Davide Panagia

Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière

In your writings you highlight the political efficacy of words. In The Names of History, for instance, this emphasis is discussed most vividly in terms of what you refer to as an “excess of words” that marks the rise of democratic movements in the seventeenth century. Similarly, in On The Shores of Politics, you begin your discussion with an excursus on the end of politics as the end of the promise. Finally, in Dis-agreement you speak of “the part of those who have no-part” as voicing a “wrong” for the sake of equality. In each of these instances, however, your treatment of words (and language more generally) is very different from those thinkers of the “linguistic turn” in political philosophy who expound on an ethics of deliberation as the first virtue of modern democracies. For that matter, your approach is quite different from those thinkers who focus on the aporias of language as such. Could you discuss this thematic of the proliferation of words in your thinking about democratic politics? Would it be fair to characterize your research on and exposition of democratic thinking as a “poetics of politics”?

The improper event: on Jacques Rancière's mannerism

In this essay I examine certain conceptual resources available in the work of Jacques Rancière for those interested in attending to the aesthetic and political complexities of democratic citizenship. I argue that the best way to broach these resources is to consider Rancières manner of impropriety regarding the forces of unity and disunity that comprise democracys insurgence, as well as his account of the phenomenality of democratic life and the conditions that make political subjects visible, audible and perceptual. This involves a sustained critique of the proper and the sensible as criteria for political inclusion. Democracy is thus not an institutional form of government but an event of appearance that arises out of the dissonant blur of the everyday. Rancières insights into the insensibility of democracys emergence, I conclude, complicate the constitutionalist solution to citizenship by raising the question of equality and emancipation as a question of how to relate to the impropriety of democratic citizenship.

The force of political argument

In this essay, the author examines the tensions that emerge between the practice of essay writing and a commitment to philosophical justification as themodel for political argument in contemporary political thought. He focuses on Jürgen Habermas’s adoption of the performative contradiction as an ideal for communicative exchange and shows the unacknowledged role that sincerity plays in Habermas’s argument. He then links this account to his explorations of the rise of aesthetic criticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its contribution to democratic thought. Turning to one of the key literary and political critics of the period, William Hazlitt, the author shows how his theory of essay composition lends itself to a radical democratic imaginary that complicates the account of political argument Habermas sets out. Hazlitt’s essays, the author concludes, are exemplary in their embracing of contradiction as a condition of democratic life.

“You’re Eating Too Fast!” On Disequality and an Ethos of Convivium *

One of the most powerful of all political gestures is an aesthetic one: the divisions of the senses that determine what counts as a legitimate political claim. Accompanying such gestures are assumptions about the correspondences between a sense organ, acts of perception and the making of sense. This essay explores these aesthetico‐political concerns by asking the following question: is there a taste for politics? I begin by examining the mouth as a complex organ of political reflection in the history of political thought and the role of flavor as an important thematic consideration in selected works of Plato, Kant and Rousseau. I then move to a discussion of some recipes of the nineteenth century gourmand Pellegrino Artusi and their contribution to the eco‐gastronomic interventions against culinary globalization of the Slow Food movement. My interest is to explore the ethical orientation of convivium which, I argue, is rooted in sensation. As developed and theorized by the practitioners of Slow Food, convivium relies on a principle of transversality that is neither utilitarian, rationalist nor communicative but is, rather, organoleptic: it requires an appreciation of how the divergences of tastes, textures and flavors coexist in the diurnal dimensions of sensory life. * Versions of this paper were presented at the Trent University Philosophy Society (Peterborough, Canada), the Canadian Society for Italian Studies International Conference (Trieste, Italy), and at “The Politics of Food, Taste and Time” panel of the 2006 meeting of the American Political Science Association (Philadelphia, USA). I would like to thank Jane Bennett, Bonnie Honig, Patchen Markell and John McCormick for their comments, criticisms and for agreeing to participate on an extremely convivial APSA panel. In this regard my gratitude also goes to Werlen Hansjakob, the Philadelphia Slow Food Convivium leader, for providing victuals. This essay was written with generous support from the Canada Research Chairs program and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Research Grant. What separates speaking from eating renders speech possible; what separates propositions from things renders propositions possible. (Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense.)

Words cloth'd in reason's garb : Stanley fish's aesthetics and politics

Much recent and not so recent political theory attends to the relationship between signifier and signified. Whatever your particular theoretical orientation, chances are it posits a relationship between a name and its referent such that the production of meaning (which results from various strategies of reading and writing competency) is a primary political outcome. Leo Strauss, for instance, famously endorsed a practice of “reading between the lines” so as to arrive at the esoteric meaning of a canonical text. Here, reading and writing

Rancière’s Sentiments

Author(s): Panagia, Davide | Abstract: In Ranciere’s Sentiments Davide Panagia explores Jacques Ranciere’s aesthetics of politics as it informs his radical democratic theory of participation. Attending to diverse practices of everyday living and doing—of form, style, and scenography—in Ranciere’s writings, Panagia characterizes Ranciere as a sentimental thinker for whom the aesthetic is indistinguishable from the political. Rather than providing prescriptions for political judgment and action, Ranciere focuses on how sensibilities and perceptions constitute dynamic relations between persons and the worlds they create. Panagia traces this approach by examining Ranciere’s modernist sensibilities, his theory of radical mediation, the influence of Gustave Flaubert on Ranciere’s literary voice, and how Ranciere juxtaposes seemingly incompatible objects and phenomena to create moments of sensorial disorientation. The power of Ranciere’s work, Panagia demonstrates, lies in its ability to leave readers with a disjunctive sensibility of the world and what political thinking is and can be.

The Limits of Critique

The CI Review is no passive construct here, though readers may wish Bear’s version were more con- vincingly anchored in individual accounts rather than asserted in sweeping generali- zations. Ultimately, however, Disillusioned ’s greatest services may be historiographic. Bear successfully dislodges the truism that photography was immediately accepted as a new ideal of objectivity and restores to view the capacity of its earliest viewers to analyze photographic images as constructions. The stage is set for future studies that might locate in such activity the more unruly imaginative freedoms Bear considers elu- sive. In equally convincing terms, his conclusion dislodges the modernist history of photography that valorized objectivity as its patrimony and reinserts Rejlander and Robinson as the precursors of postmodernism, when photography’s referentiality was challenged and subverted again. S A R A H M . M I L L E R is an independent scholar of photography and modern art. Currently a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, she is working on a book about the multiplicity and contest of ideas of “documentary” in American photography of the 1930s. Rita Felski. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 232 pp. D AVIDE P ANAGIA The Pleasures of Criticism could have been the alternate title to Rita Felski’s provoca- tive The Limits of Critique. In this book Felski traces the cynegetic tendencies (my term, not hers, for the cynical or disillusioning mode) of postwar literary criticism in the West to survey, hunt, and capture meaning in literary works. Those hunting practices are named the hermeneutics of suspicion and much of Felski’s analysis is devoted to unpacking the diagnostic parameters of suspicious reading, its moods and attitudes, and its effects. Felski’s is the kind of psychology of epistemes that wants to remind readers why they might want to pick up literary works in the first place: that is, for the sheer plea- sure of wanting to play with worlds and their varieties. Like Amanda Anderson’s char- acterological study of theoretical argument (that Felski cites), the ambition is not only to diagnose the limiting effects of suspicious hermeneutics but also to remind readers that interpretive detection is not the sole response that works invite or, indeed, de- serve. For Felski, suspicious reading is cynegetic; it is a mode of tracking meaning as if one were hunting prey. By the end of the nineteenth century, cynegetic practices were adapted by police powers for the detection and pursuit of criminals. Police cynegetics concerned itself with “bodies in movement, bodies that escape and that it must catch, bodies that pass by and that it must intercept.” 1 Hence the efficacy of Felski’s adjoining suspicious reading to detective novels throughout, but especially in chapter three. To argue that critique is committed to suspicious reading in the manner in which Felski does means that critique is governed by the impulse to police something like the kernel of a literary unconscious in constant flight. This, in sum, is her story of twentieth- century literary criticism. But Felslki wants to offer us a reprieve from the hunt as if to say, “stop chasing and start reading.” Her Latour-inspired reasoning claims an aesthetic work as a nonhuman actant, populated by a diversity of other nonhuman agents that complicate critical sus - picion’s reduction of aesthetic pleasure to the pleasure of the hunt for meaning. The issue with Felski’s critique of “Crrritique” regards the professional transformation of 1. Gregoire Chamayou, Manhunts: A Philosophical History, (Princeton, N.J., 2012), p. 90.

Exposures and Projections

In this essay I offer a set of preliminary considerations regarding the possibility of an ethics of appearances as the basis for thinking about how we relate to one another in pluralist democratic societies. I begin by sketching out what an ethics of appearances might mean or look like by turning to a set of provocative remarks that Simon Critchley makes in Infinitely Demanding (Critchley S, Infinitely demanding. Verso, London, 2007). I then draw a distinction between different approaches to how we handle appearances: the ostensive approach (exposition) and the absorptive approach (projection). I proceed to show how our political ideas and practices are imbued with certain aesthetic sensibilities and, as such, are plagued by the problem of making our sensations perceptible and available to others. Our practices of confronting and contending with this impossibility of sharing sensation, as well as our admitting to our inevitable disappointment when faced with this limit of such shareability suggests, I contend, the availability of a dissensual core to our understandings of citizenship. I conclude that democratic citizenship is not grounded in a consensual being-in-common but in a dissensual event of intangible hapticity.

Cinéma vérité and the Ontology of Cinema: A Response to Roy Germano

In this response I discuss the cinema ontology of Roy Germano’s project of analytic filmmaking. I argue that though the project is at once compelling and ambitious, there are challenges posed by the medium of cinema itself that ultimately undermine Germano’s commitments to indexicality, referentiality, and continuity in political science research.