At the Threshold between Politics and the Political

Abstract

The debate about the difference between “politics” and “the political” forms the theoretical background of this study. It offers the opportunity to speak about the political significance of uncivil, illegal and disruptive agency that is not embedded in an institutional political context and often explicitly confronts or challenges such institutional politics. I look at this debate through a postfoundationalist lens and discuss the position of various authors who have played a crucial role in defining this “political difference” (Marchart 2007). They have done so by focusing on the role of the political as a dynamic in human interactions that escapes a “static” organization of politics, both in the sense of a state-induced management of political issues and in the sense of immobilizing or capturing human interactions in a certain prescribed order. The idea of a political element in human interactions that is not already fully captured within politics as an institutional model of organization is important to me in formulating my own understanding of the practice of “unruly politics.”