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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
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