Another Kratos for the demos

Vladimir Safatle

Among the majors topics of the debate on radical politics, we find today a social
diagnosis that insists that our liberal democracies are in the process of emptying
popular sovereignty. According such diagnosis, we would increasingly be moving
towards a democracy without demos, in the sense of a political experience that
preserves the institutional appearance of a democracy while limiting the scope of
choices and decisions endorsed by popular sovereignty. It should be noted that
we are not just talking about a gradual shift of real decisions out of the forums
controlled by democratic representation. Forums that would be silenced by the
action of economic agents hegemonic within the processes of material
reproduction of neoliberal capitalism. We are also talking about a colonization of
political representatives by the limits imposed by economic power and their
form of naturalizing specific social organizations.
In this context, insisting that we move towards a democracy without
demos would be a claim for a shift in the process of deliberation to instances and
dynamics capable of being better controlled by popular sovereignty. Economic
power hangs over the heads of the population and the task of critical thinking
would be to insist on the necessary return of democratic power to its true
source. Hence the concept of "people," "popular sovereignty," and "democratic
deliberation" should shift to the center of our current concerns.
However, I would like to stress, even if this may sounds initially
paradoxical, that the recovery of the demos will not be exactly the responsible
for strengthening our democracies. For until today, the very concept of demos
has been bound by metaphysical presuppositions that are little discussed.
Presuppositions that are linked to a modality of the exercise of power and force
that should be the true object of criticism. The basic assumption I would like to
make is: there is no point in discussing the ways and the need to shift the true
center of deliberations on modes of social governance if the very concept of
"deliberation" is not criticized. There is a transformation in the concept of
deliberation with its correlates (consent, voluntary action, internal cause) that
must be the true condition for a social transformation with its emergence of new
political subjects. This transformation could better explain us
Aristotle understood the deliberation (bouleusis) concerned with what
depends on our will to be realized. We don’t deliberate, for example, on the
solstices or on the sunrise. We deliberate on what can be done in various ways,
on what is undetermined. For this reason, deliberation will be defined as the
rational search for the means to an end. Because it is a rational search for the
means, deliberation is the most typical exercise of the representative capacity of
consciousness. For better to deliberate I should submit all features of the
experience to the representation. It is only through this strategy that the decision
can be formed, with its non-violent consent. In a way, this scheme has remained
as the foundation of the understanding of emancipated political action. That is,
political emancipation would be linked to the ability of the subjects to deliberate
in view of the decision, taking distance from all that is involuntary, non-
consented, non-represented and moved by an external causality.
However, I would like to affirm that perhaps true social transformation is
not only linked to the empowerment of previously vulnerable and invisible
subjects, that is, to the displacement of the capacity for deliberation and decision
by the hands of one group to another. Emancipation will be, at its most
fundamental level, linked to a mutation in the very notion of the exercise of
power. There would be no real social transformation without a recomposition of
the very notion of agency. That is to say, we are not faced with a question related
to the change in the definition of "who acts?", But to a question linked to the
mutations in "how does one act?". Even if this question about the anatomy of
action would necessarily implies the very notion of what is a subject.
This is a way to also say that the emergence of collective subjects linked
to previously unreported and denied autonomy of groups does not necessarily
equate to a social transformation linked to the realization of emancipation
processes. If we think of emancipation from the paradigm of adulthood, of being
in the position of a subject of rights, then we may have the impression that the
mere submission of the self to the form of the individual who has rights and is
recognized in his majority of deliberation and decision may imply in structural
social transformation. As if the central problem of social life were linked to the
fact that not all of subjects are fully entitled individuals, not all have attained a
desired individuality understood as a general anthropological horizon for the
processes of emancipation. That is, as if the normative basis of our social
struggles was linked to the possibility of generalization of a mode of social
existence characterized by rational agency linked to the maximization of
interests, to the exercise of my ability to calculate and deliberate from interests,
such as is defined by the existence of the modern individual. The individual as a
mode of existence is often seen as a pre-political ground for politics and this is
the point that we should discuss. Because a structural transformation can not be
the mere transference of already existed figures of the subject and his agency. As
I said, a structural transformation is rather a question of decomposing the very
notion of agency as it has been thought so far. And to do so, it must be
understood that the fundamental concept in the debate about the recomposition
of democracy is not exactly "demos" but "kratos" and I would say that many of
the impasses that affect our political alternatives today find their source in this
polarity. That is, it is not about simply strengthening the demos, but about
allowing the otherwise social emergence of kratos.
