Infrapolitical Desistance (Historicity I)

Abstract

This text attempts a first and preliminary answer to the “call”, implicit as well as explicit, in the motto Otherwise than Political; an answer that considers a series of problems related to what we call Infrapolitical Deconstruction. Identifying in Hegel the main articulation of modern metaphysics, the linkage between ontology and human history, the text tries to think a relationship to temporality and to historicity that is not attached to the metaphysics of the political, of politics and of polity. In order to achieve such a possibility, the text refers to Derrida’s reading of Heidegger and to the Heideggerian destruction of the metaphysical postulates feeding the political demand (will to power, subjectivism, total mobilization, etc.), highlighting that the question of différance not only supplements the “unfinished” project of Being and Time, but also detaches itself from Levinas’ effort to replace the role of fundamental ontology with ethics as prima philosphia. Infrapolitics would entail, in this constellation, a desistance from the political, and as such, a possibility for a thinking of history other than ontology.