Metapolitics

Bruno Bosteels

Metapolitics designates, either positively or negatively, a particular relation between politics and the thinking of politics, that is, between historical instances of politics, governance, and policy making, on one hand, and categories of theory, intellectual history, or philosophy, on the other. It is the name for an encounter, or missed encounter as the case may be, between action and thought, even while its most recent usage is meant precisely to cancel out all traditional oppositions between practice and theory, between history and conceptuality, or between the real and the speculative. In the ideological realm, the invocation of meta-politics over the past 200 years has covered the full spectrum of possibilities, from the liberal Enlightenment to antirevolutionary Catholicism and from a neo-pagan New Right to the proposal for a reinvention of communism. This vacillation is partly due to the fact that the term is used both as a programmatic self-description Among ...

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