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authorSilvio Rhatto <rhatto@riseup.net>2019-12-02 12:55:57 -0300
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+[[!meta title="Stasis Before the State: Nine Theses on Agonistic Democracy"]]
+
+* Athor: Dimitris Vardoulakis
+* References:
+ * https://www.worldcat.org/title/stasis-before-the-state-nine-theses-on-agonistic-democracy/oclc/1000452218
+ * https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/2009359
+ * https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1xhr6vd
+ * https://www.academia.edu/35908382/Vardoulakis_Stasis_Before_the_State_--_Introduction
+ * https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823277414/stasis-before-the-state/
+
+## Excerpts
+
+ This question would be trivial if sovereignty is under­
+ stood simply as the sovereignty of specific states. The
+ question is pertinent when we consider the vio­lence
+ functioning as the structural princi­ple of sovereignty.
+ Sovereignty can only persist and the state that it sup­
+ ports can only ever reproduce its structures—­political,
+ economic, ­legal, and so on—­through recourse to certain
+ forms of vio­lence. Such vio­lence is at its most effective
+ the less vis­i­ble and hence the less bloody it is. This in­
+ sight has been developed brilliantly by thinkers such
+ as Gramsci, u
+ ­ nder the rubric of hegemony; Althusser,
+ through the concept of ideology; and Foucault, as the
+ notion of power. It is in this context that we should also
+ consider Carl Schmitt’s definition of the po­liti­cal as the
+ identification of the e ­ nemy. They all agree on the essen­
+ tial or structural vio­lence defining sovereignty—­their
+ divergent accounts of that vio­lence notwithstanding.
+ The prob­lem of a space outside sovereignty is com­
+
+ [...]
+
+ Posing the question of an outside to sovereignty
+ within the context of the mechanism of exclusion turns
+ the spotlight to what I call the ruse of sovereignty. This
+ essentially consists in the paradox that the assertion of
+ a space outside sovereignty is nothing other than the as­
+ sertion of an excluded space and consequently signals
+ the mobilization of the logic of sovereignty.
+
+ [...]
+
+ To put this in the vocabulary used h
+ ­ ere, the at-
+ tempt to exclude exclusion is itself exclusory and thus
+ reproduces the logic of exclusion.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Turning to Solon’s first demo­cratic constitution,
+ I ­will suggest in this book that it is pos­si­ble by identify­
+ ing the conflictual nature of democracy—or what the
+ ancient Greeks called stasis. Agonistic monism holds
+ that stasis is the definitional characteristic of democ­
+ racy and of any other pos­si­ble constitutional form. Sta­
+ sis or conflict as the basis of all po­liti­cal arrangements
+ then becomes another way of saying that democracy is
+ the form of e ­ very constitution. Hence, stasis comes be-
+ fore any conception of the state that relies on the ruse of
+ sovereignty.
+
+ The obvious objection to this position would be about
+ the nature of this conflict. Hobbes makes the state of
+ nature — which he explic­itly identifies with democracy —­
+ also the precondition of the commonwealth. Schmitt
+ defines the po­liti­cal as the identification of the enemy.
+
+ [...]
+
+ ent power. Is t ­ here a way out of this entangled knot?
+ Antonio Negri’s most significant contribution to po­
+ liti­cal philosophy is, in my opinion, precisely at this
+ juncture. His intervention starts with his book on Spi­
+ noza, The Savage Anomaly, in which he distinguishes
+ between potentia (constituent power) and potestas (con­
+ stituted power). 20 It is most explic­itly treated in Insur-
+ gencies, which provides an account of the development
+ of constituent power in philosophical texts from early
+ modernity onward and examines the function of con­
+ stituent power in significant historical events. 21 The
+ starting premise of this investigation is the rejection of
+ ent power. Is t ­ here a way out of this entangled knot?
+ Antonio Negri’s most significant contribution to po­
+ liti­cal philosophy is, in my opinion, precisely at this
+ juncture. His intervention starts with his book on Spi­
+ noza, The Savage Anomaly, in which he distinguishes
+ between potentia (constituent power) and potestas (con­
+ stituted power). 20 It is most explic­itly treated in Insur-
+ gencies, which provides an account of the development
+ of constituent power in philosophical texts from early
+ modernity onward and examines the function of con­
+ stituent power in significant historical events. 21 The
+ starting premise of this investigation is the rejection of
+ and avoiding the ruse of sovereignty. 23
+ The appeal to constituent power gives Negri the means
+ to provide an account of democracy as creative activity.
