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+[[!meta title="Stasis Before the State: Nine Theses on Agonistic Democracy"]]
+
+* Athor: Dimitris Vardoulakis
+* References:
+  * https://www.worldcat.org/title/stasis-before-the-state-nine-theses-on-agonistic-democracy/oclc/1000452218
+  * https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/2009359
+  * https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1xhr6vd
+  * https://www.academia.edu/35908382/Vardoulakis_Stasis_Before_the_State_--_Introduction
+  * https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823277414/stasis-before-the-state/
+
+## Excerpts
+
+    This question would be trivial if sovereignty is under­
+    stood simply as the sovereignty of specific states. The
+    question is pertinent when we consider the vio­lence
+    functioning as the structural princi­ple of sovereignty.
+    Sovereignty can only persist and the state that it sup­
+    ports can only ever reproduce its structures—­political,
+    economic, ­legal, and so on—­through recourse to certain
+    forms of vio­lence. Such vio­lence is at its most effective
+    the less vis­i­ble and hence the less bloody it is. This in­
+    sight has been developed brilliantly by thinkers such
+    as Gramsci, u
+    ­ nder the rubric of hegemony; Althusser,
+    through the concept of ideology; and Foucault, as the
+    notion of power. It is in this context that we should also
+    consider Carl Schmitt’s definition of the po­liti­cal as the
+    identification of the e ­ nemy. They all agree on the essen­
+    tial or structural vio­lence defining sovereignty—­their
+    divergent accounts of that vio­lence notwithstanding.
+    The prob­lem of a space outside sovereignty is com­
+
+    [...]
+
+    Posing the question of an outside to sovereignty
+    within the context of the mechanism of exclusion turns
+    the spotlight to what I call the ruse of sovereignty. This
+    essentially consists in the paradox that the assertion of
+    a space outside sovereignty is nothing other than the as­
+    sertion of an excluded space and consequently signals
+    the mobilization of the logic of sovereignty.
+
+    [...]
+
+    To put this in the vocabulary used h
+    ­ ere, the at-
+    tempt to exclude exclusion is itself exclusory and thus
+    reproduces the logic of exclusion.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Turning to Solon’s first demo­cratic constitution,
+    I ­will suggest in this book that it is pos­si­ble by identify­
+    ing the conflictual nature of democracy—or what the
+    ancient Greeks called stasis. Agonistic monism holds
+    that stasis is the definitional characteristic of democ­
+    racy and of any other pos­si­ble constitutional form. Sta­
+    sis or conflict as the basis of all po­liti­cal arrangements
+    then becomes another way of saying that democracy is
+    the form of e ­ very constitution. Hence, stasis comes be-
+    fore any conception of the state that relies on the ruse of
+    sovereignty.
+
+    The obvious objection to this position would be about
+    the nature of this conflict. Hobbes makes the state of
+    nature — which he explic­itly identifies with democracy —­
+    also the precondition of the commonwealth. Schmitt
+    defines the po­liti­cal as the identification of the enemy.
+
+    [...]
+    
+    ent power. Is t ­ here a way out of this entangled knot?
+    Antonio Negri’s most significant contribution to po­
+    liti­cal philosophy is, in my opinion, precisely at this
+    juncture. His intervention starts with his book on Spi­
+    noza, The Savage Anomaly, in which he distinguishes
+    between potentia (constituent power) and potestas (con­
+    stituted power). 20 It is most explic­itly treated in Insur-
+    gencies, which provides an account of the development
+    of constituent power in philosophical texts from early
+    modernity onward and examines the function of con­
+    stituent power in significant historical events. 21 The
+    starting premise of this investigation is the rejection of
+    ent power. Is t ­ here a way out of this entangled knot?
+    Antonio Negri’s most significant contribution to po­
+    liti­cal philosophy is, in my opinion, precisely at this
+    juncture. His intervention starts with his book on Spi­
+    noza, The Savage Anomaly, in which he distinguishes
+    between potentia (constituent power) and potestas (con­
+    stituted power). 20 It is most explic­itly treated in Insur-
+    gencies, which provides an account of the development
+    of constituent power in philosophical texts from early
+    modernity onward and examines the function of con­
+    stituent power in significant historical events. 21 The
+    starting premise of this investigation is the rejection of
+    and avoiding the ruse of sovereignty. 23
+    The appeal to constituent power gives Negri the means
+    to provide an account of democracy as creative activity.
