In an effort to keep up with and follow the unsteady and scattered political thing, I turn to the unrivaled masters of the categories in Western philosophy: Aristotle and Kant. What I borrow from the two thinkers in chapters 2 and 3 of this book is the list or table of categories brought to bear on political phenomena. If, in the case of Aristotle, detailed descriptions of predication teach us the variegated ways of saying being, Kant’s theoretical apparatus readies any possible object of experience for representation.
An argument that juggles Aristotle and Kant ends up, at first glance, suspended in the abyss between political being and political consciousness. Is it not caught up in an irreconcilable conflict between “ancient” presence and “modern” representation, politically reflected in the distinctions between direct and representative democracies?
By no means do the differences between the two approaches suggest that Aristotle’s method is somehow more naïve than Kant’s. Twentieth-century phenomenology ventured to roll back and bring down the screens of subjective representation in denouncing the subjectivist framing of cognition for its theory of “picture-consciousness”; by this route, Husserl sought to return to Aristotle after Kant. The verdict that Aristotle’s categories have been outmoded by the table Kant elaborated in his Critique of Pure Reason is as crass as it is unphilosophical. I cannot help but notice in this respect that the historical dialectics of the categories is comparable to the fate of energy, which has taken millennia to come into its own between the clashing significations of ancient “actuality” and modern “potentiality” (and this history is still nowhere close to being over).1 In a like manner, an audacious juxtaposition of the ancient and modern variations on categorial thinking will afford us an all-around vision of the political thing itself.
The first Aristotelian category is ousia, normally translated as “being,” “beingness,” or “substance.” I suggest “presence,” or, more exactly, as-what the thing is present or presents itself.2 Now, this category is not atomic or simple: no sooner is it introduced than it subdivides into the “primary,” πρῶτος, and the “secondary,” δεύτερος. The division in ousia means that a thing first presents itself as what it is in one way and then, upon taking a second look, in another. Its first presentation in our everyday experience is as this singular being (this human, this horse)—a freestanding, separate, independent thing, whether animate or inanimate. The second manner of the thing’s self-presentation is this as that, comprehended through the genus (γένος), making the singularity of this discernable exactly as what it is (Cat. 2a, 11–18).3 Except when we come across a hitherto unknown creature or object, this already stands under the aspect of that, the second ousia folded into the first. It is just that the first presentation was not explicit about the interpretation it had accepted as a given.
Automatically identifying this human as human, we do not linger in the gap of presence between this and this as that. But we are also apprised of those tragic circumstances, in which, for politically motivated reasons, the ligature between this human and the this as that of humanity tears: in which the designation human is refused to a human being based on her or his racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, or gender identity, and the passage from the first to the second ousia is blocked. This is not a cognitive misstep. Political through and through, the unwillingness to comprehend human thisness with reference to the human genus culminates, in extremis, in genocide. Nor is this a short-lived oddity. A seamless transition to the second ousia for some humans (these humans who, thanks to their gender, class, race, and other markers, are immediately interpreted as that of humanity) is the flipside of the judgment that those other humans are nonhuman, impeding their passage to that which is their genus.
If ousia solidifies into the English (though, at bottom, Latin) “substance,” as conventional translations want it to do,4 then the first Aristotelian category loses its categorial features. To maintain, via a hermeneutical decision factored into this act of translation, that Aristotle differentiates between primary and secondary substances is to switch from an internally complex category to a cumbersome system of classifications. The two “substances,” denoting the particular and the general classes of being, are an empty box within a box, detached from the thing’s own presence and givenness in experience. Classified, the second substance subsumes the first in a hierarchical relation artificially and belatedly implanted into Aristotle’s text, where ousia actually promises radical equality. We are yet to take stock of the political reverberations rippling out from this act of translation.
What is the presence of politics itself, its ousia? There is no political genus outside the primary modes of political being: a state, an ideology, a movement, a supranational community, and so forth. In other words, there is no such thing as a stable and unchangeable political substratum underlying (ὑποκείμενον) the epiphenomenal diversity of discourses, practices, institutions, processes, and regulations that go under that name. Opening the gateway to effectual truth, politics is a profusion of effects bereft of a preexisting unitary cause. It is always this politics, codified and practiced in a given style at a specific time and place, from partisan resistance to ideological state apparatuses, from the normative desideratum of perpetual peace to the drafting of a constitution, from Napoleonic conquests to China’s Cultural Revolution. That is to say, politics is a plethora of political things without the political Thing.
A little further in his Categories, Aristotle will observe that “ousia, strictly speaking, applies to first presences only, because they not only underlie but provide all things else with their subject” (3a, 1–2). A conventional metaphysical take, which Derrida submits to deconstruction, is that, while the thing’s primary mode of being present is a self-sufficient this, its secondary presence (say, in representation) already harbors an absence. Yet, Aristotle’s text is more aporetic than that: in its atomic singularity, the this, tode ti, signals itself, gives a sign of what it is (ουσíα δοκεî τóδε τι σημαíνειν—3b, 10). Out of its thisness, it overflows the this and becomes not-this, the that of signification.
Leibniz’s monadology with its affirmation that substance is a singularity, or substance individuelle, adheres to the metaphysical reading of Aristotle. Both the first presence of things and a monad, coinciding with the autistic this, defy interpretation that operates in accord with the formula this as that. But the presumed belatedness of signification in relation to thisness also reinforces categorial thinking. Other categories must be in place for us to make a hermeneutical leap bridging the divide between this and that, which is why, by itself, ousia eludes identification and is a category on the verge of the uncategorizable.
Quite strikingly, the ontological singularization of politics goes against the grain of its classical conception as the highest universality—the abode of the common good—and of its modern depiction as the agglutination of individuals who subscribe to the social contract. Within the paradigm of ousia, which adumbrates the thing’s presence as what it is, we can cite no more than this political situation. How to tackle this paradox?
Sovereignty encapsulates the singularity of political presence. However we define it, the exercise of sovereignty always concerns and is concerned with a this: it is supreme in a polity and remains incommensurate—at times existentially so—with other sovereign entities. Because in practice sovereignty admits no sharing (only powers can be divided, not sovereignty), it blocks the transition from primary to secondary presence, from this political unit, for which it is valid absolutely, to that which the sovereign this exemplifies. In its singularity, it is immediately universal, like a beautiful work of art that doles out for itself beauty as such, leaving no space for equal participation (methexis) in the idea of beauty. Of sovereignty, like of the politics it momentarily condenses in itself, there is no genus, unless the genus perfectly overlaps with the species. By and large unenforceable, international law does not override national sovereignties; the bare fact of relations between absolutes threatens to relativize them and is perceived as unviable; the threat of war is embedded in the ontology of multiple sovereign entities. These are some of the by-products of limiting political ousia to the first presence.
The exclusive and absolute nature of sovereignty’s first presence explains why the categories are more appropriate to understanding political realities than the concept. Subsuming singularities under abstract universals, conceptual thought fails to problematize the (politically problematic) passage from the first to the second manner of presence, which amounts to interpretation: the passage internal to ousia is hermeneutical. It diffuses this and this and this in a general that erasing the differences among them. In the opening pages of the present study I have written that “the concept is sovereign, and absolutely so, before any attempt to work out the concept of sovereignty on our part.” But once attempts at a conceptual rather than a categorial articulation of sovereignty get off the ground, it turns out that their outcomes are sound on the assumption of one world-state: Francisco de Vitoria’s res publica totius orbis, Grotius’s “worldwide rule of law,” Kant’s Weltrepublik, or Fichte’s “universal monarchy.” The category of the first ousia is indispensable for understanding a multiplicity not gatherable into the One, yet absolute in each part that is at the same time the whole.
With this assessment, I do not intend to romanticize the primary presentation of the this and, with it, sovereignty itself. Although they signify and display themselves in keeping with the Aristotelian aporia, both are literally dumb, idiosyncratic and idiotic,5 closed off to understanding and dialogue. Absent the hermeneutical engagement readying this for interpretation as that, physical violence and war will prevail—hence, the Hobbesian imputation of a bellicose state of nature to the arena of international relations between equally sovereign states. Forget the flat depiction of Hobbes as a pessimist; all he does is hold fast to the ontological-categorial view of sovereignty as the first and only political presence. Authors sympathetic to the idea of cosmopolitanism, by contrast, dream of the second presence (and a second coming?), of a postsovereign political genus that would converge with humankind and perhaps make politics superfluous.
Of late, in the most diverse corners of philosophy and political theory, sovereignty has been flayed on the torture rack of critique for harboring and promoting the legacy of metaphysics. The signature metaphysical trait imputed to sovereignty is that, as pure presence admitting no representation, it cannot be delegated, and in its delegation divided, without coming undone. On my reading of Aristotle’s categories, does this critique not miss the point and warp the first political ousia? The singular universality of sovereignty, warding off totalization, should give us pause. We can make no more than a general inference from the adherence of politics to the first ousia, namely that its being is inseparable from political beings, that is to say, from the world of phenomenality and becoming, institutions and movements, revolutions and constituent assemblies. This politics baffles; it shuns classification, ideal types, and the trappings of “secondary substance.” This sovereignty likewise does not lay claim to pure presence but is the being of political beings in a political unit where it is deemed valid and binding. It is not the highest class of political things but one of their categories, itself absurd without the addition of other categorial specifications.
