In political philosophy, the state has invariably appeared as a figure for something or someone beyond the institution itself. From Hobbes’s Leviathan, which parades it in the shape of an “Artificial Animal” or “Artificiall Man” “of greater stature and strength than the Naturall,”1 to Hegel’s thesis in his Rechtsphilosophie that the state is one of spirit’s most advanced shapes,2 this feature of political reality has been clothed in layer upon layer of mythological meaning, including the mythology of reason itself. Eager to demystify the state and to live up to a self-professed scientific ideal, political science slots it into an inflexible institutional architecture, propped up by theories of normativity and rational choice. The upshot of the disenchantment of politics that ensues is similar to the dénouement of analytical thought and (experimental) physical sciences: the object of study is unfigured and disfigured, disappearing into a motley of minute structures and microprocesses. In all three instances, knowledge commences at an infraobjective level after the knower has effaced the object’s identifiable outlines (the assemblages of the Kantian “figurative syntheses” that add up to the “transcendental synthesis of the imagination”), fragmented its cognitive and perceptual unity into component parts, and transcribed them into their numeric equivalents.
My alternative suggestion is to survey the state as a junction for the categories liberally drawn from Aristotle and Kant: positionality, substance, relation, modality, quantity, and quality, among others. The advantage of this political-philosophical protocol is that it commits to a multifaceted view, which refrains from figuring or disfiguring the political entity and portrays it, as far as practicable, in accord with its own demarcations, following its contours. Rather than an encyclopedic theoretical account, mine will be a methodological exercise in categorial thinking, receptive to revision and future elaboration to the extent that it keeps an ear to the ground of the state’s givenness in political apperception. The horizon for what I undertake here in broad brushstrokes will thus be a phenomenological, not an ideological, critique of the state.
To be in a state or to have a state is to take a stance in a given place, with or against—with-against—others. From the PIE root *stā-, it means “to stand,” “to make or be firm.” In Persian and Slavic languages, this root precipitates the word stan, which, in addition to signaling where one stands, names the being-country of a country, as in Pakistan, Uzbekistan, or Afghanistan. A position, a posture, a status, the state is the response to an existential-phenomenological question: How does where one stands stand?3
Beyond the promising, though formal, indications etymology offers us, it is imperative to go back to Aristotle in order to ascertain their philosophical soundness. As soon as we do so, we will observe that positionality (θέσις) is a philosophical category, and standing (στάσις) is a variation on the theme of thesis (Cat. 6b, 12). Stasis embraces the mutually contradictory significations of stability and tumult, stagnation and civil war. The standing position that this word, a precursor of our “state,” signals is overdetermined, split between a standstill or standing down, on the one hand, and standing up (to fight), on the other. The position and the state that epitomizes it are divided against themselves. How where we stand stands is negatively conditioned by a dizzying multiplication of stances: it never stands in one way alone. A subject and an object, it stands over against itself, ever primed for conflict, falling apart in the thick of its fragile and tense unity. The position is shattered in its standing modality, with figuration both impossible (just try giving a figure to the simultaneity of stability and tumult!) and necessary (after all, only a figured something or someone can assume, or be in, a position).
There are several important consequences to approaching positionality as a point of departure for thinking the state by means of the categories. I will list but a few of them here.
1. Instead of launching from a place, itself the category of where in Aristotelian philosophy, instead of setting out from a site, as Heidegger does in his discussion of the matter,4 and restricting politics to a politics of place, this approach calls for a more ample phenomenological interpretation of political formations. When it comes to the status of the state, we go directly to emplacement and orientation, to situatedness, coordination, and alignment. Yet, because in stasis the position is opposed to itself, the nascent phenomenology of the state is exceptionally complicated, its oppositional character externalized in relations to other states and, occasionally, internalized in situations of a civil war. This is a far cry from the political organicism and parochialism the politics of place stubbornly clings to.
2. The primacy of positionality reawakens the intuition we have unearthed while considering Schmitt’s theory of “the political”: in questions of state, accidents precede substance. The how of the stance is more consequential than what or who stands. Quite literally, substance is, itself, a play on standing: it makes itself firm from below (sub) by furnishing a firm foundation for beings. Political substance is, for its part, the effect of political subjectivity, of the subject position with a unique orientation and style of occupying a place.
3. Statelessness, the condition increasingly affecting vast populations around the world, whether or not they are refugees, names above all neither the condition of placelessness nor the absence of basic rights that go along with citizenship, but the denial of a position to the stateless. The loss of place and the loss of rights are the ramifications of this denial. The stateless are deprived of the opportunity to have a legal, political, or ontological standing, which, as a metaphysical reflection of the physical upright stance (the status of the bipedal animals that we are), bespeaks something essentially human. Their dehumanization and the extreme endangerment of their lives are attributable to the proscription of a unique position: Thou shalt not stand! Neither at a standstill nor in tumultuous movement, the stateless multitudes are expelled to the hither side of stasis, their empirical deaths corroborating their phenomenological and existential erasure.
In its standing position, in its erection which the institution formalizes, the state demands that its citizens stand up for it at a time of war, that they be prepared to fight and die for it, to lay down their lives. Its stance is virtually inseparable from a standing army. Thus, when universal national conscription is scrapped, so is the existential significance of the nation-state. More provocatively still, expressed in the political state, uprightness is the mark of masculinity, of a part of human sexuality that, in standing up, in getting erect, illegitimately stands in for the whole of humanity. Although he does not articulate it in these terms, that is the subtext of Heidegger’s association of the Greek polis with a pole: “polis is the polos, the pole, the place around which everything appearing to the Greeks as a being turns in a peculiar way.… The pole, as this place, lets beings appear in their Being and show the totality of their condition.”5
Heidegger flagrantly omits two things from his explication of polis. First, the pole (“the pole, as this place …”) is not the place it marks and orders around itself, something that troubles the ellipsis of being as being-in-place-and-in-a-position. The central indicator of an abode, the sign for habitation, is alien and uninhabitable. Second, the static nature of the rock-hard polos is but half of the fissured stasis phenomenon, encompassing a standstill and a free fall. The ontological turning of beings around the pole hinges on the stability of the immobile center, while, in truth, the center divides against itself and produces restful unrest and unrestful rest. Phallogocentric to the nth degree, the pole-like shape of the polis and Staat is, for Heidegger, how beings in their totality display themselves. Under-standing (Verstand) bows to this hypostasis of masculinity in the eternal erection it converts into a manifestation of ironclad necessity.
The issue of necessity takes us back to the category of modality. As he comes up with his famous definition of necessity—“nothing other than the existence that is given by possibility itself [nicht anderes als die Existenz, die durch die Möglichkeit selbst gegeben ist]” (CPR B111)—Kant articulates the three ingredients of the category of modality (necessity, existence, possibility). The political necessity proper is to take a stance, to assume a position in the field of positionality dominated by the state. This necessity lurks behind the impossibility of neutrality Schmitt underscores in his works. The state as a stance is the form of existence given by the possibility of the political itself. All oppositions to it, be they of the anarchist or other strains, fall under such necessity by virtue of taking a stance vis-à-vis a standing that not only is of the state but that also is the state.
Contemporary technocracies are the ultimate perversions of the oppositional stance into a contrived nonoppositionality; they pretend that they embody a neutral absence of any stance and conceal a blatantly ideological position behind a postideological smokescreen. It is not by chance that a technocratic state is known as “managerial” or “administrative.” Flaunting the end of the political, it contrives its necessity from an existence given by the possibility—which Lenin reckoned within reach after the Communist revolution6—of overcoming politics in the sense of the partial and polarized positions participating in a multiparty system. At the same time, and contrary to the affirmations dotting the official discourse on the subject, this possibility (of the impossibility of politics) is the highest stage of the political disguised as its other. The perverse technocratic existence, spawned by the possibility of political impossibility, inheres in the necessity of the phenomenon it negates, which is why the administrative state is still identified as a state, and justifiably so.
Even if taking a position on the chessboard of political positionality is unavoidable, its exact coordinates admit several degrees of freedom. The state organizes the body politic in a standing political formation, potentially ready for battle. Other positions are also plausible: for example, the flat horizontality of certain strands of anarchism, Deleuzian politics, and “grassroots democracy,” or a sitting arrangement7 suspended somewhere between the horizontal and the vertical axes, most notably in sit-ins, the strategies of the Occupy movement, and protests defending native settlement rights, most recently at North Dakota’s Standing (!) Rock Indian Reservation. In each case, the position of choice is both literal and figurative; better yet, it is figurational or literal-figurative, in that phenomenological description invalidates the distinctions between these two indices of political, ontological, and other types of orientation. Across the board, counterstate positions are nonetheless severely limited due to the stance they adopt against the state, and, in this standoff, participate in the dynamics of the state. They back up Hegel’s verdict in politics: any opposition to dialectics is thoroughly dialectical. It may well be that phenomenally-ontically the lying or sitting positions are beneath (according to the spatial and axiological significations of the word) the state but modally-ontologically they are altogether absorbed into and coopted by the state.
An assortment of possible positions boils down to the necessity of being in or assuming a position, the necessity entwined with another category—that of relation. In Aristotle’s oeuvre, after all, positions are the instances of what to, πρός τι (Cat. 6b, 12), and are therefore relational. We always take a stance for or against something, and a state is a stance with regard to others, both among those who comprise a polity standing side by side, shoulder to shoulder, and between states, each of them turned toward rivaling political units in a face-to-face alliance or confrontation, overt or covert. Further, relations can be of different kinds, as Kant demonstrates in his discussion of community, causality-dependence, and substance-accident. How does each of these subcategories bear upon the state?
Community (Gemeinschaft) is the reciprocity of acting and being acted upon, Wechselwirkung zwischen dem Handelnden und Leidenden (CPR B106), harkening back to the Aristotelian relation as a correlation of the doing and the done, the sensing and the sensed, to give just a couple of examples. In a state, the relation of community denotes the correlation of being at a standstill and taking a stand, the outcome of hardening into a vertical position and the act of making firm. Stasis is the perfect specimen of Kantian community, which has internalized the reciprocal movement-rest of Handeln and Leiden.
In the so-called international community the rules of the game are such that some states monopolize the acting stance, even as others (the majority) are allotted the role of being acted upon. Despite the de jure absolute sovereignty of all states, a few of them de facto stand out on the international arena and, more vertical than their peers, satisfy to the letter the notion of the state-as-an-upright-stance. There are, then, states that are less “genuine” than we think. Precluding the reciprocity of acting and being acted upon, the international community is not a community in accordance with Kant’s characterization of this relational mode. And the same unevenness is detectable within states, where the principle of the equality of all citizens is disrespected in legal and political practices (for example, after the implementation of the Patriot Act in the United States, violations of “due-process provisions, protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, detentions without hearings, probable cause, and denial of bails” have been rampant when it came to the citizens and immigrants of Middle Eastern or Islamic origins).8 Some stand and have a standing against the masses of those who don’t, eating away at the very possibility of a national community. Where we stand stands differently, depending on who this “we” is, unless the state has become communist with each acting and being acted upon based on a material equality of standing.
If the relational category of community presupposes reciprocity between its members, then another sort of relation—causality and dependence (CPR B106)—implies a hierarchy purged of every vestige of reciprocity. The cause is the origin, an autonomous principle, the metaphysical status principi, the single thing that stands by itself, without external support, irradiating multiple effects.
Translated into political terms, the cause-effect relation is that of mastery and vassalage, of total authority and submission. The cause rules autocratically and the effects obey its overwhelming power that, emanating from the outside, cannot help but be experienced as violent. In its present condition, then, “the international community” is a misnomer. International relations among states are, for the most part, those of causality and dependence; political relations within states do not live up to the reciprocity of acting and enduring an action that defines a community. Assuming that the state is the cause, the citizens’ standing is derivative with respect to how the state itself stands. So, totalitarianisms thrive on likening the state to the cause, the supreme standing relative to which everyone and everything else lie prostrate. Though a fiction, the social contract reversed political cause-effect relations and posited a concert of individual wills at the origin of the state, which, qua their effect, could be dissolved whenever the implicit agreement to create and continue to re-create it broke down.
