









































ZURICH (2022)



The idea of public space is crucial for our political 
imagination, precisely because it is perceived as 
being not only threatened, but even as on the way 
toward extinction. Throughout its history, the 
concept seems to imply both a promise of a more 
transparent social world, and a threat to which we 
are exposed: it is a space of free exchange, but also 
one to which we are subjected, and where conflict 
seems unending. 

In this sense, two competing versions could be 
given: the first one would tell a story of the rise 
and fall of public space, and it is probably the most 
common one; the second, which is less frequent, 
presents public space as always and structurally 
constituted by a conflict that will make it into a 
space of struggle, where the dreams of undistorted 
communication not only cover over the reality 
of power, but in fact are instrumental for its 
deployment. These two can neither be fused into a 
common story, nor can we simply choose between 
them; perhaps they can be said to constitute 
something like the antinomy of public space.

Kant and the Enlightenment
The classical origin of most stories of public space 

is the agora in the Greek polis, which has taken 
on a symbolic value for all subsequent theorizing, 
notwithstanding the fact that it must be seen as a 
retroactive fantasy, similarly to many other such 
Greek “origins” that have been assumed since the 
late eighteenth century onwards. That the selection 
of citizens that were allowed to take part in Greek 
democracy was indeed small has been brushed 
aside, which has made it possible to transform it 

Public space. Conflicts and Antinomies

Sven-Olov Wallenstein



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into a model for various promises of a restored Gemeinschaft in modernity, 
a community that would rest on a direct “representation,” as if the 
exclusionary mechanisms at once had been repressed and sublimated into 
a kind of ideal space. This trope appears in Winckelmann, Rousseau, the 
early Romantics, the young Hegel (who would later discard it), and many 
other thinkers on the eighteenth century that were trying to articulate a 
new foundation for political theory after the downfall of the absolutist-
theological model. (In fact, even though this is rarely made into an explicit 
theme, the various versions of contract theory seem to require something 
like a common space, a medium of assembly, in which the first act of 
signing occurs, since it takes place at one singular point in time, not as a 
series of individual events separated in space and time.)

The second step in this story is the construction of an ideal public 
space, which as we noted often looks back to its alleged Greek origin, 
and yet constitutes something basically new. This is the idea of a world 
of rational reflection, communication, and judgment that would rely on 
readers dispersed in space and time, only related through the sense that 
they share a common rational project. We find this outlined in Kant,1 in 
his conception of the Enlightenment and its Öffentlichkeit as a spatial and 
temporal ideal form where all dogmas, theoretical as well as moral and 
political, can be subjected to debate. To participate in this debate, Kant 
proposes, one must however act as a “public” person and not as a bearer of 
official authority, as in the case of the judge, the magistrate, the priest, etc., 
which in Kant’s vocabulary are “private” uses of reason (for us today, this 
terminology would be inverted). The divide between these two roles comes 
across in a statement that has spawned many vitriolic remarks, and it seems 
to make Kant into a late-come proponent of the traditional doctrine of 
Reason of State, or even a kind of Prussian state philosopher: “Reason 
as much as you wish but obey!” What Kant in fact means, however, is  
something different that still today remains a basic tenet of legal theory. 
Whoever acts as a figure of public authority must uphold what Kant in 
other contexts calls the “mechanism of society,” since processes based on 
authority must be transparent and predictable once the initial variables 
are clearly staked out. We may indeed reason as much as we want, and 
question the soundness of laws. but this reasoning belongs to a space of 
individual, intellectual license, which as such is not the basis of procedures 
of authority. When passing a judgment, the court must follow the law, 
even though each of its members may very well perceive the law as unjust.

While the private use of reason is based on authority and obedience, 
Kant stresses the processual character of the public debate, which means 
that it should remain open-ended. We are living in an age of enlightenment, 



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he writes, not an enlightened age, since the latter 
would assume that reason had been perfected. If 
the process were to be stopped, i.e., if we would 
attain a perfect “match” between thinking and 
world, such a state could in a sense not be separated 
from a metaphysical dogmatism where truth 
could be decreed, and reasoning comes to an end. 
Enlightenment is reflexive, in the sense that it must 
always be prepared to question its own results.

