autonomy of the political

Emergency and the abdicating liberal executive. by Gerardo Muñoz


Over at the newspaper Perfil, the constitutional scholars Andrés Rosler and Guillermo Rosler have an excellent critical analysis of the omnibus emergency decree (“Decreto de Necesidad y Urgencia”) proposed by the newly minted Argentine President Javier Milei, which has the alberdinian ringtone in its title “Proyecto de Ley de Bases y Puntos de Partida para la Libertad de los Argentinos”. As members of his cabinet have described without vacillation, the aspiration of the legislative package has the high aspiration of enacting a true political revolution in the name of unmediated “civilization freedom” against the institutions and mediations of the state. Rosler & Jensen make a good case that Milei is far from being the ‘founding father’ of the instrumentalization of executive emergency; and in fact, at least since the the transition to democracy of the 1980s, Argentine executive power has increasingly become a normalized standard of broad executive decrees against the letter and spirit of Article 99 of the Argentinian Constitution. As a matter of habit and precedent, the exceptional character of the emergency decree over time has sort of become the supra-institutional norm of governance, thus blurring the state of emergency from the normal course of institutional mediations and consequential remedies. Paradoxically, Milei’s revolutionary force expresses more of a continuity with the collapse of the liberal modern state than a counter-revolutionary seeking a strong formal stabilization between the economic interests and state functions. 

As an addenda to Rosler & Jensen’s illuminating piece, I wanted to register the symptomatic and perhaps unique paradox of the revolutionary executive command; mainly, that at the same time that it discharges an ambitious and total encompassing legislative omnibus bill for the emergency, its purpose differs from the classical conception of political decision that seeks to harmonize a strong state and a sound economy, as Carl Schmitt famously argued in the 1930s. Indeed, Schmitt argues in “Strong State and Sound Economy” (1932) that authority emerges from success and achievement between the spheres. Now this success presupposes not only the effective deployment of state institutions (“the constitutional legalization of new institutions”), but also that the autonomy of the political system guarantees the separation between the unity of the state and the plurality of civil society [1]. This means that even if Milei’s libertarian ideal of a strong financial state is taken at face-value, the betrayal on the autonomy of the political reveals the feeble dimension of his executive force; a self-defeating overreach that, similar to the ways of the Trump presidency (2016-2020) in the United States, ends up revealing the executive weakness with respect to the conservation of the autonomy of the political [2].

In other words, by disdainfully acting through an unbounded economic ideal to disarm the state, the executive also abdicates his energetic capacity to reorganize the chaos from partisan, ideological, and economic interests in the long run. In his proposal to the business class to consolidate the authority of the state, Schmitt advised about the necessity of a robust and independent neutral bureaucracy for legislative deference and operative allocation of reasonable decision-making regulations. This allows us to differentiate another structural disparity between the Argentine and the North-American forms of executive power: whereas the first tends to maximize the power of its office through a vicarious political charisma that leads to its own abdication; the hamiltonian energetic executive (Federalist 70) has drifted towards a process of abdication or self-evolving expansion and containment within the principal tracks of a gigantic administrative apparatus. The picture in question is, of course, one of paradox: this means that the presidentialist model of the Latin Americanist design, at least broadly speaking, differs substantially from the energetic American model, precisely because every attempt to enact hegemonic force ultimately shrinks the overall reach of the administrative execution. Hence when Rosler & Jensen write about the executive that “…nuestra Constitución no adoptó un modelo de ejecutivo fuerte de impronta alberdiana, con amplias facultades, sino que se inspiró en el modelo norteamericano en donde este tipo de decretos no existe”, they only partially give capture the full picture. In other words, the contrast is not merely at the level of executive forms of potestas (executive order without Congress authorization and “Decreto de Necesidad y Urgencia”), but also, and more importantly, at the very capacities for abdication and abnegation of delegated power within the two institutional arrangements where the administrative institutional building from within plays a fundamental role in the functioning of formal liberal political designs. 

In fact, if we are to follow Rosler & Jensen’s astute intuition that Milei is nothing new under the sun, we could say that his executive habits, now cloaked under extreme commercial faith of the “invisible hand” of the market, follows to the letter the political tradition of the liberal criollo political class that the republican theorist Juan Bautita Alberdi criticized in the nineteenth century. As he wrote in his posthumous writings: “Argentine liberals are platonic lovers of a deity they have neither seen nor known. Being free for them does not consist in governing themselves, but in governing others. The position of the government: that’s all about freedom. The government’s monopoly: that’s all about liberalism…Liberalism, as we have to respect the discontent of other officials against us, is something that does not fit into the head of an Argentine liberal. The dissident is an enemy; the dissent of opinion is war, hostility, which authorizes repression and death” [3]. In this strong cautionary denunciation, Alberdi’s well-crafted portrait of Liberalism has at least two conjoined features that adds sharp historical relief: the deficiency of Liberalism was always the aspiration of unconstrained freedom (of interest) suppressing the autonomy of the political and dissent (the enemy), while increasing the frontiers of government over the space of civil society. In effect, the sovereign exception (broadly applies to Latin America) can be said to have been an exception to neutralize the very condition of exceptionality constitutive of sovereignty’s exclusionary political theology.

