Bonnie Honig, is a political, feminist, and legal theorist specializing in democratic theory. In 2013-14, she became Nancy Duke Lewis Professor-Elect of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science at Brown University, succeeding Anne Fausto-Sterling in the Chair in 2014–15. Honig was formerly Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. In April 2013, Honig delivered the “Thinking Out Loud” Lectures in Sydney, Australia. In the lectures, entitled “Public Things,” Honig draws on D.W. Winnicott and Hannah Arendt to conceptualize the importance of public things to democratic life. Honig elaborated this theory in a lecture delivered at the annual Neal A. Maxwell Lecture in Political Theory and Contemporary Politics at the University of Utah entitled “The Fight for Public Things.” It was subsequently published as part of a symposium in Political Research Quarterly. The ensuing book, Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair, was published by Fordham University Press in 2017. The argument of the book is encapsulated in her 2017 Boston Review essay, "The President’s House Is Empty."
Honig taught at Harvard University for several years before moving to Northwestern University. The 1997 decision by then-President of Harvard Neil Rudenstine not to offer Honig tenure was highly controversial, and attracted harsh criticism from a number of prominent Harvard professors as a violation of Rudenstine's stated commitment to increasing the number of tenured female professors. In 2017-2018 Honig served as Interim Director of the Pembroke Center at Brown University. Before Public Things, Honig published Antigone, Interrupted. In 2012, her previous book, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy was awarded the David Easton Prize. Also in 2012, she won the Okin-Young Award in Feminist Political Theory for "Ismene's Forced Choice: Sacrifice and Sorority in Sophocles' Antigone," published in Arethusa. From 2016-2017 she held a fellowship at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and conducted research on political thought.
Research
Honig is most well known in political theory for her advocacy of a contestatory conception of democratic politics, also known as agonism. In her book Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, she develops this notion through critiques of consensual conceptions of democracy. Arguing that every political settlement engenders remainders to which it cannot fully do justice, she draws on Nietzsche and Arendt, among others, to bring out the emancipatory potential of political contestation and of the disruption of settled practices. Recognizing, on the other hand, that politics involves the imposition of order and stability, she argues that politics can neither be reduced to consensus, nor to pure contestation, but that these are both essential aspects of politics. Her second book, Democracy and the Foreigner, aims to illuminate the underestimated role of foreignness in democratic politics, particularly in the founding of democratic communities. In doing so, she aims to shift the question from how to deal with foreigners to “What problems does foreignness solve for us?” This strategy of subverting binary oppositions by shifting the question of a well-known debate in order to obtain a new and revealing perspective, recurs throughout her work and the insights that result constitute her distinctive contributions to political theory. In Antigone, Interrupted, Honig intervenes in the recent turn to mourning and lamentation in political theory and cultural studies. By way of a rereading of Sophocles' tragedy, she counters the privileging of mortality and vulnerability as part of an anti-sovereign politics. Instead, Honig offers an “agonistic humanism” that stresses equality in life, not death, and an activist politics of counter-sovereignty.
Personal life
Honig is married to MIT economist Michael Whinston. Her son Noah is the CEO of eSports gaming franchise Immortals.
Selected bibliography
Books
Honig, Bonnie. Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair. Fordham, New York.
