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With or against agitation?

Assembled here are eleven papers that track the implications and associations of agitation – across politics, psychoanalysis, culture and the history of science. For many of the contributors, the word is closely equated with political expression and debate. Agitation emerges as the various localized activities that conjugate politics: the day-to-day commitments and responsibilities that ensure a particular agenda remains alive within the body of the collective. Yet as Sheldon Wolin reveals in his opening paper, agitation is an equivocal subject, and implies conflicting political tempos. To the frenzied restlessness of modernization, he contrasts the time of popular, democratic agitation. In turn, Benjamin Arditi critiques the ideology of political realism and calls for a redefinition of emancipatory political activism for our current times. Andrew Hussey proceeds historically, and insists on the continued relevance of the Parisian revolutionary tradition. Alenka Zupanc̆ic̆ also turns to the French Revolution, but from the perspective of Kant’s allusions to the event in The Contest of Faculties. Whereas her subject is the stirring of revolutionary enthusiasm in distant spectators, Elleke Boehmer, on the other hand, reassesses Nelson Mandela’s careful yet unequivocally direct endorsement of anti-colonial terrorism. What might it mean, she asks, to explore Mandela’s justification of political violence in the light of the present ‘war on terror’?