Time and history. Researches on the ontology of the present 9788855293778, 9788855293785

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Massimo Villani Time and History. Researches on the Ontology of the Present

Zeugma

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Massimo Adinolfi e Massimo Donà

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Zeugma | Lineamenti di Filosofia italiana 28 - Proposte

Massimo Villani

Time and History Researches on the Ontology of the Present

Pubblicazioni del Centro di ricerca di Metafisica e Filosofia delle Arti dell’Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele di Milano DIAPOREIN

Pubblicato con il contributo del Dipartimento di Scienze Umane, Filosofiche e della Formazione dell’Università degli Studi di Salerno

© 2022, INSCHIBBOLETH EDIZIONI, Roma. Proprietà letteraria riservata di Inschibboleth società cooperativa, via G. Macchi, 94 - 00133 - Roma www.inschibbolethedizioni.com e-mail: [email protected] Zeugma ISSN: 2421-1729 n. 28 - novembre 2022 ISBN – Edizione cartacea: 978-88-5529-377-8 ISBN – Ebook: 978-88-5529-378-5 Copertina e Grafica: Ufficio grafico Inschibboleth Immagine di copertina: Maria Morganti, Dettaglio di “Sedimentazione 2014 #5”, Venezia (2014), Pittura a olio su tela, 18 x 16 cm. Ph. F. Allegretto. Courtesy l’artista (per approfondire la sua opera consultare il sito: «Un archivio del tempo», www.mariamorganti.it)

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Multiple Temporalities and Resumption of History

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. William Shakespeare

“Every one is a son of his time; so philosophy also is its time apprehended in thoughts”. Through the reference to the temporal element, this famous passage from the Vorrede to Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts1 sanctioned not only the process of the spirit, but also its synchronic character: philosophy is the knowledge that is always able to “gather together the separate moments”2 in which the Spirit settles, and thereby becomes “absolute knowing”3 to the extent that it has nothing outside itself, nothing outside its synthetic and synchronic unity. There is only one time, which is comprehended as a concept: it is not possible to jump out of it because there are no other temporalities. Moreover, time welds consequent-

1.  G.F.W. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1820), Engl. transl. by S.W. Dyde, Batoche, Kitchener 2001, p. 19. 2.  G.F.W. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Engl. transl. by A.V. Miller, Oxford University Press, Oxford-New York-Toronto-Melbourne 1977, p. 485. 3.  Ibidem.

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ly and immediately together with history: “everyone is a son of his time” means that everyone is a necessary consequence of certain premises. In other words, what is before does not simply vanish over time but is preserved afterwards, according to the renowned logic note of overcoming that Hegel calls Aufhebung4. There is history because time is organized in a coherent structure in which the past vanishes, but is also preserved on a higher level. The hypothesis from which this book starts is that the twentieth century has broken this link between time and history, thus producing a twofold consequence. On the one hand, time definitively loses the characteristics of linearity and coherence that it still had in Hegel, and will be conceived in terms of a multiplicity of heterogeneous temporal lines; on the other hand, and consequently, history, in the strong sense that has been said, tends to disappear from the philosophical horizon to give way to theses on a post-historical time, whose main characteristics are stasis, the inability to synthesize incoherent temporalities, the impossibility of producing openings towards the future. However, precisely within the short century5 – the one in which time has supposedly contracted to the point of expunging history from itself – critical reflections were produced, which, despite the acquisition of scientific and philosophical lessons about the multiform and reversible nature of time, have recovered a fruitful relation with history in a cumulative and teleological sense. This book has obviously no exhaustive intent, limiting itself to exploring some figures

4.  See G.F.W. Hegel, The Science of Logic (1816), Engl. transl. by G. Di Giovanni, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2010, pp. 81-82: “The German ‘aufheben’ has a twofold meaning in the language: it equally means ‘to keep,’ ‘to preserve’, and ‘to cause to cease,’ ‘to put an end to’”. 5.  See E.J. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century 19141991, Abacus, London 1994.

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of a much broader constellation and focusing on a number of authors – Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Roberto Esposito, Merleau-Ponty, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière – whose specificity lies in their giving this type of reflection an intense theoretical and political tone. To introduce this semantic framework, we can start with Nietzsche. His theory of the eternal return breaks the linearity of time and proposes a circular image of it. However, the deeper operation of the author of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft does not consist simply in bending what was previously straight so as to eliminate any possible idea of progress and/or teleology. In reality, Nietzsche thinks of the institution of the present through the eternal return. The return is not mere iteration, but a form of thickening of the present; in other words, it is the condition of possibility that enables man to take root in it, in its becoming. It was perhaps Deleuze who more than others caught this coincidence of present and becoming in the obscure Nietzschean fragments: c’est le rapport syntétique de l’instant avec soi comme présent, passé et avenir, qui fonde son rapport avec les autres instants. L’éternel retour est donc réponse au problème du passage. Et en ce sens, il ne doit pas être interprété comme le retour de quelque chose qui est, qui est ou qui est le même. Dans l’expression “éternel retour”, nous faisons un contresens quand nous comprenons: retour du même. Ce n’est pas le même qui retour, mais le revenir lui-même constitue l’être en tant qu’il s’affirme du devenir et de ce qui passe. Ce n’est pas l’un qui retour, mais le revenir lui-même est l’un qui s’affirme du divers et du multiple. En d’autre termes, l’identité dans l’éternel retour ne désigne pas la nature de ce qui revient, mais au contraire la fait de revenir pour ce qui diffère.6

6.  G. Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie, PUF, Paris 1962, pp. 54-55.

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Therefore according to Nietzsche, time is not simply a passage, but an intensive dimension, which, in its eternal return, is consolidated, stabilized, and eternalized. As mentioned, it will mainly be Deleuze, in the context of the French Nietzsche Renaissance, to emphasize the coincidence between becoming, event, and eternity in Nietzschean metaphysics7. However, the concept of return acquires in the meanwhile new connotations in Freud’s work. The father of psychoanalysis, in fact, shows the coexistence of present and past: the latter does not move away on the timeline, but is always here, “returns” as something that does not vanish in the way of what simply ends, but always haunts the present. This image of time offered by psychoanalysis must, however, be understood in its radicalism. The return of the past is not limited to disrupting the linearity of time, for example by confusing what comes before and after. A recent and essential study by Alessandra Campo has shown how Freudian Nachträglichkeit completely cancels the image of the line, more or less twisted, to introduce one of a present constantly in act8. Freud continues, therefore, a process in which the present is, as it were, enlarged and enriched. Another exponent of this process is Henri Bergson; as early as in Essais sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), and then in his major later works – such as Matière et mémoire (1896) and L’Évolution créatrice (1907)9 – he developed a theory of duration which conceived time as pure differential heterogeneity.

7.  On this point, I refer to my Pensare la politica fuori della contingenza. Deleuze e l’evento, in «Quaderni Inschibboleth», n. 15, 2021, pp. 409-428. 8.  A. Campo, Tardività. Freud dopo Lacan, Mimesis, Milano-Udine 2018. 9.  However, in this context, a ‘minor’ work by Bergson is particularly important, which had a particularly complex publishing history and which did not enjoy the visibility it would have deserved. It is Durée et simultanéité, à propos de la théorie d’Einstein (1922), a text in which he critically con-

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While the theories briefly described above made the idea of progressive history problematic by cancelling the linear image of time, from the twentieth century a philosophical line that emphasizes the notions of closure, oblivion, and end becomes hegemonic. It is, of course, a theoretical path of Heideggerian origin that records the tragic events of the first half of the century on an ontological level. After Auschwitz, it is difficult to write poetry, stated Adorno, and it is now impossible to think of history in terms of progress and starting from the identity of the rational and the real. Although the themes of history and destiny are central to Heidegger’s thought, his reflection is mainly directed towards the definition of an original temporality (Zeitlichkeit) whose prominent content is the moment (Augenblick), namely a chronological fragment exposed to the other temporal dimensions – the past and the future – but which is like an island floating in the sea of ​​unrealized possibilities. This is the sense of the essential historicity of Dasein: “Dasein is in itself historical in so far as it is its possibility”10. Heidegger can talk about the historicity of the Being-there in terms of destiny (Schicksal) and common destiny (Ge-schick) because Dasein falls into its possibility, is thrown into it (geworfen), and, consequently, adhering to its ownmost possibility means experiencing the most radical contingency11: destiny is a contraction of the possible, and history is nothing but aban-

fronts the theory of relativity formulated a few years earlier by Einstein. For an extensive discussion of this important book, see A. Campo, S. Gozzano (eds.), Einstein vs. Bergson. An Enduring Quarrel on Time, de Gruyter, Berlin-Boston 2022. 10.  See, M. Heidegger, The Concept of Time (1924) Engl. transl. by W. McNeill, Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken 1992. 11.  Anticipated by the 1924 conference just mentioned, the themes of temporality and historicality are extensively explored in paragraphs 67-77 of Sein und Zeit.

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donment to this ontological fragility in which human praxis can only ascertain its own inefficacy12. In short, while in the authors mentioned above time is thought of as a proliferation of virtualities in which beings are, as it were, supported, the Heideggerian thought determines a history in which action is replaced by désœuvrement, a radical passivity13. It is perhaps here that the theories about the end of history commence: starting from an interpretation of Hegel at the hands of Heidegger14 – who in turn started from an interpretation of Nietzsche as a decisive moment in the oblivion of the being15 – the idea of a time wrapped in itself is established: time separates itself from history, and leaves it in the immobility of its fulfilment. The global triumph of capitalism and man’s capacity to destroy the entire planet reduce human beings to appendages of an impersonal mechanism, within which they reiterate a ghostly existence with no future16. The three chapters this volume consists of, which can be read independently of each other, intend to explore the different approaches to the epistemological, technical, political, and philosophical crisis that marked the 1930s and even more the post-war period. The three essays are not concerned with the thought of the Krisis – variously interpreted by authors such 12.  For the developments of these themes in Heidegger’s thought following the “kehre” see G. Strummiello, L’ altro inizio del pensiero. I Beitrage zur Philosophie di Martin Heidegger, Levante, Bari 1995. 13.  See C. Wall, Radical Passivity. Lévinas, Blanchot, and Agamben, SUNY Press, New York 1999. 14.  A. Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Leçons sur la «Phénoménologie de l’Esprit» professées de 1933 à 1939 à l’École des Hautes Études, réunies et publiées par Raymond Queneau, Gallimard, Paris 1947. 15.  See M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Neske, Pfullingen 1961. 16.  See M. Fisher, Ghosts of my Life. Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, John Hunt Publishing, London 2014.

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as Husserl, Heidegger, Jonas, Anders – that identifies a split after which time separates from history and the latter can only be blind repetition. There are two points that the various authors examined here have in common, despite their irreducible differences. The first relates to the decentralization of perspective: the theorists of the Krisis maintain a Eurocentric gaze, which, in the historical context of the early twentieth century, cannot but ascertain a decline, both in terms of ‘values’ – principles that can no longer contain the growing complexity of the world – and in material terms, considering the economic crises, the no longer uncontrollable military escalations. If seen from within, Europe is on an inexorably descending path; only from a point of view displaced outside, the same process can appear in terms of change and novelty17. The time of the Krisis is also responsible for the end of colonialisms – or at least of the old ones –, of new forms of emancipation, such as that of women18. Ultimately, it is the time when new subjects burst onto the scene. It is, therefore, not a world that wanes and leaves history in its stagnant iteration but a metamorphosis that lets new and different scenarios emerge. The second and most important point of contact between our authors is the idea that the breaking of time – the Shakespearean time “out of joint” revitalized by many philosophers of the twentieth century19 – does not imply the impossibility of his17.  See R. Esposito, Da fuori. Una filosofia per l’Europa, Einaudi, Torino 2016. 18.  See A. Cavaliere, La comparsa delle donne, Fattore Umano, Roma 2016. 19.  See J. Derrida, Spectres de Marx. L’État de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale, Galilée, Paris 1993; G. Deleuze, Fuori dai cardini del tempo. Lezioni su Kant, Mimesis, Milano 2004: it is the transcription of a course held in Vincennes from March 14th to April 4th 1978, the original text of which is available at www.webdeleuze.com.

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tory. The chronological displacement – differently interpreted by all of the authors summoned here – indicates a multiplication of levels, which, far from closing history, constitutes an enhancement of the praxis. In conclusion, these authors do not emphasize the ‘post’, the feeling of having arrived later, but find in the non-coincidence of time with itself – the Nietzschean Unzeitgemäß – the possibility of a continuous revival of history. While not being the object of focus of the following essays, Michel Foucault is definitely the author who mainly inspired those researches, representing the key to understanding the philosophers here consulted. As it is well known, history has a crucial role in the development of his work, to the point that it’s been claimed it wasn’t strictly philosophical: il lavoro di Foucault non era filosofico: Foucault analizzava delle situazioni e delle trasformazioni, non rimetteva in gioco il problema del senso e della verità […]. Non faccio una gerarchia tra ‘filosofico’ e ‘storico-critico’: semplicemente distinguo. Potrei dire: due registri filosofici, uno metafisico e ontologico, e l’altro epistemologico e ideologico (cioè di analisi delle formazioni di discorsi e di pensiero).20

As a matter of fact, Nancy can’t see the ontology that, more or less implicitly, Foucault sets to work in the different stages of his research21, but the trap he falls into is probably due to the rarity with which history has been thematized, by 20th century philosophy, to the benefit of extensive reflections on time. An exemplary case of this behavior is found in an author such as Deleuze, who, while close to Foucault, explicitly and

20.  J.-L. Nancy, Le differenze parallele. Deleuze e Derrida, ombre corte, Verona 2008, p. 63. 21.  For a criticism of Nancy’s position see R. Esposito, Da fuori, cit., pp. 117119.

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programmatically distinguishes between time (or becoming) and history: de plus en plus, j’ai été sensible a une distinction possible entre le devenir et l’histoire. C’est Nietzsche qui disait que rien d’important ne se fait sans une “mice non historique”. Ce n’est pas une opposition entre l’éternel et l’historique, ni entre la contemplation et l’action: Nietzsche parle de ce qui se fait, de l’événement même ou du devenir. Ce que l’histoire saisit de l’événement, c’est son effectuation dans des états de choses, mais l’événement dans son devenir échappe à l’histoire. L’histoire n’est pas l’expérimentation, elle est seulement l’ensemble des contions presque négatives qui rendent possible l’expérimentation de quelque chose qui échappe à l’histoire. Sans l’histoire, l’expérimentation resterait indéterminée, inconditionnée, mais l’expérimentation n’est pas historique.22

Foucault himself acknowledges the peculiarity of his approach compared to a strictly philosophical one: ce qui fait que je ne suis pas philosophe dans le sens classique du terme – peut-être ne suis-je pas philosophe du tout, en tout cas, je ne suis pas un bon philosophe – est que je ne m’intéresse pas à l’éternel, je ne m’intéresse pas à ce qui ne bouge pas, je ne m’intéresse pas à ce qui reste stable sous le chatoiement des apparences, je m’intéresse à l’événement.23

Giving an account of Foucault’s multiple approaches to history would be too bold an endeavor in this context. However, it would be appropriate to note a feature emerging from the previous quote, that, while explicit in his ‘genealogic’ phase, actually pervades his whole work. The goal of the philosopher from Poitier is, in fact, to abandon any overlooking gaze that presumes to embrace phenomena from a point detached from 22.  G. Deleuze, Pourparlers 1972-1990, Minuit, Paris 1990, pp. 230-231. 23.  M. Foucault, La scène de la philosophie (1978), in Id., Dits et Écrits tome III, Gallimard, Paris 1994, pp. 571-595: p. 573.

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them: the philosopher – the genealogist in particular – must adhere to the dispersion24 in which the concreteness of processes exists. He does not totalize history, but rather he observes, accompanies even, the wirkliche historie: “L’histoire ‘effective’ se distingue de celle des historiens en ce qu’elle ne s’appuie sur aucune constance”25. Because of this, Foucault continues, “La généalogie est grise; elle est méticuleuse et patiemment documentaire. Elle travaille sur des parchemins embrouillés, grattés, plusieurs fois récrits”26. Its criticism potential is its ability to witness the way the present institutes itself. Foucault, walking on Nietzsche’s footsteps, defines the Entstehung, the emergence, as “l’entrée en scène des forces”.27 Two consequences must be examined. The first one is that the “scene” of history is always innervated by forces that constantly innervate it, and also initiate it. There’s always force vectors to grasp in order to question the present and open new possible futures. Secondarily, and subsequently, philosophy – in its genealogic method – can take a stance, because it implements a gaze that is within touching distance to phenomena: the event, the discontinuity pulsating within history, is never conceived as a shock coming from an absolute exteriority, that condemns knowledge to passivity; on the contrary, the condition of possibility of the event is found in the multiplic-

24.  This approach that programmatically gives up on synthesis has been harshly criticized by those who interpreted Foucault’s approach as hyper-realist and lost in minutiae, surrendering to political urges. See J. Baudrillard, Oublier Foucault, Galilée, Paris 1977; M. Cacciari, “Razionalità” e “Irrazionalità” nella critica del Politico in Deleuze e Foucault, in «aut aut», n. 161, 1977, pp. 119-133. 25.  M. Foucault, Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire (1971), in Id., Dits et Écrits tome II, Gallimard, Paris 2001, pp. 136-156: p. 147. 26.  Ivi, p. 136. 27.  Ivi, p. 144.

