Politics in Pre-Political Times

The philosophical injunction to grasp one’s time in thought is beset today by an oscillation between disorienting anxiety and a renascent enthusiasm. The anxiety is determined by the objective temporality of crisis, understood, in keeping with the medical derivation of the term from Hippocratic medicine, as that phase “in which a decision is due but has not yet been rendered” (Koselleck 361); when decisions are looking for their subjects. It is an anxiety that is also shadowed by a catastrophic tonality; in the absence of sublime visions of final collapse, there is a deep-seated sense that social stagnation or regression will continue to shadow any possible ‘recovery’, and that the only events punctuating an otherwise featureless future will be starkly negative...