Categories of the Impolitical

The notion of the ΓÇ£impoliticalΓÇ¥ developed in this volume draws its meaning from the exhaustion of modernityΓÇÖs political categories, which have become incapable of giving voice to any genuinely radical perspective. The impolitical is not the opposite of the political but rather its outer limit: the border from which we might glimpse a trajectory away from all forms of political theology and the depoliticizing tendencies of a completed modernity.
The bookΓÇÖs reconstruction of the impolitical lineageΓÇöwhich is anything but uniformΓÇöbegins with the extreme conclusions reached by Carl Schmitt and Romano Guardini in their reflections on the political and then moves through a series of encounters between several great twentieth-century texts: from Hannah ArendtΓÇÖs On Revolution to Hermann BrochΓÇÖs The Death of Virgil, to Elias CanettiΓÇÖs Crowds and Power; from Simone WeilΓÇÖs The Need for Roots to Georges BatailleΓÇÖs Sovereignty to Ernst JungerΓÇÖs An der Zeitmauer.
The trail forged by this analysis offers a defiant counterpoint to the modern political lexicon, but at the same time a contribution to our understanding of its categories.