Instituting Thought

Three Paradigms of Political Ontology

Roberto Esposito, Mark Epstein

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509546442
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This new book by the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito addresses the profound crisis of contemporary politics and examines some of the philosophical approaches that have been used to try to understand and go beyond this crisis. Two approaches have been particularly influential – one indebted to the thought of Martin Heidegger, the other indebted to Gilles Deleuze. While opposed in their political thrust and orientation, both approaches remain trapped within the political ontology that has framed our conceptual language for some time.

In order to move beyond this political ontology, Esposito turns to a third approach that he characterizes as 'instituting thought'. Indebted to the work of the French political philosopher Claude Lefort, this third approach recognizes that the road to reconstructing a productive relation between ontology and politics, one that is both realistic and innovative, lies in instituting praxis. Building on this insight, Esposito conceptualizes social being as neither univocal nor plurivocal but as cross-cut by the dual semantics of political conflict.

This new book by one of the most original European philosophers writing today will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, social and political theory and the humanities generally.

1
Destituting Power

1. One cannot state that the relationship between Martin Heidegger’s thought and politics has been fully explored – regardless of the growing interest directed at the issue, which has led to its becoming a focal point of interest in contemporary philosophical debates. Even more than the objective complexity of the issue, the fashion in which it has been undertaken, which was mostly prejudiced, has prevented this exploration from occurring more fully. Facing off and confronting each other frontally are two widely divergent lines of interpretation, which provide opposing evaluations of the philosopher’s well-known compromises with Nazism. Where some interpreters have seen them as a point of coalescence that leads to a precipitate of his thought, and therefore the key to interpreting all of Heidegger’s thinking, others have attempted to isolate them, reducing them to a mere biographical episode, of little relevance with respect to his work as whole. The presupposition – but ultimately also the consequence – of both perspectives has been the selection, within the vast Heideggerian corpus, of those texts that best seemed to bolster their respective interpretive strategies. Where those who argue for the centrality of the Nazi option privilege his writings from the 1930s where it is more explicit, their adversaries focus their attention on those that follow or even on those that precede them chronologically, starting with Sein und Zeit, and put aside those texts that are more directly implicated with the regime. Subsequently, especially with the recent publication of the Black Notebooks, the gray area within Heidegger’s work has appeared to grow ever larger, taking on various shadings of antisemitism. At this point, in the course of an unusual crescendo of disagreements and polemics, the hermeneutical confrontation shifted to the incriminated texts, which were examined not only from an ideological and political point of view but also from a philosophical one.

What remains at stake, regardless, is the configuration of the relationship between politics and thought. In what sense can Heidegger’s thought, given all the changes it underwent in the course of time, be considered “political”? And to what extent do his political stances, taken during the Nazi years, retain some philosophical importance when considering his thought in its entirety? The answer to this dual question has up to this point oscillated between two extreme polarities, whereby in one case one tends to politicize all of Heidegger’s philosophy, while in the other one tends to affirm its substantially impolitical nature. Each perspective, however, has had to confront irrefutable matters of fact. If the hyperpolitical interpretation – which depicts the philosopher as a crypto-Nazi – does not manage to explain the extraordinary theoretical depth of some of the most fundamental works of twentieth-century philosophy, the impolitical one is led to ignore the just as indubitable influence of Heidegger on ample areas of contemporary political philosophy. I am not only referring to Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, avowed political thinkers and Heidegger’s students,¹ I am also referring to a number of philosophers with strong political inclinations such as Nancy, Sloterdijk, Agamben, who have all been intensely influenced by the Heideggerian paradigm. In truth an observation of this kind could be extended to the entire area of continental thought. While one must certainly make all the necessary distinctions, the Heideggerian tone of philosophers such as Derrida, Schürmann, and Vattimo, themselves important interpreters of Heidegger, is not in doubt. But which thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century, with the exception of the analytical school, can be considered completely extraneous to the Heideggerian lexicon? The fact that a majority are located on the political left – to the extent that some have talked of a gauche heideggerienne² – only increases the problematic nature of the issue.³ If Heidegger’s political engagement – whatever its nature and duration – was situated on the German right, why did it arouse such an enduring interest among what, starting with Sartre, can be defined as the European philosophical left? Why did engaged thinkers on the left, communists if not also anarchists, not only never cut the thread that tied them to Heidegger’s philosophy, but instead appropriated some of its constitutive categories and reworked them as their own?

