Excerpt

The fundamental ambiguity of the scholastic universes and all of their productions … lies in the fact that their apartness from the world of production is both a liberatory break and a disconnection, a potentially crippling separation. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations¹ The public sphere is in this scene what one might call the factory of politics—its site of production. Alexander Kluge, “On Film and the Public Sphere”²

In political and cultural theory today, all roads seem to lead through the public sphere. In an era of apparent political regression and economic decline, grand pronouncements of radical…