3

THE SECOND LOOK

Kant

A FORM OF POLITICS

We have forfeited, or perhaps have never had access to, the experience of politics. The forfeiture happens on two parallel tracks.

On Track A, “the political” evanesces into conceptual ether, vapors rising from the semantic surface of the term that changes from a noun (politics) to a substantivized adjective, a more abstract part of speech. Institutions both exploit and foster this condition. Supplanting political phenomena are the vague proceedings that take place at an increasing distance not from citizenry but from politics, not in the dark couloirs of power and behind-the-scenes diplomacy but in brightly lit corporate boardrooms and lobbying shenanigans. Representative democracy resembles a nihilistic vacuum, which has expanded outward from what Lefort identified as the empty place of democratic power to engulf the very meaning of this political regime.1 Its effects dephenomenalized, politics no longer houses secrets and arcana but the noumena, abstract and disembodied. At least in the West, war—one of the most explosive political events—has retreated from the public eye, having been outsourced to other parts of the world. It is plausible that the repatriation to the United States of the bodies of the few military personnel killed “on active duty” abroad or the influx of refugees into Europe announces a kind of rephenomenalization of politics, a startling and unwilled return of the repressed and the clandestine.

On Track B, the forfeiture of the experience of politics (I wonder how it is related to the perceived need in Europe and the United States to elect “outsiders,” politically inexperienced leaders in the hopes of rattling a faulty system) obliquely touches on the meta-issue of what makes politics politics. How is the experience of politics possible? It is not that we have no chance to vote in municipal or federal, parliamentary or presidential elections, to join a protest rally, or, where freedom of assembly is not constitutionally guaranteed, to participate in underground resistance to the authorities. Although all of the above activities are reckoned to be political, the conditions of possibility for the experiences they entail are either absent or unspecified. The content of experience is eviscerated because its form, which need not be transcendental, is wrecked. No matter how evident the political undercurrents of this or that activity, without an experiential form, it is haphazard, incomprehensible, and eventually ineffective.

Track A is certainly not the road less traveled by, trodden as it is by a broad coalition of critics from the phenomenological, Marxist, communitarian, and traditionalist or social-conservative camps. Rather than unique, the loss of political experience complements the intrusion of abstraction into every province of life, whether one attributes these infringements to the imperialism of scientific rationality, the breakdown of long-established authoritative meaning structures, or the percolation of capitalist exchange-value from the economic sphere to the noneconomic world of “externalities.” Experience here is converted into a fetish: a material, empirical, concrete mode of givenness with privileged access to the still untainted life or lifeworld, community, and use-value.

By comparison, Track B is a minor footpath no one except the staunchest Kantians would favor. Yet, once we tread it with political categories for a GPS, this footpath will turn out to be an exceptionally promising avenue. Judge for yourself: in bemoaning the derealization of politics, we concentrate on the subtraction of several categories—quality, substance, and reality itself—from its contemporary paradigm. In decrying the loss of political experience as experience, we hit upon the withdrawal of the categories from the understanding of politics and from its perception. Those who move along Track A continue to believe that something of politics (disfigured, narrowed down, sapped, enervated) survives the assault of abstraction. To embark on a journey along Track B, one must abandon all such illusions; here, politics is not too rarified but too dense, impenetrable, imperceptible, idiosyncratic, idiotic—in a word, privatized.

The existentialist undercurrents of Schmitt’s, Ernst Jünger’s, and, via Heidegger, Arendt’s works aim to counteract the loss of political meaning and experience by positing an extreme case that shakes the subject out of complacency and indifference, be it war, preparedness for a confrontation with an enemy, or revolutionary ferment, rebeginning the project of coexistence. With the exception of Arendt, who associates the other beginning with the second nonbiological birth of the human in logos, political existentialism revives experience by appealing to its visceral, raw, affective sides—to its qualities, not to the possibility of experience in general. Even if the primacy of existence over essence holds the potential to transform the form of experience, the chief theoretical preoccupation has been with restoring its depleted content.

This is where Kant’s philosophy proves to be vitally significant. Curtly stated, the form of experience, die Form der Erfahrung (CPR A110), is not an actual-empirical given, but the condition of possibility for having an experience, not, as caricatures of the transcendental project have it, an empty immaterial container waiting to be filled with sundry matters, but a hylomorphic assemblage. This form is incomplete unless it combines an intuition of the spatiotemporal manifold (“appearances” or “sensations”) with the categories that interpret the manifold from within, serving as the signposts for thinking amid perception. Therefore, “the categories are nothing other than the conditions of thinking in a possible experience [die Bedingungen des Denkens in einer möglichen Erfahrung]” (CPR A111). Take them away, and what remains is sheer thoughtlessness or nonsense saturated with a plethora of sensations, “a swarm of appearances [ein Gewühle von Erscheinungen] filling our soul without experience ever being able to arise from it” (CPR A111).

In appendix 2, I will come back to Kant’s discomfort with jumbled multitudes, with swarms and crowds of sensations and appearances that rob us of meaningful experience. I will make a case for reading it as a political problem and, indeed, as a political categorial problem fixated on quantity. For now, suffice it to say that the withdrawal of the categories from a joint constitution of possible experience with the aesthetic synthesis of intuitions leads to another bifurcation of politics.

On the one hand, unchecked abstractions, reinforced by the power of the concept and ideology, the one often bleeding into the other, rush to fill in the cognitive gap resulting from the retreat of the categories only to engender bankrupt thought that has drifted away from existence. An unabashed abstraction in normative political theory gives rise to the subject of rational choice, the hero of electoral decisions, coalition formation, and bureaucratic organization.2 Nothing could be further from our political reality, where a vast majority of people vote against their economic and social interest and where, as I’ve noted, choice-making follows the model of the fleeting online preference one registers in one’s social media networks. On the other hand, multiple disjointed intuitions inundate the cognitive arena with the not yet experienced, indefinitely deferring the moment of having an experience (in this sense, abstraction is the already not experienced). This is what the politics of sheer sensuousness looks like. The scattering of power into Foucault’s micropolitics of virtually everything or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s multitudes erode the form of possible political experience from this other direction—that of appearances rid of categories and concepts alike. What they have on offer are “blind” political intuitions, while the aficionados of an undiluted abstraction traffic in “empty” political thoughts (CPR B75).

True: political events occasionally pass below and above the threshold of experience, its bandwidth configured by a meaningful amalgam of intuitions and categories. The political variables of globalization and the challenges global climate change poses to transnational governance refuse the form of experience from above. Espionage, the hacking of foreign governments’ sites and electoral systems, and the secrecy, with which Schmitt credited “great politics,” reject that form from below. The one is too vast for the integration of appearances with categories, the other too minute. Above and below these limits, politics is no longer a res, a thing “for us,”3 and certainly not a res publica, which, I dare assert, is a thing “with us” or “as us.”

Although what is exterior to the form, within which experience is possible, is expanding and exerting ever-growing pressure on the upper and lower thresholds of that form, deformation is not a foregone conclusion. We must fight tooth and nail, in theory and in practice, for the enhancement of our understanding of political phenomena with categories that have been cast aside and for categoriality itself, mutually constitutive of political and other sorts of experience with the sensuous manifold.

POLITICAL FIGURATIONS

For those fond of a cookie-cutter use of the deconstructive method, appeals to reinstate the experience of politics are redolent of nostalgia for pure presence and its political corollary, sovereignty with totalizing and personalist overtones. Why, below the experiential threshold, refuse the gift of dispersed, disseminated multiplicities prior to their synthetic ordering and integration with the categories of understanding? Why not celebrate that which surpasses our senses and the cognitive capacity to make connections, causing the category of causality to implode, above that threshold? Isn’t the disintegration and collapse of possible forms of experience liberating?

To begin with, Kantian synthesis does not generate a totality that obliterates difference. Upon a close examination, the work of synthesis is sensitive to the multiplicity given a priori and concerns “the action of putting different representations together with each other and comprehending their manifoldness in one cognition [verschiedene Vorstellungen zu einander hinzuzutun, und ihre Mannigfaltigkeit in einer Erkenntnis zu begreifen]” (CPR B103). So much so that the yield of synthetic work is analysis itself! The manifold of intuitions or sensations does not melt into the unity of cognition, which, in the course of synthesizing multiplicities, grasps nothing other than the manifoldness of the synthesized. It is when they are altogether unrelated to one another, discombobulated, and insulated from the categories (quantity, relation, and so on), as they necessarily are below the experiential threshold, that the representations participating in the manifold become the same in their pure difference. The multitudes and micropolitics, too, stand in need of categorial mediations if we are to make sense of their dispersion. Disingenuous in their flight from the faculty of understanding, their theorists still busy themselves with disavowed, static (because cut off from the opposites), and consequently depoliticized categories.

