Paul Mazzocchi

Despite his influence in utopian studies and democratic theory, French philosopher Miguel Abensour (1939–2017) has yet to be fully discovered in the English-speaking world as only a fraction of his work has been translated. A Politics of Emancipation fills this void by translating a selection of his seminal essays into English for the first time. The Reader provides a systematic overview of Abensour's work and the two inseparable projects that govern his approach to political theory: on the one hand, a radical critique of all forms of domination and, on the other, a desire to conceptualize the political as the realm of freedom and emancipation. For Abensour, both projects are to be undertaken together in order to avoid the double trap of an evacuation of conflict from politics and the reduction of politics to a form of domination. In other words, a politics of emancipation requires a "ruthless" critique of domination coupled with an analysis of politics as the domain within which human beings experience freedom and equality.

Martin Breaugh is Professor of Political Theory at York University. He is the author of The Plebeian Experience: A Discontinuous History of Political Freedom. Paul Mazzocchi is Adjunct Professor at York University. Together they are coeditors (with Christopher Holman, Rachel Magnusson, and Devin Penner) of Thinking Radical Democracy: The Return to Politics in Post-War France.

"This is an excellent collection of important and representative texts by a highly original thinker, whose message is deeply relevant to current concerns. It is enhanced by judicious editorial work and above all by a superb editors' introduction that will undoubtedly be a crucial touchstone for English readers seeking a point of entry into Abensour’s work." — Warren Breckman, coeditor of the two-volume The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought

While critical utopias sought to rescue the political import of utopia, recently scholars have questioned their overemphasis on literary forms and a disempowering pluralism. Challenging the applicability of these claims to one of the instigators of critical utopias, I provide a political reading of Miguel Abensour’s understanding of utopia and connect this to councils as a concrete institutional infrastructure. This begins with a re-reading of his influential conception of the ‘education of desire’ in relation to the simulacrum as a utopian ‘model’ that, in rejecting identity-thinking, refuses to reduce utopias to a blueprint. I then turn to conceptualising the utopia of councils through the simulacrum on two fronts: first, as a form subject to innovation in the context of the dialectic of emancipation; second, as a content that aims to both ‘democratise utopia’ by embracing plurality and ‘utopianize democracy’ by expanding the realm of democratic space.

This chapter reads the German revolution through Miguel Abensour’s theory of insurgent democracy, and in the context of two major criticisms of radical democratic theory.  Insurgent democracy posits a radical version of democracy that exists against the state and is founded in the emergence of a subject (the demos) asserting its political capacity.  But two persistent and interlinked criticisms are levelled against this type of vision of democracy: it is inattentive to institutions and it lacks a mechanism for maintaining its radical or insurgent nature.  Abensour responds to these criticisms through a reconceptualization of institution and an exploration of the possibility of an institutional right to insurrection.  Drawing on these insights, this chapter suggests the need to think the German Revolution from the perspective of an insurgent institution which, by producing a sens (meaning and direction) to revolt, acts as the condition of possibility of revolutionary action.  But, in continuing to understand democracy against the state, the chapter considers the ways in which the revolutionary insurgence came up against the attempts to suppress its momentum in re-inaugurating new forms of a “state” politics.  It also considers the contours of the right of insurrection against such statist regressions.

In suggesting the need to acknowledge a prehistory of the "new utopian spirit," this paper explores the utopian afterlives of Etienne de La Boétie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. La Boétie's text has exercised an important influence on a number of scholars who have contributed to the critical re-thinking of utopia, centrally Miguel Abensour, Pierre Clastres, Gustav Landauer and Pierre Leroux.  By exploring their appropriations of the text, the paper aims to understand the contribution La Boétie has made to a critical conception of utopia, one attuned to the dialectic of emancipation and the problems of plurality and temporality.  This emerges centrally in the understanding of the relationship between desire, friendship and refusal that has been drawn from the text.

Miguel Abensour’s work has largely been neglected in the English speaking world, only finding its way into the margins of a smattering of works.  This neglect has been unfortunate, given that his work is located within the critical democratic and utopian traditions that seek to recuperate the political efficacy of each.  More to the point, Abensour’s work provides a means to bridging the allegedly irreconcilable gap between the two.  But this is not by way of a synthesis.  In reading Abensour – and in excavating the varied pieces of his thought – I aim to show that we should understand democracy and utopia as poles of a dialectics at a standstill; this entails refusing to reduce one to the other, so as to retain the challenge each presents to the other in order to enrich and develop it.  Thus, we need to probe how utopia dislodges and challenges democracy, only to wind up needing democracy to dislodge and challenge itself in return, and vice versa.  In exploring this dialectics at a standstill, this paper aims to excavate and constellate three constitutive moments in Abensour’s thought: the political, the democratic and the utopian.

This paper attempts to draw out the political import of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh, by engaging the critique levelled against it by his student and literary executor Claude Lefort. In suggesting a tension in Merleau-Ponty’s work that obscures alterity, Lefort seems to miss the rich political import of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh. Founded in his development of the concepts of écart and reversibility, Merleau-Ponty’s ontological position breaks with many of the standard tenets of political thinking, and offers a multifaceted conception of alterity. I will suggest that Lefort’s own claim to alterity buckles under the immanent weight of his critique of Merleau-Ponty, offering at best a conception of otherness limited to a self-relational non-identity. This conception ultimately fails to adequately consider the relations existing between different beings-in-the-world. In thinking being as flesh, Merleau-Ponty offers us an ethico-political optic that attempts to think alterity and ontology in a manner that unhinges us from our closed and autonomous being, opening us to the world, others and to the non-identical becoming that characterizes being as such.