Stasis Before the State: Nine Theses on Agonistic Democracy 0823277429, 9780823277421

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S TA S I S B E F O R E T H E S TAT E

fordham university press new york 2018

commonalities Timothy C. Campbell, series editor

S TA S I S B E F O R E T H E S TAT E Nine Th ­ eses on Agonistic Democracy dimitris vardoulakis

Copyright © 2018 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be repro­ duced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—­electronic, mechanical, photocopy, record­ ing, or any other—­except for brief quotations in printed re­ views, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the per­sis­ tence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-­party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or w ­ ill remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www​.­fordhampress​.­com. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data available online at http://­catalog​.­loc​.­gov. Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca 20 19 18  5 4 3 2 1 First edition

for Alexis

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CO N T E N T S

Preamble: The Ruse of Sovereignty or Agonistic Monism? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Thesis 1: Constituent power forges the distinction between democracy and sovereignty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Thesis 2: Sovereign vio­lence is always justified vio­lence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Thesis 3: The dif­fer­ent ways in which vio­lence is justified delineate dif­fer­ent forms of sovereignty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Intermezzo 1: Sovereignty and the Refugee . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Thesis 4: Judgment is constitutive of democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Thesis 5: Judgment establishes the agonistic relation between democracy and sovereignty by dejustifying vio­lence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

Thesis 6: Demo­cratic judgment shows the imbrication of the ontological, the po­liti­cal, and the ethical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Intermezzo 2: The Refugee and Re­sis­tance to Sovereign Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Thesis 7: Stasis indicates that judgment is the condition of the possibility of the law, or that democracy is the form of the constitution . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Thesis 8: Stasis, or agonistic monism, names the forms of the relation between democracy and sovereignty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Thesis 9: Stasis underlies all po­liti­cal praxis . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Acknowl­edgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

viii Contents

S TA S I S B E F O R E T H E S TAT E

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PREAMBLE: THE RUSE OF SOVEREIGNTY OR AG O N I S T I C M O N I S M ?

­ ere is a commonly held narrative about constitutional Th forms in the Western po­liti­cal and philosophical tra­ dition. The story is schematically as follows: Initially Aristotle and other ancient phi­los­o­phers, including, in­ fluentially, Polybius, propounded the theory of the three constitutional forms—­monarchy, aristocracy, and de­ mocracy. This model assumes a revolution or circularity between the three forms.1 ­Later, around the seventeenth ­century, a radical transformation occurs, and po­liti­cal repre­sen­ta­tion assumes center stage. In the contractarian tradition, the constitution is defined by how constituted power represents the p ­ eople. This story, further, unfolds as a kind of narrative of pro­g ress or Bildungsroman. Repre­sen­ta­tion ultimately—­and this may be understood genet­ically or historically—­leads to forms of representative democracy characterized by a strong link between constitutional and state forms. Thus, famously, Hegel

argues in the introduction to his lectures on world his­ tory for the operation of reason in history, which ulti­ mately amounts to an argument about pro­gress, whereby ­there is only one state that encapsulates rationality at each historical era.2 This narrative is still prevalent—­even pervasive—­ today in the form of the assumption that liberal democ­ racy is the best or most desirable constitutional form. Even if this narrative is rarely explic­itly stated, and then only to be quickly acknowledged as remaining incom­ plete or inadequate—­I am thinking ­here of books such as Fukuyama’s The End of History—­the narrative re­ mains largely unchallenged. Even Marxist thought, which identifies class strug­gle as the motor of historical development, rarely contests the historical “fact” of the triumph of representative forms of liberal demo­cratic governance. Fi­nally—­and this is the most impor­tant point—­this narrative identifies liberal democracy as the utmost perfected form (to date) of sovereignty. Or, to put it the other way around, in the prevalent narrative about constitutional forms, sovereignty is reminiscent of what R. G. Collingwood calls an “absolute presuppo­ sition.”3 Sovereignty is the unquestioned and unques­ tionable premise assumed in the narrative that regards liberal democracy as the most perfect constitutional form. Tacitly, sovereignty is taken as omnipotent. Is it pos­si­ble to provide an alternative story, one that is, if not untold, at least rarely harkened? I am thinking

2 Preamble

­ ere of the story according to which democracy is the h primary constitution and, consequently, that all other constitutional formations are nothing but subversions of democracy. As Eric Nelson has shown, this argument against the cyclical change between the constitutions and for the primacy of democracy—­which Nelson refers to as “republican exclusivism”—­emerges in the seven­ teenth c­ entury as a result of the renewed interest in the Hebrew republic.4 I am making the additional point that this rejection of the circulation of constitutions may lead ­either to the cele­bration of sovereignty and liberal democracy—­which is the position Nelson takes—or to a radical demo­cratic politics.5 This is the politics that I want to describe in terms of agonism. Such an agonistic democracy is not understood ­here as a constitutional form but rather as the form of the constitution. This story emerges in Spinoza’s Theological Po­liti­cal Treatise as well as his Po­liti­cal Treatise and then in Marx’s notes on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. According to this narrative, democracy is counter­ posed to sovereignty—­t hat is, it does not presuppose sovereignty but is in fact presupposed by sovereignty. As I have argued in Sovereignty and Its Other, this al­ ternative narrative can come to the fore only if we think of democracy in agonistic terms, that is, as being in­ volved in a strug­g le with sovereignty.6 In this, I have been following Derrida and Negri, who—in dif­fer­ent ways—­ d raw a distinction between democracy and

On Agonistic Monism  3

sovereignty. What I want to add h ­ ere is that this ago­ nism is monist. By monism I understand both the onto­ logical condition that existence is never isolated but is always a “being with” and the po­liti­cal insight that ­there is only ever one constitution, democracy, and that all other constitutions are effects of democracy. I ­will develop this position in the form of nine ­Theses. This form of pre­sen­ta­tion inevitably results in elliptical arguments, but the upside is a more synoptic perspec­ tive, which is my aim. Further, I ­will show how stasis plays a crucial role in the narrative that identifies de­ mocracy as the form of the constitution. Th ­ ere are multiple reasons for this, not least of all that the term “constitution” is in fact the Latin translation of stasis in forensic rhe­toric. But more on stasis in due course. We first need to frame the prob­lem of the two dif­fer­ent narratives about the constitution with more clarity, in par­tic­u­lar through what I called the absolute presuppo­ sition of the predominant narrative, namely, sovereignty. Presupposing sovereignty as the necessary condition for constitutional forms essentially raises the question ­whether it is pos­si­ble to conceive of a space separate from or not consumed by sovereignty. 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, 4 Preamble

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 plicated when viewed with this structural vio­lence in mind. The effect of this structural vio­lence—in the wide variety of forms in which it can be expressed, given spe­ cific historicopo­liti­cal conditions—is that it proliferates exclusions. ­These can be the excluded within a social formation, such as the poor or minorities, or it can be ­those excluded from the state externally, such as foreign­ ers, immigrants, and refugees. The excluded can also be thoughts or ideas, opinions or cultural practices, that do not conform to the mechanism of reproduction used by sovereignty. In fact, both of the exclusions—­“personal” and “impersonal,” for want of better terms—­are inter­ connected. For instance, the wide variety of racisms is always physical and conceptual. Thus, Gil Anidjar has shown in his remarkable Blood how blood is never only physical but also partakes of ideas through the “rhe­toric of sanguification”—­a move that allows him to show how On Agonistic Monism  5

blood is indelibly linked to the history and politics of Chris­t ian­ity.7 Or—­preempting an example that I ­w ill deal with ­later—­justifying vio­lence against refugees contributes to the affirmation of sovereign power. Exclu­ sions are the phenomenal effects of a structural vio­ lence, and si­mul­ta­neously they sustain and promote sovereignty by contributing to its ideological matrix. Exclusion both produces and is produced by structural vio­lence. Thus, the operation of exclusion is the crucial mechanism for sovereignty’s structural vio­lence. 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. Let me provide h ­ ere just one example of the ruse of sovereignty from Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Po­liti­cal. It comes ­after the definition of the po­liti­cal as the iden­ tification of the ­enemy, or as the one who is excluded through violent means from the polity. In the course of discussing several objections to this idea, in his charac­ teristic irony Schmitt entertains the possibility of a staunch pacifism fiercely committed to end vio­lence. To be consistent with its princi­ples, such a pacifist attitude should be prepared to wage war to end enmity, or, in Schmitt’s words, it should be prepared to conduct “the absolute last war of humanity.” The result w ­ ill be two­ 6 Preamble

fold. Schmitt speculates that such a war “is necessarily unusually intense and inhuman b ­ ecause, by transcend­ ing the limits of the po­liti­cal framework, it si­mul­ta­ neously degrades the ­enemy.” (In Theory of the Partisan this conception ­will be designated as absolute enmity.) More importantly, such a pacifist politics ­w ill still not escape the logic of sovereignty: If pacifist hostility ­toward war w ­ ere so strong as to drive pacifists into a war against nonpacifists, in a war against war, that would prove that pacifism truly possesses po­liti­cal energy ­because it is sufficiently strong to group men according to friend and ­enemy. If, in fact, the ­will to abolish war is so strong that it no longer shuns war, then it has become a po­liti­cal mo­ tive, i.e., it affirms, even if only as an extreme possi­ bility, war and even the reason for war.8 The war to end all wars is still po­liti­cal in Schmitt’s sense to the extent that an e­ nemy is identified—­the e­ nemy is the e­ nemy. And the one who decides on the exceptional circumstance so as to identify the e­ nemy is the sover­ eign. To put this in the vocabulary used h ­ ere, the attempt to exclude exclusion is itself exclusory and thus reproduces the logic of exclusion. The belief in the exclusion of sovereignty from the po­liti­cal is simply an illusion that we have stepped out­ side its structural vio­lence using the very mechanism of exclusion that creates and promulgates that vio­lence. The ruse of sovereignty is that sovereignty’s rejection is On Agonistic Monism  7

nothing but the subjective reanimation of the mecha­ nism of exclusion, with the result that sovereignty is in­ scribed in a new context proliferating in­def­initely. Thus the ruse of sovereignty mirrors Hegel’s conception of the cunning of reason. As Hegel holds, reason operates and determines even that phenomenal realm that seems di­ vorced from it. Or, differently put, the universal arises out of particularity.9 Similarly, the ruse of sovereignty pres­ents sovereignty as operative in that which is opposed to it precisely ­because such an opposition presupposes the conceptual framework defining sovereignty. One way in which the ruse of sovereignty operates is by confining the effects of structural vio­lence to a logic of victimhood. ­Those who are affected by such vio­lence seem to have two options—­either the revolutionary op­ tion to use vio­lence to c­ ounter the vio­lence exercised on them or the reformist option to try to change the system from within. According to the first alternative, ­there ­will always be victims whose only possibility for redemption, according to this logic, ­w ill be a kind of apocalyptic moment—­the end of capitalism, the complete annihila­ tion of the one designated as the e­ nemy, or the “end to the civil war that divides the ­peoples and the cities of the earth.”10 Such a logic quickly reaches Arendt’s melan­ cholic insight that “all revolutions since the French have gone wrong, ending in e­ ither restoration or tyranny.”11 According to the second alternative, the best that can be hoped for in practical or pragmatic terms is ­either an endless critique without any “normative” purchase or a 8 Preamble

tinkering at the edges of already established forms of lib­ eral democracy. It is ­either a self-­indulgent lament about forms of victimhood or a belligerent pursuit of identity politics—­such as new rights for minorities—­but without considering that such a strategy is only pos­si­ble on pre­ supposing and thus reproducing the status quo. Conse­ quently, confining the effects of structural vio­lence to a logic of victimhood perpetuates the ruse of sovereignty. Let me try to formulate the ruse of sovereignty in one more way and to provide one more example. The notion that ­there is an “outside” to sovereignty and the exclusions through which sovereignty’s structural vio­lence operates mirror each other, relying on the same mechanism of ex­ clusion. A good example of this is the stock standard re­ sponse of liberal demo­cratic politicians when faced with protests: “­Isn’t democracy ­great! Without democracy such protest would have been impossible.” In other words, the challenge to sovereign power is reversed as an affirmation of sovereign power. The ruse of sovereignty consists in posing a dilemma: ­Either ­there is something outside sov­ ereignty, or sovereignty is omnipotent. The ruse resolves this dilemma in such a way that e­ ither option leads es­ sentially to the same result, namely, to taking sovereignty as an absolute presupposition. From the perspective of politics, ­there is nothing outside sovereignty. What I call “agonistic monism” is an attempt to ad­ dress the ruse of sovereignty. The idea that democracy is agonistically related to sovereignty is fundamental to agonistic monism. I take this to mean that a relation On Agonistic Monism  9

persists between democracy and sovereignty: Th ­ ere is no pure outside sovereignty.12 In other words, the correct question is not about what is excluded from sovereignty but rather the manner in which democracy is related to sovereignty—­democracy and sovereignty are distinct but not separate; that is, they do not exclude each other. The mechanism of exclusion presupposes the agonal re­ lation between democracy and sovereignty. At the same time, this agonistic relation is a monist relation in the sense that what cannot be accommodated within sov­ ereignty is also the condition of its possibility. The op­ posite of exclusion is not inclusion—as Agamben, for instance, thinks—as this plays right into the hands of the ruse of sovereignty. Rather, the opposite of exclusion is the being with of democracy, which emerges through the agonistic engagement with sovereignty. Sovereign vio­lence is an effect of its other, where “other” denotes both ­those who are the target of vio­lence and the demo­ cratic disposition that is opposed to sovereignty. Differently put, agonistic monism suggests that t­ here is a po­liti­cal question: Democracy or sovereignty? If the answer to the question is ­either democracy or sover­ eignty, then sovereignty prevails, b ­ ecause even if we as­ sert that we are with democracy and that sovereignty is our e­ nemy and needs to be excluded, we are still using the logic of exclusion characteristic of sovereignty to place democracy outside sovereignty. This is what I call the ruse of sovereignty. Conversely, agonistic monism asserts that democracy is the cause of sovereignty so that 10 Preamble

the two are inextricably bound in a relation. The ques­ tion then is no longer about which one is excluded but rather about which one is dependent on the other. Let me describe the same point from a dif­fer­ent per­ spective, without relying so much on the relation be­ tween democracy and sovereignty. If we do not take democracy to designate only the regime that gives power to the demos—no m ­ atter how the demos is defined, as the ­people of a national community or as the multitude that is incommensurate with any form of repre­sen­ta­tion; if, in other words, we do not take the definition of democ­ racy to be exhausted in the opposition of constituent and constituted power, then how can we define democ­ racy? 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 before 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 e­ nemy. On Agonistic Monism  11

Do not both of them ultimately defend a politics of sover­ eignty as opposed to a demo­cratic politics? Foreground­ ing the question of conflict has the ­great advantage of posing this question, which essentially means that it establishes the opposition—­that is, the conflict or stasis—­ between democracy and sovereignty. And answering this question, as I ­will suggest in this book, hinges on ­whether conflict is liquidated in a higher term or w ­ hether conflict can provide an account of stasis as the form of the po­liti­cal. In order to highlight the contrast between democracy and sovereignty, I w ­ ill proceed from the ruse of sover­ eignty, since this represents the most cunning form that the relation between the two can assume. The ruse of sovereignty can take a g­ reat variety of forms, a very small number of which I ­w ill describe ­here. All ­t hese forms are the result of sovereignty’s structural vio­lence. Such a structural vio­lence becomes the alternative to stasis or demo­cratic conflict. So I ­will start by exploring this sovereign form of vio­lence in the first three Th ­ eses. The next three Th ­ eses ­will concentrate on the opposition of democracy and sovereignty. And in the final three ­Theses I w ­ ill turn explic­itly to stasis to highlight its im­ portance for agonistic monism.

12 Preamble

TH ESIS 1 Constituent power forges the distinction between democracy and sovereignty

Why does sovereignty have recourse to vio­lence? The ­simple answer: ­because of the exception. In modern ­legal terms, this is articulated u ­ nder the doctrine of the raison d’état. Within a broader context, sovereign vio­lence arises as a defense of its existence, for example, when an external ­enemy, such as another sovereign state, is threatening an invasion. Or it can be an internal ­issue, such as what­ever economic circumstance may threaten the economy and hence the collapse of the state. At the point of such exceptions, the sovereign is expected to take what­ever mea­sures reasonable within its power to stem that threat and perpetuate its rule. But this commonsense description of sovereignty’s structural vio­lence becomes more complex as soon as we consider both its transcendent and its immanent di­ mensions. Let us start with the former.

The exception indicates the excess of the law, since it ultimately points to the necessity for its suspension to protect the state. This means that for the exception to be operative, t­here must be law, t­here must be instituted power. Sovereignty as the exception is that which tran­ scends instituted power. I cannot do justice ­here to the long and complicated genealogy of this idea. Such a ge­ nealogy includes the medieval princi­ple of legibus solutus and its transformation in modernity by thinkers such as Bodin, who insisted that sovereignty is never given or is unconditional, and the British articulations of the same idea, for instance in Locke, u ­ nder the rubric of the sovereign prerogative.1 Such a genealogy would also need to include Bataille’s extrapolation of sover­ eignty as an economy of excess.2 Carl Schmitt has been a crucial figure in bringing this position within the context of con­temporary philosophy and po­liti­cal the­ ory. Recall his famous dictum: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”3 Constituted power is not self-­ contained. For it to be instituted—as well as for its pres­ ervation—it requires transcendence. Schmitt defines this excess, identified through the operation of the ex­ ception, as sovereignty. The tradition that defines sovereignty in terms of the exception is referred to as po­liti­cal theology. The reason is that the exception has a theological provenance in the sense that it is analogous to the transcendence constitu­ tive of the divine in the Christian tradition. Hence Schmitt’s other famous statement: “All significant con­ 14  Thesis 1

cepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.” 4 Or, as Hobbes put it much earlier, the sovereign is a “Mortall God” or “Gods Lieutenant.”5 The result of the transcendence characteristic of po­ liti­cal theology is that it is hard—if not impossible—to envisage anything outside sovereignty. Differently put, it seems impossible for the subject to escape the vio­lence characteristic of the operation of sovereignty. The subject is in the grip of the ruse of sovereignty. ­Those phi­los­o­phers mentioned above who pay attention to sovereignty’s structural vio­lence encounter this prob­ lem—­and they are usually thought to be unable to cir­ cumvent it. Thus, Foucault warned, or maybe bemoaned, that “we still have not cut off the head of the king.” 6 And Althusser’s so-­called functionalism is said to lack the means of liberation from interpellation, or the subject’s entrapment by ideology.7 Po­liti­cal theology uses the definition of sovereignty as the exception to arrive at the ruse of sovereignty. The exception—as we saw—­presupposes constituted power. At the same time, Schmitt insists that the realm of the po­liti­cal is autonomous and in­de­pen­dent.8 But this au­ tonomous realm can also be the subject of a threat. Does this threat pose the possibility that t­ here is an outside sovereignty? Schmitt provides an ingenious answer to this question in vari­ous works, such as The Theory of the Partisan: The threat does not indicate an outside to sovereignty ­ because the threat reaffirms sovereignty what­ever the result of the threat. E ­ ither the threat is On Constituent Power  15

unsuccessful, in which case the existing sovereign per­ sists, or the threat is successful, in which case the old sovereign is replaced by a new one.9 Within this ambit, as Schmitt again clearly recognizes, the only possibility of po­liti­cal change is the substitution of one sovereign by another. The ruse of sovereignty is ­here in full swing—­ and we ­will see in Thesis 8 how Schmitt founds this po­ sition on a reading of stasis. In any case, according to Schmitt’s po­liti­cal theology, t­ here is no scope for po­liti­ cal change other than as an indefinite substitution of one sovereign by another. The proximity between the attri­ bute of the “indefinite” to divine infinity highlights the immutability of sovereign power within the tradition of po­liti­cal theology—­the po­liti­cal equivalent of roman­ ticism’s “bad infinity.” This is po­liti­cal theology’s route of arriving at the ruse of sovereignty. ­After asserting the exception and accepting the ruse of sovereignty, the most common conception of the po­ liti­cal task is the invention of mechanisms to curtail or check the excessive power of sovereignty, which may serve as a definition of liberalism. We also find reformu­ lations of the exception, such as Bonnie Honig’s attempt to blunt its authoritarian edge and Andreas Kalyvas’s radical redescription of exceptionality in order to align it with popu­lar democracy.10 Neither of t­ hese approaches has an answer to Schmitt’s insight that po­liti­cal change essentially consists in an endless succession of sover­ eigns, focusing instead on the question of how to refor­ mulate what Bodin called the “marks” of sovereignty. 16  Thesis 1

