ABSTRACT
Politics and events circle each other like twin stars, generating an immense theoretico-gravitational field that hangs constellations of questions above patchworks of speculative, critical, and pragmatic landscapes: what is the political event? What, if any, epistemological or ontological access might we gain to it? What is the status of our actions – or, for example, those of gathering storms, circling vultures, or crashing markets – relative to its emergence? Like a night sky scattered with black holes – each of which, though hidden from sight, pulls us in different directions – this field of problems orients many of the key approaches in current social theory. In the past several decades, it has transformed our understandings of the performance of identity (Butler 1990), the practice of self-exploitation (Foucault 1977; Deleuze and Guattari 1983), and the struggle to envision and realize social change (Pignarre and Stengers 2005; Shukaitis et al. 2007). Beyond its more anthropocentric impacts, it has also transformed key debates in a range of topics from political ecology (Vayda and Walters 1999) to forestry management and lawn care (Robbins 1998, 2007), and from particle physics (Anderson 2007) to cosmology (Trotta 2007).
