If an autobiography is to be even minimally readable, the autobi-ographer must step in and subdue what you could call memory’s autism, its passion for the tedious. He must not be afraid to invent. Above all he must invent himself. Like Rousseau, who wrote (at the beginning of his novelistic Confessions ) that “I am not made like anyone I have ever been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence,” he must sustain, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, the illusion of his preternatural extraordinariness.

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Police Abolitionist Movement and the Neoliberal ParadoxThomas L. DummThomas L. DummAmherst College Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Polity Volume 55, Number 4October 2023Rear Windows The Journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/726441 Views: 86Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref HistoryPublished online August 30, 2023 KeywordsabolitionneoliberalismpoliceFoucaultdiscipline© 2023 Northeastern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Alyson Cole, Robyn Marasco, and Charles Tien Rear Windows, Polity 55, no.44 (Aug 2023): 649–654.https://doi.org/10.1086/726675

Abstract:I juxtapose two narratives concerning the politics of grief to reflect on loneliness in the US. I describe how Americans attempted to grieve the loss of the first 400,000 Americans to die from COVID-19. I then discuss how Donald Trump, often described as a sociopath, may better be understood as a person unaffected by modernity: one who reflects and amplifies a growing inability in American political culture to properly grieve without turning to grievance. I argue that the key to understanding Trump is to see him and the movement he leads as a product of the American public who no longer have the capacity to experience loneliness.

In A Politics of the Ordinary , Thomas Dumm dramatizes how everyday life in the United States intersects with and is influenced by the power of events, on the one hand, and forces of conformity and normalcy on the other. Combining poststructuralist analysis with a sympathetic reading of a strain of American thought that begins with Emerson and culminates in the work of Stanley Cavell, A Politics of the Ordinary investigates incidents from everyday life, political spectacles, and popular culture. Whether juxtaposing reflections about boredom in rural New Mexico with Emerson's theory of constitutional amendment, Richard Nixon's letter of resignation with Thoreau's writings to overcome quiet desperation, or demonstrating how Disney's Toy Story allegorizes the downsizing of the American white-collar work force, Dumm's constant concern is to show how the ordinary is the primary source of the democratic political imagination.

A Note on the Loss of the Ordinary Thomas L. Dumm (bio) We live in extraordinary times. That is a cliché, to be sure, but it is a pertinent one when we think about the current state of human affairs, with climate change brought about by the carbon economy of late capitalism having an impact on so many dimensions of life: one million animal species predicted to go extinct within the next thirty years, the coming displacement of hundreds of millions of people due to rising sea levels, the impact of drought contributing to current wars in the Middle East and ongoing refugee crises, and a dramatic intensification of economic inequality within advanced capitalist countries contributing to the rise of new authoritarian, anti-liberal, ethno-nationalist, neo-fascist movements, in short, a potential upending of what we might want to call ordinary life in most corners of the Earth. The question we face is whether the very idea of the ordinary as a place of meaning and a resource for life can survive in the face of the catastrophic. The catastrophic refers to those phenomena—as already mentioned, war, extreme weather events, famine, drought, genocide, and economic depression—that tend to erase the signposts that may lead us back to some semblance of continuity, toward a (re)construction of the social, political, and cultural orders that we previously inhabited. Click for larger view View full resolution A politics of the ordinary must struggle with this question because the political survival of the ordinary depends upon what Stanley Cavell once called the ongoing “conversation of justice.” In contradistinction to the rules-based order of justice advanced by John Rawls—with consent being founded upon the acceptance of one’s position prior to the lifting of a veil of ignorance—Cavell suggested that consent is something that is ongoing, and moreover, “Consent to society is neither restricted nor unrestricted; its content is part of the conversation of justice.” Those who find themselves unable to consent to the terms of and conditions by which they find themselves within a society, that of being treated unjustly, will try to engage the terms of the social contract by participation in more conversation. If that conversation fails to occur, between those who believe they are being treated unfairly and those who are supposedly doing the treating, then political activism or even revolt, a refusal of further consent, will happen. Or a more passive withdrawal into a quiet discontent may occur, not passivity, but a form of resignation. Cavell suggests this is what Henry David Thoreau is thinking of when he refers to the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation. (We certainly may read all sorts of signs of withdrawal of consent throughout contemporary American society in the various activisms of both Trumpian authoritarianism and a newly activated left.) Cavell was not only interested in the consent from below. He was also concerned with consent from above. He wrote, Consent from above is an acknowledgement of one’s sense of being compromised by the persistent failures of democracy and shows the persistence of one’s consent to this shameful condition of society by living now in an illustrious monarchy, hence one reachable from here (and for those of us here, only from here); which means living as an example of human partiality, that is to say, whatever Moral Perfectionism knows as the human individual, one who is not everything but is open to the further self, in oneself and in others, which means holding oneself in knowledge of the need for change; which means, being one who lives in promise, as a sign, or representative human, which in turn means expecting oneself to be, making oneself intelligible as an inhabitant now also of a further realm … and to show oneself prepared to recognize others as belonging there; as if we were all teachers or, say, philosophers. What Cavell was suggesting, in his inimitable voice, is that those who benefit the most in a society—those who are privileged, socially, economically, culturally—have the deepest responsibility to consent through an ongoing reexamination of their privilege and the price that others pay for that privilege, to mitigate...

