Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism: Solidarity, Mimesis and Radical Social Change 9781474276184, 9781474276191, 9781474276207, 1474276180

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Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism

Also available from Bloomsbury On Resistance, Howard Caygill The Impossible Community, John P. Clark Philosophical Anarchism and Political Obligation, Magda Egoumenides Anarchism and Political Modernity, Nathan Jun The Bloomsbury Companion to Anarchism, edited by Ruth Kinna Lifestyle Politics and Radical Activism, Laura Portwood-Stacer Daoism and Anarchism, John A. Rapp Black Flags and Social Movements, Dana M. Williams

Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism Solidarity, Mimesis and Radical Social Change Iwona Janicka

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Iwona Janicka, 2017 Iwona Janicka has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 9781474276184 ePDF: 9781474276191 ePub: 9781474276207 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Moim Rodzicom

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Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations

ix



Introduction

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1

Universality in Triangulation: Hegel on a Carousel Hegel’s static triad: Universality–particularity–singularity Butler’s dynamic universal: Political performativity Circulating singularity Recognition and the question of asymmetry Where are ‘we’ in Butler: The question of collectivity

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Universality in Mimesis: Structural Failure and Social Transformation Towards recognition: Performativity as a special case of mimesis How mimesis produces failure Why we repeat: Freud, Foucault, Derrida Does gender always have to be sexual? Butler and the question of the transgender Structural failure and the question of formalism Slow social transformation: How radical is that?   Reform, revolution, emancipation, subversion   Collectivities of heterogeneity

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3

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13 15 20 25 32

39 41 47 52 63 70 74 76 78

Universality in Space: Collectivities of Heterogeneity meet Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherology 81 Sloterdijk’s theory of bubbles and foams 86   The archaeology of the intimate 86   Republic of spaces: A city of human foams 91 ‘Everything is a society’: Gabriel Tarde and the contamination of anthropocentrism 94 Schaumdeutung versus Traumdeutung: Ego formation through the ears 96 Foam ethics: Immunism of co-fragile heterogeneous systems 103 Affirmation versus critique: Foucault and the planet of the practising 105

viii Contents

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5

Co-Immunism versus Communism: Challenging Alain Badiou’s Model of Revolution Universal doubling: Generic multiplicity and universal singularity   Generic multiplicity in ontology   The difficult passage: Between being and being-there   Universal singularity in the world of appearing The problem with particularity Make it quick: Event and revolution as irruptive transformations Communism à la parisienne Towards Anarchism Away from equality Solidarity with singularity and contemporary anarchism Directed mimesis, contagion and anarchist r/evolution Impure universality and slow social transformation

Bibliography Index

117 119 120 126 128 133 137 142 153 155 161 169 173 175 187

Acknowledgements I would like to extend my special thanks to Ian James for his support and encouragement in developing this project. My warmest thanks go also to Martin Crowley and Todd May for their constructive feedback on the early version of this book. For their generous financial support, I wish to thank the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the British Academy. On a more private note I warmly thank: Eva von Redecker for our neverending debates and her insightful comments on the text, Nina Rismal and Anatole Lucet for proofreading the early draft for clarity, Ann for a house with a garden and Aurélie for her neo-Dadaism. I also wish to thank all my other fantastic friends who indirectly contributed to this book and whom I fear to name in case I forget somebody. (Yes, it is you, too.) I thank my parents, Grażyna and Marian (Dziękuję Rodzice), and my brother, Czarek. Finally, I would like to thank Jakob for keeping things sane. Parts of Chapter 1 first appeared in Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 36 (3), 2013, published by Edinburgh University Press, under the title ‘Hegel on a Carrousel: Universality and the Politics of Translation in the Work of Judith Butler’. Sections of Chapter 2 originally appeared as ‘Queering Girard – De-Freuding Butler. A Theoretical Encounter between Judith Butler’s Gender Performativity and René Girard’s Mimetic Theory’, in Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, vol. 22, 2015, published by Michigan State University Press. Selected parts of Chapter 5 initially appeared under the title ‘Are These Bubbles Anarchist? Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherology and the Question of Anarchism’, in Anarchist Studies, 24 (1), 2016, published by Lawrence & Wishart.

Abbreviations Judith Butler AC

Antigone’s Claim (2000)

APO

‘Against Proper Objects’ (1994)

BTM

Bodies that Matter (1993)

CHU

Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2000)

CQ

‘Critically Queer’ (1993)

DJTS

‘Doing Justice to Someone’ (2006)

ES

Excitable Speech (1997)

FW

Frames of War (2009)

GAO

Giving an Account of Oneself (2005)

GT

Gender Trouble (1990)

IGI

‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’ (2004)

PL

Precarious Life (2004)

PLP

The Psychic Life of Power (1997)

PW

Parting Ways (2012)

SD

Subjects of Desire (1999)

UC

‘Universality in Culture’ (1996)

UE

‘The Uses of Equality’ (1997)

UG

Undoing Gender (2004)

WCF

‘What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’ (2001)

Abbreviations

René Girard DD

Deceit, Desire, and the Novel ([1961] 1965)

EC

Evolution and Conversion (2007)

ISSF

I See Satan Fall Like Lightening ([1999] 2001)

S

The Scapegoat ([1982] 1986)

TH

Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World ([1978] 1987)

VS

Violence and the Sacred ([1972] 1977)

Peter Sloterdijk AU

Ausgewählte Übertreibungen. Gespräche und Interviews 1993–2012 [Selected Exaggerations. Conversations and Interviews 1993–2012] (2013)

INT

‘The Space of Global Capitalism and its Imaginary Imperialism: An Interview with Peter Sloterdijk’ (2011)

MLA

You Must Change Your Life ([2009] 2013)

S I

Spheres I: Bubbles ([1998] 2011)

S II

Spheres II: Globes ([1999] 2014)

S III

Sphären III: Schäume [Spheres III: Foams] (2004)

STD

The Art of Philosophy ([2010] 2012)

Alain Badiou BE

Being and Event ([1988] 2005)

CH

The Communist Hypothesis ([2009] 2010)

E

Ethics. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil ([1994] 2001)

LW

Logics of Worlds ([2006] 2009)

M

Metapolitics ([1998] 2011)

MS

The Meaning of Sarkozy ([2007] 2008)

PE

Philosophy and the Event ([2010] 2013)

xi

xii Abbreviations

PP

Philosophy in the Present (2009)

SMP

Second Manifesto for Philosophy ([2009] 2011)

SP

Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism ([1997] 2003)

Introduction The turn of the millennium demonstrated a fully fledged revival and fusion of various left-wing social movements with differing agendas. The movements for women’s, black, indigenous, LGBT and animal liberation and also ecological, anti-nuclear and anti-war movements spoke out simultaneously against the global capital. Considering the diverse emphases of these groups is there a philosophical framework that could help us understand their nature and their modes of operation? The phenomenon of contemporary activism on the radical political left has provoked much debate in recent scholarship on social transformation. Much of the research on the topic suggests concepts of event, revolution, equality, emancipation and democracy as key for understanding social transformation at the turn of the twenty-first century. But, contrary to the dominant, largely Marxist, interpretations in the field, it seems that this perspective does not anymore fully capture the diversity and the concrete operations of these heterogeneous movements. We need a new idea of social transformation and a new set of concepts to accurately describe social change that is happening today. In this book, I consider contemporary left-wing social movements of the last fifteen to twenty years through the link between universality and social transformation. Universality is ‘one of the most contested topics within recent social theory’ (CHU 14). In the last two decades, there has been a ‘return of universalism’ after a phase of discredit by poststructuralist and/or postmodern theory. The question around which the discussion on the universal has been centred was: ‘is universality worth saving?’ (Schor 1995: 30), and it has concentrated mainly on the relation between universality and particularity.1 This book, in turn, focuses primarily on the relationship between singularity and universality and between singularity and particularity. It reconsiders universality while taking on board the poststructuralist heritage. What is more, it links the question of universality to radical left politics and tries to overcome poststructuralist angst over concrete political action.2 The current debates See Laclau 1995, 1996; Schor and Weed 1995. Informative overviews of the debates surrounding the universal can be found in Phillips (1992) and Zerilli (1998). For interesting interpretations of universality in contemporary debates, see, in particular, Dorothea Olkowski’s idea of the ‘sensible universal’ (2007) and, in connection with radical left politics, Saul Newman’s ‘unstable universalities’ (2007).

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around social transformation have been structured on the one hand by anticapitalist discourses coming from a broadly conceived Marxist tradition and, on the other, by narratives aimed at spreading democracy, human rights and liberal economic market forms. The latter have been the most powerful and influential models of change in recent decades and have been both implicitly and explicitly criticized by thinkers who are important for this project. The model of social transformation that will emerge from this book is a contestation of both the Marxist legacy and the capitalist democracy. It is an affirmation of the neglected ‘third way’ that is anarchism. The question of universality and social transformation has a long tradition that is interlaced in Immanuel Kant’s concept of ‘universal history’. Universal history, Kant emphasizes, is ‘the realization of a concealed plan of nature’ (2006: 13). It is a unified and teleological procedure that arises from nature and allows us to recognize a pattern promoting the development of the rational capacities of the human species (see Kant 2006: 3). Through history, the ‘cunning of nature’ is directed at bringing about a ‘perfect state constitution, as the only condition in which nature can fully develop all of its predispositions in humankind’ (Kant 2006: 13). In the tradition of the Enlightenment, history is always linked to universal natural laws applicable to all mankind and so it is always related to universality. In the Enlightenment it is abstract universality that is at the heart of history. G. W. F. Hegel, who continues Kant’s reflections on universal history, ‘regards human beings as thoroughly historical creatures’ (Dudley 2009: 1). This means for Hegel, in contrast to Kant, that the very foundations of the human condition develop from one historical era to another rather than remaining the expression of a single, static human nature. The Hegelian ‘cunning of reason’, anticipated by Kant, has, as ‘its universal end, that the concept of spirit should be realised’ (Hegel 2001: 39).3 History is a single, coherent, directional process in which ‘the universal emerges unscathed from the curbing and buffeting that particulars have to endure’ (McCarney 2000: 126). In Hegel, history is part of the logic of the whole and, as in Kant, it is conceptualized as unified ‘regular progression’ on its way towards an ultimate end, its telos – the fulfilment of Spirit (see Taylor 1975: 389–427). In the light of this tradition, the question at the origin of this project was: how can we think of social and historical change against Kant’s and Hegel’s accounts of unified and teleological universal histories? How can we conceptualize both universality and social transformation while bearing in mind the breaking up of meta-narratives in the twentieth century? What Cited here from McCarney because of the translation he provides (2000: 125).

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Introduction

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is the form of universality and social transformation that could appropriately account for the twenty-first century? Is Western liberal democracy the end of history, as Fukuyama (1992) argued with reference to Kant and Hegel? Hegel is the structuring figure of these concerns, which still animate contemporary political debates. One way this question has been tackled on the political left is by going back to the thought of Karl Marx. In the nineteenth century, Marx took up the legacy of Hegel and claimed that the progress of history does not take place, as Hegel would want it, in self-consciousness but in humans’ relation to the world, in their control over the environment and economic structures. Humans ‘would relate in connections of mastery and servitude until they were masters of the physical world’, he claimed (see Cohen 2000: 23). Marx’s teleological premise was that communism is ‘imminent and inevitable’ (see Elster 1985: 514). Capitalism, in the process of universal and self-destructive dialectics, would ultimately put an end to itself and the perfect society, that is, communist society would suddenly emerge (Elster 1985: 309). Revolution at a suitable point in history was, for Marx, the means of bringing about this ultimate goal of history. This Marxist approach has been one of the ways to bring together universality and social transformation. Another way to deal with the question of universality and socio-historical change is by trying to envision transformation in a less coherent and less teleological way. Instead of picturing history as a steady development towards a goal, a deep procedure that is occasionally ruptured by great events, one could imagine it as a dispersed and decentralized process anchored in the present. One could envision social and historical change not only in temporal terms but also, and much more importantly, in spatial and mimetic terms. This project offers one of the ways to do that. By going back to Hegel, and by tracing a different path to that taken by Marxism, I propose a version of universality that will enable us to think about social transformation in terms pertinent to the new millennium. This book suggests a model of slow and disseminated social transformation, operating according to the logic of mimesis and rooted in the spatiality of spheres. I do this with the help of selected contemporary philosophers: Judith Butler, René Girard and Peter Sloterdijk. Instead of a base in equality and revolution, this model of ‘slow’ social transformation is built upon ‘solidarity with singularity’, mimetic contagion, co-immunity and collectivity. The concept of slow social transformation that I wish to propose here and that could serve as a theoretical framework to describe contemporary left-wing radical politics is based on two notions: mimesis and solidarity with singularity. Mimesis is understood here as both witting and unwitting imitation of

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behaviours in the bodily practice and is mainly drawn from the work of René Girard and Judith Butler. If mimesis is directed, then it is a form of training – a contribution that Peter Sloterdijk’s work makes to Butler and Girard’s take on this concept. Training is an exercise of repeating certain practices that lead to specific habits. The aim of training is to perform a given practice with less effort the next time it is undertaken regardless of whether it is proclaimed as training or not. One could say that it is a continuous effort to make a particular practice less witting, a form of automatization of a practice that is meant to become a habit. The idea of day-to-day training of one’s specific habits in a milieu where others do it as well and where at each point there is a possibility of a mimetic contagion offers an illuminating perspective on contemporary anarchist cooperatives and housing projects. These collectives operate as habitbased communities because they assume that the only way to bring about social transformation is through a daily practice rather than a one-off revolution. However, in order to accurately describe them, the concept of mimesis is not enough as religious communities, sports clubs, the army or a family setting also operate mimetically. An additional notion is needed in order to capture their specificity and that is solidarity with singularity. Solidarity with singularity is a form of political practice that is predicated on acts of cooperation with and support for entities that remain unintelligible from within a given status quo, or to use Jacques Rancière’s term, from within an available distribution of the sensible (partage du sensible). I construct the concept of ‘solidarity with singularity’ by turning to the work of Sloterdijk and combining it with Judith Butler’s take on Hegel. The purpose of this concept is to bring together to a certain extent the diverse political and social aims of various contemporary left-wing collectives that do not necessarily proclaim themselves ‘anarchist’: they practice solidarity with animals, plants, the environment, women, minorities, LGBT or refugees, that is, whoever and whatever is in the position of oppression or unintelligibility. Solidarity with singularity, a coming together of Hegel, Butler and Sloterdijk, best accounts for social transformation as a slow, continuous process and is a point of convergence with contemporary anarchism in practice. With these two main concepts of mimesis and solidarity with singularity the volume proposes a perspective on social transformation that does not have to involve the idea of revolution. Revolution, defined as an irruptive event and as represented in the Marxist tradition, constitutes the principal counter model to the slow social transformation presented in this book. I consider Alain Badiou, an important figure in contemporary philosophy, in the context of a Marxist understanding of

Introduction

5

social transformation and universality. That is also why I engage extensively with his ideas in the latter part of this book. Badiou is dealt with not merely as a representative of Marxism – undeniably, he is a philosopher in his own right. However, his way of thinking about social change, through equality and revolution, comes from a Marxist legacy and this aspect is what constitutes the main interest of this project. Badiou’s model is the sudden emergence of a paradigm-changing event. Whereas his revolutionary event is rare, irruptive and tied to very specific points of eruption, the idea of transformation based on Butler, Girard and Sloterdijk is tied to practices of mimesis. Because it is based on mimesis, social transformation is continuous, decentralized and rooted in the present. It also removes the determining political subject from the equation. With Michel Foucault, it abandons the illusion that the world can be reshaped at will and casts the subject into the unknown future. Instead, the subject has two options that are complementary. Either one has to give oneself over to the unknown – this is what Judith Butler proposes – or one has to orient one’s mimesis in order to produce ‘habitable spheres’. The latter option is explored using Peter Sloterdijk’s work. I try to embrace both of these paths and bring them together in this book. The combination of the two – directed mimesis – which will always be interrupted by singularity coming from the failure inherent to repetition, is what drives slow social transformation. Together with this, what is proposed here is a different concept of agency from the traditional humanist idea of a socio-political agent. A new model of social transformation suggested in this book is a theory of mimetic training directed towards creating a more hospitable socio-natural environment and embodied in anarchist collectives today. This project starts with G. W. F. Hegel’s triad of universality–particularity– singularity. In Chapter 1, I confront Hegel’s ideas on the interaction between universality, particularity and singularity with those of Judith Butler, in order to show that Butler’s universal is dynamic and infinitely self-renewing. In addition, I engage in detail with Butler’s politics of translation. I demonstrate how the concept of structural failure that is at the basis of Butler’s two key concepts for thinking politics – translation and performativity – allows for a constant circulation of the universal and, in consequence, brings about social transformation. On the basis of this, I explore in further detail the common mimetic basis between Butler’s idea of performativity and René Girard’s concept of mimetic desire. My engagement with Girard brings into relief the mimetic aspect of Butler’s work. The two concepts explore different mimetic fields and feed into each other to help us think of social transformation in terms of

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mimetic contagion. Mimesis is particularly important here because it is the basic mechanism of social transformation. I argue that structural failure in mimesis – that is, the impossibility of imitating perfectly – is both inevitable and constitutive and that it has the potential to transform society through exposure to singularity. The effects of the repeated failures in mimesis cannot be appropriated and this is exactly where the potential for transformation lies. As Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis inform Butler’s theoretical framework to a great extent, I argue that in her case important paths of interrogation are foreclosed because psychoanalysis does not offer her the conceptual tools to think about them. The most notable example is the question of transgender, which is unintelligible for Butler from within a psychoanalytical framework. I demonstrate in Chapter 2 how Girard’s model is able to overcome this problem. The Butler–Girard framework enables us to think about social transformation in terms of open, mimesis-driven collectivities of heterogeneity. One can imagine these as spaces where a person is exposed to a variety of models for mimesis and where the proliferation of models takes place through inspiration, that is, through mimetic contagion. Such a concept of social transformation emphasizes the importance of the immediacy of models and, in this way, foregrounds the spatiality related to intimacy with others. I call this process of infecting spaces with change slow social transformation. As neither Butler nor Girard account for spatiality in their works or its importance for human collectives, Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of spaces is crucial. Sloterdijk’s thinking on spherology contributes to exploring in further detail the connection between mimetic collectivities and space. In Chapter 3, slow social transformation is conceptualized as primarily a spatial phenomenon happening inside and between collectivities of heterogeneity, or spheres, in Sloterdijk’s terminology. Shared space is considered here as a common ontological category where mimesis, if oriented, ensures the production of good habits and, through these, ensures the production of habitable spheres. The insight that mimesis affords in this context is that everything that people do is done better or worse, is achieved more or less. This continuous aspect of slow social transformation is crucial and distinguishes it from an eruptive and localized model of revolution. The pivotal term that lies at the heart of this conceptualization of slow social transformation is solidarity. I conceive solidarity as a form of practice rather than in terms of sentiment (empathy, sympathy, compassion, etc.). It is a constant exercise of both habit and habitability. Solidarity requires acts. I argue with the help of Sloterdijk that solidarity should not be understood as something that can only take place between humans. Rather it should be

Introduction

7

regarded as a concept that encompasses the environment, the natural and the inanimate worlds, as a part of our shared co-immunism. Co-immunism emphasizes the importance of our location in the world and our symbiosis with both the animate and inanimate surroundings. With the reference to Gabriel Tarde’s work, I throw into relief the non-anthropocentric vision of the world that is present in Sloterdijk’s theory of spheres. In this context, the planet we inhabit and its elements such as air and water are part of our co-immunity because they share our spheres in a constitutive and necessary way. Although we cannot exist without them, they problematically occupy the position of invisible singularity in the available conceptual frameworks for ordering of the world. The version of transformation presented above challenges Badiou’s idea of universality and his model of revolution. Because the concept of revolution is not able to capture changes that develop at a slower pace and according to a different mode of operation than that of an event, I argue that a different conceptualization of radical social change is necessary. If the reference to the ‘common’ justifies the resuscitation of the notion of communism, as some Marxists claim, one needs to ask if perhaps there are better ways to do that than by re-implementing communism. I demonstrate that contemporary anarchism fused with Sloterdijk’s co-immunism is just such an illuminating way of ‘activating the common’ in a non-communist way. Chapter 5 deals, therefore, with contemporary anarchism in practice as it is portrayed in Uri Gordon’s Anarchy Alive! (2008). It combines anarchism with Sloterdijk’s co-immunism in order to complete the model of slow social transformation. This particular blending of theories necessitates the use of a core concept that is different from equality – a fundamental idea on the political left. Therefore, I argue against the utility of the concept of equality in conceptualizing slow social transformation and propose instead ‘solidarity with singularity’, a combination of Hegel, Butler, Girard and Sloterdijk, as the pivotal concept that best accounts for both slow social transformation and contemporary anarchism. Singularity encompasses here entities that are excluded from current versions of particularities and universality – the transgender, the Palestinians, the prisoners in Guantanamo – but also entities such as animals, plants and the environment. I propose a theoretical and philosophical framework that could help us think about social transformation beyond an exclusive concern for the human and also help to account for the diversity in contemporary activist-anarchist movements. Anarchism is important here because it treats domination as a dispersed phenomenon. That is also why anarchist practice that contributes towards social change is decentralized and diffused as well. It operates in ways

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that bear a similarity to Sloterdijk’s spheres. This philosophical synthesis of Hegel, Butler, Girard and Sloterdijk offers a theoretical structure that allows for a better understanding of contemporary anarchism in practice. Admittedly, Hegel, Butler, Girard, Badiou and Sloterdijk are strange bedfellows and they seem perhaps even more so in the context of contemporary anarchist cooperatives. However, their specific ideas converge: Butler, Girard and Sloterdijk share an interest in particular thinkers that makes it possible to successfully combine them. Butler and Girard both engage extensively with Sigmund Freud; Girard and Sloterdijk are considerably influenced by Gabriel Tarde; and finally, Sloterdijk and Butler continue Michel Foucault’s late work though in different ways. Tarde, Freud and Foucault coalesce the work of Butler, Girard and Sloterdijk that makes it possible to propose a model of slow social transformation. Also they offer each other solutions to impasses that their respective systems of thought encounter. Their common feature is that they pose similar questions, whether explicitly or implicitly, about universality and about social transformation and reach the limits of their chosen theoretical frameworks. The only way to productively overcome this is then to introduce a different philosopher who does not necessarily belong to the same conceptual universe and see whether she or he can help in overcoming these deadlocks. That is also why each chapter in this book formulates a problem with the help of a given philosopher that is solved in the following chapter by constructively engaging with a different philosopher. A chapter always solves an old problem and poses a new one that is in turn solved in the subsequent sections of the book. The reason why these specific thinkers are assembled in the present volume is that this particular combination of such unlikely allies seems to work. Each of the key thinkers is able to address and expand the interests of the previous one. They propel each other’s ideas and when synthesized in this unusual way they offer a novel perspective on radical left-wing cooperatives. This theoretical constellation is fruitful because from their ‘failures’ emerges a space for a new conceptual figure. To a certain extent, these productive failures materialize my theory on the textual level as well. The book draws a line from Hegel and his concept of universality to contemporary anarchism as it is practiced today. I look at practice in its most serious of implications from unwitting mimesis (Girard, Butler), through training (Sloterdijk) to politics and collective social transformation (contemporary anarchism). From a confrontation between a spatial, mimetic understanding of social transformation and the model of revolution, we end up with contemporary anarchism in practice as an organized form of channelling slow social

Introduction

9

transformation. My claim throughout this book is that contemporary left-wing activist collectives (housing projects, cooperatives, autonomous zones) demonstrate through their practices how one can effectively harness mimesis towards a more habitable world.

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Universality in Triangulation: Hegel on a Carousel The question of universality is not a purely abstract one. It is tightly connected to the realities of our daily lives in that the notion of universality is formed and articulated in specific cultural conditions. Depending on our idea of universality, for instance, in respect to the question of ‘who counts as human’, we interact with people and react to what happens to them accordingly. A striking example of this procedure were the media reports on a single death of a Western soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan and the blatant omission of the number of civilians killed in the same strike. In this procedure, notions of the universally human were used for some agents (the soldier), but they excluded others (the civilians) from this concept, placing them in an invisible remainder. The specific interplays of universality, particularity and singularity are illuminating in these instances. The question of universality then is the question of intelligibility. It is a procedure of a tacit ordering of the world in that we place some entities in the visible categories of universality and particularity, and others in the category of invisible singularity. A constant reformulation of the concept of universality to include the excluded is an integral part of social transformation, and this is what this chapter is interested in exploring. This, in turn, will contribute towards proposing a form of social transformation throughout this book that would encourage openness to a continuous reformulation of universality, and as a result foster social change. Judith Butler’s relationship to G. W. F. Hegel’s writing is in this context particularly relevant as she returns to the concept of universality in order to tackle the question of cultural recognition of some entities and the unintelligibility of others. In thinking about universality, Judith Butler can be placed in the line of non-totalizing interpretations of Hegel of the 1990s.1 In response to a question about whether she is resistant to placing her concept of the universal within Examples of this tendency are also Jean-Luc Nancy’s book on Hegel, The Restlessness of the Negative ([1997] 2002), and Catherine Malabou’s The Future of Hegel ([1996] 2005).

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a dialectical logic, Butler once admitted in an interview: ‘I think it would not make sense for me to say that I resist dialectics. I do resist the claim that dialectics leads to teleological closure’ (Butler and Connolly 2000: §31). The movement away from the critiques of Hegelian totality by Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault opens up a space for possibilities beyond the rehabilitation of binary oppositions (see Baugh 2003: 119–73). Butler’s reading of Hegel without closure allows for the conceptualization of an affection of the universal by the singular. That is to say, her concept of translation is dialectical in the sense that the Same is affected by Otherness and thus changed, in this way aligning Butler with a non-totalizing reinvention of Hegel. In order to understand how one can reformulate the concept of universality and social transformation in a way that would be pertinent to the most recent developments in contemporary theory and political practice, one needs to first go back to the place of Hegel within Butler’s work. In 1998 in her preface to Subjects of Desire (1999), Butler admits: In a sense, all of my work remains within the orbit of a certain set of Hegelian questions: What is the relation between desire and recognition, and how is it that the constitution of the subject entails a radical and constitutive relation to alterity. (SD xiv)

Hegel recurs throughout Butler’s writing and he structures her ideas on universality. Therefore, I wish to start with investigating two key issues. Firstly, I confront Hegel’s ideas on the interaction between universality, particularity and singularity with those of Butler, and show that Butler’s universal is dynamic and infinitely self-renewing. Secondly, I engage with Butler’s politics of translation and demonstrate how a Levinasian perspective on Hegelian dialectics changes the functioning of the universal. In relation to this claim, I also demonstrate how the structural failure in translation and performativity allows for the constant circulation of the universal, and, as a consequence, brings about social transformation. The former issue concerns dynamics, and, more specifically, the circulation between singularity, particularity and universality. The latter concerns the specific consequences of this dynamic proposed by Butler’s system on politics and social change. In order to fully envisage the specific dynamic of the universal in Butler’s work, I place Hegel’s concepts in a triangular structure where each vertex is occupied by the category of the universal, the particular and the singular, respectively. This arrangement provides a useful framework that will allow us to explore the respective fates of the universal, particular and singular when confronted with Butler’s theoretical work, and will allow for a



Universality in Triangulation: Hegel on a Carousel

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better appreciation of how these specific terms interact with each other. In fact, we will see that in the process of universality formation all three members of the singular–particular–universal triad leave unrecognized remainders. This unrecognized residue of failed particularization and failed universalization, which should be also understood as singularity, circulates between the three instances, and keeps the system going ad infinitum. When appropriated by Butler, Hegel’s singularity–particularity–universality triad is in continual circulation. Bringing together Hegel with Butler is important because it allows us to extract the concept of singularity, which is essential for understanding the notion of solidarity with singularity in Chapter 3 and is crucial for describing contemporary anarchism in practice in Chapter 5.

Hegel’s static triad: Universality–particularity–singularity Hegel develops three moments of a notion in his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (I): The Science of Logic ([1817] 2000): universality (das Allgemeine), particularity (das Besondere) and singularity (das Einzelne) (Hegel, I §20, §163–5). The distinction between the universal and the particular is between the generic term (applicable to all entities, for example animal) and the specific term (applicable to some entities, for instance, elephant). The universal and the particular are relational terms, that is, they are fully dependent on each other. The universal is contaminated by the particular, that is, we are not able to grasp the idea of the animal without thinking about particular instances of animalness: elephant, tiger, hippopotamus or fish. The particular, further, is inseparable from the universal (see Hegel, I §24A.1; Inwood 1992: 303). In each particularity a universality is implied. The way to arrive at universality is therefore through plurality. We can extract the universal category only by having at least two particularities from which we may abstract universality (to put it crudely: white person + black person ⇒ race, lesbian + heterosexual ⇒ sexuality, Polish + French ⇒ nationality). Implicit in this procedure is the negation of the singular instance of each entity. Thus, to identify an entity as a particular instance of the universal ‘animal’, its singularity needs to be negated in order for it to be named ‘elephant’ or, even to a higher degree, for the elephant to be named Benjamin Blümchen. In such an operation, violence towards the singular is potentially involved through the negation and exclusion inevitably required to arrive at a universal. The categories forming particularities and universalities are chosen arbitrarily. In a specific cultural and historical context, certain categories are

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recognized and considered worth abstracting from (like race, sexuality or nationality), while other categories are not recognized. Therefore, one is left with singularities. These are entities that do not share particular categories with any other entities, and therefore they are banned from the sphere of the particular: they constitute a certain trace or a remainder from the particular– universal dyad. The singular is the exceptional singular, the excess, which makes universality what it is: it does not enter the particular–universal exchange but paradoxically defines it through the exclusion it accomplishes. That means that universality cannot exist without the operation of singularity because singularity structures through the exclusion what universality is. Singularity in Hegel is a restoration of universality on a higher level. This is because singularity represents unity, in contrast to the sundering of particularity, and also because singularity applies to the whole subject (for instance, Socrates), not just part of it, as in the case of particularity (see Inwood 1992: 302–5). Singularity is essential and constitutive because without its exclusion and its inherent excess it would not be possible to particularize and universalize entities. One of the central interests of this book is therefore the fate of singularity when the work of negation cannot incorporate it into the universal–particular relation. For Hegel, there is no sharp logical, epistemological or ontological difference between universality, particularity and singularity. According to Hegel, the pattern of the universal–particular–singular is a triadic structure that is exemplified in all thought and all things. Therefore, we can also map it onto the single structure of a triangle in order to observe the interaction of these three concepts with each other and with Butler’s ideas. We can observe that, in Hegel there is a constant exchange and interdependence between the universal and the particular, whereas the singular is left out of this interaction. The singular is constitutive but not relative, unlike the relationship between the particular and the universal. The universal is fundamentally dependent on the particular, and vice versa. The triangle in Hegel would then be a static structure with local movement between the two instances: the exchange relation between the particular and universal. The singular, however, remains located beyond this mobile pattern. This poses an important question about the fate of the singular in this potentially violent Hegelian particular–universal dyad. It is violent because both particularity and universality need to exclude entities in order to operate. Any one entity can have a number of particulars but only some of them form universals (universality formation), and any one entity appears in already recognized particularities (particularity formation). This means two things that are intertwined in Butler’s work: firstly, that some characteristics are recognized



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and privileged in particular political contexts, and secondly, that only some characteristics are recognized at all, even in language, as a result of the cultural and socio-historical context. These are the problems of universality in culture that Butler addresses throughout her work (see UC).

Butler’s dynamic universal: Political performativity In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2000), Butler arrives at her concepts of universality and hegemony within a Hegelian framework. Strongly influenced by Michel Foucault, Butler’s initial assumption is that we can talk about universality only within the bounds of the discourse in which we are positioned. No assertion of universality can take place apart from cultural norms and language. The universal is produced by discourse and is rooted in language. It is culturally and historically constructed (see CHU 193). With these initial poststructuralist axioms Butler develops her concept of the universal. In Butler’s view, universality is performatively enunciated and discursive. It is, on the one hand, tied to language and our places of enunciation. It is established through reiterative speech acts, which renew its claims to hegemony through repetition. On the other hand, it is inseparable from constant bodily performativity, unwitting imitation and the repetition of cultural norms. In those two areas, language and material performativity, it is possible to make effective claims to universality and hegemony and accomplish social transformation. Language and performativity are inseparable from each other and Butler often intermixes the vocabulary of both spheres to emphasize their interdependence. For Butler, there is a fundamental unsurpassability of language in politics. On a basic level, language structurally affirms itself as necessary and universal in its operation as language; the only means of subversion, therefore, is subversion from within the system, from within the language. On an intrinsic level, as universality is rooted in language, it is therefore necessary to establish rhetoric as the assertion of universality. Butler claims that ‘the universality is not speakable outside of a cultural language, but its articulation does not imply that an adequate language is available’. It only means that we do not escape our language, although we can push its limits (see CHU 41). A language must therefore be found that enables subjects who are not considered as subjects to enter the sphere of political legibility. However, not only does this process require finding a language to re-introduce the excluded into the sphere of the universal, but it is also necessary to expand the notion of universality

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through translation. Translation, for Butler, is therefore the process ‘by which the repudiated within universality is readmitted into the term in the process of remaking it’ (CHU 3). I wish to argue that this is achieved by exposure to alterity by way of common vulnerability and by the contagion of heterogeneity that will spread and inevitably increase social transformation. Butler deals with the concept of translation most extensively in her book Parting Ways (2012). The politics of translation that she proposes is saliently influenced by Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics and Walter Benjamin’s concept of translation (see PW 13).2 Its relation to Levinasian alterity is constitutive, and it makes Butler’s politics of translation an inevitably ethical project. Butler discusses the question of translation in the context of the Israel–Palestine conflict. In her view, a resource – that is, a tradition, principle or injunction – can be made available to us only if it is first translated. Through translation a resource is introduced into our temporality (see PW 8): If the ethical demand arrives from the past, precisely as a ‘resource’ for me in the present – a message from an ancient text, a traditional practice that illuminates the present in some way, or might dispose me toward certain modes of conduct in the present – it can only be ‘taken up’ or ‘received’ by being ‘translated’ into present terms. Receptivity is always a matter of translation. […] In other words, I cannot receive a demand, much less a commandment, from a historical elsewhere without translating, and, because translation alters what it conveys, the ‘message’ changes in the course of the transfer from one spatiotemporal horizon to another. (PW 10–11)

The loss of the original is therefore the condition of the survival of a certain demand captured in this resource (see PW 13). In the case of injunctions such as ‘thou shalt not kill’, it can be understood and applied in one’s life on the condition that it is translated into concrete circumstances in which one lives (see PW 17). For Butler, therefore: ‘there is no ethical response to the claim that any other has upon us if there is no translation; otherwise, we are ethically bound only to those who already speak as we do, in the language we already know’ (PW 17). The demand that she speaks about is the Levinasian demand of the Other. As Levinas’s Other is radically different from us, unintelligible and incommensurable with us, Butler’s alterity must be necessarily transmitted in translation. Even more, it must be established at the very core of transmission Butler also acknowledges the influence of Gloria Anzaldúa, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha and Talal Asad on her conceptualization of translation (see UG 228; PW 12–13; UC). In reference to Benjamin she says ‘one cannot understand the Levinasian demand except through Benjamin’s account of translation […]. Translation makes the demand available’ (PW 13).

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(PW 17). In that way, the trajectory of translation is counterhegemonic because one discourse is interrupted by another ‘in order to make room for what challenges its scheme of intelligibility’ (PW 17). Hence, ‘translation becomes the condition of a transformative encounter’ (PW 17) with the Other: If a demand comes from elsewhere, and not immediately from within my own idiom, then my idiom is interrupted by the demand, which means ethics itself requires a certain disorientation from the discourse that is most familiar to me. Further if that interruption constitutes a demand for translation, then translation cannot be simply assimilation of what is foreign into what is familiar; it must be an opening to the unfamiliar, a dispossession from prior ground, and even a willingness to cede ground to what is not immediately knowable within established epistemological fields. (PW 12)

In this way translation forces an encounter with the epistemic limits of a given discourse and leads it into a crisis. In order to emerge out of this crisis, the discourse cannot take any strategy that would try to assimilate and contain difference (see PW 12–13). It needs to rearrange its own terms and in this way must be a form of dispossession. It thereby becomes a condition of an ethical response to the claim of the Other and a precondition of a new way of thinking about territory, property, sovereignty and cohabitation (see PW 11). The encounter with alterity, the possibility of an ‘ek-static relationality’ with what is outside me, is the scene where ‘something new happens’ (PW 12). This proneness to change through the incorporation of the unexpected is important for Butler, and differentiates her own stance from that of Hegel. Whereas Hegel accounts for change in so far as it is part of the natural dialectic of things, and where change (including the destruction of an entity) is essential to it (Inwood 2006: 429), Butler is interested in accounting for change that is radically new and unexpected. What is happening in Butler is the reverse of Hegelian dialectics: instead of turning the singular into the same (the universal), the singular transforms the universal each time it is included into the universal. This happens not only through the means of particularity (which is the instance when the singular appears or, in political context, when it becomes recognized); it is also powered by failure in the process of particularization and universalization, by the remainders that force universality into constant translation. What is meant by this is the way the singular can also be seen as a failed instantiation of the particular in the singular–particular dyad, and the particular as a failed instantiation of the universal in the particular–universal dyad, and thus as a kind of remainder that does not manage to form part of a stable, closed dyad. As

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I show below, performative failure is an instance of this dialectic, and so is the process of mimesis that I describe in Chapter 2. Through this process, the limits of the current notion of universality and the existing standards are exposed and challenged (although indirectly) by singularity. In this way, universality revises itself ‘in more expansive and inclusive ways’ (UC 48). Butler’s reversal of Hegelian dialectics should be understood here as reversing the direction of affection: the Spirit is affected by the singular and, therefore, in Butler, there is no universality without translation (see CHU 216). This view of Hegelian dialectics is achieved by using Levinas’s conceptualization of the Other. The lack of intelligibility of the Other is essential for preserving its radical otherness (see Davis 1996: 40–1). Butler’s Hegelian understanding of dialectics is thus interrupted by the influence of Levinas, and changes accordingly her conceptualization of universal, particular and singular interactions. Hence, translation is the key in Butler’s universality. For universality to performatively enact itself it must undergo a set of translations into various rhetorical and cultural contexts. It is part of the mechanism of renewal in which ‘the established discourse remains established only by being perpetually re-established, so it risks itself in the very repetition it requires’ (CHU 41). This risk, introduced by the intrinsic failure in repetition, is constitutive of the very mechanism of renewal. In other words, there is no translation without contamination. Without translation, in Butler’s view, the only way to assert universality would be through colonial or expansionistic logic, which would be tantamount to a totalizing operation of the Same, to the dialectic operation of the Hegelian abstract universal towards the particular. One of the social and political aims is therefore ‘establishing practices of translation among competing notions of universality’ (CHU 167). Through what she calls ‘perverse reiterations’, a new set of demands on universality can be mobilized (see CHU 40). What is essential though is the temporal aspect of a political or social aim, the ‘not yet’ realized of a political aspiration, of democracy for instance: ‘that which remains “unrealized” by the universal constitutes it essentially. The universal announces, as it were, its “non-place”, its fundamentally temporal modality’ (CHU 39). In Butler’s view, for the translation to act in the service of the struggle for hegemony, ‘the dominant discourse will have to alter by virtue of admitting the “foreign” vocabulary into its lexicon’ (CHU 168). In order for her project of translation to enact a politics of translation it should constitute a ‘movement of competing and overlapping universalisms’ (see CHU 168–9). The idea of material performativity needs to be added to the notion of translation as a way to renew and redefine universality. Both translation and



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performativity are similar in their potential for transformation owing to the inherent failure in their renewals. Performativity, for Butler, means the imitation or citation of norms: that is, their appropriation and re-enactment by a subject.3 She proposed it for the first time in her Gender Trouble (1990) where she applied this idea to gender and tagged it as performative: that is, the subject as constituted by a series of repeated acts that a subject does (performs), rather than a gender essence that a subject possesses. This process of norm citation can never be performed perfectly, in Butler’s view. As she claims in Bodies that Matter (1993): ‘That reiteration is necessary [is] a sign that materialization is never quite complete, that bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled’ (BTM 1–2, italics mine). The slippage in performance is structurally unavoidable; thus ‘sex [and gender are] both produced and destabilized in the course of this reiteration’, as ‘gaps and fissures are opened up as the constitutive instabilities in such constructions’ (BTM 10). In the example of imitating gender norms, the gaps and fissures are created by the inevitable difference between prescribed sexual norms of gender identity (in the regime of heterosexuality) and the successful approximation to this socially constructed model. In this space between the ideal norm and the performed act that is, the gaps and fissures created by failure in the performance, both variation and transformation are possible. This reveals the structurally intrinsic but necessary and useful role of failure in the citations of all cultural norms. Failure in Butler’s system is inevitable and constitutive, and it opens up a space for change in the universal, for its renewal and redefinition. Butler is looking ‘for possibilities that emerge from failed dialectics and that exceed the dialectic itself ’ (UG 198). Failure ensures social transformation and change. It is not only constitutive on the personal level of all gender enactments (see GT 200), subject formation (see CHU 108) and the imitation of cultural norms, but also on the level of political performativity and the struggle for hegemony. Butler, in the wake of Foucault, believes that social transformation can only be achieved from within the system. It is ‘only within the practices of repetitive signifying that a subversive identity becomes possible’ (GT 199), and this is The idea of ‘citationality’ or ‘iterability’ is borrowed from Jacques Derrida’s work, mainly from ‘Signature Event Context’ ([1972] 1988). I indicated at the beginning of this chapter that Butler takes a different stand to that of Derrida on the question of dialectics in Hegel. Nevertheless, Derrida has had a significant influence on many aspects of Butler’s thinking. Three important ideas from Derrida should be mentioned in this particular context: ‘democracy to come’ (la démocratie à venir) that is Butler’s the ‘not yet’ realized of democracy (see CHU 39), the importance of contextualization and the question of repetition as powered by failure that is described in ‘Signature Event Context’ as the condition of ‘citationality’. On the importance of Derrida’s contextualization and citationality for Butler, see in particular Excitable Speech (1997).

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why failure is so essential for her idea of social transformation. It guarantees change as an exposure to the singular in the contagion of alterity rather than its exclusion. Interestingly, due to the risk in repetition offered by structural failure, we are given over to the unknown. Butler is affirmative and hopeful about the future unknown resulting from failure. She claims that it is necessary for democracy to be unknowing about its future because this unknowingness opens up questions and ascertains constant renegotiation of the universal and of democracy (see CHU 41). The universal is, therefore, a form of political performativity for Butler. It establishes itself performatively through reiteration, like gender and other cultural norms. Its discourse works in the present and is tied to the present. Its inherent failure gives the universal the power, retroactively, to deprive the past of its full control over discourse and of its absolutist claims. It allows for reciting a set of cultural norms that displace legitimacy from presumed authority to the mechanism of renewal. This renewal of the universal and its circulation is conditioned by the constant necessity of repetition, of re-establishing the dominant discourse. The failed performativity can produce unconventional formulations of universality that expose the limited and exclusionary features of the former universality at the same time that they mobilize a new set of demands. The final destination of the renewal, of the process of translation and performativity, is the movement itself (see CHU 40–1). As Butler claims: ‘The point of hegemony […] is precisely the ideal of a possibility that exceeds every attempt at a final realization, one which gains its vitality precisely from its non-coincidence with any present reality’ (CHU 162). This non-coincidence is essential because it opens up new fields of political possibility.

Circulating singularity In her recent work, Butler is mainly concerned with the unrecognizable singular. In her Precarious Life (2004), she borrows Giorgio Agamben’s concept of homo sacer. This is a figure of Roman law, which can be defined as an entity that can be killed but not sacrificed because it does not have the status of a person, of a subject, of a victim.4 Butler raises a question about recognition, For the lack of space and for sake of the argument I deal here only with Butler’s appropriation of homo sacer, and do not comment on Agamben’s original concept, which he, in his turn, took over from Roman law. It is necessary, however, to note in brief that the question that Butler poses throughout her work – ‘who counts as living’ or perhaps, as in the case of Precarious Life, ‘who does

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about who counts as human. She claims that some lives are considered worthy of being grieved over whereas others are not, and this differential allocation of grievability ‘operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human’ (PL xv). In Butler’s view, Guantanamo prisoners, for example, do not count as human, and the framework that was constructed authorized limitless aggression against targets, the invisible, unrecognized homo sacer. Here I wish to take up the figure of homo sacer, which both Agamben and Butler consider in respect to politically unrecognizable entities, in order to demonstrate throughout this project the ‘flickering’ status of this category and that of singularity. Homo sacer, the killable, ‘banned’ individual, stands outside the universal–particular relation set up by law; but, as the excluded, it is also constitutive of universality. My argument is that homo sacer is an entity that is invisible from within the universality–particularity dyad but at the same time it constantly tries to emerge through translation. I argue that homo sacer belongs to the sphere of the singular in the suggested Hegelian triadic structure of the universal–particular–singular because, in contrast to the sphere of the particular, homo sacer does not possess a shared place of enunciation of the afflicted particular. It is the singular that poses the severest political problem because there is no political space for the singular, in contrast to a well-established space for the victim in Western culture, which belongs to the sphere of particularity. As Butler claims in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Those who should ideally be included within any operation of the universal find themselves not only outside its terms but as the very outside without which the universal could not be formulated, living as the trace, the spectral remainder, which does not have a home in the forward march of the universal. This is not even to live as the particular, for the particular is, at least, constituted within the field of the political. It is to live the unspeakable and the unspoken for, those who form the blurred human background of something called ‘population’. (CHU 178)

The difference between homo sacer and the victim is the question of recognition. Homo sacer, as the singular, constitutes an empty category, devoid of the recognizable common features that would necessarily transfer it to the sphere of not count as living’ – is precisely the question of homo sacer (‘bare life’) that Agamben discusses in his work from 1998. Butler critically considers Agamben’s ideas from Homo Sacer ([1995] 1998) in the context of the Palestine–Israel conflict and the war on terror, and in a way continues Agamben’s reflection on bare life in the context of American politics after September 11. For an extended discussion of Agamben’s ideas on homo sacer in the context of Guantanamo prison see PL 60–100.

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the particular, of the victim of ethnic, sexual or religious discrimination, if she were to be recognized. In Butler’s system, to ask for recognition is then to wish to join the ranks of the particular, of the ones who have their political place of enunciation and who are worthy to be mourned. For the unrecognized singular that Butler considers in her work – Palestinians in the Israel–Palestine conflict, the afflicted in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo – victimhood as recognized particularity would seem to be a preferable status. There is a peculiar doubling of the singular when considered through Butler’s system. On the one hand, the singular is made up of invisible characteristics that are not shared by the particular: being without a counterpart, it is therefore left alone. On the other hand, the singular is the result of failure within the universal–particular dyad, in its striving towards becoming an all-encompassing universal. In this case, the singularities are entities that do not fit into the universal. In both cases singularity is a trace, a supplement that remains unrecognized but also excessive. This peculiar doubling raises a question about the possible distinction between singularity routinely produced, as a remainder of failed particularization and failed universalization, and the potentially progressive singular that could be a lever of social change. In Butler, the singular that demands recognition, demands entering the sphere of the particular and then the sphere of the universal, amounts to being a potentially progressive singular. In respect to this Butler claims: The universal begins to become articulated precisely through challenges to its existing formulation, and this challenge emerges from those who are not covered by it, who have no entitlement to occupy the place of the ‘who’, but who nevertheless demand that the universal as such ought to be inclusive of them. (UC 48)

And she subsequently emphasizes: ‘The universal can be articulated only in response to a challenge from (its own) outside’ (UC 49).5 Butler is committed to a hegemonic transformation of the epistemological horizon, a historically variable episteme, which is transformed by the emergence of those singularities, those entities that are non-representable within their own terms. She pleads for the recognition that these singularities should be granted: to be considered human and in effect acknowledged as victims. This is crucial because from this position of the particular these ‘impossible figures’ can compel the universal This comes down to the question of political agency, which is not very clear in Butler, partly because it is directly related to an account of collectivity, which in turn is missing from her philosophical system.

