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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The pandemic has brought into sharp relief the fundamental relationship between institution and human life: at the very moment when the virus was threatening to destroy life, human beings called upon institutions – on governments, on health systems, on new norms of behavior – to combat the virus and preserve life. Drawing on this and other examples, Roberto Esposito argues that institutions and human life are not opposed to one another but rather two sides of a single figure that, together, delineate the vital character of institutions and the instituting power of life. What else is life, after all, if not a continuous institution, a capacity for self-regeneration along new and unexplored paths? No human life is reducible to pure survival, to “bare life.” There is always a point at which life reaches out beyond primary needs, entering into the realm of desires and choices, passions and projects, and at that point human life becomes instituted: it becomes part of the web of relations that constitute social, political, and cultural life.
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Seitenzahl: 154
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Translator’s Note
By Way of a Prologue
Note
I. The Eclipse
From the Pandemic
Institutions and Movements
The Invention of Nature
Sovereign Institutions
Notes
II. The Return
Sociology
Law
Philosophy
Politics
Notes
III. The Productivity of the Negative
The End of Mediation
Humanity’s Prosthesis
Instincts and Institutions
The Social Imaginary
Notes
IV. Beyond the State
Sovereignless Institutions
The Law of Private Individuals
Subversive Justice
Beyond the State?
Notes
V. Institutions and Biopolitics
Biopolitics
Double Birth
Impersonal Law
Instituting Life
Notes
Epilogue
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Translator’s Note
By Way of a Prologue
Begin Reading
Epilogue
Index
End User License Agreement
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Institution
Roberto Esposito
Translated by Zakiya Hanafi
polity
Originally published in Italian as Istituzione © 2021 by Società editrice Il Mulino, Bologna.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2022
This work has been translated with the support of the Center for Books and Reading of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5157-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.Library of Congress Control Number: 2021950727
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Les institutions sont la garantie du gouvernement d’un peuple libre contre la corruption des moeurs, et la garantie du peuple et du citoyen contre la corruption du gouvernement
Institutions are the guarantee of a free people’s government against the corruption of morals, and the people’s and citizens’ guarantee against the corruption of the government.
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just
Translator’s Note
Regarding the Italian costituente, destituente, and istituente: these words could be translated, using the present participle, as constituting, destituting, and instituting. The result is ambiguous, though: for example, is “instituting thought” an action or a way of thinking? To avoid this confusion, in agreement with the author, I have chosen to follow the paradigm of constituent power.
This usage has a long history in English translations of political philosophy from French (pouvoir constituant), Italian (potere costituente), and German (verfassungsgebende Gewalt). It also reflects the use of “constituent power” in a large corpus of scholarly works on the topic written originally in English, from Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (1963) to Lucia Rubinelli’s Constituent Power: A History (2020).
While perhaps more distant from everyday language, “instituent thought” maintains its close genealogical kinship with the concepts and history out of which it arises.
Zakiya Hanafi
By Way of a Prologue
“Vitam instituere”/To Institute Life
In an obscure but crucial nook of the Western tradition, the expression vitam instituere, to institute life, poses a still unresolved question. At the heart of this phrase, which Humanist tradition linked to a text by a Roman jurist named Marcianus, stands the enigmatic relationship between institution and human life. We must resist the persistent temptation to view them as diverging poles, destined to meet up, or collide, only at a certain moment. Rather, they should be recognized as the two sides of a single figure that delineates at the same time the vital character of institutions and the instituent power of life. What else is life, after all, if not a continuous institution, a capacity for self-regeneration along new and unexplored paths? This is what Hannah Arendt meant when she said that human beings constantly start something new because, being born into the world, they themselves are a beginning.1
This first beginning was followed by another, the faculty of speech, which we can regard as a second birth. From that came cities – the political life that opened the horizon of history, although without ever cutting the thread that binds it to its biological roots. However different the regime of nomos may be from that of bios, it has never separated from it. If anything, their relationship has become tighter and tighter, to the point that it is impossible today to talk about “politics” without mentioning life. Institutions are at the center of this shift. They are the bridge by means of which law and politics shape societies, differentiating and uniting them.
