View source for Metapolitics

{{Short description|Political discourse about politics itself}}
'''Metapolitics''' (sometimes written '''meta-politics''') describes political attempts to speak in a [[metalinguistic]] sense about [[politics]]; that is, to have a political dialogue about politics itself.{{cn|date=September 2024}} Activists who use the phrase often view metapolitics as a form of "inquiry" in which the discourse of politics, and the political itself, is reimagined and reappropriated. The term was coined by [[Marxists]] and is almost always used in the context of ideological discourse among the [[far-left]] and [[far-right]], unlike the wider academic field of [[political philosophy]]. Those citing the term often do so in an attempt to take a "self-conscious" role in describing their preferred form of political inquiry.

==Contemporary thought==
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By ‘metapolitics’ I mean whatever consequences a philosophy is capable of drawing, both in and for itself, from real instances of politics as thought. Metapolitics is opposed to political philosophy, which claims that since no such politics exists, it falls to philosophers to think ‘the’ political.
 | source = [[Alain Badiou]], April 1998<ref>{{cite book | author= Badiou, Alain| title= Metapolitics| translator= [[Jason Barker]]| location= London & New York|publisher= Verso| date= 2005| isbn= 1-84467-035-X| pages= xxxix}}</ref>
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The term "metapolitics" originated from [[left-wing]] French academics, being first popularized by [[Alain Badiou]] and [[Jacques Rancière]]. Discussing Badiou's ''Metapolitics'', Bruno Bosteels asserts that:
{{quote|“Badiou argues against the tradition of political philosophy, which he associates with the likes of [[Hannah Arendt]] and [[Claude Lefort]], by proposing to think not of ‘the political’ (le politique) but of ‘politics’ (la politique) as an active form of thinking, or thought-practice, in its own right. He then goes on to evaluate the proximity of this proposal for a ‘metapolitical’ orientation to the work of his teacher [[Louis Althusser]] and his contemporaries Jacques Rancière and [[Sylvain Lazarus]], before offering [[case study|case studies]] on the concepts of democracy, justice and [[Thermidorian Reaction|Thermidoreanism]].”<ref>Excerpt from: Bosteels, Bruno. ''[http://ruconnected.ru.ac.za/mod/resource/view.php?id=142127 Philosophy for Militants.]'' Verso, 2012.</ref>}}

=== Contemporary politics === 
{{Excerpt|Nouvelle Droite#Metapolitics and strategy}}

==References==
{{Reflist}}

==Sources==
{{refbegin}}
* {{cite journal |first=Tamir |last=Bar-On |year=2001 |title=The Ambiguities of the Nouvelle Droite, 1968-1999 |journal=The European Legacy |volume=6 |number=3 |pages=333–351 |doi=10.1080/10848770120051349|s2cid=144359964 }}
* {{cite journal |last=De Benoist |first=Alain |year=2014 |title=Alain de Benoist answers Tamar Bar-On |translator=Christine Rhone |journal=Journal for the Study of Radicalism |volume=8 |number=1 |pages=141–161 |doi= 10.14321/jstudradi.8.1.0141|s2cid=144595116 }}
* {{cite encyclopedia |last=Johnson |first=Douglas |contribution=The New Right in France |title=The Far Right in Western and Eastern Europe |editor1=Luciano Cheles |editor2=Ronnie Ferguson |editor3=Michalina Vaughan |edition=second |year=1995 |publisher=Longman Group |location=London and New York |isbn=9780582238817 |pages=[https://archive.org/details/farrightinwester00luci/page/234 234–244] |url=https://archive.org/details/farrightinwester00luci/page/234 }}
* {{cite journal |first=Tom |last=McCulloch |title=The Nouvelle Droite in the 1980s and 1990s: Ideology and Entryism, the Relationship with the Front National |journal=French Politics |volume=4 |issue=2 |year=2006 |pages=158–178 |doi=10.1057/palgrave.fp.8200099|s2cid=144813395 }}
{{refend}}

==Further reading==
*Carlo Gambescia, ''Metapolitica. L’altro sguardo sul potere'', Edizioni Il Foglio Letterario  2009, {{ISBN|978-8876062476}}.
*Carlo Gambescia, ''Trattato di metapolitica,'' Edizioni Il Foglio, 2023, 2 voll.: - vol. I. ''Storia, concetti  e metodo'', {{ISBN|978-88-7606-981-9}}; - vol. II. ''Laboratorio storico'', {{ISBN|978-88-7606-966-6}}
*Felix Schilk (2025). ''The Metapolitics of Crises: How the New Right Weaponises Narratives to Mainstream Far-Right Ideology''. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. {{doi|10.1007/s10767-025-09519-3}}

==External links==
*A. J. Gregor. Metascience and Politics. [https://web.archive.org/web/20040218155431/http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/dictionaries/difficultwords/data/d0008232.html Dictionary definition]
*[[Peter Viereck]], ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=xJS44lXfKvYC&pg=PA134 Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler]'', 2003. {{ISBN|978-0-7658-0510-2}}.
*[http://www.nhinet.org/viereck16-2.pdf Peter Viereck, Metapolitics Revisited]
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20090130074342/http://versobooks.com/books/ab/b-titles/badiou_a_metapolitics.shtml Commentary on Alain Badiou's book ''Metapolitics'']
*[http://mises.org/journals/qjae/pdf/qjae7_4_8.pdf Leo Zaibert, ''Toward Meta-politics'']
*[[Igor Efimov]]. ''[https://www.e-reading.club/book.php?book=99575 Metapolitics: our choice and history]'' (in Russian). Leningrad, 1991. 224 pages. {{ISBN|5-289-01365-2}}

[[Category:Political terminology]]
[[Category:Linguistics]]


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