Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics

By Bonnie Honig

Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, originally published in 1993, has been called a founding text of agonism, which treats political contestation not as a regrettably necessary way to correct political imperfections but as a necessary, sometimes joyful feature of democratic life. As Bonnie Honig writes in the preface to this thirtieth anniversary edition, "the agonism that informs this book is democratic: it is committed to shared spaces and relational practices in which diverse groups and individuals set and reset the terms of living together as equals."

By rethinking the established relation between politics and political theory, Honig argues that political theorists of opposing positions often treat political theory less as an exploration of politics than as a series of devices for its displacement. She characterizes Kant, Rawls, and Sandel as virtue theorists of politics, arguing that they rely on principles of right, rationality, community, and law to protect their political theories from the conflict and uncertainty of political reality. Drawing on Nietzsche and Arendt as well as Machiavelli and Derrida, Honig instead explores an alternative politics of virtú, which treats the disruptions of political order as valued sites of democratic freedom and individuality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781501768460

Book preview

Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics

30th Anniversary Edition

Bonnie Honig

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

For Michael

Democratic ages are times of experiment, innovation, and adventure.

—Alexis de Tocqueville

The hero’s gesture has not accidentally become the pose of philosophy since Nietzsche: it requires heroism to live in the world as Kant left it.

—Hannah Arendt

Not long ago I became acquainted with the Kantian philosophy—and I now have to tell you of a thought I derived from it, which I feel free to do because I have no reason to fear it will shatter you so profoundly and painfully as it has me.—We are unable to decide whether that which we call truth really is truth, or whether it only appears to us to be. If the latter then the truth we assemble here is nothing after our death, and all endeavor to acquire a possession which will follow us to the grave is in vain.

—Heinrich von Kleist

(in a letter to his fiancée)

Contents

Preface to the 30th Anniversary Edition

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

1. Negotiating Positions: The Politics of Virtue and Virtù

2. Kant and the Concept of Respect for Persons

Beginnings

Respect for the Moral Law

Reverence-Respect for Persons

Teleological Respect for Persons

Liberal Respect for Persons

Setting the Conditions for Moral Improvement

Kant’s Virtue Theory of Politics

3. Nietzsche and the Recovery of Responsibility

Three Kinds of Recovery

The Genealogical Recovery of Responsibility

The Re-covery of Responsibility: Against Remorse

The Re-covery of Responsibility: Eternal Recurrence

Alternative Responsibilities: The Self as a Work of Art

Nietzsche’s Re-covery of Virtue as Virtù

Nietzsche’s Reverence for Institutions

4. Arendt’s Accounts of Action and Authority

Action, Identity, and the Self

Acting through Speech: Promising and Forgiveness

The Postulates of Action

Stabilizing Performatives: Arendt, Austin, and Derrida

Acting through Writing: Founding the New American Republic

The Undecidability of the American Declaration of Independence

Intervention, Augmentation, and Resistibility: Arendt’s Practice of Political Authority

Making Space for Arendt’s Virtù Theory of Politics

5. Rawls and the Remainders of Politics

Reconciliation or Politicization?