Overstepping the upper limit of possible experience is likewise not a good escape route from the categories, causality not excepted. Without input from the manifold of appearances, synthesis rigidifies and becomes purely intellectual (synthesis intellectualis), exclusively dealing with the “combination of understanding,” Verstandesverbindung. In this, it differs from the “figurative,” figürlich, synthesis (synthesis speciosa) that spurs perception and imagination alike (CPR B151).

It is, however, far from certain that political actors are prepared for the unfiguring or the disfiguring of the global and planetary realities demanding an intellectual synthesis. Rather than shift from figurative to intellectual synthesis, the faculty of understanding halts its synthesizing activity and is, in the best scenario, mired in analytic “complexity.” From the standpoint of hegemonic ideology, interminable analysis is decidedly advantageous: when the figurations of power disappear, it is unclear who or what to resist; when the understanding of causality behind political processes is impaired, the question why resist? is unanswerable; when synthesis as the interrelation of the manifold in its multiplicity is emasculated, so is organized resistance.

In the wake of the catastrophic totalitarian experiments that pepper the history of the twentieth century, the figure of a political collective, of a we who would be the agent of politics, cries out for a drastic reimagining. The liberal blueprint for unlimited inclusivity and tolerance toward others is consistent with the overall un- or disfiguration of the modern world. Understandably aspiring to unbolt the tolerant and inclusive we from the plinth of immediate biological belonging (ethnicity, race, and so forth), this blueprint supplies no suitable mediations for an actual reconfiguration of community. Category-wise, the unconditionally open we is bereft of qualities, of a reality negated into limits. Thus, it is unimaginable, has no image: “For the imagination is to bring the manifold of intuition into an image [Bild]” (CPR A120). The failure of political imagination to envision another shape of the we, let alone to exercise the capacity to piece the manifold together, elicits the entrenchment of ultranationalism that takes it upon itself to combat the despotism of figurelessness by recoiling to the old, immediate figures of communal being. As I’ve stated earlier, electoral politics worldwide is now dominated by these two choices, their shared genealogy pointing back to a letdown in the synthetic activity of reimagining and refiguring a we.

The Kantian distinction between figurative and intellectual syntheses goes a long way toward explaining the misgivings and downright animosity that philosophers in the West have harbored toward politics. Despite the need for a rational comprehension of the common good, it was (still is) virtually unfeasible to come up with mediations between political realities and the form of intellectual synthesis, of the categories’ interlacing among themselves. Actual politics stirred strong destructive affects, incited the irrational outbreaks of war and violence, masterminded ways to manipulate public opinion—in short, did everything to prevent the common good from being realized. Ever since Plato, philosophers have been painfully attuned to the fact that the experience of politics attainable through what Kant will dub figurative synthesis contradicted the political ideal, arrived at through intellectual synthesis. Theories of normativity are the hyperbolic descendants of that awareness, which they also suppress by focusing exclusively on the intellectual dimension. Another easy way out is to reinstall a version of the philosopher-king (minus the Socratic profession of ignorance) in the new, though in fact very old, desideratum for the rule of experts, Innerarity’s “democracy of knowledge” or Jason Brennan’s “epistemocracy.”4 The drawback of these solutions is that they sweep the tensions between intellectual and figurative political syntheses under the theoretical rug, pretending that the contradiction can be resolved on a safe philosophical or epistemological playground.

Parliamentary democracy has always prided itself on its historical achievement of intellectual synthesis in politics. As the standard argument goes, this regime sublimates physical hostilities into sparring in language among debating adversaries in parliament, all the while the seat of its sovereignty—the people—obstinately shies away from figuration. But is this democratic sublimation not the achievement of ideology at its most potent? Does it not deepen the metaphysical body-mind split and veer on the side of the disembodied mind, for which the exigencies of the body are beneath what merits (political) consideration? When Kant characterizes the categories as “forms of thought,” Gedankenformen (CPR B150), by no means does he endorse this uncritical schism. In figurative synthesis, Gedankenformen (which stand in sharp contrast to Kant’s other attempt at defining the categories as “the pure concepts of understanding,” inasmuch as thinking does not understand and understanding does not think) combine with the aesthetic form of time-space and the matter of sensation so as to dispense experience to its subjects; in intellectual synthesis, forms of thought “run” on empty, that is to say, on themselves, understanding themselves alone. The possibility of experience awakens when one coaxes the intellectual out of the figurative, whereby experience becomes a form of thinking and sensing, of thinking in sensing, of categories and intuitions in the experienced object.

It must be obvious at this point that the doggedness with which I stress figurative political synthesis is not a call to arms in defense of the political-theological canon, concurring with its justification of the divine rights of kings and the absolute authority of the sovereign as the earthly incarnations of power. My thesis, rather, is that we cannot hope to experience politics unless we manage to integrate figuration with intellectual synthesis.5 Lamentably, it is this very integration that has been (irreparably?) undercut. Modern metaphysics has disconnected the body from the mind; modern political philosophy has isolated political figurativity from amorphous precepts and formal ideas. Machiavelli, for one, vehemently objected to their segregation.

After the two sides have been drawn apart, the recipe for their reconciliation seems to be symbolism. Say, power, distilled from the circumstances in which it is exercised, is no longer intrinsically graspable through an experience or a figure. Handed over to intellectual synthesis, any phenomenalization of power is grasped as its symbol, a condensed and palpable but ultimately superfluous illustration of the underlying metaphysical concept. Other than that, the meaning of political figures in modernity is circumscribed to the actual emissaries of power, fluid in democracy and stagnant in particular individuals or families in other types of government. The figuration of power is then conflated with personal authority and finally with authoritarian rule.

A renaissance in the form of political experience would impart a second life to figurative synthesis beyond its truncated association with power’s figureheads. We cannot contrive a figuration of “the political,” which is, Schmitt’s exertions notwithstanding, an abstraction under the sway of intellectual synthesis. But we can—nay, we should—imagine the figurative syntheses of res publica’s instantiations and reinterpret mundane political realities (the state not excepted) along these lines. To do so, it would be necessary to re-create, in part by drawing on the categories, the experiences of the state as a standing political reality, of a revolution that overturns the status quo, of power, of sovereignty. “In part,” because, together with Kant, we will find the categories alone wanting as we hasten the renaissance of political figurative syntheses, regardless of the thesis that “all synthesis, through which even perception itself becomes possible, stands under the categories [unter den Kategorien]” (CPR B161). As an alternative, we will be compelled to explore another membrane, separating categorial from noncategorial approaches and comparable to the permeable sheath between the political and the nonpolitical domains.

THE CATEGORIES “THEMSELVES”

If I have decided not to comb through the list of the Kantian categories “themselves,” that is because they are too abstract to bear fruit in isolation from other elements of cognition. Kant is mindful of their limitations. Within the critical project of transcendental philosophy, the categories are sutures between the “logical functions of judgment” they rediscover in the object (CPR B128) and the schematisms of understanding that elucidate their action in time. That is also why Kant gives the categories short shrift, summarizing them in a table, upon which he hardly comments. It would nonetheless be instructive to contemplate the tacitly political role they play in the making of the Critique of Pure Reason (provided that the categories are necessary for the understanding of any object, we cannot do without them when that object is the system of understanding as such) and their political instantiations outside its confines.

I have alluded to the work the modal category of possibility performs behind the scenes for Kant’s transcendental philosophy. So does synthesis—“the mere effect of the imagination, of a blind though indispensable function of the soul” (CPR A78)—that assembles the many (plurality, quantitative) in relations of community. The difference between synthesis and totality (multiplicity under the aspect of unity) is the form of relationality each of them evinces: communal interdependence in the former, hierarchical dependence in the latter. A synthesis keeps itself open both by eluding the logical faculty of thinking via imagination and by obviating causal relations that subordinate effects to the cause. The relational category community admits the constitutive gap of disjunction into politics and into the transcendental analytic.

