Agamben, Badiou, Bensaïd, Brown, Nancy, Rancière, Ross, Žižek: Democracy in What State? (2009/2011) [French/English]

“Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?”

In responding to this question, eight iconoclastic thinkers prove the rich potential of democracy, along with its critical weaknesses, and reconceive the practice to accommodate new political and cultural realities. Giorgio Agamben traces the tense history of constitutions and their coexistence with various governments. Alain Badiou contrasts current democratic practice with democratic communism. Daniel Bensaid ponders the institutionalization of democracy, while Wendy Brown discusses the democratization of society under neoliberalism. Jean-Luc Nancy measures the difference between democracy as a form of rule and as a human end, and Jacques Rancière highlights its egalitarian nature. Kristin Ross identifies hierarchical relationships within democratic practice, and Slavoj Zizek complicates the distinction between those who desire to own the state and those who wish to do without it.

Concentrating on the classical roots of democracy and its changing meaning over time and within different contexts, these essays uniquely defend what is left of the left-wing tradition after the fall of Soviet communism. They confront disincentives to active democratic participation that have caused voter turnout to decline in western countries, and they address electoral indifference by invoking and reviving the tradition of citizen involvement. Passionately written and theoretically rich, this collection speaks to all facets of modern political and democratic debate.

Démocratie, dans quel état?
By Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaïd, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, Slavoj Žižek
Originally published by La Fabrique, Paris, 2009
Canadian edition published by Les Éditions Écosociété, Montréal, 2009, ISBN 9782923165585

Translated to English by William McCuaig
Publisher Columbia University Press, 2011
New Directions in Critical Theory
ISBN 0231152981, 9780231152983
130 pages

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Julia Schramm: Klick mich: Bekenntnisse einer Internet-Exhibitionistin (2012) [German]

Politologin, Publizistin, Piratin, Provokateurin, Privilegienmuschi, Post-Gender-Feministin, Politikerin.

Sie leben im Netz. Sie kommen aus dem Netz. Sie kennen die echte Welt und haben noch eine Welt hinter dem Monitor, mit allen Geschichten, allen Bildern, allem Wissen der Menschheit. Von dort aus erobern sie die Wirklichkeit. Die Kinder des digitalen Zeitalters sitzen mittlerweile in den Parlamenten und stehen mächtigen Firmen vor. Wir müssen sie kennenlernen. Julia Schramm – die, die aus dem Internet kommt – erzählt ihre Geschichte. Was sie macht. Wie sie lebt. Wie sie denkt.

»Mein Name ist Julia und ich lebe im Internet. Ich bin da ziemlich glücklich, habe Freunde, die ich nur digital kenne und abschalten kann, wann ich will. Ich kann im Internet alles sein: Mafiaboss, Barbie, Hitler, Hotelbesitzer und ein kleines grünes Krokodil. Am Computer bin ich Gott. Und dabei fühle ich mich großartig – großartig böse, kalt und berechnend. Bereits in jungen Jahren, mit 13 oder 14, war ich mir über die schier endlosen Möglichkeiten der Identitätskonstruktion bewusst. Das Internet war der Ort, wo ich alles zum ersten Mal erlebte: Liebe, Sex und Verrat. Aufklärung, Freiheit und Politik. Dort rede, lache, weine und denke ich. Denn ich bin ein Kind des digitalen Zeitalters, ich bin die, die aus dem Internet kommt. Und das ist meine Geschichte.«

Publisher Albrecht Knaus, Muenchen, Random House, 2012
ISBN 3641081920, 9783641081928
208 pages

FAIL – Prominent Pirate Party Politician Goes After Book Pirates (Torrentfreak)
Pirate Party Member Insists on Copyright for Book (Spiegel)

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Peter Sloterdijk: Critique Of Cynical Reason (1983/1988)

In 1983, two centuries after the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, another philosophical treatise—polemical in nature, with a title that consciously and disrespectfully alludes to the earlier work—appeared in West Germany. Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason stirred both critical acclaim and consternation and attracted a wide readership, especially among those who had come of age in the 1960’s. Sloterdijk’s finds cynicism the dominant mode in contemporary culture, in personal institutional settings; his book is less a history of the impulse than an investigation of its role in the postmodern 1970s and 1980s, among those whose earlier hopes for social change had crumbled and faded away. Sloterdijk thus brings into cultural and political discourse an issue which, though central to the mood of a generation, has remained submerged throughout the current debate about modernity and postmodernity.

With Adorno and Horkeimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment as his primary jumping-off point, Sloterdijk also draws upon, and contends with, the poststructuralist concepts of Deleuze and Guattari. He defines cynicism as enlightened false consciousness—a sensibility “well off and miserable at the same time,” able to function in the workaday world yet assailed by doubt and paralysis; and, as counterstrategy, proposes the cynicism of antiquity—the sensuality and loud, satiric laughter of Diogenes. Above all, Sloterdijk is determined to resist the amnesia inherent in cynicism. The twentieth-century German historical experience lies behind his work, which closes with a brilliant essay on the Weimar Republic—the fourteen years between a lost war and Hitler’s ascent to power, and a time when the cynical mode first achieved cultural dominance.

Originally published as Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, 2 vols, 1983 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main
Translated by Michael Eldred
Foreword by Andreas Huyssen
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1988
Volume 40 of Theory and History of Literature
ISBN 0816615861, 9780816615865
600 pages

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