Political and Impolitical: Two Perspectives to Rethink the Common and the Political in Contemporary Thought

Abstract

This article introduces a distinction between two ways of thinking the common and the political in contemporary, post-foundational political thought which I call “political” and “impolitical”. Both stances share the idea that the community is both impossible and necessary. Nonetheless, while the political perspective seeks to think a new political subjectivity to produce a new commonality, the impolitical will try to think ways of desubjectification in order to avoid cooperating with any form of Power. The paper tries to show their useful insights and to point out their limits to re-think the common and politics in times of neoliberal governmentality.
Keywords: community, politics, impolitical, post-marxism, subjectivity, post-foundationalism