The Politics of Originating Positions

The Practice of Punishment

Irresponsible Rogues and Idiosyncratic Misfits

Liberal and Other Alternatives

6. Sandel and the Proliferation of Political Subjects

Two Kinds of Dispossession

The Communitarian Subject of Possession

Occasions for Politics

Politics as Friendship

Morally Deep Questions

Morally Deep Answers

The Rawlsian Supplement

7. Renegotiating Positions: Beyond the Virtue- Virtù Opposition

Notes

Index

Cover

Title

Dedication

Epigraph

Contents

Preface to the 30th Anniversary Edition

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

1. Negotiating Positions: The Politics of Virtue and Virtù

2. Kant and the Concept of Respect for Persons

Beginnings

Respect for the Moral Law

Reverence-Respect for Persons

Teleological Respect for Persons

Liberal Respect for Persons

Setting the Conditions for Moral Improvement

Kant’s Virtue Theory of Politics

3. Nietzsche and the Recovery of Responsibility

Three Kinds of Recovery

The Genealogical Recovery of Responsibility

The Re-covery of Responsibility: Against Remorse

The Re-covery of Responsibility: Eternal Recurrence

Alternative Responsibilities: The Self as a Work of Art

Nietzsche’s Re-covery of Virtue as Virtù

Nietzsche’s Reverence for Institutions

4. Arendt’s Accounts of Action and Authority

Action, Identity, and the Self

Acting through Speech: Promising and Forgiveness

The Postulates of Action

Stabilizing Performatives: Arendt, Austin, and Derrida

Acting through Writing: Founding the New American Republic

The Undecidability of the American Declaration of Independence

Intervention, Augmentation, and Resistibility: Arendt’s Practice of Political Authority

Making Space for Arendt’s Virtù Theory of Politics

5. Rawls and the Remainders of Politics

Reconciliation or Politicization?

The Politics of Originating Positions

The Practice of Punishment

Irresponsible Rogues and Idiosyncratic Misfits

Liberal and Other Alternatives

6. Sandel and the Proliferation of Political Subjects

Two Kinds of Dispossession

The Communitarian Subject of Possession

Occasions for Politics

Politics as Friendship

Morally Deep Questions

Morally Deep Answers

The Rawlsian Supplement

7. Renegotiating Positions: Beyond the Virtue-Virtù Opposition

Notes

Index

Copyright

Guide

Cover

Title

Dedication

Epigraph

Contents

Preface to the 30th Anniversary Edition

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Start of Content

Notes

Index

Copyright

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Preface to the 30th Anniversary Edition

Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, originally published in 1993, has been called a founding text of agonism.¹ Agonism treats contestation not as a regrettably necessary way to correct political imperfections but as a necessary, often joyful feature of democratic life. Agonism rejects efforts by political theorists or philosophers to theorize politics based on justified norms, rules, or truths that provide incontestable foundations for politics. Agonism is committed to contest, not for contest’s sake but for the sake of those remaindered by even the best, most tolerant, democratic political orders. Still, the agonism that informs this book is democratic: it is committed to shared spaces and relational practices in which diverse groups and individuals set and reset the terms of living together as equals.

In addition to arguing for agonism as a politics, Displacement also enlists agonism as a method. If political theory’s aim is not to end contestation but to perpetually reignite it so as to re-equalize parties to democratic contestation, then the approach we take as theorists should reflect that. In scholarship, this means assuming that our interlocuters’ texts have something of value to offer agonism, even though we differ with them. We appreciate them, further, because the clash with them elevates our thinking and sharpens our vision. Moreover, because agonism is actional, we focus not just on different thinkers’ arguments, and our own and others’ criticisms of them, but also on each text’s performative impact, narrative strategies, dramatic appeals, and rhetorical emplotments. Written in the wake of a linguistic turn that moved from Ludwig Wittgenstein to J. L. Austin and Jacques Derrida, Displacement helped not only to initiate political theory’s agonistic turn, it also prefigured some of the other turns that followed soon after—the rhetorical, literary, sensorial, affective, and aesthetic turns. Like agonism, these various turns inquire into how norms are experienced and not solely whether they are right, justifiable, or foundational for politics.

The debate that was dominant in Anglo-American political theory at the time of Displacement’s publication, still important but no longer dominant now, was that between liberalism and communitarianism, represented in this book by John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice and Michael Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. These texts sought to generate normative principles that would settle certain fundamental matters beyond dispute so they could serve as foundations for politics. Agonism, committed to the perpetuity of political contest, takes a different approach. It is less about building a politics on a certain theory of the subject, or incontestable foundations or consensus, than it is about enacting a politics where consensus occasionally gels, or coalitions stabilize for long enough to advance equality further. It is less about winning or losing an argument than it is about reframing, joining with others in understanding, and finding a way forward together, through conflicts. It is less about victory than taking turns and contesting prior settlements. This means that the convictions that drive us in any one moment must also be subject periodically to renewed interrogation or reconsideration. Agonism is antidogmatic, but not neutral: it is committed to democratic equality.

