Literature
Arendt, H. (1961/1993). The Crisis in Education. In: Arendt, H. Between Past and Future.
Eight Exercises in Political Thought (pp. 173-196). New York: Penguin Books.
Arendt argues that we must separate education from the political. She understands the
school as a place between the private and the public realm and the educators’ responsibility
as a double one: on the one hand they have to protect the world, on the other the child.
Badiou, A. (2006). Against ‘Political Philosophy’. In: Badiou, A. Metapolitics (pp. 10 – 25).
London: Verso.
Badiou explores ‘the political’, ‘philosophy’, and the relation between them, thereby raising
the question: Is ‘political philosophy’ just an intellectualization of the political?
Badiou, A. (2006). Politics as Truth Procedure. In: Badiou, A. Theoretical Writings (pp. 155 –
163). London: Continuum.
When is an event political? What are the conditions for the political to happen? And what are
the relation between politics and the state of the situation?
Bargu, B. (2013). The Politics of Commensality. In: Blumenfeld, J., Bottici, C. and Critchley,
S. (eds.) The Anarchist Turn (pp. 35 – 58). London: Pluto Press.
This paper engages directly with Arendt’s work on the public and the political, but questions
her claim that the modern period is characterised by a rise of the social sphere, which has
invaded and extinguished the political, arguing instead that there has a been a constriction of
the social. The writer draws on anarchist and Marxist traditions in developing the central idea
of “commensality” and commoning and its importance for contemporary political debates.
Benhabib, S. (2001). Judgment and the Moral Foundation of Politics in Hannah Arendt’s
Thought. In: Beiner, R. and Nedelsky, J. (eds.) Judgment, Imagination and Politics (pp.
183-204). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
The author explores judgment as a moral and political faculty by following Hannah Arendt’s
discussion of Kant’s notion of reflective judgment. Benhabib departs from Arendt by arguing
for an implicit relation between politics and ethics.
Benhabib, S. (2011). Claiming Rights Across Borders: International Human Rights and
Democratic Sovereignty. In: Benhabib, S. Dignity in Adversity. Human Rights in Troubled
Times (pp. 117-137). Cambridge: Polity.
The author discusses the question of universal human rights, international law, and
democratic accountability in a world of growing interdependence.
Bottici, C. (2011). From imagination to the imaginary and beyond; Towards a theory of
imaginal politics. In: Bottici, C. and Challand, B. (eds). The Politics of Imagination (pp. 16
– 37). London: Taylor & Francis.
An exploration of the concept of imagination in the history of Western philosophy and a
discussion of the relationship between “the imaginal” and “the political” in the context of
contemporary politics, arguing that it can be both emancipatory and oppressive.
Fraser, N. (2013). Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History. In: Fraser, N. Fortunes
of Feminism. From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (pp. 209 – 226).
London: Verso.
An exploration of the distinctive strands in second-wave feminism and their problematic
connections with aspects of capitalist and neo-liberal political and social discourses and
developments. A very thought-provoking text.
Laclau, E. (2007). Why do empty signifiers matter to politics? In: Laclau, E. (ed.).
Emancipation(s) (pp. 36 – 46). London: Verso.
‘Empty signifiers’ is a term used in semiotics to denote signifiers without referents, such as a
word that doesn't point to any actual object or agreed upon meaning. Laclau points to the
equivocality and ambiguity of such signifiers, and thus their potentiality of indicating the
discursive presence of their own limits.
Owens, P. (2014). Not Life, but the world is at stake: Hannah Arendt on citizenship in the age
of the social. Citizenship Studies, 16 (2), pp. 297-307.
The author starts from Arendt’s central distinction between the social and the political,
between ‘life itself’ and a political space, arguing that social administration takes care of life’s
necessities while political actions are concerned about the world we share and have in
common.
Rancière, J. (2007). The Community of Equals. In: Rancière, J. On the Shores of Politics (pp.
63 – 92). London: Verso.
The author argues that equality should be perceived as a starting point rather than a
destination: “Politics is a specific rupture in the logic of arche. It does not simply presuppose
the rupture of the 'normal' distribution of positions between the one who exercises power
and the one subject to it. It also requires a rupture in the idea that there are dispositions
'proper' to such classifications”.
Tarlau, R. (2014). From a Language to a Theory of Resistance: Critical Pedagogy, the Limits
of ‘Framing’, and Social Change. Educational Theory, 64 (4), pp. 369 – 392.
The author draws on literature from the fields of critical pedagogy and social movement
theory to argue for the role of grass-roots social movement participation in building critical
consciousness, the need to draw greater links between informal education and social change,
and the potential of public schools to connect to larger movements for social justice.