The persuasive force of exceptionalism : radical democracy, Michel Foucault, and the limits of the modern subject.

• Main Author: Miller, Jacquelyn
• Other Authors: Walker, R. B. J.
• Language: English; en
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: Carl Schmitt; Politics; UVic Subject Index::Humanities and Social Sciences::Political Science
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1828/2393

Does a radical democratic pluralization of power seriously confront the problem posed to contemporary political thought by the current purchase of Carl Schmitt's political theory? Arguably not, given that the force of his approach lies not in the fascistic or dictatorial concentration of power but in his definition of sovereignty as consisting in exceptionalism, the practice whereby some agency, whether an individual or a group, decides the limits of the polity or decides what or who is fitting and appropriate to the polity and what or who is not, an inherently exclusivist act. While radical democrats attempt to overcome this problem of exclusion by being more inclusive and pluralist, they ultimately affirm this idea that the properly constituted polity, the condition of possibility of progress, emancipation, and pluralism, must be limited, excluding some forms of life while including others. They ultimately oscillate around this issue, arguing for more and more freedom and pluralization, while maintaining the need for limits. The nature of this problem stems from the ontology of the autonomous subject of modernity. In modernity, after nominalism removed God from creation, the human being came to assume disproportionate emphasis as meaning-giving subject, assuming the capacity to unilaterally determine what qualifies for existence and what does not. Just as the subject was conceived as self-sufficient in its own right, the modern polity was also so conceived. Thus, both modem subjectivity and sovereignty assume a solipsistic and monistic ontological form, in addition to being exclusive. Michel Foucault makes a concerted and sustained effort to comprehend and thus stop himself from replicating this problem, an approach far more promising than that of radical democracy, but is limited to the extent that he remains committed to freedom and human creativity and fails to see the onto-theological basis of the problem of modern subjectivity. The failure of his endeavor and that of radical democracy give a powerful indication of the persuasive force of Schmitt's theorization of sovereignty as consisting in the decision on the exception. The violently monistic and exclusive nature of this form of action indicates the need for a serious interrogation of the problem of the modern subject that continues to constitute the modern Western mode of inhabiting this world, limiting all transformations that fail to appreciate its ontological novelty and significance.