20030414 Political Ontology

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Political Subject and Absolute Immanence1

This is the subject that we want to confront here, a subject that is all the more important in the face of

the fundamentalist infection, whether it be Islamic or Western and/or Christian, which risks wiping

out the great secular values of tolerance to which we have grown accustomed.

I will situate the problem within the debate on the multitude. To begin with, inEmpire, the concept

of the multitude is defined against that of the people. It is defined there as a set of singularities

bearing inalienable rights, and thus in contrast to what we encounter in the process of constitution of

the modern State. Secondly, the multitude is defined against the traditional ideas of class and of the

masses. If we can say that the multitude works, if one of its fundamental qualities consists in its

expressing living labour, the set of singularities that the multitude is cannot be reduced to an indistinct

unity, whether we call this unity class or mass. Rather, the valorisation of production derives from

the capacity of singularities to produce value. Thirdly, the multitude is given, on the ontological

plane, as constitutive power:ithe social and the political, united in the biopolitical, together form the

genealogical basis and product of the multitude.

Having said that, we have still not said how the multitude is capable of becoming a political subject.

That is, a political subject at a remove from any theological basis concerned with essence or identity,

but a political subject situated in absolute productive immanence. Many of those who agree with the

concept of the multitude as it is expressed inEmpire, asserting its correctness from the productive and

the political standpoint, go on to pose the question of how this multitude can express itself as subject,

as force, as capacity for decision. Evidently we are not speaking of definitions of Power la Carl

Schmitt; rather, we are engaged with the forces and desires that give life to the multitude. And yet we

must try and understand what it is that gives substance to the actions, to the project and to the capacity

of the multitude to construct history.

1 Thanks go to Alberto Toscano and Juliet Rufford for much improving this translation.

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A. Spinozas conjecture

It is well-established that Spinozas discussion of the strategy of conatus (striving) represents the

linear course of an argument that proceeds from the phenomenology of a multitude of subjects to the

definition of democracy. It is a line of argument that leads from cupiditas (desire) to amor (love),

from the expression of desire to the transformation of co-operation into the common, and from the

anthropology of singularities to a political ethics. Thus, in Spinoza, the conditions of the political

subject are included in the power of conatus: they unfold through various degrees of ontological

perfection, from the imagination to the material re-composition of bodies, from singularities to the

collective and from the affirmation of the individual to the universal. Here we see how the expressive

process of being develops. Ancient materialist ontology established the passage from singularity to

value through the insertion of the clinamen. With Spinoza, materialist ontology is traversed and

founded anew by desire. It is a living force that unfolds in the world so as to construct it as divine.

Freedom translates the continuity of an absolute productive immanence, of a vis viva that develops,

from physical conatus to human cupiditas to divine amor. Ethics constitutes the physical world before

it interprets the human and sublimates itself in the divine. Eternity is lived as presence. The collective

subject is born in the shape of a common subject; it is produced by the passion that stirs up and

constructs both the world and the divine. The immanence of Spinozas argument is thus complete. It

dares to oppose itself (and succeeds in so doing) to the transcendental presumptions of modern

political thought, countering the modern State with the aim of absolute democracy. The goal of

Spinozas State is the establishment of liberty. Let us paraphrase this Spinoza of ours: the State is not

established in order to keep Man in a state of fear (as Hobbes wished); in fact the reverse is true. The

civic State is established in order to liberate the individual from fear, so that he should live better in

security; or more precisely, so that he should maintain, without causing harm to others, his natural

right to act and to exist. Thus, the end of the State is freedom.

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As we have said, this process is not described simply from the metaphysical standpoint. Both in the

Tractatus Teologico-Politicus and in the Ethics, this process is directly related to the constitution of

bodies, from the single body to the collective and common body. It is the productivity of the bios that

is at stake here. In Spinoza we have the basis for a definition of biopolitics.

B. Spinozas infinite and the blockage of the investigation

The shift in the problematic of materialism (and of immanence) from its classical form (the Lucretian

materialism of the clinamen) to the Spinozian one (a materialism of the passions) is a powerful one.

But we must also indicate the limits of this position. It harbours a residue of infinity, there is always a

mark of teleology, a measure that blocks (and presumes to shape) the power of Spinozas materialist

ascesis. The relationship of singularity to multitude is one that, in some ways, cannot be pursued

within the ambit of Spinozism. The idea of the infinite and the teleology of measure even spurt some

of their venom onto the new radicalism of Spinozas materialist procedure. Spinozas materialism,

which posited the concept of the multitude in such real and forceful terms, is, nevertheless, unable to

show us political subjectivity within the fabric of absolute immanence. The force of liberation from

the measure of being, from the pre-figuration of being, that characterises ascesis is only partially

successful. If we bear in mind that the common is subject to the same measure as the passion of the

singularities, we are unable, with Spinoza, to draw upon such a force. Indeed, we experience its

blockage and are, therefore, in thrall to an ethical and ascetic illusion: the blockage of what serves as

the measure of the modern; that is, the blockage represented by the infinite. The measure of

modernity renders the relationship between singularity and totality tautological.

