We Ourselves: The Politics of Us, Letting Be II 9781474475242, 9781474475266, 9781474475259, 9781474475273

Citation preview

We Ourselves

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Speculative Realism Series Editor: Graham Harman Books available Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media, Levi R. Bryant Form and Object: A Treatise on Things, Tristan Garcia, translated by Mark Allan Ohm and Jon Cogburn Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers, Adrian Johnston The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism, Tom Sparrow Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology, Markus Gabriel

Christopher RayAlexander and Jon Cogburn Against Continuity: Gilles Deleuze’s Speculative Realism, Arjen Kleinherenbrink Speculative Grammatology: Deconstruction and the New Materialism, Deborah Goldgaber Letting Be Volume II:We Ourselves: The Politics of Us, Tristan Garcia, translated by Christopher RayAlexander, Abigail RayAlexander and Jon Cogburn Forthcoming books

Assemblage Theory, Manuel DeLanda

Letting Be Volume III: Let Be and Make Powerful, Tristan Garcia, translated by Abigail RayAlexander, Christopher RayAlexander and Jon Cogburn

Romantic Realities: Speculative Realism and British Romanticism, Evan Gottlieb

After Quietism: Analytic Philosophies of Immanence and the New Metaphysics, Jon Cogburn

Garcian Meditations:The Dialectics of Persistence in Form and Object, Jon Cogburn

Infrastructure, Graham Harman

Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making Second Edition, Graham Harman

Speculative Realism and Science Fiction, Brian Willems Speculative Empiricism: Revisiting Whitehead, Didier Debaise, translated by Tomas Weber Letting Be Volume I:The Life Intense: A Modern Obsession, Tristan Garcia, translated by Abigail RayAlexander,

The External World, Maurizio Ferraris, translated by Sarah De Sanctis Indexicalism:The Metaphysics of Paradox, Hilan Bensusan New Ecological Realisms: PostApocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory, Monika Kaup

Visit the Speculative Realism website at: edinburghuniversitypress.com/ series-speculative-realism.html

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L ETTING B E V OLUME II

We Ourselves The Politics of Us

Tristan Garcia Translated by Christopher RayAlexander, Abigail RayAlexander and Jon Cogburn

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

English translation © Christopher RayAlexander, Abigail RayAlexander, Jon Cogburn, 2021 Nous by Tristan Garcia © Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f ) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Bembo by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 7524 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 7526 6 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 7525 9 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 7527 3 (epub)

The right of Tristan Garcia to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Series Editor’s Preface

viii

We Ourselves Book I: Transparencies The first person plural

5

Everyone-we-I

30

Three objections

36

Every we is a system of divisions

50

Conflicts of division

56

The intersection model

59

The transparency model

64

The contour

66

The overlap

70

Transparency and opacity

74

Re-covering

78

The bottom

81

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Book II: Constraints 1. The Ground of We

105

2. Dynamic

162

3. Domination

186

4. The End of We

216

Bibliography Index

230 248

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I would like to thank Agnès Gayraud, Patrick Garcia, Denis Seel, Flora Katz, Pierre-Alexandre Fradet, and Vincent Normand for their reading and remarks.

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Series Editor’s Preface

Writing of a fallow period in European music between Handel’s death in 1759 and Haydn’s stylistic breakthrough of 1781, Charles Rosen diagnoses the problem as follows: ‘no composer had sufficient command over all the elements of music for his personal style to bear the weight of a large series of works, a genuine oeuvre’.1 Tristan Garcia is not yet forty years old, but is already in the midst of producing two distinct oeuvres: one in philosophy, the other in literary fiction. I refer not only to his prolific output, but to the striking range of topics on which he is able to write with such originality and tact. It has already been the privilege of the Edinburgh University Press Speculative Realism series to publish some of Garcia’s most important philosophical works, beginning with his youthful monument Form and Object (2014). Next up was the first volume of his Letting Be trilogy: The Life Intense (2018), with its bull’s-eye portrait of the contemporary human lifestyle. The present work, first published in French in 2016, is the second work in the same trilogy. It is our good fortune to have the same team of gifted translators for the present instalment, Abigail and Christopher RayAlexander along with Jon Cogburn. As the reader will soon discover, they have rendered the French original in lucid English prose.

1

Rosen, The Classical Style, p. 48.

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SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

ix

The central topic of Garcia’s book is the flexible plural pronoun ‘we’, which he plausibly regards as the basis of every form of politics. A perplexity quickly arises from the fact that each of us belongs to many we’s simultaneously: as defined by nationality, gender, race, place of employment, political ideology. To live means to inhabit multiple overlapping circles of we’s, which at times can create serious tensions. Here Garcia cites Kimberlé Crenshaw’s influential work on ‘intersectionality’ as an important first step in exploring the problem.2 What does it mean to be both black and a woman in America, or an immigrant and a Muslim and gay in present-day Europe? If we look at the current map of Africa, we find that many of the borders were drawn solely for the convenience and interests of the colonising powers, with numerous tribal units split by the lines between nationstates. But before we quickly assume that the nation-states are artificial entities and tribes are natural ones, we should note that the ‘artificially drawn’ borders have displayed surprising durability across the decades. A similar point could be made about the Middle East. Garcia’s main difference from intersectional theory is that, although he is known for a ‘flat ontology’ in which all beings are equally beings, in political terms he insists that there is always a de facto pecking order among the different we’s. This is easy to see in the case of orthodox Marxists, who hold that all conflicts result from the primary conflict of class struggle. For the Situationist Guy Debord, by contrast, the chief divide is between the young and the old. Two people might agree about every single political issue yet still be sharply distinguished by how they prioritise them. Recall the O. J. Simpson murder charges of 1994 and Simpson’s trial the following year. There was a great deal of tension at the time between two groups who both typically vote Democrat: 1) black Americans and 2) liberal white Americans, feminists in particular. For the former group the Simpson case was at bottom really about racism and corruption in the Los Angeles police force, while for the latter it was primarily about domestic violence against women.

2

Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex’.

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Simpson’s controversial acquittal was mostly hailed by the first group and bewailed by the second. For Garcia, this sort of tension is the basic site of politics, which is really about defending our own particular way of prioritising our various we’s. It is the fate of our era, he argues, to have lost our previous certainties about how to rank them. Having established this basic model of a strife of intersecting but unequal we’s, Garcia turns in the second half of the book to considering the implications. Since the nineteenth century there has been a general tendency to replace all models of opposition with ones based on difference in degree. Charles Darwin’s account of the historical origin of species was a part of this process, through its phylogenetic linking of ostensibly different animals with each other over extremely long stretches of time. The traditional concept of distinct races of humanity also came under critical assault. Recent attention to androgyny and intersex individuals, as well as bisexuality, has cast new doubt on assumptions that there is something ‘natural’ about sexual dimorphism and heterosexuality. More generally, Garcia holds, crises always arise from the middle of two oppositions. If the bipolar class conflict of Marxism is challenged by evidence of emerging additional classes (‘the creative entrepreneur’, ‘the social media influencer’) it becomes a matter of theoretical life and death to be able to interpret the new classes as merely ‘satellites’ of one of the recognised ones. Garcia also returns to one of his favourite themes from both Form and Object and The Life Intense: the underrated importance of age group as a distinct social we, and the emerging special status of the adolescent among all such groups. Additional importance for age group stems from its partial overlap with the gendered we, given the usual social pre-eminence of sexually charming younger women and powerful older men. Garcia traces the ultimate root of the conflict over the intersecting we’s to the perennial duel between idealistic and realistic conceptions of human identity and everything else. Idealists emphasise the boundless mutability of personal and group identity and the common humanity of all, while realists – Garcia refers primarily to Carl Schmitt, but also to the nearly forgotten historian Arnold J. Toynbee – insist that there will always be a difference of some sort

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SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

xi

between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that ought to be preserved, for fear of watering down one’s own civilisation.This idealist/realist debate does not always overlap with political orientation, but sometimes cuts straight through a political group. For instance, the neoconservative advisors in the George W. Bush administration were actually ‘idealists’ who – at least in public – justified the invasion of Iraq as a way of liberating those oppressed by Saddam Hussein and welcoming them into the ranks of happy global humanity. By contrast, there were numerous figures in the American military who took the ‘realist’ stance that deposing Saddam would merely open a power vacuum leading to increased Iranian influence; hence, there should be no American invasion, but at most a CIA-backed effort to change the Iraqi government via coup d’état. As of this writing in 2020, the realists are looking much better in this particular case, even if we grant the most charitable interpretation of neoconservative motives. For the political realist, to attempt to spread the universal too far is to risk tremendous loss on another front. In principle Russia could join the European Union: and yet, the realist asks, would the Union then not be modified far beyond its original purpose? In principle Cyprus was not supposed to join the Union without first solving its dispute with Turkey, yet if Cyprus were delayed then the support of Greece for enlargement would be lost, and Germany would then lose its desired accession of Poland. Both Poland and Cyprus did join, of course, but who is to say whether Cyprus might not pull the EU into dangerous conflict in the future? There is no a priori way of knowing when the idealist is right and when the realist is. But if we cannot know for sure that either the idealist or the realist is right, neither can we say that each is ‘partly right’, since the one is the negation of the other. It would be more accurate to say that the idealist is right until the realist proves them wrong, and vice versa. In short, to launch a politics purely in the name of justice or emancipation misses not only that the side of justice is not always clear, but also that there is no increase of justice in one place without an increase of injustice in another. As Garcia puts it: ‘History is essentially the history of domination, inequality, and injustice.Therefore, there can be no definitively just approach to history . . . This system is a vast, complex apparatus composed of pulleys, hoists, and counterweights that constantly generate

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compensation.’ Later he continues the theme: ‘A political idea is a reasoned negotiation that involves exchanging a little less domination for a few more effects of domination.’ In the political atmosphere of the present, in which words such as emancipation and justice carry almost infinite moral authority, it is the ‘realist’ side of Garcia’s book that may be the most unsettling to readers. Nonetheless, one senses strong idealist sympathies in the author, and one is struck by how well he knows the literature of feminism and queer theory in particular. Finally, like any piece of writing by Garcia, this book is characterised by an appealing writing style and a freshness of thinking that makes it feel as if the reader’s mind has been cleansed. Graham Harman Long Beach, California June 2020

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Book I Transparencies

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The first person plural Let us begin by acknowledging that the subject of politics is we.1 In contrast with the first person singular, something about the first person plural grants it a permanent variation of range, since it can just as readily designate only you and me, or the totality of living things, or even what lies beyond. Let us imagine a circle, what we might call the ‘circle of we’.We can picture how its limits encircle those around us, our family, our clan, our tribe, and our community. Or, on the contrary, we can imagine the diffusion of that circle within the social realm. This diffusion increases when the circle is extended to sensate beings, animals, and even certain vegetables. As the circle expands or shrinks, its diameter corresponds to a given state of us. Consequently, there are as many political subjects as there are states of us, which we can understand as possible extensions of this imaginary circle. ‘We’ is an ectoplasmic form found in the majority of human languages. It is capable of embracing everything that lies between myself and the rest of the world.Through ‘we’, many subjects situate themselves, limit themselves, negotiate their similarities and differences, and engage in politics. We can’t keep ourselves from saying ‘we’, no matter our degree of engagement, our line, or our camp. We all say ‘we’, regardless of the group: professional activists, mere sympathisers, sceptical citizens with fluctuating convictions, socialists, social democrats, LGBTQI activists, takfiri Wahhabists, Trotskyites from the Comintern, separatists, Pabloites, Third Worldists, neoconservatives, autonomists, indigenists, anti-colonialists, untouchables from the Bahujan Samaj Party, Republicans, Ba’athists, patriotic nationalists, fascists, apolitical people, Christian Democrats, Mormons, promoters of the Third Way, defenders of animal rights, Zionist Jews, pan-Africanists, deep ecologists in the tradition of Ecosophy T, suffragettes, Bolivarians, anarchists, neo-Nazis, homonationalists or femonationalists, Labour supporters, degrowthists, liberal libertarians, constitutional monarchists, Black Nationalists, Mensheviks,

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Soka Gakkai Buddhists, abolitionists, civil rights activists, Sunni jihadists, reformists, pro-life activists, and so on. The essence of political discourse lies in defining how we understand this ‘we’, what our rights and legitimate claims are, and our conception of society as a whole. However, political discourse also requires us to negatively identify those who oppose us, the enemies whom we designate as ‘you’ or ‘them’. Try for a moment to make no distinction between all of the possible groups and associations to which you feel you belong and those that appear distant, even exotic. Stop separating the collective identities that you consider to be grounded, universal, and serious from those you consider irrational, ridiculous, or dangerous. Suspend your moral judgement.Then, through thought, try to establish a sort of imaginary plane upon which you might consider, at once equally and distinctly, everything that speaks in the name of we. Try this now, and you will see that everyone who says ‘we’ speaks as the same person, which is to say that they take on the being of people who speak that way, even when those people have an identity or principles that irritate or repulse them.We say ‘we’ along with them. So let us examine this vertiginous diversity alongside the cacophony of our attempts to portray ourselves. Let us do this even though it might seem to the more sceptical among us as a sign of fanaticism or a proof of the airy nature of all proclamations of identity. However, let us also suppose that the proliferation of divergent and contradictory we’s is not irrational, but rather manifests a noble trait of subjectivity: its propensity to organise itself politically. What happens when we say ‘we’? By the grace of language, which allows us to inhabit that pronoun, we can at different times claim to be on all sides, including that of even our fiercest adversaries. Nothing enunciated in the name of a we is a complete stranger to us. However, ‘we’ also signifies our we, as distinct from your we. We know that you say ‘we’, but you don’t say it like us. We can tell this because our practices, customs, and ideas are different. We is at once the possibility of being everyone, the vague promise within language of universal belonging, as well as the concrete assignation to a particular identity.2 We is something that we are and that you are not, even if you also say ‘we’ in your own way.

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This we is a flexible entity.3 It is malleable enough to take in beings of all kinds, but still sufficiently limiting to allow for distinctions between camps, depending on who is using the word and how they are using it.We should not naively think that all who cry ‘we’ understand the word in the same way. But we also shouldn’t think that ‘we’ is a meaningless word that we can define however we want. Nor is it a simple indexical term, a mirror word that just refers back to its conditions of enunciation, to who said it and when and where they did so. The truth is that, even if there is only one word to say it, there is not only one we.4 Nevertheless, there are not as many different we’s as there are uses of the term. In order to avoid falling into either opening of this double trap, it is useful to consider the we as a structure that is at once both free and determined. We should not think of we as a pure phenomenon of language. We structures the spirit of those who make use of it, and orients that usage without entirely forcing it. One may speak of we with respect to a very small number of people, or in reference to everyone. Nevertheless, there is something within that we – a sort of resistance within its ectoplasmic form – that follows a certain logic.This logic only becomes apparent through the repetition of its variations. Therefore, in order to comprehend what we is, we must go against all the recommendations of the sociological method and treat the masses and the state without distinction. The more we’s that we recognise, the more we abstract from the particularities of the use of the first person plural. Our common traits stand out more clearly. A general understanding of what we is requires nothing more than a moral quality, a certain empathetic disposition that allows us to weaken the closed-mindedness of our own convictions and principles in order to strengthen our ability to mentally participate in any community whatsoever. Listening to everything that the people around us say and naively including ourselves whenever we hear ‘our brother’, ‘our family’, or ‘our comrades’ is enough for us to imagine being one of them, sharing their ideas and identity, and counting ourselves as part of their number. But where to begin? First, let us draw an initial circle of we. Then, let us adjust its perimeter, cut it into subsets, and shift its boundaries to try to discover as many manifestations of identity as possible in recent history.

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We can begin by tracing an imaginary line around all human beings. This yields a more or less circular figure, the interior of which consists of endlessly multiplying sections of the circle. The most notable of these, or at least the one that superficially seems most important and most present in political discourses, is the section pertaining to individuals described in Woyzeck as ‘poor people like us’, the landless and the disinherited, the proletariat, the workers, the exploited, the small.5 The name changes, and, as it transforms, the circle is no longer exactly the same. At its biggest, its default definition is the we of the Occupy movement: ‘We are the 99%.’6 It is the nameless we, we the many standing in opposition to the minuscule minority that possesses the planet’s economic wealth. Blurring the lines between all who are neither ‘masters’ nor ‘bosses’, the we of the many is the main character of Marxist history. This we is celebrated by the well-known couplet of ‘The Internationale’: ‘We are the law, we are the many. We who were nothing, let us be all.’7 But this we of the many, which has the right to aspire to everything, this immense we of all who feel dispossessed of economic means, robbed of their inheritance, excluded by the telling of history and the curating of cultural knowledge, and cut off from the law and the state apparatus, such a we is weakly determined. This we is purported to be the democratic subject of history. However, as soon as we try to give it a name and stake out its limits, this we divides itself into a multitude of slightly more particular we’s. They alternate between intersection and opposition, but such we’s most commonly end up being superimposed or overlapping one another. Then the circle’s diameter is diminished, or, more accurately, its contours change and become more difficult for us to picture. In a well-known speech from 1913, the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst declared as much: If there is a great industrial strike, you know exactly where the violence is, and every man knows exactly how the warfare is going to be waged; but in our war against the government you can’t locate it [. . .] If any gentleman who is the father of daughters in this meeting went into his

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home and looked around at his wife and daughters, if he lived in England and was an Englishman, he couldn’t tell whether some of his daughters were militants or non-militants [. . .] We wear no mark; we belong to every class; we permeate every class of the community from the highest to the lowest; and so you see in the woman’s civil war the dear men of my country are discovering it is absolutely impossible to deal with it: you cannot locate it, and you cannot stop it.8 And yet, by this we Pankhurst does not mean the dispossessed in general, but rather a we divided into sexes: ‘we, the women’. This we cuts transversally through all of the social classes: among the 99% just as well as the small group of the 1%. Within the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and in both colonised and colonising countries, there are women. They are not equally distributed in all classes and jobs, nor is their identity limited to their class. A woman is not a part of the lower classes of society. So, then, what is a woman? Pankhurst wrests a we from the various social subgroups. This we, which transcends all those subgroups, is a universal feminine identity. Pankhurst uses ‘we’ to point towards a principle that escapes localisation within class. Women are found in all social, cultural, and ethnic circles. Gathering them together by saying ‘we’ produces another cut, a reorganisation of the group, the tracing of another circle that overflows the customary boundaries of caste, tribe, or lineage.This is in order to unite, not the proletarians of the world, but the women of all countries and classes. The history of feminism is the story of the constitution of this we.9 It is the long story of the formation of a new circle of humanity. This new circle is not divided according to class but rather by sex.The circle is cut in two, and we insist that its two sections should be equal. This we is the subject of Carrie Chapman Catt’s famous declaration: ‘We women demand an equal voice. We shall accept nothing less.’10 We ask for the ability to be us, neither more nor less than you. This we is also seen throughout Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘Manifesto of the 343 Sluts’. She opens this declaration with a factual statement given in the third person: ‘A million women in France have abortions every year [. . .] One

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keeps quiet about these million women.’11 Beauvoir goes on to say ‘I’ (‘I declare that I am one of them’) so that all of the signatories may inhabit that I. She then concludes, ‘We demand the right to unrestricted abortion.’ In short, what we have here is a miniature model for the constitution of a political subject: first the impersonal fact, then the isolated subjective experience, and finally the demand for rights in the name of us all. And yet, this we which was charted by feminism has also been cut into sections. There can be no doubt that it was divided and traversed by contradictions from the very beginning. As it integrated the differences between class, race, and sexuality, this we was also pulled in different directions by those very differences. The more attention we pay to the effects of that two-way process of integration, the more the boundaries shift. As awareness of sexual minorities emerged, other we’s also came forth. For example, in the process of establishing the homosexual we that includes its masculine gay part, the feminine we was split between lesbians and heterosexuals. This displacement can be seen in the radical texts of Monique Wittig, such as ‘The Straight Mind’: ‘If we, as lesbians and gay men, continue to speak of ourselves and to conceive of ourselves as women and as men, we are instrumental in maintaining heterosexuality.’12 Saying ‘we women’ supports the division of gender. It does so by grounding itself in discourse that normalises and naturalises heterosexuality (which is to say, discourse that is qualified as straight). Because of this, homosexual women have an interest in first presenting themselves as homosexuals, and not as women. Claire Michard astutely analyses Wittig’s strategic discourse along these lines: The author thus develops a privileged solidarity with lesbians without breaking solidarity with feminists, homosexual men, or the generally oppressed writ large. But while the author’s solidarity is marked by ‘we’, there is no such connection to those who speak from within straight discourse. Those people are exclusively presented in the third person, which is to say, as non-subjects vis-à-vis the interlocutor. The author never joins up with them.13

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In refusing to ever say ‘we’ in a way that betrays a minority identity, Wittig defends a new political division of we that overflows the traditional boundaries of both Marxist and feminist schools of thought. We are familiar with the role that this skewed division plays in affirmations of gay pride and slogans like ‘We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.’14 This type of division has made its mark on activist movements for minority rights, so much so that we might think that the essential aim is to learn how to say ‘we’ and how to make that word resonate in the public sphere. This proud we embodies the vow of those who campaign against the discrimination suffered by disabled people: ‘Nothing about us without us.’15 In other words, we don’t just want you to defend us; we want to be able to defend ourselves. Many marginalised groups of people became conscious and protective of their ability to speak for themselves during the twentieth century. And, at the very same time, politics became confused with having one’s voice heard. This brought about a period of enthusiasm. The we looked like a kind of miraculous solution or the magic formula for a spontaneous politics. To be able to express a we was already a form of emancipation.To say ‘we’ was to become it. It was to trace a circle that made the invisible visible: ‘we, women’, ‘we, single mothers’, ‘we, Jewish people’, ‘we, the colonised’, ‘we persons with reduced mobility’, ‘we, the elderly’. But now it’s clear that the we of the minorities or subalterns who have access to speech and a visible identity is neither a simple nor a magical we. Just like all the others, it is riddled with contradictions, or, rather, fractured by the lines of its own divisions. We find the circles are set within one another. For black American women activists, and most notably homosexuals within that group, racial differences have inserted a wedge between those who rally behind ‘we, the women’ and those who associate themselves more with ‘we, the homosexuals’. Recognising this has given rise to innumerable moral dilemmas. For example, in 1970 Patricia Haden, Donna Middleton, and Patricia Robinson confessed to uncertainty about the meaning that they could attribute to we, granted the privileged identities that they had assumed, willingly or otherwise. Along with their feminist comrades, they defined themselves as ‘we, the women’, but with a clarification: ‘Yet we black women in our deepest humanity love

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and need black men, so we hesitate to revolt against them and go for ourselves’16 – meaning that they sometimes present themselves as ‘we, black people’ at the price of being ignored as women. This problem becomes even more complicated for black lesbian activists, who experience not only the incompatibility of their gender and racial solidarities but also the disparity between their sexual community and these two other groups. Being primarily associated with white homosexuals brought up in the middle and upper classes, they feel a certain disconnect with their sexual minority.This brings about fractures that weaken the unified we for which they had wished and called out. It is possible to imperceptibly slide from the circle of sexes to the circle of races. This latter division isn’t exactly the same, but it still displays some analogous features. Like Emmeline Pankhurst’s ‘we, the women’, ‘we, black people’ was an expression within language itself of a striking discovery associated with the struggle for civil rights in the US. This was the discovery of an identity that is irreducible to other identitybased divisions. There were black men and black women, a black working class and a black bourgeoisie, black Americans and black Africans. And yet, there was an obvious link between black identity and the most underprivileged classes of American society. The black we was distinct from the proletarian we and the we of the marginalised, but it was never completely separate from them. These are sections from many different but correlated circles. The exact measure of their correlation continues to be the subject of countless sociological studies. However, rather than remain a sociological subject, the black we had to become independent in order to become a political subject. Beginning in the 1950s, Ralph Ellison spearheaded the critique against Marxist universalism. He did so in accordance with a set of convictions that came to resemble those of New Liberalism: ‘That’s how they lost the Negroes. The Communists recognised no plurality of interests.’17 Class division trumps all of the other divisions of the social world. In Invisible Man, ‘the fraternity’ of the CPUSA (Communist Party USA) shows itself to be discouragingly rigid in its conception of identity. This forces the protagonist to view himself as ‘colorless’. Without his colour, he becomes invisible. In

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the early stages, it was certainly possible to say ‘we, black people’ and to understand that to mean all black people, regardless of their class. This immediately brought the intersection between we poor people and we black people to light. As in the lyrics of Curtis Mayfield, it was necessary to define one’s colour:‘We the people who are darker than blue.’18 This was the theme of many of the greatest hits of the 1960s, from artists such as James Brown (‘Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud’),19 Nina Simone (‘Four Women’),20 and Sly Johnson (‘Is It Because I’m Black?’),21 who all presented a subject who identified proudly with their own colour. By doing so, they rejected the notion that such identification is shameful. And so it was no longer a question of feeling invisible in society, like the narrator of Invisible Man: I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywoodmovie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything and anything except me.22 Throughout the entirety of the work, the narrator, whose colour paradoxically turns him invisible, is trying to escape from the hell of a me that prevents one from existing in society. Ellison’s narrator is endeavouring to finally say ‘we’. In the twentieth century, all ethnic minorities learned to declare their we in accordance with a model that built a social circle out of pride and visibility. One might even venture to say that the lion’s share of modern politics has been dedicated to the elaboration and enunciation of this we. Such is the case with ‘Native Americans’. Beginning in the 1980s, the book series with the slogan ‘We Were Here First: The Native Americans’ served to recall a forgotten truth. In spite of the wars and linguistic and cultural differences that had always kept them apart, this strategy

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allowed indigenous tribes to express their belonging to a unique we that was present on the American continent long before the Europeans arrived. Sometimes the we of colour, the ethnic we, the territorial we, and the national we blend together harmoniously – or at least appear to do so – but sometimes they infringe upon one another. Most colonial situations are readily comprehensible when considered through the lens of this overlapping of circles. Comprehended within a larger national circle, those who fight for independence or emancipation draw other circles that are inscribed within or straddle these national boundaries. In so doing, the peripheral we affirms the existence of a we that is distinct from the metropolitan one. This former we is included within a distant assemblage. This forcible inclusion is illegitimate in the eyes of the periphery. For this reason, the correct designation of ‘our name’ has often been first on the agenda for debate in anti-colonialist politics. Should we fight for the rights of a particular we within a country that is populated by both colonists and indigenous people? Or should we speak in the name of a new national we, one that excludes colonisers for good? Many activists studied in Europe and felt a sense of belonging to a growing bourgeoisie with connections to the colonial middle classes. But how were they to reconcile their class consciousness with their feeling of national belonging? On this issue we may note that, at the outset, members of NAMSA (the North African Muslim Student Association) defined themselves as ‘students’, which is to say, as representatives of an educated elite. The declaration of their 1935 congress then marked a decisive turning point in their political inflection. When they substituted this we with a ‘we, the colonised’, they showed that their primary solidarity was with those who had no access to education in their countries of origin. ‘We, the colonised’ grew stronger and stronger, and was placed ahead of ‘we, the students and the learned’: ‘We, the colonized, the learned, ought to devote our time and resources to defending the interests of our homelands.’23 The way we reconcile and prioritise these we’s almost entirely explains politics.Which kind of division should I first refer to when I say ‘we’? Do I first belong to ‘we, humans’? Or, more generally,

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to ‘we, sensate beings’? ‘We, natural beings’? Or does the situation require more precision? ‘We, women’? ‘We, black people’? ‘We, white people’? ‘We, Arab Muslims’? ‘We, the progeny of the great Indian civilization’? (This recalls Nehru’s declaration during his trip to the United States: ‘You Americans are so adolescent. We Indians are an ancient people with a culture thousands of years old.’)24 Or would it be better to first identify ourselves economically: ‘we, the proletarians’, ‘we, the exploited?’ Are we slaves, peons, or salaried employees? What name should we use for ourselves after realising that we belong to a dominated class? The precariat? The oppressed? The suppressed? The subalterns? ‘We, the colonised and humiliated’, in the style of Nkrumah or Lumumba’s speeches?25 This is not a question of linguistic subtlety, but rather an extremely precise, delicate, and difficult choice. Everyone who takes a political position is faced with this question, and even those who refuse to take a stance still have to decide what or who falls within the circle. Jacques Chevallier is one of the great forgotten figures of ‘mediation’ during the Algerian war. He promoted the plan to form a federal Algeria, knew Messali Hadj well, and tried until the end to maintain contact with both the National Liberation Front and the Secret Army Organisation. Chevallier was born in El Bidar, and he published a book entitled We, Algerians with Calmann-Lévy in 1958. When Chevallier said ‘We, the Algerians’26 he included himself as a French colonist in a we that extended to the indigenous we because he too had been born in that land.This we was denounced as unacceptable by the pieds-noirs, who refused to back the inclusion of Arabs. The activists fighting for freedom also rejected this we because they considered the pieds-noirs’ fantasy of belonging, as seen in Chevallier’s Algerian we, to be wholly illegitimate. They thought the we of Algeria should refer exclusively to the indigenous populations. In a manner of speaking, this co-inclusive we existed in a vacuum, a sort of political non-place that none of the existing parties wanted or were able to recognise. It disappeared with the arrival of Algerian independence. The history of colonialism, as well as that of anti-colonialism, is the theatre of war for a number of we’s that are situated inside one

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another. This is because, as Edward Said wrote, the we of the colonisers constructs the colonised as Other27 (Simone de Beauvoir used the same expression with respect to women in The Second Sex).28 But at the same time, the colonisers’ we claims to integrate the colonised into the progress of civilisation. This makes we into a sort of linguistic trap for the colonised. Aligning themselves with a universal we in order to demand equal rights requires a reference to the very same universalism of which they have been deprived. It requires calling upon the same universalism that had previously been used to justify labelling them as inferior beings who were left behind by historical and cultural progress. Joining with this we also risks neutralising the particular identity of the colonised by presenting all people as a single block devoid of false differences. But saying ‘we, the indigenous’ or ‘we, the colonised’ against a white universal we reduces a group to a particular community and risks excluding and racialising ourselves. In other words, we do the colonisers’ work for them. It is very clear that no we is univocal. Some people have fought colonisation in the name of our humanity, and others have defended the coloniser under the same aegis. This same word is a bone of contention for many different groups. The ‘we, Republicans’ from Jules Ferry’s speeches to the French National Assembly in favour of colonisation’s civilising mission was contested at the time by certain pacifists.29 For example, in an article from 1896 on ‘The United States of Europe and Peace’, Madame Destriché declared, ‘The Abyssinians and the Cubans conduct themselves with bravery. What do they want? To defend themselves or win their independence from the monarchies that deny them this liberty. We, the French Republic, must wish for their success.’30 She then compares the French nationalist struggle to wrest Alsace and Lorraine back from Germany to the struggles of the colonised peoples of Africa and Asia. But independence for those countries did not bring the colonial dilemma to an end. Indeed, it was quite the opposite. All putatively post-colonial political declarations are an exercise in redefining the we within a framework where every word counts. For example, the ‘Call to the Indigenous People of the Republic’ proclaims ‘WE, the descendants of slaves and deported Africans,

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daughters and sons of colonized people and immigrants, WE, the French and the non-French living in France, male and female activists struggling against the oppression and discrimination produced by the post-colonial Republic. . .’31 This organisation aims to give rise to a twenty-first-century we in opposition to that of the French Republic, a we capable of traversing the divisions within the social sphere. It aims to unite immigrants of all generations with the descendants of populations that were colonised by the French in sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, and the Antilles. The affirmation of the existence of such a we depends on the belief that what the members of this we have in common –even if it is sometimes just the feeling of being discriminated against – will always be stronger than what divides them (gender, profession, and religion, for example). But this is always the promise of politics: to put a name on what we have in common that is stronger than what separates us. The French Republic has long claimed to stand for this we, one that rises above all of the dividing lines of race, gender, and class. However, it is interesting that the French Republic has never said ‘we’ in its constitutions. The Republic speaks in the third person as the ‘French People’, ‘the French’ and ‘their representatives’.32 We can almost conceive of an entire history of French politics exclusively concerned with tracking moments when different groups, parties, and associations have taken Republican principles originally stated in the third person and translated them into the first person. Perhaps the Republican idea has always been impersonal, encased within a bloodless constitution, unable to articulate itself through one or more concrete subjectivities. Multiple declarations from the Paris Commune utilise the we, but it was undoubtedly Sylvain Maréchal’s manifesto for the ‘Conspiracy of the Equals’ that inaugurated this tradition of French declarations in the first person by taking up the impersonal principles of the Republic and demanding their immediate application. When the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’ declares that ‘all men’ are born and remain equal, Maréchal responds thus: ‘Are we not all equal? [. . .] Well then! We aspire to live and die equal, the way we were born: we want real equality or death; this is what we need.’33 The Equals were not contesting the contents of the Declaration.

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They were taking it at its word and reproaching it for its fundamental inability to convey its message through a we. In other nations, such as the United States, this tension doesn’t exist, or at least not in the same way, because the Constitution itself opens with an affirmation of ‘We, the People’.34 For this reason in particular, political debates are frequently carried out in the name of the Constitution (for example, in the name of the 1st Amendment), and not against it. Because the Constitution starts off with ‘we’, it is presumed to be a democratic weapon used to counter authoritarian abuses. In France, on the other hand, the very enunciation of constitutional principles is always subject to reproach precisely for never having said ‘we’. The French Constitution speaks in the name of no one, or rather, from the political point of view of no one in particular. The Republic is everyone and no one, but it is never us. ‘We, the People’ is the American we that is supposed to go beyond the differences between ‘we, men’ and ‘we, women’; between ‘we, the poor’ and ‘we, the rich’; between ‘we, black people’ and ‘we, white people’; between ‘we, Christians’, ‘we, Jews’, ‘we, Muslims’, and ‘we, Buddhists’. This very inclusive we is also what enables a population to mobilise in times of national unity against a common enemy. Proust provides a lucid description of the momentum that chauvinism and Germanophobia were gaining in the salons of Paris during the First World War through an analysis of this pronoun: ‘Mme Verdurin, in conversation, when she communicated news, used “we” in speaking of France [. . .].’35 In one of his major speeches from 1941, we can see how a similar semantic slippage allowed Stalin to shift from ‘we, the communists’ to ‘we, the Russians’, preparing to defend the country against the Nazi invader. Owing to both custom and Stalin’s authority, the circle of the new ideal we became the circle of the old patriotic we, without which the Party did not think it would be able to stave off the German onslaught. Stalin’s speech begins with the following (the order of terms is important here): COMRADES, men of the Red Army and Red Navy, commanders and political instructors, working men and working women, collective farmers – men and women,

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workers in the intellectual professions, brothers and sisters in the rear of our enemy who have temporarily fallen under the yoke of the German brigands, and our valiant men and women guerrillas who are destroying the rear of the German invaders!36 Stalin finishes off his oration with ‘Long live our glorious Motherland, her liberty and her independence!’ He thus raises the banner of Lenin. However, ‘our Motherland’ was a chauvinistic Russian term that harkened back to the war between Tsar Ivan and the Boyars. For that reason, Lenin had banned it. Nevertheless, the term emerges here again as part of the circle of interests used by Stalin to define what we are. A significant portion of twentieth-century political history stems from enormous geopolitical or geostrategic we’s that flatten all other identities. For example, Churchill’s words made clear the state of total war between the Allies and their Nazi enemies: ‘It’s either us or them.’37 Perhaps the Cold War was nothing more than the passage from disjunction (‘or’) to a stable conjunction (‘and’). This conjunction indicates a simultaneous coexistence and irreducible difference. ‘Us and them’ became the slogan during the confrontation between the Truman Doctrine and the communists.38 When the Soviet regime collapsed, other big we’s and other big they’s appeared or reappeared; these were the we’s of empire. Just as in Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’,39 the future of these we’s of empire is sustained by the ‘common sense’ observation that people are always wont to divide themselves into them and us, the in-group and the others, our civilisation and that of the barbarians. Since 1993 Huntington has forwarded the hypothesis that future battle lines will not coalesce around an ideological or economic difference between us and them, but rather a cultural one. He holds that civilisational we’s will henceforth sketch out the battlefield and draw the dividing lines. This implies that there is a ‘big we’ of the West and a ‘big we’ of the Arab Muslims.Within each of these ‘big we’s’ there are smaller we’s, for instance, Sunni and Shi’a Muslims. Those who oppose Huntington have only rarely accused him of being completely mistaken.40 Instead, they critique the way

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his interpretative framework erases differences and conflicts that he considers to be ‘secondary’. It’s all a question of prioritisation among the circles. While we must be cognisant of the conflicts between civilisational circles and the clashes between the circles drawn by social classes, the essential decision involves choosing which side of which battle line should take priority over the others. If one first divides the world into civilisational circles, one ends up relegating to the background the ideological and economic circles that separate rich from poor. In order to clearly perceive certain lines that traverse and divide the world, it is necessary to blind ourselves to other lines that can hardly be traced and barely stand out at all. In the same way, tracing the real outline of the we of social class and the we of gender blurs or even erases the (also real) lines of fracture between civilisational or religious we’s, leading to their systematic undervaluation. The religious we’s also stake out circles that resurface in the social world. These circles try to encompass those left behind by modern society’s beliefs in laicisation and secularisation and its slide into disenchantment. These circles of religious we’s both bring individuals together and divide them into different groups. For example, the common usage of the Shiite we and the Sunni we establishes a system of polarisation without which the conflicts, alliances, and counter-alliances of the Islamic world would be incomprehensible. When an Iraqi imam such as Rafi’ Al-Rifa’i argues that fighting against Islamic State would reinforce Iran, he is operating on the supposition that there is greater distance between ‘we, the Sunni’ and ‘we, the Shi’a’ than there is between himself and the forces of Islamic State within ‘we, the Sunni’. This notion leads to the careful negotiation and prioritisation of religious we’s: ‘Why should we fight ISIS? [. . .] We are not stupid enough to start internal [Sunni] fighting only so that the [Shiite] militias can come and slaughter us.’41 Religious we’s have always been systems of dividing circles that are themselves riddled with internal divisions. Those divisions can provoke a schism, a sort of mitosis of the religious circle. At other times, shattered circles of belonging regroup into a single, greater we.These revivals are often due to a sense of fraternity.‘We, brothers’ is the strongest intensity bestowed upon a political person. Like ‘we,

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comrades’ or ‘we, friends’, ‘we, brothers’ plays the role of a shepherd. In retracing the circle of a we gathered by faith, ideas, and values, the aim is to establish a group that brings individual identities and particular sects back into the fold. Published in 1936, Hassan al-Banna’s 50-Point Manifesto for the Muslim Brotherhood ( Jamāʻat al-Ikhwān al-Muslimīn) addresses a we that gathers to unite Muslims under a single Ummah with uniform Shari’ah law.42 In this way, al-Banna re-grounds a strong Muslim-speaking subject, one that had been dispersed with the decline of the Caliphate, the collapse of the hegemony of the Ottoman Empire, and the end of European political and commercial domination. In a text entitled ‘Our Mission’, al-Banna speaks to his ‘brothers’ and asks what this we wants. When he analyses the character of this European culture that has become purely materialistic,43 it becomes clear to him that, as science and modern industry have spread wealth to different populations, they have also led to the removal of religion from certain spaces reserved for the state, such as schools and legal institutions. No longer united by spiritual values, these peoples are instead unified by material goods. When the organisation first came into being, al-Banna emphasised the importance of solidarity and altruism in the teaching of Islam (for example, collecting and distributing zakat, constructing and renovating mosques, founding madrasas, engaging in social work for the most marginalised groups, and so on). In this way, alBanna sought to restore Egyptian workers’ sense of belonging to a fraternity that had been forgotten. In response to accusations that they were just playing the political game, he frequently advised his brothers to respond by saying, ‘This is Islam, and we do not recognize such divisions.’44 Al-Banna’s explicit goal was to eliminate the divisions of class and race (he rarely mentions sex or gender) that modern civilisation placed within the idea of a Muslim we: ‘Islam is equal for all people and prefers nobody to others on the grounds of differences in blood or race, forefathers or descent, poverty or wealth. According to Islam everyone is equal [. . .]’45 Al-Banna then clarifies his point: ‘However, in deeds and natural gifts, then the answer is yes. The learned is above the ignorant . . . Thus, we see that Islam does not approve of the class system.’46 By

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positing education as the only grounds for difference in authority, the Muslim we subsumes the we of class and the we of race, thereby establishing both equality and hierarchy within this we. Little by little, this political Muslim we was reconstructed in the twentieth century. Some time before the reconstruction of this Muslim we, a Jewish we was reformulated and, in certain milieux, transformed into a political Zionist we. This occurred after Theodor Herzl’s speech at the 1899 Third Zionist Conference in Basel. Herzl carefully clarifies the point: ‘We are not here to occupy ourselves with the internal affairs of the individual countries of which we happen to be citizens.’47 This declaration sets the national we aside. Herzl speaks of ‘our people’, but in successive conferences he often ended his addresses with a vision of our contributions to the progress of the whole of humanity: ‘If it portends injustice toward our people we shall reply to it in the future. In our future, in our country! And our answer shall consist in the advancement of human civilization.’48 Militant radicals such as Ze’ev Jabotinsky would soon thereafter have a different interpretation of the relationships between the interests of the human species in general, class interests, Jewish interests, and Zionist ideals. Although he was a socialist, Jabotinsky started out by presenting himself as a nationalist politician (a kol-yisroel politician) rather than a class politician.49 He argued that one could see throughout the world that general national interests were eclipsing particular class interests. Jonathan Frankel observes that: ‘Standing beyond or above class, his movement had the right and duty to take the lead in the politics of national unity.’ Frankel here cites Jabotinsky: ‘“We, Zionists”, he concluded, “consider ourselves not a party but the spokesmen of the entire Jewish people.”’50 We can see how this new political we emerged from an attempt to remove class and party differences. This new division of the political space forces an overlapping of the different polarisations of questions both social (revolutionaries versus conservatives) and religious (Jews versus antisemites). At the crossroads of these polarities, one finds Jewish revolutionaries and revolutionary Jews, as well as Jewish conservatives and conservative Jews. And one can also see parallel lines of division among antisemites. It’s all a question of priorities.

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Since the late nineteenth century in France, the antisemitic we has become a political subject. This began with the writings of Édouard Drumont.51 This we would subsequently be taken back up, revised, and clarified by Albert Regnard and Édouard Marchand.52 This antisemitic we then resonated with different political identities, so that the Antisemitic and Nationalistic Youth League of France could later write ‘we, revolutionary antisemites. . .’ In Ukraine, after the Russian Revolution, some activists conversely referred to themselves as ‘antisemitic revolutionaries’. This order of priorities (between the social question and the antisemitic question) is often a cause for debate within fascist movements. It was one of the breaking points in the relationship between the members of the SA (Sturmabteilung) in Munich and the movement led by Ernst Röhm, who maintained close ties to leftist workers in northern Germany. In order to avoid further fractures in the sense conveyed by ‘we, the fascists’, Mussolini often referred instead to an open we without any a priori commitment to a specific doctrine: ‘We, the fascists, have no preconceived doctrine; our doctrine is deeds.’ He then adds, ‘We, the fascists, have never concealed our complete disinterest with regard to all theories [. . .] We are aristocrats and democrats, revolutionaries and reactionaries, proletarians and anti-proletarians, pacifists and anti-pacifists.’53 In Pasolini’s film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, the Duke even declares that ‘We, fascists, are the only true anarchists.’54 This fascist we has always oscillated between an authoritarian we and this other open we, a kind of vital we that represents the hope of escaping all of the old categorisations of self and corrupt institutions of power. The French writer and collaborationist Lucien Rebatet once asked the following: Why did we declare ourselves as fascists? We did so because we were horrified by democratic parliamentarianism, its hypocrisy, its incompetence, and its cowardice [. . .] Fascism represented movement, revolution, and the future [. . .] We wanted to abolish all political sects in favour of a singular party.55 The hope of the fascist we is to do away with false divisions and parliamentary carping that impede the country’s vital development.

