The idiot

Abstract

In this paper, I will examine a number of treatments of the notion of “the idiot” (along the way touching on some satellite concepts such as event, cosmopolitics, process, the virtual) in order to explore the potential uses of the idiot in the ‘doings’ of social science. The attraction of the ‘idiot’ is that it provides a resource for addressing the essential openness of events – that is, their openness onto possibility or the virtual. In other words, it is a means for not only making the point that things (and events) could be other than they are, but that what things and events ‘are’ is constitutively ‘other’, in that they are in a process of becoming. The upshot of this is to shift from a view of events and things in terms of problems in need of a solution (eg “how can we grasp – represent - them properly?”) to a vision of events and things as occasions for posing - inventing – more interesting problems (eg “what can be at stake here?”).