Praxis and Critique: On Fugitive Politics

Through dialectical reflection upon the predicament of fugitive political praxis – forms of political action or claim making compelled to resist or give expression to political wrongs via the very mediums and contexts that sustain their imperceptibility and uninhabitability – this dissertation engages simultaneously in an immanent critique of the ‘primacy of [decentered/ fugitive] praxis’ and the development of a critical theory of fugitive politics. The ‘primacy of praxis’ names a constellation of contemporary political thinking that has discovered, out of both the ruins of sovereign or autonomous subjectivity (‘the decentering of the subject’) and the impasses of Critical Theory, novel forms of (fugitive) political possibility. The challenge of the dissertation is to salvage the promise of fugitive praxis from the antinomous theoretical architecture that falsifies it by inflating its plurality, agonism and indeterminacy into the status of ontological, affirmative or axiomatic givens. To raise the question of the inhabitability of fugitive politics is to ask after the particular social and political conditions that variably obstruct or facilitate responsiveness to the fragile claims of fugitive politics. Thinking both with and against Adorno – using his own philosophical insights to exceed his philosophy’s particular, historically sedimented limitations – the dissertation aims to rethink the interpretation of fugitive praxis in the historical present by salvaging his critical conception of mediation. Critical political interpretation, I will argue, neither affirms the resistant or heterogeneous power of (de-centered) praxis, nor discloses its impossibility within the mediating context of the historical present. On the contrary, it proceeds through micrological ambivalence to elucidate political praxis it where it emerges – in triumphant and transient flashes as well as in its disappointing, constrained and damaged forms – neither to celebrate nor mourn, but to disclose the conditionality of praxis and so to dis-close concrete insight as to how different form of praxis and different forms of political institutions might be realized.

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