An Archaeology of the Political, by Elías José Palti (introduction)

An Archaeology of the Political Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century to the Present E L Í A S J O S É PA LT I

INTRODUCTION A Conceptual History of the Political— the Archaeological Project

I

n the past twenty years, there have been an enormous number of studies referring to “the political.” The term was originally coined by Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political (1932), where he identified it with what he named “sovereignty.” In his definition, the sovereign is “the one who decides in the state of exception.”1 In the end, “the political” refers to a plane prior to the legal, that which escapes all norms and, indeed, fetters them. In other words, it is the original instituting act of every political-institutional order.

Schmittean theory was vilified for a long time because of the irrationalist (and ultimately totalitarian) consequences that it entails. Nevertheless, in the past few decades his texts have become the basis for a crucial reformulation of philosophical and theoretical debate. Thanks to precursor works by authors such as Claude Lefort, they have emerged as a key for understanding modern democracy. As a result, the focus of political-philosophical reflection has recently been reoriented to penetrate that dimension of reality known as “the political,” which is now clearly differentiated from “politics.” Whereas politics represents just one instance of social totality, the political refers to the way diverse instances are disaggregated and mutually articulated. This also has methodological derivations. To understand this dimension would require an approach that is both historical and conceptual, one that does not simply describe

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processes and phenomena but is also able to disclose the political and conceptual problems at stake in each case.

This type of approach underlies a wide range of perspectives. Authors as diverse as Reinhart Koselleck, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Carlo Galli, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposíto, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek—to cite only some of the more notable names—have dedicated themselves to the task of elaborating on the concept of the political, pointing out the plurality of aspects it encompasses.

This book follows this line, while, at the same time, it engages in a critical debate with the key authors who have brought about this change in contemporary political theory. It takes on many of their conceptual tools and disputes others. Nevertheless, there is a point on which this work sets itself apart from all the rest: the historical perspective it brings to this debate.

In previous books on the subject, the presence of the realm of the political is simply taken for granted. It appears as a given, an eternal essence.2 Covering a wide chronological range, beginning in the seventeenth century and reaching the present, this book shows that the realm of the political is not a natural, transhistorical entity. This is true not only in the sense that, as a category, it only became a subject of discourse relatively recently (as we have seen, it cannot be traced further back than the beginning of the twentieth century, when Carl Schmitt devised the term). But also, and more importantly, it did not always exist as an empirical reality. Here we find the fundamental hypothesis that presides over our analysis: The opening up of the horizon of the political is the result of a crucial inflection that was produced in the West in the seventeenth century as a consequence of a series of changes in the regimes of exercise of power brought about by the affirmation of absolute monarchies. It is at this point that the series of dualisms articulating the horizon of the political emerged, giving rise to the play of immanence and transcendence hitherto unknown.

Of paramount importance in this work is explaining how such an inflection was produced: how the horizon of the political could emerge out of the very theological universe it came to dislocate, and how that new terrain, within which all the subsequent political debates took place, became established. As we will see, if we lose sight of the nature of the cru-

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cial transformation produced at that moment, we will not be able to fully comprehend the ultimate meaning of those debates.

In addition, this book intends to show that the dimension of the political is a historical entity in the sense not only that it has an origin that can be traced but also that it has undergone a number of crucial reformulations in the course of the four centuries of its existence. From the seventeenth century to the present, the political became successively redefined, accompanying changes in the regimes of the exercise of power.

These latter actually indicate the different ways in which the series of dualisms that articulate that field become structured, the different logics of functioning of the play of immanence and transcendence, or, more precisely stated, the different modes of production of the transcendence effect (the justice effect) out of immanence.

The present book thus seeks to provide a more accurate picture of modern political-intellectual history—one more attentive to the discontinuities in its trajectory—than the picture offered in the current texts on political history and political philosophy. Ultimately, it will help us to understand why we cannot transpose ideas from one conceptual context to another, why to do so inevitably entails inflicting violence on the logic that articulates the symbolic webs from which political concepts take their meaning. This was, I think, the aim of Michel Foucault’s project of an archaeology of knowledge, although, as we will see, I object to some aspects of it and ask for precision in others.