Thus, to the infinite of modernity we must oppose the eternity of creation, or what we now call

(postmodern) expression. So it is not by materialist physics (in the form Spinoza gives it) opening

itself to the question of the common (through the exploration of the passions) that the question of the

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political subject can be considered resolved. The question of the political subject calls for another

approach. It demands that the tautology of measure (of the subject and the totality) be overcome and

that the conception of the common be sustained by the genealogy of innovation. The problem is not

that of grasping the passage from singularity to the common but of grasping the innovation, novelty

and creativity that constitute it. Communication among subjects is not enough to construct a world.

This world must comprehend novelty, openness, expressivity and surplus.ii

Some postmodern thinkers have sought this creative opening on the margins of the totality formed by

the action of the singularities. But the margin represents a liminal transcendence: it is an immanence

that is almost transcendence, an ambiguous place in which materialist realism and ascetics end up

bowing to a form of mysticism. Derrida endlessly peruses the margin of being; Agamben, the artist of

paradoxes, fixes upon it as though it were a power of the negative Perhaps it is merely a case of

waiting for the other, and, as in Levinas, this waiting for the common transpires into mysticism. There

are also those who have tried to pursue this teleology (from the subject to the common and from the

multitude to its subjectivation), projecting it onto a thousand plateaus of singular power. Here, in

Deleuze and Guattari, the edge of being is rent asunder but the appearance of the singularities takes

place in a circuit from which there is no exit.

All of which suggests that we must reaffirm the question we posed at the beginning of our discussion,

only this time we will be setting off from a new assumption: the multitude will only be able to

become a subject when its common becoming is presented as a surplus, as a new creative articulation

of ontology. The singularisation of the multitude posits the immeasurable: it is not universal but

common, it is not infinite but eternal, it is not the substance of temporality but the arrow of time, and

it is not the accumulation of singularities but rather a proliferation of ontological expressions.

C. Another example: aporias of the biopolitical in Agamben

As we have already noted, Giorgio Agamben has attempted to find a new positivity on the negative

margin of the world. He attempts to construct an ontology of the margin, complicating the constitutive

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process of the immanent subject by contrasting it with the singular difference and the negative

repetition of experience. According to Agamben, an event is determined: it is an exteriority that

suffers, on the limit, but is unable to break off. It is a difference that persists and resists politically.

Thus, Agamben, far from giving us a new definition of the political subject, presents us with a new

ontological possibility. In fact, the core of Giorgio Agambens reasoning in Homo Sacerconsists in

the construction of a concept of biopolitics (and of biopower) set in contrast to the concept of modern

sovereignty. If modern sovereignty can be defined as a set of Powers, Agamben aims (in his anti-Carl

Schmitt)to perfect and overturn that concept. And there is no doubt that here we are touching upon a

central element of the definition of modernity and of the political. In the context of the 1970s and the

political crisis that characterised it, Agamben perceived this problem perfectly. Today, however, he

seems to have retreated from this insight. Indeed, the process whereby he forms his definitions avoids,

from the start (and thus prevents one from attaining), the productive dimension of the bios, which is to

say, the materialist moment of innovation. If the first definition of the political is to be sought in the

biopolitical, if Western politics is co-originally biopolitics, how can Agamben say that the decisive

political conflict that governs every other conflict is, in our culture, that between the animality and the

humanity of Man? (Laperto. Luomo e lanimale, p. 82)

Summing up this first transition, we can conclude that, for Agamben, biopolitics is not immediately

productive. Indeed, before rooting the analysis in the biopolitical, Agamben wrestles with the modern

concept of sovereignty, that is, with the concept of sovereignty as state of exception that Carl

Schmitt had proposed as the transcendental schema of political reason. He absorbs and retains this

determination of sovereignty. In this way, though, he finds himself unable to account for the

productive dimension of the bios and ends up blocking the bios on a naturalistic plain (life aszo) or

on a generically anthropological negativity (sacredness, bareness, exclusion, camp without any

historical determination). Consequently, since for Agamben biopolitics is not productive, he finds

himself with only two possible alternatives: either naturalism or an existential conception with a

nihilist tinge, marked by a limit, a separation, an insoluble strain Here the subject becomes a

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mystery (Laperto. Luomo e lanimale, p. 95: once again the mysterium coniuctionis from which the

human is produced undergoes an unprecedented deepening of the practical-political mystery of

separation).