The opposite alternative is a ­wholehearted antistatism. One strand of such an antistatism has its roots in a certain reading of Marx and expresses itself as a radi­ cal leftism wedded to the idea that a genuinely radical leftist party cannot assume executive power.11 Another strand of antistatism develops as a critique of Marxism, especially in its doctrinaire or party-­sanctioned form. In continental philosophy, it can be traced to the vari­ous articulations of the po­liti­cal centrality of the “event.” But h ­ ere we have left the province of critique to exercise instead an outright rejection—­a move with its own difficulties, such as the question as to the pragmatics of such an antistatism. And t­here is the more pervasive suspicion that the event’s radical novelty is a remnant of transcendence, since the event’s extralegal positioning, which transcends constituted power, may not appear ultimately all that dif­fer­ent from sovereignty itself. Another way of putting this would be that the out­ right rejection of sovereignty presupposes the logic of sovereignty, thereby implicitly reaffirming sovereignty through its denial—­t here is, in psychoanalytic terms, a denegation of sovereignty. The ruse of sovereignty re­ turns. It is at this point that the importance of agonistic monism comes to the fore. To start moving ­toward agonistic monism, we need to draw a distinction between democracy and sover­ eignty. For this, we should consider the second aspect of the exception, namely, its immanence. In Schmitt’s def­ inition of the sovereign as the one “who decides on the On Constituent Power  17

exception,” the decision only ever arises as a possibility when executive power is faced with par­tic­u­lar circumstances that are unexpected and not codified in law. Th ­ ese are essentially threats to the viability of the state. Leav­ ing aside the question ­whether such threats ­ought to be real or ­whether they can be manufactured, the decision on the exception is only conceivable so long as it in­ cludes an immanent context of relations of power.12 The exception is not only transcendent but also radically immanent.13 An impor­tant implication of the immanent opera­ tion of sovereignty is that it adds a significant layer to sovereignty’s structural vio­lence. As Foucault has shown in an unparalleled fashion, vio­lence needs to be exam­ ined through its effects. ­There is vio­lence in the sense that power relates to ­humans in terms of enforcement, legalization, and regulation. The key for a critique of power is to concentrate not on the source but on the target of vio­lence. Vio­lence as directed t­ oward subjects discloses sovereignty’s immanent operation—­instead of a transcendence that legitimates its extralegal authority. Yet despite the indispensable insights offered by recog­ nizing that vio­lence needs to be understood as an im­ manent operation, the critique of sovereignty that this move affords cannot go beyond scrutinizing par­tic­u­lar articulations of vio­lence, and thus it is unable to tackle the ruse of sovereignty. For many who do not want to embrace a normative approach to sovereignty, the casti­

18  Thesis 1

gation of specific articulations of vio­lence constitutes the limit of critique. For t­ hose who are dissatisfied with this limit and who want to push critique further without recourse to the discourse of normativity, this is the point where it is necessary to introduce the figure of constituent power. Perhaps the most common way of quickly defining constituent power is by saying that it is the source of the genesis of constituted power—­that is, of the institutional and l­egal apparatus of a state. Further, this common narrative about constituent power usually points to the birth of the concept in the context of the French Revo­ lution, whereby constituent power is understood as the ­w ill of the ­people as distinct from the vari­ous insti­ tutions of the state and the government. Thus Sieyès describes constituent power in 1788 as follows: “A con­ stitution is not the work of a constituted power but a  constituent power. No type of delegated power can modify the conditions of its del­e­ga­tion.”14 Constituent power is the force of transformation, and as such a force it retains a certain vio­lence. At the same time, as a closer look at the insight provided by Sieyès would reveal, t­ here is a fundamental ambiguity in the concept of constitu­ ent power. The question is about what the verb “modify” means. Does the vio­lence of constituent power effect a change in the guise of a full-­scale revolution that pro­ foundly alters, even refounds, the state? Or is the modi­ fication instead to be understood as a transformation of

On Constituent Power  19

laws and institutions while leaving the foundations of the state intact? Differently put, is constituent power re­ sponsible for a new foundation of sovereignty, or does it regulate its evolution so as to preserve it? Through this ambiguity, constituent power combines the issue of vio­lence with the question of destruction or reformation of a state. Perhaps the most influential contribution to this problematic is provided by Hannah Arendt. And it is the most influential b ­ ecause it high­ lights the ambiguity through her hesitation to resolve it: Is the concept of radical novelty that she forcefully foregrounds since The ­Human Condition actually con­ cordant with the revolution or with the more moderate idea of the w ­ ill of the p ­ eople changing the state?15 The issue achieves its greatest visibility in On Revolution. Arendt’s—­infamous—­rejection of the French Revolu­ tion as merely a social movement seems to suggest the former, namely, that po­liti­cal acts require radical re­ foundations of the state, as constituent power does not care to tinker with social f­actors. And her cele­bration by contrast of the American Revolution, and in par­ tic­u ­lar the republicanism of the council system, sug­ gests that the w ­ ill of the p ­ eople, or constituent power, can be expressed through constituted forms, which now contain within themselves the possibility of their transformation.16 This ambiguity turns into a paradox when we con­ sider the po­liti­cal implications of constituent power. On one extreme, we can find an appeal to constituent power 20  Thesis 1

in order to defend a strong notion of sovereignty. H ­ ere again the charge of sovereignty is led by Carl Schmitt, who readily avails himself of the concept of constituent power in order to forge the connection between the transcendent and the immanent sides of sovereignty.17 The upshot of this move is the defense of dictatorship as the expression of constituent power.18 On the other extreme, we find constituent power mobilized in the ser­ vice of democracy understood as popu­lar sovereignty.19 Thus we are in danger of turning to constituent power to enable a critique of sovereignty and its immanent dispensation of vio­lence, only to end up in the position that constituent power can be mobilized promiscuously ­toward divergent and even contradictory po­liti­cal proj­ ects, including the very dispensation of sovereign power that we wanted to critique. The ruse of sovereignty returns—­emboldened—­through the aporias of constitu­ 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 Insurgencies, 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 On Constituent Power  21

the idea of pure novelty. By emphasizing the importance of the ­future for any revolutionary movement, Negri sidesteps the ambiguity between a new foundation for the po­liti­cal and its preservation—­and this puts the concept of constituent power on a completely dif­fer­ent footing. This consists in the distinction between con­ stituent power as a defining feature of democracy, which necessitates its distinction from sovereignty: “Every­ thing . . . ​sets constituent power and sovereignty in op­ position, even the absolute character that both categories lay claim to: the absoluteness of sovereignty is a totali­ tarian concept, whereas that of constituent power is the absoluteness of demo­cratic government.”22 This insight is fundamental to my concept of agonistic monism. Constituent power leads to absolute democracy ­because it neither inaugurates a new state nor preserves an old one, thereby eschewing the aporias of constituent power 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 t­oward ­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 22  Thesis 1

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. This is an instructive moment of hesitation in his thought. At certain moments the im­ manent foundation of the ontological is described as a “horizon of war,” and at o ­ thers vio­lence is relegated to a category of sovereignty whereas constituent power is understood as joyful.25 Yet at other moments, the ques­ tion of the ­enemy is given a central position in the discus­ sion of po­liti­cal change—­and hence to an understanding of constituent power.26 The role of vio­lence is used to forge the distinction between democracy and sovereignty through the figure of constituent power, yet the obfus­ cation around vio­lence comes to haunt and destabilize this distinction. A more explicit consideration of vio­ lence in relation to constituent power is necessary to reap the rewards of Negri’s bypassing of the ambiguity of constituent power and the adumbration of the distinc­ tion between democracy and sovereignty. Without a consideration of vio­lence, radical democracy ­w ill never On Constituent Power  23

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. Such an explicit consideration of vio­lence can start with the following question: What is the connection between constituent power and the structural vio­lence characteristic of sovereignty? I suggest that constituent power is the target of sovereign vio­lence. To make this point, it is impor­tant to note that sovereignty’s struc­ tural vio­lence is not simply exhausted by the clashes be­ tween two sovereign states—­wars that can be justified with recourse to jus ad bellum princi­ples. Rather, it in­ cludes the vio­lence that coerces submission to the sov­ ereign authority in the first place as well as the acts that police and reproduce that authority. Thus, for example, the structural vio­lence of sovereignty in the case of a war ­will have to include the way that sovereignty justified its vio­lence so as to gather troops to fight in the war it is conducting. It is within this setting that we can start un­ derstanding constituent power as the target of sover­ eignty’s vio­lence. Such an understanding has several effects, the three most impor­tant being the following: First, this means that constituent power is no longer to be understood as the ­will of the ­people. It is pos­si­ble to find sovereignty subjugating a ­people to its ­will—as La Boétie observes, the p ­ eople all too often fight for their own servitude—­and thereby allowing the usual asser­ 24  Thesis 1

tion that a­ fter the formation of the state constituted power takes privilege over constituent power. But this is no longer the case. As the target of structural vio­lence, constituent power becomes the condition of the possibil­ ity of sovereignty. ­There is no sovereign vio­lence ­unless ­there is a constituent power. Thus, constituent power points to an initial way in which something can be found “outside” sovereignty without being excluded from sov­ ereignty. The result is that constituent power provides a first way to ­counter the ruse of sovereignty. Second, this means that constituent power affords us a space distinct from yet not subsumed within sovereignty. I am not saying that constituent power is the provocation of par­tic­u ­lar sovereign states. This would be absurd, since other sovereign states, terrorism, and illegal activi­ ties can be—or could be regarded as—­provocations to par­tic­u­lar sovereign states. Rather, I am construing con­ stituent power as a provocation to the operation of sover­ eign power in par­tic­u ­lar circumstances, that is, as a provocation that elicits vio­lence. This is the basis of ago­ nism, but it is also crucial for understanding the onto­ logical. The excess of constituent power indicates vari­ous relations of being. ­These relations are immanent rela­ tions ­because they are linked to ­those who become the subject of vio­lence. Further, ­these immanent relations are agonistic ­because they indicate the strug­gle between democracy—as expressed by constituent power—­a nd sovereignty. An agonistic ontology of power points to a space that is distinct but not separate from sovereignty. On Constituent Power  25

Third, this also entails that democracy—as the constitutional expression of constituent power—is the condition of the possibility of sovereignty. Constituent power is the cause of sovereign vio­lence, and hence de­ mocracy is the cause of sovereignty. In other words, constituent power is not simply opposed to constituted power, leading to the usual and well-­k nown difficulties of how to define the ­people or the demos of democracy. Instead, constituent power is presented ­here as the source of the conflictual nature of the demo­cratic. Any form of constituted power has to presuppose constituent power in order to exercise its force, that is, its vari­ous forms of justified vio­lence. This relation is the expression of the monist princi­ple I indicated at the beginning. The first sustained extrapolation of agonistic monism is provided by Spinoza in his two po­liti­cal treatises. Thus, in Chapter 16 of the Theological Po­liti­cal Treatise, Spi­ noza calls democracy the most natu­ral constitution. He means to indicate by this the coincidence of natu­ral right and civil law. However, such a coincidence is far from unquestionably harmonious. Given that, for Spi­ noza, natu­ral right is coextensive with power (potentia, or constituent power), the po­liti­cal arena is never immu­ nized from power strug­gles in which vio­lence remains an inherent possibility. And the description of potentia as the multitude in the Po­liti­cal Treatise shows another facet of this strug­gle. Namely, whenever a sovereign power seeks to monopolize the use of vio­lence for its own aims, the multitude always remains the strongest 26  Thesis 1

force. Even in the case of the monarch, insists Spinoza, when the p ­ eople seem to be the targets of the king’s vio­ lence, still in real­ity the multitude hold more power than the monarch since they are feared more by him than the fear that the monarch inspires in them. Vio­lence re­ mains an ever-­present possibility for the construal of this power strug­gle and this fear to make sense. In Spi­ noza, then, the agonistic relations of power both point to the distinction between democracy and sovereignty and also show that democracy is the more primary of the two. This is the double move that I designate as agonistic monism. For a more detailed development of agonistic mo­ nism, we need first a better understanding of sover­ eignty and, in par­t ic­u ­lar, the dif­fer­ent forms that the omnipotence of its structural vio­lence can take. And we also need to develop a better understanding of democ­ racy as the other of sovereignty and hence as what may offer a certain re­sis­tance to sovereignty’s structural vio­lence.

On Constituent Power  27

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TH ESIS 2 Sovereign vio­lence is always justified vio­lence

This is the most obvious aspect of sovereign vio­lence— so obvious in fact that it resembles G. K. Chesterton’s notion of the mystery as that which remains unseen precisely ­because it is vis­i­ble to all.1 Sovereignty always seeks to justify its vio­lence, and its justifications need to be credible. Steering a plane into a skyscraper on aesthetic grounds or bombing a sovereign nation to subsidize pet­ rol production are not credible justifications. Conversely, the notion of the exception contains within it, of neces­ sity, a notion of credible justification. The exception is understood as a response to a state of emergency, that is, as a response to circumstances that afford the sover­ eign the possibility to justify vio­lence to protect the existence of the state. Before expanding further on the sovereign justifica­ tion of vio­lence, two caveats are in order. First, I am not denying that t­here acts of vio­lence that may not be

a­ ccompanied by a justification. For instance, a violent perpetrator may be a psychopath recognizing neither social norms nor inhibitions; his acts of vio­lence may be simply for vio­lence’s sake.2 My point is that such acts of vio­lence are not po­liti­cal precisely ­because they lack justification. Thus I am denying that an account of po­ liti­cal vio­lence can bypass the necessity of accounting for the justifications of vio­lence. One may ­counter by saying that decisionism eschews justification. Th ­ ere is indeed a sense in which a sovereign decides on the ex­ ception, in Carl Schmitt’s sense, without recourse to justification, whence the transcendent ele­ment of the Schmittian sovereign. But at the same time the excep­ tion or the state of emergency are subject to justification, and Schmitt insists that they should indicate an exis­ tential threat to the state, pointing to the immanence of Schmitt’s conception of the sovereign. I am aware of one example of decisionism that seeks to bypass justification: Giorgio Agamben’s theory of bare life. I cannot go into the details h ­ ere, but the key point is that the separation of zoe and bios—­the separa­ tion of pure natu­ral life from po­liti­cal life—­provides the mechanism of what Agamben calls invariably the excep­ tion or the sovereign ban. This separation starts a logic of exclusion and inclusion that is indicative of the oper­ ation of sovereignty from antiquity to the pres­ent day, according to Agamben. However, the violent act that performs that separation is not in need of justification. Thus, the figure of homo sacer, who is paradigmatic of 30  Thesis 2

the sovereign ban, is the one who can be killed with im­ punity; no justification is required. As a result, Agam­ ben is unable to provide an account of po­liti­cal action and po­liti­cal potential other than as a compulsion to repeat vari­ous accounts of the violent production of bare life. Given the complete absence of justification in Agamben’s account of sovereign vio­lence, the entire Homo Sacer series fails to provide an account of the political—­despite the fact that he offers other fascinating insights.3 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 Hegel’s. As we can see already from the opening pages of the Philosophy of Right, the actions of the state are ra­ tional, and this includes violent acts. To the extent that rationality is a precondition of justification, then our positions appear similar. The difference emerges when this account is positioned within a historical context. Ultimately, for Hegel this rationality is responsible for real­ity, as it is exemplified in the individual who personi­ fies reason in history—­Hegel’s famous example is Caesar. Conversely, I am interested in the ways in which ratio­ nality fails justification. Or, differently put, I am inter­ ested in how justification, no ­matter how grounded in On Justified Violence  31

reason, cannot live up to “real­ity”—­whatever that might mean. And consequently, history is not determined by the “cunning of reason” but rather by the exemplifica­ tions of reason’s failures, which r­ eally means reason’s inadequate justifications of vio­lence. 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. The po­liti­cal justification of vio­lence is part of the sovereign rhetorical strategy to control repre­sen­ta­tion. The examples ­here abound. In Sovereignty and Its Other I analyze this point with reference to Marx’s Eigh­teenth Brumaire. ­Here, I ­w ill mention one example, the oft-­ used meta­phor of the ill polity, which I choose b ­ ecause it ­will have some bearing on a point I w ­ ill raise in Thesis 9. The meta­phor of the ill polity is common in ancient 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. The meta­phor persists in modernity, and we can find examples much closer to home. Mao Zedong justifies 32  Thesis 2

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. Let us return to consider more carefully how sover­ eign vio­lence always strives for justification. This means that we can characterize the acts of sovereignty as con­ forming to a rationalized instrumentalism. Sovereign vio­lence is instrumental in the sense that it always aims toward something—it is not vio­ ­ lence for vio­ lence’s sake. This means that the desired outcome of sover­ eign vio­lence is calculated with the help of reason. The On Justified Violence  33

extrapolation of vio­lence in instrumental terms is noth­ ing new. For instance, Hannah Arendt pres­ents instru­ mentalism as the defining feature of vio­lence.7 Yet the instrumentalism of sovereign vio­lence is not as self-­ evident as it may at first appear. For instance, as Fran­ çois Jullien shows, the conception of an instrumental thinking as appropriate to the po­liti­cal arises in ancient Greece, and it does not characterize the Chinese cul­ ture, including even the ways in which warfare is con­ ceived.8 The impor­tant point, then, is to remember that the instrumentality of reason in the ser­v ice of a justifi­ cation of vio­lence is a characteristic of sovereignty as it is developed in the Western po­liti­cal and philosophical tradition. The “invention” of the instrumentality of reason is an impor­tant moment in the history of thought, and its “inventors,” the ancient Greeks, amply recognized its importance. In fact, their tragedies are concerned pre­ cisely with the clash between the older forms of thinking and new forms exemplified by instrumental reason. The best example of this is perhaps the Oresteia. In the first play of the trilogy, Agamemnon is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra. In the second play, Orestes, Agamem­ non’s son, responds by killing his ­mother. In the third play, the Eumenides, the court of Athens is called to de­ cide w ­ hether Orestes’s murder was justified. The alter­ natives are that he is e­ ither guilty of matricide pure and ­simple or that his act was a po­liti­cal one aiming to ­free Argos of a tyrant. Th ­ ere is, then, a standstill or stasis—­ 34  Thesis 2

and I draw again attention to this word, to which I w ­ ill return ­later—­between the two dif­fer­ent l­egal frame­ works: one legality privileging kinship, the other privi­ leging instrumental rationality whereby the murder of Clytemnestra is justified by the end of saving the city from a tyrant. The judges’ vote is a tie, at which point the goddess Athena, who presides over the proceedings, casts the vote to f­ ree Orestes of the charge of matricide. Calculative reason prevails as the mode of the po­liti­cal. But at the same time, it should not be forgotten that the vote was equally split. For the ancient Athenians, it is impossible to reconcile the two dif­fer­ent legalities—­the politics of kinship and the politics of instrumental reason. Justice persists in this irreconcilability, despite its tragic consequences. The most significant po­liti­cal novelty introduced by Chris­ tian­ ity is the universalization of justice—­ and hence of justification. For instance, as I show in Sovereignty and Its Other, the importance of the injunction to “love thy neighbor” in Romans consists precisely in that this is not a law but the basis of all laws, according to Paul. When rationalized instrumentalism meets the universal, they necessarily produce a sense of totality. This can take a wide variety of forms, and I ­w ill only provide ­here one example, that of Carl Schmitt’s po­liti­ cal theology, since I have already tackled his work earlier. The universalizing aspect of Schmitt’s po­liti­cal the­ ory consists in the totalization of the po­liti­cal, which we have already encountered as the autonomy of the On Justified Violence  35

po­liti­cal. It is b ­ ecause of this autonomy, you ­will recall, that according to Schmitt the only possibility of change for sovereignty is its substitution by another sovereignty, thereby animating the ruse of sovereignty. The question now becomes: How can one critique this totalizing move? How can one critique the autonomy of the po­liti­cal that posits the ruse of sovereignty? Critique is pos­si­ble by recognizing how the political-­ theological tradition relies on a tautological metaphysi­ cal premise.9 This gives it both a sense of inescapability but also sows the seeds for its critique. Specifically, Carl Schmitt posits, initially, that the ­legal framework and the decision of the sovereign constitute the totality of the po­liti­cal, whereby politics is reduced to constituted power. Thus, politics consists in enmity, which requires that we distinguish between the ­enemy and the foe, where the foe is not linked to constituted power but is rather a personal adversary. Po­liti­cal theology insists, in addition, that this totality of constituted power is rup­ tured ­every time ­there is an emergency, at which point it is reasonable for the sovereign to decide how to save constituted power.10 Thus, the metaphysics of po­liti­cal theology asserts a totality (the po­liti­cal aspect) only in order to negate it (the theological aspect). But i­sn’t this simply to presuppose what you need to prove? What if the totality of law and the sovereign decision is never a totality in the first place? Differently put, the metaphys­ ics of po­liti­cal theology requires the isolation of the po­ liti­cal sphere determined by the justification of vio­lence 36  Thesis 2

and hence by the operation of instrumental reason. Yet to obfuscate the fact that this sphere is not in fact com­ plete or total also posits its own transcendence. Critique is pos­si­ble by breaking the hold of this tau­ tology, which amounts to saying that po­liti­cal critique cannot start with constituted power. In other words, critique cannot be directed solely, or even primarily, against forms of legitimation. Instead, critique needs to shift its focus to justification. More precisely, critique should aim to show that the giving of reasons for one’s acts of vio­lence can never be absolute. No justification is beyond dispute, and hence no justification leads unprob­ lematically to legitimacy. This is not a relativist position that rejects the operation of reason in the po­liti­cal. On the contrary, it is the recognition of the limits and limi­ tations of reason—­a recognition of the fact, for instance, that for politics in most cases rhe­toric and emotion hold sway over rationality. Justification is not a ­matter of va­ lidity but of persuasion. ­There is no reason to announce—­ tautologically—­a totality of calculative reason legitimated by and legitimating a par­tic­u­lar regime, only in order to presuppose its transcendence. Instead, we can recognize ab initio the limits of giving reasons. And ­these limits are disclosed by paying attention to that which is the condition of the possibility of the justification of vio­ lence: constituent power. Recognizing the limits of giving reasons opens up the possibility of critiquing justification. I w ­ ill analyze the nature of this critique further in ­Theses 4 and 5. The On Justified Violence  37

impor­tant point ­here to remember is that this possibility arises ­because justification is never inviolable. Differ­ ently put, the use of reason always contains within itself the possibility of its undoing. Jacques Derrida has ana­ lyzed the deconstructability of reason u ­ nder the guise of the autoimmunitary logic of sovereignty. In a sense, Derrida’s insight goes back to the Greeks, who refused to universalize the totality created by reason. But whereas for the Greeks this was also ­because of the influence of custom and the unwritten laws of kinship represented by the old pantheon, for us t­oday it consists in showing that the autonomy of rationalized instrumentalism is only an illusion. And this, as I ­will argue in Thesis 6, has implications for how we understand the relation between politics, ethics, and ontology without falling prey to the ruse of sovereignty.

