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This article addresses recent strains of white nationalism rooted within anxieties over demographic replacement (e.g., "the Great Replacement"). More broadly, the article argues that the contemporary politics of white grievance cannot be reduced to an ahistorical desire for racial supremacy. Rather, these anxieties represent the political reflex to perceptions of loss on the part of historical white majorities—a loss that takes a distinctly melancholic form in both discourse and practice. To understand white nationalism as a melancholic politics is to recognize the pathologies that stem from its underlying psychodynamics. At the affectual level, for instance, the subject of white grievance is constituted as the subject of politicized rage through its organizing narratives. And ultimately, the politics of melancholic whiteness raises significant challenges for a democratic polity. Most fundamentally, the melancholic fixation upon loss forecloses the futurity required by a democratic politics. Upon diagnosing these destructive pathologies, the article goes on to propose alternatives to approach civic change in less destructive, more democratically generative fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay engages an undertheorized form of democratic agency: the embodied spectacle that characterizes a strain of activist politics. Where an existing literature addresses “the spectacle” as a tactic of power, it does not do justice to how marginal groups have used radical bodily acts in order to intervene within the image-world of democratic politics (e.g., hunger strikes, die-ins, self-immolation). The essay argues that such performances represent a standing challenge to democratic theory and demand a more richly sensuous approach to how political claims are made. Such forms of bodily theatre do not only “speak” in ways that exceed official civic discourses but, in so doing, they unsettle the space of citizenship. Ultimately, these bodies do something in being undone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages some questions raised by recent work on civil society: What is missed by a rationalist reduction of politics, and why does it matter? How does the somatic dimension of citizenship open deliberation to social economies of power? From these questions, the article interrogates what agency is possible if power is inscribed within the affects that mobilize action and judgment- with particular attention to the work of William Connolly. Over the course of the article, it is argued that Connolly's politics of sensibility makes an ambivalent contribution to these problems. While critics charge that he undermines possibilities for associational agency, this article proposes a rather more productive contribution to the arts of coalition building. And yet, these resources must be pressed beyond recent trends in the literature if they are to do justice to the unruly movements of civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article intervenes in recent debates surrounding Adorno’s contribution to critical social theory. Where it is something of a commonplace to argue that Adorno pessimistically withdraws from political concerns, the article argues for a more productive set of normative contributions – based within his utopian gestures towards a ‘difference without fear’. At stake is not only a more sensitive approach to Adorno’s texts, but the broader normative question of difference and its political meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]