Thomas Clment Mercier King's College, London (Dpt.

War Studies)

THESIS STRUCTURE (Feb. 2015)

The Violence of Legitimacy

Democracy, Power, Antagonism
This text was initially established as a brief summary of my PhD thesis,
destined to clarify my argument with some members of my Department
(Kings College London, War Studies). It presents its overall argument,
elements of problematisation, and a chapter outline... This is a work in
progress. Please do not cite without permission of the author. Please let me
know if you have any advice, remarks, criticisms or questions.
Update (July 2016): A lot has changed since this outline was written.
The thesis is now finished and, although the general argument is more or
less the same, I have modified the thesis structure in some aspects, chose a
slightly different title, and modified a couple of intellectual moves
(especially in my readings of Weber and Marx/Engels).
Actually, what is most shocking to me is the change in tone: the final
result does not rely on the pol-sci lingo as much as this text could lead to
believe which, I hope, is a good sign maybe one of emancipation and
growing confidence. This modification originated in a personal interrogation
on the importance of (trans-)disciplinarity, and a deepened engagement with
psychoanalytic theory, summarised in a Preface. Please let me know if you
have any questions, or if youd like to read specific parts of this work.

The violence-legitimacy couple is a traditional staple in dominant strands of

International Relations, social theory and political science, relying as they do on the
possibility to distinguish rigorously between legitimate violence (power) and
illegitimate violence. This distinction, however, ignores the simple fact that the
process of legitimation itself involves an undeniable violence, a violence which starts
with concealing the violent dimension of its own doing: the notion of legitimation
(Legitimierung) seems to designate the process through which violence conceals itself,
through violence, through cultural or linguistic forms of domination, forceful
domestication, semantic orthodoxies, etc. The examination of this paradoxical
thomas.mercier@kcl.ac.uk

Thomas Clment Mercier King's College, London (Dpt. War Studies)

violence (located before violence) constituted a notable aspect in Marx and Engelss
theory of ideology, in Webers sociology of legitimate domination (Herrschaft),
Bourdieus analytics of symbolic violence or Foucault's analytics of powerknowledge dispositives. The notion of epistemic violence, for instance, elaborated
by Spivak on the basis of her reading of Foucaults Madness and Civilisation, helps us
understand effects of legitimation as resulting from a repressive process of violent
self-legitimation rather than as the deployment of ahistorical normative principles
founded in universal reason. In this perspective, it becomes possible to analyse the
power relations and conflictuality underlying democratic societies, political
identities and sovereignties beyond the apparent naturalness and legitimacy of these
objects: legitimation processes are themselves defined as essentially conflictual.
However, the conceptualisation of this violence as such remains highly
problematic and paradoxical chiefly because it should lead to interrogate the
violence of all conceptuality, theoreticity and criticality. This, of course, should
imply an overall problematisation of the concept of violence, notably through
critical phenomenologies of violence.
Highlighting the antagonistic dimension of all process of legitimation entails not
only a deconstruction of state sovereignties and territorialities (and, consequently, of
the methodological protocols of International Relations as discipline), but also a
re-assessment of the universal claims presupposed by democratic ideals and
practices (either in cosmopolitan form or not). This does not necessarily imply
abandoning all form of democratic legitimacy. Indeed, violent phenomena of
inclusion-exclusion, antagonistic interests and hegemonic processes of legitimation
constitute irreducible elements of democratic politics according to agonistic theories
of democracy for instance: Connolly, Honig, Laclau & Mouffe, or Balibar.
Unsurprisingly, their analyses rely on thinkers who were interested in the role of
conflictuality in the production of signification and legitimacy (Marx & Engels,
Weber, Foucault, but also Nietzsche, Freud, or Arendt), which makes their
interpretation of democratic legitimacy necessarily problematic. One could say
that, in emphasising the antagonistic dimension of democratic politics, these
theories not only tend to problematise the question of legitimacy, but also make it
aporetic by pointing to the fundamentally violent and illegitimate character of all
legitimacy or legal system.

thomas.mercier@kcl.ac.uk

Thomas Clment Mercier King's College, London (Dpt. War Studies)

