About

This research project will critically investigate and develop the concept of institution, departing principally from the work of Roberto Esposito and Cornelius Castoriadis. Both approaches pivot on the productive tension between institution as a noun (the institution/instituted) and as a verb (to institute), permitting the development of a dynamic and transformative concept of instituent praxis. Traditionally, institution is more a category of conservative than radical political thought: from early modern theories of the state and civil society in Burke and Hegel against the convulsions of the French Revolution, to Arnold Gehlen’s anthropology of institutions as stabilising or correcting the deficiencies of human existence. When it appears in the discourse of the left, it is often as a disciplinary apparatus to be resisted, escaped, or destroyed. But while such accounts diverge in their political relation to institution, they nevertheless share a concept of institution as primarily static and dominatory; and it is against this reduction that Esposito and Castoriadis position themselves. In evaluating their work, I will contest the designation of the instituent paradigm as essentially reformist – a charge attributed both to the logic of institution as ultimately bureaucratic and immobilising, and to the theories of Esposito and Castoriadis themselves – by identifying the real limits of their accounts and expanding the conception of institution as both a mode and site of struggle. In doing so, I will (i) develop a more fine-grained conception of institution in both its noun and verbal forms, opposing the tendency to ‘black-box’ its configurations in much of the literature; (ii) illuminate more clearly the relation between institution as a category of ontology or philosophical anthropology and as a politico-historical problem; and (iii) relate institution to the problem of the state and social transformation today.