kallipolis

The city of pigs. by Gerardo Muñoz

When describing the ideal archaic and primitive polity of basic needs at the beginning of The Republic (371e-373), Socrates willingly accepts Glaucon’s definition that this society will amount to a “city of pigs”. In the English translation of F.M. Cornford, just after Socrtates says that “(these people) lead such a healthy life in peace, they will naturally to come to a good old age, and leave their children to live after them in same manner”, his interlocutor responds that “That is just the sort of provender you would supply, Socrates, if you were founding a community of pigs” [1]. That the ideal of the polity resembles a community of pigs is bathed in an important irony here, since as Leo Strauss once noted, this animal community is one in which there are no pigs, since this a community that is strictly vegetarian (the influence of archaic Orphic culture should not be ruled out from this passage).

But just like sluggish and stagnant pigs that roam a piece of land, this archaic form of city life is a proto-form of the kallipolis or the beautiful city, whose enchantment does not derive from external garments, but rather from a mediation of Justice that maintains social stasis or harmony within the passions. In this sense, the city of pigs is beyond a regulatory meditation of production understood as accumulation (although there is some exchange between goods and services), and for that matter it is a form of life that is beyond poverty and wealth. In fact, it is absence of a cycle of inequality either in the form of abundance or scarcity that defines the first communities in The Laws. Thus, we read in Book III 679c:

“Because of all of this, they were not intolerably poor, nor driven by poverty to quarrel with each other; but presumably they did not grow rich either, in view of the provining lack of gold and silver. Now the community in which neither wealth nor poverty exists will generally produce the finest characters, because tendencies to violence and crime, feelings of jealousy and envy, simply do not arise. So these men were good, partly for that that very reason, partly because of what we might call their ‘naivete’ [2].

The kallipolis that characterizes the beautiful city is thus the memory of the retreat from the machinery of legal expansion – the “too much law” syndrome that according to the Judge Neil Gorsuch characterizes the current state of empire of the administrative state – that for Plato took the form of continuous lawsuits and party strife in order to “hurt each other by word and deed” [3]. This means that the Beautiful City where pigs roam in the open is oriented towards Justice because everything is under the constraint of proportionality that mediatites between the soul and the body, and between actions and the good inherent in things due to their limitations in use. In other words, the city of pigs is an early emblem of the paradigm of the “rule of proportion”, a condition in order to nurture a healthy politeia. Thus, proportionality is a notion that allows not just for the metabolic organization of social life, but perhaps more fundamentally to the sensible understanding of nomoi as revolving around the territory, the attunement to music, and to the lawgiver’s institutional design to preserve a form of life.

If we can understand the city of pigs as a memory rather than as a construction of a future utopian society, it is because only in accounting for proportionality can the nomoi asymptotically enter in relation to Nature that has long been severed from the experience of human beings and the gods. This is why for Plato the truth of the kallipolis staged by the city of pigs belongs to the memory of the ‘Age of Cronus’ and not to that of Zeus. As the Athenian says in Book IV of The Laws: “The story has a moral for us even today, and there is a lot of truth in it: where the ruler of a state is not a god but a mortal, people have no respite from effort to imitate the life men are said to have led under Cronus; we should run our public and our private lives, our homes and our cities, in obedience  to what little spark of immorality lies in us, and dignify this dispensation of reason with the name of ‘law’” [4]. In this determination, the nomos is a memory of the happy life that strives to organize the community beyond the purpose of hostility and strife, abstract quantification and normative obedience (even though there might be necessary elements of these in the polity). Yes, it is true that law is always backwards looking – the process of adjudication needs a prior norm or principle to consider – but the sense of nomoi here is accounting for a priori of proportionality between separate regions of human experience.

The laws or nomoi as justice is not defined by the attempt to construct morally rational norms for adjudication, but rather to coordinate the proportionality dispensed (dianomē) between reason (nous) and the sensibility of the soul (daimones). Rather than thinking of the good as substance and fact, what is good is only in the proportion between soul and reason. Hence, the possibility of naming (eponamazo) of nomos cannot be understood as mere force of adjudication of any given legitimate authority, but as the mediation that guards against the unrestrained force of sad passions (greed, jealousy, resentment), as well as the disastrous consequence of political injustice through mere the exercise of public force that has been understood as the enactment of police powers to curb illicit actions.

