Repository | Journal | Volume | Articles

Institutions are made for regulating the unregulated while revolutions are beginnings of a new order while breaking with the rules of the old one. One could expect then a fundamental contradiction between institution and revolutionary rupture. It’s though not that simple. The inherent problem in every beginning, exemplifed with reference to the Jewish tradition of thought, lies in the paradox of all revolutionary events: to formulate the beginning as the beginning of an order already presupposes the sense the order itself. In a foray through Arnold Metzger's Phänomenologie der Revolution and Alain Badiou's Politics of Truth, the paper identifes an emerging gap between order and revolution, or institution and event. Based on this fnding, it is suggested to fll the gap by analysing the phenomenological concept of ‘instituting’ (‚Stiftung‘). Only a notion of ‘instituting’ (‚Stiftung‘) allows to establish a link between practices and events in order to formulate the desideratum of an 'instituent revolution' that generates a rupture by simultaneously opening up a feld of reproductive practices.

DOI: 10.19079/metodo.8.1.51

Full citation: