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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This new book by the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito addresses the profound crisis of contemporary politics and examines some of the philosophical approaches that have been used to try to understand and go beyond this crisis. Two approaches have been particularly influential - one indebted to the thought of Martin Heidegger, the other indebted to Gilles Deleuze. While opposed in their political thrust and orientation, both approaches remain trapped within the political ontology that has framed our conceptual language for some time. In order to move beyond this political ontology, Esposito turns to a third approach that he characterizes as 'instituting thought'. Indebted to the work of the French political philosopher Claude Lefort, this third approach recognizes that the road to reconstructing a productive relation between ontology and politics, one that is both realistic and innovative, lies in instituting praxis. Building on this insight, Esposito conceptualizes social being as neither univocal nor plurivocal but as cross-cut by the dual semantics of political conflict. This new book by one of the most original European philosophers writing today will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, social and political theory and the humanities generally.
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Seitenzahl: 539
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Introduction
1 Destituting Power
2 Constituting Power
3 Instituting Thought
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
1 Destituting Power
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Instituting Thought
Three Paradigms of Political Ontology
Roberto Esposito
Translated by Mark William Epstein
polity
Copyright page
Originally published in Italian as Pensiero Istituente. Tre paradigmi di ontologia politica © 2020 Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Torino
This English translation © 2021, Polity Press
The translation of this work has been funded by SEPS
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4642-8 – hardback
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4643-5 – paperback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Esposito, Roberto, 1950- author. | Epstein, Mark William, translator.
Title: Instituting thought : three paradigms of political ontology / Roberto Esposito ; translated by Mark William Epstein.
Other titles: Pensiero istituente. English
Description: Medford : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A leading Italian philosopher develops an original perspective on the crisis of contemporary politics”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020057166 (print) | LCCN 2020057167 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509546428 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509546435 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509546442 (epub) | ISBN 9781509548040 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Political science--Philosophy. | Ontology.
Classification: LCC JA71 .E68213 2021 (print) | LCC JA71 (ebook) | DDC 320.01--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057166
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057167
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Introduction
1. The title and subtitle of this book are related in a doubly asymmetrical manner. First because the title – Instituting Thought – only refers to the third of three paradigms mentioned in the subtitle; but also because, instead of examining it from without, I place myself and proceed from within, attempting both its definition and its radicalization. Setting up in an already established construction site, modifying its outlines to the point of reconfiguring them into a new shape is, moreover, a consequential way of proceeding for a programmatically instituting thought. As in the case of the first two ontologico-political paradigms, I also interpret the third through the work of a twentieth-century author: the French philosopher Claude Lefort. Thanks to the still somewhat limited circulation of his thought – at least as compared to Heidegger and Deleuze, the referents of the other two paradigmatic axes – one can still question it in ways that are less conditioned by other interpretations, thus foregrounding, whether explicitly or implicitly, that which refers to the lexicon of institutions or, perhaps better, of instituting. This subject matter, organized into an ample series of textual and conceptual cross-references, becomes both the gravitational center and the theoretical purview of the entire book.
The pronounced heterogeneity of the three paradigms is highlighted by the shared weave that they partake in, which is defined by the category of political ontology in its specific postmetaphysical acceptation. To fully capture its meaning and scope, one needs to start by acknowledging the peculiarity of the politico-ontological approach, as compared to all other kinds of theory, sociology or even political philosophy. Unlike these, which are circumscribed within a specific regional ambit, political ontology does not relate to the area of being that concerns politics, but rather to the essential relationship that conjoins being and politics. And this is the case for both sides of the relationship – the necessarily political configuration of political praxis as well as the ultimately political character of every event. As concerns the first side, it is obvious that any political action implies a conception of space, time, and human beings – and therefore of being. One can certainly state that the different rankings of political philosophies, ancient and modern, are predicated on the more or less intense awareness that their authors had of this implication. The extraordinary philosophical prominence of the political works of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Hegel is due to their being not only theories but precisely political ontologies. This is true also of the great political thinkers of the twentieth century, from Weber to Schmitt, Arendt, and Foucault – who are all authors of political ontologies in the fullest sense of the term, rather than of philosophies. Moreover, every philosophical definition of being entails presuppositions and effects of a political nature – even those that deny that this is the case, since this very negation is based in principle on an opposition between the political and the impolitical. To claim that something, an action or a discourse, is not political already situates it within an opposition of a political nature. That which presents itself as apolitical or antipolitical does so as a consequence of removing its instituting moment, which, as such, is always political. Additionally, any modality of being – beginning with its own “power to be” – expresses all the political tension of the relationships it originates from and tends to alter.
Of course, the relationship between being and politics – which is constitutive of political ontology – has been understood in very different ways in the course of time. For a long period, indeed for the entire course of the history of metaphysics, it was interpreted as a basic foundation of a substantive kind, one that was destined to guarantee the correctness of political action. In other words, one imagined that politics could, or should, be guided by specific principles, grounded in the sphere of being and expressive of it. This kind of presumption characterized a significant part of the philosophical tradition, both of Platonic and of Aristotelian origin – but also the one that derives from Christian roots. Obviously it is not possible to establish any continuity between ancient and modern politics, given their crystal-clear lexical dissimilarities. When compared to ancient politics, which was still bound to metaphysical presuppositions, whether theological or natural, modern politics begins with and is constituted precisely starting with their revocation. Modernity, in the most pointed sense of the term, implies the negation of that which precedes it, of every transcendent presupposition. The abandonment of the state of nature as a preliminary condition for the state of politics, as theorized by Hobbes, bestows on the category of negation a central role in the modern configuration of power: only by negating that which precedes it can the political order establish its place. But, even though it characterizes the foundation in negative terms, modern political philosophy remains tied to the logic of foundation, brought to its culmination by Hegel precisely through the dialectical use of negation. Only with the crisis of Hegelianism does this dispositif begin to show the first signs of degradation, which Nietzsche will push to a point of no return. After Nietzsche, all attempts at restoration notwithstanding, the hypothesis of grounding politics in the sphere of a substantive being seems to be definitively exhausted, a process tied to the ongoing deconstruction of the notion of substance itself.
