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Agonistics: The implications of Mouffe's approach for IR (2013)…
Agonistics: The implications of Mouffe's approach for IR (2013)
Social order
Hegemonic
particular configuration of power relations
hegemonic practices
practices of articulation which create an order and fix the meaning of social institutions
contingent
order as precarious and temporal articulations
exclusion of other possibilities
"things could always be otherwise"
counter-hegemonic practices
challenge the order
The Political
antagonistic dimension
challenges the order
Politics
ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions which establish an order
hegemony
antagonism
Liberalism (pp. 3-5)
universal consensus based o reason
the denial of the political or antagonism
IRT: peace; cooperation; win-win, absolute gains
individualism
neglects collective identities
"being as presence"
(social) objectivity
schools of thought (pp. 6-9)
Aggregative model
political actors pursue their interests (realist IRT)
Deliberative model
role of reason and moral considerations (liberal IRT)
Mouffe also criticizes "cosmopolitan approach to democracy" (pp. 19-21)
because of its essentialism to conceive a world beyond hegemony and sovereignty, and antagonism
Kantian (traditional liberal) cosmopolitanism
"Vernacular cosmopolitanism" of Homi Bhabha & Dipesh Chakrabarty
"Decolonial cosmopolitanism" of Walter Mignolo
The agonistic model
How to establish the us/them distinction in a way that is compatible with pluralism?
conflict does not take the form of antagonism (enemies) but of agonism (adversaries)
for liberal pluralist democracies (p.19)
This regime offers "the possibility of conflicts to take an 'agonistic' form (adversaries) in order to avoid antagonisms (enemies)
Mouffe reproduces the same IR logic of conflict/cooperation by applying PDT tenets. the conception of IR as a discipline circumscribed to European relations of power and/or regional relations of power reveals her European etnocentrism; thus, her approach does not imagine a world in which African, Asian and Latin American nations can engage. What I put into question, in other words, is the scope of the agonistic model (conflict/cooperation model) to explain (trans-continental) trans-Pacific relations such as CL-CN
I make this observation despite the fact that Mouffe is looking for a "plurality of alternatives" beyond the "Western models" (p. 20)
she criticizes such forms of "pluralism without antagonism" (p. 22)
my challenge then is to find the "political" dimension of the CL-CN
the footprint is Derrida's hostipitality
It is "the space where an agonistic encounter takes place between a diversity of poles which engage with each other without any one of them having the pretence of being the superior one. This agonistic encounter is a confrontation where the aim is neither the annihilation nor the assimilation of the other, and where the tensions between the different approaches contribute to enhancing the pluralism that characterizes a multipolar world" (p. 41).
her idea of antagonistc dimension entails to acknowledge that the world is a "pluriverse" not a "universe" (p. 22)
thesis: the world order is "agonistic" because it acknowledges "a plurality of regional poles organized according to economic and political models without central authority [...] conflicts are less likely to take an antagonistic form than in a world where a single economic and political model is presented as the only legitimate one and is imposed on all parties in the name of its supposedly superior rationalist and morality" (p. 22)
pluralism entails "the political" - conflict
The agonistic model applied to the EU
Background: we are experiencing a reinforcement of national (and regional) identities instead of supranational ones (p. 43)
Problem
"many conceptions of a post-national Europe are informed by an individualistic and rationalistic framework that prevents us from grasping the process of collective identity formation and from acknowledging the nature and role of national and regional forms of identification" (p. 44)
Argument
'constitutive outside' (proposed by Henry Staten to describe Derrida's undecidable concepts)
Identity
assertion of a difference
determination of an other
the frontier between interior & exterior
the creation of a 'we' through the formulation of a 'they'
there aren't 'essential' identities but forms of identification (p. 45)
Affects
1 more item...
Identities (constitutive outside)
constructed as difference
relational
us / them
social objectivity is constructed by relations of power
leave aside
collective identities
role of affects (passions) to constitute identities
Social order