Nancy Fraser - Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy I was already partially wary of social justice notions that framed identities as closed epistemological spheres where no knowledge of identity-based experience could be shared, or at least communicated, because it seemed to reify identity into something eternal and constitutive (rather than constituted). Beyond that epistemolgical problem, there seems to be a more overt political/social problem that Fraser is pointing out here: the impossibility of deliberations between various publics (in their own public spheres) makes the project of democratic socialism/communism impossible. Even in a classless society, antagonisms exist between various social groups, and those antagonisms need to be worked out practically in discussions over legislative and institutional decisions, and if there's no (material) means of mediating between different publics, then egalitarian social projects become impossible. So, I'll lay down a commitment to egalitarian politics contra a politics that takes identity as something self-enclosed, non-porous, and self-evident - that seems like a fair commitment to hold.