To do so, we must first ask ourselves: what has been the kratos that
defines our hegemonic conception of democracy so far? What metaphysics does
it presuppose and accomplish? For this kratos is the very expression of the
demos ability to decide. It will express the implicit grammar of decision and
deliberation proper to the emergence of people in democracy. Understanding it
is the condition for having a better comprehension of what is the exercise of the
people's power in democracy.

Um demos que não sai de si mesmo

I would like to begin remembering how the strength of the demos in

democracy has so far been inseparable from an ipse. We’re dealing here with a
krátos that is the manifestation of an ipse, of a force to realize the condition of
being itself. We could even suggest as a definition: democracy seeks to appear as
the social space of manifestation of the force of being myself. The rationality of
democracy is based on the belief that subjects share a fundamental desire: the
desire to empower themselves with the force to be themselves. What is, in fact,
only the beginning of the problem, not its solution.
We can here remember such important Jacques Derrida’s statement in
Rogue: two essays on democracy: “By ipseity I thus wish to suggest some "I can,"
or at the very least the power that gives itself its own law, its force of law, its self-
representation, the sovereign and reappropriating gathering of self in the
simultaneity of an assemblage or assembly, being together, or ‘living together’, as
we say”1. Ipseity, being itself, appears here in a quite significant declination. It
appears inseparable from the capacity to give to oneself its own law, to represent
oneself and to be in assembly on condition that one stands in one own domain.
This presupposes a fundamental identity between law and case, between
representation and the represented, between being together and being in my
own domain. Such identity originates from a non-thematized overlap between a
metaphysical foundation and a political exercise.
Let us try to better understand this point. To insist that democracy is a
social space grounded on the force of being myself means among other things
that, however a democratic society may be an antagonistic society, a society
characterized by the recognition of the productivity of social conflicts, we
normally believe that such multiplicity of perspectives can be incorporate into a
demos, into a people, even if this incorporation expels part of the population
from the condition of people. This multiplicity can be incorporated into a demos
because the unfolding of multiplicity is the expression of a force that never
leaves itself. In democracy, people is the name of this movement to actualize what
never leaves itself, to put in assembly what retains its own determination. In this
sense, social conflicts appear as modes of unfolding a convergent force proper to
societies that act immanently, as if such societies were at the same time cause
and effect, origin and production. Let us remember, for example, Tocqueville
speaking of America as a democratic society par excellence, since it would be a
society that: "acts by itself and for itself. There are no authorities except within
itself; One can hardly meet anybody who would dare to conceive, much less to
suggest, seeking power elsewhere"2. Tocqueville's statement is interesting for
defining democracy as an emergent political body characterized by a certain
immanent potential univocity, even if such univocity actualize itself through a
multiplicity of voices.
Then we have what we can call the first metaphysical presupposition of
democracy: democratic sovereignty is the expression of the ipseity proper to
what can be the cause of itself, proper to what acts by itself and for itself. This
sovereignty rests on a more fundamental principle of sovereignty, namely, the
sovereignty presupposed by the very notion of -self. This is a central point,
namely, there is always an exercise of sovereignty in affirming oneself. We know
that self-affirmation is not just a constatative statement, but it is a performative
production that requires some recognized authority and strength. And strength
is necessary because self-affirmation is also a capacity for exclusion. It is only
1
Idem, p. 11
2
TOCQUEVILLE, Alexis; Democracy in America, p. 74
possible for me to be my own cause if there is nothing to remove me from the
legislation of myself, nothing that places me outside the jurisdiction of myself, of
my own domain. The exercise of such selfhood is a sovereignty because, as
Derrida will remember, it will be inseparable from the constitution of forms of
immunity, of self-immunity (and since Hobbes we see how sovereignty and
immunity are bounded). For I would say that the power that is an ipse would not
be able to affirm itself without being immunized mainly against what is
involuntary, unconscious, not subject to laws, contingent and that, therefore, can
only appear as a potential attempt on freedom. These figures of the involuntary,
of the unconscious, of the contingent are not only alterities. They are the
potentiality of another nomos, expressions of another order. An order that is not
configured in the form of will, of conscience, of necessity. Therefore, they are the
manifestation of a heteronomy that calls into question what we mean by agency,
by activity. They break the force that appears as "mine."
