Agonism

In this article, I draw on Judith Shklar to provide an alternative to the liberal model of military intervention proposed in the last few years by intellectuals such as Michael Ignatieff. I suggest that Ignatieff misunderstands Shklar's liberalism of fear when he appropriates it as a foundation for military intervention on behalf of human rights. Through a reading of his Tanner Lectures Human Rights as Politics. Human Rights as Idolatry on one hand, and drawing on Shklar's entire body of work on the other, I highlight the profound differences separating these authors with regard to: their stance on natural law; the question of foundations and moral universals; the question of voice (Who speaks on behalf of the op-pressed?); and their general stance with respect to the legacy of colonialism. I pit what I call Shklar's activism against Ignatieff's interventionism, and put forward a reading of «putting cruelty first» as opening a forum for contestation across nations and cultures.

If politics is ultimately about our deepest fears and desires rather than about, say, tax policy or better health care, then what place is there for a Left whose raison d’être will always be tied to improving the economic fortunes of the least fortunate? One answer is to begin to outline an “economics of meaning,” where economic or class critiques are a means to channel anger, create meaning, and build solidarity rather than to implement better policy outcomes (although, of course, policy changes would be good on their own, for moral rather than necessarily electoral reasons). This requires changing standard conceptions of what elections are for and what it means to win.

This practice-based doctoral research explores the nature of the feral, as manifested in an object-based installation practice of contemporary art that scavenges - physically, socially and metaphorically - in the gap between defined spaces. My conception of the feral draws out the political promise of this indeterminacy: the state of being partly wild and partly civilised. The page is also constructed materially, as a space where
heterogeneous elements meet: different voices expressed through the writing and images of my practice.

In claiming the feral as a critical concept, I reject its more common, derogatory, usage. In particular, during the 2011 London riots, the former British Lord Chancellor Kenneth Clarke labelled the rioters a “feral
underclass”, seeking to fix them in this uncivilised, abject position. I unfix this separation, through a feral interpretation of my objects, as they interpenetrate domestic, institutional, and civilised public spheres.
Mother’s milk solidifies as plaster-filled condom bombs, at once phallic and breast-like, poised to ignite a pyre of social theory texts in a gallery project space, a former factory; haphazard conglomerations of plant matter and urban debris are strung together in bunting on an inner-city community hall.

The feral becomes here a rival concept to Julia Kristeva’s formulation of abjection, as the seeping bodily organs evoked by my objects are not defined in terms of the individual, but reflected on through the formless
mass of the social body, the displaced undercommons of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, the wild of Jack Halberstam, the rioters of Joshua Clover.
The feral has an antagonistic quality, but it cannot fit the relational models of art put forward by Chantal Mouffe and Claire Bishop that seek to civilise this antagonism. Neither can the positivity of Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman new materialism extract the hybridity of materials I use from the precariousness of the social conditions from which they are drawn. My practice, like the feral, resists these separations.

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

Recently the political philosophy of agonism has been applied by urban theorists to model inter-cultural urban encounters in so-called 'micro-publics', such as the workplace or the classroom. The paper examines to what extent agonism offers a viable model for dealing with urban diversity in these mundane, social encounters. I will argue that, applied to these lower-level social contexts, agonism takes the vulnerability of citizens with regard to their ethnic, cultural or religious attachments insufficiently into account. The resulting injuries will most likely be counter-productive to the goal of living with diversity. By way of a contrast, I will offer two less demanding, more practicable types of intercultural civility.

There are numerous existing political atheologies that can be characterised by three movements – negative, positive, and critical atheological projects. By focusing on the critical atheologies of two political theorists, Richard Rorty and William Connolly, this article presents an insider's view of the influence that atheism has on political thought. After drawing out just what makes Rorty and Connolly's philosophies atheological, this article sets itself the task of drawing the consequences of a critical atheology for two fundamental concepts of contemporary political theory: secularism and toleration. These Enlightenment ideals can be rescued and re-framed following a pluralist critique. By refining our understanding of secularism beyond a strict church-state separation, an agonistic secularism which promotes an ethos of engagement is defended therein. Secondly, toleration is then defended in its agonistic form to include the practice of critique against conceptions of indifference or respect. Finally, the hard case of the French ban on veils in public schools is discussed to highlight the contribution of this political atheology to an important social issue.

