Beyond the principle of sovereign unity: identity and representation as the resources of authoritarian power

По ту сторону принципа единства суверенитета: тождество и репрезентация как ресурсы авторитарной власти

Vakhshtayn, Victor (Вахштайн, Виктор) ()
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Vakhshtayn, Victor (Вахштайн, Виктор): Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA)

Working Papers from Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration

Abstract: Unity and indivisibility proclaimed by Jean Bodin is the fundamental principle of sovereignty. As it is shown in this text, this principle can be productively problematized. At the heart of this problematization is the conflict between the two "rock" political forms, singled out by Karl Schmitt - representation and identity/immanence, taken as an unavoidable condition for the possibility of the exercising of state power. Conflict, in this case, is understood not as divarication, not as the situation of choice in favour of one or another basis of sovereignty. It is about the possibilities of using the unavoidability of this very conflict itself for the construction of unique "bad governments", the so-called authoritarian regimes. In the introduction, we've drawn the distinction between ontological and symbolic sovereignty, symmetric with Schmitt's distinction between identity and representation. In the first chapter, the problem of transforming a sovereign into a "figure of silence" in European political philosophy is elaborated. In the second chapter, we analyze two strategies of "gaining" sovereignty: Kant's and de Sade's. In the third, we propose a sketch of a reconceptualization of the dictatorship, based on the dictator's ability to use resources of identity as a political form.

Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2018-06
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