At the Limits of the Political: Affect, Life, Things 1786604582, 9781786604583

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At the Limits of the Political

At the Limits of the Political Affect, Life, Things

Inna Viriasova

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26–34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2018 by Inna Viriasova All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-7866-0456-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Viriasova, Inna, author. Title: At the limits of the political : affect, life, things / Inna Viriasova. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017059483 (print) | LCCN 2018000061 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786604583 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781786604569 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Political science—Philosophy. Classification: LCC JA71 (ebook) | LCC JA71 .V565 2018 (print) | DDC 320.01—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059483 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii Introduction: Beyond Politics

1

PART I: THE TOTALITY OF THE POLITICAL AND ITS LIMITS

15

1

Carl Schmitt: The General Economy of the Political

17

2

Michel Foucault: Power and Biopolitics

33

3

Jean-Luc Nancy: Primordial Politics of Being-With

49

4

Massimo Cacciari and Roberto Esposito: The Category of the Impolitical

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5

Giorgio Agamben: Bare Life and Form-of-Life

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PART II: MAPPING THE UNPOLITICAL

101

6

The Great Outdoors of Politics: Quentin Meillassoux on Ancestrality, Justice, and Extinction

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7

Unpolitical Life: Michel Henry and the Real Limits of Biopolitics

125

8

Decolonizing Political Thought: Buddhist Compassion at the Limits of Western Politics

147

v

vi

Contents

Conclusion171 References183 Index193 Author Biography

205

Acknowledgments

This book has benefited from the generous advice, critique, and support of my teachers, mentors, and colleagues. I would like to extend special thanks to Mark Franke and Antonio Calcagno for their unfailing encouragement and assistance throughout the years. I am also grateful to Geoffrey Whitehall, Benjamin Muller, Matthew Moore, Francois Debrix, Andrew Biro, and the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their suggestions and critiques, as well as to all others who have contributed to this project at different stages of its development. I am thankful to Sarah Campbell and the Rowman & Littlefield International team for the pleasant and seamless process of putting the book into print. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my family and friends, and especially to my partner, James Depew, for the encouragement, thought-provoking discussions, honest critiques, and assistance in editing my writing. Some of the chapters included in this book previously appeared in print and are here reproduced with the permission of copyright holders. An earlier version of chapter 1 was previously published as Viriasova, Inna. “The Political Totalization of Carl Schmitt: Deciding on ‘the Absolutely Unpolitical.’ ” Telos 175 (2016), 85–104. © 2016 Telos Press. Reprinted with permission of Telos Press. Chapter 6 first appeared in print as Viriasova, Inna. “Speculative Political Theory: Quentin Meillassoux and ‘the Great Outdoors’ of Politics.” Theory and Event 20:3 (2017), 629–52. © 2017 Inna Viriasova and The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. Parts of chapter 7 appeared in print as Viriasova, Inna. “Unpolitical Life: Michel Henry and the Real Limits of Biopolitics.” Diacritics 42:3 (2014), 84–113. © 2014 Cornell University. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. vii

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This book brings together a number of contributions in contemporary political philosophy in order to sketch a cartography of “the unpolitical”—the radical or absolute outside of politics that remains indifferent to the problems of political co-belonging. In the midst of the numerous calls to rethink politics so that this politics, in turn, becomes capable of addressing the problems that haunt contemporary societies, the project of thinking the unpolitical is a call for the articulation and affirmation of possibilities of living and being together that are not determined by any political conception, ideology, movement, and demand. At the same time, this living is not apathetic, withdrawn, or disinterested, but oriented toward the recognition of a productive exteriority of politics. The unpolitical thus outlines an alternative ground for the unconditional experience of living and rejoicing in life in the multiplicity of its worldly expressions, as well as for a new form of community that is open to humans and nonhumans alike. Despite strongly coming to the fore in the philosophical debates of the past few decades, the question of the limits of politics permeates the history of Western political thought and has preoccupied political thinkers since antiquity. The distinctions between oikos and polis, theoria and praxis, vita contemplativa and vita activa, for example, have contributed to the establishment of a fairly clear delimitation of the political and nonpolitical spheres of human activity, and many of them have survived until today in the form of an opposition between the public and private spheres. One of the prominent examples of the separation between politics and the nonpolitical is found in Aristotle’s analysis of oikos and the polis. As he notoriously argues in the Politics, oikos (the household) is preoccupied with the provision of life’s bodily necessities and everyday wants, and the duty of the manager of the household is to “order the things which nature supplies” (I.10, 1258a24–25, 1

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trans. Jowett). Political community, on the contrary, even as it originates in the family and the bare necessities of life, in the pressing need to establish a self-sufficient existence, continues to exist for the sake of “the good life.” Human existence in a community thus has a clear path of development: from the natural union of male and female for the purposes of procreation and the provision of daily necessities, it evolves into a political community, the polis, ordered by the principles of justice. Political community is the telos of human existence; it aims at the highest good and embraces all other communities. As a result, “the state is a creation of nature, and . . . man is by nature a political animal,” for if “the earlier forms of society are natural, so is the state, for it is the end of them, and the nature of a thing is its end.” This logic culminates in Aristotle’s notorious conclusion that “he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity [either a beast or a god]” (I.2, 1252b30–1253a3). Importantly, the domain of the household is an essential part of the political body, since no one can live a good life without having first satisfied his basic needs. Consequently, oikos is a pre-political rather than merely nonpolitical domain, supplying life’s necessities in order to assure its fullness in the polis—a community based on the principles of justice, which distinguish humanity from other gregarious animals. Political community is limited to humanity, relegating animals and slaves, who only function to provide for the necessities of life, to the household. The latter is the domain of the body, of the kind of life common to all living beings, which, as Giorgio Agamben (1998) famously argues, is designated by the Greek term zoē, while political community is based on good or qualified life—bios—which is proper only to humanity. In the same way as a living creature consists of soul (the mind or the rational element) and body (the passionate element), the former being the natural ruler of the latter (Aristotle 2001, I.4, 1254a35–36), the composite whole of community consists of a duality—the polis and oikos—with former standing above the latter but also relying on it as an indispensable step toward the achievement of a good life. The Christian conception of community, however different from the Aristotelian one, similarly contains a duality between two forms of being, political and apolitical, that stand in a hierarchical relationship to each other. Augustine’s distinction between the “City of God” and the “City of Men” is emblematic in this respect. In the simplest terms, the City of God is heaven, an ideal and a goal to aspire to, and the City of Men is the actual, fallen world of immediacy where all creation finds itself before it is redeemed by God. The heavenly city is the end goal of the earthly one; nevertheless, it appears only as a result of the abolition rather than the transformation of the earthly city. Therefore, politics, the domain of worldly affairs, finds its end and fulfillment not in the perfection of its guiding principles, however good they



Introduction: Beyond Politics 3

may be (e.g., administration of justice, provision of order, and peace), but in its own cessation. The telos of political being transcends its immediate field and lies in God’s redemption of the world. The City of God is post-political, since politics exists for the sake of keeping the effects of fallen human nature at bay, and so where there is no sin, there will be no need for politics. All civilization-building activities are thus futile, and the ultimate purpose can be found only in the City of God. Politics is a transitory reality, a stepping stone on the way to the heavenly city. Politics cannot redeem itself and develop into the likeness of the City of God, even if guided by similar principles, because the earthly and the heavenly cities are essentially different; they are incompatible at their hearts. The two cities “were created by two loves: the earthly city by love of oneself. . .; the heavenly city by the love of God. . . . The first glories in itself, the second in the Lord” (Augustine 1994, XIV.28). The earthly city is guided by the flesh, it desires war and domination and is marked by scarcity, while the heavenly city lives by the spirit and desires charity. As a result, the complete transformation of one city into the other is a matter of rupture and not evolution, even though, according to Augustine, they are now intermingled and will be divided only at the Last Judgment. Political and nonpolitical realities cohabitate for the time being and will be cleansed of each other in the coming of God’s Kingdom.1 With the ascent of modernity and the ideas of the Enlightenment, the duality of heaven and earth is overshadowed by the duality of nature and culture or nature and politics, where the latter is assigned the task of redeeming the former from chaos. Politics, no longer guided by transcendent, divine principles but by reason, transforms into a means of salvation here on earth. Thomas Hobbes’s early social contract theory exhibits well this modern relocation of redemption from the City of God to the City of Men—the commonwealth. Humanity is given the tools of its own deliverance: from the state of nature it steps into the civilized domain of politics through reason-based, self-interested cooperation. In Leviathan, Hobbes advocates the necessity of instituting politics, the commonwealth, motivated by the fear of “the state of nature,” that is, the nonpolitical, disordered realm of human existence that lacks absolute power. The state of nature, on the one hand, is the state of unlimited freedom, where everyone can do whatever he or she wants and is limited only by his or her own, primarily physical, capacities. On the other hand, such freedom leads to conflicts of interest, with the natural rights and desires of multiple individuals constantly intersecting. Since there is no external power that oversees social interactions and ensures observation of multiple contracts, the natural state of humanity is nothing more than “the war of all against all” (pt. I, ch. 13, para. 8). The apparently unlimited freedom turns into unfreedom, since one

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is never guaranteed anything. There are only obstacles manifested by the conflicting desires of others. As Hobbes famously puts it, life in the state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” It is an asocial life of contingency and war, without a guarantee for personal security, social meaning, and productivity. Life in this state is qualitatively inferior to its political form: it is solitary as opposed to social, poor as opposed to wealthy, nasty and brutish as opposed to peaceful and civilized, unproductive as opposed to fruitful. The main concern of every individual in this state is the struggle for power and, most importantly, self-preservation by any means. The lack of security and fear of death in the state of nature are the major motivations for the social contract. The use of reason, with which all humans are equally endowed, ensures that the majority of individuals, in the pursuit of their best interests, decide to agree on peaceful coexistence. Thus, the political state is established by persons who, in the face of the fear of death, give up their absolute right to everything and “confer” it, together with their power, onto one person or a group (the sovereign) in exchange for protection from immediate and potential enemies, resulting in the accumulation of power in the sovereign’s “hands” (I, 13, 13). The establishment of the commonwealth also regulates the use of violence, left over from the state of nature, which now becomes the exclusive right of the sovereign. In sum, Hobbes establishes a hierarchy between the conflictual, asocial and apolitical state of nature and the political state, defined by freedom and peace and, in order to support this hierarchy, he depicts the former in the most negative terms. In the end, sociality and politics are confined to the commonwealth, designed to preclude the dangers of contingency, insecurity, and disorder of the state of nature. The hierarchical distinction between politics and the nonpolitical culminates in the modern refinement of the classical distinction between the public and private spheres of life. No longer concerned with the transition from nature to civilization, both the public and the private domains characterize the forms of sociality commonly encountered in modern European societies. The public sphere is a contested concept, and yet a few common traits surface across its multiple accounts. In particular, it is commonly differentiated from the private sphere. An early version of this distinction is represented by the separation between the space of the polis—centered around agora or marketplace—and the space of home. This distinction is vaguely superseded by the Roman realms of publicus and privatus, and later by the Christian differentiation between the rule of the king or a feudal lord and familial rule. With the emergence of the bourgeoisie in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the liberal public sphere develops at the outset as a realm independent from both the absolutist state and the private sphere. As Jürgen Habermas (1991)



Introduction: Beyond Politics 5

argues, it emerged as a space of public communication regarding issues of political concern, as an open deliberative forum that contributed to the constitution of the collective body of citizens and civil society, inasmuch as it put state authority under scrutiny through informed and critical discourse by the people. As the bourgeois public sphere develops, the private sphere still remains with the family and the productive activities of the household, including the satisfaction of life’s necessities, the management of property, and the accumulation of wealth. With the growth of market economy and the development of capitalism, the traditional distinction between the public and the private, between political and domestic concerns, becomes blurred and eventually nonexistent. Hannah Arendt (1998) shows that what has remained for centuries hidden in the private domain (i.e., the bodily part of existence, all things connected with the necessity of the life process itself) has now become the preoccupation of the public sphere, which essentially transformed politics into the “gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping” (28) or “biopolitics,” to use Foucault’s term, infinitely distancing it from the political ideals of antiquity. The newly emerging sphere that erases the boundary between the public and the private by permitting the public appearance of activities associated with mere survival, is, as a result, no longer properly political but “social.” From a domain of action, individuality, competition, virtue, and difference, the public sphere has transformed into a domain of behavior, masses, and conformism, into a sphere that has a tendency to grow and to devour all other realms and distinctions, culminating in the phenomena of mass society and totalitarianism. In opposition to the totality of the social, the bodily oriented domain of conformity, there emerges a new object of concern, discovered by Rousseau and the Romantics: “a sphere of intimacy,” which was formerly protected by the private realm of the household. The modern flight from the outer world into the inner subjectivity of the individual, “the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses” (Arendt 1998, 50), results in the reversal of the classical parallel between the domains of soul and body and politics and the nonpolitical. Politics, once the proper domain of the appearance of humanity, individuality, and discursive agonism, is now guided by the formerly hidden necessities of the body. Meanwhile, that which used to appear and achieve its fulfilment in the political public sphere—“the soul” or interiority—is now identified with the hidden sphere of the intimate. This new duality between the social and the intimate, where the former constantly threatens to take over the latter, marks late modernity, eventually resulting in the total control of human life by the social-political domain of the state, epitomized in the totalitarian projects of the twentieth century.

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REDEMPTION OF THE POLITICAL AND THE LOSS OF THE OUTSIDE The totalitarian tendencies of late modernity have received their most severe critiques in the aftermath of World War II and the sobering effects of its unimaginable horrors, which exposed the fact that the old distinctions between politics and the nonpolitical—be it the household, the heavenly city, private property, or the intimate—were no longer viable. One of the questions that postwar intellectuals faced was whether Western modernity and its political categories and ideals were complicit in establishing the conditions of possibility of such phenomena as fascism, totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. And the answer was, often enough, affirmative. For instance, as Zygmunt Bauman (1999) convincingly argued, the Holocaust was “another face” of modern society, a logical outcome and not a mere aberration of the modern ideal of self-regulating (political) reason. This realization marked the point of no return for Western civilization, challenging political philosophy to reconsider its founding premises. As a result, the political-philosophical task of the second half of the twentieth century was to reconsider the very being of politics, its proper domain and limits, and to answer the questions of whether everything is indeed social and political, and whether we can think and live otherwise. The historical distinctions between politics and the nonpolitical have been widely challenged and rethought within contemporary political theory. More specifically, the traditional identification of politics with the state has become one of the major subjects of postwar critiques, since it was often held responsible for the emergence of totalitarian phenomena. The need to understand the root causes of totalitarianism and its popular support, as well as to prevent their emergence in the future, resulted in the reconsideration of the essence of politics. The question that had been asked again and again in this regard was “Is everything political?” and the most enthusiastic answers to this question arose in the field of political ontology. Many argued that in fact not everything is political because what is traditionally understood as “politics” is confined to the limited domain of the state and its institutions. And while “politics-as-state” simply preserves the status quo and is charged with the task of pacifying the conflictual tendencies of human nature, real change and transformation, action and progress come from the dynamic, ontological domain of “the political.” It is the political that lies at the limits of politics as its irreducible subversive excess, and so any totalitarian closure of politics-as-state is always already challenged by the inexhaustible force of the political. However effective these critiques were in reconsidering politics in nontotalizing terms, the possibility of the radical outside of the political was



Introduction: Beyond Politics 7

nevertheless obscured by them. In a way, the notion of the political itself has become a new totality that stubbornly refuses both to complete itself and to let go of its totalizing ambition. Insofar as the empirical reality of politicsas-state encounters its limits in the ontological reality of the political, and this political, in its turn, is only limited by the domain of politics-as-state, it is difficult to see whether there is any reality, form of relationality, or action left that can radically exceed the totalizing embrace of this “political difference.”2 The concept of the political has gradually transformed the traditional horizon of political analysis, dedicated to the state and its institutions, into a more open and flexible ontological framework; however, this conceptual transformation resulted in the erasure of the radical outside of politics. This erasure occurred along several fronts: the critique of transcendence, the disappearance of the state of nature, and the politicization of life and ontology. Nature, a domain of necessity, conflict, and “war of all against all,” which was formerly opposed to politics, has been drawn into the domain of the political in at least two important ways. First, many political thinkers have argued that the tendency toward conflict describes not only the prepolitical state of humanity but actually indexes the very essence of being human and being alive. As such, the so-called state of nature is positioned at the heart of political community. Second, biological life and economic activity, which had formerly been confined to the private domain of the household, have since become the primary objects of modern political government, resulting in the emergence of biopolitics. Like nature, transcendent principles were also eliminated from the field of the political, resulting in the post-theological immanentization of politics. The political has lost any sense of teleology that would take it outside its own field of operation (e.g., divine rupture or community of the heavenly city) or would put to rest the driving power of the agon. Politics has become not only infinite, in the sense that it does not have a predetermined end or a goal, but also finite, since it acknowledges its inability to complete itself in the fulfillment of any of its projects, guiding principles, or values. Politics has become its own goal that can never be fulfilled; it is a paradoxical immanent totality that refuses to complete itself. It is impossible to escape the political because there is no longer anywhere to find refuge, including the very life and being of humanity. As, for instance, many post-Heideggerian thinkers argue, to be means to be thrown into the world, implying the essential impossibility of solitude. To be is to be “with,” to experience existence as co-existence. Therefore, the domain of ontology, which was once the prerogative of the philosopher, whose bios theoretikos stood above bios politikos, has now become a major preoccupation of political thought and has resulted in the politicization of ontology. Contemporary philosophy ultimately completes the task that was already defined by

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Aristotle: to be human means to be political, and as long as one is, one cannot escape politics. In a nutshell, the political is no longer confined to something like the public space of the agora but consumes what was once considered its outside: nature, economy, conflicts and wars, passions, desires, interiority, life, and being itself. It consumes relationality in its generality and leaves no room for the absolutely unpolitical. Even though postwar rethinking of politics was guided by the need to critique totalitarian politics, it resulted in the neglect, if not erasure, of the outside of politics, constituting a new quasitotality and foreclosing the reality of its outside. The first part of the book is dedicated to developing this argument that the political has become a totalizing concept in contemporary political philosophy and outlines the ways in which this totalizing ambition, as well as a nascent intimation of its limits, can be detected in the works of Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Nancy, Massimo Cacciari and Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben. These thinkers, of course, do not stand alone in their engagement with political ontology and the notion of the political in particular. One can potentially draw into this discussion Hannah Arendt, Jacques Rancière, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Claude Lefort, Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and many others. However, despite the variety of approaches to the political, we can still detect among them a recurrence of at least three major themes that characterize the constitution of the political as a new form of totality. These are the politicization of nature, life, and ontology. In the works of Schmitt, Foucault, and Nancy all of these themes are developed to a greater or lesser degree, and I dedicate a chapter to each of their contributions, illuminating the role they play in the constitution of the totalizing tendency of the political. Chapter 1 examines how Schmitt’s concept of the political becomes totalizing as it consumes “nature” and “life” at the level of both actuality and potentiality. For Schmitt, the political is the total potential of human life for conflict which determines, in the last instance, all other spheres of activity and relationality. This totalization, I argue, results from the repression of the “absolutely unpolitical,” which we encounter, in Schmitt, in the heterogeneity of nonhuman forms of life. In the end, Schmitt’s model of political totalization urges us to rethink the relationship between human and nonhuman, and to question the possibility of the radical outside of politics along the line of human relationships with “nature” and “things,” as well as to problematize the reduction of life’s power to the agonistic model. Chapter 2 deals with the problem of the politicization of ontology and life, focusing on Foucault’s reconceptualization of power in terms of the multiplicity of force relations as well as his notion of biopolitics. Politics, defined as power relations, exhibits a totalizing tendency because it does not allow for an outside, and, more importantly, because in modernity it takes life as its central object.



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A resistance to biopolitical totalization, according to Foucault, may take the form of a struggle over the notion of life, redefining it beyond the framework of biological objectification. We find an intimation of this sort of resistance in Foucault’s last works, in which he turns to a notion of life as a “domain of error” and speaks of “an other life” and “an other world,” laying the ground for a further exploration of the unpolitical in the domain of philosophy of life. Chapter 3 closes the examination of the totalizing ambition of the political by focusing on the problem of the politicization of ontology in Nancy’s philosophy of the singular plurality of being. Nancy argues, following Heidegger, that being is essentially “with,” implying a certain primordiality of politics: to be always already means to be political. Even as Nancy proclaims that “not everything is political,” he maintains that politics is the place where everything crosses paths or establishes relationships. As such, the politicization of being results in establishing the political as a primordial totality of “being-with” that, in its turn, challenges us to reconsider the possibility of an unpolitical “being-without.” In its endeavor to reconsider and, perhaps, even to redeem politics, contemporary political philosophy has turned its back on the unpolitical but, importantly, did not get rid of it altogether. Despite the fact that politics is no longer clearly distinguished from the nonpolitical, the ghost of the latter lingers and continues to reappear, even if only negatively and in limited forms. First, the outside of politics has been long discussed in terms of the negation of politics. In this regard, postwar political philosophy has been guided by the critique of totalitarian politics and, simultaneously, by the fear of depoliticization. As Oliver Marchart (2007) notes, political thought has depended on the “neutralization or sublimation thesis,” meaning that the political has been seen as “increasingly neutralized or colonized by the social . . . or sublimated into non-political domains” (44). The political has been interpreted as an essentially threatened principle, and, rather than simply being recognized and defined, it had to be forcefully affirmed against the imminent prospect of depoliticization. From this point of view, anything nonpolitical has been interpreted only negatively, as something that must be either avoided or politicized. Any condition without politics has been described unfavorably, for example, as a state of suffering, apolitical apathy, withdrawal, resignation, nonparticipation or abstention from praxis. Contrary to such a negative view, there has emerged another prominent approach to the question of the outside of politics, framed by the notion of “the impolitical,” pioneered in the works of the Italian philosophers Massimo Cacciari and Roberto Esposito. This notion is only now gaining recognition in English-speaking scholarship, primarily due to a somewhat delayed appearance of English translations of Esposito’s early works (see, e.g., Esposito 2015). The category of the impolitical offers an innovative positive

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account of the limits of modern politics, meaning that political exteriority is no longer seen as something that needs to be simply feared or eliminated; on the contrary, it offers a promise of renewal of the political itself. Chapter 4 presents a critical introduction to the category of the impolitical through a close reading of Cacciari’s essay “Nietzsche and the Impolitical” as well as Esposito’s Categories of the Impolitical. Both thinkers emphasize that the impolitical is not a rejection of the political but constitutes its immanent critique; it is the political viewed from its external limits. In a way, their view of the impolitical is similar to many other contemporary reconsiderations of the notion of politics in terms of the political, where the latter is renewed through a critical philosophical intervention. As a result, despite its unique contribution, the impolitical, I argue, does not deliver on its promise of going beyond the political: its main task still lies in rethinking politics and not in accounting for its radical exteriority. The impolitical thus indexes only a relative, rather than absolute, outside that always already stands within the renewed political space. A somewhat similar approach to the outside of politics that has become prominent within past few decades is found in Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life,” which he also discusses in impolitical terms. Bare life, as I show in chapter 5, fuses the impolitical with the experience of living beyond politics. However, contrary to Cacciari and Esposito, it appears in a negative light: it is first and foremost an excepted life, an originary problematic (but also constitutive) aspect of Western (bio)politics. Consequently, bare life, for Agamben, must be redeemed through its irreversible politicization. The resulting notion of “form-of-life” indexes life that no longer exceeds politics but rather defines its new form. I suggest that a close examination of Agamben’s version of the impolitical urges us to reconsider the possibility of something like positive bare life. Can we conceive of bare life as a positive experience of life-as-such that precedes as well as exceeds any form of politics, and not merely as a by-product of the biopolitical anthropological machine? An answer to this question, as in the case with Foucault, lies in a philosophical reconsideration of the notion of life, which would place the question of its “quality” beyond the imperative of politicization. Despite the aforementioned limitations, I believe that we can speak of the advent of the unpolitical in contemporary political philosophy, and one of the major tasks of chapters 6, 7, and 8, which comprise the second part of the book, is to illuminate some central avenues of this advent.3 My suggestion is that despite the lack of theoretical engagement, the unpolitical remains real. The loss of immediate vision of the unpolitical is conditioned not by its ultimate absence or impossibility, but by a certain coloring of the lens through which philosophers have been looking at this problem. First, this lens has been colored by the presupposition of the primacy of the political, which



Introduction: Beyond Politics 11

resulted in the blindness toward its radical outside. In light of “the death of God,” famously proclaimed by Nietzsche, modern political philosophers have implicitly assumed that politics was able to account for the totality of human existence, experiences, and interactions and, perhaps, to even become the means of salvation of secular Western societies from their own wrongs. This book is a call for a reversal of this perspective, in the form of undermining the primacy of the political and challenging its totalizing tendency. Second, the lens of our theoretical vision has been colored by the dominance of the poststructuralist and post-foundational methodologies, which deny access to anything “real” that has not always already been affected by the social-political world and its discursive practices, thus acknowledging the legitimacy of only relative exteriority. In response to the current domination of the idea of the relative outside of politics, epitomized by the notion of the impolitical, this book calls for a shift toward a realist framework, suggesting that we can think the outside of politics in radical or absolute terms, and without falling into the trap of naive apoliticism or reversing to the premodern conceptions of the nonpolitical. Third, our theoretical lens has been colored by colonialism, with its universalizing ontological claims. Political philosophy, in this regard, has acted as a censor and a guardian of the “proper” qualities of the political, regardless of how much it has tried to affirm the impropriety of anything properly political. The decolonization of theory, and of political thought and practice in particular, can begin when we are ready to admit the plurality of ontological models developed by non-Western systems of thought. Speaking to this demand, this book is an invitation to look at the question of the outside of politics from a non-Western perspective in hope of advancing the project of decolonization of political philosophy. The selection of thinkers and approaches that I turn to in order to explore the unpolitical is not an exhaustive one, and the versatility of political exteriority is in no way limited to their considerations. However, these particular interventions act as productive pointers in the task of mapping the unpolitical since these ideas function as points of condensation that address central concerns regarding the totalizing ambition of the political. Among these concerns are a reconsideration of the relationship between humans, nonhumans, and things; a rethinking of life that puts it beyond the reach of biopolitical objectification and beyond the ontological model of being-with; as well as an opening to a non-Western view of the limits of politics that considers affect as a core notion in the conception of sociality. One of the most prominent approaches that must be considered in any discussion of political ontology today is post-humanism or new materialism that implicitly addresses the limitations of Schmitt’s category of the political along the lines of the human relationship with “nature.” Many of these interventions, however, by inviting nonhuman exteriority into the political fold,

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perpetuate and even further amplify its totalizing ambition. In this regard, chapter 6 focuses on an examination of the political dimensions of Quentin Meillassoux’s thought and argues that his speculative materialism, contrary to many other contributions within this emerging philosophical trend, presents a challenge to contemporary political theory as it demands the recognition of the real limits of politics. Having embraced the possibility of a world without “correlation,” Meillassoux’s philosophy opens to several options. One is expressed by his quasi-messianic consideration of a “world without politics” grounded in the notion of ancestrality and absolute justice. Another possibility is characterized by a quasi-nihilistic acceptance of the end of humanity—extinction—that indexes the limit of politics in terms of its pending abolition. Meillassoux’s philosophy thus contributes to the emergence of speculative political theory that rests on the acknowledgment of the absolute limits of the political form of being. Chapter 7 develops a critique of the totalizing ambition of modern biopolitics based on Michel Henry’s radical phenomenology of life. Following his critique of modern philosophy, I suggest that the outside of biopolitics may be identified in “life-as-such,” understood as the experience of self-affection that manifests itself prior to and independently of the world. While a biopolitical notion of life is confined to biological objectification and is indexed by resistance to death, a radical phenomenological view frees the concept of life from any objective determination. Life cannot be confined to a limited figure and thus escapes biopolitics. Furthermore, insofar as life’s mode of manifestation is not worldly but acosmic, it extends beyond the political ontology of “being-with.” It is an experience of “being-without” that forms the basis of a universal community of life—“pathos-with”—that is potentially open to every living being, human and nonhuman alike. Chapter 8 locates the debate on political exteriority at the intersection of Western and Buddhist political philosophy, showing how such shifting of perspective allows us to displace the problem of political totalization onto a new set of coordinates marked by the project of decolonization of theory. In this chapter, I argue that the Buddhist philosophy of compassion contains a positive theory of the unpolitical, which explicates a form of relationality that not merely displaces the totalizing ambition of the concept of the political but also affirms its radical exteriority that contains the potential for politically indifferent but, nevertheless, transformative action grounded in the ontology of inter-being. The chapter proceeds by staging a conversation between Arendt’s critique of compassion, which is representative of the Western suspicion of this apolitical affect, and Buddhist philosophy, which considers compassion the cornerstone of its social ontology. For Arendt, compassion is a problematic natural affect that remains invisible in the public sphere, devoid of the imperative of responsibility, and thus incapable of grounding political



Introduction: Beyond Politics 13

action. Buddhism, on the other hand, views compassion as a universal affect that can and must be practically cultivated in order to develop into a transformative action that appears in the world. It also uproots anthropocentric conceptions of sociality and lays a ground for a post-humanist conception of community, embracing an interspecies model of justice. To conclude, the notion of the unpolitical is able to attune our theoretical vision to the concepts as well as experiences that radically extend beyond the political and that so far have remained unthought. The present book is an inquiry into the possibility of this unthought. How may we begin thinking these experiences and concepts? I will commence my exploration of this question with the following theses in mind. First, it is necessary to recognize that contemporary political thought is totalizing insofar as in its attempt to redefine politics it fails to positively account for its radical outside. Second, despite the effective lack of theoretical engagement, the radical outside of politics does persist, even as it remains difficult to describe it with the existing conceptual apparatus. Third, it is necessary to think this outside so that we can discover new possibilities of living “other,” “true,” “good,” and “happy” lives that eschew any totalitarian potential. We need to invent concepts and a language that will allow us to think the unpolitical in a new way. Guided by these considerations, the overarching intent of this book is, by way of critique, to explore ways of thinking the radical outside of politics as well as the possibilities which this thinking offers for contemporary societies. NOTES 1. For an in-depth examination of Augustine’s political thought, see, for instance, Jean Elshtain’s Augustine and the Limits of Politics (1998). 2. For a discussion of “the political difference” see Marchart (2007). 3. This task finds a parallel in the current work of Laurent Dubreuil (2006, 2009, 2012), who similarly addresses the problem of the totalizing ambition of the political difference. Dubreuil’s project is motivated by “the dream of breaking away . . . from all forms of politics and the political” (2009, 5), and a possibility of “leaving politics,” resulting in the theoretical affirmation of “apolitics.” The latter is defined as “a movement of critique, refusal, separation, and proclamation where those involved, while not losing sight of the fact that policies may clash, still insist that it is inherently insufficient to simply settle wrongs” (17). While the settlement of these wrongs is at stake for politics, the task of which is to organize and manage the lives merely “lived,” apolitics “simply allows us to make life more livable” (17; emphasis added). This notion of “livable life” constitutes the ground of Dubreuil’s project of the affirmative refusal of politics—an affirmation of “a rupture that would not be integratable” into politics.

Part I

THE TOTALITY OF THE POLITICAL AND ITS LIMITS

Politics is a terrible force: If one only knows about it, one has already succumbed to it. One has lost one’s innocence. —Thomas Mann

Chapter 1

Carl Schmitt: The General Economy of the Political

Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (1932) is widely regarded as the first major instance of theorizing “the political” (das Politische), and is also an early example of conceptualizing this political as a totality.1 In modern times, politics has been primarily understood in conjunction with the notion of the state: institutions operating for the sake of mediating human relations in the process of attaining a good life. Schmitt’s concept of the political is no longer attached to the state; on the contrary, the concept of the state now presupposes the concept of the political (2007, 19). The political is marked by the autonomy and specificity of the friend-enemy distinction, which underlies the multiplicity of human endeavours as their ultimate possibility. Within Schmitt’s work, the political evolves into a potentially all-encompassing phenomenon that leaves no space for “the absolutely unpolitical”—the reality that cannot be politicized and persists in the relationship of indifference to, rather than withdrawal from, the political. The political is among the most studied aspects of Carl Schmitt’s thought, appropriated by contemporary, typically leftist, scholarship for its critique of liberal democracy (see, e.g., Mouffe 1999, 2005; Dyrberg 2009; Marchart 2007), but also critiqued for its totalization, particularly in conjunction with Schmitt’s affiliation with Nazism in 1933–1936. Despite the attention to “the political,” Schmitt’s notion of “the unpolitical” has received little consideration, even though it plays a crucial role in revealing the political totalization at hand. On most occasions, Schmitt presents the unpolitical as a merely “fictitious” reality, as nothing more than a product of a political decision. However, when we read The Concept of the Political (1932) and Political Theology (1922) more closely, we can see that even though Schmitt acknowledges the unpolitical only as a “fiction” and avoids any lengthy discussion of “the absolutely unpolitical,” his political totalization essentially relies on 17

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obscuring this radical exteriority. Contemporary political theory inherits this obscuration and so by examining Schmitt’s thought we gain a better understanding of the mechanism of the “forgetting” of the unpolitical. In Schmitt, this mechanism is present in a doubling of the moment of sovereign decision: first is an originary decision on the unpolitical “as such,” and second is a political decision on the friend-enemy distinction. Schmitt prioritizes the latter decision and dedicates most of his time to discussing how we may identify and distinguish the political from other spheres of human activity. However, what is masked by this prioritization is the fact of the essential limitation of the political to humanity, insofar as what remains absolutely unpolitical for Schmitt consists in heterogeneous non-human forms of life. In the end, even as Schmitt’s concept of the political announces the end of the modern separation between “the state of nature” (the state of conflict, war, misery) and “politics” (the state of peace, security, culture), and establishes the political as a totality that permeates human life as a whole, he does not ultimately overcome the modern distinction between the non-human and politics. It speaks volumes that even as his totalizing vision of the political relies on the elimination of the absolutely unpolitical, the very fact of this philosophical elimination remains unthought by Schmitt. It is crucial, then, to examine in detail not only how the political becomes the total but also how the absolutely unpolitical is brushed aside by the desire for the affirmation of the political, of its primacy and valorization as the measure of all human relations. HISTORICAL-INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND The historical-intellectual context of the beginning of the twentieth century contributed greatly to Schmitt’s rethinking of the political in terms of the conflictual reality of human life, epitomized in the criterion of the friend-enemy distinction. First, the political embraces the spirit of that conflict-ridden age. The horrors of World War I, the struggles of the Weimar Republic and the failure of its democracy, all of these events find their way into Schmitt’s legal-political theory in the form of a confession of anthropological pessimism. Second, Schmitt establishes his affirmation of the conflictual reality of the political primarily as a polemic against the ideals of liberal democracy, which he sees as a movement of “neutralization and depoliticization” (Schmitt 1993). He explains that in the seventeenth century a shift takes place in Europe from Christian theology to natural science, at the core of which lies “an elemental impulse that has been decisive for centuries, i.e. the striving for a neutral sphere” (137), a sphere without conflict, where common agreement would be reached through the exchange of opinions. Such a trajectory toward



Carl Schmitt: The General Economy of the Political 19

neutralization or even deliberate depoliticization of reality appears within the liberal narrative of transition from the conflictual state of nature to the neutral sphere of the political state. In its essence, liberalism is a repression of the conflictual essence of the political. Against such a liberal, consensus-driven view of human nature, Schmitt embraces and affirms a belief in “a problematic human nature” defined by its conflictual drive (2007, 61). In opposition to the traditional interpretation of the Hobbesian transition from the state of nature to politics, Schmitt suggests that the commencement of the political way of life merely orders and contains but does not do away with conflictuality. Humanity undergoes a transformation only in its form of life and not in its essential quality. Liberal political thought, however, is in denial of this fact and ends up repressing the “genuine” essence of the political, replacing it with the neutral, depoliticized sphere of the state and law. Schmitt’s concept of the political is an attempt at lifting this repression: emerging as a reaction to liberalism, the political indexes the return of the repressed of liberal politics, since it gives a conceptual presence to and expresses the inexhaustible possibility of the interruption of order by the dynamic principle of intensive life. Furthermore, two other, seemingly opposing, tendencies of the early twentieth century contributed to the totalizing extension of the political beyond the old framework of politics-as-state. First, the emergence of effective, non-state political actors and processes as well as the progress of democracy and the politicization of civil society contributed to diminishing the role of the state in defining “proper” political spaces (cf. Arditi 1996, 15). Second, “the closure of the map” (Bey 1991, 102), which marks humanity’s entrance into the new century, the disappearance of no-man’s land, terra incognita or the frontier, of the factual outside of the international system of nation-states, contributed greatly to the immanentisation of the political. Thinking the political beyond the state commences as a mechanism of compensation for a lost “transcendence” in politics. This transcendence is lost in both ideal and material sense as a result of the processes of secularization as well as appropriation of the material space of the globe by the community of states. The “death of God” and the occupation of terra incognita thus present a similar challenge for political thought: in light of the loss of transcendence, the outside of politics is being rethought in terms of immanence. An outside that can no longer be identified with an external reality, either material or divine, must be now located on the inside. Importantly, the reality of conflicts, crises, and the loss of transcendence have also resulted in the disappearance of any certainty in human existence except for the certainty of death. As Richard Wolin puts it, such “existentialism” meant that “human existence, in its brute factivity, became a value in and of itself” (1990, 394). In a world without foundation, the primary certainty of

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life becomes death. It is not surprising that Schmitt will embrace the threat of violent, real death as the indicator of the “genuine” quality of the political. In sum, Schmitt’s concept of the political emerges as a self-referential reflection on the history and prominent tendencies of late-modern politics, but at the same time it itself represents an instance of a new historical-political consciousness, defined by a lack of a foundational principle. The affirmation of the political, performed in the face of liberal depoliticization and the displacement of the state’s primacy, is deemed possible only if it overcomes the limitations of its own sphere and merges with life itself, becoming total in a new sense. Schmitt realizes this necessity and so proclaims: “We have come to recognize that the political is the total, and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is unpolitical [Unpolitische] is always a political decision, irrespective of who decides and what reasons are advanced” (2005, 2). This proclamation rests on the elimination of the absolutely unpolitical and on the permanent relocation of the outside of politics (e.g., the state of nature and biological life) to the inside. THE POLITICAL AS THE TOTAL: THE FRIEND-ENEMY DISTINCTION To diagnose the political as totalizing requires an elaboration of a concrete symptomology. In the first place, the political as the total results, counterintuitively, from Schmitt’s desire to affirm the autonomy of the political based on the friend-enemy distinction. He famously proposes: The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy. This provides a definition in the sense of a criterion and not as an exhaustive definition or one indicative of substantial content. . . . It is independent, not in the sense of a distinct new domain, but in that it can neither be based on any one antithesis or any combination of other antitheses, nor can it be traced to these. . . . Thereby the inherently objective nature and autonomy of the political becomes evident by virtue of its being able to treat, distinguish, and comprehend the friend-enemy antithesis independently of other antitheses. (2007, 26, 27; emphasis added)

Schmitt is determined to show that the political is not limited to a specific sphere, and to distance it from the common “negative” definitions that rely on a contrast with other domains, such as economy, law and morality (2007, 20). The political has been long subordinated to other spheres and has thus been viewed as a mere extension of other human activities. In opposition to these widespread attitudes of his time, Schmitt presents a positive view of the political, meaning that it proceeds from its own criterion, and so introduces



Carl Schmitt: The General Economy of the Political 21

into the discourse of political philosophy a distinction (friend-enemy) that lays the ground for the autonomy of the political. However, as long as the political discovers its autonomy in an always potentially multiple “criterion” and not an “essence,” it avoids any “substantial” limitation. As such, it is the specificity of the political criterion rather than the autonomy of the political sphere that is at stake for Schmitt (cf. Szabo 2006, 32; Arditi 1996, 17). Its inessentiality provides the concept of the political with an unprecedented plasticity and the possibility for mobility across other social fields. The political becomes neither dependent on other spheres nor limited to its own sphere. Quite the opposite, it is capable of investing all human relations and endeavours with its intense principle of differentiation. Schmitt writes: The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation. . . . [However,] every distinction, most of all the political, as the strongest and most intense of the distinctions and categorizations, draws upon other distinctions for support. (2007, 26, 27; emphasis added)

The political distinction stands out among all other distinctions due to its degree of intensity, ultimately implying that any distinction may be politicized. As the intensity of a certain opposition grows, it will eventually reach its highest level, and, when it reaches this level, it will no longer be an ethical, religious or any other opposition but a political distinction, transforming into an opposition between a friend and an enemy (62). The quantitative augmentation of the intensity of an opposition thus results in its qualitative transformation—politicization. By focusing on the quantity of the energetic charge of the political distinction, Schmitt introduces omnipresent potentiality as a defining factor of the political (Marder 2005, 16). That is, since any opposition may become political, the political is the total potential inherent in all other spheres of human life. It determines them in the last instance. Furthermore, the concept of the political is “parasitic” (Shapiro 2003, 107) inasmuch as it feeds off or derives “its energy from the most varied human endeavours” (Schmitt 2007, 38). This parasitism results, again, from the absence of the “proper” place of the political. As the political is marked only by the criteria of differentiation and intensity, it can potentially consume any relational antithesis; it does not have a place of its own, it does not belong to a limited field. As Marton Szabo points out, the political has an infinite character: it can refer to anything by “touching” its subject. The political is a total contact, “an infinite substance that penetrates life as a whole” (2006, 33). At the same time, the ability of the political to thrive off heterogeneous relations is indicative of the political as a principle of displacement, as apparently non-political spheres become infected and ultimately displaced by the political. Consequently, the latter is a principle of both infinite contact and

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displacement, total unity and the erasure of difference. Due to the displacement of the state’s “monopoly on politics” (Schmitt 2007, 22), there is no longer an objective structure to mark the line between the political and the non-political. As a result, no endeavours are non-political as such; they are merely not-yet-politicized, and are only relatively unpolitical. As Schmitt concurs, “the total reality of the political” is thus revealed because concepts that at first glance had appeared non-political “turn into political ones” (38). In sum, the combination of the criteria of intensity, differentiation, and potentiality results in the emergence of the political as a totality. All living relations can potentially reach the level of intensity necessary for the political to emerge, and so the political is nothing less than “intensive life [intensives Leben]” (Schmitt in Wolin 1990, 406). Life charged with conflictual energy, life that struggles with life and with death is what ultimately defines the political for Schmitt. More specifically, it is the possibility of physical demise that determines the reality of conflict at the heart of the political. “The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing” (Schmitt 2007, 33). In the age of violent conflicts, loss of transcendence, and absence of the firm ground of existence, death appears to be the only measure that offers a “foundation” for new politics. Schmitt embraces this pessimistic diagnosis of modernity and builds his theory of the political on this quasi-foundation. His discourse, in this regard, is not unique, as modern science also comes to define life through its conflict with death. As Xavier Bichat writes, for example, life is “the sum of the functions, by which death is resisted. . . . The measure . . . of life in general, is the difference which exists between the effort of exterior power, and that of interior resistance” (1815, 21, 22). Life is a perpetual struggle between a unity, an ensemble of functions, and its real, “negated other”—disintegration and death. Since no life is free from the imminent possibility of death, it is unavoidably charged with political energy, with actual war between human groups being its most intense manifestation. The political is a constitutive part of living insofar as life is marked by a degree of intensity in its struggle with death. Schmitt may object that a “life which has only death as its antithesis is no longer life but powerlessness and helplessness.” Thus, the “natural” movement of life toward death is not in itself political because it lacks power. What makes life political and an act of power is the fact that life struggles not with death but with life (1993, 142). The political quality of life consists in killing (not mere dying), in a violent form of death, bodily destruction at the hands of another life. Life murders life, splits against itself and devours itself. Thus the political essence of life consists in struggle with death, but this possibility of death now takes the form of another life. The general underlying condition



Carl Schmitt: The General Economy of the Political 23

of this tendency of life toward politicization is finitude, where the figure of an enemy, in its very living nature, manifests a looming possibility of violent termination of life (i.e., of physical death) and not just a threat to our “way of life” (2007, 27). As a result, death is not opposed to life but is a function of life, a conclusion that scientific thought of the nineteenth century also readily embraces. As Michel Foucault has shown, modern physiology, for instance, begins to view the animal organism (including humans) as a bearer of death, containing “a perpetual devouring of life by life” (1994, 277). Life is a “wild,” “inexhaustible force,” “mute and invisible violence” that devours beings from within their inner darkness (278). Life gains its political charge by facing death in and as itself, by dividing and violently destroying itself. The intimate connection between specifically human life and the political is epitomized in Schmitt’s pessimistic anthropology. While “optimistic anthropology” views humans as beings driven to mutual agreement, “all genuine political theories,” Schmitt writes, “presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but a dangerous and dynamic being” (2007, 61; emphasis added). In this framework, as Leo Strauss suggests, the question of the negation or affirmation of the political is basically reduced to a quarrel about human nature: whether humans are “good” or “evil.” Schmitt’s assumption about humans as “evil” cannot be deduced from his concept of the political; on the contrary, the political rests on the presupposition of pessimistic anthropology. The latter is indeed no more than an unprovable “supposition” that largely remains a matter of an “anthropological confession of faith” (Strauss 2007, 96). As long as the opposite anthropological belief is possible, the political remains in principle “threatened,” and so requires a decisive “affirmation” of its reality and not mere “recognition.” In this regard, Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political is a normative (and not polemical, as he would have preferred) affirmation of the political based on a belief in the human as a dangerous and dynamic being. Schmitt’s political anthropology, then, constitutes a specific philosophical decision about the nature of the human, which he does not fail to acknowledge: “Because the sphere of the political is in the final analysis determined by the real possibility of enmity, political conceptions and ideas cannot very well start with an anthropological optimism. This would dissolve the possibility of enmity and, thereby, every specific political consequence” (2007, 64). Schmitt derives his anthropological convictions from the given reality of the political (the real existence of such phenomena as conflicts, wars, etc.); however, he also reverses this relationship to support the necessity of affirming the political. That is, in the first instance, a philosophical decision on human nature rests at the basis of the recognition of the political. As a result, the political arises as inherent in the very nature

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of humanity; it is intensive life, and, thus, impossible to eliminate. Nothing escapes potential politicization. Since the political is an essential feature of human life, “politics cannot be exterminated . . . it continues to remain the destiny” (78) of human life. The human ceases to be human when it ceases to be political. In the end, the totalizing tendency of the political consists in the consumption of life, in its concreteness and potentiality, and of various human relations and endeavours by the total potential of politicization. It becomes practically impossible to distinguish between what is political and what is not. In Schmitt’s thought we witness the emergence of, to use Bataille’s terms, the “general economy” of the political. For Bataille, “general economy,” the unconscious of a “restricted economy” (a specific sphere of activity guided by the principles of productive activity and accumulation), considers the heterogeneous “play of living matter in general” (1988, 23), not confined to a particular domain and a utilitarian aim. This “general play” is precisely what Schmitt suggests about the political: its energy is not restricted to a specific domain, but rather displaces, connects and underlies various human activities, including life’s conflict with itself. The concept of the political, then, indexes a specific political intensity of the play of the living matter in general. Such a general economy of the political is nothing less than totalizing: the political has no real limit as long as conflict defines human life, resulting in the ever-present possibility of the emergence of the friend-enemy distinction across various fields and relations. The political is also impossible to escape theoretically, insofar as we encounter a “contradiction” every time we attempt to define something as unpolitical (cf. Strauss 2007, 94). As Schmitt maintains, any decision on the unpolitical is a political decision, and thus any gesture toward the outside of the political is necessarily an act of further politicization. From the perspective of the political totality, the outside, for Schmitt, is never “absolutely unpolitical [absolut Unpolitische]” (2007, 25; translation modified) but only “fictitiously unpolitical [ fiktiv Unpolitische]” (2001, 30; translation modified), meaning that it is designated as unpolitical only for a political reason, from the perspective of the primacy of the political. However, this very obscuration of the notion of the absolutely unpolitical constitutes the condition of possibility of political totalization because it is indicative of its real limit. Once a discussion of these real limits is ignored or eliminated, it becomes possible for Schmitt to affirm, without raising an objection, that “the political is the total.” To revitalize a discussion about the absolutely unpolitical means to challenge the totality of the political. In order to begin questioning the political in this way, it is necessary to first identify its operation within concrete situations and to elucidate the logic of its emergence—the logic of two decisions.



