Political Concepts

A Critical Lexicon

Adi M. Ophir, Ann Laura Stoler, J. M. Bernstein

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780823276707
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Deciding what is and what is not political is a fraught, perhaps intractably opaque matter. Just who decides the question; on what grounds; to what ends—these seem like properly political questions themselves. Deciding what is political and what is not can serve to contain and restrain struggles, make existing power relations at once self-evident and opaque, and blur the possibility of reimagining them differently. Political Concepts seeks to revive our common political vocabulary—both everyday and academic—and to do so critically. Its entries take the form of essays in which each contributor presents her or his own original reflection on a concept posed in the traditional Socratic question format "What is X?" and asks what sort of work a rethinking of that concept can do for us now.The explicitness of a radical questioning of this kind gives authors both the freedom and the authority to engage, intervene in, critique, and transform the conceptual terrain they have inherited. Each entry, either implicitly or explicitly, attempts to re-open the question "What is political thinking?" Each is an effort to reinvent political writing. In this setting the political as such may be understood as a property, a field of interest, a dimension of human existence, a set of practices, or a kind of event. Political Concepts does not stand upon a decided concept of the political but returns in practice and in concern to the question "What is the political?" by submitting the question to a field of plural contention.The concepts collected in Political Concepts are "Arche" (Stathis Gourgouris), "Blood" (Gil Anidjar), "Colony" (Ann Laura Stoler), "Concept" (Adi Ophir), "Constituent Power" (Andreas Kalyvas), "Development" (Gayatri Spivak), "Exploitation" (Étienne Balibar), "Federation" (Jean Cohen), "Identity" (Akeel Bilgrami), "Rule of Law" (J. M. Bernstein), "Sexual Difference" (Joan Copjec), and "Translation" (Jacques Lezra)

1

Archē

Stathis Gourgouris

I can say, perhaps a little playfully but not altogether inaccurately, that I have chosen to engage with the very first political concept—certainly in name, if nothing else. But as you will see, my reading is precisely to demonstrate how, from its initial invocation (from its archē, as it were), this concept renders any notions of the first, or of the one, impossible, indeterminable, an-archic. In this sense, though the word I am examining is archē, the political concept I substantially engage with and care about is “anarchy,” whose elemental significance, I argue, is actually inherent in the archaic conceptualization of archē. It is this archaic conceptualization that interests me here; hence, I do not engage with some important treatments of this notion in Heidegger, Derrida, or Reiner Schürmann. So I will merely weave a thread around four instances of the notion in the Greek philosophical vocabulary, two phrases in Aristotle, one in Herodotus, and the famous passage known as the Anaximander fragment.

Let us look at a well-known assertion in Aristotle’s Politics:

Ἔστι τις ἀρχή καθ’ ἦν ἄρχει τῶν ὁμοίων τᾦ γένει καὶ τῶν ἐλευθέρων (ταύτην γαρ λέγομεν εἶναι τὴν πολιτικήν ἀρχήν), ήν δεῖ τὸν ἄρχοντα ἀρχόμενον μαθεῖν.1

This phrase encapsulates not only the paradoxality of democracy but also the deeper significance of what it means for a society to constitute on its own and for itself a mode of political life without fixed norms and without guarantees. This mode of life is political par excellence, and democracy is its name. It is a mode that animates political life: the essence of human being as zōon politikon. If the human animal is a political animal, it is because it refuses to consider the archē of things as natural and subjects it to interrogation. Aristotle’s particular stipulation about rulers learning by being ruled has drawn voluminous commentary on its significance as political science. But as always there is more to the Greek language than might be immediately comprehensible.

We must not forget that archē means both origin and rule, much in the sense that, in the English language, we understand rule to pertain both to matters of governance and to matters of principle, indeed first principles, the essential rules of the game, of proposition, of foundation, of order. The ruler, after all, is a primary figure (even in cases articulated as primus inter pares), the premier in a constitutive mechanism of ruling that presupposes him to be the primary guardian of the set of rules he represents. In any archaic configuration of power, the archon commands authority not only over the domain of rules that govern a society. He also embodies the point of departure of whatever trajectory such rules are to have in their implementation, whether they are to be enforced in principle or not, safeguarded for future generations (of rulers and ruled), or dismantled in favor of another course of rule, another beginning. Such is obviously the essence of the figure of the patriarch, which is why even when the primordial parricide takes place, according, let us say, to Freud’s tales—when, in fact, the singular origin of principle and rule is to be multiplied and distributed (in Freud’s analysis, institutionalized) in the hands of the many murderous sons—the patriarchic order is hardly abolished. On the contrary, in its multiplication, the authorial origin is consolidated.

