CPT 201340 A Contemporary Political Theory (2014) 13, 168-217. Doi:10.1057/cpt.2013.40 Published Online 21 January 2014 Bonnie Honig

Critical Exchange
Humanism from an agonistic perspective: Themes from the work of Bonnie Honig
Contemporary Political Theory (2014) 13, 168217. doi:10.1057/cpt.2013.40; published online 21 January 2014
Without things to ght about democracies cannot exist. Bonnie Honig Few theorists have done more in recent years to explore and develop our understanding of the political conicts and struggles that lie at the heart of democratic politics than Bonnie Honig. Through books such as Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, and Democracy (2009), Democracy and the Foreigner (2001), and Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (1993), along with numerous scholarly journal articles, Honig has sought to develop an agonistic account of democratic politics, and also to sketch out a role for political theorising that alerts us to the exclusions and remainders that accompany any political order. She prompts us to be attentive to these exclusions, and to believe that political theory should provide resources for those engaged in democratic activism to challenge the existing order of things. At the same time, we are reminded to be solicitous towards democratic achievements, and to protect those institutions that make democratic life possible against the challenge of more authoritarian forms of politics. Thus we should engage in both combat, as we seek to render our democratic institutions more open, inclusive and just, and also care as we seek to protect the values that have been created in, and by, the always imperfect forms of democratic politics that we currently possess. Recent years have seen a revived interest in humanism in democratic theory. This is interpreted by Honig as a return to an older tradition, as it is a form of humanism grounded not in rationality, but the ontological fact of mortality, not the capacity to reason but vulnerability to suffering (2010, p. 1). Against this mortalist turn, Honig reminds us that there is more that binds humanity together than the inevitability of suffering and death, and through readings of (for example) the story of Antigone she develops an account of agonistic humanism that posits, alongside these mortalist elements, the equally important qualities of natality, creation and new beginnings. Politics may consist of struggle, pain, and conict but also of mutuality, pleasure and care (2010, p. 26). The three engagements with Honigs work in this Critical Exchange take up this humanist theme in various ways. Clare Woodford draws on themes most fully
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developed in Honigs Democracy and the Foreigner, in particular her use of the work of Jacque Rancire to develop an account of the taking immigrant as a positive democratic actor. Woodford articulates a concern that Honigs development of this idea may not adequately account for structural features that could make demonization of difference more likely. On this view Honigs preferred democratic cosmopolitanism can itself become a police order, in Rancires terms, recuperating inequalities and entrenched antagonisms within its institutional and policyorientated dimensions. To counter this, Woodford seeks to draw together Honigs invocation to employ myths in order to foster alternative imaginaries, with Rancires afrmation of poetics as a precursor of politics. This would encourage us to view our cultural norms and practices anew, as they themselves become foreign to us, leaving us receptive to the possibility of disruptive change. Alan Finlayson explores the ways in which Honigs practice of political theory itself inscribes or enacts agonistic claims. This occurs though two devices. Firstly her use of the epigraph, employed not merely to display erudition or add an element of external authority to an argument but (having itself an agonistic role) to render visible the traditions of thought against, through, and with which political thinking must always take place. The second element of Honigs practice is the use of exemplars, gures who engage in the forms of natalstic, creative politics that interest her. The examples of Ruth, Antigone and Louis Post all exemplify a kind of political action that embodies Honigs notion of virt exible and timely judgment and adaptive strategy which allows them to work the intervals, to call for, or create, more inclusive forms of political life. Finlayson sees this work as related to the Renaissance humanist tradition as exemplied in the work of Machiavelli. The contribution by Marc Stears focuses on British intellectual life in the mid-tolate 1930s, a time when Europe was of course living in the shadow of the Nazi threat and thoughts were turning to the likelihood of war. This was a time, according to Stears, when questions that we would now recognise as revolving around humanism, realism and agonism, the central concerns of Honigs work today, were becoming dominant. In response to the Jed Estys thesis that British intellectual thought at this time retreated to the comforts of conservatism and romanticism, Stears offers readings of Virginia Woolfs Between the Acts, and Dylan Thomass Under Milk Wood, that seek to show British cultural artefacts of this era as both more complex and more agonistic than that. Woolfs apparent portrayal of rural stability and communal values carries an undercurrent in which violence, death and destruction remain as our genuinely unifying characteristics. Thomass work comes closer to the mix of natality and mortality highlighted as desirable by Honig, portraying a town in which this violence, death and destruction are all with us, but in which death does not have dominion, and in which the combination of communal life and salty individualism provide life and hope. These three essays provide thoughtful and insightful reections upon Honigs work itself, or upon themes that relate closely to it. Honigs reply, at the end of this
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collection, is itself a model of both generosity and engagement. We would like to thank all four contributors for giving so willingly of their time and effort. Mathew Humphrey University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK mathew.humphrey@nottingham.ac.uk David Owen University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK dowen@soton.ac.uk Joe Hoover City University, London EC1V 0HB, UK joseph.hoover.1@city.ac.uk
Perspectives of foreignness: Honigs humanism and radical democratic subjectication
Politics exists because those who have no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account. This always one-off act of equality cannot consist in any form of social bond whatsoever. Equality turns into the opposite the moment it aspires to a place in the social or state organisation. Jacques Rancire, Disagreement (1999, pp. 27, 34) [W]e need a politics that acknowledges our passionate ambivalences and engages them by pluralizing our attachments so that the nation-state is just one of several sites of ambivalent attachment rather than the sole and central site of simply romantic love. Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (2001, pp.121122) Immigration has long been recognised as posing a challenge to democracy. In claiming rights that they have not been accorded, immigrants challenge the
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fundamental denition of democracy as founded on equality the rule of the people as equals and everywhere comes up against the edges of this equality, the borders across which equality does not travel and the term the people does not apply. This is a particular kind of challenge then, a challenge of who is included in democracys purported equality: who counts and who does not count. Furthermore, in discussion of this challenge, immigrants themselves are treated as objects rather than subjects of politics. As Paul Apostolidis points out in his recent book Breaks in the Chain, the debate about immigration is carried out through native-born Americans statements about immigrants and proposals for what to do to and (less often) for immigrants (2010, p. xiii). Rarely in considering immigration and democracy are the immigrants themselves the subjects, subjects who can come into democracy to make demands upon it, to determine the precise nature of the challenge they wish to pose to a particular conguration of democracy, to stretch and recongure it, instilling a deep challenge to the entrenched ways of doing things, a challenge to democracy to become less bounded and conditional and more open and responsive. This is a topic addressed by Bonnie Honig in her book Democracy and the Foreigner (2001) where she suggests that this taking immigrant should be recast as a positive democratic actor with potential to refresh and deepen democracy. This rethinking the role of the immigrant forms part of Honigs theory of democratic cosmopolitanism whereby she envisages a democracy committed both to a cosmopolitan openness to foreigners as well as democratic values of both local and popular empowerment. In recasting immigrants in such a way, Honig draws heavily on Jacques Rancires conceptualisation of democratic politics constituted as a claim to equality, staged via a taking of rights that have not yet been accorded. Given the central importance of Rancire for Honigs democratic cosmopolitanism, I wish to explore the relationship between Honigs and Rancires work in more detail to show the challenge that Rancire poses for Honig, but also, in addressing this, how Honigs work can be regured as a valuable supplement for Rancirian politics. Such a topic is of relevance beyond Rancire or Honig scholarship, for it pertains to the nature and practice of democratic politics in general. Rancirian politics is about the empowerment (the moment of subjectication) of any people who are without voice, who are excluded from the dominant order, and although Honig draws our attention to immigrants as a particular instantiation of such subjectication, politics is not limited to immigrants but is the tool that must be used by any who are excluded to break open the dominant order and assert their existence. It seems such an argument should be a valuable tool for emancipation and empowerment of both immigrants and others, but Rancire has been subject to much criticism as to the availability of his politics given that it cannot be organised or planned. Initially it seems that Honigs democratic cosmopolitanism can respond to this via her argument that foreigners are those who do democracy and hence if nation states are more open to foreigners, more politics will occur. However, in clarifying the nature of the benets of the foreigner for democracy, I show that it is not so much foreigners but
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what she identies as their perspective of foreignness that is doing the work here. On its own democratic cosmopolitanism need not lead to a more open democracy, and furthermore, could even intensify, the us/them paradoxes that Honig wishes to relieve. Instead, I emphasise that the particular salience of Honigs foreigner gure is the foreignness it embodies, as a perspective of non-belonging. Detached from democratic cosmopolitanism, I suggest that this be regured as a democratic praxis of looking anew at our ordinary social practices, which, for the sake of democracy, must not be simply located in subjects from beyond national borders, but within us all. Therefore, I suggest that Honigs work offers us a praxis of politics: by making social practices seem strange (foreign) to us it is to be hoped that we can entertain a new critical perspective from which to question and subvert. In this way, our police order can be made more disposed towards irruptions of politics offering subjectication and emancipation for all who nd themselves oppressed or excluded; all those who nd themselves beyond the metaphorical, as well as the literal, borders of democracy.
Politics or Police? Honigs Democratic Cosmopolitanism

In Democracy and the Foreigner Honig argues that we can use Rancires work on democratic taking as a way to think about immigrants in democracy more positively, and thereby overcome the negative status of what she identies as the bad taking image of the foreigner. In this all-too-familiar image, the immigrant is seen to have rejected the hand of friendship that the citizenry perceive they have offered, and instead is caricatured as a badly behaved guest, repaying citizen hospitality with the ingratitude of demands (Honig, 2001, p. 79). Yet in the light of Rancires understanding of democratic politics as that which actually goes against everyday run-of-the-mill political activity, Honig suggests that these actions should not be perceived as overstepping the bounds of the hospitality offered, but instead as a democratic act. Rancire conceives of politics in this way in contrast to the everyday ordering of our lives which he instead denotes as police. The police is for Rancire everything that is part of the sensible order the ordinary system of categorisation that assigns bodies to specic places and tasks (1999, p. 29; 2004a, p. 12). Rancire stretches this term beyond its Foucauldian association with discipline, to one that refers to the entire conguration of occupations and the properties of the spaces where these occupations are distributed (1999, p. 29) in what is recognised as a sensible distribution. Hence for Rancire, it is this sensible order that politics challenges. Furthermore, Rancire tells us that this challenge is effected through imitation of the dominant grouping to enable the emergence of a new grouping whose identity has not yet been recognised by the police (he refers to this grouping as the part that has no part) and whose claim for recognition cannot be accommodated without a change to the police (Rancire, 1999, p. 30). Politics works then, by overturning the
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fundamental assumptions of the sensible order, by making new sense perceptible within what was previously disregarded as irrelevant noise (1999, p. 30). Consequently Honig argues that when immigrants engage in taking rights that they are not accorded, instead of judging them harshly we should recognise the quintessentially democratic nature of their behaviour. In this way, she shows us that foreigners are of central importance for democracy in that they challenge it to be true to its basic values of equality and openness; they are the catalyst that prevent democracy from entrenching injustice and keeps it open to revision and renewal. In light of this claim, it no longer makes sense to think of democracy as a nationcentred set of solidarities, practices and institutions, and accordingly she suggests we turn to a cosmopolitan understanding of democracy instead (Honig, 2001, p. 8). Beyond the obvious appeal of such an argument for all democrats who see the current failure of democratic practice on immigration to live up to democratic ideals, Honigs work does initially pose an attractive way of defending Rancires work against his many critics, who accuse him of neglecting the organisational nature of politics and thereby avoiding political change, since if he denies that we can organise resistance it seems that the police order will remain undisturbed (see inter alia, iek, 1999, ch. 4; Labelle, 2001, p. 94; Badiou, 2006, 2009; Citton, 2009, p. 128; Hallward, 2009, p. 154; Dean, 2009a, pp. 1314; 2009b, p. 23). Rancires assertion that politics is rare (for example, 1999, p. 40) understandably adds further fuel to these concerns. By refusing to see that which we commonly understand to be political in the everyday workings of a democracy, and re-labelling these as part of the police, Rancire is charged with neglecting variation in the police order and the ability of ordinary politics to effect meaningful change within the everyday. Hence critics suggest that in order to better understand political resistance we need to turn more attention to the police order (Norval, 2007, p. 141; Bosteels, 2009, pp. 169170; Citton, 2009, p. 138; Davis, 2010, pp. 92100) because it is here that we can begin to effect immediate change. Although other theorists, in contrast, do cite Rancire as inspiration for political action and even desire to use his work to support mobilisation of political movements,1 they fail to engage with these critiques, leaving it unclear as to how politics can be brought about and how the part that has no part would be able to enact politics. Hence, my investigation was sparked by an initial curiosity as to whether Honigs work offers an insight that could be of value in bridging this gap. Consequently, by identifying the features of politics in immigrant takings and pointing towards openness to immigrants as one way that more politics could be brought about, Honig seems to speak to this concern. Her democratic cosmopolitanism rstly offers us a concrete way of identifying politics in something that we may otherwise overlook as merely ordinary and everyday, revealing its power to challenge the police order; and secondly, by showing that foreigners are more likely to enact politics (see esp. pp. 8082 and 100101) she argues that we could increase the potential for politics through loosening our commitments to nation-bounded citizenship by enacting transnational ties, promoting social and worker movements
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and expanding alien suffrage (2001, p. 102), thereby increasing sites of foreignness within democratic nation states. However, I wish to suggest that in its current form democratic cosmopolitanism is ill-equipped for this second step (increasing the potential for politics) and may actually have the opposite effect, since by overlooking the relationship between Rancires police and politics, I am concerned that Honig has failed to realise the extent to which some elements of democratic cosmopolitanism may operate to restrict its ability to create spaces for politics. This is evident when we uncover a little more about what democratic cosmopolitanism consists of. Honig is keen to distinguish her own particular brand of cosmopolitan, which she terms democratic cosmopolitanism, from other cosmopolitanisms (such as those expounded by Julia Kristeva and David Hollinger), because she wishes to avoid rooting it in a national ideal and instead roots it in a democratic ideal. However, in Democracy and the Foreigner she does not seek to construct a detailed theory as such, instead wishing to devote more space to her defence of the constitutive role that foreigners play in democracies. However, she does indicate its basic principles: democratic cosmopolitanism is the name for forms of internationalism that seek not to govern, per se, but rather to widen the resources, energies, and accountability of an emerging international civil society that contests or supports state actions in matters of transnational and local interest such as environmental, economic, military, cultural, and social policies. This is democratic cosmopolitanism because democracy, in the sense of a commitment to local and popular empowerment, effective representation, accountability and the generation of actions in concert across lines of difference, is its goal. (Honig, 2001, p. 13) In this sense, although it is not clearly dened, it does appear that democratic cosmopolitanism still takes the form of a set of solidarities, practices and institutions but is no longer nation-centred, instead operating across rather than within borders. At their most successful, Honig tells us, such actions in concert open up and even institutionalize spaces of public power, action and discourse that did not exist before (2001, p. 13). There also appears to be an ethical element here that is especially apparent in the call to seek out friends and partners even (or especially) among strangers and foreigners (Honig, 2001, p. 13). Furthermore, the requirement of foreigners for democracy leads Honig to identify the aforementioned policies of promotion of transnational ties and social and worker movements as well as expanding alien suffrage as necessary for democratic cosmopolitanism (2001, p. 102). In this sense then it seems that democratic cosmopolitanism may better be understood as constituting police order, in that it comprises ethical commitments, institutions and policy proposals. It will therefore be susceptible to the police tendencies of opposing competing articulations of equality and potentially suppressing rather than opening up potential for politics.
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In saying this I am not implying that democratic cosmopolitanism carries any particularly malign content, since Rancire has made it clear that there is variation in police order, some kinds being more benign than others2; I simply wish to assert that it contains content in a way that Rancirian politics does not. Hence in accepting Honigs argument without further clarication, we may miss out on the way these elements of democratic cosmopolitanism could become entrenched in a repressive manner, not only limiting its potential to create conditions more conducive to Rancirian politics, but enhancing its potential to act as a repressive force, whereby it may be rendered blind to its own injustices. Furthermore, I would suggest that in accepting Honigs argument as it stands, we would also fail to acknowledge the depth of insight that Rancires work on politics offers democracy today as well as the full extent to which Honigs work on foreignness could provide a valuable supplement to Rancire in response to his aforementioned critics. In suggesting that democratic cosmopolitanism could become entrenched and repressive, I am drawing on Rancires claim that as soon as the equality that is enacted in the moment of politics is institutionalised it turns into inequality. Hence, any statement of equality must always be a one-off performance (Rancire, 1999, p. 34): in being institutionalised it becomes particular to one dominant party. Therefore, to the extent that democratic cosmopolitanism involves institutionalisation and the advocacy of certain policies, such as that of open borders, it belongs to the realm of police and cannot be relied upon to open up more spaces for Rancirian politics. This could be problematic, since although Honig has shown a strong relationship between the deepening of democracy and foreignness, I am concerned that the claim that a cosmopolitan openness to foreigners will bring about a democracy more open in terms of values rather than just in terms of borders is too hasty. Honig shows how foreigners and strangers can and often do act as a democratising supplement, enacting politics in the Rancirian sense by taking rights before they are granted (2001, pp. 100101). However, this does not mean that they will necessarily do this, or that the police order will be receptive to their politics.3 In the face of an oppressive police order many immigrants may simply be forced to keep their heads down and accept their lot as second-class citizens operating on the borders of society. Such a scenario makes us recall Rancires cautious insistence that politics is rare, for certainly in the face of oppressive orders politics is the exception rather than the norm. Instead, in order to understand better how such a deepening of democracy could be brought about it is necessary to consider what the conditions are for success. What is it that prevents the police order from being more open to politics, effected both by immigrants and other actors?
Passionate Ambivalence and Foreignness as Democratic Practice

