The aim of this essay is to consider both Schmitt’s polemical and his analytical claims in dealing with a concept which is central to his theory and yet strangely overlooked by the secondary literature: the concept of friendship. The essay proceeds in three steps; first it makes some textual claims about the meaning and role of friendship in Schmitt’s writings; secondly its puts forward an interpretation of the significance of friendship in Schmitt’s political thought; finally, it tries to disentangle polemics (...) from diagnostics in Schmitt’s discourse and draws some tentative conclusions. (shrink)

If, today, ‘politics is in culture and culture is relentlessly political’ (Brown, 2002), if the domains of ‘the political’ and ‘the cultural’ can no longer be easily distinguished or kept separate, then contemporary political theory requires an understanding and analysis of cultural politics. This essay undertakes the first stages of such a project by trying to theorize ‘cultural politics’. I argue that ‘cultural politics’ proves to be an object of discourse — it indeed has a certain discursive existence — but (...) not an object of discipline, since no single field or discipline produces it as an object of knowledge. I read this disciplinary failure optimistically, arguing that the study of cultural politics requires a reorientation of theory. The sort of interdisciplinary and multiple-genre work needed to study cultural politics produces a conception of theory as fugitive. Fugitive theory must travel among disciplines, calling on a variety of theoretical and political resources to sustain itself; it refuses the very notion of ‘applied’ theory, insisting that theory ‘is already at work’ in politics (Butler, 1997). To link politics to culture is to practise fugitive theory. And the practice of fugitive theory therefore has the capacity to reveal and explore the workings of cultural politics. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to consider both Schmitt’s polemical and his analytical claims in dealing with a concept which is central to his theory and yet strangely overlooked by the secondary literature: the concept of friendship. The essay proceeds in three steps; first it makes some textual claims about the meaning and role of friendship in Schmitt’s writings; secondly its puts forward an interpretation of the significance of friendship in Schmitt’s political thought; finally, it tries to disentangle polemics (...) from diagnostics in Schmitt’s discourse and draws some tentative conclusions. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the antagonistic character of democratic politics, specifically in relation to the neo-republican conceptualisation of politics, as outlined by Philip Pettit. I take up a problem not addressed in the neo-republican scholarship, namely, the broader dispute over the practice of contestation and the scope of its reach in relation to the activity of politics. This article proceeds through an examination of what I call Pettit’s method of political theory in order to approach sideways the concept of (...) ‘contestation’ as a marker for a sublimated antagonistic dimension of neo-republican politics. Drawing on the work of Rancière and the insights of post-Nietzschean critical theory (Derrida, Laclau and Arendt), I examine the relationship between populism, democratic contestation and non-domination in neo-republican discourse. As such, this article exerts pressure on Pettit’s privileging of a status concept of freedom as the supreme political ideal of republican politics. This article explores the political possibilities opened up through a re-politicisation of non-domination, and the radical potential that resides in a politics that does not foreclose on democracy, understood in terms of popular power and not popular control. (shrink)

In this paper we outline a theory that explicates the hypertrophy of the “political” in relation to contemporary art, literature, and culture. Beginning with a critique of Nicholas Bourriaud’s 2016 work The Exform, we interrogate Bourriaud’s engagement with contemporary art and Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology. We approach Bourriaud’s Althusserian source material through a consideration of its reappraisal by Warren Montag, Althusser’s own Lacanian influences, and through some surprising continuities with the thought of controversial German jurist and political theorist Carl (...) Schmitt. Finally, we attempt to synthesize these discussions into our speculative theory of the “Ideological Aesthetic,” which addresses a conceptual gap in past theoretical discourse on ideology. (shrink)