38  Thesis 2

TH ESIS 3 The dif­fer­ent ways in which vio­lence is justified delineate dif­fer­ent forms of sovereignty

What does it mean that ­there is no “outside” of the structural vio­lence that characterizes sovereignty? Even the most noble act contains within it the potential to be reinscribed within the matrix of instrumental rational­ ity, thereby animating the mechanism of the justifica­ tion of vio­lence.1 For instance, let us take a look at the criticism of humanitarianism and NGOs. One of the most prominent of its critics is Eyal Weizmann, who analyzes in The Least of All Pos­si­ble Evils the ways that humanitarian interventions operate u ­ nder the logic of the worst pos­si­ble evil, which is a logic of sovereign vio­ lence.2 Thus despite its most honorable intentions, hu­ manitarianism can always be co-­opted by constituted power. Despite t­ hese critiques, which need to be carried out, it is instructive that what is lacking in them is an explicit acknowl­edgment that vio­lence can always be inscribed in acts. What is lacking is a philosophical

reflection on the nature of vio­lence starting from the recognition that po­liti­cal vio­lence is always justified vio­lence—­and this also means, since we purport to act as rational agents, that ­every action can precipitate or be understood as a (violent) reaction. It is impossible to define clearly what a violent act is without ultimately admitting that ­every act retains an ele­ment of vio­lence. The impossibility of identifying something that is “outside” justified vio­lence poses a significant defini­ tional prob­lem for sovereignty. When every­thing is understood—­potentially or actually—­under the category of vio­lence, when e­ very action can potentially be inter­ preted as justified vio­lence, that category itself becomes empty. Schmitt’s solution to this prob­lem, as we saw at the end of the previous Thesis, is to insist on the auton­ omy of the po­liti­cal through the distinction between ­enemy and foe, which in turn requires its construction as a totality, leading to the vicious circle that I outlined. The solution that I propose instead is that in the definition of sovereignty as the justification of vio­lence, the impor­tant term is justification. Consequently, an analy­sis of sover­ eignty requires an analy­sis of justification. Or, differently put, it requires an analy­sis of how rationality is instru­ mental prior to and as a condition of legitimacy. This is the point where my approach parts ways both with theories of agonistic democracy and with theories of radical democracy. Theories of agonistic democracy would acknowledge the ineliminability of vio­lence, but they tend to argue for ways in which this can be amelio­ 40  Thesis 3

rated within constituted power. For instance, we can recall Chantal Mouffe’s argument about the transfor­ mation of antagonism to agonism or the arguments about multiplicity or pluralism in William Connolly. Conversely, theories of radical democracy tend to em­ brace this violent aspect as an indication of the onto­ logical significance of figures such as the event or the revolution—­I am thinking ­here of Badiou and Žižek. Both agonistic and radical demo­crats recognize the omnipresence of vio­lence, but the former respond by trying to control it, the latter by celebrating its po­liti­cal potential. I differ from t­ hese positions in that I do not regard vio­lence understood in relation to constituted power—­either to reform or to change it—as a significant po­l iti­cal category. Po­l iti­cally, only justified vio­lence ­matters. The po­liti­cal task, therefore, needs to focus on how the justification is instrumentalized. As an instrumental rationalism, the justification of vio­lence suggests that sovereign acts conform to means-­ and-­ends relations. In the opening of his “Critique of Vio­lence,” Walter Benjamin makes a s­ imple observation with far-­reaching implications. He suggests that the means-­and-­ends relation can outline a typology of sov­ ereignty. The main purpose of my Sovereignty and Its Other was to develop this observation, which Benjamin never did. I show t­ here that the relation between an end and the means of the exercise of power allows for three distinct ways in which the justification of vio­lence can be accomplished. First, t­ here is the justification of the On the Three Forms of Sovereignty  41

means by an end, which I call ancient sovereignty. Sec­ ond, ­there is the justification of the end by the means, which defines modern sovereignty. And third, t­ here is the justification of means through further means, ap­ pearing as if ­there is no end, which constitutes biopo­ liti­cal sovereignty. Let me sketch ­here the historical and conceptual development of this typology of sovereignty, by focusing on the role played by justified vio­lence in dif­fer­ent forms of sovereignty. Let us look at a few quick examples to distinguish between t­ hese instrumental re­ lations. I w ­ ill focus on the idea of a foundational death or murder to help me weave a narrative thread from an other­wise complex and diverse field. A text that exemplifies the ancient justification of vio­ lence is Augustine’s City of God.3 Augustine’s argument relies on the positing of an end, the city of god, which can never be attained in one’s life but which neverthe­ less is the ideal governing one’s actions. This allows Augustine to make a distinction between two types of ­people. ­There are, first, the pilgrims, who aspire to this ideal, and in fact they are called pilgrims b ­ ecause their life is likened to a journey t­oward that end. And ­there are, second, the pagans, who oppose the ideal of the city of god and who thereby place obstacles on the pilgrims’ journey. For this reason, the pilgrims are justified to ex­ ercise vio­lence against the pagans. The end—­that is, the journey ­toward the city of god—­justifies the exercise of vio­lence as a means to its attainment. According to Book 15, the city of god was not founded (it is eternal), but the 42  Thesis 3

city on earth, occupied by the pagans, has a definite founding moment: Abel’s murder. The founder of the city of man is Cain, by virtue of his fratricide, which ac­ cording to Augustine exemplifies all the sinful motiva­ tions characteristic of the pagan city and which in turn justifies the vio­lence against the pagans. How dif­fer­ent is Niccolò Machiavelli’s evaluation of Romulus’s killing of Remus in the ninth chapter of the first book of the Discourses: “It is at any rate fitting that though the deed accuses him, the result should excuse him; and when it is good, like that of Romulus, it w ­ ill always excuse him, b ­ ecause he who is violent to destroy, not he who is violent to restore, o ­ ught to be censured.” 4 Vio­lence h ­ ere becomes the means for the foundation of the city. In this account, the means of vio­lence justify the end. The murder itself is reprehensible—­“the deed accuses him,” is how Machiavelli puts it—­but when the means lead to a g­ reat end, such as the establishment of Rome, the exercise of violent means is justified. As Ma­ chiavelli puts it, “he who is violent to restore” is justified. This reverses the earlier structure of the relation between means and end—­the reversal characteristic of modern sovereignty. A significant implication of this reversal is that the end of the exercise of instrumental rationalism now also becomes the preservation of sovereignty.5 In other words, the foundation and the continuation of sovereignty rely on the same structure of means justify­ ing the end. Calculative reason now also justifies the perpetuation of the state. The modern po­liti­cal order is On the Three Forms of Sovereignty  43

premised on this princi­ple, which is responsible, for in­ stance, for the establishment of clear borders between states as well as the distinction between internal and ex­ ternal sovereignty. Michel Foucault introduces the term “biopolitics” in the final lecture of Society Must Be Defended. The exer­ cise of vio­lence is not carried out h ­ ere ­under the prospect of death—­t here is no founding murder. Rather, biopo­ liti­cal power is exercised through the control of life: “Once power begins to intervene . . . ​to improve life by eliminating accidents . . . ​death becomes, insofar as it is the end of life, the term, the limit, or the end of power too. Death is outside the power relationship. . . . ​Power has no control over death, but it can control mortality. . . . ​ Power literally ignores death.” 6 Death is not a concern of biopower, but the mortality rate is, ­because the mor­ tality rate can be controlled with policies such as, for instance, antismoking mea­sures. Foucault continues contrasting this approach to modern sovereignty. The contrast with the previous two forms of means-­and-­end relations that I sketched above is not simply the dimin­ ished significance of death in biopolitics. More impor­ tantly, the exercise of vio­lence is encrypted in the vari­ous pro­cesses of regulation and normalization. The rationalization of instrumentalism changes. Th ­ ese pro­ cesses become an end in themselves, which ­really entails that the justification of biopo­liti­cal vio­lence appears as means justifying further means—­regulation and con­ trol giving rise to further regulation and control.7 The 44  Thesis 3

objective of power is no longer to posit an end that ­either justifies or is justified by vio­lence. It is rather to appear as if ­there is no end beyond the control of immanent rela­ tions of life.8 Why does it ­matter to think of—to define—­sovereignty in terms of how vio­lence is justified? By bringing the dif­fer­ent forms of justification to the fore so as to recog­ nize and take account of its po­liti­cal significance, we achieve two t­ hings at once. First, we bypass the tautolo­ gies of legitimacy, whereby the only possibility for po­ liti­cal change is the substitution of one sovereign regime by another. And, second, we do so by making critique pos­si­ble, since it is now pos­si­ble to devise strategies to dejustify sovereignty—as I ­will explain shortly.

On the Three Forms of Sovereignty  45

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Intermezzo 1 Sovereignty and the Refugee

To nuance further how justification operates, that is, how sovereignty is exercised, I ­will now turn to the figure of the refugee. To examine the exercise of sovereignty and how it leads to the ruse of sovereignty, we need to exam­ ine a par­tic­u­lar instance where vio­lence is justified. ­There is a significant tradition in po­liti­cal philosophy that regards the refugee—as well as related figures—as disclosing insights into sovereignty. Hannah Arendt is responsible for the first power­ful exposition of the refu­ gee’s role in disclosing the workings of sovereign power.1 In the famous ninth chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt points out that stateless ­people ex­ pose a conflation of the notions of the citizen and the ­bearer of ­human rights. Arendt demonstrates that the entire Eu­ro­pean state organ­ization up to World War II had been premised on this conflation.2 As a result, the stateless affirm the irreconcilability between nationality

and h ­ uman rights. Consequently, the stateless—­whom Arendt also refers to as the “nakedness of being ­human,” the “alien,” and the “new barbarian”—­pose a threat to established sovereign power. The reason is that they ex­ pose the inability of the sovereign state to provide for the refugee the “right to have rights,” which consists in that one’s actions and opinions ­matter or that one is in­ cluded in the polity. More broadly, the realm of rights cannot be contained within the borders of the sovereign state.3 Thus Arendt shows that the stateless pose a threat to par­tic­u ­lar national formations and challenge the limits of sovereign power as such. Differently put, the stateless p ­ eople, by virtue of their positioning outside national sovereignty, raise the possibility of a space “out­ side” sovereignty. This makes stateless figures such as the refugee hugely impor­tant for interrogating the ruse of sovereignty. Arendt’s insight entails an intimate connection be­ tween the refugee and sovereign power b ­ ecause the ref­ ugee poses the question w ­ hether t­here is something outside sovereignty. Let me provide some key examples without offering ­here any systematic analy­sis, as I just want to indicate the extent to which this is a per­sis­tent issue in po­liti­cal theory: The question ­whether ­there is something outside sovereignty is developed by phi­los­o­ phers such as Giorgio Agamben, who translates in Homo Sacer Arendt’s notion of the “nakedness of being” to the figure of bare life. This figure signifies for Agamben the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion from the law, 48  Intermezzo 1

which, he argues, is constitutive of sovereignty. Arendt’s insight also resonates with the work of po­liti­cal theorists such as Wendy Brown, who argues for the importance of walls in conceptualizing con­temporary articulations of sovereignty’s power. According to Brown, the erec­ tion of walls is a response on the part of sovereignty to the “ungovernmentality” that characterizes economic immigrants, refugees, and so on. Just like Arendt, Brown discerns a profound threat that t­ hese figures pose to sov­ ereign power.4 Fi­nally, Jacques Rancière exemplifies a post-­Marxist perspective of the nexus between refugees and power when he stresses that the immigrant is the new proletariat, in the sense that the sans-­papiers in­ dicate the “part that has no part” and is shunned by sovereignty in a genuinely violent gesture.5 Many other examples could have been added ­here, such as Balibar’s thinking about the “democ­ratization of borders” or Habermas’s cosmopolitanism. Nonetheless, the issue is consistently the same, namely, w ­ hether t­ here are fig­ ures such as the refugee who point to an “outside” of sovereignty—­irrespective of the divergent analyses pro­ vided by the aforementioned thinkers. Given the importance of the figure of the refugee for understanding the problematic we are concerned with ­here, I w ­ ill show how the three justifications of vio­lence operate to produce the ruse of sovereignty by turning to a concrete po­liti­cal example. Specifically, I analyze the Australian state’s policy on refugees arriving by boat from Indonesia. The policy is encapsulated in Prime Sovereignty and the Refugee  49

Minister John Howard’s statement on October 28, 2001: “We w ­ ill decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.” 6 Despite dif­fer­ent governments and tactical shifts, this position has re­ mained essentially the same up to the time of this book’s writing.7 The importance of this policy is highlighted by the fact that it is perceived as both the most extreme and the most “successful” policy of its kind. Thus, the Australian government policy on refugees has been a point of deliberation in both Southern Eu­ro­pean coun­ tries and in the United Kingdom.8 I ­will show that the position expressed by this state­ ment contains all three modalities of the justification of vio­lence against the refugees. To do so, I w ­ ill concen­ trate h ­ ere only on one, albeit significant, component of the implementation of the refugee policy, the so-­called PNG Solution, which stipulates that asylum seekers ar­ riving in Australia by boat must have their refugee status assessed offshore, in a third country.9 Specifically, ac­ cording to an agreement between the Australian and the Papua New Guinea governments announced on July 19, 2013, all refugees arriving by boat to Australia ­will have their claims pro­cessed in PNG, and if they are found to be refugees, they are to be settled in PNG as well.10 The public justification for the PNG Solution was three pronged.11 I w ­ ill sketch h ­ ere the three approaches to show how each represents one modality of the justifica­ tion of vio­lence. First, ­there ­were the evil “­people smug­ 50  Intermezzo 1

glers.” The PNG Solution was touted as a way to ­battle that “evil,” which was responsible for numerous deaths at sea. The identification of the evil against whom vio­ lence is justified mobilizes the logic of the ancient justification of vio­lence, since the “­people smugglers” occupy the equivalent position of the pagan as described by Augustine: They are the obstacle to be removed so as to attain a just end. Second, the modern justification of vio­lence is registered as the safeguarding of the Austra­ lian borders that now become effectively impenetrable: Even if refugees cross the Australian border, they ­w ill still be sent to a third sovereign state both for the pro­ cessing of their asylum claim and for settlement. This conforms to the modern justification of vio­lence, accord­ ing to which the use of means is justified for the preser­ vation of the state by protecting the state’s borders. Third, the biopo­liti­cal register is equally prominent. One of the main justifications of the severe policy was to function as a deterrent that saves lives. It is for the preservation of refugees’ lives, who ­were in danger of drowning on the way to Australia, that the Australian government incar­ cerates asylum seekers in PNG while refusing settlement in Australia regardless of the outcome of their asylum application. As the biopo­liti­cal logic would have it, the protection of life justifies the vio­lence of regulation and control. ­There is, then, one position, and it is supported by three distinct justifications that correspond to the three dis­ tinct forms of instrumentality characterizing sovereign Sovereignty and the Refugee  51

power. Each of ­these justifications may be weak in itself, and I w ­ ill show shortly that specific arguments can be employed against each of them. But, critically, t­hese three distinct justifications are interchangeable. In the public debate t­ here is often a rapid movement between the dif­fer­ent justifications. Three inferences can be drawn. First, the justifications are distinct but also part of the same logic. This is the sovereign logic of rationalized instrumentalism. ­Because all justifications of vio­lence conform to the same logic, far from being mutually exclusive, the three modalities of justification are in fact mutually supportive. This is what I call the cosup­ ponibility of the justifications of vio­lence. Second, the effect of the slippage between the dif­fer­ ent justifications as well as their cosupponibility is to pres­ent the sovereign position about the justification of vio­lence as self-­evident, inviolable, and reasonable—or, ultimately, absolute. In other words, the absoluteness of sovereignty has nothing to do with the power of sover­ eignty as it is exercised through its institutions—­the police, the army, the judiciary, and so on. Rather, the absoluteness of sovereignty is an expression of the rhe­ torical and logical mechanisms whereby sovereignty uses the justification of vio­lence to dominate public de­ bate and to persuade the citizens. The exercise of sover­ eignty is the effect of an interpretative pro­cess. Differently put, this entails that the justification of vio­lence is more primary than the legitimate forms assumed by consti­ tuted power. Without an effective justification, any gov­ 52  Intermezzo 1

ernment loses its mandate to govern, even though its decisions and po­liti­cal actions, its policies, and its legis­ lative agenda may perfectly conform to the law of the state. Third, the cosupponibility of the three modalities of the justification of vio­lence and the absoluteness of sovereignty returns us, yet again, to the ruse of sover­ eignty, presenting it as inescapable. How can we avoid the omnipotence of sovereignty’s structural vio­lence when its justifications seem to cover our entire episte­ mological field, becoming omniscient? And how can we avoid such a vio­lence that appears to cover the entire field of po­liti­cal relations, that is, the entire field of be­ ing with ­others, making sovereign vio­lence omnipres­ ent? How can democracy as the other of sovereignty be mobilized to respond to sovereignty’s justification of vio­lence? This final question is, I believe, the most fun­ damental po­liti­cal question. It essentially asks about the relation of sovereignty and democracy. What is re­ quired at this juncture in order to broach the relation between democracy and sovereignty further is a better determination of democracy.

Sovereignty and the Refugee  53

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TH ESIS 4 Judgment is constitutive of democracy

In the Athenian Constitution, Aristotle gives an account of the first ever demo­cratic constitution, written by Solon in the early sixth ­century BC. This account con­ tains the earliest reference to a law that I w ­ ill refer to as the “law of stasis.” I prefer to refer to it as the law of stasis instead of the customary “law against neutrality” for sev­ eral reasons. Neutrality is a concept only anachronisti­ cally ascribed to the law, as the concept is absent from the classical Greek conceptual framework. More impor­ tantly, but relatedly, the law inscribes stasis—­conflict, disunity, contestation—at the heart of the po­liti­cal and the demo­cratic. And at the same time it raises the ques­ tion about what forms of vio­lence support this demo­ cratic sense of stasis and what forms, conversely, are determinative to the po­liti­cal. In other words, Solon’s law of stasis indicates conflict as the defining characteristic

of democracy while also raising the question of the dif­ ferentiation between dif­fer­ent forms of vio­lence. As such, Solon’s law is crucial in extrapolating agonistic monism. ­There are several other references to the law of stasis in antiquity, the most impor­tant of which are contained in Aristotle’s Athenian Constitution and in Plutarch’s life of Solon. ­There is not much dispute about the con­ tent of the law, since the dif­fer­ent versions even repeat similar wording—­although ­there are subtle variations of meaning, as I w ­ ill indicate by comparing Aristotle and Plutarch’s versions in the next Thesis. Nevertheless, all agree on the extraordinary position of the law of stasis in the context of Solon’s demo­cratic reforms. Let us read the law, as it is given to us in Aristotle’s text: ὁρῶν δὲ τὴν πόλιν πολλάκις στασιάζουσαν τῶν δὲ πολιτῶν ἐνίους διὰ τὴν ῥαθυμίαν ἀγαπῶντας τὸ αὐτόματον, νόμον ἔθηκε πρὸς αὐτοὺς ἴδιον, ὃς ἃν στασιαζούσης τῆς πόλεως μὴ θῆται τὰ ὃπλα μηδὲ μεθ’ ἑτέρων ἄτιμον εἶναι καὶ τῆς πόλεως μὴ μετέχειν. Rackham’s translation in the Loeb edition reads (with amendments): And as he saw that the state was often in conflict, while some citizens would let ­things take their course through idleness, he laid down a special law to deal with them, enacting that whoever did not take a stand in a stasis was to lose his citizenship and to be expelled from the polis.1 56  Thesis 4

What is extraordinary about this law is not simply that it legislates a strong notion of participation, whereby the citizen is expected to engage agonistically in po­liti­cal events of the polis. Such an agonistic politics has long been recognized as defining of the Greek city-­states.2 Rather, what is extraordinary is the use of the word stasis, which indicates that the crisis precipitated by conflict is the defining characteristic of democracy. To explain this point, I need to make a small digression. The first ever democracy was instituted through the Solonian reforms that w ­ ere introduced to counteract a chronic po­liti­cal no less than social crisis in Athens. The crisis was the result of a protracted animosity between the rich and the poor parties. The confrontation was largely b ­ ecause of material inequalities, such as the re­ quirement to hold property in order to be a citizen, and the economic inequalities that w ­ ere threatening to turn into slaves a large portion of the poor population who had defaulted on their payments. Unsurprisingly, given the sensitivity of t­ hese issues, tensions ran high, and the city often found itself in conflict or stasis, with the two sides taking arms against each other. The situation had reached an acute crisis, at which point the Athenians re­ solved that they had to take decisive action. They turned to Solon, who was largely viewed as impartial and wise, to write a new constitution for the city. He responded by compiling the first ever demo­cratic constitution. Now, what is in­ter­est­ing—or, perhaps, perplexing—­ within this context is that the most common word used On Judgment and Demcoracy  57

by both Aristotle and Plutarch to describe the crisis in Athens is “stasis.” In other words, the Athenians hoped to overcome the crisis of the conflict or stasis between the two parties, yet Solon’s law reinscribes stasis at the center of Athenian democracy: The crisis is the condi­ tion of citizenship and residency within Athens and even of the possibility of the operation of the state. So­ lon’s law does not describe mea­sures whereby the crisis can be avoided. Instead, it describes how every­one is re­ quired to participate in it—as if the aim is to accentuate the crisis. Th ­ ose who avoid conflict w ­ ill be punished. The demo­cratic overcoming of crisis consists in the institu­ tionalization of crisis within the constitution. Accord­ ing to Solon, his fellow Athenians need to recognize the illusion that the implementation of mea­sures can always prevent crisis. According to Solon, democracy consists in the dispelling of that illusion. This does not mean that certain mea­sures or policies cannot and should not be devised to ameliorate or evade predictable crises. Rather, it highlights that such mea­sures are never ade­ quate. Or, to put it the other way around, Solon sees crisis as a way of being, as a condition of existence, and he is determined that his demo­cratic constitution ac­ knowledges this. What are we to make of this extraordinary cele­ bration of stasis in the first demo­cratic constitution? The first impor­tant aspect—­a nd I w ­ ill turn to ­others in due course—­consists in that it recognizes that judg­ ment is a necessary condition of democracy. The crisis 58  Thesis 4

indicated by the word stasis calls for participation not in the sense of precipitating a bloody conflict but in the sense of taking a stand. In Greek, the word for crisis and judgment is the same, κρίσις. The citizens ­ought to make a judgment about which party or which position to sup­ port. Failing to exercise their judgment is an indication of idleness (ῥαθυμία), which is, in Solon’s mind, inexcus­ able. For Solon, crisis is inescapable, and this premise entails that without judgment t­ here is no democracy. All the other Solonian reforms retain a certain topicality, which gives them historical import. But the law of stasis, by asserting that judgment is a necessary con­ dition for democracy, retains a dimension beyond the ancient Greeks and speaks to our con­temporary po­liti­ cal predicament. A significant clarification about judgment is required at this point. By judgment I do not mean an activity that relies on set, preestablished criteria. In this, I follow a tradition about judgment with a long history. Arendt is responsible for the animation of this tradition in rela­ tion to po­liti­cal questions in the twentieth ­century. As she memorably puts it, a judging activity that no longer relies on traditional props is a thinking “without banis­ ters.”3 She further elaborates her theory of judgment in her lectures on Kant. Arendt discards determinate judg­ ment, that is, the judgment that subsumes the par­t ic­u­ lar u ­ nder the universal—or, differently put, a judgment that relies on established laws. Instead, she advocates the importance of reflective judgment, which Kant On Judgment and Demcoracy  59

develops in the third Critique, according to which a par­tic­u ­lar judgment cannot be subsumed ­under univer­ sal criteria.4 (We ­will see ­later, in Thesis 7, how this is consistent with stasis theory in ancient forensic rhe­ toric.) More generally stated, judgment is the activity that responds to the par­tic­u­lar circumstances. Judgment is a situated activity. Such a situated response requires a crisis—­hence Solon’s insight about the link between stasis and judgment.

