Politics and Difference

In its most basic form, politics is irrevocably an analytics of difference. Whether enacted by classic liberalism, revolutionary practice or poststructuralist poetry, all politics ultimately seeks ways to reorganize the social for there to be justice and peace, however defined. This at least implicitly acknowledges that there are real social differences to work with. The most enduring differences have operated in binary and oppositional matrices: free/slave, citizen/barbarian, court/aristocracy, bourgeois/worker, city/country, intellectual/mob, metropolis/colony. As we know after poststructuralism, the nature of these large-scale and pervasive differences is that they are constitutive of discursive and subjective processes, including desire.