Description
The concept of prefigurative politics has gained an increasing amount of scholarly attention over the last several years with substantial research done on its relevance as a mode of resistance to global capitalism (Raekstad & Gradin, 2022; Monticelli, 2023). Prefigurative approaches to defiance are often contrasted to contentious and strategic modes due to their insistence on the unification of the means and ends relationship in political action. While this has resulted in a plethora of inter-disciplinary research on ‘world building’ and constructing alternatives to the status quo, little to no attention has been paid to the onto-logic of prefigurative political action and how best to conceptualize the enactment of prefiguration (Fians, 2022).
This paper will address the lack of onto-logical analysis of the mode of political action that prefigurative politics enables. I trace the roots of the strategic and contentious onto-logic of political action in the (post)Hegelian and Marxist tradition according to which an act is political if it involves the active negation of the present (political) conditions for the sake of achieving a pre-defined end.
Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and his Nietzschean inspired critique of (post)Hegelian dialectical conceptions of sublation, the paper will argue that prefigurative politics are underpinned by an affirmative onto-logic of political action. Instead of engaging in active negation of the status quo as in traditional and contentious modes of resistance, the enactment of prefigurative action involves the passive affirmation of alternative beliefs, habits and ways of life.