Kant emphasizes the anarchic nature of the category “communal relations” by correlating it to the form of disjunctive judgment. The parts participating in a community “are thought of as coordinated with one another, not subordinated [als einander koordiniert, nicht subordiniert], so that they do not determine each other unilaterally, as in a series, but reciprocally, as in an aggregate” (CPR B112). The Greek syn- of synthesis is homologous to the Latin co- of coordination and community. Its anarchic vectors do not irradiate from a single underlying cause—hence, the reciprocity of the codetermined parts. The synthesis of understanding, like the synopsis of perception, is a community of meanings, none of them more profound or essential than the others. Still, the anarchy attributable to the disappearance of a single governing principle-origin does not connote the absence of order, which persists in coordination and subordination alike. What varies in each case is how order comes about: Does it stem from communal relations among relatively autonomous parties, or is it deducible from the axioms of causality, upon which the relata depend? We might say, by analogy, that “politics” is a community of political meanings coordinated with one another, not subordinated to a unitary political principle, even one as decisive as the friend-enemy distinction.

Approached from another angle, the difference between coordination and subordination brings up the question: Is the politics of reciprocity without mastery and subservience really conceivable? Is this technically speaking anarchic idea political, or should it be more accurately assigned to the social aggregate?

Switching from Latinate to Germanic words, Kant intimates that in the nonhuman world, “in the whole of things,” in einem Ganzen der Dinge, we find not subordination but “interordination”: “Now, a similar connection is thought of in the whole of things, since one is not subordinated [untergeordnet], as an effect, under another, as the cause of its existence, but is rather coordinated [beigeordnet—a better translation might be “interordinated”] with the other simultaneously and reciprocally” (CPR B112). Although Kant will not go as far as this, the order of things precludes the subordination of its parts when God, the immutable Cause subtending all reality, is out of the picture. Following the withdrawal (or the death) of God, this order is autopoietic in its emergence from reciprocal interactions between individual things. It is interordinated inasmuch as nothing holds it together save for the two-way linkages between any pair of nodes in its assemblage. Is order a necessary and sufficient precondition for relationality in politics, even if it comes about without being ordered from above? Is commerce in “the whole of things” political or is it a “free” association, an apolitical society, simply by virtue of having been extricated from relations of dominance and subordination? If the former, then why would a human order be an exception to this rule?

With respect to the category of quantity, Kant all but abandons the relational openness of synthesis. The “unity of rule now determines every manifold [Diese Einheit der Regel bestimmt nun alles Mannigfaltige]” (CPR A105) and the “transcendental unity of apperception [transzedentale Einheit der Apperzeption] makes out of all possible appearances that can ever come together in one experience a connection of all these representations in accordance with laws [nach Gesetzen]” (CPR A108). The addition of quantitative to relational categories triggers an about-face not from dispersion to gathering but from synthesis to the rules of synthetic unity. One cannot have a community in conformity with transcendental laws that reveal themselves as the cause behind the synthesis firmed up into a unified whole. The legislative branch of pure reason throws its weight against the judiciary branch, where disjunctive judgments aired synthetic assemblages. Perhaps it is the executive branch with its “productive synthesis of the imagination” that can salvage something of the freedom of synthesis by reverting to the “blind,” if necessary, faculty of imagination.

In spite of the prevalence of juridical concepts in Kant’s work, its political structure respects the principle of the separation of powers. By virtue of this separation, the transcendental field suffers the equivalent of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that result in frictions and a lack of fit among different categories of the same thing (here, synthetic assemblages). Acutely political, the frictions between the relational and the quantitative categories of synthesis lacerate the transcendental sphere, while in the empirical world they drive a wedge between community and unity. The outcome of unification, synthesizing diverse factions and integrating the manifold into a single unit, is only as strong as the unity and ongoing effectivity of the rule that ordains it, because the manifold retains its heterogeneity and keeps challenging the rule from below.

Should the need arise to present a united front against the enemy, the “determining rule” would be, paradoxically, that of disunity, of conflict between “us” and “them.” But, should unity be nurtured by a shared desire for a universally just and egalitarian society (the desire that sometimes occludes the figure of the enemy, the one who thwarts progress toward the realization of the ideal), unity would be at once the content and the form of the rule. Either way, a political community will not materialize from the subordination of politicized subjects to a noble or ignoble cause (or the Cause)—the fight for justice or against an enemy whose difference from “us” is sensed as an existential incompatibility. Communal coordination outside all rules and laws will spring from the free solidarity among participants without a why? and without an unequivocal because. Harnessed for a cause (or the Cause), subordination overrules coordination, and political community withers in political unity (synthetic quantity neutralizes synthetic relationality).

It is, nevertheless, too early to succumb to a feeling of dejection at the sight of political community’s short-lived success: unity is similarly precarious. An end result of the intricate work of unification, it is susceptible to falling apart the moment that work comes to a close. Supposing, as Kant does, that quantity “is the category of the synthesis of the homogeneous [der Synthesis des Gleichartigen] in an intuition in general” (CPR B162), there is no end to the quantifying homogenization of political actors. Before the procedures of quantitative synthesis, homogeneity must have been invented and imposed, leveling the many in preparation for counting them. Yet, for better or for worse, the body of citizenry does not hand itself over to total homogenization. In the “ideal case” of tabulating political votes as well, heterogeneity creeps in by way of the disparities in who actually voted, who had access to polling stations and requisite IDs (notable in this regard is the difference between the African American and Caucasian citizens of the United States), or who benefited from educational programs and opportunities that are the minimal precondition for casting a ballot (think of the caste-related literacy imbalances in the world’s largest parliamentary democracy, India). Political quantification is a synthesis of the unsynthesizable, the forging of unity that for the time being obfuscates, rather than eradicates, heterogeneity. It therefore undoes with one hand the very thing it laboriously manufactures with the other and involuntarily commits to the disjunctive freedom of synthesis at the heart of political community.

So far, we have gotten no more than a foretaste of the political subtext of Kant’s categories quantity, relation, and modality—the latter in the guise of transcendental possibility. In a negative key, the category quality has also made its brief political appearance apropos of the figureless we. Another modal category, namely, necessity, deserves our attention.

For Kant, “every necessity always has a transcendental condition as its ground [Aller Notwendigkeit liegt jederzeit eine transzedentale Bedingung zum Grunde]” (CPR A106). Without a transcendental grounding, what we have before us is not necessity but Humean customary regularity, demonstrable from repeated experiences (CPR A112). Political necessity, in turn, is neither transcendental nor custom-bound. Beyond the daily struggle over the categories and the discursive limitation of viable alternatives to a “necessary” course of action, it is activated in the extreme situation of a state of emergency or a state of exception. As Giorgio Agamben comments on St. Thomas’s Summa theologiae, “the theory of necessity is none other than a theory of the exception (dispensatio) by virtue of which a particular case is released from the obligation to observe the law. Necessity is not a source of law, nor does it properly suspend the law; it merely releases a particular case from the literal application of the norm.”6

An occasion-specific and circumstantial declaration of political necessity (for instance, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack) stretches the sovereign muscle beyond the predictable, regularized, customary administration of public affairs. It disrupts the political routine in response to an emergency, to which it strains to be adequate but which it actually begets or at least aggravates. The sovereign disruption unfailingly cites political necessity and justifies itself on grounds other than transcendental (“a source of law”) or empirical (totally outside the law, “properly suspend the law”). It posits itself in the interest of ends that have long turned into mere buzzwords: reestablishing order, bringing normalcy back, ensuring public safety and security. Anything but conservative, it seeks its legitimation from the future when these goals will have been attained.

Compared to the twelve “ancestral” categories, the categories Kant considers “derivative” are more overtly political. When they mingle with one another and with the elements of sensibility, the categories “yield a great multitude of derivative a priori concepts”: “under the category of causality [are] subordinated the predicables of force, action, and passion; under that of community, those of presence and resistance; under the predicaments of modality those of generation, corruption, alteration, and so on” (CPR B108). That action and passion—notions crucial to the understanding of political conduct—are among the Aristotelian categories is, for Kant, evidence of his predecessor’s shortcoming, the inability to separate transcendental foundations from that which can be deduced from them. Resistance channels the disjunctive synthesis of community into a patently political vein. Generation, corruption, and alteration are the possibilities, actualities, and necessities that descend to the phenomena of life from the sterile realm of modality.

