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Public Things : Democracy in Disrepair / Bonnie Honig.

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: Thinking Out LoudPublisher: New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2017]Copyright date: ©2017Description: 1 online resource (160 p.)Content type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780823276431
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 321.8 23
LOC classification:
  • JC423
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources:
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface: Opting Out -- Introduction. Thinging Out Loud -- Lecture One: Democracy's Necessary Conditions -- Lecture Two: Care and Concern: Arendt with Winnicott -- Lecture Three: Hope and Play: Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope and Lars von Trier's Melancholia -- Epilogue: Public Things, Shared Space, and the Commons -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary: In the contemporary world of neoliberalism, efficiency is treated as the vehicle of political and economic health. State bureaucracy, but not corporate bureaucracy, is seen as inefficient, and privatization is seen as a magic cure for social ills. In Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair, Bonnie Honig asks whether democracy is possible in the absence of public services, spaces, and utilities. In other words, if neoliberalism leaves to democracy merely electoral majoritarianism and procedures of deliberation while divesting democratic states of their ownership of public things, what will the impact be?Following Tocqueville, who extolled the virtues of "pursuing in common the objects of common desires," Honig focuses not on the demos but on the objects of democratic life. Democracy, as she points out, postulates public things-infrastructure, monuments, libraries-that citizens use, care for, repair, and are gathered up by. To be "gathered up" refers to the work of D. W. Winnicott, the object relations psychoanalyst who popularized the idea of "transitional objects"-the toys, teddy bears, or favorite blankets by way of which infants come to understand themselves as unified selves with an inside and an outside in relation to others. The wager of Public Things is that the work transitional objects do for infants is analogously performed for democratic citizens by public things, which press us into object relations with others and with ourselves.Public Things attends also to the historically racial character of public things: public lands taken from indigenous peoples, access to public goods restricted to white majorities. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, who saw how things fabricated by humans lend stability to the human world, Honig shows how Arendt and Winnicott-both theorists of livenesss-underline the material and psychological conditions necessary for object permanence and the reparative work needed for a more egalitarian democracy.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780823276431

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface: Opting Out -- Introduction. Thinging Out Loud -- Lecture One: Democracy's Necessary Conditions -- Lecture Two: Care and Concern: Arendt with Winnicott -- Lecture Three: Hope and Play: Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope and Lars von Trier's Melancholia -- Epilogue: Public Things, Shared Space, and the Commons -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

In the contemporary world of neoliberalism, efficiency is treated as the vehicle of political and economic health. State bureaucracy, but not corporate bureaucracy, is seen as inefficient, and privatization is seen as a magic cure for social ills. In Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair, Bonnie Honig asks whether democracy is possible in the absence of public services, spaces, and utilities. In other words, if neoliberalism leaves to democracy merely electoral majoritarianism and procedures of deliberation while divesting democratic states of their ownership of public things, what will the impact be?Following Tocqueville, who extolled the virtues of "pursuing in common the objects of common desires," Honig focuses not on the demos but on the objects of democratic life. Democracy, as she points out, postulates public things-infrastructure, monuments, libraries-that citizens use, care for, repair, and are gathered up by. To be "gathered up" refers to the work of D. W. Winnicott, the object relations psychoanalyst who popularized the idea of "transitional objects"-the toys, teddy bears, or favorite blankets by way of which infants come to understand themselves as unified selves with an inside and an outside in relation to others. The wager of Public Things is that the work transitional objects do for infants is analogously performed for democratic citizens by public things, which press us into object relations with others and with ourselves.Public Things attends also to the historically racial character of public things: public lands taken from indigenous peoples, access to public goods restricted to white majorities. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, who saw how things fabricated by humans lend stability to the human world, Honig shows how Arendt and Winnicott-both theorists of livenesss-underline the material and psychological conditions necessary for object permanence and the reparative work needed for a more egalitarian democracy.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 02. Mrz 2022)