Etienne Balibar se réfère à l’idée arendtienne de la citoyenneté pour montrer que la démocratie se construit nécessairement au travers d’une aporie. D’une part, la démocratie évoque l’idéal isonomique de l’égalité pour fonder la communauté ; d’autre part, elle inscrit la différence dans l’éventualité d’une contestation permanente des principes unificateurs. Ce que je propose, c’est de contribuer à développer le dialogue entre E. Balibar et Hannah Arendt en m’interrogeant sur la possibilité d’aller au-delà de l’horizon de la violence. Le concept d’agon qu’Arendt utilise pour qualifier le vivre ensemble isonomique n’est pas la concurrence entre artisans, ni le conflit entre ennemis, mais renvoie plutôt à l’institution d’un monde commun grâce aux différences. L’agir agonistique comprend le risque de se distinguer, d’être en désaccord, de se différer, non seulement par rapport aux autres mais aussi par rapport a soi-même. Il faudrait alors définir la violence comme une force qui agit sur l’agon, c’est-à-dire, sur la capacité de « devenir-autre ». C’est justement ceci qu’aussi bien la loi que la notion moderne de droits oblitère.

Die Rückkehr des A(nta)gonismus? Mouffes agonistisches Demokratiemodell und die politischen Umbrüche in Griechenland. In: Agridopoulos, A./Papagiannopoulos, I. (Hg.) (2016): Griechenland im europäischen Kontext: Krise und Krisendiskurse. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, S. 275-295.

Em mais um volume, o Apoena – Grupo de Estudos Schopenhauer-Nietzsche traz a público textos apresentados no IV Encontro Nietzsche-Schopenhauer: Ecologia Cinza, Natureza Agônica, em novembro de 2012, em Fortaleza. O IV Encontro Nietzsche-Schopenhauer foi consagrado à discussão acerca da concepção da natureza na contemporaneidade e da maneira pela qual as perspectivas de Schopenhauer e de Nietzsche tornam possível sua problematização. Dos pontos de vista de Schopenhauer e Nietzshe, a natureza é marcada por uma tensão inteiramente incompreensível para o ecologismo, mas que é o foco daquilo que poderíamos chamar de ecologia cinza. Daí o fio comum que agrupa as orientações diversas dos textos presentes na primeira parte deste volume. A segunda parte traz textos mais diversos, que giram em torno da questão ético-política dos afetos e paixões a partir de Schopenhauer e Nietzsche.

Chantal Mouffe’s conceptualization of a deliberatively forged consensus as a hegemony and her assertion that adversarial politics best nurtures the conditions of freedom have had a profound influence on contemporary democratic thought. This article takes a critical view of this trend, arguing that a norm of consensus is a very precondition, rather than impediment, for the kind of pluralistic democracy Mouffe and other agonists wish to promote. It is asserted that Mouffe’s dehistoricized refutation of consensus lacks causal or explanatory relevance to how concrete actors embedded in empirical situations relate to one another and that the very preparedness to find something acceptable about another is at the heart of what it means to treat others justly.

The way in which societies institutionalize “collective memory” is one of the most important aspects of contemporary politics, feeding directly into the constitution of individual and communal identities, and creating sources of discord and dialogue. This essay explores some of the most significant issues at stake in debates over the political uses of the past. I suggest that it is important to distinguish between three modes of historical consciousness, memory, mythology, and critical history. I then offer a critique of Avishai Margalit’s "The Ethics of Memory" (2002), arguing that in failing to allow space for “acknowledging” the plurality of communal myths his strong communitarian conception of mnemonic ethics leaves room for the perpetuation of asymmetric power relations and the imposition of hegemonic identities. Developing this line of thought, the essay then explores some of the ways in which agonistic democratic theorists might think through the relationship between past and present, myth and history. I argue that it is necessary to avoid procedures and institutions that entrench diverse identities while simultaneously establishing conditions in which different communities can freely propound their historical identity-constitutive claims.

