Law and Agonistic Politics

The Ancient Greek notion of agonism, meaning struggle, has been revived in radical legal and political theory to rethematize class conflict and to conceptualize the conditions of possibility of freedom and social transformation in contemporary society. Insisting that what is ultimately at stake in politics are the terms in which social conflict is represented, agonists highlight the importance of the strategic, affective and aesthetic aspects of politics for democratic praxis. This volume examines the implications of this critical perspective for understanding law and considers how law serves either to sustain or curtail the democratic agon. While sharing a critical perspective on the deliberative turn in legal and political theory and its tendency to depoliticize social conflict, the various contributors to this volume diverge in arguing variously for pragmatic, expressivist or strategic conceptions of agonism. In doing so they question the glib assumptions that often underlie a sometimes too easy celebration of conflict as an antidote to de-politicizing consensus. This thought provoking volume will be of interest to students and researchers working in legal and political theory and philosophy. List of Contributors, Preface, Introduction, 1 The Democratic Narcissus: The Agonism of the Ancients Compared to that of the (Post)Moderns, 2 Democratic Agon: Striving for Distinction or Struggle against Domination and Injustice?, 3 The Opening: Alegality and Political Agonism, 4 The Expressive Agon: On Political Agency in a Constitutional Democratic Polity, 5 Staging Dissensus: Frederick Douglass and ‘We, the People’, 6 Polemos and Agon, 7 Questioning the Law? On Heteronomy in Public Autonomy, 8 Agonism, Antagonism and the Necessity of Care, 9 The Stranger in Synagonistic Politics, 10 Passionate Subjectivity, Contestation and Acknowledgement: Rereading Austin and Cavell, 11 On the Rationality of Disagreement and Feeling: Brethren, Bombers and the Construction of the Common, 12 The Complex Agon, 13 The Absurd Proposition of Aboriginal Sovereignty, Index