Few characters are more memorable in the first book of Plato’s The Republic than the sophist Thrasymachus, whose shadow is still very much looming around us given that it is obvious that today everything in our contemporary world is optimized through force. Thrasymachus’s strict identification of reserve power (potentia) with justice (ius) is in many respects prophetic, since it already subordinates the ideal of justice with practical reason and effective norms, a crowning achievement of modern political power. This is why Leo Strauss could claim in The City and Man that Thrasymachus’ position is ultimately a defense of the thesis of “legal positivism” that brings to fruition the legitimate order and the police powers of the city. In other words, Thrasymachus discovered that the requirements for the permanence of an active social order of a police entails the mediation of the two dimensions of legal authority: obedience and the internal recognition of a secondary rule that liquidates the possibility of raising the question of what is “just” (now internal to the organization of internal powers). If the aim of “justice” becomes the optimal application of effective rules and norms that provide the services of the city, then political rule becomes an infallible and uncontested logic. Politics is ultimately force, and force is the energy organized by politics in the city.
As Strauss writes: “Thrasymachus acts like the city, he resembles the city, and this means according to a way reasonably acceptable to both…Thrasymachus is the city. It is because he is the city that he maintains the thesis of the city regarding justice and that he is angry at Socrates for his antagonism to the thesis of the city. Thrasymachus’ rhetoric was especially concerned with both arousing and appeasing the angry passions of the multitude, with both attacking a man’s character and counteracting such attacks, as well as with play-acting as an ingredient of oratory” [1]. Well before the general equivalent of contractual commercial relations, Thrasymachus’ rhetorical deployment functioned as a techne alupias against the unwarranted passions of human beings. And, contrary to the common opinion that separates the craft of sophistry from the unity of rational discourse (logos), Thrasymachus’ defense of force presupposes the autonomy of language in the rhetorical construction (very much like modern poetry centuries later) to serve as the hospice of rational pondering in the polis. To make language the exclusive battle ground: even in antiquity it was said of Thrasymachus, “you are just like your name, bold in battle”. And Plato wanted to hold on to this picture. This ultimately means – and it is still at the center of our contemporary predicament – that the coming of the “Social man” in the city is only possible on the condition of a primary transformation of the event of language and the speaking being. This is why if Thrasymachus was the “pioneer of rhetoric and elocution”, as it has been claimed, it is only because his appeal to the pragmatics of political power was mediated by the invention of the ‘mystery of the prose style’; that is, of reducing the non-grammatical mediation to the orderability of a prose adjusted as an instrument to the world [2]. The enslavement of the passions is the commencement of the social prose in which we are forced to act in our alienated roles.
Only when language becomes rhetorical communication it is possible to grasp the world as a case of an entity of legibility and knowability, where reasons (inclusive and exclusive, that is, as what can be delegated for my own interests) and political rule converge without residue. What will become obvious through the cybernetic dominion over “information”, it was first elaborated as the pressure of rhetoric where the logical force of predication took its force to disclaim myth as the unappropriated experience of worldly phenomena. The art of rhetoric does not render “truth” obsolete; it rather incorporates theoretical and systemic deductions – a flattening of logos without myth -, so that the event of truth can no longer stand as the unsurveyed horizon of the intelligibility [3]. The consolidation of force means this much: that Thrasymachus’ prose of the world is not just an exclusive political program of the “fictitious”, as much as a program for the total attainability of the world; a world that by becoming fully accessible and objective, it pays the high price of eclipsing the presence of things, and the event of truth and naming in language. A world without kallipolis that will only distribute and perpetuate ad infinitum injustice as the corollary for the triumph of immanence of force.
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Notes
1. Leo Strauss. The City and Man (University of Chicago Press, 1964), 78.
2. Bromley Smith. “Thrasymachus: a pioneer rhetorician”, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1927.
3. Gianni Carchia. “La persuasión y la retórica de los sofistas”, in Retórica de lo sublime (Tecnos, 1994), 60.
For anyone familiar with the delicate thought of Monica Ferrando, the short book just published, Arcadia Sacra (Il Molino, 2024), makes it impossible not to read it in light of her the two previous works, the ambitious Il regno errante (Neri Pozza, 2018) that reconstructs the political paradigm of the nomos of Arcadia, and L’elezione e la sua ombra: Il cantico tradito (2022), which brought to light the corrupted meaning of a theopoetic understanding of “election” and its appropriation by an effective economic theology apparatus that governs over the destiny of the modern edifice. Arcadia Sacra continues Ferrando’s highly original reconstruction of the unforgettable myth of Arcadia within the obscure setting of secular modernization in which painting itself has come into crisis to the point of utter obsolescence. We might be the first epoch in the history of humanity (or even prehistoric, since painting goes back to the non-original origin of the caves, as Ferrando has argued) in which painting itself is lacking and almost non-existent [1]. And although Ferrando does not allude to the present directly, it goes without saying that by choosing as her focal point Titian’s early picture “The Flight into Egypt” (1508), the vision deployed in the essay can only speak to us as urgently, where the thematics confronted by the Renaissance of Venetian painting returns to our present in a fractured flash: imperial conflagration, unlimited deployment of force, usurpation of territory and multiplication of legal checkpoints, and the accelerated disconnection between architecture and nature, color the ongoing devastation of the vantage point of the landscape now eclipsed by the radiant artificial confinements of the contemporary metropolitan designs.
Already during his postwar years in the United States, Theodor Adorno observed how the unbounded sadness of the American landscape has nothing to do with an inhuman romantic sublime; it was rather that the landscape feels as if it bears no traces of the human hand [2]. If Americanism configures the long lasting night of planetary nihilism; this is so, not only due to capitalist subsumption and production of human life, but fundamentally because of the inherent obliviousness of the landscape that forecloses dwelling in the world. But the myth of Arcadia, as Ferrando will insists, is no utopia nor crafted rhetoric (the bucolic genre as an aesthetic compensation to the normative grid of the social bond); it is also the question about the earthly ground of existence, and the necessary attunement with the things that have been domesticated into order of the metaphysics of idolatry and objectivity (Ferrando 28). In this sense, Arcadia does not name another world to come; it is a world that has been registered many times, reappearing whenever the hand reaches out in proximity as if caressing the landscape’s skin.
The mytho-poetical deployment of Arcadia returns amidst a world in conflagration, and for Ferrando this has fundamental political implications insofar as it shows a way out from the grammar at the service of force and political dominion of commanders and soldiers – which is always already exercised as legitimate to coerce and to become a tool for the regulation of abstract mediations – into the voice of poets, painters, and shepherds (Ferrando 51). Arcadia reveals that the human species is a ductile animal that can sense by the ability to touch and use. This is why Arcadia stands as a third space outside the political dichotomy of empire and republicanism, between the struggle of usurpation and conquest, and the techno-political administration of common goods of social distribution and institutional delegation. The abstract humanism of the Renaissance, as Heidegger once claimed alluding to Machiavelli’s political thought, is also the commencement of a specific political technology rooted in certainty and justification that can only conceive representation as the ground for the production of an “effective truth” [3]. The virtuous homini militari of the Italian city states anticipate the neutralization of force as legitimate rule that will prepare the stage of modern political realism based on fear and normative rule of law. The final efficacy of force is to transform the sense of the world into a mere object, as Weil clearly understood it in her essay on Homer’s Iliad. One of the key insights of Ferrando’s Arcadia Sacra (2024) is that it shows that, parallel to the revolution in political technologies taking place in Renaissance Humanism, the image of Arcadia was being rediscovered in treatises and paintings in order to remain faithful to a different attunement of the nomoi, in which the philosophy of history of sacrifice, endless civil wars, and destruction of the Earth do not constitute true destiny (Ferrando 14). In an exoteric way – and it is so, because the craft of the painter is, precisely, depiction and figuration of the nakedness of what appears before our vision- painters like Titian, Veronese, and Bellini, became witnesses to the acquiescence of the nomos mousikos, which far from soliciting the conceptual density of a theory of Justice; it registered the preeminent condition of poetizing nature of living in the vanishing world. Indeed, it was in the musical nomos where the soul could establish the communication between exteriority and interiority within the gleaming order of things.
If Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art suggests that the erection of work occupies the open space of this clearing; Ferrando will thematize how Boccaccio’s understanding of the Earth as radiantly divine was drawing upon the tradition of Arcadia will emerge as the pictorial space of the artists to disclose the vibrant sense of a necessary freedom (Ferrando 43). This means that living among the gods is not reducible to panentheism, if understood as oppositional to monotheism; rather, it was the opening to the event that gathered forms of life, creations, affections, and territories. In other words, there will always be gods whenever the world is not enclosed into the homogenous surface of a unified planetarity. And is not painting the quasi-originary activity of human anthropogenesis (the event of being in the world as such) the sensible evidence that negates any conceptual and political translation directed towards action and justification? After all, painting is, among other things, the business of depicting mute things, as Nicolas Poussin famously claimed.
But muteness must be qualified and expanded, since Arcadia is no asylum or final refuge of man. Titian’s “The Flight into Egypt” depicts a rite of passage, but also opens to a set of rhythmic connected activities that lead to the landscape. Thus, as Monica Ferrando reminds us, building from her previous Il regno errante, Arcadia is also the material experimentation of acoustic energy; music, or the the nomos mousikos, no longer guided by the command of political service, directed by attunement of the lyre and the syrinx, will speak the unwritten language of the human soul. Painting and music convergence at the nonsite of permanent formlessness. And it is rhythmic music allowing improvisation and experimentation that reimagines a different conception of the polis; a transfiguration of political life, in which the principle of civility in all of its complexity (citizenship, objective transference and negation, civilizational fortitude) will no longer articulate the principal axis of the human commonwealth. Neither a source of higher natural law nor a mere expansion of positive norms, the nomos of Arcadia for Ferrando entails: “inalterabile a unire intimamente musica e legge, entrambe ágrapha, non scritte, se non nel cuore. L’interdipendenza tra modi della musica e nomoi della città, che sarebbe vano interpretare secondo un rapporto causale, trova nella stessa parola nomos un compendio inesauribile, ribadito nella Politeia: «Non si introducono mai cambiamenti nei modi della musica senza che se ne introducano nei più importanti nomoi della polis” (Ferrando 54). The separation of law from music – as Ferrando will say for poetry and philosophy in later pages – will ultimately lead to the moral struggle towards the rise of the fictitious (and whoever can impose it through their effective hegemony) against the emergence of the “love of thought” (l’amore del pensiero) (Ferrando 57). In this sense, the moralization of justice and its conversion into a specific historical grammar (lex scripta in the juridical apparatus) will ground the order of the polis in which the human will be absolutely sacred so that the sacred nearness between existence and the world – the atopia where the promise of happiness can take place – will vanish forever. As Carlo Levi saw clearly during the postwar years, the rise of the political administration of fear will coincide with the decline of painting as the source of being in liberty within the senses [4]. And, in our days, the historical termination of secularization can only be felt like an unending glacial interregnum (it is no surprise that Disney’s epochal blockbuster is precisely a defense of alienation of a cold being in a Frozen castle) in which the prehistoric reminiscence of the garden can only appear as an afterthought or mere representation, always out of reach, and viciously grazed by wild beasts before our own eyes.
But seeing is already an exercise in prefiguration of a world that returns where painting stands as the medium for a mediation between the formlessness and the soul. This is why, above all, pictorial space is a privileged surface from which to flee our condition of unworldly inmates of our times. In a certain way, painting does not just bring to bear truth against the regime of calamitous fictions; it is also bears witness, as Ferrando states towards a high moment of Arcadia Sacra (2024), to the rediscovery of a new mental space that revives the attunement to a state of the world no longer reduced to the depredatory practices of civilizational extraction and consented servitude (Ferrando 77). The tradition of painting is not just a collection of forms and artistic conventions, but the ongoing concert that facilitates our movement (and being moved) towards happiness.
This is the promise of the itinerant Mary’s passive and inclined face in Titian’s early masterpiece. It does not come to surprise that for Ferrando, the mother dwells among the gods of peace, in contrast to the figures of the commander or the inquisitorial or priestly judge that monitor an endless narrative of intra-species civil war (Ferrando 63). It should not go without saying that at the same time that some contemporary scholars in the face of a historical crisis of legitimation attempt to revive the aura of the homini militari, the precepts of the ragion di stato and the technical virtues of the charismatic Prince; it has been the work of Monica Ferrando, in fully in display in Arcadia Sacra (2024), that invites us to turn to the counters of eros of painting that, almost stubbornly, transmit to us the infinite possibilities of life among the green blades of grass in Pan’s spiritual land (Ferrando 82) [5]. The sacredness of Arcadia resides in this unbounded exteriority that thanks to the mystery of the mother, is always commencing; and, having achieved happiness, it wants to know nothing about bring the world to conclusion. Beneath the arcana imperii (Rome) and the bylaws of the polis (Athens), the landscape of Arcadia remains a harmonious passage of our cohabitation.
5. I am thinking here of the works of several American historians of political thought and legal scholars in recent years that have mobilized efforts to restore a “neoclassical”, Renaissance centered political tradition, as a response to the crisis of modern liberalism. The most prominent list includes, although it is not limited to James Hankins’ Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Harvard U Press, 2020), Harvey Mansfield’s Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth (Cambridge U Press, 2023), and Adrian Vermuele’s endorsement of Renaissance imperial categories such as Ragion di stato, Lex Regia and the tradition of the Mirror of Princes, see his “Sacramental Liberalism and Region di Stato” (2019) and “The Many and the Few: On the American Lex Regia” (2023). The pastiche of this neoclassical investment made possible by rhetorical and hermeneutical deployments of instrumentalized myth, it is something that I have taken note of in “¿Revival de la tradición legal clásica?” (2022). Drawing a parallel to this classical absorption in American political thought, one could say that this is a reiteration of what Monica Ferrando herself has analyzed in her chapter on German Romantic Neoclassicism and the Winckelmann aesthetic project in her L’elezione e la sua ombra. Il cantico tradito (Neri Pozza, 2022), except now that it lacks aesthetic meditations (there is no Dichter als Führer), thus culminating in the direct exercise of applied executive force.
The Supreme Court of Colorado has recently upheld the constitutional argument developed by two constitutional scholars, William Baude & Michael Paulsen, that disqualifies former President Trump from a presidential nomination under section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. According to this legal argument by one of the nation’s renowned legal originalists, any former public official who has taken an “oath” to the Constitution and engages in a rebellion or insurrection is disqualified from returning to public office as expressed in the letter of the Reconstruction Amendment. What is more, section three is ‘self-executing’, which means that it applies through adjudication by the courts without having to pass by legislative majority from Congress. Regardless of the future outcome of the contentious case, what is remarkable is how the development of American democracy – centered on the republicanist innovation of electoral power and voting, if we are to believe Sanford Levinson’s hypothesis – bends towards an executive constitutionalism that sits way above the political representation mediated by constituent power (Congressional authority) [1].
