{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","title":"Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","id":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","uuid":"e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","title":"Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics","normalized_title":"democracyandotherneoliberalfantasiescommunicativecapitalismandleftpolitics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":229,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Democracy%20and%20Other%20Neoliberal%20Fantasies%20Communicative%20Capitalism%20and%20Left%20Politics","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e38ef66b-e3ac-494b-b5ea-9cc05b2975d8/search"},"page":{"printed_page":13,"pdf_page":23,"physical_index":23,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"f1fbdcb1cc41a014386b6375b17abcee6e2b7d17e7d65e904e00bc4201eed02c"},"chapter":"Comunicative Capitalism & Left Politics","content":"Accounts of post-politics tend to slip between two. diferent positions: post-politics as an ideal of consensus, inclusion, and administration that must be rejected and post-politics as a description of the contemporary exclusion or foreclosure of the political. Chantal .Moufe and Jacques Ranciere hold versions of the former view, Zizek takes the latter, and Wendy Brown specifies this latter point in terms of de-democratization.\n\nMoufe is the most compelling and precise as she takes aim at third way politics, the liberalism of John Rawls, and the deliberative democracy of Jirgen Habermas. Arguing that these approaches \"negate the inherently conflictual nature of modern pluralism;' she concludes, \"They are unable to recognize that bringing a deliberation to a dose always results from a decision which excludes other possibilities and for which one should never refuse to bear responsibility by invoking the commands of general rules or principles:'21 Consensus-based ideals. fail to acknowledge that politics is necessarily divisive. A decision for one course rather than another excludes some possibilties and positions. Part of the challenge of politics is taking responsibility for such exclusion.\n\nKey to the strength of Moufe's argument is her careful use of Carl Schmitt's critique of liberal parliamentarianism. Schmitt argues that liberalism seeks to evade the core political opposition between friend and enemy, attempting instead \"to tie the political to the ethical and subjugate it to economics:'22 Yet the political cannot be avoided, and attempts to submerge or eface it as intellectual deliberation or market competition result only in the displacement of the intensity characteristic of the political to another, potentially even more violent, realm. In Schmitt's words, \"The political can derive its energy from the most varied human endeavors, from the religious, economic, moral and other antitheses. It does not describe its own substance, but only the intensity of an association or dissociation of human beings whose motives can be religious, national (in the ethnic or cultural sense), economic, or of another kind and can efect at diferent times diferent coalitions and separations:'23 The political marks the intensity of a relation, an intensity that characterizes the antagonism constitutive of society (around which society forms).\n\nMoufe's emphasis on the unavoidability of antagonism and division indicates a weak point in Ranciere's discussion of post-politics (and postdemocracy, since for him democracy and politics are interchangeable). \"While attuned to the ways contemporary practices of counting opinions and managing preferences presume community and disavow political conflict and division, Ranciere tends to write as if the disappearance of politics were possible, as if the evacuation of politics from the social were a characteristic of the current conjuncture. 24 For example, he argues that today \"the identification between democracy and the legitimate state is used to produce a regime of the community's identity as itself, to make politics evaporate under a concept of law that identifies it with the spirit of the community:'25 Ranciere is right to emphasize the convergence between presumptions of democracy and of legitimacy. But he is wrong to imply the existence of a string of identifying moves that turn politics into law and law into unified community. In the United States, at least, law is the site of open and avowed political conflict that undermines even the fiction of community, a conflict that brings to the fore the relations of power and privilege already (and necessarily) inscribed in law. Ranciere's claim that \"the state today legitimizes itselfby declaring that politics is impossible\" simply does not apply to the United States post-September 11.26 From the firing of the attorneys in the civil rights division of the Justice Department, to the manipulations of law undertaken in the justification of torture, to the abolition of habeas corpus in the Military C�mmissions Act, to the employment of presidential signing statements designed to undermine the laws they ostensibly endorse, law remains a highly cont�ntious political site, indeed, the site of a counterrevolution endeavoring to install the vision of a unitary chief executive above the law.\n\nINTRODUCTION\n\n13","previous_page":12,"next_page":14}