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For the fascists, this singular we is what must sound the call to action and hold together by force what were crumbling groups, cliques, interests, and mediocre we’s. As in communist traditions, the we takes on a decisive importance in fascist movements because it becomes a principle of greater political unity that cloaks false divisions. The we becomes an ideal of life, camaraderie, and fraternity. The statement of purpose of an identity movement currently popular among French youth says as much: ‘We declare war against all of those who would uproot us and make us forget who we are.’ Then they continue, ‘We are comrades, friends, brothers, a clan. More than just a youth movement, we are the youth on the move.’56 This identitary we is a we of origin, one founded on soil and bloodlines, a religious identity (Christian), and a colour (white). Furthermore, it is also a generational we, because it becomes an identity grounded in age as well as sex, gender, class, ethnicity, and religion. The circle of the national we is intertwined with the circle of different ages, as well as with the circle of youth in particular. A strange echo emerges; this patriotic-nationalist group’s ‘we are the youth on the move’ is reminiscent of the formula invoked in a twentieth-century socialist song. Pacifist Paul Vaillant-Couturier wrote the following words, set to the music of Arthur Honegger: ‘We are the ardent youth who came to scale the sky.’57 This use of we to designate a class in terms of age serves to divide the twentieth century in half. During the first half of the century, this we was associated with political, fascist, communist, and socialist movements that tried to mobilise young people and give them a political identity (Napoleon’s Young Guard comes to mind). Charles Péguy’s Our Youth was an early indicator of this change.58 Youth, with its doubts and outbursts, is an identity in itself. In the second half of the twentieth century, youth became an autonomous political subject in the same way as sex, gender, ethnicity, and colour. We might even say that what we call ‘counterculture’ was largely the creation of a ‘we, the youth’ that splashed declarations across the walls of Paris in 1968: ‘We’re all enraged!’ This we was frequently challenged (as in Pierre Bourdieu’s claim that, from a sociological point of view, ‘youth is just a word’), but it brought about the emergence of a new political subject. The title of a song

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by Taxi Girl, ‘We Are Young, We Are Proud’, puts a new twist on James Brown’s ‘I’m Black and I’m Proud’. It exhibits the constitution of a we that longs to move beyond traditional political divisions in order to affirm the existence of a community parsed in terms of age.59 This is the we of the ‘kids’ from The Who’s ‘The Kids Are Alright’,60 the we that one finds in what has become a proverbial song of protest by The Doors: ‘We want the world, and we want it now.’61 The political subjects of rock and pop and the experimentation with systematic transgression that accompanies them make up the ‘we, the youths’ or ‘we, the youth’ that punk band Sham 69 sings about: ‘If the kids are united, then we’ll never be divided.’62 We can see the evolution of this we in the history of recorded popular music. During the 1980s, this we led to the hope for a we that would be universal but empty, like the one that resounds in the song ‘We Are the World, We Are the Children’, which Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, and members of the band Toto wrote in order to raise money for children suffering from famine in Ethiopia.63 Later on, we find some contemporary formulations of the we that verge on the tautological.Take, for instance, the we vehemently and combatively affirmed in Ke$ha’s ‘We R Who We R’.64 This we is a circle restricted to the person speaking, the only one who knows what they themselves are, but at the same time it is also a universal circle that designates all of those who are what they are. This we designates everyone and no one. Making this we authentic, however, means excluding those hypocritical we’s who are not really what they claim to be. In their rush to reconcile contrary positions, certain countercultural slogans risked exposing their inconsistency. Such was the case with the phrase ‘We are all German Jews’, declared in May ’68 in solidarity with Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Shortly thereafter, Dominique Grange wrote a song, a couplet of which affirmed that ‘We are all Jews and Germans, we have all been dissolved.’65 Thirty years later, a still optimistic Daniel Cohn-Bendit declared, This slogan has supported the refusal of exclusion in all of its forms: ‘We are all immigrants’, ‘We are all foreigners’, ‘We are all undocumented’. It communicates an identification

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between some of the youth and people on the margins of society. This slogan has taken on a life of its own. It has survived as a symbol of solidarity. It is a good slogan. It gets behind its own metamorphosis.66 However, through its metamorphosis, this slogan actually lost its meaning. It no longer brought contradictory identities together, and the youth themselves no longer used it. Its use instead moved to the rest of civil society and the media. For example, the phrase ‘We are all Americans’ emerged the day after 9/11, as did ‘We are all Charlie’ after the attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Then this we was twisted and parodied on the internet, and it has now become everyone and no one. The internet abounds with examples of small, childish battles over different we’s in an attempt to escape ‘we, everyone’. Here we might think of the debate surrounding the contemporary interpretation of ‘swag’, which is a modern version of ‘cool’. We have seen some oppositional redefinitions of the acronym. Some people affirm that ‘swag’ means ‘secretly we are gay’, while others argue that it means ‘secretly we are African guys’ or even ‘American guys’. ‘Having swag’, and therefore also being desired by others who want to be like us, entails an attempt to appropriate the very terms of that desirability: we are what you want to be. In this case, this ‘secret we’ is a manifestation of the desire to reform a small circle of initiates within the empty circle of democracy. In opposition to the we of everyone and no one, the modernity of avant-garde aesthetics and politics has long depended on seizing an aristocratic we from within a democratic regime. But if we can be anybody at all, how can we be distinguished? The Nietzschean maxims ‘[W]e the noble, the good, the beautiful and the happy!’67 and ‘[W]e spirits that have become free . . .’,68 both of which are variations of Stendhal’s ‘happy few’,69 already set the tone for the pamphlets and manifestos that later affirm: ‘[W]e, DADA, don’t agree with them’ (Tristan Tzara),70 ‘We, Surrealists, undertake to celebrate here the fiftieth anniversary of hysteria’ (André Breton and Louis Aragon),71 ‘We, Suprematists [sic], throw open the way to you. Hurry!’ (Kazimir Malevich),72 ‘We, situationists, protest. . .’ (Guy Debord, who said this many times).73 Sometimes, as in the

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case of Futurism, the aesthetic aristocracy that tried to uproot all old identities to reveal a new, irreducible we came to resemble a rite of purification in opposition to the social norms of the we. But what exactly should we oppose? In Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, the we of power, a totalitarian we, is predominant.74 The author imagines a world where people’s identity has been reduced to identification codes composed of letters and numbers. When the totalitarian we is triumphant, the resistance affirms the singular I. However, in a liberal society where the I has won the day, dissidents have to find a new ideal we. The Coming Insurrection contains the following passage: ‘The more I want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The more I express myself, the more I am drained.’75 The I is the empty form of the liberal world. The I is an impasse that power uses to forbid us from being ourselves. ‘The self is not some thing within us that is in a state of crisis; it is the form they mean to stamp upon us.’76 In order to become us, the I must become ‘communal’. ‘Communes come into being when people find each other, get on with each other, and decide on a common path [. . .] It’s what makes us say “we”, and makes that an event.’77 Delivering a political elegy for friendship, the Invisible Committee, as in primitive Christianity and utopian socialism, substitutes a we rooted in ideas for all the we’s based in particular interests (gender, class, race, etc.). These interest-based we’s come to resemble something like identity police despatched by power. The we of political communes ‘would not define themselves – as collectives tend do to –by what’s inside and what’s outside them, but by the density of the ties at their core’.78 In a manner similar to the union within Christ or a classless society, the commune is a we that is not set in opposition to you, them, others, or enemies. On the contrary, the communal we welcomes them. It is the utopian dream of an absolute and autonomous we that doesn’t structure itself through opposition to an outside. Of course, this utopian we was first rhetorically claimed for us all by a very limited avant-garde. It was the part speaking for the whole. The opponents, the resistance, and the outcasts still say ‘we’ in small groups, but they do so in the name of a principle they

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have remained faithful to, a principle that the others have betrayed. After all, what is this group? We cannot escape it, though we might sometimes forget it in our less humane moments. It is the we of we’s, namely, humanity. The elderly deportee Robert Antelme makes a fitting observation in The Human Race: ‘The SS cannot alter our species. They are themselves enclosed within the same humankind and the same history.’79 This we is shared by those who defend it as well as those who negate it; it is the human we. We say ‘we’ to our own, but in doing so we include ourselves with everyone else. And there you have it; we arrive right back at the place where we started. One can sometimes glimpse this great we of humanity in the writings of Erasmus.80 It is the human we of Étienne de La Boétie.81 It doesn’t explicitly appear in Montaigne’s Essays. However, when in ‘An Apologie of Raymond Sebond’, Montaigne puts forward a series of examples to show the moral superiority of beasts over people, he still makes us distinct, albeit negatively: ‘we, the humans’ are those who, in our madness, ‘prefer ourselves before other creatures, and sequester our selves from their condition and societie’.82 ‘We, the humans’ is a we of principle grounded in nothing but itself. Humanity is that which calls itself we and which leaves no room for a remainder. This full, integral we is the only one without an interlocutor. While ‘we, women’ responds to ‘we, men’, in the same way that ‘we, white people’ responds to ‘we, black people’ or ‘we, Indian people’, ‘we, humans’ is a message without a recipient. The opening and closing of the totality of the forms of we move along in accordance with this human we.83 This is what Francis Wolff defends in Notre humanité (Our Humanity): the human we is ultimately grounded in the ability to predicate things through language. Because this ability is only developed by our species, the sphere of being delimited by the word has no outside. We are thus confined to our selves. This confinement, which we see in Sartre’s humanism, for example, is the ground of political responsibility because only humans can judge other humans. However, as Francis Wolff recognises, modern politics has seen the appearance and reappearance of discourses that engage an even bigger we, one that surpasses our humanity. This is Steven

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Wise’s ‘we, animals with practical autonomy’ (the great apes, dolphins, and possibly elephants).84 It is the ‘we, the great apes’ evoked by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer. In her plea for a ‘humanity beyond humanity’, Cavalieri says: The notion of ‘us’ as opposed to ‘the other’, which, like a more and more abstract silhouette, assumed in the course of centuries the contours of the boundaries of the tribe, of the nation, of the race, of the human species, and which for a time the species barrier had congealed and stiffened, has again become something alive, ready for further change.85 What we have here is a progressive view, that some will call naive, of the linear history of we. This view sees a we that first emerged in the dark corners of groups of humans who kept to themselves. It then became more pliable, diffusing and moulding itself to the limits of family and clan first, and then to those of ethnicity and nation. This we finally came to correspond to an entire species. Enthusiastically pursuing this development, Cavalieri postulates that this we will continue to expand. Because of this expansion, and as we become increasingly intolerant of unnecessary animal suffering, we will identify not just with our species, but with all feeling things. We might say that history is the story of the concentric expansion of we. Any truly progressive person ought not to limit their we to humanity. They ought to be conscious of we’s that start off small in number, we’s that are first confined to small groups of humans and are then centred around larger and more abstract categories, such as those of faith or nation, before they go on to encompass the whole of the species. History doesn’t halt at humanism’s ‘impassable barrier’86 of we, because stopping there would perpetuate our community’s insensitivity towards other feeling beings, not just the ones that are rational and capable of speech. People are neither the terminus a quo nor the terminus ad quem of the political we. Some say ‘we, animals and humans’ when defending the rights of non-human species, in the same way that some speak in the name of ‘we, the cyborgs’, at once man and machine,

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in the hope of ‘building a political form’.87 For a long time now, all of the we’s have been kept in a sort of box, one that we thought was tightly sealed but that has shown its permeability. A certain period in the history of we has gone by many names. This period began in the Renaissance and seems to be close to its end, if it didn’t already end a few generations ago. During this period, all we’s were parsed in terms of humankind. Having crossed over the boundaries of the human, which are no longer very clear, we have to go even further and make room among us for all of the great apes, then the large mammals, then all mammals, and, finally, all animals. We must also say ‘we’ in the name of those who do not say ‘we’ but who live and feel just like we do. Everything that lives is in the ‘biotic community’ evoked by environmentalist Aldo Leopold, the author of a moral maxim often cited by ecologists: ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’88 Following Leopold’s lead, J. Baird Callicott conceives of a ‘land ethic’, an ethics centred around ‘citizenship in the biotic community’.89 In this way, we embraces the entire ecosystem and stretches across the whole surface of the Earth.90 But where does all of this end? No form of life should be excluded from a generous movement like this. But is there anything that we is not? What aren’t we? Here we are overcome by a vertiginous feeling, as it seems that there is nothing capable of stopping the expansion of the circle after it passes beyond the boundaries of humanity.

Everyone–we–I Let us imagine a we structured as a series of concentric circles. Those circles encompass the biosphere, planet Earth, the whole community of sentient beings, then those endowed with a central nervous system, then mammals, then those once referred to as ‘superior’ mammals, followed by the great apes, and finally humanity. Now, within the circle of humanity, let us imagine connections and disjunctions between a number of circles. Like a ring with interlocking bands, these overlapping circles criss-cross and intersect with one another according to gender (male and female,

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but also androgynous, transgender, queer, etc.); sexual orientation (homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, asexual, etc.); race, skin colour, and ethnicity (black, white, Arab, Asian, Indian, Melanesian, etc.); social class (proletarian, lower and upper middle class, bourgeois, rentier capitalist, aristocrat, etc.); age (infant, pre-adolescent, adolescent, adult, elderly, etc.); communities of belief (religions, philosophical sects, ideological organisations, and political parties, etc.); and so on. Now imagine tightening all of those circles like a slipknot. We pull the knot, it tightens, and different ethnic groups, tribes, clans, and families come into view. We make the opening even smaller, and everything suddenly seems to organise itself into different bands. There are comradeships, friendships, and trios. Pull just a little tighter, and we see couples – you and me. But what comes after that? We can continue to tighten the knot until it appears to be little more than a point, and what do we get? That thing we call ‘I’. Of course, both schizophrenia and the Freudian distinction between the ego, the id, and the superego demonstrate that the I can also be a we. I am certainly many. As Félix Guattari’s ‘schizo-politics’ proclaimed, ‘We are all groupuscules.’91 In response to questions about their collaboration, Deleuze and Guattari once made the following wisecrack: ‘The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.’92 A fundamental feature of modernity lies in the recognition that the visible, unique, free, and intentional I no longer represents the unsurpassable lower bound of politics. This is because I’m not the only me in me. Marcel Gauchet’s L’Inconscient cérébral (The Cerebral Unconscious) traces the genealogy of this idea through the study of reflexes, psychoanalysis, and Nietzsche’s Depth Psychology.That genealogy also extends to the introspective work of Paul Valéry, the author of Tel Quel, who declared that ‘to be yourself is to be alone with yourself, which means that there are always two of you’.93 Rather than being the atomic particle or constitutive element underlying all communities, the twentieth-century I was reduced to being one degree of community among others. I am one among many, and there are also many within me. Writing along these lines, Valéry notes in his Cahiers how a person is ‘an individual in the eyes of society but a plurality to himself. External

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groups tell him, “You are one.” To this he responds, “You are one, world, where I am many.”’94 While the outside assigns the I a singular identity, there is nevertheless an entire population inside the I that demands representation as the we within. The disintegration of the I and the existence of an inner we are commonplace ideas in late modernity. This notion dates back to the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought on by the combined efforts of poetry, psychology (postulating a tiered model in which consciousness of the self is only the most superficial layer), and philosophy (which made the I into a word, and then into a mask that covers the multitudinous manifestations of the self). In The Gay Science, Nietzsche exclaims, ‘I am many.’95 As Valéry further explores the atomic level of subjectivity, he finds that there is no such thing as a singular identity. The closer we get to the I, the less unified, solid, and substantial it seems. In order to truly comprehend the I, we have to talk about shards, fragments, and variations. Under the microscope of modern analysis, the I appears to conform to Sartre’s formula in No Exit: ‘I’m a crowd all by myself.’96 In similar fashion, Henri Michaux describes the I’s mode of existence as akin to that of a small community: I am inhabited; I speak to who-I-was and those within who-I-was speak to me. Sometimes I feel awkward, as if I were a stranger. They make up an entire society unto themselves, and it strikes me that I no longer hear myself. We are never alone in our own skin! I am multiple and I continue to multiply despite years of not knowing what to do with this growing pile of ‘I’s’. I’ve never quite figured out exactly how many we are, but conditions are overcrowded, and we are constantly stepping over each other . . . when one wants to speak, another takes the podium, and we can’t make ourselves heard any more.97 If we accept this proliferation of the modern spirit, we should be able to imagine a politics of the self that addresses the relationship between the infant, the adolescent, and the adult that we have been, as though they were elected representatives of our own inner parliament. Each of these permutations would have a voice

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in the deliberations of the self. Through this metaphor, we comprehend how the modern decomposition of the I does nothing more than push the limits of person back to the personality. It does this by acting as if there were some smaller and more essential I’s within the I we see. In other words, whether it be as the schizzes of a person or as their past incarnations, we can conceive of an I that is also really a we.98 This I both brings together different versions of the self and places them into opposition. However, doing so still requires us to imagine those I’s as the lower bound of we. From this angle, there is no infinite regression because there are no I’s within each of my personalities, or better yet, because ‘I’ and ‘we’ simply signify the same thing. In this case, every I is a we, and every we is an I. This means that we lose the very concept of we. In order to preserve the concept of we, we have to extend it as far as possible, but we also have to limit it. We can uncover nothing more fundamental than the I, which we understand in the sense of ‘one or another of my personalities’. Now that we have delineated the limits of a minimal we, we can proceed to the other extreme of the spectrum and sketch the contours of a maximal we. Our first attempt at exploring these different levels of the we had left off at a we that is common to all of the sentient beings of our biosphere. The contemporary idea of the Anthropocene is an expression of this we.99 Such a we posits relationships between all of the subjects of both human history and natural history, without distinction. Furthermore, beyond the community of natural beings, we have also seen the development of ideas such as Bruno Latour’s ‘parliament of things’ and Levi Bryant’s ‘democracy of objects’.100 Following these ideas, the political we ought to be extended to all entities, both animate and inanimate, that enter into and circulate within societal networks. In order to describe the perceptions that pass between objects, Graham Harman similarly evokes a rational polypsychic hypothesis.101 This hypothesis points towards a sort of secret life of objects among other objects, a life devoid of sensation but not of relations. In this way, we can imagine an inanimate we made up of objects, a kind of subjectivity stripped of life, a representation of a silent community of things that enter into relationships

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beyond the confines of our consciousness. But how can we make these things say ‘we’? The human we enhances itself with these objects and interacts through them. Indeed, there has long been political speculation about the consequences of forming a we of ‘cyborgs’. In the works of Donna Haraway,‘cyborgs’ are those enhanced with pacemakers, grafts, implants, electronic chips, and other connected objects, meaning that cyborgs are at once both natural and artificial subjectivities. In order to escape from ‘obsolete’ modes of humanity as sexual and rooted in gender, Haraway proposes an ‘ironic political myth’ and opts for hybrid identities that indistinctly fuse together nature and culture.102 The cyborg, a being that is at once organic and artificial, serves as her model. As a means of challenging all binary divisions in our identities (man–woman, black–white), Haraway strategically chooses to attack the we of all we’s: humanity. The human we distinguishes us from other animals and machines, but the ‘we, cyborgs’ that is to come will mix them all together.103 Nevertheless, this identity is still centred on us as organisms. Cyborgs’ bodies may be enhanced, but they are bodies nonetheless. So now let us try to say ‘we’ beyond the limits of our bodies. Let us say ‘we’ in the hope of including everything that surrounds us. This is what Arne Næss’s deep ecology refers to as the realisation and development of the Big Self.104 It also appears in Walt Whitman’s transcendentalist poetry: We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return, We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark, We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks, [. . .] We are snow, rain, cold, darkness, we are each product and influence of the globe, We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two [. . .]105 We have passed from circle to circle and are now embracing almost everything. This swelling ecological we goes beyond enlisting all of the animate and inanimate things that accompany us on Earth. It also

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brings in our environment, including the atmosphere, the moon, and the solar system. Taken in a cosmic sense, Whitman’s we is capable of embracing everything, provided that we first empty it of its contradictions and stop thinking about this we as a system of social antagonisms. The poem’s first line declares, ‘We two, how long we were fool’d’, as if we had mistakenly thought that we were split in two.106 Whitman’s we is instead a spiritual form of the whole of the entire universe in unison. Brian Cox, a physicist and public advocate for science, sums things up thus: ‘We are the cosmos made conscious. Life is the means by which the universe understands itself.’107 In the words of theologian Don C. Nix, the formula becomes the following: ‘We are realizing that the story of the Cosmos, from the Big Bang to us, is our story, and that we are the Cosmos in human form.’108 (We can also find comparable propositions in Whitehead’s metaphysics, as well as in Gnosticism and certain Vedic teachings.) We might even say that as it nears the limits of everything that there is, we becomes the name of a subject-object. If we are everything, then everything is we.We end up comprehending ourselves, either by comprehending everything or by being comprehended by the totality of things. We becomes the redundant name for everything. Having arrived at this point, it seems impossible for us to encompass anything bigger. And yet, at this point, we no longer functions as a political form. We instead becomes the subject of a kind of wisdom aimed at the reconciliation – debatable though it may be – of everything with subjectivity. In order to identify ourselves with everything, we at least have to distinguish and differentiate between a subject that is we-everything and an object that is we-everything. This is how the we resists its absolute absorption into totality. We can be almost everything, but in becoming everything, the we dissolves. When the we is everything, it isn’t we any more. Little by little, the present work will try to construct a model of this distinctive form of we. At this stage of the investigation, ‘we’ signifies nothing more than a vague, variable figure that evolves through a series of concentric or interlocking forms. It passes through different points on the scale between everything and I, but it cannot be absolutely

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reduced to either term. I and totality are the two absolute boundaries beyond which the we disappears. However, from within the limits of I and totality, we appears to us as the universal organising principle of subjectivity.

Three objections At this stage of our reasoning, many will refuse to be assimilated into a we. We will consider three major objections.

I am me The first objection arises from that cautious or suspicious type of person who prefers to say ‘I’. Those who voice this objection will say, ‘I do not accept the way in which you splinter humanity into vast categories and claim that I must identify myself with them. Why, you ask? Because I cannot be reduced to my gender, sexuality, race, or age. I am an individual and above all of that.’ Witold Gombrowicz writes the following in his Diary: I did not idolize poetry, I was neither excessively progressive nor excessively modern. I was not a typical intellectual. I was neither nationalist, nor Catholic, nor communist, nor a right-winger. I did not venerate science, or art, or Marx. So, who was I?109 Gombrowicz describes an individual identity that has been uprooted from all of its affiliations. This is a vague or ambiguous identity that refuses to name itself or ‘show its papers’. Especially at the beginning of the twentieth century, many individuals sought to define themselves through negation. Wary of all attempts at reducing the self to a collective category, they tried to elude the trap of the we and proudly refused to exhibit any signs of belonging to the herd. Each individual’s inner life is far too subtle to be forcibly identified with such basic collective categories as one’s social origin, sex, or skin colour. Following Gombrowicz, we can also add one’s

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adherence to political and religious dogmas to this list of categories. John Lennon’s song ‘God’ lists the things in which the song’s narrator does not believe, namely, magic, the I Ching, the Bible, Hitler, Jesus, JFK, Buddha, the Bhagavad Gita, kings, Elvis, Bob Dylan, and his own group, the Beatles.110 Reading between the lines, here we see an absolute individuality that no longer accepts sacrificing its singularity to swear allegiance to something that would make it part of a hopelessly vulgar we. Such a vulgar we can only contain what thousands or even millions of people have in common, specifically, the most feeble, least distinct, and least interesting parts of who they are. At the end of the song, Lennon will only admit to believing in himself, his partner,Yoko, and therefore their love.This ending gives us a sort of minimal we that saves the individual from solipsism. This minimal we is the lover’s we, the couple, you and I. Beneath this there are only my different personalities, and beyond that, absolute solitude.111 We should be careful not to get the wrong idea about the free-spirited individual’s doubts about their affiliations. At issue here is not whether we should reduce our understanding of an individual to the way they articulate their gender, sexuality, race, social class, or age. Dubious and recalcitrant with regard to any categorisation whatsoever, twentieth-century individualism has taught us that no one should be prisoner to their identities. We now know that no one should be subjected to a genericised description in terms of age, sex, gender, race, class, or belief. The result of such a process is akin to a banal government ID. Nevertheless, an absolute distrust of all affiliations resonates like a tired refrain. The feeling persists that we must take with a grain of salt those who, like me, maintain the following: I am never defined by my skin colour, my origins, my sexuality, or my generation; I judge each person by their singular being and unique qualities; I choose my friends based on affinities that have nothing to do with any of these categories; I’m not really into joining groups; I’m an individual; I am only what I am. We don’t suspect that we might be mistaken in loudly and proudly trumpeting this individual identity, even though we know that it is fundamentally just another generic identity like any other. It is the identity of ‘we, the others’, the individualists.

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We is a flexible social form that can be applied equally, neither more nor less, to those who assume it and to those who refuse it. At the end of the twentieth century, we therefore see a small society take shape as the we of the individualists. We see these societies materialise when we consider social networks, online gaming communities, blogs, forums, and Facebook. Those who didn’t want to belong have found a community where they do indeed belong, but from a distance. Of course, there were other communities like this before the advent of the internet.112 In Society and Solitude, Emerson speaks of a friend who had a very difficult time because ‘he could not speak in the tone of the people’.113 Being in the company of his peers causes this friend much suffering. This prompts Emerson to describe literature as the silent community of the solitary. There have always been cultural and industrial means of incorporating the we of individuals who refuse to be we. In order to not belong to any we whatsoever, it was necessary to find another way of expressing our radical non-belonging, one so original that it also distinguished us from all of the others who also claimed not to belong to any group. For the Romantics, this was the mark of genius. But there are still subgroups among geniuses. The exceptions to community also form a community, even if only as a result of their definition through negation and their search for singularity. What interests us here is all of we. The individual who proudly says ‘I’ can no longer safely assert their independence just because they think they have created a freer, more singular idea of identity, one that refuses to be reduced to a social identity that they did not choose and that seems to have nothing to do with them. Like the social me and the ‘moi profond’ or inner me of Proust, there is a social we and an inner we whose dimensions vary in accordance with each person. To be more precise, we feel as if there is a we unto which we ourselves have been assigned, and there is also an ideal we with which we think we voluntarily identify ourselves. This voluntary we allows us to imagine the community of fellows to which we aspire to belong. There is a certain type of person whose first move will be to try to cast off all we’s in an attempt to claim to be solely themselves. This is a demonstration of that person’s status as a free thinker. It

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is in no way our intention to delegitimise the formation of such unique personalities. Instead, we aim to show that the formation of this me never happens in a void, but is instead grounded in a we. A follower of Fourierism and later Saint-Simonianism, Michel Derrion was a silk worker who was inspired by the Lyonnais silk worker revolts, or the Canut revolts. Derrion became a pioneer of the nineteenth-century French cooperative movement and wrote the following about himself: I repeat, I belong to no political party. I have friends everywhere, everywhere affections, but I am not bound to any exclusive society. I have no oath to keep. I am ME . . . totally and completely devoted to the great human family.114 We should emphasise that this speech on independence concludes with a pledge of allegiance to humanity. We can never say ‘I’ in opposition to all the other we’s.We can only say ‘I’ in opposition to certain we’s in particular, and we do so in the name of other we’s.

We are everyone We now run up against the second objection. Instead of those who proclaim, ‘I am me’, this objection comes from those who take the opposite tack and express themselves in the name of a ‘we, everyone’. This latter group declares their opposition to all particular we’s, but they do so in favour of a universal we. They stand against all of the divisions that we have previously listed. They affirm that all such partial identities (male, female, white, black, Jewish, Arab, Russian, etc.) are false. They instead maintain that we can all hope to be reconciled with a greater, ultimate sense of belonging. Anyone who brushes the we’s aside as so many fictions or lies does so in the name of one single we. This is the message of Saint Paul’s promise: ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.’115 Alain Badiou has forwarded a reading of Pauline universalism that sees in Paul’s promise a prefiguration of the hope of communism.116 On this reading, identities are always false figures

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of division that should be eclipsed by a single, egalitarian humanity that shoulders its own destiny. Indeed, Marx and Engels prophesied similarly in The Communist Manifesto: National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.117 And yet, in the Pauline and Marxist promises of erasing all particular we’s (be they ethnic or national), we can still see how the false antagonisms of our identities appear against the background of an authentic we, the we of humanity. We must first be able to say ‘we, humans’ if we want to have any hope of erasing ‘we, Jews’, ‘we, Greeks’, ‘we, men’, ‘we, women’, or any of the other identities that impede the fulfilment of some greater, ultimate identity, whether it be in the eternal Christ or in a classless society. Nevertheless, anyone who says ‘we, humans’ still continues to oppose that we to a hidden they, namely, the non-humans. The absolute reconciliation of ‘we, humans’ with ourselves can only happen on the backs of other beings that are excluded from the eternal and barred from the absolute. Let us momentarily allow these political and religious promises to erase antagonistic identities and collapse the difference between humans and other species. We can reformulate Saint Paul’s message to that end: ‘There is no longer human, nor animal, for you are all one in Jesus Christ.’ We can do the same with the passage from Marx and Engels: ‘Along

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with the class antagonism within humanity, the hostility between humans and other species will come to an end.’ This means that there will no longer be injustice, exploitation, or domination of other life forms by humans, a notion which brings us back to the different states of we. We first imagined these different states as a series of concentric circles. We might imagine that we, humans and animals, share a common political destiny. Doing so would entail our mutual participation in a shared identity devoid of antagonism, a we that is extended to include all living things. The problem is that we have no reason to stop this process of extension at any particular level of the universe. Eventually, at the upper limit of the possible extension of the first person plural, we gets conflated with everything. We thus dissolves. The word loses its significance and is subsumed into the cosmos. The sole boundary of we is everything.That means that there is no ‘we, everyone’ grounded a priori in absolute reason. Accordingly, because both the Christian promise and the communist promise appeal to a true, reconciled identity, a ‘we, everyone’, they both also remain limited in their critique of antagonisms and false identities. Our criticism depends on the ability to critique some antagonistic identities in the name of other antagonistic identities. Nevertheless, from the universalist point of view, all identities are simultaneously false (because they divide, so identities are divided among themselves) and true (because they unite, so identities are united among themselves). It’s all a question of degree.We can respond to a person who talks about a total we – a we that stands in opposition to other partial and illusory we’s – by letting them know that their we is just as partial and illusory as those they critique. This doesn’t mean that the identities proposed by Christianity or Marxist communism are illegitimate. It just shows that they are incapable of delegitimising all other identities. There has always been and there will always be a boundless abundance of we’s.

We-of-interests and we-of-ideas There are many meanings of ‘we’, despite it being only one word. And now a third objection arises.

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This time, the objection comes from those who speak neither in the name of ‘me’ nor in the name of ‘we, everyone’. This third objection allows for the existence of a complex structure of numerous concentric or interlocking we’s, but it also insists – and with good reason – that from the outset we have been confusing at least two different kinds of identities under the same label of ‘we’. ‘We, black people’ and ‘we, white people’, or ‘we, men’ and ‘we, women’ cannot equate to ‘we, communists’, or even ‘we, Christians’.The first set of identities refers to forms of belonging that have not been chosen, but that the individual instead received at birth. The second set of identities result from choices for which an individual can be held responsible. For example, a person may be born into the male sex and with a certain skin colour, but, from that point on, he chooses what he believes and to which political party he belongs. Belonging to a certain sex and voting for one party or another are not completely comparable. After all, if we can freely choose to engage in something, we can also always choose to disengage from it. The third objection comes from those who demand the right to be judged on the basis of the we’s into which they have entered freely and with full knowledge, not because of the we’s into which they were born despite themselves. These objectors criticise us for using one and the same word to describe both their freedom and their contingent circumstances.118 It’s true that, as soon as I say ‘we, humans’, ‘we, women’, or ‘we, black people’, I am committed in a different way than if I had claimed to speak on behalf of ‘we, jihadis’, ‘we, anarchists’, or even ‘we, Zionists’ or ‘we, Shintoists’. In the former case, the we is something inherited. It is certainly possible to transform the relationships that we have with people of the same sex or the same skin colour into a political movement. Nevertheless, the initial reason for these relationships is a fact of our birth. By contrast, when I affirm that I belong to an ideological group, when I join a community of believers, when I express my religious affiliation, and when I proclaim my solidarity with a community of comrades or friends, I make use of a performative we. I belong there inasmuch as I affirm my belonging there. For the sake of clarity, we will now speak of a ‘we-of-interests’ to refer to every we in which a particular subject is raised, and a

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‘we-of-ideas’, which is characterised by a we that a subject is able to choose and that can be changed at will. In this sense, ‘we’ is an indicator of one’s freedom that allows for there to be a relationship between the identity imposed on an individual by the circumstances of their birth, and the identity upon which an individual decides. There is a we that determines us, and another we that we determine. There is a we that engages us in society, and another we in which we ourselves engage. This third objection is motivated by questions of individual freedom. It accordingly contends that there is not actually one universal we alongside some other particular we’s, but rather that there are always two types of we’s that we must carefully distinguish. Free will has to do with an unchanging line of demarcation that passes through our identities. We can imagine free will by thinking of shady and sunny mountain slopes situated on either side of what we might call the unchangeable crest line of the self. On one slope lies the we to which we are subjected, while the other slope is home to the we that we choose. Proponents of the third objection always try to evaluate people by what is on their slope of voluntary belonging, in spite of knowing that, on the other slope, there is a range of determining factors for which no individual can rightly be held responsible. Individuals exist on the ridge separating the interests of their gender, race, and even class (because we don’t choose the circumstances of our birth), from their religious, political, and philosophical ideas. We might concede this point, but not without also insisting that the dividing line so carefully guarded by the defenders of free will is never fixed in place. The dividing line is never fixed because there is no definitive border between absolute we’s-of-interests and absolute we’s-ofideas. In fact, we can arrive at an understanding of a society or community by observing its differential power dynamics between we’s-of-interests and we’s-of-ideas. The greater the tendency for we’s-of-ideas to be converted into we’s-of-interests, the less a subject gets to deliberate and decide on how and where they belong. We see an example of this when we look at political and religious identities. When reinforced through a rigorous process of education, these identities are supposed to be passed down through the

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family. As such, if any individual’s decisions are contrary to these identities, they will be considered a form of betrayal or deviance. We do not choose our age, our sex, or our ethnicity. We likewise do not choose our gender or our sexual identity. In such a society, we also do not choose our beliefs or our class (or our caste) because these things are also inherited. We can imagine shrinking a we-of-ideas down as much as possible.This would make all we’s into we’s-of-interests, by which we mean we’s that are communicated, inherited, and fixed into place by customs and norms. But even here we run into a sort of stubborn resistance of the idea, which refuses to be totally transformed into a particular interest. After all, we still at the very least need the individual to consent to a custom in order for its continued communication to be possible. Even if all we’s-of-ideas are also we’s-of-interests, it is still necessary for each of us, generation after generation, to carry on the idea and accept being part of a group wherein all we’s are connected to our inherited interests. It seems that the permanent power struggle between interests and ideas cuts through and divides the we. Nevertheless, the free individual is not necessarily the crest line separating the inherited we’s from the chosen we’s-of-ideas. On the contrary, this line shifts along with different periods of time and different societies. We is an ectoplasmic form made of interests and ideas that have no fixed relations. It is impossible to decisively say, once and for all, that my gender, my sexuality, and my race fall on the side of a belonging rooted in my interests, but that my faith and my political opinions count as ideas in which I have freely chosen to believe. There are changing conditions that allow us to intuitively measure the degree to which a group leans towards authority or freedom.The more that we’s-of-ideas (our chosen ways of belonging) seem to be we’s-of-interest (the ways of belonging that we communicate through customs), the more the group takes on an authoritarian structure. On the other hand, a group is liberal to the extent that interests are treated as ideas. This is definitely the case for Western societies at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this context, even gender is not inherited. In such a society, it becomes unacceptable to see one’s belonging to a sexuated we as a matter of interests, and not of ideas. Freedom and emancipation

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are strongly associated with the valorisation of we’s-of-ideas. Now, not only do faith and political affiliation resemble beliefs, but this could also become the case for gender. The inverse effect of the custom that defines authoritarian groups can be understood as the critical effect. The critical effect is what defines liberal groups of subjectivities. As we see in existentialism, deconstruction, and gender studies, all we’s-of-interests are by nature rooted in custom and can be historicised. Historicisation then reveals their contingency, for which reason they ultimately fall under the purview of an individual’s rational choices. Far from being able to modify our situation at our whim, we seem to be unable to change ourselves. I am not ‘free’ either to escape the lot of my class, of my nation, of my family, or even to build up my own power or my own fortune [. . .] I am born a worker, a Frenchman, an hereditary syphilitic, or a tubercular.119 That is how Sartre describes the ‘situation’ of freedom, which is nothing other than the joining together of what we have been calling a ‘we-of-interests’. This situation is a given state that freedom nihilates120 in order to authorise an existential project, which we have been referring to as a ‘we-of-ideas’. The critical effect inherent in Sartrean existentialism is not aimed at negating the existence of communities of interests in favour of a singular ideabased destiny for which I am responsible. It instead focuses on a particular detail: if there were just a tiny hole in being, that would be enough for me not to be entirely determined as the being that I am. The responsibility would then fall to me for all of the things that make me up. Born in a certain social class, I am not responsible for the identity that I have inherited, but I am responsible for what I do with it, including how I assert, hide, or forget it. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler provides a comparative analysis of natural we’s and constructed we’s. Through the critical effect, she historicises how gender differences have been naturalised. She shows that natural models of gender (such as Goethe’s ‘Eternal feminine’) have always been constructions.The critical effect causes inherited interests into which we were born to instead appear as

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ideas. The performance through which we act as if we naturally belong to ‘we, men’ or to ‘we, women’ is nothing but an effect of custom (a historical construction, the daily repetition of small acts). Working in the opposite direction of the critical effect, the customary effect transforms roles into nature, and makes ideas into interests. As is evident in the work of Sartre or Derrida, the critical effect allows us to thwart the customary effect. All of this suggests that freedom is not about absolutely choosing who we are, but instead being responsible for what we make of it: ‘It is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint.’121 In this way, the critical effect never negates the existence of inherited interests. On the contrary, it proclaims that the necessity to constantly transform our interests into ideas is an indispensable part of the pursuit of freedom. Due to the critical effect, the more a society is liberal in its customs, the more it promises the transformation of a we-of-interests into a we-of-ideas. We may now recall the resistance of the idea within the transmutation of all we’s-of-ideas into we’s-of-interests. Similarly, we can also spot the stubborn resistance of a we-of-interests within the liberal process. Let us imagine for a moment a fictitious group that is absolutely liberal in its customs. In such a group, a radical version of the critical effect will have entirely supplanted the customary effect. Within the confines of this human group, no we is a we-of-interests. Instead, every we is an idea. This means that an individual can always define their gender, their sexuality, and even their age. Of course, they still have a natural age that isn’t up to them.We can say, for example, that someone is thirty years old. But this natural age, which should cause them to belong to the community of interests of other thirty-year-olds, exists in a relationship that is not unlike that between genetic sex and gender: it’s a piece of data, not an identity. Being thirty years old is like being a woman. It is a constructed identity that implies that a group shares certain interests, manners, and tastes. It means that the group behaves in one way and not another. An individual born with the appearance of a woman can profoundly feel themselves to be a man. Similarly, a person who looks thirty can have a deep sense that they are an adolescent. In that case, they belong to the community of teenagers.They dress, listen to music, eat, speak, and mimic the social behaviours of

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that community. Such a person’s community-of-ideas is not determined by the community that they have inherited. To enforce that inheritance would be to impose an illegitimate violence on their being. The critical effect allows natural age to be dissociated from social age in a way that obviates this violence. The same goes for race within the confines of our little imaginary society.122 Everyone is free to invent their racial identity, conceive of new hybrid races, or declare themselves aracial. Here, all of the we’s are constructed, so they can all be chosen and ‘performed’, like an actor playing a part. We can conceive of this kind of limit case for the freedom of customs, one that absolutises the we-of-ideas to the detriment of the we-of-interests. Nevertheless, doing so prompts the emergence of an irreducible we-of-interests, a communicated identity into which we are born and which we are not free to choose. But what is this identity? At this degree of radical freedom, the we-of-interests is none other than the we-of-ideas itself. We are free from all ties of belonging, except for the one that binds us to this free we. As in Sartre, we can no longer choose to not choose. From birth, we all inherit our belonging to a liberal community that requires us to invent our own belonging. It could be that this freedom mandates our adherence, in which case it proves to be a we-of-interests rather than a we-of-ideas. On the other hand, it could be that this freedom is so strong that it can even allow us to choose a more restrictive we as our identity. We can therefore freely decide to remake ourselves as men or women ‘by nature’ and authoritatively pass down those ways of belonging to our children. The customs of our little ultraliberal society make it an authoritarian group for the generation to come. The customary effect doesn’t magically transform all that we can choose to be into nature, any more than the critical effect can completely change what is passed down to us into a free identity. Depending on the group, there is an inverse correlation between the growth of a we-of-interests and the growth of a we-of-ideas. However, ‘we’ is never what forms us absolutely, nor is it absolutely what we form. *

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We have now responded to our three objections and thereby justified our decision to take an interest in the full diversity of we’s. At this point, we becomes a little more than me, but a little less than all of us. What we are trying to understand is the structure of all these particular we’s that both separate beings and bring them back together, whether their unifying identities be imposed or chosen, ephemeral or durable. Sometimes, we thought of these we’s as concentric circles situated between everything and me. Other times, we imagined we’s as interlocking rings, or sections of overlapping circles – we are no longer entirely sure which is best. There are so many different kinds of we’s that we need an image just to be able to see what all we’s have in common.This will allow us to visualise their general form. Many studies and models have been based on the form of these collective identities. For example, we might think of Gustave Le Bon’s crowd psychology.123 We might also think of Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, in which he offers a critical analysis of crowds and groups and their patterns of aggregation and submission to a leader. To be more precise, we could say that sociology and political science have attempted to describe and explain how political identities, which is to say, we’s-of-ideas, are formed out of we’s-ofinterests. In his research on different African and Southeast Asian ‘ethnopolitical’ rebel movements, Ted Gurr has proposed a theoretical model for how a ‘we’ is constructed among guerrillas and other groups in revolt. This kind of we inextricably intertwines an inherited ethnic identity with a constructed political identity: Ethnopolitical action presupposes an identity group that shares valued cultural traits and some common grievances or aspirations. These sentiments and interests provide the essential bases for mobilization and shape the kinds of claims made by group leaders [. . .] The timing of action and the choice of strategies of participation, protest, or rebellion depend largely on political opportunities external to the group, principally its relationship to the state and external actors.124 This passage from Gurr gives us a concrete model of how a we is formed. Rebellion arises from an inherited we that has been

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a target of discrimination. This we leads to the construction of a redoubled, strategic we that soon becomes a political we, a party based on ethnicity. Gurr has long espoused the idea that we can evaluate the breadth, intensity, and duration of a rebellion by examining the state of a population’s identity, particularly its relative frustration, or that of which one group feels it is being deprived in comparison to another group. There are also many other models from sociologists and political theorists that aim to explain the logic behind organisations of we. Their intent is to understand how a given we organises itself and becomes a political idea in order to defend a common interest. However, these traditional models from political science cannot provide the image that we seek because their understanding of the social world cannot escape the lofty viewpoint of the third person plural. From this perspective, groups act in certain ways, and political identities form through certain processes. Political science can be defined as a field of knowledge that analyses ‘we’ from the outside. In other words, this approach sees ‘we’ as if it was always a ‘them’. When the time comes to explain why we are ourselves, this approach seems to reduce all subjects to the status of actors who are condemned to assume an identity, as if it were a uniform, in order to play their part. However, we never form ourselves in this way. We are born among we’s, and we discover the logic of our ways of belonging little by little. It’s only after some time that we might be able to perceive ourselves from the outside and see what one of our identities looks like from the viewpoint of another of our identities. By depriving itself of the use of the first person plural in its attempts to comprehend the we, this politico-theoretical model acts as if it were observing a game board on which a number of different groups do battle. Everyone has an assigned spot on this board. Everyone easily recognises who is who as well as the interests and inclinations of each group. And yet, when we say ‘they’ and ‘them’ from this lofty vantage point, we lose sight of the point of the game because we fail to comprehend what it means to be caught up in a we that is already on a team and very much in play. We would like to give a causal account of the reasons that underlie the feeling of belonging to a we.

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And yet, in order to comprehend we, we need to comprehend ourselves. This means that we need to study this form from within, not just in its public manifestation in the game of roles and positions. This isn’t solely a question of what happens during elections, conflicts, or insurrections, when each person finds themselves restricted to manning their position. We also have to think about the we in terms of its daily, routine functions, the ones we occupy without even noticing. We need to find a structure that is common to all we’s from the vantage point of we.

Every we is a system of divisions What happens whenever we say ‘we’? First of all, saying ‘we’ means choosing a plane. For example, if we speak as ‘we, black people’, then this implies that we have distributed identities in a way that relegates sex to the background. After adopting this position, our knowledge of whether a specific black person is a man or a woman, or whether a specific white person is a man or a woman, will always matter less than our ability to determine whether that person is black or white. It’s all a question of priorities. Saying ‘we’ requires us to organise these planes. After that, saying ‘we’ entails processes of demarcation and division to establish the limits of each plane. We can understand this demarcation as a tracing of the borderline that separates a we from an undifferentiated exterior. This undifferentiated exterior can be understood as ‘you all’, ‘them’, ‘something else’, or even ‘nothing at all’. If we want to demarcate humanity in this way, we have to use theoretical tools that are simultaneously scientific, metaphysical, and political.With the help of operative definitions of the ‘essence of humanity’, these theoretical tools justify our attempts to separate out a single species, humanity, from an otherwise indistinct arrangement of all the other species, which are referred to collectively as ‘beasts’. If we want to demarcate humanity, we have to be able to distinguish it from everything else. But the same instrument that allows for demarcation also divides up what remains. It should then be possible to divide this remainder into different species. All living non-human things got classified in this way.

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There were many attempts to determine an accurate system of divisions, one capable of dividing organisms while still preserving humanity’s demarcation as separate from the beasts. First, there were the pioneering attempts of Fuchs (1543),125 Gessner (1551),126 and Camerarius (1694)127 to classify plants and animals, either alphabetically, according to their external appearance, or with regard to differences in the sexes. Joseph Pitton de Tournefort128 realised that the easiest and most effective way of avoiding the errors of the Ancients129 was to arrange the species into a hierarchy of levels. The levels of that hierarchy were then codified by Carl Linnaeus.130 Following on the heels of the work of the Jussieu family131 as well as advancements made by Georges Cuvier,132 a logic of natural classification began to emerge. This classificatory logic depended on the constant presence of certain features, but it also jeopardised the separation of humanity from the beasts. The genealogical and phylogenetic classifications of evolutionary theory took our unique prominence among the other species and made it obsolete.133 The division of living things into species thereby eventually undermines the demarcation of the human species. By division, we do not mean the isolation of a group from everything surrounding it, but the way in which a group that has already been demarcated is divided into a multiplicity of subgroups. ‘We, the human race’ is simultaneously an indication of a demarcation (we are a species that is distinct from everything that isn’t us; we are different from others in a way that is totally different from the differences that others have between themselves) and of a division (because there are plenty of different species outside of us, and there might also be multiple races within us). Saying ‘we, white people’ creates a demarcation of white people, but this doesn’t simply separate white people from all other people. It also implies the existence of a colour-based division outside of white people.There are white people, but there are also black people, Asian people, people of mixed race, and so on. In this way, the racialist134 we creates a demarcation around its own colour, and it also presupposes a series of divisions for all of the other colours. This kind of division is all about degrees of precision. People can claim to speak in the name of ‘we, white people’, ‘we, Westerners’, ‘we, Caucasians’, ‘we, Aryans’, ‘we, Europeans’, ‘we, pureblooded

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French’, or even ‘we, Christians’, but in each individual case, the result will be the creation of a different kind of division of the world that surrounds them. Each of these divisions is different, even if they all seem to refer to the same identity or sense of belonging. The degree of precision of each division depends upon the number of sections brought together in the demarcation of an identity. When it comes to racialist divisions, that which is supposed to distinguish white people from black people, brown people, or even ‘foreigners’, functions at a different level of precision than that underlying the difference between Nenets, Yakuts, Indo-Europeans, Buryats, Aboriginal Australians, Tatars, and so on. Within a single plane of demarcation and division, each we indicates a further degree of precision. In spite of all of their journalistic vocabulary and insights, those who situate themselves within the plane of age and try to allude to ‘we, the young’, ‘we, Generation X’, ‘we, Generation Y’, ‘we, the twenty-somethings’, or ‘we, the 15–25-year-olds’ still choose a certain level of division. This level largely determines the system of boundaries with which the speaker ends up. This division then becomes a matter of strategy. It is an ongoing calculation, a kind of spontaneous politics that, like the bass line of a song, vibrates within language and persists beneath all of our utterances. This division’s vibration is there whenever we take a stand, and it underpins all of our commitments. It is also what we notice in the way that others speak. We catch a glimpse of their means of dividing a system of we’s as soon as they start to say ‘we’ and ‘they’. Our ears perk up. In a discussion, the first thing that we notice about a person is how they systematise their we’s. Dividing a we is not simply a matter of sketching out a rough line between us and them, and then calibrating the degree of precision of this distinction to make it fit with our current discussion. Rather, this division requires a negotiation between a number of different we’s and them’s in order to determine who is closest and who is furthest. Above all, we must decide who is far enough to be separated from us by a sort of limit, and who bears enough of a relation to us for us, we and them, to be distinct from a third group. This is more than the logic of the friend–enemy distinction that we find in Carl Schmitt’s work. It is instead a calculation

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of the effects of proximity followed by the effects of limits, which allows differences in degree to continuously transform into differences in nature. In this way, we often find ourselves in a situation where ‘we are against you’ until a third party appears, one that seems to be further from both us and you than we are from each other. Alliances are forged in response to the following question: should we call the oppositional pairing of us and you a ‘we’ with respect to them? This was the approach taken by advocates of the Union Nationale when war was declared in 1914, an approach that would subsequently divide labour movement activists. The question was, had the situation become so dire that it was now necessary to use national divisions to cover over class solidarity with German workers, and thereby wholly separate France, bourgeoisie and proletariat alike, from Germany? The way in which all we’s are re-covered135 by a nation is frequently discussed in strategic terms. Rather than talking about a ‘core we’, should we instead layer our we’s, and talk in terms of a ‘we of circumstance’ in order to designate what we are, we and you, up against them? Perhaps, but here we encounter an essential feature of the structure of we. Language has but one we. Even though we can distinguish different shades and hues of its meaning in context, we remains univocal. We can say ‘we’ in the name of you too, but soon we will no longer be able to pinpoint the difference between we-us and we-you. The infinite nuances of these we’s still don’t prevent us from conflating them into one and the same word. It is possible to use ‘we’ to refer to both my town and my country. We might feel that the relationship between us, our town, and our neighbours is grounded in a we-of-proximity that is stronger than the bonds that unite the population of my homeland. We can see this in the logic reiterated by Jean-Marie Le Pen: ‘I prefer my family to my friends, my friends to my neighbours, my neighbours to my countrymen, and my countrymen to Europeans.’136 This weof-proximity is contrasted with a we that stands at a greater distance from us, one that bears a looser relationship to us. When, by ‘we’, I mean both my village and my country, I make the flexible form of we fluctuate through these tightly concentric circles, from the smallest to the largest. However, because we is fundamentally

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a principle of division, applying this kind of logic means that we have to choose, little by little, between stronger and weaker senses of we. I can opt for a we that is more extensive but less intense, one that unites me with people that I have never met, but with whom I have an a priori connection because of our shared community based in language, territory, or history. In such a situation, the we is extended further, but it also becomes more abstract. I can also do the opposite and draw boundaries in a way that favours we’s that are closer to me. These closer we’s become more concrete, but less extensive. In this latter case, whenever I have to prove my belonging to a we, I will choose an identity that is close and concrete, as opposed to an idealised, distant identity. Adopting this kind of identity can make me into a kind of deserter, like a person who refuses to go to war in the name of a we that is too large to be meaningful. What we have here is a classic moral dilemma, the likes of which can be found from Greek tragedy (for example, the trials of Antigone)137 to Shakespeare (for example, the struggle between the Montagues and the Capulets in Romeo and Juliet). However, this moral dilemma only exists if I decide to divide my spheres of belonging in the old way, which is to say, in terms of concentric circles that begin with my beloved, pass through my family, and end with my society. Within these ancient or classical models, ‘we’ connotes different degrees of intensity of my feeling of identity. According to this model, different circumstances require me to choose between these different degrees of we. I am ordered to have only one we, despite the fact that I continue to belong to a number of different levels of interlocking we’s. Indeed, we is a principle of division because it is both singular (because there is only one term for it) and multiple (because there are many different we’s according to its levels and degrees of precision). The we simultaneously unites and divides. But what does the we divide? The we establishes that which is shared between individuals by placing them on either side of a boundary. The we also deals out different spaces. For example, saying ‘we, the youth’ means assigning oneself to a certain zone, as well as a privileging of that particular place to the detriment of others. Saying ‘we’ also entails partitioning time and asserting that, for us, ‘we, the younger generation’, any previous period of history that

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you mention belongs to an undifferentiated past, a backdrop that we use to discern what is happening now. This division changes things to such an extent that this youthful vision of the peaks and valleys of history might be unrecognisable to someone who instead speaks in the name of ‘we, the older generation’. And just like space and time, all objects are traversed by lines of division that change in accordance with the ‘we’ chosen. The different ways that tastes, codes of conduct, and words are allotted depend on the frameworks implied by the use of one or another kind of we. The we establishes solidarities and situates divisions. In doing this, a we also establishes the different degrees of empathy, comprehension, and rebelliousness that govern our affects. For example, the divisions brought about by we explain why I experience variable degrees of sadness or outrage when confronted with events that are otherwise objectively similar. While I respect the death of any and every human being, when I hear the announcement of someone’s death, my political reaction will depend upon my system of divisions. ‘Why did they die?’ I might ask, or, ‘Were they one of ours or one of theirs?’ If it turns out to be one of theirs that we have killed, we feel sad. However, after a preliminary speech about how the act was unjustifiable, the conversation will quickly turn to how to prepare our defences for whenever they strike back. The word that ‘we have reason to fear reprisals and a heightened climate of vengeance’ soon begins to spread. If it turns out that it’s one of us that they have struck down, we become violent.Their murder is presented as an absolutely unconscionable act of barbarism. Our deaths are to be unconditionally condemned as a declaration of war. We can even comprehend those among us who, unfortunately, seek to avenge those deaths. States, parties, and groups react in this same way. Nothing can neutralise these standoffs. Everything is traversed by a we, a system of divisions that allows us to evaluate and calibrate our behaviours and systems of values. Nevertheless, despite the narrow-mindedness of this logic of taking sides, we should be careful not to judge it too harshly.There is no such thing as absolute good will. After all, even the humanist who claims to mourn all human deaths equally can still be accused of speciesism. Indeed, the anti-speciesist can point out that said

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humanist still draws a line between humanity and all other sensate species. This causes the degree of intensity of the humanist’s mourning to vary in accordance with the way that their system of divisions situates victims on different sides of that line. After a terrorist attack, there are always some animal rights activists who respond by pointing out that we only care so much about the deaths of a few human beings because we belong to the same species. According to these activists, we continue in the meantime to brutally slaughter thousands of other conscious and sensate beings. Not even sages who claim to have liberated themselves from all attachment to the world can escape this accusation. By claiming to view the death of an insect in the same way as the death of a close friend, they leave themselves open to critique.This very equanimity towards the world can also be denounced as a form of not only indifference, but also injustice because it entails an identical reaction to things that happen to different beings. When it comes to establishing a politics, we, understood as a system of divisions, is precisely what stands in the way of the lofty indifference of the sages’ wisdom.138 A politics can be understood as an attempt to establish a system of limits and an order of priorities. It thereby offers a way of differentiating the near from the remote by degrees, allowing us to assess what is just or unjust, legitimate or illegitimate, and tolerable or intolerable. This entails the clear and necessary risk that people might act in bad faith. All of this means that a we is not simply ‘a group of people’. Rather, it is a system of divisions that organises changes in how we understand justice, the variable interests of things, and the degrees of intensity and clarity of everything that we encounter. A we justifies relegating certain groups to the background in order to allow other groups to stand out more clearly.

Conflicts of division That’s what a we is like. There is, however, an abundance of different we’s. This means that there are also many different planes of division, as well as many different systems of limits. Up to this point, we have only considered one plane of division at a time. But now

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we should try to envision all of these different planes of division at once, and to see therein the simultaneous reflections of our sexual identity, our racial identity, our social identity, our generation, our faith, and our friendships. What are the effects of these planes on the way that we divide up our world, our interests, and our values? Asking this question allows us to see some strange points of overlap between those terms, and here things quickly become messy. We don’t always act or think in the same way. From one moment to the next, the appearance of the world can change, as well as the way we separate our friends from our enemies. The lines that once marked the difference between affinity and hostility, truth and lies, hypocrisy and sincerity, and heroism and cowardice can shift. Sometimes our priorities, ambitions, frustrations, and sense of justice are turned upside-down. Our understanding of what constitutes a necessary evil or a legitimate act of resistance or terrorism, as well as the way that we attribute or pardon guilt, can always be changed or reconfigured. Everything is unstable. Nothing is completely clear or distinct. There are no definitive boundaries. Everything, or almost everything, changes as we move from one we to another. Sometimes even what is up or down, who is right or wrong, what constitutes progress or regression, and the very course of a struggle can flip in meaning or direction. This confusion of we’s happens a lot in our world today. It’s not hard to find people who express their dismay when they begin feeling that what they value in their struggle might be seen in the opposite light by another community.139 Over there, they stand in opposition to what they think they would be over here. On a given plane, from the perspective of their apparently stable system of divisions, it might seem like their group believes in the same things that they always have. They may, for example, be in favour of emancipation and against oppression. Nevertheless, on a different plane, they may discover that they stand accused of the very things against which they always fought. As humanists, we can try to embrace the whole of humanity, respect all people, and struggle against barbarism. However, from the perspective of an anti-speciesist, in so doing we still fail to recognise the personhood status of individuals of other species. Our position can therefore be reframed as another sort of barbarism.

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We, on the plane of defenders of human rights, might also turn out to be imperialists or neocolonialists on another plane, which to say, the very opposite of what we took ourselves to be. We, feminists, might well have fought our whole lives against patriarchy and male domination in order to gain the freedom of choice, to be able to wear trousers in the street, to not have to wear a bra, to have access to contraceptives, and to have control over our own bodies. Nevertheless, we too can be accused of working for the powers of Western liberalism if we fail to recognise the right of Muslim women to manifest sexual difference by veiling their faces in public spaces. To us, this right seems more like a form of enslavement. But this means that the very rights that we want to secure for all women in all cultures can seem to others like a subjugation, as is the case for women who don’t want to remove their veils. In a similar fashion, we could re-read the history of the feminist struggle from the point of view of racial differences, and we could then observe that the majority of white feminists gave up the struggle against imperialism and racism in exchange for the privileges of Western society and their integration into the ruling classes.140 Other people might reject such a re-reading of feminism and instead insist on the tremendous solidarity between the struggles of European activists and the we of colonised peoples. From that position, the supposed conflict between a we of gender and a racialised we does nothing more than repeat the age-old problem of how to deal with the conflicting priorities that emerge in our attempts to negotiate different identities. As Josette Trat writes,‘We cannot help but recall how, throughout the 70s, the French Communist Party reproached second-wave feminist activists for “dividing” the working class.’141 Here, the conflict emerges between a ‘we, workers’ and a ‘we, women’ that also includes women from the bourgeoisie. Once there are multiple planes of we, the dividing lines overlap, and even the general direction of a political struggle becomes the subject of uncompromising debate. The meaning of a struggle on one plane can appear completely opposite to the meaning it takes on in another plane. These reversals, or putative reversals, are the kind of thing that we have to constantly fend off as we move from one system of

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divisions to another (for example, in the movement from division by gender to division by race). This creates a sense of disorientation within individuals as they try to navigate their way through politics. At first, it seemed as if they had found true north on their moral compass. But then they see the map from another plane of we, and suddenly north becomes south. What they thought was progressive can suddenly appear to be reactionary (and vice versa). The lack of compatibility between the boundaries, values, and identities of different planes of we make it so that moving from one plane to another can completely reverse one’s positions and the factions to which one belongs. Of course, such conflicting loyalties and dual affiliations have always existed, whether it be between a pope and a king, a spouse and a lover, a family and a beloved, or a country from whence one came and a country in which one lives. An individual’s identities are never univocal, and this is precisely what gives them their texture. However we construct a model of identity for the first person plural, what is of interest is the contemporary proliferation of these conflicts. It’s up to us to figure out how to host a multitude of different we’s within us, even as they become increasingly discordant and detached from each other over time.We must learn to listen to the cacophony of these different ways of belonging. If we push the image of this multivocity to its limit, we can catch a glimpse of the greatest possible number of we’s, including those that are loosely affiliated and even those that are mutually exclusive. We might say that what defines us is our simultaneous and contradictory belonging to different we’s that fail to correspond to one another. And yet, there is only one world, and we only have one life.

The intersection model Contemporary sociology and cultural studies have forwarded the notion of ‘intersectionality’ as a way of accounting for the pile-up of a number of different, conflicting we’s within the identity of a single individual. The term intersectionality was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw. ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex’, her article published in 1989, proposes the following simple image

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as a way of modelling what might happen when a black woman finds herself at a crossroads of different ways of belonging: Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination [. . .] But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident: Sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm.142 The intersection analogy gives us a very clear image that lets us distinguish between different we’s as if they were different social currents. Standing at the intersection of many different currents, an individual who has the double identity of being black and being a woman may be in no position to determine whether the discrimination she suffers is directed at her because she is an ethnic minority or because she is a woman. And yet, this ‘intersection’ quickly came to designate something that was less like a crossroads, and more like a way of crossreferencing different social groups. Now that we have defined a we as a system of divisions, we can easily imagine what the ‘intersection’ between a number of different systems of division might look like: a homosexual Arab immigrant in Europe simultaneously belongs to both a racialised group and a sexual minority. There may only be one individual, but within them we find different systems of division within the social space. Ever since the work of Joan Wallach Scott, sociologists have noted that the conflicts among us lead to a kind of political parasitism.143 For example, this can happen when an individual confronts their own contradictory identities and is forced to choose one we over another. In this way, we end up sabotaging the possibility of a convergence of the struggles of all those in society who speak in the name of ‘we,

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the oppressed’. We thereby also lose sight of the hope central to all emancipatory theories. More recently, Sara Farris described what she viewed as the disturbing development of a sort of femonationalism, conceived of as the rights of women being weaponised against postcolonial immigrants, and Muslims in particular.144 We see another example of this in the work of Jasbir Puar. Her analysis of homonationalism explains how a similar reversal occurs when a religious and ethnic minority is accused of homophobia by a sexual minority.145 Faced with such conflicts and reversals, the idea of intersectionality arises from the junction of different minority groups’ struggles. Through this coming together, many individuals, and particularly black women, experience a double sense of belonging. Although they were in solidarity with the struggle for racial emancipation, many of these black women endured participating in groups that were centred on masculine authority, where their status as women still caused them to suffer discrimination. Similarly, as women in solidarity with the struggle for the emancipation of women, those same black women participated in organisations formed largely of and by the white middle class, and as such, they suffered discrimination due to their status as working-class black people. The activists of Boston’s Combahee River Collective coined the term ‘simultaneity’ in order to describe this problematic situation.146 In short, the idea is that systems of domination are not externally connected. Instead, the process of creating different planes brings these systems of domination together into a space in which they inform and structure each other. This is the reason why the sociological model of intersectionality focuses on marginalised or minority identities. The notion of intersectionality is supposed to let us see the common denominator of what happens to people subjected to oppressive institutions and allow us to detect subtle articulations of racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and other types of discrimination (for example, discrimination against the disabled or the obese). As such, intersectionality helps us contest models of normative identity that centre around putatively ‘pure’ or ‘neutral’ identities such as that of white, heterosexual, upper-class men. This means that, instead of continuing to focus on ‘average Joes’, the model of intersectionality shows

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us the points of contact between systems of domination.This theoretical reversal shifts the focus to accommodating the hybrid identities of victims. In terms of intersectionality, the more an individual’s identity increases the possibility of their being subject to discrimination, the richer and more complex their identity becomes. And along with this increase in richness and complexity, it also becomes increasingly difficult to locate the precise source of the discrimination being suffered. Does a person suffer because she is a woman, an immigrant, an undocumented immigrant, a transsexual, and so on? Intersectionality lets us understand how and why the crossings of race, class, and gender give rise to multiple dimensions of disadvantage. It is a way of accounting for the long-suspected notion that a person who is a victim in one field of struggle can also produce effects of domination within another field of struggle. This is the message of Flora Tristan’s famous statement: ‘The most oppressed man can oppress one being, his wife. She is the Proletarian of the Proletarian himself.’147 An activist who is attentive to questions of race might add that an oppressed woman can still oppress a woman from another culture. This effectively makes racialised women the ‘proletarian of the proletarian of the proletarian’. The image of the intersection allows us to understand the way that these forms of domination are embedded within one another. Crenshaw, Collins,148 and McCall149 offer models of different experiences of subordination in their works. However, they also give the illusory impression that there are identities that are eminently intersectional, namely the identities of social victims, and other identities that we might call intersectional in a more simple or weak sense. The male WASP is the best example of this latter kind of identity. While the image of the intersection allows sociological investigations to accommodate the identities that have been marginalised up to this point, that same model perpetuates the illusion of a sort of gravitational system of identities. Instead of placing traditionally accepted identities at the centre of the system, intersectionality places subaltern identities there and makes everything else revolve around them. As Kimberlé Crenshaw puts it, this is an issue of modelling and ‘mapping the margins’ of social and political subjectivity.150

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Crenshaw ‘wanted to come up with a common everyday metaphor that people could use’ as a means of describing the interactions between different planes of domination.151 However, as happens whenever any image is turned into a concept, this image accrued a number of associated representative elements.These representative elements remained unthought at the inception of the concept, but they eventually imposed themselves on its meaning.152 And yet, if the intersection becomes a model for understanding what we is, then the intersection is no longer just a metaphor. We have to take it seriously. Let us recall that the concept of the intersection refers to a set-theoretic operation, or rather, a result of that operation that allows us to define the members of a set in terms of their belonging to two different sets.153 The fact that there is an intersection between them means that it is possible to confuse the two sets.This makes it necessary to ensure that certain members of the first set are not members of the second set, and vice versa.With this in mind, let us return to the intersectional model of identities. As soon as we posit intersectionality as a way of thinking about the crossings between race and sex, for example, we have to be able to imagine both a racialised social space in which sex does not exist and a sexualised social space in which there is no race. All talk of intersections requires us to locate these intersections on the map of oppressed identities, but it also makes us posit non-intersectional identities (for example, a genderless race or an aracial gender). The paradox is that building a model of we centred on the identities of subalterns and the twice or thrice ostracised also necessitates a series of less complex marginal identities. In such a case, the dull identities of dominant individuals are pushed to the margins of the model. Nevertheless, a white, upper-class, Protestant, heterosexual male belongs to a space that is neither neutral nor lacking in complexity. It’s not as if all of his identities are perfectly lined up with one another. Just like a homosexual black woman, he too is caught up in different ways of belonging that intersect and overlap one another.As soon as he says ‘we’ in the name of the ruling classes, his world is divided up in a way that can never be perfectly aligned with what he would perceive if he spoke instead from a position of belonging to ‘we, heterosexuals’ or ‘we, Westerners’. Everyone is complex, no one is non-intersectional. The incompatibility of we’s

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is not fundamentally a result of discrimination. It is rather a consequence of the very structure of the first person plural, a complex system of divisions that never really coincide with each other. In order to provide a model of the conflicts between us, we should therefore also universalise our image of the intersection. The problem is that, if everything is always intersectional, then we ultimately lose our ability to distinguish all of the different groups from one other. Everything becomes confused and indecipherable. If all social spaces are traversed by the crossings of gender, race, and class, then it becomes impossible to represent those crossings in terms of multi-directional traffic in an intersection, or with the image of different, intersecting mathematical sets. We could say that everything is divided through and through into genders, races, classes, and ages.154 Every point of our space is an intersection. What, then, is this space? Nothing, including the identities of the dominated and those of the dominant, is now located outside of these intersections. This means that, strictly speaking, there are no more intersections, since absolutely everything continuously intersects with everything else. Despite its importance, the image of the intersection doesn’t quite do justice to the situation. Even if the intuition that brought about the intersectional model is accurate, neither its metaphor nor its concept (which centres on systems of oppression rather than the ways in which identities are distributed to everyone in general) is sufficient for the creation of an image and idea of we.

The transparency model The only possible model requires us to stack up we’s on top of one another like a pile of transparencies.155 We can think of a we as a complete system of divisions that cuts into the cultural and social space, and even into the natural world. We can then imagine the surface of everything that is, and on top of it, we can use our minds to trace a series of lines.We can trace what a person belonging to this or that we is, has, does, is able to do, and is obliged to do. The result is the sketch of a territory that is at once symbolic and concrete. It is a system of limits.

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Let us imagine using this method to trace the lines of a we based in gender. We can lay that tracing over the surface of everything and then carefully lift up only the layer on which we have traced those limits. What we see looks a lot like a transparency. We can now see the system of divisions abstracted from the thing that it allowed us to divide into a set of traits. Our everyday objects have disappeared, and now all that remains are our representations and our ‘gendered’ plane of interpretation. This plane is a transparency. It doesn’t conceal other planes beneath it. Instead, like the layers used in animation or the frames employed in computer-assisted retouching and design programs, the transparency on which we traced a we also allows us to catch sight of other we’s that lie beneath it. Now let’s return to the social space and trace another system of divisions. This time, let’s use ethnic or racial categories to trace a we in terms of what we are, where we live, our habits, our customs, our rights, our privileges, and our limitations. Then let’s peel off this transparency too and take a look at it in isolation. Now let’s do it all again, one last time. Let’s mentally trace the society in which we live, and let’s do so in terms of social categories and class. This time we will direct our attention to cultural and economic capital, types of behaviour, access to education, tastes, familial inheritances, glass ceilings, and disparities that separate one tax bracket from another. All of this and more must be considered in order to establish a more or less distinct line between the upper and lower classes, the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat, the working proletariat, artisans, retailers, and so on. To set the stage for the little scene that we have just described, we already need to lay out three distinct layers. Of course, we normally never see these layers in isolation since they are always traced while laid out on top of one another. Nevertheless, we arrive at a clearer image if we imagine having traced them in order, one after another. After tracing all of them, we can pile up the layers of transparencies.What we now have is a representation of our simultaneous perception of all the identities that we have traced. By stacking the transparencies up on top of one another, we suddenly discover the full complexity of what we call ‘we’.

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We can superimpose the same world on itself three times, and the different dividing principles will each yield a unique image. Each image will also infringe on the other two.There will be certain places where the lines overlap with one another and thereby thicken and reinforce one another. But in other places, the drawing of the social world will seem indecipherable, like a chaotic mess of intricate forms, a network or mesh that can prevent us from making out what lies beneath. In this way, we keep sliding one transparency on top of another. This creates a stack of transparencies that is always unstable. This structure is fragile, but for now it works as a model for thinking about what we is, namely, a system of stackable transparent layers meant to divide up the social world and all living things.This system follows a few rules.

The contour The first rule concerns the tracing of divisions. When we speak as ‘we, inasmuch as we are men’, or ‘we, who are truly men’, we presuppose a generalised system that divides the world up into real men, effeminate men, masculine women, and real women. This system of divisions is applied to all of the individuals that I might meet, and it leaves enough of a margin to accommodate adjustments, subcategories, and variations of intensity (for example, very, very masculine; very masculine; a little masculine; sometimes masculine and sometimes less so).This system is applied not only to my interpretation of behaviours but also to all sorts of activities (as we see in statements such as ‘literature is more for women’, or ‘football is more for men, but it’s becoming feminised’). Such systems can become very sophisticated, as we find in the praxis of some seasoned gender rights activists who can tell on sight whether a lesbian person is butch, femme, futch (a combination of the first two terms), or a lipstick lesbian. All such typological systems are frameworks that can be carefully applied on a case-by-case basis. They are rigid enough to apply to special cases but flexible enough to be periodically updated when I encounter limit cases that ‘change my way of seeing things’.

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Anyone who says ‘we’, therefore, is not just talking about themselves and their ilk. They presuppose the existence of a complete system that typologically divides the world. Of course, some of our transparencies only need two or three essential figures in order to make the world decipherable. It can be enough to distinguish between men and women, or between Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid races, as in the works of late nineteenth-century racialist theorists. That alone is enough to make a system. However, such tracings often become more complex over time, and subsets emerge. For example, Gobineau argued that colonialism had diffused the white race among the ill-defined categories of the black and yellow races.156 This had produced mixed races, which would eventually bring about the end of the racial differences that had divided the essence of the human genus up to that point. These shades of difference would ultimately fundamentally destroy the function of categorisation. Consider Joseph de Maistre’s famous words: But there is no such thing as man in the world. In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me.157 Following de Maistre’s lead, we could also say that ‘there is no such thing as the French, the Italians, or the Russians. In my lifetime I have seen French women and French men, Italian women and Italian men’, and so on. We could then elaborate even further: ‘There is no such thing as French women in the world. In my lifetime, I have seen rich French women, poor French women’, and so on. But in refusing to categorise, we run into a paradox; we are compelled to keep adding new categories and to pass from one transparency to another in our attempts to point out a singular, underlying reality that still functions categorically. The more that we refuse to outline by categorising, the more that we end up adding contours in our attempt to obtain some pure, fine-tuned particular. We might say that infinite variations, modulations, and

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gradations are all that there really is, and that sweeping, closed categorical forms do not exist. So how should we proceed? In order to represent them, we have to make use of the greatest possible number of transparencies and multiply our categorisations. When we trace on a transparency, we cannot perfectly reproduce the variation of shades, the slightly more and the slightly less that turn the social world into a game of variable intensities. We have to be satisfied with holding onto a few traits and making them into contours. Saying ‘we’ means peeling apart the layers of complexity underlying our social world, or, more broadly, all living things. This entails transposing intensities into extensions158 and dividing, bit by bit, sometimes clumsily, sometimes precisely, the subtleties of everything that is. Saying ‘we’ means using traits, limits, contours, and modulations of the masculine and the feminine to begin the process of schematically determining the infinitely diverse shades that colour the social situation and origins of each person. Every we is a system of divisions. No matter how refined the transparencies may be, they can still never be more than an approximation. From the outset, the purpose of the traced lines is to delimit a closed form, which absolutely does not mean that no one can enter into or leave a we once it has been traced. On the contrary, the function of the contour is to transform the acts of entering into and exiting out of this form into a regulated procedure. In this way, the contour always serves as the grounds for excommunication. In the fourth volume of his authoritative System des katholischen Kirchenrechts (System of Catholic Ecclesiastical Law), Paul Hinschius looks into the origins of excommunication in the Catholic Church. He discovers three degrees of sanctions that the Church used in the fourth and fifth centuries to determine the contours of excommunication. As Jean Gaudemet summarily describes it, in the case of lay people, the Church would decide whether they would receive ‘perpetual exclusion from the community, up until death, or in due course, which would be a major future excommunication’; ‘simple exclusion from the communion of the body of Christ and from religious ceremonies reserved for the faithful, which would be a

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minor future excommunication’; or ‘suspension from sharing in the rights of Christians as members of the Church’.159 Other historians have gone on to show how each of these sanctions actually depended upon context, and that the decisions were never exactly the same from one province to another. Even just deciding whether the Eucharist would be given or withheld entailed a wide variety of different reasonings and outcomes. However, the measures that prescribed exclusion from the group of Christians gradually became more precise and uniform. As the Church more clearly affirmed what it meant to be Christian, it also legislated how people could enter into it and leave it. We might simply interpret this phenomenon as a reinforcement of the line of division separating the inside of the Church from its outside. Determining the identity of a religious community eventually requires us to more exactly determine the conditions of inclusion within or exclusion from that community. This is what we mean by ‘tracing the contours of a we’. We can, for example, look at the procedures of exclusion from the Communist Party that Edgar Morin describes in his Autocritique and note how, in many ways, they closely resemble the protocols of the Catholic Church. There is a definitive contour of ‘exclusion properly speaking’, but there are also other contours beneath this initial one.These intermediary contours lay out procedures for marginalisation, exclusion in certain specific instances, and suspension of certain rights. What interests us here is the fact that, on all transparencies of identity, the tracing of a contour implies that institutions with complex procedures have created different strata of belonging.160 These procedures determine who belongs fully and completely, and who will be sidelined and subjected to partial, temporary, or total exclusion. In this way, anyone who says ‘we’ traces a system of contours, which is to say, closed forms that signal thresholds of belonging or exclusion.These thresholds become visible when the members of a we decide to make an example of someone by pushing them to the margins, or when an individual simply sees how much they have slowly distanced themselves from a community. In either case, each transparency bears a tracing that transmutes an infinite number of different degrees and shades of harmony and discord. Even though the result is little more than rough lines and

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divisions, they still point towards recognised thresholds. On this side, you are still one of us; on that side, you are no longer one of us at all. When it comes down to it, a contour is what transforms gradual differences into an absolute boundary. Either you belong or you no longer belong. Differences of degree are necessarily expressed by tracing a limit. This is the first rule for systems of division.

The overlap The second rule makes its appearance whenever systems of division are multiplied. That which we are able to organise by contouring principles of inclusion and excommunication on one transparency becomes disorganised when another transparency is layered on top. It then becomes difficult to make out the contours. Where gender difference once served as a dividing line in the social realm, we now instead find an uninterrupted block. Where we once saw something homogeneous on one transparency, we now discover an unexpected fracture. Another transparency, the mass of Christians unified by the Church, who are all one in Jesus Christ, turns out to be fractured by innumerable other systems of division. There is no longer one solitary block. The result of stacking at least two systems of division is what we call overlap. For example, we can consider the map or maps of Africa. We know that these divisions of national borders are inherited from decolonisation and the subsequent tracings of the limits between new states. These divisions were often created by taking a ruler and drawing a line right through the middle of indeterminate territories. Between 1960 and 1985, only 13% of the total length of those African borders – which is to say, only around 10,000 kilometres out of a total of almost 80,000 – were redrawn. This is proof of the permanence of those post-colonial divisions. Geographer Éric Bordessoule writes that only ‘a fifth of African borders (15,000 km) come from precolonial outlines’, namely, ‘the borders between Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, and Ethiopia, which are drawn over the

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southern borders of Turco-Egyptian provinces, specifically areas that were utilised for the slave trade’.161 Since they were drawn during or after colonisation, many of the remaining borders are often criticised for covering over real ethnic divisions. The borders of Niger and Nigeria, for example, cut the ethnic space of the Hausa people in two. However, certain geographers suggest a more nuanced approach to the colonial responsibility for this overlap by reminding us that that the national border actually reflects the pre-colonial division between the Sokoto Caliphate and the regions that refused to bend the knee to the authority of its sultan, Usman dan Fodio. The origin of an overlap has important political stakes. We have to determine who is responsible for tracing out these overlaps because, if national and ethnic divisions fail to coincide, it can give rise to trouble and even civil war. Sometimes an overlap results from a desire to map out cultural differences. Sometimes this was done in consultation with the chiefs of local tribes. For example, the difference between the periods when two groups – the nomadic peoples of French-colonised Chad and those of English-colonised Sudan – used grazing land during the dry season registers this kind of overlap. Bordessoule recalls that ‘in 1931, the initial border of Sudan was placed farther to the north in order to adjust it to fit the area of the pasturelands divided up by Turkana herdsmen’.162 It is all a matter of dividing and re-dividing, which is to say, overlapping.This responsibility often seems to be directly incumbent upon the coloniser: The Caprivi Strip, a Namibian salient that is 450 kilometres in length and between 30 and 90 kilometres in width, is divided in a way that has nothing to do with either its geography or its population, but rather with Bismarck’s desire to secure a route between the English and the Portuguese territories that would allow him access to the Zambezi river. Similarly, the position of Gambia, an interesting semi-enclaved country within Senegal, reflects the old colonial rivalry between France and England.163 Many of the armed conflicts in recent African history stem from problematic border overlappings.This might be an issue of two states

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seeking to control the same territory (for example, the Aouzou strip between Chad and Libya, the Kagera region between Tanzania and Uganda, or the Agacher strip between Burkina Faso and Mali), of ethnicities divided into neighbouring states (for example, the Ogaden War), or of populations divided among different states but denied their own state (for example, the Tuareg people). More frequently, different groups in conflict with one another are brought together within the same state, but the government is in the hands of one single ethnicity. This is sometimes the ethnic majority (for example, the Hutu of Rwanda, prior to the genocide) and sometimes an ethnic minority (for example, the accusations that the Mbochi people of the Republic of the Congo have a monopoly on positions of power). Conflicts can also be rooted in the coexistence of multiple ethnic divisions within national boundaries (for example, interactions between the Mandinka, Senufo, Dyula, and Kulango peoples, as well as many others, within the same political space of the Ivory Coast). By superimposing a map of ethnicities, which is constantly being redefined, over a map of African nations, the borders of which were drawn with an eye towards stability, we obtain an image of the overlaps and potential conflicts on the continent. We could say the same thing about a map of the Balkans or the Caucasus. These regional overlaps are an exemplary model of what happens any time we stack identities. Moreover, they are precisely what allows us to detect the differences between overlapping transparencies. If two different transparencies can be perfectly aligned, then the result is really only one transparency, and we would no longer have any way of differentiating between them. There has to be at least some point where the overlap is discernible for the two transparencies to be distinct. For example, it is this overlap that allows us to distinguish between a transparency showing an ethnic ordering and one showing a national ordering on the map of Africa. Now let us universalise this logic. It is easy for us to understand that, by superimposing a transparency that traces gender over a transparency that traces the Marxist notion of class, we find proletarian women who are in solidarity with bourgeois women. But at the same time, we also know that there’s a schism between the

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proletariat and the bourgeoisie among the women who share that solidarity. This issue was raised by Rosa Luxemburg, who called for women’s suffrage even though she saw bourgeois women as ‘parasites’.164 Luxemburg’s position implies that we have both to fight for all women in general and to fight against some of these women in particular at the same time. More than just ‘intersections’, these overlaps make manifest the difference between two different transparencies and allow us to differentiate between two political planes. This happens while we are still using some of the least sophisticated categories of division. If we fine-tune the precision of our cuts, the overlaps start to abound. Such overlaps are not irrational. They are a product of the way that different systems of representation coincide within one and the same world. The more that each transparency defines the minute contours of the social world, the more likely it is that stacking transparencies will have a chaotic effect that makes politics indecipherable. This situation also demands an increasing level of attention and precise familiarity with the contours in order to clarify the differences between the transparencies and planes that are in play at any particular moment. On top of the transparencies where we traced the differences between gender, race, and class, we can also add a transparency where we trace the difference between species. This latter transparency is where we trace the legal difference between people and other beings in accordance with our beliefs regarding the dividing lines between humans and animals of other species, or between mammals and other animals. We can even trace an upper bound of such divisions between all sensate and insensate beings. Then we can add another transparency to trace the differences between infants, adolescents, and adults of different ages as defined in different cultures and historical periods. Following that, we can add even more nuance by tracing out subcategories that differentiate between people in their thirties, forties, fifties, and so on. At this point, we can add a final transparency to the top or bottom of the pile that we have been assembling. On this final transparency, we can trace the divisions between different religious forms of belonging. Within ‘we, Muslims’, for example, we can trace the differences between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims. We can

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then go on to trace the differences within those subcategories in terms of different degrees of intensity of faith by drawing lines between believers, practitioners, fundamentalists, and so on. The same process can similarly be applied to Christians, Jews, and so on. Like the aforementioned map of Africa featuring an overflowing stack of superimposed and overlapping divisions, we can also imagine a general map of beings that is similarly saturated with transparencies. This provides us with an image that roughly sketches the complexity of the meaning of we. For this reason, multiple systems of division never completely coincide (or else they would form one and the same plane of transparency). This is the second rule for picturing we.

Transparency and opacity And yet, this apparent chaos is really the result of an order. This is the third rule of our model. Unlike what the intersectionality model suggests, the model of transparencies forces us to develop a pecking order among the divisions.165 It is always necessary to determine which transparency has top priority, and which transparency should come right after the first one. These transparencies are planes that are at once differentiated and transparent.Their defining characteristic is their occupation of an ordered place according to how they are stacked on top of each other.There is a first transparency, a second, a third, and so on. I can believe that the first plane of my division of the living world involves marking out the boundaries of the community of all that feels, of all the subjects that have the right neither to suffer nor to be killed. And yet, if the first transparency that I lay down is thus delineated in terms of species, I end up tracing a contour that also guides my dietary and political practices. I still recognise that there are differences between social classes and human cultures. However, I mentally register those divisions as something secondary that is added after the transparency that has first priority. The more a transparency is cast to the side when the time comes to prioritise them, the less clear and distinct its tracing becomes when it is finally added to the pile of transparencies. It is true that you can see through a transparency, but it is not

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absolutely transparent. This means that with each additional layer, a little bit of legibility is lost along the way. That which allows us to properly make out the order of transparencies is their coefficient of transparency. We start by laying a transparency of representations over everything that we encounter. We then draw the contours of our most fundamental limits on this transparency. To show how this works, we can again think of the difference between sensate and other beings.We can then place another transparency on top of that first one in order to indicate differences in social class. But before we can even begin the second tracing, we have already transferred the first transparency’s system of limits onto the second by stacking them. Overlaying the two transparencies makes it just a little more difficult to clearly discern the dividing lines between classes. Even though I recognise their importance, the tracings on the second transparency necessarily become less clear and distinct than those established on the first transparency, which was laid the closest to the real world. The limit between what we should and should not eat, a division that encompasses all sensate creatures, can still be clearly seen through the second transparency. And yet we also have the following comments posted online on a militant vegan forum by someone using the handle Fabisha: In the last few days, two people have shared arguments with me that I have never heard before (or that I have never heard formulated in this way, without vegaphobic prejudices).These two people are involved in activist circles, particularly those concerned with intersectionality. They also come from a ‘working class’ background, and we might even say decidedly so.They are very interested in and sensitive to vegetarianism, but they run into a cultural obstacle, or more precisely, a symbolic barrier, that is very difficult to break through. For them, foods like tofu, quinoa, etc., are heavily laden with social connotations. They’re a bourgeois thing, and bringing that kind of food into their daily lives seems like a kind of social ‘treason’. They fully understand that those prejudices are based on stereotypes, but the symbolic barrier still remains very strong.

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I should clarify that this isn’t about the widespread ideas that ‘vegetarianism is a bourgeois thing’ or that ‘animal rights are a rich people thing – why put animals before other people?’ What really gets brought out in all of this is the link between culinary culture / dietary habits and identification in terms of social class. If I understand this right, they are reclaiming their social origins in other ways. They are displaying the ‘social codes’ from their class of origin in public spaces and trying not to conform to the social codes of the dominant social classes as an act of ‘resistance’. This makes adopting dietary habits that are identified with a ‘dominant group’ a hard step for them to take.166 In response to Fabisha’s comment, many of the forum’s participants used arguments such as the following: grains are less expensive than meat, so eating meat cannot be a sign of belonging to the working class; in industrialised countries, overconsumption of meat, which is also prevalent within the working class, is a recent trend; there are numerous non-Western vegetarian traditions to be found among the very people who have been oppressed by the West. The industrial exploitation of meat is a sign and symbol of capitalism, and by the same token, of the ruling classes. But the debate rages on. It is very clear that the act of ‘resistance’ carried out by those who refuse to adopt dietary habits that they see as bourgeois is not meaningfully connected to the reality of the price of food commodities or the history of industrial livestock farming. It instead functions as a social tracking device that shows that eating quinoa or tofu is socially meaningful in the West. And yet the counter-arguments from committed vegans are unlikely to convince others. This is because this confrontation is taking place on multiple levels or planes. Feelings cannot be used as rebuttals to arguments. The feeling that Fabisha is talking about has to do with a shift in priorities. That shift coincides with a reversal of planes and flipping of transparencies between groups of people whose beliefs are still very close to one another, if not almost identical. At the present moment, the vegetarian we (which has changed in the past and may again in the future) largely overlaps, albeit not exclusively, with a we of the educated,

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white, upper-middle class. Layering a transparency with a social or racial tracing on top of one that delineates anti-speciesist divisions reveals the appearance of a near-total alignment that problematises the seemingly autonomous, rational, and universal nature of the decision to become vegetarian or vegan. Nevertheless, some activists refuse to see the alignment that comes into view through these transparencies because they believe that their motivations are purely rational and have nothing to do with racial or social belonging. This belief obscures class motivations and commitments.This overlap and correspondence can only be seen by those who place a transparency tracing race or class underneath the transparency tracing an anti-speciesist we. However, as long as the transparency tracing an anti-speciesist we has definitive priority, it will blur the other divisions of identity. Those other divisions continue to exist, but they are seen as secondary. Two people with exactly the same beliefs and way of dividing up the world can still be distinguished by how they order their priorities. A person who first divides the world according to classes before demarcating which sensate beings should be treated as persons, and who leaves the question of what should or should not be eaten up to chance, will understand the decision to become vegan as something grounded in certain forms of social belonging. They will see how this ethics can appear to some as a form of domination or a lesson that one class imposes upon another. Someone else who aligns themselves with the same vision of the world but who begins by demarcating sensate beings without first dividing them into social classes, will see the first person’s argument as illegitimate or specious.Their incomprehension is a result of opacity.While the first person can clearly see the social motivations of veganism, the universality of vegan principles will be less transparent. Similarly, the second person will clearly see the universality of those principles, but the social motivations of veganism will be less transparent. Both of these people have adopted the same divisions at the level of species (they are both anti-speciesist) and at the level of class (they are both committed to the struggle against the Western ruling classes’ dominance). They only differ with respect to the order of their priorities, which leads to shifts in the transparency or opacity of their respective divisions.

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In concrete terms, this means that privileging a specific interpretative framework, for example social class, forces me to neglect somewhat the subtlety and importance of differences of gender, race, or belief. In the same way, we might say that the Marxist tradition has long made tracings in terms of gender, race, or belief opaque by refusing to place those transparencies at the bottom. For Marxists, the position of priority is reserved for the transparency of class struggle. Conversely, by using gender divisions as their bottom-most transparency, first wave feminism made social and racial distinctions somewhat more opaque. Those social and racial divisions would later be rediscovered by second wave feminism. A transparency is less opaque the closer it is to the bottom of the pile, but it is also more susceptible to being covered up by transparencies traced in other, unforeseeable ways. Here we see the model’s third rule: whenever a division distinguishes between identities, it also covers up other identities. We have to choose the order in which we prioritise our transparencies, which means that social space is never ‘omnitransparent’. Everything that makes society a little bit clearer on one level makes it a little more opaque on another level. As we are better able to see one area, we lose our ability to see another area as clearly.

Re-covering This is the fourth rule: everything that covers over something else runs the risk of being re-covered, or covered over as well.167 Every division leaves itself wide open to the possibility of a re-division that it did not – or did not want to – imagine. There is a simple, fundamental dilemma that looms whenever any we is constituted out of a series of transparencies. The closer a transparency is to the bottom of the pile, the more it is susceptible to being re-covered by other transparencies. Likewise, the more a transparency re-covers the tracings of other transparencies, the more it distances itself from the bottom (which also means that the bottom itself becomes more opaque). Does this mean that we should multiply the transparencies, using one to re-cover another over and over in order to attend to all of the ways of dividing up the world, without definitively privileging one particular way

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of seeing things? In such a case, we run the risk of a progressive increase in opacity; we lose sight of the bottom, and it seems as if all we are doing is interpreting interpretations. We get the feeling that we have piled up too many transparencies, and that all of our tracings just reproduce other tracings. We can no longer tell the difference between what is traced on top of a transparency and what lies beneath it. Should we instead satisfy ourselves with a single bottom-most transparency for interpreting the world? Doing so would just increase our risk of being taken unawares and recovered by others who will point out what we were unable to see or divide. Stacking up transparent transparencies in this way calls for things to be placed into a prioritised order. This means that my vision of the world is always in danger of being obscured by some secondary transparency which, through neglect or forgetfulness, might remain hidden even to me. A political adversary could ambush me by seizing upon that calculation and tracing it onto the surface of my representation of the world. All of a sudden, my whole system for mapping identities, power dynamics, justice, and injustice can be upended by a blueprint of identities that I had forgotten about, whether intentionally or unintentionally. If I forget all that separates the poor and the rich throughout the world, my civilisational cartography, instead divided by religions or ethnicities, can suddenly be re-covered by a social division that overlaps with it, muddles it, and maybe even proves it to be false. Conversely, if I fail to take account of the distinctions between religious communities, my vision of a world organised in terms of the haves and the have-nots can make the world more and more illegible. It becomes impossible to comprehend fault lines and wars, which, from this perspective, appear either systematically irrational or the result of false divisions created by those in power in order to divert our attention from the true struggle. This is the presupposition of any rigid division that clings to its prioritised transparency and rejects all possible re-coverings as if they were false diversions orchestrated by the powers that be. These rigid divisions are blind to all other systems for distributing identities except for the one that is traced directly onto its primary interpretative framework, which is to say, directly onto the bottom of things.

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It is in order to maintain a single, real, and prioritised tracing of separation that Guy Debord denounces false separations as the ‘fallacious archaic oppositions [. . .] [of] regionalisms and racisms’.168 These are reinforced by ‘pseudoplayful enthusiasms [that] are aroused by an endless succession of ludicrous competitions, from sports to elections’.169 Moreover, ‘one particular spectacular opposition is always in the forefront of illusory roles: the antagonism between youth and adults’.170 Indeed, it is all a question of planes or levels – of forefronts and backgrounds. Debord is content with pointing out one level of separation, the one traced on his prioritised transparency, as solely and absolutely true. From then on, all further differences must appear as illusory or false. They are all effectively instruments used to divide us by those in power. Debord uses a framework that re-covers all of the divisions discussed in the news – for example, regional and national divisions or intergenerational conflicts – and presents them as false distinctions. This same framework also clears the way for the appearance of its only true separation, which he names Spectacle. Nevertheless, by reducing its separations of identities to a single interpretative framework, even the most coherent world view multiplies its risk of re-covery.The fewer the transparencies on top of the prioritised transparency, the more likely it is that another tracing will unexpectedly slide on top of mine, re-covering my division of the world and discovering its blind spots. Such a world view becomes its own Achilles heel. Each of its component parts seem to be secure, but, when everything is assembled, we find a system of limits and contours in which someone else can easily discover opacities, fractures, and things left unthought. Debord, for example, blinds himself to real differences in race, sex, and religion by systematically reducing them to misleading effects. No tracing is safe from being re-covered. Albeit in spite of itself, no system of divisions can keep from revealing its omissions when it is stacked with other systems of limits. Those other systems of limits show real boundaries where there was once nothing more than an uninterrupted block. They also give rise to blocks where once only boundaries were to be found. Politics entails re-covering our opponents’ bottom-most transparencies and defending our prioritised transparency from being

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re-covered by those used by our opponents. Politics thus involves defending the way that we prioritise and order the transparent representations that we use to divide and distribute identities. We have to face the fact that, in politics, we always expose our transparencies to the threat of being re-covered by another’s way of tracing the world. Of course, we are also trying to re-cover the world views of others under our own. This is the very meaning of political struggle: we blind ourselves at the same time that we begin to truly see. At the very moment that we become capable of reading a certain distribution of we, we also expose the other modes of distribution that we are incapable of recognising.

The bottom We have now presented our first image of what is happening behind the scenes of the simple word ‘we’. Through a series of re-coverings, we arrive at a model of ‘we’ that designates nothing more than a strategic stacking of planes of representation. We use this model to picture different levels of what we are and of that to which we belong. With varying degrees of precision, ‘we’ means a certain way of contouring living things (human society in particular) that allows a continuous modulation of beings to transform into systems of limits. As these systems are stacked on top of each other, they make reality legible for a subjectivity. At the same time, that legibility is constantly threatened by the multiplying layers of transparency and opacity and proliferating points of overlap between different planes. This is what we really is: this piling of layers that provokes debates about what is and isn’t visible because of the order in which the pile is stacked. Everyone tries to re-cover other subjectivities’ world views to prove that their perspective allows them to see more clearly. Everyone tries to show that there are in fact differences where others see nothing but blurry identities. Everyone tries to awaken solidarity where others impose false or negligible differences. Whenever we say ‘we’, we imply a certain visibility, a system of transparencies and successive levels of identity. Saying ‘we’ means attempting to impose this system on the debate at hand.

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Whether it is inherited or chosen, every we works in this way. We have to imagine a kind of errant form, the product of endlessly varying the ordering of our stack of transparencies, and with them our representations of the different planes of we. All of this is done in order to modulate the contrasts between transparencies, displace their respective interests, and shift the limits between different factions. From time to time, during certain important moments in our lives, the order of our we changes suddenly, and the very form of we is itself transformed. We feel as if we have been turned upside down, or converted, or that we have finally been freed from the trappings of our prior beliefs. Everyone has had the experience of changing their priorities regarding different forms of belonging and then watching the divisions of everything they can see transform right before their eyes. This happens when, from a certain point onwards, someone sees everything through the transparency of social classes, religious communities, generations, animal species, and so on. It is still the same world, but not exactly the same divisions. Everything is always overlapping, but everything overlaps differently because of how transparencies are ordered and how we’s are prioritised. This means that the peaks and valleys, the tiny cracks and the massive fractures, the uniform masses and the shapeless deserts are distributed differently, as are interests, values, honour, and justice. Now we have a model – something that is at once an image and an idea – of all possible we’s. These we’s are unconstrained transparencies that can be stacked in any order and that divide the social reality in which we live. Now we have an image and an idea of we that has somehow been unstuck from everything else. This we is still up for grabs. It is supposed to let us trace some sort of thing, but without us really knowing what that thing is. What do we find beneath the we? We have defaulted to the space ‘in which we live’, the ‘social space’, or ‘reality’, terms that are vague enough to simply designate the bottom on top of which we lay our we’s. But now we must go deeper and find out if there really is a bottom at all. Now that we have conceived of our model, it may at first seem as if any transparency whatsoever can serve as the bottom-most plane or be used for re-covery. It may also seem as if everything

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is divisible through the innumerable possible combinations that can be used to order transparencies. We can first divide the world by genders, then add class differences (this will make it a little less clear), then racial or national differences (this makes it increasingly opaque), and then the differences and affinities between species (this will make it barely visible). The same thing happens if we start by dividing the world into communities of belief, then into nations, and then into social classes; or if we first trace the contours of human identity; or if we instead divide things by races and civilisations; and so on. There are as many different ways of ordering the transparencies as there are different we’s. This model therefore becomes an identity generator. Some generated identities are very common (humanism, racialism, etc.), and others less so. For example, which collective identity corresponds to the ordered combination of age-race-gender-class? Our model claims to chart all possible we’s. Nevertheless, owing to its high degree of abstraction, this model doesn’t account for the simple and obvious fact that not all of the combinations of identity are made manifest, and that they aren’t something that individuals simply choose, as if they were whimsical costumes from an immense wardrobe. By presenting the rules for a game of pure divisions, we have managed to think about all possible we’s. We have considered all we’s except for the we – the one that is concrete and constrained. What are the determinations that force us into a we? What keeps me from being a member of all possible communities, and instead makes me into someone who, no matter what I do, belongs to one we rather than another? Having presupposed our ability to belong to everything that is ‘we’ for someone else, we have tried throughout Book I of the present work to conceive of an image and an idea of a we stripped of its determinations and its power to constrain. This model appears to be free of constraints. It seems only to be limited by each division’s degree of precision and the requirement that we order the levels, choose a bottom-most transparency, and expose ourselves to the possibility of being re-covered by other planes. In this model, these are the only rules of the vast game of we to which using the first person plural is reduced. No configuration of we, according to this model, can be deemed

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more just or rational than any other. From the perspective of this model, all we’s are equal. They all result from the same process of division and arrangement of identities. And this is precisely what we must think if we want to empathetically embrace all we’s and understand the underlying structure that they have in common. We must always begin by taking all of the we’s into account, be they friends or enemies. This first model was a necessary one. Nevertheless, constructing this unconstrained model is only the first stage of an exact comprehension of we. It still needs to account for the fact that we never take on all of the identities that there are and that we are only ever assigned to certain ones in particular. This means that we have to return to the parameters of our original question and give an account not just of we in general, but also of our we. What is it that makes a we ours? The first response to this question maintains that we are something at bottom.We is not a free, unconstrained form.This is because it traces and re-transcribes a system of representations that applies a series of transparencies to a base.This form lets us highlight what is faintly inscribed underneath ‘we’, within ourselves.This base is a natural inscription of categories impressed directly onto our very nature. Beyond our representations, there is a pre-existing order that divides things up before we do. This gives rise to the following paradox: there must already be differences and limits inscribed into what lies beneath us, since we can make these dividing lines out when we trace their contours. However, if these differences inscribed directly onto things already exist, as if they were a part of nature, then there would be no need for transparencies. Then again, if we find that political transparencies do indeed exist, it is because the prioritising orders of our natural identities aren’t directly inscribed onto nature. Like other animals of other species, we therefore have to separate our ways of belonging and order them for ourselves. There are transparencies, but we don’t know what exactly we should use as the basis for their order. Having arrived at the end of Book I, we might say that this is just our condition. This is the historical situation of our we. If we ask ourselves who we are, we can respond that we are those who no longer know the order

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of our we’s. We know that the form of we is not absolutely free from constraints, but we cannot tell what its ground is any more. Simply put, we have to ask what constrains our identities – what is it that lies beneath them? This will be the point of departure for Book II. There, the free play of transparencies that we have just described stems from an un-grounding, as we see with the modern failure to inscribe identities beyond our representations and onto the very surface of Nature. But if Nature is no longer what we is at bottom, or the ground of we, all we’s become autonomous forms, like loose sheets of paper. We’s then become transparencies that only let us trace successive layers of representations of representations, all of which are groundless and untethered in the end. Is there nothing more than groundless forms of we ordering our interests and ideas?

Notes 1. Translators’ note: The title and very first line of Garcia’s text introduce a term that consistently proves to be the most difficult to translate: nous. In French, nous can be translated as a subject pronoun (‘we’), an object pronoun (‘us’), or as a reciprocal pronoun (‘ourselves’). The situation is further complicated in We Ourselves because of how Garcia elaborates a technical understanding of nous while simultaneously incorporating the full gamut of the possibilities of natural language. Indeed, this tendency to alternate between appeals to our intuitive use of everyday language and the technical elaboration of the elements of that language can be seen as one of the most prominent characteristics of Garcia’s style. Accordingly, we have gone to great lengths to distinguish between the technical development of nous and the otherwise natural flow of Garcia’s language in a way that seeks a compromise between minimal intrusiveness and maximal theoretical accuracy. This is a fraught enterprise, but it might be the only possible approach to a philosophy such as Garcia’s, one that both recognises and respects the aporetic character of philosophical, and especially metaphysical, thinking. Finally, our (non-standard but necessary) use of ‘we’s’ only ever refers to the plural of ‘we’ and never indicates possession. 2. Translators’ note: In analytic philosophy, it is common to differentiate the use of a word from its mention via quotation marks and to understand the quotation marks as picking out units of language. Garcia’s

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3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

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use of ‘nous’ in the passage translated above doesn’t fit either of these paradigms well because, in cases such as this, he is often marking both the concept in question and the entity picked out by that concept.This is absolutely intentional on his part, as the impossibility of restricting ourselves as philosophers to mention or, in a continental register, to the ‘for us’ is part of an important strand of his thinking. The slippage is perhaps the most important consequence of the deconstruction of those idealist and relativist methodological strands one finds in the phenomenological and structuralist traditions, as well as the linguistic versions that one finds in the linguistic turn of traditional analytic philosophy. Our use of the singular ‘we’ above is the first case in this text that instantiates this issue. We are not using ‘we’ in the standard plural sense, nor are we merely commenting on the second-person plural pronoun in the English language. The linguist Émile Benvéniste proposes this definition, which this whole work perhaps tries to elucidate: ‘“[W]e” is not a quantified or multiplied “I”; it is an “I” expanded beyond the strict limits of the person, enlarged and at the same time amorphous’. Benvéniste, Problems in General Linguistics, p. 203. Translators’ note: While this is not exactly the case with the English ‘we’, ‘us’, or ‘ourselves’, it is indeed the case with the French nous. Cf. note 1. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are ours. ‘Wir arme Leut’. See Georg Büchner, Woyzeck, Act I, scene 1. The expression ‘We are the 99%’ first appeared on a flyer in August 2011 announcing the general assembly of the Occupy movement in New York. The lyrics of ‘The Internationale’ were written by Eugène Pottier in 1871 after the fall of the revolutionary Commune of Paris. Available at (last accessed 28 May 2020). While discussing the distinction between the vision of history and society of men operating in the public sphere and that of women confined to the private sphere, Virginia Woolf wrote that ‘It would seem to follow then as an indisputable fact that “we” – meaning by “we” a whole made up of body, brain, and spirit, influenced by memory and tradition – must still differ in some essential respects from “you”, whose body, brain and spirit have been so differently trained and are so differently influenced by memory and tradition. Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes.’ Woolf, Three Guineas, p. 22.

