ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 addresses the theoretical procedure, which comprises both science and philosophy as different modes of the explication of the world. Whereas aesthetic and governmental procedures constitute their worlds and political and ethical procedures disrupt and subvert them, the theoretical procedure latches itself on worlds and their objects in order to expose their nature or function. Just as the knowledge of an object is not the same as the object itself, the theoretical procedure retains its identity in whatever region of the world it takes as its object. Nonetheless, the truth claims made in this procedure tempt the practitioners of other procedures to appropriate it as their foundation. This chapter focuses on the attempts to ground politics in theory and demonstrates the paradoxical nature of ‘theoretical politics’ that finds in its political inefficacy the vindication of its truth.
