The question of political puts the political into question. It is political of all politics . The political politicizes the polity It is the essence of politics. Without the political, there cannot be politics. Different shapes of politics arise from different forms of the political. There is no one singular, transcendent politics. There is no singular political too. Politics is plural because the political is plural. The political irrupts as interrogation. This is perhaps, may be why Karl Marx advised us to question everything. Every interrogation leads to a struggle for a world without a predetermined response to the question. Politics is in someway a struggle for a world. It is the pollical that becomes a fire in the belly of the politics and directs politics in a definite direction. Hence, we may ask: where politics is heading in our country? Perhaps we have to lay our hands on the political of this politics. The political of the politics is the political engine of the politics. We shall take our que from Jean-Luc Nancy to understand the political of the reigning politics in our country.
We say everything is political. Nancy says that by saying so we lose the specificity of politics and totalize everything to the extent that the horizon of thought is that of political absorption of every sphere of existence. In the context of this subsumption , Nancy invites us to distinguish the political from politics. Politics to him signifies everyday to and fro of the representative political arena and the political is that which is most political of the politics. Hence, what is most political of the reigning politics of today? Is it organizing a society into a unity? On the face of what we experience, it does not appear to be so. Perhaps, Claude Lefort may give us insight into our context and reveal us how our very divisive politics is the political that creates a majoritarian unified community.
Lefort had earlier in the 1970s had popularized the distinction between the political and politics. He thought of the political as the manner in which society was organized as unity through the then empty place of a king. He pointed out that in a democracy political is the empty symbolic space of authority. The political, therefore, is signified as a space for the contestation of the basis of power. The space is empty. Hence, the political will decide whose authority will be challenged. We can see how Congress, Nehru and the Gandhi family are being discredited to run the engine of the politics of the BJP. This points that the political of the reigning politics is the deauthorization of what is thought to be elite that enjoyed power and privilege for a long time. Power being an empty space, it appears that the tables are fast turning. The ruling BJP is today being interrogated for its alliance with big corporates who are thought to be the real parivar of the ruling benches.
Nancy might further illumine us. He wanted to set up a philosophical question of the political and the questioning of the philosophical about the political. To achieve these ends, He along with Phillippe Lacoue- Labarthe, a center for Philosophical Research on the Political. He thought it was necessary to take up this approach because he thought that political has withdrawn from politics. Improving of Lefort, he indicated that political did not designated the unity of a society but the disposition of the community. Therefore, to decode the political, we have to decode the disposition of the community. The disposition of the majority is manufactured by addressing its fears in our society. The ruling BJP then, presents itself as a protector of the majority. This politics of appeasement of the majority then is legitimated and people are disposed to move to BJP as they then think that voting for BJP is voting for their own interest.
Nancy sees an opportunity in the withdrawal or retreat of the political from the politics. We indeed can re-treat or retrace the political again in this retreat or the withdrawal of the political. Nancy describes the two modes of the withdrawal of the political . The first is the collapse of the political into the law. Human rights or law then takes the center stage. Here we have the politics of making or breaking the law. The political is generated around the law. Politics round the law has brought about the farmers agitation as well as agitation against the EVMs. Besides, we can see how law and legal or constitutional agencies are being used and abused by the ruling benches to harass, split or break the opposition.
The second is withdrawal that consists in the what may be called the self-representation, that is described as spectacle. It produces the politics of events or spectacles. It creates a society of spectacle that is based on the politics of perception. The political then becomes involved in the generation, circulation and management of perception. In such as condition appearance begins to look what is proper. Under this condition, there is no other way of designating what is proper except the opposite of the spectacle. We can clearly notice how mega events have become the way of doing politics in our days. The ruling party seems to have made it its habit to convert everything into an event and use it to generate political capital. We are indeed a society of spectacle.
Following Nancy, we have to replay the question and rethink the political in our country. The rethinking of the political is at once an interrogation of the political that has the power to open and deconstruct the reigning politics. Perhaps, the raising of the right questions is the dire need of the hour. It is in the questions that we raise lie the philosophical. The philosophical undergirds the questions that stir the political and thus, generate the politics in a society. To change politics, we need interrogation triggered by the philosophical that will then evoke the political in our people and leading them toward a new politics that will be emancipating and bringing peace, harmony and prosperity for all. The Philosophical, the political and politics do not follow one another in a linear manner. They are intertwined with each other.