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to re-orientate itself and change its parameters (see CHU 149). In this way, the universal can renew itself in a non-totalizing, less violent form that will include the singular in its ever-expanding project of translation. In her considerations of the Hegelian universality–particularity dyad, Butler claims that the tragic consequences of the formal notion of universality (abstract universality), that is, of universality that fails to embrace all particularity, is the creation of hostility towards particularity. Butler asserts that Hegel’s abstract universal is not working towards ‘a true and all-inclusive universality’ because by the exclusion of particularity it is destroying the particularity that it purported to include (see CHU 23–4). Butler concludes on Hegel’s idea that there is a basic negativity haunting the concept of the universal. Particularities appear through differential emergence: ‘no particular identity can emerge without presuming and enacting the exclusion of others, and this constitutive exclusion or antagonism is the shared and equal condition of all identityconstitution’ (CHU 31–2). This exclusion is both constitutive and problematic as there is always a remainder that is left out of the hegemony to come back and haunt the universal. Butler tries to solve the problem of violent Hegelian abstract universality through her idea of competing universalities.6 This is a concept of universality that emerges from the interaction between particularities. Each particular position, in order to articulate itself, involves the (implicit or explicit) assertion of its own mode of universality. The intrinsic competing versions of universality that a particularity contains emerge in confrontation with another instance of particularity. A good example that Slavoj Žižek gives to explain Butler’s notion of competing universalities is that of religions; it is not enough to claim that the generic term ‘religion’ is divided into multiple particularities: Judaism, Islam, Christianity, animism, polytheism, Buddhism. The point is rather that each of these particular religions contains its own universal notion of what religion is as such, as well as its own view on how it differs from other religions (see CHU 315). These competing universalities, instead of relating a particular claim to the claim that is universal, where the universal is positioned as anterior to the particular and incommensurable to it, should employ practices of translation in their struggle for hegemony. In Butler’s view it is crucial to establish these practices of translation between competing notions of universality because their claims may belong to the overlapping set of social and political aims, and thus The concept of competing universalities was most likely inspired by, and bears a similarity to, some aspects of Hegel’s ‘concrete universal’. It is a notion that is highly ambiguous in Hegel’s work. See Inwood 2006: 366–80.

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be more effective in achieving ongoing social transformation (see CHU 166–7). For Butler, the universal is not violent by definition, but there exist conditions under which it can exercise violence. That is when the operation of universality fails to be responsive to cultural particularity and fails to undergo reformulations of itself in response to these cultural conditions: that is, when it fails to undergo the process of translation (see GAO 5–7): For the purpose of a radical democratic transformation, we need to know that our fundamental categories can and must be expanded to become more inclusive and more responsive to the full range of cultural populations. This does not mean that a social engineer plots at a distance how best to include everyone in his or her category. It means that the category itself must be subjected to a reworking from myriad directions, that it must emerge anew as a result of the cultural translations it undergoes. (UG 223–4, my emphasis)

If we consider Butler’s ideas through the suggested Hegelian framework of the universal–particular–singular triangulation, then we can observe there is a repeated circulation between the three concepts in the system. What Butler is conceptually trying to do, when mapped onto this triangle, is to push homo sacer (the singular) towards the sphere of the recognized entity/victim (the particular), and then, through the operation of competing universalities, from the site of the particular towards the universal (the sphere of hegemony). This circulation (singular ⇒ particular ⇒ universal) is part of the process of translation that is key to her theory of universality. It is also a process whereby the universal is constantly renewed and constantly expanding. In each of the stages there is an inherent failure: singularities left out from the sphere of particularity, competing universalities devoid of hegemony. This unavoidable failure in negotiating hegemony or the status of particularity leaves remainders, and these are pushed back again to the sphere of the singular, completing the circulation. As Butler claims in her reading of the Hegelian universal: ‘not only does universality see itself as negative, and thus as the opposite of what it thought it was; it also undergoes the pure transition from one extreme to the other, and so comes to know itself as transition’ (CHU 23). Thus, the process of translation reaches the final stage of the circulation: what remains from the universal is pushed towards the singular. Therefore, failure ascertains constant movement in the system. The circulation starts again: singular ⇒ particular ⇒ universal  ⇒  singular, and renews the universal again and again, each time with a difference. Circulation is conditioned by the constant necessity of repetition, re-establishing the dominant discourse, which introduces change



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due to the unavoidable failure in political and cultural performativity. A neverending mechanism is taking place in Butler’s system as applied to the Hegelian framework. The question that remains is whether this failure in the transfer of the singular towards the particular, and the particular towards the universal, is a necessary spectre, something that has to haunt the system in order for the system to function, in order to preserve the system and to keep it moving. The question of the universal is thus inextricably connected to the questions of ethics and social transformation.

Recognition and the question of asymmetry In order to fully understand the political potential of Butler’s thinking and its relevance for theorizing contemporary anarchism in practice, it is necessary to consider the question of recognition and, specifically, its relation to the concept of equality. Such reframing will enable us to position Butler on the map of progressive politics, and to account for possibilities that her system proposes in terms of social change. This particular framework is important as the question of equality lies at the core of contemporary political philosophies.7 As Todd May remarks, quoting the economist Amartya Sen, all key political theories that stood the test of time were dealing with one sort of equality or another: of outcome, of resources, of liberty, of income, of opportunity, of happiness, or some combination of these (see May 2008: 4). When reading Frames of War (2009) or Precarious Life, one almost automatically assumes that Butler’s call for the recognition of homo sacer is a call for equality. As it is a call to apprehend someone as living, to give her the minimal recognition of her existence as a fellow human being and therefore as an equal in her right to live, one automatically interprets that it is equality that is here at stake. However, Butler’s system is not committed to the idea of equality in structural terms.8 To be precise, I do not claim that Butler is a camouflaged proponent of discrimination. She shares the political views of the left about the equality between humans being an important political aim. But I argue that, in her system, equality would constitute a closure, a totalizing gesture bringing the circulation of universality to a halt. Her system is based on infinite repetition, on constant renewal, that ascertains social change I will come back to equality in Chapter 5 in the context of contemporary anarchism in practice. In her exchange with Laclau on equality, one can see, from a Rancièrean point of view, the extent to which the problems that Butler and Laclau encounter originate from considering equality as a goal rather than a presupposition (see UE).

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owing to its structural failure in the circulation of the singular. Equality in her system would mean stasis. The consequences are that she is committed to the idea of a constitutive asymmetry that could be also defined here as structural inequality. She is committed to difference and differentiation. As humans in binary constellations are incommensurable to one another, there is always an asymmetry of the positions of two people facing each other. The arguments to support this claim and its consequences for the conceptualization of politics from a Butlerian point of view are presented below. Butler’s idea of recognition in terms of inequality and difference or, for that matter, asymmetry first needs to be understood by turning to her own beginnings, to Hegel’s conceptualization of recognition in the original situation of master and slave. The conceptual model of master and slave is the paradigm of inequality in inter-human relations. In Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, on which this reading is based,9 each of the ‘first’ two men possessed separately the subjective certainty of being autonomous human beings. Once the two men encounter each other, for the idea of ‘I am a human being’ to bear universality, it needs to be objective. This means that it needs to be a reality not only to the subject but also to the other facing him. The idea of equality is from the start precluded in Kojève. He explicitly claims that recognition cannot be mutual or reciprocal: the man who wants to be recognized by another in no sense wants to recognize the other man in return. It is in the nature of the fight to the death that there is no possibility of a draw: ‘they must constitute themselves as unequals in and by this very fight’ (Kojève 1980: 8). The one who succeeds will not recognize the one who loses. This inequality together with ‘overcoming the other dialectically’, that is, preserving what is overcome, ascertains infinite movement in the system, its infinite continuation. After a fight, where the winner becomes a master and the defeated man a slave, the outcome preserves the initial state of inequality: ‘man is never simply man. He is always, necessarily, and essentially, either Master or Slave’ (Kojève 1980: 8). Butler’s thinking is strongly influenced by this initial Hegelian situation as understood by Kojève. Not only does she constantly return to it in her work but she also bases her concept of subject and social relations on the master and slave model. The relation between master and slave becomes one of dependence, in Butler’s reading: the master needs the slave in order to gain recognition. In order to understand the relationship of Hegel’s ideas to those of Butler, and later to those of René Girard, I employ Hegel, as mediated through Alexandre Kojève’s work. It was Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel ([1947] 1980) that influenced the reception of Hegel in France, and thus both Girard and Butler (see Baugh 2003).

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By forcing the slave to recognize the master, a purely subjective certainty is transformed into universally valid and recognized truth (see Kojève 1980: 11–12). Because annihilation of the slave would undermine entirely the project of recognition, the desire to kill is held in check. It is replaced by domination: ‘Domination, the relation that replaces the urge to kill, must be understood as the effort to annihilate within the context of life. The Other must now live its own death’ (SD 52). The subject emerges in the moment of internal splitting: with the unhappy consciousness. Once the slave recognizes that he is able to produce, that he has a formative capacity, he rejects the apparently external master. He takes the place of the master: he becomes the master over himself and lord over his own body. In Butler’s interpretation, this is the passage from bondage to unhappy consciousness. It involves splitting the psyche into two parts – master and slave internal to a single consciousness – psyche and body, where body becomes alterity ‘but where this alterity is now interior to psyche itself ’ (see PLP 43). The sphere of the ethical can be thus explained by the transposition of external domination onto consciousness. The subject finds himself in an ethical world, subjected to various norms and ideals: she ‘emerges as an unhappy consciousness through the reflexive application of these ethical laws’ (see PLP 32). This split in consciousness introduces the Other into the subject. Recognition, for Butler, begins with the insight that one is lost in the Other, ‘appropriated in and by an alterity that is and is not oneself ’ (see AC 14): I am invariably transformed by the encounters I undergo; recognition becomes the process by which I become other than what I was and so cease to be able to return to what I was. There is, then, a constitutive loss in the process of recognition, since the ‘I’ is transformed through the act of recognition. (GAO 27–8)

Butler is interested in the position of the slave in the Hegelian framework and tries to negotiate between these two instances: master and slave that are, on the one hand, internal to the subject, and, on the other, to be found in external relations. Her interpretation focuses on the norms of recognition made available to a subject by a particular cultural and historical context. As Lloyd (2007: 17) rightly observes, Butler’s account of recognition differs from that of Hegel in that ‘it concentrates on the question of the cultural (and thus variable) norms that determine who counts as a being that qualifies for (social) recognition in the first place’. As will become clear in the following analysis of her concept of ethics, language and norms, it is not recognition of equality that she is concerned with. It is precisely on the presupposition of vulnerability, of fundamental inequality, that she founds her ethics.

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Her conception of inter-human relations is based on the inherent concept of asymmetry. On a political level, in Frames of War and Precarious Life, she places herself in the position of a mediator, the in-between third instance, who speaks on behalf of the homo sacer to her audience, and who considers that the asymmetry between human vulnerability is inherent to the whole circulation of the universal. If we have a brief look at Gender Trouble, from 1990, and Frames of War, from 2009, for comparison of the implied audience of her system, we can observe how her addressees shift throughout her work: starting from the ‘vulnerables’, the queer community in Gender Trouble for whom she deals with the questions of survival and life (see UG 205) towards the audience who is able to grant recognition in Frames of War.10 In the latter work, she constructs her position not as a fellow struggler alongside the unrecognized but as one who asks on behalf of the homo sacer for their recognition as victims/particularity. She is asking those who are able to give recognition, the ones in the position of hegemony. The demand is directed to and carried out from within the position of universality. As Žižek rightly remarks: ‘When we criticize the hidden bias and exclusion of universality, we should never forget that we are already doing so within the terrain opened up by universality’ (CHU 102). As I demonstrated earlier, in Butler’s Hegelian framework the singular needs to pass through the particular to reach the universal. One possible reading of this narrative situation in this context is that recognition is either granted or not granted from the position of universality, and this puts homo sacer in an unavoidably passive position, very similar to the position where distributive theories of justice put people ‘from below’.11 One could potentially conclude that the tools that Butler leaves for homo sacer to carry out social transformation are few. She reasons with the stronger to recognize the weaker, and she supports this demand with an ethical claim that each of us is constituted by alterity and foreignness, therefore each is obliged to recognize the other. The narrative situation mirrors somewhat the ethical demand, as ethics, for Butler, is something that follows from being addressed and addressable, and from addressing the other. This reading might seem rather ungenerous but it definitely hovers over Butler’s work as a possibility. Another reading is that recognition is not something to be bestowed by one individual onto another, because neither the language nor the frames of recognition belong to our store of private resources that we can create at will.12 As Chambers and Carver (2008: 125–6) observe: See also on this question von Redecker 2011. On the connection between equality, the passivity of the unrecognized and distributive theories of justice in a Rancièrean context, see May 2008, 2010. 12 On the question of Hegelian recognition and feminist theory, see also Hutchings 2003. 10 11



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Instead ‘recognition’ names a reflective process in which one comes to be only through being recognized. This means that neither subjectivity nor human existence can be taken for granted in advance; the process of recognition (not contained or controlled by any single subject) makes human being possible.

In this specific reading, changes in the frames of recognition would have to happen irrespective of the agency of a single subject. If one decided on the latter interpretation then the question that inevitably follows would concern the mechanism of change in the frames of recognition. This book is interested in developing the latter line of interpretation. That is also why René Girard’s idea of mimesis is so important for this project, because Girard’s model provides the tools that could account for the mechanism of change in the cultural frames of recognition. Butler’s system acknowledges the initial inequality in social structures, and proposes alternative ways to deal with this asymmetry of position. The idea of social transformation implicit in her work is not anchored in a sudden appearance of the singular, in an event, in the tradition of radical left-wing theories of equality, but rather it is a continuous change coming from the singular. Yet, singularity has to be first recognized, it has to appear, for this whole process of transformation to begin in the first place. In what follows I would like to consider three aspects in which asymmetry in Butler plays a crucial role: the ethics of vulnerability, language and in norms of recognition. On an abstract level what foregrounds asymmetry is our constitution in language and exposure to norms of recognition that are not our own. Butler explores physical vulnerability on the level of language. Vulnerability is not only considered on the purely physical level, as a threat of finitude and bodily harm, but it is also combined with the social and linguistic level. She analyses in her Excitable Speech (1997) the relation between language and body, and considers the possibility of being physically hurt by language. She is interested in the puzzling combination of the linguistic and physical vocabularies in such an expression as ‘I’m hurt by an insult’, and claims: ‘hate speech exposes a prior vulnerability to language, one that we have by virtue of being interpellated kind of beings, dependent on the address of the Other in order to be’ (ES 26). Because there is no protection from this vulnerability, one also clings to terms that pain us because they offer, at least, some form of social and discursive existence (see ES 26). When a term injures, it works its injury through the accumulation and dissimulation of its force. The speaker who utters the racial slur is thus citing that slur, making linguistic community with a history of speakers (see ES 51–2). Thus it is the violence of the temporality that injures the

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subject, as the time of discourse that is used against her is not the time of the subject herself. The subject is disoriented by the context of a slur because the insult carries the whole of cultural heritage and historicity with itself. In a way, the subject does not know the time and place of injury (see ES 4, 31, 36, 80). Our vulnerability appears in this exposure to language, in being interpellated in terms that are not our own, in the relation of asymmetry towards language. The only possibility of a critical response, for Butler, in such a case is to re-appropriate the injurious term and, through repetition, re-signify it: ‘if the text acts once, it can act again, and possibly against its prior act. This raises the possibility of resignification as an alternative reading of performativity, and of politics’ (ES 69). This is because what constitutes the ‘total speech situation’, in J. L. Austin’s speech act theory that Butler uses in Excitable Speech, is a failure to achieve a totalized form in any given instance, the structural impossibility to complete an exact, perfect reiteration (see ES 3). The asymmetry in relation to language is then counteracted by the movement of translation, in the infinite circulation of a term. The unavoidable asymmetry in the system is also exposed in her conceptualization of frames or norms.13 It is frames that decide which life will be recognized as life, and which will not. These frames have to circulate in order to establish their hegemony. The circulation constitutes the iterable structure of the frame. In order for the frame to install itself it has to break due to the structural failure in repetition, and this is the moment where other possibilities of apprehension and potential social transformation emerge (see FW 12). Butler claims that calling into question ‘the regime of truth’ that Foucault discusses can not only be motivated by the wish to subvert it but also by the wish to recognize the Other, and be recognized. Because our reflexivity is not only socially mediated but also socially constituted, the norms that constitute us precede and exceed us. The temporality of the norms is not our own temporality. What happens when one offers recognition to the other person is that one submits to a norm of recognition. This is because one does not offer this recognition from one’s private resources, just as one does not tell one’s own stories using one’s own private language. Thus, in the moment of offering recognition to the Other, we become ‘an instrument of that norm’s agency’. It seems therefore that I am ‘invariably used by the norm’ to the degree that we try to use the norm in order to offer Butler uses two terms in order to account for the recognizability of life and of the human: ‘frames’ in her Frames of War, and ‘norms’ in her other writings such as Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). These terms seem to be almost interchangeable. Frames have a specifically visual aspect and could be considered as norms of recognizability.

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recognition to the other person. ‘Though I thought I was having a relation to “you”, I find that I am caught up in a struggle with norms’ (see GAO 26). This asymmetry and the structural failure in the system ascertain the infinite reformulation of norms, and thus in a way guarantee social transformation. Finally, in her conceptualization of ethics, the obligation towards the Other comes from the recognition of vulnerability. In Butler’s view, which is strongly influenced by Levinas’s ethics, we are constituted through the Other, and for the Other. The obligation towards the Other emerges from the fact that we are social beings from the start – we are dependent on what is outside ourselves, including other people (see FW 23). Through the encounter with the Other, we are given over to an unaccounted for transformation, to the unknown. The life of the Other is something that is ‘ek-static’, in terms borrowed from Martin Heidegger, something that is beyond, and so constitutive of the subject. Therefore, ethics is ‘based on our shared, invariable, and partial blindness about ourselves’ (GAO 41): I find that my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others. I am not fully known to myself, because part of what I am is the enigmatic traces of others. In this sense, I cannot know myself perfectly or know my ‘difference’ from others in an irreducible way. (PL 46)

Butler’s concept of ethics is based on our absolute dependency on the Other. We must accept this indispensable sociality, and also the fact that we are undone by each other. ‘And if we’re not, we’re missing something’ (PL 23). The fact that one is capable of violence towards the Other places responsibility on the subject. This is also the case even if that violence means denying someone otherness or reducing the Other to one’s own categories. As we are all bodies, the vulnerability of our bodies puts us in a precarious situation. We are all in need of ‘food, shelter, and other conditions for persisting and flourishing’ (FW 29), and this is where the idea of equality still hovers in Butler: in our common finitude, on the level of bodily precariousness, in the need of favourable conditions for existing.14 Vulnerability is ‘a collective condition, characterizing us all equally’ (GAO 35). For Butler, equality comes in a way from vulnerability, and is not necessarily limited to humans. However, whereas this vulnerability is shared equally on the level of presupposition – we are all vulnerable – the vulnerability of each of us only appears when it is addressed to the Other, to the one in the As it will become clear in Chapter 3, the idea of dependency and vulnerability is also crucial for Sloterdijk, but he conceptualizes it in terms of common beginnings rather than a common finitude.

14

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position of power. The absolute dependency on the Other, or of the Other on me, is always asymmetrical on this minimal binary level. Even though on the collective level everybody is involved to a different degree in a network of interdependencies, we are all constituted by this basic asymmetry between two people. In his discussion of Levinas’s ethics of vulnerability, Todd May (2008: 151) observes that ‘as long as ethics is a matter of vulnerability rather than equality, it remains beholden to an ethics of inequality, or, more precisely, an ethics of mutual inequality’. Here, he gives a tacit response to Butler’s problems as well. Because one is at once above and below the Other, capable of violence towards her and obliged to her out of that capacity, we do not occupy the same level (see May 2008: 151). This relation of basic asymmetry seems to exclude any possibility of collectivity: there is a ‘you’ and there is a ‘me’ but there is no possibility of a collectivity, of a ‘we’. From Todd May’s perspective, an advocate of Jacques Rancière’s presupposition of equality in politics, an ethics that is based on such a structural inequality cannot serve as a framework for politics as ‘there can be neither masters nor slaves, even where the slaves are also masters and the masters also slaves’ (May 2008: 151). This would mean that Butler, and her thinking about politics through vulnerability, would be completely lost to progressive politics due to her commitment to asymmetry. In the final chapter I argue that this is not necessarily the case. Solidarity with singularity, rather than equality, can be considered as a convincing basis for collectivity. This also positions Butler, enhanced by ideas from René Girard and Peter Sloterdijk, at the theoretical heart of contemporary anarchism in practice. Butler’s system is structured to an important degree around the idea of asymmetry, and the incommensurability of one entity to another. In Butler’s view, the greatest problem of contemporary political life is not equality but the fact that not everyone counts as human, and this is what she addresses in her work. Butler fully embraces Kojève’s statement that ‘it is only by being “recognized” by another, by many others, or – in the extreme – by all others, that a human being is really human, for himself as well as for others’ (Kojève 1980: 9). The politics of translation, the circulation of the singular in the infinite reformulation of the universal, starts therefore with recognition.

Where are ‘we’ in Butler: The question of collectivity Throughout her work, Butler’s concerns are explicitly political. The aim of Gender Trouble is to extend the very notion of the political (see GT 201): ‘a



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new configuration of politics’ would emerge owing to the repetition of gender norms that would displace the very norms that make gender (see GT 202–3). In Excitable Speech she critically engages with hate speech and discrimination. In Frames of War and Precarious Life Butler pleads for a change in frames of recognizability in order to grant the status of victims to homo sacer killed and ungrieved in military conflicts. In her Parting Ways she examines unsparingly the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Most of her work has a strictly and explicitly political character and she describes herself as ‘a theorist of political strategy’ (Butler, Meijer and Prins 1998: 276). In interviews Butler personally supports social movements and engages politically. However, I would like to argue that her theoretical system does not, and cannot, account for the idea of a collectivity or collective politics. She is interested in singular acts of personal performativity as a part of politics but she ignores community as a political factor. In view of the explicit political interests visible in Butler’s most recent work, how are we to understand the absence of a serious treatment of the collectivity? There is a conflict between Butler’s personal political interests and what her system proposes in terms of collective social transformation. As I will show below, the fact that Butler fails to account for a collectivity poses a serious problem to her socio-political thinking. Butler conceptualizes the political in terms of precarity which, she claims, should be a point of departure for rethinking the politics of the left (FW 3). Community should be based on ‘“common” corporeal vulnerability’ and loss (PL 42), not only because of our common finitude but also because of our common dependence on existing norms of recognition: ‘Each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies – as a site of desire and physical vulnerability’ (PL 20). One task of politics is then ‘minimizing the condition of precariousness in egalitarian ways’ (FW 54). It is to develop a point of identification with suffering: ‘“I in the mode of unknowingness” (who am I without this person, what is left of me?)’, that is, to use grief as a resource for politics (PL 28–32). Butler proposes to reconceptualize politics by thinking of corporeal vulnerability itself, by challenging oneself by thinking of a ‘situation in which we can be vanquished or lose others’ (PL 29). For Butler, living is political: ‘To live is to live a life politically, in relation to power, in relation to others, in the act of assuming responsibility for a collective future’ (UG 39). However, to assume responsibility for a future is not to know its direction in advance. It means giving oneself over to unknowingness (see UG 39). This unknowingness is important for Butler as it leaves space to integrate the singular into the sphere of recognizability.

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Butler suggests a series of political aims for social transformation: using performative contradiction as a tool for progressive politics,15 modifying ‘sites of unrepresentability’ through the politics of translation (see UG 107; CHU), reconceptualizing body in the field of politics (FW 52) and establishing the logic of iterability and performativity as a social logic (ES 151). Furthermore, the performative speech act (taken from Austin’s speech act theory) holds a political promise because of the possibility of the speech act to take on a non-ordinary meaning, and to function in contexts where it has not hitherto belonged. This potential places the performative at the centre of politics of hegemony, one that offers an unanticipated political future (see ES 161).16 Butler’s conceptualization of the political in terms of common vulnerability, a community based on corporality, is the furthest her system can take her in terms of collectivity. Apart from occasional statements, the notion of a collectivity or a community is almost non-existent in Butler’s writing. Butler is committed to singularity, to the history of singular bodies, to heterogeneity and individual performativity as a political tool. The point of departure for her theoretical reflections is always a single subject, the individual in a system, rather than a group of people.17 She conceptualizes a human being as one contributing to humanity out of a basic sociality of the self, out of the responsibility that originates in people’s dependence on us to survive and our initial dependence on others to survive (see UG 19). A subject is tied to language, to norms of recognition, to Others, and is focused on her private struggle against hegemony. Butler’s political project seems to be a one-person act: the one against the many, where she constantly focuses on the relation of a single human being to the other person. The question is, however, whether single subjects can bring about radical social transformation, operating locally and in dispersed collectivities. In terms of collectivity, Butler only vaguely mentions the ‘physical force of collective strength’. She believes, in fact, that ‘it would be a mistake to imagine that a political claim must always be articulated in language’ (CHU 178). An alternative, when making a political claim, is the body: ‘a line of human bodies in the plural’ (CHU 178), the collection of bodies coming together in a struggle. However, there is no presupposition uniting this mass of bodies, making them into a community, apart from the presupposition of their common vulnerability. As in the case of her opposition to gay marriage, see CHU 171–9. At this point Žižek accuses Butler of being caught in the very game of power she opposes (see CHU 220) but Butler responds that this ‘complicity by default’ in the dominant power is the very condition of agency rather than its destruction (see CHU 276–7). 17 Lois McNay (2008), for instance, criticizes Butler ‘for [a] debilitating emphasis on an individualistic conception of political practice as a matter of displacement and resistance’ (see Jagger 2008: 105). 15 16



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Butler’s avoidance of coming close to any kind of essentialism is counterproductive as she only gives tentative suggestions on the social transformation that involves a group of people. Within her framework she is unable to propose affirmatively any alternative apart from a critique of the status quo. It is in Antigone’s Claim (2000) that Butler comes closest to practical considerations of the possibilities and consequences of social movements. There she stands alongside a social activist, Antigone, and speaks with her rather than for her. It is a theoretical exercise in transformation where Butler examines how far her system can go in thinking change in the Lacanian symbolic. By analysing the incest taboo she considers whether, firstly, it is possible to change the universal in a structuralist Lévi-Straussian sense, and secondly, how to do it. She also reflects on the fate of a single subject in political struggle. In an interview published in the collection Occupy Anarchy! (2012), Butler refers to her book on Antigone when asked about a single piece of advice that would be most valuable for those involved in any socio-political struggle: KB: Finally, is there one piece of advice you feel is most valuable that you could offer to anyone involved in any ongoing social or political movement? Butler: I don’t know what I can give. But I wrote a book on Antigone once. And the problem with Antigone is that she stood up to the despot Creon, but in such a way that she ended up dying. So she bought her defiance with her death. The real question I ended up asking, after studying that play for some time, was, ‘What would it mean for Antigone to have stood up to Creon and lived?’ And the only way she could have lived is if she had had a serious social movement with her. If she arrived with a social movement to take down the despot, maybe it would have taken 18 days only, like in Egypt. It’s really important to be able to re-situate one’s rage and destitution in the context of a social movement. (Butler and Kyle 2012: 93)

The question remains, however, if bodies coming together in a short-term collective struggle is enough advice to give activists. Is a mass of people, regardless of how safe and hospitable they are to all kinds of minorities, enough as a prerequisition for a social change? Also, by what technologies or techniques can social movements be produced? Butler avoids any kind of practical advice or affirmative statement on forms of political agency, as these would be problematic in terms of her system. She personally supports such movements (see Butler 2012a; Butler and Kyle 2012); however her system does not account for them in her theoretical work. Although she calls for a reconceptualization of the body in the field of the political and politics in terms of an alliance of bodies, she is still caught in her struggle with language: ‘I confess […] that I am

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not a very good materialist. Every time I try to write about the body, the writing ends up being about language’ (UG 198). Butler wants to discuss the body and physical agency but she constantly falls into the discursive materiality that she inherited from Foucault and Lacan. There is an abstraction in this materiality that disables thinking about activism. We can observe this intense focus on the intimate connection between materiality and language when she discusses injurious language in Excitable Speech. She examines the physicality of injury that is caused by racial slurs, and how body performativity can subvert this hurt. The same theoretical fusion happens in Bodies that Matter, where she examines body and materiality by analysing discourse. This direct connection of collectivity to bodies, and bodies to language, brings Butler to an impasse and prevents her from making any affirmative claims concerning social transformation based on collectivity. Agency and responsibility are always an individual affair of one constantly engaged with the many: the many in their bodily presence around us, in language we were taught by them to speak, in norms that we incorporated by imitating others. Butler’s commitment to the individual performativity as a political tool prevents her from thinking of collectivity. The question to be posed is therefore what it is exactly in Butler’s system that makes it so difficult to treat collectivity. This question is important not only for scholars interested in Butler’s work. It has also a broader relevance for thinking about contemporary social movements. Here we are confronted with a thinker of political strategy, who is to a certain extent incapacitated by her own philosophical framework to think about the questions she considers essential. In the following chapter I demonstrate that it is her engagement with psychoanalysis that constantly returns her to thinking about human beings as individuals. There I explore in detail the debilitating effects of her relationship with psychoanalysis on what she tries to conceptualize throughout her work, and I try to detach her from the psychoanalytical framework. Her main effort is to convince her audience that what constitutes them is their inherent sociality; it is the Other. In that sense she is trying to overcome the assumption of the initial loneliness of a subject. However, psychoanalysis does not provide her with the conceptual tools to overcome the singleness of a subject as a point of departure. I argue in Chapter 3 that in order to do that successfully it is necessary to turn to Peter Sloterdijk’s idea of initial co-subjectivity. As an aspiring socio-political philosopher, Butler offers very few proper solutions to the questions she discusses and virtually no tactics that could be employed by social movements. Bodily ontology and precarity are points of departure for Butler in rethinking politics. She turns to the question of the



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human as the site where the problem of ethics and social transformation should start and end. She considers the possibility of establishing a community from the perspective of openness, constant inclusion and vulnerability, which is renewed in the process of translation between competing universalities. The incorporation of singularity into the struggle for hegemony, addressability and the non-violence principle characterizes her entire thought. Butler concedes that violence is constitutive of subject formation but refuses to acknowledge it as indispensable for the functioning of human beings in a community. She indirectly challenges the assumption of the irreducibility of violence in consolidating social groups, which we find in René Girard’s work on mimesis, and tries to establish an alternative non-violent version of inter-human interaction based on translation. I will argue in Chapter 2 that by introducing Girard’s concept of mimesis it is possible to move Butler’s thought into the basic collectivity of three, and by this essential step one can start conceptualizing social transformation with Butler. The two theorists’ visions of the universal are often compatible, and offer similar conditions of possibility if they are thought through together: the principle of non-reciprocity, the focus on the community starting with the originary triad as well as their problematic approach to foundations.18 The most important uniting feature, however, is their commitment to the idea of performativity and to mimesis. The question treated in the following chapter will be whether it is possible to propose a viable model for social change by extending Butler’s system, and combining it with that of Girard.

On the subject of Butler’s post-foundational theoretical stand see Marchart 2007: 11–18.

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2

Universality in Mimesis: Structural Failure and Social Transformation Towards recognition: Performativity as a special case of mimesis So far I have demonstrated how the circulation of singularity through particularity produces a non-totalizing universality in Judith Butler’s work. The moment of recognition is essential to Butler’s system, as it triggers circulation, translation and the reformulation of the universal. Once the singular has been recognized and, thus, admitted to the particular it competes to join the universal in the process of translation. I described in detail this process of cultural translation in Chapter 1. In order to complete the description of circulation in Butler’s system, the question that remains to be answered is how the passage from the singular to the particular takes place: how homo sacer enters the frames of recognizability that previously did not register her as human, how singularity becomes intelligible. Butler does not answer this question explicitly. Therefore, the answer that is proposed in this chapter is a combination of two ideas: René Girard’s mechanism of mimesis with Butler’s concept of performativity. The two concepts explore different mimetic fields, feeding each other to help us think of social transformation in terms of a mimetic contagion of heterogeneity. By bringing together Hegel, Girard and Butler, I link the mechanism of mimesis to the formation of universality. I argue that through the operation of mimesis, with its inherent structural failure, singularity is introduced in particularity and that through this it enters the process of the circulation of universality. My main argument here is that the failure inherent in mimesis leads to a change in frames of recognition, allowing singularity to emerge in particularity. In this process, singularity affects particularity and reformulates it. That is also why the structural failure inherent in both the operation of mimesis and in universality is essential to this conceptualization. The tacit assumption of this position is that failure introduces difference rather than sameness. This process of mimesis,

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which is always interrupted by singularity coming from the failure inherent in repetition and the heterogeneity resulting from it, is what I call a ‘mimetic contagion of heterogeneity’. Girard’s concept of mimesis and Butler’s notion of performativity are complementary ideas that are equally important to this analysis. The combination allows for expanding the notion of gender performativity into the different socio-political fields of Girardian mimesis. The specificity of Butler’s engagement with gender performativity, in turn, is very important, as it provides valuable insights into the concrete workings of mimesis. Butler offers a sophisticated and complex picture of psychological aspects of mimesis in her account of performativity – identity formation and the structure of the psyche. It is an account that resonates convincingly with Girard’s ideas when disentangled from psychoanalytical elements. Although Butler considers psychoanalysis central to ‘any project that seeks to understand emancipatory projects in both their psychic and social dimensions’ (CHU 14), I try to show in the first part of this chapter that this is not necessarily the case. As is argued, psychoanalysis is not able to account for a whole spectrum of social and political situations and Girard will enable us to push Butler’s thinking in directions that were foreclosed by her psychoanalytical preoccupations. Butler and Girard’s engagement with the Freudian Oedipus complex will be a case in point. This analysis moves within the structural limits of triangulation in the Oedipal complex and will discuss the question of the transgender as an example of the limits that psychoanalysis imposes on Butler. Through my detailed discussion of the transgender I try to detach Butler from psychoanal­ysis. The goal of the first part of this chapter is, therefore, to demonstrate how Girard can offer Butler new possibilities for thinking about gender and identification that psychoanalysis does not make possible. It aims to show that mimesis constitutes a possible path for establishing such an alternative framework. The advantage of mimesis lies precisely in its ability to overcome psychoanalytical impasses. The combination of Butler and Girard’s work allows us to envisage an idea of a social transformation based on mimesis that is more fluid and slower, yet no less radical in its outcome. Both processes of mimesis and cultural translation propose a social transformation that is not predetermined as to its results. It produces ‘unanticipated effects’ (Butler and Olson 2000: 335). In the second part of this chapter, I assert that what Butler and Girard’s systems offer in combination is a concept of change based on repetition with a structural failure that needs to be considered as a form of radical transformation – radical because it essentially lies in giving oneself over to the unknown of singularity. In this way,



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social change relies on the derailment coming from failure in mimesis. It is a form of transformation that is slow because it is disseminated. Although Girard is not concerned with social transformation per se, or in the socio-political applicability of his theory, his system, nevertheless, offers itself to such extensions. In this way, Butler and Girard supplement each other. Let us start, however, with the relation between mimesis and performativity and their complementary interests. Butler’s concept of performativity bears an extensive similarity to Girardian mimesis. The difference between these two concepts lies in their scope as well as in their grounding in contrasting paradigms. Butler’s performativity can be traced back to a collage of concepts and theories: Foucault’s idea of episteme, Bourdieu’s habitus, Derrida’s citationality, Austin’s speech act theory and psychoanalysis. Girard’s mimesis, in contrast, is an anthropological idea, which avoids any association with poststructuralist presuppositions and suggests a less elaborate theoretical support for what Butler demonstrates in Gender Trouble – that is, the importance of imitating cultural norms that are embodied in others for the constitution of an identity. Butler’s performativity seems to be a specific elaboration on the concept of Girard’s mimesis. It is a more detailed and complex engagement with the problem of unwitting citation and its political, as well as cultural, implications.

How mimesis produces failure René Girard’s mimesis is a procedure whereby a human being imitates – wittingly or unwittingly – the behaviour of another person. The mechanism of mimesis produces ‘mimetic desire’, in Girard’s language, which functions in the form of a triangle involving two subjects and an object of desire. The crucial assumption of Girard’s mimetic situation is that the Other (the model, the mediator1) precedes the subject in her desire for an object. That means that desire is never independent or authentic – it originates always with the other person. It is only through the unwitting imitation of desire of one of the models for the object that the Other’s desire is triggered as well. The prestige of a model–rival is imparted to the object of desire and confers upon it an illusory value. A subject unwittingly imitates the desire of this model for an object and starts to desire it as well. This is how our desire for an object is created. Girard’s triangular desire demonstrates that desire originates neither in us nor in objects Girard abandons in his later work the term ‘mediator’ for the sake of ‘model’.

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but in others, who, be they parents, friends or colleagues, serve as models for the selection of an object. They also constitute models of behaviour as they incorporate social norms and repeatedly enact them. On this very basic level, Girard and Butler share to the same extent the conviction that ‘social relations precede object relations and determine them’ (McKenna 1992: 80). We are born into an already populated world, in which the ‘models’ around us perform norms that they previously mimetically acquired by being in direct exposure to their Others. Without this basic sociality of coming into an already populated world, a human being cannot exist for either Butler or Girard. How this ‘selection’ of models exactly works and why we tend to imitate one set of social norms rather than another is a question that Butler is particularly interested in. Girard, on his part, is more interested in the mechanism itself and how it plays out for whole communities across different cultural and temporal contexts. Mimesis is, thus, Girard’s transhistorical constant that has to be understood primarily as a mechanism, one that, through incessant repetition, produces context-dependent essences such as the sexual drive, femininity or violence. These essences give the impression of being natural and innate to humans in a particular culture. This includes the notion that to have a gender is an unquestionable fact of life and, related to that, ideas about what is considered as naturally feminine or masculine. It also covers questions about who counts as human and the very existence of the concept of the human. Girard argues against such object-focused interpretations of culture. That is why he criticizes both Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, because Freud constructs a theory based on sexual objects and Marx interprets the world from the perspective of economic objects. In Girard’s view, such procedure is an ‘erroneous schematization of culture’ (see TH 75). He claims that the advantage of his mimetic theory is the elimination of the ‘false specificities of human being’, that is, incest prohibition or an economic motive. From this perspective, he considers himself an anti-essentialist and accuses Freud of multiplying essences if he cannot find a solution to his theoretical problems. In Girard’s interpretation, Freud was not able to explain either why we repeat or how we repeat: ‘The Oedipus complex cannot conceivably account for any forms of reproduction or repetition’ (TH 412). Freud admitted in Beyond the Pleasure Principle ([1920] 1991) that the repetition of what causes suffering ‘poses an insoluble problem if all behaviour stems from the “pleasure principle”’ (TH 356). This is the precise point in which Butler is particularly interested and what she herself calls ‘stubborn attachments’. She thinks that ‘a subject will attach to pain rather than not attach at all’ (PLP 61). Girard, in turn, accuses Freud of solving this problem by constructing



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a new instinct, that is, the death drive. Otherwise Freud would not be able to account satisfactorily for the recurrence of the initial Oedipal situation (see TH 361): As it is impossible to constrain dynamic processes within a system of archetypes, Freud finds it necessary to create more and more essences. […] Freud not only retains the essences of his predecessors, like masochism, sadism and even ‘jealousy’, ‘envy’ and so forth, but he is also forced to double up the essences that he has just invented; he has two kinds of masochism, two kinds of Oedipus complex. (TH 361) Freud never resolved the problem of reproduction because he never discovered mimetic desire. According to Freud, the subject has only himself to draw upon. He is restricted to one tip of the triangle; he must find a first partner whom he will mistake for his mother and a third whom he will mistake for his father. If he is really searching for his mother in the object and his father in the rival, what miracle makes it possible for him to re-generate the appropriate structure of desire and rivalry every time? (TH 359–60)2

For Girard, an adequate perspective on culture is one through mechanisms, that is, through the mechanism of mimesis. This is his stable universal, which is present in all cultures and at all times and produces the impression of essences, depending on the cultural context and interpretation: be it the scapegoat mechanism, the death drive or desire. It is an anthropological constant, which has a universalizing effect in a given episteme. The mechanism of mimesis works within immanence and as a result establishes the impression of an essence. Being, therefore, is an effect of mimesis, acquired in a continual bodily repetition and as a result it effectuates being through sedimentation. In this respect Girard’s concept of mimesis has a strong resonance with Butler’s idea of performativity and with her conceptualization of our relation to the Other. Girard claims that ‘to choose to be oneself  is to choose to be the Other’ (Girard 2004: 28). If Girardian terms were applied to her ideas, Butler’s ‘Other’ could be seen to represent not only particular individuals but, more importantly, also the set of norms, ‘the regulatory law’, which is embodied and performed by particular others. The individual at her birth is thrown into the ‘regulatory frame’ and unwittingly imitates her surrounding models as she Also: ‘Instincts, drives, fetishized sexuality, “characters” or “symptoms” – all are just false essences we are attempting to deconstruct – they are merely Platonic ideas that are in the process of disappearing’ (TH 351). Girard convincingly explains Freud’s ‘psychoanalytic mythology’ using the mechanism of mimesis (see particularly TH 353–92). The exact problem of repetition, why and how it happens, is something that Butler also tries to account for. I discuss it further in the chapter.

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initially considers it ‘natural’ to follow them (BTM 12). The particular others ‘materializ[e] the norms’ (BTM 16) – that is, through their acts they become cultural others. They are potential mediators who have already incorporated and are still in the process of incorporating the ‘regulatory law’. As Girard claims: ‘no one can do without a highly developed mimetic capacity in acquiring cultural attitudes – in situating oneself correctly within one’s culture’ (TH 290). The regulatory law is hence not only external, but – more importantly – an integrated internal law, which operates in the liminal zone between the external and internal spheres and is constitutive of identity. The bodily performance is where identity is to be found as a form of mimetic identification and re-enactment. We are compelled to repeat the norms, such as specific behaviour, dress and social roles, which are found in culture and society because we are encircled by people who enact them and serve as models to us. In Girard’s theory it is impossible for humans not to imitate a model and so not to repeat an incorporated norm. This, however, does not predetermine the result of such a repetition. Consider Butler’s example of gender, which is also applicable to the operation of other norms: ‘Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’ (GT 45). The appearance of gender identity has been created through the sedimentation of gender norms, ‘sedimentation that over time has produced a set of corporeal styles which, in reified form, appear as the natural configuration of bodies into sexes existing in a binary relation to one another’ (GT 191). The subject does not actively choose to become a particular gender, as if she were choosing which clothes she will wear on a particular day, but rather her gender identity is an effect of the repeated practices of gender norms. Gender is acting through an unwitting imitation of the gendered behaviours of the others. The psychic subject is then ‘constituted internally by differentially gendered Others and is, therefore, never, as a gender, self-identical’ (IGI 133). This mimetic mechanism works across all social norms and frameworks and leaves no exception. The practice of embodying norms is then a ‘compulsory practice, a forcible production’ (BTM 231), but not one that is fully determining. I will show that the reason for this lack of predetermination is structural failure in mimesis. Mimesis can be reduced to a process of unwitting imitation. It always goes wrong and, structurally, it always has to go wrong in order to both repeat and preserve itself. The inherent failure of mimesis results in significant consequences. It is similarly conditioned to the one of performativity and



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brings about similar consequences. I will discuss the centrality of failure to the whole of Butler’s system later in this chapter. The perfect imitation of a model, that is, perfect mimesis that would take place one hundred per cent of the time, is impossible not only because of the impossibility of an exact and flawless imitation but also because of de-contextualization and temporality. A slippage in mimesis is structurally unavoidable. An identity is produced and destabilized in the course of a reiteration. Gaps and fissures are created by the inevitable difference between, on the one hand, prescribed norms of particular identity in the regime of the established hegemony (who is human, for instance) and, on the other, the successful approximation to this socially constructed model. If we chose only one model, the perfect imitation would not be possible; with many models surrounding us, which we imitate unwittingly, the (unaccounted for) selectiveness introduces even more variety to our imitation process. Therefore, mimesis can only function through an approximation and exists as an approximation. In this space between the ideal norm and the performed act, variation and transformation are possible. This reveals the structurally intrinsic but necessary and productive failure in all mimesis. The failure in mimesis is, therefore, inevitable and constitutive and can have a positive effect of spreading the contagion of heterogeneity. This mode of functioning through constant failure in the repetition mirrors the process of the infinitely circulating universality that I described in Chapter 1. As singularity is a failed instantiation of the particular in the singular–particular dyad and the particular is a failed instantiation of the universal in the particular–universal dyad, failure is an essential part of this process. In the process of universality’s infinite circulation, universality is constantly exposed and constantly challenged (although indirectly) by singularity. On the social level, the failure in mimesis allows singularity to emerge into particularity. In that way it carries the potential for social change through exposure to singularity. The effects of the repeated failures in mimesis, however, cannot be appropriated and this is exactly where the potential for transformation lies. This idea of a spreading contagion is opposed to Alain Badiou’s notion of an evental site from which universality– singularity suddenly irrupts into the world. Hence, in the case of gender performativity, gender transformation seen through the mechanism of mimesis would not operate within a binary system. Rather it would involve many degrees of  ‘queering’ occurring between different mediators, each characterized by their own unique mixture of queerness. As Butler remarks in Gender Trouble, queerness could be then understood not only as an example of citational politics, but also as a reworking of the unintelligible

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into political agency. This would mean, in our context, an introduction of the unrecognized (singularity) into the sphere of particularity and thus putting it on the path towards the potential reformulation of universality. In consequence, the process would make the unrecognized appear in the political realm. This is because, in order to mimetically take up a form of conduct and go on repeating it with one’s body, a prior recognition of that behaviour is not a prerequisite. That is where mimesis or citationality has a political promise. In the case of the category of the human, it would be open to the constant inclusion of the non-human into its composition and be exposed to an infinite translation of the universal, with the inevitable consequences that the category of the human would expand to the extent that it would become redundant. By combining Butler and Girard’s system one could propose such a radical form of materiality – a truly radical form of body politics, where bodily repetition of models or norms would amount to the ‘psyche’. Butler herself plays with such a flattened concept of the psyche when she negates the depth of the psyche in The Psychic Life of Power (1997). By rejecting this inner depth, she does not mean, however, to refuse the psyche altogether. On the contrary, the psyche for her has to be rethought as ‘compulsive repetition’, ‘as that which conditions and disables the repetitive performance of identity’ (see IGI 134). This flattened idea of the psyche would open up a space of the human in a most radical way. It would mean opening it up towards the post-human, towards even non-organic entities like cyborgs, imitating humans and counting as human despite not having a psyche. It would constitute a form of ‘aliveness’ beyond the human or the organic. Admittedly, Butler tends in the direction of precariousness rather than aliveness in her theory that is, as she herself concedes, ‘struggling toward a non-anthropocentric conception of the human’. She argues against ‘a certain presumptively masculine idea, embedded in classical liberal political forms, of the subject who is self-sufficient and a-social’. As she admits in the same interview with Antonello and Farneti (2009): What if our ontology has to be thought otherwise? If humans actually share a condition of precariousness, not only just with one another, but also with animals and with the environment, then this constitutive feature of who we ‘are’ undoes the very conceit of anthropocentrism. In this sense, I want to propose ‘precarious life’ as a non-anthropocentric framework for considering what makes life valuable.3 In Chapter 3, I use Peter Sloterdijk’s work to develop in greater detail this non-anthropocentric element in Butler’s writing.

