post-politics

is a form of de-politicization whereby politics proper is replaced by expert social administration.

In the age of 'post-politics', when politics proper is progressively replaced by expert social administration, the sole remaining legitimate sources of conflict are cultural (religious) or natural (ethnic) tensions.' (zizek New left review 'against human rights' 34 July-august 2005).

is a form of depoliticization which operates not through repression or disavowal but through foreclosure, which is to say that it is a politics which forecloses, or heads off, objection by representing a seemingly complete symbolic order which 'lacks the inscription of its lack'.

Zizek distinguishes post-politics from other forms of depoliticization on the basis that it operates not through repression or disavowal but through foreclosure the total erasure of the political from the Symbolic. The outcome of foreclosure is not 'a truncated symbolic order', but a seemingly complete symbolic order, which 'lacks the inscription of its lack)' (zizek 2008: xii), one that renders mute the articulation of radical dissent. Foreclosure, it should be noted, is the form of denegation peculiar to psychosis. For Zizek, it is this shift from disavowal to foreclosure that defines post-politics as a modality of depoliticization (Zizek 1999: 236-7).

is the depoliticization of political matters as they are given over to experts and bureaucratic administration. It is politics without politics, just like cream without fat, beer without alcohol, coffee without caffeine. It is reality deprived of its substance.

On today's market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol. . . And the list goes on: what about virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare, the contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration as politics without politics, up to today's tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of Other deprived of its Otherness (the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality, while features like wife beating remain out of sight )' . . . . . . .it provides reality itself deprived of its substance, of the resisting hard kernel of the Real in the same way decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like the real coffee without being the real one, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being one. (Zizek 2003b : pdf)

is when politics proper is replaced by expert social administration. It is when administration is deemed too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.

I have come to thte conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians Charles De Gaulle

post politics, n.Definitions

post politics