Reiner Schürmann and the Poetics of Politics

Reiner Schürmann’s thinking is, as he himself would say, “riveted to a monstrous site.” It remains focused on and situated between natality and mortality, the ultimate traits that condition human life. This book traces the contours of Schürmann’s thinking in his magnum opus Broken Hegemonies in order to uncover the possibility of a politics that resists the hegemonic tendency to posit principles that set the world and our relationships with one another into violent order.

The book follows in the footsteps of Oedipus who, in abject recognition of his finitude, stumbles upon the possibility of another politics with the help of his daughters at Colonus. The path toward this other, collaboratively created and thus poetic politics begins with an encounter with Aristotle, a thinker whom Schürmann most frequently read as the founder of hegemonic metaphysics, but whose thinking reveals itself as alive to beginnings in ways that open new possibility for human community.