Let’s speak of “politics.” I mean: let’s speak of the word politics [politique].4 It is no doubt a good and even a necessary means of speaking of the thing itself. Indeed, certain linguistic phenomena involving this word deserve our attention. To give an idea of what I intend to do, it is enough for me to point out the following: when I say, “let us speak of the word ‘politique,’ ” you do not know whether I am using the adjective or the substantive, or whether the latter is to be understood as feminine or masculine. Now, these trivial considerations involve several problems at once.

Let us begin with the adjective. An excessive use is made of it today when, in domains that are not in principle defined as “political,” we affirm an essential political implication. In the artistic domain in particular, it is often seen as necessary to declare that a work or an intervention has a political relevance, a political sense, or even a political nature. Whereas in the past we would come across the notion of the political commitment of an artist (of a writer, a philosopher, or a scientist), today we must refer to a necessarily political dimension in their practice itself. What cannot be said to be “political” appears suspect in being only aesthetic, intellectual, technical, or moral. But what one calls “political,” or the “political dimension,” remains most of the time without any other precise definition. This is because the meaning of the word seems to be implicitly established: “political” would mean that which goes beyond all the particular delimitation of discipline and activity, operating at the level of the entire society (even that of humanity), of its conditions of existence and meaning. “Political” is thus invested with a potentially unlimited content.

This usage of the word derives from a more or less conscious belief in the idea that everything is or should be political. Now, this idea constitutes nothing other than the content of what one calls “totalitarianism.” Many would be very vexed to learn that they speak—even if they do not think—in a “totalitarian” manner. However, it deserves to be said. Every time “political” refers to such a totalizing property, there is indeed “totalitarianism.” That is to say, the horizon of this thought is that of a “political” absorption or assumption of every sphere of existence (I am pointing here more or less to a formula of the young Marx).

The simplest logic allows us to conclude that such an assumption of every sphere of existence in its entirety takes away the very specificity of the sphere of the assumption itself. If everything is political, then nothing is anymore. And this is perhaps in effect the real situation in which we find ourselves. But then we should no longer be able to speak of what is “political,” except as an abuse of language and with a view to exploiting the accents—flattering, heroic, and charged with historical destiny—that are associated with this big word political.

That is, moreover, why the philosophical scene today is so intensely occupied with works that undertake to redefine and reanalyze the field and the sense of what is “political” in order thus to pull the word out of its dilution in what would have to be called social immanence.

What haunts the unreflective totalitarianism involved in the abuse of the term is in fact an obsession with the suppression of the separation. Everything must be political because politics as a separate sphere must be suppressed. Whether it is in the form of the state or that of parties, in the form of “politicking” or “the politician’s politics” (a very remarkable tautology that one could analyze at length) or even that of subversive actions, every separate instance is now set to disappear—that is to say, quite naturally, every separate instance of communal existence. Communal existence must then, in the end, or at least in the regulative principle, ensure—on its own and as such—its own end, its sense and its fulfillment.

Now, this is precisely what must be placed in doubt, and it is indeed what we do in fact doubt, more or less consciously. The very people who claim that everything is political are often also those who think that democracy is not an end in itself and that our question is rather one of knowing toward what ends (or even toward what surpassing of the very idea of “end,” which would involve another register of analysis) to direct it.

At this point we can touch upon another linguistic phenomenon. For a little over twenty years now, we have commonly spoken of “the political” [le politique], and this usage relegates “politics” [la politique] to the subordinate level of the execution of tasks (or even maneuvers). “The political” seems to represent the nobility of the thing—which thereby implicitly regains its specificity, and thus its relative separation.

We thus fail to recognize that this word in the masculine, a newcomer to the [French] language with this meaning, was introduced to refer to the concept or the essence of the political thing or domain—but precisely to the extent that this concept, or indeed this essence, required examination, analysis, interrogation. We began to speak of “the political” in this particular way from the moment we found it necessary to question the foundations of what we had previously called either the “science of government” or “public law.” “The political” became the name of a problem, and one of no small importance. A problem of grounding, of foundation, or, on the contrary, the laying bare of an absence of depth. But it is also because of this problem that “politics” [la politique], losing all dignity as art in the old sense (of techn, of savoir faire), has become “politicking,” whereas this art (of politics) was so noble and so powerful.

This is not the case in the personal vocabularies of the philosophers that I invoked a moment ago, each of whom questions, according to his own approach, either the masculine or the feminine, the essence or the art of the thing called politics / the political. My objective today was not to summon them—or the thing itself—to be judged. It was simply to suggest, very modestly, that we should not be using the terms politics / the political without at least trying to clarify what we are talking about. For, to be frank, the meaning of the word is lacking in our ordinary language, except in the form of a nebulous and totalitarian notion, in a consensually somnambulistic manner. But precisely this, the ordinary manner of speaking, produces political effects.

Political rigor and exactitude, today, begin with this critique of our language, even if we initially find it frustrating. How can we speak knowingly of “politics” and the “political”? I leave off deliberately with this question for today.

24 January 2003