However, the opposite is true: expanding the field of violence to all forms of politicity
actually implies a concomitant expansion of questions of legitimacy. If the political
is conceived as intrinsically violent, then the notion of legitimacy necessarily comes
to the foreground, as it becomes imperative to decide and to select between
violences, and to choose the lesser violence or the most legitimate. This is what
Balibar, following Derrida, calls the economy of violence. As a result, agonistic or
conflictual theories of democracy cannot do away with a certain messianicity a
messianic becoming consubstantial with force and signification (to speak like
Derrida). What is the place of the notion of democratic legitimacy in this economy?
Is it possible to conceive a violent process of democratisation, and what would such
conception imply with regard to traditional discourses on violence and legitimacy?
In order to answer these questions, I locate my thesis at the intersection of 3 fields:
agonistic theories of democratic politics, performativity studies (in relation to
Critical legal studies), and Derridean deconstruction.
*
In my Chapter One, I consider legitimation from the standpoint of performativity
studies, following more particularly Derridas deconstructive reading thereof.
How may we acknowledge the unnatural and potentially violent character of
legitimation without eliminating the inescapable necessity for some legitimacy? One
could try to resolve this apparent difficulty by summoning theories of
performativity. The notion of performative legitimation, hypothesised notably by
Judith Butler, implies the production of legitimating conventions, hinging on the
illocutionary force of a speech act (Austin). The transformative power of this
performative thus supposes a certain violence, a force of law. Performative
legitimation cannot be without violence if it indeed produces concrete effects in
terms of political legitimacy, thus enabling the enforcement of legislations,
legitimating or justifying specific forms of violence or discrimination, control or
constraint in the socio-political field, be it democratic or not. Therefore, the notion
of performativity helps us understand legitimation as forceful operation both in
theoretical and practical terms, with ideal-ideological (linguistic or discursive,
symbolic or epistemic) and material effects. Performativity, if taken seriously, goes to
subvert the ideological-material dichotomy inherited from orthodox-Marxism and

thomas.mercier@kcl.ac.uk

Thomas Clment Mercier King's College, London (Dpt. War Studies)

beyond a dualism which, I contend, persists in politological concepts of

legitimacy.
On these premises, I argue that a consequential articulation between performativity
and legitimacy should also take into account Derridas deconstructive approach to
performativity. Indeed, since Austin, the interrelation between performativity and
legitimacy has been a subject of continuous debate within performativity studies,
although the notion of legitimacy never quite came to the centre of the discussion.
Austin demonstrated that the performative power of a speech act, its illocutionary
force, entirely depends on the context of utterance, that is to say on the legitimating
conditions which allow such or such utterance to have an actual impact: juridic
conventions, positions of power, capacities of actors, etc. These cannot be ignored,
indeed, but they do not suffice to explain a certain paradox of performativity,
consubstantial with the notion. The paradox is as follows: Derrida contends that, if
the so-called 'felicity' of a performative act depends on preexisting power structures,
on legitimated and legitimating conventions, then the performative cannot produce
any actual effect in its own right: there is no performative event if the performative
only enacts the possibilities inscribed in a political situation. In order to perform
something like an event, a performative must go to disrupt, at least partially, though
irreducibly, the existing legitimacies of power structures, thus inventing and
imposing a new legitimacy: it must exceed present possibilities and do the impossible,
which signifies that it must be, somehow, non-legitimate or non-felicitous in order
to have an actual, meaningful impact on the situation of utterance. In other words,
an authentic performative must posit itself, at least partly, beyond legitimacy and
beyond power, beyond performativity, in order to transform, performatively, forcefully,
the interpretative models through which it may subsequently be read as legitimate
(or contested).
The paradox is that what we call performative power, in the strict sense of the term,
cannot have actual power; an authentic performative must exceed its own
performative power in order to actually have power. This paradoxical positing
implies an undeniable violence: it is a violence beyond power, an violent excess of
power beyond power, which must, paradoxically, incapacitates power (starting with
its own) in order to produce the event. In order to have actual power, that is to say
force or effectivity, the performative must lose its power, which implies the violence
of a self-differential performativity: this performative violence supposes a certain
thomas.mercier@kcl.ac.uk

