Логиката на преутвърждаването и оттеглянето на политическото
Logic of reaffirmation and the retreat of the political

Summary/Abstract: The paper is based on the hypothesis that politics emerge when a decision has to be made regarding the common, and every decision on the common simultaneously decides collaterally (in an implicit way, or according to the logical operator eo ipso) what are the boundaries and limits of the common (notwithstanding whether it confi rms them, changes them, or cancels them). Thus the question arises what is the specifi city of this particular type of acts of reaffi rmation, where the reaffi rmation is a secondary act to another, explicit and central act of affi rmation. This particular reaffi rmation veils itself as an act, while at the same time actually maintaining (or, to put it more correctly, incessantly creating) the horizon within whose limits the very act of decision on the common is realized. What is characteristic of such an act of reaffi rmation is that it presupposes a convention, in the sense that a move is made within a coordination game, where the player has to make guesses what the other players’ moves would be, and it is this convention that allows the act to be conceived as a “re-”affi rmation. One of the theses in the paper is that in a situation of crisis such collateral, eo ipso reaffi rmation becomes more and more problematical. However, affi rmation as reaffi rmation of the convention on the limits of the common, by the very fact that it conceals itself as an independent act (or as an act in general), discloses itself in its concealment to be a political action, that retreats as political, and as an action at the same time. And as long as it is this action that every time makes possible the concrete limits of the political, it enacts a retreat of the political “itself”, leaving politics confront the risks of a double disappearing: a) either everything becomes political; b) or the political is restricted to a particular domain and thus becomes a problem of expertise.

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