Carl Schmitt: The General Economy of the Political 25

DECIDING ON “THE ABSOLUTELY UNPOLITICAL”: CONSTITUTION OF THE PRE-POLITICAL FIELD On the one hand, the political is defined by conflict, disruption, enmity and a possibility of real killing; on the other hand, as long as the specificity of its criterion lies in the friend-enemy distinction, the political also functions as a form of ordering. This conclusion is based on an observation that, for Schmitt, the political emerges only in concrete situations. The political is a “situational” phenomenon (cf. Schmitt 2005, 13), a decision that arises as a result of ordering and elimination of heterogeneity in the process of establishing a “normal situation.” The political decision (on the friend-enemy distinction) is never abstract: it never pre-exists but arises out of a concrete situation. The political enemy is “the stranger,” “the negated other”; however, the immediate presence of such an enemy “can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party. Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict” (2007, 27; emphasis added). Only from within a concrete situation can one decide on who constitutes an “enemy” and a “friend,” “them” and “us”; only from within a concrete situation can one assign identities to entities and groups. This process of identification is a process of ordering: each group is allocated a specific place in the field of a conflict and is expected to perform a certain role, to behave in a certain way. According to this logic, any genuine political decision is an ordering action. It is a process of identification or normalization that establishes an expected pattern of behaviour. Our friends are expected to act with us and to protect our lives, and our enemies are expected to act against us, threatening our very lives. Schmitt’s Political Theology exposes this logic of political ordering and obliquely clarifies its underlying mechanism—the exception of the absolutely unpolitical. “Every order,” Schmitt notes, “rests on a decision and not a norm” (2005, 10), and the political ordering rests on a decision on the concrete friend-enemy distinction. Nevertheless, this decision is always secondary because it applies to an already constituted pre-political field, established by the originary occurrence—the decision on the absolutely unpolitical. Schmitt examines this logic in relation to the operation of legal norms, but it can be extrapolated onto the political order as well, since “every order,” he argues, contains this logic. Schmitt writes: The exception appears in its absolute form when a situation in which legal prescriptions can be valid must first be brought about. Every general norm demands a normal, everyday frame of life to which it can be factually applied and which is subjected to its regulations. The norm requires a homogeneous medium. This

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effective normal situation is not a mere “superficial presupposition” that a jurist can ignore; that situation belongs precisely to its immanent validity. There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos. For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist. (2005, 13; emphasis added)

Rewritten from the perspective of the political rather than legal ordering, this paragraph shines in a new light: “The exception of the absolutely unpolitical appears when a situation in which political decisions can be made must first be brought about. Every distribution of identities between friends and enemies demands a normal, political frame of life. The political decision requires a homogeneous medium or normal situation. There exists no friendenemy distinction that is applicable to chaos. For the political ordering to make sense, a normal situation must exist.” The most important question that arises in this regard is about the core of such a normal situation and of what is left behind—the absolute form of exception. The latter is different from a fictitious form of exception—an exception from the existing norm, from the political. The common notions in Schmitt’s writings, such as “depoliticization” and “neutralization,” correspond to the notion of the fictitiously unpolitical exception. However, there are two kinds of exceptions and thus two kinds of decisions that affect the political totality. The “absolute form” of exception pre-exists the establishment of the norm and, thus, of the political field. A “normal situation,” opposed to “chaos,” that enables any subsequent application of a general norm emerges as the result of an exception in its absolute form. The political, as a distribution of identities among friends and enemies, according to this logic, relies on the establishment of a normal, pre-political situation inasmuch as no stable distinctions can be made in chaos. When Chantal Mouffe notes that Schmitt’s theory is lacking an account of the “common symbolic ground” (1999, 5) that might be necessary for political rivals to engage in a mutually meaningful relationship, she identifies a similar problem. She is pointing out the necessity of an existing pre-political field in order for political phenomena to emerge; however, she is not exactly right to suggest that an account of this common ground is missing in Schmitt. The constitution of a normal, pre-political situation in Schmitt rests upon the originary event or a decision to except the absolutely unpolitical, i.e. everything which from that particular moment cannot be even potentially identified as a friend or an enemy. For Schmitt, this is an exception of everything non-human, inhuman or, better still, of the heterogeneous power of life that cannot be in the last instance subsumed under the drive to politicization. This unpolitical power of life, according to Schmitt’s logic of opposition between “homogeneity” and “chaos,” between ordering and a lack of determination, is essentially the heterogeneity of life’s energies that characterizes



Carl Schmitt: The General Economy of the Political 27

“chaos,” since the notion of “chaos” implies irreducible multiplicity and difference and not merely emptiness or void. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, chaos is “characterized less by the absence of determinations than by the infinite speed with which they take shape and vanish. . . . Chaos makes chaotic and undoes every consistency in the infinite” (1994, 42; emphasis added). Chaos is not so much an absence of stability but a movement of infinite displacement of determination: it is a multiplicity of heterogeneous elements that are impossible to assimilate under a unitary principle (cf. Bataille 1985, 140). When Schmitt opposes “homogeneous medium” to “chaos,” by the very same token he creates an opposition between the specifically political quality of life and the heterogeneity of life’s energy. In other words, the homogeneous medium that enables political decision and ordering consists in delimiting only certain forms of life as potentially political. Here Schmitt partakes in the originary event of modern political philosophy: the elimination of the absolutely unpolitical, of the heterogeneous essence of life (often referred to as “nature”), and its substitution by the fictitious reality of a non-political concept, such as humanity. The establishment of the political as the total for Schmitt requires an absolute form of exception that ensures the philosophical primacy of the homogeneity of life’s potential, determined in terms of a drive to politicization as well as humanity. Stated otherwise, Schmitt’s conscious decision consists in his subscription to pessimistic anthropology, from which follows his implicit commitment to the view of human life as essentially driven toward politicization. The political is “intensive” life, life in conflict with itself, even if this conflict gains its actuality only in a specific confrontation between an enemy and a friend. However, this vision of life as conflictual is dependent upon the reduction of its heterogeneity through a primary, perhaps unconscious, philosophical decision that excludes non-human life from the field of consideration, establishing a homogeneous philosophical medium—“humanity”— that enables the subsequent politicization of any concrete situation. The nature of the political totalization consists in the erasure of differences within life’s power. The originary event of decision homogenizes life: it excludes unpolitical life from the pre-political field. Schmitt famously notes the connection between the exception and life: “In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition” (2005, 15; emphasis added). Since any exception manifests the power of real life, Schmitt’s opposition established here is between the stabilization of order and the power of life, and as long as the political is a specific kind of ordering, it is opposed to the power of real life. As a result, that “intensive” life, which inheres in the political, is an already homogenized power; it serves as a medium that allows for the political ordering to emerge based on the specific principle of confrontation. Life is reduced to a conflict

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and an essentially politicizable power. The absolute form of the exception, then, appears when the very field for political thought is established, when a decision is made about what constitutes the “vital normalcy” that grounds political phenomena. Political consciousness is established through a “censorship”—an exclusion of heterogeneous, in this case non-human, elements from life’s domain. One way of addressing Schmitt’s political totalization is to acknowledge life’s heterogeneity and to affirm that its reality is not exhausted by the homogeneous tendency toward politicization. Some may object that Schmitt recognizes the role of other, non-political antitheses, such as economic, religious and moral ones, meaning that he does acknowledge the heterogeneity of life’s power. However, since all non-political antitheses may become political, since the concept of the political can assimilate them, they are deprived of real heterogeneity. There is no difference of kind between these antitheses and the political. The only real distinction is established through an originary decision on what constitutes the absolutely unpolitical: the elements, powers and energies that are radically heterogeneous to any political assimilation. Who decides on the unpolitical? Where is the “agency” of a decisionmaker? Obviously, insofar as a concrete situation is at hand, the real participants of this situation will determine what is to be “discarded” as unpoliticizable. For example, in a situation of war between two entities, the plant and animal life of the actual battlefield might be excluded as absolutely unpolitical: even potentially, they will not be taken into account when the friend-enemy distinction is performed. From this point of view, the notion of the unpolitical resembles what Leo Strauss calls “the neutral.” He suggests that the Schmittian enemy figure appears as a result of the dissolution of neutrality: “Each looks intently at his enemy; in order to gain a free line of fire, with a sweep of the hand they wave aside—without looking at—the neutral who lingers in the middle, interrupting the view of the enemy” (2007, 106; emphasis added). Even though for Strauss the neutral is what enables the reconciliation of the enemies, it is open to other interpretations. Neutrality can be viewed in more general terms, as the unpolitical blindly swept aside by the desire for the political. The neutral, in this case, is actively eliminated and not merely ignored. Political totalization for Schmitt begins with the effective elimination of the absolutely unpolitical, with “the cognitive-perceptual elimination of the neutral third” (Marder 2005, 18). The unpolitical has no reality in and of itself; however, this negation of real heterogeneity is a necessary decision preceding the political. Even though the “situational” character of the political might imply that its real limits coincide with the limits of the concrete situations in which it emerges, the political in fact remains totalizing because these situations ultimately rely on a prior philosophical decision, which



Carl Schmitt: The General Economy of the Political 29

determines the pre-political field in reductive terms. That is, when the question of the unpolitical is considered in light of political philosophy, and particularly, in light of attempts to conceptualize the political, the decision on the absolutely unpolitical, this originary and absolute form of exception, appears to be nothing more than a specifically philosophical decision. The latter is apparent in several interconnected instances in Schmitt: his political anthropology, the tendency to politicize life and to reduce its heterogeneity and, most importantly, in his discussion of the concept of “humanity.” He writes: Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet. The concept of humanity excludes the concept of the enemy, because the enemy does not cease to be a human being—and hence there is no specific differentiation in that concept. . . . [Since] there are no wars of humanity as such . . . humanity is not a political concept. (2007, 54, 55)

Humanity is not a political concept for Schmitt because it does not have a real “other” whom it can negate or, at least, not within the limits of the planet. One can speculate on the possibility of the real wars of humanity only in the form of science fiction, by imagining alien worlds. As long as these worlds remain unknown, we would have to accept that any war for the sake of humanity is nothing but a “highly political utilization of the non-political term” (2007, 55). No political entity, for Schmitt, corresponds to humanity as such; but insofar as any decision on whether something is unpolitical is a political decision, the concept of humanity, as Schmitt himself sees it, is nothing more than a fictitious unpolitical concept. The same is true for the notion of the “inhuman,” since an enemy can only be fictitiously dehumanized and depoliticized for a political reason. “The concept of human only superficially neutralizes differences between people. In reality, it carries with it a murderous counterconcept with the most terrible potential for destruction: the inhuman” (2002, 114). This “inhumanity,” nevertheless, appears as a mere difference within humanity, it is a distinction that depends upon a specific political decision on who counts as human, sharing in “our” identity, and as inhuman, the other who has to be negated, or “a monster” that must be “utterly destroyed” (2007, 36). The real inhuman (e.g., the animal, technology, nature, life, etc.) never as such enters the stage of the political, and only appears when a “man . . . treats another man as if he is inhuman” (2002, 114; emphasis added). This “as if” bears the heavy weight of totalization as long as the inhuman enters the stage of the political only under a disguise of “defective” humanity, and not in its own right. As a result, “humanity” is not a strictly fictitious unpolitical concept, as Schmitt maintains, but it is rather a pre-political concept since it designates a field that grounds the very possibility of the political. In fact, humanity constitutes the pre-political field that enables Schmitt’s discussion of the

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political. His interpretation of “humanity” illuminates the logic of the absolute exception: this notion demarcates a pre-political field and relocates to the absolutely unpolitical domain everything non-human or inhuman. This exclusionary assignment of the “intensive” energy of life to human life implies the reduction of the very idea of life, of its lived heterogeneity, to the human, political form. As long as Schmitt claims that humanity does not have a real enemy on this planet, his argument seems justified. However, once we question this premise, we can see more clearly how the notion of humanity for Schmitt functions as the ultimate pre-political field that rests on the exclusion of the absolutely unpolitical, on a specific philosophical decision that denies not just agency but even the possibility of real death to anything non-human, and thus opens a door for its elimination without the “regret” of killing. Since the political consists in the ever-present possibility of real war, which necessarily implies the possibility of real killing, this seems to demand consideration of everything that can be killed. Schmitt does not fail to emphasize that “an enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people, confronts a similar collectivity” (2007, 28; emphasis added). But why does the category of the enemy have to be limited to the similar, to a human faction? If, as a result of deliberate human action, an animal species disappears, a forest dies, or earth deteriorates, does this not count as real killing? Perhaps, Schmitt would respond that the political relationship is dependent upon the mutual recognition and negation of otherness (63), and since no forest recognizes (i.e., represents) humanity as an enemy, we cannot speak of a real political phenomenon here. However, such conclusion becomes problematic when we take into account the possibility of the real violent death of humanity as a result of the transformations taking place in non-human forms of life. Are not global warming, deforestation, changes in animal behaviour, among many other phenomena, examples of a reaction by the inhuman—by “nature”—to war that the human wages against it? And might one not designate that reaction as itself warlike, since it threatens the life of its adversary? In line with a long tradition of political philosophy, Schmitt insists that the political field is limited to the human. However, this limitation is not a merely neutral proposition because it necessarily implies the affirmation of the reverse relation: the determination of the human as essentially political being. The living essence of a human being, life “within” the human, is reduced to the movement of a homogeneous power—the political—and the “inhuman,” the heterogeneous power of life, remains beyond the field of consideration of the political. This omission of real inhumanity is not accidental: it is an originary decision that excludes the absolutely unpolitical from the field of political vision. This is the blindness that allows political vision; censorship that allows political representation. It is the originary exclusion of



Carl Schmitt: The General Economy of the Political 31

the unpolitical inhumanity of life that grounds, in its turn, the emergence of both humanity and the political. In this light, Schmitt’s thought partakes in the exception of the absolutely unpolitical that characterizes a general movement of modern political philosophy away from “nature.”2 One might be tempted to dismiss the Schmittian affirmation of the political as the total by attributing it to his national-socialist “sympathies.” However, the legacy of the concept of the political lives on, and so does its totalizing ambition. Schmitt’s totalization of the political, as evidenced by his expansion of the political field to encompass all human endeavours, including life itself, has significance largely due to its appropriation by leftist scholarship, where it amplifies the left’s traditional difficulty in theorizing any existential dimensions outside of social-political relations. Even though many thinkers extend the application of the concept beyond Schmitt’s own intentions, they need to see clearly that any appropriation of the Schmittian political faces the risk of perpetuating its totalizing and anthropocentric logic, which relies on the essential elimination or even extermination of the absolutely unpolitical, i.e. the inhuman. This problem also bears important consequences for projects of rethinking community as well as political ecology, as it raises the question of the possibility of an effectively open and real community inclusive of non-human forms of life. Schmitt’s model of political totalization urges us to rethink the relationship between the human and inhuman, and to question the possibility of the radical outside of politics along the lines of human relationships with “nature” and “things,” as well as to problematize the reduction of life’s power to the agonistic model. NOTES 1. Even though Schmitt introduced the concept of the political into the theoretical discourse of the twentieth century, he did not invent the term. The nature of the political had been a question open for discussion for some time before Schmitt. According to Kari Palonen (2007, 70), the substantivized adjective “the political” appeared, for example, in the works of Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel in 1790s, and Georg Jellinek in 1900. However, all of them used the concept to refer to the activity of the state. 2. Other thinkers have identified a similar tendency in modern philosophy, in the way in which humanity constitutes itself, for example, in opposition to “the animal.” See, for instance, Agamben (2004); Derrida (2008, 2010); Latour (2004).

Chapter 2

Michel Foucault: Power and Biopolitics

There are two major ways in which Foucault may be said to contribute to the constitution of the totalizing tendency of the political: methodologically and genealogically. The former is present in Foucault’s reconceptualization of power as a multiplicity of force relations that always contain resistances. It leads, in a way similar to Schmitt, toward the constitution of a general economy of the political in terms of a general economy of power. Insofar as power relations are everywhere, everything is political or, rather, everything is potentially political, that is, may become political through the intervention of resistances. Second, Foucault applies his methodological innovations to the study of modern societies, proposing that we live in the age of biopolitics. The multiple relations of power in modernity take biological life as their primary object, and so politics exhibits its totalizing ambition by attaching its operation to individual bodies and populations in an effort to govern and multiply life. There is little place for the absolutely unpolitical in Foucault’s analysis; however, his genealogies of the biopolitical government of modern populations lay out the field of intervention for many contemporary critiques of biopolitics, which attempt to address the possibility of either affirmative biopolitics or post-biopolitical politics. Understanding the ways in which biological life and politics, traditionally opposed domains of human existence, become intertwined is important for the project of overcoming political totalization. Foucault indicates that the potential for resistance to any form of government is contained within its very object, and so the resistance to biopolitics necessarily emerges within life itself. In order to resist the totalizing grip of biopolitical power relations, we need to see how “life always escapes” insofar as it cannot be contained within a limited figure, including a negative figure of modern biology, which defines life merely as a process of struggle with death. By rethinking life, Foucault prepares an important 33

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avenue for thinking the unpolitical. Is there a sense to life in which it may remain beyond the reach of any sort of politicization? Many continue to wrestle with this question and we will be unable to avoid it insofar as biopolitics colors our horizon. However, as Deleuze (1988) puts it, “When power becomes bio-power resistance becomes the power of life” (92), and so “the force that comes from outside [is] a certain idea of Life, a certain vitalism, in which Foucault’s thought culminates” (93). In this chapter, by examining Foucault’s methodology and genealogy of biopolitics, I want to explore this “vitalism” and clear the field for a radical critique of biopolitics that will follow in chapter 7. DYNAMIC SOCIAL ONTOLOGY When interrogating Foucault’s work on the matter of the totalizing ambition of modern politics, the first problem that arises is the meaning that he attributes to the notion of politics. It is not clear what Foucault means by “politics” or “political” (as an adjective) and if he distinguishes them at all from “power relations.” It seems that Foucault’s initial use of these notions is rather conventional, meaning that they refer to the government of the state. As Barry Hindess (2005) suggests, Foucault was not much concerned with how “politics” and related terms should be used, and he uses “political” to refer to aspects of the government of a state: “A type of reason that . . . has been particularly influential in the history of Western societies and that . . . could well be described as ‘political’ ” (390). However, politics, as government of the state, is desubstantialized: the state is not a universal or essential characteristic of politics, but it is merely one type of reason that assumes dominance in modernity and presents itself as invariant and ahistorically given. In fact, the thought of political reason as state reason is specific to modernity (cf. Foucault 1979) insofar as the thought of the essence of sovereignty and the centralized exercise of power has been one of the major preoccupations of modern political philosophy. Foucault is critical of such an enterprise not because he thinks that it fails to account for the reality of the political, but because such preoccupation with the state as the ahistorical locus of power fails to recognize its immanence to a wider field of operation of multiple forces. The government in modern societies, according to Foucault, is not limited to the state because the latter is merely one of the ways of strategic integration of multiple force relations that extend throughout the social body, and his critique of modern “political reason” calls for the illumination and uncovering of this “positive unconscious” or the “grid of intelligibility” of modern political rationality.



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In The History of Sexuality (1990) Foucault develops his methodological critique of “Power” by focusing on its “grid of intelligibility”—“the multiplicity of force relations.” Through a critique of the political reason of modernity, Foucault presents a different “level” of political analysis—“a micro-physics of power” (1995, 26), which renders the multiplicity of force relations as “a grid of intelligibility of the social order” (1990, 93). He begins his critique of “Power” with a historically situated critique of state-centered political reason by identifying “Power” with what is traditionally meant by “politics”: “the system of Law-and-Sovereign” (97), “a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state” (92), and managerial techniques that order societies and oversee the centralized exercise of power and its “proper” distribution in order to achieve the “good life.” Power has been long interpreted as a substance that can be possessed, held, exercised, and contained within essential political institutions, resulting from the originary transaction (i.e., the social contract) between the multitude and the sovereign. Contrary to such view of “Power,” Foucault offers its alternative understanding as “the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization” (92). It is a flexible grid which “underlies” or “conditions” the manifest expressions of “Power.” The latter is nothing but an always provisional result of integration of a multiplicity of forces. The notion of power as a multiplicity of force relations shares many characteristics with the Schmittian concept of the political (however, in this case, it is not a concept that is at stake but the very materiality of the forces). Among them, first of all, is conflictuality, for the force relations under consideration are not only multiple but also engaged in “ceaseless struggles” (Foucault 1990, 92). They are “unbalanced, heterogeneous, unstable, and tense” (93), “nonegalitarian and mobile” (94). As Foucault notes in Discipline and Punish (1995), “the study of this micro-physics [of power] presupposes that . . . one should take as its model a perpetual battle rather than a contract regulating a transaction or the conquest of a territory” (26; emphasis added). We see a rejection, similar to Schmitt’s, of the liberal, contractual model of social relations, where conflict is overcome through a rational agreement. The operation of multiple forces, on the contrary, is war-like and their battle is ontological, constitutive of the very being of the social. However, while for Schmitt the political lies in the friend and enemy distinction and their war-like relationship, for Foucault the conflict is prior to any constituted identities (insofar as friend and enemy are real, identifiable entities). The Schmittian version of conflict is thus, at most, a crystallized form of the relations of forces. The battle model of power that Foucault presents is located not at the level of constituted identities or defined adversaries, but at the ontological level, meaning

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that it presents an originary difference that lies at the basis of the social order. As John Protevi (2010) puts it, Foucault develops a “differential historical methodology” and “a dynamic social ontology” (7). The plane of the multiple power relations is “infinite,” in a sense that it is not confined to a specific sphere. Like “the political,” power relations proliferate everywhere, they come from everywhere, and have no singular source; in this sense, power is omnipresent, “power is everywhere” (Foucault 1990, 93). Everything is potentially involved in its game. Foucault writes: Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter; they are the immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which occur in the latter, and conversely they are the internal conditions of these differentiations; relations of power are not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, wherever they come into play. (94; emphasis added)

First, the organization of power is immanent and in no way superstructural; second, power is not external to other spheres or types of relations, and the appearance of their very difference is itself an effect of power relations. Finally, power is productive and not merely repressive. While force relations make power intelligible, power is “a grid of intelligibility” for social relations. In order to understand these relations one has to decipher them, to decompose the visible unities and identities into the multiple fields of forces that are organized on the basis of various strategies that only appear stable (e.g., class and gender divisions, situations of domination, etc.). In an interview conducted in 1978 by Pasquale Pasquino, Foucault describes his project as a reading of reality: “Deciphering a layer of reality in such a way that the lines of force and the lines of fragility come forth. . . . It is the reality of possible struggles that I wish to bring to light” (1996a, 261). The relations of forces are at the basis of Foucaultian epistemology; they form a grid that enables an understanding of social reality and reveals possible points of struggle. The notion of force, which in physics signifies capacity for work or productive interaction and impact, incorporated into the study of social reality, signifies the primary source of production and, consequently, of the intelligibility of any social organization. In sum, Foucault’s conception of power as the multiplicity of force relations opens onto the problem of ontopolitics. Once force is determined as irreducibly conflictual and as a multiple relationality that is never at rest, it presents the possibility for a conception of primordial politics. The totalizing embrace of the political widens inasmuch as the relations of forces permeate physical and social reality, and insofar as their interaction is marked by irreducible conflict.



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POLITICS AS STRUGGLE FOR POWER Since force relations are everywhere, power, as their strategic, immanent integration, is also everywhere. Once an extra step of identification of power with politics is made, we may conclude that politics is everywhere or that everything is political: the general economy of the political is constituted as a general economy of power. It is difficult to clearly outline how Foucault envisioned the relationship between the notions of “power” and “politics” and to conclusively establish their identification in his works, yet it is similarly challenging to disentangle them. On several occasions, Foucault brings politics and power closely together. For example, in a debate with Giulio Preti in 1972, when asked to express his view on the difference between political and social relationships, Foucault initially replies: “I label political everything that has to do with class struggle, and social everything that derives from and is a consequence of the class struggle, expressed in human relationships and in institutions” (1996b, 104). Prompted by Preti’s suggestion that “politics is everything connected to the struggle for power,” Foucault modifies his answer: “If we give to the term ‘political’ the meaning you attribute to it—and yours is the more precise definition, I must admit—then my definition cannot stand. I also want to give politics the meaning of a struggle for power; but it’s not power understood only as government or state, but economic power as well” (104). We see a tentative definition of politics emerge here—politics is a struggle for power. Foucault’s understanding of power here is reminiscent of the one from Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality insofar as it extends beyond the Marxist prioritization of class struggle as well as beyond the identification with state and government. What Foucault labels as “economic power” should be interpreted not only in terms of the economy of market exchange but also in its wider meaning as oikos. The latter, however, refers not only to an actual household but also more generally to the domain of the private that has been traditionally opposed to the political sphere. Foucault’s suggestion that power transcends the space commonly allocated to it implies that politics, as a struggle for power, also extends throughout the social fabric, regardless of the distinction of life into public and private. Politics is not just power but struggle for power. What does this mean? If we go back to Foucault’s definition of power as the multiplicity of force relations and their strategic integration, we can suggest that politics is a struggle for power in terms of a power game that oscillates around the possibility of multiple strategic situations. Power is “the process which, through ceaseless struggle and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses” multiple force relations; it is “the strategies in which. . . [these relations] take effect, [and] whose general design or institutional crystallization is

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embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies” (Foucault 1990, 92–93; emphasis added). Politics is a strategic game or struggle for the integration of multiple force relations that can, at times, become fixed or tentatively crystallized in the form of institutions. In sum, we have three levels of analysis here: force relations, their strategic integration as power, and their fixation as institutions. The latter is “Power”: “Permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing . . . simply the over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement” (93). However, “power” is nothing like “Power,” since its organization is not fixed by institutions. It does not arrest the movement of forces but directs them in a non-totalizing way, resulting in “a complex strategical situation in a particular society” (93), which is “nothing other than the instant photograph of multiple struggles continuously in transformation” (Foucault 1996a, 260). As such, power is a constant modification and rearrangement of multiple force relations, a perpetuum mobile of the social order, as well as the mobile grid of its intelligibility. Since politics is a struggle for the strategic integration of force relations, it cannot be identified with the institutional stabilization of the mobile field (since this would mean at least a temporary cessation of struggle), neither it can be equated with the mobile field itself, because it has to do with the overall design of the relations between these forces. As a result, we can identify politics with the second level of analysis—power relations as a strategic integration of forces. I believe that Foucault suggests such an understanding of politics when he writes that the “multiplicity of force relations can be coded—in part but never totally—either in the form of ‘war,’ or in the form of ‘politics’; this would imply two different strategies (but the one always liable to switch into the other) for integrating these unbalanced, heterogeneous, unstable, and tense force relations” (Foucault 1990, 93; emphasis added). This codification is not fixed, so it does not refer to the institutions of state government (though it does not exclude them). Foucault presents politics in terms of a strategy, while power is also defined in terms of the strategic integration of force relations. Consequently, power relations and politics are closely connected with each other, if not identical. They both operate at the level of strategy. If power relations refer to the immanent organization of multiple force relations, and politics is understood as a never-ending struggle for power and its strategic codification, we can distinguish between two kinds of strategies here: the strategy of power and a “meta-strategy” of politics. Even though it remains unclear how these two strategies relate to each other in Foucault, it is apparent that one cannot be understood without the other, leading to a fairly common identification of power and politics in Foucaultian scholarship.1



Michel Foucault: Power and Biopolitics 39

Such an identification or, rather, lack of a clear distinction between power and politics has had an enormous effect on political thought dominated by the methods of social science and the analytical tradition in political philosophy. Insofar as politics is no longer confined to a sphere or a distinct domain, it exhibits a totalizing ambition that bears important consequences for the disciplinary study of politics. As Foucault suggests, it is in the “sphere of force relations that we must try to analyze the mechanisms of power. In this way we will escape from the system of Law-and-Sovereign which has captivated political thought for such a long time” (1990, 97). The object of political theory is at stake here: traditionally limited to the domain of the state and law, it is transformed into a wider field of power and force relations. As a result, we can speak of decentralization and anarchization of political theory rather than of a mere evolution of its object. In Paul Brass’s words, “The subject matter of what has been traditionally considered central to political science, namely, power and government, has been stolen by Foucault” (2000, 305). The study of politics can no longer be claimed by any discipline, including political science and political philosophy. Wendy Brown (2002) similarly suggests that the disciplinary challenge for politics has come from a reconceptualization of “power,” which “[Max] Weber called ‘the lifeblood of politics’ ” (561). Due to the omnipresence of power relations, politics becomes totalizing. As Brown rightly notes, “If the political is signalled by the presence of any human relations organized by power . . . then it is inevitable that we would find the political everywhere today—in cultural, familial, economic, and psychosexual relations, and more” (569). Insofar as power struggles are involved, all relations can be rendered political. But is it actually the case that the political for Foucault is, at the very least potentially, everywhere? Does politics invest everything? Politics, understood as relations of power, can indeed arise anywhere and everywhere, inasmuch as power is omnipresent not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere (Foucault 1990, 93). Even though power might not be an actual totality, nothing can escape it at the level of potentiality. Everything may become involved in power struggle, in the play of forces, and can become a nodal point through which the lines of forces and resistances pass. Power is also everywhere since there is no real “outside” to it. To speak of an outside of power, Foucault notes, means to misunderstand its relational character (95). What is usually referred to as the outside of power, for instance, resistance, is incorporated into the network of power as its integral part and, importantly, as its condition of possibility. “Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power,” and “can only exist in the strategic field of power relations.” Resistances are “the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite”

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(95, 96). The possibility of resistance, in actual fact, distinguishes power relations from mere relations of violence and domination. GOVERNMENTALITY AND RESISTANCE: NOTHING IS POLITICAL, EVERYTHING CAN BE POLITICIZED If it does not make sense to speak of the outside of power, can we identify the outside of politics? Are there force relations that cannot be coded in terms of a political strategy; are there relations that cannot be politicized? Is everything indeed at the very least potentially political? Foucault never addressed the problem of “everything is political” in his published writings. However, he makes several relevant remarks in this regard in an unpublished manuscript on “governmentality” of 1979,2 which also offers an insight into how he understood the notion of politics in relation to resistance. There occurs a shift in Foucault’s thought (sometime around the end of 1970s) from “power” to “governmentality” as the major tool of analysis. As Protevi suggests, in his lectures on Security, Territory, Population, Foucault moves “to ‘governmentality’ as the model for social relations, as its grid of intelligibility. Rather than social relations being seen as war, we are asked to see social relations as the ‘conduct of conduct,’ as the leading of men’s lives in quotidian detail” (2010, 7).3 Foucault moves his attention away from relations of forces to relations of actions. In most general terms, governmentality is defined as “action upon action.” However, despite the shift in the primary concept of analysis, Foucault retains the idea of the integration of a multiplicity of relations as the primary aspect in the play of power and resistance. He adopts the term governmentality, alongside politics, as a name for strategic integration of power relations, pointing to “a strategic field of power relations in their mobility, transformability, and reversibility . . . power as a set of reversible relationships” (2005, 252). Governmentality also refers to “a problematic of a society’s immanent power relations which, unlike the juridicalinstitutional system of that society, ensure that it is actually governed” (2010, 159). In a nutshell, governmentality signifies the strategic exercise of power that enables immanent social ordering. “Where there is power, there is resistance.” This remains true for Foucault even as he moves toward the concept of governmentality as the grid of intelligibility of social relations. More than that, the possibility of resistance that is necessarily present in any governmentality becomes something like “true” politics for Foucault. Following Foucault’s notes, Michel Senellart points out that the notion of resistance is at the heart of Foucault’s renewed conception of politics: “The analysis of governmentality . . . implies that ‘everything is political.’ . . . Politics is nothing more and nothing less than that which is



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born with resistance to governmentality, the first revolt, the first confrontation” (Foucault 2007, 259f). Two notions of politics with opposing meanings appear here: first, in the sense of “everything is political,” of which Foucault is critical and, second, in the sense of politics that is born with resistance to governmentality. The full passage from the manuscript helps to further clarify what Foucault means: The analysis of governmentality as singular generality implies that “everything is political.” This expression is traditionally given two meanings:—Politics is defined by the whole sphere of state intervention, . . . . To say that everything is political amounts to saying that, directly or indirectly, the state is everywhere.—Politics is defined by the omnipresence of a struggle between two adversaries. . . . This other definition is that of K. (sic) Schmitt. The theory of the comrade. . . . In short, two formulations: everything is political by the nature of things; everything is political by the existence of adversaries. It is a question of saying rather: nothing is political, everything can be politicized, everything may become political. Politics is no more or less than that which is born with resistance to governmentality, the first uprising, the first confrontation. (Foucault quoted in Senellart 2007, 505; emphasis added)

Foucault’s critique of “everything is political” rests on the following propositions. First, everything is political by “the nature of things,” referring to the totality of the state. Or, rather, everything appears to be political as long as the state is seen as the major marker of political reality; everything is political as long as the state is or appears to be omnipresent. As a result, when Foucault notes that the analysis of governmentality implies that “everything is political,” he means that this implication is viable insofar as it rests on a faulty assumption: identification of governmentality with the total state. Second, everything is political because of the omnipresence of struggle between two adversaries. Even though his reference to Schmitt’s “theory of the comrade” is very brief, it points out the major difference between their approaches to the question of struggle. Foucault states that for Schmitt politics is defined by “the omnipresence of a struggle between two adversaries.” However, even as Foucault suggests that politics is defined by struggle for power, the crucial difference here is that for him the struggle is always multiple and unpredictable due to the distributed possibilities of resistance. It is not confined to a binary opposition between friend and enemy, as it was for Schmitt. From Foucault’s perspective, the identities of adversaries are themselves just effects of an “underlying” power struggle rather than the generative principle of that struggle. While for Schmitt everything is political because of the existence of adversaries, Foucault advocates the view that “everything can be politicized” due to the omnipresence of multiple struggles, with resistance playing a key role.

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Nothing is political means that nothing is essentially political, and to say that something is political in reference to the state or to the mere presence of adversaries amounts to depoliticization. In other words, nothing is really political, in a sense of true politics, but “technical.” The presence of multiple governmental techniques implies that what is traditionally referred to as “politics” is not more than “political economy”: the ordering of life in its slightest detail guided by the principles of preservation and multiplication (i.e., biopolitics). These practices are thus more akin to “policing” than “politics” (cf. Rancière 2001). Nothing is political but everything can be politicized, may become political due to the intervention of resistance. As in Schmitt, we see a dislocation of the political to the level of potentiality: power relations may become political (and, supposedly, this becoming is never-ending) since politics is born with resistance to governmentality. Politics is distinguished by the possibility of resistance, the destabilization of existing power strategies and the creation of the new ones. And insofar as resistance is immanent to power relations, power is always political; there is no nonpolitical power but only violence. As a result, nothing is political by nature, but everything is always already becoming political due to the presence of resistances. However, one might object that everything only may become political, meaning that the possibility of politicization is not always actualized. One way of understanding Foucault’s hesitation in this regard is by suggesting that impossibility of politicization characterizes only the “states of domination” in which, by definition, the chance of resistance is minimal or nonexistent. These are situations where “power relations are fixed in such a way that they are perpetually asymmetrical and allow an extremely limited margin of freedom [i.e., positive resistance]” (1996c, 441). These states are the opposite of “true” politics born through resistance, and so the unrealized potential of politicization, the “may,” refers primarily to these states of domination. Once the domination is challenged, everything is exposed to the prospect of politicization insofar as the relations of forces and their mobility cannot be eliminated but only temporarily arrested by the threat of violence and domination. Another way of addressing this concern, however, relies on a different understanding of political totality, the one that, I argue, has come to define the notion of the political in contemporary political philosophy. This is an “open” totality, which we already saw in Schmitt and will again see in Nancy, that exists primarily at the level of potential, regardless of its actualization, and that refuses to let go of its totalizing ambition despite, at the same time, refusing absolute closure at the level of the actual. From this perspective, the totalizing potential of the political cannot be dismissed only because the actual political reality does not conform to an immediately apparent image of a totalitarian society or a state of domination. The door to total politicization



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remains open at the level of potential: everything is political insofar as we remain unable to identify a real limit to the possibility of this “may be.” BIOPOLITICS AND LIFE THAT ESCAPES Foucault famously applies his methodological innovations to the study of modern society, suggesting that we live in the age of biopolitics. The relations of power that, in the first place, are not confined to a specific field of operation take life as their primary object. Modern politics thus exhibits a totalizing ambition by attaching its operation to individual bodies and populations in an effort to govern and multiply life. Biopolitics is a mode of politics that relies on the new procedures and techniques of power that came to fruition in the nineteenth century. The specificity of these new procedures lies in their primary object—life—the ultimate potential of all that lives. Modernity is marked by the problematization of life by politics: “What might be called a society’s ‘threshold of modernity,’ ” Foucault writes, “has been reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (1990, 143). The very life of modern humanity is put under scrutiny by political government, but, importantly, this “life,” this object of power is not a neutral, preexisting domain to which power applies itself. Quite the contrary, power relations discover, define, and reproduce life as their object through a variety of discourses, disciplines, and knowledges. In Foucault’s words: Methods of power and knowledge assumed responsibility for the life processes and undertook to control and modify them. Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, an individual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and a space in which they could be distributed in an optimal manner. . . . The fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate. (1990, 142; emphasis added)

Western man had to learn what it means to be alive, what it means to be a living being. Life was objectified as a property of “man” that had to be studied, analyzed, and managed. It was demystified and transformed into a material object of various technologies of power, including care for the populations, their well-being, reproduction, proper healthcare, and welfare. This objectification of life was based on a specific development of the nineteenth century—the establishment of “the conditions of possibility of a biology”—a rigorous scientific approach to life. In The Order of Things

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(1994), Foucault shows how the transition from “the Classical” to “the Modern episteme” was marked by a shift from a “taxonomic” to a “synthetic” notion of life, and it is the latter that established the ground for the emergence of modern biology and biopolitics. According to Foucault, the “synthetic” notion takes life as the potential or invisible “unity” that reconciles and draws together “the great dispersion of visible differences” of living organisms. If the taxonomic notion of life was based on a tabular representation of the multiplicity of beings, the synthetic notion of life aims to establish a transcendental continuity between visible beings or empirically observable living organisms. However, while living organisms can be easily accessed by scientific techniques and subjected to experimentation, life itself, the “enigmatic” center of identity supposedly shared by these organisms, receives no essential definition, it is rendered “non-perceptible” and “purely functional.” Life can be experienced, perceived, or known only through the observation of the multiple “plans” for its preservation; it “withdraws into the enigma of a force inaccessible in its essence, apprehendable only in the efforts it makes here and there to manifest and maintain itself” (272). The life of an organism is thought of as a synthesis of the functions of its own maintenance; as such, life is paradoxically excluded from its own field, which is instead occupied by the visible bodies that share in the universality of something called “life,” in the power that moves them but itself remains absent. In sum, from the perspective of modern biology, the only way life can be manifest is as living organisms, and so, the modern notion of life develops in correlation with the visible domain of the living body. This objectification of life’s “essence” through organismic representation bears real consequences for politics: it allows this “life” to become a field that can be governed, ordered, and cared for by means of scientific knowledge. Biopolitics, in governing life, has no need to speculate about the essence of life (it is distinctively secular in this regard), but only to know life—to constantly incite the production of new evidence of what it means to be a living body, which can be then used for governing it. Another crucial aspect of life, which constitutes the object of biopolitics, lies in its relationship with death. Insofar as modern science defines life primarily as a struggle with death (cf. Bichat 1815), biopolitical techniques intervene to regulate this dance of life and death. Life can be either maintained and multiplied or abandoned to die. The biopolitical decree is “to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (Foucault 1990, 138). Is there “life” beyond biopolitics? There are several possible ways to address this question. First, as long as politics is defined by struggle and resistance, as long as politics is born with resistance to governmentality, there is a possibility of different life, of life that exceeds biopolitics. Foucault acknowledges that “it is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them” (1990,



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143). His project, especially of the later years, was to examine these alternative ways of living that positively resist existing forms of governmentality. The relation to self in the practice of care, for Foucault, is the primary case of such a resistance, of positive self-government and self-creation. As he puts it, “there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself” (2005, 252). Life that “escapes” the grip of modern biopolitics assumes the form of the ethical care of the self, of selftransformation. However, it remains unclear whether this practice of care is a case of another politics or of a real unpolitical experience. What does it mean for life to escape biopolitics and its technologies of power? Does it lead to the depoliticization of life? Is care of the self a nonpolitical practice, and does it lead to an unpolitical form of living? It appears that insofar as this practice is a form of resistance, it remains, by Foucault’s own standards, necessarily political; insofar as politics is born through resistance, the practice of selfcare is a political practice. As a result, there is no radical outside of politics, but only movement from one mode of politics to another, even if these modes are immanent to each other. Care of the self as a political practice, as a mode of politics, can exist within a biopolitical framework. By being engaged in power relations one always remains on the outside by means of resistance, since from the point of view of the structure of power relations the excess of any mode of politics will itself always remain political. It will also define politics “proper” inasmuch as this excess, by definition, is a kind of resistance and, thus, a political practice par excellence. The second way to address the question of life beyond biopolitics is to ask what “kind” or “form” of life it may be. We can find intimations of the unpolitical form of living in Foucault’s last lectures at the Collège de France (2010, 2011). The example of the Cynics’ form of care of the self presents an instance of contemplating the outside of politics. Foucault writes: The philosophical parrhēsia of Diogenes basically consists in showing himself in his natural nakedness, outside all the conventions and laws artificially imposed by the city. His parrhēsia is therefore in his very way of life, it is also apparent in this discourse of insult and denunciation with regard to power. . . . In the case of the Cynics we have a mode of connection of philosophical truthtelling to political action which takes place in the form of exteriority, challenge, and derision.” (2010, 287)

The art of living of Diogenes is suggestive of an unpolitical form of life. Arnold Davidson (2011) similarly singles out Foucault’s account of “Cynic provocation . . . as an emblem of the risks and the intensities of counterconduct” (39). The ethical-political practice of counter-conduct, understood as “the ‘insubordination of freedom,’ the ‘rebelliousness of the will and the intransitivity of freedom,’ the ‘art of voluntary inservitude’ and of

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‘deliberative indocility’ ” (30), opens new possibilities for action that modifies the existing force relations and that stands up “ ‘against the impoverishment of the relational fabric’ of our social world” (33–34). In this regard, the counter-conduct of care of the self (as a form of life that escapes politics) can be interpreted as a “revolt” against the total politicization (and thus impoverishment) of relationality in modernity. This could mean, for example, the return of friendship (which allows one to live “very intense affective relations”) as a form of social relation (cf. Davidson 2011, 34). Furthermore, insofar as “politically and ethically, counter-conduct is the invention of a new philosophical concept” (39), it might as well signify the need for an advent of the notion of the unpolitical in times when the new totalizing potential of the political appears to prevail. Another way of addressing the question of life beyond biopolitics consists in challenging the very notion of life that grounds biopolitical governmentality. What is the meaning of that life which is able to escape? Is this escape conditioned by a difference in understanding what life is or may be? As Gilles Deleuze argues, following Foucault, “life becomes resistance to power when power takes life as its object.” Most importantly, “when power becomes bio-power resistance becomes the power of life, a vital power that cannot be confined within species, environment or the paths of a particular diagram” (1988, 92). The force that exceeds biopolitics is life that cannot be confined within any figure, such as basic needs, biology, or human rights. As a result, life that escapes cannot be conceived in the same terms as life that constitutes the object of biopolitics. Life that remains inaccessible in its essence and that manifests itself only through biological objects, susceptible to biopolitical investment, cannot really exceed biopolitics, but rather, at best, constitutes its “affirmative” reworking.4 Furthermore, life that is reduced in its essence to a struggle with death cannot constitute the ground of resistance to biopolitics. This is where Foucault’s vitalism comes forth. In the last text published before Foucault’s death (which was essentially a homage to Georges Canguilhem), Foucault sought after a different way of approaching the notion of life. As Agamben (1999) contends, starting with The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault was under the inspiration of “Bichat’s new vitalism and definition of life as ‘the set of functions that resist death,’ ” but in the end he moved away from this understanding toward a more positive one (220). As Foucault writes, “at the most basic level of life, the processes of coding and decoding give way to a chance occurrence that, before becoming a disease, a deficiency, or a monstrosity, is something like a disturbance in the informative system, something like a ‘mistake.’ In this sense, life— and this is its radical feature—is that which is capable of error” (1998, 476). Life is no longer defined by its struggle with death. Even though Foucault



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does not further elaborate the notion of life as error, its appearance is indicative of a shift in his understanding of life away from the biological and toward a philosophical determination. It is basically a recognition that life has always been “a question of ethics and politics, not a scientific question” (475–76), and that the biologist has always had “to grasp what makes life a specific object of knowledge and, thus, what accounts for the fact that among the living, and because they are living, there are beings capable of knowing, and of knowing, finally, life itself” (476; emphasis added). The biologist has to acknowledge his limitations in his very life, insofar as his knowledge is only possible because he is himself living. The act of biological objectification of life, then, is always an after-the-fact objectification of that which escapes knowledge but can be experienced only as such, as a lived life. This different way of approaching the notion of life constitutes the biggest challenge to biopolitics insofar as it takes away its grounding in science. Life that errs, or life that is not merely conjured by science but must first be lived, is that life which always escapes and can never be confined within any figure. The lessons that we learn from Foucault’s methodological and genealogical investigations are at times contradictory, but important nonetheless. First, there is no outside of politics because power relations are everywhere, they saturate our everyday existence by breaking down the divide between public and private domains, by investing every social production of knowledge, and by taking life as their primary object. Second, life always escapes any final figuration by power. In particular, as we move toward a positive view of life, as a domain defined not by its resistance to death (i.e., by biological science) but by contingency or error, we begin to see how any knowledge and scientific objectification of life becomes obstructed by life itself. Life, as opposed to consciousness or cogito, conditions any knowledge of life, or as Foucault puts it, “knowledge, rather than opening onto the truth of the world, is deeply rooted in the ‘errors’ of life” (1998, 477). As a result, paradoxically, there is no outside to (bio)politics except for life itself. Life is both the object and the condition of possibility of biopolitical government, but it also constitutes its radical exteriority. In the end, the battle for life takes place on its own ground. In order to set life “free” from its biopolitical confinement, it is necessary to remove the notion of life from its biopolitical identification: first, by moving away from the biological objectification of life and, second, by substituting a positive definition of life for the negative one. Life has become one of the major axes along which modern political totalization has met its real challenge, and so the unpolitical reality of this life requires close attention in order to further cultivate a ground for an effective critique of modern biopolitics.

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NOTES 1. Maurizio Lazzarato’s (2002) attempts to distinguish between power and politics in Foucault by differentiating between the notions of “biopower” and “biopolitics.” This differentiation works, however, only insofar as one assumes that Foucault’s analysis of power is always historically situated, meaning that when he speaks of power he does so in the context of his analysis of a specifically modern mode of power—biopower. 2. Michel Senellart explains in a footnote: “Manuscript on governmentality (untitled, bundle of 11 sheets numbered 22 to 24 and then not paginated) [was] inserted between the lectures of 21 February and 7 March 1979 of Naissance de la biopolitique” (2007, 504). This is also the only text in which Foucault references Carl Schmitt. 3. For example, in one of his later interviews Foucault defines the relation of power as “a relationship in which one person tries to control the conduct of the other” (1996c, 441). 4. Among the thinkers who are associated with the project of affirmative biopolitics are Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004) and Esposito (2008, 2011).

Chapter 3

Jean-Luc Nancy: Primordial Politics of Being-With

Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of the singular plurality of being or being-with is a pivotal instance of the totalizing ambition of the political emerging at the level of ontology. In his rethinking or, as he calls it, “retreating” of the notion of the political, somewhat similarly to Schmitt and Foucault, Nancy challenges its traditional identification with the state, as well as its “theological” and “the techno-social” closure. The political, for Nancy, is the place of the in-common as such, where the common is defined by “sharing”—a simultaneous movement of differentiation and union of the plurality of beings. Importantly, Nancy addresses the totalitarian tendency of modern politics and suggests that not everything is political; however, even so the political still remains the condition of possibility of sharing. For Nancy, the political is the place where everything crosses paths, even if these established relationships are themselves not political, and, as a result, the political, as the place of the encounter, is ultimately no less totalizing than the politics it sets out to critique. Such politicization of ontology leads to the emergence of a new, paradoxical totality of the political: an “open” totality that refuses closure and, simultaneously, refuses to let go of its totalizing ambition by establishing itself as the exclusive condition of possibility of any encounter within the worldly horizon. In a nutshell, for Nancy, being is essentially “with,” resulting in the constitution of the primordial and open totality of the political. THE MODERN TOTALITY OF THE POLITICAL AND ITS “RETREAT” Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy (1997) in their collaborative work at the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political (1980–1984) 49

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coined the concept “the retreat of the political” (la retrait du politique) as a response to the particular historical situation of the “closure” or “completion of the political.” This retreat has both negative and positive connotations: retreat, in a sense of closure, suggests a kind of withdrawal, absence, or disappearance and, at the same time, rethinking, reconsideration, and a new treatment of “the essence of the political.” In the latter sense, retreating the political, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy clarify, “evokes the necessity of dwelling on what makes the social relation possible as such” (1997, 180n1). When the old sense of the political retreats or withdraws, it opens space for a positive project of rethinking it in a new way, leading, in Philip Armstrong’s words, to “the radical re-articulation of relationality” (2009, 3). Retreating, as a positive gesture for the sake of the future, of new thought, emerges as an act of critical negation of what currently is—a distancing from the “old” political philosophy. What does it mean that the political has retreated or achieved closure? Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argue that modernity is an epoch of “the absolute reign or ‘total domination’ of the political,” suggesting that the political is “completed to the point of excluding every other area of reference” (1997, 110–11). This completion is coextensive with the slogan “everything is political.” There are two meanings to this closure: first, the closure of the “theologico-political” and, second, the completion of the political in political economy or “the techno-social.” The former refers to a religious (or quasireligious) legitimation of community, where a God or a leader signifies and legitimates the origin of the common and is able to say “we” for all its members. Nancy suggests that the modern process of secularization of societies is characterized by the withdrawal of the theologico-political closure, meaning that there is no longer One who can embody and represent community, resulting in the withdrawal of every possible figure of community. As a result, we witness “the end of the political” in a sense of “the end of religion: the end of an order of given, tied-up sense” (Nancy 1997, 91). The diagnosis of the modern closure of the political in “the techno-social” is a familiar theme that appears in works of many other thinkers, including Arendt and Foucault, who identify this tendency of the modern political as the advent of “the social” and “biopolitics,” respectively. Nancy argues that in modernity the political has been reduced to political economy, blurring the traditional separation between the private domain of the household and the public domain of political community. The polis has become a large oikos, resulting in the application of the rules and concerns of the latter to the former. Such a displacement, Nancy notes, was not simply one of magnitude but involved a qualitative transformation of the politeia, a knowledge of the affairs of the city-state, into an oiko-nomia, reconfigured “no longer only in terms of subsistence and prosperity (of ‘the good life’) but in terms of the



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production and reproduction of wealth (of ‘having more’)” (Nancy 2010a, 46–47). In the end, Nancy contends, there is “no difference between ‘everything is political’ and ‘everything is economic’ ” (47). Another aspect of the closure of the political in the socio-technical lies in the modern proclamation of the self-sufficiency of humanity, the possibility of its self-production and reproduction without an external point of reference. As Nancy puts it, humanity, in the absence of a God, has “no final destination other than its own self-production. . . . ‘Everything is political’ thus also amounts to affirming that there is a self-sufficiency of ‘man’ considered as the producer of his own nature and, through it, of nature in its entirety” (2010a, 47). The belief in such a natural self-sufficiency of humanity continues to dominate the meaning of politics today, insofar as the primacy of political economy has never been more devastating. Like Arendt, LacoueLabarthe and Nancy contend that we witness “the total immanentisation of the political in the social” (1997, 115), where the political is converted into a form of “banal management or organisation” that defines the epoch of the domination of political economy. The art of political government, reinvented in terms of the economic regulation of the social, results in the closure of the political. Nevertheless, Nancy suggests, despite the total domination of political economy, the inconsistency of its principle of self-sufficiency becomes more and more apparent. What is today called the “end,” “crisis,” “eclipse,” or “paralysis” of politics is nothing more than the crisis “of man’s self-sufficiency and/or of the nature that is within him” (2010a, 48). The modern political had been “sublimated” under the guise of either theology or economy; however, these sublimations have now withdrawn, exposing the “illusion” of the totality of such political. Specifically, “politics has withdrawn as the donation . . . of a common essence and destination: it has withdrawn as totality or as totalization. In this sense, not everything is political” (Nancy 2010a, 50). Not everything is consumed by the symbols of theology and economy, at least not anymore. The political totality has retreated. Once this happens, what is left behind is an empty space, allowing the emergence of the project of the positive retreating of the political. The “new” thought of the political, to which Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy dedicated their work at the Centre, is thus historically conditioned by a clearing of the space of political philosophy through the retreat of the “old” political categories and their totalizing horizon. But why is it at all necessary to retreat the political once it has withdrawn and its place vacated? Why is its absence to be feared and not tolerated? This question is an inquiry into the future of politics as well as the future of thought due to the essential co-belonging of politics and thought. Without the withdrawal of the political there is no space for both an alternative thought of community and an alternative community of thought, since “the essential

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(and not accidental or simply historical) co-belonging of the philosophical and the political” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 109) prescribes a relationship between politics and thought. The philosophical questioning of the essence of politics is inseparable from the political determination of philosophy, and from the political determination of being. In the Western tradition, politics and thought (or philosophy) have been inseparable, and Aristotle’s discussion of the inseparable relation between the polis and logos is one of the notable examples of such co-belonging. A task for thought, then, in light of the withdrawal of the political, lies in questioning its own political origin. In the words of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “what remains to be thought . . . is not a new institution (or instruction) of politics by thought, but the political institution of so-called Western thought” (110). Moreover, the question of co-belonging of politics and thought also raises the question of their mutual limitation, meaning that the question of the limits of the political is intertwined with the question of the limits of thought. The unpolitical, in this sense, would mirror the position of the unthought. The retreating of the essence of the political is “the questioning of the philosophical as the political” within the horizon of its negative withdrawal. What is at stake is not a return to some originary, pure essence of the political that was clouded by theology or economy but, as Armstrong suggests, an “opening toward the political,” which “does not mark a return to . . . concept of the political that exists in its pure, uncontaminated state or given identity, but reopens the ‘open space’ of the Centre to a spacing in which the questioning of the political is at once delimited and delimiting” (2009, 3). This opening is the positive retreating of the political resulting from a double crisis: the closure of the political and the “practical deprivation of philosophy as it regards itself and its own authority.” In the end, there are two ways of interpreting the retreat of the political: first, as withdrawal in the sense of its being “the ‘well-known’ and in the sense of the obviousness (the blinding obviousness) of politics” (as in “everything is political”) and, second, “as re-tracing of the political, re-marking it, by raising . . . the question of its essence” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 112). Importantly, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy are quick to warn us that such retreating of essence does not indicate “a falling back into ‘apoliticism,’ ” but renders possible “a questioning which refuses to confine itself to the categories ordinarily grouped under ‘the political’ and probably, in the long run, to the concept of the political itself” (112). This refusal to confine the political to specific categories is what Nancy will later call the “unworking” of the immanent horizon of politics and thought. As Ignaas Devisch explains, “immanentism,” for Nancy, signifies a “closed community” that produces “itself or its essence as its own ‘work’ . . . based on a nostalgia for a lost community: an original and immediate beingtogether that has been lost but whose immanence can be restored” (Devisch



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2000, 240). Nancy’s critique of immanentism, as a result, is guided by the task of retreating the political, of raising the question of the political in a new way, and not a return to some original community. The retreating as unworking consists of a double movement of closure and opening: the deconstruction of the present version of the political does not result in the revelation of its preexistent, hidden essence (it is not an unearthing); on the contrary, it opens onto a new meaning or sense of the political that is non-totalizing. The understanding of the retreat as both closure and opening makes it possible for Nancy to conclude that “if ‘everything is political’—in a sense that is neither that of political theology nor political economy—it is insofar as the everything [le “tout”] can be neither total nor totalized in any way” (Nancy 2010a, 51). This examination of the essence of the political as “being-with” and the meaning of “everything” as “being-in-common” lies at the center of Nancy’s philosophy. POLITICAL ONTOLOGY OF THE IN-COMMON: RETHINKING MITSEIN While in his early works, including collaborative publications with LacoueLabarthe, Nancy is primarily focused on the negative aspects of retreating the political, on pointing out what it is not, in his later works, for example, in Being Singular Plural, Nancy presents his project in a more positive way, in terms of thinking the essence of the common. The question of this essence (or rather co-essence) is “the ontological question of the political (le politique) [that] arises at the moment of the evaporation of the possibility of a polity that would incarnate such a being-with” (Critchley 1999, 56). That is, the question of the political (le politique) can be raised positively and in a new way because politics (la politique) or the incarnation of the common has withdrawn. In light of this retreat, Nancy wants to think the common and togetherness in a new way; he wants to think existence as essentially immanent co-existence or being-with that is not subordinated to any transcendent principle. The question of the political becomes an ontological question of the being of the common. I argue that in rethinking the political in terms of Being as the in-common, Nancy displaces the totality of politics (la politique)—as in “everything is political”—with the new, primordial totality of the political (le politique). He notes that everything is not political by nature, presupposing that the political “resides” in everything before entering into relationships with others. Quite the opposite, for Nancy the political emerges only as and through the relationships and so it must be understood “as the specific place for the articulation of a nonunity—and for the symbolization of a nonfigure. . . . In such a

