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. 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

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: "“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 studies on the concepts of democracy, justice and Thermidoreanism.”"

Contemporary politics

Sources