|
Article Excerpt
Despite renewed interest in the Schmittian problematic of the exception as the constitutive principle of the political, the full significance of Schmitt's political philosophy remains underestimated. Starting from Schmitt's account of the relation between the constituted order and its constitutive principle, the decision on exception, this article outlines a broader discursive space that is herein called the political ontology of exceptionalism and articulates three these that describe the ways in which all forms of order are constituted, sustained, and undermined by various functions of the exception. Keywords: exception, sovereignty, decision, the political, transgression.
**********
It has become customary to observe that, in the complexity of current political developments united under such rubrics as globalization, regionalization, postmodernity, or advanced liberalism, the "normal" and "stable" political, economic, or social orders are undermined and dissolved in the proliferation of "exceptional" events that effect a permanent crisis of governability, the modern state, sovereignty, democracy, and so on. Exceptionalism appears to be the name both for the overall state of affairs in various fields at various levels in world politics and, more ominously, for the political strategy of responding to these challenges through a unilateral policy course that does not shun recourse to violence bypassing conventional international legal and consultative mechanisms. (1)
In contemporary political philosophy, this crisis has found a striking explication in Giorgio Agamben's claim about the exception (the "sovereign ban") being inherent to modern politics and presently so bursting open the political space that the state of exception becomes the global "rule." (2) Conceptually, the Schmittian problematic of the exception as the constitutive principle of the political (3) has arguably made a comeback in the critical discourse, (4) though the full significance of Schmitt's political philosophy still remains underestimated.
Moreover, the renewed interest in rethinking the problematic of the political (5) has served to bring up the relation between the constituted order (politics, or la politique in Lefortian terms) (6) and its constitutive principle (the political or le politique), which in Schmitt's approach is precisely the decision on exception. (7) This article takes its point of departure from this distinction in order to outline a broader discursive space that I refer to, somewhat ironically, as a general theory of the exception.
What I seek to conceptualize is less the proper definition of the political and the role of the exception in politics and more the relation between order and its constitutive transgression, a relation that is at work in domains as different as religion and romance and may be presented in terms of conceptual dyads such as governmentality/sovereignty, norm/exception, religion/faith, and marriage/love. The discussion seeks to draw together the contemporary ruminations on the problematics of foundation, decisionism, and the exception into a set of propositions regarding the constitution of various forms of order.
The points of departure for this endeavor have been provided by my attempts to synthesize the insights of Carl Schmitt and Michel Foucault, two thinkers who have only recently come to be mentioned in the same sentence. In my view, these authors share a point of departure in a philosophical disposition that I call ontological extremism, which locates the condition of possibility of order in the founding rupture of the exception. (8) Nonetheless, there are crucial divergences between Schmitt and Foucault, most notably regarding the relation to the principle of sovereignty, valorized positively by Schmitt and famously denounced by Foucault. Yet, rather than view the theoretical projects of these two thinkers in terms of an incommensurable opposition, we may suggest, rather, that the two approaches are permanently at work in mutual deconstruction, the positively valorized concepts in one approach (sovereignty and governmentality, respectively) functioning as disavowed blind spots in the other.
This article suggests that a similar relation of mutual deconstruction obtains between Schmitt's political realism and the poststructuralist orientation more generally. Rather than serving as an easy target of poststructuralist criticism, the Schmittian political ontology functions as an irreducible limit of this criticism, serving as the "undeconstructible" excess of political realism, that which remains after the deconstructive labor. It is in the interstice of the two projects of poststructuralism and Schmitt's political realism that a theory of the exception finds its locus as a discourse on the dynamics of oscillation between politics and the political, the constituted order of governmentality and the constitutive sovereign decision that escapes it. The logic that I seek to reconstruct is thus distinct from a narrowly "poststructuralist," let alone "postmodern," orientation, being at work in such diverse discourses as Slavoj Zizek's "ethics of the real" and a Luhmannian systems theory. (9)
A caveat on my title: "a general theory of the exception" is of course an ironic description for an enterprise that attempts to develop general propositions concerning that which by definition is always in excess of this proposition. However, the term general in my application is rather idiosyncratic and draws from Foucault's distinction between general and total history. (10)
While a "total theory" seeks to reconstitute its entire domain on the basis of a certain set of foundational principles, general theory (the phrase used in a title to which Foucault refers for his project of archaeology) seeks to map the space of relations between objects, focusing on gaps, discontinuities, and interstices between them that define the space of irreducible difference, or, in Foucault's own term, dispersion. "A total description draws all phenomena around a single centre--a principle, a meaning, a worldview, an overall shape; a general history, on the contrary, would deploy a space of dispersion." (11) The generality of a theory is therefore not owing to the broad or even unlimited domain of its application, but, more concretely, is constituted by its reconstruction of a basic relation or arrangement, actualized in a variety of settings. Here I seek to thematize the relation between order and its constitutive transgression that may be formalized in a pun as a relation between X and its excess (Xs), in which X refers to the positivity of order that in Foucauldian-Deleuzian terms may be termed a diagram, (12) and Xs refers to the exception, transgression or surplus of order; in short, that which cannot be subsumed under the principles of X.
