Description: Drawing on Winnicott and Hannah Arendt, Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair develops a lexicon for a political theory of public things. Indigenous activism, racial inequality, and democratic citizenship; care, concern, hope, and play all figure in readings of contemporary events and literary, film, and political theory (Tocqueville, Melville, von Trier).
Brief description: Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University. Her most recent books are Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair and A Feminist Theory of Refusal.
Review Quotes: Although, on the surface, the title "Public Things" is just a routine translation of the Latin res publica, Honig injects into the phrase a radical twist which exposes the "disrepair" of contemporary democratic politics. Although upholding the need for publicly shared concerns, her book also launches an indictment: namely, that increasingly such concerns are reified and objectified and thereby transformed into targets for individual or corporate appropriation.-- "Global-E, UC Santa Barbara"