over, harping, betraying its promises … getting mixed up, coming and going, blotting itself out by maneuvers whose thread no one seems to be able to find anymore.12
In Latour’s estimation the only counter is “the dissolution of coalitions of naysayers,” so that “what was united disperses like a flock of sparrows, becomes a ‘crooked movement.’”13
Perhaps all one can aspire to is “crooked movement” during a period in US political history when partisan obstructionism remains the order of the day. President Obama’s election in 2008 precipitated a hard right turn in US politics, already in an archconservative place after two terms of the junior Bush presidency. By Obama’s second-term election a culture of venomous incivility fanned by Tea Party extremism further encouraged the incessant posturing of the “party of no.” Partisan voting blocks in Congress and the Senate, acting in lock-step, opposed all legislative and diplomatic initiatives, from routine committee member nominations, to nuclear nonproliferation agreements with Iran, to virtually any meliorist environmental legislation or gun control. The expansion of “conceal and carry” and “stand your ground” laws at the very moment of mass shootings; the increase in militias, border militarization, and incarceration without due process; the failure to prosecute police in the killings of black men, women, and children, along with the impact of movements associated with corrosive ideologies—“corporations are people,” Citizens United, abortion restrictions, “right to work” attacks on organized labor, curtailment of public welfare, climate change denial—all contributed to the deathliness of obstruction. It goes without saying that governance at a standstill has only been further exacerbated in the era of Trumpism, where “the man in the white house sits, naked and obscene, a pustule of ego, in the harsh light, a man whose grasp exceeded his understanding, because his understanding was dulled by indulgence.”14 Legislative blockage is not only the chronic symptom of politics as usual, or the nasty aftereffect of government shutdown and paralysis (fortified by post-Brexit, new-populist cross-Atlantic mirroring to become what Balibar diagnoses as “a deep crisis of the political institution”), but also channels a lethal undertow, a death wish; it tolls the suicidal endgame for deliberative democracy.15
No longer persuaded that we can simply block blockage with its own blunt instruments (in the spirit of Wikileaks and Anonymous), I have channeled my critical ire (and profound political frustrations and fears) into compiling a lexicon whose terms, directly or indirectly, flow out of the conditions of political obstruction, impasse, and impolitic actions and speech. Bifocal by design, the book is organized, first, as an (albeit idiosyncratic) critical vocabulary of keywords that describe micropolitical phenomena for which classical political theory and political science have no precise names, and second, as a narrative about “the long Restoration” (the name of Alain Badiou’s conservative sequence), whose through line extends from the French monarchie censitaire to configurations within early twenty-first-century capitalo-parliamentarianism.
To this end, I emphasize the character and range of “small p” politics, half of a dyad whose other half is “big P” Politics, or “the Political.” “The Political,” with emphasis on the definite article, has served as shorthand, especially on the left, for the refusal to accept the terms of politics on offer in the mediocracy. Though no uniform theoretical program is identified with it, the Political is commonly taken to mean the categorical rejection of capitalist triumphalism in a post-Wall era of global hypermarkets. As Alain Badiou explains in his chapter of Metapolitics titled “Against ‘Political Philosophy,’” the Political delegitimates “plurality of opinion” in order to effect the “possibility of a rupture with what exists.” It has been used as a catchall for modes of political thinking that are at once classical (Platonic, Kantian, Schmittian) and as yet unthought: a communism to come, a democracy relieved of applied ethics, an “inarticulable” subject of politics.16
I remain committed to these retreated forms of the Political, yet find myself at the start of a turning circle whose purview entails taking stock of politics in its messier, everyday guises. The abandonment of “small p” politics to pundits and members of the chattering classes risks putting theorists of “big P” Politics” out of action. By framing the Political in terms of that which is extraneous to or other to problems of statecraft, constitutionalism, and institutionalism, many thinkers have left undertheorized the formless force field of “smallest p” politics that keeps the system of capitalo-parliamentarianism in place and prevents emancipatory politics from taking place. This situation prompts a return to some of the classic writings on micropolitics by Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour with an eye to building out a non-classical, non-canonical vocabulary of microphysical or molecular or non-transcendent disarticulations of power. Political fiction, with its exploration of psychopolitics, impolitic gestures, and idiosyncrasies of political intelligence, has also provided essential material for elucidating “small p” politics. And recent work on economies of existence have led me to highlight specific modes of financialization, managerialism, and calculated social relations as quintessential mediums of a “small p” political lexicon.
While the terms selected are occasionally neologistic (“thermocracy”) or may involve an unconventional usage (the shift from substantive to adjectival inflections of “the impolitic”), they are chosen for their value as paleonymy—reworked old names that draw out recessed political dimensions within ordinary language. Derrida associates paleonymy with the “extraction of a reduced predicative trait that is held in reserve” and considers it an instance of “the name being maintained as a kind of lever of intervention in order to maintain a grasp on the previous organization, which is to be effectively transformed.”17 It is precisely this heuristic of interventionist, paleonymic conceptual levering that one finds in the Political Concepts initiative, a loosely affiliated group of philosophers and theorists who produce an online journal. Typically the intellectual gambit involves reworking well-worn political vocabulary (“amnesty,” “grandeur,” “legitimacy,” “consent,” “equality”); or making-political parts of speech or minor words (prepositions, adverbs, adjectives), as in the juridical measure of “enough” when applied by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Jacques Lezra), the semantic traction of “blood” in contexts of theological vengeance (Gil Anidjar) or the neoliberal tincture of “development” within the politics of modernization (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). A similar way of working informs Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt’s idiosyncratic “An Atlas of Concepts (with interspersed stories)” which offers (for my purposes) a particularly rich and useful definition of “Obstinacy” [Eigensinn] as something plastically political: a “resistance to primitive expropriation” whose “elements continually construct themselves anew and grow out of such heterogeneous roots that the type of experience and resistance identified as OBSTINACY cannot be conceptually isolated.”18 Rather than the assumption of a predetermination of what does or does not count as a political concept, there is in such lexical experiments an effort to expand the scope of what demands political accounting or is considered politically significant. “Political” is taken to refer to the multiplicity of forces, structures, problems, and orientations constitutive of modes of existence and being-in-community. The concept of political concept, accordingly, becomes a way of endowing non-political vocabulary with political significance, and a way of thinking concepts not just as freestanding, transhistorical monoliths, but as time-sensitive and site-specific units of language. Barbara Cassin’s notion of “philosophizing in languages” contributes to this view of political concepts as inflected by particularities of idiom, history and geopolitics.
Throughout the book, select terms are distilled from episodes that are themselves culled from scenes in novels, films or TV serials that fill in areas where political theory falls short. Such episodes typically feature intense lobbying; interests that are secured, only to be razed from memory by the arrival of ascendant agendas; opportunistic shifts of ideological position; flurries of bait and switch; and the traffic in personal information, mutual interest, earmarks, and palace intrigue. These are the effluvia constitutive of the anthropology of the opinion system and that render “what happens” historically
