Political judgment with a difference: Agonistic democracy and the limits of "enlarged mentality"

This essay considers what it means to exercise good political judgment in t he context of the politicization of identity. When Hannah Arendt's discussi on of the "enlarged mentality" of the judging subject is amended by Hans-Ge org Gadamer's phenomenology of play and Pierre Bourdieu's skeptical critiqu e of the faculty of judgment, a more complex picture of the formation of en larged thought emerges, Genuinely enlarged thought may require something mo re than the transcendence of private and personal opinions to reach a more general standpoint-it may involve interrogating the exclusions that establi sh identities in the first place, destabilizing and reworking the self-unde rstandings of the judging "I." However, even decentered subjects who enlarg e their mentalities and relinquish exclusionary identities must create some degree of provisional closure through the process of judgment, while recog nizing that the decisionary aspect of judgment is not remainder-free.