Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on the Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Rhetoric and Radical Democratic Political Theory
- 2 Performing Radical Democracy
- 3 Aboriginal Sovereignty and the Democratic Paradox
- 4 Judith Butler, Radical Democracy and Micro-politics
- 5 Post-structuralism, Civil Society and Radical Democracy
- 6 Hegemony and Globalist Strategy
- 7 Is ‘Another World’ Possible? Laclau, Mouffe and Social Movements
- 8 Friends and Enemies, Slaves and Masters: Fanaticism, Wendell Phillips and the Limits of Agonism
- 9 The Northern Ireland Paradox
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Performing Radical Democracy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on the Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Rhetoric and Radical Democratic Political Theory
- 2 Performing Radical Democracy
- 3 Aboriginal Sovereignty and the Democratic Paradox
- 4 Judith Butler, Radical Democracy and Micro-politics
- 5 Post-structuralism, Civil Society and Radical Democracy
- 6 Hegemony and Globalist Strategy
- 7 Is ‘Another World’ Possible? Laclau, Mouffe and Social Movements
- 8 Friends and Enemies, Slaves and Masters: Fanaticism, Wendell Phillips and the Limits of Agonism
- 9 The Northern Ireland Paradox
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Power is not stable or static, but is remade at various junctures within everyday life; it constitutes our tenuous sense of common sense, and is ensconced as the prevailing epistemes of a culture. Moreover, social transformation occurs not merely by rallying mass numbers in favour of a cause, but precisely through the ways in which daily social relations are rearticulated, and new conceptual horizons opened up by anomalous and subversive practices.
(Butler 2000a: 14)It may seem perplexing in a book exploring the politics of radical democracy to have two chapters devoted to the work of Judith Butler, for she is hardly known as a democratic theorist. Indeed, a quick search through the indexes to all her single-authored books reveals the sum total of only one reference to democracy in all nine texts (2004a: 226). Even extending the remit a bit wider to include references to the writings of, say, radical democratic thinkers such as Laclau and Mouffe fails to yield much more. They appear in the indexes of just two books (Excitable Speech and Bodies that Matter). Yet in this chapter, I will argue that Judith Butler is a radical democrat and that she develops her account of radical democracy, in part, out of a critical engagement with the work of Laclau and Mouffe, particularly that of Laclau. Moreover, to make my case, I will be drawing amongst other things on some of the very texts that appear to offer little indexical evidence of Butler's interest in radical democracy.
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- Information
- The Politics of Radical Democracy , pp. 33 - 51Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2008