Abstract
This article sets out to offer a new reconceptualisation of the common good as the mechanism providing the temporal coordinates for revolutionary politics. The first section investigates the pairing of commonality and goodness, revealing its nature as a synthesis of apparently irreconcilable opposites. The second section examines how this irreconcilability is overcome, advancing the argument that to heal the divide, a double movement of definition and concealment is necessary, whereby the process of definition of what constitutes the common good is accompanied by an expropriation, or hollowing out, of meaning. The third section offers a proposal for overcoming this epistemological impasse about the nature of the common good, by contrasting chronos and kairós, chronological time and what in English can be translated as ‘opportune time’, and offering kairós as the chance to create, within the fissures of the totalitarianism of chronological time, the timescape for revolutionary politics. This proposal is carried on in the second part of this article, starting with ‘ Chronos and Kairós ’ section, where the concept of kairós is expanded upon and coupled with the Epicurean and Lucretian idea of the clinamen, the swerve of the atoms that introduces the element of chance against Democritean determinism. With the support of Antonio Negri’s reading of kairós and clinamen, the article argues in ‘Alma Venus: Love, Desire and Revolution’ section that these two concepts provide the spatial and temporal coordinates for revolutionary politics, in tension and critical engagement with Ackerman’s idea of constitutional moments, to conclude in ‘Conclusions: Kairós and Revolutionary Politics’ section, that the common good is to be defined as that which takes place and is identified/identifiable within these coordinates.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
‘Charactered in these shores/we may behold mankind’s/magnificent and progressive destinies’ from Giacomo Leopardi’s ‘The Broom, or the Flower of the Wilderness’ (Singh 1990, p. 321). Of Leopardi, Schopenhauer said: ‘But no-one has treated this subject [the misery of our existence] as thoroughly and exhaustively. He is entirely imbued and penetrated with it; everywhere his theme is the mockery and wretchedness of this existence.’ (Schopenhauer 1958, vol II, p. 588).
With reference to Hayek’s argument about competition in markets as an epistemological tool of discovery precisely in function, or better a replacement, of the common good (Hayek 1944).
This article has a long history and when I started writing, I could find little on these two crucial chronological categories to situate the space for political action, especially on kairós in its non-theological acceptation (for which see Tillich 1936). Since then, Kimberly Hutchings’s contribution (Hutchings 2008) has been published, to which the reader is directed for a much more in-depth and comprehensive analysis of these concepts in the development of world-political time.
The conceptual value of the Alma Venus will be analysed in more detail in the ‘Alma Venus: Love, Desire and Revolution’ section, including its ‘revolutionary’ facet. Here it is only intended to convey the feeling, as expressed in the incipit of the De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), Lucretius’ major poetic work and compendium of his Epicurean philosophy, of nature’s awesome and totalising powers of reproduction as a metaphor of capitalism’s equally totalising powers (Lucretius 2008).
I am using this term simply to refer to a landscape of time, with no necessary implications as to the multidimensionality of time, quite apart from the discussion of the binary distinction between chronos and kairós.
This definition might seem excessively simple and generalised, but for the sake of convenience it is adopted here as a ‘rough and ready’ distinction between, let us say, a theocratic or ethnically cleansed state and a multi-cultural democratic one.
Again, these seem to be uncontroversial assumptions on the value of democracy as process rather than as result.
This distinction might appear a bit awkward in English which, as often, does not distinguish semantically between the abstract and the concrete, or the general and the particular as, for example, French or Italian would.
I do not engage here with the distinction between a rational conception of the good as an object of knowledge and one grounded on its conceptualisation as an object of desire, or indeed on the formation of a community of values beyond (or below) a conscious, reflexive rationalistic approach to the definition of a community. This decision is dependent on an evaluation of the axiological trajectory of a community at its conclusion, rather than throughout the process of definition.
It would be better to consider these experiments in social democracy as short-lived exceptions rather than as models (apart from their strategic value as counter-weapons to full-blown socialism). This is said in no way as a criticism, more as a recognition that history seen in its longue durée might have a different view of this phenomenon than we do, living as we are in its immediate aftermath. Or maybe that is another trick of capitalism, of having made the social part of the histoire événementielle, as disposable as the media that convey it.