And insofar as to the normative nuances of the case are concerned, the application of section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment does not express a constitutional crisis as much as it reveals the system of the constitution‘s arcana of power: “the officer” and the ‘highest office’. In fact, as many legal scholars have already noted, the center of the applicability of section 3 will be waged on whether the Presidential office qualifies as an “officer of the United States” or not [2]. Implicitly it should not be noted that this is the constitutional standard through which the case already presents itself. In other words, what is at stake in section is not only the betrayal of an oath, democratic legitimation, constitutional public meaning, or a violation of separations of power; what is at issue is the enduring force of an office and the command of the officer in a concrete institutional reality.
And not just any office, but according to the opinion of the Colorado Supreme Court, it pertains to the “highest office” of the land, which is not lex scripta in Constitution but implicitly derived: “President Trump asks us to hold that Section 3 disqualifies every oath-breaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land. Both results are inconsistent with the plain language and history of Section 3″ [3]. As in the allegorical ‘Commandant’ in Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”, the highest office follows the unwritten Executive office tradition in order to bar a former president (involved to some degree in an insurrection) for its own endurance: the being of command that must self-execute itself in order to be what it is, that is, the highest office [4]. The paradox, then, it is not just at the level of interpretative enterprises of a specific legal culture – in other words, what legal theory will allow judges to accept Trump as officer or non-officer of the executive branch, as Vermeule suggests – but rather, the fact that in order to preserve the veneer of democratic legitimation between the different conflicting public powers and its potential rise to “authoritarianism”, the highest office must rank at the center of the executive force of either general economy of deference and public legitimation [5]. This also speaks to the ‘royal’ tailoring of American republicanism (the monarchical force in the executive) in which the unbound dimension of the “highest office” also entails a constrained, impersonal, and thus anti-constituent dimension that shows its relief upsetting the modernist liberal forms of the separation of powers [6].
From this picture it follows that the so-called post-liberal and virtuous calls for a neoclassical regime change perhaps have failed to grasp that this regime has always been beneath their own noses: the ‘highest office’ dispenses the soulcraft that subsumes civil society to the functions of the administrative state bypassing practical spheres of separation. If the arguments and debates about section 3 matter, it is precisely because it reveals the esoteric arcana (the highest office) of American structure of government runs parallel to its exoteric liturgical arcana (voting rights) – and, precisely, it it comes to no surprise that executive immunity under section 3 comes into full tension with voting rights in an unprecedented theater of active operations in which both levels of the arcanni convergence and collapse. In a way, this validates Carl Schmitt’s assumption that decision over exception is constitutive of every legal system, and that every legal system (insofar as it does not want to crumble under the abstraction of a general norm) arms itself with a sovereign decision. The highest office in the American constitutional system is the institution for the self-executing force of sovereign immunity.
In this legal landscape, a recently published book, Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political (2023), by classicist Melissa Lane aptly analyzes the binding notion of political rule with the public office in Plato’s Republic. In another epoch, the publication of such book would have been taken as a theoretical touchstone for either side of the constitutional crisis, since Lane’s intricate argument illuminates the original tension between political rule and office in a democratic polis; a highpoint of intensity that fractures office-holding (anarchos) as in the account of the “democratic man” in the parabola of the young lotus-eater goes: “intolerance good breeding, anarchy freedom, extravagance magnificence, and shamelessness courage” [7]. Thus, as Lane observes, the attitude of the anarchos is not merely achieving the erasure of power or government, but more specifically the destruction of the proper constitution of the office. It is also telling that the energy of the anarchos is not against the state or a “leader” (archontes), but oriented towards the civil magistrates and bureaucratic power; or, to put it in the language of modern American public law, against the administrative state. At the end of the day, the elemental unit of administrative law is the autonomy of the command of an agency / office of regulatory power dispensed from the Executive branch. And is not in the modern opposition of movement – institution the very friction between office and anarchos? If politics is reduced to this polarity, then there is no longer any paradoteon, a complex term that Plato in his late work associated with restraint and prudence when regulating music for the fulfillment of the kallipolis through the generations [8]. The highest office constitutes, in this way, an ur-officium, the arcanathat binds the political system when all there is a system of commands.
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Notes
1. Sanford Levinson. An Argument Open to All: Reading The Federalist in the 21st Century (Yale University Press, 2015).
The same year that Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology (1922) appeared in the intellectual scene of the Weimar Republic defending the exceptional of the decision against immanentism, a short opuscule entitled Die staatenlose Bildung eines jüdischen Volkes (The stateless formation of the Jewish People, 1922) written by Jewish philosopher Erich Unger was published as an untimely response to the question of “Jewish identity” (Judentum) and its fate in the wake of civilizational collapse. The fact that this essay – as well as his 1921 book Politics and Metaphysics, which Walter Benjamin described as the most important political reflection of his time – has remained on the fringe of intellectual history, political theory, and the history of thought is something that anyone must seriously reflect upon. It should not come to a surprise that this text comes back today to attentive readers evidences how every creation, event of speech, or written word does not reside in the preventive invention of a specific audience; but, on the contrary, in the way that its words, images, and thought will generate the evanescence community of extemporal readers. The century that separates us in time from Unger’s essay bears witness to its ultimately proximity and prophetic calling.
In 1922, for Unger, very much like for us today, thinking about politics meant finding a way out of a catastrophic politics [1]. If Politics and Metaphysics had suggested the necessity of an existential and energetic exodus for breakthrough against civilizational sedentary absorption and domestication, in The stateless formation of the Jewish People (1922) Unger argues critically against a state Zionist project that artificially, and through the anti-universalism paradigm of force (just as Weil would argue during her war writings about politics in the West) will attempt to “absolute Judaism, and all the manifestation of judaism that remain outside, hostile to the state trend” [2]. For Unger, Zionism as a political ideology and state program fails to come to terms with the concrete “outside the world historical power” that characterizes the universalism of the Hebrews as a theology marked by dispersal in the West; that is, outside the philosophy of history of sacrifice and soteriological incarnation of the Christian eon [3]. Hence, Zionism’s political form of the Jewish people was epochally insufficient – too empirical and thus trapped into the modern logic of racial and biological survival – to express the true conditions to enact as the “a priori” for the question of Judaism as a grounded redemptive universality. And insofar as Zionism presupposes something “outside of itself” (corporeal and spiritual Judaism), for Unger “the demand for an imperial state…must modify its demand, since it should express its underlying basis of the demand differently” [4]. The Hebrew ‘universality’ was metaphysical as much as “concrete”, based on modal ritual and myth, and for this reason at a distance from the discharge of formal logical statements [5].
