Pouvoir constituant betrayed: a model of abjection in power relations

ABSTRACT

Examination of the limit serves as a powerful tool for revealing the hidden characteristics of concepts, and also their relationship with other concepts. This article follows the processes of sovereign exceptionalism from Marx to the capitalist estrangement of labour from Marx to their limit figures. The paper builds on comparisons between the proletarian and the homo sacer; however, the focal point is not on the figures themselves, but their importance in understanding the effect of biopolitics on power relations. Building on the concept of pouvoir constituant as discussed by Carl Schmitt, this paper addresses the ways in which different types of constituent power form structures that can then be used against the constituents themselves. The limit figures suggest a process of abjection is co-created in the establishment of power structures, and that overcoming this process requires a conscious dis-agreement with the politics of policing.

KEYWORDS:

• Marx
• Agamben
• bare life
• capitalism
• power
• abjection

Notes

1. Ire and Irländer will be used to reference the Irishman in Marx and Engels, not as a particular Irish person, but as the signifier for the abstracted abject being in Marxist theory.

2. Elsewhere, Agamben has elaborated upon the distinction between zoē and bios and the implications of these terms. ‘The Ancient Greeks did not have only one term to express what we mean by the word life. They used two semantically and morphologically distinct terms: zoē, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living being (animals, humans, or gods), and bios, which signified the form or manner of living peculiar to a single individual or group. In modern languages this opposition has gradually disappeared from the lexicon’ (Agamben 2000, p. 3). The life-as-bios is thus the common life that identifies the human-as-such, separate from the more general life-, or being-, as-such. In The Unspeakable Girl, Agamben discusses the nature of the commonality of zoē between animal, human and god: ‘The Greek word for animal, zoon, means, literally, ‘living being’...In their ‘animal’ nature – which is to say, their living nature – man and god commune’ (Agamben 2014, p. 43). Agamben explores the distinction of zoē as ‘animal’ nature and humanitas, or humanity, in The Open, where he comes to draw conclusions about the importance of this divide between animal and human, zoē and bios: ‘From the beginning, metaphysics is taken up in this strategy: it concerns precisely that meta that completes and preserves the overcoming of the animal physis in the direction of human history…In our culture, the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man. That is to say, in its origin Western politics is also biopolitics’ (Agamben 2004, pp. 79, 80). Philosophically, politically and biopolitically, the act of distinction between zoē and bios is the act of determining what makes a human ‘human’.

3. This is the original German term used by Marx to describe what Milligan fully defines ‘to stand not simply for Political Economy as a body of theory, but for the economic system, the developing industrialist capitalist system, portrayed and championed by the classical political economists’ (Marx 1988, p. 24). It will be used throughout this essay similarly, to describe the economic system and the political economy that enables it.