“Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate. Its justification loses its plausibility the farther its intended end recedes into the future.”
Hannah Arendt, 1969, On Violence, Harcourt and Brace.
Category Archives: Bite Size Theory
Bite Size Theory: The Politics of Small Things
“Factual truth is the bedrock of a free politics. Difference of interpretation and opinion is its process. That the factual sometimes fades into the interpretative does not mitigate against the requirement that an interpretative scheme or doctrine cannot substitute for politics. That the interpretative sometimes seems to the convinced to be the factual does not mitigate against the requirement that for people to meet and interact in a free public, they must share a sense of a factual world. That fact and interpretation get mixed up is very much a part of the messiness of politics, a messiness that is confronted in concrete interactive situations.”
Jeffrey Goldfarb, 2006. The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times, University of Chicago Press.
Bite Size Theory: Mikhail Bakhtin
“Democracy is no longer an unequivocal ideal, it is also a historical fact, not just the prize but the battleground on which social struggles take place […] Both Left and Right work the terrain of democracy, and though the ground ought to favour the former, it is from the latter that some of the most successful and inventive thrusts have come.”
Ken Hirschkop, 1999, Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy, Oxford University Press.
Bite Size Theory: Democracy and the Foreigner
“Democratic cosmopolitanism is a name for forms of internationalism that seek not to govern, per se, but rather to widen the resources, energies, and accountability of an emerging international civil society that contests or supports state actions in matters of transnational and local interest such as environmental, economic, military, cultural and social policies.”
Bonnie Honig, 2001, Democracy and the Foreigner, Princeton University Press.
Bite Size Theory: The Way We Argue Now
“If anyone else had published the second and third volumes of the History of Sexuality, they would have had little to no impact on the theoretical domains of literary and cultural theory in the U.S. academy.”
Amanda Anderson, 2006, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory. Princeton, Princeton University Press, p. 121.
Bite Size Theory: Being Singular Plural
“What comes to us today is the demand to give the meaning of being-in-common according to what it is – in– common or with- – and not according to a Being or an essence of the common.”
Jean-Luc Nancy, 2000, Being Singular Plural, University of Minnesota Press.
Bite Size Theory: The Ethics of Deconstruction
“Democracy is a fragile, agnostic, doxic form of political life, where fragility is the price to be paid for the refusal of all forms of immanentism. Democracy is the politics of difficulty, opacity, and dirty hands, of the fact that the social is not a complete, transparent oeuvre, that political action is always taken on an open, undecidable terrain.”
Simon Critchley, 1992, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Blackwell.
Bite Size Theory: Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy
“At the source of democracy can be found the rejection of a number of things: power detached from the social ensemble, law that governs an immutable order, and a spiritual authority possessing knowledge of the ultimate ends of human conduct and of the community. However, it is not enough to say at the source of democracy: this rejection has been democracy’s permanent driving energy. A force of negativity inhabits it.”
Claude Lefort, 1999, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy. New York, Columbia University Press
Bite Size Theory: The Sources of Social Power (Volume 4)
“Neoliberals, like socialists, must compromise with power realities to achieve any of their goals. So within what is often called the neoliberal movement I distinguish four tendencies: principled neoliberalism elevating markets and individualism, the interests of capitalists, the interests of political elites, and a conservatism that uses the state to enforce morality, law and order, nationalism, and militarism. Though there is overlap among all of these, it is useful analytically to separate them.”
Michael Mann, 2013, The Sources of Social Power: Volume 4, Globalizations, 1945-2011, Cambridge University Press.
Bite Size Theory: Turning Operations
“Politics is an irreducibly strategic concern and a domain of strategic action.”
Mary Dietz, 2002, Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt, and Politics, Routledge.
Pop Theory 