"The prior equation, the one brutally enforced by the Mubarak regime and relied upon for its international legitimacy, had been simple: the more democratic freedoms enjoyed by Egyptians, the more risk of Islamic fundamentalist rule. Regional “stability” and its necessary condition, that is, a certain secularity, could thus be bought by various freedoms. The question of religion or secularism determines the political future. In their articles in the most recent issue of American Ethnologist, Hussein Agrama and Charles Hirschkind address one of the most striking features of the Egyptian uprising: the extent to which it defied precisely this religious–secular binary. It’s not just that the various mobilizations brought together Islamists and secularists, though it did, nor that the properly political demands of the protestors were somehow outside the religious–secular binary. Rather, they each variously argue, the mobilization itself “unfolded without the question ‘secular or religious?’ ever imposing itself on the expressions of popular sovereignty.” That is, the Egyptian protest movement forged a practice of political solidarity indifferent to the secular and religious polarities that had structured the space of political possibility in Egypt."

http://biqbal.wordpress.com/2012/08/13/13-08-12/#more-1029


the second is linked to in the first, written by agrama, and discusses the notion of bare sovereignty and asecularity:

"The approach to secularism as a historical problem-space, and the central role of the state’s sovereign power within it, has consequences for some of the critical claims of political theology. It may also help to frame the recent events in Egypt in a particularly revealing light. The fact that it is state sovereignty that ultimately decides where to draw a line between religion and politics means that it is a power that stands, importantly, prior to religion and politics. Since it stands prior to both, it cannot be pinned down to either. In other words, pace Carl Schmitt, some significant political concepts are not secularized theological concepts. This is especially the case with state sovereignty, because it stands prior to religion and politics and decides the distinction between them. Importantly, however, while state sovereign power stands prior to religion and politics, it is not indifferent to the question of how to distinguish and separate them.

This conception of state sovereignty contrasts with the manifestation of sovereignty that we saw in the protests. From the vantage point of the tradition of democratic legitimacy, the protests were a manifestation of pure popular sovereignty. I will contrast this to state sovereignty by calling it “bare sovereignty.” Like state sovereignty, bare sovereignty stands prior to religion and politics. Unlike state sovereignty, however, this bare sovereignty is utterly indifferent to the question of where to draw a line between them. It stands apart from the modern game of defining and distinguishing religion and politics, and does not partake of it. Not surprisingly, the protests expressed every potential language of justice, secular or religious, but embraced none. In the sense that it stands prior to religion and politics, and that it is indifferent to the question of their distinction, the bare sovereignty manifested by the protest movement stands outside the problem-space of secularism. In that sense, it represents a genuinely asecular power."

http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/03/11/asecular-revolution/

Has the time not come for those who have believed that their hearts should become humbly submissive at the remembrance of Allah and what has come down of the truth? And let them not be like those who were given the Scripture before, and a long period passed over them, so their hearts hardened; and many of them are defiantly disobedient.

lol

babyfinland posted:

Crow posted:

isnt this asecular power a precursor to "modernity"? always a space that opens to re-imagine modernity? in that it's happened many times, something that isnt just imagined in Egypt or the Arab Spring?

what? no. secularism is a constitutive part of modernity.

what do you mean no, how do you explain the 20th and 19th century utopian revolutions?

Perhaps nowhere else does the paradox of sovereignty show itself so fully as in the problem of constituting power and its relation to constituted power. Both theory and positive legislation have always encountered difficulties in formulating and maintaining this distinction in all its weight. "The reason for this," a recent treatise of political science reads,

is that if one really means to give the distinction between constituting power and constituted power its true meaning, it is necessary to place constituting and constituted power on two different levels. Constituted powers exist only in the State: inseparable from a preestablished constitutional order, they need the State frame, whose reality they manifest. Constituting power, on the other hand, is situated outside the State; it owes nothing to the State, it exists without it, it is the spring whose current no use can ever exhaust. (Burdeau, Traite, p. 173)

Hence the impossibility of harmoniously constructing the relation between the two powers-an impossibility that emerges in particular not only when one attempts to understand the juridical nature of dictatorship and of the state of exception, but also when the text of constitutions themselves foresees, as it often does, the power of revision. Today, in the context of the general tendency to regulate everything by means of rules, fewer and fewer are willing to claim that constituting power is originary and irreducible, that it cannot be conditioned and constrained in any way by a determinate legal system and that it necessarily maintains itself outside every constituted power. The power from which the constitution is born is increasingly dismissed as a prejudice or a merely factual matter, and constituting power is more and more frequently reduced to the power of revision foreseen in the constitution.

