Browsing by Subject "social agonism"

This thesis critically engages with various approaches to political inclusion. I show that certain difficulties in their perspectives on language as a candidate for conveying representation and recognition of new agents in public space can be observed. I focus on the moral limitations of these approaches, particularly the issue of articulating identities as a form of suppression; confining the political performance of individuals to frames of political identities; the problematic engagement of excluded agents in existing discourses that are embedded in particular power structures; and normative justification of moral permissibility concerning political agendas of new political agents. In the first chapter, I analyze the normative foundations of inclusion in the theories of Luce Irigaray (‘I-you’-identities), Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau (‘we-them’-identities), as well as the cosmopolitan political project (‘we’-identities) in detail. In the second chapter, I critically investigate and analyze strategies of inclusion by means of articulation in these approaches. Finally, the third chapter outlines problematic moral implications of these approaches in order to close a gap within the current scientific debate on this topic and provide foundations of possible future research. Questions addressed there include: Why favor inclusion at all? Which mechanisms of inclusion would be better than the existing ones? Should inclusion aspire to allow for differences and inclusion on terms that are insensitive to differences?