Metadichol® is a Nanoemulsion of long-chain alcohols found in many foods. Metadichol acts as an inverse ag-onist on Nuclear Vitamin D receptors (VDR) that have a ubiquitous presence in cells and acts by modulating the immune system and affects many biological processes to modulate many diseases. We have demonstrated that Metadichol is useful in both type 1 and two diabetes and in modulating insulin levels and reducing sugar levels and thus increasing insulin sensitivity. We had earlier shown that it binds to VDR and thus an effect on glucose homeostasis that is a hallmark of VDR pathways. We now report also that it is an agonist of GPR120 (G protein-coupled receptor 120) which has emerged as a key target for metabolic diseases like obesity and insulin resistance. In the in-vitro assay, Metadichol is comparable to GW9508 the most extensively used standard compound in GPR 120 research.

In his most explicitly philosophical book Pascalian Meditations, Pierre Bourdieu (2000) clarified what he meant by the notion of symbolic violence. Symbolic violence signifies more than simply forms of discursive power that mediate social relationships without the
imposition of physical force. Rather, it signifies a form of violence that the target of the violence is themselves complicit in. “Symbolic power is exerted only with the collaboration of those who undergo it because they help to construct it as such” (p. 171).

In December 2008, Athens saw an eruption of violent protests that followed the murder of a teenager by a policeman. Initially reacting to police violence, the protestors did not articulate a specific agenda. The rallies, which mobilised a substantial part of the population – particularly the youth – dissipated a few weeks later. Similar outbreaks have taken place in other European cities in recent years (e.g. the Paris banlieues) and warrant a number of questions with regards to the capacity of our states and our cities to nurture a strong democratic life, acknowledging the role of conflict and preventing its violent expression.

The Sentient House project is an investigation into approaches that the artist- designer can take to better involve the public in developing a critical perspective on pervasive technology in the home and the surrounding environment. Using Interaction Design approaches including workshops, surveys, rapid-prototyping and critical thinking, this thesis suggests a framework for developing a more participatory atmosphere for Critical Design.
As the world becomes more connected, and ‘smarter’, citizen’s concerns are being sidelined in favour of rapid progress and solutionism. Many of these initiatives are backed by government and commercial concerns who may not have the public’s best interest at heart.
The designs and approaches generated from this public participation seek to provide an outlet for a more agonistic debate and to develop tools and approaches to engage the public in questioning and addressing how technology affects them in the future.
The outcomes of this research suggest that the public is receptive to a more active involvement in designing their digital future, and that the designer can be a critical component in revealing hidden consequences and alternative pathways for a more transparent and desirable future.

This paper explores artist-led physical, digital and social spaces in the UK and their relation to the idea of self-organisation as an alternative to combat the dominance of neoliberal social institutions and control. Giving a brief historical overview of how artist-led spaces developed from artistic self-organisation in the 1970s it aims to show why – despite instances of co-optation by capital – they remain a vital infrastructure for artistic and cultural resistance and development.

At a time when global politics is becoming increasingly fraught and the usefulness of established social and artistic institutions being questioned, could artist-led spaces provide examples that could lead to meaningful social change under a system, capitalist or otherwise, in the future?

Il s’agit de comprendre la question du conflit dans la pensée de Jean-François Lyotard. Le fil conducteur de l'approche est l’agonistique langagière, conception selon laquelle les jeux de langage sont des sortes de lutte : les rapports entre les phrases sont des rapports de pouvoir discursif. Tel objectif présuppose d’abord de reconstruire la généalogie de l’agonistique, ensuite de rechercher les implications du principe de l’agonistique langagière dans le contexte de la Grundlagenkrise et finalement de montrer les ressemblances et distinctions entre le concept du différend et celui de l’agôn. C'est sur cette base que la question de la possiblité d'un "avec" agonistique nous interpelle.

Two Turning Points: Polish Art After 1955 and 1989

After 1955 the government was interested in presenting its legitimacy through the visual arts. The widespread agreement between the political and cultural worlds, and the decision to choose the "informel" abstraction as the new Polish formula of modernity, appealed to many artists after the trauma of socialist realism, enabling them - by mediating between different ways of conceiving modernity - to express generational, historical experience and recreate a "true" Polish vernacular art while also voicing the aspirations of the regime. After 1989 agonism became a real challenge, because it taught us how to use a language in which difference in a value not to be ignored. So, although 1989 must be rgarded as symbolic, it is hard to agree with the views which assume that after regaining independence nothing changed in Polish art.

