Public Things - Honig, Bonnie
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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…mehr

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Produktbeschreibung
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 livenesss-underline the material and psychological conditions necessary for object permanence and the reparative work needed for a more egalitarian democracy.
Autorenporträt
Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University. In 2017-18, she served as inaugural Carl Cranor Phi Beta Kappa Scholar. An affiliate of the Digital Democracy Institute at Simon Fraser University and the American Bar Foundation, Chicago, her work in democratic and feminist theory studies the cultural politics of immigration (Democracy and the Foreigner, Princeton University Press, 2001), emergency (Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2009), mourning (Antigone, Interrupted, Cambridge University Press, 2013) and refusal (A Feminist Theory of Refusal, Harvard University Press, 2021). Her book Public Things : Democracy in Disrepair (Fordham University Press, 2017) came out days after Trump's 2017 inauguration, and her first piece of public writing about that presidency, "The President's House Is Empty," appeared on that inauguration day in the Boston Review. A collection of her public writing, Shell Shocked: Feminist Criticism after Trump, appeared with Fordham University Press in 2021. In 2023, her first book, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, was republished as a thirtieth-anniversary edition by Cornell University Press.