Metapolitics


Metapolitics is metalinguistic talk about politics; a political dialogue about politics itself. In this mode, metapolitics takes on various forms of inquiry, appropriating to itself another way toward the discourse of politics and the political. It assumes a self-conscious role of mediating the analytic, synthetic, and normative language of political inquiry and politics itself. Put simply, it is dialogue about the way politics will talk about itself.
The language used for studying, analyzing, and describing a language is a metalanguage. In current usage and praxis, the term metapolitics is often used in relation to postmodern theories of the Subject and their relation to political theory. In its broadest definition, metapolitics is a discipline that studies the relationship between the state and the individual.

Contemporary views

Two important contemporary thinkers in the field of metapolitics are Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière. Discussing Badiou's Metapolitics, Bruno Bosteels asserts that: