Democratic Biopolitics: Popular Sovereignty and the Power of Life 9781474449366

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Democratic Biopolitics

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To Marina and Pauliina

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Democratic Biopolitics Popular Sovereignty and the Power of Life

Sergei Prozorov

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Sergei Prozorov, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10.5/12.5 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 4934 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 4936 6 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 4937 3 (epub) The right of Sergei Prozorov to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Acknowledgments Prologue: Towards an experimental analytics of government Biopolitics and the eclipse of democracy Affirmative biopolitics Experimental analytics: A note on method Outline of the argument

vii 1 1 5 9 14

PART 1: ROUSSEAU AND THE CRITIQUE OF BIOPOLITICS 1.

Rousseau’s aporia The divided demos Subtraction: The constitution of the sovereign Emanation: The constitution of government Politics: The existence of the people Government over kingdom Individual as universe

21 21 23 30 39 44 50

2.

The community of solitary walkers The free subject of reverie The universal and the singular Rousseau and radical democracy Rousseau’s ambivalent legacy Democracy as the experience of the generic

55 55 61 70 77 83

PART 2: FREEFORM LIFE 3.

Biopower and the politics of contingency From opposition to synthesis Biopower in the void The scandal of contingency Freedom, equality, community

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95 95 98 107 112

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contents 4.

Is there a democratic form of life? The disappointments of the faithful democrat Democracy of the incommensurable Democratic mannerism

117 117 122 133

5.

Demos distracted Between captivation and boredom The importance of getting carried away The unborable Phish

142 142 148 153 158

6.

How to enjoy democracy again (and again) The malaise of democracy The pleasure of formation Democratic biopolitics in the age of post-truth

163 163 172 184

Epilogue: Why democracy is good for life

197

Notes Bibliography Index

201 204 210

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Acknowledgments

The research for this book was undertaken during the course of the Academy of Finland project ‘Biopolitics and Democracy in Global Governance’ (2015–19), for which I was Principal Investigator. I gratefully acknowledge the Academy’s funding and I am thankful to all the members of the project’s research group, who heard or read the ideas presented here probably a few times too many and provided helpful comments on every occasion: Jaakko Ailio, Marco Piasentier, Jemima Repo, Lauri Siisiainen and Cai Weaver. I am also thankful to the partners of the project for their comments and criticism, which much improved the final version: Catherine Mills, Mika Ojakangas and Simona Rentea. The book was completed during my move from the University of Helsinki, where I worked for eleven years in various teaching and research positions, to the University of Jyväskylä, where I started as Professor of Political Science in August 2018. I am thankful to the administrative personnel at both universities for their help in the smooth transition that permitted me to focus on finishing this book.

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Prologue

Towards an experimental analytics of government

Biopolitics and the eclipse of democracy The trouble with liberal democracies is that they are biopolitical. This seems to be the consensus among various theoretical approaches to biopolitics that have taken up and developed Michel Foucault’s original diagnosis of the transformation in power relations in Western modernity. The advent of biopower is held to have displaced or subsumed sovereign power, whose (re)appropriation has been the object of the struggles for democracy since the eighteenth century. Ever ironic, power has mutated into something else precisely when its former incarnation was about to be reclaimed by the people. The subsequent triumphs and setbacks of democracy have barely affected the overall mode of the biopolitical government of populations, which has operated in a similar way in ideologically disparate regimes. Biopolitics has eclipsed democracy and any reinvigoration of the latter must proceed by confronting the former. There is a sense of resignation in this narrative, which approaches biopower as the insidious force that subjugates us at best as dupes who misrecognize their own subjection as the triumph of democracy, and at worst as hapless victims of the power that blindly strikes at the very life it swears to secure. This stance understandably leads to a certain cynicism regarding democracy: what does the formally democratic nature of the regime matter, if the actual decisions regarding our lives are not made by ourselves or even our representatives, but the authorities whose power is grounded in rationalities entirely independent from the democratic process and increasingly at odds with it? Yet, the proliferation of non-democratic biopolitical rationalities does not mean that democracy 1

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democratic biopolitics itself has become meaningless or irrelevant. In fact, the list of problems with or grievances about biopolitics that can be drawn up after a quick survey of the literature, such as exclusion, hierarchy, non-accountability, non-transparency and delegitimization of alternatives (see, for example, Vatter 2014; Vatter and Lemm 2014; Dillon 2015; Repo 2015), is immediately familiar from the democratic struggles worldwide since early modernity up to now. Biopolitics is long overdue a democratic revolution of its own, but no one seems to have an idea of what that might mean in practice. This is the direction I explore in this book. Rather than criticize existing democracies as biopolitical and hence not adequate to their concept, I pose the question of whether the rationality of biopolitics might itself be rendered democratic. While the discourse on biopolitics and democracy has focused on how the former corrupts the latter, I propose to inquire into how the latter can positively transform the former. Conversely, while the critical discourse on biopolitics and democracy has thus far sought either to defend democracy from biopolitics or to mourn its defeat by biopolitics, I shall argue that democracy itself becomes viable only by its biopolitical conversion, in the absence of which it is resigned at best to hovering above lived experience as a regulating structure and at worst to abandoning this domain to non-democratic governmental rationalities, of which contemporary neoliberalism is a good example. While biopolitics without democracy is lethal, democracy without biopolitics is lifeless: hence the urgency of the question of their positive synthesis. Thus, against the current tendency to identify biopolitics with camps, racism, eugenics and other unpalatable things, in this book I shall offer a more positive image of biopolitics as a lived praxis of democracy. Let us first briefly address the negative synthesis of biopolitics and democracy as articulated in the canonical theories of biopolitics. We shall begin with Foucault’s inaugural account of biopolitics. Famously dismissive of the traditional concerns and problematics of political theory, Foucault offered his diagnosis of biopolitics to complement and correct the understanding of modernity in terms of the gradual spread of liberalism and democracy. In Discipline and Punish, he posited the disciplinary formation of docile bodies as the counterpart of the emergence of the liberal subject: [the] general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all these systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and non-symmetrical. The real, corporal disciplines constituted the foundation of the formal, juridical liberties. (Foucault 1977: 222)

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prologue Similarly, on the level of populations, biopolitics constituted the underside of the expansion of democratic government that continued to make populations governable at the very moment when the people were called upon to rule themselves. Moreover, Foucault repeatedly emphasized that, for all their ideological and institutional differences, democracies and non-democracies (both fascist and socialist) relied on the same rationalities of the governance of the vital processes of populations, be it racism, eugenics, social work or factory management (Foucault 2003: 261–2). For Foucault, this similarity either entailed the relegation of democracy to a secondary, epiphenomenal status or testified to its hopeless corruption by biopolitical rationalities that are much more powerful than it is. The prevailing narrative of Western modernity is less about the progressive spread of democracy than about the ‘demonic’ union or negative synthesis of sovereign and biopower (Foucault 1988: 71; Foucault 2003: 255–6). Subsequent theories of biopolitics have largely abided by this inaugural diagnosis and emphasized it even more vividly. Giorgio Agamben opened the first volume of his Homo Sacer series with a still controversial claim about the ‘inner solidarity of democracy and totalitarianism’, which is grounded precisely in their shared biopolitical orientation (Agamben 1998: 10): ‘Only because politics in our age has been entirely transformed into biopolitics was it possible for politics to be constituted as totalitarian politics to a degree hitherto unknown’ (ibid.: 120). While Agamben extends Foucault’s biopolitical diagnosis, originally limited to European modernity, to the entire Western ontopolitical tradition, he follows him in viewing biopolitics as the dark underside of modern democracy, whereby every act of political empowerment of the people was accompanied by a more intense and insidious subjection of their bare life to, paradoxically, their own sovereign power: [The] contiguity between mass democracy and totalitarian states does not have the form of a sudden transformation; before impetuously coming to light in our century, the river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer his life runs its course in a hidden but continuous fashion. It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals’ lives within the state order. (ibid.: 121–2)

From this perspective, the contemporary degradation of liberal democracy into Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’ is merely the final step in the abysmal process of the biopolitical contamination of democracy (Agamben 2000: 73–89). Even more explicitly than in Foucault’s case, 3

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democratic biopolitics the modern narrative of the long march of liberal democracy gives way to the narrative of its degradation at the moment of its apparent triumph: ‘Democracy, at the very moment in which it seemed to have finally triumphed over its adversaries and reached its greatest height, proved itself incapable of saving zoe, to whose happiness it had dedicated all its efforts, from unprecedented ruin’ (Agamben 1998: 10). While Foucault and Agamben approach biopolitics as the underside of democracy that eventually triumphs over it, Roberto Esposito draws attention to the incompatibility of the universalism and homogeneity proper to democracy and the particularistic orientation of biopolitics. Given this incompatibility, the perceived predominance of biopolitics in late modernity must logically entail the ‘eclipse of democracy’: [When] the living or dying body becomes the symbolic and material epicentre of the dynamics of politics as well as its conflicts, we move into a dimension that lies not simply, as we sometimes hear, after or beyond democracy but resolutely outside it – not only removed from its procedures but from its language and conceptual apparatus. Democracy is always directed to a totality of equal subjects, given the fact that they are separated from their own bodies and therefore understood as pure logical atoms endowed with rational will. Biopolitics is incompatible with the conceptual lexicon of democracy. Contrary to what we might think, the onset of life into dispositifs of power marks the eclipse of democracy, at least democracy as we have imagined it up until now. (Esposito 2008b: 643–4)

Thus, Foucault, Agamben and Esposito all view the relation between biopolitics and democracy in negative terms: the more Western societies become biopolitical, the less democratic they are. The sole exception to this negative diagnosis comes from Antonio Negri, yet it is attained only by a terminological move that dissociates biopolitics from biopower, which, contrary to Foucault’s original notion, is completely identified with sovereignty: ‘Biopower stands above society, transcendent, as a sovereign authority, and imposes its order’ (Hardt and Negri 2004: 94). In this manner, it becomes possible not merely to make biopolitics and democracy compatible, but to completely identify the two (ibid.: 148, 159). In this manner, Negri not so much resolves the problem as dissolves it: genuine, that is, non-sovereign, biopolitics can only be democratic, just as democracy, insofar as it is more than an institutional sham concealing sovereignty, can only be biopolitical. There may be some advantages in such an a priori reappropriation of the concept of biopolitics for the democratic project of the multitude, but for our purposes in this book this solution is too simple, since it removes the very tension between the two concepts that we seek to explore and rearticulate in a more fruitful manner than that of a frontal opposition. 4

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prologue If Foucault, Agamben and Esposito are correct about the necessarily negative synthesis of democracy and biopolitics, the fact that we are governed biopolitically entails that we are governed non-democratically, even if we happen to inhabit nominal democracies, vote freely and have our votes counted fairly. Democracy has been hollowed out and rendered meaningless due to a persistent gap between our exercise of popular sovereignty as subjects of government and our experience of being governed by rationalities and expertise that seem to have little relation, let alone correlation, to these exercises in popular sovereignty. We are subjects of the democratic process who are, at the same time, subjected to biopolitical rationalities. While Foucault, Agamben, Esposito and numerous other students of biopolitics have clearly demonstrated how biopolitics can undermine democracy, they have been surprisingly reticent about the alternative possibility. And yet, if one of the two heterogeneous logics can affect and even transform the other, why cannot there be a reverse relationship of democracy affecting and transforming biopolitics positively, whereby we become subjects not only of popular sovereignty but also of the governance of our own lives?

Affirmative biopolitics In recent years, the theory of biopolitics has increasingly devoted its attention to a positive conversion of the concept into an ‘affirmative biopolitics’. In contrast to Negri’s terminological decision to make biopolitics a priori affirmative in opposition to the sovereignty of biopower, Agamben, Esposito and other authors have focused on the possibilities of the immanent conversion of existing biopolitical rationalities (see also Vatter 2014; Vatter and Lemm 2014; Prozorov 2016). The key term of Agamben’s affirmative biopolitics is form-of-life, hyphenated in order to stress the inseparability of life and its form: [This] biopolitical body that is bare life must itself be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe. (Agamben 1998: 188)

Since sovereign biopolitics includes unqualified life (zoe) into the positive form of bios only in the destitute mode of bare life, the sole possibility for biopolitics to refrain from this negation and begin to affirm life requires that bios and zoe become entirely indistinct, that the apparatus that keeps on dividing life from itself is rendered inoperative. What is affirmed in Agamben’s affirmative biopolitics is therefore not any particular form of bios but a bios of zoe itself, unqualified life that enjoys its absence of qualifications as its sole proper form. 5

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democratic biopolitics While the privileged figure of Agamben’s approach is suspension and inoperativity, Esposito’s version of affirmative biopolitics proceeds through a radical reversal of the conventional biopolitical logic. In Esposito’s argument, violence enters biopolitical rationality through the logic of immunity, whereby government undertakes to protect life against its own constituent negativity that places it in permanent danger to itself. The excessive force of this immunitary violence transforms biopolitics into thanatopolitics either partially (as in liberal recourse to authoritarian policies) or completely (as in the homicidal and ultimately suicidal paroxysms of Nazism). Affirmative biopolitics must temper this immunitary drive by restoring its relation to the communitarian principle of exposure to the other from which it arises and seeks to efface (Esposito 2008a: 164–94; Esposito 2011: 165–77). While the immunitary logic is plagued by the paradox of negating the immanent negativity of life that only plunges it further into the negative, Esposito seeks to attain the ‘self-suppression of the negation itself’ (2008a: 102), whereby this immanent negativity is rethought as an essential part of life, without which it would lose its self-generating potential. Despite evident resonances, the discourse of affirmative biopolitics is only of limited relevance to the question of democratic biopolitics considered in this book. This discourse unfolds at such a general level and envisions such sweeping changes that it becomes difficult to relate them to any determinate political form. Indeed, given the broadly Heideggerian background of both Agamben’s and Esposito’s philosophies, one cannot help hearing in the background of their discourses Heidegger’s famous equivocation regarding the political system adequate to the age of technology: ‘I am not convinced that it is democracy’ (Heidegger 1991b: 104). This need not be a problem as such, as philosophical experimentation may and should go beyond existing political regimes and imagine hitherto unexplored alternatives. However, the effect of this quest for novelty is the strengthening of the perception of the inescapability of the existing modes of biopolitics within existing democracies and hence the perpetuation of the antinomy between the two. Indeed, if affirmative biopolitics is conceived in terms of the deactivation of the entire Western ontopolitical apparatus or the inversion of the constitutive distinctions of modernity, then it seems that, for the time being, we are stuck with biopolitics as we know it: that is, as fundamentally un- or even antidemocratic. While the discourse of affirmative biopolitics affirms life insofar as it evades any form of order and government, in this book we shall instead pose the question of what form of life could possibly affirm and sustain the symbolic order that defines democracy. Thus, even as we will rely on some of the key concepts of affirmative biopolitics below, 6

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prologue most notably Agamben’s form-of-life, we shall contextualize them in the more specific discussion of how to attain a positive synthesis of biopolitics and democracy. This approach connects our inquiry with some of the key themes currently addressed in political theory that are, at first glance, distant from the problematic of biopolitics. The diverse debates around ‘new materialism’ in recent years have highlighted the importance of restoring a material dimension to the study of political practice, which is both embedded in a variety of material support structures and embodied in living beings. While feminist and postcolonial theories have long insisted on this embodied nature of politics that is always marked by difference, antagonism and power, contemporary discussions, from the revival of vitalism to the theory of affects to the refoundation of politics on the grounds of quantum physics (Barad 2007; Bennett 2010; Wendt 2015; Massumi 2015), make a rather more general case for prioritizing material, affective and lived aspects of politics. Materiality has also entered the discourse of political theory in a different sense, in the mode of the problematization of its scarcity in the contemporary discussions of precarity as the fundamental feature of contemporary societies in the neoliberal modes of governance. The dismantling of the structures of the welfare state is undermining democracy by removing the material supports and infrastructures (health care, education, public spaces) in which democratic praxis is embedded, while exposing the bodies of democratic subjects to additional risks, dangers and suffering (Brown 2015). In her Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler brings the two problematics together in an innovative manner that comes closest to the intentions of this book. Butler seeks to reorient the problematic of democracy from the more familiar liberal and republican theories towards what she calls a more plural and embodied account (Butler 2015: 217). The paradigm of democratic praxis is, for Butler, an assembly, the coming together in a public space that performatively constitutes this very space as public and itself as a political subject. While the theme of public concerted action has always been central to democracy, its material, affective and bodily aspect has often been overshadowed by the emphasis on collective identity and/or discursive practice. Against certain readings of Arendt’s theory of politics, Butler rejects any attempt to separate politics from the material conditions that function as its support structures, be it employment, health care, reproduction, education and so on, as well as the affective experiences shared by its participants: joy, desire, rage and so on (ibid.: 45–6, 110–18). It is not merely that these supports and experiences are essential for political praxis or that the very distinction between what is political and what is not must itself 7

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democratic biopolitics be decided politically. More importantly, political action today concerns precisely the demand for or contestation of the absences of these very support structures, be they economic, educational, environmental, judicial or otherwise: ‘There are ways of expressing and demonstrating precarity that importantly engage embodied action and forms of expressive freedom that belong more properly to public assembly’ (ibid.: 10). The assembly, the subject of democracy, constitutes itself by manifesting its own precarity, vulnerability or dependence, exposing its own being exposed. The performativity that characterizes politics goes beyond language or discourse and rather refers to the very coming to presence of living beings in their very precarity in order to oppose it. This performativity is affective before it is signifying: it constitutes the subject as desiring, enraged, grieving or empowered, before these affects have been articulated in discourse. Butler reserves the term ‘biopolitics’ for the rationalities of government that render us precarious, that expose living beings to an ‘unlivable’ life of misery and devastation, ‘the powers that differentially dispose lives to precarity as part of a broader management of populations through governmental and nongovernmental means’ (ibid.: 196). In contrast, resistance to this biopolitics in the form of assembly is democratic in the plural and embodied sense that Butler seeks. We end up in a clear contrast between biopolitics and democracy that we have already observed: biopolitics resigns us to precarity, while democracy makes it at least possible to resist it, to seek, as Butler argues with reference to Adorno, ‘a good life in a bad life’ (ibid.: 193). The binary opposition between biopolitics and democracy echoes the dualism between Empire and multitude in Hardt and Negri’s work: on the one side we have expropriation, domination and violence resigning us to a ‘bad life’, while on the other there is a living force of resistance that, by coming together, affirms its desire for and enacts the possibility for a good life. Nonetheless, if we take seriously the embodied nature of democratic praxis that is no longer isolated from democracy as its necessary, but still heterogeneous, support, but rather is its very content, then the democracy of the assembly must be biopolitical as well. As lived praxis of the common manifestation of vulnerability and interdependency, what else could it be? On the other hand, the biopolitics that the assembly resists must, at least in most of the Western world, be democratic in a minimal yet still important sense of deriving its legitimacy from being constituted in regular competitive elections. Even if we acknowledge the tendency for relegating important powers away from public authorities to the market in neoliberal governmental rationality (Brown 2015), this shrinking public authority is still constituted in a democratic fashion. 8

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prologue Instead of a gulf between biopolitics of population management and the democracy of the living assembly we rather have both democracy and biopolitics on both sides of the divide, though admittedly not in the same sense. How could the governmental rationalities that expose so many of us to precarity be authorized by the very same principle of democracy that legitimizes our coming together to resist them? Are biopolitical governmentality and the democratic assembly even conceivable in the same discursive space? Is the democracy affirmed by the assembly of the precarious the same kind of democracy as the one that appears to have resigned them to precarity? Conversely, does the biopolitics of embodied and affective performativity that characterizes the assembly even share the same concept as the biopolitics of population management and regulation? While it is certainly easier to think of the two as entirely heterogeneous, this only resigns us to the perpetual replay of the impasse in which democratic theory finds itself when faced with the proliferation of biopolitical rationalities of government. If these rationalities are wholly heterogeneous to democracy, if they cannot be democratized, then the democratic affirmation of the assembly is bound to remain in permanent opposition, incapable of being converted or translated into governmental rationalities of its own. This move evidently cedes too much ground to the adversary ahead of any confrontation: it must surely be possible for the democratic assembly to govern itself without this governance necessarily assuming the rationality that the democratic struggle was up against. While Butler’s focus on the assembly locates democracy largely outside the domain of government, which is in turn wholly suffused by biopolitical rationalities, in this book I shall return to the more familiar sense of democracy as a regime or form of government1 and probe the implications of rethinking biopolitics on the basis of the main principles and presuppositions of this form of government. My question is therefore not how to oppose biopolitics from a democratic standpoint, but how to democratize biopolitics itself and thereby also ‘biopoliticize’ democracy in the sense of making it plural and embodied, a space of coexistence of forms of life rather than a normative framework.

Experimental analytics: A note on method The methodological orientation of this inquiry is what I would like to term ‘experimental analytics’. In political science we rarely get to practice the experimental method. Only political actors get to experiment with their ideologies, policies or entire populations, while the scholars of politics can only hope to observe the latter, not without frustration 9

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democratic biopolitics and consternation. Nonetheless, philosophers and social scientists do retain the possibility of experimenting with their concepts and theories, posing questions such as: what would be the effect of using concept X in this or that manner, combining it with concept Y, approaching domain Z from a different perspective and so on? With all these questions it is not a matter of testing the veracity of a theory but rather its force, its capacity to produce certain effects, attain some kind of change in our understanding of political reality, open up new possibilities. Experimental analytics is, then, a method that inquires into the possibilities opened up by modifications in our concepts and theories. It is therefore distinct from the two well-established forms of analytics in modern philosophy: Kant’s transcendental analytic and Foucault’s interpretive analytic (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 104–24). While Kant’s transcendental analytic seeks to identify the a priori conditions of any possible experience or knowledge, Foucault’s interpretive analytic focuses on identifying the conditions of existence of actually existing forms of knowledge or rationalities of power. In his 1982–3 lecture course ‘The Government of Self and Others’, Foucault contrasted these two dispositions as the ‘analytics of truth’ and the ‘ontology of the present’ or of ourselves (Foucault 2010: 20–1). The experimental analytics that we would like to propose as our method is similarly concerned with our present (as opposed to truth in general) but rather than focus on the conditions of possibility of actuality – that is, actual regimes of knowledge, power or ethics – it raises the question of the conditions of the possible itself. Instead of asking what made a certain actual state of affairs possible, we pose the question of what possibilities this state of affairs might offer, if viewed from a different perspective or, alternatively, what possibilities this different perspective opens up in a given state of affairs. In fact, Foucault himself practiced a version of this method, particularly in his lecture courses, which often adopted a certain historical theory or interpretive framework in a provisional manner in order to test its possibilities. Mitchell Dean and Kaspar Villadsen (2016: 71) have termed this orientation ‘pragmatic perspectivism’, which takes up concepts and theories in a tentative way to see where their application might lead: ‘What will happen if I analyze political struggles and state formation through the vocabulary of war?’ When Foucault takes up the ‘historico-political’ discourse of the war of the races in the lecture course ‘Society Must be Defended’ (Foucault 2003), he does not make a definitive commitment to this mode of interpretation as somehow more ‘correct’ than alternative theories of social order, let alone ‘true’ in the sense of correspondence to reality. Yet, neither is his interest merely antiquarian, focused on the reconstitution of this archaic discourse. What is 10

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prologue at stake here is clearly not a testing of a theory in question as regards its truth, but rather a testing of its force, capacity or potentiality in understanding the present. How does this perspective fare in the domain in which it is applied? Does it yield new knowledge, surprising discoveries, additional possibilities of thinking or acting and so on? Or does it rather constrain and stifle thought, resigning it to the reproduction of sterile distinctions or oppositions? The theory is upheld only as long as it continues to generate new possibilities and is abandoned without regret when it ceases to do so and becomes a constraint on thought. In previous studies I have practiced this form of analytic without much explicit methodological reflection over it, sometimes in the guise of more familiar methodologies of textual or discourse analysis. In Understanding Conflict between Russia and the EU (Prozorov 2006), I tried to test the limits of a radical pluralist approach to international relations against every form of universalist and cosmopolitan challenge. I was interested in finding out what possibilities the critique of universalism opened up for a pluralistic and non-conflictual coexistence in the international realm. Dissatisfied with the possibilities I discovered, I eventually turned to a more positive investigation of universalism in Void Universalism I and II (Prozorov 2013a; Prozorov 2013b), which sought to redefine universalism on the basis of the void rather than the global or any other image of totality. If every known form of universalism merely universalizes some particular content in a hegemonic manner, then why not start from subtracting all such content altogether, starting from nothing but the void? The experiment thus consisted in testing the possibilities opened up by thinking universalism on the basis of the concept of the world as the void from which all particular worlds emerge. My investigations of Russian postcommunist politics (Prozorov 2009) and the biopolitics of the Stalinist period (Prozorov 2016) similarly tested the possibilities offered by particular theoretical perspectives (Agamben’s messianic version of the end of history thesis and the Foucauldian problematic of biopolitics, respectively) in grasping both the Soviet and the post-Soviet periods in an innovative manner, opening up new avenues of questioning, new possibilities for comparative investigations, new solutions to the problems identified. It was not a matter of testing the ‘hypothesis’ that history actually came to an end in postcommunist Russia or that Stalinism possessed a certain biopolitical blueprint, but of testing the productivity of the shift of perspective along these lines, the added value of approaching the periods in question from the end of history perspective as opposed to the theory of democratic transition, from the perspective of biopolitics as opposed to 11

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democratic biopolitics the theory of totalitarianism. The perspective is then vindicated not by its correspondence to reality but by its enhancement of possibilities of understanding and acting within this reality. Finally, my studies of contemporary philosophers such as Foucault (Prozorov 2007) or Agamben (Prozorov 2014) ventured to test a particular reading of their work that went against the prevalent modes of reception: reading Foucault as the philosopher of the ‘undefined work of freedom’ (Foucault 1984: 46) and Agamben as the ‘comic’ philosopher of the happy end of history. What was at stake in these studies was less a hermeneutic fidelity to these authors than an attempt to test the limits of the applicability of their thought beyond canonical interpretations, possibly arriving at the point where it becomes impossible to proceed in a Foucauldian or Agambenian way, but where it is possible to proceed in principle – a new avenue resulting from experimenting with existing theories or concepts. Agamben himself discussed this methodological principle in terms of Feuerbach’s concept of Entwicklungsfähigkeit, the capacity for development that characterizes philosophy in which ‘the difference between what belongs to the author of a work and what is attributable to the interpreter becomes as essential as it is difficult to grasp’ (Agamben 2009a: 8). Yet, every such exercise also involves understanding that there might come a moment when we are aware of our inability to proceed any further without contravening the most elementary rules of hermeneutics. Although this is a particularly happy moment for the interpreter, he knows that it is now time to abandon the text that he is analyzing and to proceed on his own. (ibid.: 13)

This evidently does not mean that the experiment has been unsuccessful, precisely because a new path has been opened, even if this is the path on which the author in question can no longer be a companion. The strict hermeneutic fidelity to the authors in question is therefore less important than the fidelity to the most fundamental orientation of their thought, which in the case of both these authors consists precisely in the enhancement of possibilities. When applied to philosophical or theoretical texts, the intention of experimental analytics is less to interpret the said than to amplify the sayable on the basis of the said. While experimental analytics may be practiced on both historical sources and normative discourses, it is itself neither historical nor normative precisely to the extent that its process is experimental. It is not historical insofar as it is not a matter of reconstituting the conditions of possibility of past or even present practices, but of elucidating the possibilities available in the present. In fact, even the past may be investigated in this manner, not from a counter-factual perspective that inquires into 12

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prologue what might have been, but rather from the perspective that reconstitutes and amplifies the effects that a historical event may still produce in the present as a result of a perspectival or conceptual shift applied to it. Even past events may still remain pregnant with possibilities in the present that could be activated by a shift in the manner of their interpretation. Experimental analytics is not normative precisely insofar as its object is possibilities as possibilities, not preferred options or alternatives. It therefore does not seek to establish or legitimize a particular alternative to the existing order of things but to establish the possibility of alternatives as such. To seek to enhance the possibilities of thought or practice beyond those available in the contemporary order of things is not to delegitimize this order in terms of some normative criterion that would in turn authorize the establishment of a different type of order. The commitments of experimental analytics are not of a normative but an ontological character. It is committed to the possible as such; it seeks to restore potentiality to actuality by a twofold movement of amplifying the possibilities that the actual order has relegated to the past as what might have been but was not and rendering the actual order itself potential in the sense of its potentiality not-to-be or its contingency. In his famous essay ‘Bartleby, or on Contingency’, Agamben refers to this movement as the ‘decreation’ of reality, whereby ‘what could not have been but was becomes indistinguishable from what could have been but was not’ (Agamben 1999a: 270). Decreation evidently does not refer to the destruction of the world, but rather to its return to its potentiality not to be, whereby it exists on a par with the infinite plurality of possible worlds as something whose existence is in no way necessary, as something that can not be: ‘the actual world is led back to its right not to be; all possible worlds are led back to their right to existence’ (ibid.: 271). In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche famously wrote of a ‘thousand paths that have not yet been trodden, a thousand healths and hidden isles of life’ (Nietzsche 1977: 77). The greatest Nietzschean of the twentieth century, Michel Foucault, echoed this statement by saying that ‘what exists is far from filling all possible spaces’ (Foucault 1996: 312). Of course, the point is not to tread all the thousand paths, fill all the possible spaces or exhaust all the possibilities in actuality, which is neither possible nor desirable. What is at stake is rather the restoration of their possibility against all claims to historical or logical necessity, all invocations of causal or teleological determination, all tyranny of actuality in both thought and practice. The world, in which a thousand untrodden paths are open, is markedly different from the world in which there is ‘no alternative’ to whatever already exists and it is the task of experimental analytics to produce this difference in whatever domain it is practiced. 13

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democratic biopolitics For this reason, the method of experimental analytics accords with the substantive problematic of this book: that is, the inquiry into the possibility of a positive synthesis of biopolitics and democracy, in which democracy acquires vitality by being translated into actual forms of life and biopolitics acquires democratic legitimacy by being rethought in a pluralistic and egalitarian fashion that respects the contingency constitutive of democracy. In our interpretation democratic biopolitics refers to a pluralistic coexistence of possibly incommensurable forms of life that are all legitimate only to the extent that they recognize and manifest their own contingency, their own potentiality to be and not to be. Democracy is, then, not an attribute of a particular form of life but of their coexistence, whereby these myriad forms coexist as possibilities to be taken up or abandoned, much as Nietzsche’s thousand paths, healths and isles of life. Our experimental analytics of democratic government will thus arrive at the understanding of democracy itself as first and foremost an experiment in living.

Outline of the argument This book may be read as an immanent critique of the theory of biopolitics. While the problematic of biopolitics has been among the most fecund in philosophy and social sciences in recent decades, the field of biopolitics studies today appears to be divided between two discourses: critical analyses of biopolitical government, which follow the canonical texts in viewing this government as inherently undemocratic, and the emerging discourse of affirmative biopolitics, which unfolds at such a distance from actual governmental practices that it risks becoming a well-intentioned utopia. In this bipolar structure it is difficult even to pose the question of democracy: contemporary governmental practices are conceptualized as anti- or non-democratic, precisely insofar as they are biopolitical, while affirmative biopolitics remains a possibility that still remains to come and is envisioned as utterly heterogeneous to our modern political tradition, including democracy. What is lost in this split between the undemocratic biopolitics of the past and present, and the wholly other biopolitics of the future is the possibility of transforming biopolitics in the here and now, not on the basis of some radically new values or norms but rather on the basis of the fundamental principles of Western liberal democracy that the emergence of biopolitics has allegedly sidelined. Even if we grant that biopolitics has affected democracy negatively, it does not follow that democracy cannot affect biopolitics positively. The exclusion of democracy from the concerns of the theory of biopolitics therefore does not appear to be justified. 14

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prologue On the contrary, a re-engagement with democracy could both allow a more refined empirical analysis of contemporary biopolitical government and hopefully make the discussion of affirmative biopolitics less esoteric. This book is also an exercise in auto-critique. In my earlier book, Theory of the Political Subject (Prozorov 2013b), I have defined political subjectivity in terms of dis-identification, one’s subtraction from one’s identity or ‘place in the world’ that enables one to discern the wrongs of the world in question and venture to set them right. While I still uphold the basic logic of this definition, the logic of subtraction no longer seems to me to be entirely adequate, since it is easily misunderstood as affirming the exit from one’s particular worldly identity into something like a universalist political entity, movement or community akin to Rousseau’s popular sovereign. It is precisely this Rousseauist disposition, constitutive of the contemporary critique of biopolitics in its many guises, that I seek to challenge in this book. While this disposition opposes a universalist ethos of democracy to the particularistic rationality of biopolitics, making the two irreconcilable, in this book I seek to bring democracy and biopolitics together by probing the possibility of a synthesis of universalism and particularism in a particular manner of living that, following Heidegger and Agamben, I shall analyze in terms of distraction. While still subtracted from its own place in the world or identity, a distracted form of life, which oscillates between captivation and boredom and is never exhausted by whatever form it assumes, definitely remains particular. Nonetheless, insofar as this distraction embodies the experience of contingency, which is the ontological precondition of democracy, it also carries within itself the universalist implications of contingency: freedom, equality and community. These universal axioms, which I first addressed in Ontology and World Politics (2013a), are thus not affirmed in isolation from, let alone in conflict with, particular forms of life but rather within them, exposing every form of life to another as free, equal and in common. There is no ‘universalist’ form of life to be opposed to the multiplicity of particular forms and no properly democratic form of life to be opposed to antidemocratic or outright apolitical ones. There is, instead, a way to dwell in all these particular forms that makes it possible to affirm the universals without abandoning the particular. Precisely for this reason, democracy and biopolitics are not incompatible and it is possible to democratize the government of life by subjecting its rationalities to the same affirmation of contingency that defines the more restricted representative conceptions of democracy. The first part of the book undertakes a genealogy of the antagonistic relationship of biopolitics and democracy by revisiting Jean-Jacques 15

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democratic biopolitics Rousseau’s political thought. In Chapter 1 we shall first revisit Rousseau’s account of the inherently problematic relation between sovereignty and government, and then briefly address the interpretations of this account in contemporary critiques of biopolitics in the work of Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. We shall demonstrate that the dualism established by Rousseau between universalist popular sovereignty and particular acts of government remains at work in contemporary critical literature on biopolitics. As an inherently particularistic mode of government, biopolitics is necessarily opposed to popular sovereignty expressed in general will and can therefore only contaminate or pervert democracy. In Chapter 2 we shall discuss a recent reinterpretation of Rousseau by Peter Sloterdijk, which introduces an intricate twist into Rousseau’s political theory by prioritizing his late work, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, as politically more important (and benign) than the theory of sovereignty in The Social Contract. In contrast to Sloterdijk, we shall read these two works as by no means diametrically opposed but in fact affirming the same thing: the sheer existence of the subject, individual or collective, subtracted from all particular predicates. We shall argue that both the solitary walker and the sovereign body politic are, for Rousseau, emblematic political subjects, insofar as they are no longer contaminated by particular identities, interests and desires and enjoy their sheer existence, alone or in common. It is this mode of subtractive subjectivity that Rousseau wishes to oppose to partial interests in society that perpetually threaten to corrupt the general will. We shall then show how the contemporary critique of biopolitics relies on the same logic of subtraction in order to articulate an alternative to the biopolitical rationality of government, which necessarily leads it into the same aporia as it did Rousseau: if democracy is conceivable only through the subtraction from all particularism, it ends up unsustainable and indefensible in the face of this very particularism. The second part of the book offers a resolution of this aporia. Rather than keep democracy and biopolitics apart as irreconcilable opposites, we shall inquire into the possibility of their positive synthesis. Our starting point in Chapter 3 will be the biopolitical declension of Claude Lefort’s idea of the democratic mise-en-forme as characterized by ontological contingency and epistemic indeterminacy. Lefort’s powerful image of the empty place of power at the heart of democracy is, in the context of biopolitics, specified in terms of the absence of anything like a proper form of life and the affirmation of radical pluralism of contingent ways of living. This contingency is, moreover, not itself contingent but is a necessary consequence of the disarticulation of truth, power and ethics in the democratic regime. From this necessary 16

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prologue contingency we shall infer the principles of freedom, equality and community that are universal conditions of legitimacy for all forms of life in a democracy. In Chapter 4, we shall address the question of whether these principles constitute a form of life of their own or rather function as the framework for the coexistence of diverse forms of life. While the first possibility is best illustrated by Alain Badiou’s politics of truth, which in many ways follows and elaborates the Rousseauan tradition, the latter option has been developed in Jean-Luc Nancy’s theory of democracy. We shall critically engage with both positions while ultimately opting for the third, inspired by Agamben’s idea of destituent power. Rather than single out any particular form of life as democratic, we argue that democracy may be affirmed from within any particular form of life, as long as this form is practiced in the manner that manifests its contingency. While this analysis demonstrates that democratic biopolitics is conceivable in principle, there remain the questions of its realizability and the sustainability, which are addressed respectively in Chapters 5 and 6. Firstly, is this ontological contingency of democracy accessible in actual experience or is democracy doomed to remain a transcendental principle that regulates our experience without itself entering into it? In Chapter 5 we shall argue that the ontological contingency that defines democracy has a correlate in our lived experience: namely, its capacity for distraction, for alternation between captivation and boredom, which makes it possible for us to dwell within plural forms of life in a nondefinitive manner, retaining our potentiality for being otherwise. We elaborate this argument in a reading of Heidegger’s critique of curiosity and distraction in Being and Time. While Heidegger famously dismissed distractibility and curiosity as aspects of the inauthentic Dasein of das Man, we shall demonstrate how distractibility is an ineradicable feature of Dasein that is also at work in Heidegger’s own project of authentic choice even as he unduly restricts it to making this choice only once. In contrast, we shall argue that democracy is existentially experienced in the potentiality for perpetual alteration between captivation and boredom in whatever form of life we dwell in. We shall thus ground the possibility of democratic biopolitics in the aspect of the human condition familiar and available to all. The second question is whether a biopolitics that adopts this manner of living is ultimately sustainable. In Chapter 6 we shall again answer this question in the affirmative by arguing that the oscillation between captivation and boredom in the distracted dwelling in forms of life is not merely a possible but also an enjoyable experience. Drawing on JeanLuc Nancy’s account of enjoyment as the experience of one’s formative 17

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democratic biopolitics force in every act of formation, we shall argue that the biopolitical declension of democracy that affirms the experimental, free-form life renders democracy more viable by adding to its normative legitimacy an affective dimension of enjoyment. Democracy is not merely ‘right’ from any given normative perspective but also feels good, since it ensures the continuous oscillation between captivation and boredom, whereby we keep forming and transforming our lives. The enjoyment of democracy is nothing other than the pleasure of giving form to one’s being. Thus, biopolitical democracy is not merely sustainable but is in fact strengthened, quite literally reinvigorated by its translation into concrete forms of life. We shall therefore conclude that our inquiry into democracy and biopolitics has important implications for rethinking democracy in the condition of its apparent crisis due to the rise of authoritarian and xenophobic populism.

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Chapter One

Rousseau’s aporia

The divided demos What is the demos that has the kratos in a democracy? There appears to be an inherent ambiguity in the notion of democracy regarding the demos as the subject of rule. While this subject is easily identifiable in monarchy or tyranny and even in aristocracy or oligarchy, the subject of rule in a democracy – that is, the demos or the people – has from the outset been a problematic figure. Even when it could be conceived as present in its entirety in the Greek polis, the demos was composed of all free men and therefore excluded quite a substantial part of the population (women, slaves, children, foreigners), the people that did not form part of a people. Moreover, even this partial demos was divided between the assembly and elected bodies such as the council and the courts, and between majority and minority whenever these bodies made their decisions. In contemporary representative democracies, the demos is even more difficult to conceive of as a subject, since in its very exercise of its powers in elections it appears, firstly, incomplete due to considerable abstention and, secondly, divided into a majority and a minority or into several minorities. Unlike the monarch, the tyrant, an aristocratic family or an oligarchic clique, all of which exist as positive figures with their identities and interests, the demos is never present as a positivity but is always already divided and withdrawn. It is because of this lack of presence that it must be represented as a subject of rule by partial bodies: parliaments, magistrates, presidents, judges and so on. Yet, precisely because it was never fully present to begin with, the demos cannot be properly or fully represented, every effort at representation leaving a remainder or excess of the unrepresentable. If democracy is characterized by popular sovereignty, only the people and not their representatives can be truly sovereign, but the people is, from the outset, too divided and diverse to assume this title. This is why, in the Western political tradition, the notion of the people has been so 21

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democratic biopolitics ambivalent, referring at once to what is the subject of rule (demos) and what must be excluded from it: the poor, the undeserving, the underprivileged, the objects of ‘social’ government (Agamben 2000: 29). The people is thus divided from itself, the first part becoming the whole of the demos endowed with sovereignty and the second remaining the excluded part lacking sovereignty and sometimes even representation. The people ‘is what cannot be included in the whole of which it is a part as well as what cannot belong to the whole in which it is always already included’ (ibid.: 32). This non-coincidence of the people with itself makes it possible to problematize any given democracy incessantly and demand its further democratization: the struggles for universal suffrage, social democracy, communist revolution and so on were all in part motivated by the desire to make the People as sovereign and the people as the abject remainder coincide completely. If democracy continues to be an essentially contested concept, claimed by all sides in a political conflict and denied to their adversaries, this is because no such coincidence has been achieved and probably cannot be achieved as the demos is constitutively divided from itself, being both sovereign and plebeian at once. This scission within the concept of democracy may also be problematized from the other angle, that of kratos: power, rule or government. In his ‘Introductory Note on the Concept of Democracy’ (2011a), Giorgio Agamben argues that democracy today means two things: the form of constitution of the political body and the form of government. The articulation of the two notions goes back to Aristotle, who in his Politics, spoke of politeia (constitution) and politeuma (government) as signifying the same thing (Politics 1279a 25) and hence famously defined types of constitution by the holder of supreme power (kyrion) in it. In modern political thought the dualism between constitution and government reaches its apex with Rousseau: while the body politic is constituted by the general will of the sovereign people that alone has the power of legislation, particular executive acts are performed by the government, which is distinct from the sovereign, even as it is held to emanate from it. While in its sovereign capacity the people is the subject of power united in its general will, in the domain of government it dissolves into the multiplicity of particular identities and interests that serve as objects of rule. Thus emerges the tension between the people as the subject of sovereignty and the people as the object of government. This tension becomes particularly pronounced in modernity with the extension and the intensification of the activity of government that is applied to ever more domains, including, most importantly, life as such. 22

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rousseau’s aporia This is why the problematic of biopolitics is at once central for democratic theory and the cause of a permanent unease for it (Agamben 2000: 32). Transposing the division between sovereignty and government on to the immanent division of the people from itself, we end up with a paradoxical figure of the people that, as sovereign subject in its general will, authorizes the government of itself as the living population, split into a myriad of particular categories and identities. In democracy the people as the subject of sovereignty faces the people as the object of government and does not recognize itself. As we shall argue in this chapter, Rousseau’s political thought may be read as an attempt to resolve this ambivalence by purifying sovereignty from government while at the same time subordinating government to sovereignty. While government cannot be autonomous from sovereignty, it can by no means be identified with it or even allowed to get too close to it due to the risk of the contamination of the general will by particular interests. The further away government is from sovereignty, the less it can claim to be a democracy; and yet, the closer it gets to sovereignty, the more it corrupts the general will that defines democracy. This aporia of Rousseauism continues to haunt contemporary political thought and is particularly pronounced in the critique of biopolitics in continental political theory. While not all the authors in this field engage with Rousseau’s thought explicitly, they all proceed from the same problem-space, in which the aspirations for the sovereignty of the people are threatened to be rendered hollow by the government of people’s lives.

Subtraction: The constitution of the sovereign Let us begin by revisiting Rousseau’s account of the constitution of the people in The Social Contract. Prior to addressing various forms of government, Rousseau considers what he calls ‘the true foundation of society’ – ‘the act whereby a people is a people’ (Rousseau 1987: 147). The social compact proceeds by the total alienation of each associate, together with all of his rights, to the entire community. For first of all, since each person gives himself whole and entire, the condition is equal for everyone; and since this condition is equal for everyone, no one has an interest in making it burdensome for the others. (ibid.: 148)

Two implications follow from this definition of the ‘social compact’ that we shall encounter repeatedly in the analysis of the general will. Firstly, the alienation in question is equal for every associate by virtue of being 23

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democratic biopolitics ‘whole and entire’ – there should be nothing left with private individuals that could form the basis of a hierarchical or otherwise inegalitarian relationship. Secondly, precisely by virtue of this equality of alienation, there is no one to benefit from this alienation other than the resultant collective itself: in giving himself to all, each person gives himself to no one. And since there is no associate over whom he does not acquire the same right that he would grant others over himself, he gains the equivalent of everything he loses, along with a greater amount of force to preserve what he has. (ibid.: 148)

This ensures that alienation does not establish any relation of domination: the subjects to the social compact retain their freedom in the very act of alienating it and in addition acquire the security of the social state that permits them to preserve these freedoms: it is so false that there is, in the social contract, any genuine renunciation on the part of private individuals that their situation, as a result of this contract, is really preferable to what it was beforehand, and instead of an alienation, they have merely made an advantageous exchange of an uncertain and precarious mode of existence for another that is better and surer. (ibid.: 158)

This definition permits Rousseau to argue that his social compact is not merely compatible with freedom and equality but that it is in fact wholly contained in the affirmation of the latter: ‘if one enquires precisely wherein the greatest good of all consists, which should be the purpose of every system of legislation, one will find that it boils down to the two principal objects, liberty and equality’ (ibid.: 170. Cf. Cohen 2010: 10–12; Dent 2005: 129–31). While we shall return to these two principal objects repeatedly below, at this stage it suffices to note that they follow immediately from the understanding of the emergence of the people by the alienation of the particular identities and interests of individuals to the whole. From this perspective, any incomplete alienation from the particular poses a danger to the universality of the compact and hence to the freedom and equality affirmed in it: If some rights remained with private individuals, in the absence of any common superior who could decide between them and the public, each person would eventually claim to be his own judge in all things, since he is on some point his own judge. The state of nature would subsist and the association would necessarily become tyrannical and hollow. (ibid.: 148)

The association would become tyrannical if it turned out that private individuals had alienated themselves not to each other in the alienated 24

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rousseau’s aporia state but to some particular interests or a private individual. It would become hollow if it were unable to achieve the ‘whole and entire’ alienation, leaving private individuals to enjoy their rights and hence leaving the state of nature in place. Instead, the association is attained and sustained by the reciprocal subtraction of all individuals from their ‘persons and power’ that constitutes the general will whose sole content is freedom and equality: ‘each of us places his person and all his power in person under the supreme direction of the general will and as one we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole’ (ibid.: 148. See Inston 2010b: 136–8). The ‘public person’ thus constituted receives the name ‘city’, ‘republic’ or ‘body politic’ and is called ‘sovereign’ when active, ‘state’ when passive and ‘power’ when compared to others of its kind (ibid.). The associates that form this person are in turn called ‘people’, who are ‘citizens’ when participating in the sovereign authority and ‘subjects’ when subjected to the laws of the state (ibid.). This conceptual structure sets up the key opposition in Rousseau’s political thought: between the sovereignty of the republic and the government of the state, and, correspondingly, between citizens and subjects. Let us first address the constitution of the sovereign. For Rousseau, sovereignty is inalienable and hence the sovereign cannot be represented by anything but itself (ibid.: 153). Sovereignty is ‘merely the exercise of the general will’ (ibid.) and, while power can be transferred and delegated elsewhere, this is not the case with the will. As we shall see below, this fundamental principle accounts for Rousseau’s famous hostility to the idea of representation (Lorkovic 2012: 75; see also Strong 2002: 89–92). It is impossible for the people simply to will to obey some master in the future – such an act, were it to take place, would only dissolve the body politic as such. Secondly, sovereignty is indivisible: ‘it is either a will of the people as a whole or of only a part’ (Rousseau 1987: 154). A will of the people of the whole is general, while the will of a part is ‘merely a private will or an act of magistracy. At most it is a decree’ (ibid.: 154). While it is clear how a will of a part of the people is merely private, it is notable that Rousseau also includes in this category acts of magistracy and decrees: that is, governmental acts that, while not being strictly acts of the general will, are nonetheless in some relation with it – the relation that becomes increasingly problematic in Rousseau’s text and its subsequent interpretations. For Rousseau, confusion regarding the status of acts of magistracy results from the failure to distinguish between sovereign authority and its ‘emanations’ in governmental acts or decrees (ibid.: 155). This confusion leads to the perception of sovereignty as divisible into legislative and executive powers, domestic and foreign policy, and so on. In fact, sovereignty is indivisible as the exercise 25

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democratic biopolitics of general will, while all particular acts of government emanate from this exercise even as they lack its generality. Rousseau fortifies the distinction even further when he argues that the general will can never be reduced to the will of all, which is the mere sum of private wills. The general will does not add these private wills up but rather ‘remove[s] from these same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel each other out’: what remains is, then, the general will (ibid.: 156). The criterion of generality is thus the extent of subtraction from particular wills, which is why the will obtained from the large number of small differences that cancel each other out is more general than the will obtained from a small number of ‘partial associations’ (ibid.). In fact, these partial associations are the main adversary in Rousseau’s account of sovereignty, insofar as they perpetually threaten to undermine generality: for the general will to be well articulated, it is therefore important that there should be no partial society in the state and that each citizen make up their own mind. If there are partial societies, their number must be multiplied and inequality among them prevented. These precautions are the only effective way of bringing it about that the general will is always enlightened and that the populace is not tricked. (ibid.)