This, however, does not mean that political ontology itself disappears. Instead one could say that it is precisely the consummation of the metaphysical foundation that entails the need for a different establishment of the political. Only now it is inscribed in the fissure into which the foundation has precipitated – in other words, in its not being a foundation any longer. From this point on, any political conception presupposes a negative horizon: not only a negative foundation, one already theorized by modern political philosophy, but a non-foundation, a lack of foundation. Starting from this point, the relationship between being and politics no longer refers to presence but to absence, to a void, a gap. This explains why the principal political ontologies of the twentieth century are all inscribed in the groove of difference: from the point of view of ontology, politics is defined by the relationship between being and difference. This is what opposes them to the ancient and medieval ontologies of identity, pushing the ontologies of difference toward contemporaneity. In this sense, to borrow Foucault’s celebrated expression, they are all “ontologies of actuality.”
But they do exhibit a decisive variation, precisely as regards the role of difference, which changes as a function of the theoretical frameworks of which it is a part. Inside the paradigmatic triangle formed by being, politics, and difference, the three terms constantly change position and meaning, combining with one another in unprecedented ways. It is these shifts that define the diversity of the three paradigms we examine here. Politics can exhibit a trait that reproduces ontological difference within itself, as Heidegger maintains. Or it can instead constitute the intrinsically differential characteristic of a being extended over a single plane of immanence, as in Deleuze’s perspective. Finally, in yet another semantic register, interpreted by Lefort – but one that we can also define as neo-Machiavellian or conflictualist – social being is instituted by a symbolic difference that possesses the characteristics of politics. These are precisely the figures delineated by the three most important ontologico-political paradigms of contemporary philosophy: the post-Heideggerian, the Deleuzian, and the instituting paradigm, which is still in the process of being elaborated. These three paradigms don’t succeed one another chronologically but exist contemporaneously, interweaving in complex ways, which sometimes juxtapose them and sometimes exhibit one as the reverse of the other. But they do give rise to a diversity of effects on the philosophical debate, effects that the following pages emphasize, motivated by an intent that is itself ultimately political. My thesis is that, while the first two paradigms – the post-Heideggerian and the Deleuzian, which follow different and sometimes opposed modalities – are inscribed in the current crisis of the political and thus contribute to its exacerbation, only the third, the instituting, is able to reverse this drift with a new, affirmative project. What divides them is the role that the negative plays for each one with respect to the constitutive relationship between ontology and politics. In Heidegger the negative is present with such intensity that it opens up a gap between the two, while in the Deleuzian paradigm, conversely, it is erased, owing to their complete overlap. What characterizes the instituting paradigm, on the other hand, is a productive relationship with negation that allows one to articulate being and politics in a reciprocally affirmative relation.
2. Tracing the first ontologico-political paradigm – which is oriented toward the deactivation of action, and therefore also definable as a “destituting” paradigm – back to Heidegger is neither a foregone conclusion nor one devoid of problems. This is not only because he never claimed to be a political thinker, not even in the dark period of his rectorate, but also because all contemporary philosophers who, in various ways, could be ascribed to the destituting paradigm are situated in a political orbit that is radically counterposed to Heidegger’s. And yet, this very clear distance in political orientation notwithstanding, all of them, from Schürmann through Nancy to Agamben, consider him an essential theoretical point of reference. In this respect the same paradoxical relationship that had tied Heidegger to his great Jewish disciples – Marcuse, Arendt, Löwith – repeats itself. In this case, too, naturally, each of the philosophers I mentioned follows his or her own original path, in which references to Heidegger alternate with just as frequent ones to Bataille, Benjamin, and Foucault. And yet the traces left by Heidegger in their thought remain indelible. How come? What paradigmatic thread ties intellectuals of the extreme left to a thinker whose political orientation was always toward the right? In order to answer this question – which has made people use the phrase “left Heideggerianism” – one needs to look at Heidegger not from the perspective of his inauspicious political commitment in the 1930s – a perspective that is all too much in evidence today – but rather from that of the impolitical turn that succeeded it, and in ever more pronounced forms, from the postwar period to the 1960s.
The following pages provide a fairly detailed account of Heidegger’s itinerary, reconstructing the transitions and the discontinuities of a grand thought that ever more clearly modifies its conception of politics. These are pages that never elide the profound connection to the theoretical center of gravity of his work as a whole, represented by the “negative” dispositif of ontological difference. From this angle, one can even trace an obviously imperfect parallel between ontological difference and the political–impolitical bipolarity. In both cases the relationship is characterized, and constituted, by a negation. Just as alētheia is recognizable only in the negative modality of “non-concealment,” analogously politics originates negatively from an impolitical presupposition that both founds it and defies it. Having originated from something non-political – the impolitical site of the polis – politics is not able to correspond to it with a sufficient degree of radicalism. The complex equilibrium that still allowed Heidegger in the 1930s to imagine the instituting of the political, even if by thinkers and poets, breaks at some point, projecting the two poles, the political and the impolitical, in ever more divergent directions. When this happens, the impolitical – understood, up to a certain moment, as the negative foundation of politics – becomes its absolute negation. This is the case when politics – any type of politics, including that to which, in the early 1930s, Heidegger had entrusted the task of saving the West from the anti-metaphysical grip that was strangling it – appears to him to be incorporated and perverted by technological Machenschaft [machination], a legacy contemporary to the Romanization of the Greek language. That is when, having lost its contacts with an ever more degraded politics, the impolitical expands to the point of occupying the entire ontological horizon, clearly separating itself from the destiny of humankind. From this point on, the only way for humans to respond to that which calls them is to deactivate their action, ready to listen to a poeticizing or meditative thought.
