Agonism at 25: Bonnie Honig's Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

This panel will examine the significance of Bonnie Honig’s Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics 25 years after its publication (in 1993), and serve as an occasion for critically reflecting on the state of the subfield.

PTDP challenged the hegemony of justificatory approaches in political theory, and helped to usher in what we might call an “agonistic turn” in political theory, both in terms of its style and argument. PTDP argues for conceiving of politics as an agonistic field, where no absolute is ever fully absolute (for good and ill), and where institutions, laws, and norms depend on continued political action and resistance to sustain them. PTDP also argues for and enacts political theory as itself an agonistic endeavor: treating all attempts to achieve theoretical closure as invitations for theoretical analysis, resistance, and unsettlement. Honig’s agonistic theoretical style practices fidelity to the agonistic politics she describes; where other political theorists see the diversity, tensions, and antagonisms of politics as an invitation to offer orderly norms and rules for politics, Honig sees the diversity and tensions of politics as an invitation to theorize what we are doing, to offer an energetic, relentless, and deeply thought mirror to political life, that reveals the stakes of how we do politics, and how we might do it otherwise. As part of this agonistic style, PDTP and Honig’s later work assume the importance of bringing queer theory, theories of race, empire, and postcoloniality, and feminist theory into the everyday practice of political theorizing.

As agonism has itself become an established, and even dominant, model of political theorizing, it is an opportune time to revisit perhaps its most important founding document. In particular, returning to PTDP offers an occasion to remember that a now widely dispersed mode of political theorizing has a history, and to recall and examine the critical context in which this mode of political theorizing was forged. In so doing, the panel will offer a forum in which to examine the promise and problems of agonistic theory today. We might ask, for example, whether agonism itself has become a normative style that generates closures that Honig worried about in PTDP. PTDP was novel and even radical in its insistence on 1) attending to diverse kinds of difference as part of ordinary, democratic and liberal political theorizing; 2) drawing from postructuralists like Derrida in practicing a literary mode of reading texts that diagnoses ambivalence and tensions in diverse political positions, rather than attempting to affirm or declaim norms, institutions, or rules; and 3) connectedly, in calling attention to what we might call pervasive political doubleness: e.g. how institutions, laws, and diverse forms of political action are all Janus-faced, both enabling and disabling of freedom, equality, and other political goods. Returning to PTDP allows us to ask: have our modes of invoking difference, political doubleness, and ambivalence become overly settled parts of political theorizing, that themselves require challenge and unsettling? In particular, to what extent has the apparent absorption of agonism (or at least the insistence on the inevitability of contestation) within deliberativism and liberalism muted the radical edges of Honig’s original critique? By revisiting one of its founding documents (and perhaps its most important founding document), we might ask: what should agonistic theory be like today? What are the closures that require our attention and theoretical analysis? Does PTDP call us to a new agonism in the present moment?

Finally, returning to PTDP offers us a useful lens through which we might examine and think through the implications of Honig’s later work. To what extent is her important work on xenophobia, emergency politics, rights, the politics of mourning, and public things (among other things) an extension of the agonistic style and conception of politics that she forges in PTDP? Or, does her later work – for example, her focus on the importance of “public things” – challenge or unsettle her claim in PTDP that “law, responsibility, authority, the state, community, and sex/gender” are “all performative products, maintained daily, politically, and imperfectly” (210)?

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Lida E. Maxwell Boston University

Presenters

• Cristina Beltran New York University

• Stephen K. White University of Virginia

• Miriam Leonard University College London

• Shatema Threadcraft Dartmouth College

• Bonnie Honig Brown University