flesh out a conception of democracy that affirms the agency of the living. Generational democracy empowers the living to act as constitutional authors. The self-ennobling dimension of constitutional authorship and democratic socialization ensures a people capable of improving constitutions in ways that enhance democratic agency. The strengthening of democratic agency is also central to Paine’s right to welfare, which redresses legacies of economic injustice by creating substantial equality between generations. Welfare rights enhance the agency of the living by providing for economic opportunity and by securing agency in the face of impending death. Generational democracy achieves intergenerational justice and care for the future precisely because it focuses on enhancing the democratic agency of the living generation.
This essay challenges Sheldon Wolin’s critique of social acceleration in order to recuperate impa... more This essay challenges Sheldon Wolin’s critique of social acceleration in order to recuperate impatience for democracy and political theory. First, I argue that patience and impatience offer a more productive temporal framework of analysis. Second, I demonstrate that impatience is an implicit demotic virtue, which changes democracy’s relation to social acceleration. Third, I illustrate the continued viability of patient theorizing by showing how Wolin revises an initially rash understanding of political time due to critical interlocutors. Finally, I flesh out a positive impatience within Wolin’s approach to political theory. Impatient theorizing results from and is commensurate with demotic impatience.
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