Why Citizenship

Abstract

The way to render wandering and feral characteristics politically significant is to graft them onto the citizen, the subject who renders the political sphere a living reality. This grafting is important for two key reasons. First, the conscious activities of wandering ferals could very easily devolve into nihilistic destruction without recognition of the primacy of the political and the importance of critical interrogation and disruption as a specifically political act. Second, as Susan Bickford (1996, 186) has pointed out, “no one can be actively engaged in the tension of citizenship all the time, or even most of the time, and politics is not the whole of human existence.” Thus, feral subjectivity and methodology as part of citizenship is defended in this chapter as a conscious and or temporary choice utilized by those committed to expanding the public sphere and revitalizing the democratic tradition. Feral citizenship is not a type of political agency for nomadic peoples; it is an approach to political agency intent on encouraging and celebrating disruptive, nomadic agents of politics.