All of Heidegger’s work, starting in the early 1940s, revolves around this destituting paradigm. That which was conceived as the negative presupposition of all political institutions and of instituting itself now becomes its very clear rejection. Politics, which at this point has been entirely absorbed by technology, should no longer be instituted, but destituted. Any kind of “doing” should be undone. Only the radical tonality, the decisive lexicon related to taking a decision, is what remains of the political – a decision that now coincides with a non-decision, one that corresponds to the oxymoron of the will to not will. But, once all political possibilities have been voided, even the impolitical, deprived of its original foundational power, ends up annihilating itself. If the impolitical is thought of as the source of the political, when the latter implodes into technology, the impolitical ends up sliding into nothingness aswell. Once the political has been annihilated, the impolitical, deprived of a point of contrast, sinks with it. Insofar as human beings are concerned, since they are ontologically prevented from transforming reality, they can only wait for the fulfillment of destiny. What is striking in Heidegger’s language is the activist tone taken by that which one can subject oneself to only in a passive manner: the non-postponable nature of the ultimate option that continues to suggest the category of potentiality – but only so long as it remains unrealized, sheltered from an activity that, in realizing it, would empty it. It is this impolitical intensity of the deactivation of all politics that post-Heideggerian thinkers absorb from Heidegger, transposing it, in similarly radical fashion, into a horizon that is as theoretically revolutionary as it is practically inert.
One needs to add that the Heideggerian roots of this destituting line are not the only ones. At its origin, not always fully consciously, lies a paradigm that in its day was defined as impolitical, inscribed on the reverse of the official side of twentieth-century philosophy. I am thinking of authors who were not professional philosophers, such as Karl Barth, Simone Weil, Georges Bataille, Hermann Broch, Elias Canetti. They are the first to coin the, elevated and tragic, language of dis-activation: from “decreation,” to “passive action,” to “non-agent,” “not translated into act,” “decreation,” “blocked at the stage of pure potentiality.” The entire lexicon of the destituting paradigm was born between the 1920s and 1930s and was then resemanticized at the end of the century. At its center we find a negative presupposition – expressed by the prefix in im-political – which excludes any affirmative judgment. In this world one finds nothing but conflicts of power and interest, separated by an invisible line from what is not and will never be able to be. The impolitical is not something situated beyond it, that does not exist as such, but that invisible line itself. It accomplishes nothing but express the impossibility of representing goodness, justice, and value politically. But the impolitical, in turn, cannot escape the contradiction of being able to define itself only on the basis of the political, from which it distances itself. It is this insurmountable antinomy that places it on the same slim ridge that both conjoins and disjoins gnosticism and mysticism, pushing one into the reverse of the other. That which ultimately remains, notwithstanding everything that distinguishes individual interpreters from one another, is the shared depoliticizing outcome that the entire paradigm of deactivation produces. Removed from any perspective oriented toward action, protected from the temptations of work, bent on the anarchical removal of principles, it dissolves the possibility of the political in the as yet unrevealed enigma of a potentiality devoid of act.
3. The ontologico-political paradigm whose influence is most strongly felt in Deleuze’s works is antipodal to the post-Heideggerian paradigm. Deleuze himself, while recognizing Heidegger’s philosophical stature, views his own oeuvre as a sort of confutation of the latter’s. While they both share a number of themes, what sharply separates them is the plane, which Deleuze himself defines as one “of immanence,” that is in principle destined to abolish all kinds of ontological difference. Since being is univocal, in other words constituted in the unique form of difference, instead of being separated from an ontic dimension, difference coincides with the becoming of being itself. Without dwelling on the transitions that lead Deleuze to elaborate this plane of immanence, we can state that its effect is the exclusion of the notion of the impolitical itself, a notion that, on the other hand, Heidegger’s political reflections do revolve around. Once the negative presupposition of the political has been suppressed, the latter expands to the point of filling the entire movement of reality. This is what Deleuze argues, at least starting from 1968; and this period is identified, not only by him, as the period in which the realization of the political and the politicization of the real resolve into each other without residue. From this perspective the French philosopher’s work – especially the Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus – can be seen as the most intense political ontology of the twentieth century, in other words a work in which the two terms, ontology and politics, experience the highest degree of superposition, one that frontally collides with the irremediable fracture Heidegger opened between them.