The commonality can be established provided these goods are those for which there is a recognised common need. The quality of common goods as needs has to do with their basic value, which admits in principle no exclusions. Another way to recognise them as common needs is the fact that their social value and their individual value will tend to coincide. For example, an individual’s need for water fulfils the same basic need as a group’s need for water. This characteristic makes needs different from desires, in which social value and individual value may normally differ. Several consequences derive from this basic distinction, the main one being that while needs can/should be regulated according to social and political criteria, desires should not be. This categorisation is consciously in opposition to Hannah Arendt’s exclusion of basic bodily needs from the political (Arendt 1958, p. 10). The consequent dangers of a depoliticisation of needs are to be seen also in the context, I believe, of the corresponding expansion of the ‘politics of desire’, in both facets, repression and of expression of desire.
As Kalyvas put it, ‘Ackerman deradicalizes the moment of constitutional politics’ (Kalyvas 2008, p. 169).
Neil Walker argues that democracy suffers from ‘empirical incompleteness’ and ‘moral or normative incompleteness’ and that this accounts for the ‘contingent necessity’ of constitutionalism (Walker 2010, p. 206). This of course means that constitutionalism, and constitutionalisation processes, far from being in tension with democracy, have been seen as acting as enablers of democracy. Walker questions the continued validity of this relationship under the conditions of globalisation and transnational legal networks. This debate has seized the international legal community (see most recently Teubner 2012), and goes beyond the scope of this article.
In a sliding scale of importance, where constitutionalism informs and normatively underpins democracy at one end, or at the other simply allows the procedural functioning of democracy, this reading of the relationship between democracy and constitutionalism sits uneasily at the procedural end. Uneasily because the expropriation process outlined in this article makes any such locating exercise quite pointless.
Theorists of the procedural, minimalist, nature of democracy and constitutionalism, include Schumpeter (1942, ch. 22).
One thinks of the right to a clean environment as paradigmatic in this sense.
An interesting, if customarily obscure, discussion on kairòs in Negri (2000).
The parallel between kairòs in its acceptation as Messianic time and Jetztzeit has been suggested (Agamben 2005, p. 215) and dismissed (Löwy 2005, p. 134, note 161). See also Arendt (1958, p. 208), where she talks about new events ‘breaking into the continuum, the sequence of chronological time’, in the context of her preoccupation with political freedom.
Arendt’s rejection of absolute beginnings can be elegantly side-stepped by a concentration on the kairotic moment’s capacity to provide a break from the future, i.e., creating the possibility of a different trajectory from that designated by the past. An insightful summary of Arendt’s argument in Kalyvas (2008, p. 223 ff). Benjamin’s ‘time of the now’ was equally past-oriented, as the possibility of a rupture, and at the same time a completion, of the past (Agamben 1999, p. 267).
I direct the reader for this to Hutchings (2008).
An excellent treatment of revolutionary politics that takes into account the notion of the extraordinary in Kalyvas (2008).
This misguided appropriation of residuality by the human rights discourse was described by Pasolini as the ultimate betrayal of the marxist dialectic of struggle, which the democratic intellectual turns into a ‘regressive civil war’ (Pasolini 1987, p. 120).
There is not the space here to deal comprehensively with this complex relationship and it is mentioned only to stress the possibility of a kairotic moment of revolutionary or progressive politics bringing into being a change in the law or a counter-hegemonic reading of the law. An example of this is given at note 33.
This is the Alma Venus of the Latin text; the translation ‘dear’ does not convey at all the etymological meaning of the adjective alma, derived from the verb alĕre, to nourish. The whole passage is replete with terms referring to renewal and reproduction, and with references to nature’s rebirth in the Spring.
Etymologically, the adverb derives from the adjective cupidus, in itself to be derived from Cupid, the god of desire and erotic love, equivalent to the Greek Eros.
Quoting the opening of this poem, Schopenhauer described this force [sex-relation] as the ‘invisible central point of all action and conduct’ (Schopenhauer 1958, p. 513).
In the Lucretian text, the exigum clinamen principiorum/nec regione loci certa nec tempore certo (Book II, 292–293).
Löwy notes how Benjamin’s conception of history, as outlined in his Theses, ‘rejects the pitfalls of ‘scientific prediction’ of the positivist type and brings within its purview the clinamen rich in possibilities, the kairos pregnant with strategic opportunities’ (Löwy 2005, p. 109).
For lack of a better term, the organicism of economic and legal regimes acting in concert. The literature on constitutionalism and constitutionalisation is vast and growing, and not feasible to reproduce in this article, which does not to wish to engage in this debate; see also note 13.
