Stasis Before the State

Nine Theses on Agonistic Democracy

Dimitris Vardoulakis

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780823277407, 9780823277391
• eBook ISBN: 9780823277414
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This book critiques the relation between sovereignty and democracy. Across nine theses, Vardoulakis argues that sovereignty asserts its power by establishing exclusions: the sovereign excluding other citizens from power and excludes refugees and immigrants from citizenship. Within this structure, to resist sovereignty is to reproduce the logic of exclusion characteristic of sovereignty.In contrast to this "ruse of sovereignty, " Vardoulakis proposes an alternative model for political change. He argues that democracy can be understood as the structure of power that does not rely on exclusions and whose relation to sovereignty is marked not by exclusion but of incessant agonism.The term stasis, which refers both to the state and to revolution against it, offers a tension that helps to show how the democratic imperative is presupposed by the logic of sovereignty, and how agonism is more primary than exclusion. In elaborating this ancient but only recently recovered concept of stasis, Vardoulakis illustrates the radical potential of democracy to move beyond the logic of exclusion and the ruse of sovereignty.

THESIS 1

Constituent power forges the distinction between democracy and sovereignty

Why does sovereignty have recourse to violence? The simple answer: because of the exception. In modern legal terms, this is articulated under the doctrine of the raison d’état. Within a broader context, sovereign violence arises as a defense of its existence, for example, when an external enemy, such as another sovereign state, is threatening an invasion. Or it can be an internal issue, such as whatever economic circumstance may threaten the economy and hence the collapse of the state. At the point of such exceptions, the sovereign is expected to take whatever measures reasonable within its power to stem that threat and perpetuate its rule.

But this commonsense description of sovereignty’s structural violence becomes more complex as soon as we consider both its transcendent and its immanent dimensions. Let us start with the former.

The exception indicates the excess of the law, since it ultimately points to the necessity for its suspension to protect the state. This means that for the exception to be operative, there must be law, there must be instituted power. Sovereignty as the exception is that which transcends instituted power. I cannot do justice here to the long and complicated genealogy of this idea. Such a genealogy includes the medieval principle of legibus solutus and its transformation in modernity by thinkers such as Bodin, who insisted that sovereignty is never given or is unconditional, and the British articulations of the same idea, for instance in Locke, under the rubric of the sovereign prerogative.¹ Such a genealogy would also need to include Bataille’s extrapolation of sovereignty as an economy of excess.² Carl Schmitt has been a crucial figure in bringing this position within the context of contemporary philosophy and political theory. Recall his famous dictum: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”³ Constituted power is not self-contained. For it to be instituted—as well as for its preservation—it requires transcendence. Schmitt defines this excess, identified through the operation of the exception, as sovereignty.

The tradition that defines sovereignty in terms of the exception is referred to as political theology. The reason is that the exception has a theological provenance in the sense that it is analogous to the transcendence constitutive of the divine in the Christian tradition. Hence Schmitt’s other famous statement: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”⁴ Or, as Hobbes put it much earlier, the sovereign is a “Mortall God” or “Gods Lieutenant.”⁵

The result of the transcendence characteristic of political theology is that it is hard—if not impossible—to envisage anything outside sovereignty. Differently put, it seems impossible for the subject to escape the violence characteristic of the operation of sovereignty. The subject is in the grip of the ruse of sovereignty. Those philosophers mentioned above who pay attention to sovereignty’s structural violence encounter this problem—and they are usually thought to be unable to circumvent it. Thus, Foucault warned, or maybe bemoaned, that “we still have not cut off the head of the king.”⁶ And Althusser’s so-called functionalism is said to lack the means of liberation from interpellation, or the subject’s entrapment by ideology.⁷

Political theology uses the definition of sovereignty as the exception to arrive at the ruse of sovereignty. The exception—as we saw—presupposes constituted power. At the same time, Schmitt insists that the realm of the political is autonomous and independent.⁸ But this autonomous realm can also be the subject of a threat. Does this threat pose the possibility that there is an outside sovereignty? Schmitt provides an ingenious answer to this question in various works, such as The Theory of the Partisan: The threat does not indicate an outside to sovereignty because the threat reaffirms sovereignty whatever the result of the threat. Either the threat is unsuccessful, in which case the existing sovereign persists, or the threat is successful, in which case the old sovereign is replaced by a new one.⁹ Within this ambit, as Schmitt again clearly recognizes, the only possibility of political change is the substitution of one sovereign by another. The ruse of sovereignty is here in full swing—and we will see in Thesis 8 how Schmitt founds this position on a reading of stasis. In any case, according to Schmitt’s political theology, there is no scope for political change other than as an indefinite substitution of one sovereign by another. The proximity between the attribute of the “indefinite” to divine infinity highlights the immutability of sovereign power within the tradition of political theology—the political equivalent of romanticism’s “bad infinity.” This is political theology’s route of arriving at the ruse of sovereignty.

