ABSTRACT
Is all of politics, its forms, meanings and manifestations reflected in this book? Certainly not, and this poses a number of challenges that I identify in the language of enigmas and research clues. It seems clear to me that political activity, understood in a broad sense, does not take place only in a differentiated field that enjoys considerable autonomy. In this sense, the latent risk lies in circumscribing and normalising politics by confining it to a specialised sphere. That risk was present throughout the writing of this book and much of the interest of the distinction between the front stage and backstage of politics or, in other words, between politics as a spectacle or performance and politics behind the scenes, is that it allowed me not to forget that the field’s operation also has informal aspects and, above all, that much of politics occurs outside it. To put it another way, it is unimaginable that politics, the things of politics, its meanings or its interpretations of reality and interventions in it are not deployed in non-institutional and even de-institutionalised spaces, in “interstices” of power (as Foucault 1995: 300 referred to them). However, at the same time and without contradiction, politics does take place in an autonomous space that is disembedded from other spaces: it is neither reasonable nor realistic to think of society without topography, without sinuosities, without fields or arenas and, in this case, of politics as if it lacked a sphere of its own. One of the challenges is to work on that fine line between the politics of the field or, in other words, the political activity that takes place there and that other politics – generally profane and often vulgar (in the sense of the common people) – that escapes the practical sense so typical of professional political agents and is captured (at least, in part) by the populist leaders who are currently gaining ground, which falls outside the logic of the field.