As Kant notes, this is due to a “maturing 
capacity for judgment” characteristic of that 
period which allows for the step out of our “self-
incurred tutelage” (Unmündigkeit), as he writes in 
the Enlightenment essay which also makes it all 
the more essential for everyone of us to attempt to 
“think in the place of everyone else,” as he later will 
say in the Critique of Judgment (§ 40).2 What Kant 
in fact discovers, as he moves from the first to the 
third Critique and the various essays on politics, is 
that judgment is not simply “determining,” as in 
theoretical cognition, but also “reflexive,” engaging 
a dimension of intersubjectivity that requires us to 
change perspective, and to project a possible future 
where we all would be spontaneously reconciled, 
while still acknowledging that no empirical state 
of affairs could ever be said to be precisely such a 
fulfilled state. 

In the third Critique, the discussion of judgment 
is carried out in terms of taste, beauty, and the 
sublime, and the link to the political writings does 
not at first hand seem obvious, although a closer 
reading of the texts reveals many subterranean links. 
They are however always tentative, as if experiments 
in thought that transfer propositional forms by 
way of analogy, metaphor, metonymy, and a host 
of other figures. Rather than an aestheticizing of 
politics, or a politicizing of aesthetics, the twofold 
temptation that haunts post-Kantian modernity, 
it is an exercise in what Kant in the third Critique 
calls an “enlarged mode of thought” (erweitere 
Denkungsart), a reflection that does not aim for 



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grounding in theory of practice, but moves freely between them, drawing 
on all types of sources and texts, unfolding in the interstices of imagination 
and judgment. 

For instance, when Kant refers to the French revolution, he introduces 
the idea of a “sign of history” that would account for the way in which 
empirical events impact not only the affective part of the spectator, but 
also introduces ideas of reason, and even constitutes a kind of historical 
teleology, although surrounded by several caveats. The sign introduces a 
certain temporal dimension, and, as we will see, it at least communicates 
indirectly with the idea of a public space that would be materialized and 
embodied in a kind of monumentality. The relevant passages can be found 
in the second part of Kant’s The Conflict of Faculties,3 where the question is 
whether progress in history can be ascertained or not. No direct empirical 
facts will suffice, Kant claims, instead we should attempt to find “signs” 
that indicate—indirectly, precisely as signs—the existence of a transformed 
moral disposition. The French revolution, he suggests, is such a case, not 
because it has brought about shifts and changes in government (these 
may be reversed, and even lead to a factually worse state than before), but 
because it affects the spectators in a particular fashion. It is not the violence, 
the sound and fury of the res gestae that signify moral improvement; in 
fact, at the end of the day, the effects of the revolution may be such that it 
actually increases the amount of suffering in the world. The crucial aspect 
is what Kant calls enthusiasm,4 a particular passion among those who 
experience it from a certain distance, in this case from across the Rhine: 
it is the Germans who are filled with enthusiasm, and a whole generation 
of idealist philosophers and poets in the wake of Kant will corroborate 
his analysis. The Germans, Kant argues, are precisely by virtue of their 
distance from the stage of history exempt from the violence of pathological 
passions, since they have nothing to gain by entertaining them; on the 
contrary, their passions will be redirected from immediate aims towards 
moral principles, and in this they indicate a particular receptivity for ideas 
that is lost in the immediate imbroglio of the French milieu. 

First, we must note the theatrical dimension. The drama is organized 
by the divide between stage and audience, perhaps to some extent drawing 
on an implicit reading of Aristotle’s Poetics, where enthusiasm replaces 
katharsis as the desired outcome. But the revolution is as such obviously 
not a fiction, rather a real event whose moral effect can only be discerned 
if it passes through a certain distancing and aesthetic derealization. The 
impact of the political is registered in a quasi-aesthetic space, and even 
though the real (events and actions) cannot be reduced to an aesthetic 
phenomenon, the relation to moral principles can only be created by way 



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of a certain circulation within an aesthetic realm. 
The entangled nature of these relations no doubt 
signals a hesitance on Kant’s part, but, arguably, just 
as much the contradictory and entangled nature of 
the real itself. 