60  Thesis 4

TH ESIS 5 Judgment establishes the agonistic relation between democracy and sovereignty by dejustifying vio­lence

To delve deeper into the function of stasis in Solon’s law, it is necessary to recognize that t­ here are two conceptions of stasis operating h ­ ere. It w ­ ill not be correct simply to say that ­there is on the one hand a destructive stasis such as the one that ravaged Athens prior to the Solo­ nian demo­cratic reforms and on the other a demo­cratic crisis; such a response would simply raise the question of the difference between t­hese two senses of stasis. Even more importantly, such an approach w ­ ill enforce a separation between democracy and sovereignty, thereby leading to the ruse of sovereignty. Rather, we can glean the difference between the two conceptions of stasis by turning to Plutarch’s wording of the law of stasis and by comparing it to Aristotle’s. Plutarch writes in the Life of Solon:

Τῶν δ’ ἄλλων αὐτοῦ νόμων ἴδιος μὲν μάλιστα καὶ παράδοξος ὁ κελεύων ἄτιμον εἶναι τὸν ἐν στάσει μηδετέρας μερίδος γενόμενον. In Perrin’s translation: Among his other laws ­there is a very peculiar and surprising one which ordains that he ­shall lose his citizenship who, in time of faction, takes neither side.1 ­ ere is one significant difference in the wording com­ Th pared to Aristotle. According to Plutarch, the polis is ἐν στάσει, or in a state of conflict. This is a construction that posits the polis as a passive entity. The polis is in the grip of stasis, as if crisis is something that overwhelms and inundates the polity. By contrast, Aristotle uses the participle of the verb στασιάζειν (stasiazein) to describe the polis—­πόλιν στασιάζουσαν. The participle evokes a sense of activity. The polis does not suffer from a crisis beyond its con­ trol; it is not taken over by crisis. Rather, in Aristotle’s formulation the polis remains in an active state of engage­ ment, which gives the citizens the basis for forming judgments. Despite the two centuries separating Solon from Aristotle, the idea of a crisis that is seen as positive ­because it is intrinsically linked to judgment still reso­ nates. Given ­these shared assumptions, Aristotle states the law of stasis as a ­matter of fact, seeing no need to add any comments or qualifications. Conversely, Plutarch, separated by half a millennium from Aristotle and 62  Thesis 5

mentally disengaged from the culture that established the first democracy in Athens, does not discern the same link between the active sense of crisis and judgment. With the establishment of successive empires, first Alexander’s and then the Roman, the idea of crisis ac­ quires a negative signification. Hence Plutarch feels com­ pelled to introduce the law of stasis by qualifying it as “very peculiar and surprising.” More precisely, the law of stasis is called ἴδιος by Plutarch, meaning not simply peculiar but idiosyncratic. The word even has a pejora­ tive connotation, as the etymological link between ἴδιος and idiot suggests. Immediately a­ fter the passage cited above, Plutarch provides a protracted explanation—­ which he admits is speculative—­about what Solon was trying to achieve with his law. The two conceptions of stasis highlight the contrast between justification and judgment. On the one hand, justification is the activity that supports the exercise of power. It is a defining characteristic of sovereign vio­lence. Justification is in operation while considering the stasis between the warring parties of the rich and the poor, which threatened to lead Athens to ruin. Both parties justified their aggression with reference to their interests. Their justifications ­were incompatible ­because their in­ terests w ­ ere conflicting. Th ­ ere was no way forward for Athens, other than civil war or inviting Solon to overhaul its constitution radically. On the other hand, the law of stasis positions the citizen to make judgments. The active engagement promoted by the law is not a self-­interested On Dejustifying Violence  63

engagement. The criterion of a typology of action is not a selfish versus an altruistic action. Rather, the criterion is between an engaged and a nonengaged citizen. And engagement entails drawing judgments about how to act. This establishes an agon or contest between two dispositions. ­There is no separation between them but rather an agonal relation. Stasis is not exhausted in de­ fining the constitutive feature of democracy as the con­ flictual nature of citizenship. In addition, and just as significantly, it determines the relation between sover­ eignty and any other po­liti­cal arrangement—­for instance, Solon’s law disenfranchises and expels from the city anyone who is opposed to the conflictual nature of the democracy; anyone expelled is thus regarded as an opponent. How can we better depict this conflictual relation? What does this agon consist in? On the one hand, ­there is the sovereign disposition, which proceeds by way of the justification of vio­lence. On the other hand, ­there is the demo­cratic activity of judgment. In Sovereignty and Its Other, I call “dejustification” this agonistic response to justification. As the name suggests, dejustification is the kind of judgment that ­counters the vari­ous justifica­ tions of vio­lence constituting sovereignty. In this sense dejustification is an interruption or a rupture of the dominance that sovereignty seeks to institute. But it would be a fundamental m ­ istake to understand this in­ terruption as a nonrelation.2 Instead, dejustification is the judgment that indicates the agonistic relating between 64  Thesis 5

democracy and sovereignty. Another way to put this is to say that dejustification shows the relations that delimit sovereignty. Dejustification indicates the specificity of judgment. It indicates the inadequacy of specific articulations of justification. Dejustification always requires par­tic­u ­lar sites of agonistic engagement. It is only ever activated against specific justifications of vio­lence or acts of sov­ ereignty. To show quickly what I have in mind, I w ­ ill re­ turn to the example of the Australian government’s asylum-­seeker policy, which I outlined in Intermezzo 1. As you w ­ ill recall, the ancient modality of the jus­ tification of vio­lence was mobilized by calling ­people smugglers “evil,” thereby justifying vio­lence against them. To dejustify this justification, one may ask ­whether the mea­sures against the “evil” ­people smugglers also do a lot of harm ­toward ­others, in par­tic­u­lar to t­hose refugees who are now stranded in countries that are not signatories to the refugee convention. The modern sov­ ereignty justification according to which the state has the right to protect its borders can be met with a re­ sponse that underlines the state’s responsibilities for the protection of the ­human rights of t­ hose seeking asylum. ­There has been significant work conducted by l­egal experts in Australia to assert the importance of the rights of the refugees. One of the most power­ful in­ stances of this was the report prepared by the Australian ­Human Rights Commission, The Forgotten C ­ hildren, which examined the impact of detention on ­children.3 On Dejustifying Violence  65

And the biopo­liti­cal argument can be countered by pointing out that the actions of the Australian govern­ ment only pretended to care for the life of the refugees. For instance, if the government was ­really worried about the lives of the refugees traveling on unseaworthy boats, then it would be hard-­pressed to explain why it paid ­people smugglers to turn t­hese boats back to Indone­ sia.4 Or, more generally, the government’s pronounce­ ments about avoiding deaths at sea are hypocritical in the sense that this simply lets refugees die elsewhere, in subhuman conditions at makeshift camps in countries that are not signatories to the refugee convention and where they are not afforded any l­egal protection. Can t­ hese vari­ous dejustifications be successful? Such a question is complex ­because it depends on what one understands by “successful.” Dejustifications can be successful in the sense of prompting policy changes. For instance, successful campaigning against aspects of the refugee policy as exercised by the Liberal government led to revisions of the policy by the L ­ abor government elected in 2007, such as the closing of detention centers located in remote, desert locations in the Australian mainland and the abolishing of the Temporary Protec­ tion Visas that denied successful asylum claimants basic rights within the Australian state. But the policy has remained essentially the same. For instance, the PNG Solution was a policy devised by a ­Labor government. ­There are vari­ous reasons for that. First, dejustification c­ ounters the reasons proffered for 66  Thesis 5

exercising power in par­tic­u­lar cases. But in many ways the giving of reasons is simply a disguise for deeper, psy­ chic re­sis­tances. In encountering the unconscious, de­ justification cannot hope to be successful. Th ­ ere w ­ ill always be ­people—­and politicians ­will be happy to har­ vest their votes—­who believe laughable claims such as that refugees are responsible for traffic jams in Sydney.5 In Freud’s terminology, denegations can never be coun­ tered by simply pointing out the repressed content. This is not meant as an excuse to refrain from dejustification or as an apol­o­getic for a pessimistic or melancholic dis­ position about politics but as a recognition that makes the po­liti­cal task of dejustification all the more urgent, all the more impor­tant. Second, it is fundamentally impor­tant that dejustifi­ cation avoids the trap of separating democracy and sov­ ereignty. Thus, dejustification points to a kind of po­liti­cal activity that is not condemned from the very beginning to the ruse of sovereignty. And this means that dejusti­ fication must remain mindful of the gap separating justification from legitimacy. No ­matter how successful the deconstruction of the giving of reasons may be, legiti­ macy may still rely on psychic pro­cesses that give a gov­ ernment its mandate despite good reasons against it. Yet if democracy is distinct from sovereignty, and so long as we understand their relation in terms of the vari­ous pro­ cesses of justification and dejustification, then the means of dejustification’s success cannot simply be ­whether a government or a law changes. On Dejustifying Violence  67

Third, the fact that policy has not shifted signifi­ cantly since 2001 demonstrates that dejustification is not enough in countering the claims of the sovereign justi­ fication of vio­lence. Campaigners or activists may talk ­here about the importance of long-­term strategies that aim to “change the attitude” of the citizens. At this point, however, we have left the specificity of dejustifi­ cation’s agonistic engagement with justification and have moved to the second aspect of judgment—­which I deal with in the next Thesis.

68  Thesis 5

TH ESIS 6 Demo­cratic judgment shows the imbrication of the ontological, the po­liti­cal, and the ethical

What activists or policy makers may call a “change of attitude” is the embracing of the possibility that being is being with. This shows that t­here is also a judgment about the attitude one adopts in relation to o ­ thers. Such a judgment has to ask the question as to how it is pos­si­ ble to relate to the other in a nonviolent way. This sec­ ond crucial aspect of judgment can be discerned by considering once again the Solonian law of stasis.1 So­ lon’s law describes not only the state in which one is—­ active or inactive—­but also indicates that one ­ought to be active or risk losing one’s citizenship. Thus, the law of stasis opens up a space where ontological, ethical, and po­liti­cal concerns converge. Moreover, this convergence is pos­si­ble b ­ ecause of the description of the individual as existing in an agonistic mode of being. The fact of making judgments and engaging agonistically with

­ thers entails the convergence of ontology, ethics, and o politics. At this point, the two conceptions of stasis indicated in the previous Thesis resonate with Nietz­sche’s insights on the agonistic nature of Greek ethics and politics. In “Homer’s Contest,” Nietz­sche notes the opening of Hesiod’s Works and Days, according to which t­ here are two goddesses of Strife with “quite separate dispositions.” The first is the Eris who “promotes wicked war and feud­ ing,” and as such she is universally despised, even though “the yoke of necessity forces” her upon h ­ umans. The second Eris “is good for men.” According to Hesiod: She drives even the unskilled man to work; and if someone who lacks property sees someone e­ lse who is rich, he likewise hurries off to sow and plant and set his ­house in order; neighbour competes with neighbour striving for prosperity. . . . ​Even potters harbour grudges against potters, carpenters against carpenters, beggars envy beggars and minstrels envy minstrels.2 On the one hand, we have the destructive Eris, who op­ erates by justifying the exercise of war and feuding. This is the kind of goddess that a con­temporary theorist might associate with thanatopolitics. This is, further, the Eris who conforms to the identity politics of “love thy neighbor” b ­ ecause this precept also denotes t­ hose who are not “the ­children of God,” against whom vio­lence is justified. On the other hand, the good Eris promotes 70  Thesis 6

competition and thereby becomes the motivating ­factor for existence. The neighbor ­here is one’s agonistic other without whom one cannot achieve one’s self-­identity. Con­temporary theorists might talk ­here of Eris as a god­ dess supporting democracy.3 In any case, Nietz­sche strongly emphasizes how such an agonal ethic, with the emphasis it places on jealousies and envies, is far re­ moved from the mostly Stoic and Christian conceptions of morality determining our world. But the par­t ic­u ­lar emotions or moods motivating action are secondary compared to the agonal spirit regulating the Hellenic world, according to the opening of Works and Days. Nietz­sche’s interpretation does not, however, stop at this point. Instead, the stronger inference he draws is that the agon described by the second Eris indicates that, for the Greeks, the possibility of judgment imbricates questions of existence, ethical concerns, and po­liti­cal practice. According to Nietz­sche, the distinction be­ tween the two Goddesses of Discord is a remarkable idea “at the gate of entry to Hellenic ethics.” 4 Nietz­sche also insists that without this agonistic ethic, “the Hellenic state, like Hellenic man, deteriorates.”5 Fi­nally, as Acam­ pora observes, not only is this notion of the agon re­ sponsible “for the exercise of judgment,” but in addition “Nietz­sche considers striving and strug­gle to be basic conditions of existence.” 6 In this conception of the agon, then, we encounter what I call the ontologico-­ethico-­ political imbrication. I am using the word “imbrica­ tion” to highlight their overlap while at the same time On the Ontologico-ethico-political  71

suggesting that they do not collapse into one another. Being, questions of what ­ought to be, and concerns about how to act are distinct yet interconnected. The ontologico-­ethico-­political imbrication is pos­si­ ble b ­ ecause of the introduction of the other. Th ­ ere is no agon when one is alone. Agon is pos­si­ble when an other is pres­ent to contend with. Nietz­sche notes as much by drawing attention to the practice of ostracism. The Greeks used ostracism to expel from the cities t­hose who had assumed too much power—­and thereby been regarded as the best. The reason was that it is impossible to compete with the best, explains Nietz­sche, and thus ostracism functions as “a stimulant: the preeminent in­ dividual is removed to renew the tournament of forces.”7 This gives us an impor­tant insight: The other—­a nd hence ethical concerns—­are fundamental for democ­ racy. What are the inferences that we can draw about democracy from this conception of the other? How does the other nuance the relation between democracy and sovereignty? Before showing some of the implications about such a construal of the other, it is crucial to avoid misunder­ standing what the other denotes in this context. First, a demo­cratic being that departs from a consideration of the other is incompatible with a Christian morality, which regards the other in terms of pastoral care.8 Despite a huge variety of approaches that spans also a bewilder­ ing variety of dogmatic and institutional variations, overall such an ethics takes the other as the one who is 72  Thesis 6

to be loved. This love is expressed in moral attitudes such as charity. How dif­fer­ent is this notion of charity from that of envy, which, according to Nietz­sche’s “Homer’s Contest,” characterizes the agonal ethics of the Greeks! One can love and be charitable to another ­because the other is seen as a separate being. The other is simply t­ here to allow the self to fulfill certain moral values in­de­pen­dent of their encounter—­more precisely, to fulfill and impose ­these values. The other is the con­ dition of the possibility of the violent justification of values. Conversely, envy indicates the engagement with the other in their particularity. The ethics of “Homer’s Contest” requires the encounter with the other—­which is the reason why it is agonal. One’s agonistic comport­ ment requires the other. The other is not a separate entity but a co-­competitor who is indispensable in de­ termining one’s identity. The other is an agonistic part­ ner. Democracy does not seek to be charitable to the other but instead affords the other the re­spect to give them a voice to express their opinions as well as to de­ bate and rebuke t­ hese opinions. Second, the other as understood ­here is also in­ commensurate with a Levinasian approach, whereby the other is treated as the universal that determines one’s actions. As Derrida has forcefully demonstrated, such a universalization of the other is always, and despite itself, imbued with the possibility of the justification of vio­ lence.9 Instead, demo­cratic judgment insists on the im­ portance of the other b ­ ecause the other is an extension On the Ontologico-ethico-political  73

of oneself. The “I” is not an in­de­pen­dent entity enjoying a metaphysical, moral, and po­liti­cal autonomy. Rather, as Derrida puts it: What is proper to a culture is not to be identical to itself. Not to not have an identity, but not to be able to identify itself, to be able to say “me” or “we”; to be able to take the form of a subject only in the non-­identity to itself or, if you prefer, only in the difference with itself. ­There is no culture or cultural identity without this difference with itself.10 The “I” is always determined by its other, or, as I call it call it elsewhere, its Doppelgänger.11 ­After ­these clarifications, we can return to the ques­ tion about what the other and the ontologico-­ethico-­ political imbrication contribute to an understanding of democracy. First, the most impor­tant feature of the agonal rela­ tion to the other is that the agon with the other is part of one’s identity, without relying on exclusion. The basis of the relation is not the justification of vio­lence against the other. As such, it charts a region that is not included in sovereignty—it is “outside” sovereignty but without being excluded from it. This is hugely impor­tant b ­ ecause it bypasses the ruse of sovereignty, according to which, as we saw earlier, the rejection of sovereignty relies on its exclusion, which is nothing but the reanimation of the sovereign logic of justified vio­lence. As such, the other further nuances constituent power. In Thesis 1, 74  Thesis 6

constituent power was shown as that which was needed for justified vio­lence to operate and hence as the condi­ tion of the possibility of sovereignty. The other functions in a similar manner, except that it further expands con­ stituent power to provide it with an ontological and po­ liti­cal layer. From this perspective, the conception of constituent power finds its proper place in the concep­ tion of the other. Constituent power is not a purely po­ liti­cal concept, but it carries ethical and ontological implications. Second, this agon or contest requires resolutions. This means that t­ here w ­ ill be winners and losers. The discord that characterizes agonistic democracy refash­ ions a series of concepts determinative of democracy. For instance, it is an illusion that democracy can be based on absolute equality. What are more primary than equality are the relations of power that are responsible for the agon in the first place. This allows for the devel­ opment of a concept of agonistic equality.12 More gener­ ally, the concept of the agon also introduces a concept of power not reducible to instituted power. This is the concept of power that Spinoza refers to as potentia, as opposed to potestas, which is the power linked to forms of legitimacy. Potentia is a relational power. Without the exercise of power, relations between h ­ uman beings are meaningless. Further, otherness is not personalized in Spinoza—it is not confined to ­human interaction be­ tween individuals. Rather, potentia points to a sense of otherness as a system of relations that constitutes society. On the Ontologico-ethico-political  75

Or, differently put, constitution is ­here understood as agonal—­before legitimacy even comes into consideration. Third, the imbrication of the ontological, the ethi­ cal, and the po­liti­cal gives rise to a notion of agonistic democracy that cannot be reduced to a notion of de­ mocracy as government. The state and the three arms of government—­executive, legislative, and judicial—­cannot encompass the breadth of this imbrication. Instead, as Derrida insists, democracy is an unconditional. And, the other side of this recognition is that democracy is fragile, since its unconditionality consists in welcoming the other, giving the other a voice that affirms the other’s po­liti­cal and ethical position. Derrida insists that the most difficult question of democracy is this fragility when faced with the prospect of accepting an other who is inherently undemo­cratic.13 In other words, the greatest difficulty of democracy is how to retain its ethical import while recognizing the inevitability, even the necessity, of justified vio­lence. ­These insights amount to saying that a demo­cratic being is conflictual—­which is to say that it cannot find certainty in any po­liti­cal regime promising unity or in a state characterized by order, peace, and stability. Rather, democracy in this sense is a regime that is inherently open to the possibility of conflict without any under­lying structure to regulate this conflict or to resolve it to some­ thing posited as higher.

76  Thesis 6

Intermezzo 2 The Refugee and Re­sis­tance to Sovereign Power

The description of judgment as the activity that enacts the agon between democracy and sovereignty raises the prospect of avoiding the ruse of sovereignty and hence of re­sis­tance to sovereignty. Is the theory of judgment advanced h ­ ere adequate to the task of opposing sover­ eignty? And if so, how can it be mobilized for a po­liti­cal activism intending to check sovereign power? Raising the issue of re­sis­tance to sovereignty si­mul­ta­neously raises the prob­lem of counter-­resistance.1 As has often been observed, any re­sis­tance to sovereign power has the potential to lead it to adapt and to adopt a new form whereby sovereignty is in fact strengthened. Does this mean that re­sis­tance can inadvertently facilitate the re­ turn of the ruse of sovereignty? Or is it pos­si­ble to dis­ cover a notion of re­sis­tance that affirms the agon between democracy and sovereignty?

