"The Nervature of Past Life": Spatiotemporal Constructions of Post-National Politics in the Struggle for European Legitimacy

Abstract

In this thesis paper, I propose an alternative means of studying post-national politics through the integration of aesthetics into the discipline of political studies. I argue that traditional methods of studying politics perpetuate an exclusionary, homogenizing national bias that renders them inappropriate tools of understanding the experience of political subjects in a global environment. I argue that to circumvent these processes of exclusion, we must find a means of taking the experience of the political subject into account in our studies of political conditions. Following Jacques Rancière, I argue that both the political and the aesthetic are types of experience that emerge through a distribution of common sensory experience, or le partage du sensible. I propose the use of Michal Bakhtin's chronotope as a means of considering the connections between the sensory experience of the individual and larger political conditions, in particular as it relates to the development of state legitimacy. In the last two sections of the paper, I apply the chronotope to the study of two different types of political structures: the traditional nation-state and the European Union. In doing so, I attempt to uncover the ways in which both entities perpetuate similar notions of time and space, ultimately engaging in similar...