Introduction: Disorienting democracy
Disorienting the left and the limits of communism
Rejecting postdemocracy and rethinking the state of the left
Plotting our route
Dis-reconnaissance in preparation for voyage
Practicing dissensus
1. Equality: the twisted path of emancipation
‘Politics’ as appropriation, subjectivation and dis-identification
‘Politics’ can be willed
The ordinary in the extraordinary: how to decide between ‘politics’ or police
‘Politics’ and effectivity
Strategy: from police to ‘politics
2. Reflexivity: Untangling the revolution
The counter-revolutionary charge
Domination and emancipation in critical theory
Distinguishing domination via the aesthetics of knowledge
Christoph Menke and critical thinking as a practice of reflexivity
Reflexivity as dissensual practice
3. Aversivity: Thinking against conformity
Appropriating emancipation against conformity
Emancipation in Cavell’s aversive thinking
Dissensual community
Exemplars of dissent
Provoking the self through aversivity
4. Poeticity: from the glade of the cicadas to the island of the people
‘Literarity’ or ‘literariness’?
Rancière, writing and literarity
Re-tracing literarity against Derrida
Doubling democracy, doubling literature
Poeticity as play with meaning
5. Absurdity: aesthetics of subversion
Senses of absurdity
From theatre to the streets
Subversion as iteration in the work of Judith Butler
Reading Butler and Rancière together
Practicing absurdity, living the carnival
Reflections on revolutionising: a voyage without a compass
Biography
Clare Woodford is Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the School of Humanities, University of Brighton, UK
