Thinking about conflict: Stasis and the re-foundation of politics

Conflict is fundamental to an agonistic theorization of politics, although it must be delimited in a democracy, while also being preserved as a necessary moment for change (cf. Mouffe 2005). The conflictual view of politics, or, politics as dissociation (cf. Marchart 2018), ultimately belongs to the ontological domain of understanding, but as being ineliminable parts of real-life political experiences, and because of having a distortive potential, it is still necessary to conceive it in the context of democracy, which excludes radical negativity as real-life practice. The ancient political theory of stasis can provide support for this claim, since it rests on the premise that “war should stop at the gates of the city” (cf. Loraux 2002), thus, violent relations such as war and civil war form the frontier of politics, suggesting a literally agonistic view. This revolves around the practice of association, the idea (also) seen in Arendt that politics can be constructed primarily through speech and public discourse (Arendt 2005). However, in the stasis-literature one can find an argument seemingly contradicting this prescription of the polis. Solon, the arbitrator in a civil war, prescribed for his fellow citizens, that “…whoever when civil strife prevailed did not join forces with either party was to be disfranchised and not to be a member of the state.” (Aristotle, Const. Ath. 8.5.) However, this statement confuses the vision of an agonistic, let alone a consensual, democracy and seems to support a radically dissociative theory of politics. It is also worth addressing the foundational value of radical negativity in political ontology from this perspective. The role and position of conflict in the associative theory of politics—or the political—can rest on this classical-based conceptualisation. The paper addresses the following problems: first, stasis as civil war can play a role in defining the polis, tor the political (this has the potential to underpin and deepen the Arendtian theorization of politics); second, stasis as civil war can illuminate the nature of over-polarization and disintegration, revealing the ambivalent political position and identity of citizens-of-civil-war; third, stasis can point to the urgent need to decide and re-establish the political community. This third aspect seems to be capable to show how the Solonian advice, as a non-depoliticizing action, can lead to a solution of stasis, to the over-politicisation of political affairs, and radical polarization. It could be argued that stasis in this case actually describes the urgency of decision, which is ultimately a decision that leads to the creation of a temporary and transitory political community—nonetheless, this kind of stasis as a decision does not solve all the problems that stasis as a disruptive set of events has caused in the polis.