+ This has a wide spectrum of aspects and implications
+ that I can only gesture t ­ oward ­here. For instance, this
+ approach shows how democracy requires a convergence
+ of the ontological, the ethical, and the political—­which
+ is also a position central to my own proj­ect (see Thesis
+ 6). Consequently, democracy is not reducible to a con­
+ stituted form, and thus Negri can provide a nonrepre­
+ sen­ta­tional account of democracy. This is impor­tant
+ because it enables Marx’s own distaste for representative
+ democracy to resonate with con­temporary sociology
+ and po­liti­cal economy—­a proj­ect that starts with Negri’s
+ involvement in Italian workerism and culminates in his
+ collaborations with Michael Hardt. Besides the details,
+ which Negri has been developing for four de­cades, the
+ impor­tant point is that this description of democracy
+ and constituent power is consistently juxtaposed to the
+ po­liti­cal tradition that privileges constituted power and
+ sovereignty. 24
+
+ There is, however, a significant drawback in Negri’s
+ approach. It concerns the lack of a consistent account of
+ vio­lence in his work.
+
+ [...]
+
+ Without a
+ consideration of vio­lence, radical democracy ­w ill never
+ discover its agonistic aspect, namely, that conflict or
+ stasis is the precondition of the po­liti­cal and that, as
+ such, all po­liti­cal forms are effects of the demo­cratic. In
+ other words, Negri’s obfuscation of the question of vio­
+ lence can never lead to agonistic monism.
+
+ [...]
+
+Production of the real:
+
+ Second, the state of emergency leading to justification
+ does not have to be “real”—it simply needs to be credi­
+ ble. Truth or falsity are not properties of power—as Fou­
+ cault very well recognized—­and the reason for this, I
+ would add, is that power’s justifications are rhetorical
+ strategies and hence unconcerned with validity. This is
+ the point where my account significantly diverges from
+
+ [...]
+
+ If we are to understand better sovereign vio­lence, we
+ need to investigate further the ways in which vio­lence is
+ justified. Sovereignty uses justification rhetorically. In­
+ stead of being concerned with w
+ ­ hether the justifications
+ of actions are true or false, sovereignty is concerned
+ with ­whether its justifications are believed by ­those it af­
+ fects.
+
+ [...]
+
+Torture:
+
+ Greek po­liti­cal philosophy. 4 Hannah Arendt also pays
+ par­tic­u­lar attention to this meta­phor. According to Ar­
+ endt, Plato needs the meta­phor of the politician as a
+ craftsman in order to compensate for the lack of the no­
+ tion of authority in Greek thought. ­These Platonic meta­
+ phorics include the meta­phor of the statesman as a
+ physician who heals an ailing polis. 5 The meta­phor of
+ craftsmanship is used as a justification of po­liti­cal power.
+ craftsmanship is used as a justification of po­liti­cal power.
+ The meta­phor persists in modernity, and we can find
+ examples much closer to home. Mao Zedong justifies
+ the purges of the Cultural Revolution on the following
+ grounds: “Our object in exposing errors and criticizing
+ shortcomings is like that of curing a disease. The entire
+ purpose is to save the person.” 6 Whoever does not con­
+ form to the Maoist ideal is “ill” and needs to be “cured.”
+ Similarly, George Papadopoulos, the col­o­nel who headed
+ the Greek junta from 1967 to 1974, repeatedly described
+ Greece as an ill patient requiring an operation. The dic­
+ tatorial regime justified its vio­lence by drawing an anal­
+ ogy of its exceptional powers to the powers of the head
+ surgeon in a hospital emergency room. Th
+ ­ ese operations
+ on “patients” took place not in hospitals but in dark po­
+ lice cells or in vari­ous forms of prisons or concentration
+ camps. And the instruments of the “operations” ­were
+ not t ­ hose of the surgeon but rather of the torturer and
+ in many cases also of the executioner. The analogy be­
+ tween the surgeon and the torturer is mobilized to pro­
+ vide reasons for the exercise of vio­lence. An emergency
+ mobilizes rhetorical strategies that justify vio­lence, ir­
+ respective of the fact that such a justification may be
+ completely fabulatory.
+
+ -- 32-33