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place, politics is far from being ‘everything’—even though everything passes through it and meets up or crosses paths in it” (Nancy 2010a, 51; emphasis added). Such politics, or rather the political, is a place where everything passes and meets; it is the space where all relations are formed and contained. This is reminiscent of Kant’s idea of space as an a priori condition of the appearance of the external objects (and thus of forming relations with them). As Ingram suggests in this regard, “with explicit reference to Kant, Nancy allows that a kind of transcendental reflection may be possible which delimits the a priori conditions circumscribing the limits of political life—the essence of the political (le politique) as distinct from its empirical manifestations (la politique)” (1988, 97). Nancy’s philosophy is dedicated to an examination of these a priori conditions: the primordial ontology of the political as being-with, the political as the place of the encounter of everything there is. As a result, even as Nancy argues that not everything is political, he nevertheless contends that existence is always already political in a sense of being essentially in-common or “with.” The political is the totalizing condition of possibility of relationality insofar as it admits of no other principle that could offer the space for the encounter of beings. Nancy commences his radical rearticulation of relationality with a critique of Heidegger, by declaring his intention to “rewrite” Being and Time. However, Nancy notes, this critique is not limited to Heidegger’s thought, but “concerns the whole of Western thinking in its way of comprehending or failing to comprehend what Heidegger was the first to elucidate: the essential character of the existential with (that is, of the with as condition of possibility of human existence—if not even of the existence of all beings)” (Nancy 2008, 3–4). The primordial quality of the political (le politique) then is the question of “the being-together. . . [that] resists all assignation in empirical factuality” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 134), and which is born from rethinking Being as essentially in-common. Nancy, in his examination of Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein and the question of Mitsein, suggests that Heidegger simultaneously opened and erased the possibility of thinking an essential “with” of Dasein. The opening is signaled by his positing of Mitsein as co-essential to Dasein: insofar as we are thrown into the world, our entrance into sociality is not an independent decision. We are inscribed into the world and so the fact that we are social beings is not merely an empirical but ontological fact of human existence. As Devisch puts it, “to be thrown into the world implies that I am, as a Dasein, co-original with a Mitsein. The ‘there’ (da) makes of me at the same time a ‘with’ (mit)” (2000, 242). This position asserts the primacy of relational structure, as opposed to a solipsistic view of existence. Nevertheless, Nancy suggests, Heidegger foreclosed this opening toward the radical relationality of Dasein by subordinating Mitsein to the distinction between the improper



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and the proper, the “Anyone” and the “people,” resulting in the suppression of the “with” (Nancy 2008, 5). Anyone, for Heidegger, refers to the improper (or “inauthentic”) mode of Being-with: common existence in the sense of “banal,” indifferent and anonymous. The people represents the proper (or “authentic”) mode of Mitsein: Being-with as a community of destiny, guided by the common cause for which it is necessary to fight and even sacrifice one’s life. The critique of this Heideggerian subordination of Mitsein to the community of destiny, as the proper, authentic place of being-with, fuels Nancy’s philosophy of the “with.” He writes that in Being and Time “the affirmation of the essentiality of the with is insidiously neglected in favor of another category, community, which appropriates the with into a destinal unity in which there is no room for the contiguity of the theres, nor consequently any logical, ontological or topological room for the with as such” (13). According to Nancy, it is this “with as such” that must be thought in order to elucidate the essential quality of existence as co-existence—“the primordial, ontological condition of being-with or being-together” (2000, xvi). Nancy suggests that Heidegger’s ontological project must become a “social ontology,” where the question of being-with acquires primacy, essentially turning into “a co-existential analytic” that has the ambition of being a first philosophy (Critchley 1999, 53). Thinking “the with as such” also challenges Nancy to reconsider the notion of community, integrating it with the idea of being-with in a new way, beyond Heideggerian destiny and unity. Nancy argues that plurality is not an added but an essential quality of Being, as a result, “Being ‘itself’ comes to be defined as relational, as non-absoluteness, and . . . as community” (Nancy 1991, 6). This community “unworks” itself (rather than referring to some preexisting common essence); it is not empirically but ontologically given: primordial community of being-with-each-other that in its essence is the singular plurality of being. In the Heideggerian manner, Nancy suggests that singularity is always already exposed to the outside, and due to this “primordial structure, it is at once detached, distinguished, and communitarian. Community is the presentation of the detachment (or retrenchment) of this distinction that is not individuation, but finitude compearing [com-paraît]” (29). Singularity never appears in solitude: by the very fact of being in this world (that, by definition, is always plural, multiple), singularity can only co-appear. “Community means,” Nancy writes, “that there is no singular being without another singular being, and that there is, therefore, . . . an originary or ontological ‘sociality’ that in its principle extends far beyond the simple theme of man as a social being (the zoon politikon is secondary to this community)” (28). Community is “the being-ecstatic of Being itself”: insofar as something has being, insofar as it exists, it necessarily extends beyond itself in ek-stasis, it is relational in its very essence. Even in solitude one is never alone; even in death, since one always dies in and for

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the world. An empirical community, the polis as the secondary community of zoon politikon, is what has been indexed as politics (la politique), while the political (le politique) refers to this originary “sociality”—the primordial community of Being as essentially with. It is also important for Nancy to assert the radical finitude of this community (“finitude compearing”): only what exists exists, and nothing else. There is no transcendence beyond existence, no external force that guides and manifests itself through the finite; there is no outside of this world. “There is no ‘outside,’ no getting away from the closure of immanence” (2003, 75–76). While Nancy is critical of immanentism, the cause of the totalitarian closure of community, and while he affirms transcendence, in a sense of the excess of representation (i.e., the political beyond politics), he is critical of the notion of transcendence in the traditional sense, as something that exists beyond the world, beyond the singular plurality of being. In other words, Nancy affirms the closure of immanence (i.e., immanence of existence) contrary to the totalitarian immanentism and theologico-political transcendence. SENSE AS THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD: THE SHARING OF BEING If there is nothing beyond this world, what is within it? There is the world and there is sense or meaning: the world is sense, and sense is the origin of the world. The notion of sense is crucial for Nancy because it grounds the idea of co-existence and being-with. Sense makes sense only when it is shared; like language, it is always in-common: “There is no meaning if meaning is not shared . . . because meaning is itself the sharing of Being” (Nancy 2000, 2). Nancy argues that Being does not have meaning but is “given to us as meaning,” that is, meaning is not an attribute, a quality of existence that can be uncovered, but it is given to us insofar as we can say we. It is between us: “Meaning is its own communication or its own circulation . . . and we are this circulation” (2). Another word for this circulation is sharing: primordial exposition of all things to the outside, and of the self (ecstatic, human Dasein) as “a pre-cognitive affective disposition towards the world” (Critchley 1999, 64). It is interesting to note that while Nancy’s co-existential analytic is primarily dedicated to Dasein and thus human community, he does not fail to indicate the “infinite” character of sharing. It goes, he writes, in all directions at once, in all the directions of all the space-times [les espacetemps] opened by presence to presence: all things, all beings, all entities, everything past and future, alive, dead, inanimate, stones, plants, nails, gods—and “humans,” that is, those who expose sharing and circulation as such by saying



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“we,” by saying we to themselves in all possible senses of that expression, and by saying we for the totality of all being. (Nancy 2000, 3)

Being as being-with-one-another concerns all things, the totality of all being; everything that has being circulates as meaning, which is the ultimate picture of radical relationality. However, humans occupy a special place in this circulation: they expose sharing by saying (or being able to say) “we” for the totality of all being. Here we encounter the ontological question of logos and its relation to specifically human existence as political co-existence. It is the question of logos as a distinctively human capacity for thought, which in the Western tradition has been inseparable from the question of the political. Insofar as we interpret being-with or ontological “sociality” as the primordial political, we also ought to view thought as political because, according to Nancy, thought is essentially in-common. He brings up Descartes’s example to show that the very truth of ego sum is possible only because of the “we.” But this plurality does not concern the possibility of recognition by the other, as in Hegel, because “before recognition there is knowing: knowing without knowledge, and without ‘consciousness,’ that I am first of all exposed to the other, and exposed to the exposure of the other. Ego sum expositus. . . . The Cartesian subject knows himself to be exposed, and he knows himself because he is exposed” (Nancy 1991, 31). The Cartesian ego sum counts as “evidence” or the first foundation only because it can be recognized by anyone (Nancy 2000, 66), so even though Descartes in his pursuit of certainty doubts everything, he must assume community, “the stage of the ‘we,’ ” and must be already exposed or co-appearing in order for his thought to be able to acquire certainty through potential recognition by everyone. In this way, the methodological pretence of thought (of “thinking with”) is “neither substantialist nor solipsistic: it uncovers the stage of the ‘at each time’ as our stage, the stage of the ‘we.’ [The] ‘theater of the world,’ as Descartes also liked to call it” (66). Thought finds its confirmation and certainty on this stage of singular plurality; like sense it gains its certainty due to the essential sharing. Consequently, the political and thought, for Nancy, are at some level indissociable. However critical he is of the indissociability of the political and the philosophical (i.e., of the polis and logos) in Western tradition, he is not trying to dissociate them but is trying to merely question or “unwork” their relationship to the point of opening the thought of community to new possibilities, such as the thought of community beyond any organicism (e.g., philosophical determination of the essence of community as communion). In the words of Devisch, “if we want to frame a political space where the ‘with’ is not an oppressive force anymore, we also have to take into account how community is (un)thought, how the Western logos is operating not as an idealistic structure of our thinking, but as the material finite condition

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we live in” (243). Nancy deconstructs the traditional thought of community and politics, of being-together as destiny or communion, and points toward the “unthought” of this thought—the political as essential being-with, as the unworking of the immanentist (totalitarian) horizon of politics. Consequently, the political designates “not the organization of society but the disposition of community as such”: contrary to its dissolution in the sociotechnical, the political “must inscribe the sharing of community” (Nancy 1991, 40). This inscription is not a project of regaining a lost communion or reestablishing it in the future, but it signifies a kind of communal ordering based on the conscious experience of sharing. However, Nancy notes, the political understood as conscious experience does not solely depend on the so-called political will (which is a determining factor of what has been traditionally understood as politics) and “implies being already engaged in the community, that is to say, undergoing, in whatever manner, the experience of community as communication” (40). In a way, the political is a conscious realization of the unconscious disposition to community as co-existence. THE POLITICAL AS COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS The parallel between the political as being-with and the unconscious appears in Nancy’s engagement with psychoanalysis in The Sense of the World (1997). Acknowledging Jacques Lacan’s contribution, Nancy writes: The “unconscious” designates . . . the inexhaustible, interminable swarming of significations that are not organized around a sense but, rather, proceed from a significance or signifyingness [significance] that whirls with a quasi-Brownian motion around a void point of dispersion, circulating in a condition of simultaneous, concurrent, and contradictory affirmation, and having no point of perspective other that the void of truth at their core. (46–47)

The unconscious is a swarming of significations around a void, and this is exactly what, according to psychoanalysis, the subject must become able to bear. I suggest that Nancy undertakes this task on the scale of the collective unconscious and its subject—community. The whirling of the unconscious and circulation of contradictory significations is evocative of what Nancy says about meaning: it is its own circulation, and “we” are this circulation. Furthermore, the “we” here stands for the singular plurality of being—the basic contradictory affirmation that community needs to become able to sustain. The unconscious is the world without a center, the world that revolves around nothing: it is “not at all another consciousness or a negative consciousness, but merely the world itself. The unconscious is the world as



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totality of signifiability, organized around nothing other than its own opening. For psychoanalysis, this opening opens on nothing” (Nancy 1997, 47). The unconscious as the world is an “open” totality that is organized around its point of irreconciliation, the void. This opening as an essential feature of the world-unconscious translates into the thought of community: as “transcendental of the polis,” being-together is “not an organicism, whether that of a harmony or of a communion, nor that of a distribution of functions and differences. But no more is it an anarchy. It is the an-archy of the archè itself” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997, 119). Being-together as the primordial political is defined by its opening, its absence of a final ground or foundational principle. It is the unconscious of the polis, it is an-archic archè: “Being-in-common [être-en-commun] is very much the concern of psychoanalysis (it is the ‘unconscious’), and this is why psychoanalysis is a privileged witness or symptom of the end of the world-cosmos and the birth of the world” (Nancy 1997, 48). While the world-cosmos, by definition, is organized around an archè, the view of the world, which Nancy presents here, affirms the nothingness as its centering principle or, in other words, it affirms the irreducible plurality of archè as the plurality of the origins of the world. Consequently, community, which is organized around the conscious experience of sharing, is necessarily “grounded” in the political—the unconscious disposition of community as such, or being-with. We can see here the operation of two principles—disappearance and appearance—that Nancy also calls “the undifferentiated” and “the punctual.” In order to clarify his view of the political as an unconscious or undifferentiated principle, Nancy contrasts it with love. He notes that “the political . . . must not be the assumption or the work of love or of death” (1991, 40), and further explains that “the political is the place of the in-common [le lieu de l’en-commun] as such . . . the place of being-together [le lieu de l’être-ensemble],” while love is “the place of being-with [l’être-avec]” (Nancy 1997, 88).1 The “with” of love, according to Nancy, refers to “a contradiction as such . . . , played out between two punctualities”; two in the sense of “everyone for him- or herself, none being reducible either to the self or to a third term” (88). Such is the formula of love. Love, for Nancy, appears on the side of truth (or rather the play of truth between two truths). Truth is punctual, a point of fixation or certainty, and consequently it is at the limit of sense, because sense is always in-between, which is the prerogative of the political. Insofar as existence “does not take place for one alone or for two but for many,” it is in-common and, as beingtogether, essentially political. For the political or together, contrary to the with of love, “the common concern, beyond ‘two,’ is the numerous as such and even in principle the innumerable” (88). While love is binary, the political involves the innumerable: the open totality of the world that has infinite number of singular plural origins, and thus refuses to differentiate itself or to

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account for itself. The political, consequently, as the place of the in-common as such, is basically the place of “indistinct anonymity whose grouping is given, while its tie [lien] properly so-called is not” (88). The appraisal of such anonymity gestures toward Nancy’s initial task of rewriting Heidegger’s Being and Time: while the latter considers the anonymity of “anyone” to be the sign of inauthenticity, Nancy suggests that the genuine philosophical novelty of Heidegger’s work lies precisely in the existential analytic of such inauthenticity. Love and the political are opposed to each other as “pure truth” (“punctuality, myth”) is opposed to “pure sense” (“undifferentiated and vague being-toward”) (Nancy 1997, 89). These two principles, however, in order to last, must intersect with each other: love must come to make sense and the political must punctuate itself into myth. “For this reason, they have been set up, in our tradition, as two interconnected and antagonistic paradigms, each exposed, in a sense, to the other, each attracting and repelling the other” (89). The punctual and the undifferentiated are the two “registers” of togetherness in a more general sense: they comprise the world formed through the relation of repulsion and attraction, as well as appearance and disappearance. THE LIMITS OF BEING-WITH Is there a limit to existence as co-existence or being-with? Is there a limit to the political and its community of primordial sharing? In Nancy’s project of radical rearticulation of relationality there is very little room left for the unpolitical as long as the political defines being in its essential togetherness or singular plurality. As Simon Critchley suggests, Nancy presents being-with in “absolutist terms,” as the “must” for thought (1999, 59), which posits the question of the unpolitical in terms of the de-absolutization of this ontological possibility. Can we think “being-without” that, perhaps, underlies the coexistential structures of being-with, “a being-without the other that is without being” (66)? Is there anything beyond being that does not cross over into the “other” world of transcendence, but rather manifests itself as a condition of our worldly existence? In order to begin answering this question we need a different methodology since Nancy’s adherence to the ontological structure of being-with does not allow for a “solitude” that is able to cross into the space of the unpolitical conditioning of being itself. Being, perhaps, is not the only mode of existence or sharing, and as a result, the political might not determine the space where everything meets or acquires the condition of possibility of establishing relationships with other beings. However, Nancy does not admit of this possibility, remaining faithful to his post-Heideggerian project, which is nothing other than the project of radical political ontology in



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the sense of radical politicization of being in its essential structure. Without the unpolitical, being-with remains a “must” for thought because otherwise thought would cease and sense would become non-sense, insofar as thinking, according to Nancy, requires togetherness and sense requires the sharing of being. As a necessity for thought, the primordial totality of the singular plurality of being can be challenged only when we elaborate a philosophical structure of being-without that is able to manifest itself, to borrow Critchley’s words, “without being.” This is a task that has been addressed by a number of continental philosophers, including Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry, and I will return to this question in detail in chapters 6 and 7. For now, it is worth looking in further detail into Nancy’s own attempt to “distinguish politics” (2010b, 21) from other “places of existence,” as well as to situate this attempt within the ontology of being-with, in order to understand how Nancy misses the mark of “realism” required by the thought of the unpolitical. Upon an initial reading of Nancy’s note “Is Everything Political?” (2010a), there is a sense that Nancy affirms a certain exteriority of the political, which is manifest as distinct forms or figures of being-together, somewhat reminiscent of an earlier distinction between politics and the nonpolitical spheres of human life. However, importantly, Nancy’s political does not determine or “figure” any of these spheres. To be fair to Nancy’s intentions, he affirms that not everything is political in a historical context, where the phrase “everything is political” has constituted the horizon of our thinking “during a very long period from 1789, perhaps, right up to our own time, though we ourselves are unable to determine whether ‘our own time’ is still circumscribed by this horizon” (45). Nancy distances his understanding of the political from the previous philosophical determinations of this concept in terms of such totalizing symbols as divine union, community of destiny, and even political economy. Nevertheless, it is my suggestion that Nancy does not radically circumvent the horizon of the political totality because even as he redefines the political as “a place of detotalization” (51), he does not overcome the absolutization of the principle of “being-with,” in relation to which any “being-without” remains unthinkable. In other words, even as Nancy wants to distinguish “politics” against the background of the quasi-totalizing ontology of “the political” (and, perhaps, even succeeds in doing so), he does not determine the real limitation to this political ontology inasmuch as this would amount to negating his philosophy of singular plurality of being. In his attempt to distinguish politics, Nancy proclaims that “politics is born in the separation between itself and another order . . . (through . . . art, love, thought, and so on)” (2010b, 18), that order whose “task” is to give figure or form to the sharing or to the common. Thus, Nancy argues that initially “politics” (in his earlier works, Nancy prefers to refer to “politics,” in this sense, in terms of le politique, commonly translated as “the political”), as well as

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philosophy, is founded “in the field of an essential withdrawing: that of the gods, that of being-together . . . , or, to put it better, in the withdrawal of presence” (Esposito and Nancy 2010, 76). Such politics consists in a continuous withdrawal from the representation of being-together, from the in-common as totality. Consequently, it is the space of preservation of the incommensurability between multiple senses of sharing (produced, again, in the place or experience of art, love, thought, etc.). Politics is thus the “place for the articulation of nonunity” (Nancy 2010a, 51). Nevertheless, while it is distinguished from other registers of experience, politics “gives them their space and possibility” (Nancy 2010b, 26), which, I argue, essentially means that even though politics does not subsume them, it conditions and prepares space for them, revealing its ultimate and unbreakable relation with these other spheres. What Nancy basically implies is that what lies “beyond” politics is not another (e.g., a-, anti-, or un-political) reality that takes responsibility for the in-common, but rather the impossibility of any unitary representation. As Nancy puts it, “Politics must be understood through a distinction from—and a relation with—that which cannot and must not be assumed by it, not, to be sure, because this should be assumed by some other activity (art or religion, love, subjectivity, thought. . .), but because this must be taken charge of by all and by each in ways that must remain diverse, indeed divergent, multiple, even heterogeneous” (21). Sharing happens through a variety of experiences that intersect in the space of the political, and so politics stands on guard against the reduction of this heterogeneity to a specific reality, unitary principle, or symbol. However, this “politics” does not appear to be radically distinguished from itself but remains ultimately attached to “the political” understood as being-with or community, which encompasses “everything” in an open ontological totality. In Nancy’s words, “ ‘everything is political’ . . . —in a sense that is neither that of political theology nor political economy—insofar as the everything [le “tout”] can be neither total nor totalized in any way” (2010a, 51). The “retreated” political is presented by Nancy as the condition of possibility of “everything.” It remains unclear how anything can be radically outside of politics and how these alternative figures of togetherness can be really unpolitical as long as being is essentially structured as sharing. Insofar as being is essentially “with,” and the real “without” remains unthought, and insofar as leaving the “world,” in Nancy’s sense, remains “forbidden,” politics is not radically distinguished, but maintains itself as a primordial totality, especially as it subordinates any other (ontic) place of existence to the ontological principle of the political as the place of being-together. Politics is “the place of an ‘in common’ as such,” “the specific place for the articulation of a non-unity,” “a place of detotalization” where everything passes, meets up, or crosses paths (Nancy 2010a, 50–51). “The in-common of



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the city has no identity other than the space in which the citizens cross each other’s paths” (Nancy 1997, 104). Everything shares the political space and is shared (as sense) in this space, while this space itself is not everything—a nonunity. “Politics is in charge of space and of spacing (of space-time), but not in charge of figuring” (Nancy 2010a, 50). Everything is conditioned by it and gains its form or figure through it, though politics itself is figureless. What figures or gives form to the sharing is precisely not politics, but “other places of existence . . . where incommensurability is in some way formed and presented: they can go by the names ‘art,’ ‘religion,’ ‘thought,’ ‘science,’ ‘ethics,’ ‘conduct,’ ‘exchange,’ ‘production,’ ‘love,’ ‘war,’ ‘kinship,’ ‘intoxication’ ” (50). These other places are distinct from politics; however, they are conditioned by it: politics guarantees, without laying claim to it, the sharing out of the incalculable. The city is a multiple localization, the space of circulation and sharing (Nancy 1997, 104). The polis, then, is not the figure of the political but only its space that, nevertheless, is impossible to leave. “The polis is only the place from where (rather than ‘where’), the place from which—though without leaving it, without leaving the world that conjoins cities, nations, peoples, and states—it is possible to sketch out, to paint, to dream, to sing, to think, to feel a ‘good life’ [where ‘good’ is ‘not determined in any way, by any figure or under any concept’]” (2010b, 27; emphasis added). To leave politics (or the political), from this perspective, would mean to leave being, to cease to exist, so death may appear as the only radical exteriority of the political; it is the limit of the city that one is able to cross only as one ceases to “be there.” But even in death, is one ever alone insofar as one always dies for another or for the world? It is precisely the possibility of leaving the polis without dying that must be actualized for the political to finally resolve its totalizing ambition and to give way to the unpolitical. As Laurent Dubreuil (2006) similarly suggests, once we have “lived politics,” once we have recognized “its necessity, its grandeur and its risks,” we must “leave politics” without, at the same time, rejecting it. Such departure is not a withdrawal or retreat from the political, but rather an affirmation of its real exteriority, which, Dubreuil notes, “cannot be completed once and for all but forever begun again” through a “vital contradiction” (97). Nancy’s most significant accomplishment, in this regard, lies in his recognition of the necessity of the political as the space of worldly encounter and sharing of sense and not as the unitary figure of community; however, for this political to achieve its goal of detotalization, its real limits must be outlined, including at the level of ontology. Only then would it be possible to leave politics without looking back and, at the same time, without abolishing politics. In order to advance this leave, what must be thought is the real limits of thought, the “without” of being-with, and the “non-relation” of radical relationality.

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NOTE 1. In The Sense of the World (1997) Nancy differentiates between “being-together” and “being-with” as the places of the political and of love, accordingly. However, in Being Singular Plural (2000), he uses these two notions interchangeably: they both refer to the same condition—“the primordial, ontological condition of being-with [l’être-avec] or being-together [l’être-ensemble]” (xvi).

Chapter 4

Massimo Cacciari and Roberto Esposito: The Category of the Impolitical

Turning away from the investigation of the totalizing tendency of the political toward an examination of its limits, the first notion to grab our attention would certainly be the Italian category of “the impolitical.” What is unique about an intervention indexed by this notion is that through it the question of political exteriority acquires its own terminological specificity in contemporary philosophy. It is no longer the concept of “the political” that is employed to speak of the outside of traditional “politics,” but “the impolitical.” This notion was first introduced by Massimo Cacciari and further developed by another contemporary Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito. Both thinkers imbue the impolitical with a positive sense: the outside of politics is no longer feared, avoided, and criticized as an instance of apolitical withdrawal and non-action. On the contrary, the impolitical perspective acquires the important function of pointing out and even correcting the “imperfections” of the political; it serves as a passageway between the old politics of the total state and a new post-foundational or “grand politics” that has become conscious of its finitude. The project of the impolitical has been successful in elucidating and deconstructing the totality of the political, pointing out the need for another politics that would be founded on a radical opening and not rely on a unitary form of representation, be it the state, theology, or even philosophy. Nonetheless, the impolitical, I argue, is a notion that still primarily serves a political task as its goal is to reinstate politics in a new form. In this function, it remains oblivious to the problem of the radical exteriority of politics, foreclosing the field of political ontology from conclusively dealing with its long-standing totalizing ambition. As a result, as we draw inspiration from the notion of the impolitical, we need to be aware of its limitations that, however, are nothing less than an invitation to move forward with an exploration of the unpolitical. 65

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MASSIMO CACCIARI: THE IMPOLITICAL AND GRAND POLITICS The category of the impolitical appeared on the Italian philosophical scene with the publication of Massimo Cacciari’s 1978 essay “L’impolitico nietzschiano” (“Nietzsche and the Impolitical”).1 Cacciari derived this notion from Thomas Mann’s provocative critique of democracy in his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1983) (Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen), originally published in 1918. Cacciari envisioned his essay as a response to Mann’s reading of Nietzsche, who considered the latter “the symbol of hatred for the political” (2009, 93–94). According to Mann, Nietzsche clearly recognized the fact that German higher culture opposed politicization and was essentially “nonpolitical” (Mann 1983, 78). Nietzsche, who called himself the “last nonpolitical German,” was, as a result, “a national spokesman” who concurred “with all exemplary German thought and desire” (175–76). Nonpolitical thought, in Mann’s interpretation, corresponds to the rejection, refusal, and lack of desire for politics, an attitude that he himself readily adopts. “I do not want politics,” he writes, “I want objectivity, order and decency. If this is philistine, then I want to be a philistine. If it is German, then in God’s name I want to be called a German” (189). Importantly, Mann’s rejection of politics is grounded in his understanding of what politics is: for him politics embodied revolt, disorder, and the destruction of traditional values, and held the danger of a journalistic-rhetorical vulgarization of public space (Craig 1995, xi). Not surprisingly, Mann identifies politics with democracy, a regime where everything is subject to debate and the exchange of opinion. His rejection of politics, consequently, takes the form of a critique of democracy. For Cacciari, Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, and specifically his interpretation of Nietzsche, raise the question of “what should we understand by the impolitical?” (2009, 94). While Mann’s reading of Nietzsche emphasizes the rejection of the political, Cacciari finds such interpretation problematic. He suggests that Mann misunderstood “the antihistoricist direction” of Nietzsche’s thought (Cacciari 2009, 94). Nietzsche cannot be considered a spokesperson for German history and its nonpolitical culture. Quite the opposite, Nietzsche does not reject the political but breaks with the existing tradition by questioning the very meaning of the political. As a result, the Nietzschean impolitical is nothing like a heroic renunciation of politics but is rather a questioning and a critique of politics—the work of its “deconstruction” in the pursuit of “grand politics” (96). Building on his rereading of Nietzsche, Cacciari suggests that modernity has been marked by total politicization, in the process of which “the political tends to represent itself as total concept,” and intervenes everywhere, with its logic constituting “the method of any social relation” (2009, 96). This total



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politicization culminates in the total state, which, nevertheless, presents itself as a “neutral [and only possible] form of political organization,” surpassing the historically determined work that led to its configuration. The modern state manifests the absolutization of the political, and so the total state and total politicization become synonymous. This movement toward total politicization and the successful coupling of the political and the state becomes possible due to the theological valorization of the political. The political, both in its democratic and socialist versions, relies on an eschatology: it “presupposes a human nature that is to be liberated from the alienation to which the institutions of civilization have presumably condemned it.” In a semireligious fashion, the political presumes to offer “the redemption of the totality of man, the overcoming of the empirical, contingent immediacy of his figure” (97). The promise of such “salvation” forms the ethical foundation of the political and thus facilitates its valorization, including the valorization of its greatest expression—the state, which now defines itself and its functions as “values” (96). The state becomes the measure of value and, as a result, presumes to regulate the totality of social relations. The impolitical intervenes in this process as “the critique of the political as affirmation of value” (Cacciari 2009, 95); it “represents the critique of values on whose bases alone such totality [the political, the state] is conceivable” (97). The impolitical exposes and deconstructs the theologico-ethical foundation of this totality, as well as devalorizes the political by affirming its nontotality and elucidating the arbitrariness of its foundation. Cacciari’s impolitical, consequently, is quite different from Mann’s “nonpolitical”: it is not a rejection but a critique of the political as imbued with value. Furthermore, Mann’s aversion to politics results in a dialectical reversal of valuation: it is now the nonpolitical that becomes the positive source of value, and as such it remains attached to what it rejects. Contrary to Mann, the Nietzschean impolitical, Cacciari argues, is non-dialectical insofar as it does not establish itself as an alternative value based on the rejection of the political. More than that, it is intrinsically nihilistic and disenchanted and so it is a critique of any form of valuation per se, which, to use Nietzsche’s term, is basically “transvaluation.” The impolitical emerges independently from both the political and its opposite—the nonpolitical—and constitutes “an analysis of the authentic genealogy of the process of politicization” (95). And as any good genealogy, it remains value-free. Cacciari further argues that in addition to the modern process of total politicization, we witness the simultaneous decay of the political due to its internal contradictions. The impolitical, as a result, performs a double function. First, as discussed earlier, it is both a genealogical analysis and a critique of values that ground the political totalization. Second, it is an exposition of the internal contradictions of this process of politicization as well as an illumination of

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the premises of a new, “grand” politics that comes forth due to these contradictions. Cacciari agrees with Nietzsche that the modern absolutization of the political contains the seeds of its own demise and is “destined to disappear, because its foundation disappears, namely, trust in absolute authority and in divine truth” (2009, 97). Democracy particularly contributes to such a desacralization of the political by pluralizing the principles of social ordering. Democracy affords every political subject the right to express and organize its own life, which results in opening the political space toward multiple forces that are irreducible to the functions of the state. As Cacciari puts it, this very same process that appears as absolutization of the political, defines it in actuality as a field of heterogeneous forces, of contradictions—as a space where endless differences occur. The absolutization occurs through a loss of centrality and a constant weakening of the system. Far from leading to unity, to common origins, the total politicization increases the entropy of the system. (97–98)

This process is analogous to an imperial overstretch: an empire, as it extends by incorporating new territories, multiplies local centers of power, and eventually becomes ridden with revolt, resulting in the loss of control over its territory. In a similar manner, progressive politicization reveals the field of the multiple and heterogeneous force relations that the state has once claimed to conceal under its form. The increasing extension of the political field increases its entropy, resulting in the destabilization of the very boundaries of the political and leading to its decay. Nonetheless, the process of democratic destruction of the political totality and decay of the total state is not so clear-cut. It can be interpreted, simultaneously, as a decay and “the greatest extension of the political, the perfection of the Politisierung [politicization],” where “everybody makes politics and organizes himself politically . . . because the political has lost any aura” (Cacciari 2009, 98). Instead of resulting in depoliticization, then, the democratic critique of the total state lays the ground for even more encompassing “second-stage” politicization: having “transcended” the state and its “aura,” the political now encompasses “everybody,” turning an individual into an object of selfpolicing and self-ordering. Impolitical reflection intervenes in this caesura between the decay and perfection of the political, and prepares the passage to a new, grand politics (revolving around the Nietzschean “will to power”), which has the potential to render the dilemma of the modern political obsolete. In Cacciari’s words, the impolitical is “the critical stage of grand politics” (2009, 96): the crucial stage, founded on the critique of total politicization, which the political passes through on its way to becoming grand politics. Importantly, Cacciari notes, impolitical critique is unlike the Marxist critique of ideology, which notoriously rejected the political as a form of “false consciousness.” The



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impolitical is rather a genealogy, a work of deconstruction insofar as it shows that the political is “historically marked and produced the forces of its own crisis” (96). The task of the impolitical lies in naming the multiplicity of these forces that make up the crisis of the political, enabling a critique of values based on which the political totality became conceivable in the first place. The impolitical, as a result, is defined by its function: mediation, staging, and facilitation of the passage from the “old” political toward a politicization of a different kind, toward grand politics. As Cacciari puts it, “grand politics has, as its condition, the impolitical acknowledgement of the nontotality of the political: a radical critique of the state-worshipers” (2009, 102). Hence the main aim of impolitical critique is the establishment of a new politics which is not grounded in any system of valuation and which contains will to power at its core. This, essentially, is a “politics without foundation” (102) that revolves around its own nontotality and retains at its core the entropy that produced it. While the political, in the form of the total state, aims at centralization and total ordering of the forces circulating in its field, grand politics is essentially a manifestation of this entropy, and its individual expression is the Nietzschean will to power. Ultimately, the core function of the impolitical is a redemption of politics. It is an attitude and a critique that aims to illuminate the contradictions within the field of the political totality, to deconstruct its foundational values, and to reveal its essential nontotality. The impolitical is a nihilistic acknowledgment of the loss of the centering principle, the impossibility of eliminating entropy in politics, which paves the way for the advent of grand politics and defines a new post-foundational political consciousness. The impolitical is a critical distancing from the political, a gaze from the margins or, in the words of Alessandro Carrera, a “ ‘sublime’ limitation of politics” (2009, 17). Cacciari suggests that the recognition of such limitation remains the only option for critical reflection in an age when the political and the state are no longer credible: “The only glimmer, the only narrow door left to us in the era of the demythologization of the political, is to keep one’s eyes open and to watch and observe well what is going on in the world, in order to work out that dissolution of values of the state that is the intuition of the ‘philosophy of the morning’ ” (2009, 103). The impolitical is the process of both “watching” and “observing,” as well as of “working out,” the deconstruction of the values of the state and the political in the wake of the Nietzschean “philosophy of the morning”—a philosophy of finitude and grand politics. The impolitical is a critique and deconstruction of the political as a value and a totality; it is a gaze from the margins of the political but, most importantly, it is also the recognition of the very existence of these limits; it is an affirmation of the finitude of the political. Such affirmation not only destroys the ground of modern politicization but facilitates the transition toward

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politics without foundation. As the impolitical “brings the political back to the acknowledgement of its intrinsic nihilism,” it simultaneously facilitates “a construction of grand politics” insofar as grand politics lies in “a nihilistic devaluation” (Cacciari 2009, 96). The impolitical nourishes the seeds of grand politics that the political supposedly always already contains. The impolitical destruction of the political totality is thus the construction of a new kind of politics. Can the impolitical be distinguished from grand politics after all, insofar as both are understood by Cacciari in terms of a nihilistic devaluation? Can we say that the impolitical is anything more than a mere function of grand politics? When we revisit one of Cacciari’s conclusions that the impolitical is “the critical stage of grand politics,” it is possible to deduce from this statement that the impolitical is a process of passage from one political consciousness to another. However, it is also plausible to argue that the impolitical is nothing more than an important stage of grand politics, meaning that the impolitical is itself an element contained by this new kind of politics. From this perspective, the limits, which impolitical critique identifies, are not the real limits of the political, but rather a dividing line between its two modes: foundational and post-foundational politics. Impolitical reflection, then, signifies an ability to tell one from the other but does not define a “space” of its own. In sum, the impolitical, as the process of the critique of the political, is itself grand politics or, rather, grand politics is a multiplicity of processes, among which the impolitical signifies a passageway from “petty” to grand politics. Cacciari succeeds in showing that the Nietzschean impolitical proves to be not a rejection of politics, as per Mann’s interpretation, but a project of redemption of the political or, rather, the project of construction of a new politics without foundation. Alessandro Carrera reaches a similar conclusion when he writes that Nietzsche’s “impoliticalness” is not an alignment against the decadence of politics, but “the most radical criticism of politics. It is, ultimately, a call for grand politics, which is another name for total disenchantment, accepting nihilism and groundlessness as unavoidable features” (2009, 22). The next to follow in Cacciari’s steps was another Italian political philosopher Roberto Esposito, who dedicated much attention to the impolitical in his early works, and who ultimately popularized this notion in contemporary political philosophy. But before proceeding with a discussion of Esposito’s contribution, it is worth briefly noting the lesser-known contribution of French political philosopher Julien Freund. A year before the appearance of Esposito’s Categories of the Impolitical, Julien Freund published his work titled Politique et impolitique (The Political and the Impolitical, 1987). Freund used the term impolitique to signify the type of politics undertaken by



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those who do not understand what politics really is. In this sense, contrary to Cacciari, Freund’s impolitical has a negative connotation; however, it does not coincide with the negation of politics either. Freund cautions us, as Cacciari did and Esposito will also do, not to confuse impolitical with “apolitical” (apolitique), “antipolitical” (antipolitique), or “nonpolitical” (non politique). Action is nonpolitical if it is not concerned with politics (la politique) directly; antipolitical action opposes or rejects politics; and apolitical being is disinterested in politics altogether. The impolitical is none of the above because it necessarily involves participation in political life, “but lacks judgement or skill in performing its function, because it lacks the sense of discernment” (Freund 1987, 1).2 The impolitical is essentially marked by lack: a lack of skill and a lack of understanding of political goals and limitations. But it is also an active offence and violation of the intelligence and relevance of political action. It is an injury to the spirit and vocation of politics, meaning that the impolitical considers “politics for itself and not in its function of service to society and its citizens, to whom it is accountable” (3). It consists “in reasoning in terms of power and not those of society . . . in politicizing everything, both in subordinating other human activities to politics and in considering autonomous activities only from the political point of view” (4). The impolitical, for Freund, is thus indicative of total politicization and political action oriented toward questions of power and, as a result, is ignorant of the essential function of politics, which for him is social service. While Cacciari’s impolitical is the critical deconstruction of the political, Freund’s impolitical is an obstacle and a threat to the proper functioning of politics (understood in a more traditional way as the institutional ordering of social interactions). As a result, politics, for Freund, must be rejuvenated and redeemed against the threat of the impolitical. ROBERTO ESPOSITO: THE IMPOLITICAL GAZE Roberto Esposito’s contribution to the thought of the impolitical is currently the most widely known and has attracted scholarly attention and criticism. However, there has thus far been little discussion of Esposito’s early works in English-speaking scholarship due to the absence of their English translations (until very recently) as well as the popularity of his later works. The notion of the impolitical, as a result, has been overshadowed by debates around Esposito’s more recent theoretical contributions, including the works on biopolitics, community, immunity, and the impersonal.3 Esposito first developed the notion of the impolitical in his Categorie dell’impolitico (Categories of the Impolitical) published in 1988. Though he acknowledges Cacciari’s preceding work on this category, Esposito does

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not build his own engagement on Cacciari’s contribution. The book primarily consists of the analysis of the writings of several “impolitical” authors, which forms the basis for Esposito’s own conception of the impolitical. As Esposito notes, this notion took shape gradually, drawing inspiration from across the range of diverse thinkers, such as Romano Guardini, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Hermann Broch, Elias Canetti, Simone Weil, and Georges Bataille. Esposito’s vision of the impolitical, however, is not elaborated fully in the book, which is mostly dedicated to a close reading and discernment of impolitical tonalities in the works of the aforementioned authors. We get a much clearer understanding of what Esposito means by the impolitical in his original introduction of 1988 to Categories of the Impolitical and, most prominently, in the Preface written for the second edition of the book in 1999. Esposito’s discussion of the impolitical is situated at the intersection of two significant works of the beginning of the twentieth century: Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man and Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political. Even as the title of Esposito’s book speaks to this double reference, he is quick to distance himself from both authors suggesting that his view of the impolitical cannot be identified with either Mann’s apoliticism or Schmitt’s total politics and politico-theological argumentation. Regarding Schmitt, Esposito notes that his own intervention begins where Schmitt’s discourse ends, “taking up what lies ‘beyond’ it” (2015, 1). However, even as Esposito’s engagement with Schmitt is limited and is dedicated to one of his earlier, less-known works—Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form (1923) (Roman Catholicism and Political Form), I suggest that Esposito’s fleeting reference to Schmitt is more important for his notion of the impolitical than it might first appear. Let us recall our discussion of Schmitt’s concept of the political and, specifically, its constitutive “blindness.” As Michael Marder puts it, the political “begins with the cognitive-perceptual elimination of the neutral third. . . . It arises from a pronounced blindness . . . to everything that surrounds or falls outside of it” (2005, 18–19), and the only “visible” spot within this neutral field is the “fictitiously unpolitical.” While the Schmittian political totality is characterized by its blindness toward its own foundational exteriority, that is the “absolutely unpolitical,” Esposito’s impolitical aims to directly engage it. Esposito, as a result, describes the impolitical as the “vision” or “gaze” directed at the political from the outside: “The impolitical is the political, as seen from its outermost limit” (2015, 13). In other words, the outside of the political is no longer eliminated but rather illuminated though an impolitical gaze. Interestingly, Esposito resists labelling his work political philosophy and prefers to call it political thought. “Thought”—contemplation, vision, spectatorship—has its origin in the Greek theoria, which, according to



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Aristotle, is opposed to praxis—a realm of action fueled by desire (e.g., politics and ethics). Esposito’s identification of the impolitical as “vision” is somewhat reminiscent of this classical distinction between theoria and praxis, where the impolitical indexes a reflexive distancing from political praxis. However, despite the similarity, there is a significant difference between Aristotelian theoria and Esposito’s impolitical vision. While the former is concerned with the unchangeable and eternal, the impolitical is concerned with the opposite: it illuminates political reality in its essential changeability, irreducible difference, and finitude. Esposito suggests that, as a result, “all great political realism from Machiavelli onward, as nontheological thought of politics, has been impolitical” (2015, 13), even if its impolitical orientation remained merely unconscious. Consequently, the theoretical function that the impolitical performs is not directed toward normalization of the political as it was, for example, for Schmitt. To the contrary, the impolitical signifies the essential impossibility of a normal situation—the impossibility of its complete representation. The impolitical challenges and deconstructs the political and illuminates the originary instability of any ordering. It reminds us that at the heart of any normalcy lies abnormality and irregularity. The “impolitical perspective” points at an absence of the political foundation and, as in Cacciari, affirms politics without foundation. This is the “proper” function of the impolitical relation with the political—an affirmation of its originary impropriety. As a result, Esposito’s impolitical project implies a different kind of vision: a vision guided not by a search for the unitary principle or essence of the political, or of itself as a vision, but by an affirmation of its “irreparable inessentiality” and self-differentiation (xxvi). Esposito’s impolitical thought thus falls within the field of post-foundational political theory that emerges as a critique of traditional political philosophy (cf. Esposito 1993a). THE IMPOLITICAL AS THE OTHER OF REPRESENTATION, DEPOLITICIZATION, AND POLITICAL THEOLOGY The impolitical tradition, according to Esposito, emerges as a critique of the dominant modes of operation of the political in modernity, which are representation, depoliticization, and political theology. First, the impolitical must be understood as the other of representation. He writes: It is the other of representation and remains obstinately outside of it. But its specific unrepresentability is very different from that imagined by modern depoliticization, because it in no way opposes the political. In this sense, the impolitical is far removed from Mann’s term “nonpolitical.” It is not an alternative value [valore] to be posed in opposition to the political. Quite the opposite: it is the

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refusal of the political as invested with value, of any “theological” valorization of the political. (Esposito 2015, 8; translation modified)

For centuries representation has constituted the essence of (liberal democratic) politics in the West, for example, in the form of the representation of the common interest through state government. The impolitical points toward the persistent remainder of the representable, accountable, and immediately visible in the political space, while also itself remaining unrepresentable as a category. Esposito turns to Hannah Arendt in this regard: her conception of politics in terms of “plurality” emphasizes the necessity of unrepresentability, since it is impossible to represent plurality without reducing it to a unity. Any attempt to represent it, whether through a formal system or a sovereign decision, involves a reduction resulting in an effective suppression of plurality and, consequently, conversion of the political into a technical or totalitarian form. For politics to remain authentic, it must embrace the impossibility of representing the multiple, and the impolitical points to this impossibility. As consequence, the impolitical itself becomes politically unrepresentable. Since it is the “other” of representation, Esposito notes that it is difficult to speak of the impolitical, to “represent” it in language. This does not mean, however, that we cannot speak of it, but that we must use non-representational terms. As a result, Esposito prefers to denote the impolitical not as a “category” but rather as “a perspective, a mode of gaze, a way of looking at politics.” Because a category “already gives an idea of some completed, defined thing—of a concept. . . . While [the impolitical] is, in this case, more precisely a tonality, a mode of looking” (Esposito 1993b).4 The impolitical is a coloring, a specific tonality of the gaze from the outside of the political that resists representation and definition. The language of the impolitical must also remain impolitical, in the sense of affirming the essential inability of the impolitical to permanently fix the meaning of anything. Esposito’s discourse on the impolitical is a project of merely encircling conceptually that which essentially resists definition. Esposito further warns that the impolitical is not the same as depoliticization— the refusal of the political in favor of another, apolitical reality that establishes itself as an alternative value, a preferable mode of existence or as apathy and withdrawal. It is far removed from Mannian apoliticism. Like Cacciari, Esposito suggests that the impolitical signifies a different sort of refusal: it is a refusal and a critique of the political as value and, specifically, of its “theological” valorization. Political theology, according to Esposito, refers to political thought or, more precisely, to Catholic political philosophy that conflates “power” with “the Good,” forming the ground for valorization of the political, understood as the operation of power. This conflation



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and subsequent valorization of the political are among the central objects of impolitical critique. The emergence of political theology coincides with the modern process of secularization as the concepts with theological origin become translated into politico-juridical language, effectively resulting in the theological justification of the existing political order. Esposito shows, for instance, how in Romano Guardini’s political Catholicism the theological conception of the Good undergoes politicization by being translated in terms of power in two ways: “it contemplates that the Good can be represented by power, and that power can produce the Good” (2015, 3). Guardini presents an “affirmative conception of power” that outlines the “duty” of this power: “man must exercise power in order to obey God, in the sense that it is God who imposes on man the exercise of power, in order that he be sanctified. That is why power is good: It is the Good’s translation into politics” (5). Furthermore, such a translation of the operations of power in terms of the Good produces an eschatology, in which another reality is affirmed and awaited. For the impolitical, however, there is no other reality, except the reality of politics as it is, meaning that it does not present an apology for the political based on its justification by theological or any other transcendent principle. The impolitical affirms the essential finitude of the political, its foundation in the actual absence of any foundation, in the constitutive, unrepresentable emptiness. The impolitical opposes the politico-theological reduction of plurality to unity and, specifically, restores conflict to its “proper” place at the heart of the political, which has been denied it by many modern political philosophies of depoliticization. Traditionally, human plurality that is characterized by tensions has been resolved into a unity of sovereign representation, as, for instance, in the contractual model of society. Esposito’s position here is similar to other post-foundational thinkers, including Schmitt, who aim to integrate “the state of nature” with the political. Esposito suggests that the central theme behind “all the great conceptions of politics” (i.e., the “impolitical tradition” starting from Nietzsche and continuing in Weil, Arendt, Canetti, Bataille, etc., and which also can be found in earlier instances such as in Plato, St. Paul, St. Augustine, and Machiavelli) is that of “irreducible conflict and irreconcilable contradiction” (Esposito 1993a).5 This tradition lies in opposition to the modern conception of politics based on the contractual model, of which Hobbes’s Leviathan is a pivotal example. Hobbes, Esposito argues, could not resolve contradictions except at the price of progressive neutralization: exclusion of conflict from the civil order and the complete depoliticization of society in favor of the sovereign (2015, 2). Esposito concludes that any political theology that requires the submission of political reality to a unitary principle (i.e., the Good or the sovereign) essentially depoliticizes this reality by affirming the necessity and possibility of resolving these conflicts

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and contradictions. As a result, while this tradition might be called “political theology,” its politics, effectively, “is a politics of depoliticization” (8), the act of repression of the reality and memory of originary conflict. Contrary to this tradition, Esposito affirms “political realism”—the non-theological thinking of politics that does not confuse politics with morality. Neither does it contain apologetic justifications of a concrete Good on the basis of which reality must transform into something other than what it is, leaving behind conflicts and contradictions. THE SHADOW OF POLITICS: THE COINCIDENCE OF THE POLITICAL AND THE IMPOLITICAL Impolitical refusal results in a critical attachment to, rather than a radical separation from, the political, deconstructing both the theological and depoliticizing tendencies that define modern politics. The impolitical does not draw a line between itself and the political, and does not establish separate spheres of their operation, which would be the case if it were to coincide with apolitical or antipolitical attitude. Quite the opposite, the impolitical is in “direct opposition to . . . every form of depoliticization, and . . . is therefore anything but a simple negation of the political” (Esposito 2015, 13). Drawing on Canetti, Esposito argues that the impolitical is the shadow of politics and not its outside, and so it is attached to, as well as separated from, the political. Esposito writes: It is not enough merely to say that an impolitical stance is not disposed to rejecting the political. It is necessary to go further and say that from a certain point of view the impolitical coincides with the political. . . . This can be put even more strongly: the impolitical is the political, as seen from its outermost limit [confine esterno]. It is the determination of the political, in the literal sense of tracing its terms [termini]—which coincide with the entire reality of human relations. (13; translation modified)

The impolitical is the political. Obviously, it is a different “form” of the political; it signifies not an exteriority of politics but something like “proper politics,” a reversal of “apolitical,” “depoliticized,” and “theological” attitudes to politics. The impolitical is the authentic political, and not an apolitical or antipolitical attitude, and Esposito tirelessly emphasizes this distinction. He notes that some critics of his Categories of the Impolitical speak to this point as they suggest that “the impolitical is a relative of the ‘antipolitical’ that is dominant today, albeit a fairly sophisticated one” (2015, xiv). Esposito argues that the fundamental difference between the impolitical and any sort



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of a- or antipolitical attitude is that while the latter implies the modality of opposition to or disinterest in the political, the impolitical implies “neither weakening nor abandoning a focus on the political” but, on the contrary, entails its intensification and radicalization (xv). This project of intensification consists in the construction of “proper politics,” even as it embraces the absence of propriety, illuminated by the deconstructive gaze of the impolitical. As Esposito puts it, “the political has neither determinate proprieties nor essence—that what is most proper to it lies in the absence of propriety, as its essence lies in an irreparable inessentiality” (xxvi). This is the problem of the origin in political philosophy that, Esposito maintains, modernity conceptualizes (but does not invent) beginning with Machiavelli. This is the problem of “the constitutively ‘demonic’ nature of the political, meaning its inability to be reduced to a single ‘symbol’ ” (xxvi). What is at stake for Esposito is the irreducible conflictuality, unrepresentability, and finitude of the political that add up to the problem of its “origin.” We can notice the similarities between Esposito’s argument and Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s discussion of the an-archic archè of the polis.6 Politics, as being-in-common, affirms the void as its centering principle or, rather, the irreducible plurality of archè as the plurality of origins of the world. Esposito gestures in a similar direction when he suggests that the polis as “a unitary cosmos” never existed, “on the contrary, from the very beginning the nomoi of the polis were in conflict with each other” (xxv), affirming the plurality of political origins, their anarchy and irreducibility to a single “symbol.” An important trait that constitutes the political “proper” for Esposito is the acknowledgment of its constitutive “demonic” element and finitude. The demonic aspect refers to the irreducibility of the conflictual aspect of the polis that has been overlooked, denied, and even repressed by modern political philosophy, perpetuating “a politics of neutralization.” Esposito argues, similarly to many other post-foundational political thinkers, that far from conflicting with political conflict and negating the political as conflict, the impolitical considers the political as the only reality and the entirety of reality, adding, however, that it is only reality. Not in the sense that outside of this reality there exists another space, time, or possibility. . . . Rather in the sense that this nonopposition is precisely a “non”: neither an apologetic assumption of the political, nor an impossible withdrawal from it. This “non” is the limit that defines the political, circumscribing it within its specific, finite terms. (2015, xvii–xviii)

The impolitical affirms conflict (polemos, agon) as the only reality of the political, meaning that there is no alternative reality to the political. There is no outside of the political as such, but only as an ideological illusion (such as apolitical attitude whose conflict with the political is, by definition,