To this we must add the temporal nature of 
the historical sign: it is a signum rememorativum, 
demonstrativum et prognosticon, i.e. a sign of memory 
that tells us that there has always been a certain 
amount of progress, a sign that demonstrates that 
there is a case in the present, and a sign that offers 
the prognosis that there will be progress in the future, 
that hope is not lost regardless of the vicissitudes of 
the revolution at present. In this sense, it institutes a 
historical possibility: even though empirical events 
may lead us astray and even turn out disastrously, 
this possibility cannot sink into complete oblivion. 
The same holds for the Enlightenment, which for 
Kant, as we saw, is not simply an empirical phase in 
history, but a reflexive move within reason itself, in 
which it calls upon itself to know itself, from within, 
without any support from transcendent authorities. 

The sign can in this sense be understood within 
a logic of the monument: it preserves a moment 
in time, embodies an idea, and projects it into 
the future. Orienting the affective response of the 
beholder towards the domain of moral principles 
and supersensible ideas, it points to a possibility 
to be realized in the future. But it also points to 
the transcendence of such a future in relation to all 
empirical presents; the aesthetic affect must remain 
in an imaginary realm, if it is to retain its force in the 
realm of political, whereas any collapse of the two 
into each other would be precisely a “transcendental 
illusion” in the sense Kant had already outlined in 
the first Critique.

The sign of history is only one of the many 
intermediary figures that Kant proposes to create a 
bridge between the sensible and the supersensible, 
nature and freedom, and it is no easy task to sort 
them in a clear order, or to see if they are connected, 

      IF THE “CRITIQUE 
OF POLITICAL 

REASON” REMAINED 
IN A STATE OF 

FRAGMENTATION 
AND SUSPENSION, 

IT WAS BECAUSE 
THE POLITICAL FOR 

KANT COULDN’T 
BE SUBSUMED 

UNDER A PRIORI 
PRINCIPLES.

“

”



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hierarchically or otherwise. As Lyotard points out (and in this he often 
comes close to Arendt),5 if the “critique of political reason” remained in 
a state of fragmentation and suspension, it was because the political for 
Kant couldn’t be subsumed under a priori principles, but always mobilized      
concepts drawn from cognition, ethics, and aesthetics, even religion, in a 
way that blurs the line between proper and improper uses. 

The Rise and Fall of Public Space
In the tradition from Kant, this lack of a priori principles has often been 

taken as a positive characteristic: it is the absence of univocal rules that 
constitutes the idea of society as a kind of ongoing mediation and reflection, 
an open-ended process of legitimization and production of consensus that 
neither acknowledges the decrees issued by a sovereign power, nor those of 
any alleged science of politics. Thus, many have claimed that the creation 
of a modern political space would have Kantian Criticism and the French 
Revolution as  two founding moments. As Claude Lefort puts it, the end 
of the eighteenth century would have been the moment of the “democratic 
invention” or the “invention of democracy,”6 which as such was marked 
by a constitutive ambivalence:  the subject that speaks (the “people”) is 
at the same time to be brought forth in this very same address, via a kind 
of political performativity. But rather than simply a contradiction that 
in advance would undermine this new political logic, the performative is 
what dismantles the theological and/or ontological foundation of politics, 
to the effect that we can say that there is politics, in the modern sense of 
the term, precisely to the extent that the very idea of a foundation has 
eroded. There is an absence at the heart of society, a void that many are 
indeed eager and even desperate to fill, which is why a certain totalitarian 
temptation always follows modern democracy like a shadow (for instance, 
as we noted earlier, by letting the aesthetic fill out this gap, not just as a 
“bridge,” as Kant writes, but as a common positive ground).

A somewhat different narrative is provided by Jürgen Habermas, from 
his early analysis of the public sphere to the later theories of communicative 
action.7 For him, the idea of a constitutive void or indeterminacy is not 
enough to safeguard a modern idea of the political; instead, he suggests 
that the theory of communication must be given a “transcendental” status 
if the respective roles of discourse are to be safeguarded. Despite these 
differences, Lefort’s and Habermas’s theories both delineate powerful 
and highly influential narratives of the emergence of political freedom as 
connected to the space of public life, and for both the Kantian moment 
occupies a central place. 



