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Title: Destituent Power
Author: Hostis
Date: November 1, 2020
Language: en
Topics: destituent power; agamben; invisible committee; insurrectionary anarchism; riot; walter benjamin
Source: https://destituencies.com/2020/destituent-power-an-incomplete-timeline/

Hostis

Destituent Power

A Note For the Reader

A proper genealogy of the destitution thesis has yet to be written. The

names, dates, and texts that follow are necessarily incomplete. This is

because the very nature of destitution is something that interrupts. It

robs assumed modes of power of their sure-footedness by suspending the

judgement implied by “class,” “community,” “nation,” or “people” as the

ground on which to found a new form of authority. Even the name

“destituent power” feels paradoxical to us. Perhaps it is because the

word “power” seems to only roll off the tongue of those thirsty for

something more. This lust for abundance makes the power-hungry

condescend to the destitute. At most they treat it as a means to an end

as the cost of redemption, like a guerilla roughing it in the jungle

until they capture the glittering palace like a prize. What if

destitution itself was enough?

Despite its incompleteness, this timeline serves as a preliminary

documentation of both its actualization and counter-actualization (i.e.

the materialization of the idea and the idealization of matter). This

line zig-zags from the recent to the past, beginning in December 2001 in

the midst of an Argentine insurrection, next visiting reflections penned

from 1920 in Berlin following a right-wing putsch, only after which the

term arrives in roughly 2014 on the lips of radicals in the Global

North. And like so many things before it, the concept is treated like a

miracle delivered by a high priest (in this case, Giorgio Agamben)

rather than a term forged in the fires of struggle.

Insurrection climaxed on the 19^(th) and 20^(th) of December 2001 in

Argentina. Remembered through the chant “¡Que se vayan todos!” They all

must go!, the packed streets rejected both political parties and union

leadership. Perhaps for a time, it may have even seemed like the

government would never prop itself back up – a string of officials

foolishly ascended to the presidency only to fall. Participating in the

events by way of militant-research, Colectivo Situaciones named the

emptying out of government, “destituyente,” “power which
 doesn’t create

institutions but rather vacates them, dissolves them, empties them of

their occupants and their power.”^([1]) Curious is how the socialist

elements of North American anarchism reacted to these events. In

contrast, they saw a democratic Leninism at play in the neighborhoods

and streets. After touring the protests, they wrote back home about

organizational forms for “building power” on a mass scale, touting it as

a success story for ”direct democracy, popular assemblies, and

self-management.”^([2]) The lesson such North American anarchists took

from it had nothing to do with vacating institutions, but a testament to

how to found alternative ones.

Flash-forward to a published conversation from 2002 between Paolo Virno

of autonomia fame and two Colectivo members. About halfway into a

discussion on general intellect and exodus, Virno interrupts the

conversation to pose a question (a question that is laden with all of

the eurocentric elitism that one may hear): “Among the cultivated

Argentine comrades, Walter Benjamin is read?” To which, they

appropriately reply: “(Laughter). Yes, of course
”^([3]) Of course...

for it is Benjamin’s 1921 essay, “On the Critique of Violence” (“Zur

Kritik der Gewalt”), with its technical usage of Entsetzung, which

serves as the locus classicus of destituent power. Why? The events of

19^(th) and 20^(th) of December 2001 simultaneously marks both

Entsetzung’s incarnation via collective social antagonism and the

counter-actualization of destitution for understanding anti-state and

anticapitalist struggles. When Colectivo Situaciones clarify what led

them to the creation of ‘de-instituent’ power, they do so as part of a

larger set of reflections whose themes are none other than suspended

time, historical impasses, and what they call an exhaustion of a

historical sense (or what Benjamin identified as the poverty of

experience). The key: Entsetzung, which refers to the deposing of

sovereign power without its replacement. Entsetzung serves as the

ur-form of what now goes by the name of “destituent power,” understood

not only as suspension, abolition, and deposing, but also in terms of

die Entsetzung; that is, dispossession as our general condition.

Next comes 2014, which roughly marks the year of destituent powers’s

popular reception within various leftist milieus in the global North.

