The two faces of power 4: anarchy and politics
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 17, 2023
It was a German constitutionalist of the late nineteenth century, Max von Seydel, who asked the question that sounds unavoidable today: “what remains of the kingdom, if one does remove the government”? Indeed, the time has come to ask ourselves whether the fracture of the political machine of the West has reached in recent years a threshold beyond which it can no longer work. Already in the twentieth century fascism and nazism had answered the question in their own way through the instauration of what has rightly been called as a “dual state”, in which the legitimate state, founded on the law and constitution, is joined by a discretionary state only partially formalised and the unity of the political machine is thus only apparent. The administrative state into which European parliamentary democracies — more or less consciously — slipped is, in this sense, from a technical point of view, nothing but a descent of the nazi-fascist model, in which discretionary bodies extraneous to the constitutional powers join those of the parliamentary state, progressively emptied of its functions. And it is certainly singular that a separation of kingdom and government also manifested itself at the top of the Roman Church today, in which a pontiff, found himself in the impossibility to govern, has spontaneously deposed the cura et administratio generalis, while yet maintaining his dignitas.
However, the most extreme demonstration of the fracture of the political machine is the emerging of the state of exception as a normale paradigm of government which, by now in place for decades, reached its final form in the years of the so-called pandemic. What, in the perspective that interests us here, defines the state of exception, is the break between constitution and government, legitimacy and legality — and, together, the creation of a zone in which they become indiscernible. Indeed, sovereignity manifests itself here in the form of a suspension of the law and the consequent instauration of a zone of anomie, in which, however, the government claims to act legally. While suspending the juridical order, the state of exception claims, indeed, to be still in relation to it — to be, so to say, legally outside the law. From a technical point of view, the state of exception makes a “state of law” indeed true, in which on the one hand the law theoretically applies, but has no force, and on the other hand directives and measures that do not have force of law acquire force of it. At the limit, one could say that at stake in the state of exception is a floating force-of-law without the law, an illegal legitimacy matched by an illegitimate legality, in which the distinction between norm and decision loses its meaning.
It is essential to understand the necessary relation that unites the state of exception and the political machine. If sovereign is the one who decides on the exception, the state of exception has always constituted the secret centre of the bipolar machine. There can be no substantial articulation between reign and government, legitimacy and legality, and constitution and administration. Insofar as it marks the point of their coincidence, the hinge that joins them can belong neither to one pole nor the other, and can in itself be neither legitimate nor legal. As such, it can only be object of a sovereign decision, which punctually articulates them through their suspension.
Just for this reason, however, the state of exception is necessarily temporary. A sovereign decision made once and for all is no longer such, just as a permanent articulation between the two poles of the machine would end up compromising its functionality. A normal state of exception becomes undecidable and therefore abolishes the sovereign, who can only be defined through decision. It is certainly no coincidence that both nazism and contemporary administrative state have resolutely adopted the state of exception as the normal and non-temporary paradigm of their government. However this situation is defined, in any case in it the political machine has given up its functioning, and the two poles — kingdom and government — mirror each other without any articulation.
It is on the threshold between reign and government that the problem of anarchy can be correctly situated. If the political machine works through the articulation of the two poles kingdom/government, what the sovereign exception clearly shows is that the space between them is in reality empty, it is a zone of anomie without which, however, the machine could not work. Just as the norm does not contain its application, but for this it needs the decision of a judge, so the kingdom does not contain in itself the reality of government and the sovereign decision is what, by making them indiscernible, opens up the space of governmental praxis. The state of exception is, therefore, not only anomic, but also anarchic, in the double sense that the sovereign decision has no foundation and the praxis that it inaugurates moves in the indistinction between legality and illegality, norm and decision. And since the state of exception constitutes the hinge between the two poles of the political machine, this means that it works by capturing anarchy at its centre.