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Such radical opening is very different from a liberal humanist procedure that insists on broadening the notion of human rights and to include ‘aberrant’ practices. However, the notion of ‘universal human rights’ presumes an already established idea of what a human is without the possibility of its radical reformulation. Such liberal procedure seems problematic because it underestimates the extent to which ‘exclusions are constitutive of the “neutral” universality of human rights, so that their actual inclusion in “human rights” would radically rearticulate, even undermine, our notion of what “humanity” in “human rights” means’ (CHU 101–2). Universality always involves a set of exclusions and inclusions but it also simultaneously needs to keep open the possibility of questioning and renegotiating these inclusions/exclusions. The concept of universality that Butler pursues is one that is open to a complete reformulation (translation) rather than a simple addition of another entity. The unknowingness about the result of a transformative inclusion, of reformulation, of failure in mimesis is key in Butler’s idea of social transformation. This form of flattened psyche as ‘compulsive repetition’, which Girard brings out more clearly in Butler, would constitute the most radical extension of Butler and Girard’s ideas in the ethical sphere and take a further step away from anthropocentrism.

Why we repeat: Freud, Foucault, Derrida The question that one is compelled to ask is how exactly does this mechanism of mimesis work? In order to explain the compulsion to repetition in Butler’s system, one needs to bring together three thinkers that she uses in her work who answer each other’s questions: Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. All in combination are able to account for the mechanism of repetition in Butler, as Foucault solves Freud’s problem of why we repeat things that cause us suffering and Derrida solves Foucault’s problem of  how to account for failure. Two clarifications are necessary at this point. Firstly, the ‘problems’ of Freud and Foucault and their ‘solutions’ to which I point here refer strictly to specific questions in Butler’s work. At issue here is how she employs these thinkers in order to solve specific problems that are at the core of her writing, rather than by making a general statement about the key problems of Freud, Foucault or Derrida. Secondly, related to the question of the ‘compulsion to repetition’ is the question of the selection of a model for repetition. Unfortunately, language fails us here: the ‘selection’ or ‘choice’ of a model assumes a subject that is given a chance to determine the outcome of mimesis. In this form of transformation

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through mimesis, the selection of models is not meant as a wilful, conscious act of choice or decision-making but rather it is the tendency of a subject to repeat particular norms rather than others, to attach herself to a particular identity (like the female identity) and continue reiterating it in bodily performativity: even if the chosen identity involves subjection, as described in The Psychic Life of Power. This unwitting tendency to lock onto certain identities rather than others and in that way orient one’s mimesis is what is considered here and what Butler tries to account for using a psychoanalytical framework. In the psychoanalytical framework, the necessity to repeat is connected to the unconscious, to primary loss and through this loss to identity formation. In order to fully account for the selection of a model and its repetition, Butler refers to the psychoanalytical concept of the ‘phantasmatic’, where norms are not only embodied, but, after Bourdieu, where this embodiment is a mode of interpretation (CHU 152). Norms are not static entities, but ‘incorporated […] features of existence that are sustained by the idealizations furnished by fantasy’ (CHU 152). In Butler’s view, no norm can operate without the activation of fantasy or more specifically ‘the phantasmatic attachment to ideals that are at once social and psychic’ (CHU 151).4 By pointing towards this phantasmatic, Butler only goes so far with psychoanalysis in her account of why repetition happens at all. Instead, she deals more extensively with the selection of models, if one puts it in Girard’s terms, or – to use Butler’s terms – with the repetition of specific norms, with attaching oneself to particular identities. This is where, in her opinion, the Foucauldian notion of power can give us particularly good answers if combined with psychoanalysis, as will be presented below. She does not, however, consider Foucault to be entirely unproblematic. The issue that Butler sees in Foucault’s system and from her perspective this critique could also be applied to Girard, is that ‘it relies upon either a behaviourist notion of mechanically reproduced behaviour or a sociological notion of “internalization” which does not appreciate the instabilities that inhere in identificatory practices’ (CHU 151). On the one hand, she tries to propose a psychoanalytical criticism of Foucault because to her ‘the formation of the subject cannot fully be thought […] without recourse to a paradoxically enabling set of grounding constraints’ (PLP 87). On the other hand, however, she wants to contribute to a ‘reemergence of a Foucauldian perspective within psychoanalysis’ in order to solve Freud’s problems with repetition (see PLP 87). In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, Slavoj Žižek’s focus on the phantasmatic resonates with Butler. For more on how they agree and disagree about the usefulness of psychoanalysis to think politics, see CHU 136–58.

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By bringing together Freud and Foucault in The Psychic Life of Power, Butler is trying to account for the process of norm repetition with its particular set of stubborn attachments – repetitions of what causes suffering. Due to our unconscious attachments to subjection, it would be a mistake, in her view, to think of the unconscious as automatically the place of resistance (see PLP 88). In this context, she employs a Foucauldian framework to analyse the process of subjection – both of subordination and subject formation. For Butler, ‘attachment to subjection is produced through the workings of power’ (PLP 6). Power produces foreclosures that structure the subject and her attachments. It seems, then, that power must also produce repetition: ‘if conditions of power are to persist, they must be reiterated’ (PLP 16). However, one does not exactly know how power enforces reiteration in the Foucauldian framework. One merely knows that power needs repetition in order to operate and the subject is the site of this reiteration (see PLP 16). It is also power that determines what norms are taken up and repeated in the subject’s own acts. A unique composition of norms and selected behaviours makes up the specificity of the subject’s psyche. This does not necessarily imply the psyche’s self-determination or autonomy but neither does it imply full predetermination of the psyche (see CHU 154). Butler wonders about two questions in this context: where resistance comes from in subjects if power determines what norms are repeated, and how one should understand ‘interiority’ in Foucault (PLP 89). She suggests that perhaps the ‘body has come to substitute for the psyche in Foucault – that is, as that which exceeds and confounds the injunctions of normalization’ (PLP 94). The Foucauldian subject for Butler is precisely ‘never fully constituted in subjection […] [but] it is repeatedly constituted in subjection’ (PLP 94, my italics). Through this possibility of repetition, the enabling power is drawn. This is because repetition can always go wrong. The possibility of failure, as I will show later in this chapter, is the decisive factor in Butler’s system, but neither psychoanalytical nor Foucauldian frameworks can account for this failure. In order to solve these problems, Butler reaches for another paradigm. As the trajectory through psychoanalysis is fragmentary and problematic, an approach through Derrida seems particularly convincing as it provides the missing link. In this case, it needs to account for an absolutely fundamental question to which the psychoanalytical paradigm fails to provide a satisfactory answer: why do we repeat? Additionally, it needs to explain where failure comes from and so support and theoretically complete Butler’s combination of Foucault and Freud. In Excitable Speech, which takes a clear step away from the Freudian framework, Butler explains, in the wake of Derrida, that repetition comes from the excess in

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language that strives for resignification. Butler builds on Derrida’s analysis of Austin’s speech act theory, in particular his thoughts on performative utterances, that is, pronouncements that accomplish acts. Examples of performative utterances are promises, bets, declarations of war, acts of naming (the baptism of a child, the launching of a ship), acts of founding and the marriage ceremony (‘I do’, ‘I hereby pronounce you husband and wife’). Derrida is interested in the structure of repeatability, which he calls iterability. ‘Iterability’ draws together Latin ‘iter’ (again) and the Sanskrit ‘itara’ (other) and is ‘the logic that ties repetition to alterity’ (see Derrida 1988: 7; Royle 2003: 67). Iterability is the capacity of a word, in Derrida’s analysis, or of a social norm, in Butler’s, to be repeated again and again in different contexts. Every time a repetition happens, it is singular because it involves a different temporality and a different contextualization. In that way iterability entails both sameness (repetition) and alterity (difference) (see Royle 2003: 67–8). Butler claims that in contrast to Austin,5 for whom the force of the performative is derived from established conventions, for Derrida the force of the performative is ‘derived precisely from its decontextualization, from its break with a prior context and its capacity to assume new contexts’ (ES 147). Repetition is primarily citational, a term that Butler appropriates not only from Derrida but also from Jacques Lacan. She follows the latter in saying: ‘the force and necessity of […] norms is […] functionally dependent on the approximation and citation of the law; the law without its approximation is no law’ (BTM 14, 13–15). Later in her essay, she also states that law ‘can only remain a law to the extent that it compels the differentiated citations and approximations. […] [C]itation of the law is the very mechanism of its production and articulation’ (BTM 15). The notion of citationality distances repetition away from a merely mechanical process to suggest instead a repeatability that includes otherness and the possibility of change within it (see Jagger 2008: 67). Otherwise, repetition would suppress excluded singularity. Therefore, in reference to Derrida, Butler states: If iterability is a structural characteristic of every mark, then there is no mark without its own proper iterability; that is, for a mark to be a mark, it must be repeatable and have that repeatability as a necessary and constitutive feature of itself. (ES 149)

Thus, both for Butler and Derrida there is no possibility of not repeating. Butler goes as far as to say that ‘citationality assumes the form of a mimesis without Or Bourdieu, for whom the force of habitus also comes from conventions. Both Bourdieu and Derrida read Austin to delineate the force of the performative utterance (see ES 142–59).

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end’ (see ES 151, 102). To this one can briefly add that the mimesis that Girard proposes includes this precise infinity of return because Girard poses mimesis as axiomatic. Butler succinctly summarizes Derrida’s ideas on the repeatability of the performative: Performatives fail […] because, for Derrida, they must fail as a condition of their iterability […]. Derrida claims that the failure of the performative is the condition of its possibility, ‘the very force and law of its emergence’ […]. That performative utterances can go wrong, be misapplied or misinvoked, is essential to their ‘proper’ functioning: such instances exemplify a more general citationality that can always go awry. (ES 151)

That is how a ‘failed performative’, in Austin’s sense, is a condition of a critical response (see ES 19). One can see how Butler, with Derrida’s concept of iterability, accounts for the possibility of change and resistance not only by attributing it to a different contextualization and a different temporality but, even more importantly, she accounts for it with the notion of structural failure. As I have argued in Chapter 1, in Butler’s system singularity strives to be readmitted into universality and due to its failure to do so completely it continues trying as part of its ‘proper’ functioning. It is, therefore, failure that propels the repetition into infinity and this is where the potential for social transformation lies. If we turn for a moment to Girard, we can see that the Butler–Derrida– Austin line of thought introduces an important aspect into Girard’s mimesis. This is the political dimension. Both Butler and Derrida consider the logic of iterability as a social logic and explicitly offer a way to think of performativity in terms of social transformation (see ES 150–1). Performativity holds a political promise because it allows the singular to reformulate completely the parameters of universality (ES 161). Doing is political as it challenges universality, the naturalness of hegemony and the obviousness of established conventions. Acts are repeated and, through contextualization, temporality and failure, changed. Although Butler reflects mostly on the level of discursive-linguistic agency, in terms of resignification as resistance, where the body runs the risk of becoming merely a performative effect, one needs to remember that performativity/ mimesis is something that one does with one’s body. Girard throws into sharp relief this non-discursive aspect already present in Butler. The fact that we do something in performativity/mimesis is therefore crucial. The ‘now’ emerges in repetition and the temporality of mimesis is, thus, one of the present.

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Does gender always have to be sexual? Butler draws extensively on Sigmund Freud’s work. In order to explain why she uses so much Freud in her writing, it would be accurate to say that Butler is offering ‘something like an exegesis of a certain psychoanalytic logic’ (PLP 138). It seems, however, that there is more than that at play in Butler’s relationship to psychoanalysis. There is a problematic split in her approach. On the one hand, she wishes to expose, reformulate and subvert the terms of psychoanalysis. She uses sophisticated interpretations to show, for instance, how certain psychoanalytical postulates about primary heterosexuality would have to presume prior homosexuality in order to be consistent in their own terms. She challenges, for instance, the psychoanalytical reading of incest and structures of kinship in Antigone’s Claim (see also Chambers and Carver 2008: 121–36), Lacan’s idea of a phallus in Bodies that Matter, gender identification in Gender Trouble and The Psychic Life of Power. She also admits that she tried to distance herself from Lacan by thinking of social transformation: In my work I have tried to establish […] incommensurability within gender theory by insisting on the incommensurability between gender norms and any lived effort to approximate its terms. In this sense, I have imported a Lacanian scheme into gender theory, although I have sought to retain something of the transformative possibilities associated with gender as a social category, thus distancing myself from a Lacanian notion of the symbolic. (APO 24–5, n. 13)

On the other hand, Butler builds on selected psychoanalytical claims without questioning them. She often cites Freud to support her ideas without necessarily subverting him: she uses mourning and melancholia in Precarious Life where she claims, following Freud, that mourning is ‘submitting to a transformation’ and she develops this idea further to account for an ‘ungrievable life’ throughout her work (see PL 20–1; FW). This is an exemplary case of her eclectic thinking where she takes an isolated element from a thinker’s system and turns it around for her own purpose, ignoring the possible implications that this particular choice triggers. What is more, she claims that one cannot account for subject formation ‘without recourse to a psychoanalytic account of the formative or generative effects of restriction or prohibition’ and therefore employs Freud to rethink Foucault’s ideas on power. She is also convinced that psychoanalysis rightly insists on the idea of the unconscious (see PLP 87; UG 190–200). One wonders, however, if this intense and complex engagement is necessary to posit claims that could be perhaps made successfully without the



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psychoanalytical entanglement. Didier Eribon brings this critique very well to the point in his Echapper à la psychanalyse (2005: 83) when he says that ‘it would be undoubtedly simpler, more efficient and more productive – both politically and theoretically – to plainly refuse the pertinence [of the key notions of psychoanalysis]. To completely reject them’.6 Even more importantly, one wonders if certain other paths of interrogation are not foreclosed because psychoanalysis does not offer the conceptual tools to think about them. In consequence, Butler is only able to question psychoanalytical assumptions but she is not able to go beyond them, to rethink constellations that are not included in a psychoanalytical framework. She is, therefore, constrained in her thinking by the limits of psychoanalysis even though she introduces bits and pieces of other thinkers to expand this framework. It is indeed an exemplary Foucauldian situation where a discourse offers the means of resistance only within its own bounds and strictly directs the line of thinking and, unavoidably, the line of questioning. Although these are indeed self-imposed bounds, my claim is that Butler’s interests are not fully catered for by this particular choice of discourse.7 Butler’s engagement with the Freudian Oedipus complex and Girard’s alternative explanations is a good case in point. Butler’s account of gender identity draws on the Freudian paradigm of ego formation through melancholia. She brings to our attention the fact that Freud in ‘The Ego and the Super-Ego (Ego-Ideal)’ ([1923] 1991) does not only describe ‘character formation’, but also the acquisition of gender identity. Freud claims that identification happens as a response to the loss of a loved object. In order to preserve it, we install the lost object in the ego. Freud claims that in the process of ego-formation a child desires one of its parents but the taboo against incest means that the desire has to be given up. Like the melancholic, who takes the loss into herself and thereby preserves it, a child preserves the desired and lost parent through identification. The ego in Freud is then a repository of all desires that had to be given up. As Freud puts it: ‘the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and […] it contains the history of those object-choices’ (Freud 1991: 368). If the primary object of desire is the mother then the identification will be with her and if it is the father then with him. Freud does not, however, determine why a child desires one parent rather than another but he attributes it to a child’s ‘disposition’: either ‘feminine’ or All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are the author’s. Some of Butler’s explicit engagements with psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan) can be found in PLP 132–50, 167–200; BTM 57–92; UG 102–30; GT 78–88; AC.

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‘masculine’. The disposition of the child is its innate desire for the member of the opposite or the same sex. However, Freud himself is hesitant about dispositions and gives an example of a ‘little girl’ who identifies with her father that brings ‘her masculinity into prominence’. It would seem that the primary object choice is the result of primary disposition, feminine or masculine to start with, and Butler rejects such postulations (see Salih 2002: 52–6; Freud 1991: 372). ‘Feminine’ would mean identifying with the mother and desiring the father, and ‘masculine’ – identifying with the father and desiring the mother. She asks: ‘to what extent do we read the desire for the father as evidence of a feminine disposition?’ (GT 82). Even though Freud suggests bisexuality as ‘originally present in the children’, it seems to Butler that bisexuality in Freud ‘is the coincidence of two heterosexual desires within a single psyche’ (GT 82). The masculine disposition is never directed towards the father as an object of love and the feminine disposition is never directed at the mother. Therefore, there must be, according to Butler, another prohibition at work that directs this gender identification and is the source of the problems that Freud encounters in accounting for identification.8 Butler is interested in precisely those dispositions and how this primary object choice works.9 She proposes in this context the concept of a primary prohibition on homosexuality: heterosexuality and gender identification are established not only through implementing the incest prohibition but, prior to that, through the prohibition on homosexuality (see PLP 135). As we know, for Freud identification with the same-sex Other is a psychic form of preserving the lost object. Due to cultural taboos against incest and homosexuality, our passionate attachment to the same-sex person (mother or father) is rejected. A girl becomes a woman by losing her mother as a primary object of love. This giving up an object of love is only possible through a melancholic ‘bringing inside’ of her mother through identification with her (PLP 134). In the case of a heterosexual union with the parent, the object of desire is denied but not the modality of desire (heterosexual desire). In consequence, desire is deflected to other objects of the opposite sex, constituting the normal process of mourning. In the case of a homosexual union with the parent, both the object and the modality For the problems Freud has with positing the source of identification see Freud (1991: 371–2; GT 78–89). 9 Butler often uses examples of the female Oedipus complex structure because, from the perspective of her reading, the male Oedipus complex has a more complicated double displacement (see PLP 127–38). From a Girardian perspective, however, the difference between the female and male Oedipus complex is irrelevant and that is why I do not follow the psychoanalytically based distinction between the male and female Oedipus. 8



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of desire require renunciation and so become subject to internalization through melancholia. In this way, gender is acquired as the internalization of the prohibition on homosexuality. This identity is constructed and maintained by the consistent application of the taboo against homosexuality (see GT 86). Thus, ‘homosexuality is not abolished but preserved, though preserved precisely in the prohibition on homosexuality’ (see PLP 135–42), and gender identification is based on this set of disavowed attachments. Femininity is then formed through the refusal to grieve the feminine (the mother) as a possibility of love – ‘an exclusion never grieved, but “preserved” through heightened […] identification’ (PLP 146). A woman becomes a heterosexual melancholic where she refuses to acknowledge the attachment to the same sex and so a strictly straight woman is the truest lesbian melancholic (see PLP 147).10 Butler finds this interesting because this account seems to follow from Freud’s own claims (see UG 199–200).11 To this Freudian interpretation, Butler importantly adds the surface of the body as the site where identification takes place (see Salih 2002: 56; GT 86). Identification happens through bodily acts of ‘incorporation of the Other by mimetic practice’ (IGI 132–3): ‘Identifications are always made in response to loss of some kind and […] they involve a certain mimetic practice that seeks to incorporate the lost love within the very “identity” of the one who remains’ (IGI 132). As pointed out above, the choice of the model is directed by the taboo against homosexuality and, therefore, gender identification follows from the ‘acting out’ of this prohibition. This constitutes precisely the difference between the melancholia caused by separation, death or the breaking of an emotional tie and melancholia in the Oedipal situation. As Butler asserts in Gender Trouble: ‘In the Oedipal situation […] the loss is dictated by a prohibition attended by a set of punishments’ (GT 87). A child who enters the Oedipal drama with incestuous desires has already been subjected to the prohibition of homosexuality. ‘Hence, dispositions that Freud assumes to be primary or constitutive facts of sexual life are effects of a law which, internalized, produces and regulates Butler acknowledges that ‘a homosexual for whom heterosexual desire is unthinkable’ will maintain his or her heterosexual desire through melancholic incorporation. However, due to different cultural sanctions towards homosexuality and heterosexuality the two types of melancholia are not equivalent (GT 95; see Salih 2002: 57). 11 A similar structure of melancholia is posited in Antigone’s Claim, where Antigone becomes, in a way, her brother because she lost him. However, the question is then why she chooses particularly her brother Polyneices as a figure of identification if she had also lost other people, including her other brother Eteocles, her sister (whom she repudiates), her mother and her father–brother Oedipus, who are all left ungrieved (see AC 67, 79–81). There is an implication of incest in the relation with Polyneices. Does the object have to be sexual? 10

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discrete gender identity and heterosexuality’ (GT 87). For Butler, therefore, gender identity is produced by an incorporation of the cultural prohibition on homosexuality. Although in 1990 she still explicitly concedes a doubt ‘whether loss or mimetism is primary’ and admits that this poses ‘perhaps an undecidable problem’ (IGI 133), it seems that a couple of years later in 1997, in The Psychic Life of Power, she decides on loss. Our bodies enact this incorporated prohibition as femininity or masculinity constituting a residue of this primary, most important loss. The question that one needs to pose to Butler, however, is what about the other prohibitions apart from incest and homosexuality that we incorporate in our bodies and which contribute to our gender identity? What about all that the melancholic phrase ‘I have lost nothing’ incorporates? Does gender have to be always already sexual? In order to see how Girard tackles the problems ingrained in the psychoanalytical matrix let us first make explicit the undercurrent of assumptions that Butler works with. Firstly, for Freud and Butler (and Hegel), desire is always already there. That one desires is a precondition for the functioning of their systems. Secondly, Butler assumes that the taboo against homosexuality permeates our culture and affects the structure of desire and identity irrespective of our immediate collectivity. The Foucauldian prohibition produces the primary desire as homosexual. Thirdly, she takes up the psychoanalytical assumption that the disavowed, like the Lacanian Real, structures our psyche. Fourthly, that sexual desire is central to the formation of gender identity. With Girard one can explain identification without recourse to a primary prohibition or initial desire or, to put it in more psychoanalytical terms, without turning to castration or lack. As already pointed out, desire is produced as a result of the mechanism of mimesis. Girard accounts for the Freudian Oedipus complex with the double bind of mimesis. In his view, there is no way for a child to distinguish between the behaviour that is ‘good’ to imitate (that is non-acquisitive mimesis, imitating a model without wishing to appropriate the model’s object of desire as in the case of Christians imitating Jesus or Don Quixote imitating Amadis) and behaviour that is not good to imitate (acquisitive mimesis that leads to mimetic rivalry and results in violence because its aim is to possess the other’s object of desire). In the case of a disciple–master relationship, which Girard gives as an example of a double bind, the disciple imitates the master. This imitation is clearly expected in the educational process. However, once the disciple surpasses the master, the master will become hostile towards this disciple due to the emerging rivalry. The double bind takes place when a subject is incapable of correctly interpreting the double imperative



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that comes from the other person: as a model, imitate me; as a rival, do not imitate me (TH 291). In the Oedipus complex, Freud assumes that a child has an intrinsic desire for the mother and an inherent narcissism. Girard refuses Freudian essences and claims that the father is a model for apprenticeship and this inevitably involves also being a model in terms of sexual desire. The child, in Girard’s view, does not know what it does when it imitates the father’s desire for the mother. It does not distinguish between imitation and rivalry. It is the adult’s interpretation, in this case Freud’s, that accuses the child of sexual desire for the mother, whereas the child, according to Girard, only unwittingly imitates a model, in this case, the father (see TH 352). The paradoxical double bind of imitation is a process that introduces ambivalence between the parties involved: on the one hand, a child admires, venerates and imitates its father; on the other hand, it feels guilty, jealous and angry towards the same object.12 Consequently, this ambivalence can unleash violence and this is how Girard comes to the conclusion that all desire is potentially rivalrous and violent because even the ‘good’ form of mimesis can turn into ‘bad’ rivalrous competition. This is a variation on Kojève’s originary situation of Hegel’s master and slave dialectics in so far as the conflict is also hinged on asymmetry and misrecognition. However, here it is mimesis that is the driving force rather than a need for recognition. In order to contain the violence that can erupt from the repeated double bind the process of socialization is necessary. As there is no way of distinguishing on an objective basis between forms of behaviour that are good to imitate and those that are not, a child has to be furnished with models and prohibitions. In the Oedipal context, this ambiguity lies in the cultural norms that prescribe that the boy is like his father but only that far – he is not allowed to desire his mother. Socialization teaches individuals to manage this problematic double bind through norms: The individual who ‘adjusts’ has managed to relegate the two contradictory injunctions of the double bind – to imitate and not to imitate – to two different domains of application. That is, he divides reality in such a way as to neutralize the double bind. (VS 177)

In a ‘normally functional family’, imitation and rivalry are well ‘canalized and restrained’. A family prepares and strengthens a child for a world in which such structures are not readily available (see TH 353). However, for Girard, the family as a carrier of socialization does not play ‘the same necessary role’ as it does in Freud had problems in accounting for the ambivalence towards the same-sex parent and, therefore, suggested primary bisexuality (homosexual feeling towards a parent) and devised the super-ego (see TH 362).

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Freud (TH 354). Any form of exposure to the norms through socialization will try to curtail the ambiguity of mimesis and, therefore, any form of kinship structure or collectivity would do.13 At the origin of this adjustment, individual or collective, lies concealed ‘a certain arbitrary violence’ that the norms exert on the individual. The violence of being lost in the norms is a necessary part of an adjustment to society. In Girard’s system, therefore, gender identity would come from the non-acquisitive imitation of a model or models: mother or father, mother or mother, father or father. This would mean imitating a whole range of forms of conduct, norms embodied and repeated in their behaviours and also, but not necessarily, the modality of their desires (be it homosexual or heterosexual). Non-acquisitive mimesis could be in that case attached to the mechanism of gender identification and acquisitive mimesis to the modality of desire. A disjunction of gender identity and sexual interest would be possible here. Let us, however, first think through the options that Girard’s system proposes for the conflation of desire with identity which psychoanalysis makes. Let us also analyse the modalities of desire that are involved in Girardian triangulation. It is necessary to note that these are purely structural considerations. Although Girard in his interpretations of literary study cases often works within the framework of heterosexual desire his theory does not posit that heterosexual or homosexual desire is either primary or necessary. There is nothing originary or autonomous in desire, for Girard. Admittedly, Girard is neither interested in how homosexuality or heterosexuality is exactly produced through mimesis nor its truth relation to reality. His position is purely theoretical and, therefore, he is much more careful in pronouncing whether homosexuality is produced in that way or not. He admits that ‘we should subordinate homosexuality to the rivalry that can produce [homosexuality], no less frequently, does not produce it’ (TH 345). Girard tries, in his own way, to account for the influence of the mimetic game on ‘at least some of the forms of homosexuality’ (TH 335). For Girard, homosexuality can be structurally related to mimetic Butler, on her part, considers heterosexual kinship structures to be problematic. She considers it vital to rethink the structures of kinship beyond the family and, therefore, she opposes the uses of the Oedipus complex that assume a ‘bi-gendered parental structure and fail to think critically about the family’ (CHU 148). She asks: ‘If Oedipus is interpreted broadly, as a name for the triangularity of desire, then the salient questions become: What forms does that triangularity take? Must it presume heterosexuality?’ (UG 128). In this context, she also proposes ‘the Antigonean revision of psychoanalytical theory’ that might ‘put into question the assumption that the incest taboo legitimates and normalizes kinship based in biological reproduction and the heterosexualization of the family’ (AC 66). That problem is, however, profoundly connected to the psychoanalytical framework and could be pre-empted by Girard and his mimetic desire.

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rivalry as ‘the model and the rival, in the sexual domain, is an individual of the same sex, for the very reason that the object is heterosexual. All sexual rivalry is thus structurally homosexual’ (TH 335). In this case, what he refers to as homosexuality is the subordination of sexuality to the effects of the mimetic game of the double bind: the model is the rival and the rival is the model. ‘Any form of sexual rivalry is homosexual in structure […] at least as long the object remains heterosexual’ (TH 337). Thus, in Girard’s view, one should eliminate the false difference between homosexual and heterosexual eroticism as the rival is metamorphosed into an erotic object. Through his structural thinking, he detaches desire both from sex and from identification. Both desires, homosexual and heterosexual, are produced in the triangular structure, depending on the constellation: a heterosexual configuration implies homosexual desire and a homosexual configuration implies heterosexual desire. The triangular mimetic structure involves both heterosexual and homosexual desire at the same time. Let us think this through step by step and first consider a triangular mimetic structure involving two men, as models and rivals, and a woman, as the object of desire. The constellation of departure here involves a heterosexual desire: both men desire a woman. One man admires the other and imitates his desire for the woman and so becomes a rival. Both imitate each other’s desires for the woman and intensify the involvement with each other. The fierce rivalry leads to the obsession with the rival rather than the object of desire and leads to the eroticizing of the rival. This is how a heterosexual constellation involves inevitably a homosexual structure: Homosexuality, in literary works, is often the eroticizing of mimetic rivalry. The desire bearing on the object of rivalry – an object that need not even be sexual – is displaced towards the rival. Since the rival need not necessarily be of the same sex – the object itself being not necessarily sexual – this eroticizing of rivalry can also take the form of heterosexuality. (TH 346–7)

However, if the constellation of departure is homosexual then there are two options with different consequences. Let us start with the simpler one. If all three tips of the triangle are of one gender – all parties involved are either only women or only men – then the structure would inevitably be exclusively homosexual in nature. This poses no further problems. If, however, the constellation of departure is homosexual yet mixed – a man and a woman are rivals over a woman as an object of desire – then the rivalry is heterosexual in structure. Therefore, Girard claims that ‘there is no structural difference between the type of homosexuality and the type of heterosexuality’ that we are

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considering at this point (TH 347). Both desires are involved here. The interesting part, however, in this constellation is the question of identification that results from such a structure and the question of the nature of desire. As Girard claims, obsessive rivalry can lead to becoming the double of the model–rival. If one conflates for a moment sexual desire with gender identity, as Butler does, then in the proposed above mixed homosexual structure of departure this would mean that a man, by imitating the desire of a woman for another woman, would become a male lesbian and a woman, by imitating the desire of a man for a woman, would become a female straight man. This would then posit a structure of desire of a transgender person: a lesbian trapped in a male body, a straight man trapped in a female body.14 The interesting part in such a triangular structure is that Girard’s structure of mimetic desire involves both desires operating at the same time if the parties are of a different gender and that it is able to account for desire in a transgender person whereas psychoanalysis is not. It could also account for a transgender desire of wanting to be a different gender irrespective of the modality of desire (homosexual or heterosexual) or irrespective of any sexual desire at all, if one does not conflate sexual desire with gender identity. This, in turn, would overlap with the transgender position where there is no necessary relationship between gender identity and sexuality: ‘Trans people generally undergo gender reassignment without changing their sexual orientation – transsexual people are just as likely to be straight, gay, lesbian or bisexual in their new gender role as any people are. […] There is no relationship to sexuality’ (Whittle 2000: 19). One can observe here how Girard’s model accounts for the constellations that Butler is interested in – the transgender – but which she does not and cannot fully explore using the psychoanalytical framework. She deals with the prohibition on incest and homosexuality but with psychoanalysis she lacks the tools to account for a transgender position. The question of identification in transgender does not make itself available for conceptualization with Freud and one wonders if it is a necessary spectre that has to haunt Butler’s system.15 Transgender desire is unintelligible from within psychoanalysis because there are only two options possible in that framework: homosexuality and heterosexuality, man and woman. However problematic Butler has tried to make those psychoanalytical presuppositions, her subversive reading could only lead her reformulation to occur within the bounds of the psychoanalytical framework: questioning the For a Girardian analysis of male lesbianism, see Janicka 2013. On how Butler misreads Freud, see Prosser 1998: 40–2.

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heterosexual matrix and the binary logic of male and female rather than actively exploring other modalities. This is particularly visible in Butler’s take on Freud’s ‘little girl’, which I discussed at the beginning of this chapter. It is necessary to ask, this time perhaps more of Butler than of Freud, why the masculinity of the little girl could not possibly be read as a case of foreclosed transsexuality rather than as a foreclosed homosexuality? ‘Sigmund Freud never discussed transsexualism per se’ (Rosario 1996: 38), yet Butler has and this foreclosure in Butler could be considered to be problematic from the transgender perspective. Butler pays little attention to the case of the masculine ‘little girl’ in Freud’s text and so, in a way, she erases the figure of the transgender person here. My claim is that this erasure is enabled by the use of psychoanalysis in her work. This is perhaps why Butler does not account for transgender as well as she could if she employed a different framework, despite the fact that transgender and violence towards transgender people is such an important preoccupation to her thinking. Transgender serves as the abject that panics heteronormativity. Yet, the mechanisms of transgender identity are not explored as much as the mechanisms of homosexuality and heterosexuality, masculinity and femininity. There is a profound conservative normativity in psychoanalysis that is at variance with Butler’s theoretical interests and Girard offers a possibility of overcoming it. Girard’s model is able to account for different modalities of being and of desire: for being a man, a woman or a third entity and for desiring homosexually, heterosexually and polysexually. Butler makes the connection desire–loss and prohibition–identity through Freud and Foucault to show how unacknowledged loss structures who we are. She makes a similar point in Precarious Life, where she transposes Freud’s mourning and melancholia to think about ‘ungrievable lives’, about the singular that constitutes who we are and who counts as living. For Girard, the pathways of desire and identity do not necessarily have to overlap. Desire is constructed through mimesis and identity is constructed through mimesis, but there is a whole spectrum of gender identity that is not constructed as a result of sexual desire, prohibited or not. Hence the link desire–identity is much weaker in Girardian theory than it is in Butler and it forecloses the possibility of a formative primary experience. For Girard, it is the violence in coming to terms with a double bind that structures us, in that we are exposed to context-dependent punishments. The mistakes we make in particular situations, where we accidentally entangle ourselves in rivalry rather than imitation, have as much influence on us, if not more, as has the incest taboo or taboo on homosexuality embedded in our culture. Butler’s argument about primary prohibitions rules out the constitutive importance of the private

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dynamics between models and rivals. Such private dynamics, however, directly manage both desire and identity. The question that one is compelled to ask Butler is if this ‘ungrievable loss’, if this melancholia which constitutes our gender identity, has to be necessarily related to sexuality. She writes that ‘gender itself might be understood in part as the “acting out” of unresolved grief ’ (PLP 146). However, one wants to ask, ‘What about all other unacknowledged losses that we carry in us and which make us melancholic in terms of gender in all other ways than sexual?’ Butler’s thinking is inflected by Freudian pansexualism where gender identity is inevitably connected to sexuality. Although she devotes a great part of her theoretical work to problematizing the relationship between gender and sex, she does not sever the two. For Butler, the link between gender identity and sexuality is unbreakable. In ‘Against Proper Objects’ (1994), Butler argues that ‘an analysis of sexual relations apart from an analysis of gender relations is [not] possible’ (9). In her analyses of regulatory practices, she reveals that in heteronormativity not only is sexual difference key but also the heterosexuality of desire. To be a man means to want a woman. She shows how heterosexual desire consolidates masculine identity in our culture. The unintelligibility of the gay and lesbian is constituted by exactly the same mechanism. A man desiring a man is an impossibility. This interpretation, however important and enlightening, is constructed from within psychoanalytical discourse. One can ask whether the difficulty of disjunction between gender and sex is Butler’s problem or the problem of heteronormativity. If her analysis that the heterosexuality of desire is always presumed in our culture is right, does it mean that gender identity has to presume sexuality? Is an asexual position possible both in our culture and in Butler? Although I agree with Butler that analyses of gender and sexuality should not be strictly separated, the point of contention is that sexual orientation (irrespective of whether it is heterosexual or homosexual) should not be posited in a causal relation with gender identity. This is, however, what Butler implicitly does in her interpretation of heterosexual melancholia. Although she stresses that the categories of class and race are equally important as that of gender to feminist analyses and she criticizes the binary frame, in which the gender–sexuality discussion entraps feminism, it is not race or class that is reinscribed into her re-reading of Freud but foreclosed homosexuality. This persistence of sexuality in the understanding of gender and feminism is curious.16 See APO and Prosser (2006: 277–80) for a transgender critique of Butler’s ideas in APO.

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In mimesis, the spectrum of gender behaviour is as broad as the scope of the model’s desires and behaviours. If the female model is asexual then a child will imitate her femininity together with other behaviours without necessarily desiring homosexually or heterosexually (or sexually at all). This is where the disjunction between sexuality and gender would be possible. This, however, still does not answer how or why we come to select one model rather than another, how we come to repeat one set of norms and conventions rather than another. Girard avoids any kind of possible psychological explanation on the level of an individual. For him, ‘it is hopeless to attempt to isolate the three elements of mimetic desire: identification, choice of object and rivalry’ as they always appear together (VS 180). His theory coincides with that of Butler’s in that they both think that identification is directed by cultural norms and that the structures of prohibition regulate the choice of object. Girard would, however, add a collective factor to this dynamic that Butler leaves aside. The importance of a collective dynamic is key for Girard in directing both desire and identification. It is the others around the subject that activate the norms through repeating them in their behaviours. The norms that are enacted by a collectivity around a subject offer a particular set of conventions and regulations for this subject. It is this set of possibilities that a subject will take as a mimetic basis for performing his own unwitting repetition. This repetition is ‘never merely mechanical’. Even in the strictest arrangement of conventions, however, there is a possibility of transformation and this is due to the failure in mimesis.

Butler and the question of the transgender From the transgender perspective, Butler has been harshly criticized for not accounting for transgender identity as an identity operating in its own terms.17 Namaste goes as far as to say: ‘Clearly, as scholars and as activists, we need to challenge Butler’s negation of transgender identity’ (Namaste 1996: 188). Bettcher (2009) succinctly summarizes the transgender position on some of the problems that Butler encounters with accounting for transgender: For a broader transgender critique of Butler, see Prosser (1998, 2006); Namaste (2000, 1996: 183–90); Bettcher (2009). For Butler on transgender, see many references scattered throughout BTM, UG and GT, in particular BTM 128–37, UG 76–101 and GT 130–50; also CQ, DJTS and Butler 1998. Unfortunately, due to space limitations, I am not able to comment in detail on all the vehement disagreements between transgender studies and Butler, as one of the founding figures of queer studies.

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Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism In arguing that Xtravaganza [a transsexual] is killed because of her gender subversion, Butler must understand this as breaking from demands of heterosexuality […]. What is missing from such an account is recognition of trans oppression as a modality in some ways distinct from the heterosexism.

Moreover, Butler often uses examples of drag queens in order to expose the fake naturalness of gender and heterosexuality. Drag is used as an example of gender performativity that ‘allegorises heterosexual melancholy’ (CQ 160) and not as a modality specific to transgender identity. She has been criticized from a transgender perspective for her focus on drag for other reasons as well. As drag is a performance happening in spaces created and defined by a male gay culture, Butler ‘refuses to examine the territory’s own complicated relations to gender and gender performance’ and so she ‘ignores the milieu in which drag practices are situated’ (Namaste 1996: 186–8). Namaste (1996: 188) further argues: ‘Given the overwhelmingly gendered nature of such a setting, it seems problematic to merely cite drag practices as an exposition of the constructed nature of all gender’. By using drag as a way to represent and theorize gender relations and because of the degree of abstraction of her project, ‘Butler fails to examine the multiple concrete ways in which gender is regulated in everyday life’ (see Bettcher 2009; Namaste 1996: 186–90). Finally, from Butler’s position, it would be difficult to account for transgender trajectories and specifically transsexual trajectories, that aspire to that which Butler’s project in a way devalues: ‘Namely [that] there are transsexuals who seek very pointedly to be nonperformative, to be constative, quite simply, to be’ (Prosser 2006: 264). However, from Butler’s position, this would be as difficult as accounting for a straight position without implicitly accusing it of complicity with heteronormative hegemony and, in that way, automatically devaluating it too. There is, therefore, a clear split in Butler’s use of transgender identities: camp and drag are useful to make her point about gender performativity, but transsexuals (and straight people, for that matter) are impossible to accommodate properly in her project. As Prosser (2006: 264) remarks: What gets dropped from transgender in its queer deployment to signify subversive gender performativity is the value of the matter that often most concerns the transsexual: the narrative of becoming a biological man or a biological woman (as opposed to the performative of effecting one) – in brief and simple the materiality of the sexed body.

Instinctively, one wishes to account for Butler’s failing in this matter by referring to the Foucauldian framework in which she operates. As there exist,



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however, compelling transsexual re-appropriations of Foucault, let us start with a brief account of one of these arguments in order to return to Butler’s reading of Foucault later in this section. Dean Spade makes a valuable analysis from a Foucauldian perspective of a medical discourse that surrounds sex reassignment surgery and its productive disciplinary power of generating gender for transsexuals: ‘a Foucauldian critique of the diagnosis and treatment of transsexualism exposes how the invention of this “disorder” [Gender Identity Disorder] and its purported therapy do, indeed, function to regulate gender performance’. He is interested in how ‘successful recitations of the transsexual narrative’ in meetings with medical professionals (doctors, surgeons, psychiatrists and therapists) are essential to obtaining authorization for body alteration (Spade 2006: 319): in particular, how transsexuals are forced to tell strategic lies about how their gender feels in order to ‘get the opportunity to occupy their bodies in the way they want’ (Spade 2006: 327). He tracks back the feeling of being disturbed about one’s gender in childhood to the reactions of parents, teachers and psychologists to the behaviours and preferences that were considered untypical of one’s assigned gender. His analysis of the disciplinary practices surrounding transsexuals is valuable and insightful. However, one is still compelled to ask about the transsexual’s need for a sex change, the mental path that is taken by a transgender person from the problem (‘there is something wrong with the way my body feels’) to the answer to this problem (‘I’m trapped in the wrong body’ and so ‘I need to change my sex’) that should solve this problem. The problem with the transsexual position, from a Foucauldian perspective, is the illusory conviction that sex reassignment surgery makes a crucial difference: a difference that is considered by a trans person to be more essential and decisive than other technologies that constitute gender in the social world such as clothing, make-up, gender-specific manners, dieting, body building and other gender practices. This precise idea that a change in biological sex is the final step that will make a transgender person complete, that is, really a woman or really a man, is caught in the discourse on sex that Butler has tried to question throughout her work on gender. It is the idea that there is a gender essence in a sexed body and that this essence lies in one’s primary and secondary sex characteristics. In ‘Doing Justice to Someone’ (1998), Butler analyses this problem in her discussion of the Joan/John case: There was an apparatus of knowledge applied to the person and body of Joan/ John that is rarely, if ever, taken into account as part of what John responds to when he reports on his feelings of true gender. The act of self-reporting and the act of self-observation take place in relation to a certain audience, with a certain

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Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism audience as the imagined recipient, before a certain audience for whom a verbal and visual picture of selfhood is produced. These are speech acts […] that are very often delivered to those who have been scrutinizing, brutally, the truth of Joan’s gender for years. (DJTS 189) When Joan looked in the mirror and saw something nameless, freakish, something between the norms, was she not at that moment in question as a human, was she not the spectre of the freak against which and through which the norm installed itself? […] John seems to understand clearly that the norms are external to him, but what if the norms have become the means by which he sees, the frame for his own seeing, his way of seeing himself? What if the action of the norm is to be found not merely in the ideal that it posits but in the sense of aberration and freakishness that it conveys? (DJTS 190)

Disciplinary power produces our sense of gender and the need of the transsexual to submit to a body alteration. Butler does not accuse transsexuals of being accomplices in the workings of heteronormativity. Rather, they are guilty of believing, like any other straight ‘feminine’ female or ‘masculine’ male, that there is something essential about the body one occupies, which makes a person into a woman or a man. She directs her critique at the frames of recognizability, at the world in which for a person to be accepted in a society, body alteration ‘into a more socially coherent or normative version of gender’ is necessary (DJTS 187): Consider precisely where the norm operates when John claims, ‘I looked at myself and said I don’t like this type of clothing.’ To whom is John speaking? And in what world, under what conditions, does not liking that type of clothing provide evidence for being the wrong gender? […] John reports, ‘I don’t like the types of toys I was always being given,’ and John is speaking here as someone who understands that such a dislike can function as evidence […]. But in what world, precisely, do such dislikes count as clear or unequivocal evidence for or against being a given gender? (DJTS 190)

Because Butler is so critical of gender and its workings in society, analysing transsexuality on its own terms is particularly difficult. That is also why Butler claims that ‘to the extent that lesbian and gay studies refuses the domain of gender, it disqualifies itself from the analysis of transgendered sexuality altogether’ (APO 11). The question is, however, if it is really a problem of gender. Is it not, rather, the problem of the materiality of bodies that, as Butler herself confesses, constantly escapes her? Or, to put it in other words, is the problem instead to be found in ‘queer’s poststructuralist problems with literality



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and referentiality that the category of transsexuality makes manifest – particular in relation to the sexed body’ (Prosser 2006: 278–9). Having said that, the question of transgenderism and intersexuality, to be more specific, is a point where Butler and Foucault nevertheless split ways. In Gender Trouble, Butler discusses Herculine Barbin, a nineteenth-century hermaphrodite whose journals are introduced into the English-speaking world by Foucault. Butler departs from Foucault’s account of Herculine’s experience in significant ways and claims that Foucault’s introduction to the journals ‘in some ways’ contradicts Foucault’s theory of sexuality, as offered in The Will to Knowledge ([1976] 1990). Butler accuses Foucault of romanticizing Herculine’s world of pleasures as the ‘happy limbo of a non-identity’ (Foucault 1980: xiii) that ‘exceeds the categories of sex and of identity’ (GT 128). He postulates, in her view, in his introduction to Herculine Barbin’s journals, a ‘prediscursive libidinal multiplicity that effectively presupposes a sexuality “before the law”, indeed, a sexuality waiting for emancipation from the shackles of “sex”’ (GT 131). On the other hand, Butler claims, he insists in his History of Sexuality ([I [1976] 1990; II [1984] 1992; III [1984] 1990) that ‘sexuality and power are coextensive and that we must not think that by saying yes to sex we say no to power’ (GT 131). This is where, in her view, Foucault falls into his own trap when he considers Herculine’s intersexed body as a case of exposure and refutation of  ‘the regulative strategies of sexual categorization’, which should result in a ‘happy dispersal’ and proliferation of pleasures (GT 130). Butler accuses Foucault of rejecting the figure of the female homosexual as his way of escaping the problematic category of sex in interpreting Herculine’s discursive position (GT 135–6). Her analysis focuses subsequently on the place of homosexuality in Foucault’s scheme and does not take into consideration the transgender position as a question in its own right. When one turns to the question of the transgender in Butler’s interpretation of Herculine, one can see that Foucault can account for it only up to a certain point. The moment of bucolic innocence for Foucault is the situation when a category of sex, as it is known and understood, is confounded: when the presumed classification system is redistributed. The intersex individual is this figure of redistribution and confusion that dispels the artificial unity of different sexual elements and functions in the category of sex. The transgender position would be then the site of confusion as long as it does not fall into the fixity of sex. Foucault interestingly leaves this space for the transgender position, occupied by the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin, on condition that it should not be caught

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in the categories of sex. This space in Foucault, however, would have difficulties in accommodating, as Prosser rightly remarks, transsexuals or people who want to belong to the other sex. Through their transition, they would naturalize the law by embodying it in the ‘symbolic structures of [their] anatomy’ (GT 143). Intersex individuals and individuals occupying the ‘third gender’ do not comply with the requirements of the norm and therefore they constitute categories that could be accommodated by the Foucauldian framework. This is where Butler joins Foucault and claims that both resistance and humaneness emerge at the limits of the intelligibility of a transsexual in a society. This is where Foucault’s operation of critique takes place as ‘the desubjugation of the subject within the politics of truth’ (DJTS 193). This is where the question if s/he is a subject emerges: ‘We cannot precisely give content to this person as the very moment that he speaks his worth, which means that it is precisely the ways in which he is not fully recognizable, fully disposable, fully categorizable, that his humanness emerges’ (DJTS 192). The transgender individual shows the limits of the norms and is positioned ‘between the norm and its failure’. Transgender is ‘the human in its anonymity, as that which we do not yet know how to name or that which sets a limit on all naming. In that sense, [s/he] is the anonymous – and critical – condition of the human as it speaks itself at the limits of what we think we know’ (DJTS 193). This would be, however, a position of the transgender who does not strive to succeed in gender performance. Then again, not all transsexuals want to occupy the interstices of a binary gender. As some transgender theorists argue, occupying the sphere of the gender in-between as a potential form of transgression and resistance would ‘make the subject’s real life most unsafe’ (see Prosser 2006: 275). Therefore, implying that transgender people should resist the norm, because they are already outside the norm anyway, seems perhaps a problematic suggestion if they are to be the only ones doing it. Even if this suggestion is implied on a highly theoretical level it is equally problematic. Although Butler accuses Foucault of contradicting himself, there is a contradiction in Butler that stems from exactly the same problem: of not being Foucauldian enough. I would like to propose that the problem that Butler encounters with the transgender position is much less anchored in her Foucauldian heritage and the idea of complicity with power than it is in her attachment to psychoanalysis. As Didier Eribon argues in his Echapper à la psychanalyse, Foucault developed his project of The History of Sexuality as a point of resistance to psychoanalysis, which was dominating the thinking of



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the French intellectual left of the 1970s (see Eribon 2005: 11–12).18 He claims that Foucault’s interest in intersexuality was an expression of this opposition to the psychoanalytical discourse: ‘In order to radically question psychoanalysis, Barthes and Foucault become interested in the figures of the androgyne and the hermaphrodite’ (Eribon 2005: 78). It was a way to escape the normativity of discourses and morals and evade the rules of sexual reassignment and exclusion. Eribon links this interest in intersex individuals to an interest in other possibilities of being and other realities (see Eribon 2005: 78). In the introduction to Herculine Barbin (1980), Foucault criticizes psycho­ analysis for being a discourse that ‘promises us at the same time our sex, our true sex and the whole truth about ourselves’ through sex. Butler, by using psychoanalysis in her analysis of gender identity as melancholia, falls prey to the illusory idea that it ‘is sex itself which hides the most secret parts of the individual: the structure of his fantasies, the roots of his ego, the forms of his relationship to reality. At the bottom of sex, there is truth’ (Foucault 1980: x–xi, my emphasis). Butler psychoanalyses Herculine through Freud’s melancholia and the concept of narcissism in order to draw the limits of Foucault’s theory (GT 141–3). Moreover, she tracks Foucault’s complex relationship to homosexuality in his writing and makes him an accomplice in the operations of the law (GT 136–8). She focuses on heteronormativity and the problems of the gender binary, yet the transgender position seems to be an excluded term that structures her interpretations. It is a field in Butler that is never considered in its own right. The final question, therefore, that remains to be posed is whether the transgender is the necessarily excluded singularity that ensures the functioning of Butler’s gender system. As Prosser rightly argues: ‘the figure of transgender has […] proven crucial to the installation of lesbian and gay studies – its installation as queer’ (Prosser 2006: 278) in that it has always been used as an example for gender performativity. Were the transgender category to be included into queer studies, it would completely reformulate the operative principles of the field in accordance with the procedure of translation. Therefore, the simple process of the inclusion of the transgender, as yet another sexual minority – camp, drag queens and kings, ‘transgendered persons, transgendered sexualities, transsexuality, transvestism, cross-dressing and cross-gendered identification’ – that Butler makes sure to recite in her works, is not enough (APO 24, n. 8). An Eribon claims in reference to 1970s’ France and his interest in Foucault: ‘I decided to return to the problem of resistance to psychoanalysis in order to show that it was precisely this project that was at the heart of Foucault’s work during that period’ (2005: 12).

