The trouble of ‘living with others’: Language, community and the politics of belonging

Abstract

In this article I ask myself the following question: ‘Rather than try to escape the seemingly awful choice between the private and the public, between the particular and universal, or between justice and freedom, I ask if I simply have the option to enact democracy and see ‘what follows?’. To reach that question I engage with an empirical problem, namely the struggle over the legitimacy of the Irish language as a public good, and more specifically as the medium for education in an Irish secondary school. In response to this I analyse the situation in terms of a politics of belonging. However, I then flip my reasoning, questioning its tendency towards ‘master explication’ and the privileged position of the theorist, and instead explore the possibilities offered by an anarchic approach. This latter orientation involves a reading against myself through a dialogue with the work of Gert Biesta as he engages with Jacques Rancière’s concept of subjectification. And so, instead of trying to escape (to master?) the awful choice between justice OR freedom, I am led towards the openness of ‘what follows?’.