A. Poststructural Political Theory

1. Poststructural Feminist
Butler, Judith and Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State?, Seagull Books, 2007.
Critiques Declaration of Rights of Man (1789), Arendt, Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, Derrida, and Paul Gilroy; analysis of statelessness of Guantanamo/Gaza and of expulsions that produce national unities (e.g., of immigrants); argues for counternationalist modes of belonging (58-9) as a type of insurgency (63-5) (Butler) and for critical regionalism as opposition to extra-state collectivities (WTO, UN, UDHR, ASEAN, SAARC, etc.) (Spivak).

Ziarek, Ewa Płonowska.  An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy.  Stanford University Press, 2001.
Argues for feminist politics of difference model for alternative intersubjective relations (5) through a constitution of nonappropriative self/Other relations (2, 8, 12)based on accountability to differences of sexuality/gender/race in what Spivak calls "an 'impossible' ethics [of] infinite accountability for jusice without the final assurance of norms."(Fr. Fem. 81, in Butler/Scott ed., Fem. Theorize Pol) She uses Lyotard on the differend (see Grebowicz ed.  _Gender after Lyotard_) to open an approach to ethics in democracy by recognizing what cannot be articulated within hegemonic formations (6,9, 227 n 18) and shifts ethics beyond identification (central to Butler and laclau/Mouffe) towards Kristeva's ethics of the irreconcilable and an embodiment (3, 8,10) to inscribe the asymmetry of sexual differnec einto the heterogeneity of democractic community (10-11). (Her major example of this differend is Patricia Williams’ Alchemy on where suffered wrong is prevented from being signified by racial neutrality of justice that claims to redress it.) Agrees with Laclau and Mouffe's call for antagonism/difference in democracy (9, 14) but critiques them through an ethics calling for accountability to racial and sexuality difference/embodiment and gender assymetries in social practice (14) and calls for responsibility for violence that may accompany contestation of social identities (11) Attempts to balance between freedom and obligation in two different lines of pomo ethical inquiry: ethos of becoming (Nietzsche (heteromorphism), Deleuze, Foucault) and ethos of obligation (Levinas (heteronomy), Derrida, and in some ways Lyotard) (6-7) in finding the failure of identity as both an effect of antagonisms with others and of internal tensions/negativity to prevent both paranoid reification of the social and of subjective antognisms in the figure of the Other (7).  In this analysis freedom becomes not an attribute or possession of the subject but a praxis situated in 1) intensification of erotic pleasure; 2) “patiently documentary” genealogical critique, allowing the subject to overcome historically sedimented identities and create modes of being that are still “improbable.”(8)

Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia U., 1982.
Argues for ethics of democracy opposed to destructive jouissance and fantasy in political life work beyond identification to reverse democracy into fascism through the use of abjection and through the functioning of the Freudian “logic” of the uncanny in xenophobia and racism.

Berlant, Laura.   The Queen of American goes to Washington City: essays on sex and citizenship. Duke UP, 1997.

Barlant, Laura and Lisa Duggan, ed., Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest.  NYU Pr., 2001.

Cornell, Drucilla.  At the Heart of Freedom: Feminism, Sex, and Equality. Princeton UP, 1998.  Influential for Ziarek and Butler.

Yeatman, Anna, Postmodern Revisionings of the Political, Routledge, 1994, esp. vii-xii,
80-91, 92-105.
Opposed to homogenized notions of reason and consensus in order to render visible systemic internal exclusions for dialogue between different perspectives and allow for decentralized, coherent, heterogenous forms of community.

Brown, Wendy. Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics. Princeton UP, 2005, esp. “Neoliberalism and the End of Democracy,” 37-50.
Brown, Wendy. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, 1995, esp. “Freedom and the Plastic Cage,” 3-39.
Argues for democracy as a sign not of elections, rights, or free enterprise but of a way of constituting and distributing power, with the dream of democracy as that humans might govern themselves by governing together, so we must “formulate a discourse of freedom appropriate to contesting contemporary antidemocractic configuratiosn of power” (esp. vs. freedom emerging in reaction to perceived injuries (book title) or constraints from regime on the regime’s own terms—must address the subject constitution that domination effects, i.e., constitution of social categories: workers, blacks, women, teenagers. (States 5, 7)

2. Postcolonial Feminist
Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, “Righting Wrongs,” in Human Rights, Human Wrongs: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2001, ed. Nicholas Owen, Oxford University Press, 2003. 168-227.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty.  A Critique of Postcolonial Reason.
p. 430
---. Death of a Discipline. 33-4.
Democracy as one of several things we “cannot not want”; figure of democracy transformed from Enlightenment to postcolony and figure of woman transformed from honorary brother (see Derrida, Politics of Friendship) to the figure of the impossible; for figure of impossible read Coetzee’s Disgrace.

3. Foucauldian
Samantrai, Ranu. AlterNatives: Black Feminism in the Postimperial Nation, Cultural Sitings, Stanford University Press, 2002.
Follows Laclau and esp. Mouffe in a) recognizing conflicting locations and refusing assumptions of coherent subjects and monolithic communities 52-3; b) naming the successful collectivity as hegemony rather than consensus, thereby recognizing that the semblance to community  emerges through “making certain differences matter and others cease to matter” 53-4; c) calling for ongoing conflict as guard against death of democracy. Follows Foucault (vs. Habermas) in finding “enabling constraints” (Butler Bodies) of power to permeate social relations 51; because disenfranchised often reinterpret apparent consensus as dominance/coercion (56); relies on dissent of minorities to forestall nostalgia for unity and provide impetus for expansion of democracy through change/resignification of identities/interests 56; argues rights must be respected “in such as way that we do not fix their meanings but keep them available for appropriation by subjects of rights who are themselves open questions and whose practices of liberty spur on revisions of the differences that matter” (58); so “When coupled with the rhetoric of rights, liberty, and equality, dissatisfactions over naming of identities become contestations of the political characteristics of the national community” 58.

Rajchman, John, “Foucault Ten Years After,” New Formations 25 (1995): 14-20.

4. Derrida
Derrida, Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins, Verso, 2005 (1994).

5. Lyotard
The Differend: Phrases inDispute. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Recognizes that  which cannot be articulated within hegemonic formations; criticized by Laclau and Mouffe and others for uncritical embracing of fragmentation and contingency of postmodern culture; his emphasis on irreducible antagonism seen by Ziarek (9) as opening inquiry into possibility of ethics of extreme antagonism (differend) imposing obligation to respond to obliterated wrongs.

6. Nancy
Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community, Trans. Peter Connor, et al., University of Minnesota Press, 1991 (1986). Partial Trans.
James: interrogation (both historical and philosophical) of the political opens up fundamental rethinking of the nature of the political and of the contemporary.173 James: Recasting Heidegger and rethinking Bataille’s notion of community.174 See Community at Loose Ends for discussion.
---. Retreating the Political. With Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Ed. Simon Sparks. Trans. Céline Surprenant, Richard Stamp, Leslie Hill, et al. Routledge, 1997.
James, Ian.  The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford Univ. Pr., 2006.

5. Poststructural Marxist
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Verso, 1985.
Rejects possibility of revolution in favor of pragmatic and ubiquitous tactics for change;

Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox.
Crtical of attempts to negate the inherently conflictual nature of democratic politics through the search for consensus and promotion of social unanimity (in deliberative democracy” of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas and “third way” politics of Tony Blair and Anthony Giddens) as serious threats to democratic institutions. Argues following Wittgenstein, Derrida, and engaging with Carl Schmitt
Mouffe, Chantal. The Return of the Political, Radical Thinkers, Verso, 2005 (1993).
Argues for conflict in preservation of liberty (36, ctd. Ranu 55) and pluralism at core of modern democracy (98, ctd. Ranu 54), and calls for protections of minorities from majorities by separation of church and state, separation of powers, limitation of state power, and guarantees of individual liberties (104-5, ctd. Ranu 55); understands rights to be “while belonging to the individual, can only be exercised collectively and which presuppose the existence of equal rights for others” (19, ctd. Ranu 58).

9. Other Poststructuralists
Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy. Verso, 2006 (2005).
Argues that democratic practices of government by all are hated by social elites attempting to export democracy by force and willing to abandon civil liberties and destroy collective values of equality.
Rancière, Jacques.  On the Shores of Politics, Radical Thinkers, Verso, 1995 (1992).
Rancière. The Politics of Aesthetics.

Agamben, Giorgio.  Homer Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr. Daniel Heller-Rozen, (Stanford UP, 1998).
---.  States of Exception. 2005
Suggests that constitutions carry within them rights of sovereign to suspend constitutional protections, countering assumptions that sovereignty is overcome in democratic constitutionalism by contract-based forms of parliamentary forms of gov’t.; Agamben reading (drawing on Arendt and Benjamin) of “state of exception” in particular (cf. Schmitt) resonates with suspension of rights & imprisonment of population  in name of nat’l security, viz., state power exercising itself thru capacity to return a part of pop to state outside polity, which he calls “bare life.”

Lefort, Claude.  The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism. Ed. John B.Thompson. MIT Prress, 1986.
Argues that fascism and Stalinism emerge as programmatically antidemocratic countermeasures to fragility of democracy manifesting as disincorporation of power (restores link between power and body by mobilizing fantasy of social unity—embodied in figure of leader—through invention and expulsion of enemies that threaten pollution of social body/unity 298) and indeterminacy of social relations . Agrees with Foucault that totalitarian demand for loyalty and promise of restoration of social wholeness (based on race in fascism and proletariat class in Stalinism) cancels symbolic function of power as empty place = contingency of democratic politics (sovereignty of “demo we”/”people”?) Thesis of democratic disincorporation criticized by Ziarek to contest disembodied characher of citizenship following Kristeva 10.
---. Democracy and Political Theory. Trans. David Macey. Oxford: Polity, 1988.
Democracy contrasted with totalitarianism as order in which a transcendent grounding of social organization has disappeared, so that it is riven with internal contradictions and traversed by disseminated sites of power, but power or authority tht is nowhere specifically or exclusively located. (82)

Keenan, Alan.  Democracy in Question: Democratic Openness in a Time of Political
Closure, Stanford University Press, 2003.
Critiques Rousseau, de Tocqueville/Le Fort, Arendt, Habermas/Benhabib, Castoriadus, Laclau & Mouffe, and Sandel in arguing for affirmation of the need for certain closures in democratic process (e.g., identification with institutions or groups, resort to particular documents like constitutions, etc.) and the losses and suffering that accompany those closures as grounds for identification. Urges practitioners and theorists to work out how to enact such closures positively in ways that invite participation in democractic structures rather than alienating through moralistic statements that define identity through past complicity in harm of unequal societies (186-9). Suggests that groups may strengthen democratic openness by speaking to their Others as sites of possibility, where each may ask of themselves what they may do with the power and potential granted to them by their specific positionalities to produce new political and ethical arrangements (186). For our present purposes

Mark Warren, “What should we expect from More Democracy: Radically Democratic Responses to Politics” Political Theory, 24.2 (May, 1996): 241-70.
Useful on obstacles to radical democracy.

Connolly, William. Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox. Cornell Univ. Pr., 1991.
Useful analysis of democratic possibilities in recognition of contingency of identity.

Curtis, Kim.  Our Sense of the Real: Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics. Cornell Univ. Pr., 1999.
Excellent analysis of how difficult it is to break out of the political ignorance that prevents us from seeing and responding democratically to our implicationin a variety of forms of suffering and injustice.   See esp. p. 1-5 on different forms of political oblivion in which citizens easily forget and are forgotten, losing touch with political reality of plurality and mutual indebtedness.

Giles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

Paul Smth, “Laclau and Mouffe’s Secret Agent,” in Community at Loose Ends

B. Global South/North Questions about Democracy

Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon, ed. Boaventura De Sousa Santos, Reinventing Social Emancipation: Toward New Manifestos 1, Verso, 2005.

The Democratisation of Disempowerment: The Problem of Democracy in the Third World, ed. Jochen Hippler, 1995

C. Modern Liberalist Theories of Democracy
C1.Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Century Theorists & Documents:
Rousseau, On the Social Contract. Trans. GDH Cole (1913). Dover Editions, 2003 (1762).
Argues that all modern governmental systems are fundamentally flawed and foster inequality and servitude, so the social contract must be completely revised to ensure equality and freedom. (Keenan, 11, 40-55.)

Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789)
Embodied as preamble in French Constitution of 1791; influenced by U.S. Declaration of Independence and French Enlightenment; asserted equality of all men, sovereignty of the people, inalienable rights of indidividual to liberty, property, security. Rejected by Foucault emphasis on questioning rather than consensus/agreement: Locke and Rousseau social contract in which sovereignty rests with the people through reciprocal relations with rulers (who may be removed for violations)—substituted for by Habermas with “rational communication” (see below)

Hobbes:  notion of subject and sovereignty

Locke, John. The Second Treatise of Government. Dover Editions.
Popularized Rousseau’s theory of the social contract linked to human rights with emphasis on property rights.

Marx, Civil War in France, Pt. III.
From early on argued for ideal of direct democracy, as in Paris Commune, reaching its pinnacle with abolition of state and the end of the division of separation of state and civil society, and critiqued bourgeois democracy (univ. suffrage, political liberties, rule of law, political competition) b/c constitutions sanctioned social power of bourgeois while withdrawing political guarantees of this power for other groups, e.g., proletariat.  (Dict. Marxist Thought, 2nd ed., 134)

C.2 Modern Interpretations of Liberalism
Schmitt, Carl.  Political Theology.1922
Defines sovereign as the one who decides when exceptions to political procedures will be carried out.
Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. 1923
Argues that liberalism and democracy are not compatible and against parliaments who claim to represent popular will and practice discussion and openness but carry out decisions in back rooms, and so Schmitt supported emergence of totalitarian structures (i.e., Hitler); suggests that constitutions carry within them rights of sovereign to suspend constitutional protections, countering assumptions that sovereignty is overcome in democratic constitutionalism by contract-based forms of parliamentary forms of gov’t.

Levinas, E., Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being

Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (1984)
Rousseauian argument for strengthening of democracy by massive extension fo political machinery.

Norberto Bobbio, Future of Democracy (1987)
Representationalist defense of what looks like Montesquieu’s ideal monarchy.

C3. Modern Communitarian Multiculturalism
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, Harvard UP, 1989; irreconciliability of identity preferences moderated in his Multiculturalism and the “politics of recognition”; Taylor crit. Habermas b/c his discursive conception fo democracy fails to connect self to an external moral order, thereby failing to guarantee against loss of meaing (sources of self 510)

C4. Liberal Integrative Pluralism
Jürgen Habermas
Controversial attempt to find in rational communication a substitute for social contract critiqued by Foucault and others; s.a. writings by Seyla Benhabib.

C5. Modern Feminist
Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor, Harvard UP, 1991. Performative politics of race questions injustices caused by racist/sexist oppression that cannot be signified by racial neutrality of justice that claims to redress it. Trenchant analysis of injustices caused by racist/sexist oppression as complete example of where “suffered wrong is prevented from being signified by the racial neutrality of justice that claims to redress it.”

Young, Iris Marion.

D. Other Theorizations
(See Routledge series on political thought of major thinkers: Nietzsche (Nietzsche and the Political), Levinas (Levinas and the Political) , etc.)