Interestingly, Honig has actually attended to the contemporary tendency towards entrenchment of polarised political position-taking. She observes this in relation to
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the subject of foreignness where she notes that each of the two opposing gures of the good and bad foreigner present in foreign-founder myths is associated with an extreme position (indiscriminatory love or hatred of foreigners), each of which could potentially antagonise those who do not support it to the point where they may be pushed to support its opposite (that is, where those who are viciously antiimmigrant may push others to become virulently pro-immigrant, regardless of the details of particular cases, hence she speaks of two competing extreme positions of xenophobia versus xenophilia (2001, ch. 4)). Since to strongly favour either version is to increase the potential for antagonism, Honig suggests that it may be better to move beyond a passionate attachment to either pole and replace it instead with an understanding of the various dimensions of the relationship between national borders and differing views of foreignness (2001, p. 76). By promoting in place of nationalism a denationalising democratic cosmopolitanism, Honig hopes to help us re-negotiate the binaries that have riven our political landscape. By diluting our national attachments and spreading ourselves more thinly over multiple attachments it is to be hoped that democratic cosmopolitanism will make these attachments less important to us, thereby providing more receptivity to the increased occurrences of Rancirian politics that foreigners may enact. Honig suggests that this tendency is rooted in the common reading of foreignfounder texts within the genre of a romance or happy-ending love story where the key problem for democracy is one of nding the right match between a people and its law, a state and its institutions (2001, p. 109). Instead, because such readings have so far allowed us to overlook the complex, constitutive, role of foreignness as an undecidable supplement in national democratic imaginations she suggests we may be better off reading democratic texts in the genre of a gothic romance, thereby prompting a re-reading of democracy that accepts, rather than seeks to resolve, the passionate ambivalence at its heart (2001, p. 108). In line with such a reading of democracy Honig suggests that we should regure democratic subjects as gothic subjects with the associated characteristics of passionate ambivalence. This includes an acceptance of ones relationship with democracy as one of maturation, of getting older, growing up with ones new partner(s) in democratic life, seen as an ongoing relationship that requires constant attention and effort (2001, p. 113). Furthermore, such subjects are those that exist in agonistic relation to a founder whose alienness is a poorly kept secret; subjects do not expect power to be granted to them by nice authorities with their best interests at heart (or, if they do harbour such an expectation, they are the sort that is able to rally after an initial disappointment); subjects who know that if they want power they must take it; subjects who know that such takings are always illegitimate from the perspective of the order in place at the time; subjects who know that their efforts to carve our a legitimate and just polity will always be haunted by the violence of their
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founding; subjects who experience the law as a horizon of a promise but also as an alien and impositional thing. (Honig, 2001, pp. 114115) This perspective of foreignness is not intended to inspire those characteristics found in gothic horror of paralysing paranoia in the face of monstrous forces beyond our control, nor a clear distinction between the forces of good and evil but instead a healthy caution to be wary of authorities and powers that seek to govern us, claiming to know what is in our best interests, such that we must take from the genre of the female gothic the valuable exhortation to take matters into our own hands, along with a better understanding of not only the powers but also the limits of self-conscious agency (2001, p. 118). Yet as we have seen, Honig sees these characteristics of foreignness and passionate ambivalence as part of her wider model of democratic cosmopolitanism. She suggests that seeking cosmopolitan instead of nationalist democracy need not mean giving up the passion that nationalism incites, but inciting that passion through other means. Since the gothic genre recognises that a subject can be passionately devoted to someone she does not necessarily trust, or is not necessarily all good (2001, pp. 120121), Honig hopes that, as far as foreigners are concerned, passionate ambivalence will enable us to be passionately devoted to welcoming immigrants for the benets they may bring while being aware that this need not result in a nave trust. She accordingly calls for a democratic cosmopolitan politics that acknowledges our passionate ambivalences and engages them by pluralizing our attachments so that the nation-state is just one of several sites of always ambivalent attachment rather than the sole and central site of simple romantic love. (2001, p. 122) In this way, Honig hopes democratic cosmopolitanism may help us overcome the need to intensify paradoxes that make us rescript political problems into a situation of us against them (2001, p. 122), instead realising that the problem may lie with us all along as interpreters of foreignness (Honig, 2001, p. 119). She identies democratic cosmopolitanism as a counterpolitics of foreignness (2001, p. 99), understood as a perspective of foreignness as ambiguous detachment and passionate ambivalence. It seems to me that such a practice could be of immense value in both prompting the subjectivity necessary for Rancirian politics as well as making any police order more open to politics by weakening peoples attachments to the order in which they live. However, for this to be possible, it is necessary to distinguish between two opposing elements in Honigs democratic cosmopolitanism, the logos-forming policies, ethical solidarities and institutionalisation versus its logos-challenging practice of foreignness and passionate ambivalence. Otherwise, we risk defusing the potential of these practices to challenge police order, which for Rancirian politics, they must continue to do, even where that order is the very order of democratic cosmopolitanism that Honig proposes.
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I consequently propose that Honigs faith in democratic cosmopolitanism as a system of governance may be a little hasty and instead suggest that she needs to distinguish between the level of a particular instantiation of inequality (in the treatment of immigrants which may be overcome by politics that can force the recognition of immigrant rights and thereby instigate police order that recognises immigrant equality), and the more general level of politics as countless diverse moments of equality that challenge the many inequalities that will always continue to emerge from the police ordering of our social lives. Honigs suggestion that democratic cosmopolitanism could help us overcome the drive to binaries in contemporary politics omits what is motivating this drive in the rst place, what is entrenching values into a more xed order rather than a looser conguration. Although Honig asserts that passionate ambivalence is expressed by gothic subjects in their knowledge that one can be passionately attached to somethingand be deeply and justiablyafraid of it at the same time (2001, pp. 120121), she does not examine whether structural factors may induce passionate political position-taking in such a way as to make demonisation of difference more likely,4 regardless of the particular conguration of the police order, thereby denoting who is more or less able to exhibit passionate ambivalence in a way that may need to be attended to prior to the call for democratic cosmopolitanism.5 Without attending to this question, it is difcult to assess whether the gothic subject armed with passionate ambivalence would be strong enough to counter this disposition. It is consequently necessary to consider why a nave trust versus ambiguity towards the nation becomes polarised in modern democracy (in both literature and practice) into the melodramatic binaries of the consuming love versus fear encompassed in the gothic genre. Such a melodramatic intensication of binaries is addressed by Rancires essay The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics, where he argues that the current order of things brings an unprecedented dramaturgy of innite evil, justice, and redemption (2006, p. 2), evoking the impression that the way democracy is read today is already less in accordance with the genre of modern romance, or indeed, gothic romance, but instead, accords more with gothic horror.6 Perhaps surprisingly, Rancire roots the tendency towards polarisation by diagnosing it as a symptom of what he calls the ethical turn. This turn seeks to overcome opposition and division through consensus: rising above distinctions, to form an ethical community beyond difference, uniting the people into a single one, a one that is identical with the counting of the population and of its parts, and with the counting of the interests of the global community and of its parts. (Rancire, 2006, p. 6) Thus anyone who does not t can no longer be recognised because they, as a supplement to the people, are no longer supposed to exist, since everyone is included (2006, p. 7).7 It is this that leads to entrenchment of polarised positions, between the
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included and either the subordinated other: receiver of help or aid on unequal terms; or the radical other: permanently alien, the evil that is the object of hatred. This polarisation is evident in the growing proliferation of the categories of innite justice versus absolute evil in contemporary politics (Rancire, 2006, p. 3) and hence it is this that drives the dynamics of the aforementioned demonisation. Consequently it becomes evident that we must re-consider the link between the recognition of the value of foreignness for democracy and Honigs aforementioned call for cosmopolitanism with its associated inclusion of immigrants and denationalisation (2001, p. 102), for it is not clear that combined in such a way these steps could overcome the drive motivating the inhospitality and hatred that immigrants continue to face. Instead, in the current order of things, could they not simply multiply the sites where the absolute evil of the ethical turn is claimed to reside and thereby further entrench the hold of police orderings? Furthermore, inasmuch as democratic cosmopolitanism contains positive ethical content the concern emerges that it could simply be reduced to another ethical community that excludes those who do not share its values. Indeed Honig notes that democratic cosmopolitanism may not escape the paradoxes and conundra of which the symbolic politics of foreignness are symptomatic, yet she still hopes that it may relieve some of the pressures that intensify those paradoxes or it might even stop us from rescripting those paradoxes into political problematics that usually end up pitting us against them (2001, pp. 121122). In line with this laudable aim, I propose that Honig should detach foreignness and the ambivalent subject from democratic cosmopolitanism and instead use them to supplement Rancires politics, whereby the ambivalent subject challenges entrenchment of these paradoxes in order to avoid the possibility of their simply being re-inscripted on a larger, more terrifying scale. Although Rancire indicates that we can never overcome entrenchment of polarised positions, his work does suggest that it remains possible to weaken this entrenchment, lessening subordination of one pole by its opposite via practices such as the poetics of politics (1994, 2004b, 2007). In other words, it is possible to lessen the entrenchment of any police order so that it is more open to instances of politics. He therefore calls on us to embrace the ambiguous, precarious, litigious cuts of politics (2006, p. 19) which has the capacity to rend and overturn this order. This means embracing partiality, accepting the taking of sides, the holding of opposing positions. It appears to me that Honig intends passionate ambivalence to do just this, by accepting that we will have multiple plural attachments, rather than pushing us to take up one consistent position. As we have seen, however, this requires detaching it from the other elements of cosmopolitan democracy, for as long as passionate ambivalence is associated with a particular system of governance it would have the opposite effect, normalising these attachments, neutralising their potential to challenge the current order by bringing them into the fold of acceptable beliefs and rendering impotent their political power to disrupt. By extracting foreignness (as exemplied by the characteristics of the gothic subject) from democratic cosmopolitanism, it is possible to highlight its potential as a
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practice that could encourage instances of Rancirian politics. The salience for us of Honigs argument is that by identifying the characteristics of foreignness she has shown how to gain that perspective necessary to enact politics: the perspective necessary for democratic subjectication. The value of the gure of the foreigner is that it enters into a system that will always be perceived as strange (foreign) and external. This raises the possibility that there is political efcacy in acting foreign in the sense not of imitating foreigners, but of imitating their perspective. By looking anew at our ordinary cultural norms and behavioural practices we make them seem strange (foreign) to us, revealing a new perspective from which to question, subvert, exploit and rupture police order. In addition, although Rancire roots the current drive to demonisation and polarisation in the contemporary order it is evident that any entrenchment of values into a specic order constitutes his police,8 yet how extreme the entrenchment seems to depend on how open that order may be to irruptions of politics.9 To counter this, it seems we must seek to encourage politics by attending to the conditions most conducive to its emergence, and consider whether these could comprise less entrenched police order. I therefore wish to underline that I am not proposing that Honig should abandon democratic cosmopolitanism, for it seems evident that as a system of governance supplemented by passionate ambivalence and foreignness it may have a lot to offer as what Rancire refers to a better police (1999, p. 31), yet the distinction between its institutional, ethical and policy commitments as part of a police order and the moments of politics that may emerge from the practice of passionate ambivalence and foreignness need to be articulated more clearly. It consequently becomes necessary to recognise democratic cosmopolitanism as comprising two dimensions which Honig fails to distinguish: on the one side a system of institutions, ethical practices and policy prescriptions; on the other, content-less practices. As a system of institutions, ethical values and policy prescriptions Honigs democratic cosmopolitanism does not offer a way of breaking with the current order of demonisation and could simply offer a variation of police order, a new conguration within this. However, when supplemented rstly, by an analysis of the structural causes of this order, and secondly, by the practice of foreignness and passionate ambivalence to cosmopolitan democracy as merely one possible means of enabling more politics, it is possible that democratic cosmopolitanism could offer potential as a police that is constitutively open to the disruptions of politics,10 in the sense of a police that instils conditions more conducive to politics than those currently on offer. However, its identity as a police order must be explicitly acknowledged, in order to avoid it simply replacing one set of binaries with another: becoming entrenched within the current order of things, and so pitted against an opposing demonised viewpoint. It could thereby become part of the polarising order of things which it seeks to overcome, re-inscribing the injustices it seeks to ease. In acknowledgment of this, I instead propose that cosmopolitan democracy should not be presented as a form of politics, but should be investigated as to its potential to be a form of police that is more conducive to the emergence of politics.
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Conclusion
In investigating the way in which Rancires political taking is of use to Honigs democratic cosmopolitanism, the concern emerges that when such taking is related to Honigs model of democratic cosmopolitanism it may lose its critical purchase and thereby fail to challenge and in the worst instance could simply re-inscribe, rather than ambivalently re-negotiate the dynamics of demonisation that Honig seeks to avoid. In response to this I have sought to separate Honigs gothic subject, as the practitioner of foreignness and passionate ambivalence, from democratic cosmopolitanism in order to suggest a democratic praxis more conducive to effecting politics. It is suggested that this may guard against the likelihood of cosmopolitan values becoming entrenched into an oppressive police order, instead seeking to make it more open to stagings of equality. Yet, in response to this conclusion, if foreignness does serve to demonstrate the conditions under which Rancirian politics could be made more likely, a new question emerges concerning the structural conditions under which this foreignness could be engendered and nourished among democratic subjects.
Notes
1 The most obvious exponent of such a view is found in Todd Mays use of Rancire to inform contemporary anarchist society and radical social movements in his two latest books: The Politics of Jacques Rancire (2008) and Contemporary Political Movements and the Thought of Jacques Rancire (2010), although he is not alone in this positive use of Rancire (see Deranty, 2003a, b, 2010; Panagia, 2003, 2006; Chambers, 2005, 2011, 2012; Power, 2009). Contra Badiou, iek and the rest, May sees no problem in using Rancire to inspire a politics of emancipation that is not opposed to democratic political movements and even questions whether some form of institutionalisation of Rancirian democracy could be conceived (2008, pp. 176184; 2010, pp. 2627, 137). 2 The police can procure all sorts of good, and one kind of police may be innitely preferable to another. This does not change the nature of the police, which is what we are dealing with here (Rancire, 1999, p. 31). 3 Indeed, see Paul Apostolidis book Breaks in the Chain (2010) for accounts of the lengths the police order has gone to repress immigrant politics in the United States. For more global examples of repression of immigrant and worker politics, see Paul Masons Live Working or Die Fighting (2007). 4 For example, struggle for access to resources could increase hostility to difference. 5 Thanks to Joe Hoover for providing the example whereby such ambivalence may require a substantial amount of security (both psychological and material) and may not for example be as easily attained by those who feel most at risk from immigration, such as low-waged workers whose job security appears threatened. 6 In making this observation I do not wish to follow Richard Rorty down the path of romanticising the nation in response to the gothic horror reading (1999). In contrast I agree with Honig that this may not escape the gothic horror scenario but actually embed it, placing those who will not join the consensus of the liberal democratic nation beyond its boundaries, representing the forever-excluded gothic monster, and setting in motion the very dynamics of demonization that Honig has traced (2001, p. 117). But I would assert that Rorty is merely reading in accordance with the aforementioned order of things, an order that Honig has failed to unveil.
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7 Indeed, Honig would agree with Rancires claim that this move to consensus actually results in entrenching difference; see, for example, Honig (1993). 8 equality turns into the opposite the moment it aspires to a place in the social or state organisation (1999, p. 34). 9 He implies that the ethical regime is an order that aims to totally dissolve the specicity of politics, stiing it via consensus which claims to include all, thereby xing the position of the Other (2006b, pp. 27). 10 Again see Honigs later work (2007, 2009) for further development of these themes.
References
Apostolidis, P. (2010) Breaks in the Chain: What Immigrant Workers Can Teach America About Democracy. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press. Badiou, A. (2006) Metapolitics. London: Verso. Badiou, A. (2009) The lessons of Jacques Rancire: Knowledge and power after the storm. In: G. Rockhill and P. Watts (eds.) Jacques Rancire: History, Politics, Aesthetics. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Bosteels, B. (2009) Rancires Leftism, or, politics and its discontents. In: G. Rockhill and P. Watts (eds.) Jacques Rancire: History, Politics, Aesthetics. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Chambers, S. (2005) The politics of literarity. Theory and Event, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_ and_event/v008/8.3chambers.html, accessed 2 December 12. Chambers, S. (2011) Jacques Rancire and the problem of pure politics. European Journal of Political Theory 10(3): 303326. Chambers, S. (2012) The Lessons of Rancire. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Citton, Y. (2009) Political agency and the ambivalence of the sensible. In: G. Rockhill and P. Watts (eds.) Jacques Rancire: History, Politics, Aesthetics. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Davis, O. (2010) Jacques Rancire. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Dean, J. (2009a) Democracy and Other Neo-liberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dean, J. (2009b) Politics without politics. Parallax 15(3): 2036. Deranty, J. (2003a) Jacques Rancires contribution to the Ethics of recognition. Political Theory 31(1): 136156. Deranty, J. (2003b) Rancire and contemporary political ontology. Theory and Event, http://muse.jhu.edu/ journals/theory_and_event/v006/6.4deranty.html, accessed 2 December 13. Hallward, P. (2009) Staging equality: Rancires theotocracy and the limits of Anarchic equality. In: G. Rockhill and P. Watts (eds.) Jacques Rancire: History, Politics, Aesthetics. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Honig, B. (1993) Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Honig, B. (2001) Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Honig, B. (2009) Antigones laments, Creons grief: Mourning, membership, and the politics of exception. Political Theory 37(5): 442. Labelle, G. (2001) Two refoundation projects of democracy in contemporary French philosophy: Cornelius Castoriadis and Jacques Rancire. Philosophy and Social Criticism 27(4): 75103. May, T. (2008) The Political Thought of Jacques Rancire; Creating Equality. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. May, T. (2010) Contemporary Political Movements and the Thought of Jacques Rancire: Equality in Action. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.
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Mason, P. (2007) Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global. London: Harvill Secker. Norval, A.J. (2007) Aversive Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Panagia, D. (2003) Thinking with and against the Ten Theses. Theory and Event, http://muse.jhu.edu/ journals/theory_and_event/v006/6.4panagia.html, accessed 2 December 13. Panagia, D. (2006) The Poetics of Political Thinking. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Power, N. (2009) Which equality? Badiou and Rancire in light of Feuerbach. parallax 15(3): 6380. Rancire, J. (1994) The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, Translated by H. Melehy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rancire, J. (1999) Dis-agreement, Translated by J. Rose. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rancire, J. (2004a) The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, Translated by G. Rockhill. London: Continuum. Rancire, J. (2004b) The Flesh of Words. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rancire, J. (2006) The ethical turn of aesthetics and politics. Critical Horizons 7(1): 120. Rancire, J. (2007) What does it mean to be un? Continuum 21(4): 55969. Rorty, R. (1999) Achieving Our Country. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press. iek, S. (1999) Political subjectivization and its vicissitudes. In: The Ticklish Subject, Ch. 4. London: Verso.
Clare Woodford Queen Mary, University of London, London E1 4NS, UK
The virt of invention: Bonnie Honigs exemplars of agonistic politics
Critiques of agonistic political theory, and attempts to assimilate some of its insights to theories of inclusion or deliberation, often fail to observe the distinctiveness of the way in which agonism conceives of the relationship of political theory to political activity, and the particular forms of writing to which this gives rise (for example, Chambers, 2003; Dryzek, 2005; Knops, 2007). Agonistic political theory is very conscious of the fact that it starts in medias res, that politics is always already underway and that the beginning and end of the story are equally hard to see. In contrast with those styles of political theory which claim to be concerned with moral
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universals, and with how these might regulate existing polities, agonism is animated by political interest in worlds not yet built and possibilities that are still emergent and in need of activist support and sustenance (Honig, 2009, p. 133). Political theory of this sort (although it is hardly a labour conned to the political theorist) seeks to identify opportunities for action, propelling us into them (Honig: 2009, p. 131). This aim induces agonistic theorists to write in very particular ways, something I explore in this essay through an examination of two characteristics of the work of Honig: epigraphs and exemplars. Demonstrating agonistic claims, her writing tries not only to tell readers about political virt but also to show it to them and invite them to respond.
Epigraphs
A striking characteristic of Honigs writing is her use of epigraphs. Of course, epigraphs are not uncommon in both literary and academic writing. But they are certainly used extensively by Honig: all of her books, chapters and articles begin with/ are preceded by quotations. For instance, Emergency Politics cites Rosenzweig prior to the contents page and at the head of the introduction. The chapters feature citations from Kapuciski, Connolly, Wittgenstein and Wendy Brown. Before page one of Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics are citations of Tocqueville, Arendt and Kleist. The chapters feature Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Ben Jonson, Rawls, Kafka, Adorno, Oakeshott, Pocock and Kristeva. Democracy and the Foreigner is preceded by Rancire and the chapters include epigraphs from Derrida, Jabes, Freud and Melville. Elsewhere she has in this way made use of Butler in Honig (2010) and President Kennedy in Honig (1993). Furthermore, as I will show, Honig uses epigraphs very artfully. She uses them not as adornment or as gratuitous displays of erudition but as devices which indicate both an embrace (of a theme, an author, a tradition) and a distancing from it, announcements of a theme to be subjected to agonistic reection. In academic writing citation is a way of introducing witnesses. These are, according to Aristotles Art of Rhetoric, anyone (or anything) we bring into our discourse to support our claims anyone whose thoughts might bring insight, and whom we think our audience will take seriously. They may be ancient such as the poets and all those other famous men whose judgements are well known or recent, namely notables who have given some judgement (1375b). What Serjeantson observes in relation to Renaissance uses of testimony is still true today: Its primary function was to bear witness to something, to prove an authors case and to confer value on the thing being argued for it also served as testimonial to the author himself, demonstrating his participation in a shared intellectual culture (Serjeantson, 2007, p. 192). Honigs citations certainly demonstrate authoritative erudition and indicate the intellectual cultures with which she has afnity. But her use of quotations as epigraphs makes them quite unlike the sorts of thing we nd buried in the middle of
