Dialegesthai: Towards a Posttranscendent Politics—Or, let's Talk about Bodies

The purpose of this essay is neither to praise or condemn dialectic nor to adjudicate between dialectics. I seek instead to investigate a particular relation between dialectic and dualism that was developed in the ancient Greek polis as a way of opening a conversation concerning the necessity of waging a posttranscendent, postdualist politics. Approaching the polis through the problematic nomos of flesh, and focusing on the produced opposition between reason and appetite, the essay suggests how a dispositif of transcendence operated in the polis to reduce the rule of the many, associated with the mob-like appetites of the body, in favor of the few who had (allegedly) achieved self-mastery and transcendence. For beings produced as body this meant a greater degree of corporeal vulnerability and a reduced, at times radically reduced, potential for survival. This politics of transcendence did not vanish with the polis but persisted in diverse forms, continuing to under-write the unevenly distributed right to be that it originally authorized and that, beginning in ‘1492’, was globalized, becoming the massive assault on bodies that has characterized the bio(geo)politics of Western modernity and still dominates the present. The essay concludes with a consideration of what a posttranscendent politics might be and a postscript regarding the cunning of passion.