This will remind us, at least axiomatically, that Saint-Just’s maxim that a government ruled by hegemonic underpinning tends to produce only monsters and absolute enemies meets the truth of a historical pathology. In a wider panorama of Latin American political thought, the ideals of Liberalism have only fomented the administration of political stasis or civil war over the spiritual unity of constituent power in which the state and its institutions have been too fragile to overcome throughout its different renditions (the criollo oligarchic state, the national popular, the socialist welfare state, and the openly revolutionary socialist states) [4]. In contrast to the constitutional ‘royalism’ of the original North American republican organization of public powers and its abnegating executive office (a war of independence waged against the British Parliament), taking a look at contemporary presidential power allows us to derive the different compensatory strategies in confronting the collapse of the legitimacy of the modern legislative state [5]. The so-called “revolution of freedom” (with the consumer citizen at the center stage of the always unfinished and ongoing coercive consent required by the passive revolution) mandated by the executive against the institutional fabric is ultimately a renewed attempt at conserving the root and branch of the hegemonic logistics at the heart of the region’s post-independence apparent state and its rocky historical development.

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Notes 

1. Carl Schmitt. “Strong State and Sound Economy: An Address to Business Leaders” (1932), appendix in Renato Cristi’s Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Liberalism (University of Wales Press, 1998), 221.

2. I argued for this position in several publications a few years ago, see for example Gerardo Muñoz, “¿Se avecina un momento Weimar en los Estados Unidos?”, La voz de los que sobran (Chile), November 2020: https://lavozdelosquesobran.cl/opinion/se-avecina-un-momento-weimar-en-los-estados-unidos/07112020 

3. Juan Bautista Alberdi. Escritos Póstumos: Del Gobierno en Sudamérica (1896), Vol.IV, 188.

4. The continuity of stasis at the foundation in the region is something that can be derived from Rafael Rojas’ historiographical contribution Los derechos del alma: ensayos sobre la querella liberal-conservadora en Hispanoamérica 1830-1870 (Taurus, 2014)

5. Eric Nelson. The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding (Harvard University Press, 2014). 

The Rue Saint-Benoît Group. Introduction for a 2024 seminar. by Gerardo Muñoz & Philippe Theophanidis.

The Rue Saint-Benoît Group, organized by Marguerite Duras, Robert Antelme, and Dionys Mascolo and other fellow-travelers of the interwar years can hardly be defined as a political movement, a literary school, nor an intellectual community with a direct orientation or aesthetic program. In fact, the Saint-Benoît Group (transnational in its composition) understood itself as a shared experience of thought that gravitated under the words of the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin: “The life of the mind among friends, thought is formed in the exchange of the written word and for those who seek”. It is also known that Hölderlin was the quintessential poet dwelling in the fracture between tradition and modernity, the flight of the gods and the eclipse of the poetic in the wake of a consummated technological Prometheism. To affirm Hölderlin’s words entails to confront the difficult questions of language and the voice as conditions for thought. How can we think of an intellectual experience in which friendship becomes inseparable from thought; and, at the same time, when thought becomes a condition for the endurance of friendship? And to what extent could this double register allow for a reinvention of the autonomy of politics in the wake of the crisis of Humanism? 

These are the enduring questions that the experiential setting of the Saint-Benoît Group bequeaths to us today. If the Saint-Benoît experience has remained opaque and invisible even within monumental historiographic narratives of twentieth-century ideas, it is because only seldom have these problems been rightly posed. Under the sign of a “friendship of thought” – a transfigurative plane that immediately resonates with the immaterial common intellect, the Heideggerian incursion on the task of thinking, and the revival of a sensible Platonism – the members of the Saint-Benoît Group witnessed the catastrophe of modern politics in real time; such as, although not limited to, the concentration camp, the postcolonial wars of liberation, communist totalitarianism, and the exhaustion of the fundamental categories of political Liberalism. Taking distance from the elaboration of a normative political theory, the Saint-Benoît Group favored the heterogeneity of stylistic endeavors and expressive acts in order to grapple with the crisis of experience. And it is to their specific scenes of writing that we must attend to in a systematic and careful way. 

In this eight-week course we will explore the diversity of the writings of the group, including figures such as Dionys Mascolo, Robert Antelme, Marguerite Duras, Maurice Blanchot, Elio Vittorini and other fellow-travelers to explore questions concerning the nexus between experience and creation (both of us have worked on some of these writers intermittently in the past couple of years). To the extent that we still live among the ruins of the legitimacy of modern politics, the contestatory style of Saint-Benoît Group still raises the question about the human species within our civilizational collapse.

