Arendt and Deleuze on Totalitarianism and the Revolutionary Event: Among the Peoples of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-136
Author(s):  
James Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Moment ◽  
State Form

Gilles Deleuze and Hannah Arendt are two thinkers who have theorised the exceptionalism of the revolutionary moment. For Deleuze, it is the moment of the people to come. For Arendt, it is the moment of the freedom of political action. In the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall there has been extensive debate on how to remember the German Democratic Republic (DDR) and how to understand the events leading up to its demise. Arendt's analyses of totalitarianism, natality and the public sphere provide points of orientation in an attempt to clarify the nature of the DDR, the dishonesty of its evaluation in the West as well as the transitory purchase of its legitimating discourse on later generations of its citizens. Deleuze's reinvigoration of the revolutionary sense of the term ‘people’ sets it in defiance of prevalent notions of popular sovereignty and therefore facilitates a different reading of the protests against the so-called people's republic of the DDR: something else was at issue besides the substitution of one state form for another.

Democracy and constitutional reform: Deliberative versus populist constitutionalism

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (9-10) ◽  
pp. 1116-1131
Author(s):  
Simone Chambers
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Constitutional Reform ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Popular Participation ◽  
Checks And Balances ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
Important Means ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Citizen’S Participation

Constitutional reform has been an important means to push populist authoritarian agendas in Hungary, Poland, Turkey and Venezuela. The embrace of constitutional means and rhetoric in pursuit of these agendas has led to the growing recognition of ‘populist constitutionalism’ as a contemporary political phenomenon. In all four examples mentioned above, democracy, popular sovereignty and direct plebiscitary appeal to the people is the rhetorical and justificatory framework for constitutional reform. This, I worry, gives democracy a bad name and reinforces the widespread suspicion that citizens should not be directly involved in constitutional reform as popular participation can lead to dangerous majoritarianism and is easily manipulated by elite actors seeking to weaken constitutional checks and balances. But the problem, I argue, is not inherent in citizen’s participation in constitutional reform. In contrast to populist constitutionalism, I develop an idea of deliberative constitutionalism in which citizens can participate in constitution-making and reform without hijacking constitutionalism for majoritarian, nationalist or anti-pluralist ends. Deliberative constitutionalism as I understand it has four features: a Habermasian co-originality thesis that articulates the interdependence of democracy and liberalism mediated by a conception of discourse; a proceduralized idea of popular sovereignty that reduces the tension between appeal to the people and respect for pluralism; the centrality of the public sphere over the voting booth as the cradle of democracy; institutional innovations intended to include citizens in constitutional reform (including through referendums) but avoid majoritarian and populist pathologies.

Divine Democracy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Vatter
Keyword(s):  
Public Reason ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Jacques Maritain ◽  
The Public ◽  
Universal Human Rights ◽  
Theological Foundations ◽  
The Public Sphere

The ‘return of religion’ in the public sphere and the emergence of postsecular societies have propelled the discourse of political theology into the centre of contemporary democratic theory. This situation calls forth the question addressed in this book: Is a democratic political theology possible? Carl Schmitt first developed the idea of the Christian theological foundations of modern legal and political concepts in order to criticize the secular basis of liberal democracy. He employed political theology to argue for the continued legitimacy of the absolute sovereignty of the state against the claims raised by pluralist and globalized civil society. This book shows how, after Schmitt, some of the main political theorists of the 20th century, from Jacques Maritain to Jürgen Habermas, sought to establish an affirmative connection between Christian political theology, popular sovereignty, and the legitimacy of democratic government. In so doing, the political representation of God in the world was no longer placed in the hands of hierarchical and sovereign lieutenants (Church, Empire, Nation), but in a series of democratic institutions, practices and conceptions like direct representation, constitutionalism, universal human rights, and public reason that reject the primacy of sovereignty.

Bowling for Communism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Demshuk
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Black Market ◽  
Civic Life ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
The Public ◽  
Civic Pride ◽  
Urban Decay ◽  
Local Officials ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Market Construction

This book illuminates how civic life functioned in Leipzig, East Germany's second-largest city, on the eve of the 1989 revolution by exploring acts of “urban ingenuity” amid catastrophic urban decay. The book profiles the creative activism of local communist officials who, with the help of scores of volunteers, constructed a palatial bowling alley without Berlin's knowledge or approval. In a city mired in disrepair, civic pride overcame resentment against a regime loathed for corruption, Stasi spies, and the Berlin Wall. Reconstructing such episodes through interviews and obscure archival materials, the book shows how the public sphere functioned in Leipzig before the fall of communism. Hardly detached or inept, local officials worked around centralized failings to build a more humane city. And hardly disengaged, residents turned to black-market construction to patch up their surroundings. Because such “urban ingenuity” was premised on weakness in the centralized regime, the dystopian cityscape evolved from being merely a quotidian grievance to the backdrop for revolution. If, by their actions, officials were demonstrating that the regime was irrelevant, and if, in their own experiences, locals only attained basic repairs outside official channels, why should anyone have mourned the system when it was overthrown?

