The third chapter draws upon the procedures of ordinary language philosophy discussed in Chapter 2 to offer a critique of contemporary democratic theory. A significant point of contention between deliberative and agonistic democratic theorists is over the purpose of political argumentation. While deliberative democrats maintain that the goal of political debate is to reach agreement, many agonistic democratic theorists claim that arguments can foster relations of adversarial respect. This chapter demonstrates how the deliberative versus agonistic democracy debate is operating at cross-purposes. Behind this debate is the skeptical concern that if political argumentation cannot come to an agreement, then the enterprise is either irrational or prone to relativism. Drawing upon Cavell’s insight that human understanding rests upon agreement in forms of life, I examine how democratic discourse involves agreements at two levels: at the level of opinions and at the level of the discourse itself. This chapter clarifies what is at stake in the deliberative-agonistic democratic theory debate. Cavell helps us reimagine democracy by fostering a culture in which minority communities do not have to phrase their grievances within the language of hegemonic cultures.

Engaging directly with agonistic thought, Chapter 6 asks whether contestation about corporate human rights abuses, over the long-term, shapes democratic institutions more broadly. What is clear in agonistic scholarship is that confrontation must be incorporated or integrated into democratic institutions. This chapter empirically tests this relationship. It finds that contestation improves measures of respect for human rights and civic empowerment. That is, without any formal or informal response, simply speaking out and making abuses known improves respect for human rights, generally. The data also illustrate that, regardless of the outcome, there is a positive cumulative effect of trials over time, demonstrating the importance of reflexive innovation. In contrast, simply engaging in non-judicial remedy alone does not improve respect for human rights. The analysis shows that there is a positive, cumulative relationship between respect for human rights and those non-judicial remedy efforts led by the state. If corporations lead the non-judicial remedy effort, however, they do nothing to improve respect for human rights or more robust civic engagement over the long-term.

This chapter introduces the main concerns and aims of this book with an opening case study on Phoenix’s Meleager exemplum in Iliad 9. It then surveys the recent developments of scholarship on allusive marking, especially in Latin poetry: it explores the ‘Alexandrian footnote’ and other tropes of allusion; challenges the assumption that such devices are distinctively bookish and scholarly; and introduces a new term for the phenomenon (‘indexicality’). The second half of the introduction outlines the author’s methodological approach to early Greek allusion, incorporating elements of both neoanalysis and traditional referentiality. The author focuses on ‘mythological intertextuality’ in archaic epic, exemplified through a close reading of the ‘Nestor’s cup’ inscription. This section considers the reconstruction of lost traditions, the question of Homeric allusion to Near Eastern poetry, and the gradual transition to ‘textual intertextuality’. No specific watershed can be pinpointed. The growing practice of citing other poets by name attests to increasingly greater engagement with specific texts, but the Iliad and Odyssey already provide a plausible example of direct intertextual allusion. The chapter closes by addressing three further issues of context that are central to this study: audiences and performance, poetic agonism, and authorial self-consciousness.

In many policies for and practices of education for democratic citizenship it is assumed that the democratic community is a community of shared democratic values. On such an account, education has the task of including “newcomers” into this community by ensuring that they adopt and internalize the common democratic values. In this chapter, I discuss the work of two authors, Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière, who both have challenged this understanding of democracy and the democratic community. Both authors highlight the contested (Mouffe) and sporadic (Rancière) nature of the democratic community, thus bringing into view the work done to constitute the political community. They also highlight that this constitution does not happen before democratic politics can take place, but actually is an essential part of it. I provide a reconstruction of Mouffe’s and Rancière’s ideas and explore the implications for education.

Chapter 10 argues the practices and discourses of reconciliation have tended to operate as a form of inappropriate and premature settlement or closure of the grievances of victim-survivors and their descendants. To encourage victim-survivors and a society to pursue reconciliation in the absence of addressing other elements of transitional justice may operate as a reaffirmation of the power structures of states and churches. While the experience of Canada and Australia contains an explicit reconciliation discourse and practice, in the absence of significant change in and imagination regarding power relationships in those societies, they join the United States, Ireland, and the United Kingdom in remaining deeply unreconciled societies. In addition, the reconciliation practice of the Catholic church regarding historical abuse demonstrates its inability to effectively self-critique in its processes of reconciliation.

This chapter traces the emergence of the field of memory studies and assesses the historians’ contribution to this field. In particular the influential work of Pierre Nora is discussed here. Memory history, it argues, has moved from underpinning national historical master narratives to promoting transnational cosmopolitan forms of memory that in turn have produced greater self-reflexivity about the relationship between historical writing and collective identity formation and helped to de-essentialise collective identities. The chapter introduces and analyses a range of different memory debates that all, in their different ways, have helped to de-essentialise the construction of collective identities: memory debates surrounding communism, the Holocaust, Brexit, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa are all discussed in this respect. The chapter also introduces the concept of ‘agonistic memory’ and discusses how it may help to repoliticise memory and contribute to greater self-reflexivity about the construction of memory and the shaping of collective identities.

In Chapter 1, I lay out the paradox of “intolerance” as analyzed in the work of Chantal Mouffe. Her understanding of the incompatibility between liberalism and democracy illuminates the complex relationship between pluralism and intolerance. Of crucial concern is how Mouffe’s pluralism requires what I describe as apophatic intolerance, a refusal to lay hold of the Absolute and a refusal of political closure and pure tolerance.

Chapter 6 draws on the concept of agonistic emotions and affects to think with some of the arguments of Chantal Mouffe’s political theory and discusses what this means pedagogically in handling far right rhetoric in the classroom. To show the possibilities of the concept of agonistic emotions and affects, the chapter puts in conversation Mouffe’s work on agonistic pluralism with affect theory. The analysis makes the argument that affect theory enables the theorization of agonistic emotions and affects as an intersection of language, desire, power, bodies, and politics that can be engaged with and channeled democratically in classroom debates. The chapter makes a political and pedagogical intervention into the terrain of countering extremism in education by offering ways of addressing productively the tensions emerging from the affective dimension of far right rhetoric in classroom spaces.

Chapter Two provides an original interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone, arguing that the play illustrates the tragic consequences of perceiving law exclusively in its human or divine form. It builds on and diverges from the Hegelian reading of the play, drawing out the role of hubris, as characterized by Creon’s myopic view of law as human fiat, as well as Antigone’s exclusive concern for the gods’ commands, and shows that either form of hubris results in tragedy. To approach justice, the law must instead be conceptualized as not only human and divine but also as natural, for it is natural law that could have mediated the divine and human aspects of the law that clash in the persons of Antigone and Creon. The prudential voices of Teiresias and Haemon suggest how this natural law of justice could inform both Creon’s and Antigone’s views of law and avert the tragedy with which the play necessarily ends. This chapter also takes up the issue of agonistic politics, which some have interpreted the play to illustrate, and shows the peril of this view of politics for religious freedom.