The second specification of the general will is even more important for our argument. Rousseau argues that the general will ‘must be general in its object as well as in its essence; that it must derive from all in order to be applied to all, and that it loses its natural rectitude when it tends toward any individual, determinate object’ (ibid.: 157). As Tracy Strong has argued, ‘the general will, being general and sovereign, applies only to that which concerns all equally, that is, in the same way and thus defines them as citizens’ (Strong 2002: 95). If the will in question is merely applied generally while its object remains particular, we end up in a tyrannical situation of the domination of the particular will, which has nothing to do with Rousseau’s intention in The Social Contract, despite the widespread reading of Rousseau as a proto-totalitarian thinker (Talmon 1985. See Cohen 2010: 34–7; Strong 2002: 79–85). The general will cannot refer to a particular object, about which it could and should have no particular opinion, having subtracted itself from all such objects. Just as a private will cannot represent the general will, the general will, for its part, alters its nature when it has a particular object, and as general, it is unable to render a decision on either a man or a state of affairs. (Rousseau 1987: 157)

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rousseau’s aporia In such a situation, the people no longer functions as sovereign but as magistrate, exercising a particular governmental function that, once again, emanates from the general will but remains decidedly distinct from it. Since there can be no general will concerning a particular object, the object of law, which is the activity restricted to the sovereign, must always be general. When the entire populace enacts a statute concerning the entire populace, it considers only itself, and if in that case a relationship is formed, it is between the entire object seen from one perspective and the entire object seen from another, without any division of the whole. Then the subject matter about which a statute is enacted is general like the will that enacts it. It is this act that I call a law. (ibid.: 161)

To say that the object of the laws is general entails that the law ‘considers subjects as a body and actions in the abstract, never a man as an individual or a particular action’ (ibid.). Thus, while a law can establish a monarchy, it cannot name a king: ‘Any function that relates to an individual does not belong to legislative power’ (ibid.: 161). Law is thus constrained by the requirement of the dual universality of essence and object: what the sovereign declares regarding a particular object is not a law but a decree, and the sovereign is thereby not a sovereign in this very act but only a magistrate. Moreover, while such acts may be legitimate in principle, they cannot be confused with the exercise of general will, whose generality must rather be protected from the ‘seduction of private wills’ (ibid.: 162): ‘the general will is always right but the judgment that guides it is not always enlightened’ (ibid.). There are two ways in which the general will can be contaminated by particular wills. When private will seeks to dominate the general will, we have the will of all, an essentially un-political usurpation of sovereignty by private faction, even when – perhaps especially when – it expresses the opinions of the majority; when a presumption to general will dominates the private by attempting to ‘render a decision on either a man or a state of affairs,’ we have despotism, which undoes the general will because it adopts particular objects, whereby impinging on the privacy of individual will. (Lorkovic 2012: 73)

In the first case the particular accedes to the status of the universal in a hegemonic fashion, while in the latter case the universal governs the particular in a totalizing or even totalitarian manner. It is this fallibility of judgment that brings Rousseau to the figure of the legislator, the inaugural leader of a republic, whose role is to 27

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democratic biopolitics establish the people as a sovereign body. The paradox of the legislator in Rousseau’s thought is well known: the legislator’s task is nothing less than the instantiation of sovereignty, transforming the populace into the people, which involves changing human nature, transforming each individual (who by himself is a perfect and solitary whole) into a part of the larger whole from which this individual receives, in a sense, his life and his being; to alter man’s constitution in order to strengthen it. (Rousseau 1987: 163)

Since its task is to establish the sovereign, the legislator cannot itself be the sovereign. Nor can it be merely a magistrate, since its function is not particular and executive. Finally, it cannot represent the people because, as sovereign, the people are not representable. In fact, the legislator has no place in the republic that it constitutes: ‘This office, which constitutes the republic, does not enter into its constitution’ (ibid.: 163). Its constitution of the people cannot be presented within the republican constitution, in which it is only the people that are sovereign. The actions of the legislator must therefore be self-effacing, its heteronomous law-giving acts giving way without remainder to the autonomy of the people living under these laws (cf. Inston 2010a: 393–394; Strong 2002: 160–1). The legislator can introduce the first laws only by simultaneously renouncing all power over men; otherwise the laws it introduces will bear the mark of its particular interests. The enormous power of transforming human nature is thus combined with utter powerlessness over those whose nature is transformed. Rousseau famously formulates the paradox involved in this activity: for an emerging people to be capable of appreciating the sound maxims of politics and to follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause. The social spirit which ought to be the work of that institution, would have to preside over the institution itself. And men would be, prior to the advent of the laws, what they ought to become by means of laws. (Rousseau 1987: 164)

Since the legislator can use neither force nor reasoning in this process, its authority must be ‘of a different order’, which Rousseau compares to religion (see Strong 2002: 94–5). We must note that the generality of the laws does not entail for Rousseau that the same laws can be applicable to any state whatsoever; otherwise there would be a need for only one legislator in history, whose laws could then be emulated by other states. The laws are general in the sense of applying universally to all the citizens of the republic, but 28

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rousseau’s aporia they are not the same for all republics: ‘The same laws cannot be suitable to so many diverse provinces which have different customs, live in contrasting climates, and which are incapable of enduring the same form of government’ (Rousseau 1987: 167). Thus, even as the content of the general will ultimately consists in freedom and equality, these two principles ‘should be modified in each country in accordance with the relationships that arise as much from the local situation as from the temperament of the inhabitants’ (ibid.: 171). Once again, we observe an ambiguous articulation between the universal and the particular, the generality attained by the subtraction from everything individual and the myriad particularities that nonetheless persistently add themselves to this very generality: Aside from the maxims common to all, each people has within itself some cause that organizes them in a particular way and renders its legislation proper for it alone. Thus it was that long ago the Hebrews and recently the Arabs have had religion as their main object; the Athenians had letters; Carthage and Tyre, commerce, Rhodes, seafaring, Sparta, war and Rome, virtue. (ibid.)

If the legislator makes a mistake regarding this particular cause, ‘the laws will weaken imperceptibly, the constitution will be altered, and the state will not cease being agitated until it is destroyed or changed, and invincible nature has regained her empire’ (ibid.: 172). While Rousseau first distinguished laws as general in both object and essence from particular acts of government, he now supplements the generality of laws with the specific features of the people in question that contextualize and modify this generality. Yet, it is important to note that, while certainly not general, these features do not belong to the particular order of government either; instead, as aspects of tradition or habit, they appear to precede and condition even the institution of the most general laws. The final qualification of the generality of the laws is that their passage need not always be unanimous. There is only one law that requires unanimity – the social compact itself, into which no one can be forced (ibid.: 205). Otherwise, the law passed by majority obligates all the citizens, which raises the question of how one can be both free (as part of the sovereign) and bound by the law that one did not support (see Cohen 2010: 78, 81; Trachtenberg 1993: 220–30). Rousseau attempts to resolve the problem in the following way: The citizen consents to all the laws, even to those that pass in spite of his opposition, and even to those that punish him when he dares to violate any of them. The constant will of all the members of the state is the general will,

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democratic biopolitics through it they are general and free. When a law is proposed in the people’s assembly, what is asked of them is not precisely whether they approve and reject, but whether or not it conforms to the general will that is theirs. Each man, in giving his vote, states his opinion on the matter, and the declaration of the general will is drawn from the counting of votes. When, therefore, the opinion contrary to mine prevails, this proves merely that I was in error, and what I took to be the general will was not so. (ibid.: 206)

Thus far, the argument is not very controversial: in contemporary democracies we accept the result of elections even if it conflicts with our votes without this acceptance being perceived as the limitation on our (political) freedom, even as it might involve the restriction on some private freedoms of ours. What is more problematic is the next sentence: ‘If my private opinion had prevailed, I would have done something other than what I had wanted. In that case, I would not have been free’ (ibid.). This statement identifies freedom with sovereignty to such an extent that it produces a paradox: if I had acted freely (following my private opinion), I would not have been free (since the general will of which I am part and in which I am free decided otherwise). Yet, Rousseau introduces a caveat that makes this identification less ominous: ‘This presupposes, it is true, that all the characteristics of the general will are still in the majority. When they cease to be free, there is no longer any liberty regardless of the side one takes’ (ibid.). Since, as we have seen, the ‘ultimate objects’ of the general will are freedom and equality, it follows, somewhat tautologically, that I am only free when I accept the general will that affirms freedom and am not free when my private opinion conflicts with this affirmation of freedom. The submission to the majority, which, as we have seen, can always be corrupted by particular interests, is not absolute but depends on whether the general will that affirms freedom and equality of all is indeed what is willed by this majority. The tyranny of majority thus appears to be excluded.

Emanation: The constitution of government Let us now proceed to the discussion of government in Book III of The Social Contract. Rousseau famously distinguishes between legislative and executive power as between two causes of every free action: the will that determines it and the power that executes it. While the will is exercised by the people as a whole (hence its generality) and pertains only to general objects (hence its generality again, as the dual definition requires!), executive power cannot belong to the people as a whole since it consists of ‘particular acts that are not within the province of 30

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rousseau’s aporia the law’ (ibid.: 173). This power is to be exercised entirely in accordance with the general will but should never be confused with it, as it is merely the ‘minister’ of the latter (ibid.): ‘The government is an intermediate body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication and charged with the execution of the laws and the preservation of liberty, both civil and political’ (ibid.). Since Rousseau previously defined the sovereign as the people in its active state and subjects as the people in their passive state, government is then nothing other than the intermediate between the people as active and the people as passive. Rousseau labels the governmental body the prince and emphasizes that the submission to the prince can never be a matter of the social contract, but is only a commission, in which leaders exercise the power given to them by the sovereign, even if the same sovereign has thereby transformed itself into the subject: ‘The sovereign can limit, modify, or appropriate this power as it pleases, since the alienation of such a right is incompatible with the nature of the social body and contrary to the purpose of this association’ (ibid.: 174). The prince remains an emanation of the sovereign even as it rules it like a subject. Moreover, any confusion between the respective functions of the sovereign, the prince and the people inevitably leads the republic into ruin: If the sovereign wishes to govern, or if the magistrate wishes to give laws, or if the subjects refuse to obey, disorder replaces rule, force and will no longer act in concert, and thus the state dissolves and falls into despotism or anarchy. (ibid.)

We must note that while the latter two options are quite self-evident, magistrates giving laws leading to despotism and the people’s refusal to obey leading to disorder, the sovereign’s wish to govern is a rather more ambiguous case because it does not seem to lead necessarily to either outcome. Moreover, we have already seen that the sovereign can in fact govern, the only difference being that its acts of government do not take the form of law but remain decrees. Indeed, as we shall see below, one of the forms of government – namely, democracy – is based precisely on this identity between sovereign and prince (ibid.: 179). Once again, we observe the tension between the two principles in Rousseau’s thought. The prince emanates from the sovereign but must remain distinct from it; it only executes the will of the sovereign but cannot determine it. What Rousseau wishes to preserve is the generality of the sovereign will, which is attained through the subtraction from all particular content. The problem with government is that its agent, being 31

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democratic biopolitics a particular person or group thereof, is always at the risk of contaminating or perverting this generality: As soon as he wants to derive from himself some absolute and independent act, the bond that links everything together begins to come loose. If it should finally happen that the prince had the private will more active than that of the sovereign and that he had made use of some of the public force that is available to him to obey this private will, so that there would be, so to speak, two sovereigns, one de jure and one de facto, at that moment the social union would vanish and the body politic would be dissolved. (ibid.: 176)

And yet, it is impossible to do without a prince – a particular self, individual or collective, that would be distinct from the state as a whole, even as it remains subordinate to it. The sovereign, which exercises legislative power by general will, cannot be endowed with the task of governing ‘by means of particular acts’, since this would immediately dissolve its generality: ‘Were it possible for the sovereign considered as such, to have the executive power, right and fact would be so completely confounded that we would no longer know what is law and what is not’ (ibid.: 200). Government is something ‘naturally separate’ from the sovereign (ibid.) and yet essential for the state, which would otherwise relapse into the state of nature that it left by virtue of the social contract. This is because there is more to politics than law – the discovery that, in Foucault’s original diagnosis, is constitutive of the modern (re)invention of biopolitics and governmentality more generally (see Foucault 2003: 38–40; Foucault 2007: 56–9, 63–4; Foucault 2008: 171–2). If it were possible to govern solely by means of the law, the very distinction between sovereignty and government would disappear. If this is impossible, it means that there are particular acts, decrees, ordinances that, while somehow related to the law, are not reducible to it. While the law obliges everyone to do the same thing in the same way, it cannot assign particular tasks or duties to particular individuals or categories of the population: no one has the right to demand that someone else do what he does not do for himself. Now, it is precisely this right, indispensable for making the body politic live and move, that the sovereign gives the prince in instituting the government. (Rousseau 1987: 200)

The government is an essential supplement to the popular sovereignty expressed in law. For the body of the government to have an existence, a real life that distinguishes it from the body of the state, and for all its members to act in concert and to fulfil the purpose for which it is instituted, there must be a particular

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rousseau’s aporia self, a sensibility common to all its members, a force or will of its own that tends towards its preservation. This particular existence presupposes assemblies, councils, a power to deliberate and decide, rights, titles and privileges that belong exclusively to the prince and that render the condition of the magistrate more honorable in proportion as it is more onerous. (ibid.: 176)

The problem is that this necessary distinction of government from both the people and the state makes insubordination possible, putting the generality of the sovereign will at permanent risk. This insubordination may take two forms, pertaining to the two possible wills of the prince that are distinct from the general will that it serves: the private will of the individuals composing the prince and the corporate will of the prince as such. While the former must be non-existent in the governmental body, the latter must be subordinated as much as possible to the general will so that the prince must always be ready to ‘sacrifice the government to the people and not the people to the government’ (ibid.). This concern leads Rousseau to the discussion of the proper ratio between the number of citizens and the number of magistrates, in which he concludes that while the effectiveness of government is best served by the inverse ratio of magistrates to citizens (the smaller government being better for a larger state), the rectitude of government is, on the contrary, best served by a positive relationship between the two: while the prince composed of one person (the monarch) is furthest away from the general will, the more numerous magistrates will come closest to it (ibid.: 178). On the basis of these deliberations, Rousseau offers his classification of governments. The government composed of the entire people or the majority thereof is called democracy, the government of a small number of magistrates is an aristocracy, while the government of a single magistrate is monarchy. Given his preference for the inverse ratio of magistrates to citizens, Rousseau concludes that democratic government is best suited for smaller states and monarchy for larger ones, while aristocracy fits the intermediate size best. While the full discussion of these three types of government in Rousseau is beyond the scope of this chapter, we shall merely highlight the aspects most relevant to the tension between sovereignty and government. Unsurprisingly, democracy appears to be the most problematic form in this respect because, in it, sovereign and government appear all but indistinct, creating an impression of a ‘government without government’. While, at first glance, democracy appears a sensible way to govern, since ‘he who makes the law knows better than anyone else how it should be executed and interpreted’ (ibid.: 179), this advantage turns out to be problematic, ‘since things that should be distinguished are not’ (ibid.). Democracy is problematic insofar as it establishes an excessive proximity between the sovereign and the prince, 33

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democratic biopolitics in which the risk of the contamination of the general will by particular interests is amplified: [It] is not good for the body of the people to turn its attention away from general perspectives in order to give it particular objects. Nothing is more dangerous than the influence of private interests on public affairs, and the abuse of the laws by the government is a lesser evil than the corruption of the legislator, which is the inevitable outcome of particular perspectives. (ibid.)

The risk of the corruption of the general will is so great that Rousseau is even willing to admit a greater separation of and even a degree of independence of government from the sovereign to avoid this. As we shall see below, a sovereign people can easily depose a corrupt government simply by assembling and manifesting its presence. Yet, if the people itself becomes corrupted by particular interests, there is no longer anyone to depose it and set things right. Since government is inherently problematic, it is better to let it become or remain corrupt than threaten the corruption of the sovereign by its proximity to it. We must emphasize that Rousseau’s notion of democracy is far removed from the modern concepts of representative democracy, which in his view would rather correspond to some form of aristocracy, with the proviso that the general will remains impossible to represent in any case. Rousseau’s democracy is direct not merely in the legislative aspect (which is true for every form of government in his theory!) but also in the executive aspect, whereby the entire people would not only make laws but also issue decrees and implement them in practice (cf. Cohen 2010: 135–9). This explains Rousseau’s ambivalence with regard to democracy, which he famously deems too perfect a form of government to be suited to men and only appropriate for a ‘people of gods’ (Rousseau 1987: 180). There is nothing particularly demanding about the people exercising legislative power. It is only the implementation of the laws by the people as a whole that is problematic since it requires the fulfilment of too many preconditions to be possible in practice: a very small state, a simplicity of mores, a high degree of equality, the absence of luxury and so on. This is why Rousseau argues that the best method of the election of magistrates in a democracy is by lot and not by choice: since democratic government must presuppose substantial equality of ‘mores and talents’ (ibid.: 208), the choice of the actual governmental officials appears ‘almost indifferent’ (ibid.). While this emphasis on homogeneity has been the object of repeated criticism (see, for example, Dent 2005: 160–79; Klausen 2014: 177–203; Neidleman 2016: 124–30), we must bear in mind that all these preconditions pertain not to the exercise of the general will, which is possible under any conditions, but specifically 34

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rousseau’s aporia to the exercise by the people of executive power. The homogeneity that Rousseau’s democracy requires is not an attribute of the democratic sovereign but of the democratic prince. Aristocracy, which includes elective aristocracy that we would today associate with representative democracy (Dent 2005: 44), is evidently spared the problem of the identity of prince and sovereign. The risk of corrupting the sovereign is thus lower, while the danger of the governmental abuse of the laws is evidently higher: ‘The corporate interest begins to direct the public force in less strict a conformity with the rule of the general will’ (Rousseau 1987: 182). Finally, monarchy combines in one person the will of the people, the corporate will of the prince and the private will of the individual, which entails the greatest risk of the private will dominating the others, separating itself from the people, and the consequent loss of the cohesion of the state (ibid.: 183). Just as in the case of laying down the fundamental laws, it is impossible to decide on the best form of government without considering the particular features of the country in question, such as the climate – warm countries being more prone to despotism than cold ones (ibid.: 179–80). Ultimately, the answer given by Rousseau is a curiously biopolitical one: that that form of government is best under which the population grows most (ibid.: 191). Yet, while Rousseau has little to say about the best form of government, he has a lot to say about government going bad, which he considers an ‘inherent and inevitable vice, which, from the birth of the body politic, tends unceasingly to destroy it, just as old age and death destroy the human body’ (ibid.: 192). Rather than be a simple and unproblematic emanation of the general will, government is inherently opposed to the sovereign that authorizes it: ‘Just as the private will acts constantly against the general will, so the government makes a continual effort against sovereignty. The more this effort increases, the more the constitution is altered’ (ibid.). For Rousseau, there are two ways in which a government can degenerate, by shrinking and by the dissolution of the state. The shrinking of the government refers to the passage from democracy to aristocracy and, finally, to monarchy, in the course of which corporate and private wills acquire greater strength at the expense of the general will. The dissolution of the state can, in turn, take two forms. Firstly, the prince may usurp sovereign power, which entails the dissolution of the social compact, since for the people the government is now a mere tyrant, which they are ‘forced but not obliged to obey’ (ibid.: 193). Secondly, the state dissolves when the members of the government usurp individually the power they should exercise only as a collective prince. While in the former case the corporate will of the prince triumphs over the 35

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democratic biopolitics general will, in the latter case the private will of the persons composing the prince dominates over both the corporate will of the prince and the general will, leading to the dissolution of the state, its degeneration into the negative correlate of its form: ochlocracy, oligarchy or despotism (usurpation of general will) and tyranny (usurpation of princely power) (ibid.: 193–4). In all these cases, states perish because of the domination of the universal and the general by the particular and the private. For Rousseau, this is a ‘natural and inevitable’ tendency that cannot be eradicated but can at least be mitigated by giving the state the best possible constitution that maintains its sovereign authority. It is therefore not the laws themselves but the legislative power that sustains the state (ibid.: 194). For this reason, to maintain itself, sovereign authority must manifest itself in the assembly of the people as a whole. However impractical or outright chimerical this might seem, for Rousseau the manifestation of the sovereign must be regular and periodic. It is not enough for the people to assemble only once to establish a government, which, as we have seen, is inherently driven to overstep its boundaries and usurp sovereign power. Hence Rousseau’s general principle that ‘the more force a government has, the more frequently the sovereign ought to show itself’ (ibid.: 196). Once the sovereign is manifest, the authority of executive power is suspended. The power that emanates from the sovereign must logically vanish in its presence: ‘where those who are represented are found, there is no longer any representative’ (ibid.: 197. See also Strong 2002: 91–2). Rousseau notes that these periods of the assembly of the people have historically been the times of greatest tumult – in Roman history, for example – precisely because they marked the suspension of princely authority. These intervals of suspension, during which the prince recognizes or ought to recognize an actual superior, have always been disturbing to him. And these assemblies of the people, which are the aegis of the body politic and the curb on the government, have at all times been the horror of leaders. Thus they never spare efforts, objections, difficulties, or promises to keep the citizens from having them. (ibid.)

And whenever the people are insufficiently enamored of liberty, these efforts tend to succeed so that ‘sovereign authority finally vanishes, and the majority of cities fall and perish prematurely’ (ibid.). This is why Rousseau insists on the need for the people to assemble actively and not entrust public service to representatives: ‘once public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens and they prefer to 36

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rousseau’s aporia serve with their wallet rather than with their person, the state is already near its ruin’ (ibid.). Serving with one’s wallet – that is, maintaining the state by paying taxes – is viewed by Rousseau as so detrimental to liberty that he views even forced labor as less opposed to it: ‘in a truly free state the citizens do everything with their hands and nothing with money. Far from paying to be exempted from their duties, they would pay to fulfil them themselves’ (ibid.: 198). In a well-constituted state, public business always takes precedence over private affairs: in a well-run city everyone flies to the assemblies; under a bad government no one wants to take a step to get to them, since no one takes an interest in what happens there, for it is predictable that the general will will not predominate. (ibid.)

There is a mutually reinforcing relationship between the prevalence of private interests in the society and the power of particular or private wills in government: the less the citizens care about public affairs, the more powerful private or corporate wills become in the government, and, conversely, the less the government is subordinate to the general will, the less the citizens will concern themselves with public affairs. Representation is so problematic for Rousseau because it inevitably represents the general by the particular, which paves the way for the above-discussed forms of usurpation of popular sovereignty. This is why representatives or deputies have only a very modest function in Rousseau’s account: they cannot really represent the people but are merely its agents. They cannot conclude anything definitely. Any law that the populace has not ratified in person is null; it is not a law at all. The moment a people gives itself representatives, it is no longer free, it no longer exists. (ibid.: 198–9)

Evidently, this proscription on representation pertains only to the legislative power of the people as sovereign, since the people are routinely ‘represented’ in their executive power by the government, which, as the emanation of the sovereign, are indeed its agents, having the power of decree and not of law (Strong 2002: 96). Nonetheless, as we have seen, even this relation of emanative agency is extremely problematic for Rousseau as it is fraught with the risks of usurpation of sovereignty and the dissolution of the people. If it was the ‘opposition of private interests [that] made necessary the establishment of societies’ (Rousseau 1987: 153), then the resurgence of these private interests in government threatens the very existence of these societies. 37

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democratic biopolitics We now proceed to Rousseau’s discussion of the way government is instituted, where we shall again encounter the tension between government and sovereignty, the particular and the general, decree and law. To recall, government ‘functions only by means of particular acts’, which do not have the force of law (ibid.: 200). Hence, the institution of the government cannot be a social contract. There is only one contract in Rousseau’s scheme and that concerns the association itself, the emergence of the people. Any further contract, such as between the people and the government, would be logically inadmissible as it would limit the inalienable sovereignty of the people. Instead, government is established in a two-step process, which involves both sovereign and governmental powers. Firstly, ‘the sovereign decrees that there will be a governing body established under some or other form’ (ibid.: 201). This act of general will, which is evidently a law, simply declares that a government should be established without actually appointing any leaders to this government. This appointment is the second step, which, unlike the first one, is evidently a particular act that cannot take the form of law and is instead a governmental decree. Yet, how can an act of government exist before the actual government is appointed? Rousseau resolves this conundrum by momentarily converting sovereignty into democracy: This takes place by a sudden conversion of sovereignty into democracy, so that, without any noticeable change, and solely by virtue of a new relation of all to all, the citizens, having become magistrates, pass from general to particular acts and from the law to its execution. (ibid.: 201)

Thus, while Rousseau did not propose democracy as the best form of government, it certainly emerges as the indispensable one, since the conversion of the people into magistrates is the only way to establish any government, be it democratic, aristocratic or monarchical. Whatever form of government the people want to establish, they must first establish a democracy and then either maintain it or transform it into aristocracy or monarchy. By the same token, with regard to any already established government, the sovereign may remove it whenever it pleases it, even when the form of government is hereditary monarchy. The assembled people decide whether or not to preserve the present form of government, while the same people as the democratic prince decide whether to maintain its present occupants. Both the composition and the form of government may be changed by the sovereign whenever it assembles: there is no law that cannot be revised or abolished, and even the social contract itself is not irrevocable. 38

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rousseau’s aporia Thus, for Rousseau, the general will is truly sovereign, its power encountering no limit whatsoever. Rousseau even goes so far as to term the general will ‘indestructible’ even as he argues that all existing states wither and dissolve. The destruction of every state is never owing to the sovereign acts of the general will but solely to its contamination by the particular, whereby the general will first loses its unanimous status and eventually is entirely sidelined by private or corporate wills: When the state, on the verge of ruin, subsists only in an illusory and vain form, when the social bond of unity is broken in all hearts, when the meanest interest brazenly appropriates the sacred name of the public good, then the general will becomes mute. Everyone, guided by secret motives, no more express their opinions as citizens than as if the state had never existed; and iniquitous decrees having as their sole purpose the private interest are falsely passed under the name of laws. (ibid.: 204)

Yet, even in this case, the general will is not ‘annihilated or corrupted’ (ibid.: 204) but only ‘subordinated’ to other wills that prevail over it. The general will always wills freedom and equality, and could not possibly will anything against the common interest, but when it is sidelined or rendered silent by particular wills, the state is brought to ruin. However essential government is to the state, it is also the source of perennial danger to it, unlike sovereignty, which maintains its indestructible purity even at the moment of the decay and dissolution of the polity. It is now easy to see why the Rousseauan perspective would approach the rise of particularistic government, including biopolitical government, with quite some trepidation. We now proceed to the discussion of how the Rousseauan problematization of government re-emerges in the contemporary critical discourse on biopolitics.

Politics: The existence of the people It is notable that in his works on biopolitics and governmentality Foucault makes only one passing reference to Rousseau. The reference occurs in the context of the discussion of the emergence of the modern ‘economic’ mode of government: How one can give a general principle of government that will allow for both the juridical principle of sovereignty and the elements through which an art of government can be defined and described. The problem of sovereignty is not eliminated; on the contrary, it is made more acute than ever. (Foucault 2007: 107)

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democratic biopolitics While Foucault does not pursue this question in relation to Rousseau explicitly, the possibility of reconciling sovereignty and government is indeed the key question of Rousseau’s political thought and, via Rousseau, enters the critical theories of biopolitics and governmentality. In this section we shall address the way the problematic relation between sovereignty and government is reconstructed by three key authors in contemporary continental thought: Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Let us begin with perhaps the most paradigmatically Rousseauan approach in contemporary political thought, Badiou’s politics of truth (cf. Critchley 2008). The division between sovereignty and government is the main focus of Badiou’s reading of Rousseau in Being and Event, where The Social Contract is discussed as a paradigm of the political ‘truth procedure’, the unfolding of the consequences of the event. Rousseau’s general will is understood as the analogue of Badiou’s own figure of the post-evental generic subset of the situation that he calls its truth: General will never considers an individual nor a particular action. It is therefore tied to the indiscernible. What it speaks of in its declarations cannot be separated out by statements of a knowledge. A decree is founded upon knowledge, but a law is not; a law is concerned solely with the truth. (Badiou 2005a: 347)

In Badiou’s meta-ontology, the generic subset of the situation is compiled out of all the parts of the situation that are connected to the undecidable event: because the situation itself cannot admit the existence of the event, the resultant subset cannot be discerned by any intra-situational predicate. Its indiscernibility in terms of any particular criterion ensures its universality, which is why Badiou reserves the name ‘truth’ for this paradoxical subset. If we view Rousseau’s social compact as the analogue of Badiou’s event, then the general will is precisely the ‘truth’ of this event, which separates in the social body that which has to do with the event of this compact and which cannot be isolated by any particular predicate. Thus, while decrees of magistrates may be founded on particular knowledge of society, laws, as acts of the general will, proceed solely from the truth of the social compact itself, ceaselessly referring back to the event of the constitution of the people as such. Thus, general will ‘cannot take persons or goods into consideration’ (ibid.): it does not deal with these entities as beings but approaches them solely in the facticity of their being as such. It is for this reason that Rousseau is able to equate obedience to the general will to the exercise of freedom: ‘obedience to the general will is the mode in 40

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rousseau’s aporia which civil liberty is realized’ (ibid.: 346). If the content of the general will pertained to particular ‘persons or goods’, let alone took account of their particular interests, it would be impossible to view obedience to any such particular injunction as the exercise of freedom, at least not for everyone, since different individuals would be affected differently by particular decisions. Yet, if the general will wills only the general – that is, that which is indiscernible in terms of any predicate – then it cannot demand obedience to any particular decision, but only to the affirmation of this very indiscernibility, whose sole content for Rousseau is freedom and equality (ibid.: 347). The elements of a set that cannot be discerned according to any predicate could never form any hierarchy or relation of dependency. This is why Rousseau’s scandalous ‘forcing to be free’ (see Dent 2005: 144–52) is, for Badiou, hardly paradoxical or otherwise problematic. In order for the social compact to avoid being an empty formula, it tacitly includes the commitment, which alone can give force to the others – that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be forced to do so by the entire body. This means merely that he will be forced to be free; for this is the sort of condition that, by giving each citizen to the homeland, guarantees him against all personal dependence – a condition that produces the skill and the performance of the political machine, and which alone bestows legitimacy upon civil commitments. Without it such commitments would be absurd, tyrannical and subject to the worst abuses. (Rousseau 1987: 150)

Freedom is constituted by being affirmed generically as valid for all: one is at once subjectivized as free and subjected to the general will that affirms freedom universally. If things were otherwise, freedom would merely mean the arbitrary power of the stronger over the weaker. For this reason, the universal affirmation of freedom is not itself a free choice that can be left up to the individual, but the condition of any such choice being genuinely free and thus in a certain sense a matter of subjection (cf. Inston 2010b: 139–41). Yet, insofar as the general will has no other content than freedom and equality, this subjection only subjects the individual to itself as constitutive of the sovereign. For this reason, Badiou concludes that, for Rousseau, ‘politics is the existence of a people’ (Badiou 2005a: 348; cf. Lorkovic 2012: 71). This is an interesting formulation that we should linger over. Politics in this understanding is not about acting on behalf of the people’s demands, desires or interests but only about manifesting their sheer existence. Moreover, this existence is an absolute value: that is, the people either exists or it does not, because the general will ‘is either itself or something else; there is nothing in between’ (Rousseau 1987: 198). The founding 41

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democratic biopolitics act ‘whereby a people is a people’ is not merely the origin of politics but its entire content that, to recall Rousseau, must be periodically reactualized to assure the people of its own existence. Politics is nothing but the perpetual return to the event of the social compact, which in every act of legislation affirms first and foremost that the people exists. In fact, Rousseau’s politics cannot do much more than that, since any attempt to discern particular attributes of the people, let alone its constituent parts, would risk reintroducing ‘partial societies’ with their corporate interests that can only corrupt and undermine the popular sovereign. It is clear that this generic politics is strictly opposed to the activity of government in general and to biopolitical government in particular, which firstly acts on the people as objects and, secondly, acts precisely on their particular features, identities, interests or desires. As Badiou recognizes, this generic vision of politics runs into two problems. Firstly, if the event of the social compact is undecidable, how is its occurrence to be decided? How does the people, which manifests its existence politically, first come to be? Secondly, how is the generic understanding of the general will compatible with the principle of majority voting in the acts of legislative power? The first problem returns us to Rousseau’s enigmatic figure of the legislator, which Badiou reinterprets in terms of his concept of intervention that decides on the occurrence of the event, which is ontologically undecidable. Just as it takes an absolutely unfounded act of intervention to proclaim that what has taken place was indeed an event and not merely an inconsequential modification, the establishment of the people as sovereign requires the intervention of the figure of the legislator who can ‘transform each individual (who by himself is a perfect and solitary whole) into a part of a larger whole from which this individual receives, in a sense, his life and his being’ (Rousseau 1987: 163). What has remained a paradox for most commentators in Rousseau (see Inston 2010b, Ch.7) is, in Badiou’s reading, endowed with a (meta)ontological necessity: since the event of the social contract is undecidable, for the people to appear as its effect its occurrence must be decided in an ungrounded manner by a figure that is at once constitutive and external to the republic. The legislator ensures that the instantly vanishing event will have had a chance at generating at least some consequences but, since the legislator only ‘frames’ the laws without having legislative power of its own, it can never stipulate what these consequences will be. The legislator decides on the undecidable and thereby makes it possible for the indiscernible to appear and assert its existence. The problem of decision-making and majority voting is rather more problematic (see Cohen 2010: 73–82 for a detailed discussion). Badiou 42

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rousseau’s aporia addresses Rousseau’s elliptic footnote: ‘For a will to be general, it need not always be unanimous, however it is necessary for all the votes to be counted’ (Rousseau 1987: 154; Badiou 2005a: 350). While the latter imperative evidently prescribes universal suffrage and the absence of formal exclusion of anyone from the social body, it is not clear how a non-unanimous vote (a majority, simple or qualified) can serve as the ‘adequate sign of the generic’ (Badiou 2005a: 351). Rousseau ventures to resolve these difficulties by distinguishing between important and urgent decisions, the former requiring an (almost) unanimous vote and the latter made by simple majorities: [The] more important and serious the deliberations are, the closer the prevailing opinion should be to unanimity. The more the matter at hand calls for alacrity, the smaller the prescribed difference in the division of opinion should be. The first of these maxims seems more suited to laws, and the second to public business. (Rousseau 1987: 206)

Yet, while this distinction makes sense from a practical perspective, it is problematic from the generic and indiscernible perspective of the general will, which now becomes conditioned by fully discernible empirical matters, such as the relative importance or urgency of the decision in question. Moreover, this conditioning raises the obvious question of who is to decide on the importance or urgency of the decision in question and whether this decision is itself important or urgent. Once it is a matter of absolute or qualified majorities, the general will ‘loses its generic character and becomes a technique for the evaluation of circumstances’ (Badiou 2005a: 352). The same problem arises when Rousseau discusses the formation of the government. As we have seen, Rousseau resolves this problem by momentarily converting the popular sovereign into a democratic government, which can now make particular decisions, such as nominating specific persons into government, because these decisions are no longer political but governmental (Rousseau 1987: 201). In order to decide on the particular, the general will must first transform itself into the particular, become what it is not so as to be able to do more than manifest the sheer being of the sovereign. Whatever the dexterity of this move, it indicates the fundamental gulf that remains in Rousseau’s theory between sovereignty and government, the general and the partial, the universal and the particular. While government with its particular persons and particular decisions is necessary for the republic, it always places the sovereign people at the risk of corruption and degeneration, exposing the general will to particular interests and partial associations. Since genuine politics consists solely in the manifestation of the people 43

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democratic biopolitics in its very existence, government, including biopolitical government, appears to be a necessary evil – all the more evil, the more it is necessary. Badiou thus concludes that ‘Rousseau’s genius was to have abstractly circumscribed the nature of politics as generic procedure. Politics is, for itself, its own proper end; in the mode of what is being produced as true statements by the capacity of collective will’ (Badiou 2005a: 353). Indeed, as we shall see in Chapter 4, Badiou’s own politics of truth, which he steadfastly opposes to the biopolitics of ‘democratic materialism’ (Badiou 2009: 1–7), is paradigmatically Rousseauan in its desire to maintain the generic in its indiscernibility against the contamination by particular interests or concerns that are inherently devoid of truth. Thus, biopolitical government may well be necessary and inescapable but it is not, as such, political, and the relationship between the political and the governmental remains forever antagonistic.

Government over kingdom Badiou’s reading exemplifies most starkly what we have called Rousseau’s aporia: politics gains access to the generic and the universal solely on the condition of not being able to act on it, to translate this universality into governmental practices which remain heterogeneous to the general will even as they appear to emanate from it. In the context of the theory of biopolitics this aporetic relationship between sovereignty and government has been treated most extensively in Giorgio Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory (2011b). In this book Agamben complements his earlier theory of sovereign power (1998), which articulated Carl Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty with Foucault’s notion of biopolitics in a single figure of the state of exception, with the genealogy of government, which he traces back to late Antiquity and early Christianity, particularly the doctrine of the Trinity. Taking his point of departure from the debate between Schmitt and Erik Peterson on the possibility of political theology, Agamben quickly moves beyond that particular controversy to outline a fundamental split in Western ontology between two dimensions: ‘being and praxis, transcendent and immanent good, theology and oikonomia’ (2011b: 140). Typically for Agamben’s line of reasoning, this split simultaneously forms an articulation, the bipolar machine of Kingdom–Government, in which Schmitt’s logic of sovereignty and political theology occupies the first, ‘theological’ dimension of Kingdom. Agamben’s own interest is in this book clearly captured by the second, immanent ‘economic’ dimension of Government, which he reconstitutes starting from the Trinitarian dogma all the way up to contemporary political and sociological theories. 44

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rousseau’s aporia Moreover, in the course of the study Agamben makes it clear that the two poles of the ‘machine’ are not functionally equivalent: in fact, the Kingdom serves as the ultimately fictive foundation of Government, the locus of ineffectual being at once excluded and included from effective praxis: ‘God’s impotence functions to make possible a righteous government of the world’ (ibid.: 106). The ostensibly absolute power of the sovereign that should logically exceed the governmental power that derives from it ends up wholly sustained by the latter and in fact exists only as the necessary presupposition for the effects produced by it. Just as God’s glory is ultimately the product of our practices of glorification, the splendor of the sovereign is nothing but a shadow cast by the tedious workings of the myriad of bureaucrats, the ‘angels’ of government. The King reigns only because he does not govern, though, to be fair, government can govern only by presupposing a transcendent figure that only reigns. Thus, Agamben concludes the inquiry with the following statement: the real problem, the central mystery of politics is not sovereignty, but government; it is not God, but the angel; it is not the king, but ministry; it is not the law but the police – that is to say, the governmental machine that they form and support. (ibid.: 276)

While Agamben’s own prioritization of government over sovereignty as the fundamental problem of politics is clear, his key finding is actually the indissociability of one from the other, which is all the more surprising due to the absence of any necessary connection between the two. Sovereignty is nothing but the presupposition of governmental practices, which themselves derive their legitimacy from it. The gap between being and praxis, which characterizes the relation between Father and Son in the Trinitarian dogma, is, in Agamben’s reading, present throughout modern politics in a secularized version that only transfers it from the theological sphere to worldly domains without transforming its logic. In an appendix to the book, entitled ‘The Economy of Moderns’, Agamben first addresses the reproduction of the providential logic of government in Malebranche’s theology, in which God’s general will is expressed in the form of immutable laws, while his particular wills are expressed in the form of occasional miracles (ibid.: 261–4). He then finds the same logic transferred, ‘without reservations’, into Rousseau’s republican political theory (ibid.: 273). Rousseau’s general will is nothing but a secularized version of Malebranche’s general will of God and similarly is expressed in the form of law valid for the entire social body. The particular will is, in turn, restricted to the executive power of government that can obligate particular individuals (ibid.: 274). Recalling Foucault’s brief allusion to Rousseau in Security, Territory, Population, Agamben 45

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democratic biopolitics claims that, for Rousseau, it is not a matter of deriving government from sovereignty but, on the contrary, conceptualizing sovereignty in the manner that would accord with the art of government. Pursuing this claim further, Agamben retraces Rousseau’s attempt to maintain the two wills in an articulation, whereby government functions as an emanation of sovereignty (Rousseau 1987: 155). In this manner, Rousseau can maintain his insistence on the indivisibility and inalienability of sovereignty, while accepting the multiplicity of partial governmental acts based on particular interests. As in Malebranche the occasional causes are nothing but the particular actualizations of God’s general will, so in Rousseau the government or executive power claims to coincide with the sovereignty of law from which it nevertheless distinguishes itself as its particular emanation and actualization. (Agamben 2011b: 275)

The concept of emanation, admittedly not very typical of a treatise on politics, was articulated in neoplatonism and taken up in the Trinitarian theology to refer to the procession of persons in the Trinity. Rather than being divided or decomposed into elements, divinity proceeds from the Father to Son without being diminished. And yet, just as in the case of the Trinitarian economy and in the theory of providence, what cannot be divided is articulated through the distinctions sovereign power/government, general will/particular will, legislative power/ executive power, which mark within it a series of caesurae that Rousseau tries carefully to minimize. (ibid.: 275)

Secularization, which moves a phenomenon to a worldly domain without amending the theological logic in which it was originally articulated, entails the perpetuation of the originally theological problem in modern politics: The economico-providential apparatus is passed on as an unquestioned inheritance to modern politics. What was needed to assure the unity of being and divine action, reconciling the unity of substance with the trinity of persons and the government of particulars with the universality of providence, has here the strategic function of reconciling the sovereignty and generality of the law with the public economy and the effective government of individuals. The most nefarious consequence of this theological apparatus as political legitimation is that it has rendered the democratic tradition incapable of thinking government and its economy. (ibid.: 276)

According to Agamben, Rousseau both recognizes government as a problem and tries to minimize its significance, presenting it as mere execution 46

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rousseau’s aporia of sovereign authority that emanates from it. Yet, this downplaying conceals the ‘substantial untruth of the primacy of legislative power and the consequent irreducibility of government to mere execution’ (ibid.: 276). As government, including biopolitical government, assumes ever greater importance in Western societies, the democratic tradition inspired by Rousseau cannot respond to its predominance, having convinced itself of the derivative status of government: If today we are witnessing the government and economy’s overwhelming domination of a popular sovereignty emptied of all meaning, this perhaps signifies that Occidental democracies are paying the political price of a theological inheritance that they had unwittingly assumed through Rousseau. (ibid.)

Just as Foucault in the 1970s accused the socialists of the time of failing to have developed an autonomous rationality of government and hence having to borrow its tools from their ideological antagonists (Foucault 2008: 92–4), Agamben makes an even more general claim about the failure of modern democracy to come to terms with what the ‘central mystery’ of politics is, its getting ‘lost in abstractions and vacuous mythologemes such as the Law, the general will and popular sovereignty’ (Agamben 2011b: 276). This is certainly a stinging critique, not merely of Rousseau but even more importantly of the contemporary Rousseauans such as Badiou, who continue to downgrade government (and biopolitics) in constructing politics as the sphere of generic existence of the people as sovereign. Plausible as this critique is, we nonetheless wonder if it fully does justice to Rousseau’s argument. After all, as we have shown in the previous section, Rousseau was clearly aware of the problematic nature of the relationship between sovereignty and government, which in fact forms the central motif of The Social Contract. While, for Agamben, Rousseau’s reduction of government to the emanation of sovereignty testifies to a fundamental misunderstanding of its operation, it is also possible to view it as a purposeful, though not necessarily a successful, strategy to minimize the autonomous force of government, which, as Rousseau clearly recognized, remains fundamentally heterogeneous to the sovereignty of the general will insofar as it deals with particular goods and persons and their particular interests. Precisely because government, with its contingent rationalities and actions with no foundation in the universality of the general will, threatens at every point to contaminate and corrupt the republic, it must be simultaneously downgraded in its importance and rendered dependent on sovereign authority. None the less, as we recall, Rousseau also recognized that the relative autonomization of the prince from the sovereign was a better 47

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democratic biopolitics outcome than the corruption of the sovereign by the prince. For this reason, while government was to be subordinated to the sovereign, it could not be kept too close to it – hence the danger of democracy as a form of government in which sovereign and prince become indistinct. The idea of emanation is then a compromise between the autonomy of government that resigns us to despotism and its complete dissolution in the sovereign that threatens to corrupt the latter. The eventual triumph of executive over legislative power that Agamben quite plausibly diagnoses may, then, be not an effect of this compromise solution but a simple indication of its defeat that proves that Rousseau’s fears of partial societies and particular interests were in fact well founded. Interestingly, Agamben does not stop at the critique of Rousseauism but also applies the same kind of criticism to liberalism, albeit in an inverted form. If democrats and republicans focused on popular sovereignty to the detriment of government, liberalism represents the opposite tendency of affirming the supremacy of the other, governmental pole, all but eliminating the pole of transcendence, sovereignty or Kingdom. Yet, ‘by doing so it merely plays off one side of the theological machine against the other. And when modernity abolishes the divine pole, the economy that is derived from it will not thereby have emancipated itself from the providential paradigm’ (ibid.: 284). In modernity, the divine will is [annulled] in the freedom of men. At this point, theology can resolve itself into atheism and providentialism into democracy, because God has made the world just as if it were without God and governs it as though it governed itself. Modernity, removing God from the world, has not only failed to leave theology behind, but in some ways has done nothing other than to lead the project of the providential oikonomia to completion. (ibid.: 286–7)

Thus, both the attempts to affirm sovereignty over government and to affirm government over sovereignty fail to get rid fully of the other pole in the bipolar machine that Agamben reconstructs. Democracy and liberalism are two partial attempts to transform the machine that end up strengthening it precisely when they thought they managed to defeat it. The attempt to make the people divine left it at the mercy of the bureaucratic apparatus of modern-day angels, while the depoliticizing negation of sovereignty made the entire world synonymous with God’s will. For Agamben, both economic government without sovereignty and sovereignty without government are unsustainable projects that depend on the other pole even as they disavow it. Just as immanent governmentality must conjure a transcendent locus that would authorize its contingent effects, the politics of pure sovereignty, contained entirely in the general will that wills only its 48

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rousseau’s aporia own freedom and equality, must develop governmental apparatuses, unless of course it renounces the very idea of maintaining and reproducing some form of social order. Agamben’s analysis thus provides us with two extreme figures that should not be dismissed too quickly, however absurd they might appear at first glance: economic government without any legitimacy or source of authorization and a democracy that is wholly inoperative and ineffective. The reason why they should not be dismissed is that the former of these actually resembles Agamben’s own account of the nihilism of the contemporary society of the spectacle (and even more so, the analyses of Agamben’s more radical followers in Tiqqun (2010) and the Invisible Committee (2009)). In turn, the latter figure bears some resemblance to Agamben’s own earlier theorization of political community in terms of inoperativity of whatever being (Agamben 1993). Agamben’s coming community, subtracted from every particular identitarian predicate, manifests itself precisely in the affirmation of its sheer existence, just as the general will of the sovereign people. Since Agamben is famously critical of the very idea of will, general or otherwise (see Agamben 2013; Agamben 2018), this resemblance is certainly not a matter of complete correspondence but only suggests that Agamben’s own search for a new configuration of political community is not that far from the Rousseauan affirmation of the general or the generic as its sole content. Rather than simply oppose Badiou’s set-theoretical reinterpretation of Rousseauism, Agamben performs a subtle shift within it. For Badiou, government may well be unavoidable but this does not make it political – it remains an activity devoid of truth from which proper politics must be protected. The only practice that proper politics can legitimately engage in is the militant affirmation of equality, which manifests the generic existence of the people. As we shall argue in more detail in Chapter 4, Badiou’s politics is therefore best grasped in terms of the struggle for democracy, as opposed to political praxis within an established democracy, in which it would remain without much to do. When democracy is not yet (fully) constituted, its relation to government can be bracketed off and politics can be grasped in its purity as entirely heterogeneous to and autonomous from government. For Agamben, this arrangement is far too naïve, since the problem of all politics, including revolutionary, emancipatory and egalitarian politics of constituent power, has been its inevitable corruption by its particularistic emanations in the constituted power of government (Agamben 2005a: 88). A generic political community may indeed exist, but not as a result of the uncoupling of sovereignty from government; it is only as a result of rendering the entire bipolar machine of sovereignty–government inoperative. 49

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democratic biopolitics We must therefore revisit Agamben’s enigmatic final sentence in The Kingdom and the Glory and ask what it means to ‘lead the project of the providential oikonomia to completion’ (2011b: 287). Could it be that the completion in question refers not to the accomplishment of any final goal of the oikonomia in question but rather its simple suspension in an inoperative state, an ending without a telos? Only such a completion would make it possible for human existence to reclaim fully its inoperative and hence potential nature, which Agamben discusses at length in terms of whatever being, form-of-life and even, on one occasion, in Badiou’s terms of the generic (Agamben 1998: 62, 188; Agamben 2000: 11; Agamben 1993: 1–3, 93–6). A form-of-life wholly exhausted in bare life, a community that subtracts itself from every determinant, a generic or indiscernible subject cannot simply assert its sovereignty against government (or govern itself without sovereignty) but must bring to a halt the machine as a whole. While Badiou’s militant subject risks becoming entirely inoperative in any actually existing democracy, Agamben’s inoperative subject cannot but appear extremely militant.

Individual as universe Roberto Esposito’s reading of Rousseau outlines a via media between these opposed readings, highlighting the ambivalences in Rousseau’s thought that make his legacy for the theory of biopolitics even more complicated. For Esposito, Rousseau’s political philosophy neither exemplifies an authentic politics nor is responsible for a thoroughgoing depoliticization of Western societies but rather expresses the aporias involved in the very constitution of political community. For Esposito, Rousseau’s understanding of community is marked by the insistence of the non-originary character of community, the impossibility of describing the origin of community other than as absent or lost. The community is only ever given to us in the experience of its loss or vanishing: ‘Originary presence is already altered, decentred and separated from what it is. It is condemned to difference and therefore negated in its identity’ (Esposito 2010: 47). Whenever we try to identify a natural or originary state, we discover that it is not really natural but always already social and historical (see Strong 2002: 42–8; Cooper 1999: 17–29). A true state of nature is not accessible other than by retracing its negation. From this perspective, community is never given or originary but always something to be realized. However, it must be realized, precisely because the solitary and asocial existence that characterized the hypothetical natural state is no longer an option. Yet, if the human being is originally completely solitary and self-enclosed, how can it enter a community to begin with and 50

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rousseau’s aporia in what will this community consist? In Esposito’s reading, the aporia of Rousseau’s thinking of community is that it ventures to ‘derive a philosophy of community from a metaphysics of solitude’ (ibid.: 51). The tensions between the universal and the particular, the general and the partial, sovereignty and government, citizen and subject that we have addressed in this chapter all arise from the problem of constructing a community out of originally solitary beings. One way to resolve or at least force this aporia is to realize the community precisely on the model of the solitary individual ‘closed up on own absoluteness’ (ibid.: 52) – a possibility highlighted by those critics of Rousseau who accused him of a proto-totalitarian disposition (see Talmon 1985; cf. Strong 2002: 64–6). A community conceived as a single self-sufficient individual endowed with a single will certainly resonates with totalitarian ideologies. And yet, as Esposito argues, such a reading obscures Rousseau’s persistent attempts to prevent precisely the abuse of power by the state in relation to the individual that characterizes every totalitarian regime. The entire distinction of general and particular wills and the limitation of sovereignty to the former serve to prevent the conflation of legislative and executive powers that would enable violent domination: Were it possible for the sovereign considered as such to have the executive power, right and fact would be so completely confounded that we would no longer know what is law and what is not. And the body politic thus denatured would soon fall prey to the violence against which it was instituted. (Rousseau 1987: 200)

While this is probably the best description of totalitarian government, it certainly was not Rousseau’s intention in The Social Contract to legitimize such an arrangement. And yet, the aporia remains there in Rousseau’s insistence on the ‘total alienation’ of every associate to the community whereby it becomes an ‘indivisible part of the whole’ (ibid.: 148): ‘Where the proto-totalitarian risk in Rousseau seems most evident isn’t in the juxtaposition of the communitarian model to that of the individual but in their reciprocal interpenetration that awards to the community the profile of the isolated and self-sufficient individual’ (Esposito 2010: 53). It is not that the community tramples the individual but that it becomes one. It is a myth of community that is transparent to itself, in which every one communicates with the other one’s own communitarian essence, without mediation, filter, or sign to interrupt the reciprocal fusion of consciousness. There is no distance, discontinuity, or difference with regard to another that is no longer other, because the other too is an integral part of the one. (ibid.)

