CHAPTER ONK Negotiating Positions: The Politics of Virtue and Virtu [Virtu] rouses enmity toward order, toward the lies that are concealed in every order, ...

Sophocles' Antigone is a touchstone in democratic, feminist and legal theory, and possibly the most commented upon play in the history of philosophy and political theory. Bonnie Honig's rereading of it therefore involves intervening in a host of literatures and unsettling many of their governing assumptions. Exploring the power of Antigone in a variety of political, cultural, and theoretical settings, Honig identifies the 'Antigone-effect' - which moves those who enlist Antigone for their politics from activism into lamentation. She argues that (...) Antigone's own lamentations can be seen not just as signs of dissidence but rather as markers of a rival world view with its own sovereignty and vitality. Honig argues that the play does not offer simply a model for resistance politics or 'equal dignity in death', but a more positive politics of counter-sovereignty and solidarity which emphasizes equality in life. (shrink)

This book intervenes in contemporary debates about the threat posed to democratic life by political emergencies. Must emergency necessarily enhance and centralize top-down forms of sovereignty? Those who oppose executive branch enhancement often turn instead to law, insisting on the sovereignty of the rule of law or demanding that law rather than force be used to resolve conflicts with enemies. But are these the only options? Or are there more democratic ways to respond to invocations of emergency politics? Looking at (...) how emergencies in the past and present have shaped the development of democracy, Bonnie Honig argues that democracies must resist emergency's pull to focus on life's necessities because these tend to privatize and isolate citizens rather than bring us together on behalf of hopeful futures. Emphasizing the connections between mere life and more life, emergence and emergency, Honig argues that emergencies call us to attend anew to a neglected paradox of democratic politics: that we need good citizens with aspirational ideals to make good politics while we need good politics to infuse citizens with idealism.Honig takes a broad approach to emergency, considering immigration politics, new rights claims, contemporary food politics and the infrastructure of consumption, and the limits of law during the Red Scare of the early twentieth century. Taking its bearings from Moses Mendelssohn, Franz Rosenzweig, and other Jewish thinkers, this is a major contribution to modern thought about the challenges and risks of democratic orientation and action in response to emergency. (shrink)

This book intervenes in contemporary debates about the threat posed to democratic life by political emergencies. Must emergency necessarily enhance and centralize top-down forms of sovereignty? Those who oppose executive branch enhancement often turn instead to law, insisting on the sovereignty of the rule of law or demanding that law rather than force be used to resolve conflicts with enemies. But are these the only options? Or are there more democratic ways to respond to invocations of emergency politics? Looking at (...) how emergencies in the past and present have shaped the development of democracy, Bonnie Honig argues that democracies must resist emergency's pull to focus on life's necessities because these tend to privatize and isolate citizens rather than bring us together on behalf of hopeful futures. Emphasizing the connections between mere life and more life, emergence and emergency, Honig argues that emergencies call us to attend anew to a neglected paradox of democratic politics: that we need good citizens with aspirational ideals to make good politics while we need good politics to infuse citizens with idealism.Honig takes a broad approach to emergency, considering immigration politics, new rights claims, contemporary food politics and the infrastructure of consumption, and the limits of law during the Red Scare of the early twentieth century. Taking its bearings from Moses Mendelssohn, Franz Rosenzweig, and other Jewish thinkers, this is a major contribution to modern thought about the challenges and risks of democratic orientation and action in response to emergency. (shrink)

Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, edited by Bonnie Honig, a collection of critical feminist essays on Hannah Arendt, illustrates both the disorientation and the insights that can result when feminist philosophers come to terms with a canonical figure who is a woman.

Bonnie Honig invigorates debate over the politics of refusal by insisting that withdrawal from unjust political systems be matched with collective action to change them. Historical and fictional characters from Muhammad Ali to the Bacchants of ancient Greek tragedy teach us how to turn rejection into transformative efforts toward self-governance.

This paper reads Sophocles' " Antigone " contextually, as an exploration of the politics of lamentation and larger conflicts these stand for. Antigone defies Creon's sovereign decree that her brother Polynices, who attacked the city with a foreign army and died in battle, be dishonoured - left unburied. But the play is not about Polynices' treason. It explores the clash in 5th century Athens between Homeric/elite and democratic mourning practices. The former memorialize the unique individuality of the dead, focus on (...) the family's loss and bereavement and call for vengeance. The latter memorialize the dead's contribution to the immortal polis and emphasize the replaceability of those lost. Each economy of mourning sees the other as excessive and politically unstable. The remainders of both, managed by way of exception institutions such as tragedy and the Dionysian Festival, continue to haunt us now. (shrink)

Oxford Handbooks of Political Science are the essential guide to the state of political science today. With engaging contributions from 51 major international scholars, the Oxford Handbook of Political Theory provides the key point of reference for anyone working in political theory and beyond.

