Laura Llevadot: “If everyone realizes the current system is not the only one, eternal and untouchable, we could change many things”

Laura Llevadot suggests bringing people closer to philosophy and has launched the collection  <i>Pensament Polític Postfundacional</i>.
Laura Llevadot suggests bringing people closer to philosophy and has launched the collection Pensament Polític Postfundacional.
Interviews
(27/03/2019)

This is not the first time Laura Llevadot tries to bring philosophy closer to the people. Lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy of the UB, and coordinator of the Masterʼs degree in Contemporary Thought and Classic Tradition, in 2014 she launched the Barcelona Pensa Festival to get philosophy out in the street -a week full of activities- to address a non-specialized audience.

Loyal to her disseminating spirit, she launched the collection Pensament Polític Postfundacional to invite people think about politics in a different way. This collection is edited by Gedisa, it has fifteen titles and it analyzes the line of the contemporary political thought, by seventeen authors, some of them being Jacques Racnière, Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. Eight volumes have been edited so far, and the last one to be released has been Jacques Derrida: Democràcia i sobirania, signed by Llevadot.
 

Laura Llevadot suggests bringing people closer to philosophy and has launched the collection  <i>Pensament Polític Postfundacional</i>.
Laura Llevadot suggests bringing people closer to philosophy and has launched the collection Pensament Polític Postfundacional.
Interviews
27/03/2019

This is not the first time Laura Llevadot tries to bring philosophy closer to the people. Lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy of the UB, and coordinator of the Masterʼs degree in Contemporary Thought and Classic Tradition, in 2014 she launched the Barcelona Pensa Festival to get philosophy out in the street -a week full of activities- to address a non-specialized audience.

Loyal to her disseminating spirit, she launched the collection Pensament Polític Postfundacional to invite people think about politics in a different way. This collection is edited by Gedisa, it has fifteen titles and it analyzes the line of the contemporary political thought, by seventeen authors, some of them being Jacques Racnière, Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. Eight volumes have been edited so far, and the last one to be released has been Jacques Derrida: Democràcia i sobirania, signed by Llevadot.
 

With Barcelona Pensa you showed philosophy can be interesting to everyone, if properly explained. Now, you want to bring post-foundational political thought to the non-specialized audience. Start with me. Tell me about it.

The line of our current political thought, named post-foundational thought, gathers theories by some authors, many of them French, who present the problem of politics beyond classical politics. They want to show a lack of basis in representative liberal democracies and change the bases of the modern political thought.

So, from these authorsʼ points of view, there is not a basis in political order and legal order, like it was believed.

Right. What these authors show is that the current political and legal fields, as we know them, respond to a specific, historical and questionable logic, and it can be criticized and modified. They claim there is nothing as natural or rational as it is expected to be. From this perspective, for instance, nothing legitimizes the cycle of a constitution, a declaration of independence or an established institutional order. Collective demands, social movements, which are part of politics, are ways to question the established politics. When this does not let them interpellate, totalitarianism comes in, even when it is covered by the name of democracy.

What else do they have in common?

Most are powered by the milestones from post-structuralism, after the crisis of Marxism, and make a clear differentiation between politics (institutions, representation and governance models, politiciansʼ media show) and that which is political (understood as the societyʼs need to organize and find solutions to those issues that affect the population. A common denominator in post-foundational thought is to return the centrality to the political issue in detriment of what is institutional or established.

For example?.

Womenʼs movement. Despite having a law on gender (which may be reversed, by the way), what feminists say is that personal issues are also politic. What happens in your house, the relationship you have with your partner or children is politics as well, even our intimate relationships, and therefore it has to be questioned. Therefore, many of these authors criticize representative democracies, which only regulate laws when the problem lies in the rules, in the way to “normalize” people, or adopt situations which are sometimes violent.

What alternative do they suggest?

Itʼs not about suggesting alternatives but analyzing of the ways of domination, without which any alternative will be ineffective. However, each of them provides ways to think other ways to organize the political issue: some talk about participative democracies, others suggest sortation, others such as Chantal Mouffle and Laclau talk about taking institutions. Derrida, for instance, suggests a “New international”, Badiou thinks of re-thinking communism…

Sortation? Like being the president of a block of apartments?

Why not? From the way Rancière defends equality, for instance, but also from the critical perspective towards a distinction between theory and practice which many of these authors share, we are not sure about having professional politicians. The professional politician thinks s/he has a specific knowledge on that which is politic, -which is common- legitimated by his or her career in the party. We need to put this professionalization of politics in doubt, since it presupposes there are elites that know how to govern, while the others are only left to vote.

Each of the volumes focuses on a thinker and a text by a different author. How did you set these partners up?

When we thought about this collection, together with Caterina da Lisca from Gedisa, we wanted to show these post-fundational authors -who I think are necessary to understand citizen movements and conflicts that challenge the traditional thought and politics at the moment- and we wanted to gather and publish the research carried out by some researchers, each of them with their author, to the academia of this country, and who share a common perspective. I think itʼs important for people to know what we do, sometimes under precarious conditions because many of these authors are young and their work conditions are not the best, although their commitment and passion for their work is great. I think there is a need to put these tools at everyoneʼs reach in order to think about what affects us.

Jacques Derrida: Democràcia i sobirania, signed by you, has been released and will be presented on April 2 in La Central. Why Derrida?

I have been working on this author for years, and I wanted to put together those questions by Derrida, which affect us all. I specially highlight his critique on sovereignty, the nation state, the founding violence of every law, the excluding community, phallogocentrism, representation… If anything defines democracy, according to Derrida, is being an open system, able to allow the right to alterity. This means being open to heterogeneity, to everything the state and the legal construction exclude, despite living in these states and despite not having overcome representative democracy. Although I focus on this question, and despite having given examples with current political episodes such as 15M or the sovereign process, I wanted to show Derrida in problems that are also about politics and affect us all: language, writing in a minority language like Catalan, gender difference, political pressure of gender identification, or hospitality.

Can you tell me the name of an unpublished title?
The next one to be published is Jean-François Lyotard: Estètica i política, by Geard Vilar, and then we will publish Hanna Arendt: llibertat política i totalitarisme, by Fina Birulés.

Whatʼs the last objective of this collection?

The idea is to invite people to read these thinkers, to show their works and to make them accessible for the audience, analyzing questions that affect us directly. We would like to show all these authors provide tools to understand current politics differently. We are tired of how democracies work and we should make our own theory practice, our own critical thinking. If everyone realizes the current system is not the only one, eternal and untouchable, and we see there are different ways to think, we could change many things.