Luke Collison

When Derrida admits the example of the Clipper chip into the book version of Politics of Friendship, he intends only to recall that a reflection on the politics of friendship should be indistinguishable from a meditation on the meaning, history and techniques of the secret. However, in doing so, he also admits a discussion of how ‘tele-technologies’ disturb the conditions of the Kantian 'secret', as that which one thinks must remain secret because an engagement has been entered upon and a promise made in certain non-natural conditions. In this way, Derrida alerts us, first, to the role of designs, as 'technologies', within the public realm in allying the contemporary liberal political subject to the humanist educational subject; and, second, to the potential of design education within the university, in advocating a philoxenia that welcomes the invention of the other, to break with the horizon of cosmopolitics as phratrocentrism.

The concept of ‘political energy’ is often treated as merely a rhetorical synonym for enthusiasm and active engagement. However, as Bruce Clarke’s Energy Forms argues there is an allegorical traffic of ideas between politics and science that reaches an apotheosis in the early-twentieth century interest in energy. In the field of the ‘energy-humanities’ inaugurated by Clarke, the work of George Sorel remains largely overlooked. Situating itself in this field, my paper investigates the interplay of science and politics in Sorel’s work. I contend that Sorel, influenced by Vico’s ideogeneitic law anticipates Clarke’s allegorical framework. Paralleling Henri Bergson’s attempts to rethink the novelty of life in the post-thermodynamic framework of energy, I argue that models from science (Brownian motion and friction) underlie Sorel’s conceptions of political myth and class antagonism. While these remain inchoate in Sorel’s works, I conclude with the suggestion that these traces are completed in Ernst Jünger’s conception of ‘total mobilization’.