ABSTRACT
In order for politics to be thinkable there must be some moment at which thought moves over into politics. Now, one could pick at this opening sentence for some time, books could be written and research projects designed to interrogate whether it is true or not. Its truth or otherwise will certainly depend upon what one means here by ‘politics’ (twice and non-identically), ‘thinkable’, ‘some moment’, ‘thought’, ‘moves over’, and indeed ‘into’, none of this is without consequence for either deconstruction or truth. However, allow me momentarily to place my own opening sentence in inverted commas, as if it had been spoken by someone else and with the authority of someone else. Allow me the considerable license of taking this quotation as axiomatic for what is to follow even if both you and I do not believe it as a statement of fact, or at least even if you and I do not quite believe it as a statement of fact because we are more than capable of acting upon it in good faith as if it were fact. Such a statement is a seduction to short-circuit thinking. It asks us not to look at it-do not question me, take me as ‘read’. In this sentence one can fi nd a concentrated example of the logo-rhetorical illusion that is the predicate of politics, in which politics and thought separate themselves into conceptual spheres just as these spheres emerge from the mediated, supplatory conceptualization in which thought and politics are inextricably bound one to the other. However, today I am in the mood to be seduced and there are ways in which one can, more or less, give oneself up strategically to such overtures. Imagine for a moment that both thought and politics were imaginable outside of mediation and that one followed the other as day follows night and that one could be translated into
the other by some alchemical process. Then imagine the consequences of this for politics. If one were able to momentarily suspend all this disbelief (as if ‘deconstruction’ and centuries of politics had never happened) then we would fi nd ourselves in the position of the policymaker. This is not a new position to be in but one that has a certain visibility today in the technocratic space of liberal democracies. Today, ‘policy-making’ is outsourced to so-called ‘think tanks’ where policy is formulated and road-tested on ‘focus groups’ before being adopted (or paid for) by political parties, diluting to taste.