Consider corruption, a category that is in equal measure political and theologico-metaphysical. In some countries (Brazil or Malta, to name a few) corruption scandals are rocking the highest echelons of the establishment as information about kickbacks and similar schemes comes to light. In other countries (above all, the United States), corruption does not crop up in the list of pressing public concerns because it is normalized and institutionalized in the form of lobbying. Be this as it may, the philosophical and theological roots of this category extend back to the original sin and the subsequent narrative of the Fall. For the Gnostics, matter is the evil that ought to be expunged for ideal and unburdened spirit to triumph. Death cleanses by ridding the soul of its corrupt material support. As Clement of Alexandria puts it: “the gnostic soul must be consecrated to the light, stripped of the integuments of matter, devoid of the frivolousness of the body and of all the passions, which are acquired through vain and lying opinions, and divested of the lusts of the flesh” (Strom. 5.11). The element of light houses the incorruptible spirit St. Clement wishes to preserve in its purity at the expense of matter, the indwelling of the flesh with its sinfulness, falsehood, and “frivolousness.”

Much of the same happens in the postrevolutionary Terror in France, with Robespierre decrying “corruption,” “l’excés de la corruption humaine,” his favorite term for the materiality of existence.7 In the footsteps of the Gnostics, he bemoans the fall of spirit into matter, the loss of the human in the density of existence, the corruption of our rational dimension by its entwinement with the opaque body. If the ensuing purges were carried out on such a massive scale and were meant to be total, that is because their target was, apart from the corrupt public officials and institutions, everything corruptible: matter as a whole. Sound as they are, today’s complaints about political corruption, pining for the vanished Golden Age or the utopian ideal of purity, either run the risk of falling flat as vague attempts to blow off the steam of discontent or, provided that they are in good faith, flirt with a maximally antimaterialist posture that logically culminates in the purges.

To be perfectly clear, I am not suggesting that we fatalistically accept the ever-worsening abuse of power wielded for the sake of private interests. The political sphere cannot rot infinitely the same way that nothing can grow indefinitely: Isn’t the complaint about the never-ending political decay the reverse of the medal of eternal economic growth? The only way to dissipate the intellectual fog enveloping generation, corruption, and alteration is by analyzing them as categories. On the practical level, working with the hylomorphism of “derivative” categories, we will help along those changes in political materiality that would bring with them alternative forms of organizing a shared existence. The choice we face is stark:

to excoriate corruption by setting the body of the world and body politic on fire, the preferred element for rituals of purification, or

to cultivate hulē in a different manner, letting alternative forms blossom from it, fully accepting that they are also destined to metamorphose, grow, and decay.

There will be always something “rotten in the state of Denmark”; the problem is how to turn this rottenness into a fertile soil for another growth.

Kant’s point regarding categorial purity is valid solely on the assumption that the transcendental field is the base of the empirical superstructure. But what if in politics—not as a sphere of human activity and of pathos, passion, passivity, but as a properly categorial sphere—this quintessentially metaphysical order were upended? What if, in their hermeneutically circular interaction with the nonpolitical or the as yet nonpolitical realities, political categories took over a constitutive, transcendental, or quasi-transcendental function? And what if they did so not under the aegis of politics as first philosophy (of a political a priori), but out of their originary impurity, impropriety, and contamination? Aristotle’s categorial thought is more receptive to this prospect than Kant’s, for the very reason for which the German philosopher chastises his Greek predecessor, namely, mixing ancestral and derivative categories. Contamination, however, does not translate into the flattening and disappearance of the contaminated terms—here, empirical and transcendental. With a word on loan from Derrida, I have qualified politics and political categories as quasi-transcendental. A more accurate rendition is transtranscendental, the cipher for my adaptation of Kant’s critical project.8

AN EXCURSUS ON TRANSTRANSCENDENTAL REASON

Why is political categorial reason transtranscendental? Allow me to offer a preliminary explanation of this neologism. If to transcend is to move beyond, then to transtranscend is to go beyond the beyond. The speculative doubling of trans- makes two conflicting interpretative options equally plausible: a passage to something located further away than the horizon of the first “beyond” or a homecoming to that which is right here and now, beyond when registered from the perspective of that initial “beyond.” Transtranscendentality, then, encompasses the trajectories of moving higher than the highest and lower than the lowest. (Spoiler alert: extremes meet!) It does so not in an effort to outdo the metaphysical meta- or trans- but to put on display their coimbrication with the realities they surpass.

Why not also add the lateral-dorsal extension to transtranscendentality that would challenge the transcendental fixation on verticality? Dorsally, “beyond the beyond” is the play of reason behind the subject’s back, the cunning of dialectical reason Hegel delights in. Laterally, it encourages a multiplicity of grassroots that, akin to the categories, are untraceable to a single root, radical Cause, principle, or concept. In sum, the doubling of trans- recovers the field of immanence and empiricism after a detour through transcendence and transcendentality.

Political categorial reason is transtranscendental because it (1) peers behind transcendental philosophy, uncovering the political elements of “pure” (stringently purified of empirical influence) categories and (2) scans political categories proper for the nonpolitical (“ordinary”) contributions to their discursive, epistemic, and ontological formation. It upsets the transcendental-empirical hierarchy: chunks of the empirical turn out to be transcendental as regards transcendental reason. In two steps, political categorial reason leads the “beyond” of pure understanding beyond itself. The first step (1) is looking at politics as an object of possible experience and, simultaneously, as the material condition of possibility for experience in general, not to mention for the modal category possibility. The destination of the second step (2) is the hic et nunc of political work-in-progress in an ongoing exchange with nonpolitical realities.

Kant believes that the hypothesis concerning the empirical origination of “pure” transcendental concepts is nonsensical. Upon reiterating that “we cannot think any object except through categories [Wir können uns keinen Gegenstand denken, ohne durch Kategorien]” (CPR B165), he writes, with a large dose of irony, that the categories are “a priori concepts, hence independent of experience (the assertion of an empirical origin would be a sort of generatio aequivoca)” (CPR B167). Generatio aequivoca is a Medieval syntagm for “spontaneous generation,” like the emergence of maggots or flies from rotting meat (Paul Guyer and Allen Wood’s English translation of the Critique of Pure Reason gives this example in a footnote;9 it bears mentioning that Aristotle subscribed to the plausibility of this sort of generation, scientifically disproven by Francesco Redi as late as in 1668.)10 My handling of political categories, whether relevant to Kant’s transcendental analytic or not, is a clear illustration of what to him is generatio aequivoca.

The claim that equivocation is in the political “object” itself does not help parry the charge of generatio aequivoca, because the categories should not “have been taken as really material [eigentlich material], as belonging to the possibility of the thing itself [Möglichkeit der Dinge selbst], when in fact they should have been used in a merely formal sense, as belonging to the logical requirements for every cognition” (CPR B114). As far as Kant is concerned, the material embeddedness of the categories in the things themselves and their treatment as real predicates are the readily identifiable features of Aristotelian philosophy. His transcendental project is markedly indifferent toward that of which the categories are in each case predicated: politics or apples, economics or oranges. A badge of transcendental purification, of having rid thinking of empirical influences, this indifference boasts complete neutrality, the apolitical nature of thought uninvolved in—disengaged from—the actual existence or nonexistence of the world (the category existence is a priori, and so unaffected by the world’s eventual destruction and disappearance). Perhaps, it is the negative, critical impulse of “pure” reason that depoliticizes all a priori concepts, including the categories.

For all his protestations against generatio aequivoca, Kant himself rubber-stamps the transcendental contamination and politicization of the categories: “in the case of these concepts, as in the case of all cognition, we can search in experience, if not for the principle [Principium], then for the occasional causes of their generation [Gelegenheitsursachen ihrer Erzeugung], where the impressions of the senses provide the first impulse [den ersten Anlaß] for opening the entire power of cognition to them.” (CPR A86). The occasional, unprincipled, anarchic origination of the categories in experience is the transtranscendental vector of transcendental reason. The impulse sent, prior to the a priori, from the here-and-now beyond the beyond recaptures Aristotle’s first ousia, a this on the edge of handing itself over to interpretation, to becoming this as that. Quietly operative alongside the sovereign principle, transtranscendental occasionality makes the category of possibility possible. The exposure of “occasional causes” (Gelegenheitsursachen) behind the pure concepts of understanding is Kant’s concession to the unfeasibility of thoroughgoing disengagement and neutrality, depoliticization and transcendental withdrawal. In the style of the “blind” power of imagination conducive to synthesis, the initial nontranscendental impulse inching toward the transcendental sphere curbs the autonomy and self-sufficiency of pure reason. And what are these “occasional causes,” if not the singular intersections of the categories prearticulated with intuitions in the materiality of res publica?

