“To be contemporary is to hold one’s gaze on what cannot be seen — the light that ceaselessly withdraws.” — Giorgio Agamben, What Is the Contemporary?1

Peruvian politics does not collapse because it recomposes itself. Each impeachment, each scandal, each resignation does not destroy the state; it redistributes the state, creating a new ontology of the state as a flux. When Boluarte is removed — as Castillo, Vizcarra, and Kuczynski were before her — the country does not reveal its fragility but its particular mode of endurance. It may be theorized as an immanent republic, a polity that lives within its own instability.

Spinoza foresaw this condition of the state, where power does not emanate from a transcendent center but from the continuous motion of the multitude. A republic persists not through obedience but through recomposition. Every crisis is a new arrangement of the collective conatus. Peru survives because it never stops reassembling itself.

For Schmitt, politics exists where decisions about the exception are made. In Peru, the exception is permanent; the normal state is the interim. Yet this continuity has an unexpected consequence, an emergent sovereignty becomes diffuse. It no longer resides in a person or an formal institution. Decisions are made, but power no longer incarnates itself, it belongs to and decentralized and self-organized Republic.

Negri would see in this the potentia multitudinis that is the living power of society unfolding without closure. Each presidential fall confirms that social life — its energy, intelligence, and desire — exceeds any apparatus. The republic is immanent because its source lies not in law but in the persistence of common life, its potentica comes from the whole network of citizens and the stuff whitin the Peruvian polity.

Agamben would complete the picture, government has ceased to be theology or reason of state; it is now pure oikonomía — administration without glory, operation without myth. In that emptiness lies its strength, as it can begin again without redemption.

The immanent republic seeks neither stability nor legitimacy. It endures by circulating through its crises, governing and being governed at once, self-administered in the flow of its own uncertainty.

  1. Agamben, G. (2009). What is the contemporary? In What is an apparatus? and other essays (pp. 39–54). Stanford University Press. ↩