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dialectically attached to what it denies) or as the impolitical (which is not the other of the political but rather coincides with it). Esposito’s work falls within the tradition of political realism that affirms the political for what it is but does not present an eschatological alternative to it. Contrary to politics of depoliticization, and a variety of a- and antipolitical attitudes, the impolitical affirms the political as inescapable. It “defines the whole of reality in political terms. . . . For the impolitical there is no entity, no force, and no power that is capable of contesting the political from within its own language” (xvi–xvii). The impolitical does not contest the political but radicalizes it, identifies the reality of politics for what it is without attributing to it any substantial value. The impolitical determines and delimits the being of politics, coinciding with the reality of human relations in its entirety, including conflict and difference, absence of foundations, and, most importantly, finitude. Like Cacciari, Esposito notes that the political is not always aware of its “constitutive finitude,” and so the impolitical “ ‘remind[s]’ the political of its finitude, returning it to the very heart of the political so that finitude dwells not only at its margins, but at its very center” (2015, xviii). The impolitical is “the heart” of the political; it is its absent foundation that coincides with the political precisely because it does not negate it but constitutes its unrepresentable origin. The impolitical is strictly the “non” of the political: neither an apology nor an impossible withdrawal from the political. Importantly, however, what makes it impossible to withdraw from the political, for Esposito, is the very conception of withdrawal presupposing a given identifiable entity from which one has to take distance, resulting in an undesirable dialectical attachment. Esposito wants to avoid such implications by identifying the apolitical attitude with such withdrawal, while the impolitical indexes the impossibility of radical withdrawal. Due to this reasoning, Esposito presents us with two options: to be apolitical, remaining dialectically or negatively attached to politics, or to be impolitical, affirming the impossibility of moving beyond the political. Both choices suggest the same impossibility of the radical outside of the political. But what is the ultimate benefit of identifying the impolitical as a limit of the political and not envisioning a way of crossing it? I suggest that only once we manage to conceptualize a “detachment” from the political not in terms of another reality strictly produced by the withdrawal from the political but, rather, as “indifferent” to the political (as well as to the very idea of withdrawal), we might be able to conceive of a possibility of crossing this threshold into an unpolitical outside. The impolitical reminds the political of its finitude, locating it, simultaneously, at the margins and at the core of the political. Consequently, the impolitical is both the limit and the heart of the political: by reminding the political of its finitude, the impolitical points out the reality of its limits, its non-totality and separation from transcendent order that could guarantee its



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infinity. In this respect, Esposito engages with Simone Weil’s affirmation that “there is no other force on this earth except force” (Weil in Esposito 1996a, 68).7 Weil, according to Esposito, belongs to the realist tradition since she suggests that there is no transcendent force in this world that is opposed to the real force. Following Weil’s logic, Esposito writes that the impolitical affirms that there is no political but the political. But also, precisely for this reason the political is closed—or, more accurately, determined—by this identity with itself. It is nothing other than itself. Its potential [potenza] is only such as it is. It cannot transcend itself toward any end or completion beyond its own bare being-such. The impolitical is the end of every “end of the political.” (2015, xviii)

As there is no recourse to another reality of force in opposition to this world, the contact with the force “which is not of this earth” can be bought only by “passing through a kind of death” (Weil in Esposito 1996a, 68). No worldly force is absolutely sovereign: its reality constitutes its own limit, meaning that it cannot transcend the worldly reality. There is no other force (i.e., God) that is opposed to the worldly force; it is this force itself that reaches its limit and so becomes radically impotent in its inability to go beyond itself. “What is sovereign in this world is determinateness, limit” (Weil 2002, 279). The impolitical, likewise, is not another force or reality opposed to the political, but rather an eyewitness attesting to the limits the political. It is an invisible internal threshold that the political cannot cross unless it passes through a kind of death and thus no longer belongs to this world. The question that arises in this respect is about a possibility of crossing the threshold of worldliness that is not conditioned by death. In other words, what needs to be considered further, and will be addressed in chapter 7, is the possibility of a non-worldly reality that is not constituted by the passage of death but, perhaps, is essentially manifest indifferently to the world. To sum up, we can detect two major interrelated aspects of the impolitical in Esposito: it is the limit of the political and its heart. First, it is the limit of the political: “the border, the margin that the political cannot determine precisely because it is in turn determined by it—just as the voice is by silence” (2015, xxvii). The impolitical determines the political in its finitude, attesting to the limit of political reality. It is not the political that tries to delimit its own exteriority, as was, for instance, the case with the Schmittian political that determined its outside as an exception. For Esposito, it is the impolitical gaze that determines the political and its limits in the literal sense of determination, of drawing up the terms for the totality of human relations. The impolitical brings finitude of the political to political consciousness. One might go as far as to suggest that the impolitical is not only the silent unconscious of the political but rather its reflexive consciousness: it is the mirror

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at the limit of the political that reflects nothing other than the political itself. As Esposito puts it, “the impolitical defines the whole of reality in political terms” (xvi), and opens the angle of refraction through which reality acquires its full visibility in political terms. Furthermore, the impolitical is the heart of the political insofar as its limits are internalized by the political “proper” as its quasi-origin. The impolitical is the difference inherent in the political: it differentiates and subtracts the political from itself, from its “fullness,” but without constituting a dialectical opposition. As already noted earlier, the impolitical coincides with the political, and, as a result, it does not appear “as such” but only as a vanishing trace or threshold. This threshold is an ontological anomaly, a space outside of space, existing only in its disappearance. Esposito identifies the impolitical as an ontological anomaly of this kind when he suggests that the work of deconstruction performed by the impolitical turns back onto itself, resulting in the loss of any essential identity of the impolitical, “as if it could not manifest itself except by cancelling itself in the pure ‘taking place’ [aver luogo] of the political” (2015, xxii). For Esposito, there seems to be no impolitical that does not always already coincide with the political. Since the impolitical is manifest as the intensification of the differentiating limit (xxii), it is, in the end, nothing more than the internal differentiation and limitation of the political. The impolitical, as a threshold, has another distinctive feature: it both separates and unites. It is “a division, but at the same time a union, of what it divides” (Esposito 2015, xxii). If there were only separation, then we would inevitably end up with two opposing spheres or realities; however, this is not the case with the impolitical as it necessarily connects that which it divides. Esposito notes that “ ‘sharing’ [condivisione] (or, in Bataille’s French, partage)” is the term that better than any other conveys this liminal “copresencing of separation and connection” that the impolitical indexes. As a result, “the impolitical is not divided from the political, but . . . shares the political space. It is the sharing of the political—or better still, the political as sharing” (xxii).8 Another crucial aspect of the impolitical as threshold is that it is not only the limit of politics but also the limit of itself, of its own being a limit. The impolitical vision of the political is not concerned with the constitution of the limit, and neither it is interested in itself, meaning that what is at stake for the impolitical perspective is not its own representation. As such, it becomes difficult to speak of the impolitical since it is opposed to the representational mode of thought and resists its own representation as a force or reality that opposes the political. The impolitical coincides with and shares the political space: it is the political as sharing, it is the heart of the political, not its mere limit. In Esposito’s words, “the ‘outside’—or more accurately, the void



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of substance to which the impolitical refers—is located squarely within the political. One could say, perhaps, that it is that very same ‘political,’ but without the operation of its mythical ‘fullness’ ” (2015, xxvii). The subtraction of the political from this “fullness” encapsulates Esposito’s initial argument about the opposition between the impolitical and the regime of political theology and representation, which tend to reduce the political to a unitary “symbol.” The impolitical can manifest itself only as a failure, absence, or rupture within the political but remains unrepresentable as such. The impolitical is the “negative” of the political, the “wound that cuts or interrupts it,” and not its “external reality” that, according to Esposito, “does not exist as such” (1996a, 62). It is the “immemorial background” or “forgotten origin” of the political, “the inactive heart which political action unconsciously carries within itself as its objective limit or its internal contradiction” (64). Even though Esposito draws the two aspects of the impolitical (i.e., heart and limit) closely together, the emphasis here still falls on the internalization of political exteriority: the impolitical is the heart or immanent transcendence of the political rather than its radical exteriority. Esposito notes in his introduction to the second edition of the Categories of the Impolitical that while his initial formulation of the impolitical focused on the exteriority and the limit, his later elaboration of this notion has tended ever more explicitly to interiorize its exteriority, its being-outside, its limit—just as Bataille called his passion for the “outside” precisely inner experience, thereby alluding to a perfect overlapping of immanence and transcendence. . . . Transcendence is not the opposite of immanence but rather its interruption, or its exposure to its own “outside.” It is the transcendence of immanence, not from immanence. (2015, xxvii–xxviii)

The impolitical is the exposition of the political to its outside, which is superimposed onto the inside as its interruption, or as its “immanent transcendence” (Bosteels 2010, 222). It is the impossible inner experience of being outside that, as anomalous threshold, cannot be located. This understanding of the impolitical is characteristic of Esposito’s later works that develop ideas already found in the last chapter of Categories of the Impolitical dedicated to Bataille. It is interesting that Bataille, according to Esposito, is representative of the “ecstatic register” of impolitical thought, and Weil is representative of its “ascetic register” (Esposito 2015, xxi; 1996b, 22–23). While the ascetic register emphasizes a more radical limit or exteriority of the political, the ecstatic register circumscribes the impolitical in terms of the relative outside.9 Esposito’s later works are preoccupied with the ecstatic dimension. The impolitical as ecstasy (from Greek ek-stasis—displacement) indexes a displacement of “traditional” politics, opening to its essential inessentiality. While displacing the political through its deconstruction and

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devalorization, and by reminding it of its finitude, the impolitical simultaneously illuminates that which remains of the political after this displacement— unrepresentability, emptiness, and silence. And, most importantly, impolitical ecstasy illuminates the quality of the political as sharing.10 The impolitical shares the space of the political, meaning that it both de-limits the political and coincides with it. The impolitical shares in the ecstasy of the political or, rather, in the political as ecstasy. The impolitical is ecstatic, it reaches toward exteriority, transcends the political while still remaining immanent, partaking in the being of the political. Consequently, the quintessence of Esposito’s notion of the impolitical is expressed in his initial assertion that “the impolitical is the political.” The impolitical is not much more than the political itself, at least that is what Esposito seems to emphasize in his later works, as if apologizing for a potential misunderstanding of his earlier works that could suggest otherwise: that there could indeed be something beyond the political in a radical sense.11 CONCLUSION: IMPOLITICAL POLITICS In his early works, Esposito succeeds in distinguishing between “apolitical” foundational politics (politics of the political philosophers focused on representation, depoliticization, and political theology) and “impolitical” post-foundational politics, which distances itself from the tradition founded on the repression of the essential unrepresentability and conflictuality of the political. In this distancing, the impolitical remains, nevertheless, indebted to this tradition of political philosophy as it articulates itself in relation to this tradition. This applies particularly to Esposito’s notion of the impolitical, which is historically situated against the background of the modern politics of depoliticization. However, if we agree with Esposito that the impolitical tradition, or at least its constitutive elements, extend beyond modernity (to Plato, St. Paul, and St. Augustine), then its historical background appears less important. In this regard, the impolitical does not arise simply as a reaction to modern politics, remaining necessarily attached to modernity and its political language (Esposito 2015, xxii–xxvi). The impolitical, according to Esposito, articulates the limit of the political as the “ahistorical element of history” (xxiv); as a result, such a limit is never reducible to its historical-empirical actualization. Nevertheless, I suggest that even though the impolitical, as a principle of new politics, is not historically conditioned, its terminological articulation is historically situated, leaving the impolitical indebted to modernity. This does not necessarily constitute a weakness of the impolitical, but helps us better situate Esposito’s philosophical project. The impolitical does not transcend the modern horizon of thought; instead, it introduces a rupture



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within it, a wound that, paradoxically, is supposed to help us heal our political being-together. For Esposito, the impolitical remains a political project, as it was for Cacciari, akin to many other contemporary attempts at rethinking politics. In the final analysis, it appears that Esposito suggests that there is no way of crossing into something like the real outside of the political, since this kind of outside simply does not exist without an immediate relation to politics. The impolitical is the outside-within of the political; it is a vision, a gaze, a domain of contemplation that enables the constitution of a new politics without foundation. The impolitical is a theoretical engagement with the political; it is a “corrective” political project that aims at returning politics to its origin, which ultimately consists in a plurality of origins, in the originary an-archy of the political. The possibility of the unpolitical remains beyond the scope of Esposito’s philosophy of the impolitical. As such, the impolitical does not oppose the totalizing politicization of human relationality but, on the contrary, aids in the renewal of this process: the impolitical opens the angle of refraction through which reality acquires its full visibility in political terms. The impolitical disappears with the appearance of the political and manifests itself only by cancelling itself in the taking place of the political. The impolitical is never radically beyond politics, it is not unpolitical, insofar as it shares, coincides with, and differentiates the domain of the political, cuts it open without ever leaving it. The impolitical constitutes a new politics without foundation. The limitations of Esposito’s notion of the impolitical raise a crucial question for an unpolitical project, especially since his intervention has become one of the dominant ways in which the outside of politics has been approached in theoretical debates over the past few decades. This is not to suggest that we need to merely discard the impolitical as insufficiently radical. However, the thought of the impolitical remains incomplete insofar as it does not allow for the possibility of this radical outside of politics, which I chose to call the unpolitical, in part to distance my project from Esposito’s. For the impolitical vision to be “complete,” it must account for the fallibility of its vision. One of the sources of such fallibility and a blind spot of the impolitical may be found in Esposito’s abandonment of the initial consideration of the impolitical in terms of exteriority. In this regard, his engagement with the thought of Simone Weil remains unsatisfactory, insofar as Weil was persistently preoccupied with the ability to pass through the doorway of “society,” without endlessly remaining on its threshold. She writes: “This world is uninhabitable. That is why we have to flee to the next. But the door is shut. What a lot of knocking is required before it opens! Really to be able to enter in, and not be left on the doorstep, one has to cease to be a social being” (1956, 2:466). It remains ultimately unclear whether Weil affirms the possibility of stepping

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outside or merely points out the impossibility of doing so, as Esposito seems to suggest. However, this question demands an answer, for as long as we remain undecided, the shadow of political totality will continue to haunt the field of political ontology. NOTES 1. Here and below, I use the term “impolitical” to translate the Italian l’impolitico, even though some English translators of Cacciari’s work prefer to translate it as “the unpolitical.” For example, Alessandro Carrera, the editor, and Massimo Verdicchio, the translator of Cacciari’s collection of essays titled The Unpolitical: On the Radical Critique of Political Reason (2009), note that they prefer to translate l’impolitico as the unpolitical (Carrera 2009, 241n10). Cacciari derives his use of the term from Mann’s unpolitische, which current English edition of his work translates as nonpolitical, yet Carrera and Verdicchio prefer to adopt Mark Lilla’s translation of the term as the unpolitical, which they believe is closer both to the German and the Italian (241). However, we do not find any discussion of the reason why they think the unpolitical would best reflect Cacciari’s argument. It seems that Carrera and Verdicchio merely prefer the term unpolitical to nonpolitical (the latter, as we will see, is indeed contrary to Cacciari’s argument), without considering an alternative to both of them— the impolitical. A similar question of translation arises with Roberto Esposito’s term l’impolitico, which he explicitly borrows from Cacciari. Bruno Bosteels (2010) addresses this problem of translating impolitico as either unpolitical or impolitical by examining the Latin root of the prefix “im” (or “in”). The latter, he notes, has both a negative and a more positive connotation (opposed to “un” that, supposedly, has only a negative one): negative “as in the existing English term ‘impolitic,’ attested to for many centuries and meaning roughly what we would call ‘politically incorrect’ today,” and positive “as in ‘immanence,’ from the Latin for ‘staying or standing inside,’ ‘remaining within’ ” (222). The translation of impolitico as impolitical, rather than unpolitical, I believe, better reflects the topology of the outside-within that characterizes Cacciari’s as well as Esposito’s l’impolitico. For the sake of consistency, I will translate the German unpolitische as “impolitical,” when referencing Cacciari’s essay, and will use “nonpolitical,” when referencing the existing English translation of Mann’s Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen. 2. Here and below, the translations of this work are my own. 3. In his later works, there occurs, as Esposito put it, a certain displacement of the semantic center of gravity from the impolitical toward community and biopolitics. See, for instance, his “trilogy” Communitas ([1998] 2010), Immunitas ([2002] 2011), and Bios ([2004] 2008), as well as Third Person ([2007] 2012). Esposito’s later works were among the first to be translated into English, while his early work Categories of the Impolitical (first published in Italian in 1988) appeared in English only in 2015. 4. Here and below, the translations of this work are my own. 5. Here and below, the translations of this work are my own.



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6. Esposito does not fail to acknowledge the similarities between his notion of the impolitical and Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Nancy’s “retreat of the political” (cf. Esposito 1996a, 59). In his later works, he also points out a similarity between his and Nancy’s views of community as sharing (cf. Esposito 2015, xxviii). 7. Here and below, the translations from this work are my own. 8. The idea of sharing becomes very important for Esposito’s later thought of communitas, where munus is understood as “nothing in common,” as the “spacing” established by the “operative impossibility of community” that, nevertheless, is at the heart of community. In Communitas, Esposito suggests that it is necessary to think community as always “implying the impolitical,” meaning that one has to accept the impossibility of the historical representation of the political: “The community is and needs to remain constitutively impolitical in the sense that we can correspond to our being in common only to the degree in which we keep it away from every demand for historical-empirical actualization” (2010, 97). 9. The possibility of the more radical “outside” of the political is articulated in the ascetic register of the impolitical, which Esposito does not develop in his later works. He associates the ascetic aspect of the impolitical represented by Weil with “passive power”: a way of relating to the force of this world, the “non-agent action” that is a kind of “shrinkage, contraction, reduction of the person, in favor of the impersonal” (Esposito 1996b, 22). While the person is the usual agent of political action, the impersonal is the non-agent of “passive politics” that consists in the “passive attitude of waiting or attention,” in the power of “passion, patience, forbearance” (22). This attitude is effectively “abandonment” (an action not motivated by outcomes, reminiscent of Galassenheit) and is opposed to renunciation (abstinence from action motivated by desire) which, according to Esposito’s logic, would amount to an antipolitical rather than an impolitical attitude. 10. Bataille’s notion of partage (sharing) has been an inspiration for both Esposito’s and Nancy’s philosophy of community. On the relationship between the impolitical, community, and ecstasy, see, for example, Esposito (2010, 86–111). 11. Bruno Bosteels (2010, 212) similarly attests to this difference between Esposito’s earlier and later works, suggesting that the move toward the impolitical as the relative outside of politics was seemingly preceded by an attempt to explore the possibility of going beyond politics in a more radical sense.

Chapter 5

Giorgio Agamben: Bare Life and Form-of-Life

Giorgio Agamben presents a vision of the impolitical that, contrary to Cacciari’s and Esposito’s approach, is primarily negative. For him, the impolitical is bare life—the originary problematic aspect of Western (bio) politics that, in order to mitigate its destructive power, needs to be addressed through politicization. However, despite the primarily negative rendering of the impolitical by Agamben, I argue that, paradoxically, we get a glimpse of something like positive bare life in his notion of “form-of-life” (or “happy life”) that is supposed to form the basis of “coming politics.” In his search for a new form of politics, like many other thinkers, Agamben redeems bare life through its politicization in terms of form-of-life; nevertheless, it is possible to open this notion to an unpolitical interpretation and explore the possibility of life beyond politics that would be irreducible to a negative condition of excepted bare life. Agamben famously finds the inspiration for his philosophical project in Foucault’s investigation of biopolitics.1 But even as he pays homage to Foucault in his Homo Sacer (1998), it is difficult to see Agamben’s work as a direct engagement with Foucault. Mika Ojakangas (2005) describes this situation as an “impossible dialogue on bio-power,” implying that Agamben’s view of biopolitics, except for the term itself, has little in common with Foucault’s. If for the latter biopolitics was a modern phenomenon, the result of a transformation of the previous mode of power relations (marked by sovereignty, with its right over life and death), for Agamben biopower emerges with the inception of Western politics. As he puts it, “before impetuously coming to light in our century, the river of biopolitics . . . runs its course in a hidden but continuous fashion” (1998, 121). Foucault’s work is dedicated, according to Agamben, to the study of “growing inclusion of man’s natural life in the mechanisms and calculations of power” (119), implying that 87

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Foucault’s biopolitical inquiries were limited to the study of modernity, which did not invent biopolitics but simply brought it to light by explicitly recognizing life as the object of politics. Furthermore, Agamben’s view of biopolitics, contrary to Foucault, hinges on the notion of “bare life.” He proposes that Western (bio)politics was founded on the originary exception of bare or naked life from the polis. Bare life is life exposed to an unconditional threat of death (1998, 88, 90), and, as a result, the biopolitical regime is essentially negative as it contains death as its animating principle. Biopolitics, in its essence, is thanatopolitics. Meanwhile, Foucault’s conception of biopolitics has a more positive character because its main principle is not the threat of death, as it used to be in the case of sovereign power (and of which Agamben gives an accurate account), but “the care of ‘all living’ ” (Ojakangas 2005, 6). “Make live and let die” is the operating principle of biopower. As Ojakangas explains, for Foucault, “In order to function properly, bio-power cannot reduce life to the level of bare life, because bare life is life that can only be taken away or allowed to persist. . . . Bio-power needs a notion of life that corresponds to its aims [which are] . . . to ‘multiply life,’ to produce ‘extra-life’ ” (14). As a result, Foucault’s biopolitics seems to already presuppose, as its ground, a more positive notion of life, for which Agamben is only searching with his “form-of-life.” Consequently, Agamben’s project might have been born out of a misreading of Foucault’s account of biopower. Due to these considerations, in this chapter, I will focus solely on Agamben’s original account of biopolitics and the role that the impolitical plays in it, and for the most part avoid its comparison with Foucault’s account. THE IMPOLITICAL AS BARE LIFE The impolitical (impolitico), variously translated in English as “unpolitical,” “nonpolitical” or “impolitical,” is not an immediately visible notion in Agamben’s work; however, upon closer examination, it appears to be intimately connected with the pivotal concept of his political philosophy—“bare life” (nuda vita). In fact, for Agamben the impolitical is bare life. When introducing this notion, he follows Schmitt, who asserts that “the political is the total, and . . . any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision” (Schmitt 2005, 2). Agamben slightly adjusts the content of this statement, thus reorienting its central application, by adding a clarification that this unpolitical refers to bare life. Building on a similar passage from Schmitt’s Staat, Bewegung, Volk, Agamben writes, “ ‘It is general knowledge among the contemporary German political generation that precisely the decision concerning whether a fact or a kind of thing is apolitical [apolitico] is



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a specifically political decision’ (ibid., p. 17). Politics is now literally the decision concerning the impolitical [dell’impolitico] (that is, concerning bare life)” (1998, 173; emphasis added; translation modified). Agamben translates Schmitt’s proposition about the impolitical in terms of life, and not just any life, but naked life that emerges as an exception instituted by the sovereign decision. This sovereign connection is crucial, because it clarifies the fact that the origin of naked life is not natural: it is not “simple natural life, but life exposed to death” that constitutes “the originary political element” (88). Even as this life is excepted from the polis, it lies at its origin, and so it is included in the political through its exclusion. As a result, the impolitical bare life belongs to the domain of the relative outside, which is merely one step removed from ultimate politicization. Agamben employs the notion of the impolitical on a number of other occasions (cf. 1998, 131; 2004, 76, 77). For instance, he writes, “The political . . . is drawn out of the living being through the exclusion—as impolitical—of a part of its vital activity” (2007, 6; translation modified). The impolitical clearly appears here as only a part of the vital activity of a living being. What is this part? Agamben famously begins his investigation into the history of Western biopolitics by suggesting that ancient Greeks did not have a unitary concept of life, as in modern English, for example, but differentiated between two kinds of life: zoē and bios, which are “the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods)” and “the form or way of living proper to an individual or group” (1998, 1), respectively. In other words, the Greek notion of life was apparently based on a clear distinction between the mere fact of living (zoē), sometimes also referred to as nutritive or vegetative life devoid of logos (Agamben 1999, 231), and qualitative life proper to (some) human beings—bios, life that takes place in the polis for the sake of a “good life.” Corresponding to this linguistic distinction, the ancient Greeks maintained a separation of spaces dedicated to these different kinds of living: while oikos or the domain of the household was the space of zoē, devoted solely to the maintenance and reproduction of natural life, the polis was the space where logos was exercised for the sake of the good life. Following his reading of Aristotle, Agamben suggests that the distinction between zoē and bios, even though it has not been preserved in contemporary European languages, does not totally disappear but, on the contrary, forms the foundation of Western politics as its ontological presupposition. As he puts it, “in contrasting the ‘beautiful day’ (euemeria) of simple life [zoē] with the ‘great difficulty’ of political bios. . . . Aristotle may well have given the most beautiful formulation to the aporia that lies at the foundation of Western politics” (1998, 11). This irresolvable contradiction that constitutes the transhistorical ontology of Western politics is, importantly, not “pure” zoē, but bare life—life that is “included in politics in the form of exception, that is, . . .

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included solely through an exclusion” (11). As exception, bare life is not a-, non-, or pre- but im-political because it is not simply opposed to politics, like zoē might be opposed to bios, and it does not preexist politics, as the state of nature might precede the commonwealth, but rather it is co-originary with politics. Politics is constituted, according to Agamben, through an originary split between inside and outside, between the political and the impolitical; it emerges in the delimitation of its constitutive outside and in defining its limit. Due to the dialectic of the limit, which not only separates but also unites, the outside of political space always faces the inside. More than that, it is domesticated or integrated by the inside through the attribution to it of the status of the outside. “Exteriority [impolitical life],” Agamben writes, “is truly the innermost centre of the political system, and the political system lives off it in the same way that the rule, according to Schmitt, lives off the exception” (36). Consequently, this exteriority is never truly absolute; it is merely a relative outside epitomized by the figure of homo sacer that indexes the zone of indistinction between the political inside and the outside. Agamben resolves the problem that this indistinction poses by reworking the very limit between these two domains: he “collapses” one into the other, not by normalizing the exception or turning it into the rule, but by rethinking the notion of life in terms of “form-of-life”—life that is inseparable from its form. This new notion of life or form-of-life is “integral” (Prozorov 2009, 343), meaning that it precludes the possibility of distinguishing life from itself, of separating living (zoē) from its form (bios), as was the case with bare life. This does not suggest, however, a return to some prior state of innocence of zoē or a state of nature, to a state uncontaminated by sovereign politics, since, as Agamben reminds us, the “purity” of zoē as truly nonpolitical life is unavailable. All that we know of this nonpolitical life is bare life, which is always already a political product. As William Rasch puts it, “the political . . . does not replace nature; it creates it” (2007, 101). This “nature” that represents an exteriority of politics is “not simply natural reproductive life, the zoē of the Greeks, nor bios, a qualified form of life. It is, rather, the bare life of homo sacer . . . , a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast, nature and culture” (Agamben 1998, 109).2 The outside of Western politics is thus a zone of indistinction, the outside-within, the exception; it has the topology of a Mobius strip, where what is presupposed as external reappears as the inside (37). Similarly to Cacciari and Esposito, Agamben’s impolitical signifies a threshold, a space outside of all spaces, which is “the always present and always operative presupposition of sovereignty [and politics]” (1998, 106). The political does not oppose or replace the impolitical, but actually creates it. Impolitical life, for Agamben, is not independent of politics; on the contrary, it is a political product: it is the threshold which politics invents and



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continuously reinvents, and through which it declares its own nonidentity with itself. Agamben refers to Blanchot in this respect suggesting that “confronted with an excess, the system interiorizes what exceeds it through an interdiction and in this way ‘designates itself as exterior to itself’ ” (18). In a nutshell, the impolitical has a negative connotation for Agamben and designates life resulting from an abandonment based on the sovereign decision and a withdrawal from the political. This bare life is “a destroyed or degraded bios from which all positive determinations have been subtracted” (Prozorov 2009, 341). Sovereignty gets a hold of life not by conquering it but by withdrawing from it, applying its law to life in the process of abandoning it. The impolitical is not simply left outside of the political but is rather forced outside or banned by the sovereign from entering, and ultimately from being subject to either sacred or profane law. As Agamben sums up, “the rule applies to the exception in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it. The state of exception is thus not the chaos that precedes order but rather the situation that results from its suspension. In this sense, the exception is truly, according to its etymological root, taken outside (ex-capere), and not simply excluded” (1998, 18). To use the Schmittian terminology, the exception that founds Western politics is not “real” or “absolute” but “fictitious”: the juridical-political order is structured around the inclusion of what is simultaneously taken outside, the inclusion of what has been abandoned. The figure of homo sacer represents this structure since he does not simply exist in the anomic state of nature, where the natural law of survival rules, exposing him, along with everyone else, to the perpetual threat of death. This state of nature is a political construct and, as such, it does not preexist politics but emerges as its consequence. Similarly, then, the condition of homo sacer is not indicative of a prepolitical state of chaos but appears as a result of exception from the political order, of stripping bios down to naked life. However, this sovereign abandonment of life does not conclusively sever its link with politics: bare life is never really outside or absolutely excepted but is placed within the political order as its structurally necessary element. Agamben explicitly derives this conclusion from Schmitt that, again, positions him at a distance from Cacciari and Esposito. In this regard, first, for Agamben, the impolitical exception appears as a structurally necessary, rather than contingent or disruptive, element of the political and, second, the absolute exteriority of politics is reduced to the relative status of the sovereign exception that acquires primarily negative connotations. In the end, Agamben’s notion of the impolitical is attached solely to bare life, as an excepted part of vital activity, and receives no redemption as such in the coming politics. Agamben’s main task consists in rethinking politics, while the impolitical serves merely as the negative background against which

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this urgent task is posited. While, for Agamben, the state of exception functions as the ahistorical negative foundation of Western politics, the reduction of political exteriority to bare life, I argue, functions as the negative foundation of his own messianic political project, insofar as he aims to redeem bare life by politicizing it in terms of “form-of-life,” without leaving any room for a positive rethinking of its bareness as such. COMING POLITICS AND FORM-OF-LIFE Agamben suggests that the modern biopolitical regime posits the acute necessity of rethinking politics in a way that would prevent the multiplication and reproduction of bare life as the sole ground of sovereignty.3 He writes: One of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics (which will continue to increase in our century) is its constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside. Once it crosses over the walls of the oikos and penetrates more and more deeply into the city, the foundation of sovereignty—impolitical life [l’impolitica vita naturale]—is immediately transformed into a line that must be constantly redrawn. (1998, 131; translation modified).

The task of modern biopolitics lies in maintaining and redrawing its own foundation: the nonpolitical zoē that, contrary to its originary confinement in the household, has penetrated (as Arendt and Foucault have also suggested) the core of the political, and now, as bare life, has become the sole foundation and object of politics. As a result, following Walter Benjamin, Agamben argues that while in earlier history the exception (as well as bare life of homo sacer) emerged only at specific times during states of emergency and was confined to them, in the twentieth century the exception has become the rule and bare life now coincides with the biological life of all political subjects, that is, citizens. Today, he notoriously proclaims, “we are all virtually homines sacri” (115). Another reason for Agamben’s interest in rethinking politics, similarly to Schmitt and many other contemporary thinkers, is a sense that the political has become threatened or taken over by the nonpolitical concerns, that is, has become apolitical or depoliticized. He argues that for modern humanity that, through various totalitarianisms, has reached its historical telos, “there is nothing left but the depoliticization of human societies by means of the unconditioned unfolding of the oikonomia, or the taking on of biological life itself as the supreme political (or rather impolitical) task. . . . Posthistorical humanity seems to take on its own physiology as its last, impolitical mandate” (2004, 76, 77; emphasis added). In the modern biopolitical regime,



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the political has been completely reduced to the impolitical: life has been reduced to bare life that is defined through the struggle with death and mere survival rather than by happiness, which is the “proper” goal of political existence. It is this turn from death to happiness that defines Agamben’s search for a new politics and a new form of community. In this pursuit, he proposes to begin not by rejecting the present condition but by working through it, by taking it to its limit. Through his reading of Walter Benjamin, Agamben attempts to turn the “fictitious” exception that has defined modern politics into a “real” exception, which Benjamin associated with “divine violence” (Agamben 1998, 63–65). In this way, the abandonment of bare life is “appropriated” rather than negated (cf. Prozorov 2009), which essentially addresses the problem of indistinction of the political inside and the outside. A solution is found in the assertion of the as such of the outside, taking it beyond the mere status of exception, tackling the possibility of the unpolitical as such, beyond mere exception. However, even as Agamben attempts to take the notion of politics beyond its determination by sovereign biopolitical exception, he stops one step short in rethinking the impolitical or bare life in unpolitical terms. As a result, I suggest that, by further developing what Agamben calls political life or “form-of-life,” we get a glimpse of bare life as such, despite Agamben’s intention to do the opposite. Against the background of his initial critique of sovereignty, Agamben’s project consists in the search for the “coming” or “post-sovereign” politics, “the guiding concept and the unitary center” of which would be “formof-life” and no longer the excepted bare life (1996, 155). He presents the possibility of such “non-Statist politics” in the emancipation of life from its division into worthy and unworthy forms of living, into political and bare life, and offering, instead, a new notion of “political life”—“a life directed toward the idea of happiness and cohesive with a form-of-life . . . a life for which living itself [is] at stake in its own living . . . a life of power (potenza)” (153). This new politics is no longer a mere means to survival (as, for example, seen in the social contract theories), but emerges as a submission to essential human potential and happiness. Every form of human living “always retains the character of a possibility; that is, it always puts at stake living itself. That is why human beings—as beings of power who can do or not do . . . are the only beings for whom happiness is always at stake in their living, the only beings whose lives are irremediably and painfully assigned to happiness” (Agamben 1996, 151; emphasis added). The natural sweetness of zoē or the simple “beautiful day” of life, to which Aristotle opposed life in the polis, becomes the guiding principle of the coming politics, since human happiness, Agamben affirms, no longer requires the submission to a historical telos or a good life, which used

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to be achieved only through a thorough purification of bios from zoē. The so-called goodness of life lies in the living itself; bare life “as such” (not as an exception but, paradoxically, as form-of-life) is the political life of happiness. Form-of-life is the core of new politics and new politics is at the heart of form-of-life. What is redeemed in the impolitical bare life, then, is its political nature: insofar as in the form-of-life it is impossible to isolate something like naked life, that is, to depoliticize it, this constitutes form-of-life as “political life” par excellence (151). Human beings are beings of power (potenza) that are assigned to happiness, and a completely new politics corresponds to such an assignment: it is “a politics contained in the sheer experience of existence (bios as zoē) that does not strive to attain any identity or realize a vocation” (Prozorov 2009, 346). It is a politics of “means without end” (Agamben 2000). This conclusion allows Agamben to offer a new vision of the origin of politics and its necessity. Within the Western political paradigm, Agamben argues, “there is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion” (1998, 8). Roland Barthes, in his lectures on The Neutral, defines a “paradigm” as “the opposition of two virtual terms from which, in speaking, I actualize one to produce meaning” (2005, 7). As in Saussurean linguistics, meaning arises from the opposition of terms and not their intrinsic values. Paradigm, in Agamben’s sense, indexes the originary relation between bios and zoē that forms the basis of Western politics and, more generally, of meaning, insofar as logos is indissociable from bios politikos. Barthes, in his discussion of the paradigm, points to “the desire for the Neutral”—the desire to go beyond the opposition of a paradigm. It is not a desire for “grayness,” “neutrality,” or indifference” but a “burning activity” that outplays the paradigm and so brings “rest” (7). Importantly, this overcoming of the struggle of opposing forces “does not occur through suspension, abstention, abolition of the paradigm, but through invention of a third term: complex term and not zero, neutral term” (55; emphasis added). “The Neutral,” for Barthes, is such a “third term,” “tertium,” a structural position that outplays the paradigm. For Agamben as well, the task consists in the creation of a tertium, of a new notion of life—form-of-life—that outplays the traditional paradigm of Western politics that relies on the opposition and interdependence of bare life and political form of existence. Western politics has been founded on the separation of life from itself, on the distinction between various kinds or forms of life, where the attainment of the good life has acquired the status of telos. Contrary to this “paradigm,” Agamben proposes that politics must be rethought as “that which corresponds to the essential inoperability [inoperosità] of humankind. . . . There is politics



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because human beings are argōs-beings that cannot be defined be any proper operation—that is, beings of pure potentiality that no identity or vocation can possibly exhaust” (2000, 141; emphasis added). Agamben borrows the notion of “argos” from Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle wonders if there is such thing as an ergon—work proper to man—or whether “man as such might perhaps be essentially argos, that is, without work, workless” (141). Agamben suggests that man indeed is workless, a being of pure potentiality that is not exhausted by any identity or work and is not limited by proper function and sphere of action (as, for example, “a carpenter and a shoemaker have their own proper function and spheres of action”). It is this essential worklessness of humankind that allows its irremediable and painful assignment to happiness (142). Human beings are essentially assigned to happiness, which cannot be achieved through any work, insofar as work presupposes an end product, a certain telos and, often enough, a rigid definition of happiness. Agamben writes: The issue of the coming politics is the way in which this argia, this essential potentiality and inoperability, might be undertaken without becoming a historical task, or, in other words, the way in which politics might be nothing other than the exposition of humankind’s absence of work as well as the exposition of humankind’s creative semi-indifference to any task, and might only in this sense remain integrally assigned to happiness. (141–42)4

This view of politics and its community, as an exposition of the essential worklessness or inessentiality of humanity, is reminiscent of Nancy and Esposito, who similarly rethink a possibility of community that would be irreducible to a unitary principle or identity and rather hinges on its impossibility. Agamben’s rethinking of politics is also somewhat similar to Karl Marx’s “imagination” of the communist society that, in his projection, would not only abolish exploitation and wage labor (including its necessary attachment to a profession or a proper function) but also liberate human desire and creativity that always remain semi-indifferent to any particular task. Only when “nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity,” he famously writes, it becomes possible for me to do as I wish: “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic” (Marx and Engels 2004, 53). To use Agamben’s terms, in the communist society one is essentially “workless.” Just like for Marx, Agamben’s subject of the new politics—“the coming being,” a “whatever (qualunque) being”—is a singularity that is “reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims)—and it

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is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself” (1993, 1). A whatever being can hunt but is not a hunter, can critique but is not a critic, that is, his or her singularity is “expropriated of all identity, so as to appropriate belonging itself” (11). This belonging, when exposed as such, is “whatever you want” (2), referring to “an original relation to desire” of whatever being (1), which is reminiscent of the Marxian project of liberation of desire in communist society. The notable difference between Marx and Agamben here is that whatever being, according to Agamben, is not able to form a societas, while Marx speaks of a communist society. Agamben suggests that whatever singularities form a community without affirming an identity, and that they “co-belong without any representable condition of belonging” (86). This community is “the principal enemy of the State” (87), since the latter can recognize any claim for identity but cannot come to terms with an absence of such a claim. Consequently, Agamben argues that “whatever,” insofar as it refers to the expropriation of all identity and thus never belongs to a set of qualities or to a societas, is “a pure exteriority, a pure exposure . . . the event of an outside” (67). This outside, however, is not another space beyond a determined space, but a passage or a threshold—the ek-static “experience of being-within an outside” (68). What is distinct about Agamben’s view of exteriority as threshold here is that it appears to exist as such, in a sense that there is no fixed inside or outside that the limit mediates, and the passage itself, as “whatever” life, is all there is. This being-within an outside is not an outside-within or an expropriated exteriority but is more akin to the outside which, as Quentin Meillassoux puts it, “thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory” (2008, 7). It is in this “event of an outside,” I suggest, that Agamben approaches the idea of bare life as such, even as he continues to address it in terms of political form-of-life. The life of “whatever being” is “whatever life” or “form-of-life”: life not assigned to work or common identity but only to happiness. One cannot work to attain this happy life, including by the means of politics and can only experience or live it as such in the very act of living it as politics. Consequently, the grounding concept of the coming politics, for Agamben, is “form-oflife” or “happy life” of whatever being, life that, contrary to bare life, is not separate or distinct from its form—the form that only comes from life itself. Agamben’s use of hyphen in the term form-of-life is deliberate (and inspired by Heidegger), and not to be confused with concrete forms of life, the term which Agamben also uses on occasion. The use of the hyphen points out a specific type of relationship between life and its form: “the hyphen is . . . the most dialectical of punctuation marks, since it unites only to the degree that it distinguishes and distinguishes only to the degree that it unites” (Agamben 1999, 220). As a result, form-of-life is an expression of a dialectical unity of



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what has been long separated in the Western tradition—of bare life and its political form. Form-of-life is a name of a “being that is only its own bare existence” and of “life that, being its own form, remains inseparable from it” (Agamben 1998, 188). This integral life is still bare life but no longer in the sense of excepted, abandoned, or degraded form of bios, but rather in the sense of life that affirms itself as such, that affirms in every being its manner or form of being, its inoperativity and potentiality (cf. Prozorov 2009, 347). Thus, this form-of-life, I argue, is not strictly political, as per Agamben’s suggestion, but also necessarily unpolitical. The unpolitical is no longer impolitical, an outside-within of the political, because the distinction between inside and outside is renounced in the process where politics and its exteriority become “absolutely immanent” to each other, making it possible to affirm bare life as such. In The Coming Community (1993) Agamben elaborates on the notion “as such” (tale quale), which is related to the notion of “whatever” (qualunque). Both terms touch upon “an absolute such-quality that does not refer back to any presupposition” but only indicates “being-such, . . . manner of being.” The “suchness” does not refer to any quality but is exposed in itself in the same way as I, as a singularity, am never “this or that, but always such, thus” (96). Consequently, Agamben concludes, “the category of suchness is . . . the fundamental category that remains unthought in every quality” (98). What would it mean, then, to speak of the unpolitical as such or, rather, of bare life as such as the real or absolute limit of Agamben’s coming politics? First, it would no longer be the negative foundation of sovereign politics but would be exposed in itself, without referring to any other quality, entity, or sphere. The unpolitical would be neither an interruption of the political (its wound, crack, lack, or void) nor a dynamic principle of politics, but rather the third term that dissolves any political paradigm. This unpolitical, bare life as such, insofar as there is actually nothing “naked” in it, since it cannot be distinguished from the form that “clothes” it, is then nothing less than form-of-life or, rather, life-as-such: an immediate sweetness that remains stubbornly unthought within old and new politics alike. There is a significant difference between Agamben’s insistence that formof-life is necessarily political life—the core of the coming politics—and the alternative interpretation of this life as unpolitical—the unthought of politics that persists and is exposed only as such. The latter is the radical outside of politics that can be thought only as unthought. Perhaps, as in the case of the bare life of sovereignty (as well as the pure Being of metaphysics), unpolitical life-as-such is “an unthinkable limit” that reason cannot think except “in stupor and in astonishment” (Agamben 1998, 182). While Agamben is determined to redeem politics through a new, integral notion of life—form-of-life or political life—my concern is rather with the unpolitical that, for Agamben,

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remains lost in the net of sovereign politics, since in the coming politics there will be only happy life lived as politics. What emerges at the limit of Agamben’s project, then, is the notion of the unpolitical form-of-life, the unthought of a new politics that requires further examination. POLITICS, THOUGHT, LIFE The notion of “thought” occupies a prominent place in Agamben’s project, most importantly, because of its intimate relationship with the idea of form-oflife. Similar to the experience of life-as-such, thought, in its “purity,” belongs to the kind of experience that cannot be easily pinpointed, because “to think does not mean merely to be affected by this or that thing, by this or that content of enacted thought, but rather at once to be affected by one’s own receptiveness and experience in each and every thing that is thought a pure power of thinking” (Agamben 1996, 153). The pure power of thinking refers to the potential (potenza) also indexed by form-of-life: thought cannot be reduced to an object or a thing just as life cannot be exhausted in some identity or work. The notion of form-of-life affirms the inseparability of life and its form in the same way as thought, in its potentiality, is indistinguishable from itself and is thus “able to think itself” (153), to coincide with itself as life coincides with its form. The object of thought is “the potential character of life and human intelligence” (153). As a result, Agamben calls thought “an experience, an experimentum” and “the nexus that constitutes the forms of life in an inseparable context as form-of-life” (153). Thought constitutes form-of-life; it is not separate from and more valuable than mere living, as, for instance, in ancient Greece bios theōrētikos, the domain of contemplation, was prioritized over the concerns of both oikos and bios politikos. For Agamben, not only do the latter two coincide with each other, but thought itself is inseparable from them. Human life, as form-of-life, is completely indivisible. Thought constitutes form-of-life; it is no longer a mere instrument, a means toward the end, for example, happy life, as has been the case for traditional philosophy that took charge of politics by trying to design its best model. To the extent that Agamben’s coming politics is politics without an end and of pure means, thought is form-of-life and form-of-life is thought. He writes: “Thought is form-of-life, life that cannot be segregated from its form; and anywhere the intimacy of this inseparable life appears, in the materiality of corporeal processes and habitual ways of life no less than in theory, there and only there is there thought. And it is this thought, this form-of-life . . . that must become the guiding concept and the unitary center of the coming politics” (155). By placing thought at the center of politics, Agamben emphasizes the difference between classical philosophy, which had made bios theoretikos “a



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separate and solitary activity (‘exile of the alone to the alone’),” and modern political philosophy that begins with “the thought of the one and only possible intellect common to all human beings, and, crucially, with Dante’s affirmation—in De Monarchia—of the inherence of a multitude to the very power of thought” (1996, 155). Agamben adheres to this modern affirmation of human intellectual potential, referring to it as “the diffuse intellectuality” (or the Marxian notion of a “general intellect”), that constitutes “the experience of thought . . . [as] always the experience of a common power” (154, 155). Like Nancy, Agamben argues that when I think, that is, exercise the power of thought, I always belong to the multiple, I am “with,” I am involved in the multiplicity of force relations. “After all,” Agamben writes, “if there existed one and only one being, it would be absolutely impotent. . . . Where I have power, we are always already many (just like when, if there is a language, that is, a power of speech, there cannot be then one and only one being who speaks it)” (154; emphasis added). As a result, Agamben suggests that community and power are identical, meaning that a communitarian principle inheres in any power due to “the necessarily potential character of any community” (154). Insofar as human beings are never fully enacted, this enables their communication with others that consists in communication not of something in common (an identity) but “of communicability itself” (154). Due to the always already multiple character of thought and power, as well as the origin of communication in potentiality and not in identity, due to the potential character of community as such, Agamben views this “coming community,” as Prozorov puts it, as “genuinely universal and non-exclusive” (2009, 347). However, insofar as Agamben assigns the power of thought and its potentiality to “human life” (1996, 151), the question of the universality of such a “human community” and life remains open.5 If thought and form-of-life form the “foundation” of a new politics, then how is it possible to think the unpolitical? Would not that amount precisely to a renewed attempt at separating life from itself? I am convinced this is not the case. Insofar as form-of-life is power and, according to Agamben, “the supreme power” is “only a power that is capable of both power and impotence [adynamia or ‘the potentiality to not-be’ (dynamis me einai)]” (1993, 35, 36), the unpolitical becomes an exploration of this potential to not-be of the form-of-life: an exploration of the unthought of the political life as thought. While form-of-life is identical to thought, the unpolitical-as-such is its unthought that can be thought only as such, as unthought. The multitude, the supreme “power of thought as such,” of “pure potentiality,” is thus manifest in the unpolitical that remains a “foreign territory” for political thought. Life-as-such is among the few notions that we can explore today with a feeling of being “altogether elsewhere,” regardless of the accumulation of scientific knowledge about something that is called “life,” insofar as we can

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imagine and even, perhaps, experience life prior to and after thought, that is uncorrelated with it. In this respect, I agree with Agamben’s contention that the concept of life is the point of departure and the subject of “the coming philosophy” (cf. 1999, 220, 238). Specifically, Agamben refers to the various elaborations of the concept of something like integral life in, for instance, the works of Foucault and Deleuze, as well as his own philosophical project, of course. Esposito’s notion of “the impersonal life” (2012) and Michel Henry’s notion of “transcendental life,” I suggest, are also significant examples of such an elaboration. While Esposito’s notion of impersonal life can be closely compared with Agamben’s concept of form-of-life, Henry’s philosophy, which I engage with in chapter 7, offers an opportunity to further explore the notions of the unpolitical-as-such and positive bare life by taking them beyond thought, being, and, most importantly, beyond biopolitics. NOTES 1. Hannah Arendt’s ideas, especially her discussion of naked humanity in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), are also among the noted origins of Agamben’s notions of biopolitics and bare life. 2. Catherine Mills notes that there are altogether “four categories of ‘life’ operating in Agamben’s Homo Sacer: zoē or biological life, bios or political life, ‘bare life’ (sometimes rendered as ‘naked life,’ from the Italian term ‘nuda vita’), and a new ‘form-of-life’ ” (2005, 219). 3. In this respect, the pressure and the necessity of rethinking modern politics is vividly expressed in the phenomenon of the camp that encompasses and manifests the horrors of the “biopolitical paradigm” or “ ‘nomos’ of the modern” (see Agamben 1998, 119–80). 4. Another aspect of life defined by happiness, for Agamben (2004, 89–92), is its transcendence of the distinction between man and animal. As Catherine Mills explains, “This [happy] life is not simply redeemed or reconciled in the sense of simply re-integrating natural and non-natural life through, for instance, reducing one to the other. Instead, it is ‘outside of being’—that is, external to the Heideggerian opposition of animal and man on the basis of the openness to being, and instead characterised by beatitude or happiness” (Mills in Murray and Whyte 2011, 125–26). 5. Agamben addresses the problem of the relationship between the human and the animal, for instance, in The Open (2004).

