The Misguided Search for the Political (PDF)

There has been a lively debate amongst political theorists about
whether certain liberal concepts of democracy are so idealized that
they lack relevance to 'real' politics. Echoing these
debates, Lois McNay examines in this book some theories of radical
democracy and argues that they too tend to rely on troubling
abstractions - or what she terms 'socially weightless'
thinking. They often propose ideas of the political that are so far
removed from the logic of everyday practice that, ultimately, their
supposed emancipatory potential is thrown into question.

Radical democrats frequently maintain that what distinguishes their
ideas of the political from others is the fundamental concern with
unmasking and challenging unrecognized forms of inequality and
domination that distort everyday life. But this supposed
attentiveness to power is undermined by the invocation of rarefied
models of political action that treat agency as an unproblematic
given and overlook certain features of the embodied experience of
oppression. The tendency of radical democrats to define democratic
agency in terms of dynamics of perpetual flux, mobility and agonism
passes over too swiftly the way in which objective structures of
oppression are often taken into the body as subjective
dispositions, leaving individuals with the feeling that they are
unable to do little more than endure a state of affairs beyond
their control.

Drawing on the work of Adorno, Bourdieu and Honneth, amongst
others, McNay argues that in order to make good the critique of
power, radical democratic theory should attend more closely to a
phenomenology of negative social experience and what it can reveal
about the social conditions necessary for effective political
agency.