Martin Deleixhe

Conflicts in common(s)? Radical democracy and the governance of the commons:

Prominent radical democrats have in recent times shown a vivid interest in the commons. Ever since the publication of Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom, the commons have been associated with a self-governing and self-sustaining scheme of production and burdened with the responsibility of carving out an autonomous social space independent from both the markets and the state. Since the commons prove on a small empirical scale that self-governance, far from being a utopian ideal, is and long has been a lived reality, a few authors have attempted to turn them into the conceptual matrix of their own account of radical democracy. Negri and Hardt, on one hand, Laval and Dardot, on the other, have jointly coined the term ‘the common’ (in the singular) to suggest that the self-governance quintessential to the commons could be turned into a general democratic principle. Though this is an attractive theoretical prospect, I will contend that it fails to account for an important contradiction between the two theoretical frameworks it connects. Whereas the governance of the commons depends on harmonious cooperation between all stakeholders which in turn relies on a strong sense of belonging to a shared community, radical democracy is highly suspicious of any attempt to build a totalizing community and constantly emphasizes the decisive role of internal agonistic conflicts in maintaining a vibrant pluralism. I will further contend that the short-sightedness of radical democrats on this issue may be partially explained by the strong emphasis in the commons literature on a related but distinct conflict, that which opposes the commoners to the movement of enclosures. I will argue, however, that this conflict is not of an agonistic nature and does little to preserve the dynamism and the constant self-criticism proper to the radical democrat regime.

Biopolitical Sovereignty and Borderlands

ABSTRACT Lately, it has been suggested in several corners of the “border studies” that Giorgio Agamben’s influential description of a new form of sovereignty—what one might call a biopolitical sovereignty—would provide an apt conceptual framework to tackle the ever-evolving nature of contemporary borders. My contention however is that border and borderland studies should approach Agamben’s conceptual framework carefully. For his depiction of a biopolitical sovereignty suffers from a conceptual flaw and could therefore prove misleading as a critical tool of enquiry to apply to borders. The forced pairing of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Carl Schmitt’s state of exception is, I will argue, unsustainable. I will first make that case at a strictly conceptual level. I will then substantiate my claim that Foucault’s and Schmitt’s views on sovereignty have different political implications by presenting two distinct conceptual developments on borders based on their respective work. I’ll show that while Foucauldian political sociology is mostly concerned with a diffuse network of control apparatus that substitute themselves to the physical border, neo-Schmittians rather turn their attention towards coercive materializations of the border. In conclusion, I will contend that, while control apparatus currently operates alongside militarized borders since the beginning of the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe, it is nonetheless wrong to assume that those two border regimes are mutually reinforcing.