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absolute reformulation, a translation of the universality of the gender system in Butler, would be necessary. This is what transgender theorists are trying to accomplish.

Structural failure and the question of formalism Above I have proposed, with Girard, a possible model for accounting for gender identity and sexual desire that could be an alternative to psychoanalytical formulations. I focused on the question of the transgender because it is unintelligible from within Butler’s psychoanalytical framework and it constitutes a form of singularity from within her system. I argued that, although one might want to criticize Butler’s Foucauldian framework for not properly accounting for the transgender, it is psychoanalysis that is at the root of the problem. In particular, it is the psychoanalytical illusion that sexuality hides the roots of one’s gender identity. By engaging in such detail with the question of the transgender in Butler’s work, I have hoped to distance Butler from psychoanalysis. This was a crucial step towards demonstrating that other frameworks are necessary to conceptualize questions that are important for Butler. In the rest of this book I argue that a mimetic framework combined with Sloterdijk’s spherology can offer more productive tools towards this goal. The question of failure is key for such an alternative conceptualization. As I have already suggested, failure is of particular importance to Butler’s whole system. Although Butler never explicitly positions it as an essential concept to her work, the notion of failure reappears in ways that cannot be ignored. One could go as far as to say that Butler’s whole system revolves around the concept of failure and ascertains its proper functioning. Apart from its importance for gender performativity and the reformulation of universality, failure is essential to Butler’s notion of subject formation, ethics and social transformation. Girard, for his part, does not explicitly theorize failure as an important part of the process of mimesis. Interestingly, however, failure in mimesis constitutes one of the most important, if not saving, features of peaceful mimesis that is unacknowledged in Girard. It is a safety catch in that it allows us to grow different from each other. Mimetic conflict can be defined as, on the one hand, a threatening sameness, but on the other hand, mimesis paradoxically bridges the difference between entities. If mimesis is repeatedly close to perfect it leads to violence or to mental disorder in an individual, as it endangers the individual’s



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sense of self. This structural flaw in the mechanism of mimesis, therefore, is the space for individuation, differentiation and variation. The gaps and fissures that are created between the model and the successful approximation to the ideal is the space for social transformation, for which Butler also argues in her own terms. Additionally, varying temporalization and contextualization contribute further to differentiation. Girard’s main concern about contemporary times is that, by our increasing sameness to one another, we are approaching a mimetic crisis with no means of overcoming it – the law, technology, mass media, democracy all seem to be ineffective as structures for the containment of violence (see EC 13–14). Girard describes the contemporary world in a pessimistic way because humans cannot control reciprocity and this inevitably must lead to the war of all against all. However, in his reflections on the structures of containment Girard does not include the self-preserving clause that mimesis provides for itself.19 He is surprised that, although we have the means to destroy each other, we have not done this so far. Society’s task would be then to allow for the greater exposure to difference among individuals and to non-acquisitive models in order to spread positive mimesis in the form of a contagion of heterogeneity. Yet with such a focus on failure one is not far from making failure into a universal and falling into a sort of formalism. In exchange with Ernesto Laclau, Butler asks this vital question: could failure be treated as the universal, as a structural foundation: I wonder whether failure […] does not become a kind of universal condition (and limit) of subject formation; a way in which we still seek to assert a common condition which assumes a transcendental status in relation to particular differences. To the extent that, no matter what our ‘difference’, we are always only partially constituted as ourselves […] and to what extent are we also bound together through this ‘failure’? How does the limitation on subject constitution become, oddly, a new source of community or collectivity or a presumed condition of universality? (UE 10)

In response to this, Laclau interprets the notion of failure in Hegelian terms, claiming that in the greater logic there is no overall failure, only single failures that cancel themselves out in the greater logic: It is perfectly possible to think of this iterability as something whose recurrence – or rather, linearity – cancels the ontological difference, i.e. whose movement is at any stage incomplete (and in that sense a failure), but which as a system Throughout his work, Sloterdijk develops further Girardian reflections on the available structures of containment (cf. AU 303).

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Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism does not leave anything outside itself. In that case we would be in the realm of Hegel’s Greater Logic: the failure of each single stage cannot be represented as such, because its ‘for itself ’ is a higher stage and, ergo, there is never constitutive failure, no ultimate deadlock. The insistence of Being through its various manifestations is nothing beyond the sequence of the latter. What, however, if the logic of the failure/iteration is not the logic of the Aufgehoben, if what insists in iteration is the contingency of the series, the hopelessness of its attempt at an ultimate closure? (UE 12)

Laclau thinks here of a closed system, which ‘does not leave anything outside itself ’ if failure were to be thought of as a universal. A system that can be deduced from Butler’s thinking and which is partly resonant with what Laclau proposes always leaves a residue or a trace and is haunted by failure and forced into reformulation by it. Failure does not determine the content or substance of an identity. Butler insists: To the extent that all identities fail to be fully structured, they are each equally (although not substantively or ‘ontically’) formed through the same constitutive failure. This ‘sameness’ is interesting since it is not to be rigorously understood in terms of a given ‘content’ of identity. On the contrary, it is what guarantees the failure of any given ‘content’ to successfully lay claim to the status of the ontological or what I call the ‘foundational’. (UE 10)

Therefore, the question of failure as an ontological foundation is rejected in favour of a sameness of structure in the mechanism of universality. As failure does not predetermine the outcome of transformation, it cannot be considered foundational. The question of a foundation in relation to structure, however, remains: can an empty structure be considered foundational? In the midst of a general agreement on universality in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, this is the precise point of contention between Butler and Laclau. Butler would not agree with Laclau in claiming that universality is an empty, purely structural concept. For Laclau, according to Butler, universality is an empty place but an ineradicable place. The absence of any shared content is, paradoxically, the promise of universality and the failure in fully filling in the content is its condition (see CHU 32–3). This emptiness of the universal, which can be filled each time with different claims, is, in his view, exactly that which makes it anti-foundational. They agree that ‘the field of differential relations from which any and all particular identities emerge must be limitless’ and that the incompleteness of every identity is a result of its ‘differential emergence’ in that ‘no particular identity



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can emerge without presuming and enacting the exclusion of others’ (CHU 31). Although she jokingly calls herself a ‘closet formalist’, Butler questions Laclau’s universality as an empty space ‘which awaits its content in an anterior and subsequent event’ (see CHU 136, 34–5). She wonders if Laclau’s universality is empty because it already suppressed the unrecognized and whether there is any place in Laclau’s formal structure for the trace of the disavowed, of singularity. For Butler, it is precisely ‘the exclusion of certain contents from any given version of universality [that] is itself responsible for the production of universality in its empty and formal vein’ (CHU 137). It is the trace, the unrecognized, the singular that undermines any claim to a predetermining structure: ‘the formalism that characterizes universality […] is always in some ways marred by a trace or remainder which gives the lie to the formalism itself ’ (CHU 137). For Butler it is imperative to understand how specific mechanisms of exclusion produce ‘the effect of formalism at the level of universality’ (CHU 137, 11–43, 144–8). This is where her idea of culture translation comes in. It is the excluded that always interfere with the universal, challenge its stability and expose it as a lie. As the outcome of a transformation is never entirely determined by structural failure: the singular will always emerge to redefine the universal. Butler believes that one should continue using and challenging the concept of universality (see CHU 264). By constantly questioning such ‘sullied terms’ as universality, freedom, justice, equality, one is able to re-appropriate them to an ‘unexpected innocence’ (see ES 161). As the transformation is not predetermined as to its outcomes and failure is particularly important for transformation, one wonders if failure can be pursued as a political aim. As Butler, Žižek and Laclau admit in the introduction to Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, failure (theorized also in terms of negativity, a gap or incompleteness) is central to their concept of hegemony and universality. Each of them tries to take account of ‘what constitutes or conditions the failure of any claim to identity to achieve final or full determination’ and they add that ‘we each value this “failure” as a condition of democratic contestation itself ’ (CHU 3). However, they all reject failure as a political aim even if it is a structural source of alliance (see CHU 32–3) as it would be perhaps self-defeating: Much as this failure cannot be directly pursued as the ‘aim’ of politics, it does produce a value […] the value of universality. Thus the aim of politics must then change, it seems, in order to accommodate precisely this failure as a structural source of its alliance with other such political movements. (CHU 33)

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That is why Butler claims that ‘democracy is secured precisely through its resistance to realization’ (CHU 268). Such a vision of politics would tend towards projects that are constantly emerging and constantly failing and whose constitutive part is this infinite reformulation.

Slow social transformation: How radical is that? If one takes Butler’s system with its operative principles and applies them to the idea of social transformation, one will have to conclude that social change is inevitable. In the Butler–Girard theoretical framework, social transformation will unavoidably happen because of the structural failure that occurs with each repetition of norms, frames, subject formation and gender. For those to operate they need to circulate. In order to circulate they need to be repeated. When they are repeated, failure is structurally included in the process. Through this inherent failure, social transformation is inescapable, but through this failure, as well, we are thrown into the unknown. Butler and Girard explore a certain common assumption: the human is a mimetic (citational) being. The inherent failure in the mechanism of mimesis accounts for change and social transformation and this takes place through the contagion of heterogeneity. The intrinsic failure also constitutes a condition of universality, as the constant exposure to singularity guarantees universality’s infinite renewal. This, in turn, by keeping any given universalization of content from becoming a final one, disseminates the field of the political. In this way the very notion of the political is extended because it allows the spreading of the political towards spheres that were not political before. The question then is about the ‘direction’ of this inevitable change. Orienting mimesis, which means working on the ‘right’ habits, would be constitutive of this vision of politics. In Chapter 3, I discuss in detail the idea of right habits. With the help of Sloterdijk I argue that mimesis, if oriented in the right direction, produces habitable spheres and this is where the political is anchored. That is also why mimesis and space are inextricably connected. Butler, on her part, sees the unknown that comes from repetition as the source of agency. With the help of Foucault, Butler shows the limitations of a humanist understanding of agency for social change. From the Foucauldian perspective, the subject cannot be the ground of agency because its very existence is a product of power relations, which ‘delimit in advance what the aims and expanse of agency will be’ (CHU 151). In this way, Foucault fails to show where resistance comes from (see Jagger 2008: 68). As I demonstrated



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in this chapter, with the help of Derrida’s iterability Butler surmounts the impasse in Foucault as to how it is possible that individuals are not entirely determined by the disciplinary power that constitutes them. Repetition is always at risk because of structural failure and agency is located in the variation produced by that repetition (see GT 198). One never knows where the transformation will lead and what kind of transformation will happen. Butler suggests, with reference to the Other, that we should give ourselves over to the unknown, which would mean also to give oneself over to this unknown in social transformation. As such a concept of repetition encompasses infinity – an infinity that is hidden in mimesis due to its never-ending circulation – our exile in heterogeneity seems to be irreversible (see CHU 171). In consequence, both identity and universality are posited as effects produced by infinite repetition. The impossibility to determine the outcomes of change is the consequence of conceptualizing social transformation through structural failure. Butler refuses to give advice or provide a theoretical framework for active social movements because she wants to allow the situation to stay open to the possibilities that one is not able to predict or anticipate. This openness to change is essential, regardless of the result, as it provides the space for contingency in the slow process of translation. Butler’s system is interested in changing frames of recognizability, rather than in individual or collective agents accomplishing transformation through institutionalized forms of politics. Her system focuses on the politics of everyday life, of slowly making space for homo sacer through local struggles for recognition in the daily reproduction of social life. Slow social transformation takes place, for Butler, where ‘daily social relations are rearticulated and new conceptual horizons opened up by anomalous and subversive practices’ (CHU 14). The change that is happening comes, therefore, from the world we inhabit and this position assumes that our world carries the potential for such a transformation. As will become clear in Chapter 4, the theory of social transformation based on the concept of revolution rejects the possibility that change can come from the alteration of our world. This is much less hopeful than Butler’s position. For Alain Badiou, the world needs an event – a sudden occurrence from beyond the system, from beyond this world – in order to carry out social change. Revolution is the only means to suddenly and completely rearrange the world. Does this mean, however, that Butler’s vision of social transformation is less radical than that of Badiou? This question will be addressed in Chapter 4.

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Reform, revolution, emancipation, subversion In Butler’s system neither revolution nor reform is a viable option. The latter is not possible as it does not include singularity as an indispensable part of transformation. It neither opens universality to its alternative versions nor dismantles the dominant terms. And the former evades the path through particularity and recognition in the reconfiguration of universality. Revolution is a form of social transformation that is focused on the outcome rather than the process. It makes a clear distinction between the means and the ends. To make the difference clear, one can use the vocabulary from the modality of revolution and say that what is important for Butler is revolutionary action rather than the world after the revolution. What is important is a series of actions that contribute towards a revolutionary outcome: towards the reconfiguration of universality. Similarly, emancipation has to be refused from within Butler’s system as a possible form of social transformation. Because of her Foucauldian lineage, thinking in terms of liberation from power structures is impossible as it would presume an outside that is free of them. From precisely this Foucauldian perspective, Butler criticizes Slavoj Žižek and Julia Kristeva’s strategy of subversion (see CHU 139–40; GT 107–74). That is also why, in Butler’s opinion, Foucault stood explicitly against emancipatory and liberationist models of sexuality in The History of Sexuality and this is where his problems with feminism are to be located (GT 129–30). Feminists of Foucault’s time took the category of sex as a point of departure without inquiring ‘how the category of “sex” and sexual difference are constructed within discourse as necessary features of bodily identity’ (GT 130). They did not consider the workings of all-pervading power. Mere subversion, pace some theorists, would not in itself be enough for Butler as a form of social transformation either.20 As she admits: ‘The goal […] cannot be pure subversion, as if an undermining were enough to establish and direct political struggle’ (CQ 163). The political potential of performativity means producing ‘alternative modalities of power’, establishing contestation that is not ‘a “pure” opposition […] but a difficult labour of forging a future from resources [that are] inevitably impure’ (CQ 164). This would mean resistance through re-signification as a form of social transformation where social change originates in the permanent failure that is inherent to repetition. This would also mean orienting performativity/mimesis that will nevertheless always be interrupted by the introduction of singularity into the process. On subversion in Butler see Lloyd 2007: 51–5; Jagger 2008: 162.

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Yet, one should still ask if the combination of Butler and Girard does not leave transformation entirely to chance – to whatever comes from singularity. The question that also emerges is why both singularity and heterogeneity should imply a change for the good. This concern is triggered by Butler’s optimism towards the outcomes of transformation, towards the new. Butler assumes that through reiteration the term will be re-signified in favour of an oppressed person, that it will empower her. She does not take into consideration the possibility that it might be otherwise: that it might be exacerbated and lead to even great injury. This is where Žižek’s criticism of Butler’s idea of inclusion is relevant. Žižek claims that the important issue in the debate about universality and social transformation is not the marginalities (the singularity) and their exclusion. From his perspective it would make no sense to include all the aberrations and exclusions in a universal concept, as there are marginalities such as neo-Nazis or remnants of the Ku Klux Klan that are also excluded from the hegemonic symbolic regime. The problem is, according to Žižek, that the system itself has to rely on those who are excluded, the half-spectral and the disavowed, from the public domain in order to operate: it has to rely on ‘its own obscene spectral underside’ (see CHU 313–14). One could reply, however, that the inclusion of this type of singularity (such as neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan) would be problematic, from Butler’s viewpoint, as it would translate universality into paths that are less open and less welcoming towards other singularities. This openness to constant translation and reconfiguration is essential for Butler’s universality. As she points out: ‘universality belongs to an open-ended hegemonic struggle’ (CHU 38). This is where the good is locatable in Butler. In the last chapter I bring together this definition of the good as openness to singularity with the one proposed by Sloterdijk: the good as producing habitable spheres, in order to theorize contemporary anarchism in practice. In an interview with William Connolly, Butler discusses the new that is the result of such a transformation: I think that the forms of what waits ahead are unknowable and cannot be derived, even retrospectively, from an already established plan. So, in this sense, I would insist that what comes of certain dialectical crises is ‘the new’, a field of possibility which is not the same as an order of possibility. I think many people recoil from this possibility, fearing that the new which is not predictable will lead to a full-scale nihilism. And it is, in a way, a risky moment in politics. What the new form of universality brings will not be necessarily good or desirable and the politics of judgment will be brought to bear on what arrives. But it is equally

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Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism true that nothing good or desirable will arrive without the new. The distinction seems to me to be very important. (Butler and Connolly 2000: §39)

Although she acknowledges that the product of transformation does not have to be necessarily positive, Butler is nevertheless hopeful about the future and signals that the results are worth the risk. Then again, in her system there is no other alternative than to give oneself over to the unknown. Butler does not propose criteria to evaluate the transformation, which inevitably happens, as this would trigger a series of theoretical consequences for which her system might have difficulties accounting. Without such criteria she can only be optimistic about the future. This decision clearly marks the boundaries of her system. The only condition that she, however, sets for universality is that it should stay open to possible reconfiguration through an exposure to singularity. In this respect her position is similar to that of Badiou, who claims that in order to be considered universality, universality should be ‘offered to all […] addressed to everyone, without a condition being able to limit this offer’ (SP 14). Both this openness to all and the readiness to be constantly reformulated are crucial for slow social transformation.

Collectivities of heterogeneity The Butler–Girard framework is able to lead to a model that could, however, contribute towards social transformation and still respect Butler’s reservations on agency. Butler’s point of departure is an individual – a psychoanalytical heritage that entirely determines how her system functions and how far she can stretch her thinking on social transformation. Whenever Butler speaks about social transformation she speaks about a single human being, a subject or ‘human animal’, entangled in sociality. It is a theory that tries to convince us of our basic relation to others and, as Adam Philips shrewdly observes, of ‘something we might otherwise doubt; our attachment to others’ (PLP 153). That is also why Butler has problems thinking of collectivity because first and foremost she struggles to convince her readers that others are essential to us, essential so that we persist as humans. Girard, with his concept of mimesis, introduces Butler to plurality, as his point of departure is the relation between multiple people. A human becomes a human, in the Girardian approach, the moment she starts imitating other human beings – their desires and their behaviours. Sociality is assumed in Girard as the starting point. And Butler, admittedly, with her idea of recognition taken from Hegel, also acknowledges



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the importance of the Other. The question in her case concerns however the transition from two people (the Other and I) to a collectivity. It seems that Butler can be introduced into a very basic form of plurality, a triad, through Girard and Hegel, in a way that would be compatible with her theoretical framework. Both are constructing a model about the original situation that is empirically inaccessible. For Girard, it is the originary situation of two people imitating each other’s desire and reaching for the same object, whereas for Hegel it is the initial situation of master and slave, where two people also face each other and mimic each other’s desire for the same thing: the desire for the other’s being, for recognition. In this instance of the originary event, when the two first people meet for the first time, the first transformation of the world takes place. This encounter changes the world that is hostile to the human project into a world of harmony with this project (see Kojève 1980: 11). This action begins by imposing oneself on this first other person, in Kojèvian terms, or in Butlerian terms by addressing the Other. What Butler introduces to the framework of the originary event is that performativity or mimesis is addressed to the Other, to the third person. It is a triangulation not only by imitating the other’s desire (the norms incorporated in the Other) but also by addressing the desire to the Other when one mimics it. Whereas Girard would focus on the relationship between the adversaries, Butler puts her emphasis on the relationship with the addressee, on the fact that I am performing my being for the third Other. From this perspective, humans could be considered therefore not as dyadic creatures (as Hegel would suggest in his model focusing on the encounter of the first two humans) but rather as constituted by a triangular relationship: that is by the subject, by the Other who is the addressee of mimesis and ‘the Other of the Other’ that is the ‘historical legacy’ of norms incorporated in the Other (see UG 151). This expansion towards a triad also resonates with Levinas’s concept of the Third Party (le tiers). The term designates those who do not constitute the Other facing us but rather those who are around us forming part of society. In her explicit reference to Hegel, Butler claims in Undoing Gender (2004): ‘who we “are” fundamentally is a subject in a temporal chain of desire that only occasionally and provisionally assumes the form of a dyad’ (UG 151). This brings together Girardian and Butlerian points in a Hegelian framework. By displacing the binary model for thinking about relationality, one is made to think about the originary event in terms of a triad, of a community, that is, in terms of the political. Yet it is only this far that Butler’s system can stretch in thinking community – three. More than three seems to be too many for Butler, as the individual is lost and only the

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inter-human dynamic is left to be considered – a field into which Butler does not venture. Thus, Butler combined with Girard – whose work serves here as a foil to better elucidate the problematic elaborated by Butler – produces a framework where the triad is the basic form of relationality. It is the subject, the Other (the addressee) and ‘the Other of the Other’ – a set of cultural norms that one performs – which form the basis for thinking of collectivity. However, I wish to argue that in order to think of collectivity properly, one needs to overcome the individual as the point of departure. That also means overcoming even such a social individual as is captured in Girard and Hegel. Otherwise one keeps returning to the old binaries – the subject and the Other, the subject and the object, the individual versus the collectivity – which always lead back to the singleness of the subject. If one starts with consubjectivity, with a dyad beyond subject–object opposition, then this singleness is more of an accident than a necessity. That is why Peter Sloterdijk’s work is so important to this project. What Butler and Girard’s systems offer in combination is a concept of change based on repetition with a structural failure that needs to be considered as a form of radical transformation. As was remarked at the beginning of this chapter, by bringing together Hegel, Butler and Girard I connect the mechanism of mimesis with universality formation. I argue that, through the operation of mimesis with its inherent structural failure, singularity is introduced into particularity and through this it enters the process of circulation of universality. Failure is what ascertains the radicalism of change. What is more, if one thinks in terms of a contagion of heterogeneity that the Girard–Butler framework proposes, then one needs to think in terms of open, mimetic collectivities of heterogeneity. One can imagine those as spaces, where one would be exposed to varied models for mimesis. As one cannot stop mimesis or hinder failure in repetition, the contagion of heterogeneity would follow as an inevitable consequence. Contributing to heterogeneity of such a collectivity would be part of accelerating social transformation. This would mean providing differentiated models and ensuring openness to failed mimesis. Heterogeneity is important here because it implies a non-totalizing universality that is accomplished through the operation of singularity. The implicit assumption about singularity is that it will introduce difference rather than sameness. Through the emergence of singularity, the frames of recognizability would constantly be changed. Such a model of social transformation would emphasize the importance of the immediacy of models and, in that way, would put in the foreground the spatiality related to intimacy with others. In Chapter 3, Peter Sloterdijk’s thinking on spherology allows us to establish the connection between collectivity and space.

3

Universality in Space: Collectivities of Heterogeneity meet Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherology If social transformation happens as a result of the mechanism of mimesis and we perform mimesis regardless of our wish to bring about social transformation, does it make sense to talk about this process in terms of social transformation? Whatever one does is mimetic and any action is always in a way derailed from within because of the structural failure in mimesis. How does this general mechanism contribute to our thinking about social transformation, apart from the obvious conclusion that it always happens, and so perhaps it never really happens? Peter Sloterdijk’s work is of particular importance in dealing with this question because he considers mimesis as a form of training. I assert in this chapter that thinking about social transformation in terms of mimesis makes sense if one assumes that mimesis is always oriented. As an infinite repetition it is always pointed in a direction. Conceptualizing social transformation in terms of mimesis means thinking about social transformation in the form of good habits that produce habitable spheres. That is why, with the help of Sloterdijk’s work, one of the main theses of this chapter is the claim that a concern for mimesis in the form of good habits is a way of practising social transformation. It is a social transformation that is anchored in the daily practice of humans interconnected by shared space. Hence, space in the form of spheres will also be of key importance. Spatiality in the form of collectivities of heterogeneity is determining for mimesis as it provides models that are both wittingly or unwittingly imitated. It provides a landscape of possibilities that individuals multiply and transform through practice. Spatiality in the form of spheres provides resources for mimesis. There are therefore two important aspects of the relationship between mimesis and space. Firstly, selecting certain models rather than others is a way of orienting mimesis. This selecting is, on the one hand, a process that I described in the previous chapter on Butler and Girard in terms of unwittingly locking on

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a model and imitating it. On the other hand, it can be also based on a knowing decision to channel one’s mimesis in a certain direction. It can be understood as what Sloterdijk calls training. This is because the mechanism of mimesis cannot be controlled in any other way than by channelling it. This channelling, however, is also vulnerable to failure and to the effects of the unknown. That is also why every training, both witting and unwitting, will always be derailed from within through the inherent structural failure. Secondly, by the decision to direct mimesis, subjects share space with specific models that will be either wittingly or unwittingly taken up by further imitation. Thus, models for imitation will spread by mimetic contagion. That is why the focus of this chapter is space, as a source and repository of models, and good mimesis, as a mechanism that can be directed and therefore is bound to be inherently ethical. Thus, a human being has two options that are complementary. Either one has to give oneself over to the unknown – this is what Butler proposed and what I described in Chapter 2 – or one has to orient one’s mimesis in order to produce habitable spheres. The latter option will be explored in this chapter through Peter Sloterdijk’s work. The combination of the two – directed mimesis, which will always be interrupted by singularity coming from the failure inherent to repetition – is what summarizes slow social transformation. This is also where the good is located: in the production of habitable spheres that are open to singularity. In the first part of this chapter, I engage with Sloterdijk’s theory of spherology in order to fully account for collectivities of heterogeneity, which were proposed in the previous chapters with the help of Butler and Girard. The connection that I establish here between Sloterdijk’s spherology on the one hand and Butler–Girard’s collectivities of heterogeneity on the other is based on mimesis as their key mode of operation. Sloterdijk is essential for this analysis because he makes it possible to account for collectivity, not in terms of vulnerability or common finitude, but rather in topological terms of shared space. This is where his universality is anchored. For Sloterdijk, in dialogue with Heidegger, ontological difference is spatial difference (see INT 190). Here, I demonstrate how Sloterdijk’s concepts of bubbles and foams help us think about collectivities of heterogeneity as socio-political agencies and push Butler and Girard’s thinking towards conceptualizing space.1 Butler and Girard lack any account of either spatiality or immunity in their theories. Sloterdijk’s explicit point of critique of Girard, and also of Marx, for In Butler’s case, the closest she comes to thinking of space is when she engages with Derrida’s ideas on context (see ES).

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that matter, is this missing account: ‘They suffer from the same deficit – they neither sufficiently account for spatial qualities of social cells nor for the immunity character of primary spaces’ (S III 252).2 It seems that in Butler’s case, space would be the most appropriate and convincing way to conceptualize the missing account of collectivity, and also a way to map the field of the social in her framework. This account of space would also include an account of immunity, a mechanism that guides the selection of models or, in other words, orients mimesis. Sloterdijk develops his theory of spheres in a trilogy under the same title Spheres (I [1998] 2011; II [1999] 2014; III 2004), and I limit my analysis of spatiality to this particular body of work. I concentrate on collectivities of heterogeneity, and conceptualize them as Sloterdijk’s spatial collectivities – foams and bubbles. Therefore, the first key discussion of this chapter is spatiality. In the latter part of this essay, I deal with the question of directed mimesis, treated by Sloterdijk in You Must Change Your Life ([2009] 2013), and with non-anthropocentrism. ‘Practising life’ is an element that Sloterdijk takes directly from Foucault’s later work, and it allows us to make a connection between Sloterdijk and Butler. In this framework ‘man himself produces man’, not through work, as Marxists would have it, but through ‘life in forms of practice’ (MLA 4). When Sloterdijk discusses identity, he conceptualizes it in terms of unwitting repetition: what ‘seems like mere self-identity is de facto the result of a perpetual self-reproduction by overcoming invisible training programmes’ (MLA 408). This is, in a nutshell, what Butler tried to show with her gender performativity using a different framework – gender is a form of training that initially is taken up unwittingly until a person decides to practice alternative gendered patterns rather than traditional ones. The interplay between visible (witting) and invisible (unwitting) training programmes that constitute forms of oriented mimesis will allow for aligning later Foucault’s ‘arts of existence’ and Butler’s performativity with the theoretical lineage of Gabriel Tarde, Girard and Sloterdijk. By attaching Butler to this lineage, it will be possible to move Butler further away from psychoanalysis and open up a path for thinking of collectivity, community and solidarity beyond anthropocentrism. Slow social transformation will therefore be conceptualized here as a life in training. Through the daily practice of mimetic repetition, a human contributes to social transformation in a gradual fashion. She contributes to it every day, does it more I use the published English translations wherever available (MLA; S I; S II; STD). All other translations from German (AU; S III) are my own.

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or less, by orienting her mimesis in one direction rather than the other. That, in turn, ties mimesis to a responsibility for choices which affect the spheres one shares with others. As a result, the shared space (a flat, a collective, a town, a region, the planet) is made to be either more or less habitable. By devoting part of this chapter to Gabriel Tarde, I would like to throw into relief the non-anthropocentric aspect of Sloterdijk’s work. What Sloterdijk proposes in his Spheres project seems to be a much more powerful manoeuvre away from anthropocentrism and humanism than Butler accomplishes with her idea of precarity. This is the case even when she evokes the precariousness of the environment in order to blur the line between organic and inorganic entities.3 The idea of solidarity is very strongly connected to Sloterdijk’s non-anthropocentrism. By proposing an alternative story to the one told by psychoanalysis, Sloterdijk is able to advance a radical idea of solidarity with the outside. This concept of solidarity is conceptualized not only to include human-to-human relations but also the world surrounding the human. It puts forward the idea of a human, not as a lonely and separate being, but rather as one that is right from the start and inextricably connected to the world around her: to the air she breathes, to the spaces she inhabits, to the technologies that immunize her. It is solidarity with entities that one does not recognize but without which one is not able to exist. This is what in the framework of Hegel and Butler falls into the category of singularity. By a non-anthropocentric conceptualization of solidarity, Sloterdijk successfully shifts the emphasis towards singularity. The importance of singularity in the process of both mimesis and universality is an aspect that Sloterdijk does not explicitly consider in any of his works. Yet my claim is that singularity and, what I call, ‘solidarity with singularity’ are important aspects of his work and the framework of Butler and Girard throws this into relief. Butler and Girard supplement Sloterdijk in a way that is useful for thinking of slow social transformation. Although Sloterdijk is a thinker whom it would be difficult to place on either side of the left-wing versus the right-wing political division, it is this non-anthropocentric focus on singularity that will allow us to make use of his ideas for radical left politics. In Chapter 5, I consider, from the spherological point of view, contemporary anarchism in practice. In order to activate Sloterdijk’s ideas politically, Butler–Girard’s ideas of singularity and structural failure need to be introduced into spherology. That is why a synthesis of the three thinkers is so important. It is necessary to note, however, that Sloterdijk See interview with Antonello and Farneti (2009).

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the philosopher would most likely be opposed to using his spherology for the purpose of thinking about radical left politics. Yet both his Spheres trilogy and You Must Change Your Life, independently of his explicit political views expressed elsewhere, provide very useful conceptual tools for thinking about contemporary anarchist politics as a part of slow social transformation. This will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5, and this is where this project is headed. Finally, the relation of Sloterdijk’s spherology to universality should be considered in terms of space. Sloterdijk does not explicitly consider the question of universality in the works I discuss here. However, this does not preclude the possibility of thinking of universality with Sloterdijk or, as is the case here, using his idea of space in order to complete the notion of universality that has been so far established with the help of Hegel, Butler and Girard. From the spherological perspective, the unity of humankind cannot be conceptualized through common physis but, rather, it should be thought in terms of a common space that has to be considered ecologically and immunologically – including the medium of air that surrounds us (see S II 991–2). It will perhaps be useful to start thinking about space in Sloterdijk with a brief clarification of what his concept of space is not. Although both Sloterdijk and Jürgen Habermas, Sloterdijk’s main philosophical contender in Germany, consider universality in terms of space, their respective universalities are constructed in significantly different ways. Habermas’s universality is one derived from the tradition of the Enlightenment. It is based on a rational consensus in the public sphere. It operates according to common rules subsumed under the rule of ‘the one’ in which reason is considered as a context-transcending power (see Ashenden and Owen 1999: 1–20). Universality belongs to the sphere of rational criteria that create universal moral norms through discussion and agreement in the public sphere. Sloterdijk, unlike Habermas, does not understand space as something that is based on a shared rationality. Rather, space for Sloterdijk is a common ontological category shared by all entities alike: humans, animals, plants and inanimate objects. It is an open but conglomerated structure, housing a multiplicity of microspheres from which universality slowly emerges because of the mimetic interaction between the microspheres. The fact that the public sphere is based neither on rationality nor on communication but instead on immunity and mimesis should be kept in mind as starting points for thinking of universality and space with Sloterdijk.

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Sloterdijk’s theory of bubbles and foams The archaeology of the intimate In order to think properly about collectivity and collective social transformation, one needs to completely rethink conceptual points of departure.4 Instead of thinking about human beings as individuals who try to make connections with the outer world, one needs to start thinking about humans in terms of pluralities that run the constant risk of becoming separated. Sloterdijk conceptualizes the human being as originally a dyadic structure always nestled in a sphere. The sphere is a key notion with which he attempts to describe both human beings and human space in a new way, combining topological, anthropological, immunological and semiological aspects. This is to emphasize the rarely considered idea of the ‘interior’, which is created between two human beings and the space around them in an intimate ‘being-with’, which Sloterdijk calls a microsphere or a bubble (see S III 13). He characterizes it as a sensitive, adaptive and moral immune system. For Sloterdijk, humans cannot exist without an immune system, which means they cannot exist beyond ‘the wall-less hothouses of their closeness relationships’ (S II 135). They create various worlds together with other people, animals or things, which are called spheres. A sphere is ‘a place of strong relationships’ where one establishes a ‘psychical relation of reciprocal lodging’ (S III 302) with people and objects nearby. In his grand meta-narrative that is Spheres, Sloterdijk presents human beings from the point of view of intimacy and relocation and is interested in forms of collectivity and, most importantly, in ‘the collective forms of individuality’ (see Schinkel and Noordegraaf-Eelens 2011: 7). In what follows, I briefly outline how Sloterdijk conceptualizes a system in which humans originate from plurality and are inextricably connected to the inorganic world surrounding them. This is crucial for understanding solidarity with singularity. In order to understand how Sloterdijk thinks about spheres it is useful to consider the first sphere a human inhabits. In Spheres I, he considers the smallest possible form of sociality. His point of departure is one anterior to the habitual Freudian conceptualization of a human being. Sloterdijk focuses on the time before the birth: the nine months after conception, where a human being begins to exist only in and through a relationship with another human being – the mother. His initial assumption is that a human being starts as a The ‘Archaeology of the Intimate’ was the initial subtitle of the first volume of Spheres (Sloterdijk and Heinrichs 2011: 138).

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coexistence, rather than a metaphysical autonomous one. ‘Being-a-pair’, he claims, ‘precedes all encounters […] it always takes precedence over the two single units of which it seems to be “put together”’ (Sloterdijk and Funcke 2005). Human space is from the beginning bipolar, and it is co-subjectivity that is a basis for subjectivity. Therefore, being is always primarily being-with and ‘there can be no I without us’ (Thrift 2012: 140) – a claim that also strongly resonates with Butler’s ideas. It is therefore only through being in a pair and in the act of habitation that a subject comes into existence and continues existing. From this perspective, individualism and loneliness come chronologically after beingwith: ‘With this we enter the terrain of a radicalized philosophical psychology that departs from the general faith in the priority of individuality’ (see Sloterdijk and Funcke 2005) and this philosophical gesture accomplishes a radical critique of subjectivity. For Sloterdijk, humans are first and foremost ‘human locators’ in that they are ‘subjects only to the extent that they are partners in a divided and assigned subjectivity’ constituted by space (S I 85). Existence starts with inhabiting a mother’s body and proceeds to inhabit closed interiors, apartments and houses. This transfer from space to space is accompanied by recreating protective envelopes, which constitute immunity, using technological means. For Sloterdijk humans have no choice but to build spheres. They need protective or immunizing systems to survive. In order to exist they need to be ‘continually working on their accommodation in imaginary, sonorous, semiotic, ritual and technical shells’ (S I 84). They are, in that sense, interior designers. Sloterdijk defines a sphere as: [t]he interior, disclosed, shared realm inhabited by humans – in so far as they succeed in becoming humans. Because living always means building spheres, both on a small and a large scale, humans are the beings that establish globes and look out into horizons. Living in spheres means creating the dimension in which humans can be contained. Spheres are immune-systemically effective space creations for ecstatic beings that are operated upon by the outside. (S I 28)

The name Sloterdijk gives to humans is Homo immunologicus, which describes humans as creatures that ‘exist not only in “material conditions”, but also in symbolic immune systems and ritual shells’, as those who must give their lives a symbolic framework (MLA 10). Humans are embedded within envelopes that give them meaning and recreate a form of physical or psychic protection. These envelopes are formed through strong relations with people or with other entities that give us immunity, ranging from architectural structures, interior spaces and technology to grand meta-narratives such as religious and political

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systems. Such envelopes are always spatially situated, and often take the form of the physical spaces that surround us. One can say that a microsphere emerges whenever a psychical or physical membrane is established that provides immunity (see Borch 2011: 32). Because humans need multiple spheres and multiple immune mechanisms to exist, the world in Sloterdijk’s philosophical system is not a single coherent whole but rather it is made up of immiscible worlds. Humans participate and create multiple microspheres simultaneously. As Bruno Latour rightly observes: ‘we move from envelopes to envelopes, from folds to folds, never from one private sphere to the Great Outside’ (Latour 2011: 158–9). Latour compares the relationship of the human to the inaccessible Great Outside with a cosmonaut in the outer space who cannot survive without his life support system and so ‘naked humans are as rare as naked cosmonauts’ (Latour 2011: 158). In order to survive one needs to create immunity and therefore ‘we are never outside without having recreated another more artificial, more fragile, more engineered envelope’ (see Latour 2011: 158). Depending on a type of immunizing technique that is needed at a given time, humans are constantly moving between different existing microspheres or creating insulating bubbles of their own. Because Sloterdijk is concerned with ‘collective immunological forms’, he is deeply interested in dwelling and housing in all possible senses (Schinkel and Noordegraaf-Eelens 2011: 20). That is why ‘an inquiry into our location’ is so important. Humans are ‘ek-static beings’,5 a thought that both Butler and Sloterdijk explicitly borrow from Heidegger; however they ‘must first be homely, must first be housed, before [they] can become ecstatic’ (Sloterdijk 2001: 199, cited in Morin 2012: 84). ‘The home, the dwelling place, is therefore essential to the coming-to-the-world of the human animal’ (Morin 2012: 84). Spheres are exactly those worlds that are ‘membranes that protect against outside but [that] are not airtight and impervious like environmental enclosures’ (Morin 2012: 84). As Sloterdijk says in an interview: I claim that people are ecstatic, as Heidegger says, but not because they are contained in nothingness, but rather in the souls of others, or in the field of the soul of others, and vice versa. They themselves are ecstatic because the other always already penetrates them. (INT 185–6)

The Heidegger-inspired being-in-the-world means, for Sloterdijk, ‘being-inspheres’ and spheres are the product of human coexistence. Humans can almost ‘Ek-static’ meaning here ‘outside of itself ’ and constituted by this outside (people, things, phenomena etc. that we encounter in our lives).

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in all situations create an endosphere with another human being. This endosphere between people constitutes, for Sloterdijk, human interiority. This interiority is conceptualized as external to an individual – a concept radically different to the one in depth psychology where interiority is inside the individual: ‘[a human] is a natal [geburtlich] and mortal creature that has an interior because it changes its interior’ (S II 198). This relationship between external interiority and the interiority inside the spheres can also be found in Butler’s idea of interiority on the surface of the skin, presented in Chapter 2. Sloterdijk, however, has a more expanded vision of such interiority – he discusses the apartment in the times of modernity in terms of human interiority. In Sloterdijk’s view, the apartment for the contemporary human is an immune system (see S III 535). It is a means of defence and an expansion of a body. Therefore, it is not possible to feel at home without first becoming almost unconsciously one with all the objects that fill one’s apartment (see S III 521). These constitute in a way a part of our interiority. A symbiosis with the apartment, becoming one with one’s immediate environment, is an insulation technique, a form of protective cocoon: ‘where uninvited guests practically never have access’ (see S III 582, 540). Interiority viewed from this perspective is neither internal nor entirely human. It is made up of links with inanimate objects and the environment in which humans are placed. As Efrain (2012: 153–4) succinctly puts it while discussing Sloterdijk’s sphere: The fundamental microcosm is […] that which takes place when at least two bodies interact in a relation of co-existence which is both spatial and psychological, and which includes the objects, machines in our negotiations with physical and cultural environments from which we seek protection or immunization.

That is why Sloterdijk poses a question about the absolute localization of a human being and asks in a radical fashion ‘where is human’ rather than asking the metaphysical question ‘what is human’ (see S I 27). He considers ‘an inquiry into our location’ particularly productive ‘as it examines the place that humans create in order to have somewhere they can appear as those who they are’ (S I 28). However Sloterdijk is even more radical than this. Spheres are not considered as structures reserved for humans only. This is because all entities are able to make links and establish relations, be they organic entities or not (see Thrift 2012: 143). This pansocial understanding of spheres is one of Gabriel Tarde’s influences on spherology and is discussed later in this chapter.

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Psychological and physical immunization is a process that is constituted and supported by technology, spanning architecture and interior design to the newest isolation technologies such as MP3 players with earphones. An MP3 is particularly interesting as it is an example of a new insulation technique. It puts the listener into a psychically cocooned bubble and is equivalent to the introduction of the acoustic micro apartment into the public space (see S III 594). Other insulation techniques include carefully arranging one’s room, performing religious and symbolic rites or undertaking other personalized immunizing practices. Sloterdijk’s normative claim is that modern humans need protective spheres, and technology provides this sheltering function because the modern age suffers from ‘immunodeficiency caused by the deterioration of solidarities’ (S I 73). With the deterioration of grand meta-narratives, people have become homeless and exiled and therefore they need to develop technical immunities and indulgences (Verwöhnungen) in order to be able to live: ‘What is truly at stake for the postmoderns are successful new designs for livable immune relationships’ (S II 958). In Sloterdijk, technology is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, technology constantly provides the new shells and protective envelopes that constitute our immunity. It has an important immunizing function, without which modern humans cannot survive. And, on the other hand, it contributes towards expelling us into individuality and aloneness. What is particularly interesting for Sloterdijk in today’s society is the fact that, for the first time in history, humans are equipped with their own immunity and so are able to separate themselves from society’s collectives and take to an individual pursuit of happiness principle. This movement towards individualism was brought about and encouraged by the technological innovations that have taken place throughout the centuries, such as the invention of mirrors. However, as Morin (2012: 92) rightly observes, for Sloterdijk, in dialogue with Heidegger, we should not pull back from technology: We should not retreat from technological globalisation into a non-technological dwelling, but on the contrary seek to create more connection, more densification, since it is precisely this trop-plein of things, connections, and information, that pushes us towards trust and responsibility, towards peace and co-habitation.

Working on one’s different spheres in life, being the designer of one’s own life spaces and co-creating them with others, is one of the key activities in the creation of microspheres. It is important to remember, however, that humans are



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not only designers of their own interior but also, together with other humans, of the world. This aspect of collectivity in designing public and private spheres is essential for the social transformation that is proposed here. It is anchored in the necessity of sharing spaces with others – with the outer limit of a single planet – and with the responsibility related to this fact. Space is also crucial because it is the medium of contact with others. This is where models for mimesis are located. Collectivities of heterogeneity described here as foams that constantly aggregate and interact mimetically are therefore of crucial importance.

