Jacques Lezra: Defective Position

Abstract

Through this essay I intent to interrogate the concept of position departing from Jacques Lezra’s thought about what he called “defective institution(s)”. Lezra’s work is evidently traversed by a series of conceptual situations surrounding what is known as early modernity, but also by thinkers like Machiavelli, Marx and Louis Althusser. It is about this last name that I try to weave the reflexive knot about positionality as “coup de force” (Derrida), a primary violence, atomic, with the seal or stamp of a punctual deviation, or minimal violence. This deviant violence is which allows me to think the commencement as curvature and the institution as defect –against Hegelian mediation that assumes institution as supplement for an ontological, previous deficiency. Finally, I inquire, by crossing Lezra and Deleuze, the possibility of a contingent sadism to think the violence of this defective positionality, as an important element to think the constituent conjuncture