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ity of forces that build time and support history, therefore in the possibility for human praxis of articulating different temporalities. The event is the production of a gap, of a radically historical anachronism. This way philosophy goes back – after the crisis experienced with Heideggerism – to being a knowledge that can’t not act, can’t not be in act. The ontology at the base of this theory is, like Foucault himself states in very famous pages, an ontology of the present or, in more accurate words, of actuality:  il s’agira de ce qu l’on pourrait appeler une ontologie du présent, une ontologie de nous-même, et il me semble que le choix philosophique auquel nous nous trouvons confrontés actuellement est celui-ci: on peut opter pour une philosophie critique qui se présentera comme une philosophie analytique de la vérité en général, ou bien on peut opter pour une pensée critique qui prendra la forme d’une ontologie de nous-même, d’une ontologie de l’actualité; c’est cette forme di philosophie qui, de Hegel à l’école de Francfort en passant par Nietzsche et Max Weber, a fondé une forme dans laquelle j’ai essayé de travailler.28

‘Actuality’ [actualité] can initially be defined as the group of more or less recent occurrences that are relevant in the current time. But more specifically it’s what is happening, what acts here and now and has experienceable effects. Here too there’s a displacement between time and history, but this time it’s the inconsistency between historical and conceptual de­ velopment, because of which the various aspects of an age can’t be organically synthesized in a single historical-­conceptual device. On the contrary, the displacement between time and history allows the emergence of complex instances that, each at its pace and each more or less returning, confront each other, 28.  M. Foucault, Qu’est-ce que Les Lumières? (1984), in Id., Dits et Écrits tome IV, Gallimard, Paris 1994, pp. 679-688: pp. 687-688. Emphasis added.

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intersect each other, mingle with and exclude each other, but, and that’s the crucial point, prevent the closure of a device – a Gestell – that is completely impersonal and throws the action into impasse and impotence. The fundamental thesis inherited by Foucault, that the presented researches aim to relaunch, is that the inherent heterogeneity of time, far from cutting a wound in history that would cause an emptying, an “ontological squandering”29, produces a differential history which is always liable to be constantly altered. The things and the possibilities happening around us are more than what can be seen by a philosophy that conceives the history as decline and oblivion, and the event as the blow of an absolute exteriority: La révolution risquera toujours de retomber dans l’ornière, mais comme événement dont le contenu même est inimportant, son existence atteste une virtualité permanente et qui ne peut être oubliée: pour l’histoire future, c’est la garantie de la continuité même d’une démarche vers le progès.30

29.  G. Agamben, The Time That Remains. A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (2000), Stanford University Press, Stanford 2005, p. 40. 30.  M. Foucault, Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire, cit., p. 686.

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I

The Time of Politics Event and History in the Reflections of Jacques Rancière

The first issue that the topic of immanence raises with politics today is that of the latter’s representability. The rationality of neoliberal politics is unresponsive to forms of transcendence, but, by embracing immanence as its horizon, it naturalizes its own government dynamics, making them look necessary, even obvious. On this hand, then, immanence doesn’t seem to have political fertility. This picture makes politics unperceivable in itself. Akin to some of Malevič’s paintings: no contrast, in any sense of the word: resistance, conflict, phenomenality. It is then necessary to clearly observe political praxis in its specificity – as other than the economic, technological, cognitive, biological processes – but at the same time to give account of such specificity within the immanence in which the political event occurs: it’s this very immanence that must be acknowledged no longer as capture and oppression of politics, but as its only room for fulfillment and especially its condition for possibility.1 *  An early version of this essay was published in «Shift. International Journal Of Philosophical Studies», n. 1, 2018, pp. 167-182. I thank the Editor and the Editorial Board for granting this new publication.

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No nostalgia for pure politics. If at all, there’s the need for once again asking the question what politics is, without making it a metaphysical enquiry – which would inevitably suck political praxis into the abstracting cone of theory – but trying to show what politics does, how it acts and what makes it possible. A study on a specific aspect of Jacques Rancière’s work would be instrumental in this endeavour. Among the sharpest of the authors populating the current debate scene, his contribution seems to befit the understanding of politics as an event – a gap, a break that is not akin to mere administration – without ever thinking about it as something metahistorical. With Rancière it’s about rethinking the human experience tracing it back to the dimension of temporality: people are political beings, we can condense that here and now, because they are made of temporality. However, the more specific intention is to demonstrate, through the analysis of Rancière’s work, that the political productivity – or inversely, the antipolitical – of a philosophy depends strictly on the image of time and history that the philosophy is working with. The examination of this specific aspect of Rancière’s thought isn’t aimed at replicating its keywords: Rancière’s – and his

1.  Such task is perhaps not far from the one, carried out by Roberto Esposito over the last years, of a reflection on the relationship between politics and negation. As he extensively showed in his book a few years ago, an affirmative philosophy can only be possible by confronting the negative that permeates the human experience. Where, Esposito says, the “metaphysical machine” keeps producing a politicization of the negative and a politics of negation – building metapolitical devices that transcend the dimension of that experience – politics and negation must be disarticulated, so that the affirmative character of the former and the function of logical and ontological determination of the latter can fully sink in. Refer to Politica e negazione. Per una filosofia affermativa, Einaudi, Torino 2018, and Due. La macchina della teologia politica e il posto del pensiero, Einaudi, Torino 2013.

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readers’ – insistence on concepts as “partition of the perceivable”, phenomenality, exteriority, etc., leads to expound his thought in an exclusively spatial interpretation, at least partially losing some of its fecundity. This study, besides attempting an affirmative read on immanence, to be acknowledged as condition and nourishment for the political action rather than an obstacle to it, aims to try to take the theoretical-political reflection back sub specie durationis; both to debunk the thesis of the end of history, variously dissimulated in several rhetorics of the ‘post-’, that is of a time that comes after truth, after history, after politics, and that imposes factuality as a necessity; and to strip the analysis from a mostly spatial paradigm in a context like the current one, in which the Blut und Boden2 ideology is strongly returning, albeit disguised as humanitarian and/or emergency pretexts.

1. What Politics is Not As is well known, Rancière’s thought takes shape starting from a bitter argument with Althusser, with whom he had previously collaborated on the writing of one of the chapters of the

2.  The logic according to which the states – not just European ones – manage migration flows heeds the slogan ‘let’s help them in their own countries’, which corroborates the idea of a vertical bond tying men to a land, to a space they own, out of which they are without nomos, clandestine. In broader terms, however, even a radical theory of democracy should not ignore that, in an extremely fluid and ever-changing historical context, there’s still room for identities that find a foothold in the ‘traditional’ cardinal points: “space and territory – once their formal definition has blown up – become bearers of motivation for the political battle, they supply memory, experiences and concrete knowledge”, L. Bazzicalupo, La doppia crisi della democrazia, in Ead. (ed.), Crisi della democrazia, Mimesis, Milano 2014, p. 28.

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monumental Lire ‘Le Capital’3. May ‘68 marks a divide in his path, forcing him to face two issues. On one hand, political commotion was brewing, not aimed towards overturning and conquering the power, but precisely towards the destitution of any and all pedagogical, political, symbolical instances that might legitimize asymmetry between an active subject and an obedient and passive one. On the other hand, and conversely, movements taking the floor, anonymously and collectively, were questioning the role of intellectual and political élites, showing spontaneous skills and potential that did not need representation nor external direction. While Althusser founded the distinction between two different anthropological types through the science/ideology binomial – the scientist can rip through the opaqueness of the ideology curtain, and the common man, the proletarian, lives passively in the murkiness of ideological mystification4 – according to Rancière “il s’agit d’affirmer au niveau théorique la capacité des classes dominées de former les armes idéologiques de leur combat, donc de fonder leur droit à la révolte indépendamment des appareils politico-­ syndicaux ‘de la classe ouvrière’”5. Starting from here, Rancière develops a singular concept of politics in its ‘purity’ and ‘autonomy’. It is, in fact, not condi3.  L. Althusser, E. Balibar, R. Estabet, P. Macherey, J. Rancière, Lire ‘Le Capital’, Maspero, Paris 1965, 2 voll. Rancière’s text was expunged from the second edition: actually his contribution largely exceeded Althusser’s system. See P.A. Rovatti, Critica e scientificità in Marx. Per una lettura fenomenologica di Marx e una critica del marxismo di Althusser, Feltrinelli, Milano 1973, pp. 135 and ss. 4.  See especially L. Althusser, Pour Marx, Maspero, Paris 1965. For the subsequent autocritical developments of the theory of ideology, see Id., Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État (Notes pour une recherche), in Id., Positions, Éditions Sociales, Paris 1976. 5.  J. Rancière, Sur la théorie de l’idéologie. Politique d’Althusser, in “L’Homme et la Société”, n. 27, 1973, pp. 31-61: 34

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tional to science; but that doesn’t mean it lets itself be confused by pure spontaneity, a blind, ephemeral process: “l’affranchissement du prolétariat est impossible sans la théorie des conditions de cette libération, c’est-à-dire la science marxiste des formations sociales”6, but this knowledge and this discipline are not in a different plane in which ideology is stagnating, on the contrary they exist and make sense only in the concrete, argumentative dimension in which they develop7. Therefore, not functional to knowledge. But in distancing himself from blind spontaneity, Rancière asserts that politics is also not an extension of the subjects’ vital power8. This means that nothing, in the given context, explains the etiology of the insurgence of the political event9. At the same time, Rancière must distance himself from another theoretical front. Politics, as mentioned, is not functional to a transcendent cognitive instance, and it’s not the direct expression of moral vitalism. But neither is the political rift due to the blow of an absolute otherness: these dramaturgies of the great Other prove to be impolitical because they trap the thought in an ethical-mystical impasse, waiting passively 6.  Ivi, pp. 47-48. 7.  See A. Badiou, Les leçons de Jacques Rancière. Savoir et pouvoir après la tempête, in L. Cornu, P. Vermeren (dir.), La philosophie déplacée. Autour de Jacques Rancière, Horlieu, Bourg en Bresse 2006, pp. 131-154. 8.  J. Rancière, Biopolitique ou politique?, in “Multitudes”, n. 1, 2000. 9.  In Rancière’s lexicon, into which we’re not gonna delve right now, politique is different from police. Both are “partitions of the sensible”, that is ways of cutting the sensible space and deciding who’s included in it and in what capacity, and who isn’t. While police is the given asset, the space resulting from a division based on placements and functions, politique isn’t an established order, it’s rather something performative, the set of practices that result in a supplement unaccounted for in police. See J. Rancière, La mésentente. Politique et philosophie, Galilée, Paris 1995, especially chapter 2, ‘Le tort: politique et police’, pp. 41-68.

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for an abrupt, unforeseeable, incalculable event, whose only – ethical, not political – function is to have humans facing their ontologically precarious condition10. That’s when the pivotal question comes into play: if the political phenomenon is absolutely heterogeneous from the context, if it is absolutely unattached, taking shape outside of any cause-effect relations, what makes it different from the great Other leading back to an original abyss? More concretely: given a radical plane of immanence, how to interpret politics not as administration or projectation, but as mutation, gap, break? How can immanence make room for the insurgence of heterogeneity? Rancière identifies a specific time of politics in the answer to this crucial question.

2. Divergent Times At first, the time of politics can be kairos. The kind of politics intended as contingent insurgence of something other than the given context can only correspond to a time that means tear, instant break, that is out of sync with the objective, mechanical chronos. A time of exceptional decision, that breaks the homogeneous continuity of the unfolding of a calculating motive. As a matter of fact, chronos and kairos can correspond to different political rationalities: Il kairos è dalla parte opposta rispetto alle strategie di neutralizzazione della contingenza. […] L’anacronia introdotta dal 10.  This pose of “abandonment” that echoes Heidegger is what Rancière criticizes in many authors who in many other ways are aligned to his own views, especially Lyotard and Badiou. See J. Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthétique, Galilée, Paris 2004.

27 kairos mina il regime cronopolitico che impone, ed è a sua volta supportato da, strutture temporali cristallizzate nella modalità del chronos, sul modello dell’orologio.11

But this is not the road Rancière intends to walk. The idea of a simple opposition between kairos and chronos, which is symmetrical to the one between freedom and necessity, is too naive. The apparent impoliticity mentioned earlier – which by the way elevates perpetual crisis to government device12 – also implies that the neoliberal rationale unfolds in a kairological, rather than chronological, time. This is a government system that, resistant to the logic of a coherent project, feeds precisely on the unpredictable and the contingent, something that “proprio grazie alla sua variabilità, può essere inclinato”13, in other words, governed. A system that is no less normative than the ‘classic’ one, but that doesn’t hold any transcendent model, on the contrary it extrapolates the norm ex post, as emerging from contingency itself, on a fitness criterion14. Kairos therefore pierces immanence, but does not explain its potential. Rancière suggests a different path. The theme of time comes into Rancière’s reflection for the first time at the beginning of the 80s, when he publishes a

11.  B. Accarino, Cairologia, in “Filosofia Politica”, n. 1, 2017, pp. 35-45: 36-37. 12.  See D. Gentili, Il dispositivo della crisi. Antagonismo e governamentalità, in D. Gentili, E. Stimilli (ed.), Differenze italiane. Politica e filosofia: mappe e sconfinamenti, DeriveApprodi, Roma 2015, pp. 140-149; Id., Crisi come arte di governo, Quodlibet, Macerata 2018; G. Agamben, La crisi perpetua come strumento di potere. Conversazione con Giorgio Agamben, in “il lavoro culturale”, October 2, 2013, http://www.lavoroculturale.org/la-crisiperpetua-come-strumento-di-potere-conversazione-con-giorgio-agamben/. 13.  B. Accarino, Cairologia, cit., p. 39. 14.  See L. Bazzicalupo, Dispositivi e soggettivazioni, Mimesis, Milano 2013, pp. 27-33.

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huge reconstruction of the French working class movement between 1830 and 1848. La nuit des proletaires is an archive research conducted with what was defined as a “hyper-realist” method: the author “refuse de conceptualiser” in order to let the forces in question speak for themselves; “l’a-conceptualisme en question passait par l’attention à ne jamais glisser de concepts interpretatifs véhiculant le discours de l’autr dominateur ou éclairé”15. In giving their voice back to the working class, Rancière finds that, breaking every recognition rule, they projected themselves out of the status of ‘worker’, ‘proletarian’, ‘laborer’. They dedicate their nights, the time they should devote to resting, to intellectual activities, reading, studying, talking to each other and to their superiors. Their emancipation doesn’t happen through work, rather through that leisure that is a ‘master’s’ prerogative. In conclusion, they’re altering the partition of the times, spaces, and functions they were destined to: “le renversement du monde commence à cette heure où les travailleurs normaux devraient goûter le sommeil paisible de ceux que leur métier n’oblige point à penser”16. At the core of the book then, there are these nights “arrachées à la successione normale du travail et du repos”, during which there is “la suspension de l’ancestrale hiérarchie subordonnant ceux qui sont vouès à travailler de leurs mains à ceux qui ont reçu le privilège de la pensée”17. An idea of politics as a clash between different temporalities is beginning to take shape: a hierarchized time, in which lives are taxonomically ordered, collides with a co-existential time in which those hierarchies are destroyed and lives are distributed with equity.

15.  Y. Michaud, Les pauvres et leur philosophe. La philosophie de Jacques Rancière, in “Critique”, n. 601-602, 1997, pp. 421-445: pp. 421-422. 16.  J. Rancière, La Nuit des prolétaires. Archives du rêve ouvrier, Fayard, Paris 1981, p. 7. 17.  Ivi, p. 18.

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This image of time becomes sharper when Rancière, a few years later, goes specifically into a critique of the ways in which humanities and social science have dealt with the intertwining of time and history. In the beginning of the 90s, starting from the book Les mots de l’histoire18, Rancière focuses on the critique of Nouvelle histoire, and it’s important to emphasize how the concepts and key words of what will become the Rancière lexicon, starting from the notion of ‘subjectivation’, are going to stem from these analyses.

3. Against Scientific History Rancière’s argument against the historiography of the “Annales” is symmetrical to the one against Althusser: if the latter was about affirming the individuals’ political ability outside the tutelage of a scientific élite, the latter is about subtracting the human praxis from the knowledge – the scientific history – that aims to encase it within specific historical and territorial boxes. The main goal of the Nouvelle histoire was, in fact, that of removing contingency from the historic account, reducing the mutation to simple effect of structural causes, to mere accident or epiphenomenon. Not for nothing, the historiography of the “Annales” takes shape in the context of the critique of that history that was derogatorily defined “événementielle”. French historiography emphasized the “fact”, represented by political-military documents and embodied by a subjective historical agent, a Hero19; the fact would soon be replaced by 18.  J. Rancière, Les mots de l’histoire. Essai de poétique du savoir, Seuil, Paris 1992. 19.  C.-V. Langlois, Charles Seignobos, Introduction aux études historiques (1989), ENS Éditions, Lyon 2014.

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the “hypothesis” of the researcher, contaminating the historical method with techniques and approaches derived from different fields, sociology above all20. But it’s the foundation in 1929 of the magazine “Annales d’histoire économique et sociale” by Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre and Ferdinand Braudel that marks a decisive turning point in historiography. Their contribution is found first and foremost in the criticism of the “fact”, aimed to restore the essential role of the scientist. Events per se are mute: only the intervention of the historian can make them perspicuous. Furthermore, historians don’t just find themselves confronted with available data to simply select and order them; on the contrary, claims Febvre, “to elaborate a fact means to build it. It is the question’s duty to provide an answer. And if there’s no question, all that’s left is nothing”21. Consistently with this approach, the historian’s sources won’t just be military, diplomatic and political documents: those recount a history made by individuals, a shallow history in which events that bear no sense in themselves are going to chaotically explode. Historians must multiply their sources, analyzing the most diverse material to gain access to a more stable temporality: “un temps social dont les catégories majeures – conjoncture, structure, tendance, cycle, croissance, crise, etc. – sont empruntées à l’économie, à la démographie et à la sociologie”22.