The two most widely circulated sources are speeches and fragments of

Giorgio Agamben and the books of the Invisible Committee. Yes, a

reception, but just as it is with every reception, a repetition. A

repetition that refashions the weapons inherited from previous

struggles. Consider two contrasting cases. In the closing pages of the

second chapter of To Our Friends, the Invisible Committee writes,

“Coming out of Argentina, the slogan ‘Que se vayan todos!’ jarred the

ruling heads all over the world. There’s no counting the number of

languages in which we’ve shouted our desire...to destitute the power in

place.” By linking destitution to the announcement of a collective

desire, the Committee directs our attention back toward the 2001

insurrections in order to grasp an arrested truth at the very moment of

its realization. As Colectivo Situaciones put it, “The multitude does

not present itself as people-agent of sovereignty. Nor does it operate

according to its instituting power. We believe that the powers

(potencias) of this new type of insurrection function in a

‘de-instituting’ way, as in the battle cry ‘Que se vayan todos!’ (all of

them must go).” The same, however, cannot be said for Agamben. In place

of the repetition at the heart of theoretical receptions, Agamben’s

wager is that the destitution of capital and its nation-states is not a

question of politics but of ontology; since the historical separation of

life from its form is the separation of the Being of Humanity from

itself. While this may seem a dubious characterization, Agamben himself

formulates the primacy of ontology in no uncertain terms when he writes:

“the machinery of government functions because it has captured within

its empty heart the inactivity of the human essence. This inactivity is

the political substance of the West, the glorious nourishment of all

power.” On this account, destituent power is said to be the deactivation

of the technique of sovereign power that splits forms-of-life into

animal/human, bare life/power, household/city, and even

constituent/constituted power.^([4]) That is, for Agamben, destituent

power is an attribute of the inoperative/inactive subject that is the

Being of Humanity; a power or capacity that wrests back life’s own most

possibility for assuming any form whatsoever from the truncated

existence that defines us as the subject of so many dispositifs.

If we could break chronological order by neatly folding time, we would

stitch together 2001-1921-2014 and more as the concept shuttled

back-and-forth through time. But for simplicity’s sake, we begin the

timeline with Benjamin. For the purposes of this document, we hold in

tension Benjam’s Entsetzung as that which links ‘de-instutent’

insurrections and the destitute as a process (rather than a people or

program) with no end. And with each passage, contemporary practices of

destituent power are simultaneously advances and problems. For us,

however, none hold meaning unless they are considered in light of powers

like patriarchy, gender, coloniality, antiblackness, globally-integrated

capital, and the state. Regarding the timeline itself, we have attempted

to keep our commentary to a minimum, and when unavoidable, have

relegated any remarks to the footnotes. The footnotes where we have

provided context, background, and theoretical formalization are in bold

and serve as clarificatory remarks to help situate the reader’s position

relative to the double articulation of destitution as idea in

insurrectionary praxis and destitution as collective practice in

partisan analysis. As a final note, we would like to draw the reader’s

attention to two sets of footnotes: fn. 12 and fn. 11 & 20. While

footnotes 11 and 20 document the differing translations of Entsetzung

employed by Agamben over the past 20 years – from its first appearance

in Homo Sacer I as “de-pose” to its appearance in his Epilogue to The

Use of Bodies as “destituent power” – footnote 12 serves as the

historical documentation of the collectivities and concrete situation

that led to the practical articulation of what ultra-leftists the world

over now simply refer to as “destituent power.”

Destituent Power: An Incomplete Timeline

1921: Walter Benjamin, Zur Kritik der Gewalt (‘On the Critique of

Violence’)

»Philosophie« dieser Geschichte deswegen, weil die Idee ihres Ausgangs

allein eine kritische, scheidende und entscheidende Einstellung auf ihre

zeitlichen Data ermöglicht. Ein nur aufs NÀchste gerichteter Blick

vermag höchstens ein dialektisches Auf und Ab in den Gestaltungen der

Gewalt als rechtsetzender und rechtserhaltender zu gewahren. Dessen

Schwankungsgesetz beruht darauf, daß jede rechtserhaltende Gewalt in

ihrer Dauer die rechtsetzende, welche in ihr reprÀsentiert ist, durch

die UnterdrĂŒckung der feindlichen Gegengewalten indirekt selbst

schwÀcht. (Auf einige Symptome hiervon ist im Laufe der Untersuchung

verwiesen worden.) Dies wÀhrt so lange, bis entweder neue Gewalten oder

die frĂŒher unterdrĂŒckten ĂŒber die bisher rechtsetzende Gewalt siegen und

damit ein neues Recht zu neuem Verfall begrĂŒnden. Auf der Durchbrechung

dieses Umlaufs im Banne der mythischen Rechtsformen, auf der Entsetzung

des Rechts samt den Gewalten, auf die es angewiesen ist wie sie auf

jenes, zuletzt also der Staatsgewalt, begrĂŒndet sich ein neues

geschichtliches Zeitalter [...] Verwerflich aber ist alle mythische

Gewalt, die rechtzende, welche die schaltende genannt werden darf.

