White is one of several theorists turning in recent years to mortality as a site of human commonality and ethical promise. I call this move ‘mortalist humanism’ and I discuss it in detail, in contrast with a more agonistic alternative, in Honig (2010) ‘Antigone’s Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism’, New Literary History 41: 1-33.
2.
Bruce Robbins argues that Brooke is a cosmopolitan rejected by the provincials of Middlemarch in a novel that, on his reading, ultimately sides with the local: (2010) ‘Victorian Cosmopolitanism, Interrupted’, Victorian Literature and Culture 38(2): 421-5. In my view, what the crowd rejects is not the cosmopolitanism but the cowardice of Brooke, evidenced by his incapacity to address them without taking too much drink and his quest to represent them without ever having risked exposure to them. That he tells them they must yield to forces that threaten them but are inexorable (on this he cites Adam Smith) does not add to his charms.
3.
Romand Coles (2005) Beyond Gated Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Also, for a more politically situated analysis of the consequences for politics of death-avoidance, see Jacqueline Stevens (2009) States Without Nations. New York: Columbia University Press. Another democratic theorist who sees exposure and service as apprenticeships in equality is James Tully, whose recent work I would situate somewhere between Coles and White: (2008) Public Philosophy in a New Key, vols 1 and 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See also my review of Tully in Perspectives on Politics (June 2010), and Political Theory (Feb. 2011), the latter featuring a response from him.
4.
For a more detailed development of this claim, contextualizing White’s work as part of the ethical turn, see Jason Frank’s (2010) review of this book in Perspectives on Politics 8(2): 669-71.
5.
I develop this idea in more detail in Honig (2009) Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