I ­will return to the treatment of refugees by the Aus­ tralian state in order to interrogate the intricate nexus of re­sis­tance and counter-­resistance. I aim to show that re­sis­tance with recourse only to dejustification runs the risk of reviving the ruse of sovereignty. Re­sis­tance also requires the ontologico-­ethico-­political imbrication in order to avoid exclusion and hence evade the logic of sovereignty. Among the responses to the PNG Solution and the Australian government’s policy to transport asylum seekers to third countries was that of the “Boundless Plains to Share,” a collective campaign for the humane treatment of refugees.2 Alana Lentin encapsulated that response to the PNG Solution in an article written for The Guardian, in which she argued that “open borders are the only solution to Australia’s immigration im­ passe.”3 The call for open borders highlights a site of re­sis­tance to sovereign power. The link between sover­ eignty and the border is undeniable. As Carl Schmitt delineates in The Nomos of the Earth, the entire Eu­ro­ pean conception of constituted power can be understood from the perspective of how the border is conceived.4 And as Eyal Weizman demonstrates, the border is not simply a geo­graph­i­cal marker that designates a clear line on a territory but rather an architectural construct that can be discontinuous and articulated in a variety of complex ways.5 Even more broadly, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson define the border as “an epistemo­ logical device, which is at work whenever a distinction 78  Intermezzo 2

between subject and object is established.” 6 Within this context, propagating an open-­border policy position may appear as a forceful act of re­sis­tance against the justification of vio­lence directed t­ oward refugees by the Australian state. The possibility of counter-­resistance, however, is never distant whenever sovereignty is challenged head on. In this par­tic­u­lar instance, it is instructive to start with the h ­ orse­shoe theory about borders, which sees an im­ plicit alliance between globalization and a radical poli­ tics that calls for open borders. Hence this theory purports that globalization’s call for the ­free flow of capital across borders and the activist’s call for the dismantling of borders as a form of re­sis­tance to sovereignty ultimately share the same aim—­a po­liti­cal order without borders. I want to state categorically that, at one level, the h ­ orse­shoe theory about borders is a sophism. ­There are clear dif­ ferences between globalization and the activist call for open borders. In par­tic­u ­lar, the aim of globaliza­ tion is accompanied by a justification of vio­lence—­for instance, for the protection of the interests of the inter­ national corporations, which includes the control of the flow of h ­uman populations—­ thereby still operating within a logic of sovereignty. Globalization is not seri­ ously antistatist and in fact requires the state to police economic interests. Conversely, the activist call is—or may be—­positioned as the countering of any justifica­ tion of vio­lence related to borders. Yet b ­ ehind the soph­ istry of their supposed sameness lurks the fact that they The Refugee and Resistance to Sovereignty  79

have one impor­tant feature in common: Both globaliza­ tion and the call for open borders are opposed to one specific conception of sovereign power, namely, the mod­ ern nation-­state. Globalization affirms other forms of sovereign power—in par­tic­u ­lar, neoliberal biopolitics—­ whereas the call for open borders does not address the ancient and biopo­liti­cal conceptions of sovereignty. For tactical reasons it may be expedient to call for open borders. But as re­sis­tance to sovereignty, it is too narrow in its scope b ­ ecause it cannot account for an­ cient and biopo­liti­cal sovereignty. The resemblance of globalization and neoliberal biopolitics functions as a reminder for the importance of the cosupponibility of the three justifications of vio­lence characterizing sover­ eignty. Focusing too narrowly on one form of sovereignty allows the other forms to return and dominate the stage. A narrow focus on dejustifying one modality of the jus­ tification of vio­lence leaves the stage open for other forms of sovereignty to establish their legitimation. Is it pos­si­ble, then, to find a universally agreeable basis upon which to make the call for open borders, in such a way as to evade the particularity of the justifica­ tions of vio­lence, or at least to preempt the operations of sovereignty? For this we need to turn away from the Australian case and to an influential paper by Joseph Carens, “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Bor­ ders.” Carens proposes a moral basis for making the case for open borders. This moral basis is founded on the seemingly commonsense assumption of the “equal moral 80  Intermezzo 2

worth of individuals.” 7 The result is a series of argu­ ments that demonstrate the moral imperative for open borders. But how is this conclusion reached? Th ­ ere is a double move operating h ­ ere. First, ­there is the Kantian assumption of taking each ­human as an end in itself, which is now translated to the just imperative to treat “the individual as prior to the community.” 8 Second, this leads to a retention of sovereignty, which is, how­ ever, made subservient to morality: “State sovereignty would be (morally) constrained by the princi­ples of jus­ tice.”9 Consequently, Carens is not only unconcerned with resisting sovereignty, but he is in fact concerned to protect sovereignty from accusations of immorality. “Aliens and Citizens” may appear to be a challenge to sovereignty as it puts forward an argument for open borders, but it still requires sovereignty to function. It is not an act of re­sis­tance to sovereignty but a plea—­even an apol­o­getic—­for reform. To return now to the Australian case, we can see how such an argument can readily play into the hands of ­t hose adhering to the policy credo of “we decide who comes to this country and the circumstances u ­ nder which they come.” The fact that the moral worth of the individual is prior to politics essentially means that ­t here are moral princi­ples separate from particularity. To put it in Kantian terms, the moral realm is in­de­pen­ dent of natu­ral ­causes. Yet they are immediately re­united as soon as sovereignty—­and its legitimacy—­are purported to rest on a moral basis. This immediate reunification is The Refugee and Resistance to Sovereignty  81

characteristic of sovereignty.10 And when morality be­ comes the basis of the po­liti­cal, the par­tic­u­lar sover­ eignty that is supported is biopo­liti­cal sovereignty. It is not surprising that Carens’s argument about the prior­ ity of the individual’s worth could easily have been appropriated by the Australian government when it purports to be acting to protect the lives of ­those who ­were in danger of drowning by trying to cross to Aus­ tralia in unseaworthy vessels. As Desmond Manderson has brilliantly shown, the moralizing discourse is very much alive in the Australian government’s justification of the vio­lence exercised against the refugees.11 The Kan­ tian assertion of the moral worth of the individual as the basis of the po­liti­cal readily plays into the hands of biopolitics.12 But ­t here is another instructive ele­ment in Carens’s argumentation. The argument totally relies on the ruse of sovereignty. This consists in the pres­ent case in sepa­ rating sovereignty from something more impor­tant or more primary, excluding sovereignty from the founda­ tion of po­liti­cal legitimacy. Yet that very exclusion is a mark of the sovereign logic of the justification of vio­ lence. Thus, the rejection of sovereignty is nothing but its implicit reassertion. When sovereignty is resisted by being excluded, it returns as a form of counter-­resistance and reinscribes itself squarely at the center of the po­liti­ cal. Carens blindly affirms the ruse of sovereignty. His attempt at re­sis­tance to sovereignty ends up being a glo­ rious apol­o­getic of sovereignty. 82  Intermezzo 2

To resist sovereignty without reverting to the ruse of sovereignty, a double move is necessary. First, the ago­ nistic ele­ment needs to come to the fore. This consists in drawing a distinction between democracy and sover­ eignty so as to allow for their agonism to unfold. This agonism consists in the clash between judgment—in its vari­ous guises, as I described them earlier—­a nd justi­ fication, which is inextricably linked to sovereignty’s structural vio­lence. Second, the question of the relation between democracy and sovereignty needs to assume center stage. And this can only happen by inquiring which one is more primary. In this second move, what I call monism is r­ eally impor­tant. In what way is democ­ racy more primary than sovereignty so as to be the cause of sovereignty? We have seen aspects of this monism, for instance, by showing that constituent power is the tar­ get, and hence the condition of the possibility, of the jus­ tification of vio­lence. But this monism also needs to be better highlighted within a historical-­conceptual set­ ting, so as to provide democracy with the conceptual rigor to resist sovereignty. I w ­ ill sketch how stasis can do just that in the follow three ­Theses.

The Refugee and Resistance to Sovereignty  83

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TH ESIS 7 Stasis indicates that judgment is the condition of the possibility of the law, or that democracy is the form of the constitution

It is instructive to note the place in The Athenian Constitution where Aristotle chooses to mention the law of stasis. The Solonian law is not mentioned as a mere cu­ riosity, as is the case in Plutarch’s account. Nor is it men­ tioned in the context of mea­sures taken to overcome the conflict between the two factions, the rich and the poor. Rather, the law of stasis appears in §8, which is dedicated to the structure of the vari­ous institutions of govern­ ment that Solon established as part of the first demo­ cratic constitution. Section 8 opens with the famous reform of election to office by lot. This is followed by the description of the Council of the Four Hundred and the Council of the Areopagus, which ­were responsible for making decisions about the main affairs of the state and for overseeing the ­running of the laws. Thus, §8 de­ scribes what we would call t­ oday the constitution—­the fundamental structure of the governance of the state.

­A fter outlining the constitutional framework, Aris­ totle introduces the law of stasis through a contrast with the words ὁρῶν δὲ. This can be translated as follows: “And yet Solon noticed.” The disjunctive δὲ—­“and yet”—­indicates that the l­egal setting is not adequate to address the constitutional form. The legislator also looks at the existence of the p ­ eople. How one leads their lives—­one’s being and ethical comportment—­are con­ stitutive ele­ments of the l­egal framework. The state and its laws do not operate by themselves, as if they are a self-­ moving machine (τὸ αὐτόματον). They require the par­ ticipation of the ­humans—­they require the engagement of the citizens. In other words, the agonism of stasis in­ dicates that the sphere of the law is not in­de­pen­dent. Rather, it requires the imbrication of the ontologico-­ politico-­ethical. This has an impor­tant implication. Namely, it ­counters the idea that sovereignty is defined with recourse to its juridical operation. This idea is determinative for thinkers such as Foucault and Negri. For instance, Foucault’s distinction between classical forms of sover­ eignty and the disciplinary mechanisms of power de­ veloped in the nineteenth c­ entury and culminating in biopolitics relies on delimiting classical sovereignty through the l­egal sphere. We see a similar move in the genealogy of power that Hardt and Negri extrapolate in the first part of Empire. The difficulty with this approach is its proximity to the conception of the autonomy of the po­liti­cal, which in turn underlies the ruse of sov­ 86  Thesis 7

ereignty and the prospect that the only possibility of po­liti­cal change is the indefinite substitution of one sovereign by another. The responses to the problematic of the ruse of sovereignty are unsatisfactory whenever they start with the premise of the l­egal nature of sover­ eignty. The Foucauldian response consists in insisting it is an illusion to think that change can be effected in and through government—­a point that was dramatized in the famous debate with Chomsky on Dutch tele­vi­sion. The Negrian response, by contrast, is to separate completely constituent power from the ­legal framework, leading to the conclusion that democracy is pos­si­ble on the condi­ tion that it is separated from sovereignty.1 The former response runs the risk of conceiving po­liti­cal change merely in terms of tactical interventions and the latter of establishing a strange ­family resemblance between democracy and Christian models of universal peace and love—as is conceded, for instance, in the last part of Empire. As Solon’s law indicates, stasis is linked to the l­egal sphere. But unlike the above conceptions of sovereignty, stasis is not delimited by the juridical but is rather the excess that delimits the ­legal sphere. And, further, this is pos­si­ble b ­ ecause of the operation of judgment linked to stasis and functioning as the precondition of the delivery of the ­legal verdict. One of the best illustrations of this connection is provided in Aeschylus’s Eumenides. We saw in Thesis 2 how the Oresteia sets up the agonism between a politics of kinship, represented by On Stasis and the Form of the Constitution  87

the older deities, and a politics of rationalized instru­ mentalism, represented by Athena and the new pan­ theon. In addition to the agonistic aspect, Eumenides contains an assertion that, at first glance, may seem nonsensical—­the kind of statement that would tempt a philologist to talk about a textual corruption. Athena opens her summary of the case against Orestes by un­ derscoring the importance of the trial. She says, ad­ dressing the judges: “you who w ­ ill judge the first trial of bloodshed [πρώτας δίκας κρίνοντες αἵματος χυτοῦ].”2 Clearly, it does not make sense that Aeschylus ­will have Athena say that ­there has never been another “trial of bloodshed” before this one. The idea of the first trial could not possibly indicate a temporal priority, since it would be illogical that ­there have been no other mur­ ders or ­trials of murderers prior to this one. Rather, the expression “πρώτας δίκας” indicates a space before the application of the law but not separated from the law. It is a “first trial” in the sense that it points to what comes before the application of the law, namely, the judgment as to what law Orestes is to be tried u ­ nder—as the mur­ derer of his ­mother or as the po­liti­cal rebel who freed Argos of its tyrant. In other words, the word “first” in­ dicates a kind of judgment prior to the juridical verdict. Such a judgment gives the ­legal sphere its form—it is its condition of possibility. This is the kind of judgment that arises in Orestes’s case from the standoff or stasis between the two dif­fer­ent senses of legality—­between kinship and rationalized instrumentalism—­ and that 88  Thesis 7

calls for a judgment in order for ­either ­legal framework to be pos­si­ble in the first place. This judgment required before the commencement of the trial proper is clearly identified and theorized as the theory of stasis in forensic rhe­toric.3 In rhetorical manuals, the theory of stasis is presented as the ques­ tion of how to determine the issue at hand. It is the question: What is it that calls for an argument? An often used example to illustrate the function of stasis in rhe­toric is the murder of the adulterous eunuch. A husband finds his wife in bed with a eunuch. In a rage, he kills the eunuch. ­These facts are beyond dispute. The issue or stasis is w ­ hether the deed should be tried ­u nder the right of the husband to kill an adulterer, or ­whether it should be classified as a murder, given that the eunuch could not, properly speaking, be a “com­ plete” adulterer.4 The stasis h ­ ere is similar to that of the Eumenides in the sense that a prelegal judgment is required about which law is to be applied. The judg­ ment that arises from stasis relies on an interrogation of par­tic­u ­lar circumstances. It is not the application of a predetermined law—­t hat application is the verdict. In the ­legal sphere, too, the judgment of stasis con­ forms to the “thinking without banisters” we saw in Thesis 4. The point that we glean from the Eumenides and from forensic rhe­toric can be articulated in a more con­ temporary register. As Jacques Derrida observes in “Be­ fore the Law,” the paradox of the law is the inability to On Stasis and the Form of the Constitution  89

reconcile its generality with its particularity. A law is a law by virtue of making a claim to its being applicable to many dif­fer­ent situations. A law guarantees a certain proscription in its generality. At the same time, a law is only ever applied in par­tic­u­lar contexts and in specific circumstances. The application of the law has to retain a certain singularity. What forges the connection be­ tween the generality and the particularity of the law is neither inside nor outside the law. Derrida describes this positioning within recourse to Kafka’s parable “Before the Law.”5 In Kafka’s story, a man from the country en­ acts that positioning between the inside and the out­ side of the law. Judith Butler theorizes this positioning in terms of performativity, explic­itly acknowledging Der­ rida’s essay as a major source for her account.6 What I am adding to this discourse is that the consti­ tutive undecidability of the law and performativity had been highly theorized in forensic rhe­toric through the figure of stasis. The aporetic link between the generality of the law and its application consists in a krinein—to use Athena’s term from the Eumenides—it consists in judgment. Further, what I am also suggesting is that this judgment is always related to acts of vio­lence. This may be the killing of a ­mother, who is also a tyrant, or a eu­ nuch, who is also an adulterer—­a nd the judgment is called to determine t­ hese distinctions. Or it may be the less bloody but no less violent act of shutting the gate to prevent one from ­going through it. ­These are acts of vio­ lence for which reasons can be provided—­for instance, 90  Thesis 7

the avenging of the ­father’s murder or the liberation of the city, murder in rage or the right to kill an adulterer, and the freedom of movement or the advice that it is better to proceed when the time is right. But what is dis­ tinctive about this giving of reasons is that it precedes ­legal application. It is on the threshold of the generality and the applicability of the law. Consequently, such a judgment is related to but not commensurate with the pro­cess of legitimation. ­A fter this con­temporary contextualization of stasis, let us return to provide some details about the develop­ ment of stasis theory in forensic rhe­toric. ­There is some debate as to when stasis theory is explic­itly developed. The name usually put forward as making the strongest contribution is Hermagoras in the second ­century b.c., but the under­lying idea that the issue at hand needs to be detected for a successful rhetorical argument is al­ ready pres­ent in Aristotle and his contemporaries.7 The highest point of the theorization of stasis in rhe­toric is regarded to be Hermogenes’s work in the second ­century a.d., by which point stasis had become one of the most impor­tant parts of rhe­toric, the linchpin of the part more generally referred to as invention.8 Crucially, the rhetorical theory of stasis is also car­ ried over to Latin rhe­toric, although the translation of the term is not consistent. For instance, stasis is trans­ lated as “status” by Quintilian, who summarizes and thematizes past accounts of stasis but other­wise contrib­ utes ­little new to stasis theory.9 He defines “status” as On Stasis and the Form of the Constitution  91

the issue arising “from the first conflict [est status prima conflictio].”10 The idea of the first trial we encountered in the Oresteia is ­here formalized as the kind of consider­ ation that is required to form the basis or status for the law and its application. We see then in Quintilian the idea that stasis is the condition of the possibility of le­ gality in the sense that it is the judgment preceding the law and structuring ­legal application. In the context of Latin theories of stasis, Quintilian provided the most widely consulted account. But within the larger context of the po­liti­cal impor­ tance of forensic rhe­toric, Cicero is the pivotal figure. The reason is that in his early work, De Inventione, Cicero translates stasis as constitutio.11 This is an impor­tant translation given that Cicero is also the one who uses for the first time the word constitutio to refer to what we still ­today call “constitution,” that is, the ­legal basis of po­liti­cal legitimacy—or, differently put, the govern­ mental form or what was called politeia in classical Greek.12 Stephen Holmes observes that constitutio in Latin has a variety of meanings “that remain pertinent to constitutional theory ­today.” For instance, he gleans the following: “making a pact or agreeing to act in con­ cert, strengthening defenses in preparation for an ­enemy attack, fixing a f­ uture date for a group meeting, arrang­ ing to pay or repay an amount due, appointing someone to a position, and preparing a ­legal case or lodging an accusation before a tribunal.”13 I ­w ill return in the next thesis to the polysemy of stasis. For the moment, we can 92  Thesis 7

summarize ­these meanings by saying that they point to taking a stand that includes ­others and in such a way as to be conceived as the condition of the possibility of the institutions and governmental forms of the state. It is lit­ erally a stasis—­a standstill—­with ­others. The vari­ous meanings of stasis are given a more explicit communal dimension. If we return to the first demo­cratic constitution writ­ ten by Solon and recall that its condition of possibility is the stasis or conflict that persists between citizens and in which citizens are obliged to participate at peril of losing their citizenship, then we see a direct lineage between the law of stasis and what we call constitution nowadays. Specifically, the transference of stasis into rhe­toric added to conflict and judgment (krisis) as marks of citizenship the idea of stasis as the condition of the possibility of a strong l­egal bond. Stasis unfolds in vari­ous relations to laws, institutions, and government. It is a communal ac­ tivity, standing together, literally a con-­stitution. This does not simply matrix dif­fer­ent forms of government. Rather, it shows what the dif­fer­ent forms of government require. It indicates, in other words, the form of the forms of government, the form of the constitution.14 The demo­cratic princi­ple of judgment and partici­ pation contained within the notion of stasis finds itself reformulated and highly elaborated in t­oday’s idea of the constitution. But what remains constant, regardless of w ­ hether it is acknowledged, is the demo­cratic basis or status of the form of the constitution given its prov­ On Stasis and the Form of the Constitution  93

enance in the concept of stasis. What I am suggesting is not simply that ­there is a connection between Solon’s law of stasis and the idea of the modern constitution. I am not making a historical point. Rather, the connection of stasis to conflict and to judgment—­and hence to democracy—­and the subsequent development of this into the modern constitution suggest the idea of agonis­ tic monism. Stasis in its articulations with conflict and judgment is the precondition for the idea of the constitu­ tion. And hence, democracy is presupposed in the idea of the constitution.