Thus, this democratic force that will also be a struggle for immunity, a
decision to immunize, is based on the defense that, those who acts, acts to unfold
its own domain. It is no accident that ipse, as Benveniste has showed, is
associated with a series related to power, possession, property, the authority of
the master. In fact, Benveniste seeks to explain why: "various languages
designate 'the master' by a term meaning 'himself'" 3 following for it the
deployments of *potis from Sanskrit. This allows him to show how identity and
mastery will always be related. What is ipse is available in the condition of
integral possibility of use, because it is an expression of my ability to dispose of
myself.
It may seem that we have here some form of anachronism, for it is not
difficult to see how that ipseity seems to be constituted from a notion of
autonomy which, after all, is modern. This notion is linked to the capacity to give
to oneself its own law, thus constituting a field of self-legislation and self-
government which has, in turn, the force of self-determination. Modern
autonomy realizes the idea that my determination will be an expression of
freedom just when it is the result of a self-legislation. This is one of the major
regulative ideas of our forms of life. What explains the reason that, even when we
normally engage ourselves in the critique of the dynamics of social alienation,
our criticism is normally made in the name of the rise of a potential self-
legislation, of an autonomy to come.
However, we can reverse this analysis and ask whether the modern
notion of autonomy has not been built on deeper and more original metaphysical
presuppositions. Let us ask what the notion of self-legislation necessarily
presupposes. What in modern autonomy perpetuates a mode of being whose
roots lead us to the “prehistory of modern subjectivity”? There is no point in
criticizing the legal paradigm implied in the very notion of "self-legislation" if,
after all, our criticism is guided by even greater presuppositions internal to the
very notion of autonomy. It is no use, for example, to remember that self-
legislation entails a legal notions of jurisdiction based on concepts of universality
and unconditionality, concepts that require the internalization of disciplinary
dispositive able to conform the self to the form of the subject of rights, if I can not
move out of what such a jurisdiction presupposes.

3
BENVENISTE, Emile; Vocabulaire de termes indo-européens, volume I, p. 90
 In this sense, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that self-
legislation and self-government are necessarily based on a much more decisive
and pregnant principle, namely the notion of self-belonging. For this reason, our
critique of the model of freedom as self-legislation will be ineffective if it is made
from the conservation of a principle that is the very foundation of modern
autonomy, namely, self-belonging.
We know a multitude of distinct philosophical strategies that will define
freedom as a form of self-belonging (such as, for example, the Stoics and their
notion of oikeiôsis, the Cynics and their notion of autarkeia, Spinoza and his
clearly juridical notion of sui iuris, Kant and his concepts of mündigkeit and
selbst-bestimmung, among many others). We could use a reading strategy that
will explore the obvious strong distinctions between such conceptions and even
show how they will produce different life forms. But we could also insist that
within this difference, within this dispersion there is still a common principle
that defines a certain limitation, which makes such a field of differences turn
around a common and seemingly insurmountable difficulty. A insurmountable
difficulty at least for us, that read such philosophical experiences through the
threshold of historical possibilities inherent in contemporary capitalist societies.
For the fundamental question here will be: which are the contemporary social
forms that shape and define the possibilities of realizing demands of self-
belonging? For our time, what does it mean to read and try to recover diverse
forms of self-belonging as a model of realization of freedom?
If we accept that freedom can not be understood only as an exercise of
individual expression, but that it is in fact a mode of social relation, then it will be
important to ask about the practical conditions for actualizing certain
philosophical concepts linked to the normative structure of the notion of
freedom. This gives to the philosophical activity a strategic character. There are
historical situations in which is impossible to make certain concepts explicit, at
least if we want to preserve the potential for emancipation that they were once
able to express. There are certain things that we can no longer speak of if we
want to accomplish them. I believe that such a presupposition holds for the
multiple and diverse forms of freedom as self-belonging.
Pois aceitemos que um dos maiores impactos do capitalismo encontra-se
na colonizaçã o de todas as formas de auto-pertencimento pela noçã o genérica de
propriedade. For in present historical conditions it is not possible to insist on a
form of belonging that is not expressed under the regimes of property. Within
our capitalist societies, all forms of belonging and possession were colonized by
a general form expressed in property relations. Self-belonging is, for us, equal to
self-ownership. It would not be possible for a reflection of political philosophy to
ignore this situation. It would not be possible to ignore that there is something
like a metaphysical force of capitalism, that is, a way proper to capitalism to
conform the general possibilities of existence and of relation upon the regimes of
property and commodification.

