the citizen from the demos to media theaters of depolicitized life.
Trumpism lines up on axis with Berlusconismo inasmuch as both qualify as names for oligarchic name-branding, pasquinade, and the mastery of political special effects. In each case the proper name erects a fence—a wall—around a motley assortment of personality traits, bait and switch tactics, and, in the case of Trump and Berlusconi, crass publicity stunts that supply the playbook of political impasse. Impasse is perhaps the new watchword for the contemporary state of politics, at once unexceptional and diffusely traumatic. Lauren Berlant makes the argument that once trauma is conceived no longer as an exceptional event and “crisis ordinariness” takes hold as the norm, history becomes little more than an adjustment narrative in which difficulties are succumbed to or navigated. From this perspective, the extraordinary “always turns out to be an amplification of something in the works, a labile boundary at best, not a slammed-door departure. In the impasse induced by crisis, being treads water; mainly, it does not drown.”27 Perhaps it is this sense of “small t” trauma that most effectively captures what is at stake in “small p” politics, from the ordinariness of exceptional crisis and the routinization of habitual politics, to the micropolitics of molecular cultures implanted in the byways of managed life.
Part of the difficulty, but also part of the interest, of trying to give definition to unexceptional politics derives from the opposition between the distinction in French between “le” and “la” politique: the Political versus politics, or polity versus policy. In his entry on “le” and “la” politique in the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: dictionnaire des intraduisibles (Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon), Philippe Reynaud observes that la politique in its most conventional translation to English, covers both “politics” and “policy.”1 Politics is commonly keyed to American pluralism—electoral politics, political participation, party formation, the recruitment of governing elites, and regime competition—whereas policy is taken to refer to strategies of state power. Reynaud stresses that the duality of politics and policy in English tends to get lost in French, where distinctions between state power (commandement) and deliberation, or between civic relations and strategic action, are more stringently maintained by the le/la divide.
Oliver Marchart reminds us that
although the theoretical differentiation between “politics” and “the political” occurs for the first time in German political thought with Carl Schmitt, the habit of differentiating between these two concepts started in French thought as early as 1957, with the publication of Paul Ricoeur’s essay “The Political Paradox.”2
For Ricoeur, polity (le politique) denotes ideal political organization and historical rationality, whereas politics (la politique) refers to the empirical and concrete manifestations of this ideal sphere. Ricoeur factors temporality into the equation:
Polity takes on meaning after the fact, in reflection, in “retrospection.” Politics is pursued step by step, in “prospection,” in projects; that is to say both in an uncertain deciphering of contemporary events, and in the steadfastness of resolutions … From polity to politics, we move from advent to events, from sovereignty to the sovereign, from the State to government, from historical Reason to Power.3
In addition to foregrounding paradoxes embedded in political thought, Ricoeur underlines the familiar opposition between Machiavelli and Marx. “The Prince, he notes, showcases “the logic of means, the pure and simple techniques of acquiring and preserving power.” It is on the basis of “this essential untruth, of this discordance between the pretension of the State and the true state of affairs, that Marx meets with the problem of violence.” At stake is “a political mode of existence that combines the Marxist critique of alienation with the Machiavellian, Platonic and Biblical critique of power.”4 Here, Ricoeur would have us extend “polity” into politics by bracing together subjection and calculated maneuvers. This move runs parallel to Balibar’s much later use of the term politique (devoid of any definite article) when glossing Schmitt’s Leviathan. Political, taken both substantively and adjectivally, names the process by which the state of nature—essentially an anti-political force—becomes the state, straddling the rule of law (polity) and the police (politics).5
Though Ricoeur and Balibar reveal the fungibility of the distinctions among polity, politics, and the Political, it is clear that the theoretical gulf between politics and the Political widened considerably in the wake of bitter post-‘68 schisms on the global left. Chantal Mouffe, for example, lays claim to the Political as a means of cutting loose discourses of the liberal subject from American-style pluralism. In On the Political, she defines the Political as “a space of power, conflict and antagonism” in contradistinction to Heidegger’s “ontological essence of politics,” or Hannah Arendt’s “space of freedom and public deliberation.”6 Mouffe is interested in showing “how the rationalist approach dominant in democratic theory prevents us from posing the questions which are crucial for democratic politics.” “My aim,” she states, “is to bring to the fore liberalism’s central deficiency in the political field: its negation of the ineradicable character of antagonism.”7 “In The Concept of the Political [1932],” Mouffe notes, “Schmitt declares bluntly that the pure and rigorous principle of liberalism could not give birth to a specifically political conception. Every consistent individualism must, in his view, negate the political since it requires the individual to remain the ultimate point of reference.” What she proposes (following the examples of Arendt, Agamben, Derrida, Hardt, Negri and many others), “is to think ‘with Schmitt against Schmitt,’ using his critique of liberal individualism and rationalism to propose a new understanding of politics.”8 For Mouffe, to become operative “the Political” must recur to new social movements, political identities, and mobilizations of antagonism. The latter is more fully drawn out as “agonistics,” to emphasize the discursive force of antagonism: the demotic, colloquially articulated expressions of dissensus that serve to undercut consensus-driven interests, claims of inalienable right, and market values of competition.9
In On the Shores of Politics (Aux bords du politique), Jacques Rancière similarly targets neoliberal ideologues who trumpet “the end of political divisions and social antagonisms” under market capitalism, or who bemoan the “exhaustion of egalitarian and communal (mis)adventures.”10 Rancière is committed to identifying “a few paradoxes which may prompt us to reexamine not just philosophy’s political role, but also the status of the peculiar activity which we call politics.”11 “Politics” here is “empirical politics,” and traces back, via Plato’s Gorgias, to maritime sovereignty and the sailor’s ethical code of “profit and survival.”12 After maritime imperialism makes it to shore, it swells in scale, eventually occupying the cartographic and temporal expanse of infinitude. For Rancière, equality is the only countervailing force, qualified as the “Two of division”; that is, “a One that is no longer that of collective incorporation but rather that of the equality of any One to any other One.”13 Against empirical politics, against what he calls “the new ‘liberal’ dream of the weights and counter-weights of a pluralist society guided by its elites,” Rancière endorses the old class struggle and the new “humanizing power of division.”14 They alone seem to have the capacity to make any politics (in terms that Rancière would be willing to call politics) visible. They alone seem up to the task of stripping democratic pluralism of its depoliticizing foils.
For Alain Badiou, the Political lives on in an emancipatory sequence most readily apprehended
