Democracy and the Political Unconscious by Noelle McAfee

Democracy and the Political Unconscious by Noelle McAfee

Author:Noelle McAfee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI027000, Philosophy/Movements/Deconstruction, PHI019000, Philosophy/Political
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2008-03-16T16:00:00+00:00


In Habermas’s ideal politics, questions of universal moral validity, that is, justice, take precedence over questions of solidarity. Habermas subordinates deliberation aimed at choosing what kind of community we would like to be to deliberation aimed at questions of justice. The distinction itself is fine, at least for analytic purposes; but the notion that these can be engaged in independently of each other is wrong. Whenever people deliberate about what kind of community they want to be, they are addressing matters of justice. And whenever questions of justice are on the table, they are approached in the context of a particular community’s concerns. A political community addressing an issue of immigration is simultaneously struggling to integrate its desire to stand for openness and freedom with the exigencies, whether real or felt, of limited resources. Communities that are deliberating about how to “treat minorities and marginal groups” are very much involved in questions of justice while struggling to forge their own self-understanding. What I or we stand for is very much a part of who I or we are. In such cases, deliberations turn on how to forge a particular community that upholds values that all might be proud of upholding. Our own self-understanding is tempered by what we think others will think of us, and most of us want to be seen as member of a moral order. So deliberation aimed at forging collective purposes is always already wrapped up with questions of more universal morality.

Moreover, it is these very deliberations aimed at deciding what kind of community we want to be that turn a people into a public that might also take up questions of justice. Unless a public makes itself in the work of deciding what it ought to do on matters of common concern, there will be no public to adjudicate questions of justice.

Michael Sandel makes a similar point in his rejoinder to John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. Like Habermas, and also following Kant, Rawls prioritizes the right over the good, universal principles of justice over particular concerns of a given community. Sandel argues that questions of justice are posed somewhere, in some particular context, among some particular people. The public work that makes a people a public is as vital as the public work of deciding matters of justice, and probably prior to it as well.

I asked earlier about this work that makes people a public; what kind of work is it? Derrida in his writing on public judgment said it was a judgment, a yes or no, not a knowledge. Likewise, Aristotle long ago noted that choice and deliberation in politics are about matters that have no certain answer. We deliberate about what we should do. We deliberate well when we have a sense of what good ends are, and that can only be arrived at through practical deliberation, not scientific knowledge. Yet Habermas’s political questions take a form more akin to questions of knowledge than questions of purpose. He is quite explicit about this.



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