What did the apriorist consideration of Judaism mean for Unger? The hypothesis in The stateless formation of the Jewish People (1922) was far from bring esoteric: Judaism is a exclusively a spiritual, immutable soul matter that hoevers the surface of the corporeal; and, more importantly, “it governs itself independently through the insubstantial for of a concrete existence” [6]. In other words, for Unger before the unity of the “People”, the articulation of the “movement”, and the erection of a positivist constitution based on Zionist nationalist principles, one should consider the sensible fabric of a people – a dispersed, multiple, and metapolitical communities that have endured outside the geopolitical and sacrificial structuration of Christian history – that each and every time have insisted on the separation from the subsumption into a sphere of power and domination, into an ethnic-community validated by recognition and its claims to “consciousness” at the most empirical and material level. But this would amount to an effective liquidation – a surrogate for the acceleration of the dominant religion of historicity – of Judaism into yet another planetary religion, and an expression of power that integrates itself into the struggle for the nomoi of a contained and policed world. For Unger, “empirical Zionism” becomes the attempt to reduce Judaism to a “real self-executiving power” that will diminish the “supreme expression of existence” of Judaic spiritualism as “an inner experience that it is not historically given but that must precede it in order to make Judaism an endless and inevitable precondition of a truly world historical project” [7]. In this mold, Judaism will be dispensed into the theaters of the constitutive war of historical progress.
As such, Judaism as theologically transcendent is not to be conflated into the corset of a political fictive ethnicity, but rather as an autonomous transmission that allows the communication from soul to soul that descends all the way from its metaphysical beginning. And at this beginning that has exerted itself against the whirlwind of historical fixation (the very structure of civilization after Cain according to his mentor, the Jewish theologian Oskar Goldberg) were metaphysical and errant fragments of encounters and communication, of psychological energy and dispersal of shared spiritual goals. If this is lacking, then no political form [for Judaism] will arise, but only a foolish copy of the already-existing, because the spirit cannot be skipped and left out without the rising danger” [8]. It is telling that for Unger this rising danger can emerge not only from indirect powers that exert pressure against the unity of authority – as Schmitt would have in his framework of his theory of sovereignty in Political Theology (1922) – but also, and more dramatically, from the suppression and alienation of the spiritual interiority by which a “people” never coinciding with itself can arrive at the “crystallization point” (sic) outside of the individual [9].
Circling back to the problem of “catastrophic politics” – that Schmitt wants to “contain” through decisionism, and that Unger wants to overbecome through an exodus from political thresholds – at the crux of Unger’s indictment of the arcana of Western politics is the “it has set everything in such a way so that the metaphysical or religious area, the internal direction, stands as a mere private thing”, sidestepping the fact that even reality and the constitution of the principle of reality depends on interiority for the possibility of an outside. And it is this outside what allows the a priori historicity that Oskar Goldberg had defended in his book The Reality of the Hebrews (1925). As the late Bruce Rosenstock lucidly argued, for Goldberg (who stands as the unnamed reference in Unger’s position about an experiential Judaism), the “a priori” takes place in an ur-time in which the physical world was closely connected to the transcendental presence of the gods, in which the people cease to be a cultural, ethnic, or identitarian unit in order to become a humanity capable of “overcoming the catastrophic history of wars sparked by competition over scarce resources” [10]. In endorsing the instrumentalized politico-theological reduction of state Zionism, Unger sees the abdication of the “Jews as the people who have driven the spirit the furthest…to cultivate the spirit deeper, more skillful, more subtle, to be the most deeply suitable through this tension” [11]. A true and vital reality was in the conspiracy between souls, wherever and whenever these meet as the ultimate manifestation of the fidelity to the unspeakable mediation between the true life and the divine.
At the height of 1922, Unger did not suspend from a certain self-afflecting optimism, and towards the end of The stateless formation of the Jewish People (1922) he writes: “The Jews should not overlook their uniquely favorable situation; mainly, they have been materially unhistorical for two thousand years, and the only one that have not been beaten into a reality and into the shackles of the past or the empirical state that others have had to suffer” [12]. In Unger’s reading, Judaism and its errant communities (the ‘wandering Jew’ that Joseph Roth will narrate in these years, but that one must trace to the mythic texture from expulsion of Cain to the marrano) have shown the density to gather through spirit a resistance to the paradigm of force and the technicians in charge of dominating over materialism. As Unger states unequivocally: “the one who technically masters matter is ultimately defeated” [13].
This was Unger’s anti-promethean wager in 1922 skeptical of all political horizons oriented towards foreseeable catastrophes blinded to the underlying cyclical polarity of barbarism and civilization in the West. The wayward asymptote of a non-catastrophic politics was not to be found in the abstraction of the political concept or the mechanical construction of a state form through assimilation and usurpation, but in what Unger termed, in the most intense poetic moment of his essay, the Hebrew “ increasing decipherability of its own origin”. And unlike Enlightenment historians such as Edward Gibbon who saw the state as the irreversible revolution in world history that brought the age of the nomads to an end; for Unger the twentieth century meant the fixation of the state degenerating in the worst of barbarisms. It was the existence of the unit that must generate the internal limit to the political, and not the political as the external threshold to what is inherited in the world. And yet, insofar the events of thought, language, and imagination take place, the origin (urgeschichte) will always escape what has been sedimented by rubble and wars that fuel planetary destruction and collapse.
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Notes
1. Erich Unger. Die staatenlose Bildung eines jüdischen Volkes (Verlag David, 1922).
2. Ibid., 6.
3. Ibid., 10.
4. Ibid., 15.
5. Erich Unger. “Universalism in Hebreism”, trans. Esther J. Ehrman, The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Vol.4, 1995, 307.
6. Erich Unger. Die staatenlose Bildung eines jüdischen Volkes (Verlag David, 1922), 8.
7. Ibid., 19.
8. Ibid., 25.
9. Ibid., 24.
10. Ibid., 29.
11. Bruce Rosenstock. Transfinite Life: Oskar Goldberg and the Vitalist Imagination (Indiana University Press, 2017), 172.
During the flourishing of Renaissance civic humanism, the tradition of Tacitism, as well as the work of Tacitus, was broadly understood as advisory to the problem of tyranny within the cycles of political power’s rise and decline, unmasking imperial rule’s debasement and cruel domination [1]. It is in Edward Gibbon’s erudite project where Tacitus’ political wisdom receives an integral treatment about the institutional dimension of power and its cohesive structure based on both facts and theoretical presuppositions. For Gibbon, the wisdom of Tacitus is not merely anchored in theoretical speculation; rather, the rhetorical construction takes its energy from the convergence between historical facts and the physics of a concrete political order. Tacitus’ wisdom is practical but also flexible, and this entails that political realism is not about the opportunist dimension of power (although this most certainly occurs in every political community), but about the deployment of analytical understanding regarding faults, fissures, and disequilibrium of institutions. Tacitus’ thought is about vision, and this means looking at the cracks, identifying the asymmetrical correspondences, and teasing out the nuances of a particular reality.
This presupposes that Tacitus’ enduring notion of the arcanum imperii, far from posing a ‘mystery of the state’ (its legitimacy, rule, and mystical reserve), allows for a strong narrative about the latent crisis internal to every political community. Tacitism is, insofar as it confronts the crisis and ruin of a political order, draws a negative reflection on the ongoing force of civil war as a historical and existential condition of domination. In other words, no politics can exist without the concrete legibility of the faults of conflict, which ultimately entails that civil war and political power are constantly in proximity. The arcana delimits the problem of civil war as the internal contradiction of every imperfect institutional design that cannot transcendent its own crisis through conceptual reordering.