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It is however also crucial that in both accounts 
(more emphatically in Habermas), the public sphere 
is perceived as under threat. When Habermas in his 
classic 1962 study on the transformations of the 
public sphere begins by locating the promise of a 
public sphere, he points to the time of Kant and the 
emergence of what could be called modern media 
as a site of free reflection (they create a “world of 
readers,” eine Leserwelt, as Kant says). But at the 
same time, this account seems already from the 
outset destined to end with the corruption of this 
very same system, at a point where it is absorbed 
by commercial interests and becomes part of a 
culture of the spectacle. One can ask to what extent 
the public sphere that Habermas’s whole discourse 
mourns for ever existed; if it was there as a promise 
at the end of the Enlightenment, as an idea (but 
nothing more) in Kant, then as soon as its real and 
material infrastructure was set in place, it began to 
deteriorate. 

It seems clear that the idea of a single public space 
governed by the rules of rational communication 
was never, or will ever be, instantiated empirically, 
and in this sense it can only be taken as a 
“regulative” idea in the Kantian sense: it is there in 
order to make sense of, or more precisely to judge 
and evaluate, a given empirical manifold, but it 
is never instantiated as such, which is probably 
why Habermas in his later writings comes to 
understand the ideal communicative situation 
as a transcendental requirement (or in terms of a 
“transcendental pragmatics,” as proposed by Karl-
Otto Apel).8 The problem with this however is 
whether such a regulative idea is at all capable of 
accounting for a factual development: it achieves its 
authority by adopting a normative transcendence 
with respect to the vicissitudes of history, while it 
remains unclear to what extent any of these factual 
developments were ever directed by this ideal. 
Similarly, one could ask if the ideal of a transparent 
communication could ever account for what goes 

       IT SEEMS 
CLEAR THAT 

THE IDEA OF A 
SINGLE PUBLIC 

SPACE GOVERNED 
BY THE RULES 

OF RATIONAL 
COMMUNICATION 
WAS NEVER, OR 

WILL EVER BE, 
INSTANTIATED 
EMPIRICALLY.

“

”



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on in communication; simply reiterating the traditional divide between is 
and ought may seem like evading the question, or at least to remain deaf to 
what goes on in language. The later claims by Habermas that the problems 
could be settled through a “procedural rationality” (a minimum set of rules 
that safeguard rationality without making any substantial claims about 
the content of debates) seems to go in the same direction, and appears to 
assume that the basic questions have already been solved, or at least could 
be bracketed because of their technical, specialized nature.9      

Drawing on Habermasian ideas, but in a way that stays closer to 
concrete problems of public space, the urban theorist Michael Sorkin has 
suggested an analogous account of the privatization of public space, which 
ends on an even more apocalyptic note and predicts the “end of public 
space”.10 Many other similar cases could be cited;  a conclusion would 
be that it seems almost unavoidable to inscribe the idea of a public “site” 
(whose spatial characteristics may vary) for rational political discourse in 
a story that tells of rise and decline. If such a site once existed—be it the 
Greek agora, the Renaissance city, the ideal space of the Enlightenment—it 
is now a memory, an object of nostalgia. At the same time, this narrative 
cannot simply ascribe the demise of its object to some external cause: the 
rise of an affluent class that only looks to its own interests, the commercial 
press, the proliferation of information, technological changes; all of these 
are both what made this site, space, or sphere possible, and that which lies 
behind its inevitable deterioration in the present.