Let us take a step back. Colloquially, state signifies a condition, a temporarily stabilized being of something. The semantic lever here is the word temporarily: the state of things is a transit station on the path of perpetual alteration, as in changes from the solid to the liquid and gaseous states of matter. While the idea of a physical state privileges the static connotations of stasis with its relative stability, it also hints at a series of transformations leading beyond the present state, and so accounts for the meaning of stasis as unrest. The same holds for the political state, in that its ousia may at any moment depart from a stabilized this, seeking a series of explications in this as that.
What does the political state temporarily stabilize? The answer is unambiguous, and it goes beyond, as well as peers below, the thought of early Marx it is evocative of: the state is the substantivizing stabilization of conflict and antagonism—not their extinguishing but their channeling, steering, direction, arrangement in standing or standoffish formations, that is to say, their management. In the state, stasis acquires a form (in another formulation, the state is stasis hypostatized) educed from the political things themselves, a snapshot of their standing at the moment. The state formalizes the condition proper to the res publica that hosts the possibility of strife and contention.
The condition of res publica and of the conflicts that take place there is temporal; even though the thing itself incessantly changes, its hypostatized standing remains relatively unperturbed. Keeping to a rigorously phenomenological method, we might say that problems crop up when state form loses contact with that which it formalizes. Hollowed out, it pretends to lead a life of its own, detached from the res publica and oblivious to anything but procedural stipulations.9 It is then that substantive political forms are experienced as impositions and arouse the revolutionary desire to overthrow them. Isn’t anarchism the purest expression of this desire still unconscious with regard to its deep cause, the wish to return from the content-less state form to the status of how the political things themselves stand?
The interpretation of the state as a substantive form of relationality and as a formalization of political being is evident in the republican tradition.10 Indeed, the previously nonpolitical word status is politicized in Latin when it describes the condition of public things, status rei publicae, at the origins of the political state. In Justinian’s Corpus iuris civilis, it is the emperor’s duty to reward peace and maintain status rei publicae, the state of public things—pacem decoramus et statum rei publicae sustentamus (1.17.1pr). And, earlier still—besides the aforementioned Enneus, Cicero, and Augustine, who conjugated res publica with the dual standing of the Roman polity on its “ancient manners and men”—Livy relates in his History of Rome the vow that the Great Games of Titus would be held again “if the state of the public thing should remain as it was before [si eodem statu res publica staret]” (30.2.8).
The substantive form of status is affixed, besides the res publica it formalizes, to the conditions of the ruler (status principi), of the crown (status coronae), of the realm (status regni), of the empire (status imperii), and of the polity (status civitatis).11 Whatever the this it singles out, the status is a standing inseparable from that which or the one who stands. And so, we hit a fork in the road of formalization between (1) the premodern experiments in political hylomorphism, where the state is the form equiprimordial with material, spatiotemporal positionality, and (2) the modern work of producing a formal conception of state form, a partial second ousia where the as that is unfastened from the this it was meant to flesh out. Having lost the last ties to figuration, the modern state no longer reveals its substantive whatness or whoness; it no longer responds to the phenomenological-existential question Who or what stands? but presents an abstract form of standing pertaining to no one in particular, behind which precious few stand and thrive.
The state’s penchant for abstraction is admittedly anticipated in its early formalizations, where independently of the noun in the genitive that follows it—regni, imeperii, rei publicae—the status remains constant and, in its constancy, minimally indifferent to the beings of which it is a condition. The modern state intensifies this tendency and also paradoxically lives up to the primacy of the position, the how of the stance preceding substance. (Formal proceduralism is the case in point of a single-minded focus on the how in juridical and political systems.) That said, an accident is still the accident of something. The how sundered from a what or a who generates abstract whatness in greater need of legitimation the further away it is from political subjectivity. In modernity, this desiccated and immaterial whatness is “a form of public power separate from both the ruler and the ruled.”12 The how of the administrative state is a technique of domination concentrated in the expression “the despotism of no one,” Despotie des Niemand,13 a despotism emancipated from the visible figure of a despot.
The formal conception of state form is a substance that tends toward its own desubstantivation in a countermovement to the self-deformalizing thrust of the categories. That is, finally, what is at stake (it, too—a vertical pole) in the speculative reversals, indicated in stasis. The *stā- of a stance or status inflects steering and constancy, starting and destiny, movement and rest, beginning and end (hence, the volatile, temporally constituted verb to be, estar, in Spanish and Portuguese). Substance does not neutralize these and other “binary” pairings on a common turf but undergoes politicization welcoming them in itself already in its prehistory as Aristotle’s ousia. No wonder that we have grown accustomed to treating the state and politics as one and the same thing: on their substantive side, both are adept at accommodating oppositions, along with the movements that oppose them, and at dialectically twisting that which intends to negate them into a refined mode of their own expression.
Classical political texts are fixated on the stability of the status and endeavor to pass qualitative value judgments on it. Thus, Cicero speaks of optimus status civitate, “the best state of the polity,” in Letters to His Brother Quintus as well as in De republica (1.33–34, 70–71) and De legibus (1.15, 3.4). In Cicero’s wake, Erasmus’s Institutio (1.75) contrasts the best state of public things (optimus Reipublicae status) and the worst (pessimus Reipublicae status), and Thomas More’s Utopia includes in its subtitle the words de optimo rei publicae statu, in the same year of 1516. Setting aside for the time being the content of these qualities, observe that they address the question of political positionality, How does where one stands stand? The options are either that public things stand well or that they stand poorly. A good standing, a sound status, indicates spatiotemporal durability, itself a corollary to well-constituted foundations. How it stands, the state of the state, circles back to what it stands upon, even if experientially and conceptually the position comes first, before the substratum that sustains it.14
Take, for instance, Erasmus, whose Institutio is a “must-read” for anyone wishing to grasp the metaphysics of the state’s political standing. “The prince’s imperium over the populus,” he writes, “is none other than that of the mind over the body [non alius modi esse imperium principis in populum, quam quale est animi in corpus].” The “reign of the mind in the body [animum regnare in corpore]” is, for him, the best (optimum) condition and the source of happiness (felicitas) (1.80). Consequently, the happiest state (felicissimus status) is obeying the best laws under the best prince, who provides for all (6.1). Erasmus’s optimal order is the government of the body by the mind, whose paragon is the prince/principle, or the head (and the brain) of the body politic. His solution to the problem of a sound status, shared with the rest of the philosophical lineage he is a part of, is visible to a naked eye: to stand well, one ought to stand on one’s head. The metaphysical inversion of physical positionality shadows the qualitative categorization of the state with remarkable consistency from ancient Greek philosophy through medieval political treatises to Hegel’s philosophy of state. It is in a culmination of this long history that the ideology critique Marx develops in Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843) and The German Ideology (1846) cuts the ground from under the headstand that political metaphysics performs and the best status appears as the worst, particular class interests of the bourgeoisie amounting to a false universal.
The axiological qualities of the state rest, in any event, on the physicality of the status (most of all, its firmness), which affords the political stance its verticality. If the state describes how the things themselves stand without abstracting their form from the content, then its hardness is due to its rootedness in hylomorphic political realities. If, however, these ties are loosened, then the state rigidifies into an institution, precisely in order to compensate for the lack of support from what is supposed to guarantee its existence. The state that derives its firmness from the things themselves is the status of the republic or of the realm; the one that relies on intricate institutional structures and mechanisms is an abstract juridical entity in force on a given territory.
Aristotle’s and Kant’s categories alike can offer invaluable assistance to philosophical attempts to comprehend the state’s territorial boundaries. The relevant Aristotelian category is quantity, or, more specifically, geometrical continuous quantities. What these measures demarcate, with respect to the state, is not the perimeter of combined plots of land; there is strictly speaking no geometry or geography of the state, and the nomos of the Earth is, by implication, inapposite here. Continuous quantities do not delimit a portion of the Earth (gē; terra) but, rather, circumscribe the territory, into which terra has mutated. As Heidegger argues, the Roman invention of the territory expresses “the basic comportment of the Romans toward beings in general,” “the rule of the imperium.” “Imperium,” he continues, “says im-parare, to establish, to make arrangements: prae-cipere, to occupy something in advance, and by this occupation to hold command over it, and so to have the occupied as territory. Imperium is commandment, command.”15
The state that occupies a territory is inevitably imperial or imperialistic, whether or not it expands into an actual empire. The territory is that upon which … of the stance that is the state. But a territorial state does not coincide with the places it corrals nor does it really stand on Earth. The continuous quantities that bring the territory into existence dematerialize the phenomenological-political status, setting it up as subject to occupation, surveillance, control, and measurement, just as the discrete quantities applied to population as a mass, with an ascertainable volume and density, pave the way for a governmental state.16 Be it geometrically or arithmetically, the state serves as a control-and-command center with regard to territories and populations thanks to the hyperinflation of its quantitative side.
Following Kant, the boundary gives itself to understanding in qualitative, rather than quantitative, categories: limitation (Einschränkung) “as reality combined with negation [als Realität mit Negation verbunden]” (CPR B111). In and of itself, “reality” is unaware of its finitude: the limit materializes after the real has been confronted with negation. In the absence of the other subcategories of quality, reality is indistinguishable from nonreality. Limits give the thing its particular qualities, and, in exchange for this service, it gives up its drive toward a potentially infinite expansion in a general atmosphere of indeterminacy.
Status rei publicae, too, ripens to qualitative differentiation once the reality of the political res has been mixed with its negation. On its positive side, the ensuing limit enables the stance or the standing of the state (stasis-qua-standstill). On the negative side, it bridles an indefinite, creeping expansion at the core of the state’s imperial ambition (stasis-qua-unrest).17 Sovereignty, conversely, is oblivious to the multiple edges and the “thickness” of political limits; from its perspective, the negation of state reality is everything that lies outside the sovereign entity. When that negation encroaches on the political unit and is on the verge of being realized, the state finds itself embroiled in a war. The political tragedy of world history is that the delimitation of states does not rely on the mechanisms of self-critique, but happens on the basis of the threat or actuality of external negation, analogous to external criticism. This last point requires a more detailed explanation.
The qualitative category repeats, on a smaller scale, the maneuvers of Kant’s entire critical project. Reason is initially not so different from reality:18 it also knows no boundaries and, by means of critique denoting the movement of negation, must encounter its proper limits. Before its self-delimitation, reason deems itself omnipotent and sprawls everywhere indefinitely, which is why it cannot stand on its own. The transcendental function of critique is to dispense to reason its standing, to make it qualitatively rich, to combine its reality with negation so as to arrive at its limits.19
For states, war has satisfied the critical function by providing them with much the same political categorial assets—a concrete standing, a motivational determination to fight that seamlessly passes into qualitative determinacy, and precise territorial boundaries stipulated in peace treaties. Critique has silently consented to this historical qualification of political units: reluctant to combine the reality of the state with its negation, “criticism initially kept aloof from the State” up to the point where “criticism became the victim of its ostensible neutrality; it turned into hypocrisy.”20 Over and above such dishonesty, critique, irreducible to the retrofitting of a bellicose course of action for thought, leaves the qualities of the state at the mercy of war, turning militarism into ultima ratio for refuting or validating every critical insight.
We can only imagine how qualitatively different the reason of the state (ratio status, raison d’état) would have been under the guidance of critique. In Kantian terms, it would have been doubly restrained, both as reason and as what is essentially “of the state.” In political practice, we witness something else altogether. The few existing obstacles on the path to unlimited authority are removed and raison d’état, not least in France under President Emmanuel Macron, renounces the critiques of reason and of the state in the name of security and national interest, the apotheosis of uncritical argumentation. States of exception and emergency become the rule, and extreme means turn into an end in itself: raison d’état = political raison d’être.
Accursius’s Digest, dating from the first half of the thirteenth century, abstracts status from res publica and prepares the basis for ratio status with the formulation “to preserve the state so that it shall not perish [ad statum conservandum ne pereat]” (D. 1.1.1.2). What ratio status conserves is the state as an essentially conservative reality, the reality that says no to its negation, eschews its temporal limits, and presents itself as infinite or eternal in reaction to threats that expose its finitude. The conservation of the status, its political survival and persistence in being, supplies the sole guideline worth adhering to. No sooner does the state lose its original standing as the standing condition of the res publica than it oversteps the limits set by the political things themselves.21 The spotlight shifts from qualitative distinctions to the unconditional injunction to perpetuate a vacuous, self-referential state form.
