Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion: Historical and Critical Essays 3030605183, 9783030605186

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Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion Historical and Critical Essays Edited by Blanca Rodríguez Lopez Nuria Sánchez Madrid Adriana Zaharijević

Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion

Blanca Rodríguez Lopez Nuria Sánchez Madrid • Adriana Zaharijević Editors

Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion Historical and Critical Essays

Editors Blanca Rodríguez Lopez Faculty of Philosophy – Department of Philosophy and Society Complutense University of Madrid Madrid, Spain

Nuria Sánchez Madrid Faculty of Philosophy – Department of Philosophy and Society Complutense University of Madrid Madrid, Spain

Adriana Zaharijević Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory University of Belgrade Belgrade, Serbia

ISBN 978-3-030-60518-6    ISBN 978-3-030-60519-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60519-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword: Inclusion/Exclusion—On the Conditions of Common or Critical Engagement

My task here is to attempt to explain the title of this paper, ‘Inclusion/ Exclusion’, and the concepts that appear in the subtitle, ‘On the Conditions of Common or Critical Engagement’. It seems to me that, in one way or another, it is possible to understand two of these registers (‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’), but the trouble lies in the third, the one in between, the one connecting these two, marked by ‘/’ (slash, as the Americans say, stroke, as they say in Britain). It is within this register, to be found at the very point between ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion,’ a space brimming with hesitation and reflection (as well as force and violence), that far from simple decisions are made. Before a foreigner or immigrant becomes part of the space designated as ‘inclusion’ or ‘exclusion,’ he or she is for us a ‘/’. What then is this ‘/’? In English (and not only English) this sign hides a ferocious strike and violent separation and interruption. At the same time, it announces a choice between ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’; but then, paradoxically, it stands more as conjunction than disjunction. The ‘/’ sign does not represent a brief pause, nor does it imply an urgency to hasten the choice of either ‘inclusion’ or ‘exclusion’. On the contrary, it would appear that ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’, thanks precisely to the register covered by the sign ‘/’, are mutually interwoven, interchangeable, or interpermeable one into the other, and are extraordinarily difficult to separate, however deftly or dexterously handled. It is necessary for this v

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reason—I would like to insist on this—to construct a right to non-­ separation of the ‘inclusion’ from the ‘exclusion’ or, better, a right to the ‘/’. What we are actually talking about here is time; i.e. a period in which we can carefully and meticulously craft decisions that will neither be exclusive nor exclude, even when, paradoxically, they temporarily (and always temporarily!) suspend inclusion or the participation of all in particular institution (a family, corporation, city, state, etc.). Before I attempt to consider ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ more closely, as two operations that always complete one another without being complementary, here are a few preliminary and regulative principles that issue from the space in which these two registers differ, and are separated by a ‘/’ (slash): • ‘Inclusion’ (integration) and ‘exclusion’, as well as the ‘/’ space appear wherever there is a project or possibility for the constitution (a closing: claudere = to close; excludere = not to allow in or admit, to expel) of some fictitious entity such as the family, group, corporation, movement, city, state, Europe, or world state. It is a question of the future, of constructing and projecting actions to be conducted in the near future.1 A project of closure implies an opening of borders (and vice versa), and this entity that possesses limits could be called the institution, as opposed to ‘status’, which is an imprecise designation, or ‘contract’, which a priori excludes a third party. The institution assumes the arrival and presence of those who are not here now, unlike a group, which in one way or another always resists the arrival of new members, but also the potential free departure of those already present, that is, temporary interruptions of movement and border crossing (the border being the limit of the institution).2  In ‘Progetto’ (published in Laboratorio Politico, No. 2, March–April 1981, 81–119), Massimo Cacciari goes back and forth between ‘force’ and ‘violence’ in describing the main characteristics of a project. ‘Violenza suona nel progetto’ (101). It is an act of overshooting and expanding to beyond the surface or edge (proictus), which then always implies exclusion, abolishment, banishment, expulsion (proicto). 2  Two examples: The true impetus for Michael Dummett’s book On Immigration and Refugees (2011) was the encyclical Pacem in Terris by Pope John XXIII: ‘(…) when there are just reasons in favour of it … must be permitted to emigrate to other countries and take up residence there. The fact that he is a citizen of a particular state does not debar him from membership of the human 1

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• As regards the condition for the ‘common engagement’ of the subtitle of this paper (von Jhering used a potentially analogous term in 1886, die aktive Solidarobligation), such an engagement should be beyond the ‘inclusion/exclusion’ principle, and will be fulfilled if and only if an ideal institution opens its doors to all without exception, and if one acts in a way that anyone would act and in the way that everyone should act. If the rules of inclusion or exclusion are entirely transparent and achievable for anyone, regardless of any temporary prohibitions, it is possible to speak of fulfilling the principle of universality. Engagements—whether to another person (e.g. to be married), with a political party, in a football supporters group, a movement, in the preservation of one’s culture by closing borders, in the activity in war—are not examples of common and critical engagement because they a priori exclude others and exclude the possibility of all being included. ‘Critique’ (or, for Amartya Sen, ‘critical reasoning’) consists of engaged acts when it obligates to urgent action not only the members of a group, but all future, inactive members/parts of the human community (‘global commitment’ for Judith Butler). • Only those whose action or whose engagement actively excludes all or other groups should be marginalized,3 temporarily although not for-

family, or from citizenship of that universal society, the common, worldwide fellowship of men.’ The famous observation of Hugh of Saint Victor from Book 3 of Didascalicon is even more interesting: ‘The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land (perfectus vero, cui mundus totus exsilium est). The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his (ille mundo amorem fixit, iste sparsit, hic exstinxit)’ (H.  Saint Victor, The Didascalicon, New  York, Columbia University Press, 1961, p. 101). 3  To ‘marginalize’ means to ‘place’ in the margin or background, in a certain way to reject or remove (‘injustices’ provoke an ‘urgent need for their removal’, A. Sen), but not put out (esclore). The problem is of course with the word ‘place’, i.e. in the characteristics and execution of such an operation. This temporary ‘not taking into consideration’ is well formulated by La Rochefoucauld in his Maximes: ‘Action de tenir quelqu’un à l’ écart, de le repousser’ [The action of keeping someone at a distance, of pushing them away]. In ‘In Praise of Exclusion’, Suzanne Dovi speaks of a certain ‘ethics of marginalization’: ‘However, in order to improve the representation of historically disadvantaged groups, democratic theorists need to consider when it is justifiable, desirable, and even morally necessary to limit, or even deny, access and influence to overrepresented, privileged groups’ (Dovi 2009: 1172). Dovi calls this standard ‘the oppression principle’ (1174): ‘Democracies ought to marginalize those who oppress and those who benefit from oppression’ (1181).

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mally or ‘categorically’, nor eliminated or disqualified.4 The temporary suspension of certain groups or minorities still does not mean exclusion, but certainly reveals the limits of democracy and the improvidence of position, according to which the problem of exclusion can be solved simply by inclusion (Iris Marion Young). Let us look now at the problem of our asymmetrical distinction ‘inclusion/exclusion’5 and why it is insufficient to bind ‘exclusion’ exclusively with injustice, and ‘inclusion’ with basic democratic protocol. It is not only a matter of ‘exclusion’ ‘also [being] vital for directly promoting other democratic objectives, e.g. autonomy or equality’ (Dovi), just like ‘inclusion’; there is also the difficulty of various integrative strategies for advancing institutions, making them moral as well as efficient. Towards the end of a letter to the Marquis d’Argence de Dirac, on 2 December, 1761, Voltaire sends his fond wishes. Here they are: Je vous souhaite, dans votre retraite, des journées remplies, des amis qui pensent, l’exclusion des sots et une bonne santé.

Not a trace of affection or moralizing. On the one hand, we have ‘thoughtful friends’, who obviously have the capacity for reflection; on the other, there are clods to be excluded, probably because they think poorly and err in judgment or, paradoxically, because they ‘exclude poorly’. Voltaire then leads us to the first and most fundamental problem when it comes to ‘exclusion’, which also refers to epistemology and the cogito. Although there are several sets of topics and problems which are easy to classify and connect with our perhaps somewhat rough distinction of ‘inclusion/exclusion’ (each with certain political consequences and none which is simple or resolvable),6 the first difficulty that we  ‘Categorical exclusion’ is Cathy Cohen’s term from 1997. The violation of certain groups, even if it is ‘Alternative für Deutschland’ (AFD) and its current presence in the Bundestag, is certainly an anti-democratic act. 5  Niklas Luhmann, e.g., claimed that exclusion rather than inclusion is the rule, and, moreover, that inclusions differ from one another. Cf. Braeckman (2006: 65–88). 6  Informally, when speaking of ‘exclusion’, we think of gender (the exclusion of women from political life), but also of migrants and immigrants, then of the poor who live on the outskirts, in the suburbs and ghettos, followed by various sets of odd or asocial persons (invalids, the autistic, the 4

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encounter with ‘exclusion’ concerns is that of epistemological or cognitive abilities and activities. The ability to reason always assumes a deft manipulation of the various techniques and protocols of exclusion. One who is capable of concentrating, of directing his attention unwaveringly, excludes something or perhaps everything else. One capable of counting makes good use of the method of exclusion in situations where, e.g., all variables are systematically excluded. One capable of thinking, whom Voltaire a priori classifies as a friend, probably makes very good use of the three basic laws of thought, one of which is the ‘principe du tiers exclu’ (principium tertii exclusi or tertium non datur, that there is no third possibility or middle term; in English, this is the ‘law of excluded middle’),7 the other two being the law of identity and the law of contradiction. If we put aside all the other operations and social acts or acts of the community8 that in one way or another imply exclusion (when we choose, we exclude; when we vote, we exclude; when we decide, we exclude; in competitions, we exclude, or else there is mutual exclusion, etc.), the competence of those who think (Voltaire would call them friends) continuously excludes those who think or act problematically— in a word, the incompetent. The English word ‘competence’ is perhaps instructive here; as a legal term it refers to the domain of power, a synonym for jurisdiction, as well as more colloquially to someone’s ability to perform a task, intellectual or otherwise. Only the competent ought to be given competence; the incompetent must be excluded from competence. It seems to me that it would not be overly intelligent to think that Voltaire had the idea that dimwits exclude themselves (by their very nature, they would in effect be unable to ‘exclude’ properly). If ‘exclusion’ involves acts by which one excludes, and further, the subject(s) and subject(s)object(s) of exclusion, as well as an entity that remains after the exclusion disabled, etc.). The great theorist of democracy, Robert Dahl writes: ‘The demos must include all adult members of the association except transients and persons proved to be mentally defective’ (Dahl 1989: 129). 7  Every judgment is either true or false; something is either A or not A. There can be no third. Cf. Kolmogorov (1925). 8   It was likely Edmund Husserl in 1921 who first used this phrase ‘Soziale Akte’ and ‘Gemeinschaftsakte’. Husserl (1973: 165, 192).

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takes place, and finally the space in which the excluded are found after the exclusion—then those who think and who also spread well-being and kindness (because they are friends) will have a lot of work indeed. If we systematically exclude dullards from our lives, as Voltaire would have us do (and in the contemporary world this would mean unfollowing them on Facebook and Twitter), it would be uncertain indeed whether we would really have peace as individuals (Voltaire is writing to one who is retiring from public life) or succeed in abolishing a group of entirely vague and dysfunctional negative social acts or asocial acts, with the aim of advancing the institution or the community. When it comes to the histories of institutions and common engagement, Voltaire’s advice and counsel, which have lost none of their currency or appeal, have nevertheless implied only two options: (1) those excluded or that which is excluded ought to be eliminated or grouped (pseudo-institutionalized) on the periphery or margins of an entity, or transferred to some new, isolated and secured zones; and (2), the more sophisticated option is the attempt to mitigate the damage by introducing or adding new actors (‘inclusion’ or regrouping), such as new friends who lessen the influence of the idiots. The problem with such idiots, however, is that they are always widely and evenly distributed (never grouped), and that they are always recognizable (cunning or intelligence can be hidden or tempered; stupidity less so). The third option concerns the right to something in between, the right to the ‘/’; i.e. the right to the third (as well as the right of the third),9 and this right to the third option excludes a priori the coercion of an urgent choice between ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’. That is to say, common or critical engagement, on which I insist, assumes broad action which is in part necessarily epistemological, and does not only include (or bind or involve) Voltaire’s ‘amis qui pensent’, but also includes those others, whose acts, it seems to me, we still understand insufficiently and rarely take into consideration (provisionally, I will here call them ‘negative social acts’) and which are diverse and probably necessary for the constitution of the  Aristotle invented but also called into question the ‘principe du tiers exclu’ when distinguishing between judgments about the future that can be neither true nor false, just as Voltaire’s wishes for the Marquis d’Argence de Dirac cannot exclude some third possibility. 9

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group.10 A group pushing a car that has broken down is not endangered and destabilized unless one of them is a disabled person who cannot participate in this action in the same way.11 How can we classify all these acts which are not complementary and in harmony with the acts of the majority? How do those who Husserl rather vaguely called ‘abnormal’ (der Anomalen)12 constitute the world and its institutions. How do they (the ones opposite from ‘my normal We’ [meines normalen Wir])13 participate (der Beteilingung) in these acts—answering this is a task that still lies before us. Belgrade, Serbia

Petar Bojanić

References Braeckman, A. (2006). Niklas Luhmann’s Systems Theoretical Redescription of the Inclusion/Exclusion Debate. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 32(1), 65–88. Cacciari, M. (1981). Progetto. Laboratorio Politico, 2, 81–119. Dahl, R. (1989). Democracy and Its Critics. New Haven: Yale University Press. Dovi, S. (2009). In Praise of Exclusion. The Journal of Politics, 71(3), 1172–1186. Dummett, M. (2011). On Immigration and Refugees. London: Routledge. Husserl, E. (1973). Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Vol. 2. Den Haag: Matinus Nijhoff. Kolmogorov. (1925/1967). On the Principle of Excluded Middle. In J. van Heijenoort (Ed.), From Frege to Gödel (pp.  414–437). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (2009). The Capabilities of People with Cognitive Disabilities. Metaphilosophy, 40(3–4), 331–351.  Nussbaum (2009) insists exclusively that the ‘law ought to show respect for them as full equals’. ‘Law must provide’, ‘law must go further’—these are the phrases she uses; certainly insufficient, but the basic condition of any future engagement of all. 11  Cf. Tuomela (1991: 272 and 1995: 138); B. Schmid (2009: 47). 12  Husserl provides a very broad designation for those who do not belong to the world of the normal (der Welt der Normalen). As early as 1931, he wonders about the problem of the participation of the abnormal in the constitution of the world. This includes foreigners, animals, children, the ‘twisted’ (die Verrückten), the ill (die Kranken), but also thieves, cheats, the ‘pseudo-honest’ (die Scheinehrlichen), ‘pseudo-citizens’ (die Scheinbürger), etc. Husserl (1973: 133, 146). 13  Husserl (1973: 141). 10

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Pope John XXIII. (1963). Pacem in Terris. Retrieved from http://www.vatican. va/content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_11041963_ pacem.html. Schmid, B. (2009). Plural Actions: Essays in Philosophy and Social Science. London: Springer. Tuomela, R. (1991). We Will Do It: An Analysis of Group-Intentions. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 51(2), 249–277. Tuomela, R. (1995). The Importance of Us. A Philosophical Study of Basic Social Notions. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Contents

Part I Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion: The Historical Context   1 1 The Vulnerable Subject: Butler Reading Hegel  3 Clara Ramas San Miguel 2 The Privatization of the Sustainability of Life in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition 21 Sara Ferreiro Lago 3 Eccentricity and Vulnerability: Helmuth Plessner’s Philosophical and Political Anthropology 41 Roberto Navarrete Alonso Part II Rethinking Vulnerability: Discussing Interdependence and Violence in the Twenty-First Century  65 4 Vulnerability and Care as Basis for an Environmental Ethics of Global Justice 67 Txetxu Ausín xiii

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5 Independent and Invulnerable: Politics of an Individual 83 Adriana Zaharijević 6 Feeling Vulnerable: Interpersonal Relatedness and Situatedness101 Igor Cvejić 7 Contemporary Declinations of Violence and Exclusion: Thinking Extreme Violence and Vulnerability with Étienne Balibar and Judith Butler117 Emma Ingala Part III Rethinking Exclusion: The Challenges of Democratic Orders in the Twenty-First Century 135 8 Difference and Recognition: A Critical Lecture on Axel Honneth, Jacques Rancière and Nancy Fraser137 Laura Herrero Olivera 9 On the Discourse of Exclusion in a Globalizing World161 Francisco Blanco Brotons 10 Subject and Research in Global Capitalism: Some Notes on the Fundamentals of Feminist and Marxist Theories on the Frame of Intersectionality185 Clara Navarro Ruiz 11 Forms of Life and the Transformation of Public Space: Debunking Social Exclusion in Contemporary Democratic Societies?205 Nuria Sánchez Madrid Name Index225 Subject Index229

Notes on Contributors

Txetxu Ausín  is a tenured scientist at the Institute for Philosophy, CSIC (Spanish National Research Council). He is the Director of the Applied Ethics Group (GEA). He is an invited professor in several universities and a researcher at the Institute for Democratic Governance Globernance. His research areas involve public ethics, bioethics, deontic logic, human rights, philosophy of robotics and ICT.  He is an editor and author of publications about these issues and the Editor in Chief of the international journal DILEMATA on applied ethics [www.dilemata.net]. He is also President of the Spanish Network of Philosophy [http://redfilosofia. es/] and Independent Member of the Public Ethics Commission of the Basque Government. Francisco Blanco Brotons  is an architect and has a PhD in Philosophy from the Complutense University of Madrid. He has developed his research at the Institute of Philosophy of the Spanish National Research Council (IFS-CSIC), and is participating in the research project “Human Rights and Global Justice in the Context of International Migration”. He is also participating in the project “Borders, democracy and global justice: Philosophical arguments around the emergence of a cosmopolitan space” of the IFS-CSIC, which is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. His research topics are political xv

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philosophy and contemporary theories of justice, focusing on global justice. Petar Bojanić  is Professor of Philosophy at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (University of Belgrade) and co-director of the Center for Advanced Studies—South East Europe (University of Rijeka), where he also teaches at the doctoral studies in the department of Philosophy. Bojanić’s research is focused on the political philosophy, philosophy of law, architecture, phenomenology, social ontology, theory of institutions and Jewish political tradition. He has authored numerous books and his last book Violence and Messianism has been published and translated into seven languages. Igor Cvejić  is a research fellow at the Institute for philosophy and social theory, University of Belgrade. He earned his PhD in philosophy at the University of Belgrade with the thesis entitled “Kant’s theory of feeling”. The area of his research includes philosophy of emotions, social engagement studies and issues of collective intentionality and social ontology. Sara Ferreiro Lago  has a degree in Philosophy from the Complutense University of Madrid. From 2015 to 2019, she worked at this university as a researcher in training. Since September 2020, she has been a collaborating professor at the Nebrija University. Her doctoral thesis deals with the question of sovereignty in the context of the crisis of the State. She has written several articles and book chapters on political philosophy. In her works she analyses the processes of subjectivation, the borders and exclusions of the public space, the problem of inter/ecodependence and the question of violence from a feminist perspective. Laura  Herrero  Olivera got her PhD in Philosophy (2016) for her research work on Kant Philosophy. Her academic training was in Madrid (Universidad Complutense-UCM), Tübingen (Eberhard Karls Universität) and Berlin (Freie Universität). She teaches Modern Philosophy at National Education University-Spain (UNED). She is a member of the Research Group “Normativity, Emotions, Discourse and Society” (GINEDIS) led by Nuria Sánchez Madrid (UCM) and a member of the University Institute of Feminist Research (UCM). Some of her recently published works include “Moral Autonomy, from the Kantian

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proposal to Autonomy in Bioethics” (2017), “Images of Craziness, Normality, and the Praise of Stupidity in the Work of Jean Paul” (2018), “The Search of the final limit in practical research”, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Section’ (2018), and “Pedagogies, (2019). She has translated into Spanish the book by Onora O’Neill, Justice Across Boundaries (2019) and is currently preparing the edition of the book Philosophy Among Geographical and Conceptual Borders (2020). Emma  Ingala is a senior lecturer in the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), Spain. She specializes in post-structuralist thought, political anthropology, feminism and psychoanalysis, and is a member of the research groups ‘Metaphysics, Critique, and Politics’, ‘Body, Language, and Power’ and the Institute for Feminist Research at UCM. She is a co-­ editor of the journal LOGOS. She has co-edited with Gavin Rae the ­volumes The Meanings of Violence: From Critical Theory to Biopolitics and Subjectivity and the Political: Contemporary Perspectives. She has written several book chapters and numerous articles that were published in journals including Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía, Daimon, Ideas y Valores, Isegoría and Literature and Religion. She has also been an invited visiting professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, and at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. Roberto Navarrete Alonso  is Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Society of the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). His PhD research was dedicated to Franz Rosenzweig and Carl Schmitt and his main lines of research are political theology, the problem of secularization and contemporary Jewish thought. He was DAAD fellow at the Institute for Systematic Theology of the University of Freiburg and post-doctoral fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He co-edited the Spanish edition of Helmuth Plessner’s work on political anthropology with Kilian Lavernia. Clara Navarro Ruiz  works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). Her main investigation interests are contemporary Marxism and the intersectional critique of capitalism, focusing on

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the critique of value-dissociation (Wertabspaltungskritik). She is an author in diverse academic journals; her latest published work is in 2020, “¿Qué fue de…? Breves apuntes sobre el capitalismo cognitivo y el modo de producción capitalista en el siglo XXI” (Res Publica, 23(1)). Clara  Ramas  San  Miguel  is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Zaragoza. She holds a European PhD from Universidad Complutense de Madrid and has enjoyed research stays in Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. Her research lines are metaphysics, political philosophy, modern German philosophy and social ontology. She has written papers and translations on Marx, Schmitt, Arendt and Heidegger. Blanca Rodríguez López  is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Society of the Complutense University of Madrid and is also the coordinator of the Master Program in Applied Ethics. She is a visiting professor at Oxford University. At the beginning of her career, she worked on utilitarianism, rational choice theory and Game theory. Later she worked on liberalism and social norms and in the last few years, she has focused on bioethics. She has written several papers on ethics and political philosophy. Nuria Sánchez Madrid  is an associate professor at the Department of Philosophy and Society and a member of the Institute for Gender Studies of the Complutense University of Madrid, where she leads the Research Group “Normativity, Emotions, Discourse and Society” (GINEDIS) and the Latin American, Portuguese and Spanish Research Network “Kant: Ethics, Politics and Society” (RIKEPS). She has been a visiting professor at Universities of Brazil, Chile, Turkey, Greece, France, Germany, Italy and Portugal. She has also edited and contributed to several collected volumes from publishers including Palgrave Macmillan. Adriana  Zaharijević  is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. Zaharijević writes in the field of political philosophy, feminist theory and social history. Her latest book is The Life of Bodies. Political Philosophy of Judith Butler.

Introduction

This volume presents an attempt to conjoin two related, but in essence deeply problematic notions: vulnerability and exclusion. Their relationship today seems unambiguous: if one is excluded, one is, in all probability, vulnerable and vice versa. We take this as a given. However, we also wish to see what lies behind that givenness, and in a certain sense produces it. Like many of the notions that have taken shape in philosophy and social theory, once they become part of the policy language of righting wrongs, they tend to become hollow and stripped of their multiple layers of meaning. Often, they portray a phenomenon as something that can be singled out and cast outside a larger and inevitably more complex frame. Both exclusion and vulnerability are cases in point: certain groups/ populations/identities are vulnerable, thus actions need to be taken to alleviate their vulnerability; certain groups/populations/identities are excluded, and so ways to include them need to be found. Without questioning the fact that there are indeed such groups, assembled and categorized as vulnerable and/or excluded, we wanted to understand why this is the case; more specifically, in what ways these groups are related to others (those deemed ‘invulnerable’ or those excluded on some different basis); how, and from where, the boundary between the excluded and the included arises; what the stakes of ‘invulnerability’ (to which the alleviation of vulnerability supposedly leads) might be; in what ways such categorizations preclude or forestall the agency of the excluded/the xix

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vulnerable. What might be the conclusive frame to which actions of inclusion and alleviation of vulnerability lead—one in which all are recognized as vulnerable and where the notion of exclusion has ultimately lost its meaning, or one in which the desired invulnerable individuals monitor the boundaries of their communities or nation-states, caring for the included and warding off those who do not belong? The questions themselves are certainly not new, although the answers to them have assumed a specific form and content in the twenty-first century. With this volume we want to emphasize both their novelty and their deepseatedness. Following a variety of critical approaches, all of the contributions here attempt to shed light on the dense theoretical content and complex conceptual history of such notions.

Exclusion and/or Vulnerability A stock term in a wide range of disciplines, and rooted firmly in everyday language through its various policy and media framings, ‘exclusion’ is all too often taken to be self-evident and readily understood. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, it refers to a situation in which someone or something is prevented from entering a place or taking part in an activity. The word, in Spanish (exclusión), comes from the Latin ‘excludere’ (to keep or shut out, hinder). The Serbian version—isključivanje—in fact contains a ‘key’ (ključ), implying that the one who is kept out and hindered from coming in is without a key, and that there is a door which opens only to those who can unlock it. That door, a threshold between inside and outside, is what makes exclusion liminal (as a boundary defining who is in and who is not), movable (the key can be given to someone who did not possess it before, or be copied and multiplied), and obstructive (of the free passage before the door was built and the key manufactured). Understood in this way, exclusion is operational in citizenship procedures, founded on jus soli and jus sanguinis; in the contract of marriage, as it functions as an institution based only on two contractors, excluding all possible others; in the ownership of property, since the privatum bars, or excludes, all others from laying claim to it. Exclusion is everywhere: it is both constitutive of thinking (tertium non datur/the

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excluded middle) and indispensable in action—indeed, wherever there is a choice, there is also some form of exclusion (see also Bojanić in this volume). It would thus seem that it is not exclusion that is undesirable in itself— even if we might argue for a more capacious thinking, less prone to cuts and slashes, as much as we might opt for less decisionist and more deliberative modes of acting. What is undesirable is in fact what falls under the umbrella term of ‘social exclusion’, ‘a process through which individuals or groups are wholly or partially excluded from full participation in the society in which they live’ (European Foundation 1195, p. 4, quoted in Rawal 2008, 164). If a person is excluded from the workings of the society she assumedly belongs to, then she is not only prevented from taking part in it, but her very rights to participation come into question. For that reason, a broader definition of social exclusion would have to involve ‘a process and a state that prevents individuals or groups from full participation in social, economic and political life and from asserting their rights’ (Beall and Piron 2005, p. 9)—which they presumably possess but are barred from using in proper ways. The immediate question, of course, is who comes to define full participation and the criteria on the basis of which it becomes precluded (the issue is intranational, but also international, with a Northern economic and political model accepted as globally applicable). The question becomes all the more complex if we remember that the term ‘social exclusion’ addresses very different groups of people: the lower strata of society (indeed, the term is an expansive addendum to older debates on poverty and deprivation [Aasland and Flotten 2000, p. 1027]); certain identity-based groups within the society, but nonetheless excluded from its dominant norms; and certain groups of people who are external to the society, but still live in it. Social exclusion functions as a systemic blockade, restriction or obstruction of the individual access to resources, opportunities or rights. However, the one who is socially excluded is almost by definition representative of the group one willingly or unwillingly belongs to (whether these are comprised of socially marginalized individuals, delinquents, lesbian mothers, second-generation ethnic minorities or refugees escaping from war). In this sense, exclusion assumes a hierarchy of socially desirable or acceptable groups, and it is this chosen

xxii Introduction

or unchosen membership in a particular socially-formed group that defines one’s capability for full participation in society. Becoming included therefore assumes a certain level of integration (or assimilation), i.e. an acceptance of the existing hierarchy and a willingness to participate in its consolidation. In truth, the desire for inclusion—by becoming a citizen, by gaining the right to marry, by possessing property, by being socially acceptable and so forth—should not be surprising: inclusion not only leads to active participation in society, but it also allows certain rights to be claimed as unalienable. Exclusion is restrictive to those who are thought to belong to less desirable social groups, but at the same time this is, in a somewhat Foucauldian sense, also a productive phenomenon. Certain norms, social hierarchies, inequalities and alienations are constantly being produced and reproduced through multiple exclusions, which generate a variety of affects (fear, repulsion, self-blame, powerlessness, ambivalence toward measures aimed at lessening social exclusion, feelings of heightened vulnerability, etc.). It might be claimed that it is precisely this productive dimension of exclusion that links it to vulnerability: groups that have a tendency to be or feel excluded also have a tendency to be or feel vulnerable to the social reproduction of discrimination, alienation and deprivation. And yet, vulnerability is often figured as an immutable state of certain populations, which are not by definition socially excluded. Women are surely the most prominent example of such a figuration. Their disposition to being hurt or injured is not understood as a temporary state, inflicted by some mode of deprivation that can be removed by successful integration, but as a permanent, even distinctive bodily trait. The paternalism implied in actions of alleviating the pernicious effects of exclusion becomes even more conspicuous here. Certain kinds of bodies are prone to injury, to wounding, even if no real wounds have been inflicted, and are thus in need of protection. The wound (vulnus, rana) figures in both vulnerabilidad and ranjivost. The presence of a wound, as something embodied and immovable, strongly underscores the division between those that are in possession of agency and in no need of protection, and those who are passively awaiting protection and are always potentially victimized.

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Such ontologizing of the wound has many dangerous consequences, as has been amply testified to in feminist activism and policy-making (we will enumerate only a few examples, as the list does not exhaust itself here): the emphasis on vulnerability reproduces the passivity of the weaker sex; demands for protection are directed towards state structures, themselves productive of various forms of exclusions, especially in today’s neoliberal and authoritarian political framework which nurtures right-­ wing populism and annuls the last vestiges of social welfare; coalitional action is precluded between groups whose vulnerability is socially and politically induced and distributed. Furthermore, a fantasy of invulnerability and mastery is nourished in some population segments, which can themselves turn against the vulnerable: ‘When nations advertise their hypervulnerability to new immigrants, or men openly fear that they are now the victims of feminism, the recourse to “vulnerability” in such instances can become the basis for a policy that seeks to exclude or contain women and minorities, as when the vulnerability of “white people” constructs black people as a threat to their existence’ (Butler et  al. 2016, p. 4). Many contributions in this volume attempt to elaborate the notion of vulnerability developed by Judith Butler in her later works, applying it in different contexts. Intersecting with the general frame of exclusion, vulnerability is variously entwined with precarity, with socially produced feelings of unequal distribution relative to dependence/independence, or as a background for understanding violence. Rather than being assigned to certain (excluded) groups, vulnerability is regarded as a differential operation of power that demands a critical engagement in the domain of political thinking. There is one specificity to this volume that should be particularly stressed. It represents the result of two encounters of philosophers from Spain and Serbia, two countries which until now have never had an exchange in the field of philosophy and social theory. With a strong emphasis on exclusion and vulnerability, and without a preliminary set­up for a joint framework or theoretical tools for dealing with the proposed topic, we came together as groups having a pronounced interest in similar problems, with a similar philosophical background—principally without drawing from our own local vocabularies and historical

xxiv Introduction

registers—and with a keenly shared sense of the present and its burning issues. The two workshops in question took place on 7–8 November 2017 at the Complutense University of Madrid (Engaging Vulnerability and Exclusion: Rethinking the Subject in the 21st Century) and on 23–24 September 2019 at the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade (The Return of Violence: Contemporary Anxieties of the Community) and offered a context of discussion for almost all of the chapters in this volume. The Spanish contributors are associate professors, lecturers and researchers at the Complutense University of Madrid and the Institute of Philosophy of the CSIC of Spain. Most are members of the Research Group Normativity, Emotions, Discourse and Society (GINEDIS) and of the Innovative Teaching Project Vulnerability, Exclusion and Disability. Logics and Subjective Effects of Contemporary Social Suffering (PIMCD UCM 1482018/19), led by Nuria Sánchez Madrid. The Serbian contributors are researchers at the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade and members of the Group of Social Engagement, led by Adriana Zaharijević. The volume testifies to their common interest in the entwinement of philosophy and social sciences, focusing on the contemporary analysis of the challenges that precarity and the ideological legitimation of exclusion pose to a post-metaphysical conception of human dignity. Yet it also addresses the social recognition of grievable lives and the desire to boost the political agency of minoritized groups in the global sphere, particularly in the social and political context of Southern Europe. The uneasy positioning of Serbia as both ‘European’ and ‘Southern’, and of Spain as belonging unambiguously to the West and the global North, while at the same time being emblematically European, complicates the issue of our ‘place’ and gives to our discussions an added gloss and politically engaging meaning. The first section, Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion: The Historical Context of the Political, revisits Hegel’s (via Butler), Helmuth Plessner’s and Hannah Arendt’s notions of the political as the potential source of our contemporary understanding of the entangled knot of exclusion and vulnerability. The opening chapter ‘The Vulnerable Subject: Butler Reading Hegel’ by Clara Ramas San Miguel, explores the ‘double-edged’ concept of vulnerability in Butler, as that which both enables the modes of relationality and opens us up to violence, injury and exploitation. The

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exploration of this double valence comes conjointly with a critique of the sovereign subject in Judith Butler’s later thought, tracing its connections to Hegel and his reception by Žižek, Malabou and Nancy. Ramas’ goal is to show that in conceiving of the vulnerable subject Butler remains faithful to the long-standing Hegelian legacy. In his chapter ‘Human Being, Vulnerability and Politics: Helmuth Plessner’s Political Anthropology’, Roberto Navarrete approaches vulnerability through Plessner’s Macht und menschliche Natur, a book published just two years before the collapse of Weimar Republic. This contribution invites us to revisit a largely forgotten but uncannily relevant discussion on the nature of the political, where the ‘friend-enemy’ topos would give shape to two crucially different political anthropologies—one of difference in Schmitt and one of relation in Plessner. At the core of this essay is Plessner’s notion of human inscrutability, taken to be the cause of essential human vulnerability, since the individual identity emerges from a constant exposition and relation to ‘otherness’. This chapter also aims to highlight some affinities that this episode of Weimar intellectual life shares with the contemporary revival of populism. Sara Ferreiro’s contribution takes issue with Hannah Arendt’s distinction between life-sustaining activities and political issues. In this vein, she tackles the arguments which Arendt draws upon for legitimating a standpoint on the public value of the body that disavows private space insofar as it reduces the tasks related to the reproduction of life to a bare compulsion of need or to a state of pre-political violence. The second section, Changing the Scene of Vulnerability, invites us to consider some notions or experiences that may seem apparent and unambiguous, but are, on closer examination, potentially generative of an endless spiral of exclusions. Adriana Zaharijević’s contribution ‘Independent and Invulnerable. Politics of an Individual’ is an inquiry into the nineteenth-­century liberal conception of the individual and its uses in the framing of neoliberal political rationality. Zaharijević claims that the notion of independence is indeed inextricable from an incessant circuit of exclusions, but that it is also closely related to a specific epistemic and normative configuration of the creature who is the bearer of independence, i.e. a sovereign individual who governs himself. Questioning this legacy proves to be a step towards a political imagination appreciative of bodily vulnerability. The chapter by Igor Cvejić, entitled ‘Feeling

xxvi Introduction

Vulnerable: Interpersonal Relatedness and Situatedness’, delves into the intersubjective recognition of another’s vulnerability. Cvejić tries to understand not vulnerability per se, but how one feels vulnerable and how others perceive and appreciate one’s vulnerability. Due to the fact that culturally and socially dependent criteria condition one’s emotional agency, emotional exclusion can be treated as a form of a social exclusion, conditioning not only one’s own feeling of vulnerability, but also the other’s capacity to feel or grant to another the right of emotional agency. In his chapter, ‘Vulnerability and Care as Basis for an Environmental Ethics of Global Justice’, Txetxu Ausín links the development of a solid base for an environmental ethics of global justice with a proper understanding of vulnerability as a basic fact of human existence. In dialogue with contemporary authors (I. M. Young, Butler, Pérez Orozco, Puyol), he introduces the concept of care as a necessary basis for an environmental ethics adequate to our essential and supervening condition as vulnerable and eco-interdependent. Finally, Emma Ingala’s contribution to this volume, ‘Declinations of Violence: Thinking Extreme Violence and Vulnerability with Étienne Balibar and Judith Butler’, ponders the turn to non-violence/anti-violence, together with a certain recuperation of the notion of the human, as a response to a specific conjuncture characterized by extreme forms of violence. These forms of violence require a reassessment of what we understand by and how we conceive of violence, as well as of the particular effects of extreme violence, crystallized in enhanced modes of exclusion and vulnerability which, again, are so pervasive and omnipresent that they frequently go unacknowledged. The third section of the book, Rethinking Exclusion: the Challenges of Democratic Orders in the 21st Century, engages with contemporary struggles of exclusionary conceptual frames, recounting some of the key challenges faced by democratic orders in the twenty-first century. The chapter by Laura Herrero Olivera, ‘Difference and Recognition. A Critical Lecture on Axel Honneth, Jacques Rancière and Nancy Fraser’ argues for the intertwining of difference and recognition, following the conceptual thread of Arendt, Honneth, Rancière, Fraser and Semprún. Her contribution deals with the performative features of social identity, addressing Arendt’s appraisal of the pariah, Honneth’s model of social recognition and Rancière’s conception of disagreement. The tensions that have

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emerged in the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, where every day female workers risk their lives working as ‘mule women’ in a no-man’s land, act as a concrete example of the exclusionary practices tolerated by the European states. Francisco Blanco Brotons provides a critique of the discourse on social exclusion in his chapter ‘On the Discourse of Exclusion in a Globalizing World’. His critique is based on the acknowledgement of certain key features of today’s world, and the claim that the discourse on social exclusion removes our focus on them, thereby concealing relationships fundamental to domination, subordination, and exploitation. Brotons suggests the notion of ‘adverse incorporation’ as a finer and more adequate conceptual framework. Clara Navarro’s chapter ‘Subject and Research in Global Capitalism: Some Notes on the Fundaments of Feminist and Marxist Theories in the Frame of Intersectionality’ gives a critical account of Roswitha Scholz’s Wertspaltungstheorie, a promising combination of Marxist and intersectional lines of thought. Outlining the virtues and shortcomings of Scholz’s account, Navarro argues, in line with Santos, Butler, Lorey and Haraway, for a different path to the new form of social critique. Finally, Nuria Sánchez Madrid, in her ‘Plural Forms of Life and The Transformation of Public Space: Averting Social Exclusion in Contemporary Democratic Societies’, focuses on strategies of resistance against the allegedly neutral perspective adopted by the liberal tradition of social and political theory vis-à-vis the plurality of personal expectations about happiness and wellbeing. The author argues that the material and symbolic hindrances that individuals and groups find as they pursue happiness belong to a set of problems that politics must face and attempt to forestall in the entangled context of global neoliberal society. The chapter also explores whether the classical liberal disclaimer regarding the economic and social misfortune of citizens has been seized upon by neoliberalism as an excellent opportunity to make of livability an unexpected source of business and profitability, drawing as a conclusion that it is deeply damaging to our affective life and health. In the form of an afterword, Petar Bojanić engages with the notion of exclusion, its conceptual history and its interplay with its counterpart, inclusion, in his ‘Inclusion/Exclusion. The Vulnerable Slash and the Conditions of Common or Critical Engagement’.

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As was stated above, the papers in this volume tackle various issues that fall within the scope of the complexity which produces exclusion, such as the propulsiveness of the nation-state, the lack of personal wellness and social welfare, the state of human capital in neoliberal times and, finally, the flawed nature of democracy itself. However, they also address issues that explain the many meanings of vulnerability that shape subjectivity in our present world, testing ideas such as inscrutability, happiness, individuality, sovereignty, extreme precarity and extreme violence, livability and interdependence. The intertwined subject of this volume becomes more challenging amid the havoc wreaked by the current pandemic crisis. In fact, the upheavals (sacked people, collapsed health systems, burned out teleworkers, shattered social ties) brought about in a global scale by the COVID-19 have highlighted the influence of social structures in the probability that millions of human beings have of staying safe or facing death, casting light over the consequences of living or not in a country provided with a robust public health system and a public network of economic support addressing the most vulnerable. Put it differently, the different degrees of soundness that divide the governments of Germany or Portugal from those of Mexico, Brazil or Peru give an answer to the uneven social impact the pandemic spread. As Judith Butler stated in recent publications, ‘Whether a body that falters and falls in caught by networks of support, or whether a moving body has its way paved without obstruction, depends on whether a world has been built for both its gravity and mobility—and whether that world can stay built. The skin is, from the start, a way of being exposed to the elements, but that exposure always takes a social form’ (Butler 2020, pp. 198–199). In this vein, the historical and critical approaches contained in this book display complementary accounts of the scope that social constructions have for the conditions that make it possible to live a livable life, a correlation that the currently on-going crisis confirmed. As Adriana Zaharijević and Sanja Bojanić claimed in a 2016 article, the ban from the social map that makes lives readable and visible generates the abjection of the human: ‘Bad lives seem confined to certain spaces. They do live somewhere physically, perhaps even in our midst, but they do not appear as lives worth grieving over: their sheer physicality does not grant them recognition. Such lives may be deprived of legal and/or ontological subjecthood. When they do

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not qualify as properly gendered or having clear borders of materiality, they may be relegated to the domain of the abject’ (Zaharijević/Bojanić 2017, p. 176). Insofar as they share these appraisals of the social production of vulnerability and exclusion, the contributions aim to gain influence in the policy-making of South Europe and thus to build a more cohesive and solidary European Union. Madrid, Spain Belgrade, Serbia

Blanca Rodríguez López Nuria Sánchez Madrid Adriana Zaharijević



References Aasland, A., & Fløtten, T. (2001). Ethnicity and Social Exclusion in Estonia and Latvia. Europe-Asia Studies, 53(7), 1023–1049. Beall, J., & Piron, L.-H. (2005, May). DFID Social Exclusion Review. London: Department for International Development. Butler, J. (2020). The Force of Non-Violence. London and New York: Verso. Butler, J., Gambetti, Z., & Sabsay, L. (2016). Introduction. In J.  Butler, Z.  Gambetti, & L.  Sabsay (Eds.), Vulnerability in Resistance. Duke University Press. Rawal, N. (2008). Social Inclusion and Exclusion: A Review. Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology, 2, 161–180. Zaharijević, A., & Milutinović Bojanic, S. (2017). The Trajectories of the Concept of Life in Judith Butler’s Thought. Isegoría, 56, 169–185.

Part I Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion: The Historical Context

1 The Vulnerable Subject: Butler Reading Hegel Clara Ramas San Miguel

In this contribution to a volume dedicated to conjoining the related but problematic notions of ‘exclusion’ and ‘vulnerability’, I would like to explore the tie between the notion of ‘vulnerability’ and the critique of the sovereign subject in Judith Butler’s later thought, tracing its connections with G.  W. F.  Hegel and the critical reception of the German thinker by such authors as Slavoj Žižek or Jean-Luc Nancy. I will develop this issue in three stages. First, I will explore Butler’s approach to the question of the subject, which she receives under the influence of Adorno and Foucault as an

This work was completed within the framework of the following research projects: Precariedad, exclusión y diversidad funcional (discapacidad): lógicas y efectos subjetivos del sufrimiento social contemporáneo. Innovación docente en Filosofía (Ref.: Innova-Docencia, Proyecto N° 148), funded by the Complutense University of Madrid; POSTORY: Historiadores, Mnemohistoria y artesanos del pasado en la era posturística (AGREEMENT NUMBER: 2013-1572/001-001 CU7 MULT7), funded by CE. EACEA, Culture, Multianual Cooperation Projects. 2007–2013; and Naturaleza y comunidad IV: El filósofo, la ciudad y el conflicto de las facultades, o la filosofía en la crisis de la humanidad europea del Siglo XXI (Ref. FFI2017-83155-P), funded by the Complutense University of Madrid.

C. Ramas San Miguel (*) Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Rodríguez Lopez et al. (eds.), Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60519-3_1

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‘opaque subject’, and will analyse the connection between vulnerability and the critique of the sovereign subject. The understanding of this critique requires us to focus on Butler’s reception of Hegel’s idea of recognition, which is grounded especially in her interpretation of The Phenomenology of Spirit. According to Butler, recognition, as consciousness apprehends through the Hegelian experience of master and slave, is always reciprocal, never unilateral. The emerging notion of subject is that of a non-reflexive, intrinsically dependent being, formed in relations of dependency, which is able to ‘give an account of oneself ’ insofar as it is intertwined with others. Secondly, I will try to develop this notion of subject which Butler portrays, as present in the reception of Hegel by Nancy, Malabou and Žižek. The leitmotiv of these approaches is to ascertain that the subject is not sovereign but rather ‘outside of oneself ’, and that alterity is an inevitable component of the subject. This also implies that the subject as such is not a reflexive, interior entity, but always mediated by the shared experience with others. Lastly, I will outline how Butler tries to develop a ‘double-edged’ concept of vulnerability which is politically useful, through the understanding that vulnerability is both that which enables us to establish ‘sexual, social, and ethical modes of relationality’ and, at the same time, that by which we might ‘become subject to exploitation’. I will also try to sketch the critical approach to the binary thought of Hegelian heritage which is assumed by Butler in her political-philosophical considerations.

1

 he Opaque Subject and the Idea T of Recognition in The Phenomenology of Spirit

In her book Giving an Account of Oneself, published in 2005, Butler gathers materials from various lectures and seminars, all of which leads to the question: under what conditions can the question of moral philosophy be formulated in the contemporary social context? This approach takes for granted not only the fact that moral questions arise in the context of

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social relations, but also that the very form of these questions changes and depends on this context. More specifically, as in a remark by Adorno, ‘We can probably say that moral questions have always arisen when moral norms of behaviour have ceased to be self-evident and unquestioned in the life of a community’ (quoted in Butler 2005, p. 3). But then the status of the self or the subject which acts in the framework of these norms, and its relation to them, is not self-evident. Clearly, there is no moral without a certain self or I, but: what is this self? In what terms can it appropriate morality, or give account of itself? How does the self behave in relation to the context of social relations and conditioning moral norms? First and foremost, the ‘I’ is implicated with its conditions: ‘Yet there is no “I” that can fully stand apart from the social conditions of its emergence, no “I” that is not implicated in a set of conditioning moral norms, which, being norms, have a social character that exceeds a purely personal or idiosyncratic meaning’ (Butler 2005, p. 7). This does not imply, however, as some readings of Foucault would affirm, that the self is a mere product or instrument of a previous network of power relations: ‘In an important sense, this matrix is also the condition for the emergence of the “I”, even though the “I” is not causally induced by those norms. We cannot conclude that the “I” is simply the effect or the instrument of some prior ethos or some field of conflicting or discontinuous norms’ (Butler 2005, p. 7). Both sides are to be considered; the self has indeed an entity of its own, but this entity ‘is already implicated in a social temporality that exceeds its own capacities for narration […] the “I” has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation—or set of relations—to a set of norms’(Butler 2005, p. 8). After studying, along the lines of Nietzsche and Foucault, how the existence of these norms inhere in the ontology and formation of the subject, without this being a mere effect of discourse and norm, Butler notes that the relation of the self with the norm and the emerging formation and recognition is not enough. We must also consider the relation to others. In fact, here is where the very substance of the subject—an opaque substance, that is—may lie: ‘The opacity of the subject may be a consequence of its being conceived as a relational being, one whose early and primary relations are not always available to conscious knowledge’ (Butler 2005, p.  20). We must then conceive ourselves as essentially and

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intrinsically dependent beings: ‘If we are formed in the context of relations that become partially irrecoverable to us, then that opacity seems built into our formation and follows from our status as beings who are formed in relations of dependency’ (Butler 2005, p.  20). Here lie the most important ethical bonds and ethical responsibility for the subject, as they give shape to the space where our relations to others take place. Butler reckons that Foucaultian theory, even its later re-elaborations (from the 1980s) on the question of ethics and the subject, is not enough to fully acknowledge the meaning and presence of the other.1 The framework of the ‘regime of truth’ for self-constitution still fails to think the presence of the other in the scene of recognition (Butler 2005, pp. 22–25). The question of recognition emerges for Butler when examining the premises of the ethical question: How should I treat another? Or, as this question actually means ‘How should I treat you?’, with it we are immediately caught in the sphere of power, in one’s relationship with another being. The first-person perspective assumes the ethical question, but does not rightfully apprehend this dependency of the ethical sphere on the social/power sphere. This is where we talk about recognition, and a set of perplexities emerge: ‘If I understand myself to be conferring recognition on you, for instance, then I take seriously that the recognition comes from me. But the moment I realize that the terms by which I confer recognition are not mine alone, that I did not single-handedly devise or craft them, I am, as it were, dispossessed by the language that I offer’ (Butler 2005, p. 26). I cannot ‘offer’ pure recognition because I cannot purely offer, as I am not an immediate, autonomous, independent subject. The subject cannot offer recognition from ‘its own private sources’; being a subject does not mean being my-self, but to be already opened to others. If the framework of the Nietzschean-Foucaultian analytics of power is insufficient for understanding the constitution of the subject, how is it to be understood? At this point, Butler turns to Hegel, and finds in the post-Hegelian reception of authors such as Jean-Luc Nancy or the feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero a much better basis for thinking  In this book Butler uses ‘the other’, without capitals, in the sense of ‘the human other in its specificity’, and ‘the Other’ where, for technical reasons, the term needs to mean something slightly different, as in Lévinas, who uses it as a placeholder for an infinite ethical relationship (2005, p. x, Abbreviations). 1

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recognition, in a way that involves the social foundation for giving an account of oneself. To sum up: An account of oneself is always given to another, whether conjured or existing, and this other establishes the scene of address as a more primary ethical relation than a reflexive effort to give an account of oneself. Moreover, the very terms by which we give an account, by which we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves and to others, are not of our making. They are social in character, and they establish social norms, a domain of unfreedom and substitutability within which our ‘singular’ stories are told. (Butler 2005, p. 21)

In this chapter I will deal with Butler’s interpretation of Hegel. What might Butler see in Hegel that would enable her to see the presence of the other in the constitution of the subject? Why is Hegel useful for designing a ‘more primary ethical relation’ than the reflexive one? How to understand this pulse which drives [zieht] towards the other, and to enter into a relationship [Be-ziehung] with the other? How do we understand— Butler refers to it in Hegelian terms—this ‘desire’? The first sketch of an answer by Butler is a quote by Jean-Luc Nancy in his study on Hegel, The Restlessness of the Negative: ‘I can only recognize myself recognized by the other to the extent that this recognition of the other alters me: it is desire, it is what trembles in desire’. To fully understand the paradox of the subject which gives account of itself only in relation to others, Butler deems it necessary to turn to Hegel, and entitles a section of her book ‘Post-­ Hegelian Queries’ (Butler 2005, pp.  26–40). The key lies then in the section of The Phenomenology of Spirit entitled ‘Lordship and Bondage’ (or as it is more commonly known, ‘Master and Slave’). It was indeed Hegel who clearly stated that recognition cannot be unilaterally given, but is always reciprocal: ‘In the moment that I give it, I am potentially given it, and the form in which I offer it is potentially given to me’ (Butler 2005, p. 26). In ‘Lordship and Bondage’, Hegel shows that one self-consciousness cannot have an unilateral effect on other self-­ consciousness. This is made clear in the case of dominion; as one tries to gain dominion over the other and maintain a sovereign position, one sees that it acts only while the other does the same. This is why recognition

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between them never occurs in the form of a pure offering: I receive it in the act of offering it. The title of the preceding section is clear enough: ‘The Independence and Dependence of Self-consciousness’ [Selbständigkeit and Unselbständigkeit des Selbstbewusstseins] (Hegel 1970, p. 145 ff.). To what extent can a consciousness be independent in its relationship with another? Hegel starts with precisely the opposite evidence. If ‘we’, the ‘we’ who read the development of the consciousness on its way through the Phenomenology, pay attention to what is happening to the consciousness in its relation to the other, we must acknowledge the following: ‘Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or recognized’ (Hegel 1970, p. 145). One exists, then, only so far as one is recognized by other. Apparently, we have ‘the action of one alone’, but this action is at the same time ‘its own action and the action of that other as well’, because the other is ‘likewise independent, shut up within itself ’; the very fact that the other is independent means that it does the same as the first. The process then is absolutely the double process of both self-­ consciousnesses. Each sees the other do the same as itself; each itself does what it demands on the part of the other, and for that reason does what it does, only so far as the other does the same. Action from one side only would be useless, because what is to happen can only be brought about by means of both. (Hegel 1970, pp. 146–147)

This section of Hegel’s book argues how the consciousness which believes itself to ‘exist for itself ’, that is, the ‘lord’ or ‘master’, is turned into the opposite of what it wants to be, that is, the ‘bondsman’ or ‘slave’; ‘So, too, bondage will, when completed, pass into the opposite of what it immediately is: being a consciousness repressed within itself, it will enter into itself, and change round into real and true independence’ (Hegel 1970, p. 152). Seen in this way, the truth of independence is dependence. And so one can certainly ask: What kind of selfness is acting here? As Butler puts it, is the other capable of executing it in the same way as me, or is this the encounter with absolute alterity? What notion of subject emerges from this?

