Monday, February 26, 2007

The mulitiple Individual

"It is necessary to theorize the individual, not as a monad, an ‘unencumbered’ self that exists prior to and independently of society, but rather as a site constituted by an ensemble of ‘subject positions’, inscribed in a multiplicity of social relations, the member of many communities and participant in a plurality of collective forms of identification." (Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political, 97)

So, I have realized that how the subject is conceived determines the political form it will support. The subject is the metonymic polis. This means that if the subject is multiple, it will support a pluralist framework; however, if the subject is singular, it will support a state that is unified on the questions of the Good, and the Will.

From a Christian perspective, our trouble with liberal-democracy (that it creates homogeneous subjects and supports empire), and the trouble with dictatorship (while it has the power to police the market, the sovereign itself is unpolicable), stems from our inability (the impossibility) to "think" trinitarian forms of government and subjectivity that can articulate singularity and plurality without mystery. Because the acceptance of mystery is conversion. Thus to have a state that is both multiple and plural is to have a Christian state, otherwise, you are stuck with mediocrity, or genocide.

This is to say that I don't think that Radical Orthodoxy can sincerely support pluralism (religious), as their teleology of politics results in trinitarian ends under which "genuine subjectivity" is only available through conversion.

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