Fracturing Politics: (or, How to Avoid the Tacit Reproduction of Modern/Colonial Ontologies in Critical Thought)

This article engages in an experiment that aims to push critical/post-structuralist thought beyond its comfort zone. Despite its commitment to critiquing modern, liberal ontologies, the article claims that these same ontologies are often tacitly reproduced, resulting in a failure to grasp contemporary structures and histories of violence and domination. The article brings into conversation five selected critical scholars from a range of theoretical approaches and disciplines who explore the potential of the notion of ‘fracture’ for that purpose. The conversation revolves around political struggles at various sites – migrant struggles in Europe, decolonial struggles in Mexico, workers and peasant struggles in Colombia – in order to pintpoint how these struggles ‘fracture’ or ‘crack’ modern political frames in ways that neither reproduce them, nor lead to mere moments of disruption in otherwise smoothly functioning governmental regimes. Nor does such ‘fracturing’ entail the constructing of a ‘complete’ or ‘coherent’ vision of a politics to come. Instead, we detail the incoherent, tentative and multiple character of frames and practices of thought in struggle that nevertheless produce an (albeit open and contested) ‘whole’.