Besides the faculty of imagination, which is a blind condition of possibility for transcendental sight, and besides actual experiences that potentiate transcendental notions, the subject’s own synthetic activity is an instance of transtranscendental reason. A derivative category of causality, the action of combining enables synthesis, which “can be executed only by the subject itself, since it is an act of its self-activity [sie ein Actus seiner Selbsttätigkeit ist]” (CPR B130). In the spirit of deconstruction, the supplement precedes what it supplements: as soon as we touch upon it, that which is derivative mutates into the origin of the origin. Synthesis is an act (Actus in the categorial sense) whereby the subject has already acted upon itself before the synthetic a priori, its transtranscendental self-activity (Selbsttätigkeit) gathering it with itself in a synthesis before synthesis and in a prequel to cognition through the categories. The subject divides against itself, actively giving and passively receiving (itself) from itself alone. Its assembly (“thing,” logos), its self-gathering, contends with this highly political division between ruling over and obeying oneself, pitting self-acting against the self acted upon. The gap between the empirical and the transcendental is not, itself, empirical or transcendental but transtranscendental and, in the last instance, political.

If Kantian subject-formation is transtranscendental, then the process is launched from the cleft between empirical and transcendental subjectivities. “The” subject is nothing but the relation between the two, between I think and I intuit. I think myself intuiting: that is how “I as intelligence and thinking subject cognize my self as an object [Object] that is thought, insofar as I am also given to myself in intuition, only like other phenomena, not as I am for the understanding but rather as I appear to myself” (CPR B155). I am conscious of myself as I think accompanying my every representation and as I appear to myself, experiencing myself in inner sense. The difference between I and myself, or between I think and I intuit, holds the key to how the political subject organizes and relates to itself, for instance, in a republican form of government where, in harmony with Kant’s philosophical principle of individual autonomy, the people is the ruler and the ruled.

But—mind the gap!—the category of relation presupposed in transtranscendental subjectivity is exceptionally convoluted. When there is no republican reciprocity between the agent and the patient, the ruler is the external cause or the substance of the ruled, who are its effects or accidents. I think reaches I intuit from elsewhere, as an arbitrary imposition of a disembodied mind on a mindless body. I am ruled by the other amounts to I am thought by the other and I am given over to the experience of the other, according to an alien combination of categorial forms and intuitions. The nightmare of my life is, then, a plot unfolding in the other’s dream. It is actually true that I am, insofar as I am thought (categorially interpreted) by and handed over to the experience of the other. “My” thoughts and dreams are fragments that, twisted and distorted, boomerang to me from that alterity. Before this happens, I must become other to myself in the transtranscendental gap of my subjectivity.

Struggles for independence against the occupying forces (as in a colonial setting) or against an absolutist regime commence viscerally from experiencing the foreignness of all the possible experiences, ways of thinking, and intuiting “I” am featured in as a categorial object. They start from the felt abjection of total dependence and, having gestated in that awareness, give birth to the relational gap of political subjectivity. The Hegelian and Marxist subject-object of history can also mature in the Kantian philosophical incubator in the shape of I think that, up until the moment of a revolutionary irruption, is doomed to contemplating itself as a categorial concoction experienced by the other and to encountering itself in transcendental cognition through the other’s cognitive lens. It is not enough for the I intuit of the colonized (and of the otherwise oppressed) to gain access to the inner sense of oppression without also experiencing the incongruity, if not a downright contradiction, between this intuition and the alien I think. The two Is must be grasped not only as empirical and transcendental but also as indexed to different historical subjectivities. In turn, the déformation professionelle of independence fighters is their reliance on a mechanism that overcompensates for the lived contradiction of the oppressed subject: in a symmetrical negation of the absolutist or colonial status quo, they aspire to independence and forgo the element of interdependence. “I” sacrifice the partial truth of domination on the high altar of my dream of freedom.

Transtranscendental reason also proscribes a metadiscourse on the subject of reason and of politics. We can only speak of and think the categories categorially: the unity of the transcendental rule follows the category of quantity; forms of possible experience—that of modality; the limits of human reason Kant endeavors to expose—that of quality. It is this circularity, this self-referential nature of categorial thought, that allows the extremes “higher than the (transcendentally) high,” “lower than the (empirically) low” to meet: what is above that which is above extends below that which is below. Why? Because the categories that, entangled among themselves, encircle speech and thought are political, and because political categories are the cognitively processed, politicized, and abstracted empirical realities.

“BEFORE” THE CATEGORIES: FORMS OF JUDGMENT

The categories are the vanishing moments of understanding, less explicitly so in Kant than in Hegel. Their stabilization in a table is, in psychoanalytic terms, a reaction formation to this fugaciousness. Before they fade away, it is crucial to examine the theoretical frame in which they are encrusted, so as to follow the vectors of their mobilization (hence, of their politicization) and to perceive whence they come and whither they go. One section of the frame is made of the categories as the objective reflections of the understanding that, on the subjective side, is contained in judgments. Therefore, we cannot avoid consulting the table of judgments, with one eye to their political potential and the other to their categorial reference. Comprising the frame’s other section is the “schematism” that conjugates the categories with time. It might be helpful to articulate their thematic arrangement in the juridical language it already speaks: we begin with judging, then move on to accusing-predicating-categorizing, and finally our understanding, exiled from the exclusively logical universe, “does time.” That, too, is Kant’s Copernican turn: judgment logically precedes accusation (predication or categorization), as well as the sequences of precessions and successions that are time.

Quantitative judgments include the universal, particular, and singular varieties that are parallel to the quantitative categories of unity, plurality, and totality. Combined, the first two categories of quantity produce the third (viewed under the aspect of unity, plurality is a totality). The first two judgments taken together also logically engender the third in a classical syllogism. But what is simultaneous in logic is often chopped up and disjointed in the order of time.

In political history, the Age of the Enlightenment was the turning point, at which singular judgments lost their legitimacy and had to be replaced with universal ones. A singular judgment has the form The X is Y, reminiscent of the self-interpretation programmed into the Aristotelian ousia. It certainly did not disappear in the post-Enlightenment era, but it no longer supplied the foundations for anything, started sounding dogmatic, and surrendered its justificatory power. The stock example of a singular judgment in politics is Louis XIV’s proclamation L’État, c’est moi (“I am the state,” though in the English rendition the subject and the predicate are inverted). The predicate consumes the subject without leaving a remainder, or, as Kant has it, in a singular judgment (judicium singulare), “the predicate holds of that concept without exception [ohne Ausnahme]” (CPR B96).

Louis XIV’s articulation of the sovereign and the state tolerates no exceptions within judgment, not least when the judgment itself is exceptional, singular, one of a kind. So understood, critiques of absolutism anticipate the ascendance of universal political judgments All Xs are Ys moderating the quantitative exclusivity of singular judgments. Social contract theory develops on this basis; in the state of nature, all subjects are said to be equally powerful and potentially lethal for others (Hobbes) or equally happy, carefree, and sociable before the invention of private property (Rousseau). The power of all is then devolved to the sovereign in a mass alienation that institutes a tense civic peace.

Remarkably, theories of radical democracy recoup the singular form of political judgment. Arendt’s revolutionary rebeginning in collective action, Rancière’s previously excluded groups that expect to be counted disturbing the settled parameters of the status quo, or Badiou’s commitment to the event of equality announce, in a kind of off-stage commentary: We are politics or This is politics (and everything else is but administration and policing). They are political in the venerable lineage of a headlong engagement incapable of standing back and relativizing its position among many others. We are politics is the analog of I am the state, a singular judgment hoping to universalize itself outside the mediations of particularity. It is an exception that accommodates “without exception” a single and singular Effect expressing its Cause.

