ABSTRACT This paper explores two emancipatory ways that the struggle over recognition can take under conditions of social invisibility and hyper-visibility: that of social visibilization, and that of a dialectical interplay between invisibility and visibility. The theories of recognition of Honneth and Rancière acknowledge that recognition is based on socially mediated perceptual processes that enable or prevent recognition: whether and how subjects become socially visible or remain invisible. For Honneth, social invisibility is a marker of misrecognition and consists of deliberate (...) inattention and ignorance of others, so that struggles over recognition must take place, in part, through making previously invisible subjects visible. I argue here that Honneth’s account of social (in)visibility and his corresponding view of recognition in terms of properly formed visibilization, while valuable, prove insufficient when considering how racialized societies are underpinned by the power dynamics of invisibility and hyper-visibility. I turn to the works of Fanon, Ellison, and Rancière to illustrate these dynamics and to offer an account of how struggles over recognition requires practices of dis-identification from these dynamics that involve attempts to create interstices within dominant orders of (in)visibility where subjects might appear on their own terms. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the importance of practices of disidentification and imagination for democratic progress and change. To this end, I bring together certain aspects of Stanley Cavell’s and Richard Rorty’s reflections on democracy, aesthetics, and morality with Jacques Rancière’s account of the importance of appearance for democratic participation. With Rancière, it can be shown that any public–political order always involves the possibility (and often the reality) of exclusion or oppression of those who “have no part” in the current (...) order through a particular order of perceptibility, and that democratic action, therefore, requires rupturing acts of political agency on the part of self-proclaimed political actors through which disidentifications and constructions of difference against such existing orders become possible. With Cavell and Rorty, in turn, it can be shown that these rupturing moments, in order to actually become politically effective, require a responsive disposition and a willingness to engage in practices of imagination on the part of those who occupy dominant positions on existing orders, insofar as they must acknowledge the expression of others’ sense of injustice. The upshot of my discussion is that a comprehensive account of the aesthetic dimension of democratic politics must simultaneously address the interruption of political action on the one hand and responsiveness on the other, and that Rancière and the neo-pragmatists Rorty and Cavell complement each other insofar as they illuminate the blind spots of their respective approaches. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the advantages of a theory of political representation for a prag- matist theory of (global) democracy. I first outline Dewey’s disregard for political rep- resentation by analyzing the political, epistemological and aesthetic underpinnings of his criticism of the Enlightenment ideal of democracy and its trust in the power of the detached gaze. I then show that a theory of political representation is not only com- patible with a pragmatist Deweyan-pragmatist perspective on democratic politics but also (...) that Dewey’s concept of “publics”, if applied to contemporary circumstances of globalized politics, requires such a theory. I suggest a pragmatic theory of political rep- resentation that combines elements of Dewey’s aesthetics, particularly his own theory of vision, with Michael Saward’s conception of representative claim-making into the notion of aesthetic democratic representation. (shrink)

Social and political philosophers often speak of the “invisibility” of individuals and groups as a problem of social justice and emancipation when the interests, needs, and experiences of these ind...

In this essay, I reconsider the constitution of democratic freedom in aesthetic terms. My interest is in articulating a conception of aesthetic freedom that can be mapped onto a conception of democratic freedom. For this purpose, I bring together Charles Sanders Peirce’s ontology, which comprises fragments of an aesthetic theory, Friedrich Schiller’s concept of aesthetic play and Stanley Cavell’s democratic perfectionism. By providing a philosophical framework for constructing an aesthetics and politics that supports the recent aesthetic turn in political theory, (...) which urges overcoming political theory’s excessive dependence on an epistemological theory of representation, and by proposing a modification to the turn’s heavy reliance on theories of affect, my reading of Peirce, Schiller and Cavell offers a new way to think about the political significance of the autonomy of aesthetic experience and affect for democratic freedom. (shrink)

Der Begriff „Multikulturalismus“ bezeichnet ein komplexes und vielfältiges Spektrum an philosophischen und politischen Ideen. Im Kern geht es bei dem Begriff um die Frage, wie man die Herausforderungen, die mit der kulturellen und religiösen Vielfalt in heutigen pluralistischen Gesellschaften verbunden sind, verstehen und darauf reagieren kann. Der zentrale Anspruch, der im Namen des Multikulturalismus erhoben wird, ist die aktive staatliche Anerkennung von Minderheitengruppen durch „group-differentiated rights“, wie es der führende Theoretiker des Multikulturalismus Will KymlickaKymlicka, Will formuliert hat. Ein gruppendifferenziertes Recht (...) ist das Recht einer Minderheitengruppe, in einer Weise zu handeln oder nicht zu handeln, die mit entsprechenden religiösen oder kulturellen Pflichten oder Verpflichtungen vereinbar ist. (shrink)