Unconditional Agonistics: Sam Weber’s Afterword to Jean-François Lyotard’s Just Gaming

Abstract

Can politics be agonistic through and through? Does not any contest require some rule that makes it a contest to begin with, and that prevents its self-destruction? But if there is a rule of the contest, is not the rule, as opposed to the contest itself, the essence of politics? These are some of the central questions of contemporary political theory, and Sam Weber has something important to say about them—no only in his most recent writings, where political issues are addressed mostly through the category of singularity, but in a lesser known text, one that is perhaps hidden as a response to another text: the Afterword to Jean-François Lyotard’s Just Gaming. This brief response presents an important challenge to Lyotard’s famous conception of agonistics, and suggests what I will call an “unconditional agonistics.” Following a deconstructive logic, Weber shows that no true agonistics can depend on a law, no matter how minimal, and yet it cannot not call for a law either. It is due to this necessary ambivalence between the need and the exclusion of a law (a fundamental rule) of the game that agonistics is possible at all. Otherwise, if a law regulates the contest, agonistics becomes conditioned by it, which implies that, in the last instance, the contest is subordinate to a master who is not part of it.