What presents itself at first blush in the singularity of thisness (τόδε τι) is a prerequisite for predication, which cannot itself be predicated or categorized. The first ousia simply is (an impenetrable what). For presence or presencing to become a category and to be invested with meaning, the interpretative supplement of the second look at this as that is requisite. Before arriving at “this human being you categorize [κατηγορήσεις] as a human being” (2a, 23–4), you must do plenty of cognitive-political work. To make sense, this must stand accused, publicly pointed out in its very being (here: human), through which it is what it is. In a toxic mix of intellectual laziness and political cunning, the pointing out of this has rarely obeyed such an imperative and has depended instead on the negative gesture of predicating this on its divergence from not-this, as a source of meaning for the second ousia of this as that. For example, I am male (this), therefore I am human (this as that) hides the negative interpretation, I am not a woman (not-this), therefore I am human (this as that). The linkages between this human and humanness, between X and X-ness, are not, as already noted, secure. They demand intricate political strategies of justification and legitimation well in excess of logical inductive and deductive procedures.
The peculiarity of sovereign entities is that they act as though their thisness depleted that as which it must be categorized. Laying monopoly on legitimation, they shrink political being to the beings that they, themselves, are and deny it to all others. So, democracy views its systems of legality as synonymous with legitimacy in quantum huiusmodi;6 absolutist monarchy admits no valid source of authority other than the divine right of kings. Instead of understanding this as that, sovereign self-understanding declares an immediate identity and equivalence between the one and the other, between a format of governance certain regimes happen to embody and governance as such. Louis XIV’s L’État, c’est moi (“I am the State”) is only the most barefaced sovereign predication. Far from anomalous, the embrace of immediate identity between a given mode of legitimacy and legitimacy as such is also characteristic of those regimes that excoriate the absolutist model of sovereignty. They slip their thisness in the vacant place of the genus and imperceptibly exchange the manner of their self-presentation for a nonexistent political presence per se. The ensuing universalization (or, better, absolutization) of the singular, repeated in each sovereign instance, casts a long shadow of an imminent war over the political terrain. Now, the implications of absolutization go beyond the limits of sovereignty. In a necessary, transcendental illusion, though politics is a glut of dispersed political things, it is experienced from within its thisness, as the Thing that has absorbed into itself all meaning, political or not.
The phenomenology of sovereignty culminates in a life-and-death struggle of singular universals at the same time that, on the ideal philosophical horizon, peace and equality reign supreme. There are, Aristotle avers, no degrees of presence in the way things look in keeping with what they are, in accordance with their images-ideas, εἴδει. “Unless an idea is also a genus, none of the ideas is more of an ousia than another” (2b, 23–24). And, again, “no ousia admits of any degrees” (3b, 33–34). The way politics looks in democracy is not more truly political than its mode of appearance in aristocracy or in monarchy. Constitutionality is not the prerogative of a liberal democratic constitution alone. Only in a state of conceptual and ideological bafflement will one submit, as in twentieth-century French political philosophy from Lefort to Rancière and Badiou, that (radical) democracy occupies the entire political genus, while all other regimes are reduced to the functions of police and administration. The principles of a multipolar international order that does not foist a universal way of being present on every polity in the world lie in Aristotle’s categories. In particular, these principles may receive intellectual sustenance from the category of ousia warranting the equality of incommensurables—and, with it, the possibility of meaningful peace—as far as their (equal) access to political presence is concerned.
That Aristotle is able to maneuver around sameness and difference without diluting the one in the other testifies to his philosophical prowess. The rule of thumb that holds for ousia applies to differences (διάφορα) as well. The mode of a thing’s presence is not present in the thing itself; the differences defining the thing are nowhere to be found in it (3a, 20–25) but emerge between things. A polity self-defined as democratic is not in a position to monopolize legitimacy, as it does not contain the whatness of democracy, much less of politics. The distinct attributes of democratic regimes, such as majority rule, are not present in just about any res publica. We are barred from touching ousia directly and have no other choice but to work at presence, striving to achieve it, while it is already silently there, both present and not present, itself and not itself. (Analytically departing from the second ousia, we retrospectively reach out to, without ever reaching, the first, which we also repeat.) Because, by taking the second look at/of ousia, our hold on presence through interpretation is tenuous, countless cracks will traverse the thing and the category of its presence: the political this and monarchy, this democratic regime and politics as such, lumped together in highly disputable predicative statements.
Eventually coming back to the singularity of the first way in which the thing is present, Aristotle reaffirms that it is a this, τόδε τι (3b, 10). The first ousia is atomized (is ἄτομον), unlike the second, which “is not of one but of many [πολλῶν]” (3b, 17). Upon our initial look at it, an entity, a political unit, presents no inner divisions, a monolithic façade obscuring the composite nature of its presence. The second ousia manifests what has been there all along, unmarked and unnoticed, in the first: a complex presence, the contested designations of majority—absolute, qualified, and so on—in democracy; vicarious delegation and representation “from above,” as a smokescreen for the lateral representation of the ruling elite, in theocracies. Whereas in its atomicity the category of the first ousia risks mimicking the simplicity of the concept, the supplement of the second ousia mitigates this risk and discloses the inner heterogeneity of the political thing. The articulation of this as that does away with the illusion that reality is atomistic, self-enclosed, and independent. “Direct” democracy, too, is representative, each subject representing her- or himself. There you have it—a political allegory for the centrality of the second ousia to acts of meaning-making.
In addition to welcoming complexity in the schism internal to the category, Aristotelian presence admits exteriority into the thing itself. Outlined with respect to their beingness, beings are available for lived hermeneutic overtures and tied into the knot of predication, categorization, and articulation (this as that). There is not a single quality, which, if distilled from this, would adumbrate ousia; this may be elaborated as that and that and that, each time different, according to the plurality of the “second looks.” Now, the different versions of that interpreting the same this can come into conflict with and contradict one another. The presence-beingness-whatness of a democratic this comprises majority rule, as well as the rule of law and periodic election cycles in a multiparty system, among other things. But a majority decision can conceivably suspend future elections and the rule of law, as in the aftermath of the 1933 federal elections in Germany that were instantaneously followed by the “Enabling Act” (Ermächtigungsgesetz) that proscribed all subsequent democratic procedures. One as that of democracy becomes incompatible with another, exemplifying in practice the theoretical split in its ousia. A potentially self-contradictory elaboration of tode ti is not unique to this regime; rather, such an elaboration substantiates the effectual heterogeneity of politics and, broadly, of categorial thought.
The presence of politics is akin to presence in general: a common field of opposition, it satisfies the description of ousia as identity in difference, being “numerically one and receptive to contraries [ἔν ἀριθμῶ ὄν τῶν ἐναντίων εἶναι δεκτικόν]” (4a, 11–12). Political polarities, chief among them the friend-enemy distinction, are aspects of the same mode of presence that harmonizes them after adapting to their creases and their changing patterns. “Total” war and “absolute” enmity do not contravene the participation in politics of opponents ready to fight to their death. If anything, the apotheosis of bellicosity adds intensity to their engagement and consolidates political ousia receptive to contraries.
This gathering capacity of ousia is not justified by ascribing to it an unchangeable nature that would undergird all change—something we have come to associate, almost instinctively, with the idea of substance. Ousia is invariably change; by virtue of its extreme receptivity, it is, in itself, entirely other to itself, and it cobbles its identity together out of this otherness: “For whenever ousia admits of such contraries, it is by a change in itself [οὐσιῶν αὐτὰ μεταβάλλοντα δεκτικὰ τῶν ἐναντίων ἐστί]” (4a, 30). If ousia were form, it would have changed in tandem with its contents; if it were a cause, it would have been continually modified in light of its effects; if it were time and space, it would have had the duration and extension of the things themselves. That is how politics as a form, cause/cosa, and time-space operates, drastically changing its modes of presence to accommodate that which it receives in the cleft of its nonidentity.
Aristotle will rehash the insight on the essential otherness of ousia in these words: “What is most proper [ἴδιον] to ousia is that, remaining numerically one and the same, it may, according to a change in itself, receive the contraries [τὸ ταὐτὸν καὶ ἒν ἀριθμῶ ὂν δεκτικὸν εἶναι τῶν ἐναντίων κατὰ τὴν ἐαυτῆς μεταβολήν]” (4b, 17–18). What is thus most proper to the primordially divided (first and second) ousia is not to have anything proper, isolated, nonpublic, set apart from the rest, consecrated, and immutable. A receptacle for change, the manner of presence is eminently changeable and changing, capable of being present otherwise than it is. The manner of political presence everywhere trails and foreshadows that of ousia as such: it accommodates strife and consensus (and, within strife, two or more warring factions), tumult and order, revolution and institution. And it does so by becoming each time other, receiving into itself contention and its logical instantiation in contradiction to such an extent that these form what is ownmost to the political thing, its assemblage in falling apart.
Those who think that they have received a thoroughgoing explanation of politics through the analysis of its ousia should stand corrected. We have done no more than examine a single category. Should the investigation end here, it would be no different from the products of conceptual understanding, if not still more indefinite and abstract. To obtain a 3D image of politics, it is necessary to track a legion of res publica’s intersecting and diverging lines, segments, and planes that come to visibility in a kind of categorial stereoscopy.
