INTRODUCTION

A Conceptual History of the Political—

the Archaeological Project

I
n the past twenty years, there have been an enormous number of stud-
ies referring to “the political.” The term was originally coined by Carl
Schmitt in The Concept of the Political (1932), where he identified it with
what he named “sovereignty.” In his definition, the sovereign is “the one
who decides in the state of exception.”1 In the end, “the political” refers to
a plane prior to the legal, that which escapes all norms and, indeed, fetters
them. In other words, it is the original instituting act of every political-in-
stitutional order.
Schmittean theory was vilified for a long time because of the irratio-
nalist (and ultimately totalitarian) consequences that it entails. Neverthe-
less, in the past few decades his texts have become the basis for a crucial
reformulation of philosophical and theoretical debate. Thanks to precur-
sor works by authors such as Claude Lefort, they have emerged as a key
for understanding modern democracy. As a result, the focus of politi-
cal-philosophical reflection has recently been reoriented to penetrate
that dimension of reality known as “the political,” which is now clearly
differentiated from “politics.” Whereas politics represents just one in-
stance of social totality, the political refers to the way diverse instances
are disaggregated and mutually articulated. This also has methodologi-
cal derivations. To understand this dimension would require an approach
that is both historical and conceptual, one that does not simply describe

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 XVIIIINTRO D U C TIO N

processes and phenomena but is also able to disclose the political and
conceptual problems at stake in each case.
This type of approach underlies a wide range of perspectives. Authors
as diverse as Reinhart Koselleck, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Carlo
Galli, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposíto, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj
Žižek—to cite only some of the more notable names—have dedicated
themselves to the task of elaborating on the concept of the political, point-
ing out the plurality of aspects it encompasses.
This book follows this line, while, at the same time, it engages in a criti-
cal debate with the key authors who have brought about this change in
contemporary political theory. It takes on many of their conceptual tools
and disputes others. Nevertheless, there is a point on which this work sets
itself apart from all the rest: the historical perspective it brings to this
debate.
In previous books on the subject, the presence of the realm of the po-
litical is simply taken for granted. It appears as a given, an eternal essence.2
Covering a wide chronological range, beginning in the seventeenth cen-
tury and reaching the present, this book shows that the realm of the
political is not a natural, transhistorical entity. This is true not only in the
sense that, as a category, it only became a subject of discourse relatively
recently (as we have seen, it cannot be traced further back than the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, when Carl Schmitt devised the term). But
also, and more importantly, it did not always exist as an empirical real-
ity. Here we find the fundamental hypothesis that presides over our anal-
ysis: The opening up of the horizon of the political is the result of a cru-
cial inflection that was produced in the West in the seventeenth century
as a consequence of a series of changes in the regimes of exercise of power
brought about by the affirmation of absolute monarchies. It is at this
point that the series of dualisms articulating the horizon of the political
emerged, giving rise to the play of immanence and transcendence hith-
erto unknown.
Of paramount importance in this work is explaining how such an in-
flection was produced: how the horizon of the political could emerge out
of the very theological universe it came to dislocate, and how that new
terrain, within which all the subsequent political debates took place, be-
came established. As we will see, if we lose sight of the nature of the cru-

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 INTRO D U C TIO NX IX

cial transformation produced at that moment, we will not be able to fully

comprehend the ultimate meaning of those debates.
In addition, this book intends to show that the dimension of the polit-
ical is a historical entity in the sense not only that it has an origin that
can be traced but also that it has undergone a number of crucial refor-
mulations in the course of the four centuries of its existence. From the
seventeenth century to the present, the political became successively re-
defined, accompanying changes in the regimes of the exercise of power.
These latter actually indicate the different ways in which the series of du-
alisms that articulate that field become structured, the different logics of
functioning of the play of immanence and transcendence, or, more pre-
cisely stated, the different modes of production of the transcendence
effect (the justice effect) out of immanence.
The present book thus seeks to provide a more accurate picture of
modern political-intellectual history—one more attentive to the discon-
tinuities in its trajectory—than the picture offered in the current texts on
political history and political philosophy. Ultimately, it will help us to un-
derstand why we cannot transpose ideas from one conceptual context to
another, why to do so inevitably entails inflicting violence on the logic
that articulates the symbolic webs from which political concepts take
their meaning. This was, I think, the aim of Michel Foucault’s project of
an archaeology of knowledge, although, as we will see, I object to some
aspects of it and ask for precision in others.
In addition to the two systems of knowledge that Foucault analyzed in
his classical work Les mots et les choses—the “age of representation,”
which corresponds to the classical period (the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries), and the “age of history,” which corresponds to the modern
period (the nineteenth century)—I will identify a third specific regime of
knowledge, “the age of forms.” This emerged in the twentieth century as
a result of the breakdown of the evolutionary-teleological assumptions
inherent in the age of history—a conceptual shift that passed unnoticed
in Foucault’s archaeological reconstruction. Each period in this archae-
ology of knowledge corresponds, in turn, to a particular regime of exer-
cise of power whose emergence entailed the reconfiguration of the hori-
zon of the political. It would be articulated (and rearticulated) according
to different types of logic: a “logic of folding,” for the age of representation;

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 X X INTRO D U C TIO N

a “logic of undifferentiation/identification,” for the age of history; and a

“logic of leap,” for the age of forms.
These changes are what we will explore in the following pages. This is
thus a kind of archaeological endeavor in the sense that its goal is to re-
cover and retrace the different political-conceptual niches in which the
regimes of exercise of power were displayed, the series of successive trans-
formations they underwent, as well as the different historical-conceptual
constellations to which they gave rise. Overall, the present book describes
the long cycle of the emergence, transformation, and final dissolution of
the political.
Making this archaeological reconstruction has actually required the
inscription of the development of political thinking within a broader
historical-intellectual perspective and an approach to various kinds of
discourses coming from different cultural records—the history of the
arts, literature, science, and so on—in addition to the history of political
thinking. It thus intends to provide the basic framework for understand-
ing the terms in which the discourse on the political was established
in each historical moment and the basic coordinates whereby political
languages were articulated, defi ning the particular modes of conceiv-
ing and practicing political power. Ultimately, by hewing to a historical-
conceptual perspective throughout, this book intends to provide a map of
the different conceptual frameworks on which the different forms of
political discourse must be placed and, as a result, to prevent the anachro-
nistic projections that are common in the traditional approaches to the
history of political philosophy.
Yet, for this it is necessary to transcend the level of ideas or thinking
and place our focus on a conceptual dimension embedded in political
practices themselves, which is an intrinsic dimension of them and with-
out which, these practices cannot exist, a phenomenological realm previ-
ous to the distinction between the symbolic and the material, in which
the two are fused and, therefore, cannot be detached from each other. It
is at penetrating that realm that the project of an archaeology of the po-
litical is aimed.

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A N A R C H A E O LO GY O F T H E P O L I T I C A L

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