Verwerflich auch die rechtserhaltende, die verwaltete Gewalt, die ihr

dient. Die göttliche Gewalt, welche Insignium und Siegel, niemals Mittel

heiliger Vollstreckung ist, mag die waltende heißen.^([5])

suspension of law [auf der Entsetzung des Rechts] coupled with the

violence on which it depends as they on it (ultimately, the violence of

the state) will give rise to a new era of history. If the dominion of

myth is already, in the present age, broken in places, that new ear is

not such an unimaginably distant prospect that a word against law would

take care of itself. However, if violence is assured of its continued

existence as something pure and direct, even beyond law, that proves

both the possibility of and the manner of revolutionary violence, by

which name the highest manifestation of pure violence by humanity should

be called. However, it is neither equally possible nor equally urgent

for humanity to decide when in a specific instance pure violence was

real. For only mythic violence, not divine violence, will be

recognizable with certainty as such, except in effects that defy

comparison, because the expiating force [Kraft] of violence is not

obvious so far as humanity is concerned. Pure divine violence is free

once again to adopt any of the everlasting forms that myth has

bastardized with law. It is able to appear in true war exactly as in the

divine court of the many on the criminal. But all mythic violence is

reprehensible, the violence that establishes law, which may be termed

the deciding kind; likewise reprehensible is the violence that upholds

the law, the managed violence that serves it. Let divine violence, the

insignium and seal, never the means of sacred execution, be called the

disposing kind.”^([6])

conditions) strike must count as a pure means. Two essentially different

types of strike...need to be described in greater detail at this point.

It was Sorel who...first drew a distinction between them...contrasting

them as political and proletarian general strike [...] The political

general strike demonstrates how the state will lose none of its

strength, how power passes from the privileged to the privileged, how

the mass of the producers will swap masters.’ Unlike this political

general strike...the proletarian version sets itself the sole task of

destroying the violence of the state. It ‘excludes all ideological

consequences of any possible social policy; its adherents see even the

most popular reform as bourgeois.’ ‘This general strike very clearly

proclaims its indifference to the material gains of conquest by stating

that it seeks to do away with the state
’ While the first form

[political strike] of withholding labour amounts to violence,

occasioning a purely external modification of the conditions of labour,

the second [proletarian general strike], being pure means, is wholly

nonviolent. The reason is that it occurs not in any state of readiness

to resume work after superficial concessions and some sort of

modification in the conditions of labour but in a determination to

resume only a quite different kind of labour, one not imposed by the

state — a total upheaval that this type of strike not merely causes but

actually brings about.”^([7])

the suspension [Entsetzung] of law with all the forces on which it

depends as they depend on it, finally therefore on the abolition of

state power, a new historical epoch is founded.”^([8])

1995: Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

fullness of man at the end of history—which first appears in Kojeve’s

review of Queneau, has been taken up by Blanchot and by

Nancy...Everything depends on what is meant by ‘inoperativeness.’ [...]

The only coherent way to understand inoperativeness is...as a generic

mode of potentiality that is not exhausted...in a transitus de potentia

ad actum [passage from potentiality to actuality].”^([9])

rather ‘de-poses’ (entsetzt) it.”^([10])

violence], which is maintained by mythical forms of law, in the

deposition of law and all the forces on which it depends (as they depend

on it) and, therefore, finally in the deposition of State power, a new

historical epoch is founded.”^([11])

2001: Colectivo Situaciones, 19&20: Notes for a New Social Protagonism

of the Spanish destituyente. A power which is, in a way, the opposite of

instituent: that doesn’t create institutions, but rather vacates them,

dissolves them, empties them of their occupants and their power.”^([12])

which we have talked about other insurrections. This one, the one of the

19^(th) and 20^(th), takes place by opening spaces that go beyond the

knowledges about other insurrections such as they existed in the entire

Marxist-Leninist discourse on revolution. Indeed, it was an insurrection

to the extent that we witnessed the disruption of an order that claimed

to be sovereign over the multitude [...] In fact, the movement of the

19^(th) and 20^(th) was more a de-instituting action than a classical

instituting movement. Or, in other words, the sovereign and instituting

powers (potencias) were the ones that became rebellious without

instituting pretensions...while exercising their de-instituting powers

on the constituted powers. This seems to be the paradox of the 19^(th)

and 20^(th).”^([13])

produce a ‘situation of situations,’ a center replacing the centrality

of the state it questioned. This was an experience of self-affirmation.

