Esposito is at once a more deconstructive and more academic thinker than his operaista counterparts, but Categorie dell’ impolitico bears nothing of the pensiero debole that marked Italian academic philosophy in the 1980s. It takes a different track, working through writings by Schmitt, Arendt, Broch, Canetti, Weil and Bataille to trace an alternative line of thought that questions the auto-legitimating logic of modern politics both in its representative and contractual moments as well as in its politico-theological modes of legitimation. More than a work of Begriffsgeschicte, the book looks backwards to see forward, beyond the events of 1989, which were brewing as the text was composed. Far from approaching this historical moment with leftist melancholy or intimations of Hegelian inevitability, Categorie dell’ impolitico declares, as Esposito would suggest in the preface to the text’s 1999 resissue, ‘the end of the end of the political’.
It is not only in this historical sense, however, that the book is untimely. In its formal functioning also, the text displays a complex syncopation, refusing to correlate its movement from chapter to chapter with any kind of neat transition from discussions of one thinker to the next: from Arendt to Broch, for example, or Weil to Bataille. These changeovers are rather accomplished on the back of concepts, appearing part way through the chapters and often in unexpected ways. They are the points of maximum tension in the text—little knots, if you like, characterised at once by elegant textual slippages and powerful conceptual tightenings. Indeed, the name of the book itself, deriving as it does from both Schmitt’s Begriff des Politischen and Mann’s Betrachtungen Eines Unpolitischen, displays something of this knot-like quality, lacing together two opposing threads of thought from which it equally wants to declare a departure.
For Esposito, it is crucial to distinguish the impolitical from the apolitical. While the latter determines the political negatively, sitting outside or beyond it, the former is coextensive with politics and, indeed, limns it. This means the impolitical cannot be identified with the processes of depoliticisation that characterise secular modernity. In Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form, Schmitt complains that modern politics has become merely a matter of technics. And he seeks to restore authority to politics by submitting it to a kind of theological transvaluation. Noting the affinities of Schmitt’s argument with that of theologian Romano Guardini, Esposito contends that this depoliticisation and theologisation are two sides of the one coin. The more the modern state cedes its sovereign power to technics and economic forces, the more it clings to the theological supplement that animates its claims to autonomy. The impolitical is the category that exposes this secret complicity. ‘It does not oppose value to politics’ Espositio explains. ‘But does exactly the opposite. It refuses the attribution of value to politics or its theological valorisation’.
Central, for Schmitt, to the theologisation of sovereignty is the principle of representation. ‘There is no politics without authority’, he writes, ‘nor is there authority without an ethos of conviction’. Representation, understood as a complexio oppositorum that holds together opposite elements without merging them, is the formal device by which the Catholic Church links power and authority, decision and conviction. By joining, through an infinite chain of mediations, the authority of the priest to the persona of Christ, the Church acquires a juridical-representative structure that invests it with a specifically wordly power. Thus, while representation becomes central to modern politics after Hobbes, it is a purely immanent representation that requires the moment of theologisation to link it to a decisive power that holds together immanence and transcendence, history and ideas, life and authority, power and goodness. By contrast, as becomes clear in the work of Hannah Arendt, the impolitical consists in precisely the contestation of such representation.
Although the impolitical aspect of Arendt’s work is partial and problematic, the notion of irrepresentability is substantial to her conception of politics as plurality. The attempt to represent plurality, she argues, involves a reductio ad unam (which begins with Platonic idealism and extends to 20th century totalitarianism—insofar as it supplements the modern bourgeoise state). More than this, even the logic of revolution, which initially displays an anti-representative impulse, falls prey to an autolegitimating dynamic of restorative return that involves a kind of ‘theatrical’ representation. Furthermore, in her final trilogy, Arendt shows how the will, which is metaphysically founded in terms of contingency and liberty, becomes caught in a paradox of wanting and not wanting that prevents political action or at least allows it only by a violent suppression of the conflictual alterity that constitutes it. The irresolvability of this situation is made clear by the workings of representation and decision, both of which exclude the plurality outside of which every political form is pushed to reverse itself either into its unformed (technical) or deformed (totalitarian) opposite.