At the center of Tacitus’ arcana in Rome is the death of Nero as well as the fault lines of civil war: “The was revealed that arcanum of state, the discovery that emperors might be made elsewhere than Rome” [2]. Of course, Rome as the glorious center of power was fundamental and indivisible; but for Tacitus the argument condensed in the arcana is precisely that the corruption of politics takes place when political representatives (power delegated at the provinces) and that of the center ceased being in coordination, losing the grip of institutional mediations. Thus, the ruin of politics is best expressed by the disjointment of formal procedures between authority and delegation, the vesting of the emperor and territorial monopoly, legitimate rule and predatory corruption. When this happens the arcana is transformed into a permanent revolution that dissolves checked political rule into the willful triumph of the uncontained and proliferated fragmentation (this is why Tacitus looked back with nostalgia to the unlived era of Roman republicanism).
For Gibbon to hold on to the Tacitan tradition of the arcana imperii meant, above all, to underscore the esoteric relationship between history and revolution as part of the desire to understand political energy, which he posed as a methodological concern: “In our larger experience of history the imagination is assisted by a perpetual series of causes and effects , to unite the most distant revolutions” [3]. The arcana is political wisdom of a secondary source; that is, it’s not a normatively established political premise or category, but an excess to description of political order. Hence, it is not that the arcana imperii is a monocausal and ultimate foundation of instability – and in this sense he was still faithful to his conception of plurality of causation in defense of the study of literature and the imagination – the emphasis is placed, on the contrary, in the way in which grasping the archeological and heterogeneous field of tension that will reveal, in turn, the historical specificity of the arcana [4].
In other words, the arcana grants access to the fundamental features of the epiphenomenon of civil strife without a recourse to abstraction and the closure of the concept. In this way, it could be said that the arcana (in part in the reading that Gibbon undertakes of Tacitus) is continuously operating in three distinct registers: a) it is a comprehensive analytic of the plurality of causation that impact political conflict and civil war, b) it reports to the center of authority, probing its direct and indirect meditations on the ground; its forms of delegation and adjudication, and its production of legality and dominium and implementation; c) it demands to design a description and a narrative of the political situation in order to properly respond to the paradox of tyranny and corruption within a specific polity.
Having sketched out the operational effect of the arcana, we can say that the notion is far from being reducible to a Renaissance “ragion di stato” scenario assisting in the consolidation of power in the hands of the price; the arcana seeks to elucidate the contours and limits of the intensification of war and its risks; a problem that becomes central to Hobbes notion of the state [5]. To claim that this political wisdom is something that merely emerges technically-placed in the Renaissance “great men”, and systematically blurred in modern liberalism is a thesis that will need further elaboration about the resources of the state and the underpinning of modern legitimacy through civil society and its late-modern mutation into planetary imperial spaces. In a certain sense “Tacitism” opens the possibility of sketching the political crisis of in each distinct epoch. It is perhaps in this sense that Carl Schmitt invites us to think the issue in an entry of his Glossarium:
“The beginning of Tacitus’ Histories has moved me. Is it just rhetoric, like Ortega told me?’ Isn’t it about the identity of the situation, that is, existential participation, participation in one and the same nuclear and ancestral situation of our eon? Every word of that chapter of Tacitus is absolutely current: «Magna ingenia cessere; opus adgredior optimum casibus, atrox proeliis, discors seditionibus, ipsa etiam pace saevum. Of course, “ipsa etiam pace sacvum, bella civilia et exterior plerumque permixta.” The relationship between international war and civil war, that is not rhetoric but the horrible reality recognized and expressed, the non-distinction between war and peace.” [6]
The arcana never truly coincides with a philosophy of history or a rhetorical veneer of civil existence (social contract). The subversiveness of Tacitus plays out in thinking through the elaboration of a specific governmental organization [7]. And what is the “ancestral situation of the eon” if not the polar relationship between political order and stasis, the duality between civil war and the principle of authority, the nihilism of the will and the limits of a public rule of law, however ordered? Tacitus’ classical wisdom, invested in plotting legible facts with a singular narrative, far from raising itself to a “science of politics” or a set of “fundamental principles of order”, responds to potential fluctuations devoid of a universal grammar. In this way, politics remains closer to a physical experiment: an active self-evolving canvas in which the arcana is irremediably drawing upon the instituting and destituting of interconnected forces at play.
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Notes
1. Arnaldo Momigliano. “Tacitus and the Tacitist Tradition”, in The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (University of California Press, 1990), 120.
2. J. G. A. Pocock. Barbarism and Religion: The First Decline and Fall, Vol.III (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 25.
3. Ibid., 58.
4. G.W. Bowersock. “Gibbon on Civil War and Rebellion in the Decline of the Roman Empire”, Daedalus, Summer, 1976.
5. Richard Tuck. “Hobbes and Tacitus”, in Hobbes and History (2000), eds. G. A. J. Rogers and Tom Sorell, 99–111.
6. Carl Schmitt. Glossarium: Anotaciones desde 1947 hasta 1958 (El Paseo, 2019), 7.
7. Ronald Syme. “Who was Tacitus?”, Harvard Library Bulletin XI, Spring 195, 185.
What comes after state form? The grounds for a self-evolving civil war at the heart of the social is what opens up in the wake of the collapse of the categories and grammar of modern politics. Stasiology becomes the fundamental unit to grasp the decoupling of the liberal state from its fixed guarantees and duties. Already during the crisis of legitimation of the seventies, we were told that the modern secular liberal state can no longer guarantee the conditions that made it possible, in the famous hypothesis developed by Böckenförde. The stasiological paradigm thoroughly governs the once implied mediations, social forms, and positive juridical norms of state-society internal mechanics without reminders and procedures. This is why all calls for political realism today are futile and insufficient; the only real existing realism is the one that must be confronted with increasing categorial inversions that ultimately channel the passage from a sufficiently ordered polity (the equilibrium of commerce and virtues) to the conflagration of the civil war as the production of social fabric.
All of this is implicit and glossed in Rodrigo Karmy’s excellent essay Stasiología: guerra civil, formas de vida, capitalismo (Voces Opuestas, 2023) in which the empty performance in the stage of fictitious contemporary sovereignty exchanged for the effective precautionary inversions that have become operative at a planetary scale: republicanism has given in to empire; the horizon of “liberty” nows entails dispossession and domination; authoritative and legitimate rule now means interpretative and exceptional discretionary execution; and, civil society (the modern civilizational unity for social cohesion) has become an axiomatic nexus to manage the tractions and turbulence of total economy (equivalence). The current state of things could not be more grim – and everything that passes through the sign of “order” (orderability, ordinary, ordo) elevates in the name of an self-sufficient abstraction that government paranoia to guide every deviation. The Leviathan stage has zoomed in into the pastoral exercise of uncontested dominion. Those that have claimed that the polis – precisely, as the sphere of social exchange and masquerade, in other words, of practical nihilism – is defunct are perhaps right in stating that its autonomy was destined to become the sheltered territory for pirates, delinquents, and the mafia. What is civil society today if not the confluence or the commuting space of the concert of all existing indirect powers?
