{"title":"Books by Bonnie Honig","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780199548439","title":"The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory","description":"Long recognized as one of the main branches of political science, political theory has in recent years burgeoned in many different directions. Close textual analysis of historical texts sits alongside more analytical work on the nature and normative grounds of political values. Continental and post-modern influences jostle with ones from economics, history, sociology, and the law. Feminist concerns with embodiment make us look at old problems in new ways, and challenges of new technologies open whole new vistas for political theory.This Handbook provides comprehensive and critical coverage of the lively and contested field of political theory, and will help set the agenda for the field for years to come. Forty-five chapters by distinguished political theorists look at the state of the field, where it has been in the recent past, and where it is likely to go in future. They examine political theory's edges as well as its core, the globalizing context of the field, and the challenges presented by social, economic, and technological changes.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56227387408757,"sku":"9780199548439","price":38.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780199548439_e5575426-590e-4fb9-88ce-5a5db5cd6bf4.jpg?v=1786012977"},{"product_id":"9780674248496","title":"A Feminist Theory of Refusal","description":"An acclaimed political theorist offers a fresh, interdisciplinary analysis of the politics of refusal, highlighting the promise of a feminist politics that does not simply withdraw from the status quo but also transforms it.   The Bacchae, Euripides’s fifth-century tragedy, famously depicts the wine god Dionysus and the women who follow him as indolent, drunken, mad. But Bonnie Honig sees the women differently. They reject work, not out of laziness, but because they have had enough of women’s routine obedience. Later they escape prison, leave the city of Thebes, explore alternative lifestyles, kill the king, and then return to claim the city. Their “arc of refusal,” Honig argues, can inspire a new feminist politics of refusal.   Refusal, the withdrawal from unjust political and economic systems, is a key theme in political philosophy. Its best-known literary avatar is Herman Melville’s Bartleby, whose response to every request is, “I prefer not to.” A feminist politics of refusal, by contrast, cannot simply decline to participate in the machinations of power. Honig argues that a feminist refusal aims at transformation and, ultimately, self-governance. Withdrawal is a first step, not the end game.   Rethinking the concepts of refusal in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Adriana Cavarero, and Saidiya Hartman, Honig places collective efforts toward self-governance at refusal’s core and, in doing so, invigorates discourse on civil and uncivil disobedience. She seeks new protagonists in film, art, and in historical and fictional figures including Sophocles’s Antigone, Ovid’s Procne, Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna, and Muhammad Ali. Rather than decline the corruptions of politics, these agents of refusal join the women of Thebes first in saying no and then in risking to undertake transformative action.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56292674011509,"sku":"9780674248496","price":26.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780674248496_4f3ea827-2d67-4708-ac23-f28fdd3438fa.jpg?v=1786015198"},{"product_id":"9780823290093","title":"Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eToward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence\u003c\/i\u003e brings together major feminist thinkers to debate Cavarero's call for a postural ethics of nonviolence and a sociality rooted in bodily interdependence.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eToward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence\u003c\/i\u003e brings together three major feminist thinkers—Adriana Cavarero, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig—to debate Cavarero's call for a postural ethics of nonviolence. The book consists of three longer essays by Cavarero, Butler, and Honig, followed by shorter responses by a range of scholars that widen the dialogue, drawing on post-Marxism, Italian feminism, queer theory, and lesbian and gay politics. Together, the authors contest the boundaries of their common project for a pluralistic, heterogeneous, but urgent feminist ethics of nonviolence.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294958104949,"sku":"9780823290093","price":23.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780823290093_62bd21ee-5d29-43e7-937a-4cf127c2f0a2.jpg?v=1786016028"},{"product_id":"9780823276417","title":"Public Things","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn the contemporary world of neoliberalism, efficiency is treated as the vehicle of political and economic health. State bureaucracy, but not corporate bureaucracy, is seen as inefficient, and privatization is seen as a magic cure for social ills. In \u003ci\u003ePublic Things: Democracy in Disrepair\u003c\/i\u003e, Bonnie Honig asks whether democracy is possible in the absence of public services, spaces, and utilities. In other words, if neoliberalism leaves to democracy merely electoral majoritarianism and procedures of deliberation while divesting democratic states of their ownership of public things, what will the impact be?\u003cbr\u003e Following Tocqueville, who extolled the virtues of \"pursuing in common the objects of common desires,\" Honig focuses not on the demos but on the objects of democratic life. Democracy, as she points out, postulates public things—infrastructure, monuments, libraries—that citizens use, care for, repair, and are gathered up by. To be \"gathered up\" refers to the work of D. W. Winnicott, the object relations psychoanalyst who popularized the idea of \"transitional objects\"—the toys, teddy bears, or favorite blankets by way of which infants come to understand themselves as unified selves with an inside and an outside in relation to others. The wager of \u003ci\u003ePublic Things\u003c\/i\u003e is that the work transitional objects do for infants is analogously performed for democratic citizens by public things, which press us into object relations with others and with ourselves.\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003ePublic Things\u003c\/i\u003e attends also to the historically racial character of public things: public lands taken from indigenous peoples, access to public goods restricted to white majorities. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, who saw how things fabricated by humans lend stability to the human world, Honig shows how Arendt and Winnicott—both theorists of livenesss—underline the material and psychological conditions necessary for object permanence and the reparative work needed for a more egalitarian democracy.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56295003259253,"sku":"9780823276417","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780823276417_ed8da792-32ca-4385-97cf-fd510553844f.jpg?v=1786015998"},{"product_id":"antigone-interrupted","title":"Antigone, Interrupted","description":"Sophocles' Antigone is a touchstone in democratic, feminist and legal theory, and possibly the most commented upon play in the history of philosophy and political theory. Bonnie Honig's rereading of it therefore involves intervening in a host of literatures and unsettling many of their governing assumptions. Exploring the power of Antigone in a variety of political, cultural, and theoretical settings, Honig identifies the 'Antigone-effect' - which moves those who enlist Antigone for their politics from activism into lamentation. She argues that Antigone's own lamentations can be seen not just as signs of dissidence but rather as markers of a rival world view with its own sovereignty and vitality. Honig argues that the play does not offer simply a model for resistance politics or 'equal dignity in death', but a more positive politics of counter-sovereignty and solidarity which emphasizes equality in life.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57483576017269,"sku":"9781107036970","price":68.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781107036970.jpg?v=1786178778"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-bonnie-honig.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}