Friday, January 28, 2011

Egypt and Ranciere

Like many of you, I've been glued to Al Jazeera English live all morning. It is hard to describe. The NPD HQ is one fire, a curfew has been issued and the protesters don't seem to have gone away. The police seem to have completely left Cairo. The army has been called in, but no one knows what will happen next. I also agree with Marc Lynch that the US needs to get in front of all of this.

Yesterday I started teaching Ranciere's On the Shores of Politics to my Argumentation class. I talked about the events in Tunisia and in Egypt, and I used it as a way to talk about Ranciere's comments on the hatred of democracy, on the fear of democracy that seems to come from those places that most claim to support democracy. That indeed, few of us are for democracy, but rather for stability, terra firma, rather than the sea that is democracy. The sea, that as Schmitt remarked in his Nomos of the Earth, that is res Nullius and res Ominium, that the sea belongs to nobody because it belongs to everybody.