If Arendt emphasizes the element of plurality in impolitical thought, Hermann Broch (working in the wake of Nietzsche, Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ and Freud’s Totem and Taboo) stresses its conflictual aspect. Central to Broch’s critique of political theology is the positing not only of a radical break between law and justice but also of the impossibility of a historical (or eschataological) recomposition of the relation between politics and ethics. This becomes clear in his Tod des Vergil, which takes the form of a dialogue between the Emperor Augustus and the poet Virgil. While Augustus holds that power has the ability to transfigure evil into good, Virgil contends that it is rather evil that transfigures power (by revealing it for what it is). That there is no possibility of synthesis between these positions becomes clear when Virgil cedes the Aeneid to Augustus. In doing this, the poet heeds his notion of justice as the taking of distance from the proprium (the world that is appropriable, the Nomos that gives sanction to property and self-possession). Ethics, in this sense, is the irrepresentable of politics—its inexpressible remainder.
For Elias Canetti, by contrast, the impolitical is not so much the presupposed other of politics as its silent shadow. According to the vision he presents in Die Provinz des Mehschen, power floods all of represented reality. Only at the limits of this fullness does non-power appear, not as the outside of politics but rather its absence or reversal—like an inside-out glove. It is not only a matter of history sanctioning the subordination of the possible to power but also of the capacity of political-theological Oneness to incorporate all alternatives to this univocity, including multiplicity, metamorphosis, and the masses. Yet, insofar as the impolitical is the shadow of politics, it is constituted in opposition to any form of depoliticisation. In a certain sense, the impolitical underlies politics. Or, to put this differently, it is the political seen from its external borders. Canetti thus opens another perspective on the impolitical, which extends beyond its refusal of representation. He associates it with the great tradition of political realism that passes through Thucydides and Machiavelli—that is, with the view that power relations cannot be resolved.
But the implications of this insight are severe. If there exists no end to power or no subject of anti-power, because the subject is always constituted by power, then there is only one way to contain power: to reduce the subject. This is the impolitical imperative pursued in the work of Simone Weil. At stake for her is not a weakening of the subject but a refusal of politics as action—a passive politics, if you like, invested in passion, forbearance, and patience. More accurately, Weil seeks an action-without-agency, which she figures in at least two ways: first, by stressing the mutuality of action and thought (which transforms volition into necessity, making it clear when to act and when not); and second, by privileging abandonment (action not motivated by outcomes) over renunciation (abstinence from action motivated by desire).
Weil’s strategy of refusal (or mysticism, as it is sometimes dubbed) is not a retreat from politics. By declaring ‘in this world there is no other force but force’, she places herself squarely in the realist tradition. But there are two sides to this avowal. On the one hand, it unmasks the pretenses of worldly jurisprudence: ‘The notion of rights is linked to that of partition, exchange, or quantity. There is something commercial about it. … Rights are by their nature dependent on force’. On the other hand, it raises the question of an unworldly force, something akin to death, or what she calls justice. For Weil, such justice can neither combat force nor meet it. But it also imposes a necessary limit on force—insofar as force is all there is and nothing more. It is on this border, where force cannot be sovereign, that the impolitical appears.
As Bataille recognizes, however, borders do not only separate but also hold in common that which they differentiate. The impolitical and political, life and death, immanence and transcendence—all are held together, for Bataille, in what he designates as the ‘community of the impossible’. Distancing himself from Weil (as well as the two great thinkers of ‘the end of history’—Kojeve and Junger), Bataille seeks to move thought beyond both dialectical synthesis and the mere fluctuation of conceptual opposites. Thus, his conception of sacrifice as a ‘will to loss’ implies a critique of modernity that entails a refusal of both transcendence and an indifferent acceptance of secularism—since to understand the loss of the sacred as the ‘end of the social’ would only license political-theological efforts of forced reconstitution. Without detailing Bataille’s conception of sovereignty as a ‘community of those without community’, it is safe to say that his notion of partage, describing the liminal copresence of separation and concatenation, supplies the book’s most succinct register of the impolitical: ‘the impolitical is not only the limit of politics but also the limit of its own being a limit’.
It is this limiting of limiting, more so than the subsequent (and related) drift toward the biopolitics of community, that interests me in Esposito’s thought. The impolitical provides a way of rethinking politics from its borders and, in so doing, raises the possibility of thinking those borders (or, better, thinking on those borders) from a perspective that is interested in something other than their constitution. Such a rethinking of/on borders seems more urgent now than at the time of the book’s writing, since, in the present conjuncture, the bordering of the political is amplified and enhanced by the proliferation of political borders (within and beyond constituted spaces as well as at their limits) and the various technologies that control them.
