Introduction

Unless you accept a generic definition of politics as, for instance, “power” or “the personal,” the idea that you can step out of politics – literally walk away from the conventions that give political language-games their contours into another area of existence – is uncontroversial. I have worked in earlier chapters to explicate the importance of this kind of horizontal movement for perception and creativity, two components of theorizing, in Wittgenstein's work. This is not the only kind of motion I want to talk about here. In this chapter, I want to focus on the vertical drop below the conventions constitutive of politics into the bedrock of what Agamben has described as “bare life,” Homo sacer (life doomed to die; the sacred outlaw of Roman law that anyone was free to kill). This fall from politics is not voluntary; it is, rather, achieved by force and coercion, components of the relation between sovereignty and the body, and the corresponding erosion of superficial trust that exposes what Wittgenstein conceived as the narrow space between surface and depth grammars also described in terms of trust.