Part II

MAPPING THE UNPOLITICAL

No matter how wide you stretch it, the political horizon might be too small to encompass the whole Earth. . . . Can we enlarge our definition of politics to the point where it accepts its own suspension? But who can really be that open-minded? —Bruno Latour

Chapter 6

The Great Outdoors of Politics: Quentin Meillassoux on Ancestrality, Justice, and Extinction

It has been the central argument of the preceding chapters that contemporary political philosophy does not offer a satisfactory positive account of the radical outside of politics. While a number of post-foundational thinkers, in one way or another, bring into discussion the question of the exteriority of politics, they in the end fail to address it unpolitically. For example, as seen in the analysis of Schmitt, Foucault, and Nancy, the notion of the political, which comes to replace the traditional notion of politics-as-state, exhibits a new totalizing tendency and ultimately leads to the neglect of the question of radical political exteriority. Even as Cacciari and Esposito attempt to address this question through their category of the impolitical, their interventions remain lacking insofar as the impolitical continues to be attached to the political as a function of its internal transformation and critique. We encounter another attempt to think the outside of politics in Agamben’s notion of bare life that is manifest in the figure of homo sacer and that indexes the deprived condition of living beyond the limits of the polis. Importantly, the notion of bare life, despite its mostly negative assessment by Agamben, points out a productive direction for further work on the unpolitical insofar as in this notion the outside of politics is no longer seen as merely a question of how politics is thought, but is located at the level of lived experience of homo sacer. Noting the increasing commonality of the experience of homo sacer in the contemporary world, Agamben sets out to redeem it by re-conceptualizing bare life in terms of the integral and happy form-of-life, that is, by ultimately re-politicizing it. Taking inspiration as well as distance from these more familiar ways of addressing the outside of politics in contemporary theory, represented primarily by Esposito and Agamben, I would like to turn to a relatively new development in continental philosophy—speculative realism—which, arguably, 103

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offers a unique way of rethinking political exteriority in radical terms. Speculative realism over the past few decades has acquired recognition, if not fame, in academic discussions in Europe and North America, resulting in a number of publications that examine its major premises, contributions and applications.1 In political theory, the influence of this philosophical trend has primarily surfaced under the names of “new materialism” and “object-oriented ontology,” and has been also incorporated in the field of “post-humanist” studies (see, for example, Bennett 2010; Bogost 2012; Coole and Frost 2010; Grosz 2011; Grusin 2015; Johnson 2013; Latour 2004). The shared premise of these varied approaches, which implicitly address the anthropocentric limitations of the Schmittian political discussed in the first chapter, consists in an affirmation of the political agency of non-human beings and things, which have been traditionally excluded from the considerations of political philosophers. Importantly, this new materialist approach, generally speaking, accomplishes two distinct but intimately connected tasks: first, it acknowledges the non-political reality and agency of “things” that exceed the human-centered world and, simultaneously, it draws this non-political real back into the fold of politics by suggesting that the non-human agency of “things” does in fact have political nature and thus needs to be accounted for in political terms. From this perspective, humans, animals, things, natural phenomena, etc. are recognized as equally active participants in political processes that affect the distribution and management of spaces, interactions, and relations, constituting a post- or even non-human politics. What we witness here, as “nature” and “things” become further politicized, is the familiar disappearance of the “great outdoors” of politics. We are not allowed to think the reality that extends beyond humanity in unpolitical terms, since even non-thinking nonliving non-humans engage in relationships that may be described as political. Politics, in this way, has been liberated from being the prerogative of the human species and become truly capable of welcoming every thing in its totalizing embrace. In light of new materialist developments in political thought, this chapter turns to the philosophy of Quentin Meillassoux, one of the noted representatives of speculative realism, in order to recuperate the “great outdoors” of politics.2 I suggest that Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism resists politicization insofar as it affirms a reality that exists independently of human thought and the human world. Specifically, I argue that the embrace of “a world without correlation”—the hallmark of speculative realism—presents a challenge to political theory because it demands recognition of the real limits of politics. This challenge may be outlined as follows: there was, and may still come, a time without humans, and this temporality indicates the real limit to human thought and any resulting activity, including politics. This world without humanity can nevertheless be thought, but only as a world that is



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anterior or posterior to human thought. The advent of humanity as well as its political form of being is an event that occurred in a world without politics, and so it must be thought as such. In the same way, humanity must be subject to the real possibility of its extinction, which would also mark a real limit of politics. In what comes below, I focus on Meillassoux’s notions of “ancestrality,” “arche-fossil,” and “justice,” and outline how these notions, from within his wider project, speak to questions of politics and its limits.3 I also address the notion of “extinction” and show how its challenge is different from that of “ancestrality,” opening to the possibility of a different understanding of justice and the subject that awaits it. It is important to note that my turn to Meillassoux’s philosophy in search of the outside of politics is not motivated by a desire to restore some pre-modern non-political domain or a theory of the “state of nature.” It is also not a rejection but, rather, a working through the domination of post-structuralist (and post-foundational) and new materialist thought that tend to mask political exteriority. Without rejecting this rich background of political theory, the present chapter, however, raises the question of what it would mean for political philosophy to seriously consider the radical outside of politics, specifically, in terms of the time before the advent or after the extinction of humanity. In the spirit of Meillassoux’s project for philosophy, this chapter sets off to outline some effects that non-correlationist or radically unpolitical reality produces for politics, thus sketching a speculative political theory that is grounded in thinking its absolute limit. BEYOND CORRELATION: THE “ARCHE-FOSSIL” AND “ANCESTRALITY” Speculative materialist philosophy arose as a challenge to the idea that, according to Meillassoux, has defined modern philosophy—“correlationism” (2008, 5). Meillassoux explains that the Kantian revolution in philosophy inaugurates the correlationist thesis, according to which “we cannot represent the ‘in itself’ without it becoming ‘for us,’ ” meaning that “we cannot know anything that would be beyond our relation to the world” (4) and that “we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (5). For correlationism, the relationship between thinking and being or subject and object is unsurpassable and assumes primacy over the related terms. As a result, “the ‘co-’ (of co-givenness, of co-relation, of the co-originary, of co-presence, etc.) is the grammatical particle that dominates modern philosophy” (5). Philosophical disavowal of dogmatism and naive realism results, according to Meillassoux, in a philosophy that is no longer able to do what it has claimed

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as its own task for centuries—to think the absolute. The absolute has been entangled with metaphysics and divinity, but after Kant both are relocated to the domain of faith, no longer subject to knowledge. As a challenge and a provocation to correlationism, Meillassoux endeavours to “take up once more the thought of the absolute” (28) that is non-religious and non-metaphysical and that lays ground for the project of “speculative” philosophy (see Meillassoux 2010, 445). What does it mean to think the absolute once again? It essentially means to think what is real in itself: that radical exteriority which philosophers abandoned in their critique of dogmatism. As Meillassoux puts it, contemporary philosophers have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers: that outside which was not relative to us, and which was given as indifferent to its own givenness to be what it is, existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not; that outside which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory—of being entirely elsewhere. (2008, 7)

Disentangling philosophy from the constraints of phenomenology, Meillassoux sets out to challenge correlationism from within and to surpass the cogivenness of thought and being by forcing us to once again think “the great outdoors,” without however returning to dogmatism or naive realism. He formulates this challenge in terms of “arche-fossil,” an object that calls out to our thinking from the “ancestral” reality in which there is no one to witness its emergence. This simple object, Meillassoux argues, incites us to break with the correlationist circle and to think that which is “anterior to every form of human relation to the world” (10). Meillassoux brings to our attention the fact that contemporary empirical science is able to determine the age of things or the fossils of creatures that lived as well as events that occurred before the advent of humanity and, perhaps, even terrestrial life altogether (e.g., the accretion of the earth, the formation of stars). Thus science is able to produce statements about “events” that are older than any form of life on earth. Meillassoux calls these statements “ancestral” as they engage with “ancestrality”—a “reality anterior to the emergence of the human species—or even anterior to every recognized form of life on earth.” This reality is indexed by the “arche-fossil” or “fossil matter,” which are “materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality or event” and which designate “the material support on the basis of which the experiments that yield estimates of ancestral phenomena proceed” (2008, 10). Importantly, ancestrality does not refer to “ancient” events, or recent events that simply went unnoticed, since they still contained the potential of being witnessed insofar as they were contemporaneous with the existence of thought. The ancestral contains a “temporal discrepancy between thinking



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and being” (112); it designates “an event anterior to terrestrial life and hence anterior to givenness itself,” evoking not merely temporal or spatial distance but radical “anteriority in time.” It is “a non-given occurrence” in a sense that it is “not contemporaneous with any givenness” (20). What is the meaning of the scientific statements about the manifestations of the world that occurred anterior to any human relation to this world? How can one think and ascribe “truth” to such statements? Meillassoux, through a dialogue with possible correlationist responses to his argument (2008, 10–17), shows that “an ancestral statement only has sense if its literal sense is also its ultimate sense.” In other words, it either has “a realist sense, and only a realist sense, or it has no sense at all” (17), which presents a challenge to correlationist thought. The correlationist cannot accept the literal signification of an ancestral statement without breaking the correlationist circle; otherwise he becomes immersed in a set of absurdities. The correlationist interpretation of an ancestral statement, as a signification of reality that always-already exists only “for us” insofar as it is us who are thinking it, turns out to be insupportable, Meillassoux proposes, as soon as we ask, for instance, if the accretion of the earth actually happened and require a simple answer of yes or no. On the one hand, yes, the correlationist will reply, since the empirical declarations pointing to this event are objective, in a post-critical sense of objectivity as derived from intersubjective agreement or universal verification by the scientific community. On the other hand, the correlationist is bound to respond negatively to this question because for him the object-referent of an ancestral statement could not have existed in the way in which it is naively described, as a non-given occurrence, as non-correlated with a consciousness, inasmuch as existence or being for him, by definition, is givenness and a world is meaningful only as “given-to-a-living (or thinking)-being.” To speak of the accretion of the earth then is “to evoke the emergence of manifestation amidst a world that pre-existed” (15) a meaningful world, which makes no sense. Ultimately, Meillassoux sums up, the correlationist ends up with a rather extraordinary claim: the ancestral statement is a true statement, in that it is objective, but one whose referent cannot possibly have actually existed in the way this truth describes it. It is a true statement, but what it describes as real is an impossible event; it is an “objective” statement, but it has no conceivable object. Or to put it more simply: it is a non-sense. (17)

Here lies the singular critical potency of the arche-fossil with regard to correlationism, as it admits no compromise with the latter: once one has acknowledged the existence of the arche-fossil, one has thereby disqualified the correlation. There is no middle ground between the recognition of the correlational and the ancestral. One has to choose whether to affirm the correlation and thus render the objectivity of science suspect and its truth

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“non-sense,” or to acknowledge the arche-fossil and thus impose a real limit on thought’s co-relation with being through thinking (with the help of science) the absolute. Meillassoux invites us to choose the latter “in order to achieve what modern philosophy has been telling us for the past two centuries is impossible: to get out of ourselves, to grasp the in-itself, to know what is whether we are or not” (27). TOWARD THE SPECULATIVE LIMIT OF POLITICS Ancestrality is the first way in which Meillassoux’s speculative materialism allows us to encounter the real limits of politics. The political is suspended by the acknowledgement of the ancestral reality anterior to the emergence of the human species, i.e. being anterior to the inauguration of thought. This ancestral being is radical “being-without” from the perspective of the political ontology of being-with; it is a world without a sense of the world since it is a world without thought. In the same way that scientific statements about the events that predated humanity and even terrestrial life make sense only if they are interpreted literally, we must interpret literally the statement that ancestrality is radically unpolitical. Some may object, as already noted above, that displacing the human from its central position in the political sphere does not result in the radical displacement of politics since non-humans, including living beings and things, can act independently and contribute to the establishment of a network of relations that resembles politics. In response to such an objection, I suggest that despite the fact that non-human “actants, acting agents, interveners” (Latour 2004, 75) can and do contribute to the field of relationality that can be described as post-humanist politics, taking humanity out of the equation altogether results in total depoliticization at the level of both actuality and potentiality. That is, while we can conceive of post-humanist politics, non-human politics is “non-sense.”4 “Politics,” “the political,” “the impolitical,” or whichever term we chose to designate that specific reality or type of relational network that emerges in the field of confrontational interaction between multiple human and even non-human actors that can be designated, in the way that Foucault intended, as power relations (i.e., “the multiplicity of force relations”), emerge with the inauguration of thought and thus with the inauguration of humanity. The reality that is anterior to thought is radically unpolitical. In other words, humans are not the only actants of the political reality, but their emergence does mark the origin of the specific type of force relations that can be called political.5 Certainly, the non-human world is not devoid of force relations, but in the absence of contemporaneous thought that can distill the socio-political quality of these relations, we can speak of these forces only in scientific and never political terms. These relations of forces never become the relations of power. The



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domain of “physics” thus remains separate from the domain of politics, which is inaugurated with the emergence of thought. I am suggesting that the only politics possible is correlationist politics, meaning that thought must attach itself to being in order to become political and that being, in order to be political, must retain its attachment to thought. From this perspective, the speculative detachment of thought from being that is performed by Meillassoux offers us the possibility of thinking not only “the absolute” but also reality that is radically unpolitical. Now we can understand better the ultimate meaning and at the same time the ultimate correlationist limitation of Thomas Mann’s proclamation that “politics is a terrible force: If one only knows about it, one has already succumbed to it. One has lost one’s innocence” (1983, 303). “Innocence” is lost when thought refuses to think a world that is devoid of thought and when political philosophy refuses to acknowledge, in the literal sense, a reality that is radically devoid of politics. The same problem plagued Esposito’s “impolitical” and Nancy’s “politics,” which are entangled in the dynamics of correlationist circularity: even as they attempt a detotalization of the political, they are never fully free from this totality because its real limits never come into consideration. As a result, it is not altogether surprising to read in Nancy that “politics is far from being ‘everything’—even though everything passes through it and meets up or crosses paths in it” (2010a, 51) or in Esposito that the category of the impolitical “could not manifest itself except by cancelling itself in the pure ‘taking place’ of the political” (2015, xxii). The political remains totalizing until we acknowledge its radical exteriority and Meillassoux’s notions of arche-fossil and ancestrality are helpful in this regard. Thinking the unpolitical from this perspective also means overcoming what Meillassoux calls a “species solipsism” or a “solipsism of the community” that mark political philosophy insofar as it “ratifies the impossibility of thinking any reality that would be anterior or posterior to the community of thinking beings. This community only has dealings with itself, and with the world with which it is contemporaneous” (2008, 50). Importantly, the overcoming of this solipsism does not occur in the name of extending politics toward non-human reality and thus politicizing “dia-chronicity,” that is, “events that are anterior or ulterior to every terrestrial-relation-to-the-world” (112), but for the sake of affirming the absolute limit of politics and accessing its “great outdoors.” WORLDS WITHOUT POLITICS: BETWEEN RADICAL JUSTICE AND EXTINCTION There are two other notions in Meillassoux—“extinction” and “justice”— that offer a direction for thinking the unpolitical slightly different from

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“ancestrality.” These terms are still concerned with the reality that is external to thought but now this reality is connected not only to ancestral statements but also to propositions about a world that is “to come” or that “may be.” In this regard, Meillassoux presents us with the thought of “a world without politics” that springs from his affirmation of the “necessity of contingency” or of “hyper-chaos” as the non-metaphysical absolute. My suggestion here is that despite the fact that Meillassoux presents the notion of “extinction” as the mirror image of “ancestrality,” the logical and structural position of the former is different from the latter. However, even as these two realities present two distinct possibilities, they both equally index a “world without politics.” The notion of “extinction” appears once toward the end of After Finitude when Meillassoux clarifies the challenge of the arche-fossil.6 He notes that its problem is not confined to ancestral statements because “it concerns every discourse whose meaning includes a temporal discrepancy between thinking and being—thus, not only statements about possible events occurring prior to the emergence of humans, but also statements about possible events that are ulterior to the extinction of the human species.” In other words, thinking ancestrality is as problematic for correlationism as thinking, for instance, “the climactic and geological consequences of a meteor impact extinguishing all life of earth” (112), which is the subject of empirical science and its discourse. For Meillassoux, the temporality of the arche-fossil is extended to embrace any reality that is prior or posterior to human or terrestrial life. From this perspective, extinction appears as the mirror image of ancestrality and its challenge is supposedly symmetrical to the ancestral challenge to correlationism. I agree that these diachronic realities posit a similar problem for correlationist thought in general, since they refer to a world that is not contemporaneous with any thought; however, even in this shared capacity they differ in the implications they bear for the scientific inquiry as well as for the ethics of the subject who thinks them. First, in relation to the events that may occur after the extinction of terrestrial life, the arche-fossil can be used only as a metaphor for science and never as “the material support” for experiments that yield some concrete data about a world to come, as is the case with ancestral phenomena and events, the existence of which the arche-fossil indexes with its very materiality (cf. Meillassoux 2008, 10). Second, since extinction remains a possibility and, as Meillassoux argues, any possibility must remain un-totalizable (i.e., detached from any empirical constants), we must think extinction differently from ancestrality (which is not a possibility but indexes events that supposedly have taken place or actualized). It is my suggestion that “extinction” indexes a possibility of the “advent” of a world without politics that merely “may be,” and the recognition of this extreme possibility (or “virtual event”) of extinction has the power to modify the ethical and even political subjectivity of those who think it.



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In order to understand a possibility of the advent of another world and its implications, we need to first consider Meillassoux’s discussion of the nonmetaphysical absolute. After having staged and explicated the arche-fossil’s challenge to correlationism, Meillassoux proceeds to show how we can think an absolute beyond metaphysics, an absolute that is not dogmatic or “absolutist.” Such absolute, he argues, must postulate “an absolute necessity that does not reinstate any form of absolutely necessary entity” (2008, 34). Its only truth or the only necessity it can contain is “contingency,” and thus its name is “hyper-Chaos, for which nothing is or would seem to be, impossible, not even the unthinkable” (64). Meillassoux launches his project of thinking the absolute by working through (rather than rejecting) “strong correlationism,” which, as Graham Harman (2011, 23–24) explains, is wedged between “weak correlationism” and “absolute idealism.” The former is the common Kantian position that the things-in-themselves can be thought but not known, while the latter maintains that we cannot claim to even think the in-itself because the moment we think it, we turn it into the object of thought, into the for-us, and so it is impossible to go beyond the human-world correlate. Strong correlationism occupies a middle ground between these two positions: it claims that we cannot think the unthought as such without falling into contradiction, but “our inability to think the unthought does not prove the nonexistence of the unthought” (24). Meillassoux’s own position, speculative materialism, rests on the inversion of the strong correlationist claim: reason’s inability to grasp the thing-in-itself transforms into an absolute knowledge that the in-itself exists without reason. The truth of the great outdoors, which correlationism has proclaimed to be inaccessible to thought or reason due to its finitude, is “unreason” or absolute contingency—absence of any reason for anything. The correlation itself is submitted to this principle of unreason, resulting in an acknowledgement of its “facticity”: no reason can be given for its existence and thus it can be only described and not explained. The correlation, consequently, is not itself necessary or absolute but, as with everything else, only its facticity or “contingency” is necessary. Meillassoux sums up: facticity will be revealed to be a knowledge of the absolute because we are going to put back into the thing itself what we mistakenly took to be an incapacity in thought. In other words, instead of construing the absence of reason inherent in everything as a limit that thought encounters in its search for the ultimate reason, we must understand that this absence of reason is, and can only be the ultimate property of the entity. We must convert facticity into the real property whereby everything and every world is without reason, and is thereby capable of actually becoming otherwise without reason. (2008, 53)

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The non-metaphysical absolute lies in the principle of contingency or unreason, freeing the process of becoming from any necessity or teleology. Everything and anything could be otherwise without having to give any reason for being so. The only absolute necessity is “everything’s non-necessity,” opening unto “an extreme form of chaos,” for which nothing is impossible, “except something that is necessary, because it is the contingency of the entity that is necessary, not the entity” (65). In uncovering the absolute of hyper-Chaos, which thought can nevertheless think without falling into correlationism, Meillassoux essentially liberates the thinkable from probabilistic confines that are grounded in the stability of the laws and conventions that govern our present world, including the laws of physics. As a result, the totality of the thinkable and thus possible, Meillassoux notes, “can no longer be guaranteed a priori” (2008, 103), resulting in “the detotalization of the possible” (110). We no longer possess any means of determining what may be or even of explaining what is; ontology is radically destabilized insofar as we cannot measure or predict the possibilities of which hyper-Chaos, “which is the only in-itself,” is capable (111). What we must assert is that “the possible as such, rather than this or that possible entity, must necessarily be un-totalizable” (127). The establishment of hyper-Chaos as absolute results not only in detotalization of ontology but also, Meillassoux contends, presents “the minimal condition for every critique of ideology,” since an ideology is “any form of pseudo-rationality whose aim is to establish that what exists as a matter of fact exists necessarily.” As a result, by demonstrating the impossibility of existence of a necessary “entity,” it is possible to demonstrate that any “social situation which is presented as inevitable is actually contingent” (2008, 33–34). From this perspective, can we think of Western political philosophy, marked by the primacy of the political, as an ideological form of rationality? The answer, I believe, will be affirmative as long as politics, either empirically or ontologically, is viewed as the telos of human life and community, as the privileged place of being-together or relationality, or as the inevitable and omnipresent reality of power relations as well as their very possibility. Meillassoux’s speculative materialism allows us to affirm, without reservation, first, that “politics,” a specific form of human activity and interactions, is not a necessary but contingent social formation, and second, that the political, the ontological register of relationality, power relations, conflict, desire, event, etc., is similarly not necessary but contingent and, together with many other contemporary correlationist forms of thought, it must be subjected to the destabilization and de-totalization achieved through the acknowledgement of the non-dogmatic absolute of contingency. As such, a speculative realist approach makes even a preliminary definition of politics challenging since no characteristic can be necessarily attributed to it, resulting in questioning



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the possibility of political theory that would concern itself with questions that are qualitatively distinct from questions of philosophy (the task of which is nothing less than to think the absolute). Are we, then, not able to say anything about politics? Due to the absoluteness of contingency and the resulting destabilization of ontological principles, we can say with certainty only that politics is not all, that not everything is political in actuality and potentiality, as well as that the possible cannot be exhausted by either an advent of a new politics or its abolition. The fact that certain societies have developed political institutions and that they chose, despite many disappointments and critiques, to continue designating them as political is not an indication of an inherent necessity of human nature or a trait of the structure of being, but a contingent event or discourse that contains no reason for its emergence and perpetuation. Such radical detotalization of the political allows political thought to lose the heroic (as well as imperialist) character it has assumed throughout centuries and to acknowledge its radical exteriority without subsuming it once again under a totalizing embrace. This exteriority, as was suggested above, is ancestral in character; however, insofar as politics, in the same way as thought, had its beginning in the advent of the present world (the “third” world, as Meillassoux calls it), it may cease to exist with the next advent of another (“fourth”) world, thus locating another sense of its real exteriority in a world to come. Meillassoux, grounded in his affirmation of contingency and unreason, suggests that we must rethink “history” beyond teleology or necessity and employs the notion of “advent” to speak of the absolute novelty of becoming. Advent is a sudden occurrence without reason or ex nihilo, irreducible to the actualization of some pre-existent potentiality and thus radically novel compared to what came before. Advent is without reason and without limit; it is “an irreligious notion of the origin of pure novelty” (2011a, 179). Meillassoux proposes that the cases of such advent “can be divided into three orders that mark the essential ruptures of becoming: matter, life, and thought,” each of which “appears as a Universe that cannot be qualitatively reduced to anything that preceded it” (187). All of these “Worlds,” Meillassoux argues, arise suddenly and appear improbable from the perspective of the constants of a preceding “World”: for instance, life did not emerge as a result of development of matter, there was no life inherent in matter before the advent of life. Life emerged as a rupture with an existing material configuration and not as its necessary effect. The same is true for the advent of matter and thought, as they did not pre-exist but arose ex nihilo, without reason. Meillassoux further asks us to think another possible advent and the consequences of such thinking for the present world. The method, he explains, consists “in going to the outer limits of what becoming can do once it is ‘unharnessed’ from empirical constants” (2011a, 223) and focusing on the

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possibilities that would have the most significant effects on the subject who imagines them. Or, as Harman puts it, “we surf along the contours of the logically possible, treat all such possibilities as equally likely, and then focus not on the ones that would be most ‘probable,’ but on those that would be (ontologically) the most important” (2011, 92). By definition, the advent of the next world must introduce an absolute novelty, so we must think this advent from the position of the present world of thought, which is essentially the world of humanity, insofar as humans are uniquely defined by their ability to access the truth, which is “the eternal contingency of that which is” (Meillassoux 2011a, 190–91). Because of this ability to think the absolute, the human represents “the insurpassable effect of advent ex nihilo” (189). What kind of a radically novel World can follow the human, i.e. a World that would not be just a variant of a former World? In answering this question, Meillassoux advances a proposition that is formulated at the intersection of his ontological affirmation of absolute contingency and his normative desire to outline a non-totalizable system of irreligious ethics based on the knowledge of the real. Such a task of constitution of “an immanent ethics” based on a radically irreligious ontology is the end of his philosophy, inasmuch as “the goal of every philosophy must be the immanent inscription of values in being,” meaning that any justification of an ethics (the domain of “human requirements”) must ontologically relate to “a non-human real” (195). In other words, “the philosophical inscription of values in the world consists in refusing the merely human character of norms of conduct; values also ought to teach us something about the world” (196). Philosophy is called to demonstrate that values and moral aspirations are not absurd illusions, conventions or vulgar ideologies, but rest instead on the “perception of the world in its ultimate truth” (197), which is the necessity of contingency. Faithful to this philosophical task, Meillassoux suggests that “the sole conceivable radical novelty following the human” is contained in “the World of justice” marked by “the recommencement of the human in just form” (2011a, 192). The only thing that can transcend thought (which has become capable of attaining the absolute) is “the re-emergence of thought in accordance with the reign of a rigorously egalitarian justice among thinking individuals” (2011b, 162). This re-emergence is nothing else than “rebirth” of humans as thinking beings, indexing the “advent of a new constancy”—the World of universal justice. Meillassoux writes: rebirth entails the advent of a World different from the World of thought, and not an advent internal to the creative activities of humans. Following the three Worlds of matter, life, and thought, the rebirth of humans ought to be distinguished as a fourth World . . . if a World were to arise beyond the three preceding ones, this world could only be that of rebirth of humans. We will call this “fourth order” the World of justice, a World where humans acquire immortality,



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the sole life worthy of their condition. World of matter, World of life, World of thought, World of justice: four orders, of which three have already appeared, with the fourth able to take place and existing already as an object of hope, of desire of every human qua rational being. (2011a, 189)

The fourth World, the World of justice is the World in which humans are reborn, in which they acquire immortality, the only condition suitable for beings that are able to think the absolute. However, even as this World is possible, it cannot be considered either probable or improbable and so remains “improbabilizable.” As such, its advent cannot be brought about by human deeds and efforts, and cannot be an end or a goal of a politics. Nevertheless, it exists in the present world as an object of hope and desire of every human worthy of the name. That is, those who practice their humanity, “those who think the impassable character of a condition shared equally by all beings of reason, can only hope for the recommencement of our lives in such a way that justice would surpass the factual death that has struck down our fellow humans” (191). Death is the utmost injustice for a thinking being, and in the advent of the fourth World it is corrected and so lays ground for the principle as well as the fulfillment of universal justice. Importantly, the pursuit of justice that consists in hoping for the advent of the fourth World, as Nathan Coombs (2014) points out, restores speculative philosophy to its guiding role insofar as this pursuit is removed from “the realm of collective political contestation” and is subsequently grounded in the knowledge of the non-human real. The hope of justice, then, “ceases to be a simple passing fashion and becomes instead the true intuition of the highest innovative power of becoming” (Meillassoux 2011a, 207). The radical contingency of becoming brings the promise of immortality—universal justice. The universal, Meillassoux reminds us, is universal only insofar as it makes no exceptions; as a result, we must refuse injustice not only in relation to the living, but even more so to the dead, since universal justice must rest on the principle of universal equality in its application. Such equality defies any distinctions based in biological condition (skin colour, sex, size, etc.) and also in the bodily and physical state. Therefore, since bodily life and death are “never anything but a biological difference without moral significance,” universal equality must apply to all human beings whether they are living or dead (Meillassoux 2010, 453). The refusal of injustice for the living and the dead is the “hope” that lies at the core of the new “factical ethics,” springing from the intuition of the power of becoming. This ethics is “irreligious” or “immanent” because, unlike religion, it “posits this life as the only desirable life” and does not promise “some other life than ours (a life founded on another truth)”; it is rather an ethics that manifests “such a desire for this life that it wishes this life to be immortal” (Meillassoux 2011a, 188).7

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What about those lives that ended in horrible deaths and that throw our entire world into question? Meillassoux argues that it is precisely these “essential spectres”—“horrendous,” “premature and odious deaths”—that force us to face the possibility of and to hope for the advent of the fourth World, where justice will be served to these deaths in the form of their bodily rebirth. A “spectre,” Meillassoux explains, is “a death that we have not yet mourned,” leaving us in limbo, unable to overcome “the destructive, because obsessive, memory of the disappeared”; and an “essential spectre” is “one whose death was of such a nature that, for essential and not solely psychological reasons, we are no longer capable of mourning.” It indexes a death “that bears no meaning, no completion, no fulfillment: just an atrocious interruption of life, such that it would be simply obscene to think that it was not experienced as such by those who suffered it” (2010, 451). When speaking about these deaths, Meillassoux has in mind the disasters of the twentieth century in particular, which leave all those who come after immobilized. How is it possible to move forward, to act in any way in the full awareness of these deaths? Is there anything that can bring justice to them, so that we might complete our “essential grief” and begin to live with these spectres rather than continue to die with them? The answer, Meillassoux suggests, lies in embracing the absolute contingency of becoming and thus the possibility of the World of justice, the advent of which does not depend on human actions and so remains only eternally possible. This “eternal possible,” he writes, frees me from suffering over the appalling misfortune of those who have experienced atrocious deaths, allows me to escape being paralyzed by an impossible mourning for the atrocities of the twentieth century, and also permits me to invest my energy in an egalitarian politics that has become conscious of its limits. Indeed, politics is delivered from all charges of messianism, since eschatological awaiting is entirely recuperated by individual subjectivity. This partition of tasks (individual messianism, political finitude) allows us to avoid the totalitarian temptation of collective action. We can effectively expel the eschatological desire from politics only by allowing this desire to be unfolded openly in another sphere of existence (such as private life or philosophy). (2011b, 163; emphasis added)

The hope for the advent of the World of justice allows one to mourn the horrendous deaths and to no longer be paralyzed by their memory, to let go of the urge to avenge them or to invent a politics that would prevent their occurrence in the future. This letting go, however, in light of hoping for the contingent advent of universal justice, simultaneously allows one to recover one’s political agency or subjectivity. This hope, importantly, is always individual, which prevents the temptation of turning justice into a project of new totalitarian politics. As Meillassoux puts it, “The surmounting of despair



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[over horrible deaths] aims at liberation of the power of action present in the subject” (2010, 464–65), resulting in a kind of individual messianism. The eschatological desire of the subject for the advent of universal justice is thus separated from any politics that might see justice as its goal. Politics cannot do anything for the advent of the fourth World and, as a result, the only politics that can emerge in the face of the “eternal possible” is a politics that has become conscious of its limits. The truly eschatological subject is messianic, while a politics in which this subject invests her energy is marked by finitude. FROM VECTORIAL TO SACRIFICIAL SUBJECTIVITY Meillassoux emphasizes that even as the advent of the fourth World is unaffected by the actions originating in the present world, thinking this “absolute hypothesis” (this remarkable event of which becoming is capable) is primarily “a matter of transforming our present existence” (2010, 470). As a result, the central questions are: once an event is recognized as possible, how does it modify my subjectivity and what kind of “immediate practice” does it yield? The belief in the advent of justice is an embrace of immortality, resulting in subjective transformation, since “if I really believe that I will come back eternally according to the same path of life, then I transform myself” (Meillassoux 2010, 467). This transformation is essentially an enhancement, in our present world, of the subjectivity of human beings who take the hypothesis of the advent seriously (462). This eschatological subject, whom Meillassoux calls “vectorial”—the subject “moved by the desire for universal justice” or “magnetically attracted by the vector of the emancipation to come”—is the only effect that the fourth World has upon present existence (463). While the present world has no effect on the possibility of the fourth World, the hope for the advent of the latter transforms and produces a new type of subjectivity in the present world—the vectorial subject of universal justice. This subject is unpolitical at the outset insofar as his initial action lies in hope (i.e., desire crossed by thought) and in the letting go of his power to achieve justice, which may come about only through the advent of the next world. However, this subject may choose to invest her energy in an egalitarian politics in full awareness that this politics too is incapable of bringing about the advent of justice. As such, this politics, from the moment of its conception, desires only the immortality of human beings (i.e., justice) and not its own immortality. It is politics that exhausts itself in the fulfillment of its “goal,” which, in turn, it can never achieve through its own action but only through the advent of the next World. As Meillassoux puts it, “an emancipatory politics is a politics that seeks its own proper abolition in the accomplishment of the end that is sought. . . . [However,] it would be ruinous

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to believe that politics could by itself achieve this abolition—that the end of politics could be a politics. For this is obviously wrong: a world without politics is beyond the reach of our actions because it does not belong to our world” (2010, 476–77; emphasis added). All actions of a vectorial subject must be affected by and measured against this particular acknowledgement of political finitude. The eschatological subject, then, is a subject who desires life marked by justice and is devoid of desire for politics: the suppression of politics is the finality of a politics of emancipation because politics seeks justice and not politics itself. . . . The end of politics is that which proceeds from an ontological uprising that is independent of our action, an uprising whose hypothesis contributes at present to the shaping of the subjectivity of the vectorial militant. The end of politics is the finality of politics, but the end of politics is not a politics. In summary, militants must love life and know that life is not entirely politics—that life itself seeks to accomplish itself elsewhere than in politics: in love, friendship, art, thinking. (477)8

Those who desire universal equality and justice are “vectorized” because they know the object of their desire as really possible, but they also know that they are ready to live without this vectorization of desire, since the fulfilled life of equality is their goal and not the desire itself that is defined by this goal. What does it mean to say that the end of politics is a world without politics? Meillassoux suggests that if we address this question in the context of existing ideas and categories, we will rediscover “communism as the promise and experience of the end of politics, the end of vectorization, the end of eschatology and the beginning of an existence dedicated to its own proper experience” (2010, 474). Communism signifies for Meillassoux, as it did for Marx, a just social order based on the principle of universal equality; however, while for Marx its achievement was the end-goal of revolutionary, militant politics, for Meillassoux communism is only “achieved” as an advent, that is, irrespective of the present actions of its adherents. Once the advent of justice has occurred, “there will be a communist life, that is to say, life finally without politics.” This World or life without politics, Meillassoux further clarifies, is “life without the balance of power, ruse, war, bloody sacrifice for the sake of a universal and also life without the unspeakable enthusiasm which proceeds from all these things in those [i.e., militants’] generous souls” (473). From this perspective, the ultimate transformative task of the vectorial subject is to overcome her desire for politics and, “even in a world of war, violence and sacrifice,” learn to “love life beyond war, violence and sacrifice” (473–74). Meillassoux does not say much about what such desire for life that comes to replace the desire for politics would resolve into, except that it will result in an abolition of the present ethics based on a desire for justice. The ethics of the fourth World will rather take the form of “a benevolence inherent



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in a condition emancipated from early death. The universal would cease to designate the requirement of conditions necessary for the blossoming of every life, and would refer instead to the invention of possible links between humans devoted to thought” (2011a, 221). We can only imagine what kind of links might emerge in the fourth World between humans, however, what is important is that they will take a benevolent form, signaling the unpolitical character of this World. As the political has been long associated with the conflictual potential of human life, benevolence would define a world without politics.9 Even before the advent of the World of justice, Meillassoux notes, the very hope for it may produce an effect that seemingly resembles “the invention of possible links between humans devoted to thought”—a community of hope. Hope recommences the unity of the human collective and assigns it a common project that is not abstract but “nourished instead on their ownmost experience: that of the boundless refusal of death of one’s neighbour.” As a result, humans “through a fidelity initially aimed at those who are closest among the deceased, act to conserve the community in expectation of its ultimate possibility,” leading to a unification of humanity based on “intensively lived values, because they are founded on the active expectation of an ontologically remarkable event that is accessible to every thinking being” (2011a, 207). Even as Meillassoux’s entry into contemporary philosophy is marked by his affirmation in After Finitude of the capacity of mathematics to lead us beyond the tenets of correlationism (i.e., beyond humanity), Meillassoux’s philosophical project is humanist at its core. He fully acknowledges this fact, remarking, however, that his “factical” humanism is predicated upon the principle of human “mastery of nature” understood, contrary to its traditional form of demiurgic and technical domination, as “the capacity of humans to extract themselves from their innate powers by an unselfish act that simultaneously achieves the refusal of a supernatural omnipotence” (214; emphasis added). This capacity for self-disempowerment legitimates the “superiority of humans over anonymous nature, as well as their evident duty of preserving nature.” This duty, Meillassoux clarifies, is “the offering made to the unborn in memory of the expected dead: the perpetuation of a world here below as the hope of its recommencement” (214). Meillassoux’s rethinking of “history” beyond reason and teleology and grounded in the radical contingency of becoming appears to inadvertently achieve a goal that Kant identifies with his “idea for a universal history”— recommencement of (irreligious) hope. Kant writes that the revelation of guiding thread of history opens “a consoling prospect into the future . . . , in which the human species is represented in the remote distance as finally working itself upward toward the condition in which all germs nature has placed in it can be fully developed and its vocation here on earth can be fulfilled”

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(2012, 22). For Meillassoux, the premise of becoming (contingency) is opposite to that of Kant’s (a plan of nature), but the intended outcome of their philosophical projects is similar—the institution of hope in the future fulfillment of human potential. The crucial difference lies not in the hope itself but in its “flavour”: for Kant it is sweet, because the aim is guaranteed through the teleological unfolding of the plan of nature; for Meillassoux it is bitter, because no necessity or probability guarantees this future. The only necessity to which becoming is subordinated “is its own eternal power of the advent or abolition of each thing” (Meillassoux 2011a, 176). As a result, Meillassoux’s “universalist hope,” beyond all calculation and all foresight, is “a tormented joy” that is “linked to the symmetrical consciousness of a possible non-advent of the next World” (192–93; emphasis added). Not only is the individual subject of hope crossed by this torment, but the project of philosophy itself is affected by this insurmountable doubling of the possible. As Meillassoux describes it, “the most important task for philosophy—its final challenge—is not being, but ‘may-being.’ For the may-be unites within itself the true heart of every ontology (the absoluteness of factual possibility) and the deepest aspirations of ethics (the universal fulfillment of justice)” (2010, 463). Meillassoux dedicates himself primarily to an examination of the one side of this “may-being” or “symmetrical consciousness”—the advent of the fourth World of justice—which raises the question of its opposite, of the non-advent. What would the non-advent of justice mean and can we not suggest that, rather than constituting the perpetuation of the present World, this non-advent would itself be a kind of advent of a fourth World understood in terms of its symmetrically opposite possibility—“abolition”? This “advent” of “abolition,” I would like to suggest, can be thought of as the fourth World of “extinction” of thought, insofar as extinction is analogous not so much to ancestrality but to the possibility of justice. The initial problem that we encounter in postulating the possibility of extinction as an advent-abolition, while still relying on the methodology of speculative materialism, is whether it constitutes a radical novelty. For Meillassoux, the only novel World that could arise beyond the three preceding ones is the World where humans are reborn and thus acquire immortality, which is the only life worthy of their condition as beings that can think the absolute. However, to insist that becoming must necessarily bring about novelty would mean to impose an additional necessity upon it, which goes against Meillassoux’s own ontology, in which becoming is subordinated only to the sole necessity of contingency. As a result, even if a World of the extinction of thought and, by this very logic, of humanity would mean a return to a version of a previous World, such as the World of matter or of life, this does not mean that it is impossible or less significant than an advent of an absolutely novel World. Furthermore, it would be difficult to argue that the extinction of humanity would not amount to an



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absolute novelty and that the World after humans would not be different from the World that preceded humanity. The fourth World of extinction is a version of a world without politics in two distinct ways. First, as a world that is not contemporaneous with thought, similarly to ancestral reality, it is devoid of politics. Second, as a world marked by the death of all humans (i.e., their extinction), it is a world of absolute equality and, perhaps, justice that is served in the name of the essential spectres. If justice is accomplished in extinction, then it marks an advent of a world without politics. It may be difficult to see universal justice in extinction precisely because of its radically equalizing effect. Intuitively, we desire justice based on inequality: we want to differentiate between those, who we think “deserve” rebirth, such as essential spectres, and those who may disappear forever, such as those who in full awareness of their actions caused these horrendous deaths. If all humans are equal and all are thus reborn, as in Meillassoux’s version of the just World to come, and if that “God,” who will be the “guarantee” of the future immortality of humans, “does not yet exist” (Meillassoux 2010, 458), then we have no ground to hope that this future life, as Peter Gratton notes, would not be “a life born by a Demiurge who resurrects us only to provide us with greater evils” (2012, 14). There is no guarantee that benevolence will take the place of violence in the fourth World and that those who killed and tortured in the present World would not continue to do so after the advent of the fourth World. However, one can logically hope that the extinction of humanity would bring about absolute equality and justice, insofar as it would prevent the future emergence of essential spectres and, in their name, would silence human violence forever. It is my contention that this possibility of justice-as-extinction is logical and has as much ontological significance as the possibility of human rebirth. As a result, if we follow Meillassoux’s reasoning, then we must admit that the “joy” of hope for the advent of the fourth World of rebirth must be tainted by the torment of its “abolition,” which is the possibility of human extinction. It is possible that the acknowledgement of extinction as a real possibility, in the same way as the acknowledgement of rebirth, the advent of neither of which depends on human action, may lead to resignation, apathy and even nihilism: “why act if action has no effect on the future?” However, the awaiting of extinction does not have to result in mere resignation and may, on the contrary, positively transform the subject who acknowledges this possibility. While Meillassoux calls the subject magnetically attracted by the vector of the emancipation to come “vectorial,” the subject that is guided by the symmetrical possibility of advent-abolition, I would like to suggest, is “sacrificial.” The sacrificial subject is one attracted, in the name of the very same justice, to the possibility of its own abolition in the World of extinction. It is the subject who says: “I sacrifice my own desire for immortality so

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that horrendous deaths will never reoccur.” Most importantly, this sacrifice lies not only in letting go of the possibility of one’s rebirth, but also in an assumption of responsibility derived from the condition of human “superiority” over anonymous nature, in Meillassoux’s sense. That is, once I accept the real possibility of human extinction, I continue to take care of the present world and nature rather than abuse it, even as I fully hope to not benefit from this care in the future in any way. Such perpetuation of the present world in the awaiting of human extinction, even by Meillassoux’s own standards, would be the most “unselfish act” by which humans disempower themselves (i.e., “extract themselves from their innate powers”) and thus fulfill their humanity. To use familiar Heideggerian terminology, awaiting extinction is the being-toward-death of humanity through which it attains its authenticity. From this perspective, while the fourth World of extinction is a world without politics, its awaiting produces a politics of humanist anti-humanism that has become conscious of it limits in the same way as the hope for justice results in an emancipatory politics marked by the joyful consciousness of its finitude. In both cases, politics is forced if not to experience then at least to imagine and acknowledge its real limits. To conclude, Meillassoux’s philosophy challenges political thought to reconsider its founding premises, including the question of the radical or absolute limit of politics. While contemporary political thought, dominated by naive realism (the science of politics) or post-structuralism (the thought of the political), finds it difficult to locate and think the radical exteriority of politics, Meillassoux’s methodology offers us at least three ways of thinking and conceptualizing this absolute outside: ancestral reality, the world of universal justice, and the world of human extinction. Importantly, Meillassoux’s philosophy leads to the emergence of speculative political theory that has become conscious of the real limits of politics, as well as of its own finitude as a domain of thought. To think politics “after” Meillassoux would mean to detach from the desire for the necessity and permanence of politics, and to do politics “after” Meillassoux would mean to derive the authenticity of political action from the humble acknowledgement of its essential limits and real finitude. NOTES 1. “Speculative realism” is an umbrella term that indexes a rather heterogeneous multiplicity of thinkers, all of whom appear to agree at least on one point: “correlationism” is a problem that requires philosophical intervention. There has emerged a growing body of literature on the topic of speculative realism, speculative materialism, and object-oriented philosophy. For an introductory and more specialized discussion



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of these subjects see, for example, Brassier et al (2007); Bryant et al (2011); Ennis (2010, 2011); Harman (2010, 2011); Gratton (2014); and Morelle (2012). Morelle’s paper, in addition to a general discussion of speculative realism, offers a bibliography, including major primary works and secondary sources, as well as journals and blogs dedicated to speculative realism. 2. It is worth noting that even though this chapter focuses solely on Meillassoux’s contribution to contemporary (political) philosophy, his project does not stand in solitude and does not arise ex nihilo. A number of his arguments, insights, and conclusions challenge, resonate with and draw upon (often implicitly) the work of many other prominent contemporary philosophers of immanence, among whom are, for example, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and, most notably, Alain Badiou. For a brief discussion of Bergson’s influence on Meillassoux see, for example, Meillassoux (2011b, 170–71). For a discussion of some major differences between Deleuze and Meillassoux see Bell (2015). See also Meillassoux’s essay “Subtraction and Contraction” (2007), where both Deleuze and Bergson are engaged indirectly. I will briefly note here a few important differences between Meillassoux and Badiou in order to avoid a possible confusion regarding the implications of their respective projects for political thought. For a more detailed discussion of the relationship and some major differences between Badiou’s and Meillassoux’s projects see, for instance, Meillassoux (2011b, 161, 169–71); and Norris (2015). Badiou was Meillassoux’s teacher and mentor, and his influence on the latter is most apparent in their shared engagement with mathematics as well as the concept of contingency. In one of his interviews Meillassoux suggests that he “had already sketched the major outlines of [his] own philosophical ideas on contingency” before he read Badiou’s Being and Event in 1992. However, he further admits, “Badiou provided [him] with the mathematical soil needed for their development, along with essential intellectual support for [his] desire to reactivate philosophy in its most speculative aspect” (2011b, 161). The major point of disagreement between the two thinkers is that Meillassoux believes in a “necessity of contingency,” while Badiou upholds a “contingency of necessity.” As per Meillassoux’s own interpretation of this divergence, for Badiou necessity (i.e. any truth procedure) occurs on the basis of an event—an epitome of contingency as it is never reducible to the elements of the situation in which it intervenes. In a way, the experience of necessity here is conditioned by a contingent or undecidable event. Meillassoux, on the other hand, aims to “extract the meaning of a really unconditional necessity on the basis of the more radical level of contingency,” a necessity “anterior to that of the Badiouian event” (2011b, 169). This necessity is contingency itself. Another important point of divergence between the two thinkers concerns the position of the subject. Badiou’s philosophy contains a residue of correlationism due to his emphasis on the subject as “militant of truth”: “it is always for a subject that there is an undecidable event” (166). Meillassoux, on the other hand, does not prescribe a role for a human subject, aspiring to remove it from the picture altogether. Lastly, another relevant feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy is his “speculative theology” (Norris 2015, 32) of divine inexistence which sets him far apart from Badiou’s militant atheism. In the end, these differences are translated into divergent approaches to politics. Badiou retains a need for politics fueled by the desire

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of a militant subject (cf. Badiou’s Metapolitics), while Meillassoux remains unwilling to succumb to this desire insofar as politics is not a necessity, and is subjected to the promise of its own contingency, which is finitude. 3. Among the publications that discuss the place of politics in Meillassoux’s philosophy are Nathan Coombs’s “Speculative Justice: Quentin Meillassoux and Politics” (2014) and Peter Gratton’s “Meillassoux’s Speculative Politics: Time and the Divinity to Come” (2012). 4. For a conception of nonhuman politics see, for example, Ferguson (2014), who argues that politics preexisted humanity and that the development of humanity is actually an effect of politics rather than a precondition for it. 5. This argument rests on the presumption that nonhumans do not think or, at least, they do not think in the same way as humans do. The question of the possibility of nonhuman thought remains beyond the scope of this work. 6. Meillassoux, of course, is not the only thinker who addresses the question of extinction. See, for example, Brassier (2010) and Thacker (2010, 2011, 2012). 7. It is possible to discern here a resemblance to the Nietzschean “eternal recurrence,” which may be interpreted as serving the ethical task of refusing nihilism just as the hope of immortality becomes the ground of Meillassoux’s irreligious ethics that overcomes despair. For a succinct discussion of the Nietzschean concept see Evans (2015). 8. Alain Badiou similarly acknowledges the existence of three other spheres, in addition to politics, where events occur: love, science, and art. However, for Badiou, politics, as a truth procedure following an event, stands out because of its unique universality: it can overlap with the other three. Meillassoux, on the other hand, seems to acknowledge the real finitude of politics and its concerns. 9. Interestingly, the ideas of rebirth and benevolence feature prominently in some non-Western philosophies, for example, Buddhism and Confucianism, and if we wanted to better imagine the links that humans may establish in the fourth World described by Meillassoux, we could, perhaps, turn to these philosophies for some suggestions.

Chapter 7

Unpolitical Life: Michel Henry and the Real Limits of Biopolitics

What is the relationship between life and politics? Can their connection be interrupted and their bond broken? These are among the central questions of contemporary biopolitical thought, which have received a number of, often contradictory, answers. From a Foucaultian perspective, for instance, life in modernity appears to be thoroughly consumed by politics, but, at the same time, it also serves as a ground for new political resistances that recuperate life from its imprisonment in concrete forms of subjugation. Agamben’s response is quite different: there is an ontological connection between life and politics insofar as Western politics is constituted through the production of excepted bare life. The latter, however, does not form the ground of resistance to biopolitics as such, and is recuperated from its abandoned, depoliticized condition in terms of form-of-life that forms the basis of coming politics. Esposito similarly acknowledges the inseparability of life and politics and offers a critique of the modern immunitary mechanism that separates life from its communal essence. Contrary to this negative operation of biopolitics, indexed by the power over life, Esposito illuminates the inexhaustible potential of the power of life, which forms the core of his project of affirmative biopolitics. Despite the variety of approaches, contemporary biopolitical thinkers fail to effectively examine an unpolitical perspective and view the radical detachment of life from politics as impossible or undesirable. How may we begin this task of detachment? A first step, I suggest, consists in disassociating life from the conception that has enabled it to become an object of politics in the first place. That is, we must de-objectify life. In his analysis of the modern episteme, Foucault showed how the constitution of biology aided in the scientific objectification of life, preparing the foundation for the emergence of biopolitics. How can we transcend this objectification in times 125

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when materialism dominates theoretical accounts of politics without, at the same time, establishing a new political theology? I propose to look at the work of a contemporary French philosopher Michel Henry, a thinker who has been rarely considered in relation to questions of political theory because, perhaps, his contribution vividly points out the limits of any form of political existence. In Henry’s radical phenomenology of life, we find a unique consideration of the unpolitical, the kind that is hard to come by within the works of those who can be less problematically classified as political thinkers. While Henry’s philosophy might seem irrelevant for political thought, especially regarding its more traditional questions, such as government, justice, constitution, and sovereignty, I suggest that he offers a unique way of thinking the radical outside of politics in terms of life, positively detaching it from a necessary bond with politics. He also brings to the fore an important and often overlooked question of the relationship between politics, as a form of being-in-the-world, and its outside that is revealed in the experience of living independently of the world. THE DOUBLING OF THE COGITO: HENRY’S REREADING OF DESCARTES Henry posits a question similar to that of Meillassoux: is there a reality that is not a mere double of thought, revealed merely in correlation with the domain of visibility and rational knowledge? Using psychoanalytic language, Henry asks if there is something like the unconscious as such. The concept of the unconscious, he notes, appears in modern thought “simultaneously with and as the exact consequence of the concept of consciousness” (1993, 2). What came to challenge the domain of representation and rationality appeared, ultimately, as their shadow, as otherness that cannot manifest itself independently but only as subtracted from the conscious. As a result, Henry writes, “there is no irreconcilable opposition between conscious and unconscious. The only true opposition is between them and life” (61). Life is that “great outdoors” that has been concealed by the modern, correlationist philosophies focused on the cogito, and Henry’s task consists in, first, bringing to light “the unthought ground” from which this correlationist doctrine proceeds and, second, in affirming life as the unconscious as such—a non-correlationist reality of “thought” understood as auto-affection.1 Henry describes correlation as the paradoxical project of modern critique of representation: “the more representation is criticized and contested . . . , and the more our epoch defines itself against representation . . . , the more the empire of that same representation expands to include everything” (1993, 159). This “absolute dictatorship” of representation is specifically



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conditioned by the modern forgetting of life, which, however, has never been absolute, insofar as occasionally life was “rediscovered.” But, unfortunately, even when some thinkers managed to get a glimpse of life, it was drawn back into the shadows soon enough. Descartes’ early concept of consciousness, Henry suggests, was the first such “effort toward a radical phenomenology” of life, which was only later overshadowed by his “scientific aim” and, consequently, lost. Contrary to the conventional interpretation of consciousness in Descartes as the certainty of the “I think,” Henry argues that Descartes gave this concept its “ontologically radical significance” in which it “designates appearance considered in itself . . . , the original manifestation in which everything that can exist comes to be a phenomenon” (1993, 2). It is through this rather unconventional reinterpretation of Descartes that Henry will arrive at a conclusion that life is that original manifestation that has been long displaced by the primacy of the rational thought as well as the worldly mode of manifestation. In his search for a radical beginning, Henry explains, Descartes doubts everything, including the visible world as well as eternal truths, and it is through this reduction of everything to potential nothing (the radical epochē of the world) that Descartes becomes able to consider what remains in itself: the very appearance of appearance, abstracted from everything that appears in it. Descartes will notoriously call this “pure appearance,” this radical foundation of being, “thought.” I think therefore I am. Importantly, Henry notes, in this “therefore” thought is affirmed as “the indispensable precondition necessary to the proposition of being” (1993, 13). The certainty of thinking is prior to the certainty of being. But what is the meaning of this thinking? Where does thought find its materiality? Henry argues that “thought” doubles itself as it enters the stage of modern philosophy. In a more traditional interpretation, the Cartesian cogito finds its possibility in the world; is it essentially rational understanding—the ultimate basis of the modern theories of knowledge and science. However, Henry contents, originally this cogito in Descartes refers to something else, to the radical certainty of pure appearance: a “more ancient revelation” arrived at only by the epochē of the world. In Descartes’s foundational texts the cogito refers to the “radical, almost unthinkable interiority” that constitutes “the first essence of consciousness.” The proposition “I think therefore I am” thus “refers all mediation back to ‘that type of inner knowledge (cognitione illa interna) that always precedes acquired knowledge’ ” (23). In this, according to Henry, Descartes affirms the immediate impression of seeing rather than the reflexive consciousness of rational thought and understanding. The original cogito is self-sensing thought, an immediate inner knowledge and impression, an original revelation, “the mute immanence of its first being-to-self, in the affectivity of pure self-sensing” (33) which “deserved another name, a name that indeed Descartes gave it, the

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name of ‘soul’ or . . . ‘life’ ” (40). In the sensing, in the self-affecting thought beyond thought, the Cartesian epochē accedes to the radical beginning it was seeking—“the pathetic auto-revelation of life” (Henry 2007, 253). Descartes’s proposition “videre videor” (Lat. “I seem to see”), Henry suggests, offers an example of how this irreducible manifestation of life is derived through the radical reduction of the world. After Descartes has doubted everything he sees, the whole world that is perhaps just an illusion, he nevertheless sees it, even if Descartes himself, his body, his eyes do not exist: “Yet I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed (At certe videre videor, audire, calescere)” (Descartes 1996, Second Meditation, AT VIII, 29).2 Descartes rejects seeing: due to the reduction of the world, the human eye is barred, pronounced incapable of vision, and the pure fact of seeing is denounced as well. Only the certainty of “seeming” remains, with its unique mode of manifestation: it is not that of seeing (videre) in its empirical or transcendental mode, but videor, “the primal semblance.” Seeing, however deceiving it may be, nevertheless exists in the mode of videor—“the original capacity to appear and give through which vision originally presents and manifests itself, regardless of what veracity is accorded it as vision, regardless of what it sees or believes itself to see, even regardless of seeing itself” (Henry 1993, 19). As when we are asleep and dreaming, we might feel sad or scared, imagine or see some things that are not really there; but despite the lack of reality of the object of this seeing and feeling, the affects remain real: they cannot be reduced to nothing just because it is not the actual eye that sees. This seeing as self-sensing or self-affection contrasts seeing that constitutes itself through the attainment of a worldly object. In this sense, the original essence of life’s revelation as self-sensing is irreducible to the ekstatic mode of manifestation of the world. Henry concludes by establishing a hierarchy in which sense or feeling appears before thought: “I sense that I think, therefore I am.” This means that “seeing is thinking that I see . . . but thinking that I see is sensing that I see” (21). Videor ultimately designates a seeing that senses itself seeing, “a radical interiority” that excludes videre or an ek-static seeing. The opposition between videor and videre, in sum, signals the division of thought according to two fundamental modes of manifestation: one is focused on the visible, the phenomenality of the world, whereas the other affirms the invisible, “the astonishing concept of a vision, an eye, whose essence is not light” (1993, 272). The concept of consciousness doubles itself and comes to designate both the visible and the invisible. Unfortunately, Henry maintains, the revelation of life and its invisible, acosmic (non-worldly) mode of manifestation, discovered by Descartes, was eventually lost as modern “philosophy of consciousness” abandoned the path to the original revelation of life, and moved toward “the world and its knowing, to a transcendental



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theory of knowledge and science” (3). This historical deviation resulted in the “forgetting of life,” in the loss of “the great outdoors” of representational consciousness. Henry argues that it was Kant’s critique of the Cartesian soul that sealed the forgetting of life and foreclosed “to contemporary thinkers access to what constitutes both our innermost being and its original essence” (1993, 3). Like Meillassoux, he identifies Kant’s philosophy as the moment of solidification of correlation because Kant raised “the philosophy of consciousness (as an ontology of representation. . .) to an elaborate theory of the objective universe” (3). In his examination of the insights of the “beginning Cartesianism,” as well as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, Henry addresses the loss of “the great outdoors” of representational thought by affirming, similarly to speculative realism, a radical exteriority uncorrelated to thought. However, contrary to Meillassoux, who concerns himself with the world(s) not contemporaneous with terrestrial life, for Henry this exteriority is life— an experience of “self-affection, independent of the difference between ‘subject and object,’ between ‘knower and known’ ” (1993, 164). Life is non-correlationist as it never becomes an “ob-ject of or for a subject” (4); it is real experience rooted in the immediacy of self-affection that circumvents correlation. ABSOLUTE LIFE: IMMANENCE AND AFFECTIVITY There is an irreconcilable opposition between the immanence of life and the transcendence of the world; nonetheless, this opposition does not describe their relationship exhaustively: while life’s manifestation is independent of the world, it is not the case the other way around. Henry, in his seeming dualism or even gnosticism,3 subjects the world to the primacy of life, establishing a hierarchy of their modes of manifestation: life’s manifestation is independent of representation, consciousness, thought, and politics, and is always prior to being-in-the-world (1993, 26). It is important to remember, however, that even as life is acosmic, it is “concretely experienced substance—the lived-experience of one’s own ipseity” that acquires its reality “deep within the structure of interior feelings” (Rivera 2011, 207). This affirmation of the real substantiality of life’s experience is at the core of Henry’s project of a “radical” or “material” phenomenology. Its implications for the thought of the unpolitical are apparent: life as real experience, beyond world and beyond thought, is an implicit affirmation of the radical outside of politics. But this affirmation is not established as a simple negation of worldly politics and rather subjects it to the a priori of life. It is a displacement, and not a rejection, of the political as the condition of possibility of relationality.