20.  H. Berr, La Synthèse en histoire. Essai critique et théorique, Félix Alcan, Paris 1911. 21.  L. Febvre, Examen de conscience d’une histoire et d’un historien, in “Revue de synthèse”, n. 7, 1934, p. 93-106: p. 98. My translation. 22.  P. Ricoeur, Temps et récit. Tome I, Seuil, Paris 1983, p. 147. See C. Ginzgurg, Prefazione, in M. Bloch, I re taumaturghi (1924), Einaudi, Torino 1973, pp. XI-XIX: p. XII: “la storiografia o non era scientifica, e allora rimaneva confinata, al limite, nell’aneddoto; o era scientifica, passibile cioè

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Starting from Paul Simiand, the kind of history that delves into recounting a bunch of heterogeneous facts will be called histoire événementielle (or histoire de bataille). Paul Lacombe, revisiting the concept, will affirm: Les actions historiques, comme les actes ordinaires, peuvent être considérées, soit par l’aspect qui les rend semblables a d’autres, soit par l’aspect qui les fait uniques. Dans le premier cas, ce sont des institutions; dans le second cas, ce sont des événements. L’événement est en soi impropre à devenir l’objet d’une connaissance scientifique, puisqu’il ne se prête pas à l’assimilation, qui est le premier pas de la science.23

What matters here is the contradictory nature of the strategy employed for the scientification of history. Oddly enough, on one hand the “Annales” historians claim to want to build a “living and human history, full of thoughts and actions”24, for which they revisit Bergson’s teachings two fundamental assumptions on dynamic and evolving dimension of time25. On the other hand, what was taken from the “duration”, or rather the “long duration” to which Nouvelle histoire wants to pay attention, is exactly the heterogeneity and immeasurability that, according to Bergson, makes it different. The scientific turn of historiography is made possible by a static, “eternalized”26 time, compared to which any discontinuity is but a forgettable, shallow detail. Therefore, the critique of evenemential history destroys two fundamental assumptions: “que l’individu est le di comparazioni tali da condurre all’enunciazione di leggi, e allora si identificava con la sociologia”. 23.  P. Lacombe, De l’histoire considérée comme science, Hachette, Paris 1894, p. 1. 24.  L. Febvre, Examen de conscience, cit., p. 103. 25.  See M. Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire ou Métier d’historien, Colin, Paris 1993. 26.  See P. Ricoeur, Temps et récit. Tome I, cit., p. 145.

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porteur ultime du changement historique et que les changements les plus significatifs sont les changements ponctuels”27. What disappears in this crystalized time – conceived as a line made up by homogeneous points and expressed in a univocal direction – is precisely the unpredictability of human actions, as well as their potential to produce radical discontinuities, events. In one word, politics itself – in the above mentioned sense – is retreating. In his essay on long duration, Braudel identifies in the concepts of “structure” and “model” the keys to understanding long duration. With structure he means “une organisation, une coherence, des rapports assez fixes entre realités et masses sociales”28; while the models are very plastic “sistèmes d’excplicitations” that the researcher has to test by dilating the diachronic dimension29. Compared to this temporality that expresses the values of immobility and deterministic consistency in cause-effect relations – rather than the sense of duration and of anarchic becoming –, the short time disclosed by the event appears as “la mesure des individus, de la vie quotidienne, de nos illusions, de nos rapides prises di conscience, le temps par excellence du chroniqueur, du journaliste”30. The “wise [savant]” have instead the skill “de passer du temps court au temps moins court et au temps très long”31, because he know that the most authentic historical agents aren’t those who make noise, that there are more silent, more effective ones32. The most complete manifesto of this method

27.  Ivi, p. 146. 28.  F. Braudel, La longue durée, in “Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations”, n. 4, 1958, pp. 725-753: p. 731. 29.  Ivi, pp. 740-471. 30.  Ivi, p. 728. 31.  Ivi, p. 748. 32.  See ivi, p. 728.

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is Braudel’s masterpiece, La Méditerranée33, in which he shifts the focus of the historical narration away from the sovereigns and their antics to a stable geographical and cultural block, in this case the Mediterranean34. As Ranciére states, “la destitution des princes comme objets d’histoire” makes way for enthroning “la mer bleue qui fait l’histoire des hommes”35; but “ Ce déplacement scientifique répond au déplacement d’une politique qui ne bat plus à l’heure des rois mais à celle des masses”36. In other words, Braudel and the historians of the “Annales” acknowledge that the modern age is “l’âge des larges masses et des grandes régularités qui se prêtent aux calculs de la sciences”37. A different problem then arises: does the image of time that they elaborated allow them to give the masses their voice back? Can history as a rigidly scientific field take account of the political skills of people?

4. A Time for the Masses According to Ranciére, this way of addressing the masses is a capture rather than a liberation of their word. Michelet al33.  F. Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, Colin Paris 1949. 34.  Rancière notes that by moving the story of Philip II’s death to the end of the book, Braudel shows of considering it a completely neglectable event: “la mort déplacée de Philippe II, nous comprenons qu’elle métaphorise la mort d’une certaine histoire, celle des événements et des rois. L’événement théorique sur lequel se clôt le livre est ceci: que la mort du roi ne fasse plus événement. La mort du roi signifie que les rois sont morts comme centres et forces d’histoire”, F. Braudel, Les mots de l’histoire, cit., pp. 26-27. 35.  Ivi, p. 37. 36.  Ibidem. 37.  Ivi, p. 22.

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ready identified “l’entrée du people des anonymes dans l’univers des êtres parlants” as the characterizing passage of modern history, and with his romantic pathos, at first he seems to want to leave room for this “historicité nouvelles”38 built by the ‘people’. However, in Michelet’s prose, the appearance of the people becomes an “événement non événementiel”39. It is obviously about the Revolution that, in Michelet’s romantic Stimmung, becomes something unspeakable, an event that no report can saturate, and thus only the historian can barely address it, not through a rigorous analysis, but through poetic suggestions40. From this perspective, there’s no chance for the people to speak, but “c’est au contraire l’historien qui va se mettre en scène”41, explaining what the ‘poors’ can’t say. They don’t know that their words express nothing subjective, but through them a genius loci expresses itself: “ils ignorent ce sens qui les fait parler, qui parle en eux. Le rôle de l’historien est de délivrer cette voix”42. The people’s word is thus reduced to an epiphenomenal expression of a territorialized Geist: this is how Michelet “met en place en même temps le sujet de la démocratie et l’objet de la science”43. This territorialization of the word produces, in fact, ‘people’ as a subject that is tamed ahead of time, because it’s open to the calculation and analysis of its “orographic” constants. A non evenemential people, one might say, an impolitical peo-

38.  Ivi, p. 93. 39.  Ivi, p. 92. 40.  See J. Michelet, Le Peuple (1846), Flammarion, Paris 1993, ‘Préface’, p. xxxv: “France ‘n’aura jamais qu’un seul nom, inexplicable, et qui est son vrai nom éternel: la Révolution”. 41.  J. Rancière, Les mots de l’histoire, cit., p. 93. 42.  Ivi, p. 97. 43.  Ivi, p. 107.

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ple. This “géographisation du sens”44 is then brought to the extremes from Nouvelle histoire, that, as we’ve seen, displaces the core of history from the unpredictable praxis of men to the arché of a place. Starting from Braudel’s Mediterranean, what happens “nest pas la soumission des faits historiques à des données géographiques. C’est, bien plus profondément, une géographisation ou une territorialisation du sens”. This means that every people speaking out – which is what makes a ‘people’ an antagonist –will never be anarchic, free, an addition to data, but will always remain mere expression of something that is already presumed and settled in a place: “le lieu est ce qui donne lieu. Toute production de parole peut se représenter comme l’exacte expression de ce qui lui donne lieu, de sa propre légitimité”45. This spatial variation of the historical account is however made possible by a specific image of time, an “eternalized” image, as we’ve seen, for which a phenomenon is historical because it is direct expression, causally determined, of a certain historical phase. A phenomenon is historical when it can undergo an identification process, univocally traced back to a temporal slot. This tight immanence between cause and effect prevents the eventuality of politics.

5. The Anachrony Rethinking the event, without making it the expression of an absolute Other, requires then the elaboration of another image of time. First and foremost, it must consider the possi-

44.  Ivi, p. 135. 45.  Ivi, pp. 136-137.

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bility of anachronism, what Febvre considered “le péché des péchés”46 of the historians. A true blasphemy in scientific history, the anachronism is not simply the mistake of wrongly placing an event on the timeline. It is, as Rancière explains, “le péché contre l’éternité dans le temps, la presence de l’éternité comme temps”47. The time thought by historical science is, in fact, a time constituted comme principe d’immanence subsumant tous les phénomènes sous une loi d’intériorité. La vérité de l’histoire est alors l’immanence du temps comme principe de co-présence et de co-appartenence des phénomènes. Le temps fonctionne bien ainsi comme ressemblance ou substitut de l’éternité.48

In this frame, time acts “comme l’efficace de sa proper vérité”49, and that’s why Febvre can dismiss Rabelais’s hypothesis of atheism as “anachronistic” – in the specific sense of lacking relationship with the truth. According to Febvre, “l’‘époque’ de Rabelais ne lui permettait pas l’incroyance parce que le temps empirique dont elle est le principe transcendental était un temps entièrement déterminé dans ses ‘emplois’ par la religion chrétienne”50. An epochal theory produces a specific figure in history: time becomes history organizing itself around certain subjective principles that withhold (epechein: to restrain, to suspend) the becoming. Saving the political phenomenon means above all to be equipped with a post-epochal concept of history, an anarchic

46.  L. Febvre, Le problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle. La religion de Rabelais, Albin Michel, Paris 1968, p. 15. 47.  J. Rancière, Le concept d’anachronisme et la vérité de l’historien, in “Inactuel”, n. 6, 1996, pp. 53-68: 57. 48.  Ivi, p. 57. 49.  Ibidem. 50.  Ivi, p. 59.

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history that frees the infinite potential of praxis and thought, untying them from any assumption. History exists, Ranciére claims, exactly because les hommes ne ‘ressemblent’ pas à leur temps, pour autant qu’ils agissent en rupture avec ‘leur’ temps, avec la ligne de temporalité qui les met à leur place en leur imposant de faire de leur temps tel ou tel ‘emploi’. Mais cette rupture n’est elle-même possible que par la possibilité de connecter cette ligne de temporalité à d’autres, par la multiciplité des lignes de temporalité présentes dans un ‘temps’.51

We can then foresee an image of time as pure heterogeneity, as discordance between multiple temporal lines. To formally describe this temporal image, Ranciére introduces the concept of anachrony. It consists in ways of connecting different temporal lines, des événements, des notions des significations qui prennent le temps à rebours, qui font circuler du sens d’une manière qui échappe à toute contemporanéité, à toute identité du temps avec ‘lui-même’. Une anachronie, c’est un mot, un événement, une séquence signifiante sortis de ‘leur’ temps, doués du même coup de la capacité de définir des aiguillages temporels inédits, d’assurer le saut ou la connexion d’une ligne de temporalité à une autre. Et c’est par ces aiguillages, ces sauts et ces connexions qu’existe un pouvoir de ‘faire’ l’histoire.52

If this is the formal definition of anachrony, the material and performative sense of the concept was already supplied by Ranciére in La nuit des proletaires: in that archival reconstruction, as previously seen, the ‘proletarian’ doesn’t appear as the concept of an existence assigned to a specific and univocal use

51.  Ivi, p. p. 66. 52.  Ivi, pp. 67-68.

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of time, but rather as the historical agent that breaks the ordinary sequence of time conditioned by the work/rest cycle. Conclusively, history and politics exist because human praxis has the power to break any synchronization, because humans are capable, with their actions and their words, to produce anachronies, discontinuities, ruptures, events. It should be noticed that also Nicole Loraux, from the point of view of a professional historian, has praised anachronism53. According to her, it is about “témoigner de la fécondité d’un pratique sous contrôle de l’anachronisme”54. Here the anachronism operates as a “fiction heiristique”55 that allows to notice everything that exceeds the linear time, typical of historians. Only through a crack in the linearity of historical development can we perceive what Loraux calls “démocratie au-delà d’elle même”, that is an idea of politics that doesn’t overlap with the actual political regime of Classical Athens, but that can be deduced from the detractors of democracy, and that only through the comparison to modern theories can give us the idea of a radical democracy practice56. Loraux suggests to consider those phenomena that happen in the chronological time of history, upsetting the “narration ordonnée” that historians attempt to carry out: these repetitions, overturnings, and suspensions that “donnent au conflit sa temporalité”57. Even in Loraux, then, the anachronism is used as a device of deciphering the political conflict. But Ranciére is more radical.

53.  N. Loraux, Éloge de l’anachronisme en histoire, in “Le Genre humain”, n. 27, 1993, pp. 23-39. 54.  Ivi, p. 30, emphasis added. 55.  Ivi, p. 32. 56.  See Ivi, pp. 30-32. 57.  Ivi, p. 37, emphasis added.

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Bringing back to light the temporal pluralities that the modern self-interpretation tries to synthesize, he identifies the condition of possibility of both history and politics. The differential plurality of temporal heterogeneities makes the limitlessness possible, and that is the main feature of a process of political subjectivation: Rancière says that a subject is, or better yet, becomes political when it denies any limit, undoes any epoché, excludes any exclusion, affirming the equality of everybody to anybody, connecting times, spaces, and functions that gave themselves separately. In this sense, “en portant la marque de l’illimité”58, a political subject corresponds with the process in which it shows its ability to distance itself from the intricate relationships in which it is originally placed, its ability to avoid any identification, any ontology59. The anachronism, or anachrony, meant as the discordance of time, in Rancière isn’t simply a device of criticism or decodi­ fication (of the political). The anachrony is identified as the transcendental of politics. This condition of possibility has a critical function because it allows to perceive the political phenomenon in its purity, without subsuming it under an economical, technical-scientific, or ethical rationale. This purity is not the autonomy of the political, doesn’t put politics in a transcendental dimension compared to technical-­ economical processes. It is instead what stands out as differential, as a contrast, meant at the same time as phenomenon and as conflict. For Rancière, in fact, politics does not have an ontological origin, but only comes to in the evenemential process of a phase shift.

58.  See J. Rancière, Les mots de l’histoire, cit., pp. 185-188. 59.  Exactly because it exists without an ontological basis, in a completely practical and performative dimension, it would be more appropriate to talk about political subjectivation, instead of ‘subject’ or ‘subjectivity’.

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Rancière talked about the “pureté de l’écart”60 to think the politics of immanence, to think the latter as a condition – as in possibility and way of being – of the former. This idea emerges, as we’ve seen, in the critic that Rancière gives of scientific history61, but a larger projects takes its first steps from this, meant to rethink the event, without making it the expression of an absolute alterity, but rather of a potential of immanence.

6. The Event It is possible to think the political event within the immanence, if we start from the representation of history as discontinuity. Politics as event has nothing to do with the messianic time, nor with the irruption of a metahistorical heterogeneity. It depends on the human skills of experimenting different articulations between multiple temporalities: Il arrive des événements parce qu’il y a des temps différents qui se télescopent, il arrive des événements parce qu’il y a du futur, du futur dans le présent, parce qu’il y a aussi du présent qui répète du passé, parce qu’il y a des temporalités différentes dans un ‘même’ temps.62

Neither messianic nor kairological, the time of politics is not a different time, separate and by itself. On the contrary, the time 60.  See J. Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthétique, Galilée, Paris 2004, p. 100. Emphasis added 61.  Human sciences, especially sociology, that would become the fundamental epistemological model for the Nouvelle Histoire, are born, according to Rancière, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, with a restoration intent that consisted in affirming the perfect univocity of times, spaces and social roles: see J. Rancière, Les mots de l’histoire, cit., pp. 54-88. 62.  J. Rancière, Histoire des mots, mots de l’histoire, in “Communications”, n.58, 1994, pp. 87-101: p. 93.

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of inconsistent coexistence of plurality is inherent to politics. The time of politics is the one sparking in the friction between different temporalities. Paradoxically, it is in modernity that this time emerges, immune to the synchronization of a plurality of heterogeneous times, through which modernity itself is thought63. The age of the masses is not, in fact, that of calculable regularities, that offer a tame, manageable subject to democracy. It is rather that of conflict between two images of time. On one side, in a representation belonging to Greek classicism, a horizontal grid, that places time along a line between past and future in which things are linked in a cause-effect relationship, always carries a dissimulated vertical dimension of time, where existences are distributed in a hierarchical way. Aristotle and Plato describe this “double nature du temps”64: the former, in the Poetics, describes the tragic heroes as “men of action”, whose adventures follow a teleological rationality, and for this very reason, they oppose “ceux qu’on appelle hommes passifs ou méchaniques”, stuck in the time of everyday life where things happen casually65. The latter, in the Republic, makes specific times, spaces, and functions correspond with these two types of humans. So, a rationality that “fait passer les hommes actifs de la fortune à l’infortune et de l’ignorance au savoir” goes along with a “distribution bien ordonnée des temps et des espaces, des activités et des capacités”66. Then again, the modern fights for emancipation make this first image of time collide with a second figure, in which time is no longer marked by spe63.  See R. Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 1979. 64.  J. Rancière, Les temps modernes. Art, temps, politique, La Fabrique, Paris 2018, p. 21. 65.  See ivi, p. 20. 66.  Ivi, p. 21.

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cific properties. The time of work, previously confined in the private dimension, then external and submitted to the heroic time of action, gains public and political relevance. What used to be dismissed starts to emerge, time gets complicated, it multiplies its folds. It is an an-archic time of pure coexistence, that “récuse l’opposition entre deux types de succession, un temps commun aux humains que l’on disait actifs et à ceux que l’on disait passifs”67. It’s a time in which “toutes les activités sont équivalentes et simultanées”68. The time of the coexistence of heterogeneities, is a time “sans hiérarchie”, “démocratisé”69. The political event finds its condition of possibility precisely in the clash between these temporalities – one hierarchic, the other democratic and egalitarian – that are irreconcilable. Politics is the event, because nothing in this configuration explains the radical change etiologically: “il faut en finir avec la vielle idée marxiste que le monde de la domination sécrète sa propre destruction”70. On the contrary, politics is always subjectivation, demonstration of the inconsistency in the given material and symbolic configuration; politics is ‘making history’, not in the sense of heroically transcending the plane of events, but in that of multiplying the gaps between inconsistent temporali­ ties, rather than waiting and enduring the irruption of history of something metahistorical.

67.  Ivi, p. 40. 68.  Ivi, p. 67. 69.  Ivi, p. 59. 70.  J. Rancière, En quel temps vivons nous?, La Fabrique, Paris 2017, p. 11.