One form gathering together numerous public things (and each thing is, as I’ve argued earlier, already a gathering or assemblage): that is what status rei publicae is. The state is how the many stand in a uniform position and present a united front; it is the archetype of Kant’s quantitative allness or totality (Allheit oder Totalität), which sights unity in plurality (CPR B111). Status rei publicae conveys allness more effectively than status regni or status imperii by conjoining the state in the singular with the plural rei publicae and contributing after a fashion to the ancient dialectic of the one and the many. The question is: How does it accomplish this feat?
Disparate realities cannot have an identical stance, a homogeneous standing, a unitary position and orientation, no matter the immanence of their status or condition. Instead, they are ordered, organized, aligned, and arranged by the state-totality that, faithful to the Kantian category of quantity, espies unity in their plurality. A coherent stance of the state is nothing else than the product of ordering and alignment that, as a political equivalent to the a priori synthesis in the first Critique, subtracts itself from that which is ordered or aligned. While status rei publicae models the quantitative logic of the state exceptionally well, it magnifies the contradictions plaguing this logic. In contrast to the felicitous one-on-one match of status and imperium or regnum, the state is a tense assemblage of the one status that is never going to reflect the condition of the many public things it encompasses. The solution is a staple sort of ideological maneuvering and, in the ontological register, a political transcendental illusion: the many must act and think as though the necessarily inadequate form of the one were theirs. In this manner the “allness or totality” of the state is forged from a sleight of hand that swaps unity for plurality, not from a synthesis of these other quantitative subcategories.
Like many kindred entries in our political lexicon, revolution boasts an “impure” origin, spanning Christian theology and astronomy.22 Staying close to its semantic birthplace, revolution returns (indeed, rolls back) to the rotary movement of a return, of cyclicality or circularity. But, although its prehistory displays a steady trajectory backtracking to the recovery of a preceding state or position, its politicization empties the word of all content and diverts it from any particular direction. Political revolutions can be past- or future-oriented, conservative or progressive, impelled top-down or bottom-up. Their theorization is concerned with the issue of necessity, even if it also acknowledges the other modal categories of possibility and actuality: the possibility of a qualitatively different actuality (“another world is possible”) or the reactivation of an actuality deemed lost, buried under and betrayed by subsequent historical developments.
Perceived in a political tonality, revolutions problematize spatial representations of temporality without deciding whether time is a continually rotating wheel, an arrow flying on a predetermined arch from the past of misery to the future of freedom, or a jagged line full of sudden ruptures and radical discontinuities. Nor does a uniquely political revolution prescribe a definite change of position to the body politic that undergoes it: lateral or vertical, turning around (front-to-back) or overturning (upside-down). As changeable as the change it promises, it dodges the logic of the concept and invites a meticulous categorial analysis.
In On Revolution, Arendt writes: “Modern revolutions have little in common with the mutatio rerum of Roman history or the στάσις, the civil strife which disturbed the Greek polis.”23 As a rejoinder to her assertion, it is futile, to say the least, to try to understand revolution by making its meaning aloof to stasis, which entails civil strife and the very thing that strife “disturbs.” Lenin titled one of his books The State and Revolution,24 and we, too, must go back to this coupling that points to the modern variation on stasis. On the one hand, there is the actual state with a manner of standing, a post, a position it defends as the entrenched status quo; on the other hand, there is a possible revolution, the thunderbird (the Russian burevestnik) of change, a different manner of standing, or another position altogether, which might not be a vertical stance. The two “hands” belong to the same creature, which is stasis, situating revolution at the core of the state. In what way?
First, revolution constitutes the state insofar as where we stand does not stand still but imperceptibly turns and dramatically overturns depending on the precarious balance of power, intensities of political affect, distributions of political energy-mass, degrees of discontent, and so forth. Second, revolution is integral to the state to the extent that the spatiotemporal horizon of how it stands presupposes that it may stand differently than it does at the moment. Seeing that no status is homogeneous but, divided against itself (covering over these divisions is the task of ideology), wavers between mutually contradictory positions, revolution sheds light on and deepens the cracks in established institutions, immanently pushing a given state to a position incompatible with the status quo.
I am certainly mindful of the fierce debates around the scale and scope of a desirable revolution in the early years of the Soviet state, with Stalin and Trotsky as the main antagonists. Should the workers’ revolution be confined to one country, or should it be worldwide? Should it be followed by a period of normalization or should it become permanent? A prototype of the October Revolution, the French Revolution similarly espoused universal ideals, used as a justification for the Napoleonic conquests that purported to project revolutionary values beyond the boundaries of the French polity. Still, a political state is only one of many instantiations of stasis at rest, entangled with the stasis of tumult. Other kinds of state are similarly susceptible to revolutionary influences.
Revolutions that are not mere revolts set their sights on both micro- and macrolevels, the subjective world of psychological states and the objective state of the world, judged to be out of sorts, whether materially imperfect or unjust, whether too chaotic or straightjacketed into hierarchies. They aim to shake up and remold the historical shape of the human who will become a true citoyen, or an entirely new species of Homo sovieticus. In the same breath, they strive to overthrow the predominant framing and division of the world into classes or a mechanistic society where all differences are flattened, the Gesellschaft that was the target of the German Conservative Revolution following World War I.
In the interplay of state and revolution, then, stasis includes the senses of positing and deposing—in Reiner Schürmann’s vernacular, the institution and destitution of hegemonies. In addition to the political positions running the horizontal gamut from left to right and vertical (hierarchical) power relations, state and revolution are the metapositions, with respect to which these realities make sense or stop making sense. Revolution is positional negation involving the entire body politic. When it turns the relations of rule and authority upside-down, revolutionary upheaval dispenses power to the previously powerless. When it rotates front to back, it is moved by a wish to return to a romanticized and since lost Golden Age and is, essentially, a conservative revolution. Such was the case of the past-oriented restoration of “usurped rights and freedoms,” for instance, in John Locke’s treatment of the Glorious Revolution in seventeenth-century England.25 In turn, the glory of the Glorious Revolution did not fail to evoke the brilliance, splendor, and brightness of fire associated initially with the gloire of God and subsequently with the Dutch invader of England, William III, who was described as “glorious” in the revolutionary years of 1688 and 1689.26
Successive changes in position amount to movement, expressed in the mobilization of the population for the revolutionary cause and in the shifts of the body politic on the vertical and horizontal axes of power distribution, all the way to a dislocation of that system of coordinates as such. At the crest of their utopianism, revolutions equate deposing the “old” regime with the total undoing of positionality, synecdochally represented by the standing position. So, for example, once implemented, the revolutionary demand for radical equality results in the flatness of the body politic, now assuming a horizontal, lying position after the standing one. In Hegel’s interpretation of the French Revolution, this flatness radicalized in “an actual upheaval of actuality [die wirkliche Umwälzung der Wirklichkeit]” (PhS §582) connotes death, which Robespierre’s postrevolutinary Terror mediated in history.
For all the excitement revolutionary change elicits, we must be able to analyze, to break its movement down into the still frames it consists of. There is no deposing of something or someone that or who is not already posited or positioned with relative stability and durability. So long as a state (of mind, of the nation, or of the world) exists, persists, and is readily discernible, revolution remains possible. But if everything is in flux, which for Arendt is a telltale sign of totalitarianism with its erasure of the experiential boundaries between a movement and a state,27 then there is nothing to turn around or upend, to revolt against and depose. Restless movement, the stuff of totalitarian as much as of capitalist dreams, exacerbates one strand of stasis at the expense of the other, contriving the most stagnant state of affairs out of perpetual mutability. A permanent revolution, of the kind Trotsky imagined via Marx and Ryazanov, is not communist utopia but capitalist reality. Clinging to a never-ending revolutionary actuality, it undercuts its very conditions of possibility.
But what exactly is revolutionized in revolutions? Whatever the answer to this question, it is important to remember that in matters of revolution, as in those of the state and of politics broadly speaking, accidents precede substance: what is positioned and deposed is secondary in relation to the how of positioning and deposing. I have already intimated that the body politic is the substance of revolutions, which is to say that their substance is the political subject in the making and, above all, the ontology of power relations. It is this subject that alters positions, deposes or is deposed, and, through its twists, turns, and returns, is transformed in its very subjectivity, ceding priority to accidents over substance. It turns out that the political-revolutionary subject is neither a what nor even a who but the how: being-in-rotation, revolving, turning over, under, or around.
Now, as we know, Aristotle distinguished between the first ousia that presents itself as an atomic and autistic this, τόδε τι, and the second, where what the thing presents itself as is not a simple One but the many, πολλῶν, this as that (Cat. 3b, 10–17). On this view, a revolution is the turning from the merely given, unconsciously handed down way of being to a consciously chosen mode of existence. The hermeneutical step, interpreting the impenetrable this of the first ousia as that, is a revolution before revolution, rendering the subject’s position explicit and deciding whether to accept or reject its how.
According to its discourse, what the revolution bends and deposes is the old “regime,” that is to say, the hegemonic rule, guidance, direction, or directedness granting the polity its form and calibrating its political-phenomenological intentionality. In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, anomie reigns supreme, precisely because, glancing back at what it has deposed, revolution prohibits positionality in general. But, as soon as a new regime succeeds the old and a fresh set of coordinates guaranteeing a meaningful public orientation is in place, order is restored. This restoration is a source of disappointment to fervently committed revolutionaries who are under the impression that, despite having been turned around or upside-down, the same thing endures, unscathed in its substantive identity. They then see perpetual change as a silver bullet for the stagnation of substance, which is why, like Trotsky’s comrade Ryazanov, they proclaim: “Our motto must be the revolution in Permanenz (uninterrupted revolution),” which will not be “ ‘order’ in place of revolution, but revolution in place of order.”28
The intuition of revolutionaries such as Ryazanov is predicated on the impression that political substance precedes its accidents, and revolution is an accident in need of continual commitment and support, lest it dissipate, leaving prerevolutionary substance intact. But their mistake is not limited to a distorted view of the substance-accident relation in politics. It escapes permanent revolutionaries that the key problem is not the stabilization of the revolutionary regime in the absence of a fixed objective order but the fact that what hasn’t yet happened (or perhaps has happened innumerable times without cementing itself) is a revolution in power, in the categories of power, beyond a simple rearrangement of its relations. This perspectival shift will take place provided that we recover the primacy of the how over the what and the who in politics. In the meantime, the worry of people like Ryazanov will be misplaced, yet strangely justified.
Historically, when revolutionaries come to power, they repeat the worst violent excesses of their predecessors. It is not enough to give power to the previously powerless, rotating those who are in power, without turning around the meaning and practice of power itself. (Diluted, these rotations are a part of democratic governance.) To do so in thinking one would need to explore power’s connections to mastery and dominance behind the experience of oppression. One would also be well advised to consider how it is linked to energy through the concepts of potency, potentiality, or possibility, and how it may be diverted toward actuality.29 Once power is plugged into the modal category of possibility, there is no stopping until it is illuminated by all the other categories and revolutionized in theory, if not in practice.
The temporal breadth of revolutionary change matches the psychological depth of the transformation it effects. With this overused, threadbare word psychology inserted into a political frame of reference, I am alluding not to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century invention of “mass psychology” but to something of the ancient psychopolitics, where parts of the soul (psukhē) reflect certain constituents of the polis. The relevant portion of the psyche here is the Platonic thumos, which, as I write in Pyropolitics, “can bring our blood to boil at the sight of injustice, [and] is much more than the political affect of anger, rage, or indignation. It is the site of an inflammation in the soul and a breeding ground for the highly mobile revolutionary sparks that can instantaneously jump from one soul to another.”30 No revolution can afford to sidestep thumos, animating the body politic and acting as a barometer for the intensities and qualitative transformations sparked by the revolutionary project. Positively formulated, every effective revolution is a return to and a turning around of the soul that tips the balance of psychic positionality (“mental states”).
