ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the emergence, content and limits of the discourse of crisis: a turn within contemporary political theory and popular discourse that seeks to capture a perceived exhaustion of traditional political categories and a deadlock within political theory. This discourse highlights questions about political ontology, the “essence” of politics, its limits and beyond. However, employing concepts used in anthropological research, chiefly the concept of liminality, this chapter seeks to show: this discourse becomes itself part of the crisis. Instead of showing a way out, it employs a strategy that may best be described as contracting political concepts, as folding and thereby increasing the surface of the debate, a sort of metamorphosis that contributes – indeed – to a state of permanent liminality. Specifically, the concepts of “imitation” and “permanent liminality” will be outlined here as tools that allow us to step out of the discourse of crisis and really explore the phenomenon which it revolves around – “externalisation.”
