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Enthusiasm has long been perceived as a fundamental danger to democratic politics. Many have regarded it as a source of threatening instabilities manifest through political irrationalism. Such a view can make enthusiasm appear as a direct threat to the reason and order on which democracy is thought to rely. But such a desire for a sober and moderate democratic politics is perilously misleading, ignoring the emotional basis on which democracy thrives. Enthusiasm in democracy works to help political actors identify and foster progressive changes. We feel enthusiasm at precisely those moments of new beginnings, when politics takes on new shapes and novel structures. Being clear about how we experience enthusiasm, and how we recognize it, is thus crucial for democracy, which depends on progression and the alteration of ruler and the ruled. This book traces the changing ways enthusiasm has been understood politically in modern Western political thought. It explores how political actors use enthusiasm to motivate allegiances, how we have come to think on the dangers of enthusiasm in democratic politics, and how else we might think about enthusiasm today. From its inception, democracy has relied on a constant affective energy of renewal. By tracing the way this crucial emotional energy is made manifest in political actions – from ancient times to the present – this book sheds light on the way enthusiasm has been understood by political scientists, philosophers, and political activists, as well as its implications for contemporary democratic politics.
capacity to disagree’.33 In many ways this breakdown helps us to define the political itself, with the contrast between disagreement and agreement operating almost as an axis around which politics can rotate. Indeed, as Jacques Rancière has argued, politics is an entity that hinges upon such a distinction – the difference between what he terms ‘dissensus’ and ‘consensus’.34 On the one hand, a politics based on ‘consensus’ is a vacuous enterprise, in which ‘there is no contest on what appears [or] on what is given in a situation and as a situation’; on the other hand
its status as something fait (‘done’/‘fact-ed’). The pictures were prompted by the fact of the conflict, but their status as historical data remains uncertain, since they depict nothing – destroyed tanks or dead bodies – that would allow the viewer to establish an affective relationship to the event’s material consequences. As Jacques Rancière has written, Ristelhueber ‘effects a displacement of the exhausted affect of indignation to a more discreet affect, an affect of indeterminate effect’. 11 What we see is that we do not see what we expect, and perhaps even
an intersubjective relation where previously there was none, confronting existing systems with what lies behind their boundaries, and in so doing providing them with three possible responses. First, to ignore the interruptive noise and hope it goes away of its own accord; second, to forcibly exclude the noise in the hope of achieving or maintaining a nominally spotless purity; or third, to transform in such a way as to incorporate the noise within itself. 10 It is for this reason that Jacques Rancière argues that ‘politics comes about solely through
Modernity ( Stanford University Press , 1993 ). For an account of the pathologies of secularism regarding political engagement, see William Connolly , Why I Am Not a Secularist ( University of Minnesota Press , 1999 ). 2 I use Jacques Rancière’s Hatred
systems and the general decline of the ideological apparatus of Marxism, far from seeing the promised universal reign of a liberal utopia we instead saw the uncanny return of ethnic violence, virulent nationalism and religious conservatism. As Jacques Rancière says: ‘The territory of “posthistorical” and peaceful humanity proved to be the territory of new figures of the Inhuman.’17 These forces have been intensified and invigorated by September 11. What we are seeing today is a global proliferation of religious fundamentalism – of both the Islamic and Judeo
: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 60. 38 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 165. 39 Jacques Rancière, ‘Comment and Responses’, Theory and Event, 6.4 (2003), para. 4. 40 Quoted in Chris Harman, ‘Thinking it Through: Out of Apathy’, Socialist Review, 219 (May 1998), http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr219/harman.htm [accessed 24 July 2017]. 41 Wark, #Celerity, 3.2. 42 Colin Graham, ‘“Every Passer-by a Culprit?” Archive Fever, Photography and the Peace in Belfast’, Third Text, 19
members themselves. I ask that we, as readers– spectators of the argument, become more attentive to the dancing bodies that have interrupted and transfigured our symbolic frameworks across 4 4 Dance and politics space and time. I have constructed my conceptual framework from a choreographic, critical reading of Jacques Rancière’s concept of dissensus. Rancière sees the essence of politics ‘as the manifestation of dissensus as the presence of two worlds in one’ (Rancière 2010: 37). Dissensus is the collision of two worlds, one intervening in the other and
, turning on collective mentalities and anonymous forces in the unfolding of the past. Yet such readings ignore Michelet’s actual procedures of research and writing, which arguably recast both “hermeneutic” and “scientific” methods in order to create a genuinely “modernist” historical scholarship. Michelet’s history writing, Jacques Rancière has argued, brought to the fore the salient but repressed
longer defined through the old Marxist class historicist paradigm. See Metapolitics, p. 27. See Laclau, On Populist Reason, p. 223. See Lacan’s discussion of the operation of the ‘Name of the Father’ as a master signifier in the understanding of psychosis, in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III: The Psychoses 1955–1956, trans. R. Grigg (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997), p. 102. Zˇizˇek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 87–88. See Jacques Rancière in ‘Peuple ou multitude: question d’Eric Alliez a Jacques Rancière’, Multitudes, 9 (May–June, 2002): 95