Like the Latin quantitas after it, the Greek poson did not involve numeric values as abstract entities. In itself, the category condensed a question, how many? or how much?, rather than the number as an ethereal and ideal unit. Politically, the principal queries of poson are “How many are we?,” “How many rule over a polity?,” and “How many are subject to political authority?” Aristotle commences his Politics with a warning: asking about the numbers of those who are ruled over will get us nowhere, and least of all will it disclose the traits characteristic of politics. The contrast that truly matters, between a household and a city, is not the numeric extent of those subjected to the authority of each organization but “a difference in kind,” διαφέρειν ἀλ
οὐκ εἴδει (1252a, 10), indeed an eidetic difference to do with the type of the good a partnership is after.
Although how many? is not the definitive question about politics, it is not utterly irrelevant to the understanding of the res publica. Raise it we must, on the condition that it assume its rightful place in line with the rest of the categories. Both Plato and Aristotle were convinced that the size of the polity mattered for good governance. When the number of subjects surpassed the optimal (and relatively tight at that) limits, fair and just laws could no longer be administered and enforced. Far from arbitrary, the numeric constraints on a polity coincide with the threshold at which several households that form a political community (κοινωνία) attain self-sufficiency, or else self-rule (αὐταρκεία) (1252b, 29). Such constraints are therefore the consequences of, not the causes behind, the organization of human coexistence. Later on, for Montesquieu, the republican type of government befitted the territorially or population-wise smaller states versus the great expanses and extents of polities in Asia that called for despotism.7 Seeing past the Orientalist bias encrusted into his remarks—an attitude that persisted all the way to the twentieth century with Mikhail Bakunin’s reflections on China’s “monstrous size of the population”8—we may infer from the most diverse theoretical texts that substantive political matters are indissociable from quantitative categorizations. For example, when subjects are converted into “the masses” in parliamentary-democratic or authoritarian regimes, they are prone to being molded from the outside, instead of giving themselves political form in the richer sense of the Greek autarchy.
In Aristotle’s oeuvre, quantity has two modalities: discrete and continuous, διωρισμένον and συνεχές (Cat. 4b, 20–21). Discrete quantities are closer to numbers and the study of arithmetic; their continuous counterparts, those that are held or had together (sun-eché), involve geometrical measures—lines, surfaces, space, but also time (4b, 25). So, one may count the number of subjects and rulers (in self-rule these magnitudes are equal),9 as well as gauge the extent of the territory controlled over time by a given group, its borders being the political instantiations of the line. But to privilege, within quantity itself, the discrete kind or to assimilate the other kind to the discrete is to abdicate the paradox of continuous discontinuity and discontinuous continuity at the heart of this category, of any categorial assemblage, and of the political thing itself.
Each of the quantitative modalities points in the direction of specific political problems. The ratio of the rulers and the ruled calculated as discrete quantities gives us a measure of power, valid alongside its relational, qualitative, or activity-oriented categories. Concretely, however, the relation of the discrete and the continuous has been a matter of extreme concern in political theory, where the ratio of these measures indicates the effectiveness of control over a territory. Even the anarchist Bakunin was preoccupied with the vastness of the sparsely populated Russian Far East, traceable back to his native country’s “absurd desire to extend its frontiers.”10
Among discrete quantities, Aristotle somewhat surprisingly cites logos, its parts—the syllables—lacking a common limit, and so discontinuous with one another (4b, 34–36). That which establishes commonalities does not have contiguous borders between its components; it is internally fractured, bereft of the common, κοινὸν (4b, 36–37). At this moment in Aristotle’s text, speech is not the province of pure metaphysical presence. Logos proceeds at an unsteady pace and with a halting rhythm, its syllables taken together disjointedly. If politics is an engagement in logos, its spatiotemporal work of gathering is, at its origin, scattered and disassembled, working against itself. A political community in logos is disarticulated in its very articulations. Pluralistic openness to discussion, a continual renegotiation of provisions for coexistence, spasmodic restarts of the constitutive act—these are the tip of the iceberg, the visibly expressed facets of logos’s genetically fissured character.
Undeterred by fantasies of a totalitarian coalescence of the body politic and by attempts at a drastic separation from foreignness in absolute enmity, the one extreme nourishing the other, politics most often takes place in the gray area between the discrete and the continuous. The contiguity of borders (that is: of political lines, the prime exemplars of continuous—if, like all other categories, self-deformalizing—quantities) presupposes the existence of an exteriority that encroaches on the polity at its frontiers. The encroachment is the nontranscendental condition of possibility for war or for peace, incidental to how the inside configures and defines its relation to the outside. What, for Kant, is quality (limitation) and forms of intuition (space and time) is continuous quantity for Aristotle. Such technical discrepancies notwithstanding, there is no politics of the one shorn of the outside, be it relative or absolute. If everything were one, it would have still yielded a fractured unity needing the indefatigable work of harmonization, as we have discovered in Aristotle’s take on logos. Mao Zedong laconically expressed the axiom that the one does not exist as one, in a self-contained unity, by saying that “One divides into two” and adding: “This is a universal phenomenon; and this is dialectics.”11 Does it follow that the minimal political number is two?
The Schmittian friend-enemy split, phenomenologically encapsulating the experience of radicalization, corroborates the hypothesis that political numeration must begin at two. But it also raises several red flags (decidedly not of the Communist variety). When the two face each other, the script is not political but ethical, as per Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas. The encounter of the one and the other, to the exclusion of everything and everyone else, is a nongeneralizable, singular rendezvous, which may be terribly vicious or generous beyond measure. Levinas chronicles the event of facing the other across the gulf of “absolute separation,” the common spring of war and peace antecedent to both these political conditions.12 In the categorial language of discrete quantities, we could say that the separation between two units betrays the total indifference of numbers. Levinas, for his part, detects at the zero-point of ethics a radical nonindifference, probably because the Aristotelian diorismenon is not discrete enough for his philosophical taste.
Here, the other red flag ought to be raised. Both in ethics and in politics, there are never only two in a bilateral relation; in addition to the two, the time and space (time-space) of relative and absolute separation counts as the ineliminable third. In late Levinas, a trace of all the other others persists in the face of the other as politics suffuses ethics; in the political world, polarity is always a multipolarity embracing the poles and everything in-between, even in a global confrontation of two dominant factions, such as the Cold War. The relation of the rulers and the ruled, too, inspires us to start counting at three, as the space of legality among other modes of recognized legitimacy (in effect, the recognition of legitimacy as such) is tallied together with the two, who may, in self-rule, actually refer to one and the same subject. Whatever the circumstances, politics commences at three.
Like ousia, Aristotelian quantities have no contraries—τῶ ποςῶ οὐδέν ἐστιν ἐναντίον (5b, 12)—but unlike that category they do not alter themselves in order to accommodate difference. A lot depends on whether we deem contrariety essential to political reality. On the one hand, if the answer is yes, then quantity will be at odds with this essence, which is worrisome considering the special status it now enjoys among the categories. Quantitative coordinates will then be neutralizing and depoliticizing, conducive to a consensus to the extent that they reinforce a notion of politics as a census of opinions and positions, reconciled with an eye to the same indifferent premises. In the technocratic outlook, these effects of quantification are laudable. On the other hand, the answer may be no, in which case contrariety will be an ancillary product of res publica’s paradoxical categorial ensemble. As such, its erasure in quantitative predications will result in a superficial impoverishment of the political thing that will in no way affect the core of politics.
Democratic counts and tabulations receive difference on neutralized grounds, once real oppositions have been driven out. Buried under the neutrality and noncontrariety of numbers are substantive decisions on who or what is included in and excluded from a procedurally democratic bookkeeping. The stipulations of absolute vs. relative majorities, for instance, are not themselves quantitative, regardless of their constant preoccupation with the question how many (votes)? Try as we may, we will not find the value of neutrality in regimes other than democracy, despite the fact that numbers are instrumental for defining those systems of government as well (to stay with the case of monarchy: the rule—or the beginning, arkhē—of the one).
Aristotle discloses a deeper reason as to why quantities have no contraries: they do not participate in confrontational relations of oppositionality because, according to him, they are nonrelational. “More” or “less” are terms of comparison that work with quantities, to which they are not integral (5b, 15–25). This obtains per definitionem for discrete measures, or numbers. When they are integrated on a basis that is foreign to them, the deviations of one quantity from another betoken equality and inequality, ἴσον and ἄνισον (6a, 27–28). The equality of ousiais was that of incommensurables; numeric quantity is the equality of commensurability, at least potentially reducing different measures to the common denominator.
The formal routines of democratic equalization treat each vote as a quantum entirely separate from the qualitative dimension of political life and therefore inconsistent with categorial thinking. The democratic slogan “rule of laws, not men” further mystifies authority under the cloak of scientificity and transparency—more so when the “sovereign” law is that of numbers. For the laws neither interpret nor enforce themselves,13 and (in politics at least) numbers neither possess inherent significance nor relate to one another but require active human decision-making and interventions.
