Rhetorical citizenship: studying the discursive crafting and enactment of citizenship

This article argues for the relevance of a rhetorical approach to the study of citizenship, proposing the concept of rhetorical citizenship as a term for a fourth dimension of citizenship and as a scholarly approach to the topic in addition to the dimensions of status, rights, and identity commonly recognized in the literature. We show how this view aligns with current views of the multidi Citizenship Studies mensionality of citizenship, explain our use of the term rhetoric, and illustrate the usefulness of a rhetorical approach in two examples. In close textual readings both examples – one vernacular, one elite – are shown to discursively craft and enact different notions of citizenship vis-a-vis the European refugee crisis. We conclude that a rhetorical perspective on public civic discourse is useful in virtue of its close attention to discursive creativity as well as to textual properties that may significantly, but often implicitly, affect citizens’ understanding of their own role in the polity, and further because it recognizes deep differences as inevitable while valorizing discourse across them.     

The Politics of the Third Person

Abstract

Against the enthusiasm for dialogue and deliberation in recent democratic theory, the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito and French philosopher Jacques Rancière construct their political philosophies around the nondialogical figure of the third person. The strikingly different deployments of the figure of the third person offered by Esposito and Rancière present a crystallization of their respective approaches to political philosophy. In this essay, the divergent analyses of the third person offered by these two thinkers are considered in terms of the critical strategies they employ. Contrasting Esposito’s strategy of “ethical dissensus” with Rancière’s strategy of “aesthetic dissensus,” it is argued that Esposito’s attempts to recruit the figure of the third person to dismantle the dispositif of the person are politically (if not philosophically) problematic, while Rancière’s alternative account of the third person is more promising for political theory and practice.     

Speaking through the body: detention and bodily resistance in Italy

This work reflects on the character of the modalities that non-status migrants are deploying in the context of current politics of the camp, with special attention to the Italian context. It will suggest that once the possibilities of dissent through the voice (the political tool par excellence in a liberal democracy, and one associated primarily with rationality and the capacity for reason) are foreclosed, migrants tend to resort to another powerful tool: their own body. Detainees have made their bodies speak by resorting to practices of self-mutilation, hunger strike, suicide attempts, and lips and eyes sewing. Detainees' violent acts of dissent are not dissimilar from the violent modalities used, a few centuries earlier, by some enslaved people who chose liberty through death. The aim is not so much to make comparison between the two figures, but to emphasise the way in which, under conditions of extreme control, subjugation or unfreedom, acts of dissent and resistance – and thus acts of politics, as articulated in Rancière's concept of dissensus – are not necessarily enacted through democratic practices but, on the contrary, through whatever modalities are available to them, including violent (self-harm) modalities.     

The improper event: on Jacques Rancière's mannerism

In this essay I examine certain conceptual resources available in the work of Jacques Rancière for those interested in attending to the aesthetic and political complexities of democratic citizenship. I argue that the best way to broach these resources is to consider Rancière's manner of impropriety regarding the forces of unity and disunity that comprise democracy's insurgence, as well as his account of the phenomenality of democratic life and the conditions that make political subjects visible, audible and perceptual. This involves a sustained critique of the proper and the sensible as criteria for political inclusion. Democracy is thus not an institutional form of government but an event of appearance that arises out of the dissonant blur of the everyday. Rancière's insights into the insensibility of democracy's emergence, I conclude, complicate the constitutionalist solution to citizenship by raising the question of equality and emancipation as a question of how to relate to the impropriety of democratic citizenship.