About this item
Highlights
- This book explores an often neglected current in contemporary French political thought that challenges the limits of the concept of democracy.
- Author(s): Bryan Nelson
- 240 Pages
- Political Science, Political Ideologies
Description
About the Book
Puts forward a bold, polemical interpretation of democracy as an emancipatory political project through the work of Jacques Rancière, Claude Lefort and Miguel Abensour
Book Synopsis
This book explores an often neglected current in contemporary French political thought that challenges the limits of the concept of democracy. It situates the projects of Jacques Rancière, Claude Lefort and Miguel Abensour in relation to each other, as well as to the larger philosophical question of the nature of democracy itself. In doing so, Bryan Nelson illuminates democracy's potential as a profound emancipatory and transformative project, offering an unprecedented challenge to modes of domination, strategies of inequality and hierarchies of all kinds.
Against prevailing interpretations, the author draws on the central concepts, problems and polemics in the works of Rancière, Lefort and Abensour to develop a bold conception of democracy that allows us to rethink its character, power and broader social and political implications.
Review Quotes
Nelson's book is imbued with both a sense of urgency and an almost timeless feeling. It asks us to rethink democracy, because the all-too-established notions that try to tame it fail at grasping its "savage" nature. This task is demanded by our times, but it is also intrinsic to democracy itself.--Martín Plot, California Institute of the Arts