Exception and event : Schmitt, Arendt, and Badiou

Whatever else the fascination with the problem of sovereignty over the past decade or so will have meant, or how we will construe it when it comes time for us to reflect and write its history, one thing it has clearly done is provoke a set of theoretical, philosophical, and even theological debates that were for a long time - indeed a very long time - considered dormant, if not completely obsolete. In the period (not so far off) when some version of Marxism still represented the one axiomatically justified point of departure for left-wing intellectuals and activists, who could have guessed that Carl Sclunitt's political theology would return, and do so not just among conservative factions, but among the ostensible friends of democracy? In the era, even more recent, when a resigned consensus emerged concerning the necessity of liberal democratic institutions, and theoretical debates circulated around, not this or that politics, but the preservation of 'the political', who would have predicted that, in the blink of an eye, like a building without a foundation, that consensus would collapse, and theorists would find themselves exploring not the virtues of political order but the violence that founds all law, or the force that generates order by remaining outside of it? When nearly everyone of significance was arguing for the cultural and linguistic specificity of knowledge, the ethics of difference or tolerance, and the thoroughly situated character of all subjectivity, who might have thought that, in but a few short years, the really interesting new philosophies would present themselves as philosophies of truth, and the most celebrated theorists - Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere, for instance - would be those concerned with universalism? In this chapter, I take up the decidedly modest task of charting some of these developments by explicating the work of Carl Sclunitt, Hannah Arendt, and Alain Badiou. I maintain that, despite appearances, democracy - or a substantialist version of the demos - is by no means anathema to Sclunitt's conception of the sovereign exception, but indeed grounds his theory of the modem state. I further suggest that the republican approach to the formal rights of the citizen, as defended by Arendt, ultimately relies on a kind of sovereign exception that Arendt herself must acknowledge without admitting, specifically the capacity for judgement and morality possessed by the thinking self. That is to say, despite her vehement and compelling effort to distinguish between freedom and sovereignty, and to conceive of politics as the plurality opened up by the former rather than the unified and commanding will of the latter, Arendt finds herself requiring a 'standpoint outside of the political realm' (Arendt 1993:259) that also stabilizes and protects that realm. I thus turn, albeit with some notes of caution, to Badiou's politics of truth, or the truth-event, and his unexpected rehabilitation of universalism. The theory of the sovereign is a theory of friends and enemies, or the existential inescapability of political division, political strife, and war. It is a symbol of death­ always haunted by the 'real possibility' of killing and being killed (Sclunitt 2005:28). Badiou's figure of 'the militant' traverses any conception of political community, whether substantial or formal, that is not attached to the articulation of a universal truth. Whatever else this might mean, it clearly represents the beginnings of a politics after sovereignty.