"Let us first remember Machiavelli, particularly one aspect of his thought which has been particularly influential on contemporary neo-republican and democratic theories which in the post-68 era combined a post-totalitarian reflection on the immanent perversions of revolutionary conquests of power and, more positively, a phenomenology of “new social movements”, which aimed not so much at “conquering power” than democratizing existing institutions or pushing and coercing the State towards its own democratization (thus in a sense retrieving a fundamental tradition of civic mobilizations and movements for civil rights). I am particularly thinking of Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort, and Jacques Rancière. Machiavelli’s proposition, as we remember, expressed in the first chapters of the Discourses on Livy, states that in class societies (he speaks of the “humors” among which the wealth, prestige and power are unequally distributed in the Republics, ancient or modern, Rome and Florence being taken as examples), the objective of the dominant classes is to keep their power and increase it continuously, therefore oppress the dominated mass, but the objective of the mass is simply not to be dominated: it is not to conquer power or reverse the relationship in a symmetric manner, to become dominant in turn, but to neutralize the dominant will to power. The consequences of such negative representation of the political quest for justice, whose relative success in the history of Republics Machiavelli would credit for their prosperity and stability, are far reaching as we know, perhaps more than ever in today’s politics."
- Etienne Balibar, "Justice and Equality: A Political Dilemma?: Pascal, Plato, Marx"
(내가 가지고 있는 영역본의 출처는 Umbra였던 것 같은데, 확실치 않다. 어쨌든 인터넷에 전문이 있어 링크한다. www.mcrg.ac.in/Lecture_Etienne.pdf)
작년 언젠가 이 글 불어본을 인용했는데
오늘 우연히 영역본을 인터넷에서 찾았다.
작년에도 이 문구를 인용하고 단상을 적어 두었는데
다시 봐도 눈에 확 들어오는 주장이다.
계속 생각할 문제다.
Posted by 아포리아
