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“POLITICAL DIFFERENCE” AS THE FUNDAMENTAL COGNITIVE CHALLENGE OF POLITICAL THEORY (ON CONCEPTUAL DIFFERENTIATION BETWEEN POLITICS AND THE POLITICAL)
Dragutin Lalović
; Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The author clarifies the point of publishing a series of translations of some fundamental
texts regarding the conception of politics/the political. The selection
includes the following: “The Political Paradox” (1964/1957) by Paul Ricoeur;
What is Politics? (1993) by Hannah Arendt; “An epilogue” (1968/1962) by
Leo Strauss; and For a Conceptual History of the Political (2003) by Pierre
Rosanvallon. In contemporary political theory, the conceptual differentiation
between politics and the political is termed “Political Difference”. The
contribution to reflection on this conceptual pair in the political theories of
Schmitt, Arendt and Lefort is briefly outlined. The problem matter is masterfully
presented and critically valued in Oliver Marchart’s book Post-Foundational
Political Thought (2007). This paper summarizes and evaluates the
sense of Marchart’s theoretical investigation of “political difference” as a
conceptual differentiation between the ontological moment and the ontic moment
of new political ontology. The radically new concept of the political is
a transcendental prerequisite for the possibility of existence of society, while
politics is a social sub-system and a special type of activity. “Political difference”
is, in fact, political-ontological difference; it constitutes a theoretical
field which eludes both traditional political philosophy and political science.
Marchart’s principal theoretical insight is that, in political difference, the political
appears in two meanings: as the ontological moment of original commencement
and the way of establishing the social, and also as the way of relating
two moments in their irrevocable difference, but also in their essential
interdependence. The primacy of the political over politics (and the social in
general) is thus manifest in the mediationally understood political, which discursively
constitutes and maintains political difference between the ontologically
understood political (“moment” of Being) and the ontically understood
politics (“moment” of being). And this is precisely the conceptual determination
of freedom.
Keywords
politics; the political; political difference; Schmitt; Arendt; Lefort; Marchart
Hrčak ID:
81926
URI
Publication date:
14.5.2012.
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