In establishing an anarchic framework for understanding public space as a vision for radical democracy, this article proceeds as a theoretical inquiry into how an agonistic public space might become the basis of emancipation. Public space is presented as an opportunity to move beyond the technocratic elitism that often characterizes both civil societies and the neoliberal approach to development, and is further recognized as the battlefield on which the conflicting interests of the world's rich and poor are set. Contributing to the growing recognition that geographies of resistance are relational, where the “global” and the “local” are understood as co-constitutive, a radical democratic ideal grounded in material public space is presented as paramount to repealing archic power in general, and neoliberalism’s exclusionary logic in particular.

Responding to David Harvey’s critique of my paper ‘Why a radical geography must be anarchist’, I once again reiterate the importance of anarchist perspectives in contemporary politics and geographical praxis. In challenging Harvey on the limits to Marx, I urge him to think again about the hidden vanguardism, implied statism, and veiled hierarchy that continue to lurk within the Marxist project, and importantly how these specters constrain both our collective political imagination and the possibilities of radical geography. I am admittedly very critical of Harvey, but I nonetheless refuse to close the door on dialogue between the Black and Red, even in the face of ongoing Marxist ridicule of anarchist politics. Accordingly, I propose an agonistic embrace of a ‘postfraternal’ or ‘postsororal’ politics on the left, where we come to appreciate ongoing conflict as a sign of a healthy leftist milieu. In doing so we can move beyond the misguided idea that all disagreements over strategies, tactics, and organizing methods will ever be resolved. Ultimately, what I have dubbed ‘the condition of postfraternity’ keeps us alert to the continually unfolding possibilities of a thoroughly politicized and forever protean space. By embracing this shifting horizon, not as a static limit to our politics, but as a beautiful enabler of visionary possibilities, the rhizomes of emancipation grow stronger.

Living in a democracy or working in a group requires the use of deliberative processes to agree and decide on ways of living together and projecting ourselves into common desirable futures. However, these processes remain an illusion, according to the political philosopher Chantal Mouffe. Because, decision by consensus often marginalises minority opinions, but also, rationality does not make it possible to overcome conflicts. They are rather often rooted in affects. Consequently, how can we open spaces for debate that are participatory, inclusive and that mobilise the affects? What methods and roles for such an agnostic design (from the Greek Agon, adversary)?
My first contribution is the definition of a group of practices (and its 6 common properties), and of the research field that studies them (and the typology of its research objects). These are the “group” and the “research field” of design for debate. Among these practices, my study focuses on “Discursive Design” for debate, in which programmes such as Critical Design, Speculative Design and Design Fiction participate.
To answer my questions, three fieldworks have been explored iteratively (a series of five projects), among stakeholders (e.g. an ethics commission, and a research laboratory), using qualitative methods borrowed from action research, ethnography and Information and Communication Sciences.

The analysis revealed how design can stimulate interpersonal debate when it generates a ‘dissonance’ among the social values of the public, by presenting an ambivalent artefact (which juxtaposes discordant social values). I have called this form of ethnomethodology through design, the bridging experiment. As a second result, beyond the simple design of an artefact, design can reach and mobilise a “public” (in the sense of John Dewey) concerned by a latent issue, by joining it in its own context. And, by orchestrating a whole communication situation where audiences and artefacts meet. I offer a descriptive model called the Discursive Design Communication System.
Thus, when it thwarts the polarisation of opinions, the artefact takes on the role of a non-human diplomat, which intensifies conflicts in order to connect worlds that do not speak to each other. But also, as a media, design adopts the role of an “agnostic mediating artefact,” which opens up multidimensional communication situations— between human, non-human and fictional actors.

