Planning as an instituting process. Overcoming Agamben’s despair using Esposito’s political ontology

Abstract

In the face of the growing interest in Agamben’s work by planning scholars, this article suggests reframing such an interest by examining the theoretical controversy between Agamben and another Italian philosopher, Roberto Esposito, with special attention to their common roots within the philosophical realm of political ontology. Their different conceptualizations of biopolitics and norms can lead to opposite conceptualizations of the relationship between people and institutions leading to very different planning theoretical possibilities. Like Agamben, Esposito’s theory helps recognise the intrinsic violence of planning discourses. However, unlike Agamben, Esposito provides a constructive way out of it through the disentanglement of the exclusionary level of norms from the potentially inclusive affirmative biopolitics (not politics over life but politics of life) of what he calls the instituting thought. Esposito’s conceptualization of institutions can further support the ongoing new-institutionalist developments of planning scholarship, showing a way to conceptualize the planning relevance of civic organizing, insurgent practices, and social uprisings without undermining the primacy of institutions in planning.