This essay’s title is from Wittgenstein: we "should call [a game with vagueness in the rules] a game, only if we are dazzled by the ideal and therefore fail to see the actual use of the word ‘game’ clearly," quoted in James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key: Volume I, Democracy and Civic Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 140.
2.
James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an age of diversity ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 174.
3.
Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 23.
4.
When he historicizes universalisms that present themselves to us as transcendental or rational, and exposes their contingent, historical character, he locates them in the agon they seek to transcend. Similarly he argues against constitutional democracy, which sets the terrain for democratic activity, and for democratic constitutionalism, in which "the constitution and the democratic [re]negotiation of it are equally basic" (Public Philosophy I, 4).
5.
Tully, Public Philosophy I, 141.
6.
Tully, Public Philosophy I, 179.
7.
Tully, Public Philosophy I 165, 179.
8.
Tully, Public Philosophy I, 244.
9.
Tully, Public Philosophy I, 239.
10.
On this point, see Marc Stears, Demanding Democracy and Honig and Stears, "The New Realism" in History versus Political Philosophy, eds. Jonathan Floyd and Marc Stears (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
11.
Tully, Public Philosophy I, 239 (italics added).
12.
Tully understands all too well the mutual implication of violence and reason in his theoretical chapters (Public Philosophy I chapters 1-3); indeed, he insists on it, siding with Foucault against the proclaimed wonders of a power-free Habermasian consensus (e.g., Public Philosophy I 143). I discuss in detail Habermas’ references to "Paris and Philadelphia" on behalf of their "rational trace" in Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), chapter 1.
13.
Tully, Public Philosophy I, 137.
14.
Tully, Public Philosophy II, 178.
15.
Tully, Public Philosophy II, 177 n. 21
16.
We also need something else: the arboreal angle of vision however, needs to be complemented as well by the anti-arboreal, rhizome perspective advocated by Deleuze, William Connolly, and others.