But when Aristotle demands that the archon must also be archomenos, something else entirely takes place. The singular notion of archē is deconstituted by a corresponding alterity. In order to know how to rule, one must know how to be ruled: this is the quintessential element of autonomy. Knowledge of being ruled does not mean mere experiential accounting from the standpoint of the (always) ruled. In a direct sense, it means knowing the other side of rule, enabling an affirmative investment in the object of rule from a subject-position that is not consumed in the typical objectification suffered by those ruled. In this respect, being ruled provides the sort of knowledge—achieved explicitly as a result of learning (mathein)—that relativizes a ruler’s presumed monopoly over the authority to determine what rule means and, in effect, abolishes the presumed epistemic distinction between rulers and ruled in producing a subject of authority, of power, in the double sense.2 Aristotle’s phrasing is perfectly apt: τὴν τῶν ἐλευθέρων ἀρχήν ἐπίστασθαι ἐπ΄ ἀμφότερα: “the rule of the free is known from both sides.”3

This co-incidence can be considered from two standpoints. On the one hand, the ruled authorize their own position as ruled; that is, they are not ruled in the simple sense of submitting to the authority of the ruler, an authority predicated on the assumption that the ruler is also the origin of rule. They are ruled by virtue of their own decision to be ruled, which is to say, they hold the reins of interrogation (and thus signification) over the terms of ruling—who rules, why, and how?—the very mode of interrogation of the rule of law. This is why this notion has nothing to do with the debilitating paradox of “voluntary servitude” that Étienne de la Boétie so brilliantly exposed several centuries ago, which nonetheless continues to characterize most of today’s societies of consensus. The ruled who hold the reins of interrogation over the signifying framework of rule can never become servile by definition; they are motivated by a principle of self-limitation that safeguards their autonomy, their self-determination. That is why in the Athenian polis slaves are not ruled, strictly speaking; they just execute commands. For this reason, the police work was assigned to slaves, the famous Scythian archers.4 It is similar in the case of women and children, whose existence within the oikos bears its own economy. As Hannah Arendt argued, Athenian democracy makes the political independent of the social and the economic; the necessity of entwining these two domains is a problem of modernity. Whatever the conditions of power within the oikos and the specific variations of patriarchical society pertinent to the Greeks, archē in the political sense exists only in the public space of male citizens. All others are altogether outside the realm of ruling, not only because to be ruled means to participate in ruling but also because ruling does not mean issuing commands within a hierarchical structure. Rather, ruling becomes a condition shared by the free and the equal, which is as such—Aristotle is unequivocal on this—political rule (πολιτική ἀρχή). By this logic, a ruler who has never known how to be ruled—a ruler who has not known the autonomy of being ruled—cannot possibly rule without abusing autonomy in favor of ruling in its name. Aristotle’s injunction against such a ruler opens the way toward considering the project of autonomy as an interminable exercise of self-rule even in the political domain of being ruled.

On the other hand, Aristotle’s configuration of archē also subverts the signification of ruler as primordial authority, which is why it is pertinent only to a democracy and not a monarchy. If, concurrently to rule, archē signifies origin, the requisite knowledge of archomenos forbids the ruler’s singular occupation of the origin of authority, thus introducing a difference at the origin, a foundational différance. As archomenos, a ruler can never claim to be the first and only. At most he can acknowledge the position of archon as a transitory moment in the process of ruling, which is a process whose ultimate beginning is unknown and irrelevant and whose ultimate endpoint is incomprehensible as such—a process undertaken by society as a whole, provided that society recognizes and enacts its autonomy.5 For an archon to recognize the archomenos as a subject-position means to recognize an alterity within, which by traditional logic is impossible. What makes this possible—the capacity for self-alteration—is even more far-fetched, logically speaking. It signifies a process by which alterity is internally produced, dissolving the very thing that enables it, the very thing whose existence derives meaning from being altered, from othering itself.6

If knowing how to be ruled is essential to ruling, no ruler can claim self-authorization, and archē can no longer constitute itself as a singular origin. Authority begins already cleft and differential, open to question at the point of its constitution, by virtue of the fact that both subject and object of power are in a position of co-incidence. Although nominally, at a specific point in time, someone rules and someone is being ruled, these positions are not structurally or temporally frozen but are provisionally filled by whoever fills them. In a democratic situation, according to Aristotle’s stipulation, this “whoever” pertains to both domains (ruler and ruled) without qualification—hence being called to the responsibility of ruling by lot. In this respect, the mutual alterity between the positions of ruler and ruled does not disintegrate to mere opposition but, rather, remains involved in a mutual complicity where any primordial notion of archē as singular authority or singular origin of power is irreparably disrupted. This exposes the whole business of ruling as a veritably an-archic condition, in the sense that rule, although not abolished, is provisionally constituted on no other ground than the equal sharing of power among a people who occasionally perform the position of ruler and occasionally perform the position of ruled but are in essence always, politically, acting in both positions simultaneously. In this very sense, anarchy is the archē of democracy.

One may object that my quick reading of Aristotle’s phrase is not very Aristotelian. Strictly speaking, this would be correct. By Aristotelian terms, it is a perverse reading—my conclusion at least, because the co-incidence of ruler and ruled is no doubt what the Aristote...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction. Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon
• 1. Archē
• 2. Blood
• 3. Colony
• 4. Concept
• 5. Constituent Power
• 6. Development
• 7. Exploitation
• 8. Federation
• 9. Identity
• 10. The Rule of Law
• 11. Sexual Difference
• 12. Translation
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index