Instituting Thought. Roberto Esposito
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thought – at least as compared to Heidegger and Deleuze, the referents of the other two paradigmatic axes – one can still question it in ways that are less conditioned by other interpretations, thus foregrounding, whether explicitly or implicitly, that which refers to the lexicon of institutions or, perhaps better, of instituting. This subject matter, organized into an ample series of textual and conceptual cross-references, becomes both the gravitational center and the theoretical purview of the entire book.
The pronounced heterogeneity of the three paradigms is highlighted by the shared weave that they partake in, which is defined by the category of political ontology in its specific postmetaphysical acceptation. To fully capture its meaning and scope, one needs to start by acknowledging the peculiarity of the politico-ontological approach, as compared to all other kinds of theory, sociology or even political philosophy. Unlike these, which are circumscribed within a specific regional ambit, political ontology does not relate to the area of being that concerns politics, but rather to the essential relationship that conjoins being and politics. And this is the case for both sides of the relationship – the necessarily political configuration of political praxis as well as the ultimately political character of every event. As concerns the first side, it is obvious that any political action implies a conception of space, time, and human beings – and therefore of being. One can certainly state that the different rankings of political philosophies, ancient and modern, are predicated on the more or less intense awareness that their authors had of this implication. The extraordinary philosophical prominence of the political works of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Hegel is due to their being not only theories but precisely political ontologies. This is true also of the great political thinkers of the twentieth century, from Weber to Schmitt, Arendt, and Foucault – who are all authors of political ontologies in the fullest sense of the term, rather than of philosophies. Moreover, every philosophical definition of being entails presuppositions and effects of a political nature – even those that deny that this is the case, since this very negation is based in principle on an opposition between the political and the impolitical. To claim that something, an action or a discourse, is not political already situates it within an opposition of a political nature. That which presents itself as apolitical or antipolitical does so as a consequence of removing its instituting moment, which, as such, is always political. Additionally, any modality of being – beginning with its own “power to be” – expresses all the political tension of the relationships it originates from and tends to alter.
Of course, the relationship between being and politics – which is constitutive of political ontology – has been understood in very different ways in the course of time. For a long period, indeed for the entire course of the history of metaphysics, it was interpreted as a basic foundation of a substantive kind, one that was destined to guarantee the correctness of political action. In other words, one imagined that politics could, or should, be guided by specific principles, grounded in the sphere of being and expressive of it. This kind of presumption characterized a significant part of the philosophical tradition, both of Platonic and of Aristotelian origin – but also the one that derives from Christian roots. Obviously it is not possible to establish any continuity between ancient and modern politics, given their crystal-clear lexical dissimilarities. When compared to ancient politics, which was still bound to metaphysical presuppositions, whether theological or natural, modern politics begins with and is constituted precisely starting with their revocation. Modernity, in the most pointed sense of the term, implies the negation of that which precedes it, of every transcendent presupposition. The abandonment of the state of nature as a preliminary condition for the state of politics, as theorized by Hobbes, bestows on the category of negation a central role in the modern configuration of power: only by negating that which precedes it can the political order establish its place. But, even though it characterizes the foundation in negative terms, modern political philosophy remains tied to the logic of foundation, brought to its culmination by Hegel precisely through the dialectical use of negation. Only with the crisis of Hegelianism does this dispositif begin to show the first signs of degradation, which Nietzsche will push to a point of no return. After Nietzsche, all attempts at restoration notwithstanding, the hypothesis of grounding politics in the sphere of a substantive being seems to be definitively exhausted, a process tied to the ongoing deconstruction of the notion of substance itself.
This, however, does not mean that political ontology itself disappears. Instead one could say that it is precisely the consummation of the metaphysical foundation that entails the need for a different establishment of the political. Only now it is inscribed in the fissure into which the foundation has precipitated – in other words, in its not being a foundation any longer. From this point on, any political conception presupposes a negative horizon: not only a negative foundation, one already theorized by modern political philosophy, but a non-foundation, a lack of foundation. Starting from this point, the relationship between being and politics no longer refers to presence but to absence, to a void, a gap. This explains why the principal political ontologies of the twentieth century are all inscribed in the groove of difference: from the point of view of ontology, politics is defined by the relationship between being and difference. This is what opposes them to the ancient and medieval ontologies of identity, pushing the ontologies of difference toward contemporaneity. In this sense, to borrow Foucault’s celebrated expression, they are all “ontologies of actuality.”
But they do exhibit a decisive variation, precisely as regards the role of difference, which changes as a function of the theoretical frameworks of which it is a part. Inside the paradigmatic triangle formed by being, politics, and difference, the three terms constantly change position and meaning, combining with one another in unprecedented ways. It is these shifts that define the diversity of the three paradigms we examine here. Politics can exhibit a trait that reproduces ontological difference within itself, as Heidegger maintains. Or it can instead constitute the intrinsically differential characteristic of a being extended over a single plane of immanence, as in Deleuze’s perspective. Finally, in yet another semantic register, interpreted by Lefort – but one that we can also define as neo-Machiavellian or conflictualist – social being is instituted by a symbolic difference that possesses the characteristics of politics. These are precisely the figures delineated by the three most important ontologico-political paradigms of contemporary philosophy: the post-Heideggerian, the Deleuzian, and the instituting paradigm, which is still in the process of being elaborated. These three paradigms don’t succeed one another chronologically but exist contemporaneously, interweaving in complex ways, which sometimes juxtapose them and sometimes exhibit one as the reverse of the other. But they do give rise to a diversity of effects on the philosophical debate, effects that the following pages emphasize, motivated by an intent that is itself ultimately political. My thesis is that, while the first two paradigms – the post-Heideggerian and the Deleuzian, which follow different and sometimes opposed modalities – are inscribed in the current crisis of the political and thus contribute to its exacerbation, only the third, the instituting, is able to reverse this drift with a new, affirmative project. What divides them is the role that the negative plays for each one with respect to the constitutive relationship between ontology and politics. In Heidegger the negative is present with such intensity that it opens up a gap between the two, while in the Deleuzian paradigm, conversely, it is erased, owing to their complete overlap. What characterizes the instituting paradigm, on the other hand, is a productive relationship with negation that allows one to articulate being and politics in a reciprocally affirmative relation.
2. Tracing the first ontologico-political paradigm – which is oriented toward the deactivation of action, and therefore also definable as a “destituting” paradigm – back to Heidegger is neither a foregone conclusion nor one devoid of problems. This is not only because he never claimed to be a political thinker, not even in the dark period of his rectorate, but also because all contemporary philosophers who, in various ways, could be ascribed to the destituting paradigm are situated in a political orbit that is radically counterposed to Heidegger’s. And yet, this very clear distance in political orientation notwithstanding, all of them, from Schürmann through Nancy to Agamben, consider him an essential theoretical point of reference. In this respect the same paradoxical relationship that had tied Heidegger to his great Jewish disciples – Marcuse, Arendt, Löwith – repeats itself. In this case, too, naturally, each of the philosophers I mentioned