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texts, supported by bracketed citations, providing vital yet unobtrusive ballast to arguments that might otherwise oat away. Epigraphs stand apart from the main movement of a text, commenting on the action from a distance, inviting readers to try out different views of it. For instance, the citation at the head of Emergency Politics is from Rosenzweig: If yearning were to forget what it already possesses, then that would be a lie, but if possession forgot to yearn that would be death. Here are central motifs of Honigs work yearning, forgetting, possession, death and a kind of prefatory summation of the text to come, an indication of the place to which it will take us. The epigraph invites us to view the readings offered by the book of various political moments, actions, ideas and phenomena with this paradox in mind and as readers coming to a text already in possession of something which, it suggests, we are not being urged to forget but to which there is something that may be added. That epigraph may be read in light of one Honig chose for Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics some 15 years before. This was Kleists expression of anxiety at the implications of the Kantian bar on the thing-in-itself and of his subsequent distress at our inability to establish whether we live in a world of truth or appearance. If the latter he writes, then the truth we assemble here is nothing after our death, and all endeavour to acquire a possession which will follow us to the grave is in vain. Here is an implicit critique of the vanity of wanting to possess knowledge beyond the mortal, an invitation to ask the question of how we might know and appreciate what we have, so that paradoxically we might then have more of it. That is what Honig explores, in Emergency Politics, through the terms of mere life and more life, themselves a citation of Derrida and of herself (Honig, 1993, pp. 113114; 2009, p. 10). All texts are reliant on the direct or indirect incorporation of things already said. In placing quotations prominently on the edges of her texts Honig draws attention to that fact, demonstrating an agonistic claim: thinking, writing and acting are always part of traditions which make them possible but from which they must either escape or be victims of their own foreclosure. Honig, and in this she is at her most Derridean, accepts that thinking occurs within a horizon but also against it and in the service of what is to come. Her epigraphs weave together texts, traditions and thoughts until her works exist in some strange place where Kleist and Rosenzweig, Tocqueville and President Kennedy, Rawls, Nietzsche, Arendt, Rancire and Sandel all meet. But this is not a place at which they arrived of necessity and Honigs epigraphs ensure openness, not closure. Rupturing the texts from which they come Honig also introduces that rupture into her own, putting it into an acknowledged and ongoing relationship with others an exemplication of the agonistic thought the gesture enunciates. Honigs deconstructive readings of political theorists identify the contradictions and foreclosures that hold claims in place, bringing them to the surface not so as to take something from them but so as to give them something back: ambiguity, undecidability and paradox. The point is not to win the argument but to stage it (to stage the agon) and in so
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doing create opportunities in which virt might be glimpsed. For instance, at the head of chapter ve of Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, Honig introduces us to Rawls: Embedded in the principles of justice there is an ideal of the person that provides an Archimedean point for judging the basic structure of society. She also introduces us to Kafka: He found the Archimedean point, but he used it against himself; it seems that he was permitted to nd it only under this condition. This is a beautifully neat summation of the poststructuralist critique of Rawls: discovery of a point sufciently distant from the world that it can be used, if not to lever it then to judge it in its entirety, subverts itself; we who might make use of such leverage over the world, because we are a part it, become (like Wile E. Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons) subject to our own inventions and trip or blow ourselves up. However, merely exposing this achieves little and triumphalism in so doing repeats the gesture under examination. Consistently Honig has sought to show the importance of building and caring for institutions as well as the necessity of criticising them. Her criticism of Rawls is not that he has the temerity to try and ground just institutions but that in inventing a mechanism for judging such grounds he allows himself to obscure or deny those things which are too hard for it to judge (and thus he will fail truly to care for the institutions under consideration). His theory becomes more and more beholden to its ideal invested in securing the conditions of its approximation, maintenance, and automaticity (but not those of its selfovercoming) (1993, p. 126). Honigs epigraphs are a means of such self-overcoming, of resisting the urge to ontologise claims and ndings while acknowledging a diversity of debts to tradition. Where Rawls wants a lever so large it requires him to stand apart from the world, Honig wants us to stay in the thick of it and to nd there the resources with which to plot a route into a future elsewhere. That quotation from Kafka is one of a series of very late aphorisms gathered under the title He. Given that the citation appears after a chapter devoted to Hannah Arendt, it is not unreasonable to assume that Honig found it in The Human Condition (1959) where it appears as the epigraph to section six, Arendt's reections upon the fate of the vita activa in the modern age. The motif of the Archimedean point runs throughout this section which contains an account of world alienation (the outcome of our progressive attainment of a universal or cosmic standpoint) and a critique of the reversal of means and ends exemplied by the atomic bomb. A cost of seeking the Archimedean point is that we might, as Arendt puts it, lose the ability to produce stories and become historical (1959, pp. 296297) preconditions of being political and hence free. Rawls Archimedean point presupposes an ideal of the person created out of abstraction. His is a theory concerned with means not ends. He attempts to create a polis out of the most general assumptions (Rawls, 1973, p. 260) presuming wants and interests as if these meant something apart from their particular embodiment and narration. His is, we might say, political theory acting into nature rather than forming part of the web of relationships.
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In placing Rawls next to Kafka (Arendt standing behind) Honig is not trying to have one win out over the other. The gesture enables simultaneous reection on the necessity of institutions (of the sort Rawls is trying to justify from outer space) and resistance to their ontologising. As Rawls becomes part of her text a debt is openly acknowledged and Honig demonstrates her craft of recombination (2009, p. 134). Her writing goes into the web of relationships out of which all such writing and thinking is produced, and, rather than hide it from us, shows us where things come from, inviting us to orient ourselves towards her text in different ways at different moments and to pursue, if we wish, some of the pathways to which it points.
Exemplars
Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics begins with three citations, one of which, from Kleist, we have already considered. Another is from Tocqueville. It identies democracy with experiment, innovation and adventure. The third is from Arendt. It announces heroism as a natural outcome of modern philosophy because it requires heroism to live in the world as Kant left it. Honig implies that in the face of the anxiety Kleist felt we are challenged to cultivate a kind of heroic attitude of democratic experiment, innovation and adventure. This is what the book will call virt. In developing this conception across her work Honig employs another kind of citation, that of actions rather than words: exemplars of democratic ideals and practices (2009, p. xi). She re-tells Arendtian historical stories of actors who nd themselves in the gap between thought and feeling, possession and possessed, and who, in response, attend with care to their present while acting into a future to come. These are actors who make some kind of choice, a commitment, but who, in order to honour it, cannot allow themselves to become subsumed within it, beholden to their ideal. Through their example Honig promotes an innovative politics tempered by maintenance, not just new beginnings but preparation, receptivity and orientation (1999, p. xvii). Consider the story of Ruth as addressed by Honig in Democracy and the Foreigner. Caught between Moab and Bethlehem, and between systems of property ownership and inheritance, Ruth a woman and a foreigner has no place. Honigs procedure here is typical of something she does rather often (Honig, 2001, pp. 41 72). First, she presents us with the story an unusual reference for contemporary political theory and one that immediately pluralises the tradition while opening onto numerous contemporary political concerns (immigration, gender equality, property rights). Then she introduces us to two interpretations of the story of Ruth (two ways of re-telling it) and gives us a reading of these that is sympathetic but also precise and critical. She shows how both Ozick and Kristeva advance readings that ignore or misread key moments, reducing Ruth to an agent of care, a giving maternal or daughterly woman (2001, p. 60). In contrast, Honig shows us a Ruth who is active and strategic, demonstrative of invention and transgression (2001, p. 61). Honigs
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Ruth, she writes, does what she can to get what she and her mother-in-law need to survive and be secure. Importantly, that includes claiming rights to which she has no right (2001, p. 61). A second example is Antigone, about whom Honig has written extensively. Antigone is already an exemplar for a number of discourses philosophical, psychoanalytic, feminist and more and a cipher for numerous preoccupations: death, family, religion and state power. Honigs reading of Antigone poses itself against these and puts itself in the middle of them. She takes aim at those who recuperate tragic drama for simplistic humanism, the universality of the mortal, and at those who make Antigone an exemplar of sacrice in the name of principle and an embodiment of human vulnerability. But, rather than simply push Antigone outside all of this, Honig characteristically nds her at the meeting point of a series of problematic binaries: humanist and anti-humanist; power and powerlessness; desire and principle; ethics and politics; human and animal (2010, p. 4). She then shows us an Antigone not passively in the grip of these antinomies but actively working the intervals (Honig, 2010, p. 22); a conscious political actor in the most straightforward (some might want to say base) sense. Honigs Antigone is a political actor not just because her commitment to the personal is political, nor only because in clinging to the principles of the private realm she unsettles and thus exposes the orders of the public. She is a political operator a strategist, even a rhetorician. In a detailed, intertextual and historical reading, Honig turns Antigones famous and famously problematic dirge into something politically telling: a parody of Pericles, mimicry of Creon, a subtle citation of Herodotus. In Honigs hands Antigones speech is no ethical lament but a political intervention. It provides reasons, makes an argument and speaks over the authority that would silence it. Antigone herself is neither the nineteenth-century romantic heroine of pure, unwavering lial love, nor the twentieth-century exemplar of the differend, but wry, funny. Arch (2010, p. 12). Where others nd Antigone at this point frantic, Honig nds her outfoxing Creon, insulting him to his face, exposing his faults and putting him on trial. In some respects this reading is thoroughly Arendtian. Honig embraces not the death of Antigone but her birth through speech as a political agent. She is an instance of generative action rather than ruminative reection or ethical orientation (2010, p. 9), a participant in an agon with Creon. But Honigs essay turns into a reection on the distinction between phone and logos, voice and reasoned speech, endorsing Rancire's rejection of the identication of logos with politics, and phone with antipolitics. At issue is what speech is, what can be counted as speech. Honig reveals Antigone as an exemplary political actor in the Rancirean sense, the inventor of a speech which Creon does not and cannot hear, practitioner of a literarity (allusive, excessive in sound and content) which disputes the partition of the sensible (and which Honigs reading helps us to count). Antigone works the intervals between feast and nitude, appetite and hunger, abundance and lack, festival and lamentation (2009, p. 9).
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Honig nds a third exemplar, Louis Post, Woodrow Wilsons Labor secretary, caught between the systems of law (of what it does and does not authorise) and the systems of public administration, (the applications of general law to practical cases). Again, Honig rst recasts other interpretations, those which have contained his actions by nding them to be an anticipation of what the law now prescribes, and then shows us Post as a political actor, an agent of paradox using his discretionary power to limit his discretionary power. She shows us a master rhetorician, combining appeals and seeking to place his actions in a context that makes them most favourable, artfully using interpretation, the substitution of one expression for another on which the law depends to undo the law (2009, p. 77). Post acts in the gap between procedural and substantive justice in which the use of technicality is not simply subversion of the law but a device available for capture by parties from all sides with a variety of agendas whereby all sorts of ends, just or unjust, might be sought (2009, p. 78). In this space, Posts goals could not be met by the law alone. Supplement was required: interpretation, timing, humor, cleverness, idealism, humanism, prerogative, and administrative decision (2009, pp. 7879). Importantly, Honig is not presenting Post as a kind of conscientious objector. He is not the noble gure who abjured or threw himself to the lions, nor did he throw himself into all out war against the system. He does not represent a revolutionary politics in any simple sense but a connective or additive political action that invents routes out of situations. Post acted in the realm of as if as if he was already living in the world he sought with his own action to bring into being (2009, p. 79). In Ruth, Antigone and Post, Honig nds exemplars of a kind of political action. Each is caught between contradictory forces and yet makes of that an opportunity. Each is an inventor Ruth of ruses, Antigone of subversive rhetoric, Post of procedural applications. Each is an actor who is not supposed to be able to act, exercising the right to have rights. Each is an exemplar of the kind of political action exible and timely judgment and adaptive strategy which Honig has elaborated through the concept of virt. In advancing this concept not in the genres of writing favoured by analytic philosophy or methodical political science but through the presentation of examples Honig places herself within a particular strand of the philosophical and literary tradition for which the presentation of great lives as a source of instruction or as models is an essential element. In the nineteenth-century both Emerson and Carlyle gave thought to the heroic or representative man and to the social uses of such gures. For Emerson such a man was one who inhabits a higher sphere of thought and who has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light and large relations (1887, p. 12). He was also one from whom our own life receives some explanation, and generative because in possession of a pictorial or representative quality (1887, pp. 1314). Where Carlyle (1911) came to see the hero as a mythic saviour, Emerson saw the representative gure as the embodiment of an idea, providing access to the human genius itself and, behind that,
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to the rst cause. Great men, he wrote, are a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism and enable us to see other people and their works (1887, p. 29). It seems impossible to place Honigs treatment of exemplars in the same domain as Carlyles authority gures in whose natural and heavenly light we might bask (1911, p. 2). It is tempting to place her in the tradition of Emerson, not least because of his part in a distinctively North American tradition and the connections between Emerson and Nietzsche, one of Honigs more important sources. Yet Emersons approach, congruent with Honigs in as much as the exemplar is a kind of energy resource, surely departs from her in too easily subsuming particularity into universality. Given Honigs commitment to the reading and re-reading of antique texts and, of course, her advocacy of virt, we can best understand her by going further back to genres of writing that were prevalent at the high point of Renaissance humanism. In Renaissance writing, as Timothy Hampton explains, exemplars were guides to action yet also icons after which the reader is formed, opportunities for reection on the constitution of the self (1990, p. xi). In such writing, Heroism is a deliberative rhetoric intended to provoke action. The image of the exemplar exhorts the reader (1990, p. 4). This is not a matter simply of learning to imitate the great and the good. Rather, the presentation of exemplars puts readers into a dialogical (one might say agonistic) relationship with the past and invites thought about how, through our present actions, the future might be different. One cannot help but be reminded of Pococks interpretation of Machiavellis Prince as a typology of innovators and their relation with fortuna (2003, p. 158), an exploration of virt understood as that by which we innovate and so let loose sequences of contingency (2003, p. 167). Machiavelli proposed that in order to know how to act in new principalities one should adduce the highest examples both of prince and of state and follow the paths beaten by great men imitat[ing] those who have been supreme (The Prince, chapter six). He wanted, as Victoria Khan explains, to educate his reader's practical judgment, the faculty of deliberation that allows for effective action within the contingent realm of fortune and recognised that such education must focus on particular examples rather than on the general precepts appropriate to theoretical reason (1985, p. 64). He does not intend for us merely to imitate but, rather, to reect, and in identifying the difference between the situation of the exemplar and our own, identify the space and resources in and with which we might exercise our own will. His texts dramatize and inculcate such judgment (1985, p. 64).1 Honigs use of exemplars is rhetorical and theatrical in just this way. She undertakes a process of appropriation, through which a contingent past activity is raised to a momentary universality that makes discernible its value for the present (Hampton, 1990, p. 11) and in the process dramatises for the reader an experience of two exemplary gestures. The rst is the activity of the character under consideration, how in a moment of little room they found the opportunity to invent a way out; the second is Honigs own recuperation of this action. Ruth, Antigone and Post, in ambiguous positions, caught between systems (legal, judicial, ethical, religious,
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economic) seize opportunities for invention, originating action that afrms their personhood, opening onto the possibility of the new. Finding this possibility denied by subsequent analyses Honig presents a reading of these readings, criticising appropriations of exemplars which separate them from their originating, creative action. Honig returns to the source and reactivates the text. Re-reading the commentaries (showing their misreading and its effects) becomes a re-reading also of the event, a way of opening and releasing its energies. As she observes: it matters how we tell the story (2009, p. 80). By locating her reading as one among others, yet also showing how we might both draw from and criticise those others, she invites us to make readings of our own (including readings of Honig). In this respect the procedure is itself exemplary the reader nds themselves between systems, between ways of reading, and experiences how one might recuperate and draw from an experience of political invention.
Conclusion
Honigs writing like that of all agonists is not simply a version of those political theories who seek to be alert to plurality, diversity and difference. Compared with the radical liberalism of, say, Iris Young or the ambitions for managed inclusivity of deliberative theorists such as Seyla Benhabib or Simone Chambers, Honigs work is evidently a quite different, specic and particular, activity of thought, writing and acting. It acknowledges the differences and pluralities internal to itself and invites thought on possible action, possible worlds. It is a writing that goes into civic life and action rather than one which pretends to stand aside from it or which seeks to produce criteria by which it may be judged. But Honigs writing is not the outcome of a simple choice on her part. She writes as she does because her theoretical presuppositions demand something of the sort. A theory that rests primarily on abstractions must provide concepts and the rules that govern their relationships. But a theory of virt for which judgement and the formation of a course of action is not a matter of the application of rules but of a malleable and adaptive, practical or strategic reason one always coming from and going back into its context has no choice but to show the kind of thing it is about: it must provide examples (see also Khan, 1986, p. 75) and it must try to be an example. Agonism understands that the regulation of political life must take the form not of a consensus converted into criteria for validation expressed as rules, but of questions and challenges to the criteria invoked by a claim. What matters is not the xing of the roles of inventor, spectator and judge in this agon but the capacity for continued creative response (the formation of a new question, the raising of an objection in a different way, the expression of a sensibility not yet accounted for, the parody of a leader, the reinterpretation and reapplication of a rule). Agonism commends the regulative effects upon a regime of the multiple acts of creative explication and deliberation that in turn give rise to further creative challenges in the ongoing
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sequence of actions we experience as political history. Agonism also knows that theory has no political force other than that which involves glorifying the existing order of things (Marx, 1954, p. 20). As Honigs writing demonstrates, rather than a theory of political action agonism is a theory for political action offering ways of thinking, incitements to the practice of virt and resources for invention. Agonism recognises and exposes the political nature of philosophies which claim to stand apart from and objectively judge, or provide criteria with which we must judge, police orders (see Rancire, 1999). But agonism cannot (although opponents might demand it and proponents wish it) provide any sort of alternative to present police orders without undoing itself. Embracing its reduced position as a spectator of politics agonism turns itself into the theorist, historian, interpreter and critic of the theatre of politics; of the nature and provenance of particular works; of the development, defence and overturning of particular traditions; of their success and failure as responses to the matters they were concerned with. It seeks out new sources and new manifestations that might teach us more about what this art can achieve, enabling those who practice it. Artful though it may be, agonism never mistakes itself for the writer or actor, producer or legislator of such works. Its task is to show them to us, to keep the art alive and to provide reference points for its practitioners, exemplars to inspire it, resources for entry into politics, there to act in honour of the natality which Honig has helped us to witness.
Note
1 Here we might note the way in which, without violating the particularity of her examples, Honig indicates the contemporary matters with which they might be connected. Her chapter on Ruth culminates with a discussion of the sister-cities project; the essay on Antigone on which I have concentrated leads on to a discussion of political interventions into the Iraq war that employ the themes of motherhood and mourning; the chapter on Louis Post is openly saturated in concerns about contemporary political demonology.
References
Arendt, H. (1959) The Human Condition. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Carlyle, T. (1911) Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Chambers, S. (2003) Deliberative democratic theory. Annual Review of Political Science 6: 307326. Dryzek, J.S. (2005) Deliberative democracy in divided societies: Alternatives to agonism and analgesia. Political Theory 33(2): 218242. Emerson, R.W. (1887) Representative Men: Seven Lectures. London: Routledge. Hampton, T. (1990) Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Honig, B. (1993) Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Honig, B. (2001) Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Honig, B. (2009) Antigones laments, Creons grief: Mourning, membership, and the politics of exception. Political Theory 37(1): 543. Honig, B. (2009) Emergency Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Honig, B. (2010) Antigones two laws: Greek tragedy and the politics of humanism. New Literary History 41(1): 133. Khan, V. (1986) Virt and the example of agathocles in Machiavellis prince. Representations 13(winter): 6383. Knops, A. (2007) Agonism as deliberation On Mouffes theory of democracy. Journal of Political Philosophy 15(1): 115126. Marx, K. (1954) Capital, Vol. 1. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Pocock, J.G.A. (2003) The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rawls, J. (1973) A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rancire, J. (1999) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Serjeantson, R.W. (2007) Testimony: The artless proof. In: S. Adamson, G. Alexander and K. Ettenhuber (eds.) Renaissance Figures of Speech. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 181194.
Alan Finlayson University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK a.nlayson@uea.ac.uk
Death shall have no dominion: Humanism, realism and agonism in Virginia Woolf and Dylan Thomas
And death shall have no dominion. Dead men naked they shall be one With the man in the wind and the west moon; When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone, They shall have stars at elbow and foot; Though they go mad they shall be sane, Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
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Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion. Dylan Thomas, And Death Shall Have No Dominion, Twenty Five Poems, 1936. In the decades lived in the shadow of Nazi and Communist totalitarianism, British writers asked whether it was possible to reconcile the realities of terror and social dislocation with nobler political ideas, including aspirations to communal harmony, democratic equality and social justice. They asked, just as Bonnie Honig has more recently, whether realism had always to be pessimistic or whether it was possible to present a different view of the core features of humanity itself, one that was somehow immune to the forces that had caused the evils that engulfed the political world. This contribution analyses two literary responses to that question, one by Virginia Woolf, the other by Dylan Thomas. It argues that although both Woolf and Thomas shared the same essential purpose, they diverged in their responses, with the former positing that optimism in politics is always eventually grounded in mirage, while the latter offered a richer vision, rooted in the possibilities of everyday life.
Bonnie Honig: Humanism and Realism

