ABSTRACT
This chapter reframes the discourse on politics by questioning the central role of human beings assumed by political thought. With a cursory glance at the first modern Western constitutions—American, French, and Polish—three characterizations emerge as framing the thought of politics: the notion of the human as a living, rational being; the idea of endowment or possession intrinsic to such a being, namely logos, reason, and rights; and the centripetal political organization based on the conjunction between human beings and their rights and possessions. If according to Aristotle humans engage in politics for the sake of good life, the notion of mortals borrowed from Heidegger displaces the human defined through the prism of life and resituates politics with regard to the priority given to the event of the world. It entails a radical—going to the very roots of the human—re-orienting of the understanding of humans and their politics. It calls for learning a new set of relations and pathways among beings, inaugurated for the sake of being, its event, and the world it gives. And hence also opened for the sake of us, mortals, always already quartered in this non-repeatable world-event.
