Exposures and projections

Davide Panagia

pp. 99-115

in: Alistair Welchman (ed), Politics of religion/religions of politics, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

In this essay I offer a set of preliminary considerations regarding the possibility of an ethics of appearances as the basis for thinking about how we relate to one another in pluralist democratic societies. I begin by sketching out what an ethics of appearances might mean or look like by turning to a set of provocative remarks that Simon Critchley makes in Infinitely Demanding (Critchley S, Infinitely demanding. Verso, London, 2007). I then draw a distinction between different approaches to how we handle appearances: the ostensive approach (exposition) and the absorptive approach (projection). I proceed to show how our political ideas and practices are imbued with certain aesthetic sensibilities and, as such, are plagued by the problem of making our sensations perceptible and available to others. Our practices of confronting and contending with this impossibility of sharing sensation, as well as our admitting to our inevitable disappointment when faced with this limit of such shareability suggests, I contend, the availability of a dissensual core to our understandings of citizenship. I conclude that democratic citizenship is not grounded in a consensual being-in-common but in a dissensual event of intangible hapticity.

Cited authors

Critchley Simon