A more cogent strategy for countering ideological obfuscations would, to my mind, rehabilitate the form of particular judgment Some Xs are Ys. Here, cutting through the universalist pretense of liberalism and the singular fictions of conservatism, we confess that some states are truly sovereign on the international arena (in keeping with their economic influence, or military arsenals and capacities) while others are reduced to doing their bidding. We may also acknowledge, as George Orwell did, that in domestic politics all citizens are equal, but some citizens are more equal than others. By the same token, neither the singularity of what I hold dear and unreservedly commit to nor the universality of “everything” is political. Rather, some events, structures, and processes are political, judging by how effectively they cross the membrane between infra- and intrapolitics.

Affirmative, negative, and infinite are the varieties of qualitative judgments: positing, negating, and positing something as negative. Against formal logic, Kant insists that “in a transcendental logic infinite judgements must also be distinguished from affirmative ones,” by concentrating on the negative or positive content of the predicate respectively, and not only on the form of judgment (CPR B97). The positing of negativity is infinite because it does little to delimit the subject’s qualities, excluded from one class of entities and incorporated into virtually everything else. (In Kant’s example, “The soul is nonmortal” exempts the soul from the realm of mortals, placing it in a potentially infinite field of undying beings.) So, infinite judgments veer toward indeterminacy and are reluctantly political.

Consider the halfhearted statement of Rex Tillerson, former US secretary of state, addressed to North Korea: “We are not your enemy.”11 As well as taking over North Korea’s sovereign right to decide who its enemies are, the proclamation is utterly ambiguous and politically suspect. (A more sensible and humble thing to say would have been “You are not our enemy”; Tillerson, however, went on in the course of the same remarks to aver the opposite: “But you are presenting an unacceptable threat to us, and we have to respond.”) Describing “us” as nonenemies in relation to “you,” it ostensibly refrains from taking sides, since the semantic region of nonenemies is potentially infinite in its inclusion of friends, distant allies, and all the neutral parties. Evasion of determinacy, the negation of quality in the thick of qualitatively focused propositions, is a distinguishing trait of infinite judgments that are the logical contrivances of neutralization and depoliticization.

How do qualitative judgments apply to politics? Intermingling with the realities of the nonpolitical world, politics is potentially unlimited, inviting a speculative infinite judgment, Politics is nonpolitical, and, vice versa, Nonpolitics is political. For it to make sense, this judgment must be deformalized by spelling out the circumstantial, nontranscendental, or transtranscendental, conditions under which the barriers between politics and nonpolitics become permeable. Anything less than a speculative infinite judgment will not do justice to the quality of politics. Affirmative judgments, positing the category reality, will tie the object judged about to an exclusive qualitative criterion (for example, Politics is hot; it emits the heat of commitment, hostilities, and the like). Negative judgments will flip this exclusivity around into negation (for example, No genuine politics is institutional; it happens when established institutions are radically challenged and undermined). While there is some measure of truth in these propositions, they are hopelessly partial, oblivious to all judgments and categories other than the qualitative and, within the fold of quality, to the obverse of what they affirm or negate. Without the real zest of speculative infinite judgment, affirmation and negation are insipid and inattentive to res publica ipse, the political thing itself that is heating and cooling, instituting and instituted, politicizing and depoliticizing. Positing a single quality as pivotal misses the mark of politics, which is bereft of an essential criterion, save for that spun by conceptual machinations.

Relational judgments are categorical, hypothetic, and disjunctive. (In the table of categories, these are translated into substance-accident, cause-effect, and community or reciprocity.) Categorical judgments accentuate the inner connection present in every form of judgment, the relation of the predicate to the subject, the copula rather than the terms it articulates (CPR A73). Political-ideological strategizing excels in disguising this relation by redefining the predicate until it loses touch with the subject altogether. In 2017, Spain’s central government labeled the Catalan referendum and the subsequent declaration of independence illegal, an assault on the rule of law, and lastly an act of sedition and constitutional insubordination, requiring the use of force. Its ideological posturing has severed the relation between the subject and the predicate in the categorical judgment Any declaration of independence is an act of constitutional insubordination to the entity one demands independence from. To assimilate the push for independence to disrespect for the rule of law or legality (the latter two are not synonymous at all) is to becloud what really matters: a declaration of independence establishes a new constitution, changes the source of legitimacy, and so is demonstrably unconcerned with the old regime’s definitions of legality and illegality.

Hypothetic political judgments of the if … then type do not parse out actual relations in the manner of their categorical counterparts but produce a relation where none has existed before. Dictatorial inclinations come to the fore when leaders present themselves as the mythical katechons, the restrainers or the withholders of chaos, of disorder, of the abyss, or, in the theological narrative whence the word derives, of the Antichrist (2 Thessalonians 2:6–7). The gist of the claim is that if the leader-regime-status-quo falls, then the world—political, planetary, or even cosmic (a lot rides on a purposeful confusion of these levels of worldhood)—will come to an end. Parallel to the cause-effect relations in the table of categories, the hypothetical judgment of the political katechon, piecing together two distinct judgments, The regime collapses and The world ends, forges out of the powers that be the guarantors of spatial and temporal existence.

The absolutist judgment The state is me undergoes a subtle transformation into If I am, then the state also is, harboring the threat of negation If I am not, then the state also is not. Instead of weaving a close-knit identity of the subject and the predicate, the composite proposition strings together two distinct orders of being, where the former is the cause and the latter the effect. Thereafter, the leader who is the subject of hypothetic political judgments can (and does) profess reluctance to assume responsibility, to carry the world on his (most often his) shoulders, but accepts the mission out of his patriotic sense of duty and in the spirit of self-sacrifice. This generic scenario applies to already beleaguered absolutisms and to many modern dictatorships, such as António de Oliveira Salazar’s nearly four-decade rule in twentieth-century Portugal.

Disjunctive judgments assemble “a certain community of cognitions [eine gewisse Gemeinschaft der Erkenntnisse]” that “mutually exclude each other” (CPR A74). In Antiquity, a typical disjunctive judgment would have been A given polity is either a monarchy, or an aristocracy, or a democracy, or a degenerate variation on these three primary types. Mutually exclusive, the six modes of governance joined a community of political cognitions. Modernity has added to these regimes various mixed types, such as the British constitutional monarchy coupled with parliamentary democracy. In postmodernity, disjunctive political judgments are knottier than ever. Aggravating the modern trend, their components are not mutually exclusive but mutate into one another. Moreover, the resulting whole no longer amounts to a community (Gemeinschaft) of cognitions but is chronically fragmentary, the list of hybrid regimes staying open-ended. The parts have as little identity (that is, self-identity) as the whole: one can no longer tell what a polity is nor can one pinpoint the object of political cognition at the disjunction of unknowns. What matters is the survival of the status quo, whatever the form, deformation, or reconfiguration it might undergo to achieve this goal.

When relational judgments have politics in view, they remind us of the dynamic nature of their object as the pendular movement of politicization and depoliticization. The categorical form can envelop statements with diametrically opposed contents: Politics is dissensus and hostility (Schmitt, Rancière) and Politics is dialogue and consensus-building (Habermas, Rawls). But what is the work of the copula is, slotted between the subject politics and varying predicates? Read in a logical vein, outside normative and ontological constraints, the copula binds the subject to the predicate and conveys that politics begins as soon as hostilities boil over or the moment dialogue is initiated between parties with disparate interests. The predicate is a trigger event, and what it triggers is politicization; thus, for all the differences between them, categorical judgments say the same thing: Politics is politicization. (It is important to note here that, because the contents of categorical judgments about politics are mutually exclusive, the complete judgment should be Politics is politicization and depoliticization.)

This is still more apparent in the hypothetical judgments of the if … then kind that convert the subject (politics) and the predicate into the effect and the cause: If hostilities in a certain domain reach a critical point, then the domain becomes political or If reasoned dialogue and clear channels of communication are established between warring factions, then politics replaces sheer violence. Logical correlates of the relational category community, disjunctive judgments skirt the reductionism of those positions that are fixated on one trigger event, holding it wholly responsible for politicization. When they take politics for their object, these judgments come closest to the thinking of political categories: Distinct political theories assume that politics should be understood either in quantitative or in qualitative or in modal or in relational or in positional or in spatiotemporal or in voluntarist-agential terms. In truth, it is the ensemble of these categorial cross-sections that accounts for the phenomena of politics.

