Elena Trubina, Ural State University
During the past decade, intellectuals continued their radical search for discourses that would correspond to the language of people and things themselves. They saw that revolutions let life and discourse briefly coincide—only to be quickly blighted by failure. One of the books that questioned “sacred” ideas was Jacques Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy. It is a thoughtful attempt to sort out both deliberate and inadvertent contributions to what seems to be a widespread disillusionment with democracy. Rancière distinguishes democracy from socialism, emphasizing that dreams of a democracy of the multitude need to be reconsidered and perhaps given up in light of the total dominance of capitalism. The ambivalent outcome of neoliberal politics has been that democracy has ceased to be a positive ideal. The alliance of state oligarchy and economic oligarchy (which is everywhere at work) has appropriated the idea of democracy which, in the process, has been compromised. It is in the “power of intelligence” that thinking people possess that a French philosopher sees an inspiration.
In Rebel Cities, David Harvey is aware that people prefer to vote and rally “against” oligarchs (who control the world’s assets) rather than “for” democracy. In doing this, they also rally against the cultural entrepreneurs (including intellectuals) who are reluctant to engage in anticapitalist politics and thus contribute to the ongoing capitalist appropriation of the commons. Harvey’s book is a great reminder of the importance of scale and duration for the democratic and anticapitalist struggle. While it is possible to temporarily sustain “horizontal” democracy within a small local collective, things become more difficult when it comes to a city—not to mention a planet. Harvey says that Planet Earth is taken by corporate capital. With this assertion, he invites us to stop denying the self-evident.
Planet Earth is “mobilized” to produce more surplus—making more and more people homeless, literally and metaphorically. It is against this mobilization (which comprises the truth of modernity) that Peter Sloterdjik wrote the three volume book Sphären [Spheres]. It was translated into Russian seven years ago and, based on the conversations that I had about it at home, it is the most interesting book on space that people have seen in decades. The first volume (Bubbles) is available In English; the other two are in preparation. It is a learned, entertaining, and highly readable book. It deals with various “couples” (“duets”), or “microspaces” — the spaces of coexistence between people, things, and God. The existence of a human being as part of containing sphere—whether a womb or erotic bliss—provides the focus of this volume. Regarding interfacial space, Sloterdjik claims that because the face—not the hand or the brain—was discovered, humans became humans and that their defining feature is openness, not only to the world (this too often leads to expansion), but towards their fellow human beings, as well. Here, Sloterdjik argues that for centuries people have been engaged in producing a specific surplus, that of intimacy which, however, is not sufficient to cure us from uncertainty of dwelling within the colossal.
The books
Ranciere J, 2007 Hatred of Democracy, translation by Steve Corcoran (Verso, London)
Harvey, D 2012 Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (Verso, London)
Sloterdijk P, 2011 Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology, translation by Wieland Hoban (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA)