We can then call a power capable of liberating the anarchy that has been captured in the machine as authentically anarchic. Such a power can exist only as the arrest and destitution of the machine, it is, i.e., an integrally destituent and never constitutive power. In Benjamin’s words, its space is the “effective” state of exception, opposed to the virtual one on which the machine is based, which claims to maintain the juridical order in its own suspension. Kingdom and government exhibit in it their definitive disconnection and it can no longer be a question of restoring their legitimate articulation, as right-thinking critics would like, nor of playing the administration against the state, according to a misunderstood conception of anarchy. We’ve known for some time now, with lucid awareness and without any nostalgia, that we move every time, every day, on this impervious and risky threshold, where the articulation between kingdom and government, state and administration, norm and decision is irrevocably broken, even if the funereal spectre of the machine continues to go round in circles around us.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, March 17, 2023
It was a German constitutionalist of the late nineteenth century, Max von Seydel, who asked the question that sounds unavoidable today: “what remains of the kingdom, if one does remove the government”? Indeed, the time has come to ask ourselves whether the fracture of the political machine of the West has reached in recent years a threshold beyond which it can no longer work. Already in the twentieth century fascism and nazism had answered the question in their own way through the instauration of what has rightly been called as a “dual state”, in which the legitimate state, founded on the law and constitution, is joined by a discretionary state only partially formalised and the unity of the political machine is thus only apparent. The administrative state into which European parliamentary democracies — more or less consciously — slipped is, in this sense, from a technical point of view, nothing but a descent of the nazi-fascist model, in which discretionary bodies extraneous to the constitutional powers join those of the parliamentary state, progressively emptied of its functions. And it is certainly singular that a separation of kingdom and government also manifested itself at the top of the Roman Church today, in which a pontiff, found himself in the impossibility to govern, has spontaneously deposed the cura et administratio generalis, while yet maintaining his dignitas.
However, the most extreme demonstration of the fracture of the political machine is the emerging of the state of exception as a normale paradigm of government which, by now in place for decades, reached its final form in the years of the so-called pandemic. What, in the perspective that interests us here, defines the state of exception, is the break between constitution and government, legitimacy and legality — and, together, the creation of a zone in which they become indiscernible. Indeed, sovereignity manifests itself here in the form of a suspension of the law and the consequent instauration of a zone of anomie, in which, however, the government claims to act legally. While suspending the juridical order, the state of exception claims, indeed, to be still in relation to it — to be, so to say, legally outside the law. From a technical point of view, the state of exception makes a “state of law” indeed true, in which on the one hand the law theoretically applies, but has no force, and on the other hand directives and measures that do not have force of law acquire force of it. At the limit, one could say that at stake in the state of exception is a floating force-of-law without the law, an illegal legitimacy matched by an illegitimate legality, in which the distinction between norm and decision loses its meaning.
It is essential to understand the necessary relation that unites the state of exception and the political machine. If sovereign is the one who decides on the exception, the state of exception has always constituted the secret centre of the bipolar machine. There can be no substantial articulation between reign and government, legitimacy and legality, and constitution and administration. Insofar as it marks the point of their coincidence, the hinge that joins them can belong neither to one pole nor the other, and can in itself be neither legitimate nor legal. As such, it can only be object of a sovereign decision, which punctually articulates them through their suspension.
Just for this reason, however, the state of exception is necessarily temporary. A sovereign decision made once and for all is no longer such, just as a permanent articulation between the two poles of the machine would end up compromising its functionality. A normal state of exception becomes undecidable and therefore abolishes the sovereign, who can only be defined through decision. It is certainly no coincidence that both nazism and contemporary administrative state have resolutely adopted the state of exception as the normal and non-temporary paradigm of their government. However this situation is defined, in any case in it the political machine has given up its functioning, and the two poles — kingdom and government — mirror each other without any articulation.
It is on the threshold between reign and government that the problem of anarchy can be correctly situated. If the political machine works through the articulation of the two poles kingdom/government, what the sovereign exception clearly shows is that the space between them is in reality empty, it is a zone of anomie without which, however, the machine could not work. Just as the norm does not contain its application, but for this it needs the decision of a judge, so the kingdom does not contain in itself the reality of government and the sovereign decision is what, by making them indiscernible, opens up the space of governmental praxis. The state of exception is, therefore, not only anomic, but also anarchic, in the double sense that the sovereign decision has no foundation and the praxis that it inaugurates moves in the indistinction between legality and illegality, norm and decision. And since the state of exception constitutes the hinge between the two poles of the political machine, this means that it works by capturing anarchy at its centre.
We can then call a power capable of liberating the anarchy that has been captured in the machine as authentically anarchic. Such a power can exist only as the arrest and destitution of the machine, it is, i.e., an integrally destituent and never constitutive power. In Benjamin’s words, its space is the “effective” state of exception, opposed to the virtual one on which the machine is based, which claims to maintain the juridical order in its own suspension. Kingdom and government exhibit in it their definitive disconnection and it can no longer be a question of restoring their legitimate articulation, as right-thinking critics would like, nor of playing the administration against the state, according to a misunderstood conception of anarchy. We’ve known for some time now, with lucid awareness and without any nostalgia, that we move every time, every day, on this impervious and risky threshold, where the articulation between kingdom and government, state and administration, norm and decision is irrevocably broken, even if the funereal spectre of the machine continues to go round in circles around us.
(English translation by I, Robot)
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René Magritte, On the Threshold of Liberty, 1930. Courtesy of WikiArt.
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