ABSTRACT
ORCID: 0000-0002-5051-5307
In chapter 3 (“The Center Cannot Hold: Memory, Identity, Fugitivity”), Lucy Cane shifts attention from the diagnostic to the prescriptive aspect of Sheldon Wolin’s work, and begins her assessment of the extent to which he is able to see through loss. The chapter traces how Wolin’s engagement with the sixties and growing hostility to state and corporate power generate his “archaic” narrative of America’s democratic heritage. Taking Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as counterpoints, Cane argues that Wolin’s archaic vision of participatory democracy illuminates important dimensions of democratic empowerment. On the other hand, she points to the problematic melancholia of Wolin’s aspiration to revive the collective identity of “the body politic.” The chapter then outlines Wolin’s subsequent efforts to make his democratic vision less melancholic, first by remembering the mixed legacy of America’s participatory heritage and then by promoting the “re-cognition” of difference and the “continuing self-fashioning of the demos.” Chapter 3 interrogates his lingering anxieties about identity politics and criticizes his demand that the identities of oppressed groups be “bracketed.” It draws on Juliet Hooker’s work on “black fugitivity” to underscore further the limitations of Wolin’s so-called “fugitive” project of continually self-fashioning of the demos.