Modal judgments, according to Kant, are adept at abstracting from the content of that which is judged about and revolve around “the value of the copula in relation to thinking in general [den Wert der Kopula in Beziehung auf das Denken überhaupt]” (CPR B100). Possibility, actuality, and necessity find their twins in problematic, assertoric, and apodictic forms of judgment. We may map the gulf in political theory between descriptive (or positive) and normative approaches onto this tripartite Kantian division. Political positivism purports to offer assertoric judgments where assertions are actual, borne out in historical (though frequently dehistoricized) actuality. Normative theory expounds what ought to be the case, usually on the basis of first or last principles disengaged from reality. The normative ought appears to stem from apodictic judgments. Yet, is a necessity that is not actual (and, indeed, a priori not actualizable) necessary? If not, then does it not enact theoretical wish fulfillment, as in a dream or a hallucination, explicitly forbidden from coming true in reality and symptomatically presenting a distorted panorama of the underlying issue? Should we reach the verdict that normative necessity has a wildly fantastic tinge to it, we would have to reconnect the conjectures of normative theory with problematic judgments regarding what is merely possible.

Possibility is perhaps the lead modal political category—logically connected to problematic judgment—that exerts a powerful influence on the remaining components of modality, necessity, and actuality, objectifying apodictic and assertoric judgments. The apodicticity of the norm is a façade for an unbridled speculation on what would be necessarily the case in an ideal, purely possible world. By comparison, the assertoric nature of descriptive theory (and of political realism broadly speaking) displays a more modest face of problematic judgment. In their book on Rawls, Chandran Kukathas and Philip Pettit presented a symptom of this condition afflicting political thought when they wrote: “it is necessary to appreciate that there are two aspects to political theory, traditionally conceived. It involves the analysis of what is politically feasible on the one hand, and of what is desirable on the other.”12

The feasible and the desirable sit on two different sides of a fissure in political possibility. The official narrative is that the standpoint of feasibility is wary of actual constraints, with implied assertoric judgments detaining possibility within pragmatic limits. But what happens is that certain bits of actuality or of what is asserted about the current state of affairs are themselves raised to the pedestal of necessity, the resultant toxic mix yielding a “sober” judgment of feasibility. A commonplace relativist critique There are no value-free descriptions, which guides thinking and action toward a dead end, has but a premonition of this categorial ideological game. Still, for the purposes of a constructive ideology critique that would enable us to separate the wheat from the chaff, it would be prudent to restate the relativist insight in terms of the categories and the judgments that antecede them: In politics, there are no assertoric judgments without interference from problematic and “strained” apodictic varieties.

The same dividing line in the possible, and in the judgment passed on degrees of possibility, is detectable in revolutionary aspirations. As Slavoj Žižek has frequently argued, leftist Liberals suffering from the “beautiful soul” syndrome advocate for an anticapitalist revolution in a clandestine hope that it would never actually take place. In their capacity of stakeholders in the current power constellation, they cling to the status quo and, at the same time, give a fairly harmless outlet to the fantasy of its destruction. That is why beautiful leftist souls reckon the revolution desirable but not feasible—and support it for that very reason.

Think what one may of the end results of his political work, Vladimir Lenin was a trailblazer who pointed the way out of the labyrinths of the possible. His revolutionary discourses, and in particular the speeches given between the February and October Revolutions of 1917, are, oddly enough, at the interface of assertoric and apodictic political judgments.13 Despite the fact that the revolutionaries, including Lenin himself, were in dire straits and despite the unfavorable circumstances at the time, Lenin announced assertorically that the revolution was actually taking place and stressed the apodictic character of the event, along with the necessity and actuality of the proletariat’s victory in the ensuing struggle. His lesson to us is that it is futile to fashion a compass for political action out of abstract possibility, which is more likely than not to be actually impossible. Only a mélange of assertoric and apodictic judgments will mend the tear in possibility, between what is said to be feasible and what is said to be desirable.

Politics as such can also provide materials for modal judgments, according to which politicization will be possible, necessary, and actual. But what does a problematic judgement about politics say? Both Politicization is possible and the more provocative Politicization is possibility treat the predicate as the content and the form of judgment. That which is judged about (politics) is already the possibility of politicization achievable by setting the categories in motion, while the problematic judgment about it has the form of possibility. It follows that, with respect to politics, Kant’s retraction of the copula’s ontological meaning from statements of modality, where the is must be stringently logical, does not apply. Apodictic judgments on the necessity of politics are swathed in ontology. They convey that res publica and political difference, much like sexual difference, are not accidental additions to, but integral parts of, being human. Assertotic judgments on political actuality are ontological with an existential twist: Politicization is under way spins actuality out of possibility after the fashion of Heidegger’s “existence” that melds the three modal categories into an existential actuality as the necessity of possibility.

“AFTER” THE CATEGORIES: SCHEMATISM

Judgments are the austere logical and subjective instantiations of the categories; schemata insert the categories into the order of time, putting some flesh on the bare bones of pure understanding. For Kant, the mediations of schematism are unsurpassable, in that the categories and the transcendental aesthetics of experience (space and time) are two forms of the a priori that are not to be conflated. Heidegger’s thesis The meaning of being is time is incomprehensible from a Kantian perspective, where it would mean that the category of existence is a pure form of sensible intuition. At best, Heidegger’s predecessor will concede that “reality,” Realität, is “a concept, which in itself indicates a being (in time) [Begriff an sich selbst ein Sein (in der Zeit) anzeigt]” (CPR A143). As logical functions, then, judgments are categories stabilized in atemporal molds; as temporalized categories, schemata come adrift and are prepared to receive any object in light of “the general conditions under which alone the category can be applied” (CPR A140). What are the general political conditions for applying the categories? How might schemata work in politics?

Taking up quantity, Kant notes that the “pure schema of magnitude” is “number, which is a representation that summarizes the successive addition of one (homogeneous) unit to another” (CPR B182). In its unity, number is a plurality of homogenized units added to one another in a succession, that is to say, in a temporal pattern. We could transpose this definition onto a numeric succession of political regimes, classically ranging from one ruler through a few to many. We could also predictably claim that the scientific and philosophical invention of homogeneity and its implementation within a quantitative outlook are the forerunners of modern democratic constructions. The disadvantage of such claims is that they do not give enough credit to the political constitution of the categories. So, what if things were the other way around? What if the schema of magnitude (as Kant sees it, his monarchic leanings notwithstanding) were not just political but a priori democratic, because it counted and counted upon homogenous units in a uniform succession, out of which time itself is woven?

On the one hand, 1 + 1 + 1 … = (a) a dynamic representation of number, (b) a chain of instants that make up time, and (c) electoral multiplicities in representative democracies. On the other hand, isolated from “before” and “after,” extracted from a succession, sequestered from the order of time, one—let alone the One—is not a number: absolute monarchic rule does not sit comfortably with the “pure,” but essentially democratic, schema of magnitude. Democracy judges all kinds of politics starting from and coming back to itself: hence, the predominance of quantitative categories in the age of democratic hegemony and the surreptitiously democratic take on democracy’s own nuts and bolts, the numbers. None of this is strange, given that in the same paragraph Kant reopens the door to the empirical constitution of transcendentals, as well as to a cross-contamination of transcendental aesthetics and analytics, acknowledging that the act of numeration produces (the a priori aesthetic form of) time. “I generate time itself in the apprehension of the intuition [ich die Zeit selbst in der Apprehension der Anschauung erzeuge]” (CPR B183) by threading together in a numeric twine the instants, each of which counts as one. Before the advent of modern democracy, time itself is democratized.

We discover a piece of evidence supporting the transtranscendentally democratic framing both of the quantitative schema and of schematism itself in Kant’s stipulation that “the schema of a pure concept of understanding [that is, of a category] is something that can never be brought to an image at all [was in gar kein Bild gebracht werden kann], but is rather only the pure synthesis, in accord with the rule of unity according to concepts in general” (CPR A142). Kant could not be blunter in the way he perverted the Aristotelian skhēmá-figure, using the same Greek-derived word: in philosophical modernity, the categorial schema is dis- or unfigured. The nonfigurative, nonimagistic representation of politics predicated on synthesis intellectualis is, we might recall, a trait of democratic neutralization, complicating practical responses to the questions of where power lies and how to resist it. In theory, schematism is a corollary to the democratic disembodiment of authority, to “ruling the void”: there is no image that would be commensurate to the categories in general and to democratic sovereignty in particular. The disfiguration of cognition and politics is total, in that we no longer begin phenomenologically with the things themselves—or with res publica for that matter. The schema of pure concepts is a cognitive frame appropriate to democratic legitimacy.