In addition to the two systems of knowledge that Foucault analyzed in his classical work Les mots et les choses—the “age of representation,” which corresponds to the classical period (the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), and the “age of history,” which corresponds to the modern period (the nineteenth century)—I will identify a third specific regime of knowledge, “the age of forms.” This emerged in the twentieth century as a result of the breakdown of the evolutionary-teleological assumptions inherent in the age of history—a conceptual shift that passed unnoticed in Foucault’s archaeological reconstruction. Each period in this archaeology of knowledge corresponds, in turn, to a particular regime of exercise of power whose emergence entailed the reconfiguration of the horizon of the political. It would be articulated (and rearticulated) according to different types of logic: a “logic of folding,” for the age of representation;

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a “logic of undifferentiation/identification,” for the age of history; and a “logic of leap,” for the age of forms.

These changes are what we will explore in the following pages. This is thus a kind of archaeological endeavor in the sense that its goal is to recover and retrace the different political-conceptual niches in which the regimes of exercise of power were displayed, the series of successive transformations they underwent, as well as the different historical-conceptual constellations to which they gave rise. Overall, the present book describes the long cycle of the emergence, transformation, and final dissolution of the political.

Making this archaeological reconstruction has actually required the inscription of the development of political thinking within a broader historical-intellectual perspective and an approach to various kinds of discourses coming from different cultural records—the history of the arts, literature, science, and so on—in addition to the history of political thinking. It thus intends to provide the basic framework for understanding the terms in which the discourse on the political was established in each historical moment and the basic coordinates whereby political languages were articulated, defi ning the particular modes of conceiving and practicing political power. Ultimately, by hewing to a historicalconceptual perspective throughout, this book intends to provide a map of the different conceptual frameworks on which the different forms of political discourse must be placed and, as a result, to prevent the anachronistic projections that are common in the traditional approaches to the history of political philosophy.

Yet, for this it is necessary to transcend the level of ideas or thinking and place our focus on a conceptual dimension embedded in political practices themselves, which is an intrinsic dimension of them and without which, these practices cannot exist, a phenomenological realm previous to the distinction between the symbolic and the material, in which the two are fused and, therefore, cannot be detached from each other. It is at penetrating that realm that the project of an archaeology of the political is aimed.

—JEREMY I. ADELMAN, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and director of the Global History Lab at Princeton University

—MARK THURNER, School of Advanced Study, University of London

“This is a key book that fills significant gaps in the scholarship of the long conceptual history of the political.”

—FEDERICO FINCHELSTEIN, New School for Social Research

“In this bold and ambitious survey of Western political theory and practice since the seventeenth century, Palti provides a ruthlessly incisive analysis of the sources of our unfolding crisis. An Archaeology of the Political exemplifies the power of conceptual history at its best not only to illuminate the past, but also perhaps light the way to a better future.”

—MARTIN E. JAY, University of California, Berkeley

“Notable not only for its breathtaking scope and its conceptual originality but also for the range of sources used.”

—HISPANIC AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

“[Palti] presents a broad but disturbing panorama to reflect upon the immense political challenges facing the contemporary world.”

—SOCIETY FOR U.S. INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

ELÍAS JOSÉ PALTI is principal researcher for the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina, a professor at both the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes and the Universidad de Buenos Aires, and the director of the Center for Intellectual History at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. He is a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow and the author of thirteen books in Spanish.

COLUMBIA STUDIES IN POLITICAL THOUGHT / POLITICAL HISTORY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS | NEW YORK CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU

Cover image: El Greco, El entierro del señor de Orgaz (Wikipedia Commons) Printed in the U.S.A.

“A tour de force. Elías José Palti’s concise conceptual history of ‘the political’ dethrones our most cherished ideas about what political modernity is and where it came from.”

Cover design: Rebecca Lown

“One of the most original interpretations of the political (as opposed to politics) in many years.”