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Contrary to the idea that being-in-the-world, constituted by the correlation between subject and object or thought and being, is the only possible way of experiencing life (as per, for example, Heidegger’s suggestion, cf. Henry 1993, 45–46), Henry affirms that the experience of life is not only independent from correlation but actually enables it in the first place. Life is prior to the relation between thought and being insofar as “only what is alive can be affected by anything else and the world” (79). Yet, this does not establish a necessary relationship between life and thought; one who is living is not necessarily thinking-representing. In this respect, the figures of the infant and the animal exemplify the immediacy of life’s experience, its inner knowledge that excludes thought (see Henry 1993, 211, 229, 294; 2008, 128). Because the animal expresses the absence of thought and rationality that has traditionally defined the human, “it is eidetically necessary that the animal, insofar as it represents the essence of life, and life excludes thought, is determined in its being by forgetting” (Henry 1993, 211). Forgetting belongs to life and defines its radical immanence in the rejection of the ecstatic dimension in which thought moves. Thus, forgetting is not an operation of thought (something that was once present and now is gone) but an originary precondition of life’s immanence, of the inner assembly through which life coheres with itself. As Henry puts it, “in the absolute already of Life’s autarchic enjoyment lies the Immemorial, the Arch-Ancience that eludes any thought—the always already forgotten, that which lies in Arch-Forgetting” (2003, 151).4 Before there is a world, thinking, being, and memory, there is life’s Forgetting. Life’s embrace precedes everything, the world and its multiple forces, it is “the force prior to all force, the power of all power” (Henry 1993, 212) that, nevertheless, cannot think, remember or represent itself in the world. Consequently, the “hyperpower” of life is simultaneously its radical impotence, insofar as life cannot objectify itself, transcend itself, be other than itself and, most importantly, be rid of itself. To “ ‘suffer oneself’ is the structure of life” (Henry 2003, 199), not as a negative experience that needs to be eliminated, but as a mode of access to life, its proper mode of revelation. While this “absolute” life, Henry suggests, experiences itself as autarchic selfenjoyment, the radical passivity characterizes the way in which each living being relates to life and thus to itself. The pure fact of experiencing oneself or “sensing” oneself means being radically passive with respect to one’s own life: one is living, in life, not as a result of a choice or an act of will, but rather as a gift. As Henry writes, will’s essence contains its anti-essence, its inability to will or not will itself. This inability is the greatest force. . . . This force is life. It is the force of being, the edifying gathering that presents everything to itself. Such a force, which is neither action nor will. . . , is the passion of being, the primal suffering in virtue



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of which the essence of being is also that of life. After immanence and as its ultimate precondition, every philosophy of life inevitably encounters this second essential determination: affectivity.” (1993, 177)

Primal suffering, the submission to life at each moment is “unfreedom”; the very structure of life is “insurmountable passivity in regard to self” (215). Life’s hyperpower is impotence since self-destruction of the inner essence of life is impossible. Death, then, no longer defines life, and serves as a mere reminder that life is not a product of the ego’s will (one does not have an ability to choose either to not live or not die), but is bigger than the living. Through death, a living being faces the hyperpower of life and comes to terms with its own radical passivity in relation to life. The mode of revelation proper to life consists in the pure fact of experiencing oneself structured as suffering oneself. This suffering is not a negative experience but consists in bearing oneself. This experience of suffering, Henry notes, has an antinomic structure: two contrasting affective tonalities, suffering and joy, are bound together by reference to “the absolutely primitive original unity” (2003, 200). The two affective tonalities are possible only in life’s self-suffering, so that “suffering takes place and does not stop taking place within happiness, as what gives it to itself, as its internal and insurmountable condition” (201). Consequently, pure states of suffering and joy are impossible; they are inseparable from each other, they constitute each other. “Happy are those who suffer” (Henry 2007, 259). Even the one who suffers, whose form of life appears to be the most meager, is not separated from the happy, abundant life of which essence one partakes insofar as he is living. As such, “within each form of life, even the most unhappy, there is accomplished the essence of absolute Life” (Henry 2003, 205). This absolute life, in its self-suffering, delights in itself: happiness lies in the very simple fact of experiencing oneself, “in the radical immanence of this experiencing, where there is neither ‘outside’ nor ‘world’ ” (103). Life is thus “self-sufficient” insofar as its foundation is self-affection in which life exhausts itself. Life, in its pure, phenomenological bareness, is always already happy life. Suffering and joy, these different affective tonalities, constitute “the unique essence of being, as life, as the original self-experience in self-growth of self-delight” (Henry 1993, 232). In suffering, the self plunges into the power which established it, becomes submerged in “the intoxication of life” (Henry 2007, 259). Perhaps, this life’s immediate delight in itself is what Aristotle meant by the natural sweetness of zoē and Agamben by “happy life,” to which humans “are irremediably and painfully assigned.” Form-of-life, then, is life’s painful but irremediable assignment to happiness, which Agamben also calls “sufficient” life (in the sense of good enough), and which, following Henry, we can further qualify as an intoxicating and always abundant life.

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If the experience of life is always both, happiness and suffering, “bare life” emerges in a positive light: it can never be purely unhappy insofar as it is life. What does its bareness signify if life can never be reduced to pure suffering? Perhaps, at this point, we must question the very notion of bare life. Is it a mere thought experiment that never appears in experience, or is life, in its essence, nothing but bare life that is exhausted in its self-suffering and self-enjoyment and is not more than that? In the latter case, bare life is simply life-as-such, not different in its essence from form-of-life insofar as there is no other life than life. No living being is outside of life and thus no living is deprived of life’s delight: as life is radically immanent, it does not vary in quality, and so everyone has an equal “share” of life, is equally alive regardless of her relation to the polis. In sum, Henry’s notion of life is integral, meaning that life is immanent to itself and indivisible. Life is “an auto-revelation”: it “carries no divide or gap within it and never differs from itself” (2007, 247). Therefore, it becomes practically impossible to conceptually distinguish between something like “naked” and “qualitative” life, as in both cases it is the very same life that, regardless of its modalities, and even in the most humble of its impressions, remains the same and is one with itself. THE UNPOLITICAL FORM-OF-LIFE: INDIVISIBILITY OF LIFE AND THE LIVING Life is not only one with itself, but also with what reveals itself in it—“the living” (vivant)5—the only real form that life ever takes. There is no life without the living and there is no living that finds its “source” in something other than life; consequently, life is always already form-of-life. Life is anterior to the living: as there is no living without life, there is no life without the living; “life . . . resides inside, in every living being, as that which causes it to live and never leaves it for as long as it lives” (Henry 2007, 249, 250). Importantly, “the living” or “a living being,” for Henry, signifies “life which experiences itself, and not just a complex set of material processes which know nothing of themselves” (2007, 250). Both life and the living have nothing to do with the visible, objective processes denoted as “life” by the sciences, and biology in particular. The scientific substitution of material processes for life constitutes nothing but forgetting or even murder, rather than knowledge, of life. Living, for Henry, is possible only outside the world, but neither living nor world are possible apart from life. The relationship between life and the living, then, is not that of scientific knowledge, it is not a relationship between a subject and an object, but an immanent, immediate relation of oneness. This unity, nevertheless, does not mean total identity because while the living coincides with life, life is always more than the living.



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Henry describes the relationship between life and the living as “generation” and “birth”: from life’s viewpoint, it is generation, and from the living’s, it is birth (Henry 2003, 51; see also Rivera 2011). If there is any knowledge involved in this relationship, it is an immediate self-knowledge of life that knows itself and that it embraces without uttering a word. “Life,” Henry writes, “knows itself without knowing it” (2003, 232); it is “knowledge” merely in the same sense as it is “thought”: immediate self-sensing that circumvents representation and objectification. Taking this into consideration, we can agree with Agamben that “thought” is indeed form-of-life, insofar as thought is but another name for life’s self-revelation. Like Henry, Agamben contends that “to think does not mean merely to be affected by this or that thing . . . but rather at once to be affected by one’s own receptiveness” (1996, 153). However, contrary to Agamben’s assertion of the political essence of thought and form-of-life, Henry’s relational unity of life and the living, I argue, is distinctly unpolitical, since life manifests itself in the inner certainty of feeling and never in the world, and, as a result, never in politics. Life is an always already unpolitical form-of-life. The unpolitical, immanent relationship of life and the living, when viewed from the perspective of the world, is also, paradoxically, a non-relation, solitude or being-without. As Henry explains, the experience of the living self emerges only in life, “the living being is thrown into life, inasmuch as life, by throwing itself into life, throws the living being into life.” The relation of the living self to itself is then seemingly posited by “an other”—life. However, simultaneously, “this relation to oneself designates the absence of any relation” because this otherness “is in the first place nothing posited or thought of as other, . . . is nothing that goes beyond what emerges within this relation to oneself” (2008, 132). The other is nothing other than the self, and the living is nothing more than life. Henry writes: The ground on which I stand is never larger than the two feet that cover it. That is the mystery of life: the living being is coextensive with all of the life within it; everything within it is its own life. The living being is not founded on itself; instead, it has a basis in life. This basis, however, is not different from itself; it is the auto-affection in which it auto-affects itself and thus with which it is identical. (132)

Life is never other than itself; even in a living being it retains the unity of its own essence, it “remains alone with itself” (Henry 1973, 284). This relationship of life to itself is a non-relation inasmuch as there is no other toward which life extends itself. The other in this relationship is life itself: what relates and what is being related to are the same. Life’s relation to itself and the living is that of an immediate bond. Henry calls this unity of life’s essence “solitude”: “the relation of the essence with itself . . . is a relation such that in

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it the essence rejoices concerning itself, has the experience of itself, reveals itself to itself in that which it is, such as it is. That which has the experience of self, that which enjoys itself and is nothing other than this pure enjoyment of itself, than this pure experience of self is life. Solitude is the essence of life” (285). While the world is grounded in the relation to objects and requires an extension of self toward otherness, the acosmic relation of life to itself is solitude and non-relation when viewed from the perspective of the world. And only when this immediate relation is mediated through the world, only then it requires an elaboration in different terms, constituting a task for political thought. While an interpretation of the human as an inherently political being is a familiar motive in political philosophy, Henry’s affirmation of life’s essential solitude lays the ground for an unpolitical conception of humanity: the cogito or logos, which has been used to define humanity, is exhausted in videor and, as a result, it requires a re-definition of the human as “living” rather than thinking being (1993, 321). The human must be understood as grounded in life rather than as something more than a merely living being. Such a misconception of the human, Henry argues, originated in Greece: in the classic conception, “a man is more than a living (vivant), a man is a living endowed with Logos. . . . It follows, reciprocally, that life is less than man, or in any event less than what makes his humanity” (2003, 50). This conception of the human as more than life seemingly forms the core of Agamben’s distinction between zoē and bios. The mere living part of “man” (zoē) has traditionally been considered insufficient to constitute his humanity (bios), requiring an added connection to logos and, consequently, to the polis and its world. Contrary to this tradition, Henry argues that life is always more than a human being, more than reason and language, and so “it is from Life, not from man [and his politics], that we must begin” (51). The hierarchy established here is between life and the living, and no longer between different empirically identifiable forms of life that are supposedly qualitatively different from each other due to the presence of an additional attribute—logos. We begin from life and not from the human in order to avoid a substitution of humanity for life as well as a reduction of life to humanity which, according to Henry, was also Heidegger’s mistake, for whom “man” was the necessary guardian of the truth of being (1993, 96). “Life,” Heidegger writes, “in its own right, is a kind of Being, but essentially it is only accessible in Dasein” (Heidegger in Henry 2003, 45). This is essentially a correlationist statement: as life’s revelation is reduced to human receptivity, it loses its independence and becomes a correlate of human (representative) consciousness, a mere object for a human subject. What Henry asserts, in response, is the primacy of life, where the human arrives only as an addition to the already accomplished essence of life. As a result, “man” cannot add anything to life,



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to its quality, and so he cannot be more than simply living. And since living, in Henry’s terms, is not possible in the world, man as living does not refer to “the ecstatically appearing individual” (who is ever alienated from and just a stranger to himself) but to “the individual who as suffering-Self coincides with the foundation of things” (1993, 265), and so appears in the disappearance of logos. THE UNPOLITICAL COMMUNITY OF LIFE How does Henry’s conception of the human as living, grounded in life’s essential affective solitude, translate into community, and how does the essential non-relation manifest itself intersubjectively? The answer lies in Henry’s notion of “community of life” that, I argue, is an unpolitical community that appears prior to any form of political togetherness. There are two types of intersubjectivity: relations mediated through the world and relations formed in life. Relations that emerge in the world are intentional and mediated by perception and thought; as a result, Henry suggests, it is not the real other that is involved in these relations but “the other in thought” or “a quasiother” (2008, 102). Vital relations, on the contrary, are “nonintentional,” not grounded in representation, but “put Life into play.” These relations are constituted as relations “with Life” and draw their essence from it (2003, 61). Real intersubjectivity is thus formed only in life: before being placed in being, in the world, every living being is placed in life, and it is there that the relationship with the other begins. Importantly, since radical powerlessness characterizes every living self, this self cannot be the point of departure in relations with others; finding its origin in life, the self can establish its relations with others only in life. The self, however, can mistakenly take itself for the origin of this relation and even of its own life, resulting in the “transcendental illusion of the ego.” Henry suggests that contemporary societies embrace such a “system of transcendental egoism . . . [where] each person is concerned with the other only with a view of himself” (255). Against this “normal” situation characteristic of modernity, Henry argues that the real relations with others are possible only in life, and when life is forgotten, community becomes equally impossible. Real intersubjectivity is based in the recognition of the in-common of the living, of the fact of being simply “livings, carrying this life in them,” “sharing” in the essence and the gift of life (Henry 2003, 254, 257). Life is selfgivenness insofar as it is what gives and what is given; consequently, since it is life that gives, living beings “can only have a share of this gift in life. This is what constitutes the essence of every possible community. . . . What is shared in common is not some thing; instead, it is this original givenness as

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self-givenness. It is the internal experience that brings to life everything that is” (Henry 2008, 120; emphasis added). The essence of the in-common is life and, consequently, community is always a community of living beings who equally share in this gift of life. “Community is an a priori” (131) insofar as living beings are thrown into life, into the shared experience of living. There is no “part of no part” among them: every living has an equal “share” of life and cannot be separated from it. Furthermore, given the transcendental affectivity of life’s essence, Henry concludes that “real being with the other occurs in us as an affect” and not as representation (2008, 115). Each member of community relates to others through life before being related through world, and since life escapes thought and can only be experienced as pure affectivity, this “primal experience [of community] is barely conceivable” (133). In the community of life, Henry writes, the living being is neither for itself nor for the other; it is only a pure experience, without a subject, without a horizon, without a meaning, and without an object. It experiences both itself—the basis (fond) of life—and the other, inasmuch as the other likewise has this basis. It thus does experience the other in itself but on this basis, in terms of the other’s own experience of this basis. Both the self and the other have a basis in this experience. But neither the self nor the other represents it to themselves. The community is a subterranean affective layer. Each one drinks the same water from this source and this wellspring, which it itself is. But, each one does so without knowledge and without distinguishing between the self, the other, and the basis. (133; emphasis added)

The experience of the in-common occurs as pure, invisible experience of life’s relentless arrival unto itself and so the arrival of each one unto herself. The essence of community and life is not something that is but rather “occurs and does not cease occurring,” it is a “process without end, a constant movement” (Henry 2003, 55). The movement of life coincides with the movement of the in-common, where no living is separated from life’s movement of selfrevelation. Since life is a process without end, the community of life does not have an end, both in the sense of termination and a goal. The only “end” of the community of life is life itself. This community of life, I suggest, is unpolitical: the subterranean affective layer never appears in the world of politics, either as the state or “the political.” It is, importantly, in no way pre-political, tending toward the telos of politicization; it is rather indifferent to any political expression of its essential relationality, even as it always conditions this very expression and forms its real content. The pure experience of life’s community and the thinking of this community remain related, insofar as life conditions politics and thought, and unrelated, insofar as life remains essentially indifferent to its worldly



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representations. As Henry puts it, “To those thoughts of life, however, and although they all come from it, life remains indifferent” (1993, 10). The essence of community is life, the essence of community is affectivity. Every community is a community of living beings. Life does not require the human but only the living, and the living is not reducible to “man.” As a result, Henry argues, “the community is not limited to humans alone. It includes everything that is defined in itself by the primal suffering of life and thus by the possibility of suffering. We can suffer with everything that suffers. This pathos-with is the broadest form of every conceivable community” (2008, 133–34). This community of life cannot be known or thought but, nevertheless, remains intelligible and available to experience solely “on the basis of the primal intelligibility of pathos” (134). This sort of intelligibility implies equality of the living in their access to community based on the primal suffering of life, opening this community to a variety of non-human forms. Community of life, then, essentially contains post-humanist potential.6 It is important to note that Henry might disagree with an interpretation of life and community as unpolitical, since for him the recognition of the immanence of life’s revelation requires an overcoming of its alienation from communal as well as political essence. Henry develops this point in his analysis of Karl Marx. He describes Marx’s project of the early philosophical manuscripts as “the critique of political essence” (1983, 17–53), in which he rejects the Hegelian view of the state, since the life of individuals for him is irreducible to the ideal essence of universality. For Marx, it is people that make the state, and not the other way around; “political substance is founded in them [in their living praxis] rather than itself founding them” (25). Marx reverses the relationship between the individual and political essence, and so claims “to conquer the transcendence of the political,” demanding that “the substance of the State [i.e., politics] become the individuals’ very life” (32). Politics thus belongs to life and its radical immanence, and social analysis must now be framed as a philosophy of immanence. “The political element is the essence, but precisely because it is the essence it cannot be separated from us” (33). Henry suggests that Marx’s refusal to circumscribe political essence within the sphere of the state ultimately results in the reduction of the totality of the real to politics—in the total politicization of life. This politicization, however, is no longer external but springs from life itself. “The political essence,” Henry writes, “is the essence and the ultimate reality of the real” (40). As a result, the individual and society in their very reality become “political.” If for Hegel political essence was located beyond individuals, for Henry’s Marx the political is immanent to their lives. The real and the ideal are homogeneous. “The essence of the individual is the political essence” (48). Since politics implies sharing, in Henry’s reading of Marx “the individual is in the people like a fish in water, and his substance lies only in the social

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substance” (1983, 296). The individual, as long as his essence is life and living praxis, is inseparable from the community of life to which all living beings belong. Marx’s thought places us before the question: “What is life?” (306) and a part of the answer to this question lies in acknowledging life’s immanent essence as always already social, in a sense of sharing life, partaking in the gift of life. What I want to point out here is my disagreement with Henry on the question of the political essence of life. Even though I strongly agree that life is in its essence shared and so constitutes an a priori community, I hesitate to call it political. The form of sharing of the living in life, in my view, remains unpolitical because their relations in life abandon the space of the in-between, which is the place where politics takes place. Living beings partake in life’s shared essence immediately, without the intervention of worldly transcendence, and so their relations remain unpolitical and indifferent to any form of politicization. The moment we decouple political being from its constitutive relationship with the world, and so pronounce life essentially political (as Henry seems to do in Marx), in that moment we reconstitute the totalizing ambition of the political, which, I believe, is a task contrary to Henry’s own intention of affirming life’s primacy over the world, as well as its unique, acosmic mode of manifestation. Even as Henry offers a uniquely unpolitical view of life, in his analysis of Marx he succumbs to the all too familiar desire for the political. This politicization, however, does not seem to be present in his later works that implicitly support the unpolitical interpretation of life advanced in this chapter. How does unpolitical, affective community of life relate to the world? Henry argues that when, “instead of being carried out ‘unconsciously’ as a pure affect in the immediacy of life, the relation between the living occurs through the mediation of the world . . . a new dimension of experience emerges that must be described in its own terms” (2008, 133). The latter, I suggest, are political terms. But what kind of politics are we talking about here and based on what premises? We get a sense of an answer to this question in Henry’s occasional distinction between two kinds of worlds (none of which, importantly, refers to something like the other world in a sense of an after world): “the abstract” and “the real” or “absolute” world (see, Henry 1973, 291; 2008, 134). While the abstract world is the world that excludes life, “the world that does not exist and has put subjectivity out of play” (2008, 134), the real world is the cosmos “for which every element . . . exists ultimately as auto-affective” (134). It exists in and through the pathetic (affective) community, it unfolds on the basis of the immanent movement of life. So, when we deal with the worldly mediation of the unconscious, pure experience of life, and community, there are two ways we can go about it: we can either uphold the essential opposition between life and the visible world,



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falling into a dogmatic dualism, or we can move toward a more positive account of a world grounded in living relationality. It is from life, not from the world, that we must begin. To begin from life does not mean to exclude the world, but calls for a change of perspective. As Simon Jarvis puts it, “We do not need to put out our eyes in order to listen to the voice of life; we do not need to imagine a dead world in order to protect a living subject” (2009, 374). The world that claims primacy over life does not know life, while the world that acknowledges its basis in life is a world “without lie” (Henry 1973, 291). We encounter a different sort of “vision” here, vision that is auto-affective, that immediately knows itself as a nonvision, and which, however, is not mere blindness, but is really experienced. The real world is built on the assumption that “in seeing, there is always a nonseeing and thus something unseen that altogether determines it” (Henry 2008, 134). This nonseeing is life. Consequently, in order to think the political experience (i.e., relationships mediated through the world), and in order to avoid the problems of correlationism, we must begin with the unpolitical, which is life. The forgetting of life would always result in philosophical correlationism as well as “barbarism” (Henry 2012), in the same way as the forgetting of the unpolitical would result in the perpetuation of the problem of total politicization. THE FORGETTING OF LIFE AND THE UNPOLITICAL There are two “kinds” of forgetting. The first is essential forgetting: life is not susceptible to being known, thought, and envisioned; life is “ArchForgetting.” The second is historical forgetting: once modern scientific methods of knowledge are prioritized, once science becomes the basis of access to truth, the reality of life is forgotten. There are several themes in Henry’s works that address modern “ways of slandering life,” which, I argue, correspond to the forms of politicization of life. The historical forgetting of life can be separated into three major interconnected tendencies: scientific, philosophical, and psychoanalytic. Correspondingly, I distinguish between the following ways of forgetting the unpolitical: the invention of biopolitics, the prioritization of being-with over life’s solitude, and the construction of the concept of the political as the negative unconscious of representational politics. Scientific forgetting and biopolitics. The inauguration of modern science, according to Henry, was marked by “the Galilean decision”: the “mathematization of the universe” that excluded subjective impressions from its field and focused solely on objects and their visible qualities. It left “outside its field of interest the decisive phenomenological question of knowing whether there exists a mode of revelation other than that in which the phenomena of the

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world give themselves to us” (Henry 2003, 46). Modern science laid ground for the forgetting of life by giving primacy to the study of the phenomena of the world, which above all characterizes biology that studies “living” organisms. Henry argues that once life becomes the object of biology, we no longer know it: in biology “there is no life; there are only algorithms” and “the infrangible pathētik embrace” of life is reduced to “material particles” that experience nothing and are, in principle, incapable of doing so (38, 39). As consequence, science is forced to say what it really cannot say, is forced to speak of life even though it does not know life. In this shift of focus, modern science does not merely forget but “murders” life by depriving it of its unique mode of self-revelation and reducing “everything that lives, and experiences itself as living, to a set of blind processes [functions like nutrition, mobility, metabolism, etc.] and to death” (39). In the end, the emergence of biology with its “synthetic” notion of life, which signals, as per Foucault’s suggestion, the inauguration of biopolitics, simultaneously signals the emergence of thanatopolitics. The biopolitical objectification of life is essentially the murder of life. Because biology knows nothing of life, it only ever encounters living beings reduced to their “bare” objectivity. Due to the reduction of life to objective phenomena, it is living beings or “living organisms as objective empirical beings appearing in the world” (2003, 46), and not life, that become the object of science and biopolitics. Such substitution indexes an attempt at an interruption of the relationship between life and the living: the living, understood as a mere living organism, is separated from its origin in transcendental life, and so it becomes possible to conceptualize life as “a force inaccessible in its essence” (cf. Foucault 1994, 272). The inauguration of modern biopolitics coincides with the emergence of biology and the human sciences, and since sciences do not know life, biopolitics puts into question and cares merely for the objective processes associated with the biological existence of organisms and the species. Biopolitics is a politics of care for natural or biological “life” and not life as such. In the forgetting of life, biopolitics extends its totalizing embrace under the assumption that politics has the capacity to extend everywhere, over every “bit” of life, which only results in separating life from itself. A strategy of resistance to biopolitics, then, exemplified by Henry’s philosophy, consists in “remembering” life, in the affirmation of the unique mode of revelation of life in self-affection and the inseparability of life and the living. Philosophical forgetting and being-with. The philosophical approach that “slanders” life, Henry suggests, “oscillates between the confusion of the living with a being made manifest through being-in-the-world and the definition of the phenomenality proper to the living by attributing to it a . . . form of this same being-in-the-world” (2003, 50). This approach substitutes



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a being manifest in the world for the living and suggests that the only form of manifestation of life and the living is possible as being-in-the-world. We have access to life only in and through the world. Like science, philosophy abandons and even negates the question of an acosmic mode of revelation (47). Henry suggests that this tendency in Western thought reaches its “endpoint” in the philosophy of Heidegger. The latter springs from the radical negation of life’s essence, of the self-revelation foreign to the world, and so “signifies nothing less than the impossibility of any form of life, and thus amounts to the murder of life—not accidentally but rather in principle” (46). Such thinking again contributes to the constitution of modern politics as thanatopolitics built on the “murder” of life. Insofar as access to life is presupposed to be possible only through the world and in the form of Dasein (which, as Nancy has shown, is essentially Mitsein), we witness a constitution of the ground of a community that is centred around the principle of worldly togetherness. Being, as in biology, is substituted for life, however, the emphasis lies not on its organismic character but on its appearance in the world’s light. The relation between a being and life is thus established only in and through the world, and those who do not have a world are not truly living. From this perspective, the living “enters into the condition of living” not thanks to life but “only because he is open to the world”; he does not have an immediate access to life but requires the light of the world. Consequently, a gap is introduced between the living and life that makes it possible to speculate about the level, degree or quality of life within a certain living being. Access to the world’s horizon of light becomes the key to the attainment of “qualitative” or “good” life, of proper human life in a community, which is the only life that, as Agamben has shown, ultimately counts. Reduction of life’s manifestation to being-in-the-world results in its total and unavoidable politicization where being-with commands over the notions of life and community. A strategy of exceeding the philosophical politicization of life consists in opening to the “truth” of life, to its original mode of revelation in selfaffection. From this perspective, even that which does not have a world can be fully living, can be a part of the unpolitical community of life, since the multiplicity of the forms of living and their relations find their condition not in being-with of the world but in life’s pathos, essential “solitude” or “beingwithout.” Moreover, from the perspective of Henry’s “transcendental life,” Aristotle’s classical distinction (that Heidegger did not overcome) between humans, beasts, and gods no longer holds, and neither does Agamben’s distinction between zoē, bios, and bare life. We are left with a positive notion of the unpolitical form-of-life that indexes an integral, acosmic, and posthumanist understanding of life and its community, an understanding that arises in the wake of Henry’s philosophical project.

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Psychoanalytic forgetting and the political. The third way of forgetting life is similar to the other two since it rests on the familiar denial of the specificity of life’s mode of revelation. In Henry’s words, it “makes life the metaphysical principle of the universe, but by stripping it of the capacity to reveal itself, to experience and live, by stripping it of its essence,” and so turning life into “a blind entity” (2003, 50) that received the name of “unconscious.” I call this approach psychoanalytic since the concept of the unconscious figures prominently as the inaugural concept of the science of psychoanalysis. The core of this approach consists in recognition of the limits of consciousness and representation, and the acknowledgement of an unconscious force that is responsible for the activity of the human psyche. Henry suggests that the unconscious, a vital force that radically refuses ecstatic phenomenality and defines the psyche’s essence, discovered, for instance, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud, is life (1993, 286). However, their affirmation of this force did not go as far as to grant life its own mode of appearance; inasmuch as life is alien to representation, “it finds itself deprived of the power of accomplishing in and through itself the work of revelation—it becomes blind and unconscious” (2003, 49). For these thinkers, life comes to define the psyche’s essence only as a force that secretly moves underneath the surface, but never shows itself and cannot be known as such. In the absence of vision, life does not experience and know itself; it is un-conscious, the reverse of that which represents, and as such it is “unknown, unknowable, and unknowing, and its mode of being is blindness” (1993, 147). Since this unconscious cannot be experienced as such, as, for instance, Schopenhauer and Freud conclude, in order to unravel its mystery, in order for it to be something rather than nothing, it has to be brought to the light of consciousness, it has to be represented. Life appears blind only when it is defined from the perspective of vision and representational consciousness. The un-conscious here means unmanifest in terms of representation: it is un-representable, it is blindness that, in its essence, is nothing more than mere absence of seeing. The unconscious is thus by definition bound to or correlated with consciousness, it is its “exact consequence.” Such a conception of life, Henry suggests, bears important consequences: “A blind and unconscious life, a life that desires without knowing what it desires and without even knowing that it desires, is an absurd life. An absurd, blind, unconscious power, life can then be charged with every crime. In its murderous frenzy, entering millions of times into a struggle against itself, it becomes the source of all that ravages the universe” (2003, 49). Put otherwise, from the murder of life follows the conclusion that life is itself murderous: it is a secret force that kills from within, that turns against itself. Life, as such a negative unconscious, is essentially death. Contrary to this view of life as the negative unconscious, Henry shows that the “ontological concept of the unconscious” has two different meanings:



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“representational unconscious” outlined above, and the unconscious that refers to life’s essence—“pure unconsciousness as such” (1993, 287, 297). The former is nothing but the barred consciousness (“the pure and simple negation of phenomenality”), where “the bar placed on phenomenality concerns only representational phenomenality.” This negation, however, inadvertently “liberates appearance’s original dimension in which being reveals itself to itself outside and independent of ek-stasis, in the radical immanence of its self-affection as life” (287). This is pure unconsciousness as such, the experience of life that is, paradoxically, never truly unconscious insofar as affect never remains unrevealed or unexperienced. This unconscious that refers to life’s essence is also never blind as it immediately knows and experiences itself in the movement of self-revelation that desires and rejoices in itself. While the psychoanalytic reduction of life to blind and unconscious force results in the forgetting of life through its subjection to the power of representation, it also signals life’s politicization. What is essentially unpolitical, the a priori of the world, is deprived of its power to reveal itself except as the obverse, a wound or an interruption of politics anchored in representation. Many concepts that signify the excess of traditional politics (including “the political” and “the impolitical”) and that could potentially account for the unpolitical, are constructed primarily in terms of the political unconscious. As a result, “remembering” life’s specific, non-worldly mode of manifestation offers a strategy of limiting the totalizing tendency of the political. In the context of the forgetting of life and total politicization, a project of remembering life might be interpreted as a turning away from the world, an antipolitical theological project. It is important to remember, however, that this difficult task of affirming life’s invisible essence is not a rejection of the world, but “is the means of access to what is real in that world—to the unique reality” (2003, 242). In the words of Karl Hefty, the phenomenality of life provides no way of escape from the world; nor does this phenomenality perform the task of “a formal and empty negation of the world.” . . . On the contrary, Henry sees unfolded, at the foundation of the world, “the horizon of a pure world,” not another world, but “this world without laceration” (ce monde sans déchirement), in which, in his words, “is inaugurated our vital communication with the Being of nature.” (2007, 238–39)

The “world without laceration,” “the world without the lie,” “an absolute world [un monde absolu]” (Henry 1973, 290, 291), I argue, is a basis for a conception of a living politics or, rather, “a politics of the living” (Henry 2004) since the relations mediated through such a “world”7 retain the connection with their vital essence. Henry’s affirmation of the world “without the lie” is a critique of the modern world that forgets life, and it also contributes to the unpolitical critique of the totalizing tendency of modern politics as it

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urges us to not only think beyond (bio)politics, but to also realize that we always already live in the reality of this “beyond.” CONCLUSION: A POLITICS OF THE LIVING The totalizing ambition of the political encounters its real limit in the transcendental life that is experienced by everything that lives. The relation that every living has to itself through acosmic self-affection and which constitutes the first point of resistance to the operation of power, remains beyond the reach of any form of politics and the political. Life and the living persist in their indifference to politics. Even though they are manifest prior to politics, they are not pre-political but unpolitical, since there is no necessary tendency in them to become political. But this does not mean that politics will remain indifferent to life. The very act of theorizing unpolitical life might be considered as a political engagement, inasmuch as theory engages that kind of “thought” that relates to the world. However, it is my contention that thinking life from an unpolitical perspective does not bring it back under the complete rule of politics; on the contrary, it attunes political vision to “foreign territory,” to the reality that conditions politics and stubbornly remains beyond its reach. The acknowledgement of this limit also holds a promise for the renewal of political thought, for the enrichment of social relationality that would take into account the invisible, inner aspect of every living being, and for the elevation of ethical ways of life to the level where they can compete with politics in their presentation of models of togetherness that take life as their starting point and hold the potential to extend beyond humanity. An exploration of a positive relationship between the world and life constitutes one of the major problems for renewed political thought, the thought that emerges with and after Henry. An important part of such exploration lies along the line of the relationship between essentially invisible life and its visible forms, as the invisible essence of life conditions worldly appearance but by no means denies it. We find in Henry several suggestions for considering the connection between life’s essence and its positive manifestation in and through the world. Even though he argues that, for instance, action’s visible form is but an “empty shell” of the real action of life (1993, 139), once life is “remembered,” the connection between life and the world, which is always already there unconsciously, is re-established consciously: the affectivity of life is no longer rendered a blind force. Henry writes in this regard: “the more intensely life experiences itself in the pathos of its suffering and joy, the more lively, the more luminous, the more intelligible, are the images in which it projects itself. This world-truth, affectivity’s production and radical determination of representation, is brought to light by every form of art” (1993, 269).



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As it appears that the invisible essence of life is capable of projecting itself in the world without losing itself, this raises an interesting question: if art is essentially living art, what does it imply for the art of living—a visible form of life rendered as art? Can we say that living, from this perspective, is an aesthetic project, a form of art that finds its ultimate condition in life? The question of the relationship between invisible life and its visible forms, between life’s “truth” and the “lie” of the world can be also seen in terms of the return to a problem of “true life,” which for a long time had been a major philosophical question and became irrelevant only when science laid its claim on truth. Foucault, in this regard, dedicated his last series of lectures at the Collège de France (2011) to an investigation of the question of true life or ethical parrhēsia, of the way of living as an object of care (epimeleia), of “the aesthetics of existence.” He focused on the Cynics’ way of living as an example of “true life” understood as “an other life” (une vie autre), life that is radically and paradoxically other, striving for “an other world” (un monde autre) (244). This way of living (which, in the case of the Cynics, exhibits the truth of life partially as the bareness of life) manifests itself as a constant critique of this world, a world given at any particular point in history. Despite significant differences, we can notice here some similarities between Foucault’s and Henry’s projects, both of which, I believe, are dedicated to a search for something like “true life” that is defined by its relation to “an other” or “an absolute” world. Considering Foucault’s examination of the problem of true life in terms of the aesthetics of existence and Henry’s assertion of art as a privileged way of life’s self-projection into the world, it would be interesting to further investigate the political potential of life’s positive relationship with a world in a sense of true life—a visible form of living in which the unpolitical form-of-life projects itself. The question of true life, at the intersection of Henry’s and Foucault’s works, addresses the possibility of something like “a politics of the living,” in terms of both collective and subjective ethical experience of living in the “world without the lie,” without the forgetting of life, which is essentially “an other world,” a world devoid of biopolitics. NOTES 1. It can be argued that Henry does not solve the problem of correlation but rather represents a case of “fideism” that, in its search for the limit of consciousness and intentionality, turns to mystical and pious donation, something forever beyond human thought (see, Meillassoux 2008, 48). This argument can be addressed in at least two ways. First, this “piety” (life) as Henry wants to think it, however inaccessible to thought, is, nevertheless, not evacuated of content, it is not a mere incapacity of reason; life is a real, positive experience of self-affection. Second, as James Williams (2008) points out, fideism’s devolution to “wholly-other” is incompatible with

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Henry’s argument that is “explicitly and firmly opposed to any notion of the ‘WhollyOther’ . . . [and is based] on immanence rather than absolute transcendence. . . . For Henry, faith is not at all a question of a mysterious transcendent donation, but rather stems from the argument that life is given to itself as auto-affectivity determining a selfhood which is given to itself” (274). 2. Considering that the tense of the verb videor is passive, a more accurate English translation of videre videor would be “I see myself seeing” or “I have seen myself seeing.” This articulation of the passivity of videor better reflects Henry’s emphasis on the radical passivity of life in a sense of receptivity. 3. On the problem of dualism or Gnosticism of Henry’s thought, see, for example, Rivera (2011); Steinbock (1999); Williams (2008). 4. A comparison can be drawn between Meillassoux’s notion of “arche-fossil” and Henry’s “Arch-Ancience,” both of which refer to the reality prior to the inauguration of human world and thought. While arche-fossil refers to a pre-historical artifact that testifies to the events that occurred in the past and were not manifest to anyone, Arch-Ancience refers to an ahistorical principle, suggesting that life’s manifestation is prior to being. Life is the always already forgotten not as something that preceded human history and the world, but what continues beyond thought in every historical present and conditions this thought. The arche-fossil is a visible fact of that which once did not appear to anyone (thus was relatively invisible) but is still presumed to have existed (since it exists, is visible to us now); Arche-Ancience is invisible in its essence, it never appears as an object to anyone, neither before nor after the inauguration of the world. 5. “The living” and “a living being” are common translations of the French term vivant. The translation of vivant as “a living being” might seem less accurate considering Henry’s emphasis on the distinction between life (vie) and being (être); as a result, it is worth keeping in mind that in this translation the emphasis falls on “living” rather than on “being.” The living is further differentiated from the empirical living beings or organisms. 6. Henry, unfortunately, does not develop this potential in his writings. For a discussion of the post-humanist aspect of Henry’s notion of community see Gschwandtner (2012); Viriasova (2015). 7. There are two notions of “world” in Henry: while one refers to the visible world, the other—cosmos—is a world of life, internal and invisible (cf. Yamagata 1999, 247). Henry employs the concept of “the cosmos” in his work on the art of Kandinsky (2009). He suggests that the cosmos is revealed only in affect, and quotes Kandinsky in this regard: “ ‘The world . . . sounds. It is a cosmos of spiritually affective beings. Thus, dead matter is living spirit.’ This is why painting, for example, is not the figure of external things but the expression of their internal reality, their tonality, or what Kandinsky calls ‘the inner sound,’ an experience of forces and affects” (2008, 134). Art becomes for Henry a unique practice that brings life’s self-experience to “light” because it always springs from life’s feeling (see Henry 1993, 269).

Chapter 8

Decolonizing Political Thought: Buddhist Compassion at the Limits of Western Politics

The preceding chapters have so far addressed the question of political exteriority from within the framework of Western philosophy, exploring the potential of thinking the unpolitical in terms of the uncorrelated experience of transcendental life and affect, as well as “things” and “worlds” that preexist or arise after human thought. While this exploration does not exhaust the potential of Western philosophy, an important step in furthering this discussion, I believe, lies beyond the confines of Western sociopolitical ontology. This is an increasingly timely endeavor considering the growing commitment to the values of multiculturalism and decolonization in academic research, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. So far, not enough has been accomplished in this direction, specifically regarding questions of political ontology. The contributions from non-Western traditions have been primarily addressed by scholars of religious studies, anthropology, comparative literature, and comparative philosophy. In the domain of political studies, we have also witnessed the growing influence of non-Western perspectives, especially Islamic and indigenous, crystalizing in a novel field of research commonly referred to as comparative political theory. However, many scholars do not have a clear idea of what this field entails, resulting in an overly compartmentalized approach to non-Western traditions of thought that often relies on “us” versus “them” (or “familiar” vs “alien”) thinking and is ultimately framed by the Western conceptual apparatus.1 Some have argued that an intervention into this situation must begin by challenging the existing comparative methodology (see March 2009; Godrej 2009). In agreement with this approach, I see cross-contamination between different political ontologies as a productive model for comparative political theory. The comparative approach has often demanded a sort of theoretical purity from both interlocutors before they enter into conversation, because 147

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comparison typically requires preexisting identities and the fixed characteristics of that which is being compared. The method of cross-contamination, to the contrary, is essentially relational and so eliminates the need for purity and preexisting identity since it challenges the very boundary between inside and outside. From this perspective, one need not be fully embedded in a certain tradition of thought before engaging in conversation with another, but only need be in sufficient proximity to make contamination possible. This is the general approach that the present chapter will assume in comparing Western and non-Western approaches to political exteriority. What happens when we open Western ontology to challenge as well as to conversation-contamination with non-Western traditions that, from the very beginning, had assigned to politics a secondary, if not altogether marginal, role? The problem of the totalizing ambition of the political seems to dissipate. However, this is not going to happen as long as the insights of such traditions do not contaminate the basic premises of Western political ontology. Among non-Western traditions that, I believe, are particularly relevant regarding the question of the unpolitical are indigenous and Buddhist philosophies, both of which present a relational view of being and life. Indigenous ontologies, in their undeniable variety, exhibit a common element: they have a distinctively nonhuman-centric view of being, life, and community.2 Displacing the human from the central position in the web of living relations radically extends the space of politics and sociality. This opening can be interpreted in two ways: either in the familiar terms of total politicization or, alternatively, as a displacement or devalorization of the political. Despite the fact that nowadays politics indeed plays an important role for indigenous peoples, especially as it offers the promise of rectifying past injustices, and we can clearly speak of indigenous politics, it remains unclear whether one could possibly identify politics as a specific sphere of concern within indigenous communities prior to the colonial encounter. The difficulty of examining the latter possibility is obvious: considering the predominantly oral tradition of indigenous peoples, it would be difficult to reach any definitive answer regarding the role of politics in precolonial times. However, despite these limitations, some scholars have argued that the sociopolitical structures of indigenous peoples have indeed been traditionally very different from Western models and that is why we need a different conceptual apparatus to engage them effectively (see Clastres 1987; de la Cadena 2010; Povinelli 2016). The most striking feature of these structures, again, is their ecological or nonhuman-centric orientation, which right away challenges the very foundations of Western political ontology, already identified by Aristotle: man is an animal who, based on his access to logos, acquires an essentially political quality. Politics, as a result, is a community limited to



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select representatives of the human species, who get together for the sake of survival and continue living together for the sake of good life. Once logos, the cornerstone of Western politics, is removed from the equation, as is the case in many indigenous ontological models, it becomes difficult to speak of politics, since now intelligible relationality permeates the networks of humans and nonhumans alike. In a similar way, life is identified not through biological constants but through an ability to establish relationships and to communicate, so that a human, an animal, and a stone can be equally alive (cf. Hallowell 1960; Harvey 2013, 18, 100). Such relational openness and detachment from species determination displaces the relevance of Western concepts of the political. Nevertheless, politics and its classical questions became relevant after the colonial encounter, which brought with it the forceful imposition of specifically Western forms of community or being-together within rigid political structures, such as the state, citizenship, and constitution. But the continuing engagement with these structures, unfortunately, might be actually detrimental to ongoing practices of decolonization, calling for the cultivation of a non-statist approach to indigenous “politics” (see Coulthard 2014, 178–79). While over the past two decades we have witnessed growing academic attention to indigenous thought and, specifically, its political implications (see, among many others, Alfred 2005; Simpson 2014; Coulthard 2014), over the past thirty to forty years, very little work has been done in Englishspeaking scholarship that seriously engages Buddhism and its political philosophy (Moore 2016, 1). This is one of the reasons I turn to Buddhism in this chapter. Furthermore, Buddhist thought is also attractive because even as it emerged as an oral tradition, it has since developed an extensive written base that allows non-Buddhists to engage it effectively. My ultimate reason for turning to Buddhism, however, is because it does not view politics as the primary mode of ordering and solving the problems of social coexistence, but rather places emphasis on individual and communal “spiritual” or ethical pursuits. As Moore puts it, “Buddhism is radically deflationary about the importance of politics to human life, coming about as close as possible to being overtly antipolitical without actually embracing anarchism” (2016, 2). This does not mean that one cannot discern a Buddhist theory of politics (see Cummiskey 2013; Moore 2016); but even so, political philosophy occupies a humble position within the Buddhist tradition. Most importantly, I argue that Buddhism actually contains a positive theory of the unpolitical, specifically in its philosophy of compassion, which explicates a form of relationality that displaces the political and its totalizing ambition of ordering human and nonhuman relations. While many Western thinkers interpret compassion as an essentially apolitical affect, the transformative potential of which, could, on occasion,

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be activated through politicization, Buddhists see compassion as positively unpolitical and still capable of transformative action. Compassion for Buddhism remains potentially useful but ultimately indifferent to political action, and this indifference, crucially, is unproblematic, since it does not automatically mean inaction. As a result, with the Buddhist notion of compassion we see the deconstruction of the Western overdetermination of action by politics. To be unpolitical does not signify a state of apathy, resignation, absenteeism, apoliticism, or, in a word, inaction. Compassion is a positive, unpolitical action that grounds its practice in the affirmation of an alternative reality or essence of the self, community, and relationality, rather than in the rejection of politics. In order to illuminate the unpolitical potential of compassion, I will proceed by staging a conversation between Buddhist and Western interpretations of this affect, exposing the differences in their ontological models that allow and, correspondingly, forbid a positive theory of the unpolitical. This task, as noted earlier, is methodologically challenging, especially considering the single author-centered approach employed in preceding chapters. In Buddhism, due to its emphasis on the interconnectedness of being, less importance is assigned to any individual “truth.” As a result, in my engagement with Buddhism, I will combine the voices of its practitioners as well as contemporary commentators. I will employ Hannah Arendt’s thought to speak for the Western tradition because her approach is representative of the common critique of compassion as an apolitical affect, which is incapable of action. The existing political thought of compassion understandably oscillates around one central question: What is the relationship between compassion and politics? Can compassion be political and under what circumstances can it lead to transformative political action? We can distinguish between a critical or negative, and a positive or redemptive way of addressing this question.3 Despite their differences, the majority of scholars seem to agree that compassion, or one of its cognate affects such as empathy, sympathy, or altruism, is a natural attribute of human beings, but they disagree about its sociopolitical implications. The first line of reasoning opposes compassion on multiple grounds, and includes such modern thinkers as Spinoza, Kant, and Nietzsche. A contemporary critique is also voiced by Arendt who suggests, as we will see later, that compassion is an essentially apolitical affect; it can never enter the public sphere because it occurs naturally and thus is opposed to reason and freedom, which define the domain of politics. It can be of service in the private sphere, but remains alien to the demands of political life that takes place in the common world. The defenders of compassion and its moral and political value do not have a homogeneous voice, and they approach this question in a number of, sometimes incompatible, ways. There are at least two major directions that



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their arguments pursue, both of which similarly attempt to mitigate the fact of the human natural ability to experience compassion and the possibility of its political application. On the more extreme side, some thinkers, such as Adam Smith (2002) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2009), argue that compassion is essential to our being-together, and that without it sociopolitical interaction would be impossible. Compassion and empathy, and not fear, insecurity, and struggle for survival, are among the primary motivators of human sociality. Another response comes from those who, without claiming that compassion is somehow essential to our being-together, explore the ways in which this intrinsically apolitical affect can be politicized, that is, put to the service of political action as a powerful motivator. It is within this framework that we find most existing responses to the negative critiques of compassion. This line of engagement often surfaces under the umbrella term of “the politics of the emotions” (Ure and Frost 2014, 1), examining the process of cultivating and harnessing compassion through the intervention of reason. This approach occupies a productive middle ground between the overtly negative and overtly positive views of compassion by acknowledging that compassion can be cultivated: its problematic aspects are real but can be overcome if it is subjected to reason, thus allowing this affect to play a positive political role. As the process of the decolonization of academia is only nascent, it is not surprising that existing scholarship on compassion is self-referential, dealing almost exclusively with the Western canon of political philosophy. Despite the fact that Buddhism, over millennia, has devised a complex system of practices of cultivating compassion, instead of merely looking for ways of theoretically defending it, this voice continues to be excluded from the conversation.4 This chapter, then, is an intervention not only in the debate on the unpolitical but also into contemporary scholarship on compassion that needs to open to non-Western perspectives. In what comes below, I examine Arendt’s critique of compassion and attempt to “contaminate” it with a Buddhist perspective, illuminating its positively unpolitical potential, as well as drawing out some of its wider implication for questions of community and justice. ARENDT’S CRITIQUE OF COMPASSION For Arendt, like many others, the notion of compassion hinges on the experience of suffering of another, which is then transferred onto the one witnessing this suffering. To experience compassion, she writes, is “to be stricken with the suffering of someone else as though it were contagious” (1963, 85). This simple definition lays the ground for Arendt’s subsequent critique of compassion: first, it is always realized in the relationship between self and other; second, this relationship is not voluntary but occurs naturally, that is,

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the witness of suffering occupies a passive position—he or she is overcome by compassion as if by a contagion. One cannot be immune to compassion and so this affect is never freely chosen. In this regard, Arendt is faithful to Immanuel Kant’s assessment of this experience. Kant proposes that we can view “humanity”—the relationship to other’s suffering—as either active or passive, and it is only to the former that we owe a duty. He writes: humanity (humanitas) can be located either in the capacity and the will to share in others’ feelings (humanitas practica) or merely in the receptivity, given by nature itself, to the feeling of joy and sadness in common with others (humanitas aesthetica). The first is free, and is therefore called sympathetic (communio sentiendi liberalis); it is based on practical reason. The second is unfree (communio sentiendi illiberalis, servilis); it can be called communicable (since it is like receptivity to warmth or contagious diseases), and also compassion, since it spreads naturally among human beings living near one another. There is obligation only to the first. (1999, 6:456–56:457, 575)

