Stasiology

The development of the science of political parties (it could perhaps be called stasiology).

In this study, in the light of latest trends in stasiology, an attempt is made to examine the potential role of political parties in initiating, directing and managing social, economic and political changes in Himachal Pradesh.

The surprising development in this regard is that, despite all these difficulties, students are engaged in making an empirical study of party politics with the aim of refining the discipline of stasiology.

His Encounter review (September 1960) included the following prophetic passage about ‘stasiology’: the study of the breakdown or paralysis of the State.

As for the stasiology evoked therein (which would be working either at the heart of the One, or in the centre of a Trinity or Holy Family), this is a motif which – in different words, in another style and in view of other consequences – could very well describe one of the subterranean but utterly continuous themes of this essay: […]

The reformulation of the problematic of "political theology" in the form of "stasiology" is significant, for it points to the severing of the political from the question of the state, or the loss of the state's monopoly on the political.

That theorisation exposes how sovereignty – comprised of an originary and ineliminable fracture – institutes the very idea of politics, government and rule as a political stasiology.

Rather than thinking the stasiology of the state on the basis of external war that is interiorized, polemos should be thought on the basis of the stasiology inherent in the sovereign right to be without right.