PREFACE
1. Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 6.
2. Derrida, 6.
3. I owe this indication to Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback. Derrida will later on recount this oversight in “Majesties.” Cf. Derrida, Sovereignties in Question, 112–13.
1. POLITICAL CATEGORIES
1. All references to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason appear in brackets, containing the pagination of the first (A) or second (B) editions.
2. Michel Foucault, for one, does not lighten this burden but increases it, precisely with an eye to Plato’s thought. “In short,” he notes, “the political problem is that of the relation between the one and the many in the framework of the city and its citizens.” Foucault, “ ‘Omnes et Singulatim,’ ” 307.
3. O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction, passim.
4. On the first pages of The Seductions of Quantification, Sally Engle Merry admits that “quantification organizes and simplifies knowledge” (1).
5. All references to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit appear in brackets, containing the abbreviation PhS and a relevant paragraph number.
6. Parmenides of Elea, “Fragments,” 42.
7. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 175.
8. Heidegger, 173–74. Similarly, the infamous mind-body split notwithstanding, res persists on the two sides of the abyss in the division Descartes introduces between res cogitans and res extensa.
9. In Francis Ponge’s memorable expression: le parti pris des choses.
10. For more on the elusive meanings of Aristotelian energeia, see Marder, Energy Dreams.
11. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 45.
12. Cf. Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth and Land and Sea.
13. I undertake this task, in basic outline, in the two appendices to Political Categories, where I scrutinize Aristotle’s and Kant’s foundational texts revolving around the categories of thinghood and understanding.
14. All references to Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political appear in brackets, containing the abbreviation CP and a relevant page number from the English translation.
15. For issues in political existentiality, refer to Marder, Groundless Existence.
16. Heidegger reflects this trend in the very organization of Being and Time, a book, in which the “existential analytic” of Dasein is marked off from the “categorial analytic” of the world.
17. Schmitt, Political Theology, 38.
18. Schmitt, Political Theology II, 128.
19. Marder, Groundless Existence, 65–66, 76.
20. Tacker, Becoming a Revolutionary, 205.
21. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 17.
22. Quoted in Nelson, “Lay Readers of the Bible in the Carolingian Ninth Century,” 47.
23. Cf. Innerarity, The Democracy of Knowledge, passim.
24. Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, 34.
25. Badiou, Philosophy and the Event, 9.
26. Machiavelli, The Prince, 61.
27. In this respect, the work of Slavoj Žižek is illuminating.
2. THE INITIAL APPROACH
1. For more on this, consult Marder, Energy Dreams. And, besides, the differences between Aristotle and Kant on the categories—the former accentuating their relation to being, the latter associating them with thinking—only buttress my point regarding the melding together of ontology and epistemology in the categorial approach I advocate.
2. Cf. also Meta. 1028, a16–b2.
3. Heidegger differentiates between the presence of the first ousia and the presencing of the second, or “the showing itself of outward appearance to which all origins also belong, in which what actually persists allows that as which it presences to emerge.” Heidegger, “Metaphysics as History of Being,” 7.
4. Cf. Harvard University Press’s “Loeb Edition” of Aristotle’s Categories.
5. For the political meaning of these terms, see Innerarity, La política en los tiempos de indignación, 3ff.
6. Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy, passim.
7. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 283.
8. Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, 100.
9. Montesquieu foresees this situation when he writes, “In a democracy the people are, in certain respects, the monarch; in other respects, they are the subjects.” Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 10.
10. Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, 100.
11. Quoted in Schram, “Mao Tse-Tung’s Thought from 1949–1976,” 471.
12. “The same and the other at the same time maintain themselves in relationship and absolve themselves from this relation, remain absolutely separated.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 102.
13. Time and again, Schmitt explains that “laws do not rule.… Whoever exercises power and government acts ‘on the basis of law’ or ‘in the name of the law’ [‘auf Grund eines Gesetzes’ oder ‘in Namen des Gesetzes’].” Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy, 4.
14. While modernity hollows out, clears all content from, and quantifies space through its translation into discrete numeric units, in Greek antiquity space was the embodiment of continuous measurement, a quantity grounded in the experience of spatiality and, therefore, hylomorphically consistent with its content and materiality.
15. The adjectives good and bad, describing political programs, positions, and regimes, are not qualities but value judgments.
16. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 64.
17. Montesquieu, 231.
18. Rendueles, Sociophobia, 27.
3. THE SECOND LOOK
1. The more recent studies of this tendency include Mair, Ruling the Void (2013), and Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured (2014). I thank Daniel Innerarity for these references.
2. Cf. Dunleavy, Democracy, Bureaucracy and Public Choice.
3. “Objects of sensible intuition must accord with the formal conditions of sensibility that lie in the mind a priori.… Otherwise they would not be objects for us.” CPR A90.
4. Brennan, Against Democracy, passim.
5. The figures of sovereignty we have chanced upon in the discussion of the Aristotelian category of quality are the ubiquitous products of figurative political synthesis, exhibiting both geometrical and existential features.
6. Agamben, State of Exception, 25.
7. Robespierre, Textes choisis, 60.
8. In Absolute Recoil, Žižek invokes “beyond the transcendental” mostly in the sense of dialectical materialism (49ff.). Although my notion of transtranscendentality has clear affinities to this move, it insists on the hermeneutical circle in which political categories rotate with their nonpolitical counterparts and non- or precategorial givenness.
9. In Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 264.
10. Heynick, Jews and Medicine, 238.
11. Morello and Gearan, “Tillerson to North Korea.”
12. Kukathas and Pettit, Rawls, 1–2.
13. For my analysis of Lenin’s speeches between the two revolutions, see Marder, “On Lenin’s ‘Usability.’ ”
4. THE CATEGORIES “AT WORK”
An earlier draft of the section “State” was written under the title “The Categories of the State” and is included in The State in Anarchic Times: Towards a Dialectical Theory of State, ed. Artemy Magun (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). An earlier draft of the section “Revolution” appeared in the special issue of the journal Phainomena dedicated to the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution.
1. Hobbes, Leviathan, 9, emphasis added. The word choice of stature is far from accidental; it gestures toward the etymology of the state. According to Carl Schmitt, the anthropomorphic version of political thought sees wars as duels between magni homines and fantasizes about the state as “a legal subject and a sovereign ‘person.’ ” Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 142, 145.
2. “The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea. It is ethical spirit [sittliche Geist] as the substantial will manifest and revealed to itself.” Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 155.
3. I have also consulted Heidegger’s shorthand notes on the state in his Hegel seminar; cf. Heidegger, On Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 117ff.
4. “One translates polis as state (Staat) and city-state (Stadsstaat); this does not capture the entire sense. Rather, polis is the name for the site (Stätte), the Here, within which and as which Being-here is historically. The polis is the site of history.” Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 162.
5. Heidegger, Parmenides, 89.
6. Cf. Lenin, The State and Revolution, 45. Thus, present-day technocrats are Leninists, minus the necessity of the revolution prior to the rise of the administrative state.
7. It is worth noting that, in Russian idiom, “to sit” can mean “to serve a jail term.”
8. Bozorgmehr and Bakalian, “September 11, 2001, Terrorism, Discriminatory Reactions To,” 1126.
9. Quentin Skinner, in the second volume of Foundations of Modern Political Thought, outlines these two ways of understanding the state in historical perspective: “Before the sixteenth century, the term status was only used by political writers to refer to one of two things: either the state or condition in which a ruler finds himself (the status principi); or else the general ‘state of the nation’ or condition of the realm as a whole (the status regni). What was lacking in these usages was the distinctively modern idea of the State as a form of public power separate from both the ruler and the ruled, and constituting the supreme political authority within a certain defined territory” (2:353).
10. For an excellent account of res publica in the republican tradition, see a volume edited by Dominique Colas and Oleg Kharkhordin, The Materiality of Res Publica (2009).
11. For status civitatis refer to Cicero (“de optimo statu civitatis”: Cic. ad Q. fr. 3.5.1) and Sallust (“de statu civitatis”: Sal. Cat. 40.2).
12. Skinner, Foundations, 2:353.
13. Heidegger, Ponderings XII–XV, 103.
14. In Louis XIV’s world, how the state stands is how I, the absolute monarch, stand; in fact, I am the standing of the state.
15. Heidegger, Parmenides, 44.
16. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 110.