In recent years, Honig has taught us more about both humanism and realism in political philosophy than has anyone else. Although her work on these two strands of contemporary thinking has been produced independently, when it is put together it demonstrates that the humanism of Girorgio Agamben, Judith Butler (in some moods), Nicole Loraux and Stephen White and the realism of Raymond Geuss and Bernard Williams have something striking in common. Both of these movements insist that what is universal to humans is not rationality but the ontological fact of mortality, not the capacity to reason but vulnerability to suffering. Contemporary humanism and realism undeniably construct different social and political philosophies, but what Honig has shown is that they both exhibit a tendency to build their philosophies up from the insistence that the humans most basic common denominator is the capacity to feel pain and suffer or to die (Honig, 2009; Honig and Stears, 2012).1 Honig has, of course, done more than just describe this tendency in contemporary realist and humanist thought. She has also given us powerful reasons to be sceptical of it. Through her careful readings of a host of sources, ranging from contemporary lm to ancient Greek tragedy, she insists that it is possible to craft a realistic and humanistic political philosophy that is not centred on mortality and suffering but that draws as well on natality and pleasure, power not just powerlessness, desire not just principle.2 An agonistic realism and an agonistic humanism, she has explained, would both be more attractive alternatives to a mortalist realism and a mortalist humanism. Such agonistic varieties of humanism and realism might still start from a
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tragic perspective, rather than from a naively utopian Enlightenment view. But they would move from there to be far more broadly encompassing. They would issue in a call to action, rather than just inaction; they would advance a story of responsibility, rather than one solely of passivity; and they would embrace the creative communalities of festival and ritual, as well as the mechanical rights and entitlements associated with the liberal state (Honig, 2009, p. 11). When I started reecting on Honigs engagement with mortalist humanism, I was instantly drawn back to Dylan Thomas celebrated poem, And Death Shall Have No Dominion, an excerpt of which appears above, and which featured in almost all of the literature textbooks of my youth in South Wales. In Thomas poem, death is indeed presented as the unifying element of the human experience: dead men naked shall become one, Thomas tells us. But the poem also gives us reason to be sceptical of drawing too much from this particular form of unity. The glory of humanity is not to be found in a passive embrace of the singularity of the dead, the poem continues. It is sanity, movement and love that are to be valued. And they continue after death, if only by paradox. For Thomass poem, therefore, it is an effort at overcoming of deaths passivity, not a submission to its all-embracing unity, that is continually to be demanded, no matter how futile such an effort may appear. Only if we try to maintain the glories that we associate with life even more than mere life can we say truly that death shall have no dominion. On deeper reection, it then struck me that the importance of this poem goes beyond its individual contentions. Noting that it appeared in 1936, it pointed me towards a moment in British intellectual life when questions of what we would now call humanism, realism and agonism dominated political and cultural discussion. That moment comprised the years that surrounded the Second World War, from the mid-1930s, when British intellectuals began to realise the true ferocity of the Nazi challenge to their civilisation, to the mid-1950s, when memories of the horrors of Holocaust and War began to fade and the comforting illusions of the social democratic welfare state began to take hold. During these years, British writers reconsidered the fundamentals of their social and political philosophy. Having spent decades producing idealised visions of a future, modernised society, they now focused on the challenge to these visions posed by the realities of conict, death and social division. The Nazi threat, combined with the crumbling of Empire and the depth of the Great Depression, seemed to suck the life out of political theories that celebrated the possibility of social progress, the positive contribution of technological innovation, and the ethical integrity of the individual and collective citizen. The key question that British intellectuals asked themselves in this context, then, was whether it was possible to be fully cognisant of the new realities of terror and social dislocation and nonetheless still maintain at least some of the aspirations to communal harmony, democratic equality or social justice that had shaped political and cultural thought in the immediately preceding decades? Could there, in other words, be an alternative realism, one based perhaps on a different view
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of the core features of humanity itself, that was somehow immune to the forces that had caused other, more naively optimistic political theories to crumble? This period, therefore, should provide extraordinarily rich sources for those excited by the potential for an agonistic realism and/or an agonistic humanism. It has, though, so far attracted extraordinarily little engagement along these lines. The one exception to that rule is Jed Estys, A Shrinking Island (2004). Esty argues that British intellectuals shocked by the combination of imperial decline, Nazi threat and economic collapse turned inwards to a conservative and romantic vision Englishness in these years. Notions of an idealised community parochial and inward-looking but also warm and sustaining were thus deployed by liberals, socialists and conservatives alike as a stabilising factor within their worldviews which had otherwise been shattered violence and disillusion. The real, on this account, became the local and the human became the communal. The solid foundations that were so widely sought were discovered immediately below our feet, in our own locality and in our own traditions. There is, I believe, much of value in Estys analysis. Nonetheless, as with almost all innovative readings, I argue that Estys interpretation overlooks some crucial distinctions in the arguments of this period. Most crucially, I contend in this article that two versions of this effort at a communitarian stabilising emerged in this period. First, there was a view that insisted that although English communal rituals and practices provided the prospect for some moments of stabilisation, individuation, disagreement, aggression and power would nonetheless always assert themselves as the true realities of our social situation. Seen this way, community is never anything but illusion, while violence, death and destruction remain always with us as our genuinely unifying characteristics. Second, there was a rival view that disagreement and community, or death and life, were both somehow simultaneously real and illusory, and that there is no unavoidable need to prioritise the power of one over the other. Indeed, according to this argument, it is an error to do so, granting death a dominion that it should never be permitted. This article describes and analyses both of these views through a reading of a single text in each of the traditions. The rst being Woolfs novel Between the Acts, published just as the Second World War began (2000, [1941]). The second being Thomass play for voices, Under Milk Wood, which was written on-and-off through the Second World War, and rst performed in 1954 (2004 edition cited). My aim in presenting these texts here is not somehow to resolve the tensions between them. It is, instead, to reveal the outlines of two ways in which British writers of this key period in the twentieth century differently reected on the questions of humanism, realism and agonism that Honig has so effectively presented to us today.
Community, Dispersal and Violence in Virginia Woolfs Between the Acts