This is why, even in the most dramatic circumstances, we can never stop instituting life and redefining its contours and objectives, or its conflicts and opportunities: because human beings are instituted by life, which ushers them into a common world, inseparable from the symbols that express it over time. This symbolic dimension shapes people no less than it is shaped by them, and it is not something added to human life from the outside: it makes human life what it is, distinguishing it from all other types.
No human life is reducible to pure survival – to “bare life,” to use Walter Benjamin’s well-known expression. There is always a point at which life projects out beyond primary needs, entering the realm of desires and choices, passions and projects. Given that human life has always been instituted, it never coincides with mere biological matter – even when crushed, by nature or history, and flattened into its hardest stratum. Even then, for as long as life is such, it reveals a way of being that, however deformed, violated, or trampled upon, remains what it is: a form of life. It receives this quality by belonging to a historical context made of social, political, and cultural relations. That which institutes us from the beginning, and which we ourselves institute continuously, is a web of relations within which the things we do acquire meaning for us, but for others too.
Of course, all this is predicated on the condition of staying alive. The unfolding of the relational life presupposes the staying power of the biological life, the possibility of survival. There is nothing reductive about the word “survival”: although vivid in our hopes and fears today, it is etched deeply into the entire history of humankind. The issue of conservatio vitae, the preservation of life, has been central to classical and modern culture. It resonates in the Christian appeal to the sacredness of life as well as in the political philosophy introduced by Hobbes, and touches the raw nerves of contemporary biopolitics. Staying alive is the first task demanded of individuals in every society: a challenge not always won and, indeed, regularly lost, that looms up again from time to time with unexpected violence.
This defensive act precedes all other options; it is their precondition and prerequisite. But after the first life, and along with it, we must also defend the second life, the one that is instituted and has the capacity to institute. For this reason, staying alive requires that we not give up on the other life, our life with others, tied to the most powerful meaning of communitas. This applies to both the horizontal plane of society and the vertical line of generations. The primary task of institutions is to allow a social ensemble to live together in a given territory, but also to ensure continuity throughout change, by extending the lives of parents into those of their children. The meaning of institutio vitae, the institution of life, must be traced in part to this necessity. Even before fulfilling a functional use, institutions respond to humans’ need to project something of themselves beyond their own lives – beyond their own deaths – by extending their first birth, so to speak, into their second.
Note
1.
Hannah Arendt,
The Human Condition
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 9.
IThe Eclipse
From the Pandemic
The coronavirus pandemic threatened to tear this dense fabric apart with unexpected violence. Much has been written about the phenomenology of the pandemic, with intentions and arguments that need not be repeated here. Our attention is better focused on the relationship between the emergence of the virus and the response of institutions. If we can shift our gaze away from the very deep wounds that the pandemic has inflicted on the body of the world, the task that now awaits us is to institute life anew or, more ambitiously, to institute a new life. The urgency of this need takes precedence over any other economic, social, or political necessity, because it forms the material and symbolic horizon from which all the others derive their meaning. After being challenged and at times overwhelmed for months by death, life seems to be calling for an instituent principle to restore its intensity and vigor.
But this cannot be done without first asking a fundamental question about the way institutions responded to the challenge of the virus, particularly in Italy. To keep a balanced judgment, we must guard against generalizations, by distinguishing between and articulating different levels of discourse. Certainly, negative aspects abound in the efforts that regional, national, and international institutions made to contain the damage; so much so that the negative can even be said to have prevailed at times over the positive. It is impossible to forget the inadequacies, shortages, and delays of the early interventions, which sometimes caused irreparable social harms and, especially in some areas, health harms as well. This lack of decisiveness was sometimes accompanied by excess intrusion into individual lifestyles, even when not strictly required, adding substantial political, economic, and social costs. The shifting of boundaries between legislative and executive powers in favor of the latter, caused by the use of emergency declarations that were not always necessary and sometimes arbitrary, went so far as to threaten the democratic endurance of political systems. These appeared to be struggling in the inevitably failed attempt to pursue and match the effectiveness of the more drastic procedures implemented by authoritarian regimes. In the second wave of the pandemic, still in progress at the time of writing, miscalculations and failures to act have been even more evident, with effects we will be able to gauge in the coming months; not to mention the horrific number of victims in Italy, higher than in comparable European countries.
