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This chapter introduces two sets of focus group participants—all women of voting age living in the Tokyo metropolitan area. These women use emphatic narratives about education, self-improvement, community, and national development when talking about electoral participation. They assume responsibility for teaching themselves and analyze their own interactions with the state in everyday life as their primary data source for evaluating national politics. Participants transform the focus group into a “community of practice” and through this process provide insight into how any study group, regardless of topic, upends traditional modes of knowledge production. Women's study groups yield alternative definitions of democracy and political practices that clash with “elite” national politics in Japan.

This introductory chapter proposes hermeneutic communism as an alternative to the current capitalist and neoliberalist strategies that currently dominate the political landscape. Communism cannot be translated into a particular philosophical stance, nor can hermeneutics be translated into a political position, yet both draw our attention to a current lack of emergency, that is, the increasing homologizing of the political, economic, and social structures of power. As the political alternative to the impositions of neoliberal capitalism and the philosophy of the interpretative nature of truth, communism and hermeneutics have become alternative responses for the losers of history, that is, the weak. South American communism and philosophical hermeneutics in particular are shown to be effective examples of emergency, alternative, and change—and it is these models that will be discussed in succeeding chapters.

This chapter recounts the history of U.S. violations of its international trust obligations to Native peoples mandated in the Charter of the United Nations. Among its other trust responsibilities, the United States was to ensure that Hawaiians would be able to develop self-government. Instead, the United States imposed statehood on Hawai‘i without providing political alternatives such as independence, thus violating Native Hawaiians' rights to self-government. Furthermore, the United Nations never inquired into the statehood plebiscite, nor did the United Nations monitor the process. As a matter of fact, the U.N. record reveals that the United States was a permanent member of the U.N. committee that received and acted upon America's report on statehood.

This chapter begins by addressing the limitations of a strictly juridico-political understanding of the state of exception in relation to the activation of alternative political knowledges, which are linked to the so-called “unauthorized” states of exception. Contrasting three essays (by David Kazanjian, Hester Blum, and Glenn Hendler) against one another and against Herman Melville's “Bartelby, the Scrivener,” the chapter examines their elaboration of writerly politics toward an interrogation of how aesthetics can do justice to the question of humanity that “requires acknowledgment on grounds that can never be provided.” These essays propose an idiom of disruption and spacing; and questions of spacing open up a new perspective on the limit to state rationality, if not always state power.

This chapter discusses how the figure of God is addressed in Breaking the Waves. In the film, Bess McNeill talks to God, while letting the audience know that God exists only via her own belief. In some way, this invention makes God hers and hers alone. Thus, God produces two contradictory tendencies. First, God produces a sense of fate for Bess, an uncontrollable destiny to which she must submit. Second, God is a means by which she upends that same sense of fate. The metaphor of breaking, in the film’s title, suggests that Bess is broken by God (she is subject to what she sees as God’s unavoidable power). However, that sense of fatedness is itself broken by the way that Bess channels—or invents—God’s voice, thus creating a radical political alternative.

Chapter 4 presents an empirical case on the problematic public disconnect in contemporary democracy where multiple publics are fractured in the public sphere. The chapter explores how a group of everyday citizens created connections between diverse publics in the public sphere. The analysis centres on the creative and playful connective activities of Knitting Nannas Against Gas (KNAG), an Australian-based social protest group opposed to coal seam gas development. Drawing on interviews conducted with the members of these groups across four different locations in New South Wales, the chapter reveals a rich variety of ways in which these groups seek to create connections with two opposing publics, as well as with latent publics. The chapter shows the significance of aesthetic-affective forms of communication, including non-verbal communication in crafting novel connections in a fractured public sphere, and discusses the ways these connections can help enhance the epistemic quality and reflexivity of the public sphere. The chapter concludes by discussing how the case of KNAG enriches current ideas on connectivity in deliberative systems.