Feminism as Epic Theory

Sheldon Wolin identifies a particular tradition within political theory that he calls ‘epic theory’. Epic theory, he explains, is political theory's equivalent of the Kuhnian scientific revolution. This article takes up the analogy between epic theory and scientific revolution to show that feminism is an epic theory in the truest sense of the term, a sense not fully grasped by Wolin. It is so for two reasons. First, it is a theory of the whole. Second, it is less a discovery than an invention of the world. The author seeks to account for the existence of feminism in the face of its impossibility, and to demonstrate the magnitude of the achievement that feminism represents.

Zum Spannungsverhältnis von Volkssouveränität und Verfassungsgerichten. Eine Review zur Kritik der judicial review

Maus, Ingeborg, 2018: Justiz als gesellschaftliches Über-Ich. Zur Position der Rechtsprechung in der Demokratie, Suhrkamp, Berlin. / Michelsen, Danny, 2019: Kritischer Republikanismus und die Paradoxa konstitutioneller Demokratie. Politische Freiheit nach Hannah Arendt und Sheldon Wolin, Springer VS, Wiesbaden.

Fred Moten’s Refusals and Consents: The Politics of Fugitivity

This essay analyzes Fred Moten’s “antipolitical” romance with the “fugitive black sociality” that he radically opposes to “politics,” defined as inescapably tied to antiblack modernity. By comparing Moten’s argument to other voices in the black radical tradition, and by triangulating Moten with Hannah Arendt and Sheldon Wolin, this essay opens inherited conceptions of the political to risk and reworking but also complicates figurations of fugitivity and resists the antagonism Moten posits between black fugitivity and democratic politics.