Tarizzo

zoWhat is a Political Subject?

Davide Tarizzo

«Pour m'exprimer comme il me vient, rien n'est incompatible avec la vérité: on pisse, on crache dedans. C'est un lieu de passage, ou pour mieux dire, d'évacuation. [...] La vérité est séduction d'abord, et pour vous couillonner. Pour ne pas s'y laisser prendre, il faut être fort.» Jacques Lacan

To answer this question, "what's a politicalsubject?", we would need to grasp the precise meaning of the two small words it contains: political and subject. That's the way philosophical analysis, since Socrates, would proceed. However, at least in this case, the opposite might be true. Hence, instead of asking what's the political and what's the subject, I will try to grasp from the very beginning the meaning of the whole: political subject.What is it? Maybe, once we find an answer to this question, it will be easier to find an answer to the other two. As you will notice, the general framework of my approach comes directly from Lacan. For instance, what is a political subject? Taking seriously the Lacanian notion of the subject of enunciation, I would say that a political subject is simply a "we" –the subject of a politicalenunciation. In modern times, you don't have to look far away in order to contemplate the rise and the pulsations of a subject of this kind. Who doesn't remember the opening words of the American Constitution: «We, the people...»? Here's

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an instance of political subject, of "we", the people of the United States of America, which is by the way a political subject still perfectly alive, as everyoneknows. Indeed, what I want to remark on immediately is that the political subject must not be confounded with the "constituent power". The example of America gives me the opportunity of clarifying this point, which is of some importance. Traditionally, from Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès to Carl Schmitt (including, more recently, Antonio Negri and others) the constituent power has been conceived as thepolitical force, I dare say the mystical force, which hides behind any juridical outfit named State. From this point of view, the res publica is always a knot, wherein two strings are tied together: the political and the juridical (jus publicum). As Schmitt put it in his Verfassungslehre, the «constituent power is a political Will whose power or authority amounts to the capacity of taking theconcrete, foundational decision about the species and the form of its own political existence».1 I won't analyze here this crucial reference to the Will, that represents the hard core of Schmitt's decisionism. Rather, I'd like to underline that for him the constituent power is nothing but the condition of existence of a State, namely of a modern State. Without the constituent power there would be noState. And beyond the constituent power there is simply nothing. Therefore, what I was calling a political subject («We, the people») is always caught by Schmitt in the movement of a Constitution, which is the foundational act of a modern State and remains in his view the essential political act. One can't go further and beyond this political act, which is the political act par excellence of thepolitical subject par excellence: the people, the nation (the heart of any modern Nation-State). «The people, the nation, remains the primal cause of every political event».2 The history of the United States allows us to look well beyond the "constituent power". Indeed, well before the Constitution, the American people, I would say America as such, was already born. With the Declaration ofIndependence, in 1776, a political subject was already in place and alive –so alive that it could bear a tremendous war of independance against one of the greatest powers on earth. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake (pace Schmitt) to describe this political subject as a "nation", although it was certainly a "people". In other words, we have to distinguish the people (populus) from the nation. In America,...