Paul Rekret’s “The Impasse of Post-Metaphysical Political Theory: On Derrida and Foucault ” appears in Telos 161 (Winter 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our store.
The debate between Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault over the status of Descartes’ Meditations can be read to indicate some profound implications for the ways by which we conceive of a post-metaphysical political theory. This article documents the way in which the terms of the debate suggest that in conceiving politics after metaphysics in terms of competing accounts of the contingency of Being or, in Stephen White’s words, as weak ontologies, we are lead towards a profound paradox and impasse. To suggest that there is broad agreement in post-metaphysical political thought regarding the instability of ontology and the consequent theoretical task of questioning the grounds or foundations of particular political concepts or institutions is to overlook a fundamental paradox. What the debate between Derrida and Foucault in fact indicates is that these differing weak ontologies are in fact incommensurable with one another.
Since the Treaty of Westphalia, sovereignty in the West has been imagined in terms of the nation-state and its ability to provide a universal basis for political relations both within state boundaries and in relations with other similarly organized entities. On the one hand, the nation-state originates as a means of overcoming the religious civil wars, and its establishment coincides with the attempt to relegate theological disputes to a private sphere that does not threaten the structure of the state. In this way, the state as opposed to the church becomes the primary form for defining the political. On the other hand, the development and stability of the nation-state system seems to have been inextricably linked to the dynamic of colonialism. As Carl Schmitt lays out in 
Georg Lukács’s essay “The Dialectic of Labor” belongs to the last period of his life and was composed in the context of the so-called “renaissance of Marxism”: a movement, beginning in the mid-1950s, within several of the Eastern Bloc nations—most notably Hungary, Poland, and the former Yugoslavia—that sought to re-energize the humanistic dimensions of Marxism suppressed by the enforcement of orthodoxy. Lukács’s substantive contribution to the “renaissance of Marxism” took the form of two enormous projects: a Marxist ontology (Zur Ontologie des gesellschaftichen Seins) and a systematic aesthetics (Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen). Although Lukács’s relationship to “dialectical and historical materialism” remains complex, “The Dialectic of Labor” stands as a reflection of this humanistic tendency inasmuch as it, by way of an ontological elucidation of the “philosophy of praxis,” emphasizes the functional role of subjectivity as a constitutive moment in the social-historical process. 
The Adventurous Heart is a collection of short essays, thoughts, stories, dreams, philosophical musings, and other unclassifiable writings on a number of experiences: nature, death, travel, sex, drugs, antique shops, museums, practically anything that caught Jünger’s ever inquisitive eye. It provides, as Jünger says, “small models of another way of seeing things.” This “other way” is what Jünger calls “stereoscopy,” the ability to see things in a dual aspect, perceiving their surface and depth simultaneously. . . . Jünger’s “stereoscopy” revealed to him the “secret correspondences existing between things,” and his reflections, written in an elegant, often lapidary style, trigger in the attentive reader a similar effect.
Karel Kosík’s story begins with the end of a statue. In 1962, a granite statue of Stalin that had been begun in 1955 was completed only to be torn down several months later. For Kosík, the statue, “designed to last forever,” perfectly represented the provisionalism and nihilism of modern times. It laid bare the inescapable tension between living peacefully in social life and the animal brutality that occasionally became necessary. When the statue was torn down, the base was left behind. In Kosík’s time, there were plans to transform the space into a garden restaurant. The restaurant’s relationship to its past would be complicated, but plans were scrapped, which saved any Prague tourists from the awkwardness of “Would you like to see our drink menu while you contemplate what it means to live under threat of random and instantaneous erasure?” 
