Politics, Infrapolitics, and the Impolitical: Notes on the Thought of Roberto Esposito and Alberto Moreiras

Abstract

During times of decline and reaction in which a real transformation of prevailing political order seems ever more unlikely, language often comes to rescue, allowing one to revitalize, think anew, or at very least delimit concepts of politics or the politicar* with simple yet thoughtprovoking addition of a prefix. Thus, in response to disaffected scene of postpolitics so widely discussed in late 1980s and early 1990s, we obtain triad of archipolitics, parapolitics, and metapolitics in work of Jacques Ranciere, particularly in his 1995 book Disagreement : Politics and Philosophy , a triad to which Slavoj Žižek, in The Ticklish Subject : The Absent Centre of Political Ontology , responds rather sympathetically before adding a fourth term, ultrapolitics, supposedly of his own making, while Alain Badiou in 1994 proposes a very different understanding of metapolitics in a collection of essays of same title, just as in Casser en deux l'histoire du monde (Breaking in Two History of World), a pamphlet from that