In it there was a re-discovery of popular powers

(potencias)...De-institution, therefore, seems to be a major signifying

operation: if the politics carried out in terms of sovereign institution

finds the point of its existence in the constitution of the social from

the state, de-instituting action seems to postulate another path for

practicing politics and enunciating social change. Such de-institution

does not imply an a-politics: to renounce support to a representative

(sovereign) politics is the condition...of situational thinking and of a

series of practices whose meanings are no longer demanded from the

state. We call aperture the combination of the action of de-institution,

which expands the field of the thinkable, and the exercise of a

protagonism that does not limit itself to the instituting functions of

sovereignty.”^([14])

2008: Mario Tronti, Sul potere destituente

today. Less important considering the fact that today it’s possible to

make a pure and simple criticism of existing conditions that is strong

enough to have the same aggregating, mobilizing capacity. And also

because we are no longer dealing with subaltern classes. The same kind

of work that we were talking about before, which is fragmented,

dispersed, and yet nevertheless at a higher level of consciousness than

traditional work – because it’s a question of knowledge workers – makes

possible a more realistic, less ideological discourse. Less messianic,

more immanent to the practice of effective struggle against one’s own

working conditions, more so than against those who manage those

conditions. Because the primary thing is not so much the project of

building something, but rather of destituting that which is, of throwing

that which is into crisis. That’s an idea I’d bet on. I think you’re

referring to destituent power as an alternative to constituent power,

whereas the various ideologies of the multitude continue to speak of

constituent power.”^([15])

idea. We’d need to think about it further, go a little deeper,

articulate the discourse a bit. Because in my opinion this might be what

gets us beyond the crisis of subjectivity. Subjectivity, especially when

once it became social subjectivity, with the possibility and with the

reality and practice of organization, was naturally constitutive; it was

the bearer of a positive project. In fact, it linked the struggle to the

solution of problems, more than to the actual reasons for the struggle.

This is kind of the logic in which the workers’ movement was trapped: at

times, it was less a critique of capitalism than a sermon for

socialism.”^([16])

2013: Giorgio Agamben, ‘For A Theory of Destituent Power’^([17])

conflicts. What shall we do, what strategy shall we follow? [...] I

think that we have to abandon this paradigm [constituent power] and try

to think something as a ‘purely destituent power,’ that cannot be

captured in the spiral of security. It is a destituent power of this

sort that Benjamin has in mind in his essay On the critique of violence

when tries to define a pure violence which could ‘break the false

dialectic of lawmaking violence and law-preserving violence’ 
 While a

constituent power destroys law only to recreate it in a new form,

destituent power, in so far as it deposes once and for all the law, can

open a really new historical epoch.”^([18])

2014: Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is a destituent power (or potentiality)?’

inoperativity, and if this inoperativity can, however, be deployed only

through a work, then the corresponding political concept can no longer

be that of ‘constituent power’ [potere constituente], but something that

could be called ‘destituent power’ [potenza destituente]. And if

revolutions and insurrections correspond to constituent power, that is,

a violence that establishes and constitutes the new law, in order to

think a destituent power we have to imagine completely other strategies,

whose definition is the task of the coming politics. A power that was

only just overthrown by violence will rise again in another form, in the

incessant, inevitable dialectic between constituent power and

constituted power, violence which makes the law and violence that

preserves it.”^([19])

Critique of Violence, trying to define a form of violence that escaped

this dialectic: ‘on the breaking of this cycle that plays out in the

sphere of the mythical form of law, on the destitution (Entsetzung) of

law with all the powers on which it depends (as they depend on it),

ultimately therefore on the destitution of state violence, a new

historical epoch founds itself’ (Benjamin, 1977, page 202).”^([20])

neutralized. Benjamin located this ‘destituent power’ in the proletarian

general strike, which Sorel opposed to the simply political strike.

While the suspension of work in the political strike is violent...the

other, as pure means, is without violence’ (Benjamin 1977, page 194).

Indeed, this does not entail the resumption of work ‘following external

concessions and some modifications to working conditions,’ but the

decision to resume only a work completely transformed and nonimposed by

the state; that is, an ‘upheaval that this kind of strike not so much

causes (veranlasst) as realizes (vollzieht)’ (page 194). The difference

between veranlasst, ‘to induce, to provoke,’ and vollziehn, ‘to

accomplish, to realize,’ express the opposition between constituent

power, which destroys and always recreates new forms of law...and

destituent power, which, in deposing law once and for all, immediately

inaugurates a new reality.”^([21])

it is first of all and only in a form-of-life that it can be carried

out. Only a form-of-life is constitutively destituent. The Latin

grammarians called deponents (depositiva, or, also, absolutive or

supine) those verbs that, similar in this regard to the middle voice

verbs, cannot properly be called active or passive...What do the middle

or deponent verbs ‘depose’? They do not express an operation, rather

they depose it, neutralize and render it inoperative, and, in this way,

expose it/ The subject is not merely, in the words of Benveniste,

internal to the process, but, having deposed its action, it is exposed

and put in question together with it. In this sense, these verbs can

offer the paradigm to think in a new way not only action and praxis, but

also the theory of the subject.”^([22])

potentiality or habit, it is the habitual use of a potentiality that

manifests itself as power of not...The destitution of the being-in-work

of the work (of its energeia) cannot be carried out by another work, but

only by a potentiality that remains as such and shows itself as

such...To destitute work means in this sense to return it to the

potentiality from which it originates, to exhibit in it the

impotentiality that reigns and endures there.”^([23])

2014: Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies

juridical order and that which conserves it that Benjamin thought in the

essay ‘Critique of Violence,’ in seeking to define a form of violence

that escapes this dialectic: ‘On the interruption of this cycle

maintained by mythic forms of law, on the destitution [Entsetzung] of

the juridical order together with all powers on which it depends as they

depend on it, finally therefore on the destitution of state violence, a

new historical epoch is founded.(Benjamin 4, pp. 108-109/251-252). Only

a power that has been rendered inoperative and deposed by means of a

violence that does not aim to found a new law is fully neutralized.