The contributions of this thesis are conceptual (a glossary of concepts related to the ‘tactic of dissonance’), practical (a method of design-driven ethnometodological research, and a communication model of Discursive Design), empirical (six case studies and the analysis of a systemic and longitudinal experience of one year of design residency in an ethics commission) and theoretical (discussions on design’s specific contribution to the political—defined by Mouffe as the very condition of the confrontation of opinions that is intrinsic to the endeavour of living together). I start with the analysis of a Critical Design project pre-dating the Ph.D. research (Dog & Bone, 2010-2011). Its limitations—its provocativeness and the strategy of the exhibition, which did not allow debate to occur—lead me to question the concept of ‘provocation,’ and instead, to explore ‘dissonance’ (drawing on Festinger 1957). Following this first experience, I fine-tune my central research object, which includes practices that draw on Reflective (Sengers et al., 2005), Discursive (Tharp & Tharp 2008), Adversarial (DiSalvo 2009) and Participatory design. Throughout a review of the literature, I refine my understanding of what designing for debate means, elaborating on the concept of agonism (a situation of constantly renewed confrontation. Mouffe 2000). In seeking ways of dissemination other than the art and design exhibition, I come to examine how to orchestrate a “communication situation” (Goffman) that includes humans and non-humans.
I finally outline potential roles offered to the political designer in contemporary societies.
_
Download at Designfordebate.fr

"This book investigates one of the most characteristic and prominent features of ancient Greek literature – the scene of debate or agon, in which with varying degrees of formality characters square up to each other and engage in a contest of words – and sets out for the first time to trace its changing representations through Homeric epic, historiography and tragedy. Combining literary dialogic theory with sociological approaches towards structure, it makes the claim that debate is best understood in relation to an institutional framework, in which issues of authority and dissent are variously set out and worked through. Intersecting with key recent scholarship, it shows that the Homeric poems establish, and scrutinise, the assembly as an institution which accommodates dissent, in line with an understanding of epic narrative as foundational; that the historians’ marginal status as writers in an oral culture manifests itself in their representing debate as a challenge to the utility of public institutions; and that tragedy marks the formal institutionalisation of dissent in its adversarial structure with an onus on speaking back, which offers a new way of thinking about tragic politics in terms of the process by which dissent is enacted and managed.

Aimed at both scholar and student, including anyone interested in the origins of political thought, this book demonstrates not only the fundamental importance of debate to these genres, but also the ways representations of debate construct an agonistic mentality which intersects with and informs the broader cultural construction of a citizen community.
"

Hannah Arendt's fierce critique of sovereignty, along with her excavation of Greek agonism, has gained much traction among critical theorists of international politics who revisit the basic assumptions of conventional international theories, such as state sovereignty and power as domination. This paper engages with an increasingly popular stream within such critical international studies that appropriates Arendt's agonism to envision a form of a global public acting in concert. I argue that Arendt's thoughts cannot be reduced to a radical vision of agonistic cosmo-politics. Rather, her thinking suggests that political actors appreciate and care for their public worlds while remaining alert to institutional ossification. Her appreciation of the constitutional state confirms that state agency is an important element of her thoughts. By examining the vicissitudes of publicity found in Arendt's thinking and their reflexive effect on inter-polity relations, the article elucidates the grounds of her international agonism and brings home a form of international politics where states pursuing the domestic goal of greatness coexist and cooperate. Thus, the study suggests that critical scholars of radical agonism miss the important implications of an "institutional" Arendt for international politics.

Nietzsche’s writings on responsibility pose an interpretative challenge pointing to a broader tension in his work. On the one hand, he dismisses responsibility as a metaphysical illusion incompatible with a scientific worldview. On the other, he praises rare individuals who construct a strong will for which they can be responsible. This impasse is reflected in the literature with some scholars treating this as an irreducible tension, or by emphasizing one aspect of Nietzshce’s thought over the other. Against such approaches, I argue that Nietzsche engages responsibility as a political convention that reflects and organizes social forces, relations of power, and affective attachments, and therefore must be studied, understood, and challenged in these terms. Rather studying responsibility philosophically, Nietzsche engages the value of responsibility and its possibility for revaluation. To support this argument, I reconstruct Nietzsche’s mode of political inquiry, in which values are created, maintained, and evolve through agonistic contest. Accordingly, I re-read Nietzsche’s naturalism and his account of the “sovereign individual” as competing agonistic perspectives that Nietzsche utilizes to contest the ossification and taken-for-granted value of moral responsibility. Nietzsche’s political project, therefore, aims to explore how responsibility has shaped political life and to unsettle the givenness of modernity’s conception of responsibility and encourage its revaluation.

In this paper we attempt a tentative answer to the following question: in Trojan Women, is Euripides criticizing a certain degeneration of agonism ― something we could label as “‘asymmetric conflict”’? Why this question? Trojan Women are well known as a powerful tragic play, which puts on stage the condition of the enslaved (and barbaric, to a Greek eye) women of Troy. Interpretations and academic studies of Trojan Women are more than abundant, given the undoubtable value of the play. Our tentative attempt does not gain inspiration by secondary literature about the play, but from a problem that we face nowadays and that seems to be displayed in this classical tragedy.

International relations (IR) scholars have increasingly integrated Hannah Arendt into their works. Her fierce critique of the conventional ideas of politics driven by rulership, enforcement, and violence has a particular resonance for theorists seeking to critically revisit the basic assumptions of IR scholarship. Arendt's thinking, however, contains complexity and nuance that need careful treatment when extended beyond domestic politics. In particular, Arendt's vision of free politics-characterized by the dualistic emphasis on agonistic action and institutional stability-raises two crucial issues that need further elaboration for IR research that appropriates her thinking. One involves the orientation of her international thoughts. Although Arendt shows "idealistic" aspirations for authentic politics practiced by diverse equals in an institutionally articulated space of freedom, she never loses interest in the extant situation of "non-idealistic" politics. Engaging with Arendt's theory orientation requires a careful analysis of difficult topics, such as her distinctive conception of the political and her critiques of the nation-state and international law. The other topic that needs clarification when Arendt's thoughts are applied to IR involves specific ways of associating different sites of power. A close examination of Arendt's council-based federalism reveals her distinctive idea of international politics, based on her acute awareness of the fundamental complexity that lies in power association and state agency. Bringing IR topics like state agency into conversation with her works generates illuminating questions for Arendt scholarship. Likewise, the ongoing debate on agonistic and institutional features of Arendt's thoughts can provide crucial insights into critical studies of international politics.

The diagnosis of a new geological epoch, The 'Anthropocene', has implications far beyond geological science. If human activity has disrupted the planet, then this diagnosis potentially disrupts socio-political conventions. This article assesses the implications the Anthropocene has for democratic politics, by delineating three challenges; challenges of knowledge, time and boundary. In contrast to the claim that democratic institutions are unable to adequately respond to these challenges, I suggest that they might be strengthened through an engagement with them. Following an 'agonistic' understanding of politics, I argue that the contestation instigated by the challenges of the Anthropocene is key to democratic renewal. Just as democracy in the Anthropocene can be enhanced through an agonistic approach, agonistic theory can be enriched through an engagement with the Anthropocene.

This thesis is situated at the crossroads between philosophy, political theory, and art. It proceeds from an enquiry into various philosophical discourses on ‘the real’ – in particular the Lacanian conceptualization of the real as impossible and the Guattari-Deleuze formulation of the real as artificial. It examines what these discourses engender in political theory and in the fields of art and activism. It looks at their investment in constructing ‘a people’ and seeks to understand this as an enterprise that involves images and their configuration. From this angle, the project is interested in exploring the discussion on ‘democracy and art’ and engages in advocating a shift in current positions on their relation. After critiquing Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism, it is suggested that provoking such a shift might be achieved by outlining a model similar to the way that Mouffe develops a model or ‘democratic design’.

Mouffe’s model is structured on Lacan’s ‘impossible real’. Accordingly, this dissertation points towards a design for pluralism based on ‘a real’ grounded in Wilfrid Sellars’ conceptualization of a stereoscopic fusion between what he termed the manifest and scientific images of man-in-the-world. The project suggests that images can be sites in which such models or ‘designs’ are put into conceptual shape. Sellars’ characterization of science as being rational, not because it has foundation, but rather because it is a self-correcting venture that can put any claim into jeopardy, is drawn on as the basis for the ‘construction of a people’ established on the Sellarsian real. Furthermore, the project engages with the work of a number of post-Sellarsian thinkers to lay the grounds for an argument for ‘reasoning’ as a distinct position that can be taken up in the context of the structural reality of democracy and its relation to art. The term post-agonistics (or postagonistics) indicates this shift to reasoning and how it might contribute to the expanded field of art.

