Politics beyond the State: forgetting the violence?

Abstract

This article deals with the relation between politics, the political and violence. Western political theory has historically tended to reduce politics to the State and to dissolve violence in political ends. This tradition was broken by Weber and Schmitt. The conceptual distinction between politics and the political is consolidated in contemporary political theory, but it does not resolve some of Weber and Schmitt’s insufficiencies. One is the relationship between the political and violence, which is analyzed in Lefort, Rancière and Bourdieu in this work. We can formulate two questions on this: is it not true that conceiving politics as something not reduced to the State, 1) ends up omitting violence which is also present in the political, as if the only violence were that of the State?; and 2) downplays the monopoly of legitimate violence as a characteristic trait of politics?