Republic of spaces: A city of human foams Sloterdijk defines foam as a collection of bubbles in the microspherological sense: With the concept of foam we describe an agglomeration of bubbles in the microspherological sense […]. The term stands for systems or aggregates of spherological neighbourhoods in which each ‘cell’ builds a self-completing context (colloquially: a world, a place), an intimate space of meaning or a ‘household’ that is maintained by dyadic and pluripolar resonances and that is animated by its very own dynamic. (S III 55)

Foam is a system without a centre or hierarchy (S III 50). It a relationship hothouse, in which every consubjectivity builds a sphere of intimacy, and each bubble is preoccupied with its own immunity, with its own micro-insulation (see S III 498). The composites of foam are bubbles of different sizes and ages that are glued to one another. Foam works according to the principle of co-isolation where one and the same wall functions as a border for other microspheres. In this way, bubbles in foam influence one another (see S III 55). If one bubble bursts, the others are affected by it and the fragility and co-fragility of bubbles is important for immunitary configurations of human existence. Therefore, sharing walls both provides stability and exposes bubbles to danger. What Sloterdijk’s theory of spheres accomplishes is conceptualizing social life as precarious, as one ‘consisting of the precarious building and break-down of spatial collectivities’ (Schinkel and Noordegraaf-Eelens 2011:13). We are constantly building and destroying microspheres in our daily life or they are built and destroyed for us. This focus on precariousness brings him very close to Butler’s concerns. The metaphor of foam is productive as it refers to a fusion of opposing matter, to the subversion of the substance and to the revolt of the inconspicuous

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(see S III 35). What one would call ‘society’ (always written in Spheres in inverted commas), Sloterdijk conceptualizes as a dynamic and asymmetric conglomeration of space-pluralities and process-pluralities. From a spherological perspective ‘society’ is: [a]n aggregate of microspheres (couples, households, companies, federations) of different formats that like individual bubbles border with each other in a mountain of foam and order themselves under and above each other without ever really being either within reach or effectively separable from one another. (S III 59)

In foam, the basic elements are not individuals but pairs, households and resonance communities (see S III 302). As Borch remarks, defining couples, households, companies and federations as single bubbles that make up foam runs the risk of reducing their complexity (see 2011: 32). However, this seems to be merely a question of scale and foams should be viewed as structures with a fractal dimension: from a distant perspective couples, households, companies and federations may be viewed as single bubbles embedded in a ‘society’ foam, yet from a close perspective they are complex foams in their own right composed of multiple bubbles. Each microsphere has a monadic fractal structure where a part is a minimal version of the whole. As mentioned above, microspheres emerge each time a membrane is formed that produces immunity. This happens each time one interacts with people and objects, when ‘one goes from one thing to the next and builds a context, a coherence or a connection (Zusammenhang)’ (Morin 2012: 87). Consequently, rather than dispersing, foams operate by concentrating and agglomerating – they form collectivities of heterogeneity. According to Sloterdijk, the proper dwelling of a human being is a sphere or multiple spheres where solidarity, trust and cooperation can develop. Each person spontaneously produces meaningful surroundings that establish connections (see S III 662), that is, instances that multiply spheres and so create foams. Even such non-spatial relations like sympathy or understanding translate themselves into spatial terms in order to be imaginable and liveable (see S III 13–14). From this metaphorical conceptualization (Denkbild) of foam one can propose interpretations of social connections: Also in the human field, the single cells are glued to one another by reciprocal isolations, separations and immunisations. The multiple co-isolation of bubble-households [Vielfach-Ko-Isolation der Blasen-Haushalte] in their plural neighbourhoods can be described as simultaneously closed off and cosmopolitan. This is where the specificity of this type of objects lies. That is why when



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seen from one’s own perspective, foam builds a paradoxical interior where most of the surrounding co-bubbles are at the same time close by and inaccessible, connected and distracted. In spherology, foams build ‘societies’ in this limited sense of the word. (S III 56–7)

Although bubbles are inaccessible to one another, they share walls that allow an exchange with the surrounding. Sloterdijk calls them ‘porous foams’. The relations between microspheres are based on imitation and contagion: ‘the similarity between neighbours is based on mimetic contagion [mimetische Ansteckung]’ (see S III 259–60). In an interview with Bettina Funcke, Sloterdijk claims: ‘in social foam there is no “communication” [...] but instead only inter-autistic and mimetic relations’ (Sloterdijk and Funcke 2005). In order to account for this relation of mimesis between microspheres, Sloterdijk draws on Gabriel Tarde’s sociology of imitation from The Laws of Imitation ([1890] 1962) and Monadology and Sociology ([1893] 2012). According to Tarde ‘society is imitation and imitation is a kind of somnambulism’ (Tarde 1962: 87). By highlighting the somnambulistic character of imitation Tarde argues that ‘imitation should be understood as a basically hypnotic relation where imitations are a result of contagious hypnotic suggestions’ (Borch 2011: 31). Through this connection to Tarde, Sloterdijk can reject the usual conception of society and propose his own alternative in the shape of foams. There is a strong resonance between the work of Tarde, Girard and Sloterdijk on the subject of mimesis. The somnambulistic or unwitting character of Tarde’s concept of imitation strongly influenced Girard’s concept of mimesis. In its turn, Girard’s mimetic contagion resonates in Sloterdijk’s spherology:6 Symbiotic spaces [bubbles and foams] are made con-comfortably, con-frivolously, con-deliriously, con-humorously, and usually also con-hypocritically and con-hysterically. Therefore they are not safe from mimetic pollution [mimetische Verpestung] and the outbreak of paranoid epidemic. (S III 723, my emphasis)

Tarde is therefore a point of convergence between Girard and Sloterdijk. The echo of Tarde’s work with both Girard’s and Sloterdijk’s systems, and the resonance of Girard in Sloterdijk’s Spheres, allows us to establish a direct connection between spherology and collectivities of heterogeneity, and fuse both systems. In particular, it is because mimesis is the main operative mechanism in all of these constructs. As Sloterdijk puts it: ‘It is time to reveal humans as the beings who result from repetition’ (MLA 4) – a statement that Girard in Sloterdijk: see S I 221–2; S II 178–82; S III 252, 410, 463.

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is also strongly reminiscent of Butler’s thinking on performativity. When he speaks about practice, he speaks about mimetic repetition: Humans live in habits, not territories. Radical changes of location first of all attack the human rooting in habits, and only then the places in which those habits are rooted. Since the few have been explicitly practising, it has become evident that all people practice implicitly, and beyond this that humans are beings that cannot not practice – if practising means repeating a pattern of action in such a way that its execution improves the being’s disposition towards the next repetition. (MLA 407)

Viewed from this perspective, foams are spaces that are constructed through mimetic practice. As foams aggregate, ‘neighbouring’ microspheres acquire similar habits through ‘imitative infections’, which can be also called intercultural exchange (see S III 259–60). This is how contagion in human foam is possible, and how it can spread to other collectivities. It is this mimetic practice that makes spheres as a result more habitable or less habitable. The habitability of spheres in Sloterdijk is connected to the air aspect of foams. Foams are multi-chamber systems consisting of spaces formed by atmospheres in both physical and emotional senses. They are structures created by ‘gas pressure and surface tensions, which restrict and deform one another according to fairly strict geometric laws’ and for Sloterdijk ‘modern urban systems could be easily understood with analogy to these exact, technical foam analyses’ (Sloterdijk and Funcke 2005) but also they are created by human mimetic practices that produce specific ambiences. The aerial aspect of spheres encompasses a spectrum of phenomena ranging from environmental pollution to social ambience and makes spheres a particularly illuminating framework for thinking about society.

‘Everything is a society’: Gabriel Tarde and the contamination of anthropocentrism Sloterdijk bridges the gap between nature and society with the idea of foams as fractal structures in which each bubble is already a miniature of the whole. It is a heritage that Sloterdijk takes over from Gabriel Tarde’s work, together with the idea of: imitation as a form of inter- and intra-bubble dynamic, the impossibility of full homogeneity on a micro and macro level and a radical theory of associations.7 Sloterdijk comments on Tarde’s Monadology and Sociology as ‘a For Sloterdijk’s direct engagement with Tarde’s work see S III 259–60, 296–8, 302, 498, 817, 878.

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brilliant neo-leibnizian attempt’ to generalize thinking about associations to such a degree that objects are considered as instances of being-with (see S III 296). Tarde’s influence allowed Sloterdijk to develop a theory of society which is non-anthropocentric in its entirety. The field of the social both in Sloterdijk and Tarde encompasses everything, organic and inorganic entities alike, and so constituting a ‘universal sociological point of view’ (Tarde 2012: 34). Sloterdijk’s concept of bubbles and foams, as the stuff out of which the universe is built, strongly reminds the reader of Tarde’s monads. As will become clear from a very superficial presentation of some of Tarde’s key ideas, Tarde is a major influence on Sloterdijk’s Spheres project. Tarde refuses to take the human being as the basic unit of society, as a measure according to which both the natural and cultural worlds are interpreted and evaluated. According to Tarde, all reality at all scales, from atoms to galaxies, is made up of societies: ‘everything is a society, […] every phenomenon is a social fact […]. All sciences seem destined to become branches of sociology’ (Tarde 2012: 28). He uses the word ‘society’ to describe any form of association and rejects the specificity of human societies. These only seem specific to us because we see them from inside whereas we observe all other associations – bacteria, plants, animals, stars or scientific paradigms – from the outside. We do not have an access to their complexity nor sufficient means to comprehend how they work and what they are. The prejudice of anthropocentrism blocks our understanding of the essentially social bonds of reality: In truth, one might justifiably wonder […] whether it is really certain that our own intelligence and will, those great egos disposing of the vast resources of a gigantic cerebral state, are superior to those of the tiny egos confined in the miniscule city of an animal or even plant cell. Surely, if we were not blinded by the prejudice of always considering ourselves superior to everything, such comparisons would not be to our advantage. At root, it is this prejudice which prevents us from believing in the monads. (Tarde 2012: 22)

This prejudice also keeps up the problematic distinction between nature and society and the micro and macro distinction that disables an alternative understanding of both society and human–non-human interaction: ‘In reality, we judge beings to be less intelligent the less we understand them, and the error of thinking the unknown to be unintelligent goes hand in hand with the error […] of thinking the unknown to be indistinct, undifferentiated, and homogenous’ (Tarde 2012: 24). For Tarde, there is no middle ground: ‘Either there is no intelligence at all in matter, or matter is wholly saturated with intelligence’ (Tarde

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2012: 25). Tarde’s is a pansocial vision of reality (see Lorenc 2012: 71–95) and the entities participating in all associations are monads. A monad, like a bubble, is an individual element, a ‘representation, a reflection, or an interiorization of a whole set of other elements borrowed from the world around it’ (Latour 2010: 154). These elements are ‘borrowed’ through imitation. Tarde’s logic goes like this: monads have a tendency to associate and ‘to associate always and everywhere means to assimilate, that is, to imitate’ (Tarde 2012: 48, n. 52). Monads, as fractal structures that are present in all nature without exception, question the usual anthropocentric vision of the world found in classical philosophy and Durkheimian sociology. Tarde’s major influence on Sloterdijk’s Spheres project is evident in that he allows Sloterdijk to overcome the gap between biological and cultural phenomena and propose a novel meta-narrative describing an all-encompassing field of the social. This non-anthropocentric vision of the world is important for Sloterdijk’s concept of solidarity, and is of particular interest for this project.

Schaumdeutung versus Traumdeutung: Ego formation through the ears In his trilogy Spheres, Sloterdijk accomplishes a radical break with the psychoanalytical heritage. He establishes an alternative intersubjective conceptual model based on space, a dyad conception of a subject, relations without an object (nobject) and emphasis on the tactile-psychoacoustic rather than the visual. He convincingly argues against Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and this section demonstrates how Sloterdijk accounts for the Oedipus complex and melancholia from within a spherological framework. This will present an alternative to the psychoanalytical conceptualization found in Butler. As I demonstrated in Chapter 2, Butler’s relentless efforts to tie the human to other humans and also to the outside world are severely inhibited by her psychoanalytical framework. She starts with a single subject as a point of departure and always ends up with a single subject who has to be constantly convinced of her attachment to others. That is also why she is not able to conceptualize collectivity. Neither does her starting point in psychoanalysis make it possible for Butler to think about the issues that structure her concerns, such as the transgender. I would like to argue in what follows that an alternative story about humans to the one proposed by psychoanalysis makes it possible to overcome this problem. I demonstrate that Sloterdijk’s nobject relation can be, in fact,



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considered as a relation to singularity and that from the perspective of this framework one’s primary solidarity is with singularity. Sloterdijk sets out his critique of psychoanalysis with interpretation of the early history of ‘human faciality’. His main thesis is that ‘the humans have faces not for themselves, but for the others’, an idea expressed most clearly by the Greek word for human face, prosopon, which refers to ‘the sight one presents to the other’s gaze’ (see S I 192). Initially, Sloterdijk claims, humans were given over to the gaze of the other – they looked at others and responded to being seen. In this way, the face contained from the very start a ‘reciprocal intertwining of gaze and counter-gaze’ without suggesting a self-reflective turn (see S I 192). In Ancient Greece, bronze mirrors were reserved exclusively for women. Greek men could only find out about their appearance from the way others regarded them. Therefore, before the invention of mirrors, humans were returned to themselves by the regard of other humans. The Other acted as a personal mirror by producing not a reproduction of the Other but an ‘affective echo’ (S I 199–200). It is unimaginable to contemporary humans, surrounded by mirrors and own reflections, that until recently human populations almost never saw their own faces. Sloterdijk argues that only in European and Asian antiquity were people able to slowly establish ‘a form of intimate eccentricity in relation to themselves that allowed them to be themselves in one place, and at once their own observer in another’. This nascent individualism started the ‘history of the human who wants, and is meant to have the ability to be alone’ (see S I 200–3). The increasing accessibility of the mirror organizes lives in such a way that humans think they can now play both parts in the initial bipolar relationship, without a real Other, culminating in the ‘fiction of independence’: ‘the dream of self-rule’, ‘where the individuals decide once and for all that they themselves are the substantial first part, and their relationships with others the accidental second part’ (S I 203). Whereas the other human being was constitutive to us before, the Other is now expelled and replaced by technical means of selfcompletion (S I 205). Sloterdijk explains from a historical perspective that mirrors were ‘a very late addition to primary interfacial reality’ and leaves aside from his considerations ‘the precarious reflections’ in the water surface ‘that have always been possible’ (see S I 192) – an image that Freud found so powerful and turned into his Narcissus concept. Glass mirrors were first introduced only to the very few around 1500 in Venice, and they were supplied to large populations in the nineteenth century. Sloterdijk attributes the success of Freud’s psychoanalysis

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and Lacan’s concept of mirror stage to this widespread use of mirrors in the past two centuries: Only in a mirror-saturated culture could people have believed that for each individual, looking into one’s own mirror image realized a primal form of self-relation. And only in a population defined – across all classes – as mirrorowners could Freud and his successors have popularized their pseudo-proofs for so-called Narcissism and the supposedly visually transmitted primary autoeroticism of humans. Even Lacan’s tragically presumptuous theorem about the mirror stage’s formative significance for the ego function cannot overcome its dependence on the cosmetic or ego-technical household inventory of the nineteenth century – much to the detriment of those who were taken in by this psychological mirage. We should precisely not read the myth of Narcissus as evidence of a natural relationship between humans and their own faces in the mirror, but as an indication of the disturbing unaccustomed nature of burgeoning facial reflection. (S I 197)

Against Lacan’s visually focused mirror stage in the child’s development, Sloterdijk suggests an alternative system based on psychoacoustics and the nobject relation.8 Sloterdijk traces both psychoacoustics and nobject relations back to the situation of the foetus in the mother’s body. He proposes that the ego is formed ‘via the ears’, and that it is the auditory and the audio-vocal selfrelationship of the subject that is key in its development. He calls this phase the ‘siren stage’ from the Odyssey, and asserts that ‘humans emerge without exception from a vocal matriarchy’ (S I 508), ‘they come into the world through chamber music’ (S I 517).9 For Sloterdijk, a ‘psychoacoustic relationship’ is much more significant than the visual relationship. ‘The ecstasy of anticipatory listening’ is constitutive of the subject (see S I 439). The presence of the companion for the foetus is non-visual, pre-visual or even pre-imaginary. It is felt by resonances that are the basis of a nobject relation. Psychoanalysis tried to make the ego dependent on visual self-images and disregard the importance of originary auditory and tactile inputs (see S I 445–6). The human connection to sound is much deeper than psychoanalysis has allowed one to assume (see S I 492–520). This importance of the acoustic for the foetus and the concept of His critique of psychoanalysis is to a great extent based on Thomas Macho’s work, which revealed psychoanalysis’s ‘fundamental construction error’ based on its object prejudice (S I 291–9). 9 On the basis of those two different examples, Freud–Lacan and Sloterdijk, one can see how emphasizing different threads of a literary heritage of ancient Greece produces completely different theories of the subject. As we saw in Chapter 2, Butler brings up a similar point when she briefly considers the consequences for psychoanalysis (and our culture) had Freud taken up Antigone as his key figure rather than Oedipus. 8



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mother’s whole body as a musical instrument contribute to the understanding of the importance of audio-vocal technology as an immunizing technique (see S I 510, 507). It also furnishes theoretical tools towards non-anthropocentrism by dissolving ‘the boundar[ies] between soul and machine’ as both are providers and recipients of sounds and resonance (see S I 510). As I remarked above, the difference in temporal points of departure between psychoanalysis and spherology implicates a whole range of consequences for each of these systems. It allows Sloterdijk to propose a so-called nobject relation, which, it will be argued, is a crucial contribution to the concept of slow social transformation. The foetus and its partner (the placenta) are united by a bipolar intimacy, the first solidarity. The primary pair ‘floats in an atmospheric biunity, mutual referentiality and intertwined freedom from which neither of the primal partners can be removed without cancelling the total relationship’ (S I 43). Nobject relation is a relation which is first perceptible for an individual if it is denied or terminated. As long as the foetus is living inside the mother, it floats in a non-duality and does not realize it is part of somebody else, that is, that it is in a relation with the mother. Its nature is a closeness relationship, which is erased as a relationship because there is no subject–object relation but rather an un-relationship (see S I 287–9). This is one of the points of critique that Sloterdijk makes towards psychoanalysis when he claims that it is a mistake to describe the early mother–child relationship in terms of object relationships (see S I 293). To be precise, Sloterdijk does not negate the existence of an object– subject relationship but rather he claims that what makes us into a subject is a part that is undistinguishable from us. It is a no-part, something without which we are incomplete or have problems in existing: that which, to use Butler’s term, undoes us if it is taken away. Solidarity, ‘a creaky word from the nineteenth century’, is often used to describe this connecting force between people, groups and nations even though it does not fully account for this strong reason for being together (see S I 45). Once the child is born, the newborn’s first partner is the outside world – before it comes in contact once again with the mother – it is the air that it breathes, which replaces the lost amniotic fluid as the successive element: ‘For the child, extra-maternal being-in-the-world first and last of all means beingin-the-air and participating without struggles […] in the wealth of this medium’ (S I 298). As a medium, air cannot be described in object terms, and therefore, together with atmosphere, it is in a nobject relation to humans. However once air is denied to a human, it moves into an object relation with the human (see S I 298). Nobject is then ‘the unabandonable intimate something, without whose

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presence and resonance the subject cannot be complete’. This something can be ‘things, media or people that fulfil the function of an intimate augmenter for subjects’ (S I 467). Such a strong nobject relationship to an unrecognized entity is what can be also viewed as characteristic of the position of singularity towards universality in the Hegel–Butler framework. Nobject, like singularity, is an entity that cannot be captured by the available partage of the categories of universality–particularity in the world. However, without it, a given entity cannot exist. Universality cannot exist without the operation of singularity because singularity structures through the exclusion that which universality is. What Sloterdijk proposes, and what Butler could not achieve even with her use of Levinas, is that this unrecognized entity is connected to us through solidarity. From a spherological perspective, solidarity is the primary relation between a human being and the surrounding world. In Sloterdijk’s view one should relinquish the terms ‘subject’ or ‘ego’ and their relation to a corresponding object, as it too ‘displays the mistaken postulate of separability from [one’s] augmenters and allies’ (see S I 468). This is also how Sloterdijk explains the concept of Freudian melancholia. It is a state where a person was abandoned by her intimate patron, most important augmenter and motivator: ‘mourning a lost beloved person would only take on aspects of melancholia if this person had simultaneously been the genius of the abandoned individual’ (S I 460). It is an unwanted withdrawal from the field of closeness and ‘pathology of exile in its purest form’ (S I 461, 459–68). One can see how the psychoanalytical focus on object loss in melancholia is out of place here. Sloterdijk notes that Lacan in his lecture series The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960 ([1986] 2008) sought to articulate a ‘pre-objective psychological object’: ‘the thing’ (la chose). He criticizes Lacan, however, for considering all humans as equally likely to become melancholics because, according to Lacan, we are all ‘mother-amputees’, all orphans of the chose. The loss of the mother is declared to be ‘a universal human fate on an archaic level’ (S I 468). This effaces any possibility of therapeutic hope, which Sloterdijk finds to be problematic as it turns humanity into ‘universal human patienthood’ under a slogan: ‘you have not been helped until you comprehend that no one can help you’ (S I 470). For that matter, it seems to be a universal fate in Butler’s system as well because, as demonstrated in the previous chapter, we all are melancholic bearers of femininity and masculinity. Sloterdijk, in contrast, rejects melancholia as a universal condition. In this context, however, one is still entitled to ask if the loss of the intimate intrauterine partner at birth could not be considered as negativity in the



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Lacanian sense? Could this not be the lack that structures who we are? This is precisely the point that Butler takes up when she discusses gender identity in terms of melancholia. From Sloterdijk’s perspective, the birth cannot be interpreted in terms of Lacanian lack. It cannot be understood as an event that carries the same value for the subject as the lack does, with the exception that it takes place chronologically earlier than it does in the psychoanalytical timeline: at birth rather than during child development. It is undeniably true that at birth we lose our initial intimate companion together with the initial medium (amniotic fluid). However, for Sloterdijk this moment is conceptualized as a moment of transfer: on the one hand, a transfer into another medium (air), and on the other, towards strong relationships to other people and objects. At the moment of birth, a process of constant replacement starts. One part of co-subjectivity will continue entering close relationships with others, building bubbles, envelopes and shells with people and objects. Therefore, indeed, there is a concept of loss or separation in Sloterdijk, however it is dealt with differently from the way it is in psychoanalysis – it is not considered in terms of negativity or lack but rather as a moment of readiness for other people, for making connections with the external world. As the co-subjective pair is ‘always connected from the start in original augmentation’ of each other, they are ‘further enriched and differentiated through separations and reconnections’ (S I 438–9). Therefore, the initial intrauterine partner is a form of preparation for sociability and resonance with other people and objects and its loss is an opportunity for expansion. For Sloterdijk, an individual is not meant to remain an inseparable companion of her intimate alter ego. She is meant to exchange this partner for other intimate partners of the external world. This process of including more and more others into close relationships, this slow expansion towards the world is how Sloterdijk defines maturation – as ‘the increasing readiness to count to three, four and five’ (S I 438). The crucial point in Sloterdijk is that the replacements for my co-subjective partner do indeed work. They are successful and we constantly transfer and multiply connections with people and objects that contribute to our immunity, that allow us to build foams and create more and more microspheres. A very profound idea of sociability is captured in this model because maturity is connected to the ability to enter differentiated resonances with people and also to expand these connections. As one can see here, Sloterdijk proposes a much more positive and affirmative conceptualization of inter-human relations, of separation and even of loss than psychoanalysis does. In Sloterdijk’s framework, if one suffers from melancholia because one has lost a life partner who was also

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one’s partner in co-subjectivity, there is both a need and a possibility of help. To put it briefly, the techniques of overcoming melancholia and the therapeutic process would be accomplished, according to Sloterdijk, by creating ‘new circles of resonance’ and trust and by ‘restoring faith’ in one’s augmenters (S I 463).10 The idea that a human being arrives at birth into the ‘wealth of air’ resonates repeatedly in Spheres and is the basis for further disagreement with psychoanalytical theory. Sloterdijk argues against the idea of a human as a lacking being (Mängelwesen), which is the basis of the Lacanian view on desire. Part of this unease about lack and loss has been already visible in his arguments against the psychoanalytical conceptualization of melancholia. In Sloterdijk’s view: ‘The truth is that humans are creatures that stem from a form of constitutive luxury’ (INT 188). He traces this luxury back to the moment of birth where ‘the child comes into the world and the first thing it discovers is a treasure’. ‘The original experience of being-in-the-world is the arrival at a treasure island’ (INT 189). It is the mother who is considered as treasure, treasure that progressively retreats: While the child grows older, the treasure becomes ever more invisible until one simply has a mother and one no longer understands that the first thing one discovered in the world was richness. A mother is nothing other than the principle of richness in the form of a person, for the interesting thing is of course: she always has something, she never comes empty-handed. She is so to speak a source herself, she is more source than human, that means she herself is a sort of magician, a fairy, the nymph of her child. And for this reason, when human beings come into the world, they always arrive at a treasure island. (INT 188)

The richness of the world we arrive into – the wealth of air, the abundance connected with the mother, the multiplicity of connections we are able to make with the animate and inanimate worlds – is what predisposes us towards connections of solidarity with the world around us: cooperation and community. It pushes us towards responsibility, co-habitation and trust. Solidarity with singularity is a point of departure for humans arriving into the world.

For more on Sloterdijk’s ideas on melancholia, see: ‘Spheric Mourning. On Nobject Loss and the Difficulty of Saying What is Missing’, S I 459–70.

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Foam ethics: Immunism of co-fragile heterogeneous systems Butler carries out a thorough analysis of our original fragility using a combination of the psychoanalytical framework, Heidegger and Levinas: an individual is an ek-static being and therefore dependent on and constituted by the Other. As I argued earlier, the psychoanalytical framework puts Butler in a position where she first has to convince her readers of their undeniable connection to the Other before she can move on to treating with politics. The act of binding a subject to the Other has to be accomplished as a way of preparing the theoretical grounds for any affirmative theory of improving ‘the conditions of persisting and flourishing’ (FW 29) towards which she vaguely gestures in Frames of War and Precarious Life. Butler’s claim is that since we are all precarious we all need sheltering and protection. Sloterdijk works with the same basic assumption of inherent vulnerability but he picks up where Butler leaves off. In order to account for the fragility of microspheres, Sloterdijk proposes ‘foam ethics’. This is an ethics of co-fragile systems and a part of the ‘interpretation of foams’ (Schaumdeutung), which is an allusion to Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung, 1899). This ethics of the fragile, of the easily destructible, of the weak, resonates profoundly with Butler’s ethics of vulnerability that I described in the first two chapters. I would like to show that Sloterdijk’s ideas on foam ethics are complementary and can be considered as an extension of Butler’s ideas. It is a direction that Butler is hinting at in her most recent public talks but that she has not developed so far. For both Butler and Sloterdijk, vulnerability is a form of relationality that is tied to specific spheres, to a particular set of historical, economic and social configurations. Bodies do not come into the world as self-motoring agents: they enter in the mode of dependency and in the need of ‘conditions of support’. In one of her recent talks, Butler is clearly turning towards thinking of bodies in terms of ‘technical support’ when she discusses social movements.11 One can see that she is tentatively starting to conceptualize space when she says in her address that ‘the street is […] not a basis or platform for a political demand but an infrastructural good’ and that the ‘demand for infrastructure is a demand This recent tendency towards thinking of ‘technology’ and ‘conditions of support’, as well as social movements, which are described in this paragraph, is very clear in her lecture entitled ‘Understanding Society’ given at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge on 22 May 2013. All citations from Butler in this paragraph come from this talk.

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for a habitable ground’. When she claims that ‘a body has to be grasped in its supporting network of relations’ and that it has to be thought of as depending on infrastructure, technology and machines we can observe how near she comes to Sloterdijk in her preoccupations. Sloterdijk provides us with a coherent system that is compatible on the level of ethics with Butler’s interests. When we think about humans we need to think first and foremost about sheltering; or, as Sloterdijk succinctly put it in a documentary on the contemporary resurgence of Western Marxism: before we start thinking about communism we need to think about ‘co-immunism’.12 Sloterdijk understands co-immunism as a principle of solidarity based on space. It is a principle of helping each other on a global scale because we are able to destroy each other on a global scale. Therefore, due to shared space(s) the key question for foam ethics is the question of localization, which implies in Sloterdijk three things. Firstly, it is the ethics of taking and giving space to others; as Sloterdijk puts it: ‘the gestures of giving space and taking space [are] the first ethical acts’ (S III 884). This is to be understood not only in terms of the inception of pregnancy but it stretches from daily human interactions in public spaces to immigration politics or a relationship with nature. Secondly, it is a question of producing spaces – alone and with others, for ourselves and for others: ‘each person […] produces spontaneously emanations of ambiences or meaningful environments’ and in that way each person is a kind of ‘installation artist’ (see S III 662). In this way, the good is defined as the respirable (see S III 260): ‘[ethics] attributes to people and cultures the atmospheric effects of their actions; it stresses the production of climate as core procedure of a civilisation’ (S III 260). Thirdly, we need space to live, a safety bubble, a glasshouse or an ‘autogenic container’ (S III 302) to immunize us in our constitutive precarity. As we can see, Sloterdijk found a way to radically expand the vulnerability of a body that one finds in Butler’s system into the vulnerability and fragility of spheres that we share with others: other living beings like humans, animals, plants; objects and nobjects like air or the environment. For him, the most fragile is the starting point of responsibility. This is a non-anthropocentric gesture that Butler is also trying to make and for which she seems to lack sufficient theoretical tools: an appropriate framework and an appropriate mode. What Sloterdijk is postulating is a climate ethics, in both an ecological and situational sense. In this respect, air, and what he calls air conditioning, is of particular interest and importance to Sloterdijk. This is because we are in a nobject relation with Marx Reloaded (2011), [Film] Dir. by Jason Barker.

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this key medium after birth. With growing air pollution, our connection to air is being transformed from a nobject relation into an object–subject relation, with dangerous consequences for ourselves. As I mentioned above, from the spherological perspective, the unity of humankind cannot be diagnosed any longer through a common essence but rather through a common location that has to be considered ecologically and immunologically – including the medium of air (see S II 947–8). Therefore he calls foam ethics interchangeably the ‘ethics of a situation’, the ‘management of civilisation greenhouses’, the ‘ethics of atmosphere’ and ‘soap-bubble ethics’. In this way, climate techniques and ‘breath techniques’ are key in thinking about contemporary collectivities: ‘Society is its room temperature, it is the quality of its atmosphere; it is its depression, it is its clearing up; and it is its fragmentation into countless local microclimates’ (S II 966). From the spherological perspective questions of humanity and the Umwelt, as both the natural environment and the social world around us, become thoroughly political (see S II 967). As one can see, the theory of co-fragile systems, where solidarity is based on common space and on the fragility of that space, is, as Sloterdijk calls it, a ‘postheroic theory’ – a theory in which the emphasis is transferred from the eternal, substantial and primary of the heroic theory towards the ‘fleeting, unimportant, secondary’ of spherology (see S III 37). It is a theory that sides with singularity and exposes our constitutive solidarity with singularity. It is a theory far removed from a revolutionary model. Sloterdijk examines contemporary culture in terms of immune systems and proposes that the aim and function of technology is to allow us to find safety and to build protection in order to reduce our inherent vulnerability. This is an affirmative step that Butler has not taken and it is doubtful if her theoretical framework would ever allow her to propose a grand narrative such as Sloterdijk’s. That is also why Sloterdijk is a crucial element in thinking of slow social transformation based on Butler–Girard’s mimesis, as he provides us with a theory that overcomes critique. The question of critique and affirmative theory in reference to Butler will be discussed in the following section.

Affirmation versus critique: Foucault and the planet of the practising In the paper entitled ‘What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’ (2001), Butler reads Foucault’s inquiry into the concept of critique and makes the implied normativity of his paper explicit and compatible with her own views

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on critique: a preference for a riskier practice and for occupying ontologically insecure positions (see WCF 12). This investigation into critique has interestingly a mise-en-abyme structure, where Foucault reads Kant’s ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’ ([1784] 1975) in order to locate the question of critique and Butler reads Foucault’s ‘What is Critique?’ ([1978] 2007) – an essay that Foucault ‘did not dare’ to entitle ‘What is the Aufklärung’ (see Foucault 2007: 67) – in order to propose her own, very Foucauldian, interpretation of the term. Already on this framing level, critique is set up as an inquiry that is locked into specific questions present in specific texts, aware of its own textual frameworks: Kant is taken up by Foucault and Foucault is taken up by Butler in a linear engagement with the philosophical tradition. In Foucault’s view, the question of critique is first and foremost a question of ‘how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them’, which he calls ‘the critical attitude’ (Foucault 2007: 44). This is a question that, according to Foucault, surpasses Kant’s focus on ‘the limits and impasses’ of knowledge (connaissance) and unavoidably involves the issue of power (Foucault 2007: 68). For Foucault, critique is a question of, on the one hand, techne, of the art of governing men and of being governed and, on the other, the knowledge–power nexus: What we are trying to find out is what are the links, what are the connections, that can be identified between mechanisms of coercion and elements of knowledge, what is the interplay of relay and support developed between them, such that a given element of knowledge takes on the effects of power in a given system where it is allocated to a true, probable, uncertain or false element, such that a procedure of coercion acquires the very form and justifications of a rational, calculated, technically efficient element. (Foucault 2007: 59)

In Foucault’s view, in order to understand what constitutes ‘the acceptability of a system’, that is, what is taken for granted in a system as natural and obvious, the knowledge–power nexus has to be described (see Foucault 2007: 61). In order to expose these epistemological certainties, the historical specificity of knowledge– power analysis is essential: it is ‘important at every stage in the analysis to be able to give knowledge and power a precise and determined content: such and such an element of knowledge, such and such a mechanism of power’ (see Foucault 2007: 60). Furthermore, Foucault claims that ‘the route goes by way of an analysis of the knowledge–power nexus supporting [historical acceptability], recouping it at the point where it is accepted, moving toward what makes it acceptable, of course, not in general, but only where it is accepted’ (Foucault



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2007: 61). Such a preference for contextual locality can be also pinpointed in Butler’s mode of critique that is often dealing with concrete case studies, and is anchored in a close reading of specific texts. In contrast to Foucault, who is recouping the knowledge–power nexus ‘in its positivity’ (Foucault 2007: 61) in the system of acceptability, we can see in Butler’s work that she analyses situations that are largely not accepted in current society. She is recouping the nexus in its negativity in order to be able to analyse the contemporary sociopolitical context. Even though Butler assigns her interest in ‘breaking points’ to Foucault as well (see WCF 9), it seems from Foucault’s ‘What is Critique’ that he is more interested in the ‘arbitrary nature in terms of knowledge’ and the ‘violence in terms of power’ that makes the system ‘difficult to accept’ rather than the specific cases of exclusion that Butler is interested in. They have the same temporal points of departure – the present – but the difference is, as I will demonstrate, how they distance themselves from the present in order to be able to expose epistemological certainties. The reason why the ‘unrecognized’ and the marginalized or, in this context, ‘unacceptability’ seems so important to Butler is not only because of her commitment to questions of singularity but also because this is a way to access and tackle that which is unquestioned in our cultural and temporal context: the naturalness of heterosexuality, of kinship structures, of binaries. The accepted nexus in our current times is precisely invisible because it is natural to its contemporaries – it constitutes our most certain ways of knowing. What can be made visible, however, is the problematic position of queer and transgender people, and people on the margins, and owing to this detour through negativity we can arrive at the acceptability of our current historical context. An investigation into acceptability seems possible only for a historical analysis of the past – a project that Foucault carries out. In Foucault’s detour through the past, the former acceptability structures are implicitly confronted with the present episteme and the conditions of acceptability are consequently revealed – for both present and past. This is in order ‘to explore what might be changed, in its own thought, through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to it’ (Foucault 1992: 9) – a practice that bears a similarity to Butler’s idea of translation. This ‘foreign element’ operates like singularity in that it forces a given epistemological certainty to reformulate itself completely. That is also why, for Foucault, such an analysis ‘has to keep itself within the field of immanence of pure singularities’ (Foucault 2007: 63) – singularities as instances without ‘incarnations of an essence’, without ‘foundational recourse’, without ‘escape

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within a pure form’ (Foucault 2007: 63): in short, instances that are banned from both particularity and universality. Butler’s mode of critique is an analysis of such singularities; however, this analysis is not enabled by the past and its different structure. It is an analysis of the ‘unrecognized’ and the ‘marginalized’, of the ‘unacceptability of a system’ in the present. The difference between Butler and Foucault in the concrete operation of critique lies in this detour: Foucault takes the route of positivity through the past and Butler the route of negativity through the present.13 Both these paths, however, aim to allow for alternative possibilities of thinking and of ordering to emerge. Nevertheless, as I pointed out in the two previous chapters, making singularity visible, that is, transferring it into particularity, is a difficult task in itself. It is a problem that Butler formulates here as: What happens when I begin to become that for which there is no place within the given regime of truth? (WCF 8)

In this sentence, it becomes clear to what extent singularity is a ‘flickering category’ – it is an instance that appears and disappears; at some moments it becomes visible and at other times not. This lack of a defined political place of enunciation makes singularity into a blurred concept that is particularly difficult to tackle. Butler fully agrees with Foucault’s idea of critique as ‘the art of not being governed like that’ but she accentuates a normative level in Foucault’s critique as well as the importance of enactment to critique itself, the importance of practice (see WCF 1–2). In particular, she refers to ‘arts of existence’ in Foucault’s The Use of Pleasure ([1984] 1992) where she is interested in Foucault’s move beyond ethics as a set of prescriptions towards ethics as a ‘moral experience [that] has to do with a self-transformation prompted by a form of knowledge that is foreign to one’s own’ (WCF 4). Foucault’s arts of existence are important for Butler for two reasons: firstly, because it is a form of practice that ‘exposes the limits of [the] epistemological horizon itself, making the contours of the horizon appear, as it were, for the first time […] in relation to its own limits’ (WCF 5), and secondly, because this practice involves self-transformation in relation to norms: Both the transformation of the self in relation to ethical precepts and the practice of critique are considered forms of ‘art’, stylizations and repetitions, suggesting that there is no possibility of accepting or refusing a rule without a self who is stylized in response to the ethical demand upon it. (WCF 5) This is perhaps also why Butler lacks an account of historicity or historical temporality, which Badiou furnishes. This is dealt with in Chapter 4.

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Butler picks up on the fact that an art is not a single act belonging exclusively to a subject but rather a series of repetitions, a ‘stylized relation to the demand upon it’ (WCF 7). As stylization, it is not fully predetermined – ‘it incorporates a contingency over time that marks the limits to the ordering capacity of the field in question’ (WCF 7). Thus, the self, is compelled to form itself, but to form itself within forms that are already more or less in operation and underway. Or, one might say, it is compelled to form itself within practices that are more or less in place. (WCF 12)

Critical practice is therefore ‘this stylization of the self in relation to the rules’ (see WCF 7). Because power is fundamentally dependent on ‘the horizon of knowledge’ in which it operates, critique cannot be reduced to pure voluntarism (WCF 6). It ‘extends and reformulates the prior set of rules and precepts’ (see WCF 6–7). In this way: [e]ngaged in ‘arts of existence’, this subject is both crafted and crafting, and the line between how it is formed, and how it becomes a kind of forming, is not easily, if ever drawn. For it is not the case that a subject is formed and then turns around and begins suddenly to form itself. On the contrary, the formation of the subject is the institution of the very reflexivity that indistinguishably assumes the burden of formation. The ‘indistiguishability’ of this line is precisely the juncture where social norms intersect with ethical demands, and where both are produced in the context of a self-making which is never fully self-inaugurated. (WCF 11)

This reflection on the arts of existence is not developed any further in Butler’s work. However, what she gains from it is a way to map ‘a more productive approach to the place of ethics within politics’ as part of exposing epistemological horizons and ‘thinking otherwise’ (WCF 3). It is a rejoinder to, as she claims, the badly posed question that was also asked in Chapter 2: do transformation and heterogeneity have to be necessarily good in their outcomes? Or, as she formulates this ‘fault-finding’ criticism: What good is thinking otherwise, if we don’t know in advance that thinking otherwise will produce a better world? If we do not have a moral framework in which to decide with knowingness that certain new possibilities or ways of thinking otherwise will bring forth that world whose betterness we can judge by sure and already established standards? (WCF 3)

In order to show what is wrong with this question she ‘return[s] to a more fundamental meaning of “critique”’ as ‘arts of existence’ (WCF 3). She concludes, posing the ‘correct’ question about who counts as living:

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If that self-forming is done in disobedience to the principles by which one is formed, then virtue becomes the practice by which the self forms itself in desubjugation, which is to say that it risks its deformation as a subject, occupying that ontologically insecure position which poses the question anew: who will be a subject here, and what will count as a life, a moment of ethical questioning which requires that we break the habits of judgment in favour of a riskier practice that seeks to yield artistry from constraint. (WCF 12)

This breaking of habit is achieved not only through the structural failure in mimesis but also through the decision to orient mimesis differently. This is where Sloterdijk is particularly helpful. In You Must Change Your Life he develops a thesis that humans are ‘beings [that] result from repetition’ (MLA 4). As a mimetic being this Homo repetitivus ‘struggles with itself in concern for its form’ by means of infinite repetition (MLA 10). Bubbles and foams are important as co-isolated spaces because they allow habits, which are cases of sedimented mimesis, to develop in a controlled environment. They influence mimesis because they provide good or bad models that will be wittingly or unwittingly imitated. This human being creates not only her psychosocial immune system through training and habit but also herself as a subject: Just as practice makes perfect, training makes the subject. […] As soon as one realizes how every gesture carried out shapes its performer and determines their future state from the second occurrence on, one also knows why there is no such thing as a meaningless movement. (MLA 322)

Arts of existence with their aspects of ‘self-production’, ‘breaking habits’, ‘virtue’ and ‘artistry’, and their relation to critique in Foucault, are a point of convergence between Butler and Sloterdijk. Sloterdijk takes up Foucault’s arts of existence and argues against critique. According to him, critique is helpless. Instead, he creates a grand meta-narrative that aims to describe the world more accurately and, owing to this new perspective, change our ways of thinking and interpreting it. He remarks in an interview: ‘The only form of critique that counts for me is that one offers a better theory, or a better description of the world’, and adds: I believe that indeed the age of critique has passed, for […] critique itself is actually a form of the production of illusion. That is to say that critique is strong when one believes that through the use of negations, the person using these negations becomes sovereign. I believe that has been the idea of critique that something like sovereignty arises through negativity. I take that to be a romantic exaggeration, since experience dictates that critique actually breeds



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helplessness. Instead of turning people into sovereigns, critique makes them rather more helpless than they are. But what is highly meaningful, are associations, organizations, solidarizations, collective actions: all of them things that are operative. (INT 187)

Thus, he proposes to ‘replace critique’ with ‘an affirmative theory of civilization, supported by General Immunology’ (see MLA 425) and leaves it to his readers to decide where the better descriptions of the world lie. The question to be posed, however, is: what is the fundamental difference between what Butler interprets as critique in Foucault and what Sloterdijk asserts as a replacement of critique in the affirmative mode? The key question is if they are really that fundamentally different, considering that both take Foucault’s arts of existence as their points of departure, the former to assert the critical mode and the latter to assert the affirmative mode. The question is particularly relevant if one takes into consideration Foucault’s words from 1980, as cited by Sloterdijk himself: ‘I say certain things only to the extent to which I see them as capable of permitting the transformation of reality’ (MLA 159; Foucault 1991: 174). Sloterdijk considers Foucault’s investigation into interconnected structures of disciplines and discourses a breakthrough that enabled the exit from ‘a long history of ideological misunderstandings that ultimately refer back to pathogenic legacies of the French Revolution’ (MLA 132). From the perspective of this project, it opened the possibility of developing a model of social transformation that would constitute an alternative to an abrupt form such as revolution – revolution understood here as a problematic shortcut in transformation. What is important for Sloterdijk is to take up the analysis of discursive forms that Foucault started and to develop it further into ‘a de-restricted disciplinics’ opening it up to an ‘inconceivably wide landscape of disciplines’ (MLA 155). Its sum would form ‘the basis for the routines of all cultures and all trainable competencies’ (MLA 155). By stretching the analysis out in that way – towards thinking all spheres of life in terms of practice, repetition and mimesis – Sloterdijk proposes to go ‘beyond Foucault’ (see MLA 132): ‘The path followed in exemplary fashion by Foucault leads, if pursued far enough, to a General Disciplinics as an encyclopaedia of ability games’ (MLA 155). This is also what his ‘general anthropotechnology’ aims to do. It describes humans ‘as the creatures that live in the enclosure of disciplines, involuntary and voluntary ones alike’, as humans who are placed in co-isolated spaces and inevitably repeat the models to which they are exposed. Sloterdijk explains Foucault beyond subversion and critique in the way that he attributes to Foucault the rediscovery of the fact that ‘one cannot

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subvert the “existing” – only supervert it’, that is, change the existing through practice and training (MLA 152). This procedure is part of ethics (see MLA 152). Interestingly, for Sloterdijk, ethics emerges automatically with mimesis because we are ‘damned to distinguish between repetitions’, between models to be imitated (MLA 404). That is why, he considers the mimetic human being to be equivalent to the ethical human being. He says: ‘we will characterize [Homo immunologicus] more closely as the ethical human being or rather Homo repetitivus, Homo artista, the human in training’ (MLA 10). Thus, ethics is a ‘primary orientation’. He claims that, for Foucault, discourse analysis stands for ‘an acquisition of the ability to navigate in the horizontal space’ that is constituted by discourses ‘and the vertical [stands] for height of rank and decisiveness, assuming that existential height implies the ability to make decisions’. He adds: This brings into view an ethics that does not have values, norms and imperatives at its centre, but rather elementary orientations in the ‘field’ of existence. In the orientation-ethical approach to the how, the whither and the wherefore of existence, it is assumed that the ‘subjects’ – the existing parties as those able and unable to live their lives – are ‘always already’ immersed in a field or milieu that provides them with basic neighbourhoods, moods, and tensions in certain directions. That is why ethics is the theory of the first disclosednesses [Erschlossenheiten] and movednesses [Ergriffenheiten]. (MLA 161)

These orientations constitute tendencies: moods and inclinations rather than points, acts and givens. For Sloterdijk, we are all vertically challenged: ‘we have to practise learning to live – and […] one can neither not practise nor not learn to live’ (MLA 59). From this perspective, Sloterdijk reads the classical theory of habitus and hexis, such as that of Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, as a theory of training where virtue is described as second nature acquired through practice (see MLA 184), in the sense that a good person is an ‘artist of virtus’. She is constantly training her artistry of good. As Sloterdijk puts it: ‘The authentic form of the habitus theory describes humans in all discretion as acrobats of virtus – one could also say as carriers of moral competency that turns into social and artistic power’ (MLA 185).14 In such a conceptualization of ethics, what is considered good or appropriate are ‘names for the extraordinary, to whose nature it belongs to appear in the guise of the normal’ (MLA 184). The older theories of habitus that Sloterdijk considers as correct conceptualizations of repetition constitute ‘part of a doctrine of incorporation and in-formation of virtues’ (MLA 184). Sloterdijk considers Bourdieu’s theory of habitus limited in its scope on many different levels. For a critical discussion, see MLA 175–89.