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7. Thinking Politics Within Immanence The image of modern itself is at stake. Far from being defined as synchronization of heterogeneous times, the core of modernity is this plurality of forms of life affirming in itself, without being taxonomically distributed. Le temps moderne est un temps qui n’est pas encore contemporain de lui-même [… and] ce qui est moderne, n’est pas l’homme ou la femme épousant, sur l’axe horizontal du temps, le rythme accéléré des machines, c’est l’abolition, sur son axe vertical, de la hiérarchie séparant les hommes mécaniques et les hommes libres. C’est la redistribution non hiérarchique des formes fondamentales de l’expérience sensible.71

And obviously the dismantling of the category of modern also compromises all the rhetorics of the ‘postmodern’ and in general any “concezione lineare delle epoche e subalterna alla semantica storicistica della modernità”72. But more than that, what is at stake is the political productivity of theoretical perspectives that, with the intention of shaking the political to separate it from the technical-economical dynamics, make politics flow into transcendence, stripping the human praxis of its creating potential. The event remains outside of history and acquires connotations that are more mystical than historical-political. There’s not enough time to delve into the specificity of Rancière’s work in our contemporary context. On one hand, the contiguity to Foucault’s path is obvious: by making history – in71.  J. Rancière, Les temps modernes, cit., pp. 60 and 77. 72.  R. Esposito, Anacronismi, in “Filosofia Politica”, n. 1, 2017, pp. 13-24: p. 16. In this broad essay, Esposito establishes, in the fields of philosophy, historiography, and politics, a relationship between origins and actuality: this out-of-axis overlapping exposes the anachronism as producing different developments, new and unexpected changes.

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tended as archeology, genealogy, and ontology – the ocre of his thought, Foucault made it an eminently political thought73, capable of a “regard dissociant”74 aimed to understand the continuity of history through its ruptures. On the other hand, Derrida’s position is paradigmatic in some – impolitical – way of thinking the event, widely spread in the contemporary discourse. Derrida has in fact firmly claimed the historicity of deconstruction. The latter is not, he frequently stated, un système, pas plus qu’elle n’est une philosophie: elle interroge le principe philosophique. C’est une aventure singulière dont le geste dépend à chaque fois de la situation, du contexte, politique notamment, du sujet, de son enracinement dans un lieu et une histoire, et qui lui permettent, en quelque sorte, de signer le geste déconstructif.75

In a sense, deconstruction, especially in the moment when its ethical and political content becomes explicit76, wouldn’t have been possible outside the process of political dismantling that the world was living by the end of the Cold war: it registers 73.  See L. Bazzicalupo, Storicizzazione radicale, genealogia della governamentalità e soggettivazione politica, in “Materiali Foucaultiani”, n. 7-8, 2015, pp. 173-188. See also J. Revel, Foucault, une pensée du discontinu, Mille et une nuits, Paris 2010, and Ead., Foucault avec Merleau-Ponty. Ontologie politique, présentisme et histoire, Vrin, Paris 2015. 74.  M. Foucault, Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire, in “Hommage à Jean Hyppolite”, Paris 1971, pp. 145-172: 159. 75.  J. Derrida, Jacques Derrida penseur de l’événement, in “Humanité”, 28 Janvier 2004, available at: www. humanite.fr. 76.  Derrida, however, denies that there was such a drastic change in tune in his thought in the Nineties: in the third chapter of Voyous (Galilée, Paris 2003, p. 64) he states that there can’t be any political or ethical turn in deconstruction, because, he explains, la pensée du politique a toujours été une pensée de la différance et la pensée de la différance toujours aussi une pensée du politique”.

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a “mutation, qui est justement une terrible secousse dans la structure ou l’expérience de l’appartenance”77. Besides, deconstruction ‘functions’ according to a time that Derrida defines “out of joint”, a temporality out of sync, preventing any closure of history78. However, the impolitical result of his perspective depends on the way he treats this excess – this disjointed time – that he nonetheless deals with. This supplement, Rancière explains, can be read in two ways. Either you understand it as the political excess itself […] or you understand it as the excess of something that exceeds the rationality of politics and makes it dependent upon another law, which in generally conceived of as the ethical law.79

In Derrida, the phase shift, the supplement us what overcomes the practical abilities of men: conversely, for Rancière it is precisely the human ability to ‘make history’. What in the latter’s semantics is discordance – the asymmetry that makes new articulation possible – in Derrida’s language becomes “aporia”, difficulty, paralyzing indecisiveness80. Both perspectives thematize a breach. On one hand Derrida’s entame is certainly an inaugural cut81, owing this value to the fact that it exposes 77.  J. Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié, Galilée, Paris 1994, p. 98. 78.  See J. Derrida, Spectres de Marx, Galilée, Paris 1993. 79.  J. Rancière, Should Democracy Come?, in P. Cheah, S. Guerlac (ed.), Derrida and the Time of the Political, Duke University Press, Durham-­ London 2009, pp. 274-288: p. 276. 80.  See ivi, p. 282. 81.  See J. Derrida, Psyché. Inventions de l’autre I, Galilée, Paris 1997, p. 88: “Le mot entame, dont je me suis beaucoup servi ailleurs, me paraît le plus approchant pour traduire Aufriss”. Heidegger, in turn, with Aufriss means the rift that shields and exposes at the same time: see. M. Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, Günther Neske, Pfullingen 1959.

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humans to another law, a justice that exceeds any legality82. On the other hand the asymmetry, the anachrony, is politically productive. It is the only starting point for sabotaging capitalist synchronization. Precariousness, as a way of experiencing time that marks our own time, is not only, according to Rancière, an uncertain, fleeting time, it is above all un temps où les individus vivent l’entremêlement de plusieurs temporalités hétérogènes, par exemple celle du travail salarié et celle des études, celle de la création artistique et celle des petits boulots au jour au jour; un temps où se multiplient ceux qui ont été formés pour un travail et en font un autre, qui travaillent dans un monde et vivent dans un autre. Ce temps, on peut le décrire comme fait d’intervalles en entendent le mot an un double sens: intermittences du travail mais aussi intervalles entre plusieurs temporalités. C’est sans doute à partir de ces intervalles qu’il est possible de penser les nouvelle formes d’interruption du temps dominant.82

Note since a system tends to close, it is necessary to infinitely launch its enclosure; but: the existence of a phase shift makes the end of history possible and allows the political event to be thought within immanence, as the purity of a gap.

82.  J. Rancière, Les temps modernes, cit., p. 43.

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II

The Chain of the Present Populism and the Challenge of History

We can talk about a ‘populist phase’ in regards to today’s political scene when referring to a peculiar/distinctive tone on which western democracies are modulated. It would be necessary to start with a distinction between the journalistic use of the word ‘populism’ – where the meaning shifts from a derogatory to a positive sense, according to the collocation on the scene – and its theoretical and academic elaboration, which is extremely complex and refined. Since this contribution doesn’t aim to be a thorough analysis of the phenomenon, its widely known1 indeterminedness/indefiniteness will not be

*  An early version of this essay was published in “Lo Sguardo – Rivista di Filosofia”, n. 19, 2019, pp. 77-96. I thank the Editor and the Editorial Board for granting this new publication. 1.  Thus spoke Francesco Panizza in the opening of a miscellaneous volume on the theme: “It has become almost a cliche to start writing on populism by lamenting the lack of clarity about the concept and casting doubts about its usefulness for political analysis. Populism is a contested concept and agreements on what it means and who qualifies as a populist are difficult because, unlike other equally contested concepts such as democracy, it has become an analytical attribution rather than a term with which most political actors would willingly identify”, F. Panizza, Introduction. Populism and the Mirror

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resolved in the following pages; populism will generically be addressed as a mode – in the musical sense of the word – that goes through different political experiences conducting them back to a a series of dominant features: the centrality of the leader, the immediate relationship, external to the institutional dimension, of the leader with a population that, in turn, by virtue of this relationship, feels itself cohesive and united against an ‘élite’. Directly involving the pane of subjectivations, populism presents itself as a government technique, but also, and especially, as a way of being in the world, an individual and collective ethos. The theme being so extremely relevant today has forced scholars to take a stance on the phenomenon, stigmatizing its potential illiberal drift, or opposedly, highlighting its ability to expand and empower the democracy spaces2. This essay aims, abstaining from any judgment of value, to enlighten an aspect of the populist theory and praxis that is often dismissed, that is the lack of a historical perspective. The populist way of government, this is the thesis hereby supported, takes shape starting from a context that seems to be flat, void of any relaof Democracy, in Id. (ed.), Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, Verso, London-New York 2005, pp. 1-31: p. 1. 2.  On one side, Nadia Urbinati in her recent dissertation (Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2019) highlights how by filling the Lefortian empty space of power with the leader’s empirical subjectivity, populism represents a dangerous fracture in the tradition of western politics. On the opposite side, Chantal Mouffe (For a Left Populism, Verso, London-New York 2018) claims that only populism can give a voice to those citizens who are vexed by the allegedly forced choices imposed by the expertise. Carlo Formenti (La variante populista. Lotta di classe nel neoliberismo, DeriveApprodi, Roma 2016) considers the fights that claim to stand on a socioeconomic ground to be anachronistic, and reconsiders the possibility of a leftist kind of populist politics, firmly tied to the perimeter of the State, in antagonism with the globalized flows of the capital

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tionship with the past; nor does the present seem to lay the grounds for future projects, for a beginning. If this is true, there will be two consequences. First of all, the temporality underlying the populist theory – that will be traced back to Laclau’s conceptualization – answers to a logic of the “chain”3, with a double meaning: a) linking unrelated frames, each immobile per se; b) chaining to an eternal present, with no long term future plans. Secondly, this lack of historical perspective opens an unchecked space for the rise of memory meant in an almost mythical dimension, in excess compared to the historiography discourse. The association of Laclau’s theory to Hannah Arendt’s philosophy is definitely not immediate. However, we will attempt a comparison to highlight common points in such different semantics, with the primary intent to find an alternative path to explore. The German philosopher elaborates, in fact, an image of history equally marked by discontinuity: the basis for a free and politically productive action is for it to be untied from the deterministic chain of time. Far from happening ex nihilo, the action has precisely the task of filling the empty space it is set in: it forms a fruitful relationship with the past in order to be able to govern the present without being overwhelmed by it and, at the same time, stimulating the event, the novum breaking in. The difference between the two paradigms isn’t simply theoretical, but is seen concretely on the plane of sub3.  It’s a word play on the term ‘chain’ that, as it’s well known, plays a central role in Laclau’s lexicon. The political construction of the social doesn’t happen, according to the Argentinian philosopher, on the basis of a common essence or a shared socioeconomic status, but by articulating «social questions» that, while partially stifling their specificity for the benefit of what they share in terms of equivalence, they don’t lose their specificity: the front taking shape from that doesn’t have, then, a fusional nature, but rather looks like a chain, a series of elements both linked and detached. See E. Laclau, On Populist Reason, Verso, London-New York 2005, in part. pp. 67-128.

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jectivations. While the populist perspective takes shape only in the moment of the symbolic structuration of the conflict, Arendt’s perspective calls back to an ethic effort of self-built, made of rooting in history and standing out from the determinations of the present. In this case, these full subjectivities – not merely formal ones – break the punctiform and kairological time, unfolding a collective action that creates history, creates world.

1. The 80s Frame: the End of History In order to contextualize the discussion, we need to start from the 80s, when two probably not unrelated phenomena occur. On one side the historical depth disappears. The past of the advanced capitalistic societies is inscribed in cartographies in which temporal succession is exchanged with spatial simultaneity. As Jameson writes, we now inhabit the synchronic rather than the diachronic, and I think it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism.4

This paratactic distribution of all the points of time makes the past “vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum”5, a gallery to draw from following the practice that in postmodern architecture is called “historicism”6. Be4.  F. Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, Durham 1991, p. 15. 5.  Ivi, p. 17. 6.  Jameson defines historicism as “the complacent eclecticism of postmodern architecture, which randomly and without principle but with gus-

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sides, if everything is equally on the surface, the same present happening is a point on the map with no privilege: in this symbolic universe it seems difficult to even “fashioning representations of our own current experience”7. This flattening of the historical depth is, on the other hand, the emergence of the theme of memory in the social science field. Pierre Nora elaborates the concept of place of the memory, defined as “unité significative, d’ordre matériel ou idéel, dont la volonté des hommes ou le travail du temps a fait un élément symbolique du patrimoine mémoriel d’une quelconque communauté”8. The place guarantees the Erlebnis of the past prevented by the historiographic reconstruction: history becomes present. Two years prior, Yosef Yerushalmi has suggested a true dualism between history and memory, stating that Historiography played at best an ancillary role among the Jews, and often no role at all; and, comcomitantly, while memory of the past was always a central component of Jewish experience, the historian was not its primary custodian.9

In a call-back to Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire by Maurice Halbwachs10, Yerushalmi claims that collective memory is not a psychic structure similar to Jung’s archetypes, but rather “a

to cannibalizes all the architectural styles of the past and combines them in overstimulating ensembles”, ivi, pp. 17-18. In late-modern architecture it’s actually possible to distinguish historicism, meant as formal restoration of past styles, from the eclecticism as anti-historicist practice in the measure in which it consists in the mix of multiple heterogeneous styles, thus eliminating any historical distance. See C. Jencks, The Story of Post-Modernism, Wiley, Chichester 2011. 7.  F. Jameson, Postmodernism, cit., p. 34. 8.  P. Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de Mémoire, vol. I, Gallimard, Paris 1994, p. 2226. 9.  Y. Yerushalmi, Zakhor. Jewish History and Jewish Memory, University of Whashington Press, Seattle-London 1982, p. XIV. 10.  M. Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, Alcan, Paris 1925.

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social reality transmitted and sustained through conscious efforts and institutions of the group”11. So, in this decade the idea of memory as anti-­historiographic starts to spread, and this idea gets absorbed by professional historians themselves: social sciences are fascinated by a resource to use as a supplement or even as a substitute of historiographic reconstruction, in the hope of accessing that incandescent core of the past, from which the ‘cold’ language of the historian cannot draw12. In this context, characterized by the elision of the historical depth and the fascination of memory as anti-­historiographic, Laclau elaborates his populist theory. In order to avoid any misunderstanding, it should be cleared immediately that the intention is to keep a certain distance from any interpretation of Laclau’s theory and of populism as nothing but an anti-intellectual movement, a purely visceral movement that seeks validation from power in a metahistorical source. In such a reading, populism ambisce a trapiantare i valori di un mondo del passato, che idealizza come un mondo di armonia ed equità sociale, in quello attuale: in tal senso il populismo si propone come il canale attraverso cui un immaginario antico, ossia una visione del mondo che viene da molto lontano e che nel popolo

11.  Y. Yerushalmi, Zakhor. Jewish History and Jewish Memory, cit., p. XV. 12.  On the emergence of the dualism history/memory see K. Lee Klein, On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse, in «Representations», n. 69, 2000, pp. 127-150. The author closely links the emergence of memory as anti-historical discourse with the growing awareness of the partiality of any historical account; in that sense, memory would do the story justice: “It is no accident that our sudden fasci- nation with memory goes hand in hand with postmodern reckonings of history as the marching black boot and of historical consciousness as an oppressive fiction. Memory can come to the fore in an age of historiographic crisis precisely because it figures as a therapeutic alternative to historical discourse” (p. 145).

53 si sarebbe conservata intatta, ritorna attuale per purificare il mondo intero13.

In this explicitly anti-modern view, the people appear not as a historic product, but as keeper of an immemorial14 dimension. On the contrary, the aim is to affirm that populism – even when its concrete manifestations border on folklore – can’t be treated as other than political reason15, as mere obscurantism. “Se hace mal en minusvalorar teóricamente el popu­ lismo”, because it dispone de una teoría creada por virtuosi intelectuales. […] En realidad, el populismo – como cualquier teoría que se precie – tiene una idea más o menos expresa de la modernidad, dispone de una teoría social, juega con una teoría de la cultura y mantiene una apuesta antropológica.16

But mostly, it must be emphasized that the populist theory is deeply rooted in the neoliberal context: en ningún caso el populismo es la lucha entre la modernidad y su residuo arcaico. Es más bien una respuesta a las dimensiones problemáticas inherentes a la modernidad y a lo inevitable. crisis social que este género en su actual forma neoliberal.17

13.  L. Zanatta, Il populismo, Carocci, Roma 2013, p. 17 14.  “Both the populist and the religious imagery, at least the most traditional one, the most resistant to secularization, tend to reject the legal and rational fundament of the political community, that is the idea that it’s based on a rational agreement by which citizens willingly stand, and which is legitimized by laws born by healthy dialectics. They believe instead that the political community is based on a revealed order, on a natural law that precedes it”, ivi, p. 45. 15.  “[Il populismo] è apolitico, o potremmo dire addirittura antipolitico, dal momento che i valori cui si ispira e su cui si fonda attengono alla sfera sociale e solamente a essa”, ivi, p. 17. 16.  J.L. Villacañas Berlanga, Populismo, La Huerta, Madrid 2015, pp. 17-18. 17.  Ivi, p. 29.

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Far from dating back to mythical and immemorial constructions, this theory fully takes on the notable features that the ontology of actuality. Starting from the lack of foundation of society, the exasperated fragmentation in which it gives itself; it is obviously the same basis for the neoliberal rationale18, that this theory tries to bend in a completely different direction: Al responder a este rasgo central de la falta de fundamento de las sociedades, el populismo considera que no hace sino ejercer la política verdadera. A este hecho lo he llamado la premisa liberal del populismo.19

Apparently then, Laclau’s reflection is historically inserted and fully absorbs the typical specificities of the historical context previously described. Together with Chantal Mouffe, in 1985 he wrote that his goal was “to reread Marxist theory in the light of contemporary problems”, which necessarily meant “deconstructing the central categories of that theory. This is what has been called our ‘post-Marxism’”20. It is, then, a thought completely included in the historical dimension, which feeds on the very concrete context of the neoliberal breakthrough21.