17. For more on the energy of movement and rest in the political state, consult Marder, Energy Dreams, esp. 130–33.
18. Hegel likewise concedes this point both in his Phenomenology and in Philosophy of Right.
19. In Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, this negative qualitative determination corresponds to the ripening of a fruit.
20. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 98.
21. For a discussion of the critique of logos set out by phenomena, see Marder, Phenomena-Critique-Logos.
22. I will not sum up here the history of the uses of revolution. For a useful overview, consult Magun, Negative Revolution, 4–11, and Therborn, “Foreword,” xiv–xvii.
23. Arendt, On Revolution, 21.
24. Lenin, The State and Revolution, 45.
25. Magun, Negative Revolution, 7.
26. Schwoerer, “Introduction,” 2.
27. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 412.
28. Trotsky, “Social Democracy and Revolution,” 450.
29. I have begun such a consideration in Marder, Energy Dreams, chap. 5, titled “Political Fantasies.”
30. Marder, Pyropolitics, 46.
31. Kautsky, The Road to Power, 90–91.
32. Castro, Selected Speeches, 17.
33. Castro, 107.
34. Lorimer, Fundamentals of Historical Materialism, 32.
35. Althusser, For Marx, 106.
36. Althusser, 106.
37. Stalin, Mastering Bolshevism, 35–36.
38. Foucault, “ ‘Omnes et Singulatim,’ ” 324.
39. Foucault, 324.
40. Barbone, “What Counts as an Individual for Spinoza?,” 102.
41. Foucault, “ ‘Omnes et Singulatim,’ ” 307.
42. Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, 126.
43. Negri, Insurgencies, 30–31.
44. Keaveney, Sulla, 136, translation modified.
45. Foucault, “ ‘Omnes et Singulatim,’ ” 300.
46. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 173.
47. Althusser, 176.
48. On the theological precursors of “the separation of powers,” see also Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory.
49. Voltaire, The Portable Voltaire, 221.
50. Bernhardt, Itinerant Kingship, 45.
51. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 43.
52. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 157.
53. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 51.
54. Foucault, The Order of Things, 83.
55. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, xxi.
56. Bickerton, Cunliffe, and Gourevitch, “Introduction,” 4.
57. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 71.
58. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 102.
59. Bodin, Les six livres de la République, 111. All translations of this text from the original French are mine.
60. Bodin, 113.
61. Bodin, 119.
62. Bodin, 116.
63. Hobbes, Leviathan, 120.
64. Bodin, Les six livres de la République, 116.
65. Schmitt, Political Theology, 5.
66. Schmitt, 8.
67. Bodin, Les six livres de la République, 160.
68. Schmitt, Political Theology, 7.
69. Schmitt, 9.
70. Bodin, Les six livres de la République, 119.
71. Rousseau gathers the modalities of actuality and necessity in his take on sovereignty: “The Sovereign, by the mere fact that it is, is always everything it ought to be.” Rousseau, “The Social Contract,” 52.
72. Hobbes, Leviathan, 120.
73. Hobbes, 120.
74. Hobbes, 120–21.
75. Bodin, Les six livres de la République, 123–24.
76. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 210.
77. Hobbes, Leviathan, 122.
78. Hobbes, 120.
79. Hobbes, 121.
80. Bodin, Les six livres de la République, 112.
81. Bodin, 114.
82. Hence, also Grotius: “That is called Supreme, whose Acts are not subject to another’s Power, so that they cannot be made void by any other human Will. When I say, by any other, I exclude the Sovereign himself, who may change his own Will, as also his Successor, who enjoys the same Right, and consequently, has the same Power, and no other.” Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis, 1.iii.VII.
83. Hobbes, Leviathan, 120.
84. Bodin, Les six livres de la République, 183.
85. Schmitt, Political Theology, 8.
86. Heidegger, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus, 33.
87. Hobbes, Leviathan, 127.
88. Hobbes, 128.
89. Hobbes, 127.
90. Bodin, Les six livres de la République, 193.
91. Schmitt, Political Theology, 12.
92. Schmitt, 13.
APPENDIX 1
1. Although I am referring to “species,” the argument applies to animate and inanimate entities alike. The word in question is eidos, which also means “image,” “idea,” or “kind,” terms that I use interchangeably with “species.”
2. Rousseau, “The Social Contract,” 41.