Thomas Clment Mercier King's College, London (Dpt. War Studies)

performative impower as the condition for any performativity. On this basis, I

distinguish between, on the one hand, the traditional concept of performative power
(whose performativity depends on existing power structures and legitimate
conventions as enabling factors), and on the other hand what I call, following
Derrida, performative violence (which disrupts performative criteria and tentatively
produces the conditions of its potential legitimation). Only performative violence
disrupts the conditions of felicitousness of traditional theories of performativity
(agency, conventions, intentionality, context of utterance, etc.) in order to make law
and legitimacy through the formless form of a spectral event, before or beyond
legitimacies.
Performative violence, in this sense, is neither legitimate nor illegitimate: it is alegitimate. This is why this a-legitimacy is not performative in the strict sense of the
term: it is archi- or post-performative, as it does not pre-exist the performative
utterance which gave birth to it. It is wholly the result of its own event, of its own
diffrance, its becoming-other. Suspending existing legitimacies, performative
violence rips performative legitimacies apart in order to posit itself beyond
legitimacies and performativities: as such, its legitimacy remains to come, answering
to an infinite and inappropriable alterity. But even so, this paradoxical a-legitimacy
remains the (violent) condition for all existing powers and legitimacies, for their
performative positions and for their interpretability.
The following chapters examine the implications of such post-performative or
archi-performative violence in relation to theoretical dispositives which critically
articulated antagonism and democracy.
*
In my Chapter Two, I analyse Marx and Engelss conceptualisation of ideology. In
The German Ideology, political ideology is defined as the expression (Ausdruck) in ideal
form of a prior violence, that of the class struggle (Klassenkampf). The ideological
merely represents, in a distorted form, a more originary antagonism, a situation of
domination (Herrschaft), which determines politics in all its aspects. Thus, ideology is
always denounced for its illusory character and is defined, in the last instance, as a
mere supplement to the class struggle, a residue without any organising, enabling or
legitimating power of its own: it is only a representation of violence. Here, the term
representation (Vorstellung) must be understood both in its cognitive and political
thomas.mercier@kcl.ac.uk

Thomas Clment Mercier King's College, London (Dpt. War Studies)

acceptations, which entails a certain ambiguity in Marx and Engelss treatment of

ideology. For instance, democratic politics (understood as a juridical and
philosophical apparatus, a set of superstructural institutions and legitimating
principles) are solely envisaged as the form taken by a deeper civil war (Brgerkrieg)
between antagonistic classes. In this war, democratic legitimacy is defined as a
purely ideological expression, a parasitic element of pure linguisticality and
consciousness without any real, effective (wirklich), performative power on
infrastructures, materiality and praxis.
However, by using Derridas deconstructive reading of performativity and with
reference to Marx and Engelss other works, I demonstrate that the logic of
ideologisation always presupposes, somewhat implicitly, a certain legitimating force
attached to an irreducible performativity. This ambiguous effectivity (Wirklichkeit) of
political ideology is instantiated through various theoretical efforts and figures,
among which one finds: a) Marxs attempt to exorcise the legitimatingdelegitimating effects of spectrality and ideology, such as analysed by Derrida in
Spectres of Marx; b) Marx and Engelss representation of ideologisation as a
phenomenon of monsterisation of humanity, a monstrous labour, a childbirth with
violent effects of cognitive expropriation and legitimation; c) Marx and Engelss
continuous denunciation of alienation as an empirical distortion, as an unheimlich
phenomenality altering empiricity before the experience, and transforming praxis
before praxis; d) Engelss ambiguous treatment of the notion of Realpolitik, and the
overall undecidability of the status of political ideology among other forms of
ideologies in The German Ideology.
But this undecidability appears, first and foremost, through the ultimately
unconvincing distinction between the notions of ideology on the one hand, and
intellectual labour on the other hand. In spite of their differences, both notions
designate a spiritual (geistig) force organising material labour in self-difference and
self-separation, implying effects of legitimation and a performative politicality.
Dividing the limit of class division at the border between intellectual and material
labour, the process of ideologisation has the performative effect to differ the pure
presence of class struggle, to make class struggle an unpresentable war, a nonontological violence always-already represented through effects of ideologisation and
legitimacy. This differential process, neither neutral nor non-violent, suspends the

thomas.mercier@kcl.ac.uk

Thomas Clment Mercier King's College, London (Dpt. War Studies)