Kant differentiates between the passive sympathetic feeling—the natural receptivity of a human being to the feelings of another, which constitutes “aesthetic humanity,” and rational benevolence—the capacity and the will to share in others’ feelings which constitutes “practical humanity.” The latter is free, because it is based on practical reason, and the former is unfree, because it spreads naturally, like a contagious disease, to which humans are only passively receptive according to their nature. Consequently, since politically we can manifest only that which we can rationally apprehend and control and upon which we can act, compassion, for Kant, remains apolitical. Arendt similarly notes that compassion, as both the ancients and moderns saw it, is “a natural, creature affect which involuntarily touches every normal person at the sight of suffering, however alien the sufferer may be,” and as a result, it appears to be an ideal foundation upon which a society may be established “in which men might really become brothers” (1968, 14). However, she is quick to point out that such society would be devoid of politics because of the affective nature of compassion. Because compassion is totally natural and inescapable to humans, “it can overcome us like fear without our being able to fend it off.” As such, both fear and compassion “are purely passive” and thus “make action impossible” (15). Since for her action is at the heart of politics, the impossibility of action equals the impossibility of politics, which is an undesirable outcome considering Arendt’s strong affirmation of political action as one of the crucial elements of the human condition. Kant and Arendt speak of compassion in terms of contagion and are both dismissive of its active potential. This raises the question of whether compassion appears under their suspicion precisely because of its ability to blur the limit between self and other in the same way as a contagious disease



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does. Compassion, from this perspective, is a threat to the autonomy of the rational subject and his or her will; it is an impersonal force that challenges the stability of the established sociopolitical world that relies on the differentiation between persons. For order to be maintained, the limits of the self need to be sanitized. The maintenance of community, in this case, relies on what Esposito (2011) calls the mechanism of “immunity” that guards the limits of each self from intervention from the outside—by another human or nonhuman entity. As a result, it is a community that paradoxically requires the originary separation between its members’ bodies and identities. Compassion, then, constitutes a threat to any such community, leading, perhaps, to an (un)conscious rejection of its sociopolitical potential. Compassion, according to Arendt, even as it is natural and unfree, is still a relational phenomenon, and so it is important for her to show how its relationality is different from political relationality. There are three interrelated components to this difference: first, compassion comprehends only the particular, while politics deals with the universal; second, it has difficulty speaking and prefers invisibility, while politics revolves around speech and vision; and third, it abolishes the in-between essential to politics. Arendt suggests that compassion has a limited scope of application—one person at a time, and if it reaches further, it loses its authenticity. As a passion, it relates to the suffering of another in an immediate, passive way. Because of this immediacy and intimacy, compassion cannot embrace more than a single object at a time. In Arendt’s words, “compassion, by its very nature, cannot be touched off by the suffering of a whole class or a people, or, least of all, mankind as a whole” (1963, 85). Its appearance depends on the personalization of the sufferer, the connection with her particular sadness, pain, or misfortune. Generalizations, on the contrary, depend, to various degrees, on the depersonalization of the sufferers, going as far as lumping them together into such an aggregate as “one suffering mankind,” which is the work of pity (85). Importantly, in compassion’s dependency on passive intimacy lies its strength as it can play a significant role in the private realm and, especially, in “dark times,” characterized by obscuration of the public realm, as well as among the “pariah peoples” and excluded groups, all of whom are marked by a “radical loss of the world” (1968, 11, 13). However, despite its effectiveness in nourishing the “warmth of human relationships” among the “pariahs” of this world, it remains apolitical insofar as it “can comprehend only the particular, and has no notion of the general and no capacity for generalization” (1963, 85), which are essential for politics that concerns itself with the common and not with a particular individual. In addition to the inability to generalize, compassion, Arendt argues, possesses a “curious muteness” or “awkwardness with words” as it hides in the shadows of the private sphere, remaining invisible to the public eye. Speech,

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according to Arendt, is concerned with the in-between that characterizes human relationships; it expresses “inter-est” (inter-being) that results from the separation between “me” and “you.” Compassion, which relies on the immediacy of passive affect in response to the suffering of another, understandably exhibits “incapacity (or unwillingness) for all kinds of predicative or argumentative speech.” It is directed toward “suffering man himself” and so replies “directly to the sheer expressionist sound and gestures through which suffering becomes audible and visible in the world.” Importantly, Arendt notes, “passion and compassion are not speechless, but their language consists in gestures and expressions of countenance rather than in words” (1963, 86). Compassion lends “its voice to the suffering itself,” circumventing “the drawn-out wearisome processes of persuasion, negotiation, and compromise, which are the processes of law and politics” (87). However, in this immediacy of compassionate response to the suffering lies one of its major weaknesses: instead of changing the worldly conditions of suffering through time-consuming political methods, it demands swift and direct action that would relieve suffering immediately, opening the door to violence (87). Unfortunately, Arendt does not go on to justify this claim further and to show whether this connection between violence and compassion is necessary or merely accidental. She only relies on historical examples, such as the French Revolution, to support her claim. However, there exist as many examples of the opposite, where compassion opposed violence and where politics and law, on the contrary, devised tools of mass murder and extermination, justified by the “wearisome processes of persuasion.” Even if compassion does not necessarily replace public discussion with violence, Arendt is right to note that compassion’s language is most often not composed of words, as it relies more on “gestures and expressions of countenance,” in the same way as suffering, when it is experienced, is primarily expressed through gestures (or phonē) rather than rational speech (or logos). Suffering, perhaps, can be described in words after the fact, but in the moment, it remains speechless; compassion thus can also be described rationally after the fact, but as experience it only exists as a direct and inthe-moment response to the suffering of another. Speaking about compassion reintroduces the distancing of the in-between, which is also a necessary precondition of politics. Arendt (1998) argues, following the Greeks, that the political requires words for processes of persuasion insofar as the human condition is marked by plurality. Without speech politics ceases to exist since to speak is to manifest something in the common world and in the public realm, where politics takes place. Compassion, since it is alien to words, remains mainly invisible, unless it forces itself into the public light as violence, compromising its own nature. Thus, the authenticity of compassion, not unlike love and fraternity,



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depends on this invisibility. For Arendt, these affects “manifest themselves only in darkness” and “in conditions of visibility they dissolve into nothingness like phantoms,” even as they make suffering, insult, and injury more endurable in private. And as compassion sustains its “purity,” hidden from the light of the public realm, it loses its political relevance precisely because of this purity. In its unconditional opening to the other, compassion erases the space of the in-between where politics originates. In Arendt’s words, “because compassion abolishes the distance, the worldly space between men where political matters . . . are located, it remains, politically speaking, irrelevant and without consequence” (1963, 86). Due to its “inherent worldlessness,” compassion becomes “false and perverted when it is used for political purposes” (1998, 52); one form of such perversion is violence, another is pity. I would like to suggest that another, implicit reason for the muteness of compassion in Arendt is its “inhumanity” or sublimity. She writes: “However much we are affected by the things of the world . . . they become human for us only when we can discuss them with our fellows. Whatever cannot become the object of discourse—the truly sublime, the truly horrible or the uncanny—may find a human voice through which to sound into the world, but it is not exactly human” (1968, 24–25). If suffering and compassion are marked by muteness and can never properly become the object of discourse as such, are they then not fully human experiences? Perhaps, they are an expression of the inhuman and impersonal force of life that reaches beyond humanity toward all that lives and suffers. Through suffering and compassion we become able to go beyond the limits not only of the individual self but also of the species. The “not exactly human” quality of compassion can be further understood if we view it as a sublime affect. As Lora Frost suggests, “compassion constructs us as participants in a non-instrumental inter-subjective, agonistic, and affective practice whose riskiness is not unlike the risks posed by feelings of the sublime” (2014, 52–53). This risk arises from the fact that compassion puts the unity of the subject that experiences it under pressure, it “interrupts and destabilizes any positivizing notions of the self” (53). The opening that this experience offers then, as noted earlier, is an opening to a different kind of community, where the relationship between self and other is challenged by blurring the very limit between the two, and which also has the potential of welcoming nonhuman forms of life. Muteness and invisibility of compassion are the signs that, according to Arendt, also mark “goodness,” and, according to the Christian worldview, compassion (caritas) is a goodness. In this regard, Arendt’s critique is specifically directed to the Christian understanding of compassion, which limits the scope of her critique to Christian discourse. She explains: “the one activity

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taught by Jesus in word and deed is the activity of goodness, and goodness obviously harbors a tendency to hide from being seen or heard” (1998, 74). Goodness is aporetic: its act must be performed and, simultaneously, it must appear as if it has never happened. Goodness must not appear in order to retain its authenticity, because it is meant to benefit only its recipient and not open on to a series of reciprocal exchanges. Of course, for the Christian, it will always be visible to God, who will judge and reciprocate it in the afterlife, but in the world it must remain invisible, otherwise it can be still considered impure, as the doer may receive in return gratitude, praise, and social recognition. Goodness is a pure gift that requires nothing in return.5 According to the same logic, compassion as goodness must be extended to the sufferer without the expectation of reciprocity and for that reason it must remain invisible to the world. The question remains whether it must appear to the sufferer himself to be considered compassion or whether it is enough to simply feel compassion without manifesting it to the sufferer. If the former is the case, then it loses its status of goodness; if the latter is the case, then Arendt’s critique of compassion’s inability to act is justified, insofar as it would be possible for one to sit in front of a TV screen and feel sad at the sight of malnourished children and still call this experience compassion without ever taking action to alleviate their suffering, either through politics or through violence. This aporia, I would like to suggest, only stands within a Christian frame of reference, marked by the prescription of the invisibility of goodness. Once we lift this prescriptive normativity, more possibilities for practicing compassion emerge, some of which I will examine later in relationship to Buddhism. Arendt is very clear that authentic compassion in itself remains politically irrelevant; however, it finds a connection to politics, overcoming invisibility and muteness, by transforming into solidarity or, alternatively, into pity. “Terminologically speaking,” she writes, “solidarity is a principle that can inspire and guide action, compassion is one of the passions, and pity is a sentiment” (1963, 89). Pity is a sentiment that corresponds to compassion, but contrary to the latter, which arises as if through contamination by another’s suffering, it consists in “being sorry without being touched in the flesh” (85). Because pity does not partake in suffering immediately, it preserves the distance that exists between the sufferer and the observer, and thus it can be talkative and rational, impersonal, and even “enter the marketplace,” where politics takes place. Importantly, pity requires suffering to continue in order to exist and establishes an unequal relationship between the object and the subject of the sentiment. Pity, consequently, can be used to justify unsavory actions, including violence, as was the case during the French Revolution. Pity, Arendt argues, ends up glorifying suffering, since “without the presence of misfortune, pity could not exist” (89).



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Solidarity, somewhat like pity, maintains the in-between of human relationships and consists in a “dispassionate community of interest with the oppressed and exploited” (1963, 88). It is thus able to partake in political action and to take the time to speak, negotiate, compromise, and persuade on behalf of sufferers. Solidarity, even as it remains dispassionate, maintains its relationship to suffering, but even as it may be aroused by it, it is not guided by this affect. Furthermore, unlike pity, but certainly not unlike compassion, solidarity looks at everyone with “an equal eye” and “comprehends the strong and the rich no less than the weak and the poor” (89). A community of solidarity then is not necessarily always a community of the poor or oppressed. Solidarity does not condescend to the sufferer and, in its action, aims at ending the conditions of suffering because it does not essentially require it to continue for some ulterior motives. Unlike compassion, solidarity partakes of reason and so it can “comprehend a multitude conceptually” (88), allowing for group-oriented action. For Arendt, solidarity appears to be the only possible form of community of interest that is able to emerge in response to suffering, since pity lacks equality and compassion lacks reason, speech, and generalization. I would like to suggest, contrary to Arendt, that it is possible to conceive of another community—a community of compassion—that relies on the principle of interconnectedness of all beings (and not merely on a particular sufferer-observer relationship) and that is able to appear in the light of the world without losing its authenticity. For this purpose, I now turn to Buddhism, which offers an alternative view of compassion and implicitly addresses many of Arendt’s critical points directed at this affect. A THEORY OF THE UNPOLITICAL: BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY OF COMPASSION The Buddhist view of compassion (karuna)6 is grounded in a particular view of human nature. In the words of the Dalai Lama, “at the most fundamental level our nature is compassionate, and . . . cooperation, not conflict, lies at the heart of the basic principles that govern our human existence” (2002, 68). This statement does not imply that there exists some static, unchanging, absolute entity called “human nature”; it rather reflects “the simple observation that all sentient beings demonstrate certain basic tendencies. All desire happiness; none desire suffering. Everyone—even animals—appreciates affection. All living beings incline toward peace and harmony. All creatures prefer resting and quietness to bloody encounter” (68–69). This compassionate “nature” can become obscured due to ignorance and this may result in acts based on mistaken beliefs; however, one cannot become totally alienated from it. Similarly to what Arendt suggests, compassion can and often does, in its most

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basic form, manifest itself spontaneously: “human beings are fundamentally compassionate [because of their] natural ability to connect spontaneously and deeply with the suffering of others” (73). This natural spontaneity that cannot be rationally explained is taken in Buddhism as an indication of “a profound interconnectedness among all living beings,” an assertion that is grounded, as we will see later, in one of the distinct Buddhist teachings of “no self.” However, even as one cannot give a rational explanation to this natural reaction, this reaction itself is not opposed to reason, as it was for Arendt. On the contrary, compassion goes hand in hand with reason or wisdom (prajna). These two virtues are inseparable: one cannot practice genuine compassion if one is ignorant of the nature of reality and self, but one acquires this wisdom through the practice of compassion. Similarly to Arendt, Buddhism considers compassion an experience that arises naturally and spontaneously in response to the suffering of others. However, while for Arendt, this constitutes an exhaustive definition of compassion, for Buddhism this is merely a starting point for an elaborate discussion. Importantly, for compassion to be genuine, again contrary to Arendt for whom it must remain invisible and speechless, it must embrace a worldly component. As the Dalai Lama puts it, compassion is an aspiration, a state of mind, wanting others to be free from suffering. It’s not passive—it’s not empathy alone—but rather an empathetic altruism that actively strives to free others from suffering. Genuine compassion must have both wisdom and lovingkindness. That is to say, one must understand the nature of the suffering from which we wish to free others (this is wisdom), and one must experience deep intimacy and empathy with other sentient beings (this is lovingkindness). (2005, 49; emphasis added)7

Compassion is not merely an immediate reaction to suffering but an active aspiration, a desire and an action directed toward freeing others from suffering that arises from knowledge of “human nature.” It does contain an immediate connection to the other but is not limited by it: in order for compassion to be genuine, it has to surpass its emotional component and transform into action. How do we reconcile these seemingly opposing definitions of compassion: a natural ability to connect spontaneously with the suffering of others and an active striving to free others from suffering? These definitions highlight both passive and active components of this affect, so which one of them is correct? The passage quoted above suggests that they are not exclusive of each other, as compassion must include both empathetic feeling and active striving. However, in one of the Dalai Lama’s other discussions of compassion (of bodhichitta8 in particular), we read that “spontaneity is not a given but an achievement” that emerges after a long practice. So, compassion supposedly



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arises spontaneously even as spontaneity is considered an achievement. The key to understanding this seeming contradiction lies in the Buddhist view of compassion as a heterogeneous experience. For Arendt, compassion is a homogeneous phenomenon, while for Buddhism it contains multiple experiences and stages that develop over time as a result of practice. Compassion that arises naturally or exists potentially in every human being is not the same as compassion of an advanced being or bodhisattva. As George Dreyfus puts it, “the compassion that exists naturally in humans is limited. It is underdeveloped, weak, and partial” (2002, 42). Or as the Dalai Lama points out, “the seed of love and compassion is there in us instinctually, but promoting and nurturing it requires insight and education” (2011, 96). It is to the uncultivated kind of compassion, I suggest, that Arendt directs her critique. However, Buddhism identifies different types of compassion that one can experience as a result of dedicated cultivation, and these cannot be easily dismissed by Arendt’s critique. Another reason why it might be difficult to reconcile the passive and active definitions of compassion is that while in the West compassion is widely considered an emotion or passion, in the Tibetan language originally there is no such word as emotion (Dreyfus 2002, 31).9 There is no one word that serves to generalize this heterogeneous experience, because in one form compassion can be visibly experienced as an emotion, and other times it is primarily a mental state. As Dreyfus notes, in an undeveloped state, one may experience compassion toward certain beings and at the same time feel hostile toward others, and this is what Arendt would call the particularity of compassion. In this instance compassion is strongly connected to emotions and sympathies. However, the Buddhist normative view of compassion is stronger and extends toward all beings, which is particularly true for bodhisattvas—beings seeking to become Buddha purely for the sake of helping others. In this case, compassion is equally extended to everyone and cannot be sustained as an emotion. But even in the case of bodhisattvas, the advance is gradual, as beginning bodhisattvas are often portrayed as being moved or overwhelmed by emotion and even cry. As they progress, their compassion changes and becomes more equanimous; it becomes stronger and more balanced, devoid of emotional outbursts. As a result, Dreyfus concludes, compassion, as a natural capacity, may be experienced emotionally, but through cultivation it is transformed into “a mental state that is so different from what we mean by emotion that it cannot be included in this category” (42). Based on these considerations, I suggest that we may distinguish between notions of genuine and natural compassion in Buddhism. While the former arises due to practice and cultivation, the latter is an inherent human potential that expresses itself spontaneously in outbursts of tears, immediate painful emotion, or even acts of violence. The major weakness of Arendt’s critique

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of compassion lies in her lack of differentiation between various forms of compassion, and as a result, she addresses the political shortcomings of only natural compassion. In what comes below, I will primarily focus on the notion of genuine compassion in Buddhism in order to show that it contains an unpolitical active potential that Arendt was unable to recognize. One of the central questions that needs to be addressed regarding compassion as an active potential and aspiration is how it can become action, that is, how compassion can express itself in the world and transform from a desire into a responsibility. While compassion is defined through action, this action does not arise naturally but is cultivated through an embrace of wisdom and loving-kindness. First, prior to an act of genuine compassion, one must develop an understanding of the “true” nature of reality. The nature of all existence, according to Buddhism, is suffering (duhkha)10 due to the impermanence of everything, and understanding this “truth” leads to a recognition of our “community in deprivation” or shared vulnerability (Dalai Lama 2011, 120). This community is primarily passive because it relies on conditions that we find ourselves in—suffering and impermanence: “Just by being human, by seeking to gain happiness and avoid suffering, you are a citizen of this planet, regardless of nationality or religious belief” (95). This universal community, importantly, includes nonhuman beings, as they are also subject to these conditions. All sentient beings share a psychological attitude toward suffering—they dread it. They avoid suffering and seek happiness, and the recognition of this non-ontological sameness or equality is the first step toward generating compassion. Compassion is thus distinctively characterized by equality: insofar as one suffers, he or she is subject to compassion equally to anyone else who suffers. Compassion arises due to the existence of suffering and not based on the evaluation of actions of a particular individual (which we may rationally condemn); “it is based on recognizing that we are all similar in wanting happiness and not wanting pain, even if we have silly ideas about how to achieve these goals” (104). As a result, compassion, contrary to Arendt’s assessment, is able to comprehend the universal and embrace one’s enemies alongside one’s friends. While natural compassion may be imbued with attachment and primarily directed toward a particular individual or a small group, such as family members or loved ones, genuine compassion is not biased or partial but is thoroughly imbued with the universal aspiration to end the suffering of all sentient beings, friends or not. At the same time, this universal attitude is not dispassionate, as solidarity was for Arendt, but grounded in genuine sense of intimacy with all beings—loving-kindness—that can be generated through specific practices. Compassion, not unlike solidarity, looks upon all beings equally, without singling out any particular group. In this regard, it is distinct from pity, as it was for Arendt. In the same way as “the near-enemy”



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of love is attachment, and that of equanimity is indifference, the near-enemy of compassion is pity. It is an enemy because while compassion is based in openness and emphasizes the immediate intimacy of all living beings, pity, by looking down upon a sufferer, sets up a separation and duality, where “I” and “you” are seen as different (Kornfield 1988, 24). “Oh, that poor person” is an expression of pity that indicates that the onlooker is somehow removed from the condition of another’s suffering. Compassion, on the contrary, is based on the recognition of the equality of beings insofar as they all suffer, desire to avoid suffering, and seek happiness. Genuine compassion is directed toward the suffering of all beings but, as noted earlier, its attitude is not always the same—there are different types of compassion that, in their turn, are directed at different levels of suffering. There are three levels of suffering: physical and mental sensations of pain and discomfort; the suffering of change; and the pervasive suffering of conditioning (Dalai Lama 2005, 68–72). The first level is the easiest to comprehend since it touches every human being equally and even animals seek to avoid it. The modern materialist understanding of suffering is often limited to this level, resulting in a limited view of compassion: the latter reacts to the visible, representable, or even quantifiable forms of suffering. Arendt’s analysis of compassion is also restricted to this level. The other two levels of suffering do not easily manifest in the world: the suffering of change and the suffering of conditioning. The former arises because all experiences, even the most desirable ones, are subject to change, and so they are eventually replaced by a neutral or an undesirable experience, resulting in a profound dissatisfaction that leads to suffering. The third level of suffering, which is considered the most significant, arises due to ignorance: “unenlightened existence is suffering by its very nature” (70). Importantly, the rise of “engaged Buddhism” has led to the recognition of another, fourth level of suffering, which is unrelated to individual ignorance. In the contemporary world, with its increasing degree of interdependence, it would be difficult to argue that suffering is the sole (karmic) responsibility of the sufferer. To counter such a traditional understanding, engaged Buddhism acknowledges “the political, economic, and ecological causes of ‘social suffering,’ in addition to the psychological and spiritual suffering that Buddhist ritual and mental training traditionally addressed” (Queen 2013, 528).11 Besides the more immediate, for instance, physical reasons for suffering, the most fundamental reason for suffering, according to traditional Buddhism, springs from ignorance and, specifically, from an ordinary person’s “inborn erroneous view of self as an enduring entity.” One never succeeds in freeing oneself from suffering as long as one tries to hold on to “that which is in constant flux and has no existence outside of shifting contexts” (Galin 2003, 109). The nonexistence of an absolute, ontological reality of self (anātman,

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meaning “self-is-not-an-essence-or-entity,” derived from the Sanskrit term for the idea of essential self—ātman) is one of the central teachings of Buddhism and the generation of true compassion is inseparable from the gradual recognition of this truth. However, this recognition itself depends upon the practice of compassion, resulting in an interdependent, non-dualistic relationship between understanding and compassion. Importantly, the goal of meditative practices is not to attain selflessness or become selfless, but to realize that “selflessness is simply the way things are” (Jenkins 2013, 467). The other term often used to describe this state of being is “emptiness.” Selflessness or emptiness, however, does not signify nonexistence or nothingness; emptiness is not a void but includes everything. This concept points out not to the total unreality of experiences but merely the absence of absolute ontological substances and entities that remain unchanging over time, one of which is individuality or self. As David Galin notes, the teaching about selflessness is often misunderstood in the West because of the long tradition of thinking in terms of entities and essences and the resulting resistance to going beyond this scheme of understanding (2003, 108). In our naïve perception of the world, we understand the self as an agent with independent will and a distinct identity, whose essence is unitary and unchanging. The Buddhist schools teach that this sense of self as an absolute reality is “a completely metaphysical construct, a mental fabrication” created on the basis of “the physical and mental aggregates of the individual” (Dalai Lama 2005, 117). In the same way as “reality is made of things consisting of a succession of evanescent moments” (Dreyfus 2002, 31), self is “a dynamic process, a shifting web of relations among evanescent aspects of the person such as perceptions, ideas, and desires” (Galin 2003, 108). It is commonly misperceived as a fixed entity due to ignorance, which can be dispelled by the practice of compassion that helps one realize that individual “me” and “you” are fictitious concepts. Again, one becomes capable of genuine compassion due to wisdom grounded in understanding the nonexistence of self; however, the acquisition of this wisdom depends on the practice of compassion. While the traditional Western outlook embraces the idea of separateness and distinctness of persons, which is the view held by Arendt, Buddhism emphasizes not merely the nonexistence of self but also, importantly, “the interconnectedness and commonality of all persons, and all forms of life” (Cummiskey 2010, 664). The idea of selflessness is inseparable from the affirmation of universal interconnectedness, which is the basis for developing the second component of genuine compassion—loving-kindness. While for Arendt the problematic quality of compassion as a contagion that blurs the boundary between self and other or destroys the in-between of human relations led to disqualifying its active potential, for Buddhism, on the contrary, this quality is the ultimate source of its worldly, transformative potential. This



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potential, importantly, remains latent in natural compassion and can only be realized in its genuine form cultivated through concrete meditative practices grounded in wisdom and loving-kindness. As the Dalai Lama writes, loving-kindness—“the feeling of intimacy with and empathy toward all beings”—is accomplished “on the basis of recognizing our interconnectedness and interdependence with them” (2005, 71). Insofar as self is a dynamic process, it is practically impossible to draw a limit between one self and another; as everything is subject to change, it is impossible to distinguish between the separate identities (which, by definition, require temporal stability) of individuals, beings, things, and phenomena. One of the pivotal figures of engaged Buddhism, Thich Nhat Hanh, suggests that due to the interdependence of all beings, we must speak of being in terms of “inter-being.” He explains: Nothing can exist by itself alone. It has to depend on every other thing. That is called inter-being. To be means to inter-be. . . . Looking deeply into a flower, we see that the flower is made of non-flower elements. We can describe the flower as being full of everything. . . . We see sunshine, we see the rain, we see clouds, we see the earth, and we also see time and space in the flower. A flower, like everything else, is made entirely of non-flower elements. The whole cosmos has come together in order to help the flower manifest herself. The flower is full of everything except one thing: a separate self, a separate identity. The flower cannot be herself alone. The flower has to inter-be with the sunshine, the cloud and everything in the cosmos. If we understand being in terms of inter-being, then we are much closer to the truth. Inter-being is not being and it is not non-being. Inter-being means being empty of a separate identity, a separate self. (Thich Nhat Hanh 2002, 47; emphasis added)12

Self can only be described in term of co-existence or inter-being; it is a relational concept as it arises through an encounter with everything, with emptiness. To be means to inter-be and any sense of separateness is merely an illusion. The flower continues to be by opening to the sunshine, the cloud, the earth, and the water rather than retreating into itself. If the flower were to insist on closure, on maintaining its separate self, it would certainly perish. The same goes for humans, whose very bodies are webs of relations, including other human bodies—the bodies of ancestors, parents, and children, as well as nonhuman elements and the environment. In the words of Varela and Depraz, “each person’s individual life is like a hologram of human social life, with its bonds and interpersonal circulation” (2003, 223), except that it extends beyond merely human sociality. Interconnectedness allows for a conception of community based on the notion of compassion as a gift. Compassion springs from the realization of the interconnectedness of existence, and since we are all connected, the distinction

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between you and me becomes irrelevant. As a result, in compassion, as Wang rightly suggests, “we share a reality in which giving and receiving has lost its directionality . . . when I give to you, I am not adding to you and subtracting from me. In nourishing you, I am nourishing myself because our experience of each other is not separate. . . . We are in communion, without the normal boundaries of ego, personality and defense” (2005, 104). The notion of a gift, from this perspective, ceases to be an aporia, and we approach the possibility of a pure gift. In a nutshell, Buddhist ethics based on the precepts of selflessness, emptiness, and interconnectedness offers a more compelling perspective for understanding compassion than Western ontology that has long relied on the premise of the separateness and autonomy of persons. The Buddhist view allows us to think community that circumvents the immunitary mechanism embedded in the concept of community as a social contract that relies on the existence of subjects with autonomous bodies and wills. According to the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, one can develop different types of compassion grounded in wisdom and loving-kindness. Specifically, coming to understand the different levels of suffering, the object of one’s compassion shifts from one level to another. Moving between the different types of compassion is based on concrete practices: compassion is the result of specific training based on an application of concrete guidelines. This distinguishes Buddhism from Arendt’s view of compassion insofar as for her compassion can be harnessed only through solidarity, which addresses the other’s suffering through a dispassionate application of reason. In Buddhism, on the other hand, compassion can be cultivated through practices that are not necessarily directed at the rational apprehension of this affect but aim at cultivating a disciplined attitude or mental state through meditation, which involves a bodily aspect. This normative transformation that the cultivation of compassion calls for is based on concrete “know-how” (Varela and Depraz 2003, 221), contrary, for example, to the Christian worldview that rather embraces abstract moral injunctions, and upon which Arendt’s critique of compassion relies. We find a discussion of a path for generating compassion through different practices in Tsong-ka-pa’s Illumination of the Thought of Chandrakirti’s ‘Supplement to the Middle Way’ (1980, 81–230). At the outset, he identifies three types of compassion, which, however, are not mutually exclusive and all of which share the aspect “of wishing to protect all sentient beings from all suffering” (123). First is “compassion observing sentient beings” (116) that are qualified primarily by their suffering. The second type of compassion “deconstructs beings into streaming masses of components” (Jenkins 2013, 471); it is “compassion observing phenomena” or observing beings understood only as impermanent phenomena. The third type of compassion perceives emptiness and so views sentient beings as empty of inherent existence;



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it is called “compassion observing the unapprehendable” (Tsong-ka-pa 1980, 119). The first type of compassion has the widest practical applications for Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike since its object is “undeconstructed sentient beings” (Jenkins 2013, 471). This is the most immediate object and sense of compassion that humans have; however, in order for it to transform from natural into genuine compassion, one has to work on it. Most importantly, one needs to generate an unbiased, equanimous attitude and develop the same closeness and intimacy with every sentient being, including one’s enemies. Through this training, compassion distinguishes itself from the bonds of attachment, pity, and the particular, and becomes truly universal. The normative recommendation to develop compassion contains concrete instructions for two major methods: “the seven-point cause-and-effect method” and “the method of equalizing and exchanging self and others” (Dalai Lama 2005, 183; see also Tsong-ka-pa 1980). The former practice is grounded in the Buddhist cosmology of reincarnation and begins with a reflection that at some point each and every person has been one’s mother: “when we truly realize our interconnectedness over the scope of beginningless lifetimes, we realize that every other being has been our parent and has treated us with this same loving and nurturing kindness.” The mother is chosen as a figure of great kindness but, in practice, can be substituted by visualizing any other person for whom one has the utmost affection. The goal is to eventually extend the feelings of affection that arise with regard to one’s mother toward every other being. Appreciation of the interconnectedness of all beings over the course of multiple rebirths allows one to develop a strong sense of empathy toward other sentient beings and thus to feel a greater sense of intimacy with them. This is based on an ability to perceive their kindness regardless of their present actions. This intimacy is a gradual development: it begins with a particular (i.e., an immediate, “easy” object of affection, like one’s family) and extends toward the universal (i.e., the community of all living beings), without losing its authenticity, as was the case for Arendt (cf. Jenkins 2013, 466). Interestingly, this universal community of affect is also reminiscent of Meillassoux’s community of hope that, as he suggests, arises through an awaiting of the advent of the world of absolute justice, thus overcoming the limitations of the immediate and familial bonds and attachments and extending equally toward the living, the dead, and the unborn. The process of the development of compassion is divided into multiple stages. First comes the cultivation of a sense of equanimity toward all beings, then a sense of closeness to others based in an understanding of interconnectedness, culminating in a sense of genuine intimacy. As a result, one becomes unable to bear others’ suffering and wishes to see them freed from it. As compassion grows, it brings about a commitment to bring a release from suffering; more than that, one wishes that others enjoy happiness. Having

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generated compassion, loving-kindness, and a sense of personal commitment, “we give rise to ‘extraordinary altruistic attitude’ that seeks to release all beings from suffering by oneself alone,” which becomes the ground for examination whether one actually possesses the capacity to bring about universal well-being (Dalai Lama 2005, 184–86).13 Cultivation of compassion and loving-kindness culminates in an assumption of the responsibility to help others’ suffering. In other words, genuine compassion undergoes all of these permutations, gradually changing into an action, and without this transformation, it remains a merely natural affect with unrealized potential. As the Dalai Lama puts it, “if a person who has attained stability in his or her compassion training continues to stay in seclusion, that person is not really doing anything with compassion” (Dalai Lama in Davidson and Harrington 2002, 91). In the end, meditation practice must become a transformative action (cf. Cummiskey 2013, 540). The second method for cultivating compassion is exchanging oneself and others based on the recognition of the fundamental sameness of oneself and others (see Dalai Lama 2005, 187–88). Since all beings seek happiness and wish to be free from suffering, oneself and others are identical, and the only difference lies in number: a single individual versus countless beings. Logically, the needs of the many are always greater, so the concern for these needs should naturally dominate one’s actions. One specific practice in this regard is the practice of giving and taking—tong len. In this practice, one imagines taking upon oneself all the suffering and potential suffering of others, while giving them all of one’s happiness and positive potential, thus increasing compassion and loving-kindness. This practice is performed in conjunction with the inhalation and exhalation of breath—inhaling others’ pain, and exhaling your own happiness into their lives.14 Even though this meditative practice might not have an immediate effect on the suffering of another being, it nevertheless increases the practitioner’s determination, courage, and will power, as well as creates peaceful atmosphere. As Varela and Depraz note, such practices as tong len, if done repeatedly, “lead to a progressive softening or weakening of the automatic position of the ‘me-first’ characteristic of our cognitive ego, or self. The habit of self-interest is gradually replaced by an automatic inversion of one’s position so the welfare of others spontaneously takes precedence” (2003, 221). Interestingly, the effects of compassion training have also been examined by neuroscientists at the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, University of Wisconsin-Madison, whose research suggested that “compassion can be cultivated with training and that greater altruistic behavior may emerge from increased engagement of neural systems implicated in understanding the suffering of other people, executive and emotional control, and reward processing” (Weng et al. 2013, 1171).



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IMPERSONAL JUSTICE Compassion is not merely a beautiful philosophy but can have real practical applications in Buddhist as well as non-Buddhist communities. This is mainly due to the fact that for Buddhism, even as compassion is considered to be a normative experience, its cultivation is based not on abstract moral injunctions but on concrete know-how, making emotional training and ethical transformation universally available. One does not have to be a Buddhist in order to benefit from the centuries-old practices for the cultivation of compassion. Even as some meditations are grounded in “religious” ideas of karma and reincarnation, the practice itself does not require a prior “conversion” to Buddhism. The areligious nature of practice opens the Buddhist view of compassion to a non-antagonistic conversation with the Western tradition of thinking compassion. It offers a vision of compassion that is inseparable from transformative worldly action, the importance of which is not diminished by the fact that it might be unpolitical. For Buddhism, as it was for Arendt, compassion, because of its connection to intimacy, abolishes the space between living beings, rendering compassion unpolitical. This was a problem for Arendt, because she equated the possibility of action with politics. For Buddhism, this is not an obstacle but, on the contrary, a source of the transformative potential of compassion: because of its unpolitical “nature,” compassion is able to grow into an active commitment to bring an end to others’ suffering. The cultivation of compassion results in the assumption of “universal responsibility” toward all beings as well as opens up to an alternative kind of community: a community defined by shared suffering and the determination to end this suffering. Importantly, it is not limited to humanity and embraces all sentient beings (but does not ultimately demand even this limitation). In sum, in the Buddhist philosophy of compassion, we encounter a positive theory of the unpolitical, which affirms an experience outside of politics with the potential for transformative action grounded in the ontology of inter-being. Furthermore, while the Buddhist view of compassion challenges the ontological primacy of the political, it also challenges the traditional Western understanding of justice grounded in anthropocentrism and the idea of the autonomous self. For contractualist theories of justice in particular, the starting point is the moral importance of the “distinction” or “separateness” of persons (cf. Rawls 1971). Buddhism, on the contrary, emphasized interconnectedness and considers the idea of self generally a result of ignorance. Compassion occupies a privileged position in cultivating one’s understanding of inter-being and, in its turn, relies on the recognition of this premise for its practice. Once we displace “the Archimedian point of a theory of justice” (Cummiskey 2013, 537)—the concept of the person—how can we continue

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to think justice? One of the ways to do it is to conceptualize justice in terms of shared ethic that embraces inter-being and a secularized notion of karma. Once we remove the premise of reincarnation from the latter, what remains is the idea of balance, so justice as karma would be a balancing act or form of exchange (or gifting) directed at aligning actions and reactions. The principles of interconnectedness and no-self add the qualification that in this form of exchange no giver or receiver can be identified. Justice as a balancing act, then, can be seen as impersonal exchange. There are two components to this notion of justice as shared ethic or compassion. The first is “individual” self-transformation based on cultivation of compassion that may lead to an assumption of responsibility for the suffering of others. Second is a social ethic grounded in the principle of impersonal flow. This ethic is based on the premise that all forms of consumption are tied to suffering, the locus of which is often impossible to pinpoint, and thus it has an impersonal or structural, as per Marx’s suggestion, nature. This impersonality poses a problem for the theory of justice that oscillates around the idea of the person because it raises the question of how to “repay” those who have suffered. A way out of the situation is to let go of the idea of justice based on the premise of the separateness of persons and exchange with clearly identified “givers” and “receivers.” What if when I consume a product that I know manifests others’ suffering, I commit (or am compelled by some means) to be compassionate, that is, to take responsibility for this suffering. In a way, I acquire an impersonal (karmic) debt that I must repay in one form or another to someone or something else, but not necessarily to the person who is directly related to the product I consume. As such, justice is served in the act of balancing the causes and effects of impersonal suffering. Importantly, this model of justice as a balancing of the impersonal flow of suffering is not limited to humanity, and some of its basic principles can be implemented in relationship to nonhuman beings as well as the environment. NOTES 1. For further discussion of comparative political theory see, for example, Dallmayr (1999, 2004); Parel and Keith (2003); Williams and Warren (2014). 2. On the question of indigenous ontologies, see, for example, Blaser (2014); Descola (2013); Harvey (2013); Hunt (2014); Kohn (2013). 3. For a detailed discussion of both defenses and critiques of compassion in Western philosophy see, for example, Nussbaum (1996). 4. This situation, however, is not unique to Buddhism; a somewhat similar approach to compassion can be found in indigenous thought (specifically, this similarity can be traced in relationship to indigenous conceptions of personhood [see, e.g., Bird-David 1999; Mosko 1992; Strathern 1988; Viriasova 2015; Wagner 2008]), as



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well as in some Christian mystical traditions of medieval monasticism (see McNamer 2009). 5. On the notion of the gift and its aporetic logic see Derrida (1994). 6. My discussion of compassion in Buddhism is mostly limited to the Mahayana tradition, and Tibetan Buddhism in particular, because their normative project of the liberation of all beings has a distinct worldly orientation, while other traditions are more focused on individual enlightenment. 7. A similar definition of compassion can be found in other traditions of Buddhism. For example, Buddhaghosa, a Theravāda commentator, writes: “When others suffer it makes the heart of good people tremble (kampa), thus it is karuņā; it demolishes others’ suffering, attacks and banishes it, thus it is karuņā; or it is dispersed over the suffering, is spread out through pervasion, thus it is karuņā” (quoted in Jenkins 2013, 466). 8. Bodhichitta can be defined as “an altruistic intention to attain buddhahood [i.e., enlightenment] for the benefit of all beings” (Dalai Lama 2005, 182), which is a crucial trait of a bodhisattva. 9. However, as Dreyfus points out, by now Tibetan teachers have been exposed to the question of whether compassion is an emotion so many times that they have created a new word tshor myong, “experience of feeling,” to translate the word “emotion.” 10. In order to avoid a common misunderstanding of this premise, it is important to note that “life is suffering” does not mean that all life is merely suffering. Suffering is recognized and experienced because there is also joy, and so these affects are inseparable. 11. However important, I leave this tradition of Buddhism out of consideration due to the limited scope of my argument. For a further discussion of this tradition see, for example, Queen and King (1996); Eppsteiner (1988); Ambedkar (1992); and Sivaraksa (1992). 12. This view is somewhat reminiscent of Nancy’s post-Heideggerian proposition that being is essentially “being-with.” One may also note a similarity between Thich Nhat Hanh’s description of inter-being and Deleuze’s and Guattari’s famous description of a rhizome formed by a wasp and an orchid (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 8). 13. This account is adopted from the Dalai Lama’s description of the seven-point cause-and-effect method (2005, 184–186) and can also be found in Tsong-ka-pa (1980). 14. For a detailed description of this technique see, for example, Varela and Depraz (2003, 222).

Conclusion

HC SVNT DRACONES (Latin “here are dragons”) is a phrase that notoriously appears on the Lenox Globe of the early sixteenth century describing the territory of the eastern coast of Asia. In medieval cartography, the images of dragons and sea monsters were often used to indicate uncharted areas on maps. Dragons, these mythical and surely dangerous creatures, were an indication of the limits of the known human world, and they were also a warning to all those who would dare to venture beyond these limits. Human relationship with dragons had never been a simple one. In ancient as well as modern literature, we encounter a few familiar scenarios of dealing with dragons. For example, they can be simply left alone or ignored, hoping that one will never have to deal with them. They may appear in one’s dreams as a reminder of the darkness that always lurks in the shadows of waking life. Alternatively, they can be slayed to restore the order of the world once and for all. Or, as we learn from contemporary movies, they can be turned into faithful friends or even pets. Fear, ignore, conquer, domesticate: these common tropes of human dealings with the unknown are representative of how contemporary political philosophy has approached its own dragon—the unpolitical—the uncharted territory at the limits of politics. For the longest time, philosophers had, or at least they liked to believe they had, a more or less clear sense of what lay beyond the walls of the polis, and they had a variety of names for it: the domain of mere existence, the household that took care of the essential needs of the people, the heavenly city, the state of nature, and the private sphere, to name just a few. With the ascent of modernity, the border between politics and the nonpolitical has grown thinner and thinner, culminating in the totalitarian political projects of the twentieth century. Understandably, the task of many prominent postwar intellectuals was to challenge the situation where 171

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everything had become political, resulting in a rejuvenation of the field of political ontology, yet again tasked with rethinking the essence of politics. These multiple postwar inquiries constituted not merely a new age of political theorizing but have radically redefined the conceptual playing field of what was to become contemporary political philosophy. First and foremost, as the totalitarian political projects of the twentieth century became undermined, they happily announced that the state, the traditional sine qua non of politics, is indeed not all. What came to challenge and eventually displace the central idea of politicsas-state was the mysterious and multifaceted category of “the political” that lay claim to what has formerly appeared only at the limits of politics: nature, economy, conflicts, wars, passions, desires, interiority, life, and even being. But as the political affirmed that politics, in the sense of the totality of the state-centered ordering of social life, is not everything, it has lost a clear vision and understanding of its own limits. This is how the dragon of the unpolitical was born, and the relationship with it unfolded according to the familiar scenarios of fear, ignorance, conquest, and domestication. THE UNPOLITICAL IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY: FEAR, IGNORANCE, CONQUEST, DOMESTICATION Fear. A somewhat commonsensical approach to the unpolitical today is fear. In this regard, any nonpolitical exteriority is perceived primarily as a withdrawal from politics, as a state of apathy, inaction, resignation, or absenteeism. And since politics in modernity has been valorized as the means of the secular salvation of societies from all sorts of problems and wrongs, nonparticipation was consequently labeled as something negative. It is an attitude or a state of affairs to be avoided, especially if democracy and its foundational institutions are to be preserved and effectively maintained under the persistent, and not altogether ungrounded, threat of the return of totalitarianism. On the theoretical level, the fear of the unpolitical has emerged in response to the perceived threat of neutralization and depoliticization. Many thinkers, including Schmitt, Arendt, Foucault, Agamben, Rancière, Nancy, Esposito, Laclau and Mouffe, Lefort, and many others, have argued that the political in modernity has been increasingly neutralized and also actively colonized by the social, economic, as well as other nonpolitical domains. A similar attitude was also expressed by many second-wave feminists, who suggested that “the personal is political,” foreclosing any discussion of the unpolitical as gender insensitive. In sum, as the category of the political emerged as a radical critique of politics, it also appeared essentially threatened by nonpolitical



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principles and concerns, resulting in a mostly negative view of any unpolitical effort, theoretical or otherwise. Ignorance. Another effective strategy of dealing with the limits of politics has been to turn a blind eye to its very existence—not only in the form of active denial or repression but also in the form of mere ignorance. Out of sight, out of mind. This strategy was successfully employed by Schmitt, whose major aim was to establish the political as totality and to convince his readers that any decision on the unpolitical is always a political decision par excellence. Schmitt defined the political, against its preceding conflation with other domains, as an autonomous but flexible and nonessential principle, a latent potential that inhabits all human activities and comes to fruition in the antagonism between friend and enemy. As a result, anything that might lie beyond politics is never “absolutely” but only “fictitiously” unpolitical, resulting from a sovereign decision that orders the political space by assigning the identities of friends, enemies, as well as by declaring exceptions. However, even as Schmitt, in his desire for the political, hastily sweeps aside the neutral field that encloses the very relationship between friends and enemies, declaring its unimportance and even impossibility, the political remains secretly dependent on this exception of the absolutely unpolitical. His totalizing political vision is essentially enabled by his blindness toward its radical exteriority. Before the political order based on the friend and enemy distinction can emerge, the normal situation must be established through the originary exception of the absolutely unpolitical—that which from that moment forward could never enter the political domain and whose existence must be denied as a fiction. We encounter the unpolitical in Schmitt only as a specter that, despite it being ignored, occasionally emerges out of the shadows of political totality in the shape of the heterogeneity of nonhuman forms of life, nudging philosophers to once again reconsider the limits of the political along the lines of the human relationship with “nature” and “things.” This task was readily undertaken by the recent, so-called new materialist trend of political thought that, unlike Schmitt, not only positively acknowledged the nonhuman exteriority but also undertook to conquer it. Conquest. One of the favorite scenarios of contemporary philosophy embraces the heroic narrative of the political. This approach does not stand on its own as it responds to the commonly perceived threat of the unpolitical understood in the above-mentioned terms of depoliticization and neutralization. Since the political appears as a threatened principle, it has to be proactively defended, because simply ignoring this threat would not make it go away. This defensive attitude is driven by faith in the ultimate value of the political: no ground must be left untouched by the desire for the political. Several strategies have been employed in this conquest. With secularization

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that, importantly, ran parallel to the process of disappearance of any terra incognita on the world map, the first to go were the theological principles that used to ground the commonwealth, as well as the factual outside of the international system of nation-states. The disappearance of traditional theological and terrestrial exteriority lead to a reinvention of the outside of politics in immanent terms: from now on one could legitimately speak only of the relative outside, as doing otherwise would risk the accusation of turning political theory into theology. The late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries saw another facet of totalization emerging as “the state of nature” was drawn into the political fold. By this time, the state of nature was no longer a central concept of political philosophy, but could be used as a metaphor for what this state signified for the early modern thinkers—human strife and conflict. As we remember from Hobbes, for example, he saw conflict as the essential trait of the nonpolitical nature of humanity that was dealt with through the institution of the political commonwealth. For later thinkers like Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Schmitt, conflict was no longer an undesired natural trait that could be suppressed by politics. Quite the opposite, conflict was now seen as an inexhaustible human potential that not only could not be eliminated but also actually constituted the heart of sociopolitical existence. This theoretical reorientation lead to the emergence of a new term—the political—that embraced the former political exteriority as the new core of politics. We see this motif reiterated in the works of many contemporary political thinkers. Foucault, for example, rethinks power in terms of multiple force relations that thoroughly permeate societies and admit of no absolute exteriority; Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy retreat the political in an attempt to recuperate its conflictual nature; Esposito, similarly, through his notion of the impolitical addresses the traditional suppression of conflict in political philosophy; and Agamben’s discussion of bare life shows how permanent exposure to death, formerly associated only with the nonpolitical state of nature, comes to constitute the heart of Western politics. Next to be conquered was life. Foucault, among many other biopolitical thinkers, shows how in modernity life became the central object of politics. If formerly life belonged to the economic domain of the household and was tended to in the shadows of the private sphere, in modern societies the very biological lives of individuals and populations are publicly exposed, forming the core concern of political government. Politics thus essentially transforms into management of a large household, merging with economics. Importantly, biopolitical totalization is philosophically grounded: it relies on the synthetic notion of life that comes to the fore in the nineteenth century in the emerging discipline of biology. It is the biological objectification of life that constitutes the condition of possibility of biopolitics, feeding into an illusion that life can indeed be totally determined by politics.



