Instituting Thought. Roberto Esposito

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СКАЧАТЬ substitution of the category of production, transposed to an ontological level, for that of praxis, a category still too charged with the negative to be able to merge with the plane of immanence. In the course of an extensive interpretation of creatio ex nihilo – taken beyond the moment of Genesis and rendered co-eternal with the world – productive creation exposes the created to an unceasingly renewed creation, which is made possible only via the abolition of what precedes. In the Deleuzian paradigm, even thought is qualified by the continuous creation of new concepts rather than by a differential resumption of that which has already been thought. This is the same relationship that exists between the virtual and the actual: the latter is no more than the momentary and deceptive fixation of a process that flows ceaselessly from one virtual to the next. Understood in this manner, the constitutive act, which “dissolves” being into an eternal becoming, is at the same time destitutive of that which it creates, and therefore ultimately also destitutive of itself – just as desire, which moves the entire Deleuzian political ontology, is always at the same time a desire for life from the universal point of view and a desire for death from the individual point of view: a desire for escape and abolition, for emancipation and self-repression. This is true of any desire, which is limitless and therefore also inclusive of its opposite.

This is what explains the insuperability of capitalism, as elaborated upon by the philosopher. Within Deleuze’s ontological dispositif there are two ways in which capitalism cannot be denied: on the one hand, because negation does not exist, only affirmative difference does; on the other, because no other social formation can unleash the flows of desire and nomadic movement to the degree capitalism can. It is true that capitalism simultaneously harnesses them with bonds, blockages, and striations that must be vanquished by means of what Deleuze refers to as “counter-effectuations.” But this occurs from within capitalist effectuation itself – since there is nothing external to it. It is an effectuation that needs to be fully completed, freed from its contradictions and indulged in, in an ever-accelerating fashion. In this sense acceleration, or intensification, appears to be Deleuze’s only political category: one oriented not to changing the present state of affairs, but rather to pushing it toward implosion. What needs to be accelerated or intensified is always the reality that is unfolding, never a different one, which is declared impossible. As in the case of Nietzsche, the only way of facing nihilism is to drive it to its extreme outcomes, making what had been passive up to that point active. This is how Deleuze believes that capitalism – with all the slivers of fascism that characterize it – should be led to self-destruction: by infinitely accelerating its movement, in a coincidence of creation and destruction, constitution and destitution. Driving affirmation to its acme also means affirming that which is counterposed to it, thus leading to the collapse of both forces. As Hegel had explained, absolute affirmation coincides with absolute negation. At the apex of its development, the constituting paradigm tends to join the destituting paradigm from the opposite side, in a shared rejection of instituting thought.

4. What distinguishes instituting thought from the destituting paradigm and its messianic matrix, as well as from the constituting one and its eschatological inspiration, is its taking leave of the lexicon of political theology while it remains aware of the incompleteness of modern secularization; this awareness is especially strong in Lefort. The instituting paradigm is protected from the return of the theological because it is extraneous to the presupposition of the One that, albeit in different forms, remains at the heart of both Heideggerian and Deleuzian ontologies. Social being is neither univocal nor plurivocal, but conflictual in the instituting paradigm, and this is why it can be defined as neo-Machiavellian. What characterizes the social – all interhuman relationships – is neither the absoluteness of the One nor the infinite proliferation of the manifold, but the tension between the Two. Even when it proclaims its compactness or seems to fracture into infinite differences, society is always characterized by a fundamental antagonism, one that ultimately all the others can be related back to. The role of the political, both central and ineradicable, is to stage this division, raising it from the empirical plane of the clash of powers and interests to the symbolical one of the government of society. The institutional bent that gathers the social around the division that runs through it is symbolic – in its distinction from both the real and the imaginary. Sumbolon, according to its own etymon, evokes an order that is not alternative to the conflict but is produced by it and productive of it, in a form destined to constantly change on the basis of the power relationships that are established each time between the parties to the conflict. This does not mean that instituting praxis, from its Machiavellian matrix through all its subsequent incarnations, is neutral. It certainly takes sides, it is partisan – oriented toward an expansion of freedoms and a narrowing of inequalities. It is difficult to imagine something that represents the instituting paradigm better than the Roman institution of tribune of the people [tribunus plebis], mentioned by Machiavelli in his Discourses. Born of the conflict with the nobility and itself a generator of new social clashes, this is perhaps the clearest example of an instituting power that does not destroy a given institutional equilibrium, but innovates it in an affirmative sense. From this point of view Machiavelli’s thought is at the heart of the instituting paradigm. The political is that which unites society via its divisions, rendering a fracture that had not reached awareness and was therefore potentially destructive up to that point symbolically manageable. Within the instituting paradigm, difference remains what it is, without splitting into the ontological fracture between the political and the impolitical, as in Heidegger, or being flattened out into the Deleuzian coincidence of ontology and politics. If the political is made into the institution of the social, it is thereby contained in the social, but not identified with it. One is holding fast to the symbolic limit, thus preventing the social from coinciding with itself and subsiding into absolute immanence.

Obviously such a dynamic, which inscribes transcendence into immanence, so to speak, presupposes a radical revision of the category of institution, by comparison with the canonical ways in which it has been treated in the 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 СКАЧАТЬ