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democratic biopolitics Yet, Esposito argues that such a self-contained community, akin to the community of Clarens described in Julie, or the New Heloise, is not the one proposed in The Social Contract, which, after all, installs numerous precautions to avoid the indistinction between sovereignty and government, the legislative and the executive, the public and the private. In fact, in his critique of democracy as only suitable for the ‘people of gods’, Rousseau addresses precisely the risk of the indistinction between sovereign and prince that would characterize this mythical self-enclosed community. In Esposito’s reading, the mythical figure of community occurs primarily in Rousseau’s discussion of small republics or ‘homelands’, such as Corsica, in which the myth of community is realized not in the ascendancy of the whole over the part (the totalitarian domination of the general will over the individual) but, on the contrary, in the autonomization of the part from the whole, evident in the privilege Rousseau’s thought assigns to small and isolated communities defined by a particular identity as opposed to abstract cosmopolitanism (see Cohen 2010; Klausen 2014; Neidleman 2012 for diverging interpretations of Rousseau’s relation to cosmopolitanism). For Esposito, Rousseau’s oscillation between the universalism of the general will and the particularism of micro-republics demonstrates that his thought is stuck midway: neither ancient individualism nor new universalism, or better, the one in the other: the one reversed and both negated and made stronger in the other. An individual universalized, which is the general will, and a universal individualized, which are small homelands. It is as if the critique of absolutism were continually on the point of giving way to a new mythology of the absolute, of the whole and of the part, of the whole as part and of the part as the whole. (Esposito 2010: 55)

Being stuck midway between the universal and the particular, it is no wonder that Rousseau’s thought is so strongly marked by melancholy, ‘the melancholy of an existence that has lost its own essence and of an essence that can no longer find a way to become an existence’ (Esposito 2012a: 32). Esposito finds the same operation at work in Rousseau’s rethinking of the subject, which is externalized entirely into the community or the universe as a whole at the same time as this universe is gathered up entirely within the subject (Esposito 2010: 58): ‘If by “community” one understands the exteriorization of existence, its mythologization can be referred to as the interiorization of that exteriority’ (ibid.: 60). The subject both expands and contracts infinitely: ‘Existence tends towards its own extreme until existence is lost in its other. The centre makes itself 52

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rousseau’s aporia one with its ultimate circumference. But, and here is the other side of the coin, the circle makes itself one with its opposite’ (ibid.). It is as if the subject loses itself in the common only to recuperate this loss in its own self as the very subject of its own loss. It is precisely the experience of this loss of self, this ecstatic exteriorization towards the entire universe that constitutes the subject as such. This is why, as Esposito remarks, Rousseau could argue in a late text that, despite the persecution he so profusely complained about, he was unable to hate his enemies: ‘I love myself too much to be able to hate any man. To do so would be to limit and confine my existence, whereas I would prefer to expand it to include the whole universe’ (Rousseau 2004: 100). In his Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Rousseau invokes this expansion as the effect of the practice of reverie, which we shall address in detail in the following chapter: Nothing personal, nothing that involves the interests of my body can truly possess my soul. My meditations and reveries are never more delightful than when I can forget myself. I feel transports of joy and inexpressible raptures in becoming fused as it were with the great system of beings and identifying myself with the whole of nature. (ibid.: 111)

And yet, it is precisely this ecstasy that returns the subject to itself in the act of reverie: The more sensitive the soul of the observer, the greater the ecstasy aroused in him by this harmony. At such times, the senses are possessed by a deep and delightful reverie, and in a state of blissful self-abandonment he loses himself in the immensity of this beautiful order, with which he feels himself as one. A sweet and deep reverie takes possession of his senses then and through a delicious intoxication he loses himself in the immensity of this beautiful system with which he feels himself one. (ibid.: 108)

For Esposito, who is interested in rethinking community in terms of desubjectivation, the opening of the self to exteriority, this eventual recuperation and interiorization on Rousseau’s part testify to the limits of his thought on community. While this may be the case, it is important to linger on this figure of the subject that loses itself in the world and then finds itself in this loss. What interests us in this figure is precisely its oscillation between the singularity of the self and the universality of the ‘system of beings’ or existence as such. It is notable that Rousseau’s reverie has no particular content: there is ‘nothing personal’, nothing ‘concerning my body’ in it. Nor is this reverie an explicit meditation on the universal: for example, the content of the general will. Instead, it accesses the universal precisely in the movement of ecstasy that subtracts from the self 53

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democratic biopolitics all particular content and leaves it with nothing but the sensation of its existence as such. This subject reveling in its solitude that encompasses the entire universe is neither the universalized individual of the protototalitarian interpretation of Rousseau nor the individualized universe of the communitarian reading. Instead, it opens on to a new possibility of conceptualizing political community beyond both universalism and particularism. In the following chapter we shall pursue this possibility further, taking our point of departure from Peter Sloterdijk’s analysis of Rousseau’s Reveries.

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Chapter Two

The community of solitary walkers

The free subject of reverie In the chapter ‘Fifth Walk’ of his Reveries of the Solitary Walker Rousseau describes his experience of rowing out on to Lake Biel and surrendering to a reverie, letting his mind drift for hours without any object or content. I let myself float and drift wherever the water took me, often for several hours on end, plunged in a host of vague yet delightful reveries, which though they had no distinct or permanent subject, were still in my eyes infinitely to be preferred to all that I had found most sweet in the so-called pleasures of life. (Rousseau 2004: 85)

Rousseau distinguishes these protracted states of reverie from the more fleeting moments of ‘madness and passion’ that are all too rare and short-lived. In contrast, reverie gives access to a ‘single and lasting state, which has no very strong impact in itself, but which by its continuance becomes so captivating that we eventually come to regard it as the height of happiness’ (ibid.: 87–8). Reverie makes it possible to contemplate being itself in its pure duration, ‘the simple feeling of existence’ (ibid.: 88). Yet, what makes this contemplation the height of happiness? What is the source of our happiness in such a state? Nothing external to us, nothing apart from ourselves and our own existence: as long as this state lasts, one is self-sufficient like God. The feeling of existence unmixed with any other emotion in its itself a precious feeling of peace and contentment which alone would be enough to make this mode of being loved and cherished by anyone who could guard against all the earthly and sensual influences that are constantly distracting us from it in this life and troubling the joy it could give us. (ibid.: 89)

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democratic biopolitics In his Stress and Freedom, Peter Sloterdijk argues that Rousseau’s description of reverie offers nothing less than a ‘primal scene of existential thought’ (Sloterdijk 2016: 20): [Probably] for the first time on European soil, an experience of freedom was expressed in which the subject of freedom refers exclusively to his felt existence, beyond all achievements and obligations, and also beyond possible ambitions to be recognized by others. This subject discovered itself in an ecstasy of being-with-oneself – and that it has nothing else to say. By experiencing the feeling of pure existence, it believes it has acquired a sovereign title of being. (Sloterdijk 2016: 21)

It is notable that, from the outset of his reading, Sloterdijk approaches Rousseau’s reverie in terms of sovereignty: not the sovereignty of the people expressed in the general will, nor the sovereignty of the small homeland like Corsica. Instead, it is the sovereignty of a being over its being, a sovereignty all the more self-sufficient because it has bracketed off everything it could possibly be lacking in and is content in remaining sovereign over its existence itself. In this moment, the concept of freedom involuntarily takes on a new meaning, a meaning that contradicts everything ever associated with it in the past (freedom as the right to be unmolested by arbitrary rule, as a legal cooperative in the polis, as individual autarchy, as cult freedom, as the privilege of masters, as the freedom of the Christian). It refers to a state of exquisite unusability in which the individual is entirely with themselves, but mostly detached from their everyday identity. In the freedom of reverie, the individual is far removed from ‘society’ but also detached from their own person as woven into the social fabric They leave both things behind: the world of collective themes of concern and themselves as part of it. Hence the individual becomes free through the conquest of carefreeness. Freedom is experience in the most current sense by those who discover a sublime unemployment within themselves, without having to report to an employment agency. (ibid.: 22)

The subject of the reverie is unemployed, or, in Agamben’s terms, inoperative, insofar as it has disengaged itself from the ‘social fabric’ and its own identity as ‘woven’ into it. It is important to note that, just as in the constitution of the general will, the subject subtracts itself from their particular ‘everyday identity’, interest or desire. Similarly to Esposito’s interpretation, the universal and the singular appear to be symmetrical precisely because all particular content – that is, the ‘social fabric’ – has been bracketed off. However different their preferences, the solitary walker and the citizen of the republic leave the same thing behind. 56

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the community of solitary walkers In his reading, Sloterdijk focuses more on the different preferences, highlighting not merely the inoperativity of the subjects of the reverie, but also their indifference to the world from which they subtract themselves. Theirs is an ‘immaterial meditation’ that contemplates nothing but pure duration. It is not a retreat from the world into any esoteric or mystical sphere but the experience of their own existence that is no longer concerned with the world from which it has subtracted itself: The only people who could call themselves free would be those who succeeded in attending to themselves in such a way that the source of a feeling of existence began to flow inside them, with the timbre of a quiet euphoria that manifests an immaterial affirmation of the total situation before any articulated agreement with one or the other. The decisive aspect of these discoveries is the absence of any reference to achievements. The subject of the Fifth Walk is neither a cognitive subject nor a willed, entrepreneurial or political subject. It is not even an artistic subject. It has nothing to say, it has no opinion, it does not express itself, and it has no project. It is neither creative nor progressive, nor is it benevolent. Its new freedom is revealed in its ecstatic unusability for any purpose. Rousseau’s free human discovers that they are the most useless person in the world – and has no objections whatsoever. (ibid.: 23)

Once again, we encounter an intricate proximity between the singular and the universal in the experience of reverie. The euphoric sensation of the sweetness of existence that the subject perceives is, for Sloterdijk, not restricted to the subject’s ‘inner self’ but rather affirms the ‘total situation’ before any articulated agreement with anything particular. It is as if the subject of reverie has indeed succeeded in externalizing itself throughout the entire universe, albeit at the cost of losing its entire positive content. The solitary walker affirms existence as such, in general, without being able to or even wanting to affirm anything in particular. It has no particular project, does not express itself in a particular way and has no particular opinion on anything. Yet, this indifference to the particular does not entail that the subject is completely indifferent or devoid of all will. In fact, the subject of reverie does will existence in general, the very existence that in the reverie is indiscernible between the singular and the universal, the self and the ‘system of beings’. One enters the reverie in order to avoid worldly distractions and upsets and enjoy one’s existence in all its self-sufficiency, like God or, may we suggest, any other sovereign. Even when Rousseau’s solitary walks do end up focused on external objects, he engages with them in a very singular manner. A case in point is the discussion of his newfound passion for botany in the Seventh 57

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democratic biopolitics Walk. Rousseau explicitly contrasts his enjoyment of the ‘vegetable kingdom’ with any scientific or practical interest in it that can only distort one’s experience of nature (Rousseau 2004: 116). Rousseau contemplates nature in much the same manner as he contemplated his bare existence during his boat trips: [Botany] is the ideal study for the idle, unoccupied solitary. This ideal occupation has a charm which can only be felt when the passions are entirely at rest, but which is then enough to make our lives pleasant and happy; but as soon as our self-interest or vanity are brought into play and we are concerned to obtain positions or write books, as soon as we learn only in order to teach, and devote ourselves to botany merely for the sake of becoming authors or professors, all this sweet charm banishes, we see plants simply as the instruments of our passions, we take no real pleasure in studying them, we do not want to know but show that we know, and the woods become for us merely a public stage where we seek applause. (ibid.: 115–16)

In contrast, Rousseau’s interest in botany is not of a scientific or educational nature: I am as much of a botanist as anyone needs to be who only wants to study nature in order to discover ever new reasons for loving her. I do not seek to educate myself. It is too late for that. In any case, I have never known all this science to contribute to our happiness in life; my aim is to find a simple and pleasant pastime which I can enjoy without effort and which will distract me from my misfortunes. (ibid.: 115)

The contemplation of the kingdom of plants does not have any worldly goal, does not seek to cultivate any worldly identity (of a scientist, botanist, teacher and so on); on the contrary, it is preconditioned by one’s subtraction from the affairs of the world that enables a more intense enjoyment of one’s own existence (see Neidleman 2016: 45, fn. 12): ‘One has only to love pleasure to yield to such delightful sensations’ (Rousseau 1987: 109). Sloterdijk interprets Rousseau’s retreat into reverie as a revolt against the ‘tyranny of the real’ that resigned the subject to permanent stress. Indeed, both the lake trips and the forest walks are therapeutic exercises that help Rousseau detach himself from the world of misunderstanding and persecution: Deep in the forest shades it seems to me that I can live free, forgotten and undisturbed as if I no longer had any enemies, or as if the foliage of the woods could protect me from their attacks as it obliterates them from my

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the community of solitary walkers mind and in my folly I imagine that if I do not think of them, they will not think of me. The pleasure of going to some lonely spot in search of new plants is combined with that of escaping from my persecutors and when I reach places where there is no trace of men I breathe freely, as if I were in a refuge where their hate could no longer pursue me. (Rousseau 2004: 117)

Detaching oneself from reality permits Rousseau to experience relief from this stress: The subjectivity released while fleeing from pursuit from the real – the pure feeling of the real removed from all topics – reached, just this once, the pole of complete freedom from stress. Where there is no domineering topic, there is no concern and where there is no concern, there is no reality. (Sloterdijk 2016: 31)

However, things are somewhat more complicated. If Rousseau was simply seeking escape from reality, the freedom affirmed in the Reveries would be entirely apolitical, the diametrical opposite of the freedom of the sovereign people in The Social Contract. However, the ‘topics’ Rousseau flees from all pertain to particular aspects of existence but not to existence itself, the universality that is embraced rather than fled from. What Rousseau flees from is, then, not reality per se, but particular cares and concerns that he perceives as persecuting or domineering. We may recall that the wariness of oppression and violence arising from private and corporate interests characterizes The Social Contract as much as the Reveries and may well be the guiding thread throughout Rousseau’s work (cf. Althusser 2007: 120–1). Rousseau’s discussion of his efforts to attain inner peace in the face of public persecution in the Eighth Walk demonstrates this point quite clearly. Looking inward to find the source of his anger and dissatisfaction, he eventually locates it in selflove (amour propre), which, in contrast to the love of self (amour soi), loves not the self as such but the self as viewed by others and is therefore dependent on public opinion and recognition (Rousseau 2004: 129. See Cohen 2010: 101–4; Strong 2002: 54–9). While amour soi is directed at one’s self as a whole, at one’s very existence in an unqualified and undifferentiated sense, amour propre rather singles out and amplifies in the self some particular aspects that one expects to be approved by others, while at the same time repressing and concealing those that may encounter disapproval (Dent 2005: 39–41). Attaining peace of mind is thus only possible by returning from the perverse self-love guided by external factors, in which one’s identity is constituted by others, to the pure love of self, which is nothing other than the enjoyment of one’s existence: ‘It is only self-love that can make us constantly unhappy’ (Rousseau 2004: 130. 59

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democratic biopolitics See Cooper 1999: 172–81). When one’s identity begins to depend on the approval of others and this approval is not forthcoming, one is resigned to suffering and resentment. Rousseau recalls his unease in public settings, where self-love steps in whenever he feels hated or deceived by others, causing a ‘childish resentment, whose stupidity I see all too clearly without being able to suppress it’ (Rousseau 2004: 132). In such situations, even the solitary walks give the author no pleasure whatsoever, appearing ‘tedious and insipid’ (ibid.: 133). Far from enjoying the quiet happiness that I find there today, I took with me the turmoil of futile ideas which has preoccupied me in the salon; the memory of the company I had left followed me in my solitude, the fumes of self-love and the bustle of the world dimmed the freshness of the groves in my eyes and troubled my secluded peace. Only when I detached myself from the social passions and their dismal train did I find [Nature] once again in all her beauty. (ibid.: 133)

This discussion succinctly demonstrates the dangers of particularism. Our social or worldly existence, in which our identity is validated by others, turns the natural and blissful ‘love of self’ (amour soi) into pathological self-love, which is activated only in the presence of others in the mode of pride and vanity. As soon as self-love sets in and predominates, one is overcome by the desire to be recognized and valued in this particular identity and, should this recognition and value not follow, one surrenders to resentment, anger and hatred. It is easy to see that the extension of this logic to the society as a whole would lead to the diagnosis Rousseau already ventured in the Discourse on Inequality (1987: 60–4) and tried to remedy in both The Social Contract and the Reveries (cf. Cooper 1999: 186–9). While a relational identity is necessarily founded on some particular aspects of one’s worldly existence, one’s sheer sense of existence, the object of ‘love of self’, remains untainted by deceit, intrigue or malice around us and can serve as the foundation for the cultivation of both inner peace and popular sovereignty: ‘However men choose to regard me, they cannot change my essential being, and for their power and for all their secret plots, I shall continue, whatever they do, to be what I am in spite of them’ (Rousseau 2004: 130). Thus, only by subtracting himself from his social identity and the self-love arising from it, is Rousseau able to enjoy fully the reverie of his solitary walks: ‘The evil that men have done me does not affect me in the least. I laugh at all their scheming and enjoy my existence in spite of them’ (ibid.: 135). It would thus be a simplification to frame Rousseau’s revolt and the reaction to it in modern political thought as a conflict between 60

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the community of solitary walkers romanticism and realism, whereby the latter wishes to draw the subject back into reality and stress, redefining freedom in terms of responsibility, recognized necessity, self-fulfillment or any other positive concept that Rousseau ‘would have shaken his head at’ (Sloterdijk 2016: 44). Rousseau’s conflict is not with reality as such but with particular worldly identities, including his own. Sloterdijk’s reframing of his revolt in terms of an attack on reality as such ultimately permits him to include Rousseau himself among the realist persecutors of romantic freedom: It is impossible for us to repeat Rousseau’s own dissolution of the disharmony between subjective reverie and the demands of public life. The unnerving Swiss thinker famously suggested subsuming the freedom of the individual under a homogeneous collective will. In this way, real individual freedom was sacrificed for a fictitious freedom in group subjectivity. Rousseau should have retracted his doctrine of volonté générale in the light of his experience on Lake Biel. His failure to do so was disastrous for the modern world. (ibid.: 49)

With this accusation we are back to the proto-totalitarian interpretation of Rousseau that links the argument of The Social Contract to the sequences of state terror from the Jacobins to Gaddafi. While this reading is not entirely implausible, it is at the very least complicated by Sloterdijk’s own prior analysis of the reverie as the experience of freedom, and hence a political experience in some sense. Precisely as political, the experience of reverie cannot simply be opposed to the sovereignty of the people as ‘real individual freedom’ versus ‘fictitious freedom in group subjectivity’. As Tracy Strong has argued, ‘the Reveries seem to be written with precisely the image of the society of the Social Contract in mind’ (Strong 2002: 148). The fact that both works are so affirmative of freedom requires exploring their similarities further beyond the simple opposition of the individual and the collective.

The universal and the singular As we have seen, the constitution of the subject of reverie and the constitution of the general will follow the same logic of the subtraction from the particular, in the first case towards the singular and in the second case towards the universal. Subtraction is an important methodological tool in Rousseau’s thought more generally. His well-known account of the state of nature is produced entirely by the subtraction of all social content from the human being, which makes it possible to conceive of what the natural condition of humanity would have been 61

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democratic biopolitics (see Neidleman 2016: 20; Inston 2010b: 17–19; Strong 2002: 83–5; Cooper 1999: 37–65). Similarly, subtraction is essential to Rousseau’s epistemology, as his idea of truth is attained by subtracting from abstract metaphysical claims, received wisdom and the opinions of others: ‘accessing the truth is much more a matter of subtraction than of addition. Rather than add to the repository of human knowledge, Rousseau tried to uncover truths that have been obscured by the vast accumulation of human cogitation’ (Neidleman 2016: 66). Subtraction is also central to those contemporary experiences that, as it were, bring the human being closest to its natural condition: the retreat into reverie and the gathering into community (cf. Cooper 1999: 12–13). In the first case, one withdraws from the societal realm of identities and differences in order to enjoy the sweetness of one’s bare existence. In the second, one withdraws from the same realm together with others in order to manifest the existence of the community in general, without these identities and differences dividing it from within: ‘What makes the work of legislation trying is not so much what must be established as what must be destroyed’ (Rousseau 1987: 170). At first glance, the two directions are diametrically opposed, leading to the ‘bipolar’ reading of Rousseau as affirming at once (or in different texts) both solitude and community (cf. Neidleman 2016: 24–5). Yet, as Heidegger has famously argued with regard to the concept of being, ‘being is most universal, encountered in every being, and is therefore most common; it has lost every distinction, or never possessed any. At the same time, being is the most singular, whose uniqueness cannot be attained by any being whatever’ (Heidegger 1991a: 192). The alliance of the singular and the universal against the particular is thus neither incoherent nor paradoxical but fully warranted from an ontological perspective (cf. Cooper 2004). After all, what Rousseau experiences in the boat on Lake Biel is his own existence. What Rousseauan politics consists in is, as Badiou argued, the existence of the people. The godlike selfsufficiency experienced in the reverie is parallel to the self-sufficiency of the general will that is indivisible, inalienable and indestructible. For all their evident differences, the solitary walker and the sovereign people are constituted in the same manner and manifest themselves in the same way. Indeed, early on in his first Discourse, Rousseau argued that ‘the good man is an athlete who enjoys competing in the nude’, ‘contemptuous of those vile ornaments which would impair the use of his strength’ (Rousseau 1987: 4). The individual and the collective subject emerge in the act of subtraction from every discerning predicate that serves only to stimulate amour propre and instead manifest nothing but the power of their sheer existence.1 62

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the community of solitary walkers It is this sentiment of one’s own existence that constitutes the subject in Rousseau’s thought, be this subject individual or collective. What matters for Rousseau is neither solitude nor community in themselves but the possibility of ‘enhancing one’s existence’, which can be attained both in solitude and at the assembly of the people (Neidleman 2016: 25–6; cf. Cooper 2004: 105–6). Jason Neidleman interprets this notion of enhanced existence in terms of desire for communion, ‘to make oneself one with something beyond oneself’ (Neidleman 2016: 25). In the Reveries, Rousseau wishes to expand his existence to ‘include the whole universe’ (Rousseau 2004: 100), while Julie in Clarens experiences everything she sees as the ‘extension of her being’ (Rousseau cited in Neidleman 2016: 33). To recall Esposito’s reading, Rousseau’s subject perpetually oscillates between expansion and contraction, externalizing itself in the entire universe, which then is encapsulated in the existence of the individual. It both empties itself out into the world and makes this world its own, so that it is always its own existence that is extended, expanded or maximized. For Neidleman, such a communion may be sought with nature (in the hypothetical state of nature), with other people in society (the sovereign assembly) or with one’s own being (in reverie): what matters is the recovery of the sentiment of one’s existence in all these experiences. Existence precedes everything else in Rousseau’s system and reverie offers a medium by which social men and women can recuperate the sentiment of existence, which is the sentiment that allows us to access that part of our soul that is human being, God and nature all at once. In reverie there is no distinction between love of oneself, love of God and love of his creations – they all merge into one. Here we finally experience the pure sentiment of existence, so immediately present for natural man, but so foreign to us. (Neidleman 2016: 88)

From this perspective, the opposition between solitude and community is displaced as the two are merely different directions for the same quest for communion, which always involves a certain transcendence of the self (ibid.: 24–38): ‘Rousseau’s writings on republicanism, like his writings on reverie, enunciate the structural or formal preconditions for the re-emergence of communion’ (ibid.: 107). These conditions consist in the subtraction of the subject from every particular identity or determinant. After all, if, as Rousseau argued in the Dialogues, ‘our true self is not entirely within us’ (Rousseau 2012: 118), then it cannot be accessed through the identity predicates and determinants that define us, both as individuals and as collectives. Contrary to Sloterdijk, the individual and the community are therefore not in conflict for Rousseau: in fact, 63

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democratic biopolitics they both face the same threat from particular societal forces and partial associations that divert them from their communion with being into the social game of the struggle for recognition, stimulated by amour propre: ‘Mediation was for him the barrier to both individual liberty and collective identity. An unmediated, solidaristic community of equals was for Rousseau the only content in which individual liberty could flourish’ (Neidleman 2016: 127, emphasis original. See also Einspahr 2010; Trachtenberg 1993: 93–6, 98–104; Cooper 1999: 119–20; Derrida 1998: 141–63). For this reason, Neidleman argues that there is no contradiction between The Social Contract and the Reveries (as well as other works by Rousseau such as Emile and Julie), which all form a coherent series of attempts to recover one’s sentiment of existence (Neidleman 2016: 130). At this point we may encounter two objections. While it might be the case that the solitary walker and the sovereign body politic are constituted in the same manner, is it not evident that the parallel only goes so far? Firstly, while the solitary walker exhausts itself in its subtraction from its world and its worldly identity, the same subtraction is only the precondition of the constitution of the sovereign people. Secondly, while the solitary walker fully enjoys its freedom in subtracting itself from the world and its cares and concerns, the citizen–subject famously alienates himself with all his rights to the entire community. Let us deal with these objections in turn. Firstly, while it is evident that the body politic constituted by subtraction from the particular does not do so solely to engage in unproductive reverie, we should pause before opposing the solitary walker and the body politic in terms of passivity versus activity. To recall Badiou, Rousseau’s politics consists in the sheer existence of the people, not the management, administration or regulation of this existence, which are reserved for government, that problematic emanation whose heterogeneity and danger to the sovereign we have addressed in Chapter 1. While the sovereign people authorizes these activities of government, Rousseau repeatedly emphasizes that they remain distinct from and heterogeneous to the exercise of the general will, even when, as in a democracy, the sovereign and the prince happen to coincide. The content of the general will is ultimately exhausted in liberty and equality, ‘liberty because all particular dependence is that much force taken from the body of the state; equality, because liberty cannot subsist without it’ (Rousseau 1987: 170). It is certainly possible for certain governmental policies not to be in accordance with these principles and thereby conflict with the general will. Yet, no particular policy actually follows from these principles and the general will would presumably be content 64

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the community of solitary walkers with quite diverse policies as long as they do not come into conflict with freedom and equality. Just as the subject of the reverie subtracts itself from its place in the world to enjoy itself in its sheer being, the body politic does not exhaust itself in particular acts of government but maintains itself in existence in a similarly inoperative state, until its ‘reverie’ is disrupted by the governmental abuse of the general will or its own corruption that threatens the polity’s very being. Thus, despite apparent differences, Agamben’s inoperative community of ‘whatever being’ and the militant subject of Badiou’s truth politics become almost indiscernible: what makes the political subject militant is precisely its inoperativity, the distance it establishes between its existence as a political body and its particular identities and interests liable to the acts of government. From this perspective, we must qualify Rousseau’s famous statement about the opposition of liberty and repose. The people of Poland feel the heaviness of fatigue. They would like to combine the peace of despotism with the sweets of liberty. I fear that they may be seeking contradictory things. Repose and liberty seem incompatible to me, you must choose between them. (Rousseau 1953: 161)

While the peace of despotism is certainly incompatible with liberty, what about a different, non-despotic peace of reverie, in which alone the solitary walker experiences true freedom? We suggest that in this fragment Rousseau all too hurriedly identifies repose with despotism in order to advocate active struggle for liberty in the conditions of its absence, specifically in the Polish context. Yet, while it is certainly impossible to attain liberty in a state of repose, if only because one’s reverie might be disturbed by the despot, Rousseau’s liberty ends up practiced precisely as repose, the sheer manifestation of one’s existence as individual or collective. Thus, one need not choose between the repose of reverie and the sweets of liberty: the two are fully compatible but accessible only once despotism is out of the way. Secondly, while the language of alienation in The Social Contract certainly begs the question of the possibility of reconciling it with the freedom of the solitary walker, it is important to bear in mind what the individual with all its rights is being alienated to. To be alienated to a will whose entire content is freedom and equality is to be subtracted from any hierarchy or dependence to particular individuals, groups and interests. This is why it is so important to ensure that ‘the general will must be general in its object as well as its essence, that it must derive from all in order to be applied to all’ (Rousseau 1987: 157). When this will ‘tends towards any individual, determinate object’ (ibid.), the same 65

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democratic biopolitics alienation appears at once extremely oppressive and quite absurd, as the will directed at a manifestly particular object becomes imposed on the entire community. If the content of the general will were not restricted to the affirmation of universal equality and freedom, the proto-totalitarian reading of Rousseau would have been more than justified and so would Sloterdijk’s contrast between the solitary walker and the social contract. Yet, insofar as to alienate oneself to the general will is to subtract oneself from every relation to the particular, it is not that far from the subtraction undertaken or experienced by the solitary walker. While Rousseau does invoke particular features of culture, tradition or habit when discussing specific forms of government and even, as we have seen, makes the choice of the form of government dependent on the specific features of the country in question (size, climate, population and so on), the general will of the sovereign people can establish itself anywhere on this planet with exactly the same austere content of freedom and equality (see Neidleman 2016: 109–13). Of course, there does remain a problem in The Social Contract that finds no analogue in the Reveries: namely, the process of the establishment of the government. The subject of the reverie does not have to establish any government or engage in any particular mode of comportment during its reverie, though of course it also has to comport itself in particular ways once it returns to the world after the boat trips. In contrast, the general will must also and at all times maintain itself in relation to that which contradicts it at every step: that is, the particularistic activity of government, which the sovereign institutes as an act of general will. As we have seen, the relationship between sovereignty and government remains a problem that cannot be resolved or minimized through the doctrine of emanations. This is evident in Rousseau’s concern about the usurpation of sovereignty by government throughout The Social Contract: it is as if the emanations from the general will threatened at every moment to undermine or destroy the latter. The body politic can never fully yield to reverie since it must permanently keep watch over its own sovereign inoperativity that is at the risk of usurpation by particular forces and partial associations. We may thus conclude that The Social Contract and the Reveries do not stand opposed as a proto-totalitarian dystopia and a discourse on existential freedom, but rather form a bipolar structure, in which both the collective and the individual are constituted as sovereign subjects through the subtraction from all particular identities and attributes. Rather than exemplify an illegitimate transfer of freedom from the individual to the collective, the theory of sovereignty in The Social Contract ultimately seeks to resolve the same problem that preoccupies the solitary walker: the avoidance of domination, dependence or any external interference, which 66

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the community of solitary walkers can only distract and upset one’s enjoyment of one’s existence. Rousseau’s solution is to subject all government to a sovereign power defined in such a way that it would exclude domination or dependence by definition. Rather than subject the individual to a totalizing domination, this general will de-totalizes the social body by locating its sovereign authority in nothing other than the manifestation of the sheer existence of the people. Thus, while all particular acts of government will inevitably involve relations of dependence, hierarchy or exclusion, this government is itself subordinated to the sovereign instance, whose sole content is freedom and equality arising out of the sheer facticity of existence subtracted from every positive predicate, of all ‘sensual and earthly impressions’. In this manner, universality and singularity join forces against the tyranny of the partial and the particular that is associated with government. To recall Rousseau’s injunction in the Political Fragment, ‘make man social or leave him alone; if you divide him, you destroy him!’ (cited in Neidleman 2016: 24). While in the existing society man is divided by amour propre and the struggle for the recognition of others, in both the solitary reverie and the community of citizens he is no longer divided, having subtracted himself from all particular attributes that could have divided it: ‘we are united through our common alienation from the world’ (Froese 2011: 73). This is how we understand Rousseau’s claim in The Social Contract to outline ‘a form of association which defends and protects with all common forces the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before’ (Rousseau 1987: 148). The ambition of The Social Contract is not to force solitary walkers into a new community, in which they would abandon their solitude, but to establish something like a community of solitary walkers. Our interpretation of the Reveries accords with Jason Neidleman’s reading of this text as indicating Rousseau’s articulation of a cosmopolitan ethics. Of course, most readings of Rousseau emphasize his strong preference for communitarian patriotism against cosmopolitanism (see Klausen 2014; Cohen 2010). Pankaj Mishra has recently deployed the contrast between the cosmopolitan Voltaire and the communitarian Rousseau as the key political division of modernity, presenting Rousseau as the prophet of the current ‘age of anger’, the revolt of the resentful majorities left behind by the global forces of progress that promised universal freedom and equality (Mishra 2017: 77–93, 106–7). While Rousseau’s invectives against abstract cosmopolitanism are well known, Neidleman argues that they are pragmatic rather than principled. The problem with cosmopolitanism for Rousseau is its abstract nature, which makes it incapable of mobilizing passions in defense of the political order 67

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democratic biopolitics and only serves to undermine the passions that sustain particular communities. Communitarianism and patriotism are preferable because in practice they are more successful in cultivating support for the polity, such as Poland, and thus ensuring its survival against a powerful adversary, such as Russia. Neidleman demonstrates how, rather than function as a direct opposition, cosmopolitanism and communitarianism ultimately refer to the same thing in Rousseau: namely, the sentiments of fraternity and solidarity, and the overcoming of amour propre (Neidleman 2012: 81–2). Whether these fraternal sentiments are best cultivated on the national or the global scale is ultimately a pragmatic question. This means that there can also be a cosmopolitanism that would not be a merely hypocritical and abstract proclamation of universal fraternity but would be capable of actually generating positive affect for humanity as a whole. If the problem with the existing forms of cosmopolitanism is their abstract nature, then a ‘concrete’ cosmopolitanism, grounded in sentiment rather than rationality, should resolve this problem. It is here that the Reveries come in as Rousseau’s pathway to a genuine cosmopolitanism. By removing himself from society, Rousseau discovered that the barriers to a genuine love of humanity were all products of society. Although reverie does nothing to alter the sociopolitical reality of institutionalized inequality, it does present a spiritual or psychological alternative to it – one grounded in the universality of original goodness rather than the particularity of amour propre. (Neidleman 2012: 83. See also Cohen 2010: 16–20, 97–129)

For Neidleman, it is Rousseau’s assumption of the natural goodness of man that makes it possible to derive a cosmopolitan approach from the subtractive orientation of reverie. Once all particular identities, interests and desires are subtracted, all that is left is one’s essential sentiments that are pure and not yet contaminated by amour propre. Reverie frees these sentiments from the intellect, making them available as foundations for the development of fraternal sentiments that could be extended to humanity as a whole: ‘human beings, in freeing themselves of a concern for the opinion of others, also put themselves in a position to experience an authentic communion des cœurs’ (Neidleman 2012: 86). Subtraction from others in their particularity makes it possible to experience one’s belonging to a community that is at once universal (not defined and confined by any particular identity) and singular (since its content is existence itself, which is always one’s own). Reverie removes prejudice, status and amour propre from consciousness. It is a repudiation of politics that can ultimately function as a support for it – in

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the community of solitary walkers a democracy. Rousseauan reverie causes patterns of particular association and affiliation to evaporate and in that it contributes to what is perhaps the greatest service that affect can provide for democracy. Reverie loosens rigid patterns of exclusion, be they homo-fraternal and phallogocentric, or bourgeois, sectarian or aristocratic. (ibid.: 88–9)

Thus, rather than being opposed to the popular sovereignty described in The Social Contract, the experience of reverie is actually a precondition for a true sovereignty, which is attained ‘via the stripping away of identity rather than through its imposition’ (ibid.: 89). While the proto-totalitarian reading of Rousseau attributes to him the imposition of some particular content upon the society in general, the cosmopolitan Rousseau in Neidleman’s reading rather affirms the freeing of the general from the particular, which lets fraternal sentiments emerge and strengthen in the absence of any limits or lines of exclusion. Even if these sentiments ultimately coalesce in a particular community, be it Corsica or Poland, this community is no longer defined by anything particular, but only by the universal affirmation of existence within it: ‘Reverie returned Rousseau to himself, to his essence, which was for him the universal essence of all humankind’ (Neidleman 2016: 84). It is then possible to agree with Neidleman that the opposition of cosmopolitanism and communitarianism is ultimately displaced by Rousseau in favor of a more fundamental division between the generic and the particular, between the expansive fraternal sentiments and the sedimentation of particular identities, between the love of one’s existence and the love of one’s identity. This is why the freedom of the solitary walker is not expropriated but ensured by its alienation from its social identity and place in the world, which constitutes a community of those who share nothing but this alienation and their exposure in the facticity of their existence (cf. Neidleman 2016: 96–104). In other words, Rousseau ventures to prevent governmental despotism by bringing the universal and the singular together into a single figure of the generic, a being (individual or collective) that, having subtracted itself from every determinate predicate, appears solely in its being. Particular acts of government, which emanate from the generic, nonetheless remain entirely heterogeneous to it, precisely insofar as they are no longer restricted to the singular-universal manifestation of being itself, but address beings in their specificity. This is why, while the general will certainly authorizes government as an unavoidable practical necessity, it can never legitimize it in its own terms, there being no passage between the generic and the particular, which remain united only by their disjunction. 69

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democratic biopolitics

Rousseau and radical democracy Our reading of the Social Contract together with the Reveries permits us to offer a slight correction to Kevin Inston’s recent interpretation of Rousseau in terms of contemporary radical democratic theory (Inston 2009; Inston 2010a; Inston 2010b; Inston 2016). While Inston is certainly correct in opposing proto-totalitarian readings of Rousseau’s thought as essentialist, homogenizing and depoliticizing, his own interpretation of Rousseau as the prototype of the pluralist and agonistic theory of radical democracy (2010b: 3) imposes on Rousseau’s thought a very specific logic of hegemonic universality that distorts his own construction of the relation between the universal and the particular, sovereignty and government. For Inston, Rousseau’s oft-criticized universalism is not strictly opposed to the particular but rather exists on its basis: ‘The general will does not instate an oppressive form of unity that excludes difference and questioning but actually depends on them for its formation and constant renewal’ (ibid.: 3). As a result, ‘the particular and the universal share a tense coexistence where neither term can exist without the other’ (ibid.: 11). And yet, it is this tension alone that, for Inston, makes democracy possible. Rousseau’s observations about democracy as a form of government that is suitable only for a people of gods are thus reinterpreted in the positive key. A perfect democracy is not merely impossible but would also be undesirable even if it were possible, since it would efface the tensions and antagonisms in the society that it was meant to address in the first place. If the people actually did become gods, there would presumably be no more political contestation and democracy would be rendered meaningless at the very moment that it became possible. ‘True democracy’, where the sovereign and the government, the universal and the particular, perfectly coincide, would therefore be self-cancelling, if it were possible – it would eliminate the gap in the social where political debate and change can occur. In other words, it would paradoxically eliminate democracy itself. (Inston 2009: 577)

For Inston, the very fact that democratic government fails repeatedly keeps open the space of contestation in the society that would otherwise be eliminated and thus ensures that democracy remains possible (Inston 2010b: 163–5). The government corresponds to the executive power of the state applying the laws, sanctioned by the popular sovereign, to specific contexts. The necessity of the government stems from the irreducible but not incommensurable character of the particular and the general. If the particular and the general could be fully reconciled, the question of how they should be governed would

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the community of solitary walkers become irrelevant. The mediatory role played by the government seeks both at once to bring the particular and the general together to ensure obedience to the laws and the equal enjoyment of rights by all members and also to maintain a degree of distinction between them so as to prevent a situation in which the particular would lose all freedom to make decisions without interference from the dominant social force. (Inston 2009: 577)

In line with Laclau’s theory of hegemony (Laclau 2005: 107–65), Inston approaches the universal as non-existent, an empty category that is filled with particular content in the hegemonic operation. For this reason, the problem that we have identified in Rousseau – that is, the subtraction of the generic from the particular in the constitution of both the individual and the collective subject – simply does not arise in his interpretation. Since he envisions the universal as always already hegemonic, a particularity claiming for itself the universality that it can never really attain (Inston 2010b: 126–8), the subtractive logic that we have reconstituted in Rousseau is little more than a deluded attempt to access the inaccessible. Instead, politics should proceed through the perpetual reactivation of the tension between the universal and the particular, whereby governmental acts emanate from the sovereign people without abolishing the distance between the two. This move is certainly present in Rousseau, albeit in an inverted form. While the logic of hegemony focuses on the ascent from the particular to the (quasi-)universal, Rousseau focuses on the reverse move of the conversion of (universal) sovereignty into (particular) government, in which the people becomes the magistrate. Yet, as we have seen, for Rousseau this move is fraught with dangers, since the particularization of the universal risks the expropriation of the general will by private or corporate interests that leads to the corruption and dissolution of the polity. These dangers are all but invisible in Inston’s interpretation, whose rejection of any claims to ‘pure’ universalism makes it difficult to see what Rousseau’s problem is: if hegemony is all there is in political life, then why worry about protecting the general will from the particular acts that constituted it in the first place? The key passage in The Social Contract that makes Inston’s hegemonic interpretation problematic is Rousseau’s insistence that the general will must be general both in object and in essence, that it must derive from all to be applied to all (Rousseau 1987: 157). Due to his points of departure in Laclau’s theory of hegemonic universality, Inston rejects the very existence of the universality ‘in object’, that arises ‘from all’ and is not merely applied to all. Yet, for Rousseau, such a universality clearly exists, whenever the sovereign people assembles and manifests itself and whenever anyone at all is overcome by reverie during a walk in the forest. The universal is not an 71

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democratic biopolitics empty category filled with particular content but a real existential condition attained by the subtraction from such content. It is a construct, to be sure, but one with a real and immediate existence that, moreover, is valorized by Rousseau at both individual and collective levels against ‘partial associations’ and all other forms of particularist influence. It is this subtraction that gives real existence to freedom and equality, which for Rousseau are not empty signifiers deployed in the struggle for hegemony, but conditions of existence attainable for both the individual and the people as a whole. The persistent struggle of particular forces and partial associations to occupy the locus of the universal temporarily appears entirely redundant in these moments, when universality reveals itself immediately and directly. Whenever the people assembles as a sovereign body, the authority of the government is suspended and ‘the person of the humblest citizen is as sacred and inviolable as that of the first magistrate’ (ibid.: 197). This is why it makes perfect sense for Rousseau to envision politics as a defense of this universality against all attempts at its capture by hegemonic particular contents. In contrast, for Laclau and Inston, there is no sense in opposing every attempt at the universalization of the particular, especially as long as it remains partial, tentative, incomplete, retaining the openness that enables its contestation and eventual replacement by another, similarly hegemonic universality. These contrasting conceptions of the universal lead to the divergence of the two theories on the question of difference. Inston correctly states that Rousseau’s universalism is not opposed to difference, as the protototalitarian reading would suggest: A multiplicity of differences grants the numerous interest groups relative equality, for the distinctions between them become more frequent and smaller, and so decreasing the likelihood of one group trying to suppress the others. The preservation of difference, or, more precisely, the respect for difference as fundamental to social relations, thus proves central to Rousseau’s political theory. Rousseau only opposes particular identities when the latter seek to achieve supremacy over all the others. (Inston 2009: 565)

While Rousseau does not oppose difference as such, what he does oppose is the ascent to supremacy of one particular identity over others, which is precisely the definition of hegemony in radical–democratic theory. For Inston, hegemony is the one and only operation that can produce a quasiuniversal that remains incomplete and hence contestable, but impossible to oppose as such, since it forms the very substance of politics, particularly democratic politics. In contrast, Rousseau is highly wary of the existence of a small number of articulated and aggregated particular identities, one of which would be capable of dominating others. In contrast, a myriad 72

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the community of solitary walkers of differences ultimately attributable to singular individuals makes such domination highly unlikely and instead enables the constitution of the general will, whereby these numerous particular identities are brought together in the general will by the process of canceling out whatever in them opposes each other (Rousseau 1987: 156). Rousseau’s affirmation of the pluralization or multiplication of differences arises out of his ambition, however naïve or utopian, to make hegemonic articulation impossible and thereby protect the universal from the particular. From this perspective, we may take issue with Inston’s (2016) criticism of Jean-Luc Nancy’s reading of Rousseau in Inoperative Community and other texts, in which Nancy approaches Rousseau as one of the first to conceive of community as the always already lost state of immediacy, transparency, self-identity, which Nancy defines in terms of immanence. In contrast, Inston follows his radical–democratic interpretation of Rousseau to argue that Rousseau’s own work anticipates many of the themes that Nancy himself raises in his theory of community (1991, 2000): the impossibility of the closure of community into self-immanence due to the perpetual perfectibility of mankind, the permanent contestation of the legitimacy of the community due to its openness to the outside and so on. Inston suggests that Rousseau even goes one important step further than Nancy in complementing the ontological reflection on community by the more explicitly political account of the existence of community, the risks it faces and the responsibilities it must assume. While Nancy is apparently content to rethink community ontologically in terms of the sharing of nothing but difference itself, Inston’s Rousseau specifies this difference in terms of political antagonism: ‘The harmonious sharing of differences would suppress community just as much as complete identity would’ (Inston 2016: 196). If our reading of the common generic basis of the general will and the reverie of the solitary walker is at all correct, the affinity between Nancy and Rousseau is even stronger that Inston would like to argue. A generic community is constituted by the subtraction from any possible essence and any possible immanentism. While, as we shall discuss in more detail in Chapter 4, Nancy uses Rousseau as a helpful if somewhat caricaturized contrast for his own rethinking of democracy, Rousseau’s critique of particularism is not that distant in its intention from Nancy’s own attempt to render both community and democracy inoperative and suspend them from the production of any essence. Rousseau’s solution is to make this very essence unworkable and to elevate the inoperativity of reverie to the status of generic essence of both individual and collectivity. Yet, this is where our reading diverges from Inston’s. His claim about the advantage of Rousseau’s radical–democratic reading over Nancy’s 73

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democratic biopolitics ‘philosophical’ and allegedly depoliticized reading reintroduces particularistic differences into the concept of the general will, which contradicts his earlier argument about the similarity of Rousseau’s and Nancy’s accounts of community. The latter statement can hold true only if the former is rejected: Rousseau’s community is similar to Nancy’s only if it is envisioned as radically inoperative, wholly contained in the manifestation of its generic existence, and not as a series of hegemonic articulations of particular contents into quasi-universals. If the general will were indeed constituted by hegemonic articulation, then it would have positive content beyond liberty and equality, and would then, in Nancy’s terms, be at the risk of closure into self-immanence. As we have discussed above, the moment the content of the general will goes beyond the affirmation of freedom and equality, the proto-totalitarian reading of Rousseau begins to acquire credibility. It is possible to understand how one can be ‘forced to be free’ (and equal) without a fatal contradiction, but not how one can be forced to be or do anything else while still remaining free and equal. This is why any ‘work’ of community, even if this is the perpetually contested work of hegemonic articulation, exposes it to the risks that Nancy identified in The Inoperative Community. In our view, Rousseau’s theory can avoid these risks, but only when remaining faithful to a strict limitation of the content of the general to the generic, as in the Social Contract. Even in this case, however, the problem is resolved only at the level of the general will and the popular sovereign, and not at the level of the prince and government, where the generic gives way to particular emanations that threaten its very genericity. Thus, in his other texts, such as The Government of Poland, which Inston discusses in his critique of Nancy, this limitation is more difficult to trace, as they are preoccupied less with outlining a general theory of sovereignty than with describing a particular form of government in a particular spatiotemporal context. This form of government may, as Inston argues, be more democratic and less totalitarian than often thought, but since it is no longer a matter of the constitution of community as such, these texts can hardly be comparable with Nancy’s general theory of community and hence have less relevance for staging a hypothetical ‘debate’ between Nancy and Rousseau on community and immanence. This does not mean that Nancy’s reading of community is somehow more philosophical and less political than Rousseau’s. While Nancy’s earlier work may have been ambiguous about the political status of his account of community (see Nancy 2007b; Nancy 1992), in later work he quite clearly separated his communitarian ontology of being-with from democratic politics, which protects this community without being 74

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the community of solitary walkers reducible to it (Nancy 2010; Nancy 2011). While we shall discuss this politics in more detail in Chapter 4, at this point we shall only note its similarity to Inston’s radical–democratic vision in the insistence on openness, non-totalization and pluralism, though we must emphasize that Nancy is rather less keen on antagonism and contestation, which is so central to Inston’s vision of radical democracy. Since his vision of pluralism highlights the radical incommensurability of differences in society, these differences need not necessarily cause tensions and oppositions, and the contest between them might in fact be meaningless. While Inston’s interpretation of Rousseauism approaches politics as a clash between particular differences for the interpretation of the meaning of the general, Nancy rather approaches democratic politics in terms of protecting, guarding, maintaining the general as the incommensurable. It is a matter of neither passivity nor depoliticization: such a politics could instead consist in active interventions, upsetting hierarchies, overcoming exclusions and so on. Where Nancy differs from Inston (and the radical–democratic theory of hegemony more generally) is with regard to the relation between the general and the plurality of incommensurable differences. For Nancy, democratic politics is not about the clash of differences; it is rather what prevents these differences from clashing, so that all of them can come into presence and manifest themselves (2010: 17–18; 2011: 70–2). There is little point in these differences clashing because their incommensurability might even exclude the existence of anything common for them to clash about. The general will of Nancy’s politics thus consists in the affirmation of incommensurability as such, from which, as we shall see below, freedom and equality may actually be inferred. For Inston, these differences are never so incommensurable as to preclude their clash: they are different takes on the same thing (that is, the content of the general), and it is in the clash itself that politics consists. As long as this clash persists or at least remains possible, the self-immanence of society is excluded and radical democracy continues to exist. Which of the two is closer to Rousseau’s position? At least in The Social Contract, Rousseau is quite clear about the content of the general will, which is restricted to freedom and equality, so there is really no need to clash about it, even though there is probably still room for disagreement regarding the interpretation of these two principles. Indeed, for Rousseau, any clash to determine the general will otherwise – that is, in more substantive, specific or particular terms – would exemplify nothing less than the attempt of at least one party to the conflict to appropriate the general will for itself, installing its particular interest in the place of the general. Such a clash would be furthest away from 75

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democratic biopolitics politics as the manifestation of the existence of the people. It would rather mark an illegitimate attempt to divert the people from the general to the particular, which would entail its dissolution and ruin. Whenever there is a clash about the general will, the general will is in trouble and must be defended. In the proto-totalitarian reading of Rousseau, this would be a defense of the total against every expression of difference. In contrast, in the interpretation we are developing here, this would be precisely a defense of the generic existence as a singular universal against the challenge from particularistic forces that threaten to contaminate and dissolve it. Inston defends Rousseau from the proto-totalitarian reading by attributing to him Derrida’s famous mode of argumentation, according to which the conditions of possibility of a phenomenon or event are at the same time the conditions of the impossibility of its completeness or closure. In his late work, Derrida discussed this logic in terms of auto-immunity: whatever makes our existence possible also threatens it, and, conversely, what we find threatening ends up essential to our very being (Derrida 2004; see Inston 2016: 190). If Rousseau is read as reasoning in the same way, then it is evidently impossible to read him in a proto-totalitarian manner, since every aspiration towards totality, closure or self-immanence is not merely impossible but actually undesirable even if it were possible. Exposure to the other may threaten but also sustains the very existence of a community, while its closure into self-immanence resigns it to decay and demise. It is thus impossible to desire totality, closure or fusion, without at the same time desiring the death of the very community that one apparently affirms – Nancy’s key point in The Inoperative Community (1991: 31–5). Insofar as Rousseau affirms community, he cannot, in this logic, will its closure as this would undermine its very existence. Yet, this is true only if, as Nancy does, we read totalitarianism precisely as this affirmation of death as the very essence of community. The totalitarian ambition is undesirable, only if death is posited as undesirable almost by definition, which is a somewhat simplistic gesture given the totalitarian catastrophes of the twentieth century. While totalitarianism can certainly be dismissed as irrational, this irrationality is not sufficient to render it non-existent. Yet, even if the ‘auto-immunitary’ reading of Rousseau is accepted, it is valid only as long as the binary oppositional structure that Derridean deconstruction targets remains in place. It only makes sense to argue for the auto-immune relationship between the universal and the particular (or self and other, identity and difference, society and individual, and so on), if the former is viewed as, firstly, distinct from and, secondly, superior to the latter. However, in our interpretation of The Social Contract and the Reveries, 76

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the community of solitary walkers this oppositional structure is no longer operative: the universal is no longer opposed to the singular but consists entirely in the exposure of singularities in their sheer existence. The self no longer depends on the exposure to the other that might be threatening to it: subtracted from their particular identities, the self and the other form a community of singularities whose entire content is freedom and equality. In our view, Rousseau does not merely resign himself to the impossibility of universality or community, but rather rethinks them in the manner that goes beyond the idea of auto-immunity. It is not merely that the universal remains haunted by the particular or that community must remain exposed to difference; instead, singularity and difference become the sole content of the universal and the common. The universal is never immune from the singular because it is nothing but singular existences in common. This is why, while Inston is entirely correct in rejecting the protototalitarian interpretation of Rousseau, his alternative radical–democratic interpretation ends up somewhat underwhelming. Its radicalism comes down to the paradoxical insistence on the limits to any radical transformation of the idea of politics itself. All politics follows the same script of the perpetual contestation between particular forces, identities and interests in a pluralistic realm, in which every universal is a transient effect of hegemonic articulation, which, in order not to collapse into despotism, must be ceaselessly contested. What this approach leaves foreclosed is the truly radical and truly democratic possibility of political content that would not simply be universal in the sense of applied ‘to all’ for whatever contingent reason, but that would actually arise ‘from all’ without any particular content added to it. As we have shown, it is at least possible to reconstitute such an approach in Rousseau’s Social Contract, even if this remains a partial interpretation that other texts, especially those dealing with concrete polities of his lifetime, might not fully support.