Between the Acts, Woolfs last novel, was written in the last few months of peace and the rst few months of the Second World War. It tells the story of a traditional
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English town community coming together on single day for an outdoor play or pageant performed under the direction of an outsider, Miss La Trobe, on the grounds of Pointz Hall, an estate belonging to a family of farmers and businessmen who had bought it just over a century ago. The novel is shot through with anxiety, unease and a conscious sense of unreality. The primary tension is generated through the implicit but powerful contrast of the leisurely life of sitting together outside (rst for a family picnic, then for the traditional play, and during intermission for tea and cakes) and both the impending violence of the war and the actual small-scale violence of power displayed within the host family, its friends and the community at large. All seems peace and collective ease on the surface, but everyone is aware of the existential threat that Nazism poses to England, and also of the desperate inequalities of power and esteem that shape the lived experience of everyone in the story. Woolfs tale is, then, in one regard at least, a contemplation of the way in which the habits and rituals of community life sit with the realities of violence and domination. At rst blush, it may appear that Woolf resolves this tension in favour of the communal practices. Or, to put that more mildly, that she is suggesting in Between the Acts that the habits, rituals and common practices of the English people (or a part of them) offer the resources with which they might cope with the violence of war and the domination of inequality. This, indeed, is Jed Estys interpretation. For him, Between the Acts offers a redemptive version of insularity, in which humane English values are represented as a sane alternative to the barbarism of Hitler (2004, p. 39). Everything, it may appear, is held together at Pointz Hall and in the neighbouring town by a celebration of the parochial, the ritualistic and the known. There are three dimensions to this possibility: temporal, discursive and existential. In temporal terms, Woolf beautifully displays the contrasting speeds of the life of communal harmony and that of violence and destruction. Whereas war races towards us, and power insists always that things be done and done now, time in a parochial English community is both slow and long. Rituals are repeated across generations, they have existed for so long, in fact, that people cannot remember when they started. There is also time in such a community for doing nothing, or, put another way, for sitting together, relaxing in each others company, thinking about little more than fairy tales, romances and the everyday miscellanea of country life. There is no hurry. The only forces that rush are those that propel us to destruction. In discursive terms, the collective spirit of resilience is displayed by continuing patterns of speech. Woolf expertly displays the ritual to the kinds of conversations that people have. There are distinct patterns to the discussions that concern preparing for lunch, picnicking, being an audience at a play, and, most strikingly of all, to taking tea together. Everyone, no matter how rich or poor, young or old, can nd their place in these discussions. Their repetition, their lack of complication, even their emptiness, presents a warmth, an equality, and a familiarity, that offers powerful resources of reassurance and togetherness in the face of barbarism and violence.
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Woolf portrays Giles Oliver, the one character who stands aloof from these social practices, as pompous and almost idiotic. As others take tea, worry about the quality of the cakes and concern themselves with who should sit where, Giles Oliver worries about the war and the economy but he is not rewarded for such thoughts. He is, instead, described as the one taking up a pose, that of one who bears the burden of the worlds woes, making money for [his wife] to spend. His wife in turn looks on and decides that she doesnt admire him for his seriousness, but dismisses him as a silly little boy (2000, p. 68). In existential terms, Woolfs novel continually reminds us of the way in which people become who they are as the result of sustained and deep communal relations, and as the result of relations to the natural world. The elderly sister of the owner of Pointz Hall, Mrs Swithin, is the clearest representation of this notion in the novel. Not only can she trace her familys relationship to the town back to the period before the Norman conquest, but her constant reading is a book called An Outline of History which explains in laymens terms the evolution of humankind, especially of English humankind, especially as it relates to the natural world. There used to be rhododendron forests in Piccadilly, she reads, lled with barking monsters from whom presumably, she thought, we descend (2000, p. 8). None of the characters in Between the Acts, with the possible exception of the plays director Miss La Trobe, is presented as having a personality above and beyond that which they have inherited as a result of both the long course of historical evolution and of their particular place within a distinctive community settled in the English countryside. Drawing these three dimensions together, it is easy to see why Esty and others see Between the Acts as a celebration of a particular communal English resilience. In the face of the most destructive form of violence imaginable, Woolf celebrates our capacity to break free by altering our experience of time, by embracing the ritualistic language of community experience, and by acknowledging the role of history and of place in shaping our very identity. This reading is, however, to miss the real force of Between the Acts. Although these elements are undeniably present in the novel, they are undercut and eventually surpassed by a sharply opposing argument. That alternative emerges most powerfully at the end of the play that the community watch together. The play that Miss La Trobe directs is a historical pageant, a genre that was wildly popular in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Having performed (badly) a sequence of events from British history, the players end with a section entitled Ourselves. In it, they emerge from hiding after an intermission to hold up reective devices to the audience so that they can see themselves. It is worth quoting the moment in full: Look! Out they come, from the bushes the riff-raff. Children? Imps elves demons. Holding what? Tin cans? Bedroom candlesticks? Old jars? My dear, thats the cheval glass from the Rectory! And the mirror that I lent her. My
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mothers. Cracked. Whats the notion? Anything thats bright enough to reect, presumably, ourselves. Ourselves! Ourselves! Out they lept, jerked, skipped. Flashing, dazzling, dancing, jumping. Now old Bart he was caught. Now Manresa. Here a nose There a skirt Then trousers only Now perhaps a face Ourselves? But thats cruel. To snap us as we are, before weve had time to assume And only, too, in parts Thats whats so distorting and upsetting and utterly unfair. Mopping, mowing, whisking, frisking, the looking glasses darted, ashed, exposed. People in the back rows stood up to see the fun. Down they sat, caught themselves What an awful show-up! Even for the old who, one might suppose, hadnt any longer any care about their faces And Lord! The jangle and the din. The very cows joined in. Walloping, tail lashing, the reticence of nature was undone, and the barriers which should divide Man the Master from the Brute were dissolved. (2000, p. 109) Almost everything here displaces the communitarian reading of Woolfs novel favoured by Esty and others. Two things deserve particular attention. First, it is crucial that the community is not, and cannot, be represented as a whole in this way. The audience members are caught, instead, in parts. And, second, although that disaggregation experienced by the people themselves as distorting and upsetting and utterly unfair it is nonetheless implicitly evoked as real. The reecting devices, after all, snap us as we are, before weve had time to assume. The clear suggestion here, then, is that togetherness is an illusion, maintained only by conscious efforts at its creation, and the somehow more natural state is one of distinctiveness and separation, even within a single person as their noses are separated from their trousers and the rest of their face. Once alerted to it, readers of Between the Acts will notice that this notion of communality as illusion and individuation as reality is repeated throughout the text. That symbol of collective memory and timeless evolution, Mrs Swithin, for example, is also portrayed as a deluded dreamer, always creating images of togetherness where none exist in reality. At one moment, she is described as caressing a cross and gazing vaguely at the view before: she was off on a circular tour of the imagination one-making. Sheep, cows, grass, trees, ourselves all are one. If discordant, producing harmony if not to us, to a gigantic ear attached to a gigantic head. And thus she was smiling benignly the agony of the particular sheep, cow, or human being is necessary; and so she was beaming seraphically at the gilt vane in the distance we reach the conclusion that all is harmony, could we hear it. And we shall, Her eyes now rested on the white summit of a cloud. (2000, p. 104)
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More pointedly still, the audience at the play are dismissed at both the intermission and the events conclusion, by a hidden gramophone playing a popular track of the day. As the text has it: the audience stirred. Some rose briskly; others stooped, retrieving walkingsticks, hats, bags. And then, as they raised themselves and turned about, the music modulated. The music chanted: Dispersed are we. It moaned: Dispersed are we. It lamented: Dispersed are we, as they streamed, spotting the grass with colour, across the lawns, and down the paths. Dispersed are we. (2000, p. 59) As the illusion of communal togetherness is undercut by the dispersal and individuation, Between the Acts also creates a powerful picture of two other realities which take its place. The rst of those is the reality of power. Throughout the novel, that is, Woolf seeks to demonstrate that it is only through the assertion of an individual will that a moment of collective togetherness can actually be experienced. That is displayed most insistently by the person of Miss La Trobe and her dictatorial control over the play and her audience. The audience of the play are shown continuously looking to the programme that La Trobe has provided for guidance of where they are meant to be when, and how they are meant to respond to what they have been shown. They have no ability themselves to shape their behaviour, they generally act as they are instructed to act by the programmatic demands and they describe each other as naughty when they stray from the expectations that the programme helps to generate (2000, p. 105). Their collective identity as an audience is almost entirely the result of the subjection to the power of the inuential director. Intriguingly, La Trobes efforts to control her audience only really go awry when she leaves them in peace for a while, hoping that they will reect on themselves, with no music or performance. She wanted to expose them, as it were, to douche them, with present-time reality, we are told. Something goes profoundly wrong with this experiment, though, as the audience feel nervous and unsettled when they are left without instruction. They dont know what to do, what to look at, whether they can speak or not, how they should feel. Reality is too strong for the people of the town, Miss La Trobe tells herself, observing their deep discomfort and cursing herself for failing to continue to provide them with the artice they required for communal connection. This is death, death, death, she noted in the margin of her mind; when illusion fails (2000, p. 107). If power is one reality essential to the maintenance of the illusions which make life liveable, then the other reality on which Woolf dwells is undeniably violence. Violence is the constant danger in Between the Acts: not only the violence of the oncoming war, but the violence which lurks under the surface of all human relationships. We are shown multiple stories of violence all of which somehow escape from the disguise of politeness or queasiness. Isa Oliver, Giles wife, is confronted by the real (the word itself is used several times) in the form of a newspaper story of the rape of a young girl by British soldiers (2000, p. 15). Old Mr Oliver, who is constantly pushing his own
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military memories to the back of his consciousness, is brought face-to-face with violence again when he terries his young grandson and then dismisses him as a cry baby (2000, p. 10). And most tellingly of all, Giles Oliver is tempted into destruction by a scene in nature: There, couched in the grass, curled in an olive green ring, was a snake. Dead? No, choked with a toad in its mouth. The snake was unable to swallow; the toad was unable to die. A spasm made the ribs contract; blood oozed. It was birth the wrong way round a monstrous inversion. So, raising his foot he stamped on them. The mass crushed and slithered. The white canvas on his tennis shoes was bloodstained and sticky. But it was action. Action relieved him. He strode to the Barn, with blood on his shoes. (2000, p. 61) In this incident, the pull of violence is shown to be irresistible to Giles. Its timeframe replaces the comfortable and leisured one of the rest of the story it was action and it relieves in some way, restoring the natural order through the destructive deployment of force that remains displayed the blood on his shoes is a later point of reference throughout the remainder of the novel. It is unsurprising given these elements that Woolfs last novel ends with a further reminder of the essential place of violence and destructiveness in human relationships, even if it also provides a glimmer of an alternative. For at the end of the day, when the townspeople have all left the estate and the older members of the family have gone to sleep, Giles and Isa are left along together for the rst time of that day. What is their response to their new-found isolation, their escape from the illusions generated by communal coming-together under the power of a director like Miss La Trobe or the customs and traditions of picnicking and tea-taking? Alone, enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must ght; after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But rst they must ght, as the dog fox ghts with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the elds of night. (2000, p. 129) The ending is telling, of course. It shows that Between the Acts is not an unremittingly pessimistic novel. There is the chance of love and of new birth. There remains some possibility of genuine human warmth. But it demonstrates too Woolfs insistence that individuation, violence and destructiveness (to which we might add power and death) are the only certainties of our existence. Another life might be born, the novel tells us, but rst they must ght. The unavoidable reality here is the violence. The capability of creating anew, and of shaping an illusion of togetherness, is there, however fragile it may be and however dependent on power. It gives us some reason to continue to hope, perhaps, but we must not fool ourselves into taking it as less illusory than it is.
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Ritual, Community and Eccentricity in Dylan Thomass Under Milk Wood

