Political Differentiability

Abstract

The urgent task of political ontology is, I believe, neither to investigate the nature of the political nor to define politics; instead, the pressing task is to put into question the political difference itself between the political and politics. The subject of my inquiry is, in other words, the political difference as political difference. To demonstrate this thesis, I examine Oliver Marchart’s and Giorgio Agamben’s positions. The political difference takes in Marchart the form of the never-ending play between the political and politics and in Agamben the constantly renewed sovereign decision between life and law. Besides reformulating Marchart’s and Agamben’s positions, I want to show that the never-ending play and the sovereign decision fail to capture the political difference, because it is approached through the differentiated—whether between the political and politics or between life and law. Drawing on the diverse works of Agamben, I argue that the political difference becomes intelligible as the political differentiability that points to the power of differentiation, to the ability of the political differencing to differentiate. And the task of thinking and of political practice is neither the thinking itself nor the political practice itself, but rather to experience political differentiability as the shared field of thinking and practice, as the common dimension of philosophy and politics. I argue that experiencing political differentiability, ontology and politics can avoid falling prey, respectively, to intellectualism and to wild practicism.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Oliver Marchart, Ülo Matjus, and Jüri Lipping for reading and commenting on the earlier versions of the article.

Notes

1. Marchart’s line of argumentation is mainly influenced by Ernesto Laclau’s post-Marxist and deconstructionist work. In the reconstruction of Marchart’s position, however, I have attended more, but not entirely, to Martin Heidegger’s writings because my thesis is fundamentally related to his thought. In “The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics” (1957), Heidegger seeks specifically to reflect on “the difference as difference.” Martin Heidegger, “The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” in Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), 47.

2. Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 166; hereafter cited in the text.

3. In Post-Foundational Political Thought, there is no chapter on Agamben. But in Marchart’s Die Politische Differenze (2010), the German revision of the English edition, there is a section on Agamben.

4. Agamben is commonly accused of intellectualism. While recognizing Agamben as a great philosopher, Ernesto Laclau argues, for example, that he seeks to go “beyond politics” by dismissing “all political options in our society.” Ernesto Laclau, “Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy?” in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, ed. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCalorl (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 22. See also Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 12–14.

5. Oliver Marchart, Die Politische Differenz: Zum Denken des Politischen bei Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, Laclau und Agamben (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2010), 238–39.

6. Marchart, Die Politische Differenz, 221.

7. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), ix.

8. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 2; hereafter cited in the text.

9. In his writing, Agamben tends to use the term “law” in a rather broad sense that refers to “the entire text of tradition in its regulative form, whether the Jewish Torah or the Islamic Shariah, Christian dogma or profane nomos” (Homo Sacer, 51.)

10. In Homo Sacer and other works, Agamben develops and transforms Carl Schmitt’s conception of the state of exception (Homo Sacer, 15–29.) However, I do not discuss the differences between Agamben’s and Schmitt’s positions, because this issue exceeds the scope of the article.

11. For Agamben, the sovereign power designates neither “the will of a subject hierarchically superior to all others” nor the attribute of a state or a juridical system, but rather the internal structure of the law with the constitutive outside—with life (Homo Sacer, 26.)

12. For Heidegger, the matter of thinking, throughout the history of metaphysics, has been the same, that is, being. Nevertheless, this sameness does not mean that the great philosophical systems are interchangeable or identical. On the contrary, the matter of thinking is the same in the sense that the sameness lets the differences appear. The sameness is not the abstractly identical. See Heidegger, “The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 45.

13. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 87.

14. See, for example, Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Identity, in Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), 36-37.

15. Giorgio Agamben, “*Se: Hegel’s Absolute and Heidegger’s Ereignis,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 130.

16. Agamben, “*Se: Hegel’s Absolute and Heidegger’s Ereignis,” 134.

17. Agamben, “*Se: Hegel’s Absolute and Heidegger’s Ereignis,” 131.

18. Giorgio Agamben, “Parades: The Writing of Potentiality,” in Potentialities, 216.

19. Agamben, Means without End, 115.

20. Agamben, Means without End, 117.