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Cover Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- 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

Since the end of the Cold War, the concept of reconciliation has emerged as a central term of political discourse within societies divided by a history of political violence. Reconciliation has been promoted as a way of reckoning with the legacy of past wrongs while opening the way for community in the future. This book examines the issues of transitional justice in the context of contemporary debates in political theory concerning the nature of 'the political'. Bringing together research on transitional justice and political theory, the author argues that if we are to talk of reconcili.

Radical democrats highlight dramatic moments of political action, which disrupt everyday habits of perception that sustain unequal social relations. In doing so, however, we sometimes neglect how social conditions—such as precarious employment, social dislocation, and everyday exposure to violence—undermine political agency or might be contested in uneventful ways. Despite their differences, two thinkers who have significantly influenced radical democratic theory (Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière) have been similarly criticized for contributing to such a socially weightless picture of politics. However, attending to how they are each preoccupied by the social conditions of inequality and loneliness enables us to recognize two distinct aspects of democratic politics–emancipation and civility. Cultivating an interpretive flexibility to shift between these aspects of politics might enable radical democrats to more clearly picture how struggles for appearance are limited and shaped by the social conditions within which they are enacted.

The epistemic friction that is generated when privileged subjects are confronted by different social perspectives is important for democratic politics since it can interrupt their active ignorance about oppressive social relations from which they benefit. However, members of oppressed groups might sometimes prefer not to accept the burden of educating the dominant. In circumstances of structural inequality, withdrawing from privileged subjects' ignorance can be a form of self-preservation. But such withdrawal also has the potential to induce epistemic friction insofar as it depletes the opportunities for active ignorance to reproduce itself. Herman Melville's tragicomic short story of Bartleby – the legal copyist who 'would prefer not to' – has been celebrated by philosophers as emblematic of such resistant withdrawal. Interpreting the story as a dramatisation of the epistemic friction encountered by its narrator makes vivid how such withdrawal can be political.

In her influential discussion of the plight of stateless people, Hannah Arendt invokes the 'right to have rights' as the one true human right. In doing so she establishes an aporia. If statelessness corresponds not only to a situation of rightlessness but also to a life deprived of public appearance, how could those excluded from politics possibly claim the right to have rights? In this article I examine Jacques Rancière's response to Arendt's aporetic account of human rights, situating this in relation to his wider criticism of Arendt's conception of the political. According to Rancière, Arendt depoliticizes human rights in identifying the human with mere life (zoë) and the citizen with the good life (bios politikos). For, in doing so, she takes the distinction between zoë and the bios politikos to be ontologically given whereas politics is typically about contesting how that distinction is drawn. For Rancière 'the human' in human rights does not refer to a life deprived of politics. Rather, the human is a litigious name that politicizes the distinction between those who are qualified to participate in politics and those who are not. In contrast to Arendt, Rancière's approach enables us to recognize contests over human rights, such as that of the sans papiers, as part and parcel of social struggles that are the core of political life.