Politics of the One: Concepts of the One and the Many in Contemporary Thought

by Artemy Magun (Editor)

Overview

This volume in the Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy series examines one of the most important topics in contemporary political theory: how to conceptualize the relationship between the one and the many.

The essays discuss how to reconcile multiple ontologies without subsuming them to a totalitarian unity. While one school of thought (Deleuze, Negri) seeks to create a new ontology based on the many instead of the one, (which, politically, is close to anarchy), another proposes to understand the "one" as the "ultra-one" of the event (Badiou). In this groundbreaking work, leading thinkers explore these debates and offer alternative concepts. Building on Jean-Luc Nancy's essay who proposes an ontology of "singular plurality," contributors aim to synthesize the one and the many and suggest different ways of forming collectives, beyond the dominant representative political forms.

An original and challenging work, Politics of the One addresses new possible ways of bringing people together, integrating philosophy with theoretical and practical problems of politics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781441187192
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	11/01/2012
Series:	Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Artemy Magun is Professor of Democratic Theory and Chair of the Department of Political Science and Sociology at the European University at Saint-Petersburg, Russia. He also teaches at the Smolny College of the Saint-Peterburg State University.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the One
The Concept of One: From Philosophy to Politics (Artemy Magun)
Part I. Metaphysics of the One and the Multiple
1. More than One (Jean Luc Nancy)
2. Condivision, or Towards a Non- communitarian Concatenation of Singularities(Gerald Raunig)
3. Unity and Solitude (Artemy Magun)
4. The Fragility of the One (Maria Calvacante)
5. The One: Construction or Event? For a Politics of Becoming (Boyan Mancher)
Part II. 20th-Century Thinkers of Unity and Multiplicity
6. Truth and Infinity in Badiou and Heidegger (Alexey Chernyakov)
7. Complicated Presence: The Unity of Being in Parmenides and Heidegger (Jussi Bachman)
8. The Universal, the General, the Multiple in the Perspective of a Political Utopia: Deleuze and Badiou on the Event (Keti Chukhrov)
9. Humanity, Unity and the One (Nina Power)
Part III. Unity and Multiplicity in Nature
10. Elemental Nature as the Ultimate Common Ground of the World Community (Susanna Lindberg)
11. Vegetative Democracy, or the Post-metaphysics of Plants (Michael Marder)
Part IV. Unity in Action: Forms of Political Consolidation in the Case of Contemporary Russia
12. Collectivity in Post-revolutionary Russia -(gor Tchubarov)
13. Street University: Production of Collective Time and Public Space (Pavel Arsenyev)
14. Fighting Together: the Problem of Solidarity (Carine Clément)
Part V. E Pluribus Unum: Res Publica and Community
15. How Does One Constitute the One? Theology of the Icon, Theory of Non-representative Art and of Non-representative Politics (Oleg Kharkhodin)
12. Drawing Lots in Politics: Unity and Totality (Yves Sintomer)