This does not mean, however, that the matter is closed. It is in fact precisely this superposition that prevents Deleuze from elaborating an effective political thought, almost as if the three areas of being, politics, and thought could not find any possible articulation within his philosophy. This also helps explain the sharp distinction between a first, more technically philosophical part, essentially devoid of political references, and a later one, which exhibits a strong political orientation but is perhaps not as philosophically rigorous. The impression one receives is that, the more politics is superposed on being, becoming the constitutive cipher of its becoming, the less it is being thought of in its specificity. Once it has been extended to the entire ontogenetic process and is its immediate expression, politics ends up losing its own contours, and in the end confuses them with those of being, in which it inheres. If being is political as such, according to Deleuze’s own explicit declaration, how can a specifically political activity be distinguished within it? What differentiates it from that which it is not? Or from another kind of politics, oriented in the opposite direction? I believe that the reason for this impasse – which has not prevented a motley galaxy of political thinkers, in addition to neo-naturists, post-humanists, and hyper-immanentists, from drawing inspiration from the Deleuzian paradigm for their theses – should be sought in Deleuze’s loss of contact with the category of negation. It is true that his emancipation from the negative – which does constitute the principal explicit objective of his ontology – never happens all at once or completely. One can instead say that his work is indeed troubled by it in all its parts, without ever managing to completely discard it. So he passes, sometimes on the same page, from the mutual implication of difference and negation to the opposition between them, from a conception of difference as a figure that affirms the negative to another, which instead excludes it, and he never opts definitely for one of the two. This is the reason for a tragic vein that runs through an oeuvre that is all too often interpreted in an insufficiently problematic fashion. The fact remains that the greater the influence of Bergson, this staunch proponent of the misleading and therefore non-existent nature of the negative, the more Deleuze abandons the category of the negative. This development, in turn, has entropic effects on the determination of the political, since one cannot ask oneself what politics is, even a certain kind of politics, without simultaneously knowing what it is not. This is the way in which a position that is programmatically hyperpolitical – in the sense that it interprets any event in political terms – is reversed, if not into a depoliticizing outcome, at least into a failed determination of the political: of its subjects and objects, of its ends and means, of its organizational forms and strategies. And this is not due to a default, as in the case of Heidegger, but to an excess of politics – which, being defined as identical to everything that exists, risks becoming something that is not at all defined.
If the Heideggerian paradigm can be called destituting, the Deleuzian, even taking its most influential political translations into account, can be called constituting. Obviously, not in a technical – that is, juridico-political, sense; but certainly in an ontological sense, as an eternally creative form, and also, precisely for this reason, one that is decreative of the reality just created. Just as the primacy of constitutive power – one proposed, within the same ontological perspective, by Antonio Negri – overwhelms constituted power, so the infinitely productive power of being resolves each “state” into its own becoming, dissolving it as such. This is the effect of the substitution of the category of production, transposed to an ontological level, for that of praxis, a category still too charged with the negative to be able to merge with the plane of immanence. In the course of an extensive interpretation of creatio ex nihilo – taken beyond the moment of Genesis and rendered co-eternal with the world – productive creation exposes the created to an unceasingly renewed creation, which is made possible only via the abolition of what precedes. In the Deleuzian paradigm, even thought is qualified by the continuous creation of new concepts rather than by a differential resumption of that which has already been thought. This is the same relationship that exists between the virtual and the actual: the latter is no more than the momentary and deceptive fixation of a process that flows ceaselessly from one virtual to the next. Understood in this manner, the constitutive act, which “dissolves” being into an eternal becoming, is at the same time destitutive of that which it creates, and therefore ultimately also destitutive of itself – just as desire, which moves the entire Deleuzian political ontology, is always at the same time a desire for life from the universal point of view and a desire for death from the individual point of view: a desire for escape and abolition, for emancipation and self-repression. This is true of any desire, which is limitless and therefore also inclusive of its opposite.
This is what explains the insuperability of capitalism, as elaborated upon by the philosopher. Within Deleuze’s ontological dispositif there are two ways in which capitalism cannot be denied: on the one hand, because negation does not exist, only affirmative difference does; on the other, because no other social formation can unleash the flows of desire and nomadic movement to the degree capitalism can. It is true that capitalism simultaneously harnesses them with bonds, blockages, and striations that must be vanquished by means of what Deleuze refers to as “counter-effectuations.” But this occurs from within capitalist effectuation itself – since there is nothing external to it. It is an effectuation that needs to be fully completed, freed from its contradictions and indulged in, in an ever-accelerating fashion. In this sense acceleration, or intensification, appears to be Deleuze’s only political category: one oriented not to changing the present state of affairs, but rather to pushing it toward implosion. What needs to be accelerated or intensified is always the reality that is unfolding, never a different one, which is declared impossible. As in the case of Nietzsche, the only way of facing nihilism is to drive it to its extreme outcomes, making what had been passive up to that point active. This is how Deleuze believes that capitalism – with all the slivers of fascism that characterize it – should be led to self-destruction: by infinitely accelerating its movement, in a coincidence of creation and destruction, constitution and destitution. Driving affirmation to its acme also means affirming that which is counterposed to it, thus leading to the collapse of both forces. As Hegel had explained, absolute affirmation coincides with absolute negation. At the apex of its development, the constituting paradigm tends to join the destituting paradigm from the opposite side, in a shared rejection of instituting thought.
