“POLITICAL DIFFERENCE” AS THE FUNDAMENTAL COGNITIVE CHALLENGE OF POLITICAL THEORY (ON CONCEPTUAL DIFFERENTIATION BETWEEN POLITICS AND THE POLITICAL) Cover Image

“Politička razlika” kao temeljni spoznajni izazov političke teorije (o pojmovnom razlikovanju politike i političkoga)
“POLITICAL DIFFERENCE” AS THE FUNDAMENTAL COGNITIVE CHALLENGE OF POLITICAL THEORY (ON CONCEPTUAL DIFFERENTIATION BETWEEN POLITICS AND THE POLITICAL)

Author(s): Dragutin Lalović
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences
Published by: Fakultet političkih znanosti u Zagrebu
Keywords: politics; the political; political difference; Schmitt; Arendt; Lefort; Marchart

Summary/Abstract: The author clarifies the point of publishing a series of translations of some fundamental texts regarding the conception of politics/the political. The selection includes the following: “The Political Paradox” (1964/1957) by Paul Ricoeur; What is Politics? (1993) by Hannah Arendt; “An epilogue” (1968/1962) by Leo Strauss; and For a Conceptual History of the Political (2003) by Pierre Rosanvallon. In contemporary political theory, the conceptual differentiation between politics and the political is termed “Political Difference”. The contribution to reflection on this conceptual pair in the political theories of Schmitt, Arendt and Lefort is briefly outlined. The problem matter is masterfully presented and critically valued in Oliver Marchart’s book Post-Foundational Political Thought (2007). This paper summarizes and evaluates the sense of Marchart’s theoretical investigation of “political difference” as a conceptual differentiation between the ontological moment and the ontic moment of new political ontology. The radically new concept of the political is a transcendental prerequisite for the possibility of existence of society, while politics is a social sub-system and a special type of activity. “Political difference” is, in fact, political-ontological difference; it constitutes a theoretical field which eludes both traditional political philosophy and political science. Marchart’s principal theoretical insight is that, in political difference, the political appears in two meanings: as the ontological moment of original commencement and the way of establishing the social, and also as the way of relating two moments in their irrevocable difference, but also in their essential interdependence. The primacy of the political over politics (and the social in general) is thus manifest in the mediationally understood political, which discursively constitutes and maintains political difference between the ontologically understood political (“moment” of Being) and the ontically understood politics (“moment” of being). And this is precisely the conceptual determination of freedom.

  • Issue Year: XLIX/2012
  • Issue No: 01
  • Page Range: 171-183
  • Page Count: 13
  • Language: Croatian