To provide an answer that is not limited to empirical circumstances of a biographical or editorial nature – after the war, these had a far from negligible impact on the circulation of his thought – one has to take into account the interpretive contrast between a political and an impolitical reading and attempt to rethink it in a theoretically more articulated form. What appears in the Heideggerian literature as an interpretive dichotomy – between political and impolitical – should be recognized as a dispositif that is internal to his thought. The hypothesis I advance here is that Heidegger’s philosophy, and not only that which addresses the political, is constituted in and by its relationship with this dispositif. In other words, it is constituted along the mobile line where the two vectors of the political and the impolitical reciprocally imply each other and continuously translate into each other, albeit without cancelling their difference and in fact reinforcing it. The specificity of the Heideggerian conception of the political resides precisely in its antinomical relationship with the impolitical dimension. Far from delineating an area external to the political horizon, this relationship represents both its necessary presupposition and its internal challenge. The issue should be viewed from both sides: if the political is always generated from an impolitical ground, the latter in turn takes on a political significance, entering into tension with the former. One should actually talk about a single unit of meaning rather than two opposite elements, a unit that can be viewed from different angles. This is the reason for the divergent perspectives it gave rise to in the critical literature, exhibiting either political or impolitical characteristics. Even if one divides this unit into distinct paths, one should not lose sight of the contradictory node that is formed by their intertwining, because it is the only one capable of providing the overall cypher of Heideggerian thought.⁴

The fact that the two layers of Heidegger’s discourse, while inseparable, are never unproblematically superimposed on each other but, on the contrary, become increasingly conflictual along the arc of his entire oeuvre represents a hermeneutical difficulty for those who approach his thought. What is at stake is precisely the figure of their difference, in a manner that in some ways recalls the ontological difference between Being and beings: although it reveals itself through beings, Being cannot be limited to them. In their turn, beings can never exhaust the being that they “are,” but rather tend to forget it. The political is also traversed, if not constituted, by a difference between what it is and what it is not and ultimately can never be. From this point of view, as is the case with all the other most important concepts of the philosopher, starting with alētheia, the positive can never be defined except by starting with the negative, in fact from the modality of the double negation, as the opposite of that which is not. This is also the case for the political – except for a brief period, which ran its course in the mid-1930s, when Heidegger attempts to express it directly – which only becomes meaningful by carving itself out from a non-political background that constitutes its condition, but never coincides with it. In the course of time, what changes is the relationship between these two registers of the negative: that which is, so to speak, constituting, on the one hand, and the destituting, which is destined to increasingly exclude the former, on the other. If the negative presupposition, that is to say, the impolitical, is that from which the political stems and takes shape, from a certain point onwards it becomes the explicit negation of the political. What was initially a tension internal to a single process diverges into a laceration between contrastive poles, destined to mutually annul each other.

From that point on the impolitical is on an ever more marked collision course with the political, which is homologized into a single nihilistic dimension, one that coincides with the generalized domination of technology. The impolitical therefore transitions from the role of a necessary background to that of functioning as a critical dispositif in its relationship with the political. What was a negative presupposition that enabled one to think of the political becomes its pure negation: no longer the “non-political” from which the political starts, but that which negates it in its very possibility. In this case, however, one should not understand “negation” to mean any active modality, an action against, but rather a “non-action” in the radical sense of an abandonment of the category of “action” itself. If all existing manifestations of politics are part of the same destructive technology – as Heidegger, starting from a certain phase, will argue with ever greater conviction – the “impossible” task of the impolitical becomes that of their deactivation. That such a task is consciously impossible is due not only to its inability to translate into action but also to the absence of any subjectivity capable of enacting it. It is precisely the paradigm of “putting to work...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• 1 Destituting Power
• 2 Constituting Power
• 3 Instituting Thought
• Index
• End User License Agreement