Abstract

Beginning from the texts of Colectivo Situaciones on the insurrectional movements of December 2001 in Argentina, this article raises the question of institutional critique on the basis of a reflection on destituent practices. Far from being reducible to the aim of a reinstitution – that is, the aim of accomplishing the classical functions of political power – these practices refer instead to a « positive no », to the self-transforming actualization of the potentials of social action before and beyond the figures of institutional representation. Thus, what appears amidst destitution is not a « labor of negation », but rather the contours of an instituting activity that engenders new forms of coexistence and coaction, even if this activity is partially haunted by the staging of past conflicts. To better understand this instituent activity, we must consider a second meaning of the word « destitution », which is desubjectivation as the destruction of the faculty of subjectivation, as Agamben describes it in Remnants of Auschwitz. It is only on the basis of the double meaning of destitution that the complex co-involvement of institution and destitution can be brought to light and that the privilege long accorded to « constitution » can be questioned, on the level of the theory of subjectity as well as that of politics