What is politics? Some categories: a note

Politics, like love and friendship, is both a sharing and a contestation.  Friendship stages a sharing in which contestations are normal; love interrogates the manner of being of the lovers and their being-together, and does so risking excess and transgression of all limits, including those proper to the persons; like politics, it can be headily exciting but also dangerous. The political is a world of a “we,” that goes beyond “I” and “you” (or “she/he and it”); it is not the fact of community but a certain way of being in common.  It is based on something shared or common, which is both a particular form of life and a way this fabric is articulated and grasped through practices of discourse.  (Hegel called this latter “Spirit”).  Ultimately of course what is shared is language, and because language, unlike animal signaling, and unlike perception at its most normal (not that of the true artist and artwork), permits disagreement and so the normativity of the true and false or good and bad. This means that the good and our participation in it are not merely received, nor produced and exchanged, but are necessarily a question, an issue, a problem. The political is a sharing of problems, and a problematizing of sharing, or of (lived) worlds and (created and represented, and fragmentary) worlds. The political community always involves both a sharing, having and being in common, and discussion and problematizing.  It tends to make an issue of the way things are.  In the West, our ideas of love and politics as well as art and science are based on this idea.  Too often in the contemporary world mere sharing takes place with little discussion.  This is like going with someone to the park to enjoy the sunshine, food and drink, but saying nothing; later you can cherish having been alive together, as you shared an experience.  This is friendship as religion rather than art and politics; it models being-together as a sharing but not a conversation, a matter of course and not discourse, familiarity elevated and deepened, but not made strange. The opposite of politics is ideology, just as, in an earlier time, the opposite of religion was idolatry.  Ideology does not think; it knows.  Ideology is not false because of what it dissembles, but because of how it presents what can be understood without thinking, and it resists thinking. It relies on its common sense.  This means that there is a way that things are, it is in essence good and unchanging, and so unchangeable, and good people understand this naturally in understanding the way of things.  The law case and war have in common with medicine and the thinking proper to it of wanting merely to restore order in the event of a problem.  Politics proper begins on the far of law and medicine, war and governance.  Pure administration naturally turns to medical models, as it has done massively in our society in recent times.  This is why metaphors of disease and contagion have been a consistent staple of right-wing discourse of governance. Law proceedings may be war by other means, and they are more just than vengeance, which is like war in law’s absence.  They displaced it in the same way that sacrifice was displaced by the self-invoking poetic reflections repeated in prayer (in Judaism and its sequelae) and tragedy (in Greece), the political art form par excellence since it stages antagonistic contradictions. Politics is more engaging than war and not definitionally rare as medicine and law cases are; they are rare because their purpose is to restore normality.  And it is more than religion when this is understood as holiness and worship, which is an intensified experience of presence. The politics to come will draw its poetry from love and friendship, and will engage us with the eroticism of thinking in the face of the most disturbing and troubling works of perceptible and conceptual form that reflect the desperate and urgent tasks of thinking about our world in our time.