Rousseau’s ambivalent legacy The preceding discussion demonstrates that the relation between sovereignty and government is both central to Rousseau’s political thought and perhaps its most problematic aspect. While Rousseau seeks to subordinate governmental acts to the sovereignty of the general will, this subordination remains tenuous and insecure due to the fundamental heterogeneity between the two dimensions. As a result, governmental acts perpetually endanger the freedom and equality of both the individual and the collective, the solitary walker and the body politic. Insofar as the scope and intensity of governmental practices have grown immensely since Rousseau’s time, this problem has only become ever more acute. 77

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democratic biopolitics The problematic of biopolitics, whether understood narrowly or broadly, pertains precisely to the proliferation of governmental practices, which are by definition particularistic and hence always at the risk of conflicting with the general will that authorizes them. The widespread perception of the eclipse of democracy by biopolitics, with which we began this book, is now understandable from within the Rousseauan tradition of political theory that the authors in the theory of biopolitics share, either explicitly (Badiou) or implicitly (Agamben, Esposito). Badiou’s invectives against the contemporary ‘democratic materialism’, according to which there are only bodies and languages, individuals and communities (Badiou 2009: 1–7), makes sense solely from the perspective of the generic, which asserts the existence of universals beyond these particular entities. Agamben’s conclusions about the government and the economy’s domination of a popular sovereignty ‘emptied of all meaning’ is similarly understandable from within the perspective that presupposes that popular sovereignty must have a meaning beyond the particular rationalities of government. Esposito’s contrast between democracy as requiring abstract and homogeneous subjects and biopolitics as governing concrete and particular objects presupposes that the former group can actually exist as sovereign without being transformed into the latter group. The universal emerges by subtraction from the particular and elevates itself as sovereign, while subordinating the particular to itself as its own emanation. While Rousseau’s warnings about the tyrannical potential of particularistic government retain their timeliness to this day, it is important to note that it is not even government specifically that is at fault in Rousseau’s scheme, but particularism in general. Although Rousseau’s preference for the reveries that subtract him from his world of petty rivalries and persecutions is evident, he is also clearly aware of the opposite tendency to cultivate, rather than subtract oneself from, one’s particular attributes, identities or interests as a matter of amour propre. It is not government that prohibits us from engaging in solitary walks and dreamy boat trips, in which we may enjoy the singular universal of our sheer existence. Similarly, no government could possibly withstand the universal affirmation of freedom and equality by all the subjects in the state, when they assemble to manifest their sovereignty as a people. Nonetheless, we continue to cultivate our particular forms of life to the detriment of experiencing our own generic essence either individually or collectively. It is not merely that we are led astray by particular governmental practices that divert us from the experience of our freedom and equality but that we lead ourselves astray by yielding to our particular interests and desires, which produce nothing but division and inequality 78

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the community of solitary walkers (Rousseau 1987: 69–70). As Rousseau remarks in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, even without government involvement, the inequality of prestige and authority becomes inevitable among private individuals as soon as they are united in one single society and are forced to make comparisons among themselves, and to take into account the differences they discover in the continual use they have to make of one another. (Rousseau 1987: 77–8)

The particularism that produces inequality and conflict precedes the institution of the government, which itself is no more than a symptom of the more general problem of the decline of the generic in favor of the partial, particular and private. A Rousseauan politics would therefore necessarily combine resistance to despotism with a cultivation of an existential disposition that would be wary of particularism in all its forms. Instead, it would affirm that in the human condition that characterizes the solitary walker and the general will alike: that is, the generic being that is ipso facto free and equal, insofar as it is subtracted from all relations of dependence or hierarchy.2 And yet, this is where the Rousseauan disposition encounters its limits. Having consistently subtracted every particular predicate from both individual and collective existence, Rousseau ends up with the notion of the subject that is only authentically itself as long as it is wholly exhausted in the manifestation and enjoyment of its existence. The more this subject engages with the world, including the resistance to its partial and particularistic forces, the greater the risk of particularism creeping in and perverting the universal. Agamben’s insistence on inoperativity as the necessary feature of any new politics or the ‘coming community’ is a case in point. To resist and overcome the apparatuses of power successfully, in which sovereign and biopolitical logics are entirely indistinct, it is not enough for the subject to opt for the paradigmatically sovereign move of the institution of a new polity in the act of general will. The constituent power of the new sovereign remains inseparable from the constituted power of government that appears to emanate from it, despite its best intentions: Politics has suffered a lasting eclipse because it has been contaminated by law, seeing itself, at best, as constituent power (that is, violence that makes law), when it is not reduced to merely the power to negotiate with the law. The only truly political action, however, is that which severs the nexus between violence and law. (Agamben 2005a: 88)

This is why, in the final volume of his Homo Sacer series, Agamben develops an alternative concept of destituent power, a power that unworks itself 79

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democratic biopolitics in every constitution and renders itself inoperative in its every operation. Agamben’s intention is to formulate something like a concept of sovereignty that would be able to hold off its own emanations, resist its own exhaustion in the constituted orders of particularistic government, law, economy or police. Of course, such a concept can be formulated only by dissociating sovereignty from constitution altogether or subjecting its every constitutive effort to an immediate destitution (Agamben 2016: 263–79). While is it easy to criticize Agamben’s emphasis on inoperativity as resigning us to passivity, what his critics have failed to see is that in the radical–democratic tradition from Rousseau onwards the only way to be consistently radical is to be entirely inoperative. Let us consider a few other examples. For all its apparent activism and militancy, Badiou’s politics of truth must perpetually guard itself against slipping into the truthless domains of bodies and languages, individuals and communities, in which its generic orientation would be corrupted. From this perspective, the safest way to ensure its genericity is to refrain from all activity in these domains – a principled boycott that appears to be Badiou’s personal response to the ‘capitaloparliamentarism’ he despises (2008: 43–70). The same politics of withdrawal has also characterized other militant political thinkers, from Slavoj Žižek’s ‘Bartleby-politics’ (2006: 342–3, 371) to Hardt and Negri’s discourse of the exodus of the multitude from Empire (2000, 2004). Going beyond avowedly revolutionary political thought, the same inoperative orientation may be observed in the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy, for whom the greatest danger for any subject, collective or individual, is putting itself to work for the realization of its own essence. Starting from his seminal Inoperative Community (1991) to the most recent Disavowed Community (2016b: 71), Nancy has resisted every conception of politics as the realization of myth through the work of (self-)sacrifice and instead posited community as wholly contained in its own unworking. Both the advantages and the limits of Rousseauan inoperativity are demonstrated in the work of Jacques Rancière, who deploys it as a fundamental principle of both politics and aesthetics. Equality, which, similarly to Badiou, is the sole content of Rancière’s politics, is not something that can be translated into a maxim of government, let alone become a feature of some social order: [Equality] turns into its opposite the moment it aspires to a place in the social or state organization. The two processes must remain absolutely alien to each other, constituting two radically different communities even if composed of the same individuals, the community of equal minds and that of social bodies lumped together by the fiction of inequality. (Rancière 1999: 34–5)

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the community of solitary walkers Against reformist or revolutionary aspirations for transforming society, Rancière declares that ‘there is no such thing as a possible society. There is only the society that exists’ (Rancière 1991: 81). Equality is a practice that can never yield stable effects that would coalesce into a new social order: ‘anybody can be emancipated and emancipate other persons so that the whole of mankind be made of emancipated individuals. But a society can never be emancipated’ (Rancière 2010a: 169). Thus, a solitary walker can emancipate itself in reverie and there can probably even exist a society composed entirely of solitary walkers, which was perhaps Rousseau’s intention in The Social Contract. But there can never be an emancipatory form of government, even if this government is a democracy, in which the sovereign and the prince coincide entirely. In a somewhat uncanny manner, the democratic prince that emanates from the general will must inevitably become the dark double of the latter, the governmental Mr Hyde to the sovereign Dr Jekyll. Inoperativity is also central to Rancière’s reconstitution of the ‘aesthetic regime’ in arts during the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century, which was made possible by the break with every hierarchical order regulating representation, which paved the way for the radical equality of the objects of art and the radical freedom of its subjects. The aesthetic regime finally made possible the community of the free and the equal, but only on the condition that this community no longer took on the task of constructing a new society. Freedom and equality were no longer conceived as determinate goals of action but as the effects of suspending all end-oriented action in favor of free play. [The] aesthetic paradigm was constructed against the representative order, which defined discourse as a body with well-articulated parts, the poem as a plot and a plot as an order of actions. The aesthetic revolution developed as an unending break with the hierarchical model of the body, the story, and action. The free people, says Schiller, is the people that plays, the people embodied in this passivity that suspends the very opposition between active and passive; the little Sevillian beggars are the embodiment of the ideal, says Hegel, because they do nothing; the novel dethroned drama as the exemplary art of speech, bearing witness to the capacity of men and women without quality to feel all kinds of ideal aspirations and sensual frenzies. But it did so at the cost of ruining the model of the story with causes and effects and of action with means and ends. The aesthetic paradigm of the new community, of men free and equal in their sensible life itself tends to cut this community off from all the paths that are normally used to reach a goal. (Rancière 2013: xiv–xv)

In both aesthetics and politics, freedom and equality are not goals to be attained through the governmental transformation of the society but 81

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democratic biopolitics rather existential conditions available to subjects by means of subtraction from any such transformation. The subject of freedom and equality attains its sovereign presence at the very moment it renounces every quest for its attainment as a matter of a transformative project. This is why Rancière’s own inquiry into the history of French emancipatory politics in Proletarian Nights (2012) proceeds through a painstaking investigation of the workers’ diaries, letters, newspapers and poetry in nineteenth-century France and not the exegesis of Marxism and other revolutionary teachings. Rancière’s Proletarian Nights offers a nineteenth-century version of Rousseau’s Reveries – utopian visions of emancipation from labor, as opposed to the emancipation of labor from the wrong economic system through the construction of the right one. The scientific Marxist revolution certainly wanted to put an end to the workers’ reveries, along with utopian programmes. But by opposing them to the effects of real social development, it kept subordinating the end and means of action to the movement of life, at the risk of discovering that this movement does not want anything and does not allow any strategy to lay claim to it. (2013: xvi)

Rancière is entirely correct in highlighting the irreducible heterogeneity between the reverie as the state of actual emancipation and the projects of mobilization and subjection for the purposes of future emancipation. Yet, the very insistence on such heterogeneity does not exactly fill him with optimism. After all, the ‘scientific Marxist revolution’ easily succeeded in pushing aside and marginalizing the workers’ revolutionary dreams, mobilizing them for work and struggle, even as its own record in emancipation remained quite dismal (see Prozorov 2016). By the same token, the emancipatory education of Joseph Jacotot, which proceeded from the assumption of the equality of intelligences to teach pupils what one did not even know oneself, was quickly forgotten as progressive education reformers set themselves the task of emancipating society as a whole, attaining little more than the stultification of individuals (Rancière 1991). Rancière’s studies are, then, chronicles of noble failures of Rousseauan subjects, who ventured to attain freedom and equality by subtracting from their worlds, only for the worlds in question to ignore their reveries at best and at worst to give them a rude awakening. This quick overview should suffice to demonstrate how influential Rousseau’s thought has been on diverse trends in continental political thought, which in their own ways have kept reproducing (even when trying to resolve) his fundamental aporia of sovereignty and government. One can be truly sovereign only by reclaiming one’s generic essence outside the apparatuses of government. Yet, this means that the only activity that 82

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the community of solitary walkers is legitimate in this scheme is precisely the passage outside, the subtractive move that may take the form of a humble refusal, a grand exodus or a general strike, but must not go further than that, if it is to avoid its conversion into a new form of order at the very moment of the subtraction from the old one. All the militant activism inspired by the Rousseauan paradigm is cultivated precisely for this one step of subtraction or disengagement, which would allow the manifestation of popular sovereignty in its sheer existence. It is clear that this disposition cannot but view itself as wholly heterogeneous and oppositional to the expansion and intensification of government, and especially biopolitical government that seeks to manage the existence of the people as an object, often reduced to its vital processes. What was the very site of freedom in Rousseau and his followers turns into the prime site of subjection. Where the solitary walker could enjoy the sweetness of its existence subtracted from worldly cares and concerns, it is now this existence itself that is at the risk of being subjected to particular governmental rationalities. This is the first pole of domination by the particular that we have identified in Rousseau. Yet, there is also the second pole of the temptation of the particular, in which our existence is at every moment tempted to give itself a particular form, to suspend its reverie and engage in the cultivation of a specific form of life, whatever this might be: entrepreneurship, dance, yoga, gardening, science, karate, poetry and so on. With these particular forms of life come particular identities and interests that wrest the subject away from its generic existence as individual or part of the body politic. In Rousseau’s scheme these particular forces, however innocent they might appear, may ultimately corrupt the general will by diverting the citizen from the sovereign people of which it is part. The willful dispersion of our existence into a plurality of particular forms of life is thus unwittingly in collusion with the governmental domination that operates through these very forms. In this manner, biopolitical government threatens popular sovereignty by disturbing our reverie and wresting us away from the inoperative community of the general will.

Democracy as the experience of the generic This is the Rousseauan legacy that continues to animate contemporary discussions about the conflict between democracy and biopolitics. It bears repeating that, in Rousseau’s own terminology, such a conflict does not really take place since he viewed democracy strictly as a form of government and not of popular sovereignty. There could be no contradiction between biopolitics and democracy for Rousseau because 83

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democratic biopolitics as a form of government democracy is already particularistic, just as biopolitical governance is. In strict Rousseauan terms, democracy and biopolitics would both stand opposed to sovereign power from which they emanate. On the one hand, in democratic government the people becomes the prince and therefore can deal with particular matters in a wholly legitimate way, since this is what all government is supposed to do. And yet, since the very same people also compose the sovereign, which is to be preoccupied solely with the general will, their exercise of governmental powers threatens at every moment to corrupt them as legislators. As Rousseau notes, this is much worse than the governmental abuse of laws, which in Rousseau’s scheme happens almost by definition (1987: 179). While particularism can never be adequate to the universality of the general will, what is more damaging than this ever-present gap is its disappearance through the corruption of the general will by the particular, which is all the more possible if the very same people is both sovereign and prince at all times. This is why Rousseau is so wary of democracy as a form of government: it is especially harmful to the sovereignty of the people, which we today tend to think of as the very definition of democracy. Yet, this merely shows the fundamental confusion of modern political thought between politics and government: it has managed to elevate to a fundamental political ideal what used to be only a specific arrangement of governmental practices (cf. Vatter 2014: 1). Nonetheless, to avoid even greater confusion, in the remainder of this book we shall use the term ‘democracy’ in the modern sense, intending by it what Rousseau meant by popular sovereignty. In other words, the tension between sovereignty and government in Rousseau will be reconstructed in terms of democratic politics (of popular sovereignty) versus biopolitical government. We have seen how the Rousseauan account of the relation between sovereignty and government deprives the subjects of popular sovereignty of any active means in the confrontation with the particularistic rationalities of government: all that the sovereign can do is suspend governmental authority by assembling and manifesting its own existence. To do anything more would amount to setting up a government once again, changing one’s role from sovereign to prince and thereby reproducing the original problem. Yet, there is another weakness that the critique of biopolitics inherits from Rousseau: namely, the wariness, suspicion and disdain for particular forms of life themselves, which, as we have seen, arise from amour propre and do little more than cause division and inequality. If we give the name ‘civil society’ to the space of the coexistence of a plurality of particular forms of life, then Rousseau’s entire project may be summed up as the critique of civil society in the name of 84

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the community of solitary walkers at once individual and collective liberty, individual and collective sovereignty, the singular and the universal, both understood in generic terms. From this perspective, Rousseau’s influence may be observed in theorists as diverse (and indeed opposed!) as Arendt and Badiou, both of whom seek to isolate and purify politics from particularistic elements that can only contaminate and pervert it. Arendt’s separation of political praxis from labor (ergon) and work (poiesis) isolates the mode of being of popular sovereignty that is determined by neither cause nor end and is therefore wholly self-sufficient and self-contained, having no product aside from itself (Arendt 1998 [1958]). The political subject is neither determined by particular interests nor oriented towards a particular goal but manifests its own existence in its very praxis. The inversion of the hierarchy of praxis–work–labor from the nineteenth century onwards has led to the contamination of politics by the plurality of governmental or managerial concerns that destroyed its sovereign self-sufficiency. While he is otherwise critical of Arendt’s political theory (see Badiou 2005b), Badiou similarly seeks to purify politics as a truth procedure from all the particular concerns of bodies and languages, individuals and communities that define the biopolitics of ‘democratic materialism’. As a truth procedure, politics only deals with the universal, which democratic materialism declares to be non-existent. It is therefore thinkable only in subtractive terms, as a break with all the social practices of individuals and communities that are inherently devoid of truth and can therefore only attain the conservation or mortification of physical existence (Badiou 2009: 1–7, 509–11). In his book on St Paul, Badiou issued vehement diatribes against particularistic identity politics that serves only to consolidate the false universality of the general equivalent of the market, in which all possible identities can interact without ever forming anything like a general will: ‘black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, Catholic paedophiles, moderate Muslims, married priests, ecologist yuppies, the submissive unemployed, prematurely aged youth’ (Badiou 2001: 10), Instead, from Badiou’s universalist perspective, ‘these categories must be absented from the process, failing which no truth has the slightest chance of establishing its persistence and accruing its immanent infinity’ (ibid.: 11). Thus, politics must subtract itself from ‘communities and cultures, colours and pigments, religions and clergies, uses and customs, disparate sexualities, public intimacies and the publicity of the intimate’ (Badiou 2009: 2). To the valorization of the many forms of life of bodies and languages Badiou opposes a life in truth, the participation in the new body of faithful subjectivity (2009: 512–13). Yet, all that this body is meant to be faithful to is, in a clear parallel to Rousseau’s general will, the principle of radical equality of all beings. 85

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democratic biopolitics The paradox of this arrangement is that radical equality is accessible only by the subtraction from all the particular forms of life, whose equality is professed in this affirmation. The Rousseauan liberty is similarly accessible only by the withdrawal from all the forms of life within which one could be free or unfree. In this manner, liberty and equality no longer pertain to concrete individuals and communities that are always already dispersed into particular forms of life but only to the generic subject (individual or collective) that subtracts or absents itself from the latter. This leads us to two logically possible configurations of the relation between democracy and biopolitics. If democracy could not possibly be found within the biopolitical domain of government, it could still exist on a transcendental plane, as the condition of possibility of diverse forms of life that does not enter into their empirical constitution. This appears to be Badiou’s diagnosis of ‘democratic materialism’, which is democratic only because the bodies and languages, individuals and communities coexist under the explicit or implicit injunction of tolerance and the prohibition on intervention. Other than that, there is no democracy within this pluralistic realm, since there is no possibility of constituting the generic subject out of these particularistic identities. Democracy becomes a background constitutional, legal or normative principle authorizing societal pluralism but is foreclosed from any actual experience. It is then possible for the most diverse political and apolitical identities, such as Marxists, nationalists, goths, birdwatchers or neoliberals, to dwell in a democracy without ever experiencing the conditions of democracy within their life forms. Modern-day liberal democracy, especially in its narrow electoral sense, would also exemplify this retreat of democracy on to the transcendental plane. The second possibility is that democracy may acquire an empirical existence but only in the form of the mass subtraction from the realm of pluralistic particularism and the constitution of the popular sovereign or Badiou’s subjective ‘body of truth’. Democracy is then conceivable less as a principle than as a movement, literally a movement of subtraction that wrests individuals and communities away from their particular identities towards a new social body. Recalling Neidleman’s analysis of Rousseau’s Reveries, the active component of reverie is negative, the ‘purge’ of all particular content that functions as a constraint (Neidleman 2012: 87). Badiou’s reading of Paul (2001) provides a paradigm of such a movement that he also traces in the revolutionary movements of modernity from Robespierre to Mao, in which the metaphor of the purge was actualized in a rather more violent fashion. Discourses of direct democracy, particularly the more militant varieties, would also exemplify this conversion of democracy into a popular movement. 86

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the community of solitary walkers We may immediately see that this alternative presents the subject with a difficult choice between a democracy it can only presuppose but never experience and a democracy that is only experienced outside all the particular forms of life, in which this subject finds herself. Either democracy becomes an increasingly formal principle that bears all but no relation to the demos and its power, or it becomes an extremely demanding and almost utopian project of the assembly of a new social body that would leave behind particular identities and forms of life, ‘colours and pigments, uses and customs’. Democracy ends up experienceable only in the instances of the assembly of the people, when they quite literally subtract themselves from their immediate environments, roles and identities in order to serve ‘with their person’ and not ‘with their wallet’. Yet, this can only mean that it is impossible to experience democracy as a ‘black homosexual’, a ‘moderate Muslim’ or even a ‘prematurely aged youth’: as long as one is in a form of life, democracy retreats on to the transcendental plane that regulates particular ‘bodies and languages’, and as soon as one leaves this form of life, one becomes a generic subject with no particular form of life to define it. The experience of democracy is conceivable only as the experience of the generic. We may elucidate this paradox by revisiting Rousseau’s famous discussion of religion in The Social Contract. Rousseau distinguishes between the ‘religion of man’, ‘limited to the purely internal cult of the supreme God’ (1987: 223); ‘the religion of citizens’, ‘inscribed in a single country’, with its own ‘dogmas, rites, exterior cult prescribed by laws’ (ibid.); and, finally, the ‘religion of the priest’, which distinguishes between secular and religious authority and hence ‘subjects [men] to contradictory duties and prevents them from being simultaneously devout men and citizens’ (ibid.). The third type is exemplified by Roman Catholicism and the second type by the religions of Antiquity, while the first type, the least problematic one for Rousseau, is exemplified by Christianity as the religion of the Gospel, distinct from any of its institutional forms. The second type of religion removes any distinction between religion and law, clergy and sovereign. The problem with this indistinction is that the rites and dogmas of this religion are insufficiently general, which leads to the corruption of the general will and the ascent of the particular to the status of the general, which in the case of religion is exacerbated by the fact that this ruling religion ‘makes a people bloodthirsty and intolerant so that men breathe only murder and massacre’ (ibid.: 224). In contrast to this, the first type is less problematic since it makes religion a strictly internal matter of individual conscience, which is of no importance to the sovereign: ‘since the other world is outside the province of the sovereign, whatever the fate 87

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democratic biopolitics of subjects in the life to come, it is none of its business, so long as they are good citizens in this life’ (ibid.: 226). Yet, this subtractive religious experience withdrawn from society remains insufficient for Rousseau, for whom ‘no state has ever been founded without religion serving as its base’ (ibid.: 223). Religion is necessary for the republic insofar as it brings the citizens in common on the basis of shared principles and cultivates the feelings of community, solidarity and patriotism (Neidleman 2016: 141; Dent 2005: 170–4). This brings us to the third option of a religion separated from the state, which removes the problems associated with the second type while providing for a social experience of religion that goes beyond the merely internal experience of the first type. And yet, surprisingly at first glance, Rousseau dismisses this option, which we would now recognize as the relatively unproblematic separation of church and state (Neidleman 2016: 160–1), as ‘so bad that it is a waste of time to amuse oneself by proving it. Whatever breaks up social unity is worthless. All institutions that place man in contradiction with himself are of no value’ (Rousseau 1987: 223).3 Instead, Rousseau famously opts for a minimalist ‘civil religion’ defined by the sovereign, restricted to the most general ‘sentiments of sociability without which it is impossible to be a good citizen or a faithful subject’ (ibid.: 226). The dogmas of this religion are ‘simple’ and ‘few in number’: the existence of a powerful, intelligent, beneficent divinity that foresees and provides, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws. There are the positive dogmas. As for the negative dogmas, I am limiting them to just one, namely intolerance. (ibid.: 226)

Rousseau’s civil religion may be grasped as the benign form of the second type of religion, devoid of all particular content that made the latter prone to intolerance and violence. Just as proper laws must deal only with the general and bracket off the particular, civil religion is reduced to the affirmation of the most general maxims – that is, the sheer existence of God – in parallel with the sheer existence of the people that the general will manifests in politics. In the specific context of religion, it is easy to understand Rousseau’s invectives as arising out of his wariness of sectarianism: in contrast to the generic content of both the religion of man and Rousseau’s own civil religion, the religion of the priest is particularistic, introducing its own dogmas and rituals without, however, endowing them with the force of law, as the malignant form of the religion of the citizen does (Neidleman 2016: 138). It thus introduces a conflicting source of authority and loyalty, which has not been authorized by the general will and for this reason cannot even 88

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the community of solitary walkers have the force of the governmental decree. Yet, precisely for this reason, it is not clear why this exercise of particularistic religions without sovereign authorization is so dangerous for ‘social unity’. We may understand it better if we generalize Rousseau’s line of reasoning beyond religion to every form of life. What is troubling for Rousseau is not merely the sectarianism of the religion of the priest, which cannot be necessarily inferred from its definition, which also applies to perfectly benign religions with no claims to power, but precisely the fact that it can ‘place man in contradiction with himself’, with himself as the subtractive subject of the general will (or, for that matter, of reverie). The religion of the priest is simply a particular form of life, from which the subject has subtracted itself to enjoy its generic existence, and which now threatens to pull him back from this generic existence by attracting him with its particular content. The religion of the priest is dangerous precisely because it does not make a claim to power and does not seek to found a new sovereignty. It is instead perfectly content with wresting the subject away from the sovereign to which it belongs in a subtractive generic mode and endowing it with a particular form of life. Split between the generic body of the sovereign and this particular form of life, which need not be religious but could be literally any hobby or lifestyle whatsoever, the subject is indeed placed in contradiction with itself and it is remarkably difficult to resolve this contradiction. The particular form of life cannot be allowed to contaminate the body of the sovereign; otherwise it becomes the citizens’ religion of the malignant type. Yet, neither can the subject simply be left alone to practice it individually (as in the religion of the first type), since this would entail the weakening of its participation in the sovereign people. In this manner, the civil religion and the religion of the priest enter into a contradiction, which is structurally similar to the contradiction between the generic and the particular that we have analyzed at length above. For Rousseau, it is possible to experience democracy only in a subtractive mode of generic existence, while any retreat into a particular form of life threatens the dissolution of the generic body. From within this particular form of life democracy appears only in the mode of the injunction to subtract oneself from it. This has two important implications. Firstly, the experience of democracy as the subtraction from the particular will not necessarily be appealing to everyone and at all times. Rousseau’s own difficulties in overcoming the pathological amour propre and the resentment it brings show the tenacity of particular social identities and forms of life. One can never be certain that the generic experience will actually acquire the generality it requires to make it anything more than itself a particular and somewhat idiosyncratic lifestyle, defined by subtraction from every other lifestyle. Secondly, insofar as particular forms of life are, by definition, foreclosed 89

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democratic biopolitics from the experience of the generic, they are bound to remain devoid of all democracy. At best they are simply outside the horizon of democracy as apolitical forms of self-fashioning and at worst they become sites for the actual assault on democracy through exclusions, hierarchies and restrictions involved in their very constitution. Thus, there is only a choice between democracy and particularism, but no possibility of experiencing democracy within a particular form of life. For the Rousseauan disposition that views these forms of life as inherently without truth and yielding nothing but self-love and resentment, the choice might appear obvious. Yet, it is clearly not obvious to the subjects of contemporary Western societies, which have, in the recent decades, witnessed the immense proliferation of the most diverse lifestyles but not much innovation and creativity with regard to democracy, which instead has survived precisely in the quasi-transcendental sense of the normative framework that is impossible to argue with and even less possible actually to experience. From the Rousseauan perspective, these developments are lamentable insofar as they divert the citizens of nominally democratic regimes from the generic manifestation of their (individual or collective) being, more often than not in favor of non-serious, inauthentic, individualist and narcissistic forms of life. The irony of this familiar complaint is that it expresses disdain over what is arguably one of the greatest achievements of ‘really existing’ liberal democracies. No other form of government in history has sustained such a dazzling proliferation of forms of life, which, moreover, have managed to coexist in a reasonably peaceful manner. While other regimes have tended to authorize or legitimize only specific forms of life, arising out of religious or ideological dogmata, contemporary liberal democracy affirms the legitimacy of the hitherto unprecedented diversity of forms of life. Yet, precisely this tends to aggravate the Rousseauist proponents of democracy, for whom these forms of life are deficient precisely insofar as they are not themselves democratic. Dietary fads, mobile phones, Pokémon Go, online dating and ecotourism are all derisively dismissed as trivial and inauthentic, in contrast to the existence of the people as sovereign, be it Badiou’s faithful subject or Agamben’s coming community. We thus end up with a plurality of forms of life that have nothing to do with freedom and equality, and a properly ‘political’ or ‘democratic’ form of life wholly contained in freedom and equality. Even if we do not follow Badiou’s idea of the political truth, it is not difficult to see which form is endowed with superiority: egalitarian and emancipatory politics is certainly preferable to twerking or bingo. Yet, as we shall argue in detail in Part 2, this superiority contradicts the very freedom and equality that the general will affirms: in their generic existence, 90

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the community of solitary walkers subtracted from positive predicates, all individuals and communities are free and equal as ‘whatever’ beings. However implicit and tentative the hierarchy between the democratic and other forms of life is, it betrays the promise of democracy, producing a new and privileged identity in the midst of and out of the generic. By highlighting the differences between the trite and trivial forms of life in the society and the generic existence of the sovereign demos it only succeeds in identifying this generic existence by a predicate of its own, thus hypostasizing it into an identity (cf. Agamben 1993: 63–5). Whereas the Rousseauist disposition cannot but reconstitute this hierarchy in valorizing the generic existence of the political subject as a paradoxically privileged form of life, in the remainder of this book we shall pose the question of whether this generic existence might in fact be experienced from within any particular form of life, however trite and insignificant it might appear. If the universal is produced not by agglomeration into a totality but by subtraction from particularity, can this subtraction be practiced from within a particular form of life and not as a clean break from it? Rousseau’s reverie would then no longer be viewed as a detachment from particular forms of life but as something with which these forms of life are themselves inoculated. In such a case, democracy would no longer demand a particular form of life attained by the subtraction from all other forms of life but would rather be construed in a pluralistic sense as the legitimate coexistence of the most diverse forms of life. Such a democracy would not be inherently opposed to biopolitics but would itself acquire a biopolitical dimension, as diverse forms of life become sites of the affirmation of democratic principles. This approach to democratic biopolitics would then be able to realign Rousseau’s democratic universalism and its principles of freedom, equality and community (the big words that all seem to demand capitalization) with the utmost banality, inanity or triteness of particular lifestyles that we adopt in our everyday lives. As we shall argue in Part 2, democracy is not about seeking, let alone imposing, greatness. It is instead about ensuring the freedom and equality of the most banal and insignificant.

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Chapter Three

Biopower and the politics of contingency

From opposition to synthesis In the first part of our inquiry, we have identified the aporetic relation between sovereignty and government in Rousseau’s political thought as a key moment in the genealogy of the contemporary critical discourse on biopolitics and democracy. Biopolitical government, whose rationalities are by definition particular, partial and specific, cannot be reconciled with the generic, singular–universal principles of democracy. Democracy either may recede into the background as the transcendental condition of possibility of the biopolitical order that cannot itself be experienced or it might be reactivated in the generic revolt against particularistic and particularizing biopolitics, which would constitute a community of singularities that have subtracted themselves from all forms of life that biopolitics prescribes and governs. Biopolitics without democracy or democracy against biopolitics – these are the options the Rousseauan disposition leaves us. The question that we shall pursue in the second part of the book concerns a third possibility, which is foreclosed in Rousseau’s scheme but nonetheless merits a closer investigation. Can the experience of the generic that defines both the general will and the solitary reverie be brought into the particular forms of life themselves? Can democracy be experienced without a necessary subtraction from every particular form of life? Can the freedom and equality that form the content of the generic experience of popular sovereignty also be experienced in the myriad of trivial and banal forms of life in which we dwell? Does democracy presuppose a specifically democratic form of life – for example, Rousseau’s sovereign or solitary walker – or does it rather consist in the manner, in which all forms of life could be practiced? Our line of inquiry connects with Axel Honneth’s recent study of the social foundations of what he calls ‘democratic life’ in his Freedom’s Right (2014) and the accompanying The Idea of Socialism (2017). Honneth’s project seeks to redeem the promise of the French Revolution to attain 95

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democratic biopolitics freedom, equality and fraternity, which, in his view, was led astray by both liberalism, due to its individualist understanding of freedom that downgraded both equality and fraternity, and socialism, due to its restriction of freedom, equality and fraternity to the economic sphere (2017: 6–26). Instead, Honneth argues that social freedom – that is, freedom in the community of equals – is possible only as a holistic project involving the entirety of the social order or at least its three main ‘ethical spheres’, which Honneth, following Hegel, defines as personal (family, friendship, love), economic (consumption and labor) and political (the public sphere and the state) (2014: 42–61). Moreover, the reciprocity that characterizes social freedom should be exercised not merely within these three spheres but also between them, so that none acquires predominance over others, even as the political sphere does in fact attain a certain priority due to its capacity to steer the society on the whole and protect its freedoms (2017: 96; 2014: 176). The practice of social freedom within and between the personal, economic and political spheres produces what Honneth calls a ‘democratic form of life’ (2017: 92): ‘democracy’ does not merely signify free and equal participation in political will-formation; understood as an entire way of life, it means that individuals can participate equally at every central point in the mediation between the individual and society, such that each functionally differentiated sphere reflects the general structure of democratic participation. (ibid.)

In this manner, Honneth develops John Dewey’s idea that ‘democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself’ (Dewey cited in Honneth 2017: 124, fn. 19). For Honneth and Dewey, democracy reflects the way society as such develops and progresses by the perpetual overcoming of all barriers to communication within it. The project of the democratization of society thus has a secure foundation in the historical patterns of the development of societies. Yet, this foundation is not a blueprint: while the logic of democratization is the same for all the spheres of every society (the reciprocal affirmation of freedom of each and all in a community of equals), the specific institutional forms that social freedom must assume remain a matter of experimentation and not of doctrine. Honneth’s theory clearly resonates with our inquiry into the possibility of democratic biopolitics. By approaching democracy as a way of life and not merely a form of government, institutional design or normative principle, it highlights the lived and experiential aspect of democracy. By insisting that democracy is practicable beyond the narrowly political and economic sphere and also extends to the personal sphere of family, 96

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biopower and the politics of contingency friendship and love, it connects to the concerns of theories of biopolitics that problematize the predominance in these spheres of the rationalities of government that escape democratic accountability. Finally, as we shall discuss in more detail below, the notion of social freedom developed by Honneth resonates with our argument about the interrelated character of freedom, equality and community as the ontological principles of democracy. Nonetheless, our approach proceeds from a more pluralistic vision of society than the Hegelian threefold division. Instead, our point of departure will be Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of ‘struction’, which refers to coexistence without coordination, which renders pluralism no longer a matter of functional differentiation of social spheres but of incommensurability of forms of life that cannot be easily grouped into categories or subsumed under particular spheres. Yet, just as Honneth seeks to bring the same content of social freedom into three distinct societal spheres, we seek to translate the democratic principles of freedom, equality and community, which we shall derive from the ontological contingency at the heart of democracy, into the practice of these incommensurable forms of life, which thereby become free, equal and in common in their very nonequivalence. As we shall argue in Chapter 4, this non-equivalence of forms of life makes it impossible to speak of a ‘democratic form of life’, which would suggest that democracy resides within one specific form. What is democratic is rather the manner in which a certain form, which itself may well be non-political, is upheld: as the expression of one’s essence that irrevocably differentiates one from everyone else or as a contingent mode of self-fashioning coexisting on a par with others. In the latter case, we may indeed speak of a ‘democratic life’, in which myriad forms, which themselves need not have anything to do with democracy, are affirmed and upheld in the manner that accords with democratic principles. We shall first address the central problem that the affirmation of democracy poses for biopolitics. While biopolitics has historically been made possible by the emergence of the positive sciences of humanity, from biology to economics, which enabled grounding practices of governance in scientific knowledge, modern democracy is rather constituted by the experience of radical contingency and the destabilization or dissolution of all foundations. As Simon Critchley has argued, ‘democracy installs a metaphysical agnosticism, or perhaps even a metaphysics of absence, at the heart of the political life’ (Critchley 1992: 209). Any attempt to think biopolitics in a democratic key must entail traversing the confrontation between the founded knowledges that ground biopolitical government and this metaphysics of absence. In Chapter 3 we will address the ways in which the democratic affirmation of contingency fundamentally reorients the problematic of biopolitics. 97

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democratic biopolitics In Chapter 4 we shall address the question of how this contingency may actually be experienced in concrete forms of life – does it produce a specifically democratic form of life or rather govern the coexistence of diverse and possibly non-political forms? We shall explore the two fundamentally different answers to this question given respectively by Badiou, perhaps the most faithful Rousseauan in contemporary philosophy, and Nancy, perhaps the most principled opponent of Rousseauism. We shall then outline a middle path, drawing on Agamben’s theory of form-of-life, in which constitution is always accompanied by destitution. What is democratic in this approach is not a form of life itself but the manner of living it: not every form of life is a form-of-life, though every form is, in principle, practicable in this manner. In Chapter 5 we shall elucidate this manner of living in terms of the tendency towards distractibility in the human condition, which permits ceaseless adoption of forms of life in curious captivation and their abandonment in indifferent boredom. We shall develop the notion of a freeform manner of living that oscillates between captivation and boredom in its very praxis, retaining the potentiality for transformation in whatever form it takes up. In the final chapter we shall argue that this oscillation between captivation and boredom, in which the formative force of life is never fully exhausted in any determinate form, is what makes democracy not merely normatively legitimate but also enjoyable, a source of the pleasure of perpetual formation and transformation of forms of life under the condition of their freedom, equality and community.

Biopower in the void Why is biopolitics a problem for democracy? As we have seen, critical theorists of biopolitics have argued that in its attempt to regulate forms of life in their concreteness, positivity and particularity, modern biopolitics goes further in its exercise of power than democracy, in which power is exercised on citizens as abstract legal subjects rather than as concrete living beings. Insofar as it seeks to govern life in accordance with specific modes of knowledge extending beyond the legal sphere – biology, economics, sociology and so on, biopower establishes a much stronger relationship to knowledge than sovereign power, including popular sovereignty. While competing political actors in a democracy certainly make claims to knowledge and truth in justifying their policies, these claims remain without foundation simply because of the competitive character of the political process, which makes possible the complete reversal of the policy in question in the next election. Indeed, the competition at work in a democracy is not between the 98

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biopower and the politics of contingency contending versions of the good and the true, but between candidates for temporary occupation of the seat of government. Unlike many versions of aristocracy, democracy does not endow this occupant with any epistemic or moral privilege. The winner of democratic elections has not been proven the best in anything other than attracting votes and the transient majority it has secured only legitimizes its acts of government as such without endowing them with any ethical or epistemic privilege over the alternatives. All of this is basic to democracy, even though we sometimes forget this in the routine if still fervent denunciations of the unethical and unknowledgeable character of today’s politics and politicians. Yet, what about biopolitics, which governs lives in all their specificity, concreteness and particularity, and claims a foundation for its policies in life sciences? While it is not very difficult to come to terms with the fact that the income tax rate, voting age or defense budget is without any ethical or epistemic foundation, it is admittedly much harder to do so with regard to the policies legitimized as somehow in accordance with the scientifically ascertained nature or interests of ‘life itself’. How can biopolitical government depend on the statistical accidents of electoral politics? The government of life seems far too serious a matter to be left to the contingencies of democracy, which explains why it must be entrusted to experts, whose authority is no longer conditioned by unstable electoral majorities. While we would be outraged at the suggestion that political scientists could or should instruct us how to vote ‘correctly’, we do not seem to mind experts in health care, psychology, pedagogy and economics instructing us in the art of living well: taking care of ourselves, bringing up children, making our living and so on. The pluralism and contestability that we have come to view as the key advantages of democracy are missing from the spheres that are at least as important to us as the spheres governed by the democratic process. In this familiar narrative of the inherent democratic deficit of biopolitics, the founded nature of biopower clashes with the contingency and indeterminacy that define modern democracy. In this chapter, we shall therefore rely on Claude Lefort’s concept of democracy, which emphasizes precisely these two features, in order both to mark the gap between biopolitics and democracy and to attempt to bridge it. In Lefort’s influential reading, the symbolic order or mise-en-forme of democracy is conditioned by the dissolution of the theologico-political paradigm of monarchy, which articulated and embodied power, knowledge and ethics in the figure of the sovereign. With the disappearance of the absolute sovereignty of the monarch in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the European revolutions of the nineteenth century, the 99

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democratic biopolitics locus of power in society becomes void, no longer embodied by the transcendent figure of God or King. For Lefort, the ‘people’, which at first glance appears the natural successor to these sovereign figures, can never attain a positive presence in a democracy. At the very moment of the exercise of its sovereignty in an election, the people is dissolved into a plurality of particular groups. The Rousseauan generality is absent not only on the level of government (with which Rousseau would agree) but also on the level of the sovereign, whose general will never attains real presence. Any occupant of the place of power in a democracy does so only as a matter of contingency, its claim to power founded on nothing but a statistical majority. Whereas the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century responded to this contingency by filling the empty place of power by ideological indoctrination, single-party domination and charismatic leadership, which sought to endow society with a ‘body’ once again, be it a racial or class body, modern democracy maintains and affirms the locus of power as open and unfigurable. This ontological void at the heart of democracy has profound epistemic and ethical implications, introducing a ‘fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law and knowledge at every level of social life’ (Lefort 1988: 19). As a result of this ‘dissolution of the markers of certainty’, society appears ‘disembodied’, lacking a positive figure defined by its nature, essence, task or vocation: ‘The being of the social vanishes, [or rather] presents itself in the shape of an endless series of questions’ (ibid.: 227). The first thing to be said about a democratically governed society is that it is never assured even of its own existence as demos, let alone its principles or values. Nonetheless, this indeterminacy is not a defect that destroys or paralyzes democracy but rather its very substance: a democratic society is nothing but an endless series of questions or acts of self-questioning, its ‘[existence] indicated only by incessant work of its enunciation’ (ibid.: 110). The sole condition of legitimacy in a democracy is the persistence of the ‘debate as to what is legitimate’ (ibid.: 39). The advantage of Lefort’s understanding of the democratic mise-enforme is its applicability to a wide range of approaches to democracy: ontological contingency and epistemic indeterminacy characterize the most narrow constructions of electoral democracy as much as they are valid for the more substantive, participatory and deliberative versions of democracy. The place of power remains void irrespective of whether the demos is expected only to exercise its power once every four years or to remain perpetually engaged in deliberative discourse on both the content of democratic principles and the form of their actualization. No amount of participation and deliberation could fill this void of power 100

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biopower and the politics of contingency and endow the demos with a positive presence. The continuum from the least participatory forms of representative democracy to the most participatory forms of deliberative, grassroots and direct democracy pertains only to the Rousseauan problem of maintaining and maximizing the existence of the people as sovereign, preventing its contamination by the particularistic government that it authorizes. As we have shown in Part 1, all these variants of democracy will therefore suffer from Rousseau’s aporia, whereby the sovereign people is constituted by the subtraction from its particular forms of life, within which its sovereignty is hence inaccessible. The more extensive the participation of the people in this generic body, the greater this subtraction must be, which raises evident questions as to the practicality of these designs. Yet, even when the people assembles itself for deliberation or decision-making, it is still present only as an ‘endless series of questions’, the answers to which can only be tentative. Contingency and indeterminacy thus characterize the very existence of the modern demos, irrespective of whether this existence is a momentary act of voting or a protracted process of deliberation. It is easy to see that Lefort’s notion of democracy implies a pluralism that is far more radical than standard liberal theories of democracy would be willing to admit. The absence of the ‘being of the social’ implies the absence of any coordinating principle that would endow society with a positive presence. Ontological contingency and epistemic indeterminacy make it impossible to construct any representation of society as a determinate figure. This impossibility of coordination or construction aligns Lefort’s work on democracy with Nancy’s recent discussion of struction, which we shall address prior to further elucidating the consequences of contingency for theorizing democratic biopolitics. The idea of struction refers to an ensemble without any logic of assembly (or con-struction), a space devoid of ordering principles but not for that reason disorderly (de-constructed). The immediate context of the presentation of the concept is Nancy’s meditation on technology, whose historical unfolding he analyzes in terms of the dialectic of construction and deconstruction. The ‘constructive’ paradigm that defines modernity is described by Nancy as architectural or architectonic, endowed with a certain coordinating principle or engineering design that applies to the entire order in question, bringing all its elements into an intelligible unity. From the outset, this constructive paradigm was accompanied by its opposite, which Nancy describes as destructive or deconstructive, associating it both with the aesthetics of Mallarmé and Baudelaire and the philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger (Nancy 2015b: 48). Whereas the constructive paradigm endowed the world with the arche and the architect, the principle of order and the subject 101

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democratic biopolitics of its production, deconstruction maintained the contingency of all things, the originary absence of any arche. Nancy’s diagnosis of the contemporary state of affairs, which quickly moves beyond the question of technology to embrace the ontological dimension, posits that both of these paradigms have now become vacuous. We have come to a point in which architectonics and architecture – understood as the determination of an essential construction or essence as construction – no longer have value. They have worn themselves out by themselves. It is not only a construction that has been destroyed by time. It is the very principle of construction that has been weakened. (ibid.: 51)

It is not that de(con)struction has defeated or delegitimized construction. Instead, it has illuminated something more basic: [What] is of concern is not to re-construct (contrary to the incessantly repeated petition addressed to ‘deconstructionists’: would you reconstruct already?). Nor is it to return to founding, building, constituting or instituting gestures, even if it is to open and inaugurate, to allow for a birth of sense. What is at stake beyond construction and deconstruction is struction as such. Struo signifies to amass, to heap. It is truly not a question of order or organization that is implied by con- and in-struction. It is the heap, the non-assembled ensemble. Surely, it is contiguity and copresence but without a principle of coordination. (ibid.: 48–9)

While in the paradigm of construction one could speak of either natural or technological coordination, in struction we rather face the uncoordinated simultaneity of things or beings, the contingency of their belonging together, the dispersion of profusion of aspects, species, forms, tensions and intention. In this profusion, no order is valued more than the others, they all – instincts, responses, irritabilities, connectivities, equilibriums, catalyses, metabolisms – seem destined to collide or dissolve into one another or to be confused with one another. (ibid.)

It is important to note that this apparent disorder is not simply the effect of deconstruction, of the constructed order brought to ruin. While deconstruction successfully undermined the self-evidence or necessity of every principle of construction, it encountered a limit in struction devoid of any ‘con-’, a ‘pure and simple juxtaposition that does not make sense’ (ibid.: 49). Only that which was presented as constructed can be deconstructed, just as only that which claimed to be necessary can be demoted by the demonstration of its contingency. The plurality of contingent forms proper to struction is not deconstructible because 102

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biopower and the politics of contingency they never formed a constructed unity to begin with. And yet, this mode of coexistence is not merely chaotic or disorderly in the negative sense: Struction offers a dis-order that is neither the contrary nor the destruction or ruin of order: it is situated somewhere else in what we call contingency, fortuity, dispersion or errancy, which could also be called surprise, invention, chance, meeting or passage. It is nothing but the co-presence or, better yet, the appearing-together of all that appears, that is, of all that is. (ibid.: 54)

Nancy’s account of struction is thus strongly distinct from the diagnosis of modern nihilism, in which the ‘order of ends’ ends up destitute as such: Whereas we were in the habit of relating sense to an ultimate purpose or a final end (whether it was one of history, wisdom or salvation), today we are discovering that ends are proliferating at the same time as they are constantly transforming themselves into means. Whereas until now one used to describe ends (values, ideals and senses) as being destitute, today ends are multiplying indefinitely at the same time as they are showing themselves to be more and more substitutable and of equal value (ibid.: 45).