18.  Remember Margareth Thatcher’s famous motto «There’s no such thing as society». See also L. Bazzicalupo’s preface to J. L. Villacañas Berlanga, Il populismo, Mimesis, Milano-Udine 2017, p. 11: “populismo e neoliberalismo rinviano l’uno all’altro perché hanno in comune l’accettazione spinta della frammentazione dei legami sociali, la fine della comunità di governo, delle istituzioni”. 19.  J. L. Villacañas Berlanga, Populismo, cit., p. 16. 20.  E. Laclau, C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Verso, London-New York, 1985, p. IX. The text subsequently says “poststructuralism is the terrain where we have found the main source of our theoretical reflection and, within the post-structuralist field, deconstruction and Lacanian theory have had a decisive importance in the formulation of our approach to hegemony”, ivi, p. XI. 21.  On the genealogy of neoliberalism, see also, beside M. Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au collège de France (1978-1979), Galli-

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The latter is not just the background of an intellectual activity: everyone of Laclau’s argumentations, even the most abstract one, finds its humus in first-hand, concrete experiences22 from which he tried to gain marketable resources for that specific circumstance23. In what sense is it possible then, to talk about the lack of historical depth in Laclay? To answer this question, it is necessary

mard-Seuil, Paris 2004, the most recent P. Dardot, C. Laval, La nouvelle raison du monde: Essai sur la société néolibérale, La Découverte, Paris 2010. Here the two authors see neoliberalism as a perfectly consistent monolith that leaves nothing outside itself, not noting, how Foucault did instead, the coexistence of heterogeneous and inconsistent political rationales that neoliberalism has no interest in univocally summarizing. On the end of neo­ liberalism see C. Crouch, The Strange Non-death of Neoliberalism, Polity Press, Cambridge 2011, and also M. De Carolis, Il rovescio della libertà. Tramonto del neoliberalismo e disagio della civiltà, Quodlibet, Macerata 2017.  22.  E. Laclau, Theory, Democracy and Socialism (1988), in Id., New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, Verso, London-New York 1990, pp. 197-248: 200: “when today I read Of Grammatology, S/Z or the Écríts of Lacan, the examples which always spring to mind are not from philosophical or literary texts; they are from a discussion in an Argentinian made union, a clash of opposing slogans at a demonstration or a debate during a party congress. Throughout his life Joyce returned to his native experience in Dublin; for me it is those years of political struggle in the Argentina of the 1960s that come to mind as a point of reference and comparison”. 23.  As F. M. Cacciatore and M. Filippini write in the introduction to E. Laclau, C. Mouffe, Egemonia e strategia socialista. Verso una politica democratica radicale, il melangolo, Genova 2001, pp. 18-19: “progetto di questo libro nasceva anche per rispondere (teoricamente e politicamente) all’egemonia neoliberale e neo-conservatrice (di matrice reaganiana e tatcheriana, per intenderci) e all’ideologia della fine delle ideologie, ovvero al dogma della ‘ingovernabilità’ imputata all’‘eccesso di democrazia’. […] Ciò non significa stabilire alcun ordine di preminenza o gerarchia tra ‘politica’ e ‘filosofia’. Se si presupponesse la prassi politica come fondamento unico della teoria, non si farebbe altro che tradurla (o ridurla), a sua volta e di contrabbando, in un centro o significato trascendentale”.

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to explore some specific points of the Argentinian philosopher’s theory, with no claim of painting a thorough picture of it.

2. The Historical Understanding of the Social The concepts of populism and hegemony, while already present in Laclau’s reflection in the 70s, play a peculiar role “nella svolta post-fondazionalista che Laclau compie a partire dai primi anni ’80”24. It should be reminded that an entropic perspective of society was taking hold in that period: having reached a certain level of development and collective emancipation, advanced democratic societies were going to suffer this rising dynamism as a threat against the establishment. It’s the same well known thesis expressed by Huntington in 1975: the effervescence of society (he examined the U.S. specifically) would have led to a “democratic distemper” that had to be corrected by dosing certain individuals and groups with “apathy and noninvolvement”25. Dissolving the political power of the so-

24.  S. Mazzolini, Laclau lo stratega: populismo ed egemonia tra spazio e tempo, in F. M. Cacciatore (ed.), Il momento populista. Ernesto Laclau in discussione, Mimesis, Milano-Udine 2019, pp. 33-74: p. 40. The author explains in detail how the emphasis, in Laclau’s reflection, shifts from the concept of populism, central in the first works of the philosopher, to that of hegemony, prevalent starting from the mid-80s. For a more general discussion on the evolution of the thought of the Argentinian philosopher see D. Howarth (ed. by), Ernesto Laclau. Post-Marxism, Populism and Critique, Routledge, New York 2015.  25.  Samuel P. Huntington, The United States, in M.J, Crozier, S.P. Huntington, J. Watanuki, The Crisis Of Democracy. Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, New York University Press, New York 1975, pp. 59-118: p. 114. Democratic Distemper is the title of two paragraphs in the same essay.

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ciety – of the being-together – and reducing politics to mere administration of functional relationships: this was the budding neoliberal project. Against this ideology of the end of politics, Laclau first of all states the difference between the social and the political. The latter remains in a transcendent dimension that the former cannot absorb. Here is how he spoke in a text dated 1987: Any advance in the understanding of present-day social struggles depends on inverting the relations of priority which the last century and a half’s social thought had established between the social and the political. This tendency had been characterized, in general terms, by what we may term the systematic absorption of the political by the social. The political became either a superstructure, or a regional sector of the social, dominated and explained according to the objective laws of the latter. Nowadays, we have started to move in the opposite direction: towards a growing understanding of the eminently political character of any social identity.26

Laclau’s argument is clearly addressed not only towards the neoliberal de-politicization, but also towards the strict Marxist determinism. What matters in relation to our argument is the fact that, in order to describe the difference social/political – retraced on Heidegger’s ontological difference – Laclau uses the concepts of sedimentation/reactivation: “to use Husserlian terminology: if the social is established through the sedi­mentation of the political, through the ‘forgetting of ori­ gins’, the reactivation of the original meaning of the social consists on showing its political essence”27.

26.  E. Laclau, Letter to Aletta (1987), in Id., New Reflections on The Revo­ lution of our Time, cit., pp. 159-176: p. 160. 27.  Ibidem.

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These two concepts lead us to the core of our problem, that is what Laclau calls “historic understandind” and “radical historicity” of the social. The text where the theme is most thoroughly dealt with is the essay Reflections on the Revolution of our Time, dated 1990, whose main intento is to show “the intrinsic negativity of all antagonism, which prevents us from fixing it a priori in any possibile theorization about the ‘objectiviy’ of social agents”28. The atomistic society in whose intrinsic determinisms politics would be “absorbed” is actually void of any objective fundament; this sort of “nihilism”, far from causing the abandonment of any emancipatory perspective, constitutes “an unprecedented opportunity for a radical critique of all forms of domination, as well as for the formulation of liberation projects hitherto restrained by the rationalist ‘dictatorship’ of the Enlightenment”29. For Laclau, two logics of history coexist in Marxism, and they’re not compatible30. The first – expressed in the Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie – explains history in terms of contradiction between productive forces and relationships of production; the other one – calling back mostly to the Manifest – identifies

28.  E. Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, in Id., New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, cit., pp. 3-88: p. 4.  29.  Ibidem. 30.  As shown in the last quote, the target of Laclau’s argument in the essay is the rationalistic and essentialistic positions that are “entrenched in the defence of ‘reason’ and attempt to relaunch the project of ‘modernity’ in opposition to those tendencies considered ‘nihilistic’. The work of Habermas is perhaps the most representative of this attitude”, ivi, p. 3. However Laclau’s intent is to obtain from Marxism categories that are useful in the context of current times: “In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy the project of a radical democracy was presented through a deconstruction of the history of Marxism as its starting point, hence its emphasis on the subversive nature and growing centrality of ‘hegemony’ in Marxist discourse. Here the argument is presented positively as a logical sequence of its categories”, ivi, p. 4.

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class antagonism as the driving force of history. The philosopher states that depending on which perspective is adopted, the questioning of the social will be of a fundamentally different kind. In the first case, the first case, the questioning will refer to the objective meaning of historical process and the positive logics in the constitution of the social. The analysis will aim to reveal, beyond the awareness of social actors and the phenomenal forms that their actions take, a rationality which is established at the level of essences.31

In this hypothesis, historic understandind is “an operation of recognition”32 that must find the essential identity, fixed a priori, of empirical agents that are involved and dissimulated in a necessary process. If we assume the perspective of constitutive antagonism, then  contingency radically penetrates the very identity of the social agents. The two antagonistic forces are not the expression of a deeper objective movement that would include both of them; and the course of history cannot be explained in terms of the essential ‘objectivity’ of either. The latter is always an objectivity threatened by a constitutive outside.33

In order to explain this constitutive outside, Laclau uses this example: Insofar as an antagonism exists between a worker and a capitalist, such antagonism in not inherent to the relations of productions themselves, bot occur between the latter and the identity of the agent outside. A fall in a worker’s wage, for example, denies his identity as a consumer. There is therefore a ‘social objectivity’ – the logic pf profit – which denies anoth-

31.  Ivi, p. 21. 32.  Ibidem. 33.  Ivi, p. 22.

60 er objectivity – the consumer’s identity- but the denial of an identity means preventing its constitution as an objectivity.34

If this negation is not conceived as something that in turn gets absorbed by a superior objectivity – the same way it happens in the dialectic perspective – then it remains something “constitutive and therefore indicates the impossibility of establishing the social as an objective order”35. It’s necessary to highlight the ambiguity of this constitutive character of the outside. The social agents are exposed to an exteriority that in constitutive as long as, on one side, prevents the totalization of their identity: as we see in Laclau’s example, more identities coexist at once, and this structural inconsistency is possible exactly because social agents have no limits in essence. On the other side, the negation of identity is, paradoxically, its condition of possibility: the social agents, not being submitted to the rules of a historical process, become concrete only in the praxis of their instantiation36. Laclau concludes stating that “the link between the blocking and simultaneous affirmation of an identity is what we call ‘contingency’”37. A radically contingent being, like those who walk the social field, has its conditions of existence outside of itself, in the facticity in which it is immersed: There is thus a historicization of the categories of social analysis which, on linking the unity between the components of an abject to contingent and specific conditions of existence, introduces a essential instability into the relations between

34.  Ivi, p. 16. 35.  Ibidem. 36.  To explain this point Laclau uses the model of Wittgenstein’s language games, whose rules exist only in the practical instance of their application. See ivi, pp. 21-22. 37.  Ivi, p. 21.

61 such components. While the first – objectivist – kind of questioning of the social looks for essential characters beyond historical specificity, the second moves in the opposite direction: by weakening the boundary of essence through the radical contextualization of any object.38

This instability of the social is not immediately perceivable because “insofar as an act of institution has been successful, a ‘forgetting of the origins’ tends to occur; the system of possible alternatives tends to vanish and the traces of original contingency to fade. In this way the instituted tends to assume the form of a mere objective presence. This is the moment of sedimentation”39. However, the reactivation of the social cannot consist of returning to the origins: the historicity of the actors, that is the fact that their conditions of existence are outside of themselves, makes it impossible to go back up to conditions that are logically conceivable: reactivation can only be rediscovering, through the emergence of a new antagonism, the contingent nature of so-called ‘objectivity’. In turn, however, this rediscovering can reactivate the historical understanding of the original acts of institution insofar as stagnant forms that were simply considered as objectivity and taken for granted are now revealed as contingent and project the contingency to the ‘origins’ themselves.40

The difference we previously mentioned between social and political is abundantly clear: the latter is the event that institutes the social starting from its absent ground. While the social is the ground on which different debate practices get rigid, the political is what reactivates any institution’s contingency;

38.  Ivi, pp. 22-23.  39.  Ivi, p. 34. 40.  Ivi, p. 35.

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as Marchart perfectly explains “the political points to the absent ground of the social and, at the same time, substitutes for that absence by (re)grounding the latter”41. The political becomes one with the historic comprehension of facticity: “to undestrand something historically is to refer it back to its contingent conditions of emergence. Far from seeking an objective meaning in history, it is a question of deconstructing all meaning and tracing it back to its original facticity”42. Once again, it means to expose the social to its outside, to a heterogeneity that is impossible to reabsorb. While the sedimentation occurs on an extensive, spatial plane, the political is purely a temporal event: Laclau conceptualizes these sediments as space, they spatialize the temporal moment of pure dislocation into a choreography. Traditions are nothing but such routinized practices. […] Yet inasmuch as these spatial, ‘ossified’ sediments can, on the other hand, be reactivated, there also exists a tempora­ lization of space or an ‘extension of the field of the possible’. […] This is the moment of the dislocation of a given spatial system through time – time being precisely the category that

41.  O. Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought. Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badi ou and Laclau, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2001, p. 138. The sense in which the ‘post-foundational’ perspective is discussed is also understood. Society is not simply an impossible totality – as Laclau had already stated in an essay dated 1983, The Impossibility of Society, in Id., New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, cit., pp. 89-92; see in particular pp. 90-91. The totality, Marchart explains, remains present in its absence: “Society-as-totality is an impossible object, but it is precisely because of its impossibility that it functions as condition of possibility for the social, whereby the latter is understood as the discursive terrain on which meaning is being partially fixed into nodal points. Thus, we have to conclude that society is both impossible and necessary”, O. Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, cit., p. 137.  42.  E. Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, cit., p. 36.

63 prevents social sediments, once and for all, from becoming firmly established.43

The outside to which the social is exposed manifests itself phenomenologically as time; it remains however something not assimilable by the social plane – pure exteriority – because, as Laclau emphasizes, there’s no symmetry between the processes of spatialization and temporalization: “while we can speak of the hegemonization of tome by space (through repetition), it must be emphasized that the opposite in not possible: time cannot hegemonize anything since it is a pure effect of dislocation”44. This is why the complete constitution of society becomes impossible, and the historical-political dynamics remain open: contingency is still the main modal category, and talking about the end of history or the end of politics makes no sense at all.

3. The Presentism of Populism As we can infer from this quick excursus, Laclau’s reflection deals with all the elements emphasized in the post-modern theory: end of ideologies, fragmentation of the social, spatialization of experience. But, far from deducing from those a thesis of impossibility of the political experience45, it shows how this very condition makes it possible to conceive the politici-

43.  O. Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, cit., p. 139. 44.  E. Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, cit., p. 42. 45.  Even Jacques Rancière, about Lyotard’s reflection in particular, talks of an “ethical turn” within which politics is only thinkable as evenemential blow by an absolute otherness that reminds humans of their finiteness. See J. Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthétique, Galilée, Paris 2004.

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zation of the social46. The latter, as we’ve briefly mentioned, is not to be intended as the full embodiment of a universality, on the contrary the political sparks exactly from the absence of any universalities: There is the possibility that one difference, without ceasing to be a particular difference, assumes the representation of an incommensurable totality. In that way, its body is split the particularity which it still is and the more universal signification of which it is the bearer. This operation of taking up, by a particularity, of an incommensurable universal signification is what I have called hegemony.47

In other words, from the specificities of the historical context, Laclau gets the resources for a re-launch of the political. The latter becomes one with the “historical comprehension” of the social, to the point that one might define the political activity as a performative comprehension of one’s time. However, the extremely formal development of Laclau’s thought makes contingency – the core concept of his reflection – into something rigorously void of content. Scrupulously distincted from the category of accident48, contingency is exactly “the impossibility of fixing with any precision – that is in terms of necessary ground – either the relations or the identities”49 of social actors. Contingency is the event that dislocates the spatially given structure of the social and that phenomenologically manifests itself as temporality. But the event itself is 46.  S. Žižek acknowledges that Laclau, with authors like Rancière and Balibar, have “the everlasting merit that they went forward from Althusser without allowing themselves to be immersed in the postmodern andor deconstructionist morass”, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, Verso, London-New York 1999, p. 232. 47.  E. Laclau, On Populist Reason, Verso, London-New York 2005, p. 70. 48.  E. Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, cit., pp. 18-20. 49.  Ivi, p. 20.

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“empty”: it owes its condition of existence to the historic conjunction – and they can’t be deduced a priori from any logical necessity – but it radically separates itself from it. Defined as pure “effect of dislocation”, time is precisely this cut that can’t be stitched in which the political subjectivity takes form.  The latter is then in some way nailed down to the contingent conditions in which it exists, but at the same time, it constitutes itself ex nihilo: the radical break in which happens what Laclau calls the “catachrestic construction of the people” 50 is in fact a resetting of history, the start of a subjectivation that has no past. The void that characterizes it and that unties it from any ultimate determination is, in fact, also the thing that separates it from where it comes from. Conclusively, there’s nothing before political subjectivation; there are only questions that assume a political identity in their symbolic transfiguration (through an empty signifier). Here we see the double bind of the logic of the chain we mentioned at the beginning: the political event emerges from the concatenation of social questions, and it’s chained to a present that has nothing behind. Besides, since the political experience is based on the antagonism that, as we’ve seen, shows the impossibility to subsume the social in a definite figure, this political logic risks to suggest an iterative image of history:  a sequence of ruptures, that is of resettings of time, with no reach towards the future51.  50.  See E. Laclau, On Populist Reason, cit., pp. 67-83. 51.  See G. Amendola, Democrazia radicale biopolitica e soggettivazione, in A. Amendola, L. Bazzicalupo, F. Chicchi, A. Tucci (eds.), Biopolitica, bioeconomia e processi di soggettivazione, Quodlibet, Macerata 2008, pp. 363-376, where, discussing the theories of Rancière and Laclau, the author states: “questo formalismo, il rischio di accontentarsi di riproporre il conflitto per il conflitto, senza immaginare la possibilita di qualsivoglia ulteriorita rispetto a un perpetuo movimento di fratturazione e di instabile ricostituzione dello

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If all this is true, it is possible to talk about a certain presentism in populism. The political event exists in a present that burns bridges with the context it comes from, and shows no characters of political projectuality.  François Hartog defines the concept of presentism starting from the fundamental reflections of Koselleck. According to the latter, the historical time is produced by the separation between the given field of experience and the horizon of wait; and the modern temporal structure was characterized by a strong asymmetry that benefited the wait, the projection towards the future52. Well, according to Hartog, the contemporary experience of time is that of a “présent perpétuel, insaisissable et quasiment immobile […]. Tout se passe comme s’il n’y avait plus que du présent”53. Presentism means the double impossibility of past and future: Ainsi le présent s’est étendu tant en direction du futur que du passé. Vers le futur: par les dispositifs de la précaution et de la responsabilité, par la prise en compte de l’irréparable et de l’irréversible, par le recours à la notion de patrimoine et à celle de dette, qui réunit et donne sens à l’ensemble. Vers le passé: par la mobilisation de dispositifs analogues. La responsabilité et le devoir de mémoire, la patrimonialisation, l’imprescriptible, la dette déjà.54

The formalism of Laclau’s theory seems to link its practical effects to a dead-end present. The punctiform time in which

spazio politico, mi sembra il limite principale dei tentativi demo-radicali di rivitalizzare il possibile significato emancipatorio della democrazia”, p. 372. 52.  R. Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 1979. 53.  F. Hartog, Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expérience du temps, Seuil, Paris 2003, p. 28. 54.  Ivi, p. 216.