This paper examines Honig’s use of Rancière in her book ‘Democracy and the Foreigner’. In seeking to clarify the benefits of ‘foreignness’ for democratic politics it raises the concern that Honig does not acknowledge the ways in which her own democratic cosmopolitanism may be more akin to Rancière’s police than politics. By challenging Honig’s assertion that democracy is usually read as a romance with the suggestion that it is more commonly read as a horror, I unpick the interstices of Honig’s (...) and Rancière’s work to separate foreignness from democratic cosmopolitanism. Instead, although I posit democratic cosmopolitanism’s potential as a police more conducive to politics I also suggest that the particular salience of Honig’s ‘foreigner’ figure is that it supplements Rancièrian politics, demonstrating a praxis of ‘looking anew’ at our ordinary social practices. By making these seem strange to us, we can discover a new critical perspective from which to question and subvert, thereby furthering the potential of Rancièrian democratic politics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Miracle of MetaphorRethinking the State of Exception with Rosenzweig and SchmittBonnie Honig (bio)For the word is mere inception until it finds reception in an ear and response in a mouth.—Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of RedemptionThe legal anthropologist Carol Greenhouse opens her book on time, A Moment’s Notice, with a story recorded by Goethe, who, when traveling through Italy, observed a trial and took note of its peculiar timekeeping (...) practices. A man seated at a desk held in his hand a glass sand bottle, a timepiece. It was not immediately clear what his purpose was. But Goethe soon noticed that as the prosecutor spoke the man kept the bottle lying on its side, its sands inert, and whenever the defense began to speak the man would turn the bottle upright and restart its sand flow. When the state spoke, time stopped. The defense, however, was subject to time.The story accords well with the views of state sovereignty propounded by Carl Schmitt, who identifies sovereignty as such with the power to legally suspend law for a time by declaring a state of exception. For Schmitt, as for Giorgio Agamben, who works in his wake, the state of exception is that paradoxical situation in which the law is legally suspended by sovereign power. The ensuing condition is one in which we—or, rather, sovereign powers—are neither subject to law nor free of it but rather both, since the state of exception is itself a legal condition of alegality. Grounded in paradox—the legal suspension of law—and seeming well positioned to explain elements of the current political landscape that liberal and deliberative democratic theorists only criticize, Schmitt’s “state of exception,” I think it is fair to say, has captured the imagination of contemporary political theory.I seek to loosen its hold on our imagination by pluralizing the particular political theology on which Schmitt’s account is based and from which it draws sustenance. And I do so with the intent of highlighting the dependence of the so-called state of exception upon democratic energies and its vulnerability, therefore, to democratic action and resistance.I begin by devoting sustained attention to Schmitt’s metaphor for the state of exception—the miracle, noting that we may accept his metaphorization and yet be drawn by it to very different conclusions. Alternative conceptions of miracle, as we shall see, point not to singular sovereign ruptural power but rather to receptivity, popular power, and the importance of orientation in everyday life to divinity or sovereignty. For this alternative, I turn to Franz Rosenzweig’s theology. Another implication of the work begun here is to lay the groundwork for questioning contemporary identifications of action with event and politics with singularity. I ask whether the metaphor of miracle, normally taken to mark extraordinary, ruptural, or inaugurative politics (as, for example, by Hannah Arendt), might not license instead a turn to the ordinary, away from rupture to the everyday, from transcendence to immanence (though, as William Connolly points out, the immanent can also be ruptural [Pluralism] and, as Eric Santner points out, the rupture sought by Rosenzweig’s new thinking is one that would return us to a different ordinary [On the [End Page 78] Psychotheology of Everyday Life and “Miracles Happen”]). Motivating this exploration is an intuition: that contemporary political theory’s debates about whether political action is best seen as ordinary or extraordinary, ruptural or rule-governed, may be a reiteration of earlier debates in political theology about the status of the extraordinary—god and miracle or divine agency—in the ordinary human world. Mindful of that reiteration, and with the help of Rosenzweig’s “new theology,” we may rechart our course and see opportunities to rethink emergency politics in the state of exception in more democratic terms.A Secret Conversation?In Political Theology, Carl Schmitt, the soon-to-be-lapsed Catholic legal thinker who would later become jurist to the Nazi party in 1930s Germany, claimed that all significant political concepts are reinhabitations of theological concepts and should be treated as such. In The Enemy, an intellectual biography of Schmitt, Gopal Balakrishnan points out this is an overstatement... (shrink)