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There, ‘the original ethical life’ is tantamount to oriented mimesis that ‘always seeks to exchange harmful for favourable repetition. It wants to replace corrupt life forms with upright ones’ (MLA 405). It is reformatory. From this perspective it is possible, therefore, to claim that a concern for good habits is a form of practising social transformation. Social transformation is directly related to the daily practice of good habits. As Eduardo Mendieta rightly put it: Anthropotechnology, qua study of the different practices that lead to the creation of different habitats with corresponding habits, the setting up of different residencies in which to lodge and accommodate so that we can inhabit under and with others, means that ‘humanity’ has once again become a thoroughly political category. (Mendieta 2012: 76)

Thus, mimesis, as an ethical and political mechanism, comes down to a concern for good models and good habits that, in consequence, produce liveable habitats for all. As one can see in ‘What is Critique’, Butler describes Foucault’s virtue as ‘breaking the habits’, ‘yielding artistry from constraint’, as desubjugation. This is to some extent similar to Sloterdijk’s interpretation in that a subject has to decide on the direction of mimesis and break certain automatisms that she unwittingly acquired. However, Butler does not develop any further this mimetic aspect in her considerations on ethics. She does not consider what happens once the habit is broken. In her own philosophical system, as I demonstrated in Chapters 1 and 2, she reaches to Levinas, Derrida, precarity and vulnerability in order to account for ethics. Sloterdijk takes mimesis and conceptualizes it as a constitutively ethical mechanism, with the assistance of Foucault’s later work and classical habitus theories. There, the good is considered as striving for the highest, hardest, the most improbable of a system of values in relation to which one trains. Thinking of ethics in terms of excellence in performance – where artists of virtue ‘perform the near-impossible, the best, as if it were something easy, spontaneous and natural that virtually happens of its own accord’ (MLA 184) – detaches the idea of good from a set of fundamental values. Foucault became, in Sloterdijk’s interpretation, what Nietzsche provided the first notions of – ‘the carrier of an intelligence that had become pure muscle, pure initiative’ (MLA 154). From this angle, philosophy, as much as life, is ‘an exercise of existence’ (MLA 154). Sloterdijk aims in both his Spheres project and You Must Change Your Life to introduce ‘an alternative language, and with the language an alternative perspective’ for phenomena that were traditionally referred to as ethics, morality, spirituality and asceticism (MLA 4).

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Both in mimesis and in ethics ‘there is a choice that changes all the factors influencing human behaviour’ (MLA 406), not only in terms of the direction in which we want to take mimesis, that is, which models we want to imitate, but also in terms of passive–active dynamics in a subject that Sloterdijk names: ‘having-oneself-operated-on’ (Sich-Operieren-Lassen) versus ‘self-operating’ (Operieren). The relationship between the two modes of action is based on a decision between, on the one hand, arranging others to perform life improvements for us and, on the other, carrying them out on ourselves: Together, they refer to competing modes of anthropotechnic behaviour. In [self-operating], I am moulded as an object of direct self-modification through measures of my own; in [having-myself-operated-on], I expose myself to the effects of others’ operating competence and let them mould me. The interplay of self-operation and having-oneself-operated-on encompasses the entire selfconcern of the subject. It is easy to see why this is the only possibility in a modernized world. Individuals are not only unable to take the entire work of changing the world upon themselves – they cannot even take care of everything required for their own personal optimization by themselves. By exposing themselves to the effects of others’ ability to act, they appropriate a form of passivity that implies a roundabout or deferred way of acting themselves. The expanded passivity competence of the moderns expresses itself in the willingness to have oneself operated on in one’s own interests. (MLA 374)

What is important for us then is gaining this ‘passivity competence’, letting others affect us and so making space for the affection of the Other. Sloterdijk considers thinking about Foucault’s disciplinics in terms of self-operation and having-oneself-operated-on as a ‘suitable replacement’ for Foucault’s own terminological framework of domination. This would move away ‘the field of exercises and reflexive praxes’ from ‘the naïve over-politicizations underlying the common ways of discussing “biopolitics”’ (see MLA 479, n. 108). The key difference between Foucault’s critique, as interpreted by Butler, and Sloterdijk’s affirmative theory is that he introduces a new idiom in order to account for the contemporary world. He develops a completely new way of ordering the world that allows us to ‘think otherwise’. It is a language of lightness that replaces critique, which is a discourse of heavy essences. In an interview he explains in detail the need for affirmative theory: The reason a new vocabulary is necessary in the cultural sciences can be explained in seven simple words: because the old one is basically useless. And why? Because all previous natural languages, including theoretical discourse,



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were developed for a world of weight and solid substances. They are thus incapable of expressing the experiences of a world of lightness and relations. Consequently they are not suited to articulate the basic experiences of the modern and the postmodern, which construct a world based on mobilization and the easing of burdens. This already allows me to explain why, in my view, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School is outdated and must be replaced by a completely different discourse. Because of their Marxist heritage, critical theorists succumb to the realistic temptation of interpreting the light as appearance and the heavy as essence. Therefore they practice criticism in the old style in that they ‘expose’ the lightness of appearance in the name of the heaviness of the real. In reality, I think that it is through the occurrence of abundance in the modern that the heavy has turned into appearance and the ‘essential’ now dwells in lightness, in the air, in the atmosphere. As soon as this is understood, the conditions of ‘criticism’ change dramatically. Marx argued that all criticism begins with the critique of religion; I would say instead that all criticism begins with the critique of gravity. (Sloterdijk and Funcke 2005)

This is directly connected with another point of criticism against the Frankfurt School, and in particular Habermas, that Latour points out: ‘humanists are concerned only about humans; the rest, for them, is mere materiality or cold objectivity’. What humanists miss, however, is that when they ‘accuse people of “treating humans like objects”, they are thoroughly unaware that they are treating objects unfairly’ (see Latour 2011: 160). Sloterdijk deals with both humans and non-humans as ‘matters of concern’ of equal value and this non-anthropocentric stance that redeems matter and materiality is an important aspect of the slow social transformation that is being proposed here. The slow social transformation developed from Girard, Butler and Sloterdijk is based on, firstly, shared space as a common ontological category that also provides models for imitation, and secondly, oriented mimesis that ensures the production of good habits and, through these, habitable spheres. It is an idea of transformation that is based on daily effort and constant training that will make a limited space – stretching from an apartment to a shared planet – more (rather than less) fit to live in. Because failure is always part of the process of mimesis, both static foams and fixed, identical models are not possible. The singularity hidden in imperfect mimesis will always emerge to challenge universality and force it into a complete reformulation. This form of slow-paced transformation is based on cooperation, solidarity and community and is an alternative to an abrupt and heroic idea of social change. The effects of habits both on

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humans and the natural environment are a matter of equally serious concern and this makes the idea of slow transformation non-anthropocentric. In the following chapters, I analyse Alain Badiou’s model of revolution and confront communism with the co-immunism described above.

4

Co-Immunism versus Communism: Challenging Alain Badiou’s Model of Revolution Before completing the model of slow social transformation based on oriented mimesis and space, it is necessary to challenge Alain Badiou’s idea of revolution. This is often considered to be the only model of truly radical social transformation and, therefore, it is the main contender of slow social transformation. I argue that we need to overcome thinking in terms of revolution and event (Badiou’s key philosophical concept) in order to make space for thoughts about the new possibilities that are perhaps more appropriate for the twenty-first century. Hegel is the figure that connects the key elements of both modalities: slow social transformation and Badiou’s idea of revolution. Badiou admits that Hegel is an important figure in many respects to his work: ‘The relation I have to Hegel is both close and complicated. […] I’ve always had a close dialogue with Hegel’ (PE 128). This is the case, in particular, with respect to the question of negation: In Hegel […] the negation of a thing is immanent to this thing but, at the same time, it goes beyond this thing. The core of the dialectic is this status of negation as an operator that at once separates and includes. In this sense, I’d say I’m constantly in the dialectic […]. But as my dialectical thought includes a figure of chance, it’s non-deterministic. (PE 127–8)

That is why the event, as a dialectical category of exception and its relation to universality, is the focus of this chapter: The category of exception is a dialectical category because the thinking of exception always takes place on two contradictory fronts. As exception must be thought as a negation because it is not reducible to what is ordinary, but it must also not be thought as a miracle. It, therefore, has to be thought as internal to the process of – non-miraculous – truth, but thought, nonetheless, as an exception. (PE 127)

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In the following text, I examine the concept of universality in Badiou’s work and draw some parallels between what he proposes as universality and what I have established on the basis of Hegel and Butler in Chapter 1. I focus on the generic procedure of politics as a type of human production capable of laying claim to universality (see SMP 142–3).1 Revolution, as a dialectical but totalizing procedure of exception in politics, will be under particular consideration in this connection. I also demonstrate that Badiou’s political views modify his philosophical claims in a contingent rather than a necessary way. Badiou’s Marxist heritage precludes certain theoretical possibilities that his system offers: for instance, opening up the category of the inexistent to include more entities than the sans-papiers or factory workers. This would mean to include inexistents that could overlap with a more open category of singularity. For Badiou, there is only one centre of the void in a situation from which the inexistent rises. It does not, however, necessarily follow that the inexistent always has to be a crypto-proletariat. As I argue, the fact that in Badiou it is the sans-papiers that should carry the potential for social transformation rather than, for instance, the transgender is strictly the result of a Marxist heritage. It does not necessarily follow from his ontology. That is why the problem with Badiou is that his political views influence his ontology, making some inexistents more legitimate than others. In relation to this, I consider the consequences and possibilities of Badiou’s philosophical system beyond his clear political agendas. Finally, a critique of Badiou’s communism will be undertaken from two perspectives: firstly, system-internal problems will be pointed out, and secondly, I will suggest that a different framework would address the core of the Idea of communism better. According to Badiou, ‘Idea’ has to be written with a capital ‘I’ because it is a Platonic ideal, something which I explore further later on in this chapter. My claim will be that anarchism could be such a framework. If ‘the common’ is at the heart of communism then perhaps a combination of Sloterdijk’s non-anthropocentric theory of space and contemporary anarchism in practice would be an appropriate framework to think about the future of the Idea of communism in the twenty-first century. Slow social transformation, which brings together these frameworks, seems more appropriate: it generalizes the void in that it does not require a localized centre of the void. Instead of focusing on specific types of an inexistent (sans-papiers), it allows anything that is singularity to rise and reformulate universality. This poses a continuous rather I leave Badiou’s other generic procedures – love, art and science – aside as they do not directly relate to the specific questions in which this project is interested.

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than an irruptive process of change, where all types of singularity are allowed to participate. Which singularities will effectively contribute to the reformulation of universality is something that one is not able to predict. For the category of universality to remain open to infinite translation, this unknown is crucial.

Universal doubling: Generic multiplicity and universal singularity The key to Badiou’s philosophy is the concept of universality. His entire philosophical system is a description of a complex structure of universality composed of a network of interrelated concepts both in ontology and on the level of ‘the world of appearing’. He is a self-proclaimed Platonist whose philosophy is meant as a critique and an alternative to the philosophy of finitude. Let us start by focusing on a peculiar doubling of universality that is in operation in Badiou’s work and is most visible in ‘Eight Theses on the Universal’ ([2000] 2004), in which he summarizes his ideas on universality. This is in some respects a bridging text between Badiou’s mathematical ontology, as described in detail in Being and Event ([1988] 2005), and his logic of appearing from Logics of Worlds ([2006] 2009). It brings together two separate fields of enquiry: ontology and logic. Whereas the former refers to being, the latter refers to worlds of appearing in that ‘“Logic” and “appearing” are one and the same thing’ (LW 101).2 To quote the theses briefly, Badiou claims that: MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

MM

the universal is singular (thesis 2); it originates in the event (thesis 3); it presents itself as a decision of the undecidable (thesis 4); it has an implicative structure in that it has consequences (thesis 5); it requires an act and fidelity (thesis 6); it is open (thesis 7); its proper medium is thought (thesis 1); and it is a generic multiplicity (thesis 8).

Most of these points will become clearer later on in this chapter; however, one can already observe that there is a doubling in universality. On the one hand, there is generic universality in the form of generic multiplicity (thesis This is a direct quote from Badiou. Throughout the text, where I capitalize words it is Badiou’s terminology. Through capitalization, he marks his difference to the usual understanding of the term or reference to a philosophical tradition.

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8), discussed by Badiou in reference to the sphere of ontology in Being and Event. On the other, there is a peculiar fusion of universality and singularity – universal singularity (thesis 2) – which is discussed extensively in respect to the world of appearing in Badiou’s various books. This doubling can be partly accounted for by pointing to the different philosophical fields of consideration: ontology accounts for generic multiplicity and logic accounts for universal singularity. However, Badiou tries to forge bridges between these separate areas. He tries to account for universal singularity on an ontological level but admits that it is beyond ontology to do that either fully or successfully. From the other side, he tries to translate the principle of generic multiplicity into the world of appearing. He does so by referring to the idea of truth, of which the equality invariant is particularly important for politics. The question to be asked here is: what is the relation between ontology (the sphere of being) and logic (the sphere of existence)? Does the fact that this relation cannot be established otherwise than through axioms bear directly on the incommensurability between the Idea of communism and its historical incarnations? I demonstrate that the link between these two levels of enquiry is established purely arbitrarily and is based mainly on Badiou’s political views rather than following from his philosophical system. This link is contingent, rather than necessary and, as Badiou himself admits in reference to the choice of ideas, ‘it is a question of taste’ (Badiou 2000: 92). Although there are two types of universality in his work, a special emphasis is placed on one. Through his axiomatic thinking, Badiou sides with the abrupt and radical universal singularity, rather than the ‘static’ generic multiplicity. This is because universal singularity, in the form of the event, is in line with his political views on social transformation. In this context, I examine how the passage from ontology to concrete situations happens: how the logic of a situation is transformed so that things that were previously indiscernible suddenly appear. To put it in terms of Hegel and Butler, I examine the key question that is here recognition.

Generic multiplicity in ontology Badiou uses the term ‘generic multiplicity’ in order to designate pure universality in ontology. Universality, as we already know from Hegel, is defined as a category applicable to all entities. Ontology, in order to think of being, and through thinking of being to think of a category common to everything, needs a system of thought ‘capable of apprehending pure multiples independently of any characteristic other than their multiplicity’ (Burchill 2000: viii). Mathematics,



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and in particular set theory, fulfils this requirement because it attributes to sets no other essence than that of being a multiplicity and that any multiplicity is a multiplicity of multiplicities without reference to unities of any sort (see Burchill 2000: ix). Mathematics is ontology for Badiou because it allows us to think the unthinkable, the unpresentable; it allows us to think being qua being. Generic multiplicity is one that firstly can be described only by saying that it is. And so ‘the indiscernible part, by definition, solely possesses the “properties” of any part whatsoever. It is rightfully declared generic, because, if one wishes to qualify it, all one can say is that its elements are’ (BE 339), and secondly, which is concomitant with the first point, it is a multiplicity that is common to all multiplicities: ‘the indiscernible, the absolutely indeterminate, which is to say a multiple that in a given situation solely possesses properties which are more or less “common” to all the multiples of the situation’ (BE 356). The generic is the very stuff that all being is made of and universality, as generic multiplicity, is the very being of the world. In his terminology, the generic is exchangeable with the indiscernible, the absolutely indeterminate: ‘“generic” and “indiscernible” are concepts which are almost equivalent’ (BE 327).3 Finally, ‘the generic is egalitarian, and every subject, ultimately, is ordained to equality’ (BE 409). I will come back to this specific point later. On the level of ontology, Badiou tries to conceptualize how multiples become discernible, to recreate on the level of ontology how multiplicities appear in the world. He tries to conceptualize with the help of mathematics the passage from being to being-there. We can start with an assumption that among multiplicities, which by definition lack reference to specific objects, there is nevertheless a possibility of the relationality of one element to another element or one set to another set, as expressed in a mathematical equation. On an ontological level this is a process of ordering multiplicities or bringing out elements according to the criteria put down in an equation. It is a process of ordering that has its equivalent in the world of appearing in that entities fall into the category of singularity, particularity or universality according to their status in a structure of a given world. Badiou accounts for the appearing of multiplicities with the difference between the concept of inclusion and that of belonging and the fact that ‘there is an excess of inclusion over belonging’ (BE 89). He explains it in detail in Being and Event: Badiou explains this ‘almost’ equivalence with a difference in linguistic connotations that are associated with the words indiscernible and generic. The former ‘conserves the negative connotation’, whereas the latter ‘positively designates that what does not allow itself to be discerned’ (BE 327).

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It is formally impossible […] for everything which is included (every subset) to belong to the situation. There is an irremediable excess of sub-multiples over terms. Applied to a situation – in which ‘to belong’ means: to be a consistent multiple, thus to be presented, or to exist – the theorem of the point of excess simply states: there are always sub-multiples which, despite being included in a situation as compositions of multiplicities, cannot be counted in that situation as terms, and which therefore do not exist. (BE 97)

Badiou terms this fact of belonging to a situation or, in other words, this fact of existing as ‘count-as-one’: Take any situation in particular. […] Its structure – the regime of the count-asone – splits the multiple which is presented there: splits it into consistency (the composition of ones) and inconsistency (the inertia of the domain). However, inconsistency is not actually presented as such since all presentation is under the law of the count. Inconsistency as pure multiple is solely the presupposition that prior to the count the one is not. Yet what is explicit in any situation is rather that the one is. In general, a situation is not such that the thesis ‘the one is not’ can be presented therein. On the contrary, because the law is the countas-one, nothing is presented in a situation which is not counted: the situation envelops existence with the one. Nothing is presentable in a situation otherwise than under the effect of structure, that is, under the form of the one and its composition in consistent multiplicities. (BE 52)

For Badiou, being is not discernible and cannot present itself as such because it is in every multiple and because for something to be discernible a unifying operation, or, in other words, ‘the count-as-one’, has to make the multiple consistent. It follows, therefore, that ‘the pure multiple, which is absolutely unpresentable in a “count-as-one” is nothing’ (Burchill 2000: iv) because ‘none of its terms are themselves counted-as-one’ (BE 175). If one were to translate Badiou’s concept into Hegel–Butler’s terms on the basis of what has been described so far, one could say that ‘generic multiplicity’ is Hegel’s universality because it is a generic term applicable to all entities. Count-as-one, in turn, is the operation of particularity because to exist means to belong to a situation, to be recognized. Particularity is whatever can be discerned in knowledge. In other words, ‘that which is not susceptible to being classified within a knowledge’ does not exist (see BE 293). Having said that, a question emerges: what is the place of singularity in Badiou’s framework if generic multiplicity is equivalent to universality? In Chapter 1, with the help of Butler’s work, I argued that singularity is indiscernibility or, to take Badiou’s term, singularity would be tantamount to generic multiplicity because of its



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indiscernibility. Universality, from Butler’s perspective, was a result of the continuous work of translation. It was an infinite reformulation by means of singularity that had to pass through particularity on its way to universality. Singularity, as an entity that remains unrecognized and waits its turn to appear, was, in a way, generic. It carried an infinite potential to transform universality because of its indeterminacy. This potential to transform entities can be found in Badiou, as well. Here, singularity is also described as the bearer of change (see LW 357). Transformation takes place at an ‘evental site’, which is ‘an entirely abnormal multiple; that is, a multiple such that none of its elements are presented in the situation’ (BE 175) and none of its element belongs to a situation. Based on this description, one could ask: what, then, is the difference between generic multiplicity and singularity? Here, based on the above definition, singularity seems to be generic, too, because it is indiscernible. The difference seems to be the remainder to the count-as-one or, if we visualize it with Venn diagrams to help us along here, the interval between nothingness and inclusion and, on another level, the interval between inclusion and belonging, as that which cannot be captured by the count-as-one. In this way, everything ‘is’ but ‘to inexist’ is ‘exclusively internal to appearing’ and so the existence of singularity is equal to zero (SMP 60): The multiple-thing is in the world but with an intensity equal to zero. Its existence is a non-existence. The thing is in the world but its appearing in the world is the destruction of its identity. Thus, the being-there of this being is to be an inexistent of the world. (SMP 58)

However, this definition of singularity seems to be still very close to one of generic multiplicity with the exception that it refers to the logic of appearing rather than ontology. This being the case, one needs another criterion that would make the distinction possible. This criterion is the power of transformation. One could say that, in Badiou, the difference between singularity and universality (genericity) is the power of the former to transform that which is inexistent into an existent. Singularity would have the power to affect the logic of appearing in a world by reordering the rules of appearing: reordering, in Badiou’s terminology, the transcendental of a world. This difference between genericity as a dormant multiplicity and singularity as an active power can only be established retroactively by witnessing the consequences of the operation of singularity: Everything [...] depends on the consequences. [...] There exists no stronger a transcendental consequence than that of making something appear in a world

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which had not existed in it previously […]. Hence, we can identify a strong singularity by the fact that, for a given situation, it has the consequence of making an inexistent term exist in it. (CH 220–1)

In more abstract terms one can posit it in the following manner: Given a site (a multiple affected with self-belonging) which is a singularity (its intensity of existence, as instantaneous and as ‘evanescent’ as it may be, is nevertheless maximal), we will say that this site is a strong singularity, or an event, if, in consequence of the (maximal) intensity of the site, something whose value of existence was nil in the situation takes on a positive value of existence. (CH 221)

This implies a ‘violent paradox’ in his opinion, as ‘under the effect of an event, the inexistent aspect of a site comes to exist absolutely’ (CH 222). In Hegel– Butler’s terms, this meant that singularity completely reformulates universality in the process of translation into a new universality. This process is parallel in its results to that in Badiou, with the exception that in Butler it passes through particularity. If one considers the example of the proletariat that Badiou gives in his Second Manifesto for Philosophy ([2009] 2011), it becomes clear that the question of appearing in Badiou is fundamentally the question of recognition as one knows it from Hegel and Butler. Badiou claims that in Marx’s analyses of capitalist societies the proletariat is the inexistent peculiar to political multiplicities. This means that the proletariat is a multiplicity that does not have political existence; however, it does not mean that it has no being. ‘According to the rules governing the appearance of the political world, it does not appear within this. [The proletariat] is there but with the minimal degree of appearance, namely, the degree zero’ (SMP 61), and so it is ‘completely subtracted from the sphere of political presentation’ (SMP 61). The revolutionary slogan of ‘The Internationale’, ‘we are nothing, let us be all’, proclaims a revolutionary change of a world that is an evental change of the transcendental. ‘The transcendental has to change in order for the assignation to existence and, thus, the inexistent as a multiplicity’s point of non-appearing in a world, to change in its turn’ (see SMP 60–2). Although Badiou never uses the actual word ‘recognition’, as the term implies recognition by a consciousness, he conceptualizes it in Logics of Worlds through the concept of the ‘inexistent’ and how the inexistent comes to appear. In Butler’s terms of Precarious Life, the inexistent is the unrecognized homo sacer, the singularity. For a change in the laws of recognition to happen, an inexistent has to transform the laws of appearing. Once they are transformed, singularity is catapulted in Badiou into universality or, as is the case in Butler, it constantly



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subjects universality to translation. As one can see, there is a direct relation between ‘nothing’ and ‘all’ in evental transformation, between singularity and universality in Badiou. It is a quick and radical flip between singularity and universality that suffers no mediators such as particularity. Particularity is distributed post factum as a new status quo. In this example, one can observe that, in ontology, for an entity to appear there is a movement from universality to singularity, from generic multiplicity to event, and in the world of appearing there is the movement from singularity to universality – we were nothing, let us be all. However, this is a movement of invisibility (generic multiplicity) to another invisibility (singularity), if one is not already faithful to the event as a newly established universality. It is so because one can only recognize the event from within the situation where the singular is already the universal. From the perspective of political practice, one is compelled to ask if there can really be this complete fusion of singularity with universality without passing through particularity? Can a rejection of particularity be postulated without incurring serious consequences in practice? What about transformation among those who are not already faithful to the event? How does one deal with the unconverted, with the ‘enemies of the revolution’? Is there any space in this model of social change for the not yet converted? The consequence of an inexistent suddenly coming into existence is the creation of a new inexistent: Every situation has at least one proper inexistent aspect, and if this aspect happens to be sublimated into absolute existence, another element of the site must cease to exist, thereby keeping the law intact and ultimately preserving the coherence of appearing. (CH 224)

This is a consequence that has been already pointed out in Chapter 1: singularity is always in excess in the circulating universality and it is a necessary spectre that has to haunt the system in order to preserve it and keep it moving. Badiou’s answer, therefore, is similar to Butler’s in that new inexistents are inevitably created and need to be created as part of the process of universality. However, the key difference between Badiou and Butler in this respect is that for Badiou there is one key inexistent per situation, a centrality of a void (E 68–9; M 116), which suddenly and immediately flips the singular into the universal. This central singularity of a situation carries, for Badiou, a truly transformative potential. It stands in contrast to the routinely produced singularities in Butler that are the standard results of failed particularization and failed universalization. In Butler–Hegel’s idea of singularity an infinity of possibilities is

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dormant in singularity. This potential of infinite possibilities constantly translates universality into the completely new, whose range of possibilities seems to be larger than the one offered by Badiou’s event. Even though Badiou attempts to provide us with the conceptual tools to discern the event, one wonders if it is not perhaps the case that ‘the converted’ already have this ability to recognize the event. They know precisely what they are waiting for: a reincarnation of the Idea of communism that should happen, as will become clear, in a very concrete form. The rest of us are, however, left out. In Butler there is no saying which singularity will be truly transformative because transformation is a continuous process rather than a rare occasion for which one has to wait. The key opposition in terms of social transformation is, therefore, the irruptive, evental transformation of Badiou versus the continuous transformation of Butler. As I have argued in Chapters 1 and 2, social transformation in Butler should be viewed in terms of the disseminated and local processes of translation between competing notions of universality, failure in mimesis and infinite circulation. Translation is a process of constant renewals of universality, based not on mere inclusion of another particularity into universality, but on forcing universality to completely reformulate its terms through the exposure to singularity. It is a vision of social transformation that is dispersed rather than concentrated at an evental site. Butler’s singularity does not suddenly explode as a localized event, as is the case in Badiou’s system. Rather, through failure in mimesis it slowly appears, it slowly becomes intelligible, and in that way it slowly joins the ranks of particularity. From there on it can try to challenge hegemony through translation and infinite circulation. Therefore, the key difference between Badiou and Butler, if viewed in terms of the end result of social transformation, is one of the pace and localization of social transformation. Whereas in Butler’s system social change happens slowly and continuously, in Badiou it is a sudden rupture in the modality of revolution. However, Butler’s transformation is no less radical merely because it is less sudden. It has revolutionary effects but does not operate in the mode of revolution. I will come back to the question of revolution further in this chapter.

The difficult passage: Between being and being-there One would be right to observe at this point that while discussing Badiou’s singularity, I suddenly switched from ontology to the logics of appearing. He admits that ‘the thinking of change or of singularity is neither ontological nor transcendental’ (LW 357). It is not ontological because the operation of singularity



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cannot be captured by mathematics: ‘with the event we have the first concept external to the field of mathematical ontology’ (BE 184), ‘ontology has nothing to say about the event […] ontology demonstrates that the event is not’ (BE 190). And neither is it transcendental, because in order to discern a singularity one has to be localized in a singularity, operating according to its internal laws: it ‘can only be recognized inasmuch as it has already been recognized’ (BE 189). One can only recognize a strong singularity, an event, by already being faithful to it, and living according to its own precepts and according to its truth. That is also why the connection between ontology and the logic of appearing has to be established axiomatically by Badiou. As an event is indescribable ontologically, it has to be simply arbitrarily assigned to something in the world of appearing. In Badiou’s case, an event is assigned in the domain of politics to an abrupt and militant transformation such as a revolution, otherwise it would not be possible to rationally deduce one from the other. The fact that he uses entirely different forms of mathematics in relation to being and appearing underlines this problem. Ricardo L. Nirenberg and David Nirenberg (2011) give a detailed and convincing exposition of the arbitrary connections between ontology as set theory and logic as category theory in Badiou. They claim that: [i]n deducing philosophical and political consequences from his set-theoretical arguments, Badiou confuses contingent attributes of informal models with necessary consequences of the axioms […]. The politico-philosophical claims that result have no grounding in the set theory that is deployed to justify them. (586)

As Badiou’s ontology can formalize neither the concept of event nor that of the subject (see BE 410), the question is how appropriate mathematics is in thinking about those two essential ideas in his philosophy. Badiou works with a system of axioms in his philosophy and it is difficult to see why he needs the set theory to establish some of his positions. Ed Pluth defends a similar idea, claiming: ‘nothing about the view that the one is not requires one to embrace anything about set theory’. He rightly questions: ‘could not the basic theses of Badiou’s philosophy be entirely independent of set theory’s axioms?’ (Pluth 2010: 46–7). Considering that Badiou links in a problematic way mathematical ideas with his philosophical claims, it is difficult not to agree with some scholars and view it at times as an abuse of both mathematics and his readers (see Nirenberg and Nirenberg 2011). What is more, in reference to this problematic link between ontology and logic one needs to ask how the event happens, how singularity suddenly surges

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up from generic multiplicity? Badiou speaks of mutation in his Second Manifesto for Philosophy, and claims: ‘the fact that there are inexistents renders it necessary for events to occur which drastically change the relation, at a local level, between the multiples of a world and the transcendental legislation of their immanent identities and differences’ (SMP 59). However, his philosophical system does not account for any kind of mechanism that would provoke change. In Butler, it is inherent failure in mimesis that keeps the system going ad infinitum. In Badiou, the event suddenly happens and there are no means to explain on an ontological level this mechanism of real change. What one can only say is that mutation ‘is introduced in some sort of supplementary way within the register of appearing’ (SMP 76). Once the inexistent acquires a maximal existential value, it changes the register of appearing and introduces a trans-temporal truth. Why there should be mutation in the first place, in particular on an ontological level, is not accounted for. To say that mathematics as ontology is not able to account for mutation is not a convincing argument to justify this lack. Badiou mentions in passing that he ‘borrows something from Hegel – namely, that existence must be thought as the movement that goes from pure being to being-there’ (SMP 45). Hegel is here called upon to provide support for the problematic connection between ontology and logic; however, it is questionable if referring to him is sufficient, without accounting more extensively for movement in Badiou’s philosophy. ‘Mutation occurs’ is a claim that is again selectively and arbitrarily posited to bring together ontology and logics and it is necessitated, as will become evident, mainly by Badiou’s political views. A similar case will become apparent with equality and truth, which are both established axiomatically, as ontology has nothing to say about either of them.

Universal singularity in the world of appearing Because the concrete analysis of a situation is not ontological, it is necessary to turn now to universal singularity and see what happens there on the level of the world of appearing and so also in terms of practice. The moment one starts discussing universal singularity one is already on the level of existence. Badiou’s most direct engagement with universality in non-mathematical terms, apart from his ‘Eight Theses’, is in his book Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism ([1997] 2003) in which the universal is understood as the universal address (SP 92). It is an idea that is addressed to all, applicable to the whole of humanity. According to Badiou and Paul, universality is beyond all difference because difference is a given, it simply exists in the world. Universality is indifferent to



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difference. It is indifference to particularity. It transgresses difference not by trying to destroy it but by keeping to it and so neglecting it. By not denying the difference, for example, of the sexes or of nationality, this difference is made negligible (see SP 104–5). It is, thus, imperative that universality presents itself as ‘an indifference that tolerates differences, one whose sole material test lies […] in being able and knowing how to practise [truths] oneself ’ (SP 99). In this context, Badiou gives an example of Chinese communists who practiced the policy of ‘the mass line’. This policy was based on the assumption that people gripped by universality in the form of a truth are able to traverse their opinions and customs without having to give up the differences that allow them to recognize themselves in the world (see SP 99). This means that universality is addressed to the ‘different’ to enable the resurfacing of the ‘same’ (SP 98). What matters is that ‘differences carry the universal that happens […] like a grace. Inversely, only by recognizing in differences their capacity for carrying the universal that comes upon them can the universal itself verify its own reality’ (SP 106). This announces in Paul the termination of communitarian particularism and, for Badiou, the uselessness of identitarian politics, the uselessness of particularity for the work of universality.4 While generic multiplicity designates what universality is, universal singularity designates what universality does and, as such, directly relates to practice. Practice, for Badiou, has to be considered in terms of truths and the activity of practising fidelity to truths (see SMP 127–8). Together with the shift from ontology to existence there is a shift from the question of being to the question of practice. As he comments in Logics of Worlds, the second part of Being and Event: ‘To an ontology of true-universality there succeeds a pragmatic of its becoming’ (SMP 128). Badiou proposes what he calls an ‘affirmative vision of universality’ which is assembled by ‘the body, subjective orientation, points and organs’ (SMP 127). He claims: While the generic designates what a truth is in so far as it is distinguished from all other types of being, the body and its orientation designate what a truth does and, hence, the way in which it shares […] the fate of objects in the world. (SMP 128)

Truths are, therefore, a question of practice, of ‘integrative doctrine of doing’ (SMP 128) in the world of appearing. They are realizations of the universality in worlds. This is an axiom that Badiou posits in order to establish a connection For a non-revolutionary interpretation of Paul and a critique of Badiou’s reading see MLA 302–5.

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between ontology and logic. Event and truth are vehicles for generic multiplicity as ontological universality to appear in the world; otherwise, without their operation, generic multiplicity would remain an indiscernible static being. As Badiou claims, being ‘does not occur, it simply is’ (SMP 75). In other words, one could say that ontological universality has to pass through singularity (‘a truth can only originate in an event’: SMP 81) in order for universality in the form of truth (‘A truth is an appearance of being’: LW 513) to emerge on the level of the world of appearing, which Badiou calls universal singularity. As mentioned above, there is a merging between universality and singularity on the ontological level in that genericity and singularity are only retroactively discernible. This fusion is also established in the world of appearing. Truths are a universal–singular, that is, universal in their address (‘offered to all […] addressed to everyone, without a condition being able to limit this offer’: SP 14) but singular in their locality. They are unique to a world. They are also addressed to particularity (to opinions, customs and differences) and these must finally ‘be traversed in order for universality itself to be constructed, or for the genericity of the true to be immanently deployed’ (SP 98). Truths are embodied universals: in singular worlds and in faithful subjects. A person’s active fidelity to a truth, to an Idea, is a decision that for Badiou is key in a human’s life.5 From this perspective, it becomes clear that Badiou is not interested in the static generic multiplicity that is ontological universality. He is not interested in universality that can be also described as generic being-in-common, this being that unites us all based on ontological equality – organic and inorganic entities alike – because we all are and everything is. A concern for such universality would involve a restructuring of the count-as-one towards a heightened attentiveness to materiality of all kinds – and this aspect is lacking in Badiou. It would mean a form of ‘co-immunism’ (see Chapter 3), where materiality would be viewed first and foremost as something in need of conditions for persisting and flourishing. Instead, Badiou is much more interested in the universal singularity of the world of appearing and the question of practice that is related to it. This clear preference for an active universality is informed by his political views and his ideas on social transformation rather than necessarily following from his ontology or his logic. For Badiou there is one invariant in politics and that is equality. Equality passes from indiscernibility in ontology to indifference to Truths can be encountered in four spheres: the sciences, the arts, politics and love. Badiou chooses all these spheres arbitrarily and openly admits that alternative categories could have been conceptualized as well, such as law, religion and work. They seemed, however, to be unsatisfactory to Badiou (see SMP 142–3).

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particularity in the world of appearing. There is, however, no necessary reason why equality should be characteristic of generic multiplicity when it resurfaces in the world, rather than freedom or solidarity or any other concept. Nor is there any reason why it should be restricted as a possibility to humans only. Badiou defines equality as ‘subjective’: Such equality is by no means a social programme. Moreover, it has nothing to do with the social. It is a political maxim, a prescription. Political equality is not what we desire or plan; it is that which we declare to be, here and now, in the heat of the moment, and not something that should be. […] For equality is not an objective of action, it is its axiom’. (M 98–9)

Similar to Jacques Rancière’s idea of equality, it is a presupposition (Rancière 1999; May 2008), rather than an objective and, as such, it is restricted only to those who claim it.6 In a way there is no equality until it is actively declared and that is also why the ontological static equality of all beings, although posited by Badiou, does not interest him if it is not activated. The core of the problem here is the fact that only a particular fraction of the world can activate it. To quote this excerpt again: ‘the generic is egalitarian, and every subject, ultimately, is ordained to equality’ (BE 409). However, not everyone counts as a subject for Badiou. Only those faithful to the Idea of communism or some other (legitimate) ‘truth’ count. Only those acting as equals are equal. Badiou’s Idea of communism is not generic communism – a form of pansocial, non-anthropocentric idea of equality of all matter, in the manner of Gabriel Tarde, that would call for a complete reconfiguration of our approach to who counts as human,7 to the environment, to the natural world and objects. As Badiou says in an interview: ‘“Communism” […] is a word that expresses the common, the in-common. But it doesn’t refer to an ontology of the in-common; it refers to the necessity of working to extend the exceptional character of truth procedures’ (PE 59). He differentiates himself from Jean-Luc Nancy on this point. What is at stake here for Badiou is actively establishing equality in the world of appearing and accomplishing it in an abrupt, militant way – in the form of a revolution. The process that Badiou is trying to envision in his work is the passage from generic multiplicity, as universality on an ontological level, into universal singularity. This happens through the means of an event, which surges up in order In a striking essay on Rancière, Badiou argues that he came up with the concept of equality as a presupposition first (M 114–23). See May and Love 2008 for a critical engagement with Badiou’s essay on Rancière. 7 Badiou’s answer to who counts as human would be a militant to a truth that is immortal. 6

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to establish generic universality on the level of the world of appearing. There has to be a violent rupture in the status quo in order to establish the equality of generic universality on the level of the world of appearing. As one can see here, the question of universality is a question of philosophical choice on Badiou’s part (SMP 60). It is an axiomatic decision that cannot be rationally deduced. Rather, the universality he favours is a matter of preference. There are two options. On the one hand, we have the static generic multiplicity of being that is both the point of departure and point of destination for thinking about the world in terms of the equality of all matter. On the other hand, it is the universal singularity of the world of appearing that demands practice: it demands actively establishing equality in the world by rupturing the current count-as-one. This universal singularity is restricted to a particular type of individual. Badiou prefers the latter. He sides with the universality that appears together with singularity as a sudden and violent coming into existence, a rapid conversion of universality into singularity and singularity into universality. Badiou claims that ‘every eternity and every universality must appear in a world and, “patiently or impatiently”, be created within it’ (LW 513). Whereas in Butler universality involves infinite reformulation, the infinite work of singularity on universality and a slow coming-into-appearance of new particularities, in Badiou it is a sudden emergence of singularity that immediately establishes universal singularity in the world. Singularity is a mediator between the universality of being and the universality of existence. Subsequently, it orders the new count-as-one, the new split into particularities. Particularity, in Badiou, is not a crucial element of social transformation, as it is in Butler, but rather a sign of post-evental normalization. What is particularly problematic in the above doubling of universalities is the lack of a necessary relation between ontology and the world of appearing. I argue in what follows that there is a similar doubling in Badiou’s concept of communism. On the one hand, there is communism as a quasi-ontological category and, on the other hand, there is communism as a historical incarnation in the world of appearing. Even though Badiou tries to show that communism is necessitated by ontology, there is no relation between ontology and logic apart from the name that links the two spheres (‘communism’) and the axiom proclaiming this link. There are two worlds in Badiou’s work –the ontological part and the part relating to the world of appearing. These two fields are linked together in a very problematic way. This lack of commensurability will prove particularly important when I consider Badiou’s thinking on communism in ontological terms, and his ideas on reintroducing communism into the world.



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The problem with particularity From the section above, one can see that particularity is completely effaced from the process of universality. In Badiou’s view, ‘If the universal is for everyone, this is in the precise sense that to be inscribed within it is not a matter of possessing any particular determination’ (PP 47). The universal–singular amalgam posits a direct participation of singularity in universality without the detour through particularities – nationalities, cultures or genders (see PP 75). As Slavoj Žižek claims: ‘You can be a human immediately, without first being German, French, English’ (PP 72). This is also the ‘fundamental message of philosophy’ that Badiou and Žižek share: ‘you can immediately participate in universality, beyond particular identifications’ (PP 72). Badiou’s issue with particularity is well captured by the distinction he makes between a true event and its simulacrum, a difference he transposes on the distinction between communism (an event) and Nazism (the simulacrum of an event). The formal characteristics of both are the same, ‘all the formal traits of truth are at work in a simulacrum’ (E 74), with two differences. Firstly, the event addresses the void whereas a simulacrum addresses a substance. This means that truth’s address is universal and the simulacrum is addressed to particularity: ‘Fidelity to a simulacrum, unlike fidelity to an event, regulates its break with the situation not by the universality of the void, but by the closed particularity of an abstract set (ensemble) (the “Germans” or the “Aryans”)’ (E 74). Nazism as a simulacrum is distinguished by the vocabulary of plenitude and substance, and brings about the absolute particularity of a community, rooted in the characteristics of soil, blood or race. ‘What allows a genuine event to be at the origin of truth – which is the only thing that can be for all, and can be eternally – is precisely the fact that it relates to the particularity of a situation only from the bias of its void’ (E 73). Void is the absolute neutrality of being, the multiplicity-of-nothing that ‘neither excludes nor constrains anyone’ (see E 73). Secondly, in a point directly connected to the first, truth is not directed against any person because this person can potentially become a subject to a truth. A simulacrum, in turn, names an enemy based on substance (Jew, gay, black) and fights against it (see E 76). Through the definition of a simulacrum as an idea based on particularity, Badiou defines evil: ‘evil is the process of a simulacrum of truth’ (E 77). Identitarian and communitarian categories have to be absented from the truth process otherwise no truth can be established (see SP 11): ‘For if it is true that every truth erupts as singular, its singularity is

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immediately universalizable, universalizable singularity necessarily breaks with identitarian singularity’ (SP 11).8 The above distinction between a true event and its simulacrum shows particularity as the source of a problem rather than a medium towards universality. Badiou blatantly rejects the struggle for the emancipation of women and black people, and treats it as equivalent to capitalist logic. He interprets the wish for the recognition of cultural or sexual minorities as the wish to be exposed to the same laws of the market as the rest (see SP 10–11). The search for recognition from the state is thereby tantamount to inscribing minorities into the capitalist-parliamentarian status quo rather than allowing them to radically transform it. For Badiou, communitarian politics and ‘minoritarian pronouncements are genuinely barbaric’ because ‘each figure gains its rotating legitimacy from the other’s discredit’ (SP 12–13). They do not suspend differences to achieve radical universality but designate particularity, just as the law does. The law is always particular, predicative, partial: ‘if a truth is to surge forth eventally, it must be nondenumerable, unpredictable, uncontrollable’. It must be a grace (SP 76). Therefore, one needs to take up the challenge of thinking politics outside its subjectivation to the state, outside particularities and identitarian politics, outside the framework of parties or the party (see CH 192). Particularity cannot function, for Badiou, in a progressive fashion. In an interview with Badiou, Peter Hallward problematizes this complete rejection of particularity by pointing out that ‘where people are oppressed, they are oppressed as women, as black, as Jewish or Arab’ (Badiou and Hallward 2001: 107), which means they are oppressed precisely as particularity. This is how particularity as identity politics is created in the first place – because people are neither treated on the basis of their singularity nor as entities belonging to the universal concept of the human. Badiou believes that communitarian claims are what he would call ‘syndicalism’ (particular claims that seek to be recognized in a determinate relation of forces) rather than ‘politics’ (see Badiou and Hallward 2001: 109). He asks: ‘What exactly is meant by “black” or “women”? […] What does “black” mean to those who, in the name of the oppression they suffer, make it a political category?’ (Badiou and Hallward 2001: 107–8). Badiou doubts if these categories are able to transform universality. To answer his reservations, one could say that the struggle of particularity is precisely a struggle not to be considered different. It is a universal struggle for the ‘indifference to difference’ that Badiou himself promotes in Saint Paul: The What Badiou calls here ‘identitarian singularity’ has, in my framework, the place of particularity.

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Foundation of Universalism. It is not a struggle to be treated on special terms because of one’s particularity, but rather one to be treated the same, regardless of the particularity of gender, skin colour or nationality, for example. From Butler’s perspective, it is a struggle to be recognized (discernible as existent) so that one can transform the old universality into a new universality where one’s difference is considered indifferent – on a par with the indifference to hair colour, eye colour, height or abilities to the definition of human. The end point of a politics based on particularity is joining universality by completely reformulating it rather than by demanding simple integration into the existing order. A simple integration is something that Badiou claims, incorrectly, to be the aim of the politics of particularity (see Badiou and Hallward 2001: 109). The aim is, however, precisely to stop being viewed as particularity. It seems that Badiou does not understand the purpose of particularity or what it means to be in the position of a particularity that is discriminated against: being a woman or being black. His position is that of universality that allows only certain types of singularity to transform its parameters. In the context of ‘correct’ political action, Badiou defines a truly political claim as ‘something which touches on a transformation of that order as a whole’ (Badiou and Hallward 2001:  109), and considers that the factory worker and sans-papiers constitute such categories. Inspired by Marx’s proletariat, the sanspapiers represents for Badiou the generic of humanity that has the potential to transform the transcendental of the world completely. In his understanding, the struggle of feminism or of black people is a struggle that is set up according to properties ‘invented by the oppressors themselves’. In that way, these categories are not progressive (see Badiou and Hallward 2001: 107). However, one has to ask if the sans-papiers or factory workers, the crypto-proletariat that Badiou champions, do not fall into that category as well? Badiou comments on Rancière and his idea of those who have ‘no part’ – a category that corresponds to Badiou’s sans-papiers in that it designates a group of people who do not belong to a dominant societal category – in the following way: This idea actually goes back at least as far as to the Marx of the [Economic and Philosophic] Manuscripts of 1844, who defined the proletariat as generic humanity, since it does not itself possess any of the properties by which the bourgeoisie defines (respectable, or normal, or ‘well-adjusted’, as we would say today) Man. (CH 249, n. 10)

From Hegel–Butler’s perspective, this would be a description of singularity. This singularity, had it not been for the Marxist heritage in Badiou’s work, would not

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necessarily have to be the sans-papiers, but rather could be attached to such unrecognized categories, for example, as Butler cites in her recent work: the Palestinians in the Israel–Palestine conflict, Afghani and Iraqi civilians who fall victim to the US military actions or transgender. To make his philosophical system internally consistent, Badiou would have to call this generic category of humanity not sans-papiers but homo sacer, the inexistent that rises. However, he cannot do that because of his Marxist heritage, where a single centre of action (the economy) is considered able to successfully address all the different problems in society. There is only one type of a legitimate inexistent in a Marxist way of thinking. In Marx, it is the proletariat, and in Badiou, it is the sans-papiers. These represent the generic humanity because labour power is understood as the generic human category. However, if one were to reject all particular categories ‘invented by the oppressors themselves’, and labour power would be one of them, one would end up with the category of the human. Yet ‘human’ for Badiou would be a category too close to vitalism, human rights and the ethics of the Other for it to be a useful category. This is one of the cases where Badiou’s philosophy traps itself in political convictions that he does not wish to change. Considering his binary thinking of communism versus capitalism, making concessions to the most universal of categories relevant to human individuals would mean that he would end up as a result in his enemy’s camp – the ‘ethical ideology’ of pro-life activism. As much as this category would suit the third-wave communism as ‘for all without exception’ he strictly rejects this option. What is more, the category of human is not a given in Badiou either. In order to become a human, one needs to become subject to a truth. This position follows from his Platonism, otherwise one is a human animal – an entity that leads a life not worth living – a problematic idea, to say the least, because of its implicit reduction of animality to useless existence. This is also how he describes those who do not choose to declare the truth of communism: ‘Whoever does not illuminate the coming-to-be of humanity with the communist hypothesis […] reduces humanity, as far as its collective becoming is concerned, to animality’ (MS 110). It is a bad intellectual habit running throughout the history of philosophy that Badiou does not choose to challenge.9 That is also why Sloterdijk calls him a ‘ruthless Platonist’.10 Badiou differs dramatically in his approach towards heterogeneity in social transformation to the position taken by Butler. The Butler–Girard idea of For a critical discussion of the portrayal of animals in philosophy see also Crowley 2009: 127–56. ‘Rücksichtsloser Platoniker’ (Sloterdijk 2010: 52). Karen Margolis translates this phrase as ‘the obdurate French Platonist’ (STD 98).