Even so, it behooves us to ask about the role of institutions in reverse terms: How would we have withstood the virus’s onslaught without institutions? What would have happened, in Italy and elsewhere, if there had been no institutional framework to guide our behavior? Looked at from this point of view, it must be acknowledged that the contribution of institutions appeared for quite some time to be the only available resource. I am referring not only to regional and national administrations but to all institutions in the areas affected by the virus – from social organizations and professional associations to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – which have represented the last line of resistance against the pandemic. The fact that the virus did not engulf all barriers and spread undisturbed is owed essentially to them.
No doubt, as has been said, we acted in a state of emergency and, therefore, although the two concepts cannot be superimposed, in a state of exception with respect to institutional normality. But, leaving that aside for the moment, it was a state that could not be extended indefinitely and was later legitimized by the Italian Parliament. Most importantly, it was provoked not by a sovereign will to extend control over our lives but, rather, by a mix of necessity and contingency that was completely unforeseeable and quite different from a project aimed at subjugating the population. As legal scholars know, necessity is one of the primary sources of law, along with custom and written laws. In the case in question, the role of a tragic contingency is clear, with the consequent need to contain it. Certainly, for those who have the power to proclaim a state of emergency and prepare a response, the decision is always subjective. But in this case one is hard pressed to deny the degree of objectivity of an event whose beginnings and effects have very little of the voluntary or planned about them.
Similarly, it is undeniable that, in our intensely biopolitical regimes, healthcare has become a directly political matter at the disquieting crossroads between the politicization of medicine and the medicalization of politics; just as it is evident that our awareness of health has significantly increased compared to any previous type of society. But this, it seems to me, is not a bad thing. The fact that the right to life is considered an unquestionable premise on which all others are based marks an achievement of civilization from which we cannot retreat. In any case, our current biopolitical regime should not be confused with a system centered around sovereignty, because it constitutes a profound alteration of that system. Imagining that we are at the mercy of an unlimited power intent on taking over our lives does not account for the fact that centralized decision-making has long exploded into countless fragments, largely autonomous from national governments and located even in a transnational space.
Well then, keeping in mind all the limits mentioned above, it can be said that, on the whole, institutions in Italy withstood the impact of the disease, activating their immune antibodies. Of course, we know that every immune reaction, if intensified beyond a certain threshold, risks provoking an autoimmune disease. This happens when a society is overly exposed to desocialization. The problem our political systems always face is that of finding a sustainable equilibrium between community and immunity, between the protection and compression of life. The strength, but also the adaptability, of institutions is measured by how well they are able to adjust their defense level to the threat at hand while not underestimating or amplifying its perception.
During the early stage of the pandemic, institutions were hit by controversies arising from perspectives often so diametrically opposed that they canceled each other out. Institutions were criticized for doing too much and for not doing enough, due to indecision. Accused by some of unlawfully curbing individual liberties, to others they seemed incapable of governing individual and collective behaviors with a firm hand. Needless to say, as far as these kinds of criticisms are concerned, I have no intention of questioning their legitimacy or, as regards several of them, their merits, both of which seem well founded. But we must not lose sight of the fact that even the harshest criticism of institutions can only be developed from within them. What else are the media, websites, newspapers, and even writing and language, if not also institutions? True, they are different from political institutions and sometimes in blatant opposition to them. After all, conflict is not extraneous to democratic institutions; indeed, it is a prerequisite for their functioning.
The logic of the institution – or rather of what in this book I will call “instituent praxis” – implies a continual tension between inside and outside. Whatever lies outside institutions, before being institutionalized itself, alters the previous institutional structure, challenging, expanding, and deforming it. The difficulty of recognizing these dialectics stems from two mistaken assumptions that form the polemical objective of this book: the tendency to equate all institutions with state institutions; and the tendency to view them as static, as “states,” instead of in continuous becoming. As the masters of legal institutionalism teach, not only do there exist extra-state institutions but also anti-state institutions, such as protest movements that possess some form of organization. They express an instituent energy that institutions should also keep alive in order to “mobilize” and, in some ways, surpass themselves.