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10. Catt, ‘Carrie Chapman Catt’s Speech on “The World Movement for Woman Suffrage 1904–1911: Is Woman Suffrage Progressing?”’, pp. 260–2. 11. Beauvoir, ‘Manifeste des 343’. 12. Wittig, ‘The Straight Mind’, p. 55. 13. Michaud, ‘Assaut du discours straight et universalisation du point de vue minoritaire dans les essais de Monique Wittig’. 14. For a long time this was one of the slogans of Queer Nation, an LGBTQI activist organisation founded in New York in 1990. 15. ‘Nothing about us without us’ is the motto of multiple organisations defending disability rights, such as the Nous Aussi (Us Too) association.The slogan was broadcast in the public sphere during numerous international forums on disability. 16. Haden, Middleton, and Robinson, ‘A Historical and Critical Essay for Black Women’, p. 136. 17. Ellison, Conversations with Ralph Ellison, p. 126. 18. Curtis Mayfield, ‘We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue’, Curtis, Curtom Records, 1970. 19. ‘We demand a chance to do things for ourselves.’ James Brown, ‘Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud’, King Records, 1968. 20. Aunt Sarah, the first of the four women of the song, sings ‘My skin is black . . .’ Nina Simone, ‘Four Women’, Wild is the Wind, Philips Records, 1966. 21. ‘The dark brown shades of my skin only add color to my tears.’ Sly Johnson, ‘Is It Because I’m Black?’, Is It Because I’m Black?, Twinight Records, 1970. We should note that this song begins in the first person singular and ends with a call to the first person plural: ‘We’ve tried so hard, we’ve tried so hard [. . .] to be somebody. [. . .] But hey, we can’t stop now.’ 22. Ellison, Invisible Man, p. 3. 23. Quoted in Liauzu, Histoire de l’anticolonialisme en France, p. 37. 24. This is according to John Vorys, an American member of Congress, who accused Nehru of speaking out of both sides of his mouth because the Indian head of state allegedly first modestly said, ‘We Indians are a young nation and you should be kind to us and make allowances for our youth.’ Only later did he allegedly affirm the Indian civilisation as superior because it was wiser and more ancient. Quoted in Rotter, Comrades at Odds, p. 104. 25. Prime minister and then president of the Republic of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah also spoke of ‘We of the African race’ in his speeches. Nkrumah, I Speak of Freedom, pp. xi–xiv. Patrice Émery

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26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

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Lumumba, prime minister of the Congo, spoke just one year before being assassinated in the name of a specific we: ‘Morning, noon and night we were subjected to jeers, insults and blows because we were “Negroes”.’ This appears in his speech at the Ceremony of the Proclamation of the Congo’s Independence on 20 June 1960, in Léopoldville. Lumumba, The Truth about a Monstrous Crime of the Colonialists, pp. 44–7. For example, he writes, ‘We no longer find ourselves alone with “the others” behind us. We are all here, on the same line, us and the Muslims, to live and build with an equal love and identical care for our shared land. And because it’s our shared land, we, all of its inhabitants, regardless of our origins, we are first of all Algerians.’ Chevallier, Nous, Algériens, ch. 11. Chevallier assigns two meanings to the term ‘nous’ – there is a strict sense that allows him to refer to European colonists, and there is a broad sense that includes these colonists and the indigenous population (‘the Muslims’). Said, Orientalism. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 855. Ferry would occasionally note his belonging to a subgroup: ‘We, moderate Republicans’. This is seen, for example, in his speech at Vic-de-Bigorre on 19 April 1891. Ferry, Discours et opinions de Jules Ferry, vol. 7, p. 224. Quoted in Liauzu, Histoire de l’anticolonialisme en France, p. 75. Bouteldja and Khiari, ‘L’Appel des Indigènes’. Godechot, ed., Les Constitutions de la France. Translators’ note: Garcia emphasises the ‘we’ in this quotation. The remaining emphases are present in the cited translation of the text. See Maréchal, ‘Manifesto of the Equals’. ‘We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.’ Constitution of the United States of America, 1787, available at (last accessed 28 May 2020). Proust, Time Regained. Joseph Stalin, ‘Speech at the Red Army Parade on the Red Square, Moscow’, 7 November 1941, available at (last accessed 28 May 2020).

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37. A conversation between Winston Churchill and one of his aides reportedly incorporated this idea of ‘them or us’: ‘During the war, Churchill’s aristocratic candor even led him, on occasion, openly to voice misgivings about his own policies. As his close wartime aide R. G. Casey recalled, while watching a film of British bombing raids against German towns, Churchill “suddenly sat bolt upright and said to me, ‘are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?’” Casey assured him that he was simply being affected by the graphic film footage, reminding him “that we hadn’t started it, and it was them or us.”’ Newell, The Soul of a Leader, ebook, 49. 38. There is even a video game called Us and Them – Cold War, developed by Icehole Games, in which historical figures such as John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, and Henry Kissinger appear. This is also the title of a Pink Floyd song. 39. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. This is an edited and extended version of a controversial 1993 article. 40. See, for example, Edward Said’s critique in ‘The Clash of Definitions’. See also George Corm, Pour une lecture profane des conflits. Corm sees Huntington’s framework as tending to cover over political conflicts with its strictly religious dividing lines. Marc Crépon criticises him above all for pointing out the new source of our fears, the new them to be an enemy to our we. Crépon suggests as a replacement to this we an expanding we. Crépon’s we is an increasingly vast sphere of civilisation based on mutual belonging. See Crépon, L’Imposture du choc des civilisations. This mirrors the logic of the idealist who endlessly counters the realist’s exclusive we with an inclusive we.This work aims to identify the necessary limits of both the dynamic idealist and the dynamic realist. 41. Rafi’ Taha Al-Rifa’i, ‘Sunni Mufti of Iraq Rafi’ Al-Rifa’i: We Are Not Stupid Enough to Fight ISIS; The Shiites Would Slaughter Us’. 42. al-Banna, Five Tracts of Hasan al-Bannā’, pp. 40–68. 43. al-Banna, Five Tracts of Hasan al-Bannā’, pp. 40–68. 44. al-Banna, Five Tracts of Hasan al-Bannā’, p. 26. 45. Quoted in Lia, The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt, p. 204. 46. Quoted in Lia, The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt, p. 204. 47. Herzl, The Congress Addresses of Theodor Herzl, p. 17. 48. Herzl, The Congress Addresses of Theodor Herzl, p. 38. 49. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, p. 165. 50. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics, p. 166. See also his analysis of the lay Jewish Socialist party, the Bund, ‘between nation and class’, pp. 171–258.

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51. Édouard Drumont, in honour of whom the Antisemitic and Nationalistic Youth League of France was formed, declared the following at that time: ‘What we, revolutionary antisemites want is a true republic, not a plutocracy run by financiers.’ Quoted in Crapez, ‘Le socialisme moins la gauche’, p. 84. 52. Albert Regnard contributed several articles to La Revue socialiste (The Socialist Review) in 1886. Édouard Marchand wrote La France aux Français! (France for the French!) in 1892. 53. Benito Mussolini, quoted in Neumann, Béhémoth. Structure et pratique du national-socialisme, p. 432. 54. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Produzioni Europee Associati, 1976. 55. Rebatet, Les Mémoires d’un fasciste, p. 31. 56. See the website for Génération Identitaire. 57. Vaillant-Couturier,‘Jeunesse’, Chants de la liberté français, Le Chant du monde, 1960. 58. While trying to re-establish the mystique of his youth, Péguy begins this work with the following definition of the political we to which he feels he belongs: ‘We are the rearguard; not only are we the rearguard, but we’re a bit of an isolated and sometimes almost abandoned rearguard. We’re an army with no base. We’re almost seen as specimens. We ourselves will be archives, statistics, fossils, witnesses, survivors from historical times. We will be charts that they will consult.’ Péguy, Notre jeunesse, pp. 8–9. Notre jeunesse is also one of the first works on the political ageing of a we – of a generation. 59. Sabatier, Nous sommes jeunes, nous sommes fiers. 60. The Who, ‘The Kids are Alright’, My Generation, Brunswick/Decca, 1965. 61. The Doors, ‘When the Music’s Over’, Strange Days, Elektra, 1967. 62. Sham 69, ‘If the Kids are United’, Sunday Morning Nightmare, Polydor, 1978. 63. USA for Africa, ‘We Are the World’, Grace, Columbia, 1985. 64. Ke$ha, ‘We R Who We R’, Sleazy, RCA, 2010. 65. The song ends with these words: ‘We are many, we are everywhere, this is not just a beginning, the struggle continues.’ Dominique Grange, ‘La pègre’, La pègre, Expression Spontanée, 1968. 66. Cohn-Bendit, ‘Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands’, L’Express, 16 April 1998. 67. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 20. 68. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, p. 174.

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69. The dedication of Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme, ‘To the happy few’, stems from Shakespeare’s ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.’ Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 4, scene 3, line 62. 70. Tzara also writes the following on the same page: ‘We are successive / We are exclusive / We are not simpletons.’ Tzara, ‘Monsieur Antipyrine’s Manifesto’, p. 2. This text, delivered on the first Dada evening in Zurich in 1916, is ‘punctuated by the “we” from beginning to end (“we declare. . .”, “we want. . .”, “we are not. . .”, “we are. . .”)’, notes Anne Tomiche in La Naissance des avant-gardes occidentales, pp. 11–15. In the ‘First German Dada Manifesto’, Huelsenbeck also repeatedly declares we: ‘We, the Dadaists. . .’, ‘We were the Dada. . .’ Huelsenbeck, ‘First German Dada Manifesto (Collective Dada Manifesto)’, pp. 257–9. 71. André Breton and Louis Aragon,‘The Fiftieth Anniversary of Hysteria (1878–1928)’, quoted in Green, Art in France, 1900–1940, p. 272. 72. Kazimir Malevich, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting, quoted in Bowlt, ed. and trans., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, p. 302. 73. Debord and Gallazio, ‘Défendez la liberté partout’, p. 68. Debord and Gallazio were part of the Italian section of the Situationist International. 74. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We was first published in 1921 in Russian and first translated into English by Gregory Zilboorg in 1924. The French title, Nous autres (We Others), better fits the intellectual tradition of dissidence. Its more specific title points to an excluded, marginal we. 75. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, p. 29. 76. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, p. 33. 77. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, p. 101. As philosophers concerned with autonomy often do, the Invisible Committee admit that communes understood in this way cannot exceed a certain size. When they do, they must separate in order to avoid reconstituting a ‘hegemony’, structures of power, delegations, and domination. The ideal commune has always been a modestly sized group. This points to the problem of the relationship between a growing plurality of communes, or separated human we’s. All of these groups run the risk of developing their own rules and then clashing with one another like so many factions of strangers. So the indefatigable logic of antagonism is revived, eclipsing that of communal sharing. 78. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, p. 102.

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79. Antelme, The Human Race, p. 74. 80. Erasmus sometimes uses the word we to refer to all humankind, as when he is surprised by humans’ propensity towards violence and war among themselves, even over frivolous matters: ‘But, God in heaven, we humans, what tragedies of wars we stir up, and for what frivolous causes!’ (‘Nos, Deum immortalem, quam frivolis de causis quam bellorum tragoedias excitamus!’), Adages, IV, I, 1. Erasmus, Collected Works, p. 406. Sometimes he reserves the word ‘we’ to refer just to Christians, also to find a civil war in the first person plural: ‘We Christians fight with Christians’ (‘Nos Christianis pugnamus cum Christianis’). Erasmus, Collected Works, p. 423. 81. For example, La Boétie writes, ‘[W]e are all comrades.’ La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. 82. Montaigne, ‘An Apologie of Raymond Sebond’, p. 245. 83. However, as historian Dipesh Chakrabarty notes, this we of species is still more of a theoretical construct than a sensate experience: ‘Who is the we? We humans never experience ourselves as a species. We can only intellectually comprehend or infer the existence of the human species but never experience it as such.’ Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, p. 220. 84. See Wise, ‘Animal Rights, One Step at a Time’, pp. 19–50. 85. Cavalieri and Singer, ‘A Declaration on Great Apes’, p. 5. 86. This is Jeremy Bentham’s phrase. See Garcia, Nous, animaux et humains. Actualité de Jeremy Bentham, p. 18. 87. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, p. 155. 88. Leopold, ‘The Land Ethic’, p. 262. 89. Callicott, ‘The Land Ethic’, p. 211. 90. This is the historical process that Dominique Quessada sees as inevitable. He here distinguishes between multiple extensions of the circle of we and finally lands on a we of all terrestrial we’s: ‘To enact the now-inevitable change of perspective, human beings have no other choice than to think of themselves as a “we” that belongs to a larger “we”, like a “we” within another “we”. It’s the “we” of a humanity having to consider itself as a species, and it’s the “we” of the whole that is found on the map of non-separation [. . .] Being a “we” within a larger “we” – a double “we” that can no longer be severely opposed to a “them” or an “Other” – leads to both the idea and experience of a community bound by fate. Everywhere, there is climate change, the sea level is rising, carbon dioxide levels are getting higher, raw materials are being exhausted. . .’ Quessada, L’Inséparé, pp. 310–11.

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91. Deleuze attributes this phrase to Guattari: ‘Guattari’s formula, “we are all groupuscules”, indeed heralds the search for a new subjectivity, a group subjectivity, which does not allow itself to be enclosed in a whole bent on reconstituting a self (or even worse, a superego), but which spreads itself out over several groups at once.’ Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, p. 192. 92. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 3. 93. Valéry, Cahiers, vol. 2, p. 248. 94. Valéry, Cahiers, vol. 4, p. 248. 95. Nietzsche, Le Gai Savoir, p. 93. 96. Sartre, No Exit, and Three Other Plays, Kindle, 45. 97. Michaux, Qui je fus, p. 79. 98. Translators’ note: As explained in a translator’s note from Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 39, this is a neologism stemming from the French schize, which stems from the Greek skhizein, meaning ‘to split’, ‘to cleave’, or ‘to divide’. 99. The Anthropocene refers to a hypothetical geological era that we would already be in. This epoch covers the period during which it becomes impossible to distinguish between the consequences stemming from natural planetary activity on Earth (the composition of the atmosphere, climate, ecosystem, soil quality, etc.) and the consequences of human activity on the planet. This leads to a new community and introduces a collective subject beyond nature and culture. 100. See Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 144; Bryant, The Democracy of Objects. 101. See the final chapter of Harman, The Quadruple Object. 102. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, pp. 178, 149. 103. Hoquet, Cyborg Philosophie. Penser contre les dualismes. 104. See Næss, ‘The Three Great Movements’. 105. Whitman, ‘We Two – How Long We Were Fool’d’, in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, p. 114. 106. Whitman, ‘We Two – How Long We Were Fool’d’, p. 114. 107. Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe, Season 1, Episode 1, BBC 2, 2010. 108. Nix, This Shimmering Life, p. 7. 109. This quotation is taken from an entry in his Diary dated 1961. It was the text chosen to introduce a collection of his poems, Moi et mon double. 110. John Lennon, ‘God’, Plastic Ono Band, 1970. 111. Translators’ note: ‘Solitude’ is a technical term in Garcia’s Form and Object, denoting the status of an object considered apart from all

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113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

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of the objects comprehended by and comprehending that object. For Garcia, such de-determined objects are ‘things’, and ironically the only thing that things have in common is the fact that they are distinct from one another. As a result of this contradiction and Garcia’s commitment to the fact that numerosity is relative to the sortal properties in question (e.g. there can be one or two rabbits but not one or two things simpliciter), Garcia holds that dedetermined objects, things, are solitary. To understand the thing presupposed when we talk about an object is to understand that object in a state of radical solitude. Pascal Quignard elaborates and defends this ideal in his work, Sur une communauté des solitaires (On a Community of the Solitary): ‘For me, the essence of Port-Royal is the passionate invention – even if it is difficult for the mind to grasp – of a community of the solitary [. . .] They were not guided by any external rules. They obeyed no one, and carefully maintained their withdrawal from the world. They studied. No one was ever addressed without formality, whether it be God, children, paupers, or beasts. Even the crows were greeted thus, while they admired their hard, black beaks and petted the cats.’ The solitary inhabitants of Port-Royal thought it best not to recognise their belonging to any ‘we’. However, they all share the fact that they were born into a very specific place in society because ‘the solitary ones were all men from civil society, aristocrats, and the wealthy bourgeoisie, who decided to adopt the customs of monasticism (including its abstinences, silences, austerities, vigils, tasks, and lectures [. . .])’. Quignard, Sur une communauté des solitaires, p. 28. Emerson, Society and Solitude, p. 9. Derrion, Constitution de l’Industrie et organisation pacifique du commerce et du travail, p. 9. Epistle to the Galatians 3:28. Badiou, Saint Paul:The Foundation of Universalism. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, ch. II. Gilles Hanus returns to this deeply Sartrean distinction by opposing a passive ‘collective’ that creates a grouping of subjects assembled by chance (for example, a group of people waiting at a bus stop) from an active group formed by choice for a common interest or goal. The active collective can try to construct a ‘we’, but it is always at risk of unravelling into a depersonalised ‘one’ (for example, ‘we do’ becomes ‘one does’). See Hanus, L’épreuve du collectif. For our part, we instead insist that it is never possible to establish such a clear

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121. 122.

123. 124. 125.

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distinction between an imposed collective identity and a collective identity that we choose.We see no difference between a passive and an active first person plural. We call each other ‘we’. Here we are interested in ‘we, women’, ‘we, black people’, ‘we, white people’, or ‘we, Christians’, precisely because of the lack of distinction between our given condition and the identity that we affirm. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 481. Translators’ note: ‘To nihilate’ (néantiser) is a term taken from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. It should be understood in contrast to the verb ‘to annihilate’. Whereas ‘annihilation’ implies making something into nothing in the sense of destruction, ‘nihilation’ instead places the accent on the production of nothing itself. On Sartre’s understanding, a totally determined world would leave no room for freedom of action. Nihilation creates a space or hole in the order of being that makes it possible to operate free from constraints. For Sartre, this nihilation is created when consciousness detaches itself from reality, thereby ‘[enfolding] its objects in a shell of nothingness, thus making itself a reflecting of them, a point of view on them’. Cf. Barnes, ‘Sartre’s Ontology’. Butler, Undoing Gender, p. 1. Translators’ note: We worry that our translation might lead a reader at this point to wrongly assume that Garcia is simply endorsing these kinds of hypotheticals. Unfortunately, the risk is unavoidable, as it is so central to Garcia’s narrative strategy to use the voice of whichever strand of the dialectic he is traversing with the reader. Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Gurr, People versus States, pp. 94–5. Leonhart Fuchs, The New Herbal of 1543. Employing an alphabetical system of ordering, Fuchs does not yet claim to classify the plants that he identifies in the works of Antiquity. Here we are specifically referring to Conrad Gessner’s Historia Animalium, which was published in Zurich in four volumes from 1551 to 1558. The first volume is dedicated to viviparous quadrupeds (and includes Albrecht Dürer’s famous drawing of a rhinoceros, as well as that of a unicorn), the second to egg-laying quadrupeds, the third to birds, and the fourth to fish and other aquatic animals. The final volume was intended to treat serpents and scorpions, but it never appeared. Published in Tübingen in 1694, Rudolf Jakob Camerarius’s De sexu plantarum epistola establishes a distinction between the sexes of

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128.

129.

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132.

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plants and paves the way for them to be classified in terms of their reproductive processes. Joseph Pitton de Tournefort’s Éléments de botanique, ou méthode pour connaître les plantes was published in Paris in 1694. He distinguishes between two different criteria of classification (either by flower or by fruit). He further organises plant species by studying the flower’s corolla, the other parts of the flower, the roots, the stalk, and the flavour.This hierarchical study makes Pitton de Tournefort the first to give genus a place in the taxonomical hierarchy (a genus is formed of multiple species), although he did not ultimately systematise that insight. Translators’ note: In France, the querelle des Anciens et des Modernes (quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns) was a seventeenthcentury artistic, literary, and intellectual debate around whether contemporaries should imitate the ancients (which was the position of the Ancients) or innovate (the stance of the Moderns). The first entirely hierarchical system is found in Carl Linnaeus’s work. See especially Linnaeus, A General System of Nature Through the Three Grand Kingdoms of Animals, Vegetables, and Minerals (1806). Linnaeus adopted John Ray’s understanding of species as a group of individuals that, through reproduction, produce other individuals that resemble them. See Ray, Historia Plantarum, vol. 1, p. 40. See Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, Genera plantarum secundum ordines naturales disposita. In this work, Jussieu distinguishes between three groups of plants that were then divided into five classes, and then further divided into a hundred or so families. Some of his classifications are still in use today. Georges Cuvier transposed Jussieu’s principles of division from the vegetable kingdom to the animal kingdom. See Cuvier, Animal Kingdom, Arranged According to its Organization. Cuvier’s first volume concerns mammals and birds; the second, reptiles, fish, molluscs, and annelids; the third, crustaceans, arachnids, and insects; and the final volume treats zoophytes. Translators’ note: For a more detailed account of the development of the classifications by which humans separate themselves from other animals, and ultimately from other forms of intelligence (e.g. AI), see chapter VI, ‘Humans’, in Book II of Garcia’s Form and Object. Translators’ note: Merriam-Webster’s dictionary lists ‘racialism’ as a synonym for ‘racism’, and the Oxford English Dictionary similarly notes that the use of ‘racialism’ has now been ‘largely superseded’

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by ‘racism’. Merriam-Webster Dictionary, s.v. ‘Racialism’, available at (last accessed 30 May 2020); Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘Racism’, available at (last accessed 30 May 2020). Nevertheless, it is important to distinguish Garcia’s choice of ‘racialism’ (racialisme) and associated word forms from his use of ‘racism’ (racisme) and its associated forms in the context of the present work. Here, ‘racialism’ refers to a world view or system of categorisation that emphasises or prioritises race as a grounding structure. For Garcia, the deployment of a racialist framework may well focus on one race in particular, but it also indirectly posits the existence of a series of other races. In this way, race functions in a manner analogous to the other categories that he studies throughout the present work. Similar distinctions between ‘racialism’ and ‘racism’ have been posited by a number of other scholars. Tzvetan Todorov distinguishes ‘between “racism”, a term designating behaviour, and “racialism”, a term reserved for doctrines’, and goes on to ‘add that the form of racism that is rooted in racialism produces particularly catastrophic results: this is precisely the case of Nazism’. Todorov, ‘Race and Racism’, p. 64. Gunnar Myrdal works with a homologous definition of ‘racialism’ and argues that ‘political reaction fosters racialism’. Myrdal, ‘Racial Beliefs in America’, p. 97. Yet another example of this distinction is elaborated at length in Robert Johnson’s ‘Was the British Empire Racialist or Racist?’ See Johnson, British Imperialism, pp. 107–21. However, we should be careful to note that Garcia’s distinction has nothing to do with the differentiation between ‘racists’ and ‘racialists’ commonly found in America’s far right political discourse. Chester L. Quarles provides an account of this pseudo-distinction in Christian Identity: ‘To purists, racialism is simply a racial preference and a racialist is merely one who wishes to associate primarily with members of his own race. The racist, on the other hand, is often a hater, with severe prejudices and extreme bias against other racial groups.’ Quarles, Christian Identity, pp. 67–8. 135. Translators’ note: In most instances, we have chosen to translate Garcia’s recouvrement with the neologism ‘re-covery’. This is to emphasise the dual meaning of the word in French and in this work. On the one hand, recouvrement can mean recovery in the sense of rescue, restoration, or reacquisition. On the other hand, it also conveys a covering over that obscures something anew or

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137. 138.

139.

140. 141. 142. 143.

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reveals one thing by covering up something else.This latter sense is the price to be paid for the former sense. It seems that he first pronounced this in a 1989 speech on ‘la préférence nationale’ (a National Front expression that refers to the political aim of preserving benefits for people with French nationality). Antigone in Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, pp. 55–128. Translators’ note: Garcia’s assessment of the wisdom of sages here should be read in the light of his discussion elsewhere of how different religions appeal to wisdom as a way of regulating and de-intensifying intensities. See specifically the section entitled ‘Thanks to wisdom’ in Garcia, The Life Intense, pp. 121–3. The idea that this common feeling of identity is on the verge of being lost underlies Edwy Plenel’s work in Dire nous. The author is sad to see the progressive disappearance of a universal we of equality, a we that makes no distinctions between social origin, social status, or religious belonging or belief. In the present work, we are trying to show that the apparent loss of a universal we capable of bringing everyone together actually matters little because such a we turns out to be just as exclusive as any other we. The question at hand instead requires us to comprehend the internal logic by which all we’s, whether very extended or very reduced, are traversed by the conflicts sown within them by their systems of divisions. In order to be able to say ‘we’ (which, we should note, is an ideal that we share with Plenel), we first have to weigh the price to be paid for the establishment of any political identity whatsoever. Said otherwise, we have to determine what is negated by our affirmation. See Plenel, Dire nous: Contre les peurs et les haines, nos causes communes. See Boggio Éwanjé-Épée and Magliani-Belkacem, Les féministes blanches et l’empire. Trat, ‘“Les féministes blanches et l’empire”’. Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex’, p. 149. For example, Scott has recently focused on debates surrounding the banning of the Islamic veil in French schools and the contradictions that emerge between those who adhere to the Republic, universalism, and secularism, and those who are instead attentive and sensitive to ‘differences’ as the only social good.This latter group wants to avoid a situation that ‘has secured “us” in an inflexible and thus dangerously defensive posture in relation to “them”’. See Scott, The Politics of the Veil, p. 20. ‘I propose to employ the concept of “femonationalism” to address the political economy of the discursive formation that brings together

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147. 148.

149.

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the heterogeneous anti-Islam and anti-(male) immigrant concerns of nationalist parties, some feminists, and neoliberal governments under the idea of gender equality.’ Farris,‘Femonationalism and the “Regular” Army of Labor Called Migrant Women’, p. 187. See Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, pp. 27–8. The Combahee River Collective is a black lesbian feminist organisation. In their ‘Statement’ from 1977, they declare, ‘The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression [. . .] The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.’ The Combahee River Collective, ‘Statement of the Combahee River Collective’, 1977, available at (last accessed 28 May 2020). Quoted in Dijkstra, Flora Tristan, p. 190. Patricia Hill Collins provides us with a great first example of the topology of a political subjectivity structured by overlapping inequalities when she attends to the way in which black women took hold of their status as ‘outsiders within’. This status means that black women are excluded from the inside of a domain because they face effects of domination for being women within a group of black people who are also subject to effects of racial domination. Similarly, when black women enter into groups of women who suffer the effects of masculine domination, they can also still face the effects of domination targeted at them for being black. Collins’s article clearly shows how intersectionality allows us to reverse a system of valorisation of subjectivities in a way that turns a doubly dominated subjectivity into a richer, more interesting identity. Intersectionality allows us to re-centre the social margins. See Collins, ‘Learning from the Outsider Within’, S15. According to McCall, this is primarily a question of methodology. Intersectionality should allow feminism to become ‘interdisciplinary’ in a way that comprehends structures of inequality. See McCall, ‘The Complexity of Intersectionality’, p. 1795. Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins’. Crenshaw, Interview by Bim Adewummi, New Statesman, 2 April 2014. Translators’ note: For more on the transformation of image into concept, see the section entitled ‘The idea of an image’ in Garcia’s The Life Intense, pp. 41–3. Translators’ note:To be clear, in standard set theory, the intersection of a set with itself is well defined and in fact just equal to itself. But

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155.

156. 157.

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159. 160.

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this does not hold in the kind of paradigmatic cases Garcia discusses above. Translators’ note: For more on the paradoxical structure of these divisions, see the respective discussions of gender, race, class, and age in Book II of Garcia’s Form and Object. Translators’ note: With the exception of the word nous, the French word calque is the term which most resists and complicates translation in We Ourselves. At first glance, calque can mean a tracing, the result of drawing on a piece of papier calque, but it also connotes the English word from linguistics, calque, defined as a loan translation. The vast scope of Garcia’s investigation and his frequent terminological variations foreclose the possibility of directly translating calque as calque. In most cases, we prefer to translate calque as ‘transparency’. This is both for reasons of style (the term proves particularly clunky in English because Garcia employs it in widely varying metaphorical contexts) and substance (in both its adjectival and nominal senses, ‘transparency’ conveys the possibilities of superposition, duplication, revelation, and obfuscation). We also employ ‘transparency’ as a translation of other significant terms that perform the same function as calque. In We Ourselves, ‘transparency’ refers to a relationship best embodied by the transparent cells of an animator or the sheets of transparent plastic used with overhead projectors prior to the advent of computer-based projection. With that being said, this description of ‘transparency’ will be complicated by Garcia’s account of transparency and opacity in the eponymous section of Book I of the present work. Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, pp. 205–12. While mocking the French Constitution of 1795, de Maistre searches for the right word to address Man as a whole. See Maistre, Considerations on France, p. 97. Translators’ note:The genealogical and formal connections between extension and intension are an essential part of the first book in this trilogy. See especially chapters 2 and 3 of The Life Intense. Gaudemet,‘Les formes anciennes de l’excommunication’, pp. 64–5. Translators’ note: Here we see one category – such as being Catholic or being communist, with fuzzy boundaries and more or less implicit norms governing the extent to which one is a member of that category – being replaced with multiple attempts at precise categories concerning what kind of (full or partial) Catholic or communist one can be. This is one key sense in which the (nonnormative and precise) extensive can attempt to sideline the (in

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TRANSPARENCIES

161. 162. 163. 164.

165.

166.

167.

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this case fuzzy and normative) intensive in Garcia’s dialectics. For Garcia, this kind of ongoing failure to make explicit the ongoing implicit normative grounds is an inevitable part of conceptual and social development, a dialectical engine in part because it gives rise to new normative grounds. And it is also a deep point that has an important resonance both with Taoism and Zen Buddhism and with what analytical philosophers (reflecting on the failure of their earlier paradigm) now call the Kripke–Wittgenstein paradox. Garcia’s The Life Intense is in part an extended meditation on how this process has played out in Western culture with respect to the notion of intensity itself. Bordessoule, ‘L’État-nation en Afrique subsaharienne’. Bordessoule, ‘L’État-nation en Afrique subsaharienne’. Bordessoule, ‘L’État-nation en Afrique subsaharienne’. This difference is clear from the speech that Rosa Luxemburg delivered on 12 May 1912 at the Second Social Democratic Women’s Rally in Stuttgart, Germany. See Luxemburg, ‘Women’s Suffrage and the Class Struggle’. Translators’ note:The first book in the trilogy traces the revenge of the extensive on the intensive. Practically, this works out the various ways in which the contemporary cult of intense experiences self-destructs. Theoretically, every attempt to elucidate the intense as the other of our systems of categorisation ends up categorising the intensive and hence rendering it extensive. Garcia gives a history of electricity as his paradigm case of this, but he clearly also has his eye on the tradition of process philosophy of which we might regard Gilles Deleuze as the culminating representative. And here, in the second book, we see the opposite manoeuvre, the revenge of the intensive on the extensive. In theoretically dividing up the world, we are just trying, as the brutal metaphor goes, to cut nature at the joints that are already there. Fine, but the result is a set of systems of divisions, and the practical normativity arises again at the level of deciding which system of division it is correct to privilege in a given situation.The correctness here must be normative, akin to and including moral deliberation. The alternative would be to have a system of divisions for all systems of divisions. But that would just be one more system of division. ‘Vegetarianism and Social Class’, Vegeweb, available at (last accessed 14 January 2020). Translators’ note: We have chosen re-covery and its variants to translate recouvrement and other associated terms. In Garcia’s use

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of the word, we can see that two different meanings are simultaneously in play: on the one hand, we have the dominant sense of re-covery as a covering over of what was once uncovered; on the other hand, we have the sense of re-covery that we encounter when we talk about a recovered artefact or a rescued person. Paradoxically, the first sense has to do with something that has been newly obscured, while the second sense refers to something that has been rediscovered and reincorporated into our understanding of the world. 168. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, p. 30. 169. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, p. 30. 170. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, p. 30.

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Book II Constraints

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1 The Ground of We

Species Sometimes it is good to tell a story about what we feel. Let us try to tell a story that expresses as clearly as possible what we ourselves think that we have become. We have been taught to distrust grand narratives. We know all too well that they are nothing more than biased, self-serving reconstructions that operate as stand-ins for what really happened. But without narration, it becomes impossible to tell where we stand. We therefore have to go out on a limb once more and try to transform what we feel into a story. While admitting the flawed and partial nature of such an endeavour, this is what we will try to accomplish by staging the crisis of our classificatory categories. For some centuries, there were certain categories that made it possible to ground the feeling of we. It should then be possible to retrace a sort of transcendental story of those categories so that we can arrive at a rough understanding of the developments that have progressively led us to believe that we can no longer find a way to ground ourselves. How did we arrive at the point where our identities seem like systems of transparencies that can be combined and interchanged at will, without any sort of foundational constraints? Let’s go ahead and roll the dice.We can examine recent history in order to isolate a few signs that indicate the metamorphosis of the concepts that form the foundation of our classifications. Let’s begin by taking a look at the concept of species. We seem to immediately run into a real constraint that imposes a clear identity upon us: our genetic heredity, our phenotype, our

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physiology, our cognition. These are all differences that the concept of species inscribes into living beings. Thinking in terms of species lets us group animal organisms according to their similarities while at the same time excluding ourselves, human beings, from those groups.The human species has long been the foundation or ground on which we trace our representations. The category of species is supposed to support all of the secondary divisions between men and women, rich and poor, Europeans, Africans, Asians, Amerindians, children, adults, and so on.We might belong to a number of different groups that are considered cultural or natural to varying degrees, but we are all human beings. Species difference already existed underneath our representations. It is a natural constraint that has largely determined our sexual and racial subdivisions. And yet, because it was at once both a principle of division (between all species) and a principle of demarcation (of one species in particular, our species), the notion of species was ambiguous. In a move that would be followed by Jussieu and Cuvier, Linnaeus refined the classification of living beings. It became more sophisticated, and its governing principles changed. From then on, science focused on the distinctive characteristics of organisms. This made it possible to place them into groups and subgroups, according to a logic that was not necessarily based on the similarities and dissimilarities of beings as they appear to us. Classification was then charged with uncovering one or more principles. Even though they sometimes flew in the face of common sense, these principles explained the distribution of everything that lives and allowed us to divide up all living things. In following this principle or principles, we were supposed to be able to account for the whole diversity of living beings without having to depend on our human perspective.Then the delicate question concerning humanity’s exceptional demarcation was raised. Granted that the divisions separating humanity from other species were not so different from the differences that separated those other species from each other, how could humanity not be categorised as an animal species? The different difference, a redoubled difference, between human beings and non-human species could not be the same as the simple difference that exists between one species of animal and another (like the difference separating cheetahs from leopards).This is why the different

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difference served as a grounding category. The redoubled difference established a space (namely, society) demarcated from Nature.1 This grounding space was where the we was unified. Among all of the other species divided up within the set of living things, there was nothing else that said ‘we’.This was because the other animals didn’t have access to logos, free will, speech, thought, perfectibility, tools, self-consciousness, the infinite, and other things that belonged solely to human beings. So nothing could be we but us, human beings. Out there, in Nature, there was nothing but ‘them’. We found ourselves comprehended or surrounded by Nature.We were divided by science into one species among others, but we were also demarcated by the magic circle of we. We, humans, were ourselves by ourselves and for ourselves.To be clear, we were ourselves by ourselves, because our we was founded on nothing more than our ability to bestow this specificity upon ourselves by thinking, speaking, and acting freely, and by organising ourselves into societies. With the advent of humanism, our we no longer looks like a gift, whether from the gods or from Nature. Our we established its own foundation, and it was its own principle; we gained the right to be us because we were the only ones capable of conceiving of such an exceptional right. The human exception rested on this alone: we had convinced ourselves that we were the only ones that could think about how we were the only ones (thanks to our consciousness, thought, and language, which gave us this ability). Our ability to see clearly stemmed from this blindness, and vice versa. ‘Humanity’ was the metaphysical name for this virtuous metaphysical cycle (although, for the enemies of humanism, it is a vicious circle): humanity recognised itself as distinct because it thought that it alone was capable of recognition. This was the price to be paid: we were ourselves only for ourselves. There was nothing beyond humanity – neither gods, nor beasts, nor alien creatures – that could give us external confirmation. It could be that, in the eyes of others, we were not really human beings in the way we thought we were. Our superior humanity eluded the grasp of animals, who could scarcely respond to us with more than a sort of confused and astonished fear. It was up to us, humanity, to clearly comprehend that humanity constituted the exceptional circle of we. This circle could only be devised from within. The other animals were indifferent to it, condemned to observe our

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private realm in a kind of stupor. If they could have accessed this extraordinary domain, they would have found themselves among us. Then they would have been like us. Nevertheless, our we was still an exclusive, hermetic space, at the heart of which dwelled this fabulous we. Outside of this we, it was meaningless. Inasmuch as we were humanist human beings, we were our own grounding. And then we found that species had become un-grounded. This doesn’t mean that it suddenly lost its epistemic utility as a principle for dividing up living things. Rather, little by little, it was no longer to be found inscribed directly onto Nature. It detached from its ground instead. It became a simplified division projected onto the otherwise complex and subtle reality of living things by the language and thought of one particular species, ours. Through un-grounding, division into species became more akin to a system of beliefs that progressively peeled away from life itself. It started to appear to us as a kind of interpretative framework through which we could read the changing nature of all living things. The very concept of species has been suffering a long, slow death ever since the triumph of evolutionary theory. Of course, we still talked about the differences between species, but those differences were increasingly unable to define a system of divisions that could ground our exceptionality. What we got instead was more like an increasingly complex game of comparisons made through nuances and gradations. The notion that species could be a grounding principle had previously emerged out of the joint efforts of metaphysics (from Aristotle onwards), classificatory sciences, and legal and political practices and customs (such as the legal definition of personhood and the determination of the status of non-human beings). The aim of those efforts was to trace the diversity of all living things. The similarities and dissimilarities of different organisms could then be compared in order to determine the smallest possible number of ordering principles. Nevertheless, during the nineteenth century, the dominant idea became that the order of living things was no more than the reflection of their history.This meant that all classification was necessarily phylogenetic. Candolle’s classic definition of species reformulates Cuvier’s principle in this way:

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A species is the set of all individuals that resemble each other more than they resemble others. ‘Species’ refers to a group who, through mutual reproduction, produce fertile individuals and reproduce themselves through subsequent generations, in such a way that we can imagine them all having once originated with a single individual.2 However, ancestral descent means that species as a principle necessarily changes over time. How can we trace the insurmountable boundaries between species if, as Candolle suspects, it is always possible for us to go back, generation by generation, and find a common ancestor? We can thus conceive of the collection of all living things as a tree whose branches are all connected, no matter how distantly, because they share the same trunk. Underneath the apparent diversity of species, there is a single, unique subject – Life – which undergoes constant variation. The only way to organise and comprehend our spontaneous image of Nature was through a patient and necessarily incomplete reconstruction of the evolution of living beings and their interconnections. Now that we recognise genetic heredity’s role in the individual forms taken on by all living things, ancestry is what links together all living beings. The only way to explain what separates and unites living organisms is by reconstructing their genealogies.We can do this by sketching out the relations among things as trees (some of them proven, some hypothetical), recognising where they come together and where they branch apart, and following the continuous transmission lines of certain appreciable characteristics. This is the first stage of our little tale about the crisis of this classificatory category: classification no longer operates with an atemporal, ahistorical, and static notion of Nature. Instead, classification now focuses on the evolution of living things. Species are not simply sets that contain individuals as if they were just one more element among others. On the contrary, now species has become more like a process, and organisms are like different moments of that process. This simple idea radically transforms the outline of this category of species.We used to imagine a system of divisions that drew limits and boundaries to separate one species from another. This made each species into an enclosed space. It was a sort of series of display

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cases, inside of which we could arrange the individual representatives of different species. Now, however, ‘species’ denotes what joins different organisms together (and not what separates them). Tracing species now means tracing lines of connection that run from ancestors to their descendants.This means grouping things in accordance with the synapomorphies and homoplasies measured by cladistics. Of course, there are some nodes along these evolutionary lines, but we are always splitting the same line, namely, the line of heredity. This is the source of the decisive change: ever since the classical age, a line was what separated (the difference between two organisms of two distinct species), but in modernity, a line is what joins together (the lineage of two organisms). Human beings are no longer separated from chimpanzees by an insurmountable barrier. Now the human is a segment of a line running back to a common ancestor. That line branches out in numerous directions, one of which leads to the chimpanzee. Now that we have adopted the evolutionary principle of living things, the transparencies that we use to interpret living things allow us to trace genealogies. Rather than dividing one species from another, those genealogical tracings instead form a line that links one species to another. Our illustrations now look less like a system of boundaries and more like the life lines studied in palmistry. This is the second stage of our tale: in both the sciences and metaphysics, classificatory categories no longer function like systems of demarcating lines. They instead operate like genealogical systems of lineages. Having already been overturned by Darwinism, the principle of division into species was redefined by Ernst Mayr as part of a neo-Darwinian synthesis, an alliance that was forged between evolutionary theory and molecular biology. According to Mayr, the difference between species is nothing but a precarious balancing act, an ecological effect of isolating populations. This isolation causes a species to develop apart from others. A kind of nesting effect is created and, little by little, a species loses its ability to reproduce with surrounding populations. There are no specific essences. There are only threshold effects within the continuous variations in the different branches of the general evolution of life. Now, how should we divide – and demarcate, for that matter – a we among the variable intensities of living things? Classification,

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which once connected the demarcation of the human being to the division of all species, can no longer justify this magical separation. From this point on, instead of tracing boundaries, classification traces genealogical lines between all living things. Because a line is a real, continuous, unbroken, geometrical thing, modernity leads us to think of things in terms of change and permanent variation. Here we find the third stage: our categorical systems of lines now focus our attention on intensive variations instead of different extensive limits. The question is no longer about where the we of we’s begins and ends. We have stopped looking for an absolute boundary or an ‘impassable line’ on the surface of a transparency that we have superimposed on all living things. Now the question is different: when did something begin to take shape? And when will it break down or become something else? Certain critiques of the concept of species already see it as nothing more than a simple grammatical effect. They hold that an illusion of language leads us to anchor the categorisation of beings in a model based on how we divide things with words. As Jody Hey hypothesises, this causes us to treat individuals as if they were mere instantiations of common nouns.3 Others, such as Massimo Pigliucci, detect a tendency of human cognition to categorise classes of being in order to more efficiently identify them.4 This means that species isn’t found in the reality of living things, but rather in the eye and mind of the beholder, the one who is observing, studying, and putting things in order. The fourth stage of our tale is the following: species as a category of extensive division is rejected for being too subjective. It is a cognitive or linguistic construction projected onto a reality that is taken to be fundamentally intensive, which is to say, made up of variations. We soon started talking about ‘speciation’ more than species. Phylogenetic classification of species organises living things by ‘clades’, which are the nodes that appear along lines that trace the permanent variation of living beings. This is a consequence of Darwin’s conclusion: ‘I believe that the arrangement of the groups within each class, in due subordination and relation to the other groups, must be strictly genealogical in order to be natural.’5 The order of priority of different classes had to be determined more by principles of generation than those of genus. It

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was therefore necessary to think of species not just as an object but as an event subject to temporality.We gradually became convinced of the following: The reality of the living world is one of individual organisms on which we superimpose the conventions of language. The species is nothing more than a collection of individuals, defined at best by a synapomorphy or at worst by the mean and variance of some measured parameters.6 This idea might seem abstract, but its political consequences are easy to see. We had previously used scientific distinctions based on differences of nature to determine a definitive human ‘we’. Now all of that had to be re-evaluated. This was the case because there can only ever be a difference of degree separating ‘us’ from ‘them’. That is why everything that the category of species had allowed us to ground in politics and law slowly but surely began to crumble. The human being’s status as exceptional, its standing as the subject of laws rather than their object, is no longer assured by the metaphysico-epistemological category of species. Moreover, if there is never anything but speciation, then there aren’t really any human beings either.There is just an unending process of ‘humanisation’, a kind of fluctuating intensity of humanity, a force in motion. How should it be divided? Where does it begin? Where does it end? Just as one only needs a line segment to project an infinite line, our thought can likewise conceive of humanity as a continuous process. Now we arrive at the fifth stage: there are only differences of degree inscribed into Nature. Paradoxically, differences of nature only exist within our categories, which are themselves cognitive, linguistic, and cultural constructions. On the natural ground of things, nothing can differentiate itself from others cleanly enough to maintain a categorical distinction. The closer our knowledge comes to the rift that was thought to be inscribed within the very material of living things, the more we discover slippages, nuances, and shades of grey.This makes it impossible to ground a claim of absolute discrimination (such as the difference between the subject and object of laws that we find on our representational transparencies) in the specific variations of living things.

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The emergence of anti-speciesism as a politics demanding animal rights is without doubt the primary sign of this disintegration of species. It shows that the concept of species is no longer strong enough to allow us to justify dividing things in a way that defines a solid, humanist ‘we’ as grounded in itself. We cannot continue to say ‘we’ with exclusive reference to the human species because the boundaries of this species are already frayed. The walls dividing humanity from other species collapse, and we are mixed in with the higher mammals. This categorical confusion then continues by degrees: the higher mammals become indistinguishable from all other mammals, and then all mammals blur together with everything that lives, feels, and suffers. The political consequences of this increasing blurring of categories of species are most evident. The works of Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Steven Wise, and Martha Nussbaum blaze the trail towards an animal politics as they write against ‘speciesism’ (a notion that is modelled after racism).7 ‘We’ then refers to all subjects of a life, or all higher mammals, or all sensate beings, or anything that can be thought of as having interests and therefore rights. This does not mean that we have to deny that there are differences between the species. On the contrary, the domain of the living is one of perpetual differentiation and variation. However, contemporary knowledge is no longer capable of grounding ethical, legal, and political categories within differences that are inscribed onto the very nature of things. Nothing is ever different enough to justify a differentiation between what is ‘for itself ’ and what is ‘in itself ’, or what is and what is not a subject. Categorical differences now appear to be nothing more than the simplified and simplifying products of the systems of divisions administered by our perception and language. This is why species now seems to be both un-grounded and incapable of grounding anything at all. The category of species can only ever help us better understand how we think about things.We certainly perceive differences between human beings and other beings, but those differences are never strong enough to be ontologised or inscribed into being. The political lines that we trace between the species now appear to be detached from Nature. It seems that they are only inscribed at the level of our representational transparencies.

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As the category of species falls apart, the way is cleared for an animal politics. This categorical crumbling also enables a further transhumanist or posthumanist politics that involves hybrids, cyborgs, artificial intelligence, the Singularity (in Vernor Vinge’s sense of the word),8 and every other entity that could possibly come after the human race. When we get to the bottom of things, there are no humans.There is only humanisation. Politics must therefore find a way to become transhumanist. Politics cannot just be humanist any more. Without a grounding in species, the we flows into both the pre-humanity of animals and the post-humanity of artefacts. The political sense of humanity also loses its system of divisions within a hazy, swirling crowd of life and artificiality that gradually forbids us to speak only in the name of ‘we’, as speaking human beings, whenever we say ‘we’.This means that animal politics and posthumanism represent mere historical symptoms of the crisis of species as a classificatory category. This is the final stage of our tale: any change in our classificatory categories is accompanied by a change in our legal and political representations.We may very well still have the feeling that we can sense a clear difference between human beings and others. Nevertheless, our reason’s inability to substantiate the unsurpassable line between an us and a them causes our representations to loosen and detach. Where there was a line, we now see a continuum. The lines that we trace in order to distinguish human subjects from other animals, be they in legal terms or even according to our feelings, no longer appear as anything more than the lines of our system of divisions. They no longer resemble a system of borders inscribed directly onto natural things. Similarly, the classificatory category of species no longer allows us to ground a system of divisions.That possibility is lost once species reveals itself to be an artificial system of divisions grounded in a natural basis that knows no limits, only variations and infinite gradations. This is an abridged version of the tale of what happened to the category of species. But this story is just one of many.

