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From Stasis to Tragedy: Ontology and Phenomenology of Political Difference

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Political Ontology and International Political Thought

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Abstract

This chapter outlines the parameters of a formal ontology of the political, or, else, a type of void political ontology, that undermines the depoliticising logic of foundationalism from within without falling back to an abstract exteriority or a ‘false’ transcendence and, thus, clearing the ground for a non-ideological treatment of pluralism. Such a void ontology rests on the difference between politics and the political as the double lack (stasis) both within politics (any particular order resting on its constitutive exception) as well as within the political itself (as the radical impotence penetrating the political itself in the form of a constitutive split permeating its operation that corresponds to the idea of the Lacanian Real as inexistent, incomplete, not-all). The rest of the chapter examines tragedy as the necessary but fictional ground of a depoliticized/ideological mode of subjectivity that structures the terrain of human agency, order and intelligibility around a traumatic core. Tragedy, here, exemplifies the tension between two contradictory tendencies that, nevertheless, meet in their depoliticising effects: either by reducing the political to its constituted expression (post-politics) or by hyperpoliticising the transgressive moment of the political (ultra-politics).

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  1. University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK

    Vassilis Paipais

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Paipais, V. (2017). From Stasis to Tragedy: Ontology and Phenomenology of Political Difference. In: Political Ontology and International Political Thought. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57069-7_5

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