The Agonistic Condition
Materialism and Democracy
Examines the philosophical background to theories of conflict in political theory and their sources in philosophy
Preface
Preamble, The Agonistic Condition
Introduction: Agonism and Democracy
[1] Agonistic Democracy
[2] What is Agon?
[3] The Repression of Instrumentality
[4] Agonism and the Phronetic Tradition
1. The Political as Irreducible to the Institutional
[5] The Problematic of the Confinement of the Political to Institutions
[6] The Expansion of Power (Nietzsche)
[7] Pluralism, or the Materialism of Differentiation (Connolly)
[8] The Agonistic Interplay of Law and Culture (Tully)
[9] Natality and Agonism (Arendt)
[10] (Re)founding (Honig)
[11] The Ontologization of the Political (Schmitt)
[12] The Ever Present Possibility of Antagonism (Mouffe)
[13] The Political Difference (Marchart)
[14] Monism and Instrumentality (the first sense of agonism)
2. Consensus as Incommensurate with the Political
[15] The Problematic of the Politics of Consensus
[16] Power or Consensus? (Nietzsche)
[17] Genealogy and Resentment (Connolly)
[18] Consensus or Recognition? (Tully)
[19] The Rise of the Social (Arendt)
[20] Agonism as Disruption (Honig)
[21] The Double Sense of Agonism (Schmitt)
[22] Pluralism or Consensus? (Mouffe)
[23] The Rise of the Political (Marchart)
[24] Stasis (the second sense of agonism)
3. Instrumentality and Agonism
[25] The Problematic of the Repression of Instrumentality
[26] The Calculating Animal (Nietzsche)
[27] Becoming and the Ineffectual (Connolly)
[28] Use Without Ends (Tully)
[29] The Slavery of Modernity (Arendt)
[30] Paradoxes of Excess (Honig)
[31] Total Peace (Schmitt)
[32] Liberalism, the Frenemy, and the Instrumentality Without Ends (Mouffe)
[33] The Two Negations (Marchart)
[34] The Conflation of Causality and Instrumentality (repression)
5. The Ruse of Power
[35] The Problematic of the Ruse of Power
[36] The Magic Trick of the Ascetic Ideal (Nietzsche)
[37] Agonistic Respect and Existential Faith (Connolly)
[38] Not European Enough (Tully)
[39] The Inverse Relation of Power and Violence (Arendt)
[40] The ruse of power and neoliberalism (Honig)
[41] Where does War End? (Schmitt)
[42] The Logic of the Whatever (Mouffe)
[43] The Persistence of Political Judgment (Marchart)
[44] Violence and Political Change (the Epicurean “Social Contract”)
Afterword
[45] Afterword: In Defense of Instrumentality, or, the Persistence of the Good
Bibliography
Index
In The Agonistic Condition Dimitris Vardoulakis offers a deep and powerful critique of what he calls “ineffectualism,” the idea, promoted by many left leaning philosophers, of the value of non-instrumentality. For Vardoulakis, this allows for a return of metaphysics, a disengagement with the actual world as such that leads to various forms of domination and control. By fundamentally accepting the Nietzschean concept of the death of God, Vardoulakis calls for a radical affirmation of instrumentality, not in terms (once again) of domination, but precisely for the opposite reason. Vardoulakis claims—very convincingly—that we must embrace instrumentality as being the basis for a human centered form of judgment that has no truck with the transcendental. This is the basis for the agonistic--i.e. human--condition itself. This book should be on the shelf of every scholar who is interested in having a radical rethinking of the entire basis of leftist anti metaphysics and the politics that result from it.
With The Agonistic Condition Dimitris Vardoulakis adds a third volume to his extensive and brilliant rethinking of the phronetic tradition. Against the common-sense view that agonistic thinking is opposed to instrumental action, Vardoulakis unearths a forgotten Aristotelian and Epicurean inheritance of phronesis that is the foundation of agonistic politics beyond what he calls “the ineffectual.” Counterintuitive, incisive, learned, and simply stunning: Vardoulakis’s philosophical erudition is a pinnacle of contemporary political theorizing.
The Agonistic Condition rehabilitates a kind of instrumental thinking and acting that has been the target of attack of much political and ethical theory. In this text, Vardoulakis presents a convincing argument about the way in which ends-directed action opens a space for contestation that is central to any democratic condition.