+    This has a wide spectrum of aspects and implications
+    that I can only gesture t ­ oward ­here. For instance, this
+    approach shows how democracy requires a convergence
+    of the ontological, the ethical, and the political—­which
+    is also a position central to my own proj­ect (see Thesis
+    6). Consequently, democracy is not reducible to a con­
+    stituted form, and thus Negri can provide a nonrepre­
+    sen­ta­tional account of democracy. This is impor­tant
+    because it enables Marx’s own distaste for representative
+    democracy to resonate with con­temporary sociology
+    and po­liti­cal economy—­a proj­ect that starts with Negri’s
+    involvement in Italian workerism and culminates in his
+    collaborations with Michael Hardt. Besides the details,
+    which Negri has been developing for four de­cades, the
+    impor­tant point is that this description of democracy
+    and constituent power is consistently juxtaposed to the
+    po­liti­cal tradition that privileges constituted power and
+    sovereignty. 24
+    
+    There is, however, a significant drawback in Negri’s
+    approach. It concerns the lack of a consistent account of
+    vio­lence in his work.
+    
+    [...]
+    
+    Without a
+    consideration of vio­lence, radical democracy ­w ill never
+    discover its agonistic aspect, namely, that conflict or
+    stasis is the precondition of the po­liti­cal and that, as
+    such, all po­liti­cal forms are effects of the demo­cratic. In
+    other words, Negri’s obfuscation of the question of vio­
+    lence can never lead to agonistic monism.
+    
+    [...]
+    
+Production of the real:
+
+    Second, the state of emergency leading to justification
+    does not have to be “real”—it simply needs to be credi­
+    ble. Truth or falsity are not properties of power—as Fou­
+    cault very well recognized—­and the reason for this, I
+    would add, is that power’s justifications are rhetorical
+    strategies and hence unconcerned with validity. This is
+    the point where my account significantly diverges from
+    
+    [...]
+    
+    If we are to understand better sovereign vio­lence, we
+    need to investigate further the ways in which vio­lence is
+    justified. Sovereignty uses justification rhetorically. In­
+    stead of being concerned with w
+    ­ hether the justifications
+    of actions are true or false, sovereignty is concerned
+    with ­whether its justifications are believed by ­those it af­
+    fects.
+
+    [...]
+
+Torture:
+
+    Greek po­liti­cal philosophy. 4 Hannah Arendt also pays
+    par­tic­u­lar attention to this meta­phor. According to Ar­
+    endt, Plato needs the meta­phor of the politician as a
+    craftsman in order to compensate for the lack of the no­
+    tion of authority in Greek thought. ­These Platonic meta­
+    phorics include the meta­phor of the statesman as a
+    physician who heals an ailing polis. 5 The meta­phor of
+    craftsmanship is used as a justification of po­liti­cal power.
+    craftsmanship is used as a justification of po­liti­cal power.
+    The meta­phor persists in modernity, and we can find
+    examples much closer to home. Mao Zedong justifies
+    the purges of the Cultural Revolution on the following
+    grounds: “Our object in exposing errors and criticizing
+    shortcomings is like that of curing a disease. The entire
+    purpose is to save the person.” 6 Whoever does not con­
+    form to the Maoist ideal is “ill” and needs to be “cured.”
+    Similarly, George Papadopoulos, the col­o­nel who headed
+    the Greek junta from 1967 to 1974, repeatedly described
+    Greece as an ill patient requiring an operation. The dic­
+    tatorial regime justified its vio­lence by drawing an anal­
+    ogy of its exceptional powers to the powers of the head
+    surgeon in a hospital emergency room. Th
+    ­ ese operations
+    on “patients” took place not in hospitals but in dark po­
+    lice cells or in vari­ous forms of prisons or concentration
+    camps. And the instruments of the “operations” ­were
+    not t ­ hose of the surgeon but rather of the torturer and
+    in many cases also of the executioner. The analogy be­
+    tween the surgeon and the torturer is mobilized to pro­
+    vide reasons for the exercise of vio­lence. An emergency
+    mobilizes rhetorical strategies that justify vio­lence, ir­
+    respective of the fact that such a justification may be
+    completely fabulatory.
+
+    -- 32-33