94  Thesis 7

TH ESIS 8 Stasis, or agonistic monism, names the forms of the relation between democracy and sovereignty

If we pause for a moment to consider Holmes’s point about the polysemy of constitutio in Latin, we w ­ ill find ourselves facing the most difficult as well as the most re­ vealing aspect of stasis—­namely, the bewildering mul­ tivalence of the term and its cognates arising from the root *sta.1 This wide variety of meanings saturates the Western metaphysical tradition, and its mark on po­liti­ cal thought has been determinative, as has often been observed.2 Schematically, ­there are two main clusters of meaning, one signifying immobility, the other signify­ ing mobility.3 From the first semantic cluster signifying immobility, a large number of words enter Romance languages, such as state, static, status, status quo, stand, substance, and so on. The po­liti­cal import of ­these terms leads to the idea of the stability—­yes, another word whose root is *sta—­ provided by sovereignty to the state. The development

of this cluster of meanings ultimately gives rise to the figure of the sovereign as the figure that unifies the ­people into a po­liti­cal community. One state with one law, no state within a state—­the entire constellation of ideas referred to as “secularization” is contained within the unfolding of concepts linked in vari­ous ways to this semantic root. In addition, t­ here is a veritable ontologi­ cal and epistemological apparatus relying on defining existence as static. Heidegger is perhaps the thinker who more than any other has concentrated on this by point­ ing out that *sta in the sense of immobility is the root of existence as understood in onto-­theology. From the early discussion of the epistemology of the “pres­ent at hand” in Being and Time; to his exploration of the ety­ mological roots of metaphysical concepts such as the concept of being in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics or of the t­ hing as a Gegen-­stand, as a standing against; to his verdict that “the more extensively and the more effectually the world stands at man’s disposal” the more modern man is mired in humanism and the further removed he is from “the ­great age of the Greeks,” Heidegger has consistently, even compulsively, circled the vari­ ous meanings of immobility arising from *sta,  noting their fundamental function for Western metaphysics.4 Yet at the same time, one of Heidegger’s own terms for the kind of stance that overcomes metaphysics, ek-­ stasis, relies on the same *sta root and refers directly to

96  Thesis 8

stasis.5 This is not as surprising as it may at first appear. The second cluster of signification, the one indicating movement, is often understood as being opposed to, or contradicting, the first one. The po­liti­cal meaning of this cluster, for instance, yields a series of terms that confound the stability and unity of the state and its sov­ ereign. Thus, as already noted, stasis signifies faction and civil war in ancient Greece. It is the disunity of the polis. In a famous passage in Republic, Plato contrasts this meaning of stasis to polemos (war).6 Civil war is the scourge of the po­liti­cal, the most pernicious disease that the polis needs to expunge. By contrast, polemos is ex­ ternal war and the source of civic virtue for the ancient Greek polis.7 The meaning of stasis as civil war is ren­ dered as sedition in modern En­glish, when Hobbes translates Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War.8 ­Needless to say that one governing power’s sedi­ tion is the rising party’s revolution—­a term that in Greek is itself derived from *sta, as a quick examination of the etymological root of epanastasis or a glance at Greek texts such as the fifth book of Aristotle’s Politics show us.9 I do not want to indulge h ­ ere in a further develop­ ment of this contrast between the two clusters of mean­ ing arising out of *sta and permeating stasis. This would be an endless and ultimately fruitless task. I would like to pause only for a parenthetical remark to situate Agamben’s discussion of stasis in the first chapter of his

On Agonistic Monism  97

book Stasis within the context of the two clusters of sig­ nification for stasis.10 According to Agamben, stasis rep­ resents something associated with the natu­ral and the ­house­hold. The opposition that he draws from this is be­ tween stasis and the political—­and thus stasis names the relation, as Agamben himself explic­itly concedes, between zoe and bios, that is, the relation that was the starting point of the entire homo sacer series. Stasis effects, according to Agamben, a separation between the natu­ral and the po­liti­cal, only for them to be re­united in order to produce sovereignty. What I am finding defi­ cient in Agamben’s analy­sis is the insistence on an ini­ tial separation from the po­liti­cal, given that the two clusters of signification of stasis both contain ineradica­ ble po­liti­cal motives. Thus, Agamben’s entire discussion of stasis departs from a premise that misses the essen­ tial distinction contained within stasis and that devel­ oped over the centuries so as to be determinative of Western metaphysical and po­liti­cal concepts. Starting with such a separation between zoe and bios, Agamben ultimately has absolutely nothing to say about the im­ portance of stasis for democracy—in fact, the word de­ mocracy appears incidentally only once in Agamben’s text. And this omission is stark given that his discus­ sion of stasis is presented as an encounter with Nicole Loraux, whose major contribution, as we saw, is the insis­ tence on the importance of stasis for democracy. If we want to think the demo­cratic significance of stasis, then the real question is how to think the con­ 98  Thesis 8

nection between the two clusters of signification. What is the relation between ­these contradictory, counter-­ refuting meanings arising from the same root? Signifi­ cantly, this question maps onto the question of the relation between sovereignty and democracy, which, as mentioned, is instrumental for recognizing the monism of agonism—­a nd which is the reason for the signifi­ cance of stasis in po­liti­cal thought. In the history of thought ­there are—to the best of my knowledge—­only two significant attempts even to raise this question of the relation between the two semantic clusters of stasis and thereby address the relation between democracy and sovereignty through stasis. The first can be found in Carl Schmitt and the second in Nicole Loraux.11 In the second volume of Po­liti­cal Theology, which is also the last book he published before his death, Schmitt engages in a debate about secularism with Erik Peter­ son. I w ­ ill not be distracted ­here by the details of this debate except to say that one of the key references is Gregory of Nazianzus’s definition of the trinity in De Filio: “ἔστι γὰρ καὶ τὸ ἓν στασιάζον πρὸς ἑαυτὸ.”12 The relation between ­Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is defined as stasis: “the one is in stasis within itself.” Clearly, it is not obvious what the word στασιάζον, describing the relations of the Trinity, signifies in this definition. Spe­ cifically, does it refer to the cluster of meanings indicating immobility and giving rise to the entire metaphysical and theological apparatus of the Western tradition? Or does it register, to the contrary, the cluster of meanings On Agonistic Monism  99

signifying movement, which seek to undermine this metaphysical apparatus and its po­liti­cal consequences? In order to argue for a stringent secularism, Peterson opts for the former option. The relations of the Trinity are static. Th ­ ere is a perfect unity within the Trinity. Such a unity, Peterson observes further, is not forthcoming in ­human relations. This lack of stasis in the sense of im­ mobility in h ­ uman affairs affords Peterson the basis for the secular thesis of a detheologization of the po­liti­cal.13 Schmitt’s response is effectively a compelling account of the relation between the two clusters of meaning of stasis but by privileging one term so as to dissolve their relation. Schmitt opts to translate στασιάζον through the second cluster of signification, the cluster showing movement and upheaval—he translates it as “Aufruhr.”14 This essentially allows Schmitt to inscribe and consume the second cluster of signification within the first one, thereby annulling their relation. Stasis as immobility in­ corporates stasis as mobility—­with all the metaphysical and po­liti­cal implications this entails. Schmitt accom­ plishes this with a double move. On the one hand, he argues that Gregory of Nazianzus shows that stasis as faction or civil war is unimaginable in order to think both the identity and difference between the members of the Trinity.15 On the other hand, he also shows that ­every unity implies a duality, or a friend-­and-­enemy rela­ tion.16 This duality of enmity is, according to Schmitt, the constitutive characteristic of the po­liti­cal. This parallel argument essentially means that t­ here is no stasis as revo­ 100  Thesis 8

lution and conflict without presupposing a unity immune from the conflict. In terms of the two clusters of signifi­ cation of stasis, mobility of necessity implies immobility. Or, to put it in the vocabulary used in Po­liti­cal Theology II, the po­liti­cal implies the theological, and e­ very attempt to eliminate the theological—­such as Peterson does by arguing against the existence of unity—­entails a depoliticization. Yet at the moment that unity and theologization are posited as the enemies of the po­liti­ cal, as that which the po­liti­cal needs to expunge to reach modernity and secularization, at that very same mo­ ment the structure of enmity is recuperated. Enmity, in its subservience to unity and immobility, is assumed in the mechanism that seeks to expunge theology. Thus, even though detheologization may appear as a thor­ ough depoliticization when it rejects that t­ here is a rela­ tion between enmity and the Trinity, still this rejection reinscribes po­liti­cal theology. Unity or immobility is both the necessary cause of duality or enmity, and hence e­ very sense of enmity necessarily presupposes unity. James Martel describes this typical Schmittian move as the “sovereign trap”: “to turn away from the theological roots of sovereignty is, as Schmitt shows, to turn ­towards the very mechanism that produces ‘modern’ sovereignty in the first place.”17 To put it in the terms used h ­ ere, any attempt to assert division or exclusion—­understood as hallmarks of stasis as mobility— of necessity implies unity, according to Schmitt’s reading, or stasis as immobility along with its entire On Agonistic Monism  101

metaphysical and theological apparatus. The result, then, is the affirmation of the transcendence of sover­ eignty, as I described it in Thesis 1, whereby t­here is nothing outside sovereignty, and its very overcoming entails its reaffirmation. The result is the ruse of sovereignty. The implications of Schmitt’s brilliant account of the liquidation of the relation of the two clusters of signification of stasis are stark, both from a po­liti­cal per­ spective and for any attempt to overcome onto-­theology. Po­liti­cally, this entails the eternal return of sovereignty. Re­sis­tance entails sovereignty. The weight of the historical narrative I outlined in the first paragraph of the Pream­ ble can be invoked to support this position: The French Revolution results in the establishment of the Empire and the coronation of Napoleon; the Rus­sian Revolution shows the triumph of Leninism as a prelude to Stalin­ ism; and more recently the vari­ous revolutions in the ­Middle East referred to as the “Arab Spring” led to the ossification of repressive regimes. In Schmitt’s “stasiol­ ogy,” the existence of the po­liti­cal is dependent on the cluster of signification indicating immobility, translated in po­liti­cal terms as the figure of the sovereign. Thus, in Schmitt’s account, enmity is the epiphenomenon of sovereignty, and disunity is the immanent manifesta­ tion of an under­lying and pervasive unity. Philosophically, the same argument can confront the Heideggerian optimism of a destruction of meta­ physics. Any gesture of exclusion, any move that affirms 102  Thesis 8

the friend-­and-­enemy relation, of necessity—­and de­ spite, even ­because of, the fact that this necessity may be denied—­reinscribes the logic of sovereignty that asserts as primary the static epistemology of Western meta­ physics. Authenticity, by its very success in overcoming onto-­ t heological categories, mobilizes the exclusory logic that returns the same metaphysical categories, often ­little altered. Schmitt’s account of the relation between the two clusters of signification of stasis results in a triumph for the meanings signifying immobility. Nicole Loraux’s account of stasis in The Divided City is not simply the only significant challenge to Schmitt’s interpretation of the relation between the two clusters of signification of stasis—­even though Loraux never mentions Schmitt. More fundamentally, it offers a radi­ cally dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal vision—­one to which, despite its shortcomings, I am deeply indebted. The key to Loraux’s contribution is that that relation is not framed in terms of overcoming but rather as a “founding forgetting.”18 To put her point in the vocabulary used ­here, before de­ scribing it more in her own terms, the cluster of mean­ ings signifying immobility “forgets” ­those signifying mobility. Unlike Schmitt’s interpretation, mobility does not exclude immobility, and hence it is not imbued in the logic of sovereign vio­lence. Rather, the significations of mobility are the basis or cause of immobility. Thus Loraux essentially turns Schmitt’s argument on its head by providing an account that retains an active relation between the two clusters of signification of stasis. Where On Agonistic Monism  103

Schmitt liquidates the relation, Loraux emphasizes its centrality for democracy. Let us see the main moves Loraux performs to con­ struct this argument. The starting point is the acknowl­ edgment of the fundamental importance of “division” in the city. One of Loraux’s key references ­here is Solon’s law of stasis. Democracy requires participation, which in turn requires taking a stand, and this means that the po­liti­cal relies on the division of the polis and the fact that one of the parties ­will prevail in decision making. However, ­there is according to Loraux a watershed mo­ ment in 403 b.c., when the first amnesty in the history of politics is offered. ­A fter the inglorious defeat of the Peloponnesian War, the decline of Athens is further pre­ cipitated by internal discord. The regime of the Thirty Tyrants temporarily takes the upper hand, only for the demo­crats fi­nally to prevail in 403 b.c. At this point, the leaders of the demo­crats themselves call for a forgetting of the past so as to guarantee the stability and unity of the polis. The division or discord that is constitutive of Greek democracy is renounced in ­favor of the stability of the city. The cluster of meanings signifying mobility is forgotten for the sake of the cluster of meanings sig­ nifying immobility. It is as if, writes Loraux, “the mem­ ory of the city ­were founded on the forgetting of the po­liti­cal as such.”19 The originary division, which con­ sists in taking a stand, as Solon’s law of stasis insists, and which is definitive of democracy, is forgotten for the sake of stability and the state. The demo­crats themselves 104  Thesis 8

forget the division—­the disunity or discord—­that is constitutive of democracy. We can discern this forgetting as extending to the en­ tire history of the Western po­liti­cal and philosophical imaginary. For instance, let us take the example of the development of the idea of the constitution, as I presented it in the previous Thesis. The idea starts with the stasis or discord between two adversarial positions, pre­ sented, for instance, by Aeschylus in the trial of Orestes. This adversarial basis of stasis is formalized within a ­legal framework with the assistance of rhe­toric. The rhetorical theory is further formalized in a ­legal frame­ work, whereby constitutio as the adversarial meaning of stasis is transformed to constitutio as the constitution, the basis, the solid and stable foundation upon which stands the system of laws. This history of the development of the idea of the constitution is the history of the grad­ ual forgetting of its roots in the cluster of signification of mobility. I am not trying to develop ­here an accurate or “factual” account of the history of constitutions but rather to show the logic of forgetting that underlies that historical development and that Loraux pinpoints to the symbolic significance of a par­tic­u­lar historical event, the amnesty of 403 b.c. We can add ­here that this fundamental forgetting is nothing but an attempt to dissolve the relation between the two clusters of signification—as Schmitt’s approach demonstrates—­and as such Loraux has stumbled upon the first iteration of the ruse of sovereignty. From this On Agonistic Monism  105

perspective, the forgetting of the originary division of democracy performed in 403 b.c. is not just the first am­ nesty but also, and more importantly, the first articula­ tion of sovereignty within the purview of the cluster of meaning signifying immobility. It is the first real act of sovereignty. I also need to add that I have already departed from Loraux by applying such a logic to the historical devel­ opment of the constitution and, by extension, to sover­ eignty, since Loraux herself is concerned to confine her inquiry to the Greek polis. I regard this as the most sig­ nificant shortcoming of her inquiry. Pace Loraux, I hold that it is paramount to note the crucial role for the po­l iti­cal of the concepts arising from the polysemy of stasis. And it is also po­liti­cally and philosophically indispensable to register Loraux’s move within this polysemy, as the cluster signifying mobility is ­here rec­ ognized as the condition of the possibility of the po­liti­ cal and as what the po­liti­cal and the philosophical need to forget so as to create what we know nowadays as Western thought and politics. In other words, stasis is still impor­tant t­oday b ­ ecause it ultimately names the relation between democracy and sovereignty. Whereas stasis for Schmitt is presented as the ge­ne­tic source of sovereignty, Loraux shows that stasis is relational—or, more accurately, it conditions the forms that the rela­ tion between democracy and sovereignty can assume; it is the relationality of po­liti­cal relations. The repres­ sion of this relationality is one of the constitutive func­ 106  Thesis 8

tions of the ruse of sovereignty. Conversely, agonistic monism acknowledges the po­liti­cal articulation of this relation. Hence, agonistic monism leads to the idea of the primacy of conflict or discord—of stasis—­for the po­liti­cal. Given that democracy is also defined through stasis, this also entails that democracy is the constitu­ tional form of any regime of power. I am suggesting that Loraux’s position essentially ar­ rives at agonistic monism, despite the fact that she does not recognize—or acknowledge—it herself. The forgetting of the originary division of democracy essentially recon­ figures the agonism contained in the law of Solon. Now, agonism is not solely the disputes unfolding between citizens; it is also the dispute enacted between democ­ racy and its other, sovereignty—­a dispute staged around the relation between the two clusters of signification of stasis, that is, staged by and through stasis. The forget­ ting is the forgetting of stasis as the agonistic relation that runs through the Western thinking and practice of politics. But this also means that the source of the dispute is the operative presence of democracy within sovereignty. Such a presence may be operative subter­ raneously, in the sense that it may not be vis­i­ble. In fact, the entire domain of visibility—­a nd invisibility—­may be ceded to sovereignty and the derivatives of *sta within the cluster signifying immobility. Yet for that reason, the possibility of discord and division is opera­ tive so as to enable both action and thought. Monism retains its agonal power. On Agonistic Monism  107

In other words, what Loraux signifies as a “funda­ mental forgetting” is not a passive forgetting; it is not a complete elimination. Instead, it is to Western po­liti­cal and philosophical thought something akin to what Freud calls the unconscious or Derrida the trace.20 Or, to put it in somewhat Spinozan terms, it is the causa sui of Occidental politics. Or, to put it as a response to Schmitt’s po­liti­cal theology: Mobility is that which ­causes immobility. Re­sis­tance is the cause of unity and stability. Or, in the vocabulary of Thesis 1, constituent power is the cause of the existence of sovereignty. Or, in yet another formulation, monism insists on retaining the relation between the two clusters of signification, which is only pos­si­ble, as Loraux demonstrates, by tak­ ing mobility as the condition of the possibility of im­ mobility. I am not suggesting that we should collapse the differences of the vari­ous formulations paratacti­ cally presented above. They all have their own distinct genealogies, and ­these are impor­tant to investigate and explore. What I am emphasizing instead is that they all refer to the relation opened up by stasis between the clusters of signification of mobility and immobility and, moreover, in such a way that mobility is the primary term of the relation. Monism, as I describe it, indicates that relation. Agonistic monism is another name for stasis. Differently put: If agonism refers to the fact that the relation between democracy and sovereignty is irresolv­ able and that it persists as a strug­gle, then monism re­ 108  Thesis 8

fers to the fact that democracy is the term of that relation that sustains and supports this irresolvable agonism. From this perspective, what I understand as agonistic democracy is the affirmation of this double relation—­ both agonal and monist—­between democracy and sov­ ereignty. This is not to say that democracy is unconcerned with forms of constituted power or that democracy is dif­fer­ent from the vari­ous forms of government—as if it is pos­si­ble to separate a “pure” demo­cratic activity from the tumult of politics and of its institutional actualiza­ tions. Far from asserting such as separation, the concept of agonistic democracy insists instead on the inherent fragility of democracy b ­ ecause it is related to the con­ tested site of vio­lence—on how vio­lence is justified and dejustified. ­Every legitimation of power traverses this site, which is, however, forever contestable and in a state of fluidity. Hence, what­ever institutional solidification results can never be absolute but is rather always in dan­ ger of unraveling. Differently put, agonistic democracy is forever vigilant of the inherent disunity that is pos­si­ ble and that is never effaced by the seeming stability of institutions of power, which are supposed to effectuate the unity of the state. Or, epigrammatically put, before the state comes stasis.

On Agonistic Monism  109

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TH ESIS 9 Stasis underlies all po­liti­cal praxis

­ ere is l­ ittle dispute as to the indispensability of repre­ Th sen­ta­tion for politics.1 The question is to what extent repre­sen­ta­tion is constitutive of the po­liti­cal. (As you ­will recall, this is the position of the prevailing narrative about the development of politics as essentially an un­ folding of sovereignty, which I outlined at the beginning of this book.) Or is, alternatively, repre­sen­ta­tion the product of agonistic democracy? This dilemma essen­ tially repeats the question about the relation between the two clusters of signification of stasis outlined earlier. The inextricability of repre­sen­ta­tion and constituted power arises from the fact that repre­sen­ta­tion is never simply a relation between something existing in the world and its repre­sen­ta­tion. It also always has a third term, a rep­ resentative, who is in control of the repre­sen­ta­tion and consequently of the operation of the po­liti­cal. That third

term is imbued in the operation of sovereignty.2 Repre­ sen­ta­tion as constitutive of the po­liti­cal tries to assert the evasion of the relation between the clusters of sig­ nification of mobility and immobility through the constitution of unity—­ a constitution performed by repre­sen­ta­tion. It would be useful at this point to recall that repre­sen­ ta­tion is not placed at the center of the po­liti­cal arena ­until modernity. The impor­tant move that allows for repre­sen­ta­tion to appear as constitutive of the po­liti­cal in the prevalent narrative I described earlier consists in the fundamental division that enables the theory of the social contract. The first component part of the division is something prepo­liti­cal, usually identified with the natu­ral and often referred to as the “state of nature,” es­ pecially in early accounts of the social contract. ­There is, ­after that, the social sphere that denotes a commu­ nity. And t­ here is, fi­nally, the po­liti­cal, which produces a notion of the p ­ eople and which is characterized by an authority that controls repre­sen­ta­t ion. That authority is the sovereign, who is conceived as the entity who en­ compasses, or represents, the entire polity. This idea is famously portrayed in the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan.3 In the third chapter of Sovereignty and Its Other, I provide a detailed discussion of the function of t­hese three moments in the production of sovereignty in Hobbes, so I ­w ill not repeat the particulars ­here. In any case, the division between ­these three moments, leading 112  Thesis 9

to the concept of the ­people that are represented in poli­ tics, is widely recognized. For instance, it is regularly used to provide definitions of po­liti­cal concepts. Thus, one way of defining biopolitics is to accept that sepa­ ration in order to argue that the distinctive feature of biopolitics is its flattening out. Roberto Esposito describes biopolitics as follows: “At the moment in which on one side the modern distinctions between public and pri­ vate, state and society, local and global collapse, and on the other that all other sources of legitimacy dry up, life becomes encamped in the center of e­ very po­liti­cal pro­ cedure.” 4 Another way is to flatten out this separation by positing, as Margaret Thatcher did, that “­there is no such t­ hing as society.” In e­ ither case, biopower spreads its operation so as to include, it is argued, ­every aspect of living, including natu­ral pro­cesses such as repro­ duction, as well as e­ very facet of social relations. This, further, turns the individual and the ­people into a population to be managed and normalized. But the r­eally impor­tant point of the division be­ tween the natu­ral, the social, and the po­liti­cal pertains to the repre­sen­ta­tion of vio­lence. Vio­lence becomes part of a repre­sen­ta­tional mechanism—or, of the mechanism of po­liti­cal repre­sen­ta­tion. Nature is violent but in an ir­ rational manner. This vio­lence is gradually given over to the sovereign. Regardless of the vari­ous accounts of this move, this transference of the control—­t he repre­ sentation—of vio­lence by sovereignty is linked to legiti­ macy. Differently put, the sovereign is the representative On Stasis and Political Praxis  113

