Instituting Thought. Roberto Esposito
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domains of political science, sociology, and the law. The passage from the noun (“institution”) to the verb, “to institute,” already points to a deep transformation with respect to all the katechontic, eschatological, and messianic dispositifs of political theology, which are all explicitly hostile to any encounter with history. Rather than referring to a consolidated order of rules and laws, instituting refers to a task that coincides with that of politics and is destined to continually change the normative framework in which it operates – and to do so without either deactivating it in a salvific mode or dissolving it in the name of a creativity so accelerated that it destroys what was just created. An instituting logic exhibits a profound relationship with the historicity of existence, one that is far removed both from the deactivation of destituting power and from the acceleration of constituting power. The instituting movement is always a creatio ex aliquo – neither a *decreatio nor a creatio ex nihilo; it keeps together origin and duration, innovation and conservation, functionalizing the one toward the further empowerment of the other. As Lefort’s teacher Merleau-Ponty argued, the institution, however original, always arises in the context of a preexisting situation; it always makes use of fabrics that were woven previously, in the fields of the arts, the sciences, thought, and, naturally, politics. It does not entrust itself either to the Heideggerian temporality of the event or to the Deleuzian one of repetition – exceeding both the severe majesty of being and the inarticulate flow of becoming. To institute in the grooves of what was already instituted creates stability and stabilizes creation – and does so without revolutionary proclamations, messianic prophecies, or anarchistic intentions, since there does not exist and there has never existed a society able to forgo power. Instituting praxis deconstructs any substantiality of power, doubts any claims to belonging, reveals its empty center, which can be occupied each time only by the forces that prevail in that moment, before they are substituted by others, which are just as replaceable. Within the instituting paradigm, political subjects do not precede the conflict in any substantive fashion but are shaped and transformed by it. The category of subjectivation, which coincides with the always collective movement of instituting, takes the place of the category of subject.
An important contribution in this direction was provided by the legal institutionalism of the first decades of the last century, represented by figures such as Maurice Hauriou, and especially Santi Romano. At the center of their work, whose foundational value was also recognized by Carl Schmitt, are the challenges they pose not only to the obligatory relationship between institution and legal person – via the reference, brought into play by Hauriou, to an institution-thing that recalls the category of the “impersonal” – but also to the identification of institution and state, an identification Romano declared was “in crisis” already in the first years of the twentieth century. Their work exhibits elements of a rupture with the legal lexicon that has not yet been sufficiently exploited in its ontologico-political and even philosophical presuppositions. This is about the paradigmatic contrast between institution and law, which was then taken up and even developed with originality by the young Deleuze. The state not only is not the sole – or the main – form of institutional arrangement, but it always coexists with other institutions subordinated or superordinated to it, which are autonomous and compete with it because they are situated outside the sovereign regime, if not actually opposed to it. But in Romano’s elaboration these can be considered institutions to all effects and purposes, so long as they meet the condition of being internally organized; and this applies even to those that the state declares illegitimate on the grounds that they are hostile to it, as in the case of revolutionary associations. This does not necessarily mean that they have reasons that are ethically inferior to its own – in fact they are often superior. It is difficult not to grasp, or to underestimate, the innovative power of the instituting paradigm with respect to the two currents of legal normativism and decisionism, with which it was necessarily in conflict. A radically different conception of the law separates them: the first two currents rely on a paradigm that is enclosed in the language, also sovereign, of the primacy of the written law and of the will of the legislator; institutionalism on the other hand relies on a paradigm that is open to the pressures of society and to the exigencies of history, it has to respond to the urgencies of necessity and to the needs of life. In this sense the law is the object of a struggle that centers on its own meaning even before centering on the issue of specific rights. To say that the law, instead of responding to institutions that are fixed in time, never ceases to institute means attributing a performative force to it that unleashes all its performative power. Precisely insofar as it is “unnatural” – entirely artificial – instituting law can intervene effectively in life: not in order to save it or re-create it anew, as the paradigms of political theology propose in a politically inactive manner, but in order to change it from within. This is a possible starting point from inside the crisis of contemporary political philosophy. Today the only paradigm of political ontology that is capable of politically rearticulating being and thought is the one that refers to instituting praxis.
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The first person to talk about a postfoundational political ontology is Oliver Marchart: he does so in an important book, dedicated to the thought of Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, and Laclau, which opportunely substitutes this term for the excessively generic and trite “poststructuralism.” As he develops the tension between the polarities of politics and the political, la politique and le politique, Politik and das Politische, he sees the second term as possessing that energetic element that is destined to confer vitality to the first, which is still devoid of a foundation. The impolitical, conceived of as a supplement to the lack of legitimation in postclassical political ontologies, withdraws at the very moment at which it institutes the social. This withdrawal is not, however, equivalent to the negation of the foundation – which would restore the same metaphysical mechanism that had been deconstructed, only in the negative – but instead intends to assume it in a weak version, which oscillates between presence and absence without ever coinciding with either one or the other. According to Marchart, one should beware of confusing postfoundationalism with anti-foundationalism or, even worse, with the postmodern thesis that “anything goes,” “since a post-foundational approach does not attempt to erase completely such figures of the ground, but to weaken their ontological status.”1 Having reemerged as “the political” – in a sense that does not coincide with that used by Carl Schmitt – this artificial foundation has the function of preventing “politics” from closing in on itself, flattened out into mere administration. In this fashion something similar to what Heidegger defines as “ontological difference” would be inscribed at the heart of political ontology. Resting on an absent base, a new artificial foundation would work affirmatively, precisely because of its own negativity.
This perspective is not fully convincing, not only because it makes reference to a weak ontology,2 but also because it takes a very heterogeneous group of philosophers back to the same paradigm. While Marchart does reconstruct their different itineraries, pointing out semantic and conceptual dissimilarities, he does so within a single horizon. A problem of this kind – also present in Carsten Strathausen’s book on neo-ontology,3 where he assembles a series of thinkers who share an overcoming of Marxian and post-Marxian dialectics but do not really have much in common – is instead absent in Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen’s research on political ontology. They divide the thinkers included in Radical Democracy into the opposed categories of lack and abundance: “two different versions of radical democracy follow from this: one that emphasizes the hegemonic nature of politics, and another that cultivates a strategy of pluralization.”4 The former, generally thinkers with a Lacanian background, like Laclau for instance, think of the political starting from a constitutive lack, and institutionalize it as an absent foundation. Not only democracy, but also the hegemonic alternatives that succeed one another within it are always internally destabilized by a lack of substance that renders them structurally incomplete and impermanent. On the other hand, the ontologies of abundance, in which one can easily recognize Deleuze’s profile and that of nomadic thinkers, create ever new networks of materiality, flow, and energy. The sign of some sort of lack transpires in their case too, but it is always filled by new differences, which succeed one another in a potentially infinite becoming. In this game of mutually reflecting mirrors, there seem to be two political theologies that face each other, counterposed and complementary,