class struggle to the legitimacy-to-come of an archi-performative messianicity,

through the promise of what Marx calls, for instance, true democracy.
*
The critique of liberal, parliamentary or deliberative democracy is at the heart of
Chantal Mouffes theorisation of radical democracy. This is the subject of my
Chapter Three.
Mouffes critique explicitly targets forms of political legitimation presenting
themselves as non-violent or non-antagonistic in nature. Radical democracy is not
only accepting of difference, dissent and antagonisms, but is dependent on them in
order to build its legitimacy as democracy. Mouffe thus operates a double
argumentative gesture: on the one hand, she recognises the necessity of violent
antagonism in constructing and legitimating political institutions, in producing
categories of identification and disidentification, and in defining shared values and
domains of commonality. In order to explain the necessary dimension of
antagonism in human societies, Mouffe draws on Schmitts notion of hostile
politicality. She contends that all democratic legitimacy apparently founded on
rational, ahistorical, or universal criteria actually presuppose a deeper, more
originary antagonism (deemed ontological) which confers to such criteria their
political efficacy and concreteness agonistic radicalism is thus presented as a
realism and pragmatism. This polemological argument is relatively close to
Marxism: traditional approaches to democratic politics are contested in the name
of a prior conflictuality, whose warlike violence determines politics in all its aspects,
even in time of peace. However, in contrast to Marx and Engelss theory of class
struggle, Mouffe, following Schmitt, defines the antagonism as immediately political;
she names the political this irreducibly antagonistic substrate of all socio-political
relations. Mouffe goes to argue that the conflictual dimension of political claims
benefits pluralism and contributes to democratic legitimacy. On the other hand, and
contra Schmitt, Mouffe suggests that this antagonism should be defused, and
channelled into a more positive vision of politics and democracy. She contends that
enemies should be considered as adversaries, and that antagonism should be
modified into agonism.
In this sense, agonism is a form of antagonism which supposedly excludes warlike
politics and the execution of enemies. This raises a difficult question: on which basis
thomas.mercier@kcl.ac.uk

Thomas Clment Mercier King's College, London (Dpt. War Studies)

is it possible to distinguish between antagonistic pluralism, agonistic pluralism and

liberal pluralism? Where is the limit? On this account, Mouffes theory displays a
performative contradiction: if antagonism is indeed an ontological dimension in
politics and democracy, on which legitimacy can she found and theorise radical
democracy? In other words, what is the legitimacy of the performative gesture
through which Schmittian hostility and the real possibility of war may be
turned into agonism?
In her definition of antagonism, Mouffe remains captive to Schmitts ontotheological presuppositions. She essentialises the dimension of antagonism
(paradoxically turned into a transcendental signifier in her theory), as well as
existing antagonists, while trying to go beyond this conflictual essence through her
agonistic politics. As a result, her agonistic democracy is either thoroughly
Schmittian (as it reifies antagonism and warlike politics in anti-democratic fashion,
without hope for non-antagonistic claims), or entirely non-Schmittian (as agonism
cannot be antagonistic in the Schmittian sense, suggesting that radical democracy is
a form of social pluralism in the liberal sense of the term, the one criticised by
Schmitt and Mouffe). By contrast, the performative violence defined in this thesis is
structurally pre-antagonistic, as it suspends and deconstructs the logic of
antagonism in its homogeneity (and correlated frontlines and identifications). This
performative-transformative force implies an economy of violences and legitimacies
beyond democratic pluralism: it is a force of differentiality or diffrance before and
beyond the plurality of identities of values. Immediately transformative of politics
before the political, it supposes the irruptive event of what Derrida calls
democracy-to-come.
*
In my Chapter Four, I explore further the distinction between power and violence
by interrogating Balibars dialectic of Gewalt and his persistent representation of
legitimacy as a form of ideality, attached solely to power.
While Marx and Engels analysed processes of ideologisation as resulting from class
struggle, and while Mouffe, following Schmitt, defined effects of legitimacy as a
subset of political antagonism, tienne Balibar conceives legitimation as a product
of political violence itself, as a form a symbolisation-idealisation of material violence, a
violent process of conversion of violence into power. Through a discussion of
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Thomas Clment Mercier King's College, London (Dpt. War Studies)

