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Reconfiguring Domination and Civic Virtue: From Pre-Emption to Inoperosity

Environmental Policy
Green Politics
Political Participation
Social Movements
Climate Change
Capitalism
Luigi Pellizzoni
Scuola Normale Superiore
Luigi Pellizzoni
Scuola Normale Superiore

Abstract

Republicanism gives non-domination a central role. Non-domination means more than liberal non-interference and other than Aristotelian political virtue. Being free to choose is important, but even more important is how and by whom the palette of options is decided. Engagement (in issue- and goal-definition) is therefore crucial, without becoming an end in itself. Yet, the figure of domination changes over time. The paper seeks to address a most recent incarnation: pre-emption. Pre-emption institutes a particular ‘politics of time’ where an eschatological event is set and continuously postponed, opening an operational space where past, present and future are no longer sequentially connected, and change reproduces the ruling order. Mainly discussed in relation to the military and security, pre-emption plays a growing role in environmental politics. Drawing on academic and policy literature, the paper will discuss three examples: how ‘participation’ is framed in responsible research and innovation; how ‘choice’ is understood in the case for human enhancement; how ‘nature’ is conceived in Ecomodernism and the Anthropocene thesis. I will show how what is premised, or promised, on one hand is hollowed out on the other, while future is posited and past redefined in order to govern the present, hampering a transformative green politics. The declension of civic virtue capable of challenging this type of domination, I will argue, is captured by the notion of ‘inoperosity’. Inoperosity does not mean passivity, resignation, but a policy of self-limitation, of ‘choosing not to’. Does this correspond to degrowth, as an idea and emergent forms of mobilization? Only in part. The Republican outlook, I'll contend, helps to distinguish actual attempts to build non-dominative socio-material relations from celebrations of the communal and human potency.