Online research in philosophy

Prologue : narratocracy and the contours of political life -- From nomos to nomad : Kant, Deleuze, and Rancière on sensation -- The piazza, the edicola, and the noise of the utterance -- Machiavelli's theory of sensation and Florence's vita festiva -- The viewing subject : Caravaggio, Bacon, and the ring -- "You're eating too fast!" slow food's ethos of convivium -- Epilogue : "the photographs tell it all" : on an ethics of appearance.

Images of political thought -- Delicate discriminations : Thomas Hobbes's science of politics -- The banality of the negative : Gilles Deleuze's ethics of the problem -- The beautiful and the sublime in Rawls and Rancire -- The force of political argument : Habermas, Hazlitt, and the essay -- Les sans papiers, or, No vox populi, vox Dei.

In this essay, the author examines the tensions that emerge between the practice of essay writing and a commitment to philosophical justification as the model for political argument in contemporary political thought. He focuses on Jürgen Habermas's adoption of the performative contradiction as an ideal for communicative exchange and shows the unacknowledged role that sincerity plays in Habermas's argument. He then links this account to his explorations of the rise of aesthetic criticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its (...) contribution to democratic thought. Turning to one of the key literary and political critics of the period, William Hazlitt, the author shows how his theory of essay composition lends itself to a radical democratic imaginary that complicates the account of political argument Habermas sets out. Hazlitt's essays, the author concludes, are exemplary in their embracing of contradiction as a condition of democratic life. (shrink)