Genealogies of Public Space
Other narratives than those of rise and fall are obviously possible, not 

just in the sense that they would cite other empirical cases, but also, and 
more profoundly, in that they would question its underlying assumptions. 
In some cases, they could amount to what looks like an inversion of the 
first story. So in the case of Richard Sennett, whose The Fall of Public 
Man attempts to show how the nineteenth century, with its emphasis 
on personal authenticity and psychological truthfulness, displaced 
an Enlightenment culture of conversation and of the salon.11 In the 
eighteenth century “public man” was at liberty to stage a self, in a kind of 
enactment of the self in terms of rhetoric rather than psychology, whereas 
the nineteenth century would instead demand that one should appear as 
one truly is and condemn the split between inside and outside as a sign of 
moral inaptitude.12  

Other stories take us beyond the figure of reversal, and instead opt for a 
different and more conflict-ridden understanding of the historical process, 
tending to something that, following Nietzsche and Foucault, could be 



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called a “genealogical” model.13  In these stories, it 
makes no sense to ask if public space in the “true” 
sense existed at one point of another, if it was once 
a promise that was later betrayed for some reason, 
or if there has been a fall from one state to another. 
Public space has always been both an object of 
dispute, and a disputed space of the dispute itself, 
to the effect that it has no true or ideal sense beyond 
all the ways in which it has been appropriated, 
rejected, contested, and redefined. If such a space 
has a constant feature—this time not in the sense 
of a regulative idea but rather that of a pervasive 
empirical fact—it is that it has always been based on 
various exclusions and hidden or explicit privileges, 
as any analysis of the actual composition of the 
alleged origins in the Greek political assemblies and 
the agora will unambiguously show.     

 As Rosalyn Deutsche suggests, the kind of 
analysis that we have previously discussed, which 
mourns the downfall of an ideal public domain, 
might even, somewhat provocatively, be called 
“agoraphobia.”14 What it profoundly fears, she 
argues, is to acknowledge that all public discourse is 
marked by asymmetries and power relations, not just 
incidentally and contingently, but structurally and 
constitutively. Non-violent discourse might in this 
sense fulfill a very traditional definition of ideology: 
an imaginary solution to real contradictions, 
transposed to the realm of regulative ideas that 
always ought to be realized, but in fact never are 
(similarly to way in which the idea that all humans 
are equal in principle can serve to obscure that fact 
that they are never equal in reality). Such an ideal 
will always appear as distant in time or space, always 
lost or to come, and this temporal projection is what 
holds fear at bay by rationalizing it. 

In a similar vein, Chantal Mouffe claims that 
“the political,” which for her must be distinguished 
from “politics” in the empirical sense of processes of 
policy-making and decision-making, has to do with 
the way in which a society is symbolically instituted 

      IT SEEMS 
ALMOST 

UNAVOIDABLE 
TO INSCRIBE 

THE IDEA OF A 
PUBLIC “SITE” 

FOR RATIONAL 
POLITICAL 

DISCOURSE IN A 
STORY 

THAT TELLS 
OF RISE AND 

DECLINE.

“

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in terms of a fundamental antagonism.15 This she distinguishes from liberal 
conceptions, which are based on an “aggregative” model that understands 
the political in terms of the economy and the market, and from a deliberative 
model that understands the political as the application of morality. For 
Mouffe, the political has to do with passions, and to take a political stance 
will always involve a separation between an “us” and a “them,” which 
creates an asymmetry in the space in which the two parties are to meet. 
The problem for Mouffe becomes to what extent this antagonism can be 
transformed into an “agonism” that would allow passionate encounters 
while still mitigating or sublimating the violence of antagonism. How can 
we acknowledge the legitimacy of the opponent, without reference to a 
set of rules or a rational consensus to be achieved as the outcome? Does 
the shift to agonism not presuppose some standard according to which it 
can be construed as successful—or, inversely, as has been argued by Slavoj 
Žižek, must the idea, or ideal, of agonism, not have recourse to a more 
basic liberal-capitalist order that itself cannot be challenged?

Just as for Deutsche, this has important consequences for the notion 
of public space. Mouffe places her theory in clear opposition to the one 
proposed by Habermas, but also, although less clearly, to Hannah Arendt, 
whose conception of an “enlarged thought” and a political intersubjectivity 
draws on Kant’s aesthetics.16 For Mouffe, public space cannot be seen as one 
entity that could subsequently be occupied or compromised by external 
forces, rather it is a constitutive plurality in a sense that goes beyond the 
peaceful “space of appearance” as delineated by Arendt: it is a multiply 
contested and non-symmetric space, a battleground traversed by struggles 
for hegemony. If public space is the space where politics is realized, this 
can only occur through acts of confrontation and unmasking. What 
Mouffe proposes is that the public domain must be seen as an ongoing 
experimental construction, rather than as a regulative idea against which 
all empirical domains should be measured and against which they all will 
appear as deficient. 

