Genealogies of Political Modernity

Antonio Cerella

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350079472
• eBook ISBN: 9781350079489
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

What is political modernity? And how much of its concepts and structures has changed or remained the same with the advent of the so-called globalization? What does it mean, from a political perspective, that we live in a postmodern era? This book discusses these issues in light of the key authors and texts of the continental philosophical tradition: from Carl Schmitt to Giorgio Agamben, from Thomas Hobbes to Michel Foucault. Looking at the roots of the current historical crisis that characterizes Western political regimes, this book gazes into the past in order to trace the possible development of our current global era, in which all the classical concepts and our symbolic resources seem to be called into question, leaving a vacuum of meaning for political action as much as for political theory.

Part One

On Sovereignty

1

Rex Sacrorum: On the Origins and Evolution of Sovereign Power

Priscis ergo temporibus, antequam fasti a Cn. Flavio scriba invitis Patribus in omnium notitiam proderentur, pontifici minori haec provincia delegabatur, ut novae lunae primum observaret aspectum visamque regi sacrificulo nuntiaret.

Macrobius, Saturnalia i, 15.9¹

In what has been defined as one of the more impenetrable pieces of prose in any modern language, namely the epistemo-critical prologue to his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiel, Walter Benjamin writes: ‘The term origin [Ursprung] is not intended to describe the process by which the existent come into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance.’² For Benjamin, original phenomena are endowed with a dual nature or ‘rhythm’. As he explains, ‘there takes place in every original phenomenon [Ursprungsphänomen] a determination of the form in which the idea will constantly confront the historical world … This dialectic shows singularity and repetition [Einmaligkeit und Wiederholung] to be conditioned by one another in all essentials’.³ Here the original moment is not understood simply as an absolute beginning but rather as a presence that lies latent in the phenomena that it originated. In this sense, ‘origin is origination’,⁴ that is an energy that constantly forces the historical matter to reinvent its forms or, better said, the origin is itself the shapeless matter that gives life to historical forms through the drawing force that determines the always incomplete dialectic between original repetition and historical singularity. The origin is, in short, a sort of black hole that tends to reabsorb, though never completely, the historical energy that it produced. The task of the researcher, in Benjamin’s view, should be that of revealing the ‘innermost structure’ of an original phenomenon, thus bringing to light its ‘primordial essence’.

But how is it possible to decide on the originality of historical phenomena? In fact, as Benjamin points out, not all ‘primitive facts’ can and must be considered original. How can we discriminate, then, between primitive phenomena and original phenomena? According to the German scholar, the latter bear special signs of recognition, the marks of what he calls ‘authenticity’, for, as he puts it, ‘every proof of origin must be prepared to face up to the question of its authenticity’.⁵ For Benjamin, the authenticity of phenomena is their ‘hallmark of origin’, a sort of ‘spark’ ignited by the friction between the moment of emergence and its repetition – a revealing sign that the researcher should seek to trace. Authenticity is the beating heart of that ‘maelstrom in the stream of becoming’ of which Benjamin speaks in his magnum opus.

In this chapter, sovereignty is considered to be an original phenomenon in these Benjaminian terms. For sovereignty, as we shall see, can be understood as an original tension characterized by permanence and change, a tension that goes through the entire political history of the West. It bears in itself those marks of primordiality and authenticity that make it an ever present and yet transformative historical force, a future past, a power with two faces: one visible and one invisible. And it is the dark, ‘nocturnal’ side of sovereignty that this chapter seeks to explore.

It is surprising that Giorgio Agamben, one of the most acute and sensitive interpreters of Benjamin’s work, has described sovereignty as a sort of ahistorical and ontological dispositive. As he writes in the first volume of the Homo Sacer project, ‘the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original – if concealed – nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power’.⁶ For Agamben, in other words, the sovereign gesture of inclusive exclusion of bare life in the polis would conceal the original nucleus of power, its ‘arcane ontology’. In his genealogies, Agamben returned several times to the enigma of sovereign power. And, in the last volume of his project, he traced the structure of the exception back to ‘first ontology’ and to the ‘event of language’:

In the course of the study, the structure of the exception that had been defined with respect to bare life has been revealed more generally to constitute in every sphere the structure of the archē, in the juridico-political tradition as much as in ontology. In fact, one cannot understand the dialectic of the foundation that defines Western ontology, from Aristotle onward, if one does not understand that it functions as an exception … The strategy is always the same: something is divided, excluded, and pushed to the bottom, and precisely through this exclusion, it is included as archē and foundation. It is possible, however, that the mechanism of the exception is constitutively connected to the event of language that coincides with anthropogenesis. … That is to say, the ex-ceptio, the inclusive exclusion of the real from the logos and in the logos is the originary structure of the event of language.⁷

For Agamben, the logic of the exception is the reflection of an appropriatio primaeva, an ‘initial appropriation’: the event of language. As a sort of anthropogenetic Big Bang, this event reverberates in all spheres of human life and knowledge: from language to politics, from metaphysics to history, from ontology to law.

