Introduction: An ‘Untimely’ Political Thought for Serious Times

Abstract

In the late 1960s, a French philosopher provocatively maintained that a book of philosophy must be, on one hand, a very special kind of detective story and in a way, on the other, a sort of science fiction.¹ By detective story, he meant that when writing or investigating a book of philosophy, concepts must be conceived to be made and unmade on a mobile horizon and always in relation to a specific ‘drama’ or theme. Concepts intervene to solve particular problems, exert their sphere of influence on a ‘local situation’, and change and evolve along with the questions from which they stem. Furthermore, insofar as the author dislocates his concepts, which he inherits from his own time and tradition, and recreates them, his work is necessarily ‘untimely’; irreducible to both the philosophy of history and the philosophy of the eternal, his personal philosophy delves into the questions regarding the unknown or that which is still not well known and, in this sense, it has something to do with science fiction.