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Humanism from an agonistic perspective: Themes from the work of Bonnie Honig

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Notes

  1. The most obvious exponent of such a view is found in Todd May’s use of Rancière to inform contemporary anarchist society and radical social movements in his two latest books: The Politics of Jacques Rancière (2008) and Contemporary Political Movements and the Thought of Jacques Rancière (2010), although he is not alone in this positive use of Rancière (see Deranty, 2003a, 2003b, 2010; Panagia, 2003, 2006; Chambers, 2005, 2011, 2012; Power, 2009). Contra Badiou, Žižek and the rest, May sees no problem in using Rancière to inspire a politics of emancipation that is not opposed to democratic political movements and even questions whether some form of institutionalisation of Rancièrian democracy could be conceived (2008, pp. 176–184; 2010, pp. 26–27, 137).

  2. ‘The police can procure all sorts of good, and one kind of police may be infinitely preferable to another. This does not change the nature of the police, which is what we are dealing with here’ (Rancière, 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 Mason’s 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.

  7. Indeed, Honig would agree with Rancière’s 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 specificity of politics, stifling it via consensus which claims to include all, thereby fixing the position of the Other (2006b, pp. 2–7).

  10. Again see Honig’s later work (2007, 2009) for further development of these themes.

  11. 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’.

  12. Also Bonnie Honig, Antigone Interrupted, TS. I am extremely grateful to Bonnie for sharing this draft with me.

  13. Honig, Antigone Interrupted.

  14. Dylan Thomas, letter to Madame Caetani, dated October 1951, reprinted in Fitzgibbon (1966).

  15. 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’.

  16. As I have argued with regard to Hannah Arendt’s 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, specifically with regard to the politics of sex/gender, in ‘Toward an Agonistic Feminism’ (1995)).

  17. On this point, see my (Honig, 2014) critical engagement with Michael Walzer’s Biblical realism in ‘Between Sacred and Secular: Michael Walzer’s Exodus Story’.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK

    Mathew Humphrey

  2. University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK

    David Owen

  3. City University, London, EC1V 0HB, UK

    Joe Hoover

  4. Queen Mary, University of London, London, E1 4NS, UK

    Clare Woodford

  5. University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK

    Alan Finlayson

  6. University College, Oxford, OX1 4BH, UK

    Marc Stears

  7. Brown University, Providence, 02912, RI, USA

    Bonnie Honig

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  7. Bonnie Honig
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Humphrey, M., Owen, D., Hoover, J. et al. Humanism from an agonistic perspective: Themes from the work of Bonnie Honig. Contemp Polit Theory 13, 168–217 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2013.40

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