O exercício do não-pertencimento

If we accept this idea, then we will be forced to ask ourselves: what means to
exercise a force that is the exercise of an experience of self-belonging? For it is
probable that we are obliged to say that such force will always be necessarily
linked to the submission of the exercise of power to the affirmation of what
comforts me within the limits of my property and identity. This power confirms
social life in the illusion that it can deal just with what circulates always in the
form of the proper. Therefore, this exercise of power will necessarily be the
affirmation of a possession. However, it must be emphasized that in an effective
democracy, a democracy yet to come, agents will be in continuous dispossession
of themselves to be able to implicate themselves with processes that
deconstructs the person's system of determination and its properties. Effective
democracy could not be the affirmation of self-ownership. Instead, democracy
would be the emergence of political deprived of relation of property, even of self-
ownership. Such dispossession of properties is the condition to incorporate
processes that continually withdraw individuals from their supposed identities,
processes able to create a field of generic implication. There is a social plasticity
within effective democracy that we do not know yet.
What can this concretely means? Let us first recall some characteristics of
kratos. If we follow Benveniste again, we will see that initially kratos means force
or power. But the Greek terms for force are several: bia, ís, iskhús, sthénos, alké,
dúnamis. What then is the specificity of the force that is kratos? Starting from
certain relations with alké, Benveniste reminds us that kratos is usually linked to
the superiority of one who affirms his strength over others. It may be the
superiority of physical strength, superiority in combat, but it may also be
superiority in the assembly, in a exercise of power proper to the king or to the
chief. There are thus two values of kratos: "superiority, prevalence" in a test of
strength and "power of authority". These values denote a hero quality.
However, by going from the noun kratos to the adjective krateró s, a
significant change occurs. For the adjective can also mean "hard, cruel, violent" in
a sense that is far from being a compliment, because it indicates what causes
suffering, what hurts and destroys. Benveniste even speaks of two semantic
groups that must be seen separately. If the former designates a political and
moral quality that composes mastery, the latter never evolves to a political or
moral quality. The wisdom of the Greeks brought together political activity and
the exercise of cruelty, the imperious submission to the will of another, to the
same term. The affirmation of authority appears as an always possible
submission to the will of the other.
But what would be the release of the kratos from this hardness and
cruelty proper to the will of the other that seem to accompany it as a shadow?
We know the liberal way to get out of this impasse. It goes through the refusal of
a common force other than the agreement, the association between individual
forces. Even the scheme of the emergence of the general will in Rousseau does
not escape this strategy. The general will is a kind of collective individual force.
Because the limitation of the cruelty of the exercise of force is possible just
through the recognition of the field of properties of each individual or through
the calculation that each individual makes between what he loses by adhering to
common force and what he gains. That is, a calculation always made by
individuals and their conscious systems of representation.
Such a strategy prevents us from asking the question of another type of
cruelty: the cruelty necessary for reducing the existence to the possible forms of
what appears always as object of individual property. We end up forgetting to
ask ourselves if the greatest cruelty is not the one that leads to the annihilation of
individuals, but this that leads us to reduce the forms of existence and the
exercise of force to the forms of individuals' autonomy, to the exercise of the
interests that are constitute as representations of consciousness, which define
relations to the other in the preferential form of the contract and relations to
itself in the preferred form of self-legislation.
In this sense, let us think on what can be a kratos that would no longer be
the expression of the associative exercise of individuals, which would no longer
be based on the common deliberative capacity of individuals. Let us think of this
kratos in three levels of social relations: the relations to objects, the relations to
the subjects and the relations to oneself.
In this conference, I would like to pay special attention to a dimension of
social relations normally forgiven when it is a matter of emancipation processes,
namely, the relations to objects. For we are deeply colonized by the notion that
labor produces the right to possession. What I work on is mine. A people, as a
collective political subject, as a collective worker, should also appear as the
owner of objects in which he works. Following this scheme, social emancipation
is usually understood as taking possession of objects whose source of existence
are my work or the work of the people of which I am a part.
