Stirred and shaken: from the “art of the possible” to emancipator politics

Abstract

This article explores the persistence of agitation in emancipatory politics. It disputes Bismarck’s characterization of politics as “the art of the possible”, which was taken up later as a rallying cry by political realists everywhere. It also distances itself from eschatological views of emancipation of the type usually associated with Jacobinism. The purpose of this is to destabilize the frontiers between the possible and the impossible, and between revolutionary and non-revolutionary politics. Agitation is not a hangover from the hot politics of times past but lives on as part of an internal periphery of institutional politics in liberal democracies. It functions as a symptom that prevents the closure of politics in a purely gentrified format of exchange or, alternatively, agitation in tandem with emancipatory politics brings out the “eventness” of events and reveals the working of the impossible. This will allow me to introduce a minimal definition of emancipation as a dispute about whether existing conditions encourage or harm equality and freedom, and about whether another world is possible.

Key words: agitprop, emancipation, revolutionize, Benjamin, Rancière.