The Antinomy of Public Space
How should we judge the conflict between those two stories? To some 

extent it is reminiscent of what Paul Ricoeur once called a “conflict of 
interpretations,”17 i.e. between a restorative hermeneutics that wants to return 
to an original sense buried under sediments of history, and a “hermeneutics 
of suspicion” in the wake of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, for which the 
given—consciousness, texts, or, as in this case, this strange entity called 
public space—always harbors inner contradictions that must be unearthed, 
and that eventually will destroy the unity of the object in question.



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But perhaps the choice of the word “hermeneutics” 
as an overarching term is misleading, since it glosses 
over the highly different conceptions of thought 
itself that we find in these two conceptions. At stake 
are not just methodologies of interpretation, but 
a kind of antinomy that lies deep in the heart of 
thought itself. But what, then, is this antinomy?

The term seems as such to already settle the 
conflict, since it belongs to the Kantian vocabulary. 
For Kant, an antinomy results from two conflicting 
interests, and his chief example is the notion of 
freedom: for the understanding, as the faculty that 
legislates over the science of nature, the interest lies 
in maximizing the scope of causality, and freedom 
is an impossible concept, since it would disrupt the 
causal chain. For the faculty of reason (as opposed 
to the faculty of understanding, and directed 
towards ideas), the interest is to safeguard a sphere 
of the supersensible that preserves the autonomy 
of rational agents. In natural science, causal chains 
must be seamless, and that free actions do not 
exist is not an empirical discovery, but an a priori 
requirement. For ethics, freedom is inversely what 
is required for the moral law to be at all applicable, 
and its status cannot be revoked by any reference to 
physics. What holds together these two claims is the 
architectonic of reason, which allows the sensible 
(nature) and the supersensible to co-exist.18 

Now, in the case of public space, just as in Kant’s 
analysis of freedom, both parties can argue their 
respective cases forcefully: the idealist account lays 
claim to an ethical necessity (no empirical facts can 
settle the question of what public space should be), 
whereas the genealogical seems to refer to a kind 
of sensible manifold (ethical ideals are not what 
matters, but rather significance lies in what people 
in fact do). What is striking, and rather different 
than in Kantian philosophy, is that the first version, 
which stresses universals and communicative 
action, tends to be pessimistic about the present 
and even more so about the future, whereas the 

      IF PUBLIC 
SPACE IS THE 

SPACE WHERE 
POLITICS IS 
REALIZED, 

THIS CAN ONLY 
OCCUR 

THROUGH ACTS 
OF CONFRONTATION 

AND UNMASKING.

“

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second version, which stresses contingency and forces, tends to see the 
future as open an undecided. What seems to be at stake here is thus not 
the difference between theoretical and practical reason, or between nature 
and freedom, as Kant would have it, but rather between two versions of 
freedom, which is why we cannot solve the issue by an appeal to some 
putative architecture of reason. The antinomy of public space in this sense 
testifies to division between two ideas or even ideals of philosophy, rather 
than to a split inside a particular philosophy.

Endnotes
1. The classic text is Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay, ‘An Answer to the 

Question: What is Enlightenment?’ in Immanuel Kant, Political 
Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge 
Univ. Press, 1990).

2. Immanuel Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Mary C. Smith, tr. http://
www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html.

3. Translated in Political Writings (as in note 1).
4. I draw here on the commentary by Jean-François Lyotard, 

L’enthousiasme: La critique kantienne de l’histoire (Paris: Galilée, 1986).
5.  Which is not to say that their readings coincide: in many respects they 

differ sharply, in a way not unrelated to the antinomy between the two 
stories of public space that will be sketched in the following section.

6.  See Claude Lefort L’invention démocratique: Les limites de la 
domination totalitaire (Paris: Fayard, 1981).

7.  Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen 
zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Luchterhand: Neuwied, 
1962), and Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativem Handelns 
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981).

8. See for instance Karl-Otto Apel, Understanding and Explanation: 
A Transcendental Pragmatic Perspective, trans. Georgia Warnke 
(Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1984).

9. In another terminology, the idea of a procedural rationality endowed 
with an intentionally “thin” definition seems to deny the possibility 
of ”deep conflicts”, i.e., conflicts where the very nature of rules is 
at stake. Interestingly, such conflicts are abundant at the level that 
many (though not all) philosophers would see as the basic one, the 
foundations of mathematics and logic.

 10. See for instance the contributions in Michael Sorkin (ed.), Variations 
on a Theme Park: The New American City and The End of Public 
Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992). For a critical discussion of 
Sorkin’s account, as well as of similar proposals by Mike Davis, see 



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Rosalyn Deutsche, ‘Men in Space,’ in Rosalyn 
Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics 
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). This is 
obviously not to deny the empirical pertinence 
of the analyses of late capitalist space and of 
the commodification of the urban landscape 
proposed by Sorkin and Davis; it does however 
mean to question their underlying narrative 
structure, which tends to project a past and 
more ideal situation or possibility that at one 
point were betrayed.

11. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New 
York: Random House, 1977).

12. While doubtless effective as an antidote to the 
traditional story, the image of a fall occurring at 
the beginning of the nineteenth century, should 
not lead us into believing that free public sphere 
once existed, and then vanished, but we should 
rather see one contradictory and tension-
laden structure displacing another, as Sennett 
shows. That the ideal of public man was highly 
disputed can be seen in the writings of Rousseau 
and Diderot. If Diderot in his Paradoxe sur le 
comédien shows how the actor’s distance from 
himself is a precondition for theater, then 
Rousseau can be said to invert this theory by 
making theater itself into a paradigm for false 
social relations, as in his Lettre à d’Alembert sur 
les spectacles. 

13. For Foucault’s account of Nietzsche, see 
‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’ in: Michel 
Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 
ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. 
Bouchard and Simon Sherry (Ithaca: Cornell 
University Press, 1977). Foucault says little 
about public space, but it would no doubt be 
fruitful to enter this complex via his analysis 
of Greek democracy and his discussion of 
parrhesia, “fearless speech,” which always 
introduces a difference that breaks with the 
merely formal symmetry of equals. See the 



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two last courses at the Collège de France, Le gouvernement de soi et 
des autres: Cours au Collège de France (1982-1983), ed. Frédéric Gros 
(Paris: Seuil ; 2008), and Le courage de la vérité: Le gouvernement de soi 
et des autres II: Cours au Collège de France (1983-1984), ed. Frédéric 
Gros (Paris: Seuil: 2009).

14. See Rosalyn Deutsche, ‘Agoraphobia,’ in: Roslyn Deutsche, Evictions: 
Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).

15. For Mouffe’s views, see Chantal Mouffe, On the political (London: 
Routledge, 2005), and Chantal Moufe, ‘Agonistic Public Spaces, 
Democratic Politics, and the Dynamics of Passion,’ in: Joseph 
Backstein, Daniel Birnbaum, and Sven-Olov Wallenstein (eds:), 
Thinking Worlds: The Moscow Conference on Philosophy, Politics, and Art 
(New York and Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2008). For the relation to Carl 
Schmitt and the conception of the political as oriented along the axis 
friend-foe, see her anthology Chantal Mouffe, The Challenge of Carl 
Schmitt (London: Verso, 1999). 

16. See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald 
Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1992).

17. See Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics 
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, new ed. 2007).

18. I disregard some of the more objectionable moves that permit Kant 
to close the gap between theoretical and practical reason, above all 
the reference to the thing itself, of which he says that it is at least not 
contradictory to assume would be the locus of a free, supersensible 
causality. Kant is perhaps too eager to close the gap, because of 
the demand for an architectonic unity of reason, even though his 
“dissolution” (Auflösung) of the antinomy is dependent on it, as I think 
is evinced by respective developments of the theme in Arendt and 
Lyotard.


