Main deficiency of active people. Active men are usually lacking in higher activity—I mean, individual activity. They are active as officials, businessmen, scholars, that is, as generic beings....Active people roll like a stone, conforming to the stupidity of mechanics. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human.

Covering the theories of, among others, Derrida, Lefort and Laclau, this volume opens up space to the political (polemicisation). Chapters cover themes such as social structure, ethical arguments, and political organisation.

Here lies the vocation of those who preserve our understanding of past theories, who sharpen our sense of the subtle, complex interplay between political experience and thought, and who preserve our memory of the agonizing efforts of intellect to restate the possibilities and threats posed by political dilemmas of the past. —Sheldon S. Wolin, “Political Theory as a Vocation”In the same way in which the great transformation of the first industrial revolution destroyed the social and political structures as well as (...) the legal categories of the ancien regime, terms such as sovereignty, right, nation, people, democracy, and general will by now refer to a reality that no longer has anything to do with what these concepts used to designate—and those who continue to use these concepts uncritically literally do not know what they are talking about. —Giorgio Agamben, Means without Ends: Notes on PoliticsLooking obliquely at the edges of things, where they come together with other things, can tell you as much about them, often, as can looking at them directly, intently, straight on. —Clifford Geertz, “The Near East in the Far East”. (shrink)