Prof. Kaufmann discusses Sartre, Jaspers, Heidegger, Kierkegaard

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The End Of The Political

(as we know it)

The Political is suffering. It is suffering its own demise. Having been the ground of representations, having had the control of power, having claimed its central role in governance, it forgot it also had to manifest its effectiveness and its right to withhold these powers. Thus, the Political has proven to been arrogant. This arrogance is documented in its own attempts to negate and/or to resist all criticism referring to the fundamentalist character of its (essentialist) self-determination. This negation is all-embracing and ever-resisting: it stands against all alternative signifiers that struggle to have a share of its powers: social formations, cultural expressions, public discourses - all valid human expressions of representation/power/governance that seek to produce meaning and diffuse it with and through different means, forms and structures than those of the bureaucratic and narcissist patterns of the Political.

Yet, negation and resistance are counter-productive. They are regularly deductive, often inductive and definitely seductive. The Political, in its very moment of suffering, refuses to subject itself in a process of re:arrangement, of re:allocation, of re:orientation of its meaning. It resists analysis. Against the prospect of its redefinition, it beholds Law as its primordial asset and poses it as an armor of references ready to repulse any objections: a deo rex, a rege lex.

But the production of meaning and its free dispersion at all directions is the fundamental pattern designating the movement of human history. All counter-productive formations (discursive or non-discursive) had and will never be able to totally control the flow of the production of meaning. For the latter, always finds its way in knowledge, even in forms that appear latent and marginalised. Mainstreaming these oppressed forces that proliferate meaning outside the sphere of the demised Political, is like placing a self-reflecting mirror in front of its face, it is a step towards the (always historical) moment of its discursive arrest. This task asks for our support and creative force: we need to make it happen.

 

 

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The End Of The Social

The Social has no end. It regularly has means of different kinds: of conduct, of misconduct, of power, of control. Round means of these types, a series of conflicts rise. Each conflict, no matter how micro or macro it may be, involves only aspects of the Social. There never is one single conflict to comprise all conflicts in the landscape of the Social. But there are myths of conflicts that claim to do so. This mythic claim, whenever it appears, functions as the origin of conflict as such. Because it produces an aspiration of an end: an end as scope and an end as a conclusion. Through this aspiration, conflict reproduces imaginaries and desires. And by attempting to fulfill its aspiration, it acts against the constant flow of the Social: conflict tries to interrupt this vital flow, to arrest it within the imaginary conclusion that it aspires: namely, it attempts to castrate it. 

Yet, this castrating force, the desire-to-reach the (double) end is the contradiction that keeps the Social in motion. Conflicts, with all their energy and their need to accumulate resources (material or conceptual), directly result to the mobilisation of the Social and its infinite flow. They reproduce a spiral movement of ideas, beliefs, hopes, struggles, power games and resolutions, all clashing at the plain of discourse, all for-themselves, all dead before we know it. This constant death keeps the Social alive. This death is the very erasure of the End that haunts the Social. Against this Real condition, all we need to know, is the means for and with which we participate in the games of conflicts. And keep participating but as knowing subjects and as subjects of knowledge. 

For what we know is what we owe and what we own. 

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