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social transformation is based on intermingling with singularity. It is about forming collectivities of heterogeneity, where particularity and universality are constantly rubbing against singularity. In this way, singularity–particularity units tend to form strange amalgamations that slip away from the frames of recognizability. In result, they confound or panic the system of recognizability, hegemony and universality. Badiou’s event – singularity turned suddenly into universality – does not allow for such in-betweens, intermediate states of passage and a sort of queerness of status. It is a militant politics of ‘you are with us or against us’ with no possibility for an ambivalence of position. This attitude towards heterogeneity is an important difference between both systems and it excludes certain forms of social transformation as a possibility. Finally, Badiou agrees with Žižek’s point that ‘the human as such appears only in the non-human; the non-human is the only way to be human in the universal sense in an immediate way’ (PP 77). Butler would largely agree with this view in that homo sacer, or singularity, carries an infinite potential for the redefinition of the human. The immediate element, however, poses a question. Proposing an immediate flip from singularity into universality advances an idea of permanent revolution. Badiou may openly accept that ‘the era of revolutions is closed’ (quoted in Hallward 2003: 41) but his theory of change is nothing else than a model of revolution. Particularity in Badiou’s conceptualization is a static category created by oppressors. If there is movement in Badiou’s system, it is only in the upsurge of singularity. That is also why Badiou does not see a possibility of change in the laws of appearing, in particularity, other than through an event. In the following I describe how he envisions change, and I consider in detail the question of communism.

Make it quick: Event and revolution as irruptive transformations As I have mentioned above, ‘every radical transformational action originates in a point’ (BE 176), and this point is an event. In Badiou’s philosophy, revolution operates in the mode of an event. An event introduces ‘something other’ into a situation, it is the unpredictable, the absolutely new (see E 69). It is a perturbation of the world’s order because it locally disrupts the logical organization – the transcendental – of a world (see SMP 91). An event is also always a sudden encounter with the absolutely unexpected. If this were not the case, it would mean that the event was predictable and that, in turn, would mean that it was

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inscribed into ‘the History of the State’, which would be a contradiction in terms (see CH 225). For Badiou, an event is something which makes a possibility, previously invisible or even unthinkable, suddenly appear in the world. He claims that ‘an event is not by itself the creation of a reality: it is the creation of a possibility, it opens up a possibility. It indicates to us that a possibility exists that has been ignored. The event is, in a certain way, merely a proposition’ (PE 9–10). The state, both the state of the situation and the state in the political sense, is the one that decides on the possibilities in the world: ‘the State, the state of things, is; it’s what claims to have the monopoly of possibilities. It’s not simply what governs the real. It’s what pronounces that which is possible and impossible’ (PE 10) and a true event completely changes this range of possibilities. In that way a ‘revolution implies the gesture of redesigning the world from zero’ (MLA 392) because it suddenly and completely ruptures the old world order. Badiou understands the event as the only truly radical and valuable form of change. I will briefly point out a couple of relevant issues with the concept of an event that are particularly important for slow social transformation. In Badiou, as in a strictly Marxist view, only one central point has to be changed in order to change the world. As Todd May (2008: 80) observes ‘there is no room to allow, for instance, gender oppression or racial discrimination a separate analysis. These problems do not have their own integrity. They are offshoots of the more fundamental problem of capitalist exploitation’. If the assumption is that only the central singularity of a situation can completely reformulate the transcendental then, as I argued above, the question of sanspapiers as the centrality of a void should automatically address the more general question of political oppression. Badiou assumes, without providing any economic analysis in his work, that if this singularity rises, the society as a whole will be transformed. The idea that there is only one cure to all the ills of a society is problematic as it downplays the importance and complexity of other struggles that are simultaneously taking place in the world. It introduces a hierarchy of issues where anti-capitalist struggles bear more weight than animal liberation, feminist, anti-racism or environmental movements. Badiou rejects the legitimacy of feminism, the gay movement and the African-American civil rights movement because he considers them as merely reformist changes, rather than cases of truly radical transformation. I would like to argue that he rejects them not only because they do not fit into his political landscape of what counts as a ‘truly transformative’ non-existent but also because these movements did not operate according to the principles of an event. They developed more slowly, over a longer span of time, and according to a different mode of operation



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than the logic of an evental rupture. Because of this other mode they are not recognized by Badiou as radical transformations. However, it is undeniable considering the world today that these movements have been no less radical in their effects on the transcendental of the world than the effects of a revolution. What is more, the problem with the concept of a revolution is also the fact that its agent is a restricted category. There are recognized ‘legitimate’ agents of revolution, men, and less ‘legitimate’ agents, women. Contrary to their factual historical importance, women have been denied the status of active subjects in revolutionary change (see Redecker 2014; Godineau 1998). The hero of the revolution and its vanguard are conceptualized as male subjects. Marx, for instance, speaks of the working class as ‘Männer’ (male subjects): ‘But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men [Männer] who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians’ (Marx and Engels 2001: 18).11 There is no space for women in fraternité.12 A political subject is always positioned in-between two events: the past event and the event to come (see PE 22–3). For Badiou, one of the ways to prepare oneself for an event is by fidelity to the previous event. The problem with this claim is that the absolutely new is impossible to conceptualize. That is why, if one waits for another incarnation of communism as an event, then one is waiting for something that one already to some extent knows: a reinvented communism rather than the unknown that will change the contemporary world. A similar point is brought up by Costas Douzinas (2010: 86): If progress is no longer guaranteed by historical necessity and the revolutionary wager has been firmly placed on the long odds of the (coming) event, how can values and norms prepare the epiphany and the fidelity necessary for its realization? If radical change is not the linear unfolding of the human spirit, but a rare and unpredictable instance of eternal return, how does the event link with moral imperatives and psychological motivations? 13

This also puts a political subject in a situation where there are only very specific types of political occurrences that can count as events. The reincarnation of communism would count as a legitimate event, but a reincarnation of capitalism or democracy would not, even if the latter completely reformulated On this point, see Redecker 2014. See also on the question of brotherhood and its problems, specifically in relation to Nancy, Crowley 2009: 108–25; Derrida 1997: 96, 227–70; 2005: 56–62. Derrida (2005: 63) asks ‘How not to speak of brothers?’ and it seems that solidarity would be a possibility. 13 As Hallward also points out it amounts to preaching to the already converted (cited in Douzinas 2010: 86; Hallward 2004: 17). 11 12

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the transcendental of the world, and so by definition would count as events. This differentiation in events does not, however, follow necessarily from Badiou’s theory of event but rather it is a consequence of Badiou’s political convictions. That is why the Idea of communism is for Badiou the only legitimate, and so the only possible event in the realm of politics. A system such as Badiou’s establishes an impermeable ethical shield that makes subjects accountable only from within their truth. This is an important feature of a revolutionary logic. As Sloterdijk asserts: The actually occurring revolution claimed ethical sovereignty, thus immunizing itself to all verdicts from without. If the party was always right, this was because the revolution is always right; consequently, those who actually carried out the revolution were right. Hence even their perversions were meant to be subject only to their own interpretations. No one who was not themselves at the forefront of the revolution was entitled to a judgement about the means it should choose. It alone could know how much killing was necessary for its success; it alone could decide how much terror would guarantee the triumph of its principles. (MLA 388)

This is a consequence of an ethics that is only accountable to its own truth. It is also a mechanism internal to the operation of an event. Events have the potential to address all individuals but they effectively do not. This requirement for a universal to be able to address all inhabitants of the world (in order for it to be a universal), and its structural impossibility of achieving it in a particular world is an important paradox of the universal. This failure internal to the universal is necessary in order not to create an absolutely dominant discourse, which it would be impossible to evade. Universality in Butler seems to be able to regulate itself by this paradox. It is something that is incorporated in Butler’s understanding of competing universalities and the idea of a singularity that constantly attempts to translate universality. However, it is not certain that this mechanism is embraced by the operation of Badiou’s event. Badiou’s event demands an immediate and complete conversion to its truth and does not leave options for the unconverted or the not yet converted remainders. The militant logic of ‘you are with us or against us’ that Badiou favours precludes a way out for the uncommitted. In many aspects, therefore, Badiou’s event reminds one of a religious discourse. Even though Badiou accuses the philosophy of the Other of being religious because it conceptualizes the Other as the absolutely Other, that is God (E 23; Hallward 2001: xxvi, xxxvi), it seems that his philosophy is very



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much constructed along this line as well. This appears to be the case not only in the words that Badiou happens to choose in order to describe an event – grace, resurrection, immortality, eternity – but also the idea of an event itself functions according to the rules of Christian discourse: it is open to all, it is a grace, it is a conversion of the entire life, it is not a matter of opinions but faith, it is beyond rationality and only from within the truth can we understand it. In that respect Badiou is truly a Marxist.14 As Leszek Kołakowski claims in his Main Currents of Marxism ([1976–8] 2005): Marxism performs the function of a religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character. But it is a caricature and a bogus form of religion, since it presents its temporal eschatology as a scientific system, which religious mythologies do not purport to be. (Kołakowski 2005: 1208)

This description is also pertinent to Badiou’s use of set theory in Being and Event. It is a form of scientific system (or perhaps a form of scriptures that the uninitiated cannot fully decipher), which provides a necessary support for his philosophy. Susan Buck-Morss (2010: 78) claims that ‘[Badiou’s] prototype of the transforming event is the conversion of St. Paul’ and that ‘this is the rescue of theology in the literal sense’. Yet, interestingly, ‘as a Marxist, materialist and atheist, [Badiou] insists on the totally secular character of this rescue, that is to be made fruitful for revolutionary politics today’ (Buck-Morss 2010: 78).15 Because event and revolution are not able to capture changes that operate according to different modes and paces, another conceptualization of radical social change is necessary.16 That is why one needs a change of focus: from revolution as the ‘politics of absolute means’ (MLA 426) to continuous transformation as a form of everyday local practice, as training, as mimesis. This is not only because, if one considers manmade catastrophes of the twentieth century, ‘the greatest disaster complexes came about in the form of projects that were meant to gain control of the course of history from a single centre of action’ (MLA 445), but also because the centrality of a void is not able to address appropriately all the complex problems of a society: the living conditions See also Sloterdijk and his argument in You Must Change Your Life that ‘communism is the fourth monotheism’ (MLA 388, n. 121). 15 See also Depoortere (2009), where the author suggests that Badiou is a very useful philosopher for theologians. 16 Eva von Redecker (2014) defends a view that we need to vigorously redefine the concept of revolution so that it can theorize the feminist movement; however we should keep to the ‘beau mot’ of revolution. In her Metalepsis und Revolution (2015), she develops a processual understanding of revolution, which is neither teleological nor bound to the intention of the actors, but driven by the ‘metaleptic’ dynamics between interstitial practices and articulated material structures. 14

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and improvement possibilities of the underprivileged, the domination and oppression of different minorities, the abuse of the environment and animals. What is more, it is a question of two different speeds of social transformation. Whereas revolution proposes a sudden flip from singularity into universality, slow social transformation based on mimesis would allow for a continuous change of habits. This would mean operating according to a mode of ‘more or less’, ‘better or worse’, achieving a transformation every day through practice. It would mean a continuous movement in a certain direction (see STD 8). It would also mean the reverse of a revolutionary logic: whereas in revolution different means are used to achieve different ends, in a slow social transformation, acting as if we have already achieved the ends would constitute the means. We would act as if we already were in the society in which we want to live. There would be no difference between the ends and the means. This is one of the key insights of anarchist theory that converges with Sloterdijk’s theory, even though in his interpretations of anarchism Sloterdijk is very far from proclaiming himself an anarchist. What he thinks is anarchism is dramatically different from what is proposed here and what the current recuperations of anarchism in theory and practice try to achieve.17 However, slow social transformation brings together elements of co-immunism, anarchism and mimesis in order to be able to conceptualize a form of social change that is relevant to the twenty-first century. It also offers a way to conceptualize contemporary anarchism in practice. I will come back fully to thinking of anarchism and co-immunism together in the next chapter. In the rest of this one, however, I will suggest how a combination of anarchism and co-immunism could address questions that lie at the heart of the Idea of communism.

Communism à la parisienne The anticipation of a new event must be accompanied by what Badiou calls an Idea, ‘the assertion that a new truth is historically possible’ (see CH 256). This is where Badiou’s Platonic Idea of communism has its place in his philosophy. As we saw above, Badiou chooses an ‘active’ form of universality. Badiou’s Idea of communism, which emerges as the paradigm of equality in a world, ‘comes itself from the idea of practice (from the experience of the real) […] but can nevertheless not be reduced to it’ (CH 247). ‘It is the protocol not of the existence but Sloterdijk has a very limited understanding of anarchism in that he equates it with violence and revolution; see, for instance, MLA 49–50, 154, 385–97.

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rather of the exposure of a truth in action’ (CH 248). In his books The Communist Hypothesis ([2009] 2010) and The Meaning of Sarkozy ([2007] 2008), Badiou tries to rehabilitate the term ‘communism’. In his view the Idea of communism has not yet been fully realized and the fact that history presents us with multiple examples of communism that were implemented and failed does not prevent Badiou from continuing to pursue the Idea. It is a sign of his personal fidelity to the event of communism that he continues to reinstall it in philosophy and political thought. The continuous inspiration for Badiou is the Paris Commune (1871), whose failure was extensively commented on by Marx, Lenin and Mao, as well as the Cultural Revolution in China (1966–76), to which he remains faithful by calling himself a Maoist. He claims that ‘the apparent, and sometimes bloody, failures of events closely bound up with the communist hypothesis were and are stages in its history’ (CH 7–8) and, thus, the failure of communism in Stalinist Russia, and its terror, has its source in a point that ‘has been badly handled’ (CH 39). For Badiou, this means that the mistake lies in the choice of the party–state structure rather than in the Idea of communism as such: A point is a moment within a truth procedure (such as a sequence of emancipatory politics) when a binary choice [...] decides the future of the entire process [...]. Any failure can be located in a point. And that is why any failure is a lesson, which, ultimately, can be incorporated into the positive universality of the construction of a truth. Before that can be done, the point over which the choice proved to be disastrous must be located, found and reconstructed. (CH 39)

This is what Badiou attempts to do in his work: to search and theorize the point of failure of the past incarnations of the communist hypothesis. He claims that once we know this point, we are forbidden to fail again (CH 40). The Stalinist Terror, understood as the discontinuity of worlds, was an inevitable part of the event. Thus, Badiou questions whether we should abandon the communist hypothesis because ‘all the socialist experiments that took place under the sign of that hypothesis ended in “failure”’? He asks if we should abandon it, and consequently ‘renounce the whole problem of emancipation’ (see CH 6). His answer to this question is, of course, negative. For Badiou, ‘the crisis of the communist Idea is the very crisis of the political idea as such’ (PE 77), therefore there is no other option for politics than communism. In his conceptualization there is a choice between, on the one hand, ‘victorious renewal of the Communist hypothesis’ and so emancipation and, on the other, ‘warmongering capitalist-parliamentarianism’ and the status quo (SMP 125). However, there is no possible third way beyond capitalism and communism.

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For Badiou, the Idea of communism is the paradigm of equality for all humanity. It is a universal equality invariant applied in a particular world. It did not start with Marx and Engels and the political implementation of their ideas in the twentieth century but much earlier. The paradigm of equality was sowed not only by Christianity, as he argues in Saint Paul, but even before that: the Idea of communism was present in the revolt of Spartacus against the Romans. It can be also found in the sixteenth-century uprising led by Thomas Münzer. These are examples of ‘this practical existence of communist invariants’ (MS 100). Thus, ‘as a pure Idea of equality, the communist hypothesis has no doubt existed in a practical state since the beginnings of the existence of the state’ (MS 100). For Badiou, the mass political movements always referred to, and will always refer to, the ‘communist invariants’ – equality and freedom from oppression. Yet, each political situation, each world, will require its own local incarnation of the invariant (see Pluth 2010: 156). Thus the words ‘communism’ and ‘communist’ have to be taken in the generic sense that they have in the works of the young Marx. Communism should not be thought as an adjective attached to a word like ‘party’ – it should be thought ‘as a regulatory hypothesis enveloping the variable field and new organizations of emancipatory politics’ (SMP 155). It is an operation rather than a concept. The Idea of communism is the horizon of a new possibility of a future freed from capitalism, a structured inequality, in Badiou’s view: ‘the conviction that another political, collective and social world is possible: a world in no way founded on private property and profit’ (PE 14–15). It is the question of a completely new world, against the contemporary situation of ‘ethical ideology’ (human rights) and ‘warmongering capitalist-parliamentarianism’. What Badiou calls ‘the question of communism’ is the question whether there exists for humanity an authentic global alternative to what there is today (see PE 36). Communism is, therefore, a movement rather than a state, much less a political state or a party discipline. It proposes universality and equality to the whole of humanity (see PE 150–1). Badiou proposes two separate historical sequences of communism. In the first one he elaborates on the relation between ‘equality’ and ‘freedom’. He proposes the view in which ‘freedom’ in a capitalist democracy is given priority over equality, where most importantly ‘equality’ is subordinated to the ‘freedom of property’ (see PE 15). In contrast, in communism, ‘equality’ regulates ‘freedom’ in the sense that freedom should not influence equality to any considerable degree, hence the primacy of collective over private property (see PE 15). In the other sequence, Badiou analyses communist stages in history



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and the future of communism. The first stage was the Commune of Paris (1871) and the question of the duration of the communist hypothesis. The Commune failed and the problem of duration was passed on to the second stage of the communist hypothesis, that is, to Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution (1917). The problem of duration was solved by Lenin and Stalin through the introduction of the ‘iron discipline’: the party and the party-state. Stalin treated the question of the victory of communism as though it was a problem of a military type, which implied the destruction of the enemy (see CH 274). The failure of communism in Russia and China has taught us to ‘abandon once and for all the militarized paradigm of the Party’ and try to establish politics without parties (CH 277). The main political question that Badiou poses concerns the future of communism. We are currently poised before the third stage of communism and we have a choice to make (that is, in Badiou’s terms, we are at a point): either we remain in capitalism or we try to reinstall the communist hypothesis. In Badiou’s view, the continuation of the second stage of communism is not possible any more, the second stage is closed: Marxism, the workers’ movement, mass democracy, Leninism, the proletarian party, the Socialist state – all these remarkable inventions of the twentieth century – are no longer of practical use. At the theoretical level, they certainly deserve further study and consideration; but at the level of politics, they have become impracticable. This is a first point of essential awareness: the second sequence is closed, and it is no good trying to continue or restore it. (MS 113)

This is because ‘the communist hypothesis as such is generic, it is the basis of any emancipatory orientation […]. But the way that the hypothesis presents itself determines a sequence’ (MS 113–14). The aim for the third communist sequence is to reinvent the communist hypothesis in a completely different mode to the first and the second sequence (‘we must actually re-establish the hypothesis in the field of ideology and action’ (MS 116), ‘a new modality of existence of the hypothesis’ (MS 115)) in order to create a new world. It is the only sensible option Badiou sees for a collective action: ‘The communist hypothesis remains the right hypothesis […] and I do not see any other. If this hypothesis should have to be abandoned, then it is not worth doing anything in the order of collective action’ (MS 116). Collective means for Badiou ‘immediately universalizing’ and that is why an ‘event is ontologically collective to the extent that it provides the vehicle for a virtual summoning of all’. This also makes it political (see M 141). Thus, for Badiou the question of communism is the question of collectivity.

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If this is the case, the following question emerges: why still use the name communism if the Idea of communism is allegedly completely different from its historical realizations? Why keep to the name when Stalin has entirely discredited it? After all, it is the paradigm of equality that is crucial for Badiou. Why not invent a different name or simply remain without a name, with an unnamed event (x) to come? On the one hand, Badiou claims that the name communism is unimportant; it is as good a name as any other: ‘communist hypothesis – whatever words they use, as such words matter little’ (MS 110) or ‘In my terms, this is what I call the question of communism – but other names are possible’ (PE 36). However, he does not choose to call it differently. He also claims in a footnote, in an off-hand manner, that In a general sense, I prefer the struggle for a reappropriation of names to the pure and simple creation of new names, even if the latter is often required. That is why I also preserve without hesitation, and despite the sombre experiences of the last century, the fine word ‘communism’. (MS 91, n. 4)

Badiou uses ‘communism’ in the generic sense as pertaining to the whole of humanity and rejects the adjective use of the word like ‘communist parties’ or ‘communist State’, which is an oxymoron in his terms. Communism is thus a ‘set of intellectual representations’ (see MS 99). It is a regulatory idea: ‘In other words, communism is what Kant called an “Idea”, with a regulatory function, rather than a programme’ (MS 99). However, one could argue that it is impossible to erase completely the historical past of the communist Idea. To claim that communism as was practised in history is not ‘what communism really is’ and that Stalinism is a slippage at a particular point in history is not productive (see Kołakowski 2005: 1209).18 In a book edited by Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek entitled The Idea of Communism (2010), to which Badiou also contributes, one can see that most of the contributors try to show that the historical incarnations of communism have little to do with the Idea of communism that they are expounding.19 Such approaches to the subject of communism seem possible only from the perspective of a Western Marxism untouched by the historico-political reality of communism. From the perspective of the so-called post-communist countries to discuss communism as completely separate from On the inadequacy of Badiou’s communist Idea, see also Hallward 2008; Bensaïd 2009; Barot 2010; Khalfa 2009. 19 Only Jacques Rancière, Susan Buck-Morss and Alessandro Russo take into consideration historical aspects and their importance for thinking ‘something new […] under the name of communism’ (see Rancière 2010: 172; Russo 2010: 180–94; Buck-Morss 2010: 67–80). See also a book on the actuality of communism by Bosteels, where he says that the reappearance of the name communism ‘could be the leverage that opens up the present to the historicity of its possible alteration’ (Bosteels 2011: 9). 18



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its practical application in history, for instance, its embodiment in Leninist– Stalinist ideology and practice seems unviable. It comes down to ignoring the historical experience of communism as the Idea put into practice. This is an intellectual gesture that David Graeber describes in his ‘Revolution in Reverse’ (2007) in terms of who does the work of imagination in a society. He claims that extremely ‘lopsided structures of imaginative identification’ are produced in our society (13). Whereas the excluded are always preoccupied with the ones doing the excluding, the reverse is rarely the case. However, one can also transpose this analysis onto the attitude of the Western left towards the experience of post-communist countries, which seems to bear no relevance to the question of communism that Western Marxists discuss. Yet it is impossible to wish away or opt out of a historical legacy that is still very visible in post-communist countries. To do so would mean to presuppose the necessity of selective forgetting, of selectively disinheriting parts of history from thinking politics and political practice. Alternatively, as Bosteels puts it, it would mean ‘a push away from history and toward the affirmation of the eternity or, at the very least, the trans-historical availability of communism qua invariant Idea’ (Bosteels 2011: 275). Badiou proposes a form of Platonist Marxism and the question is whether this performative contradiction is productive for thinking about social transformation. If one ignores the practice side of implementing the Idea of communism into history then ‘With whom, with what subjective forces, can you imagine building this communism?’ (Rancière 2010: 175). How can one then talk about practice? To quote Rancière again, the question is: ‘how far can we name it communism at all?’ (Rancière 2010: 174). As Alessandro Russo points out the name ‘communism’, because of its historico-political application, has been split into two – the name in philosophy and the name in politics (Russo 2010: 190) – and what Badiou and other contributors to The Idea of Communism are discussing is the name in philosophy that is separate from history and from politics. This split enables them to ignore the importance of historical embodiments of the Idea of communism. Russo asks a series of important questions in his contribution. Can communism be a name for politics today, considering that communism still exists as the name of a powerful party-state: ‘How is one to deal with the Chinese Communist Party? Is it the same “communism”?’ (Russo 2010: 190). If one keeps to the name of communism then one will always be attached to the historical connotations of the word even if one does not want to repeat its failures. How operative, then, is communism as a name of social transformation and will it not backfire on its activists? As Russo (2010: 191) rightly remarks:

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Declaring ‘communism’ as the name for a contemporary political enterprise would soon lead to a deadlock. This is not to say that emancipatory and egalitarian political projects cannot exist, but how could the name ‘communism’ play the role of a basic cultural reference for revolutionaries? Where is a principle of the separation between true and false communism to be found?

Bosteels (2011: 18) echoes this concern when he asks: ‘is it possible to be a young communist today without being either an ignoramus (of history) or an ingénue (of morality)’? If both the name of ‘communism’ and the legacy of revolution are problematic then ‘today’s political creations must inevitably involve the invention of other names to designate projects of mass self-liberation’ (Russo 2010: 191) and also they must involve a different thinking about social transformation. This also provokes another question: why cannot that name be anarchism? Badiou places equality at the heart of the Idea of communism and equality is also the basic concept of contemporary anarchism.20 As Gianni Vattimo claims in the same volume: ‘We need an undisciplined social practice which shares with anarchism the refusal to formulate a system’ (Vattimo 2010: 207). In The Meaning of Sarkozy, Badiou questions the future of the Idea of communism and its third phase: The (workers’) movement of the nineteenth century and the (Communist) party of the twentieth century were forms of material presentation of the communist hypothesis. It is impossible to return to either of these. What then could be the moving force of this presentation for the twenty-first century? (MS 114)

The ‘class party’ is an idea that has been exhausted for Badiou. He claims, citing Marx, that communism ‘involves the most radical rupture with traditional association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ (CH 100). If we are poised before the third stage of communism and, as Badiou claims, we are looking for an authentic global alternative – social organizing beyond party-state, social change (allegedly) beyond revolution (see Hallward 2003: 41), free association based on equality invariant – then one has to ask why Badiou does not consider anarchism as a possibility, as an incarnation of the Idea of communism for the twenty-first century that is already taking place in practice now, particularly when one considers autonomous zones, the Occupy and Zapatista movements as forms Attaching anarchism to equality is what Todd May (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010) does in his work on Rancière. Some of Badiou’s ideas come close to the more ‘dogmatic and sectarian’ forms of anarchism for which revolution, a ‘decisive revolutionary rupture’, is the only form of radical social transformation (Schmidt and van der Walt 2009; see Davis 2012: 212–15).

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of contemporary progressive politics? If, according to Badiou, theories about ‘new forms of political organization’ are a defining feature of our times and if currently we are in ‘the era of the reformulation of the communist hypothesis’ (CH 66) then why not allow anarchism to be that third phase? It would be both a form of an overcoming of communism that has been historically discredited and a form of continuing the Idea of communism as equality invariant in a different manifestation. It would be submitting to a dialectic in which Badiou is interested. Badiou claims that: [a]ll emancipatory politics must put an end to the model of the party [...] in order to affirm a politics ‘without party’ and yet at the same time without lapsing into the figure of anarchism, which has never been anything else than the vain critique, or the double, or the shadow, of the communist parties. (CH 155)

Apart from his strict political convictions, it is not entirely clear why Badiou blatantly rejects anarchism when his ideas clearly point towards anarchism as the future embodiment of equality invariant.21 Anarchism is a political inexistent in the debates of French and French-influenced left-wing contemporary philosophers,22 and it seems it is high time for this inexistent to surge up and completely reformulate the terms of the contemporary debates on social transformation. As Todd May remarks, anarchism is ‘the neglected alternative of recent Western thought and practice’ (May 2008: 99). When Žižek comments on Badiou’s work: Badiou […] stresses that philosophy and politics should not be confused with each other. He claims in his text on the end of communism that the problem in relation to totalitarianism is that we still don’t have an appropriate socio-political theory with which we can analyse these of course deplorable phenomena like Nazism and Stalinism in their own conceptuality as political projects. (PP 57)

The problem seems to be rather the fact that neither Badiou nor Žižek wish to critically engage with anarchism as a possibility.23 The former’s communism is not able to mediate between the idea and the real, between philosophy and history/politics. It does seem that Badiou occasionally confuses philosophy with politics when his political views mould his ontology. The failure of Marxism Particularly when we consider anarchism as Todd May defines it in respect to Jacques Rancière’s work. There the key idea is also equality (see May 2008, 2010). On the similarity between Badiou’s and Rancière’s ideas see M 114–23. 22 Naturally with some rare exceptions, see for instance: Angaut et al. 2012; García 2007; the journal Réfractions, recherches et expressions anarchistes. 23 See also a discussion of Badiou and Žižek in this context in Newman 2007: 186–94. 21

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and of its historical incarnations does not invite us to reintroduce communism into history. But rather, it invites another kind of thinking, thinking that existed before Marx wrote ‘[the] history [of anarchism] has been that of a suppressed alternative, an unacknowledged “third way” forced to subsist in the shadows of Marxism and liberalism’ (May 1994: 44). It invites us to take anarchism seriously. As I argued above, Badiou is waiting for a very specific sort of event and anarchism does not fulfil his personal political requirements. Rather than waiting for the ‘unknown’ that would arrive together with a true event, Badiou is waiting for something he already knows. It is this truly ‘new’ that becomes neglected because it is not considered as a possibility. What is more, as I have already remarked, Badiou prefers to redefine the terms rather than construct a new framework of interpretation.24 One needs to ask, however, if it is really both conceptually and practically useful to continue applying the term communism to discuss ‘the common’. As Žižek remarks: ‘it is this reference to the “commons” which justifies the resuscitation of the notion of communism’ (Žižek 2010: 213). ‘The common’ is helpfully defined by Michael Hardt as: ‘the earth and all the resources associated with it: the land, the forests, the water, the air, minerals’ and also ‘the results of human labour and creativity, such as ideas, language, affects’ (Hardt 2010: 136–7). But ‘the common’ also includes being-in-common, the ‘togetherness of people with every other being such as animals, plants, even stars and stones’ (Nancy 2010: 147), ‘the common character of all beings: that they are’, the common that is space (see Nancy 2010: 152–3), that is equality invariant (Rancière 2010: 167–77; Badiou).25 ‘The common’ in this sense is tantamount to the being-with of spherology that I described in the chapter on Sloterdijk. It is co-immunism that originates in ‘the common’, in the shared, in the being-in-common. That is why, viewed from this perspective, thinking about ‘the common’ will not be surrendered if one stops using the word communism. Rather, new ways of conceptualization emerge together with new terminology, as we saw with Sloterdijk. This allows for a new conceptual re-ordering of the world and could be considered as a conceptual ‘event’ of a kind because it allows for new possibilities to be created. De-historicizing communism will not contribute to a more productive engagement with the Idea of ‘the common’ but rather it runs the risks of restricting the possibilities for thinking of  ‘the common’ should its results not be in line with a form of Marxism. As in my claim in Chapter 2: as much as Butler A similar view is explicitly defended by Michael Hardt (2010: 130) and implicitly by other contributors to Douzinas and Žižek’s edited volume The Idea of Communism. 25 See also in this context, Dardot and Laval 2014. 24



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is limited by her psychoanalytical framework in what she aims to achieve, the exploration of ‘the common’ is limited by communism. Co-immunism offers a new way to engage with ‘the common’ and if combined with anarchism it could allow for a full exploration of ‘the common’s’ potential on social and political level. To think in terms of slow social transformation means to combine all these frameworks – co-immunism, anarchism and mimesis – so that one can consider ‘the common’ in terms of a singularity that needs solidarity.

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Towards Anarchism Slow social transformation is happening continuously throughout society. Humans through orienting their mimesis produce spheres that become more habitable or less habitable, depending on their habits. In this chapter, I argue that slow social transformation, if oriented towards producing more habitable spheres, finds its fullest realization in contemporary anarchism in practice. Uri Gordon’s Anarchy Alive! (2008) describes anarchism in a way that makes it possible to consider it as an effective form of harnessing of slow social transformation. It is tantamount to collectively creating habitable spheres on a daily basis in the hope that other people or groups will be mimetically infected by the change that is implemented in anarchist collectivities. I demonstrate that both contemporary anarchism, as it is described by Gordon, and slow social transformation have at their centres the concept of solidarity with singularity. Because solidarity is not considered by Gordon to be at the heart of anarchism, this chapter will have to make a double gesture. It will have to demonstrate that anarchism is an actualization of slow social transformation as a political practice in that they both share solidarity with singularity as the central idea. And it will also have to show that neither equality nor domination, pace Todd May and Uri Gordon, are the most appropriate terms for understanding anarchism. In his compelling theoretical contributions to anarchism, May brings together Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière in order to provide a muchneeded theoretical support to anarchist thought.1 He links anarchism to two key ideas: equality, in Rancière’s understanding, and domination, in Foucault’s. Here I would like to detach anarchism from equality and stretch the concept of domination. Therefore, firstly, I argue that equality is not the most productive term for thinking about social change. It neither covers the diversity of anarchist concerns nor does it provide the most fruitful framework for thinking about Other notable thinkers who brought together postmodern and poststructuralist thought together with anarchism are: Lewis Call (2002) and Saul Newman (2001, 2010, 2016); on this poststructuralist anarchism or post-anarchism, see also Rousselle and Evren 2011; Amster et al. 2009.

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entities in the position of singularity. I contend that it is necessary to move away from the idea of equality in order to distance oneself from irruptive models of change such as Badiou’s idea of revolution, and to conceive of models appropriate for the twenty-first century. Replacing equality with solidarity will also mark the difference in this context between anarchism and Marxism,2 and will help us think of new frameworks in which to conceptualize the social change that is taking place in anarchist collectivities on a day-to-day basis. Secondly, I argue that it is necessary to broaden the concept of domination that both Gordon and May consider crucial for understanding anarchism. Domination focuses on particularity: on people or groups that are victims of coercion, exploitation or discrimination. I would like to stretch this concept to include singularity and, importantly, singularity beyond the concept of the human. That means including entities that are unintelligible from within the predominant framework of universality–particularity, and so they do not even occupy the position of the oppressed victim: of particularity. Although domination is an important concept, it does not fully account for all aspects of contemporary anarchist movements and all its concerns. It does not provide the most satisfactory framework for thinking about, for instance, anarchist activism in the field of environmental issues. A combination of Sloterdijk’s account of solidarity and Hegel–Butler singularity allows us both to expand the notion of domination and to give ontological reasons for our solidarity with the excluded entity. Solidarity with both dominated particularities and unrecognizable singularities seems to be the key mode of operation of contemporary anarchist practice. Although it is arguable whether anarchism is in need of a single umbrella term that gathers together its diversity,3 I would, nevertheless, like to suggest that solidarity with singularity is such a concept. By bringing together specific aspects of the work of G. W. F Hegel, Judith Butler, René Girard and Peter Sloterdijk, it is possible to come up with a theoretical structure to understand contemporary anarchism in practice and strengthen it. Slow social transformation is such a philosophical framework that could help us account for the diversity in contemporary anarchist activist movements. It permits thinking about social transformation beyond an exclusive concern for the human. It is a way to think about the collective production of habitable spheres not only for humans but also for the natural world. There are, however, thinkers who claim that anarchism is inseparable from Marxism. Overlaps between anarchism and Marxism can be found in Daniel Guérin, Georges Fontenis, Socialisme ou Barbarie, the Cohn-Bendits, Situationism and Anarcho-communism. 3 For instance, as I quoted in Chapter 4, Gianni Vattimo claims that it is the strength of anarchism that it does not have a system (see Vattimo 2010: 207). 2



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Away from equality There are two fundamental problems with equality that make it unsuitable for thinking about anarchism. Both problems are connected to the fact that equality is a concept that refers only to humans and their interaction with each other. The first problem is one of recognition: if homo sacer is not able to activate her presupposition of equality in very specific ways – through a dissent, protest, revolution or other political action – she will remain unintelligible. These specific ways of activating equality, however, also presuppose very specific entities that are able to activate their equality, making equality a concept that is relevant only to very particular types of people. The second problem is one of anthropocentrism. If one wished to stretch singularity beyond the human in order to incorporate such entities as animals or the environment, then its mode of operation and its presupposition cannot be subsumed under equality. Considering that not an insignificant part of anarchist activism is focused on non-anthropocentric struggles, for instance, animal liberation or ecological issues, the concept of equality leaves such activism entirely unaccounted for. I would like to show that it is necessary to abandon the idea of equality as the pivotal concept for thinking both social change and anarchism in order to be able to fully account not only for all entities that make up singularity (homo sacer, animals, the environment) but also for their singular (unintelligible) ways to affect universality. These arguments will become clearer when we briefly consider the mechanics of contemporary French equality discourses on the political left, and the deadlock that they fall into. Both Rancière and Badiou are representatives of ‘active’4 equality5 in the sense that in order for equality to work it has to be proclaimed or presupposed by singularity. It has to be activated by the oppressed entity. Singularity, which in Rancière is called ‘the part that has no part’ or ‘the count of the uncounted’, rises in order to disrupt a particular social arrangement. Through its intervention ‘the part that has no part’ questions a localized distribution of particularity and universality. According to Rancière, the rise of singularity happens out of a presupposition of equality. This presupposition activates ‘the part that has no part’. Equality in Rancière is, thus, defined as a presupposition A distinction between active and passive equality is convincingly argued by May. Rancière belongs to the former and distributive theories of justice with John Rawls, Amartya Sen and Robert Nozick belong to the latter (May 2008). 5 The similarity between Badiou and Rancière’s ideas is dealt with by Badiou himself in Metapolitics (M 107–23). Here, I am only interested in their similar views on the question of equality and how it works. 4

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rather than a demand6 and, as in Badiou, equality has to be activated in order to exist and operate. In this respect, Rancière and Badiou are very close to each other. This, as Christopher Watkin also argues, restricts us to a vision of equality as operating in the sphere of capability in that for Badiou not everybody is ‘ordained to equality’ (BE 409) because not everybody counts as a subject. Only those who are faithful to the Idea of communism, the idea of equality, count as such. That means that only those who act as equals are equal and therefore only a particular fraction of humanity is capable of equality. For Rancière, equality is postulated by speaking beings. He gives the examples of the Joseph Jacotot’s students, who learn autonomously using the method of ‘intellectual emancipation’, and plebeians on the Aventine Hill, who presume their equality with the patricians (Rancière 1991, 1999). These are human beings who, as May puts it in a way that hits the mark, ‘unless [they] are deeply damaged in some way, [are] capable of creating meaningful lives with one another’ (May 2010: 7). This ‘unless’ is precisely the point. Watkin (2013: 526) expresses it well when he says: What – or rather whom – these examples exclude, however, are those with an impairment sufficiently grave to bar them even from participating in a linguistic or educational context in the first place, a context where methods such as Jacotot’s or Menenius Agrippa’s can be deployed. This framework does not engage with those who cannot speak or understand orders (because of severe disability, senility, or extreme youth, for example), and therefore we can see that there are not simply two groups (say, the patricians and the plebeians) but three: in addition to the patricians who argue for inequality, and the plebeians who demonstrate their equality by speaking and understanding, there are those who have no share in the example as Rancière presents it, those without the capacity to enter a dialogic context in the first place.

This being the case, the question that emerges in respect to both Rancière and Badiou is the following: what about those who are not able to activate equality? What about the part of singularity that is not able to rise against a status quo or whose dissensus operates in a way that is imperceptible (cannot be recognized) by a current vision of universality that the concept of equality is a part of? What about singularity that does not operate in the usual ways we expect ‘the part that has no part’ to operate? In order to solve the problems inherent to active equality, that is, that equality can be postulated only in very concrete ways and only certain types of humans can accomplish it, a thinker like Jean-Luc Nancy is usually called upon. He For an excellent account of equality in Rancière, see May 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010.

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solves the problem of capability by positing ontological equality in the form of ‘being-in-common’. As we have already seen in the Butler–Hegel account, singularities are incommensurable with each other. This fact of having nothing in common, apart from their common incommensurability, is what makes them equal for Nancy (see Nancy 1996: 98–9). This is what Nancy calls the singular plural. The consequence of this position, however, as Watkin points out, is that ‘Nancy is unable, on the basis of this incommensurability alone, to distinguish between humans and animals, or indeed between humans and all living things, or even between human beings and any other thing at all’ (Watkin 2013: 528). Watkin calls this ‘the problem of equality’s unlimited expansion’ (528–9) because ‘the difficulty is around those who are included – animals, plants, all life …’ (534). And he, thus, concludes that ‘given the choice between the capacity problem [Badiou, Rancière] and the problem of unlimited expansion [Nancy], it would be preferable to grapple with the latter: better to work on restricting an overabundant notion of equality than on expanding an overly narrow one’ (534). And this is precisely where the problem of thinking in terms of equality is (accidentally) captured. The reasoning that I briefly outlined above, and the conclusion at which Watkin arrives in his ‘Thinking Equality Today: Badiou, Rancière, Nancy’ (2013), are, I would argue, symptomatic for contemporary French equality discourse on the political left. This is deeply problematic because such a discourse arrives at a deadlock and, in order to overcome it, ends up going in circles. To make things clear, I believe that Watkin presents a cogent argument but falls into the trap that is inherent to the concept of equality. It seems that it is impossible not to fall into it if one continues thinking in terms of equality. This is what makes Watkin’s article so symptomatic of discourses on equality, as it presents the end result of what equality discourses offer to us. That is, we come back to the point of departure and start using arguments that we criticized others for using in order to promote a particular vision of equality. Where does the problem lie? Let us recapitulate the line of thinking of someone who is not strictly a Rancièrean, Badiouian or Nancean but wants to elaborate the most egalitarian idea of equality, someone who wants to take the middle course. On the one hand, we reject Badiou and Rancière because they do not include all humanity in their idea of equality but then on the other hand we try to limit an all-encompassing idea of equality that Nancy proposes in order to include only humans. This is because what is tacitly assumed in this middle course position is that ‘animals, plants, all life’ cannot and somehow should not be included in the discourse on equality. In this view, we have to

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start restricting the ‘unlimited expansion’. Thus, we end up with a concept that is inherently based on exclusion – either certain types of people are not included in equality or anything that is not human is not included. We are going in circles because we want an opening up from Badiou and Rancière but a closing down from Nancy and the central problem of this whole operation is that we already know what the limit case is: it is the human. And, as we already know from Butler, there is nothing neutral about the concept of the human. The discourse on equality revolves around a specific concept of human which also means a specific configuration of universality. Equality ends up as being not only a purely anthropocentric concept but also one that needs specific exclusions to operate. We could respond, however, that exclusion is a characteristic feature of all universality, even one as accommodating as Butler’s circulating universality, and that is also why equality as a form of universality operates through exclusion. The problem, however, is that equality is not an open concept, as is Butler’s universality in translation, because, as we saw, once it radically opens up in Nancy’s conceptualization, the tendency is to restrict it again. This need to restrict it kicks in because otherwise there is not much one can do with it politically. Equality is the key concept of the projects of emancipation of the left-wing politics. If it remains on the level of ontology as a static concept (that is, we are equal because there is nothing common about us apart from our shared incommensurability) then it is useless as a concept for politics. Badiou and Rancière are keenly aware of this point. And even if we still wanted to pursue the path suggested by Nancy of radical equality, the question remains whether Nancy provides us with enough tools to develop thinking of ontological equality in a more affirmative and active way: if there are enough building blocks in Nancy to translate ontological equality onto the level of practice and in this way to activate it.7 Ontological equality seems to be an end point of this perspective and raises a serious doubt whether such an engagement with Nancy would bring fruitful results. If we want to activate ontological equality then problems with capacity begin, as in Badiou or Rancière. In this way equality is a self-inhibiting concept – it stumbles over itself. And that is also why one needs a different framework to overcome the issues inherent to equality. Nancy seems to guard himself from a potential activation of his ideas: see for instance Nancy’s postface to Martin Crowley’s L’Homme sans (2009). Although Nancy is wary of making his ideas politically active, there are some interesting attempts in that direction (Crowley 2009, 2013; Vieira and Marder 2011). What I am trying to suggest in this project is that Sloterdijk, whose point of departure for thinking ontology is, similarly to Nancy, Heidegger’s being-with, offers perhaps more rewarding material to accomplish this than Nancy.

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Let us now turn to the accusation that anthropocentrism is directly related to the problem of the limits of equality. One could rightly ask: what is so problematic about equality revolving around the human? Why not strike a middle course between Badiou–Rancière and Nancy with the figure of the human – a position that hovers implicitly in Watkin’s approach. Again, the best response can be found in Butler’s work, which I discussed in detail in Chapters 1 and 2: there is nothing neutral about the concept of the human because there is nothing neutral about a specific configuration of universality at a certain point in history. A society is mapped into singularities, particularities and universalities, and a large part of humanity still belongs to the category of singularity. Declarations of the equality of entities whose actions are not recognized as human actions run the risk of not being recognized as valid, especially if those in the position of singularity happen to declare it in ways that are different from the standard procedure of a ‘declaration of equality’, namely, uprisings, revolutions, protests and obstructive sit-ins in public spaces. So there is already a prescribed or pre-established series of steps to express one’s presupposition of equality that belongs to a particular vision of universality, and it does not leave much space for unthought-of options. That is why thinking about social transformation in terms of equality does not address the core of the problem. This does not mean that equality as a value is unimportant, but rather that we need to change the framework to permit the possibility that other concepts might work better to achieve what equality discourses want to achieve. Equality is the basis of projects of emancipation whose end point, I would argue, is providing conditions for flourishing and persisting for all. And it is this all, and who belongs to this all, that is precisely the bone of contention. Gordon gives a good historical example of the question of recognition at the heart of equality discourses when he says ‘many of the authors of the US Declaration of Independence, who proclaimed that “all men are created equal”, were at the same time slaveholders and benefactors of the genocidal dispossession of North America’s indigenous peoples’ (Gordon 2009: 263–4). Or one can think of the agora in Ancient Greece and the fact that women, slaves and metics (resident aliens) were not included in the definition of ‘all Athenians citizens’. Precisely who is counted in the term all is a key question at the very heart of the concept of equality which is, however, absent from discourses on equality. This is precisely the question of the relation between universality and singularity that Butler has been focusing on throughout her entire work. And here the concern is not only about the capacity to take an already established (legitimate) path of how to declare equality but rather, and

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more acutely, about not being recognized as an entity that fits the category of ‘someone or something that resists’. To think in terms of equality before one considers the question of who counts as equal is putting the cart before the horse. The term ‘equality’ always risks excluding too many entities. That is also why one needs to ask if it is useful to think in terms of equality about social change. The true problem is that we are too limited in our thinking about social transformation. The concept of equality limits our understanding of social change and the world around us. It limits it to humans only. The fact is that the world is not made of humans only. We share space with animals and plants. We are surrounded by the environment. We are placed in an atmosphere with which we have a symbiotic relationship – we cannot live without air or without water. That is why we should consider options that exceed the category of the human. Next to homo sacer, entities like animals or the environment belong to the category of singularity. And as singularity they need to first be recognized, they need to enter the circulation, in order to reformulate universality. In a sense we should go beyond Butler and find a way to activate Nancy’s ontological equality. This is where Sloterdijk can be of help. As I pointed out above, the human-only limitation is inherent to equality. This leads to ‘the problem of unlimited expansion’ (the inclusion of animals, plants and all life), which is in reality an artificial problem. Because of its limitations, equality is not able to account for a non-anthropocentric view of the world and that is why we need a more radical concept that transgresses the human at the outer limit of equality. We need to expand thinking on social transformation towards animals, plants and the environment because the problems that we face today and in the twenty-first century are not related only to humans but also to the natural spheres which we inhabit.8 This is because the human, as we know from Heidegger through Butler and Sloterdijk, is an ek-static being and that is why she is intimately connected to the outer world. We need a framework that encompasses all these concerns: not only singularity in the form of homo sacer, but also singularity in the form of the natural world. Singularity should be expanded to include everything that is in need to persist and flourish. That is why we need to abandon equality as key concept and start thinking in terms of solidarity with singularity and in terms of co-immunity. I argue that anarchism is the umbrella term that could be applied to all the diverse See Nancy (1997: 157–8; 1996: 160; 2015: 38–41, 53–60) on the limits of environmental thinking. See on an ecocentric approach towards nature: Katz et al. 2000; Katz 2000; Rolston 1988, 2012.