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Agamben’s intervention is an even better example of the political conquest of life, since he, unlike Foucault, offers not only a genealogical investigation of the biopolitical regime of modernity but also a normative affirmation of a coming politics grounded in the notion of form-of-life. The impolitical bare life is a negative and, unfortunately, necessary product that emerges at the moment of the constitution of Western politics. It is the life of homo sacer, abandoned to death by sovereign withdrawal. In modernity, as the sovereign exception is no longer confined to states of emergency and becomes the norm, we all virtually become homines sacri, and the urgency of addressing the problematic condition of bare life appears undeniable. This task, however, happens at the expense of the unpolitical. The problematic life of homo sacer at the limits of the political is not redeemed as such; on the contrary, a new politics is conceptually constituted through its politicization in terms of form-of-life. The consideration of life thus begins and, via the route of the impolitical, ends with its politicization; while politics changes its form, the life that grounds it retains its political character. Another blow to the unpolitical emerged in the form of the political conquest of ontology, exemplified, among others, by Nancy’s philosophy of the singular plurality of being. The project of retreating the political, which he undertook with Lacoue-Labarthe, instead of displacing politics, results in the constitution of its new vision—an an-archic, post-foundational politics—that, nonetheless, perpetuates its totalizing tendency by descending to the level of ontology. Following Heidegger’s intimation, Nancy contends that existence is always co-existence, that being implies plurality, and so is essentially “with.” The political, in its turn, while it does not define anything essentially, is the place of articulation of this plurality, the place of the in-common as such. As a result, not everything is political, but everything crosses paths in politics: it is the condition of possibility of all relationality, even if these relations are in themselves not political. The political, as the place of the encounter, is ultimately no less totalizing than the politics it sets out to critique; but it is a paradoxical, open totality that explicitly refuses closure, affirming plurality as the quasi-origin of the world and non-unity as the heart of community. Domestication. The essence of the strategy of domesticating the unpolitical lies in turning any philosophical consideration of political exteriority into a faithful friend of the project of the renewal of the political. Traces of this strategy can be observed in just about every contemporary theoretical engagement in the field of political ontology, many of which readily admit the existence of something like the relative outside of politics, and of which Cacciari’s and Esposito’s notions of the impolitical are pivotal examples. The impolitical emerges as a critique of modern politics associated with the (total) state, representation, theological thinking, and suppression of conflict. Contrary to Agamben’s negative view, the impolitical here emerges as a positive path toward new, “grand” politics or politics without foundation. It is the critical

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stage of this renewed political and, as a result, is never absolutely unpolitical: the impolitical is a critical vision from the limits of politics, a mere shadow, whose existence is defined by the sole purpose of renewal of the political. All in all, contemporary political philosophy has become comfortable with its exteriority because the latter was gradually turned into an always already familiar terrain; and even if it occasionally happens to appear in the shape of an anxiety-provoking sea monster, that shape itself remains constant. The monster emerges, from time to time, to shake up the status quo and to remind us to remain on guard against all sorts of “evil,” but it never means real harm. It is merely a friendly (impolitical) critique or feedback construed for the sake of the constant renewal and perpetuation of the political. ALTERNATIVE SCENARIOS: AFFECT, LIFE, THINGS Alternative scenarios of the relationship between the political and the unpolitical are based in the recognition of the real or absolute exteriority of the political that, importantly, neither negates politics nor exists as its mere derivative or servant. Like Esposito’s impolitical, the unpolitical—the radical exteriority of politics—is not a-political, in the sense of rejecting politics, or pre-political, meaning that it necessarily tends toward eventual politicization. Serving politics does not constitute the raison d’être of the unpolitical; on the contrary, it persists in a relationship of equality as well as indifference to politics that, importantly, does not translate into inaction or apathy. The unpolitical deconstructs the traditional association of action with politics, thus affirming the possibility of transformative unpolitical action that might be as effective and as legitimate as its political counterpart. Without denying the infinite capaciousness of the outside of politics, the advent of the unpolitical in contemporary philosophy can, nevertheless, be traced along the lines of three focal areas that can be generally encountered under the names of “affect,” “life,” and “things.” Life. The battle for life takes place on its own territory. Considering the existing consensus regarding the biopolitical nature of modern governmentality, thinking life unpolitically must begin by addressing the basic philosophical premises that make life susceptible to political management. First is the premise, as in Schmitt, that life’s energy is essentially conflictual, defined by the constant implicit as well as explicit struggle with death. Insofar as the political signifies strife, life merges with it and its movement becomes indistinguishable from the general economy of the political. Life becomes positively unpolitical when we subtract both death and conflict from its essential definition, which becomes possible, for example, with the help of nonWestern ontological systems, and Buddhism in particular. The latter offers



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an alternative, nonconflictual social ontology that relies on the principle of inter-being that emerges in light of the destabilization of the essentialized notion of self that dominates Western philosophy. As such, conflict is never found at the level of ontology, and only characterizes a human condition based on ignorance, which brings the need for politics into existence. Politics is devalorized and relegated to performing a policing function, broadly construed, for the sake of ordering communal existence dominated by ignorance, while individual enlightenment remains the major source of lasting sociopolitical transformation. Another premise that exposes life to politicization is its biological objectification. As we learn from Foucault’s analysis, modern scientific studies rely on the synthetic notion of life that also forms the ground of biopolitics. Life is understood as an invisible unity, inaccessible in its essence, that draws together its visible manifestations—living organisms. Life can be known only through the study of empirically observable entities, and it can thus be politically managed through the subsequent application of this knowledge to individuals and populations. Biopolitical government of life is grounded in the objectification of life’s essence. An unpolitical view of life, as a result, is found in the affirmation of its nonobjectifiable core, which we encounter in Henry’s radical phenomenology. Addressing the prioritization of the worldly mode of manifestation in the Western philosophical tradition, Henry proposes that life manifests itself acosmically: its mode of manifestation is not that of the world, of transcendence, but of inner feeling or immanent self-affection. As such, life is not identical with biological life or with the living beings that appear only in the light of the world. While life is invisible, its essence is no longer inaccessible: it is experienced as self-suffering by every living self. Life reveals itself to itself without the mediation of the world; and, ultimately, the substitution of life’s essence by its worldly manifestations, such as living organisms, constitutes nothing less than the murder of life. Biopolitics is thus really thanatopolitics. Life’s mode of manifestation is not only independent from the worldly one but also precedes it: life is the world’s a priori. Since the political form of relationality embraces the in-between of human beings, and relies on worldly separation as well as togetherness (i.e., sharing), life, which manifests itself in self-affection and abolishes worldly distancing, is essentially “beingwithout.” Life is radically unpolitical and precedes any form of political being: one needs to live before being political. Importantly, while life is prior to politics, it is never pre-political, in the sense of being teleologically drawn to politics; even as life grounds its worldly, including political, manifestations, it remains indifferent to them. Life persists in a relationship of indifference to any form of politics and the political. Life manifests itself only in immanence, and so what appears through life as the living is never outside

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life. The living only exists in life, without requiring the world, and the only “form” that life takes is the living. As a result, life is always already formof-life; it is also positive bare life because its world is essentially reduced, meaning that this nakedness is inherent and not merely the result of exception from the political. Life is unpolitical form-of-life that rejoices in itself in all its worldly forms that, regardless of their political status, are equally living and equally partake in the community of life. Even as life-as-such remains unpolitical, its affirmation of the radical equality of the living also offers a ground for renewed thought of community, which becomes more and more urgent in light of the crises of inclusion that we increasingly witness in contemporary democratic societies. Things. The relationship of nonhuman exteriority with the political has been one of the major questions of recent post-humanist or new materialist interventions that, as noted earlier, implicitly accept the challenge of addressing the limitations of the Schmittian category of the political. Post-humanists move away from the traditional exclusion of nonhumans from politics, which was often justified by their presupposed lack of access to logos and thus to any sense of morality and justice. New materialist thinkers argue, often incorporating the insights of the sciences as well as indigenous worldviews, that politics must include what used to be marked as nature, animals, and things, not necessarily because they can think but because they can act, establish relationships with each other as well as affect humanity. Nonhuman exteriority is invited to partake in politics on equal terms, going as far as to suggest that there is such a thing as nonhuman politics. As a result, while the limitations of the Schmittian political are addressed, its totalizing character remains intact as it incorporates nonhuman exteriority into its domain. New materialism thus constitutes one of the most recent conquests of the unpolitical. Against this background, the speculative realist philosophy of Quentin Meillassoux offers a unique consideration of the unpolitical that rests on a non-correlationist view of things and worlds that precede as well as supersede humanity. Correlationism consists in the common post-Kantian affirmation that all human knowledge is limited by relation to the world, postulating the essential inseparability of thinking and being, of subject and object, and thus losing the ability to think the absolute or the real in itself that is indifferent to its own givenness as well as to human thought. Political philosophy has not been immune to correlationism, vividly exemplified by political totalization that does not admit of a reality that would be radically unpolitical or indifferent to politics. Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism, as a result, simultaneously contributes to a critique of political totalization, and the ideas that play a central role here are ancestrality, justice, and extinction. The ancestral challenge to the political consists in coming to terms with the fact that there was a time without humans, and this temporality indicates



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the real limit to human thought and any resulting activity, including politics. The ancestral world is the world indexed by the arche-fossil—an object that emerged before the advent of humanity or even terrestrial life—which signifies radical temporal anteriority and the resulting discrepancy between thinking and being. As such, it indexes a world without correlation and, by derivation, a world without politics. The acknowledgment of ancestral reality that is anterior to the inauguration of human thought suspends the political, illuminating a radical “being-without” that marks a world without a sense of the world, since it is a world without thought. Another challenge to correlationism emerges from thinking realities that only may be—the worlds of justice and extinction—grounded in Meillassoux’s affirmation of the necessity of contingency as the non-metaphysical absolute. Contingency constitutes the only necessity, freeing the process of becoming from any teleology and thus making the possible untotalizable. Politics and the political, as a result, are nothing but contingent occurrences that emerged and might as well disappear in a coming world without politics. One of these possibilities, for Meillassoux, lies in an improbabilizable advent, a radically novel world of absolute justice in which all humans will be reborn and will acquire immortality, finally working through the mourning prescribed by essential specters—horrendous, inexplicable deaths. This world of justice cannot be brought about by human effort; it cannot be the goal of politics, but exists only as an object of desire of each human being, renewing his or her political agency—a vectorial, unpolitical subjectivity moved by the hope of abolishing politics in the advent of absolute justice. Politics is relieved of any messianic promises and becomes conscious of its real limits, constituting the core premise of speculative political theory. Insofar as, according to Meillassoux, may-being is the true heart of every ontology, the joyful awaiting of the world of justice is tainted by the torment of its non-advent or “abolition,” which lies in the possibility of human extinction. The world of extinction is a world without politics since, like ancestrality, it is not contemporaneous with thought and because it accomplishes absolute justice in the name of the essential specters by silencing human violence forever. The awaiting of extinction produces a politics of humanist anti-humanism that has become conscious of its limits and that is driven by a sacrificial subject. This subject surrenders her desire for immortality for the sake of justice, as well as fulfills her humanity, indexed by the unique capacity for self-disempowerment, in an unselfish act of assuming responsibility for the present world with the hope to not benefit in any way from this care. This notion of surrender-care, importantly, offers the possibility of thinking and designing new forms of relationships between humans and nonhumans in the Anthropocene based on the premises of unpolitical ontology, which admits both their equality and an unproblematic indifference of nonhumans

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toward humanity, challenging us to significantly reorient the way we think about environmental security today. Affect. The examination of the role of affect in politics occupies a prominent place in contemporary Western political philosophy, while its unpolitical apprehension comes most strongly to the fore in formerly marginalized nonWestern and indigenous perspectives. What does it mean to decouple affect from politics and examine it from an unpolitical perspective? It means, first of all, to deconstruct the traditional identification of politics with transformative action, as well as of living community with the political. This task has been to some extent accomplished in Henry’s rethinking of life as an acosmic experience of self-affection that reveals itself in the interiority of self-feeling, and which also constitutes the core of any community—the subterranean affective layer of pathos-with, of co-feeling, co-suffering, or, better still, com-passion. Similarly to Henry, we find an elaboration of a positive theory of the unpolitical in the Buddhist philosophy of compassion, which offers an alternative view of community that rests on the principle of inter-being and that remains indifferent to politics, without, however, rejecting it. The discussion of the role of compassion in the Western tradition is often critical, deeming compassion an apolitical obstacle to public action, or centered around the possibility of harnessing this unruly affect in the service of political action. Compassion is seen either as negatively unpolitical or as just another ingredient added to the political by way of rational mediation. The major pitfall of these approaches consists in viewing compassion as a homogeneous phenomenon that humans experience naturally, thus always remaining in a passive position in relationship to this affective experience that overcomes them like a contagion. Buddhist philosophy, on the contrary, affirms that compassion, despite being naturally present in all humans as their latent potential, can be experienced in multiple forms that are progressively derived from concrete practices. It is not simply a passive feeling but active aspiration and striving to free others from suffering, and as a result, the mark of genuineness of compassion lies in one’s engagement in a transformative, “public” action that, nevertheless, is never in itself political. To act does not mean to be political, and, as a matter of fact, politics only emerges as a response to a persistent state of human ignorance that leads to strife and conflict, and which require political mediation. However, even when politics is present, its intervention remains limited, because ordering conflict never takes care of its root cause— suffering that results from ignorance of the true essence of self, being, and community. The teaching on selflessness is one of the core tenets of Buddhism, which suggests that a unitary and unchanging self does not exist. It is a mere mental fabrication, an always dynamic process of aggregation of perceptions, ideas, and desires. Individuation is a fiction that obscures the true nature of being



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as inter-being—the universal interconnectedness of all there is. Once one acquires this wisdom or knowledge of reality, one is able to practice compassion on a different level: it ceases to be an emotion that remains attached to a particular object and transforms into a mental state that is able to embrace universality, that is, all beings regardless of their status, appearance, actions, and even species. Genuine compassion and the community it constitutes in its very practice rest on a principle of radical equality: in his or her essential interconnectedness, every sentient being dreads suffering and desires joy, and in this basic disposition he or she is equal to all other beings. The comprehension of this equality in the active practice of compassion does not appear naturally but results from the training of one’s body and mind based on concrete know-how that, importantly, are free from any abstract moral injunctions. A community of compassion is an unpolitical community that rests on principles of radical equality and openness, as it embraces human and nonhuman forms of life alike. The co-suffering expressed in compassion does not draw distinctions between life that is worthy of living and not, between human bios and animal zoē, between a good life and bare life, as any notion of “form” of life springs from ignoring the truth of the interconnectedness of all beings. In sum, the Buddhist view of compassion challenges the ontological primacy of the political, as well as problematizes the traditional Western understanding of justice and community grounded in individualism and anthropocentrism, contributing to a rethinking of these foundational notions in impersonal, unpolitical, and post-humanist terms. It also challenges political philosophy to continue the process of its own decolonization for the sake of opening our thinking to the contributions of non-Western and indigenous ontological models, which offer unique perspectives on politics as well as its real limits. *** The unpolitical attunes our theoretical vision to the reality and experiences that radically extend beyond the political, challenging the totalizing tendency that characterizes contemporary political thought. But how does thinking the unpolitical may translate into living? What new possibilities does it offer for living good and happy lives that do not engender a totalitarian potential? Even as these questions remain beyond the scope of the present work that was primarily dedicated to exploring ways of thinking the unpolitical, the unpolitical, I believe, has important implications in at least three areas that, in most general terms, can be identified as thinking, democracy, and ecology. First, the unpolitical calls for a renewal of political thought based on a reconsideration of its foundational concepts as well as dominant methodologies, including post-structuralism and post-foundationalism, laying the ground for the advent of speculative political thought that rests on the acknowledgment of the real limits of the political. The unpolitical also

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demands further decolonization of our thinking, opening toward a serious consideration of non-Western philosophies and models of togetherness that do not always conform to the Western conceptual apparatus. A positive consideration of the limits of politics and the transformative potential of unpolitical action once again raises the question of the essence of democratic communities, especially considering the growing crises of inclusion that we witness all over the world today. What is at stake here are ideals of radical openness, inclusivity, and equality that form the foundation of communities that might be called truly democratic. While politics for centuries has been constituted through exceptions that were deemed necessary for the sake of preserving proper public space, deproblematization of political exteriority relieves the anxiety induced by an encounter with the other, as she is no longer automatically seen as a threat but, perhaps, as potential for the enrichment of communities and relationality in general. Embracing an unpolitical perspective and forms of action also diminishes the current insistence on specifically political solutions to growing problems of inclusivity, exemplified, for example, by the ongoing refugee crisis and mounting impediments to human mobility across the globe. As political actions appear to be increasingly ineffective, leading to more problems than solutions, the unpolitical approaches—embodied, for instance, by communities of compassion, hospitality, and ethical care—become more and more attractive. Last, the question of the relationship between humans and nonhumans, which constitutes both a specific case of democratic inclusivity and an ecological concern in its own right, is affected by the acknowledgment of the radical detachment of unpolitical life and being from the political. In the Anthropocene, when human life appears more fragile than even before due to the consequences of its own activity, we must move away from thinking focused on the problem of human insecurity toward a paradigm that rests on the principles of a radically open community. For this shift to occur, rather than drawing nonhumans into politics, hoping to subject radical exteriority to the needs of human understanding and control, it would be more productive to admit that nonhumans may be irrevocably indifferent to humanity and its politics, as well as allowing that it might be they who have the final say in whether to welcome us into their world. Nonhuman actions, then, become intelligible based on the principles of a different, unpolitical ontology that, among other things, rests on a positive differentiation between human and nonhuman relations of force and admits that human coexistence always happens side by side with radical solitude or the being-without of life, nature, and things. We must finally come to terms that even if we stare long enough into the abyss, it might not gaze back at us because it simply does not feel obliged or, perhaps, because whatever dragon dwells within it is preoccupied with something far more interesting than humanity.

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Index

absolute, non-metaphysical, 110 – 12, 179. See also contingency absolutely unpolitical, 8, 17, 20, 33, 72, 173, 176; definition of, 17; in Schmitt, 18, 20 – 31. See also the unpolitical advent, 69, 105 – 6, 110 – 11, 113 – 21, 165, 179; and non-advent, 120, 179; of the unpolitical, 10, 46, 176, 181 affect/affectivity, 11, 46, 56, 98, 147, 149 – 52, 154 – 55, 157 – 58, 164 – 66, 176, 180; and life, 127 – 31, 133, 135 – 39, 146n7; tonalities of, 131, 169n10. See also compassion; self-affection affirmative biopolitics, 33, 48n4, 125 After Finitude (Meillassoux), 110, 119 Agamben, Giorgio, 2, 8, 10, 31n2, 46, 87 – 100, 103, 125, 131, 133 – 34, 141, 172, 174 – 75 agonism, 5, 7 – 8, 31, 77, 155. See also conflict altruism. See compassion anarchy, 39, 59, 77, 83, 149, 175 ancestrality, 12, 103, 105 – 10, 113, 120 – 22, 178 – 79 animal, 2, 23, 28 – 30, 31n2, 43, 100nn4 – 5, 130, 148 – 49, 181.

See also new materialism; post-humanism anonymity, 55, 60, 119, 122 anthropocentrism, 13, 31, 104, 167, 181 antipolitical, 71, 76 – 78, 85n9, 143, 149 apolitical, 1, 2, 4, 9, 11, 12, 52, 65, 71 – 72, 74, 76 – 78, 82, 88, 92, 180; affect, 149 – 53; and the unpolitical, 11, 150, 176 apolitics, 13n3 archè. See origin arche-fossil, 105 – 11, 179; and ArchAncience, 146n4 Arendt, Hannah, 5, 8, 12, 50 – 51, 72, 74 – 75, 92, 100n1, 150 – 62, 164 – 65, 167, 172 Aristotle, 1 – 2, 8, 43, 52, 73, 89, 93, 95, 131, 141, 148 art, 45, 51, 61 – 63, 118, 124n8, 144 – 45, 146n7 Augustine, 2 – 3, 13n1, 75, 82 auto-affection. See self-affection Badiou, Alain, 8, 123n2, 124n8 barbarism, 139 bare life, 10, 87 – 100, 103, 125, 132, 174, 181; and biopolitics, 10, 87 – 88, 92, 100; and camp, 100n3; 193

194

Index

as co-originary with politics, 90 – 92; as impolitical, 10, 87 – 94, 175; notion of, 88, 100nn1 – 2, 103, 132; politicization of, 10, 87, 89, 92, 103; positive, 10, 87 – 88, 92, 99 – 100, 132, 178; unpolitical, 10, 87 – 88, 93 – 94, 96 – 100. See also form-of-life Barthes, Roland, 94 Bataille, Georges, 24, 27, 72, 75, 80 – 81, 85n10 Bauman, Zygmunt, 6 becoming, 42, 111 – 17, 119 – 20, 179 Being and Time (Heidegger), 54 – 55, 60 being-in-the-world, 126, 129 – 30, 140 – 41. See also being-with; world Being Singular Plural (Nancy), 53, 64n1 being-together, 54 – 55, 58 – 59, 61 – 62, 83, 112, 149, 151; and beingwith, 64n1. See also being-with; community being-with, 9, 11 – 12, 139 – 41, 169n12; and being-together, 64n1; and being-without, 60 – 61, 108; limits of, 60 – 63; primordial totality of, 9, 49, 53 – 57, 59 – 62, 64n1. See also plurality being-without, 9, 12, 60 – 61, 108, 133, 179, 182 benevolence, 118 – 19, 121, 124n9, 152 Benjamin, Walter, 92 – 93 Bergson, Henri, 123n2 Bichat, Xavier, 22, 44, 46 biology, 7, 9, 12, 20, 33, 43 – 44, 46 – 47, 92, 100n2, 115, 125, 132, 140 – 41, 149, 174, 177. See also biopolitics; life biopolitics, 5, 7 – 8, 10, 33 – 34, 42 – 47, 50, 71, 84n3, 92 – 93, 100n1, 100n3, 175 – 76; biological life and, 7, 9, 11 – 12, 33, 46 – 47, 92, 100n2, 174, 177; biology and, 33, 43 – 44, 46, 125, 132, 140 – 41, 174; and biopower, 48n1; Foucault and

Agamben on, 87 – 88; limits of, 12, 46 – 47, 125 – 46; resistance to/ critique of, 9, 12, 33 – 34, 46, 92, 125, 140, 144; thinkers of, 125, 174. See also bare life biopower, 34, 46, 87 – 88; and biopolitics, 48n1. See also biopolitics; power bios, 2, 7, 89 – 91, 94, 97 – 98, 100n2, 134, 141, 181; politikos, 7, 94, 98; theoretikos, 7, 98 Bios (Esposito), 84n3 The Birth of the Clinic (Foucault), 46 Blanchot, Maurice, 91 bodhichitta, 158, 169n8 bodhisattva, 159, 169n8 body, 2, 5, 43 – 44, 128, 181 Broch, Hermann, 72 Buddhist political philosophy, 12, 149. See also compassion Butler, Judith, 8 Cacciari, Massimo, 8 – 9, 10, 65 – 71, 73 – 74, 78, 83, 84n1, 87, 90 – 91, 103, 175 Canetti, Elias, 72, 75 – 76 care of the self, 45 – 46 Categories of the Impolitical (Esposito), 10, 70 – 72, 76, 81, 84n3 Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political, 49, 51 – 52 chaos, 3, 26 – 27, 91, 110 – 12 City of God/heavenly city, 2 – 3, 6 – 7, 171 City of Men/earthly city, 2 – 3 civil society, 5, 19 class, 36 – 37, 95 – 96, 153 coexistence, 7, 53, 55 – 58, 60, 163, 175. See also being-with cogito, 47, 134; in Descartes, 57, 126 – 29. See also consciousness colonialism, 11, 148 – 49. See also decolonization The Coming Community (Agamben), 97 coming politics, 87, 91 – 98, 125, 175



Index 195

communism, 95 – 96, 118 Communitas (Esposito), 84n3, 85n8 community: closed, 52 – 53; and compassion, 150, 153, 155, 157, 160, 163 – 65, 167, 181; essence of, 53, 57, 136 – 37; of life, 12, 135 – 39, 141, 178; open, 99, 182; as pathoswith, 12, 137, 180; political, 1 – 2, 7, 50; post-humanist, 12, 31, 137, 141, 146n6; primordial, 55 – 56; a priori, 136 – 38; rethinking of, 31, 58; unpolitical, 135 – 38, 141, 181. See also being-with; sharing comparative political theory, 147 – 48, 168n1. See also decolonization compassion: and action, 13, 150 – 52, 154, 156 – 58, 160, 166 – 67; as apolitical, 12, 149 – 55, 180; Arendt on, 12, 150 – 62, 164 – 65, 167; Buddhist philosophy of, 12 – 13, 149 – 51, 156 – 67, 168n4, 169nn6 – 7, 180 – 81; Christian understanding of, 156 – 57; and community, 150, 153, 155, 157, 160, 163 – 65, 167, 181; critique of, 12, 150 – 51, 155 – 56, 159, 164, 168n3; cultivation/practices of, 151, 165 – 66; emotion and, 151, 158 – 59, 166, 169n9; genuine, 158 – 62, 165 – 66, 181; Kant on, 152; as natural, 12, 150 – 53, 158 – 60, 163, 165 – 66; and nonhumans, 13, 155, 160, 163, 168; and pathos-with, 137, 180; and politics, 12, 149 – 57, 160, 167; spontaneity of, 158 – 59, 166; types of, 159, 161, 164 – 65; and the unpolitical, 12, 149 – 51, 156 – 57, 160, 167, 180 – 81 The Concept of the Political (Schmitt), 17, 23, 72 conflict, 3 – 4, 6 – 8, 18 – 19, 22 – 25, 27, 35 – 36, 75 – 78, 82, 112, 119, 157, 172, 174 – 77, 180 consciousness, 57 – 58, 68, 107; concept of, 126 – 29; and life, 47, 134, 142 – 43; political, 20, 28, 69 – 70, 79

contamination, 147 – 48, 151 – 52, 156, 162, 180 contingency, 4, 47, 123n2; necessity of, 110 – 16, 119 – 20, 179 correlation/correlationism: critique of, 12, 104, 106 – 12, 122n1, 123n2, 178 – 79; definition of, 105 – 6; and life, 129 – 30, 134, 139, 145n1; and politics, 105, 108 – 9; and representation (in Henry), 126 – 27, 129 counter-conduct, 45 – 46. See also resistance culture, 3, 18, 66, 90 Cynics, 45, 145 Dalai Lama, 157 – 63, 166, 169n13 Dasein, 54, 56, 134, 141. See also being-with; Mitsein death, 4, 55, 115 – 17, 119, 121 – 22, 179; and existentialism, 19 – 20; of God, 11, 19; life and, 12, 20, 22 – 23, 33, 44, 46 – 47, 87 – 89, 91, 93, 131, 140, 142, 174 – 76; and the political, 20, 22 – 23, 30, 59, 63, 79. See also rebirth decision: philosophical, 23, 27 – 30; political, 17 – 18, 20, 24 – 27, 29, 88 – 89, 173. See also sovereignty decolonization, 11 – 12, 147, 149, 151, 181 – 82 deconstruction, 53, 58, 65 – 67, 69, 71, 73, 76 – 77, 80 – 81, 150, 176, 180 Deleuze, Gilles, 27, 34, 46, 100, 123n2, 169n12 democracy, 17 – 19, 66 – 68, 74, 172, 178, 181 – 82 depoliticization, 9, 18 – 20, 26, 29, 42, 45, 68, 73 – 76, 78, 82, 92, 94, 108, 125, 172 – 73 Derrida, Jacques, 8, 31n2, 169n5 Descartes, Rene, 57, 126 – 29 desire, 28, 73, 85n9, 94 – 96, 112, 115 – 18, 123n2, 158, 160 – 61, 179;

196

Index

for the political/politics, 18, 20, 28, 66, 118, 122, 138, 173 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 35, 37 domination, 3, 36, 40, 42. See also violence ecology, 31, 148, 161, 181 – 82 economy/economics, 5, 7 – 8, 20, 28, 36 – 37, 39, 51 – 52, 161, 172, 174; political, 42, 50 – 51, 53, 61 – 62. See also general economy; household ecstasis, 55 – 56, 81 – 82, 85n10, 96, 128, 130, 135, 142 – 43 emancipatory politics, 117 – 18, 122 empathy. See compassion engaged Buddhism, 161, 163, 169n11 entropy, 68 – 69 environment, 46, 163, 168. See also nature equality, 114 – 18, 121, 137, 157, 160 – 61, 176, 178 – 79, 181 – 82 equanimity, 161, 165. See also compassion eschatology, 67, 75, 78, 116 – 18 Esposito, Roberto, 8 – 10, 48n4, 70 – 85, 87, 90 – 91, 95, 100, 103, 109, 125, 153, 172, 174 – 76 essential spectre, 116, 121 eternal recurrence, 124n7 ethics, 21, 45 – 47, 63, 67, 73, 124n7, 144 – 45, 182; Buddhist, 149, 164, 167 – 68; factical, 110, 114 – 15, 118, 120. See also care of the self event, 26 – 27, 96, 105 – 7, 110, 112 – 13, 117, 119, 123n2, 124n8. See also advent “Is Everything Political?” (Nancy), 61 exception, 25 – 26, 28, 30, 75, 79, 88 – 94, 173, 175, 178, 182; fictitious and absolute form of, 26 – 30, 91, 93; of the unpolitical, 25 – 26, 30 – 31, 173. See also bare life exclusion. See exception exteriority. See outside of politics

extinction, 12, 103, 105, 109 – 10, 120 – 22, 124n6, 178 – 79; and ancestrality, 105, 110, 120 facticity, 111, 115, 119 fideism, 145n1 finitude, 7, 23, 55 – 57, 110 – 11; of the political, 65, 69, 73, 75, 77 – 79, 82, 116 – 18, 122, 124n2, 124n8 force, 36, 56, 78 – 79, 85n9, 140, 142 – 43, 153, 155; relations of, 8, 33 – 40, 42, 46, 68 – 69, 94, 99, 108, 130, 174, 182. See also power forgetting: of life, 127, 129 – 30, 132, 139 – 43, 145; of the unpolitical, 18, 139 – 43 form-of-life: and coming politics, 92 – 94, 96, 99, 125, 175; notion of, 90, 93, 96 – 98, 100n2, 131 – 32; and thought, 98 – 99; unpolitical, 87 – 88, 97 – 99, 132 – 33, 141, 145, 178 Foucault, Michel, 5, 8 – 10, 23, 33 – 50, 87 – 88, 92, 100, 103, 108, 125, 140, 145, 172, 174 – 75, 177; and Schmitt, 33, 35, 41 – 42, 48n2 freedom, 3 – 4, 42, 45, 116, 131, 150, 152 – 53, 158, 161, 165 – 66 Freud, Sigmund, 129, 142, 174 Freund, Julien, 70 – 71 friendship, 46, 118, 160, 171; and enmity, 17 – 18, 20 – 28, 35, 41, 173 frontier, disappearance of, 19, 174 gaze, 69, 71 – 72, 74, 77, 79, 83, 182. See also the impolitical gender, 36, 172 genealogy, 33 – 34, 47, 67, 69, 175 general economy, 24; of the political, 23, 33, 37, 176; of power, 33, 37; restricted and, 24 generation: and birth, 133 gift, 130, 135 – 36, 138, 156, 163 – 64, 169n5 God, 2 – 3, 11, 19, 50 – 51, 75, 79, 121, 156



Index 197

good life, 2, 13, 17, 35, 50, 63, 89, 93 – 94, 141, 149, 181 governmentality, 40 – 46, 48n2, 176 grand politics, 65 – 66, 68 – 70, 175. See also the impolitical Guardini, Romano, 72, 75 Guattari, Felix, 27, 169n12 Habermas, Jürgen, 4 happiness, 13, 87, 93 – 96, 98, 100n4, 103, 131 – 32, 157, 160 – 61, 165 – 66, 181 Hardt, Michael, 48n4 Hegel, G.W.F., 57, 137 Heidegger, Martin, 7, 9, 54 – 55, 60, 96, 100n4, 122, 130, 134, 141, 169n12, 175 Henry, Michel, 12, 61, 100, 125 – 46, 177, 180; and Meillassoux, 126, 129, 145n1, 146n4 The History of Sexuality (Foucault), 35, 37 Hobbes, Thomas, 3 – 4, 19, 75, 174 Holocaust, 6 homo sacer, 90 – 92, 103, 175. See also bare life Homo Sacer (Agamben), 87, 100n2 hope, 115 – 17, 119 – 22, 124n7, 165, 179 household, 1 – 2, 5 – 7, 37, 50, 89, 92, 98, 171, 174 humanism, 119, 122, 179 humanity, 2 – 3, 5, 7, 18 – 19, 31n2, 95, 104, 114 – 15, 119, 122, 134, 179, 182; and compassion, 152; as essentially political, 23 – 24, 108; extinction of, 12, 104 – 5, 120 – 21; and happiness, 93 – 94; and life, 92, 134 – 35, 144, 155; as pre-political concept, 27, 29 – 31; self-sufficiency of, 51 human nature, 2 – 4, 6, 19, 23, 67, 113, 157 – 58, 174; anthropological optimism, 23; anthropological pessimism, 18 – 19, 23, 27; in Buddhism, 157 – 58; and happiness,

94 – 95; as inherently political, 8, 23 – 24; as workless, 94 – 95 identity, 29, 44, 52, 63, 79 – 80, 91, 94 – 96, 98 – 99, 132, 148, 162 – 63 ideology, 1, 77; critique of, 68, 112, 114 Illumination of the Thought of Chandrakirti’s ‘Supplement to the Middle Way’ (Tsong-ka-pa), 164 immanence: and ethics, 114 – 15; and immanentism, 51 – 53, 56, 58; and life, 127, 129 – 33, 137 – 38, 143, 146n1, 177; philosophers of, 123n2; and politics/the political, 7, 19, 34 – 38, 40, 42, 45, 52, 174; and transcendence, 81 – 82, 84n1, 97 immortality, 114 – 15, 117, 120 – 21, 124n7, 179 Immunitas (Esposito), 84n3 immunity, 71, 125, 152 – 53, 164 impersonal, 71, 85n9, 100, 153, 155 – 56, 181; justice, 167 – 68 the impolitical: in Agamben and Esposito, differences, 87, 90 – 91, 95, 100; as bare life (in Agamben), 10, 87 – 92; category/notion of, 9 – 11, 65 – 66, 70 – 72, 74, 82 – 83, 85n6, 89, 91, 103, 109, 174; coincidence of the political and, 76, 78, 80, 82 – 83; community and, 85n8; conflict and, 75 – 77; as critique of the political (in Cacciari), 10, 66 – 71, 74, 78, 83, 84n1; depoliticization and, 68, 73 – 76, 78, 82; ecstatic and ascetic registers of, 81 – 82, 85n9; as gaze/ vision, 72 – 74, 77, 79 – 80, 83; impolitico, translation of, 84n1; insufficiency of, 10, 83 – 84; as lack (in Freund), 70 – 71; as limit and heart of the political, 79 – 81; as nonpolitical (in Mann), 66 – 67, 73; political theology and, 65, 67, 72 – 76, 81 – 82; representation and, 65, 73 – 75, 77 – 78, 80 – 82, 85n8; as shadow of the political (in Esposito),

198

Index

76 – 82; the unpolitical and, 65, 78, 83, 84n1, 97 indifference, 1, 12, 17, 55, 78 – 79, 94 – 95, 106, 136 – 38, 144, 150, 161, 176 – 80, 182 indigenous thought, 147 – 49, 168n2, 168n4, 178, 180 – 81 individual, 4 – 5, 68, 116 – 17, 135, 137 – 38, 153, 155, 160, 162, 166, 168, 169n6, 177. See also subjectivity infant, figure of, 130 inhuman, 8, 26, 29 – 31, 155. See also nonhuman; post-humanism inter-being, 12, 154, 163, 167 – 68, 169n12, 177, 180 – 81. See also interconnectedness/interdependence interconnectedness/interdependence, 150, 157 – 58, 161 – 65, 167 – 68, 181. See also inter-being interiority, 5, 22 – 23, 81, 127, 129 – 31, 133, 144, 146n7, 177 intersubjectivity, 107, 135. See also community intimacy, 5 – 6, 153, 158, 160, 161, 163, 165, 167. See also compassion; household; loving-kindness; private sphere invisibility, 12, 23, 44, 79; of compassion, 153 – 56, 158; of life, 128, 136, 139, 143 – 45, 146n4, 146n7, 177 Jellinek, Georg, 31n1 justice, 2 – 3, 13; absolute/universal, 12, 105, 109, 114 – 22, 165, 178 – 79; and compassion, 151, 167 – 68, 181; and extinction, 120 – 22, 179; impersonal, 167 – 68 Kant, Immanuel, 54, 105 – 6, 111, 119 – 20, 129, 150, 152, 178 karma, 161, 167 – 68 killing, 22, 25, 30, 121, 142. See also death

Lacan, Jacques, 58 Laclau, Ernesto, 8, 172 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 49 – 54, 59, 77, 85n6, 174 – 75 Latour, Bruno, 31n2, 104, 108 law, 19 – 20, 35, 38 – 39, 45, 91, 112, 154 Lefort, Claude, 8, 172 Leviathan (Hobbes), 3, 75 liberalism, 4, 35, 74; critique of, 17 – 18; as movement of neutralization and depoliticization, 18 – 20 life: biological/natural, 7, 20, 33, 87, 89, 92, 100, 132, 177; community of, 12, 135 – 39, 141, 178; and death, 12, 20, 22 – 23, 33, 44, 46 – 47, 87 – 89, 91, 93, 131, 140, 142, 174 – 76; as domain of error, 9, 46 – 47; forgetting of, 127, 129 – 30, 132, 139 – 43, 145; happy, 87, 96, 98, 100n4, 131; livable, 13n3; and living being, 47, 89, 94, 115, 131 – 38, 140 – 41, 144, 146n5, 165, 177 – 78; non-human, 8, 18, 27, 30 – 31, 155, 173, 181; notion/ concept of, 9 – 10, 12, 44, 46 – 47, 88 – 89, 90, 94, 97, 100, 125, 132, 142; objectification of, 9, 43 – 47, 88, 92, 125, 140, 174, 177; “an other life,” 9, 145; phenomenology of, 12, 126 – 27; politicization of, 7 – 8, 30, 45, 137, 139, 141; power of, 26 – 27, 30, 34, 46, 125, 130 – 31; rethinking of, 11, 33 – 34, 92 – 100, 180; as self-affection, 12, 128 – 29, 131, 140, 143 – 44, 145n1, 177, 180; synthetic notion of, 44, 140, 174, 177; taxonomic notion of, 44; that escapes biopolitics, 43 – 47, 87; and thought, 98 – 100, 113 – 14, 126 – 30, 133, 136 – 37; transcendental, 100, 140 – 41, 144, 147; unpolitical, 27, 97, 125 – 45, 182. See also biopolitics; form-of-life life-as-such, 12, 97 – 99, 132, 178. See also life



Index 199

limits of politics/the political, 1, 6, 11 – 12, 52, 65, 70, 78 – 80, 82, 104 – 5, 108 – 9, 122, 171 – 73, 175 – 76, 181 – 82. See also the impolitical; outside of politics; the unpolitical logos, 52, 57, 89, 94, 134 – 35, 148 – 49, 154, 178 love, 3, 59 – 64, 118, 124n8, 154, 159, 161; and the political, 59 – 60, 64n1 loving-kindness, 158, 160, 162 – 64, 166. See also compassion Machiavelli, Niccolò, 73, 75, 77 manifestation, 12, 107, 127, 138, 141, 143 – 44, 146n4, 177; fundamental modes of, 127 – 29 Mann, Thomas, 66 – 67, 70, 72 – 74, 84n1, 109 Marion, Jean-Luc, 61 Marx, Karl, 37, 68, 95 – 96, 99, 118, 137 – 38, 168, 174 mass society, 5. See also the social materialism. See speculative realism may-being, 120, 179 Meillassoux, Quentin, 12, 96, 103 – 24, 165, 178 – 79; and Henry, 126, 129, 145n1, 146n4 Mitsein, 53 – 55, 141. See also being-with modernity, 3 – 6, 8, 22, 33 – 35, 43, 50, 66, 73, 77, 82, 88, 135, 171 – 72, 175; late, 5 – 6, 20 morality, 20, 28, 76, 114 – 15, 150, 164, 167, 178, 181 Mouffe, Chantal, 8, 17, 26, 172 multiculturalism, 147 naked life. See bare life Nancy, Jean-Luc, 8 – 9, 42, 49 – 64, 77, 85n6, 85n10, 95, 99, 103, 109, 141, 169n12, 172, 174 – 75 nature, 1 – 3, 7 – 8, 11, 27, 29, 30 – 31, 51, 90, 104, 119 – 20, 122, 143, 172 – 73, 178, 182. See also state of nature

Negri, Antonio, 48n4 neutral, 18 – 19, 25, 28, 30, 72, 94, 173 The Neutral (Barthes), 94 new materialism, 11, 104, 178; limitations of, 104, 108. See also post-humanism; speculative realism Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10 – 11, 66 – 70, 75, 124n7, 129, 142, 150, 174 “Nietzsche and the Impolitical” (Cacciari), 10, 66 nihilism, 12, 67, 69, 70, 121, 124n7 no-man’s land. See frontier, disappearance of nonhuman, 1, 8, 11 – 12, 18, 26 – 28, 30 – 31, 104, 108 – 9, 114 – 15, 124n5, 137, 148 – 49, 153, 155, 160, 163, 168, 173, 178 – 79, 181 – 82; politics, 108 – 9, 124n4. See also post-humanism nonpolitical: life, 90, 92; politics and, 1 – 6, 9, 11, 61, 71, 171 – 72, 174; power, 42; as rejection of politics (in Mann), 66 – 67, 73. See also antipolitical; apolitical; pre-political non-relation, 63, 133 – 35. See also being-without; solitude non-Western philosophy/thought, 11, 124n9, 147 – 48, 151, 176, 180 – 82 object-oriented philosophy. See speculative realism oikos. See household ontology: indigenous, 148 – 49, 168n2, 181; non-Western, 11, 176, 181; political, 6, 8, 11 – 12, 36, 53, 60 – 61, 65, 84, 108, 147, 172, 175; politicization of, 7 – 9, 49, 61; social, 12, 34 – 36, 55, 177; unpolitical, 179, 182; Western, 147 – 48, 164, 176 The Open (Agamben), 100n5 The Order of Things (Foucault), 43 origin: of politics, 59, 77, 81, 94; of the world, 56 – 58, 77, 175 The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt), 100n1

200

Index

the other, 29 – 30, 57, 60, 126, 133 – 36, 155 – 56, 158, 161, 164, 182 otherness. See the other outside of politics: absolute/radical/ real, 1, 6 – 8, 10 – 11, 13, 31, 45, 78, 83, 97, 103, 105 – 6, 122, 126, 129; and depoliticization, 9, 18 – 20, 26, 42, 45, 68, 73 – 76, 78, 92, 94, 108, 172 – 73; and negation of politics, 9, 71; relative, 10 – 11, 22, 81, 85n11, 89, 90 – 91, 106, 174 – 75. See also the impolitical; limits of politics; the nonpolitical; the unpolitical outside-within, 83, 84n1, 90, 96 – 97. See also immanence paradigm, 60, 94, 97, 100n3, 182 pariah, 153 parrhēsia, 45, 145 passion, 2, 5, 8, 81, 85, 130, 153 – 54, 159. See also compassion; desire passivity, 85n9, 130 – 31, 146n2, 152 – 54, 158 – 60, 180 Paul, 75, 82 phonē, 154 physiology, 23, 92 pity, 153, 155 – 57, 160 – 61, 165. See also compassion; solidarity Plato, 75, 80 plurality, 9, 49, 55 – 61, 74 – 75, 77, 83, 154, 175. See also singular plural polis, 1 – 2, 4, 50, 52, 56 – 57, 59, 63, 77, 88 – 89, 93, 103, 132, 134, 171. See also community; politics the political: autonomy of, 20 – 21; category/concept of, 7 – 8, 11 – 12, 17 – 21, 23 – 24, 28, 31n1, 35, 52, 72, 139, 172, 178; as collective unconscious, 58 – 60; essence of, 19, 50, 52 – 54, 73, 77; and friend-enemy distinction, 17 – 18, 20 – 28, 35, 41, 173; as place of detotalization, 61 – 63; as place of the encounter, 9, 49, 54, 175; as place

of the in-common, 49, 59 – 60, 63, 175; primacy of, 10 – 11, 24, 112, 167, 181; rethinking of, 50, 53, 87, 92 – 98; retreat of, 49 – 53, 85n6, 175; totalizing ambition of, 7 – 9, 11 – 12, 13n3, 31, 33 – 34, 39, 42 – 43, 49, 63, 65, 138, 144, 148 – 49; as total potential, 8, 17, 21 – 22, 24, 27 – 28, 30, 33, 36, 39 – 43, 46, 79, 98, 108, 113, 119, 173 – 74; valorization of, 18, 67, 74 – 75, 172. See also political difference; political totality political difference, 7, 13nn2 – 3. See also the political political philosophy/theory, 29 – 30, 39, 50 – 51, 77, 105, 109, 112, 134, 151, 174, 178, 181; Catholic, 74 – 75; contemporary, 1, 6 – 12, 18, 42, 65, 70, 103, 105, 119, 123n2, 171 – 73, 176, 180, 181; Esposito on, 72 – 73; modern, 27, 31, 34, 77, 82, 99; postwar, 6 – 9, 171 – 72 Political Theology (Schmitt), 17, 25 political theory. See political philosophy political totality, 24, 26, 42, 51, 61, 68 – 70, 72, 84, 173; and biopolitics (in Foucault), 33, 43 – 47; new/open, 7, 8, 42, 46, 49, 53 – 54, 59, 103, 175; and omnipresence of power relations (in Foucault), 33 – 40; and ontology of being-with (in Nancy), 49, 53 – 58; symptomology of (in Schmitt), 20 – 24; as total potential, 8, 17, 21 – 22, 24, 27 – 28, 30, 33, 36, 39 – 43, 46, 79, 98, 108, 113, 119, 173 – 74; and total state, 66 – 67 politics: affirmative refusal of, 13n3; commonwealth and, 3 – 4, 90, 174; and compassion, 12, 149 – 57, 160, 167; contingency of, 112 – 13, 179; essence of, 6, 52, 172; of the living, 144 – 45; and nonpolitical, 1 – 6, 9, 11, 61, 71, 171, 172, 174; and power (in Foucault), 4, 34 – 35, 37 – 41; and thought, 51 – 52, 57, 98 – 100, 104 – 5,



Index 201

108 – 10; traditional understanding of, 5 – 7, 17, 35, 39, 41 – 42, 49, 58, 65, 71, 81, 103, 126, 143, 172, 174, 176, 178, 180; world without, 12, 105, 110, 118 – 19, 121 – 22, 179. See also biopolitics; limits of politics; the political; politics-as-state Politics (Aristotle), 1 politics-as-state, 6 – 7, 19, 103. See also politics Politique et impolitique (Freund), 70 post-foundationalism: politics, 19 – 20, 22, 59, 65, 67 – 70, 73, 75, 78, 82 – 83, 175; theory/thought, 11, 73, 75, 77, 103, 105, 181. See also post-structuralism post-humanism, 11, 13, 104, 108, 137, 141, 146n6, 178, 181. See also new materialism; nonhuman; speculative realism post-structuralism, 11, 105, 122, 181 power: community and, 99; concept of the political and, 35 – 36; as force relations, 8, 33 – 40, 42, 46, 68 – 69, 94, 99, 108, 130, 174, 182; general economy of, 33, 37; and the Good, 74 – 76; and impotence/ powerlessness, 22, 99, 130 – 31, 135; of life, 26 – 27, 30, 34, 46, 125, 130 – 31; micro-physics of, 35; omnipresence of, 36, 39, 41, 112; outside of, 39 – 40, 45; and politics (in Foucault), 34 – 35, 37 – 39; potenza, 79, 93 – 94, 98; as Power, 35, 38; and resistance, 39 – 40, 42, 45; strategies of, 34, 36 – 40, 42; struggle for, 4, 37 – 38, 41. See also governmentality praxis, 1, 9, 73, 137 – 38 pre-political, 2, 7, 25 – 31, 91, 136, 144, 176 – 77 private sphere, 1, 4 – 7, 37, 47, 50, 116, 150, 153, 155, 171, 174 psychoanalysis, 58 – 59, 126, 139, 142 – 43. See also unconscious

public sphere, 1, 4 – 5, 8, 12, 37, 47, 50, 66, 150, 153 – 55, 182 Rancière, Jacques, 8, 42, 172 realism: political, 73, 76, 78 reason, 3 – 4, 6, 97, 111 – 13, 115, 119, 134, 145n1, 150 – 52, 157 – 58, 164; political, 6, 24, 34 – 35, 84n1 rebirth, 114 – 16, 120 – 22, 124n9, 179. See also immortality; reincarnation Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (Mann), 66, 72 reincarnation, 165, 167 – 68. See also rebirth relationality, 7 – 8, 12, 36, 46, 50, 54, 83, 108, 112, 129, 136, 139, 144, 149 – 50, 175, 177, 182; radical, 54, 57, 60, 63. See also being-with; community representation: and correlation, 126 – 27, 129; and impolitical, 65, 73 – 75, 77 – 78, 80 – 82, 85n8. See also consciousness resistance: to biopolitics, 9, 33 – 34, 46, 125, 140, 144; politics and, 40 – 42, 44; power and, 33, 39 – 40, 42, 45 Roman Catholicism and Political Form (Schmitt), 72 Romanticism, 5 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 151 rupture, 3, 7, 13n3, 81 – 82, 113 sacrifice, 55, 117 – 18, 121 – 22, 179 sacrificial subject, 121 – 22, 179 Schiller, Friedrich, 31n1 Schlegel, Friedrich, 31n1 Schmitt, Carl, 8, 11, 17 – 31, 49, 72 – 73, 75, 79, 88 – 92, 103 – 4, 172 – 74, 176, 178; and Foucault, 33, 35, 41 – 42, 48n2 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 129, 142 science, 18, 22, 44, 47, 63, 106 – 7, 110, 124n8, 127, 129, 132, 139 – 41, 145, 178; political, 39, 122. See also biology

202

Index

secular/secularization, 11, 19, 44, 50, 75, 168, 172 – 73 security, 4, 18, 151, 180, 182 Security, Territory, Population (Foucault), 40 self-affection, 12, 128 – 29, 131, 140, 143 – 44, 145n1, 177, 180. See also life selflessness: in Buddhism, 158, 161 – 64, 168, 180 self-revelation: of life, 133, 140 – 41, 143. See also self-affection self-sensing. See self-affection sense, 56 – 61 The Sense of the World (Nancy), 58, 64n1 sharing, 49, 56 – 63, 80, 82, 85n6, 85n8, 85n10, 135, 137 – 38, 177. See also community singular plural, 9, 49, 55 – 61, 175. See also being-with Smith, Adam, 151 the social, 5, 9, 35, 50 – 51, 137, 172 social contract, 3 – 4, 35, 75, 93, 164, 167 sociality, 4, 11, 13, 54 – 57, 148, 151, 163. See also relationality solidarity, 156 – 57, 160, 164. See also compassion; pity solipsism, 54, 57, 109 solitude, 4, 7, 55, 60, 63, 99, 133 – 35, 139, 141, 163, 182. See also being-without soul, 2, 5, 128 – 29 sovereignty, 4, 75, 79, 90, 92 – 93, 97 – 98, 126; decision and, 18, 25 – 26, 74, 89, 91, 93, 173, 175; power and, 34 – 35, 39, 87 – 88. See also exception species, 30, 43, 46, 104, 106, 108 – 10, 119, 140, 149, 155, 181 speculative materialism. See speculative realism speculative political theory, 12, 105, 122, 179

speculative realism, 12, 103 – 4, 108, 111 – 12, 120, 122n1, 129. See also new materialism; post-humanism; Meillassoux, Quentin Spinoza, Baruch, 150 Staat, Bewegung, Volk (Schmitt), 88 state: absolutist/total, 4, 41, 65, 67 – 69, 175. See also politics; politics-as-state state of nature, 3 – 4, 105, 171; politicization of, 7 – 8, 18 – 19, 20, 75, 90 – 91, 174 Strauss, Leo, 23 – 24, 28 struggle. See power subjectivity, 5, 62, 110, 116 – 18, 138, 179 sublimation: of the political, 9, 51 sublime, 69, 155 “as such”: the notion of, 97 – 98; the unpolitical, 25, 30, 93, 97, 99, 100 suffering: Buddhist view of, 160 – 61, 164 – 66, 169n7, 169n10; and compassion, 151 – 58, 160 – 61, 164 – 68, 169n7, 169n10, 180 – 81; and joy, 131, 144, 152, 169n10, 181; levels of, 161, 164; and life’s selfaffection, 130 – 32, 135, 137, 177 survival, 5, 91, 93, 149, 151. See also bare life; state of nature sympathy. See compassion teleology. See telos telos, 2 – 3, 7, 92 – 95, 112 – 13, 119 – 20, 136, 177, 179 terra incognita. See frontier, disappearance of tertium. See third term thanatopolitics, 88, 140 – 41, 177 theology, 7, 18, 49, 50 – 53, 65, 67, 73, 123, 174 – 75; political, 50, 53, 56, 62, 67, 72 – 76, 81 – 82, 126, 143, 174 – 75 theoria, 1, 72 – 73 Thich Nhat Hanh, 163, 169n12



Index 203

things, 1, 8, 11, 31, 56, 104, 106, 108, 147, 163, 173, 176, 178, 182. See also new materialism; post-humanism Third Person (Esposito), 84n3 third term, 25, 28, 59, 72, 94, 97. See also neutral; paradigm threshold, 78 – 81, 83, 90 – 92, 96 tong len, 166 totalitarianism, 5 – 6, 8 – 9, 13, 42, 49, 56, 58, 74, 92, 100n1, 116, 171 – 72, 181. See also political totality transcendence, 3, 7, 19, 22, 53, 56, 60, 75, 78 – 79, 81, 129, 137, 146n1, 177 transcendental life, 100, 140 – 41, 144, 147 truth, 13, 45, 47, 57 – 58, 68, 107, 111, 114 – 15, 123n2, 124n8, 127, 134, 139, 141, 144 – 45, 150, 160, 163; and love, 59 – 60 Tsong-ka-pa, 164 – 65, 169n13 unconscious, 24, 27, 73, 79, 81, 126, 138 – 39; collective, 58 – 60; and life, 142 – 44; positive, 34; as such, 126, 143 the unpolitical: advent of, 10, 46, 176, 181; ancestrality and, 12, 103, 105 – 10, 113, 120 – 22, 178 – 79; community, 135 – 38, 141, 181; compassion and, 12, 149 – 51, 157, 160, 167; extinction and, 12, 103, 105, 109 – 10, 120 – 22, 124n6, 178 – 79; forgetting of, 18, 139 – 43; and the impolitical, 65, 78, 83, 84n1, 97; justice and, 12, 105, 109, 114 – 22, 165, 178 – 79; as life, 27, 97, 125 – 45, 182; loss of, 6 – 8, 10, 103 – 4; and the neutral, 18 – 19, 25, 28, 30, 72, 94, 173; and nonWestern thought, 147 – 48; notion of, 1, 11, 13, 97; as positive bare life,

10, 87 – 88, 92, 99 – 100, 132, 178; positive theory of, 12, 149 – 50, 167, 180; and speculative realism, 103 – 5. See also absolutely unpolitical; limits of politics; outside of politics unreason, 111 – 13. See also contingency unthought, 13, 18, 52, 58, 62, 97 – 99, 111, 126. See also the unpolitical unworking, of politics, 52 – 53, 55, 57 – 58. See also deconstruction vectorial subject, 117 – 18, 121, 179 “videre videor” (Descartes), 128, 134, 146n2 violence, 4, 23, 40, 42, 93, 118, 121, 154 – 56, 159, 179 vita activa, 1 vita contemplativa, 1 vitalism. See life war, 3 – 4, 7, 18, 22, 28 – 30, 35, 38, 40, 63, 118; World War I, 18; World War II, 6. See also conflict Weber, Max, 39 Weil, Simone, 72, 75, 79, 81, 83, 85n9 Weimar Republic, 18 whatever being, 95 – 96 wisdom, 158, 160, 162 – 64, 181 worklessness/inoperability, 94 – 95, 97 world, 49, 54, 79, 83, 85n9; absolute/ real, 138 – 39, 143, 145; abstract, 138 – 39; Fourth (in Meillassoux), 113 – 22, 124n9; and life, 126 – 45, 146n7; origin of, 56 – 58, 77, 175; “an other world,” 9, 145; and sense, 56 – 61, 108; without politics, 12, 105, 110, 118 – 19, 121 – 22, 179 Zizek, Slavoj, 8 zoē, 2, 89 – 90, 92 – 94, 100n2, 131, 134, 141, 181

Author Biography

Inna Viriasova teaches political theory in the Department of Politics at Acadia University. Her current research is in the areas of modern and contemporary political philosophy, critical refugee studies, non-Western and indigenous thought, and post-humanist security. She has published on questions of freedom, life, biopolitics, community, animism, speculative realism, and human displacement, as well as co-edited a book entitled Roberto Esposito: Biopolitics and Philosophy (2018).

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