The Politics of Disclosure

Abstract

This chapter considers the work of Italian critical theorist Alessandro Ferrara on exemplarity that forms part of his broader attempt to place a notion of disclosure at the heart of democratic reasoning. At its best, political thought should have the capacity to animate the democratic imagination by disclosing, through exemplary instances, new political possibilities for thought and action. Ferrara’s notion of exemplarity provides important conceptual resources for a regrounding of critical theory in the type of experientially based disclosing critique that has, post Habermas, been marginalized. Exemplary universalism suggests a way of reasoning inductively from concrete particularity that is normatively more inclusive of the voices of the marginalized and disempowered than procedural universalism. Moreover, contra Habermas, far from being an unstable process of meaning creation, exemplary disclosure has a systematic internal rationale that renders it amenable to practical inter-subjective validation. The critical promise of Ferrara’s idea of exemplarity is ultimately unfulfilled however. because of its grounding in the speculative, context-transcending construct of sensus communis understood as a matrix of precultural intuitions about human flourishing. This socially weightless abstraction undermines sensitivity to context and forecloses consideration of how enduring inequalities of race, gender, and class may prevent groups subscribing to shared ideals of flourishing. Drawing on critical race theorists such as Angela Davis, a politicized understanding of exemplary disclosure is proposed, the normative impact of which is located in the dynamics of concrete struggles against oppression.