Informed by D. W. Winnicott’s object relations theory, and focused on the role of Things in constituting the world that is the object of Arendtian care, this essay examines Hannah Arendt’s treatment in The Human Condition of two liminal examples, cultivated land and poetry, that hover on the borders of Labor, Work, and/or Action. Cultivated land could belong to Work because cultivation leaves a lasting mark on the land, but it is assigned to Labor because land, once it is left (...) uncultivated, returns to nature, Arendt says. Poetry could belong to Action, which is the realm of meaning-making speech, but it is assigned to Work because, Arendt argues, poetry’s memorability ultimately depends on its writtenness and, once it is written, it becomes a Thing possessed of the object permanence characteristic of Work’s objects. But cultivated land also has a textualized form; it, too, can be written down as, for example, in the form of mapping. Why does Arendt not consider this? What possibilities of political thought or action might have been opened had she done so? Working through these questions with particular reference to colonial cartography, and reading Kafka’s The Castle alongside Brian Friel’s Translations, this essay explores practices of participatory mapping and land sabbatical that might make of land a “Thing” in Arendt’s sense. Noting the Biblical origins of land sabbatical and that Arendt’s move in the Work section from cultivated land to text/poem retraces George Steiner’s diasporic journey “From Homeland to Text,” I suggest that The Human Condition, commonly called Arendt’s most Greek text, may have a Jewish unconscious. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Antigone-Effect and the Oedipal CurseToward a Promiscuous NatalityBonnie HonigMen, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.—Hannah Arendt, The Human ConditionIn Judith Butler’s book Antigone’s Claim, “promiscuous obedience” is the proposed response to a world constituted by “unwritten laws, aberrant transmissions” (Butler 2000). The worldly condition of “unwritten laws, aberrant transmissions” names an aspect of Antigone’s situation unmentioned by Sina (...) Kramer in her essay on Butler’s New Humanism: the curse. Antigone mourns and desires under the sign of a curse that consigns her forever to a desire that will be unrequited, and a mourning that will never achieve what we now call closure.What is the curse identified by Butler? In Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus says to his daughters (speaking about himself), “From none did you have love more than from this man, without whom you will now spend the remainder of your life” (Trans. H. Lloyd-Jones 1994, 1617–19, qtd. in Butler 2000, 60). It certainly sounds like a curse! But what sort of a curse? 1Focusing on Antigone, Butler says Oedipus’s “words... demand that for all time she have no man except for the man who is dead... this is a demand, [End Page 41] a curse, made by Oedipus, who positions himself as her only one” (60). But what Butler calls the curse is actually, or at least also, Oedipus’s statement of gratitude and debt. If Oedipus places himself in a relationship of exclusivity with his daughters, he does so because of the singularity of his debt to them at the time of his death. Here is the longer passage (from a different translation): “My children, on this day your father no longer exists. Now I have perished utterly, and no longer will you bear the burden of tending me, which was no light one, I well know, my children. Yet just one word turns all those toils to nothing, you have been treated as friends by no one more than by this man; and now you will have me with you no longer, through all your days to come” (Trans. R. C. Jebb 1889, 1612–19).2Although Oedipus seems to gift his daughters with freedom when he claims that “no longer will [they] bear the burden of tending” to their father, he also tethers his daughters to himself forever when he says his gratitude to his daughters is so immense that no one will ever love them like he does: they have been, and likely will always be, loved best and most (“treated as friends”) “by no one more than by this man,” their dead father, for all their “days to come” (in the R. C. Jebb translation) or for “the remainder of your life” (in the H. Lloyd-Jones translation). Whether as a statement of love or friendship (the translations vary), the speech both thanks and curses, pressing on us awareness of the intimate closeness of those two speech acts in a way that recalls Derrida’s analysis of the undecidability of the gift (Derrida 1995, 97).For Butler, the speech is a cursed command that Antigone should never love another as much as she loves her father. “His words... demand that for all time she have no man except for the man who is dead, and though this is a demand, a curse, made by Oedipus, who positions himself as her only one, it is clear that she both honors and disobeys this curse as she displaces her life for her father onto her brother” (60). But Oedipus says something a bit different: no one will ever love Antigone as much as he now does. On the one reading he dooms her to be forever unloving; on the other, unlovable or, simply, unloved.Antigone will love, however, and so, since Butler assumes the curse is that Antigone should not love, Butler sees Antigone’s love for her dead brother as a way to both carry and transgress the curse under which she operates. Loving a dead man is Antigone’s promiscuously obedient way to obey and subvert... (shrink)

And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israelites of our time.Herman Melville.

ABSTRACT In Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Stanley Cavell says, the film camera, a “somatogram,” reads fits and fidgets as a post-Cartesian cogito of embodied thinking. Giorgio Agamben sees the cameras of motion studies at Salpêtrière in the 1880s as dehumanizing normalizers of gesture, but Georges Didi-Huberman claims that what they recorded as hysteria was solicited by them and sometimes refused. Which is it? Does the camera humanize, normalize, or solicit gesture? I consider the question with Anna Rose (...) Holmer’s The Fits. Like Mr. Deeds, The Fits foregrounds non-sovereign body movements, but its protagonist, Toni, agonistically engages the camera’s gaze, extracting from it the respect she deserves. I argue that Toni may be seen as responding to Salpêtrière, and also to Thomas Eakins, in whose attic, in the 1880s, a young Black girl was photographed naked, on a couch. Is her stare a refusal of the white gaze or a coerced pose? Toni’s own stare suggests she avenges such historic wrongs in acts of cinematic agonism. In The Fits, the camera that might have been Toni’s reader/partner, betrayer, or groomer becomes a mystical mechanism of remediation and Toni, the ghost in its machine. (shrink)

How can truth be used to fight disinformation without reproducing the “reveal”—oriented or secret-constituting epistemology of the closet, as Eve Sedgwick described it in the Epistemology of the Closet (1990)? and how does her reading of the Book of Esther in that text help illuminate aspects of today’s Trumpism?