who manages vio­lence so as to derive legitimacy—­a point that was central in Sovereignty and Its Other. And as I showed earlier, the logic of legitimacy always pro­ duces the ruse of sovereignty. Agonistic monism and the accompanying concept of agonistic democracy are incompatible with the con­ stitutive division between natu­ral, social, and po­liti­cal, which is definitive of the social contract and which supports the supremacy of repre­sen­ta­tion. The main reason for this has to do with the imbrication of the on­ tological, the ethical, and the po­liti­cal. The ontologico-­ ethico-­political imbrication arises with the judgment that the other is an extension of the self. This essentially means that the relation to the other is not exhausted by a structure of repre­sen­ta­tion. Or, differently put, vio­ lence can never be managed through a mechanism that unquestionably justifies its use. This idea is encapsulated by Spinoza, and in par­tic­u­ lar by Proposition 37 of Part IV of the Ethics: “The good which every­one who pursues virtue aims for himself he ­will also desire for the rest of mankind.”5 This is a com­ plex Proposition that is not pos­si­ble to explicate ­here fully. I ­w ill just indicate some of the impor­tant points that relate to the pres­ent argument.6 The first point is noted by Spinoza himself in the first Scholium to Prop­ osition 37, where he claims that with this Proposition he has “shown what the foundations of the state are.” Such a foundation for Spinoza is not a social contract but the relation to the other as an extension of the self. Further, 114  Thesis 9

such an understanding of the po­liti­cal is based on im­ manent relations of being. It signifies the import of on­ tology for the po­liti­cal. And this has also an ethical significance. The idea of virtue is not reliant on some­ thing transcendent. Spinoza has already defined virtue as power (potentia) in Definition 8 of Part IV of the Ethics. This means that virtue and hence the ethical arise out of the relations of power, signifying that being is being with. Third, this provides a setup whereby concepts such as the individual or the p ­ eople who are to be repre­ sented are no longer pos­si­ble. Instead of the autonomous individual and the ­people, Spinoza’s extrapolation leads to a conception of the multitude.7 Such a multitude in­ dicates a wide variety of relations between its members, who can never be successfully represented in a discursive system or by a representative who functions as their sovereign. And the other side of this observation is that, as Spinoza recognizes in Chapter 16 of the Theological Po­liti­cal Treatise, the multitude forms the basis of de­ mocracy as “the most natu­ral form of state.” 8 In other words, it leads to what I call monism. We should remember, of course, that the concept of the “natu­ral” h ­ ere does not indicate the naturalizing of politics, which characterizes, for instance, totalitarian regimes. As Hasana Sharp has powerfully demonstrated in The Politics of Renaturalization, the concept of nature is used strategically by Spinoza to navigate precisely what is called naturalization in modern discourse.9 At the same time, we should recall that nature is a synonym On Stasis and Political Praxis  115

of God and substance for Spinoza, that is, of the entire field of relations that characterize being. As such, the multitude indicates a community that is determined by the differential relations of power. Such a community cannot be represented b ­ ecause the field of relations of  power within which it unfolds—­nature, substance, God—is an immanent causality, a dynamic pro­cess that can never be arrested by a “representative.” And this ap­ plies to the concept of democracy that arises from the notion of the multitude and that Spinoza denotes as the most natu­ral form of constitution. This is the reason why Negri insists that democracy for Spinoza is the foundation of all other regimes of power—or that de­ mocracy is absolute.10 In other words, Spinoza shows that his ontological monism translates also into what I called earlier a po­liti­cal monism—­t he assertion of democracy as the form of the dif­fer­ent constitutional forms. Such a po­liti­cal monism is pos­si­ble on condition that the tri­ partite division between the natu­ral, the social, and the po­liti­cal is recognized as relying on—or being an after­ effect of—­the imbrication of the ontological, the ethical, and the po­liti­cal. Repre­sen­ta­tion is a product of the po­ liti­cal in its relations to the ontological and the ethical. What about the structural vio­lence that was the start­ ing premise of t­hese ­Theses? Does the being with of Proposition 37 of Part IV of the Ethics and of the multi­ tude of Spinoza’s po­liti­cal treatises overcome such a vio­ lence? Does Spinoza promise a vision of democracy as absolute peace and stability? The use of the word “stabil­ 116  Thesis 9

ity,” invoking the first cluster of signification of stasis as immobility described in Thesis 8, should indicate the precariousness of such an interpretation. Such a reading of Proposition 37 and of the multitude w ­ ill do nothing but affirm Schmitt’s vision of the dissolution of the rela­ tion between the two clusters of signification, leading to the subsumption of democracy by sovereignty. Such an—­utopia of—­absolute peace would, also, be nothing but the most blind forgetting of the foundational divi­ sion, or agonism, of the po­liti­cal, as described by Loraux. In other words, it would be nothing but the return of the ruse of sovereignty. It is in order to avoid the utopian vision of democ­ racy as a state or regime within which vio­lence is eliminated—­a vision of democracy as the “city of god” on earth, something Augustine himself categorically rejected as a possibility—­that the questioning of the di­ vision between the natu­ral, the social, and the po­liti­cal is impor­tant. You w ­ ill recall that I indicated earlier how this structure is crucial for establishing a represen­ tative who controls the vio­lence associated with the low­ est step of this hierarchy. Differently put, sovereignty ameliorates and regulates natu­ral vio­lence. Thus vio­ lence is thought to be resolved through pro­cesses that establish forms of legitimacy. Conversely, questioning the division between the natu­ral, the social, and the po­ liti­cal precludes the solution of locating the regulation of vio­lence within the power of the legitimate represen­ tative of the po­liti­cal order—­the holder of sovereignty. On Stasis and Political Praxis  117

What would that mean? What is the way of expressing this point in terms that are not purely negative? It is at this juncture that the distinction between justification and legitimacy noted earlier is impor­tant. As I argue, po­liti­cal vio­lence is always justified vio­lence. Differently put, po­liti­cally speaking, it does not make sense to speak of vio­lence as such—if such a vio­lence exists. Vio­lence is always mediated through pro­cesses of giving reasons for that vio­lence. But at the same time, such a justified vio­lence should not be resolved or dis­ solved into a discourse of legitimacy. Such a move does nothing but perpetuate the ruse of sovereignty, namely, the sense that the “fact” of ­there being exclusions at a social and po­liti­cal level entails that sovereignty has the right to regulate ­these exclusions. Democracy can be understood as the re­sis­tance exercised at the point that seeks to turn justification into legitimacy. This has sev­ eral effects. First, it points to the agonistic relation between sov­ ereignty and democracy. In the confrontation between democracy and sovereignty and in the conflict that takes place within the po­liti­cal, vio­lence is not naively elimi­ nated. Rather, the key is that vio­lence is viewed as un­ justifiable. In confronting the vio­lence sovereignty seeks to justify, internal conflict and contestation can be seen as positive aspects of demo­cratic practice.11 And in af­ firming the necessity of conflict in interpersonal rela­ tions, power recognizes the importance of the other in the operation of the political—in the divisions that make 118  Thesis 9

the po­liti­cal pos­si­ble. In other words, the nonexclusion of the possibility of vio­lence is constitutive of the op­ eration of judgment, while the key characteristic of de­ mocracy is that vio­lence is never taken as justified. Any justification is potentially contestable, none is immune from critique, even though the po­liti­cal has recourse to justification and its repre­sen­ta­tions. Agonism permeates the po­liti­cal community through the exercise of judg­ ment as the pro­cess of dejustification. Such a judgment breaks the immediate link between justification and legitimacy and in the pro­cess complicates the smooth division between the natu­ral, the social, and the po­liti­ cal. Judgment, then, also shatters the illusion that repre­ sen­ta­tion is constitutive of the po­liti­cal. Second, this does not mean that we cannot distinguish between natu­ral, social, and po­liti­cal aspects. I talked earlier about the imbrication of the ontologico-­ethico-­ political nexus. This nexus in part reworks the contrac­ tarian divisions between the natu­ral, the social, and the po­liti­cal that have come to dominate po­liti­cal thinking since the sixteenth c­ entury and that are responsible for the narrative according to which liberal democracy is the culmination of a historical pro­cess and its highest rational articulation. Thus, the ontological—or, in Spi­ noza’s terminology, natu­ral—­sphere is characterized by relations of power that may of course turn violent, but they are able to be harnessed t­oward cooperation and genuine demo­cratic practices. The ethical realm, or the sphere of h ­ uman interaction, is where the presence of On Stasis and Political Praxis  119

the other is of paramount importance. As I argued, the other is part of one’s identity. In this sense, the ethical realm provides a horizon of nonviolent interaction. The po­liti­cal realm, by contrast, given its connection with justification, is inextricably linked to vio­lence. But at the same time, the justification always presupposes a dejus­ tification, and in that sense democracy is the primary constitutional form, or the form of the constitution. ­These two points together outline what I call “agonis­ tic monism.” Another word for agonistic monism is sta­ sis, as the term that provides the historical depth and conceptual complexity to think the relation between de­ justification and legitimacy, between democracy and sovereignty, between justification and dejustification. From the perspective of stasis and the relations that are associated with it, democracy is not reducible to the ­actual or potential form of a regime of power. Rather, democracy is a task—­a praxis performed in one’s inter­ actions with ­others (the ontological aspect) and through the ethicopo­liti­cal imperative to dejustify vio­lence and to resist the dissolution of justifications of vio­lence into regimes of legitimation. The carry­ing out of such a task requires a clear delineation of sovereignty so as to show how democracy is agonistically related to it. As I have argued in Sovereignty and Its Other, this task takes place through judgment, which dejustifies sovereignty’s justi­ fications of vio­lence and recognizes that being is being with.

120  Thesis 9

As a consequence, agonistic monism also demands a reworking of all the determinative concepts that shape politics. I am referring to concepts such as free­ dom, equality, citizenship, and community. The task consists in demonstrating how they all actually rely on stasis, on the division that is constitutive to de­ mocracy. And, further and fundamentally, how this division forms the basis of its own forgetting and how  it  can never be eliminated by the emergence of sovereignty through that forgetting. The primary aim of my book Vio­lence and Democracy is to accomplish the task of reconceptualizing—in all their aporetic complexity—­some fundamental concepts of democ­ racy through stasis. Essentially, agonistic monism, or stasis, pres­ents us with an endless task. The relation between democracy and sovereignty cannot be resolved in one move or in one theory, as it is staged e­ very time anew in the unfold­ ing of history. Par­tic­u­lar circumstances keep on calling for more judgments, and the continuous work of the re­ pression of the founding division of the po­liti­cal keeps on demanding the ­labor of refining our po­liti­cal con­ cepts. But it is crucial to recognize that the task is end­ less. Recognizing this prevents us from succumbing to the lure of the ruse of sovereignty, according to which the po­liti­cal is reducible to the perfecting of forms of sovereign legitimacy. Instead, it leads us to the recogni­ tion that stasis underlies all po­liti­cal praxis.

On Stasis and Political Praxis  121

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A C K N O W L­E D G M E N T S

Not only did I not intend to write Stasis before the State: Nine Th ­ eses on Agonistic Democracy as a book; I did not even realize it was a book u ­ ntil a­ fter it was written. I was writing about how to conceptualize po­liti­cal change as an attempt to explain the links between two of my books, Sovereignty and Its Other: ­Toward the Dejustification of Vio­lence, published in 2013, and the forthcoming Vio­lence and Democracy. In the book on democracy I intended to give an ac­ count of how it can be distinguished from prevailing forms of constituted power—­especially what has come to be called “liberal democracy” in cap­i­tal­ist modernity. I thought this was essential in order to describe the rela­ tion between sovereignty and democracy—­t he central concepts in each of my two books, respectively. However, the book on democracy was becoming in­ creasingly large, and I was forced to expunge the thread

of the argument pertaining to po­liti­cal change. I deci­ded to collect instead some of that material in a paper. At that stage, I envisioned it as an article, but it again ended up being too large for a journal to consider. A number of friends who read it advised me to think of it as a book. It was only their suggestion that made me realize that I had a book on my hands. I am grateful to Fordham University Press—­ especially to Richard Morrison and Tom Lay—­who embraced the idea of a book that addresses dif­fer­ent but related issues from the other two that are also included in their list. It is an honor to be published with Fordham University Press, in par­tic­u­lar in the Commonalities se­ ries, edited by Tim Campbell, in the com­pany of the kind of con­temporary books I admire. The structure of the book as a series of ­theses is the result of an attempt to avoid an analytic exposition, or a style of argumentation that relies on close readings, so as to pres­ent a synthetic picture. This is not my usual way of arguing, and it constituted a risk. The challenge to depart from my customary style of writing was re­ warding in that it pushed me to ideas and areas of thought that I would not have other­wise explored. To arrive at this structure and style was a long pro­ cess. Specifically, the first version of the text was written about a de­cade ago and published as an article in Cultural Critique 73 (2009) u ­ nder the title “Stasis: Beyond Po­liti­cal Theology?” No more than a ­couple of sentences

124 Acknowledgments

from this first iteration survive in the pres­ent book. A second major rewrite was prepared as a pre­sen­ta­tion at the New School in November  2013. I conceived both ­these earlier versions as introductions to my book Vio­ lence and Democracy—­which still remains unfinished. The writing of the third and final version took place in 2015, when I realized that the text could no longer be the introduction to Vio­lence and Democracy. The text of Stasis before the State: Nine ­Theses on Agonistic Democracy was written very quickly, and it bears the marks of its composition. It was written mostly while traveling in Eu­rope in June and July  2015. The refugee crisis unfolding in close proximity—­specifically the broadly publicized continuous drownings in the Mediterranean but also the lesser-­k nown presence of a new kind of refugee in Athens, for instance, in Pedion tou Areos—­prompted me to include the intermezza, which look at how sovereignty and democracy can deal with the question of the refugee. Given the length of time that I have been carry­ing the ideas for this manuscript and its connection to the other two books, Sovereignty and Its Other and Violence and Democracy, ­there is a large number of ­people I ­ought to thank. If I w ­ ere to acknowledge every­one who has had some input into the ideas contained ­here, I would be thanking just about every­one I have had exchanges with over the past ­couple of de­cades. Given that that’s impos­ sible, I have to be selective.

Acknowledgments  125

I would like to single out for thanks h ­ ere the three colleagues who provided the contingent impetus for the three dif­fer­ent versions of the text. Stathis Gourgouris or­ga­nized a talk for me at UCLA in October 2007, which eventually became the article that was published in Cultural Critique. Andreas Kalyvas invited me for a talk at the New School of Social Research in November 2013, which provided me with the opportunity to draft the second version. And Costas Douzinas was my host at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in June 2015, where I had the opportunity to pres­ent the final version of the text. Two par­tic­u­lar interactions have had a significant in­ fluence on the final form of the book. Athena Athana­ siou sent some insightful comments, which helped me think through certain prob­lems in the manuscript. The comments could not have arrived at better time, in August 2015, just as I was considering ­whether the manu­ script was better suited as a book on its own. A conver­ sation with Gil Anidjar about the draft in October 2015 proved instrumental in finalizing the manuscript. Gil has the natu­ral ability to identify the main point very clearly and to comment incisively on how the argument is constructed. I am grateful for their time and privileged that my manuscript attracted their attention. Given that living and “the life of the mind” are inter­ twined, I could not possibly have ­imagined a better com­ panion than Amanda Third. Her presence and thought

126 Acknowledgments

are a constant source of inspiration and admiration. This book is dedicated to my older son, Alexis. He is now old enough to have a philosophical conversation with, and his questions help me find the essential in my own thought.

Acknowledgments  127

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NOTES

PREAMBLE: THE RUSE OF SOVEREIGNTY OR AGONISTIC MONISM?

1. See Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 1279a–­b. For Polybius’s theory of anakyklosis of the constitutions, see Polybius, The Histories, trans. W. R. Paton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), vol. 3, book 6. 2. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 3. R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). 4. Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources of the Transformation of Eu­ro­pean Po­liti­cal Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).

5. I should also note also that, as James Martel has shown, t­ hese two tendencies do not preclude each other. See his brilliant Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Demo­crat (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), which demon­ strates Hobbes’s demo­cratic proclivities as inscribed within his language and rhetorical strategies. 6. Dimitris Vardoulakis, Sovereignty and Its Other: ­Toward the Dejustification of Vio­lence (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 7. Gil Anidjar, Blood: A Critique of Chris­tian­ity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 22. 8. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Po­liti­cal, trans. George D. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 36. 9. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 89. 10. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 180. 11. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and ­Future: Six Exercises in Po­liti­cal Thought (New York: Viking, 1961), 141. 12. It is instructive to remember h ­ ere that the fantasy of a pure outside sovereignty is part and parcel at least of the modern conception of sovereignty in the contractarian tradition. That pure outside is the idea of a state of nature. But this is another story, or maybe a

130  Notes to pages 3–10

subplot, which I address in Sovereignty and Its Other, chaps. 3 and 4. THESIS 1

1. Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from the Six Books of the Commonwealth, ed. and trans. Julian H. Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Leslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 2. George Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, 3 vols., trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1988–1991). 3. Carl Schmitt, Po­liti­cal Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George D. Schwab (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 5. 4. Ibid., 36. 5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 120, 122. 6. Michel Foucault, The ­Will to Power, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1990), 88–89. 7. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes ­Towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 85–126.

Notes to pages 10–15  131

8. See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Po­liti­cal, trans. George D. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 9. See, for instance, Carl Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen: Zwischenbemerkung zum Begriff des Politischen (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1975). 10. See, respectively, Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2009); and Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 11. The victory of Syriza in Greece in January 2015 belies such a position. See Stathis Gourgouris, “The Syriza Prob­lem: Radical Democracy and Left Govern­ mentality in Greece,” Open Democracy (August 6, 2015), https://­w ww​.­opendemocracy​.­net​/­can​-­europe​ -­make​-­it​/­stathis​-­gourgouris​/­syriza​-­problem​-­radical​ -­democracy​-­and​-­left​-­governmentality​-­in​-­g. See also Slavoj Žižek, “On Greece: The Courage of Hopeless­ ness,” New Statesman (July 20, 2015), http://­w ww​ .­newstatesman​.­com​/­world​-­affairs​/­2015​/­07​/­slavoj​-­i​-­ek​ -­greece​-­courage​-­hopelessness. 12​.­On the manufacturing of the exception, see Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2007). 13. I should also note h ­ ere Jean-­Luc Nancy’s insight that the necessary mingling of immanence and 132  Notes to pages 15–18

transcendence is a pivotal point of his deconstruction of Chris­tian­ity. See, e.g., The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); and Dis-­Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Chris­tian­ity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 14. Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, “What Is the Third Estate?” in Po­liti­cal Writings, trans. Michael Sonen­ scher (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2003), 136. 15. Hannah Arendt, The ­Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 16. See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 2006). 17. See Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, trans. Jeffrey Seitzer (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008). 18. Carl Schmitt, Dictatorship: From the Origin of the Modern Concept of Sovereignty to Proletarian Class Strug­gle, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Cambridge: Polity, 2014). 19. Andreas Kalyvas, “Constituent Power,” Po­liti­cal Concepts 3, no. 2 (2014), http://­w ww​.­politicalconcepts​ .­org​/­constituentpower​/­. 20​.­ Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 21. I should note ­here that ­there has been since significant work on discovering the historical roots of Notes to pages 18–21  133

the concept of constituent power in instances earlier than the French Revolution. See, for instance, Filippo del Lucchese’s impor­tant article “Machiavelli and Constituent Power: The Revolutionary Foundation of Modern Po­liti­cal Thought,” Eu­ro­pean Journal of Po­liti­cal Theory 16, no. 1 (2017), 3–23. 22. Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 13. 23. For Negri’s conception of the absoluteness of democracy, see his “Democracy and Eternity in Spinoza,” in Subversive Spinoza: (Un)con­temporary Variations, trans. Timothy S. Murphy et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 101–112. 24. For Negri’s most succinct analy­sis of this tradition, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), part 1. I should also note h ­ ere that Derrida arrives at the distinction between democracy and sovereignty through another route, one that does not rely on the idea of constituent power. I believe that this raises—­among other issues—­the tricky question of Derrida’s relation to Spinoza. This is a topic that I cannot deal with h ­ ere in any detail. 25. Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 134  Notes to pages 21–23

26. See, e.g., Hardt and Negri, Empire: “The first question of po­liti­cal philosophy ­today is . . . ​how to determine the e­ nemy against which to rebel” (210–211). THESIS 2

1. See Dimitris Vardoulakis, “How Many Does It Take to Dance? The Mystery of the Po­liti­cal in G. K. Chesterton,” Paragraph 40, no. 2 (2017), 174–192. 2. The point I am making about an act of vio­lence that does lend itself to justification should be qualified in an impor­tant re­spect. I am not suggesting h ­ ere a metaphysics that purports to distinguish autonomous acts. Rather, any action is related to other actions—­a point that Spinoza, for instance, makes clear in the Axiom to Part IV of the Ethics. This entails that a psychotic act that lacks a justification for the vio­lence it imparts can nonetheless be inserted in a context of justification through its relation to other acts. Thus, a psychotic act could be related to the entire network of diagnosis and treatment of the psychiatric profession. Such a matrix has its own forms justification of vio­lence—as, for instance, Foucault recognizes very well in Madness and Civilization. The point I am making is that t­ hese justifications may seek to explain but not to justify a psychotic act of vio­lence. 3. I develop this critique of Agamben in more detail in my book Vio­lence and Democracy (forthcoming). Notes to pages 23–31  135

4. See Leonidas Manolopoulos, Πόλις Φλεγμαίνουσα και Πόλις Υγιής (Θεσσαλονίκη: Βάνιας, 1995). See also Kostas Kalimtzis, Aristotle on Po­liti­cal Enmity and Disease: An Inquiry into Stasis (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000). 5. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and ­Future: Six Exercises in Po­liti­cal Thought (New York: Viking, 1961), 111. 6. Quoted in Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 96. 7. See, for instance, Hannah Arendt, On Vio­lence (New York: Harcourt, 1970). 8. François Jullien, A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking, trans. Janet Lloyd (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004). 9. See Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997). 10. See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Po­liti­cal, trans. George D. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). THESIS 3

1. See Slavoj Žižek, Vio­lence (London: Profile, 2009). 2. Eyal Weizmann, The Least of All Pos­si­ble Evils: Humanitarian Vio­lence from Arendt to Gaza (London: Verso, 2012).