A categorial investigation of numerically classified political systems finds out that the rule of the many in democracy is not of a piece with any other regime. The monarchical one and the aristocratic few, along with their deficient variations, are quantities dictated by the extraneous qualitative criteria of fitness to rule: claims to divine appointment buttressing heredity, aristocratic virtue or wisdom, and so forth. In democracy, the quantitative element pertaining to “the majority” is, by contrast, definitive. The numeric classification of regimes is hardly neutral: it sifts through the political world from the perspective of democracy. Its fixation on one, few, and many rulers overlooks (willfully or not—that is another question) monarchic and aristocratic phenomenologies, where the monarch and the governing elite are incommensurate with the rest of the population, their authority predicated on that original inequality.
Democracies commence and ideally do not depart from equal or equalizable quantities: the tabulation of equally valid and powerful 1s. (I write “ideally do not depart,” since qualitative restrictions endure, whether as the benchmarks of gender and property ownership in democracy’s older varieties or as “the age of majority,” restricting the right to vote in the more recent installments.) For nondemocratic regimes, certain other-than-quantitative inequalities are fundamentally significant and the numbers of those who govern are secondary. Still, lest we suppose that total commensurability and incommensurability cover every meaning-horizon of politics, we should hark back not only to the category of ousia, which supplies the mediations between the two extremes and so makes room for thinking, but also to the very idea of the categories that obviates a unilateral determination of politics by any single one of them.
Elliptically, Aristotle removes contrariety and relationality from the universe of discrete quantities we call “numbers.” A line, space, and time are, in their turn, continuous measures constituted by relations among their parts that stand in the arrangements of before and after, above and below, and so on. As a rule, continuous measures are always “about space,” περὶ τὸν τόπον (5a, 12–13), the prototype of all continuity. In addition to their relational makeup, spatialized quantitative categories are also polarized at their extremes: “the extreme limits of the world-order [τὰ πέρατα τοῦ κόσμου] are the most distant from the middle place [πρὸς τῶ μέσον χώραν]” (5a, 14–15). Space is therefore intrinsically political, relationally differentiated, and polarized. Or at least such is our “phenomenological” view of it as the experienced order of the world, wherein the experiencing finds itself in the middle, flanked on every side by extreme “right” and “left,” “up” and “down,” “in front” and “behind.”
Building upon the category space, we can devise a schema of political topology. The analysis of continuous magnitudes is perhaps the most auspicious place to do so: after all, spatiality undergirds this type of quantitative measures as their ultimate point of reference. In his Categories Aristotle does not devote a separate section to space and time, choosing to discuss them within the scope of poson instead. But his unwavering insistence that they are categories conveys that they are born from the things themselves. In this respect, Aristotle’s philosophy is more sympathetic to the subsequent spatiotemporal projections of quantum mechanics, where quantity also vacillates with a fair share of indecision between continuity and discontinuity, waves and particles, than to the Newtonian-Kantian universe of vacuous physical or transcendental-aesthetic fields for a possible experience.14 “Quantum politics” similarly heralds the emergence of space and time from the singularities of the political things themselves: monarchic time from a history of monarchies; revolutionary temporality from the rhythm of revolutions; political space from actual political units, such as the polis, the Empire, or the nation-state. At the same time, to concede that the distributions of political time-space are singular is not to shirk the task of tracking down what they have in common. What, then, are the phenomenological (rather than the transcendental) coordinates for a spatiotemporal experience of politics?
Both the hierarchical layout of political spatiality and its revolutionary upsetting in egalitarianism ignore the three-dimensionality of each res publica:
1. Verticality. Bearing a clear stamp of their theological provenance, relations of power rely, to the point that all other orientational markers drop from collective memory, on the experience of what is above and below. Flat as they wish to be, egalitarian-horizontal communal arrangements are unable to dispense with this dimension, which is as necessary to political spatiality as to that of the lifeworld. Appeals to a source of legitimacy, be it the “general will” or a democratic decision of the people, zero in on something (or someone) to look up to or to build the rest of the political edifice upon. Vladimir Putin’s “vertical of power” (vertikal’ vlasti) establishing a chain of direct command from the president down to gubernatorial and municipal authorities is a secular version of the theological alignment of top-down politics.
2. Horizontality. Political horizontality is not emblematic of undifferentiated and amorphous multitudes alone. It is the axis, on which to discern what is to the right and to the left of a given spatiotemporal stance. The parliamentary order, dating back to the postrevolutionary period in France, is one instance of this phenomenological orientation. “Right” and “left” do not draw their sense from party politics; the official game of parliamentarism takes their phenomenological significance for granted and twists it for its own purposes. That is why these markers are semantically recoded, tagged with a novel meaning, when the spatiality of the political thing is itself reoriented, particularly away from, or in the direction of, parliamentary democracy.
3. Dorsality. The dorsal-frontal contrast between what is behind and what lies ahead shores up the antagonism between conservatism or traditionalism and political vanguardism. But, just as “right” and “left” change places when the sentient body at the epicenter of lived spatiality moves, so the dorsal plane can come to the front when this body turns around. In politics, these turns or turnings are known as revolutions.
4. Still before the theory of relativity, philosophers had been abreast of the fourth dimension, traversing the three spatial axes: time. For Aristotle, time is rooted in space. And one way to honor his acumen, with which twentieth-century philosophical luminaries Heidegger and Derrida took issue, is to monitor how time cuts through space in “4D.” Continuous measures of time are related to movement, its Aristotelian sense not stopping at locomotion. For the purposes of this overview, let us merely say that time intrudes whenever a body politic shifts its positions (as well as metamorphoses, grows, decays, or is subject to a combination of these sorts of motility) across one or all dimensions of political spatiality. In other words, time permeates every bit of space in the dynamics of the body politic, from imperceptible oscillations to seismic shakeups and dramatic leaps.
If political time-space germinates in the res publica ipse, then the experiences of before and after, below and above, behind and in front, right and left, are contingent on the relative positions of political processes, vectors, structures, institutions, and actors. Movements, such as the Nazi Hitler Youth or the Polish Solidarity, Alt-Right or Occupy, are behind or below the state, which they support or subvert. Revolutions irrupt from the crisis of stagnating institutions they hope to turn around. The democratic principle of the separation of powers, animating the system of checks and balances, inaugurates a strange political space where each branch is in some way above and in another way below the other two. National calendars commemorate the anniversaries of wars, rebellions, and declarations of independence, less so important treaties and diplomatic achievements conducive to coexistence; political time is, as a rule, represented in the shape of a bellicose, albeit finally triumphant, history. Political time-space is concretized (is figured and embodied, but also, in view of the etymology of concrete, “comes together” or “grows with,” con + crescere) in relations binding diverse instances of the political this. It is nothing else than a sequencing, distribution, and compilation of dispersed political effects without a unitary cause.
These are but preliminary observations on the political categories of space and time as they bear upon continuous measures. To return to Aristotle: mapping out the world’s “extreme limits” and the “middle place” situated at the greatest remove from them, he teaches us another vital political lesson. In colloquial and specialist usages alike, extremism tends to presuppose something similar—the distance of extremist political elements from the center. The extremes do not only lie to the right and left but also above and below (elitist and grassroots), in front of and behind (progressive and regressive) the midpoint. The political topographies they contribute to are internally and externally relative. Internally, insofar as the three pairs of extremes are what they are in relation to the center. Externally, inasmuch as the centers of political systems rarely coincide with one another in time-space. In a progressive development, Saudi Arabian women exercised their right to vote and to stand as candidates for the first time in the 2015 municipal elections. For Canadians, in the same year, this phenomenon is the centrist norm; a progressive gesture is that of deliberate gender parity adopted by Justin Trudeau’s government. The relativity of the extremes is not, however, comparable to the tenets of relativism that takes stock of political systems from a feigned and indifferent perspective, coy to the point of being disingenuous about its perspectival character as a permutation of Western liberalism. A nonrelativist anchor for relative terms is the experience of res publica, which orchestrates singular spatiotemporal and other categorial assemblages.
Dorsal-frontal extremism evolves into time extremism when it comes to contain an experiential admixture of anachronism or, conversely, the sense that reforms are running ahead of the times. And what if the political center itself is extreme or extremist? This prospect is not unthinkable: the phenomenological construal of the categories unfixes time and space from “objective” constraints and entrusts the center to the vicissitudes of (political) existence. The Aristotelian “middle place” (mesos khōra) is not a product of averaging out the extremes akin to a mathematical mean. In its lived averageness, as a milieu, it does not belong to what is above or below, right or left, in front or behind, because these differences make sense exclusively in its orbit. A precondition for meaning-bestowal, it is itself meaningless, immoderate, immeasurable. The same goes for the political “center.” In lieu of a consensual meeting point, moderating the intensity of oppositions, the in-between that is mesos khōra is the excluded middle, potentiating the extremes in their polarization. It is the extreme that, having won in a battle against the alternatives, can present itself as a bulwark of realism and appear to be neutral. Is that not the quagmire of contemporary politics with the neoliberal center—or, if you will, the Washington Consensus also reflected in the European Union’s austerity programs—bringing to life, both within and outside Europe and the United States, the very extremisms it sets out to fight?
The category of relation also sounds like a question: what to?, pros ti. In agreement with the accusation central to categorial thinking, the interrogatory drive singles out the thing not by placing it in a predefined box, as classificatory systems do, but by exploring its dimensions in an open-ended style typical of an inquiry.
