Introduction

Abstract

The thesis of this book is simple; its articulation is more complicated, as it moves between philosophy and politics, the present and the past, a New Left and an old one. Two dates form its bookends:1989 and 2001. The first, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall and realized two years later by the disappearance of the Soviet Union, opened a new era of political possibilities. The second, September 11, 2001, posed a challenge to the irenic vision of a new democratic future. My thesis is that the interpretation of 1989 as the overcoming of totalitarian communism and therefore the advent of democracy was misleading; as a result, political thinkers have been unable to understand the new challenges that arose in the wake of 9/11. They reacted to terror with force because they did not understand the paradoxical dialectics of antipolitical violence and political freedom. They were caught between politics and antipolitics. This short introduction will outline the justification of this thesis and make clear the way in which it is then articulated in the chapters that follow.