Gender As the human we was losing its external boundaries, humanity also saw its interior limits give way. The first of those internal limits is

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gender.9 It is a category that is at once metaphysical, scientific, and political. It is catalogued in terms of sexual reproduction, and it is used to justify a division of the human we into two ‘complementary’ persons. In order to make sexual difference into a baseline constraint of identity, it was necessary to locate a line of division inscribed directly onto organisms. An impassable line was required, something capable of sustaining all of the distinctions between what men and women are and do. It wasn’t enough just to show that men are one way and women another ‘in most cases’.This distinction had to be grounded in an observable discontinuity without any exceptions. It had to be a line in the sand: a natural, grounding trace that our representations could follow, trace over, and underline, so that differences could then be established at the level of culture. All of our categories are like scenes from a tiny theatre that remains oblivious to the fact that it is a theatre. Here, the same play is tirelessly staged over and over again. The same thing that happened to species happened to gender.The actors of modernity thought that they were performing original parts in the history of ideas, and meanwhile this limit crumbled without them ever noticing it. At the heart of the human species, the same thing that progressively undermined species differences also impacted gender differences. Maybe we can put it this way: there is no cause and effect relation between them. The weakening of the absolute differences between species is not the cause of the weakening of gender boundaries (nor the other way around). But there is a sort of similarity or resonance between what is happening to the limits of the human species and what takes place within those limits. As the systematic division of living things into species becomes increasingly dubious, it also becomes harder to find reasons for dividing species according to gender. So what happened here? First of all, the distinction between one’s genital sex and one’s genetic sex introduced an idea that was more like a variation of intensity than a system of limits. It is true that genital sex is at least partially contingent. It also depends on external developmental conditions and genetic codes. A fertilised egg is always undifferentiated, or bivalent. This means

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that genital sex is linked to a hormonal mechanism. In the lab, one can always induce a more or less stable inversion of sex by administering variable quantities of hormones to an embryo. And yet natural science has discovered more and more examples of transformations and variations of genital sex.We might even say that it has become particularly attentive to these phenomena.Take, for example, the often cited case of the green spoonworm. The female spoonworm has a proboscis for trapping food. The male spoonworm is microscopic. It has no proboscis and lives parasitically off the female. It attaches itself to the female’s proboscis and enters her digestive tube. It then settles itself within the female’s uterus and fertilises her eggs. The same larva can become either male or female. It develops into a female if it remains unattached, but if it attaches to the proboscis of another female, its development is interrupted, and it becomes a male. This means that it is the adult female’s proboscis that secretes the inhibitive substances that lead to male differentiation. Here sexualisation is not genetic, but instead clearly depends upon external factors. This is also the case with crustaceans. Their hormonal source of differentiation is generally situated outside of the organism’s gonads. The male is consequently a female that is transformed by an androgenic gland. Modern science has discovered that sexual differentiation is an epigenetic phenomenon. The determination of an organism’s genital sex according to its genetic sex always hinges on contingent factors that are both internal (for example, hormones) and external (for example, nutrition and temperature). An ‘impassable line’ running between genders and inscribed directly onto Nature could not be found by looking to the genital sexes, so it was necessary to go down to the genetic level. Genital sex certainly seemed to be the variable result of a hormonal process, but genetic sex was instead a discrete bit of information that could easily be encoded: we are either women (XX) or we are men (XY).There is no other alternative. So it seemed that the line in the sand should be drawn around our genes. At first, it seemed as if this line could be traced between the X chromosome and the Y chromosome: a human organism with a Y chromosome was a man. Things were simple. But we soon noticed that it wasn’t the whole chromosome that determined

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human sexuation – it was just one or more of its parts. This was called the TDF, or Testis-Determining Factor. Researchers therefore began analysing a surface molecule, the H-Y antigen, as well as some of the Y chromosome’s other genes. In 1959, however, scientists discovered individuals whose karyotypes did not seem to correspond to this expected process of division into two. Certain male individuals had the chromosomic pairs XXY10 or even XXXY. Meanwhile, certain female individuals had the chromosomic pairs XXX11 and XXXX. These chromosomic particularities seemed to be a testament to the ‘dominant’ nature of the Y chromosome. This would mean that the presence of the Y chromosome always induced a male phenotype. Nevertheless, these studies redirected our attention towards sexual exceptions. These sorts of investigations express nothing more than a renewed interest in androgyny within the field of genetics. They are concerned with individuals who are neither male nor female, and who thereby defy the attempt to divide humanity into just two categories. In so doing, they incarnate a flaw within the uncompromising dialectic between two biological principles that seem to be resilient enough to be elevated to the rank of ontological or cosmic principles. If there is something other than men and women, then it is no longer possible to think of those classificatory categories as if they were metaphysical principles through which the duality of the whole world might be expressed. Everything can no longer be explained in terms of the differences between ‘we, women’ and ‘we, men’. In 1964 we first discovered that there were also XX male individuals.Then, a few years later, we also discovered XY female individuals. These marginal cases of irregularities in genetic matching called the absolutely determinant nature of the Y chromosome into question. We cannot draw a baseline distinction between chromosomes because they do not place any absolute constraints on sexual identity. Naturalists will often disregard these exceptions. As good Aristotelians, naturalists are interested in the laws that govern what takes place ‘in most cases’. On the other hand, those same exceptions are precisely what attracts the nominalists. They prioritise singular existence above all else and see each

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individual case as an opportunity to modify and adjust rules and norms. All schools of thought that try to deconstruct the classificatory categories of sex and gender are enamoured with intersex people. Having previously been made out to be monsters or cast into the margins of historiography, intersex people became, for these movements, the true heroes of subversive works of art and theories of sexuation.This explains Foucault’s interest in the case of Herculine Barbin12 as well as Judith Butler’s13 and Thomas Laqueur’s14 studies of androgyny. Intersex individuals became the protagonists of sexuality. They are much more interesting than conforming individuals because their singularity thwarts the universality of categories that cannot contain them. Their singularity thus reduces all categories to particularities. ‘Manly men’ are particular beings, just like androgynous people. But they are also less obviously particular. This doesn’t make them less perfect, just less exciting, or more boring. Through its aesthetic and theoretical interest in exceptions to sex and gender, modernity has gradually built a model of life that encourages queer identity, an identity that is neither man nor woman. It is more stimulating to consider oneself as an exception now that the focus on norms has given way to the symbolic valorisation of what plays out in the space between the broad inherited divisions of our thinking. The exception functions strategically. Rather than deny that the majority of cases fit into one of two categorical divisions (male or female), it instead impedes the universalisation of that division. The exception prevents thought from inscribing the ‘impassable line’ into Nature itself. Having long ignored or disregarded them, we began to recognise an increasing number of particular cases as we paid more attention to exceptions. The search for TDF, or for an incontestable line between the two sexes deep within ourselves, has led modern genetics to make a series of modifications. In 1975 the H-Y antigen seemed like the sought-after TDF molecule. In many species, the presence of H-Y is actually even more closely related to the male phenotype than it is to the Y chromosome. However, a slew of counter-examples soon prompted a return to the inquiry, and a new hypothesis emerged: instead of the H-Y antigen, perhaps two genes, ZFY and SRY, were

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responsible for male sexuation. Later, this hypothesis also proved to be invalid. The longer we search for this line, the more levels of complexity appear; genetic sex no longer absolutely determines genital sex, and genital sex doesn’t actually determine gender. The refrain ‘It’s a little more complicated than that’ has become an emblem of modernity. Like a stack of transparencies coming unstuck, different levels of sexuation are detaching from each other. But what is left underneath them all? It is clear that gender and sex no longer qualify as grounding classificatory principles. They have lost the ability to impose absolute divisions. Just as species gave way to the process of speciation, gender and sex ceded their place to genderisation or sexuation.We can no longer say ‘we, men’ or ‘we, women’ in a totally grounded way because all that we find deep within us, underneath the masks of gender performance, are variable intensities.There is only ‘this is more or less feminising’ or ‘that is more or less masculinising’. Now, genders are no longer nouns; they are verbs because they correspond to acts.The political effect of this ‘performance’ is the invention of novel subjectivities. These are registered in the ongoing development of LGBTQI terminology, which currently includes lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer, and intersex people. At this point in the story, what were once distinct identities are multiplied until purely intensive, indistinct identities, ones parsed according to degrees, take their place. As recounted in the book Testo Junkie, the author Preciado injected hormones in order to change his sexuation. Having once defined himself as a ‘trans-dyke’, Preciado would later change his name and identity (from Beatriz when the book was published to Paul B. Preciado). In his book, Preciado bears witness to an era of ‘pharmacopornographic biopolitical fiction’15 marked by the widespread use of birth control pills to regulate female hormones, the marketing of chemical remedies for masculine erectile dysfunction, and testosterone usage. By observing the physiological micromutations of his putatively feminine organism as it underwent various physical changes, Preciado asserts the strictly intensive nature of not just gender, but also sex. Preciado stands opposed to the language of extension and division, which to him still

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recalls partitions, hierarchy, and domination. He doesn’t affirm a new identity, because that would just replace one norm with another. Instead, he uses his experiments to show that sexuation is a process that always entails possible variations. The aim is to show that essential identities are really just particular cases that have been elevated into universal categories. In this way, gender and sex become – or return to their status as – ideas. This means that gender and sex are also beliefs with which we can experiment. As Preciado explains, ‘Through this voluntary intoxication, which is carried out without any medical supervision, I can confirm that my gender doesn’t belong to my family, the state, or the pharmaceutical industry.’16 Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that my gender belongs to me. This isn’t a choice between absolute individualism or absolute voluntarism. As Preciado puts it, ‘It is a political experiment.’17 When people who challenge norms refer to an ‘experiment’, they almost always mean a process of variation and multiplication: ‘There aren’t two sexes, just a multitude of genetic, hormonal, sexual, and sensual configurations.’18 At this point in the decomposition process of the category of gender, there are those who, like Preciado, believe in an infinite trend towards singularisation and the pluralisation of identities.These people are right to argue that redefining genders would also inevitably involve re-grounding them in some way. This would mean that differences would again have to be inscribed into Nature and onto our bodies.We must therefore wholly renounce the modern push towards categorical detachment. However, the opponents of gender experimentation argue that the absence of categories has itself become a category. According to them, while such gender experimentation claims to contest all of the norms of subjectivity, it is really just as normative.The subversion of gender thereby becomes a gender in itself. Likewise, the refusal of norms is itself a norm.19 And the norm for gender experimentation – the thing that enables us to comprehend its polarisations and its systems of values – is intensity construed as ‘pure difference’.According to this norm, duality, division in two, and polarisation always have pejorative connotations. Conversely, plurality, dissemination, and unrestricted freedom with regard to norms are systematically valorised. In this way, gender experimentation actually

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embodies a moment in the history of our categories. It represents the conception of a paradoxical system of values wherein intensity prevails over extension, the open over the closed, multiplicity over unity, duality over totality, the non-systematic over the systematic, and, finally, non-polarisation over polarisation. Here the rejection of systematic polarisation paradoxically happens through a systematic polarisation of values. At this point we may be tempted to move beyond this moment of gender experimentation and continue on to the next stop in the story of our identities. How can we categorically divide ourselves without producing effects of domination, whether it be the domination of women by men, homosexuals by heterosexuals, or intersex people by sexuated people? Any response remains questionable because attempts to redraw gender differences must inevitably confront the problem of how those differences are grounded. It seems that differences must become legible again, be it within Nature or society. And yet, to accomplish that, we have to give them a new ground. So here is our story in short: the categorical difference between man and woman is supposed to be grounded in an exact knowledge, and yet, as the sciences gain more precise data, the changing transparency on which gender is traced allows us to glimpse an increasingly nuanced reality. We find more exceptions as we approach the ‘impassable line’, which itself tolerates no uncertainty with regard to dual memberships or intermediary cases. Where we expected to find hermetically separated principles, we instead discover processes that are subject to variable intensities. Rather than a question of sexes, this is a question of sexuation. To the modern mind, sexuated belonging functions through modulations rather than divisions. This is the domain of the continuous, not the discontinuous. The old categories persist as tracings on our transparencies, but they are now seen merely as historical and cultural constructions shaped by our interests and desires. ‘We, men’ and ‘we, women’ can hardly be taken as grounding categories any more. Instead, they are seen as mere projected forms. This is because everything that divides is the product of our perception and actions, while everything that is divided is really a vast continuum of variations.

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Denaturalised and historicised, categories enter a period of unrestricted freedom and experimentation. Intensities are celebrated to the detriment of normative identities. One result of this ‘war on gender identities’ is a model of identity formation. We don’t just study exceptions to the division between men and women.We also manufacture and invent them as ways of life. In order to establish the decomposition of those categories as a generic norm, contemporary thought and art focus on hybridisations and ambiguous forms. And that’s how we ended up in our current situation.

Race Now let’s push on a little further. A certain category – the delicate and controversial category of race – might help us to anticipate what-comes-next. If we want to better understand one category’s logic, it’s always best to approach it through another category’s logic. Race takes the differences between animal species and tries to reflect them within our human species. The systematic and scientific division of humanity into races can therefore be seen as an (unintentional) effect of the demarcation that sets humanity apart from all other animal species. Here we encounter a paradoxical and painful mystery of Western humanism. Who could have known that the categorical unification of natural humanity would also allow humanity to be cut up into natural subcategories? Nevertheless, Western humanists were not responsible for creating racial divisions. Most humanists fought against the racial classification of humanity, whether they saw different races as equal or unequal. All human peoples divide the members of their species into groups and subgroups.Those groups may be united around factors such as culture, ethnicity, birthplace or time of birth, physical appearance, skin colour, facial features, customs, language, parenting styles, dietary habits, fashion trends, and so on. These systems of divisions are far from new. What is new is the notion that a classificatory category can systematise differences within a humanity that has already been scientifically identified. In this way, race takes the way that we model divisions that are external to humanity and then applies them to divide humanity from within. Perhaps this is the price to be paid for the theoretical formulation and classification

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of human beings. By producing a scientific account of what separates all human beings from other living beings, we invite questions about what can scientifically explain how human beings are also divided among themselves. The conversation surrounding race became increasingly contentious as European nations explored and expanded beyond their previous maritime limits. From the Renaissance onwards, Europeans encountered other humans who seemed morphologically and culturally distant from them. Indeed, that distance might have seemed even greater than the difference that separated certain animal species from humanity as a whole. This led to the development of a category that modelled our internal differences in the same way that we categorised the differences between other animal species. Since that time, many different thinkers have tried to use race to ground the way that they divide up humanity. Rather than the Christian notion that all humans come from Adam and Eve, their first hypothesis instead postulated multiple points of origination for humanity. Nevertheless, for all racialist thinkers, seeing the diversity within ourselves as humans leads to a kind of spontaneous conviction. We cannot deny that we are all struck by the things that separate us morphologically. All racialist texts begin by emphasising the striking nature of these differences. It’s almost strange how often these texts begin with this kind of commentary. Rather than our shared human identity, they claim that rational classification must explain these differences. But why is this the case? Because, from this viewpoint, identity is supposed to be grounded in reason. Grounding a notion of identity in this way makes the discovery of differences into something shocking. It produces a feeling of aesthetic disgust whenever one encounters human variations. The experience of human difference shatters the harmonious image of a united we promised to us by humanism. According to this feeling, we should all be like us. However, to white European thinkers, discovering alterity is like experiencing an alteration in oneself. Arthur de Gobineau, the father of modern racialist thinking, contrasts his perception of Asian people with his version of the we of humanity. He describes Asian people as having ‘yellowish skin, scanty hair and beard, a

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large face, a pyramidal skull, small stature, thick-set limbs, and slanting eyes with the skin of the eyelids turned so much outwards that the eye will hardly open’.20 Then Gobineau turns his attention to black people: From him we turn to another – a negro from the West Coast of Africa, tall, strong-looking, with thick-set limbs and a tendency to fat. His colour is no longer yellowish, but entirely black; his hair no longer thin and wiry, but thick, coarse, woolly, and luxuriant.21 Here, we don’t pick up on any aesthetic taste for difference whatsoever. In this next citation, there is a visceral revulsion with regard to everything that affects the unity of humanity. Gobineau is disgusted by everything that appears as a gradation or, to him, a degradation of humanity’s form in the direction of animality: When we look for a moment at an individual of this type, we are involuntarily reminded of the structure of the monkey, and are inclined to admit that the negro races of West Africa come from a stock that has nothing in common, except the human form, with the Mongolian.22 For racialist thinkers such as Gobineau, race becomes a classificatory category that should account for the gradation of human forms. He aims to measure the distance between us in the same way that we measure the distance between humanity and other animal species. Through a homothetic effect, the relationship between all of humanity and other animals can be projected within humanity as a whole and used to divide us into a hierarchy of parts. Gobineau explicitly makes this claim: ‘The most reasonable view appears to be that the families into which man is divided are as distinct as are animals of different species.’23 The feeling of difference tinged with disgust is an incontestable characteristic of all nineteenth-century racialist thought. For these thinkers, the first priority was determining how to scientifically ground that feeling in reason. They wanted a system for measuring differences, which is to say, a principle of division or a

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line inscribed directly onto human bodies that would clarify the difference between us and them. The notion of race has always implied the search for a baseline, something as impassable as the notion of species or gender, something buried deep within the very stuff of our nature. We find a quite literal example of this ‘line’ in Petrus Camper’s attempts at measurement. To be precise, what he was really interested in measuring was the intersection of not one but two facial lines.The first ran from the base of the nose to the ear, and the second ran tangentially, along the outermost protrusion of the forehead and the most prominent part of the lower jaw. Camper drew those two lines so that they crossed over the human profile like a pair of scissors. He then measured the angle produced by those two lines and claimed that the varying results determined a race’s degree of elevation. In this way, he hoped to construct a rating scale, with white Europeans situated at the top. The more a jaw extended out, the more acute the angle became, and the further one’s features were from what Camper considered to be morphological perfection. Because all mammals have this angle, Camper thought it would provide one continuous means of measuring animals and humans. The paradox is that the notion of measuring race already introduces a variable intensity, here with reference to a continuum, in order to determine the effects of division. It has to presuppose a general spectrum (a spectrum determined by the different degrees of aperture taken from a profile’s measurement) that defines the ways in which different groups are extended so that they correspond to different species or races. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach focused on the same problem as Camper.24 Instead of measuring the profile of the human head, Blumenbach decided to measure its height in order to grasp the whole locus of human intelligence in one fell swoop. He divided humanity into five large morphological categories. He also had to track threshold effects in order to trace a line of division between the forms of different races. But as his research progressed, he soon discovered that his large categories contained multiple different genera and types. Some racialists did not project lines onto transparencies in order to distinguish between us and account for what they perceived as

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glaring racial differences. For example, Samuel George Morton tried calculations of volume instead of lines.25 Morton studied the respective skull sizes of Asians, blacks, Amerindians, and whites. His rather bizarre method involved filling empty skulls with peppercorns and then counting them to compare how many each skull could hold. But it turned out that the skulls varied as much or even more within their own groups than they did when they were compared along racial lines. The most voluminous Mexican person’s skull received a score of 100, while the smallest white person’s skull scored a measly 75. Gobineau states that the first racialist thinkers didn’t ‘manage to include in a systematic whole the various physiological differences between one race and another’.26 There are differences, but a single system of divisions cannot sufficiently account for them. Gobineau clearly saw the danger of only focusing on the most common way that people recognise their differences from each other, namely, skin colour: ‘Colour is capable of infinite gradation, passing insensibly from white to yellow, from yellow to black, without showing a really definite line of cleavage.’27 This baseline of demarcation is what race theorists want to try to trace directly onto our nature. However, the distinctive characteristics of races, like those of species and gender, prove to be intensive. They form infinite gradations, not neatly partitioned domains. As a representative of modern racialism, Gobineau no longer saw racial differences as substantial differences. He saw the races of his day as distinct branches that progressively evolved from one or more primitive origins. These origins were lost and remain unknown both to us and to history. The original model of unity had disappeared and could never be re-established. For Gobineau, what was actually forgotten was our original state of unity. We lost our unity so long ago that we could not even retrace how it happened. This forgotten historical process resulted in all of the obvious differences that a single scientific model failed to explain. The racialists instead decided to cross-reference the differences between external forms, limb proportions, skull structures, hair growth patterns, skin complexions, and so on. Gobineau affirms evolutionary theory as he develops his model of race into a modern classificatory category. However, he also precipitates the categorical decomposition

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of race. Race comes to be understood as a set of complex types that are separate, but not substantial. This means that they can only be changed through crossings, and not through changes in conditions. Nevertheless, crossings entail intermixing that increasingly blends distinct characteristics together.This intermixing is the result of an inescapable historical tendency, one that Gobineau laments even as he is forced to recognise it. By mixing all of its distinct types together, humanity moves towards uniformity. Humanity believes that it is inventing new intermediary forms, but it is actually just producing a single genus of hybrids. Here, people of mixed race play a role similar to that played by intersex people in the history of gender.Within both groups, we find individuals who simultaneously belong in two places and nowhere at all.These people derail categorisation and create an intermediary space.They compel us to repeatedly draw new lines of demarcation until there are so many lines that everything runs together. Here again, intensity takes the place of extension. There are no distinct races. There are just complex processes of genetic mixing that create a spectrum, a rainbow of colours and characteristics in which a difference of infinite degrees replaces the notion of racial types. As Lévi-Strauss puts it, ‘These proportions vary infinitesimally.’28 At first, opponents of racial distinctions were excited about the decomposition of racial types. Lévi-Strauss recognises as much in Race and History: The original sin of anthropology, however, consists in its confusion of the idea of race, in the purely biological sense (assuming that there is any factual basis for the idea, even in this limited field – which is disputed by modern genetics), with the sociological and psychological productions of human civilizations.29 As Lévi-Strauss explains, we can and should do away with biological racism, but we will still have to deal with lingering questions about cultural racism, hierarchy, and the very possibility of differentiating between human groups. The second half of the twentieth century saw a new phase in the decomposition of classificatory categories. After advocating for

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the dissolution of species, gender, and racial divisions, all of which separated living things and social spaces, some people voiced their regret that by tossing out the notion of categorical hierarchy, the distinction between categories had also been lost. Many people rejoiced when inequalities based in race (and sex and species) were shown to depend on groundless categories. Some of the same people were later alarmed to find that this meant that those same categories were incapable of grounding the slightest division into parts. Such categories no longer allowed us to distinguish anything as other, and this gave rise to claims about ‘the end of difference’.While they were certainly hierarchical, those categories also defined identities by distinguishing between them. In the absence of those distinctions, our thinking became afraid of the uniformity that was left in their wake, because the principles of domination became the same as the principles of difference. The evolution and reception of Lévi-Strauss’s thought signals this movement towards a new phase in the history of classificatory categories. His Race and History emphatically critiqued the way that the genetic and the cultural are conflated within racial categories. However, a decade later, his ‘Race and Culture’ worried about the triumph of that critique because it keeps us from using divisions in bad ways but also prevents us from using them for good. In lamenting the modern way in which all identities are mixed together, Lévi-Strauss seems to take a reactionary turn: ‘For one individual cannot at the same time merge into the spirit of another, identify with another and still maintain his own identity. Integral communication with another, if fully realised, sooner or later dooms the creative originality of both.’30 We might say that this kind of discourse offers a ‘eulogy of limits’. It also marks an important moment in the development of modern categories. Such eulogies of limits flourished at the end of the twentieth century. These eulogies often seem to be reactionary because people suspect that they are aimed at restoring hierarchies along with principles of distinction. Be that as it may, eulogies of limits always express the following: we need boundaries, and we need lines between ourselves and others. We need these lines to know who we are and who they are. We need them so that we can be different enough to be able to come into contact, communicate, and exchange and thus

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to grow from our experiences with one another. As a principle of difference and identity, a eulogy of limits is really just the rediscovery of the need for extension. Without extension, intensities, variations, and modulations can certainly produce singularities, but never particularities.Without extension, nothing is ever separate enough from everything else to be different or other. An absolutised difference is therefore the same as a generalised identity. Historians, linguists, psychoanalysts, and essayists such as Allan Bloom,31 Philippe Muray,32 Régis Debray,33 and Alain Finkielkraut34 have all intoned a eulogy of limits and divisions. They argue that the politics of difference can be readily assimilated into a liberal homogenisation of the world, which they perceive as a march towards uniformity hidden under a shimmering cloak of diversity. Without lines of division between the self and others, the self both grounds and loses itself in others, and vice versa. Within a purely intensive model of speciation, sexuation, or human cultural differentiation, everything is always different. Difference is what matters when we consider living things and society writ large. Nevertheless, critical minds still find it troubling that difference now seems to be a name for identity. Everything is identical because everything is equally different. We can further complicate the problem by stipulating that everything is differently different. But if everything is or is becoming different, we no longer have any experience of difference. Behind the backs of its defenders, difference insidiously transforms into a universal identity. The more everything is singular, the less singularity there is. As the universal becomes singular and the singular becomes universal, the category of particularity disappears. We can deplore the homogenisation of the world. Indeed, this is already a well-known rhetorical device in contemporary discourses about ‘globalisation’. Nevertheless, such lamentations always take a tragic turn. Those who oppose the rhapsodic politics of a generalised difference posit the need to divide particularities. And yet they are unable to decide where or how to make those divisions. The desire expressed in eulogies of limits is indeed wishful thinking. Even if everyone agreed on a desire for limits, no one would agree on exactly where to draw the lines. Being modern means thinking in a way that asserts the groundlessness of classificatory categories. They therefore only ever correspond to our

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representations. Because it is incapable of inscribing classificatory categories onto nature or even reality without reverting to its premodern state, thought that reaches out to a eulogy of limits is caught in a trap. How can we ground the cultural limits that we would like to reinstate? How can we re-ground the difference between the sexes without also bringing back the same divisions that all modern thinking sought to un-ground? We seem to have two choices.We could try to go backwards and become reactionary. This would entail re-grounding the classificatory categories of species, gender, and race in opposition to the modern scientific focus on exceptions, differences, variable intensities, and the evolution and historicity of categories. Or we could accept that the eulogy of limits is nothing but an impotent whimper. Lévi-Strauss runs into this impotence in The View from Afar: ‘But, in order not to perish, [cultural groups] must, in other connections, remain somewhat impermeable toward one another.’35 Of course, we still need impermeable divisions, by which we mean that we need a way of dividing that has more to do with extensions than intensities. But how is this supposed to work? Our present historical conditions make this impossible because our knowledge has broken down all available categories of division. Once we discover our need for a grounded system of divisions, we also realise that such a system is impossible. Our nature may give us a sense of our nuances and inclinations, but it cannot draw the lines by itself.We have dedicated so much of our theoretical attention to differences that our sciences are now brimming over with examples of exceptions.These exceptions keep us from cleanly separating life from society, which in turn prevents us from categorising life according to grounded concepts. Just like all of the other classificatory categories that were developed in the classical age and then fell apart in modernity, races are nothing more than social representations.We will never find race naturally inscribed in the ground of we. For this reason, the contemporary function of racial differences becomes purely strategic. * Here we finally arrive at the ‘what-comes-next’ that we mentioned at the beginning of this section.

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The concept of race is no longer just something to be dissolved or re-grounded. It is used strategically as a false category. We see examples of this when anti-racist activists knowingly use racial categories to make ‘whiteness’ visible in order to reveal hidden modes of domination. For instance, they may ask who, in the history of literature, is white? Or who, within this or that professional milieu, is white? If we want to be decolonial activists, we have to call out the white power structures that feign opposition to racism and discrimination while continuing to reproduce their effects of domination. This means that we can manifest our anti-racism by using racial categories to make visible the colour of people who think that they are colourless and beyond reproach in their exercise of power. As anti-racists, we fight racism and colonialism. However, we also respond to the white upper-class patriarchy36 and its power structures by reminding certain people, some of whom have good intentions, that, whether or not they themselves can sense it, the colour of their skin – white, in this instance – gives them an air of patronising condescension.We may then remind some who tell themselves that they are in favour of goodwill and harmony among all peoples that they too have a colour, which they tend to forget. We can also remind them that scientific racism was a white invention. Acting in this way, we use racial terms to denounce racial constructs. To some people, this approach represents an unconscionable instance of reverse racism. Others contend that the historical compensation owed temporarily legitimates the political necessity of such an action. As Betsy Esch and David Roediger put it, ‘The way to nonracialism is through race.’37 Nevertheless, the strategy of turning racism against its practitioners (for example, by reminding those who claim to be colourless of their whiteness) can eventually convince us of the reality of race as a strategic principle. It turns into a kind of rule for handling the we. The we is traced onto a transparency that gets laid over its objects, so it is always eventually mistaken for the object itself. In this way, representation never remains pure representation for too long because it ultimately always seems to be inscribed into reality. Why is this the case? Because the model of transparencies can become unstuck from its ground, but it is also what allows that ground to appear. Even though we know that

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our tracings are nothing more than strategically useful, groundless representations, whenever we trace limits of race among ourselves, in the end we inevitably mistake them for a kind of ground. From generation to generation, the same idea always re-emerges. According to this idea, we use racial categories because they are grounded in some kind of truth. There are black people and there are white people. As soon as we accept this notion, discourses that are at once scientific, metaphysical, and political will reappear and attempt to legitimise dividing humanity up into racial subsets. We reapply the category of race onto the social world, and we try again to comprehend our identities in this way. It could be that, while feigning transparency, this is actually history’s way of punishing those who would manipulate it by repeatedly persuading them that these strategic categories are in fact real. This is not so much a rule as a psychological tendency. At the end of the day, all the representations that we use always eventually appear to be grounded. When we are caught up in the game of strategically calling out white people, we end up believing that there really are white people and that whiteness is therefore a grounded category. White men become evil and dominating in their essence.They become the ones who invented all of the systems of categorisation and racialisation that divide human beings.38 They are like that serpent of old which brought the diabolical notion of separation into the imagined Eden of a formerly unified humanity. It is precisely this notion of separation that should be turned against them now. This leads to the idea that we should stigmatise and stop listening to white people. It is possible to take up this kind of argument, but doing so takes us right back to where we started. We believed that we had un-grounded the kind of transparencies of racial representations that we see in Gobineau in order to free individuals from the racial belonging to which they had been assigned. However, what we have actually done is re-ground that transparency. And here we are, back where we began with our grounded racial categories in hand. Inasmuch as we are historical beings, our attempts at realising an ethical principle always run the risk of doing precisely the opposite of what that principle would suggest. The passage of time often inverts the meaning of our actions.

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This is our dilemma, in short: whatever our convictions may be, whether we are racists or anti-racists, we now know that race is an un-grounded category. It is detached from Nature, and it appears on top of our historical representations. Colette Guillaumin sums the problem up thus: ‘The nonexistence of race does not dismantle the social and psychological facts of race.’39 At the beginning of its issue on race, the political and cultural journal Vacarme states that race is an ‘effect without a cause, an unreal reality’.40 Race is an un-grounded category, but we still need to learn how to use it properly if we want at least to see how it affects divisions and classifications. Underneath race, we find only variable cultural and ethnic intensities. These are gradations that fail to account for our historical, social, and political experiences with groundless classifications. In the absence of a rough or even a false system of divisions, the way that we experience ourselves becomes misleading. The truth of our identities lies to us about the reality of our identities because that reality is itself historical, which means that it is also the result of false categories such as race. Refusing to use these categories is hypocritical. We can see this hypocrisy whenever someone claims, for example, that there are neither white people nor black people, or that we are at once all the same and all different. Agreeing to use these categories, however, forces us to continue stacking up lies upon lies. We see an example of this when we claim that the division between white people and black people is a white invention. Here we arrive at a moment of hesitation in the story of our categories. We now seem to be less interested in the truth of the categories that divide living things and the social world. What interests us now is the strategic use of their theoretical remains. This is the political situation in which we currently find ourselves.

Class Perhaps we should concede that our only grounding constraint is social.This would mean that the real categories that separate beings are those that are produced by grouping those beings together in a society. There would be no grounded natural categories. Instead,

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there would just be historical and cultural categories. However, the truth is that large social categories have fared no better than natural categories when it comes to resisting the modern process of un-grounding. The breakdown process is so powerful that it also affects things that never claimed to be anything more than simple historical constructs. We can define ‘class’ as any principle that has been used historically to organise society in a way that purports to account for the difference in the conditions of different individuals.41 For example, ancient Greek city-states were divided into citizens and slaves. This division was difficult to maintain. Medieval European Christendom was similarly divided into laboratores (those who work), oratores (those who pray), and bellatores (those who fight). We might also take the modern system of divisions that Karl Marx partially adopted from David Ricardo as our point of departure. That system divides society into landlords (or rentiers), capitalists (or the bourgeoisie), and proletarians (or the working class). Marx’s heuristic focused on the historical confrontation between two classes in particular, the proletarians and the capitalists. But despite this fixation, he actually refers to a wide variety of different social classes. The logic behind his system of divisions seems to change according to the perspective that he adopts at any given moment. Jon Elster lists all of the classes mentioned in Marx’s works: There are some fifteen groups that Marx refers to as classes: bureaucrats and theocrats in the Asiatic mode of production; freemen, slaves, plebeians, and patricians under slavery; lord, serf, guild master, and journeyman under feudalism; industrial capitalists, financial capitalists, landlords, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie, and wage laborers under capitalism.42 These classes do not all appear in each of Marx’s works. For example, the difference between industrial capitalism and finance capitalism is essential to the works on political history that Marx wrote in response to the situation in France. This difference is of less interest to the more economically minded Marx of Capital.

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To differentiate between varying modes of Marxian discourses, Joseph Schumpeter tried to clearly and distinctly separate four versions of Marx: ‘the sociologist’, ‘the historian’, ‘the economist’, and ‘the prophet’.43 We might even be tempted to say that the organisation of social class also varies for each of these different versions of Marx. This variation causes shifts in his analyses of society and leads him to appeal to different discursive registers. The history of Marxism is rife with endless debates over how to define the classes that divide society. This question is further complicated when class consciousness is added to the conversation. There are two possibilities here. The first is to see our belonging to a class as something distinct from the relation that we maintain with that belonging. However, adopting this perspective opens us to accusations of being ‘mechanistic’ because, while concrete belonging is what defines consciousness, consciousness itself has no effect on concrete belonging. Our second option is to argue, as György Lukács does in History and Class Consciousness, that class consciousness is organically connected to our belonging to a class. This would mean that there is no definitive line separating interests from ideas. In other words, there is no line separating our inherited we from the we that we choose. A universal and objective system for dividing social reality is thus immediately encumbered by the lack of distinction between interests and ideas. What happens if a worker decides to speak in the name of ‘we, the bourgeoisie’ as they try to climb the social ladder? Is a worker who speaks in the name of ‘we, the workers’ more fully a worker or a better worker than one who refuses to admit that they belong to the working class? Are workers who are aware of their interests and position within the social system more fully workers or better workers than those who remain unaware? The variable intensity of class consciousness is a continuous function that hampers the ability of our scientific system of divisions to cleanly divide social reality into parts. The clash between two notions of categories – one being intensive and the other extensive – provokes a fundamental conflict of interpretation. That conflict has undermined ‘natural’ categories such as species, gender, and race. In similar fashion, it has also undermined ‘social’ categories. Rather than hinging on

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denaturalisation, the logic of conceptual decomposition relies upon multiplying exceptions and viewing the reality of identities as something variable and nuanced. Once social class was a strong and almost essential identity inherited from our ancestors, but it has become an unstable identity. It can be affected by the changing ways in which we relate to it. Louis Chauvel posits an interesting model that employs four different poles to explain the evolution of class divisions.44 In the first instance, there are classes in themselves and for themselves. This entails a society in which there are stark objective differences between classes. Class consciousness is heightened in this context. There is obviously a clear class struggle here, which calls to mind the golden age of labour organisations that directly confronted management from approximately 1848 to 1945. Then we see a change that leads to the second pole. Thanks to the gains won by the working class (for example, the reduced working week, retirement, health insurance, paid leave, etc.), the class struggle in the West led to a relative equalising of conditions, or, at the very least, a more equitable distribution of inequalities that made it difficult to trace the exact limits between workers and the ruling class. We can see an example of this in the notion of employee shareholding. This blurring of the lines between classes happens even though class consciousness is still very strong in this context, and despite the fact that there is still a high rate of unionisation. Then there is a third moment in which consciousness dies down, and we get what we call the ‘middle classes’. These are intermediary social classes with weak notions of identity and solidarity. Then there is a fourth and final situation. As long as this weakening of class consciousness persists (through processes such as de-unionisation, depoliticisation, vote splitting, etc.), inequality increases, and divisions are carved out once more. If class consciousness is strengthened in this way, within a couple of generations the reinforcement of class differences leads us right back to where we started. Chauvel’s model offers a means of dissociating class consciousness from social classes. This makes it possible to account for a number of different situations. For example, there could be stark

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social differences accompanied by a weak consciousness of identity, faint differences accompanied by a strong consciousness, and so on. Chauvel summarises the point thus: More often than not, the theory of the end of social classes is grounded in the assertion of the collapse of class consciousness (or of their collective identity). From this, theorists infer the disappearance of the objective inequalities that sustained that consciousness in the first place. However, even if those two elements are not wholly independent of each other, that which binds them together is not mechanical.45 From this point of view, it isn’t that the category of class is suppressed by the consciousness of modern humans. It just isn’t something substantial that is grounded in history itself any more. Instead, it becomes a product of history with variable forms. Our way of dividing up a society also depends on our situation within that society, including our particular interests and political ideas. The more that we see ourselves as modern, the more we recognise the relativity of our own system of divisions. In ‘The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups’, Pierre Bourdieu provides an excellent analysis of this modern awareness of the ‘constructed’ character of all divisions. What we mean by ‘bourgeois’ changes according to shifts in our strategic objectives and differences in the historical position of other classes. We are no longer talking about some kind of ‘transcendental bourgeoisie’ looming over the whole of modern history. This is instead a bourgeoisie that varies in accordance with the relations that it maintains with other classes. In Bourdieu’s terms, this means that different classes occupying the same rank in different social hierarchies can share structural similarities. It is their relative position that matters. Seen from this vantage point, the middle classes are to the twentieth-century bourgeoisie what the seventeenth-century bourgeoisie was to the aristocracy of their day. Nonetheless, this is only one part of the puzzle. The middle class also entails the construction of a new sociological phenomenon that disrupts a society’s general system of divisions by systematising an exception. Crises of division into social class always

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arise from the middle.The appearance of the middle classes in sociological studies has gradually swelled the ranks to the point where it becomes difficult to identify antagonistic classes. With regard to class, we now see a reflection of what happened when the division between men and women was undermined by the increasing attention paid to points between the two (for example, intersex, androgynous, and transsexual people). Class defectors were first thought of as isolated cases. Chantal Jaquet refers to class defectors as the ‘interclasses’.46 These cases draw our attention to the question of ‘non-reproduction’.They focus on personal stories that seem to deactivate or at least derail the transmission of class identity.We see this in Stendhal’s portrayal of Julien Sorel’s tragic trajectory in The Red and the Black. We can also find class defectors in the American ‘success stories’ of ‘self-made men’ such as artist and director Walt Disney, chocolatier Milton Hershey, educational entrepreneur John Sperling, and radio and television tycoon David Sarnoff. All of these men came from underprivileged backgrounds, and they all climbed the rungs of the American social ladder until they reached positions of power. The class defector is modern culture’s greatest hero. Sometimes we celebrate their tragic character because, in the end, they no longer belong to any class. On the other hand, sometimes we celebrate them because, by managing to successfully integrate, they serve as an example and give disadvantaged people reason to hope that they might do the same. In any case, they assert their individuality by transgressing class limits. Pierre Macherey has studied such cases: Being transclass means either claiming or being afflicted with a singularity characterised by a kind of displacement. This shift calls into question, subverts, or even shatters the ordinary norms that guarantee the continuation of a social order. How should we treat such an exception? Does it invalidate those norms? Or does it instead strengthen them since ‘the exception proves the rule’? We can further expand the scope of this question by asking what status should be granted to singularity in general. Is singularity just a glitch within our attempts at rationalisation, or does singularity instead have its own proper logic?47

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As the interclasses began to take the leading roles in modern literature and cinema, the question of what to do with exceptions gnawed its way through the foundations of social division. Some people think that society is exclusively divided by class and that historical struggles are like the gigantomachy between the gods and the giants in Greek mythology. There is a big difference between these people and others who think that, while there might well be more or less well-drawn battle lines between two groups that make up the majority of the population, there is still some room to negotiate a path between the two sides. This latter perspective holds that the middle ground between the two sides still affords sufficient room for individuals to develop and evolve. Indeed, it is possible for this middle ground to become an identity of its own, in which case those who remain outside of antagonistic class identities gradually make up a new, intermediary class. The middle classes became for the concept of class what androgyny was for the concept of gender. It was the initial example of between-the-two that undermined the dialectical divisions of our large categories. As the ensuing virulent debates among sociologists grew, recognising the middle class increasingly jeopardised the idea that society was divided into two. The supporters of this division were pitted against those who favoured a more complex and detailed way of dividing the social space. The former accused the latter of masking obvious differences and multiplying nuances until people were blinded to the actual limit, namely, the abyss that continued to separate one social class from another. Nevertheless, those adhering to a categorical notion of class division relied upon a rhetoric that turned the question of the middle class into a strategic diversion by those in power. This diversion is supposed to blind us to the deep divisions separating the extremes of society by shifting our focus to the minor differences between social groups at the centre of society. Alain Bihr addresses this in the foreword to one of his activist works: This work is for those who are suspicious of discourses that try to convince us that contemporary societies are evolving towards the formation of a ‘middle class’ that will encompass the vast majority of their populations. These discourses

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neglect the clear, continuous, and devastating deepening of social inequalities.They mask the fact that those inequalities are the result of both the ‘laws of the market’ and deliberate political decisions [. . .] This work is therefore for those who have an ill-defined feeling that our societies are still divided into social classes with divergent and even conflicting interests. This is why societies are the battlefield for a class struggle that is both intense and silent.48 We can clearly see the stakes at play regarding this system of categorical divisions. The more we divide society, the smaller the differences between classes become. We can continue to make finer and finer distinctions regarding the features and arrangements of different social groups. However, the more attentive we are to a difference that leads to conflict (class struggle), the less attention we pay to the variety and degrees of intensity of the differences between groups. We have to choose.This choice is what accelerates the decomposition of class as an organic category. The concept of class has indeed served as the battlefield for a clash between two factions. First, we have those we could call ‘extensivists’.They were first called ‘reactionaries’.Then they were seen as neo-Marxists because of their adherence to the truth of class struggle. This was evidenced by their continuously promoting the simplest and strongest notion of a division between two blocks that they still refer to as ‘classes’. Their reading of the social field maintains that there is one rift between two opposing camps in society and that this rift runs much deeper than all other divisions. There is a generalised difference between the condition of a small part of the population and that of its majority in terms of peoples’ inheritance, property, assets, wealth, access to the means of production, and so on. This difference is so strong that it is almost absolute. Indeed, it seems significant enough to be the only line that we trace when we represent social divisions. Recognising the weaker differences between subgroups and subclasses becomes secondary to the ‘extensivists’. Such subdivisions are only used to refine this primary interpretation. This is because tracing those weaker relations on the primary transparency would only cause

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fragmentation, disintegration, and the emergence of false subtleties that blind us to the widespread facts of the social organisation of domination. On the other side of the battlefield, we find a group that we could call the ‘intensivists’. They demand the right to prioritise the variable intensities of all the differences between social groups. They do acknowledge that there is indeed a difference or division that is stronger than the others. Nevertheless, they also think that there is only ever a difference of degree between what separates the haves from the have-nots and what separates the various subgroups within these ‘have-nots’. All of the stakes of this conflict are riding on the middle classes.49 Being ‘intensivist’ means recognising that there is room for degrees separating capitalists from proletarians. With the unfolding of modern history, this space of degrees has managed to become significant enough to be traced itself and utilised as a division on our transparency of social representations. Indeed, this space took on the role of a third class. ‘Extensivists’ never have to confront this problem. They would actually consider it dangerous to do so. For them, the so-called middle class is nothing more than an illusion covering over a group that actually includes the lower part of the upper classes and the upper part of the lower classes. Anything that connects the lower class and the upper class is always shown to be weaker than the line that divides them. Those weaker connections are traced at another level, one that is secondary to the transparency that divides class into two groups. For ‘extensivists’, that line should always be made clearly visible on the topmost transparency of the social world. Here again, we see that the debate boils down to the way that we prioritise the order of transparencies. In the words of Ernesto Laclau, the question for those theorising class struggle now involves determining if ‘the logic of differential identities cuts across class boundaries in order to create identities that do not intersect with class positions’.50 To people who reject the traditional Marxist division of society in two, this system of divisions based in class struggle seems doomed to come up with more and more ad hoc justifications for maintaining that division at all costs.Traditional Marxists must find ways to turn any classes that might insert themselves between the

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two great antagonists into ‘satellite’ classes.We can see this opinion expressed by liberal anti-Marxists such as Raymond Boudon: The extension of the State and of its role, the increase in the number of its agents and of their tasks, the increasing complexity of ‘organizations’ (firms, administrations), the diversification of organizational types, make the socioprofessional network impossible to reduce to a small number of ‘social classes’. All the more so, the ‘social structure’ of modern industrial society cannot be described from a model opposing two antagonistic classes.51 Nevertheless, as Marxists know all too well, positing the existence of a third class opens the door to class decomposition. We can now readily recognise the dilemmas that emerge between the (intensive) finesse and (extensive) geometry of divisions. In fact, they are the very condition of possibility of our thinking.These dilemmas are not exclusively connected to the category of social class. By this point, we hope to have shown the futility of trying to isolate the historical trajectory of each of our classificatory categories.The dispute over the notion of class is comparable to the debates concerning species, gender, and race.Therefore, instead of considering these debates as isolated cases, we should consider them all together. Like all of the other categories, classes are not just going to disappear from our thinking. Instead, they will subsist without a ground. They will have to constantly confront their own decomposition. This means that they will have to repeatedly reinstate themselves onto our representations so that we can strategically interpret our identities. However, we no longer see them as existing underneath the representations, inscribed onto the very nature of things. They instead float to the surface of our world view, acquiring a kind of ghostly consistency. Above all, we cannot forget their presence, and yet we also cannot ground their existence.

Age The general trend is now clear. We don’t need to run back over the details of what happened to all of the categories that we just

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mentioned. Instead, let’s consider one last category which, despite being of great interest, is also undoubtedly the least studied: age. It might seem paradoxical to think of classifying humans by age in the same way that we do with class, gender, or race. Intersectionality studies have almost entirely passed over this issue. It is true that there is something different about age. The category of age certainly separates humans from other humans (in terms of the succession of generations). Moreover, as time passes, it also separates all individuals from themselves. Age therefore seems to be a natural path that we all walk. It is identical for us all because it inexorably carries us along while distancing us from ourselves. And yet age functions just like gender, class, and race. It too is a system of divisions that changes according to different historical periods and cultural contexts. What is more, age can also be projected onto more or less natural variations such as puberty and menopause. The Latins, an ancient Italic tribe including early Roman inhabitants, had the following age-based divisions: infans (a girl or boy younger than seven years old), puer (a boy from the ages of seven to 17) and puella or virgo (a girl from the ages of seven to 12), adulescens (a young man older than 17) and uxor (a young woman of marriageable age), matrona (a married woman until she enters menopause), juvenis (a man between 30 and 46 years of age), senior (a man between 46 and 60 years of age), anus decrepita (a woman from menopause to death), and senex (a man from age 60 to death). The Latin system of divisions52 mixes together principles that are both biological (such as puberty and menopause) and civil (such as the right to wear a toga, the right to vote, and one’s eligibility to run for office). This system of divisions is also clearly gendered. Our choice of theoretical approach determines whether we think of this thing we call age as a purely cultural construction or as a plain biological reality. This is because, for every human culture, division into ages always entails negotiating between ontogenetic events and social conventions. Whether or not we are aware of its political nature, the category of age is nevertheless political, like all of the others. In fact, age and generational differences play a decisive role in the creation of a we.We look to those differences as soon as we start trying to understand both what separates us

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from others as well as what brings us together.Within any political organisation, communities based on age will both build bridges of complicity and dig moats of misunderstanding between generations. In such political organisations, solidarity and division are just as determined by age as they are by gender, class, and race. The category of age has also passed through phases of composition and decomposition. This passage may be harder to notice, but it is just as clear as with all of the other categories.The humanist movement and developing pedagogical questions prompted a rethinking of the European system of divisions based on age. These age divisions were largely inherited from the Greeks and Romans. Then, with the humanists, age was divided into new brackets that lent themselves to a series of apprenticeships that corresponded with the competencies that a young person might naturally display. For example, John Amos Comenius, a bishop of the Moravian Church, organised school curricula into six-year intervals.53 From the ages of one to six, the sensory faculties are awakened in the home. From seven to 12 years of age, individuals from the same generation receive an elementary education in language, customs, and religion to develop their memories and imaginations. Between the ages of 12 and 18, the ability to reason is perfected through the study of mathematics, rhetoric, and ethics. The progression continues in a similar way through adulthood. Human ages are still divided by stamping numbers onto the changing reality of a life. In the classical period, age – like species or gender – was a category that required us to triangulate between metaphysics (which imposed regularity through numbers), empirical science (which took an interest in the psychomotor development of infants), and juridical and political demands (which set the age limit dividing minors from adults). Our modern system of age divisions progressively abandoned this demand for mathematical and metaphysical regularity. It instead began to focus on the spontaneous development of life.We see this in Jean Piaget’s division of life according to an infant’s cognitive development.The modern era no longer sought to impose a transcendental order onto the movement of living things. Instead, it observed an organism’s spontaneous development in order to derive a way of dividing that development into a natural series

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of stages. Here again, variable intensity prevails over the extensive system of divisions, albeit partes extra partes. The proof of this shift is evident in our growing awareness of how the portrayal and typification of each age group changes from one historical moment to the next. The ‘30-year-old woman’ in nineteenth-century realist novels nicely reveals the effect of this categorical displacement. What was once said about 30-year-old women is applied a little later to 40-year-old women, before later being associated with 50-year-old women. What we once saw as a natural age inscribed directly onto the skin of our faces has become a variable age that we construct and deconstruct with our social representations, fashion trends, cosmetic norms, and medical advances. In the works of Balzac, a woman’s life was naturally over at 30 years of age because, as he writes in A Woman of Thirty, that is when her face began to gain character: There is no character in women’s faces before the age of thirty. The painter discovers nothing there but pink and white, and the smile and expression that repeat the same thought in the same way – a thought of youth and love that goes no further than youth and love. But the face of an old woman has expressed all that lay in her nature; passion has carved lines on her features; love and wifehood and motherhood, and extremes of joy and anguish, have wrung them, and left their traces in a thousand wrinkles [. . .]54 Today, many women pursue careers, wait to have children, and increasingly liberate themselves from traditional customs and holy matrimony. Thanks to these changes, hardly anyone would still use Balzac’s fatalistic terms to describe a 30-year-old woman today. Moreover, we cannot help but notice the sexism tinging Balzac’s cruelty. Like Schopenhauer, Balzac presents young women as people who are supposed to be charming and seductive.This also means that they are supposed to be superficial and oblivious. Only by losing their youthful charms do these women gain depth and intelligence. Women are therefore doomed to be divided into two social ages. First, there is the age of beauty without intelligence. Intelligence is

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deemed unnecessary to be pleasing and can even stand in the way of someone’s ‘innocent’ charm. Secondly, there is the age of intelligence and awareness that can only arrive once beauty has departed. In order to comprehend the pressures that women face and what motivates those pressures, we must first understand how our customary system of divisions differentiates between the stages of life for a man and a woman. Men are commonly thought to grow into their charm, while women instead grow out of it.We are constantly referring to social ages, but the way that we date those ages changes over time. For example, Marie Claire magazine recently announced that ‘40 is the new 30’,55 but Flaubert’s first Sentimental Education called Mademoiselle Aglaé a ‘twenty-five-year-old spinster’.56 This means that Balzac’s ‘woman of thirty’ could just as well have been only 25 in those days, and indeed, according to our modern maths, she could now be 40. Modern thinking understands age as a social (that is, dynamic) construct. The category of age has therefore become detached from natural age. We see natural age as a discrete numerical distance that separates each individual from their moment of birth. However, our calculations of social age do not necessarily correspond with our calculations of natural age. There may be a natural age and equivalent number, but is there really only one principle of division and only one set of limits determined by Nature to partition life’s permanent variations? Towards the end of modernity, it seemed that the notion of age as a principle of division was not entirely natural. For example, menstruation may begin earlier or later in a human’s life depending on what group they belong to. The arrival of a first menstrual cycle also changes according to an individual’s diet and sexual activities. Similarly, in different historical periods and societies, menopause occurs at different ages. Furthermore, the duration of both childhood and what is called ‘youth’ also varies from one social class to another.57 When we think about how age is constructed today, we only find a continuous intensity, or flux, of the passage of time. There does not seem to be any absolute difference inscribed directly onto our nature. In each of these instances, we find a disconnect between the principles of division that we project onto a social and cultural transparency and the variations of intensity that are inscribed into

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Nature.This disconnect always favours the liberal idea of choosing a we to which we want to belong. This is the political result of this disconnect. We can imagine a future in which liberal groups of humans will increasingly seek the right to freely determine their own age. In such a future, we would no longer tolerate our ages being imposed upon us as though they were a natural reality. Individuals may even someday be allowed to determine the age displayed on their forms of identification rather than having it externally imposed. A 20-year-old individual might already feel old and like they belong to a different age group. Likewise, a 60-year-old individual might feel perfectly at home in the company of young people. For example, Madonna has never stopped trying to look as though she belongs to the community of young people. Nevertheless, an article from the Daily Mail bore the following headline: ‘Ever youthful Madonna, 54, is betrayed by her ageing hands as she steps out without her trademark gloves.’58 Following this logic, her face belongs to the we of young people, but her hands belong to the we of old people. For the time being, because the media puts this singer’s body on display, we can see something in her natural age that resists her social age. Advances in cosmetic surgery increasingly allow us to mask (or accelerate) the effects of ageing in order to make our physical appearance match how old we feel. The more possible this becomes, the more age becomes purely a question of political identity, like that of gender. The society in which we live is not yet this type of liberal society structured around viewing age as a variable that we can manipulate and denaturalise at will. Therefore, our thinking about this issue is pure speculation for the time being.59 However, there is already at least one tangible sign of this process that un-grounds our ages: the social value of adolescence. The adolescent has become a hero in contemporary pop culture. The modern notion of adolescence has evolved from what used to be just a threshold or limen between infants and adults.That threshold has undergone a temporal expansion. It first developed into a state, and then it became an age all its own. With adolescence, we inserted a new age in between two pre-existent ages. Transforming a limit into an autonomous space is a characteristically modern operation. The more closely our knowledge approaches a limit, the more what once appeared to be

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a simple, insubstantial line between two consistent spaces instead becomes a distinct, third space. Nothing can remain a pure boundary for long. Instead, all such boundaries eventually become new spaces that are then themselves determined by other boundaries. We can easily recognise this process of multiplication ad infinitum at work in all of our modern categories. The limit between two classes will always eventually look like an intermediary class. In this way, adolescence was soon split into pre-adolescence and post-adolescence. As we move from one category to the next, that thing that we call modernity seems to ceaselessly repeat the same story, albeit with different characters. In this ongoing and never-ending story, we put our grounding categories on trial in order to break them down.

