ON THE IDEA OF A CRITICAL HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT: TEXTUAL INTERPRETATION AND THINKING IN CONSTELLATIONS

ABSTRACT This article intervenes in recent methodological debates in the history of political thought, particularly those involving the question of whether its practice should be considered primarily as a historical endeavor or as a philosophical endeavor. Moving beyond this binary, I propose an approach that utilizes both historical and philosophical techniques for the sake of recuperating the unintentional meaning embedded within any complex text. In order to clarify the operations characterizing such an approach, I take inspiration from early critical theory to develop an interpretive frame drawn from the philosophical notion of thinking in constellations. The analyst, mining the surplus of meaning that necessarily inheres in the work, can perform an original illocutionary act meant to advance a particular political end. Such an act may proceed through critically identifying the necessary gaps and ambiguities that traverse a substance that is never adequate to the thematization of the political world and reconstructing the text via the creative reorganization of its textual elements in new configurations, configurations that work to illuminate an otherwise concealed dimension of signification.