Abstract
Decolonizing Democracy takes part in a tradition of writing in which the relationship between metropole and colony is reversed and the colonial context has far more to tell the colonizer than the other way around. In this case, Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo argues that colonization is not merely an aspect or effect of sovereignty but its basis even when there are no traces of formal colonization. Much of this book is a critique of a particular left (and, I would add, Italian) tradition of thinking championed by figures like Agamben and Negri. For these writers, the solution to the oppressions of sovereignty and capitalism lies in backing away from potestas, that is to say from actual immanent forms of power, and turning instead to potentia, to a power not to be and not to do (hence Agamben’s interest in the figure of Melville’s Bartleby and his statement that “I would prefer not to”). Agamben’s preference for “inoperativity” and Negri’s interest in Spinoza as offering an alternative to potestas are two examples of this kind of thinking. For Sanín-Restrepo, such a perspective exposes the European – and hence colonizing – bias of these thinkers (143). To think this way, Sanín-Restrepo argues, is to ignore the way that coloniality is the true face of sovereignty, the way that power as potestas is inescapable and undeniable, not something that can be avoided or annulled. Sanín-Restrepo brings a Latin American perspective to the question of sovereign power, a view that understands the deep and long roots of colonialism and the way colonialism is insinuated not only in the colonies but in the colonizing nations as well. He argues that so long as we hold on to the possibility of escaping sovereignty as such, we remain effectively cut off from what is actually occurring in the political and social world. (This claim is quite paradoxical insofar as such actuality is the stated object of Agamben and Negri’s – and, by extension, Spinoza’s as well – theorization.) To hold on to the possibility of escaping sovereignty also means we allow sovereignty and its colonial principles to go unchecked and unchallenged.
For Sanín-Restrepo, many of the basic building blocks of Agamben and Negri’s thinking fail to incorporate the colonial perspective. For example, the desire to redeem life as zoe, as immanent and local, is interfered with by the failure to note that prior to being alive, bodies under conditions of sovereignty and coloniality are raced. If race is prior to life then the attempt to recoup life as such cannot succeed. Similarly and relatedly, Sanín-Restrepo opposes Negri’s “multitude,” which Negri takes from Hobbes, with his own concept of the “hidden people.” Formally, the multitude takes advantage of its own internal diversity as a way to resist false organizations of the people, making them markers of nation and state. Yet, for Sanín-Restrepo “the multitude” presupposes the very unity that it challenges. He tells us that for Negri “what is demanded of the singularity [that is, one of the individuals who collectively compose the multitude] in order to be held as part of the multitude is a qualification of her difference beyond difference itself” (158). In other words, for all of Negri’s commitment to difference, human variety is nonetheless folded into a kind of unity (“the multitude” itself) so that “the singular must already possess what is said to be the exclusive trait of the multitude [that is, totality]!” (159).
Some of the strongest parts of the book come when Sanín-Restrepo documents certain practices and thoughts that come from the Latin American tradition that offer alternative ways of both conceptualizing and practicing what Negri in particular is looking for. (The final chapter, which focuses on Negri, clocks in at 92 pages and is effectively a book within a book; it is also, I thought, the best part and the heart of Sanín-Restrepo’s argument.) He describes, for example, a particular attitude toward the dead visible in the practices of Brazilian Umbanda or Candomblé, or also Santeria in the Caribbean wherein “death does not mean to enjoy the paradise or the afterlife or to transcend to a land of plenty and thus gain access to eternity; rather, the mission of the dead is to help the living through the tribulations that are proper to life” (175). Here again, the colonial perspective suggests that the answer to sovereign oppression is not escape to a transcendent realm (including one that is disguised as being itself immanent) but rather an engagement with actual power as such. The dead in this case are seen as offering pragmatic and immediate aid; they contend with the actual constructions and operations of power and are hence considered as political, rather than as purely metaphysical or spiritual agents.
Most of the book, however, does not make specific references to particular practices in a colonial (and more particularly yet Latin American) context and is instead a deep engagement with philosophy. Sanín-Restrepo deals with Aristotelean metaphysics and Spinozan political theology, as well as with the thought of Plato, Deleuze, Agamben, Negri and Hobbes, among others. These engagements with philosophy are intense, dense, and complicated, so these sections of the book do not make for quick or easy reading. The reward though, I think, lies in the way the argument develops over the course of the book so that by the end, the stakes that Sanín-Restrepo is concerned with are very clear.
Like many books of criticism, Decolonizing Democracy is shorter on solutions than it is on the critique itself. As noted, Sanín-Restrepo tells us that we must directly confront and address issues of sovereignty and capitalism rather than try to sidestep or ignore them. He does not agree with Negri’s claim that sovereignty has morphed so much that we are effectively facing a new form of power. For Sanín-Restrepo, there is a (colonial) core to sovereign practices that remains intact however much the exterior or form may appear to alter. In terms of thinking about “what is to be done” about such phenomena, the key contribution Sanín-Restrepo makes is his idea of the “hidden people.” This notion focuses the way that sovereignty can never be all powerful or all inclusive; it is, “what the totality lacks to become a true totality, what impedes it and makes it operational and at the same time what is constitutively absent in the definition of politics and democracy” (46). Even so, for Sanín-Restrepo the notion of the hidden people is not, as it is for Marx, or at least for some Marxists, a built-in flaw in capitalism or sovereignty that will lead to the latter’s self destruction; rather – more in line with Rancière – it is a mode of resistance that must fight sovereignty on its own terms and with its own substance. At the end of the book Sanín-Restrepo says, repeating an idea that is uttered many times and in many permutations throughout the book, that “potential on its own cannot bring down the walls of potestas … only when the hidden people as an actuality of being at [the] work of difference confront the hideous separation between sovereignty and constituent power as the very matrix of the simulacrum of politics may we think of democracy” (205–6). In other words, the hidden people in their labor represent a kind of immanence that stands in the face of sovereignty in a way that is not merely metaphysical or wished. Here, Sanín-Restrepo seeks to turn the tables on the operations of power in our world; far from accepting the dominance of the oppressive system of state capitalism due to its very tangible presence, he seeks to point out the tangibility of that which opposes it and which can fight its fire with an immanent fire of its own. For Sanín-Restrepo, part of the answer to this conundrum is the role of labor “which dislocates the idea from its abstract pureness” (180) and which entails (therefore) the living manifestation of resistance. As he puts it further (here at the very end of the book, the last sentences, in fact), “The banishing point of sovereignty only comes about when it is seized by those who are placed in the exception. Only when the exceptional (the hidden people) seizes the exception may sovereignty disappear. Sovereignty repeats itself in a vicious cycle as long as the exception is not seized by the exceptional” (207).
Reading this remarkable book, I found myself wishing, even despite the complexity of the text and its relative length, Sanín-Restrepo would write further because it seemed that just at the point where the book turns towards solutions, it also comes to an end. The way Sanín-Restrepo anchors his philosophical analysis in the real experience of coloniality helps to keep what is generally a very abstract argument focused on actual politics and actual modes of resistance. Since the actual and immanent are always what Sanín-Restrepo is aiming for (against the pose of the actual and the immanent that he attributes to Agamben and Negri, among others) there is a tremendously self reflective quality to this book that helps it to remain focused on a prize that is both elusive and critical. As the title suggests, Decolonizing Democracy is devoted to the idea that democracy itself can be turned from a force that is subservient to liberalism, capitalism and sovereignty into a force for the undoing of those things. In this way Sanín-Restrepo gives us much to ponder in a time when the crises of capitalism and sovereignty are coming fast and furiously and when democracy and its values are being deeply questioned and challenged.