Instituting Thought. Roberto Esposito

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      All of Heidegger’s work, starting in the early 1940s, revolves around this destituting paradigm. That which was conceived as the negative presupposition of all political institutions and of instituting itself now becomes its very clear rejection. Politics, which at this point has been entirely absorbed by technology, should no longer be instituted, but destituted. Any kind of “doing” should be undone. Only the radical tonality, the decisive lexicon related to taking a decision, is what remains of the political – a decision that now coincides with a non-decision, one that corresponds to the oxymoron of the will to not will. But, once all political possibilities have been voided, even the impolitical, deprived of its original foundational power, ends up annihilating itself. If the impolitical is thought of as the source of the political, when the latter implodes into technology, the impolitical ends up sliding into nothingness aswell. Once the political has been annihilated, the impolitical, deprived of a point of contrast, sinks with it. Insofar as human beings are concerned, since they are ontologically prevented from transforming reality, they can only wait for the fulfillment of destiny. What is striking in Heidegger’s language is the activist tone taken by that which one can subject oneself to only in a passive manner: the non-postponable nature of the ultimate option that continues to suggest the category of potentiality – but only so long as it remains unrealized, sheltered from an activity that, in realizing it, would empty it. It is this impolitical intensity of the deactivation of all politics that post-Heideggerian thinkers absorb from Heidegger, transposing it, in similarly radical fashion, into a horizon that is as theoretically revolutionary as it is practically inert.

One needs to add that the Heideggerian roots of this destituting line are not the only ones. At its origin, not always fully consciously, lies a paradigm that in its day was defined as impolitical, inscribed on the reverse of the official side of twentieth-century philosophy. I am thinking of authors who were not professional philosophers, such as Karl Barth, Simone Weil, Georges Bataille, Hermann Broch, Elias Canetti. They are the first to coin the, elevated and tragic, language of dis-activation: from “decreation,” to “passive action,” to “non-agent,” “not translated into act,” “decreation,” “blocked at the stage of pure potentiality.” The entire lexicon of the destituting paradigm was born between the 1920s and 1930s and was then resemanticized at the end of the century. At its center we find a negative presupposition – expressed by the prefix in im-political – which excludes any affirmative judgment. In this world one finds nothing but conflicts of power and interest, separated by an invisible line from what is not and will never be able to be. The impolitical is not something situated beyond it, that does not exist as such, but that invisible line itself. It accomplishes nothing but express the impossibility of representing goodness, justice, and value politically. But the impolitical, in turn, cannot escape the contradiction of being able to define itself only on the basis of the political, from which it distances itself. It is this insurmountable antinomy that places it on the same slim ridge that both conjoins and disjoins gnosticism and mysticism, pushing one into the reverse of the other. That which ultimately remains, notwithstanding everything that distinguishes individual interpreters from one another, is the shared depoliticizing outcome that the entire paradigm of deactivation produces. Removed from any perspective oriented toward action, protected from the temptations of work, bent on the anarchical removal of principles, it dissolves the possibility of the political in the as yet unrevealed enigma of a potentiality devoid of act.

3. The ontologico-political paradigm whose influence is most strongly felt in Deleuze’s works is antipodal to the post-Heideggerian paradigm. Deleuze himself, while recognizing Heidegger’s philosophical stature, views his own oeuvre as a sort of confutation of the latter’s. While they both share a number of themes, what sharply separates them is the plane, which Deleuze himself defines as one “of immanence,” that is in principle destined to abolish all kinds of ontological difference. Since being is univocal, in other words constituted in the unique form of difference, instead of being separated from an ontic dimension, difference coincides with the becoming of being itself. Without dwelling on the transitions that lead Deleuze to elaborate this plane of immanence, we can state that its effect is the exclusion of the notion of the impolitical itself, a notion that, on the other hand, Heidegger’s political reflections do revolve around. Once the negative presupposition of the political has been suppressed, the latter expands to the point of filling the entire movement of reality. This is what Deleuze argues, at least starting from 1968; and this period is identified, not only by him, as the period in which the realiz­ation of the political and the politicization of the real resolve into each other without residue. From this perspective the French philosopher’s work – especially the Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus – can be seen as the most intense political ontology of the twentieth century, in other words a work in which the two terms, ontology and politics, experience the highest degree of superposition, one that frontally collides with the irremediable fracture Heidegger opened between them.

This does not mean, however, that the matter is closed. It is in fact precisely this superposition that prevents Deleuze from elaborating an effective political thought, almost as if the three areas of being, politics, and thought could not find any possible articulation within his philosophy. This also helps explain the sharp distinction between a first, more technically philosophical part, essentially devoid of political references, and a later one, which exhibits a strong political orientation but is perhaps not as philosophically rigorous. The impression one receives is that, the more politics is superposed on being, becoming the constitutive cipher of its becoming, the less it is being thought of in its specificity. Once it has been extended to the entire ontogenetic process and is its immediate expression, politics ends up losing its own contours, and in the end confuses them with those of being, in which it inheres. If being is political as such, according to Deleuze’s own explicit declaration, how can a specifically political activity be distinguished within it? What differentiates it from that which it is not? Or from another kind of politics, oriented in the opposite direction? I believe that the reason for this impasse – which has not prevented a motley galaxy of political thinkers, in addition to neo-naturists, post-humanists, and hyper-immanentists, from drawing inspiration from the Deleuzian paradigm for their theses – should be sought in Deleuze’s loss of contact with the category of negation. It is true that his emancipation from the negative – which does constitute the principal explicit objective of his ontology – never happens all at once or completely. One can instead say that his work is indeed troubled by it in all its parts, without ever managing to completely discard it. So he passes, sometimes on the same page, from the mutual implication of difference and negation to the opposition between them, from a conception of difference as a figure that affirms the negative to another, which instead excludes it, and he never opts definitely for one of the two. This is the reason for a tragic vein that runs through an oeuvre that is all too often interpreted in an insufficiently problematic fashion. The fact remains that the greater the influence of Bergson, this staunch proponent of the misleading and therefore non-existent nature of the negative, the more Deleuze abandons the category of the negative. This development, in turn, has entropic effects on the determination of the political, since one cannot ask oneself what politics is, even a certain kind of politics, without simultaneously knowing what it is not. This is the way in which a position that is programmatically hyperpolitical – in the sense that it interprets any event in political terms – is reversed, if not into a depoliticizing outcome, at least into a failed determination of the political: of its subjects and objects, of its ends and means, of its organizational forms and strategies. And this is not due to a default, as in the case of Heidegger, but to an excess of politics – which, being defined as identical to everything that exists, risks becoming something that is not at all defined.

      If the Heideggerian paradigm can be called destituting, the Deleuzian, even taking its most influential political translations into account, can be called constituting. Obviously, not in a technical – that is, juridico-political, sense; but certainly in an ontological sense, as an eternally creative form, and also, precisely for this reason, one that is decreative of the reality just created. Just as the primacy of constitutive power – one proposed, within the same ontological perspective, by Antonio Negri – overwhelms constituted power, so the infinitely productive power of being resolves each “state” into its own becoming, СКАЧАТЬ