Twenty Theses on Politics
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Twenty Theses on Politics
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Overview
Twenty Theses on Politics is inspired by recent political transformations in Latin America. As Dussel writes in Thesis 15, regarding the liberation praxis of social and political movements, “The winds that arrive from the South—from Nestor Kirchner, Tabaré Vásquez, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Evo Morales, Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, and so many others—show us that things can be changed. The people must reclaim sovereignty!” Throughout the twenty theses Dussel engages with Latin American thinkers and activists and with radical political projects such as the World Social Forum. He is also in dialogue with the ideas of Marx, Hegel, Habermas, Rawls, and Negri, offering insights into the applications and limits of their thinking in light of recent Latin American political thought and practice.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822389446 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/09/2008 |
| Series: | Latin America in Translation |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 184 |
| Sales rank: | 1,040,116 |
| File size: | 897 KB |
About the Author
Enrique Dussel (1934–2023) was Professor of Ethics in the Department of Philosophy at the Iztapalapa campus of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. He also teaches courses at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Dussel is the author of more than fifty books, including Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism, and Liberation Theology; The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of the “Other” and the Myth of Modernity; and Philosophy of Liberation. He is a co-editor of Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, also published by Duke University Press.
George Ciccariello-Maher is an abolitionist educator, organizer, and writer based in Philadelphia Berkeley. Eduardo Mendieta is Professor of Philosophy and Latina/o at Pennsylvania State University. His many books include Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory and Thinking from the Underside of History: Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation (co-edited with Linda Martín Alcoff).
Read an Excerpt
TWENTY THESES ON POLITICS
By ENRIQUE DUSSEL
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2008 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESSAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4345-5
Chapter One
CORRUPTION AND THE POLITICAL FIELD: THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE
[1.1] THE CORRUPTION OF POLITICS
[1.1.1] In order to clear the positive field it is necessary first to enter into the debate regarding what the political "is not." The political is not exclusively any of its components, but rather it is all of these together. A house is not only a door, nor is it only a wall or a roof. To say that politics is one of its isolated components is a reductive fallacy. We need to know how to describe it as a totality. When considered as a totality we can see that there are bad houses, houses that do not allow one to live well, which are too small, which are useless, etc. The same goes for the political.
[1.1.2] The political as such is corrupted as a totality when its essential function is distorted or destroyed at its origin. In anticipating what I will explain later, I begin my reflection on the meaning of the political by first taking a detour-a detour that leads all political actions and institutions completely astray.
[1.1.3] This originary corruption of the political, which I will call the fetishism of power, consists of the moment in which the political actor (the members of the political community, whether citizens or representatives) believes that power affirms his or her subjectivity or the institution in which he or she functions-as a "functionary," whether it be as president, representative, judge, governor, soldier, police officer-as the center or source of political power. This is how, for example, the State comes to be affirmed as the sovereign and as the power of last resort, and this represents the fetishism of the power of the State and the corruption of all those who seek to exercise State power defined in this way. If the members of a government, for example, believe that they exercise power through self-referential authority-that is, with reference to themselves-then their power has become corrupted.
[1.1.4] Why? Because all exercises of power through any institution (from that of the president to the police) or through any political function (when, for example, citizens meet in open town councils or elect a representative) have as their primary and ultimate reference point the power of the political community (or of the people in the strict sense). Failing to refer to this power, isolating oneself from it, or cutting the link between the delegated exercise of the determinate power of each political institution (arrow a in figure 2) and the political power of the community (or the people) (arrow b) results in the absolutization, the fetishization, and the corruption of the power of the representative fulfilling that function.
[1.1.5] This corruption, moreover, is double: it corrupts the governors who believe themselves to be the sovereign center of power, and it corrupts the political community that allows itself (consents) to become servile rather than be an actor in the construction of the political (actions, institutions, principles). The Corrupted representative can use fetishized power for the pleasure of exercising his or her will as ostentatious vainglory, as despotic high-handedness, as sadism toward his or her enemies or toward the improper appropriation of goods and wealth. It does not matter what apparent benefits are granted to the corrupt governor, as what is worst is not wrongly acquired goods but rather the diversion of his or her attention as a representative: from serving the community through the obediential exercise of power, the corrupt leader becomes the scourge of the people, their "bloodsucker," their parasite, their moment of weakness, and even their death as a political community. Any struggle for one's own interests-whether it be that of an individual (a dictator), a class (e.g., the bourgeoisie), an elite (e.g., Creoles), or a "tribe" (the heirs of old political compromises)-represents the corruption of politics.
[1.2] THE POLITICAL FIELD
[1.2.1] Everything that we call political (whether it be actions, institutions, principles, etc.) has as its particular space what I will call the political field. Every practical activity (events that are family related, economic, sporting, etc.) also has its respective field within which the actions, systems, and institutions appropriate to each of these activities are carried out.
[1.2.2] I will use the concept of a field approximately as it was used by Bourdieu. This category allows us to situate the various possible levels or spheres of political actions and institutions, in which the subject operates as the actor with respect to a given function or as the participant in multiple practical horizons within which numerous systems and subsystems are structured (to use the terminology of Luhmann). These fields are carved out from the totality of the "world of everyday life." Of most interest here are the practical fields.
