Partei ohne Partei

Abstract

‘Whatever’ as the ethical ground for the potentiality of a ‘party without party’ (Partei ohne Partei). Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the scrivener, says ‘I would prefer not to’ three times. This famous speech act constitutes the urtext ‘what if/ever potentiality’ of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s ethics for the contemporary philosopher (as) scrivener; the one who like the party without party (senza il partito) member, may engage in ‘an experience of the possible as such’. Does this privileging of potentiality in the political process coincide with the renunciation of the creative will to power in Guy Debord’s famous line from his film Critique de la séparation (1961),Taking his cues from Aristotle’s Metaphysics ‘thought thinking itself, which is a kind of mean between thinking nothing and thinking something, between potentiality and actuality’, Agamben affirms the anaphorised potential of Bartleby’s speech act: ‘I would prefer not to prefer not to’. What if conventional party politics, partisanship left/centre/right divisions were a thing of the past? Now to the Dead Letter Box and the potentialities of a Partei ohne Partei (party without party)!Barber’s détournement of the original Surrealist map is a situationist enterprise and related to the question of building arbitrary barriers such as the ‘Trump wall’ between the US and Mexico and the relinquishing of the open borders implicit in the European project initiated when Charles de Gaulle stated ‘Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals’, which in 1967 implicitly included Great Britain.