The succinct answer to the question of relationality is to the other. “The thing is relative [or else, “the thing is for or to what”],” Aristotle writes, “when it is said to be for what the other is [Πρός τι δὲ τὰ τοιαῦτα λέγεται, ὄσα αὐτὰ ἄπερ ἐστὶν έτέρων λέγεται], or, if not, then it is for the other [πρὸς ἔτερον] in some other way” (6a, 37–8). In this sense, the as what of ousia is the most relational category of all, considering its unlimited capacity to accommodate otherness by becoming other to itself. Politics is also profoundly relational: not only does it require engagement with friends and enemies, not only does it link the ruling to the ruled, the constituting with the constituted, but it also issues from the becoming-other of other, potentially political or politicizable precincts of human activity. It is not, for all that, sufficient to mouth platitudes about the relational ontology of everything in existence, very much in vogue in ecological theory, where difference and differentiation are lamentably undifferentiated. Resisting the temptation to indulge in ecology’s worldwide purée, we must patiently persevere in thinking through the meaning of to the other that shores up relationality.
To the other acquires multiple hues depending on who or what the political other is. If the other is an enemy, then, at the height of an armed conflict, a group of friends is toward him or her in the expectation of killing or being killed. Existential enemies are the others toward whom I am with the intent of terminating their being—physically, as well as with regard to their whoness or whatness, their ousia, their being-present-as something or someone. A friend is another political other, but, for all intents and purposes, an other who is less other compared to the enemy and, therefore, satisfies less well the Aristotelian criterion for relations. Now, these comparisons at the core of political relationality are themselves political; they are the corollaries of a decision on the exceptionality of the enemy other, not of a pregiven and merely objective difference. Friends and allies are those for whom I am an intermediary link, if not the means, in a situation of being to or for the enemy (who threatens to alter my being, to render it other). A political community, on this Schmittian reading congruent with Hobbes, is assembled in a series of countermeasures addressing the threat of alterity, which may lie outside or reside inside it.
Approached from a different angle, to the other is an ethics extended to the entire political compact. Assuming with Plato and Aristotle that the goal of political organization is not just any kind of life but a good life, the ties that bind each citizen to all the others are those of the common good. The idea of the commonwealth and its afterglow in the welfare state are intimately related to this thick account of relationality, compressed into the motto All for one and one for all. A group of friends is still a medium through which one is toward something or someone other: in the Hobbesian-Schmittian narrative, the enemy; in the Platonic-Aristotelian account, a good life. Nonetheless, in the ancient vision of political relationality, the means and the ends are one and the same if, being for the other participants in a political association, I am for the common good, itself inseparable from my own well-being and that of my fellow citizens. Outside this ethicopolitical sphere of relationality, a private good and private goods are insecure and shorn of meaning.
Ideology excels in imperceptible substitutions of the one to whom the arm of a relation is extended. It often makes us believe that something or someone is for the universal good, when in reality the political relation is that of a part, a party, or a faction that apportions to itself the status of the universal. Ideology is set to work where the well-being of a part pretends to be for the good of the whole, slipping in another other than the one talked about, for example, a group of propertied, male, white gentry for the citizen, if not for the human. The neoliberal myth of trickle-down economics equates the interest of the owners of the means of production with that of the additional workers they are able to hire thanks to their growing profit margins and, in broader concentric circles still, with the interest of society in toto. This series of ideological substitutions should have come to an abrupt end in the hyperspeculative phase of capitalism, when nothing escapes the imaginative realm of futures, derivatives, and hedge funds. But the substitutions linger on past their due date, so that it is a matter of widespread belief—of blind faith even—that the augmentation of the fantastic, speculative-economic creature that is the market somehow translates into an increase in everyone’s wealth. Logical absurdity of such beliefs aside, they respect the Aristotelian structure of relationality: what to of economic growth is indeed destined to the other, who is simply dissimulated behind other others. The workers and their interests serve as human shields for neoliberal dissimulation, long after the material bottom for their contrived trickle-down enrichment has dropped out.
The question to raise in this regard is how Rancière’s presentation of “genuine” politics—as that part which, denied recognition and participation in the official process, demands to be counted, and so universalizes itself—simulates and, at the same time, inverts the tactics of ideology. Is passing a part for the whole, and so escalating the othering of the other to whom a thing is in relation, the unwritten rule of all political tactics and countertactics? Is synecdoche the sine qua non of relationality? Is a kind of generalized bolshevism, the universal exception of a minority party that manages to universalize itself, the best we can aspire to?
Aristotle contends that what to always points to something toward which it is. To is always of something: “habit is a habit of [τινὸς] something; knowledge is knowledge of something; position is a position of something” (6b, 4–6). Millennia later, Husserl will consolidate his phenomenology around this fruitfully tautological thesis, out of which he will fashion the axiom of intentionality: all consciousness is a consciousness of something. But, at the theoretical source, explaining the category of relation, Aristotle replaces the dative with the genitive, to with of, ethics with economics, givenness to the other with the appropriation of the other. The saving grace in the substitution is a modicum of ambiguity factored into the genitive case, which, individuating the appropriating agents, appropriates them to what they appropriate. And the site of that ambiguity is politics, slotted between the ethical and the economic relations to alterity.
The impressive pliability of pros ti is attributable to the nature of Aristotelian relativity, which is essentially relative. Linking the one and the other, the in-between which I have translated as what to is unmoored from difference and sameness, and it lends itself to comparisons of like and like as much as to contraries: “like is said to be of like [τὸ ὄμοιον τινὶ ὂμοιον λέγεται]” (6b, 9) and “what to is sometimes of contraries [ἐναντιότης ἐν τοῖς πρός τι]” (6b, 15). Pros ti transposed onto the friend-enemy distinction is metapolitical, in that it acts as a jointure within and between opposing collectives. It will be said that (logical) contrariety is not the same thing as an existential opposition thought or fought out in a life-and-death struggle. Valid as it may be, the objection does little to defeat the categorial approach to politics: Aristotle’s theses on pros ti do not postulate an affective response to the other. His own example of a relation between contraries is that of excellence (or virtue), ἀρετὴ, and badness, κακία (6b, 16), qualities befitting both a who and a what, human beings and how well or how poorly anything performs its function. Aristotelian relationality does not in the least presuppose a prefabricated sense of ousia; on the contrary, it assists in the shaping of second ousia—this as that—by articulating this and that. Its autonomy vis-à-vis sameness and otherness also releases the category and the politics it informs from the shackles of anthropocentrism that hold the friend-enemy dyad back.
Intrapolitical relations cast a significantly wider net than the Schmittian couple would allow. Without a common cause, the political effects of a state, ideology, revolution, movement, power, and sovereignty are nevertheless not indifferent toward one another: each is toward or against the others. Hegemonic ideology is for the sake of the state, which it strengthens through the cathexis of patriotic involvement; the revolution is toward the state in the mode of against, overthrowing it. None of this, to wit, is set in stone. In the age of transnational capitalism, the ideological cathexis to the state is loosened in favor of “mobility.” And a revolution may overthrow one state form so as to establish another, which would be an intermediary step to a classless—and stateless—society. Such reversals indicate that intrapolitical relations are highly contextual, occasion-specific, and indexed to the political things themselves.
POSITIONALITY AND CORRELATIONALITY
Although positionality (θέσις) is a category in its own right, Aristotle is quick to acknowledge that the actual positions one may assume are relative: “while lying, standing [στάσις], and sitting are positions, the position as such is what to [ἠ δὲ θέσις τῶν πρός τι]” (6b, 12). The state and revolution are the relative positions of the political thing, the positing and the deposing that destabilize the very neat divisions between rest and movement. Political energy moves across and rests on the boundaries of status quo and change. When politicians say they want “stability,” their remark only means that they wish for the status quo not to be altered, though it’s often the status quo that makes everything dangerously unstable. Discursively and ontologically, the sta- of stability and of status turns against itself, splitting the atom of meaning.
Stasis, the colloquial word for standing, has conflicting political connotations, as it means stability and tumult, the state and the overthrow, or the convulsions, of the state. (The closest English equivalent is the adjective restive, which twists rest into its opposite: a state of agitation, edginess, fractiousness, and indeed unrest.) Politics is for the one and the other (the category of relation not superadded to but ingrained in political activity) in such a way that it is for the one as the other. That is perhaps what Aristotle has in mind when he reasons that “all relations imply their correlatives [Πάντα δὲ τὰ πρός ἀντιστρέφοντα λέγεται],” (6b, 29)—a phrase that we may sensibly translate as “all instances of what to are said against that toward which they are.” Antistrephon can, as a matter of fact, allude to a correlation and, in its technical-juridical sense, to a reversible argument, convincingly and conclusively presented by a party to litigation. In line with the tribunal of the categories, the tautology and antinomy of political relations in antistrephonta belong to a strange aggregate of same otherness and other sameness.
The reversibility of relations makes them indistinguishable from correlations. Self-relatedness or self-affection is the bedrock for all relations to an outside other; what to boomerangs, coming back to itself as that to which it was intended. So, “perception perceives the perceptible, and the perceptible is perceived by perception [ἠ αἴσθησις αἰσθητοῦ αἴσθησις καὶ τὸ αἰσθητὸν αἰσθήσει αἰσθητόν]” (6b, 37–38).
