Why Bother with the Infrapolitical? A Question of (just) Existence

Abstract

The infrapolitical is the thinking that flickers on the tremorous limit at which the end of the representation of historical progress is finally realized and the metaphysical indulgences of previous vital, political and ideological illusions (such as the bourgeois foundations of fraternity, equality, and liberty) founder and run aground, rising up, nevertheless, in increasingly vitriolic forms as subjectivist reactionary demands for definitive (nationalist, populist, or identitarian) decisions, resolutions, or truths regarding the twilight of the modern. Attunement to a specifically infrapolitical register in thinking gives no credence to the overcoming of political disenchantment in the name of fidelity to the unifying inheritance of ‘the commons’ since the infrapolitical comes to the fore in the realization (which cannot be merely confused with eschatology) that “nothing remains any longer in which the hitherto accustomed world of humankind could be salvaged; nothing of what has gone before offers itself as some- thing that could still be erected as a goal for the accustomed self-securing of human beings” (Heidegger, 2015, p. 154).

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