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.
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© 2013 Nick Garside
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Garside, N. (2013). Why Citizenship. In: Democratic Ideals and the Politicization of Nature. Environmental Politics and Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008664_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008664_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-43573-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-00866-4
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