As I’ve already mentioned, in phenomenological philosophy heavily influenced by Aristotle’s relationality, circular, autoaffective correlations abound: seeing is the seeing of the seen, desiring is the desiring of the desired, and so forth. Politically speaking, ruling is the ruling of the ruled and, vice versa, the ruled are ruled by the ruling. The tautological circularity of power relations and correlations seems so conservative as to expunge the very thought of revolt against the established order. At the same time, the political-phenomenological locution Aristotle inspires subordinates the rulers to the ruled, if only by means of the symbolic recognition the latter grant to (but may likewise withhold from) the former. When ideological defenses weaken, it becomes evident that, in any system of governance, the ruled themselves rule by silently or vociferously giving their assent to the political authorities du jour. (Approval by acclamation has not disappeared; it has merely become sublimated.) The point is to make that relation simmer, magma-like, beneath the officially static crusts of power, and so realize self-rule not as something to be achieved in a utopian future but as what has always already been the case without the ruled knowing it.
To release the explosive potential hidden in political correlations, the last thing we need is to break the cycle of fruitful tautologies. For Aristotle, such an abrupt gesture culminates in category mistakes: a bird might be a winged being, he reasons, but “wing” and “bird” are not correlations, “for the wing is the wing of a bird, when considered as winged, not as bird” (7a, 1–2). A philosophically correct description asserts, instead, “a wing is a wing of the winged, and the winged in winged by a wing [τὸ πτερὀν πτερωτοῦ πτερὀν καὶ τὸ πτερωτὸν πτερῶ πτερωτόν]” (7a, 4).
Confused correlations are the province of political ideologies of all stripes. Take the constatives Obedience is the lot of the masses and Freedom is the destiny of the masses. Both replicate the Aristotelian example of the bird and the wing and, therefore, ought to be restated in the following way: Obedience is the obedience of the obedient, and the obedient are made obedient by obedience and Freedom is the freedom of the free, and the free are freed by freedom. A mode of being or a behavior gives birth to the behaving being, which is born, on the other side of the equation, of the mode of being or behavior that singularizes it. The political correlation works perfectly when it comes to obedience, accepting the passive voice that completes the loop of mutual determination. Fear, the master, and a sense of duty (the master internalized) are not the real causes of obedience; the true cause is the obedient conduct of those who choose to obey, which invalidates Kant’s injunction for the public use of reason with its schizophrenic split between modes of behavior and the corresponding behaving being: Argue as much as you please, but obey! But freedom is not so straightforward. How does one get there? By what is one freed? For it is one thing to be made obedient by obedience for obedience, and another thing altogether to be freed by freedom for freedom. Freedom is of those who are freed. Under what circumstances does this most active of passive voices—“freed,” which is in this sense similar to “energized”—spring up? Where and when may a transition away from the state of unfreedom happen?
A tantalizing prospect is that we must be already “freed by freedom” to come up with a satisfactory response to these questions. What we have before us is one of the few occasions when the Aristotelian model of correlationality turns out to be inoperative, ceases to work, putting itself out of commission. Categorial thinking runs into one of its limits, an impasse that, even more so, affects conceptual thought. As unbolted and unhinged as it is hermetically sealed in itself, the frame for the appreciation of freedom in existence and in cogitation can be only supplied by freedom itself. Something of this hypertautology that lets newness enter the world flashes in Aristotle’s advice to coin words where they do not exist in order to enunciate correlations: for instance, “the ruddered,” which is of the rudder (7a, 5–15). The freedom to reinvent language and thinking itself is, far from arbitrary, motivated by the desire to live up to the thing itself, or, in this case, to the relation, the what to that holds between two or more things. If no word exists, it is necessary “to give the word to that which it is proper to [ῆ ὄνομα πρὸς ὂ οἰκείως ἂν ἀποδοθείν]” (7a, 6–7). Relationality per se begins with the relation between a word and the thing proper to it.
In political philosophy we have grown accustomed to the equivalent of correlates between a wing and a bird, not a wing and the winged. We explain politics starting from the state, power, enmity (the list goes on). The time has come to heed Aristotle and to find new words for the relational and, above all, correlational nature of politics in a political “word-creation,” ὀνοματοποιία (7b, 14), which we inherit within the stifling rhetorical limits of “onomatopoeia.”
Without going too far afield, a correlation might be condensed in the declaration Politics is the politics of the politicized and the politicized is politicized by politics. The first half of the statement declares that politics is the objective achievement of politicization, not an abstract entity or a network of institutions. The statement’s second half broaches the theme of the shifts from nonpolitical to political realities, tracking the outcome back to the impetus behind it. It follows that politics is the relation between the politicized and the politicizing and that it is, in fact, the politicizing of the politicized. Still, the tautology veils—more than it unmasks—politicization, which sweeps previously nonpolitical realities into the whirl of politics. It is with the view to fine-tuning the comprehension of political dynamism that I have introduced in chapter 1 of this study the neologism infrapolitics/intrapolitics.
Tellingly, correlational tautologies prove to be inapplicable to freedom as much as to politics. That is not a coincidence. The Aristotelian category of relation is basically economic and, as such, extraneous to both freedom and politics. It works if and when what to is paired with that to which it is “appropriate,” οἰκείως (7b, 10)—the domesticated, domestic, housed in the proper dwelling (oikos). Epistemic appropriateness stems from ontological property, into which the relation at hand and the parties to it are converted. This conversion instigates the replacement of the dative with the genitive case in the categorial question of relationality and the hunt after a word “proper” to each correlation. Yet, freedom and politics are radically inappropriate and aneconomic. The former thrives on the rifts in the relation between what to and that to which it is tied; the latter, as the movement and outcome of politicization, betokens an objectively unfinished transit from infra- to intrapolitics, in the course of which the identities of (proper to) previously nonpolitical domains are ruthlessly expropriated. We would be doing thinking a disservice if we were using the standards of propriety and appropriateness for political relationality and the rest of political categories. One thing alone is appropriate to the thinking of politics—its inappropriateness consistent with fidelity to the res publica “ipse.”
Relations in political epistemology are, consequently, fraught. It is a scenario Aristotle looks on as virtually unimaginable, something that, to his mind, occurs “in very few cases or never”: “the known comes into being at the same time as the knowing [ἄμα τῶ ἐπιστητῶ τὴν ἐπιστήμην γινομένην]” (7b, 27). We normally experience a time lag between the two sides in the correlation, with simultaneity reserved exclusively for their logical articulation. The politicized as politicized is abnormal because it does not preexist political knowledge; if politicization is the process whereby previously nonpolitical realities become other to themselves, then its culmination in the politicized merely objectifies the becoming-other of that which is not and will never be totally political. In “real time,” in the unfolding of political history, the knowing is coemergent with the known, the experiencing with the experienced. Which is to say that political ontology does not underlie political epistemology as its stable substratum, but is conjured up, along with this very epistemology, in the noncorrespondence, the inappropriateness, the exorbitance, and the departures from themselves of other zones of human activity that undergo politicization.
Aristotle is willing to admit the aporia of relative ousia, in which what something presents itself as is conditional on another thing outside it, a what to it implies (8a, 14–20). But he would find unacceptable the definition of a being through a relation to that which it is not or, worse, to that which negates what it is. Ontological inappropriateness is, of course, characteristic of politics, essentially betrothed to what is not essential to it. Whenever we point an accusative-categorical-categorial finger at it, we indicate another thing altogether, albeit an other entrenched in the elusive phenomenon we are after. Conducting the politicizing toward the politicized, political realities are tethered to the nonpolitical in a dynamic relation of interiority and exteriority, the relation that brings home the crucial lesson of relationality, namely that the truth of a relation resides not in the relata but between them. Accordingly, the rise of demagogues who exploit the fuzziness of political categories is a parasitic spin-off of res publica’s ontological condition, which is that of being literally up for grabs.
As far as primary ousia is concerned, Aristotle rules out its relational constitution: “this human is said of this human alone, and this ox—only of this ox [τις ἄνθρωπος οὐ λέγεται τινός τις ἄνθρωπος, οὐδὲ ὀ τὶς βοῦς τινός τις βοῦς]” (8a, 18–19). At most, one can say that this is designated in relation to itself, its what to flowing back to the source of the categorial question; hence, the difficulties of accessing primary presence as primary outside the hermeneutical structure of the second ousia, this as that. The same goes for parts (τὰ μέρη) of this: “ ‘this head’ is said of the head belonging to this headed being” (8a, 20–22). Totalitarianism and certain patriotic appeals flout this axiom of the this, insofar as they define this human as belonging, body and soul, to the polity: her head, heart, and arms are ultimately not hers, because the singular what to of these organs makes sense exclusively on the terms dictated by the exigencies of the state’s endurance, ideologically substituted for personal survival. Against the backdrop of totalitarianism, the challenge of political relationality is to carve out a niche exempt from the (private, idiomatic, and idiotic) isolation of self-referential being and from the absorption of this existence in the state, the nation, the ideology, or the movement that dwarf it. Second ousia may be an indispensable tool for the creation of political solidarity, stitching together the uncompromisingly singular this and the universal that, to which it is in a relation of ontological affinity.
