What is "agonistic communion"?

a little philosophy, a little storytelling

my backyard lilies in the uncanny red light of summer wildfires: agonistic

Agonism comes from the Greek ἀγών or agon, which means struggle: think about Olympians entering a race, or about the protagonist and antagonist of a story who are in some sense in conflict with each other. The word is also related to our concept of agony as extreme suffering, although agonism doesn’t need to have this painful connotation.

I learned about agonism from political philosophers like Chantal Mouffe, who argues that in democracies, we need to think about ongoing conflict as a good thing. Ongoing conflict means that different political parties and perspectives are engaged in a good-faith contest, with due process and respectful dialogue. Ongoing conflict means marginalized peoples and outvoted minorities can continue to work for justice and raise their voices.

As much as many of us dislike conflict, the alternative to an agonistic democracy is an antagonism that seeks to totally obliterate our opponent, or a unity that quashes all dissident voices.

I think it’s easy to see in 2024 why agonistic democracy is so important, given the rise of polarization, win-at-all-costs methods, and enormous threats to due process in the US and elsewhere. Fascism is a refusal of agonism. An inability to see the humanity of our opponents is also a refusal of agonism.

But I’m thinking about agonism beyond political elections, too. Here are other examples:

• living with chronic disease or chronic pain, which in my experience means inhabiting an irresolvable tension between radical acceptance and striving for healing

• raising children in climate catastrophe, wanting to teach them to love the world enough to work for its healing while also fearing for the losses their love will inevitably amplify (and knowing that individual empowerment will never be enough to turn the tides)

• practicing a religion like Christianity, which has empowered radically subversive love-as-justice and also been used to justify some of the most destructive projects of the last two millennia, including white supremacist nationalisms, colonization, and chattel slavery

• believing in an ethic of tenderness while walking through a world tethered to violence and domination

I live all of these agonisms and more—perpetual, irresolvable tensions—in my daily life, in my beautiful/broken body, in my concentric circles of relationship and accountability. Most of us live in many of these agonistic intersections. The question is, how do we inhabit these painful places well?

And here we arrive at communion, by which I mean sharing life, closeness, intimacy, community in all its forms. I’m borrowing this term, in part, from the religious tradition I was raised in, where communion is about shared bread and juice but also shared humanity and divine mystery, but I’m also thinking of something much wider. I’m thinking about boisterous tables I’ve sat around, with folks squeezed in around abundant food and talk and laughter, potlucks on the shores of Lake Michigan, conversations that we pick up and put down like knitting across the years, friendships across lines of difference that shouldn’t work but somehow do.

To live well in this world, to live honestly in the knowledge that we inhabit challenges that will not ever be solved, or at least not in our lifetimes, and to inhabit these challenges with courage and compassion and sometimes even joy, we need each other. I’m thinking about bell hooks in All About Love: “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”

I also think healing is probably not a destination but a process, not a finished state in this life but a pilgrimage we take together. I’m thinking about communion not as a place of pretending to keep the peace but of respectful, impassioned debates and even arguments where we honour each other’s humanity and challenge each other’s failures to recognize the full humanity of every human on this planet and the full glorious value of all our relations here. I’m thinking about agonistic communion as unruly and expansive and truly, truly hard but also probably the only thing that will save us as a species and a planet and a global society, because we are all already each other’s neighbours.

And the wisdom about how to live this way, I think, comes from agonistic life stories: stories of living and communing in the context of impossibility, in pain, in irresolvable differences, in a stubborn commitment to respect and patience and deep-down, change-everything justice.

My work right now is collecting these stories, amplifying them, putting them into conversation with each other, and sharing them with as many people as I can.