Benjamin identified this violence—or according to the double meaning of

the German term Gewalt, ‘destituent power’ – in the proletarian general

strike, which Sorel opposed to the simply political strike. While the

suspension of labor in the political strike is violent, ‘since it

provokes...only an external modification of labor conditions, the

second, as pure means, is nonviolent’ (ibid, p. 101/246). Indeed, it

does not imply the resumption of labor ‘following external concessions

and this or that modification to working conditions’ but the decision to

take up a labor only if it has been entirely transformed and not imposed

by the state, namely, a ‘subversion that this kind of strike not so much

provokes [veranlasst] as realies [vollsieht]’ (ibid.). In the difference

between veranlassen, ‘to induce, to provoke,’ and vollziehen, ‘to

complete, to realize,’ is expressed the opposition between constituent

power, which destroys and re-creates ever new forms of juridical order,

without ever definitively deposing it, and destituent violence, which,

insofar as it desposes the juridical order once and for all, immediately

inaugurates a new reality.”^([24])

ontological-political relations in order to cause a contact...to appear

between their elements. Contact is not a point of tangency nor a quid or

a substance in which two elements communicate: it is defined only by an

absence of representation, only by a caesura. Where a relation is

rendered destitute and interrupted, its elements are in this sense oin

contact, because the absence of every relation is exhibited between

them. Thus, at the point where a destituent potential exhibits the

nullity of the bond that pretended to hold them together, bare life and

sovereign power, anomie and nomos, constituent power and constituted

power are shown to be incontact without any relation...Here the

proximity between destituent potential and what in the course of our

research we have designated by the term ‘inoperativity’ appears clearly.

In both what is in question is the capacity to deactivate something and

render it inoperative—a power, a function, a human operation – without

simply destroying it but by liberating the potentials that have remained

inactive in it in order to allow a different use of them.”^([25])

2014: The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends

ruling heads all over the world. There’s no counting the number of

languages in which we’ve shouted our desire...to destitute the power in

place.”^([26])

dismantle its apparatuses, to set its symbols ablaze. To destitute power

is to deprive it of its foundation. That is precisely what insurrections

do...To destitute power is to take away its legitimacy, compel it to

recognize its arbitrariness, reveal its contingent dimension.”^([27])

abandoning our own legitimacy.”^([28])

2014: Colectivo Situaciones, ‘Crisis, governmentality and new social

conflict: Argentina as a laboratory,’

attacked the neoliberal state constituting practices capable of

confrontation in areas such as the control of money, or bartering; of

counterviolence, as in road blocks; and of political command over

diverse territories, as in assemblies; social movements, if we can still

call them that, currently confront new dilemmas about whether to

participate or not (and when, and how) in what could be called a ‘new

governmentality,’ thus expressing the distinguishing features of a new

phase of the state form and requiring us to problematize the concept of

social movement itself.”^([29])

2016: Gerald Raunig and Stefan Nowotny, “Introduction,” Instituent

Practices

destitution or varied figures of flight, defection, betrayal, desertion,

exodus. With the concept of destitution, we aimed at the potentials ‘of

a dis-position (Ent-setzung) which is not related from the outset to

performatively re-positing or re-instituting modified conditions of

acting, but to the opening of a field of changing possibilities for

acting.’ A ‘positive No’ which derives its positivity neither from

self-positioning nor from op-position, but from withdrawing its own

power from the grammars of existing lines of conflict and from being

taken into service by dominant formations of forces and desire. Such a

positive No is diagrammatical in that it crosses and abandons the

prescribed alternatives of existing grammars; and it is resistant in a

sense which cannot be derived from the negated because this resistance

has its truth in the formation of forces that withstand the attempted

impositions of subservience and deny them their cooperation, in order to

advance the capacity of these forces aloof of dominant formations. The

problem of destitution today presents itself less than ever as a

question of deposition of the old, which opens into immediate

reimposition and recomposition. It presents itself as the question of a

dis-position, an Ent-setzung, a suspension of the ways in which life and

living together are functionalized and subordinated to ends, an

affirmation of the simple fact from which these functionalizations

constantly nourish themselves as they simultaneously seek to make it

forgotten or even defamed: the fact that life and living together are in

no need of them in order to invent themselves.”^([30])