In line with my categorial analysis, another useful distinction between revolts and revolutions is that the former attempt to adjust the standing, the status, the current position of the body politic, whereas, uncompromising, the latter do not rest until the previous state has been overturned or turned around in its entirety. Revolts are local reactions to pressing social, economic, or political circumstances; revolutions are products of a global vision of the common good. What is, then, responsible for the upending of stasis in its static sense? When does an intervention pass from a local adjustment of position to its overturning and overhaul?
In quantitative terms, it is necessary to reach a critical mass of discontent and desire for radical change for a revolution to receive popular support. These aspirations must be gathered together, taken and held together, in a literal interpretation of Aristotle’s continuous—συνεχές—quantity (Cat. 4b, 20–21). Oppressed as it may be, the population is not (yet) a political subject; it belongs to the atomistic this of politics. As Kautsky, Lenin, and Castro understood it, revolutionary change requires a political enzyme, the vanguard, a small group of revolutionaries capable of turning the situation around and passing from the impenetrable this of the first ousia to the this as that of the second.
The amassing of political affect is distinct from the physical and economic models of accumulation. More than the arithmetic of addition, it depends on subtraction, where a part of the body politic withdraws from the whole it calls into being by means of this very withdrawal. That part is the vanguard, apropos of which Kautsky writes: “The vanguard of the proletariat today forms the strongest, the most far-sighted, most selfless, boldest stratum.… And the proletariat will, in and through struggle, take up into itself the unselfish and far-sighted elements of all classes.… It will place its vanguard at the head of civilization and make it capable of guiding the immense economic transformation that will finally, over the entire globe, put an end to all the misery arising out of subjection, exploitation, and ignorance.”31 In Kautsky’s revolutionary arithmetic, the “selflessness” of the proletarian vanguard is what allows this small part to step into the place of the whole, of the universal. The continuous quantity to be held together must, in other words, go through a mediation by discrete quantity—Aristotle’s diorismenon—that faces it with a mirror, facilitating its recognition as a political subject.
If revolutionary quantities measure the increasing intensities of political affect, engagement, and energy, then the quality this affect exhibits is the heating up of the body politic. The fire of revolution spreads by contagion, from the spark of the vanguard to the population at large, as Castro confirms in a venerable lineage of theologico-political “pyrodiscourses”: “We are sure that only a handful of men can launch the struggle; … that revolutionary movement, group, following the rules that guerrillas have to follow, we are absolutely sure that is the spark that would start the fire.”32 At the source of the blaze, of flaming revolutionary desire, there is a kind of cold detachment, to which Kautsky has alerted us, of a selfless group that cuts the vanguard off from the body politic, initiating the universalization of singularity. Detachment was crucial indeed to Castro’s revolutionary practice: “As far as we are concerned, we base ourselves on mathematical calculations, on numbers of men, on the volume of fire, and on a fire that burns hotter than that of arms: the fire in the hearts and the fire of the valour of an entire people!”33
“Mathematical calculations” of “numbers” and “the volume of fire” mix the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of the revolution, so that through quantitative operations one arrives at a quality (“coolness”) opposed to the one revolutionaries foster (“ardency”). Refusing the utilitarian computation of self-interest, a disinterested calculus is immersed tactically and directly in the political categories of radical change. The how of revolutionary subjectivity is coldly turning up the heat.
The movement involved in the dynamism of stasis does not stop at physical dislocation, at assuming another position or leaping to a different place. Another Aristotelian type of movement is a change of state, metamorphosis, for which fire is a sure catalyst. Be it physical or political, metamorphosis is qualitative. But the cohesiveness that fire promises, melting together diverse elements, ought to be understood quantitatively. Creating a revolutionary subject out of the dispersed masses of the oppressed is arriving in political practice at the Kantian category of “allness or totality,” which is, to repeat, “plurality regarded as a unity [Vielheit als Einheit betrachtet]” (CPR B111). The word to be highlighted here is “regarded,” “observed,” or “considered”: betrachtet. The plurality of the oppressed has always been substantively united by their very oppression; a revolution prompts the masses to turn around and redirects their regards to that unchosen unity, interpreting it for and as what it is. Instead of actively gathering the scattered plurality of emancipatory projects, expressions of discontent, or experiences of suffering, it behooves the revolutionary vanguard to show how they are, and have always been, gathered together before any conscious decision on the part of those who bear the brunt of the status quo. The appreciation of that involuntary how for what it is determines, in nuce, political subjectivity.
As for Kant’s category of quality, its three ingredients (reality, negation, limitation) lend themselves to politicization through their correlation with the different senses of stasis. The reality of a status, or a state, is its positing and the position it occupies; revolution is the negation, deposing the status; and limitation is the adumbrated combination of statist and revolutionary tendencies that give a political unit its quality. The braiding together of reality and its negation in limitation is not a matter of balancing contradictory impulses. In effect, the stronger the asserted reality of the state, the more avid the revolutionary desire to overthrow it, and the more vivid its quality. And, the other way around, those qualitatively underdetermined regimes, like democracy with its rotation of people in power, where the positing of the status quo is deliberately lax and admits of a controlled “revolt,” are in a better position to handle and subdue their total revolutionary negation than absolutist, autocratic, or tyrannical rule.
Articulated in modal categories, revolution is the possibility of overturning, overthrowing, or otherwise deposing the status quo. Far from abstract, the possibility of a change in position, of deposing state authorities and questioning the authority of the state, is engrained into the current position of the body politic: stabilization in one state signifies a real chance of future destabilization and transition to another. Within the matrix of a crudely deterministic historical materialism, the “real chance” of destabilization denotes the historical necessity of actualizing revolutionary possibilities. The trouble with this thesis is not that it introduces “a contradiction between the revolutionary activity of the Marxist parties and their teachings on historical necessity, particularly the inevitable collapse of capitalism”;34 it is, rather, the confusion such an interpretation sows in the category of modality.
A quick reminder: Kantian schematism qualifies necessity as “the existence of an object at all times [das Dasein eines Gegenstandes zu aller Zeit],” while actuality “is existence at a determinate time [das Dasein in einer bestimmten Zeit]” (CPR A145). The necessity of an actual, empirical event (revolution) is a contradiction in terms, in that the same object cannot exist at all times and at a determinate time only. Necessity cannot subsume actuality without interfering with what confers on the latter its identity as actuality. Historical materialism excoriates Kant’s transcendentalism, but the categories it adopts as its own are incoherent outside their philosophical home-turf.
Necessity entails a fair share of idealization over and above the threshold of what materialism finds tolerable: “existence at all times” is incompatible with the historical singularity of existence. Kantian schematism, however, is a thinking of categories in time, mitigating the transcendental character of pure understanding and warranting an approximation of the critique of reason to a dialectical or historical materialism. We might say that “at all times” revolution remains possible and is even necessary in this possibility, in the sense that it shadows the changeable actuality of the state’s position. But the actualization and nonactualization (the existence and nonexistence) of a revolution are not deducible from its possibility. This argument is the other side of the coin with regard to the conclusion we have reached in our discussion of Badiou on the more-than-empirical nature of political truth: one cannot infer from the actual failure of a revolution (say, the October Revolution of 1917) that revolution as such has become unviable at the level of the possible.
With his theory of “overdetermined contradiction,” Althusser takes historical materialism to its logical, materialist, and detranscendental extreme. If there is a necessity to the revolutionary event, it is unknowable, because “the Capital-Labour contradiction is never simple, but always specified by the historically concrete forms and circumstances in which it is exercised.”35 “I should like to suggest,” Althusser goes on, “that an ‘overdetermined contradiction’ may either be overdetermined in the direction of a historical inhibition, a real ‘block’ for the contradiction (for example, Wilhelmine Germany), or in the direction of revolutionary rupture (Russia in 1917), but in neither condition is it ever found in the ‘pure’ state.”36 Overdetermination leads us down a slippery slope to indeterminacy, indecision, and political paralysis when it comes to revolutionary possibility and necessity in a historical now. Taking overdetermination at its word, it is as likely that a revolution will irrupt into existence as that it will be “inhibited,” “blocked,” and left in the Kantian modality of nonexistence, Nichtsein. Following Althusser’s example, deconstructive undecidability is, despite itself, a decision against politics.
A painstaking study of the tangled world of the Capital-Labor contradiction (as of any other historical reality, for that matter) might be of value and significance to someone eager to analyze the “circumstances in which it is exercised,” not to those engaged in the political exercise itself. The simplicity and purity of the contradiction, for which Althusser reprimands Hegel, is a sine qua non of revolutionary activity, focused on disinhibiting and unblocking the event and pushing for rupture, even when all the “objective” factors conspire against the revolutionaries and counsel against an intervention. Inherent in intense political action is a purity that is not transcendental and that gives birth to its own conditions of possibility (performativity), as well as its own necessity, as Lenin demonstrated in his writings and, above all, in his revolutionary speeches.
The contrast between the contradiction that crystalizes in all its material purity in a political decision and the same contradiction clothed in layers upon layers of tortuous circumstances is not a classic case of divergence between theory and practice. There is no such divergence if revolutions occur, pass to actuality, thanks to the revolutionaries creating a revolutionary situation, replete with the modal determinations of necessity and possibility, out of an overdetermined field. Knowing and doing, understanding and action, reciprocally shape each other on this ur-stage of political categories. Yet, time and again, the actuality of a “successful” revolution bitterly disappoints the revolutionary subject. The pretext for this disappointment is twofold: (1) an actualized revolution ceases to be revolutionary, no longer turning, returning, or overturning anything; and (2) it fails to live up to the impossible ideal (for example, absolute justice or equality) that has animated it.
As it tries to redress the slowdown and stoppage in the turnings of the event, Trotskyite permanent revolution meddles with revolutionary possibility, endeavoring to revive it in actuality with implacable necessity (Kant’s existence “at all times”). In its turn, revolutionary Terror—first unleashed by Robespierre in France, then under Stalin in the Soviet Union—responds to the disappointment of postrevolutionary reality not measuring up to the ideal it was supposed to implement. The purges that ensue exacerbate the negative dimension of the revolution by destroying its actuality so as to liberate its sheer possibility, the desired ideality of the revolutionary object determined—according to Kant’s definition of ideals—exactly according to its idea. In the spirit of unfettered possibility, Robespierre decried “corruption,” which was, in his view, interchangeable with materiality, and Stalin denounced the “defects” or “insufficiencies” (nedostatki) in party work, which he blamed on “Trotskyite wreckers” and which had to be “liquidated.”37
Having botched the category of political modality, permanent revolutionaries got at least one thing right: an authentic revolution revolutionizes space and time, that is to say, the experience of spatiality and temporality in a body politic that has let go of its previous status or standing. Neither the deposing of the old status nor the new position has a rightful place on the grid of prerevolutionary political spatiality, in the same way that the legitimacy and legitimation of the emergent regime have no legitimate bases on the terms of the one it supplants. The outbreak of a revolution signals such a drastic change in the space of politics that none of the familiar orientational markers applies and one no longer intuits with any degree of certainty where left and right are, what or who is above and below, what is ahead and what behind. Another difference from revolt stands out here, in the discussion of revolutionary spatiality: even when it is incredibly popular, revolt signifies a massive shift to one of the sides of the political spectrum that does not upend that spectrum itself. A revolution, on the contrary, is such a vigorous turning around in place that it makes rotate and alters its milieu beyond recognition.
With respect to the categories of space and time, revolution reveals the transtranscendental (historical, phenomenological) conditions of transcendental aesthetics. A meaningful context for action, the revolutionary “world” broadens or narrows along with the scope of the revolution: national, international, transnational, global. The methods and signposts for a subjective orientation within this context are similarly at the mercy of the revolutionary turn. The French Republican Calendar and the shift from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in the Soviet Russia of 1918 illustrate how political temporality leverages established ways of keeping track of time. The dawn of an age, era, or epoch is felt more acutely when the revolutionary subject breaks with the previous formalization of time as part of a deeper rupture in the political time-consciousness. In an instant, a revolution overhauls the way we string instants together, modifying the temporal horizon of experience.