Instead of the void of ends under nihilism, we end up with the infinite proliferation of ends that are no longer totalizable as general principles of construction and for this reason do not constitute any unity, but only ‘an assembling that is labile, disordered, aggregated or amalgamated rather than conjoined, reunited, paired with or associated’ (ibid.: 49). It is this assembling without any principle of coordination that characterizes society in the democratic mise-en-forme as presented by Lefort. It is not merely that the demos is split into a plurality of individuals and groups, identities and interests. It is rather that this plurality has no common principle that would permit rearticulating it as a unity, however diverse it would be internally. The differences that constitute society are less irreconcilable than incommensurable. This is why Nancy’s theory of struction goes one important step further than the ‘radical–democratic’ theories of social antagonism that inspired Inston’s reading of Rousseau discussed in Part 1. For such authors as Ernesto Laclau and Oliver Marchart, the pluralism of particular identities, forces or interests in a society is bound to be ontically antagonistic because of the ontological antagonism structuring the society as such, precluding its full closure into self-immanence (Laclau 2005; Marchart 2007). For Nancy and Lefort, closure into self-immanence is similarly impossible, yet this is neither the effect nor the cause of any necessary antagonism. Antagonism is a relation, which requires that its terms be somehow commensurable even if they are irreconcilable: for example, reactionary and revolutionary political parties, the exploiters and the 103

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democratic biopolitics exploited, the people and the elites, and so on.1 Yet, for Nancy, nothing in the idea of struction guarantees or even enables this commensurability. On the contrary, this concept attunes us to the being in common without any commonality, even that of a frontal opposition: ‘What I am calling here struction would be the state of the “with” deprived of the value of sharing, bringing into play only simple contiguity and its contingency’ (Nancy 2015b: 49). We shall return to the discussion of Nancy’s own account of the political implications of struction in the following chapter. At this point, we need only note that, for our purposes in this book, this concept helps elucidate Lefort’s at first glance paradoxical idea of the social ‘without being’ that characterizes democracy. Evidently, it is not a matter of suggesting that society in a democracy does not exist, but rather that its being is devoid of any coordinating or constructive principle over the beings that co-appear in it: ‘[“Being”] is no longer in itself, but rather continuity, contact, tension, distortion, crossing and assemblage. What is given to us only consists in the juxtaposition and simultaneity of a copresence in which the co- does not bear any particular value’ (ibid.: 50–1). The demos that is the sole sovereign in a democracy presents itself as always already dispersed in struction, without any principle that would put it together (again or, rather, for the first time). Lefort’s notion of democracy as the fundamental mise-en-forme of society clearly contrasts with Rousseau’s use of the concept to denote a specific form of government, in which the magistrate coincides with the sovereign and hence the people not merely manifests its political existence as sovereign (general will) but also governs the most particular aspects of its existence itself. Since such an arrangement is historically rare if not entirely unprecedented, Rousseau concluded that a true democracy had never existed and was not suited to human beings at all. In contrast, for Lefort democracy is defined not by the composition of government but by the ontological characteristics of the people itself as sovereign. It is here that we encounter another key difference between the two authors, which concerns what we might call the ontological stability of the figure of the people. Rousseau’s sovereign people achieves stability and presence by means of the (perpetual) subtraction from all things particular, which, as we have seen, requires constant vigilance against the possible corruption of the universal and results in the maintenance of a radical gap between the popular sovereign and the governmental practices that apparently emanate from it. In contrast, for Lefort, the general and the particular are never strictly differentiated. Instead, as we shall argue in more detail below, we infer the status of the general or the universal only from its dispersion into particular entities. 104

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biopower and the politics of contingency This does not mean that the general as such is non-existent or that the universal is merely a (hegemonically constructed) particularity. On the contrary, it is precisely because the people is never present in its unity that we actually are able to infer the principles that are valid for every form in which it is dispersed. It is easy to see that biopolitical rationality as we know it conflicts fundamentally with this mise-en-forme. If the very being of the social is in question, and politics, ethics and morality no longer have secure foundations, how can life be governed in accordance with its own nature or interests? What are this nature and these interests, and what form of knowledge could possibly access them in a definitive way? Lefort’s theory of democracy, which appears reasonably uncontroversial from a more narrowly ideologico-political perspective, leaves us with a positively scandalous conclusion when transferred on to the biopolitical terrain. While we may grudgingly concede that our electoral preferences are entirely contingent and have no inherent truth or moral value, can the same apply to exercise and smoking, vaccinations and drug use? Surely, the form of life recommended by our doctors cannot be of equal status to the decadent and bohemian forms of life that revel in excess and self-destruction. And yet, this is precisely the starting point for any attempt to rethink biopolitics in a democratic key. There is nothing in the mise-en-forme of democracy that could possibly endow a particular lifestyle with any ontological or epistemic privilege. For this reason, there is no form of life proper to a democracy, no democratic bios, in whose name the unqualified life of zoe must be subjected. Just as political actors in a democracy may operate with different, even radically irreconcilable ideologies that may temporarily become ‘ruling’ without ever depriving their rivals of a legitimate status, the forms of life practiced in democratic biopolitics ceaselessly compete with one another and any one of them may accede to the ruling status, yet never at the expense of the legitimacy of all the others. The question of the proper form of life, which defines biopolitical rationality, is entirely meaningless in the democratic regime, which instead affirms the coexistence of contending forms of life in the void that none of them can legitimately aspire to fill. However, this evidently does not entail the disqualification of medicine, psychology or social science and the turn to a life of decadence. The contingency of a certain form of life in no way delegitimizes its pursuit: we all have different aesthetic, culinary or sexual tastes, whose self-evident contingency does not result in our renouncing them. What it does delegitimize is its forcing on the unwilling others, since their forms of life are just as contingent and hence equally legitimate. Any form of 105

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democratic biopolitics life whatsoever can captivate a subject but no form of life can hold a subject captive. This is what distinguishes democracy from aristocracy or monarchy that elevates a particular ideology or correlate form of life, be it liberalism, socialism or nationalism, above the others as better, truer or more beautiful and disqualifies all alternatives to it. If we can speak of something like a ‘democratic’ form of life, it is not a life defined by certain positive properties (unlike a liberal, socialist or nationalist life); rather it is a life whose properties are not forced on to the subject but freely adopted and upheld. It is from this perspective that we may problematize the contemporary predominance of neoliberal rationalities governing forms of life in numerous domains (economy, health care, security, education, romantic relationships and so on). The problem is not that these rationalities have acquired a predominant status in Western liberal democracies – in every democracy it is possible for a particular political force or form of life to enjoy majority support for a certain period of time. Yet, in the democratic mise-en-forme such predominance is nothing but a contingency, a statistical accident that does not endow these rationalities or the forms of life that they prescribe with extra, or actually any, truth or goodness. The fact that any given party or candidate won the election does not make them right, true or correct in any meaningful sense. What we observe in contemporary Europe and North America today is instead the attainment by neoliberal rationalities of the hegemonic status that endows them with the necessity and self-evidence that no other governmental rationality enjoys. This hegemony entails, firstly, that fewer spheres of life remain in the public realm of democratic governance due to the increasing privatization of formerly public functions of government, from daycare to prisons. Secondly, it leads to the increasing homogenization of governmental rationality in these spheres, as the specific founded knowledges of public health, social psychology, pedagogy and so on are increasingly suffused by and subjected to economic rationality. This universalization of economic rationality in neoliberalism undermines the democratic mise-en-forme by filling the void locus of power with the founded knowledges derived primarily from the science of economics (Brown 2015: 17–45). If economic rationality is universal, then there certainly is a proper form of life, a life lived in accordance with this universal rationality, while all other forms of life are in the wrong and must be transformed accordingly through privatization, deregulation and competition. The markers of certainty that, for Lefort, were dissolved with the decapitation of the monarch reappear in the form of the truths of economic science. Whatever the merits of the neoliberal doctrine itself, what renders it incompatible with democracy is its insistence on 106

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biopower and the politics of contingency the universality of its claims, which makes democracy nothing more than a superfluous institutional arrangement, a nuisance that may be abided by out of respect for tradition or public opinion but is itself worthless (ibid.: 115–48). The fact that neoliberalism was able to dominate in Western democracies despite its fundamental heterogeneity to its symbolic form, without having to abrogate democratic institutions formally, demonstrates that insofar as it remains a constitutional and not a biopolitical reality, democracy may be powerless to translate its mise-en-forme into life. In the absence of the biopolitical conversion of democracy, lived reality may become suffused and dominated by hegemonic rationalities, over which democratic institutions are powerless.

The scandal of contingency This example demonstrates that the contingency that conditions democracy might well be ontologically ineradicable but can be effaced ontically in the domination of governmental rationalities by founded knowledges that negate or at least temper its more radical implications. Such effacement is certainly not a new or current development. Recalling Foucault’s claim about disciplinary and biopower as the counterparts of the ascendancy of liberal democracy in the West, we may suggest that one of the reasons why biopolitics accompanied the rise of liberal democracy is precisely its capacity to alleviate the impact of contingency that democratic revolutions produced in modern Western societies. In fact, the circumspection about contingency long precedes the birth of biopolitics. As Agamben has demonstrated in his ‘Bartleby, or On Contingency’, philosophy from Ancient Greece onwards has treated contingency as a problem, something to be dealt with, mastered or managed. Agamben identifies three principles that ancient philosophy has deployed to minimize contingency. The first is the principle of the irrevocability of the past, or the impossibility of ‘past contingents’ (Agamben 1999a: 262). We may well imagine that, at a certain moment in the past, things could have been otherwise but once a certain possibility was realized, it becomes irrevocable in the present. For all practical purposes, the actualized possibility may be treated as necessary, its contingency entirely effaced. All sorts of things could have happened, but once something actually happened it cannot be undone and hence its potentiality is entirely effaced. In this line of reasoning, the long-established modes of power relations, rationalities of government or the knowledges that inform them may appear as necessary simply because of having been there already, even when, at some point in the past, they were just as contingent as their alternatives. 107

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democratic biopolitics The second and related principle is that of conditioned necessity, which ‘limits the force of contingency with respect to actuality’ (ibid.). In Aristotle’s formulation, ‘what is is necessary as long as it is, and what is not is necessary as long as it is not’ (Aristotle cited in ibid.: 262). According to this principle, founded on the law of non-contradiction, whatever exists does so necessarily, thereby losing its potentiality not to exist. Conversely, whatever does not exist does not do so in a necessary manner. In this line of reasoning, a government in a democracy may have been wholly contingent at the moment of its election, but once its authority is established, it can only be necessary, just as the perfectly possible victory of its rivals is experienced as necessarily impossible. In this example, the experience of contingency is reduced to a fleeting moment of an election before its results are announced and necessity sets in again. This is why there is something exciting in awaiting election results even when they tend to confirm our expectations informed by polls and especially when they contradict these expectations and the unexpected actually takes place, be it the Brexit vote or Trump’s victory in 2016. Yet, however unexpected the result, once it is there, its contingency is effaced and thousands of pages are covered with astute analyses of why the outcome was in fact inevitable. Finally, Agamben addresses the principle of future contingents, which retroactively cancels the contingency of a future event once it occurs (or does not). While a future event is contingent in the sense that it might take place or not, once it does take place its occurrence becomes cast as necessary, so that it could not have not taken place. The same goes for its non-occurrence, which converts its contingency into an impossibility: the event could not have taken place: ‘In both cases, contingency is replaced by necessity and impossibility’ (ibid.: 263). In this manner, an event that is entirely undecidable, such as a revolution, whose occurrence or nonoccurrence is impossible to predict, is retroactively rendered either inevitable (in the case of its success) or impossible (in the case of its failure). Since such a conversion deprives the future of all possibility, Aristotle sought to restore contingency to future events by an elegant solution: regarding the occurrence or non-occurrence of an event, only the alternative itself is necessary (the event will or will not occur) but not either of the two outcomes that remain contingent. Thus, the statement ‘tomorrow there will or will not be a battle at sea’ is always true as a tautology, while the two members of the oppositions describe contingent outcomes that can both be and not be (ibid.: 263). Agamben’s well-known reading of Melville’s Bartleby radicalizes this reading. As the epitome of potentiality whose famous preference ‘not to’ seeks to preserve his potential not to be, Bartleby dwells in the space of this 108

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biopower and the politics of contingency tautology, where something can both be and not be. Yet, with Bartleby, contingency is no longer reserved for particular outcomes of future events but is extended towards both the present and the past: ‘Such an experiment is possible only by calling into question the principle of the irrevocability of the past, by contesting the retroactive unrealizability of potentiality’ (ibid.: 266). The impossibility of past contingents is overturned in the movement that Agamben, following Simone Weil, terms ‘decreation’, in which what was not is restored to the potentiality of being and what was regains its potentiality not to be. Remembrance is not what happened nor what did not happen, but, rather, their potentiality, their becoming possible once again. It is in this sense that Bartleby calls the past into question, re-calling it –not simply to redeem what was, to make it exist again, but, more precisely, to consign it again to potentiality, to the indifferent truth of the tautology. ‘I would prefer not to’ is the restitutio in integrum of possibility, which keeps possibility suspended between occurrence and nonoccurrence, between the capacity to be and the capacity not to be. (ibid.: 267)

Agamben identifies two distinct ways to turn potentiality back towards the past. The first is Nietzsche’s eternal return, in which the past is returned to the present in the movement of infinite repetition. Yet, for Agamben, this solution is unsatisfactory: while it does make what took place both possible and actual once again, it does nothing to restore potentiality not to be. Only the actual can become potential again and again, but this potentiality is immediately actualized in its eternal return. What was not, on the contrary, is only repeated in its non-occurrence, its impossibility multiplied indefinitely. This is why this movement of infinite repetition, of copying, must be interrupted. This is what Bartleby does by his giving up the work of copying. In his preference not to, what took place and what did not are once again united in the tautology: ‘what could have not been but was becomes indistinguishable from what could have been but was not’ (ibid.: 270). In this manner, ‘all possible worlds are led back to their right to existence’ (ibid.: 271). Agamben’s paradigms are infamously hyperbolic and extreme, which has led to the misunderstanding of many of his insights, such as the state of exception illustrated by the Roman figure of homo sacer (see Prozorov 2014: 108–12). The same may be said about his discussion of Bartleby. The mode of being that restores contingency to past and present events is evidently not restricted to this ‘new Christ’ that comes to destroy the Torah ‘from top to bottom’ (Agamben 1999a: 270), but also pertains to the rather more mundane issues, such as forms of life, habits, fashions, lifestyles that Agamben turns to in the final volume of the Homo Sacer 109

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democratic biopolitics series, The Use of Bodies (2016). The notion of decreation in the Bartleby essay is in this later work replaced by the idea of ‘destituent’ power, which unworks itself in every act and renders destitute every state of affairs that it constitutes: ‘destitution coincides without remainder with constitution, position has no other consistency than in deposition’ (Agamben 2016: 275). Moreover, this notion of destitution has clear parallels with perhaps the most famous and misunderstood concept of Agamben’s œuvre, inoperativity: ‘Inoperativity is not another work that suddenly arrives and works to deactivate and depose them: it coincides completely and constitutively with their destitution, with living a life’ (ibid.: 277). Decreation, destitution, inoperativity – this series of concepts points to a specific mode of existence that affirms contingency in the present, whereby something both is (created, constituted, operative) and is not, is no more than it is not. Agamben discusses this formula of the Skeptics (ou mallon) as the closest analogue to Melville’s formula ‘preferring not to’ (Agamben 1999a: 256–7). ‘No more than’ neither affirms nor negates a state of affairs but merely declares its possibility, which is at once its possibility not to be. For a potentiality to exist as such, and not merely in the mode of its actualization, it must be at once constituted (potentiality to) and destitute (potentiality not to) and the two variants must exist to an equal degree, one no more than the other. It is easy to see that this mode of existence clearly violates the law of non-contradiction in classical logic: as long as potentiality is not actualized, it is possible for a being to dwell within the tautology, in which it both is and is not.2 A contingent being is ‘by definition withdrawn from both truth conditions and prior to the action of the “strongest of all principles”, the principle of contradiction’ (Agamben 1999a: 261). Something that exists no more than it does not, that both is and is not, could not possibly be either true or false. It is withdrawn from or prior to truth, consistency or non-contradiction. This withdrawal does not mean that contingency or potentiality simply is contradictory, and hence cannot be, according to classical logic. Instead, as Agamben notes, what is in question is precisely the ‘strength’ of the law of non-contradiction with regard to the potential and the contingent (ibid.: 262). In its ‘indifference to contraries’, in the expression of Duns Scotus (ibid.: 263), the contingent is neither contradictory nor non-contradictory – it is no more contradictory than it is not, or it is non-non-contradictory. Rather than violate or transgress the law of noncontradiction, the contingent exists in blissful ignorance of it. Much as the Freudian unconscious, it does not know the law of non-contradiction and is hence not aware of violating anything. Dialectical philosophy, either Hegelian or Marxist, has famously elevated contradiction to the primary principle of historical development. 110

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biopower and the politics of contingency As Quentin Meillassoux has shown, this affirmation of contradiction has been accompanied by the assertion of metaphysical necessity (Meillassoux 2008: 68–70): a contradictory being (which both is and is not) could never not-be and is therefore absolutely necessary. We therefore end up with a vision of history whose entire substance is contradiction and whose every stage or aspect is absolutely necessary (Harman 2011: 168–9). It is easy to see how this metaphysical standpoint yields a political philosophy that affirms the irreducibility of conflict or antagonism as the manifestation of contradiction at the heart of society. Meillassoux’s own approach is a direct reversal of this position that rejects necessity in favor of radical contingency and for this reason must dispense with the idea of contradiction. To admit contingency is, for him, to exclude the very possibility of a contradictory entity, since a contingent being must retain its potentiality not to be and therefore cannot both be and not be. Meillassoux’s world is therefore a world in which there are no necessary laws and everything can be otherwise at any moment, yet no contradictory entity could be found in it. As contradictory, this entity is always-already whatever it is not. Thus, the introduction of a contradictory entity into being would result in the implosion of the very idea of determination – of being such and such, of being this rather than that. Such an entity would be tantamount to a ‘black hole of differences’, into which all alterity would be irremediably swallowed up, since the beingother of this entity would be obliged, simply by virtue of being other than it, not to be other than it. (Meillassoux 2008: 70)

Thus, for Meillassoux, the dialectical position that approaches contradiction in terms of the perpetual flux of becoming is ultimately inconsistent, since a contradictory entity cannot become otherwise than it is, since it is always already both thus and otherwise. There is no possible otherness that could ever happen to it, since it has internalized all otherness within itself. It cannot even lapse into non-being, since it already both is and is not. It is therefore ‘perfectly eternal’ (ibid.: 69) and nothing at all can become of it, which makes it absolutely necessary. Agamben’s interpretation of contingency navigates an intricate middle path between these two positions. While, for Meillassoux, contingency makes sense only if the law of non-contradiction applies, for Agamben the contingent withdraws from the zone of the application of this law. This difference is due to the two authors’ diverging interpretations of what counts as contingent being. They both define it as what could be otherwise (and hence oppose it to the necessary), but whereas Meillassoux interprets it as the possibility for something to change (for the laws of physics to be different, for example), Agamben interprets it 111

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democratic biopolitics as the possibility for something to be both thus and otherwise, to be and not to be at the same time. Meillassoux’s objects may be forever changing but at any given moment they are actually A and not non-A. On the contrary, Agamben’s objects (or subjects, like Bartleby) might very well remain the same, but in this very sameness they retain the potentiality of being otherwise. Because it is a matter of potentiality, albeit an actually existing potentiality, the law of non-contradiction is not violated but rather sidelined or displaced, which also permits us to evade necessity, even with regard to the past: if the present exists ‘no more than’ it does not, the alternative possibilities that it has relegated to the past are, as it were, restored to potentiality and may be said to ‘inexist’ no more than they exist. The key difference of Agamben’s reading of contingency from the dialectical approach is that his indifference to contradiction, as opposed to its valorization as the engine of the historical process, both permits him to avoid attributing necessity to any aspect of this process and renders his view of history and society as not (or at least not necessarily) antagonistic or conflictual. A world governed by the principle of contingency is a world in which entities can appear both thus and otherwise, without this leading to any necessary antagonism or conflict. This explains why the ontological affirmation of contingency has democracy as its political correlate: if every manifestation of contingency were perceived as a contradiction to be eradicated or resolved, all pluralism would necessarily erupt in conflict that would preclude the consolidation of any regime, until all apparent contradictions are resolved or no antagonist is left. What makes democracy possible is instead a certain degree of indifference to contraries that makes it possible for things to be thus and otherwise without any antagonism necessarily resulting from this.

Freedom, equality, community Our excursus into the philosophical problem of contingency demonstrates that the principle of maximal pluralism of forms of life would be necessary but not sufficient for conceptualizing democratic biopolitics. The limitation is introduced by the ontological principle of contingency itself, which, in contrast to the forms of life in a democracy, is not itself contingent but rather necessary, rendering democratic society constitutively incomplete or disembodied, dispersing the demos into a plurality of forms of life (cf. Marchart 2007: 25–32). The necessity of contingency has recently been asserted in a more general ontological context by Meillassoux (2008), for whom the contingency of all there 112

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biopower and the politics of contingency is, including the laws of the physical world, is the only principle that is actually necessary. If contingency were itself contingent and hence could be otherwise, necessity would be able to creep back in at any moment, thereby bringing back contradictory entities whose exclusion we have discussed above. Thus, Meillassoux is not content with a ‘weak’ thesis, according to which if something exists, it must be contingent (ibid.: 73) but affirms a stronger thesis that it is necessary that the contingent must exist. Since contingency is thinkable (as an absolute), but unthinkable without the persistence of the two realms of existence and inexistence, we have to say that it is necessary that there always be this or that existent capable of not existing and this or that inexistence capable of existing. It is necessary that there be something rather than nothing because it is necessarily contingent that there is something rather than something else. The necessity of the contingency of the entity imposes the necessary existence of the contingent entity. (ibid.: 76)

In the case of Lefortian democracy, it is similarly important to highlight the necessity of the contingency announced by the void of power at its heart. The locus of power in a democracy is not contingently void, as if it could be filled again at any moment by a force that happens to be more appealing, convincing or dexterous. It is impossible to return to the ontopolitical matrix of the monarchy after the revolution, which exposed any articulation of power, truth and ethics in an ontic figure as false. Totalitarianism, which attempts to endow with a positive existence the demos that is supposed to be sovereign, is illegitimate from the perspective of the democratic regime precisely because it negates the necessarily contingent character of any occupation of the locus of power. It therefore treats contingency as itself contingent and for that reason dispensable: a society ‘without being’ can be endowed with being as a result of a political project so that the radical pluralism of forms of life can give way to the ascendancy of one such form to the status of the good and the true. In contrast, democracy is sustained by the insistence on the necessary character of its fundamental contingency. This is why the radical pluralism of forms of life in a democracy is ultimately not unlimited, even as it affirms the proliferation of these forms to infinity. To say that there is no proper form of life in a democracy is not to say that any particular or idiosyncratic form goes and no universal principles exist to adjudicate on their legitimacy. On the contrary, the necessary contingency at the heart of democracy serves as the source for deriving the principles that regulate the coexistence of forms of life in a democratic regime. 113

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democratic biopolitics What are these principles? We have already noted that, as contingent, all forms of life are equal and none can therefore attain hierarchical supremacy over another. Equality is thus the first ontological principle regulating the democratic mise-en-forme. Secondly, insofar as nothing can impede the circulation of these equal forms and their competition for adherents, the subjects of a democracy remain free both in the negative sense of freedom from the domination of some forms of life and in the positive sense of freedom to practice a form of life they want. Finally, insofar as equal forms of life circulate freely in a democratic space, none can be excluded from it and all forms of life remain in common. Equality, freedom and community are therefore not contingent attributes of some form(s) of life in a democracy, but the ontological conditions of democracy itself. Insofar as the locus of power is void and the demos cannot attain a positive presence, it exists in the mode of dispersion into forms of life between which no relationship of dependence, hierarchy or exclusion could be established. As we have argued in detail elsewhere (Prozorov 2013a), it is important to recognize that freedom, equality and community refer to different aspects of the same condition: the radical contingency of forms of life dispersed in struction without any coordinating order. While we are accustomed to accentuating tensions and conflicts between, say, freedom and equality, or freedom and community, in their more basic ontological sense the three principles are not merely consistent with each other but actually indissociable, any two of them reflected in the third. Freedom is nothing other than being equal to every other member of the community, not being dependent on or subjected to any other. Equality is nothing other than membership in the community of the free, in which no hierarchy can be legitimately established. Finally, community itself is nothing but the free and the equal being together without any condition of belonging and hence no possibility of exclusion. With this triad of principles we are evidently back to Rousseau’s general will understood in ontologically minimalist, generic terms, whose content, as we recall, was ultimately reduced to freedom and equality. While Rousseau did not mention community as part of the content of the general will, it is evidently presupposed in the will’s very generality as the will of the entire community without any exclusion: ‘Any formal exclusion is a breach of generality’ (Rousseau 1987: 154, fn. 1. See also Neidleman 2016: 107–8; Cohen 2010: 58–9). To recall our discussion in Part 1, freedom, equality and community do nothing other than manifest the sheer existence of the people while bracketing off the particular predicates of the plural forms of life into which

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biopower and the politics of contingency this people is always already dispersed. And yet, with this identification of the universal principles arising out of necessary contingency of democracy with the general will we appear to inherit Rousseau’s aporia: whenever this generality is actually present, it subtracts itself from particular forms of life, but whenever one dwells within those forms one does not constitute this generality. Since the latter condition is much more common than the former, the universal principles of freedom, equality and community risk remaining transcendental principles, foreclosed from actual experience. In fact, the challenge for Lefort’s or any other post-foundationalist theory of democracy has been precisely how to relate the necessary contingency at the heart of democracy to concrete forms of life. The locus of power may well be empty and the markers of certainty dissolved, but what does it matter for everyday lives in a democracy? Lefort’s diagnosis may be easily affirmed as a regulative principle or an ontological foundation of democracy, but as long as it does not enter actual experience, democracy remains separated from life – the diagnosis that motivated our very inquiry into democratic biopolitics. If the transcendental condition of democracy is beyond experience, then democracy cannot actually be experienced, can be inhabited but not lived. We are reminded here of Foucault’s reading of the Cynics in his final lecture course ‘The Courage of Truth’, which focused precisely on the Cynics’ attempt to practice a life in truth by translating philosophical truths into actual practices and experiences. Foucault contrasted this disposition with the French left of his time, which abandoned this manifestation of truth in life or, worse, practiced it in the inverted form of utter conventionalism and conservatism, adopting ‘[all] the accepted values, all the most customary forms of behaviour, and all the most traditional schemas of conduct, as opposed to bourgeois decadence or leftist madness’ (Foucault 2011: 186). The problem with socialism for Foucault was not merely that it lacked its own biopolitics (Foucault 2008: 93), but that in its utter conformism on the level of everyday life it had been rendered totally lifeless, reduced to an ideological discourse to which there does not correspond any distinct way of living. Can Lefortian democracy avoid the same fate or is it doomed to remain a transcendental principle with no relation to actual forms of life? Agamben’s account of contingency is so important for our argument because it conceives of contingency not merely as a fundamental principle but also as a form of existence or experience. Contingency is never merely a matter of foundations or grounds but rather pertains to a mode of being that preserves potentiality at the

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democratic biopolitics heart of actuality, that exists ‘no more than it does not’, in the manner that is ‘indifferent to contraries’. For democracy to be more than a transcendental principle, the contingency that characterizes it must pass into the very forms of life that dwell in it. In the following chapter we shall address three attempts to resolve this problem.

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Chapter Four

Is there a democratic form of life?

The disappointments of the faithful democrat For democratic biopolitics to be possible, the ontological contingency and epistemic indeterminacy that characterize the democratic mise-en-forme must not remain mere objects of knowledge, articles of faith or regulative norms. Instead, they must enter the very constitution of forms of life themselves. Yet, this is where we encounter a difficulty. In the previous chapter we have argued that the contingency at the heart of democracy entails the absence of anything like a proper form of life. At the same time, we have argued that it is possible to infer from this contingency the principles of freedom, equality and community that are not themselves contingent. The question is then how these principles may be brought into actual forms of life without thereby producing a subtractive, abridged generality that would return us to Rousseau’s aporia. In this chapter we shall address three possible solutions to this conundrum: Alain Badiou’s attempt to constitute a generic form of life of the faithful political subjectivity, Jean-Luc Nancy’s exclusion of politics from the affirmative procedures that coexist in the democratic space and, finally, Giorgio Agamben’s notion of form-of-life, in which constitution and destitution coincide. Let us begin with Badiou, who is closest among these authors to the Rousseauan ideal of popular sovereignty as well as its aporias. Badiou has famously defined politics as a truth procedure, in which the ‘faithful subject’ produces the consequences of the eruption of the undecidable event in its situation or world (Badiou 2005a: 327–408; Badiou 2009: 43–72). Insofar as we view forms of life among such consequences, it is clear that, for Badiou, there is a clear difference between forms of life that are truthful and those devoid or destructive of truth. While ‘democratic materialism’, the spontaneous ideology of our times, admits the existence only of ‘bodies and languages’, ‘individuals and communities’, with no possibility of adjudicating between their truth claims and no universal truth to transcend them, Badiou supplements this nihilistic 117

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democratic biopolitics worldview with a dialectical twist: ‘there are only bodies and languages, except there are also truths’ (Badiou 2009: 4). Now, everything depends on where these truths come from. If they were held to be transcendent, over, above or beyond bodies and languages, then Badiou’s thought would clearly fall outside the immanentist ontology of democratic materialism and instead exemplify an ontotheological orientation (Badiou 2005a: 282–5. See also Livingston 2012: 53–62). There are certainly passages in Badiou where his contempt for the nihilism of our time gets the better of him and he explicitly opposes the ‘true Life’ of an ‘Immortal’ subject to the petty concern with ‘what is’, the ‘mere life’ of bodies and languages (Badiou 2009: 507–14). Nonetheless, a closer reading of the process of generation of truths in both Being and Event and Logics of Worlds shows that, for Badiou, the truths to be affirmed against merely particular interests of bodies and languages are, in a strict sense, the truths of these bodies and languages themselves, arising out of the events that expose the contingency and incompleteness of worldly orders and bring to presence what these orders have resigned to the status of the indiscernible or the inexistent (see Badiou 2005a: 327–53; Badiou 2009: 363–79). Badiou’s truths do not transcend bodies and languages but reveal to them the truth of their being, much as Rousseau’s general will reveals to the people its own existence as a people, which is otherwise foreclosed from presentation by the dispersion of the people into particular identities. And yet, due to their universality, these truths, which for Badiou fall into four distinct domains of politics, science, art and love, are ontologically privileged over merely particularistic forms of life into which individuals and communities are dispersed. Human beings are capable of an infinite variety of forms of life, which may be faithful (affirming truths), reactive (negating truths) and obscure (obfuscating them) (Badiou 2009: 50–61). Thus, Badiou’s dialectical exception, ‘there are also truths’, introduces a hierarchy into the forms of life: even if they are not transcendent, truths still exist as consequences of the rupture of events in being and hence have a higher ontological status than other forms of life that may have no relation to being at all and persist as a mere play of appearances. Thus, for Badiou, equality is elevated to the status of the sole truth of politics, while an infinite variety of forms of life (religion and fashion, sports and gossip, fitness and hip hop) is relegated to the level of particular ‘opinions’ (forms of life that are inherently devoid of truth), circulating in the nihilistic space of democratic materialism. Moreover, this inequality does not merely pertain to the political truth, but also concerns the other three truth procedures: science, art and love. Badiou could not possibly accept as legitimate the pluralistic 118

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is there a democratic form of life? coexistence of equally contingent forms of life in these domains: just as there is proper egalitarian politics and then there is particularistic depoliticization, there is ‘true’ art and then there is lifeless academicism; there is properly evental science and then there is obscurantist nonsense; there is a passionate love affair and then there is ‘friendship with benefits’. In fact, the contrast between the two need not even be so pronounced for Badiou to adjudicate authoritatively between them. For example, in Logics of Worlds, Badiou ventures to prove that, in relation to the event of serialism in music (the Schoenberg-event), the work of Webern exemplifies a faithful form of subject, while Berg’s œuvre is a reactive, ‘weak’ form (ibid.: 84–8). Whatever one’s taste in music, Webern lovers are objectively more ‘in the truth’ than the admirers of Berg. Since there are only four types of truth procedure, Badiou fortunately cannot determine the truth-value of our preferences in other spheres, be it garden design, diet or pension plan. All of these and many other spheres of life (sexuality, religion, economy and so on) are objectively without truth and therefore could not possibly produce a subject: all that can happen there is the unfolding of particular interests of bodies and languages. While Badiou’s ethics clearly privileges subjective fidelity and persistence within the truth, it would be incorrect to interpret his thought as an unconditional affirmation of equality, quite simply because there are other, non-political truths. As Meillassoux has remarked in an incisive critique of Badiou, the key problem of Badiou’s ‘ethic of truths’ is not whether to affirm a truth or not, but which truth to affirm, since they might patently exclude one another: the affirmation of the political truth of equality excludes the extreme particularism of amorous truths, just as the specialized knowledge and training involved in the production of scientific and even artistic truths necessarily implies a hierarchy at odds with the strict egalitarianism of the political truth. [Badiou] never puts forward an operator of hierarchization among the four truth procedures, which, if we think about it, implies a thesis of singular radicality, truly uncommon. In the strict sense, for Badiou, a simple love story between two individuals is a truth in the same way as the French Revolution in its totality, or the theory of General Relativity. Nothing allows us to impart a superior dignity to events that involve a whole nation or a whole science, in relation to the event of an amorous encounter that merely involves two beings. This is why the ethics of truths never allows us to decide for certain what must be selected in a situation; each is here sent back to his responsibility as a plural subject, capable of multiple and ultimately conflictual truths. How to decide between the exigency of political violence, which is ultimately legitimate in certain circumstances, and the incalculable destruction of amorous relations, scientific inventions and

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democratic biopolitics artistic creations that this violence risks occasioning? The choice of a subject cannot be guaranteed by any law, any algorithm of the decision: love or revolution, austere theory or furious avant-garde, the individual is often convoked by divergent truths, and no one can replace its choices here and now between heterogeneous subjectivations. (Meillassoux 2014: 34)

While the choice between the truths may indeed be agonizing, there is a clear hierarchy between the four truth procedures and other spheres of existence, which cannot be opted for without compromising the subject’s fidelity. This is why Badiou cannot accept Lefort’s principle of the radical contingency of all forms of life, despite affirming one of the implications of this contingency: axiomatic equality. For him, there are forms of life that are true and forms of life that are not, the latter divided into the forms that negate truth (reactive and obscure subjectivities) and the forms that are objectively incapable of truth (opinions). This is why, despite his affirmation of equality that is essential to any doctrine of democracy, Badiou’s relationship to democracy remains at least ambivalent. On a number of occasions, he has instead chosen to speak of something like an ‘aristocracy for everyone’ (Badiou 2011: 14–15). Indeed, insofar as ‘life in truth’ ranks above the truthless ‘mere life’, we are dealing with an aristocratic disposition, but since the truths in question are available for everyone without qualification, this aristocracy is paradoxically universal. The problem with this universal aristocracy is that aside from the political truth of equality, which we have derived from the necessity of contingency at the heart of democracy, it is difficult to prove the universality of Badiou’s truths. Moreover, it is precisely the truth of equality that makes Badiou’s distinction between true art and academicism, true science and obscurantism, true love and promiscuity so difficult to maintain. Along with the principles of freedom and community that Badiou removes from the list of ‘truths’ for no good reason (see Prozorov 2013a: 78–93), equality renders legitimate the coexistence of the most diverse forms of life as long as they recognize and affirm their own contingency, entirely irrespective of their evental nature.1 In this setting, Badiou’s preference for Webern over Berg is precisely that, a preference, akin to someone else’s preference for Nickelback, while his ‘praise of love’ (Badiou 2012) has as much truth in it as Don Giovanni’s catalogo. Even scientific truths, undoubtedly true in their own disciplinary domains, are, for example, not determinable as true in the realm of politics. Of course, all these forms may have their adherents who, like Badiou, will consider them truths and in some worlds these adherents may even form stable majorities, but any possible predominance of the supporters of these truths will not have anything to do with their relation to the event. 120

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is there a democratic form of life? Even if we restrict ourselves to the field of politics, the situation is somewhat ambivalent. As we have argued, equality follows from the necessary contingency at the heart of democracy and hence belongs to the universal principles regulating the coexistence of forms of life in a democracy. Yet, while it is easy to infer ontological equality from radical contingency, the ontic content of equality is rather more ambiguous, as its worldly versions (economic equality, juridical equality, social equality and so on) may well oppose each other as they affirm their own supremacy and their ‘properly truthful’ character. It is as if the truth itself could split and disperse into competing ontic forms, which all claim truth status exclusively for themselves and for that reason are all doomed to remain without truth. This ontic undecidability should not be taken as proof of the ontological untruth of equality. On the contrary, it is entirely in accordance with it, as the ontological equality of forms of life also holds true for the diverse interpretations of equality itself. This means that while Badiou is entirely correct to uphold equality as the ontological condition of democratic politics, his ontic politics of equality will necessarily have to compete with other versions of egalitarianism that will not be any less truthful than itself. One way to resolve most of these problems would be to approach Badiou’s politics as meta-democratic, the politics of struggle for democracy that does not yet exist. In this struggle, the affirmation of equality does indeed lead to the constitution of a militant form of life faithful to this affirmation that would subtract itself from all particular forms of life in the name of a democratic revolution that would affirm equality as its constitutive principle. Badiou certainly approaches revolutionary struggles for democracy as exemplars of true politics and subjective fidelity. Yet, this affirmation of pro-democracy struggles is combined with a somewhat paradoxical denigration of the particular forms of life, whose free circulation democracy enables in the event of its victory. Of course, a persistent feature of democratic revolutions has been the eventual disappointment of their participants and especially their ideologues in the outcome, which usually consists in the emergence and proliferation of utterly banal (bourgeois) forms of life utterly at odds with the militant pathos of the struggle for democracy. Yet, this disappointment simply fails to recognize its own victory in this outcome, and instead of celebrating this victory, valorizes only the process of its attainment: that is, the struggle itself. In the course of the struggle for democracy, multiple forms of life, whose freedom, equality and community are affirmed in it, are temporarily suspended and subtracted from, as their practitioners come together to affirm their generic existence as the sovereign people. This results in a manifestation, 121

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democratic biopolitics however transitory or tenuous, of the Rousseauan general will, wholly contained in the sharing of freedom and equality. Yet, the victory in the struggle for democracy inevitably leads to the dissolution of this generic movement as its members retreat into their particular forms of life, whose plurality has now been rendered legitimate and which are now protected by the democratic regime. Since there are no longer any obstacles to the free circulation of these forms as equal and in common, the popular sovereign ends up dispersed into a plurality of forms of life, few or none of which exhibits the generic subjectivity that the prodemocracy movement once possessed. On the contrary, the forms of life in question often appear so depoliticized, private and particular that the question ‘Is this what we were fighting for?’ arises almost inevitably, as pro-democracy militants are disappointed in the democracy they have attained, which has no more need for struggles and the ascetic form of life that these struggles make imperative. Indeed, in an already instituted democracy there is very little left for Badiou’s faithful subject to do: hence the focus of Badiou’s own political involvement on marginal groups yet to be incorporated into a democracy, most importantly undocumented migrants. Badiou is equally affirmative of migrant workers without papers and dismissive of particularistic cultures of migrant (or native) workers with papers. Provided all the workers were actually endowed with the papers in question, there would be nothing left for Badiou to affirm and he would certainly be disappointed in what these newly legalized workers chose to do with their lives, especially if they happened to enjoy Pokémon Go, a game he finds particularly irritating (cf. Badiou 2016). Heroic struggles for democracy produce nothing but a society preoccupied with a myriad of banal lifestyles – but this is exactly what happens all the time after heroic sequences from the storming of the Bastille to Euromaidan. It takes heroism to struggle for democracy in the conditions of tyranny or totalitarianism, but the end result of the struggle is not a society of heroes, not even a society of truth, but a radically pluralistic society, whose being is dispersed into a multiplicity of contingent and incommensurable forms of life. Affirming the struggle for such a society while rejecting the only possible victorious outcome of such a struggle throws us back to Rousseau’s aporia and the antinomy between biopolitics and democracy that we started out from.

Democracy of the incommensurable A diametrically opposed answer to the question of a democratic form of life is provided in Jean-Luc Nancy’s theory of democracy. While, for Badiou, there exists a democratic form of life obtained by the 122

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is there a democratic form of life? subtraction from particularistic forms and the fidelity to the political truth of equality, for Nancy democracy ensures only the coexistence of a plurality of forms of life without prescribing any form of life of its own. In the previous chapter we discussed Nancy’s concept of struction as the name for the pluralism of the incommensurable. We have argued that it is this radical pluralism that characterizes a democratic society conceived in the Lefortian terms of the necessary contingency of its foundations. This pluralism is also the starting point of Nancy’s own theory of democracy, which may be read as the attempt to make struction legitimate. As an ontological concept, struction is not itself immediately political. No determinate political position follows from the understanding of the being of beings as ‘heaping up without putting together’ (Nancy 2015a: 36). And yet, it is possible to pose the question of what politics would be adequate to this ontology of struction, of a minimal order without coordination, of coexistence without a common principle, of presence without an architecture or an architectonic. It is not a matter of inferring a politics from ontology but of imagining a political design, in which struction would become legitimate: not merely there, but also something that ought to be the way it is. Nancy’s Truth of Democracy envisions society in terms of a radical pluralism of incommensurable ends, senses, forms of life or what he calls generically ‘procedures of affirmation’ (Nancy 2010: 26). Throughout the text Nancy engages in a somewhat esoteric debate with Badiou, whose ‘truth procedures’ are limited to four: politics, science, art and love. In contrast, Nancy’s procedures of affirmation may well proliferate to infinity and include such banal everyday activities as jogging, yoga, dreaming, gastronomy or enology. Even more important is the status he assigns to politics among these procedures. While Badiou counts politics among truth procedures, Nancy explicitly removes it from the list of affirmative procedures that set themselves their own ends and limits the function of politics to opening and guarding the space in which such procedures may unfold: ‘Power is in place to enable societized human beings to work out their own goals for themselves, goals over which power as such is powerless: the endless ends of meaning, of meanings, of forms, of intensities of desire’ (Nancy 2011: 70). Politics becomes the management of the incommensurable plurality that characterizes struction, which prevents it from succumbing to the temptation of construction, the reordering of the society as a whole in accordance with a certain architectural principle, the totalization of the plurality into a new determinate figure, the endowment of being-in-common with a common being. 123

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democratic biopolitics The difference from Badiou could not be starker. A politics that seeks truth will eventually find it, as Rousseau also did, in pure existence and the equality that arises from it. Yet, for Nancy, this truth is not enough. There are many forms of life that are neither true nor untrue, but which exist and have to coexist somehow without any single one of them dominating the others. The starting point for Nancy’s theory of democracy is thus not the genericity of individual and collective existence but the radical pluralism of coexisting forms of life. Yet, why is democratic politics proscribed from constituting an affirmative procedure of its own? For Nancy, every affirmative procedure is tempted by the idea of its own totalization, ‘of a form incorporating all the expressive forms of being-in-common’ (ibid.: 72). Yet, this totalization is manifestly impossible in most of these procedures due to their limited and particularistic character: we may proclaim a particular opera, rapper, steakhouse or trainers as the ‘best in the world’ but the world tends to be entirely indifferent to such proclamations and we normally tend to leave it there. It is only politics, which deals with its site in its entirety, that ‘allows it to be thought that something like totality might be attainable and, for that “political” reason, [is] driven to erase its own boundary by claiming that “everything is political” or that politics takes precedence over any other praxis’ (ibid.). It is this drive of politics to embrace the totality of what is that leads to various forms of ‘totalitarianism’, which destroy the very possibility of the continuous generation of sense in diverse affirmative procedures. All politics, including ostensibly democratic politics, is always at the risk of collapsing into totalitarianism. Indeed, Nancy argues that one of the reasons for the contemporary disappointment in, or even the crisis of democracy in, the West has to do with the expectation (which is entirely unwarranted in his scheme) that democracy would totalize the people, community or republic as an actual political subject, produce the demos whose name it invokes in the immanence of social reality (Nancy 2010: 17–18). In order to counter this drive for totalization, democratic politics must be held rigorously distinct from the other procedures of setting ends, making sense or affirming values: while the latter may continue to aspire to the totality they can never attain, politics must rather consist in a movement of ‘detotalization’ (ibid.: 51): ‘politics is far from being “everything” – even though everything passes through it and meets up or crosses paths in it. If “everything is political”, it is insofar as the “everything” can be neither total nor totalized in any way’ (ibid.). In Nancy’s argument, politics ‘removes from the order of the state – without taking away anything from the functions that belong to it – the assumption of the ends of man, of common and singular existence’ (ibid.: 34). Politics opens up the possibility for 124

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is there a democratic form of life? incommensurable or non-equivalent affirmative procedures to unfold but is itself radically without affirmation. The condition of nonequivalent affirmation is political inasmuch as politics must prepare a space for it. But the affirmation itself is not political. It can be almost anything you like – existential, artistic, literary, dreamy, amorous, scientific, thoughtful, leisurely, playful, friendly, gastronomic, urban and so on: politics subsumes none of these registers; it only gives them their space and possibility. Politics sketches out nothing more than the contour, or the many contours, of indetermination whose opening might allow these affirmations to take place. Politics does not affirm; it accedes to the claim of affirmation. It does not bear ‘sense’ or ‘value’. Democratic politics renounces giving itself a figure; it allows for a proliferation of figures. (ibid.: 26)

How does this account of democratic politics relate to Nancy’s ontology of struction? Democracy is quite evidently a con-struction – a regime, order or form that is produced and maintained in political practices. And yet, the principle of this construction is paradoxically contained entirely in struction itself, which thereby ends up legitimized on the ontic level as something to be protected by state power. Democracy is a construct that constructs nothing more than the legitimacy of coexistence in the absence of any principle of construction. It therefore raises to the level of normativity and legitimacy that which is in itself neither normative nor legitimate: the simple ‘heaping up without putting together’. It is thus a construct that deconstructs every principle of construction and thereby is left with affirming nothing but struction itself. For this reason, ‘politics is in charge of space and of spacing but it is not in charge of figuring’ (ibid.: 50). Politics ensures that the space of struction as such would remain devoid of any principle of construction even as it is filled with a multiplicity of incommensurable figures of construction in the most diverse spheres. Art, love and thought are entitled every time, at every occurrence, to proclaim themselves accomplished. But at the same time, these fulfillments are only valid in their proper spheres, and have no claim to make either law or politics. [These] registers belong to the order of a ‘finishing off of the infinite’, whereas politics pertains to indefinition. (Nancy 2011: 73–4)

While democracy legitimizes and protects the subsistence of struction, the latter actually makes democracy intelligible as a politically constructed space of the sharing of the incommensurable that has nothing to do with utopia or idealism, but quite simply is in accordance with the way ‘things are’ (Nancy 2010: 24–5). The coexistence of the incommensurable is all 125

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democratic biopolitics there is and democratic politics keeps it as it is, preventing any attempt at totalization. [Politics] is the place of an in-common as such – but only along the lines of an incommensurability that is kept open. It does not subsume the ‘in common’ under any kind of union, community, subject or epiphany. Everything that is of the ‘common’ is not political, and what is political is not in every way ‘common’. From now on, politics must be understood as the specific place for the articulation of a nonunity – and the symbolization of a nonfigure. (ibid.: 50–1)

And yet, if all that democratic politics can achieve is keeping open the space of coexistence and competition between incommensurable affirmative procedures, Nancy’s theory appears somewhat uncomfortably close to the ‘legitimation of the actual state of affairs’ in contemporary Western liberal democracies (cf. Nancy 2011: 74). If politics is not allowed to set itself its own ends, it becomes the guardian of the space of free circulation of particularistic forms of life (gardening, yoga, New Age, computer science, black magic, philosophy, body art and so on), which resembles the market, which is, after all, also open to the pursuit of all kinds of enterprise. Is democracy then nothing more than the political correlate of the market? In fact, it is precisely the contrast with the market that helps Nancy pinpoint the specificity of his approach to democracy. The logic of the market deals with struction by rendering its incommensurable plurality calculable through the general equivalent of money, which permits abstraction from the content and value of individual affirmative procedures. The incommensurable ends or senses thus become equivalent, but only by being stripped of their singularity and subjected to the regime that calculates their ‘worth’ in terms other than their own. In contrast, Nancy’s democracy of struction is founded ‘on the order of the unexchangeable, of what is without value because it is outside all measurable value’ (Nancy 2010: 17). While the market makes possible the free circulation of singularities by making them commensurable in the mode of the general equivalent, democracy attempts to ensure the same circulation on the basis of the opposite principle of nonequivalence of all singularities: those of persons and moments, places, gestures of a person, those of the hours of the day or night, those of words spoken, those of clouds that pass, plants that grow with a knowing slowness. [. . .] Each time it is a question of a particular consideration, of attention and tension, of respect, even of what we can go so far as to call adoration, directed at singularity as such. (Nancy 2015a: 39)

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is there a democratic form of life? This adoration ‘goes beyond itself and addresses something inestimable, something incalculable, so exceeding any possible calculation that one does not even try to imagine it’ (ibid.). For Nancy, this radically asymmetric approach to singularity is in fact closer to the revolutionary– democratic notion of equality than the market logic of equivalence: Equivalence is not equality. It is not the equality that the French Republic sets between liberty and fraternity and that can in fact be thought of as both a synthesis and a surpassing of these two notions. Equality designates here the strict equality in dignity of all living humans not excluding other registers of dignity for all living beings, even for all things. Dignity is the name of the value that it is absolutely valid, [which means] it has no worth if to ‘have worth’ implies a scale of measure. (ibid.: 40)

While the market logic of equivalence leads to the sterile and inconsequential affirmation of atomized individuals and groups as interchangeable and substitutable, the logic of the equality of the incommensurable affirms ‘absolute and irreducible singulars that are not individuals or social groups but sudden appearances, arrivals and departures, voices, tones – here and now every instant’ (ibid.: 41). The democratic ethos of non-equivalence attunes us to the perpetual coming to (and going out of) presence of incommensurable singularities: This coming about is the time of struction: an event whose significance is not only that of the unexpected or inaugural, not only the significance of rupture or regeneration in the timeline – but also the significance of the passage, of ephemerality intermixed with eternity. (ibid.: 53)

To think in this ‘pure present’, to be attentive to and appreciative of whatever comes into presence irrespective of its ‘worth’, is, for Nancy, the sole pathway out of nihilism, insofar as we understand nihilism as the ‘nullification of distinctions, of senses and values’ (Nancy 2010: 22). He calls this ethical disposition the ‘communism of nonequivalence’ (Nancy 2015a: 41) and argues that democracy actually depends on this ‘communist’ element, ‘otherwise it would be but the management of necessities and expediencies, lacking in desire, that is, in spirit, in breath, in sense’ (Nancy 2010: 15). Thus, democracy differs from the economic logic of the market precisely insofar as, in addition to merely marking the space of struction, it adds something to it: namely, it adds itself as spirit. Yet, it is precisely the status of this spirit, desire, breath or sense that remains ambiguous in Nancy’s work in the light of his insistence on the absence of a properly political affirmation in a democracy. The spirit of democracy is essential to it but apparently cannot itself be brought to affirmation within it, at least not in the same way as all the affirmative procedures it makes possible. This 127

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democratic biopolitics is why, through The Truth of Democracy, Nancy speaks of the tasks of democracy in negative terms: it cannot do anything more than keep open the space for the proliferation of ends and it must not assume any ends of its own (ibid.: 21, 33). It is, then, hardly surprising that this democracy that is proscribed from any self-affirmation can also hardly figure as the source of enjoyment or pleasure: ‘Politics leads to nothing. It can “satisfy” – sufficient structure, sufficient standards – but it cannot bring us to a climax of joy’ (Nancy 2012). The spirit of democracy is not particularly spirited. Whereas, for the Rousseauist paradigm, democracy (or sovereignty in Rousseau’s own terms!) was accessible only in the subtraction from the particular and the constitution of the generic subject of the people, for Nancy democracy is, from the outset, foreclosed from constituting any subject and restricted to protecting the coexistence of particular forms of life. Whereas Badiou strives to articulate a figure of ‘true life’ in opposition to the pluralism of bodies and languages, a privileged form of life that manifests the truth of politics (or art, science and love), for Nancy there can be no form of life with a privileged access to truth. The truth of democracy is not within any concrete form of life but between them, in their reciprocal exposure to each other as contingent and incommensurable. The only truth is the pluralism of struction itself. To affirm this truth, democracy must refrain from proposing any truth of its own, any form of life that would be specifically democratic. While Nancy has not taken part in the debate on democratic biopolitics and has generally been quite dismissive of the problematic (see Nancy 2007a: 93–5), in the Truth of Democracy he makes one crucial observation on biopolitics that both illuminates his approach to rethinking democracy and connects his thought explicitly to these debates. This observation takes place in the already familiar context of the separation of politics from the order of ends or procedures of affirmation: It is not given that the criteria for health should (or could) simply be the duration or length of life or else some physiological equilibrium that would be determined on the basis of an ideal of duration or performance. The meaning of ‘health’ cannot simply be determined in opposition to ‘illness’ or, in general, by what medicine is for us. Medicine, illness and health have values, senses and modalities that depend upon profound choices made by a culture and upon an ethos that is anterior to all ‘ethics’ and to all ‘politics’. A politics of health can only respond to choices and orientations that it itself can scarcely modify. (It is for this reason that the term biopolitics relies upon a confused hypertrophy of the sense and meaning of ‘politics’). A form of ‘health’ is a thought, a grabbing hold of existence; to risk putting it in what will be judged to be a hyperbolic and archaic way – it is a metaphysics not a politics. (Nancy 2010: 33)

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is there a democratic form of life? Nancy’s target in this fragment is more Agamben than Foucault. He has long been critical of Agamben’s interpretation of politics as related to life negatively from time immemorial (Agamben 1998: 6–9; cf. Nancy 2007a: 94). There are two extreme forms this negative relation takes in modernity: the subjection of life to political imperatives in twentiethcentury totalitarianism and the subjection of politics to life in contemporary nihilism. In the former case, politics completely dominates life, molding it in accordance with its ideas and negating it in their name. In the latter case, politics ends up serving the goal of the maintenance of life itself, there no longer being any other criterion for its legitimacy (cf. Agamben 2004: 75–7). For Nancy, both of these extreme options obscure the fact that politics need not be related to life in any immediate sense at all, either by determining it or by being determined by it. There are numerous forms of life (bioi), prescribed by different affirmative procedures. All that politics can aspire to in a democracy is to preclude the ascent of any one of them to the status of the coordinating or constructing principle. While, for Nancy, this seems to disqualify the very term ‘biopolitics’ in the context of democracy, in our view his stance rather opens the possibility of rethinking biopolitics in a democratic fashion: that is, no longer as the domination of (bare) life by its privileged form but as the coexistence of forms of life without a coordinating principle. Indeed, what are Nancy’s affirmative procedures – ‘existential, artistic, literary, dreamy, amorous, scientific, thoughtful, leisurely, playful, friendly, gastronomic, urban’ – if not forms of life perpetually coming to and going out of presence? More generally, given the radically materialist orientation of Nancy’s philosophy, its persistent focus on bodies, sense, desire, touch and pleasure, it is difficult to see how a politics derived from this orientation could be anything other than a biopolitics, a politics that makes the dispersal of incommensurable forms of life in struction legitimate. The advantage of the ontology of struction is that it demonstrates that this dispersal is not the construct of democratic politics, let alone the effect of any crisis or ruin of democracy, but rather always already characterizes the world itself, making every cosmos acosmic and every universe a multiverse. For Nancy, there is no form proper to life ‘as such’, precisely because ‘as such’ – that is, as struction – life is nothing but the plurality of its incommensurable forms. Since these forms are non-equivalent, it is impossible not merely to elevate one form over the others, but even to establish the value of life ‘itself’ as the general equivalent across this pluralistic field: incommensurable forms of life are likely to have very different criteria of health and illness. Just as one’s concern about one’s health may be lauded as proper care of the 129