[1.2.3] The subject, then, becomes present in these fields through functionally situating himself or herself in them in various ways. In figure 1 the subject is the S and appears in fields A, B, C, D, and N, which represent the family, local or neighborhood life, urban life, or social layers, for example economic, athletic, intellectual, political, artistic, philosophical modes of existence, and so on indefinitely. The everyday world is not the sum of all of these fields, nor are the fields the sum of their component systems. Rather, the first of these (world, field) comprise and extend beyond the second (fields or systems), as reality always exceeds all possible worlds, fields, or systems. This is because, in the end, all three modes are opened and constituted as dimensions of intersubjectivity and also because subjects are always already immersed in intersubjective networks-that is, in multiple functional relationships in which they play the position of irreplaceable, living, material nodes. There are no fields or systems without subjects (although one could consider a system analytically and abstractly as though it lacked a subject).
[1.2.4] The entire political field is traversed by forces, by singular subjects in possession of will and a certain degree of power, and these wills are in turn structured within specific universes. As a result, this field is not a mere aggregate of individuals but rather one of intersubjective subjects, always already related through structures of power or institutions of varying permanence. Every subject-as an actor-is an agent defined in relation to others.
[1.2.5] The world of each subject-that is, our world-is composed of multiple fields, and each field, in turn, can intersect with others, as well as with various systems. Subjects know how to behave in all of these fields and systems, as each has cerebral maps that have provided a long apprenticeship in how to move about in these fields without committing practical mistakes-notably, mistakes that make no sense within the hermeneutic horizon presupposed by each field.
[1.2.6] Each field has interest groups, hierarchies, and ways of maneuvering, with respective symbolic, imaginary, and explanatory expressions. One could create, then, a topography or map of the location of these diverse forces, with respect to which the subject knows how to act (see table 1). But this field is not merely a text to be read (as Ricoeur would argue), nor is it a symbol to be decoded or an imaginary to be interpreted, since there equally exist set actions with specific purposes, which are then repeated in institutions and structured through consensus, alliances, and enmities. These fields, then, are practical structures of the power of will as well as narratives to be understood through intersubjective practical reason.
[1.2.7] Fields are those political spaces characterized by cooperation, coincidence, and conflict. They are not, accordingly, passive structures (as in structuralism) but rather are spheres of interaction that can be not only distinguished from mechanical Cartesian, Newtonian, or Einsteinian logics but also compared to the thermodynamic logic of complexity theory with its bifurcated (or multifurcated) and nonlinear social and political cause-and-effect relations.
[1.2.8] Every field is delimited. What falls outside the field is beyond its responsibility, and what falls inside the field is that which is defined as a component according to the rules that structure those practices permitted within the field. Its limits define the surface that determines the sphere of the normative fulfillment of its content, thus differentiating the possible from the impossible. As Karl von Clausewitz states: "We are obliged to say that the political object of war is really situated outside the sphere of war." Therefore, despite the fact that the fields of politics and war are distinct, the actor can cross from one to the other in an instant.
[1.2.9] Every field consists of various systems. The political field can be institutionalized through a liberal system, a system of "real" socialism, or a system of increasing participation (as is being attempted in the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela and in the process led by Evo Morales in Bolivia). Just as fields intersect (the economic field can intersect with the political field), so too do the systems present in each field intersect with one another (the capitalist system can intersect with the liberal system or with a system of postcolonial elites educated in political dependency). The bourgeoisie in the English revolution in the seventeenth century created a parliamentary political system that allowed the capitalist economic system to carry out the Industrial Revolution (a technological system materially subsumed within the capitalist system). As we can see, these distinctions are much more appropriate than Althusser's "instance," which is the standard Marxist interpretation.
[1.3] THE PRIVATE AND THE PUBLIC
[1.3.1] The distinction between private and public refers to various positions or modes of exercising intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity is the context for existence and meaning where the objectivity of actions and institutions develops. It also contains an a priori mode of subjectivity (since there always exists a prior constitutive moment, or a Husserlian passive genesis). For example, to the child, monogamous marriage is an objective social institution (confronting consciousness as an object) while being simultaneously below and prior-constituting that very same child's subjectivity through its mother and father. Democracy is an objective political institution, which at the same time develops a subjective tolerance in the citizenry from childhood, thereby taking on a purportedly subjective character. In other words, all subjectivity is always intersubjective.
[1.3.2] I will deem private the operation of the subject in an intersubjective position such that he or she comes to be protected from the presence, from the gaze, and from being attacked by the other members of the multiple intersubjective systems of which he or she forms a part. This sort of practice is external to the political field. In a private relation there are always participants (at least two), whose interactions remain private: these are participants in the sphere of those who are the "closest" to us, of "our own," of "relatives." This is why-on the systemic-institutional level-one frequently speaks of the family or of those "within" the walls of the home; namely, the walls that separate us from the "foreign," the "beyond," and the "outside," and from the "elements" and those "dangerous" things that in primitive times terrorized human beings.