This chapter takes a different research direction. For I believe that it is fascinating, yet conceptually sterile, to think of an original ontology that determines, and operates in, multiple onto-epistemic domains.⁸ No doubt the search for this theoretical Holy Grail, a sort of archi-dispositif (‘ur-dispositive’) capable of unveiling the dynamics of power in all its ramifications, is one of the most typical philosophical signatures of modernity.⁹ But the assimilation or amalgamation of ontologically different phenomena (language, art, politics) into one and the same epistemic region seems particularly problematic, especially when one enters the territory of the political – which, as Schmitt himself pointed out, is a ‘groundless ground’, an existential intensity without essential scope.¹⁰

What follows can be read as a genealogical investigation of the autonomous origin of the political and of its representative form – sovereignty. The aim of this account is not to criticize previous genealogies, but rather to show that there is an intimate connection between modes of representation and forms of violence (specifically the political) and that changes in the ritualization of violence modify the modes of political representation. In Benjamin’s terms, the ‘sovereign constellation’ is here understood to be as an energy that combines its regions and holds together and moves its boundaries. What changes historically is not the constellation itself, but rather the assembling of its matter. The present chapter tries to reconstruct the hidden and arcane plot – the mechanisms, if you wish – of those changes and permanences, singularities and repetitions, which represent the original force of sovereign power.

The representation of power

Representation is a fundamental – if not decisive – aspect of power. It is no coincidence that Carl Schmitt devoted the densest pages of his academically more sophisticated work, Verfassungslehre (1928), to the problem of repraesentatio. According to the German jurist, representation is the determining principle of a political unity; indeed, it is possible, Schmitt writes, ‘that the political unity is first brought about through the representation itself’.¹¹ This principle is therefore thought of as a pillar of the immanent order. It gives life to the body politic, integrates its parts and makes them transparent to themselves as a whole. ‘Every political unity’, Schmitt points out, ‘must somehow be integrated because such unity is not by nature present … and genuine representation is an essential factor of the process of integration’.¹² There is no state without representation; and ‘there can be no representation without the public and no public without the people’. By concretizing the spiritual principle of political existence, representation constitutes the people as a higher unity.¹³

But what is the relationship between the principle of representation, which is a morphogenetic mechanism, and the governing function, which is instead a dynamic force? By distinguishing between Repräsentation and Vertretung, Schmitt establishes an indissoluble nexus between representation and government: in the act of representing, in his view, there is something ‘that exceeds every commission and every function. Consequently, not just any “organ” is representative. Only he who rules takes part in representation’.¹⁴ Here Schmitt resumes and radicalizes Thomas Hobbes’s personalistic doctrine of representation. In order to create a body politic by means of representation, one needs a ‘special being’ – a person – that literally embodies the political unity and is capable of mediating between representation and power, rulers and ruled, totality and multitude. In Hobbes’s words, [e]tiam plurium hominum fit una Persona, quando repraesentatur ab uno, qui habet a Singulis Authoritatem. Non enim Repraesentati, sed Repraesentantis Unitas est, quae Personam facit esse Unam; neque Unitas alio modo in Multitudine intelligi potest

(‘one single person can be made even out of several people, when it is represented by a single one who has authority from each. For the oneness [= the principle of unity] that makes a person be a single one belongs not to the represented but to the one who represents; and there is no other way to understand oneness among a multitude’).¹⁵

To support his own vision, then, Schmitt relies on Hobbes’s without, however, explaining the validity of the doctrine of representation elaborated by the English philosopher. Some commentators have in fact argued that Hobbes’s conception of political representation is incomplete, merely formal and nominalist – devoid of a detailed treatment of the relationship between the governed and their representatives – and, moreover, ideologically close to absolutism.¹⁶ But, although Hobbes’s conception is heavily abstract and personalistic and lacks an explicit discussion of the dynamics of democratic representation, this weakness should not be read as a theoretical lacuna but rather as a strategic choice on his part, for Hobbes considers the principle of representation to be as something much more original and radical than an institutional mechanism.

The problem Hobbes poses is that of theoretically framing the genetic event of the creation of a political unity (the leviathan), and not that of explaining the institutional dynamics or other forms of representation that, as he polemically points out in chapter 16 of his masterpiece, cannot exist ‘before there be some state of Civil Government’.¹⁷ Indeed, authoritatem dederunt Civitates: ‘the state bestowed authority’, or authority emanates from the state. For Hobbes, too, representation is the moment in which the great person, magnus homo, comes to life; it is the spark that makes the body of the leviathan alive: ‘A Commonwealth is said to be Instituted, when a Multitude of men do Agree, and Covenant, every one, with every one, that to whatsoever Man, or Assembly of Men, shall be given by the major part, the Right to Present the Person of them all, (that is to say, to be their Representative).’¹⁸

Despite some ahistorical undertones, the Hobbesian doctrine cannot be considered merely as formal. For therein lies a substantial problem that reflects the crisis of the foundations of modernity.¹⁹ The question that occupies Hobbes’s reflection is this: How is it possible to create a detheologized and secular political unity out of a multitude, which is now fragmented by the lack of the unifying power of transcendence? How can a disparate assemblage of faiths and beliefs be turned into a new unity without resting on a sacral axis? In short, how is it possible to transform immanence into a new form of transcendence from below?

The explosive problematic that permeates Hobbes’s thought comes here to light – namely his attempt to create a social physics that no longer relies on God or on a transcendent notion of sovereignty, but rather rests on the individual, understood as fulcrum and axis, reality and representation, body and image of the new political order. As Émile Durkheim rightly observed in his sharp comments on the English philosopher’s work, by focusing on the individual, Hobbes could not but construe another individual, abstract and gigantic, concrete and artificial, plural and unitary, in equal measure:

In principle, it is from the individual that the collective reality derives. But how does it happen that the collective reality can overcome the individual to this extent? This is the origin of the solution of continuity that permeates the frame of [Hobbes’s] reasonings and the double aspect of his doctrine: liberal and authoritarian, democratic a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Walking Tree
• Part 1: On Sovereignty
• Part 2: Political Theologies
• Part 3: History and Archaeology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Imprint