This essay focuses on Reiner Schürmann's undecidable remarks on the political, which can be traced in his work from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties. While Schürmann's later work (leading to and including Broken Hegemonies) touches on similar issues, and generates its own hesitations and vacillations, it is principally during the earlier period that the specific problem surrounding the political is extensively thematized by him. The essay will show in what way Schürmann's work from this period vacillates between, on the one hand, privileging political life as a permanent guarantor for public visibility and human action and, on the other, a mode of being and acting that has no sufficient reason to exist at all, and could as easily disappear. These two contrasting judgments will be thought in light of what can be understood as the fate and finitude of the political. In order to situate a critical exploration of Schürmann's remarks on the historical-ontological status of political life, the essay will begin by considering a correspondence that took place between Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. While Jaspers, it will be shown, understands the political to be a permanent sphere of human activity, Heidegger radically historicizes its importance, concluding with the disquieting gesture that the political realm may have played itself out. Crucially, for the purposes of an investigation into Schürmann, who tasked himself with drawing out the implications of Heidegger's rethematization of the question of being for thinking and acting, these distinct positions on the nature of the political are never resolved in his writings, but show up as signs of a deep hesitation regarding the fate of the political at the end of metaphysics.