[1.3.3] The public sphere, on the other hand, is the mode that the subject adopts as an intersubjective position in a "field with others," a mode that allows the subject to operate as an "actor" whose "roles" or actions are "represented" before the gaze of all other actors. These roles are in turn defined with reference to the foundational story or narrative-the whole libretto-of a given political system. To "enter" the public sphere is to "leave" the private sphere, a privacy in which the theatrical set no longer exists and in which one ceases to be an actor and ceases role playing (although roles do exist, in some sense, in the private sphere). There are, then, "limits," "lines," and thresholds, which are continually being crossed and surpassed, either in fulfillment or in transgression of the rules. The public is the sphere of the ostensible, and as such the most public place imaginable is that of the representative political assembly, seen and observed responsibly by the represented, who rightfully judge whether or not their interests are correctly represented. Since the time of the Greek "Agora" or the "Great Council" of Venice, politics has been synonymous with "the public."
[1.3.4] That which is done by the politician (qua politician) in the obscurity of the nonpublic-but which videos can occasionally make public for all to see-is corruption, insofar as it conceals from the represented, from the community, acts that would be unjustifiable in the public light. "Public opinion," on the other hand, is the means by which the political public sphere is nourished.
[2.01] THE PREVAILING POLITICAL ORDER
In part I of this book I seek to describe the architectonic moments-the minimum necessary and sufficient conditions-of all possible political orders. Everything I describe here will serve as a foundation that I then deconstruct in part 2. Do not, therefore, think of me as being merely a conservative, passive, or nonconflictive thinker. The task at hand is to gain consciousness of the different levels and spheres of political architectonics, which are to be then deployed in the political field through a radical notion of political power.
Chapter Two
THE POLITICAL POWER OF THE COMMUNITY AS POTENTIA
[2.1] THE "WILL-TO-LIVE"
[2.1.1] The human being is a living being. All living beings are herd animals, and the human being is a collective being by origin. Since human communities have always been threatened by their vulnerability to death and to extinction, such communities maintain an instinctive desire to remain alive. This desire-to-live of human beings in a community can be called a will. The will-to-live is the originary tendency of all human beings, and I offer this notion as a corrective to Schopenhauer's tragic formulation and the dominating tendency of the "will-to-power" of Nietzsche or Heidegger.
[2.1.2] In Eurocentric Modernity-since the invasion and subsequent conquest of America in 1492-political thought has generally defined power as domination, a definition that is already present in Machiavelli, Hobbes, and many other classic writers, including Bakunin, Trotsky, Lenin, and Weber, each of whom, however, makes important conceptual distinctions. To the contrary, contemporary social movements require from the outset a positive understanding of political power, which nevertheless bears in mind that this power is frequently fetishized, corrupted, and denaturalized as domination. The "will-to-live" is that positive essence-that content as a force and as a capacity to move, to restrain, and to promote. At its most basic level, this will drives us to avoid death, to postpone it, and to remain within human life.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Foreword: The Liberation of Politics: Alterity, Solidarity, Liberation / Eduardo Mendieta viiPreliminary Words xv
Introduction 1
Thesis 1. Corruption and the Political Field: The Public and the Private 3
Part One: The Prevailing Political Order
Thesis 2. The Political Power of the Community as Potentia 13
Thesis 3. Institutional Power as Potestas 18
Thesis 4. Obediential Power 24
Thesis 5. The Fetishization of Power: Power as Domination 30
Thesis 6. Strategic Political Action 36
Thesis 7. The Need for Political Institutions: The Material Sphere (Ecological, Economic, Cultural): Fraternity 43
Thesis 8. Institutions in the Spheres of Democratic Legitimacy and Feasibility: Equality and Liberty: Governability 50
Thesis 9. Ethics and the Implicit Normative Principles of Politics: The Material Principle 56
Thesis 10. The Formal-Democratic and Feasibility Principles of Politics 62
Part Two: The Critical Transformation of the Political: Toward the New Political Order
Thesis 11. The People: The Popular Sector and "Populism" 71
Thesis 12. Liberatory Power as Hyperpotentia and the "State of Rebellion" 78
Thesis 13. The Political Principles of Liberation: The Critical Material Principle 83
Thesis 14. The Critical-Democratic and Strategic Transformation Principles 88
Thesis 15. Liberation Praxis of Social and Political Movements 94
Thesis 16. Anti-Hegemonic Praxis and the Construction of a New Hegemony 103
Thesis 17. Transformation of Political Institutions: Reform, Transformation, Revolution: Political Postulates 108
Thesis 18. Transformation of Institutions in the Material Sphere: "Perpetual Life" and Solidarity 114
Thesis 19. Transformation of Institutions in the Sphere of Democratic Legitimacy: Irruption of New Rights: "Perpetual Peace" and Alterity 122
Thesis 20. Transformation of Institutions in the Sphere of Feasibility: The "Dissolution of the State"? Liberation 131
Notes 139
Bibliography 151
Index 155