Hegel, Marx and Engels, Balibar produces a dialectical analysis of the German
term Gewalt, signifying both power and violence: he theorises a dialectical
movement, within Gewalt, between power and violence, between legitimate violence
and illegitimate violence, between authority and force. However, Balibar also
postulates, beside this dialectical conversion, the existence of another form of
violence, inconvertible and unintelligible, destructive and irrational: cruelty or
extreme violence. Drawing on Weber, Schmitt and Foucault, Balibar defines
extreme violence as an internal limit within power and democratic politics.
This signifies that democratic politics are always traversed with violence, although
their function is to reduce this violence, and to turn the antagonism into agonism
(this operation, analogous to Mouffes, is inherited from Foucaults late writings).
This is the role, within democracy, of what he names politics of civility which,
without suppressing violence altogether, aims to exclude, somehow violently, the
most extreme forms of violence and cruelty from the field of politics. Balibars
anti-violent politics relies on what he calls, following Derrida, an economy of
violence. Balibar considers that the democratisation of politics must rely on a
phenomenology of violence: it supposes the classification of phenomena of violence
according to their productive or destructive character, their potential of
rationalisation and justification, and their capacity of self-legitimation.
Defining those phenomena, however, will prove problematic. Indeed, Balibar
misinterprets Derridas notion of the force of law and his approach to
performativity. He locates the legitimating factor of violence in the very
phenomenality of violent deeds, in their empirical existence, while Derridas
deconstruction of performativity shows that performative violence always-already
precedes the experience of violence and the interpretability thereof. Balibars
phenomenology of violence thus implies an essentialisation of legitimacy criteria,
through a reification of protocols of interpretability. As a result, his dialectical
distinction is impossible to maintain in all rigour, because the archi-originary force
of the performative precedes and conditions the interpretability of politics, which
makes the limit between legitimate power and illegitimate violence properly
undecidable. In other words, Balibars theory of conversion of violence, by drawing
a line between legitimacy and illegitimacy, can only validate preexisting structures
of legitimation, which are precisely the result of violent power relations. Therefore,
the denunciation of illegitimate violence enacts a tautology, and emphasises the
thomas.mercier@kcl.ac.uk

Thomas Clment Mercier King's College, London (Dpt. War Studies)

antagonistic character of democratic politics (deemed tragic by Balibar) rather

than pointing to the inappropriable heterogeneity preceding and exceeding all
forms of antagonism and community.
*
By contrast, Derrida's democracy-to-come, despite its messianic character,
instantiates here and now the performative promise of another legitimacy, beyond
traditional categories of politics, citizenship, community, pluralism, agonism,
cosmopolitics or democracy. In this promise, the legitimation-to-come is not
without violence, but this violence is irreducible to political antagonisms and power
relations: its archi-performative force, located beyond all theoreticity or practicality,
precedes and conditions concepts and objects of political theory, as well as the
interpretability of political practices. It is in and through the economy of this archiviolence, through this differential play of forces and significations, of violences and
legitimacies, that one can approach an authentically ethical experience of decision,
now conceived as aporetic injunction. The demand for ethical decision hinges on a
legitimation-to-come, and supposes an infinite responsibility towards the other
before and beyond all theoretical or practical knowledge, before all subjectivity,
identity or ipseity, and beyond all existing legitimating conventions. As such, it can
only take the formless figure of an im-possible decision: a decision without power,
which is the only possible decision. The self-deconstructive force of democracy-tocome signifies a demand for another legitimation, the event of a violent excess
beyond power and beyond legitimacy.
This notion is central for the argument of my thesis, which postulates both the coimplication and heterogeneity between two concepts of violence, that is, two
conceptualisations of democratic violence: democratic power and the messianic force
of democracy-to-come. Only accounting for this heterogeneous co-implication
between democratic power (the violence of determinate democratic discourses or
practices) and democracy-to-come (the violence of their deconstruction at work)
may allow us to take seriously the undeniable violence of democracies, without
falling into a teleological narrative of decadence or degeneration (Benjamin,
Schmitt, Agamben) or in the representation of democratic power and politics as a
tragic or diabolical practice resulting in undecidability and paralysis (Weber,
Balibar).
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