The story of the breakdown process in general We can now collect the scattered pieces that we have gathered thus far and summarise our story. How did we arrive at this image of disconnected transparencies as a means of visualising our conception of our identities? 1) The hypothetical starting point for all of our little stories is a universal, organic, and grounded system of divisions. For the classical age, this was its ideal if not necessarily its reality. The space of living things was organised by species, gender, race, class, age, and one’s community of belief. This was especially the case for social space, which was organised according to these factors through a series of superimposed divisions that only rarely contradicted one another. These divisions resulted from organic combinations of metaphysical concepts, scientific classifications, and juridical and political orderings. Saying ‘we’ meant using a series of coordinates that governed our ways of belonging to help us situate ourselves within Nature. Our categorical pre-divisions were made up of a set of limits that distinguished between humans and animals; the masculine and the feminine; the rights and duties of slaves, serfs, peons, and workers; and so on. These boundaries also set the age limit on childhood and designated the beginning of adulthood. They moreover divided Christians from Muslims, and so on.

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And yet the classical pre-division that allowed us to organise the conflicts and alliances between us was understood to be strictly extensive. This means that it was supposed to order all of the parts of the real one by one. It was a non-intensive space that could not be easily changed through gradations and modulations. It divided the world in the same way that we might use fences to section off different plots in a field. Of course, these categories were afforded considerable flexibility in their normal usage. Nevertheless, neither metaphysics nor classificatory sciences nor law prioritised variation over categorisation. Now let’s get back to our story. 2) Exceptions led to a crisis of extensions. Throughout the classical age, we saw the birth and growth of scientific and artistic curiosity surrounding special cases. These distinctive cases defied the systematisation and strictly extensive division of living things and the social world. As we paid more attention to this question, certain exemplary singularities emerged along the borders organising different we’s grounded in nature. We could not situate those singularities on either side of the categorical line. These heroines of modern culture, these entities situated between-the-two, came to define new interstitial spaces. It’s always this in-between that un-grounds systems of categorisation. By bringing together the limits traced between multiple identities, we refine our perception of living things and the social world. We therefore start to see that there are multiple subcategories that elude a simple division into two. So, rather than determine a limit, we instead need to isolate a new subgroup. In this way, the texture of the real appears increasingly rich as our categories appear increasingly impoverished. 3) At the end of the nineteenth century, our fascination with the abundance of exceptions was replaced by a drive to de-substantialise, denaturalise, and historicise all identities. This became our modern priority. In everyday practice, words are all that remains of these universal concepts aimed at dividing living things. We continue to identify ourselves as humans, men, women, proletarians, bourgeois, adults, or black people, but we also know that ‘it’s more

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complicated than that’. As we see in Shubha Bhattacharya’s characteristically modern formulation of the situation, this is because ‘social categories are an arbitrary construction of history and language and they contribute little to the understanding of ways in which people experience society’.60 The modern mind is discerning enough to recognise that the words ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘black person’, ‘white person’, ‘Westerner’, ‘Easterner’, ‘child’, ‘adolescent’, and ‘adult’ all only communicate approximations. Systems of division no longer draw lines that run through the real. Instead, these systems are now frameworks of division that our habits and interests superimpose on to a reality that does not itself exhibit any limits. Being modern means believing we know that there is a difference between that which is limited and that which limits. Modern people also often add that limits are just effects and reflections of our language, culture, and education. Like insects in their moulting phases, modern people gradually shed and detach their outer layer of representations to reveal the natural skin underneath. This might be the end of modernity, but our story doesn’t stop here. 4) At this point, species, gender, race, and class all seem like so many shed skins. What is the reality that lies beneath them? At the end of the twentieth century, in what we used to call the ‘postmodern’ period, the space of identities was no longer seen as something extended, a res extensa. Instead, we saw it as a plane traversed by variable intensities. Rather than focusing on ‘differences between species’, we began to instead ask how the tree of life brings together different ‘processes of speciation’. Similarly, gender no longer really existed. It was replaced by genderisation and sexuation.Analogously, rather than referring to distinct, discrete ages separated by rites of passage, we now talk about an individual’s ‘permanent becoming’. Identity no longer signifies something extensive. Instead of referring to a system of divisions, identity is now a field of variable forces. Through infinite gradations, we’s progressively ground and base themselves within one another. To postmodern thinkers at the end of the twentieth century, this seemed like the final word on the human condition. Nevertheless, we still haven’t finished telling our story.

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5) Classical thinkers never managed to perfectly align the limits of our representations with a natural ground. Postmodernism, on the other hand, was unable to perfectly align our representations with life’s infinite intensities and modulations. What’s more, the novel, plural, and non-conformist identities that postmodernism defended actually continued to constitute lines of division that became normative and got fixed into place. These identities are never just intensities, pure differences, or subversive creations. Defining our present moment is always tricky. Nevertheless, we seem to have arrived at a new point in our story. This one is characterised by the strategic use of groundless categories. Even those who no longer believe in these categories still use them. They do so because of our lack of any absolutely precise instruments with which to gauge social and historical spaces. Society was at least partially constructed with groundless categories. Therefore, we need those categories to comprehend society. We need to arm ourselves with falsities in order to understand the falseness of history. Using ideal, subtle categories allows us to account for minuscule differences and real variations. When we only use these categories, we lose sight of the great false lines that are drawn all over the world. And yet, if we rely too heavily on the strategic use of groundless categories, we risk unknowingly re-grounding those categories. * We have hardly made any headway at this point in the story. Of course, we do now know that we no longer desire to be and we cannot be completely bound by a natural ground. This is not to say that there isn’t any such natural ground. Indeed, the contrary is true.The problem is that such a ground does not include the categories of division that we need in order to conceptualise ourselves. This makes any praise of boundaries ring hollow. As soon as we try to trace these boundaries in a concrete way, we find that there is no way to use a line that has already been inscribed within natural and social space to ground our party lines. The lengthy process of breaking down our classificatory categories shows us that there is no clear line inscribed into the nature of things that could divide

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the world sharply enough for us to absolutely ground our representations. Everything is so fluid that it overflows its boundaries and becomes a question of degrees and nuances. Even the boundaries of our humanity are no longer assured. At this point, we are either dealing with a we that is groundless or a ground without a we, a ground without us.This is our moment of tragedy.We keep using categories, but we are constantly haunted by the feeling that there are no grounds for our doing so. One thing we do know is that this is the situation we are in. We don’t want to lose sight of this fact by returning to an earlier, naive view of what we are. So it’s up to us to continue the story in the most intelligent way possible. We know that we cannot ground ourselves completely, but we also refuse to think of our identities as if they were entirely free of constraint. This is because the apparent absence of limits only ever emerges by default. Above all, the absence of limits blinds us to our own determinations. It tricks us into thinking that we are all just singularities because we are no longer capable of thinking about our particularities in a clear and distinct way. These particularities are what classify, identify, and differentiate us. We should not allow them once again to become prisons or instruments of domination. Instead, we should understand that what organises us into categories is flexible. We need to do everything in our power to understand both what stops us from being absolutely unique and what prevents us from being in total communion with one another. We have to comprehend how we achieve a political existence by resisting the two extremes of absolute singularity and universal togetherness. We need to find a logic that connects us to what we are. This logic should neither absolutely confine us to nor free us from a ground. We need to formulate a principle that explains the resistance of our categories. This principle should show why we are neither totally singular (I am me) nor totally universal (we are everyone). We need to know why we are instead particulars that are organised into groups, sets, and subsets. And yet this principle should never be fully inscribed on to our very nature, nor should it justify the constraints or power that we impose on others, intentionally or otherwise.

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If this is not our ground, then why does it still seem like a kind of constraint that determines the consistency, resistance, and interests of everything that presents itself as we?

Notes 1. Translators’ note: We have preserved Garcia’s original capitalisations of the word ‘Nature’ and see this choice as a reference to the traditional understanding of nature as an entity opposed to society or civilisation. The meaning of nature would here be akin to the idea of Mother Nature. 2. Candolle, Théorie élémentaire de la botanique, p. 193. 3. Hey is one of a group of researchers who hold that the problem of the impossibility of objective categorisation in terms of ‘species’ remains insoluble unless we acknowledge that our taxa are subjective, and that our ‘categories’ are entities that emerge out of human thought and language. They are a means of organising the human species’s mind as it grapples with the diversity of all living organisms. The paradox is that the division between species comes from a specific quality, the disposition of our species’s cognitive apparatus. The difference between species would thereby be explained through the difference of one specific species, which is hardly satisfactory. See Hey and Pinho, ‘Population Genetics and Objectivity in Species Diagnosis’. 4. Pigliucci argues that the problems with defining the term ‘species’ are less of an issue for biology and more of a question for philosophy of language. In Wittgensteinian fashion, he proposes to dissolve the problem by considering ‘species’ as a term that functions in terms of ‘family resemblances’. For example, Wittgenstein thought that what all sets had in common was not a shared essence of the set, but rather a series of resemblances such as those we find between different members of the same family (e.g. size, facial features, eye colour, etc.). He thought that those resemblances were enough to define something without making reference to any such essence. If we retroactively apply Wittgenstein’s idea to the problem of how to define species, the paradox is that the very metaphor meant to replace the essence of a definition with simple family resemblances still has to give an account of the concrete principle of the ancestry of organisms, which is to say, the way that they belong to the same species. The concept of ancestry is then explained in terms of the metaphor of ancestry, which we are now

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8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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at a loss to define. See Pigliucci, ‘Species as Family Resemblance Concepts’, pp. 596–7. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, p. 373. Garcia’s emphasis. Lecointre and Le Guyader, The Tree of Life, p. 18. Singer, Animal Liberation; Regan, The Case for Animal Rights; Wise, Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights; Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. See Vinge, ‘Technological Singularity’, p. 88. Translators’ note: Garcia provides an extended meditation on the formation and paradoxes of the concept of gender in chapter XIV, ‘Genders’, in Book II of Form and Object. There were approximately 100,000 such individuals in France in the year 2000. During the same time period, calculations indicated that there were around 100,000 of these individuals in France. See Foucault, Herculine Barbin. See, for example, Judith Butler’s blog post on Caster Semenya, an intersex South African athlete with the XY genotype who underwent sex verification testing conducted by World Athletics: ‘In fact, I wonder why we feel compelled to determine sex in a definite way, given that sex can be ambiguous (and is for at least 10 per cent of the population, and much more if you take “psychological factors” into account), and the standards that we use to “determine” it are clearly shifting and not always consistent with one another (chromosomal, hormonal, anatomical, to name a few).’ Butler, ‘Wise Distinctions’. See Laqueur, Making Sex. Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 388. Preciado, ‘Tête à Queue’. Preciado, ‘Tête à Queue’. Preciado, ‘Tête à Queue’. This critique is heard at the very heart of gender studies. In a journal article in differences, Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth Wilson have called for a queer theory without anti-normativity. This would be a theory of gender transgression that would not necessarily also be a critique of normativity. They argue that anti-normativity became canonical in the academic world, and that, as an ironic consequence, it also became a norm.This proves once and for all that norms are inevitable and that any opposition to them is temporary. However, in politics, nothing is more difficult than imagining that a minority idea that we have defended might some day, at least in certain cultural domains, become the dominant one. Many different progressive forms of thought have

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run into this problem at the end of the modern period. See Wiegman and Wilson, ‘Introduction: Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions’. Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, p. 106. Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, p. 106. Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, p. 107. Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, p. 108. Blumenbach’s ‘On the Natural Variety of Mankind’ gives us a good idea of his views on the differences between humans. These stem from his understanding of the difference between all humans and other animals. Blumenbach concludes that there is indeed a unified human species, but that it manifests itself in measurable varieties and variations. Morton’s work was commented upon and critiqued by Stephen J. Gould, who pointed out its methodological weaknesses and errors in measurement, effectively making Morton emblematic of nineteenth-century pseudoscientific racism. Later respondents problematised and nuanced Gould’s critique. Gould was accused of being partially blinded by his own anti-racism and of having unjustly interpreted Morton’s quantified findings. The scientific and political debate surrounding Morton’s measurements has continued ever since then. See Morton, Crania Americana. Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, p. 113. Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, p. 115. Lévi-Strauss, ‘Race and Culture’, p. 609. Lévi-Strauss, Race and History, p. 8. Lévi-Strauss, ‘Race and Culture’, p. 625. Allan Bloom’s critique focuses on the idea of ‘openness’, which he sees as the product of postmodernism and relativism. He holds that this openness is not a critical openness, but rather an openness of indifference. According to Bloom, this establishes a cultural space that is free by default, and that can no longer be limited in any way. See especially the introduction to Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Philippe Muray’s frequent writings about the generalised erasure of boundaries – between men and women, children and adults, humans and animals, or humans and machines – characterise modernity in a way that partially aligns with some of our intuitions about the historical un-grounding of our classificatory categories. However, Muray’s objective is to produce a critique that brings two unlikely groups together: ‘Those who vehemently desire the free circulation of capital and those struggling for the free circulation of people (as seen in the sacrosanct

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35. 36.

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immigrants) are fighting on the same side. They are all frenetic deterritorializers, border erasers, supporters of a new world of oneiric confusion where the old sovereignties, the products of humanization, have been banned forever.’ Muray, Festivus, festivus. Conversations avec Élisabeth Lévy, conversation from September 2001. If we accept Muray’s idea, then it looks as though we have to reinscribe these putatively necessary boundaries directly on to the world. And yet we still cannot really decide where or how to do so. The difficulties entailed by tracing immutable borders between nations can be clearly demonstrated through a host of examples from the African continent’s recent, eventful political history. See Debray, Éloge des frontières. ‘Europe’s beauty and grandeur [. . .] is having the maximum amount of diversity in a minimal amount of space. Borders actually make this possible. Borders don’t mean exclusion. They remind us that there are others, and that humanity’s destiny isn’t necessarily a march toward uniformization.’ Alain Finkielkraut, in an interview given on French television station France 5, 4 December 2012. Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar, pp. xiv–xv. Translators’ note: Garcia’s word here is blanctriarcat, which we have translated as upper-class white patriarchy.‘Whitetriarchy’ would have been another possible rendering. The term is a recent neologism, so Garcia accompanies its introduction with the following explanatory note in the French original: ‘The term under discussion is a recent one that has spontaneously begun to circulate within the activist community. For example, transfeminist and decolonial activist Lalla Kowska-Régnier uses this word at the end of an interview from 13 February 2012 with the Swiss transfeminist website L’émilie [available at http://www.lemilie.org/index.php/ici/592-deux-personnalites-un-debat. Last accessed 22 January 2020.]’ ‘As defenders of this approach we wish [. . .] to go beyond considerations of race and class which begin from – and therefore can’t transcend – an either–or stance. If the 20th century [sic] drove home any point to revolutionaries, it is that oppressions are multiple and cannot be explained entirely through class relations.’ See Esch and Roediger, ‘Nonracialism Through Race (and Class)’. Houria Bouteldja’s recent work, Whites, Jews, and Us:Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love, provides a very interesting example. We can read therein this hesitation between two forces. The first is a worry about maintaining the strategic deployment of racial divisions (black people and white people, but also Jews, who she distinguishes from

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white people). As Bouteldja notes, this worry arises because these divisions are historically constructed, and the categories are deceptive. The second force that pulls on us is the growing temptation to adopt this problematic system of divisions in order to reverse white privilege and invert a history that has been written by the dominant class. On the one hand, races are ‘the product of modern history in the same way terms like “workers” or “women” are’. Bouteldja, Whites, Jews, and Us, p. 17. Bouteldja sees ‘white’ as a relative term that refers to the position of the dominant oppressor. Indeed, she says she herself is ‘white’ in the eyes of the Third World. On the other hand, within racialist classifications, ‘white’ refers to European men. This means that there are two kinds of white people, namely, relative white people and absolute white people. There is a functional whiteness, and an essential whiteness; only the latter necessitates whiteness of skin. This ambiguity undermines all intellectual attempts to re-racialise political relationships. This one term designates both a transcendental historical function (e.g. the Dominator, the Oppressor, the Master, etc.) and a kind of biological belonging (connected to one’s skin colour, ancestry, etc.) From that point on, the whole strategy consists of explaining the historical function in terms of biological belonging. It also entails responding to white people who try to escape from this determination with the rejoinder that, for the moment, their biological belonging condemns them to carry out this historical function. Historical race and natural race were only differentiated in order to make it harder to distinguish between them. Historical whiteness as a form of domination comes from the whiteness of skin (from Europe). For Bouteldja, the history of racial domination actually begins with European imperialism in 1492. This is immediately followed by the construction of the white subject in opposition to black people, who are objectified within the slave trade. Rationalist European philosophy, and Descartes in particular, is accused of establishing the white, patriarchal subject. The author takes issue with the ‘ourselves’ from Descartes’ famous saying: ‘We could [. . .] make ourselves as it were the masters and possessors of nature.’ See Descartes, A Discourse on the Method, p. 51. She sees this as the origin of the white man who subjugates, plunders, rapes, and commits genocide (Bouteldja, Whites, Jews, and Us, pp. 33–4). This seems paradoxical when we also take Cartesian ethics into consideration. Humanism fails to escape the critique of ‘whiteness’. The white we is seen as a machine built to exclude everything that is not us. It is an expansive immune system: ‘An organism’s immune system

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is a biological system consisting of an organized set of recognition and defense mechanisms, which distinguish between [sic] the “self ” from the “non-self ”’ (Bouteldja, Whites, Jews, and Us, p. 42). But here we can see how the author’s biological metaphor also registers the temptation to renaturalise racial identity. Race functions in a way that resembles the human immune system. In the end, we still cannot find a way to avoid the question of the origin of ‘whiteness’. Why does Bouteldja conclude that white-skinned men invented the historical function of ‘whiteness’ (by which we mean racial divisions and domination)? How can we avoid re-grounding historical ‘whiteness’ in natural whiteness or the nature of white people? Bouteldja is sometimes tempted to redefine a sort of transhistorical essence of ‘whiteness’, but she never fully takes this leap. She holds out hope for a universal we, a we of all we’s that in fact leads back to the same impasses that we will examine in the next chapter: ‘The We of our encounter, the We of the surpassing of race and its abolition, the We of a new political identity that we will have to invent together, the We of a decolonizing majority. The We of the diversity of our beliefs, our convictions, and our identities, the We of their complementarity and their irreducibility’ (Bouteldja, Whites, Jews, and Us, p. 140). Race still operates here as a strategic category. In fact, the whole structure of this discourse seems like a dialectic that has been derived from class and applied to race. Just as the proletariat is the majority class that carries within it the suppression of all classes, non-whites form a majority racial group that promises to suppress all notions of race. Within the system of race, whites have now become what the bourgeois were in the Marxist system of class. We then see an old magical formula reinstated.There is a part within us that, if we affirm its identity, has the power to dispel all of the divisions between us. Bouteldja thinks that we can reconcile the political affirmation of non-white races with a perspective that seeks the suppression of all racial differences. In this way, Bouteldja tries to reassure all of those who are allied with both universalism and anti-racism. This is why her book, like all radically decolonial thought, hesitates between two possibilities. On the one hand, there is a simple strategic reappropriation of the racial divisions between us. On the other hand, there is a kind of non-white racialist epistemology that rewrites history and reinscribes ‘whiteness’ into human nature. This ‘whiteness’ no longer functions as a fundamental expression of superiority, but rather as a sign of the evils of domination. In the first case, race is only a groundless construction in the sense that anyone could have been

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42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

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white. Black people could have been white. It just happens to be the case that white (skinned) people are the ones who have also played the role of white (dominant) people in modern history. But in the second case, race is a grounded construction. This would mean that there is a reason why white people are white. It seems that using race politically always ultimately causes us to re-ground the notion of race.We find ourselves reversing Gobineau’s white racism in order to better invert it. As a consequence, we might find ourselves praising non-white science for being superior to white science because it is non-hegemonic, respectful of the natural world, and attentive to alterity. We may also find ourselves claiming that non-white bodies are more beautiful than white bodies. Guillaumin, L’idéologie raciste: genèse et langage actuel, p. 64. This article quotes the same phrase from South African anti-apartheid activists that we previously saw cited in Esch and Roediger: ‘The way to non-racialism is through race.’ We need to name race and think about race in order to fight against it – even though we thereby certainly put ourselves at risk of becoming trapped by naming and thinking in this way. See Chémery et al., ‘La race n’existe pas, mais elle tue’. This is not solely the case for human society. We can also interpret the power relations of a non-human population in terms of class. For an example of this approach, see de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics. Elster, An Introduction to Karl Marx, p. 124. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. See especially ‘Part I: The Marxian Doctrine’. Chauvel, ‘Le Retour des Classes Sociales?’ Chauvel, ‘Le Retour des Classes Sociales?’ Jaquet, Les transclasses ou la non-reproduction. Macherey, ‘Compte rendu de “Les Transclasses ou la non-reproduction”’. Bihr, Les Rapports sociaux de classes. Here we might think of ‘Classes sans conscience ou préfiguration de la societé sans classes’, an article that sociologist Michel Crozier dedicated to exploring office worker culture. After reading that article, we might wonder if the middle classes who have little understanding of themselves and their collective interests perhaps foreshadow a society divided into social variations instead of extensive classes. This might paradoxically bring about the Marxist dream of a classless society – but in more of a liberal than a communist sense. See Crozier, The Office Worker, pp. 207–14. Laclau, La guerre des identités, pp. 8–9.

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51. Boudon and Bourricaud, ‘Social Stratification’, p. 343. 52. Translators’ note: A more extensive examination of these kinds of age divisions, their functions, and their limits can be found in chapter XV, ‘Ages of Life’, in Book II of Garcia’s Form and Object. 53. Comenius also held that a teacher only had to imitate Nature’s universal method of instruction. He thought that we could find good examples of that method in the stages of development of plants and baby birds. See Prévot, L’Utopie éducative. Coménius. 54. Balzac, A Woman of Thirty, p. 202. 55. See Schneider, ‘40 ans, c’est le nouveau 30 ans?’ 56. This quotation is drawn from the first draft of Sentimental Education, not the definitive version with which most readers might be familiar. See Flaubert, Œuvres de jeunesse III, L’Éducation Sentimentale (version de 1845), p. 26. 57. In the wake of Maurice Halbwachs’s works, modern sociologists came to see age not as a natural principle for classifying individual lives, but rather as a system of divisions constructed by society. This meant that age could be transformed. This marked the birth of a certain kind of constructivism. This allowed us to study how societies formulated the duration of different ages. This also made it possible to study generational hierarchisation as a function of social class. For example, it was found that the duration of childhood is shorter for workingclass children than for the bourgeoisie. Moreover, as sociologist JeanClaude Chamboredon observes, we also learned that ‘both delaying “permanent” entrance into the workforce as well as postponing and concentrating the time when couples can have children into a shorter period tend, along with other secondary causes, to favour deferring the period of full maturity, which we can define with reference to one’s status as a fully established professional and a married parent.This rejuvenates the age group adjacent to youth.We can now see a kind of second youth (between the ages of 25 and 35) that follows the classic notion of youth (which runs from around 18 to 25).’ See Chamboredon, ‘Classes scolaires, classes d’âge, classes sociales’, p. 19. 58. This article begins with the following words:‘She has the face and body of a 20-something.’ See ‘Ever youthful Madonna, 54, is betrayed by by [sic] her ageing hands as she steps out without her trademark gloves’, Daily Mail, 30 May 2013, (last accessed 28 May 2020). 59. We have made precisely this kind of speculative argument in 7, in a story entitled ‘Hélicéenne’.

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60. Bhattacharya defines an ‘anticategorical’ approach to social complexity that seems like an unmistakable symptom of the un-grounding of classical classificatory categories: ‘This analysis claims that society is too complex to be reduced down into finite categories [. . .] This approach believes that social life is too irreducibly complex, overflowing with multiple and fluid determinations of structures and subjects, and making fixed categories in society is nothing but to perpetuate inequalities in the already unequal system [. . .] The deconstruction of categories is considered part and parcel of the deconstruction of inequality itself.’ Bhattacharya, Reflections on Intersectionality: bell hooks’.

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2 Dynamic

The mystery of our we has to do with the fact that it takes on a form that is neither completely up for grabs nor bound to a natural ground. What determines that form? What holds it in place? Why can’t we be anything we want whenever we deploy a we? To answer these questions, we have to push we to its limit. There is something in a we that resists us. We have to test this resistance by stretching and shrinking a we as much as possible to try out its elasticity. We will use the term dynamic constraint to refer to the elastic resistance of a we. We need to ask a new question. Instead of asking about what holds us down from beneath us, we need to ask about what simultaneously holds back and unleashes our ability to expand and retract. Instead of asking after our nature, we need to ask after our boundaries. Let’s try something different. At the end of our story, it seemed as though we had no constraints. So now let’s imagine our identity as a rubbery kind of form. In physics, there is something called a stress rupture test wherein a constraint is placed on a material to detect deformations within it. We can use a similar method to determine the limits of the elasticity of a we, or its breaking point. Our first hypothesis is as follows. In morality and in politics, we use the term ‘idealism’ to refer to a lack of recognition of the limits of absolute elasticity. Idealism stretches our thinking. It seems to be able to change shape at will, with total flexibility. It never encounters an internal resistance that it cannot overcome. All idealists promise that we can be as flexible as our ideas and our only dynamic constraint is the limit that we impose on ourselves. This means that all of the intermediary identities that prevent us

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from dissolving into the purity of our ideas are actually just illusions or lies. Idealists promise us that someday we will overcome these illusions.

The idealist’s promise The Christian promise Let us test our elasticity. When we examine human cultures, we see that religions are often the first to promise an identity that extends to encompass, overcome, and erase all other identities. We have already mentioned the Pauline expression of this promise, which holds that the antagonisms between the sexes, between the rich and the poor, and between nations can all be contained within the greater unity of those who enter into the body of Christ and recognise him as the Lord. The divisions among us can all be grounded in the greater unity announced in the gospel. Achieving that unity will make all divisions meaningless.They will all disappear. While contrasting Paul’s view of humanity with the Manichean perspective, Augustine writes the following: The birth by which we are made male and female, Greeks and Jews, Scythians and Barbarians, is not the birth in which God effects the formation of man; but that the birth with which God has to do is that in which we lose the difference of nation and sex and condition, and become one like Him who is one, that is, Christ. So the same apostle says again, ‘As many as have been baptized in Christ have put on Christ: there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither male nor female, there is neither bond nor free; but all are one in Christ’. Man, then, is made by God, not when from one he is divided into many, but when from many he becomes one. The division is in the first birth, or that of the body; union comes by the second, which is immaterial and divine. This affords sufficient ground for our opinion, that the birth of the body should be ascribed to nature, and the second birth to the Supernal Majesty.1

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This Augustinian interpretation allows us to rephrase the Christian promise in clearer terms. Being embodied means we are necessarily born as men or women and assigned to different classes or castes. Moreover, we are destined to be born in a certain country and to speak a certain language. Nevertheless, our higher identity as spiritual creatures made in the image of God also links us to the unity that characterises our creator. Thanks to our identity as Christians, we are almost one and the same.This promised identity makes particular identities seem like something bare and ephemeral. These particular identities reflect our condition as temporal and historical beings. We are supposed to believe that, at the end of history, this we will be diffused and extended in the direction of unity. We will all be equally singular creatures. We will no longer have to be put in classes that are formed by comparing us to one another. We will be nothing but singular and universal.We will each be one, and we will all be united as one. There will no longer be any categories. Of course, this promise is not exclusive to Christianity. We can find the same idea expressed in many surahs of the Quran. The Prophet’s teachings tell of a temporal order in which Allah has divided humans between the rich and the poor, men and women, and so on.2 However, these teachings also promise to reveal a higher order of we. Regardless of any other categories of belonging, that higher order would solely divide the authentic believers from the others.3 Nevertheless, the extended we promised by the Religions of the Book does not stretch beyond our humanity. Instead, our humanity remains a grounding constraint. When it comes to the Buddha, he opens up an even wider horizon: All living creatures of whatever class, born from eggs, from wombs, from moisture, or by transformation, whether with form or without form, whether in a state of thinking or exempt from thought necessity [this appears to be a reference to plants], or wholly beyond all thought realms – all these are caused by me to attain unbounded liberation nirvāna.4 Here, everything that lives, including mammals, birds, fish, insects, and plants, is bound together by the promise of liberation.

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The dynamic concept of we lets religions bind us together and extend this sphere of relations as far as possible. All intermediary we’s become temporary obstacles to the full and complete realisation of ourselves. This sphere then encompasses all of those intermediary we’s. This idea’s power stems from the internal dynamics of the concept of we. There appear to be a number of mutually contradictory we’s that lend consistency to society and history. They seem to form a fabric woven from their tensions and confrontations. However, all of those we’s actually form just one whole. The day will surely come when we will see that we are all we, even if we don’t all know it yet, and even if some of us still somehow cling to the illusion that we are different from one another. The religious promise allows us to identify a commonality shared by all conflicting we’s. This promise lets us transform a number of different groups into a reconciled totality that does not yet understand itself as such. This is because anything that calls itself ‘we’ is caught in the logical trap that that term entails. For example, the enemies who refer to themselves as ‘we’ will eventually be forced to admit that everyone is somewhat similar, if only because we all make use of the same word. In that way, all we’s will become one we. The more aware we are of we, the more that we identify with each other. We has an internal logic that dictates its slow, necessary, and boundless extension to the complete fulfilment of its idea. The true we, the we of the spirit, will wipe away the illusory we’s of the body. We can now define the dynamic principle of religion as what stretches us through an idea.

The communist promise This kind of expansive idealism is not reserved solely for religion. There are also many lay versions, the most significant of which was probably communism. At the end of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels paint a picture of the classless society that would bring an end to all national antagonisms. Moreover, Engels thought that a classless society would also abolish masculine domination because the oppression of one sex by

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another is the historical manifestation of the division of human beings into social classes. We see this in a famous passage from Engels: At a definite stage of economic development, which necessarily involved the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity because of this cleavage. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes has not only ceased to be a necessity, but becomes a positive hindrance to production.They will fall as inevitably as they once arose. The state inevitably falls with them.5 In addition to the eventual downfall of the state, historical materialism also makes another promise, which is perhaps its most profound one. It promises that history gives us reason to believe that the erasure of one single division between human beings will lead to the erasure of all (false) categorical divisions between human beings. Of course, the majority of thinkers within the Marxist tradition accept that humanity will still have conflicts, but they will only be conflicts between singular beings. Humanity will no longer be held prisoner by particularities such as sex, gender, caste, class, nation, faith, or even species. In his more reserved assessment, Althusser finds that there will still be ideology in a classless society, meaning that there will still be false divisions between human beings.6 Nevertheless, Marxist science intrinsically promises an expansive we that can re-cover all of the groundless categorical limits between us. Any identity other than class identity is taken to be a direct or indirect effect of class identity. In this way, class struggle remains the motor force of history. As Delos McKown notes, Marx, Engels, and Lenin all tried to establish the following relation: the more that we recognise religion as grounded in human powerlessness and despair, the more certain we can be that religion will disappear in a classless society that frees humanity from powerlessness and despair.7 In other words, just as today’s social exploitation fortifies religious identities, a future classless society will render religious identities obsolete. This is because both religious and national identities are

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designed as largely illusory responses to class struggle, the only contradiction that really divides human beings in Marxist thought. When class differences disappear, all other categories that divide human beings should vanish as well. Of course, few Marxist theorists have risked giving a detailed account of the promised society that will banish all false we’s. However, Ernest Mandel does describe the promised society in the following way: Such a society will strive to eliminate all sources of conflict between humans. It will take all of the vast resources that are currently used for destructive and oppressive ends, and it will instead dedicate them to disease control, character development for children, education, and the fine arts. By eliminating all economic and social antagonisms between humans, it will also have eliminated all causes of war and violent revolutions. Only establishing a socialist society throughout the world can guarantee world peace for humanity. This universal peace has become necessary for the basic survival of our species in this era of atomic and thermonuclear weapons.8 Already in 1919, György Lukács pointed out that ‘this salvation, however, will not simply emerge as the outcome of a merely automatic process determined by natural laws’.9 In accordance with the Leninist concepts that he had adopted during this period, Lukács finds that the proletariat’s first goal should be achieving class hegemony, seizing power, and exercising its own dictatorship. At first, there would still be one class that dominates all of the others. This dominant class would be those who possess nothing other than their labour power. But then, thanks to the dialectic that transforms the power of the powerless class into classless power, even the dictatorship of the proletariat would eventually become obsolete: ‘After classes have ceased to exist, dictatorship can no longer be exercised against anybody.’10 In this way, Marxist expansivism is tied to the almost unbelievable idea that suppressing a single system of difference will abolish all systems of difference. From this perspective, class struggle is the

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grounding transparency that determines all others. It is impossible for any antagonisms to remain after the disappearance of the source of all antagonisms. Should antagonisms still persist, they would disprove the principles of historical materialism. Since history is the story of class struggle, there can be an end of we. This unified we is like an open field where society’s piecemeal divisions and the battle lines of its conflicts have disappeared. It is a we without classes that stretches to embrace the whole of a humanity that has finally been actualised and reconciled. With regard to this promise, Walter Benjamin recognises that ‘in the idea of classless society, Marx secularizes the idea of messianic time’.11 Nevertheless, Benjamin also claims that ‘classless society is not the final goal of historical progress but its frequently miscarried, ultimately [endlich] achieved interruption’.12 Because of this, Benjamin argues that ‘a genuinely messianic face must be restored to the concept of classless society’.13 By Benjamin’s own admission, the communist promise joins together with the religious promise inasmuch as they are extensions of we beyond all differences. Much has been written about the differences and similarities between Marxism and Christian thought. While the two promises are certainly distinct, they both hold that a single we can and should enact a historical expansion that will erase all other we’s.

Evolutionary optimism There is a third idealist promise. Instead of being religious or historical, this one is natural. We will call this third promise ‘evolutionary optimism’. In this case, the expansion of we corresponds to a principle that pre-dates human history. Instead of being grounded in revelation, this promise is underpinned by a well-informed reading of our developmental stages. This optimism first emerges in Darwin’s works and is readily detectable in Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism. Based on an interpretation of the constant transformation of living things, and particularly that of the human species, this optimism results from discovering the deliberate trajectories of a slow but guided evolution. We can take a line segment and then imagine extending it into a line

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to trace its trajectory. Similarly, these evolutionary trajectories should allow us to trace the future. By extrapolating major trends over very long periods of time, evolutionary optimism found reason to believe that all groups evolve from limited identities towards the awareness of an increasingly universal identity.There are multiple versions of this approach, including Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘Omega Point’ and, more recently, Ray Kurzweil’s posthumanism.14 We find a comparable promise in appeals to the concepts of cognitive science or evolutionary psychology in today’s popular science. That promise is already familiar: the we will expand; the we will extend! So let’s all continue to strive tirelessly in that direction. We see this in Kevin Kelly’s analysis of a new force that steers evolution that he calls ‘technium’, in personal development consultant Andrew Cohen’s ‘evolutionary enlightenment’, in Carter Phipps’s work on cooperation and a nascent evolutionary spirituality, and in Howard Bloom’s research into the natural development of societies.15 The same idealist principle is at work in all of these examples. According to this principle, violent antagonisms are not necessary, and we can discern a general trend that increasingly unites and binds us together. Steven Pinker’s project exemplifies this evolutionary optimism. In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, he investigates the level of violence in human societies and concludes that it tends to decrease. Pinker defines violence as the exercise of force with the aim of causing damage or harm. He focuses on cases of individual violence such as homicide, rape, theft, and abduction, as well as more widespread violence such as war, genocide, capital punishment, and intentional famine. He rejects all symbolic forms of violence (such as verbal or social violence) as merely metaphorical, and he has often been criticised on this point. However, this is both the very meaning and the limit of evolutionary optimism. In an act akin to placing certain stones to mark off the never-ending path of history, evolutionary optimism requires us to delineate the phenomena that we deem significant. Then, all we can see are indications that progress is possible. There may be other stones that indicate routes leading towards catastrophe, regression, neverending cycles, and hopeless stagnation. However, those other paths are seen as secondary and subordinated to the path delineated by

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the progress of evolutionary optimism. Pinker does not assert that our long-term progress is guaranteed to lead us towards a peaceful form of we. However, he does interpret history as a civilising process that partially results from the creation of a state that monopolises the use of legitimate force. This is why Pinker argues that the residual forms of violence in modern society are largely illegal and illegitimate, and that they therefore ultimately have no place within the system. They will tend to become negligible or insignificant. On the other hand, phenomena such as commerce, feminisation, cosmopolitanism, and the circulation of people in general all accompany and support a determinate trend that makes violent antagonisms give way to negotiable conflicts. We are becoming more and more reconciled with ourselves. Evolution shows this – or, at least, evolution lets us believe it. Pinker’s project offers a sweeping vision of history. First, huntergatherers grouped together into small, isolated communities. Then, cities and governments emerged within agricultural civilisations. At first, this development increased our reasons for war. However, as centuries passed, this movement also allowed for the spread of a universal order.That order was then reinforced by processes of civilisation. For example, the Middle Ages established royal court culture, the Enlightenment instilled values encouraging tolerance, and finally, after the Second World War, we have seen the ‘Long Peace’ between major world powers. Of course, Pinker doesn’t dare claim that this trend towards the pacification of our antagonisms will lead to a total disappearance of violence. However, he does think that the news and our daily emotions as we witness violence give us a false view of things.When viewing long-term developments, we are supposed to see the spread of an irenic we that Pinker associates with the following: A growing revulsion against aggression on smaller scales, including violence against ethnic minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals. These spin-offs from the concept of human rights – civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights, and animal rights – were asserted in a cascade of movements from the late 1950s to the present day.16

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Evolutionary optimism is ultimately based on prioritising indications that empathy is extending. Oppression, domination, and the ways that our we’s are constrained maintain their strength when empathy declines or stalls. For evolutionary optimists, these declines and stalls only obstruct one version of historical progress. However, they are not the only thing that determines the meaning of history. This brings us back to something that we mentioned in Book I of this investigation. By creating the ‘Great Ape Project’ and advocating for the rights of other primates that are not humans, Paola Cavalieri has pushed the logic of this evolutionary optimism even further. In broad strokes, she lays out the expansion of ‘a much larger extension of the moral community, so that it includes a wider range of nonhuman animals’ and thereby extends beyond humanity.17 In laying out the history of emancipatory social movements, Cavalieri is interested in what Darwin called ‘the gradual illumination of men’s minds, which follows from the advance of science’.18 Step by step, the human species extends the empathetic form of we beyond itself.That form of we was first limited to tribes and clans, and it was then progressively extended to the whole of humanity. This theoretical story posits that what we call ‘we’ is a form free of constraints that can naturally be extended ad infinitum.The promise of religion, the promise of communism, and even optimistic interpretations of evolution make it possible to think that the ideal diffusion of subjectivity is a step forward.They allow us to believe that this diffusion can extend our elastic form until it coincides with a universal idea. There aren’t really any grounds for making such a promise. It’s just a grandiose idea that hinges on a few carefully selected indications. Those indications allow religious believers, communists, and certain evolutionary theorists to think that the extension of a we has unlimited elasticity and no absolute constraints. Nevertheless, something still resists.

The realist’s assessment Historical assessment We have extended the we through thought. Now we need to investigate what prevents the we from endlessly stretching and spreading.

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What is lost in the promises of Paul, or Marx, or Darwin? The more we spread out a higher we, the more we encounter an element that refuses to play along. Realist thinking makes use of this element in its opposition to idealist thinking. We can here define ‘realism’ as any thought that downplays the territory gained by an expanding we and instead focuses on the forces lost on the road towards that expansion. Realists are always concerned with the price that we pay when we stretch an identity. Indeed, we can spot a realist by looking for this attitude. A realist begins by opposing the idealist promise with a simple assessment. We find examples of this rejoinder in historians’ discourses. When we read between the lines in Thucydides’s The Peloponnesian War, we constantly find the notion of a Hellenic we that risks paying the price for spreading itself too thin. Overextending through alliances and conquests causes this we to be constantly haunted by the spectre of its own enfeeblement. Realists are obsessed with the fact that we lose strength as we gain ground. According to Thucydides, there is no such thing as absolute progress. There is no way to spread a principle of civilisation without leaving that same principle open to reversal. Cornelius Castoriadis argues that Thucydides’s thinking opposes that of Herodotus, who holds that ‘many states that were once great have now become small: and those that were great in my time were small formerly’.19 The elasticity of we means that a force exerted in any direction also causes a reaction. If Thucydides is already a realist, it’s because he chooses to read history in terms of power relations. For him, history is almost a global zero-sum game. In this game we are our own opponent. We extend ourselves, but then we break into pieces. Then those pieces gather together and merge to form an even bigger group, which is also destined to break apart all over again someday. Machiavelli was among the first to explicitly articulate the rules governing this historical realism. While commenting on the peoples of Latium and the Republic’s formation, he remarks, ‘The reason why you cannot greatly extend your power is, that as your league is made up of separate States with distinct seats of government, it is difficult for these to consult and resolve in concert.’20

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That is to say, the more we extend a political identity, the weaker and less coherent it becomes as a whole. The distance between its parts increases, both in terms of space and with regard to the very concept of its identity. The more ‘we’ refers to a sizeable group of different beings, the more it loses its consistency and unity. This is how realist thought responds to the way that idealism thoughtlessly spreads a we as if it were a dynamic principle without any limitations. In Arnold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History, we find a very clear model of the internal logic of political we’s. He systematically reads the whole of human history in the light of the following relation between we’s: civilisations grow and extend themselves because they all challenge one another. A civilisation develops thanks to a ‘creative minority’ within it. This minority becomes a dominant minority that monopolises power. At the same time, an internal and external proletariat are formed, both of which are denied access to the privileges of this civilisation. As it extends itself to become an empire, a civilisation also strains, breaks down, and grows weak. It purports to unify many different languages, territories, and classes. But soon enough, it can no longer sustain this contradictory reality. At that point, a ‘schism’ appears, first within the social body, then within the group’s ‘soul’. Then the internal proletariat establishes a universal Church. For example, Buddhism was built on the ruins of Classical India, Christianity rose from the ashes of the Roman Empire, and communism was founded in the wasteland of modern capitalism. And then the never-ending process begins again as a new civilisation emerges. Toynbee supports his model with the histories of many different groups, including the Andean peoples, Arabs, Babylonians, Chinese, Egyptians, Hellenes, Hindus, Hittites, Indians, Maya, Mexicans, Minoans, Orthodox Christians, Persians, Sumerians, and Yucatecs. He also examines civilisations in which he believes that the process of extension and decomposition has ended, such as the Inuit peoples, the Ottomans, the Polynesians, and the Spartans. Toynbee’s model analyses the threshold of elasticity beyond which an empire’s expansion exceeds the limits of a civilisation’s internal resistance. If we stretch it beyond a certain point, every we snaps. Indeed, the internal differences within a group always

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eventually prevail over the identity imposed upon that group. In fact, the dynamic of we is such that no idea is ever strong enough to extend our we infinitely without also re-covering the differences between us. Those differences resist, reinforce each other, and slowly tear apart the beautiful unified tapestry with which the idealist promise had tried to cover us.

Political assessment A we that promises to extend itself risks being torn apart. Moreover, inasmuch as it becomes the only we, it also risks losing its identity. This is no longer just a historical observation. Indeed, for the realist mind, it becomes the very cornerstone of politics. Carl Schmitt, the current paragon of modern political realism, writes the following: ‘The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.’21 Both the political right and left offer their interpretations of this distinction. Chantal Mouffe’s Marxist critique of liberal ideals is one such example.22 Mouffe points out the fundamental antagonisms that both demonstrate the pacifist position’s hypocrisy and justify interpreting society through the lens of struggle. This kind of Marxist realism clearly draws inspiration from Schmitt. For him, the political we re-covers all other we’s because it is the only foundational we. All other we’s presuppose and depend upon the political we: ‘Political unity is the supreme unity, not because it all powerfully dictates or levels all other unities, but because it decides and can, within itself, prevent all other opposing groups from dissociating to the point of extreme hostility.’23 Political unity is the decisive we, and it can only be defined through negation. This we stakes out its position through opposition. ‘That grouping is always political which orients itself toward this most extreme possibility’, namely, having to ‘assume the state’s power’, ‘decide on the friend-and-enemy distinction and, if necessary, make war’.24 Schmitt’s much-vaunted test of strength arises when I recognise an enemy, or an other, to whom I am bound not just through enmity, but through existential contradiction. As I come to see that the other is everything that I would never want to be, I also

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discover who I am: ‘The enemy stands on my own plane. For this reason I must contend with him in battle, in order to assure my own standard [Maß], my own limits, my own Gestalt.’25 The enemy ‘stands on my own plane’ because – to return to the terminology of the work at hand – the enemy is located on the same transparency of identity as me but on the opposite side. Like a photo negative, the other is our form. All we’s are consolidated through their forms, and those forms depend on their negative identification with the other. This is why Schmitt admired the French Revolutionary government of Year II for denouncing the enemies of the people: the aristocrats, moderates, accomplices, and monopolists. For Schmitt, the fundamental question is always who ‘the real enemy’ is.26 Without the resistance of an enemy that totally embodies what is exterior to us, our we can no longer test and locate the limits of its form. Instead, it becomes shapeless and indeterminate. Such a we claims to be open, but it is lost in its own blurry haze. This is idealism’s mistake: it thinks that it can determine a universally inclusive we exclusively from within. Instead of appealing to historical dynamics, Schmitt assesses political dynamics in order to counter idealist (and especially Marxist) promises. No matter the context, an identity’s political power depends on how it sets its boundaries. This means that it also depends on the firmness with which we determine what we are not. The more clearly and carefully we discern where the enemy begins, the more certain we are about where we begin to be ourselves. Schmitt’s realist politics obstinately refuses the kind of idealism that defines we as something in ourselves and by ourselves. Autonomy – here understood as the possibility to determine one’s own laws and identity – is the one thing in which the realist absolutely refuses to believe. Nothing can ever limit itself from within. Viewed from inside, every subject thinks it could stretch endlessly without encountering any kind of resistance. Reality is what resists us from the outside.Those who refuse to label outsiders as enemies nuance their speech and evoke a simple notion of ‘alterity’. They are the beautiful souls. However, the more we accept alterity, the more it is assimilated, and the weaker we become. This power struggle is the core of political realism.

