ICAR Hosts McAfee on Democracy

This year ICAR has another philosopher and democratic theorist in its midst, Noëlle McAfee, associate research professor of philosophy and conflict analysis. Noëlle joins us after having spent two years in George Mason's philosophy department, and prior to that several years on the philosophy faculty at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Noëlle is spending the 2008-2009 academic year with ICAR thanks to funding from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation to work on a book on the meaning of democratic politics and to help oversee the Kettering Foundation's research on media and democracy. She is also the associate editor of the foundation's journal of political thought, the Kettering Review.

In the spring she will be teaching a graduate seminar on democratic theory and post-conflict democratization, drawing on her penchant for grounding theory in real-world problems and making sure that practice is consistent with the ideals it hopes to bring about. "There's always an idea behind our practice that will shape our practice," Noëlle says, "and these ideas need to be brought to light and scrutinized. If we think that democracy equals more ballot boxes but neglect the need for public spaces to build public relationships, we can end up with more division and conflict rather than less."

Noëlle's main interest is in the possibility of democracy. "I turned to philosophy after working in the public interest world in Washington in the 1980s, where I began to despair that no amount of fighting the good fight would work if people were incapable of self-government." She ended up writing a dissertation on the implications for citizenship and democracy in the works of the European thinkers, Jürgen Habermas and Julia Kristeva, becoming an expert in contemporary poststructuralist thought. "I hang out with the black turtleneck crowd, but my research is as informed by what regular people are doing in their communities to create change as it is by the more esoteric resources of philosophy."

Last spring Noëlle's fourth book was published, titled Democracy and the Political Unconscious. In it she looks at the causes of trauma, terror, and retribution and the resources that deliberative democratic dialogue and other public testimonies can offer. The book moves between the theoretical and the actual, from, for example, a psychoanalytic understanding of the "repetition compulsion" of the endless war on terror to the ways in which people are creating institutions in their communities to provide more space for democratic practice.