The Republican presidential candidates' rhetoric reminds me of Frederick Dolan's insights in his Allegories of America, where he represents American politics as "entirely given over to phantasms and simulacra but whose actors are driven by the need to reduce the interpretive ambiguity of their world to the reassuring forms of a metaphysical allegory."
It also recalls Bonnie Honig's dry comment in her brilliant book Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics: "The perpetuity of contest is not easy to celebrate."
No wonder I'm finding it easier these days to read political theory, novels, poetry, and art criticism: all grist for the mental mill -- to quote Pierre Rosanvallon in Democracy Past and Future, literature and poetry open us up the the presence of the world by the devices of language; art surveys the ambiguity and clears the silence of language; it remains open to the contradictions of the world and never allows concepts to exhaust the density of the real.
Now back to figuring out Nadia Urbinati's concept of representativity.
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