In February of 2000, Stanley Cavell came to Amherst College to present two public lectures as the John C. McCloy ’16 Professor of American Institutions. (I had nominated him for the lectureship the previous year, and he had been approved by a College committee and the president of the College at the time, Tom Gerety, who was himself a legal philosopher.) It was a big deal. In the fall, the lecturer had been Ronald Dworkin. Others who had lectured through these early years of the lecture included such luminaries as Martha Nussbaum and George Kateb. (The first McCloy lecturer had been Fred Korematsu, who had unsuccessfully sued the U.S. government during World War II to end the Japanese internment program. Korematsu’s invitation had been a sort of historical reparation, since John McCloy, for whom the professorship had been named, had directed the internment camp program for FDR, famously saying, when asked about its constitutionality, “Compared to my country, the Constitution is just a piece of paper.”)

Introduction:William E. Connolly at Eighty Thomas L. Dumm (bio) Beginning from his early critique of pluralism as an insurgent founding member of the Caucus for a New Political Science in the 1960s down to his present contribution to the critical study of the resurgence of fascism in the twenty-first century, William E. Connolly has been a central figure in contemporary political theory for almost all of that span. Connolly's work began as a democratic critique of the dominant paradigm of American political science in the 1960s, that of the pluralism usually associated with Robert Dahl and the school of American behavioralism. Embracing a more radical perspective on the prospects for a more democratic society, Connolly deepened his critique during the 1970s, while making his first significant borrowings from outside of political theory proper, to develop his understanding of essentially contested concepts. He also collaborated inter-disciplinarily with Michael Best in studying the American political economy, in The Politicized Economy (1973). In the 1980s and 1990s his work increasingly focused on Continental thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze, participating in what Stephen White has called "the ontological turn" in political theory. It was then that he developed his understanding of agonistic democracy, described in such books as Politics and Ambiguity (1987), Political Theory and Modernity (1989) and Identity/Difference (1991). As the new millennium approached, Connolly's perspective on a new pluralism, what has come to be called "deep pluralism," emerged as an "ethos," a perspective that embraces "agonistic respect" for others. During the twenty-first century, Connolly has come to be identified as a leader of what is known as "the new materialism," looking into the ways in which affective powers inform political perspectives in such books as Neuropolitics (2002) and Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (2008), and more recently broadening his study of the powers of actants in such works as The Fragility of Things (2013) and Facing the Planetary (2017). Also in 2017, he published his initial response to the politics of the contemporary Trump regime, Aspirational Fascism. His newest book, reflecting further on our political moment, will be out later in 2019. This brief summary hardly does justice to the sweep and importance of Connolly's corpus. One of my favorite insights from the work of Stanley Cavell was his separation of philosophers into two styles: [End Page 699] those who pretend to have read nothing, and those who pretend to have read everything. I would put Connolly on the side of those who have pretended to read everything. Correct that. Connolly doesn't pretend to have read everything, but he is willing to read anything: anything that he thinks can enable a further understanding of whatever politico-ontological problem he is studying. He is an amateur reader, in what I consider to be the best sense of the term (something we discussed this spring at another conference in California). If an evolutionary biologist can explain swarming behavior to him, he is right there. If a climatologist can help explain Oedipus, he is right there. The examples are too numerous to mention. His work is prolific, deeply learned in matters of canon, so much so as to have contributed mightily to its care, but also urgently and constantly attached to our most pressing contemporary concerns, and so ever evolving in its interests as to have incorporated neuroscience, geology, psychology, film theory… And on and on. What kills me about Bill Connolly—maybe some of you have had this experience—is that you pick up one of his books and, though before the experience of reading say, Facing the Planetary, you've never seriously considered the import of the work of Alfred North Whitehead, suddenly you feel that you need to start reading Whitehead! And you don't really want to read Whitehead, but a year later, you are incorporating Whitehead into your syllabus. As with Whitehead, also with so many others Connolly has enlisted in his ongoing, exhaustive and never exhausted project of understanding the contemporary condition, seeking to ameliorate its injustices and encourage us in our democratic insistences. For this symposium, four distinguished scholars from a variety of fields of expertise and a...

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Recently, scholars have argued that to ask questions concerning what it may mean to be human is, paradoxically, to engage in an inquiry that is at best, meaningless and at worst, moraline, distracting thinkers from the pursuit of more consequential questions. I argue that the idea of the human remains central to any comprehension of sovereign power. To do so, I present a critical analysis of Erik Santner's work on what he calls "the flesh." Alternatively, I suggest that there are migrations of sovereignty more robust than the masculinist rendering of the flesh that he presents.

This essay explores the tensions inherent in philosophical autobiography by way of an extended examination of Stanley Cavell's philosophical memoir, Little Did I Know . Using the idea of exposure to think through what may be a stake in the commitment to write about one's own life as an object of philosophical reflection, I suggest that Cavell's way of addressing the self-misunderstandings that inevitably arise in the auto-biographical act is to present the problem as being one of how to give properly, in Roberto Esposito's sense of the term.]

President Barack Obama seems to have abandoned his left base in order to rule in a bipartisan manner. In this essay, I suggest that his strategy has not been to govern from the center, even if that is the result of his strategy. Instead, by focusing attention on his conflicts with the Right he has managed to make his left base acquiescent, while illuminating the intransigence of his right opposition. In short, he has chosen the enemy he wants.