As a political mode of engagement, agonism elevates, and is elevated by, the liberal, communitarian, or democratic theories it seeks to modify. In 1993, this required dislodging the central debates of the day. I reorganized them into a different, staged clash between virtù (disruptive) and virtue (orderly) theories of politics, highlighting the contrast between these two visions of politics as sharper and more significant than that between liberalism versus communitarianism. Reading closely, infiltrating the arguments of opponents, rather than—as in Homeric agonism or analytic philosophy—seeking to destroy or defeat them, Displacement models a style of theoretical contestation worthy of the name agonism and advocates for an agonism that is both theory/method and a political ideal for democratic theory.

Displacement tests John Rawls’ just liberal order by analyzing his reasoning (for, say, the priority of liberty over equality or for the difference principle) but also going beyond his arguments to his examples of criminality and idiosyncrasy. The idea is to ask not only, as Rawls does, whether the treatment of lawbreakers or oddballs in his ideal of justice as fairness can be justified, but also: What does it feel like to practice such justification? For those who ask for it and for those who provide it, what is the experience of justification? Might someone’s ill-fittedness to a well-ordered society be a reason to question it, rather than a reason to be questioned by it? I wager that the experience of living in justice as fairness might not be as neutral or tolerant for dissident or minoritized persons as Rawls wagers, and that the mutual respect he values will be more uncertain than he allows.

In 1993, Rawls was widely read, but not literarily. Back then, I saw in Rawls’ examples a new way to think with and against his theory. His examples offered an opportunity to confront the analytic with the phenomenological, to glimpse the world of justice as fairness as it might be experienced. Examples in contemporary political theory are often treated as merely illustrative or even irrelevant adornments of rational arguments rather than as sources of a text’s power.² I did not discuss method, as such, in Displacement: I wanted the book to speak for itself. But it would have been useful, then, and I hope it is still so now, to reflect explicitly on the impact of Displacement’s literary approach to political theory’s texts and arguments.

One of the captivating examples in A Theory of Justice is Rawls’ consideration of a man whose only pleasure is counting blades of grass. The grass-counter is not bothering anyone but neither is he, from a Rawlsian perspective, living up to his potential in a society where the aim is to carve out rationally a life with a certain unity, a dominant theme.³ How, then, would justice as fairness handle such a fanciful case? Rawls asks. Thirty years after writing Displacement, I have a lot more to say about Rawls’ grass-counter than I did then, and this partly as a result of political theory’s turn in the intervening years, to which I have avidly contributed, to think with literature, drama, and film. Here is what Rawls says in A Theory of Justice:

Imagine someone whose only pleasure is to count blades of grass in various geometrically shaped areas such as park squares and well-trimmed lawns. He is otherwise intelligent and actually possesses unusual skills, since he manages to survive by solving difficult mathematical problems for a fee. The definition of the good forces us to admit that the good for this man is indeed counting blades of grass. . . . Naturally we would be surprised that such a person should exist. . . . Perhaps he is peculiarly neurotic. . . . But if we allow that his nature is to enjoy this activity and not any other, and that there is no feasible way to alter his condition . . . this establishes that it is good for him.⁴

Rawls imagines the encounter ends with people acknowledging that what is good for the grass-counter is good enough for them. This absolves justice as fairness from the criticism that it is too demanding and shows it meets the requirement of mutual respect.

But can that be right? Part of the concession to the grass-counter depends on whether there is any feasible way to alter his condition. We are left with a sense that altering him would be great, if only it could be done without violating his liberty. This matters for many reasons, detailed in Displacement, but the key is simply this: the criterion of mutual respect, which Rawls promotes as a virtue of justice as fairness, is at odds with the practices of justification that Rawls treats as its necessary condition. If people leave the grass-counter to his blades only after assessing feasible ways to alter his condition, it is hard to say he is respected.