What type of authority emerges from their writings, communication, and imagination of a fractured humanity? And how could the concept of ‘revolution’ be transformed from its moral and technical elaborations that hegemonized the twentieth century? We are aware that the Saint-Benoît Group has no “lesson” to be extracted and made “actual”; rather, we are interested in what we would call a “gesture of thinking” that prepares the condition for a life in freedom within and beyond the contours of the polis. 

*For those interested in registering for the eight week seminar beginning in February 2024, please consider signing up at 17/instituto de estudios críticos: https://17instituto.org, or by writing to extension@17edu.org.

Reformation and administration. by Gerardo Muñoz

The dispute concerning the legitimacy of modernity also implies the question of the reformation, which transferred the power away from the hands of priests into a new priesthood of everyman’s consciousness. This was the Lutheran self-affirmation of economic theology (it has been laid out by Monica Ferrando’s recent work). The new priesthood implied a consolidation of the power over interpretation, since the biblical sources were now opened to battle over meaning itself. The interests over the Hebrew sources were not new, as a contemporary scholar has shown, but it was of central interest to the hermeneutics of sola scriptura over the scrutiny of the canons [1]. If this is the case, how come Thomas Hobbes account of the religious sources point to a different dimension of revelation? As we know, Hobbes was not alien to the ancient Hebrew sources, but his treatment and conclusions were entirely misplaced. Here I want to briefly account for this divergence.

In reality, it was Carl Schmitt who best confronted this problem in a late essay form 1964, published in “Der Staat, “Die Vollendete Reformation” by asserting that Hobbes’ place in the constellation of the modern political theology of the reform was rooted in the invention of the autonomy of the political. Schmitt works his way through Hobbes’ second bibliography in a subtle way, reminding us that the theorem “Jesus is the Christ” meant the artificial creation of a political technique over the battle over “meaning and truth” that fueled the European wars of religion. Hobbes, contrary to the theologians, became the founder of a counter-power: the confrontation between Leviathan and Behemoth. Indeed, for Hobbes the “reformed theologian” stands as the Behemoth, but it has yet to come to terms with the question posed by Leviathan as who will decide. This is for Schmitt the kerygmatic theme of the New Testament, which will only be decided at the end of times, but meanwhile the decision through authority is the only way in which the problem of “civil war could be neutralized. As a commentator of his time, Schmitt was directing a direct arrow to Rudolf Sohm’s idea of reform, which ultimately coincided with an economic theology bypassing the fact that the era of concrete political theology had its ultimate principle in authority of the sovereign’s decision [2]. 

Although never registered directly, the lesson of Hobbes for Schmitt resided in circumventing the rationality of the scientist and the technocrat, going as far as to mention Simone Weil’s critique of the codependency of the total state with the essence of technology [3]. The question of decision was Hobbes’ metaphysical solution to an “intra-evangelical war”, which introduced the immanentization of indirect powers unto the flatten space of civil society. In other words, for Schmitt, the true father of the “spirit and letter” of the Reformation was neither Luther nor Calvinism, but Hobbes’ Leviathan insofar as it was able to offer a third option against the secularization of a universal priesthood of the autonomous economic theology. But this is only the beginning of the problems, since we know that Hobbes’ political philosophy was dependent on “civil society” preparing the conditions for the liquidation of anti-normative decisionism. Schmitt himself was aware of this towards the end of his monograph on Hobbes as a farewell to state form. Hence, the epoch of political theology was brought to an end not through reformation, but through the ever-expansion of the operative sphere of the concept of the civil. The triumphant economic theology that has only intensified well into our days adequates to the fullest extent to the infrastructure of Hobbes’s project. 

If this is the case, the differentiation that Schmitt establishes in Political Theology II between ius reformandi and ius revolutionis collapses, given that the solicitation of the autonomy of the social requires an ever-expanding outsourcing of administrative apparatus that will turn legality into the bin of administrative application (Verwaltungsrechts einzufügen unwissenschaftlich) [4]. And in the face of administration political theology loses its grip, and economic theology silently takes hold. The subsequent internal triumph of the verwaltungsrechts einzufügen will bring to an end the epoch of political theology. The ideal of the Reform took this challenge and brought it to the very anthropological core of humanity.

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Notes 

1. Eric Nelson. The Hebrew Republic (Harvard University Press, 2010), 8.

2. Carl Schmitt. “Die vollendete Reformation: Bemerkungen und Hinweise zu neuen Leviathan-Interpretationen”, Der Staat, Vol.4, 1965, 51-69.

3. Ibid., 66. 

4. Ibid., 67.