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This power struggle is present before the emergence of laws. It is strictly existential: ‘War, the readiness of combatants to die, the physical killing of human beings who belong on the side of the enemy – all this has no normative meaning, but an existential meaning only.’27 Defining our position means taking sides. Nevertheless, Schmitt rejects any kind of idealist dialectic that might allow one group to defend their interests while still working for the interests of everyone else. We can only ever struggle for us and against them. No one who fights for their own can also claim to fight for everyone else. Thinking that it is possible to do so reveals the absurdity or hypocrisy of idealism. This is how politics marks the particular’s resistance to reconciling the singular with the universal. Once it sides with its own singularity, no group can fight for the triumph of the universal. This is the case for Christians, communists, and liberal evolutionary optimists. Groups only ever fight for themselves. This is why no we is able to extend itself indefinitely. A we encounters fewer enemies as it becomes more extended. This causes it to lose its own identity. There will be no final battle. There will be no kingdom where all has been reconciled. If the power of a we is measured by its ability to ascertain an enemy and cleanly delimit what separates us from them, then a we that extends itself indefinitely and recognises nothing as its enemy is doomed to grow weaker until it disappears. Political dynamics only work when it is possible to define ourselves through our opposition to others. Defining ourselves from within makes it impossible to find our own limits, and this leads to loss of strength and clarity.

Neighbourly hostility We can call this purely realist principle ‘neighbourly hostility’. This principle hardens the elasticity of ourselves. It corresponds to an idea that almost always resurfaces in realist discourse, namely, that the human species is divided into small groups that are both neighbours and rivals. According to this idea, there are no communities or collectivities without an aggressive dynamic. This dynamic gathers people together and thereby makes them

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distinguish themselves from the groups that are closest to them. This is the case even if the gathering is based in love. This is the underlying logic of Freud’s pessimism in Civilization and its Discontents: The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.28 Neighbourly hostility makes it more advantageous for humans to form small groups. A group’s cohesion always depends on its ability to recognise the existential enemy posited by Schmitt. And yet it is just as important for a group to distinguish between all the neighbouring groups. We are not here referring to the ‘narcissism of minor differences’ defined by Freud and often invoked thereafter. Rather, what interests us here is the idea that there is an inverse relationship between a group’s extension and the strength of the ties that bind that group together.29 Nevertheless, that force of attraction also depends on a force, a release of aggression, which pushes anyone outside of the group away. As a group grows larger, it becomes harder for it to find the outlet that it needs to vent its aggression outside of itself. However, it also has an increasing amount of aggression that it needs to release as it grows in size. This principle also holds for cults, political parties, associations, and states. The idealist promises of a unified community promote the erasure of the small differences to be found behind a bigger, higher identity. By contrast, the realist assessment of neighbourly hostility instead emphasises our need to stand out and maintain our group cohesion through a hostile undoing of our ties to our neighbours. No community can do without ‘others’ on whom they unload their accumulated group aggression. That aggression does not diminish. It only grows as the collective expands. There are many different theories, some simplistic and others sophisticated, concerning what we are calling ‘neighbourly hostility’.

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Indeed, neighbourly hostility seems to be the very principle underlying all realist conceptions of social life. For example, this is what leads Konrad Lorenz to posit the regulatory function of intraspecific aggression. He argues that this function allows organisms of the same species to be distributed over a large territory.30 Again and again, from Freud and Lorenz to contemporary group selection theories, we find some version of the idea that a group’s intensity takes precedence over its extension. If we eradicate our barriers in accordance with the promise of limitless extension, we flout a basic dynamic of all identities – that they are all initially defined through opposition. The less opposition there is, the less of a position we hold. The promises of idealism make the following mistake: they forget that a smaller we whose opposition to an other makes it strong and distinct is naturally preferable to a stretched we that is weak and unclear because it has no outside. All realist discourse tacitly employs this image of neighbourly hostility that allows a collective identity to resist being absorbed into a larger identity. Neighbourly hostility lets it vent its pent-up violence on groups that are nearby but still remain on the other side of the fence. Realists make no judgements as to whether this tendency is moral or immoral. For them, it is just a dynamic principle that allows any group whatsoever to maintain its intensity, reinforce its internal bonds, sever its ties with other groups, and thus prevent its dissolution into a we of we’s. This principle of the elasticity of we explains why we tend to return to our original form after trying to expand limitlessly.

The dynamics of extension and intensity At the end of this thought experiment, idealist promises and realist assessments appear so directly contradictory that it seems impossible to reconcile them. Let us now try to avoid favouring one over the other in order to comprehend the dynamics of we. We can at least state what we know. We are not completely constrained by the ground of our identities, nor are we absolutely free to stretch and shrink ourselves at will. In order to grasp the scope of the relative constraint under which we find ourselves, we have to play the realist against the idealist, and vice versa. This

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doesn’t mean to say that they are each partially right. Rather, the realists and the idealists are both completely right until one of them proves the other one wrong. And yet, how can we judge between idealist promises and realist assessments? Both of them grapple with the dynamics of we. Idealism naturally (and logically) extends a we. Realism instead naturally (and logically) contracts a we. We have now heard from both idealists and realists. The realist teaches us why a we cannot extend as though it were an idea without being held back by the resistance of the real. From the idealist, we learn that contracting ourselves does not make us stronger. To gain strength, idealists say that we have to reach outside our we and find a way to connect with others. If all we’s are necessarily extended, it is because all antagonistic we’s are still we’s all the same. It is always possible to imagine a we of all we’s. This we gives us grounds for thinking that the particular differences inscribed by classificatory categories are actually false, illusory, or at least transitory. The promise of the we of we’s returns again and again. It will continue to do so because we are all we, even if we belong to different we’s. On the other hand, when a we contracts, it shows that its strength lies in its limits. Realist thought turns to this characteristic to ascertain the price we pay for extending a we. As an identity extends itself, its interior becomes increasingly fragile. It has a heightened risk of splits or schisms. Extension also weakens the external form of a we, which gets its shape by opposing its enemies. We are stronger when we are less extended. This is because the divisions that are possible among us are fewer, and because we are all mobilised together against something vast that is not us. This enemy allows us to distinguish ourselves more accurately. The relationship between our internal cohesion and our external differentiation from the enemy can be understood as the intensity of we. Our intensity is our identity. It is the self ’s power, and it is simultaneously internal and external. The less divided we are among ourselves, the more distinct we are from something else. This allows us to be more intensely. The realist’s lesson is correct. Nevertheless, realists see intensity as the ultimate criterion of their identity.

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On the other hand, the idealist judges identities by their extension. As long as there are other we’s outside of a we, idealists see that identity as merely particular. Such identities are deemed historically backward because they lack universality. According to idealists, the more a we extends itself, the more complete it becomes. This is the principle that underlies Christian, Islamic, and Buddhist universalisms. It is also the basic principle of Marxist universalism and of the evolutionary optimism espoused by certain liberal thinkers. The idealist’s lesson is just as correct as the realist’s. Now we can clearly see the dynamics that constrain a we. The more a we extends, the less intense it is; the inverse also holds: the more a we intensifies, the less extended it becomes. When it comes to measuring the dynamics of a political subject, realism and idealism are inversely related. By spreading itself out, subjectivity reconciles and unites different we’s. In this way, a diffuse subjectivity reveals what we all are ‘beyond what separates us’, which is to say, beyond the categories that govern our antagonisms. However, in so doing, political subjectivity loses intensity. It weakens both externally and internally, and its limits may even give way entirely. From within, its extension dictates that it must stretch out and re-cover too many different entities. If we say ‘we’ to refer to all sensate beings, we have to admit that the only thing we all have left in common is being sensate. And that may be a lot to have in common, but it doesn’t bridge the divide between vegetables and animals, or between those with a central nervous system and those without one, or those that can speak and those that cannot. This is the problem that contemporary ecological movements and animal rights activists must confront.The larger the set of different organisms incorporated by a we becomes, the more that the differences within that we become stronger than the one difference that is supposed to hold the boundary between we and not-we. After one conquest too many, the vast empire of we divides into regions, then enemy camps crop up, and finally civil war breaks out. As it extends, it becomes harder for a we to find anything that is still other to it. In other words, greater extension decreases the alterity outside of a we, leaving it with nothing left to oppose.The we swallows and incorporates the other we’s within it. This makes

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its form increasingly blurry. Defining its contours becomes a challenge because it is increasingly difficult to say exactly what lies outside of we. This means it is difficult to name what serves not just as an exteriority but, more importantly, as an enemy. When we have no enemies outside of us, we eventually catch sight of the enemy within us. Weakened by internal divisions and forced to watch as its boundaries collapse, the empire of we loses intensity. Nevertheless, it is always useful to counter this lesson from realism with idealist promises. A we that is solely determined by its surroundings can become more intense by withdrawing to very particular identities, like those of a clan, a tribe, a family, and so on. However, in so doing, it loses some of its extension. This reduces the dimensions of a we, but it also means that this is just another we among many others. It slowly forgets what it has in common with other we’s, be they nearby or far away. A very intense we is reduced until it becomes nothing more than one particular part of a whole that it has more and more difficulty recognising. This whole can be the human we or the greater we’s promised by Christianity, Marxism, and optimistic readings of evolution. For the very intense and reduced we, the whole fades into a blurry haze that then arouses suspicion. When it is too concentrated, a we can no longer recognise what connects it to similar groups. It is then doomed to cling tightly to its own particularity. Eventually, it will come to see this particularity as a universal. We may strongly be ourselves, but this means that we are also just one we among many others, whether or not we are aware that this is the case. However, stretching ourselves out to embrace everyone also makes us weaker. There is no magic formula that allows us to fully coincide with ourselves by simultaneously being as intense and extensive as possible. This is the condition in which we find ourselves. It is also our first constraint.

We never coincide with ourselves We is a form that is never completely free of constraints. This is because all identities, even un-grounded ones, follow this rule:

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we never coincide with ourselves. Neither idealist promises nor realist assessments acknowledge this rule, but they impose it on each other all the same. Without such a rule, a we could try to become an absolute idea that extends itself without breaking. This is what is needed to make good on the Christian promise or the Marxist promise. However, what we gain from extending ourselves is simultaneously lost, both within a we and in terms of its boundaries. The difference between us and everything around us weakens, and divisions within us also grow. For this reason, Christian expansion brings about a series of successive schisms. Analogously, the spread of the communist idea prompts fractures into different cadres and schools of thought. Everything that aims to unite us divides us in the end. An identity’s triumph is also the harbinger of its failure. This is the life cycle of all identities, all we’s and they’s, including nations, associations, churches, friendships, and even couples. When it is very small, the we curls up tight around the love of two people. This is definitely the most intense we, the one promised to us in songs and poetry. However, this we is also the least extended, which means that it is also the least singular we.We soon discover that we are always just one couple among many others. Each love would like to be the only one. To paraphrase the title of a Jim Jarmusch film, ‘We are the only lovers left alive.’31 Nevertheless, by limiting its extension to two people, this we withdraws from a whole crowd of other possible we’s outside of it. In this way, such a we lays the groundwork for its own relativisation. Whatever we may be, there are others that are that as well. In Plato’s Symposium, Diotima suggests that the whole world loves, which makes everyone a lover.32 There was a time when we tried to name our singularity to prove that we are not a we like you. However, you too say that you aren’t like the others. The very weak extension of the lover’s we spawns infinite other we’s. This makes the lover’s we into something all too common. When it discovers that it has something in common with all of the others, it extends. We lovers cannot help but admit that we are human beings like all of the other human beings who love each other. Our we accordingly loses in intensity what it gains in extension.This is the secret behind all love stories.

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The truth is, any overly large we has striking weaknesses. Idealist we’s naively believe that they can increase their extension without incurring any losses. And yet ‘we, animals and humans’ is already weaker than ‘we, humans’.When animals were ‘the others’, our connection to them had a certain shape and depth, which we suddenly lose if we decide to consider both them and ourselves as equal members of the same community. From that point on, what stands out most clearly are the things that separate us. Cosmic we’s de-intensify their subjects while voiding their political substance. We are then only held together as a group because we participate in a Greater Whole. Each of us therefore forms some part of that whole. By disregarding our reason, feelings, bodies, and specificities, we enter into a community where our existence is no different from a stone’s. In this case, what unites us is very large, but its intensity is almost null. Everything that extends itself makes its internal divisions visible. This is why humanism opened the way for racialism to appear as if it were a scientific system. This is not paradoxical. The more that humanity is one, the more that we have to account for the difference between humans. Unfortunately, this gave rise to conceptualisations of race and exposed the price to be paid for humanism. We paid for a path towards progress with a road back to regression. The form of we is trapped by this constraint that forces it back and forth. It therefore cannot reach absolute reconciliation, halt, or come to an end. We live through different phases during which our identities spread out, up until the point where they weaken and break because of how far we have extended them.We then see phases when our we’s are concentrated and drawn in very close to home. When this is the case, many different we’s that otherwise clash with or are unaware of one other coexist. That coexistence brings about their gradual incorporation under the banner of some greater unity. We are not exactly what we want to be. We are constrained by a historical dynamic that offers no miraculous resolution. Being neither absolute idealists nor absolute realists, we are buffeted by the waves of our own identities as they swell in one direction and subside in another. The hard-fought ground we think we have

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gained is immediately lost behind our backs. This means that we can never absolutise ourselves. Instead, we becomes a series of constrained identities that are at once errant and historical. The intensity and extension of these identities are constantly negotiated through politics.

Notes 1. Saint Augustine, Reply to Faustus the Manichean, Book XXIV, Kindle. 2. This is one of the meanings of surah 33,‘Al-Ahzab’ (‘The Parties’):‘For submitting men and submitting women, believing men and believing women, devout men and devout women, truthful men and truthful women, patient men and patient women, humble men and humble women, charitable men and charitable women, men who fast and women who fast, men who guard their private parts and women who guard [their private parts], men who remember God often and women who remember [God often], God has prepared forgiveness and a great reward.’ Nasr, ed., The Study Quran, pp. 1029–30 (33:35). 3. See Nasr, ed., The Study Quran, pp. 1029–30 (33:35). 4. Buddha, ‘The Diamond Sutra’, ch. 3, Kindle. 5. Engels, The Origin of the Family, ch. IX, ‘Barbarism and Civilization’. 6. See Althusser, For Marx, pp. 232–6. 7. McKown, The Classical Marxist. 8. This quotation is originally from a brochure published in 1955 by the Brussels Federation of Young Socialists (La Fédération Bruxelloise des Jeunes Socialistes (FBJS)), ‘De l’inégalité sociale à la société sans classes’. See Mandel, ‘La transition vers le socialisme’. 9. Lukács, ‘The Role of Morality in Communist Production’. 10. Lukács, ‘The Role of Morality in Communist Production’. 11. See Löwy, Fire Alarm, Kindle. 12. Löwy, Fire Alarm, Kindle. 13. Löwy, Fire Alarm, Kindle. 14. Teilhard de Chardin, Man’s Place in Nature; Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near. 15. Kelly, What Technology Wants; Cohen, Evolutionary Enlightenment; Phipps, Evolutionaries; Bloom, Global Brain. 16. Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, p. xxiv. 17. Cavalieri and Singer, The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity, p. 1.

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18. See Darwin, ‘Letter 12757 addressed to Edward Bibbins Aveling, 13 October 1880’. 19. Herodotus, Herodotus I: Books I–II, Book I, ch. 5, p. 9. Quoted in Castoriadis, Thucydide, la Force et le Droit, p. 120. 20. Machiavelli, Discourses of the First Decade of Titus Livius, p. 211. 21. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 26. 22. See Mouffe, The Challenge of Carl Schmitt. 23. Schmitt, ‘State Ethics and the Pluralist State’, p. 307. 24. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 38. 25. Schmitt, The Theory of the Partisan, p. 61. 26. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 37. 27. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, pp. 48–9. 28. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 72. 29. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 72. 30. See Lorenz, On Aggression. 31. Jim Jarmusch, Only Lovers Left Alive, Recorded Picture Company and Pandora Film, 2013. 32. ‘“Why, then”, she rejoined, “are not all men, Socrates, said to love, but only some of them? whereas [sic] you say that all men are always loving the same things”.’ Plato, ‘Symposium’, 205 a-b, p. 97.

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This conception of we holds that we is never absolutely idealist nor absolutely realist, but always in flux and subject to negotiation. This is accurate, but it is also naive. This conception implies that all we’s are solely conditioned by this dynamic: the more a we extends, the less intense it is, and vice versa. It therefore filters out all the forms of domination that hold this model back or disrupt its fine-tuned mechanics. Our thinking has presupposed that all of the different expanding and contracting we’s have equitable and balanced relationships with one another. However, this is not the case. Indeed, our model’s naivety is worrying because it fails to account for the simple fact that the relations between us are not perfectly symmetrical. All of the following sources can provoke breaks in symmetry: laws, customs, manners, education, beliefs, heritage, and relations of production; but also affinities, camaraderies, affiliations, loves, and friendships.

Asymmetry In the social sciences, scholars frequently study asymmetry. For example, in a recent call for proposals, the organising committee dedicated the colloquium to ‘the sociology of new power relations and current forms of domination’.They argued that ‘a society is first and foremost composed of the asymmetrical relations established between individuals’.1 Within a family, an administration, a political party, a church, a club, a clan, and so on, relationships based in authority and hierarchy lead to systems. These systems entail rights and duties, recognition and contestation, obligation and negotiation, admiration and disdain, and obedience and subterfuge. All of

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these relations thus come with a constraint: between us, everything is not equal.We then have to live with that knowledge by accepting it, refusing it, or constantly trying to find a way around it.We often see this particular asymmetry as the structure of domination in general. This asymmetry varies in intensity and changes according to its context, whether within the frame of slavery, serfdom, peonage, wage slavery, clientelism, and so on. It also changes as we shift between categories that divide social classes, races, genders, species, and so on. As soon as asymmetrical relations exist between us, the we of living beings, forms of domination appear. The domination might be overt, violent, and physical, or it may instead take on a symbolic form. Regardless of whether it is very strong or very weak, the structure of domination remains the same. The social sciences soon tasked themselves with comprehending how and why some individuals began to accept these relations of domination. According to Étienne de La Boétie, ‘Custom becomes the first reason for voluntary servitude.’2 In this way, he invites us to engage in a meditation that is still ongoing. What psychologically motivates people to accept being dominated? We might even say that this line of questioning led Durkheim and Weber to found the science of sociology in order to go beyond a psychology of domination. They aimed to study the relationship between the psychological recognition of domination and how domination is instituted in a society. This is why the sociological question par excellence concerns the motivations for obedience and how it is legitimised.To explore these questions, sociologists turn to the relations between individuals and social groups, between me and them, between me and you, and between me and us. But in this work, the subject we are interested in is neither me nor you. Rather than focusing on how mechanisms of submission are integrated by individuals, we are instead concerned with the relation of domination between a broad we and an exclusive we. To understand this break in symmetry, we don’t have to comprehend how and why humans accept their own submission. However, we do have to define the unequal relations between one collective identity and another. Rather than focusing on authority, charisma, or hierarchy, we can add the notion of categorical domination to our model of ourselves. Categorical domination can be

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understood as the asymmetry of a system that divides our identities through categories, or at least what is left of those categories after they have been strategically stripped bare. By ‘domination’, we don’t mean the psychological or social situation of one or more individuals who are confronted with the asymmetry of their relations with others. Here, ‘domination’ refers to that asymmetry in and of itself, inasmuch as it represents a rupture in the equality between different divisions within the same category. Such domination breaks the symmetry between two species, two genders, two races, two classes, and so on. To keep things simple, we might say that domination exists as soon as inequality arises between two parties that are located on the same transparency. But this is not exactly right. Up to this point, we have admittedly been somewhat naive. We have assumed that we could just divide ourselves into parts without also having to unequally valorise those parts. Social division requires us to imagine not only limits but also a kind of depth that lets us prioritise certain groups by raising them and lowering others accordingly. For example, we not only divide races, but we also hierarchise them. With that being said, categorical domination requires more than just inserting inequality into our systems of divisions. Indeed, it may be that this inequality does not result from valorising and devaluing different categories of people. Instead, categorical domination may arise when we articulate different meanings of we as we divide things. From this point of view, we could justifiably interpret everything in terms of division. However, at present, we must add another constraint to our model, one that differs from the strictly dynamic constraint governing the interplay of extension and intensity. How does domination place constraints on our divisions? Within a system of divisions into we’s, it is not so much a notion of races, classes, or superior species that resists symmetry. Instead, all forms of domination are signalled by a delicate articulation of the equality and inequality between us.This articulation is at work in the relations of domination between men and women, colonisers and the colonised, white people and people of colour, believers and non-believers, human beings and other animals, heterosexuals and sexual minorities, the ruling class and the working class, and so on.

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The equality within inequality What do the most obvious, violent forms of domination and the least visible, most disputed forms of domination all have in common? Breaks in categorical symmetry do not rely on plain inequality. When things are seen as absolutely unequal, there is no symmetry between them to be broken. In order for us to dominate or to be dominated, we need both an image of symmetry (and therefore, equality) and an image of rupture (and therefore, inequality).To dominate isn’t to force something – or at least, that’s not all it is. We don’t dominate someone by believing that we have all the rights and that the ones whom we call ‘them’ have none. In such a situation, they have nothing at all in common with us. Because we recognise nothing of ourselves in them, they are nothing more than raw material for our subjective development and the satisfaction of our needs. Domination begins with a feeling, one possibly tinged by misgivings or regrets, that they are like us in at least one way. Nevertheless, despite this feeling, our sameness with them remains subordinated to our differences from them. Domination therefore begins with a delicate articulation of the inequality and equality between us. Domination posits an interstitial space between at least two meanings of ‘we’. We find an example of this in slavery, the most obvious form of domination. In his justification of slavery, Aristotle very carefully establishes a distinction within human society between those who are free and those who are not: ‘It is clear then that by nature some are free, others slaves, and that for these it is both just and expedient that they should serve as slaves.’3 Properly understood, equality results from both unequal conditions and the recognition of that inequality: For the element that can use its intelligence to look ahead is by nature ruler and by nature master, while that which has the bodily strength to do the actual work is by nature a slave, one of those who are ruled. Thus there is a common interest uniting master and slave.4 According to Aristotle, while they have unequal natural capabilities, master and slave are still equals to the extent that they are

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both considered according to their unequal capabilities. All discourses that try to legitimise slavery rely on the idea that there is equality within inequality. For Augustine, original sin breaks with Nature,5 inaugurating a history that is doomed to be unequal and unbalanced. An unbalanced or skewed history is unjust. Therefore, historically speaking, it would be unjust to be absolutely just. If inequality is a given, trying to change that fact would only ever reproduce inequalities in the opposite direction. Slavery is an effect of the unequal order established by original sin. Nevertheless, this does not mean that we completely abandon the idea of equality. Domination results from an alliance between the idea of equality and historical inequality. Because inequality is the given state of humanity, master and slave can find common ground within their unequal conditions. Instead of being absolutely superior, masters can therefore be absolutely equal.This absolute equality stems from their being relatively superior to those who are relatively inferior. This counterbalanced relationship presupposes a natural complementarity that people use to justify most discourses of domination. For example, we see this in the relation between the sexes. According to Aristotle’s understanding of procreation, the body comes from the female parent, and the soul comes from the male parent. This is why Aristotle thinks of females as if they were mutilated, imperfect beings. We can find comparable examples in racialist rhetoric and in discourses that try to prove humanity as superior to all other species. Rather than condemning or even just critiquing discourses of domination, our purpose is to identify the way that all such discourses call upon a certain model of we. This should let us determine how domination uses asymmetry to constrain our systems of divisions. According to the notion of equality in inequality, each person should take their place and play their part. From this point of view, things really are equal. The dominator has an assigned role, just like that of the dominated. The dominators may have more freedom, but that freedom always comes at a price. After all, being free is their social function. They are therefore assigned to freedom, which means that they are never absolutely free. Like the idle aristocracy, their function is to be free. The lower classes likewise perform their assigned function through labour. The latter group

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is obedient to its duty to obey, and the former obeys its duty to command. Traditional justifications for human domination operate similarly. According to these models, beasts are seen as naturally natural, while humans are naturally social. Beasts are bound by instinct, while humans are bound by freedom. While beasts are imprisoned within themselves, humans are locked outside of themselves and forced to invent their own essence. Rather than insisting that any equality mixed with inequality isn’t really equal at all, these models instead locate a sort of equality in the assignment of roles that underlies all expressions of domination. Indeed, this kind of mixed equality is only possible through inequality. We are assigned to superiority in the same way that others are assigned to inferiority. Nevertheless, we are all equal in that we all equally have a condition to which we have been assigned.

The them within we The difference between ‘dependency’ and ‘slavery’ has long been a subject of debate. The most frequent conclusion is that there is no such thing as ‘internal slavery’ or slavery ‘among us’. A slave is supposed to be an other who belongs to a ‘them’. In the Dictionnaire des esclavages (Dictionary of Slaveries), Jacques Annequin examines collective slavery in Illyria, as well as its forms among the Penestae of Thessaly, the Kyllyrians of Syracuse, the Clarots of Crete, and the Gymnitae of Argos: These peoples are originally from the same territory where they live in a community and put down roots. These individuals cannot be sold to outsiders. They are very rarely emancipated. At the bottom of the social ladder, they continue to be subjected, sometimes by force, and sometimes through degradation. Nevertheless, unlike slaves, they still form part of a community in which individuals have a real social identity.6 These individuals do not seem to be slaves because they belong – however weakly, in some views – to the community of ‘we’. By contrast, slaves would belong to the dominated insofar as they are

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absolutely excluded from we. However, as many scholars have found, this idea seems to oversimplify the situation. Moses Finley argues that, in spite of the fact that they ‘were a logical class and a juridical class’, slaves in the ancient world never formed a social class.7 Claude Meillassoux emphasises the ‘de-socialization’ of slaves.8 Alain Testart focuses on how slaves are excluded from a ‘dimension that society deems fundamental’,9 and instead belong to what we might call a non-we that is within we. Even though they are dehumanised, slaves still remain human. That is precisely why slavery is a form of domination. In the same way, when women were seen as degraded forms of complete men, they were still considered human enough to be the target of discrimination. Testart points out that the Roman legal designation of slaves as a thing (res) is frequently misinterpreted as their banishment from the realm of human beings. Res only signifies an object of law, as opposed to a subject of law.This means that res is a legal designation, not an existential one.10 Humanity is divided into free humans and slaves. Among the humans, the free humans decide who is a slave.There are two we’s here: ‘we, humans’, which includes both free humans and slaves, and ‘we, free humans’. Domination results from the creation of an affinity between broad and exclusive we’s. This then causes us to imagine a them within we. Dominated peoples are always a them within a we.11 Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau cites the following grievance from a slave of mixed race named Maria Gomez. In 1776 she wrote the following with regard to her masters: They constantly speak to me in an abusive manner, strike me with blows, and treat me most harshly, none of which is permitted by either humanity or law, even if one takes into account my situation as a slave and my purely servile condition as such.12 From a rhetorical standpoint, Maria Gomez perfectly captures the relation of domination that defines her condition. In order to defend her equal rights as a subject, she seizes upon a we that has been assigned to her, the we of humanity in general. And yet she nevertheless recognises that within ‘we, humans’, she has been designated as ‘them’ not ‘we’.The masters are a double we because

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they are two subjects at once. By contrast, she is only a subject once. And yet she is still a subject all the same.We find evidence of this status in an 1819 legal intervention that Pétré-Grenouilleau also cites: ‘The slave is a part of society like any other person.’13 This is not a paradox. Rather, it is the unvarnished truth of domination. Domination entails a discrepancy between an extended (but weaker) meaning of we (broad) and a more restrained (but more intense) meaning of we (exclusive). When we strip down our classificatory categories, domination remains in the realms of species, gender, class, race, and so on. This form of domination can never be reduced to a pure constraint. It slips through the cracks opened up between broad and exclusive we’s by this dynamic logic. We always has both a broad and an exclusive meaning. These dual meanings result from the enduring and necessary discrepancy between the more intense, realist we and the more extended, idealist we. This discrepancy or rift is where all forms of social domination are born. This is also where they grow up, develop, and evolve. We cannot imagine belonging to a class, gender, ethnicity, community of belief, political party, family, and so on without also projecting a weaker we beyond this group. Such a we gathers a certain number of them within our we.Therefore, in the broad idea of ‘we’ that we make for ourselves, there is always a little bit of ‘them’. Domination invariably arises from this ‘outside-inside’ position. Granted this very general notion of domination, what is most surprising is that the idealisation of we breaks the symmetry between an us in our we (defined with reference to the broad we) and a them in our we (defined in contrast to the exclusive we). Idealism is a part of all forms of domination.The idea of a we beyond the exclusive we is indispensable. And yet this idea provokes the discrepancy that opens the way for a process of domination to emerge. Any group has to recognise and explain that we do not treat those who belong to a broadly construed we in the same way that we treat those who belong to a narrowly construed we. All discourses of domination have to concede this point, however vaguely they may choose to do so.Whether we are talking about discourses of domination between white people and black people, believers and unbelievers, Jews and Muslims, patricians and plebeians, ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’ people,

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people from nearby and those from afar, people born into privilege and those born into poverty, or well-educated and poorly educated people, we all still have something in common. This shared commonality is supposed to ground the inscription of what we do not have in common. Now we can investigate this asymmetry from a different angle by asking the following question: who sets the terms of this asymmetry? Who decides which categories are strong or superior, and which ones are weaker or inferior? The response to these questions brings us back to our model of we. The decision is in the hands of those who say we twice.The ones who dominate are the ones who possess the social, intellectual, and legal means to say we and be able to mean it in two different ways. However limited it may be, the dominated still have access to the possibility of saying ‘we’ and being understood in the same way as everyone else. However, they are not capable of determining the meaning of that ‘we’. The ‘them in our we’ do not know who we are. We tell them who we are. That is why they are dominated. We now see that domination consistently moves between two different meanings of we. Furthermore, we also already know that we never directly coincide with ourselves. Does that mean that we now have to accept domination as unavoidable? Despite all of our goodwill, is it now impossible to conceive of a political subjectivity without also imagining relations of domination? This would mean falling back in with the realists who hold that we are all determined by asymmetrical relations that have always existed and will always remain. If this were the case, then fighting for emancipation would be a governing ideal at best and a dangerous illusion at worst. Now let’s push this logic as far as possible in a direction that would seem to justify domination. Let’s see what happens if we treat it as if it were a fundamental constraint on anything with the form of we.

The necessity of domination Let us assume for the moment that all logics of domination are grounded in the idea of a just inequality, which originally arises from the lack of adequation between the broad and exclusive we’s.

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We never coincide with ourselves, because there is always something other than us in our we. All discourses of domination are founded on this belief. For example, some see woman as the other of man within humanity. Some analogously see black people as the other of white people. Similarly, within humanity there is a place for the slave, the other of the free; for the unbeliever, the other of the believer; and for the plebeian masses, the other of the individual. Within our tribe, there are also servants and dependants. Broadly speaking, anything resembling a we bears two meanings. One meaning is extended but weak, while the other is intense but constrained. What lies between these two meanings is the space between the broad we and the exclusive we.That space symbolises something that is non-we in we. That space is the place of the dominated. Non-human animals also receive this treatment. We recognise that, like us, they belong to a vast, ideal community of sensate beings. Of course, we go on to clarify that by we, we also mean something more limited in scope, namely, those who can say ‘we’ – our fellow members of the human species. Human domination of other animals begins as soon as our word ‘we’ starts to have two meanings. Instead of simply expelling other animals from the sphere of subjectivity, humanity includes them in the first meaning, the broad we, and excludes them from the second meaning, the exclusive we. When this happens, domination replaces pure constraint and pure violence. By contrast, an isolated ‘them’ knows no such thing as domination. Domination is directed towards the ‘them’ that is in our we. Those who dominate assume both their own legitimacy and their ability to articulate multiple meanings of ‘we’. However, if domination is an articulation of two meanings of we, then it remains inevitable.We can fight against it, and its terms may change over time. For example, male domination can become female domination. Regardless, it will never disappear. It fundamentally constrains every we. It is impossible for a we to coincide with itself. Therefore, the gap between a we and itself, the crack where domination takes root, will always remain open. Paradoxically, thinking of things in this way assigns the blame for the disparity between realism and idealism to this space of

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domination. If there is a gap between a particular we and a universal we, it must be because there is an idea of we that necessarily extends our particular identity. This idea of we opens up the space of domination. Ultimately, domination exists because our idealism forces us to extend our we beyond ourselves. The things that belong to the idea of we without belonging to the reality of we constitute the domain of domination. Paradoxically, slavery is a form of domination that stems from the magnanimous idea of humanity as an identity common to both humans who are really free and those who are not actually free. We can locate slavery’s field of domination between the expansive notion of humanity and the much smaller community of humans who are actually free. From that point on, we must develop juridical and ethical arguments. We need these arguments for the endless justifications necessary to maintain the disparity between our we against them and our we with them.The very same term that varies in extension and intensity thereby simultaneously reveals our community and demonstrates our hostility. What makes domination possible is also what makes it untenable.

The necessity of emancipation The longer a society legitimates and prolongs a form of domination, the more energy it has to expend in order to maintain the difference between an exclusive we and a them within a broad we. This enormous expenditure of theoretical energy is supposed to produce logics, arguments, and counter-arguments. This requires energy from juridical, moral, and institutional sectors. The more we focus on maintaining the them in our we, the more clearly we see what we have in common. This makes it more difficult to sustain the notion of equality in inequality. Instead, we tend towards equality pure and simple.Then we see movements develop to fight for different rights. Reason is less and less able to account for the different ways that we treat people who share our common identity. Eventually, only physical violence can enforce the order of domination. Over time, domination succumbs. Deeming domination theoretically necessary therefore constitutes a grave mistake. Doing so means erring through excessive

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realism and ignoring the fact that every domination’s reality carries within it the idea of what can liberate us from domination.The vast idea of ‘we, everyone’ converts what was once pure inequality into domination. This vast idea denotes a state of we that lies beyond ourselves and includes others. It thereby establishes an asymmetry between the we that is doubly we and the them in our we. But this expansive, magnanimous idea of ‘we, everyone’ is also what makes domination untenable in the long term. All mechanisms of domination teach the dominators to think of the dominated as beings that are both familiar and foreign. For the dominators, the dominated therefore stand for alterity within our common identity.This is how white men from the West considered women, black people, Jews, Asians, the colonised, and the proletariat within their modern processes of domination. And yet, for both the dominators and the dominated, the lesson taught by domination is also the key to emancipation. This key lies in an idea shared by both those who defend the possibility that there can be greater equality within inequality and those who oppose it. Nevertheless, as Verlaine writes, ‘Waking is in the dream.’14 Analogously, emancipation lies within domination. The same shared idea of a ‘we, everyone’ that once served as the grounds for domination also brings that form of domination to an end. Eventually, only force can maintain the gap between the broad we and the exclusive we. Domination can no longer sustain itself with reasons and gives way to pure constraint. Having been based in submission rooted in customs, education, and discursive constructs, domination increasingly reveals its unsustainability. This is a felicitous discovery for anyone who wishes for equality. History always seems to tend towards the breakdown of domination. We are not condemned to be dominated. Or rather, domination is only possible inasmuch as it is untenable. In this way, domination ineluctably sentences us to emancipation. This fact should offer us a certain sense of comfort. In the struggle against domination, domination eventually becomes its own worst enemy. It must appeal to the very same expansive and egalitarian idea of we that ultimately causes it to break down. However, in an unfortunate twist for emancipatory politics, any joy that we derive from this theoretical upswing is doomed to be

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short-lived. This is because there is another side to this auspicious logic. As historical processes begin to reverse forms of domination, those forms become harder to see. The increasing confusion of our systems of division is accompanied by an increasing inability to distinguish between domination and the feeling of domination.

Real domination, the effects of domination, and the feeling of domination First, we naively disregarded domination. Now, we naively believe that we should be able to recognise the evidence of domination when we see it. All forms of domination awaken a feeling of injustice that makes us feel ‘justified’ or ‘authorised’. Being dominated means being denied power. When we are dominated, we have to authorise ourselves to be able to do more. For example, being dominated authorises our reactionary verbal or physical violence. However, we may think that this same sort of violence should be impermissible for others. The feeling of being dominated and prohibited by others leads us to authorise ourselves. Of course, the feeling of being dominated can result from real forms of domination.We can objectively assess this feeling by analysing how different groups are treated differently. And yet, throughout history, these justified feelings tend to take on a life of their own and break away from the real domination that brought them about. We can see an example of this in the way that feminism has led to a masculinist response. Masculinism co-opts the female emancipatory movement’s accomplishments and uses feminism as a model to defend men’s rights and interests.This gives rise to the idea that modern society harbours a reverse sexual domination. This also leads to what Philippe Muray has described as a mothering and castrating society that produces emasculated men.15 We can obviously dispute this diagnosis and signal its reactionary character.We can further point out how it relies on the idea that all men are naturally virile.16 Or we could argue that this masculinist position is perverse because it equates two unlike things: real inequalities that have persisted for centuries and that continue to affect many people, and the mere feeling of puerile humiliation caused by the

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loss of masculine privileges. In the face of such rhetoric, we need certain proofs that legitimise drawing a dividing line between real forms of domination and imaginary forms of counter-domination. Such proofs exist. The feminists who have argued against masculinism have given us plenty of valid arguments to that effect. However, demanding proof springs the deadly trap hidden within the concept of domination. This reveals how domination has managed to endure throughout history. The more we require proof to diagnose real domination, the harder it becomes to impose a specific way of diagnosing domination. This is the case for all forms of domination, be they masculine, colonial, post-colonial, and so on. In their struggle to impose their own diagnostic and show that the dominators are engaged in domination against them, counterdomination movements also necessarily generate effects of domination.When we first see these effects of domination, we certainly refuse to recognise them as such. We have already authorised our fight against domination and justified those effects as part of that struggle. Nevertheless, these effects still exist because we can never impose a diagnostic of domination without becoming a little dominant ourselves. This domination may take an intellectual form, it may be symbolic, it may manifest itself via our representation in the media, and so on. As is always the case throughout history, it then becomes impossible to distinguish between the feeling of domination and real domination. We may even be certain that we can prove that one group dominates another and provide evidence to that effect that is objective, scientific, statistical, and so on. Nevertheless, despite this evidence’s possible legitimacy, our interventions are still necessarily imbued with involuntary effects of domination. Gradually, this feeling of being dominated becomes the thing that we share the most. The fact that domination is something that we feel makes it increasingly difficult to simply provide proof of domination. Anyone who purports only to need statistics, quantified figures, opinion polling, legal texts, and so on to objectively identify domination is setting themselves up for a terrible disappointment.There will necessarily come a time when they will need to move beyond the facts to provide evidence of ambient forms of homophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, discrimination against the Romani people, fear

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and hatred of black people, prejudicial treatment of people with disabilities, misogyny, transphobia, class contempt, speciesism, and so on. The same applies in other political camps that attempt to prove that the rich and successful face hatred, entrepreneurs endure jealousy, and that minorities are the real tyrants. In order to sustain all of these diagnostics, we have to measure and quantify a feeling. For this, we turn to political leaders’ statements; newspaper coverage; things that we see and hear all around us; illustrative anecdotes; and actions and words selectively captured from the public sphere, the media, family gatherings, social networks, and so on. It would be insincere of us to deny that these intuitive diagnostics contribute to our systematic description of forms of domination. And yet these diagnostics gradually make it impossible for us to differentiate between the reality and the feeling of domination. All attempts to clearly illuminate this distinction through the scientific method are futile. Having arrived at this point in the decomposition of our classificatory categories, we find that we can no longer apprehend domination objectively. Nor can we clearly distinguish between dominators who profess their dominance and the dominated who are aware of their status as such. At this juncture in the story of domination, progress towards emancipation on many different levels comes to coincide with the erasure of precise categorical limits. This necessarily prompts a reaction that spreads the feeling of domination. The concept of domination becomes less relevant when the dominators no longer completely accept and assume their own dominance. Instead of feeling like the exclusive we within our broad we, they also feel symbolically dominated. Their loss of privileges and the reversal of the us and them within our we make the dominated feel as if they have become other. None of this legitimises contemporary notions of anti-white racism, masculinism, ‘political correctness’, or the idea that special interest lobbyists have allowed minorities to wrest control away from the majority. Nevertheless, those notions should be read as real symptoms of a change in the optics of domination. Forms of domination that once marked breaks in the symmetry between we’s suddenly start to seem symmetrical. Of course, this has not made us all equal. We are far from that state of equality. However, the interconnected aspect of modern processes of emancipation

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(for women, ethnic and racial minorities, colonised peoples, sexual minorities, and so on) means that all identities occupy corresponding positions with regard to domination and counter-domination. This alignment erases the boundary between concrete domination and symbolic domination. The feeling of domination is currently primarily reserved for strategic use. We use this feeling to assert our rights and authorise or justify ourselves.This means that it regulates and modulates political violence, whether it is verbal or physical in nature. Indeed, this feeling of domination permits political violence inasmuch as it reflects the feeling that others have made us into a minority.

A strategic minority In this way, our political concerns gradually shifted away from defending our rights and performing our duties to one another. Politics came to centre around the struggle to impose our diagnostic of domination rather than theirs. For example, anti-capitalist politics primarily aims to demonstrate how capitalism dominates our everyday lives. Anti-capitalists accordingly gather, organise, and highlight a selection of relevant news stories to keep us from believing other ideological discourses that claim that the politics of class struggle are outdated and obsolete. Patriotic and nationalist politics try to show how European institutions, American Atlanticism, and cosmopolitanism impose their intolerable domination on us on a daily basis. Moreover, according to these politics, abolishing borders and allowing immigration destroys a people’s national identity. Liberal politics strive to impose the idea that statism, archaic corporate and syndicalist notions, and national tensions have already prevailed. Anti-speciesists seek to expose the dominance of speciesism. Humanists endeavour to demonstrate that our sensitivity, or oversensitivity, towards other species shows that a majority of us care more for them than we do for our fellow humans. Defenders of laicism or secularism fight to shed light on how religious identities have been victorious in almost every arena. Believers instead fight to unmask and make visible the hegemony of aggressive, authoritarian laicism and secularism. LGBTQI activists enter the fray in order to raise awareness of visible and invisible forms of homophobic and

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transphobic domination. Opponents of same-sex marriage fight to impose their own diagnostic and convince people that the gayfriendly agenda has won the day. This is how a democratic regime strategically deploys minorities. Of course, there are still real forms of domination.They haven’t gone away. However, the very term ‘domination’ no longer really allows us to objectively distinguish between the positions that all use this word in their rhetoric. We all re-ground our identities by convincing ourselves that we are dominated. This is why emancipation is inevitably slowed down or even halted by its own historical effects. Domination contains within itself the very thing that can end domination. Likewise, emancipation carries within it what ultimately prevents emancipation. When we critique a form of domination, we necessarily struggle to make our diagnosis of domination win out. This requires us to enter into intellectual and political power relations in order to impose our understanding of the state of we on everyone else. In so doing, we universalise our own particular image of how we all relate to one another. It does not matter whether or not this image is true. We just have to force everyone else to accept it as their own. When people use theoretical texts, works of art, legal documents, academic curricula, and so on to make others accept their notion of the state of we, they indirectly reproduce effects of domination. This happens even when we have the best of intentions. The dominators, or at least those who are considered to be dominant (we can no longer really tell because the situation changes from one transparency to another), are never unburdened or relieved by accepting the dominated group’s conception of we. Because of this, the dominators feel as though our historical story has cast them as ‘them’. They can partially maintain their dominance and still experience the feeling that someone else’s diagnostic is dominating them. This historical experience is especially common in countries that have been colonised. For example, we might think of the Béké of the French Antilles, or the pieds-noirs of French Algeria. We find that we can gradually reverse and relativise the feeling of domination. However, continuing to do so eventually makes the feeling of domination almost indistinguishable from domination itself.

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This is the whole problem with the idea of domination: it only really works as a principle of political division as long as it is in the interest of the dominators to acknowledge their own dominance. When anyone can use this concept, it no longer allows us to correctly read society and the different transparencies that we use to represent ourselves. It merely signals that we can simultaneously see ourselves as dominated on one level and still be blind to our position of dominance on another. This eliminates any possibility for a science of domination. We may still be furious about the intolerable ‘misappropriation’ we see when racists claim the feeling of racial discrimination.We may likewise be infuriated by how those who have long held women back now complain that they are being held back by women. Nevertheless, there is every chance that our anger will be in vain. It actually prevents us from grasping the underlying logic that places constraints on domination. This anger will blind us to the unnecessary asymmetry that divides us. We can overcome that asymmetry, but only on one condition: whatever ground we gain against a form of domination is invaded by a feeling of domination that jeopardises and confuses the very notion of domination. This makes it increasingly difficult to use the notion of domination to differentiate between those among us who qualify as privileged and those who have been wronged. Our aim here is not to espouse relativism or to affirm that domination can always be completely reversed. Instead, we hope to understand a little more fully a logic that is at once straightforward and complicated. According to this logic, appealing to a larger and more equal we eventually results in effects that run contrary to our advances in the struggle against domination.These effects impede emancipation and obstruct its historical victories. They also prevent us from achieving an idealist, egalitarian, reconciled we. We can at least come to the conclusion that, rather than domination itself, it is the history of domination that necessarily constrains the we. We can certainly imagine that we are all free and equal, as if there were no domination at all. However, the fact that we have never actually been equal up to this point makes domination an irreparable break in symmetry. On account of this break, even emancipation becomes a kind of counter-domination. No matter

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how generous our notion of emancipation might be, it emerges as a reaction to the history of domination, and it therefore gives rise to contradictory effects. Our we doesn’t have to have an unequal, unjust structure for this to be the case.The fact that we are products of an unequal, unjust history means that our emancipation – for humans as well as for all living beings – can never be anything but unequal and unjust. Let’s end with the example of slavery. The history of slavery became a political battlefield where we find evidence of how drastically the history of domination unbalances our view of ourselves. This history tilts our self-image to one side. In order to restore its balance, our self-image then pitches itself in the opposite direction.

The battlefield of domination For the last twenty years in the Anglo-Saxon world, ‘global history’ has referred to a return to large-scale, wide-ranging narratives such as those we have inherited from Fernand Braudel.17 Such narratives are supposed to account for all sorts of transnational phenomena. They thus enable us to reconsider inherited historical divisions and traditional cultural domains. They also challenge Eurocentric historiography to pursue a postcolonial dream. This dream entails ‘provincializing Europe’18 and rewriting history from the viewpoint of the vanquished.19 Nevertheless, sometimes our actions generate effects that run contrary to our intentions. For example, the strongest adherents to postcolonial critique often challenge the very possibility of writing a global history of slavery. To do so, we would have to place three slave trades – the European trade in African slaves, the Arab-Muslim slave trade, and the slave trade internal to Africa – on the same level for our consideration. Doing so would force us to make statistical comparisons of those three forms of slavery. We would then have to confirm that the European slave trade was the least significant of the three according to the numbers. This is in no way an exoneration. However, such a comparison tends to have political effects that are both direct and indirect in nature.These effects advance the agendas of those who imply that because the Islamic world had more slavery and

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African populations first enslaved each other, white Europeans should not now have to be the first to repent. Some people challenge the global approach. They argue that its theoretical biases and flawed universality lead to unwarranted comparisons that might legitimate reactionary discourses. Such people therefore choose to proceed differently.They instead try to dissolve the very concept of slavery by championing the irreducible particularities of each type of enslavement.This approach runs the risk of relativism. If each ‘space-time’20 has its own specificity, it can also have its own form of slavery. According to this approach, there is no such thing as a universal anthropological reality of ‘global’ slavery. Beneath the concept of multiple forms of slavery, we find this idea of differentiated space-times.21 Trying to bring various forms of slavery together under the same heading forces us to compare incommensurable realities. From this perspective, the kinds of bondage and abduction practised in certain West African societies should not be lumped together with the concept of the black slave trade as carried out by Europeans. This is because this latter form of slavery depends upon an image of black people that white subjects constructed as their other. The opposition between the universal, global approach and an approach that distinguishes between particular space-times ultimately becomes a strategic dispute over the history of domination. Each of these approaches accuses the other of advocating for a method in order to legitimate a specific contemporary political discourse. For example, we might consider the European slave trade’s responsibility for poverty in Africa today. We also have to grapple with a second historical dispute. This one involves the very definition of the concept of slavery. In Qu’estce que l’esclavage (What is Slavery?),22 Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau endorses the classical position that anything that has a concept can be thought. He then adds the more modern idea that anything that can be thought can also clearly be fought. For Pétré-Grenouilleau, we must condemn slavery, but first we have to understand what we are condemning.While carefully distinguishing between subcategories of communal servitude, peonage, forced labour, wage slavery, indentured servitude, clientelism, and so on, his book continuously seeks a dividing line. On one side of this line, we find the concept

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of slavery that says that ‘a slave is one human possessed by another’.23 On the other side of this line, we find the manifold metaphors involving slavery in our everyday language and our contemporary political vocabulary: Today, the term is synonymous with a form of human exploitation and, more generally, with anything that infringes on individual freedoms. This is how the victims of deindustrialization come to be seen as ‘modern slaves’; likewise, people with addictions became ‘slaves’ to their desire.24 Pétré-Grenouilleau’s work rightly criticises the increasing metaphorical use of slavery. These metaphors have turned this word into nothing more than a tool that we use to critique all the ways in which one human dominates another. We therefore can no longer trace a limit between a particular kind of exploitation that we call ‘slavery’ and other forms of exploitation. According to Pétré-Grenouilleau, this form of exploitation, slavery, emerged at the end of the Neolithic period. Even though it subsequently became widespread, it was never absolutely universal. This idea of slavery has undergone multiple transformations, variations, and periods of decline and renewal. Its strongest resurgence coincided with the birth of the modern abolitionist movement. Pétré-Grenouilleau believes in the historian’s ability to sift through language and restore a word’s conceptual meaning. However, by stripping a word of its connotations, we risk dismantling its power to critique. This disarms those who need to use this word as a weapon. For example, in the Marxist tradition, the connection between slavery, bondage, and wage slavery is very useful. Thanks to this connection, the type of communism that sees the seemingly free and contractual working conditions within capitalism as exploitative can claim the legacy of slave revolts. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht’s Spartacus League, so named after the famous leader of a slave revolt, provides a particularly illustrative example of such a move. The metaphor of slavery plays a key role in struggles for emancipation. All forms of domination are supposed to harken back to some form of slavery.

