The Void at the Core: Repoliticising the Concept of Institution

Abstract

Gilles Lipovetsky has defined the late-modern age, the age of emptiness, identifying in it the demise of a way of conceiving the world based on faith in the future and progress. Postmodern society means, in this sense, the contraction of social and individual time; the exhaustion of the modernist impulse towards the future, disenchantment and the monotony of emptiness (Lipovetsky, 1983). But does the emptiness of contemporaneity really represent (only) the monotonous rest of a loss? Is it just the disenchantment resulting from the disappearing of given certainties? Or can we somehow read this legacy of the modernity’s last phase as a break free from nostalgia for a lost future? Perhaps this re-emergence of emptiness is also the re-emergence of a repressed. Although perturbing, it may indicate the direction towards a new future, which will may be no longer certain, but precisely for this reason more authentic: an authentical a-going to be. After all, the very creative power of the modern was born from the relationship with the void offered by the fall of religious transcendence. From the dissolution of the classical, the baroque dimension of modernity, was called upon to find new forms and a new unity.
We might say that what characterizes modern experience is the repeated attempt to mise-en-forme of an emerging plurality, which resists its own reduction. Indeed, it is precisely the persistence of such attempts that makes this irreducibility evident. Rediscovered at the origins of the modern age, along the season of the Reform and the Counter-reform, the conflict within the social order appears to be the constant of this historical experience, which has been characterized by an ambivalent relationship with transcendence: on the one hand, the search for unity and certainty which were lost in the fall; on the other hand, the awareness that any rediscovered unity could only be the artifice of a society called upon to re-found its own institutions, to put its own conflict back in order; to come to terms with emptiness, precisely in the constant search for fullness.
Today we are dealing with a new loss of certainty. The theological-political wavers for the openness and decentralization offered by new geopolitics sets, cyberspace and extra-planetary dimensions. The violent reappearance of profoundly identity-driven – often conservative when not openly racist – xenophobic and homophobic instances is the fearful response to this openness, to the new emergence of the void, of the broken foundation of history (Brown, 2008). Since it is denied as much by the reductio ad unum of the State as by the apparent inclusiveness of neoliberal capitalism, the conflict is manifesting itself in violent clashes and immunizing communitarianism. Then, we have to come to terms with the original emptiness of modern thought, in order to make that constitutive conflict re-emerge. To come to terms again with the void that runs through the modern era and re explodes in the contemporary implies to problematize the institution, questioning its forms to the point of bringing out its dynamic, problematic, productive dimension: in a word, its political dimension.
In order to do that, I propose a path that starts from the reading of the concept of institution offered by Santi Romano (1917), in order to make its descriptive core interact on the one hand (on a theoretical-legal level) with the ater Hartian theory of ordering, and on the other (on a philosophical-political level) with the idea of democratic revolution as aniconic power, which Lefort (1972; 1986) develops from Machiavelli’s dualism.

Download the article in PDF Visit Volume’s Index