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 he Eccentric and Ticklish T Hegelian Subject

As stated above, the subject which emerges is not a sovereign subject, but a subject which is ‘outside of itself ’. In response to the interpretations which hold that Hegel’s subject appropriates that which is outside of it in an ‘imperialistic’ way, Butler, following the thought of Malabou and Nancy, states that Hegel’s relation with the Other is ‘ecstatic’, so that the exteriority of the self, or the self ‘out of itself ’, cannot be surpassed. A final moment of appropriation or reconciliation for a total Subject does not exist. As Žižek put it, the Hegelian subject is a ‘ticklish’ one: ‘The properly Hegelian answer to this is that there simply is no such ‘Absolute Subject’, since the Hegelian subject is nothing but the very movement of unilateral self-deception, of the hubris of positing oneself in one’s exclusive particularity, which necessarily turns against itself and ends in self-­ negation’ (Žižek 2000, p.  76). The entire Phenomenology of Spirit is nothing but the story of the repeated failure of the Subject to realize itself in a social Substance, in a finished and completed entity; the Absolute is not present in an immediate way, but is preceded by the pathway of the ‘natural consciousness’ with an ‘urge’ [dringt] for the ‘real science’, a way in which the subject goes through its various ‘stations’ or figures (Hegel 1970, p.  72 ff.). Hegel labels this as the ‘formation of consciousness’ [Bildung], a word which suggests that a subject is not a closed entity, emphasizing that in this way it is experienced by the natural consciousness as a ‘loss’. There is no stage in which the consciousness can rest. It is permeated with ‘restlessness’, as we find in the title of Nancy’s work on Hegel: ‘The progress towards this goal consequently is without a halt, and at no earlier stage is satisfaction to be found […]’ (Hegel 1970, p. 74). Every attempt to stay fixed at a certain point implodes from within: ‘But it can find no rest, unless she wishes to remain in unthinking indolence— and then thought will agitate the thoughtlessness, its restlessness will disturb that indolence’ (Hegel 1970, p. 75). The movement of the self is thus the revelation of the deception of individual affirmation. Žižek warns against a possible counter-argument: that this would apply only to the ‘natural consciousness’; that is, to the

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subject in the process of its formation, which is the theme of the Phenomenology. However, if we were to follow the path to the end, the actual universal, Absolute and finished Subject would emerge. But this is also not true. The ‘negation of the negation’ is not a magical return to identity after the pain of splitting and alienation, because such an identity never existed (Žižek 2000, p. 78). This is clear if one follows Hegel’s polemics with Schelling, whose major conclusion is outlined in the Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel became Hegel against Schelling when he accepted that there was no Absolute above or over the oppositions and contradictions which pertain to the Finite. The Absolute is not something which is above the reflection on these finite determinations: it is, rather, ‘the absolute reflection on itself ’. Hegel follows the impetus of Kant as the founder of Idealism: there is no reality prior to the subject’s ‘positing’ [setzen] activity. He refuses, however, to view the subject as a neutral and universal agent. Hegel admitted that there is no reality without the subject, ‘but he insisted that subjectivity is “inherently pathological” (biased, limited to a distorting, unbalanced perspective on the Whole)’ (Žižek 2000, p. 78). To properly address Hegel’s notion of reflection we would need to turn to The Science of Logic and his ‘Doctrine of Essence’, but this lies beyond the scope of the present chapter. What we must keep in mind here is that for Hegel, in Butler’s reading, the eccentric Other constantly undermines the Subject’s presumption of being absolute and sovereign. To correctly read Hegel’s claim that ‘Substance is the Subject’ is to reject this as a direct assertion of identity. Substance, the ‘ultimate foundation of all entities, the Absolute’ is not a pre-subjective ground (Grund, ground, reason, fundament), but a Subject, ‘an agent of self-differentiation, which posits its otherness and then re-appropriates it, and so on: ‘“Subject” stands for the non-­ substantial agency of phenomenalization, appearance, “illusion”, split, finitude, understanding […].’ (Žižek 2000, pp.  88–89). To sum up: ‘There is no “absolute Subject”—subject as such is relative, caught in self-­ division, and it is as such that the Subject is inherent to the Substance.’ (Žižek 2000, p. 89). Moreover, the shared experience with others transforms what I am myself: I am no longer capable of being what I was, as I am now what I became with the other. The self only becomes what it is, only speaks and knows itself, by dislocating the first-person perspective.

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Nancy’s work Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, which Butler quotes in her own book, elaborates on the Hegelian notion of the subject. It opens with a strong statement: ‘Hegel is the inaugural thinker of the modern world’ (Nancy 2002, p. 3), meaning that he takes the ‘death of meaning’ as the starting point of his philosophy; the death of sense, like the community’s religious bond, its philosophy, begins in a grey zone of opposites, of particularity and individual interest. ‘An absolute negativity of the Absolute appears to constitute all experience of this world and its consciousness of itself ’ (Nancy 2002, p. 4). The Absolute is neither present nor accessible; and those who seek to behold it directly in the infinite Universe are labelled by Hegel as sentimental or fanatical—in a word: romantic. Only the long path of exteriority, determination, finitude and negativity lead to the ‘throne of the Absolute’, as we are told on the last page of the Phenomenology. Philosophy is no longer the immediate access to the revealed, higher Being, but the knowledge of a certain Nothingness or Not-being. And here arises the idea of the subject: it is this knowledge, as the process by which the self finds itself, that constitutes a Subject: Hegel takes it upon himself to think about how the obscure knowing wherein this world undergoes itself is a knowing of the self as a non-given relation, or an infinite relation: how, consequently, what (or the one whom) he names subject is revealed in this relation and how the subject constitutes and liberates itself in the dimension and according to the logic of the negation of the ‘given’ in general. (Nancy 2002, p. 4)

This subject, it is clear, is not a subjectivity in the form of interiority, ‘a self all to itself’, but, on the contrary, that which dissolves all substance, all entity which is already given and would remain as permanent, as foundation—in the sense of the Greek hypokeimenon: that which lies below and never ceases to exist. As Žižek emphasized, the Hegelian subject is for Nancy non-substantial. It acts, it is what it does, as ‘the experience of the consciousness of the negativity of substance, as the concrete experience and consciousness of the modern history of the world […]’ (Nancy 2002, p. 5). This active character of the subject is precisely what Hegel refers to as ‘restless’: ‘Spirit is not an inert being, but on the contrary, absolutely restless [unruhig] being, pure activity’ (Hegel 1986, § 378). The subject is

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not closed, but is the form and movement of a relation with oneself, a path to one self and the arrival at oneself. Subject is then the self-­ consciousness of separation or, better, is conscious only as a separation and movement towards itself. Its reality, Wirklichkeit, is a ‘living restlessness’.

3

A Double-Edged Concept of Vulnerability

I would like to suggest that Butler’s reading of Hegel and his notion of the eccentric subject sheds some light on her notion of vulnerability, which she has developed to think the political subject beyond the established canons of political philosophy. In this sense, she would probably subscribe to these lines by Nancy: One begins by asking oneself if all common existence is political or not, if the in-and-as-common should not precisely be distinct from the political, which is at most only one aspect of it (the one concerning justice and power) … The in-and-as-common, which is certainly coextensive with collective and individual existence, is not uniquely ‘political’ […]. There is a disparity of spheres of existence, and this disparity is not an empirical crumbling: it must be thought for itself, as another type of ‘unity’ than the unity of subsumption under the essence of the ‘political’. (Nancy 2002, p. ix)

That would mean thinking common existence in a minimal space with not-yet-recognizable contours, outside the categories of the state-form, the reach of sovereignty and form of law and the juridical sphere in general. Nancy inaugurated this attempt, which many later followed, in the acclaimed The Inoperative Community, published in 1986 after a series of exchanges with Maurice Blanchot, beginning with a 1983 article of the same title; his aim was to think the political as the ‘opening of a space’, not related to either the public sphere or an agora. Precisely in this barrenness, this nudity, the place of exposure, lies the guarantee of encountering the political in its pure form. This ‘purification is operated through a desedimentation of the encrusted determinations that the political has received across its long history’ (Smith, Introduction to Nancy 2002, pp. ix–xi).

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Specifically, claims Jason Smith, this would happen outside Hegel’s political philosophy of the ‘Objective Spirit’, that is, outside the internal constitution of the State and the punctual decision for war; however, as we have seen, Hegel’s notion of the subject, as portrayed in The Phenomenology of Spirit, surely involves a political dimension. This desedimentation, however, is not a pure theoretical gesture, for the sake of finding a pure but occult ontological ‘substructure’ of political forms. Such a decomposition of the political is happening now, practically, in our own global political space: ‘The ferocious deterritorizations of capital, the installation of mediatic networks of an unheard-of density, and the promotion of international law and its reference to “humanity” all conspire in the effective (and not simply theoretical or methodological) dismantling of our system of standard political referents’ (Smith, Introduction to Nancy 2002, p. xi). The political space is ‘bare’, as Nancy anticipated in the mid-1980s, because the state-form and all its classical determinations—the person of the sovereign, borders and territory, the citizenship and ‘the people’— have been obliterated. It is this political situation that Butler deals with, and Nancy’s insights definitely resound in hers. It is precisely one of the topics addressed by Butler in a conversation with Adriana Zaharijević published recently in Philosophy and Society. In this interview, Butler considers that vulnerability reveals the ‘insufficiency of the sovereign subject’. The goal is to understand in which way this insufficiency plays out under certain social and historical conditions. Vulnerability and dispossession, says Butler, portray ‘a double-edged character’: ‘On the one hand, one requires vulnerability but also to be “outside of oneself ”, delivered over to a world of others, establishing sexual, social, and ethical modes of relationality. On the other hand, it is precisely by virtue of this kind of condition that we become subject to exploitation’ (Butler, in Zaharijević 2016, pp. 106–107). As we saw with Hegel, it is only by virtue of the openness of the subject to interaction with the other, the ‘being outside of oneself ’, that it comes to be what it actually is: a being in plurality with others, whereby this relation—and Hannah Arendt’s notion of ‘ineliminable plurality’ resounds here (Arendt 1998)—is not accidentally or secondarily acquired, but constitutive of the subject itself.

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If perhaps to eliminate possession, sovereignty or dominion is too lofty a goal, in Butler’s view we can definitely rethink our ways of acting, interdepending or being vulnerable: ‘Perhaps we have to consider those practices that effectively do undermine them, and to build those forms of kinship, community, and solidarity that effectively dispute the necessity and value of sovereignty and possession’ (Butler, in Zaharijević 2016, p. 108). With this we would need to think the public space and the ‘commons’ in a new way: the question would be not so much what we ‘own’, but what we ‘share’ or ‘circulate in common’, that is, to think the political outside the inherited canons of the centrality of the state-form and the juridical—an endeavour that many contemporary authors, like Nancy or Foucault, share. On the same path as Nancy, Butler points to other places for the emergence of a different being-in-common: ‘This happens usually outside of the structure of states, in civil society, or in nonauthorized modes of sociability. But perhaps it is possible to think about a different kind of state structure that would divide up or disperse sovereignty’ (Butler in Zaharijević 2016, p. 108). This task was systematically undertaken in Butler’s Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (Butler 2015), stimulated by the popular movements which have arisen in different places and cities around the world since 2010. Observing these experiences, Butler has explored the extent to which collective action by means of the bodies occupying public space can question imperfect and powerful aspects of contemporary politics. As she rightly noted, the ‘mob’ has always acted as a disturbing presence for the canonic theories of democracy; in his classic work on the ‘populist reason’, which she quotes here, Laclau outlined a history of how political philosophy has excluded the collective spontaneous presence of ‘the people’ as an interruption, a chaotic menace to the rightful form of the political embodied in institutions (Laclau 2005). There is, as Butler sums it up, ‘a certain disjunction between the political form of democracy and the principle of popular sovereignty, since the two are not the same’ (Butler 2015, p.  2). Butler changes the focal point, however: she approaches not so much the discursive sphere, or how and with which exclusions the political subject or popular will, the ‘we, the people’, is constituted, but rather questions the meaning of a somehow prior condition: the fact that bodies assemble. Political meanings, she states, are not

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only those enacted by discourse, written or spoken. When bodies come together, this has a political meaning as well, one which, strictly speaking, is neither discursive nor pre-discursive. This is why silent assembly, although speechless, has nonetheless an obvious common and social meaning: If we consider why freedom of assembly is separate from freedom of expression, it is precisely because the power that people have to gather together is itself an important political prerogative, quite distinct from the right to say whatever they have to say once people have gathered. The gathering signifies in excess of what is said, and that mode of signification is a concerted bodily enaction, a plural form of performativity. (Butler 2015, p. 8)

The focus shifts, then, from discourse to bodily action, and so Butler retains her concept of ‘performativity’, but now related to collective action in its most material, bodily sense. The thesis of the book is that acting together, if regarded as embodied action, can question powerful dimensions of the reigning forms of the political (Butler 2015, p. 9), a discussion which matches the previous one, that is, how to think the subject in a non-substantial way. Bodies, argues Butler, contain a persuasive force: it is this body demanding a job, education or healthcare; it is this body which lives under conditions in which life is threatened and precarity arises. Precarity can be expressed and made to appear by bodily action, more accordingly in public assemblies than in the standardized procedures of institutional politics. In this sense, collective action, when it takes place by occupying and remaining in public spaces even without a voice or speech, has a sense of its own: to begin with, it is a shared situation, opposing the individualizing moral which celebrates economic autonomy in conditions where that is almost impossible. Even before political speech with political demands emerge, the very fact of being there together, breathing together, standing together, walking together, listening together, creates a bond which inheres in the subject, modifying and constituting it. The underlying problem in the book, Butler explained later in another Seminar organized by the Institute for Philosophy and Critical Theory in Belgrade, was to rethink ‘the difference between passivity and activity in

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light of the problem—and it is a political problem—of how and when do people take action, gather or become assembled’ (Butler et  al. 2016, p. 56). The problem of assembly, then, is a game of activity-passivity. In other words, assembly as political phenomenon sheds light on the subject as a non-sovereign, open entity, occurring in the intermittent shift between active and passive, always referring, in the very same movement, both to itself and to the others. This is why we are always vulnerable and never sovereign. This passivity, of course, means on the one hand that we cannot determine the conditions under which we act: ‘It is usually in the midst of conditions in which they are undergoing something that they did not choose, and which undermines their capacity to choose’ (Butler et  al. 2016, p.  56). As Marx expressed beautifully in his Eighteenth Brumaire: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’ (Marx 2003, p. 10). They are suffering, says Butler, passively suffering a condition that is not chosen; but, at the same time, a certain agency of the subject remains: ‘… and yet there is an action that is not just my action or your action, but an acting together in the now, right?’ (Butler et al. 2016, p. 56). Our vulnerability is then double-edged: active and passive at the same time. At the same time, this openness is, as we have said, what enables us to establish social, ethical or personal modes of relationship. As Butler also stressed in Giving an Account of Oneself, the recognition of the eccentric, inter-subjective subject does not entail the annihilation of the agent’s ethical capacity. According to Butler, this double-edged idea of vulnerability can pave the way ‘to move beyond the temptation to cling to the polar opposite of the passive, the receptive or the responsive’; to think an open subject which is both, or none: ‘When we talk about responsiveness—is that passive, is that active, is that exactly both—a mode of being affected and moving toward what affects us? Is that a term—responsiveness—that defies the binary opposition itself?’ (Butler et al. 2016, p. 57). A philosophical reference here for Butler, besides Hegel, would be Spinoza and his analysis of the affect as the interaction between ‘modes’ of the infinite substance; in a more contemporary sense, it would be Deleuze, who

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retains the ontological structure of an interconnected matrix of relations. Butler is interested in locating this in-between of the active and passive, a space beyond the opposition itself. She assumes that this intention is already present in the concept of gender performativity: not merely to subvert a pole by reaching to the other, but to ‘enact the critique of the binary’. Butler concludes: ‘So I guess my interest is not to trans-valuate the binary but to move us through it, to show us another kind of possibility outside of hierarchy and binary opposition’ (Butler et al. 2016, p. 57). The continuity between Butler and Hegel here is obvious: there is an attempt in both to move beyond binary thought. We can now better understand a discussion which runs through the first chapter of Giving an Account of Oneself which is also Hegelian in its shape, and this is the question of universality. She begins with a remark by Adorno: ‘We can probably say that moral questions have always arisen when moral norms of behaviour have ceased to be self-evident and unquestioned in the life of a community’ (quoted in Butler 2005, p. 3). From this, Butler derives the question of universality. Under certain circumstances, abstract universality can be violent; that is, when it fails to respond to cultural or social particularity and fails to undergo a reformulation of itself to consider the specific conditions to which it applies. Butler states: ‘When a universal precept cannot, for social reasons, be appropriated or when— indeed, for social reasons—it must be refused, the universal precept itself becomes a site of contest, a theme and an object of democratic debate’ (Butler 2005, p. 5). When this happens, the universal loses its status as a precondition of democratic debate and becomes an imposition on participation, a form of violence as exclusion. The universal is not by definition violent, but it can exercise violence under certain conditions, as we have explained, such as when it is indifferent to social conditions that would make a living appropriation possible for its subjects, thus threatening their freedom and particularity (Butler 2005, p. 7). Needless to say, this Adornian theme originates in Hegel’s critique of abstract universality, manifested as ‘the Terror’. Žižek has also explored the Hegelian theme of ‘concrete universality’. In the Hegelian position, as opposed to the Cartesian, Marxist or Laclausian versions, there is never a particular which fully ‘realizes the concept’; universality is concrete because it is structured as a texture or as particular figurations which are

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never embodied in a figure adequate to its notion. Universality implies a gap, a hole, in the midst of the particular content of the universality in question (Žižek 2000, pp. 98–103 and, more recently, an extended and revised position of the Hegelian ‘concrete universality’ in Žižek 2012, pp. 292 ff.). This critical approach to the universal, when translated to politics, implies a caution against posing particular subjects as embodiments of abstract categories: human, class, emancipatory subject, etc. However, the ‘opposite position’ is also false, that is, understanding the isolated ‘I’ as a ‘pure immediacy, arbitrary or accidental, detached from its social and historical conditions’ (Butler 2005, p. 7). This position is by definition no more than reversed unilaterality, and as such ‘false’ in the Hegelian sense. As we have tried to show, there is a trait which underlies many of the reflections on the political by Butler, and this is her fidelity to the Hegelian gesture of subverting the binary. This task, that of ‘defying the binary opposition itself ’ for a better comprehension of the vulnerable subject, one which is open to others and capable of establishing political, ethical and personal bonds, is still open for us.

References Arendt, H. (1998). The Human Condition, with an Introduction by Margaret Canovan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, J. (2005). Giving an Account of Oneself. New  York: Fordham University Press. Butler, J. (2015). Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Butler, J., Vasiljević, J., et al. (2016). Seminar on Judith Butler’s ‘Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly’. Filozofija i društvo, 27(1), 39–52. Hegel, G.  W. F. (1970). Phänomenologie des Geistes, Werke 3, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp (English Translation by Me, Revised Version of The Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage. Retrieved July 2018, from Hegel by HyperText Website, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phba.htm, and The Phenomenology of Mind, Retrieved July 2018, http://home.lu.lv/~ruben/Vestures_filozofija/ Hegel-The%20Phemenology%20of%20Mind.pdf ).

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Hegel, G. W. F. (1986). Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse 1830. Dritter Teil. Die Philosophie des Geistes. Mit den mündlichen Zusätzen, Werke 10, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Marx, K. (2003). The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New  York: International Publishers. Nancy, J. L. (2002). Hegel. The Restlessness of the Negative. London: University of Minnesota Press. Zaharijević, A. (2016). In Conversation with Judith Butler: Binds Yet to be Settled. Filozofija i društvo, 27(1), 105–114. Žižek, S. (2000). The Ticklish Subject. The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso. Žižek, S. (2012). Less Than Nothing. Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso.

2 The Privatization of the Sustainability of Life in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition Sara Ferreiro Lago

1

Introduction

Although feminists and ecologists currently defend the importance of the sustainability of life in political debate, this centrality is not a given in the socioeconomic system in which we live. Following certain ecofeminist theories, we might say that what is at the centre of the current system are the capitalist markets. These are central insofar as they define the functioning of the socioeconomic structure, favouring the unlimited accumulation of capital as a socially guaranteed process. The proposal to place the sustainability of life as an analytical and political axis is thus presented as an act of subversion against the prevailing model, which inhibits a collective responsibility for the sustainability of life and is often presented as a biocidal model, constituting a constant threat to life by not taking into account temporal and material limits in the continuous process of capital

S. Ferreiro Lago (*) Faculty of Philosophy, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Rodríguez Lopez et al. (eds.), Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60519-3_2

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accumulation.1 It is precisely this failure to attend to the limits which has now generated the various ecological crises2 and the crises of social reproduction (or crises of care).3 It is necessary to point out, however, that within this socioeconomic system not all lives are equally exposed to harm. The lives of certain privileged subjects are established as those that must be primarily safeguarded, even in times of crisis, concentrating around these subjects the highest quotas of power and resources. But who are these privileged subjects? They are those closest to the hegemonic definition of a dignified life, which is at present linked to the ideal of self-­ sufficiency through the market. This self-sufficiency can only be illusively achieved by certain subjects (typically male, white, heterosexual, without any disabilities and upper-class) through their exploitation of other non-­ hegemonic lives. Faced with this state of affairs, the paradigm of the sustainability of life proposes,4 on the one hand, to visualize the conflict between capital and life (a conflict wider than that posed by the anthropocentric paradigm of the capital-labour conflict) and, on the other, to put forward new frameworks from which to design and build in  See Herrero, Y., «Propuestas ecofeministas para un sistema cargado de deudas», Revista de Economia Critica, n°13, 2011. 2  The ecological crisis is linked to the depredation of natural resources at a rate incompatible with that required by nature to regenerate them. A paradigmatic case, although not the only one, is that of fossil fuels, upon which a production, distribution and consumption model such as the current one, intensely energyvore and in continuous growth, inexorably depends. 3  If the ecological crisis is linked to the overcoming of the material limits of the earth and its capacity for reproduction, the care crisis is linked to the translimitation of people’s time (which is also finite). The organizational changes of time dedicated to the attention of human needs has caused a crisis of social reproduction. By breaking the past model of care management (based on the domestication of women), conflict erupts in the sexual division of labour. The traditional feminization of domestic care tasks has become problematic. This change in the classical distribution of tasks according to gender requires a new social reorganization of reproduction. This redistribution is still far from being a reality and many women who do paid work are forced to a double shift, combining this work with care tasks at home. In these circumstances, there is a decrease in the time that can be devoted to care. In addition, recently, some social transformations have taken place that significantly complicate the management of this care, aggravating the effects of the crisis. Some of these transformations are the following: The increasing requirements for care associated with the aging of the population and the maintenance of life to older ages, the urban growth model that does not take into account the needs of care, the precariousness of the market labor (which means that the scarce conciliation rights do not reach more than a privileged fraction of the workforce) or the loss of social and community networks at the same time that there has been a growing individualism. 4  See Pérez Orozco, A., Subversión feminista de la economia: Aportes para un debate sobre el conflicto capital-vida, Madrid, Traficantes de Sueños, 2014. 1

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common another notion of habitable life that does not imply the exploitation or domination of other lives. This task of collective construction, while not easy, proposes to question, from within the system but standing at its margins, those forms of subjectivity that are complicit with the perpetuation of this model, keeping in mind at all times that the responsibilities for its maintenance are asymmetric.5 However, despite the emergence of these new subversive paradigms, which place the question of the sustainability of life at the centre of the political debate, it is not difficult to find theories that have relegated this problem to the background, even though they may position themselves (in various ways) against the centrality of the market in our societies. In this chapter, I want to analyse a recent, although certainly not the last, example of this: that of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, where— as we shall see—she tries to separate life-sustaining activities from political issues, without denying their great importance. Next, I will analyse Arendt’s arguments, in her interpretation of the Greek tradition, for excluding from the public sphere those activities which are related to survival. As we will see, this issue is linked to her conception of the body, relegated to private space and tied to the compulsion of need and pre-­ political violence.

2

Vita Activa and The Human Condition

In The Human Condition, Arendt analyses the expression vita activa, by which she designates three activities: labour, work and action.6 In her opinion, these are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which men have been given life on Earth: life, worldliness and plurality.  The notion of asymmetric responsibilities helps us out of the dichotomy, one in which you are either guilty or you are a victim. We are all responsible for maintaining the current socio-economic system, which favours the aforementioned crises; however, we do not all have the same responsibility. Our degree of responsibility depends on the place we occupy in “White Capitalist Patriarchy” (I share Donna Haraway’s doubts about the name of this socioeconomic system: “how may we name this scandalous Thing?”). 6  See Arendt, H., The Human Condition, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 7. 5

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The activities that correspond to labour are those having to do with the maintenance of life. Arendt refers to labour as those repetitive tasks whose objective is the creation of consumer goods, which are ephemeral and disappear quickly.7 As she points out, the activity and efforts of the labourer were despised in classical antiquity. On the one hand, this contempt had to do with the fact that this activity did not leave a mark that might endure; that is, labour activity leaves nothing worth remembering. On the other hand, for the Greeks the notion of freedom implied being liberated from purely biological need, which is precisely what the labourer attends to. In fact, it was this liberation from necessity that justified the institution of slavery in antiquity. In this respect, Arendt points out: “Because men were dominated by the necessities of life, they could win their freedom only through the domination of those whom they subjected to necessity by force”.8 Arendt distinguishes the activity of labour, aimed at satisfying the biological needs of men, from the activity of work, which erects a world of tangible things. Work is understood as that activity which produces useful objects, characterized by their durability and stability.9 In addition, as a distinctive feature of this activity, she points out that: “From the viewpoint of nature, it is work rather than labor that is destructive, since the work process takes matter out of nature’s hands without giving it back to her in the swift course of the natural metabolism of the living body”.10 Lastly, action is for Arendt the most elevated activity, in which men reveal themselves as unique beings, in which they unveil their true selves. The condition of action is human plurality, which has the double character of equality and distinction.11 According to Arendt, only action is the exclusive prerogative of man, “neither beasts nor god are capable of it, and only action is entirely dependent upon the constant presence of others.”12 For this reason, she argues that: “A life without speech and without action, on the other hand—and this is the only way of life that  See Ibid., pp. 94–96.  Ibid., p. 84. 9  See Ibid., pp. 136–139. 10  Ibid., p. 100. 11  See Ibid., p. 175. 12  Ibid., pp. 22–23. 7 8

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in earnest has renounced all appearance and all vanity in the biblical sense of the word—is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men”.13

3

 he Distinction Between the Public T and Private Spheres in The Human Condition

After distinguishing the three fundamental activities of the active life, Arendt outlines a kind of topology or architecture of the activities in the second chapter of The Human Condition, entitled “The Public and the Private Realm”. In this chapter she distinguishes the public-political from the private, on the one hand, and the social, on the other. It is this distinction between the political and the social that leads her to criticize the Latin translation animal socialis of the Greek definition of man as zoon politikon. According to Arendt: “It is not that Plato or Aristotle was ignorant of, or unconcerned with, the fact that man cannot live outside the company of men, but they did not count this condition among the specifically human characteristics; on the contrary, it was something human life had in common with animal life, and for this reason alone it could not be fundamentally human”.14 Arendt was interested in pointing out the difference between the purely natural and social association of men, which she links with necessity, and a purely political association, which she links with freedom. To illustrate this difference, she delves into the Greek distinction between the affairs of the oikos and the affairs of the polis. The birth of the polis implied in her judgment the emergence of a new order of existence different from mere family association. It was no longer a question of life understood as mere zoé, tied to what is necessary for subsistence, but understood as bios, a good life, which is not simply a matter of living better (in the order of pleasure and pain). Arendt, quoting Aristotle, 13 14

 Ibid., p. 176.  Ibid., p. 24.

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says: “The rise of the city-state meant that man received besides his private life a sort of second life, his bios politikos”.15 Of all the activities of which men are capable, only two were considered by the citizens of the polis as apt for constituting the bios politikos: action (praxis) and discourse (lexis). From these two activities arises a sphere of properly human affairs, from which everything merely necessary or useful is excluded in an absolute manner.16 Moreover, in Arendt’s opinion, in the polis there was a sharp separation between the organizational form of the family association, which depended on the use of force and violence, and the way of life of the political association, which was governed by persuasion and the word. In classical Greece, the condition of plurality and equality was necessary for there to be this discourse as such, revealing agent’s identity.17 In the domestic sphere, in which there was absolute inequality caused by the despotic domain of the head of the family, the word was not conceived as essential. Although words were used, they were potentially substitutable for signs or sounds (foné) to communicate their completely homogeneous needs. In the opinion of the time, those who remained outside the political space, such as women or slaves, “was aneu logon, deprived, of course, not of the faculty of speech, but of a way of life in which speech and only speech made sense and where the central concern of all citizens was to talk with each other.”18 According to Arendt, it is the centrality of the word in the polis which is missing in the translation of the definition of man as zoon logon ekhon (“a living being capable of speech”) to animal rationale. Arendt points out that while errors in the translation of definitions of man (in which the original meaning of the Greek words is lost) are ancient, appearing with their translation into Latin, the loss of the sense of specific human qualities (being political and capable of speech) is even greater in modernity. In the modern era, with the rise of the social sphere  Ibid.  See Ibid., 25. 17  I use the possessive pronoun “his” here and I do not mention the feminine “her” because being a male was a necessary condition (although not sufficient) to be recognized as an equal in public space. 18  Ibid., p. 27. 15 16

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(which is neither public nor private), Arendt posits that the earlier meaning of the distinction between the public and the private has been lost. The dividing line between activities related to a common world and those related to the conservation of life, previously axiomatic, has now been completely erased.19 This modern approach to the issue, in her view, prevents us from understanding that, according to ancient thought, an expression such as “political economy” would be a contradiction of terms, an oxymoron. Economic issues were in the polis a non-political issue and by definition a family affair; indeed, the Greek word oikonomia (composed of the word oikos, “house”, and the word nomos, “law”) refers to the administration of the home. This domestic administration was aimed at the maintenance and sustainability of life. These issues are relegated to the dark domestic sphere and deprived of public light.20 Arendt reminds us that in Greek antiquity the private sphere was understood as the place where men lived together motivated by their biological needs and demands, and that among them there was a sexual division of activities: individual survival for men and the survival of the species for women.21 The relationship of this sphere with the political sphere was the following: it was necessary to dominate the vital needs of the family as a condition for the freedom of the polis. However, in both the Middle Ages and the modern era this understanding is altered and, rather than viewing political life as the objective of social and family life, the opposite is the case: politics is understood as a means for protecting society and family. At that time is when a completely different conception of freedom arises: social freedom. In her opinion, this is not true

 The fact that this division of spheres was axiomatic, even self-evident, shows that it was something that could not be discussed, could not be problematized. 20  Also hidden from the public sphere was violence in the family, which the Greeks regarded as necessary to govern biological needs. This question could lead us to ask whether an expression such as “non-violent family association” is also an oxymoron according to classical opinion. 21  Arendt points out that this division of tasks was obvious, that is, self-evident (not problematic): “That individual maintenance should be the task of the man and species survival the task of the woman was obvious, and both of these natural functions, the labor of man to provide nourishment and the labor of the woman in giving birth, were subject to the same urgency of life. Natural community in the household therefore was born of necessity, and necessity ruled over all activities performed in it” Ibid., p. 30. 19

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freedom since it justifies the political authority and monopoly of violence by the government for the defender of social interests.22 Against what she understands as a modern perversion, Arendt claims that the understanding of freedom in ancient Greece excluded need as a pre-political phenomenon. Need was a characteristic of the domestic sphere, where violence and force are justified as a means for controlling biological requirements (e.g., in the governance of slaves or in the despotic rule by the head of the family over his wife). However, Arendt does not limit herself to only defending the Greek polis notion of freedom proper, in contrast to the modern notion of freedom, but also defends the classical notion of equality, of which she affirms: “this equality of the political realm has very little in common with our concept of equality: it meant to live among and to have to deal only with one’s peers, and it presupposed the existence of ‘unequals’ who, as a matter of fact, were always the majority of the population in a city-­ state. Equality, therefore, far from being connected with justice, as in modern times, was the very essence of freedom: to be free meant to be free from the inequality present in rulership and to move in a sphere where neither rule nor being ruled existed”.23 We then see that for Arendt, the notions of equality and freedom had their space of concrete realization in the public sphere. In this space, without government among men, tasks related to the sustainability of life are excluded. For her, biological needs are irreconcilable with the freedom of men. According to this approach, the Greeks’ exaltation of courage as a political virtue takes place precisely because policy was not intended to meet vital needs, and “whoever entered the political realm had first to be

 According to Arendt, in the polis “Under no circumstances could politics be only a means to protect society—a society of the faithful, as in the Middle Ages, or a society of property-owners, as in Locke, or a society relentlessly engaged in a process of acquisition, as in Hobbes, or a society of producers, as in Marx, or a society of jobholders, as in our own society, or a society of laborers, as in socialist and communist countries. In all these cases, it is the freedom (and in some instances so-called freedom) of society which requires and justifies the restraint of political authority. Freedom is located in the realm of the social, and force or violence becomes the monopoly of government” Ibid., p. 31. 23  Ibid., pp. 32–33. 22

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ready to risk his life, and too great a love for life obstructed freedom, was a sure sign of slavishness”.24 On the basis of this conception of freedom, as opposed to necessity, Arendt presents a definition of the good life completely separate from issues related to the sustainability of life: “The good life […] was ‘good’ to the extent that by having mastered the necessities of sheer life, by being freed from labor and work, and by overcoming the innate urge of all living creatures for their own survival, it was no longer bound to the biological life process.”25

4

 he Privatization of the Body Dimension T of Human Existence

The human body in Arendt’s analysis is linked to the coercion of vital needs and to the pre-political relations of violence.26 On the one hand, she considers the body dimension as coercive because it forces subsistence and chains human existence to the compulsory repetition of laborious activity. On the other hand, according to her theory, it is precisely this coercion of the body that drives the use of violence to dominate the pressing need in the private sphere. In order to maintain the sharp division between the sphere of freedom and the sphere of need, Arendt expels the somatic dimension of human existence from the space of appearance and recognition. In Arendtian political theory, the bodily dimension of existence is relegated to the pre-­ political space. She explains that the automatism of biological life must remain hidden in the dark domestic environment, as it is not worthy of being shown in public light.27  Ibid., p. 36.  Ibid., p. 37. 26  While Arendt underlines the differences between necessity and violence and is especially concerned with its dangerous identification, she does not deny its close connection. See Arendt, H., On violence, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970. 27  Among the multiple dichotomies present in Arendt’s analysis (oikos/polis, private/public, necessity/freedom, government/equality, etc.) we find the one established between the things that must be shown in public and those that have to remain hidden: “The most elementary meaning of 24 25

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The biological reduction of human existence and the identity of men in totalitarian regimes could have a huge impact on the conception of the body in Arendt’s political theory. As Norma Claire Moruzzi points out, “Under a totalitarianism system, all the possibilities for identity are assumed to be already inscribed on the body; the categories of social identity (whether of race, ethnicity, gender, class, or whatever) become embodied absolutes, and the fate of any individual is simply determined by the policies of the all-encompassing system in which the body is confined”.28 Faced with this conception of identity, inscribed in the body, Arendtian political theory points out that only by speech and action do human beings manage to differentiate themselves. Natural or purely biological differences do not determine, in her opinion, who someone is but what he is. For Arendt there is no authentic identity prior to performative action. For that reason she points out that we cannot recognize an author behind the history of each individual but simply an actor.29 From certain conceptions of feminism, this theory of identity is problematic since it does not allow us to speak properly of an identity (“women”) prior to the action, which precedes the feminist struggle.30 For example, Seyla Benhabib in “Feminism and Postmodernism: An Uneasy Alliance” considers it necessary to oppose the political theories that advocate a performative conception of identity. In her opinion, denying the existence of an autonomous subject as a principle of action the two realms indicates that there are things that need to be hidden and others that need to be displayed publicly if they are to exist at all”, Arendt, H. The Human Condition, op. cit., p. 73. 28  Moruzzi, N., Speaking Through The Mask: Hannah Arendt and The Politics of Social Identity, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2000, p. 115. 29  “Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life story. In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an agent, but this agent is not an author or producer. Somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer, but nobody is its author” Arendt, H., The Human Condition, op. cit., p. 184. 30  “On Arendt’s account, identity is the performative production not the expressive condition or essence of action. This feature of Arendt’s work, combined with the public/private distinction upon which it is mapped, have led feminist critics of Arendt to fault her for theorizing a politics that is inhospitable to women and women’s issues. [...] The problem is that Arendt grounds that rejection in a refusal to treat private-realm identities, like gender, as potential sites of politicization” Honig, B., «Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity», in: Honig, Bonnie (ed.): Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, Pennsylvania, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995, p. 136.

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denies the possibility of women’s self-designation and their fight against hetero-designations. Benhabib considers it necessary to highlight that we are not simply actors in our stories but also authors of them.31 Contrary to what Benhabib points out, it could be argued that the idea that we can locate an author, self-constituted and transparent to himself/ herself, who precedes the action and executes it denies our condition as interdependent beings. For Arendt, the revelation of identity takes place in the “to be among men”,32 and to that extent for the revelation of one’s own self, it is essential to appear before others, to be seen and heard by others. This reminds us that we cannot exist without being questioned and, therefore, we are dependent on the other. There is no “self-­ determined”, because the identity that is revealed to others remains hidden from the actor himself.33 In my opinion, the problem with Arendt’s position from a feminist perspective is that she (based on her axiomatic division between freedom and need) only recognizes our interdependence in the public space insofar as it has to do with identity recognition. She does not recognize vulnerability and bodily interdependence as public matters. In The Human Condition, the contempt of her political theory for the body and its needs are evident in her critical analysis of the hierarchical inversion of human activities in modernity. According to her, this inversion takes place at the time of the “Rise of the Social” which reaches its peak in modern times with the rise of the animal laborans and the extension of their “way of life” to all spheres of human existence. On this issue she states: “The fact that the modern age emancipated the working classes and the women at nearly the same historical moment must certainly be  “I want to ask how in fact the very project of female emancipation would even be thinkable without such a regulative principle on agency, autonomy, and selfhood?” Benhabib, S., «Feminism and Postmodernism: An Uneasy Alliance», in: Feminist Contentions, New  York, Routledge, 1995, p. 21. 32  For Arendt, being among men is a condition of the possibility of the revelation of identity and political action. For that reason she praises the Romans for understanding life from a relational dimension: “Thus the language of the Romans, perhaps the most political people we have known, used the words ‘to live’ and ‘to be among men’ (inter homines esse) or ‘to die’ and ‘to cease to be among men’ (inter homines esse desinere) as synonyms.” Arendt, H., The Human Condition, op. cit., pp. 8–9. 33  See Ibid., p. 192. 31

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counted among the characteristics of an age which no longer believes that bodily functions and material concerns should be hidden.”34 The problem of the emancipation of the working classes and the women for Arendt is that it also led to the emancipation of the labour activity itself, putting humans under the rule of necessity and the violence that accompanies it. However, she does not analyse how the emancipation of women and the working class would be possible without introducing a political debate on how to organize more equally the tasks that have to do with the sustainability of life. She also does not explain how to eliminate domestic violence without eliminating a conception of the private space of the house as something that must always remain in darkness, invisible and hidden from public light. Arendt is even clearer about her refusal to treat the bodily dimension of our existence as a political issue in On Revolution, a work strongly critical of the French Revolution, which she does not consider totally political because it was driven by necessity and not by freedom. According to her, the French Revolution proposed to overcome the poverty and misery of the popular masses, not the creation of a public space for the exercise of freedom. This revolution is not completely political for her, since it is based on what she calls “the social question.”35 In her opinion, we should not confuse freedom, which always implies the absence of purely biological needs, with liberation.36

 Ibid., 73.  “The social question began to revolutionary role only when, in the modern age and not before, men began to doubt that poverty is inherent in the human condition, to doubt that the distinction between the few, who through circumstances or strength or fraud had succeeded in liberating themselves from the shackles of poverty, and the laboring poverty-stricken multitude was inevitable and eternal.” Arendt, H., On revolution, London, Penguin Books, 1963, p. 22. 36  “It may be a truism to say that liberation and freedom are not the same; that liberation may be the condition of freedom but by no means leads automatically to it; that the notion of liberty implied in liberation can only be negative, and hence, that even the intention of liberating is not identical with the desire for freedom.” Ibid., p. 29. 34 35

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5

( Re)Thinking Freedom and Action from Bodily Vulnerability

Judith Butler, in her reading of The Human Condition in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, criticizes Arendt for forgetting or denying that action is always supported,37 and that support is not only an indisputable part of action but also on many occasions there is a political struggle to guarantee it: “In the case of public assemblies, we see quite clearly the struggle over what will be public space, but also an equally fundamental struggle over how bodies will be supported in the world-a struggle for employment and education, equitable food distribution, livable shelter, and freedom of movement and expression, to name a few.”38 Starting from the recent movements that seek to form alliances against the current distribution of precarity, Butler emphasizes that we do not find in these a resistance to our condition as vulnerable beings but, rather, a resistance that starts from the recognition of the bodily vulnerability. These collective political actions are particularly interesting for Butler because in some way they show that leaving behind the notion of a self-­ sufficient political subject (without a body, and without organic or material needs) does not necessarily weaken or paralyze subversive political action. Moreover, in numerous protests these allied bodies expose their vulnerability as a specific form of political opposition to politically induced precarity. For this reason, she urges thinking about vulnerability and resistance together, rather than separately.39 Freedom and dependence on the body in Butler are not opposite and irreconcilable things, as was the case in Arendt. According to Butler, the constitutive vulnerability of each corporeal being is explicitly assumed by political movements that place at the centre of their claim the fact that certain material and symbolic conditions, support networks and relationships are necessary for life to be habitable.

 “Human action depends upon all sorts of supports-it is always supported action.” Butler, J., Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2015, p. 72. 38  Ibid. 39  See Ibid., p. 141. 37

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These mobilizations that claim support for action dispute the hegemonic conception of the political subject in many power regimes, which is linked to the negation of vulnerability and the ontological dispossession of certain individuals. Against such positions, Judith Butler maintains that all bodies (human and non-human) are intrinsically vulnerable and need support in any space. And, unlike Arendt, she understands that this is a political issue because it is not possible to imagine “speaking and acting beings” without support in the political sphere. Regarding her disagreement with Arendt, Butler notes: “Arendt’s view is confounded by its own gender politics, relying as it does on a distinction between the public and private domains that leaves the sphere of politics to men and reproductive labor to women. If there is a body in the public sphere, it is presumptively masculine and unsupported, presumptively free to create, but not itself created. And the body in the private sphere is female, ageing, foreign, or childish, and always prepolitical”.40 Butler is interested in pointing out the interdependence that appears implicitly in the Arendtian formulation of performativity of the action itself, but in her opinion Arendt does not sufficiently account for bodily vulnerability in her political theory from the moment in which it privatizes issues such as survival and understands the support of the action as a pre-political condition of politics (something that is resolved in the private sphere of the house). Arendt does not problematize in her work the naturalization of the distinction of public and private space in the Greek polis, and although she states that the space of appearance depends on the plural action, she does not pose problems to the question of who stays out (who enters in that plurality and who doesn’t) and how that exclusion has been decided. In addition, it is problematic for Butler that Arendt points out that those who cannot appear in the space of appearance are deprived of action and reality.41 In her view, the excluded can only be considered “unreal” by those who seek to monopolize the terms of reality.  Ibid., p. 75.  “To be deprived of it [space of appearance], means to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; for what appears to all, this we call Being, and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality” Arendt, H. The Human Condition, op. cit., p.199. 40 41

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The proposal that we find in The Human Condition, by denying the capacity for action and even the reality of the marginalized in public space, denies any capacity for political resistance to the excluded. Faced with this proposal, Butler will problematize how the space of appearance is constructed and will argue that those excluded from this space do not live a depoliticized way of being42 and, because they have agency, can resist and break into political space, rearticulating it: At stake is the question of whether the destitute are outside of politics and power or are in fact living out a specific form of political destitution along with specific forms of political agency and resistance that expose the policing of the boundaries of the sphere of appearance itself we claim that the destitute are outside of the sphere of politics—reduced to depoliticized forms of being—then we implicitly accept as right the dominant ways of establishing the limits of the political. In some ways, this follows from the Arendtian position that adopts the internal point of view of the Greek polis on what politics should be, who should gain entry into the public square, and who should remain in the private sphere. Such a view disregards and devalues those forms of political agency that emerge precisely in those domains deemed prepolitical or extrapolitical and that break into the sphere of appearance as from the outside, as its outside, confounding the distinction between inside and outside.43

In summary, exclusion is not a pre-political problem for Butler, nor an axiomatic issue, but a first-order political problem, an issue continually open to re-problematization. From Arendt’s position in The Human Condition we would not have and could not use a language capable of referring to the forms of agency and resistance assumed by the dispossessed, those who are currently claiming the right to appear. However, despite criticism of The Human Condition, it should be noted that Butler relies on an interpretation of Arendtian formulations to solve this problem, particularly the question of the right to have rights:  “The jettisoned life is thus saturated in power, though not with modes of entitlement or obligation.” Gayatri Chakravorty, S. and Butler, J. Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging, London, New York, Calcutta, Seagull Books, 2007, p. 32. 43  Butler, J., Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, op. cit., p. 78. 42

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Luckily, I think Arendt did not consistently follow this model from The Human Condition, which is why, for instance, in the early 1960s, she turned again to the fate of refugees and the stateless, and came to assert in a new way the right to have rights. The right to have rights is one that depends on no existing particular political organization for its legitimacy. Like the space of appearance, the right to have rights predates and precedes any political institution that might codify or seek to guarantee that right; at the same time, it is derived from no natural set of laws. The right comes into being when it is exercised, and exercised by those who act in concert, in alliance.44

This formulation allows Butler to consider how it is possible that those who lack rights recognized by the States are able to anticipate a norm, or even a new order, a new space of appearance, when they act together in alliance. These actions, which she calls “performative contradictions”,45 show Butler the possibility of occasionally opposing some legitimacy to legality. This opposition takes place when the persistence and exposure of the body expelled from the public  sphere (which refuses to disappear) questions the legitimacy of the social order. An example of this are the women who fight against the configuration of public space that excludes them for engaging in reproductive tasks that, according to the hegemonic framework, must remain in the dark domestic sphere. Women who question that the sustainability of life should be a feminized and private matter, or those who expose and publicly denounce violence in the home, try to reconfigure what is the limit between the visible and the invisible and between what is appropriate in public space and in private space.46

 Ibid., p. 80.  The performative contradiction consists in exercising a right that has not been recognized by the hegemonic legal and political order. An example  that Butler refers to is the demonstration  of undocumented persons, who do not have the right to express themselves in public space (as they are not recognized as citizens) and yet exercise it. This kind of action is paradoxical or contradictory because it re-presents a right  that was never present. See Gayatri Chakravorty, S. and Butler, J. Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging, op. cit., pp. 58–63. 46  See Butler, J., Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, op. cit., p. 84. 44 45

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6

Conclusion

In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Butler highlights the importance of the question of the sustainability of life in any political analysis, since it recognizes the need for support and care in all political action. However, this Butlerian negation of completely autonomous and absolutely independent political subjects does not constitute an end to politics, but rather commits us in a radical way to the world in which we live by recognizing our condition as vulnerable beings. Only a politics that recognizes our unavoidable vulnerability can allow us to rethink how to make our interdependence into a more livable common life. It is therefore necessary to fight against conceptions of bodily supports such as that of Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition, which understands them as a pre-political condition of politics, since by not sufficiently assuming inescapable vulnerability and bodily interdependence it does not give us the necessary tools to rethink diverse formulas for articulating a new notion of good life and well-being that might allow us to subvert existing material inequalities and economic injustice. The organization of the economy and politics in Greek antiquity presented by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition is remarkably different from its contemporary organization. However, it is curious that in both cases we can see an attempt to privatize the responsibility of sustaining life in the home. It must be said that today, as in classical Greece, there are no common institutions with enough strength to speak of a public and collective responsibility for the sustainability of life. Although the presuppositions of Arendt’s critique of social conception have nothing to do with Margaret Thatcher’s assumptions for criticizing the notion of society itself (“There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families”),47 interestingly, the result of both proposals is similar with regard to the sustainability of life, as the burden of responsibility for setting the conditions for its maintenance is placed mainly in the domestic sphere. On the other hand, in both positions, there is no criticism of the power relations that occur within the 47

 Quoted in an interview in Women’s Own in 1987.

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home, nor of the unequal distribution of tasks, nor of a problematization of the sexual division of labour. Invisibilizing our need for care and support in our political discourse does not make them disappear by magic. Rather, it causes our interdependence to be resolved in terms of exploitation and inequality in areas deprived of public light. The lack of public recognition of the large amount of care work aimed at the sustainability of life has led to its uneven distribution, and often these tasks are feminized or racialized. This makes some lives, those closest to the ideal of a “good life” (that of the citizen in classical Greece or that of homo œconomicus in our time), more recognized, protected and cared for while other lives are brutally exposed to precarity. In addition to the possible injustices that we could locate in the socio-­ economic models that privatize the sustainability of life, one of its main problems is that it prevents us from collectively rethinking how to make our interdependence more habitable. The recognition of our vulnerability (as a political issue) will allow us to address in the public discourse the question of the conditions of inalienable possibility for life to be maintained. From this discussion we can think of new subjectivities, and conceptions of dignified life, which move away from the preceding ideal. In the face of the current multidimensional crisis (ecological, social reproduction and care) we need to imagine and build collective alternatives. As an alternative horizon, it is proposed from ecofeminist perspectives to put the sustainability of life at the centre of our socio-economic system and to build another notion of life (one which deserves to be lived, sustained and rescued) that does not pass through the expulsion or domination of other lives. Faced with the classical idea of a “good life”, dependent on the exploitation in the domestic sphere of bodies expelled

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from the public sphere, we have to think of an idea of “good living”48 that is not based on the bad living of others.49 If in the future we want the responsibility for sustaining life to be collective, we must be able to apprehend collective forms of operating that move in that direction without idealizing them, and to take into account any inequalities and exclusions that may be reproduced.

References Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Arendt, H. (1963). On Revolution. London: Penguin Books. Arendt, H. (1970). On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Benhabib, S. (1995). Feminism and Postmodernism: An Uneasy Alliance. In Feminist Contentions. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2015). Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ferreiro Lago, S. (2018a). Postestructuralismo y feminismo: devenires y experiencias contemporáneas del sujeto. In La querella del humanismo en el siglo XX.  Elementos para una tópica (pp.  299–311). Madrid: Guillermo Escolar Editor. Ferreiro Lago, S. (2018b). El buen vivir como alternativa a un modelo civilizador en crisis. Res Publica: revista de historia de las ideas políticas, 21(3), 559–570. Gayatri Chakravorty, S., & Butler, J. (2007). Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging. London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books.

 The idea of “good living” (or “good co-living”) is widely used by indigenous movements in Latin America. The Quechua word that refers to this idea, Sumak Kawsay, and the Aymara word, Suma Qamaña that refers to living in harmony with human beings and nature (of which we are a part), from a non-egocentric or non-anthropocentric view, recognize our interdependence and ecodependence. This notion has resurfaced strongly in recent decades as an alternative to the Western civilizing model, playing an important role in social movements and government initiatives of several Latin American states. It is relevant that the notion of life does not appear as a noun in Good Living but as a verb. In the formulation itself, therefore, a performative dimension is already present. Good Living does not refer to a good life that is likely to be verified at a specific time and place, but emphasizes its dimension of becoming, which allows for new reconfigurations. 49  See Ferreiro Lago, S., «El buen vivir como alternativa a un modelo civilizador en crisis», Res Publica: revista de historia de las ideas politicas, Vol. 21, N°. 3, 2018, pp. 559–570. 48

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Herrero, Y. (2012). Propuestas ecofeministas para un sistema cargado de deudas. Revista de Economía Crítica, 13, 30–54. Honig, B. (1995). Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity. In Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (pp. 135–166). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Moruzzi, N. (2000). Speaking Through the Mask: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Social Identity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Pérez Orozco, A. (2014). Subversión feminista de la economía: Aportes para un debate sobre el conflicto capital-vida. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. Zerilli, L. (1995). The Arendtian Body. In Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (pp. 167–193). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

3 Eccentricity and Vulnerability: Helmuth Plessner’s Philosophical and Political Anthropology Roberto Navarrete Alonso

1

Introduction: Philosophical Anthropology in Dark Times

Throughout the decade and a half of survival of the Weimar Republic, German philosophy was marked by a reaction against historicism, which to a large extent had an anthropological turn as its consequence. Indeed, Karl Jaspers, Carl Gustav Jung, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger and This text is a written and extended version of the lecture I gave on 7 November 2017 at the First Spanish-Serbian Workshop on Philosophy and Social Theory, ‘Engaging Vulnerability and Exclusion. Rethinking the Subject in the 21st Century’. On that occasion, I focused on Helmuth Plessner’s conception of the individual and underlined the connection between the notions of ‘eccentricity’ and ‘vulnerability’ from that point of view. The present version also explores at the very end that same connection from the perspective of relations between nations and peoples as it is thematized by Plessner himself in the last chapter of his 1931 book Macht und menschliche Natur. In this way, I try to contribute to the revitalization of the reception of Plessner’s philosophical and political anthropology, which I have been working on during recent years, as well as to reclaim the importance of the so-called ‘continental philosophy’ with regard to the discourse on the vulnerability issue.

R. Navarrete Alonso (*) Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Rodríguez Lopez et al. (eds.), Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60519-3_3

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Helmuth Plessner are considered the founders of philosophical anthropology.1 Later during the Third Reich, Arnold Gehlen would complete this list with the publication in 1940 of his work Der Mensch. Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt.2 This chapter will focus on Macht und menschliche Natur,3 Plessner’s last book of the Weimar period, published just two years before the collapse of the Republic, the content of which is related to two other major figures of the German intelligentsia during this epoch of upheaval: the author of Sein und Zeit, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt. While the former was harshly criticized by Plessner in 1931, Schmitt seems to be a reference for Plessner’s foundation of a political anthropology. It can even be stated that the author of Macht und menschliche Natur attempts to establish a sort of an alliance with the German jurist and his polemical—and polemological—concept of the political. When Schmitt joined the Nazi Party, the alliance became an absolute failure. Similarly, Plessner’s exile in 1933 signified the political resolution of his philosophical quarrel with Heidegger. In the late 1920s, the huge impact of Heidegger’s philosophy since the publication of Sein und Zeit in 1927 overshadowed Plessner’s major contribution to philosophy, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, published in 1928.4 What might be termed the Heideggerianization of German philosophy acted as a sort of retaining wall against the potentialities of Plessner’s concept of ‘eccentric positionality’ (exzentrische Positionalität). According to Plessner’s formulation of his anthropological laws in Chapter 7 of Die Stufen, ‘eccentricity’ expresses the very difference between animal and human being, that is to say, the fundamental  See C.  Dietze, Nachgeholtes Leben. Helmuth Plessner 1892–1985. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006, p. 63. 2  See A.  Gehlen, Der Mensch. Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt, Berlin: Junker u. Dünnhaupt, 1940. 3  See H. Plessner, ‘Macht und menschliche Natur. Ein Versuch zur Anthropologie der geschichtlichen Weltansicht (1931)’, in: Gesammelte Schriften V.  Macht und menschliche Natur, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2015, pp. 135–234 [English edition: Political Anthropology, trans. N. F. Schott, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018]. 4  See H.  Plessner, Gesammelte Schriften IV.  Die Stufen des organischen Leben und der Mensch, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2003 (English translation: Levels of Organic Life and the Human. An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology, trans. M.  Hyatt, New  York: Fordham University Press, 2019). 1

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constitution of the human being. Its potentiality was not only theoretical but also—and perhaps mainly—practical or political. Plessner had already emphasized the political dimension of his anthropology in his 1924 work Grenzen der Gemeinschaft by his defence of the public sphere, sociality and civilization against communitarian ideals.5 These ideals were shared by the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD) and the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter partei (NSDAP) as well as by the Jugendbewegung and, more generally, by the German conservative revolutionary movement (Konservative Revolution), the imaginary of which, characterized by its stark Prussian and Protestant roots, had been put into words in Thomas Mann’s First World War book Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918). Heidegger, Schmitt and Ernst Jünger were prominent members of this right-wing intellectual and social movement. Indeed, Heidegger’s analytics of Dasein reflected his indifference regarding politics; in Being and Time the public sphere was reduced to the inauthentic realm of what the philosopher of Meßkirch called das Man. Heidegger’s conception of the human being was apolitical. The destiny of the Dasein (and Heidegger’s own destiny as well) was to be tempted by an ethnic-national conception of the community and by the subjugation to a charismatic leader who as ‘sovereign and master’ would embody ‘the living linkage point of every immediate relation of the community members’.6 Hence, Heidegger’s existentialism was, in Plessner’s view, a ‘pre-fascist philosophy’.7 In 1931, Plessner did not go that far in his critique of Heidegger. He did, however, condemn the non-political nature of the Dasein, as well as the a priori character of its existential analytic, which he understood as an absolutization of the European (one might even say ‘German-Protestant’) manner of human existence. Plessner had previously seen his own philosophical anthropology, at least to some extent, as consistent with the  See H. Plessner, ‘Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus (1924)’, in: Gesammelte Schriften V, 7–133 (English translation: The Limits of Community. A Critique of Social Radicalism, trans. A. Wallace. New York: Humanity Books, 1999). 6  H. Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft, p. 43. 7  H. Plessner, ‘Lage der deutschen Philosophie’, in: Maß und Wert 2 (1939), pp. 796–815, at 806. See also R.  Wolin, The Politics of Being. The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger, New  York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 5

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content of Being and Time. In fact, Plessner’s conception of the human being shared with Heidegger’s Dasein two fundamental characteristics: ‘openness’ (Offenheit) and the kairological bond between ‘situation’ and ‘decision’. Regarding Schmitt, there is evidence that Plessner had already read Political Theology two years after its publication, since, at the end of his work on the limits of the community, he approves of Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign as the one who decides on the exception.8 Nevertheless, Plessner’s Schmittian reference in 1931 was The Concept of the Political, published for the first time in 1927. Therefore, what Plessner kept in mind while writing Macht und menschlische Natur, in the feverish, almost apocalyptical political climate of the summer of 1930, was Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction as the very criterion of the political.9 It becomes the real core of Plessner’s argument in his Political Anthropology: ‘Here, we […] conceive of the friend-­enemy relation as belonging to the essential constitution of the human’.10 In what follows, I would like to analyse the affinities as well as the discrepancies that may be found between Schmitt and Plessner regarding the meaning which the conceptual pair friend-enemy acquires in both authors.11 I will thus show how Plessner would understand the concept of vulnerability—a term he does not actually use—from the perspective of philosophical anthropology, namely, as the exposition to the other or the foreign which is constitutive of individual identity. At the same time, this confrontation of Schmitt and Plessner enables us to comprehend the latter’s fascinating voice concerning the emergence of communitarianism  See H. Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft, 116f, as well as C. Schmitt, Political Theology. Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. G. Schwab, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005, p. 5: ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’. 9  See C. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. 26: ‘The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend [Freund] and enemy [Feind]’. 10  H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 53. 11  On this issue see also, at least, B. Accarino, ‘Antropologia, bios e política a Weimar’ in: H. Plessner, Potere e natura umana, trans. by B. Accarino, Roma: Manifestolibri, 2006, pp. 9–37; N. A. Richter, ‘Unversöhnte Verschränkung. Theoriebeziehungen zwischen Carl Schmitt und Helmuth Plessner’, in: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 49 (2001), pp. 783–799; and J. L. Villacañas, ‘Más allá de Schmitt: amigo/enemigo en Plessner y Blumenberg’, in: F. Oncina, P. García-Durán (eds.), Hans Blumenberg: historia in/conceptual, antropología y modernidad, Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2015, pp. 49–84. 8

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during the Weimar Republic. Since this political project is to a large extent a genuine laboratory for our own time, characterized by the revival of communitarian enthusiasm in the form of populism, these reflections might help us to respond to current political anxieties, an answer which should be premised on the recognition of vulnerability, i.e. of our limits and of the limits of our common horizon of familiarity.

2

 arl Schmitt, Helmuth Plessner C and the Concept of the Political

Schmitt understood the conceptual pair friend-enemy as the difference which determines human groupings, whereas Plessner comprehended it as a relation which does not institute identity and has to do not only with groups, but with individuals. The starting point of Plessner’s philosophical and political anthropology is the comprehension of the human being as a living organism which does not dissolve itself in the communitarian, ethnic-national dimension. The community is a constituent element of every single human being, but human singularity cannot be defined exclusively by communities.12 Indeed, even if this communitarian illusion aims at the complete dissolution of the individual, the civilization of politics—the limitation of communities by means of social mediations— proposed by Plessner in Political Anthropology, and indeed already sketched in The Limits of Community, is nevertheless based on the  As a matter of fact, in The Limits of Community Plessner is dealing with Ferdinand Tönnies’ differentiation between community (Gemeinschaft) and society (Gesellschaft). Unlike Tönnies, however, Plessner did not understand both forms of human association as mutually exclusive. It is well known that Tönnies (and conservative German thinkers in general) uses the term Gemeinschaft to refer to pre-modern forms of grouping based on feelings of togetherness and mutual bonds, which are felt as a goal to be maintained, and their members seen as a means for achieving this goal. On the other hand, according to him, Gesellschaft refers to the modern groups that are sustained by it as being instrumental for their members’ individual aims and goals. For his part, Plessner stands for the existence of a sort of dialectic between community and society as natural (or immediate) and artificial (or diplomatically mediated) forms of human association, respectively. This means above all that social bonds do not replace communitarian relations, nor does the community substitute civil society. The latter is rather to limit the communitarian connections between individuals so as to allow them to explore those fields which are beyond communities themselves, namely beyond their horizon of familiarity. This is not just a possibility, but a duty and a responsibility to the human condition. 12

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a­ ssertion of the existence of a remaining singularity which the community, both the ethnic-national and the universal community to which communism aspires, is unable to allow or to dominate. This irreducible remainder finds its realm not in the community but in civil society, that is to say, in an artificial Öffentlichkeit or public sphere which limits the immediate community or horizon of familiarity in which every individual finds himself inserted. Likewise, an openness to the foreign (der Fremde), to the other which may become hostile, is constitutive of individual identity, while the horizon of familiarity, confidence and friendship remains always unsubstantial and provisional. Human inscrutability or unfathomability (Unergründlichkeit), the cultural consequence of the human being’s natural eccentricity, comes down to this: the relation with the other, with the foreign and potential enemy, is constitutive for the self. Hence, essential human vulnerability is the effect of this unfathomability and eccentricity, i.e. individual identity (ego) emerges from the constant exposition and relation to otherness (alien). I would dare to say that this has nothing to do, as Schmitt nevertheless proposed in 1932, with the anthropological profession of faith that cements Schmitt’s comprehension of the political, namely Plautus’ famous characterization of the human being as homo homini lupus. This philosophical-anthropological slogan was later used by Thomas Hobbes as justification for his Leviathan’s absolute power and was taken up by Schmitt to ground his total(itarian) State. The hypothesis which I will try to verify is that Plessner’s political anthropology asserts the vulnerability of human being as the very reason for the human necessity of political institutions and mediations, whereas Schmitt’s (and Hobbes’) anthropological proposal refers to human dangerousness as the grounds for the political, that is to say, for the subjugation of the individual to the sovereign. Therefore, the difference between vulnerability and dangerousness would represent the anthropological criterion that would allow us to distinguish between a civilized conception of politics, according to which the other must be included, and an essentialist or uncivilized understanding of political communities, according to which the other must be excluded (and even exterminated). Apparently, Schmitt did not notice, nor want to notice, that Plessner was not considering human nature at the same level as he did. Certainly,

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Plessner established a connection between Mensch and Macht, as the title of his book made clear, but his reasoning was not of a juridical or strictly political nature, but above all philosophical: the human being was not considered by Plessner as only a political subject; neither does his concept of Macht refer solely to political power or, to use Max Weber’s definition, to a monopoly on the legitimated use of physical force. However, the 1932 edition of The Concept of the Political reveals that Schmitt welcomed Plessner’s above-mentioned connection between anthropology and politics: Helmuth Plessner, who as the first modern philosopher in his book Macht und menschliche Natur dared to advance a political anthropology of a grand style, correctly says that there exists no philosophy and no anthropology which is not politically relevant, just as there is no philosophically irrelevant politics. […] Man, for Plessner, is ‘primarily a being capable of creating distance’ who in his essence is undetermined, unfathomable, and remains an ‘open question’. If one bears in mind the anthropological distinction of evil and good and combines Plessner’s ‘remaining open’ with his positive reference to danger, Plessner’s theory is closer to evil than to goodness.13

Although not the only one, this is Schmitt’s most important reference to Plessner, from which it is possible to conclude that Schmitt was then very pleased with Plessner’s mention of his concept of the political, despite the fact that Plessner did not provide a Hobbesian pessimist Weltanschauung, unlike Schmitt’s own statements (and desires). The jurist was without a doubt trying to co-opt the reasoning of the philosopher. Indeed, Schmitt was never concerned about a foundation for his doctrine of a systematic anthropology. His own reasonings were dominated by a juridical and strictly political mind, without any deep philosophical curiosity. If at a given time he referred to Plessner’s work as the philosophical or anthropological base for his own conception of the political—just as

13

 C. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 59 f.

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in the latter case of Gehlen—this was due to a certain affinity regarding politics and a largely epochal diagnosis.14 Be that as it may, the very core of the question concerning the intellectual relationship between Schmitt and Plessner is that the former did not understand the political consequences of the latter’s philosophical anthropology, of Plessner’s commitment to a civilization of politics, i.e. power, as a corollary of the very nature of the human being. Therefore, in what follows I will provide an outline of Plessner’s conception of the human being in order to present its political scope. It is important to consider that for Plessner politics means, in a Weberian sense, the struggle for power in human relations among individuals, groups, associations, nations and states.15 Taking this definition as a starting point for his reflections, the fundamental question of political anthropology is, for Plessner, to what extent do politics belong to the essence of human being. The content of a political anthropology is a genealogy of political life based on a fundamental conception of the human being which allows us to discover a ‘political a priori’16; that is to say, the very grounds of political affairs, which must be considered in the light of its necessity for the human being. Hence, Plessner’s project seeks to dignify political affairs as a realm which is not casual or contingent, but consubstantial with humanity. At the same time, the question of the relation of the human being to politics, as well as of politics to the human being, implies a reflection on the nature of philosophy itself and, of course, on its method, i.e. the way it poses questions.

 See R. Mehring, ‘Anthropologische Fundamentierung? Arnold Gehlens objektivistiche Wendund der Sozialphilosophie’, in: Carl Schmitt: Denker im Widerstreit. Werk-Wirkung-Aktualität, Freiburg-­ München Karl Alber, 2017, pp. 182–200, 191ff. 15  Plessner makes this point explicit in the first lines of his book. See H.  Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 139. 16  H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 4. 14

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Human Unfathomability

Plessner’s conception of political anthropology represents a fundamental difference with Schmitt and his reductive distinction between pessimist and optimistic anthropologies. Plessner’s idea of anthropology is not naturalist and therefore is of no use to either left-wing (progressive) or right-­ wing (conservative) politics.17 It has nothing to do, in other words, with the state of nature in the sense of Hobbes or Rousseau, but with the human being as the historical subject of attribution of its own world (geschichtliches Zurechnungssubjekt seiner Welt), i.e. as the creator and source of meanings and cultures, or rather, of any meaning and of any culture.18 If productive capacity is an essential characteristic of the human being, then relativity represents a basic principle of anthropology understood as universal knowledge of the human being itself. The other basic principle of such an anthropology is, of course, a historical conception of the world, that is to say, the historicity of the human being and its products: a plurality of meanings and cultures with absolutely equal rights with regard to possibility and existence. Last but not least, this kind of approach to the human being does not proceed empirically nor a priori, but rather remains—according to the principle of human unfathomability—open to both methods.19 Ultimately, understanding the human being as the producer of its own a priori implies that the human being is conceived as pure potentiality or capacity: as Macht (power) in the sense of Können (being able to). From this point of view, therefore (and perhaps paradoxically), we are unable to determine what the human is able to do; its Macht or Können, which is its very nature, remains essentially unfathomable for us. The human being is unable to measure its own capacity for creation; we are inscrutable to ourselves.20 Unfathomability, then, is properly the very nature of the human being. This is without question a huge responsibility, but also  Cf. H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 9ff.  Cf. H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 13ff. 19  Cf. H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 25ff. 20  In other words, we are homo absconditus, as Plessner himself expressed it almost four decades later. Cf. H.  Plessner, ‘Homo absconditus (1969)’, in: Gesammelte Schrfiten VIII.  Conditio humana, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2003, pp. 356–366. 17 18

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an enormous uncertainty Indeterminacy is correlative of this inscrutable human being that creates its own world of values and categories intended to be immutable, supratemporal or eternal. Inasmuch as they are products of human creative potential, history and politics are as uncertain and inscrutable as their own creator, namely the human being itself. There is absolutely nothing permanent—and it is almost needless to say that this includes tradition—that the human being must abide by. Its freedom is as unlimited as its vulnerability: the human being has no guarantee at its disposal; it is literally left to its fate, that is to say, to its own capacity to produce history, which is as unfathomable as the human being itself.21 Before going any further, it is important to assess the unfathomability we are talking about. It should not be understood as synonymous with the unknowable, unless we anachronistically identify natural science (Naturwissenschaft) with Geisteswissenschaften, that is, unless we do not take into consideration Dilthey’s critique of historical reason as the very starting point of Plessner’s philosophical anthropology. Its method is not scientific stricto sensu, but hermeneutical: the human being’s inscrutability is linked to the methodological principle of an enquiry which is not oriented toward definite knowledge, but toward provisional, even if meaningful, understanding (Verstehen). Considering this, the enquiry represented by philosophical anthropology remains always open; its object, i.e. the human being, may be analysed over and over again, since it appears to us as a constantly renewed, lively and dynamic reality. From the point of view of natural science, therefore, inscrutability implies abdication; however, from the point of view of the Geisteswissenschaften it means openness and inexhaustibility, which obviously corresponds to the human being’s unforeseeable ethos or behaviour. The inscrutability of human life does not have a negative meaning, in the sense of an asymptotic approach, but a positive one. By the assumption of one’s own indeterminacy (Unbestimmtheit) or uncertainty, human beings understand themselves in terms of potentiality, or Macht, and discover themselves as an open question (offene Frage), that is, as a condition  As I noted at the beginning of this text, there is no doubt that Plessner’s anthropology of the historical conception of the world—Anthropologie der geschichtlichen Weltansicht was part of the subtitle of Macht und menschliche Natur—represents a decisive contribution to the critique of historicism, specially of Hegel’s and Marx’s teleological understanding of historical development.

21

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of history and not only as conditioned by history. Immediately, Plessner is obliged to admit that the definition of the human being as Macht, according to the inscrutability principle itself, is not definitive but regulative. At most, it is definitive insofar as it avoids any fixation of the human condition, either material or formal.22 Actually, insecurity regarding answers is the very realm of human life; it does not have a meaning from the outset, but must be acquired at every moment. Indeed, the outlines of the human being’s vital situation emerge from the assumption of the necessary character of this acquisition or conquest, that is to say, from the human struggle for meaning. Carl Schmitt re-enters the scene at this point in Plessner’s reasoning: ‘As power, the human […] is necessarily engaged in a struggle for power, i.e. in the opposition of familiarity and foreignness, of friend and enemy’.23

4

 olitical Anthropology: The Existential P Significance of the Friend-Enemy Difference

As we already know, Plessner does not understand the conceptual pair friend-enemy, in contrast to Schmitt, as only a specifically political relationship. According to Plessner’s philosophical anthropology, the human condition as such is determined by this relationship, as its existential horizon lacks determination: In its indeterminateness toward itself, that peculiar horizon takes shape inside of which everything appears to the human as known, familiar, and natural, appropriate to its essence and necessary, [and] outside of which  Material and formal determinations of human nature correspond to what Plessner refers to as the two possibilities for a priori procedures in philosophical anthropology. The former compels a description of what a human being is (‘the poet is the true human,’ as Plessner himself suggests), whereas the latter places human nature in how it is, that is to say, in a structure which must be formal and dynamic enough to make visible the diversity which arises from the totality of ethnological and historical experience as modes of the factual realization of the chosen structure. Both Scheler and Heidegger serve, according to Plessner, as examples of this kind of a priori determination of the human being’s essence. Cf. H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 21ff. 23  H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 53. 22

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everything appears as unknown, foreign, and unnatural, against its essence and incomprehensible.24

It might be asserted that Schmitt thinks not only in political, but in existential terms. The enemy, in its Schmittian sense (as hostis, not inimicus25), is someone who threatens one’s existence. Existential threat and fear, as in Hobbes’s Leviathan, is the very reason for the emergence of politics and thus the actual grounds for the institution of sovereignty. However, Plessner does not conceive fear as resulting from this kind of threat, but from its uncanny character (Plessner uses the term Unheimlichkeit, an explicit reference to Sigmund Freud’s theories). Plessner is thus in the position to assert: ‘The foreign [das Fremde] is not merely an other [ein Anderes]’.26 It is worth quoting him once again in extenso: The human does not see ‘itself ’ only in the Here but also in the There of the other. The sphere of familiarity is thus not limited by ‘nature’, extending (as if extra-historically) only to a certain limit; it is open and thereby opens up for the human the uncanniness [Unheimlichkeit] of the other in the inconceivable interlocking [Verschränkung] of what is one’s own with the other.27

In any event, Plessner does not understand the relation between familiarity and foreignness, or between friend and enemy, in a static, essentialist or absolute manner. At the same time, although the relation is not only political, Plessner does not mention Schmitt’s concept of the political in vain. The friend-enemy relation, according to Plessner, is not specifically political, as Schmitt assumes, but rather the political roots of the friend-enemy relation inasmuch as it is a constant of the human being’s vital situation. Thus, politics is constitutively human, and has nothing to do either with God or with the natural or spiritual/metaphysical realm. Furthermore, according to Plessner and contrary to Schmitt, politics is  H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 53.  Cf. C. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 28 f. 26  H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 54. 27  H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 54. 24 25

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not limited to the public sphere, to international affairs and relations between parties and public enemies. Rather, politics is ‘the secret fate of the being that is the human’,28 if and when we understand politics not in the Schmittian and Hobbesian sense, that is to say, as an artificial avoidance of the dangerousness of the state of nature, but ‘...politics being understood as the necessity, springing from the basic constitution of what is human as such, to live in a for-or-against situation and to delimit and to claim for itself a zone of its own against a foreign zone’.29 Whereas Schmitt identifies das Fremde and das Feindliche,30 namely, foreignness (or strangeness) and hostility, Plessner refers to foreignness as the possibility of hostility, which therefore is not identical, for its part, to enmity, but only a Schmittian variation: an extraordinary, uncivilized intensification of foreignness. For Plessner, politics is not, or at least not necessarily, a realm of seriousness and exception, but a daily game, the very realm of human life, since the impossibility of overcoming the difference between familiarity and foreignness, between friendship and enmity, is typical of the elementary situation in which human beings operate. We find ourselves compelled to determine our horizon of familiarity at every single moment. Constitutive human fragility and vulnerability, our indeterminacy, turns into the daily necessity of making decisions, in the sense of the uncertain and precarious distinction between our environment (Umwelt) and the rest of the world (Welt). Our essential insecurity is revealed by the permanent intersection of the two, which also determines our being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-Sein)—to quote Heidegger’s typical phrase, which Plessner also utilizes31—as a situation of permanent constriction.

 H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 55.  H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 55. 30  After defining the specific political distinction or criterion as the difference between friend and enemy, Schmitt describes the latter in more detail as follows: ‘He is, nevertheless, the other [der andere], the stranger [der Fremde]; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien [etwas anderes und Fremdes], so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible.’ (C.  Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p.  27). See also C. Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen. Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2009, p. 26. 31  Cf. H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 67. 28 29

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Eccentricity and the Civilization of Politics

Human life is vulnerable, fragile. Situated between familiarity and foreignness, the human being is a faulty, deficient one (Gehlen’s Mängelwesen).32 Its existence consists of a series of unexpected events, in which ‘every security is wrested from an insecurity and creates new insecurity’.33 Therefore, the way the human being positions itself is radically eccentric: the nature of its existential centre is not only diffused, but is eccentric itself, since it is defined by the exposition of its own core to the other. There is no order of priority between Umwelt and Welt, but an intersection of both; the distinction is therefore absolutely artificial and must be modified and renewed at every moment; our existential horizon is an oscillating line and familiarity, or friendship, must be permanently conquered. The very difference between the human being and the animal lies in the fact that, while animals achieve their balance with their environment in a natural, instinctive way, human beings remain in need of an artificial equilibrium that is never perfect or absolutely stable. There is an essential, defining inconsistency between Umwelt (friendship) and Welt (enmity) in the realm of human existence, and thus in the field of human politics. From a political point of view, defining a vital horizon or Umwelt does not only mean the artificial establishing of a ‘natural’ order of justice, but rather the creation of justice itself. However, we are still not talking about juridical justice, but of a justice which is previous to its institutionalization, i.e. an order of life which is considered to be such an order (concrete or existential), even though it lacks legal character and therefore is not legally binding. Indeed, the juridical  Cf. B. Hengstmengel, ‘Helmuth Plessner as a Social Theorist. Role Playing in Legal Discourse’, in: J. de Mul (ed.), Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology. Perspectives and Prospects, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014, pp.  289–300, as well as M.  Schloßberger, ‘Habermas’ New Turn towards Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology’, in: J. de Mul (ed.), Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology, pp. 301–313, at 302, 308, and P.-P. Verbeek, ‘Plessner and Technology. Philosophical Anthropology meets the Posthuman’, in: J. de Mul (ed.), Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology, pp. 443–456, at 447. 33  H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 58. 32

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order, according to Carl Schmitt’s theory of representation as Rechtsverwirklichung, realizes this pre-juridical justice by means of its enforcement as law.34 As with the existence of different peoples or political unities, the existence of a juridical order and in fact the existence of justice, must be considered as absolutely contingent, that is to say, independent from any form of absoluteness. Politics, as a constitutive sphere of human existence, must go through a process of de-absolutization, like the supposedly supratemporal systems, i.e. values and categories which confer meaning to our historical existence. As Macht and Können are the true essence of the human being, ‘politics does not limit itself to aiming for the maximum but seeks to obtain the optimum for its own existential situation’.35 The overcoming of absoluteness with regard to the human being, which Plessner’s philosophical anthropology fulfils, has therefore a political translation, and this is the recognition of vulnerability as constitutive of every political order or the negation of the existence of an absolute enemy. In other words, the civilization of politics against both political indifferentism and the sublimation of communities. Ultimately, as Plessner himself observes at the beginning of his book, Political Anthropology offers the philosophical grounds for what he dealt with in The Limits of Community, i.e. the basis for political constant in general human behaviour as well as the characterization of the political as a redefinition of vital relations which necessarily emerge from human life itself and therefore do not refer only to the State or to group interests, but first of all to singular human beings.36 According to Plessner, human singularity is characterized by its ‘will to what is right and to the institution of what is right.’37 At least apparently, this assumes the priority of the  It seems that Plessner would agree to a certain extent with Schmitt’s notion of konkrete Ordnung, which was developed by the German jurist in 1934, but in a way this is already present in some passages of Political Theology: ‘Every general norm demands a normal, everyday frame of life to which it can be factually applied and which is subjected to its regulations. The norm requires an homogeneous medium. This effective normal situation is not a mere superficial presupposition that a jurist can ignore; that situation belongs to its immanent validity. There exists no norm which is applicable to chaos. For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist’ (C. Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 13). 35  H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 86. 36  Cf. H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 6. 37  H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 60. 34

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political over philosophy and anthropology with regard to the essential knowledge of the human being: Politics then is not primarily a field but the state of human life in which it gives itself its constitution and asserts itself against and in the world, not just externally and juridically but from out of its ground and essence. Politics is the horizon in which the human acquires the relations that make sense of itself and the world, the entire a priori of its saying and doing.38

Indeed, if we follow Plessner’s reasoning, philosophical anthropology is only possible as political anthropology, since he declares that there is an inevitable bond between the essence of politics and the essence of the human being: a reciprocal unity of philosophy, anthropology and politics on the principle of the inscrutability of both the world and human life. Nevertheless, this principle of the human being as an open question actually possesses that priority, which means precisely that it is not possible to decide which of the above-mentioned fundamental functions of the human being has this primacy, and therefore the question remains ultimately unanswerable.39 Human nature is not reduced to the political, but, as mentioned above, the political constitutes the destiny of humanity, perhaps even to a greater extent in ‘the age of the demos and its self-­ determination in a nation-state’.40 With these words, Plessner depicts the context in which he is writing and according to which it is increasingly important to consider both the Volk and the State from a theoretical point of view. The last chapter of Plessner’s book, ‘The Human Is Tied to a People’ [Gebundenheit an ein Volk], makes clear that the introduction of vulnerability—and hence of fragility and relativity—in politics applies to individuals, but also—and this is very problematic, as we shall see—to human groups, that is to say, to States and peoples, or nations (and their relations). If philosophical anthropology is eo ipso political anthropology, although politics refers primarily to the way the individual is in the world,  H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 61.  This is what Plessner discusses in chapter 10 of Political Antropology, 61ff. 40  H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 3. 38 39

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meaning that it has to do with the difference between Umwelt und Welt, then philosophical anthropology, like political anthropology, cannot overlook the fact that the individual always acts, from the very beginning, within the fold of a certain people, i.e. a form of existence, itself contingent and hence relative, as well as vulnerable, which opposes other forms of existence that are contingent in equal proportion.41 The connection between individual and Volk is as unavoidable to the human being as its political destiny, since its own individuation takes place within the primary condition of an ethos and fulfils itself as filiation, that is to say, since the human being as a living organism is ethnic and as such belongs necessarily to a political people or demos.42 Plessner’s philosophical anthropology is also a political anthropology in this sense; the principle of inscrutability, according to which the vulnerable human being must be resolved to self-determination, is also valid regarding peoples and States, to the extent that the philosophy of life is perfectly in line with the above-­ mentioned age of the demos: In doing so, it [the philosophy of life] takes the same turn that political life has taken toward nation-statehood, to which, if we look at the East and to Africa, the future belongs to the next saeculum [age], and to which the future will belong as long as humans hold on to themselves as to the unfathomable and keep world and life open in all dimensions.43

Plessner’s philosophical-political anthropology is, from this point of view, a nation-state anthropology. This does not only explain the human need to live in an ethnic community, but also the necessarily particular character of its existence in the fold of peoples that are reciprocally confronted; peoples with different languages and customs, that is to say, with dissimilar traditions and spheres of familiarity which in any case are equally legitimate. It is important, however, not to misunderstand the necessity Plessner is talking about here. Every individual belongs ‘naturally’ to a determined ethnic community, but this belonging to a certain  See H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 85.  See J. L. Villacañas, ‘Más allá de Schmitt: amigo/enemigo en Plessner y Blumenberg,’ 56. 43  H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 83. 41 42

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ethnos is something that the individual has received, which is transmitted without needing any form of foundation or, put another way: ethnic or national belonging is absolutely contingent and, in reality, not definitive, like the sphere of familiarity itself. As stated above, this sphere is characterized by the fact that it is always intertwined with an alterity, with something foreign, in such a way that its limits cannot be definitely fixed once and for all. It is a matter of fact that human beings are born into a national community, both in a political and (perhaps above all) cultural sense. However, the belonging to this is as vulnerable as the individual itself. It is not substantially determined, not even through blood ties; rather, it has to do with borders, namely with the fact that someone is born, absolutely by chance, in a particular place. So vulnerable is our nationality that excluding someone because of their national, racial or ethnic background becomes senseless. To be fair, Plessner is oscillating here between ethnicity and biology44 on one side and history on the other; there is nevertheless no doubt that our author understood both as facts which proceed from pure experience.45 The political, national State pluriversum—even the splitting of humankind into races46—which Plessner is referring to is not the outcome of any kind of natural necessity. In all likelihood, and in spite of everything, particularly his later engagement with National-Socialism, Schmitt would have agreed with Plessner on this point, since at least in  Plessner even speaks of bluthafte Affinität, with regard to the relation of a Volk to its tradition. See H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 75, although the English version speaks of hereditary affinity. It would be unfair to attempt to find here a justification for a racist Machtpolitik. Rather, this is an alien element within Plessner’s philosophical anthropology. His proximity to Schmitt is inversely proportional to the consistency of his own philosophical proposal or, as Axel Honneth has expressed it: ‘The anthropological crucial element of his theory backs away from the use he made of it at this fatal end of his essay’ (A. Honneth, ‘Plessner und Schmitt. Ein Kommentar zur Entdeckung ihrer Affinität’, in: W. Eßbasch, J. Fischer, H. Lethen (eds.), Plessners ‘Grenzen der Gemeinschaft’ Eine Debatte, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2016, pp. 21–28, at 28, as well as K. Lavernia, R. Navarrete, ‘Introducción’, in: Poder y naturaleza humana, p.  23. By the way, Honneth’s text is a review of R. Kramme, Helmuth Plessner und Carl Schmitt. Eine Fallstudie zum Verhältnis zwischen Anthropologie und Politik in der deutschen Philosophie der zwanziger Jahre, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989, a work which defends what Mehring, as mentioned above, calls the complementary thesis on Schmitt and Plessner. 45  ‘Yet the fragmentation into precisely these and not into other nations [Völker] is a pure fact of ethno-biological and historical experience’ (H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 85). 46  See H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, p. 83. 44

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his Verfassungslehre (1928) he depicted the Volk as a national homogeneity the substance of which depends always on historical developments or, to express it with the terms Schmitt used in his famous lecture in Barcelona The Age of Neutralizations and Depolitizations (1929), the political ‘substance’ of an homogeneous demos depends always on the central domain which appears to be dominant in a certain historical period.47 Still, Schmitt steered clear of any civilization of politics, precisely due to his stubborn adhesion to the idea of homogeneity, which was unacceptable for Plessner even during the final stages of the Weimar Republic. Reflecting human nature itself, and its constitutive vulnerability, the individual’s belonging to a nation was considered by Plessner necessary, but unfathomable, an open question. This applies to the national splitting of humankind as well as the historical destiny of these nations; they are not dependent on something absolute, as the philosophical consideration of history claimed both in its metaphysical (Fichtean, and above all Hegelian) and historicist (paradigmatically represented at the time by Friedrich Meinecke) versions. In Plessner’s eyes, the plurality of nations does not meet any teleology, as if it were possible to find an absolute meaning or necessity in its history. If, according to Friedrich Schiller’s well-known phrase which Hegel adapted to his ‘philosophy of objective spirit’ or ‘philosophy of right’, universal history (Weltgeschichte) is to be considered as the universal court (Weltgericht), then the sentences which history imposes are to be considered, for their part, as being subject to appeal and revision.48 The existence of a people among the rest of the peoples is not the outcome of any plan or design, nor of world historical destiny, but of its own vulnerable and relative factual power. This is what Plessner’s civilization of politics signifies from the point of view of international relations or geopolitics. The survival of a Volk in the international political scene is based on its capacity for asserting its own tradition against other peoples, but above all beside other peoples, being absolutely aware of its circumstantiality and vulnerability, of its constituent limits, and being absolutely alien to radicalism and absolutism.  See C. Schmitt, ‘The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations (1929)’, in: The Concept of the Political, pp. 80–96. 48  See H. Plessner, Political Anthropology, 85 f. 47

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Conclusion

Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology offers us the possibility of approaching human vulnerability starting from his concepts of ‘eccentricity’ and ‘inscrutability’. Firstly, these allow us to consider individual identity as determined by an unavoidable relation to the other which is not to be considered in terms of exclusion, but rather as a constant entanglement of familiarity (friendship) and foreignness, or enmity (which Plessner, unlike Schmitt, does not identify with hostility). From the political perspective, this means a civilization of Schmitt’s (total, or even totalitarian) concept of the political which, on the other hand, does not only apply to interpersonal relations, but also to relations between human groups or—since Plessner presupposes the ethnic or national element as constitutive of human existence—international relations. Hence, Plessner understands both individual and national identities as relative, that is, vulnerable, contingent, unsubstantial, devoid of any absolute value and, ultimately, as questions without any possible, final, definitive answer. Through an a priori determination of human nature, Heidegger found an existential refuge against anthropological vulnerability in the interiority of the Dasein. The price of this absolutization of the Innerlichkeit was the negation of politics, an unpolitical attitude which opened the door to charismatic leadership and ethnic totalitarianism. For his part, Schmitt’s understanding of the political presupposed a pessimistic conception of the human being, whose vulnerability would lie in its dangerousness, political institutions and mediations being the way to protect the individual against the foreign. Schmitt’s total(itarian) State would be capable of distinguishing friend from enemy, familiarity from foreignness, without considering the political relevance of civil society, the realm in which the individual develops itself as such by means of its constant exposition and relation to the other. Schmitt’s conception of friendship led the way to a communitarian understanding of politics that would eventually liquidate the constitutional order of the Weimar Republic. Plessner’s political anthropology might be considered as a response to both versions of communitarianism (Heidegger’s being ontological and Schmitt’s polemological), through a civilized dignification of the political sphere which

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implies the recognition of the vulnerability of both individuals and peoples, meaning their constitutive indeterminacy and openness to unfamiliarity and foreignness. Considering the similarities between our current political panorama and that of the Weimar Republic, rethinking vulnerability in philosophical-anthropological terms such as Plessner’s ‘eccentricity’ and ‘unfathomability’ would seem to provide us with decisive conceptual tools for resisting and limiting the resurgence of communitarian populisms.

References Accarino, B. (2006). Antropologia, bios e política a Weimar. In H.  Plessner (Ed.), Potere e natura umana, B.  Accarino (Trans.). Roma: Manifestolibri, pp. 9–37. Dietze, C. (2006). Nachgeholtes Leben. Helmuth Plessner 1892–1985. Göttingen: Wallstein. Gehlen, C. (1940). Der Mensch. Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt. Berlin: Junker u. Dünnhaupt. Hengstmengel, B. (2014). Helmuth Plessner as a Social Theorist. Role Playing in Legal Discourse. In J. de Mul (Ed.), Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology. Perspectives and Prospects (pp.  289–300). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Honneth, A. (2016). Plessner und Schmitt. Ein Kommentar zur Entdeckung ihrer Affinität. In W.  Eßbasch, J.  Fischer, & H.  Lethen (Eds.), Plessners ‘Grenzen der Gemeinschaft.’ Eine Debatte (pp.  21–28). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Kramme, R. (1989). Helmuth Plessner und Carl Schmitt. Eine Fallstudie zum Verhältnis zwischen Anthropologie und Politik in der deutschen Philosophie der zwanziger Jahre. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Mehring, R. (2009). Carl Schmitt. Aufstieg und Fall. Eine Biographie. München: C. H. Beck. Mehring, R. (2017). Anthropologische Fundamentierung? Arnold Gehlens objektivistiche Wendund der Sozialphilosophie. In Carl Schmitt: Denker im Widerstreit. Werk-Wirkung-Aktualität (pp.  182–200). Freiburg-München: Karl Alber.

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Plessner, H. (1924). Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus. In Gesammelte Schriften V.  Macht und menschliche Natur, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp (2015), pp. 7–133 [English Edition: The Limits of Community. A Critique of Social Radicalism (A. Wallace, Trans.). New York: Humanity Books, 1999]. Plessner, H. (1928). Gesammelte Schriften IV. Die Stufen des organischen Leben und der Mensch, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp (2003) [English Edition: Levels of Organic Life and the Human. An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology (M. Hyatt, Trans.). New York: Fordham University Press, 2019]. Plessner, H. (1931). Macht und menschliche Natur. Ein Versuch zur Anthropologie der geschichtlichen Weltansicht. In Gesammelte Schriften V.  Macht und menschliche Natur. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp (2015), pp. 135–234 [English Edition: Political Anthropology (N. F. Schott, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018]. Plessner, H. (1935). Das Schicksal deutschen Geistes im Ausgang seiner bürgerlichen Epoche. Leipzig-Zürich: Niehans. Plessner, H. (1939). Lage der deutschen Philosophie. Maß und Wert, 2, 796–815. Plessner, H. (1959). Die verspätete Nation. Über die Verführbarkeit bürgerlichen Geistes. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Plessner, H. (1969). Homo absconditus. In Gesammelte Schrfiten VIII. Conditio humana (pp. 356–366). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2003. Richter, N.  A. (2001). Unversöhnte Verschränkung. Theoriebeziehungen zwischen Carl Schmitt und Helmuth Plessner. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 49, 783–799. Schloßberger, M. (2014). ‘Habermas’ New Turn towards Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology. In J. de Mul (Ed.), Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology. Perspectives and Prospects (pp.  301–313). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Schmitt, C. (1922). Politische Theologie. Vier Kapitel zur Lehre der Souveränität, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot (2009) [English Edition: Political Theology. Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (G. Schwab, Trans.) Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005]. Schmitt, C. (1932). Der Begriff des Politischen. Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot (2009) [English Edition: The Concept of the Political (G. Schwab, Trans.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007a].

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Schmitt, C. (1929). The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations. In G. Schwab (Trans.), The Concept of the Political (pp. 80–96). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (2007). Verbeek, P.-P. (2014). Plessner and Technology. Philosophical Anthropology Meets the Posthuman. In J. de Mul (Ed.), Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology. Perspectives and Prospects (pp.  443–456). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Villacañas, J.  L. (2015). Más allá de Schmitt: amigo/enemigo en Plessner y Blumenberg. In F. Oncina & P. García-Durán (Eds.), Hans Blumenberg: historia in/conceptual, antropología y modernidad (pp.  49–84). Valencia: Pre-Textos. Wolin, R. (2016). The Politics of Being. The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger. New York: Columbia University Press.

Part II Rethinking Vulnerability: Discussing Interdependence and Violence in the Twenty-First Century

4 Vulnerability and Care as Basis for an Environmental Ethics of Global Justice Txetxu Ausín

1

Our Vulnerable World

A project that hopes to develop the basis for an environmental ethics of global justice, that contemplates the problems derived from the contemporary eco-social crisis (where ecological problems and questions of social justice and human development overlap) should begin from a basic fact: our vulnerability. This is a vulnerability that is susceptible to damage, harm and injury; that is linked with fragility, pain, limitation, sickness and death; and which human animals, non-human animals and the rest of the biophysical environment have in common. In this primary sense, it is an intrinsic, essential and constitutive vulnerability that we living beings share with the entire planet, a This work was done during a MEC-Salvador de Madariaga stay at the University College of Cork (Ireland) within the framework of the KONTUZ! research project (MINECO FFI2014-53926-R), Scientific Cooperation Project UNAM/CCHS-CSIC: ‘The principles of environmental ethics and global justice’, and INBOTS (EU HORIZON 2020 agr. 780073).

T. Ausín (*) Instituto de Filosofía, CSIC, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Rodríguez Lopez et al. (eds.), Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60519-3_4

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vulnerability that forms our condition and that of our environment, and is revealed in fragility, limitations, decadence and finitude. In El inmortal (1947), Borges said that we are precious and pathetic beings; among mortals, everything is precious and precarious to the extent that each act, each moment, may be the last. The idea that vulnerability is constitutive of human beings, of the human condition, is commonplace in thinkers as disparate as Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas and Emmanuel Lévinas. Habermas thus places vulnerability at the centre of ethical interest in his argument for communicative comprehension based on a dialogue free of domination, and this is that personal identity depends on interpersonal relationships by means of language, which explains the constitutional insecurity and fragility of personal identity. According to Lévinas, the concept of vulnerability is the basis for understanding the human condition as well as the foundation of morality, while being imperative in ethical responsibility towards the other (whether human, non-human or biophysical, I would add). I will return later to the relational character of vulnerability and the inherent normativity it entails. Apart from this intrinsic, existential and common vulnerability, however, vulnerability can in reality be seen as tremendously asymmetrical and unequal. Returning to Lévinas, vulnerability reveals the asymmetrical balance between the weak and the powerful, with the resulting role of morality as a corrective device in the face of this unequal vulnerability. Gabriel Bello (2011: 67) says: It is erroneous to represent us all as equally vulnerable or as equals in vulnerability, as symmetrically vulnerable. The basic human fact is that vulnerability is unequal or asymmetrical between each other, or rather that we relate to one another from our asymmetrical vulnerability.

More than accepting the fiction that all individuals, groups and environments are equal in their vulnerability, we must declare the fight against unequal vulnerability as an ethical and political objective. While intrinsic vulnerability is reduced through equal protection for all members of a society or environment, extrinsic vulnerability or vulnerability that has occurred overtly (‘susceptibility’) requires specific, differential and active

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measures of redress and compensation; that is, it demands justice. As such, responding to this asymmetrical vulnerability is also an asymmetrical responsibility (we will return to this later). For Judith Butler (2007: 57–58): [This condition of original vulnerability, of depending on contact with the other, even if there is no other there nor any support for our lives, signifies an original neglect and need to which society should respond]. Life is looked after and maintained differentially, and radically different ways of distribution of man’s physical vulnerability exist all over the planet.

For Iris Marion Young (2011), there are individuals or groups in socio-­ structural positions of special neglect and susceptibility to harm. Although we start from a common and primary vulnerability, for some individuals and groups harm, suffering, pain, abandonment and neglect are the result of social and environmental elements. Vulnerability is not an unchangeable and stable characteristic but rather dependent, selective and variable, a multidimensional and transversal phenomenon that rests on factors that can change and in which it is possible to intervene. What is spoken of, then, are ‘spaces of vulnerability’, understood as those unfavourable conditions that expose individuals, groups and environments to higher risks, to situations of a lack of power or control, to the impossibility of changing one’s circumstances and, as such, to defencelessness (the precarious life).1 We are referring here to a kind of induced vulnerability and of the social, economic and environmental mechanisms that produce it. This asymmetry of vulnerability is clear in the field of health: health-­ related results are adversely affected by poverty, unemployment and poor living conditions. These factors, which lie beyond individual control, undermine the ability to make good choices in numerous areas of life, including health. Public health and epidemiology have emphasized that health is more than health care. Formulated from this are what are called ‘social determinants/conditions for health’, which have to do with  For legal philosophers such as H. L. A. Hart, vulnerability is precisely what acts as a backdrop for the law when it regulates human activities through regulations and social institutions. The function of the legal organization of society, of principles and of specific rules is to protect the vulnerable and the weak from the harmful actions of other individuals, groups or the State. 1

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education, income and the environment in which one lives (in terms of your health, your zip code is more important than your genetic code). A recent report in The Lancet noted that low socio-economic status is one of the strongest indicators worldwide for premature morbidity and mortality. The same occurs in studies on childhood obesity, the point being that social and economic conditions create inequality in health and, as Ángel Puyol (2016) reminds us, public health and epidemiology are not merely medical questions. Shridar Venkatapuram (2011, chapter 4) concludes that the vulnerability that produces premature deterioration or mortality is a direct result of participation in social cooperation.2 We must include within this induced vulnerability the enormous ecological crisis we presently find ourselves in. The growth in the use of natural resources and aspects of ecosystems is globally altering the Earth and disrupting the planet’s biogeochemical cycles, such as the circulation of nitrogen or the storage of carbon in the atmosphere (all levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have recently been exceeded—403.3 parts per million, double that which led to the last Ice Age—with 145% more than before the industrial revolution of 1750, due to human activities and the El Niño phenomenon). According to the UN, this unprecedented increase, along with increases in other greenhouse gases, will lead to radical changes in climatic systems that will create severe economic and ecological disruptions (Welzer 2011). The extraction of resources from the biosphere and the deposit of waste and contamination, along with occupation of environmental space, is moving the planet ever farther from a sustainable economy. Growth limits have been exceeded and we find ourselves on the brink of environmental collapse in this new era that has come to be called the ‘Anthropocene’3  It is important to emphasize that vulnerability and concepts such as ‘vulnerable groups’, widely studied in the field of jurisprudence on human rights in the European Union, have come to be used in certain cases in a way that is routine, unthinking and incoherent. Thus, this concept has contributed to the stigmatization and stereotyping of certain groups, making a reconceptualization of the idea of vulnerability even more necessary. 3  ‘The phenomenon of rapid socioeconomic and biophysical transformations that began in the middle of the twentieth century as a consequence of the enormous technological and economic development that took place after the end of the Second World War is known as the Great Acceleration. (…) this phenomenon would plunge the planet Earth into a new state of drastic changes unequivocally attributable to human activities. Thus, enormous growth in the global economic-­financial system, along with technological development and the globalisation process, 2

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(the radical human transformation of the biosphere). Today, the global ecological footprint is 1.5 times the bioproductive capacity of the planet (Spain’s own footprint, to generalize, would lead us to need three planets). The scarcity of energy and materials and the deterioration of climatic and ecological conditions have an undeniable effect on health,4 and furthermore are already the source of social and geopolitical unrest. Based on the best scientific information available, the quality of human life will suffer substantial degradation by the year 2050 if we continue on our current path: more severe climate change, a deterioration of the oceans, an alteration in the nitrogen cycle, the rapid disappearance of species of flora and fauna (biodiversity), losses of ecosystems en masse, land erosion and desertification, chemical contamination (CO2, plastic and aluminium microparticles in ocean sediment; nitrogen and phosphorous from agricultural use), along with extremely high population growth (9.5 billion people in 2050) and consumption patterns (Olabe 2016).