After asserting the exception and accepting the ruse of sovereignty, the most common conception of the political task is the invention of mechanisms to curtail or check the excessive power of sovereignty, which may serve as a definition of liberalism. We also find reformulations of the exception, such as Bonnie Honig’s attempt to blunt its authoritarian edge and Andreas Kalyvas’s radical redescription of exceptionality in order to align it with popular democracy.¹⁰ Neither of these approaches has an answer to Schmitt’s insight that political change essentially consists in an endless succession of sovereigns, focusing instead on the question of how to reformulate what Bodin called the “marks” of sovereignty.

The opposite alternative is a wholehearted antistatism. One strand of such an antistatism has its roots in a certain reading of Marx and expresses itself as a radical leftism wedded to the idea that a genuinely radical leftist party cannot assume executive power.¹¹ Another strand of antistatism develops as a critique of Marxism, especially in its doctrinaire or party-sanctioned form. In continental philosophy, it can be traced to the various articulations of the political centrality of the “event.” But here we have left the province of critique to exercise instead an outright rejection—a move with its own difficulties, such as the question as to the pragmatics of such an antistatism. And there is the more pervasive suspicion that the event’s radical novelty is a remnant of transcendence, since the event’s extralegal positioning, which transcends constituted power, may not appear ultimately all that different from sovereignty itself. Another way of putting this would be that the outright rejection of sovereignty presupposes the logic of sovereignty, thereby implicitly reaffirming sovereignty through its denial—there is, in psychoanalytic terms, a denegation of sovereignty. The ruse of sovereignty returns. It is at this point that the importance of agonistic monism comes to the fore.

To start moving toward agonistic monism, we need to draw a distinction between democracy and sovereignty. For this, we should consider the second aspect of the exception, namely, its immanence. In Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign as the one “who decides on the exception,” the decision only ever arises as a possibility when executive power is faced with particular circumstances that are unexpected and not codified in law. These are essentially threats to the viability of the state. Leaving aside the question whether such threats ought to be real or whether they can be manufactured, the decision on the exception is only conceivable so long as it includes an immanent context of relations of power.¹² The exception is not only transcendent but also radically immanent.¹³

An important implication of the immanent operation of sovereignty is that it adds a significant layer to sovereignty’s structural violence. As Foucault has shown in an unparalleled fashion, violence needs to be examined through its effects. There is violence in the sense that power relates to humans in terms of enforcement, legalization, and regulation. The key for a critique of power is to concentrate not on the source but on the target of violence. Violence as directed toward subjects discloses sovereignty’s immanent operation—instead of a transcendence that legitimates its extralegal authority. Yet despite the indispensable insights offered by recognizing that violence needs to be understood as an immanent operation, the critique of sovereignty that this move affords cannot go beyond scrutinizing particular articulations of violence, and thus it is unable to tackle the ruse of sovereignty. For many who do not want to embrace a normative approach to sovereignty, the castigation of specific articulations of violence constitutes the limit of critique.

For those who are dissatisfied with this limit and who want to push critique further without recourse to the discourse of normativity, this is the point where it is necessary to introduce the figure of constituent power. Perhaps the most common way of quickly defining constituent power is by saying that it is the source of the genesis of constituted power—that is, of the institutional and legal apparatus of a state. Further, this common narrative about constituent power usually points to the birth of the concept in the context of the French Revolution, whereby constituent power is understood as the will of the people as distinct from the various institutions of the state and the government. Thus Sieyès describes constituent power in 1788 as follows: “A constitution is not the work of a constituted power but a constituent power. No type of delegated power can modify the conditions of its delegation.”¹⁴ Constituent power is the force of transformation, and as such a force it retains a certain violence. At the same time, as a closer look at the insight provided by Sieyès would reveal, there is a fundamental ambiguity in the concept of constituent power. The question is about what the verb “modify” means. Does the violence of constituent power effect a change in the guise of a full-scale revolution that profoundly alters, even refounds, the state? Or is the modification instead to be understood as a transformation of laws and institutions while leaving the foundations of the state intact? Differently put, is constituent power responsible for a new foundation of sovereignty, or does it regulate its evolution so as to preserve it?

Through this ambiguity, constituent power combines the issue of violence with the question of destruction or reformation of a state. Perhaps the most influential contribution to this problematic is provided by Hannah Arendt. And it is the most influential because it highlights the ambiguity through her hesitation to resolve it: Is the concept of radical novelty that she forcefully foregrounds since The Human Condition actually concordant with the revolution or with the more moderate idea of the will of the people changing the state?¹⁵ The issue achieves its greatest visibility in On Revolution. Arendt’s—infamous—rejection of the French Revolution as merely a social movement seems to suggest the former, namely, that political acts require radical refoundations of the state, as constituent power does not care to tinker with social factors. And her celebration by contrast of the American Revolution, and in particular the republicanism of the council system, suggests that the will of the people, or constituent power, can be expressed through constituted forms, which now contain within themselves the possibility of their transformation.¹⁶

This ambiguity turns into a paradox when we consider the political implications of constituent power. On one extreme, we can find an appeal to constituent power in order to defend a strong notion of sovereignty. Here again the charge of sovereignty is led by Carl Schmitt, who readily avails himself of the concept of constituent power in order to forge the connection between the transcendent and the immanent sides of sovereignty.¹⁷ The upshot of this move is the defense of dictatorship as the expression of constituent power.¹⁸ On the other extreme, we find constituent power mobilized in the service of democracy understood as popular sovereignty.¹⁹ Thus we are in danger of turning to constituent power to enable a critique of sovereignty and its immanent dispensation of violence, only to end up in the position that constituent power can be mobilized promiscuously toward divergent and even contradictory political projects, including the very dispensation of sovereign power that we wanted to critique. The ruse of sovereignty returns—emboldened—through the aporias of constituent power. Is there a way out of this entangled knot?

Antonio Negri’s most significant contribution to political philosophy is, in my opinion, precisely at this juncture. His intervention starts with his book on Spinoza, The Savage Anomaly, in which he distinguishes between potentia (constituent power) and potestas (constituted power).²⁰ It is most explicitly treated in Insurgencies, which provides an account of the development of constituent power in philosophical texts from early modernity onward and examines the function of constituent power in significant historical events.²¹ The starting premise of this investigation is the rejection of the idea of pure novelty. By emphasizing the importance of the future for any revolutionary movement, Negri sidesteps the ambiguity between a new foundation for the political and its preservation—and this puts the concept of constituent power on a completely different footing. This consists in the distinction between constituent power as a defining feature of democracy, which necessitates its distinction from sovereignty: “Everything … sets constituent power and sovereignty in opposition, even the absolute character that both categories lay claim to: the absoluteness of sovereignty is a totalitarian concept, whereas that of constituent power is the absoluteness of democratic government.”²² This insight is fundamental to my concept of agonistic monism. Constituent power leads to absolute democracy because it neither inaugurates a new state nor preserves an old one, thereby eschewing the aporias of constituent power and avoiding the ruse of sovereignty.²³

The appeal to constituent power gives Negri the means to provide an account of democracy as creative activity. This has a wide spectrum of aspects and implications that I can only gesture toward here. For instance, this approach shows how democracy requires a convergence of the ontological, the ethical, and the political—which is also a position central to my own project (see Thesis 6). Consequently, democracy is not reducible to a constituted form, and thus Negri can provide a nonrepresentational account of democracy. This is important because it enables Marx’s own distaste for representative democracy to resonate with contemporary sociology and political economy—a project that starts with Negri’s involvement in Italian workerism and culminates in his collaborations with Michael Hardt. Besides the details, which Negri has been developing for four decades, the important p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Half Title
• Preamble: The Ruse of Sovereignty or Agonistic Monism?
• Thesis 1: Constituent power forges the distinction between democracy and sovereignty
• Thesis 2: Sovereign violence is always justified violence
• Thesis 3: The different ways in which violence is justified delineate different forms of sovereignty
• Intermezzo 1: Sovereignty and the Refugee
• Thesis 4: Judgment is constitutive of democracy
• Thesis 5: Judgment establishes the agonistic relation between democracy and sovereignty by dejustifying violence
• Thesis 6: Democratic judgment shows the imbrication of the ontological, the political, and the ethical
• Intermezzo 2: The Refugee and Resistance to Sovereign Power
• Thesis 7: Stasis indicates that judgment is the condition of the possibility of the law, or that democracy is the form of the constitution
• Thesis 8: Stasis, or agonistic monism, names the forms of the relation between democracy and sovereignty
• Thesis 9: Stasis underlies all political praxis
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Series Page