There he articulates the distinction between the right of proposal and of revision of a constitution; at pp. 1057–1069 the implications of this distinction are further explored; for Ackerman, it is precisely the ‘anomalous’ character of the constitutional Convention to be ‘the sign not of defective legal status, but of Revolutionary possibility’ (p. 1061).
It is difficult to declare with ease what a kairós moment might look like; for an historic example, I am thinking of the Italian Statuto dei lavoratori (Workers’ Statute) Legge 20 Maggio 1970 No 300, which was passed after the industrial action of Autumn 1969 (autunno caldo, ‘hot autumn’, as it was called), in itself the culmination of at least 10 years of political struggle. This is a piece of legislation of constitutional breadth and aspiration. The political mobilisation to guarantee the continued applicability of its Article 18 (unfair dismissal) to the present day, testifies to the symbolic importance that this legal instrument has acquired in Italy.
I owe to Emilios Christodoulidis the wording of this sentence, clarifying what the uselessness of the law means in this context.
This process of discovery of the common good against the framework provided by the constitution finds a parallel in the Schmittian localisation of the constituent people next to the constitution; see Kalyvas, note 19, 175.
Far away from the ‘procedural turn’ and the discursive practices criticised in the preceding sections.
References
Ackerman, Bruce. 1984. The Storrs lectures: Discovering the constitution. Yale Law Journal 93: 1013–1072.
Ackerman, Bruce. 1991. We the people: Foundations. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Potentialities. Collected essays in philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. The time that remains. A commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Aristotle, 1990. Politics (Trans. Harris Rackham). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Badiou, Alain. 2009. Theory of the subject (Trans. Bruno Bosteels). London: Continuum.
Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Theses on the philosophy of history. In Illuminations: Essays and reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, 245–255. Berlin: Schocken.
Bentham, Jeremy. 1907. Introduction to the principles of morals and legislation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De Beauvoir, Simone. 1948. The ethics of ambiguity (Trans. Bernard Frechtman). New York, NY: Citadel Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and repetition (Trans. Paul Patton). London: Athlone Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between facts and norms (Trans. William Rehg) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2001. The postnational constellation (Trans. Max Pensky). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Hay. 2008. The Federalist papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2005. Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. New York, NY: Penguin Books.
Hayek, Friedrich. 1944. The road to serfdom. London: Routledge.
Hutchings, Kimberly. 2008. Time and world politics—thinking the present. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Kalyvas, Andreas. 2008. Democracy and the politics of the extraordinary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kennedy, David. 2000. When renewal repeats: Thinking against the box. New York Journal of International Law and Politics 32: 335–500.
Löwy, Michael. 2005. Fire alarm. Reading Walter Benjamin’s on the concept of history. London: Verso.
Lucretius. 2008. De Rerum Natura (Trans. David R. Slavitt). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Luhmann, Niklas. 1986. Love as passion (Trans. Jeremy Gaines). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Negri, Antonio. 1999. Insurgencies: Constituent power and the modern state (Trans. Maurizia Boscagli). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Negri, Antonio. 2000. Alma Venus: Prolegomena to the common. Graduate Faculty Philosopy Journal 22(1): 289–300.
Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1987. Lutheran letters (Trans. Stuart Hood). Manchester: Carcanet Press.
Polanyi, Karl. 1944. The great transformation. The political and economic origins of our time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Rawls, John. 1971. A theory of justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1958. The world as will and representation (Trans. E.F.J. Payne). Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
Schumpeter, Joseph. 1942. Capitalism, socialism and democracy. London: Allen & Unwin.
Singh, Ghan (ed.). 1990. I canti di Giacomo Leopardi nelle traduzioni inglesi. Recanati: Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani.
Teubner, Gunther. 2012. Constitutional fragments: Societal constitutionalism and globalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tillich, Paul. 1936. The interpretation of history (Trans. N.A. Rasetzki and Elsa L. Tamley). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Walker, Neil. 2010. Constitutionalism and the incompleteness of democracy: An iterative relationship. Rechtsfilosofie & Rechtstheorie 39(3): 276–288.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Emilios Christodoulidis for his advice, to Lilian Moncrieff for her support and to the reviewers for their comments. The usual disclaimer applies.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Asteriti, A. Kairós and Clinamen: Revolutionary Politics and the Common Good. Law Critique 24, 277–294 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-013-9123-3
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-013-9123-3