2

Care

To the extent that we are inevitably open to harm, we are also open to cure and care. Cure and care are inextricably linked to the Latin verb curo meaning to care for, be concerned about, and the term ‘cure’ having also a meaning of care, solicitude and treatment. To prevent, minimize and mitigate the harm, areas and spaces of vulnerability, we should be careful; we should care for (care about, take care of ). In this sense, vulnerability (intrinsic and extrinsic) has a positive dimension insofar as it promotes cooperation, solidarity, assistance and caring, and is in fact the foundation of the idea of ethical responsibility.5 would make a coupling possible on a planetary level between the socioeconomic system and the Earth’s biophysical system, which would represent the beginning of the human era’ [Anthropocene], Mateo Aguado, Vivir bien en un planeta finito (doctoral thesis). Taken from Riechmann (2016: 73). 4  Multidimensional vulnerability and climate change (García San José 2017). 5  The idea that we depend on each other is not an inconvenience, but a good thing; accepting and understanding that we are vulnerable, fragile, changeable—without nineteenth-century delusions of absolute autonomy—becomes that which embellishes life, gives it its true richness, leading to hospitality toward others, to their care and the help they give us (Esquirol 2015). Dependence is hampered by the weight of history, drawn from the social contract, a type of rational control of the

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Human life is inconceivable without caring relationships, and neither social reproduction nor community ties are possible without care. It is one of the central activities of human life, and specific calls for an ‘ethics of care’ have put the idea of care at the heart of ethical and political theory (Carol Gilligan, Virginia Held, Joan Tronto and Eva Feder Kittay).6 Tronto and Fischer offer a standard and shared definition of care: care is a type of activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ in such a way that we can live in it in the best possible way. This world includes our bodies, our being and our environment; it is everything we nurture in order to weave together the complex network that sustains life. Care is thus understood as a practice that can be simultaneously interpreted as stages, objectives or aptitudes7 with four sub-elements: (1) attention (concern, interest), the propensity to be aware of need; (2) responsibility, the willingness to respond and deal with the needs of others8; (3) competency, the ability to provide good and successful care; and (4) the ability to respond, while considering the position of others and recognizing the potential for abuse in care. We will return near the end to the ways in which responsibilities of care are shared in society. As we said earlier, care has to do with social reproduction; that is, with the creation and maintenance of social bonds. Part of this is related to the bonds between generations (the birth and raising of children, attention given to the elderly) and another part is related to maintaining horizontal individual, shall we say, that indeed has value but hides the beauty of the donation. An additional step is offered by the market, which adds the idea of exchange between people to share and redress our destitution. Currently, however, this is also tarnished by its degeneration into consumerism and commercialism. 6  It is important to emphasize this point, as it represents one of the key elements in the ethics of care. What makes it a novel proposal is not simply its reference to the value of care, as this appears explicitly in the framework of earlier theories (such as those of Milton Mayeroff or Willard Gaylin) and can even be inferred from a certain conception of justice. What distinguishes it is the fact that care is placed at the centre of ethical reflection, and is based on acknowledging the important role of care in a certain conception of morality. It is the idea of caring for another as being correct and good that forms the seed of this proposal. 7  Care should not be confused with a type of virtue, as in the ethics of virtue or of excellence. 8  Empathy and responsibility are the main characteristics of the ethics of care. The discovery of mirror neurons has shown that empathy is a basic human ability we are born with, but which will decline if not strengthened through education.

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relationships with friends, family, neighbours, the community and the environment. Such activity is absolutely essential to society, as without it there would be no social, economic, cultural or political organization. Living in society means taking care of each other, while at the same time taking care of our biophysical environment. Tronto (2005) connects this assertion with Foucault’s concept of ‘care for oneself ’ and the ability to see oneself as vulnerable. We are all agents and receivers of care; being vulnerable and interdependent, we all need care. We take care of others and are cared for; in other words, we take care of each other. Indeed, it is not an ‘other’, it is an ‘us’. Eva Feder Kittay sums up the values and practices associated with the ethics of care as: paying attention to others, giving attention to the context, sensitivity to the needs of others, with an emphasis on vulnerability and human dependency and a relational understanding of the self.9

3

Interdependence

To be precise, the vulnerability of the human being implies accepting a relational anthropology in the face of modern individualism and the ‘unencumbered self ’, a self which is sovereign and independent. The recognition of vulnerability implies a criticism of the myth of an independent and disembodied subject, a subject that is neither born, nor gets sick, nor ages, nor loses its powers. In truth, there are no self-made men and women. As Tronto (1993: 135) says, throughout our lives we experience different degrees of dependence and independence, of autonomy and vulnerability; a political order that presumes that the nature of human life is only independence and autonomy is ignoring a large part of the human experience. Alasdair MacIntyre (2001) emphasizes the fact that we are rational and dependent animals, vulnerable to a large number of diverse afflictions, and notes that the majority of us suffer a serious illness at some point in our lives. The way of confronting this circumstance  The care perspective clearly rejects the individualistic moral model inspired by Kant that has, in turn, determined views on moral maturity à la Kolhberg (Baier 1988). Gilligan, for example, would defend a ‘post-conventional contextualism’ as being the highest stage of moral development.

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is only in small measure under our control, and usually our dependence on others increases. Thus, vulnerability takes on a social role that goes beyond intrinsic disposition and mere contingency in such a way that positive social obligations arise to minimize instability and its unequal distribution, and to reduce avoidable harm (e.g. basic support for food, housing, work, healthcare, education, mobility, expression). We are a social species, with reciprocal bonds (rights and responsibilities) built on interdependence, and not a group of solitary individuals whose only mutual obligations are limited to not invading each other’s space. This is why interdependence is the state that best characterizes us as members of a social community10: Interdependence is a value arising from human relationships themselves. No human being is, or has been, one, independent, sovereign, self-­ determined, etc. We strictly depend on others, and not just on our family when we are young, but rather throughout our entire life. Instead of thinking of ourselves as sovereign and autonomous, it is advisable that we take into account how many forms of heteronomy we accept daily. As cooperation, interdependence and plurality are constitutive values in human relationships, it is worth the effort to project these values onto social relationships in general, confirming them as being fundamental. (Echeverría 1998: 246)

Even autonomy should not be interpreted as independence, because to develop and put into practice our autonomy we also need others. This is what some have called ‘relational autonomy’ or ‘autonomy with others’. People do not sprout out of the ground like mushrooms; people produce people. We need to be cared for and accompanied by other people and social institutions throughout our lives, sometimes more urgently and completely than others, such as in our infancy, in old age, at times of sickness or dementia. Consequently, the concept of identity extends to  ‘We will need to rethink our conceptions of human nature to shift from the dilemma of autonomy or dependency to a more sophisticated sense of human interdependence. Furthermore, we will recognize how our current moral and political theories work to preserve inequalities of power and privilege, and to degrade “others” who currently do the caring work in our society’ (Tronto 1993: 101). The adaptive importance of care and mutual support has been emphasized in both evolutionary biology (Muñoz) and theoretical evolutionism (Kropotkin, Singer). 10

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the experience of interconnection in such a way that the moral domain is expanded by the inclusion of responsibility and care.11

4

Responsibility and Proper Care

As we have just said, responsibility plays a central role in the ethics of care. From this perspective, there are obligations of care to confront vulnerability and its unequal distribution. Obligations of care can be understood as proper actions and omissions, those expected for social reproduction, as care is the reproductive work of sustaining life. But who has the responsibility for these obligations of care, this proper care? How are the obligations of care distributed? Care has usually been considered a domestic task, one for the family, intimate, invisible, unproductive and without value, based on the ideology of the naturalization of feelings of commitment (of women, clearly),12 understood as charitable, voluntary, highly stigmatized action without any type of social responsibility beyond individual or family responsibility. Today, the health and social services systems take responsibility for a minimal part of care, so that informal care continues to be the main source of life support in current society in more than 80% of cases (Rogero-García 2009). Added to this is what is known as the ‘double shift’ that many women experience, as they combine work at home with work in the job market. Nevertheless, we have confirmed the centrality of care for human life, for the creation and maintenance of social organization itself, and for this reason the social and public dimension of care cannot simply be omitted. A collective organization of care is also required, with support from institutions, organizations and entities. Taking care of people requires a  ‘It is necessary for politics to be traversed by vulnerability. This allows us to understand the world in a different way: we do not know everything, nor are we able to do everything. But it is also necessary for vulnerability to be traversed by politics. Perceiving the finality of being is the condition to not shut down a sense of reality; it is what allows us to create unexpected shifts. And in this way vulnerability becomes strength; not like someone who can do everything, but rather as someone who, knowing he cannot do everything, is capable of inventing new meanings from life’ (Gil 2013). 12  What a perverse name is ‘ama de casa’ (in English this means ‘housewife’, but in Spanish ‘ama’ means ‘owner’), which makes women the owners and inheritors of a complex job for centuries on end (López Román and López Ruiz 2017: 280). 11

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community; the domestic is not private, but political. It is necessary to take care of care, to consider it a public good. Inequalities in care are a collective problem insomuch as care is a human condition and so must form part of our public values and our way of understanding what citizenship is and what it consists of (Tronto 2005: 249–250). In this sense, care fosters organized solidarity (fraternity) through governments and public institutions, as well as organizations in civil society (the third sector, NGOs), that is, social responsibility regarding care. Specifically, care requires that governments exercise two interconnected roles (in what we might call an ‘ethical mission of government’): protection, which includes not only the police and armed forces but also social security, health care, the provision of food and water, environmental protection, etc.; and empowerment, which includes public education, communications, the judicial system, financial intermediation and so on. In the words of George Lakoff (2009: 48), the ethics of care shape government, whose aim is to maximize freedom by means of protection and empowerment, protection that protects us from harm, want and fear,13 empowerment to achieve our goals.

5

Justice and Care

Following on what has already been explained, we can confirm that a responsibility arises when there is no contribution to an adequate and effective protection of vulnerable individuals, groups and environments, when the weakest and those exposed to harm are not protected, when fundamentals are not transformed in order to minimize vulnerability, when (proper) care is not placed at the centre of public policy. In this sense, the recognition of differences in need and protection constitute a question of justice. Furthermore, neglecting assistance, aid, help and resources for protection have an influence on uncertainty and insecurity, especially for the most vulnerable, and imply a rupture in the expectations for care that is characteristic of social organization. This might be an ‘improper inaction’ that causes or facilitates harm to the extent that it  In the style of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ‘Four Freedoms’ speech.

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does not impede it, whether due to intentional neglect or for negligence or abandonment. We are thinking here about (injustices such as) the lack of help for dependents, the refusal to provide primary care to undocumented immigrants or people without resources, the lack of access to basic goods (critical medications, housing, food, etc.) or the hacking and identification of personal medical data. If we have already stressed the relational character of vulnerability, the same happens with care in the sense that the absence of care creates relational harm (Martinsen 2014: 122). For Carol Gilligan, the main issue in the ethics of care is the harm caused from those relationships which suffer from a lack of care. In this sense, the classic proposals of liberal justice emphasizing state neutrality and impartiality are insufficient to take into account care-­ giving tasks and the commitment of individuals to the needs of others and the environment. This is why a new approach of justice should be based on a perspective of care that pays attention to the unequal distribution of vulnerability in society, and takes responsibility for the expectations for care of individuals, groups and the environment. This approach of justice based on the ethics of care has a close relationship with the fraternal conception of justice defended by Ángel Puyol (2017). It is necessary to abandon the idea that justice is based only on impartiality and to introduce fraternity as another of its principles, in the recognition that nobody in society should be excluded from life’s benefits and obligations, that the members of a political community should be concerned about the good fortune of others (as well as other animals and the environment) and mutually help and protect each other from the ups and downs of existence and the greatest risks of social competition (sickness, unemployment, old age, accidents, etc.).14 If we do not add fraternity, or solidarity, to impartiality as a principle of any rule on social distribution [and not only as a desirable social consequence of this distribution], justice will remain blind to suffering and the basic human needs of the members of society, in spite of guaranteeing,

 Article 1 of the UDHR of 1948 specifically includes the duty of fraternity: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood’. 14

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with the highest scruples (which are bestowed by impartiality), formal equality and freedom for all of them. (Puyol 2017: 25)

Even more, to the extent that activities of care acquire an organized public, social and institutional dimension, I have formulated and defended a ‘public ethics of care’ by which satisfaction with regard to fairness in the basic needs of care would be at the centre of governmental actions, organizations and state institutions. In this sense, Eva Feder Kittay (1999) proposed a third principle that would complete Rawls’ theory of justice, the principle of social responsibility for care, which would guarantee, with an undeniable Marxist evocation: ‘to each according to their need for care, from each according to their ability to care, and support from social institutions to make resources and opportunities available to those who provide attention and care’. This principle refers to an especially relevant issue in our societies, one which Joan Tronto has called ‘privileged irresponsibility’, that is, the ways in which the division of labour and existing social values allow some people to excuse themselves from basic responsibilities of care because they have more important work to do.15 This is the situation that allows the more favoured in society to pay for care services, usually delegating this work to marginalized sectors of the population, such as women and immigrants; often a combination of both, in the form of women immigrants (intersectionality).16 The privatization of reproductive care (…) also reflects the relative social power of different groups when it comes to making more valued and recognised contributions. People who have greater relative power in society make a huge effort to see that their care needs are satisfied under conditions beneficial to them, even if this means that the care needs of those who provide these services to them are not satisfied. More powerful people can  ‘… privileged irresponsibility is a type of personal service in which the person who receives care-­ giving tasks from others simply takes it for granted to have a right to this care. Also, the existence of this right allows it to be developed in a way that is a “bit hidden”; that is to say, it is not perceived, commented upon nor mentioned.’ This is the case of the ideological version of the traditional division of labour in the home (Tronto 2005: 240). 16  Arlie Hochschild refers to the ‘global care chain’, understood as a series of personal links between people around the world based on the paid or unpaid work of caring. 15

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delegate these caring tasks to other people: men to women, the upper class to the lower ones, free men to slaves. (Tronto 2005: 242)

There is a dual organization with regard to care-giving work. On the one hand are those who can pay for domestic work and do so; on the other are those who cannot take care of their own families precisely because they are doing the work of the first group, generally for very low wages and without protection (by multinational care groups, such as the CLECE). This is the ‘vicious circle of care’, which increases inequalities; those with more resources have greater access to care and fewer burdens to take care of, while the lack of adequate resources for care and disproportionate care-giving burdens puts those who have fewer resources in a disadvantaged situation and, as such, they are unable to access more resources to resolve the problems that make them different (Tronto 2005: 235). This is the ‘neoliberal’ view of care, which contemplates it as a mere commodity in an extension of the market into the social and personal sphere of individuals, and which, additionally, reinforces the separation between the public and the private, the political and the domestic, in effect devaluing care (which is connected to emotions, intimacy, people in need and so on).17 Thus a type of ‘methodological individualism’ is adopted with regard to care, taking for granted that all activities involved in care are the result of actions done by individual people in a context of ‘market’ and ‘services’. What is more, there is a tendency toward the total mechanization of care through a type of ‘technological solutionism’, although we know well that activities aimed at maintaining social bonds contain indispensable personal elements as they are, by definition, interpersonal (e.g. intersubjective communication, physical contact, a caress, etc.). This is a scenario that Nancy Fraser (2016: 31) calls the ‘capitalist crisis of care’; that is, when a society simultaneously withdraws public support for social reproduction, for care, and confines the main care providers in long and exhausting hours of poorly paid work, exhausting those same social capabilities that society depends on. This is exactly our situation 17

 Fabienne Brugère (2011: 73) speaks of the commercialization of fragility.

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today. The current form of financial capitalism systematically consumes our ability to maintain social bonds, like a tiger that eats its own tail. For the feminist-economist Amaia Pérez Orozco, capitalism does not recognize all types of work, and only remunerates the ‘mushroom worker’ who sprouts up from nowhere in an ironed shirt, ready for the workplace; that is, a person who does not care for others, nor is cared for. As we have already said, the work that is necessary to sustain life is made invisible (María Ángeles Durán, Katrine Marçal).18 It is extremely difficult to bring human life into the centre of the economy when hegemonic economic theory is focused on other, different matters, and when the economic pages of the newspaper speak so little about it. The anthropologist and director of the FUHEM Foundation, Yayo Herrero, has specifically connected the ecological crisis with the crisis of care, stating that ‘we live in a societal model that has declared war on life’ (Diario Vasco 26/10/2017). Thus, these generic crises, comprised of phenomena such as climate change, the depletion of materials and sources of energy, the increase in inequalities and the poorly resolved role of women as workers and care-givers (very often by force), are rooted in a view of life that sees the human being as independent from nature as well as from its fellow human beings. Nevertheless, as we have stated, we are ‘eco-­ inter-’dependent to the extent that we have surpassed the limits of the planet, above all those of us who live off resources from other parts of the world and off the people we depend on to take care of the elderly, minors, the disabled, etc. (‘our’ vulnerable people). Consequently, there is no justice without care nor democracy, without a public vision of care that situates it between an ecological ceiling that we should never have exceeded and a minimum floor of necessities below which we cannot live. An environmental ethics for global justice must by necessity pay attention to care and our essential and supervening condition as vulnerable and eco-interdependent.

 See also Marçal (2017). Here he considers the critical question in economics (How do we put food on the table?) and criticizes (the myth of ) Homo economicus, centred on personal interest and contempt for the work of care-giving; a myth that, additionally, has invaded the entire social and political space. 18

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References Baier, A. (1988). The Need for More Than Justice. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supp. Vol. 13, M. Hanen & K. Nielsen (Eds.), pp. 41–56. Bello, G. (2011). Emigración y ética. In Humanizar y deshumanizar. Madrid: Plaza y Valdés. Brugère, F. (2011). L’éthique du ‘care’. París, Presses Universitaires de France— PUF, coll. Butler, J. (2007). Vida precaria. El poder de duelo y la violencia. Barcelona: Paidós. Echeverría, J. (1998). Discurso de aceptación del Premio Euskadi de Investigación 1997. Isegoría, 19, 241–247. Esquirol, J. M. (2015). La resistencia íntima. Barcelona: Acantilado. Fraser, N. (2016). Capitalism’s Crisis of Care. In Dissent, Fall 2016: Retrieved from https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/nancy-fraser-interview-capitalism-crisis-of-care [Consulted 30 October 2018]. García San José, D. (2017). Crisis económica, vulnerabilidad multidimensional y cambio climático: La ‘tormenta perfecta’ para el derecho a la salud en Europa. Bioderecho.es 5. Gil, S. (2013, December 12). ¿Cómo hacer de la vulnerabilidad un arma para la política? In Diagonal. Retrieved from https://www.diagonalperiodico.net/ blogs/vidasprecarias/como-hacer-la-vulnerabilidad-arma-para-la-politica. html [Consulted 30 October 2018]. Kittay, E. F. (1999). Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. Psychology Press. Lakoff, G. (2009). The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics. New York: Penguin. López Román, C., & López Ruiz, V. (2017). Cuidados y trabajos invisibles como todo lo doméstico. In V. López Ruiz & J. Padilla (Coords.), Salubrismo o barbarie (pp. 278–298). Córdoba, Atrapasueños editorial. MacIntyre, A. (2001). Animales racionales y dependientes. Barcelona: Paidós. Marçal, K. (2017). ¿Quién le hacía la cena a Adam Smith?, Barcelona, Debate. Martinsen, E.H. (2014). Caring in medicine: From a gentleman’s care to a more sophisticated sense of human interdependence. In G. Olthius, H. Kohlen, J. Heier (eds.), Moral Boundaries Redrawn. The Significance of Joan Tronto’s Argument for Political Theory, Professional Ethics, and Care as Practice (pp. 113–132). Leuven: Peeters. Olabe, A. (2016). Crisis climática-ambiental. La hora de la responsabilidad. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg.

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Puyol, Á. (2016). Ética y epidemiología social. In A. Estany & Á. Puyol (Eds.), Filosofía de la epidemiología social (pp. 143–162). Madrid: Plaza y Valdés. Puyol, Á. (2017). El derecho a la fraternidad. Madrid, Los libros de la Catarata. Riechmann, J. (2016). ¿Derrotó el smartphone al movimiento ecologista? Madrid, Los libros de la Catarata. Rogero-García, J. (2009). Distribución en España del cuidado formal e informal a las personas de 65 y más años en situación de dependencia. Revista Española de Salud Pública, 83(3), 393–405. Tronto, J. C. (1993). Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality and Justice. New York University Press. Tronto, J. C. (2005). Cuando la ciudadanía se cuida: una paradoja neoliberal del bienestar y la desigualdad. In Vitoria, EMAKUNDE (Ed.), Congreso Internacional Sare 2004 ¿Hacia qué modelo de ciudadanía? (pp.  231–253). Instituto Vasco de la Mujer. Venkatapuram, S. (2011). Health Justice: An Argument from the Capabilities Approach. New York: Polity Press. Welzer, H. (2011). Guerras climáticas. Por qué mataremos y nos matarán en el siglo XXI. Madrid: Katz. Young, I. M. (2011). Responsibility for Justice. Oxford University Press.

5 Independent and Invulnerable: Politics of an Individual Adriana Zaharijević

When from the early 1980s onwards a reconfiguration of the politics of dependence began to take place, followed by a thorough dismantling of welfarism and real-socialism, individuals were called upon to use their freedom to self-actualize—to depend only on their own wits and capacities to deal with globalized insecurities. Government could no longer be interested in taking care of the governed. The governed needed to become more dependent on themselves, and less dependent on the state in particular. The governed, in other words, needed to be less vulnerable. It was repeated time and again that the welfare of individuals is best secured and promoted when they are prompted to be independent, to use all their might and imagination to be the only carers for themselves. To not be cared for by others implies a certain level of imagined invulnerability. Each and every one of us—simply by being individuals—has the capacity

A longer version of this article has been published in Croatian under the title “Protiv individue. Deindividualizirani politički subjekt” in Filozofska istraživanja 151 (3): 651–666.

A. Zaharijević (*) Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Rodríguez Lopez et al. (eds.), Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60519-3_5

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to demonstrate one’s sovereignty over oneself through one’s independence. Such reprogrammed neo-Victorian language urges us to meticulously revisit its source. The link between early liberalism and neoliberalism, at least in their shared tendency to produce strong aversion to dependence and vulnerability, to correlate it with utter abjection, is by no means accidental. I will claim that the notion of independence is inextricable from an incessant circuit of exclusions, systemic blockades, restrictions or obstructions of opportunities, rights and resources. It is, however also closely related to a specific epistemic and normative configuration of the creature who is the bearer of independence, i.e. a sovereign individual who governs himself. Revisiting the nineteenth-century independent individual—and independence here reads almost as invulnerability—can help us understand that this forceful discursive renewal of independence assumes a complementary (re)normalization of inequality: (the individual’s) freedom of self-actualization excludes the equality of possibilities for self-­actualization (of all individuals). Re-examining the early liberal vocabulary enables us to understand that being an individual is not a state or a disposition, a quality attributable to anyone and everyone. It also reminds us that it is not an empty and therefore universally applicable notion, but a notion constituted by exclusions. Being an individual assumes being embodied in a certain way and having certain qualifications.

1

What Is an Individual?

In what follows, I will first give the common description of an individual that was operative throughout the nineteenth century. I will then enumerate and briefly explain the conditions for the possibility of the emergence of an individual thus defined, at precisely that time.1 The most encompassing definition posits the individual as the only real owner of his own persona and affairs. This ownership is founded on the owner’s fundamental knowledge of his interest, agency and capacity  For a detailed elaboration of these points, see Zaharijević (2014).

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for autonomous representation. The definition is an old one, as self-­ ownership is, according to Macpherson, a key trait of the original individualism, founded on a conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them … Society becomes a lot of free equal individuals related to each other as proprietors of their own capacities and of what they have acquired by their exercise. Society consists of relations of exchange between proprietors. Political society becomes a calculated device for the protection of this property and for the maintenance of an orderly relation of exchange. (MacPherson 1977, p. 3)

This notion clearly evokes Locke’s man in the state of nature, whose freedom amounts to his being subject to nobody, the absolute Lord of his own person and possessions, and equal to the greatest. Such an unlimited freedom where everyone is equally a king, brings continual dangers and fears for the ‘king’s’ life, liberty and estates, that is, his property (Locke 1823, p. 159). Being subject to nobody evokes a receding feudal historical context (Nauta 1984) and the parallel emergence of an early capitalist society based on exchange. But as much as it may be true that Bentham built on Hobbes, as Macpherson would have it, it was only in Bentham’s time that society began to function as an arena where interests converged in an almost unimpeded circulation, and where it was politically expedient to enable individuals to act as agents of their own self-possession. In contrast to earlier times when sovereignty normally referred to the supreme authority of the ‘public sword’ or of a sovereign persona embodied by the monarch, the supremacy, absoluteness and indivisibility of such an authority would now belong to all individuals. One of the first expressions of this transference of sovereignty comes from Bentham’s ‘moral reform’ and his famed principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, founded on the solid premise that each individual has to be given the right of self-assessment of his own interest (Bentham 1776). This demand for self-assessment countered the phantasm of the persona ficta, i.e. the politically representable interest of the few, ‘the smallest number’, as the common interest of the whole. Unlike the previous fictive entity, understood as the unbreakable unit of interests of those

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subsumed, the greatest number was easily decomposable to a sheer arithmetical sum of the individuals who composed it (Mill 1825). Once the right to representation of one’s individual interest was recognized—and that was both Bentham’s and James Mill’s central concern—, the right to self-assessment became understood as the full sovereignty of the individual. John Stuart Mill’s famous statement from his Essay on Liberty substantiates this claim, and already transcends the mere question of political representation which was no longer an issue for the enfranchised middle class: ‘The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign’ (Mill 2001, p. 13, italics mine). Not only is sovereignty here almost equatable with independence, but such an equation in fact depends on the inherent capacity of an individual for self-improvement, self-betterment and, thus, self-­actualization.2 The individual is the one who constantly strives to be better than he is, because he can be better than he is. Contrary to the assumed state of perfection of the smallest number, the inborn given of the privileged few, the state of an individual is perfectibility; his work, virtue and wisdom, coupled with the relative absence of artificial, imposed constraints on the spheres of freely circulating interests, produce a constant striving towards self-improvement. In other words, in order to achieve what one has an internal capacity for, simply by being an individual, one is in constant movement, in a kind of continuous internal reform, which is self-contained and self-­ controlled. As the sole owner of himself, the individual has an indivisible possession over his life and limb, as well as his future, the movement of  Only a few sentences later, Mill introduces a potent contradiction concerning the notion of ‘any one’: ‘Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one’ (Mill 2001, p. 14). Losurdo defines this benevolent despotism for ‘the savage’ on the right path to progress—destined to disappear in the distant, indeterminate future—as Mill’s ‘pedagogical dictatorship’ (Losurdo 2011, p. 7), standing side by side with his claims for universalist sovereignty. 2

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his life, which is what constitutes his indivisible sovereignty. Such contained self-actualization reads almost as a way of reaching the state of complete invulnerability. The ‘internal reform’ took place within a political exterior that was equally disposed to and structured for reform. This is what the conservative Thomas Carlyle already deplored in 1829, before the great Age of reform even began: Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions, for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle … Men are to be guided only by their self-­ interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. (Carlyle 1829)

This reformatory spirit of the era, what Carlyle saw as the mechanization of betterment or the institutionalization of perfectibility, found its expression not only in the expansion of (male, middle class) suffrage (1832), but would also find its way into every nook and cranny of social life. No wonder that the late Victorian jurist, Alfred Dicey, termed the whole era as one of individualistic or Benthamite legislation, built upon three guiding principles: the scientific character of sound legislation, the principle of utility, faith in laissez faire—from which ‘English individualists have in practice deduced the two corollaries, that the law ought to extend the sphere and enforce the obligation of contract, and that, as regards the possession of political power, every man ought to count for one and no man ought to count for more than one’ (Dicey 1917, pp. 85–86). Therefore, being the best judge of one’s own interests, being in the rightful position to solely assess their implementation, and being politically indivisible, is to be the one who rules over oneself without the help of others; that is, independently, as if others had not existed. This ruler over oneself assumes a peculiar kind of invulnerable mastery. Moreover, being an individual means to be endowed with certain forms of self-­ legislating and self-governing powers, the rational and expedient capacity for acting according to rules not imposed from the outside, with the

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ability to orient oneself without the help of another in the vortex of alien interests. In the nineteenth century, such powers would be recognized in the form of suffrage. It was assumed that being the best arbiter in matters of one’s own interest entailed the capacity for autonomously representing them, for having a share in government as a self-governing creature. If such a capacity existed, as was proven in non-political spheres, then an individual had an intrinsic right to take part in government, simply by being a self-governing creature. In other words, sovereign self-possession of one’s interests translates into possessing civic and political rights (Marshall 1950) and claiming them for oneself. Finally, as the sole proprietor and the sole representative of what is properly his, an individual was the sovereign possessor of the right to privacy. As self-representable, the individual chooses which part of his privacy he would make represented, or public. As self-representable, he constitutes himself (and the use of male gender is purposeful here and throughout the text) as the private person who is also the owner of his privacy, which now becomes a legitimate part of his self-possession. In this sense, being an individual assumed the ability to define the divisive difference between the spheres of production and reproduction, between the public and the private.3

2

Who Is an Individual?

But who is an individual? When we say that the individual is the sovereign and perfectible owner of his own interests, the one who knows them and acts in accordance with them, and is, therefore, granted the rights to represent himself and the right to be the sole owner of his own privacy, who exactly are we talking about? Are we talking about ‘free’ labourers,  The individual is the one who can publicize his voice, being thus the maker of the public sphere. In the Age of Capital, Eric Hobsbawm writes: ‘The individual bourgeois who felt called upon to comment on public matters knew that a letter to The Times or Neue Freie Presse would not merely reach a large part of his class and the decision makers, but, what was more important, that it would be printed on the strength of standing as an individual’ (Hobsbawm 1995, p. 287). What is this standing, according to Hobsbawm? To be an individual one had to belong to the bourgeoisie as a class, a body of persons who were ‘someones’, each of whom ‘counted as an individual, because of his wealth, his capacity to command other men, or otherwise to influence them’ (Ibid., p. 286). 3

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whose freedom amounts to dispossession, because they were (at some point) granted formal equality remaining nonetheless dispossessed of the ownership of the means of production, the product of their labour and of the capacity to choose how to be better than they already were? What did formal equality—in the English context always corroborated by the ownership of property—give to the ‘class of the little people’, the proletariat, or the true greatest number, if not just a delayed promise that once they too would become sovereign individuals—in Marx’s words, ‘restricted individuals, withdrawn into themselves’, self-sufficient monads who in other individuals see not the realization of their freedom, but the barrier to it (Marx 1992, pp. 229–230)? The emancipation of the self-governing, self-representable individual is only a partial emancipation of an independent being that owes its existence to no one, an independence framed on a loathing of those dependent, those that cannot be better than they already are in a system with no precedent of enabling perfectibility for all (individuals). Thus, the ‘emancipation’ that produces restricted individuals assumes that only self-sufficient monads would be independent, while others would have their independence postponed, remaining dependent and vulnerable to various forms of exploitation and systemic domination. If the ‘lower orders’ were not, as yet, compatible with this tight— although universally applicable—definition of an individual, perhaps women, at least those not belonging to the ‘lower orders’, were? Let us, for the sake of brevity, set aside all other normative dimensions framing the ‘women’s nature’, many of which revolved precisely around vulnerability, and stick simply to its juridical design. The principle that ‘every man ought to count for one and no man ought to count for more than one’ cannot be applied in this domain. Throughout the nineteenth century, the century of the individual, women were juridically framed not as owners of property, but as part of someone else’s property. That was the ‘covered’ state of the ‘greatest number’ of women: By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law a feme-covert; is said to be covert-baron, or under

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protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord. (Blackstone 1765, p. 430, italics mine)

The greatest happiness of the greatest number of women was juridically framed as the happiness of non-individuals, those who remain dependent on another and subsumed by the persona ficta. Women were not the self-possessing owners of themselves, but the virtual possession of their lords, legally and otherwise vulnerable to their wills. Finally, let us also remember the ‘barbarians’ who, in Mill’s phrasing, could only hope for a mild despot from bygone times. Can we, in way comprehensible to the ears of the nineteenth-century man, say that the various racialized others, either the exotic savages in the colonies or the slaves and serfs at home, were individuals? If women were inherently devoid of the capacity to be possessors rather than possessions, and the ‘lower orders’ lacked the capacity to pursue their own true interests in a system of free circulation of interests, these racialized others were dispossessed of the capacity to self-improve into a category of the human (Gould 1981). They were defined either as beasts, or as ‘half-devil, half-child’, in Kipling’s famous versing of ‘white man’s burden’. The idea of the self-governing, indivisible, sovereign individual has a genealogy which today has not only historical merits. It is deeply ingrained in our epistemic structures and our ontological framings of the political. The conditions for an individual’s possibility of emergence, to which I will now briefly turn, also show that an alternative conception of the political body requires us to take into account the various exclusionary practices, structures and acts which produced the notion of the individual as an universally applicable, normatively neutral political unit which still ‘passes’ as an empty universal. The first relates to the profound transformation of the political, that is, to the historically situated transfer of sovereignty from the sovereign to sovereign individuals. The laissez-fare principle, the governing maxim of the new economic rationality, could not have been possible without a conception of the sovereignty of those who were to be let go. Second, there had to be the space where the free circulation of interests, in the form of goods and capital, was possible in order to affirm the idea of the individual as the sole owner of his own interest. Third, the affirmation of

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such an idea was supported by the post-enlightenment application— through jurisdiction and non-juridical methods of reform—of a principle of perfectibility, apparently egalitarian (anyone can be better than he or she is), but in actual fact over-saturated with norms of what constitutes ‘being better than’ (which proves to be deeply, even ontologically inegalitarian, and where ontology served to consolidate social divisions between the vulnerable and the invulnerable). The latter paradox is related to the unequal distribution of the recognition of knowledge of one’s own interest, and the unequal distribution of the independence of the governed, justified by the division of those who are able to act for themselves and in their own best interest (which a fortiori strengthened, so it was believed, the interest of the whole), and those who had to be, in various ways, cared for and catered to by the state.4 Deeply entangled with this is the systemic implementation of the idea of reform, where the sharp division between the subject of the reform—those in a position to institutionalize the betterment of others—and their objects, who could not themselves claim the capacity for self-reforming, played an important part in fortifying the strong division of classes. Those that are perfectible in themselves have an almost innate ability for self-reform (which is why they need to be let go); while others need to be institutionally prompted into reforming themselves. There need to be solid structures which would provide the conditions for the ever-delayed promise of sovereignty for all. Last but not the least important, the individual can only have emerged out of a transformed politics of domesticity, of the private and the public, of the home, and the asymmetrical and fundamentally inegalitarian positioning of the sexes.  Being cared for was a disqualification, much as it is today. Being cared for—by the state, or by the ‘baron’ or the civilizing missionary—in the nineteenth century implied dependence, which was a proof of one’s incapacity for self-actualization and self-government. Those who were in various ways cared for, those who were dependent or potentially dependable, were normatively framed as ontologically barred creatures who would never attain the proper status of the invulnerable sovereign self-governing individual, almost despite the idea of perfectibility of all. In fact, to become ‘more perfect’, to be able to perfect oneself, was a quality belonging to the ones who were in possession of their own self-actualization, which produced a vast number of those assumed to be inherently dispossessed of such a quality. The politics of identity, which was developed in the second half of the twentieth century, owes much less to the historical wounds of these marginalized groups than to the normative framing of their dependence versus the independence of the individual (anyone, and no one in particular). 4

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The notion of an autonomous—indivisible and self-sovereign—individual, supposedly applicable to anyone, was given a very specific embodiment within such conditions of possibility. The collective of individuals, and especially the political collective which grew out of these conditions, has never formed into an amalgamation of countless equal self-rulers who would also act as integral parts of the demos—a kind of seamless, inflated amalgamation granted with a certain general will to self-rule together.5 Quite to the contrary, the nineteenth-century embodied individual was built upon internal stratifications and the exclusions of those who were— as yet—bereft of the name of individual. Within such conditions of possibility, being an individual became an entitlement for which one had to qualify. Not all qualified. What kind of demos would that demos be if it were composed only of such qualified rulers? Or we may, together with Vladimir Safatle, ask what is the political force of the demos when the subjects who comprise it are not only self-identical and self-belonging, but also and essentially indivisibly self-owning? There are several important effects of the framing of sovereignty and independence through the indivisibility of one’s ownership of oneself—when one’s status as the subject is defined by the degree of one’s possession of oneself, when one’s social actions are framed by the recognition of one’s status as self-owner. First, if it is framed according to self-possession, the individual cannot be an empty universal, as not everyone qualifies for such universality. If it is framed by self-possession, it  The question of what constituted the demos in the wake of the individual is also an interesting one. Were the individuals part of the ‘common people’, and what did ‘the people’ (vulgus) really refer to? James Mill introduced a slight but significant division into the notion of the people to mark the difference between the respectable middling sorts and the classes below them. Lord Brougham, a Benthamite in the House of Lords, scornfully reminded the opponents of middle class enfranchisement in 1831 that there is a mob, but there is the people too, and ‘by the people, I repeat, I mean the middle classes, the wealth and intelligence of the country, the glory of the British name’ (in Dicey 1917, p. 101). Brougham’s ‘depositaries of sober, rational, intelligent and honest English feeling’ were very different from the gentry—the smallest number—but they were also not common in the sense in which the lower orders, or the multitude, the ‘mob’ (shortened from mobile vulgus), had been defined. In a country generally revulsive towards revolutions or the indiscriminate application of the rights of man, it was important to frame the people as those who improve through conserving, and not as the raging rabble. London mayor William Beckford’s address to the Parliament in 1761 attests to this: ‘[by the people] I don’t mean the mob; neither top not the bottom … I mean the middling people of England, the manufacturer, the yeoman, the merchant, the country gentlemen’ (in Rudé 1970, p. 293). 5

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consists of particular qualifiers—though concealed and disguised to appear as universally applicable—which cannot be in any way extended or enhanced to accommodate other qualifiers without annulling their particular qualities. Second, the only political exterior such individuals can create is a moving and disjointed procession of those that are sovereign because they are the sole owners. What is a demos in such a ‘democracy’, and what kind of popular sovereignty can such a demos produce? Within a sovereign self-ownership framework where democracy is the rule of self-ruling individuals, democracy can serve only, to reiterate Safatle’s argument, as an affirmation of the primacy of property relations, of the constitution of social agency as an expression of self-ownership. ‘Democracy has so far been the affirmation of self-ownership. It has so far been the defence of the person’s integrity as the integrity of the owner’ (Safatle 2017). There is thus a fundamental flaw in homo politicus, defined as the one who rules himself and rules as part of (such a disjointed) demos, when this rule is framed on the self-possessing sovereign individual. It is a rule premised on inequality which cannot be extinguished by any political proclamation of equality, and is deeply inconsistent with the idea of a ‘joint demos’, i.e. that which incessantly produces popular sovereignty by common political action. When homo politicus is framed as the self-­ possessing sovereign individual—and individual sovereignty, embodied in a specific way in the nineteenth century, cannot be disentangled from possession, i.e. the proprietary relation to one’s own self—then the politicus is entirely reducible to oeconomicus. This ‘ruler’ is first and foremost the owner, whose rule is the rule of entitlements amidst the majority of those who depend and own nothing, who are ontologically, juridically and biopolitically stratified as vulnerable, dispossessed and disposable in various ways. Let us once again pose the counter-intuitive question: who became embodied as an individual in the nineteenth century? Only those who belonged to the propertied classes were recognized as equal owners of interests, both because they could invest what was their own and promote its free circulation, and because they were not cared for and catered to by the State. Their property was in a relation of dependence only with its owners, which buttressed their independence and their political claim

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to be self-governing. They were considered perfectible because they were endowed with internal mobility towards self-actualization, something which amounted to self-creation and implied certain invulnerability, which most of the so-called lower orders lacked. The representatives of the ‘weaker sex’, again by their very nature, were distinctively different from individuals, because their self-actualization was to be accomplished in dependence, in being subsumed under the person of another, in being devoid of interests and figuring as possessions and not owners. Hence, if the individual is defined by the indivisibility of its ownership of itself, it must be understood as profoundly exclusionary: not only is it a holder of entitlements, but it holds those excluded to be non-sovereign, never to be self-actualized and profoundly vulnerable to various levels of exclusion.

3

Deindividualized Homo Politicus?

If we now turn to the present, with a desire to imagine a political creature irreducible to homo oeconomicus, we might need to ask whether the preservation of an individual, overly encumbered with its thick and burdensome genealogies, were a politically expedient move? How can we, in other words, conceive of a dispossessed, vulnerable, contestedly sovereign individual that is also an integral part of an inherently egalitarian demos? By asking what and who an individual is, I hoped to demonstrate that the individual is not an empty and universally applicable notion, but a notion infused with and built upon exclusions. The freedom to self-­ actualize, defined as a fundamentally individual exercise—one belonging ostensibly to anyone and everyone, according to both Victorian and contemporary thought and practice—presupposes levelling and stratifying, a system of normative exclusions and institutional arrangements to accommodate a differential allocation of dependence, and thus the incapacity to owe one’s existence to oneself. But what if we try to think of freedom as a mode of social relation, a relation which defines ‘owing one’s existence’ in non-individual terms, surpassing individual expressions of

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self-actualization in self-ownership?6 I propose we use some of Judith Butler’s propositions to try to figure a de-individualized homo politicus. Can we, first, think of a homo politicus whose main attribute would not be sovereignty, a supreme, absolute and indivisible authority? If we consider Judith Butler’s claim that ‘agency begins where sovereignty wanes’ (Butler 1997, p. 16), it follows that the action of the one who acts politically depends on the enabling constraints which produce recesses in the absoluteness and indivisibility of both the actors and their acts. To exclude the constitutive infrastructure for action—which is the immediate consequence of positing a sovereign individual—forecloses the possibility of understanding that our acts are never entirely self-actualized and self-­ generated, but conditioned (Butler 2004, p. 16), and that such conditioning has left its histories deeply ingrained in our epistemic and axiological frameworks. Figuring homo politicus as a sovereign individual ties political agency to self-possession, where sovereignty emphasizes the rightful ownership of our person and interests. Although the rightful proprietor has been framed as the owner of his life and limb, the limbs that carry this life are, more often than not, thought of as principally incorporeal. To think of homo politicus as a bodiless shroud in a whirling circuit of interests forecloses a crucial dimension of our bodily dependency and vulnerability, which we may want to erase and obliterate, but which nonetheless remains there to remind us of our shared being. Vulnerability is not just an irradicable trait of any living body, but something that traverses every singular body with its different social histories. With disincorporation, we lose the social fact that my body is mine and not mine at the same time: ‘Given over from the start to the world of others, [the body] bears their imprint, is formed within the crucible of social life’ (Ibid, p. 26). Remaining attentive to this double valence of what belongs to me, what is mine, what I own as mine, what I owe myself as my existence, and what I enact with my own acts, introduces a ‘we’ into an ‘I’, the ‘I’ which is  Marx’s solution is well known, but it bears repeating: It is only when ‘man has recognized and organized his forces propres as social powers, so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation have been completed’ (Marx 1992, p. 234). Perhaps a complete human emancipation implies forms of de-individualization, of willingly ‘becoming dependent’? 6

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never entirely seamless and congruent with itself, being always acted upon, never entirely in possession of itself, as it is constantly dispossessed by relations it enters into willingly or unwillingly. The indivisibility of the individual and of the supreme authority in matters of one’s own interest is constantly questioned by our very political constitution as bodies marked by their physical and social vulnerability. Thus, instead of being figured as a sovereign individual, the one who demonstrates one’s sovereignty over oneself through one’s independence, homo politicus may be seen as a figure endowed with only a flawed sovereignty, an inherent vulnerability and a volatile independence. This flaw acts as the constitutive trait and not as an aberration, while our independence must be seen as conditioned by the relational nature of our unwilled and unchosen cohabitation among, with and by virtue of others. Again, it is our embodiedness which produces such a state because, as a ‘living set of relations, the body cannot be fully dissociated from the infrastructural and environmental conditions of its living and acting’ (Butler 2015, p.  65). In this sense, instead of dependence, the (neo)Victorian scarecrow, and the concomitant independence, the full ownership of oneself and an absolute lack of care for the self by anyone other than oneself, we might wish to focus on the politics of interdependence Butler proposes. Only in this sense can freedom be retained, and retained only as a social relation. If we seek a political alternative to the forceful, overt assault on equality which is again taking place in the name of the independent individual, then we might look for a different source of equality, one which would not rest upon self-government and self-representation, but on precariousness. Such a notion of equality is inherently related to dependence and vulnerability, to the notion that being in possession of one’s own life and limb implies a dependency on social networks and conditions—and is therefore only a partial possession, never a source of independence as a monadic sovereign mastery. As Butler claims, ‘the injunction to think precariousness in terms of equality emerges precisely from the irrefutable generalizability of this condition’ (Butler 2009, p. 22). This generalizability arises from modes of sociality, and a body—and not some empty signifier such as a ‘sovereign shroud’ or a ‘holder of interests’—is always constitutively social and interdependent.

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Finally, can we think of a demos which would be different from a mass of sovereign individuals who govern themselves in an affirmation of their self-ownership? Can we conceive beyond the rule of law, or the rule of fear, or the rule of protection, of some kind of inviolable and indivisible property (the ‘no taxation without representation’ principle) as the founding premise for a democracy? What kind of government and self-­ government would enable a democracy, the non-exclusive rule of non-sovereign and vulnerable creatures who ‘will be in a continuous dispossession of themselves’ (Safatle 2017)7? Will this be, in effect, the governmentality Foucault described in The Birth of Biopolitics as missing, still non-existent, still to be invented: a socialist art of government (Foucault 2008, pp. 91–94)?

4

Conclusion

Let me conclude with Wendy Brown’s and Michel Feher’s statement that a defining feature of neoliberalism is the rise of human capital as a dominant subjective form (Feher 2009, p. 21), supplanting the earlier forms of homo oeconomicus, interest-holder and self-entrepreneur. This is a very distinct type of economization, far removed from the politically almost neutral model of truck, barter and exchange proposed by Adam Smith, or the Benthamite attempt to calculate pleasure with the felicitous political goal of instituting the greatest happiness for the greatest number. The homo oeconomicus of today acts as a financialized human capital concerned more with its speculatively determined value than with an

 Invoking Freud’s concept of Hilflosigkeit in his O circuito dos affetos, Safatle calls for a different circuit of affects which would produce a transformative politics, without an individual as its central figure. Defining helplessness as a specific mode of vulnerability, he claims that a political experience constituted by the exposure to helplessness and its social circulation provides a novel way to think politics. Such experience produces neither ‘the people’, as in the populist strategies, nor autonomous individuals characterized by their particular systems of interests. Rather, it opens up the possibility for the emergence of political subjects, homo politicus, for whom politics becomes a ‘practice that allows helplessness to appear as the foundation of productivity of new social forms, in so far as it prevents their conversion into social fears and opens us to events that we do not yet know how to experience’ (Safatle 2015, p. 50). 7

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immediate profit and seeking to enhance that value in every imaginable domain of life. My claim is that the vast unpolitical, anomic collection of human capitals is the only possible outcome of the politicality of the invulnerable self-ruling sovereign individual. The evolution of a political rationality that revolves around interest and sovereign possession has created a paradoxical democracy in which the self-rule of all remains reducible to the self-entrepreneurship of all, or more recently to a constant and vigorous self-appreciation of all, devoid of any political impetus. Such a political exterior has democratized dispossession and vulnerability as merely the disposability of all those who fail to self-appreciate their independence. And there the soil is rife for the emergence of a demos far more recognizable as populus. The contemporary individual we are all invited to be (in a highly Victorian manner, i.e. to be better than we already are)—independent, self-possessing and self-created, master of one’s own (and, if need be, one’s family’s) well-being—is an illusion re-animated to justify a rising precarity. However, and not only due to its delusionary nature, the individual is an impotent figure in the political sense. It makes space only for managerial forms which deal with ‘the phenomena of politics’, or for populist invocations of the ‘people’, a sort of counter-illusionary figure offering a different kind of mastery and sovereignty. A truly different homo politicus would arise neither from some organic bond uniting individuals into a populus, nor from increased sovereignty and self-rule. A necessary critical engagement in the field of political thinking, I would suggest, must now concern itself with imagining the political bonds beyond self-possession, or against individual, which cannot be cleansed of the thick sediments of its genealogies. A different—unknown, unseen— political body would need to be de-individualized, in such a way that in it none qualifies as one.

References Bentham, J. (1776 [1988]). A Fragment on Government, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Blackstone, W. (1765). Commentaries on the Laws of England (Book the First). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Butler, J. (1997). Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative. New York and London: Routledge. Butler, J. (2004). Precarious Life. Powers of Violence and Mourning. London: Verso. Butler, J. (2009). Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Butler, J. (2015). Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Harvard University Press. Carlyle, T. (1829). The Signs of Times. Edinburgh Review. Retrieved March 27, 2018, from http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/carlyle/signs1.html. Dicey, A. V. (1917 [2008]). Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Feher, M. (2009). Self-Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital. Public Culture, 21(1), 21–41. Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gould, S. J. (1981). The Mismeasure of Man. London and New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Hobsbawm, E. (1995). The Age of Capital: 1848–1875. London: Abacus. Locke, J. (1690 [1823]). Two Treatises on Government, London: Thomas Tegg. Losurdo, D. (2011). Liberalism. A Counter-History. London and New York: Verso. MacPherson, C.  B. (1977). The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marshall, T. H. (1950 [2009]). ‘Citizenship and Social Class’, in: Jeff Manza and Michael Sauder (eds.), Inequality and Society, New York: W. W. Norton and Marx, K. (1843 [1992]). On the Jewish Question. In Early Writings, London: Penguin. Mill, J. (1825). On Government, Supplement to the Encyclopedia Britannica. London: J. Innes. Mill, J. S. (2001). On Liberty. Kitchener: Batoche Books. Nauta, L. W. (1984). Historical Roots of the Concept of Autonomy in Western Philosophy. in: PRAXIS International, 4, 363–377. Rudé, G. (1970). Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century. Studies in Popular Protest. London: Collins. Safatle, V. (2015). O circuito dos afetos. Corpos politicos, desamparo e o fim do individuo. Autentica Editora.

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Safatle, V. (2017). To Be the Owner of My Own Person: Toward a Concept of Freedom as Heteronomy without Servitude. Unpublished Paper. Zaharijević, A. (2014). Ko je pojedinac? Genealoško propitivanje ideje građanina. Loznica: Karpos.

6 Feeling Vulnerable: Interpersonal Relatedness and Situatedness Igor Cvejić

Vulnerability is in theoretical literature usually defined through two connected issues. Following its Latin roots (vulnus, wound), in its most common use vulnerability denotes that someone is exposed to some type of damage, attack, danger or suffering. This phenomenon has become more important in the work of some theorists who claim that vulnerability might be understood as an ontological condition of human life, not only because we are all exposed to the conditions of aging, sickness, death, etc. (Turner 2006), but because we are all exposed (even physically) to others in the social realm, to possible harm, attack and the (unwilling) will of others, making human life precarious (Butler 2001). The thesis of the universality of human vulnerability is typically accompanied by demands to reconfigure the understanding of relevant ethical issues, followed by the idea that a mutual recognition of universal vulnerability could constitute a basis for human ethics. Other authors, instead of claiming the universal ontological character of vulnerability, stress the importance of

I. Cvejić (*) Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Rodríguez Lopez et al. (eds.), Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60519-3_6

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the characteristic susceptibilities of particular persons or groups to specific harm to which they are (or could be) exposed, thus pointing to the main problem in relations of power and domination (Mackenzie et al. 2014). My focus in this text is not the general notion of vulnerability, although this is important, but how one feels vulnerable. In the first part, I will outline the structure of such an emotional experience. I will then try to explain why the recognition of another’s vulnerability is important in regard to emotional agency, emphasizing the difference between this kind of recognition and the similar experience of empathy and social recognition. In the third section, I will concentrate on the intersubjectivity of mutual recognition. However, I think that there is an inherent normative gap between the ideal of universal intersubjective mutual recognition with respect to emotional agency and the fact that in the social realm this recognition rests on culturally and socially dependent criteria of adequacy for such emotional experience. Moreover, this gap may put some persons in a situation of emotional exclusion in which they lack the ‘right’ to feel vulnerable in their own way. In the conclusion, I offer some practical possibilities for bridging this gap through emotion-oriented environmental structures.

1

F eeling Vulnerable: Emotional Self-­Awareness and the Sense of (In)Ability

Feeling vulnerable is an emotional experience, more precisely an emotional self-awareness, of something or someone to which or whom we are exposed. This complex emotional experience involves an intentional object—the ‘target’ of vulnerability—, perceived as dangerous, damaging or harmful—danger or damage being its formal object—and the self-­ awareness of oneself as vulnerable to it. Thus, emotional self-awareness is not an additional component added to the experience of an object as dangerous, but the experience itself consists of feeling vulnerable:

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While afraid, you experience something as dangerous and at the same time ‘you’ feel vulnerable in the relevant respect. But your experience of the danger is not separate from, but rather consists in your feeling thus vulnerable. Each emotional experience has that structure: something affects you, and thereby you feel affected by it. […] there cannot be the one without the other. (Slaby and Stephan 2008, p. 507)

Such vulnerability can be even better outlined if to this explanation we add that emotion could be understood as a practical sense of ability. This central idea was introduced by John Lambie and Jan Slaby, although it has its roots in Jean-Paul Sartre (Sartre 1994 [1939]). According to Lambie, ‘first-order’ emotions can be explained by using a concept from geometry: that of hodological spaces.1 Thus, emotional experience can designate the perception of open and closed paths: Emotion experience consists of a kind of ‘path space’ or ‘hodological space’, that is, of the perception of paths in one’s phenomenal world that are open or closed, to-be-taken, or not-to-be-taken. (Lambie 2009, p. 273)

In a similar manner, Jan Slaby explains emotions as a sense of ability, placing more emphasis on the phenomenology of emotions, practical agency and embodiment. Slaby explains emotions as a corporeal practical engagement with the world2 or its relevant aspects, in which an agent senses what is possible (‘I can’) or impossible (‘I can’t’) in a given

 The concept of hodological spaces was applied previously by Kurt Lewin to explain the phenomenal perception of the world (Lewin 1938). 2  Emotions were first explained as engagements with the world in a text by Robert C. Solomon, in which he defended his understanding of emotions as judgments. Solomon argued that from his perspective emotions are intentional, not primarily being ‘about’ something (like beliefs), but instead practically entangled in the world: ‘The scholastic concept of “intentionality” was also an attempt to make this explicit, to insist that the emotions are always “about” something (their intentional object). Thus, judgments have intentionality, but I think that the traditional notion of intentionality—and, I now suspect, the concept of judgment, too—still lacks the keen sense of engagement that I see as essential to emotions, keeping in mind that thwarted or frustrated engagements characterize many emotions. Emotions are not just about (or “directed to”) the world but actively entangled in it’ (Solomon 2004). Thus, engagement with the world here stresses a specific kind of intentionality—affective intentionality—which differs from the usual cognitivist notion of ‘aboutness’ insofar as it presupposes practical commitment. 1

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situation. Thus, emotions are also a form of the agent’s self-awareness, the sense of one’s (in)ability: Affective states seem to develop within an ‘I can’ or ‘I can’t’ schema of relating to the world—an embodied sense of capability (or its marked opposite, a specific sense of inability or incapacity in relation to something that confronts one). […] Emotions disclose what a situation affords in terms of potential doings and potential happenings affecting me that I have to put up with or adequately respond to. These two distinguishable aspects—situational and agentive—are amalgamated together to form a unified state of dynamic situation—access. It is an action-oriented awareness of situation (where ‘awareness’ should not be construed too narrowly but instead as something inextricable from our practical access to what it is awareness of ). (Slaby 2012, p. 152)

Probably the best way to explain emotions as senses of (in)ability is through the negative, even horrifying, example of individuals suffering from clinical depression. As argued by Slaby, Stephan and Paskaleva, the experience of profound depression could be described as a sense of incapacity, in which a person feels unable to perform usual, everyday actions (including body movements, communicating, etc.). In short, the entire situation-agency dynamic is paralyzed by the impossibility of acting (‘I can’t’). This negative example reveals the usual role that emotions play in actively relating to the situation and why it is important to consider agency-centred accounts of emotions as practical engagements with the world (Slaby et al. 2013; Slaby 2012). This example also enables us to better explain exposure to social exclusion, which makes individuals feel particularly vulnerable. A person who is exposed to social exclusion would intelligibly feel herself exposed to paths that are usually intersubjectively acceptable but closed to her. I can present this in some easily recognizable situations, like a shop door closed in the face of an immigrant who is a person of colour, or other more complex cases of structural domination. Such situations can lead to a justified sense of inability (emotional self-awareness) to find one’s way along the usually acceptable life-paths.

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 hy Recognizing One’s Own and Others’ W Vulnerability Matters: The Case Against Empathy, the Ethics of Emotional Agency and Responsibility

Some authors, most famously Judith Butler, argue for the importance of recognizing that we are all exposed to human life-conditions, hence vulnerable and in a precarious situation. This idea is followed by the suggestion that it produces a specific kind of ethical responsibility toward others. In this section, I will argue for some advantages to the recognition of others’ vulnerability, particularly over the similar concept of empathy. However, in the following section, I will show that idealized unification through mutual recognition of another’s vulnerability is highly problematic in real societal conditions. First, I will refer to two texts that question the contemporary enthusiasm about empathy: Peter Goldie’s ‘Anti-Empathy’ (Goldie 2011) and Slaby’s ‘Empathy’s Blind Spot’ (Slaby 2014). It is important to note that their critiques are not primarily directed at what they call, following Goldman’s classification (Goldman 2006), ‘low-level empathy’, which includes various affective relations such as sympathy, shared emotions, emotional contagion, etc. The main goal of Goldman’s critique is what he calls ‘high-level mind reading’, and what Goldie calls ‘perspective-­ shifting’. Additionally, Goldie distinguishes between two varieties of perspective-shifting: (1) ‘in-his-shoes’ perspective-shifting, which presupposes that person A imagines being in the situation of B, i.e. deliberating what she herself would do in the situation that person B is in (which is actually not a classic case of empathy); and (2) ‘empathic’ perspective-­ shifting in which person A imagines being B in that situation, e.g. deliberating and deciding what to do as if she were herself person B. Goldie identifies one reason that this difference has rarely been taken into consideration in the fact that most authors rely on a simple case, or what he calls the ‘base-case.’ These are Goldie’s conditions for a base-case: …(i) there are no relevant differences in the psychological dispositions of A, the person attempting to empathize, and of B, the target of the attempt;

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in particular, both A and B are minimally rational; (ii) there are no relevant non-rational influences on B’s psychological make-up or decision-making process; (iii) there is no significant confusion in B’s psychological make-up; and (iv) B is not faced with a psychological conflict, such as having to make a choice between two or more alternatives where it is not clear to B which alternative is to be preferred. (Goldie 2011, p. 307)

In a base-case the difference mentioned above is not important (or the results at least are the same), as it presupposes that one works only with the minimal notion of a rational agency (shared by A and B). One need not think how others deliberate, about their decision-making processes or how unconscious processes influence mental states; rather, rational agency is presupposed as impersonal (regardless of which kind of person is deliberating, Goldie 2011, p. 308). However, in most meaningful real-­ life situations these conditions are rarely fulfilled, and most commonly all four are violated. Moreover, the base-case is actually irrelevant when the Other must be taken into consideration; i.e. when there is a difference between ‘me’ and ‘you.’ Goldie’s point is that the violation of any of the conditions mentioned reveals a problem with empathic perspective-­ shifting. The crucial problem comes from our usual understanding of empathy, as a relation in which we have affective insight into another’s mental states (emotions), as if they were some kind of ‘inner objects’ contained in the mind. However, emotion does not function like this. When I love someone or feel afraid, I do not look into my ‘insight’ to see whether there is love or fear. Love and fear are not objects of inner perception, but active first-person agentive engagements through which a person directs herself to another person and/or a situation. If we accept agency-centred accounts regarding emotions, then empathy looks like a much less promising possibility. This is because it is much harder to imagine empathizing with another’s agency than empathizing with another’s mental states as objects of inner perception. Moreover, Goldie and Slaby claim that this is even impossible. Attempting to give a deeper explanation of Goldie’s notion of full-blooded agency, Slaby emphasizes that agency is not just a matter of deliberating and deciding, but involves important first-personal commitments:

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The element of commitment—genuine choice in terms of first-personal involvement—is what escapes attempts of deliberately simulating another’s mental states […] An agent is the very ‘instance’ capable and called-upon to commit, to adopt stances towards the world and be ready to live up to them (beliefs, decisions, attitudes)—the mental cannot be understood in abstraction from this domain of commitment. (Slaby 2014, p. 254)

However, such full-fledged agency in a case of empathic perspective-­ shifting can only ever be the agency of the empathizer, not the agency of the person empathized with (Slaby 2014, pp.  253–254). Thus, Slaby argues that agency is empathy’s blind spot. Furthermore, the problem is not only its alleged impossibility, but that even trying to do so could be classified as a kind of ethical violence in which the agency of another person is objectified and disrupted. Even Goldie stresses this problem: In empathic perspective-shifting, where A thinks B’s thoughts, and then in imagination decides what is the right thing for B to think or to do, A usurps B’s agency, replacing it with her own. (Goldie 2011: p. 315)

Slaby continues by comparing this with patronization: Trying this would be a move that comes close to patronizing the other because one inevitably will take what is in fact one’s own agency (or would-­ be-­agency) for the agency in which the other person’s mental states are anchored. (Slaby 2014, p. 254)

My aim in introducing this short problematization of empathy is not to enter a debate about values and the possibilities of empathy. It is rather to introduce Slaby’s more modest claim that, because perspective shifting is not a self-explanatory phenomenon (particularly when it comes to agency-centred theories of mind) and because there are alternatives, ‘there is no need to let a narrowly-focused “mental simulation” literature monopolize the difficult and important topic of interpersonal relatedness’ (Slaby 2014, p. 256). And so what are the alternatives? He offers two. The first is interaction theory developed in a new phenomenology. The key point here is the thesis that mental states are not just ‘hidden’ in

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another person, but rather ‘appear’ in a relevant practical context. Practical context here refers to a joint agency, that is, agents working together, pursuing a collective goal, undertaking a common project, in friendship, partnership, etc. (Gallagher 2008). Such joint engagements create so-­ called ‘we-spaces’ (Krueger 2011). In this context, interaction does not take place between closed-off inner realms. At the same time, it accepts a person in a ‘let her be’ perspective. The second alternative, which should accompany the first, is recognizing the other’s vulnerability: Nothing is lost when one replaces this [perspective-shifting] by a stance of acknowledging, of recognizing the other, both in her (partial) agentive autonomy and in her exposedness as a vulnerable, needy being. (Slaby 2014, p. 256)

For this conception we are, of course, indebted to Judith Butler. It is important to be careful and not to confuse this kind of recognition with perspective-shifting, shared emotions or the cognition of another’s insight. What both Butler and Slaby describe is, rather, the openness or allowance to be conditioned by the other. It is not a knowledge of the other’s mental states, nor some sort of ‘grasping’ of the other’s agency, but a mere acknowledgement of the encounter with another vulnerable being. However, this can only be understood as a double-movement: first, one acknowledges one’s own limitations (Butler begins her explanation with the limits of self-knowledge, Butler 2001), feels oneself exposed to the other and thus vulnerable, senses one’s own inability, and only through this kind of exposedness, encounters the other as another conditioned, vulnerable and needy being. In this way, a specific passivity becomes constitutive of agency in interpersonal relations: ‘Butler here restores passivity to its proper place in human existence and thereby limits the power, though not the reach of agency’ (Slaby 2014, p. 256). The previous arguments build to the first point that I want to stress: why recognizing another’s vulnerability matters. It creates a unique interpersonal relatedness, one not reducible to perspective-shifting—and in fact probably its alternative. This very specific relatedness is not a kind of social cognition of the other, although it inevitably involves cognitive

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moments, but the way in which we are open to the other. This complex phenomenological structure thus includes our feeling our own inability, which we recognize and accept in the sense that we are aware of being conditioned by the other, much as the vulnerability of the other being is exposed to us through our own sense of inability and openness. The second important factor is the possibility of grounding an ethics of responsibility on the basis of this interrelatedness. Butler argues that this primary exposedness to others grounds the situation we are in, and thus grounds our responsibility: ‘This is a situation we do not choose; it forms the horizon of choice, and it is that which grounds our responsibility. In this sense, we are not responsible for it, but it is that for which we are nevertheless responsible’ (Butler 2001, p. 39). Responsibility, then, can no longer be thought of as a kind of ‘inner’ duty in isolation, but rather something that is constituted with another in a shared space where we are exposed and conditioned by the other’s ‘unwilling will’: ‘I cannot think the question of responsibility alone, in isolation from the Other, or if I do, I have taken myself out of the mode of address that frames the problem of responsibility from the start’ (Butler 2001, p. 38). In this section, I have argued that recognizing another’s vulnerability matters for two important reasons. First, it is a specific kind of interpersonal relatedness, which consists in being open to the other. Before presenting it, I also gave some arguments against empathic perspective-shifting, which could indicate that the simulation of the other’s agency is impossible and/or ethically violent. A recognition of the others’ vulnerability could thus be seen as a more promising alternative for such relations, followed with mutual acknowledgement and respect. Second, and based on this first conclusion, Butler introduces a thesis that the recognition of both one’s own and the other’s vulnerability grounds our responsibility. From there she proposes an ethics of responsibility. In the next section, I will try to address some problems with these conclusions when they are applied in the actual social realm.

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 hen Is It Appropriate to Feel W Vulnerable? The Socio-Cultural Dependency of Criteria for Adequacy and Emotional Exclusion

It can be argued that Butler’s reinvention of ethics in the realm of exposedness to human conditions drops ethics down from celestial principles to their proper place, which is the sphere of mutual interrelatedness. However, as with every prescriptive ideal, this conception comes into conflict with actual social norms of behaviour when applied to specific situations. Particularly, the problem of applying the ethics of responsibility as articulated by Butler is that people very often feel that feeling vulnerable is inappropriate, or are uncomfortable expressing their feelings of vulnerability and weakness, even thinking that they should dissimulate these. Moreover, even when expressed, such feelings can often be misused by others. This is not, of course, a criticism of Butler, but rather an indication of why an ethics of responsibility is necessary. Butler herself addresses the possibility that one cannot accept one’s own vulnerability, and consequently cannot open to the other, lapsing into what she calls ‘negative narcissism’ (Butler 2001, pp. 38–39). Without intending to disrupt Butler’s categorization, I want to address here a few structural and theoretical issues regarding two questions: (1) why someone could perceive it as inappropriate to feel vulnerable; and (2) how this could be changed. Let us take one well-known example. It is usually accepted in the literature that the neoliberal market economy can make some persons feel incapable of dealing with a given situation and thus vulnerable to the social system in which they live (particularly those marked as ‘losers,’ such as the unemployed, but also those who feel insecure at the thought of potentially losing out because there is no guaranteed stability in a free market). Many, if not most, of these would not express that they feel vulnerable; rather, they would feel ashamed or dissimulate their sense of incapability, or even show resentment toward others.3 In such a situation,  Salmela and von Sheve (2017).

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of course, a person may fail to recognize her own vulnerability, and in turn fail to acknowledge the vulnerability of another—eliminating the base for accepting responsibility in a given situation. We should ask ourselves why in this situation a first-order feeling of vulnerability is dissimulated or replaced with a highly socially charged feeling of shame? We should note that in a social space not all objects or situations are adequately perceived as harmful; that is, in the register of vulnerability. There are, of course, obvious examples, as when we are afraid of a potential earthquake or volcanic eruption. But is it appropriate to be afraid of a dog? Probably so, if it is huge, aggressive, with big teeth and infected with rabies; but probably not if it is a weak, injured puppy. The more we introduce complex examples, the more difficult it is to determine the criteria for adequately perceiving something as harmful. Moreover, these criteria are by no means universal or transcultural, but rather socially and culturally dependent.4 Imagine our vulnerable unemployed person in a leftist community—she would probably tick off a list of fulfilled criteria and agree that the market economy is harmful. However, the same person surrounded by proponents of the neoliberal system would probably be blamed for an inadequate reaction if she expressed her vulnerability, be blamed for ‘laziness’ and perceived as unworthy and shameful. When I explained my understanding of emotions in the first section, I quoted Slaby who insists that the situation forecloses both adequate and inadequate responses: ‘Emotions disclose what a situation affords in terms of potential doings and potential happenings affecting me that I have to put up with or adequately respond to’. My main point here is that in some (or, actually, most) social situations, feeling vulnerable (particularly feeling vulnerable in the specific way a person does) is not perceived as an adequate response. In the previously described situations, even if a person were to feel vulnerable, this emotion would come into conflict with social expectations, be seen as inadequate, probably suppressed, and even if expressed, would remain unrecognized. I think that it might be classified as emotional exclusion, which sometimes follows other forms of social  I thank Achim Stephan for the thesis that the criteria of adequacy of the formal object is socially and culturally dependent (2017). 4

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exclusion. When Axel Honneth explains the structure of recognition he claims that forms of disrespect, parallel to emotional support (as a mode of recognition), are abuse and rape (Honneth 1996, p. 129). Honneth here obviously overlooks the possibility of emotional exclusion when emotional support is denied to a person for structural reasons.5 What I am trying to explain is a third and different phenomenon. By emotional exclusion I want to highlight the possibility that one’s emotional reactions are for structural reasons either perceived as inadequate or remain unrecognized. A good example would be when the expressed vulnerability of a person exposed to harm is not perceived as an adequate emotional reaction (for instance, in the case of family violence). There is no need to mention that such emotional exclusion can lead to a ‘bad conscience,’ traumatic experiences, depressive reactions, etc. (although this is a topic for the psychologists). What is important is that it forecloses the open interrelatedness that lies at the basis of the application of the ethics of responsibility. What can be done to avoid this kind of exclusion? First, I want to address what I think should not be done. The seemingly most natural answer to this question is to try to ‘grasp’ the way in which the other person feels vulnerable and to try to make the way in which she feels herself vulnerable intersubjectively acceptable, as an adequate reaction to the situation. But how can we ‘grasp’ another person’s way of feeling vulnerable? It seems that we need to simulate being the other person in order to recognize this. In the second section of this text I addressed some problems with simulation theory. The main point is that simulation is probably impossible and that even attempting it can disrupt the other’s agency. More importantly, it is an entirely different type of interpersonal relatedness than the recognition of another’s vulnerability. Whereas perspective-­shifting is a kind of ‘grasping’ of another’s mental states, Butler speaks of recognizing another’s vulnerability, emphasizing an openness in which we allow ourselves to be conditioned by the other. Thus, I think that there is here a conflict between the normative ideal of responsibility for vulnerability, in the sense that we do not intend to actually know the other, and the presupposition that it is necessary to cognize  Ivković (2017, p. 78).

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the other’s states in order to make them intersubjectively adequate in a real social situation. In the last section I will try to present some possible alternatives.

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 ore Practical Conclusions: Joint M Engagements and Environmental Structures

I have already addressed the fact that many real social situations actually foreclose the possibility or likelihood of feeling vulnerable. I then argued that there might be a gap in thinking that we can solve this by trying first to ‘grasp’ another’s vulnerability and then allowing it to appear, as ‘grasping’ another’s vulnerable states is a very different (indeed, opposite) interpersonal relationship from being open to be conditioned by the other. Now, in the conclusion of this text, I will briefly present an alternative view. When Slaby recalls Butler’s notion of recognizing another’s vulnerability, he introduces it in combination with the interactionist idea of joint engagement. In this idea, mental states are not hidden in an inner realm, but somehow appear in interaction, a concept I addressed in the second section. Thus, probably the most correct way of approaching this problem is not in terms of private mental states in the souls of dependent individuals, but in how we arrange the way we can be together in a joint engagement of responsibility for a particular vulnerability. A vulnerability, then, is not to be thought of as an inner mental state, but rather as an attunement which ‘colours’ social spaces. When I say that vulnerability can be thought of as an attunement, I am referring to Heidegger’s explanation: A human being we are with is overcome by grief. Is it simply that this person has some state of lived experience that we do not have, while everything else remains as before? If not, what is happening here? […] Everything remains as before, and yet, everything is different, not only in this or that respect but—irrespective of the sameness of what we do and what we engage in—the way in which we are together is different. […] He draws us into the manner in which he is, although we do not necessarily feel any

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grief ourselves. Our being with one another, the being-there of our Dasein, is different, its attunement has shifted. Upon closer consideration of this context, which we shall not pursue any further now, we can already see that attunement is not at all inside, in some sort of soul of the Other, and that it is not at all somewhere alongside in our soul. Instead we have to say, that the attunement imposes itself on everything. It is not at all ‘inside’ in some interiority, only to appear in the flash of an eye; but, for this reason it is not at all outside either. Where and in what way is it, then? Is this attunement, grief, something concerning which we may ask where it is and in what way it is? Attunement is not some being that appears in the soul as an experience, but the way of our being there with one another. (Heidegger 1995, p. 67)

What it means more concretely is that we are not responsible for knowing another’s mental state, but for allowing a situation to be conditioned by the Other. More precisely, we must allow for the possibility that ‘closed paths’ could be opened, and ‘open paths’ could be closed (see the first section). I would like to end this text with an example. In his other texts, Slaby mentions the possibility of thinking of environmental structures as ‘extended emotions’, as tools for our feelings, calling this phenomenon ‘phenomenal coupling’: ‘the direct engagement of an agent’s affectivity with an environmental structure or process that itself has affect-like, expressive qualities’ (Slaby 2014a, p. 41). Examples of such environmental structures are the music to which we react, social interactions, atmospheres created in protests, classrooms, conference halls, etc. All such environmental structures include and exclude people, influence them to react to situations in many different ways and constitute appropriateness of vulnerability in such spaces. We must recognize that we are responsible for constituting such social spaces, and for the possibility that they can be conditioned by the Other, in such a way that it can open ‘closed paths’ and close ‘open paths’. Practically speaking, it means that we are not only responsible for our interaction with others, but also for what kind of music is playing while we are buying shoes or wine, or what seems inappropriate while we are teaching in a classroom and so on. It might seem that the only effect of this is a kind of collective therapy, and although

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perhaps not a terrible idea, this is not my present aim. My goal has been to emphasize the importance of perceiving social environmental structures as a place of struggle, when we speak of the ethics of responsibility with regard to universal vulnerability. Undoubtedly, this is not enough, does still not result in social change, but at least it creates a positive platform for sensing that social changes are possible, and at the very least it seems better than just saying, ‘Calm down, we know what you are feeling’ (Slaby, Internet, n.d., p. 24).

References Butler, J. (2001). Giving an Account of Oneself. Diacritics, 31(4), 22–40. Gallagher, S. (2008). Direct Perception in the Intersubjective Context. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 535–543. Goldie, P. (2011). Anti-empathy. In A. Coplan & P. Goldie (Eds.), Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (pp.  302–317). Oxford University Press. Goldman, A.  I. (2006). Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. Oxford University Press. Heidegger, M. (1995). The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. World, Finitude, Solitude. Indiana University Press. Honneth, A. (1996). The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. MIT Press. Ivković, M. (2017). Kritička teorija Aksela Honeta, Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju. Krueger, J. (2011). Extended Cognition and the Space of Social Interaction. Consciousness and Cognition, 20(3), 643–657. Lambie, J.  A. (2009). Emotional Experience, Rational Action, and Self-­ Knowledge. Emotion Review, 1, 272–280. Lewin, K. (1938). The Conceptual Representation and the Measurement of Psychological Forces, Contributions to Psychological Theory 1 (4), Duke University Press. Mackenzie, K., Rogers, W., & Dodds, S. (2014). Introduction: What Is Vulnerability and Why It Matters for Moral Theory. In K.  Mackenzie, W.  Rogers, & S.  Dodds (Eds.), Vulnerability: New Essays in Feminists Philosophie (pp. 1–29). Oxford University Press.

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Salmela, M., & von Scheve, C. (2017). Emotional-Roots of Ring-Wing Political Populism. Social Science Information, 56(4), 567–595. Sartre, J.-P. (1994 [1939]). Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Routledge. Slaby, J. (2012). Affective Self-Construal and the Sense of Ability. Emotion Review, 4(2), 151–156. Slaby, J. (2014). Empathy’s Blind Spot. Medicine, Health Care, and Philosophy, 17(2), 249–258. Slaby, J. (2014a). Emotions and Extended Mind. In K. von Scheve & M. Salmela (Eds.), Collective Emotions (pp. 33–46). Oxford University Press. Slaby, J. (n.d.). Against Empathy: Critical Theory and Social Brain. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/3576043/Against_Empathy_Critical_ Theory_and_the_Social_Brain (Consulted 20 October 2018). Slaby, J., & Stephan, A. (2008). Affective Intentionality and Self-Consciousness. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 506–503. Slaby, J., Paskaleva, A., & Stephan, A. (2013). Enactive Emotion and Impaired Agency in Depression. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 20, 33–55. Solomon, R.  C. (2004). Emotions, Thoughts, and Feelings: Emotions as Engagements with the World. In R.  C. Solomon (Ed.), Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotion (pp.  76–88). Oxford University Press. Stephan, A. (2017). On the Adequacy of Emotions and Existential Feelings. Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia, 8(1), 1–13. Turner, B. S. (2006). Vulnerability and Human Rights. Penn State University Press.

7 Contemporary Declinations of Violence and Exclusion: Thinking Extreme Violence and Vulnerability with Étienne Balibar and Judith Butler Emma Ingala

Twentieth-century French philosophy, and in particular poststructuralism, has often been accused of being pervaded, if not ultimately seduced, by the motif of violence, to the extent of promoting an ontologization of violence.1 Admittedly, a number of thinkers have not only reflected on violence, but also defended, albeit in a very specific context and with a very particular aim, the recourse to violence.2 Gilles Deleuze, for example, articulated a noetics—a theory of what it means to think—of violence in his book Difference and Repetition, where he maintained that

 Ann V. Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), p. 1. 2  See, for example, the essays collected in Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala (eds.), The Meanings of Violence: From Critical Theory to Biopolitics (New York: Routledge, 2019). 1

E. Ingala (*) Faculty of Philosophy, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Rodríguez Lopez et al. (eds.), Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60519-3_7

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violence is a necessary condition of thought.3 Deleuze reversed the common sense assumption according to which thought can only think through identities; that is, through concepts that shape, classify and organize the world into clear-cut identities. Against this assumption, he argued that thought can only think if it breaks with identities or, in other words, if it thinks difference in itself—difference no longer submitted to identity. Thinking identity is not really thinking but merely representing, recognizing and reproducing a pre-given model. From this, and in order to open thought to difference and properly think, Deleuze affirmed the necessity of a violent encounter with something that forces us to think: thought is not a gift but must be violently provoked.4 In a similar vein, Beatrice Hanssen has identified a recurrent figure of violence in contemporary poststructuralist thought under the form of a counter-force or counter-violence, a violence that ‘Foucault and Derrida respectively have called “anti-dogmatic” or “anti-metaphysical” violence. Thus, the use of a symbolic, figurative, discursive force, wielded as a counter-principle, is meant to undo metaphysical, institutional sedimentations of force, especially the violence exercised by instrumental reason, with its logic and practices of exclusion’.5 In relation to this emphasis on violence, French theory has sometimes been understood to offer a purely critical, transgressive, subversive and deconstructive approach that not only lacks, but explicitly rejects, a constructive and practical dimension.6 According to this reading, French poststructuralism considers normative and constructive positions as ‘normalizing and oppressive’,7 and proposes instead a deconstructive critique of the hegemonic identities. The ubiquity of images, symbols, and metaphors of violence—be it the violence of normalizing identities or the violence of the critique and deconstruction of these identities—is  Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 139. 4  Ibid., p. 321. 5  Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence. Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 14. Hanssen traces the genealogy of this notion of violence back to ‘Nietzsche’s forceful hammer blows’ (p. 7). 6  For example, Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1987). 7  Nancy Fraser, ‘False Antitheses’, in: Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 71. 3

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interpreted as an effect of this approach, which is thereby charged with naturalizing and even eroticizing violence.8 Without entering into the debate on whether this interpretation is legitimate or rather a caricature produced by the Anglo-American reception—and to a degree creation—of French theory,9 the aim of this chapter is to interrogate (1) the turn to non-violence and anti-violence, in parallel with (2) the recuperation and reassessment of the notion of the human—after the violent rejection of this notion imposed by the anti-­ humanist critique—in two contemporary thinkers that belong to the philosophical lineage of poststructuralism (the theoretical field where anti-humanism proliferated), Étienne Balibar and Judith Butler. My contention is that this turn and this recuperation are a response to a specific conjuncture characterized by extreme forms of violence that are nevertheless quite often foreclosed from the field of the visible. These forms of extreme violence require a reassessment of what we understand by and how we conceive of violence, as well as of the particular effects of extreme violence, crystallized in enhanced modes of exclusion and vulnerability which, again, are so pervasive and omnipresent that they are frequently unacknowledged. In this conjuncture, Balibar and Butler seek to articulate a conception of politics that incorporates both the deconstructive aspect of poststructuralism—necessary in order to make visible the invisible underpinnings of these extreme forms of violence—and the normative and constructive component of contemporary critical theory, crucial for designing theoretical as well as practical responses to this conjuncture. I will show this by delineating a conceptual quadrangle formed by Balibar’s notions of anti-violence and civility, and Butler’s concepts of non-violence and vulnerability. This quadrangle produces, first, an understanding of the political as inherently complex and, more importantly, as inhabited by a constant tension between insurrection and constitution, or between

 Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, p. 3.  For a discussion of this issue, see François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 8 9

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subversion and survival.10 This tension must not be understood as an exclusive disjunction or double bind, but as the unrelinquishable arena where the negotiations of political theory and practice take place.11 Second, the intersection of Balibar and Butler’s problematic fields outlines a political anthropology that reintroduces the notion of the human, incorporating both the objections of the anti-humanist critique and an idea of the human capable of functioning as a criterion to denounce and fight against extreme violence and exclusion.

1

 xtreme Violence and Precarity: New E Modalities of Violence

In his book Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy, Balibar describes the current conjuncture of the world as marked by what he calls an ‘extreme violence’ or simply ‘cruelty’12; that is, an excessive, all-pervasive and dispersed development ‘to which no symmetric counter-­ power or counter-violence can be opposed that does not disseminate and worsen it (think of the case of the “War on Terror”), pushing therefore politics toward its own self-destruction.’13 Extreme violence is ‘nomadic, undefined, polymorphous’,14 and hence a form of violence that politics cannot manage, not even having recourse to the so-called state of exception.15 In this sense, extreme violence simultaneously appears, according to Balibar, as the limit of politics—as that which obliterates the very

 Étienne Balibar, Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. ix; Drew Walker, ‘Two Regimes of the Human: Butler and the Politics of Mattering’, in Moya Lloyd (ed.), Butler and Ethics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 141 (141–166). 11  Judith Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 59. 12  Balibar, Violence and Civility, p. ix. 13  Balibar, Violence and Civility, p. xii. 14  Étienne Balibar, ‘In War’, Open Democracy, 16 November, 2015. https://www.opendemocracy. net/can-europe-make-it/etienne-balibar/in-war (last accessed 31 August, 2018). 15  Balibar, Violence and Civility, p. 20. 10

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possibility of politics—and as a dehumanizing process that turns certain humans into disposable beings.16 Balibar distinguishes analytically between two forms of extreme violence or cruelty that in practice are often intertwined: ultra-objective and ultra-subjective cruelty.17 Ultra-objective cruelty is the treatment of human beings as things, disposable waste, or useless remnants—which produces the physical and moral destruction of the individual through, for example, overwork, extreme poverty or precariousness. Ultra-­ subjective cruelty is the postulation of an absolutely homogeneous ‘us’ against other individuals or groups that appear thereinafter as incarnations of evil threatening to infect or weaken this ‘us’—this is, for example, the cruelty that was most manifestly tied to the ideology of Nazism. The problem with this threat, however, is that it is not merely external but internal, with the consequence that its elimination might require a self-destruction. Butler, for her part, analyses the effects of this extreme violence through the phenomenon of precarity; that is, the politically induced differential distribution of vulnerability, or the differing exposure to violence, injury and death across populations.18 According to her, ‘precarity is not a passing or episodic condition, but a new form of regulation that distinguishes this historical time ... Precarity has itself become a regime, a hegemonic mode of being governed, and governing ourselves.’19 From this, precarity is not a contingent situation that will eventually recede; rather, it becomes a permanent ‘mode of life’, ‘a new form of power and potential for exploitation’,20 a continuous process of ever-increasing precarization that produces subjects eroded by insecurity. The particular state of affairs portrayed by the notions of extreme violence and precarity (1) challenges a series of commonly held assumptions about violence, and (2) compels us to rethink how the field of the visible is administered and regulated. Regarding the first point, as a number of  Balibar, Violence and Civility, pp. 53, 129.  Balibar, Violence and Civility, pp. xiv, 52, 61. 18  Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009), pp. 3, 25. 19  Judith Butler, ‘Foreword’, in Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious (New York: Verso, 2015), p. vii. 20  Ibid., p. viii. 16 17

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commentators have noted,21 certain contemporary declinations of violence are difficult to recognize as such because they entail a type of violence that is not perpetrated by a visible agent who can be held responsible and whose effects are not instantaneous or immediately visible; rather, it is an ‘expansive and non-subjective’22 violence. This specific condition of violence can be illustrated through Engels’ insights regarding the condition of the working class in England: When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another [,] such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live—forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence—knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.23

In the field of environmentalism, Rob Nixon has coined the formula ‘slow violence’ to designate ‘a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and  See among others the notion of ‘structural violence’ coined by Johan Galtung in ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,’ Journal of Peace Research, vol. 6, no. 3, 1969, pp.  167–191; Yves Winter, ‘Violence and Visibility,’ New Political Science, vol. 34, no. 2, 2012, pp. 195–202; and Rob Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’ in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 22  Winter, ‘Violence and Visibility,’ p. 198. 23  Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England. From Personal Observation and Authentic Sources, trans. Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky, in: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 4 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), pp. 393–394. For a close reading of this text see Winter, ‘Violence and Visibility,’ pp. 197–200. 21

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space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.’24 This is a violence that is not spectacular and explosive but incremental, exponential and accretive, and the casualties of slow violence ‘are the casualties most likely not to be seen, not to be counted. Casualties of slow violence—or of ultra-objective cruelty, to say it with Balibar— become light-weight, disposable casualties.’25 The second point—that the particular state of affairs of extreme violence and precarity requires that we rethink how the field of the visible is administered and regulated—takes off from the first, that is the need to overcome commonly held assumptions about violence. Specifically, since extreme violence and precarity are not necessarily bound to definable subjective agents or explicit forms of physical violence—as is demanded by commonly held understandings of violence—their actions and effects often remain unacknowledged or invisible, although they are frequently at the same time in full view and even hyper-visible.26 In this sense, bringing this violence into the field of vision is not so much a simple gesture of removing the alleged veil behind which violence would be hiding, but a matter of inquiring into and redesigning the conditions for the appearance of violence and the schemas that inform the visual field. Butler has provided one of the most nuanced analyses on the issue of the recognition and visibility of violence. Her book Frames of War is well known, among other things, for foregrounding the notion of ‘frame’ as that which configures and organizes both visibility and intelligibility; that is, for unpacking and expounding all the implicit assumptions underpinning the only apparently neutral acts of seeing and understanding. Before we denounce an act or a situation as violent, it is crucial to identify the conditions that allow us to see and understand violence (or prevent us from doing so), since ‘specific lives cannot be apprehended as injured or lost if they are not first apprehended as living’.27 However, long before the  Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, p. 2.  Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, p. 13. 26  ‘Society sees and knows these conditions and the harm they cause and yet does not see them, does not recognize them for what they are. This invisibility describes a failure to acknowledge that is occasioned not by an inadequate optics but by an indifference structurally bound up with the discursive limits of intelligibility’ (Winter, ‘Violence and Visibility’, p. 198). 27  Butler, Frames of War, p. 1. 24 25

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publication of this book, Butler engaged in a thorough examination of the racist frames that intervened in the prosecution of Rodney King, to the extent that a video of a man on the ground being brutally and repeatedly beaten by several policemen was ‘used as evidence that the body being beaten was itself the source of danger, the threat of violence’.28 His palm ‘turned away from his body, held above his own head, [was] read not as self-protection but as the incipient moments of a physical threat’.29 For this reason, the video cannot be used as visual evidence of an unjustified beating unless there is a prior reconsideration of how we come to read what we see, of how the visible is produced and rendered natural afterwards. For present purposes, this means that the apprehension of and the fight against extreme violence and precarity, which in spite of their virulence can often remain unacknowledged, require the implementation of an ethics and a politics of vision, a permanent interrogation of the frames through which we apprehend and understand the world we live in. Both Balibar and Butler are aware of the complexity of the specific form of violence they are confronted with—whether it is described as extreme violence or as precarity—and assume from the start that it might be ineradicable from politics and history.30 Nevertheless, this is not tantamount to adopting a pessimistic view or simply giving up; rather, this awareness leads to the recognition of the fragility, precariousness and contingency of politics and, from there, to the exploration of the possibilities for transformation, emancipation and the striving for a more livable life. In particular, both Butler and Balibar have formulated their political positions explicitly in terms of a challenge to this extreme violence and the exclusions that adhere to it. While Butler prefers the concept of non-violence, Balibar has coined the term ‘anti-violence’.

 Judith Butler, ‘Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia’, in Robert Gooding-Williams (ed.), Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 15 (pp. 15–22). 29  Butler, ‘Endangered/Endangering’, p. 16. 30  Balibar, Violence and Civility, p. xiv. 28

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 he Politics of Anti-Violence T and Non-Violence

Balibar understands politics as a reaction or response to extreme violence and, in this sense, equates politics to what he calls ‘anti-violence’.31 To pinpoint his position, he carefully distinguishes between three possible reactions to violence: non-violence, counter-violence and anti-violence. Non-violence is, for Balibar, an abstraction from violence, an ‘act of turning away, counting oneself out, or even protecting oneself ’.32 Counter-­ violence is an inversion of violence, an act of ‘returning violence or paying it back in kind’33 that entails the legitimation of violence as a reaction to another violence that struck first and is deemed illegitimate. Balibar also identifies as counter-violence any conversion of violence into an institution, law or power. Beyond non-violence and counter-violence, Balibar finds a third option: anti-violence. Anti-violence is defined as an ‘internal response to, or displacement of,’34 violence, an act of facing up to ‘or measuring oneself against that which is, doubtless, enormous or incommensurable’.35 Balibar clarifies that anti-violence is not merely a practice of resistance, a negative contestation of the established order, but a positive place wherein subjectivities are forged.36 Because anti-violence is necessarily a collective struggle, Balibar equates this position with a politics of civility, that is, a politics that would institute a citizenship that is always ‘in the making.’37 In this sense, anti-violence is a fragile, contingent and precarious practice.38 From Precarious Life onwards,39 Butler has assumed the task of formulating and defending a claim of non-violence as a ‘response to the  Balibar, Violence and Civility, pp. 21–22.  Ibid., p. 24. 33  Ibid., p. 24. 34  Ibid., p. 22. 35  Ibid., p. 23. 36  Ibid., p. 138. 37  Ibid., p. 147. 38  Ibid., pp. xiv, 97. 39  Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004). 31 32

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conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression’40 that characterize the contemporary conjuncture. While in her first works, which focused on the performativity of gender,41 violence was mainly thematized under the form of normative violence—namely, the violence of norms in the process of subjectivation, or the normalizing effect of norms; for example, gender norms—her later reflections on violence have included a more nuanced and multifaceted understanding of violence in relation to her analyses of precarity.42 From this new perspective, violence and exclusion are prompted not only by norms of identity—for example, ‘woman’—but also by any procedure that erodes the conditions for a livable life.43 In this context, Butler clarifies that her claim of non-violence is not an ingenuous position that contemplates violence as a completely alien phenomenon; rather, ‘it is precisely because one is mired in violence that the struggle exists and that the possibility of non-violence emerges’.44 In this sense, Butler’s non-violence is closer to Balibar’s anti-violence than to his non-violence, as her notion is explicitly distinguished from a mere abstraction from violence. Furthermore, Butler’s non-violence is presented not as passive, but as an active stance, as a practice that refuses to engage in violent retribution—in what Balibar calls ‘counter-violence’— and therefore intervenes as an interruption—or displacement—of violence.45

 Ibid., p. xi.  Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 1999). 42  For an analysis of the different meanings of violence in Butler’s work, see my ‘Judith Butler: From a Normative Violence to an Ethics of Non-violence’, in: Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala (eds.), The Meanings of Violence: From Critical Theory to Biopolitics (New York: Routledge, 2019) pp. 191–208. 43  For a detailed discussion of the different meanings of livability and life in Butler’s thought, see Adriana Zaharijević and Sanja Milutinović Bojanić, ‘The Trajectories of the Concept of Life in Judith Butler’s Thought’, Isegoría. Revista de Filosofía Moral y Política, n. 56, 2017, 169–185. 44  Butler, Frames of War, p. 171. 45  Butler, Frames of War, p. 183. 40 41

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F rom All Too Human to Not Human Enough

For both the politics of anti-violence and the claim of non-violence to become intelligible positions, Balibar and Butler recognize that a reassessment of the notion of the human is required, for the target of extreme violence and precarity is not a diffuse or vague abstraction, but something intimately related with the frontiers that outline the human being, and life in general. Since both belong to the philosophical lineage of structuralism and poststructuralism, approaches for which the concept of the human is something to be overcome rather than vindicated, Butler’s and Balibar’s reappraisal of this concept cannot be understood as a mere return to positions prior to the so-called controversy about humanism46—in other words, to an allegedly essential and ahistorical human nature. On the contrary, they commit to an anthropology that is always already a political anthropology; that is, they understand the human as a work in progress that must be permanently inspected so as to denounce the exclusions it might involve and reworked to better secure the conditions of a livable life. In Butler’s words: We do not need any more ideal forms of the human that always imply lesser forms of the same, or that erase from view modes of life that cannot be translated into that norm, making them surely less livable rather than more. But precisely because ‘the human’ continues to be so politically charged, and for those very reasons, it seems we have to rethink its smaller place within a set of relations, so that we can ask after the conditions in which the ‘human’ is differentially recognized.47

Anti-humanism dominated French philosophy and human sciences during the second half of the twentieth century, with representatives such as Louis Althusser, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, to name but a few. This approach ran in parallel with the  Louis Althusser, ‘The Humanist Controversy’, in The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings (1966–1967), ed. François Matheron, trans. G.  M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 221–305. 47  Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, p. 134. 46

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proliferation of metaphors and images of violence that we briefly engaged with at the beginning of this chapter. Both tendencies—anti-­humanism and the recourse to violence—sought to denounce and deconstruct the identities and norms accepted by common sense as natural, essential and ahistorical to show that they were in reality contingent, cultural constructions politically loaded with power relations whose effect was to suffocate differences and, in general, whatever did not comply with the norm. While Balibar and Butler incorporate into their views the anti-­ humanist critique of fixed essences, and even add to them a critique of anthropocentrism,48 the specific conjuncture their theories respond to— extreme violence and precarity—demands a re-evaluation of the function of the concept of the human. This re-evaluation of the human is not exclusive to Butler and Balibar, for it has been a widespread phenomenon in contemporary political theory, to the extent that it has led some to speak of an ‘ontological turn’.49 Since this turn to the human does not return to essential and naturalist positions, Stephen K. White has specified, drawing from Gianni Vattimo’s lexicon, that it should be considered a ‘weak ontological turn’.50 Oliver Marchart has characterized this position as ‘post-foundationalism’,51 that is, a view that is neither foundationalism nor anti-foundationalism, but the affirmation of grounds as necessary yet contingent.52 Distancing itself from the radical interpretations of anti-humanism, this approach no longer argues for the total absence of all grounds, but rather for the contingency—and weak ontological status—of the act of grounding. Similarly, while it accepts that identities, substances, and essences are not universal and ahistorical but contingent, culturally constructed and contestable, it also acknowledges that a certain form of identity and humanity is necessary for engaging  Pierpaolo Antonello and Roberto Farneti, ‘Antigone’s Claim: A Conversation with Judith Butler’, Theory & Event 12 (2000). Available online at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/263144. 49  Stephen K.  White, Sustaining Affirmation. The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 3. 50  Ibid., p. 7. 51  Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 52  Butler indeed coined the expression ‘contingent foundations’. See Judith Butler, ‘Contingent Foundations’, in: Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Nancy Fraser, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 35–58. 48

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with the problems of political agency. As Marchart puts it, ‘the quest for grounds ... is accepted as a both impossible and indispensable enterprise’.53 In this sense, whereas anti-humanism criticized a notion of the human that was indeed all too human—too fixed, essential and normalizing— and was happy to see it disappear as a face drawn in the sand washed away by the sea,54 the anthropological turn in which Butler and Balibar partake is a response to the awareness that, for extended parts of the world’s population, the human is still not human enough; that is, the notion of the human at work is too restrictive and so condemns those not included to the status of inhuman. Yet, recuperating the human in this context means being careful not to fall back onto an all too human figure, wherein the human is understood to entail a fixed and clear-cut essence. In Butler’s words, ‘we must learn to live and to embrace the destruction and rearticulation of the human in the name of a more capacious and, finally, less violent world, not knowing in advance what precise form our humanness does and will take. It means we must be open to its permutations’.55 For Balibar, this entails that the human must be neither ‘absolutely one’,56 that is, a massive, exclusive, singular and unambiguous identity, nor ‘no one’,57 that is, a post-modern utopia of pure fluidity and free floating between identifications; both extremes carry effects of violence and unlivability. Having outlined what anti-violence and non-violence mean for Balibar and Butler, and having unfolded the anthropological implications behind these concepts, the next section will examine the two remaining vertices of the quadrangle that structures this chapter: vulnerability and civility.

 Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, p. 9.  Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 422. 55  Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 35. 56  Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, trans. Christine Jones, James Swenson, Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2002), p. 29. 57  Idem. 53 54

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Vulnerability and Civility

Based on their own terms, Butler and Balibar design a political anthropology within the tensional space between humanism and anti-­humanism. To do so, they agree that the category of the human must, on the one hand, be stable enough to provide a common, inclusive ground for those who do not count as human and are therefore systematically excluded and as such condemned by extreme violence and precarity to live an unlivable life, while on the other hand maintaining that ‘the human’ cannot be rethought from and around a fixed essence that would impose restrictive practices or norms. Their respective responses to this challenge are crystallized in Butler’s notion of vulnerability and Balibar’s idea of civility.58 Since Precarious Life, published in 2004, Butler has proposed an understanding of the human as simultaneously constituted and undone by its inherent vulnerability. The human cannot will away its primary vulnerability to others without ceasing to be human.59 To be vulnerable means to be exposed to and dependent on others and other things. In other words, vulnerability follows from ‘our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure.’60 This vulnerability, also referred to by Butler as precariousness, is the element of a political anthropology that is called upon not for purely theoretical purposes—that is, not just as an abstract reflection on the human condition—but as a practical rejoinder to render visible and fight against the effects of extreme violence and precarity. Precariousness is presented by Butler as a ‘general conception of the human ... one in which we are, from the start, given over to the other.’61 This is not the specific feature of certain lives as opposed to others, but ‘a  I have explored elsewhere the tropes of catachresis and mis-being as two figures of the human in Butler and Balibar. See my ‘Catachresis and Mis-Being in Judith Butler and Étienne Balibar: Contemporary Refigurations of the Human as a Face Drawn in the Sand’, Literature & Theology, vol. 32, n. 2, 2018, pp. 142–160. 59  Butler, Precarious Life, p. xiv. 60  Ibid., p. 20. 61  Ibid., p. 31. 58

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generalized condition whose very generality can be denied only by denying precariousness itself.’62 Nevertheless, this precariousness or vulnerability is differentially distributed depending on power relations and social and economic regulations, with the consequence that some subjects are more exposed to violence than others. To highlight this politically induced situation, Butler introduces the notion of ‘precarity.’63 Violence and exclusion are not simply the causal result of an existential condition of vulnerability or precariousness, but operate through the differential materialization and distribution of precarity. Addressing the issue of vulnerability allows Butler to articulate (1) a political anthropology of minimum content—which proposes not an essential but a relational understanding of the human—and, from the criterion provided by this, (2) an ethico-political obligation toward the other that depends on me. ‘The precarity of life imposes an obligation upon us,’64 she says, and her commitment is to secure the conditions to ‘make broader social and political claims about rights of protection and entitlements to persistence and flourishing’;65 in other words, to make life more livable. Balibar has been reworking his idea of the human and the subject since the 1980s. One of his first interventions took place in a special issue of the journal Topoi coordinated by Jean-Luc Nancy, who invited the contributors to respond to the question: ‘who comes after the subject?’66 With this formulation, Nancy wanted to explore, almost twenty years after its zenith, the aftermath of the critique of subjectivity and the so-­ called ‘death of the subject’; that is, the deconstruction of mastery, self-­ sufficiency and substance. In his introduction to the volume, he explained that the aim of the critique of the subject was not to obliterate or liquidate it—which would be pure nihilism—but to quarantine it, to put it on trial and enquire about the processes of subjectivation and power  Butler, Frames of War, p. 22.  Ibid., p. 25. 64  Ibid., p. 2. 65  Idem. 66  Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy (eds.), Who Comes after the Subject? (New York: Routledge, 1991). 62 63

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relations operating in its constitution.67 Nancy poses his question ‘who comes after the subject?’ because he acknowledges that in the present conjuncture ‘something ... comes toward us and calls us forth’;68 because something, or rather someone—the question is ‘who’ and not ‘what’—is interpellating us. In this sense, responding to Nancy’s question appears almost as an ethical obligation toward the ‘who’ that is addressing us. Balibar takes up Nancy’s invitation and responds that the citizen is this ‘who’ that comes after the subject.69 Tracing a genealogy that takes him from the subject as subjectus or subditus, that is, as subjected or submitted, through the subject as subjectum or hypokeimenon, the subject as the grounding principle of modernity, to the notion of citizen, Balibar shows that (1) the rights of the citizen are not grounded in an essence or nature of the human; (2) inversely, the human is the result of this formulation of citizenship; and (3) only retroactively does this human establish the sovereignty of the citizen.70 For example, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 states that men ‘are born and remain, free and equal.’71 Balibar calls this position ‘Arendt’s theorem’: ‘it is not man [sic] who makes the institution, but the institution that makes (or, depending on the case, unmakes) man’.72 This citizenship, however, is not something established once and for all, but what Balibar calls a ‘hyperbolic proposition’73 whose developments are necessarily conflictual and agonistic. Furthermore, Balibar underlines the precariousness and contingency of citizenship, and the extent to which it is permanently threatened by violence. In order to tackle this particular relationship between citizenship and violence, Balibar appeals to the notion of ‘civility’. Subjects are constituted through processes of identification with certain identities and through the  Ibid., p. 5.  Idem. 69  Étienne Balibar, ‘Citizen Subject’, in Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy (eds.), Who Comes after the Subject? (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 33–57. 70  Ibid., p. 44. 71  Ibid., p. 44. 72  Étienne Balibar, Equaliberty: Political Essays, trans. James Ingram (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 315. 73  Ibid., p. 45. 67 68

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incorporation of a sense of belonging; this is what Balibar calls, drawing from Freud’s definition of the unconscious, the ‘other scene’.74 This other scene is the place where politics is engineered; it is the condition for political action—such as transformation or emancipation—to take place, and is where Balibar locates the problem of civility, defined initially as ‘the politics which takes as its “object” the very violence of identities’75 and as its aim the limitation of this violence. Later, Balibar will equate civility with the politics of anti-violence.76 Civility is the set of strategies devised to exclude extreme violence in order to create a space for politics.77 In this sense, rather than a specific institution, civility is the instituting gesture of politics. From this perspective, the only way to confront extreme violence is to invoke, and hence to bring into the realm of the visible, the human under the form of civility, civility being ‘the point at which violence is felt to be intolerable and incompatible with “human” existence, which it threatens with death, misery, or abjection.’78 This does not make of civility an anthropological foundation,79 but a pure limit defined by its encounter with forms of extreme violence. Balibar coins the term ‘transindividual’80 to insist on the inessentiality, insubstantiality and relationality of his notion of the human. The human is the precarious, open and changing result of, to say it with Marx, ‘the ensemble of the social relations.’81 To engage with the specific violence of exclusion, from which other sorts of violence—physical, symbolic, social or economic—derive, Balibar develops what he understands by ‘anthropological differences’. The notion of the  Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, p. 2.  Ibid., p. 23. 76  Balibar, Violence and Civility, p. 36. 77  Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, p. 30. See also Balibar, Violence and Civility, p. 65. 78  Balibar, Violence and Civility, p. 159. 79  Ibid., p. xiii. 80  Ibid., p.  138. See also Jason Read, ‘The “Other Scene” of Political Anthropology: Between Transindividuality and Equaliberty’, in: Warren Montag and Hanan Elsayed (eds.), Balibar and the Citizen Subject (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 111–131, where the notion is tracked back to Gilbert Simondon (p. 112). 81  Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 7; Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trans. C.  Turner (London: Verso, 1995), p.  27; Étienne Balibar, Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology, trans. Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University, 2017), pp. 299–300. 74 75

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human that he is using does not result in a homogeneous definition, but in a collection of differential relations that are singularly manifested in each individual. The ensemble of these social relations is, therefore, dissymmetrical in that it does not materialize equally in every subject, with the result that anthropological differences appear. We cannot imagine the human without these differences; nevertheless, what distinguishes humans one from another cannot be pinned down, represented and defined clearly without inflicting violence on the subjects that are distinguished—that is, without producing exclusions through the imposition of rigid identities. In this sense, anthropological differences are ‘at once irreducible and indeterminable’.82 The examples that Balibar provides of anthropological differences are those of race, sex and normality/abnormality. While it is true that anthropological differences are precisely that which equality and the universality of rights aim to obliterate—that nobody should be discriminated against by reason of sex, race, and so on—they are simultaneously the site where exclusion can be denounced and the human reworked from within.

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Concluding Remarks

As I have argued, the state of affairs that Balibar and Butler attempt to apprehend through the notions of extreme violence and precarity has compelled them to formulate (1) a critique of violence; (2) an enquiry into the composition and conditions of the visual field and, in general, of the frames of intelligibility; and (3) a politics of anti-violence or non-­ violence. These projects have encountered the need to reassess the importance of appealing to a particular notion of the human, and have therefore operated within the tensional space created from and between humanism and the anti-humanist critique of the human. They point out the ambiguous status of the human: while it can be the source of exclusions and violence when understood in fixed, ahistorical terms, the human, rethought as a relational and non-essential being, has the potential to become a powerful resource from which to impose a limit on extreme violence and its exclusionary logic.

 Balibar, Citizen Subject, p. 16. See also p. 292.

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Part III Rethinking Exclusion: The Challenges of Democratic Orders in the Twenty-First Century

8 Difference and Recognition: A Critical Lecture on Axel Honneth, Jacques Rancière and Nancy Fraser Laura Herrero Olivera

1

Introduction: The Meaning of Recognition and Redistribution

In these pages I aim to introduce some reflections on the concepts of difference and recognition, in the way that they have been discussed by the authors mentioned in the title, Axel Honneth, Jacques Rancière and Nancy Fraser. I have chosen these thinkers considering the links that can be drawn between their works and current international political and social problems. Some of the dialogues they have maintained and published—such as the books Recognition or Disagreement, based on a critical encounter between Rancière and Honneth, or Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical Exchange, which displays an Laura Herrero Olivera is teacher in the Faculty of Philosophy, UNED, Madrid

L. Herrero Olivera (*) National Education University (UNED), Madrid, Spain Feminist Research Institute, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Rodríguez Lopez et al. (eds.), Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60519-3_8

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exchange of ideas by Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth—show a very specific attitude to their own ideas and to the way in which philosophy can develop its proposals. For this reason, the reflection I propose requires, firstly, thinking about self and social identities, and above all viewing them as non-closed concepts which need dialogue to be evolved, as well as concepts with performative implications. Recognition should be understood as the recognition and respect of identities, and difference plays a more problematic role depending on the demands posed by societies. This role can be positive if differences are respected and recognized, or negative if they are used to justify exclusions. Secondly, I am sure that this academic reflection will be enriched by anchoring it in the real-­ common world, and so I will refer not only to philosophical readings but to current political and social problems (or issues considered as problems) such as migratory movements, the crossing of borders, vulnerability and exclusion. In this sense, I will take advantage of the aspect of Rancière’s method that he calls the poetics of knowledge,1 which is part of the way to emancipation. The schema of this chapter is as follows: The chapter begins with an introduction recovering some Arendtian terms taken from her short essay ‘We Refugees’ (Arendt 1943).2 Statements in that text were written from the appealing and surprising perspective of the refugees’ own speech, to illustrate Arendt’s comments about outsiders and their struggle for recognition. I will try to link these words to a few poignant remarks in the article ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture’ (Arendt 1971). After this, I will discuss some extracts of Axel Honneth’s book The Struggle for Recognition. Many relevant pages in this book treat not only the concepts, but the reality of personal identity and disrespect, resistance and social conflicts, and it will  Rancière explains the poetics of knowledge in dialogue with Axel Honneth, in the chapter dedicated to the ‘Method of Critical Theory’, with these words: ‘It means that (…) to deal with the truth of a discourse, we must turn down the position of the scientist and re-inscribe one’s descriptions and arguments in the equality of common language and the common capacity of thinking’ (Rancière & Honneth, 2016, p. 148). In this chapter Rancière presents the poetics of knowledge as a political potential insofar as it recognizes the same capacities in any subject and, in recognizing them, no possible subordination is legitimated for the execution of political power. 2  This article was first published in a small Jewish journal called Menorah (shut down in 1961). See information in http://amroali.com/2017/04/refugees-essay-hannah-arendt/. On this page there is also a free open version. It was recovered and printed again in Robinson, M.(ed.), Altogether Elsewhere, Writers on Exile, Faber & Faber, Boston, London, 1994. I will be quoting from this book. 1

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help to use some of these realities to consider the context of contemporary social struggles and to tackle the question, ‘what happens when recognition fails?’. I will also introduce some remarks on the text ‘Invisibility: On the Epistemology of “Recognition”’ (2001) by the same author. In the next section, I will recover some of Jacques Rancière’s proposals and the meaning of his use of the concept ‘disagreement’ with the aim of questioning the concept of identity. I will move quickly to the next section in which I will summarize the tensions in the Europe’s southernmost border with the African continent, the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, where female workers risk their lives working as human mules in a no man’s land. We will use the concepts introduced in the previous sections to point out what can be said about this from a philosophical point of view. In fact, it is for this last purpose that I have chosen to examine the proposals of these particular philosophers. Finally, we will review Nancy Fraser’s ideas on difference and recognition, and will conclude by reading some extracts from Jorge Semprún’s The Long Voyage.

2

Hannah Arendt on Refugees

In 1943, Hannah Arendt wrote the following words in reference to her own life and to, at that time, her present experience as a refugee in the United States: In the first place, we don’t like to be called ‘refugees.’ We ourselves call each other ‘newcomers’ or ‘immigrants.’ Our newspapers are papers for ‘Americans of German language’; and, as far as I know, there is not and never was any club founded by Hitler-persecuted people whose name indicated that its members were refugees. (Arendt 1943, p. 110)

My interest in choosing this text by Arendt is, firstly, to shift the perspective of the discourse on refugees, that is, giving them a voice and not merely talking about them. Indeed, this is part of the function of the poetics of knowledge proposed by Rancière decades later, as in these pages we recognize Arendt as a refugee more than as an expert developing a political theory. Having chosen this Arendtian text outlines another

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interest that can be thought of as a dialectic one, as two ways of understanding oneself as a refugee are called into question. While on the one hand we recognize in Arendt’s lecture the wish to be an American and not a refugee as a way to be part of a society and the wish to assume roles equal to those of other members of that society, regardless of origin, on the other hand, current political affairs lead us to the more pressing requirement of being recognized for one’s status of refugee. This recognition is the way to be part of society, with a very specific and narrow role to be sure, but at least a part of society and not abandoned on the margins. Being a refugee is, at least, having a name in one of the most vulnerable ways in our present society. This means that, while we recognize, in Hannah Arendt’s words, a desire for identification, we also see nowadays the tendency or even the duty to be different as a way of at least being recognized. Hannah Arendt expressed her desires in such an ironic way that we shiver at the distance from which she was able to view the experiences that she and other immigrants (refugees?) have suffered. For example, we read: We left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives. Nevertheless, as soon as we were saved—and most of us had to be saved several times– we started our new lives and tried to follow as closely as possible all the good advice our saviors passed on to us. We were told to forget; and we forgot quicker than anybody ever could imagine. (…) Even among ourselves we don’t speak about this past. (Arendt 1943, p. 110)

The duty to forget their past lives leads us to the question, ‘why do they deserve the name of refugee, which links them not with their possible future or with their present situation but with their past?’. The concept of ‘refugee’ emerges here as a recognition of some past event in the sphere of private life, and this event can be remembered simply as task of the private sphere. We can thus understand Hannah Arendt’s uneasiness about the situation:

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A refugee used to be a person driven to seek refuge because of some act committed or some political opinion held. Well, it is true we have had to seek refuge; but we committed no acts and most of us never dreamt of ­having any radical opinion. With us the meaning of the term ‘refugee’ has changed. Now ‘refugees’ are those of us who have been so unfortunate as to arrive in a new country without means and have to be helped by Refugee Committees. (Arendt 1943, p. 110)

In this way, a shift can be recognized from a lack of public enterprise (‘we committed no acts’), or even a lack of public interest (‘having any radical opinion’), to a duty to be part of public affairs (‘to be helped by Refugee Committees’). It could even be said that they, the refugees, lost not only their private lives but also their humble public life, and were forced to assume a different public life, because: We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. (Arendt 1943, p. 110)

She is speaking here about her identity, her language, her natural behaviour, that is, the identity she has chosen for herself; at the same time, she is speaking about the identity others had assigned to her as the member of a historical religious community forced into exile from the European political field, the identity for which she was forced to find a safer place to begin a new life (‘We are the first non-religious Jews persecuted’). This compels us to consider whether identity will always be forced upon us, or if we can choose some of its traits. For the moment, we can grasp that the misrecognition of a difference, or the public creation of a difference, in Arendt’s life has led to the fact that: Apparently, nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends. (Arendt 1943, p. 110)

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The question of identity is commented on by Arendt in the article ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture’, written almost three decades later (Arendt 1971). The contribution of this text is to present identity as a continuous activity, a never-ending task that should not be forced but that brings with it a permanent conflict, not only between the subject and the others, but especially between the subject and itself. Although at first sight the article seems not to have much in common with ‘We Refugees’, it raises again the question of what it means to say ‘me and you’, articulated from the capacity of thinking. It is no coincidence that the question of identity is discussed in this text along with Plato’s famous statement about justice in Gorgias: ‘It is better to be wronged than to do wrong’ (Plato, Gorgias, 473e). The question of identity is introduced by quotation of Socrates: ‘It would be better for me that my lyre or a chorus I directed should be out of tune and loud with discord, and that multitude of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself and contradict me’ (Plato, Gorgias, 482b). Actually, the main objective in Arendt’s lecture is to explain again (after her major work Eichmann in Jerusalem) the meaning of the ‘banality of evil’ and how it arises from the lack or inability to think itself, or as Arendt puts it at the beginning of the article ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, from an ‘extraordinary shallowness’. We might ask into what depth we should aim to enter in order to avoid this shallowness, the condition of evil-doing, and, as a conclusion drawn from the text, we might answer that it is not different from the depth3 of ourselves and our identities, thought of as something different from ‘clichés, stock phrases and (…) standardized codes’ (Arendt 1971, p. 418). Identities should be created from the active responsibility to approve our own codes of expressions and conduct. This task is directly linked to the activity of thinking, understood as the quest for meaning. This quest aims to protect us against this disharmony with ourselves; at the same time, Arendt recognizes that  In fact, Arendt does not use the term ‘depth’ in this lecture; a term which could in some way refer to an invisible world, which she explicitly rejects. If I introduce it here, it is just to oppose it to the shallowness of an action executed in acceptance of a non-critical code. On the contrary, we can find the term ‘depth’ in Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition used to express the way in which a psychological injury can affect a subject (Axel Honneth, p. 132). 3

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‘for myself, articulating this being-conscious-of-myself, I am inevitably two-in-one’ (Arendt 1971, p. 442). By shifting the voice speaking to an imaginary reading of what would be ‘Them Refugees’, I want to point out that it is not the barbarian, the one out of society, but Plato, who can say ‘it is better for me to suffer wrong than to do wrong’; Plato is right insofar as he is a member of society. But for the one out of society and not recognized in her/his identity, it is not possible to affirm this, because the wrong is precisely the experience of being out of society. Who is the subject suffering injustice? Plato continues, as Hannah Arendt does, referring to identity, by stating that insofar as we recognize an inner difference that allows our consciousness to arise, we recognize ourselves not as one, but within the multitude: To be sure, when I appear and am seen by others, I am one; otherwise I would be unrecognizable. And so long as I am together with others, barely conscious of myself, I am as I appear to others. We call consciousness (literally, ‘to know with myself ’) the curious fact that in a sense I also am for myself, though I hardly appear to me, which indicates that the Socratic ‘being-one’ is not so unproblematic as it seems; I am not only for others but for myself, and in this latter case, I clearly am not just one. A difference is inserted into my Oneness. (Arendt 1971, p. 441)

To summarize Arendt’s proposals, we could say that the subject is always one in two, the subject is always in dialogue with itself, a dialogue that may become a struggle to bring these two into harmony as part of a moral task and a conclusion to the activity of thinking. Finally, in relation to ‘We Refugees’, the following question can be posed: ‘How can a refugee (a migrant, a person who has been denied her right to be recognized as a citizen) construct her identity, taking into account what she thinks about these two in harmony, and at the same time, what others demand from her?’ This question leads us to the interpretation and proposals of those authors writing about difference and recognition in the twenty-first century and to the proposals of Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser and Jacques Rancière. Hannah Arendt relies much on the individual activity of constructing an identity, and for that reason the public and private spheres remain distant from each other. When the private and the public spheres

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do not fit together, suicide becomes a solution for dealing with this struggle, as she dramatically expresses in ‘We Refugees’: ‘Unlike other suicides, our friends leave no explanation of their deed, no indictment, no charge against a world that had forced a desperate man to talk and to behave cheerfully to his very last day’ (Arendt 1943, p. 112). In the next section, we will see how intersubjectivity emerges as a bridge between these two spheres that are necessarily linked.

3

Axel Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition

In the second part of his book The Struggle for Recognition, entitled ‘A Systematic Renewal: The Structure of Social Relations of Recognition’, Axel Honneth presents an original interpretation of Hegel’s theory of intersubjective recognition, along with the proposals of George Herbert Mead on the psychological experience. This step adds to Arendt’s proposal on identity the need for intersubjectivity in order to build subjects, and how the lack of it leads to disrespect and even to subjects which are pathological. Taking into consideration the works of Hegel and Mead, Honneth presents the construction of the self as an evolution with well-established stages. First, as an interacting social object the subject learns what others expect from it from a cognitive point of view. Later, the encounter also poses normative questions that enable it to move from epistemic self-­ relation to the identity of the practical ego (Honneth 1995, p. 75). This difference can be illustrated by an example that distinguishes between a role being played, in which the child imitates the behaviour of a playmate and acts according to the other’s expectations, and a game in which the child has to take into account all her playmates’ expectations. A difference of generalization in behaviour is at play here, so that expectations become norms of actions that make it possible to predict the responses of others. This normative realm enables the subject to grasp both her obligations and her rights; in fact, these rights are her way of recognizing herself as a member of a community. Such rights and obligations, however,

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shared by all participants in the community, still require a way to individualize each subject, and so some way to express the differences among members of the community needs to be found; for this reason, creativity must have a place in our self-representations. This creativity is also related to the normative realm; in fact, the subject’s creativity is a response to unassimilated normativity, the aim to be free from the social conventions. This moral conflict could be resolved by an exercise in idealization: ‘If one is to realize the demands of one’s “I”, one must be able to anticipate a community in which one is entitled to have those desires satisfied’ (Honneth 1995, p.  83). This issue is a concern of Jacques Rancière’s; identification or recognition by a community should be presupposed in order to guarantee a process of subjectivation or recognition of difference or, according to Rancière, of equality. This movement of an ever wider space for freedom is a process of civilization with a tendency toward the liberation of individuality. However, Honneth wishes to make sure there is enough space for free activity and individualization. From my own point of view, there is already too much space for the idealization of human and historical progress as an ever wider space of freedom and recognition for the individual. Honneth casts his doubts about this issue. The second part of his book concludes with a chapter that reflects on the ‘Violation of the Body, the Denial of Rights and the Denigration of Ways of Life’ as categories opposed to those of love, rights and solidarity, which are the necessary steps for achieving a sufficient recognition of the subject—indeed, it is only when the subject counts upon such forms of recognition that her identity can be solidly built in the social sphere. The forms of disrespect, violation, denigration and denial of rights, on the other hand, are made possible by human vulnerability. If we depend upon social recognition to develop our self-­ image and identity, we are depending upon contingent facts and, for this reason, are inherently open to being harmed or humiliated; we are thus vulnerable to other community members. The first and most basic form of humiliation is the violation of bodily integrity that leads to a lack of confidence in oneself, to a lack of autonomy but also a lack of confidence in the social world itself:

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For what is specific to these kinds of physical injury, as exemplified by torture and rape, is not the purely physical pain but rather the combination of this pain with the feeling of being defencelessly at the mercy of another subject, to the point of feeling that one has been deprived of reality. (Honneth 1995, p. 132)

The second form of humiliation is the denial of rights, and in the light of the previous remarks means the exclusion from a society in which the subject does not find her individual expectations guaranteed: To this extent, the experience of this type of disrespect typically brings with it a loss of self-respect, of the ability to relate to oneself as a legally equal interaction partner with all fellow humans. Thus, the kind of recognition that this type of disrespect deprives one of is the cognitive regard for the status of moral responsibility that had to be so painstakingly acquired in the interactive processes of socialization. (Honneth 1995, p. 134)

What I want to emphasize by this quote is the danger of losing the acknowledgement of responsible acts. The subject feels herself no longer related to a community and in such a situation that she cannot feel responsible for her acts, as responsibility is a feeling that links us to other subjects and should be recognized beforehand as such. Finally, we find the social devaluation of a person’s honour: [...] or, to use the modern term, status (that) refers to the degree of social esteem accorded to his or her manner of self-realization within a society’s inherited cultural horizon. If this hierarchy of values is so constituted as to downgrade individual forms of life and manners of belief as inferior or deficient, then it robs the subjects in question of every opportunity to attribute social value to their own abilities. (Honneth 1995, p. 134)

These last two forms of humiliation are the expression of what Hannah Arendt presented in her text ‘We Refugees’, and we could even link the concept of humiliation with the more metaphorical one of being, in Platonic terms, ‘out of harmony’. Inevitably, such thoughts cast doubt on our preferred scenario for the twenty-first century. Do we actually prefer to be out of harmony with the multitude or do we prefer only to be out

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of harmony with ourselves? From the point of view of ‘We Refugees’, being out of harmony for the inner subject means to be tied to her destruction in the form, for example, of a suicide (or at least to commit a partial suicide by forgetting one’s private past life). In ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, harmony is achieved by a permanent conflict in the act of thinking. Both texts opt for a pre-eminence of the relation of the subject with herself. It is also true that the distance between the formulation of Plato’s propositions and Arendt’s or Honneth’s texts make it in some sense impossible to offer a neat answer. Nowadays (as in Arendt’s day), the private and public spheres cannot be presented as totally independent. In Honneth’s text, for example, ‘intersubjectivity’ expresses the bridge between them. Perhaps for this reason, from the point of view of The Struggle for Recognition, we could say that first of all we need to be in harmony with others as a condition for achieving personal identity, as ‘the experience of being socially denigrated or humiliated endangers the identity of human beings’ (Honneth 1995, p. 135). In The Struggle for Recognition, Honneth explains the motivational role misrespect can play for social movements. People will struggle for recognition after having experienced the violation of their bodies, the denial of their rights or the denigration of some ways of life, and some of their responses will assume the form of these same contingent events. It is thus very interesting to note how Honneth explains the emerging of social conflicts while paying more attention to the moral realm than to material interests. Empirical sociology would be too much under the influence of Darwinian or utilitarian models ‘in terms of competition over material opportunities’ (Honneth 1995, p. 160), and so he proposes a counter-­ model ‘that takes as its starting point moral feelings of indignation, rather than pre-given interests’ (Honneth 1995, p. 161), although at the same time he assumes that one model does not replace another, but merely extends it. This is actually an ancient question, one directed toward the causes of social movements, i.e. are these movements triggered by the need of survival, or are they normally triggered as a response to a moral injustice in the form of disrespect, lack of recognition or humiliation? Five years after ‘The Struggle for Recognition’, Honneth published the article entitled ‘Invisibility: On the Epistemology of “Recognition”’, which can be read as a good example of humiliation through the denial

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of rights and being denied the possibility to choose an autonomous way of life. Honneth tells the story of a black man who is invisible to others. A reflection about different kinds of invisibility is then introduced to explain the way in which social invisibility, a sign of social existence, can damage one’s personal integrity. Invisibility in the moral sense is conditioned by optical visibility because to be socially ignored, which is a public event, requires having been individually recognized in the private realm. In the case of social invisibility, inclusion in a community becomes impossible and at the same time the way in which the harmony of the subject with herself, in the way Arendt has presented it, is made difficult. Honneth takes another step forward and considers that we, as subjects, are not only dependent on being included in a community, or on how social respect influences our ability to dialogue with ourselves, but we also ‘suffer’ a decentration when we offer value to another subject. In Honneth’s consideration, this is the proper last step taken for understanding Rancière’s need to affirm: ‘You also have to exchange your suffering against another, which at this point is precisely a kind of symbolic suffering’ (Honneth and Rancière 2016, p. 127).

4

J acques Rancière and the Meaning of His Use of the Concept ‘Disagreement’

I want now to turn to the articles ‘Critical Questions on the Theory of Recognition’ and ‘The Method of Equality. Politics and Poetics’ (Honneth and Rancière 2016) in which Rancière discusses Honneth’s proposal on recognition. Rancière pays special attention to, and is very critical of, the concept of identity. He presents the need to construct the subject and the community, the activity described in Honneth’s text, but this construction is never-ending, as might also be thought from Honneth’s proposal. In Rancière’s words, it is possible to find the other side of creating identities, the side we have seen in Hannah Arendt’s text. Identity is not only what a subject says, or is, in terms of his or her actions, but also what others say or even impose on this same subject. For this reason, the

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struggle for recognition can sometimes be conceived as a claim for not being assigned an identity: A minority claim is not only the claim to have one’s culture and the like recognized; it’s also a claim precisely to not be considered as a minority obeying special rules, (…). It can be viewed as a claim to have the same rights (…) as all those who are not assigned any special identity. (Honneth and Rancière 2016, p. 90)

This dis-identification process is now referred to as a process of subjectivization. The subject is created in the performative action of naming it, as the collective subject of a political declaration. This configuration of the subject has its consequences in political relations, which Rancière explains in the following words: If recognition is not merely a response to something already existing, if it is an original configuration of the common world, this means that individuals and groups are always, in some way, recognized with a place and a competence so that the struggle is not for recognition but for another form of recognition: a redistribution of the places, the identities and the parts. (Honneth and Rancière 2016, p. 90)

Rancière proposes the term ‘distribution of the sensible’ to express the way in which activities are distributed in specific spaces and times. Politics has, in his texts, an aesthetic sense, simply because it should address the ways in which our sensible world is organized and why we do so. The possible emancipation of those who seek to shift their places should be conducted according to the method of equality, taking into account that a redistribution of the sensible is in fact possible. This redistribution occurs when we start not from the consideration of difference, but from the consideration of an actual equality: ‘Dissensus starts with a new belief: the joiner believes he is at home in the place where he is exploited’ (Honneth and Rancière 2016, p. 141). According to Rancière, workers can express that they are equal through their language. He speaks about workers’ newspapers and the power of imagination of those workers who can imagine that they are elsewhere while they are working. This capacity

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for thinking out of one’s own body represents a kind of subversion, a kind of revolution that demands a redistribution of the sensible. In the political sphere, common language also plays its role, as attention is redirected not to the expert, but to anyone having the same capacity to think the distribution of the sensible in a specific place and time. In the introduction to this chapter, we referred to this method as the poetics of knowledge. This appealing presentation of the revolutionary option, starting from the common universal capacity recognized in any subject, might nevertheless be seen as too optimistic to take place. It demands a mastery of language on the one hand, and on the other, if Rancière criticizes any attempt to defend a close identity, it seems to be that of a given capacity developed to the same level in each subject. In the following section, I have chosen a difficult example for reflecting upon how the characters in a specific scenario might find a way to implement a redistribution of the sensible.

5

 he ‘Mule Women’ at the Spanish T Frontier, a Reflection Inspired by Rancière’s Method4

The borders of Melilla and Ceuta are witness every day to the illegal condition of many female workers who trade goods across the border to Morocco, without the possibility of entering into contractual relations as they have no interlocutor to whom they can demand another scenario. Morocco does not recognize Spanish sovereignty over these North African territories; for that reason, commercial agreements cannot be signed, and unregulated cross-border trade takes place in broad daylight. As opposed to the illegal trade of goods on the streets of other European cities, carried out very frequently by migrants and fiercely combated by local traders, the fight against the traffic of goods across borders in these tiny European enclaves is not headed up by any local network, in part because the socio-­ economic order in these European-African cities is in fact based on these  For more information see: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/may/10/melilla-refugeesspain-africa-gateway-europe. 4

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non-contractual relations. According to the most recent data, 25% of income in Ceuta comes from IPSI, the local tax on goods arriving at the Port of Ceuta. Half of these goods become export items. It is supposed that 600 million euros are moved in the related transactions (Report 2016; APDHA 2018, p. 83). The special status of these non-recognized borders make it possible to cross them carrying only hand luggage, which means that one is allowed to carry whatever one wants as long as that person can carry it on her shoulders. Dealers working on both sides of the border hire people (mainly Moroccan women) to carry goods in hand luggage from Spain into Morocco and pay them very low wages. The interest in trading with these goods is that they are either difficult to find on the other side of the border, or much cheaper if introduced into Morocco without paying taxes. These ‘mule women’ belong normally to the poorest segments of the population, and are very often single mothers, divorced women or widows. All of them have something in common; they are the breadwinners of their households. The job is in effect a highly organized smuggling activity. The women work in front of the authorities, with timetables that depend on what other citizens can cross the border or have to move to other gates. The more they can carry, the more they are paid, and they try to cross as often as possible. For this reason, outbursts of violence have taken many lives, five in 2017, the last reported year. They have been photographed, reports have been published about their situation, but they have not spoken, which means that they haven’t made use of the common language that Rancière presupposed for everyone. One fact that can help us to understand this situation is the difference in development between both countries. According to the most recent data registered by the Human Development Index,5 Spain appears in the 27th place and Morocco almost hundred places afterwards in the 123rd position. The border is said to represent one of the widest economic differences between countries and, as very weak legislation on both sides seems to strengthen private interests and ignore public issues, this type of smuggling has become an accepted and standardized way of living.  http://hdr.undp.org/en/composite/HDI.

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Rancière discusses and disagrees with the proposals that consider passivity as an effect of not having recognized domination, and also as the consequence of not knowing what to do with the knowledge of being exploited. According to him, this explanation follows a method of inequality as it establishes a difference, a hierarchy, between those who know and those who don’t know. As stated earlier, Plato established a comparison between doing wrong and being wronged in the general terms of the city-state; in the same sense Rancière explains that knowledge is not enough. We can emphasize that this knowledge does indeed take place inside the city, that the difference between the ignorant and the ones with knowledge is only possible within a group sharing the same structure, one that is assumed as a belief: Inequality works to the extent that one ‘believes’ it, that one goes on using one’s arms, eyes, and brains according to the distribution of the positions. This is what consensus means. And this is the way domination works. (Honneth and Rancière 2016, p. 137)

The method of equality proposed by Rancière is first of all a pedagogical experiment, assuming that all parts in the play of learning and teaching are learning and teaching. Rebellion for Rancière means reconfiguring the way in which spaces are occupied. The problem is that a space must be allotted to all the players, and then the possibility of shifting these spaces emerges. Rancière’s text leaves open the question of arranging a rebellion by those who have no space in the structure, the ones that, in Rancière’s terms, have no role in the distribution of the sensible. For this reason, he speaks of the workers and petit-bourgeois. Rancière has studied the texts of the workers, as I have stated at the outset of this chapter, and given voice to the vulnerable. However, the evolution of vulnerability in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has led to their not having a voice at all; that is, when the outsider lacks the knowledge to read or write, or does not have the same language, the visibility of the structure is veiled by opacity and the lack of a recognized space. We can perhaps assume that there is always someone with more power to define the structure of the sensible, someone who, knowing the importance of shifting discourses, manages to find workers, the most vulnerable, who have no

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possibility of joining the literary game that Rancière recommends as the way to emancipation. Rancière’s ideal is in fact not possible; his workers and petit-bourgeois are able to speak and change their sensible world when they are recognized as workers and master their imagination through language. They can in effect change the distribution of their space; but for women working without a space in a no man’s land, the aesthetic experience is out of reach. Is it possible for the presently exploited workers to achieve a ‘disinterested look’ as the path to emancipation? What kind of worker can have the disinterested look described here by Rancière? [...] a disjunction between the activity of the hands and the activity of the eyes (…). A redistribution of the sensible, a dissociation of the body of the Platonic artisan whose eyes were supposed to focus only on the work of his arms. It is a way of taking the time he doesn’t have. (Honneth and Rancière 2016, p. 142)

6

Nancy Fraser: Difference and Recognition

Nancy Fraser has devoted one chapter of her book Scales of Justice to some Arendtian reflections on the twenty-first century. From her point of view, Arendt’s analyses of totalitarian regimes and of democratic experiences in mass societies have revealed a vice specific to the current century, namely, that humanity is vulnerable because plurality and freedom are in danger. This situation was an effect, on the one hand, of the crisis of the nation state triggered by the logic of imperialism, which led to the stigmatization of vulnerable minorities lacking the recognition of basic rights. On the other hand, Arendt noted an interest in introducing into politics a totalitarian way of seeing things, an omniscient perspective from the commanding heights with the aim of deleting all possible differences. To talk about difference and recognition is to talk about limits and frontiers that are effective and at the same time need to be reconsidered as being responsible for limiting the forms of humanity and not only the contingency of spaces.

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Nancy Fraser chooses to unbalance the sharp distinction between the aim of justice and the aim of a good life, the former usually aligned with politics of distribution, the latter with politics of recognition. Her task is ‘to devise an expanded conception of justice that can accommodate both defensible claims for social equality and defensible claims for the recognition of difference’ (Fraser 2001, p. 22). To accomplish this shift, the concept of identity needs to be reformulated. The question posed, then, is: ‘what is the object of recognition?’ After reading Honneth and Rancière, we might suppose that the object of recognition would be the subject or her capacities. But the object of recognition can be the group identity, based on the conception of a closed identity within groups which according to Fraser can ‘reinforce intra-group domination’ (Fraser 2001, p. 24). She goes on to argue that it is not group identity but social status that should be treated as the object of recognition: ‘Misrecognition does not mean the depreciation and deformation of group identity. Rather it means social subordination in the sense of being prevented from participating as peer in social life’ (Fraser 2001, p. 24). With this purpose in mind, institutionalized patterns are the object of assessment because they provide criteria of cultural value and are therefore responsible for the misrecognition and subordination of some actors as inferiors. If we seek to find a bridge to link Fraser’s ideas and the situation of women in emerging markets, with the intention of addressing the ‘mule women’ problem, we can turn to the text ‘Mapping Feminist Imagination’, published in 2005 and then later in her book Scales of Justice. In this article, Fraser outlines the history of Second-Wave Feminism, from its origins in the social movements of the 1960s to a phase in which the attention paid to transnational politics and economics adds a new perspective. The tendency in the feminist imagination is to move away from social vindications, extending the welfare state and the egalitarian ethos by correcting male domination (Fraser 2005, p. 198), towards a movement that pursues recognition of the difference. As Fraser says, ‘whether the question was violence against women or gender disparities in political representation, feminists increasingly resorted to the grammar of recognition to press their claims’ (Fraser 2005, p. 299). This tendency meant a shift from a politics of distribution to a politics of recognition. After 1989, however, with the imposition of neoliberalism as a new

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international language, the feminist imaginary would change its own objective. Fraser speaks of the society of insecurity, which ‘weakens social welfare protections even as it institutionalizes more precarious forms of wage labor, including subcontracting, temp work, and non-unionized work, which are low-waged and do not carry benefits’ (Fraser 2005, p. 303). This insecure society can be understood as a complete failure of the objectives of the social democracy, even a failure of the objectives of the feminism. If the interest was to broaden the welfare state, reality shows that such desires were far weaker than neoliberal society. The structure broadened was not the welfare state, but insecurity as a way of life. Given these conditions and the problems the feminist movement must face, Fraser presents her thesis as a convergence of the solutions of distribution and recognition. This thesis is explicitly formulated in Scales of Justice, and at full length in her response to Axel Honneth in their conversational essay ‘Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical Exchange’: For less integrated strata, including immigrants, these pressures are compounded when class inequalities of distribution are overlaid with status inequalities of recognition; and the latter can easily be blamed on ‘secular feminism.’ In such cases, it behoves all feminists, in Europe as well as in the United States, to revisit the relationship between the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition. (Fraser, p. 303)

The shift in the recent waves of feminism takes into account its imaginary vulnerability, more than the secure framework of social welfare. This is also an effect of the post-Westphalian model of the state, as institutions in modern states no longer protect social rights. Fraser comments: ‘[...] feminists in this phase believe that women’s chances for living good lives depend at least as much on processes that trespass the borders of territorial states as on those contained within them’ (Fraser 2005, p. 304). Going back to Hannah Arendt’s text, we can understand that allocating members of society into the refugee group reinforces the closed and prejudiced characterization of each of its members, making it more difficult to recognize them as peers participating in social life. The question this addresses to us is: who has the right to identify someone as a member

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of society? And its reverse, who has the right to deny someone’s desire to be a member of society?

7

Jorge Semprún’s Le Grand Voyage as Conclusion6

I have aimed to explore how difference and recognition, in the way they are related to identity, are conditions for personal integrity. Difference can lead to social exclusion and destruction in several forms. Some of the still most admired thinkers have been influenced by the experience and consequences of the Second World War, as we can recognize in the works of Hannah Arendt and the first Frankfurt School. But the more contemporary of these thinkers, such as Honneth or Rancière, are exploring current social issues with these same concepts. For that reason, I have mentioned the most important features and problems that arose when these concepts were set into dialogue and have gone on to present the scenario of the migrant-humanitarian crisis currently affecting Europe. Philosophy is an option for trying to understand the origin and evolution of these tragic political affairs, but language is limited by the impossibility of grasping the personal experience of, in this case, being excluded or annihilated, simply because the one in this situation is the one without a voice. In illustration of this, we have certain literary texts that invoke these experiences in a powerfully vivid way. In 1943, the same year that Hannah Arendt wrote ‘We Refugees’, Jorge Semprún was inside a cattle truck sent to Buchenwald. He survived and in 1963 published in French his memories of this experience. If Hannah Arendt was able to distance and theorize about her life, Jorge Semprún was actually able to make jokes, a fact that makes this book all the more touching:  I was standing in the great square where we lined up (…) it was April and I didn’t feel like those girls had come to visit our camp.(…)  This is the  title of  the  French original version. For  this chapter I  have translated directly from the Spanish edition. The English version has the title The Cattle Truck. 6

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    It doesn’t seem so bad.—said one of them at that moment.    (…)    Follow me.—I said   And I headed for the crematorium     Is that the kitchen?—asked the other one.     You’ll see.—I answered.  I let the girls go into the crematory, directly into the basement. They had just realized that this was not the kitchen and fell silent immediately (…). We go up to the first floor and show them the ovens. The girls have nothing more to say. (…) It is necessary that they see, that they imagine. (Semprún 2004, 77)  (…) After the liberation, travelling to France:     Well boys, we’re home.     Have you seen? We’re in France.  I was looking at the trees, and the trees hadn’t told me anything. A while ago, according to those cheers, they were German trees and now they were French trees, if I have to believe my fellow travellers (…)     Have you seen? We’re home     Not me.—I answered without moving    Why not?     Of course not, I’m not French.    That’s true, I had forgotten. That’s easy to forget with you. You speak exactly like us.   I don’t feel like explaining why I speak exactly like they do (…) It is the safest way to preserve my identity as foreigner (…). If I had an accent, my situation as a foreigner would be discovered immediately. It would be something banal, superficial. Being a foreigner has become, in some way, an inner virtue (Semprún 2004, p. 102).

Following Rancière and Fraser’s suggestions about questioning delimitations between disciplines, a wide field of rich connections can be explored in the literature to recover material for these philosophical concepts (which is of course an affirmation about good limited disciplines). I have chosen the above lines to show the importance of having a voice in a context of the struggle for recognition, even when the struggle takes place among the prisoners in a concentration camp. Inside the camp a

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redistribution of the sensible could not occur in most cases. To make it possible, a condition needs to have entered into play, and this is the moment when a prisoner, in this case Semprún, happens to be saved. I would venture to affirm that it was not the recognition of his own capacity but mere coincidence that made it possible to change the political order, but at the same time he speaks about his work as a fraternal task, that of speaking for those who were assassinated in the camps. Achieving a fair redistribution and recognition for individuals without a voice and without a group, individuals left on the margins, is conditioned by the necessity of restructuring a public sphere constructed for welfare states and mass democracies. The question is open to discussion: who is in charge of this restructuration of the public sphere?

References Arendt, H. (1943). We Refugees. In M. Robinson (Ed.), Altogether Elsewhere, Writers on Exile, Faber & Faber, 1994. Arendt, H. (1971). Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture. Social Research, 38(3), 417. Fraser, N. (2001). Recognition without Ethics? Theory, Culture and Society, 18, 2–3. Fraser, N. (2005). Mapping the Feminist Imagination: From Redistribution to Recognition to Representation. Constellations, 12(3), 295–307. Honneth, A. (1995). The Struggle for Recognition. In The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. MIT Press. Honneth, A. (2001). Invisibility: On the Epistemology of ‘Recognition’. The Aristotelian Society Supplementary, LXXV/1, Bristol. Honneth, A., & Rancière, J. (2016). Recognition or Disagreement. New  York, USA: Columbia University Press. Semprún, J. (2004). El largo viaje (Jacqueline and Rafael Conte, Trans.). Barcelona, España: Tusquets.

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Reports APDHA (Association for Human Rights in Andalusia), Derechos Humanos en la Frontera Sur, Issue, 2018. Retrieved from https://www.apdha.org/media/ informe-frontera-sur-2018-web.pdf. Human Development Report 2016, UNDP, New York. Retrieved from http:// hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/2016_human_development_report.pdf.

9 On the Discourse of Exclusion in a Globalizing World Francisco Blanco Brotons

The concepts and discourses through which we see the world are decisive elements for any critical philosophy that intends not only to obtain a sound analysis of reality but also to effect change. To understand an overwhelmingly complex reality, humanity’s first step has always been to reduce complexity by developing conceptual frameworks. However, given this tendency, the fundamental task is ‘to determine what reductions of complexity will make best sense of the contemporary world and which ones are leaving out too many tones and voices’ (Wimmer and Schiller 2002, p.  235). If we want to obtain conceptual tools that are capable of transforming the world, they should fit our present reality by reducing complexity without eliminating its essential characteristics. This chapter is part of the results of a research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness: ‘Human Rights and Global Justice in the Context of International Migrations’ (FFI2013–42521-P). A Spanish version of this text appeared in Daimon. Revista internacional de filosofía, with https://doi.org/10.6018/daimon.366051

F. Blanco Brotons (*) Institute of Philosophy, CSIC, Madrid, Spain Faculty of Philosophy, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Rodríguez Lopez et al. (eds.), Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60519-3_9

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Discourses are historical products, tools designed to understand and/or transform a particular historical moment. However, discourses, especially the hegemonic discourses that exist within a society, are strongly affected by power relations. They can mask the essential features of the world to facilitate domination, subordination and exploitation. Analysing discourses is a necessity if we are to develop a critical theory that leads us in an emancipatory direction and helps us in ‘the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age’ (Marx 1843). In line with the above, the aim of this chapter is to provide a critique of the discourse of social exclusion. I will begin by describing some of the main features of our globalizing world and continue by discussing the factors that make this discourse deeply inadequate. The discourse of social exclusion distracts attention from the main features of this world, and it can thus be manipulated to conceal the relationships underlying domination, subordination and exploitation. Against this discourse, I will propose ‘adverse incorporation’ as a conceptual framework that could be adopted to avoid these dangers.

1

Globalization

The term ‘globalization’ encompasses a broad range of phenomena or processes. The characterizations that have been offered of it are diverse, as are the impacts—on the world or on our worldview—that are ascribed to such phenomena. Several authors agree on the conception of globalization, in a general and abstract way, as a process through which there is an increase in the density, frequency, amplitude, depth and speed of social interconnections on a global scale (Giddens 1996, pp. 63–65; Held et al. 2000, p. 2; Walby 2009, p. 36). However, faced with this characterization, we must immediately warn against the tendency to understand the ‘global scale’ as a homogeneous and autonomous space, such as the level at which globalization takes place, disconnected from other spaces such as the local or national levels (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, pp. 239–247). Rather, global processes imply an entanglement of these levels, blurring the boundaries between them. The concept of globalization leads us, above all, to reject the idea that the social processes that are relevant to

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individuals are only those at the national level (Sassen 2007, p. 3), which was a fundamental assumption within the ‘Keynesian-Westphalian frame’ that dominated philosophical and political discourse from the end of the Second World War until the end of the twentieth century (Fraser 2010b, pp. 12–14). Against this assumption, we can only understand the contemporary world by recognizing the possibility that the local is also global, that the global is only possible through its materialization in the local or national, that the national should now be conceived of as something de-nationalized and that the new spaces of globalization are not defined by traditional borders (Sassen 2015, pp. 179–184). Because of all this, ‘one of the key characteristics of current globalizing processes lies in the continuous reshaping of different geographical scales, which can no longer be taken for granted in their stability’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, p. 63). Furthermore, we should not forget that economic dynamics, although not the only relevant element, most strongly condition the characteristics of the current phase of globalization. Although globalization, as posited by Marx, was always a demand of the expansionist dynamics of capital (Marx and Engels 2008, pp.  38–39), the structural transformations of the social and political order in the last decades have given a new impetus to economics as a guiding force in global relations and transformations. The current phase of globalization has occurred in the context of the ideological hegemony achieved by a new mode of understanding political organization, i.e. neoliberalism, which ‘is reconfiguring relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge, and sovereignty and territoriality’ (Ong 2006, p. 3). According to this new neoliberal order, capital must be freed from the traditional restrictions and controls exercised by the State in the Keynesian-Westphalian frame; competition and entrepreneurship should become fundamental rules for the constitution, not only of the market but also of the identity of any social agent; the State should privatize and introduce into the market any good or sector not yet regulated; even the rationality applied in exercising State sovereignty must be transformed to resemble the economic management of a private enterprise, resulting in a governance by experts (Brown 2003; Harvey 2007, pp. 64–67).

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As a result, the role and reality of the State have been profoundly transformed. It is not so much that the State has lost power, but its form and the areas where this power has been exercised have changed. Globalization has increased the number of relevant actors in the decision-making and policy implementation processes, and has complicated the possible interactions. This whole process would be more aptly described as ‘a co-­ evolution between a variety of entities’ than as erosion or decreasing processes (Walby 2009, p. 43). Through such processes, some countries have gained more power while others have lost it, as some State activities have been strengthened while others have been weakened (Ong 2006, p. 75). More decisive, however, is that globalization has opened up new areas for state management and expanded the framework within which state powers can assess the consequences of their decisions. Globalization has opened up new political spaces as well as heterogeneous and unconventional technologies of power for State management (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, pp. 189–197; Ong 2006, pp. 75–77). The State is not a victim of globalization, but an accessory to it, because it is still responsible for the regulatory framework of the spaces in which any global phenomenon must find its place (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, pp. 201–202). The space for State intervention thus expands to levels that have never been reached before. Participation in intergovernmental commissions and transnational negotiations becomes a daily task. Tools are available that transcend or blur the traditional boundaries of the national space (the outsourcing of border and control devices, special economic zones, supranational regulatory frameworks and decision-making agencies). For all these reasons, it could be said that ‘contemporary globalization does not, as many hyperglobalizers argue, necessarily narrow the scope for political action and state initiatives but, on the contrary, may dramatically expand it’ (Held et al. 2000, p. 437). As posited by Foucault, neoliberalism does not rely on reducing State activity but expects from it ‘permanent vigilance, activity and intervention’ (Foucault 2008, p. 132). However, such intervention must be guided by economic rationality, which under the current conditions of globalization means that States ‘are compelled to be flexible in their conceptions of sovereignty and citizenship if they are to be relevant to global markets’ (Ong 2006, p. 76).

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Globalization indicates the strengthening of a higher level of systemic integration than is obtained within the traditional State framework; however, this global space is characterized by enormous complexity and heterogeneity (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, p. 95). On the one hand, the relevant agents at the geopolitical level have diversified. Against the old conception of international relations as interactions only between States driven by the pursuit of their own interests, today the emphasis is on a transnational framework that focuses on multiple relationships established with multiple purposes among diverse agents, including the following: States, individuals, private transnational companies, intergovernmental agencies, private interest groups, international institutions and supranational courts of justice (Rodrigo 2016). On the other hand, this diversification is also reflected in the functioning of global capitalism. Against the traditional Marxist image of the industrial worker as a paradigmatic figure of the working class, the flexibility demanded by neoliberal globalization has imposed a multiplication of the types of work, production and consumption, which translates into a multiplication of the subjective positions and life experiences of the individuals who constitute the workforce of global capitalism (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, pp. 87–93). Such multiplication processes are only made possible through a diversification of the legal status of people and of the regulatory frameworks imposed on delimited areas even within the same State, circumstances that Ong tries to express through the concepts of ‘graduated sovereignty’ and ‘graduated citizenship’ (Ong 2006, pp. 77–79). The political space of the State becomes fragmented into different areas where special regulations are applied according to their economic potential for competing in global markets. Such fragmentation comes with a diversification of the status of residents in the State, which corresponds to different rights and management methods for maximizing their productive potential according to market demands. The paradigmatic example of these processes is that of special economic zones (Ong 2006, pp. 97–118), industrial enclaves in border spaces (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, pp. 235–242), or freeport trade zones (id., 206–208). These spaces are characterized by their networks of interconnections that create a complex geography that cannot be understood from within the territorial framework of the nation-State.

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It should not be assumed that the diversification of global networks occurs outside the cultural particularities of each region on which they are based, as if they were built by ‘cosmopolitan’ subjects beyond particular ascriptions. In their specific configurations, global market networks assume ethnic features that strengthen cultural and gender stereotypes (Ong 1999, pp. 3–5; Ong 2006, pp. 122–123). To this complexity of the spaces, regulatory systems and agents internally fragmenting the nation-­ State, we must add all the other supranational regulations that condition and overlap with State regulations, and the growing importance of private regulations that manage various social settings (Sassen 1999, pp. 411–414). The current phase of globalization has brought with it a profound transformation and complexity of the structural context within which all agents interact. Normative systems have diversified. The frameworks within which we have understood social relations have been destabilized. It is no longer evident that the priority framework for analysis is that of the State or that we can limit ourselves to one in particular. Rather, it seems reasonable to assume that many dynamics and scales of analysis intersect in each specific case that is examined or is susceptible to examination. The agents involved in decision-making have become heterogeneous, as have the dynamics of capital, the forms of work and production and the subjectivities in which every workforce is rooted. Doubtless, all these transformations should lead us to quarantine the old political concepts inherited from the Westphalian-Keynesian frame: the unity of the nation-State, the notions of citizenship and sovereignty and the correlation between State and society. I will return to this later in relation to the discourse of exclusion; however, to conclude these reflections on globalization, I must insist that we should not understand the terms ‘diversification’, ‘heterogenization’ or ‘structural complexity’ that I have just mentioned as a simple affirmation of diversity. On the contrary, it is essential to add that here we are not addressing simple diversity but rather radical power inequalities. It is unnecessary to repeat the statistics on global economic inequality to understand that such inequalities are also reflected in the political sphere and in all social spheres. The above-­ mentioned heterogeneous agents are characterized by deep power inequalities among them, whether we consider States, citizens, economic

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agents or workers. The many structural orders and institutions that shape the global world respond to the decisions of some more than others and are defined to favour some more than others. This obvious conclusion is too often forgotten because it is hidden by the discourses we so carelessly raise.

2

The Discourse of Social Exclusion

The concept of social exclusion is used to designate the ‘mechanism whereby individuals and groups are excluded from taking part in social exchanges, and from the component practices and rights of social integration and identity’ (Andersen and Siim 2004, p. 6). This concept, ‘in the strict sense implies a division of the population into two strict categories, placing the “excluded” outside of the functioning of society, having neither the rights nor the ability and resources necessary to play a role in the collectivity’ (Castel 2007, p.  34). The discourse of exclusion originated in France in the 1970s, in the context of European welfare states (Hickey and Du Toit 2007, p. 2). By the 1990s, it had become the dominant discourse on poverty in Europe and was generalized to non-­European contexts, eventually eliminating terms such as ‘poverty’ or ‘exploitation’ from discourses around the objectives of public policies and on the causes of impoverishment (Du Toit 2004b, p. 988; Hickey and Du Toit 2007, p. 5; Phillips 2013, p. 175). The concept of exclusion finds its own context of application in ‘the persistence of pockets of poverty in fairly homogeneous, wealthy countries’ (Du Toit 2004b, p. 988), social groups that should be included within the normality of the nation and in the safe shelter of its social protection schemes. The discourse of exclusion in its most common form implies what has been called a ‘residual approach’, according to which poverty is ‘a consequence of being left out of development processes, and contains the assumption that development brings growth and that what is required is to integrate people into markets’ (Hickey and Du Toit 2007, p.  5). Poverty would thus arise in those social contexts that have become a residue not incorporated into the most general development schemes and processes. The exclusion from markets, social programs, rights schemes,

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particular social groups and specific social goods, in general ‘of the functioning of society’, is considered to be the direct cause of poverty. This concept serves as a general label under which diverse socio-structural processes are grouped. Under this categorization, it would be assumed that their exclusionary character is simply what casually connects them with poverty, while the specific form and mechanisms of this connection are left unanalysed. It is not disputed that discrimination, racism, gender oppression—and many other processes and practices that link local history, culture, social identity and power—play a major role in entrenching poverty and inequality. (…) The problem lies with the fact of re-naming involved in the assumption that these processes are all ultimately ‘about exclusion’. (Du Toit 2004b, p. 1000)

Against exclusion, the solution is clear: inclusion (in the market, in development projects, in social policies, in ‘citizenship’ and in the workforce). Against the evil of exclusion, there is the good of inclusion. These are the basic parameters of what I will call the ‘inclusion/exclusion model’. In the current context of globalization, the residual approach has characterized the orthodox approach to poverty reduction by international institutions such as the World Bank, ‘where development is understood to be about the expansion and deepening of globalization, and the extension of participation in those processes through employment’ (Phillips 2013, p. 175). In a global world, if exclusion from economic processes causes global poverty, then the answer must be inclusion in a globalization process that should be extended both extensively (to include residual spaces that are still outside) and intensively (to increase internal complexity to create different consumption habits for multiple subjects). This only reproduces the expansive dynamics of global capital, which were identified by Marx (1993, pp. 407–409). In the rest of the chapter, I will explain why we would do well to reject this inclusion/exclusion model if we are to develop a critical and emancipatory philosophy for the present time. The problem is not simply the acritical export this discourse has undergone across different cultural and political contexts, from public policy debates in European welfare States

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to debates on global poverty (Hickey and Du Toit 2007, p. 3). The problem is a deeper one, as the inclusion/exclusion model described above is based on a naive social ontology, proven as inadequate for addressing social relations in the world in its current phase of globalization. As we will see, this discourse is inadequate even for the subjects paradigmatically ‘excluded’ from the global world, such as irregular migrants or people who fall into chronic poverty; indeed, it contributes to hiding the social mechanisms underlying their situation. Exclusion cannot be considered the cause of their problems nor can inclusion be understood as the good they lack. The inclusion/exclusion model is based on particular worldviews and explanatory and descriptive frameworks, idealizations about society or citizenship, oppositional binaries and rigid distinctions which are unsustainable in the contemporary world. In our social and political context, ‘above all there is a grey area where individuals are neither completely included nor completely excluded (…) This boils down to saying that the rules of inclusion are not purely and simply the inverse of the rules of exclusion’ (Balibar 2015, p. 73). While it may be the case that our world has always been characterized by this grey area, the characteristics of the current context urgently require that our theories respond to it if we do not want to raise useless or even harmful abstractions that favour the status quo.

On the Idealization of the Political It makes full sense that the inclusion/exclusion model emerged in the context of the European welfare State of the 1970s. At that time, sociological and philosophical-political thought adopted what has been called ‘methodological nationalism’, which can be defined as: […] a stance in the social sciences that unjustifiably presupposes the nation state, uncritically treats it as the natural form of social organization and/or reifies it. The nation state is assumed to completely control geographical space and is treated as synonymous with society. Methodological nationalism leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of social reality by failing to recognize transnational, sub- and supra- state organizations,

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and by not taking into account how nations are situated in and constituted by local, transnational and global forces. (Sager 2016, p. 43)

Methodological nationalism allowed an easy and quick response to the fundamental question, ‘wherein to include?’ The national State became coextensive with a delimited society, culturally homogeneous and organized by a sociopolitical structure whose general features, characteristics and boundaries were not problematized. In this context, the inclusion/ exclusion model could project a social ‘normality’ identified by the national society and participation in the socio-economic structures of the welfare State. This is the origin of one of the most notable characteristics operating at its base: ‘mainstream society is conceived to be normal; exclusion from it is supposed to be the problem. Sometimes this excluded group may even be “pathologized” and seen as deviant’ (Du Toit 2004b, p. 1001). However, in the fragmented and heterogeneous context of globalization we have described here, such assumptions become untenable. The inclusion/exclusion model is based on a moral narrative that uncritically presupposes where to include. This inclusion as a general rule is considered to be an indisputable social good in hegemonic discourses on development and poverty (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, p. 7). These develop ‘in terms of implicit normative assumptions about how social life should be organized’ (Hickey and Du Toit 2007, p. 3). By assuming a supposed obvious background, which is neither problematic nor problematized regarding where to include, a paternalistic and condescending position is adopted toward the ‘excluded’ themselves, denying their agency or political role in this process, under the basic assumption that ‘we’ know where they want, can and need to be included (Du Toit 2004a, p. 29). Undoubtedly, this could make sense within the Keynesian-Westphalian frame and its corresponding methodological nationalism which were mostly accepted within the European welfare States of the 1970s (id.). In the fragmented, conflictive and heterogeneous globalizing world, in which delimited social and political environments homogeneous and uncontroversial for inclusion cannot be assumed, we need a more complex conceptual framework. The discourse of exclusion oversimplifies social reality by relying on ‘an unhelpfully monolithic and homogeneous conception of the nature of broader society’ (Du Toit 2004b, p. 1005).

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For this reason, as we will see later, it participates in the concealment of the complex power relations of the globalizing world.

On the Fragmentation of the Space of Globalization Globalization is characterized by the multiplication and heterogenization of normative spaces, of the processes and modes of production, of the multiplication of the figures of work and of the subjectivities related to them. In this context of fragmentation, the classic notions of citizenship, national homogeneity, legal integrity and sovereign exclusivity within the national territory cannot continue to be uncritically assumed. Against this background, questions about who and wherein to include become very problematic. It is no longer possible to assume a rigid distinction between the interior and exterior of society and its correspondence with the nation-State. In this sense, ‘the modern association of the social with the political through the mediation of the nation and the state cannot be assumed at a time when processes and agents of transnational connection prompt the emergence of new assemblages of territory, authority, and rights’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2011, p. 8). The figure of the worker-citizen (wage-earner), exclusively around which revolved the idea of the ​​ ‘functioning’ of society in the era of ‘organized State capitalism’ of the postwar period (Fraser 2009, pp. 99–102), begins to be disarticulated (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, pp. 243–251). Feminist criticisms—according to which this figure made invisible the reproductive work in society carried out by women while favouring men who performed productive work outside the domestic sphere—have been strengthened by the job heterogeneity, flexibility and insecurity demanded by neoliberal globalization. Faced with this disarticulation, the idea of​​ inclusion through work assumed in the dominant inclusion/exclusion models becomes problematic (Phillips 2013, p. 175). What was important were the qualities of the relationships underlying these heterogeneous (and unequal) forms of work and not the simple inclusion in a market in which work in many cases no longer ensures family subsistence and, even less, social participation as equal citizens.

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Methodological nationalism, however, presupposed a connection not only between the worker and the citizen. In a more general way, it assumed an isomorphism between citizenship, sovereignty, solidarity group and nation, taking place in a territorial space delimited by state borders. This isomorphism, in which all members had to ‘be included’, ensured the correct ‘functioning’ of society. In this ‘container model of society’ (Beck 2004, p. 140), ‘the translation is almost one to one: the citizenry is mirrored in the concept of a national legal system, the sovereign in the political system, the nation in the cultural system and the solidary group in the social system, all boundaries being congruent and together defining the skin holding together the body of society’ (Wimmer and Schiller 2002, p. 227). The problem is that the developments of the current globalizing world make this isomorphism nothing more than an unsustainable caricature. What we must now question is ‘whether it makes any sense to try to put these figures together again’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, p. 251). The territory of State sovereignty as a space subject to a common normative structure, as a homogeneous space in which all citizens are included as equals (or should be, if they are ‘excluded’), has also entered into crisis. The inner national political space, which was considered homogeneous, is now normatively fragmented (Ong 2006, pp. 77–78). Agamben, following Schmitt, referred to ‘the exception’ as the sovereign power for suspending the validity of the law in a limited space. As Ong states, such an exception adopts an essential structural role in the functioning of neoliberal globalization (Ong 2006). In a global space not characterized by homogeneity but by the heterogeneity of specific enclaves connected to one another as nodes with different characteristics, government rationality seeks to articulate the geography in a differential way according to the potential of each area in the global market. Freeport trade zones are a historical example of this territorial-normative fragmentation (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, pp.  206–208). The ‘special economic zones’ constitute the paradigmatic example of the current form of globalization (Ong 2006, pp.  97–118). If these zones are negatively defined as spaces over which certain national laws do not apply, Ong insists that, positively, these spaces are designed to ‘promote opportunities to upgrade skilled workers, to improve social and infrastructural

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facilities, to experiment with greater political rights and so on’ (id., 78). The question here must also be, to paraphrase Mezzadra and Neilson, whether it makes sense to try once again to project that homogeneous background of social ‘normality’ in which everyone should be included. This background, at least, should not be assumed to be uncontroversial.

 n the Invisibility of the Structural Dynamics O of Inequality By assuming that exclusion from social exchange systems is bad and that inclusion is the just response, the inclusion/exclusion model ‘can serve to distract attention from overall and systemic dynamics of inequality, impoverishment, and conflict within those larger formations themselves’ (Du Toit 2004b, p. 1001). In the context of the unquestionable domination of economic rationality within the current neoliberal globalization, the inclusion/exclusion model contributes in two ways to the justification and reinforcement of its dynamics. On the one hand, it legitimizes the perspective of the main actors in this type of globalization, according to which the lack of development and poverty are precisely caused by the exclusion from these processes. The discourse of these agents is simple: if we want to favour development and eradicate poverty, we must achieve the inclusion of everyone in the processes of globalization. However, what would happen if these very processes were the causes of poverty and lack of development? What would happen if these processes were in themselves exploitative? The discourse of exclusion has served precisely to put aside in public discourse the concepts of poverty or exploitation and legitimize ‘an approach to poverty based on the extension of market forces’ (Phillips 2011, p. 390). A second bias of the inclusion/exclusion model is manifested in its usual denomination of ‘social exclusion’. This discourse attempts to attack the systems that hinder the full undertakings of the agents in the functioning of society; however, with this denomination, it is assumed that what opposes this end are ‘the result of extraneous social factors—racism, culture, ideology, policy or politics—that undermine “normal” participation in the workings of an economy that is seen as value-free and

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intrinsically neutral’ (Du Toit 2004b, p. 1002). First, remembering the quote from Castel, society is a machine with essential ‘functionings’, the exclusion from which is conceived as conceptually incompatible with participation and inclusion. These functionings are somewhat neutral and necessary, and the conflicts and problematic power relations that cause their malfunction respond to a ‘social’ sphere outside of their rules. According to Du Toit, this suggests a functionalist conception of social processes and a crude economism (id.). Missing here is an analysis of how these social, cultural or political factors have always structured the economy: […]to see these as ‘distorting’ markets and economies, leading to their ‘failure’ to fulfil their ‘function’ is to divorce analysis from reality—and to be in danger of becoming blind to the extent to which these markets’ and institutions’ existence and functioning are inextricably caught up in the realities of conflict, unequal power relations and historical legacies of violence and dispossession. (Id.)

 n the Unsustainable Dichotomization Between O Exclusion and Inclusion At a more general level, we should ask ourselves if it is appropriate to explain the situation of the ‘global poor’—of those areas that have not reached a minimally acceptable level of development in comparison with others—or, in general, the various injustices suffered by people or social groups, as if the causes were their ‘exclusion’ or ‘disconnection’ with regard to the systemic dynamics of our globalizing societies. This explanation, the inclusion/exclusion model itself, is based on a very poor understanding of these dynamics or on their ideological ‘whitening’. Contrary to what this framework of analysis would have us believe, poverty, lack of development, dispossession or the ‘irregularity’ of many people pushed to migrate are not accidental, external products of the economic dynamics of globalization, but its products and its normal operating conditions (Du Toit 2004b, p. 1002).

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As we saw in the quote from Castel, this discourse is based on a strict conceptual separation between the included and the excluded, between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of the functioning of society. This categorization disfigures and conceals the complex structural causation of social phenomena and limits the analytic potential in the context of globalization (Bracking 2003, p. 5). We must never forget the relational character of poverty, that the poverty of some provides the necessary condition for the production of privileged opportunities for others (Mosse 2010, pp. 1156–1159). We cannot individualize poverty, in the line of neoclassical economics and rational choice models, seeing it as the temporary dysfunctions of a supposed inclusive political equality, caused simply by the bad personal choices or habits of some (ignoring the structural background or presupposing it as something neutral), nor can we exceptionalize poverty as if it were something alien to the normal functioning of markets (Bracking 2003, pp. 6–7; Mosse 2010, pp. 1157–1158). From the perspective of the ‘excluded’, the discourse analysed here ‘has little meaning: they are still very much included’ (Bracking 2003, p. 7). The current conditions of globalization demand flexible and cheap workers. In this context, some scholars of migration insist that not even ‘irregular’ migrants—another paradigmatic example, together with groups subjected to chronic poverty—can be properly understood as excluded subjects. On the contrary, they play an essential role in the functioning of global economic dynamics, as the legal mechanisms and border devices determining their status are essential elements ‘of the production of the commodity of labor power and the peculiar status of this commodity among others’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, p.  102). The legal production of illegality, which is supposed to be one of the extreme forms of ‘exclusion’, actually responds to an active process of inclusion. The same can be said of the other categories uncritically populating the inclusion/exclusion model such as racism or sexism. In the same way as illegalization, ‘as racism is meant to keep people inside the work system, not eject them from it, so sexism intends the same’ (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, p. 34). What is always sought is a workforce with certain characteristics, according to more or less exploitative relationships. All of the subjects described by the inclusion/exclusion model as marginal, expelled

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from society, are really the ‘central protagonists in the drama of composing the space, time, and materiality of the social itself ’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, p. 159). The characteristics of their situation are not caused by their exclusion but by the various ways in which they are included (Du Toit 2004b, p.  1002). It is necessary to reject the sharp distinction between exclusion and inclusion established by the discourse analysed here; i.e. the idea that the first is an evil that must be overcome with the unquestionable good of inclusion. Actually, the important problem is inclusion, more specifically, how this inclusion takes place, the disadvantageous positions and the processes of exploitation, expropriation, subordination and/or domination in which the structural dynamics of our globalizing world place some for the benefit of others. This new way of addressing these problems belongs to a more general trend that has emerged from the complex processes of globalization and a questioning of the classical philosophical and political conceptual framework. I am referring here to questioning the binary way of understanding categories as separated by a clearly defined line. The opposition between exclusion and inclusion should be rejected. The same has been said of conceptual pairs that had been fundamental in thought up to the present moment: free and unfree labour, productive and unproductive work, the interior and exterior of a supposedly unified political community, temporary and permanent residents, and formal and informal markets. The theoretical challenge in this context is to develop a more critical way of conceptualizing the boundaries, of designing theoretical frameworks that can better address the ‘grey areas’, the continuous spaces that constitute our social spaces.

3

Adverse Incorporation

The expression ‘adverse incorporation’ has taken hold within the analysis of poverty as a more appropriate perspective than the inclusion/exclusion model, as it relies on a more critical social ontology and thus avoids the problems of the former. The situation of the global poor, and in general that of any agent of a group or social class, can only be understood in relation to the other social positions. In contrast to the ‘residual approach’

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which characterizes the discourse of exclusion, the discourse of adverse incorporation is based on a ‘relational approach’ (Phillips 2013, p. 175). This perspective ‘constructs an explanation based on the terms on which people are incorporated into particular economic and social processes and structures’ (id.). Poverty is not due to marginality with regard to historically developed economic and political relations, but, on the contrary, to its inclusion in these relationships (Mosse 2010, p. 1157), more precisely, by ‘the terms and conditions of incorporation’ (Du Toit 2004b, p.  1003). To end poverty, therefore, there is no need for ‘inclusion’ in such processes or in any so-called social ‘normality’, since the exploited, subordinated and dominated agents are already fully immersed in them; however, social relations and policies must be transformed (Bebbington 2007, p.  793). In contrast with the absolution of the structural background promoted by the inclusion/exclusion model, the relational perspective shows the need to put the focus of analysis on how poverty is conceived and reproduced (id., 796–798). For all these reasons, the idea of ​​‘differential [or adverse] incorporation’ has been proposed as more appropriate (Murray 2001, p. 5). The social relations in which every agent is immersed must be addressed as something multidimensional because they not only affect the way people are included in the market but also in the State, in civil society, in the community and in the domestic environment (Hickey and Du Toit 2007, p. 4). How society is categorized through hegemonic discourses, making poverty or other injustices thinkable and justifiable, is also an essential object that should be analysed (Bebbington 2007, pp. 805–807; Mosse 2010, pp. 1169–1171). This perspective also influences how any public policy attempting to solve social problems must be designed, guided and implemented. Public policies should be based on deep social analyses that consider not only political economy but also local history, culture, the sharing of political power, gender-based relationships or any other identity feature in specific contexts (id., 5). Practical policy-making cannot and should not be separated from hard-­ headed analysis of the political and social context in which policy is made and of its effects on different social classes (…) The circumstances of poverty and the reasons for poverty should be understood through detailed

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analysis of social relations in a particular historical context. This implies a structural or relational view of poverty, and, in turn, that understanding of its ‘persistence’ or its intractability or its ‘deepening’ should be driven by questions about inequalities of power. (Murray 2001, p. 5)

Against this structural background in which some are adversely incorporated and subjected to relations of domination, subordination and exploitation, their situation is understood not so much as being prevented from entering but rather that they are prevented from leaving (Phillips 2013, p. 178). In a globalized world, it is necessary to think in depth about the ‘chains that bind’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, p. 121) these heterogeneous agents to their complex labour, community, political, identity or family relationships, which implies incorporating into the analysis a host of different agents, normative systems at different levels and diverse governmental devices. A patient exploration of the multiplicity of links and agents that constitute the social landscape of a globalizing world is required. This exploration is also fundamental if we want to find points of connection, possible bases of solidarity for the reconstruction of a collective emancipatory policy: It is necessary to take this multiplicity into account if the workers of the world are to collectively reimagine and materially construct their unity. This means renegotiating a whole series of splits and divisions that cross the bodies and souls of individual workers and invest the traditional separation between skilled and unskilled labor, manual and mental labor, and the processes of ethnicization and illegalization that contribute to the composition of living labor. Shaking free from the chains of capital today requires an explicit act of refusal (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, p. 122)

To use here the expression ‘adverse incorporation’ responds to a careful selection of terminology. Different authors have proposed similar terms to refer to comparable analytical perspectives; however, the chosen terms also indicate small changes in theoretical frameworks or intentions. Mezzadra and Neilson, for example, use the expression ‘differential inclusion’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, pp. 157–166). ‘Adverse’ and ‘differential’ indicate differing circumstances. The latter denotes simply that

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something differs from something else, without attempting to value such a difference; in this sense, it is descriptively neutral. The former indicates a relationship of a certain type in which one or more elements are placed in an unfavourable position regarding another or others. It is precisely this type of relationship that is intended to be clarified by the expression we have been analysing, and so the term ‘adverse’ seems more appropriate for the case. ‘Adverse incorporation’ is not intended to describe a final state but to evaluate the processes by which agents are systematically exploited, dominated or subordinated. These processes do not simply generate difference but result in injustice. Such differences of perspective are also manifested in the use of this expression by the above-mentioned authors because they do so to underscore the screening work carried out by state borders to adapt the entry of workers to the demands of the national labour market. The terms ‘inclusion’ and ‘incorporation’ indicate similar differences. While the former denotes the action of placing something simply within the boundaries of a set, reproducing the simple opposition between inclusion and exclusion, the latter adopts a relational perspective to denote how a person or thing is in relation to the others with whom or which it forms a whole. Similar terminological problems can be noted in relation to the expression ‘the global poor’: […] to speak of ‘the poor’ is, after all, to cast the people in question as passive victims instead of agents and potential political actors. It is also to see them in a free-standing, decontextualized way, in abstraction from the social relations and processes that have generated their poverty. To name their plight ‘poverty’, finally, is to suggest that they simply, inexplicably lack the means of subsistence, whereas in fact they have been deprived of those means. (Fraser 2010a, p. 369)

Hence, Fraser proposes to replace the term ‘the poor’ with ‘the precariat’, which emphasizes the processes that generate injustice and the agency of those who suffer from it, and accommodating various degrees of inclusion/exclusion. The term ‘global’ is also problematic, since this is not the only framework of relevance in the structural causation of injustice. Rather, the discussion should contemplate the intersection of

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multiple frameworks (local, national, territorial). Fraser therefore concludes that it would be more appropriate to use the expression ‘the transnational precariat’ instead of ‘the global poor’ (id., 370). Bebbington tried to establish a reconciliation between the inclusion/ exclusion model and that of adverse incorporation by matching the latter with the economic dynamics of accumulation and the former with the social and identity dynamics of recognition (Bebbington 2007, pp. 801–805). I believe this distinction of fields of application is untenable. As Fraser notes, the dynamics of recognition, like those of the economic system, are based on the particular ways in which different agents relate to each other through the mediation of social structures, that is, the specific way in which agents are incorporated into them. What has been called ‘recognition’ relates to a theory of justice in the sense that it refers to an institutionalized relationship of subordination (Fraser 2003, pp. 27–30). The important thing is to analyse how cultural value patterns are involved in the functioning of markets and vice versa. By presenting the dynamics of accumulation and recognition as differentiated dynamics requiring different theoretical approaches (differential inclusion for the former, and inclusion-exclusion for the latter), Bebbington participates in the economist, functionalist thinking discussed in Section 2.3, presenting the markets as neutral spaces whose distortions are caused by undue interference from ‘the social’, instead of presenting them as what they really are, i.e. historical social products affected by unequal power relations. The categories that organize the social are often presented as oppositional binaries, clearly and radically different: male/female, citizen/alien, we/them (Tilly 1999). In this chapter, we have argued that this mode of thinking, obsessed with distinguishing between an inside and an outside, is precisely the way to conceptualize the boundaries and map the social that must be overcome if we want to adopt a more critical perspective and be able to address the multiplicity of links we see taking shape in the current phase of globalization.

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Conclusion

In this chapter, guided by the idea that it is essential to analyse the effects of discourses on society, what they make visible and conceal, the justifications they facilitate and the public policies they promote, the role of the inclusion/exclusion model has been analysed. In contrast with this view, the notion of adverse incorporation has been proposed as a more appropriate perspective with which to address the complexity of social relations in a globalizing world. Other discourses that are frequently used to address the situation of ‘the transnational precariat’—or other agents subjected to different types of injustices—can also be evaluated from the perspective derived from the preceding discussion. This would be the case, for example, of analyses based on the idea of ​​‘vulnerability’. In contrast with the tendency shown by these analyses to focus ‘narrowly on sensitivity or resilience of livelihood systems in relation to “shocks” and “hazards”’, it is necessary to highlight ‘the extent to which the broader structural relations that underpin these livelihoods can systematically create poverty and vulnerability in the first place’ (Hickey and Du Toit 2007, p. 8). This perspective helps us to avoid the individualization or exceptionalization of vulnerability, the tendency to explain it through people’s supposed characteristics or as exceptional effects due simply to the bad choices of agents in a neutral structure. It is neither exclusion, bad luck nor an inevitable exposure to risk that causes the greatest poverty or vulnerability of some, but rather, their integration into exploitative and precarious social relations, in a context in which the ‘adverse terms of incorporation are foundational to processes of economic accumulation’ (and not only economic) throughout our globalizing world (Phillips 2013, p. 172). Against the typical liberal discourse on justice focused on the defence of the recognition or not of certain formal rights, the perspective defended here is sceptical of such a theoretical mode of thinking, which has at best little penetration in structural causation, and at worst, can be manipulated to divert critics toward rhetorical discussions and distract their attention from the complex power relations that constitute the social world. As indicated above, the perspective of adverse incorporation insists

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on the need to attend to specific contexts, and to patiently analyse these to understand the multiple power dynamics constituting the social relations specifically involved in each situation of injustice. There is no silver bullet to advance toward justice. Echoing the classic Marxist critique, we must step beyond the liberal formalistic sphere and enter into the density of specific social relations (which include the analysis of formal and informal laws and rules). The discourse of adverse incorporation, finally, pushes us to think about society with more complex conceptual tools than those which postulate oppositional binaries, based on the requirement to distinguish between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’. Thinking about the ‘grey zone’ within which society unfolds is an essential task if we are to develop useful critical thinking in a globalizing world.

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10 Subject and Research in Global Capitalism: Some Notes on the Fundamentals of Feminist and Marxist Theories on the Frame of Intersectionality Clara Navarro Ruiz

1

 ertabspaltungskritik as a Critique W of Capitalism

In the context of the global crisis of capitalism, whose effects became clear to the more affluent European population only after 2008, it would seem that addressing the current problems of solidarity among countries, exclusion and wealth distribution can no longer be postponed. We have now learned that the so-called globalization has only been the instrument for perpetuating unequal relationships of production, through the intensification of competition between companies beyond national boundaries. Organisms of a questionable nature, which seem to defend All websites accessed in January 2017.

C. Navarro Ruiz (*) Faculty of Philosophy – Department of Philosophy and Society, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Rodríguez Lopez et al. (eds.), Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60519-3_10

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the public interest but in fact only favour laxer conditions for the circulation of commodities (the IMF), or the recent discussions about the TTIP or CETA, speak of the crisis at the economic-political level, which has had its consequences for social theory and critical thought. This context has increased the interest in critical theories which are more prepared to offer a global perspective on the situation, precisely because there seem to be so many things wrong with our present way of thinking. Thus, Marxism has experienced a revival in the past ten years, and the value-dissociation critique (Wertabspaltungskritik) is one of the most original approaches. Simply put, the scope of this theory is macro-­ social and macro-economic; society is seen as a whole, and the present state of capitalism is analysed with the most abstract Marxist categories (‘commodity’, ‘abstract labour’, etc.), which we find in the first volume of Capital. In such theories, capitalism is the form of civilization of the modern world, the backbone of power relations in all societies (now that capitalism is global).1 Their thesis of an inner limit to capital is also interesting: they claim that after the micro-electronics revolution in production, capitalism is no longer able to reproduce its own conditions of existence. The replacement of abstract human labour by machines can no longer be compensated through other mechanisms. This threatens profits and causes an excessive focus on the finance industry, which is nothing more than an illusory solution (Kurz 2005a: 246 ff.). In any case, in the value-dissociation critique, the main core concepts of capitalism, such as ‘abstract labour’, ‘market’, ‘money’ and ‘commodity’, delineate the inner matrix of our social praxis. This means that, as they determine our conceptions of politics, law, science, etc., we cannot conceive our social being without these concepts and design the goals we want to achieve as a society. It also means that our social being itself is  In a broader presentation of the Wertabspaltungskritik, the differences between this theoretical approach and other forms of Marxism should be pointed out, but this is of course impossible here. Nevertheless, the following quotation could be enough to give a slight notion of the specifics of the value-dissociation critique: ‘In contraposition to this, the position that is advocated here assumes that it is not primarily the private appropriation of surplus value that must represent the central point of attack, as in traditional Marxism, but the value form itself, that is, ‘abstract labour’ [.] Thus, the commodity form is questioned simply as a principle of socialization. [...] Against its auto-­ evaluation, traditional Marxism had not criticized surplus value as a principle of production, but only distribution on the basis of surplus value, while the form of valorization as such was further presupposed’ (Scholz 2005: 6). 1

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defined by these concepts, and that they are neither concrete nor personal, thus making the capitalist domination an abstract one. In order to overcome capitalist society, we must ‘abolish’ these concepts and make possible a new form of social being, for a society in which—in two words—profit legitimates all means to its achievement. In the following, I will focus centrally on the theory of Roswitha Scholz, a prominent scholar of the value-dissociation critique, for her ideas have helped to cast a more global scope over this theory. In addition, I think her work clearly represents some of the analytical problems faced by Marxist theories in our complex present. I will first present the evolution of her theory, and afterwards—thanks to the theoretical contributions of Buenaventura de Sousa Santos—will point out some of its weaknesses. My final aim is to make it clear that, in the context of a complex world, subject to different axes of power, the very nature of the theory must be rethought. Moreover, as we will see, the different nature of the theory is also more consistent with the new ontological and epistemological conceptions which feminism has introduced into theoretical discussions; I am here referring explicitly to those of Donna Haraway and her theory on ‘situated knowledges’, and to Judith Butler, whose reflections on ‘precariousness’ and ‘vulnerability’ have linked ontological with ethical conceptions.

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Roswitha Scholz and ‘Value-Dissociation’

Roswitha Scholz is best known for her thesis of the ‘value-dissociation’. The focus of her argumentation is highly abstract; it lies in the fact that capitalism, understood as a society in which the valorization of value becomes an end in itself, creates, at the very moment of its constitution, a shadow area in which are placed all of those activities, emotions, dispositions, etc., which have traditionally been considered as ‘feminine’.2 In  One of the best definitions she has written is expressed in this quotation: ‘The theory of the “dissociation of value” assumes that in modernity there has taken place a dissociation [Abspaltung] of the feminine, of house-“work”[Arbeit] and determinate psychic as well as reproductive dispositions [Haltungen] from those of value and abstract labour. Despite this, this dissociation at the same time represents, in the dialectical mediation with value, its supposition. In this context, women were 2

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short, ‘care work’ and the behaviours involved in its effectuation are the ‘Other’ of value—inherent and co-original to it. This ‘value shadow’ cannot be conceptualized with the instruments of political economics, and yet these are vital to its very existence. Let us hear the consequences of this conception in the author’s own words: Here I assume that the commodity-producer patriarchy is to be interpreted as a global mode of civilization. […] Women are responsible for the care of the individual as well as for [the care of ] humanity. Here, their actions are socially underrated, and forgotten in the theoretical construction. [...] In general, a dualistic conception of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ is the prevailing idea of ‘gender’ in Modernity. Hence, the commodity-producer mode of civilization has as a condition the oppression of women, the marginalization of women, as well as, at the same time and accompanied by this, the neglect of the social and of nature. (Scholz 2000: 119–120)

This apparently simple remark reveals an interest in taking Marxist theory beyond the mere conceptualization of class struggles, of widening the relations of power analysed to those of patriarchy. This means that capitalism cannot be understood, according to Scholz, by only considering the traditional proletariat, as capitalist society is also patriarchal. This same interest explains the next step in the development of her theory. In her most recent book, Differenzen der Krise-Krise der Differenzen, she tackles various conceptions of racism, antisemitism, class and intersectionality and tries to see their deficiencies. It must be said in advance that Scholz is very critical of all the theories which prevailed in the 1990s (key words: ‘queer’ and ‘cultural studies’), rooted in some of the ideas in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, to recall the classic cliché. She thinks that with these streams of thought certain cultural differences were privileged, concealing the true essence of capitalism, which lies in its abstract domination. assigned [features like] emotionality, sensibility, “nature”, passivity, a weak character and so forth; in opposition, men stood for “culture”, rationality, a strong character, the ability to impose, etc. […] This dissociation of the feminine from value represents the basic social structure of capitalism; it must not be confused with assignments of absolute identity. There, value-dissociation always takes different forms within capitalist development.’ (Scholz 2005: 260).

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The criticism we have just mentioned was quite common throughout the 1990s. One might think, for instance, of the Fraser-Butler debate (Butler 1998; Fraser 1997) and, in my opinion, it is somewhat unfair, at least in Butler’s case. However, her criticisms of intersectional frames are useful for fully understanding her point of view. In her book, she analyses theories of social inequality, antisemitism, racism, intersectionality and globalization. A great number of her criticisms point out the traditional character of the Marxism defended by authors like Hirsch, Wallerstein, Negri or Postone (Scholz 2005: 85 ff.), who do not see the role that women play in capitalism and are unable to grasp the fetishist character of labour in this system, and so do not criticize the fetishist character of labour and value. With regard to the authors of the well-known essay ‘Empire’, the criticism goes deeper, and Scholz points out in great detail the dangers inherent in their conception. Scholz (2005: 257) asserts that Negri and Hardt, with their concept of ‘Empire’, implicitly defend an affirmative character of the new, flexible, liquid subjectivities, which in her opinion should be apprehended within the greater context of a drifting capitalism. This capitalism actually demands more flexible lives to satisfy the changing requests of market competition. Another set of criticisms is aimed at those authors who have discussed issues of cultural oppression. Here, German authors such as Lenz, Soine, Viehmann and Eichhorn (Scholz 2005: 188 ff.) are criticized for either making a hierarchy of oppressions, or privileging one axis of oppression or one particular point of view (that of the ‘most oppressed’) above the others. In short, they do not link the differences to a meta-theoretical level—the capitalist-fetishist matrix—to which they can refer all of these particularities (Scholz 2005: 211). Without this more general frame, such differences remain at the sociological level, analogous to the older concept of ‘class’ in traditional Marxism. What kind of theory does she try to develop instead? Her proposal, as we have already mentioned, is the Wertabspaltungstheorie. Coming from her theory of value-dissociation (Scholz 2005: 165 ff.), she addresses the various dimensions of all the different axes of power. The dimension of value—capitalism understood as a fetishist system—persists as a general frame of analysis, in which all the different axes coexist with it in a dialectical relationship. There is no deduction of racism, antisemitism or

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gender discrimination from the value dimension, the last of these being understood in connection with the ‘dissociation concept’ [Abspaltungsbegriff] of gender. Instead, these axes coexist with it in the form of an ‘outer immanence’. The acceptance of this ‘dissociation concept’ implies a new and different understanding of the totality, which is understood as broken. Dissociation [Abspaltung] and value are coeval, and determine each other reciprocally at every level. It is not possible to subsume or incorporate the axes into a greater or more general concept (that of value); the relation remains always a dialectical one. The following quote will help clarify her position: It is not exactly that, for instance, social positions can be deduced from a monistic, economic schema, only applied to the movement of value (of valorization), while gender relations and social-psychic and cultural-­ symbolic moments connected with it form a mere (ideological or cultural) ‘superstructure’. Rather, social positions are likewise structured precisely along the dissociation [Abspaltung] and [along] their social-psychic, as well as cultural-symbolic, dimensions. (Scholz 2005: 166)

Thanks to this new understanding of her theory, we must now investigate how, in Scholz’s opinion (Scholz 2005: 168 ff.), the different social assignations and asymmetrical relationships between people are compacted in a complex tangle of diverse mixed relations, in which social disparities and situations of exclusion are constituted in complexity, and where individuality is not always the abstract model that has fruitfully fostered capitalism in the past, but one that is continually broken by such dissociation [Abspaltung] and other asymmetries. The determination of late capitalism as a patriarchy that has ‘grown wild’, as she argues, is not to be understood as a one-dimensional context with one accountable agent. It is a process with numerous breaks and opposite trends. In any case, we must not lose sight of the essential (negative) determination of the value of dimension, which makes possible a unified comprehension of the general frame. Thus, ‘social change is after the theory of value-­ dissociation [Wert-Abspaltungstheorie] caused not only by the immanent logic of value, but also by dissociation [Abspaltung] or the logic of gender,

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and not only by this, but by the mesh [Ineinandergreifen] of sexist and racist mechanisms’ (Scholz 2005: 179, 184). The analysis of these differences averts their hypostasis and homage, in a different way than the theories of intersection which she has so strongly criticized. All of this is thanks to the link to the meta-theoretical level of the value dimension, the essential constituents of social totality. However, not only is the particular side of the social being reconceptualized with her theory; the universal side also needs to be rethought, as the universal can no longer be a subjective arrogation of the white European. This must be overcome through changes in our own cultural mindsets and discussions of the inherent racism in our dominant culture. Whether we like it or not, this Western concept of universality has marked the world economically, psychosocially and cultural-symbolically, and so it must necessarily be taken into account. Universality and particularities must both be critically fathomed as objective moments of a social reality ‘where one’s own (subjective) existence must be linked as a component’ (Scholz 2005: 183). Analysed specifically, its contradictory ‘crushed’ character will provide the crux of reflection, and though this we will be able to establish new criteria for critical thought that would never be available a priori, or previous to this same procedure.3 This theoretical reasoning culminates in a type of theory strongly influenced by the traditional critical thought of the Frankfurt School. Phenomena are analysed in a historically dynamic process that follows the object by itself [an sich], that distinguishes between appearance and essence in social praxis (Scholz 2005: 26) and maintains a certain tension in the consideration of particular and universal relations. In a more recent paper (Scholz 2009: 76 ff.), Scholz has stated that this theory can be seen as a form of a dialectical realism, one which connects the qualitative and quantitative dimensions of totality in a new form, a type of dialectic which, in the words of the author herself:  The following quotation may help to clarify this last point: ‘So, on the one hand, the dialectical fundamental relation of value-dissociation must be recognizable, but on the other, its multiplicity of layers [Vielschichtigkeit] in the development of the concrete totality, as a non-hierarchical graduation of the levels of abstraction and concretion, [must be recognizable as well] in a different way that would suggest an arrogant affirmation of value as the sole fundamental principle’ (Scholz 2005: 73). 3

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…cannot be formalized or oversimplified [schematisieren] and therefore a dialectic that is not external to its object, an approach that is continually tried […] … a dialectic that cannot be justified [begründet] a priori in an abstract-‘methodological’ way […] but only on the basis of a critical, social and formal determination and a critical analysis of the (world-) social relations and their new quality, where the opposition between the dimensions of structure and action must be grasped as a real paradox of the fetish constitution, and cannot be immanently dissolved in a one-dimensional way. (Scholz 2009: 95–96)

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F rom Roots to Fruits: Some Problems in Scholz’s Theory and Alternative Approaches to Social Critique

Up to now, I have concentrated on Scholz’s theory, and one could say that we have only addressed her theory on the basis of her books, which are already a bit antiquated. Her newest essays, however, do not make a significant difference with regard to the thesis presented here. They detail lines already sketched, criticizing for that purpose other authors such as Kurz and Chorus (Scholz 2013a: 20 ff.), Federici and Dörre (Scholz 2016) and Postone (Scholz 2013b). Her criticisms are based, as before, on pointing out their lack of consideration of dissociation [Abspaltung] or the mere sociological character of their critiques (Scholz 2013a, b: 153 ff.; Scholz 2016: 53 ff.), insofar as the foundations of these lie ultimately in traditional Marxist thought. In my view, there is a profound gap between the basic outlines of her theory, which looks very promising, and its actual development. Scholz’s theory claims to consider both the particular and the universal dimensions of society, aiming to combine the micro-, meso- and macro-levels of social analysis. Yet, instead of being a conductor between different kinds of social theories, she merely denounces the deficiencies she discovers in other approaches without properly assessing the realities that they help to understand. This might be considered as simply a particularity of her thought without the slightest interest to social critique, understood globally. However, to my eyes, the reasons underlying her attitude can help us

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discover new fundamental directions for present-day critical thinking. I will go further into detail about this in what follows. I identify three main problems in Scholz’s theory, but it should first be noted that my criticisms of Scholz are not so much related to her own statements about the issues I am about to broach here, as when she actually addresses them she seems to be aware of the risks entailed in modern theory. My point here is more concerned with her attitude and her actual work; i.e. what she has truly contributed with her theory, and whether she has truly made attempts to help progress toward emancipative thought. The first problem is her understanding of the fetishist character of capitalist society. In my view, she is right in emphasizing this, and seeing it as the essence of our social being. Moreover, considering the context in which Scholz was writing (the 1990s–early 2000s), it is completely understandable that she tried to point out this fact, insofar as there was a certain resistance to calling capitalism, ‘that scandalous thing’ (Haraway 1991: 197), by its proper name. There is, however, also something different operating in her writings. I think that she misunderstands the anonymous character of fetish in capitalism due to the apparent impossibility of discerning this kind of social relation. Fetish in capitalism means that we, as a society, treat social relations as relations between things. It also means that this phenomenon is not an action the responsibility for which can be attached to any particular social agent, but a form of collective social practice we all engage in (Kurz 1987; Navarro Ruiz 2016a, 2016b). Something must be made clear: the fact that it is a social practice does not mean that we cannot understand capitalism in the frame of a historical process and the practice of repeating a determinate attitude towards production and distribution. More concretely, it is a process that (a) in a formal sense, must be understood analogously to the gender/sex relation explained by Butler (Butler 1993); this is to say, as an iterative one, in which the object and subject of the practice are not to be strictly separated. It is also a process which (b) materially considered, must be grasped as a process through which the conditions of commodity production are systematically concealed. In addition to this, the mechanisms of market competition, inasmuch as capitalism is based on the creation of social wealth through

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private producers, privileges those who access the market with greater productive means. It is these same mechanisms which ultimately create an exponentially increasing social dynamic that pushes its agents to continually raise their hourly material output. This dynamic, insofar as it is caused by the same iterative repetition of social practice, escapes the conscious control of the agents and becomes an abstract, anonymous domination. I agree with Scholz’s analytically distinguishing between appearance and essence, but I think that these terms should not be used to describe completely inaccessible and uncommunicated realms of reality. The fact that the appearance of domination in capitalism is fetishist does not mean that it cannot be understood from the social surface of social practice, which of course does not mean that we can explain fetishism as the mere sum of particular practices. I have thus spoken of social practice. Only by allowing ourselves to make such transitions can we effectively connect those approaches which address social relations between particulars (such as discourse on racism, gender, etc.) and more general practices (such as perspectives which relate to the more abstract level of capitalism, or which are concerned merely with economic relations). This is crucial, because at this point lies the possibility of successfully grasping capitalism as a mode of civilization; more specifically, the civilization of the Western, white, adult, male subject. In other words, although money might be nameless, economic relations are created by the everyday decisions of real agents, and these act upon the foundations of societies with a determinate history behind them; for instance, the history of a colonized territory, or that of a colonizer, with all of the racial implications that go along with this. The second problem in Scholz’s vision is her conception of theory itself. Her proposal is based on a dialectical opposition with other theories, and consists mostly of posing dichotomies (true/false, adequate/ inadequate) and highlighting deficits. This scope is perhaps not the most suitable for the context in which we must currently practice critique, inasmuch as our present world displays a diverse range of entangled fields with intersecting axes of oppression. Such a fact should be enough to encourage theories which, despite their differences, are willing to work

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with each other, and even enthusiastically, if, like Scholz, one claims to have developed a more comprehensive, global framework. At the foundation of this attitude lies, in my opinion, an antiquated attitude towards modern theory. Post-colonial and de-colonial thinkers (Mignolo 2012; Dussel 2014a, b; Quijano 2014) have shown the flaws of modern theory, basically its one-dimensionality and Eurocentrism, and exposed its racist core. Even so, in the form of a dialectical relation and a procedure, Scholz defends a one-dimensional view, making it similar to this older approach. Such a vision might be of use in a dichotomic, hierarchical world that might have existed in the past (or perhaps only appeared to have existed), but I feel that, to navigate our current plurality and overcome the pessimism that can render theory alone unfruitful, it is a much more useful and beneficial attitude to let critique become a certain practical ethos (Foucault 1984; Butler 2013). That is to say, the point should not be focused, as in Scholz, on ‘being right’ in opposition to others, but in understanding theory as the very practice of the interaction of diverse approaches and analyses, as well as social practices carried out in diverse social movements. Only in this way can we overcome the classic division between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ (which Scholz claims to have defeated, but has not) and, inasmuch as philosophy is traditionally, by its own terms, a totalizing, abstract type of discourse, facilitate an interdisciplinary interaction. To cast more light on this, we can now explicitly mention some of the critical theses that Boaventura de Sousa Santos has posed against modern critical thinking. In an essay on modern critical theory (Santos 2006: 21 ff.), he explains how, similar to modern non-Marxist sociology, modern critical thinking is: …a type of knowledge that, by itself, is total (or absolute), [that] sets itself up as a condition to understand totality in an adequate way; [and] only one principle of social transformation, and only one collective actor, are able to make such a transformation, [also, only] a clearly defined political institutional context, allows the approach of the battles considered necessary in the light of the inherent objectives in such a context. […] Totalizing knowledge is the knowledge of order over chaos. (Santos 2006: 22)

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Moreover, modern critical thinking shares two more features with modern non-Marxist sociology: both theories accept the notion of historical agent, which corresponds perfectly with the duality of structure/ action that underlies every sociology; and both—and this is crucial— have the same notion of society/nature relations. Although Marxist sociology was aimed towards social emancipation, in opposition to social functionalism (channelled towards social regulation), the two theories have some features in common which explain the crisis of the first. In a context in which it has become clear that the faces of oppression and domination are multiple, we can no longer rely on such a theory. Scholz, for her strongly combative attitude towards other theories, might forget that ‘one of the failures of modern critical theory was the lack of recognition of the fact that the same reason that criticizes cannot be the same reason that thinks, builds and legitimates [the elements] that are to be criticized’ (Santos 2006: 26). Modern knowledge must be considered as two-fold: (a) knowledge as regulation, whose point of ignorance is named chaos and whose point of knowledge is denominated order, which means that it strives for social order and institutionalization in order to overcome chaos; (b) knowledge as emancipation, whose point of ignorance is determined as ‘colonialism’ and whose point of knowledge is determined as ‘solidarity’,4 materialized in a critique of institutionalized knowledge and its roots through the examination of historical practices of colonialism. Thus, emancipation and the critique of knowledge necessarily go together. This much is clear: Scholz does not present a classic theory in the form of modern science. She has even written about the necessity of criticizing science and its object of knowledge (Scholz 1992). However, her insistence on finding the ultimate correct rationale for theory, as well as denouncing the deficiencies in other theories from the point of view of her approach alone, makes her theory analogous to traditional Marxist  Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s critical epistemology must be understood in the frame of a critique of modern colonialism. In his opinion, modern theory and science have worked together to reinforce a one-dimensional point of view, with knowledge that privileges Western colonial domination, insofar as modern theory and science determine what qualifies as an object of knowledge, and therefore what ‘exists’; as well as what qualifies as a subject of knowledge, and therefore what is ‘knowing’ and who can truthfully ‘know’. This is why we see those terms used here. 4

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theory, in two specific aspects: first, insofar as she also wants to find the ‘correct’ order in the realm of social knowledge against other theories; and secondly in her aim to develop a theory that supports all of the contradictions and axes of oppression in our society, yet without letting them interact with each other—given her conception of the social fetish. She might assert that her totality must be considered as ‘broken’. She might claim as well that the theory of value-dissociation is open to contradicting the theory itself in order to truly follow reality and formulate it in social concepts. However, I very much fear that the problem lies more likely in the conception of a theory where ‘the opposition between structure and action dimension must be grasped as a real paradox of the fetish constitution’, as she has stated in one of the texts quoted above, that is to say, where the opposition between action and theory is posed in two different and opposite realms which are somehow inaccessible to each other. We must thus move forward to theories that conflate the conceptual level with a more historical frame, theories which give individual, particular experiences a more significant role. In the words of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘more than a common theory, what is required is a theory of translation capable of making mutually intelligible the different struggles, creating a way for the collective actors to express themselves about the oppressions which they resist and the aspirations that mobilize them’ (Santos 2006: 23–24). This is an attitude that relates fully with the understanding of theory as an ethos explained earlier. This does not mean, in any case, that we forget about the more general frame of social praxis which is capitalism. But we can incorporate it in more historical terms if we relate it to the process of colonization and world expansion of the Western mode of civilization (Santos 2006: 21 ff.), hence revealing the relations between historical processes and the implementation of social practice which constitutes capitalist fetishism. Last but not least, I think that Scholz’s understanding of theory is indebted to a determinate conception of the knowing subject, which, despite her criticisms and efforts, makes it similar to the traditional knowing subject that tends to disappear behind theory, and that speaks from a thus-conceived neutral objectivity. It might sound trivial, but the fact that her theory is posed at a level of high abstraction, as well as the fact that she only seldom refers to social particularities, seems suspect and

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implicitly leads to an over-privileging of her own personal locus of enunciation (Grosfoguel 2014: 376), i.e. that of a Western, Northern European woman. To overcome such a position, we would do well to turn to the now canonical Situated Knowledges by Donna Haraway (Haraway 1988). Put simply, Haraway explains in that article how all knowledge is always gained from some particular point of view, and always bears a specific perspective. This thesis introduces epistemology into the complex context of history, power and critique. It implies, first of all, a review of our own set of knowledges. The historical interest of the Western canon in disembodied knowledge is related to stories of ‘militarism, capitalism, colonialism and male supremacy’ (Haraway 1988: 521), inflicted on populations who do not qualify as individuals (see Zaharijević’s chapter in this volume), and its own ‘instruments of visualization’ have played a great role in concealing these relations. Secondly, this thesis multiplies the positions from which knowledge can be truthfully expressed, in opposition to ‘neutral objectivity’, which establishes a single determinate position. Haraway opens in this sense the field of epistemological questioning of ethical and political reasoning. Knowledge and objectivity, then, are no longer about ‘transcendence and the dissociation of subject and object’, but about ‘limited localization’, opening up the problem of responsibility for the generation of the locations themselves. This gives us the opportunity to elaborate critical knowledge with emancipative possibilities. For ‘only those occupying the positions of the dominators are self-identical, unmarked, disembodied, unmediated, transcendent, born again’ (Haraway 1988: 586) partiality becomes a condition of possibility for a more democratic knowledge. Establishing this wider vision can lead to unexpected connections, something made possible by situated knowledge. Haraway’s criticism can be understood as in line with a critical tradition of epistemological thought that includes authors such as Sandra Harding or Kwame Nimako. With this tradition in mind, we will now analyse how Scholz over-privileges her own point of view in her writings, wrongly presented as objective. Two examples might be useful for seeing this clearly: firstly, her account of liquid subjectivities in late capitalism, which she conceptualizes as a feature that could be related to a society

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understood as global.5 This should actually be examined in the light of non-Western societies. It is, without a doubt, something that has happened in the great metropolises of Europe and North America, but it may be questionable for other types of societies which participate in globalization from a different social background. What is more—and I criticize here the Wertkritik as a whole—the general account of the consequences of the inner limit of capital, which creates more and more ‘useless workers’, ‘unprofitable humans’ in the words of Kurz (2005b), should be analysed according to a diversity of axes and locales. These two examples, and the fact that Scholz argues in favour of a highly abstract type of theory which seems to be exempt from critical engagement with more concrete aspects of reality, show distinctly that there is a certain absence of the individual, situated subject. This absence—in connection with what we have said before regarding her consideration of theory—is related not to anonymity, but rather to a subject of knowledge which is apparently self-sufficient, autonomous and in constant competition with other theories in the quest for a singular and true social theory. Again, her theory comes across as one-­dimensional. Although she might not defend that position explicitly, her very approach involves this danger. In opposition to this, what kind of subjectivity lies behind Haraway’s concept of ‘situated knowledge’? It is interesting to note that, in alleging the necessity of situating knowledge, there is an ontological conception of the subject that relates directly to Butler’s concept of ‘precariousness’ (Butler 2004: 17–18), which may be seen as: …the term for a socio-ontological dimension of lives and bodies. Precariousness is […] rather a condition inherent to both human and non-­ human being[s]. […] Precariousness designates something that is existentially shared, an endangerment of bodies […] not only because they are mortal, but specifically because they are social. Precariousness as precarious ‘being with’ […] is a condition of every life. (Lorey 2015: 11–12)

 Scholz has corrected this point in light of the crisis of capitalism. See Scholz 2017: p. 496 ff.

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To understand the subject as ‘precarious’ (Butler 2009: 34–35) implies understanding it as embodied and ‘fundamentally dependent on, and conditioned by, a sustained and sustainable world’, which (identically to Haraway’s epistemological conception) opens up the subject to the realms of ethics and politics, as ‘responsiveness’—and thus, ultimately, responsibility—is to be found in the affective responses to a ‘sustaining and impinging world’. Given the ineluctable mediation of these affective responses it could be said that: …[e]thics […] gives rise to critique or, rather, cannot proceed without it, since we have to become knowing about the ways in which our actions are taken up by the already-constituted social world and what consequences will follow from our acting in certain ways. Deliberation takes place in relation to a concrete set of historical circumstances, but […] [also] in relation to an understanding of the patterned ways in which action is regulated within the contemporary social horizon. (Butler 2005: 110)

Lastly, given the fact that we can call these patterned ways into question, we might say that ethics are opened up not only to critique, but to social critique. * * * We might now wonder why I have been criticizing Scholz’s theory in this way. My interest was focused, first of all, on showing how even our most apparently neutral terms must always be understood in a historical context, and that they always have political and ethical consequences. Second, I wanted to evince the dangers involved in making such a social critique without taking this fact into account, either explicitly or inherently. Even when Scholz’s intentions are aimed toward a possible social emancipation, she ends up caught in her own theoretical restrictions, which make her theory less fecund than it could be. Finally, I wanted to give some hints at what, in my opinion, critical reasoning should consist of in our present world. Given what we have been saying, it should be closer to a type of situated discourse, understood as a practice of questioning the social and material conditions of our localized lives and their

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consequences. These conditions, for their part, must always be understood in the context of a particular history and bound to different axes of interpellation. Also, and given a multiplicity of particularities, social critique should be understood in the form of a collective practice carried out through lengthy discussion. These last statements might sound rather petty, but what do they reveal in the light of so-conceived ‘objective concepts’ and highly abstract theories? They show nothing if not that what is within these are in fact reified issues awaiting discussion. Indeed, our concepts and theories are our instruments of vision; they establish our position on an issue, and thus justify a course of action in relation to this position. As we know, there is no human thing bound to routine, no material life which does not change with time. Economic relations are no exception to this. If we are to take this into account, we must make an effort to understand such concepts from a more global perspective which assumes their relation to (and inseparability from) history, colonialism and the diversity of societies. We can thus understand the role that apparently neutral economic concepts such as ‘capital’ and ‘commodities’ have had in this, and we will probably find that these have justified economically what is socially intolerable. Then, in our discussions, we must try to will ourselves away from the abuse of over-generalizing concepts, and make an effort to unmask the apparent neutrality of economic relations. This involves showing how the former are made by everyday decisions on politics and resource distribution, always bearing in mind that the anonymous, abstract and ‘thing-y’ character of a given process—that phenomenon which Marx tried to depict with his notion of ‘fetish’—hides nothing less than a social dynamic of action which must still be questioned, appearing thus as ‘natural’ instead of ‘human made’. If, furthermore, our Marxist social critique is to address other axes of oppression, we must take into account that oppression today has many faces which afflict individuals in different ways. Therefore, rather than aiming for a general theory that takes all of these into account from a particular point of view, we might change our theoretical eagerness for completion in favour of a practical disposition to openness. Such an attitude would enable us to hear as many voices as possible and attempt to engage with them in those particular situations in which it could be

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beneficial for decreasing the suffering of the majority. Thus, and as we have somehow said throughout this chapter, critique goes beyond epistemology and establishes its beginning—for its very foundations—as well as its ending, in relation to an ethical disposition. It is not so much that, until now, as Marx claimed, ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it’ (Marx 1888/1969: 8 [MECW 5: 8]). It is much more about the fact that our interpretations themselves play a role in our relation to the world, and hence somehow, from the very beginning, we are indeed changing it.

References Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York & London: Routledge. Butler, J. (1998, January–February). Merely Cultural. New Left Review, I/227. Retrieved from https://newleftreview.org/I/227/ judith-butler-merely-cultural. Butler, J. (2004). Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London, New York: Verso. Butler, J. (2005). Giving an Account of Oneself. New  York: Fordham University Press. Butler, J. (2009). Frames of War. When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Butler, J. (2013). Was ist Kritik? Ein Essay über Foucaults Tugend. In R. Jaeggi & T. Wesche (Eds.), Was ist Kritik? (pp. 221–246). Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp. Dussel, E. (2014a). Meditaciones cartesianas. Sobre el origen del antidiscurso filosófico de la Modernidad. In B. Santos & M. Meneses (Eds.), Epistemologías del sur. (Perspectivas) (pp. 283–230). Madrid: Akal. Dussel, E. (2014b). With Meneses, M. Epistemologías del sur. (Perspectivas). Madrid: Akal. Foucault, M. (1984). What Is Enlightenment? In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader (pp. 32–50). New York: Pantheon Books. Fraser, N. (1997). Heterosexism, Misrecognition and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler. Social Text, Volume 0, Issue 52/53, Queer Trasexions of Race, Nation and Gender (Autumn–Winter), 279–289. Grosfoguel, R. (2014). La descolonización de la economía política y los estudios poscoloniales: transmodernidad, pensamiento descolonial y colonialidad

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global. In B. Santos & M. Meneses (Eds.), Epistemologías del sur (Perspectivas) (pp. 373–406). Madrid: Akal. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Kurz, R. (1987). Abstrakte Arbeit und Sozialismus. Zur Marx’schen Werttheorie und ihrer Geschichte. In Marxistische Kritik, Nr. 4, Dez. pp.  57–108. Retrieved from http://www.exit-online.org/druck.php?tabelle=autoren&pos nr=8&PHPSESSID=5ac6edf2e45c63749cff29458a13175f. Kurz, R. (2005a). Das Weltkapital. Globalisierung und innere Schranken des modernen warenproduzierenden Systems. Berlin: Tiamat. Kurz, R. (2005b). Unrentable Menschen. Ein Essay über den Zusammenhang von Modernisierungsgeschichte, Krise und neoliberalem Sozialdarwinismus. Retrieved from http://www.exit-online.org/link.php?tabelle=autore n&posnr=237. Lorey, I. (2015). State of Insecurity. Government of the Precarious. London, New York: Verso. Marx, K. (1888/1969). Theses on Feuerbach. In Marx and Engels Selected Works, Volume One, pp.  13–15. Moscow: Progress Publishers. [Marx and Engels Complete Works, Vol. 5, pp. 6–8]. Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm. Mignolo, W.  D. (2012). Local Histories/Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, Woodstock: Princeton University Press. Navarro Ruiz, C. (2016a). Fin de partida. Acerca del ‘límite interno’ del capitalismo según la crítica de la escisión de valor. Oxímora. Revista Internacional de Filosofía Política, no. 9, ‘Crítica inmanente del capitalismo’, pp. 1–25. Navarro Ruiz, C. (2016b). El tablero áureo. Consideraciones sobre la teoría del valor en Robert Kurz. Constelaciones. Revista de Teoría Crítica, ‘Karl Marx, Teoría Crítica y el presente: legados, actualizaciones, reapropiaciones, 8–9(2017), 256–284. Quijano, A. (2014). Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social. In B. Santos & M.  Meneses (Eds.), Epistemologías del sur (Perspectivas) (pp.  67–106). Madrid: Akal. Santos, B. (2006). Conocer desde el Sur. Para una cultura política emancipatoria. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales. Unidad de Post Grado.

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Scholz, R. (1992). Der Wert ist der Mann. Thesen zu Wertvergesellschaftung und Geschlechterverhältnis. Retrieved from http://www.exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=schwerpunkte&index=3&posnr=20&backtext 1=text1.php. Scholz, R. (2000). Das Geschlecht des Kapitalismus. Feministische Theorien und die post-moderne Metamorphose des Kapitals. Bad Honnef: Horlemann. Scholz, R. (2005). Differenzen der Krise-Krise der Differenzen. Die neue Gesellschaftskritik im globalen Zeitalter und der Zusammenhang von ‘Rasse’, Klasse, Geschlecht und postmoderner Individualisierung. Bad Honnef: Horlemann. Scholz, R. (2009). Gesellschaftliche Form und konkrete Totalität. Zur Dringlichkeit eines dialektischen Realismus heute. EXIT! Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft, 6, 55–100. Scholz, R. (2013a). Feminismus-Kapitalismus-Ökonomie-Krise. EXIT! Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft, 11, 15–63. Scholz, R. (2013b). Nach Postone. Zur Notwendigkeit einer Transformation der fundamentalen Wertkritik. Moishe Postone und Robert Kurz im Vergleich-und die Wert-Abspaltungs-Kritik. EXIT! Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft, 12, 142–165. Scholz, R. (2016). Christoph Kolumbus forever? Zur Kritik heutiger Landnahme-Theorien vor dem Hintergrund des ‘Kollaps der Modernisierung’. EXIT! Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft, 13, 46–100. Scholz, R. (2017). Escisión del valor, género y crisis del capitalismo. Interview with Roswitha Scholz by Clara Navarro. In Constelaciones. Revista de Teoría Crítica, ‘Karl Marx, Teoría Crítica y el presente: legados, actualizaciones, reapropiaciones’, nos. 8–9, pp. 475–502.

11 Forms of Life and the Transformation of Public Space: Debunking Social Exclusion in Contemporary Democratic Societies? Nuria Sánchez Madrid

This chapter takes its inspiration from the ‘experimental pluralism’ regarding ‘forms of life’, a new paradigm in social theory recently suggested by Rahel Jaeggi—especially in her essay Kritik von Lebensformen— 1 as a helpful means of resistance against the alleged neutral perspective adopted by the liberal tradition of social and political theory vis-à-vis the This chapter has been supported by the following ongoing research projects: Precariedad laboral, cuerpo y vida dañada. Una investigación de filosofía social (PID2019-105803GB-I0), the Ayuda de Humanidades Digitales program of the Fundación BBVA 2019, the CAM Macrogroup On Trust-CM (H2019/HUM-5699), the project UCM-Santander PR87/19-22633 Filosofía y pobreza. Una historia cultural de la exclusión social, and PIMCD UCM 2019 n.º 84 Precariedad, exclusión social y diversidad funcional (discapacidad): lógicas y efectos subjetivos del sufrimiento social contemporáneo (II).  See Jaeggi (2014).

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N. Sánchez Madrid (*) Faculty of Philosophy – Department of Philosophy and Society, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Rodríguez Lopez et al. (eds.), Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60519-3_11

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plurality of human customs and the consequent abstemiousness regarding the plurality of personal expectations about happiness and well-being. Thus, my main aim in this paper will be to take issue with the liberal account of the social pursuit of happiness, highlighting that most of the structures which guarantee this state of personal satisfaction extend to the political and economic spheres, beyond the scope which is usually assigned to the private realm. According to this hermeneutical framework, the emergence of a normative order related to each form of life should be a key element in analysing the emancipatory potential and the capacity to solve problems that a particular form of life offers to human beings. Taking this perspective as an interpretative basis, I will claim here that both the material and symbolic hindrances that individuals and groups find as they establish their own paths to happiness, as well as stave off pain and suffering, display a crucial set of problems that politics must face and attempt to forestall in the entangled context of global neoliberal society. This position will necessarily argue against the liberal hypothesis and the traditional republican motto, largely claimed by influential Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant or Humboldt, that happiness should be an issue that each individual subject must resolve on her own. To counter this view, it will be useful to consider the accounts of day-to-­ day burdens in neoliberal times offered by psychopathologists such as Christoph Dejours, critical theorists such as Wendy Brown, and economists such as Verónica Gago,2 who have surveyed from different standpoints the overburdening impact that labour precarity, epistemically induced disabilities and social suffering experienced in daily work spaces actually have on subjectivation processes. The increasing number of subjects driven to ‘burnout’ situations confirms the anxieties that deeply jeopardize human liveability nowadays, expelling reflection from its comfort zone. In my view, especially the contemporary spread of burnout illustrates the level of disrepair that has characterized deliberative democracies in recent decades. I class within this phenomenon the withdrawal of the hope of welfare rights and their replacement by an increasing imperative of self-­exploitation, which transforms the class struggle into a growing demand for individual sacrifice.  See Dejours ( 2012); Brown (2015); and Gago (2017).

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This process is shown to be extremely harmful for moral and political agency, as it radically transforms the practical horizons of the subject, who removes from her life other elements not related to success or failure. In this context, discourses and performative expressions of uneasiness become a highly useful hermeneutical means for exploring those social spaces undermined by neoliberal narratives that focus on the expectations the subject is expected to meet. As is well known, the contradictions involved in the set of imperatives besieging the contemporary subject trigger new social and individual pathologies in neoliberal global societies, posing a challenge to critical theory and leading it to revaluate its bonds to the social sciences and medical humanities. It will thus be helpful to grasp the normative sources of social suffering to track the traces of a bedrock conservatism that abusively raises its voice in neoliberal societies hinting that preterit forms of reproduction and care of life are a benchmark for relieving our present anxieties. In my view, this cultural struggle requires that critical theory also take part in the discussion about sustainable forms of life, one of the key quandaries of our time, and attempt to reduce the scope of regressive conservative perspectives on human development and the achievement of welfare and self-satisfaction. Since the effort to set us free from neoliberal forms of slavery runs the risk of relapsing into outmoded and unsatisfying cultural patterns, it is in my view necessary to assess which forms of life really show their potential for fulfilling emancipatory self-development aims. Taking this into account as well, I aim to address in this article how the current stock of globally spread standards for forms of life works as a source of financial extraction for large companies and the media, which add their economic purport to ideology, generating a conservative framework that stealthily determines life and reproduction at a global scale. Ensuing from the construction of an ethical normativity that ensures some forms of life, but disavows others, large spaces of precariousness, lack of recognition and social death arise, entailing social suffering for those parts of society usually referred to as minorities. These spaces gain visibility only with great effort, as they are often misinterpreted by political theory as the effect of a subjective uneasiness, when not viewed directly as a personal disability, which hinders some subjects in building a sound personality. Moreover, inspired by some recent works—particularly Bonnie Honig’s claims about the plexus

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between democracy and the care of public things3—I will argue that several conditions usually attributed to heterogeneous claims for happiness and fortune do belong to the institutional basis of a republican democracy. I will therefore suggest that every institutional political discourse should inquire, for example, into how economic processes have aggressively shaped the emotional and affective life of workers and consumers, making the ‘affective life’ a powerful means of controlling human desires and transforming them into a source of economic extraction. In this vein, I will also explore whether the classic liberal disclaimer regarding the economic and social misfortune of citizens has been seized by neoliberalism as an excellent opportunity to make the right to liveability an unexpected source of business and profitability, drawing as a conclusion that it entails a great harm to the landscape of our affective life and health. This chapter will critically engage with the dilemmas that the perverse interactions between life and neoliberalism have brought about in recent decades, and attempt to suggest some conclusive remarks about the social and political injustice that this process triggers.

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 hould the Right to Happiness Become S a Civil Right?

To argue that happiness should be viewed as a civil demand of citizenship is a claim that counteracts the mainstream of European tradition on republicanism. There is also a large consensus among scholars about the legitimacy of the boundaries that classic liberal republicanism drew between civil claims of freedom, equality and independence and the personal quest for happiness. The following excerpt from Kant’s On the Common Saying: This May Be True in Theory, But It Does Not Apply in Practice (1793) typifies this approach to the boundaries that keep the private and public spaces safe from each other as disparate conditions of civil freedom:  See Honig (2017: 35): ‘Public things are things around which we constellate, and by which we are divided and interpellated into agonistic democratic citizenship. They are not innocent or pure. They are political’. 3

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No one can coerce me to be happy in his way (as he thinks of the welfare of other human beings); instead, each may seek his happiness in the way that seems good to him, provided he does not infringe upon that freedom of others to strive for a like end which can coexist with the freedom of everyone in accordance with a possible universal law (i.e. does not infringe upon this right of another). A government established on the principle of benevolence toward the people like that of a father toward his children— that is, a paternalistic government (imperium paternale), in which the subjects, like minor children who cannot distinguish between what is truly useful or harmful to them, are constrained to behave only passively, so as to wait only upon the judgment of the head of state as to how they should be happy and, as for his also willing their happiness, only upon his kindness— is the greatest despotism thinkable (a constitution that abrogates all the freedom of the subjects, who in that case have no rights at all). (Kant 1992–2013, 8: 290–291)

It will not sound strange that readers of Kant in the twenty-first century possess a quite different experience of the expected balance between civil and personal achievements from that purported by liberal scholars. I cannot help but feel a certain deception in Kant’s claim that patriotic governments have often been overwhelmed by paternalistic unconscious features, a long phantom shadow that has hindered many historical tendencies to social emancipation by unfolding a hegemonic view over how social agents should live and pursue what they see as their happiness. Can we continue to share the idea that a Kantian-inspired republican State should give free rein for everyone to pursue her happiness in her own way? Would it not rather entail myriad hindrances to what might be gathered as the desire of minorities, that is, their desire for self-­development? I am inclined to stand on the second query, since the liberal approach to happiness assumes that making life liveable is a much simpler issue than it really is, especially if one focuses on the institutional structures that sustain or disavow the reproduction of life and the care of vulnerable people in global democratic societies. Judith Butler has often broached the difficulty of living ‘a good life’ as the basis for a new endorsement of a social contract, conscious of an ontological and ethical interdependence that will not in any case exhaust the multiple paths for attaining a minimum physical and ethical welfare. Thus, Butler stated in Butler 2015:

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[our] shared exposure to precarity is but one ground of our potential equality and our reciprocal obligations to produce together conditions of liveable life. In avowing the need we have for one another, we avow as well basic principles that inform the social, democratic conditions of what we might still call “the good life”. (Butler 2015: 218)

I completely agree with the claim that overcoming the disavowal of dependence that keeps many subjects from personal autonomy is a key step in breaking the constraints of the liberal geography of liveability. As Adriana Zaharijević and Sanja Milutinović Bojanić have hinted, ‘[the] liveable life thus functions as a not-yet-attained life […], as a regulative ideal more than as an achieved state of humanity’,4 an ideal that boosts social resistance practices aimed at furthering emancipatory movements and radical democracy in the public realm. Put differently, the conceptual landscape we are sketching is based on the capacity of the negative experiences of lack, injustice and precarity to reshape social claims and movements. Naturally, this project of a socially embedded negative dialectics is intertwined with a deep concern for the phenomena of jettisoned, ungrievable, unsatisfying or unsheltered life. Only such a theoretical and practical concern will lead to a decided commitment to make these forms of life—in reality signs of unliveable life—visible in the public space and correlatively to denounce oppressive patterns for the organization of collective life. Yet to what extent might an account of ‘forms of life’, which at first sounds like a return to Aristotle’s practical philosophy, help us to continue to open paths of emancipation in our neoliberal society? Naturally, my suggestion does not encourage a return to a kind of Schmittian concrete order, allegedly helpful for overcoming the social quandaries of our time. My account takes inspiration rather from Rahel Jaeggi’s reflection about ‘forms of life’, which she relates to a culturally shaped ‘order of human co-existence’ that entails an ‘ensemble of practices and orientations’, guided by different beliefs and their institutional materializations. Thus, ‘forms of life’ entails heterogeneous pragmatic contexts where life is reproduced, cared for and sheltered. In fact, each form of life is intended  Zaharijević and Milutinović Bojanić (2017: 173).

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to show and legitimate its emancipative potential, even if regressive and totalitarian forms of life renounce the struggle with others to obtain normative legitimation, spreading instead the message that they are the right and unique form of living with others in a human community. Jaeggi goes on to declare that the forms in which we live give content to the sphere of what Hegel called the ‘objective spirit’, sealing the cultural and social reproduction of human life. Yet ethical life has a marked tendency to appear as a quite still image of human plasticity, hindering a society’s ability to experience the contingency of the normative orders it set up in the past. Put another way, these forms of life used to experience themselves as sound and unchangeable patterns of social coexistence, which blatantly contradicts the plasticity of ethical and political normativity. As the Hegel scholar Ludwig Siep reminds us in this context, ‘modern life forms have such massive technical and infrastructural requirements that they are not possible without considerable public services’.5 It is a matter of fact that the increasing dependence that forms of life have on technical and biomedical devices displays the historicity of the set of rules and practices that allow human beings to live according to their expectations and hopes. Thus, an account of ethical life that eschews its most contingent and necessary traits acts as cultural oppression and generates ethical violence. Contemporary political theory has fostered the identification of public justice with having access to commodities, public health care, education and housing, i.e. a long list of material conditions that make dignified life possible. A sample of this approach has been given by outstanding specialists in the history of the welfare state and theorists of global justice, who claim that removing the boundaries between people who have and do not have access to clean water or even a proper sewage disposal system ought to be the paramount political agenda today.6 In a nutshell, political theory has often overlapped with the material conditions for achieving human dignity and autonomy with the requirements of self-development. My account of this debate highlights the fuzzy watershed between private life and public space. Ensuing from the reformulation of both spaces, my claim is that capabilities  Cited by Jaeggi (2005).  See Robins (2007: 33) and O’Neill (2016).

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regarding affects and emotions aroused in the intimate sphere should also be taken into account in every attempt to redefine the tasks of the State in the twenty-first century. Related to this, I consider noteworthy the fact that the key discussion between supporters of ‘recognition’ and ‘redistribution’ in recent decades has overshadowed the emergence of the affective life as a social and political right embedded in contemporary democracies. It is therefore not surprising that social activism has contributed to legal reforms—I am thinking for instance of the parliamentary approval of homosexual marriage in Spain—with more force than political theorists. It is precisely for this reason that I view Jaeggi’s proposal as a groundbreaking philosophical survey that enables us to outline the conditions for attaining individual and collective self-determination and self-development in our present society, a traditional goal of critical theory. In this critical context, theory addresses the symbolic and material hindrances that some forms of life encounter in contemporary societies. In this vein, Jaeggi underscores that: When private happiness is decided publically and by law—by tax laws, governmental technological politics and so on—then the ways of life in which human beings find themselves must become matters of public discussion. However one wants to understand the rules of such a debate and wherever the ultimate decisions regarding such questions ends up taking place—the question, what reasons—what kind of reasons—can be validly employed in such a debate is one that philosophy can and should contribute to. (Jaeggi 2013: 6)

The central role that my account recognizes for Jaeggi’s approach hints especially at her disposal to redirect the philosophical gesture anew to the reflection on life and its enigmatic paths to improve the levels of freedom, welfare and emancipation of our societies. Under this framework, her theoretical and practical proposal takes issue with abstract theories of justice, which do not break down the material normativity embedded in the manifold demand of setting up an ethical order. Naturally, reciprocal toleration becomes a crucial issue in forming an emotional basis that is shared by a citizenry committed to the values of democracy and social progress. Therefore, it is also a key trait of a critique of forms of life not to

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adopt an authoritarian character for responding to the alleged neutrality adopted by liberal accounts regarding social models of human organization. In fact, the liberal standpoint has historically showed a weaker neutrality than that claimed by this political and social perspective, as liberalism used to identify and boost the ‘good’ or ‘tolerable’ forms of life, those which should be recognized by the normative political order, sacrificing, for instance, the forms of life that define minorities, which are thus condemned to suffer a kind of social death. Yet neither neutrality nor the abstention from judgment, much less the paternalism denounced by the spokespersons of liberal social frameworks seem able to cast light on the issues we are addressing here, as the value of plurality attempts to forestall the perils of relativism. Another trait related to forms of life should be mentioned. As Jaeggi has repeatedly remarked, forms of life might be considered ‘inert bundles of social practices’, which in a certain Wittgensteinian way include praxis components that are not always completely conscious, explicit or transparent for the agents who engage in them. Such elements thus become concealed under the naturalization of ethical order and threaten to transform a freely adopted life into a destiny. According to Jaeggi’s hermeneutical schemes, patterns of life are always directed by ethical-functional norms that make of them concrete and material problem-solving strategies, whose failure or success corresponds to their capacity to prepare subjects to face key social requirements. Nevertheless, is it honest to summarize the existence of forms of life as merely a pragmatic issue, consisting of the learning process of social maturity? In my view, a key point of Jaeggi’s proposal is to underscore the fact that the failure or success of forms of life often do not stem from their pragmatic capacity to improve individual and collective social life, but rather from their arrangement with the already existing ethical order that a society perceives as hegemonic. In this sense, it is only honest to admit that the heteronormative matrix of rules regarding family and reproduction continues to stand as a touchstone of the ethical social order at a global scale. This evidence confirms that history and customs still prevail over a constructivist view of human affects and forms of coexistence, bringing about important consequences that theory must break down accurately. As Butler, invoking Adorno, has often pointed out, the content of these forms of life—to a large extent extra-philosophical—has

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helped throughout history to outshine the despotic nature of some of these life-guiding patterns; insofar as they are not disposed to accept this, they wither and fade, even without any rationale: [The collective ethos] becomes violence only once it has become an anachronism. What is strange historically—and temporally—about this form of ethical violence is that although the collective ethos has become anachronistic, it has not become past; it insists itself into the present as an anachronism. The ethos refuses to become past, and violence is the way in which it imposes itself upon the present. Indeed, it not only imposes itself upon the present, but also seeks to eclipse the present—and this is precisely one of its violent effects. (Butler 2005: 5)

This passage helps us to address a telling feature of these forms, as they are usually viewed as overlapping with forms that define our intimacy and preferences of cohabitation, rather than understood as being able to create new social spaces that testify to the mutability of social condition. In Hegelian terms, most forms of life claim to have gained an authority that allows them to better progress through history. Yet this perspective radically changes if we engage the real genealogy of our conduct, where pragmatic and value-based features are intertwined. Thus, in consideration of Hegel’s arguments for the bourgeois nuclear family as a better pattern of cohabitation when compared to other factual alternatives, Jaeggi points out the connection between normativity and the satisfaction of individual needs and claims: If the problem (understood as task) of the bourgeois family is not simply to secure natural reproduction but also to make ethical freedom possible—to provide the natural basis for ethical freedom and thereby to make possible individual autonomy—then the challenges forms of life respond to are not only culturally formed but also normatively pre-defined. When forms of life succeed or fail, they do this in relation to the claims and challenges that they themselves have brought forth. Here one sees what one could call the ‘dialectical complexity’ of the problems that forms of life attempt to solve and the way such problems can provide a basis for critique. (Jaeggi 2013: 15)

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Jaeggi’s remark concerns the fact that traditional forms of life involve both normative and functional dimensions, which undergo crises that show different impacts on social groups. What is more, the global crisis of work shows just such an entanglement, as professional performance loses its capacity to furnish social avowal, status recognition and personal honour. In this context, Jaeggi makes use of a comment by Hillary Putnam, according to whom ‘we don’t know any good form of life, at least not one that does not have deficits as well as virtues’.7 Once forms of life are regarded as stemming from problem-solving experiments, it is revealed that they arise from an original pluralism, as solutions offering readjustments to troubles arising between subjects and the social environment do not last forever. I consider especially valuable the aptitude of this new paradigm in social critical theory to debunk a one-sided reading of Wittgenstein, which affirms that forms of life put an end to philosophical reflection, since they are allegedly immunized against any exercise of critique and safe from any transformation.8 According to this point of view, being embedded in a specific social conduct implies an unreflective immersion into quasi-instinctive behaviours. As Robin Celikates has aptly suggested, the misrecognition-based model of social practices engaged by Pierre Bourdieu9 stands for the opposite claim to a Wittgensteinian approach to social theory, as he points out the contradictions between the subjective truths of the agents that give account of their practices and the objective analysis of the observer. Thus, the agents are seen as incapable of becoming conscious on their own of the consequences and the real basis of the practices they undertake. I plainly agree with Celikates that it is worth transcending this confrontation, given the fact that forms of life do not only fulfil the function of a pre-reflexive bedrock of social structures, but are also tied up with plural normative orders, which often fall into ethical violence, especially when they reject their own contingence. To give a neat example of the immanent rethinking of forms of life, Celikates refers

 Putnam (1994: 194).  For a development of this claim, see Celikates (2015). 9  Bourdieu (1977: 79). 7 8

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to the ordinary attempts to enlarge the borders of representative politics, focusing on cases of radical democracy: As the democratization movements of the last few years—from the so-­ called Arab Spring to Occupy and the Indignados—have reclaimed the concept of democracy-as-a-form-of-life, they have also underscored the fact that such a democratic politics of forms of life is a politics of the ordinary just as much as it is an experimental politics of the extraordinary: a politics that involves the establishment of alternative, prefigurative democratic spaces that anticipate the democratic relations between equals these movements aim at, just as much as a politics of disobedience and insurgence that aims at a radical break. (Celikates 2015: 15)

Street confrontations organized by radical democracy movements have undoubtedly contributed to changing the political agenda, especially through the transformation of notions such as partisanship10 and the adoption of political strategies that go beyond the dichotomy of emancipatory truth and ideology. Yet the civil recognition of new forms of parenting, cohabitation and kinship bonds demanded by growing social groups, gathered together as the post-marriage movement—the ERC Intimate led by Ana Cristina Santos at the Institute of Social Studies in Coimbra funded a trailblazing survey on these issues—also call for a new contract no longer overdetermined by heteronormative guidelines between the state and the intimate sphere.11 As I have argued in other papers, the performative force that has only recently begun to attract the interest of critical theory crosses into our ethical life, so that any ethical account is obliged to consider it.

 See the monograph by Ypi and White (2016).  I highly recommend the articles by Pérez Navaro (Pérez Navaro 2017: 441–458), and Santos (2013: 54–64). See also After Marriage, a Conference organized by CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, New York, 1–2 October 2016. 10 11

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 e Do Not Feel Comfortable Within Your W Objective Spirit!

The staunch claims of women, LGBTQ communities, racial and ethnic minorities, along with the legacies of imperialism and colonialism, have since the 20th century been challenging the too-abstract framework that liberalism adopted to face the objective demands for freedom raised by specific subjects and groups. It is no secret that most of those social movements have appealed to the authority of autonomy as a desirable means for achieving their goals. As Honneth highlighted in Freedom’s Right: ‘No social ethic and no social critique seems capable of transcending the horizon opened up two centuries ago by linking the conception of justice to the idea of autonomy’ (Honneth 2015: 16). Freedom thus acts as the normative foundation for all particular conceptions of justice, so that its realization ‘represents the outcome of a centuries-long learning process’ (Honneth 2015: 17). Honneth goes on to argue that: This fusion between conceptions of justice and the idea of autonomy represents an achievement of modernity that can only be reversed at the price of cognitive barbarism. […] This teleological perspective, an inevitable element of modernity’s self-understanding, strips the above-described fact [that is, the fact of the tight connection between justice and freedom] of its contingent historical character. For reasons that claim universal validity, we can now regard the idea of individual self-determination as the normative point of reference for all modern conceptions of justice. (Honneth 2015: 17–18)

From this standpoint, Hegel ‘is right that we cannot experience ourselves as free as long as the preconditions for the implementation of our autonomous aims cannot be found in external reality’ (Honneth 2015: 47). Honneth is dealing, in this context, with the defence of homosexual marriage, focusing on the fact that it helped to ransom homosexual practices from social exclusion, thus opening the path to an avowed conjugality. This account notwithstanding, a slew of voices have been raised in recent years, such as that of Éric Fassin, that point, for example, at Western immigration policies which compel people to assume a clear

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sexual identity as a condition for seeking asylum from ethical persecution in their countries of origin.12 In depicting the experiences of some homosexual immigrants, Fassin quotes the spokeswoman of the movement Indigènes de la République, who remarked that ‘there are ways to deal with homosexuality that are most intimate, not in the least public, without any political claims’, thus denouncing what she called ‘gay imperialism’, as well as ‘homoracialism’ (Fassin 2014: 294). Claims like this confirm an increasing resistance to social recognition stemming from statist imposition, which often does not heed the concrete negotiation processes that the subject brings into dialogue with her social context and relationships. Amy Allen has attempted to give an effective account of what she considers the conservative traits in the goals that critical theory supports: If, as Judith Butler has argued, subjects who do not comply with a heteronormative conception of how sex, gender, sexual desire, and sexual practices are supposed to coincide (with males performing masculinity and desiring and having sex with females who perform femininity, and vice versa) are thereby rendered unintelligible and unrecognizable, then individuals may well uphold heterosexual marriage simply because to do otherwise is to risk a kind of social death. Moreover, and more pragmatically, it is entirely possible for individuals, whether gay or straight, to decide to marry in order to obtain health insurance or tax benefits, to secure parental or adoption rights or other pragmatic social goods, all the while believing that marriage is a deeply problematic and even illegitimate social institution. (Allen 2016: 104)

Allen’s account of the public recognition of intimate homosexual and queer relationships suggests that Honneth clearly views the expansion of marriage rights and the cultural avowal of certain forms of homosexual partnerships as a mark of a progressive ethical life, as societies that recognize certain kinds of homosexual relationships have progressed further in the assumption of the transformative nature of ethical life and bionormativity. I find Allen’s misgivings regarding juridical achievements such as the right to homosexual marriage slightly overstated, even if I completely agree with the idea that a civil recognition of queer intimate alliances  Fassin (2014).

12

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without providing the consequent right to kinship and the required means for attaining this will keep them subjected to unions that are symbolically hegemonic. Butler tackled this thorny issue by casting light on the perception of homosexual kinship as an aggression to the orthodox anthropological origin of culture in a 2002 article, which contains a trenchant debate with Sylvaine Agacinski, who does not hesitate to refer to the works of Lévi-Strauss as authoritative in the matter. In my view, the aesthetic fear of removing the symbolic order of human kinship is the most powerful engine of heteronormativity, which explains most of the obstacles that post-marriage activism encounters in its attempts to broaden the recognition of social rights. The activism for gaining marriage rights for the LGBTQ community recalls Antigone’s ‘promiscuous obedience’, which according to Butler makes this dramatic figure so compelling, as she performs a simultaneous adherence to, at the same time that she challenges the established norms. Such a difficult path to cultural recognition has helped to increase the emergence of a new Antigone in our own time, insofar as human beings find themselves condemned to experience their intimacy as a social defiance and to shape their ethical life within a situation of catachresis. Meanwhile, the time has passed and, paradoxically, social experience in countries of the traditionally backward Southern Europe13 has overtly agreed, after exhausting struggles, to treat gay as well as straight family models as tokens of cultural progress. Naturally, this change occurred because anthropological practices do not exclusively meet the binary frameworks outlined by structuralism. They have rather been exposed not only with the aim of engaging exogamy according to heteronormative patterns, but also with other affective demands regarding the reproduction of life and emotional dependency. In this vein, I find it quite instructive to carefully heed these words of Butler’s from 2002: If we understand kinship as a set of practices that institutes relationships of various kinds which negotiate the reproduction of life and the demands of death, then kinship practices will be those that emerge to address funda This ERC, led by Ana Cristina Santos, focuses on the intimate life of LGBTQ and disabled people in Southern Europe: https://www.ces.uc.pt/intimate/ 13

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mental forms of human dependency, which may include birth, child-­ rearing, relations of emotional dependency and support, generational ties, illness, dying, and death (to name a few). Kinship is neither a fully autonomous sphere, proclaimed to be distinct from community and friendship— or the regulations of the state—through some definitional fiat, nor is it ‘over’ or ‘dead’ just because, as David Schneider has consequentially argued, it has lost the capacity to be formalized and tracked in the conventional ways that ethnologists in the past have attempted to do. (Butler 2002: 15)

The passage focuses on the fact that the current forms of life map is far from being foreclosed, bringing into the light intimacy and affective realities that the modern bourgeois ‘objective Spirit’ has not considered valuable or even readable. Butler addressed in the previous excerpt homosexual kinship and the outsized value assigned to a male-female-based symbolic cultural order, while colleagues such as Pablo Pérez Navarro have rather focused on the claims raised by non-monogamous communities as another field of resistance for reframing the relationship between the State and the ways of experiencing intimacy and relating to others.14 Both directions tackle the ticklish issue of how to deal with forms of life that do not meet the guidelines of hegemonic cultural patterns. If we engage ethical life from a performative standpoint, the scope achieved by institutional bonds such as marriage or parenting will inevitably gain a broader impact in transforming the ethical order prevailing in societies on a global scale. This fact centrally addresses the question of who counts as a citizen and which intimate spheres are expected to claim public recognition from the State, an issue that should form part of a creditable republican agenda.

 Pérez Navaro (Pérez Navaro 2017: 456): ‘For some, the encounter between non-monogamies and the law might appear as simply a pleasant side effect of future developments of non-monogamous communities. However, when thoroughly considering their potential for destabilizing the historical links between monogamy and a complex set of privileges and citizenship rights, along with the unexpected effects that such an undermining of the monogamous public order would entail (no jury, for example, would show an interest in the religious or cultural grounds of any concrete form of non-monogamy except for possibly openly Islamophobic reasons), certain utopian possibilities stemming from this encounter with the law might start tickling our political imaginations, with the hope being that we get closer to a total reinvention of the relationship between the state and the ways we choose to relate with others’. 14

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Concluding Remarks

From the outset of this paper I have attempted to consider the personal pursuit of happiness as a key quandary that the republican mind, now ‘in dire straits’, has faced through the development of republicanism and its commitment to the universal spread of civil independence. Indeed, the danger of political paternalism looms over any grievance, urging the statist institutional framework to intensify its attention to the sources of disability and the feeling of being a ‘misfit’ that often pervades the subject in neoliberal times. Moreover, the requirements that contemporary republicanism is expected to meet aim to grant legitimacy to forms of life that the modern ethical order has condemned at best to subalternity. The fact that ‘no individual can resist’, as Adorno wrote in §18 of Minima Moralia, displays as evidence the fact that large regions of the neoliberal ‘objective’ worldliness have become a source of dreariness and melancholia, even if it may flaunt a surfeit effect in terms of material goods and technological experiences. Against the positive impression that the fetishism of neoliberal merchandise might arouse, the lethal capacity of this system of production to make life unsustainable stands out as a key trait of its uncivilizatory features. However, a central issue will be the choice of a method for approaching the tangled social dynamics that the neoliberal system of production and the conservative ethical order have brought about. In these cases, critical theory furnishes some helpful epistemic guidance. As Adorno points out, focusing on Horkheimer’s method, critical theory hunts down the truth concealed in social forms, a method that makes the theorist conscious of the historical context of each form of good: He refuses to think society as a kind of glass jar through whose solid but transparent walls one could see the realm of the true, beautiful, or good. Truth and the social life process are interwoven for him at the deepest level, not so that truth is socially relativized, but so that the shape of truth itself is continuously connected with the particular critique of social moments and has its standard in the idea of a right society, which constantly arises anew. (Adorno 1997: 154)

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Thus, determining the truth(s) about life is related to the complaint about its alienated forms under the pressure of objective powers. At present, many of those living in progressive societies still feel their intimacy restrained by a hegemonic juridical landscape, which simply conveys to them that they do not count as worthy citizens, as they do not live under the frameworks they are supposed to. Only an accurate critique of ideology might help to remove the condemnation of a large number of the population to what Adorno called a ‘false life’, which confirms that it is better suited to the emancipatory goals of critical theory to indirectly give an account of the good life, highlighting the watersheds and crevices perceptible in these widespread life patterns, and assessing how specific forms of life are damaged.15 What counts as a good life is a dizzying question for the liberal tradition, which adopts a hard-hitting distance with regard to this issue and uses it to slam the door on any claim raised against the alleged power of human desire and the need for self-development, which are multiple by definition. In opposition to this, critical theory has repeatedly undertaken the more honourable task of identifying and denouncing which lives have become invisible to public power for being considered ‘wrong’, with the aim of readjusting the edges of bourgeois ethical normativity to will away a too-sweeping recognition of what counts as a ‘good life’. The dimming of a universal framework that steers the choice of a satisfying form of life will perhaps help us to perceive other paths for boosting liveability and debunk the assumption of an ideal type of human cohabitation and care, child-rearing and personal development.

References Adorno, T.  W. (1997). Radiorede über Max Horkheimer. In R.  Tiedemann (Ed.), Gesammelte Schriften (Vol. 20). Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Allen, A. (2016). The End of Progress. Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.

 See Jaeggi’s remarks about liberal and dialectical negativism in the paper (Jaeggi 2005: 93).

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Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books. Butler, J. (2002). Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 13(1), 14–44. Butler, J. (2005). Giving an Account of Oneself. Fordham University Press. Butler, J. (2015). Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Celikates, R. (2015). Against Manichaeism. The Politics of Forms of Life and the Possibilities of Critique. Raison Politiques, 57(1), 81–96. Dejours, Chr. (2012). From Psychopathology to the Psychodynamics of Work. In N. H. Smith & J. P. Deranty (Eds.), New Philosophies of Labor: Work and Social Bond (pp. 209–250). Leiden: Brill. Fassin, É. (2014). Same-Sex Marriage, Nation, and Race: French Political Logics and Rhetoric. Contemporary French Civilization, 39, 281–301. Gago, V. (2017). Neoliberalism from Below. Popular Pragmatics & Baroque Economies. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Honig, B. (2017). Public Things. Democracy in Disrepair. Fordham University Press. Honneth, A. (2015). Freedom’s Right. The Social Foundations of Democratic Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Jaeggi, R. (2005). ‘No Individual Can Resist’. Minima Moralia as Critique of Forms of Life. Constellations. Retrieved June 17, 2019, from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1351-0487.2005.00403.x. Jaeggi, R. (2013). Critique of Life Forms. Forms of Life as Instances of Problem-­ solving. Retrieved June 17, 2019, from http://cef.pucp.edu.pe/wp-content/ uploads/2014/08/Rahel-Jaeggi-Critique-of-Forms-of-Life-Brasil-2013.pdf. Jaeggi, R. (2014). Kritik von Lebensformen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Kant, I. (1992–2013). The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Emmanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Neill, O. (2016). Justice Across Boundaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pérez Navaro, P. (2017). Beyond Inclusion: Non-monogamies and the Borders of Citizenship. Sexuality & Culture, 21(2), 441–458. Putnam, H. (1994). Words and Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Robins, B. (2007). The Smell of Infrastructure. Notes Toward an Archive. Boundary 2, 34(1), 25–33.

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Santos, A.  C. (2013). Are We There Yet? Queer Sexual Encounters, Legal Recognition and Homonormativity. Journal of Gender Studies, 22(1), 54–64. Ypi, L., & White, J. (2016). The Meaning of Partisanship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zaharijević, A., & Milutinović Bojanić, S. (2017). The Trajectories of the Concept of Life in Judith Butler’s Thought. Isegoría, 56, 169–185.

Name Index1

A

Adorno, Theodor W., 3, 5, 17, 213, 221, 222 Althusser, Louis, 127 Arendt, Hannah, 13, 21–39, 68, 132, 138–144, 146–148, 153, 155, 156 B

Balibar, Étienne, 117–134, 169, 175 Benhabib, Seyla, 30, 31, 31n31 Bentham, Jeremy, 85, 86 Blanchot, Maurice, 12 Borges, Jorge Luis, 68 Brown, Wendy, 97, 163, 206

Butler, Judith, 3–18, 33–37, 69, 95, 96, 101, 105, 108–110, 112, 113, 117–134, 187–189, 193, 195, 199, 200, 209, 210, 213, 214, 218–220 C

Carlyle, Thomas, 87 Cavarero, Adriana, 6 D

Deleuze, Gilles, 16, 117, 118 Durán, María Ángeles, 80 E

Engels, Friedrich, 122, 163

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Rodríguez Lopez et al. (eds.), Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60519-3

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226 

Name Index

F

L

Feher, Michel, 97 Foucault, Michel, 3, 5, 14, 73, 97, 118, 127, 164, 195 Fraser, Nancy, 79, 137–158, 163, 171, 179, 180, 189

Lacan, Jacques, 127 Lakoff, George, 76 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 127, 218 Locke, John, 28n22, 85 M

G

Gehlen, Arnold, 42, 48, 54 Gilligan, Carol, 72, 73n9, 77

Macpherson, C.B., 85 Marx, Karl, 16, 28n22, 50n21, 89, 95n6, 133, 162, 163, 168, 201, 202 Mill, John Stuart, 86, 86n2, 90

H

Haraway, Donna, 23n5, 187, 193, 198–200 Hegel, G.W.F., 3–18, 50n21, 59, 144, 211, 214, 217 Heidegger, Martin, 41–44, 51n22, 53, 60, 113, 114 Hobbes, Thomas, 28n22, 46, 49, 52, 85 Honneth, Axel, 58n44, 112, 137–158, 217, 218

N

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11–14, 131, 132 P

Pérez Orozco, Amaia, 80 Plessner, Helmut, 41–61 R

J

Jaeggi, Rahel, 205, 210–215

Rancière, Jacques, 137–158, 138n1 S

K

Kant, Immanuel, 10, 73n9, 206, 208, 209

Safatle, Vladimir, 92, 93, 97, 97n7 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 103 Sassen, Saskia, 163, 166

  Name Index 

Schmitt, Carl, 42–49, 51–53, 53n30, 55, 55n34, 58–60, 58n44, 172 Scholz, Roswitha, 186n1, 187–202 V

Vattimo, Gianni, 128

Y

Young, Iris Marion, 69 Z

Zaharijević, Adriana, 13, 14, 198, 210 Žižek, Slavoj, 3, 4, 9–11, 17, 18

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Subject Index1

A

Agency emotional, 102, 105–109 joint, 108 Alterity, 4, 8, 58 Anthropology philosophical, 41–61 political, 41–61, 120, 127, 130, 131 Anti-humanism, 119, 127–130 Autonomy relational, 74 with others, 74 C

Capitalism crisis, 185 global, 165, 185–202

Care capitalist crisis of, 79 collective organization of, 75 ethics of, 72, 72n6, 72n8, 73, 75–77 for oneself, 73 vicious circle of, 79 Civility, 119, 125, 129–134 Cohabitation, 96, 214, 216, 222 Consciousness, 4, 8, 9, 11, 143 Crisis ecological, 22, 22n2, 22n3, 38, 70, 80 eco-social, 67 migrant-humanitarian, 156

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Rodríguez Lopez et al. (eds.), Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60519-3

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Subject Index

D

F

De-individualization, 95n6 Democracy, 14, 80, 93, 97, 98, 155, 158, 206, 207, 210, 212, 215, 216 Demos, 56, 57, 59, 92–94, 92n5, 97, 98 Dependence, 8, 33, 34, 71n5, 73, 74, 83, 84, 91n4, 93, 94, 96, 210, 211 Difference, 15, 25, 29n26, 30, 42, 45, 46, 49, 51–54, 53n30, 57, 76, 88, 92n5, 102, 105, 106, 118, 128, 133, 134, 137–158, 179, 186n1, 188, 189, 191, 192, 194

Freedom, 15, 17, 24, 25, 27–29, 28n22, 29n27, 31–36, 32n36, 50, 76, 78, 83–85, 89, 94, 96, 145, 153, 208, 209, 212, 214, 216, 217

E

Emancipation, 31n31, 32, 89, 95n6, 124, 133, 138, 149, 153, 196, 200, 209, 210, 212 Empathy, 72n8, 102, 105–109 Engagement, 58, 98, 103, 103n2, 104, 106, 108, 113–115, 199 Equality, 24, 26, 28, 29n27, 78, 84, 89, 93, 96, 134, 138n1, 145, 149, 152, 154, 175, 208, 209 Exclusion emotional, 102, 110–113 gender, 126 globalization, 166, 168, 169 social, 104, 112, 156, 162, 167–176, 205–222

G

Government, 28, 28n22, 29n27, 39n48, 76, 83, 86n2, 87, 88, 97, 172, 208, 209 H

Happiness, 85, 90, 97, 205–216, 220 Homo politicus, 93–98, 97n7 Human, 6n1, 18, 22n3, 24–26, 29–32, 34, 39n48, 42–60, 45n12, 51n22, 67, 68, 69n1, 70–77, 70n2, 70–71n3, 72n8, 74n10, 77n14, 80, 90, 95n6, 97, 98, 101, 105, 108, 110, 113, 119–121, 127–134, 130n58, 139, 141, 145–147, 186, 199, 201, 205–208, 210–213, 218, 219, 222 Humiliation, 145–147 I

Identity, 10, 26, 30, 30n30, 31, 31n32, 44–46, 60, 68, 74, 91n4, 118, 126, 128, 129, 132–134, 138, 139, 141–145, 147–150, 154, 156, 157, 163,

  Subject Index 

167, 168, 177, 178, 180, 188n2, 217 Immigration, 217 Inclusion common, 130 critical, 176 Incorporation, 133, 177, 179 adverse, 162, 176–182 Independence, 8, 73, 74, 84, 86, 89, 91–93, 91n4, 96, 98, 208, 220 Individual Sovereign self-governing, 87–90, 91n4 self-owner, 92 Injustice, 37, 38, 77, 143, 147, 174, 177, 179, 181, 182, 208, 210 Interdependence, 31, 37, 38, 39n48, 73–75, 96, 209 Intersectionality, 78, 185–202 Invulnerability, 83, 84, 87, 94 J

Justice environmental, 67–80 fraternal, 77, 158 global, 67–80, 211 social, 67 L

Labor, 24, 27n21, 29, 34, 155, 175, 178 Life, 5, 15, 17, 21–39, 39n48, 48, 50, 51, 53–57, 55n34, 69, 71–75, 71n5, 75n11, 77, 80, 85–87, 95, 96, 98, 101, 122, 124, 126, 126n43, 127, 130, 131, 139–141, 146–148, 154–156, 165, 170, 199, 201, 205–222

231

M

Migrants, 143, 150, 169, 175 Minorities, 149, 153, 207, 209, 213, 216 N

Nationalism, 169, 170, 172 methodological, 169, 170, 172 Neoliberalism, 84, 97, 154, 163, 164, 208 P

Performativity, 15, 17, 34, 126 Plato, 25, 142, 143, 147, 152 Plurality, 13, 23, 24, 26, 34, 49, 59, 74, 153, 195, 205, 213 Poverty, 32, 32n35, 69, 121, 167–170, 173–179, 181 Power, 5, 6, 12, 15, 22, 34, 35, 35n42, 37, 46–49, 51, 59, 69, 73, 74n10, 78, 87, 88, 102, 108, 121, 125, 128, 131, 138n1, 149, 152, 162–164, 166, 168, 171, 172, 174, 175, 177, 178, 180–182, 186–189, 198, 222 Precarity, 15, 33, 38, 98, 120–124, 126–128, 130, 131, 134, 206, 209, 210 Public health, 69, 70, 211 R

Recognition intersubjectivity of, 102 redistribution, 137–139, 149, 155, 158, 212 Refugee, 36, 138–144, 155

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Subject Index

Relationality, 4, 13, 133 Responsibility ethical, 6, 68, 71, 105 social, 75, 76, 78 Rights civil, 208–216 welfare, 155, 206 S

Self-actualization, 84, 86, 87, 91n4, 94, 95 Self-awareness, 102–104 Sovereignty, 12, 14, 52, 84–87, 86n2, 90–93, 95, 96, 98, 132, 150, 163, 164, 166, 172 Space/sphere domestic, 26–28, 37, 38, 171 private, 23, 25–29, 32, 34, 35, 140, 143, 147, 208, 211 public, 12, 14, 15, 23, 25–29, 31–34, 36n45, 39, 43, 46, 53, 88n3, 143, 147, 158, 205–222 Subject absolute, 10 opaque, 4–8 universal, 10 Sustainability, 21–39

V

Violence anti-violence, 119, 124–127, 129, 133 counter-violence, 120, 125, 126 extreme, 117–134 non-violence, 119, 124–127, 129, 134 slow, 122, 122n21, 123 visibility of, 123 Vulnerability asymmetrical, 68, 69 basis of ethics, 67–80, 101 intrinsic/extrinsic, 67, 68, 71 ontological, 101 physical, 69, 96 as shame, 111 spaces of, 69, 71 unequal, 68 W

Women as property, 89 as workers, 80