The Political Event

Abstract

In the previous chapter I engaged with the tradition of dialectics by considering the speculative nature of a range of different philosophies. What I tried to show is that dialectics is not, as is sometimes claimed, a method aiming to produce a universal, even totalitarian, synthesis. Instead, dialectics is, for me, a movement between negativity and positivity that describes the impossibility of social organization. Hence, dialectics can be connected to the question of politics. That is, as dialectics cannot produce a final synthesis, the question of social organization remains open. It is precisely this openness that describes the political event. In the next two chapters I will problematize this insight by discussing a range of philosophies in much more detail. While this chapter, Chapter 3, will consider philosophies that can be associated with a German pre-Second-World-War tradition of thought, Chapter 4 will engage with some French post-war philosophies.