There is, as far as I know, no reason to think that Dylan Thomas ever read Between the Acts, let alone thought of his play for voices, Under Milk Wood, as being in conversation with it. But there are many factors which bring the two jointly to our attention. Like Between the Acts, Under Milk Wood takes place in a small community on a single day. Thomas explores his themes, as Woolf does, through the often discordant voices of his plays participants and through the voice of a singular observer, this time a disembodied narrator rather than a director. The emerging story, such as it is, has no dramatic high-points of the sort captured by Woolfs mirrored reection of ourselves. But its setting (a small town nestling in nature), its pace (the leisure of non-hurried time), its voices (the mundane, colloquial conversation), its social practices (heavily predictable, even ritualised interaction) and its themes (death, violence, community, illusion, and reality) all make comparison eminently worthwhile. The rst connection between the two works is transparently the place of violence and death. Although war does not haunt the inhabitants of Llareggub, the town at the heart of Under Milk Wood, as it does the visitors to Pointz Hall in Between the Acts, reminders of the fragility of life and the ever-present fact of human mortality are everywhere in the play, as they are in much of Thomass work. Under Milk Wood begins with its characters asleep, viewed only by the narrator. The very rst character we are shown is an elderly seafarer, Captain Cat, whose dreams are of the dead. Right at the opening of the play, he is visited in his supposed rest by a host of drowned fellow seafarers, one emerging after another, until they take the form of a chorus. With Captain Cat left talking to his lost comrades, the narrator then takes us on a tour of the town and we see death on almost every corner, and often in the most surprising of places. Early on, the narrator stops with Evans the death, the undertaker. He then shows us Polly Garter, a promiscuous young woman who always thinks of a dead lover as she tumbles into bed with her newest boyfriend. Later, we witness the ill, old men who are wheeled on to the sunlit cockled cobbles or out into the backyards under the dancing vests, and left, like crying babies. And at the plays close, we are left with a singing Reverend Eli Jenkins, who ends every day by asking God for a blessing, for whether we last the night or no, Im sure is always touch and go (2004, pp. 329, 331, 353, 374, 381). Such frequent reminders of death could, of course, give the play a heavy, melancholy air. But unlike Woolf, Thomas is eager to demonstrate the ways in which the dominion of death is thoroughly overcome in his imaginary town. Such overcoming is rooted in the restorative capacity of human warmth as experienced in the everyday. Thomass characters love each other and they dislike each other, they long for each other sexually and they despise each others company, but they are never wholly unconcerned with each other. Rather, they are connected by the mundane
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rituals of everyday social experience, as reected most of all in their conversation. As such, their minds are never on abstract concerns, such as life or even death beyond the town. They are rather constantly amused, engaged, excited, and inspired by their immediate surroundings and by the people with whom they live. Somehow, their parochial concerns lift them above the potential terrors that face them, indeed face all humans, and it is these parochial concerns that make their life worth living. The revelation of such an approach to overcoming death begins, right at the start, with the incident involving the sleeping Captain Cat. Here, the potential horror of the chorus of drowned seamen is undercut by the deads insistence on discussing the most mundane, everyday concerns. Unlike the ghosts of gothic ction, Thomass seafarers do not wish to impart any grave wisdom. Rather, they want to talk to the living in the same way that they did when they were alive. Tell my auntie it was me that pawned the ormolu clock, the rst requests. Hows it above? the others ask. They want to know whether there is still rum and laverbread to drink and eat, how the choir is in Dowlais now they are gone, and who milks the cows in Maesgwyn? (2004, pp. 329 330). This conversation sets the scene for the entire remainder of the play. Death and decay are foregrounded, but all are offset by the capacity of everyday experience to restore hope and provide reassurance to each and every one of the towns residents. This capacity itself is dependent on three features of the town. The rst is the strength of harmonious, communal interdependence. The power of community is asserted everywhere in Under Milk Wood. In almost Durkheiminan fashion, the narrator rst introduces the characters by describing their trades or vocations, picturing as he does a harmony of organic solidarity. Hush, the babies are sleeping, the narrator begins, as are the farmers, the shers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives (2004, p. 328). No one competes with anyone else for a role or a purpose in Llareggub, they may not be entirely satised with the lot that has been assigned to them, but they nonetheless identify with it and are conscious of their place within a complex whole that demands that each play their part, however begrudgingly or unsatisfactorily they do so. The second feature concerns the weight of the past. The interdependence of vocation is reinforced for the residents by history, memory and tradition. The role that each performs owes something directly to the generations that have preceded them, as do the questions they ask and the hobbies and interests that they pursue. Indeed, at one moment, the narrator makes it clear that a sense of direct connection with the past is the one characteristic of the town that makes it noteworthy in comparison with others in the Britain emerging from war. Taking the voice of a Guide Book, the narrator says of Llareggub that: Though there is little to attract the hillclimber, the healthseeker, the sportsman, or the weekending motorist, the contemplative may, if sufciently attracted to spend it some leisurely hours, nd, in its cobbled streets and its little shing
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harbour, in its several curious customs, and in the conversation of its local characters, some of that picturesque sense of the past so frequently lacking in towns and villages that have kept more abreast of the times. (2004, p. 343) The particular kind of past celebrated by Thomass narrator here, however, is far removed from the classic heritage of British conservatism. There is nothing grand, or particularly reverent about it. The singing Reverend Jenkins compares the towns natural beauty with its more celebrated neighbours: By mountains where King Arthur dreams/ By Penmaen Mawr deant/Llareggub Hill a molehill seems/A pygmy to a giant (2004, p. 344). Even more tellingly, the Guide Book continues by informing us that the one place of worship in the town with its neglected graveyard, is of no architectural interest (2004, p. 343). It is the connection of the generations through everyday experience that holds the town together and not the established hierarchies or conventional behaviours that one might have expected. The townspeople cannot, after all, even be bothered to take care of the graveyard. The third feature of the town reinforces this same theme: its essentially anarchic and democratic character. There is a complete absence of asserted power in Thomas town. No one instructs anyone, no one keeps the illusion of harmony together by insisting on it from a dictatorial standpoint. There is, in that sense, no one like Miss La Trobe of Between the Acts, and the town copes perfectly well without it. Moreover, the play continually insists on bringing any grandiose expectations back down to earth. At one moment, for example, the narrator describes the scene on top of the hill overlooking Llareggub. Stand on this hill, he says. This is Llareggub Hill, old as the hills, high, cool, and green, and atop it is a small circle of stones, made not by druids but by Mrs Beynons Billy (2004, p. 342). These are the essential moments of Under Milk Wood. The assertion that what matters in Llareggub are the people of the town themselves. They shape their own environment and they invest it with a kind of magic, while all the same returning again-and-again to timeworn conversations, expectations and relationships. The dominions of death and of fear are overcome in Under Milk Wood, therefore, by the power of parochialism: the sense of groundedness, of community and of a stability of expectation that can emerge in a town shaped by harmony, an acceptance of the importance of the past, and the absence of hierarchical domination. On this reading, then, Thomass play asserts the reality of the restorative community of everyday life, which ghts in direct and continual combat against the different reality of death. Unlike Woolf, who sees community life as a carefully sustained illusion, dependent on the exercise of power and never able to escape the presence of violence, Thomass play insists that the experience of the everyday within a particular kind of town can give us just as much by way of certainty as the fact of our own mortality. There is, however, a nal collection of themes lurking within Under Milk Wood, of which it is important to take note. Thomass description of a communal harmony
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rooted in tradition and democracy is not quite as solid as it may at rst seem. For despite the emphasis on togetherness, Thomas also tells us that the residents of Llareggub possess a salty individuality of their own (2004, p. 343). The plays leaping from voice to voice, as we cruise through the town visiting each of the many people within it, is intended, therefore, to give us a sense of the inhabitants differences as well as of their harmonies. Thomas himself described the play as rather jerky and confusing, with far too many characters and changes of pitch and temper.3 The experience of listening to it, then, has something in common with the audience of Miss La Trobes pageant in Between the Acts, as they see themselves reected in pieces in the mirrors held up by the mischievous actors. The difference, of course, is that Thomas believed that the discordant voices could nonetheless nd some harmonious rhythm as they expressed the habits and practices of their everyday experience. In his own account of his play, Thomas continued: the piece will develop, through all the activities of the morning town seen through a number of eyes, heard from a number of voices through the long lazy lyrical afternoon, through the multifariously busy little town of evening meals and drinks and loves and quarrels and dreams and wishes, into the night and the slowing-down lull again and the repetition of the rst word: Silence. And by that time, I hope to make you utterly familiar with the places and the people; the pieces of the town will t together; the reasons for all these behaviours will be made apparent; and there the town will be laid alive before you. And only you will know it. (1966, p. 364) This description captures perfectly the experience of listening to Under Milk Wood. It draws our attention clearly and directly to the fact that Thomas did believe that the pieces of the town could t together but also, paradoxically, that he insisted that such togetherness must always be experienced individually, distinctively and with singularity. That is the magic of the last sentence. And only you will know it. Thomas here is telling us that community is real. But it is also illusory. It overcomes death but it is also overcome by it. It resides in historical patterns but it is always experienced distinctively by individuals. And as he does that, he opens the door to what we might now call an agonistic realism of the sort that sadly eluded Woolf.
Realism in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain

Something crucial happened in British intellectual life in the decades that surrounded the Second World War. Faith in a host of well-established abstract, universalistic political theories whether grounded in expectations of historical progress, rationality, utility or essential human goodness was thoroughly undermined by the horrors of fascism and of war. In their place, a new realism emerged. At rst, that
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realism focused on death, on violence and on power. Any political theory worthy of its name, it was argued, would have to be built on the assumption that all human beings are prone to rely on violence to achieve their goals and are subject to pain, suffering and, of course, death themselves. New attention to these realities would encourage social and political thinkers to begin shaping alternative approaches to politics, all of which would rely on chastened expectations and on programmatic commitments that are drawn back down to earth. As Jed Esty has reminded us, one response to that realist move in Britain was the invocation of a kind of parochialism. If political theorists could no longer rely on the grand, abstract, universal concepts that had shaped the thinking of their predecessors, then they could at least turn to the part of the world that was directly around them. Reassurance, security and resilience could thus be found in local habits and traditions. If violence and death threatened to undermine the grand political narratives of an earlier age, they could be in part rebuffed by faith in the here-andnow. If Britons could cling on to established ways of life, to the patterns of the everyday, the argument was said to go, then they might be able to resist the gravest evils of fascism and of war. I have complicated this picture by suggesting that at least two variants of this argument emerged during these years. The rst, which I associated here with Woolf, saw the parochial community as, at best, an illusion masking the reality of a dispersed, fragmentary social world. Such an illusion depended, at least in part, on power, and was always imposed in the nal instance by violence. The second variant, which I associated here with Thomas, was far less pessimistic. It saw the potential for particular kinds of communities vocationally harmonious, traditional and democratic to resist the dominion of death and generate a spirit of the everyday that would at once respect the salty individuality of each other and bind them together into a collective capable of generating a mutually supportive common good. For Woolf, violence and death were reality; their opposites, the illusion. For Thomas, each was an admixture of reality and illusion. There was certainty in death, but also in community. There was doubt in death, and in community. This leaves us with the question, of course, of what is to be learnt from these historical predecessors that may aid our appreciation of the issues that Honig has done so much to highlight for us today. In Shrinking Island, Jed Esty ultimately rejects the mid-twentieth century British political philosophy that he does so much to describe. He does so because he insists that it always fell back into a kind of illusion. Despite their focus on reality, then, he despondently describes the intellectuals of this age as evoking a shared Englishness that took them on a short trip from radical intentions to conservative organicism. They fell, in other words, for an epistemological romance whose inner logic assumed the restored knowability of English culture. Whereas they should have been focus on the social differences and antagonisms that were still present in British culture and society, they proposed instead to know the reality of the entire nation. It was, he
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concludes, a dangerous error generating a political philosophy that ended up becoming normative and even statist in its effects (2004, p. 45). If this view is correct, then neither Woolf nor Thomas has much to tell us today. But, as I hope will already be clear, I doubt that it is. For neither of the authors I have examined here thought they had discovered a concrete, unchanging, denite social reality that could stave off the terrors of fascism, war or death. Woolf did not, because for her, ultimately, the communal was always illusory, always likely to be undercut by violence. Thomas did not, because he believed that the experience of the everyday offered resilient and restorative powers only when it was rooted in a community of a very particular sort, one that was vocationally harmonious, traditional and democratic. The real question, then, is whether Thomass version of realism still appeals. It has, in its favour, openness, irony and contingency that few political philosophies are blessed with. Thomas understood that any plausible realism must take violence and death seriously but must also balance them with other aspects of life that are just as real, or at least are continuously experienced as such. He also understood that real hope in politics must be grounded in the actual, lived experience of people, and not oat in the abstractions, whether conceptual or historical, so beloved of most political philosophers. Nonetheless, many will still remain entirely dismissive of this vision, believing it to be nothing more than a sentimental attachment to a lost way of life, dependent on social conditions that were always more repressive than he was prepared to acknowledge. The nal word, though, should go to Thomas himself. He knew the force of his critics arguments. They were familiar to him from the frequent attacks made of his love of Laugharne, the small town in West Wales where he lived and that was part the basis for the Llareggub in Under Milk Wood. His response to these critics is worth remembering: They are only envious. The envy Laugharne its minding of its own, strange, business; its sane disregard for haste; its generous acceptance of the follies of others, having so many, ripe and piping, of its own; its insular, featherbed air; its philosophy of It will all be the same in a hundred years time. They deplore its right to be, in their eyes, so wrong, and to enjoy it so much as well. And, through envy and indignation, they label and libel it a legendary lazy little black-magical bedlam by the sea. And is it? Of course not, I hope. (Thomas 1991, p. 281)
Notes
1 Also Bonnie Honig, Antigone Interrupted, TS. I am extremely grateful to Bonnie for sharing this draft with me. 2 Honig, Antigone Interrupted. 3 Dylan Thomas, letter to Madame Caetani, dated October 1951, reprinted in Fitzgibbon (1966).
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References
Esty, J. (2004) A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fitzgibbon, C. (ed.) (1966) Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas. London: Dent. Honig, B. (2009) Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Honig, B. and Stears, M. (2012) The new Realism. In: J. Floyd and M. Stears (eds.) Political Philosophy versus History? Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, D. (1991) Laugharne. In: R. Maud (ed.) On the Air with Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts. London: New Directions. Thomas, D. (2004 [1954]) Under Milk Wood. London: Phoenix Press. Woolf, V. (2000[1941]) Between the Acts. London: Penguin.
Marc Stears University College, Oxford OX1 4BH, UK marc.stears@politics.ox.ac.uk
What is agonism for? Reply to Woodford, Finlayson, Stears
The point is not to win the argument but to stage it (to stage the agon) and in so doing create opportunities in which virt might be glimpsed. Alan Finlayson Agonists are commonly treated as if they stand for nothing politically, as if they are keen to embrace only disruption, while supposedly failing even to specify which kinds of disruptions they favour. So it was not without some pleasure that I found Clare Woodford arguing that I had crossed the Rancirean line from the political into the police, and that I favoured immigrants or foreigners leading the way in democratic taking. The rst is a more accurate charge than the second. Democracy and the Foreigner (2001), the focus of Woodfords contribution, is a book about the impasses that block democratic theorists when they try to argue for more inclusive kinds of politics while privileging the nation state as the natural or inevitable site of democratic practice. The result is a host of arguments about whether foreigners are good or bad for democracy. Susan Okins argument that immigrant
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cultures are hostile to liberal feminism and Charles Taylors arguments in favour of multiculturalism are exemplary (Taylor, 1992; Honig, 1999; Okin, 1999). Those who seek to counter xenophobic arguments with xenophilic ones will nd only limited and perhaps illusory success, I argued, for they are trapped in a logic that remains structurally xenophobic they have entered into the domain of judging the foreigner good or bad for our democracy. So, I argue not, contra Woodford, that foreigners are more likely to enact politics, nor that foreigners and strangers can and often do act as a democratizing supplement. These are empirical questions. Instead, I use examples of democratic takings by democratic citizens of all sorts minorities, women, non-nationals and juridical citizens (that is, not just of foreigners) as a way to reopen and alter the question of what others have to contribute to us. Instead of asking: How should we solve the problem of the foreigner? I propose we try to switch the question to What problems does foreignness solve for us, as a democracy? In critical terms, I document how the familiar problem of What should we do about them? a problem that is experienced as so vexed and vexing is actually a comfortingly productive problem: it renationalises democracy and contracts its often expansive energies. It also displaces threats to democratic institutions from inside to outside our borders. This distracts contemporary citizens from noting how moribund fundamental democratic practices have become for reasons that do not necessarily have a lot to do with immigration, as such. I make the case that certain practices scripted in xenophobic registers as taking they want our welfare, they are taking our jobs can be usefully seen as displaced expressions of a certain, shall we say, citizenship-envy. And I propose that when citizens of receiving democracies feel that feeling rising up (seemingly unbidden), and discern its operations in our political cultures, we may nd in that very place some incitement to another more laudable orientation to such phenomena: admiration for all of those Hannah Arendt called natal (those who act as newcomers to politics) for whom democratic hope is a live ambition and tensed in the future not the past. Thus we may interrupt and counter some well-established scripts and help open up room for new solidarities and new sites of activism to emerge. For this to happen, a new vantage point is needed, one that breaks or at least loosens the grip of the xenophobic structure; and this, not by arguing that foreigners or immigrants really are good at democracy. They may or may not be. Rather, the claim is that the best way to counter the xenophobic is not by invoking the xenophilic, which precisely feeds the thing it seeks to oppose, but rather by attenuating and pluralising the national attachments that underwrite both xenophobic and xenophilic politics. We do this not by getting rid of the nation (too important a site of social [in]justice to be got rid of, and it is not going anywhere, anyway, any time soon), but rather by seeing democratic citizenship in plural, (trans)national terms, as a nest of often conicting attachments at the local, national, and cosmopolitan levels. This involves critically seeing that (1) the local itself may be transnational as in the case of sister cities and as is necessarily the case in imperial, postcolonial and global economies in which the
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local (even when it is marketed as local) is never merely local and (2) that the cosmopolitan is often also local as is the case with many NGOs and other solidaristic and networks-based forms of organising. Scrambling our easy assumptions about where democratic politics occurs is a key commitment of the argument for a democratic cosmopolitanism.1 (Thus, this complex cosmopolitanism is not committed to open borders, as such, pace Woodford, though it poses the question of open borders in order better to probe what drives our reexive attachments to some loci of citizenship but not others). Woodford judges my argument by the standard set by Rancires distinction between politics and the police. She is right to see a connection. As I was nishing Democracy and the Foreigner, I became acquainted with Jacques Rancires work and found it congenial. But my relationship to Rancires political theory is always agonistic. Here Woodford is, again, absolutely right. I do violate his strict distinction between the political and the police (just as I had earlier violated Arendts division between the social and the political).2 The sorts of democratic taking I seek to advance may be part of both or either politics or police orders. Sometimes, as for example when the taking is directed toward a new right or a welfare benet, it may aim to be not at all disruptive to current partitions of the sensible. And indeed its instrumental success as a taking may require as little disruption or notice as possible. As I note in Emergency Politics (2009), US Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Posts extension of the rights of the foreign-born during the US First Red Scare is the sort of radical taking that succeeds only by being an imposter by posing as police order in the moment, in order to succeed. Such actions may have an afterlife, however. They may, in the medium or long run, contribute to a repartitioning of the sensible (or not). Certainly Post tried to secure such a possibility by defending his actions before Congress with a combination of national, humanist and cosmopolitan arguments, reaching out broadly to a world that did not yet exist. It was on behalf of that possible world that he sought to solicit a public. Other takings do force a repartitioning of the sensible as such. The gay marriage movements recent successes are an excellent example. As William Connolly has also argued, the hegemony of straight sexuality cannot survive unaltered the translation of homosexuality into gay forms of life; but, as queer critiques of this particular taking highlight, this new right may quickly become a mere inclusion that does violence to more radical forms of life and does not offer anything like a repartitioning of the sensible (Connolly, 1999; Warner, 1999). Now, I think mere inclusion is often underrated by radical democratic theorists. But it is not valuable or fragile enough that we should be deterred by our concern for it from attending always also to the remainders of any and all such advances in what we might call, in Rancirean terms, police-ordered equality. Contra Rancire, however, equality cannot be our only and uncompromising aim. Democracy demands that we ght for inclusion while warning of, contesting and fending off the dangers of succeeding. We are motivated in this by awareness of the tendency of every political order to
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marginalise the remainders of political settlement. (On the remainders of politics, see my Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics). Woodford rightly quotes Rancire as saying that some police orders are better than others. They are. To my mind this means that some are worthy of being defended. Fought for. Preserved. That is, agonistic theory does not only criticise, and it does not, as such, stand apart from the messy work of actual political life. It does not fail to distinguish the better and the worse among the police orders. It may criticise the implication of the rule of law in violence, and it may not always want to quantify or rank harms, but agonists are hardly inalert to the differences between various regimes of violence, nor unaware of the salient differences among various moments of violence under the rule of law. This means, simply and clearly, that to be an agonist is not to be always on the side of the political versus the police. That is Rancires position. But it need not follow from an agonistic commitment to the remainders of politics. Instead, another conclusion is warranted: a gothic form of citizenship, passionately attached to, but also deeply wary of, the institutions to which we are committed. Gothic citizenship provides the sort of orientation necessary to, as Nancy Fraser might say, actually existing democracies. Practices of taking are a constitutive part of such a conception of citizenship. So is a steady commitment to guard against the erasure of the political by those invested in the police order. But gothic citizens commitment to agonism also postulates a commitment to the maintenance, care and promotion of agons as public sites of contestation in whose absence agonism itself is unsustainable (Honig, 1993b and forthcoming). These are all key components of the agonistic alternative to Rancire. Rancires key claim is that insofar as every socio-political order assigns certain bodies to certain locations, every order is a police order immediately and irredeemably hierarchical and so equality presses its rigorous demands against police orders as such. I may seem to concur when I argue that democratic activism necessarily violates the polite inequalities of distributive justice, which postulates inequality when it limits inequality to the degree that it can be justied. This is a key element of my critique of Rawls on distributive justice: that Rawls defends not equality but rather justied departures from equality. But it does not follow that agonistic democrats must always champion the political against the police. Rather, we favour forms of agonistic citizenship that cherish, defend and contest the (in)equalities that social democracy secures and we seek to (re)secure those public things around which contestation invariably occurs. Without things to ght about public parks, climate change, kinship structures democracies cannot exist. That is, democracy postulates not only a demos (or many demoi) but also a (or many) res publica(e); democracy needs not just democratic subjects but also democratic objects. I make the case for practices of agonistic or gothic citizenship by way of critical readings of texts and events of democratic theory and practice, traversing high and low cultures, as democracy itself is wont to do. As Alan Finlayson argues, I also use two tactics, neither of which, admittedly, offers the sort of theoretical exposition Woodford wishes I would provide. The rst is to de-familiarise the current array of