As early as the end of the First World War, Benjamin criticized this tendency with words that have lost none of their currency. He presented the relation between constituting power and constituted power as the relation between the violence that posits law and the violence that preserves it:

If the awareness of the latent presence of violence in a legal institution disappears, the juridical institution decays. An example of this is provided today by the parliaments. They present such a well-known, sad spectacle because they have not remained aware of the revolutionary forces to which they owe their existence.... They lack a sense of the creative violence of law that is represented in them. One need not then be surprised that they do not arrive at decisions worthy of this violence, but instead oversee a course of political affairs that avoids violence through compromise. (Benjamin, "Zur Kritik der Gewalt," p. 144)

But the other position (that of the democratico-revolutionary tradition), which wants to maintain constituting power in its sovereign transcendence with respect to every constituted order, threatens to remain just as imprisoned within the paradox that we have tried to describe until now. For if constituting power is, as the violence that posits law, certainly more noble than the violence that preserves it, constituting power still possesses no title that might legitimate something other than law-preserving violence and even maintains an ambiguous and ineradicable relation with constituted power.

From this perspective, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes's famous statement, "The constitution first of all presupposes a constituting power," is not, as has been claimed, a simple truism: it must rather be understood in the sense that the constitution presupposes itself as constituting power and, in this form, expresses the paradox of sovereignty in the most telling way. Just as sovereign power presupposes itself as the state of nature, which is thus maintained in a relation of ban with the state of law, so the sovereign power divides itself into constituting power and constituted power and maintains itself in relation to both, positioning itself at their point of indistinction. Sieyes himself was so conscious of this implication as to place constituting power (identified in the "nation") in a state of nature outside the social tie: "One must think of the nations of the earth," he writes, "as individuals, outside the social tie ... in the state of nature" (Sieyes, Qu'est ce que le Tiers Etat?, p. 83).

Hannah Arendt, who cites this line in On Revolution, describes how sovereignty was demanded in the course of the French Revolution in the form of an absolute principle capable of founding the legislative act of constituting power. And she shows well how this demand (which is also present in Robespierre's idea of a Supreme Being) ultimately winds up in a vicious circle:

What he (Robespierre) needed was by no means just a "Supreme Being"-a term which was not his-he needed rather what he himself called an "Immortal Legislator" and what, in a different context, he also named a "continuous appeal to justice." In terms of the French Revolution, he needed an ever-present transcendent source of authority that could not be identified with the general will of either the nation or the Revolution itself, so that an absolute Sovereignty-Blackstone's "despotic power"-might bestow sovereignty upon the nation, that an absolute Immortality might guarantee, if not immortality, then at least some permanence and stability to the republic. (Arendt, On Revolution, p. 185)

Here the basic problem is not so much how to conceive a constituting power that does not exhaust itself in a constituted power (which is not easy, but still theoretically resolvable), as how clearly to differentiate constituting from constituted power, which is surely a more difficult problem. Attempts to think the preservation of constituting power are certainly not lacking in our age, and they have become familiar to us through the Trotskyite notion of a "permanent revolution" and the Maoist concept of "uninterrupted revolution." Even the power of councils (which there is no reason not to think of as stable, even if de facto constituted revolutionary powers have done everything in their power to eliminate them) can, from this perspective, be considered as a survival of constituting power within constituted power. But the two great destroyers of spontaneous councils in our time-the Leninist party and the Nazi party-also present themselves, in a certain sense, as the preservers of a constituting moment alongside constituted power. It is in this light that we ought to consider the characteristic "dual" structure of the great totalitarian states of our century (the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany), which has made things so difficult for historians of public law. The structure by which the State party tends to appear as a duplicate of the State structure can then be considered as a paradoxical and interesting technico-juridical solution to the problem of how to maintain constituting power. Yet it is just as certain that in both of these cases, constituting power either appears as the expression of a sovereign power or does not let itself easily be separated from sovereign power. The analogy between the Soviet Union and the Nazi Reich is even more compelling insofar as in both cases, the question "Where?" is the essential one once neither the constituting power nor the sovereign can be situated wholly inside or altogether outside the constituted order.

babyfinland posted:

well thats incorrect. in both cases the question of secularism was key in the establishment of a new state sovereignty. by the time of their conclusion neither event was asecular nor demonstrative of bare sovereignty.

from homo sacer: