Cigdem Cidam
Union College, Schenectady, Political Science, Department Member
This chapter focuses on Antonio Negri’s turn to democratic theory in the wake of Italy’s “Long ’68.” As an activist thinker involved in the political struggles of his time, starting in the early 1970s, Negri challenged the Marxist... more
This chapter focuses on Antonio Negri’s turn to democratic theory in the wake of Italy’s “Long ’68.” As an activist thinker involved in the political struggles of his time, starting in the early 1970s, Negri challenged the Marxist orthodoxy’s exclusive focus on factory workers through a series of conceptual innovations, such as the “multitude,” highlighting the emancipatory potential of diverse political actors and their innovative resistance practices. Despite this crucial contribution, the chapter contends, Negri’s account, too, is haunted by the Rousseauian dream of immediacy: for Negri, insurgencies are moments of democracy because they are the immediate expressions of the multitude. And while Negri refuses to characterize such short-lived moments as failures, he still, like Rousseau, considers their transience a problem, which he tries to resolve through the cultivation of “adequate” revolutionary consciousness—a problematic move, the chapter concludes, which reproduces the antidemocratic Rousseauian tendency to turn political theory into a theory of education in Negri’s work.
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Jason Frank's The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly is a beautifully written, elegantly organized book that powerfully counters what Frank calls the 'tales of democratic disenchantment' told by many democratic... more
Jason Frank's The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly is a beautifully written, elegantly organized book that powerfully counters what Frank calls the 'tales of democratic disenchantment' told by many democratic theorists. According to this influential account, which finds its clearest articulation in Jürgen Habermas's work, the democratic age dismantled the dazzling aesthetics of monarchical authority that created passive subjects captivated by the spectacle of power, replacing it with a deliberative public composed of 'free and equal ratio-critical citizens' (p. 73). As Frank convincingly demonstrates, this familiar narrative fails to account for how the replacement of the personal rule of the king with the self-rule of the people created the need for, in Sheldon Wolin's words, 'new images and mythologies of collectivity', and a new aesthetic sensibility (p. 69). Accordingly, contemporary democratic theory ignores a central question that occupied both the theorists and actors during the age of democratic revolution and continues to haunt modern democratic theory today, namely the question of 'how to image and envision the people as a collective actor' (p. 25).
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This is an open access arti cle dis trib uted under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
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This chapter demonstrates that Rancière’s journey to democratic theory started in the aftermath of May 1968 with his efforts to overcome the problematic transformation of political theory into “a theory of education.” For Rancière,... more
This chapter demonstrates that Rancière’s journey to democratic theory started in the aftermath of May 1968 with his efforts to overcome the problematic transformation of political theory into “a theory of education.” For Rancière, unpredictability is integral to democratic politics. Thus, in an anti-Rousseauian move, he emphasizes the theatrical aspect of democratic action: taking on a role other than who they are, acting as if they are a part in a given social order in which they have no part, political actors stage their equality, disrupting the existing distribution of the sensible. Rancière’s focus on the moments of disruption, however, opens him to the charge of reducing democratic politics to immediate acts of negation. Insofar as he erases the role of intermediating practices in the stagings of equality, Rancière imposes on his accounts a kind of purity that his own work, with its emphasis on broken, polemical voices, cautions against.
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Although he has been a prominent thinker and activist of the Italian far left since the early 1960s, Antonio Negri had to wait till the publication of Empire to gain worldwide recognition. Empire, co-authored with Michael Hardt, generated... more
Although he has been a prominent thinker and activist of the Italian far left since the early 1960s, Antonio Negri had to wait till the publication of Empire to gain worldwide recognition. Empire, co-authored with Michael Hardt, generated a vibrant debate around the issues of the future of capitalism and radical leftist politics. It also opened up the way for Negri's political theory to finally get the attention that it had long deserved. This paper contributes to the growing literature on Negri's political thought and criticizes his theorization of revolutionary politics in terms of "direct" political action by focusing on a concept that begins to appear in his writings after the 1990s, i.e. the concept of "love." Putting Negri's Insurgencies and Time for Revolution into conversation with his little known political writings from the 1970s, the paper demonstrates that Negri's recourse to "love" can be best understood as an attempt to resolve the theoretical tensions he has inherited from his autonomist Marxist past. Negri's utilization of love, however, comes at a price. In his recent work, love, as a creative affect, takes the place of Negri's former stress on the constitutive role of contestation in revolutionary struggle. As such, the turn to love undermines Negri's main contribution to democratic theory as an activist thinker, namely his emphasis on the difficult work of politics required for the constitution of a common among diverse of group of people who act together.
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Antonio Negri is an Italian Marxist philosopher, political activist, and revolutionary theorist. His intellectual and political career dates back to the 1960s when he became one of the most prominent and productive thinkers of the Italian... more
Antonio Negri is an Italian Marxist philosopher, political activist, and revolutionary theorist. His intellectual and political career dates back to the 1960s when he became one of the most prominent and productive thinkers of the Italian extra-parliamentary left. He continued to be an influential figure in European neo-Marxist circles in the following decades. He captured the attention of a worldwide audience in 2000 with the publication of Empire, which was cowritten with Michael Hardt. The innovative and groundbreaking analysis of globalization developed in Empire constitutes the framework for Negri's ongoing critical engagement with global capitalism today. Keywords: democracy; globalization; Marxism
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The 2010s were a decade of protests, and if the initial few months of 2020 are any indication, various forms of street politics, including spontaneous protests, demonstrations, acts of civil disobedience, and occupations are here to stay.... more
The 2010s were a decade of protests, and if the initial few months of 2020 are any indication, various forms of street politics, including spontaneous protests, demonstrations, acts of civil disobedience, and occupations are here to stay. Yet, contemporary discussions on the democratic significance of such events remain limited to questions of success and failure and the relative virtues of spontaneity and organization. In the Street: Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political Friendship moves beyond these limited and limiting debates by breaking the hold of a deeply engrained way of thinking of democratic action that falsely equates spontaneity with immediacy. The book traces this problematic equation back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s account of popular sovereignty and demonstrates that insofar as commentators characterize democratic moments as the unmediated expressions of people’s will and/or instantaneous popular eruptions, they lose sight of the rich, creative, and varied practices of political actors who create those events against all odds. In the Street counters this Rousseauian influence by appropriating Aristotle’s notion of “political friendship” and developing an alternative conceptual framework that emphasizes the theatricality of democratic action through a critical engagement with the works of Antonio Negri, Jürgen Habermas, and Jacques Rancière. The outcome is a new conceptual lens that brings to light what is erased from contemporary discussions of democratic events, namely the crystallization of political actors’ hopes in the novel ways of being that they staged and the alternative forms of social relations that they created in and through the intermediating practices of political friendship.
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This chapter deploys the alternative conceptual lens developed in the book, according to which democratic action is a theatrical experience created and sustained through the intermediating practices of political friendship, to analyze the... more
This chapter deploys the alternative conceptual lens developed in the book, according to which democratic action is a theatrical experience created and sustained through the intermediating practices of political friendship, to analyze the Gezi protests of 2013. What emerges from this analysis is a richer account of events that moves beyond the limiting frameworks of success/failure and spontaneity/organization by bringing to light both the on-the-ground practices of political actors and the messiness and impurity of democratic politics even in the moment of its staging. Focusing on such intermediating practices as deliberation, judging, negotiation, artistic production, common use, and the organization of the mundane aspects of everyday life, the chapter demonstrates that those who took part in Gezi borrowed from past struggles, including May ’68, re-activated political habits, and, acting in unexpected ways, created new, if imperfect and fragile, forms of commonality among diverse figures, showing that another way of doing things is possible.
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This chapter argues that Jürgen Habermas’s engagement with the debates on the German student movement of 1968 led him to question the common tendency to consider the transience of spontaneous popular action a failure. Habermas’s... more
This chapter argues that Jürgen Habermas’s engagement with the debates on the German student movement of 1968 led him to question the common tendency to consider the transience of spontaneous popular action a failure. Habermas’s democratic theory construes the ephemerality of such events as an asset that ensures they remain unrestricted by existing norms. The “wild” and “anarchic” moments of direct citizen action constitute the radical core of deliberative democracy. Yet, even as he emphasizes the democratic moments’ unrestricted quality, Habermas, like Rousseau, is also wary of their unpredictability. In his discussions on civil disobedience, Habermas turns to “constitutional patriotism” as a normative criterion to contain the dangers that emanate from the unpredictability of spontaneous action. In doing so, however, Habermas risks transforming political theory into a disciplinary mechanism whereby the theorist, à la Rousseau, takes on the role of an authority figure charged with g...
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This chapter offers an innovative interpretive analysis of Rousseau’s literary and political works, highlighting how his formulation of popular sovereignty as the immediate expression of the people rests on a critique of the theater’s... more
This chapter offers an innovative interpretive analysis of Rousseau’s literary and political works, highlighting how his formulation of popular sovereignty as the immediate expression of the people rests on a critique of the theater’s conspicuous artificiality. Contrary to the established reading, Rousseau’s alternative to the theater is not the public festival, which he finds unpredictable and fragile due to its performative nature. Rousseau models his conception of politics on a different form of aesthetic experience, which he develops in Pygmalion—a monodrama that depicts the encounter between a sculptor and his work of art. The Social Contract embodies this aesthetic experience whose paradigmatic example comes from plastic arts. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the antidemocratic implications of this turn to plastic arts, which resurfaces in the works of contemporary theorists who share Rousseau’s idealization of the supposed immediacy of spontaneous action and his d...
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This essay focuses on the works of two contemporary democratic thinkers, Jacques Rancière and Antonio Negri, who are commonly considered to be “theorists of the event” and frequently cited side by side. In this essay, I challenge this... more
This essay focuses on the works of two contemporary democratic thinkers, Jacques Rancière and Antonio Negri, who are commonly considered to be “theorists of the event” and frequently cited side by side. In this essay, I challenge this categorization by highlighting significant differences between these two theorists’ seemingly similar accounts. My argument is that Rancière and Negri have developed their radically different conceptions of democratic action in response to two political questions, which first confronted them in the aftermath of May 1968: What is the role of intellectuals in emancipatory struggles? And who is the subject of revolutionary politics?
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Abstract In 2013, Gezi Park housed perhaps the most significant democratic protest of the Turkish Republic’s history. The Gezi protests have drawn the attention of many democratic theorists since then. What is surprising about these... more
Abstract In 2013, Gezi Park housed perhaps the most significant democratic protest of the Turkish Republic’s history. The Gezi protests have drawn the attention of many democratic theorists since then. What is surprising about these theorists’ commentaries on Gezi is that in none of them is it possible to find an account of political practices that enabled actors with such different interests and worldviews to act in concert during this moment of popular action. This article argues that to attend fully to the unique features of events such as Gezi, we need to develop an alternative conceptualization of democratic action that brings to light such mediatory political practices. To develop that alternative, I turn to Aristotle and creatively appropriate his notion of “political friendship.” Interpreted as an ethico-political notion, which refers to a set of mediating practices, political friendship becomes a rich conceptual resource that lays bare the dynamics of democratic popular action.
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Antonio Negri is an Italian Marxist philosopher, political activist, and revolutionary theorist. His intellectual and political career dates back to the 1960s when he became one of the most prominent and productive thinkers of the Italian... more
Antonio Negri is an Italian Marxist philosopher, political activist, and revolutionary theorist. His intellectual and political career dates back to the 1960s when he became one of the most prominent and productive thinkers of the Italian extra-parliamentary left. He continued to be an influential figure in European neo-Marxist circles in the following decades. He captured the attention of a worldwide audience in 2000 with the publication of Empire, which was cowritten with Michael Hardt. The innovative and groundbreaking analysis of globalization developed in Empire constitutes the framework for Negri's ongoing critical engagement with global capitalism today. Keywords: democracy; globalization; Marxism
Research Interests:
Although he has been a prominent thinker and activist of the Italian far left since the early 1960s, Antonio Negri had to wait till the publication of Empire to gain worldwide recognition. Empire, co-authored with Michael Hardt, generated... more
Although he has been a prominent thinker and activist of the Italian far left since the early 1960s, Antonio Negri had to wait till the publication of Empire to gain worldwide recognition. Empire, co-authored with Michael Hardt, generated a vibrant debate around the issues of the future of capitalism and radical leftist politics. It also opened up the way for Negri's political theory to finally get the attention that it had long deserved. This paper contributes to the growing literature on Negri's political thought and criticizes his theorization of revolutionary politics in terms of "direct" political action by focusing on a concept that begins to appear in his writings after the 1990s, i.e. the concept of "love." Putting Negri's Insurgencies and Time for Revolution into conversation with his little known political writings from the 1970s, the paper demonstrates that Negri's recourse to "love" can be best understood as an attempt to res...
Research Interests:
In 2013, Gezi Park housed perhaps the most significant democratic protest of the Turkish Republic’s history. The Gezi protests have drawn the attention of many democratic theorists since then. What is surprising about these theorists’... more
In 2013, Gezi Park housed perhaps the most significant democratic
protest of the Turkish Republic’s history. The Gezi protests have
drawn the attention of many democratic theorists since then. What
is surprising about these theorists’ commentaries on Gezi is that in
none of them is it possible to find an account of political practices
that enabled actors with such different interests and worldviews to act
in concert during this moment of popular action. This article argues
that to attend fully to the unique features of events such as Gezi, we
need to develop an alternative conceptualization of democratic action
that brings to light such mediatory political practices. To develop that
alternative, I turn to Aristotle and creatively appropriate his notion of
“political friendship.” Interpreted as an ethico-political notion, which
refers to a set of mediating practices, political friendship becomes a
rich conceptual resource that lays bare the dynamics of democratic
popular action.
protest of the Turkish Republic’s history. The Gezi protests have
drawn the attention of many democratic theorists since then. What
is surprising about these theorists’ commentaries on Gezi is that in
none of them is it possible to find an account of political practices
that enabled actors with such different interests and worldviews to act
in concert during this moment of popular action. This article argues
that to attend fully to the unique features of events such as Gezi, we
need to develop an alternative conceptualization of democratic action
that brings to light such mediatory political practices. To develop that
alternative, I turn to Aristotle and creatively appropriate his notion of
“political friendship.” Interpreted as an ethico-political notion, which
refers to a set of mediating practices, political friendship becomes a
rich conceptual resource that lays bare the dynamics of democratic
popular action.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This essay focuses on the works of two contemporary democratic thinkers, Jacques Rancière and Antonio Negri, who are commonly considered to be “theorists of the event” and frequently cited side by side. In this essay, I challenge this... more
This essay focuses on the works of two contemporary democratic thinkers, Jacques Rancière and Antonio Negri, who are commonly considered to be “theorists of the event” and frequently cited side by side. In this essay, I challenge this categorization by highlighting significant differences between these two theorists’ seemingly similar accounts. My argument is that Rancière and Negri have developed their radically different conceptions of democratic action in response to two political questions, which first confronted them in the aftermath of May 1968: What is the role of intellectuals in emancipatory struggles? And who is the subject of revolutionary politics?