The question of quality—poiótēs—is of what sort? Aristotle endeavors to circumscribe it to “that according to which things are said to be of a kind [κα
ἢν ποιοί τινες εἶναι λέγονται]” (8b, 25–26). Politically inflected, this category queries the sort of regime in place, as well as the kind of thing the political is. The ancients sought the answers in, at, and from the end, the telos that differentiated each thing according to the kind it belonged to. The good, to which an entity aspired and for which it was intended, regulated the sort of being that that entity was. An orientation to the common good was that according to which the political thing was of a kind called political. The qualitative features of a regime could be deduced from the degree of its proximity to this teleological criterion. The pressing philosophical issue was whether or not the regimes realized their full potential and squared in actuality with the kind of thing they were meant to be.
Aristotle began the analysis of quantity with a division between discrete and continuous measures; at the outset of his discussion of quality he similarly discerns two kinds of kind: habit, ἔξις, and disposition, διάθεσις (8b, 27). For convenience’s sake, we might think of habit as the attained and repeated actuality of a quality, and of disposition as its mere potentiality, which explains the depiction of the former as “more lasting and stable” (8b, 28). Nota bene: habit is a key ingredient of Aristotelian practical ethics, blended in his Categories with virtues as well as with knowledge (8b, 29). Its expanded scope is due to habit’s association with actuality—energeia or entelecheia—that firmly anchors it in the teleology of quality. The Aristotelian thinking of poiótēs thus sways between potentiality and actuality, the degrees between these extremes refining the qualitative makeup of things.
With respect to political regimes, movements, and ideologies, there is an important qualitative benchmark: Do they merely yearn for the common good? Are they in the habit of procuring this good? Or do they exhibit neither this tendency nor this habit, betraying the sort of thing said to be political? As in individual conduct, so in statecraft, democratic habits, reflected in actual practices and institutions, are stronger than democratic dispositions. That said, the differences are not clear-cut: habitually democratic regimes may display dictatorial or despotic tendencies, and vice versa, dictatorships may experience (and brutally suppress) democratic aspirations. For all its irony, North Korea’s official designation, “the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” aping East Germany’s “German Democratic Republic,” speaks to a strategic bid for international legitimation and, crucially, to a need to provide a symbolic outlet to the unconscious desire for democracy. The names of the two states are symptoms in a precise psychoanalytic sense: they are the distorted compulsions to repeat (control and assuage) the traumatic break between an actual political habit and the inverse disposition that only aggravates the trauma. (The overt declaration We are a democracy camouflages the negation of what it declares, We are not a democracy.)
Quality-wise, every political order is mixed, not insofar as it has a mixed constitution (for example, monarchical and parliamentary) but insofar as it is a mélange of actuality and potentiality, haunted by nonactualized hopes and unfulfilled desires. A political order is a blend of political and nonpolitical tendencies, dispositions, states, and habits. Take despotism, which has just made its appearance in this text. It is an originally economic category, smuggled from despótēs—“the master of a household”—to the political arenas of the Roman Empire, Byzantium, and the European Enlightenment. Forever in excess of itself, a political order is qualitatively an order and its disordering, a fixed habit and a disposition toward an alternative habitual practice.
If the content of this Aristotelian category sounds somewhat counterintuitive, the reason for this tinge of oddness is that when we think of quality, what we have in mind are the experienced physical phenomena of heat and cold, hardness and softness, greenness and purpleness. Human beings can become habituated to an extremely hot or cold environment, their adaptability impressive beyond belief. But the talk of actualization is absurd there, where every qualitative disposition fluctuates between “more” and “less” to the extent that it “can move well and changes with success [ἐστιν εὐκινητα καὶ ταχὺ μεταβάλλοντα]” (8b, 36). When Descartes meditates on the alterable qualities of a piece of wax, he reduces quality to a fickle disposition, a potentiality devoid of actuality. His construct of this category is emblazoned on our minds. The fickleness of politics is a point of contact with the modern (Cartesian) take on quality, divorced from actuality and from habits that, rather than the repeated patterns and crystallized manners of being, refer to behavioral characteristics. Other than that, isn’t it preposterous to elucidate political realities qualitatively?15
Once again, everyday political discourse is an excellent weatherglass for hypotheses on the categorial nature of politics, and it does not shy away from qualitative terms. We are used to the invocations of soft power and tough leadership, or red and blue states. In some of my previous work in political philosophy I have ventured to retrieve the qualitative plane of politics via “elemental regimes”: the fitful preponderance of the elements of the earth, water, air, and fire in the discursive and material constitution of the political. In Pyropolitics, I concentrate on the element of fire that choreographs the dance of political change and stability. Regimes may be categorized as “hot” or “cold,” or else as heating up or cooling down, regulated by the degree and extent of public engagement. Responsible for low voter turnouts, the motivational deficit that besets liberal democracy is a sure sign that the temperature of the body politic is decreasing. Revolutionary outbreaks are the manifestations of a sweltering political disposition. The efflorescence of social movements augurs an increase in political heat; the piling up of state bureaucracy is a cooling down that ensues from the obsession of the status quo with capturing what is in a frozen snapshot of the real.
The materiality of heat and cold in politics is irreducible to the logic of metaphor. The problematic Eurocentric feel of his remarks notwithstanding, Montesquieu ought to be applauded for the attention he pays to the interactions between a specific climate and the modes of political organization, the attention that still marked Nietzsche’s physiological theory of politics. Devoting several chapters to climate in The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu observes how “in hot climates … despotism usually reigns, passions make themselves felt earlier and are also deadened sooner,”16 or how “if it is true that the character of the spirit and the passions of the heart are extremely different in the various climates, laws should be relative to the differences in these passions and to the differences in these characters.”17 Dubious as his subsequent physiological justifications were, the French thinker did well to pore over the nexus of political organization and the place where it belonged. The qualitative side of political spatiality is this embeddedness of politics in the site where it happens, consistent with the root of climate, which means a region, partitioning the Earth into distinct zones. Continuous geometrical measures are inadequate to the task of setting the parameters for political spatiality, because the places of human and nonhuman habitation are patchy and indeed dwindling, the tensions between global homogeneity imposed on them and their physical or elemental heterogeneity inviting the intensification of conflicts, as well as fresh opportunities for sharing and solidarity.
Since the French Revolution onward, the discourse of freedom and democracy has been universalist, and so advantageous for conceptual thought, not for categorial thinking; for the movement of globalization, not for the dreams of planetary coexistence; for a flattening abstraction, not for a sharing in difference. In that revolution’s aftermath, the exaggeration of empty universality and the expansion of its void led directly to the Reign of Terror, as Hegel argues in Phenomenology of Spirit. If we are to avoid a global reign of capitalist terror, replete with a neofeudal reaction to its excesses, we ought to contextualize the universalist discourse, to put it in a particular place and to put it in its place, to reattach it to the qualitatively uneven experience of political space. That is what the category of quality promises. Of what sort? simulates the function of the categories in miniature, mediating the abstract kind and concrete being of the kind without sacrificing the one to the other. Its synthesis of the concrete and the abstract, of spatial singularity and universality, obviates criticisms leveled at the parochial politics of belonging to a place, resurgent on different continents in the extreme right’s retaliation against the neoliberal policies of free trade and multiculturalism.
A focus on the qualitative characteristics of space emplaced on the already differentiated surface of the Earth is part and parcel of elemental geopolitics. Beyond the contrast between globalism and antiglobalism, qualitative spatiality inheres in a planetary politics that repudiates the sterile abstraction of the globe. Kant glimpsed something of this idea, when in his essay on perpetual peace he based the cosmopolitan sharing of the Earth on the finite roundness of its horizons. Thanks in part to Ulrich Beck’s work on the risk society, we are also abreast of the negative and obscure underside of elemental geopolitics. The repercussions of local events, such as the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, send ripples across national boundaries, outside the places where these events happen, unstoppable by any walls. Evidently, spatial “sorts,” or qualitatively differentiated places, are not insulated from one another but interlaced by shared aspirations and common menaces.
Dissimilar as they might appear, the digital virtualization of space and global climate change are complicit in the qualitative divestment of space. Synchronizing disparate political time-spaces online can facilitate the organization of protest movements, otherwise hampered by the state apparatus from exercising their right of assembly. Still, the overall impact of digital synchronization is that it swaps possibility for the category of quality, razing differences between places as effectively as the dictatorship of quantity does. César Rendueles is right to criticize the “cyberfetishism” of alternative political organizations for its escapism, a “digital utopia”18 that replicates the logic of globalization it resists. Seen through the Aristotelian lens, quality overshadowed by quantification and digitalization is thoroughly potential, a sheer disposition pretending to hone the habits of citizen participation in disembodied contexts (the signing of online petitions and so on) or in one-off, typically reactive outbursts that may sometimes lead to physical protests and demonstrations.
If, in its broadest sense, climate is synonymous with the qualitative side of spatiality, then “global climate change” prompts a displacement and rearrangement of places on a planetary scale. The lived places themselves are disturbed, disarticulated, displaced by this change, which turns them uninhabitable, whether by submerging them under the rising seas or by driving average temperatures beyond a tolerable limit. The world is rezoned and repartitioned, not by way of a deliberate political decision but through the instauration of a new nonhuman (and inhuman) nomos of the Earth on the heels of the catastrophic impact human technologies have had on the environment. The shrinking areas fit for human habitation combined with the overall heating up of climates around the world will enable the expansion of despotism, if we are to believe Montesquieu. While the digitalization of space skips over qualitative determinations, climate change aggravates qualitative indeterminacy, whereby some sorts of places (those that are still habitable) mutate into other sorts (those already uninhabitable). The guiding question of quality, of what sort?, prompts a mystifying response that reaches over into the domain of relationality: of another.
