| Abstract: | As political geography searches in desperation for new (theoretical) directions to follow, this paper argues that the category of the ‘political’ has already curved back on itself, attaining the status of the ‘transpolitical’. Hereinafter, politics will never finish replaying its own disappearance as effect. This curvature is itself associated with profound shifts in the experience of history and time, of geography and space, and of the very ideas of theory, politics and events—shifts which continue to fascinate, haunt and transfix political geography in the enigmatic hereafter of the transpolitical. Adopting the motifs of s(ed)uction, transpearing, superficial abysses, and hypertelia (the ‘end of the end’), the paper assesses: the transpolitical figures of anomaly, ecstasy, obesity and obscenity; the irruption of the hyperreal (the more real than the real); the mutation of the political scene of representation into the transpolitical ob-scene of pornogeography; the fatal strategies pursued by the masses in relation to the spectre of the (trans)political; and the challenge of a transfinite universe for conjuring theoretical practice at the end(s) of political geography. Beginning with the transition from the political era—dominated by the transgressive figure of anomie and the emancipatory promise of revolutionary subl(im)ation—to the transpolitical simulacrum—characterized by the errant figure of anomaly and the superficial abyss of potentialization—the paper attempts to animate a transpolitical geography which affirms the s(ed)uction of superficial abysses and instantiates an ethics of the transpearing event. |
