Lior Barshack

Constituent Power as Body: Outline of a Constitutional Theology

The article attempts to contribute to the project of a political, or constitutional, theology conceived by Carl Schmitt, while criticizing Schmitts own accounts of sovereignty and constituent power. It is argued that Schmitt consistently advocated an immanent view of constituent power, namely, a view of constituent power as permanently present within and exercised by the community. The article proposes socio-theoretical, historical and normative arguments against immanent models of sovereignty, which are found to be inconsistent with individual autonomy and rights. An alternative model according to which constituent power vests in the absent, corporate body of the group is developed. Constitutional moments such as declarations of independence, revolutions, constitutional reforms, elections, impeachments, general strikes, amnesties, referenda and states of emergency are analyzed and construed as episodes of incarnation of an otherwise absent authority. The article ends with a critical assessment of Ackermans and Negris constitutional theories.

The Totemic Authority of the Court

This article examines the place of the court within civil religion. It is argued that every civil religion is rooted in a magical anchor that in contemporary democratic civil religions is provided by the court. While in most institutions of civil religion totemic authority is represented, in court it is present. Therefore, court proceedings are occurrences of magic: they are performances (rituals and ceremonies) during which the sacred Thing is present. In court, the law itself and the clerical community to which it was entrusted assume the characteristics of the sacred Thing. The law appears under two facets: on the one hand, it is a norm and a word while, on the other hand, it is a Thing devoid of meaning and reason. Formalism is a magical mode of thinking that treats law as a timeless and meaningless Thing. In the course of the argument, the distinctions between ceremony and ritual, between social structure and communitas, and between religion and magic are reformulated, and the concepts of zone of familiarity and clerical community are laid out in a nutshell.

The Sovereignty of Pleasure: Sexual and Political Freedom in the Operas of Mozart and Da Ponte

Abstract In a fragment on Mozart, Adorno suggested that under the old regime the humanity and sovereignty of the aristocracy were bound up with aristocratic libertinism. In Mozart’s time, Adorno noted, the bourgeoisie acquired sovereignty and humanity through the imitation of aristocratic libertinism. The view of sexuality as a source of humanity and freedom is implicit in Mozart’s works themselves, particularly in the operas written in collaboration with Da Ponte. However, Mozart was a libertine in a very mild and qualified sense. For him, humanity does not consist in the quest for pleasure but in the permanent confrontation with the contradictory claims of the enduring and the ephemeral, the inward and the outward. Humanity and freedom depend on enduring relations much as they are fostered by the pursuit of pleasure. Both poles of human desire seem to enhance individual autonomy vis-à-vis the social body. This essay sketches a view of the individuating and humanizing power of sexuality which finds an illustration in the radiant individuality of Mozart’s characters.

The Communal Body, the Corporate Body, and the Clerical Body: An Anthropological Reading of the Gregorian Reform

The Gregorian Reform was the culmination of one of the most thorough and impassioned engagements of Western society with the delineation of the sacred and the secular. The reform was propelled by a group of churchmen who strove to entrench the separation between the sacred and the secular spheres—between ecclesiastical and lay society—and give the sacred realm a solid institutional structure. However, the reform spurred processes of institutionalization not only within the Church but generally in lay society as well. It was followed by a large-scale development of temporal legal and administrative institutions. Lawyers, social theorists, and historians often refer to the Gregorian Reform as a crucial phase in the history, or rather prehistory, of the state. By virtue of its historical consequences, the reform is clearly suggestive of the broad social implications of different lines of demarcation between the sacred and the secular. The present essay is not written by a historian; its origin lies rather in an attempt by a legal and social theorist to comprehend, through various historical examples, alternative social strategies of deploying the sacred. The Gregorian Reform is adduced as a tentative illustration of general claims concerning the demarcation of the sacred and secular spheres, an illustration whose complexity incessantly opens up novel theoretical possibilities, almost to the point of defying the theoretical effort itself.

The Constituent Power of Architecture

The claim that law is grounded in representations of authority hardly requires justification. The article outlines one view of the power of representations of authority to subject society to the law, and attempts to shed light on the social significance of architecture as a medium of such representation. I will argue that representation sets apart the realms of the living and the dead while sustaining a complex relationship between the two realms. It houses the dead in a separate realm where they exercise authority over the living. Monumental architecture founds the authority of law, and the entire realm inhabited by the living, by relegating the dead to a separate sphere where they assume the position of ancestral lawgivers. Architecture can separate the living from the dead and anchor the rule of law by virtue of its claims to perpetuity and aesthetic form.

The subject of ideals

Abstract It is argued that ideals emerge in the course of the individuation‐separation process, preserving the narcissism of primary Thingness. Ideals form an essential part of social structure, as opposed to communitas, where individuation is suspended. The anthropological distinction between social structure and communitas is reformulated in psychoanalytic terms. Structure and communitas are shown to correspond to two alternative organizations of narcissism. Ideals and myths figure among the manifestations of the narcissism of structure. In the last section, certain explanations of the discourse of ideals are drawn from the preceding account. While the premises of the following reflections are broadly Kleinian, Lacanian concepts are supplemented, not on the basis of any definite synthesis but towards a piecemeal reconciliation.

Transformations of Kinship and the Acceleration of History Thesis

Departing from Durkheim’s assertion of the primacy of public time, I argue that time is manufactured through the legal organization of society in the form of a corporate body. As a corporation, society enjoys fictive immortality, and it is this legal fiction that allows the flow of historical time. The institution of time, and of the corporate structure in general, is made possible through the political triumph over communal aspirations for timelessness, oneness and death: aspirations for an eternal present, to which I refer as the communal body. The passage from a founding, pre-historical experience of timelessness into historical time is accomplished through the construction of a perpetual corporate body in place of a communal body that lacks a temporal dimension. I will argue that the establishment of historical time and of the corporate organization of society necessitates the normative regulation of sexuality. Thus, the relaxation of the traditional structure of historical time and of sexual morality in contemporary society are closely intertwined.