Aristotle distributes various types of qualities on a continuum, stretching between activity and actuality at one of its ends and passivity and potentiality at the other. The qualitative divestment of space confines spatiality to a mere potentiality in what is a sure sign of categorial depletion. Modernity reserves a comparable fate of nearly complete virtualization for the quality of goodness, which is, as far as Aristotle is concerned, neither the product of an axiological judgment nor another instance of potentiality, of a passive disposition to be or to do good. Rather, the ancient good (which Hegel will recover by means of the actuality, Wirklichkeit, of spirit in his Phenomenology) cannot be dissociated from the actualization of an intention, bringing about the end for which an action was undertaken. To be good at something is to “act with ease [τοῦ ποιῆσαί τι ῤαδίως]” (8b, 20) toward the accomplishment of a goal, smoothly helped along toward actuality.
Good governance and good politics would, on this view, be defined by the ease with which they attain their end. Unattached to any formal regime, the quality of goodness invites an intransigently pragmatic evaluation. Which states, friend-enemy groupings, or movements effectively live up to their stated purpose? Even when substantive ends are missing, as in Schmitt’s theory, this quality can be ascertained with respect to other categories (for example, the quantitative-relational intensity of antagonism) that remain in the foreground. At the same time, an unfettered political action capable of actualizing a plan or a program without resistance is often an ominous phenomenon: the smoothness of its passage from potentiality to actuality means that the opposition has been silenced, if not altogether eliminated. Assuming that the ease of attaining objectives and implementing the vision of political ends is the criterion for goodness, democracies will fail to live up to it. Institutional safeguards, the most prominent of them being the separation of powers, ensure that democratic political action is not easy and, in effect, uneasy, edgy, troubled by in-built obstacles to its attainment. That against which the practicalities of implementation are judged is not given, or at least not pregiven, in democracy with its difficult and “objectively” irresolvable negotiation of the nature of the good. Exactly what it is good for is always a matter of unavoidable uncertainty, and of suspicion to some.
The democratic capacity for self-reconfiguration puts this regime on the side of potentiality, its form perpetually mutating into something else. Together with figure (σχῆμά), shape or form (μορφή) is still another kind of quality for Aristotle (9b, 12). In the world of politics, the shape, the figuration of a regime, is the appearance of the constitution that makes it identifiable as what it is. A monarchy has a monarchical constitution, which, more than the fundamental law of the land, let alone a document containing this law, is the figure of the polity, its Gestalt. The figure of democracy is a constant reconfiguration or transfiguration, moving beyond the contours of a figure and in the direction of being figureless, un- or disfigured. Since its quality is ephemeral, other categories take the lead in defining it, especially the quantitative (majorities) and the modal (possibilities for change).
Democratic mutations are not limited to the never-ending modifications within democracy, teetering on the brink of an alteration into a nondemocracy. (In a nutshell, this is Derrida’s argument in Rogues.) Tirelessly reforming and deforming itself, shedding its shape and trying it on again, otherwise, democracy approximates politics “as such,” its boundaries equally porous and crossed both ways as regards the nonpolitical. As a result, a genuinely democratic actuality gravitates toward a pure potentiality and cannot be detained in a definite form, even as the ineluctable formalization of this mode of governing and, more so, its bureaucraticization impart to it a concrete shape, constitutively (constitutionally) betraying it. The democratic “sort,” democracy’s discernable poiótēs, essentially involves the impossibility of sorting this regime out. Democratic habits consist in accepting uncertainty, living with it, and shaping political coexistence without a final and immutable master plan. They work against the workings of Aristotelian habituality, normally entrusted with carrying beings to actuality; the counterwork, the alternative energy, of democratic habits is that they are actual practices, which give their consent to the infinite deferral of the actual.
Politicization and depoliticization fluctuate with the electric current powered by the felt intensity of opposition, and quality is the conductor for the tensions between the different “sorts.” Aristotle acknowledges that “qualities are receptive to opposition [᾽Υπάρχει δὲ καὶ ἐναντιότης κατὰ τὸ ποιόν]” (10b, 13) but is reluctant to admit that this is always the case: black and white are contraries; yellow and red have no contraries (10b, 15–20). What he leaves out of his account is that any quality can be set over and against what it is not—yellow versus nonyellow, red versus nonred, white versus nonwhite—in a gesture that endows it with determinacy. This point brings home the contrast between general contrariety and its politicized rendition. Although black and white are contraries, they do not rule each other out nor do they privilege one of the two participants in the pairing; in fact, they can mingle and mix, producing gray, all the fifty, five hundred, or however many shades of it. White and nonwhite, conversely, are mutually exclusive, the posited (and positive) quality cast in the limelight and set over and against everything it is not.
The formula of two sorts related to each other as X and not-X rules out neutrality, or, to go back to my example, the multiple shades of gray we spot between black and white. Applied to regimes, it politicizes them as well. There is a tremendous difference between, on the one hand, a categorization of democratic, monarchic, oligarchic, anarchic, or dictatorial qualities of regimes and, on the other, a contraposition of democracy and nondemocracy. The political quality fancied for its desirability becomes a default setting, a yardstick against which all others are to be measured and assessed. More dangerously still, it serves not only as a standard but also as a pole that taunts and readies itself to fight the rest of the regimes that fail to conform to its stipulations. A qualitative politicization of regimes was the foreign policy subtext of George W. Bush’s aggressive pursuit of “liberty” and democracy outside US borders.
The categorial complexity intrinsic to the Aristotelian quality—distributed between actuality and potentiality, habit and disposition, figure and affect—begs the question: What sort of quality do regimes represent? Are democracy, monarchy, oligarchy, and the like dispositions, tendencies toward a mode of rule, or are they habits of governance? Are they political figures analogous to triangles, squares, and circles in geometry? Or are they the congealed states of affect, the apotheoses of collective anger, madness, prudence, or irascibility?
A sophisticated approach will, no doubt, borrow something from all these qualities, all these sorts of sort, and declare that the final answer is relative to the analytical frame we adopt and the circumstances that occasion the scrutiny of regimes. Yes, regimes can have dynamic tendencies, also toward the kinds of political order they overtly forbid, which means that they can be more or less democratic, more or less authoritarian, more or less supportive of a monarch’s absolute power. Their qualities will then fall on the side of potentiality. But when push comes to shove, sovereignty knows no degrees, and so regimes as the placeholders of sovereign decision-making are akin to geometrical figures that “do not admit of more or less [οὐ δοκεῖ τὸ μᾶλλον ἐπιδέχεσθαι]” (11a, 6). Their qualitative actuality is palpable in the acts carried out under the pressure of exceptional events and in extreme circumstances.
The figuration of sovereignty and, as we shall see, by extension, of the state has been a leitmotif of political theology, from Hobbes to Schmitt, with figures ranging from (the at times monstrous) animal to human shapes. This “schematism,” in the Aristotelian sense of skhēmá, gives sovereign entities their quality even as it puts them on a collision course: knowing no degrees, the figure of sovereignty is absolute, whether or not it grants absolute power. Existential figuration is the catalyst for concretization and for war, for ontological determinacy and for intense political flare-ups, for whatever is locked within the outlines of a silhouette and the looming profile of the other, another figure potentially impinging on the first. Geometry has nothing in common with this turbulence: it exudes the dead peace of static being free of clashes among its figures. Accordingly, it is the hope of a vast majority of political regimes to institute a Janus-faced figuration, geometric inside the polity and existential beyond its frontiers.
There is no standalone organizing principle of politics; were there one, it would have ejected us from the categorial domain into the outer space of the concept. There is, likewise, no single quality that above all others we could pinpoint as political. Proneness to extreme antagonism, stoking inflamed collective affects against those labeled as enemies, and the more general pyrological or pyropolitical constitution of the body politic on the point of a revolution are not the only qualitative indicators of political realities. Politics is process and product, heating and cooling, belligerence and peace, instituting and instituted, state and revolution, a given sort and its negation, X and not-X, without the synthesis of the two.
Political nomos is rigorously antinomic, and the antinomy integral to it does not spare the pairing nomos/anomie either. Does this imply that the quality “antinomic” towers over the rest in politics? Not exactly: antinomy is not a quality at all, but a relation, and a relation of a very special type at that—shorn of middle grounds or mediations, disconnected from that to which it is related. It is a relation that remains immoderate across its appeals to moderation, nonrelational, deranged in its excessiveness, in its zealous attestation that the sides participating in it are incongruous with one another, despite being tied in a single knot by their very incongruity.
Missing in action is the “higher third” to make cause-less political effects cohere, to guarantee that relations between them would be either straightforwardly supportive or mutually exclusive, that their what to would not be at one and the same time toward and against another such effect. That is what political categories have to contend with, finding the thing they point out and accuse always on the threshold of becoming another thing, if not nothing (or no-thing). Am I not describing categorial thinking in genere, which, despite the announcement made in its very name, has no right to accuse and detain the categorized in epistemic cages? All it can do is caress the vanishing outlines of the thing. And should it insist on exercising an unjustified, self-given right to capture its object, it will be surely left empty-handed.