An Archaeology of the Political
Subtitle: Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century to the Present
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: Mar 14, 2017
Language: eng
Format: hardcover
Number of pages: 264
ISBN-13: 9780231179928
Description: In the past few decades, much political-philosophical reflection has been dedicated to the realm of "the political." Many of the key figures in contemporary political theory - Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Reinhart Koselleck, Giorgio Agamben, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, among others - have dedicated themselves to explaining power relations, but in many cases they take the concept of the political for granted, as if it were a given, an eternal essence. In An Archaeology of the Political, Elías José Palti argues that the dimension of reality known as the political is not a natural, transhistorical entity. Instead, he claims that the horizon of the political arose in the context of a series of changes that affirmed the power of absolute monarchies in seventeenth-century Europe and was successively reconfigured from this period up to the present. Palti traces this series of redefinitions accompanying alterations in regimes of power, thus describing a genealogy of the concept of the political. Perhaps most important, An Archaeology of the Political brings to theoretical discussions a sound historical perspective, illuminating the complex influences of both theology and secularization on our understanding of the political in the contemporary world. --
Notes: Source title: An Archaeology of the Political: Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (Columbia Studies in Political Thought / Political History)