A real-world example might help. Consider how the U.S. education system today deals with students who are neuroatypical, which is another way to think about the grass-counter. Often, the assumption is that such students need extra help in the classroom or that they require pharmacological treatment. They may well benefit from such interventions and their school-work may improve. But are the students the problem? Is their nature their misfortune, as Rawls says about the law-breaking criminal in justice as fairness? Or might a public education system that emphasizes testing and achievement be implicated in their plight? And might other systems also be in play? In the United States, the distribution of treatment versus punishment is often racialized. Medicalized or therapeutic approaches diagnose and prescribe, while punitive ones remove students from the classroom. An agonistic perspective presses us to ask: Why, among the neurodiverse, do some get treatment while others get punished? And how might education be reimagined or diversified so as to acknowledge a wider range of cognitive skills and practices?

In Displacement, I argued the grass-counter was an underachiever and I proposed thinking about how taking pleasure in underachievement challenges Rawls’ ideal, which values the development of conceptions of the good through rational deliberation. I read Rawls literarily in 1993, but political theory as a field was not as open then as it is now to drawing on literature.⁵ Now, I could hardly resist noting that the promiscuous or indolent grass-counter (151), associated by Rawls with pleasure, belongs in the company of other iconic pleasure seekers who refuse to be normatively (re)productive.⁶ Familiar examples from philosophy, theory, film, and literature include Melville’s Bartleby, Thoreau’s saunterer, Baudelaire’s flaneur, Chaplin’s tramp, Rancière’s farniente, the sinthomosexual of Lee Edelman’s queer theory, Homer’s Penelope, who takes her quiet time of self-belonging . . . from men’s tempo, which is greedy for events as Adriana Cavarero says, Ferdinand the bull, in The Story of Ferdinand, who likes to sit quietly in a field and smell the flowers, Saidiya Hartman’s Black American women of the early twentieth century who lived wayward lives, and the bacchants of my own A Feminist Theory of Refusal who, I argue, take prohibited leisure in their pleasure-based refusal in Euripides’ great tragedy, the Bacchae.⁷ Flaneurs, farnientes, ne’er do wells, women, the wayward, wastrels, and queers refuse the intensifying norms of production and reproduction in capitalist societies. They disidentify with demands to be socially productive or reproductive in the usual capitalist, nationalist, or heterosexual ways. All prefer not to, in Bartleby’s famous phrase, adopted by the Occupy movement in 2011. But they do not all only refuse: some engage in acts of counteridentification and collectivity, gathering in new kinships and forming new communities of relationality.

The possible queerness of the grass-counter might confront us further with the question of his sexuality. Some critics have argued that Ferdinand and Bartleby are gay. Is the grass-counter? Although I was concerned in Displacement to attend to the unjust minoritization of gay life, this question about the grass-counter did not occur to me. Asking it now, I note that this counting of blades of grass conjures gay blade a term that once meant high-achieving sword play but came to mean someone who is gay. Also, I note another striking detail: Rawls describes the grass that grips the grass-counter as geometric and well-trimmed. The effect of all that straightness is to quarantine queerness. In the end, the man’s pleasure is recoded, straightened into a good (albeit for him), and this, too, protects the admired and productive kinds of good that justice as fairness wants to promote from what might be pleasure’s disordering powers.⁸ When Rawls says the definition of the good forces us to admit that the good for this man is indeed counting blades of grass, this also means that the definition of the good forces this man to call his pleasure a good.

Justice as fairness is supposed to be neutral among conceptions of the good. The grass-counter, tolerated but concerning, suggests otherwise. He is a problem because he declines the achievement model promoted by Rawls but also because pleasure is associated with Utilitarianism, which does not prioritize the right over the good as Rawlsian liberalism requires. Pleasure has other associations too, however. For Walt Whitman, for example, pleasure enables a democratic mutuality between strangers.⁹ What if pleasure somehow subtends the good of democratic life and intensifies the forces of attraction that keep us in it together?

None of these ruminations requires that the grass-counter be gay or that he be treated as a representation of queerness. And they certainly would not license outing him in the world of justice as fairness or in its agonistic analogue, where mutual opacity might be a good. We cannot have a democratic mutuality between strangers without strangers after all! But thinking about the grass-counter’s queerness in these ways illustrates and registers the disorienting power of reading theory literarily and the value of approaching rational argumentation from an experiential or phenomenological perspective.

