Histories and Possibilities of “Instituent Power”

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel examines the historical relationship between radical politics, on the one side, and political institutions, on the other.

Radicalism has long had a conflicted relationship with institutions. While liberals (following figures like David Hume or James Madison) have tended to promote institutions as mechanisms for channelling the “natural” self-interest of the individual towards the common good, conservatives (in the tradition of Edmund Burke or Michael Oakeshott) have defended institutions as repositories of established wisdom and a foundation for genuine liberty.

For those on the radical left (and particularly those inspired by some derivative of Marxism), however, institutions have almost always been understood in fairly narrow instrumental terms, either as weapons in the hands of power, or as superstructures reducible to some more fundamental social or material base. Even where the radical left has acknowledged the need strategically to engage with institutions (as in Gramsci’s “war of position” or Dutschke’s “long march through the institutions”) it has typically been with a lingering sense of suspicion and distrust.

But is this aversion to institutions tenable in the contemporary world? Can it continue to advance the radical-left political project out of which it first emerged? Or has it perhaps become antiquated and counterproductive? How, for example, does that aversion sit alongside the rise of right-wing populism, which has developed its own anti-institutional rhetoric and its own reductive analysis? Did that aversion advance and complement or hinder and confuse radical-left responses to the global pandemic?

What might a more positive view of institutions contribute to the geopolitics of climate change, or any number of new geopolitical crises and emergencies? Is it possible to imagine a different approach to institutions without relinquishing what is radical in left-radicalism, or what renders its challenge to the established order troubling and effective?

In recent years, the one who has done the most to explore these issues is the Italian political philosopher Roberto Esposito. Beginning with the obscure Roman legal expression vitam instituere or “to institute life,” Esposito proposes that we conceive of institutions, not as static structures or forms, but as dynamic processes or manifestations of a vital, biopolitical force he calls “instituent power.” Esposito distinguishes this instituent power, which he associates with Machiavelli, from what he characterises, on the one hand, as a post-Heideggerian “distituent power,” and on the other hand, as the Spinozist-Deleuzian version of “constituent power.”

Neither purely negative nor purely affirmative (but also not a dialectical relationship between the two), instituent power pursues order through conflict. Or, put differently, it gives effective political and symbolic shape to the instituting force of conflict, while at the same time dismantling any instituted form.

For Esposito, the paradigm of instituent power offers an account of collective creativity and innovation that does not rely on the essentially theological notion of creatio ex nihilio. Moreover, instituent power is in no sense secondary or derivative. It is instead a direct and inexpungible expression of life as such, an ontological condition of our being-in-the-world. As Esposito puts it: “What else is life … if not a continuous institution, a capacity for self-regenerating along new and unexplored paths?”

Taking inspiration from Esposito’s gesture, but also leaving space to criticise his proposals, this panel develops a more historical approach to the question of left-radicalism and institutions. Or rather, it contends that the familiar opposition between the two outlined above is more of a historical phenomenon than it is an essential one, and that it took shape under specific historical conditions that we can examine and unpack. The papers are thus organised as detailed contextual analyses of socialist/communist and anarchist thinking, focusing particularly on moments – then or now – when theoretical challenges to institutions and instituent power come into focus.

The panel will also consider this question the other way round, as a “history of the future,” in which paper-givers might also consider how a possible left-radicalism could use the concept of instituent power to theorize institutions in a more positive, less conflicted way.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Immanent Constituent Power - Miguel Vatter, Deakin University

• The Demos Will Not Die: The Creative Potential of Antiauthoritarianism - Bradley J. Macdonald, Colorado State University; Katherine Young, University of Hawaii at Hilo

• The Revolution of Tè Minè: The Right to Land in the Aftermath of the Haitian Rev - James R. Martel, San Francisco State University

• "Instituent" Power and the Leftover Left - Lisa J. Disch, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Marx, Republicanism and Representative Institutions - Bruno Leipold, LSE

Chair

• Charles Barbour University of Western Sydney

Discussants

• Camila Vergara University of Essex

• Terrell Carver University of Bristol