I now advance three theses on this X/Xs relation, arguing that order is constituted, maintained, and undermined by the various functions of the exception. In this sense, a theory of the exception is also, necessarily, a theory of order.
X(Xs): The Other of Order
My first proposition may be summed up as: the conditions of possibility of order (X) are contained in the founding decision that cannot be subsumed under it (Xs). This is of course a reformulation of the classical Schmittian definition of sovereignty as a decision on exception, "which constitutes form by escaping from it." (13)
Yet, we may also read this definition in the Derridean manner, conceiving of the exception as a "constitutive outside," or a supplement of order. The Derridean notion of the supplement combines the two meanings of the term: the addition of a surplus, "a plenitude enriching another plenitude" and the compensation for a certain internal lack, which "insinuates itself in-the-place-of ... fills the void." (14) The supplement is therefore an external surplus that makes whole something that "ought to lack nothing at all in itself," (15) the condition of possibility of something and simultaneously the condition of impossibility of its completeness or closure.
The consequence of this reading is the rejection of any claim to the "self-immanence" of order, of any possibility of a system without an outside or of an order wholly sufficient unto itself, a "self-propelling machine." Any order is contaminated at its foundation by something heterogeneous to it yet essential to its emergence and continuing existence. Rather than having its positivity or identity threatened by a variously construed exterior "other" (a permanent theme of political realism and its poststructuralist criticism in international relation), all positivity is always plagued by the other within.
For [Schmitt], the political refers exclusively to the foundations, to the basic and tragic foundation of any human order whatsoever ... to the state of exception, to the ever-present possibility of war, to the land appropriation. Any foundation is, necessarily, according to the logic of Schmitt's thought, an instance of resistance to the absolute immanence, insofar as the absolute immanence implies either a pure non-order (anarchism) or an order without meaning (nihilism).... The absolute immanence is a system without an outside, without the other. But every foundation refers explicitly to the outside and the other which resists the absolutization of immanence. However ... the question is neither of an absolute exteriority nor of the absolute other--transcendence--but of an instance which opens up the absolute immanence, of a passage which is inside and outside at the same time, transcendent and immanent at the same moment. (16)
With regard to this notion of otherness, it is important to delineate it from the rather ambiguous and incoherent concept of the Other frequently deployed in poststructuralist studies. What is at stake is not a facile gesture of demonstrating the dependence of one's identity on the exclusion of the other and then proceeding to advocate "responsibility to Otherness," (17) which empirically comes down to the valorization of marginal, repressed, and otherwise disadvantaged groups, a valorization which is in fact constitutive of one's conception of the self (as a social activist or a critical intellectual). The inconsistency is immediately apparent: there is little that is so very "other" about the usual figures of otherness deployed in critical thought, both empirically (insofar as the very sympathy or concern for the cause of the other renders his otherness questionable) and conceptually (the notion of alterity is hardly apt for an ethics that ultimately professes empathy with the other's cause and hence must logically presuppose at least a minimal degree of identification).
The situation of the "other within," formalized as X(Xs), is, on the contrary, unrelated to any "empirical other" and may rather be understood in terms of Deleuze's notion of the "outside." Deleuze's reconstruction of Foucault's thought isolates three elements of any diagrammatic space: solidified "strata," or the discursive forms of enunciability and visibility, "strategies," or the nonstratified "knots" of power relations, and the "outside," the space of what Deleuze refers to as "savage" or "unnameable" forces, not integrated into forms or strategies. (18)
In Deleuze's account, it is from the outside that the diagram itself emanates, much as Schmitt's sovereign decision "emanates from nothingness." (19) As a space of pure exteriority, the outside is "other" to any form of order by its very nature, yet it may never be thought in terms of positivity, which would logically render it part of the diagram.
It is from the outside that a force affects, or is affected by, others. The diagram, as the fixed form of a set of relations between forces never exhausts force, which can enter into other relations and compositions.... In this way, the outside is always an opening to the future: nothing ends, since nothing has begun, but everything is transformed. In this sense, force displays potentiality with respect to the diagram containing it.... Moreover, the final word on power is that resistance comes first, to the extent that power relations operate completely within the diagram, while resistances necessarily operate in a direct relation with the outside, from which diagrams emerge. (20)
We may appreciate the austerity and scarcity of Foucault's ontology: (21) the otherness that precedes and exceeds the constitution of order is quite literally the void, the space of absence or emptiness, whose only characteristic is its radical difference from any diagram. Yet, to posit transcendence as absence is obviously the opposite of postulating, in a positivist manner, the absence of transcendence, which is equivalent to the effacement of the radical openness of the political and the subscription to the diagrammatic assertion of self-immanence of order. (22) Transcendence is indeed invoked in any foundational act of decision, albeit it is understood as the traversal of pure negativity, a "leap into the night." The specificity of this moment may be grasped by Derrida's notion of undecidability, a radical abeyance of certainty traversed and (as discussed in more detail below) effaced in the act of decision that institutes the certainty of new foundations. (23)
Decision and responsibility worthy of the name should not be controlled by previous knowledge, it should not be programmed.... When I make a decision, when I take responsibility, to some extent it must be in the night.... Between the accumulation of knowledge and the moment I make a choice, I take a responsibility, I make a decision,...
|