For Karmy, abstraction and inversal do not mean just arbitrariness and formlessness lacking description. There is some rationality to what is arbitrary and anarchic in how the public powers are conjoined, distributed, and organized under several logistical units of optimal endurance: a) an axiomatic method that is immanent, flexible, and technologically sophisticated in its aversion to civil war; b) there is a process of exposition and vigilance that, conflating oikos and polis, makes hostis and inimicus indistinguishable, and by extension, coextensive to a global police (just as predicted by Carl Schmitt in the prologue to the Italian edition of The Concept of the political) that can manage and intervene in world-events as without residue. Expressively, Karmy reminds us, the police apparatus becomes the composition of cybernetic deployment based on the capillary consortium of information, reproduction, and differentiations. c) And finally, there is a nomic coupling between politics and geopolitics as the univocal destiny of a planetary humanity as a nihilistic mastery over nature, passions, and geographical localities. But if a century ago Benjamin suggested in One-Way Street (1928) that the power of the proletariat amounted to the measure of its convalescence, it seems that this is a materialist ideal that also has sunk deep into the anomia of the seas. Neither a “collective and sensible” proletariat nor a mobilized pacifist can enact the much expected epochal katechon; the immanent subject of Empire is already invested in the paradigm of force and counter-force, reinforcing what Karmy sees as the global practical and rhetorical geopolitics as an ongoing polemos: “Toda guerra es, ante todo, una guerra contra el pensamiento, Por eso abunda el análisis geopolítico” (Karmy 79). The manifest destiny of geopolitical grounding (knowledge, measurement, exposition) can only admit voluntary servitude towards the conflagration and the distributions of dominance and “influence” that has only intensified from the Iraq invasion of the early millennium to the Covid-19 pandemic techno-administrative measures.
But geopolitical dominance can no longer be said to integrate – there are too many cracks and holes in what it is still called, by inertia (Karmy calls it the ‘Newtonian hypothesis’) , the autonomy of the social. Similarly, its universality is a fallen one; but not because it has accepted the Augustuinian saeculum against the Pelagian heresy, but rather because its unitary mold consists in an internal stasis fractured within: a schism of every community from itself, a separation between things and forms in the originary sense of the Greek polis. Could another nomoi be recovered here? This is the last question posed by Karmy’s Stasiología (2023) through the poetic scene of Guadalupe Santa Cruz, whose turn to the garden is an involuntary act that gathers whatever is left of an ethical life from the ongoing devastation enacted by the barbarism of civilization. The garden is the threshold to a world according to Karmy reading Santa Cruz: “…al borde del mundo, el jardín es la figura que remite al cultivo de estilo, cuidado de la potencia de la imaginación, en último término, lo que designa un gesto” (Karmy 102-103). It is no coincidence that gesture and gestar is a polysemic term that allows to comprehend the figural and self-evolving of a transformation of life; “freedom” is not to deploy internal force towards the appropriation of advantageous outcomes and interest, but of the possibility of delineating the appearance of “a life” holding the unmeasurable world in proximity [1]. It is at this point where forms color how we become who we are.
What must be saved is not “life itself”, but rather the theōs between world and existence that opens “new possibilities” that is anti-scientific precisely because it is not incorporated by the pressure of objective absorption. The theōs is the invisible deviation from the worldly necessity of how things should be and what our lives should aspire to become; and only in this sense we are all martyrs as witnesses to this nearness. Extracting a further consequence from Karmy’s Stasiología (2023) one could claim that every desertion from geopolitical destiny – its unspeakable misery, its blatant bad faith, its farcical prepotence that forces a parodic eschatology – presupposes a return to a new life, which has always began at the surface of our face, as if anticipating reality prophetically: “Only a genuine revolution succeeds in changing the way people look, their facial expressions, the light in their eyes, the charm of their smiles. Christianity appeared with new faces, or taught a new way of looking at them. It is something that anticipates reality, as if prophetically, the universal change that for almost two centuries now has been shaping new faces throughout the whole world.” [2]. If the acclamations for a “New Man” concerned the humanist aspiration of the productive modernity; the vita nova concerns, first and foremost, the conservation of the partition of the soul, the only true entity of alienability where life conquers death. The practice of stasilogy sets out an exercise of this elegant depiction: allowing invisibility to prefigure and breach a new life from the trenches of a never ending struggle.
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Notes
1. Monica Ferrando. “Gestare la figura. Note sulla pittura e il suo gesto”, Giardino di studi filosofici, Quodlibet, 2018.
2. Carlo Levi. The Two-Fold night: A narrative of travel in Germany (Cresset Press, 1962), 109.
Anna Grzymala-Busse’s recent study Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the Modern State (Princeton U Press, 2023) makes a compelling historical and data analysis grounded case for the emergence of the modern state through the process of the Church’s autonomization in its ongoing disputes with the European monarchs across the centuries. This process of the secularization of ecclesiastical forms (conciliarism, legal administration, the uniformity of procedures, rules for governing institutions, the emergence of educational training and mechanisms for political representation and fiscal control, etc), however, is silent about two defining features of the modern secular state. And I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that these two elements bring forth the way in which political authority was established after the victory of modern European Enlightenment. Busse’s book, if anything, has the felicity of putting in perspective, even if only in negative, the two pieces of the puzzle: a) coercion as guarantee by a legal process (not just the monopoly of force); b) and the inter-institutional coordination that we tend to associate with a ‘principle of an internal rule of recognition’ between different spheres of bureaucratic rationality. Busse admits for (a) that “….the authority of the people over the whole Church was not statelike. It depends on moral authority and influence, not on coercive control. Both kings and popes cajoled, convinced, and threatened rather than demanded or extracted force” (Busse, 78). But ruling on morality and influence are two weak presuppositions to guarantee systemic, homogeneous and uniform process required by institutional authority.
In other words, the Church was able to construct forms of civil mediations, although it lacked the power of efficacy; that is, a coherent set of reasons for action that would define a strong concept of sovereign authority as service (to put it in Raz’s well-known formulation). The classical apothegm by which ‘kings rule rule but do not govern’ (Rex regnat sed non gubernat) now is protracted by the exercise of an efficacious rule, which means laying out a combination of forms and a well-ordered power over coercive forms. In fact, this is one feature that will define the legitimacy of the Enlightenment according to historian Franco Venturi; the discovery of punishment understood within the scheme of a trade off between the “necessity of the right to punish when man was not able to re-establish communism” [1]. Hence, the genesis of modern legitimation is not exclusively “a given” vis-a-vis the structure of separation of powers and the ultimate source of the plenitudo potestatis; rather, it requires a second-step rule, as it were, to convalidate the specificity of institutional authority with ample concrete efficacy of police powers in charge of compliance and punishment. The reach and exercise of public police powers and the systematic ordering of penal codes through a criminal procedure and its guarantees (reasonable doubt, fair trial and due process, no crime published without a previous enacted law, nullum crimen sine lege) is what renders effective and “energic” the principle of authority.
Now, broadly speaking, when it comes to (b) Busse admits that (and this is in spite of its institutional schemes) laying down justice “…the church relied on secular enforcement, for example when it came to religious orthodoxy. […] The carrying out of sentences against heretics and apostates lay in secular hands – those found guilty were handed over the temporal authorities so as to not sully the clergy. Legal coevolution and influence, the struggles between popes and monarchs, and the diffusion of both canon law and personnel into the juridical systems were critical to the rise of constitutionalism and the rule of law in Europe” (Busse, 132-133). This asymmetry between two systems of legal jurisdiction confirm the inexistence of a strong internal rule of recognition that for H.L.A. Hart defines any robust modern legal system of public law. The internal rule of recognition, one must remember, is not a set of principles or norms for social action, but rather the internal mediation between a legislative authority and its internal obedience within a concrete application thereof. The internal rule of recognition binds a central authority with its specific formal enforcement in institutional union of primary rules and secondary rules to avoid the pathology of uncertainty. This is thoroughly absent from the free-floating institutional forms of the medieval church whose principal construction of primary rules was divorced from the objective and rational procedures of its internal coherence (the rule of recognition) that would ground, in time and place, the otherwise abstract primary norm and the pressure of contested social conflict.
