The Center as Political Foundation
Politics, in Center Study, is not primarily about interests, ideologies, or coalitions — it is about the center itself. As Katz writes, "Politics is the establishment of an arena in which actors compete perpetually, but with distinctly marked victories and defeats determining the power to make and implement laws, before a qualified audience... and without violence. The space in which politics is set is sacred, in being both commonly held and inviolable"1. The center is not a metaphor for power in general; it is the originary scene's constitutive focal point, and political life is the institutionalized struggle over who occupies it and under what conditions. Everything we call "politics" — elections, parties, sovereignty, rights — is derivative of this more fundamental dynamic.
The history of modern politics can be read as a series of attempts to justify whoever sits at the center by appeal to some supposedly more "real" authority standing behind them. As Katz observes in Power and Paradox, "all of modern politics involves trying to subordinate the actual sovereign to one or another version of supposed 'real' sovereignty"2. Whether the legitimating fiction is "the people," "the nation," "the workers," or "the oppressed," the structure is identical: a rival claim on the center is used to destabilize whoever holds it. This is not incidental to modern politics but its defining logic, one that tends toward centralization and dysfunction precisely because it never resolves the question of who rightly belongs at the center.
What makes the center politically indispensable is that it transforms violence into competition. In Katz's formulation, elections are structurally "trials of the incumbents, carried out in place of a civil war in which each side would place the other on trial for treason"3. The center provides the scene on which resentment — the fundamental human response to exclusion from the center — can be discharged through symbolic rather than physical means. When the political form fails to perform this function, as when one faction refuses to accept mock-trial outcomes as binding, the specter of actual violence re-emerges. The center's sacred character is thus not ornamental; it is the condition of political life itself.
Katz extends this further to explain why rights discourse and progressive politics produce the opposite of what they promise. "The more rights we discover, acknowledge, and demand enforcement of, the more powerful and unhindered the state must be"2. Each new rights claim is a new bid to occupy or redirect the center, requiring ever-greater centralization to enforce. Meanwhile, as Bouvard notes in Some Political Reflections, the left deploys "hyper-juridicalization" to "launder power in an acceleration of turnover of occupancy of the center conjoined with the intensification of centralized means of control"4. In each case the center is the lever: controlling the framing of who legitimately occupies it is what political power actually consists in.
Center Study therefore demands something more fundamental than a new policy agenda or coalition strategy. Since every existing political program — left, right, liberal, nationalist — constructs "a relation between a political subject and some oppressive agent," as Katz writes in The Prospects of the Hypothesis, all such programs reproduce the same mimetic structure of resentment rather than transcending it. The most concentrated statement of what is at stake comes from Making a Difference: "The struggle between defenders of civilizational intelligence and the stokers of political flames is the struggle to convert politics to pedagogy"5. The center matters for politics because it is the scene on which humanity either defers violence through shared attention or collapses back into the rivalries the originary sign was meant to forestall.
Excerpts
"Politics is most effective when the actors represent cleavages within the audience and reflect upon the meta- or constitutive rules governing the political space itself. Politics evokes other spaces or stages where members of the audience who consider themselves insufficiently represented can impinge upon or even swamp the central political space, as in civil disobedience and protest; the central political space can be overturned by revolution, which aims at instituting a new space; or destroyed by mobs, consumed by hatred towards any center."
The Problem and Possible Necessity of Politics · GABlog Read →
"Private property is one, very long and durable, set of relationships pursuant to commands of an occupied center, which is to say, a distribution by a Big Man and subsequently various forms of monarchy and states, ultimately, as our “liberal democracies,” organized around the reciprocal struggle to oust whoever has been grudgingly placed at the center."
Deferral and Appropriation; Property and the Center · Substack Read →
"Since the fall of monarchy, all of politics, from left to right, have shared the same model of “liberation.” Working class or nationalist politics, liberal and democratic politics, all construct a relation between a political subject and some oppressive agent—the political subject is formed through the struggle against that oppressive agent. Marxism, liberalism, nationalism, antisemitism, anti-colonialism, are all identical in this regard. These are all very easily identifiable mimetic scenarios—the rival who has usurped my rightful position at the center,"
The Prospects of the Hypothesis · Substack Read →
"Behind the scenes are rival powers using these purported legitimations to pin the actual sovereign to their own mapping of actual onto real sovereignty. The state is centralized, power is accumulated, the state becomes a bigger prize, power is more insecure, and the government does less and less governing."
Power and Paradox (Adam Katz) · PDF Read →
"When the king is deposed and the center left empty, all the supplemental scenes take on the responsibility of “continuity of government” while also dedicating themselves to ensuring that any temporary occupant of the center (the scandal of modern political thought is the need to come up with some reason why someone has to be there in the first place) remains cognizant of his contingent hold on the place."
Deferral and Appropriation; Property and the Center · Substack Read →
"This conflict brings us to the most fundamental or ontological level of politics, where politics is distinguished from non-politics: the distinction between differences as a series of zero-sum games (which ultimately means they are not real, just arenas where death matches are staged) and differences as originary and generative."
Making a Difference: Meta-politics, Anti-politics and Political Ontology · GABlog Read →