In the spirit of Newton, Kant prepares the other categories for quantification by pointing out how the qualitative schema, too, can be rendered in numbers. Within the logic of schematism, reality is being in time, negation is nonbeing in time, and the limit that comes through from the opposition between them is a boundary between “either a filled or an empty time [als einer erfülleten, oder leeren Zeit]” (CPR A143). If we mark negation as 0 and measure the filling or emptying of time with positive values greater than 0 denoting the degrees of being, then this schema would be laid out for numeric transcription. It would a priori homogenize, democratize, and level the world down. (The transition from reality to negation, Kant writes, “makes every reality representable as a quantum [jede Realität als ein Quantum vorstellig macht]” [CPR B183].)

The qualitative schema temporalizes political boundaries, where political being grazes the edges of nonbeing. Some of these boundaries are spatial; they are the changing, temporally variable borders of states, where what lies outside is not just another political being but nonbeing, contemplated from the vantage point of sovereign rule within state borders. The atmosphere propitious to heated international conflicts is that of repressing the nonbeing-aspect of the outside in an all-or-nothing bid to repel or assimilate another being. Other boundaries make plain the polarized divisions between groups, above all the groupings of friends and enemies. Contra the naturalization—and so eternalization—of warring factions, their temporalization through Kantian schematism allows political qualities to morph and mutate, often into their opposites. The quality “political” is not an exception here: the seesaw of politicization and depoliticization is graspable as a series of clashes between political being in time and its negation (the nonbeing of politics). The shifting limits of politics are the product of this ontological tendency and its countertendency in the qualitative schema.

Relational schematism explicates the temporal nature of political relations. Calling substance “the persistence of the real in time [die Beharrlichkeit des Realen in der Zeit]” (CPR A144), Kant twice stamps this notoriously atemporal category with time determinations. The real, according to its schema, is being in time, which means that substance is being in time persisting in time. Premodern metaphysics sneers at the entire temporal realm; Kant’s schematism promises a fresh understanding of substance in terms of stretching time out, making it elastic, cramming it for as long as practicable with being, and fending off empty time without being, to boot.

Within the category of relationality, the schema of substance gives voice to the aspirations of every status quo: staging itself as what is real, as being in time, it presents the alternatives as unreal, as nonbeing in time, and does everything to make those living under it interested in its persistence, as though their own survival were at stake. Actually, the interpretation of substance in terms of persistence in being, with the attendant desire to continue to be, is traceable back to Spinoza’s conatus essendi. The ideology behind the schema of substance is, therefore, parasitic on a fusion of the two conati—that of the rulers and that of the ruled. The goal of the regime is to convince its subjects that their persistence in time is contingent on the endurance of the status quo, affectively binding (cathecting) them to the regime’s survival. Outside the stretch it occupies, there is the horror of empty time, nonbeing, nonreality, meant to quell the desire for radical change. Conversely, a particular system of governance arrogates to itself the fullness of being and time and, in the capacity of their sole legitimate ontological mediator, vicariously dispenses them to its subjects.

The schema of cause and effect reveals the timeline of rudimentary political relations, “leading” and “following.” In a causal relation, whenever something is posited, “something else always follows [folgt]. It therefore consists in the succession of the manifold insofar as it is subject to a rule [einer Regel unterworfen ist]” (CPR A144). Arranged in a succession, leading and following belong to the principle of time, which is the rule (Regel) Kant invokes. As a result, the real rule is not in the cause (Ursache, the original thing) but in how the effect adheres or fails to adhere to that cause in a sequence of discrete moments. Also, the succession of what is posited and what follows may be suddenly interrupted, destroying the schema of causality. Politically stated, the cause or the source of authority is not in the leader but in whether and how leadership is followed by its supposed followers, the subjects, in a temporally fraught, unstable, fragile relation.

Since our contemporary technocracies allegedly replace leaders with managers and sovereignty with good economic sense, they meddle with the political schema of causality and the potential revolutionary wedges between leading and following factored into this relation. Decimating the causal political schema, doing away with the function of leadership, technocracy encourages reactive behaviors that, in an infinite regress, react to a reaction to a reaction. Everything and everyone become an effect of an effect of an effect. Managerial politics is reduced to putting out the fires that—local, transnational, and global—are increasingly unmanageable. As chief political actors react, following the followers, their stance easily slides into the worst of reactionary populisms. Political time loops upon itself: without a succession of causes and effects, it recoils, coloring our image of time in general. This is not to say that the ordering of time in a succession is somehow truer than its reactive coils; my point is that historically specific political schemata (in other words, the figurations of political order) transtranscendentally influence the patterns and shapes in which time is ordered.

The schema of community entails “the reciprocal causality of substances with regard to their accidents” and “the simultaneity of determinations [das Zugleichsein der Bestimmungen] of the one with those of the other, in accordance with a universal rule” (CPR B184). In two distinct ways, being in a community razes the metaphysical hierarchy that elevates substance over accidents. First, it postulates the authority of a universal rule, equalizing substance and its accidents by means of the very law of law, or, in political terms, the rule of law. Second, with regard to time, the schema of community occasions the simultaneity of determinations among substances. With this, it facilitates the coexistence of finite beings in time persisting in time, which is the meaning of substance once we unpack its relation to the schema of the real. The beings in question may refer to the members of a polity, sovereign political units themselves, and, in planetary cosmopolitics, all living organisms and ecosystems. Although their durations (the limited spans of their persistence) are undeniably different, the reciprocally determinative substances are synchronized at the moment of their concurrence, in a flash of “simultaneity” that evinces the mutual character of their existence, qua coexistence, in time.

Modal schematism renders thematic the articulation of the categories with time. Thus, the schema of possibility “is the agreement of the synthesis of various representations with the conditions of time in general”; that of actuality is “existence at a determinate time”; and that of necessity is “the existence of an object at all times” (CPR A144–45). Furthermore, in the schema of modality, “time itself determines whether and how an object belongs to time” (CPR A145). But because time is transtranscendentally affected by political categories and configurations, the possibility, actuality, and necessity of time itself, as much as of the objects that “belong” to it, revert, in the last instance, to political possibilities, actualities, and necessities. This reversion has been the case with the democratization of time in the quantitative schema, with the qualitative filling out or emptying of time indexed to finite political being, and with the relational ordering of time in hierarchical or egalitarian formations. Political actuality in all its apparent, empirical contingency is the necessary condition of possibility for the possibility of modal categories conjugated with time in the schemata appropriate to them.

Kant falls back on schematism so as to mediate between the categories (the pure concepts of understanding) and the objects, seeing that no image (no spatial figure) is adequate to the concept it figures. No image does justice to the concept of the political, either. But is there such a thing as the concept of the political? The overarching term I proposed, namely, res publica, is not at all conceptual; it is the phenomenologically accessible “thing,” of which the categories are predicated and which bridges the formally political and nonpolitical domains of experience. Historically salient shapes of political being vary, which is why we may avail ourselves of Kantian schematism but, unlike the German philosopher, take figuration into account.

Political schematism refers to the figurations of res publica within a unique categorial constellation. Is the resultant figure a polis, an Empire, a nation-state, or a transnational community? Note that the conditions under which these figures materialize are not entirely political: they emanate from the breathable membrane between intrapolitics and infrapolitics. When the pertinent infrapolitical field is economic, the figurations of a polity signal the exclusion of certain classes from the formal or substantive membership in a political association and from the benefits of the res publica they help bring about. Slavery, serfdom, colonization, and wage-labor create the republican common “wealth” by impoverishing and expelling from the public sphere those who materially produce it.

Marx’s modes of production (Produktionsweise) are a shining example of political schematism, where all the relevant categories are present: modality-possibility, or the forces of production (Produktivkräfte); relation, or the relations of production (Produktionverhältnisse); quality, or the means of production (Produktionsmittel); and quantity, or exchange-value (Tauschwert). Building on his analysis in synergy with Kant’s philosophy, treading synchronously Track A and Track B, the task for the political categorial thinking of the future is to broaden political schematism beyond economics and to chart schemata analogous to modes of production in other politicizable domains, be they religious, moral, aesthetic, or technological.