4. What distinguishes instituting thought from the destituting paradigm and its messianic matrix, as well as from the constituting one and its eschatological inspiration, is its taking leave of the lexicon of political theology while it remains aware of the incompleteness of modern secularization; this awareness is especially strong in Lefort. The instituting paradigm is protected from the return of the theological because it is extraneous to the presupposition of the One that, albeit in different forms, remains at the heart of both Heideggerian and Deleuzian ontologies. Social being is neither univocal nor plurivocal, but conflictual in the instituting paradigm, and this is why it can be defined as neo-Machiavellian. What characterizes the social – all interhuman relationships – is neither the absoluteness of the One nor the infinite proliferation of the manifold, but the tension between the Two. Even when it proclaims its compactness or seems to fracture into infinite differences, society is always characterized by a fundamental antagonism, one that ultimately all the others can be related back to. The role of the political, both central and ineradicable, is to stage this division, raising it from the empirical plane of the clash of powers and interests to the symbolical one of the government of society. The institutional bent that gathers the social around the division that runs through it is symbolic – in its distinction from both the real and the imaginary. Sumbolon, according to its own etymon, evokes an order that is not alternative to the conflict but is produced by it and productive of it, in a form destined to constantly change on the basis of the power relationships that are established each time between the parties to the conflict. This does not mean that instituting praxis, from its Machiavellian matrix through all its subsequent incarnations, is neutral. It certainly takes sides, it is partisan – oriented toward an expansion of freedoms and a narrowing of inequalities. It is difficult to imagine something that represents the instituting paradigm better than the Roman institution of tribune of the people [tribunus plebis], mentioned by Machiavelli in his Discourses. Born of the conflict with the nobility and itself a generator of new social clashes, this is perhaps the clearest example of an instituting power that does not destroy a given institutional equilibrium, but innovates it in an affirmative sense. From this point of view Machiavelli’s thought is at the heart of the instituting paradigm. The political is that which unites society via its divisions, rendering a fracture that had not reached awareness and was therefore potentially destructive up to that point symbolically manageable. Within the instituting paradigm, difference remains what it is, without splitting into the ontological fracture between the political and the impolitical, as in Heidegger, or being flattened out into the Deleuzian coincidence of ontology and politics. If the political is made into the institution of the social, it is thereby contained in the social, but not identified with it. One is holding fast to the symbolic limit, thus preventing the social from coinciding with itself and subsiding into absolute immanence.
Obviously such a dynamic, which inscribes transcendence into immanence, so to speak, presupposes a radical revision of the category of institution, by comparison with the canonical ways in which it has been treated in the domains of political science, sociology, and the law. The passage from the noun (“institution”) to the verb, “to institute,” already points to a deep transformation with respect to all the katechontic, eschatological, and messianic dispositifs of political theology, which are all explicitly hostile to any encounter with history. Rather than referring to a consolidated order of rules and laws, instituting refers to a task that coincides with that of politics and is destined to continually change the normative framework in which it operates – and to do so without either deactivating it in a salvific mode or dissolving it in the name of a creativity so accelerated that it destroys what was just created. An instituting logic exhibits a profound relationship with the historicity of existence, one that is far removed both from the deactivation of destituting power and from the acceleration of constituting power. The instituting movement is always a creatio ex aliquo – neither a *decreatio nor a creatio ex nihilo; it keeps together origin and duration, innovation and conservation, functionalizing the one toward the further empowerment of the other. As Lefort’s teacher Merleau-Ponty argued, the institution, however original, always arises in the context of a preexisting situation; it always makes use of fabrics that were woven previously, in the fields of the arts, the sciences, thought, and, naturally, politics. It does not entrust itself either to the Heideggerian temporality of the event or to the Deleuzian one of repetition – exceeding both the severe majesty of being and the inarticulate flow of becoming. To institute in the grooves of what was already instituted creates stability and stabilizes creation – and does so without revolutionary proclamations, messianic prophecies, or anarchistic intentions, since there does not exist and there has never existed a society able to forgo power. Instituting praxis deconstructs any substantiality of power, doubts any claims to belonging, reveals its empty center, which can be occupied each time only by the forces that prevail in that moment, before they are substituted by others, which are just as replaceable. Within the instituting paradigm, political subjects do not precede the conflict in any substantive fashion but are shaped and transformed by it. The category of subjectivation, which coincides with the always collective movement of instituting, takes the place of the category of subject.
An important contribution in this direction was provided by the legal institutionalism of the first decades of the last century, represented by figures such as Maurice Hauriou, and especially Santi Romano. At the center of their work, whose foundational value was also recognized by Carl Schmitt, are the challenges they pose not only to the obligatory relationship between institution and legal person – via the reference, brought into play by Hauriou, to an institution-thing that recalls the category of the “impersonal” – but also to the identification of institution and state, an identification Romano declared was “in crisis” already in the first years of the twentieth century. Their work exhibits elements of a rupture with the legal lexicon that has not yet been sufficiently exploited in its ontologico-political and even philosophical presuppositions. This is about the paradigmatic contrast between institution and law, which was then taken up and even developed with originality by the young Deleuze. The state not only is not the sole – or the main – form of institutional arrangement, but it always coexists with other institutions subordinated or superordinated to it, which are autonomous and compete with it because they are situated outside the sovereign regime, if not actually opposed to it. But in Romano’s elaboration these can be considered institutions to all effects and purposes, so long as they meet the condition of being internally organized; and this applies even to those that the state declares illegitimate on the grounds that they are hostile to it, as in the case of revolutionary associations. This does not necessarily mean that they have reasons that are ethically inferior to its own – in fact they are often superior. It is difficult not to grasp, or to underestimate, the innovative power of the instituting paradigm with respect to the two currents of legal normativism and decisionism, with which it was necessarily in conflict. A radically different conception of the law separates them: the first two currents rely on a paradigm that is enclosed in the language, also sovereign, of the primacy of the written law and of the will of the legislator; institutionalism on the other hand relies on a paradigm that is open to the pressures of society and to the exigencies of history, it has to respond to the urgencies of necessity and to the needs of life. In this sense the law is the object of a struggle that centers on its own meaning even before centering on the issue of specific rights. To say that the law, instead of responding to institutions that are fixed in time, never ceases to institute means attributing a performative force to it that unleashes all its performative power. Precisely insofar as it is “unnatural” – entirely artificial – instituting law can intervene effectively in life: not in order to save it or re-create it anew, as the paradigms of political theology propose in a politically inactive manner, but in order to change it from within. This is a possible starting point from inside the crisis of contemporary political philosophy. Today the only paradigm of political ontology that is capable of politically rearticulating being and thought is the one that refers to instituting praxis.