As I hope this updated discussion of just one detail in Rawls’ work shows, the work of agonism in political theory is to attend not only to the rightness or wrongness of theoretical arguments, but also to the lived experience of them. What ways of life are remaindered and whose lives are minoritized by a politics of justification in which existence as well as freedom are at stake? Such questions are answered partly by the imagination, which draws on literary and real-world analogies and examples, but also, always, by close reading. Close reading is an agonistic practice of love, debt, and resistance. In that spirit, Displacement goes on to build on elements of Rawls’ account, finding points of overlap with him for theorizing politics agonistically. I argued then that Rawls’ displacement of politics protects the private, over the public, but that the private could itself be seen as a site of contestation or agonism. I would add now that Rawls’ requirement of mutual respect can be recast as agonistic. Agonistic respect is premised on the elevating effects of agonistic contestation in plural and divided societies rather than on a shared, unifying commitment to justification.¹⁰

There are many kinds of agonism, however. Some agonists (better thought of as antagonists, in my view) take their bearings from Carl Schmitt, who theorized politics as a sovereign matter of declaring friendship and enmity. There are times, when democracy is under threat, when agonism might move to that register. But the agonism developed in Displacement is not antagonism. It gives expression to a specifically democratic commitment to the perpetuity of political contest among diverse equals, or those who should be equals, without demonizing those with whom we clash. It is through action in concert, as Hannah Arendt called it, that many of us distinguish ourselves and organize collectively to bring new political possibilities to the world. Equality is a key ideal of agonism because, without it, the spaces of contest are soon closed. Plurality is key because without it we are in echo chambers where no real clash occurs. Domination shuts down the space of contest and attenuates our sense of reality and that is why, Friedrich Nietzsche argues, the ancients exiled from the polis those who got too powerful for it. Nietzsche was no democrat, but he wrote on behalf of what we can call care for the agon and something like the agonism he valued can inspirit democratic theory, Displacement argues.¹¹ Re-reading Nietzsche for democratic theory was necessary at the time and it still is. Nietzsche is often dismissed, rejected as a dangerous aesthete or proto-fascist, but thinking with his work has been productive for agonism.

A Nietzsche with something to offer democratic theory provided a way to reconsider the work of Hannah Arendt, another of Displacement’s key thinkers. I read Arendt in a Nietzschean vein while drawing on her work to politicize and democratize Nietzsche’s agonism. But, even more so than with Rawls, here too some further thinking is in order thirty years later. I remain inspired by Arendt’s faith in the power of stories to unsettle inherited structures/identities and open room for new thinking and acting. On her account, stories of powerful political action inspire new possibilities in the future. This is why those who pursue a politics of domination use violence and censorship to prevent some stories from being told. But that is not to say that all the stories Arendt herself tells are constructive or useful. Looking back, I am surprised to find that although I noted her inattention to issues of race, gender, and ethnicity, I did not note Arendt’s near-erasure of slavery from the founding of the American republic.¹²

Others have since noted it, alongside Arendt’s failure to include the Haitian revolution in her book, On Revolution, which is focused on the American and the French revolutions. In the context of my critique, drawing on J. L. Austin and Jacques Derrida, of Arendt’s theorization of promising as an exemplary political act of new beginning, I ought to have registered how her glorification of the Mayflower Compact of 1620 centered the Mayflower and crowded out the slave ship that Hortense Spillers calls the Mayflower’s twin.¹³ Similarly, when I tracked Arendt extolling the power of the We hold of the Declaration, I might have linked it to the holds of the ships that trafficked stolen humans and converted them to property to be sold into slavery. My reading of Arendt on the American founding was shaped by the terms she set.¹⁴ Thus, in the course of explicating her views, I mentioned Jefferson’s comment about periodic rebellions augmenting the vitality of the republic, repeating his reference to Shay’s rebellion against debt, without mentioning the rebellions against slavery led by Nat Turner and John Brown.

