Law and Agonistic Politics

The Ancient Greek notion of agonism, meaning struggle, has been revived in radical legal and political theory to rethematize class conflict and to conceptualize the conditions of possibility of freedom and social transformation in contemporary society. Insisting that what is ultimately at stake in politics are the terms in which social conflict is represented, agonists highlight the importance of the strategic, affective and aesthetic aspects of politics for democratic praxis.This volume examines the implications of this critical perspective for understanding law and considers how law serves either to sustain or curtail the democratic agon. While sharing a critical perspective on the deliberative turn in legal and political theory and its tendency to depoliticize social conflict, the various contributors to this volume diverge in arguing variously for pragmatic, expressivist or strategic conceptions of agonism. In doing so they question the glib assumptions that often underlie a sometimes too easy celebration of conflict as an antidote to de-politicizing consensus.This thought provoking volume will be of interest to students and researchers working in legal and political theory and philosophy.

Contents: Introduction: law and agonistic politics, Andrew Schaap; The democratic agonism of the ancients compared to that of the (post)moderns, Andreas Kalyvas; Democratic agon: striving for distinction or struggle against domination and injustice?, Jean-Philippe Deranty and Emmanuel Renault; The opening: alegality and political agonism, Hans Lindahl; The expressive agon: on political agency in a constitutional democracy, David Owen; Staging dissensus: Frederick Douglass and 'we the people', Jason Frank; Polemos and agon, Alex Thomson; Questioning the law? On heteronomy in public autonomy, Bert van Roermund; Agonism, antagonism and the necessity of care, Keith Breen; The stranger in synagonistic politics, Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner; Passionate subjectivity, contestation and acknowledgement: rereading Austin and Cavell, Aletta Norval; On the rationality of disagreement and feeling: brethren, bombers and the construction of the common, Fiona Jenkins; The complex agon, Adrian Little; The absurd proposition of aboriginal sovereignty, Andrew Schaap.