*
The first person to talk about a postfoundational political ontology is Oliver Marchart: he does so in an important book, dedicated to the thought of Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, and Laclau, which opportunely substitutes this term for the excessively generic and trite “poststructuralism.” As he develops the tension between the polarities of politics and the political, la politique and le politique, Politik and das Politische, he sees the second term as possessing that energetic element that is destined to confer vitality to the first, which is still devoid of a foundation. The impolitical, conceived of as a supplement to the lack of legitimation in postclassical political ontologies, withdraws at the very moment at which it institutes the social. This withdrawal is not, however, equivalent to the negation of the foundation – which would restore the same metaphysical mechanism that had been deconstructed, only in the negative – but instead intends to assume it in a weak version, which oscillates between presence and absence without ever coinciding with either one or the other. According to Marchart, one should beware of confusing postfoundationalism with anti-foundationalism or, even worse, with the postmodern thesis that “anything goes,” “since a post-foundational approach does not attempt to erase completely such figures of the ground, but to weaken their ontological status.”1 Having reemerged as “the political” – in a sense that does not coincide with that used by Carl Schmitt – this artificial foundation has the function of preventing “politics” from closing in on itself, flattened out into mere administration. In this fashion something similar to what Heidegger defines as “ontological difference” would be inscribed at the heart of political ontology. Resting on an absent base, a new artificial foundation would work affirmatively, precisely because of its own negativity.
This perspective is not fully convincing, not only because it makes reference to a weak ontology,2 but also because it takes a very heterogeneous group of philosophers back to the same paradigm. While Marchart does reconstruct their different itineraries, pointing out semantic and conceptual dissimilarities, he does so within a single horizon. A problem of this kind – also present in Carsten Strathausen’s book on neo-ontology,3 where he assembles a series of thinkers who share an overcoming of Marxian and post-Marxian dialectics but do not really have much in common – is instead absent in Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen’s research on political ontology. They divide the thinkers included in Radical Democracy into the opposed categories of lack and abundance: “two different versions of radical democracy follow from this: one that emphasizes the hegemonic nature of politics, and another that cultivates a strategy of pluralization.”4 The former, generally thinkers with a Lacanian background, like Laclau for instance, think of the political starting from a constitutive lack, and institutionalize it as an absent foundation. Not only democracy, but also the hegemonic alternatives that succeed one another within it are always internally destabilized by a lack of substance that renders them structurally incomplete and impermanent. On the other hand, the ontologies of abundance, in which one can easily recognize Deleuze’s profile and that of nomadic thinkers, create ever new networks of materiality, flow, and energy. The sign of some sort of lack transpires in their case too, but it is always filled by new differences, which succeed one another in a potentially infinite becoming. In this game of mutually reflecting mirrors, there seem to be two political theologies that face each other, counterposed and complementary, one negative, the other positive. For one – one could say – there is nothing within being, for the other, nothing external to being.
Notes
1
Oliver Marchart,
Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 2.
2
Cf. also Stephen K. White,
Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of a Weak Ontology in Political Theory
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
3
Carsten Strathausen, “A Critique of Neo-Left Ontology,”
Postmodern Culture
16.3 (2006): 1–38.
4
Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen,
Radical Democracy: Politics between Abundance and Lack
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). For the bipolarity between theories of emptiness and theories of fullness, see also Laura Bazzicalupo, “Radicalizzare la democrazia: Produttività politica del vuoto o pienezza ontologica,” in
Almanacco di Filosofia e Politica
, ed. Roberto Esposito, vol. 1:
Crisi dell’immanenza: Potere, conflitto, istituzione
, ed. Mattia Di Pierro and Francesco Marchesi (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2019), pp. 75–92, here p. 7.
1Destituting Power
1. One cannot state that the relationship between Martin Heidegger’s thought and politics has been fully explored – regardless of the growing interest directed at the issue, which has led to its becoming a focal point of interest in contemporary philosophical debates. Even more than the objective complexity of the issue, the fashion in which it has been undertaken, which was mostly prejudiced, has prevented this exploration from occurring more fully. Facing off and confronting each other frontally are two widely divergent lines of interpretation, which provide opposing evaluations of the philosopher’s well-known compromises with Nazism. Where some interpreters have seen them as a point of coalescence that leads to a precipitate of his thought, and therefore the key to interpreting all of Heidegger’s thinking, others have attempted to isolate them, reducing them to a mere biographical episode, of little relevance with respect to his work as whole. The presupposition – but ultimately also the consequence – of both perspectives has been the selection, within the vast Heideggerian corpus, of those texts that best seemed to bolster their respective interpretive strategies. Where those who argue for the centrality of the Nazi option privilege his writings from the 1930s where it is more explicit, their adversaries focus their attention on those that follow or even on those that precede them chronologically, starting with Sein und Zeit, and put aside those texts that are more directly implicated with the regime. Subsequently, especially with the recent publication of the Black Notebooks, the gray area within Heidegger’s work has appeared to grow ever larger, taking on various shadings of antisemitism. At this point, in the course of an unusual crescendo of disagreements and polemics, the hermeneutical confrontation shifted to the incriminated texts, which were examined not only from an ideological and political point of view but also from a philosophical one.