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democratic biopolitics self in one form of life and dismissed as self-obsessed hypochondria in another, we are unlikely to arrive at any consensus about what good life is, whether ‘life itself’ is already good or what ‘life itself’ actually is. All that politics can legitimately aspire to in a democracy is letting these incommensurable lives live themselves in accordance with their senses and ends without dominating or suppressing other such senses and ends. Democratic biopolitics lets every bios pursue its fitness in whatever way it sees fit. This is why Nancy’s rethinking of democracy is so strongly opposed to Rousseau or at least to a certain paradigmatic ‘Rousseauism’ that he reconstructs in The Truth of Democracy. What Nancy wishes to take distance from is Rousseau’s claim that ‘were there a people of gods, it would govern itself democratically. So perfect a government is not suited to men’ (Rousseau 1987: 180). Though, as we have seen, Rousseau restricts the notion of democracy to refer to the form of government, the aspiration for perfection does characterize Rousseau’s argument in The Social Contract more generally and also pertains to the existence of the people as sovereign (cf. Starobinski 1988). In Nancy’s reading, if Rousseau resigns himself to thinking that democracy properly speaking would be good only for a people of gods, it is because of his invincible conviction that the people should be divine, that man should be divine, in other words, that the infinite should be given. (Nancy 2010: 19. See also Nancy 2011: 60)

This is why Rousseau’s democracy must be contained solely and entirely in the sovereignty of the general will, with all particular interests, senses and affirmations bracketed off to maintain the purity of the product (cf. Rousseau 1987: 179–80). This reading offers a somewhat simplified image of Rousseau’s thought, which, as we have argued in Part 1, is in many ways close to Nancy’s own account of political community as inoperative. And yet, even if we approach Rousseau’s people in the generic terms that have nothing to do either with divinity or infinity, an important difference remains: for Rousseau, the sovereign people cannot exist as dispersed into a multiplicity of particular forms of life but must come to presence as a generic subject, exercising its sovereignty as general will. The universal must come forth, subtracting itself from the particular forms of life it dwells in and bring its truth to life. Similarly, for Badiou, the fidelity to the event produces the subject through its subtraction from particular worldly identities that makes a new ‘true life’ possible. In contrast, Nancy refuses to associate democracy with the constitution and manifestation of any new subject: ‘The infinite should not be given and man should not 130

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is there a democratic form of life? be (a) god. This lesson is the correlate lesson of the invention of democracy’ (Nancy 2010: 20). The ‘infinite identity’ of the Rousseauist community is ‘infinitely lacking’ (Nancy 1991: xxxix): a democratic community exists only as heaped-up plurality without any identitarian predicate. This is why democratic (bio)politics must refrain from setting its own ends, positing a privileged form of life, defining the criteria of health and illness – any alternative would simply mark a relapse into the Rousseauist negation of struction in favor of the reconstruction of humanity in some privileged form, even if this form is only a subtractive generality. Thus, even though Nancy addresses the concept of biopolitics only tangentially, his theory of democracy makes an important contribution to rethinking democratic biopolitics, which consists in the affirmation of the incommensurability of forms of life that coexist in a democracy, making it impossible to postulate anything like a ‘true’ or properly democratic form of life, since there is no criterion in terms of which this truth could be adjudicated. As we have seen, even in the case of Badiou’s truth procedures, the criterion of truth does not operate in the same way for the four procedures. Once we remove the privilege granted to art, science, politics and love and consider a wider array of affirmative procedures, the impossibility of subsuming them under any single concept of truth becomes manifest. And yet, we often continue to ignore this incommensurability and expect a single standard to apply to the most diverse procedures, as if poetry and jogging, cooking and cinema, monasticism and death metal could be held together in a single space, in which they could be adjudicated as to their truth. We therefore habitually expect good music also to be politically progressive, progressive politicians to have good taste, astute philosophers to behave ethically and so on. It is easy to see why such expectations will inevitably end up disappointed. There is no necessary common measure for comparing and evaluating different affirmative procedures. Hence, a philosopher with known Nazi sympathies may have posed remarkably interesting and original questions, invented new approaches, problematics and ways of thinking. In contrast, a progressive politics promoting equality and emancipation may well yield a philosophy that is banal and uninteresting. One’s scholarly successes would not make their poems any better, let alone grant them any authority to transform the world in accordance with their poetic vision. My political affirmation of the equality of all beings does not contradict my love for a singular individual, nor does it authorize it. Since the affirmative procedures that coexist in struction remain non-equivalent and incommensurable, one truth cannot rub off on another. It is important to note that this position is entirely distinct from relativism: there may exist meaningful criteria of the true or the good 131

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democratic biopolitics in every affirmative procedure, which cannot be directly translated into the terms of another such procedure. This does not mean that ‘anything goes’; on the contrary, something ‘goes’ somewhere but not somewhere else. Scientific truths are different from artistic or political ones and while within these procedures it might be possible to adjudicate between truth and falsity, the adjudication between the procedures themselves might make no sense and neither does the subordination of one to another (cf. Lyotard 1988: 3–31). The pluralism of procedures is present in Badiou’s approach as well, although there it is mitigated by limiting truth to four distinct procedures. In contrast, in Nancy’s approach, the number of procedures is potentially infinite; hence the category of truth ceases to apply to them in any meaningful sense. And yet, it is important to recall that the title of Nancy’s book remains ‘The Truth of Democracy’: while there is no truth in the individual procedures of affirmation, there appears to be truth in the affirmation of their sheer coexistence without any principle of coordination. Yet, this is where Nancy’s analysis encounters a difficulty. In his desire to avoid the naïve Rousseauism of a (self-)productive democracy that turns its subjects into the gods it presupposes them to be, he appears to throw the baby out with the bathwater by rendering the spirit of democracy all but ineffable. It is clear why Nancy is so careful to avoid any self-valorization of democracy, which would lead to its ascent to the status of the privileged affirmative procedure in its own right. Just as twentieth-century totalitarianisms that deluded themselves about being able to produce their ideals as actual forms of life, a democracy that ventured to construct itself as a self-immanent community of ‘democrats’ would end up a disaster. The ease with which Rousseau’s generic and subtractive figure of the people is reinterpreted as the foundation for ‘totalitarian democracy’ demonstrates the risks involved in any endowment of democracy with a productive function. And yet, Nancy’s exclusion of democracy itself from affirmative procedures risks the opposite disaster: a political regime that can be neither affirmed nor enjoyed may at any point fall victim to the one that can. Moreover, Nancy’s austere reduction of democracy to the regulatory function of keeping the space of the incommensurable safe makes it difficult to understand how democracy, which does not affirm anything, can itself be the object of affirmation in struggles, revolts and revolutions worldwide, from the Velvet Revolutions to the Arab Spring? While Badiou’s theory could account for the emergence and persistence of prodemocracy struggles without being of much use in accounting for politics within an existing democracy, Nancy’s theory appears quite plausible in the context of actually existing democracies but can hardly explain how 132

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is there a democratic form of life? they have come about. Historical struggles for democracy demonstrate how the most diverse and even incommensurable political orientations are articulated into movements and coalitions that affirm democracy as such, as an alternative to the existing authoritarian regimes. The courage, resolve and resourcefulness of these struggles could hardly have been motivated by the regime that ‘leads to nothing’ and can only be ‘satisfying’ without being capable of inciting joy or pleasure. What is it about democracy that makes it worth struggling for? In our view, while Nancy’s ‘Rousseauism’ vainly seeks the purification of the universality of the general will from particular interests, Nancy himself commits the opposite error of affirming incommensurable particulars without explicating the universals that make this affirmation possible to begin with. If democracy affirms no content of its own, how can it ensure that the space of the coexistence of incommensurable affirmative procedures remains open and non-totalized? Is the non-totalization of struction itself not a principle that politics must explicitly affirm? Thus, neither Badiou’s articulation of a militant democratic form of life nor Nancy’s withdrawal of democratic politics from the plurality of incommensurable forms of life succeeds in resolving the key problem of democratic biopolitics: how is it possible to translate the fundamental principles of democracy into forms of life themselves, to make the transcendental conditions of democracy themselves accessible to lived experience? Badiou’s democratic form of life remains subtracted from and opposed to the diverse plurality of forms of life that are inherently without truth. In contrast, Nancy’s democracy, which withdraws itself from the affirmative procedures whose coexistence it makes possible, becomes impossible to affirm in actual experience, its spirit becoming almost ineffable. In the remainder of this chapter we shall outline a third answer to the question of the possibility of a democratic form of life. We shall argue that democracy is neither itself a form of life nor a mere framework for the coexistence of forms of life that have nothing to do with democracy. Instead, the contingency proper to democracy and the principles of freedom, equality and community that follow from it may be brought to affirmation in any form of life whatsoever, but only as long as this form is practiced in a certain way.

Democratic mannerism In the previous chapter, we argued that freedom, equality and community function as universal principles derived from the necessary contingency at the heart of democracy. It is easy to see that Nancy’s notion of struction yields the same implications, even as they remain unexplicated in his theory 133

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democratic biopolitics of democracy. To affirm struction is not merely to proclaim the absence of order or relation between individual elements, but rather to highlight their coming to presence as incommensurable and non-equivalent, their coappearance without co-ordination. The implications of struction are therefore never merely negative: to say that something is in struction is to say it is contingent, dispersed, errant among other such contingent, dispersed and errant entities. For this reason, to affirm one’s own form of life is always already to affirm it as in common with others, equally contingent with them and free from any principle of construction. To affirm oneself in any procedure in a democracy (art, science, sexuality, yoga, gastronomy and so on) must therefore mean also and simultaneously affirming the community, equality and freedom of all other affirmations that come to presence in the space of struction. In fact, Nancy’s own work has been among the most significant attempts in contemporary philosophy to rethink community (1991, 2000), equality (1997: 114–15) and freedom (1994, 1997: 66–79) as more than historically specific and essentially contested terms of political discourse but rather as aspects of the ontology of struction itself: [The] words equality and freedom are but problematic names, nonsaturated by signification, under which it is a matter of keeping open the exigency of not accomplishing an essence or an end of the incommensurable. The exigency of regulating according to a universal that is not given and must be produced. (2010: 51)

In our view, freedom, equality and community, indissociable as aspects of struction, serve precisely as the universal that keeps open the exigency of incommensurability, nonequivalence and detotalization. Yet, it is difficult to see why and how this universal would (have to) be produced, since it is evidently given in every experience of struction itself and especially since it was precisely the production of universals that was the problem with the naïve ‘Rousseauist’ understanding of democracy. We would therefore reformulate the content of affirmation proper to democracy in the opposite way: the exigency of not accomplishing an essence and reducing the incommensurable is maintained by regulating the democratic space by the universals of community, equality and freedom, which are always already given in the condition of struction and therefore do not have to be produced. Moreover, they also delegitimize production or construction as goals of democracy, while at the same time opening the possibility of infinite and incommensurable ventures of production and construction within the diverse procedures of affirmation. 134

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is there a democratic form of life? As attributes of struction, freedom, equality and community evidently resonate with the content of Rousseau’s general will, yet in contrast to Nancy’s ‘Rousseauism’ this generality is not an effect of any production, let alone any purification from the particular, but is in principle at work in every particular affirmation. It is not a matter of separating the universalist affirmation of these three principles as ‘properly democratic’ from the other affirmative procedures that democracy makes possible, since freedom, equality and community refer to nothing other than these procedures themselves and the forms of life that they constitute. It is even less a matter of elevating political affirmation above other procedures of affirmation, since once it is elevated it loses touch with the forms of life whose freedom, equality and community it was meant to affirm. It is impossible to affirm freedom, equality and community as general principles isolated from particular forms of life: they are nothing but the implications of the coexistence of the latter without any principle of construction, hierarchy or unity. Thus, rather than elevate politics above other affirmative procedures, democratic biopolitics would add the universalist affirmation of freedom, equality and community to every particular affirmation as its own precondition. We can only affirm our own idiosyncratic and non-equivalent form of life along with affirming the freedom, equality and community of all the other forms of life with which it coexists. Only such a supplementation of the particular by the universal ensures the detotalization that democracy consists in, as the universality in question has its entire content in the subversion of any totality. It is this affirmation of the universality of the freedom, equality and community of the incommensurably singular that makes possible the widest coalitions in the struggles for democracy, which frequently unite individuals and groups with incompatible ideological orientations. What the participants of democratic struggles share, affirm and enjoy is not any positive principle of the construction of society, nor even an empty signifier articulating their particular demands into a chain of equivalence (cf. Laclau 2005), but rather the contingency of their own affirmative praxis, which in its very act legitimizes all other affirmations as free and equal in their very non-equivalence. Instead of seeking one privileged form of life that alone would embody contingency and indeterminacy proper to democracy, we should pose the question of a way of living that would supplement every particular form of life by the universal affirmation of the contingency of every such form and the principles of freedom, equality and community that follow from this contingency. Against Badiou’s insistence on one properly political form of life, we would then affirm an infinite plurality of forms 135

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democratic biopolitics of life that accord with the democratic mise-en-forme, but, in contrast to Nancy, we insist that this mise-en-forme must itself be affirmed in these forms for them to become legitimate. In short, what we seek to establish is the possibility for a particular form of life to affirm something besides its own particular content rather than subtract itself from such content altogether. This line of inquiry resonates with Agamben’s notion of destituent power, developed in the final volume of the Homo Sacer series, The Use of Bodies, which elaborates his enigmatic idea of a form-of-life. As we have discussed in the Prologue, form-of-life refers to a life inseparable from its form, whereby a bios is only its own zoe, while zoe is accessible only in a certain mode of bios. Whereas the power of sovereign biopolitics is constitutive – that is, constituting a determinate actual bios out of the indefinite potentialities of zoe – form-of-life exemplifies the power of rendering actual and determinate forms inoperative, restoring to them their potentiality (Agamben 2016: 207–13, 263–79). Instead of the biopolitical apparatus, in which life was fractured into the unqualified zoe, presupposed and negated in the name of the attainment of the political life of bios, we end up with a life that generates its forms in its own living and which forms itself to enjoy its own living, a life that is inseparable from the form it takes. It is generated in living and for that reason does not have any priority, either substantial or transcendental, with respect to living. It is only a manner of being and living, which does not in any way determine the living thing, just as it is in no way determined by [the living thing] and is nonetheless inseparable from it. (ibid.: 224)

Life forms itself in myriad modes and does not coincide with any of its specific forms, since it is present in all of them. Rather than attempt to devise anything like a proper form of life, Agamben seeks to free life from the gravity of all tasks or vocations imposed on it by privileged forms: no life has to be in a certain form and no form must be actualized in life. In form-of-life, life is simply carried (away) by a form, always tentatively and usually transiently, retaining in its every activity its potential not-to and thereby rendering inoperative every operation to which it lends itself (ibid.: 189–91). This does not mean that, for Agamben, any form of life is as good as any other: ‘All living beings are in a form of life, but not all are a form-of-life’ (ibid.: 277).2 And yet, in contrast to Badiou’s ‘true life’ of the faithful subject, form-of-life is not a specific new form to be invented or adopted, abandoning other forms. Agamben repeatedly emphasizes 136

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is there a democratic form of life? that it is not a matter of offering some specific, new, hitherto unheard-of practice as an alternative to the existing or predominant forms: It is not a matter of thinking a better or more authentic form of life, a superior principle, or an elsewhere that suddenly arrives at forms of life and factical vocations to revoke them and render them inoperative. Inoperativity is not another work that suddenly arrives and works to deactivate and depose them: it coincides completely and constitutively with their destitution, with living a life. (ibid.)

Instead, it is a matter of adopting a different perspective on something entirely familiar and banal – quite simply, our habits, hobbies, tastes, manners, quirks and so on. To constitute a form-of-life out of a form of life we must not abandon any of them for some great unknown, but rather live these very familiar forms otherwise than we have tended to. The notion of destituent power adds a subtle twist to Nancy’s affirmation of radical pluralism of affirmative procedures. While it is certainly essential for democracy that diverse forms of life circulate freely in the absence of discrimination or domination, equally essential is the manner in which these forms are actually lived. A pluralistic society, in which forms of life succumb to the appropriative logic of human capital, sacrifices its democracy for the ‘idiocy of the private’ (ibid.: 230), while a society in which some form of life is endowed with the status of a transcendent truth quickly succumbs to tyranny or civil war. While Agamben takes particular care not to endow any particular form of life with epistemic or ethical privilege they could not possibly possess in a democratic mise-en-forme, what is essential for him is not the ‘what’ but the ‘how’, the way a form of life is taken up and lived, the way in which a lifestyle is adopted and practiced. Democratic biopolitics is not merely a regulated coexistence between ready-made forms of life available as individual or group identities, but also, and more importantly, a way of living that brings the contingency and indeterminacy at the origin and foundation of democracy into its very praxis, that lives the very miseen-forme that makes democracy possible. Thus, the condition of there being no form of life proper to democracy remains fulfilled, as what is affirmed is not any specific form but only the manner in which any form whatsoever could be lived. In The Fire and the Tale Agamben contrasts manner and style in the following way: ‘in any good writer, in any artist, there is always a manner that takes its distance from the style, a style that disappropriates itself as manner’ (Agamben 2017: 9). Similarly, in The Use of Bodies, style marks the ‘most proper trait’ of a poetic gesture and manner 137

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democratic biopolitics ‘registers an inverse demand for expropriation and non-belonging’ (Agamben 2016: 86–7). Whereas style designates a consistent model or a stereotype that defines a form of life in its recognizable and repeatable identity, manner refers to the failure or refusal to appropriate or identify fully with this style, a slight deviation from identity that introduces an element of destitution into what constitutes a style. It is important to emphasize that Agamben does not simply affirm destitution against constitution, potentiality against actuality, manner against style, but ventures to define a mode of praxis in which both are present at once, an act that retains and manifests its potentiality not to be, a constitutive practice that brings destitution into its every act, a style qualified and disappropriated by a manner. In this manner, form-of-life attains ontically what Lefort’s theory of democracy affirms ontologically: the putting in question of the very being of society. To live democratically is not merely to affirm democratic principles as a matter of knowledge or belief, but also to practice whatever particular form of life one dwells in in the manner that lets the ontological contingency and epistemic indeterminacy that define the democratic mise-en-forme be experienced as such. This notion of manner is considerably thinner and less substantive than the democratic form of life reconstructed by Honneth. For Honneth, the form of life characterized by what he terms ‘social freedom’ is constituted by the actual practices of mutual recognition in the spheres of personal, economic and political life, which establishes the reality of the freedom that legal and moral doctrines only offer as a possibility. Our intention in this book is less ambitious, insofar as we remain focused on possibility and not actuality – hence our outline of democratic biopolitics is an analytic experiment and not, as in Honneth, a ‘normative reconstruction’ of actual practices and normative ideals in Western modernity. Yet, we share with Honneth the interest in going beyond the transcendental conditions of democracy, be they legal or moral, towards the actual lived experience of democracy, which for us is fundamentally the lived experience of possibility itself. Another parallel with Honneth’s account concerns the universality of the fundamental principles of democratic biopolitics. While Honneth views freedom as the primary principle of modernity, from which others could be derived (Honneth 2014: 15–18), we view the three principles as equiprimordial attributes of the contingency that defines struction. Yet, just as Honneth argues that freedom acquires its reality from the intersubjective process of recognition, in which the other is no longer the limit of my freedom but its condition, we have similarly argued that democracy prescribes the universal affirmation of all forms of life as contingent and hence 138

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is there a democratic form of life? free, equal and in common. While we have not used the idiom of recognition, what is at stake in our argument is similarly the realization that one form of life can be affirmed only in common with the others as free and equal. Let us now compare Agamben’s destituent manner of living to Badiou’s militant subject of true life. In contrast to Badiou, Agamben does not single out any form of life or domain of existence as true in terms of its content, let alone offer a meta-ontological proof of its truth. Irrespective of whether his tastes in music are similar to Badiou’s, Agamben would find it impossible to establish the truth-value of Webern over Berg or the other way round: there can only be a contingent preference for either, which can be used as form-of-life, whereby one lets oneself get carried (away) by music alongside others, or be sedimented into an identity attribute demonstrating one’s exclusive taste in music. Yet, in itself this preference has no truth value of its own and as such is not different from a preference for trap music, twerking, ping-pong, kung fu and so on. It is of course possible to argue that some forms lend themselves more easily to being used as form-of-life, while others are more likely to yield private identity predicates. We need only recall Agamben’s own tirade against mobile phones and their users in What is an Apparatus? to see that he is no stranger to strong statements of preference for some forms of life over others (Agamben 2009b: 16–17). Nonetheless, even in this discussion, Agamben explicitly recognizes that the problem is not so much the form, practice or apparatus itself but the possibility of its free use in a non-canonical way, which is never entirely captured by the form in question. Just as in Profanations even pornography was shown to be amenable to a profanation that ushers in a ‘new form of erotic communication’ (Agamben 2007: 90), so in The Use of Bodies Agamben argues, with reference to Kafka, that it is not justice or beauty that moves us but the mode that each one has of being just or beautiful, of being affected by her beauty or her justice. For this reason, even abjection can be innocent, even ‘something slightly disgusting’ can move us. (Agamben 2016: 232)

The truth of a form of life is its form-of-life and for that reason it cannot be contained within the form itself. Thus, not only all the works of the Second Viennese School but also the most minor, insignificant and even ‘slightly disgusting’ forms, from speed dating to food porn, may be practiced in the mode of form-of-life, even though each of us will probably draw the line at practicing some of them. Thus, in contrast to 139

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democratic biopolitics Badiou, whose works, especially the later ones, are marked by disdain for the triviality of contemporary forms of life, Agamben is rather more appreciative of this triviality, which can still be practiced in the mode of the form-of-life rather than as an exclusive attribute of identity. Are there forms of life that cannot be practiced as form-of-life at all and hence are entirely illegitimate in a democracy? If, as we have argued, democracy makes struction legitimate, this means that it accepts as legitimate all forms of life and procedures of affirmation, but only insofar as their affirmation includes the affirmation of their own contingency and the contingency of all others. While non-democratic regimes and ideologies tend to assert their legitimacy with claims to natural or historical necessity, democracy accepts only the contingent as legitimate. The contingency that characterizes struction ontologically becomes, in a democracy, not merely a contingent fact but a necessary principle that must be affirmed in every particular procedure of affirmation. This means that forms of life that insist on their natural or historical necessity, and thereby reject their equality with other forms of life, violate their freedom or exclude them from the community, are illegitimate in a democracy and do not fall under the plurality of the forms of life to be protected by the democratic regime. While racist, homophobic or misogynist forms of life certainly belong to the ‘heap’ of struction, they find no place in the political regime that affirms struction as legitimate and takes it upon itself to protect this radical plurality of forms of life from every attempt to limit, undermine or destroy it. Could such forms be practiced in the destituent manner of form-of-life that would restore to them the affirmation of their own contingency? While it is possible to imagine something like a pluralistic racism that would affirm peaceful coexistence of essentialized racial differences, this pluralism would remain subordinated to necessity and deny the contingency of forms of life captured by the notion of race. In order to make racism compatible with the idea of form-of-life we would have to imagine an outright bizarre disposition that affirms racial difference while unworking or deconstructing the very principle of race, and affirms the contingency of what it at the same time celebrates as necessary. In short, while no form of life can be a priori denied the capacity to function in a destituent mode, some forms would certainly find this more difficult than others. While the possibility remains for the ‘slightly disgusting’ to dwell legitimately in the democratic space, it is harder to envision something extremely disgusting doing so. Thus, Agamben’s approach succeeds in navigating a middle path between Badiou’s politics of true life and Nancy’s democracy incapable of its own affirmation. While Badiou’s politics promotes a disposition of 140

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is there a democratic form of life? fidelity that would wrest individuals and communities from their banal forms of life towards political militancy in the name of the very equality that makes the proliferation of these forms possible, Agamben is rather more interested in the implications of individuals and communities taking up their current forms of life in a different way, using their lives not to constitute marketable identities and exclusive communities but to be carried (away) by myriad forms that are neither true nor untrue but are equally contingent ways in which being expresses and modifies itself. Nancy is similarly appreciative of these petty and particularistic forms of life yet remains wary of endowing democracy itself with any affirmative content besides the legitimization of the infinite plurality of these forms. In contrast, Agamben’s notion of destituent power demonstrates how every form of life, no matter how insignificant and apparently apolitical, may become the site of the affirmation of democracy. The necessary contingency that defines democracy must not simply be presupposed as the transcendental condition for the pluralism of incommensurable forms of life but must rather itself be brought to life in such a way that forms of life hold themselves in question and render themselves inoperative in their every operation. Only in this manner will it be possible to keep the locus of power unfigurable and prevent the ‘being of the social’ from attaining a privileged figure. In the following chapter we shall elaborate this line of reasoning by addressing a concrete existential disposition that makes this experience of contingency realizable.

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Chapter Five

Demos distracted

Between captivation and boredom In the previous chapter we argued that democratic biopolitics is constituted by the passage of the transcendental conditions of democracy into forms of life, whereby they function in the destituent manner, carrying within themselves the contingency and indeterminacy that characterize the democratic regime. We have thus established that democratic biopolitics is at least thinkable as a concept. Yet, how does this translation of a form of life into form-of-life take place? What in our actual experience performs the function of these magic hyphens that transform a trivial lifestyle into the lived praxis of democracy? To answer these questions, we must identify a concrete experience, mood or disposition that would allow for this entanglement of potentiality and actuality, constitution and destitution, operation and inoperativity. This would permit us to demonstrate that democratic biopolitics is not merely thinkable but actually realizable in concrete forms of life. In this chapter we shall present the experience of distraction as a paradigm of the democratic manner of living. It is because we are all capable of being distracted by entities that momentarily captivate us or withdraw from our current captivation when we are bored with them that we may dwell in our forms of life in the destituent manner, affirming their contingency and potentiality for being otherwise. The biopolitical conversion of the ontological and epistemological preconditions of Lefortian democracy is therefore not a fanciful conceptual exercise but has a firm foundation in the instantly recognizable aspects of our everyday life. Our point of departure in the analysis of distraction is provided by Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology of captivation and boredom, which is of particular importance in the biopolitical context, insofar as it seeks to establish the difference of the human Dasein from a ‘merely’ living being. In his 1929–30 lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger posited captivation (Benommenheit) 142

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demos distracted as the defining feature of animal life, whose ‘poverty in world’ he contrasted with the ‘world-forming’ character of human Dasein. The animal always remains closed in the circle of its ‘disinhibitors’, the elements of the environment, on which its receptive organs are focused. In Heidegger’s argument, insofar as the animal is completely absorbed in these disinhibitors, it cannot truly act in relation to them as beings but only ‘behave’ with regard to them as if ‘taken’ by them (Heidegger 1995: 242). The animal is certainly open to beings that captivate it but insofar as it cannot disclose them for what they are, it is only ever ‘open to a closedness’ (Agamben 2004: 65). In contrast to this ‘poverty in world’ of the animal, the human being is ‘world-forming’, standing in the open of being and disclosing worldly beings as beings. However, as Agamben argues in his critical reading of Heidegger in The Open, this world-forming disposition actually contains nothing positive. It consists entirely in the human capacity to suspend the animal relationship to its disinhibitor in an experience of profound boredom, whereby the human being is ‘left in limbo’ and experiences the inaccessible as inaccessible: ‘Dasein is simply an animal that has learned to become bored. This awakening of the living being to its own being-captivated, this anxious and resolute opening to a not-open, is the human’ (ibid.: 70). While the animal is poor in world due to its captivation by worldly beings that remain inaccessible to it, the human suspends this captivation and stands in the nullity of the inaccessible, experiencing being as nothing (Agamben 2016: 90). In contrast to Heidegger’s well-known insistence on transcendence and exteriority as aspects of Dasein’s mode of being, his idea of captivation suggests that the emergence of forms of life is quite at odds with the anthropological theme of world disclosure and instead pertains to the aspect of our existence, originally theorized in the privative terms of animality. Whenever we are in a form of life– that is, practically all the time – we are not really ‘held out into the Nothing’ (Heidegger 1977: 108) but rather captivated by something. And yet, precisely because human beings are capable of awakening from their captivation to their captivation in the mood of boredom, their captivation is never complete but always retains the potentiality for distraction. It is important to pay attention to the ambivalent meaning of distraction, which at once refers to a state of diversion, loss of attention, lack of focus (all proper to the experience of boredom) and a state of amusement, entertainment or preoccupation (all proper to the experience of captivation). Distraction is at once the condition of being gripped or taken hold of by something and the state of release from this grip into the limbo of boredom (cf. Pettman 2016: 25; North 2012: 2–6). It is therefore opposed to 143

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democratic biopolitics neither captivation nor boredom, since it makes both of them possible, but to concentration or constancy, one’s persistence within a state, be it in a captivated or bored manner. It is this general distractibility of the human condition, its being susceptible to switching from one captivation to another via the experience of boredom, which makes possible the almost infinite proliferation of forms of life: were it not for this potentiality to suspend our captivation from within this captivation, we would not be able to attain any form of life at all other than the one we were born in. The notion of distraction clearly resonates with the experience of reverie that, as we have discussed, serves as the correlate (and not, pace Sloterdijk, the alternative!) to the formation of the general will in Rousseau. And yet, insofar as Rousseau emphasizes that the reverie is devoid of a determinate object and consists solely in the sensation and contemplation of one’s existence, he clearly privileges boredom over captivation. The active component of reverie is negative – the purging of all constraints on conscious activity. From that point on, reverie becomes a largely passive experience, as the subject allows his or her surroundings to direct his or her consciousness. Reverie is about nothing in particular, at least not initially. That nothingness helps keep us in the present, sensing our immediate existence rather than reflecting upon our obligations, desires or fantasies. (Neidleman 2012: 88)

Just as for Heidegger boredom opens Dasein to the experience of being by leaving it empty and in limbo, subtracted from all particular determinations, so for Rousseau the subject can manifest and enjoy its generic existence only by withdrawing from all worldly and particular concerns in the state of reverie. For Rousseau, distraction is valuable as a state in its own right (as a protracted enjoyment of the sweetness of one’s existence) rather than as a movement from one captivation to another via boredom. The political correlate of this distracted state is the sovereign people, which reigns in its very being but only on the condition that it does not govern any particular aspect of its existence. We have already addressed the aporias of this solution that have led us instead to pursue the possibility of the affirmation of the universal and the generic within the particular forms of life themselves, rather than insist on their separation. We may now discuss this alternative in terms of distraction. Just like Rousseau’s reverie (Neidleman 2016: 76), distraction does not enjoy a very high reputation in philosophy. Paul North demonstrates in his magisterial study of this concept that distraction has been dismissed by philosophy as minor and trivial, a merely empirical accident. Starting 144

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demos distracted from Aristotle’s brief consideration and eventual banishment of the question of the implications of periodic distraction, ‘not-always-thinking’, for the sovereignty of thought, distraction has remained on the margins of philosophy (North 2012: 7, 17–35). Philosophy has been distracted from distraction, inattentive to inattention, unthinking about the unthought, which is not very surprising: distraction is difficult to isolate as either an object of thought or a realm of being. In twentieth-century philosophy, distraction was most famously addressed in Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein. In the First Division of Being and Time, Heidegger enlisted curiosity, along with idle talk and ambiguity, among the aspects of the ‘fallen’, inauthentic everyday mode of being of Dasein. [Dasein] lets itself be carried along solely by the looks of the world. It seeks novelty only in order to leap from it anew to another novelty. In this kind of seeing, that which is an issue for care does not lie in grasping something and being knowingly in the truth; it lies rather in its possibilities of abandoning itself to the world. Curiosity is characterized by a specific way of not tarrying alongside what is closest. Consequently it does not seek the leisure of tarrying observantly, but rather seeks restlessness and the excitement of continual novelty and changing encounters. In not tarrying, curiosity is concerned with the constant possibility of distraction. (Heidegger 1962: 216, emphasis original.)

Heidegger explicitly contrasts this potentiality for distraction with ‘marvelling’ or ‘being amazed’ at entities ‘to the point of not understanding’ (ibid.) – a clear analogue to the later notion of captivation in the 1929–30 lectures. Instead, curiosity is content with knowing things ‘just in order to have known’, in an ambiguous manner that makes it impossible to understand whether something has been understood or not. As a result, a curious being is always on the verge of being carried away, not in any determinate direction but solely for its own sake: ‘curiosity is everywhere and nowhere, constantly uprooting itself’ (ibid.: 217). It is ‘futural in a way that is altogether inauthentic’, in the sense that it does not ‘await a possibility’ but merely ‘just desires such a possibility as something that is actual’ (ibid.: 397). In this somewhat caricaturistic vision, curiosity seeks to actualize as many possibilities as possible and does not stick to any particular one for any more time than it takes to make it actual, before being distracted once again: ‘even if one has seen everything, this is precisely when curiosity fabricates something new’ (ibid.: 399). Since the content of the new appears entirely inessential, what curious Dasein affirms is primarily its own distractibility, which allows it to move from one captivation to another without ever being captivated to the full extent, always remaining somewhat bored and looking for an exit from whatever form 145

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democratic biopolitics of life it happens to be in. Curiosity may thus be understood either as captivation, in which the seed of boredom has already been planted, or as boredom, in which the tiny spark of captivation has set alight. In Division Two of Being and Time, Heidegger contrasts this perpetually distracted inauthentic member of the ‘they’ (das Man) with its authentic double, who has abandoned its curiosity in favor of anticipatory resoluteness, with which s/he embraces one’s historical and communal heritage or ‘destiny’, ‘hands oneself down to oneself’, choosing that which one has already inherited (ibid.: 435–6). While, at first glance, resoluteness appears diametrically opposed to curiosity, things are in fact rather more complicated. Firstly, since, as Heidegger argues, authenticity is ‘only a modified way in which everydayness is seized upon’ (ibid.: 224), an ‘existential modification of the “they”’ (ibid.: 168), resoluteness must necessarily arise from the very same structure of distractibility that defines curiosity with its veering back and forth between captivation and boredom. The ‘simplicity of [Dasein]’s fate’ and its communal version of the destiny of the people exist in the world on a par with all the other things that Dasein might be captivated by and bored with. Indeed, Heidegger notes that in ‘understanding the call [of conscience], Dasein is in thrall to its ownmost possibility of existence. It has chosen itself’ (ibid.: 334). As much as it might be opposed in content to the leap of the curious ‘they’, the ‘enthralled’ choice of one’s ownmost possibility is formally indistinct from it. One is captivated by one’s heritage in the very same way as one becomes gripped by the latest hit, fashion or rumor. For this reason, regrettable as it might be for Heidegger, he must concede that curiosity is not an aberrant or corrupt phenomenon, but rather ‘reveals an essential ontological structure of Dasein itself’ (ibid.: 224). Furthermore, the distractibility that defines curiosity is not merely a ‘true expression of existence’ (North 2012: 121), but also the sole pathway to its redemption. In its permanent leaping from one object to another, eager to grasp the latest fad, curiosity demonstrates the ‘authentic’ temporality of Dasein as always-being-ahead of oneself and for this reason ‘has secret affinities’ with resolution as well as its temporal figure of Augenblick (moment of vision) (ibid.: 120). Resolution is nothing other than distraction from distraction, which ‘disperses all fugitive selfconcealments’ of the fallen Dasein (Heidegger 1962: 357). [Resoluteness] in the face of being-toward-death is described as the dissipation of dissipation. Dasein can take hold of the levelling and diminishing tendency that characterizes its relation to the world and its flight from death by diminishing it away, [whereby] distraction and dissipation become fundamental and generative. (North 2012: 116)

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demos distracted Distraction is at once a symptom of degradation and the means of deliverance from it. Dasein can be cured from its distracted character by applying its distraction to itself and thereby draining it of all power. In this manner, the conversion of Dasein to authenticity erases its own condition of possibility. While curious Dasein moves from captivation to captivation, enabled by its potentiality for boredom, authentic Dasein should, according to Heidegger, be captivated in the manner that precludes this captivation from ever happening again as a result of a new distraction. The being of Dasein, always already scattered into myriad modalities and scattering itself further in a curious leap from one possibility to another, must be gathered together into an authentic unity. Once this proper form of life is attained, Dasein must maintain itself in constancy and resist further distraction, lest it becomes ‘fallen’ again. Resoluteness is a distraction that resolves not to be distracted any further. Authentic resoluteness must ‘resolve to keep repeating itself’ (Heidegger 1962: 355), in order to ‘remain free from the entertaining “incidentals” with which busy curiosity keeps providing itself’ (ibid.: 358). Somewhat ironically, given Heidegger’s later theorization of boredom, authentic Dasein is prohibited from ever becoming bored with its own resolute choice, which effaces the one thing that, in Heidegger’s own account, distinguishes Dasein from world-poor animals. The authentic self becomes Dasein’s own specific disinhibitor. This attempt to arrest the distracted oscillation between captivation and boredom strikes us as entirely arbitrary. Why should a particular version of communal or national heritage, into which one is thrown, become the sole legitimate content of the resolute moment of vision in the present and projection into the future? Heidegger wants to make distraction a one-time deal, much like an infectious disease that one becomes immune to after having it as a child: one is capable of becoming captivated by whatever is posited as communal destiny and immediately, in the very same movement, must lose this faculty by sticking with this heritage as one’s only authentic possibility. Yet, there is no reason whatsoever in Heidegger’s own scheme why this should be the case, why it is any less authentic to be bored with one’s destiny and instead continue to be captivated by ever new and different forms without allowing any of them to render one captive, be they traditional or novel, individual or communal. No ontic content has any relation to authenticity and all that is ontologically authentic is life’s potentiality to form, deform and transform itself in the oscillation between captivation and boredom, which makes every form of life tentative and transient, every end-state being a potential starting point for a new captivation. 147

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democratic biopolitics Heidegger’s negation of distractibility bears a somewhat uncanny resemblance to Badiou’s critique of ‘democratic materialism’ that we have addressed in the previous chapter. While the political orientations of the two philosophers are diametrically opposed, both of them privilege constancy over distraction and dissipation. Heidegger’s authenticity consists in the resolute choice for one’s historical–communal heritage that must be made again and again against the temptations of curiosity. Badiou’s truth consists in the fidelity to the undecidable and evanescent event that alone endows it with a certain reality and solidity. Irrespective of whether it is a matter of a political revolution, a scientific discovery, an artistic invention or an amorous encounter, Badiou’s ethics prescribes constancy in their affirmation and the determined pursuit of their consequences. The only difference is that while Heidegger as a conservative connects authenticity to the truths of the past (heritage), Badiou as a revolutionary demands constancy in the truth procedures of the present. Because the truths of the past and the truths of the present may well coincide, we may easily envision something like a conservative–revolutionary synthesis, whose true opponent would be neither liberalism nor progressivism, but rather the ethos of distracted curiosity, which does not mind inauthenticity, does not shun infidelity and is therefore not inclined to spend one’s life in constancy and concentration.

The importance of getting carried away The antidemocratic implications of Heidegger’s affirmation of the resolute choice of one’s heritage are well known and need not be rehearsed here. What is rather more interesting is exploring the alternative move of affirming primary distractibility as such without subjecting it to a secondary philosophical operation that abuses its power by turning it against itself, using dispersion to ensure the wholeness of Dasein’s being. This move remains entirely legitimate in Heidegger’s theoretical scheme precisely because it does not add anything to it. Spared from having to get itself together, Dasein remains free to navigate curiously between possibilities, becoming captivated by the most superficial fad and bored by its historical heritage, as well as possibly the other way round. The retention of primary distractibility entails that Dasein never becomes whole, never gathers itself together in a decisive ‘moment of vision’. Instead, it dwells in whatever form of life it happens to occupy in a decidedly irresolute manner, its captivation always already contaminated by the potentiality for boredom and its boredom always already compromised by its readiness for a new diversion. In North’s reading, this distracted mode of being makes possible a political community that 148

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demos distracted no longer presupposes the Aristotelian intellect that never sleeps, stumbles or drifts away. In contrast, a ‘distracted commonwealth’, in which the sovereign mind is dispersed into a multitude, inaugurates a political community that is ‘neither revolutionary nor utopian’, not something to be produced or ‘to come’, but something always already there, ‘infinitely dispersed historically, conceptually, and perhaps geographically’ (North 2012: 183). This community of the distractible is precisely the existential correlate of the ontological contingency of democracy, which we have been looking for in order to make the biopolitical conversion of democracy both intelligible and practicable. The potentiality for distraction both keeps the subject in a certain habitual form of life and keeps it open to another such form, so that every form is lived in a non-necessary and non-essential way, ready to be carried along towards something else. The ontological void at the heart of democracy is no longer an esoteric theoretical notion, but a potentiality inherent in our everyday existence, something Dasein ceaselessly circles around in its distraction, without ever filling it or falling into it. As a result of the mutual entanglement of captivation and boredom, the ontological contingency inscribed in the democratic mise-en-forme passes into the form of life itself. To live distractedly is to let contingency into one’s life, which thereby retains its potentiality for being otherwise in every form it happens to take. To posit distractibility as the manner of living proper to democracy is ultimately to affirm that no form of life is necessary, definitive or final. We dwell in a form of life only as long as we happen to be captivated by it and start looking for exits whenever we are bored by it. Boredom is not diametrically opposed to captivation but actually accompanies it as a ghostly presence that, at any point in time, may take its place. Every captivation retains its potentiality not to be captivated, the possibility to dissolve in boredom. This is why distraction is a matter of neither presence (focus, attention, preoccupation) nor absence (drift, diversion, absent-mindedness), but necessarily of both at once. It is therefore a real, worldly exemplar of ontological contingency that we have been looking for to make the idea of democratic biopolitics realizable in practice. It is also a concrete paradigm of the unison of constitution and destitution, work and inoperativity, actuality and potentiality that is at stake in Agamben’s admittedly esoteric notion of form-of-life. Form-of-life is nothing other than a life captivated by a form it dwells in but always retaining its potentiality for being distracted and carried away from it. In The Use of Bodies Agamben makes perhaps his most explicit break with Heideggerian ontology. He argues that despite Heidegger’s affirmation of possibility as the constitutive aspect of Dasein, his Dasein 149

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democratic biopolitics nonetheless remained stuck with or riveted to its being-there, its thrownness, which it had to assume as a task. In contrast to this grave pathos of being-consigned, which Agamben relied on earlier to theorize shame as the structure of subjectivity (Agamben 1999b: 87–134), Agamben’s own modal ontology of form-of-life rather recalls the para-existential ontology developed by Heidegger’s student, Oskar Becker. Against the unwarranted privileging of being-thrown in Heidegger, Becker affirmed a light and adventurous experience of ‘being-carried’ (Getragensein): thrown as Dasein might be, it does not land irrevocably in some determinate ‘there’ but is carried away in the very throw itself (Agamben 2016: 189–91). Similarly, for Agamben, life is never stuck in a form it must assume but is rather carried by it in the experience of captivation and carried away from it in the experience of boredom. In his early critique of Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas (1993) similarly problematized Heidegger’s figure of being as the inescapable, something we are stuck with and have to be. In his ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism’ (1990), he also addressed the political implications of this ontological standpoint, which consist in founding political community and praxis not on the possible but on the necessary, the given and the inescapable. Levinas’s own account of ethics as first philosophy is rather marked by the exigency of escaping the inescapable, which requires breaking outside of ontology as the realm of the necessary (Levinas 1998: 3–20). In contrast, Agamben seeks to redefine the ontological domain itself as that of movement rather than substance. It is not a matter of escaping being but of being itself as escape, as the distracted movement from one form of life to the other, of being carried and carried away at one and the same time. As we have argued in Chapter 3, the ontological void at the foundation of democratic society makes epistemic claims to power, truth and knowledge indeterminate; hence no form of life in a democracy could be posited as authentic. What is authentically democratic is not this or that form of life that individuals and groups may discover or invent, but only the manner in which they practice it, which retains distractibility in every distraction, forfeiting any final and definitive choice, be it in favor of captivation or boredom. In whatever form of life it takes up, distracted Dasein is no more captivated than bored. Refusing any distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic, democracy is indeed a ‘fallen’ condition, since nothing elevated or sublime fares all too well in it, exposed as it is to a plurality of equally contingent forms of life that permanently threaten to distract one from one’s captivation. And yet, this appropriation of its own impropriety also diverts democracy from the violent and potentially lethal maneuver of sovereign biopolitics 150

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demos distracted identified by Agamben: that is, the negation of improper zoe for the attainment of the proper bios. Instead, a democratic biopolitics based on the potentiality for distraction keeps zoe safe for the free enjoyment of a plurality of equally improper bioi. At first glance, it might appear counter-intuitive to argue for the democratic virtues of distraction, which is usually associated with superficiality, passivity and individualism that are quite at odds with the theory and praxis of democracy. While it would be easy to criticize the affirmation of distractibility from a more conventional perspective in democratic theory, as insufficiently oriented towards popular sovereignty, active citizenship, civic engagement and so on, it is important to understand that, just as Heidegger’s preference for resoluteness, these demands for constancy arise from the very same structure that they seek to foreclose. The point is not that distraction is somehow more ‘democratic’ than captivation (or boredom), let alone that adopting a distracted disposition will resolve the innumerable problems our democracies face, but simply that distractibility makes possible both captivation and boredom, while at the same time ensuring the possibility of their alternation – something that the philosophers of truth and authenticity rather serve to exclude. While numerous distractions are certainly stupefying, stultifying and demobilizing, it is impossible to foster active citizenship, engagement and solidarity without presupposing that the individuals and groups currently inhabiting these egoistic, passive or disengaged forms of life remain capable of being diverted from them and captivated by something new and different, letting themselves be carried along, this time by whatever one considers to be properly democratic values. Moreover, given that the most ostensibly democratic practices and institutions tend to ossify and sediment over time, becoming impediments if not outright threats to democracy, the affirmation of our potentiality for distraction and diversion from these forms cannot but be beneficial for the perpetual reinvigoration of democracy. In distraction, captivation and boredom function in tandem, making possible both the formation of the most lasting commitments and solidarities and the most fleeting and capricious crazes and fads, and the proponents of the former should take particular care not to undermine their own position in their attempts to do away with the latter. Rather than view distraction as yet another modern malaise that threatens the democratic ideal, we should rethink it as the condition of possibility of any revitalization of democracy. While we are accustomed to lament the things that distract us from democracy, from Facebook and TV series to gossip and video games, it now appears that democracy itself finds 151

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democratic biopolitics its biopolitical realization in this distracted disposition. In its oscillation between captivation and boredom, potentiality to and potentiality not to, assuming a form and twisting loose from it, the distracted multitude actually lives the ontological conditions of the democratic mise-en-forme. This reading of democratic biopolitics permits us to advance a new perspective on the two widely perceived challenges to contemporary liberal democracies. If democratic biopolitics is conditioned by the bipolar structure of distractibility as the existential correlate of the democratic mise-en-forme, it is easy to see that any dissociation of this bipolar structure would pose a danger to the democratic regime. If captivation and boredom are no longer linked by distractibility but rather triumph over one other, the contingency at the heart of democracy is no longer sustained biopolitically, rendering democracy hollow and ineffective. In contemporary liberal democracies, this danger is exemplified by two at first glance opposed phenomena of fundamentalism and nihilism. On the one hand, we observe the rise of the captivating power of conservative–populist ideologies, whose xenophobic orientation ensures the suspension of any curiosity and the perpetual repetition of the choice of one’s ‘heritage’. On the other hand, we observe the rise of a cultivated boredom, which can no longer be captivated by anything whatsoever and surveys all possibilities with equal disdain. While in the former case one keeps on replaying one’s captivation to the point of being bored with it, in the latter one ends up captivated by one’s own boredom, compulsively updating one’s newsfeed without the slightest hope of being gripped by whatever new text, post or image comes up. Neither of the two dispositions makes any use of the pluralism of forms of life proper to democracy: one has only form and the other has only formlessness, but neither actually has a life. For all their apparent differences, fundamentalism and nihilism are two sides of the same perversion of the mise-en-forme of democracy: while the former wishes to fill its constitutive void with a privileged form of life, the latter ends up captivated by the void itself, nullifying every form of life in the process. Both remain driven by the passion for authenticity, the former elevating, naïvely or in bad faith, a contingent form of life to the status of the authentic, and the latter inferring from the absence of the authentic the worthlessness of all that is. While both problems are permanent fixtures of democratic theory and have been addressed from numerous perspectives, the account of democratic biopolitics we propose in this book suggests that the solution consists in overcoming the separation of captivation and boredom that would restore contingency to the praxis of democracy. The essence 152

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demos distracted of democracy is neither the foundation nor the void but the void as foundation, the foundation for the infinite proliferation of forms of life that are themselves neither foundational nor void but perfectly livable precisely by virtue of their radical contingency. Democracy must be affirmed not only on the level of principles, norms and institutions that regulate forms of life but on the level of forms of life themselves in all their diversity and our insatiable appetite for diversion that makes this diversity possible.