136  Notes to pages 32–39

3. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 4. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on the First De­cade of Titus Livius, trans. Allan Gilbert, in Machiavelli: The Chief Works and ­Others (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), 1:218. 5. See Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, in Chief Works, vol. 1. 6. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 248. 7. The most prominent po­liti­cal example of this biopo­liti­cal logic as it is employed by neoliberalism is the situation in Greece a­ fter the financial crisis and the vari­ous memoranda with which the Eu­ro­pean Com­ mission, the Eu­ro­pean Central Bank, and the Interna­ tional Monetary Fund exercised po­liti­cal and administrative power over Greece. See Dimitris Vardoulakis, “Taking a Stand, or Why the ‘No’ Vote Is a ‘Yes’ to the Idea of Eu­rope,” Chronos 27 (2015), http://­chronosmag​.­eu​/­index​.­php​/­d​-­vardoulakis​-­taking​ -­a​-­stand​-­or​-­why​-­the​-­no​-­vote​-­is​-­a​-­yes​-­to​-­the​-­idea​-­of​ -­europe​.­html. 8​.­As it has often been noted, of course, such a sovereign adherence to means is only a dissimulation. For instance, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s argument about the moralizing undercurrent of

Notes to pages 42–45  137

biopolitics in Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). INTERMEZZO 1

1. I do not draw attention h ­ ere to the distinction between the refugee, the stateless, the rightless, the asylum seeker, and so on. Th ­ ese distinctions are meant to be legally determined, but politics always clouds ­these definitions. It is necessary to address ­these ambiguities in dealing with par­tic­u­lar cases within a specified historicopo­liti­cal milieu. But theoretically, they are unimpor­tant for demonstrating the way that ­these figures probe the limits of sovereign power. This is also the case b ­ ecause, as Andreas Kalyvas reminds me, the rights of asylum replaced the older, well-­ established rights of re­sis­tance and insurrection in cases where sovereignty acted against the interests of the citizens. 2. As Etienne Balibar has shown, the discrepancy between citizen and ­bearer of rights is even more complicated t­ oday, with the development of the notion of the social citizen, that is, of someone without official documents who is nevertheless participating in the economic and social activity of a nation. See his Droit de cité. Culture et politique en démocratie (Paris: Editions de l’Aube, 1998); and We, the ­People of Eu­rope? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swen­ son (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 2004). 138  Notes to pages 45–47

3. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian, 1962). On the idea of the “right to have rights,” see Peg Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and ­Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 4. Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone, 2010), 24. 5. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 6. A full transcript of the speech, as well as an audio copy, can be found at http://­australianpolitics​.­com/​ news​/­2001​/­01​-­10​-­28​.­shtml. 7​.­For instance, Tony Abbott, then the leader of the Liberal Party, in a policy announcement on August 16, 2013, deliberately echoed Howard’s statement: “The essential point is, this is our country and we determine who comes h ­ ere.” Bianca Hall and Judith Ireland, “Tony Abbott Evokes John Howard in Slamming Doors on Asylum Seekers,” Sydney Morning Herald (August 16, 2013), http://­w ww​.­smh​.­com​.­au​/­federal​-­politics​/­federal​ -­election​-­2013​/­tony​-­abbott​-­evokes​-­john​-­howard​-­in​ -­slammingdoors​-­on​-­asylum​-­seekers​-­20130815​-­2rzzy​ .­html. 8​.­For some of the issues raised about border policy in Eu­rope in relation to Australian policy, see, for instance, Paul Farrell, “Could Australia’s ‘Stop the Boats’ Policy Solve Eu­rope’s Mi­grant Crisis?” The Notes to pages 48–50  139

Guardian (April 22, 2015), http://­w ww​.­theguardian​ .­com​/­world​/­2015​/­apr​/­22​/­could​-­australia​-­stop​-­the​-­boats​ -­policy​-­solve​-­europe​-­migrant​-­crisis. For an analy­sis of the comments by Nigel Farage, then the leader of UKIP, on Australian immigration policy, see Alex Reilly, “Explainer: Would Australia’s Immigration System Work in Britain?” The Conversation (March 6, 2015), http://­theconversation​.­com​/­explainer​-­would​-­australias​ -­immigration​-­system​-­work​-­in​-­britain​-­38424. 9​.­The Australian government’s announcement “Regional Resettlement Agreements” can be found at http://­w ww​.­immi​.­gov​.­au​/­visas​/­humanitarian​/­novisa/​ ­byboatnovisa​.­pdf. 10​.­I should note that the PNG Solution was imple­ mented by L ­ abor Prime Minister Rudd, which indicates that the core of the policy transcends party lines. A succinct and well-­documented pre­sen­ta­tion of the PNG Solution can be found at http://­en​.­wikipedia​.­org/​ ­wiki​/­PNG​_ ­solution. I should also note that since then Nauru has also been involved as a further third country for offshore pro­cessing and settlement of refugees. I deliberately eschew ­here the details of the development of this policy to concentrate on the ­matter at hand, namely, the ways in which the policy consisted in a justification of vio­lence indicative of the operation of sovereign power. 11. As this book goes to press, the PNG High Court has pronounced the detention of asylum seekers in

140  Notes to page 50

Manus Island as unconstitutional. This ­will prob­ably mean the closure of the detention center on Manus Island, but according to the Australian government the policy ­will remain in place. THESIS 4

1. Aristotle, Athenian Constitution, in The Athenian Constitution; The Eudemian Ethics; On Virtues and Vices, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), 8.5 (trans. modified). I provide an extensive analy­sis of the Greek text in “Stasis: Notes toward Agonistic Democracy,” Theory & Event 20, no. 3 (2017). 2. See, for instance, Jacob Burckhardt, “The Agonal Age,” in The Greeks and Greek Civilization, trans. Sheila Stern (New York: St. Martin Griffin, 1998), 160–184. 3. Hannah Arendt, in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvin A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 336. Linda Zerilli has produced significant work on judgment in Arendt. See, indica­ tively, her “The Practice of Judgment: Hannah Arendt’s Copernican Revolution,” in Theory ­after “Theory,” ed. Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 2011), 120–132. 4. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Po­liti­cal Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

Notes to pages 50–60  141

THESIS 5

1. Plutarch, Solon, in Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), vol. 1, XX.1, trans. modified. 2. This is essentially the position of Agamben, who is concerned to show a “beyond” of sovereignty and biopolitics. See the discussion of Agamben in Dimitris Vardoulakis, Freedom from the F ­ ree W ­ ill: On Kafka’s Laughter (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016), chap. 4. 3. The Forgotten ­Children: National Inquiry into ­Children in Immigration Detention (Sydney: Australian ­Human Rights Commission, 2014). https://­w ww​ .­humanrights​.­gov​.­au​/­our​-­work ​/­asylum​-­seekers​-­and​ -­refugees​/­publications​/­forgotten​-­children​-­national​ -­inquiry​-­children. 4​.­Claire Phipps, “Did Australia Pay People-­ Smugglers to Turn Back Asylum Seekers?” The Guardian (June 17, 2015), http://­w ww​.­theguardian​.­com​/­world/​ ­2015​/­jun​/­17​/­did​-­australia​-­pay​-­people​-­smugglers​-­to​-­turn​ -­back​-­boats. 5​.­MP Fiona Scott stated that refugees w ­ ere respon­ sible for motorway congestion in her constituency—­ despite the fact that it is estimated that only a few hundred refugees are located in the area. See James Robertson, “Liberal Candidate Links Asylum Seekers to Traffic Jams and Hospital Queues,” Sydney Morning Herald (September 3, 2013), http://­w ww​.­smh​.­com​.­au/​ ­federal​-­politics​/­federal​-­election​-­2013​/­liberal​-­candidate​

142  Notes to pages 62–67

-­links​-­asylum​-­seekers​-­to​-­traffic​-­jams​-­and​-­hospital​ -­queues​-­20130903​-­2t1kw​.­html. THESIS 6

1. In Sovereignty and Its Other: ­Toward the Dejustification of Vio­lence (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), I describe dejustification and the judgment that considers the other in a nonviolent way as two types of judgment, which are, however, interconnected. ­Here, I want to emphasize more their interconnected­ ness, which is why I do not draw the distinction between the two types of judgment. 2. Friedrich Nietz­sche, “Homer’s Contest,” in On the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings, ed. Keith Ansell-­Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 176. The reference to Hesiod’s Works and Days is Theogony; Works and Days; Testimonia, trans. Glenn W. Most (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), ll. 12–26. 3. See, for instance, Laurence J. Hatab, A Nietz­ schean Defense of Democracy: An Experiment in Postmodern Politics (Chicago: Open Court, 1995); Laurence J. Hatab, “Prospects for a Demo­cratic Agon: Why We Can Still Be Nietz­scheans,” Journal of Nietz­sche Studies 24 (2002): 132–147; Yunus Tuncel, Agon in Nietz­sche (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 2013). 4. Nietz­sche, “Homer’s Contest,” 176.

Notes to pages 67–71  143

5. Ibid., 180–181. 6. Christa Davis Acampora, Contesting Nietz­sche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 22, 7. 7. Nietz­sche, “Homer’s Contest,” 178. 8. Cf. Michael Foucault, The ­Will to Power, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1990). 9. Jacques Derrida, “Vio­lence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2002), 97–192. 10. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on ­Today’s Eu­rope, trans. Pascale-­Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 9–10. 11. See Dimitris Vardoulakis, The Doppelgänger: Lit­er­a­ture’s Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). 12. I elaborate on a conception of agonistic equality that arises out of power relations in two articles. See my “Equality and Agonistic Democracy in Spinoza,” in Spinoza’s Authority: The Ethics, ed. Kiarina Kordela and Dimitris Vardoulakis (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming); and “Agonistic Equality in Rancière and Spinoza,” Synthesis 9 (2016). 13. See Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-­Anne Brault and Michael Nass (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005). For the most thorough discussion of democracy in 144  Notes to pages 71–76

Derrida, see Samir Haddad, Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). INTERMEZZO 2

1. Cf. Howard Caygill, On Re­sis­tance: A Philosophy of Defiance (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 2. See their Facebook page: https://­w ww​.­facebook​ .­com​/­BoundlessPlains. 3​.­Alana Lentin, “Refugees: A Call for Open Borders and the F ­ ree Movement of All,” The Guardian (July 23, 2013), http://­w ww​.­theguardian​.­com​/­commentisfree/​ ­2013​/­jul​/­23​/­open​-­borders​-­australia​-­asylum​-­seekers. 4​.­ Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2003). 5. Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007). 6. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method; or, The Multiplication of ­Labor (Durham, N.C.: Duke University 2013), 16. 7. Joseph Carens, “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders,” Review of Politics 49, no. 2 (1987): 252. Carens has revised this argument in his The Ethics of Immigration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), chap. 11. I am referring h ­ ere to the earlier paper, since it has been quite well known and influential in the secondary lit­er­a­ture and since the points of my Notes to pages 76–81  145

response apply equally to the new version of the argument. 8. Ibid., 252. 9. Ibid., 258. 10. For the importance of immediacy in the assertion of sovereignty, see my Sovereignty and Its Other: ­Toward the Dejustification of Vio­lence (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), chap. 1; and my “A ­Matter of Immediacy: The Artwork and the Po­liti­cal in Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger,” in Sparks ­Will Fly: Benjamin and Heidegger, ed. Andrew Benja­ min and Dimitris Vardoulakis (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), 237–257. 11. Desmond Manderson, “Groundhog Day,” Griffith Review 41 (May 24, 2013), http://­griffithreview​.­com​/​ ­edition​-­41​-­now​-­we​-­are​-­ten​/­groundhog​-­day. 12​.­The connection between Kant and biopolitics is one that has curiously not been taken up in secondary lit­er­a­ture. I intend to return to this topic to develop it in detail, since I regard Kant as a preeminent po­liti­cal theorist of biopolitics. But this w ­ ill have to wait for another occasion. THESIS 7

1. See, for instance, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).

146  Notes to pages 81–87

2. Aeschylus, Eumenides, in Agamemnon. Libation-­ Bearers. Eumenides, ed. and trans. Alan H. Sommerstein (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), l. 695. 3. For a discussion of Orestes’s trial in terms of the rhetorical theory of stasis, see George A. Kennedy, A History of Classical Rhe­toric (Prince­ton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 1994), 14–15. 4. See Malcolm Heath, “The Substructure of Stasis-­ Theory from Hermagoras to Hermogenes,” Classical Quarterly 44, no. 1 (1994): 114. 5. Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,” in Acts of Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Derek Attridge, trans. Avital Ronell and Christine Roulston (New York: Routledge, 1992), 181–220. Derrida even gives his own essay the same title as Kafka’s work to dramatize further the aporias generated by the paradoxical relation of the general and the par­tic­u­lar in the law as they are articulated in issues of authorship. 6. Judith Butler, Gender Trou­ble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), xiv. 7. George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhe­toric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 92. 8. For a translation of Hermogenes’s treatise on stasis, titled “On Issues” in En­glish, see Malcolm Heath, Hermogenes, On Issues: Strategies of Argument

Notes to pages 88–91  147

in ­Later Greek Rhe­toric (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 28–60. See also Invention and Method: Two Rhetorical Treatises from the Hermogenic Corpus, ed. Hugo Rabe, trans. George A. Kennedy (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Lit­er­a­ture, 2005). 9. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 3.6.1. Nevertheless, we should note that Quintilian’s summary is a fundamental source of ancient theories of stasis that have other­wise been lost. 10. Ibid., 3.6.5. 11. Cicero, De Inventione, in On Invention. The Best Kind of Orator. Topics, trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cam­ bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949), 1.1. 12. Charles Howard McIlwain, Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modem (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1947), 25. 13. Stephen Holmes, “Constitutions and Constitu­ tionalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law, ed. Michel Rosenfeld and András Sajó (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 14. Carl Schmitt uses a similar formulation to define what he calls the absolute conception of the constitu­ tion in the opening chapter of his Constitutional Theory, trans. Jeffrey Seitzer (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008). The key difference is that Schmitt conceives the form of constitutional forms as pointing to a sense of unity of the state, whereas I highlight instead the disunity or discord—­the stasis—­ 148  Notes to pages 91–93

from which the notion of the constitution is derived. I examine some aspects of Schmitt’s position in the next Thesis. THESIS 8

1. The root *sta, or *stā, derives from the Sanskrit stha. See the entry on stha in Monier Monier-­Williams, A Sanskrit–­English Dictionary: Etymologically and Philologically Arranged with Special Reference to Cognate Indo-­European Languages, rev. E. Leumann, C. Cappeller, et al. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1899), 1262. 2. See, for instance, Costas Douzinas, Philosophy and Re­sis­tance in the Crisis (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 153. 3. For a more detailed account of the multiple meanings of stasis, see Dimitris Vardoulakis, “Stasis: Beyond Po­liti­cal Theology?” Cultural Critique 73 (2009): 125–147. 4. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh and Dennis Schmidt (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010); Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Martin Heidegger, What Is a ­Thing, trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch (South Bend, Ind.: Gateway, 1967); and Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 133. Notes to pages 93–96  149

5. Heidegger refers to ek-­stasis in a variety of texts, already from Being and Time, to indicate the temporal­ ity of existence and of Dasein. The references to ek-­stasis continue in the l­ater works, a­ fter the Kehre, such as in The Four Seminars. 6. Plato, Republic, trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 470b. 7. Cf. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Po­liti­cal, trans. George D. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 46–47. 8. Thucydides, The History of the Grecian War, trans. Thomas Hobbes (London: John Bohn, 1843). 9. Cf. Leonidas Manolopoulos, Στάσις—­ Επανάστασις Νεωτερισμός—­Κίνησις (Θεσσαλονίκη: Βάνιας, 1991). 10. Giorgio Agamben, Stasis: Civil War as a Po­liti­cal Paradigm, trans. Nicholas Heron (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). I am concentrating my remarks ­here on the first chapter of Agamben’s book, which is the one most explic­itly dealing with stasis. 11. Agamben’s book Stasis is symptomatic of the failure to think the relation between sovereignty and democracy—­a relation that is fundamental if stasis is not construed simply as a designation of the internal ­enemy and hence assimilated to the predominant theoretical paradigm of liberal democracy. I deal with Agamben’s text in detail in my book Vio­lence and Democracy (forthcoming). 150  Notes to pages 97–99

12. Gregory of Nazianzus, “Oratio 29,” in Patrologia Graeca, vol. 36, §2. 13. Erik Peterson, Der Mono­the­ismus als politisches Prob­lem: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der politischen Theologie im Imperium Romanum (Leipzig: Hegner, 1935). 14. Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie II: Die Legende von der Erledigung jeder Politischen Theologie (1970; Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 1996), 90. 15. Carl Schmitt, Po­liti­cal Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Po­liti­cal Theology, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 75. 16. Ibid., 126. 17. James Martel, Divine Vio­lence: Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty (New York: Rout­ ledge, 2012), 25. Martel further reminds us what a significant hold on po­liti­cal theory this idea has had. 18. Nicole Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens, trans. Corinne Pache and Jeff Fort (New York: Zone, 2006), 43. 19. Ibid., 42. 20. Loraux examines the psychoanalytic implica­ tions of the “founding forgetting” in ibid., chap. 3. THESIS 9

1. The most detailed account of repre­sen­ta­tion in politics remains Hanna Pitkin’s The Concept of Repre­ sen­ta­tion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). Notes to pages 99–111  151

2. See the discussion of Marx’s Eigh­teenth Brumaire in Dimitris Vardoulakis, Sovereignty and Its Other: ­Toward the Dejustification of Vio­lence (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), chap. 5. 3. Carl Schmitt’s discussion is still one of the most in­ter­est­ing accounts of Leviathan’s frontispiece. See his The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Po­liti­cal Symbol, trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (1938; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996). See also the second chapter of Giorgio Agamben’s Stasis: Civil War as a Po­liti­cal Paradigm, trans. Nicholas Heron (Edinburgh: Edin­ burgh University Press, 2015). 4. Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 15. 5. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, in Complete Works, trans. Samuel Shirley, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2002) 6. For the most brilliant reading of Proposition 37 of Part IV of the Ethics, see Etienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, trans. Peter Snowdon (London: Verso, 1998). I intend to extend Balibar’s analy­sis by showing how Proposition 37 is linked to the idea of neighborly love as Spinoza extrapolates it in the Theological Po­liti­cal Treatise—see my forthcoming book on Spinoza’s Treatise. 7. For the distinction between “the p ­ eople” and Spinoza’s concept of the multitude, see Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics 152  Notes to pages 112–115

and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). See also Warren Montag, “Who’s Afraid of the Multitude? Between the Individual and the State,” South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 4 (2005): 655–673. 8. Baruch Spinoza, Theological-­Political Treatise, in Complete Works, trans. Samuel Shirley, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2002), 531. 9. Hasana Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 10. See Antonio Negri, “Reliqua desiderantur: A Conjecture for a Definition of the Concept of Democ­ racy in the Final Spinoza,” in Subversive Spinoza: (Un) con­temporary Variations, trans. Timothy S. Murphy et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 9–27. 11. See my Vio­lence and Democracy (forthcoming).

Notes to pages 115–118  153

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Commonalities Timothy C. Campbell, series editor

Roberto Esposito, Terms of the Po­liti­cal: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics. Translated by Rhiannon Noel Welch. Introduction by Vanessa Lemm. Maurizio Ferraris, Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces. Translated by Richard Davies. Dimitris Vardoulakis, Sovereignty and Its Other: ­Toward the Dejustification of Vio­lence. Anne Emmanuelle Berger, The Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender. Translated by Catherine Porter. James D. Lilley, Common ­Things: Romance and the Aesthetics of Belonging in Atlantic Modernity.

Jean-­Luc Nancy, Identity: Fragments, Frankness. Translated by François Raffoul. Miguel Vatter, Between Form and Event: Machiavelli’s Theory of Po­liti­cal Freedom. Miguel Vatter, The Republic of the Living: Biopolitics and the Critique of Civil Society. Maurizio Ferraris, Where Are You? An Ontology of the Cell Phone. Translated by Sarah De Sanctis. Irving Goh, The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion a­ fter the Subject. Kevin Attell, Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction. J. Hillis Miller, Communities in Fiction. Remo Bodei, The Life of ­Things, the Love of ­Things. Translated by Murtha Baca. Gabriela Basterra, The Subject of Freedom: Kant, Levinas. Roberto Esposito, Categories of the Impo­liti­cal. Translated by Connal Parsley.

Roberto Esposito, Two: The Machine of Po­liti­cal Theology and the Place of Thought. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. Akiba Lerner, Redemptive Hope: From the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Obama. Adriana Cavarero and Angelo Scola, Thou Shalt Not Kill: A Po­liti­cal and Theological Dialogue. Translated by Margaret Adams Groesbeck and Adam Sitze. Massimo Cacciari, Eu­rope and Empire: On the Po­liti­cal Forms of Globalization. Edited by Alessandro Carrera, Translated by Massimo Verdicchio. Emanuele Coccia, Sensible Life: A Micro-­ontology of the Image. Translated by Scott Stuart, Introduction by Kevin Attell. Timothy C. Campbell, The Techne of Giving: Cinema and the Generous Forms of Life. Étienne Balibar, Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology. Translated by Steven Miller, Foreword by Emily Apter. Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility.

Terrion L. Williamson, Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life. Jean-­Luc Nancy, The Disavowed Community. Translated by Philip Armstrong. Roberto Esposito, The Origin of the Po­liti­cal: Hannah Arendt or Simone Weil? Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Gareth Williams. Dimitris Vardoulakis, Stasis before the State: Nine ­Theses on Agonistic Democracy.