Revolutions make time incompatible with continuous quantity, upon which Aristotle insisted in his Categories, because pre- and postrevolutionary temporalities cannot be held or had together (sunechē). The temporalizing factor is the revolution itself, or, better yet, revolutionary intermittences in the otherwise continuous change of political positions on the part of the body politic. In keeping with vanguard interventions that, having distanced themselves from the whole and, having switched to discrete quantity, recast the totality they have splintered from, revolutionary temporalization authorizes continuity only across the hiatus. It draws out the power of the instant (instare: to stand at, surreptitiously connected to stasis) that punctuates the line of temporality, consisting in an infinity of such instants, and blurs the conceptual distinction between being at a standstill and rapid movement. That is why a revolutionary break with the past is actually a re-turn to the intermittences of time that the illusion of continuity has veiled over.
To concede that revolutions follow a certain rhythm and periodicity is to retrieve the word’s original astronomical meaning related to the regular rotations of celestial bodies. The rhythm of revolutions is that of the return of the repressed undertones of stasis, where what makes a comeback is not the normalcy of the status quo, but crisis, exception, and upheaval. From the standpoint of stabilized authorities, the possibility of a revolution signals a recurrence of the void and of everything the political katechon guards against. Revolutionaries upend this perception. Its circle woven of ruptures and radical shifts in position, revolutionary time-consciousness overviews history as an ongoing crisis bestrewn with brief periods of stability. Walter Benjamin has given us the image of counterhegemonic temporality in his fragment on Angelus Novus, the angel of history facing in paralyzed horror the sky-high pile of debris that is the world. The time of revolution shares with Benjamin’s angel and with Epimetheus, the mythical brother of Prometheus, the counterclockwise movement vis-à-vis the time of the state, but it eschews their helpless retrospection.
In juxtaposing the state and revolution, we are dealing with two circles, two rotations, that, pulling in opposite directions, constitute the time of stasis reminiscent of the revolution and counterrevolution of the world-order (kosmos) in Plato’s Statesman. On the one hand, we have a self-reproducing repetition of the dominant position that, like everything finite in Plato’s philosophy, is able to maintain itself only by deviating from and then reverting to its static stance. On the other hand, there is the revolutionary rotation that, at a certain pace and with a certain cadence, fatally interferes with the self-reproduction of the status, transporting it back to the beginning when it was still unable to stand on its own. The dream of a permanent revolution, for its part, rebels against time in time, aspires to make the hiatus continuous, collapses the two circles into one, and proposes to turn the revolution into a novel status.
Toward the end of the second Tanner Lecture he delivered at Stanford University in 1979, Foucault defined power in the simplest terms imaginable—so simple, in fact, that his thinking entered the conceptual territory it had otherwise kept at arm’s length. The opening salvo of his definition was negative: “Power is not a substance. Neither is it a mysterious property whose origin must be delved into.”38 Then came the positive moment: “Power is only a certain type of relation between individuals.”39
We can only speculate as to why Foucault chose such a reductionist formulation; perhaps, the lecture format is the main reason. Regardless of the explanation we favor, definitions of the type X is Y are not propitious to categorial thinking. From the outset, Foucault peels several categories off from the thing he is analyzing—above all, substance and quality (property). He proceeds to aver that only one category is relevant, that of relation. Desubstantivizing power and stripping off its qualitative dimension, Foucault inadvertently concurs with the modern representative-democratic framing of this crucial political term. More than that, he is in a good company with Hegel, Marx, and Schmitt, who all insist, if somewhat cacophonously, on power’s relational and nonsubstantive nature.
In my view, this theoretical position is as shortsighted as the premodern mystification and substantivizing fetish of political realities draped in a theological loincloth. Power is substantive and relational, qualitative and quantitative, active and passive, and, in keeping with its Latin origins, potential and actual, that is, modally inflected. To say that it is only a relation (let alone a relation between individuals, who are themselves a modern invention and the residue of power) is to erase the rich history of potentia absoluta, extraordinaria, activa et passiva, and ordinata, of potestas Dei, ecclesiae, publica et privata, gobernandi, iudicandi, ministerium, and disciplinae. And all this is not to mention that a crude distinction between substance and relation overlooks the relational constitution of the category substance—whether in its Aristotelian prototype that takes the shape of second ousia, where the this is articulated relationally as that, or in the Kantian table, where, together with accidents, it appears under the heading “relation.”
Departing from the word and the thing itself, let us start with the modality of power, which dovetails with Aristotle’s qualitative disposition. From the Vulgar Latin verb potēre, it connotes the ability to act. In the modern mindset, this ability belongs to an abstract and unlimited possibility, the “free” will still uncommitted to a particular object at the early stages of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Hegel’s gloss on such power is that it is stunningly powerless, having little or no purchase on actuality, allergic to negation by its object that, by circumscribing it, would have endowed it with determinacy. A power that is only possible isolates and keeps separate the three modal categories of possibility, actuality, and necessity. I qualify such purist power as virtual, with Machiavelli’s and Giovanni Botero’s virtù in the background.
The infrastructure of the Hegelian critique is closely affiliated with Spinozan ontology, where conatus essendi, the tie that binds everything that is to being and compels beings to want to persevere in existence, is made of the power to be, to continue being (in the gerund, between the verb to be and the noun a being). This is power as potentia, carried by substantive undercurrents and featured most prominently in Ethics: “the potentiality to exist is power [posse existere potentia est]” (I.xi). While it does not disappear from the Tractatus, in this work potentia is supplemented with potestas, power in the active sense of control over a creature, rather than the development of that creature’s ownmost possibilities for being. So, the title of chapter 16 in the latter work is “On republican foundations, on the natural and civil right of each, and on the right of the highest power [De reipublicae fundamentis; de jure uniuscujusque naturali et civili, deque summarum potestatum jure].” As potestas, power becomes synonymous with the possibility of external control40 exerted by one being over others, their ontological potentialities notwithstanding.
Before he shelves all categories of power save for relation, Foucault comes up with a handy differentiation between the pastorship that “concerns the lives of individuals” and the centralized authority of the state.41 He does not connect the former to potentia and the latter to potestas, though the parallel is self-evident. “Technologies of the self” coexist in a way that remains unexplained through state controls in Foucault’s writings and, indeed, in the political ontology he outlines. The French thinker is adamant that these technologies produce pleasures, knowledges, and subjects. It follows that, besides a “type of relation between individuals,” power is the possibility of individual embeddedness into preindividual potentia, so that our most intimate desires and wants, hopes and aspirations, are shaped by the singularizing hand of political pastorship.
We will hear, in a little while, the echoes of individuating power in the resonance chamber of ousia and of the categorial approach as a whole. As for the modal category of possibility, power implies what is idiomatically known as “staying power”—the good odds of continuing to stand and to be, the perpetuation of the status quo. To what extent this possibility is realized depends on the effectiveness with which particular modes of political organization marry potentia and potestas, the subjects’ inner aspirations and external controls. Freestanding potestas is fragile, a hollow form out of touch with those subjected to it. That is why it must resort to brute force and is entrusted to the police. Potentia without external manifestations is impotent, a disposition unfastened from actuality and akin to the Hegelian “free will” devoid of an object. It is alien to the logic of accomplishment, completion, closure, the fullness of achievement.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, theologians nonetheless formulated the doctrine of plenitudo potestatis, the plenitude of power, legitimizing the supremacy of papal authority. Marsilius of Padua argues in his Defender of the Peace (Defensor pacis) that “just as Christ had plenitude of power and authority [Christus plenitudinem potestatis et iurisdiccionis habuit] over all kings, princes, communities, collective bodies and individual persons, so they [the Popes] too, who call themselves the vicars of Christ, should have this plenitude of coercive authority defined by no human law [plenitudinem coactive iurisdiccionis, humana lege nulla determinatam]” (I.19.9.12–17). To the possibility of power, to power as possibility, the plenitude of actuality is alien. In its plenum, power rests, is actual, and in the categorial mode of actuality passes into something else altogether, incommensurable with the potentiality of a disposition: sovereignty. Taken to its logical conclusion, which goes very much against the intentions behind its original articulation, the thesis of plenitudo potestatis recovers positive powerlessness in the fullness of power, where nothing is left for actualization. This is in contrast to the dearth of power in the undetermined and unlimited ability to be able, where everything is still in need of actualizing.
The inherence of modal categories in power is evinced in pouvoir constituant and pouvoir constitué. Constituent power is the power of power, the possibility of establishing or reestablishing a political unit—not only a state but also any other specimen of applied Kantian schematism. Constituted power (stipulated and authorized in the constitution) is a set of possibilities that are actual, valid, legitimate on the grounds of its constituent counterpart. The constitution, both as a written legal document and as the being of a polity, is an intermediate link between the two powers, the substantivization of the first and the guiding light of the second.
Constituent and constituted powers stretch back to the duality of stasis, to the upheaval preceding the instauration of a regime and the relative stability of its persistence. They are the active and passive variations on standing-with in a common stance adopted by the many under the tutelage of the same principle. The inexhaustibility of the constituent element keeps possibility alive: the political unit may be reconstituted in a different shape, in another figuration or configuration, for example, as a result of a revolution. Even if the status quo does not change, possibility in the guise of constituent power continues to move imperceptibly below and behind the façade of the established institutions that require periodic reaffirmations (including implicit approval on the part of the “silent majority”) for their survival. In some cases, as in Venezuela under Nicolas Maduro, constituent assemblies are used as instruments for maintaining the status quo, harnessing power-possibility for the sake of actuality. But what if the standing-with of the constitution had to do with the binding together of potentia and potestas, of the penchant to assume a political position and the external authority ascribed to that position as a necessary one?
Romanticizing constituent power is almost irresistible. In the twentieth century, Schmitt portrayed it as “unified and indivisible,” a pure possibility bordering on the classical notion of sovereignty;42 Arendt predicated on it her theory of political praxis as an ever self-reigniting beginning; and Antonio Negri ascribed constituent power to living labor and communism, while attributing the constituted to dead labor and capital.43 Taken for a pure possibility, power is nonetheless essentially indeterminate content-wise: its categorial impoverishment strips it of particular qualities, purposes, and connections to the potentialities of its subjects. In the Roman world, Sulla was named dictator legibus faciendis et reipublicae constituendae causa, “dictator making laws and a cause for the constitution of rei publicae.”44 The hint this title conceals is that public things are incapable of standing by themselves, of gathering and constituting themselves in the absence of outside support from the Thing—the Cause—who is Sulla himself. The republic is constituted, granted an actuality, when constitutive possibilities are siphoned away from it to a dictatorial stand-in.
What the results of a unilateral (conceptual) fixing of power in a relation or possibility show is that the method for comprehending political phenomena through multiple categorial determinations is nonnegotiable. To ignore the substance, place, quality, activity or passivity, and other elements of power is to gain but partial entrance to its realm. If we condense power into a constitutive possibility, then we end up with a romanticized ideal or a dictatorial real, the one unwittingly bolstering the other. Thus, I want to revisit the individuating effects of Foucault’s pastoral power, which borrows heavily from Althusser’s interpellation, to begin exploring its links to other categories, starting with ousia.
Foucault states that he is interested in “the development of power techniques oriented toward individuals and intended to rule them in a continuous and permanent way. If the state is the political form of a centralized and centralizing power, let us call pastorship the individualizing power.”45 The pastoral gaze scans each sheep in the flock of followers and gathers these singularities together. In other words, its power individualizes by singling out a this and contemplating this as that, this sheep a part of the flock. First and second ousiais are my first and second presentations before power that identifies me as who I am through its observation “techniques,” pastoral, panoptic, and other. My self-presentation is, on the transtranscendental level, a representation of me by pastoral micropower. The technical bent of the procedure is significant: instead of nature, phusis, it is art, tekhnē, that dispenses ousia.
