ESPACE PUBLIC: DISSENSUS ET HETEROLOGIES URBAINES
PUBLIC SPACE: DISSENT AND URBAN HETEROLOGIES

Summary/Abstract: Public Space: Dissent and Urban Heterologies. Postcommunist Romanian society is about to come to a close, against the backdrop and the pretext of an international crisis, a long period of transition marked by permanent mobilization to achieve a certain number of economic, legal, military and security objectives, considered to represent the same number of formal stages to reach “the Western European” level of democracy in society. However, once this period comes to an end, it slips into what the French philosopher Jacques Rancière called “logic of police” in the organization of the urban space, which evacuates, through a series of administrative, economic or media strategies, the specific process of the public space. This process presupposes a whole ensemble of practices guided by the presupposition of equality and difference among the speaking beings, animated by the preoccupation for a constant overseeing of this equality. We shall describe such a process in terms of some of its characteristics – which we shall call “infrapolitical” – referring to some possible conditions of the politics, at the junction between rational and sensible or, individual and collective: trust, promise, hope, solidarity, values and beliefs. Their mobilization into the social body and among its individuals allows not only the invention of a new political subjectivity but also the creation of new public spaces in their sensible dimensions, as an opening towards new urban places, capable of receiving and nurturing a plurality of actions, of gestures and of discourses that are precisely creative because of the differences between them.

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