Chantal Mouffe: How to Interpret the Recent Protest Movements? An Agonistic Approach / 16th May 2013
Channel: SkriptaTV
Date: 16/03/2014

16/05/2013, 19:00h, cinema Europa
6th Subversive festival 4-18th May 2013
Moderator: Tatjana Jukić

Chantal Mouffe "How to interpret the recent protest movements? An agonistic approach"

In this lecture I will discuss a widespread interpretation of the protest movements that we have witnessed since 2011 in several countries. Putting an emphasis on the Indignados and the various forms of Occupy, some radical theorists claim that those movements represent an exodus from traditional political institutions and signify a total rejection of representative democracy. Advocating 'assembleism' instead of 'parliamentarism' those movements, they say, represent a new 'horizontalist' practice of democracy that should replace the representative 'verticalist' one. I will examine the adequacy of such a view and challenge its theoretical premises before proposing a different interpretation informed by my agonistic approach.

Chantal Mouffe
Political theorist educated at the universities of Louvain, Paris, and Essex. She is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Westminster. She has taught at many universities in Europe, North America and Latin America. Between 1989 and 1995 she was Directrice de Programme at the College International de Philosophie in Paris. Professor Mouffe is the editor of Gramsci and Marxist Theory, Dimensions of Radical Democracy, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, and The Challenge of Carl Schmitt; co-author (with Ernesto Laclau) of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985); and author of The Return of the Political (1993), and The Democratic Paradox (2000). Her latest work is On the Political published by Routledge in 2005.

http://www.archive.subversivefestival.com/subff2013/foruml/7/218/en/chantal-mouffe-how-to-interpret-the-recent-protest-movements-an-agonistic-approach