Kenosis and Withdrawal. (Alberto Moreiras)

Deconstruction is always and in every case the deconstruction of onto-theology, and politically it is always and in every case the deconstruction of political theology, that is, of political onto-theology. In this context, infrapolitical hermeneutics are given as a need for thought in the two quotations I found in an old index card that dropped out of a book–quotations I had myself written down a few years ago and forgotten. They are from Reiner Schürmann’s Broken Hegemonies: “The excess of a nocturnal knowledge in daylight, which defined the tragic hero . . . , has become our own excess. We owe it to the kenosis, to the emptying out of normative representations” (4). And, “there is no reconciliation between the ultimates of the universalizing principle and the singularizing withdrawal” (4). Infrapolitical deconstruction (which I see as the conjunction of the deconstruction of political theology and infrapolitical hermeneutics) is a practice of kenosis on the basis of a singularizing withdrawal.