That is, "things" appear here as what is at the service of the person, what
can be submitted to a relationship of person’s ownership. We see here an
emancipation that does not escape the generalization of the relations of
ownership and usufruct connected to property. In this sense, we can even say
that only in a society of owners, a society in which the fundamental status of
member is confused with the status of owner, can exist "things." In societies
where "people" are free, the price to pay for such freedom is that "things" are
subjected to servitude. Thus, if St. Thomas affirmed that people were the domain
in which reason could exercise the mastery of their own acts, as the author of
their own acts, it is because, for us, things no longer act, they are activated by us.
But we may wonder whether the true concept of social emancipation
would not be exactly the notion of a society of free subjects, but rather a society
of subjects and free objects. Should the first stage of an emancipation process not
be the emancipation of objects, a necessary condition for a real emancipation of
the subjects? For if we accept that emancipation of objects is the first condition
for the emancipation of subjects, then we will be obliged to accept the existence
of a kratos that comes from things, which is the affection of things in subjects in
an involuntary and external dimension.
On the other hand, to speak about the emancipation of objects means that,
far from being instruments or possessions, things can appear as what cause us
and what act in us without being linked to the will of a person, to the deliberation
of a conscience, like these works of art that affect us without being the
expression of a person's deliberation. They are not only the sedimentation of the
circuits of stories that composed it, but also the force of their bodies, of their
matter, of the path of their own materiality, of their "own life." A kratos liberated
from the metaphysics of property would be the recognition of the force of things
in us, in our action. The exercise of this kratos would be the condition for a
society in which objects would affect us in their impropriety and
inappropriateness. That is to say, we are talking about a society in which objects
would be inappropriate, in which they would neither be individual property nor
collective property, but would be the expression that we live inside circuits of
objects that affect us and of which we do not own. A democratic society would be
a society where things no longer exist in the form of what can be possessed.
This interferes in the very notion of what we mean by "subjects." For
subjects will have the marks of the objects that affect them and which they carry.
They will bring a nucleus of the object in themselves, and this radically modifies
what we must understand by "itself." This emergence of a new political subjects
is inseparable from the emergence of decentred subjects: subjects descentered
by what appears to them as involuntary, non-consensual and opaque as an
object.
On the other hand, a kratos no longer connected to the force of remaining
identical to itself would be the exercise of acting upon what dispossesses us. This
means acting upon what deconstitutes our formation as a people. For this force
would not constitute a collective identity, nor an interdependence based on the
necessary solidarity before the recognition of our vulnerability. This model of the
cooperation of autonomous subjects is still very dependent on an agency model
marked by the domain of self, by the disciplinary domain of self from the
conscious definition of our system of interests.
However, a kratos liberated from this metaphysical presupposition would
open us to the possibility of relying on actions that deprive us of the condition of
agents bearing interest. Politics can became the space for the deconstitution of
identities and for the emergence of a common that is not only the limitless
extension of the potential of human relation but the integration of what has
hitherto been understood as nonhuman or as thing. Let us remember, for
example, the young Marx talking about a multilateral connection to nature that
could free it from the condition of mere object, opening the social experience to a
different way of thinking the dialectic between nature and history. Recall how
the French Revolution brought the recomposition of the relations between
reason and madness (the Pinel affair), even brought the possibility of a racial
indifference that could make these "things" that were the Haitian slaves the true
enunciators of the revolutionary ideals against the Napoleonic troops. Let us
recall how the Russian Revolution even came to discuss the abolition of marriage
as a way of opening up social life to the plasticity of relations between free
subjects. All these examples show how there is a biopolitics that another kratos,
liberates from its disciplinary ties.
To conclude, I would recall that such statements may sound, at least to
some, too generic. But I would argue that this is not a problem. Adorno recalled
once that the anticipation of the form of the reconciled society is an attempt
against the reconciliation itself. For mutilated subjects that we are can not
imagine what social freedom is without designing modes of organization that are
proper to a situation of civil war like this that we live in our daily class struggles,
in our struggles against state violence embedded in our liberal democracies. To
keep silent about what will be the government of another kratos is not
impotence, but trust on the plastic force of politics and its multiple localities. The
theory may lead us to believe that we have the desire and the ability to do much
more than we have done until now, theory can say that we have not yet gone so
far with our foce of negation, but it can not anticipate what refuses all projection.
For theory relies on what only emancipated practice in its local contexts can
produce.