Downloadable from Goldsmiths Research Online: http://research.gold.ac.uk/22573/

Buildings that served purposes of sports and competitions – gymnasia, theatres, stadia –characterised the townscapes of the Hellenistic Greek poleis; sport constituted an essential part of their political culture. The cities of the kingdoms in the north, of Epirus and Macedonia, were no exceptions. At the latest since the 4th century BC, since they became structural and political unities, they were integral parts of the Panhellenic cultic network, as it is proved by the lists of sacred envoys preserved on stone in some of the great sanctuaries of mainland Greece.
The integration of the cities of Northern Greece into the agonistic culture of Hellenistic times has never been investigated on the whole. What is sufficiently known is the role of the kings and of the generals of Alexander the Great. It is above all the question of Macedonian ethnicity which has been exhaustively stressed, and we have a relatively wide knowledge of the competitions in the main sanctuaries of the north, in Dodona and in Dium. The boom of the athletic sector in Imperial times is as well undisputed. But a blind spot regarding sports and agonistic culture is the role of the Hellenistic Northern Greek cities and of their citizens, at least since the time of the sharp-tongued harpist Stratonicus who mocked the gymnastic ambitions of the citizens of Pella (Athenaeus 8, 348e). This has to do with the marginal role played by the poleis in our perception of the northern kingdoms: before the Roman conquest, political life and political culture seem to be dominated totally by the kings; the freedom of the cities is at best limited. The interest of scholars is waning after the year 167 BC; it is assumed that Epirus and Macedonia disappear from the political map of Greece the latest with the establishment of the province (explicit on this point is W. L. Adams, JSH 30, 2003, 208).
In my paper, I present the few and dispersed sources, mostly of epigraphical nature, for gymnasial education, for civic agones and for the participation of citizens of Northern Greek poleis in Panhellenic competitions. This compilation shows that sports and competition are integral parts of the political culture of those underestimated poleis, as well as they are in the “normal” Greek polis. For the cities it was as important to have their own festivals as it was to participate in supra-regional or Panhellenic ones. In the North too, there were some competitions of supra-regional importance like the Naia in Dodona, the Olympia in Dium and the games (Alexandreia, Basileia or Olympia?) in Aegae or Beroea. Of regional relevance were competitions like the hippic agon in Lete, introduced in 119 BC to honour the Roman quaestor Marcus Annius. Victors in the great Panhellenic games came from Butrint and Amphipolis; Antipatros, son of Archias, the Butrintian victor in the Olympic stadium race of the year 136 BC, was member of one of the most influential families of the newly found koinon of the Prasaibians. Rare is the depiction of athletes on grave monuments. Upon the condition that the cities of the North played an important role in the process of the formation of the Hellenistic polis I will assess the evidence to determine the role the competitions played in Epirote and Macedonian cities of the Hellenistic age in order to shed some light on the still quite dark picture of Hellenistic Northern Greece.


Die Städte der nordgriechischen Königreiche Epiros und Makedonien waren spätestens seit dem 4. Jh. v. Chr. Bestandteile des panhellenischen kultischen Netzwerkes, wie etwa die Listen der Festgesandten der großen Heiligtümer zeigen. Inwiefern die Städte Nordgriechenlands auch an der sportlichen Kultur der hellenistischen Zeit teilhatten, ist nicht zusammenhängend dargestellt worden. Der
Beitrag untersucht anhand der überwiegend inschriftlichen Quellen sowohl für im Norden stattfindende Spiele als auch für die Teilnahme von Nordgriechen an den panhellenischen Agonen des Südens die Bedeutung der Gymnasien, des Sports und der Spiele für die Städte und die Stadtbürger Nordgriechenlands in hellenistischer Zeit. Spielte auch im Norden der Sport eine den militärischen Übungen untergeordnete Rolle, so bildeten doch die Feste und die Spiele ein Gegengewicht zur Macht der Könige und der großen Staaten. Ihre Bedeutung für die Stadtbürger zeigt, daß die Welt der Poleis auch in hellenistischer Zeit eine lebendige und blühende war.

