The Philosopher’s Elusive Subject : On the Problem of the ‘Present’ in the ‘Political’

Abstract

Much Eurocentric critical political-legal philosophy begins with a disappointment with the present, with totality-as-is and with the subject of the ‘political’. The philosophical burden thus understood is to reclaim the ‘excess’ of totality for the possibility of the ‘political’ as the ‘real’ of ruptural subjectivity, as a Becoming out of the closures of present Being/Non-Being; Alan Norrie and Alain Badiou are, respectively, representative of the ‘immanentist’ and transcendental versions of this critical project of reclaiming the subject of philosophy from the closures of the present. In this essay, adopting a lens of coloniality, I suggest that underpinning this ontologic-epistemology of post-Enlightenment Eurocentric thinking is an assumption of Nothingness that defines the originary-abject which requires the invention of the philosophical problem, which requires the becoming-subject-in-the-political. I argue instead that the present is defined not by absence/inexistence, not by NonBeing/Nothingness outside of the political, but by Other/Different-Being whose Exteriority is that which continues to be negated in theory-practice. Such a perspectival shift points to the decolonial necessity of the negation of the ‘political’ itself, of the struggle for desubjectification.