The unborable We shall now elaborate our affirmation of distraction as the democratic manner of living by addressing the analysis of boredom in David Foster Wallace’s final and unfinished novel The Pale King (2011). The novel describes the experiences of the employees of the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in the 1980s. The main theme of the novel is the experience of boredom and the possibility of finding redemption in tedious and apparently meaningless activity. Wallace previously addressed this theme in his well-known 2005 commencement address to the students at Kenyon College, which presented boredom as an uncanny experience that we try to flee from with the help of superficial distractions. Yet, Wallace argues that it is only by fully traversing boredom that we are able to enjoy true freedom: The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing. (2005: np)

It is easy to observe similarities with Heidegger’s account of boredom in this text. Distraction is here presented negatively as ‘unconsciousness’, the evasion of one’s own being that resigns one to fallenness, inauthenticity and ultimately misery. And yet, the way out of this misery is not sought by Wallace in abandoning distraction for captivation by some determinate authentic form of life but rather in dwelling in an attentive and concentrated manner within boredom itself: Petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. (2005: np)

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democratic biopolitics Just as for Heidegger concentrating on boredom, going through this experience attentively gives us access to the being of beings, and for Wallace it is boredom itself that ends up truly captivating: ‘Sometimes what’s important is dull’ (Wallace 2011: 138). This is why the experience of the IRS employees in The Pale King, who have to operate in an environment that is ‘massively, spectacularly dull’ (ibid.: 83), offers an exemplary setting for the novel. Rather than engage in the familiar criticism of bureaucracy as engaged in meaningless and tedious practices, Wallace praises it for its ability to deal with boredom, ‘to function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human, to breathe, so to speak, without air’ (ibid.: 438). There is something heroic about the capacity to maintain oneself in boredom without giving in to it: ‘Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui – these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real’ (ibid.: 231). Of course, dullness is also a shield that protects bureaucracy against public opposition: ‘Abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy. For the great disadvantage of secrecy is that it’s interesting’ (ibid.: 83). Yet, for Wallace, this effectiveness is less the indicator of the danger of bureaucracy than its admirable trait that makes it capable of a true heroism: [Enduring] tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care – with no one there to see or cheer. (ibid.: 229)

What bureaucracy is capable of is dwelling in boredom without becoming distracted. On the contrary, its entire operation is conditioned by the capacity to fix its attention on the boring as such rather than any of the numerous distractions available to us: The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish. (ibid.: 438)

Why is it such a difficult task? Just as for Heidegger there was a considerable amount of effort involved in undergoing the experience of profound boredom, for Wallace dullness is not just difficult but almost impossible to experience as such, without escaping into some diversion or distraction. It is as if Dasein could not come into direct contact with 154

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demos distracted being itself but must always have it mediated by some being or realm of beings that would captivate it. A direct contact with being is not unlike staring into the void, the Nothing, which is what being ultimately was for Heidegger. [The] really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore, but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down. (Wallace 2011: 85)

Wallace’s diagnosis is that the contemporary information society is rather a society of distraction that tries at any cost to keep the uncanny experience of boredom at bay. Wallace is as critical of this superficial sliding of curiosity from one object to another as Heidegger but his solution is quite different from Heidegger’s anticipatory resoluteness. While, for Heidegger, the slide of distraction, in which captivation alternates with boredom, must cease at the privileged point of the authentic choice of one’s destiny (the ‘proper’ captivation), for Wallace the truly authentic choice would be in favor of boredom itself. The heroism of bureaucrats has nothing to do with their choice of the communal destiny but with their advanced capacity to linger with boredom, bringing it to their attention and concentrating themselves on it, as if it were the most captivating thing in the world. Rejecting every specific captivation as an easy distraction from the painful experience of boredom, Wallace makes boredom itself our paradoxical disinhibitor. Somewhat ironically, given Rousseau’s distaste for government, Wallace’s ethics of captivation by boredom, whose exemplary figures are petty government officials, has a lot in common with the valorization of general will in Rousseau’s politics. As we have seen, since its content is limited to freedom and equality, general will is subtracted from every particular object and entirely contained in the manifestation of its sheer existence. Subtracted from every particular form of life and exposed in the sheer facticity of 155

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democratic biopolitics its being, the sovereign people must be as jaded as the solitary walker in a state of reverie. Similarly to Rousseau’s preoccupation with protecting the general will from contamination and dissolution by the particular, Wallace’s injunction is to maintain one’s awareness, focus on and attention to boredom at all times. He concludes his commencement address by explicitly linking the value of education with the cultivation of this awareness: It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: ‘This is water.’ (2005: np)

The reference is to a joke that begins the address, in which two young fish are perplexed by the question of an older one ‘How’s the water today?’ because they do not know what water is. For Wallace, what education can do (and all that it can really do) is help us cultivate this awareness of what is around and in us – being itself. While, at first glance, Wallace is paradigmatically Rousseauan in affirming the generic at the expense of the particular as attainable only by subtraction from the latter, things are in fact somewhat more complicated. The boredom and dullness that Wallace speaks of are not attained by subtraction from any particular form of life but, on the contrary, by plunging into one with fervor and dedication. Wallace’s IRS agents are not subtracted from their routine and humdrum activity so as to contemplate pure being in a state of reverie. They do not abandon their work to be left empty and in limbo. On the contrary, they are (or at least are meant to be) immersed in their work and are able to perform it, no matter how excruciatingly dull it appears. Their modus operandi thus combines boredom and captivation in a productive fashion: making boredom their own disinhibitor, they are no longer inhibited by the dull nature of their work and are able to perform it in a salutary manner. Captivated by their boredom, Wallace’s bureaucrats gain access to being without abandoning the concrete form of life in which they dwell. Their work and their inoperative reverie appear entirely indistinct as they are captivated by the very failure of their work to captivate. Yet, this captivated boredom that makes heroes of petty bureaucrats is ultimately not that different from the bored captivation that defines the perpetually distracted subjects that Wallace, echoing Heidegger, 156

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demos distracted viewed as resigned to the misery of fallenness. After all, distraction, which we have defined as the simultaneous operation of the constitutive dynamic proper to captivation and the destituent dynamic proper to boredom, similarly renders the two moments indistinct, boredom retaining the potentiality to captivate and captivation being at every point capable of dissolving into boredom. The admirable capacity of the IRS agents to become captivated by the utter tedium of their enterprise therefore appears to be a special case of the ‘no more than’ disposition that Agamben used to define the experience of contingency. No more bored than captivated, the characters of The Pale King exist in the same mode as Heidegger’s curious subjects of fallenness, who are no more captivated than they are bored in any of the multiple endeavors in which they superficially engage. The only difference is the duration of their captivation-in-boredom, their capacity for attention and concentration that the inauthentic Dasein of curiosity apparently lacks. Yet, insofar as it is not forced, this faculty of endurance must also presuppose the potentiality for the contrary: diversion, drift, loss of focus and concentration. Otherwise, we would no longer be dealing with a potentiality in any meaningful sense but with a fixation that is truly pathological, as it is incapable of any distraction. If Wallace’s protagonists are so successful at maintaining themselves in boredom as if captivated, it is because they retain the potentiality to be bored with this very captivation. After all, as Wallace argued in his commencement address, they are numerous sites beyond the IRS, at which one can experiment with attention, concentration and mindfulness: traffic jams, checkout lines, staff meetings and so on. In fact, just as the fish in Wallace’s anecdote can come to the realization ‘this is water’ wherever they might swim, an encounter with being is possible as long as we are, quite irrespective of what, where and when we happen to be. It is not that we have to choose an occupation as mind-numbing as that of IRS controllers to gain the powers of concentration. It is rather that we may choose to inhabit any occupation the way Wallace’s agents inhabit theirs, which necessarily presupposes the free movement of curiosity from one form of life to another. Distraction, which at first glance was the temptation to be avoided, turns out to be the condition of possibility of the very ethos of attention and concentration. Making possible both persistence within a form of life and its abandonment for another one, distraction ensures that our captivation by a form of life does not turn into captivity within it, that life does not become wholly confined within a certain form and retains a possibility to trans-form itself in a tentative and non-definitive way. 157

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democratic biopolitics

Phish We may term this distractible manner of living that retains the potentiality for its transformation in every form it assumes a freeform life, by analogy with freeform improvisation in jazz and rock music. The analogy with musical improvisation is quite helpful for grasping the specificity of this manner of living, especially in contrast with the more familiar understanding of life as a series of freely chosen forms. In a paradigmatic improvisation, there is a theme (harmonic framework or chord progression), within which improvisation begins to unfold and to which it might also return (especially in jam-band improvisation in rock). While improvisation may begin as a set of variations on that theme, the theme need not be present at every time in the improvised section, which may rather unfold in an entirely spontaneous manner, veering into all possible directions. Unlike some forms of free improvisation, in which no main theme is discernible at all, in more familiar modes of improvisation the theme nonetheless remains defined, at least at the beginning as well as possibly at the end. In the same way, a life that retains the potentiality for transformation in whatever form it dwells in may be easily recognizable in its form yet perpetually surprising in the specific manner in which it assumes this form, as the form in question is stretched to its limits, brought in relation with its opposites, recontextualized in numerous ways, all the while carrying that undefinable air of familiarity. Freeform life is therefore not a matter of a succession of freely chosen forms, as, for example, in the (neo)liberal politics of entrepreneurial self-fashioning, but rather a matter of a free relation to form as such, not just a freedom to form but a freedom exercised within the process of formation itself, even if this formation ultimately yields little else than the endless playing with the same theme. The concept of freeform life is thus more than a fancy name for the freedom of the subject in relation to the preconstituted forms of life or the equality of these forms in relation to each other. A freeform life involves both the subject and the variety of incommensurable forms in a reciprocal transformation: the subject captivated by the form gives it vitality and diffusion, making a lifeless form into a form of life, while the same process of captivation transforms the subject in accordance with the form, changing his or her life in a particular way but always in a tentative fashion, retaining the possibility of boredom within this very captivation. Evidently, retaining this possibility does not entail any injunction to actualize it in every setting, just as the potentiality for captivation need not always be realized. Such injunctions make no sense because the potentiality in question is strictly infinite. We could in principle change 158

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demos distracted our lives every second, yet what would be the point in that? What is at stake in improvisation is not the ceaseless production of novelty, which quickly becomes tedious and oppressive, but rather the potentiality for the new to emerge in the midst of the most familiar and repetitive, which thereby exhibit their own transience and mutability. Just as in a jazz or rock improvisation, you never know how long the performers will stay on any particular theme, so a freeform life is as such compatible with a remarkable durability of forms of life: it is possible to improvise relentlessly, while retaining a signature sound over decades. This is perhaps the secret of the popularity of Phish, an American jam band founded in 1983 that has enjoyed a strongly dedicated fanbase over decades. While Phish released fifteen studio albums during their career that sold over eight million copies, they are best known for their live shows that feature extensive improvisation. In the summer of 2017, Phish performed thirteen sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden in New York City and completed the year with a similarly soldout four-night run ending on New Year’s Eve. Although the band has not produced one hit single and has rarely, if ever, been played on the radio, its concerts have gained enormous popularity and, similarly to the live recordings of the Grateful Dead in previous decades, became more popular than studio releases. The band has released dozens of ‘official’ live albums and, in addition to that, practically every show has been recorded unofficially to be traded by the fans since the band’s early days. What is it about Phish that generates such excitement about their performances? It would certainly be difficult to understand it by listening only to their studio albums, which feature more or less conventional classic rock songs with jazz, funk and country influences. Numerous critics of the band focus precisely on the quality of the studio material, complaining about the absence of memorable songs. If one remains focused on the songs themselves as the ultimate criterion for evaluation, then it becomes almost inexplicable why these generally unremarkable songs would generate a demand for concert tickets that the most popular mainstream pop and rock acts would envy and struggle to match. Would extended jam sessions based on those songs not be adding insult to injury, making the audience sit through a thirty-minute version of what was not particularly likeable as a three-minute song? The puzzle is resolved if we approach improvisation at Phish concerts in terms of the destituent manner that defines a freeform life. Extended jamming does not merely introduce additional variations to a pre-existing song, making the same song merely last longer. Instead, improvisation takes up the songs in question as templates only for improvised experimentation, which may involve chopping up and rearranging them, playing 159

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democratic biopolitics parts of different songs together or playing a song in reverse order. Rather than play their songs with additional solos and variations, Phish play with their own songs, using the established forms of the songs in unpredictable ways, thereby ending up rendering the familiar unfamiliar and introducing difference into repetition. Just as in Agamben’s argument even something ‘slightly disgusting’ can still be moving or touching when practiced in the destituent manner of form-of-life, even the less than memorable Phish compositions sound much better when ceaselessly de- and recomposed in the manner that restores to these songs the potentiality, transience and hesitation that characterize the process of artistic creation. In the extended jams at every show, Phish songs are de- and recreated all over again and it is this free relation to the familiar songs that the audience looks forward and rapturously responds in these performances. While we usually expect the concerts of our favorite bands to feature faithful renditions of familiar songs, at a Phish concert fidelity to established forms is abandoned for a free relation to form, and this freedom involved in the process of formation is exposed on stage every night. Rather than ceaselessly try to invent new forms, becoming other with every album, Phish has performed the same act of free formation for over thirty years with admirable dependability, which is why many fans are not content with seeing only one show and instead book tickets for the entire residency. They both know exactly what they are going to hear (the freeform experimentation with the familiar songs) and have not the slightest idea how this freeform jam is going to sound on any given night. In this manner, repetition and novelty, composition and improvisation, creation and decreation become indiscernible, exposing in every form the contingency of its coming to presence. By the same token, a freeform life is not defined by the novelty it produces in actuality but by the potentiality for being otherwise that it exhibits in every activity it practices. This is why we must rigorously distinguish our notion of a freeform life from the valorization of innovation and transformation that characterizes today’s neoliberal biopolitics. Neoliberalism prescribes constant change in one’s life as a matter of the actualization of one’s potentialities, whereby one ends up being all that one can be. The neoliberal subject must move from captivation to captivation without any respite of boredom. The perception that everything is possible, that I can be or do both this and that, conceals one’s subjection to the apparatuses of government that feed on that very potentiality in setting human beings to work in actuality: The idea that anyone can do or be anything – the suspicion that not only could the doctor who examines me today be a video artist tomorrow but that even the executioner who kills me, is actually, as in Kafka’s Trial, also a

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demos distracted singer – is nothing but the reflection of the awareness that everyone is simply bending him- or her self according to the flexibility that is today the primary quality that the market demands from each person. (Agamben 2010: 44–5)

Freeform life is free precisely from this injunction to perpetual transformation, which may be just as or even more oppressive than a mere prohibition. A four-hour Phish concert does not attempt to actualize all the potential of the band members by demonstrating their flexible skills in playing every possible genre of music. On the contrary, the band’s freeform jamming has retained a signature sound for decades, which nonetheless contains within itself and exhibits the potentiality for being otherwise. Freeform life does not involve a ceaseless procession of new forms but rather the exposure in every form of the contingent force of its formation. Just as Phish play with their songs, suffusing their most familiar works with a sense of indeterminacy and hesitation, a freeform life plays with the forms it dwells in, bringing an element of boredom into its every captivation and a measure of formlessness into every form it takes up. Let us now return for the final time to Rousseau’s reverie to address both the similarities of freeform life to this experience and their important differences. We may recall that, for Rousseau, reverie ‘gives free rein to [one’s] thought and lets [one’s] ideas follow their natural course, unrestricted and unconfined’ (Rousseau 2004: 35). As Neidleman argues, reverie is no mere thoughtlessness but actually requires at least two conditions: solitude and proximity to nature, as a result of which the subject is able to bracket off all particular contents of thought and enjoy the sheer sense of its own existence (Neidleman 2016: 78–84). Once this subtraction is attained, ‘there is no structure or framework governing reverie. A form, if one emerges at all, emerges out of formlessness’ (Neidleman 2012: 83). The conditional clause is indeed important here, since it is not really clear what form this would be, other than the generic sense of one’s existence: that is, formlessness itself. In contrast, our notion of freeform life does not bracket itself off from any content but rather involves it in its play in a contingent manner, whereby forms enter a relation to the formlessness, from which they arise and into which they may fade at any moment. It is not a matter of affirming formlessness over form, or the other way round, but of keeping both in play, so that every act of concentrated thought is never too far from the formlessness of reverie while the emptiest moment of daydreaming may give rise to an inspiring thought. Whereas Rousseau’s affirmation of reverie privileges the state of distractedness as the lived experience of subtraction, our inquiry into 161

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democratic biopolitics democratic biopolitics rather affirms distractibility as the potentiality for both captivation and boredom, which ensures that one never excludes the other. For this reason, rather than emphasize formlessness as the condition of emergence of form, as Neidleman does in his reading, we emphasize the potentiality of formation that remains at work, or better, in play, in the very existence and practice of diverse forms. In jazz improvisation or rock jamming, the music does not stop or dissolve into chaotic noise: even the detractors of Phish who complain about self-indulgent noodling that stretches a half-decent fourminute song to half an hour recognize that something is actually being formed in this act, even if this form is fragile and transient and seems to carry formlessness within itself without ever collapsing into it. In short, whereas Neidleman’s Rousseau viewed reverie as a break with social or political forms of life that brings one back in touch with one’s own nature and existence, after which one returns (or not) to society with stronger fraternal sentiments, in our construction of distractibility the reverie is never isolated from social forms of life but rather brought within them (cf. Neidleman 2012: 92). While, as we have seen, the privileged operation in Rousseau’s thought was subtraction, in our account it is rather addition or supplementation. It is not a matter of a withdrawal from society in the hope of a purified return in the future, but rather of bringing the destituent aspect of reverie into social praxis itself, transforming it into freeform activity that undoes itself in its very act.

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Chapter Six

How to enjoy democracy again (and again)

The malaise of democracy Our discussion of distraction in the previous chapter has demonstrated the biopolitical viability of democracy, the possibility of translating its transcendental condition of necessary contingency into actual forms of life. Democratic biopolitics is not a fanciful utopia but is fully realizable, since its experiential correlate is the immediately familiar oscillation between captivation and boredom in states of distraction. And yet, realizability is necessary but not sufficient for democratic biopolitics to take root: after all, many historical modes of politics have proven unsustainable due to excessive demands they place on the subjects, the burdensome requirements and overly high expectations that have ultimately rendered them unattractive. In this chapter we shall therefore move from the problem of the realizability of democratic biopolitics to the question of its sustainability. We shall address this question by focusing on the pleasure and enjoyment involved in the democratic manner of living. We shall argue that the ontological and epistemic principles of democracy are not negative prescriptions that limit potentialities of life but rather enabling conditions of life itself, which keep open the process of its self-formation. What makes a form of life enjoyable is precisely its contingency, its not having to be what it is and its potentiality for being otherwise. A necessary form of life, if it existed, could be dutifully abided by, tolerated or practiced without reflection but it definitely could not be enjoyed. We may therefore hypothesize that, contrary to Nancy’s account discussed in Chapter 4, the spirit of democracy is not merely perfectly formulable in terms of the principles of freedom, equality and community but also enjoyable beyond mere ‘satisfaction’ or ‘sufficiency’. We will rely on Nancy’s own account of pleasure and enjoyment in 163

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democratic biopolitics recent works that do not explicitly engage with democracy or politics to demonstrate how a freeform life, constituted in the distracted oscillation between captivation and boredom, is not merely capable of being pleasant or enjoyable but in fact shares its logic with every possible experience of pleasure. The democratic manner of living, in which the formative force of live is maintained in excess of every form, is therefore not merely thinkable (Chapter 4) and realizable (Chapter 5) but also sustainable as the source of enjoyment. The question of whether democracy is enjoyable is certainly timely. It would not be too far-fetched to suggest that 2016 was the year that marked the greatest crisis of liberal democracy in the post-World War II period. The victory of the Brexit camp in the UK referendum, the election of Donald Trump as US president, and the rise of populist forces of the right and the left throughout Europe all point to the political polarization that the West has not witnessed for decades and which liberal democracy, as we know it, is probably not prepared or even designed to handle. Even if the turmoil of 2016 remains an exception rather than the rule, it offers sufficient evidence of the increasingly problematic status of liberal democracy, a far cry from its Cold War-era stability and postCold War triumph that was somewhat too hurriedly proclaimed the end of history. While this problematic status has been interpreted from various perspectives (economic, cultural or ideological) (see, for example, Mounk 2018; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018), our inquiry into democratic biopolitics provides us with a fruitful point of entry into this debate on the current malaise of democracy. This malaise is manifested in numerous symptoms, three of which are particularly relevant for our inquiry into democratic biopolitics. The first is the increasing dissatisfaction with the gulf between the nominally democratic constitution of Western polities and the rationalities of government based on expert knowledge that evade any democratic accountability. The second is the related tendency of the proliferation of ‘alternatives’ to this expert knowledge via ‘non-mainstream’ media and social networks that frequently take the form of conspiracy theories, extremist ideologies or outright deceit and disinformation that undermine the democratic public sphere. Finally, perhaps as a result of the two tendencies above, there is a noticeable lack of vigorous support for existing democratic systems, which is particularly visible in the reluctance to promote them internationally – a tendency markedly at odds with the enthusiastic promotion of democracy worldwide after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. It is as if we no longer believe in our democracies enough to offer them as exemplary forms of government to the others and only continue to abide by nominally democratic 164

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how to enjoy democracy again (and again) principles out of habit or convenience. In the meantime, the rationalities by which we are governed are increasingly detached from any democratic legitimacy, while the resistance to this detachment appears to do away with such legitimacy altogether, frequently opting for the most ridiculous ‘alternative’, if only out of spite. It appears that the field of democratic politics today is split between two types of forces. On the one hand, we have those who enjoy democracy without abiding by it: for example, xenophobic populists who loudly insist on their own freedom of expression then to proceed to deny it to their adversaries, silencing and even excluding them from the space of debate altogether. These actors appear to thrive in democratic politics even as they abuse its basic principles: freedom, equality and community arising out of the necessary contingency of forms of life. On the other hand, we have those who uphold democracy without in any way enjoying it – the centrist, liberal mainstream that is proudly pluralistic and multicultural without affirming a form of life of its own amid this pluralism. In this approach, democracy is reduced to a regulative principle enabling the coexistence of forms of life without passing into these forms of life themselves. Democracy is something to be affirmed and defended as a constitutional order or form of government but apparently not something to be enjoyed in its own right. The true conflict today is between the abusive enjoyment of democracy and its dutiful, joyless defense. Yet, if one leaves all the pleasure of democracy to its enemies, the democratic mise-en-forme cannot be sustained. Even though the argument of this book diverges from the Rousseauan valorization of popular sovereignty subtracted from particular forms of life, we nonetheless tend to concur with Rousseau in affirming a certain sentimentalism with regard to grounding a political association, which provides a much more secure foundation than abstract norms or formal logic (Neidleman 2016: 64–5). It goes without saying that the necessary contingency that defines democracy must be inscribed into norms, institutions and laws that would sustain and, if necessary, defend it. And yet, our discussion of the biopolitical dimension of democracy in which contingency is not only presupposed but actually lived attunes us to another aspect of the legitimization of democracy that is no longer normative, legal and institutional but rather experiential. Democracy is legitimate not (only) because it is just (in accordance with norms, laws and so on) but because it is enjoyable and is therefore upheld, abided by or practiced not as a matter of obligation but as a matter of pleasure. In what does this pleasure consist? It is evidently the pleasure of pluralism, which renders legitimate a particular form of life that would be prohibited in a tyrannical or despotic regime. Democracy is certainly 165

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democratic biopolitics enjoyable insofar as it makes it possible for me to be a Marxist, a liberal or a nationalist without fearing state oppression or terror as a consequence. And yet, as we shall argue in this chapter, the pleasure of democracy goes beyond this self-evident advantage of pluralism. Democracy is not merely pleasant or enjoyable as a means to a desirable end: for example, a particular form of life that would be prohibited under a different regime. It is, rather, itself enjoyable insofar as it entails that this particular form of life would be practiced in a specific manner. In addition to legitimizing my being a Marxist, a liberal or a nationalist, democracy, in the biopolitical conversion that we have ventured in this book, also affirms our being a Marxist, a liberal or a nationalist in a specific manner, in which one’s captivation by these ideological forms is accompanied by an element of boredom that brings in destitution into the very identities constituted by our ideological preferences. The pleasure of democracy does not consist in occupying one’s identity in an exclusionary, divisive or belligerent manner but in establishing a free relation to it that renders it inoperative in every moment of its practice. While authoritarian regimes of all stripes sought legitimacy and stability in the pleasure experienced in the communion with others in a privileged identity or proper form of life, be it nationalist, religious or race- or class-based, democracy is the sole political regime whose legitimacy rather rests on the enjoyment of a distracted oscillation between identities and forms of life, none of which can attain the status of the proper and the authentic. Thus, besides legitimizing our enjoyment of whatever form of life, democracy is itself enjoyable as an experience of potentiality from within whatever form of life one dwells in. Our focus on enjoyment goes one step further than Honneth’s attempt to ground freedom in the actual processes of intersubjective communication in the spheres of personal relations, economy and politics. While we share Honneth’s point of departure in the criticism of the abstract nature of normative theory, which ventures to adjudicate the ‘just’ nature of a given political regime by evaluating it in terms of external normative principles, his approach retains the focus on justice, attempting to concretize it through the analysis of the fundamental norms actually operative in the key ethical spheres of society. Honneth is therefore able to adjudicate the regimes and practices in contemporary Western societies by questioning their conformity to the norms that are already at work in these societies. If these regimes and practices are found wanting, it is strictly in their own terms and not by virtue of any external standard. Yet, this approach leaves us with a question that becomes particularly pressing at the end of Honneth’s book, where he discusses the pathologies of the contemporary public sphere (Honneth 2014: 292–4, 325–7, 333–5). 166

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how to enjoy democracy again (and again) While the democratic public sphere is the key mode of the realization of social freedom in the sphere of politics, it has, from the moment of its inception, been characterized by the presence of the opposed tendency towards privatization and depoliticization. Although the open and inclusive communication proper to the democratic public sphere remains its criterion of legitimacy, actual practices can only be evaluated negatively in its terms, which raises the question of how it is possible for a norm to be at once legitimate and inoperative. While numerous factors could be brought in to explain this paradox, our approach suggests a more general interpretation: norms and principles may well retain their legitimate character and yet cease to be operative in actual forms of life if they are no longer perceived as enjoyable, pleasant or otherwise experienceable in a positive way. A norm that is perceived as a mere restriction may be dutifully abided by in a superficial manner but evaded or even violated whenever opportunity presents itself. It is therefore entirely possible that the norm of intersubjective communication in the public sphere becomes perceived as a merely external prescription that retains its abstract legitimacy but gives way to practices that are more enjoyable even if they conflict with this norm, such as depoliticized, privatized and individualized entertainment. Democracy may therefore be subverted and undermined without any new normative principle coming to take its place or a new condition of legitimacy emerging. Instead, it may simply retreat from the actual forms of life, while remaining the apparent normative criterion, in terms of which these forms are evaluated. Since the legitimacy of this criterion is not disputed, it is hardly possible to make democracy ‘work’ again by normatively establishing its just character. Instead, any reactivation of democracy must literally be a matter of its reinvigoration, of its (re-)entry into actual forms of life, in which its principles can be experienced as pleasant and enjoyable. In fact, the final paragraphs of Honneth’s book appear to point to the same conclusion. Having undertaken a painstaking and sobering analysis of the limited successes and frustrating failures in the realization of social freedom in the sphere of democratic will-formation, both in the public sphere and the constitutional state, Honneth nonetheless concludes on an optimistic note. While it is impossible to argue for anything like a straight path of progress towards social freedom in the history of European societies, the instances of struggle for freedom nonetheless function in the manner of Kant’s ‘historical symbols’, historical events upon which the majority of the population throughout Western Europe looks back with the same feeling of either enthusiastic approval in the case of struggles for emancipation, or with disgust in the

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democratic biopolitics case of oppression. Such unanimous judgments across national boundaries add up to a collective memory in which everything that has contributed to realizing institutionally promised freedoms is remembered as a symbol of social progress. (Honneth 2014: 335)

This collective memory may therefore serve as the basis for the renewal of struggles for freedom, ‘shared attentiveness and broadened solidarity’ (ibid.: 335). It is important to note that these historical events are not only judged as legitimate or otherwise from a certain normative perspective. In Kant’s famous discussion of the French Revolution in the ‘Conflict of the Faculties’, historical struggles for social freedom arouse enthusiasm or disgust, affects combined with the idea of the good (cf. Lyotard 2009). What was particularly important for Kant was not the specific details of the events in the revolution, but the public response of its audience, which demonstrated a disinterested enthusiasm that testified to the perpetual progress of humanity: this revolution has aroused in the hearts and desires of all spectators who are not themselves caught up in it a sympathy which borders almost on enthusiasm, although the very utterance of this sympathy was fraught with danger. It cannot therefore have been caused by anything other than a moral disposition within the human race. (Kant 1991 [1798]: 182–3)

Thus, Honneth’s hope for the continuation of the struggles for social freedom is not grounded in the mere perception of this freedom as legitimate or in its actual realization in the ethical spheres of society but in the affective dimension of enthusiasm generated by participation, observation and recollection of these struggles. This notion of enthusiasm resonates with what we have discussed as the experience of captivation by an idea or a form of life, which, as we have argued, must, in any genuinely democratic biopolitics, always be accompanied by its opposite – the potentiality of a bored withdrawal. The positive synthesis of democracy and biopolitics that we have attempted in this book both clarifies the grounds for Honneth’s optimism and explains why this optimism remains so tentative and fragile. To speak of enthusiasm or enjoyment with respect to democracy entails going beyond mere tolerance of the plurality of forms of life that democracy renders legitimate. We tend to tolerate (or not) the things that are painful and unpleasant, not something that is enjoyable in its own right. The language of tolerance makes the principles of democracy appear as strictly negative constraints on our practices, something we must (appear to) follow, even though we secretly despise it. This 168

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how to enjoy democracy again (and again) evidently does not mean that every form of life should be enjoyed or respected to an equal degree: on the contrary, the idea of distraction necessarily presupposes that some forms of life would leave us bored, indifferent or even repelled. And yet, the possibility of the distracted oscillation between captivation and boredom in a freeform life presupposes the radical pluralism of struction as the condition for the enjoyment of whatever form of life one happens to dwell in. For this reason, this pluralism is never merely tolerated but also to some degree enjoyed in the process of enjoying one’s own particular form of life. If this pluralism were somehow restricted or delimited, this would make our own lives less freeform, even if we would never have thought of adopting any specific forms of life that are proscribed or delegitimized. Thus, whenever we adopt or withdraw from any given form of life, we enjoy not merely this form itself or its successor, but the very plurality of forms of life in which we could dwell. It is this enjoyment that is shared in common by the most incommensurable forms of life in a democracy. While the form of life of the other may be absolutely impenetrable to us, we at least know that the other is enjoying this form in the same way as we do ours, as a contingent captivation necessarily accompanied by the potentiality of boredom. For this reason, the other is not to be contemptuously tolerated in its difference. Whatever this difference might be, the potentiality for solidarity with the other always exists by virtue of the fact that its form of life is constituted and upheld in exactly the same way as ours. This demonstrates once again how a freeform life unites within itself both universalism and particularism: democracy renders legitimate the most idiosyncratic form of life as long as it affirms, in its very praxis, its own contingency on a par with all other forms of life. Democracy guarantees the possibility for all of us to live different lives but in the same manner. This is why a democracy that needs defending is already in serious trouble: if it no longer provides pleasure, it can be legitimized only normatively or pragmatically as something that ‘works’. The latter is the most familiar but also the weakest possible mode of legitimation, since it evaluates democracy in terms of an external goal, be it economic prosperity or social stability, that democracy need not necessarily be the best path to attain. If democracy is not enjoyable in its own right but only accepted as a pathway to other goals, it may easily lose the competition with non-democratic regimes that may well ‘work’ more efficiently due to not being encumbered by democratic values and norms. It is precisely when democracy is just something that merely ‘works’ that we know it is no longer ‘working’ the way it should. If democracy is no longer enjoyable, this can only mean that contingency, the one thing 169

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democratic biopolitics to be enjoyed in democracy, is no longer experienceable, even though it remains proclaimed and inscribed in the normative and legal frameworks of the democracy in question. This also means that democracy is no longer biopolitical (that is, it has lost relation to life) and/or that biopolitics is no longer democratic (that is, that the politics that does have a relation to life actually negates contingency and therefore conflicts with democracy). Either way, democracy remains something right that no longer feels good – not a very secure foundation for a political regime. Something unpleasant but right may be tolerated with contempt because of its normative hegemony or legal obligation, but at the first opportunity this hegemony will be challenged and most probably defeated since it no longer has any relation to one’s living experience. A democracy whose contingency is inexperienceable may easily surrender to ideologies and governmental rationalities that negate this contingency also normatively, opting for the claims to essence or necessity, be they ethno-cultural, racial, economic or teleological. When forms of life are not unworked in their very praxis and restored to their potentiality in their very actuality, their pluralism appears worthless and dispensable: what does pluralism matter when the form of life I am dwelling in is not experienced as a matter of potentiality and freedom but that of instinct, automatism or logical or historical necessity? Democracy delegitimizes the introduction of essence and necessity into politics normatively by insisting on the emptiness of the place of power and the fundamental epistemic indeterminacy that makes every such claim to essence and necessity a priori false: there is simply no place in the democratic mise-en-forme from which such a claim could be enunciated, as long as the locus of power remains void. Our theory of democratic biopolitics adds to this normative legitimization of contingency something like its experiential legitimization: contingency is not merely ontologically necessary but also enjoyable to dwell in. Democracy offers to our enjoyment precisely what every authoritarian regime abhors: the reversibility of power relations, the forever incomplete and imperfect legitimacy of those in power, the need to justify every decision to a disrespectful audience that might have entirely different criteria of what is just and so on. In short, what the authoritarian critics of democracy decry as its messy, ineffective, even nihilistic character is not a matter of transcendental necessity that should be tolerated with a sigh but rather a source of true enjoyment. There is pleasure in the diversity and pluralism of forms of life only when these forms are not assigned to one as determinate identities but remain available as potentialities to adopt, uphold or abandon, be captivated by or bored with. 170

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how to enjoy democracy again (and again) Marx recognized this all too well when he made generic potentiality the main principle of communist society: in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. (Marx and Engels 1970: 53)

Let us interpret this overly familiar quotation from our perspective of the pleasure of contingency. It is clear that the state of affairs described by Marx is desirable only insofar as ‘I’ do not actually have to hunt, fish, rear cattle and criticize all in one day. Such compulsory multitasking would rather resonate with the contemporary neoliberal ethos of precariousness and flexibility, whereby one is expected to take on a plurality of entirely different tasks during the working day (if one is lucky to be assigned any tasks in the first place). Having to hunt, fish, rear cattle and criticize all in one day is a chore that provides no pleasure whatsoever. Yet, there must be pleasure involved in all these operations of hunting, fishing and criticizing; otherwise there is no reason why these activities would be engaged in at all. The source of the pleasure cannot be entirely located within the activity itself, which could easily be reimagined as oppressive and alienating work that prescribes or regulates our identity (as fishermen, herdsmen and so on). Nor can this pleasure be found in the renunciation of the activity in question, freedom from it in a purely negative sense: there is no evident pleasure in not being a critic, fisherman, hunter and so on. What makes Marx’s arrangement attractive is, instead, that it is possible for one to take up all these occupations without having to do so and without becoming in any way committed to them or letting them define my identity. Hunting in the morning is pleasant only insofar as it does not constitute an occupation, identity or form of life that defines me but is merely a potentiality whose actualization this particular morning remains accompanied by an unworking that frees in it the potentiality not to be. Thus, the pleasure in question consists in doing something while remaining at liberty to abandon this activity at any point in time, in not being bound by the very action one is executing, but being free not from but in one’s very activity. To the familiar figures of negative liberty (freedom from) and positive liberty (freedom to) (Berlin 2002) we must add a no less important ‘freedom in’, the freedom of the subject in relation 171

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democratic biopolitics to whatever form of life it dwells in or whatever activity it engages in. In this non-binding praxis one enjoys both the activity and one’s potential not to engage in it. What is properly pleasant in Marx’s vision of communism is doing whatever one is doing while retaining the potentiality not to do it in one’s very act of doing so. The acts in question may well be very productive and even more efficient than in a hypothetical case of voluntary or involuntary labor, of economic or non-economic compulsion. Yet, what makes them enjoyable is never their productivity but their not having to be productive, their not having to take place at all. What is at stake is then not the pleasure of any concrete activity but the pleasure of contingency that characterizes all of them at once as free, equal and in common.

The pleasure of formation We have argued that democracy is enjoyable to the extent that it brings the contingency that defines it into the very praxis of forms of life, setting the subject free in relation to whatever form of life it dwells in. Yet, what is it about contingency that is enjoyable? The question leads us to a reconsideration of the very nature of pleasure or enjoyment more generally: what is it that pleases in pleasure, what does one enjoy when one is enjoying something? Jean-Luc Nancy has addressed these questions in the works dealing with both sexual pleasure (2016a) and aesthetic pleasure (2013), though the two kinds of pleasure become all but indistinct in Nancy’s interpretation, aesthesis, after all, meaning ‘sensation’ in Greek so that the sensible and the sensual are never too far apart (Nancy 2013: 49). The key point of Nancy’s reading is that pleasure should not be conceived in terms of the satisfaction of a need or the accomplishment of a goal. Instead, pleasure is a self-propelling activity that enjoys itself and keeps desiring itself without end: the property of jouissance is to be endlessly renewed. This is very striking in the case of aesthetic jouissance, which we find in works of art. Why does not art stop, why do people continue to create? Because in art as in sexual jouissance we never say we have ‘enough’ of it. This idea makes no sense. (Nancy 2016a: 15)

With a reference to Spinoza’s notion of conatus, the force of one’s perseverance in being, Nancy describes enjoyment as the effort of a form in the process of being made and which, in a way, must never be completed. What we enjoy in an aesthetic form is the movement of this form, even though it then ends up being completed. What’s more, an

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how to enjoy democracy again (and again) aesthetic form is probably never exhausted and, on the contrary, does not stop enjoying itself. (ibid.: 30. See also Agamben 2017: 135)

This formation remains forever incomplete not because of failure or defect but because it is a kind of ‘“making” [that] is also inseparable from “undoing”, [which] has already divided the beginning from itself, separating it from its “perfectionist” aims’ (Nancy 2013: 104). We immediately recognize in this formulation the coexistence of creation and decreation, constitution and destitution, form and formlessness that is central to our concept of freeform life that defines the practice of democracy. Nancy discusses the relation between form and formation most extensively in the context of drawing, which he approaches as the opening of form, the gesture of formation that remains forever incomplete. While poetry or song may designate final and definitive forms as their products, drawing remains indissociable from the activity, never taking on a definitive form but retaining the dynamic moment of formation within itself. Drawing is not a given, available, formed form. On the contrary, it is the gift, invention, uprising or birth of form. “That a form comes” is drawing’s formula and this formula implies at the same time the desire for and the anticipation of form, a way of being exposed to what comes, to an unexpected occurrence, or to a surprise that no prior formality will have been able to precede or preform. (ibid.: 3)

This desire for formation is in play as much in aesthetic pleasure as it is in erotic pleasure: The fever of drawing, the fever of art in general, is born of the frenzied desire to push form right to the limit, to make contact with the formless, as an erotic fever pushes bodies to the limits of their own forms. (ibid.: 78)

The art of drawing is thus defined by Nancy as the ‘[thought] of a form forming itself, of the self-formative form, of the formative force of this very form, or again, of the form in its force’ (ibid.: 12). It is this formative force that accounts for the pleasure that humanity has found in drawing from its earliest history – not the pleasure of satisfaction and satiation but the open-ended pleasure that keeps desiring itself in its very act, the pleasure as incomplete as the drawing itself. Drawing unfolds a novel sense that does not conform to a preformed project. It is carried away by a design that joins with the movement, gesture and expansion of the mark. Its pleasure is the sensual pleasure of this unfolding, or the pleasure of this unfolding itself inasmuch as it invents, finds, and summons itself further, projected onto the trace that has nevertheless not preceded it. (ibid.: 22)

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democratic biopolitics Just as the drawing remains incomplete, so does the pleasure, ceaselessly generating new formation out of the formed form: [Formed] form summons a new formation because the truth of the thing cannot be presented once and for all, given that to present it – to form it – is already to remove a part of its own capacity for opening, forming, transforming or deforming. (ibid.: 25)

The pleasure of drawing is thus not the ‘pleasure of completion’ but the ‘pleasure of tension’ (ibid.: 26), ‘whose essence is repetition itself’ (ibid.), letting formative force emerge from any given form and thus unworking every work of art from within. Similarly to the Phish performances discussed in the previous chapter, what is enjoyed in drawing is not the definitive form produced by the artists but the manifestation of formation within every form, in which creation and decreation become indiscernible. For Nancy, this pleasure exemplifies what Kant famously called ‘purposiveness without purpose’ and reserved for the aesthetic judgment. Nancy generalizes this notion to embrace any kind of pleasure or enjoyment, which postpones or delays its end interminably and thereby becomes purposive: [This] pleasure is inconclusive because it is in essence the pleasure of beginning, of an opening, and so the pleasure of a desire that is aimed less towards an object to be attained than towards this very opening, towards its impulse, towards its own possibility. This possibility appears not in terms of representable, calculable and realizable ‘possibles’ but as the indeterminate possibility of the possible as such, of a potentiality to exist, a being of power, the reality of an impetus, of birth, of beginning. (ibid.: 38)

From these meditations on drawing Nancy moves to the question of the being of the subject, which he similarly redefines in terms of pleasure and displeasure: ‘Pleasure demands a relation to the self – nothing gives me pleasure if I do not please myself in taking pleasure in it’ (ibid.: 83). Every affection is also an auto-affection and the subject that experiences pleasure senses its own sense of pleasure and seeks to maintain itself in it: The subject is what relates to itself, affects itself, desires itself and hence experiences pleasure or withdraws from itself and hence experiences displeasure or pain. Desire – with its pleasure and/or pain – is not the subject’s response to an object (given or lacking); it is above all else a response or reflection of being to being itself. It is the referring of being to itself, precisely what is not but refers itself towards itself, which seeks itself and wants itself, whose being exists in this tension of self toward self. (ibid.: 28)

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how to enjoy democracy again (and again) In the terms we have introduced in the previous chapter, the subject is nothing but the oscillation between captivation and boredom, the enjoyment and sufferance of the form in which one dwells. The subject is what can enjoy (itself in) a form it lives in, letting itself be captivated by it, or suffer its own present form and seek to twist loose from it. Rather than define the subject by a determinate and accomplished identity, we may understand it as the force in excess of every form that unworks it from within, so that every identity is never more than an inconclusive sketch: ‘A subject is a sketch, an outline, a draft – not the draft of the self continually to come, but the self extended, thrown, risked, exposed’ (ibid.: 86). The destituent manner of living that we have termed ‘freeform life’ is nothing other than this ceaseless (re) sketching of the self, in which being comes to presence in a myriad of singular ways. [Drawing] constitutes a way of placing itself in contact with the formation of the form (of the thing, the thought, the emotion . . .). It is opened up by seeking the way it coincides with the most profound and secret movement of an appearance or a coming into appearance: how is it specifically? How exactly does it form itself? What is its particular energy? Little by little, what is at stake each time is nothing less than: how does the world form itself and how am I allowed to embrace its movement? Mimesis proceeds from the desire of methexis – of participation – in what plays out before the birth of the world; in its profound truth, mimesis desires to imitate the inimitable ‘creation’ or more simply, the inimitable and unimaginable uprising of being in general. (ibid.: 64)

This is why there is, quite simply, no pleasure in the formless and the amorphous. Every attempt to oppose particularism by a wholly subtractive universalism is bound to fail because all that comes to presence in it is a barely discernible generality that allows for little enjoyment. What is properly universal is not the result of subtraction but the coming into being of incommensurable singularities as free, equal, in common but each time specific. It is not a matter of affirming any of these specific forms themselves but rather the way they are formed, exactly and each time differently: ‘Drawing wants to show the truth, not of what has appearance or its appearance, but of coming into appearance that subtends it and that “itself” does not appear or show itself’ (ibid.: 92). What is enjoyable is precisely this coming to appearance, formation and alteration, which is why it never expires with the attainment of any determinate form or object but persists within it as the potentiality for transformation. Whereas satisfaction pertains to objects or things, pleasure consists in their coming to and going out of appearance, the oscillation 175

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democratic biopolitics between captivation and boredom. This alternation defines a rhythm of the subject’s way of living, a rhythmics of appearance through which the mystery –or the evidence – of the rising or suspension of forms in general is known, is recognized, and participates. In all its possible forms – a line traced by a pencil, by a dancer, a voice or an editing console – drawing/design must be understood as engaging a rhythm, setting in play a beat, a differentiation, displacements, folds and connections of the indistinct, of what is simply always itself. (ibid.: 70)

What we have termed a freeform life can thus be defined by its rhythm as a series of distinctions, whereby the subject slides between captivation and boredom and thereby lets forms come and go out of presence. This is why, as we have seen, it makes little sense for Nancy to speak of a ‘true life’ in Badiou’s manner. For him, ‘truth is only distinction’ (ibid.: 101). It is there only in the passage from the formless to form, from nothing to something, from boredom to captivation; it is there in the rhythm of the upsurge of the world as such: ‘Visual, sonorous, gestural, or tactile delineation distinguishes, differentiates, distributes and disposes at the same time as it disappears into its own movement’ (ibid.: 101). In other words, for Nancy, there is only the truth of the formation of distinct forms, never of these forms themselves. The truth in question is nothing other than struction: that is, the coming into appearance of incommensurable singularities: ‘Homo sapiens is the animal gifted with a taste for the unique savoring of things, for savoring the world as world, as the coming into appearance, release and compearance of all things together and in their indefinite multiplicity’ (ibid.: 66). As we have argued in Chapter 4, democracy is the regime most adequate to this taste for formation, since it makes legitimate this coming into appearance of the myriad of incommensurable forms of life. Only democracy makes of the absence of any proper or true form of life its sole ground, rendering every form of life legitimate but only as long as it keeps its formative force in play, unworking itself in its very constitution. For this reason, while other political regimes are certainly capable of satisfying finite needs, only democracy is capable of bringing infinite pleasure, since it ensures that the process of formation, alteration and distinction remains open. We may therefore conclude that, just as in the case of Rousseau’s contemplation of the vegetable kingdom, there are no preconditions for the enjoyment of democracy other than the ‘love of pleasure’ itself (Rousseau 1987: 109). It is not simply that democracy is pleasant to some for some arbitrary reason, like flamenco, roller-skating, Migos or margaritas might be. Instead, democracy in its biopolitical declension 176

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how to enjoy democracy again (and again) shares its fundamental structure with pleasure in general as the enjoyment of the force of formation in and beyond every form. We may now return to Nancy’s own earlier characterization of democracy as ‘leading to nothing’, not bringing us to the climax of joy. Evidently, the enjoyment that we associate with democratic freeform life ‘leads to nothing’ in the sense of involving no fulfillment, accomplishment or ‘climax’: the necessary contingency of struction ensures that none of the affirmative procedures ever attains a definitive end. And yet, this absence of climax does not indicate any deficiency of enjoyment, but only its strictly infinite character that keeps desiring itself beyond any fulfillment. In the absence of any definitive form that life must attain, the myriad forms created and decreated along the way in the perpetual movement of distraction only serve to renew the enjoyment at work in their creation: If people continue to create and jouir [enjoy], it is because desire does not stop when it takes one particular form. Because there is a constantly renewed desire, the desire to make new forms arise, to make a new sensibility perceptible. And this new sensibility is desired and created not because we lack something, but because what is desired is the renewing of meaning as such. (Nancy 2016a: 16, emphasis original)

The difference of democracy from other political regimes does not consist in the renunciation or prohibition of affirmation or enjoyment but rather in their reassignment from a privileged form of life to the ceaseless praxis of forming itself, to life as the endless play of formations and transformations, of coming into and going out of presence of singular forms that all derive their legitimacy from being heaped up without any coordination: free, equal and in common. Are we not being all too confident when we speak of the experience of formative force within every form as pleasant? Do not the critics of democracy rather find this experience unpleasant or even painful and choose instead to withdraw into the security of the authoritarian imposition of a proper, natural or necessary form of life? Is the contemporary malaise of democracy not characterized precisely by the renunciation of contingency and the withdrawal into nativist identities that apparently provide one with stability, security and thus at least a certain kind of pleasure? With regard to this question, we must first address the ambiguity of pleasure itself, which always carries within itself a certain tension: ‘The pleasure of quenching one’s thirst differs from the pleasure of tasting a delectable drink – in the first case, a tension is overcome, while in the second a tension is preserved and promises to return’ 177

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democratic biopolitics (Nancy 2013: 68). Nancy argues that the latter aspect of pleasure can never be entirely extinguished in satisfaction: a complete satisfaction would dissolve the very relation of the subject to itself, its capacity to feel or experience anything. And yet, the retention of the tension is not equivalent to the mere negation of pleasure in pain but rather points to a fundamental contradiction at the heart of pleasure itself: ‘pleasure (which desires itself) encounters the impossibility of fulfilment (in other words, of pleasing itself) without itself being affected by excess or lack’ (ibid.: 85). This is why a certain displeasure is immanent to pleasure itself: ‘it is never satisfied, always lacking a before and after, and yet finding pleasure from and in this very displacement’ (ibid.: 87). Thus, while every pleasure is accompanied by a certain sorrow over its incapacity for complete satisfaction, this sorrow is inherent to pleasure as such, it is what keeps one seeking and desiring pleasure. This is why Nancy goes so far as to make this sorrow part of his ‘ethics of pleasure’: ‘a pleasure that does not let itself be satisfied, that refuses satiety, and whose exigency never fails to turn into sorrow’ (ibid.). It is easy to see how this unison of pleasure and sorrow characterizes our lived experience of democracy. The pleasure made possible by our distracted dwelling in struction, oscillating between captivation by and boredom with plural forms of life is always somewhat hampered by the affirmation of the necessity of their contingency. To assert the freedom, equality and community of all forms of life at the very moment of one’s captivation with one of them entails the entry of an element of boredom into captivation, whereby one cannot completely abandon oneself to the enjoyment of one’s captivation. Precisely because democracy makes an infinite plurality of forms legitimate (as long as they all recognize their own contingency), it is difficult to be fully captivated by any one of them while upholding that it is just as contingent as all the others. The potentiality not to be captivated thereby enters our very experience of captivation, making it not fully satisfactory (subverting the pleasure) and stimulating distraction (thus keeping the pleasure intact, keeping it going). A certain dissatisfaction with democracy, with the possibilities it offers and the choices one has made, is therefore inherent in its very enjoyment and keeps democracy safe rather than undermine it. On the contrary, fully uninhibited enjoyment of one’s captivation, one’s reckless abandon to it, would be problematic for democracy precisely because it is so difficult to reconcile with the affirmation of the necessary contingency of all forms of life. This is why a certain ironic semi-detachment from the very form of life one dwells in, in which one’s enjoyment is, from the outset, tainted by the expectations of disappointment in it, is not a danger to the democratic process but rather the best guarantee 178

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how to enjoy democracy again (and again) of its preservation. This ‘irony’ should not be taken to mean a lack of seriousness; on the contrary, the subject of a democracy takes his or her captivation just as seriously as s/he takes his or her boredom: hence the necessary intertwining of the two in whatever form of life one occupies. It is not a matter of a lack of interest or commitment, let alone a jaded depreciation of all forms of life as equally worthless. Instead, the displeasure in question is what prevents the complete exhaustion of formative force in the actuality of a given form. The retention of formative force keeps the process of distraction going, making it possible for us to be captivated again and again, and not once and for all in the manner of Heidegger’s authentic Dasein. And yet, there is another kind of displeasure associated with democracy, which does not keep it going but rather leads to its abuse, degradation and (self-)destruction. This displeasure manifests itself in the valorization of one’s form of life not merely as enjoyable in the nondefinitive manner described above, but rather as proper, natural or necessary, and enjoyable precisely for these reasons. In this manner, the contingency that defines the experience of democracy is negated without ever being entirely effaced. In the radical pluralism of struction, a form of life can be posited as necessary or natural only in bad faith. The necessary is simply the contingent whose pleasure one wishes to perpetuate by warding off the advent of boredom. Similarly, the natural is only the artefact that is so pleasant that it fits us like a glove, becoming our (second) nature. In both cases, what is actually enjoyed is the contingent force of formation rather than an accomplished form: the only thing that can be enjoyed is what retains the potentiality not to be. And yet, it is precisely this potentiality not to be that is negated by proclaiming the enjoyed form to be proper, natural or necessary. Such a negation could not possibly amplify one’s enjoyment: a necessary form of life – that is, something that cannot not be – would be always already fully formed, its formative force expired and its pleasure extinguished. The valorization of one’s form of life as proper, natural or necessary does not arise from the enjoyment of the form in question but rather from the perception of the loss of this form’s privileged status, the expiry of its hegemony, the dissolution of its central status in the pluralistic space of struction. Many explanations of the rise of nativist populism in contemporary Western democracies invoke this line of reasoning, when discussing the voters allegedly ‘left behind’ by globalization, neoliberalism, multiculturalism and political correctness (see Mueller 2016; Judis 2016; Kellner 2016). The increasing appeal of nativism is explained as the reaction of the formerly dominant forms of life to their noticeable retreat amid the proliferation of alternative forms, be they those of 179

