¹University of California, Los Angeles

²Helen McManus is a graduate student in Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation explores the politics and aesthetics of work in nineteenth-century British thought. She can be reached at hmcmanus@ucla.edu.

^*I am grateful to Joshua Foa Dienstag, Kirstie M. McClure, Brian Walker, and the anonymous reviewers at Polity for their comments and suggestions. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2006 meeting of the Western Political Science Association.

Abstract

There is something profoundly disturbing in the concept of politics as an agon, a site of contestation, struggle, and competition. Action in a world of pervasive and irreducible conflict risks exposing the individual to the contingency of all unity, including the unity of the self, and thus forces individuals to recognize their own internal divisions and contradictions. This article considers the possibility of enduring, surviving, and excelling at agonistic politics. It asks what kind of individuality, what mode of thinking about and addressing the person's inner plurality, might provide the capacities to survive participation in the democratic agon and thus sustain democracy as a form of politics. Accounts of agonistic politics concur in imagining the individual as engaged in what might be called an inner agonism; therefore my analysis focuses on the reasons for this mimetic relationship between individuality and politics. I argue that mimesis in political imagination draws out particular sorts of affective responses, orienting the person to her political world in ways that might provide precisely the sorts of resources needed for action.