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At this point, we arrive at a third and final historiographical dispute. This dispute is over the issue of justice. Both moderate readers such as Pap Ndiaye25 and virulent critics such as Odile Tobner26 have responded to Pétré-Grenouilleau’s work. Once we consider these reactions and the numerous works from postcolonial studies that also engage with this question, we begin to make out two different conceptions of historical justice. According to the first conception, historians can try to be just. According to the second conception, any historian who thinks that they can be just in the face of an unjust situation can only ever bring about more injustice. According to this second conception, such historians serve the ideology of the conquerors. They exonerate the conquerors of their present guilt, and they thereby shift a bit more of that responsibility onto the oppressed and their descendants. Attempts to provide a global history of slavery that can appropriately measure all forms of slavery are criticised because they do a disservice to communities whose descendants are still oppressed today. Such critics implicitly adopt the following principle: historians cannot be just because history has never been just. From this point of view, we would have to contest the very possibility of evaluating slavery’s effects or reflecting upon its utility. When we do so, we often partially comprehend the phenomenon and thus lend it some historical rationale (and thereby justify it to some degree). We can now compare two opposing conceptions of theoretical justice: established justice and re-established justice. The first conception takes facts, figures, documents, and testimonies into consideration. It then tries to establish what happened, how it happened, and why it happened. It attempts to define its terms, isolate constant variables, identify certain phenomena across space and time in a way that surpasses their particular features, compare those phenomena, and then evaluate them in order to arrive at an equitable conclusion. According to the second conception of justice, historical justice can never be established because history isn’t just. History is unjust because it is written by the victors and conquerors – men, white people, Europeans, the wealthy, and so on. Such a history is marred by domination, exploitation, and the authority of the powerful.This means that, for historians, the only authentic ethical

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position entails restoring or re-establishing the balance. They have to compensate by treating phenomena in an unequal way. From this perspective, it is unjust to treat the slavery wrought by European colonisers and the slavery that some African people imposed on other African people as though they were the same thing. This would mean that apparent impartiality always eventually furthers an ideological cause. In this case, it exculpates Western guilt and instead directs the blame at formerly colonised peoples. There is no guarantee that we will find a compromise between these two notions of historical justice. Historiography becomes a battlefield where we cannot clearly distinguish between the incontestable reality of domination, the effects of domination produced by the historian’s discourse, and the feeling of domination experienced by the descendants of both previously oppressed peoples and their oppressors. Without taking sides, let us try to determine what makes this situation so difficult to reconcile. In the end, it becomes clear. History is essentially the history of domination, inequality, and injustice. Therefore, there can be no definitively just approach to history. Faced with so many past injustices, no position can be completely just. This is because ‘we’ is a form with roots in the past that allows living human beings to identify with the dead. Accordingly, people demand reparations for the injustices suffered by their ancestors.We do this as the inheritors, descendants, and representatives of our ancestors. Therefore, it is impossible to reconcile a re-established justice and an established justice. This is because a re-established justice aims to restore the balance disrupted by past injustices in the present moment, while an established justice strives to put equality into practice at any given moment. In order to re-establish justice between us, we try to rebalance our history by countering the inequalities of the past. This requires instituting compensatory inequalities in the present. On the other hand, if we are establishing justice, then we disregard the dead weight of past domination. We try instead to treat present-day living beings in an impartial manner. The first position treats the present unjustly by focusing on past injustices. By contrast, the second position’s focus on justice in the present does an injustice to history. All compromises between

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established and re-established justice diminish the disadvantages of one moment in time in favour of the other. There is a lesson to be learned from all of this. While domination is not necessary, the history of domination is. This history unbalances our identities to such an extent that it becomes impossible to ever be completely just.The fact that our dead have suffered injustice prohibits us from one day becoming emancipated, just, and definitively free from the shackles of all forms of domination. This means that there can never be any balance. The true asymmetry is not so much the one that domination introduces among us.We can overcome that kind of asymmetry. Instead, the true asymmetry is produced by the history and memory of domination. That asymmetry tinges all justice with injustice, all equality with inequality, and all emancipation with effects of domination. This is because the we dives into time27 and brings up debts and unexpected solidarities that bind the living to the dead. These bonds forbid us to imagine a future in which we could all be completely equal. Our classificatory categories have come un-grounded, and we are unable to endlessly extend and retract our identities. So now we all have to use phantasmatic identities in order to regroup ourselves. These identities bring the living and the dead together by strengthening our feeling of belonging. That feeling is in turn a little muddled because of our simultaneous feeling that we are in the minority. Now we can see how our we’s are formed. At this point in our story, we arrive at a state of confusion similar to the one characterising the stacked transparencies of identity from the beginning of this work. However, we did not initially understand how the dynamics and history of domination impose constraints on our transparencies. Now that those constraints have become apparent, we can see that what once looked like a game involving identities is actually a war. Completing the construction of our model has given us a vantage point from which we can witness the war of we’s.

The war of we’s How are we to understand this ‘war of we’s’, a war that echoes the sort of ‘war of all against all’ described by Thomas Hobbes?28

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This kind of war doesn’t involve two groups that stand in clear opposition to each other. Instead, this kind of war divides all our transparencies. It cuts through them all and causes us to confront the ways of belonging that exist around us and within ourselves. Those kinds of belonging are the vestiges of our old classificatory categories. They are what remains of our species, genders, races, classes, and ages, all of which have been thrown out of balance by the history of domination. There is no way out of this situation. It is impossible to shrink our we down to a small group’s identity, but it is also impossible to extend it so that it becomes a universal identity. Let us now return to the image of we that we sketched at the beginning of this investigation.We is made up of concentric circles and overlapping divisions. There are limits between us that vary according to our transparencies and the priority that we assign to them. Having been decoupled from each other, these transparencies are the ghostly remains of our classificatory categories. At least for the time being, those categories have become groundless. Our transparencies are planes of representation that have been peeled off and separated from what they represent. We use the lifeless husks of species, gender, race, class, age, and generation to affix political lines and limits to the reality of ourselves. In so doing, we draw a line around ourselves. In addition to distinguishing ourselves as pure singularities, we also differentiate ourselves through the groups in which we are gathered. How we prioritise those transparencies depends on how we understand them. At first, they appeared to allow for the free play of an unbounded we. But now we have ceased to be naive. Accordingly, we have included the constraints from which no one among us is exempt in our model. As a result, the game of we starts to look more like a war. There is no escaping the extensions and contractions of ourselves. When we stretch ourselves out, divisions inevitably arise within ourselves.When we instead concentrate ourselves into small, unified identities, we still have to recognise our similarity to others who remain outside of us. Most importantly, because we never perfectly match our form, domination slips in through the cracks and interrupts the balance between us. This forces us into a never-ending cycle of compensation as we respond to domination

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with counter-domination. Sometimes, the game picks up speed, and then the whole model is thrown into a panic. Each we then justifies itself in opposition to the other we’s. Because the we’s all contain both the present and the past, they authorise themselves through their feeling of being dominated, or of being reduced to a them among a we. In this way, political conflicts between species, genders, sexes, races, classes, and generations become inextricable from each other. Our use of identities is now just a strategic means of countering the way that our adversaries use identities. Each of us is torn in multiple directions by different forms of belonging, diverse interests, and various ideas of self. The battlefield is outside, within society, but it is also waged deep within the heart of each person.29 Throughout the second part of this investigation, we have been trying to piece together a brief story to explain our feeling, image, and idea of ourselves. We hoped to elucidate a model. More than just a model of we, we hope to have constructed a model of our we. This model ought to allow us to understand where we currently find ourselves in the history of our political subjectivity. Now, we have our answer. We have an image and an idea of the state of ourselves. By stretching our imagination to the limit, we can envision ourselves as a gigantic system of divisions that divides all living things. This system is a vast, complex apparatus composed of pulleys, hoists, and counterweights that constantly generate compensation. Thought cannot bring this system to a halt. We can only grasp it through the movement of a story that is also constantly changing. At times, as in our current historical moment, that system and story lead to a war waged between all identities. We are purposely using the word ‘war’ here. No matter where we might fall in the political sphere, we are at a point where we can no longer conceive of a common image of we.When we try to do so, we provoke a defiant response from others or give rise to suspicions that we are actually universalising a particularity and imposing a form of domination or counter-domination. Impositions of domination can involve subordinating one group to another, or they can subordinate one plane of identity to another, by prioritising religious identity over sexual identity, sexual identity over economic identity, and so on.

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In this war, the feeling of asymmetry becomes universally pervasive, in a symmetrical way. There are battle lines drawn between us. Both sides are certain of something that is impossible to verify: the other side is striving to impose its we on us. We are therefore justified in defending the particularity of our own we by any means necessary. This creates a state of confusion in which the combatants are blurred, and only the combat remains clear. This leads to a battle of one particularity against another, one identity against another, and one way of life against another. In other words, it’s our we against theirs.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

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Quoted in Messu, ‘Explication sociologique et domination sociale’. La Boétie, The Politics of Obedience, p. 59. Aristotle, The Politics, Book I, ch. v, p. 68. Aristotle, The Politics, Book I, ch. ii, p. 57. Augustine refuses to see slavery as commensurate with natural law. For him, it is more of an expression of the punishment for sin, whether it be personal or original sin. The principal cause of slavery is sin. Through the Fall, sin disrupts the balance of created nature. This is because ‘by the nature in which God first established man, no one is a slave of man or of sin’. See Saint Augustine, The City of God, Book XIX, ch. 15, p. 156. Annequin, ‘Grèce antique’, pp. 258–9. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, p. 77. While examining Finley’s ideas, Meillassoux posits a kind of ‘extraneousness’. He insists on the fact that slaves remain absolute strangers. Because they are de-socialised, they are prohibited from establishing bonds of kinship within their host society. Indeed, they are the ‘antiKin’. See Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery, pp. 101, 138. Testart, L’esclave, la dette et le pouvoir, p. 24. See Testart, ‘De la fidelité servile’, 113, Kindle. Translators’ note: Set-theoretically, the them within we is the complement of the exclusive we, when treating the broad we as the relevant domain. Pétré-Grenouilleau, Qu’est-ce que l’esclavage?, p. 271. Pétré-Grenouilleau, Qu’est-ce que l’esclavage?, p. 271. ‘Waking is in the dream, the worm is in the fruit.’Verlaine, ‘Nevermore II’, p. 97.

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15. Muray strategically places his arguments in the realm of feminist victories (and those of all other minorities) in a way that allows him to treat feminism as if it were the dominant ideology. See Muray, ‘Ce n’est qu’un début, continuons leur débâcle’. This also calls to mind Christopher Lasch’s work Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism, where he associates feminism’s success with economic liberalism’s victories and the promotion of individualism and careerism. Lasch argues that feminists did not contest the dominant social order but instead actually brought that order into existence. He thus disregards the internal divisions and debates on this subject that have always been a feature of feminism. 16. In an interview, sociologist Éric Fassin provides us with an example of a counterattack on this position: ‘This is a clear sign of the Right’s ideological hegemony. They want us to believe that saying horrific things about women, homosexuals, Muslims, and black people is a way of resisting political correctness. Nevertheless, their rhetoric rests on an inherent contradiction. Minorities are vilified for acting like victims, but then white heterosexual men are portrayed as victims of the tyranny of minorities.’ See Fassin, ‘Les “briseurs de tabous” sont les intellectuels organiques du néolibéralisme’. Fassin’s analysis is correct, but it presupposes two things. First, it presupposes the ability to objectively diagnose domination and show that the domination suffered by minorities (such as women, black people, homosexuals, etc.) is real and somehow primary, while the domination suffered by reactionary white heterosexual men is imaginary, symbolic, and secondary. Under this lens, their feeling of being dominated is nothing more than the feeling that they are no longer dominant. Secondly, Fassin’s analysis also presupposes that we can disregard the fact that some will see his own discourse as coming from a position of symbolic power, granted the fact that the author, Éric Fassin, is a white academic who can speak in public and has access to the media. This is also the case for the author of the work you are currently reading. The mere fact that we gave ourselves the right to publicly lecture in order to re-establish the truth about real domination is itself another indication that we are reproducing the effects of domination. It is inescapable. 17. See Braudel, ‘Capitalism and Dividing Up the World’, p. 114. 18. See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. 19. In his study of how the indigenous peoples of Peru confronted the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century, Nathan Wachtel tries to restore ‘the vision of the vanquished’ in a way that recalls the idea

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20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

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expressed by Walter Benjamin’s thesis VII in ‘On the Concept of History’. See Wachtel, The Vision of the Vanquished; Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’. See Sadri Khiari’s ‘Nous avons besoin d’une stratégie décoloniale’ (‘We need a decolonial strategy’) for more on the idea that differentiated or discordant ‘space-times’ can be used to divide up portions of territory and history in which populations live according to different rules and values. This is something that universalism fails to comprehend. Khiari writes that ‘thinking a decolonial border strategy requires us to break with the notion of a single, homogeneous political field’. This homogeneous political field would enable us to judge populations rooted in colonialism though the lens of a notion of global history that has been constructed according to Western history. See Khairi, ‘Nous avons besoin d’une stratégie décoloniale’. Pétré-Grenouilleau, Qu’est-ce que l’esclavage?, pp. 11–18. Pétré-Grenouilleau, Qu’est-ce que l’esclavage?, p. 195. Pétré-Grenouilleau, Qu’est-ce que l’esclavage?, pp. 14–15. Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau’s ‘Les traites négrières ne sont pas des genocides’ (‘The slave trade was not genocide’), an interview given to Le Journal du Dimanche on 12 June 2005, sparked significant controversy. Pap Ndiaye disputes some of Grenouilleau’s theses, while also defending him from accusations of racism and revisionism levied by COLLECTIFDOM (Le Collectif des Antillais, Guyanais, Réunionnais et Mahorais [The Collective of Caribbean, Guianan, Réunionese, and Mahoran peoples]). See Ndiaye, ‘Pap Ndiaye: Note critique sur Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau’. Odile Tobner writes as follows: ‘Apart from accusing Arabs of being as responsible as the West, the other pillar supporting white science’s attempts to exonerate French history from this inglorious chapter relies on African collaboration in the slave trade.’ Tobner argues that ‘these historians will never advise their readers to show their critical thinking skills when faced with a history that is never completely objective. History always lies to a certain extent. History at least always lies through omission because we are unable to give a total inventory of facts. History is first and foremost a matter of authority, and authority belongs to the victors.’ In her excoriating critique of Grenouilleau’s work and its ‘ideological function’, Tobner reproaches him for the way that he describes ‘three slave trades: the Arab-Muslim slave trade, the slave trade within Africa, and the European slave trade’ because ‘there was actually only ever one slave trade with exclusively racist foundations, and that was the

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slave trade carried out by Europeans’. See Tobner, Du racisme français: quatre siècles de négrophobie, pp. 267, 270–2. 27. Translators’ note: Garcia’s use of the phrase ‘le nous plonge dans le temps’, which we have translated as ‘the we dives into time’, recalls a similar turn of phrase from the final sentence of Proust’s Le Temps retrouvé [Time Regained]: ‘Du moins, si elle m’était laissée assez longtemps pour accomplir mon œuvre, ne manquerais-je pas d’abord d’y décrire les hommes (cela dût-il les faire ressembler à des êtres monstrueux) comme occupant une place si considérable, à côté de celle si restreinte qui leur est réservée dans l’espace, une place au contraire prolongée sans mesure – puisqu’ils touchent simultanément comme des géants plongés dans les années, à des époques si distantes, entre lesquelles tant de jours sont venus se placer – dans le Temps’. Proust, Le Temps retrouvé, p. 463. ‘That is, if strength were granted me for long enough to accomplish my work, I should not fail first and foremost to describe men, even if the results were to make them resemble monstrous beings, as occupying a place, a very considerable place compared with the restricted one which is allotted to them in space, a place on the contrary prolonged past measure, for they touch simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, epochs that they experience as immensely far apart, between which many, many days have acquired a place – in Time.’ Quoted in Kristeva, Time and Sense, p. 293.There are many genetic critical studies of this final page of Proust’s manuscript in particular, because of the numerous sections that he crossed out, amended, and added, leading to variants in publication that depend upon editorial choices. For another representative study of this passage from genetic criticism, see Neefs, ‘Written on the Page’. 28. Hobbes’s saying originates from the Latin phrase Bellum omnium contra omnes: ‘They are in that condition which is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man.’ See Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I, ch. XIII, § 62, 84. 29. Translators’ note: The language that Garcia chooses to describe the battlefield within resonates with Solzhenitsyn’s famous lament from The Gulag Archipelago: ‘If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’ Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, p. 168.

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We may very well be entering a long period in which our we’s are destabilised and torn apart politically. However, this is not the end. We splinter into antagonistic identities that resurface from the past and are based in class, race, ethnicity, nation, religion, and so on. As we do so, these divisions make an idea that we all share appear even more clearly.While affirming our sensitivity and our humanity, we have also made them seem like a hypocritical mask that merely hides our differences. Nevertheless, in this atmosphere permeated by the hostile affirmation of our differences, we can once again catch a glimpse of the truth of that sensitivity and humanity. We need naive ideas such as ‘what we all have in common’ in order to engage in politics. Such a universal we takes forms such as ‘we, all humans and animals’, or ‘we, all things that are equally alive’. However, the ecumenical idea of ‘we, everyone’ is no longer the end1 of we. Indeed, ‘we, everyone’ is just the extended idea of we. When it comes to the story of we, neither war nor peace has the last word. Let us now try to avoid giving in to either one of these oversimplifications.We should neither affirm combat as superior nor defend reconciliation as supreme. We should instead try to think of we as an errant and inadequate form. Neither agonistic appeals to war nor irenic calls for peace fully account for the structure of we. After reflecting upon political subjectivity, many people favour a we that can only be brought about through struggle. From this, they often conclude by affirming that struggle has no end because struggle is an end unto itself.This would mean that struggle is the very meaning of political life. Struggle becomes its own reward. We see this in Nietzsche’s works2 and in the Invisible Committee’s appeal entitled

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‘To our friends’.3 We also find this in Benedetto Croce’s works4 and in certain Marxist interpretations that have renounced the notion of a necessary end of history (along with the proletariat’s requisite and foreseeable victory). In all of these works, the final meaning of we emerges as the endless struggle of a political subjectivity that knows neither peace (which is illusory) nor reconciliation (which is deceptive). Chantal Mouffe similarly holds that social spaces and social identities contain their own inherent antagonisms. While still being faithful to Marxism in her own way, she can also be counted among those who no longer hold out hope for universal reconciliation, which she identifies with a liberal way of thinking that fails to recognise the agon as the foundation of politics. Instead, she sees all of the forces that confront us as endless, inescapable conflicts.5 From this perspective, the only way out of these conflicts would be to bring society to an end. This would also mean the end of we. Nevertheless, society has yet to come to an end. So, at this point, anything that seems to reconcile our collective subjectivity must be false and hypocritical.The ‘agonists’ among us are those who would rather have an honest struggle or even an honest war instead of a peace that distorts the truth. Sure, there may be a war going on, but it’s a war we don’t want. Let us therefore put the notion that struggle is the end of all ends behind us. If we then explore the other extreme of the ethical and political spectrum, we find political forms of pacifism. They posit a horizon wherein we will all be reconciled.There we would finally be what we really are. Having fully realised ourselves, every one of us would be equal. Earth would be peaceful and society would have no classes, no states, and no power. Or perhaps we would all be united in God, or through absolute Spirit. Once we finish formulating our political beliefs and sketching out the image of our ultimate goal, our cosmic and earthly visions of peace present the same ideal. This irenic ideal entails a life and a humanity that have been shorn of their false antagonisms in order to finally become full and complete subjects. However, as we have shown, these visions only make sense if we think of identities based in species, gender, race, and class as false identities, which would mean continuing to blind ourselves to the very structure of we.

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We cannot exalt a fundamental confrontation as if it were the constant essence of we throughout all historical periods. However, we also cannot simply assert that there is a reassuring irenic ideal on the horizon. Our search for a happy and reconciled end happens in vain. And yet we is a system of divisions that is so resistant to endings and peace that even the absence of an end, which is to say infinite struggle, cannot be its governing principle. It is not impossible for a we to halt or find peace.There are no logical reasons that oppose such a possibility. For example, in certain human civilisations, the structure of we was, if not entirely immobilised, at least slowed to a crawl for very long periods. It could be that modernity has sped up the movement of that structure for some time now, and this acceleration has in turn rapidly changed the dividing lines. It is difficult to determine whether or not this is the case. When it comes to other peoples and other time periods, perhaps it is a lack of information that sometimes makes their systems of divisions into species, gender, race, and class seem more stable and more durable than ours. What we know for certain is that the transformation of the way in which our identities are divided happens at many different speeds. Moreover, we feel and experience those speeds in different ways. It is possible to imagine that our current divisions could be prolonged for years, decades, or even centuries.We should not exclude the possibility that we might establish some kind of peace and reconciliation between our universal idea and our particular realities. It’s just that this peace will never be definitive. The longer that it lasts, the more history and tradition will reinforce it. As a result, such a peace will be increasingly prone to being suddenly torn apart by an unexpected and powerful reaction. In all likelihood, modernity was just such a reaction to a feeling that stemmed from an extended period in which tradition had stabilised the divisions of our differences into species, genders, races, and classes.Whether they are baseless or well founded, such feelings still prompt a reaction. By privileging variations of intensity, modernity broke down the traditional categories that had previously classified society and living things. Then the struggle began anew. We were caught up in the desire and need to put our particular differences on display. These differences had been masked by the intellectual propagation of universal identities. This was due to the spread of

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humanism as well as evolutionary theory, communism, liberalism, and globalisation through the circulation of goods, people, and communication. The movement of we stops, and then it starts up again. The history of we oscillates continuously. This means that any praise of the eternal struggle between broad and exclusive we’s can always be contradicted by the possibility of a relative peace. By the same token, all dreams of peace that promise our ultimate reconciliation run the risk of being undermined by our deep desire for struggle. The truth is, we is a perpetual movement that can pass through states of rest. It has no end and it obeys no governing principles. It is a manifestation of living subjectivity that has organised itself politically. It is torn asunder and then assembled once more. It takes on a form, and then it becomes deformed. As such, it is always a little more than singular and a little less than universal. It is particular. To visualise it from the greatest distance possible, we try to see the limits of how we represent history as a whole, and even more broadly, the limits of all living things that individuate and organise themselves. When we do this, we catch a glimpse of a structure that is never just or true. When it comes to we, there is neither justice nor political truth. We is radically inadequate. It is a changing structure, but one that is not destined to endless change. It is marked by the history of domination, which constantly unbalances it. It has no ground, and it has no end, but it is not an end unto itself. The we is not the struggle for life, or the class struggle, or the clash of civilisations, or the eternal conflict between masculine and feminine principles. We should rule out these grand images of the end of all ends, and we should instead try to rationally imagine ourselves without having any end in mind. We can now draw a clear image of the internal logic of we. This logic develops step by step, but the end changes with every passing moment. Its end is never immutable. We is a dynamic manifestation of animal and human subjectivity that always lacks something of what we are. This could be because a we is too large or because a we is too small. Or perhaps a we is unbalanced by domination.This lack may also result from a we that treats the living unjustly by incorporating the dead, or a we that neglects justice for the dead by focusing on the living. Every

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we always lacks something. Addressing these shortcomings provides us with a temporary end. The only end of we is the state to which it leads next.We’s tend to lead us to realise what our we lacks right now. We have arrived at the end of our exploration of all possible we’s, and we can now affirm the following: we’s always function through compensation. The necessary shortcoming of we is visible in the gap between a more intense, particular we (exclusive) and a more extended, universal we. This gap is what sets in motion the logic that governs the politics of our first-person plural. Now we can explain ourselves. When we affirm the unity of humanity, say ‘we, humans’, and make humanity into the ideal end of we, we make our contradictory characteristics clearer. Both our internal differences, such as those of ‘race’, and the identity that we have in common with others, an identity that connects us back to other animals, become more visible. We have seen this occur on many occasions. On the other hand, when we affirm our belonging to a community that includes all other animal species, everything that separates us from them suddenly resurfaces. Therefore, a we is a forced identity that makes the differences between us appear all the more clearly. It is also a forced difference that makes the identity that we have in common with others increasingly apparent. Within any we whatsoever, an excess of identity produces a lack of difference, and, likewise, an excess of difference produces a lack of identity. Whatever a we lacks becomes its next historical end. For an extremely small we such as our tribe or our family, stretching out towards universality gradually becomes an end. On the other hand, the end for a more diffuse we such as ‘we, children of God’ lies in its contraction. Anyone who primarily lives according to a very large and ideal identity (such as that of humanity) increasingly desires a more particular and concrete form of belonging. On the other hand, those whose lives are conditioned by a stronger but more limited identity (such as that of kinship, clan, and so on) cannot prevent following generations from desiring a broader sense of belonging. In the end, every we reveals a lack. So, within domination, emancipation becomes the ultimate end of we. However, within emancipation, domination (in the guise of authority, order, hierarchy, necessary inequality, and so on) becomes the end once again. We can never

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arrive at a totally definitive understanding of we, but it has its own ad hoc historical logic. Instead of absolute progress or absolute regress, there is a logic of compensation that allows the system of divisions of we to maintain itself through transformation. What a we lacks at a given moment serves as its horizon for the following moment.We all want to be free. However, the less free we are, the more we desire our freedom. Conversely, the freer we become, the less we desire our freedom.We always lose something. Depending on the moment, we either lack universality or particularity. When we extend and emancipate ourselves, we start to lose our particularity; however, we begin to feel a lack of universality once some of our particularity is regained. We have finally arrived at the most just rendering of a form which, despite always being unjust, is still used in all of our political endeavours. We is a system of compensation. It lacks identity when it becomes too differentiated, and it lacks difference when it becomes overly identified. This is how our we’s function. We ourselves change through the application of this function on a case by case basis. Our historical identities do not imprison us. Rather, they are the shifting form of our political subjectivity. It is important for us to avoid seeing the particular differences between us as some kind of curse. Our differences are not a Tower of Babel exiling us from an ideal, original state of togetherness or from a universal political community. Our identities form our condition. They cannot and should not be overcome. They are neither false nor irrational. Even though our identities are not grounded, absolutely true, or absolutely just, they do follow a logic. We can understand that logic if we adopt a dynamic understanding of ourselves and bear the history of domination in mind. Does this mean that we should do away with identities? No, it does not. Nor should we decide instead that our identities are here to stay. After all, the idealism that defines a ‘we, everyone’ and promises to put an end to all of our particularities and antagonisms also produces an identity that is itself a necessary part of the overall logic of we. So, what are we supposed to do? Domination is not a necessary constraint. We can always fight against it and try to create an idea of we without domination.

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Systems of domination themselves oblige us to oppose them with the idea of our shared emancipation. This idea6 represents a ‘we, everyone’ that moves beyond our antagonisms based in species, gender, race, class, and generation. Every form of domination contains within it the we that is the key to its own overcoming. Domination cannot appear to be eternally sustainable. Nevertheless, the terms of all struggles are always complicated, obscured, and ultimately impossible to discern. They ultimately become impossible to differentiate because, to the extent that we justify ourselves, counter-domination unfailingly produces effects of domination. Everything that exists in relation to historical domination produces effects of domination. There is no way to repair the injustice between us while being absolutely just. We can only be relatively and reasonably unjust in this pursuit. This is why we must pay attention to the counter-effects that we create by moving from one transparency to another. The history of feminism and the history of decolonisation both provide good examples of how it is always possible to invert effects of domination. What one transparency considers to be emancipation produces effects of domination on another. In spite of operating in good faith, while we fight against something on one plane, we always risk producing the opposite of what we are fighting for on another plane. However, paying unremitting attention to our own effects of domination is hardly a satisfactory political solution.This constant surveillance and vigilance regarding the effects of domination that we produce also produces effects of domination by making us think we have totally mastered language and thought. The notion that we can completely control our words, ideas, and behaviours begins as a means of self-control, but it inevitably leads us to censor others. From the 1980s onwards we have seen a reaction against what white male conservative thinkers have dubbed ‘political correctness’. This was a response to the felt effects of a symbolic domination in the public sphere. The effects of this symbolic domination resulted from the push to curb the effects of domination. We have much to learn from that reaction. We can no longer deny that emancipation and the politics of emancipation have created indirect effects of domination, and they will always continue to do so.

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Nevertheless, knowing that this is the case should not stop us from taking action. This knowledge should not prevent us from making up our minds and defending a certain idea of our equality. Instead, it should allow us to realise that a political idea is not and cannot be a just idea or a purely emancipatory solution. A political idea is a reasoned negotiation that involves exchanging a little less domination for a few more effects of domination. Those who defend the necessity of inequality, hierarchy, and authority should not think that they are shielded from the paradoxical logic of we. All politics of domination create effects of emancipation. Similarly, all reactionary politics have some progressive results.When it comes to we, there is no real victory. There are only choices that we take on ourselves as opposed to the ones that we endure. We cannot completely wipe out the domination among us, nor can we simply accept it.This is because domination contains within itself the principle that allows us to challenge domination: a broader, more equal idea of we.We can work to advance equality until we feel as though we have stretched our magnanimous idea of ourselves so much that our we threatens to split open like a skin that has become too tight. Something is lost in all notions of equality. Accordingly, in order to seek equality, we must recognise that it will never be completely adequate or definitive. In our current moment, we should be able to assert both our heightened awareness of the way that we functions and the lack of awareness that its functioning entails. We know that no idea of we is completely adequate in politics.We have also learned that there is neither a just we nor a real we. And yet, in view of this knowledge, the illusion of an emancipated we is just as legitimate as the realist idea that domination is necessary. Of course, the idealist illusion of emancipation is neither falser nor truer than the realist idea of necessary historical domination. We can still desire it as long as we recognise it as an illusion. We can embrace an ideal of extension and emancipation, but we have to keep in mind that this will never be the end of we. We no longer have to force ourselves to believe in some iteration of messianic politics. We realise that we will never be fully reconciled, and we do not bemoan this fact. We now understand the logic of we. We no longer feel doomed to be separated from each other for all time. The truth is that whenever

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our identity becomes overly large and therefore false, we are ineluctably separated from ourselves. Then, after being scattered and dispersed, we see that those whom we had previously thought of as ‘the others’ are actually very similar to us. So we gather ourselves together again. We can only tell who is like us when we are politically separated, and we can only see what separates us politically when we view ourselves as all alike. Now we understand the situation in which we find ourselves. The idea of we has become too weak to contain the intensity of the differences between us. These differences can no longer be expressed through grounded categories, and we see the emergence within us of a kind of shared passion for everything that separates us. This passion runs through a series of ethereal identities linked to ancestors, clans, sects, families, and so on. Those identities sink their roots deep into the realm of the dead to create unexpected solidarities and hostilities among the living. This happens within all political groups, whether they are revolutionary, reformist, democratic, religious, republican, patriotic, fascist, and so on. No one can escape this situation. This is the way things are in the world today. This does not mean that we should just give up. Maybe our times have it wrong. We should at least try to understand this situation and its scope. Maybe then we can find something within this present war of identities that gives us hope for some form of peace. This peace is not and never will be the end of we, just as struggle, combat, and war are not and will not be the end of we. Nevertheless, there are those among us who still hope to establish some sort of provisional peace. We can see times of widespread hostility as defining moments when we can work to rekindle our oft-forgotten desire for the idea of we. Instead of preparing to live in a continuous state of open confrontation, we who hope for some form of peace ready ourselves to grapple with the widespread eruption and expansion of the ways in which we understand differences, communities, and forms of belonging. We also brace ourselves for the violent rejection of hypocritical forms of union that are too broad and too empty. This situation will give rise to a new provisional end of we.This end reverses what has come before and gives us an idea of ‘we, everyone’ that is once again desirable. But the

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longer we live in a conflictual state of we that is repeatedly carved up and divided, the longer we will lack an image of what we all are. Is this all we can hope to gain from the back and forth of history? Now that we are fully conscious of what we are time and time again, should we imagine ourselves as beings who are inescapably caught up in history’s pendulum effect as it swings between diffusion and fragmentation? There is this pendulum effect, but there is also the story that we tell about ourselves. That story is still in progress. All throughout this work, we have been telling the story of ourselves. Simply telling that story has changed us. We have advanced our idea of ‘we, ourselves’, and we are no longer sympathetic to reactionary, modern, and postmodern models of our identities. Now we are already searching for the next step forward, and what could be more normal than that? Political thought does not depend on a messianic conception of the end of all ends. Rather, political thought consists of the search for the next step forward. If we agree that our condition matches the model elaborated in this work, and if we accept the logic of that model, then our current goal is the following: to be on the lookout for the image of we that will begin to re-emerge around us in the years to come. Is there something that we have in common that could again become stronger than our particularities? Could it do so without erasing those particularities? Perhaps what we share is an awareness of all that we have tried to elucidate as much as possible in this work. To what does the ‘we’ of the present work refer? For the time being, it refers to none other than those who have the feeling – be it vague or distinct – of having arrived at this point of the historical story that we have made for ourselves and about ourselves.This work has been written using the first-person plural so that anyone who recognises any aspect of themselves or their experiences within these pages can take hold of them for themselves, regardless of which side they are on. By paying equal attention to all we’s, we have gradually traced the silhouette of an ideal person. We have traced an open and broad we that lies behind all the particular we’s that we have evoked. By giving voice to this we from one chapter to the next, we have sketched an idea of we that underlies the whole range of possible political identities.

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This is the new idea of we that we now want to interpret and defend by seeing through what tears us apart. Moreover, to the degree that we feel increasingly torn apart, we will also surely see a re-emerging and growing image of what holds us all together. Neither the former nor the latter means the end of we. They are only ever the remotest boundaries of our imagination.The we vacillates between these boundaries. Beneath the tableau of a unified humanity, the lines of division outlining everything that separates us are glaringly visible. Today, that is all we see. And yet the movement has not stopped. In fact, the time has already come for us to see a new we arise from beneath the same battle lines that will surely soon pit us against one another. We have some idea of this we. Now we are searching for its political image, which is never discovered by one person alone.We hope that image will appear all around us in the years to come.We hope for something like a drawing traced on a windowpane. At first, it is barely visible. However, as the temperature drops on one side and water condenses on the other, it becomes increasingly easy to see. The image had been there all along, but we could not really see it. The more the conditions on either side are opposed, the more divided and irreconcilable we seem to be. In this situation, the image of what we all are has a better chance to emerge anew and shine through our transparencies. The we that has been the subject of this work all along may serve as a first sketch. This we designates all of us who recognise ourselves – to some extent – as a part of the story that we have just finished telling.

Notes 1. Translators’ note: Garcia’s use of ‘end’ (fin) throughout the final chapter of Book II of the present work is purposely ambiguous, if not outright contradictory, in a way that befits his ultimate point regarding the political possibilities of ‘we’. In the first instance, the end in question is teleological, that is, the completion or fulfilment of the projection that is to be realised or established by those who make use of ‘we’.There is also another, annihilative sense that accompanies the first sense of fulfilment, one which registers the fact that, upon the completion of its project, such a ‘we’ would disappear or cease

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to exist. Indeed, if, as postulated by the first line of the present work, ‘we’ is the subject of politics, then ‘we’ would become needless or useless after the completion of such a politics. In this way, we might think of the ‘we’ as being ‘perfective’ in the grammatical sense: to be perfect is to have been completed. Such a ‘we’ would continue on in the present as a spectral indication of something whose present relevance is conditioned by its fulfilment in the past. Moreover, to these senses we might add two additional meanings: as the French title of the present work is Nous (we), at this point in the work we have quite literally arrived at both the end of We Ourselves (the present work) and ‘we’ (the theoretical term whose elaboration and definition have been the central subject matter of the work that is now ending). Friedrich Nietzsche is aware that if a form of life feeds off combat with another, it is incapable of imagining that the end will be either absolute peace or the annihilation of the other: ‘Anyone who lives for the sake of battling an enemy has an interest in keeping that enemy alive.’ See Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, ch. 9, § 531, p. 271. In pluralistic fashion, the Invisible Committee willingly admits in this work that their aims do not entail the pacification of we: ‘Our party will never enjoy a peaceful unity.’ From this, the authors derive an ethical conception that posits that any happiness whatsoever is antagonistic: ‘To the question, “Your idea of happiness?” Marx replied, “To fight”. To the question, “Why do you fight?” we reply that our idea of happiness requires it.’ See The Invisible Committee, ‘To our friends’. ‘Its own essence demands that life must be a conflict, that the conflict must be perpetual, and that the annihilation of good is as impossible as the annihilation of evil [. . . The ethical ideal of liberty] places the end in no self-contradictory ideal of happiness, calm and beatitude or escape from pain, but in the clear, coherent, unequivocal ideal of a creation to be achieved [. . .] The liberal mind knows very well that it does not bring peace but a sword, not ease but troubles.’ See Croce, ‘Justice and Liberty’, pp. 104–6. See Mouffe, Agonistics:Thinking the World Politically. Translators’ note: The fact that Garcia invokes the terms ‘idea’ and ‘image’ in rapid succession in the concluding sections of the present work should not be missed, particularly because of the central role played by those terms in The Life Intense. His use of ‘idea’ and ‘image’ can be difficult to define, but we can achieve a summary

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understanding of these terms by attending to the way in which he describes their mutual interaction and interdependence. For Garcia, an image is associated with what impacts us directly. It is thereby associated with the concept of intensity. To turn to his preferred example, we may never see the interaction of specific electrons that generate electricity, but we are all too familiar with a lightning strike, the way that the hair on the back of our neck stands on end when we rub our stockinged feet across a carpet, and the shock suffered by our partner when we touch or kiss them after having built up this static electricity. This image helps us understand what the experience of electricity is like, but it also opens the door to the question of what something that is like that must be like. This shift is where we can locate the passage from the question of feeling and intensity to the question of thinking and identification. We can try to string together the commonalities apparent in our different experiences of electricity and determine their logic. In doing so, we give rise to an idea of electricity that becomes disconnected from any particular experience of the intensity of electricity. The Life Intense summarises this movement thus: ‘Little by little, humanity forgot the electric nature of those entities, but the idea remained in the bloodstream’ (Garcia, The Life Intense, p. 19). Nevertheless, it is important to note that the passage between image and idea is a two-way street. The eventual divorce of idea from image is also what gives rise to the need to find new images that can allow us to again experience what has been identified through an idea. Ideas can allow us to identify things, but that very process of identification also causes things to slip away from themselves. The search for new images is motivated by the search to return from the abstraction of the idea and return the thing to itself. The image is what prompts our thinking and the identification of things through ideas, but the identification made possible through ideas also degrades and deforms the experience of the image of what has been identified. We should take care not to miss the way in which the compensatory dynamics that characterise the logic of image and idea are homologous to the logic of domination and emancipation expounded in the present work: every step towards emancipation brings with it a little bit of domination, and likewise, domination contains within it the seeds of its own failure that ultimately create an opening for the possibility of emancipation. This homology is also reflected

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in the dynamic logic of we. The more the image of an experience is identified through an idea, the less intense it becomes. The same is true for the extension of an identity: as it increases, extension makes identities both less recognisable (identifiable) and less intense. For more on the dynamics of image and idea, see chapter 1, ‘An Image’, and chapter 2, ‘An Idea’, in Garcia, The Life Intense.

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Index

absence of limits, 152 age, 142–8, 160n aggression, 177 al-Banna, Hassan, 21 al-Rifa’i, Rafi, 20 androgyny, 117 Anthropocene, 93n Anti-Oedipus, 31 anti-racist, 131 anti-speciesism, 55–6, 57, 77, 113 ‘anticategorical’, 161n Antigone, 54 aristocratic we, 26–7 Aristotle, 189–90 asymmetry, 186–8, 209 Augustine of Hippo, 163–4, 212n Benjamin, Walter, 168 Bihr, Alain, 139–40 Bloom, Allan, 155n Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 125 borders, 70–2 Bordessoule, Éric, 70–1 Boudon, Raymond, 142 Bryant, Levi, 33

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Buddhism, 164 Bush, George W., xi Butler, Judith, 45, 154n categorical decomposition, 120, 122, 126, 135–6, 144 categorical domination, 187–8 Cavalieri Paola, 171 Cavalieri, Paola and Singer, Peter, 29 The Cerebral Unconscious, 31 Chamboredon, Claude, 160n Chapman Catt, Carrie, 9 Charkrabarty, Dipesh, 92n Chauvel, Louis, 136–7 Chevallier, Jacques, 15 Chimpanzee Politics, 159n Churchill, Winston, 89n ‘circle of we’, 5, 7–8, 107 circles, 30–1 class, 133–42 classificatory categories, 106, 109, 110, 114, 115, 117, 123, 124, 129–30, 142, 151 coefficient of transparency, 75 colonialism, 15–16 Comenius, John Amos, 144

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249

INDEX

The Coming Insurrection, 27–8, 91n The Communist Manifesto, 40 constructivism, 160n contour, 66–70 Cox, Brian, 35 Crania Americana, 155n Crenshaw, Kimberlé, ix, 59–60, 62 critical effect, 45 Crozier, Michel, 159n custom, 44–5 Cuvier, Georges, 96n cyborg, 34 dan Fodio, Usman, 71 Darwin, Charles, x, 111–12 Darwinism, 110 de Beauvoir, Simone, 9–10 de Candolle, Augustin Pyramus, 108–9 de Gobineau, Arthur, 123–5, 126–7 de Maistre, Joseph, 57 de Montaigne, Michel, 28 Debord, Guy, 80 degrees of precision, 51 Deleuze, Gilles, 31, 93n demarcation, 51 Derrion, Michel, 39 Descartes, René, 157–8n Dictionnaire des esclavages, 191, 193 difference, 129, 220 different difference, 106–7 Dire nous, 98n domination, 189, 222–3 dynamic constraint, 162, 180–1 dynamic principle of religion, 165 elasticity, 162, 171, 173–4 Éléments de botanique, ou méthode pour connaître les plantes, 96n

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Ellison, Ralph, 12 emancipation, 197 ‘end’, 226n Engels, Friedrich, 166 equality in inequality, 190 Erasmus, 92n ‘eulogy of limits’, 128–30 excommunication, 68–70 extension, 68, 100n, 101n, 129, 149, 173, 179–80 ‘extensivists’, 140–1 Farris, Sara, 61 Fassin, Éric, 213n feminism, 10 Form and Object, 93–4n, 96n, 100n, 160n The French Republic, 17–18 Freud, Sigmund, 177 Gaudemet, Jean, 68–9 gender, 114–22, 154n Gender Trouble see Butler, Judith genital sex, 115–16 Gombrowicz, Witold, 36 groundless categories, 151–2 Guattari, Félix, 31, 93n The Gulag Archipelago, 215n Gurr, Ted, 48 Haden, Patricia, 11 Halbwachs, Maurice, 160n Hanus, Gilles, 94–5n Haraway, Donna, 34 Harman, Graham, 33 Herzl, Theodor, 22 Hinschius, Paul, 68 humanists, 54–8, 144 ‘humanity’, 107 Huntington, Samuel, 19–20 Hussein, Saddam, xi

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250 ‘idea’, 227–8n ‘the idea of an image’, 99n ‘idealism’, 162–3, 179 identity, 179–84, 220, 221 ‘image’, 227–8n impassable line, 111, 115, 116, 118 L’Imposture du choc des civilisations, 89n intensities, 68, 100n, 101n, 127, 179–80 ‘intensivists’, 141 ‘interclasses’, 138–9 ‘intersectionality’, 59–64 intersex, 118 The Invisible Committee, 227n; see also The Coming Insurrection Invisible Man, 12–13 justice, 207 lack, 220–1 Lasch, Christopher, 213n Latour, Bruno, 33 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 53 Lennon, John, 37 Leopold, Aldo, 30 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 127–8, 130 The Life Intense, 98n, 99n, 100–1n, 227–9n lines, 110, 111, 125 Linnaeus, Carl, 96n love, 182 Lukács, György, 135, 167 Luxemburg, Rosa, 73 Macherey, Pierre, 138 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 172–3 Mandel, Ernest, 167

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WE OURSELVES

Marx, Karl, 134 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, 165 Marxism, 78, 135, 141–2, 166–8 masculinism, 198–9 Mayr, Ernst, 110 McKown, Delos, 166–7 Michard, Claire, 10–11 Middleton, Donna, 11 mixed race, 127 modernity, 218 Morin, Edgar, 69 Morton, Samuel George, 126 Mouffe, Chantal, 174, 217 Muray, Philippe, 155–6n, 213n Næss, Arne, 34 Nature, 85, 106–7, 153n ‘neighborly hostility’, 176–8 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 227n Niger, 71 Nigeria, 71 Nix, Don C., 35 Nkrumah, Kwame, 87–8n ‘Nous avons besoin d’une stratégie décoloniale’, 214n opacity, 77–8, 81 ‘our name’, 14 overlap, 70–4, 81, 82 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 8–9 particularities, 152 Patricia Hill Collins, 99n peace, 218–19, 224 ‘permanent becoming’, 150 Pétré-Grenouilleau, Olivier, 192–3

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251

INDEX

Pinker, Steven, 169–71 posthumanism, 114 Pour une lecture profane des conflits, 89n power struggle, 176 Puar, Jasbir, 61 pure boundary, 148 ‘pure difference’, 120–1 Quessada, Dominique, 92n Qu’est-ce que l’esclavage, 205 Quran, 164, 184n race, 122–33 ‘racialism’, 96–7n, 123 re-covering, 78–81, 97n re-covery, 102n re-established justice, 207–9 re-grounding, 120, 130 ‘realism’, 172, 179 Rebatet, Lucien, 23 religious groups, 73–4 representations, 131–2 resonance, 115 Robinson, Patricia, 11 Saint Paul, 40, 163 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 45, 47, 95n Schmitt, Carl, 174–6 Scott, Joan Wallach, 60–1, 98n self, 32–3 sexual differentiation, 116 sexuation, 121 Shakespeare, William, 54 Simpson, O.J., ix ‘simultaneity’, 61 slavery, 189–90, 191–3, 196, 204–6 ‘The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups’, 137

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Society and Solitude, 38 Sokoto Caliphate, 71 ‘solitude’, 93–4n ‘space-time’, 205 species, 106–14 ‘Species as Family Resemblance Concepts’, 153–4n Spectacle, 80 Stalin, Joseph, 18–19 Sur une communauté des soliatires, 94n ‘swag’, 26 System des katholischen Kirchenrechts, 68–9 system of divisions, 148 Testo Junkie, 119–21 Thucydides, 172 Time Regained, 215n Tobner, Odile, 214–15n Toynbee, Arnold J., 173–4 transparencies, 64–6, 73, 74, 79, 81, 100n, 110, 131–2 Tristan, Flora, 62 un-grounding, 85, 108, 134, 147, 149 Union Nationale, 53 Valéry, Paul, 31 veganism, 75–6 war, 217 We nous, 85n ‘we are the youth on the move’, 24–5 we of everyone and no one, 25–6 we-everything, 35 ‘we-of-ideas’, 43–4, 47

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252 We (cont.) ‘we-of-interests’, 42–4, 45, 47 ‘we, animals with practical autonomy’, 29 ‘we, black people’, 12–13, 15, 42, 50 ‘we, everyone’, 197, 216 ‘we, humans’, 14–15, 220 ‘we, the colonized’, 14, 16 ‘we, the cyborgs’, 29–30 ‘we, the fascists’, 23 ‘we, the great apes’, 29 ‘We, the People’, 18 ‘we, the Russians’, 18–19 ‘we, the women’, 9, 10, 11, 15, 42 ‘we, the youth’, 54–5 ‘we, white people’, 51

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WE OURSELVES

We, Algerians, 15, 88n ‘We need a decolonial strategy’, 214n ‘We Were Here First: The Native Americans’, 13 ‘whiteness’, 131 Whites, Jews, and Us:Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love, 156–9n Whitman, Walt, 34 Wiegman, Robyn and Wilson, Elizabeth, 154–5n Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 153n Wittig, Monique, 10–11 Wolff, Francis, 28–9 A Woman of Thirty, 145–6 Woolf,Virginia, 86n Zamyatin,Yevgeny, 27

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