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This article addresses Eric L. Santner’s claim that “there is more political theology in everyday life than we might have ever thought” by analyzing the “theologico-political problem” in the work of three prominent twentieth-century political thinkers—Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt. Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt share a preoccupation with the crisis of modern political liberalism and confront the theologico-political problem in a similar spirit: although their responses differ dramatically, their individual accounts dwell on the absence of incontestable principles in modern society that can justify life-in-common and the persistence of the political order. Their writings thus engage with the question of the place of “the absolute” in the political realm. In particular, Arendt’s indirect approach to the theologico-political problem is crucial to understanding the radicality of a political world in which traditional certainties can no longer be re-established. The theoretical trajectory I present suggests that the dispersion of political theology in everyday life has a specific corollary: modern politics operates within the tragic and paradoxical nature of its unstable and common origins that cannot be incorporated in exceptionalist versions of the body politic.

La recepción durante el siglo XX se preguntó si la filosofía nietzscheana era a-, im- o anti-política, es decir, si podía ser asimilada por la democracia, o si era antimoderna, elitista y reaccionaria. El italiano Roberto Esposito ha propuesto leerla como formando e informando el paradigma de la biopolítica. Se discuten cuatro lecturas de esa biopolítica: como formadora del paradigma de la inmunidad, como tanatopolítica, como liberal y neoliberal, y como biopolítica afirmativa. Twentieth-century readers wondered if Nietzschean philosophy was apolitical, impolitic, or anti-political; that is, if it could be assimilated by democracy or if it was antimodern, elitist, and reactionary. The Italian philosopher Robert Esposito has proposed reading Nietzsche's philosophy as forming and informing the biopolitical paradigm. Four readings of these biopolitics are discussed: as part of the paradigm of immunity, as thanatopolitics, as liberal and neoliberal, and as affirmative biopolitics

Leo Strauss’s critical engagement with Martin Heidegger’s thought is widely recognized. Central to Strauss’s depiction of Heidegger’s intellectual and political failures is the latter’s disdain for political philosophy. For Strauss, in fact, Heidegger overlooked important inquiry into the good political order insofar as he replaced political philosophy with a belief in Dasein’s finitude as key to attaining a virtuous life. However, Strauss’s unfavorable rendition of Heidegger’s mortalism, the article explains, neglects esoteric maneuvers—imbued with political inflections—advanced by the author of Sein und Zeit. By analyzing Heidegger’s esotericism as well as his search for the permanence of the secret and inscrutable, the article shows how Strauss disregards Heideggerian sigetics when foregrounding what he views as Heidegger’s disdain for political philosophy. Through the theoretical trajectory proposed by this essay, in sum, we will see that Heidegger’s exceptionalist esotericism is what Strauss ignored.

Extraordinary Matters: The Political After Martin Heidegger examines why a return to ontology became a vital source for conceptualizing political beginnings in contemporary continental thought. Martin Heidegger was exemplary of this trend. His ontological view of political foundation, I contend, reveal a philosophical desire to challenge everyday life and denounce quotidian monotony and repetition. My research rereads this period in Heidegger’s work in order to propose a radical rethinking of current accounts of political beginnings. I argue, in particular, that his theoretical unification of politics and ontology epitomizes a pervasive philosophical enmity toward ordinariness. Such an enmity has since become widespread in continental thought, influencing thinkers from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe to Jean-Luc Nancy to Ernesto Laclau. Breaking with such readings of Heidegger that see political novelty as part of the realm of “the extraordinary,” my work instead reassesses the ordinary enactment of what I call “the common” as constituting the very core of political beginnings. The first chapter of my dissertation uses archival material to reconstruct the understudied encounter between Heidegger and Carl Schmitt in the 1930s. Analyzing the dispute between the two thinkers and its broader context, I argue that this encounter catalyzed Heidegger’s ontologization of politics. Heidegger rejected liberal and communist versions of “life in common” both politically and philosophically, replacing these conceptions with what I describe as “exceptionalism”—an ontological account of “the political” [das Politische] based on extraordinariness. In the remaining chapters of the dissertation, I scrutinize the variations on exceptionalism as they appear in a number of postwar works of continental philosophy influenced by Heidegger. In the second chapter, I begin with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, and their Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique, to illustrate the impact of the notion of “the political” on French deconstruction and the problem of “the common.” Through a theoretical reading of archival material, this chapter raises questions about the ontological distinction between “politics” [la politique] and “the political” [le politique]—a distinction that has become prominent in contemporary critical theory. In its stead, I argue for a politics of the common that radicalizes what Lacoue-Labarthe terms a “déconstruction active du politique.” The final chapter further questions the collapse of politics and ontology by examining “the populist moment” in political thought. This chapter considers plural and ordinary enactments of “the many” at work in political beginnings, eschewing essentialist theories of the political body found in texts such as Ernesto Laclau’s On Populist Reason. Challenging prevalent conceptions of contemporary continental thought, especially the idea that exceptional moments or the actions of “great men” might account fully for political beginnings, I turn to the role played by “the many,” that is, those who manifest what I claim is an an-archic principle of democratic politics.

El presente artículo examina el modo en el que Arendt comprende los “comienzos políticos” a través de su _Auseinandersetzung_ con la teorización de Walter Benjamin. En primer lugar, el artículo retornará a la concepción benjaminiana del _Ursprung_ para mostrar la importancia de ella en el enfoque arendtiano del _Anfang_, haciendo legible lo que llamaré el “problema filosófico-político”. En segundo lugar, se explicará cómo los “momentos benjaminianos” en la comprensión arendtiana sobre los comienzos ayudan a la autora a tratar los problemas políticos de la espontaneidad y el fundacionalismo. Enfrentar tales problemas revela lo que está en juego en aquello que Arendt concibe como el “principio del comienzo”. Por último, se mostrará cómo este principio teorizado por Arendt adquiere un carácter an-árquico. La an-arquía, en este sentido, no equivale a un abandono de los principios políticos. Antes bien, apunta a una comprensión más sofisticada de la tensión entre “comienzo” y “gobierno” inherente en la etimología del término _archē_.

Enfatizando la distinción entre “la política” y “lo político”, Ernesto Laclau corona su examen de los puntos ciegos de la tradición marxista con un elogio del populismo. Su proyecto de recentramiento de “lo político” no postula un comienzo marcado por un gran acontecimiento. Antes bien, Laclau pondera la fundamentación ontológica como el abismo de toda politicidad. Este ensayo evalúa críticamente la conjunción de maniobras deconstruccionistas y democrático-radicales a través de las cuales Laclau inviste el cuerpo del líder populista con un carácter extra-cotidiano. En términos de Laclau, de hecho, la política radical requiere la figura del líder populista que, ontológicamente, señala el camino hacia la emancipación. Sin embargo, se mostrará cómo la suposición de que el cuerpo del líder anima los inicios políticos y los canaliza primordialmente, restringe la anterior “profundización del proyecto materialista” de Laclau y excluye una consideración del papel que “los muchos” juegan en las fundaciones democráticas.

Sheldon Wolin, one of the most influential contemporary political theorists, died in 2015 at the age of 93. His remarkable legacy within political thought includes written works such as Politics and Vision and lives on as well in a variety of his former students, for instance, Cornel West and Wendy Brown. Wolin's intellectual heritage is sure to persist, given that he "lived in the presence of time past, time present, and time future".This brief essay, however, does not seek an obituary tone. Rather, I will comment on particular topics inherent to Wolin's interpretation of democracy by taking into consideration Bonnie Honig's twofold rendition of it, centered on the paradoxical character of politics.