Politics and the Neo-political

Neo-political theory moves beyond the highly contested question 'What is Political Theory?' (White and Moon, 2004) and 'Ontologies of the Who' (Cavarero, 2004) that emphasis a shift in political theory in terms of politicizing theory. Neo-political theory is concerned with the question 'Where is Political Theory today?' This paper outlines a preliminary overview of neo-political theory in terms of transactuations of the political, specifically events and experiences that constitute freedom in a public space, in the context of the contemporary post-political vortex. It seeks to elaborate the characteristics of neo-political theory and politics more generally to ask where it works and where its institutions are located, as well as locating its constitutive conditions. In many ways there has been a certain end to a particular understanding of politics and the political as solely about the state and government. Neo-political theory seeks to extend theorisations and actualisations of the political that significantly reconfigured contemporary contestations of the political domain. Emphasis is upon rival conceptions of the political within political theory, as well as conceptions of politics and the political outside the discipline for the importance of political theory into the new millennium. This entails a move beyond rethinking the political to reactuating the political in terms of the potentialities of spontaneity as well as contingency.