This article explores how state actors and ‘state philosophers’ from the latter part of the twentieth century until the present have described and reacted to what they perceive as militant challenges to the statist order. This is understood to be an antipolitical mode of argumentation because the critiques explicitly distance themselves from ordinary politics, portraying themselves as above or beyond normal politics. It is more specifically about critiques of liberal democracy for being unable to defend itself because it regards action as antithetical to talking. The article firstly outlines the core of the critique; then it turns to an empirical exploration of two different argumentative types of the critique illustrated through two different case examples: (1) securitized antipolitics: the neo-conservative argument for using force and the critique of those standing in the way of military solutions; and (2) moralized antipolitics: the idea that Islamism represents a new life threat to the West meriting a third world-war response and the critique of liberal appeasers supposedly not up to the challenge. The article concludes by summarizing the findings in the Slavoj Žižekian concept of ultrapolitics, where a militarization of politics is offered as real, hard politics but is actually a way to avoid the truly hard fact of politics: disagreement.

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