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the political event occurs, going forward from nothing, leaving behind free room for the proliferation of a memory unlinked to the historiographic discourse. The endless distance from a past, recalled with no critical objectivity, justifies the project of suggesting its Erlebnis, first-hand experience. Trump’s slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ is probably the most effective example to summarize the confusion between a present with no ‘ecstasy’ and a timeless past.  The example of the complex vicissitudes of the Italian government in the summer of 2019 also seems to prove this point. The quick sequence of events and party switching don’t appear to be due to transformism and hypocrisy. Such a moral judgment risks to miss the structural element of a political subjectivation that is purposefully “empty”55 and, being rootless, experiences sideslips and iterations as something constitutive instead of casual. It is obviously not possible to have Laclau’s theory to account for the hardships of concrete political experiences, as if they

55.  Reminding that Conte’s government took office in the beginning of June 2018 as government of coalition between the relative majority party, Movimento 5 Stelle, and Lega Nord Per l’Indipendenza della Padania; during the speech in which he was asking for the Senate’s confidence vote, Prime Minister Conte claimed that he wanted to lead a «populist» and «anti-system» government, because he listens to «the people’s needs» and intends to remove «old privileges and dregs of power». But this analysis doesn’t concern just the two parties involved in the Government, but all the major political formations. See see N. Trafaglia, Dentro e contro. Quando il populismo è di governo, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2015, who already a few years ago stated that the populist character of the Italian party system isn’t conjunctural, on the contrary all Italian parties are “infected by the germ of populism”, p. 65. On the evolution of the Italian populist groups see R. Biorcio, Il populismo nella politica italiana. Da Bossi a Berlusconi, da Grillo a Renzi, Mimesis, Milano-Udine 2015. Conte’s speech is available here: http://download.repubblica.it/pdf/2018/politica/ presidente05062018.pdf.

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were its direct consequence. But, regardless of the fact that the contribution of the Argentinian theorist has been explicitly claimed by some political groups56, it is possible to link to a certain degree theoretic analysis with empirical observation, on the basis of the indeterminedness of the populist phenomenon that, as mentioned at the beginning, directly involves the plane of subjectivations. So, the doubt here is that, thinking itself as rhetoric construction57, as strategy not grounded in truth58, populism would produce political subjectivations coming from nothing and experiencing ‘only’ the impossibility of their totalization. Paradoxically, radical democracy has no roots.

4. Hannah Arendt: Outside the Chain of Time “For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur – the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation”59. This is what Hannah Arendt said in the 60s, and for its ambiguity, her thesis on the relationship between politics and history happens to be especially interesting in this context. We can already spot that ambiguity between the lines in the quote above: the

56.  See P. Iglesias, Understanding Podemos, in «New Left Review», n. 93, 2015, pp. 7-22. 57.  See See D. Tarizzo, Populismo: la parola al potere, in «Iride», n. 30, 2017, pp. 571-583.  58.  L. Bazzicalupo, Prefazione a J. Butler, E. Laclau, S. Žižek, Dialoghi sulla sinistra. Contingenza, egemonia, universalità, Bari 2010, pp. V-XXXII. 59.  H. Arendt, Some Questions of Moral Philosophy (1966), in Ead., Responsibility and Judgment, Shocken Books, New York 2003, p. 95.

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importance of historical depth is associated with the need of not making the past into a burden that would weigh down the spontaneity of human actions. This is politics, and not mere administration or pure dominion, when, even taking roots in an upward path, it escapes the iner­ tia of history. First of all, Arendt emphasizes the spatial character of politics. The latter deals with appearances, and needs a “space of appearances where freedom can unfold its charms and become a visible, tangible reality”60. In the political ontology of the German philosopher the being exists as pure surface: “In politics, more than anywhere else we have no possibility of distinguishing between being and appearence. In the realm of human affairs, being and appearance are indeed one and the same”61. Politics, for Arendt, is one with an elective place, the polis, which in turn isn’t evoked as a historical object: il richiamo alla polis non ha alcuna pretesa filologica o storica. Hannah Arendt […] vuole comprendere in termini filosofici come una stessa area concettuale, derivata dalle antiche nozioni di politeia e di polis, possa designare oggi qualcosa di completamente diverso dal significato originario.62

Secondly, for Arendt “è il presente il tempo della politica ed è al presente che occorre attenersi totalmente, rifiutando di

60.  H. Arendt, On Revolution, The Viking Press, New York 1963, p. 33. 61.  Ivi, p. 98. In this accentuation of spatiality, the influence of Jaspers’s existentialism and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology are obvious. See H. Arendt, Humanitas mundi. Scritti su Karl Jaspers, ed. by R. Peluso, Mimesis, Milano-­ Udine 2015; L. Boella, Hannah Arendt “fenomenologa”. Smantellamento della metafisica e critica dell’ontologia, in «aut aut», n. 239-240, 1990, pp. 83-110. 62.  A. Dal Lago, Politeia: cittadinanza ed esilio nell’opera di Hannah Arendt, in “Il Mulino”, n. 30, 1984, pp. 417-441: p. 426.

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essere posseduti dal passato o dal futuro”63. Political action hooks humans into the facticity in which they are inserted, whereas the project actuated by the ideology intends firstly to dissolve the facts for the benefit of an unlimited virtuality that, making the present into a specter, projects political initiatives into an indistinct future, and justifies them by virtue of a mythical past. This is why totalitarianism, which, according to Arendt64, is the most exasperated form of ideology, reveals itself to be a deep depoliticization: “l’esasperato orgoglio di padroneggiare le cose e edificare il reale, modificandolo secondo il progetto artificiale umano” shows una contraddittoria mistura di potenza-impotenza. Se certo ci troviamo di fronte all’esempio più radicale di identificazione della politica con la poiesis e la riduzione di un mondo in laboratorio, lo strumento ideologico che viene adoperato è esattamente la credenza in una corrente di necessità storiche e naturali, che eliminano la capacita umana di agire.65

When ideology “esalta il mito della fattibilità, della storia passata e futura, addirittura il mito della fattibilità della verità”66, the solidity of the common world, in which only humans are free to act, comes apart. Spatiality, presence, relevance to context, contingency of an act that is not predetermined: these are all important points in common with Laclau’s theory. And yet Arendt deviates from

63.  L. Bazzicalupo, Hannah Arendt. La storia per la politica, ESI, Napoli 1995, p. 75. 64.  As well known, ‘Ideology and Terror’ is the meaningful title of the last chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York 1967, pp. 460-479. 65.  L. Bazzicalupo, Hannah Arendt. La storia per la politica, cit., p. 76. 66.  Ibidem.

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his formalism because she presents a completely different notion of historicity. Behind them both stands Heidegger’s Geschichtlichkeit. Starting from Heidegger’s reflections67, both Arendt and Laclau highlight the inherent limit humans are faced with in their experience of the world, that is the insurmountable finiteness that makes the truth only revealed in hindsight, rather than in an absolute and timeless dimension68. But while for Laclau this insurmountable limit forces the subject to repeatedly experience its internal fracture, in Arendt historicity, by reconnecting humans with the unamendable “stubbornness of facts”69, gives them back the political power that, as we’ve seen, ideological virtualization took from them: The abandonment of the position of ‘wise man’ by the philosopher himself through the concept of historicity is important in two respects: first, the rejection of the claim to wisdom opens the way to a reexamination of the whole realm of politics in the light of elementary human experiences within this realm itself, and discards implicitly concepts and judgments, which have their roots in altogether different kinds of human experience. This examination is, second, guided and limited by the concept of historicity which despite its obvious closeness to the political realm, never reaches its center—man as an acting being.70

67.  See especially chapter 5 of the second section Sein und Zeit, titled Zeitlichkeit und Geschichtlichkeit. 68.  See H. Arendt, Truth and Politics (1967), in Ead., Between Past and Future. Six Exercises in Political Thought, Penguin Books, London-New York 1968; E Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, cit., in part. pp. 35-36.  69.  See H. Arendt, Truth and Politics, cit., 258. 70.  H. Arendt, Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical thought (1954), in E. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt. For Love of the World, Yale University Press, New Haven-London 1982, pp. 302-304: p. 303, em-

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Historicity prevents human praxis to appear in the perspective cone of abstractions that would entrap its meaning and, because of this, links humans with the density of the world. As it was aptly noted la Arendt accetta della storicità il movimento autolimitantesi alla analisi fenomenolgica del darsi quotidiano della vita comune, ma considera un limite e un ostacolo utilizzare questa dimensione per cogliere l’agire politico, in quanto in essa il significato coincide con l’evento e lo illumina nella sua oggettiva contestualità, ma difficilmente riesce a rendere conto della dinamica, incompiuta, prospettica, dell’azione in cui l’agente manifesta se stesso, e gli spettatori, dai proprio punti di vista, l’osservano.71

Unlike what we’ve seen in Laclau, politics doesn’t overlap with historicity, but it somehow exceeds it; the logic of the latter, “despite its obvious closeness to the political realm”, does not shed light on its core: the human being as agent. The opacity of this ‘core’ is made possible by humans’ ability to interrupt the time continuum, to open a point of suspension in time72, a gap between past and future, in which to escape the causal chain of the historic process, to avoid the burden that the before places on the after. That’s where she departs from Heidegger. He writes:

phasis added. There are different versions of this text, a communication to the American Political Science Association of 1954, all kept in the Arendt archive in the Library of Congress. Here we chose the fragment quoted by Young-Bruehl, because it’s the most attuned to our argument. 71.  L. Bazzicalupo, Hannah Arendt. La storia per la politica, cit., p. 112.  72.  On the proximity and also on the divergence of the philosophy of Arendt’s history compared to Benjamin’s, see O. Guaraldo, Cristalli di storia: il totalitarismo tra abisso e redenzione, in S. Forti (ed.), Hannah Arendt, Mondadori, Milano 1999, pp. 45-65. See also L. Bazzicalupo, Hannah Arendt. La storia per la politica, cit., p. 23.

73 Die Entschlossenheit, in der das Dasein auf sich selbst zurück-kommt, erschließt die jeweiligen faktischen Möglichkeiten eigentlichen Existierens aus dem Erbe, das sie als geworfene übernimmt. […] Die ergriffene Endlichkeit der Existenz reißt aus der endlosen Mannigfaltigkeit der sich anbietenden nächsten Mög-lichkeiten des Behagens, Leichtnehmens, Sichdrückens zurück und bringt das Dasein in die Einfachheit seines Schicksals. Damit bezeichnen wir das in der eigentlichen Entschlossenheit liegende ursprüngliche Geschehen des Daseins, in dem es sich frei für den Tod ihm selbst in einer ererbten, aber gleichwohl gewählten Möglichkeit überliefert.73

It’s easy to read Réné Char’s aphorism, often quoted by Arendt, “Notre héritage n’est précédé d’aucun testament”74, as a jab at Heidegger; what she cannot accept is the “coincidence of thought and event”75, that is the fact that the thought, “una dimensione esistenziale importantissima, venga piegata concettualmente nel senso della giustificazione-comprensione di ciò che nell’ambito di un destino epocale accade”76. Conversely, the thought for Arendt is the a-historical element that cuts the historical continuum deviating its forces. Commenting Kafka’s apologue He – in which a mysterious man finds himself facing two opponents, the first approaching him from the back and the second blocking his way on the front77 – Arendt says that the man’s position “is not the present as

73.  M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1927), Max Niemeyer, Tübingen 1967, pp. 383-384. 74.  Quoted in many of Arendt’s texts, the aphorism is the incipit of H. Arendt, Between Past and Future. Six Exercises in Political Thought, cit. 75.  H. Arendt, Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical thought, cit., p. 303. 76.  L. Bazzicalupo, Hannah Arendt. La storia per la politica, cit., p. 111.  77.  The original German version is available in F. Kafka, Gesammelte Schriften 5, Schocken, New York 1946.

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we usually understand it but rather a gap in time which ‘his’ constant fighting, ‘his’ making a stand against past and future, keeps in existence”78. ‘He’ interrupts the blind mechanicalness of the temporal process: “without man the forces of the past and of the future, one suspects, would have neutralized or destroyed each other long ago”79. This excavation operated by the man opens contingency inside of a temporality that would have otherwise remained strictly deterministic. The thought makes this excavation possible: “Only insofar as he thinks, and that is insofar as he is ageless a ‘he’ – as Kafka so rightly calls him, and not a ‘somebody’ – does man in the full actuality of his concrete being live in this gap of time between past and future”80. Far from “nailing”81 the man down to an «inheritance» that, in the decision for the finiteness of existence, becomes a «destiny», the thought frees a space-time away from any determinism. This gap is the path paved by thinking, this small track of non-time which the activity of thought beats within the time-space of mortal men and into which the trains of thought, of remembrance and anticipation, save whatever they touch from the ruin of historical and biographical time. This small non-time-space in the very heart of time, unlike the world and the culture into which we are born, can only be indicated, but cannot be inherited and handed down from the past; each new generation, indeed every new human being as he inserts himself

78.  H. Arendt, Between Past and Future, cit., p. 11. 79.  Ivi, p. 10. 80.  Ivi, p. 13. 81.  Through the category of the être rivé, being nailed down, E. Lévinas identified the overlapping point of Heidegger’s thought with Hitlerism. See E. Lévinas, Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de l’hitlérisme, in “Esprit”, n. 26, 1934, pp. 199-208.

75 between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave it anew.82

Conclusively, we can affirm that on one side we have Laclau’s model of historicity, which consists in the dislocation of a given spatial configuration, in the activation, starting from zero, of a new temporal series. The limit of this historicity is intersectional, marks the point after which a political subject exists: historicity is in this creatio ex nihilo that unties the subjectivation from the past to tie it to the context. On the other side, Arendt’s model considers a longitudinal limit that denies humans the possibility to assume a metahistorical position, but keeps them in touch with a historical depth, and capable of imagining a future. In Arendt, then, there’s a productive relationship with history: as summarized in Bazzicalupo’s effective formula83, not politics for history, human praxis in service of a necessity operating behind humans; but rather history for politics, that is the double gesture of striking roots through remembering, in a depth that prevents from being swept away by the current of events, and of excavating, through thinking, a safe space from the pressure of temporality. “Thinking and remembering is the human way of striking roots, of taking one’s place in the world into which we all arrive as strangers”84. Unlike Laclau’s formalism, that finds nothing before the moment of subjectivation, the political process for Arendt involves the whole historical depth, that is always, simultaneously, the depth of the single human beings, “the full actuality of his concrete being”. 82.  H. Arendt, Between Past and Future, cit., p. 13. 83.  L. Bazzicalupo, Hannah Arendt. La storia per la politica, cit., in part. pp. 5-32 e 285-254. 84.  H. Arendt, Some Questions of Moral Philosophy, cit., p. 100.

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It is in fact extremely meaningful that the German philosopher has carried out, in multiple texts, an exercise in exploring history; but what Arendt covers isn’t the histoire de bataille theorized by the scholars of the «Annales», which was completely devoid of the anthropologic element85. It is instead a history that is densely inhabited by singular figures, people who, strong in their depth, have faced their time without bending to its deviations. An example of this approach, that seeks the transcendent of freedom in the depth of time, is the anthology Men in Dark Times86, that is una galleria di viri illustres: il ‘lustro’ non consiste nella realizzazione di mirabolanti imprese ma – scrive la Arendt nella prefazione – nella capacità di aver prodotto con la vita e l’opera, non dunque attraverso teorie e concetti, una testimonianza di ‘luce’, autentiche ‘illuminazioni’, in mezzo alle tenebre della storia.87

Such an image of time corresponds to the idea of a precise essential hold. This history, in fact, doesn’t have as a protagonist the individual who, in the desert of time, stabilizes themself exclusively in the contingency of a conflict. It is instead a subjectivity that makes their life into a form of vigilance and resistance to any possible kind of domination. It is then explained why, in Arendt’s thought, Socrates is a core figure and is assumed as “paradigma di un modo di vita che scardina tutte le contrapposizioni frontali, non solo quella tra pensiero e azione,

85.  As duly noted, the «eternalized» time defined in the scientific turn of historiography destroys the fundamental assumption for which “l’individu est le porteur ultime du changement historique”, P. Ricoeur, Temps et récit. Tome I, Seuil, Paris 1983, p. 146. 86.  H. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, Harcourt, Braqe & WORLD, INC., New York 1968.  87.  R. Peluso, Sulla “humanity in dark times” di Hannah Arendt, in “Shift. International Journal of Philosophical Studies”, n. 2, 2017, pp. 61-78: p. 63.

