Italian Affirmations
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Published:March 2017
A forceful intervention into contemporary politics, this chapter argues that the designations left and right must be preserved, as they are names for different relations to the political origin. Drawing on Schmitt’s genealogy of modern politics, the chapter argues that the real source of the left-right distinction is not the crisis of parliamentary democracy after the collapse of communism but the incomplete and accidental manner in which modern politics inherits the very premodern political forms it presumes to overturn and reject. Yet even though contemporary politics might remain bound up with an ambiguous political heritage, it nonetheless inhabits institutional architectures and political terminologies that point to a new chain of active subjectivities and conflictual political spaces outside state politics, ones in which the traditional distinctions begin to get crowded out by emerging questions of ecology, biopolitical potentialities, and new rebellious collectives.
Left and Right: Why They Still Make Sense
A forceful intervention into contemporary politics, this chapter argues that the designations left and right must be preserved, as they are names for different relations to the political origin. Drawing on Schmitt’s genealogy of modern politics, the chapter argues that the real source of the left-right distinction is not the crisis of parliamentary democracy after the collapse of communism but the incomplete and accidental manner in which modern politics inherits the very premodern political forms it presumes to overturn and reject. Yet even though contemporary politics might remain bound up with an ambiguous political heritage, it nonetheless inhabits institutional architectures and political terminologies that point to a new chain of active subjectivities and conflictual political spaces outside state politics, ones in which the traditional distinctions begin to get crowded out by emerging questions of ecology, biopolitical potentialities, and new rebellious collectives.
Bibliography
Politics in the Present
Pitched somewhere between essay and conversation, this chapter records an exchange in which the voice of the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito merges with that of his interlocutor, Roberto Ciccarelli, to create a third person. The two figures, at once diverging and blending, present a succinct yet comprehensive account of many of the concepts, such as biopolitics, the impersonal, and the unpolitical, that have begun to pervade our political terminology and that inform many of the essays assembled here. The result is more than just a précis of Esposito’s work to date, however (although it is that). It is also an experiment in a common search for, and presentation of, the crisis in our theological, philosophical, and juridical tradition that will activate the philosophy of immanence and affirmative biopolitics lying dormant there, patiently awaiting its vindication in contemporary thought.
Bibliography
Cujusdam nigri & scabiosi brasiliani: Rancière and Derrida
This chapter opens by addressing a blind spot in Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude and in Marx’s view of history and class struggle: the knot between war and production. Are revolutionary movements still part of what Foucault identified as the modern “ontology of war,” making them a result of antagonisms inherent in the development of productive forces in the biopolitical economy of capitalism, or can we detect in them the silhouettes of an alternative political theory that could end politics as war—and as production and self-production? In partial answer to that question, the essay arrives at a defense of Derrida’s democratic politics and his ethics of hospitality, with its insistence on the perilous conflicts and potentials that arise with the entrance of the visitor, the friend, or the stranger.