In my second, ongoing, book-project titled Common Sense: A Declaration of Dependence (which will serve as my habilitation thesis at the University of St. Gallen), I turn to the notion of common sense and to revisit its conceptual history, defend it from its critics and recalibrate it as a robust political concept. In a first step, and by retelling the history of the concept, I conceptualize common sense as a narrative of subjectivation, where the concrete social Other is manifested as a constitutive factor of the subject’s be(com)ing; hence also the subtitle of my book. In a second step, I extrapolate three characteristics of what I call "a common subjectivity", namely (i) embeddedness, (ii) intersectionality, and (iii) processuality. Finally, I introduce the concepts of constellational critique, overdetermined solidarity and koinotopia as forms of holistic, collective, and inclusive practices that correspond to this type of subjectivity. Consulting thinkers such as Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Gilles Deleuze, Nira Yuval-Davis, Karen Barad, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Mignolo, Jean-Luc Nancy and Ernst Bloch, my aim is to disentangle common sense from having to designate a faculty or set of innate concepts, assumptions, and beliefs in order to qualify it as a heuristic means of political theorization and a normative means of a radical democratization of democracy.
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Late Renaissance and early Baroque music practices – with a few enlightening exceptions – have been inexplicably overlooked both as source for social-philosophical or aesthetic theorization and as application field for political-theoretical investigation. In a first step, the project reconstructs the historical (cultural, social, and political) conditions within which late Renaissance and early Baroque music practices emerged and analyzes the norms underlying these practices. In doing so, the project detects in the artworks, the modes of production as well as the performance practices of this period the theoretical elements and practical blueprints of what can be called a pluriphonic solidarity. This type of solidarity is not founded on the sharedness of goals, the commonality of an identity, the pursuit of the same interests or the satisfaction of universal needs. Rather, it is derived the subjects' (composers', performers' and spectators') mutual dependence. In a second step, the music practices of late Renaissance and early Baroque are implemented as a springboard for a collective and current form of politics discussed under the neologism of collectiversalist politics (a compositum consisting of collectivity, diversity, versatility, and universality). From this perspective, the project intervenes in a series of ongoing philosophical and political debates that revolve around the scopes, modes and aims of solidarity; the organizational forms of political collectives; their ambivalent political nature; the legitimacy of identity politics; and the query for universal politics. In doing so it corroborates what Hannah Arendt called “the plurality of joint action in agreement, the acting in concert.”
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Against conventional readings of the terms, the project addresses resentment and utopia as indispensable moments towards a democratisation of democracy. In doing so, resentment and utopia are placed for the first time in academic discourse in a productive relationship to one another. To this end, both terms must be recalibrated in order to overcome their traditional impasses. Resentment is interpreted as an affective field and utopia as performative practice. From this perspective, resentment and utopia are disclosed as being neither identitarian and exclusive nor do they automatically resort in mere daydreaming and political defeatism. On the contrary, ressentiment and utopia triangulate democracy by rendering democratic politics a critically self-reflective and pluralistic political process. As the project demonstrates, they achieve this (i) by serving as bulwarks that prevent the further corrosion of democratic structures into solipsistic fragmentarizations and authoritarian tendencies and (ii) by reminding us of the unfulfilled democratic promises, thereby forcing democracies to remain open to inclusive reconfiguration.
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Following Marx's dictum that "in his individual existence" the subject “is at the same time a social being”, my first book explores the question of collective agency of the decentered and socially constructed subject. In a first step, I turn to Karl Marx’ concept of the subject as a social being and explicate it through the concept of communist subjectivity based on Jean-Luc Nancy. In a second step and by applying the theories of Georg Lukács, Louis Althusser and Judith Butler, I show how the subject emerges at the intersection between labor, language and body practices. In a third step, the concept of the plastic body, which I borrow from Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity, serves to illustrate how the different identities encounter each other and relate to one another within the subject's singular body. My argument is that the subject as a collective being possesses collective agency and can act collectively because it has originated as a collective, i.e., as the intersection and point of condensation of societal modes of subjectivity production. This social-ontological justification of collective agency brings with it an anti-normative view of collective struggles, that are no longer subjected to the burden of moral regulations and identity politics in order to be justified.
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