Abstract

Abstract This paper examines the notion of destituent power in the work of Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. In contrast to constituent power's emphasis on the formation of a people relying on the metaphysical presuppositions this entails, including representation and identity, destituent power does away with such categories and renders them inoperative. This paper explores this gesture, together with the idea of a modal ontology that substitutes the “what” in the questions “what is being” for “how”. It is argued here that this reconceptualization has the capacity to reorient the mode of politics functioning to take account of power’s anomie and false promises to ever delay the catastrophe that has already arrived.

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