Althusser’s interpellation resorts to the voice, rather than the gaze, and singularizes the target of its hailing call, or whoever mistakes her- or himself for such a target. “All ideology,” he writes, “hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject.”46 Beneath “the category of the subject,” however, is the category of ousia, more precisely the second ousia. Contrary to Foucault’s pastoral power, the interpellating call appears to be directed to a pregiven this, a concrete individual, whom it interprets as that, a concrete subject. Ideological power is the passage from the first to the second ousia; interpellation plays the role of as in the formula this as that. But, just as Aristotle’s thought invariably folds the second ousia into the first, so Althusser’s as-that of subjectivity resides in the this of individuality: “individuals are always-already subjects.”47 Were this not so, there would have been an outside to ideology, something that Althusser vehemently rejects. (The very separation between individuality and subjectivity is an instance of the initial manner of theoretical appearance, the first ousia of political thought, and a major ideological export.) It would also be too simplistic to claim that the policing power of interpellation herds many subjects into an obedient group of followers. Singling out by means of a veiled threat of accusation and implied guilt, it creates the subject as an object for policing and gathers it with its individual self, the this connected to a that.
Far from fortuitous, there are strong resonances between the singularization of those subject to power by power’s gaze or voice and the identification of things as what they are with the help of the categories. Analogous to Althusser’s interpellation, categorial thought hinges on a public accusation that brings the accused forth from the undifferentiated background of existence. The classical power of the categories, too, lies in the propensity of those who wield them to point out by alleging, charging, and indicting the categorized as what, how, how much, how likely, when, where, why, with whom, or for what it is.
In chapter 1 of this study, I have labeled categories border terms, as opposed to the centralism of concepts and classifications. And borders, as everyone knows, need policing. I have admitted to the residual violence such an approach generates. I lost no time to suggest, if all too briefly, that the edges and borders, which stand out under the categorial lamp shining its dispersed light between the thing and consciousness or self-consciousness, may be caressed. Clearly, the caress is a tactile, not a visual, relation. But so is a concept that aims to grasp things. A caressing hand does not clasp whatever it caresses the way concepts do. It does not detain the “object” between its closed digits but, surface to sentient surface, lightly brushes the skin of appearances. When the superficies it rubs against are political (and even when they are not), we may cut our fingers and the palms of our hands on their rougher edges. How does a thinking caress of power feel? It could be painful, but the risk is worth taking, because the alternative decimates the insatiable subject of grasp together with the grasped.
Experienced by the subjects it births, power is nothing like an abstract force of possibility: the moments of pastoral observation and the emplaced interpellating calls are the lived time and space of power. Christian theological tradition subordinates the category of time to power, in that, after Augustine, it distinguishes between temporal and spiritual powers, potestas temporalis and potestas spiritualis, between the powers exercised within and over time. This distinction supplies the blueprint for the modern doctrine of the separation of powers, to which we will return.48 In On the Power of the Church (De potestate ecclesiae Prior), Francisco de Vitoria insists that “temporal power does not depend completely on,” though it conforms to, the spiritual (I.5.4–5). Thanks to spiritual power, the pope commands “the plenitude of temporal power over all princes, kings, and emperors” (I.5.6–7). The theological separation of powers will yield, as one of its upshots, the separation of power (potestas) from authority (auctoritas), a principle the Church inherited from ancient Rome. Unlike the enabling power that derives from God, de Vitoria advances, authority “is from the people” (De usu ciborum 1.5). Thus, the category of time is subject to politics and the types of power in question. (Readers hardly need reminding about the Church’s control over clock-time through bells and clock towers.)
The overdetermined fullness of the moment when the subject is hailed by the authorities that interpellate it contrasts with the underdetermined tunnel of homogenous, centrally controlled time. While phenomenology wholeheartedly embraces the notion of time-consciousness and its uneven experiences of duration colored by emotions, moods, and so on, this individual-subjective position fails to emancipate itself from political influences. The two time registers betoken the centralized and decentralized modes of power, potestas and potentia, or auctoritas and potestas. And this holds as well for the place or space of power, with parochial pockets of autochthonous existence indexed to tribalism, feudalism, segregation, whereas the presumably unmarked, undifferentiated, and indifferent grid of spatiality is apposite to territorial imperium, the self-universalizing tendencies of a nation-state, a single globalized world market, or a virtual community of netizens. The privatization of religion is not the end of religion; it is Protestantism. The individuation of space- and time-consciousness is not the end of their suffusion with power but a switch to the politics of pastorship. As regards the categories of time and space, Husserl’s phenomenology is an unconscious or un-self-conscious political Protestantism.
The place of power is a pivotal topic in political philosophy. In a premonotheistic world, each place had a deity that presided over it. Shards of this tradition are detectable in the Hebrew Bible, especially when the designation it reserves for God is 
, El’ Shaddai, the God of the Mountain, as in Genesis 17:1 or 35:11. A place is not only habitable but also governable, or, better, it is habitable inasmuch as it is governable, invested with the power of the deity who is of the place. The physical, material extent of this power sets up a dynamic perimeter (Aristotle’s continuous quantity) around lived space. The perimeter is flexible and may expand outward provided that the god of the place is powerful enough to gain an upper hand over the adjacent deities by leading his worshipers to victory over neighboring peoples. Static in the middle, in mesos khōra, emplaced power is dynamic at the limits, the perata, of its sphere of influence.
Compared to the parallel worlds of polytheism, mature monotheism and political modernity are in harmony, even when Enlightenment politics takes a sharp anticlerical turn. A universal God is the exceptional God of all the places without exception, limitlessly imperialistic, omnipresent in the totality of space. The centralization of power builds on a history of centralizing divine authority and culminating in Voltaire’s rehabilitation of a famous dictum, which is not original to him: God is “a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”49 In medieval Europe, some royal courts, especially in the areas matching contemporary Germany and Spain, were itinerant in order to locate physically the center of power on the periphery, rather than fix it at one point of the domain, in one capital city.50 Later on, the projection of the heart of authority onto the margins will take on a disembodied, less laborious, and more efficacious form.
The center becomes extreme when it puts itself in the place of extremes, at the circumference that charts the limits of a place. With the tension between the middle and the outer edges eliminated, places dissolve into a homogeneous unity of space. Centralization of power, underpinning the idea of the nation-state, entails a certain leveling of the national territory where it is enforced. This historical development is not at all linear, as Foucault rightly notes; centralization goes hand in hand with a radical decentralization, activated through the technologies of the self. Between the poles of political uniformity and singularity, the place has no place: it is either superseded by abstract territorial space or unseated by the nonextended, inner realm of subjectivity. Power is dislocated from places; it migrates elsewhere than the category where.
The dislocation of power is by no means a new phenomenon, but one that has been aggravated in modernity. It is a common political strategy to point out that power lies yonder, in a metaphysical entity nowhere to be found in space: in God, in the People, in the Law, in the Subject … An effect of this ruse is that power is not, and has never been, where one thinks it is. Otherwise, if it were precisely localizable, it would have been not power but force. Paraphrasing Heraclitus, we could say that power loves to hide, and this proclivity grants it protection, whereas the act of pinpointing its whereabouts, its where, limits power and makes those who hold it vulnerable to being deposed. (Heraclitus chances upon a positive correlation between power and the nonapparent in fragment 59: ἀρμονίη ἀφανὴς φανερῆς κρείττων, “a nonapparent harmony is more powerful than the apparent.”) The contemporary obfuscation of power arguably endows it with the greatest potency to date.
Since nothing can be misplaced in space absolutely, concealment falls back on extraspatial and atemporal metaphysical constructs. Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies elucidates the theologico-metaphysical subtleties of such concealment in the persona mixta, modeled on the part-human, part-divine (theandric) nature of Christ, “where the mixture referred to the blending of spiritual and secular powers and capacities united in one person,” be it a bishop or a king.51 Power hides in its excess over the spatial, material, and mortal body of a monarch; in a sense, it is antithetical to the givenness of res publica and therefore, in the first instance, impervious to categorial thinking. The most transparent potentia publica harbors a kernel of potentia privata—not only private, but also privative, deprived of access routes to visibility. Perhaps Schmitt had something along these lines in mind in allotting great arcana to every great politics.
Dispersed across disciplined subjects and consigned to democratic rotations, power can also take cover in time, wherein, according to Hegel, who on this point as on many others is in sympathy with Aristotle, space negates itself. After its self-negation, space doubles into space and nonspace, into material-extensive being at rest and virtual-intensive unrest: in a word, stasis. The movement of the categories, their politicizing mutation, flirts with the denial of the mutated categories to the thing. Categorial denial befalls the where of power, vanished amid decontextualizing centralization and decentralization alike. Itself nonspatial, power controls the space it converts into territory.
The qualities of power similarly fade when it claims the title absolute. That which absolute power affects is of any and all sorts; hence, this kind of power eschewing the specificity of “a kind” cannot seek qualitative determinacy from its objects (that is, from the subjects). Nor does it have an end that would individuate it. It is a disposition at best, a potentiality of subjugating everything, one that cannot pan out in practice. Yet, if it does not involve the actuality of habit—the other half of the Aristotelian category of quality—then it falls short of the absolute. Using Kant’s theoretical tools, we arrive at the same point as with Aristotle: absolute power refrains from negating the political reality of authority and, as a result, is not hemmed into qualitatively significant limits. Absent the transition from reality to its negation, not only quality, of which these are the subcategories, but also quantity, which is a coded representation of the transition, are nullified. In sum, the qualifier absolute quashes the categorial approach and pertains to a theoretical and practical conceptualization of power.
In turn, the separation of powers affords them qualitative distinctiveness. The legislative, judiciary, and executive branches each have their exact object and end, and they are habitually exercised, rather than confined to mere dispositions. Their separation indicates that their respective realities have been negated into limitation, making them at once independent and qualitatively crisp. Whereas absolute power reflects the abstract, virtual, and vacuous freedom of the Hegelian uncommitted will, the tripartite division surrenders pure potentiality for the sake of actual (limited) freedom. An early proponent of the separation of powers, Montesquieu makes the case for a surge in political liberty as a consequence of the decision not to invest all authority in “the same man or the same body of principal men.”52 The ontological precept that true freedom operates within (self-imposed) limits accounts for a high-definition image of intra- and infrapolitical qualities.
The quantitative category of power is somewhat slippery, because, more often than not, the measures applied to it pertain to force. What puts up roadblocks on the highway of power’s quantification is its tendency to self-concealment. Only force appears in the open and opens itself up to measurements and numeric comparisons. Nietzsche’s will to power is, at bottom, a will to force playing with the more and the less: “All purposes, all utilities, are only signs that a will to power has become lord over something less powerful and has stamped its own functional meaning onto it.… True progressus … always appears in the form of a will and way to greater power [Wegs zu grösserer Macht erscheint] and is always pushed through at the expense of numerous smaller powers [kleinerer Mächte].”53 Forces have calculable differentials; powers have a withdrawn excess, a hidden symbolic remainder, that does not figure in the mathematics of the will to power.
This does not mean, of course, that quantitative categories are not germane to power. We have been in their vicinity when we broached the topics of space and time, both of them types of continuous quantities in Aristotle. To pick up another thread, Foucault’s styles of power—the pastoral and that of the state—are in a strict correlation with plurality and unity in Kant. The title under which the 1979 Tanner Lectures are published, “ ‘Omnes et Singulatim’: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” patently appropriates from Kant a “critique of reason” and, less obviously, the two quantitative subcategories. The third subcategory, totality, referring to plurality from the perspective of unity, is missing, and the lacuna it leaves behind is, in itself, telling. Although the highly individuated and singularly employed technologies of pastoral power coexist with the universally administered functions of the state, they are unsynthesizable in the same metaparadigm. Power does not furnish a totality, which is yet another reason why its quantification is an unfinished, genetically incomplete project. Pastorship is to the state what relativity theory is to classical Newtonian physics: the time-space of power is either a product of singular political energy-mass distributions (congruent with Aristotle and Einstein), or it is a continuum to be a posteriori filled with political events and exercises of power (consistent with Kant and Newton).