2017: The Invisible Committee, Now

dominates us, marking a rupture in the fatality that condemns

revolutions to reproduce what they have driven out, shattering the iron

cage of counter-revolution—this is the purpose of destitution. The

notion of destitution is necessary in order to free the revolutionary

imagination of all the old constituent fantasies that weigh it down, of

the whole deceptive legacy of the French Revolution. It is necessary to

intervene in revolutionary logic, in order to establish a division

within the idea of insurrection. For there are constituent

insurrections, those that end like all the revolutions up to now have

ended [...] And there are destituent insurrections, such as May 68, the

Italian creeping May and so many insurrectionary communes
”^([31])

isolation; to abandon; put aside, let drop, knock down; to let down,

deceive. Whereas constituent logic crashes against the power apparatus

it means to take control of, a destituent potential is concerned instead

with escaping from it, with removing any hold on it which the apparatus

might have, as it increases its hold on the world in the separate space

that it forms. Its characteristic gesture is exiting, just as the

typical constituent gesture is taking by storm [...] Thus, where the

‘constituents’ place themselves in a dialectical relation of struggle

with the ruling authority in order to take possession of it, destituent

logic obeys the vital need to disengage from it. It doesn’t abandon the

struggle, it fastens on to the struggle’s positivity.”^([32])

attack the need we have of it.”^([33])

even mount a frontal fight, it neutralizes it, empties it of its

substance, then steps to the side and watches it expire. It reduces it

down to the incoherent ensemble of its practices and makes decisions

about them.”^([34])

The traditional revolutionary program involved a reclaiming of the

world, an expropriation of the expropriators, a violent appropriation of

that which is ours, but which we have been deprived of. But here’s the

problem: capital has taken hold of every detail and every dimension of

existence. It has created a world in its image [...] In doing so, it has

reduced to very little the share of things in this world that one might

want to reappropriate. Amazon’s warehouses, the expressways, ad

agencies, high-speed trains, Dassault, La Defense business complex,

auditing firms, nanotechnologies, supermarkets and their poisonous

merchandise? Who imagines a people’s takeover of industrial farming

operations where a single man plows 400 hectares of eroded ground at the

wheel of his megatractor piloted via satellite? No one with any

sense.”^([35])

things.”^([36])

wrecking, and all at once, in the same gesture.”^([37])

opponent. Whoever takes the cops for an opponent prevents themselves

from breaking through the obstacle the police constitute. To

successfully sweep them aside, we must aim beyond them. Against the

police, the only victory is political. Disorganizing their ranks,

stripping them of all legitimacy, reducing them to powerlessness,

keeping them at a good distance, giving oneself more room for maneuver

at the right moment and at the places one chooses: this is how we

destitute the police.”^([38])

Latin, also means to disappoint. All expectations will be disappointed.

From our singular experience, our encounters, our successes, our

failures, we draw a clearly partisan perception of the world, which

conversation among friends refines. Anyone who finds a perception to be

correct is adult enough to draw the consequences from it, at least a

kind of method.”^([39])

the destitution of economy. Economy rests on a pair of fictions,

therefore, that of society and that of the individual. Destituting it

involves situating this false antinomy and bringing to light that which

it means to cover up.”^([40])

2018: Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, Climate Leviathan

that underwrites Marx’s critique of sovereignty and of communism
 His

clearest statement on the matter is a refusal of the possibility that

revolutionary thought can ‘know’ in a definitive manner where

revolutionary activity is going. Communism, he wrote, is ‘not a state of

affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will]

have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which

abolishes the present state of things, the conditions of this movement

result from the premises now in existence.’ The second opening might be

grounded in Benjamin’s call for politically resolute witness to crisis,

a stance that finds affirmation in Agamben’s appeal to a ‘coming

community’ and ‘destituent’ power. We wager we need to say yes and yes,

affirming both positions at once. In this view, Climate X is at once a

means, a regulative ideal, and, perhaps, a necessary condition for

climate justice.”^([41])

2018: José Luis Fernåndez Casadevante Kois, Nerea Morån, Nuria del Viso,

‘Madrid’s Community Gardens’

injustices suffered by subordinate or oppressed social groups become

politicized, either in the form of silent rebellions that remain latent

in everyday life or through challenges that are publicly and openly

declared. The forms this collective action takes have varied over time,

due to factors such as technological developments, cultural changes or

socio-institutional processes. The idea of counter-power has always been

ambivalent: on the one hand, it is defined negatively by its capacity to

say NO and prevent the hegemonic elites from carrying out their agenda;

on the other, it transmits an assertive strength, a capacity to say YES

and deploy new sensibilities, desires, ways of organizing and

alternative lifestyles. Destituent and constituent power are two sides

of the same coin.”^([42])

2019: Lundi Matin, ‘Next Stop: Destitution’

the system intends to keep going. It is this that defines the situation

as insurrectional, as even the police openly admit. On their side, the

people have the numbers, as well as their courage, joy, intelligence,

and naivety. On the other side, the system has its army, its police, its

media, and the deception and fear of the bourgeois. Since the 17^(th) of

November, the people have had recourse to two complementary levers:

economic blockades, and the Saturday assaults on the government

districts. These are each complementary, since the economy is the

reality of the system, while the government provides its symbolic

representation. To truly destitute them both, it is necessary to attack

them both. This goes for Paris no less than the rest of the territory:

to burn a prefecture and to storm the Elysée are a single and sole

gesture. Every Saturday since the 17^(th) of November, people in Paris

have been magnetically focused on the same goal: storming the enclaves

of government [marcher sur le reduit governmental]. From one week to the

next, the only difference lies in (1) the increasing scale of the police

apparatus set up in order to prevent it, and (2) the experience

accumulated through the previous weekend’s failure. If there are a lot

more people with swimming goggles and gas masks this Saturday, it’s not

because ‘organized groups of rioters’ have ‘infiltrated the

demonstration.’ Rather, it’s because people were gassed extensively the

week before, and they drew the same conclusion any sensible person

would: better come equipped the next time. And anyway, we’re not talking

about demonstrations, but an uprising.”^([43])

2020: Rodrigo Karmy, ‘The Destituent Moment of the Chilean October’

not a ‘higher phase’ but precisely a ‘lower phase,’ what Benjamin might

have called a ‘weak’ response that never allows itself to be reduced to

the populist logic’s ‘demands for equivalence’ and its institutional

politics. When high school students say ‘evade’ and invoke ‘no fear’ as

an attitude against power, they turn the political moment into a

destituent festival where images regain their life and bodies regain

their strength. Life sees to it that imagining, acting and thinking come

together in a single intensity and that bodies break down the mechanisms

that subdue them. In this sense, it seems to me that the novelty is that

the revolt emerges without a philosophy of history, in a properly comic

gesture that does not even attempt to seize power or to negotiate with

it, but rather to lay it bare, to expose its radically arbitrary

character, its lack of any foundation. In other words, the experience of

popular insurrection takes on a destituent character (as Agamben

suggests, picking up the trail where Benjamin left it with respect to

power (potencia), or Lacan with respect to the clinic) in which

power-knowledge is deposed, and in which the people assume, for once,

that there is nothing and no one ‘behind’ (or beyond) it coming to save

them.”^([44])

Space 2014, volume 32, 65–74, 70.

[1] Colectivo Situaciones, 19&20: Notes for a New Social Protagonism,

tr. Nate Holdren & Sebastian Touza (Minor Compositions: New York, 2011),

254.

[2] Various Authors, “Que se vayan todos! — Out with them all!:

Argentina’s Popular Rebellion,” Fifth Estate 359, Winter 2002–2003.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/various-authors-que-se-vayan-todos-out-with-them-all-argentina-s-popular-rebellion

[3] https://exodusarchives.wordpress.com/2012/12/17/general-intellect-exodus-multitude/

[4] Sorry readers, this stilted language is not our doing but his.

[5] Walter Benjamin Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II.1, herausgegeben von

R. Tiedemann e H. SchweppenhÀuser, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 1999, S.

179–204, 202–03. We would like to thank Michael Kryluk for his advice in

navigating the many valences of Entsetzung and die Entsetzung, in both

Benjamin and Agamben’s work.

[6] Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, tr. J. A.

Underwood (Penguin: Stirlingshire, England, 2009), 1–28, 27–8, emphasis

ours. Entsetzung, in this passage, refers not only to the suspension of

the law but to the interruption of the dialectical oscillation between

constituted (law upholding violence) and constituent power (law founding

violence). Suspension, interruption, rupture constitute the semantic

world of Benjaminian Entsetzung.

[7] Ibid, 17–8. This passage, while not making use of Entsetzung, is one

of Benjamin’s clearest descriptions of the difference between the

constituent logic/praxis of the political strike and the destituent

logic/praxis of the proletarian general strike.

[8] Walter Benjamin, Reflections, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Schocken Books:

New York,1978), 300.

[9] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr.

Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press: Stanford, CA 1998 ),

61–2.

[10] Ibid, 64. Significant here is Agamben’s translation of Entsetzt as

“depose.” What is more, not only does he translate Entsetzt as “depose”

in his own work, he makes use of this same translation when translating

Benjamin from the original German.

[11] Ibid, 63, our emphasis.