But going straight to the crux of the matter, it follows that medieval templates as superbly redrawn in Busse’s studies lack the two fundamental determinations that ground the modern concept of law: law as the necessarily monopoly over coercion (the Austin thesis), and the concept of law as the construction of an internal rule of recognition to unite primary and secondary rules (the Hart thesis). But insofar as all major modern political concepts and mediations are secularized forms of religious and medieval forms – something we can say that Busse’s scholarship also confirms – we can then say that modern legitimacy will consist in the congruence of these two determinations to organize the mediations between civil society and state. Already in his early The value of the state and the significance of the individual (1914), Carl Schmitt will note of this formal transplant: “…the Catholic doctrine of the Pope as the infallible interpreter of the natural moral law and of the content of revelation, who receives the competence to declare state statutes that stand in contradiction with the moral law or ius divino-naturale to be non-obligatory in conscience. The exercise of his potestas indirecta which is regarded as an act of jurisdiction, and which is held, by many canonists, to be determinative of a statute’s validity in state law – contains real vis coactiva, even where the expression potestas directiva is employed in place of potestas indirecta (Suárez, de fide cath, 3.22.1)” [2].
For Schmitt, then, the process of rationalization between ecclesiastical form and the modern legal norms of the state is very much straightforward. This is what constitutes the very texture of secular modernity. But as we know, for Schmitt the secularization of forms was not enough – it must be said that he himself did not negate in his theory of adjudication of his constitutional thought – which is why the construction parameters of his ‘political theology’ proposes supplemental safeguards to isolate law and power, extending the power of secularization into the decision of the potentia dei asoluta (at times this was contained in the theological figure of the Katechon) [3]. But as Carlo Galli has noted, Schmitt’s political theology is far from a “political christology” or a substantive theological politics grounded in natural law; rather it is a resolute affirmation to defend any concrete order from the potential fallouts of the secularized cornerstones of rational neutralization (potentia directiva and potestas coactivva) of state authority [4]. Neither mechanic state forms nor a higher source of morality (natural law) would define the modern law; rather the autonomy of the political in the existential situation could provide the sufficient energy to avoid the self-defeating circularity of ius revolutionis (this is what most of the times is obliterated from the so called question of “decisionism”)[5]. If Busse is correct in making the case that all modern institutions have sacred medieval foundations; Schmitt’s concurrence in the wake of modern secularization will be to define the energy of the political as the defining element that must stand as the threshold of formal transplantations to have a chance within nihilism and against nihilism. It is both things. In other words, formlessness is the constitutive dimension of political forms; an element that defines, in my view at least, the strongest practical element of what it is to inherit a Christian political foundation. The process of secularization is thus infinite and groundless, ultimately without a moral foundation and universal design. Among its many achievements, a book like Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the Modern State (Princeton U Press, 2023) has the ability to refine what political theology is, what it meant, and what to make of its endurance and possible iterations in our present.
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Notas
1. Franco Venturi. Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1971), 116.
2. Carl Schmitt. The value of the state and the significance of the individual, in Carl Schmitt’s Early Legal-Theoretical Writings (Cambridge University Press, 2022), eds. Zeitlin & Vinx, 215.
The well-established American Liberal historian of ideas, Mark Lilla, writes in his recent essay “The Once and the Now” an outlandish thesis: “the ideologies of modern fascism are all heirs to the Aeneid.” Any reasonable reaction should start not by disputing the content of such superficial assertion, but rather by raising the central question: what has taken place in America so that this level of intellectual putrefaction and conscious oblivion towards the past could take place, thus becoming permissible and reasonable? From where does the intellectual confidence emerge so that such a lethal rhetorical force can be deployed? At a high paced rate, the United States has become a beacon for an ongoing fascination over “fascism and anti-fascism” to the point of adapting an absolute form of parody in the “serious” forms of culture, academic production, and current event discussions.
Perhaps it is not that difficult to find an answer; and, one can say that once a culture repeatedly defines itself by the parameters of its parodic enactment is precisely a culture that has effectively ceased to exist. Carl Schmitt was up to something when he writes in Glossarium (an entry from 1953) that fascism after the war amounted to the ultimate victory of Stalinism over every other geopolitical actor in the Western world. The Cold War was also a battle for mimetic containment and pacification: the uttermost consummation to the highest case of metonymic endurance. The diffused “cultural war” in America in every symbolic dimensions of life (the media, the university, the political jargon, the legal profession, the community interaction, etc) shows that the victory has now reached definitive and unprecedented heights. It is true that fascism has always triggered a sort of libidinal drive – something that Susan Sontag knew well – in the societal attachment to symbolic production. In this sense there is little new here. But the novelty shows itself if one understands that the rhetoric of fascism has now become autonomous and sine qua non to cultural solvency into nihilism.
If Lilla’s remark caught my attention it is because it fully captures this transformation at the highest levels of the American elite. This transformation is nothing but the essence of Americanism as a fictive rhetorical parody of everything belonging to “Western culture”. This is why, regardless of ideological commitments (or precisely because of them), Americanism is in the business of an active forgetting of the West; while, at the same time, presuming credentials to be its most courageous defender. But it should be clear that Americanism’s defense of the West ultimately means the compulsive expansion of public opinion through a trivialization of the alienability of the past in its own ever-changing image.
In 1935, a short book appeared in Europe penned by Catholic intellectual Theodor Haecker that was entitled Virgil, Father of the West. This essay reminded its readers that culture in Virgil’s Aeneid and Georgics is best understood as the possibility of dwelling in the land through the cultivation of the Eros itself. In fact, Haecker will go on to write that the paradigm of Virgil’s Georgica should remain well into the end of the epoch as a solid commitment to the iustissima tellus against the “mysticism of the machine and the glorification of technology”. Almost a century after, Haecker’s hope in the possibility of cultivating homecoming has literally vanished. To any attentive observer it is clear that American intellectual elites have abdicated their commitment to iustissima tellus, while the marching orders of Americanism, driven by the artificial hells of the Metaverse and planetary conflagration, have already animated the flock through the gate leaving behind nothing but resilient and uninterrupted destruction.
We had a very rich and productive conversation this week with Josep Rafanell i Orra around the new and updated edition of his book En finir avec le capitalisme thérapeutique (éditions météores, 2022). But here I just want to entertain an early moment in the book that has some importance for some ongoing discussions. In the introduction that he writes for the new edition, Rafanell engages in a rare and honest exercise in self-critique. This is what he writes:
“Dans mon livre, je défendais une politique du soin. Onze ans après, je me livrerai bien volontiers à une autocritique rétrospective : la politique me semble destinée, irrémédiablement, à devenir une métapolitique, si nous entendons par là l’inévitable ré-institution d’identités qu’il faut représenter. Retour éternel de la police avec la violence de ses abstractions. Je pense que la politique, le politique (que vaut-t-elle encore aujourd’hui cette distinction?) nous condamne à nous absenter des mondes pluriels de la communauté et à neutraliser les effectuations de la différence” [1].