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ma anche quella tra vita privata e vita pubblica, tra scelta etica e praxis”88. This might come off as disconcerting to those who, rightly so, emphasize in Arendt’s text the drastic separation between private and public, oíkos and agorà. This distinction is actually perfectly consistent with her attention to figures – of the likes of Socrates and those whose endeavors are told in Men in Dark Times – who made their bíos into an ethos: nel costante esercizio del due-in-uno, Arendt vede ripristinarsi un punto di intersezione tra il sé che pensa e il sé che si rende visibile nell’azione. La cura di sé socratica e insomma un modo di costituirsi come soggetti. E l’esercizio di un potere su se stessi che inevitabilmente produce effetti collettivi, scompaginando la posizione etica e politica degli attori in scena.89

The associations between Arendt and Foucault, suggested in the essay mentioned above, appears then very apt: they both conceive philosophy not as an exercise in abstraction that would seek normative teachings, thus clashing with reality, but rather as building full subjectivities, capable of governing themselves and others90. This density of the past, beyond consenting a “reconciliation with the world”91, prevents the creation of a mythical memory, unlinked to the historiographic discourse. On the contrary, the memory rescue of gestures, words and actions of people permits to think “the stability and durability of a purely secular,

88.  S. Forti, Letture socratiche. Arendt, Foucault, Patočka, in H. Arendt, Socrate, Cortina, Milano 2015, pp. 99-123: p. 103. 89.  Ivi, p. 106. 90.  M. Foucault, Le gouvernement de soi et des autres. Cours au Collège de France, 1982-1983, Seuil, Paris 2008.  91.  See H. Arendt, Understanding and Politics (1953), in Ead., Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954. Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, Schocken Books, New York 1994, pp. 307-327.

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worldly realm”92, breaking the circularity of the present. Conclusively, for Arendt politics means beginning, but it begins with people, with the actual fullness of their being concrete.

92.  H. Arendt, On Revolution, cit., p. 224.

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III

On the Productivity of the Gap From Agamben to Esposito, and Beyond

1. Agamben. The Time of Fiction In defining the concept of messianic time, which is the cornerstone upon which his whole ontological-political research is built, Agamben must keep at bay the idea of fiction. The risk that legitimizes keeping this distance is that of falling back into that specifically modern paradigm that the philosopher wants to avoid. Modernity has been in fact acutely aware that the being in common stands on a void that must be artificially filled1. And, if Hobbes’s solution and generally the contrac-

*  An early version of this essay was published in «Giornale Critico di Storia delle Idee», n. 1, 2021, pp. 207-218. I thank the Editor and the Editorial Board for granting this new publication. 1.  In a text very relevant to the context, since it deals with the relationship between politics and mimesis, shaping, Laura Bazzicalupo writes: “se pensiamo alla sola modernità, non può sfuggirci quanto tutta la politica attiva sia annodata attorno ad un fare, un costruire. Artificio, contratto, Stato, organizzazioni razionali secondo un modello, sono poste in essere per dare ‘for­ma’ all’informe presunto dello stato di natura, all’intollerabile disordine di una coesistenza priva di senso. Ma forse se travalichiamo i confini della modernità, questo carattere di costruttività della politica, di artificio o di convenzione finalizzata all’ordine, raggiunta attraverso rituali, gerarchie, ha

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tualist one was formal and nominal – intended, then, to make the state machine work by completely removing any purpose external to the system (Good, Truth) –, starting from the late Romanticism, especially in Germany, an eminently aesthetic strategy takes the lead, consisting in the fiction of a people. It was about forging a community, shaping a nation; the model of this operation was the most esoteric Greece, discovered by Romantic philology, opposed to the classic model of the beautiful form. This obscure Greece supplied the material to build a completely ideological myth, which in turn, worked as a model for mimesis: National Socialism was the paroxysm of such mimesis, in which a shape was stamped onto inert, passive, even precarious matter: shaping also meant saving. In this sense, National Socialism’s main operation goes far beyond the aestheticization of the political, it’s an actual fusion of arts and politics, a “production du politique comme œuvre d’art”2. Obviously fiction here is not simply lie, deceit, although, as Arendt showed in the pages focusing on the National Socialism ideology, the hyperbole of mimesis has led to the destruction of truth, to the loss of any relationship, both between subjects and with a common world3. The fiction we’re dealing with is, first and foremost, the operation of a subject that falls on an object. Politics here is strongly operative: it’s simultaneously praxis and poiesis. Fiction then carries along this idea of strong subjectivity that is precisely what Agamben means to deconstruct. Politics, according to the Italian philosopher, has nothing to do with sub-

sempre caratterizzato le ‘forme’ politiche”, Mimesis e Aisthesis. Ripensando la dimensione estetica della politica, ESI, Napoli 2000, p. 10. ­ 2.  P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J-.L. Nancy, Le mythe nazi, L’aube, Paris 1991, p. 49. 3.  See H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1973, pp. 460-479.

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jects acting in order to reach a goal; on the contrary, if we call “gesture” the moment in which the link between action and goal is neutralized – that crystalized moment in time in which action is untied from any productive intention – then Agamben can define politics as “la sfera dell’assoluta, integrale gestualità degli esseri umani”4. Politics isn’t the sphere of action, but rather a dimension in which human beings find their gestural “purezza”5, the purity of a means to no end. Now, the problem posed by Agamben’s thought is that it moves on a slippery ridge along which he keeps risking to stumble into what he’s trying hard to avoid. This happens because the ‘method’ of this thought is inspired by Heidegger’s criterion of facticity. Just like the philosopher from Meßkirch states that the identification of authenticity cannot float above falling everydayness, but can only consist in a “modified way in which such everydayness is seized upon”6, Agamben contends that the messianic redemption of the world isn’t an exit from it, but rather a “piccolo spostamento” that “non riguarda lo stato di cose, ma il suo senso e i suoi limiti”7. Before circling back to the

4.  G. Agamben, La potenza del pensiero. Saggi e conferenze, Neri Pozza, Vicenza 2005, p. 249. See also Id., Mezzi senza fine, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 1996, pp. 92-93: “Ciò che è in questione nell’esperienza politica non è un fine più alto, ma lo stesso essere-nel-linguaggio come medialità pura, l’essere-in-un-mezzo come condizione irriducibile degli uomini. Politica è l’esi­bizione di una medialità, il render visibile un mezzo come tale. Essa è la sfera non di un fine in sé, né dei mezzi subordinati a un fine, ma di una medialità pura e senza fine come campo dell’agire e del pensiero umano”. 5.  G. Agamben, Iustitium. Lo stato di eccezione (2003), in Id., Homo sacer. Edizione integrale 1995-2015, Quodlibet, Macerata 2018, pp. 169-250, especially on pp. 225-228.  6.  M. Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), Engl. transl. by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Blackwell, Oxford (UK)-Cambridge (MA) 1962, p. 224. 7.  G. Agamben, La comunità che viene (1990), Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 2001, p. 46.

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problem of fiction, let’s consider the example of the concept of ‘form of life’. Although it’s the opposite of the concept of bare life, the difference is a minuscule, unperceivable semantic dislocation. With bare life, Agamben doesn’t mean anything biological nor natural8: it’s a construct of power, which separates, within the order it produces, a meaningless, always killable life. The sovereign power produces the naked life as an original political element. The naked life is a product of the power. So, what Agamben calls form of life can’t also be a production opposed to naked life; and it’s in no way something that makes up for that life’s violability. On the contrary, the form of life is exactly “questo essere che è solo la sua nuda esistenza”9, a life that, faced with a law that grasps it bypassing any mediation, reducing the living to something amorphous and completely vulnerable, “si trasforma integralmente in legge”10. Agamben, echoing Benjamin, to the situation in which nomos and anomie overlap doesn’t oppose a link between life and law, but rather an effective (wirklich) state of exception in which the indistinction between life and law isn’t abolished, but the two terms “entrano in una dimensione nuova”11. If we go back to the concept of fiction, we see that Agamben carefully distinguishes it from messianism. He identifies the formula for messianism in a excerpt from the first Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, in which the apostle uses the expression “as not”, hos me:

8.  See G. Agamben, Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (1995), now in Homo sacer. Edizione integrale 1995-2015, cit., pp. 5-169: 87: «Non la semplice vita naturale, ma la vita esposta alla morte (la nuda vita o vita sacra) è l’elemento politico originario». 9.  Ivi, p. 168. 10.  Ivi, pp. 60-61. 11.  Ibidem.

83 Il tempo si è contratto: il resto è affinché gli aventi donna come non aventi siano e i piangenti come non [hos me] piangenti e gli aventi gioia come non aventi gioia e i compranti come non possedenti e gli usanti il mondo come non abusanti.12

The hos me lays down the factic condition in which one is, without it opening a gate to a different dimension. La vocazione chiama a nulla e verso nessun luogo: per questo essa può coincidere con la condizione fattizia in cui ciascuno si trova chiamato; ma, proprio per questo, essa la revoca da cima a fondo. La vocazione messianica è la revocazione di ogni vocazione. […] Che cos’è, infatti, una vocazione, se non la revocazione di ogni concreta vocazione fattizia?13

Paul’s as not, Agamben explains, is not to be confused with the as if that determines the centrality of fiction in modern culture. Overlapping the two formulas would mean producing an aestheticization of the messianic, in which, Agamben contends quoting Taubes, “la questione della realtà o irrealtà della redenzione diventa quasi indifferente”14. The as if seems to suggest some sort of unreachable ideal: by pretending that something like that exists – god, truth, good(ness) – history would go towards a certain progressive direction. As we’ll see, the messianic perspective intends to destitute this logic of progress, of this push towards an ideal to come, because, Agamben says, truth is already here, entirely present15.

12.  Translation proposed by Agamben in his Il tempo che resta, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 2000, p. 29. 13.  Ivi, p. 29.  14.  Ivi, p. 39. 15.  Agamben’s thought has sometimes been read as utopian: see D. La Capra, Approaching Limit Events: Siting Agamben, in M. Calarco, S. De Caroli (eds.), Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, pp. 126-62; A. Ross, Introduction, in “The South Atlantic Quarterly”, n. 107, 2008, pp. 1-13. Such readings don’t seem appropriate

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But what it’s important to note is the fact that Agamben, in criticizing the logic of fiction, quotes Jules de Gaultier’s text on Bovarism (1892)16. Here, Agamben says Il problema della finzione è restituito al rango che le compete, quello ontologico. Secondo Gaultier, nei personaggi di Flaubert appare in modo patologico quella “facoltà di credersi diversi da ciò che si è” che costituisce l’essenza dell’uomo – cioè l’essenza dell’animale che non ha essenza. Non essendo di per se stesso nulla, l’uomo può essere solo agendo come se fosse diverso da ciò che è (o, meglio, non è).17

What the Italian philosopher shares with the ontology underlying the concept of fiction is the idea of a constitutive lack of a fatefully precarious being whose shaping is also their salvation. The impression, then, is that with Agamben fiction comes back in two different yet complementary ways. In one sense the ontology of absolute potentiality, widely elaborated by him18, revives the idea of a manipulability of the being, a general Vorhandenheit.

not just because of the lack of any normative dimension in Agamben’s discourse, but mainly because his theory of temporality, here discussed, doesn’t include any projection towards a future to be reached. Because of this, as we’ll soon examine, the philosopher clearly distinguishes his messianism from eschatology and apocalypse. The hypothesis according to which his perspective is clearly anti-utopian is far more convincing. See S. Prozorov, Why Giorgio Agamben is an optimist, in “Philosophy and Social Criticism”, n. 36, 2010, pp. 1053-1073. 16.  J. de Gaultier, Le bovarysme, la psychologie dans l’œuvre de Flaubert (1892), Hachette, Paris, 2018. 17. G. Agamben, Il tempo che resta, cit., p. 40.  18.  As it’s known, the concept of potentia potentiae – that is a potentiality that does not consist in passing into action, but has potentiality itself as its object – is developed along the whole course of Agamben’s work. I will only mention the suggestive aphoristic text titled L’irreparabile, that stands in conclusion of La comunità che viene, cit., pp. 73-88.

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In another sense, as we’ve already seen, in order to avoid the subjective or demiurgic semantics immediately connected to such an ontological fictionality, Agamben must elaborate a messianic temporality which is in turn fictional, this time in the sense of not being accomplishable as such. The messianic time is, in fact, always here already, but it escapes us because of its own nature. “L’espressione tecnica per l’evento messianico è in Paolo: ho nyn kairòs, il tempo di ora”19. Not to be confused with the apocalyptic time, the time of the end of times, in which the “intemporal eternity [eternità intemporale]”20 will happen. It’s rather what shortens in the present time, separating from it within it. This ulterior yet immanent time constitutes at the same time the transcendental possibility of history, and man’s impossibility of inhabiting it, and in consequence its irreparable dereliction and inauthenticity. Here’s how Agamben describes this time inhabiting time: in ogni rappresentazione che ci facciamo del tempo, in ogni discorso in cui definiamo e rappresentiamo il tempo, è implicato un tempo ulteriore, che non può essere esaurito in essi. Come se l’uomo, in quanto pensante e parlante, producesse un tempo ulteriore rispetto a quello cronologico, che gli impedisce di coincidere perfettamente con il tempo di cui può farsi immagini e rappresentazioni. Questo tempo ulteriore non è, però, un altro tempo, qualcosa come un tempo supplementare che si aggiunge al tempo cronologico; esso è, per così dire, un tempo dentro il tempo – non ulteriore, ma interiore – che misura soltanto la mia sfasatura rispetto a esso, il mio essere in scarto e in non-coincidenza rispetto alla mia rappresentazione del tempo.21

19. G. Agamben, Il tempo che resta, cit., p. 62. 20.  Ivi, p. 63.  21.  Ivi, p. 67. Emphasis added.

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Note the symptomatic repetition of the formula “as if”. Elaborating elsewhere the concept of contemporary, Agamben doesn’t think it as simply synchronous, but rather he talks about a “non-coincidence”, “dyschrony”, “disconnection and displacement”. But what matters in this conversation is the fact that the access to the contemporary is described in these terms: la via d’accesso al presente ha necessariamente la forma di un’archeologia. Che non regredisce però a un passato remoto, ma a quanto nel presente non possiamo in nessun caso vivere e, restando non vissuto, è incessantemente risucchiato verso l’origine, senza mai poterla raggiungere.22

Conclusively, Agamben thinks “l’essere-nella-storia come la dimensione ori­ginale dell’uomo”23. People’s historicity is found in this gap that separates them from themselves, and that separates time from itself. However, this gap, while transcendentally defining what’s typically human appears to be accomplishable in two ways. It can be the abyss in which life drowns when reduced to zoé, naked life, radically vulnerable. Or it can be the crevice in which quodlibetal forms of life, that experience the absolute immanence of a shortened and “endless” time, are situated24. But, significantly, in order to describe these quodlibetal beings, Agamben must resort to a fictional kind of literature. The most significant example of this theory is certainly Melville’s Bartleby, whom the Italian philosopher mentions in several instanc-

22.  G. Agamben, Che cos’è il contemporaneo, nottetempo, Roma 2006, p. 22. Emphasis added. 23.  G. Agamben, Tempo e storia, in Infanzia e storia. Distruzione dell’esperienza e origine della storia, Einaudi, Torino 2001, pp. 93-113: 105.  24.  About quodlibetal singularities see the first two chapters of La comunità che viene, cit., pp. 9-12. 

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es25. The point is not that the writer is a fictional character, but rather that his obstinacy to not compromise himself with worldly matters, his “desistance” brings back on the forefront the ontology of lack that becomes one with the logic of fiction. Bartleby’s radical passivity, by taking him away from any shape, abandons him to death. Inexpressive of any form and refusing to be demiurgically shaped, Bartleby is doomed to vanish. The assumption of this philosophy is, then, an image of history for which the gap that constitutes it is a point of continuous emptying.26 Accessing one’s own “original dimension” means to be placed on a void, to float on which it is necessary to pretend to have a shape one doesn’t have. Such original gap, such dischrony, is not then, according to Agamben, a multiplication of planes, a growth, but rather a point of fall: when life accesses such a gap – as bíos or as zoé – it can’t but be nullified.

2. Esposito. The krisis in the Instituent Praxis Diametrically opposed to Agamben’s destituent thought, Roberto Esposito thinks of the correlation between history and

25.  It strategically appears in the first volume of the series on the sacredness of life, Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, cit., p. 55. A particularly significant occurrence is the one in the titular chapter of La comunità che viene, cit., pp. 33-35. Bartleby o della contingenza is equally important, in G. Deleuze, G. Agamben, Bartleby. La formula della creazione, Quodlibet, Macerata 1993, pp. 43-85.  26.  About this point of fall that acts as catalyst of the entire reflection of Agamben, Judith Revel aptly notes how the philosopher confidently uses a concept, that hasn’t been clearly made explicit, such as the “negative production”, See J. Revel, Che cos’è un campo? (Per tornare di nuovo su un falso paradigma neo-foucaultiano), in A. Lucci, L. Viglialoro (eds.), Giorgio Agamben. La vita delle forme, il melangolo, Genova 2016, pp. 247-266.