What remains at stake, regardless, is the configuration of the relationship between politics and thought. In what sense can Heidegger’s thought, given all the changes it underwent in the course of time, be considered “political”? And to what extent do his political stances, taken during the Nazi years, retain some philosophical importance when considering his thought in its entirety? The answer to this dual question has up to this point oscillated between two extreme polarities, whereby in one case one tends to politicize all of Heidegger’s philosophy, while in the other one tends to affirm its substantially impolitical nature. Each perspective, however, has had to confront irrefutable matters of fact. If the hyperpolitical interpretation – which depicts the philosopher as a crypto-Nazi – does not manage to explain the extraordinary theoretical depth of some of the most fundamental works of twentieth-century philosophy, the impolitical one is led to ignore the just as indubitable influence of Heidegger on ample areas of contemporary political philosophy. I am not only referring to Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, avowed political thinkers and Heidegger’s students,1 I am also referring to a number of philosophers with strong political inclinations such as Nancy, Sloterdijk, Agamben, who have all been intensely influenced by the Heideggerian paradigm. In truth an observation of this kind could be extended to the entire area of continental thought. While one must certainly make all the necessary distinctions, the Heideggerian tone of philosophers such as Derrida, Schürmann, and Vattimo, themselves important interpreters of Heidegger, is not in doubt. But which thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century, with the exception of the analytical school, can be considered completely extraneous to the Heideggerian lexicon? The fact that a majority are located on the political left – to the extent that some have talked of a gauche heideggerienne2 – only increases the problematic nature of the issue.3 If Heidegger’s political engagement – whatever its nature and duration – was situated on the German right, why did it arouse such an enduring interest among what, starting with Sartre, can be defined as the European philosophical left? Why did engaged thinkers on the left, communists if not also anarchists, not only never cut the thread that tied them to Heidegger’s philosophy, but instead appropriated some of its constitutive categories and reworked them as their own?
To provide an answer that is not limited to empirical circumstances of a biographical or editorial nature – after the war, these had a far from negligible impact on the circulation of his thought – one has to take into account the interpretive contrast between a political and an impolitical reading and attempt to rethink it in a theoretically more articulated form. What appears in the Heideggerian literature as an interpretive dichotomy – between political and impolitical – should be recognized as a dispositif that is internal to his thought. The hypothesis I advance here is that Heidegger’s philosophy, and not only that which addresses the political, is constituted in and by its relationship with this dispositif. In other words, it is constituted along the mobile line where the two vectors of the political and the impolitical reciprocally imply each other and continuously translate into each other, albeit without cancelling their difference and in fact reinforcing it. The specificity of the Heideggerian conception of the political resides precisely in its antinomical relationship with the impolitical dimension. Far from delineating an area external to the political horizon, this relationship represents both its necessary presupposition and its internal challenge. The issue should be viewed from both sides: if the political is always generated from an impolitical ground, the latter in turn takes on a political significance, entering into tension with the former. One should actually talk about a single unit of meaning rather than two opposite elements, a unit that can be viewed from different angles. This is the reason for the divergent perspectives it gave rise to in the critical literature, exhibiting either political or impolitical characteristics. Even if one divides this unit into distinct paths, one should not lose sight of the contradictory node that is formed by their intertwining, because it is the only one capable of providing the overall cypher of Heideggerian thought.4
The fact that the two layers of Heidegger’s discourse, while inseparable, are never unproblematically superimposed on each other but, on the contrary, become increasingly conflictual along the arc of his entire oeuvre represents a hermeneutical difficulty for those who approach his thought. What is at stake is precisely the figure of their difference, in a manner that in some ways recalls the ontological difference between Being and beings: although it reveals itself through beings, Being cannot be limited to them. In their turn, beings can never exhaust the being that they “are,” but rather tend to forget it. The political is also traversed, if not constituted, by a difference between what it is and what it is not and ultimately can never be. From this point of view, as is the case with all the other most important concepts of the philosopher, starting with alētheia, the positive can never be defined except by starting with the negative, in fact from the modality of the double negation, as the opposite of that which is not. This is also the case for the political – except for a brief period, which ran its course in the mid-1930s, when Heidegger attempts to express it directly – which only becomes meaningful by carving itself out from a non-political background that constitutes its condition, but never coincides with it. In the course of time, what changes is the relationship between these two registers of the negative: that which is, so to speak, constituting, on the one hand, and the destituting, which is destined to increasingly exclude the former, on the other. If the negative presupposition, that is to say, the impolitical, is that from which the political stems and takes shape, from a certain point onwards it becomes the explicit negation of the political. What was initially a tension internal to a single process diverges into a laceration between contrastive poles, destined to mutually annul each other.
From that point on the impolitical is on an ever more marked collision course with the political, which is homologized into a single nihilistic dimension, one that coincides with the generalized domination of technology. The impolitical therefore transitions from the role of a necessary background to that of functioning as a critical dispositif in its relationship with the political. What was a negative presupposition that enabled one to think of the political becomes its pure negation: no longer the “non-political” from which the political starts, but that which negates it in its very possibility. In this case, however, one should not understand “negation” to mean any active modality, an action against, but rather a “non-action” in the radical sense of an abandonment of the category of “action” itself. If all existing manifestations of politics are part of the same destructive technology – as Heidegger, starting from a certain phase, will argue with ever greater conviction – the “impossible” task of the impolitical becomes that of their deactivation. That such a task is consciously impossible is due not only to its inability to translate into action but also to the absence of any subjectivity capable of enacting it. It is precisely the paradigm of “putting to work,” moreover – which Heidegger in the mid-1930s still thought of affirmatively – that subsequently becomes the target of his polemics. The impolitical – which by now is the focus of his attention, an attention critical of all actual politics – coincides with the placing into unworkability5 of any political operation and with the destitution of any institution, even though no entity, individual or collective, can put it into practice, since it is the very notion of praxis, before anything else, that is deactivated. The impolitical, in other words, is not an active option for human beings, but the condition that necessarily makes any such option vain, annulling any decision other than to “let be” what is.
This is how the antinomy of Heidegger’s reflections on the political come to light, expressed by the negative character of the impolitical – negative with regard to any kind of politics, resisted from the very roots of its technical–nihilistic drift, but also negative in relation to itself. How can the impolitical, in its withdrawal from workability, continue to exercise any critical function whatsoever? And, even prior to that issue, how can it assume any differential relief with respect to the political, if it constitutes its negative presupposition? Non-action cannot be thought of logically outside of the relationship with the action it negates, just as destitution does not make any sense without any institution to destitute. But if this is the case, if action and inaction are the inseparable surfaces of one sheet of paper, the impolitical loses all consistency and dissolves as such. So long as it inheres in the political, it is no more than its inner fold, as is the case with some Heideggerian texts of the 1930s. When instead, in subsequent works, it becomes the motor for the deactivation of a politics that at this point coincides with technology, it loses all possible connotations. Taken to its greatest intensity, negation ends up negating even itself, annulling itself as negation. In this sense one could conclude that, for Heidegger, politics in its ultimate version coincides with the movement of its self-destitution.
*
A quasi-transcendental presupposition of the entire western conception of the political is that it has a negative foundation. The political seems to be recognizable only starting from its external limits.6 Analogously, in the world as experienced by the Greeks, the polis, to the extent that it is non-political, can be thought of only against the background of the oikos, praxis is defined in opposition to theōria, and vita activa in opposition to vita contemplativa. In the modern period the civil order is seen as rising from the abandonment of the natural one, while the public sphere, in its turn, is built as an alternative to the private. In any case, to define itself, the political needs a negative background from which to detach itself. Over time obviously the political and the non-political are interpreted in different ways, which modify both the relationship between the two terms and the value given to them individually in each particular instance. In the Greek world, while polis and oikos remain separate, they mutually imply each other in a recursive fashion: while from a genetic point of view the polis follows the formation of non-political communities, from a logical or metaphysical point of view it precedes them as their presupposed essence.7 This means that the oikos is situated in a pre-political context rather than in an apolitical or non-political dimension, one that waits to be fulfilled by the advent of the polis, just as generic life waits to be brought to perfection by the “good life.”
The situation of the relationship between the political and the non-political is different in the Christian world, where, at least in its Augustinian version, the “non” is more pronounced with respect to the political world. Rather than pre-political, civitas dei, the city of God, is radically apolitical and even post-political – in the sense that it is destined, at the end of time, to definitely take over from civitas hominis, the city of humans, which it is not placed next to horizontally, but to which it is counterposed vertically. In its turn, the human city can fulfill itself only by negating itself in the city of God. Although they commingle in the course of history, the two essentially incompatible cities are destined to be irreversibly divided on Judgment Day, when only one will remain. In the modern conception inaugurated by Hobbes, the presupposition of the political, in other words of the state of nature, tends to be seen in a light where its negative aspects are emphasized. This is not only an a-political condition or a simply non-political one, but a decidedly anti-political one, given that, in its irrecoverable lack of order, it contradicts the only possible political order, which is made possible solely by excluding the natural order. The subsequent distinction, typical of the bourgeois world, between public and private or, starting with Hegel, between state and civil society nuances and reduces this separation but does not eliminate it, giving rise to an antinomical dialectics that in Marx is resolved in revolution. Before him, even with all the conceptual reversals, one could argue that the thought of the political remains suspended by the presence of a negative element, which is necessary to delineate its specificity. With the advent of Nietzsche, this horizon is transformed and ultimately breaks up. Not only do none of the previous dichotomies seem to remain standing, but it is the very machine of negative presupposition that runs aground, not because the negative presupposition fails but because it begins to penetrate the political itself, expanding and deforming its contours. If there is something that, for all their profound differences, unifies the perspectives of Schmitt’s, Arendt’s, and Foucault’s political ontologies, it is precisely their perception of the implosion of the negative foundation and of the risk it entails for the existence of the political itself. The amalgam of the statist and the political in Schmitt, of the social and the political in Arendt, and of the political and the biological in Foucault seem to determine a turning point that cannot be grasped by means of classical categories, ancient and modern, that are involved in the very subsidence of their object. From another perspective, we are dealing with the same drift that Heidegger recognizes in the complete overlap of technology and politics that is destined to crush the latter in the cogwheels of the former. What these authors – with the exception of Foucault – share is the politically dissolving outcome to which the disappearance of the negative presupposition of the political leads. Without a contrastive backdrop, the political can no longer be thought, because it has lost its contours in an indistinction from society, nature, and technology that is irreversible at this point. The category of the “biopolitical,” which grasps the commingling of politics and life genealogically, appears to be the only one capable of subtracting contemporary political thought from this negative logic – or, perhaps better, of subtracting the negative from the logic of negation, reconverting it into an affirmative perspective.
*
2. What distinguishes the rectorial address (Rektoratsrede