Biography and context might help explain Arendt’s silences and mine. But a more theoretical assessment takes us to the heart of the theory work. I have come to think the problem is Arendt’s and my own embrace of natality and new beginning. I endorsed natality and the new in Displacement with agonistic modifications. I have since concluded, however, alongside some feminist critics of Arendt, that it matters that Arendt somehow conceives of the natal without any maternal presence. This strange way of thinking about natality means Arendt has to add plurality into her theory of action. But plurality is arguably right there in the scene of natality, in the loving, conflictual relations between mother and child whose shared flesh binds them.¹⁵ A birth with no mother is new only to the extent it disavows its enmeshment in and dependence on others. Indeed, it may well be her commitment to the new that explains Arendt’s neglect of the genocidal displacements of Indigenous peoples in the so-called New World and the afterlives of genocide and slavery in American politics. The new, a rather unagonistic ideal, erases the old, evades implication in it, and desensitizes us to its ongoingness in the present. In Displacement, I argued that agonism must contest Arendt’s public/private distinction because agonism engages identity and does not transcend it or abstract from it. I would now argue that we must also contest Arendt’s commitment to new beginnings.¹⁶

This argument has an impact on Displacement’s Derridian reading of Arendt. I enlist Derrida to highlight how Arendt turns to writing to escape the inescapable paradoxes of new beginning. But where Arendt builds on what she sees as the permanence of writing, Derrida highlights writing’s play of iteration, its promiscuities and precarities. I preferred Derrida to Arendt on this point but would now caution that focusing on the written over the oral is a trait of what Kevin Bruyneel calls settler memory and helps support the official story of the American founding as an in the beginning story.¹⁷

Which stories we preserve and how we retell them expresses care for the agon. And care for the agon involves defending it from domination. Care for the agon is a kind of relationality, a political determination to be together through conflict. It calls for hope, and so it is especially important now, when many citizens of twenty-first-century democracies are exhausted by a 24/7 politics of domination and disinformation. The politics of personal liberty and communitarian responsibility are not enough to respond to current pressures on democracy. Many feel overwhelmed, as I write, by the radical inequalities and unaccountabilities of contemporary democratic politics and by the marketized media-rhythms and algorithms of politics, which profit from outrage and increase division. It is hard to imagine that more contestation is the answer; but it is.

Hannah Arendt, who lost her homeland to fascism in the 1930s, distinguished power and violence. We can deconstruct this distinction, but we can also learn from it. Violence, which seeks to control and master, is antipolitical. Power, by contrast, is quintessentially political because it arises out of relations among free and diverse equals struggling together to rebirth the world. Power inheres in promising and forgiveness because the former joins us together and the latter keeps us together, recognizing that sometimes events have their way with us. Political action also has its own affect, on Arendt’s account. When we gather on behalf of a cause, contesting the powers that be, we experience a thrilling energy of mattering together, a feeling that is different from anything we feel alone. Arendt sometimes called it public happiness. It is an intimacy of strangers, in pursuit of a shared, democratic vision, who thrill to be together without needing to know or judge each other. Our exhilaration is democracy’s fuel, a kind of power that is inexhaustible, and, if, in the midst of events, we feel like anything is possible, that is because it is.

---

With thanks for comments and exchange to Alan Finlayson, Sam Chambers, George Shulman, Jill Frank, Samuel Galloway, and Roy Tsao, and to Ayantu Israel-Megerssa for research assistance.

1. Alan Finlayson, ed., Bonnie Honig: Agonism, Difference & Democratic Care (Routledge Innovators in Political Theory, 2023); Robert W. Glover, Games without Frontiers? Democratic Engagement, Agonistic Pluralism and the Question of Exclusion, Philosophy & Social Criticism 38, no. 1 (2012): 81–104; Mathew Humphrey, David Owen, Joe Hoover, Clare Woodford, Alan Finlayson, Marc Stears, and Bonnie Honig, Humanism from an Agonistic Perspective: Themes from the Work of Bonnie Honig, Contemporary Political Theory 13, no. 2 (2014): 168–217; Lida Maxwell, Introduction, in The ‘Agonistic Turn’: Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics in New Contexts, Contemporary Political Theory 18, no. 4 (2019): 640–641; Lida Maxwell, The Virago as Democratic Exemplar: Honig’s Feminist Agonism, in The ‘Agonistic Turn’: 641–645; Paulina Tambakaki, Agonism Reloaded: Potentia, Renewal and Radical Democracy, Political Studies Review 15, no. 4 (2017): 577–588; Nicholas Tampio, Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, in The Oxford Handbook of Classics in Contemporary Political Theory, ed. Jacob T. Levy (Oxford University Press, 2016); Mark Wenman, Agonistic Democracy: Constituent Power in the Era of Globalisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Stephen K. White, Agonism, Democracy, and the Moral Equality of Voice, Political Theory 50, no. 1 (2022): 59–85; Joanna Fiduccia, Scale of the Nation: Alberto Giacometti Miniature Monument, Art History 45, no. 1 (2022): 126–156.