What kinds of creative potential exist in silence-in not coming out? This ethnographic study takes the strategic silences that queer persons in Mumbai deploy regarding 'coming out' as productive for theorizing the connections between kinship and queerness. While some strands of queer critique conceptualize the relationship between kinship and queerness antagonistically, the author deploys the concept of agonistic intimacy outlined in Singh's Poverty and the Quest for Life (2015) to consider how queers might inhabit heterosexual kinship networks through the interplay of con-testation and submission. Silence, then, need not signal the image of the transnational queer in need of saving, but a mode of negotiating desires for respectability and queerness.

Axel Honneth may be criticised for reducing political philosophy to moral psychology. In what follows, I argue that if his theory of recognition is reframed as one of democracy, quite another picture will appear. To do this, I systematically reconstruct Honneth’s stance as a multidimensional version of radical democracy. The question I discuss is the manner in which this framework combines the three dimensions of democratic deliberation, culture, and conflict. I then discuss Honneth’s picture from both a deliberative and agonistic viewpoint. How one understands the way in which he combines the abovementioned dimensions is dependent upon which one of these two approaches one may choose. I claim that when taken together, these three dimensions form the grounding of a radical-democratic understanding of a struggle for recognition, which I term institutional agonism.

On retrouve alors, maintenant explicitement employé par Foucault, le terme d’agonistique, qui décrit la structure conditionnant de l’énonciation de la vérité dans le contexte de la démocratie grecque. Foucault parle d’un champ agonistique rendant possible la parrêsia, c’est-à-dire l’énonciation d’une vérité qui n’est point destituée de pouvoir, mais bien au contraire fondante du pouvoir démocratique. Il est remarquable que le champ agonistique conditionnant l’exercice du pouvoir-vérité démocratique renvoie à un partage avec les autres, c’est-à-dire à un avec. On parlerait alors d’un avec agonistique. Mais le plus remarquable est pourtant le fait que cette description de la démocratie n’a pas l’air de la dénonce, mais bien plutôt celui de la défense.

Una de las cuestiones más debatidas en el pensamiento político contemporáneo es la de cómo articular una noción de comunidad democrática capaz de integrar inclusivamente a la diversidad de realidades identitarias coexistentes en las actuales sociedades democráticas y pluralistas. La moderna concepción del Estado democrático-liberal, vinculada prioritariamente a la garantía de derechos individuales y a una anémica ingeniería institucional de elección de gobernantes, es cuestionada desde distintos frentes teóricos y políticos que pujan por una profundización del aspecto democrático de aquella dupla conceptual. En este contexto, buena parte de los estudios sobre la democracia parecen encaminarse hacia la búsqueda de alternativas a los enfoques minimalistas, agregativos o economicistas, hegemónicos durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX. El presente trabajo focaliza en dos de estas teorías que, aceptando los pilares fundamentales del liberalismo político, procuran radicalizar el carácter democrático del Estado moderno, a saber: la democracia deliberativa, promovida por Jürgen Habermas, y el pluralismo agonístico, que defiende Chantal Mouffe.

An account of Deleuze's late philosophy, especially in the age of neoliberalism and our "society of control." Includes discussions of (1) the marketplace of idea and the emergence of the "New Philosophers"; (2) the relation between thought and opinion (doxa); (3) chaos and cosmology; (4) the problem and politics of life; (5) modern philosophy as an institution of capitalism; and (6) Deleuze and Guattari's late recourse to the concept of utopia.

Este artículo parte de la premisa de que en las democracias liberales actuales se extiende un nuevo estilo discursivo propiamente cínico. El artículo traza una genealogía de este cinismo político partiendo del liberalismo político de John Rawls y recalando en la teoría agonística de la democracia de Chantal Mouffe, e intenta mostrar que la superación del liberalismo político que la teoría agonística lleva años proponiendo parece realizarse finalmente a través del cinismo, aunque con resultados diferentes de los esperados: la expansión del cinismo en la esfera pública debe entenderse como una degradación del debate público con consecuencias políticas inquietantes.