[12] Colectivo Situaciones, 19&20: Notes for a New Social Protagonism,

tr. Nate Holdren & Sebastian Touza (Minor Compositions: New York, 2011),

254.

[13] Ibid, 52. This distinction between destituent and constituent

insurrections will be reproduced by the Invisible Committee in Now

(2017). See fn. 28 of this text.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Mario Tronti and Adriano Vinale, “Sul potere destituente,” La Rosa

di Nessuno — Potere destituente — Pouvoir destituant (Milano, Mimesis:

2008), 23–44, 28. Thank you to Daniel Spaulding for the translation.

English translation of the full interview forthcoming.

[16] Ibid. It is worth underscoring, here, that while Tronti’s interview

may be little known or read in Anglophone, leftist, milieus, it was not

unknown to Giorgio Agamben, who, in his 2014 text, ‘What is Destituent

Power?’ characterizes Tronti’s assessment in the following terms:

“Tronti alludes in an interview to the idea of a “potere destituente”

without managing in any way to define it. Coming from a tradition in

which the identification of a subjectivity was the fundamental political

element, he seems to link it to the twilight of political

subjectivities. For us, who begin from that twilight, and from the

putting into question of the very concept of subjectivity, the problem

presents itself in different terms” (“What is a destituent power?,” 70).

We leave it to the reader to assess the accuracy of Agamben’s remark for

themselves. All we would say at this juncture is that Tronti’s

characterization of subjectivity as the trap for every revolutionary

movement appears to approximate, almost to the point of indistinction,

Agamben’s insistence upon the necessity of de-subjectifying practices; a

tactical necessity that itself presupposes a vision of subjectivity as

arrested abolition.

[17] Transcript of a lecture delivered on 16/11/2013, wherein destituent

power is offered as a response to questions of anti-statist political

strategy.

http://www.chronosmag.eu/index.php/g-agamben-for-a-theory-of-destituent-power.html

[18] Ibid.

[19] Giorgio Agamben, “What is a destituent power (or potentiality)?”

Environment and Planning D: Society and

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid, 71.

[22] Ibid, 72.

[23] Ibid, 73.

[24] Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, tr. Adam Kotsko (Stanford

University Press: Stanford, CA 2015), 268–69. This passage contains

Agamben’s new translation of Entsetz. Instead of translating

Entsetzung/Entsetzt as “de-pose,” which was Agamben’s preferred

translation in Homo Sacer I, here Entsetzung becomes destitution pure

and simple.

[25] Ibid, 272–73.

[26] The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, tr. Robert Hurley

(Semiotext(e): Los Angeles, CA 2014), 72.

[27] Ibid, 75.

[28] Ibid, 77.

[29] Colectivo Situaciones, “Crisis, governmentality and new social

conflict: Argentina as a laboratory,” ephemera: theory & politics in

organization, vol. 14(3), 2014, 395–409, 397.

[30] Gerald Raunig and Stefan Nowotny, New Introduction to the Revised

Edition of Instituent Practices (2016).

https://transversal.at/blog/Instituierende-Praxen-Introduction?hl=destituent

[31] The Invisible Committee, Now, tr. Robert Hurley (Semiotext(e): Los

Angeles, 2017), 76.

[32] Ibid, 78–9.

[33] Ibid, 80.

[34] Ibid, 81–2.

[35] Ibid, 84–5.

[36] Ibid, 89.

[37] Ibid, 88–9.

[38] Ibid, 122–23.

[39] Ibid, 128.

[40] Ibid, 137.

[41] Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, Climate Leviathan : A Political

Theory of Our Planetary Future (London, New York: Verso, 2018), 183.

“Climate X” is what Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright’s dub one possible

form of an anti-authoritarian and internationalist climate justice

movement capable of integrating the history and lessons of

anti-capitalist struggles and the knowledges and practices of indigenous

and colonized peoples into a single movement. For them, it is equally

important for climate justice movements to avoid the seductive fantasy

of a planetary communist sovereignty that would strictly regulate and

police the world’s energy consumption (what they dub “Climate Mao”) just

as it is important to reject the trappings of any liberal optimism that

encourages movements to reinvest their political energy into stricter

cap and trade deals and the passage of legally binding environmental

agreements between nation-states and international governing bodies.

Against these two options, Mann and Wainwright view a fusion of the

vision of communism articulated in The German Ideology with the

Benjaminian/Agambenian appeals to destituent power as the revolutionary

way forward in light of an ever warming planet.

[42] https://longreads.tni.org/stateofpower/madrids-community-gardens

[43] http://ill-will-editions.tumblr.com/post/180774090884/next-stop-destitution-published-on-lundi-matin

[44] https://illwilleditions.com/the-destituent-moment-of-the-chilean-october/