Bios Theōrētikos, Bios Politikos

Abstract

The difficult relation of politics and philosophy has most often been negotiated with reference to the distinction between the bios theōrētikos and the bios politiōs. It is argued that this opposition is unstable from Aristotle onwards, and that effects of that instability can be read throughout the tradition, through Kant and Hegel, up to and including Hannah Arendt and John Rawls, Jacques Ranciere, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben and Hardt & Negri. The instability of that distinction calls for a deconstructive rather than a dialectical understanding of difference.