Suchergebnisse

This essay analyzes Fred Moten's "antipolitical" romance with the "fugitive black sociality" that he radically opposes to "politics," defined as inescapably tied to antiblack modernity. By comparing Moten's argument to other voices in the black radical tradition, and by triangulating Moten with Hannah Arendt and Sheldon Wolin, this essay opens inherited conceptions of the political to risk and reworking but also complicates figurations of fugitivity and resists the antagonism Moten posits between black fugitivity and democratic politics.

AbstractThis essay criticises the limitations of the idea of formal equality in the liberal (and French republican) traditions by drawing on Karl Marx, Alexis de Tocqueville, and contemporary feminist and critical‐race theories. These suggest that any credible theory of equality must begin in fact with inequality in its many dimensions, but it also must theorise how countervailing power is developed by political action, or what Tocqueville calls association, taken as a verb and not only as a noun. By an unconventional and radicalised reading of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, this essay offers an agonistic theory of the relationship between equality and democracy to escape the limitations imposed by the framework of individual and formal rights.

This essay explores Hebrew prophecy and its modern reworkings to develop an account of authority in democratic politics that contrasts with prevailing genres of political theory. At first, we use William Blake to reveal the poetic and democratic dimensions in the biblical prophecy typically associated with absolute truth and law as command. By using the examples of Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin, we then argue that critics of white supremacy draw on the genre of biblical prophecy to address dimensions of political life obscured by liberal language. Partly, they use prophecy to name the willful blindness of whites, to provoke acknowledgment of what whites know but disavow—their domination of others. Partly, prophetic speech-acts show how commitment, judgment, and aggression are needful in democratic politics. In these ways, critics of white supremacy demonstrate genuine authority as a democratic practice.