2. In Political Theory and Its Futures, Raisons politiques (Nov. 2021): 89–96, esp. 94–95, I trace the debt of political theory to the nearly forgotten fabulist tradition of the comte philosophique.

3. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), quoted in Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 149.

4. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 432–433.

5. George Kateb pointed the way with his reading of Walt Whitman in 1990 (George Kateb, Walt Whitman and the Culture of Democracy, Political Theory 18, no. 4 (1990): 545–571). Kateb made the case for Whitman as a thinker of democratic individuality. Says Kateb: the passion to judge, condemn, and punish others is reduced and replaced [in Whitman], to a major degree, by the desire to accept or empathize or sympathize with them (556). . . . To admit one’s compositeness and ultimate unknowability is to open oneself to a kinship to others that is defined by receptivity or responsiveness to them. It intensifies the mutuality between strangers that is intrinsic to the idea of rights-based individualism in a democracy. In Displacement, I sought something similar in Nietzsche who championed a spirit who plays naively . . . from overflowing power and abundance (154).

6. Relevant here is my later argument for promiscuity as a democratic good (Bonnie Honig, Three Models of Emergency Politics, Boundary 2, 41, no. 2 (2014): 45–70).

7. Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997); Henry David Thoreau and Raymond Macdonald Alden, Thoreau’s Walden (New York: Longmans, Green, 1910); Charles Baudelaire and Jonathan Mayne, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London: Phaidon, 1964); Charles Baudelaire and Francis Duke, Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil and Other Poems, 1st ed. (New York: Vantage Press, 1982); The Tramp, directed by Charlie Chaplin (Los Angeles, CA: Flicker Alley, 1915), 32 min; Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (London: Verso Books, 2013); Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking, 1996); Adriana Cavarero, In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1995), 14; Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson, The Story of Ferdinand (New York: Viking Press, 1938); Saidiya V. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019). Bonnie Honig, A Feminist Theory of Refusal (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2021). Some of these can be read as neuroatypical. Since Bartleby (like the grass-counter) has a penchant for repetition, intense focus, and intractability, some suggest he may be autistic (Stuart Murray, Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008]).

8. Also sequestered is the wild, theorized by Jack Halberstam in Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). Agonism works in the impure space of identity clash rather than in the purity of new spaces, and the wild risks the latter, but still we might consider whether the wild is similar to what Displacement calls remainders. With the wild in mind, we are called to attend to Rawls’ domesticated natural space in his example. On straight spaces as spaces for cruising, see Lee Edelman, Tearooms and Sympathy; or, The Epistemology of the Water Closet, in Homographesis (London: Routledge, 1994). For more on the ramifications of Rawls’ grass-counter for his assumptions about the role of the family in justice as fairness, see Bonnie Honig, The Happy Grass-Counter, in Philosophy Illustrated, ed. Helen de Cruz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

9. The phrase mutuality between strangers is George Kateb’s, intrinsic to the idea of rights-based individualism in a democracy that he associates with Whitman: I much prefer to stay with his idea that what is left inside oneself when one is filling a function or playing a part is an infinite reservoir or, better, repertoire. Unexpressed potentiality rather than an indestructible core (that must remain hidden or can show itself only specially) suits the idea of ‘a great composite democratic individual,’ which is the idea to be preserved, argues Kateb, who notes, however, that Whitman’s final lesson is solitude, not the adventures of human connectedness. Perhaps we can say, from Kateb’s perspective, that assigning a good to the grass-counter assigns him an indestructible core rather than treating him as a reservoir. On desire and democracy, see also Jason Frank, Walt Whitman and the Ethnopoetics of New York, in A Political Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. John E. Seery (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011). On this point, thanks to Samuel Galloway, and his queer reading of Hannah Arendt in Queering Amor Mundi: Love, Loss, and Democratic Politics, Theory & Event 24, no. 3 (2021): 758–786.