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commitments that seems natural to us and to expose their hidden injustices and our hidden insistences on them. My use of epigraphs plays a role here for, beyond what Finlayson sees in them; they also set a mood and solicit receptivity from the reader by jostling received assumptions or associations. Since I have written on the politics of Slow Food, I will say that epigraphs function as a starter that wakes up the palate and instills a sense of anticipation or desire for the repast of arguments, images and possibilities soon to be put on the table. That the epigraphs are often funny suggests we may also call them amuse-bouches. They aim to give the reader a taste for what is to come. The second tactic, more central in Finlaysons essay, is to highlight exemplars of the alternative practices we aspire to lodge into new police orders that are better than our own. As Finlayson sees, the focus on exemplars is not just a way of promoting heroes for democratic theory, though it is that, too. It is more fundamentally a way of tracking how democratic theorists, feminists and activists treat the resources of resilience and inspiration with which the world provides us. Thus, I am interested not only in doing political theory by example that is, by promoting examples of admirable political actors, historic and mythic but also in looking critically and symptomatically at how the most radical contributions of political actors are often domesticated, even, or especially, by their admirers. Louis Post is an agent of political natality: artfully expressive, pragmatic, possessed of virt, he is capable of meeting the moment, and exemplary in doing so without guile or deception. But the courageous Post, inventive, transgressive and bold, is turned by later admirers into someone who anticipated the law a good servant of legality and not celebrated as someone who forced the law into a direction it might not otherwise have gone. As I noted earlier, some advances are best protected by stealth and this may be why natal actors innovations are sometimes covered over to reassure while innovating. It is a delicate balance that activists must often strike. But it is important to understand the politics of such domestication and to assess how and whether in each case the tactic advances progressive purposes. Finlayson sees how I undo the received reading of Post as a mere carrier of law, seeking to rescue his powerful political natality from domestication. But there is also another reading of him that needs to be addressed, and not just forgotten. Critics in his day saw Post as a lawless traitor, someone who bent the law to his own purposes, and who deserved to be brought up on impeachment charges by the House Committee on Rules. Keeping this in mind, we see how Post actually serves as the laws undecidable supplement. This is a trait he shares with the two other of my exemplars, picked out by Finlayson for attention: Ruth and Antigone. Ruth and Antigone, the Biblical heroine and the Greek protagonist of Sophocles great tragedy, are both creative, transgressive, innovative actors whose inaugural powers are covered over by centuries of insistent interpretation that treat them as the good or bad daughters or sisters of their day. I am struck, reading Finlayson, by some other similarities between these two gures, as I read them. In response to others who
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cast Ruth as a domesticated daughterly woman, I show in Democracy and the Foreigner that she can also be read as a transgressive, daring gure, and that, indeed, the textual warrants for such a reading have been insistently downplayed by many prior readers. With Antigone, I see now, I do the opposite. She is usually read as a transgressive and daring gure, but, I argue in Antigone, Interrupted (2013), she can also be read as an agent of care. Sophocles Antigone, on my reading, knits together a relationship with Ismene, her sister, in an act of sororal agonism, and her commitment to the nal rites for the dead is a sign not only of combativeness but also of care. In the case of both these gures, too many readers assume we must choose between combativeness and care and then read the text through the lens of that unnecessary constraint. But as I argue in Democracy and the Foreigner, Jacques Derrida usefully points us in a different direction. In a critical reading of Aristotle, Derrida argues that there is no politics of friendship unimplicated in enmity. Where Aristotle distinguished three sorts of friendship, based in virtue, pleasure, use, Derrida argues in Politics of Friendship (2005) that each of these three is always already touched or contaminated by the others. There is no virtue friendship without dependence upon or suspicion of use, or enticement by pleasure. There is no use-based friendship untouched by fantasy or idealism. Each is what it is not in spite of but rather because of its implication in the other registers from which Aristotle would like to distinguish it. Most readers of both Ruth and Antigone try to mobilise these gures for virtue, pleasure or use, but never acknowledge the co-implication of all three. Some think they can get Ruth to support a politics of virtue without the contaminations of her undecidable friendship as use or pleasure. Pleasure, in particular, is most often sidelined by readers of Ruth and Antigone (Kristeva (1991) is a notable exception here). The erotic dimensions of the stories are domesticated or ignored (as in Hegels Antigone and Cynthia Ozicks (1994) Ruth), often by leashing the potential power of these female protagonists agency to larger kinship structures each is turned into an expression of daughterly or sisterly devotion (by admirers) or (by detractors) into violators of proper femininity. By contrast, I worry about how insistent are deployments of these texts that aim to focus only on one pure register of friendship and about the marginalisation and violences in which such efforts often result. I see here how in these stories, virtue, pleasure and use cooperate in illicit ways to make these gures powerful and, always, problematic. Moreover, I nd in both something I have only recently come to call (thanks to the work of James Martels Textual Conspiracies (2011)) conspiracy, a practice of agentic subtlety that introduces change, builds relationships, furthers equality and seeks justice by stealth but often with shattering effects. Care and combat. Combat and care. I am fascinated by the practice of covering over such interruptions and conspiracies. I think Hannah Arendt was right, in On Revolution (1963), to note the tendency even of revolutionaries to withdraw from the radicality of their acts and seek to embed them in prior precedent or narratives of continuity. She was right, I think, to sense that there was in the Founders quest for precedent a betrayal of their
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innovations. But, contra Arendt, this was not a mere mistake, nor a failure of nerve. Their innovations were paradoxically dependent on that very betrayal. Democratic activism consists not just of innovation and interruption but also conspiracy and maintenance. The work of political theory incites us into the messy co-implications of virtue, pleasure, use, not out of them. It aims to de-sediment received ideas about what is just, what is normal, what counts as equality, in order to enable new solidarities to emerge and to undo passivity in the face of new challenges. We may do this by way of historical, conceptual, cultural or analytic work. But, however we approach the problem, it is key for us to be conscious of how it is that we habitually and ongoingly wrap the new in the old and domesticate it. Domestication means both that we give the new a home, as it were, but it also means that we go out of our way to take the edge off of it, make it ordinary, and in so doing, of course, we remainder some elements of our political communities, some modes of being and some habits of thought. Such remaindering is often a cause of suffering, cruelty or injustice and a source of subtle or explicit violence. I focus on such domestications partly because it is often our continuing commitment to them that stands in the way of our capacity to see their remainders and to imagine things otherwise. Domestication is never just a past event. It recurs daily. And so the work of theory is always to de-familiarise, and to mobilise: to track the processes whereby injustices that go on daily are relegated to a past, or justied as sadly necessary (as many realists say they are uniquely prepared to do3), or hidden. Our task as theorists is to nd the loose threads of now well-knitted stories or settlements that may yet be unravelled so as to provide us with new/old materials with which to re-knit or patch up a future. This is why it is key not only to nd exemplars to inspire, but also to recover them from beneath centuries of admiration, judgment and critique. Habituation to the practice of excavation is also a key element of agonistic citizenship. Perhaps we might say that this is where Renaissance rhetoric meets, and needs, Freudian psychoanalysis, feminist and critical theory. With all the exemplars I turn to, the aim is always, as Finlayson says, to see the world through the perspective of political natality, not just that of an ethical or humanist mortality. I would add, however, that the aim is more fundamentally to sketch out an orientation to possible futures that is hopeful without being either messianic or despairing. The themes of hope and its opposites are the subtle undertones of Marc Stears critique of Jed Estys broad-brushed painting of post-WWII British philosophy, politics and culture in his book A Shrinking Island (2004). With his own rich foray into Virginia Woolfs novel Between the Acts, and Dylan Thomas radio play Under Milk Wood, Stears means to show a kind of condent agonism of community in the pre- and postwar period that was not nave nor simply hard-boiled. From Woolf we learn about the realities of community life (it is often vulnerable to authoritarian gures and covers over constitutive violences while failing fully to provide the goods whose promises make us put up with the rest) and its fragilities (even in such
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authentic communities, people need time to put themselves together; they do not come as they are). From Thomas we learn that community can allow for the cultivation of individuality and this while also providing what I would call the resources of resilience that allow people to withstand the challenges that natality and mortality both bring. If Stears does not ask after the remainders of politics in Thomas ctional Llareggub (what would be the likely politics of foreignness in such a town?), that is because Stears is drawn to Thomas though he knows that Woolf is not wrong. Really, it seems likely that one could give a Thomasian reading of the Woolf novel (as indeed others have done, as Stears notes), and a Woolan reading of the Thomas play, in which one would light more forcefully on occasional elements of violence or marginalisation in the local scene. But Stears sees something in Thomas that stops him from making the Woolan move. He ends his essay by giving Thomas the nal word, a long passage from a reply to his critics. But Stears, ironically, does not note the (literal) last word, which he has given over to his subject. That word? Hope. In the quoted reply, Thomas defends his love of Laugharne, the real town on which his ctional one is based. Critics of the town, Thomas says in an explosion of alliteration, libel it a legendary lazy little black-magical bedlam by the sea. And is it? he asks, rhetorically, seemingly on the way to say no. But that is not what he says. Instead he says: Of course not, I hope. And so he ends not with a negation of the claims of his critics, but rather with the performative hope that what he loves, IS; that how he sees it, is how it is. The image of the shrinking island that Stears wants to contest is not just wrong on the facts not all of the realisms that took hold in Britain in this period were of the sort described by Esty it is, more importantly, wrong on the affect. The aspirations of Britons, the ones to which Stears still wants to solicit publics both old and emergent, were hopeful, Stears thinks. And they might still be. How we tell the story of that period will affect and reect how we conduct ourselves in our own. I do not think it is the reality of a small town that somehow manages to be tolerant and diverse that Stears is hoping to enlist (he knows better, I want to say), but instead the hope that allowed Thomas to love the one town and conjure the other into life with his words. From Stears perspective, surely, that is potentially the real casualty of analyses like Estys, which shrink the island and diminish its best visions and aspirations. Thomas hope, expansive and insistent, promises something more. Interestingly, at the end of his discussion of Woolfs Between the Acts, Stears offers another long and telling quote which he says shows that Woolfs novel is not an unremittingly pessimistic one. It is the end of a long day and the characters Giles and Isa are nally alone. Alone, enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must ght; after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. Stears contrasts the phrases they must ght and another life might be born, and sadly notes their asymmetry: Woolf posits necessity on the side of the ght, and casts natality as only a possibility. Perhaps, he says, it is the case after all that, for Woolf, The unavoidable reality here is the violence. But there is
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better news here for Stears than he realises, for the real contrast here in Woolfs text, it seems to me, is the ght and the embrace. They must ght, they would embrace, Woolf says. What is cast as only contingent is the possibility that the embrace would produce new life. But the embrace itself is as sure as the ght. Combat and care, I want to say. Thus, if there is pessimism here it is not due to the fact that there is always a ght and rarely a birth, but rather that the ghting and embracing cannot be uncoupled. This is an agonistic view, and there is nothing necessarily pessimistic about it. Agonism sees how politics inextricably intertwines combat and care, ghting and embracing, difference and solidarity. We cannot have one without the others (no more than we can experience a virtue friendship untouched by pleasure or use) and this is pointed to, not undercut, by Thomas with his nal word: hope. His is, as we might say with Jonathan Lear (2006), a radical hope a hope that is not justied. That is the nature of hope. It does not dwell in the same domain as justication. But it is real and is not to be confused with the optimism excoriated by realists as empty and foolish or, worse yet, dangerous. It is, on the contrary, existential, committed and difcult. Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics was an argument against justication as the central and main preoccupation of political theory. Justication, reason-giving and so on are among the things we do in political theory. But these are not the essence of the enterprise. I think what we do as political theorists is to engage in forms of critique, evaluation and analysis that might generate resources of resilience for those engaged in democratic activism or those who want to be or who may one day be called upon to be engaged in promoting, defending or altering the public goods or dominant practices of their world. As critics, it is our task to prepare people for politics. Theater critics educate audiences; political theorists solicit publics. And there is no justication for that. There is also no justication for ending without thanking Finlayson, Woodford and Stears for taking the time to engage my work with such seriousness and with exemplary combinations of critique and care. I hope I have reciprocated in kind. I know I have learned from them and thank them for pressing me to think harder about agonism, gothic citizenship and the tasks of political theory.
Notes
1 Thus it is key that we do not think of democratic cosmopolitanism as a thinning of attachment. It decentres the nation-state and pluralises attachments, but it does not, contra Woodford, entail our diluting our national attachments and spreading ourselves more thinly over multiple attachments. 2 As I have argued with regard to Hannah Arendts analogous distinction between the social and the political, the relationship between the two terms is one of mutual contamination and the distinction between them should be seen as subject to radicalisation. (There are Arendtian grounds for radicalizing rather than respecting her distinction between public and private, as I argue in Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (1993a) and, specically with regard to the politics of sex/gender, in Toward an Agonistic Feminism (1995)).
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3 On this point, see my (Honig, 2014) critical engagement with Michael Walzers Biblical realism in Between Sacred and Secular: Michael Walzers Exodus Story.
References
Arendt, H. (1963) On Revolution. New York: Viking Press. Connolly, W. (1999) Why I Am Not a Secularist. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. (2005) The Politics of Friendship. London; New York: Verso. Esty, J. (2004) A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Honig, B. (1993a) Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Honig, B. (1993b) The politics of agonism: A critical response to Beyond good and evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the aestheticization of political action by Dana R. Villa. Political Theory 21(3): 528 533. Honig, B. (1995) Toward an agonistic feminism: Hannah Arendt and the politics of identity. In: B. Honig (ed.) Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 135165. Honig, B. (1999) My culture made me do it. In: J. Cohen, M. Howard and M. Nussbaum (eds.) Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 3540. Honig, B. (2001) Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Honig, B. (2009) Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Honig, B. (2013) Antigone, Interrupted. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Honig, B. (2014) Between sacred and secular: Michael Walzers exodus story. In: Y. Benbaji and N. Sussmann (eds.) Reading Walzer. New York: Routledge. Honig, B. (forthcoming, 2014/15) Public Things. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press. Kristeva, J. (1991) Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press. Lear, J. (2006) Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Martel, J. (2011) Textual Conspiracies: Walter Benjamin, Idolatry, and Political Theory. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Okin, S. (1999) Is multiculturalism bad for women? In: J. Cohen, M. Howard and M. Nussbaum (eds.) Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 726. Ozick, C. (1994) Ruth. In: J.A. Kates and G. Twersky Reimer (eds.) Ruth in Reading: Contemporary Women Reclaim a Sacred Story. New York: Ballantine. Taylor, C (1992) Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition: An Essay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Warner, M. (1999) The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. New York: Free Press.
Bonnie Honig Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA bonnie_honig@brown.edu
2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914
Contemporary Political Theory
Vol. 13, 2, 168217
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CPT 201340 A Contemporary Political Theory (2014) 13, 168-217. Doi:10.1057/cpt.2013.40 Published Online 21 January 2014 Bonnie Honig

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Critical Exchange

Perspectives of foreignness: Honigs humanism and radical democratic subjectication

Politics or Police? Honigs Democratic Cosmopolitanism

Passionate Ambivalence and Foreignness as Democratic Practice

Clare Woodford Queen Mary, University of London, London E1 4NS, UK

The virt of invention: Bonnie Honigs exemplars of agonistic politics

Alan Finlayson University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK a.nlayson@uea.ac.uk

Bonnie Honig: Humanism and Realism

Community, Dispersal and Violence in Virginia Woolfs Between the Acts

Ritual, Community and Eccentricity in Dylan Thomass Under Milk Wood

Realism in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain

Marc Stears University College, Oxford OX1 4BH, UK marc.stears@politics.ox.ac.uk

What is agonism for? Reply to Woodford, Finlayson, Stears

Bonnie Honig Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA bonnie_honig@brown.edu

2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914

Contemporary Political Theory

Vol. 13, 2, 168217

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