What Plato calls the “little spark of immortality in us” is the very memory of the city of pigs; that is, a nomoi that refuses to conflates the community with the world, and that for this very reason it can imagine life beyond the regime of predatory and service driven social reproduction. If according to Oskar Panizza in his mythopoetic treatise, the pig in Western culture has stood as as paragon of fear, power, and untamable desire, it is not less true that the mythological animal was first and foremost symbol for what appears and shines first: “the pig is the Sun” [5]. And yet, for Plato there is a need for the nomoi because there is an archaic memory of the life beyond time and strife, which is the life of pigs that freely roam the perimeter of a space (a correspondence to the Gemeinwesen perhaps). It is this paradoxical emblem of archaic illumination and obscure remembrance that Plato registers as the “little spark of immortality”, where Justice survives not in the form of the restitution of a debt or injury (the principle of “owing what is one’s due”), but in the measureless proportion that binds soul and reason in order to keep on playing the music score of justice on Earth.

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Notes

1. Plato. The Republic of Plato, ed. F.M. Cornford (Oxford University Press, 1945), 371e-373a, 60-61.

2. Plato. The Laws, ed. T. J. Saunders (Penguin Books, 2004), 679c, 78.

3. Ibid., 679d, 79.

4. Ibidl., 714a, 126.

5. Oskar Panizza. The pig in poetic, mythological, and moral-historical perspective (Wakefield Press, 2016), 4.

On the Highest Office. by Gerardo Muñoz

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 arcana that 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). 

2. “Prof. Michael McConnell, Responding About the Fourteenth Amendment, “Insurrection,” and Trump”, The Volokh Conspiracy, August 2023: https://reason.com/volokh/2023/08/12/prof-michael-mcconnell-responding-about-the-fourteenth-amendment-insurrection-and-trump/ 

3. Supreme Court Case of Colorado, No.23S A300, 2023, page 84: https://www.courts.state.co.us/userfiles/file/Court_Probation/Supreme_Court/Opinions/2023/23SA300.pdf 

4. Giorgio Agamben. Opus Dei: An Archeology of Duty (Stanford University Press, 2013), 84.

5. Adrian Vermeule. “The Non-Originalist Decision That May Save Trump”, The New Digest, December 2023: https://thenewdigest.substack.com/p/the-non-originalist-decision-that 

6. Adrian Vermeule & Eric Posner. The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic (Oxford University Press, 2011), 5.

7. Melissa Lane. Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political (Princeton University Press, 2023), 304-305.

8. Plato. The Laws (Penguin Books, 1970), 291, 802d.

Comentario a la segunda sesión de “¿Separación del mundo: pensamiento y pandemia?” en diálogo con Álvarez Solís, Björk, y Karmy en el 17/Instituto. por Gerardo Muñoz

La segunda sesión de la serie ¿Separación del mundo: pensamiento y pandemia?” trajo excelentes intervenciones de Mårten Björk, Ángel O. Álvarez Solís, y Rodrigo Karmy. No necesito resumir aquí los argumentos expuestos que pueden leerse en el cuaderno de la Editorial 17. Lo que me gustaría hacer, en cambio, es diagramar lo que considero que fueron los tres acuerdos transversales desde los tres estilos. Estos tres acuerdos me parecen que fueron algo así como la fuerza diagonal de la sesión, y de momento creo que solo falta hilarlo con lo discutido en la primera sesión de Moreiras y Alemán. Sin más dejo los tres acuerdos y termino con un breve decálogo de las tesis que me parecieron las más fecundas para un futuro desarrollo.

i) Ya no estamos en una época organizada desde un principio hegemónico. Esta tesis creo que atravesó las tres ponencias desde diferentes ángulos: para Rodrigo Karmy se trata de la crisis de la forma entre exterioridad e interioridad que la nueva técnica cibernética produce en sus operaciones capilares de administración en tanto que nueva fase de control. Para Mårten Bjork, el fin de la hegemonía coincide con la crisis del motor de la “producción” de la civilización occidental tal y como la hemos conocido a lo largo de la modernidad política y la “historia de la lucha obrera”. Finalmente, para Álvarez Solís, el fin de la hegemonía signa la imposibilidad de un principio de conducción en la polis, que ahora es incapaz de responder de la stasis del mundo. Como me gustaría señalar en mi intervención de próximo lunes, lo que falta aquí es lo que “viene después”. Pero no en un sentido temporal. Pero si el fin de la hegemonía como “principio presencial” está en ruina, entonces debemos pasar a una impronta posthegemónica que asuma la crisis de los principios y de lo que Alemán llamó en la primera sesión el “fin de las demandas”.

