The Sociability of Experience

Abstract

Is it possible to develop and find terms which are adequate to connecting with and affecting others — not through recognition and similarity — but across difference? This emerges as a pressing question in contemporary efforts to forge new forms of political participation. For example, Hardt and Negri argue that ‘one of the central and most urgent political paradoxes of our time [is that] in our much elaborated age of communication, struggles have become all but incommunicable’ (2000, p. 54). Radical political struggles at the end of the 20th century — Tiananmen Square, the Los Angeles riots, Zapatistas, counter-globalization protests, the French riots (November 2005) etc. were like ‘burning flashes’ on the global sky failing to connect to each other. The means for translation between them had not yet emerged.

According to what logic can particularism flourish severed from the universal? (Schor, 1995, p. 16)