Registration: akadnikova@eu.spb.ru
For much of its history, Western thought has been in the grip of the concept or the idea—the one, all-powerful notion charged with the task of laying bare, dissecting, and explaining reality as a whole. The concept is sovereign, and absolutely so, before any attempt to enunciate the concept of sovereignty on our part. In modern politics, a version of this fixation on a single elucidatory principle undergirding a plethora of beings and events is ideology, where an extensive and largely unnoticeable dominant framework for thinking and perceiving precludes other possible interpretations that fall outside its parameters. The concept and ideology simplify everything, spinning the fabric of existence without folds. But, while there is but one concept befitting the abstractly unified conceptualized subject matter, the categories (including quantity and quality, relation and modality) respect and reiterate the multiplicity of the thing itself, in the thing itself, insofar as they touch upon its various dimensions. In contrast to the concept, no category alone can exhaust the meaning of anything (of any thing), despite all the machinations of metaphysical thought. Our protest against the power of the concept does not require us to snub thinking; on the contrary, thinking and acting commence with an opposition to conceptuality. So, if our resistance to metaphysical simplification, above all in how our living-together is thought of and organized, is to be something other than empty words matched by equally hollow gestures, then we will be well advised to eschew the concept of the political and to elaborate the categories of politics.