Destituent

Borrowing from the work of Hannah Arendt on revolution and Giorgio Agamben on the notion of "destituent power," this essay argues for a conceptual opening in our analytical framework that corresponds to the radical contingency that lies at the heart of any revolutionary process.

In his lecture on the concept of "destituent power," Giorgio Agamben argues, "A power that was only just overthrown by violence will rise again in another form, in the incessant, inevitable dialectic between constituent and constituted power." (5) In the post-2011 democratization processes, civil society has been integrated into this dialectic of a post-revolutionary reproduction of sovereignty.

Likewise, in his essay concluding this theme issue, Agamben asks whether today it has become necessary to imagine not a constituent power, but a destituent power that deactivates or profanes the dispositif--that renders its disparate elements and relations inoperative, opening them to 'new possible use'.

Based on a 2013 lecture in central France, it develops the notion of 'destitution' or 'destituent power'.

Responding directly to recent occupations and insurrections--from Cairo and Istanbul to London and New York City--Agamben builds upon his existing work in order to develop and clarify his understanding of the political and, in particular, the notion of destituent power (potenza destituente).

If the fundamental ontological question today is not work but 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].