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contemporary social movements that are concerned with this widely understood singularity. Here, I suggest a theoretical and philosophical framework that could help to account for this diversity in contemporary activist and anarchist movements, and help us think about social transformation beyond an exclusive concern for the human. Solidarity with singularity and, directly related to it, the theory of co-immunism would constitute such terms. This would be a way to re-conceptualize and broaden in scope the concern that lies at the very bottom of equality discourses: providing the conditions for the persisting and flourishing of all (entities). All these concerns are at the bottom of the question of co-immunity and are constitutive of slow social transformation.

Solidarity with singularity and contemporary anarchism In his book Anarchy Alive!, Gordon describes from the perspective of practice what makes up contemporary anarchism and how contemporary social movements work towards social transformation. His description is important for thinking of slow social transformation because on the practice level anarchism mirrors the focus of slow social transformation on singularity. However, as Gordon is not able to propose a single term that would capture the diversity of anarchism, he analyses it using a cluster of concepts. He takes political culture and resistance to domination as his two key concepts. He supplements them with additional satellite terms such as prefigurative politics (direct action), diversity and open-ended goals (see Gordon 2008: 29). By gathering together overlapping interests of different activist movements and their similar modes of operation, he creates a kind of family resemblance among anarchist initiatives. In that way he is able to account for the wide variety of anarchisms. In the following sections, I argue that on a theoretical level there is an alternative way to account for what Gordon describes. I suggest that by combining specific aspects of the work of G. W. F. Hegel, Judith Butler, René Girard and Peter Sloterdijk it is possible to come up with a more suitable theoretical structure to understand contemporary anarchism in practice. It is possible to find a single umbrella term that is able to gather together their diversity. I argue that solidarity, rather than equality or domination, especially solidarity with singularity, is the concept that offers such a structure. By doing this, I reconfigure Gordon’s description of anarchism and concentrate it around this single concept. This will allow for the inclusion of a whole spectrum of entities that were only partly explained from within Gordon’s perspective. In what follows, I will first

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present Gordon’s description of contemporary anarchism in practice, focusing on elements that bring it close to slow social transformation. Then I turn to May and Gordon’s understanding of domination and argue that it is necessary to expand this concept because otherwise one is not able to properly account for the anarchist concern for singularity beyond the homo sacer. For instance, the struggles of the eco-activists and the question of environment do not easily offer themselves for consideration from within domination analysis. Finally, I elaborate on solidarity with singularity, focusing on its non-anthropocentric aspects. Gordon summarizes his central argument in Anarchy Alive! in the following way: ‘anarchism today is rooted in the intersections and convergences among diverse social movements, whose contributions to defining a new terrain of radical politics since the 1960s have accumulated to shape the present movement’s culture and priorities’ (Gordon 2008: 29). In order to describe contemporary versions of anarchism, he distinguishes between ‘Old School’ and ‘New School’ anarchism based on their respective political cultures. Whereas the former ‘work[s] more closely within the traditional political culture of the anarchist movement established before the Second World War’, the ‘New School’ anarchism is a twenty-first century version as it is practised today in activist groups. In the political culture of the Old School anarchism in contrast to New School, as Gordon states, [o]rganizing typically means working in formal organisations with elected positions, rather than as individuals or in informal groups. Decisions are more often made in a debate-and-vote format rather than by facilitated consensus. Workplace organising, anti-militarist actions and publishing are more prominent than ecological and identity struggles, communal experiments and non-Western spirituality. (Gordon 2008: 25)

He (2008: 25) emphasizes that the above distinction, although valid, ‘should not be taken to mean a sectarian attitude’, as both orientations work together frequently and smoothly in local contexts. Owing to this approach through political culture, Gordon cuts through inter-anarchist squabbles about who counts as an anarchist. He includes anarchists of all sorts: The breadth and diversity of what could ‘count’ as anarchist expression is indeed hard to place in bounds. […] The concept of political culture allows us to approach anarchism from the ground up, putting organization, action and lifestyle on the same footing with ideas and theories. We can thus separate anarchism from any expectation of a fixed dogma or precise ideology. (Gordon 2008: 27)



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Gordon is particularly interested in contemporary New School anarchism and this is also where slow social transformation finds its counterpart. He captures this contemporary anarchism very well in the following passages: The anarchist movement as we see it today in advanced capitalist countries is not a direct genealogical descendant of the nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury thread of libertarian-socialist militancy, which was effectively wiped out by the end of the Second World War. (Gordon 2009: 261) Instead, the roots of today’s anarchist networks can be found in the process of intersection and fusion among radical social movements since the 1960s, whose paths had never been overtly anarchist. These include the radical, direct-action end of ecological, anti-nuclear and anti-war movements, and of movements for women’s, black, indigenous, LGBT and animal liberation. Accelerating networking and cross-fertilization among these movements led to a convergence of political cultures and ideas alongside and (to be honest) way ahead of the conventional Left (whether social-democrat, liberal or Marxist). The conditions for a full-blown anarchist revival reached critical mass around the turn of the Millennium. (Gordon 2008: 5)

He continues: While often drawing directly on the anarchist tradition for inspiration and ideas, the re-emergent anarchist movement is also in many ways different from the left-libertarian politics of hundred, and even sixty, years ago. Networks of collectives and affinity groups replace unions and federations as the organisational norm. The movement’s agendas are broader: ecology, feminism and animal liberation are as prominent as anti-militarism and workers’ struggles. […] A stronger emphasis is given to prefigurative direct action and cultural experimentation […]. These qualitative changes add up to something of a paradigm shift in anarchism, which is today thoroughly heterodox and grounded in action. (Gordon 2008: 5–6)

To this focus on action and heterodoxy, he also adds as its constitutive concepts the open-endedness of the movement’s goals and its diversity. In order to describe the anarchist organization, Gordon invokes Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s concept of the ‘rhizome’: a ‘decentralised global network of communication, coordination and mutual support among countless autonomous nodes of social struggle, overwhelmingly lacking formal membership or fixed boundaries’ (Gordon 2008: 14). This structure bears similarity to Sloterdijk’s foam because of the non-linearity, multiplicity, diversity and plurality of connection between different anarchist collectivities. Moreover, the lack of

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hierarchy between anarchist collectives as well as the significance of spatiality makes foam an appropriate structure for describing anarchism. An important argument that Gordon makes is that contemporary anarchism is not a form of democracy but a completely different political model. That provides further reasons to substitute equality with solidarity as the key operative concept of contemporary anarchism, pace May. The latter claims that ‘equality is the touchstone of a democratic politics’ (May 2009: 16) and because, as he states, equality is at the heart of anarchism, anarchism is part of democratic politics. Gordon’s account of contemporary anarchism is particularly interesting for the project of slow social transformation because for Gordon contemporary anarchism does not represent ‘the most radical form of democracy, but an altogether different paradigm of collective action’ (Gordon 2008: 70). This is because of the absence of enforcement in anarchist collectivities. Gordon claims: Democratic discourse assumes without exception that the political process results, at some point, in collectively binding decisions. That these decisions can be the result of free and open debate by all those affected does not change the fact that the outcome is seen to have a mandatory nature. Saying that something is collectively binding makes no sense if each person is to make up their own mind over whether they are bound by it. Binding means enforceable, and enforceability is a background assumption of democracy. But the outcomes of anarchist process are inherently impossible to enforce. That is why the process is not ‘democratic’ at all, since in democracy the point of equal participation in determining decisions is that this is what legitimates these decisions’ subsequent enforcement. (Gordon 2008: 69–70)

Whereas the democratic process is driven by accountability (‘demands backed by sanctions’), ‘the entire edifice of anarchist organising is built on pure voluntarism’ (Gordon 2008: 76). All decisions are made by consensus, rather than by vote, and this is what makes most sense for anarchists, considering the diversity of agendas and interests of its participants: In groups and networks thoroughly predicated on voluntary association, compliance with collective decisions is also voluntary. Consensus is the only thing that makes sense when minorities are under no obligation or sanction to comply, because consensus increases the likelihood that a decision will be voluntarily carried out by those who made it. (Gordon 2008: 70)

Because the contemporary anarchist movement is not only based on voluntarism but is also decentralized and autonomous, permanent enforcement



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would be a practical impossibility without replicating the means of enforcement used by the state (such as a police force, legal consequences and prison). The fact that anarchism is decentralized links it with the model of slow social transformation. Without a centre, a state or a centralized driving force, transformation is dispersed and necessarily slow because of this dispersion throughout the society foam. Gordon claims that since enforcement is absent from anarchist structures ‘human relations in activist networks […] follow anarchist patterns almost by default’ (Gordon 2008: 69). In this system, it seems that solidarity would be the concept that motivates this voluntarism, and is at the centre of the contemporary anarchism that Gordon describes. Both May and Gordon share the conviction that contemporary anarchism circles around the concept of domination. In their view, resistance to domination is of crucial importance for understanding and defining anarchism. In order to mark the difference between anarchism and Marxism, May proposes the term domination rather than exploitation. He argues convincingly that exploitation, as a fundamentally Marxist term, concentrates all fundamental problems of human relations in one area: the economic sphere. It assumes not only that society can be transformed if we address its central, economy-related problem (what we previously saw as Badiou’s void of the situation), but it also works with an implicit assumption that only those who have expertise in the problematic field can lead political resistance. It presupposes an avant-garde party (see May 2009: 12). In contrast to this centralized idea of social intervention, domination is, as May puts it, a much more elastic concept. It can be defined as ‘referring more broadly to oppressive power relations’ (May 2009: 12) not only in the economic sphere but also in other realms of social experience: race, gender, sexuality, education and family structures. If one looks at the key problems of human relations through the lens of domination, any form of vanguard is automatically precluded because ‘political struggle occurs across too many registers. There may be experts in this or that form of domination, but there are no experts in domination’ (May 2009: 12). As May (2009: 12) explains succinctly: If domination is elastic, then its different appearances are irreducible to a specific form of domination. For instance, gender domination may be related to exploitation, but it is not reducible to exploitation. They may well intersect, and probably do. But each has its own character that requires its own analysis and intervention. Local and intersected analyses of social and political phenomena replace the single, overarching analysis that encompasses all social space. We must understand the history and character of a particular form of domination, how it works, and how it relates to, reinforces, and is reinforced by, other forms.

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May’s understanding of domination is influenced by Foucault’s ideas on power – that power is not only restrictive but also creative. It works anonymously on the subject: Since power is not simply a matter of what A does to B, but can be a matter of who A is made to be by the practices in which she is engaged, then it is possible that A can be oppressed without there being a B that actually does the oppressing. (May 2009: 14)

That is why anarchists cannot simply say that all power relations are bad because they are power relations. Rather, they need to have a closer look at a particular arrangement of power, and see which relations are oppressive and which are not (see May 2009: 14).9 With this understanding of power and domination, May makes a valuable contribution to the anarchist view of oppression and provides anarchism with a theoretical catch-up. Gordon shares such an approach. For him, resistance to all forms of domination characterizes the anarchist movement: ‘The function of the concept of domination, as anarchists construct it, is to express the encounter with a family resemblance10 among the entire ensemble of such social dynamics that are struggled against’ both on macropolitical and micro-political levels (Gordon 2008: 32). And ‘any act of resistance is, in the barest sense, “anarchist” when it is perceived by the actor as a particular actualization of a more systemic opposition to domination’ (Gordon 2008: 34). Belonging to an oppressed group is not a matter of choice: Because of their compulsory nature, regimes of domination are […] something that one cannot just ‘opt out of ’ under normal circumstances. Women or non-white people encounter discrimination, access barriers and derogatory behaviour towards them throughout society, and cannot simply remove themselves from their fold or wish them away. (Gordon 2008: 33)

That is also why heightened sensitivity to all forms of domination is so characteristic of anarchist movements. The perspective of domination is valuable, but it is necessary to point out that the way both May and Gordon describe domination gravitates towards the concept of particularity. Women and non-white people possess a politically recognized place of the enunciation of the afflicted particular in the Western world. They are entities that ‘deserve’ to be called victims because they are intelligible from within a current version of May adds: ‘This makes political inquiry unavoidably moral, a point that Marxists have often missed’ (May 2009: 14). He describes this aspect in more detail in The Moral Theory of Poststructuralism (1995). 10 Gordon draws the idea of family resemblance from Wittgenstein (see Gordon 2008: 32). 9



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universality. Their domination is intelligible. The question is, however, how to account for entities whose oppression is unrecognizable even from within the domination framework. Gordon claims that in the late 1990s, various groups – radical feminists, ecoand queer activists, anti-racists, animal liberation militants, anti-nuclear and anti-war protesters – ‘finally fused’ ‘through the global wave of protest against the policies and institutions of neo-liberal globalisation’ (Gordon 2008: 31–2). The convergence of these different groups and their agendas constitute contemporary anarchism. Domination as a category – although important – does not allow us to mirror this whole spectrum of interests of anarchist movements. For instance, to consider environmental concerns, such as air and water pollution, from the perspective of domination seems inadequate. It does not account for our relation to the environment in the most productive way. My claim is that what is common to all these anarchist groups is solidarity with an entity in a position of vulnerability, with the singularity of a situation. Here I expand the notion of domination to comprise not only dominated particularity but also completely excluded singularity. I argue that the concern for singularity makes up the contemporary anarchism that Gordon describes. That is why I suggest that the concept of solidarity with singularity that is also at the heart of slow social transformation is at the centre of anarchist concerns, and successfully accounts for the diversity of anarchist movements.11 Solidarity with (localized) singularity is a key concept that unites the efforts of these different activist groups, be it environmental issues, the abuse of animals or discrimination towards the transgender or Palestinian struggles. It is solidarity with singularity, beyond the question of the human, beyond the homo sacer, that is at the centre of anarchist concerns. In the theoretical account of slow social transformation this opening beyond anthropocentrism and the centrality of the concept of solidarity is enabled by Sloterdijk’s philosophy. Singularity in anarchist practice is immediately opened up to include anything in need of solidarity: animals, the environment or humans.12 Slow social transformation Admittedly, Gordon mentions ‘a culture of solidarity’ (see Gordon 2008: 76–7, 16–17). However, it occupies a marginal place in Gordon’s account and when it appears it is considered only as a relation between humans. Although solidarity hovers in his account, it is not considered central for understanding contemporary anarchism in practice and it also has a more restricted meaning to the one I attempt to propose here. 12 Solidarity as a concept does not occupy a central place in anarchism. Some theorists even claim that anarchism has nothing to contribute towards understanding the concept of solidarity as such (Stjernø 2005: 57–8). Ruth Kinna observes that in this sense there is a gap in the anarchist literature on solidarity (see Kinna 2012: 316). As some non-anarchist political theorists observe, solidarity ‘has seldom been the object of an elaborated theory’ (Bayertz 1999: 4). 11

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accounts on a philosophical level for what Gordon describes as contemporary anarchism in practice. In order to support that claim, I briefly recapitulate my argument on the concept of singularity. In the description of slow social transformation throughout this project, singularity has been considered and reformulated in relation to three thinkers: Hegel, Butler and Sloterdijk. Starting with Hegel, I defined singularity and its relation to particularity and universality. There I demonstrated that singularities are entities that do not share particular categories with any other entities and therefore they are banned from the sphere of the particular: they constitute a certain trace or a remainder from the particular–universal dyad. Having established Hegel’s definition of singularity, I moved to Butler’s singularity in the sphere of the political. Singularity in Butler revolves around the concept of the homo sacer and should be understood as a ‘flickering category’. That means that it is an instance that appears and disappears – at some moments it becomes visible and at other times not. This lack of a defined political place of enunciation makes singularity a blurred concept that is particularly challenging to consider. For Butler, singularity is constitutive of who we are because without its exclusion and its inherent excess it would not be possible to particularize and universalize entities. What is more, it hovers around the concept of a human being. It focuses on persons or groups that are exploited, controlled, coerced and discriminated against but not recognized as ones whose suffering counts. They are unrecognizable from within a specific distribution of particularity and universality in a given context. The third time singularity was reformulated was when I considered the work of Peter Sloterdijk. This reformulation was necessary in order to develop a non-anthropocentric version of singularity. I demonstrated that Sloterdijk’s concept of the so-called ‘nobject relation’ could be, in fact, considered as a relation of singularity. From the perspective of spherology, then, one’s primary solidarity is with singularity. Nobject is ‘the unabandonable intimate something, without whose presence and resonance the subject cannot be complete’ (S I 467). Nobject, like singularity, is an entity that cannot be captured by the available partage of the categories of universality and particularity. This unintelligible entity is connected with us through solidarity. Sloterdijk proposes air as an example of a nobject relation. In that way, he posits singularity beyond the human and offers an interesting theoretical approach towards the environment. He is able to account convincingly for our reasons for solidarity with the natural world. From Sloterdijk’s perspective, solidarity is the primary relation between a human being and the surrounding world. That is why, in order to account



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for eco-activism in anarchist movements, Peter Sloterdijk’s work is particularly helpful. Whereas it seems awkward to use the concept of domination to account for environmental concerns, such as air or water pollution, with Sloterdijk’s idea of nobject it is possible. The concept of singularity encompasses all anarchists’ concerns: both singularity in the form of a homo sacer and singularity in the form of the natural world. Instead of domination, it seems that solidarity with singularity could be a term that is able to account for all the diverse contemporary social movements that Gordon brings together under the umbrella term: contemporary anarchism in practice. By sharing this key concept, slow social transformation finds its political actualization in contemporary anarchism in practice. It provides ontological reasons for solidarity.

Directed mimesis, contagion and anarchist r/evolution Gordon’s contemporary anarchism shares with slow social transformation the idea of non-revolutionary forms of social change.13 The anarchist idea is to enact a society that one wishes to live in rather than to wait for a revolution to happen: ‘The strategic outlook already prevalent among anarchists is that the road to revolution involves the proliferation of urban and rural projects of sustainable living, community-building and the development of skills and infrastructures’ (Gordon 2008: 107). Gordon rightly observes in his argument against revolution: ‘The moment one focuses merely on the seizure of state power, and maintains authoritarian organization, for that purpose while leaving the construction of a free society for “after the revolution”, the battle has already been lost’ (Gordon 2008: 37). To support his claims he refers to two famous passages in the anarchist tradition, one from Emma Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia ([1923] 2003): All human experience teaches that method and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and For other anarchist thinkers who also explicitly engage in elaborating a non-revolutionary form of anarchism see, in particular, Graeber 2004, 2007, Day 2005 and Davis 2012 for a good overview and discussion of non-revolutionary anarchism. Davis comments on what Graeber and Gordon propose: ‘it reflects a very significant and growing trend in the contemporary anarchist movement and beyond which is creatively redefining revolutionary struggle for the twenty-first century’ (Davis 2012: 224). According to Davis, the greatest contribution to the creative re-imagination of the revolutionary tradition is ‘the recognition that revolution can no longer plausibly be conceived as a singular, totalizing break with past structures of oppression, but must instead be regarded as an ongoing and indeed never-ending historical process’ (Davis 2012: 228). The question is, however, if one should still use the term revolution for that form of change. I have attempted to argue throughout this project that revolution is an inappropriate term for this form of social transformation.

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social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it and presently the aims and means become identical. (Goldman 2003: 260)

The other famous anarchist fragment against the revolutionary understanding of social change is a frequently quoted excerpt from Gustav Landauer’s ‘Weak Statesmen, Weaker People!’ ([1910] 2010), which states: ‘The state is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; i.e. by people relating to one another differently’ (Landauer 2010: 214). This is what Gordon calls ‘anarchist r/evolution’ (Gordon 2008: 128) and what I have accounted for theoretically as slowpaced social transformation. It is living social transformation every day by repeating practices that create more habitable spheres. As Gordon says ‘a central motivation for anarchist action […] lies in the desire to inhabit, to the greatest extent possible, social relations that approximate anarchists’ ideals for society as a whole’ (Gordon 2009: 271). And through this ‘the most effective anarchist propaganda will always be the actual implementation and display of anarchist social relations’ (Gordon 2009: 272). This is because firstly, and this is a mimetic point: It is much easier for people to engage with the idea that life without bosses or leaders is possible when such a life is displayed, if on a limited scale, in actual practice rather than being argued for on paper. (Gordon 2008: 38–9)

And secondly: People would be much more attracted to becoming part of a movement that enriches their own lives in an immediate way, than they would joining a mass movement in which their desires and needs are suspended for the sake of advancing the ‘thankless’ work of the revolutionary organisation. (Gordon 2008: 39)

The similarity between slow social transformation and what Gordon describes is particularly well captured in the passage on habit and inspiration in anarchist collectivities: People can initiate change in their own organizational practices, taking initiative to create habits of resource-sharing and of reflective and considerate use of informal power, displaying that agenda and hopefully inspiring others to follow suit. If these practices catch on, then resource-sharing and solidarity will have become something that people keep in mind by default. (Gordon 2008: 77)

The idea of a practice that ‘catches on’ and a ‘habit’ that ‘people keep in mind by default’ is what has been accounted for theoretically as Girard’s mimetic



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contagion and Sloterdijk’s Foucauldian-inspired idea of  ‘life in forms of practice’ (MLA 4).14 Slow social transformation and anarchism are forms of training: an individual habit becomes a social practice and affects the world around us. Solidarity, as I have argued in my discussion of Sloterdijk, is based on shared space and that is also what connects it to contemporary anarchism and its practices. Anarchist initiatives are about creating habits that will infect the adjacent microspheres and spread the contagion of change. The basic unit of contemporary anarchism is an affinity group that it is possible to link to Sloterdijk’s foam or collectivity of heterogeneity.15 Similar to the structures in slow-paced transformation, an affinity group is based on cooperation, solidarity and community. As Gordon remarks: While networks, rhizomes and banners express the movements’ architecture on a macro level, it should be clarified that the bulk of ongoing activity takes place on the micro level. In this context, the most oft-mentioned constituent of anarchist organising is the ‘affinity group’. The term refers to a small and autonomous group of anarchists, closely familiar to each other, who come together to undertake a specific action – whether in isolation or in collaboration with other affinity groups. (Gordon 2008: 15)

An affinity group can be either more permanent (in establishing a housing project, a publishing house, a cooperative farm) or less permanent – in a short-term coming together for the purpose of one activity: guerrilla planting of trees in an urban space, alternative spectacles, festivals, parody (see Day 2005; Newman 2009). Activity in such collectivities is important because they create spaces that function according to rules that are different from the ‘society’ around them. They are slowly taking over space through establishing alternatively functioning structures. For Gordon, ‘the attempt to live outside [structures of domination] is already an act of resistance’ (Gordon 2008: 33). Building a community or a collectivity that works differently from the oppressive structures around it is already an act of localized social transformation. It means creating an alternative structure, an alternative microclimatic May also takes into consideration Foucault’s ‘life in practice’ but focuses on the tension between the aesthetic and the moral aspect of the arts of existence (see, in particular, May 1995: 135–46). I am, in turn, more interested in the training and contagion aspect of ‘aesthetic living’. 15 The difference between these two terms here lies in their emphasis: in the collectivity of heterogeneity the emphasis lies on the aspect that singularity will always be produced in whatever collectivity, in whatever cooperative and solidarity affinity group. Any community must be aware of that aspect in the local production of universality. In the case of Sloterdijk’s foam, the emphasis lies more on the co-immunity aspect and on the ways (techniques, technologies) of practicing solidarity with singularity. 14

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space that is good to live in for the dominated person in question by providing her with co-immunity. Such an alternative is also created in the hope of affecting and inspiring people who encounter it. Or, if we combine the language of Sloterdijk and Girard, we can say that alternative spaces in contemporary anarchism (housing projects, squats, cooperative farms, autonomous zones) are bubbles and foam that provide co-immunity structures. These give support to the oppressed and also create models that will, it is hoped, infect adjacent spaces and so will spread the contagion of change. That is also why Sloterdijk’s theory of space is so interesting for thinking of anarchism on an abstract level. It is able to account for the efforts that are directed at space: taking over spaces and transforming them into livable atmospheres. It allows the promotion of a different concept of agency that is based on mimesis and training. With Butler and Foucault, I erased the traditional concept of agency in order to propose one that spreads in collectivities through mimetic contagion and is anchored in structural failure, from which resistance arises. The introduction of radical heterogenic spaces such as anarchist collectivities has disruptive qualities in that it shows there is an alternative to the status quo and has an infectious effect on adjacent spaces, on adjacent bubbles in the foam that is ‘society’. Such collectivities of heterogeneity present much needed mimetic models that would present itself for imitation. They are also important because they are starting points of transformative contagion for the future: ‘the collectives, communes and networks of today are themselves the groundwork for the realities that will replace the present society. Collectively run grassroots projects are, on this account, the seeds of a future society “within the shell of the old”’ (Gordon 2008: 37). Contemporary anarchism, as a form of slow social transformation, is a continuous activity located in the present rather than a dream of the future; it is a matter of the arts of existence, rather than rare events that revolutionize the world; it is a question of living, rather than of demanding.16 In its practices, anarchism actualizes the assumption that humans are mimetic beings who build and share spheres with other entities in the world. Because one is already an active, mimetic being that establishes habits through repetition, social transformation is a question of putting oneself in an environment Saul Newman calls it ‘enacted utopia that emerges in the present, from present conditions, and that, at the same time, affirms a radical break with the present and the invention of something completely new’ (Newman 2009: 211). Gordon, like Newman, also attaches his idea of anarchism to a certain reformulation of utopianism (see Gordon 2009; see also on the connection between anarchism and utopianism: Davis and Kinna 2009).

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that offers ‘the right’ models for imitation and of directing one’s mimesis. It means directing it towards habits that improve the spheres we inhabit not only for ourselves but also for other humans, animals, plants, the environment surrounding us. It means directing mimesis towards solidarity with singularity because singularity is what is constitutive of our existence. Anarchism realizes this intuition about human beings and their relation to the surrounding world. That is why slow social transformation is actualized to its fullest in contemporary anarchism.

Impure universality and slow social transformation In a passage at the end of You Must Change Your Life, Sloterdijk composes something of a co-immunist manifesto, when he observes: The history of the own that is grasped on too small a scale and the foreign that is treated too badly reaches an end at the moment when a global co-immunity structure is born, with a respectful inclusion of individual cultures, particular interests and local solidarities. This structure would take on planetary dimensions at the moment when the earth, spanned by networks and built over by foams, was conceived as the own, and the previously dominant exploitative excess as the foreign. With this turn, the concretely universal would become operational. The helpless whole is transformed into a unity capable of being protected. A romanticism of brotherliness is replaced by a cooperative logic. Humanity becomes a political concept. Its members are no longer travellers on the ship of fools that is abstract universalism, but workers on the consistently concrete and discrete project of a global immune design. Although communism was a conglomeration of a few correct ideas and many wrong ones, its reasonable part – the understanding that shared life interests of the higher order can only be realized within a horizon of universal co-operative asceticisms17 – will have to assert itself anew sooner or later. It presses for a macrostructure of global immunizations: co-immunism. (MLA 451–2)

The wager of this book is that contemporary anarchist cooperatives and housing projects are already working on this project of co-immunism. ‘Co-operative asceticisms’ that are practiced in these collectives and that are an expression of slow social transformation offer ways to transcend and reconfigure the old distinctions between own and foreign. Or practices; Sloterdijk takes the idea of asceticism as training from Nietzsche.

17

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Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism

Throughout this book, I have attempted to reformulate the concept of universality in a way that would help us think about social transformation as a continuous process of co-immunism, rather than a rare, irruptive event. I have traced the role of singularity in this process and claimed that its constant resurgence is key to slow social transformation. A concept of universality that has emerged is infinitely in the process of reformulation as it is constantly challenged by the ever produced singularity. The book, as a whole, proposes a form of social transformation that will foster openness to a continuous reformulation of universality and, as a result, further social change. It intends to contribute on two levels: firstly, by providing a theoretical description of both slow social transformation and contemporary anarchism in practice it wanted to contribute towards understanding progressive politics of the last fifteen to twenty years; and secondly, by promoting new models of political agency and the slow type of social transformation in the context of creating co-immunity. Co-immunity as ontological solidarity not only challenges our usual thinking about space but also proposes a new distribution of alliances. As the effective co-immunity structures today are thought on too small a scale – they are formatted ‘as in ancient times, […] tribally, nationally and imperially’ (MLA 450) – an expansion of the concept of immunity is necessary. We need to reconsider our usual allegiances. We need to start understanding that ‘individual immunity is only possible as co-immunity’ (MLA 450), not only with other humans, but with the world around us. That means making a decision ‘to take on the good habits of shared survival in daily exercises’ (MLA 452). This decision regards the direction of mimesis, performed by our bodies, as part of a continuous social transformation. Slow social transformation is then a matter of habit and, through the repetition of practice, it amounts to creating spaces, a ‘microclimate of the practising life’ (MLA 229), that have the potential to spread in favourable socio-political conditions. This is possible because spaces and ambiences produced by mimetic humans are never separated from other spaces and other people. The shared space that surrounds us, filled with the air we all breathe and the ambiences we produce, is what we have in common. Once we start thinking in those terms it is impossible to go back to theories based on an individual as a point of departure. This is a way to think about ‘the common’ beyond communism. And this is, in fact, what contemporary anarchist movements actualize in practice.

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186

Index acceptability 106–8 accountability 164 acrobat 112 activism 1–2, 136, 154–5, 169 in Butler 35–6 address, concept, 28–9, 31, 37, 78–80, 128–30, 133, 140 affection 12, 18, 114 affinity group 163, 171 affirmation 35, 101–5, 111, 114–15, 129, 158 Agamben, Giorgio 20–1 agency 5, 29, 30, 34–6, 51, 74–5, 78, 172, 174 political 5, 22, 35, 45–6 air 7, 84–5, 88, 94, 99–102, 104–5, 115, 150, 160, 167 allegiance 174 alterity 12, 16–17, 20, 27–8, 50 amniotic fluid 99, 101 animals 46, 85–6, 95, 104, 142, 150, 160, 173 in equality discourses 157–60 in philosophy 136 solidarity with 4, 7, 155, 167 anthropocentrism 46–7, 83–4, 94–9, 155, 159, 167 see also non-anthropocentrism anthropotechnology 111, 113 Antigone 35, 52, 55, 58, 98 antiquity 97 Anzaldúa, Gloria 16 apartment 87, 89–90, 115 approximation 19, 45, 50, 52, 71 Aquinas, Thomas 112 Aristotle 112 arts of existence 83, 108–12, 171, 172 Asad, Talal 16 asceticism 113, 173 asexuality 62–3 asymmetry 25–6, 28–32, 57, 92 augmenter 100–2 Austin, J. L 30, 34, 41, 50–1

automatism 113 automatization of practice 4 avant-garde party 165 Aventine Hill 156 axiom 51, 120, 127–9, 131–2 Barbin, Herculine 67–9 being-in-common 130, 150, 157 being-in-the-world 99, 102 being-with 86–7, 95, 150 Benjamin, Walter 16 Bhabha, Homi 16 binary 12, 26, 32, 44–5, 61–2 biopolitics 114 Bolshevik Revolution 145 Bourdieu, Pierre 41, 48, 50, 112 capitalism 1–3, 124, 134–6, 138–9, 143–5, 163 castration 56 circulation 30, 74–5 of universality 12–13, 20–6, 28, 32, 39, 45, 80, 125–6, 158, 160 citational politics 45–6 citationality 19, 41, 50–1, 74 class 62, 98, 139, 148 co-habitation 17, 90, 102 co-immunity 3, 7, 104, 116–51, 160–1, 171–4 co-isolation 91–2, 110–11 co-subjectivity 36, 87, 101–2 coexistence 86, 88–9 collectivity 3, 22, 32–7, 58, 63, 71, 83, 86, 91, 96 in Badiou 145 of heterogeneity 6, 78–80, 171 common, the 7, 33, 118, 121, 131, 150–1 Commune of Paris 143, 145 communism 3, 7, 104, 117–51, 154, 156, 173, 174 community 33–4, 37, 71, 79, 83, 102, 115, 133, 169, 171

188 Index contagion, mimetic 3–6, 20, 39–40, 82, 93–4, 169–72 of heterogeneity 16, 39–40, 45, 71, 74, 80 containment, structures of 71 contamination, concept, 13, 18, 94 contextualization 19, 42–3, 45, 50–1, 61, 71 cooperation 4, 92, 102, 115, 171 cooperative 4, 8–9, 173 count-as-one 122–3, 130, 132 cunning of nature 2 cyborg 46 de-contextualization 45, 50 see also contextualization democracy 1–3, 18, 19–20, 71, 74, 139, 144–5, 164 dependency 31–2, 103 Derrida, Jacques 12, 19, 41, 47–51, 75, 82, 113, 139 design/designer 87, 90–1 desire 5, 12, 27, 33, 41–3, 53–63, 70, 78–9, 102, 170 dialectics 3, 12, 17–19, 26, 57, 78, 117–18, 149 difference 26, 31, 39, 50, 59, 62, 80 differentiation 26, 71 disciplinics 111, 114 distribution of the sensible 4, 100, 155, 168 domination 7, 27, 114, 142, 153–4, 161–2, 165–9, 171 double bind 56–7, 59, 61 doubling 22, 119–32, 142–51 drag 64, 69 drive 42–3 dwelling 88, 90, 92 dyad 14, 17, 21–3, 45, 79, 80, 86, 91, 96, 168 egalitarian 33, 121, 131, 157 ego-formation 53–63, 96–102 ek-static 17, 31, 87–8, 103, 160 emancipation 1, 76–8, 134, 143, 158–9 environment 3–7, 46, 84, 88–9, 104–5, 131, 154–5, 160, 167–9, 173 equality 1–7, 150, 153–61, 164 in Badiou 120–1, 128, 130–2, 143–4, 146, 148–9

in Butler 25–9, 31–2, 73 Eribon, Didier 53, 68–9 essence 19, 42–3, 57, 65, 105, 107, 114–15, 121 ethics 16, 25 in Badiou 136, 140 in Butler 17, 27–9, 31–2, 37, 70 in Sloterdijk 103–5, 108–14 event 1–5, 7, 73, 79, 174 in Badiou 75, 117, 119, 120, 124–8, 130–1, 133–4, 137–42, 146, 150 in Butler 29 evental site 45, 123, 126 evil 133 exception 14, 117–18, 131 excess 22, 49, 121–2, 125, 168 exclusion 13–14, 20–1, 23, 28, 47, 73, 77, 100, 107, 158 exploitation 138, 165 faciality 97 failure 5–8, 17–26, 30–1, 39–84, 110, 115, 126–8, 140–5 family 4, 57–8, 165 fantasy 48 father 43, 53–4, 57–8 see also mother femininity 42, 54–6, 61–3, 100 feminism 28, 62, 76, 135, 138, 141, 163, 167 fetish 43 fidelity 133 foetus 98–9 formalism 23, 70–4, 133 Foucault, Michel 5, 8, 12, 61, 65 in anarchism 153, 166, 171–2 in Butler 15, 19, 30, 36, 41, 47–52, 65, 67–9, 74–6, 105–10 in Sloterdijk 83, 110–14 foundationalism 72, 107 see also post-foundationalism Frankfurt School 115 freedom 73, 99, 131, 144 Freud, Sigmund 6, 8, 42–3, 47–58, 60–2, 69, 86, 96–100, 103 Fukuyama, Francis 3 gaze 97 gender 19–20, 33, 40, 42, 44–5, 52–70, 74, 83, 101, 165

Index generic 13, 23, 118–35, 145–6 Goldman, Emma 169 good, the 6, 56–7, 77–8, 81–2, 104, 112–13, 174 grace 129, 134, 141 grand narrative 86–7, 90, 105, 110 greater logic 71–2 Guantanamo 7, 21–2 Habermas, Jürgen 85, 115 habit 4–7, 74, 81, 94, 110, 113, 115, 142, 153, 169–74 habitability 77, 81–2, 84, 94, 104, 153–4, 170 habitus 41, 50, 112–13, 115 Hegel, G. W. F 2–5, 11–37, 56–7, 72, 78–80, 117–20, 128, 168 hegemony 15, 18–24, 28, 30, 34, 45, 51, 64, 126, 137 Heidegger, Martin 31, 82, 88, 90, 103, 158, 160 hermaphrodite 68–9 heterogeneity 6, 16, 34, 39–40, 45, 71, 74–5, 77–116, 136–7, 171–2 hexis 112 history 2–3, 97, 111, 138, 143–50 homo sacer 20–1, 24–5, 28, 33, 39, 79, 124, 136–7 in anarchism 155, 160, 162, 167–9 homosexuality 52, 54–62, 67–9 human rights 2, 47, 136, 144 hypnosis 93 identification 33, 52, 54–5, 59, 60, 133, 147 identity 19, 23, 40–1, 44–6, 48, 53–8, 60–72, 75–6, 83, 162 politics 129, 134 imitation 3, 15, 19, 41–5, 56–8, 61, 82, 93–6, 115, 172–3 immunity 3, 7, 82–5, 87–8, 90–2, 101, 160–1, 171–4 Immunology, General 111 incapacitation, in philosophy, 36 incest 35, 42, 52–6, 58, 60–1 incommensurability 16, 26, 32, 52, 157 individualism 87, 90, 97 inexistent 118, 123–5, 128, 136, 149 infinite 5, 25–6, 30–2, 45–6, 74–5, 81, 110, 123–6, 132, 137, 174

189

installation artist 104 instinct 43 intelligibility 4, 11, 16–18, 39, 45, 60–2, 68, 126, 154–5, 166–7 interior 86–7, 89–91, 93 interiority 49, 89, 96 interruption 5, 17–18, 40, 82 intersex 67–9 iterability 19, 34, 50–1, 71, 75 Jacotot, Joseph 156 Kant, Immanuel 2–3, 106, 146 kinship 52, 58, 107 knowledge-power 106–7 Kojève, Alexandre 26–7, 32, 57, 79 Kristeva, Julia 76 Lacan, Jacques 35–6, 50, 52–3, 56, 96–102 lack 56, 101–2 Laclau, Ernesto 1, 25, 71–3 Landauer, Gustav 170 language 15, 28–30, 34–6, 50, 114, 150 Latour, Bruno 88, 96, 115 law 20–1, 27, 43–4, 50, 67–9, 71, 124, 130, 134 left, political orientation, 1–9, 29, 33, 69, 84, 149, 158 Lenin, Vladimir Ilitj 143, 145, 147 Levinas, Emmanuel 12, 16, 18, 31–2, 79, 100, 103, 113 LGTB 1, 4, 163 localization 89, 104, 126, 155, 167, 171 loss 16, 27, 33, 48, 53–6, 61–2, 100–2 luxury 102 Macho, Thomas 98 male lesbianism 60 Mängelwesen 102 Maoism 143 Marx, Karl 3–5, 42, 82, 115, 124, 135–6, 139, 143–4, 148, 150 Marxism 1–7, 83, 104, 115, 118, 135–8, 141, 145–9, 154, 165–6 masculinity 54, 56, 61–2, 66, 100 master and slave dialectics 3, 26–7, 32, 57, 79 materialism 36, 141 materiality 36, 46, 64, 66, 115, 130

190 Index matriarchy 98 matters of concern 115 maturation 101 mediator 41, 44, 45 see also model melancholia 52–5, 61–2, 69, 96, 100–2 meta-narratives 2, 86–7, 90, 96, 110 micro-insulation 91 minorities 4, 35, 69, 134, 142, 164 mirror 90, 97–8 mirror stage 98 model, in mimetic theory, 6, 29, 41–8, 55–63, 70–1, 82–3, 112–16, 172–4 monad 93–6 mother 43, 53–8, 86–7, 98–102 mourning 52–4, 61, 100, 102 MP3 90 multiplicity 102, 119–33, 163 mutation 128 Nancy, Jean-Luc 11, 131, 139, 150, 156–60 Narcissus 57, 69, 97–8 Nazism 133, 149 negation 13–14, 63, 110, 117 negativity 23–4, 73, 100–1, 107–8, 110 new, the 17, 20, 77–8, 109–10, 125–6, 137, 139, 142, 150 see also unexpected Nietzsche, Friedrich 113, 173 nobject 96–102, 104–5, 168–9 non-anthropocentrism 7, 115–16, 131, 155, 160, 162, 167–8 in Butler 46, 104 in Sloterdijk 46, 83–4, 95–6, 99, 118 non-humans 46, 95, 115, 137 norms, cultural 15, 19–20, 27–34, 36, 41–50, 57–8, 63, 66–9, 80, 108–12 now, the 51, 115, 131, 148 Nozik, Robert 155 object 41–3, 53–6, 59, 63, 89, 96, 101, 115 object-subject 80, 99, 105 see also nobject Odyssey 98 Oedipus complex 40, 42–3, 53–8, 96, 98 ontology 36, 46, 118–32, 149, 158 openness 37, 75–8, 80, 174 optimism 77 orientation, mimetic, 5–6, 48, 74, 76, 81–4, 110, 112–13, 115, 117, 153

Other, the 12, 16–18, 27–32, 34, 36, 41–3, 55, 79–80, 97, 103–4 outside, the 21–2, 31, 72, 84, 87–8, 99 pair 87, 92, 99, 101 Palestine–Israel conflict 7, 16, 21–2, 33, 136, 167 pansocial 89, 96, 131 partage du sensible see distribution of the sensible passivity 28, 114 performativity 5, 12, 15–20, 30, 33–4, 36–44, 48, 50–1, 76, 94 gender 44–5, 64, 69–70, 83 phantasmatic, the 48 plants 4, 7, 85, 95, 104, 105, 157, 160, 173 Platonism 43, 118, 119, 136, 142, 147 pleasure principle 42 plurality 13, 78–9, 86, 163 polysexuality 61 positivity 107–8 post-foundationalism 37 post-human 46 postheroic theory 105 poststructuralism 1, 15, 41, 67, 153 power 33–4, 48–9, 65–8, 74–6, 106–9, 165–6 precarity 31, 33, 36, 46, 84, 91, 103–4, 113 present, the, 3, 5, 16, 20, 51, 107–8 see also now progressive politics 22, 25, 32, 34, 134–5, 149, 174 prohibition 52, 54–7, 61, 63 proletariat 118, 124, 135, 136 psyche 27, 40, 46–7, 49, 54–6 psychoacoustics 96–8 psychoanalysis 6, 36, 40–1, 48–9, 52–3, 58, 60–1, 68–70, 83–4, 96–101 queer 28, 63, 64, 67, 69, 107, 137, 167 queering 45 race 13, 14, 62, 133, 165 radical politics 1–8, 12, 24, 29, 84, 85, 94, 162–3 radicalism 74–8, 80, 87, 120, 137–41, 167 Rawls, John 155

Index re-signification 19, 30, 50–1, 76–7 recognition 33, 34, 39–47, 57, 75, 76, 79, 120, 155, 159, 169 in Badiou 124, 134 in Butler 12, 20, 22, 25–32, 78 refugees 4 relationality 17, 79–80, 103, 121 religion 23, 115, 130, 141 remainder 1, 13–14, 17, 21–4, 73, 123, 140, 168 repetition 5, 18–20, 24–5, 30, 33, 40–7, 51, 80, 81–3, 93–4, 172–4 compulsive 47–63 of norms 15, 48, 74–6 as self-stylization 108–13 resistance 34, 49–51, 53, 68–9, 74, 76, 161, 165–6, 171–2 resonance 91–3, 98–102, 168 responsibility 31, 33–4, 36, 84, 90–1, 102, 104 revolution 1–9, 75–7, 105, 111, 117–51, 154–5, 169–70 rivalry 43, 56–61, 63 sameness 39, 50, 70–2, 80 sans-papiers 118, 135–8 sedimentation 43–4, 110 selection of models, in mimetic theory 42, 45–9, 63, 81, 83 self 34, 70, 109–10, 114 self-consciousness 3 self-production 83, 110 Sen, Amartya 25, 155 set theory 121, 127, 141 simulacrum 133–4 singleness of a subject 34–6, 78, 80, 96 siren stage 98 socialism 143–5, 163 society 79, 90–5, 105, 159, 165, 171–2 sound 98–9 spatiality 3, 6, 81–116, 164 Spirit, Hegel’s concept, 2, 18 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 16 Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich 145–6 Stalinism 143, 147, 149 stubborn attachments 42, 49 stylization 44, 108–9 subject 5, 46–9, 52–7, 63, 68, 70–1, 80, 110, 156, 166, 168

191

in Badiou 121, 127, 130, 131, 133, 136–9 in Butler 12, 15, 19–37 in Girard 41–4 in Sloterdijk 87–91, 96–102, 109, 112, 114 subjection 48–9, 134 subjective 27, 96, 129, 131, 147 subjectivity 29, 36, 80, 87, 91, 101–2 supplement 22, 128 surface of the body 55, 89 symptom 43 syndicalism 134 taboo 35, 53–8, 61 Tarde, Gabriel 7, 8, 83, 84, 89, 93–6, 131 technology 71, 87, 90, 103–5 telos 2 temporality 16, 29–30, 45, 50, 51, 108 three 13, 37, 59, 63, 79, 101, 156 tiers, le, Levinas’s concept, 79 trace 14, 21, 22, 31, 72, 73, 168 transgender 6, 7, 40, 60–70, 96, 107, 118, 136, 167 translation 5, 12, 16–24, 30–4, 37–47, 69–70, 73–7, 107, 119, 123–6, 158 transsexualism 60–8 treasure 102 triad 11–15, 21, 37, 79–80 triangulation 11–37, 40–3, 58–9, 79 trust 90, 92, 102 truth 27, 30, 68, 69, 108, 117, 120, 128–43 Umwelt 105 unconscious, the, 48–9, 52, 89 unexpected, the 17, 137 see also new ungrievable 52, 61, 62 unhappy consciousness 27 unknowingness 20, 33, 47 see also unknown unknown, the 5, 20, 31, 33, 41, 74–5, 78, 82, 95, 119, 139, 150 unrecognized, the 13, 20–2, 28, 46, 73, 100, 107–8, 123–4, 154, 167–8 utopia 172 Venn diagram 123 victim 20–4, 28, 33, 136, 154, 166

192 Index violence 13, 24, 29, 31–2, 37, 42, 56–8, 61, 70–1, 107, 142 virtue 110, 112–13 void 118, 125, 133, 138, 141, 165 vulnerability 16, 27–37, 82, 103–5, 113, 167

water 7, 150, 160, 167, 169 women 1, 4, 59, 97, 134, 139, 159, 163, 166 Žižek, Slavoj 23, 28, 34, 48, 73, 76–7, 133, 137, 146, 149–50