Issue IV: Deferral

Issue IV examines deferral and understands it not as mere delay or weakness, but as a political, philosophical, and aesthetic form in a present shaped by acceleration, enmification, apparatus-driven surprise, and the loss of mediating spaces. At its centre stands the question of how in-between spaces — of thinking, judging, governing, and form — can be reconceived and defended under the conditions of a darkening world.

The issue unfolds a conceptual field of the in-between: metaxu, deferral, interruption, interregnum, figures of weakness, relieved rule, de-singularisation, and the residual character of the state. It understands these terms not as a retreat from the present, but as means of making political and aesthetic order legible again.

1. Metaxu / Recovering the In-Between

The deficit of modern political understandings that cannot think the in-between.

The opening essay reintroduces metaxu as a neglected concept. It does not begin a Simone Weil exegesis, but rather a kind of conceptual rearmament against the deficits of modern understandings of the state, politics, and the world. Modernity privileges unambiguity, sovereignty, decision, identity, and disposal — and thereby loses the language of mediation, the force of distance, the threshold, heteronomy, and shared spaces. The in-between, by contrast, is defined here as a distinct space of order.

2. Bringing History to a Halt

Halting as political necessity?

Beginning from Benjamin’s figure of the emergency brake and from current constellations of accelerated catastrophes, this part develops a theory of interruption. Not every crisis demands more decisions; not every dangerous situation requires acceleration. Interruption appears as a political and epistemic reprieve: as moratorium, slowing, suspension of automatic chains, and the recovery of legibility and responsibility.

3. Deferral as Political Competence

Deferral as a competence of non-autocratic politics.

Following Issue III (Elements of a Theory of Waiting), deferral is drawn more tightly: no longer merely as a temporal form of waiting, but as political competence. The foregrounded question is how a non-autocratic politics bound to law, procedure, publicity, and compromise can remain capable of action under conditions of technical surprise and forced alternatives. Deferral thus becomes legible as a form of responsible government.

4. Predators and Apparatuses

The new predators (da Empoli), and how can one resist them without becoming like them?

This section is devoted to the forms of rule characteristic of the present: the alliance of princely figure, digital back office, protocol power, money machine, and technically produced surprise. With da Empoli and adjacent diagnoses, it becomes visible how political ruthlessness is now infrastructurally sustained. At the same time, the question arises of counter-expertise, protective spaces, and technical forms of democratic counter-power.

5. Interregnum / Relieved Rule

Thinking rule beyond classical concepts of sovereignty.

Interregnum is read here not only as a state of crisis, but as a relieved form of rule: as provisionality, non-closure, reduced sovereignty, and administration of the in-between. We return to thinkers through whom politics can be conceived as a limited, tragic, impure art — beyond heroism and full sovereignty.

6. Aesthetic Zone

Deferral and mediation as aesthetic subjects.

Kafka’s demonic figures of mediation, Christou’s spaces, the centre, the open grave, in-between places: the aesthetic part of the issue condenses the preceding movements into scenes, images, and dispositions. Deferral appears here as an intellectual, formal, and pictorial narrative premise. Central to this is the figure of being driven between places, spaces, states, and belongings.

7. Cross-Axes

Forms of theory in view of the simultaneous erosion of in-between spaces, statehood, and political legibility.

Several motifs run through the issue as axes of tension: figures of weakness, de-singularisation as the burial of shared in-between spaces, enmifications, the state as relic, and the failure of instituted philosophy in the face of the disappearance of its political objects. From this arises the demand for a practical theory, for a politics of philosophy, that does not respond to present losses of order merely by administering concepts.

In Issue IV, deferral names not the weakness of the political, but the recovery of its in-between spaces.