Categories of the Impolitical

The notion of the impolitical developed in this volume draws its meaning from the exhaustion of modernitys political categories, which have become incapable of giving voice to any genuinely radical perspective. The impolitical is not the opposite of the political but rather its outer limit: the border from which we might glimpse a trajectory away from all forms of political theology and the depoliticizing tendencies of a completed modernity. The books reconstruction of the impolitical lineagewhich is anything but uniformbegins with the extreme conclusions reached by Carl Schmitt and Romano Guardini in their reflections on the political and then moves through a series of encounters between several great twentieth-century texts: from Hannah Arendts On Revolution to Hermann Brochs The Death of Virgil, to Elias Canettis Crowds and Power; from Simone Weils The Need for Roots to Georges Batailles Sovereignty to Ernst Jungers An der Zeitmauer. The trail forged by this analysis offers a defiant counterpoint to the modern political lexicon, but at the same time a contribution to our understanding of its categories.