ii) La crítica de la economía política es insuficiente, necesitamos una destitución de la metrópoli. En esta tesis creo que se produce un paso importante de las posturas convencionales de la izquierda contemporánea; una izquierda que sigue subscribiendo el produccionismo propio de la economía política y de las “formas”. En realidad, como dijo una vez Lytoard, lo importante no es hacer una “crítica” de la economía política, sino pensar como salir de ella. Como subrayó Bjork, la hegemonía del siglo veinte siempre estuvo atada a un mecanismo de identificación del proletariado con la producción. Si esto fue asi, ¿qué sentido tiene seguir hablando de un horizonte hegemónico o de una ‘crítica de la acumulación’? Esto paraliza. ¿Por qué, entonces, la metrópoli? No se trata de una mera polémica entre la corte y la aldea, o entre el “campo y la ciudad”, como lo ha traducido cierto zapatismo comunitario; la crítica de la metrópoli tiene que venir acompañada de una destitución de los aparatos. En realidad, la metrópoli es la topología cibernética de la reducción del mundo. Pero como subrayó Álvarez Solís, este problema es el dilema mismo de la filosofía, puesto que ningún pensador jamás ha sido amigo de la ciudad. El polemos siempre ha consistido en una verdad contra la ciudad. Rodrigo Karmy se ha referido a la destitución de la metrópoli como un problema que debe atender a los “marcadores rítmicos”. Al final, el nuevo ciclo de revueltas experienciales (no revueltas de la multitud y de la ocupación, esto es, de las revueltas télicas) es que ponen la medialidad de las imágenes antes que el cálculo de los fines. Esto ya prepara otra ciudad, o bien, lo que yo referí como una kallipolis, puesto que la belleza es una fuerza más destructiva (archi-destructiva) que los fuegos callejeros contra la “moral de los bienes”. El lugar de los poetas ahora indica una enmienda al platonismo.

iii) La existencia es más fuerte que el sujeto. Abandonar el sujeto es dejar atrás una de las falsas puertas de escape del humanismo metafísico. Ya sea la proliferación de la imaginación (Karmy), la liberación de las apariencias hacia su afuera (Álvarez Solís), o la vida de las entidades no-existentes (Björk), en las tres intervenciones vimos un claro esfuerzo por ir más allá del embudo del sujeto, lo cual implica abrir una plano de transformación del orden mismo de lo político. O tal vez ir más alla del límite de lo político, y pensar otra cosa que política. A ese umbral le podemos llamar infrapolítica o una política poética. En la conversación echamos de menos una tematización directa sobre qué implicaría esto, sobre todo a partir de algo que Karmy enfatizó: “La revuelta es siempre, en cada caso, una revuelta en el pensamiento”. ¿Es esto algo asimilable a lo que Heidegger llamaba un giro en el pensamiento, o lo que Dionys Mascolo llamó una vez un “comunismo del pensamiento”? Aquí se juega la pregunta por el “afuera” que, desde luego, no puede ser reducida a las determinaciones espaciotemporales. Tal vez todo esto se conecta con la región “existencial” a la que aludía Moreiras en la primera sesión.

Estos tres nervios me parece que explicitan las apuestas de la conversación, así como el trabajo futuro de la reflexión existencial. Obviamente que lo que interesa no es generar un nuevo consenso, lo cual supondría caer una vez más en el cierre hegemónico, sino abrir a formas nuevas de pensamiento desde sus respectivos estilos. En este sentido las siguientes tesis me parecieron las más productivas en cuanto a un desarrollo mucho más pormenorizado que el que tuvo en la sesión:

  1. El fin de la hegemonía no solo significa que ya no podemos ordenar el mundo en un principio de legitimidad (un “fantasma hegemónico”, diría Schürmann), sino que también implica ir más allá del régimen de “supervivencia” del vitalismo contemporáneo, como el que representa la “this life” de Martin Hagglünd.
  2. La cuestión del ‘afuera’ reaparece como vórtice o “punto omega” contra la tecnificación metropolitana. Es lo que el filósofo argentino Fabián Ludueña llama el “eón de lo póstumo” de lo no-numérico. Si queremos pensar contra el laboratorio Silicon Valley, tenemos que pensar el fin del número y de la probabilidad como nueva ciencia del gobierno.
  3. Junto a la “soledad: común” necesitamos el suplemento de la “felicidad: común” (Álvarez Solís); una felicidad que ya no es felix culpa como mal menor, sino un orden de lo bello y nuevo encantamiento. Tal vez sólo desde ahí podríamos hablar de una ciudad transfigurada.
  4. El regreso de la teología indica una turbulencia para el pensamiento. Ya no interesa la tan predecible estrategia de la “deconstrucción del cristianismo” que no lleva a ningún lado, sino extraer las consecuencias de una teología que pone en jaque el régimen de la reducción de la existencia en la “mera vida”.
  5. Necesitamos pensar la amistad por fuera de una “política de la amistad”. Y necesariamente contra la crisis de la democracia liberal.