Thinking Out Loud

In the contemporary world of neoliberalism, efficiency is treated as the vehicle of political and economic health .State bureaucracy, but not corporate bureaucracy, is seen as inefficient, and privatization is seen as a magic cure for social ills. In Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair, Bonnie Honig asks whether democracy is possible in the absence of public services, spaces, and utilities. In other words, if neoliberalism leaves to democracy merely electoral majoritarianism and procedures of deliberation while divesting democratic states of their ownership of public things, what will the impact be? Following Tocqueville, who extolled the virtues of "pursuing in common the objects of common desires," Honig focuses not on the demos but on the objects of democratic life. Democracy, as she points out, postulates public things-infrastructure, monuments, libraries-that citizens use, care for, repair, and are gathered up by. To be "gathered up" refers to the work of D.W. Winnicott, the object relations psychoanalyst who popularized the idea of "transitional objects"-the toys, teddy bears, or favorite blankets by way of which infants come to understand themselves as unified selves with an inside and an outside in relation to others. The wager of Public Things is that the work transitional objects do for infants is analogously performed for democratic citizens by public things, which press us into object relations with others and with ourselves. Public Things attends also to the historically racial character of public things: public lands taken from indigenous peoples, access to public goods restricted to white majorities. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, who saw how things fabricated by humans lend stability to the human world, Honig shows how Arendt and Winnicott-both theorists of liveness-underline the material and psychological conditions necessary for object permanence and the reparative work needed for a more egalitarian democracy.

The announcement of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, is not just a scientific classification. It marks a radical transformation in the background conditions of life on earth-and not just human life-conditions which so much of how we are and what we hope for, take for granted. This change is one for which 'we' are responsible (though we never intended it), and, coupled with climate change, is likely catastrophic. Moreover we cannot reverse it. This has severe real world consequences. But it also brings new significance to some very traditional philosophical questions-about reason, agency, responsibility, community, and Man's place in Nature. The focus is shifting from imagining and promoting the Good Life (with business as usual the default position), to the survival of the species with anything like the belief in progress and visions of flourishing we once had. With this movement in the very ground of our being, Nietzsche's "Being true to the earth" requires a radical new materialism. Deep Time draws on the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, other contemporary French thinkers, and the science of climate change. The first part reflects on the series of displacements and decenterings of the privilege of the earth, and the human, from Copernicus through Darwin, Freud to the declaration of the age of the Anthropocene. What is it to be human in a posthuman world? The second part argues for the need to develop a new temporal phronesis-a sophisticated fluency in the aporetic nature of time (the paradoxical structures with which it presents us), its multi-layeredness and multi-dimensionality. Such a temporally enhanced dwelling draws on both our human and geological history. The third part follows up the problem (from part I) of who 'we' are in respect of solidarity with other humans, and responsibility for the non-human stakeholders with which we share a planet. It also addresses a range of questions centered around political agency raised by the failures of the Kyoto process. Is a democracy-to-come the problem or the solution? And could human exceptionalism be reborn as hyperbolic responsibility rather than privilege?

Secular criticism is a term invented by Edward Said to denote not a theory but a practice that counters the tendency of much modern thinking to reach for a transcendentalist comfort zone, the very space philosophy wrested away from religion in the name of modernity. Using this notion as a compass, this book reconfigures recent secularism debates on an entirely different basis, by showing (1) how the secular imagination is closely linked to society's radical poiesis, its capacity to imagine and create unprecedented forms of worldly existence; and (2) how the space of the secular animates the desire for a radical democratic politics that overturns inherited modes of subjugation, whether religious or secularist. Gourgouris's point is to disrupt the co-dependent relation between the religious and the secular-hence, his rejection of fashionable languages of postsecularism-in order to engage in a double critique of heteronomous politics of all kinds. For him, secular criticism is a form of political being: critical, antifoundational, disobedient, anarchic, yet not negative for negation's sake but creative of new forms of collective reflection, interrogation, and action that alter not only the current terrain of dominant politics but also the very self-conceptualization of what it means to be human. Written in a free and combative style and given both to close readings of texts and to gazing off into the broad horizon, these essays cover a range of issues-historical and philosophical, archaic and contemporary, literary and political-that ultimately converge in the significance of contemporary radical politics: the assembly movements we have seen in various parts of the world in recent years. The secular imagination demands a radical pedagogy and unlearning a great many established thought patterns. Its most important dimension is not battling religion per se but dismantling theological politics of sovereignty in favor of radical conditions for social autonomy.