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democratic biopolitics the metropolitan upper middle class, ethnic minorities or gay couples. Indeed, the rhetoric in the controversial campaigns during the Brexit referendum in the UK and the 2016 US presidential election referred less to grand ideological distinctions than to the most minute and banal aspects of lifestyle: drinking lattes, driving Volvos, eating sushi – as opposed to owning guns, waving the flag, listening to country music and so on. What is unpleasant for nativism is not a threat or even a risk posed to one’s form of life, since it is hardly threatened as such (as no one is forcing anyone to drink latte, go vegan or listen to trap music), but rather the perceived loss of its predominance and propriety, its predominance as proper. In the practice of their forms of life, the proponents of nativism experience both the pleasure of the formative force at work in it and the displeasure of sharing this pleasure with every other form of life around, which, as we have argued, is enjoyed in exactly the same way. The form of life one enjoys certainly accounts for one’s individuation as a subject but it can grant no subject any privilege, let alone distinguish proper citizens from outsiders, marginals or enemies. It is the desire for this privilege that leads to the attempts to prop up one’s form of life as not merely enjoyable in its own right but rather proper for the people in its entirety and not necessarily as contingent as any other. These attempts deny the enjoyment of their form of life to everyone but the practitioners of the privileged one and hence clearly contradict the democratic principles of freedom, equality and community. Thus, nativists simultaneously enjoy democracy (since it allows them the pleasure of enjoying their form of life with no restriction) and venture to undermine and pervert it (by denying this pleasure to others and demanding the restitution of their form of life as proper and dominant). What this disposition finds unpleasant is thus not democracy itself but the pleasure that it lets others derive from it. The driving force of nativism is the envy of the other’s pleasure. We may simultaneously observe the obverse case of self-proclaimed defenders of democracy that do not themselves enjoy any of the particular forms of life whose formation and circulation it allows. This is the paradox of a multiculturalism that remains wary of itself practicing any particular culture, despite affirming the equality of all of them. While we have presented the equal contingency of all forms of life as the enabling condition, making it possible to opt in or out of whatever form of life one happens to be captivated by or bored with, this disposition draws the opposite conclusion, withdrawing from every particular form of life while affirming their equally contingent character. We are dealing here with the very opposite of nativist envy: in the manner of Nancy’s non-affirmative democratic state, the democrats commit themselves to 180

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how to enjoy democracy again (and again) protecting the right of each and all to any form of life they choose but for some reason themselves renounce this right and the pleasure it brings, ending up in the position of the joyless sentinels of democracy. While the nativists separate themselves from all others through the claim to practice a proper form of life, the democrats separate themselves by claiming not to have a form of life of their own but only defending everyone else’s right to one. This creates a paradoxical sense of superiority that makes these democrats appear like a privileged group of Rousseauan universalists that have managed to subtract themselves from every particular form of life, whose equality they now claim to defend. It is not that these claims are false and underneath it all the democrats still practice some particular form of life that they disavow. It is rather that by not doing so they no longer experience the pleasure of contingency (which they only proclaim as a transcendental principle) and instead embody necessity as such: the necessity of pluralism, respect, diversity and so on, which is not accompanied by any captivation by a form of life that is to be respected or tolerated. By occupying the meta-level of the democratic regime itself and not any of the forms of life whose proliferation it enables, the democrats manage to evade contingency experientially precisely by upholding it normatively. Yet, in the absence of any captivation of their own, the democrats cannot but appear bored, no matter how passionate and sincere their defense of democracy actually is. Despite their best intentions, their jaded demeanor as self-appointed guardians of democracy does not serve as the best advertisement for it. The defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US election and the Remainers’ camp in the Brexit referendum may be at least partly explained by this joyless image that the respective candidates or campaigns were stuck with, which contrasted unfavorably with a rather grotesque vivacity exhibited by their opponents. The separation of the affirmation of democracy from its lived praxis renders it hollow and undermines one’s commitment to it. Democracy can never be merely about proclaiming and affirming the rights of others – it is about others insofar as they are equal to and in common to the self, and it is about the self insofar as it always remains free to become other. Thus, the malaise of democracy that we are living through today has to do with the separation between its affirmation and its practice: either it is practiced without being affirmed as such by the anti-democratic forces that exploit it to undermine it or it is affirmed without being practiced by the proponents of democracy ‘as such’, without any of the forms of life it makes possible. The revitalization of democracy, its becoming enjoyable once again, must therefore proceed through the reintegration of these aspects, which also entails the reintegration of the universal 181

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democratic biopolitics and the particular, the necessary and the contingent, the transcendental and the empirical in one’s way of living. It is the affirmation of the universality within every particularity that makes a particular form of life pleasant and not tribalist, exclusionary or violent, reduced to either the consumerist ‘idiocy of the private’ or the authoritarian ‘idiocy of the public’. It is the affirmation of the necessary and not merely contingent contingency of each and every form of life that makes the experimentation with them innocent and enjoyable rather than a dangerous transgression or a life-changing decision. Finally, it is the affirmation of the experience-ability of the transcendental condition of democracy in actual forms of life that makes it livable and not merely preachable. Let us now address the conditions for overcoming the blockage of pleasure that accounts for the current malaise of democracy. If what is enjoyable in a democracy is the experience of contingency in a freeform life oscillating between captivation and boredom, two following conditions must obtain for this enjoyment to be possible. Firstly, the forms in question must be sufficiently different for the alternation between them to be perceptible. If an ideology or governmental rationality acquires such a degree of hegemony that it predominates in all forms of life, the possibility of a swaying alternation that makes democracy so pleasant becomes devalued: there is little attraction in moving from one form of life to an identical one. The hegemony of neoliberalism that made the center-right and center-left parties all but indistinct in the 1990s is a good example of this devaluation. Precisely at the moment of its triumph in the Cold War, liberal democracy in the West came under attack for not leaving its subjects any genuine choice, offering nothing but different versions of the triumphant (neo)liberalism. Whenever an alternative managed to slip into the second place, be it the Freedom Party in Austria or the National Front in France, it was delegitimized to such a degree that the choice between them and the mainstream party or candidate was no longer a genuine choice, which is well illustrated by the record percentage of votes (82.2%) received by Jacques Chirac against Jean-Marie Le Pen in the second round of the French presidential election of 2002, evoking memories of ‘elections’ in the Soviet Union and some of its successor states. This brings us to the second condition. The forms of life, while differing to a significant degree, must remain similar at least in one aspect: they must all affirm the necessity of contingency that makes their free circulation in the democratic regime possible. Quite simply, the potentiality for oscillation between different forms of life in a democracy is enjoyable only if it may be expected to continue, irrespective of what form of life one chooses to enter and uphold. A properly democratic decision is the 182

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how to enjoy democracy again (and again) one that retains its potentiality to decide otherwise next time, be this in the next regular election, in an early election as a result of the loss of confidence in the government in question, or simply at any point in time by shifting one’s allegiance to an alternative policy, ideology or form of life. A form of life that competes with others in a democratic regime but ventures to abolish democracy as soon as it becomes victorious poses an obvious threat to the continuing enjoyment of the freeform manner of living. This is precisely what led to the above-discussed delegitimization of far-right populist challengers in the 1990s and early 2000s, which, in turn, led to the perception of there being no genuine alternatives in a democracy. Perhaps as a result of this perception (in addition to many other factors), these and other challengers continued to grow in popularity throughout the 2000s to pose what looked like an existential threat to democracy in the 2010s: in the French presidential election of 2017, the mainstream candidate Emmanuel Macron could no longer hope for Chirac’s 2002 result but had to be content with 66%, while in the Austrian presidential election the difference between the Green and Freedom Party candidates was a mere 8%. The situation that was exceptional and scandalous for the 1990s has apparently become the ‘new normal’ for Western democracies, yet this normality can hardly be perceived as enjoyable. The widely shared expectation that the electoral success of the populist right would lead to the undermining of democracy entails that, in choosing between these forces and the mainstream, we are no longer playing the regular democratic game, in which every outcome can be played back, but rather choosing between democracy itself and something other than it. This is why these elections tend to appear as fateful, generating anxiety rather than enjoyment. This anxiety is owing to the fact that the simultaneous operation of constitution and destitution, captivation and boredom in a freeform life that defines democracy is, in these elections, under the threat of dissolution, which would leave one only with forced captivation in the form of life now posited as proper and the delegitimization of all alternatives as improper. The possibility of having both (captivation and boredom), of eating one’s cake and having it, gives way to the need for a definitive choice between democracy and its other. And yet, whatever one chooses, the pleasure of democracy is blocked and frustrated. If one opts for the ‘democratic’ candidate of the mainstream, this choice appears to have been necessary, the other option not being a genuine alternative from a democratic perspective. Yet, if one opts for the antidemocratic challenger, one risks undermining democracy altogether, including one’s very possibility to make such a choice in the future. Rather than playfully oscillate between captivation by and boredom 183

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democratic biopolitics with equally legitimate forms of life, the subject must either persist in its support for democracy with an almost Heideggerian resoluteness or risk dispensing with it with an almost Heideggerian small-mindedness. Thus, the enjoyment of democracy is possible only when the forms of life in free and equal circulation are sufficiently diverse to make the alternation between them meaningful but sufficiently committed to the preservation of the radical contingency at the heart of the democratic regime to make the choice between them not a fateful once-and-for-all decision but one that can always be played back within the democratic setting. Of course, it is impossible to produce a perfect institutional design that would guarantee such an outcome: institutions can always be turned around and dangers to democracy can come as much from established governments eager to gain exceptional powers for its protection as they can from ostensibly anti-democratic forces. Yet, if it is impossible to resolve this problem by transforming institutional structures, it is at least possible to remedy it through changes in political culture or ethos, by cultivating the recognition of contingency as the condition of possibility of democratic freeform life. As long as the forms of life in a given society remain substantially diverse yet committed to the reciprocal affirmation of freedom, equality and community, democracy remains enjoyable as an experiment in freely forming one’s life in common with others.

Democratic biopolitics in the age of post-truth What would be the pathway towards a democratic biopolitics in contemporary Western societies, whose gradual disillusionment in the neoliberal modes of government, hegemonic for over three decades, now threatens to engulf democracy itself? How can the enjoyment of democracy be reactivated? The first step out of the current malaise would consist in overturning the hegemony of the neoliberal biopolitical rationality, not in favor of any particular alternative (socialist, nativist or otherwise) but rather in favor of the institutionalization of the radical pluralism of forms of life, in which entrepreneurial forms of life promoted by neoliberalism are restored to contingency alongside all other possible forms, no matter how outlandish or perverse. It is important to distinguish such a democratic pluralism from the pluralism that already characterizes the neoliberal mode of biopolitics itself, which is modelled on the market. The pluralism that we envision is not a matter of a competition over which of the forms of life proves more entrepreneurial – entrepreneurialism or its rivals; it is easy to see how this contest would play out but it is difficult to see why one would play it at 184

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how to enjoy democracy again (and again) all. Such pluralism would merely transpose the hegemonic rationality to a different level, whereby a form of life (entrepreneurialism) would appropriate the right to adjudicate the competition between a plurality of forms of life, including itself. In contrast, as we have argued above with reference to Nancy, the radical pluralism of struction involves forms of life that might well be so incommensurable as to make any notion of a competition between them meaningless: communism and jogging, enology and Islam, and so on. The pluralism of democratic biopolitics is therefore not a matter of a market of interchangeable lifestyles mediated by the general equivalent but rather of the affirmation of the legitimacy of myriad forms of life for which no common measure may be found, other than their necessary contingency. This pluralism exceeds not only the market competition but also the format of a competitive election. While, in an electoral setting, a subject has only one vote and must choose between alternative candidates or parties rendered at least somewhat commensurable by the very format of the election, in the biopolitical field a subject may and usually does opt for more than one form of life at once, ending up in a harmonious or uneasy amalgam of these forms, some of them more durable than the others. While electoral democracy must develop strict codes on how the choice in question must be made, democratic biopolitics makes this very choice part of the individuation of the subject, inscribing it into the formation of a freeform life. Secondly, the consequence of the legitimization of this pluralism of the incommensurable is the undermining of the position that has occupied a privileged status in modern biopolitics: the expert capable of guiding all possible forms of life towards their truth. In the entrepreneurial biopolitics of neoliberalism, this expertise would take the form of economic rationality, applied universally from self-help columns in the tabloid press to the governmental restructuring of the public sector. In any setting whatsoever, ‘life advice’ would follow a similar logic; hence an expert on entrepreneurial restructuring could swiftly move from healing a broken heart to justifying massive staff cuts at a hospital, all in the name of the human capitalization of oneself. In a genuinely democratic biopolitics, there is no place for such universal expertise simply because the incommensurability of forms of life excludes the possibility of any common discursive format under which they could be subsumed, while their necessary contingency renders any such format equal to any alternative discourse on life and its fashioning. Biopolitics is then no longer a matter of following or resisting expertise-based government of life but a ceaseless experiment with available (and why not, yet unavailable) forms of life, whose epistemic foundations might be as incommensurable as these forms themselves. 185

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democratic biopolitics This experimental or improvisational approach, which we have attempted to outline in this book, is certainly easier to welcome in theory than to apply in practice. We have grown accustomed to and complacent about the striking lack of fit between our freedom to elect those who govern us and an ever-increasing uniformity of the ways in which we are supposed to live (work, love, die and so on). Even when, in accordance with neoliberal governmentalities, we are invited to choose between competing providers of (formerly public) services, we all too often notice that while the providers may be different, the services in question are very much the same or at least guided by the same rationality. Whereas democracy continues to be the unchallengeable model of the composition of government, even when threatened by populist challengers on the left and the right, its extension to the government of life is a prospect apparently so radical that it appears doomed from the outset: what would a true democracy in public health, education or social welfare even look like? It is much easier to imagine an electoral ‘revolution’, in which a neoliberal government would be defeated by a far-right candidate like Marine le Pen or a leftist coalition like Podemos than it is to conceive of even a minor loosening of the neoliberal rationalities in biopolitical government. Perhaps, this is precisely because the electoral revolution is no longer expected to have much purchase on our lives as singular beings as opposed to the disembodied subjects of the general will. Whereas our political systems manage reasonably well with the institutionalization of contingency, the same cannot be said about the biopolitical apparatuses that have rather tended to operate under the sign of necessity derived from the founded knowledges of biology, economics, sociology and other sciences. And yet, it is precisely in this entry of contingency into the government of life that the democratization of biopolitics consists. We may now confront in more detail the inevitable objection to our idea of democratic biopolitics. Is it not merely a plea for anarchism, for ‘doing whatever one wants with one’s life’, including throwing it to the wind? Does it mean that people are free to take care of their health (or not) in whatever manner they see fit? Is contemporary medical science then to be treated on equal terms with the outlandish doctrines of quacks and charlatans? Does democratic freedom extend to the choice between living well and drinking oneself to death? These questions are actually more complex and less rhetorical than they might appear. In fact, as democratic subjects of law, we already enjoy these apparently ‘anarchic’ freedoms: there is certainly no crime involved in excessive drinking, unhealthy eating, unsafe sex and other behavior that goes against the elementary prescriptions of social medicine. The objection would acquire 186

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how to enjoy democracy again (and again) some force only when it pertains to us as subjects to governmental rationalities, to biopolitical reason, for which it is simply irrational to disobey medical advice, to let one’s health go to ruin and so on. Once again, we end up in the antinomy of democracy and biopolitics that we traced back to Rousseau in Part 1: while we are formally free as sovereign people to do whatever we want within the limits of the law, in reality we end up subjected to a plethora of disciplinary and biopolitical powers that operate not through the universal principles of law, but through the particular knowledges of human and social sciences that authorize the discourses of normalization, effectiveness, self-fulfillment and even happiness. The advent of biopolitics, however one wishes to date it, entails that democracy is always less than democracy, and to make it more democratic one must limit or remove all biopolitics from it. In this book we have elucidated the limits of this strategy and sought to advance beyond them in a different approach that does not seek to purify democracy from biopolitics but rather to expose biopolitics itself to democratic contestation. While the practitioners of the former approach (including our earlier work, see Prozorov 2007) have tended to focus on resistance to and refusal of biopolitical powers in the name of democracy, our approach in this book rather focuses on the more positive or affirmative practices of fashioning our lives in a democratic space. Rather than postulate the existence of a hegemonic biopolitical rationality that one must resist, we have proceeded from the inescapable pluralism of forms of life that circulate in this space, which may captivate us or leave us bored. The refusal of a particular biopolitical rationality and the form of life it prescribes does not mean that one thereby ‘opts out’ of biopolitics altogether: the aporias of Rousseauist politics demonstrate how this opting out is almost impossible. Yet, neither does it mean that one is inevitably consigned to the unenviable choice between accepting the hegemonic form of life and resisting it, which still entails being stuck with it, albeit in a negative fashion. There is always a plurality of forms of life that are irreducible to hegemonic governmental rationalities, and the problematic of democratic biopolitics pertains precisely to the question of how to enable their coexistence in the democratic space constituted by the affirmation of the necessity of contingency. ‘Doing whatever one wants with one’s life’ should not be understood in the negative and reactive terms of refusal but must rather be given a positive biopolitical meaning of freely forming one’s life in common with and on an equal standing with other such freely formed lives. The second objection to our approach would view it less as a radical challenge to the contemporary state of affairs than as its vindication. Do contemporary Western liberal democracies not already abide by the 187

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democratic biopolitics principles of democratic biopolitics that we have presented in this book? The legalization of gay marriage, the decriminalization of soft drugs, the expansion of the boundaries of the accepted in public morality all seem to indicate that the democratization of biopolitics is at least well under way. While the constitutional arrangements of Western liberal democracies might not have changed very much since the post-World War II period, life is certainly governed rather less obtrusively. While this evidence is persuasive, our discussion above of the universalization of economic rationality in neoliberalism suggests that, rather than having been democratized, biopolitics has been hegemonized by a single rationality that many of us have not chosen and even perceive as alien and obtrusive. While this rationality is certainly less repressive than many of its predecessors, its hegemonic character conflicts fundamentally with the radical pluralism of struction that democratic biopolitics is guided by and seeks to legitimize. This conflict leads to the temptation to dispense with liberal democracy as inevitably in alliance with neoliberal governance and hence necessarily heterogeneous to any vision of affirmative biopolitics that we might uphold. In our view, this dismissal of liberal democracy would be a catastrophic mistake. Unless one seriously wishes to abandon the principles of freedom, equality and community that follow from the affirmation of the necessity of contingency as the ontological condition of democracy in favor of a politics of the good and the true, it is difficult to envision any affirmative biopolitics in the absence of or in contradiction to liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is dispensable only from the standpoint of the politics of truth, be it Heideggerian or Badiouan, for which there is a proper and authentic form of life contrasted with banal modes of existence utterly devoid of truth. The legitimate pluralism upheld by the democratic regime is, in this approach, merely an obstacle to the triumph of the true and the proper that ends up having to compete with the reactive and the obscure in the framework of ‘democratic materialism’. In contrast, for the approach that we develop in this book, there is no truth in the forms of life themselves but only in their coexistence on the basis of the affirmation of contingency and the principles that follow from it. We therefore see no problem in insisting on the contingency of even the most appealing versions of truth politics and no tragedy in having the faithful subject coexist with reactive and obscure ones. The regime of democratic materialism that Badiou decries is the only thing that separates his truth politics from the authoritarian forcing of the truth into the real, which would resemble the very Stalinism that he so much detests (see Prozorov 2016). While liberal democracy is definitely not sufficient for the triumph of any ‘true’ form of life, it 188

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how to enjoy democracy again (and again) is absolutely necessary for this form to be capable of freely captivating subjects as opposed to holding them captive in an authoritarian fashion. Moreover, the insufficiency in question does not refer to some deepseated or superficial defect of democracy but simply to the fact that the contingency proper to democracy entails the ever-present possibility of the best designs going wrong, the people shrugging off indifferently the form of life that was supposed to captivate them all. If a form of life cannot attain political supremacy simply on the basis of its own claim to be true, there always remains a lot to do for those who wish their preferred forms of life to be maximally captivating. Yet, in the absence of the democratic affirmation of contingency, there is nothing left for them to do, since the authoritarian forcing of a form into life makes the enjoyment of this form impossible and renders it lifeless. Those interested in granting their ideas vitality should therefore take particular care to maintain and maximize democracy. On the other hand, however, we should never be complacent about any given liberal–democratic regime as a definitive actualization of democratic biopolitics because the latter is not a matter of institutional or legal design but only that of practice. It therefore makes no sense to try to establish correspondences between the ethos of democratic biopolitics that we have outlined here and any determinate political regime, let alone its specific model. As an ethos, democratic biopolitics is both a guideline for governmental practices and an instrument of their criticism. No actually existing democracy is a full embodiment of this ethos, but not because there is something particularly demanding, let alone utopian about it; it is simply because there is always the possibility of a particular form of life assuming hegemony and denying the contingency that made its original enjoyment possible in the first place. To speak of democratic biopolitics is not to describe a system or a set of institutions, which could always be turned around, perverted or hollowed out, but to insist that the radical contingency at the heart of democracy implies the freedom, equality and community of all forms of life, which also pass into these forms themselves whenever they are not upheld as exclusive attributes of private or public identity but rather retain the potentiality for destitution in their very practice. Democratic biopolitics is ultimately an exigency that we form our lives freely while retaining the formative force that keeps this formation going. Just as this force should not be exhausted in our forms of life, it should not be exhausted in our forms of government, which must retain the potentiality for transformation. Rather than dispense with or valorize the existing democratic regimes, our approach rather insists on the need for their permanent criticism for the purpose of their continuous democratization. The extension of the 189

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democratic biopolitics problematic of democracy into the biopolitical terrain yields new perspectives on familiar issues, inviting us to think about what democratic principles actually mean in the contexts of sexuality and reproduction, aging and disability, and so on. The main challenge faced by democratic biopolitics is precisely how to extend the affirmation of contingency, which is largely acceptable in the sphere of electoral preferences, to other spheres of existence, in which the legitimacy of governmental rationalities has rather tended to be grounded in necessity founded on specific knowledges developed by medicine, psychology, sociology, economics and so on. In psychoanalytic terms, the limited ‘electoral’ notion of democracy has liberated us from the discourse of the Master while still subjecting us to the discourse of the University. While this challenge is serious, it is not insurmountable: just as we do not usually ask political scientists who to vote for, it might be similarly unwise to ask sociologists about how we should interact with others, or even ask doctors how we should take care of ourselves. This does not mean that any of these professional discourses are disqualified as such, since they all might play a role in helping us to decide (just as a conversation with a political scientist may helpfully influence our voting preference), but the decision itself remains ours alone, including the decision of whether to resort to expert advice or not. At the very least, this challenge requires a more circumspect approach to the truth claims of biopolitical rationalities of government in the context of the democratic process: the knowledge that may be well founded according to its own epistemological criteria becomes contestable when it is used to justify a governmental policy. This does not mean that these founded knowledges are somehow relativized in their immanent truth claims. What is relativized, or, better, what was never absolute in the first place, is the politics that is to be inferred from them (or not). It is important to distinguish between the epistemic status of scientific statements (that is, their truth or falsity) and the political prescriptions derived from them, which do not have a scientific status to begin with. Just as the truth claims of a given science do not automatically retain their validity within aesthetic, religious, erotic or other fields of experience, they do not immediately become political truths authorizing certain acts of government. Even if we grant that a certain scientific statement is necessarily true in its epistemic field, the political prescription derived from it remains a contingent decision in the democratic space, since this or any other epistemic field cannot legitimately fill the void place of power. While we may hold as incontestable the scientific fact that eating salmon is good for one’s heart, this does not make a healthy diet a similarly incontestable political truth: it is impossible to 190

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how to enjoy democracy again (and again) found political decisions on the truths of dietetics, just as it is impossible to do so on the basis of erotic pleasure or religious revelation. This does not mean that there is no passage whatsoever between the domains of politics and science (or aesthetics, religion, economics and so on). On the contrary, in politics and governance we always encounter a myriad of such passages (Lyotard 1988: 130–5), whereby scientific, aesthetic, religious or other statements are affirmed in the political field, which is precisely the reason why no single one of them could ever acquire any predominance in this field. Democracy cannot disqualify as illegitimate a way of living or even a way of governing that is in conflict with the established knowledge. Nor does one’s grasp or ignorance of any such knowledge render one more or less qualified to govern or elect those who govern – something we often forget in branding the candidates we do not like ‘unqualified’ for office, as if there were any such qualifications in the aftermath of the voiding of the place of power in democratic revolutions. This line of reasoning might appear particularly controversial in the current ‘post-truth’ era, characterized by the devaluation of the authority of expert knowledge and the proliferation of ‘alternative facts’. While the lamentations about the age of ‘post-truth’ are certainly understandable, they also risk leading us astray: after all, it would be too simplistic to try to resolve the problems of the ‘post-truth’ disposition by restoring the authority of truth. To begin with, it is not clear when this authority existed in an untroubled and uncontested manner and what sort of truth it was. The problematization of the fallibility of our truths is historically coextensive with the generation of these truths themselves and actually functions as the precondition of their generation through the scientific method. Especially from the perspective of biopolitics, the demand for the restoration of the authority of scientific truth appears highly problematic, since it risks further isolating biopolitics from democracy and hence runs strictly contrary to our objective of democratizing biopolitics. This evidently does not mean that this objective is served by the aggressive and cynical relativism peddled by authoritarian regimes and pro-authoritarian movements worldwide, even when this relativism is expressed in the language of contingency. As we have argued above, there is a difference between the affirmation of the necessity of contingency, from which follow freedom, equality and community of incommensurable forms of life, and the affirmation of contingency as itself contingent, from which follows nothing but the equivalence of all statements and practices, including those that violate freedom, equality and community. In this manner, post-truth politics converts the critical assertion of the 191

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democratic biopolitics fallibility of our facts and arguments (which can nonetheless be held to be true or false to varying degrees) into the claim that every statement is merely an opinion, which cannot be true or false by definition and is, for that reason, never fallible, since it is no longer liable to being evaluated in terms of any truth criterion. Indeed, the more far-fetched, contradictory or absurd this opinion is, the better chance it has for wider circulation. The extreme but only logical conclusion of this approach is the dispensation with meaning altogether: an utterly meaningless enunciation would be truly ‘post-truth’. In contrast to ideological propaganda in the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, in which there was one ‘truth’, however shifting or inconsistent, dominating in the public sphere, the autocracies of the post-truth era seek to dominate the public sphere by flooding it with a myriad of conflicting opinions of the most grotesque character, thereby undermining all meaningful debate or discussion. The public sphere, which historically has been the most effective means of struggle against autocracy (cf. Honneth 2014: 255–304), is thereby reduced to a scrapheap of worthless opinions. It is clear that this disposition has nothing to do with democratic biopolitics as conceived of in this book: even as its proponents might hypocritically criticize ‘expertise-based’ biopolitics in the name of the power of the people, their goal is not to enable the coexistence of incommensurable forms of life under the conditions of freedom, equality and community but rather to institute a privileged form of life derived from the presumed essence of the ‘people’ itself. It is hardly a coincidence that the equivalence of all opinions is most aggressively promoted by the regimes and movements advocating and implementing exclusionary, restrictive or outright repressive policies: if all politics is devoid of truth, then all that is left is power that can be exercised without any limitation. If anything goes, why not the form of life already more established and more powerful? If everything is contingent, including this very fact of contingency, why cannot the hegemonic form of life assert itself as necessary, if only as a matter of opinion? The main difference between democratic biopolitics and ‘post-truth’ populism consists precisely in the absence of any privileged form of life that it attempts to institute by relativizing the truth claims of its opponents. Instead, it seeks to subject the truth claims of every form of knowledge to the same procedure that every form of life undergoes in the democratic space. It is not a matter of relativization but of the simultaneous operation of constitution and destitution that defines what we have termed a freeform life. To argue that the founded knowledge that grounds governmental rationalities is contingent is not to dismantle or even diminish its truth value, but rather to restore to it its character of 192

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how to enjoy democracy again (and again) potentiality. As we have argued above, a statement that is unequivocally true in its own epistemic field does not carry this truth into the political field, in which it might be deployed. In this field, it rather functions as a possible grounding for a form of life that might captivate one but might also leave one indifferent. For example, the scientific truths of climate change may participate in the constitution of a more environmentally aware and responsible form of life but might also be dissolved in the wider economic mode of reasoning, where they are devoid of biopolitical efficacy or might even be contested as irrelevant to one’s forms of life. While neither of these outcomes affects the immanent truth-status of these scientific claims, in the democratic space these claims are rather reconstructed as potentialities that, like all potentialities, might (not) be actualized in concrete forms of life. Precisely due to their potential character (and not to any doubt about their immanent truth-status!), these truths are politically ‘no more’ true than they are not, which, as we have seen, is not the same as being untrue or even as being just as (un)true as any other. The ‘no more than’, which characterizes every experience of contingency, pertains solely to the status of these truths as grounds for political action, which they might become whenever they manage to captivate or might not become when they leave one bored. This destituent orientation of democratic biopolitics does not transform every fact or argument into a mere opinion, which is irrevocably beyond any evaluation in terms of truth and falsity. Instead, it renders contingent the grounding of political practice by facts and arguments, suspending not the truth of a statement but the necessity of the passage from that truth to a correlate political decision. It therefore opens up the possibility that politics would unfold in the manner that is contrary to currently established scientific truths, without thereby doing anything to dismantle these truths themselves or replacing them with a different truth of its own. As our example above of climate change indicates, this is not something necessarily laudable. It is entirely possible in a democracy that forms of life decidedly in conflict with the established truths of science continue to persist or even grow in power and influence, resulting in detrimental or even potentially catastrophic effects on the environment. Yet, what could possibly be the alternative political regime in which such regrettable outcomes would be definitively excluded? Would it be based on the direct conversion of established scientific facts or accepted scientific arguments into policy in the absence of any political process of contestation and legitimization? In such a hypothetical possibility we would evidently move outside the horizon of biopolitics altogether, into something like biogovernment, yet the benefits of such a move are highly questionable. Having done away 193

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democratic biopolitics with the contingency proper to democracy and the freedom, equality and community it authorizes, we do not majestically leap into a realm of government grounded in scientifically proven necessities, but rather let our politics be determined by the rules, norms and principles (as well as conflicts, controversies and scandals) operative in the field of science. The problem is, firstly, that these norms and principles have never been insulated from the political process of the time and hence cannot be viewed as wholly ‘non-political’. Secondly, even if these conflicts and controversies are strictly immanent to the scientific process, this shows only that the scientific sphere has its own ‘politics’, which itself calls for the democratic principles and procedures with which we have just dispensed. This is why we must be not only wary about truth denialism as a threat to democracy but also attentive to the way we venture to resist it. We must begin with the affirmation that there has never been such a thing as ‘truth politics’ to begin with (or that it was a disaster whenever it was tried in anti-democratic settings!), that democratic politics has always involved competition and conflict between truth claims. The difference between democracy and post-truth politics is that, for democratic politics, truth actually matters, not as the secure foundation of every political action but as something to be contested and problematized, something whose authority in politics needs to be expanded or limited, something whose own political nature and effects need to be exposed or highlighted. Truth matters because it is addressed to the plurality of forms of life that are meaningful, that make sense in their very coexistence in struction as incommensurable (Nancy 2015a: 38–9). Truth, either scientific or philosophical, is nothing but the attempt to make sense of this making sense; hence it can never transcend this space of struction and always returns to it, as itself a form of life coexisting with others. It is for this reason that science could never adjudicate between true and untrue forms of life, but it is also for this reason that the truth claims of science will always be in play in the coexistence and communication between them. Since these forms are meaningful, it will always be possible to inquire as to their truth in a number of discursive registers. Yet, since these forms are incommensurable, no discursive register will ever suffice to establish their truth or untruth, let alone authorize political practice on the basis of this truth or untruth. We will never be able to adjudicate between the truth claims of art, yoga, religion, circus, fashion, sexuality and astrology, yet this does not render any of these procedures meaningless but rather reorients politics away from the pursuit of the truth of existence to enabling coexistence of incommensurable but meaningful forms of life. 194

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how to enjoy democracy again (and again) Post-truth politics should therefore be opposed not by elevating the authority of truth beyond that of democratic principles but by highlighting the plurality of forms of life as more than a meaningless murmur of equivalent opinions that are devoid of truth. The incommensurability of sense-making procedures does not resign us to senselessness, as long as the implications of necessary contingency at the heart of democracy are explicitly affirmed as conditions of legitimacy of all forms of life. The affirmation of freedom, equality and community permits this sense-making to unfold otherwise than as a chaotic clash of meaningless and worthless opinions. Moreover, the importance of these principles goes beyond their functioning as transcendental or normative conditions within whose limits forms of life unfold in a democracy. They can also pass into the very experience of living, making it possible to dwell in every form of life in the freeform, experimental and improvising manner, without becoming wholly invested in or identified with it, retaining the potentiality for distraction within the most enthralled captivation. While post-truth politics promises us nothing but indifference and frustration that should presumably endear us to crooks and thugs of all kinds, democratic biopolitics relies on and promotes the enjoyment that we derive from this freeform manner of living that retains formative force in whatever form it takes. This enjoyment, the pleasure of formation, of sketching out our being, is more likely to sustain democracy than any putative refoundation of politics on truth. Yet, is this not a formula for ineffective and inefficient governance, of democracy ‘not working’, which lands us precisely in the present malaise of democracy? As we have argued at the beginning of this chapter, the malaise in question arises less out of the lack of efficient governance than out of the lack of enjoyment and it is doubtful that the two lacks are entirely coextensive. By focusing on effectiveness and efficiency, on making democracy ‘work’, we risk losing sight of the other aspect that defines democracy at least as much as the positive effects of government that it is meant to produce. This aspect concerns precisely its unworking, its inoperative or destituent character that restores contingency to governmental rationalities and the forms of life they prescribe. A democracy that ‘works’ so well that it effaces the contingency that conditions it would end up undermining itself, filling the empty place of power that remains its ontological precondition and effacing the epistemic indeterminacy that follows from it. A democracy that does not keep unworking itself will work itself to death, becoming incapable of generating enjoyment and exposing itself to the temptation of pseudo-affective politics, whose sole affects are negative: resentment, envy and hate. 195

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democratic biopolitics In fact, what we often decry as the ineffectiveness of democracy is precisely the condition of its enjoyment, which, as we have seen, consists in the self-renewing desire for formation, for coming into presence in a variety of forms that are not definitive or final but never more than a sketch of our being, an outline that easily dissolves and lets a new one emerge. This transience of forms that keeps the demos forever dispersed and devoid of a proper form is, at the same time, the manifestation of the only transcendence possible in a democracy, the transcendence of formative force from out of every form.

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Epilogue

Why democracy is good for life

Throughout our discussion of the democratization of biopolitical government we have so far avoided engaging with the most basic question: why should life be governed at all? Prior to opting for democracy as the optimal mode of the government of life, should we not have first provided some justification for the government of life in general? In his 1979–80 lecture course On the Government of the Living, Foucault half-jokingly described his approach as ‘anarchaeology’ (2014: 79), whose fundamental principle is the affirmation of the ‘non-necessity of all power of whatever kind’ (ibid.). Anticipating the criticism of this approach as anarchist, he distinguished it from the more familiar versions of anarchism that proclaim that power is essentially bad and possible to abolish altogether. Instead, he asserted the non-acceptability of power as the starting point of any investigation. Rather than investigate power as to its legitimacy and possibly conclude at the end that it is illegitimate and should not be accepted, Foucault proposed to start with this non-acceptability: ‘no power goes without saying, no power, of whatever kind, is obvious or inevitable, no power warrants being taken for granted. Power has no intrinsic legitimacy. All power only ever rests on the contingency and a fragility of a history’ (ibid.: 77). This approach ‘does not exclude anarchy but in no way does it entail it’ (ibid.: 78). Rather than imagine or construct a model of a legitimate power and then use it to judge actual power relations, Foucault’s anarcheology begins with the non-necessity of government as such and then traces the ways in which various rationalities of government claim their own legitimacy in a contingent and unfounded manner. In his The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben offers a new perspective on this theme of anarcheology by returning the accusation of anarchism 197

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democratic biopolitics to the usual sender: that is, government itself. As we have discussed in Chapter 1, Agamben’s genealogy of government demonstrates the persistent gulf between being and praxis at the heart of the Western ontopolitical tradition. Acts of government remain independent from sovereign power even as they are held to emanate from it, while the sovereign can only reign but never govern. For Agamben, this entails the strictly ‘anarchic’ – that is, ontologically unfounded – character of all apparatuses of government (Agamben 2011b: 62–7). Just as, for Foucault, all power is non-necessary and emerges as a matter of contingency, for Agamben government is itself anarchic insofar as it lacks a foundation in being: ‘anarchy is what government must presuppose and assume as the origin from which it derives and, at the same time, as the destination toward which it is travelling. The governmental paradigm is always already “anarchic-governmental” ’ (ibid.: 65). In this inverted perspective, anarchism is no longer a disposition that vainly imagines the possibility of society without government but rather refers to the operations of government itself, which exercise power over life without having any foundation in life itself. The theory of democratic biopolitics that we have proposed in this book evidently shares this affirmation of the contingency of all government. There is no necessary power relation or mode of government, so it is always up to government itself to justify its existence or operations. It is up to biopolitical rationalities to explain why life is to be governed in this particular aspect or instance but not in others. Moreover, the same affirmation of non-necessity also applies to self-government: that is, all the modes of self-fashioning by which we venture to govern our own lives. Government, including biopolitical government, not only is practiced by macro-level institutions but also unfolds in rather more microscopic contexts. We govern our lives to re-form or trans-form them but also to make them con-form to the lives of others. In this process, we are perpetually confronted by the multiplicity of forms of life that we may find ourselves captivated by and eager to transform our lives in accordance with. We may in fact be so captivated that we would want to change not only our own lives, but also the lives of everyone around us, even those who happen to be captivated by other forms or, for the time being, bored with all there is. There is a perpetual temptation to translate one’s desire to change one’s own life into the political imperative to change life in general, forcing one’s preferred form of life into the lives of others (Sloterdijk 2014: 10). This is where democracy comes in. Democracy is a form of government and, like all forms of government, it is not necessary and must justify its own existence. As we have argued in this book, it does so by 198

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epilogue acknowledging and affirming its own non-necessity: that is, its necessary contingency. It is only democracy that makes of its non-necessity its sole principle. And yet, in contrast to the more familiar image of anarchism, this non-necessity of government is not to be confused with proclaiming the necessity of the absence of government. On the contrary, since our lives are governed by a myriad of agents, including ourselves, we will never be entirely rid of some form of government. The question is then how to adapt government to its own non-necessity or, better, bring this non-necessity into the praxis of government itself. As we have argued, the democratic affirmation of contingency enables free circulation of forms of life while disabling any claim to epistemic, ethical or other privilege of any of these forms. Thus, not every form of life in a democracy is in accordance with democracy: the range of legitimate forms is infinite but not unlimited. Just as democracy delegitimizes attempts to force the form that captivates us into the lives of others, it legitimizes and affirms what we have called a freeform life, a life that does not simply give itself over to a certain form once and for all, but rather experiments with its own living by combining captivation and boredom in an open disposition to the world and all the forms that surge into being within it. In this manner, democracy enables us to govern and possibly change our own lives while to some degree protecting both others and ourselves from the excesses of our captivation. It invites us to hesitate in our very captivation, so as not to exhaust all of our formative force in any present form of life but to retain the potentiality of being otherwise in whatever form we dwell. This is why we conclude this book by offering a different perspective on the question of the universality of democracy, whose apparent impossibility is often held to disqualify every effort at democracy promotion internationally and weaken support for it domestically. It appears that we can no longer enjoy our democracy if its principle cannot be shown to have universal validity, as if such validity could ever be established for tyrannical or totalitarian regimes. Yet, the very idea of universal validity would apparently contradict the idea of the ontological void at the heart of democracy, whose ontic consequence is precisely the delegitimization of any discourse, doctrine or form of life that claims universal validity. Democracy makes legitimate the virtually unrestricted pursuit of incommensurable forms of life on the condition that none of them elevates itself above others by claiming to be essential, proper, necessary or universal. If democracy were then itself a form of life, it could not have universal validity by its own definition. However, as we have shown, democracy does not prescribe any determinate form of life but rather affirms the freedom, equality and 199

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democratic biopolitics community of the most diverse forms. For this reason, democracy need not get embroiled in the aporia of asserting its own universal validity at the same time as it rejects the very idea of it. It is universally practicable not because of the privileged content it prescribes but precisely because it does not prescribe any. From the standpoint of the non-necessity of government, all regimes that found themselves on claims to necessity are illegitimate. It is only democracy that can avoid this illegitimacy by making its non-necessity its sole ground and renouncing all aspirations to give life a proper form. Moreover, as we have argued throughout this book, democracy is not merely a transcendental condition regulating the coexistence of forms of life but can actually pass into their very experience. The experiential correlate of democratic contingency is the human potentiality for distraction, our oscillation between curious captivation in a form of life and a bored withdrawal from it. In contrast to any regime that posits the existence of a proper, authentic or true form of life and thereby attempts to hold life captive in a contingent moment of captivation or even impose this captivity on a life that is bored, indifferent or fugitive, democracy ventures to institutionalize this oscillation between captivation and boredom that defines the formative force of life as the condition of perpetual renewal and transformation in politics. This is what makes democracy enjoyable as a regime that incites and encourages permanent experimentation with living one’s life in a freeform manner without ever really having to settle for any definitive form. Given that life itself is prone to distraction, captivation and boredom, democracy, which both renders these aspects of life legitimate and protects them against the excesses of government that life can be held captive by, is the one form of government that is, in the Nietzschean terms, good for life, for all life, in whatever form it happens to find itself at the moment. Democracy is more than a mere governmental arrangement that some of us may have become frustrated with and carelessly wish to discard – it is the way to affirm life in the myriad ways of living. For this reason, the negation of democracy is, in a strict sense, life-negating. This is the sole justification that democracy can have and, in fact, the sole justification it needs. If no government is necessary, the best form of government is surely the one that founds itself on its own non-necessity and frees the formative force of life itself to explore its thousand isles.

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Notes

Prologue 1.

This approach to democracy, which restores it to the discourse on forms of government practiced since Antiquity onwards, goes against the increasing tendency in political theory to equate democracy with political praxis as such, whereby all true politics is democratic and every true democracy is political. Instead, we view democracy as a form of government, which may well be generated in political praxis (for example, the democratic revolutions of modernity) but is not for that reason identical to politics. Thus, political praxis – for example, anarchist politics – may be opposed to government, including democratic government, while governmental activity, including that of democratic governments, may be wholly depoliticized, reduced to administration and management. Democracy does not refer to every aspect of political let alone social praxis, but specifically to the rule of the people over themselves, and for this reason its reference must be restricted to the sphere of rule or government, where it is to be opposed to monarchic/tyrannical and aristocratic/oligarchic forms of government.

Chapter 2 1.

We must note that while Rousseau certainly considered amour propre problematic, he also viewed it as unavoidable in social life and potentially even beneficial for it, when managed and controlled by proper education. Pride, which is an essential component of amour propre, is necessary for the constitution and maintenance of small republican ‘homelands’ such as Corsica. It also animates the struggles against injustice and for dignity by making slavery and tyranny intolerable. At the same time, beneficial aspects of pride are easily transformed into vanity and resentment that disrupt community and bring suffering to the subject. Thus, while it might be impossible to transcend amour propre entirely in modern society, it is both possible and necessary to bring it under the preeminence of amour soi, which is as close as we can get to a ‘return’ to or, better, a replication of the state of nature. For the detailed discussion of amour propre and its management in Rousseau’s Emile and other works see Cooper 1999, Ch. 4; Klausen 2014: 58–67, 185–6; Neidleman 2016: 84–6, 118–20; Dent 2005: 69–74.

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democratic biopolitics 2.

3.

Besides the reverie and the popular sovereign, Jason Neidleman has traced the affirmation of the same generic being in Rousseau’s writings on religion and reason (2016, Chs 6, 7). In these two domains the same paradigm is utilized: ‘proper’ use of religion and reason are attained by stripping them of all determinate content and their reduction to maxims that are as generic as possible, so that they could not possibly be divisive and used to sectarian ends. Neidleman (2016: 169–70) argues that, for Rousseau, contemporary institutional Christianity was problematic in two respects: as excessively cosmopolitan and hence too general for particular political communities, and as excessively sectarian and hence too particularistic to function as a civil religion. As cosmopolitan, Christianity is a version of the ‘religion of man’, while as sectarian it clearly exemplifies the third type of the ‘religion of the priest’.

Chapter 3 1.

2.

This minimal commensurability of the antagonistic positions in Laclau’s (2005) and Mouffe’s (2013) theories of hegemony leads to a persistent question of the status of the adversary in this antagonistic relation. Is the ‘regime’, ‘elite’ or casta a legitimate adversary of the people or an ‘absolute enemy’ to be destroyed? If it is the former, then the theory comes down to little more than an affirmation of liberal democracy with an updated version of the left–right distinction. If it is the latter, it is unclear to what extent the project of radical democracy is at all democratic, given its exclusion of a substantial part of the political spectrum. The theory thus perpetually oscillates between a more moderate ‘agonistic’ version and a more radical antagonistic version that places it outside the horizon of democracy altogether. In contrast, the principle of incommensurability that characterizes struction permits us to assert a radical pluralism in society, which does not necessary have to take an antagonistic form or even the form of a relation as such. The same logic of neutralizing the contradiction and dwelling within the tautology is taken up in Agamben’s later work on messianism in his analysis of the Pauline formula ‘hos me’ (as not) (I Cor. 7: 29–32. See Agamben 2005b: 23). In contrast to Kant’s concept of ‘as if’, ‘as not’ describes a real split at the heart of the messianic subject, which exists under the injunction of doing something and its opposite (working as not working, owning as not owning and so on). It is not a matter of a withdrawal from the world and the identities and roles that it prescribes, but of dwelling within them in the inoperative and destituent mode. Only in this manner is it possible for the messianic subject to be in this world but not of this world. While Agamben’s theory of messianic politics is often read as hyperbolically radical, imagining a complete overturning of politics and government as we know them, our interpretation rather follows Agamben’s own reading of messianism as performing a ‘tiny displacement’ in the real, leaving everything as it is but with a little difference (Agamben 1993: 53). The displacement concerns precisely the entry of contingency into experience, whereby we can inhabit our present otherwise in the absence of any gigantic transformation. Rather than describe some hitherto non-existent politics, Agamben’s work can rather be read as the affirmation of a ‘tiny displacement’ within contemporary democracy that would redeem its promise.

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notes

Chapter 4 1.

2.

This problem might be avoided if we redefine the evental nature itself in terms of contingency. The event would then be understood as the manifestation of the radical contingency as the sole foundation of any order or world, whose consequences (truths) would then consist in reordering the world in accordance with this contingency. See Prozorov 2013a, 2013b for an attempt at such a reading that would bridge the gap between Badiou’s ‘universalist aristocracy’ and Agamben’s and Nancy’s more democratic orientation. In The Time that Remains (2005b: 88), Agamben discussed the way particles, adverbs and even punctuation marks can become technical terms of philosophy: gleichwohl in Kant, in-der-Welt-sein in Heidegger and so on. In his concept of form-of-life it is precisely the hyphens that carry terminological significance, transforming the blanket reference to any activity of living beings into a name for a very specific ethical and ontological experience of using one’s own life as simultaneously the material for and the vehicle of myriad forms.

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Index

affirmative biopolitics, 5–9 Agamben, G., 3–6, 11–3, 22, 44–50, 56, 65, 78–9, 107–12, 129, 136–41, 143, 149–50, 157, 160, 173, 197–8, 202–3 Arendt, H., 7, 85 assembly, concept of, 7–9, 36, 63, 87

165, 170–2, 181–4, 191, 197–8, 203 contradiction, 89, 108–12, 202 Critchley, S., 40, 97 curiosity, 17, 145–8, 155, 157 Dean, M., 10 decreation, 13, 109–10, 160, 173, 174 demos, concept of, 21–2, 91, 100–1, 112, 114 Derrida, J., 64, 76 destituent power, 17, 79, 110, 136–7, 139–41, 159–62, 193, 202 Dillon, M., 2 distraction, 15, 142–57, 169, 177, 195, 200 drawing, 173–6

Badiou, A., 16–17, 40–4, 47, 49, 62, 64, 78, 80–6, 90, 98, 118–23, 130–3, 136, 139–40, 148, 176, 188, 203 Barad, K., 7 Bennet, J., 7 Berlin, I., 171 boredom, 15, 17, 142–50, 160–2, 166–76, 178–19, 183, 199, 200 Brexit, referendum on, 108, 164, 180 Brown, W., 7, 8, 106 Butler, J., 7–9

Engels, F., 171–2 enjoyment, 178–9 Esposito, R., 4–6, 50–4, 56, 63, 78 experimental analytics, 9–14

captivation, 15, 17, 142–50, 160–2, 166, 176, 178–9, 183, 199, 200 contingency, 13, 97, 100–16, 120–11, 135, 140, 149, 157,

form-of-life, 50, 98, 136–40, 149, 160, 203 Foucault, M., 1–5, 10, 12, 13, 32, 39–40, 44, 45, 47, 107, 115, 129, 197–8 210

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index freeform life, concept of, 18, 98, 158–62, 169, 173, 182–4, 192, 195

Nancy, J.-L., 17, 73–6, 80, 97, 101–4, 122–36, 140, 163, 172–8, 185, 194 nativism, 179–80 Negri, A., 8, 80 Neidleman, J., 34, 52, 58, 62, 66–9, 86, 88, 114, 161–2, 165, 201, 202 neoliberalism, 2, 7, 8, 106–7, 160, 171, 179, 182, 184–6, 188 Nietzsche, F., 13, 101, 109, 200 North, P., 143–6, 148–9

Hardt, M., 8, 80 hegemony, 71–2, 75, 106, 170, 182, 184, 189, 202 Heidegger, M., 6, 15, 62, 101, 142–51, 153–7, 179, 188, 203 Honneth, A., 95–7, 166–8, 192 improvisation, 158–62 incommensurability, 14, 75, 103, 123–33, 158, 169, 175, 185 inoperativity, 6, 49, 57, 65–6, 73, 79–81, 110–37, 142, 149 Inston, K., 70–7, 103 Invisible Committee, the, 49

Pettman, D., 143 Phish, 158–60 pleasure, 18, 58–9, 98, 128, 133, 163, 165–6, 170–83, 195 post-truth politics, 191–6 potentiality, 11, 13–14, 17, 98, 110, 112, 115, 136, 138, 142–4, 147, 151, 157–62, 166, 169

Kant, I., 167–8, 174, 202 Laclau, E., 71, 103, 135, 202 Lefort, C., 16, 99–106, 113, 115, 120, 138, 142 Levinas, E., 150 Lyotard, J.-F., 132, 168, 191

Ranciere, J., 80–2 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques amour propre, 59, 68, 84, 89, 201 amour soi, 59–60, 201 aristocracy, 33–5 cosmopolitanism, 52, 67–8, 202 critique of civil society, 84–5 democracy, 33–5, 38, 64, 69–77, 83, 86 equality, 23–5, 29, 39, 41, 65, 71, 72, 81–2 freedom, 24–5, 29, 30, 39, 40–1, 55–7, 59–61, 67, 71, 81–2

manner, concept of, 137–40 Marchart, O., 103, 112 Marx, K., 171–2 materialism 7, 129 Democratic materialism, in Badiou’s theory, 44, 78, 85, 117, 148, 188 Meillassoux, Q., 111–13, 119–20 Mishra, P., 67 Mouffe, C., 202 211

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democratic biopolitics Rousseau (cont.) general will, 16, 22–6, 29–46, 56, 62, 64–6, 69–74, 83–4, 88, 90, 104, 114–5, 130, 133, 144, 155, 186 generic experience, 61–3, 86–7 legislator, concept of, 27–9, 42–3 monarchy, 27, 33–5 particularism, 52, 60, 73, 77–8, 84, 86 pleasure, 58–9 religion, 28–9, 87–9 reverie, 55–68

struction, concept of, 97, 101–4, 123–7 subtraction, concept of, 15, 23–6, 29, 58, 61–4, 68, 78, 82, 86, 89, 91, 123, 156, 161, 175 Talmon, J., 26, 51 Tiqqun, 49 tolerance, 86, 168–9 Vatter, M., 2, 5, 84 Villadsen, K., 10 Wallace, D. F., 153–7

Sloterdijk, P., 16, 56–8, 61, 63, 66, 144, 198

Zizek, S., 80

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