Sense of Community and its Sustenance in Africa

Human Affairs ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Olatunji Oyeshile
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Sense Of Community ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic Of Congo ◽  
Republic Of Congo ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Political Marginalization

Sense of Community and its Sustenance in AfricaThere is no gainsaying the fact that Africa is inundated with many problems which have made the development and the attainment of social order, conceived in normative terms, daunting tasks. It is also a fact that there are many causes of this scenario such as political marginalization, ethnic chauvinism, economic mismanagement, religious bigotry and corruption in its various facets. However, in this disquisition we identify the lack of the development, internalization and application of the sense of community, loosely tagged community consciousness, as a major factor that has aggravated the African crisis and which if addressed can reverse the order of things positively. It is the contention of this paper that fundamentally in the case of Africa, as shown in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia and Nigeria, there has been a blind pursuit of private or individual interests to the detriment of the public sphere or public good. Ironically too, when leaders put up repressive laws in the pretense to pursue the public good, the underlying motive has always been the pursuit of selfish private whims and caprices. We noted that in contemporary Africa a major way towards a desired level of social order and development consists in engendering the required sense of community (a situation in which there is mutual co-operation, interdependence and fellow-feeling) on which other developments can be predicated. Although, the quest and realization of the sense of community is not a grand solution to our myriad of problems in Africa, at least it forms the basis on which we can start to address our problems in Africa in a meaningful way.

scholarly journals Coming up for Air: On Reading in a Global Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-21
Author(s):  
Aparna Tarc
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Teaching Of Reading ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Public Sphere

The thought of breath grips the world as climate change, racial injustice and a global pandemic converge to suck oxygen, the lifeforce, out of the earth. The visibility of breath, its critical significance to existence, I argue, is made evident by poets. To speak of breath is to lodge ourselves between birth and death and requires sustained, meditative, attentive study to an everyday yet taken for granted practice. Like breathing, reading is also a practice that many took for granted until the pandemic. My paper will engage the affective and/or poetic dimensions of reading left out of theories of literacy that render it instrumental and divorced from the life of the reader (Freire, 1978). I will suggest that scholars of literacy, in every language, begin to engage a poetics of literacy as attending to the existential significance of language in carrying our personhood and lives. I will also argue that our diminishing capacities to read imaginatively and creatively have led to the rise of populist ideologies that infect public discourse and an increasingly anti-intellectual and depressed social sphere. Despite this decline in the practice and teaching of reading, it is reported that more than any other activity, reading sustained the lives of individuals and communities’ during a global pandemic. Teachers and scholars might take advantage of the renewed interested in reading to redeliver poetry and literary language to the public sphere to teach affective reading. Poetry harkens back to ancient practices of reading inherent in all traditions of reading. It enacts a pedagogy of breath, I argue, one that observes its significance in our capacity to exist through the exchange of air in words, an exchange of vital textual meanings we have taken for granted as we continue to infect our social and political world and earth with social hatred, toxins, and death. In this paper I engage fragments of poetry by poets of our time (last century onward) that teaches us to breathe and relearn the divine and primal stance that reading poetry attends to and demands. More than any other form, “poetry,” Ada Limon claims, “has breath built into it”. As such, reading poetry helps us to breathe when the world bears down and makes it hard for us to come up for air.

An Ethic of Care: A Valuable Political Tool?

Politics ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janice McLaughlin
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Ethic Of Care ◽  
Group Solidarity ◽  
The Public ◽  
Moral Position ◽  
The Public Sphere

Since Gilligan first interpreted women's moral position as an ethic of care, feminists have wondered what this means for political action. While some view it as a way of introducing forms of understanding and appreciation which are missing in the public sphere, others have worried about the universalisation and romanticization of women's abilities which it appears to contain. This paper argues that interpretations of an ethic of care which are situated in resistance and which conceptualise its abilities as the skills of subordinated groups can hold out visions of group solidarity of benefit to politics.

Attacking the French Tradition

Tocqueville ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucien Jaume
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Power ◽  
Democracy In America ◽  
French Tradition ◽  
Decentralized Government

This chapter argues that traditionalists fail to realize the fact that for Tocqueville, the power of the people was above all a sociological and moral power, not an institutional one. Democracy in America offered an original conception of His Majesty the Majority, which was still called “the Public.” In Tocqueville's eyes, the various organs of decentralized government—the communes (dominated by great landowners) of which the monarchists dreamed, the associations of families in Lamennais, the “social authorities” exalted by Le Play and his followers—made sense only in this context. The Public was not a phantom conjured up by political dreams—a liberal illusion that in Le Play's view stemmed from “the so-called principles of 1789.” The Public was the new subject of history, or at any rate the quintessential totem of political action.

Patient Publics

2019 ◽  
pp. 143-165
Author(s):  
Nicole Curato
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

As the attention of spectacular publics wanes, disaster-affected communities begin to feel a sense of abandonment. This causes injuries to their esteem and poses limits on the scope of political action. This chapter narrates how ‘patient publics’ are constructed through the micro-politics of waiting. It argues that patient publics create a vocabulary for both acquiescence and negotiation to a political order that reproduces their subordination. Despite these limitations, however, the chapter argues that deliberative democratic theory can learn from how political claims are made amidst despair. It draws attention to modest achievements of communities that struggle but nevertheless strive to make an appearance in the public sphere.

Trials and Tribulations

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-97
Author(s):  
Stephen Lovell
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
The Public ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The People ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
People Movement ◽  
The City

This chapter tells the story of public speaking in Russia from the imposition of greater restrictions on the public sphere in 1867 through to the eve of Alexander II’s assassination in 1881. It shows that in this period the focus of the Russian public switched from the zemstvo to the courtroom, where a number of high-profile trials took place (and were reported, sometimes in stenographic detail, in the press). The chapter examines the careers and profiles of some of Russia’s leading courtroom orators. It also explores the activities of the Russian socialists (populists), in particular the ‘Going to the People’ movement of 1873–4 and later propaganda efforts in the city and the courtroom. It ends by considering the intensification of public discourse at the end of the 1870s: the Russo-Turkish War saw a surge of patriotic mobilization, but at the same time the populist adoption of terrorism seized public attention.

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