Facundo Vega

Facundo Vega is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez and Research Scientist at CONICET. He received his PhD from Cornell University, specializing in political philosophy and critical theory. Vega is currently completing his first book, entitled Extraordinary Matters: The Political after Martin Heidegger, which breaks with contemporary readings of Heidegger to argue that ‘the onto-political moment’ in current critical theory epitomizes a pervasive hostility toward ordinariness. Challenging the idea that the politically new is something extraordinary, the book examines the role of ordinariness and commonality in moments of democratic founding.

Vega’s scholarship has been supported by fellowships and awards from the ICI Berlin, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the DAAD, the Martin-Heidegger-Stiftung, American Friends of Marbach, the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. He has edited and co-edited published and forthcoming volumes with diacritics, Philosophy Today, and Theory & Event. His research has appeared in these venues as well as in The European Legacy and Cahier de L’Herne, among others. He has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University, The New School for Social Research, the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). Vega is currently working on his second book, on Hannah Arendt and political futures.

Many think we are at the end of an era. Artificial intelligence, climate change, the loss of faith in democratic systems — these alongside other contemporary phenomena have shifted the scales of what we think is in crisis. Yet the very terms we use to identify the end of our era — anthropocene, plantationocene, capitalocene — are notions that also draw attention to the erosion of life in common. How does thinking about our political future shape the understanding of our political present? This project recovers Hannah Arendt’s powerful — yet generally overlooked—account of futurity. In doing so, it locates resources in Arendt’s work for counteracting political alienation on a global scale, involving questions of Earth, world, and planetary order. Recovering Arendt’s approach to the role of science and technology, the nature-culture divide, and human exceptionalism, the project compels us to reconsider some of the basic tenants of our current thinking about crises.

Political Futures revises the consensus understanding of Arendt. Arendt is often assumed to be a thinker of exclusive action, for whom politics not only uniquely depends on action but also for whom such political action can only be performed by a select few. By centering the question of political futurity in her thought, this project makes a case for the opposite view: that politics, for Arendt, instead serves as an incubator for political imagination of alternative and emancipatory futures. From The Origins of Totalitarianism to her posthumous book, The Life of the Mind, her thinking about the future is tied to the earthly and worldly condition of politics.This project attempts to show that Arendt’s concern with the Earth and the world can provide an antidote to traditional accounts of politics that idolize personal leadership and the power of ‘great men’. Ultimately, this project shares Arendt’s critique, showing why politics, in our current planetary order, should be set off ‘not by the strength of one architect but by the combined power of the many’. It also pushes that critique forward, delineating a future-oriented politics of the ordinary.

Hannah Arendt famously asserted that ‘revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning’. Aware of political modernity’s ‘abyssal grounds’, Arendt sought, time and again, to find ways to elucidate political foundations. By returning to revolution, she reduced— in the archaic sense of restoring to righteousness — politics to the ‘principle of beginning’. This reduction, however, was itself a challenge to the philosophical tradition. From Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes, Marx, and Heidegger, philosophy, according to Arendt, subsumed the ‘beginning’ into the fusion of origins and rules. Arendt’s challenge was to think about political groundings without upholding a principle that lies beyond human affairs.

This project places Arendt’s accounts of revolution and ‘political beginnings’ alongside another attempt to understand the nature of politics: that of the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique.Founded at the École normale supérieureunder the auspices of Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser and directed by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, the Centrehosted an array of thinkers to reflect on the question of ‘the political’, including Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Sarah Kofman, Claude Lefort, Jean-FrançoisLyotard, and Jacques Rancière. In an Auseinandersetzungwith Arendt’s political thought, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, in particular, rethought the political meaning of reduction. Rather than implying a turning away from politics, the retraitof ‘the political’, for Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, meant the philosophical withdrawing and re-tracing of political grounds. Considering these accounts together, the projectwill show how the debate over ‘political beginnings’ overcomes the fetishization of the ‘great event’ and ‘exceptional leadership’ to reveal the power of acting in common.

Facundo Vega’s project, Principles of An-archy: Hannah Arendt, Reiner Schürmann, and the Politics of the Many, compares Arendt’s and Schürmann’s shared but unacknowledged interest in ‘principles’ and ‘beginnings’ inherent to politics. Vega considers how both drew from and reformulated Heidegger’s philosophy of inception in order to analyze what Arendt and Schürmann understood as moments of freedom in history. Despite their attention to Heideggerian ‘principles’ and ‘beginnings’ of politics, Arendt and Schürmann, Vega argues, underestimated Heidegger’s condemnation of the vulgarity of the many.

For Heidegger, political founding amounted to extraordinary moments illustrated by the ontological status of the ruler; for Arendt and Schürmann, political founding, by contrast, was enacted by human plurality and the many, which cannot be inscribed into the history of Being and the body of the leader. Principles of An-archy thus speaks to our contemporary political milieu in its frustrated attempts to consolidate ‘the combined power of the many’. This kind of combined power, also known as democratic an-archy, offers a unique resource for challenging the return of exceptionalism in the form of populist leadership and great men.