10. This is a way to read William Connolly’s ethos for agonism. William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Connolly’s agonism was an important influence on mine. A different approach to agonistic respect could draw on the three kinds of respect traced in the Kant chapter of Displacement, especially when read in keeping with Derrida’s reading of Aristotle’s three kinds of friendship, in The Politics of Friendship (New York: Verso, 1997) which argues for their mutual implication. I draw on Derrida’s reading of Aristotle in my reading of the Book of Ruth in Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).

11. On care for the agon, see Bonnie Honig, "12 Angry Men: Care for the Agon and the Varieties of Masculine Experience," Theory & Event 22, no. 3 (2019): 701–716; Honig, The Politics of Agonism, Political Theory 21, no. 3 (1993): 528–533.

12. I am grateful to Shatema Threadcraft for posing the question to me in Black Feminism and the Dilemma of Agonism, in The ‘Agonistic Turn’: 650–655. Arendt notes, in On Revolution, the abject and degrading misery [that] was present everywhere in the form of slavery and Negro labor (p. 70), but for her these do not possess the same power as poverty, in the French context, to derail a revolution.

13. In a reading of William Wells Brown’s Clotel, Spillers shows how the novel "juxtapos[es] ‘one little solitary, tempest-tost and weather-beaten ship,’ the Mayflower, and ‘a low rakish ship hastening from the tropics, solitary and alone, to the New World,’ ‘on the last day of November, 1620’ (Hortense Spillers, African-American Women and the Republics," in Reconsidering Social Identification: Race, Gender, Class and Caste (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011), 19.

14. Displacement turned to performativity to solve a problem posed by Arendt, for whom promising and forgiveness were examples of extraordinary action and not, as for J. L. Austin, typical, ordinary performatives or speech acts. How could they be both extraordinary (Arendt) and ordinary (Austin)? I first addressed the problem in a 1991 article, Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic, The American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (1991): 97–113, which appeared in the same moment as new work on performativity by Judith Butler, working with Derrida, in Gender Trouble (1990) and Eve Sedgwick, working with Austin, in Queer Performativity: Henry James’ Art of the Novel (GLQ 1 (1993): 1–16). A review, by Jeffrey Champlin, of my 1991 essay, which I expanded in Displacement, describes the effort to draw Austin, Derrida, and Arendt together: Using the terminology of speech act theorist J. L. Austin, Honig argues that for Arendt the Declaration of Independence succeeds as a ‘performative’ act that creates a new institution that does not rely on the ‘constative’ truths of gods or tradition. He continues that I then turn to Derrida’s article Declarations of Independence, noting Arendt focuses on the we hold, but Derrida focuses on the we of we the people and rather than accepting the promise as an answer to the problem of founding, he sees it as a moment of a leap in which the community of the ‘we’ itself first comes into being. . . . From the point of view of Derrida’s analysis, Honig sees Arendt as unjustifiably longing for a ‘pure performative’ and Derrida as insisting "that there has to be an obscure moment in which the ‘we’ both preexists the Declaration and comes into being with it (https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/arendt-on-the-declaration-of-independence-2013-11-07). This argument, sometimes trimmed down to a focus on the we hold or we, the people, has since been taken up by Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Jason Frank, Kevin Olson, and many more. See Benhabib’s contribution to The Legacy of Jacques Derrida," PMLA 120, no. 2 (2005): 464–494 at http://www.jstor.org/stable/25486172 (thanks to Rakesh Bhandari for this reference); Judith Butler, ’We, the People: Thoughts on Freedom of Assembly (49–64)