The politics as (de)construction of subjects: identity dislocations and rearticulations in contemporary multitudinal protests

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to think politics as processes of citizens’ constitution, in a theoretical systematization that consider ethical, aesthetical, communicational and political dimensions of individual’s modes of agency. We contest conceptions that understand subjects as constituted previously to the political struggle or as irrelevant for the understanding of this ght. We argue that politics (as well as its discontinuities and ruptures) emerges in the process of deconstruction/displacement of subjects. In order to build our argument, the text critically revisit four distinct proposals in the scope of contemporary political theory in its interface with communication theory: (1) the discussions of Laclau and Mouffe on the concept of articulation; (2) the debates on de-identification and subjecti cation in Jacques Rancière; (3) the discussion of Judith Butler on subject; and (4) the critics of Patchen Markell to the theory of the recognition from the defense of the anteriority of the action on the identities construction. At the end, the basic idea to crisscross these authors will be mobilized in one brief illustration of its heuristic potential for the analysis of empirical phenomena. We will argue that this attention to the deconstruction of political citizens shed light on contemporary multitudinal protests.