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life. They aren’t two dimensions meeting only in the form of mutual destruction, on the contrary, they’re opposite poles that compenetrate and sediment within each other. Starting from this image of history, it is possible to think something like an instituent praxis. Instituting life – without that having to mean ‘fictioning’ it – is possible because on one side the institution isn’t thought as atrophization of life, while on the other, (the) life is not mere dissipative energy. Nessuna vita umana è riducibile a pura sopravvivenza, a “nuda vita”. […] Essendo fin da sempre istituita, la vita umana non coincide mai con la semplice materia biologica, anche quando è schiacciata, dalla natura o dalla storia, sulla sua falda più dura. Anche in quel caso, fin quando è reale, la vita rivela un modo di essere che, per quan to deformato, violato, calpestato, resta quello che è: una forma di vita. A conferirle questa qualifica è la sua appartenenza a un contesto storico fatto di relazioni sociali, politiche, culturali.27

This is the main point: for how every time it’s a radical novelty, human life is always inserted in a context that precedes it, and that is historical in how it’s made of a sedimentation of knowledge, practice, imagery. A life never drowns in the void, because it always already belongs to this synchronic and diachronic net. It’s the concept of gap that changes. Here too it works as a criticism tool and allows to break that progressive and linear image of historic succession in which modernity recognized itself. Except now the gap is not a crack into which time falls. The gap is first and foremost a link between heterogeneous temporalities. In an essay titled Anacronismi Esposito works extensively on an image of plurivocal temporality, structurally inhabited by the anachronism: the past, the origin, doesn’t dis-

27.  R. Esposito, Istituzione, il Mulino, Bologna 2021, p. 9. 

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appear in a distant point on a linear and progressive timeline, but rather it keeps pulsing in the present, causing the coexistence of different, not mutually exclusive, times. Through the same concept of biopolitics, it is here understood “non solo il rapporto tra vita e politica, ma quello, sottostante, tra natura e storia”28. While the work on the instituent thought was going to begin a while later – set up in Politica e negazione. Per una filo sofia affermativa29, dated 2018, and then extensively elaborated in the volume Pensiero istituente. Tre paradigmi di ontologia politica30, dated 2019 – we can already read between the lines the fundamental premise of the instituent thought. Here, in fact, the gap is not simply chasm, void, but it’s first of all articulation and multiplicity. In fact, in Esposito’s logic, the institution is exactly the link in which the anachronism has a place: it’s the symbolic and material place thanks to which different temporalities meet. The gap isn’t just division, irreducible distance; on the contrary, the institution is the affirmative mode of division, that is the reason why the latter isn’t thought of as a disgregation, but as an encounter. The political ontology developed by Esposito, proposing a paradigm that starting from Lefort brings back Machiavelli’s teachings, considers social division itself as instituent: far from clashing, antagonism and order refer to one another. The institution contains and relaunches the division; thanks to its inchoative nature, what characterizes

28.  R. Esposito, Anacronismi, in «Filosofia Politica», n. 1, 2017, pp. 13-24: p. 19. 29.  R. Esposito, Politica e negazione. Per una filosofia affermativa, Einaudi, Torino 2018. 30.  R. Esposito, Pensiero istituente. Tre paradigmi di ontologia politica, Einaudi, Torino 2020.

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the social and every human interaction “non è l’assolutezza dell’Uno né l’infinita proliferazione del molteplice, ma la tensione del Due”31. But what should be noted is the fact that it’s a temporal dialectics that makes the political productivity of the institution possible: la logica dell’istituzione – o meglio di ciò che in queste pagine chiameremo “prassi istituente” – implica una continua tensione tra interno ed esterno. Ciò che è fuori dalle istituzioni, prima di istituzionalizzarsi anch’esso, modifica l’assetto istituzionale precedente – sfidandolo, dilatandolo, deformandolo.32

The coexistence of heterogeneous temporal series makes this continuous tension possible, never leading to a sclerosis of social effervescence. In other words, the institution isn’t a static depository for mnestic matter that sediments in some sort of automatic thought33; on the contrary, this multiplicity is exactly what sustains the constantly renewed institution of life. The past is past not because it vanishes, but because it doesn’t stop being placed/inscribed in history, juxtaposing with other pasts that in turn do the same, multiplying the depth of history. The institution, in this sense, is the temporal inscription of multiplicity. The divergence from Agamben’s perspective can no longer be clear-cut: where Agamben sees history as an “ontological squandering [scialo ontologico]”34 – a constant thinning of pos31.  Ivi, pp. XVII-XVIII. 32.  R. Esposito, Istituzione, cit., p. 19.  33.  As it happens in Mary Douglas’s theory: see Ead., How institutions think, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse 1986; For Esposito’s reading on this position see R. Esposito, Per un pensiero istituente, in «Discipline Filosofiche», n. 2, 2019, pp. 9-30, especially pp. 24-25. 34.  G. Agamben, Il tempo che resta, cit., p. 43. 

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sibilities from which one can be redeemed only by accessing the purity of an absolute power –, a different relationship of gap or articulation between life and history can be conceived, by virtue of which the latter steps forward through an ontologic accumulation. Not decay, but historical and ontological growth; not floating in a void to be filled with a ‘fiction’, but rooting, intensive penetration into a multiplicity that remains productive because of its inherent difference. In truth, the one exposed is a forced reading of Esposito’s work, a provocative interpretation. The “ontological accumulation” is in fact a fundamental concept in Toni Negri’s reflection35, a central plank in the constituent paradigm dating back to Deleuze and Negri, from which Esposito means to distance himself. The provocation put on Esposito’s work is meant to push towards a more fruitful relationship with the constituent thought. And to do so on the basis of the concept of gap examined so far. It’s about delving into the outcomes of the encounter with Foucault, that nudged Esposito into, so to speak, politicizing the impolitical.36 The impression is that, while openly trying to

35.  This concept is present all throughout the volume Il potere costituente. Saggio sulle alternative del Moderno, manifestolibri, Roma 2002; see especially pp. 50, 374 and 412. For an extensive analysis of Negri’s theory of temporality and the history/politics relationship, see “Etica e Politica/Ethics & Politics”, n. 1, 2018, edited by V. Morfino and E. Zaru, dedicated to the philosopher and titled Negri e la filosofia.  36.  See R. Esposito, La comunità come concetto ontologico. Dialogo con Constanza Serratore, in Id., Dall’impolitico all’impersonale: conversazioni filosofiche, Mimesis, Milano 2012, pp. 65-76: p. 73: “Quando ho terminato di scrivere Communitas sono rimasto parzialmente insoddisfatto da questa lettura impolitica – pur senza abbandonarne gli aspetti più fecondi. L’accostamento a Foucault ha costituito per me, in qualche modo, un transito da un pensiero puramente decostruttivo a un tentativo di pensiero affermativo. Immunitas, Bíos e anche il nuovo libro che sto scrivendo [Terza persona. Politica della vita e filosofia dell’impersonale, Einaudi, Torino 2007] rap-

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distance himself from the ontological premises of the deconstructive thought originating with Heidegger, and to develop a method of radical historicization, borrowed from Foucault himself and able to gain a better adherence to the consistency of today’s politics37, Esposito remained mostly within that concept grid he was trying to escape. In fact, the very moment the Italian philosopher sets is discourse under the aegis of post-foundational semantics38, falling back into the logic of lack is inevitable, and it leads into the image of the gap as an abyss, which finds its intensification in Agamben.  The historical-genealogical method developed by Esposito is sparked by the retreating of the origin. That is, the absence of the fundament made politically productive by those authors who follow Heidegger’s footsteps39. The “ontological weakness”40 here theorized pairs up with the idea that the institution should be the keeper of the void separating the social body from itself: modern democracy, Esposito states commenting Lefort, comes from the fragmentation of the Old Regime41

presentano proprio questo passo oltre, o a lato della decostruzione”. About the specificity of the concept of “impolitical” in Esposito and his difference from other authors, especially Agamben and Nancy, allow me to refer to my own Arte della fuga. Estetica e democrazia nel pensiero di Jean-Luc Nancy, Mimesis, Milano-Udine 2020, pp. 157-168.  37.  About this, see the paragraph Differenza e storia, in R. Esposito, Da fuori. Una filosofia per l’Europa, Einaudi, Torino 2016, pp. 111-121, in which the author moves a tight criticism of deconstruction and its epigones, opposing Foucault’s “historicist” method to the exasperation of the ontological difference in Derrida and Nancy.  38.  See R. Esposito, Pensiero istituente, cit., p. 162. 39.  O. Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought. Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2007.  40.  Ibid, p. 14.  41.  See R. Esposito, Pensiero istituente, cit., p. 213. 

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and the purpose of the instituent praxis is to preserve this fragmentation, to guard the gap. From this perspective, democratic politics can only appear as the reverse of the immanence in which the only acknowledged risk is that of totalitarianism: democracy means detotalization, the duty of its (instituent) praxis is to unfold, to fragment a solidity whose inertia leads inevitably to the detriment of freedom. However, this gives the demos no recognition of kratos: vitam instituere remains a fiction, it’s filling an absence. Without adequately developing this theme, there’s still room for quickly mentioning a path that Esposito himself points to.42 It is, in fact, possible to shift the focus of his analysis towards the line of thought that connects Merleau-Ponty to Deleuze and Foucault, rather than taking the road that goes from Lefort to Machiavelli’s radical contingency. In Foucault, in fact, genealogy isn’t the acknowledgment of an absence, but rather what the French philosopher, much like Nietzsche, calls the emergence, that is “l’entrée en scene des forces”43. Entstehung here means gap in the sense of contrast – in the double meaning of empirical phenomenon and conflict –, multiplicity that requires a “regard dissociant”44. History and actuality reveal themselves as a surplus not an abyss, and immanence isn’t a capture, but an incremental dynamic. The same terms apply to Merleau-Ponty’s nouvelle ontologie, which allows one to think effectively of the institution in re-

42.  Not just with the previously mentioned theory of anachronism, but also when, more recently, he acknowledges the fecundity of immanence, noting the opportunity to promote the “auto-organizzazione istituzionale dei movimenti”, R. Esposito, Istituzione, cit., p. 144.  43.  M. Foucault, Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire, in “Hommage à Jean Hyppolite”, Paris 1971, pp. 145-172: 156.  44.  Ivi, p. 159.

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lation to this surplus of being45. In fact, the image of history he develops is, exactly like with Foucault, tightened, thickened, enriched by the “fécondité illimitée de chaque present […] mais surtout celle des produits de la culture qui continuent de valoir après leur apparition et ouvrent un champ de recherches où ils revivent perpétuellement”46. This permanence of the multiplicity47 generates an instituent praxis that, consequently, doesn’t float in the void, doesn’t hold itself on a fiction that fills a lack. The image of history here proposed doesn’t consider a critical space: neither an ontological dispersion nor the unamendable distance from the origin with which praxis inevitably deals with. History is, as Merleau-Ponty writes,

45.  For a thorough examination of this ontology, especially in relation to the theme of institutions, see E. Lisciani-Petrini, Merleau-Ponty: potenza del­l’istituzione, in «Discipline Filosofiche», n. 2, 2019, pp. 71-98. The author extensively acknowledged Merleau-Ponty’s work on institution in the fundamental course held at Collège de France in 1954-1955 and published with the title L’institution. La passivité. Notes de cours au Collège de France (1954-1955), Belin, Paris 2003. 46.  M. Merleau-Ponty, Signes, Gallimard, Paris 1960, p. 95. 47.  A suggestion that also belonged to Arendt can be seen in this theme. According to the German philosopher, artworks “share with political ‘products’ words and deeds, the quality that they are in need of some public space where they can appear and be seen; they can fulfill their own being, which is appearance, only in a world which is common to all”; besides, they oppose the feverish logic of the constant production of object of consumption whose existence is ephemeral: “against the background of political experiences and of activities which, if left to themselves, come and go without leaving any trace in the world, beauty is the very manifestation of imperishability”, Between Past and Future. Six Exercises in Political Thought, The Viking Press, New York, 1961, p. 218. On Arendt’s interest in Merleau-Ponty and in phenomenology in general, see L. Boella, Hannah Arendt “fenomenologa”. Smantellamento della metafisica e critica dell’ontologia, in «aut aut», n. 239-240, 1990, pp. 83-110. 

95 L’éclatement du monde sensible entre nous: partout il y a sens, dimensions, figures par-delà ce que chaque ‘conscience’ aurait pu produire, et ce sont pourtant des hommes qui parlent, pensent, voient. Nous sommes dans le champ de l’histoire comme dans le champ du langage ou de l’être.48

It seems like Esposito, emphasizing Lefort’s work, linking it to Machiavelli and eventually inserting his ontological-political paradigm in the path of post-foundationalism, remains on the fence between a thought that only considers immanence as crisis – irreconcilable gap with the absent origin –, and a philosophy that acknowledges it as germination of forms, expressivity, inauguration of worlds. His approach to Foucault’s historicism and the concurrent critic on deconstructionism we mentioned earlier, did not lead to the abandonment or the revision of the ontological difference, also pivotal in Lefort, that brings back the retreat of the political, its unattainability in a void taken away from the social, and risks to repeat the typical antinomies of Heidegger’s thought, that Esposito very aptly defines as destituent, impolitical. Where the theory of temporality elaborated by the Italian philosopher would allow to think of a full, always expressive, productive world, “un mondo per così dire ‘aumentato’ dalla sedimentazione della determinazione precedente”49.

48.  M. Merleau-Ponty, Signes, p. 28. 49.  J. Revel, Istituzione e storicità: una lettura politica della questione dell’espressione, in M. Di Pierro, F. Marchesi, E. Zaru (eds.), Almanacco di Filosofia e Politica 2. Istituzione. Filosofia, politica, storia, Quodlibet, Macerata 2020, pp. 71-82: p. 76. Revel has worked extensively on the proximity between Merleau-Ponty and Foucault, especially in relation to the respective theories of history. On this, see the volume Foucault avec Merleau-Ponty. Ontologie politique, présentisme et histoire, Vrin, Paris 2015.

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Indice

Multiple Temporalities and Resumption of History

p. 9

I The Time of Politics. Event and History in the Reflections of Jacques Rancière 1.  What Politics is Not 2.  Divergent Times 3.  Against Scientific History 4.  A Time for the Masses 5.  The Anachrony 6.  The Event 7. Thinking Politics Within Immanence

p. 21 p. 23 p. 26 p. 29 p. 33 p. 35 p. 40 p. 43

II The Chain of the Present. Populism and the Challenge of History 1.  The 80s Frame: the End of History 2.  The Historical Understanding of the Social 3.  The Presentism of Populism 4.  Hannah Arendt: Outside the Chain of Time

p. 47 p. 50 p. 56 p. 63 p. 68

III On the Productivity of the Gap. From Agamben to Esposito, and Beyond 1.  Agamben. The Time of Fiction 2.  Esposito. The krisis in the Instituent Praxis

p. 79 p. 79 p. 87

Bibliography

p. 97

Zeugma

Lineamenti di Filosofia italiana | Proposte Diretta da: Massimo ADINOLFI e Massimo DONÀ

1. Francesco Valagussa, La scienza incerta. Vico nel Novecento. 2. Alfredo Gatto, René Descartes e il teatro della modernità. 3. Fabio Vander, Ortologia della contraddizione. Critica di Heidegger interprete di Aristotele. 4. Ernesto Forcellino (a cura di), Verità dell’Europa. 5. Lucilla Guidi, Il rovescio del performativo. Studio sulla fenomenologia di Heidegger. 6. Armando d’Ippolito, Arte e metafisica delle forme. Creazione. Crisi. Destino. 7. Guido Bianchini, L’inquietudine dell’Altro. Ebraismo e cristianesimo. 8.  Pedro Manuel Bortoluzzi, Carlo Michelstaedter e la testimonianza della verità dell’essere. 9. Antonio Branca (a cura di), Possibilità. Dell’uomo e delle cose. 10. Federico Croci, Deus Terribilis. Quattro studi su onnipotenza e me-ontologia nel Medioevo.

11. Federica Buongiorno, La linea del tempo. Coscienza, percezione, memoria tra Bergson e Husserl. 12. Giuseppe Pintus (a cura di), Figure dell’alterità. 13. Marco Martino, Il sistema dei bisogni di Hegel. Un possibile itinerario. 14.  Maria Teresa Pansera, La specificità dell’umano. Percorsi di antropologia filosofica. 15. Massimo Donà - Francesco Valagussa (a cura di), Alterità e negazione. 16. Giuseppe Pintus (a cura di), Relazione e alterità. 17.  Maurizio Maria Malimpensa, La scienza inquieta. Sistema e nichilismo nella Wissenschaftslehre di Fichte. 18. Marco Bruni, La natura divisa. Hans Jonas e la questione del dualismo. 19. Nazareno Pastorino, Destino ed eternità di tutti gli enti. L’opera di Emanuele Severino. 20. Massimo Adinolfi, Qui, accanto. Movimenti del pensiero. 21. Giuseppe Gris, L’escatologia del destino. L’apocalisse del linguaggio nell’opera di Emanuele Severino. 22. Michele Ricciotti, Provare l’Io. Julius Evola e la filosofia. 23. Valentina Gaudiano, La filosofia dell’amore in Dietrich von Hildebrand. Spunti per una ontologia dell’amore. 24. Silvia Dadà, Il paradosso della giustizia. Levinas e Derrida. 25.  Giulio Goria, La filosofia e l’immagine del metodo. 26. Carmelo Marcianò, Essere epicurei. Divagazioni su Epicuro e noi.

27. Fabio Vander, Genesi e destino. Filosofia e onto-teologia del mysterium iniquitatis. 28. Massimo Villani, Time and History. Researches on the Ontology of the Present.

Zeugma | Lineamenti di filosofia italiana 28 - Proposte

Collana diretta da: Massimo Adinolfi e Massimo Donà Comitato scientifico:

Andrea Bellantone, Donatella Di Cesare, Ernesto Forcellino, Luca Illetterati, Enrica Lisciani Petrini, Carmelo Meazza, Gaetano Rametta, Valerio Rocco, Rocco Ronchi, Marco Sgarbi, Davide Tarizzo, Vincenzo Vitiello.

ISBN ebook 9788855293785

The hypothesis from which this book starts is that the twentieth century has broken the link between time and history, thus producing a twofold consequence. On the one hand, time definitively loses the characteristics of linearity and coherence that it still had in Hegel, and will be conceived in terms of a multiplicity of heterogeneous temporal lines; on the other hand, and consequently, history tends to disappear from the philosophical horizon to give way to theses on a post-historical time, whose main characteristics are stasis, the inability to synthesize incoherent temporalities, the impossibility of producing openings towards the future. However, precisely within the short century – the one in which time has supposedly contracted to the point of expunging history from itself – critical reflections were produced, which, despite the acquisition of scientific and philosophical lessons about the multiform and reversible nature of time, have recovered a fruitful relation with history in a cumulative and teleological sense. Massimo Villani has a PhD in Political Philosophy. His studies concern modern and contemporary thinking. He is a member of the scientific/editorial staff of «Shift» and «Post-filosofie». He has translated and edited the Italian edition of several works of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière. He collaborates with the reviews «OperaViva», «err. scritture dell'imprevisto», «Singola. Storie di scenari e orizzonti». He published the monograph Arte della fuga. Estetica e democrazia nel pensiero di Jean-Luc Nancy (Mimesis, Milano-Udine 2020).

€ 8,00