A lot could change in a matter of a decade. Indeed, a lot has changed for some of us, and it seems that for Orra it is no different. He is willing to admit it. He is no longer interested in defending a “politics of care” (or a hyperbolic politics), and not because it has become a recursive cliché in the empty chatter of governing metropolitan progressivism (I think of NYC or Colau’s Barcelona), but more fundamentally because the full affirmation of politics today can only contribute to the ever expansive calculative scheme of representational politics; a representational enframing that has become defunct and emptied out with the rise of administrative rationality evolving from the internal premises of political liberalism. It is true that the liberal democratic project from its inception was too weak to deal with indirect powers, and its long-lasting solution has been to engage in practices of optimization and value dispensation. But no amount of social representation can minimize effective domination. No one could defend this except in bad faith. The destiny of politics now transformed into metapolitical saturation can only muster social existence into predatory lines.
But there is another sense in which the metapolitical collapse could be understood. At least this is where I would like to displace Rafanell’s lucid intuition: the metapolitical destiny of politics emerges in the wake of the fault line between the metapolitical conditions of politics and political representation and mediation as such. Obviously, this is the problem that, already in the 1960s, the German jurist Ernst Böckenförde had to confront in his now famous theorem: the liberal state lives through conditions that it can no longer guarantee or promote.
In other words, the metapolitical conditions required for secularization have evolved (now fully realized through the West with different intensities and semblances) into the collapse of society-state mediations, turning to police powers to maintain the ‘one piece garment’ of social life. Theoretically, the dissociation between politics and its metapolitical conditions has led to attempts at generating sedative hegemonies that are always furiously defended – even at the expense of their failures – through rhetorical bravado. So, the decline of metapolitical condition entails the passage from the conditions of social contact to the endgame of the flexible and coercive management of indirect powers.
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Notes
1. Josep Rafanell i Orra. En finir avec le capitalisme thérapeutique (éditions météores, 2022), 21.
Today the political surface only seems to obfuscate the analyses of the real forces that move at different pace underneath the crust. When recently Emmanuel Macron referred to the popular unrest protest as “la foule…pas de légitimité face au peuple qui s’exprime souverain a traversé ses élus”, he was not only speaking as the sovereign, but as something more specific; that is, as an administrator. If the old sovereign stood metonymically for the totality of the whole constituent body, Macron’s political rhetoric cleverly distinguishes between the “groups” or “masses” (this is also the same term that Sigmund Freud deployed in his contestation to Le Bon’s theory of the multitudes in 1921), and the institutional mediation of the “People”. What is interesting, in any case, is the cleavage between the two figures becoming well delimited: one being on the side of political legitimacy, the other on its inverse pole of apolitical illegitimacy. The logistics of administration (or what I have called in recent research the administrative nexus) serves to conjoint this specific separation. By the same token, we should not let pass the occasion to recall that if Macron is a hyperbolic political commander of the West, it is precisely because he stands as the executive force at the helm of the administrative legitimacy (as a political elite, he was shaped at the École nationale d’administration).
What do we mean by administrator in this specific historical conjuncture? It goes without saying that modern French public law has a long and important history of droit administratif, which in France is structured around a dual jurisdictional system enshrined by an extensive legal case law and its juridical principles. The French system of droit administratif, however, is not to be understood as an amalgamation a posteriori of classical separation of powers, but rather a concrete institutional design within public powers. This was an institutionalist design that profoundly impacted Schmitt’s thought on the concrete order in the first decades of the twentieth century. The bureaucratic institutionalization was an integral organizational mechanism of legislative congressional practice. The rise of the administrative state differs from droit administratif insofar as it represents liquidation, as well as a thorough transformation of the modern system from within. In this sense, the rise of the administrative state is an excedent to bureaucratic legitimation – and Schmitt was right to characterize as the ‘motorization of law’, a force that he saw unleashing already in the overall tendency of European public law of the 1930s, although only taken to its fulfillment in the United States (something that Schmitt did not foresee) [1]. And if we were to sketch out a minimal phenomenological reduction of administrative law today we could state that it consists of the overflow of executive power through the exercise of the principle of delegation and the extension of intra-agency policy-police enforcement. What early on administrative law professors termed the revolution of an ‘administrative process’ has now come to full extension by subsuming the tripartite structure of the separation of powers to the administrative oversight of the space of social reproduction.
That Macron can only frame his political analysis in terms of “la foule” entails that he is already occupying (at least tendentially; and I can not speak myself for the concrete institutional transformation of the executive office in the French political system) and envisioning role of executive branch as a presidential administration. In an academic legal article that will exert an enduring influence in American public law, “Presidential Administration” (Harvard Law Review, 2001), Judge Elena Kagan stated that the era of executive administration had arrived; which rather than the supremacy of an institutional branch over others, it aspired to defend the orderly equilibrium to the total functioning administration of the whole system [2]. It is important to note that today’s ascent of the administrative state across the Western Anglo-Saxon public law is not rooted in maximization of bureaucratic rationalization nor in the authority of the charismatic office of a Reichspräsident as in the Weimar Republic (I have previously shown its difference), but rather in the production of delegation and deference of political authority that flows from executive power, while remaining bounded within a logistics of balancing and equity (in fact, the notion of equity has become the administrative unity of enforcing a positive production of exceptionality, but this is a discussion for another occasion). In other words – and as paradoxically as this may sound – the Macronite experiment with executive action based on Article 49 of the French Constitution, bypassing Congress, is a thoroughly habitual and normalized practice in the American legal system, which have led some jurists to claim a last farewell to the legislative body of the State – the same branch that Woodrow Wilson would describe as the ‘body of the nation’ in his seminal Congressional Government (1885).
All things considered, whenever Macron’s technocratic politics are described there is an amnesia to the concrete fact that Americanism is not just economic planning or the drive towards indexes of productivity and financial credit standards; it is also a specific governmental stylization. And this stylization is the administrative government, whose stronghold on public law should not be taken for granted. This means at face value that the empire of judges and congressmen (the “elected representatives” upheld by the Macron internal doctrine) is ultimately marginalized in the new center stage government occupied by an elite cadre of administrators and regulators in charge of grand policydesigns in virtues of expertise, rationality, adjudication, and compartmentalized decision-making process – that Kagan recommended should orient “a coherent policy with distance from politics and public opinion” [3].
Contrary to Macron’s republicanist rhetoric, the true and concrete ethos of the administrator is no longer at the level of classical modern political representation (elections, legislative body, judicial restraintment), but rather on the production of statute rulemaking balancing (equity) that unifies the aggregation of private preferences and calculations to the specific determinations of broad and discretionary public interests. At the level of the analytics of ideal types, this transformation sediments the passage from the political elite to the executive administrator of new normative indirect powers. The ‘americanization’ of Macron’s policymaking universe is centered on the exclusion of political governance or judgement in favor of abstract administrative principles (the so-called ecological transition tied to metropolitan or specific territorial energy hubs, to cite one example) and optimal regulatory determinations. What emerges at the threshold of modern republican politics is, then, the rise of a fragmented ‘la foule’ and the activation of police-powers (legality) through the procedures of statute enactment oriented at the unruly state of contemporary civil society.
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Notes
1. Carl Schmitt. “The Plight of European Jurisprudence”, Telos, March, 1990, 35-70.
Infrapolitical Reflections 