'Pleasure with responsibility'

Conflict is widely percieved as a negative, destructive force, something we should avoid and not speak about. The antagonistic approach is considered to be un-ethical and sometimes even a bit barbaric. But if we try to look at it through the lens of participation it suddenly appears in an interesting role, as a 'micro-political practice' that allows participant to become an engaged member who insists on his beliefs even if they are different from the others (Miessen 2010: 93). In that context a french political philosopher Chantal Mouffe suggests a new model of 'friendly' agnosticism which she calls 'agonistic model of democracy or agnostic pluralism' in which as she claims the opposite sides are not in the friend-enemy relation, but are each others 'adversaries' or friendly enemies with a common symbolic space. This so called 'conflictual consensus' is to be understood as a conflictual struggle of different interpretations on the same subject. Bringing back the passions and desires in a political dialog, mobilising them towards democratic designs (Mouffe 2000). Strangely my cultural prop that we had to present in the context of Society and Individual seminar, within which also this essay is being constructed, was a condom. The reason why is because it was representing a junction of two values that are strongly important to me: one is pleasure and the other is responsibility, so I coined a new value which I called 'pleasure with responsibility'. I believe it strangely overlaps with the position that Mouffe is talking about.