Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“It follows that it is best to think about succession rituals as exercises in judgment, but also in displaying that which stands behind any judgment, which is the founding nomos of the order (originary distribution). To embody power is to select your successor—if you’re not selecting your successor, your power is conditioned on the approval of those who will. Once hereditary succession is ruled out as the default option (while remaining as an option), the process of selecting a successor entails and, really, constitutes and defines, the entire social order. All institutions are organized so as to produce candidates. One who is publicly selected as the successor now might be replaced by another, for reasons, themselves ritually embodied, that would also be public. (I’m briefly recalling arguments I’ve made one many other occasions.) It’s easiest to think of this on the model of kingship, but we can’t rule out very different forms of governance. Perhaps there won’t always be a single state—but, we could say that however power is distributed, there will be disputes within and across institutions, and with the decline in contemporary state forms (which will decline or be dramatically transformed) venues for receiving “wise” judgment regarding those disputes will be in demand—the juridical will be found to be irreducible, again and again, with each new technoscenic articulation of pedagogical platforms.”

— Adam Katz, A New Model of Power · Nov 05, 2023 · Bouvard Substack