Since, as we have seen, the category of power relations is salient in modern political thought, little needs to be said on the topic. Critical approaches, along the lines of Marx or Foucault, convey that power lies not in the relata but in the relation of domination and subordination, expressing the Kantian subcategory of cause and effect. The cause of power is not the dominant Cause or Thing; it is not the Master but the recognition of the master as master. In other words, the true cause is between the apparent cause and its effects. Relations of domination and subordination are subverted upon the disclosure of their workings, and they work smoothly so long as those caught in them misidentify the cause of domination. Obeying is like riding a bike: the moment one is cognizant in infinitesimal mechanical detail of what one is doing, one loses balance and the activity comes to an end. Except that in a political context the flash of consciousness must be shared with others, whereas in riding a bike an individual realization is sufficient to disrupt the routine.
Modern critiques of political reason steer us to the judgment we have formed—power is not where one thinks it is—with a twist: the where of power no longer designates its physical or metaphysical place but a categorial locale. To argue that power resides not in the relata but in the relation is to evacuate it from that which is categorized and to deposit it in the category itself. Irrespective of the participating terms, the very notion of relation is inundated with power, politicized.
Foucault’s expansion of power’s ambit beyond the macrorelations of dominance and subordination taps into the Kantian subcategory of community. Micropower exhibits the structure of interordination, its subjects serving as nodes in the vast networks of desires, pleasures, knowledges, and—Althusser would add—ideologies. Without referencing Kant but very much in his spirit, Foucault imputes the networked relational category of community to the epistemic “order of things”: “One must reconstitute the general system of thought whose network, in its positivity, renders an interplay of simultaneous and apparently contradictory opinions possible. It is this network that defines the conditions that make a controversy or problem possible, and that bears the historicity of knowledge.”54 The network of pastoral power is mutatis mutandis arranged in this way: in its positivity, it renders possible an interplay of simultaneous and contradictory subject positions, their simultaneity being a token of the Kantian relational category community. Productive of pleasures, knowledges, and subjects, power is produced and disseminated by its very “products” in a circular relation outside the logic of causes-and-effects.
The question of relation Aristotle poses is pros ti, what to? Modern theories and practices of power give an unreserved answer to itself, upending the Aristotelian response to the other, pros heteron. In the ancient world, power understood as a potency and potentiality presupposed an end for which it was a means, and the highest end was the eminently political (that is, of the entire polis) common good. With the rise of modern politics bent on gaining independence from theological, ethical, natural-scientific, and other extrapolitical authorities, the pursuit of power correlates to a stringently political end, that is, staying in power. The categorial revision of relationality is a springboard for opportunism: self-relations are self-serving, which is how political autonomy is thought of.
On the whole, Machiavelli’s The Prince is a manifesto declaring the autonomy of politics. More subtly, Montesquieu isolates the spirit of the laws from natural law, which was “the great organizing principle of his predecessors.”55 Likewise, every advocate of raison d’état—whether it is Francesco Guicciardini, Scipione Ammirato, or Botero in Italy, Michel de Montaigne or Cardinal Richelieu in France, or Justus Lipsius in the Netherlands—makes power self-referential. Reason of the state is, after all, neither that of logic nor that of nature nor that of God. Unyoked from infrapolitics, a “purely” political, unrestrained, and omnipotent reason petrifies, its membrane now impermeable. Categorial movement comes to a grinding halt. The diversion of relationality, its channeling back to the same (politics proper) from the other, thwarts the process of politicization in the enunciation of a uniquely political reason.
The premise behind the autonomy of politics is that this sphere of human life wields an active power of self-constitution. Activity and passivity—τò ποιεîν καì τó πáσχειν (Cat. 11b, 1)—that “have contraries and also degrees” are among the Aristotelian categories. We automatically associate power with activity, flouting the history of potentia that in Thomist theology, as well as in Spinozan metaphysics, divagates between the two categorial poles, active and passive. Duplex est potentia, “power is twofold,” writes St. Thomas in Summa theologiae (Ia, 25, i). By virtue of being actus purus, a pure act reverberating with plenitudo potestatis, God holds a power that is utterly active, “the principle of acting on something else [principium agendi en aliud].” “A truly passive power is,” conversely, “the principle of suffering action from the other [potentia vero passiva est principium patiendi ab alio]” (Ia, 25, i). In a categorial mishmash, the perfect actuality of God’s active power contrasts with the potentiality of power commanded by imperfect, finite creatures. Spinoza’s powers to affect and to be affected are the direct heirs to the Thomist theological outlook, avowedly influenced by Aristotle.
The paradox inherent in our image of power is that we perceive it at the same time as thoroughly active and as an unlimited potentiality. We forget how the potency of power is on the side of passivity if it is divested of actuality and is not handed over to the act that would externalize it in the world. The first participant in the pair of pouvoir constituant and pouvoir constitué seems to be active, the second passive. But this is a delusion, and a costly one at that. In reality, the constituted or the instituted is the hub of political actuality and, as such, is active. Passivity pertains to that power which is nothing but potency, the virtuality or potentiality of constituting without the constituted. Political activism that espouses resistance to the status quo is also downright passive, because it invariably reacts to that which it resists. It is not that we should dash to salvage the metaphysical baggage of actus purus threatened by the virtualization and “passivization” of power. A major, and not only political, provocation of our age is to recombine poietic and pathetic powers in the ways we interact with the world and with one another.
More than any other political term, sovereignty escapes the iron grip of concepts. Elusive despite the foundational stability it promises, it seems to shun philosophical understanding altogether and to encrypt itself in theology instead. Emblazoned with the symbolic insignia of divine omnipotence, sovereignty elicits extreme suspicions from the modern outlook, which assigns to it a place in the attic of intellectual history together with other similarly dusty, murky, and vaguely dangerous notions.56 Rationalist and formal-proceduralist approaches, critical IR studies, and continental political philosophy are all in agreement on this point. In his late works, Derrida draws a parallel between the metaphysical construction of state sovereignty and the sovereignty “of man himself, of the very being of man himself,”57 both in dire need of deconstruction. Negri and Hardt scrap every manifestation of sovereignty, including its popular variety, as “really nothing more than another turn of the screw, a further extension of the subjugation and domination that the modern concept of sovereignty has carried with it from the beginning.”58 Yet, to wish this concept (if a concept it is) away will not dispense either with the thing itself or with its effects; doing so will only drive it deeper into hiding and give it more influence.
To some extent, the mystery of sovereignty is also that of power. This is not at all surprising, given sovereignty’s generic definitions: “the greatest power,” “supreme power,” or Jean Bodin’s more elaborate “the absolute and perpetual power of a republic [la puissance absolue et perpétuelle d’une République].”59 The pinnacle of power, sovereignty is its end and the hyperbole of its tendencies, the actualization of power’s potentialities and an exaggerated version of power’s penchant for hiding. It confounds categorial distinctions. With it, everything becomes other than it is. “The highest” no longer fits on a scale of spatial coordinates, and “the greatest” has little to do with magnitude. Touched by sovereignty, the categories of space and quantity are altered and, therefore, politicized; they shift closer to causal preponderance. In theory and in practice, sovereignty obdurately declares its sovereignty over the categories and over cognitive faculties.
The other aspect of its impenetrability is the one I have already remarked upon in this book, namely, reduction to the first ousia. Sovereignty is always a this precluding the passage to interpretation, to the second ousia of this as that. It presents the classic case of a fixation (also in the psychoanalytic sense of the drive’s stuckness) on a single category to the detriment of all others. Conceptualization and mystification, hyperrationalism and antirationalism, share a negative catalyst—the diminishing wealth of categorial determination. As it is, the reduction of the world to numbers in a flurry of total quantification is unspeakably harmful. But when the only category standing is first ousia, the effect is all the more acute. What it conveys is nothing more than the singularity of existence that, in sovereignty, absolutizes itself and forecloses the possibility of meaning-making. To find a path between the concept and theological doctrine, it is indispensable to avail ourselves of other categories, especially the Kantian quartet of quantity, quality, relation, and modality.
Not to belabor the point, the work of bringing political categories to bear on sovereignty leaves us in an unprecedented situation: we seek the determinations of (and the conditions for comprehending) something that is, in keeping with its classical formulation, unconditional and indeterminate, because exclusively self-determined. Bodin goes to great lengths to free sovereignty, which he describes as “perpetual,” from the order of time and to release it from external constraints so that it would be genuinely absolute. The other definition he offers is more negative still: “sovereignty is limited neither in power nor in charge nor in a certain duration [la souveraineté n’est limitée, ni en puissance, ni en charge, ni à certain temps].”60 The triple eradication of limits gives us to understand that categorial paucity is not accidental: sovereignty as such is a betrayal of the categories.
Even as he makes sovereignty absolute, Bodin tacitly acknowledges the exigencies of conditioning the unconditional, if only by way of specifying the meaning of the words that elucidate the phenomenon in question. For instance, the significance of “absolute power” is that “it is not conditioned by anything other than divine law and the law of nature [elle n’a autre condition que la loi de Dieu et de nature].”61 The category of modality resurfaces in the form of the inalienable conditions of possibility for the exercise of absolute power: exempt from human laws, indexed to sovereign will alone, yet also subject to the laws of God and of nature. The very act of interpretation, which explicates the sovereign this as that which it is, imposes structural, semantic, and hermeneutical limits on its expansive reality. That is why, in what amounts to a revision of his initial position, Bodin writes that sovereignty is “this almost infinite power [cette puissance presque infinie].”62
The same fate is reserved for time determinations, or for the lack thereof. “Perpetual” is in this case obviously not synonymous with “eternal,” since political sovereigns are mortal human beings (the sovereign is a Mortall God, as Hobbes will famously opine).63 Nor does it implicate “the monarch and his heirs,” seeing that many hereditary monarchies are quite short-lived. Therefore, Bodin concludes, “it is necessary to understand this word perpetual in terms of ‘for the life of the one who holds power’ [Il faut donc entendre ce mot perpétuel, pour la vie de celui qui a la puissance].”64 The category of political time narrows down to the biological time of the sovereign’s lifespan, without admitting as much as the possibility of renewal guaranteed by the rotation of those in power in democracies or by the inheritance of the right to the throne in monarchies. The stranglehold of the first ousia on the temporality of sovereignty is unrelenting: the perpetual exercise of absolute power is associated with the life of this sovereign, and no other.
In light of Aristotle’s categories, the perpetual power at the heart of Bodin’s sovereignty is a continuous quantity, a line. Conversely, the Schmittian decision on the exception is what we may call punctual sovereignty, a freestanding instant that transcends time within time, discrete like the “point” (Punkt) of the political itself. But, whether it signals continuity or rupture in its early and late theoretical enunciations, sovereignty resists metaphysics and disappoints those who dream of atemporal being. Dying together with the sovereign, it avows life’s finitude; irrupting in extraordinary circumstances, it comes to naught as soon as the decision on the exception has been made and normalcy reestablished. Critical interventions emanating from the outside are not de rigueur for sovereignty, a finite absolute that deabsolutizes itself.
Over and above attempts to balance the ideal unconditionality of sovereignty and the empirical conditions under which a ruler enjoys it, Bodin revives the ancient dialectic of limits and the unlimited that, on a cosmic scale, unfolds in Plato’s Philebus. This dialectic will henceforth become an integral part of the thinking of sovereignty in Grotius, Hobbes, and much later Schmitt. And, in doing so, it will reveal the qualitative dimension of the term.
In his uncompromising general definitions, Bodin rebuffs any and all spatial and temporal constraints. This gesture bestows on sovereignty a reality not negated into a series of limitations, or, simply put, a quality-free existence. Note that the absence of a given category (quality) is inextricably bound to the dearth of categorial thinking as a whole. If categories are the banisters of cognition and the borders of the things themselves, then they are necessarily limit notions, accentuating the qualities of the categorizing and the categorized alike. There is nothing more alien to them than a reality bereft of limitations, let alone the absolute in any shape or form.
Besides the categories, other modes of thinking and actual political existence are incapable of lingering in the indeterminate limbo of “no limits” for long. As Bodin details the applications of absolute and perpetual power, its qualitative outlines appear, as if in a photographic negative, thanks to the practical restrictions that impose themselves on that which is in principle unrestricted. Schmitt’s sovereignty, on the contrary, commences with qualitative precision that hinges not only on the negation of political reality by its limit conditions but also on a recognition that sovereignty is “a borderline concept [Grenzbegriff], … one pertaining to the outermost sphere [äußersten Sphäre].”65 A “borderline concept” is none other than a category, and, analogous to the categories, Schmittian sovereignty is exercised at the limit, never on the political center stage. More than that, it tallies with the Kantian category quality, which has limitation for its categorial form and content.
Despite their divergent points of departure, Schmitt finds support for his vision of sovereignty on the margins of Bodin’s text. “That this concept relates to the critical case, the exception,” he writes, “was long ago recognized by Jean Bodin. He stands at the beginning of the modern theory of the state because of his work ‘Of the True Marks of Sovereignty’ (chapter 10 of the first book of the Republic) rather than because of his often-cited definition.”66 The “true marks” are the qualities of sovereignty. According to Bodin, the first mark is “the power to give the law to all in general and to each in particular [la puissance de donner loi à tous en général, et à chacun en particulier].” From this power, one may deduce every subsequent quality, from the right of pardon to declarations of war and peace, appointments of civil servants, and judgments of last appeal.67 Outside the sphere of the law, the power of the sovereign and its implications tie in with the Schmittian borderline concept, its prefiguration discernable in the eyes of the German jurist on the periphery of Bodin’s treatise, tucked into the end of book 1, which “nobody seems to have taken the trouble to scrutinize.”68
When it comes to law-giving, Schmitt is expressly interested in its obverse—the suspension of an existing legal order by sovereign decision. The event of suspending the law that has been hitherto in effect is highly circumstantial, contingent upon “the requirements of a situation, a time, and a people.”69 Bodin, for his part, is adamant that the defining feature of the gift, applicable to law-giving, is that it be unconditional, since “gifts that carry with them charges and conditions are not true gifts [donations, qui portent charge et condition, ne sont pas vraies donations].” “Thus,” he continues, “the sovereignty given to a prince under charges and conditions is neither really sovereignty nor absolute power [la souveraineté donnée à un Prince sous charges et conditions, n’est pas proprement souveraineté, ni puissance absolue].”70 Bodin’s sovereign is the giver and the receiver of a true gift that, given unconditionally, simultaneously dispenses the law to the subjects and sovereignty to the sovereign. (Derrida will put this axiom on its head, attributing the unconditionality of the gift to the political and personal rejection of sovereignty in genuine hospitality.) The gift of law is transcendentally blind to situational, temporal, and national requirements, and, in this respect, it does not function as a mirror image of suspending the normal legal order in an emergency.
A double true gift for and of the sovereign, law-giving gets us back to the category of modality. Schmitt’s negative, circumstantial version of the event follows the schema of actuality, whereby the sovereign exists at a determinate time (of crisis, exception, emergency). Unconditional law-giving accords instead with the schema of necessity, “the existence of the object at all times,” even though Bodin’s empirical account will acknowledge the pressures actuality exerts on this maximalist, principled stance.71 The schema of possibility is adequate to Hobbes’s political philosophy, where sovereignty emerges from a conditional renunciation of self-government on the part of the many and the authorization of one ruler (“one Person”) to assume their mutually renounced powers.72 Just as the schema of possibility entails “the agreement of the synthesis of various representations with the conditions of time in general,” so sovereign right in Hobbes is the agreement of the synthesis of various subjects with the desired conditions of common security, “peace and defence,”73 in general. That such an agreement does not preclude a future disagreement is what makes it possible rather than necessary: no longer fulfilling his functions, the sovereign may lose the right “conferred on him, that by terror thereof, he is inabled to conforme the wills of them all, to Peace at home, and mutuall ayd against their enemies abroad.”74 By contrast to necessity and actuality, possibility is always conditional, and so incompatible with absolute sovereign power and with the exigencies of a true gift.
The unconditional nature of Bodin’s sovereignty translates into an asymmetry between the sovereign and the subjects, who should not be considered two parties engaged in a contract. “It is crucial,” he states, “not to conflate the law and contract, because, dependent on the sovereign, the law may obligate all its subjects but not the sovereign himself; while a conventional agreement is mutual [mutuelle] between the Prince and the subjects, and it obligates the two parties in a reciprocal manner [réciproquement].”75 In the category of relation, the absolute sovereign is a cause and the subjects are the effects. But, for consistency’s sake, Bodin must absolve the sovereign from every conceivable relation, so as to recover absolute power. This decisive cut in the fabric of political relationality is behind a number of Bodin’s stipulations: that sovereigns will not undertake to keep the laws of their predecessors, that they are not subject to their own laws, or that they need not keep an oath. Each stipulation aims to nullify a specific set of the sovereign’s relations to other sovereigns, to the subjects, and, ultimately, to itself. Each thus confirms the thesis that absolute sovereignty is a betrayal of the categories (here, of relationality). The subjects-sovereign relation is a nonrelation and, as a result, Montesquieu observes that “the infinite distance between the sovereign and the people keeps them from disturbing him.”76
Failing to heed Bodin’s advice, Hobbes locates a contract (in his vernacular, a covenant) at the origins of “sovereignty by institution,” though, admittedly, the sovereign does not participate in the agreement hypothetically reached among future subjects: “Because the Right of bearing the Person of them all, is given to him they make Soveraigne, by Covenant onely of one to another, and not of him to any of them; there can happen no breach of Covenant on the part of the Soveraigne.”77 The mutual alienation of individual powers by the many forges among them a political community in the Kantian sense of a reciprocal coordination in an aggregate. Negatively mediated by the equal and symmetrical renunciation of the right to violence, the community strives toward “a Common Benefit”78 of peaceful coexistence. But the wish that precipitates the covenant is only attainable in the Hobbesian scheme of things when another kind of political relation—that of subordination, cause and effect—is set up between the people and the sovereign. In a transition from the collective renunciation of the individual right to engage in acts of violence to the positive institution of a sovereign commonwealth, the factor ensuring the durability of the covenant is a noncontractual, nonmutual investment of the one “bearing the Person of them all” with the sum total of alienated powers. Political equality and the horizontal community relations it consists of are meaningful and stable solely on the basis of the vertical and asymmetrical sovereign-people relation.
Hobbes further complicates the efforts of identifying political causes and effects with his proposals concerning the authorship, authority, and authorization of sovereign actions. Every member of the political community should be able to view him- or herself as the author of sovereign acts, as their implicit cause, to “Authorise all the Actions and Judgements, of that Man, or Assembly of men, in the same manner, as if they were his own.”79 The division of agency between authorship and action means that the participants in the founding contract are the cause of the sovereign cause and that the latter exercises its authority in their name alone. And this is, precisely, the state of affairs Bodin deems unacceptable: “one cannot call Princes sovereign, seeing that they are nothing but the depositaries and guardians of this power [vu qu’ils ne sont que dépositaires, et gardes de cette puissance].”80 The authority authorized by others invests princes with nothing more than “a power that they have borrowed for a certain time [la puissance qu’on leur a baillée à certain temps].”81 Absolute sovereignty prescribes a model of causality, in which the sovereign is the cause of itself, a self-sufficient first beginning isolated from the historical flux of past and future legislation, the consent of its subjects, and any rules extraneous to its will.82 To avoid borrowing power from others, sovereignty must be free of both external interferences and relations of representation that subordinate the representative to those whom she or he represents. At most, one can say that Bodin’s sovereignty is self-representative and self-signifying.
Applied to the study of sovereignty, the category of quantity likewise lays bare a profound discrepancy between Bodin and Hobbes. The covenant materializes when the powers of the many pass to the one, assuming that the parties “reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one Will.”83 Numeric synthesis plays a constitutive role in the becoming of the Hobbesian commonwealth, which is consequently liable to being analyzed into its constituents. By contrast, the quantitative dimension of Bodin’s sovereignty has to do with the scope and effects of law-giving on its subjects. The words “the power to give the law to all in general and to each in particular” combine the Kantian subcategories unity and plurality under the aegis of the sovereign totality. The connection between the particular and the universal is not law per se, subsuming the singularity of the case under the generality of a valid norm, but the act of unconditionally giving the law in excess of the difference between the one and the many.
Yet, in line with its other exemptions from categorial thinking, Bodin’s sovereignty is nonquantitative: “sovereignty is an indivisible thing [la souveraineté est chose indivisible].”84 Schmitt admires this milestone in political philosophy, calling it “what is truly impressive in his [Bodin’s] definition of sovereignty” and adding that “by considering sovereignty to be indivisible, he finally settled the question of power in the state.”85 The sovereign is One, a single will that does not yield to any authority outside itself and is not a member in an open-ended series of natural numbers subject to the mathematical operations of subtraction or addition, division or multiplication. It is nonarithmetically subtracted from the field of arithmetic. To invoke it is to resort to the language of quantity in order to overstep the limits of this category.
If not with the help of quantitative terms, then how to interpret the sovereign One? Its general tenor is close to Duns Scotus’s Unum transcendens that exists across a multiplicity of entities as the single identical determination of each.86 Through a theoretical backdoor, the uncountable One smuggles the oneness of beingness or presence, of a this, the first ousia proper to absolute sovereignty. Hobbes concurs with essential indivisibility at the level of “the Rights, which make the Essence of Soveraignty,”87 “this great Authority being Indivisible.”88 But he derives this feature from a metaphysical distinction between the essence and its secondary manifestations, true being and appearances, the one and the many, sovereign power and the powers of sovereignty. The latter—“Power to coyn Mony[,] to dispose of the estate and persons of Infant heires,” and so on—may be delegated to others without affecting the crux of the former. What cannot be alienated is “the Power to protect,”89 which was the purpose of the original covenant. For Hobbes, the power to grant safety and security to the subjects is the political Unum transcendens, the nonnumeric One reiterating the thisness or whatness of sovereignty. While, genetically, the one will stands at the confluence of many voluntarily alienated wills, statically, the one sovereign power is spared the possibility of analysis into the many. Which is to say that the numeric One and its nonnumeric counterpart coexist on the pages of Leviathan.
At the same time, in Bodin’s work, other sorts of divisibility affect the sovereign will, immediately deconstructing the metaphysical concept of oneness. I am referring, above all, to the inconstancy of that will, which is not required to obey the law, including a self-given (autonomous) variety of legislation. The supreme will is divided diachronically among successive sovereigns who are not under the obligation to respect the laws of their predecessors, as well as synchronically in the lifetime of the same sovereign unconstrained by its past decisions. That is because the thisness/whatness of sovereignty is actually whoness: a fickle, capricious, changeable One at the antipodes of metaphysical steadfastness.
Whereas the essence of Hobbesian sovereignty is the power to protect the subjects, and whereas Bodin argues that all “the marks of sovereignty are indivisible [les marques de souveraineté sont indivisibles],”90 Schmitt frees the punctual exercise of sovereignty from substantive, qualitative, positively determined considerations. A decision on the exception has no specifiable content, something that allows it to flee after its own fashion from categorial thinking. The Schmittian escape route also traverses the terrain of the absolute: “The decision frees itself from all normative ties and becomes in the true sense absolute [Die Entscheidung macht sich frei von jeder normativen Gebundenheit und wird im eigentlichen Sinne absolut].”91 Nonquantitatively singular, it cuts its relational attachments to the norm. Such liberation from two categories at once permits it to inch closer to the absolute.
In the nexus singularity-singularity, the sovereign decision on the exception is too fine-grained to register on the grid of categorial thinking. But, taken together with its consequences, it returns into the fold of this thinking and, perhaps unexpectedly, upholds the logic governing Kantian quantity. The decision on the exception is meant to overcome the impasse the norm is powerless to address. Having made this decision, the “sovereign produces and guarantees the situation as a whole in its totality [Der Souverän schafft und garantiert die Situation als Ganzes in ihrer Totalität].”92 The short-circuit of singularity presents situational plurality under the aspect of unity (“the situation as a whole [als Ganzes]”), which is how Kant construes the totality. Sovereignty is thus reinserted into the table of categories as a sublime quantum.
The three-way conversation between Bodin, Hobbes, and Schmitt I have facilitated on these pages is by no means exhaustive of sovereignty’s sweeping vistas. I see in it but a humble contribution to the categorial analysis of this important entry in any political dictionary.