However, Agamben has two ways out from this ambiguous line of thought. The first is represented by

Bartleby, for whom the negative becomes refusal and the refusal becomes absolute. This negative

becoming-absolute of the refusal appears almost to represent the place of the mystical. In order to

understand this passage one must bear in mind Language and Death: the Place of Negativity (1982,

Italian edition), which forms the backdrop of Giorgio Agambens thinking. The positive aspect of this

book lies in Agambens problematising of the krisis of the foundation: of his doing away with all

definitions of it in terms of destiny, against all the interpretations that in the mid-1970s reiterated a

radical pessimism (e.g. Cacciari). In contrast to these latter, Giorgio Agamben situates himself within

the place of the negative, nevertheless refusing nihilism, tirelessly asking himself what relationship

there could be between reality and history, between being and practice. If Agamben will never cross

the threshold of the positive construction of being, he is, nevertheless, able to propose, through

ontological critique, an aspect of existentialist pessimism (and of the nihilism of this school of

thought) that had, until now, been interpreted in entirely superficial terms.

But there is nothing to say that Agamben must come to a halt on this funereal conception of being that

we have described so far. Indeed, in The Coming Community Agamben interrupts the oscillation of

the non-decision between humanity and animality (and he somehow overcomes the one between

Heidegger and Benjamin). It is here that Agamben proposes that formidable concept of whatever

subjectivity that appears able to establish itself within an ontological and materialist dimension,

beyond a drift into conceptions of belonging and identity, and towards a project of metamorphosis,

hybridisation and liberation. In The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben comes very close to this

idea of a constitutive subjectivity.

But the course steered in The Coming Community is abandoned by Agamben who, in Homo Sacer,

returns to the theme of the negative and even develops further his analysis of the figure of Bartleby in

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desire that creates); toAnwesenheit(ousia, present being), Conatus (the force which is always open to

the being to-come), toBesorgen, he opposesAppetitus; and toMglichkeit, he opposesPotentia.

D. Power and Poverty

The conclusion that we can draw from this lengthy discussion and from this example is that if we

want to pose the problem of the construction of a new political subject (constituting it according to the

flows of the ontology of immanence), we must not cross the margin but must rather take up a position

within the biopolitical fabric. That is, we must elucidate the common dimension of the productive

bios. It is there that we must dig so as to avoid crushing any emergent subjectivation by determinism,

and in order to elevate subjectivation to the immeasurable, elevate it to the position of a surplus with

respect to even the materialist experience of the world. This is true of the imagination just as it is of

the rational schematisation of the construction of the world. The only chance for subjective opening,

the only possibility for giving direction to the multitude, lies in engaging with it as immeasurable and

thereby qualifying the common that characterises it as creation.

It is for this reason that I propose to set out from poverty. For Agamben, in the light of a political

Power defined in a one dimensional manner, the only possible reaction, as an alternative to Power, is

that of bare life the extremity, the margin of life. But here we remain caught within modernity, or

more precisely, in the narrow-minded 1930s definition of Power as ideological la Carl Schmitt. In

contrast to this position, we understand Power in biopolitical terms: we are immersed in Power; we

are within Power and harbour no illusion of being outside out of it, or being on the margins. But if

biopower is an invasion of life, the exercise of Power shows itself to be essentially, exploitation.

Here, then, the poor person emerges and is revealed in a clear light. It is the poor person that requires

an explanation for the concept of the political to be constructed, and not vice versa, as Agamben

would prefer. At present, the experience of poverty occurs within a common that knows no outside,

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within a dense common that has neither spatial fissures nor temporal suspensions of time. In

postmodernity the poor are the excluded, and this exclusion is within the production of the world.

But in this situation, to be excluded is a logical paradox: in a linguistic community, exclusion is only

a pathological fact and, in biopolitical production, it is materially impossible. Here we see the

emergence of the first features that characterise the scandal of the experience of the poor in

postmodernity. One is the poorest of the poor because one is the most integrated in the common, in

the commonality of life, of language, of production and of consumption. One is excluded within the

biopolitical, in that same biopolitical that he produces and in which one is subjectively produced.

Poverty is thus a being inside. Is it also a being against? This is what is revealed by the resistance of

the poor. This is what is revealed by the fact that this resistance is productive of new spaces of

creation and circulation; that thus the resistance of the poor person rises up as surplus. The poor are

excluded from the world that they produce, but that power becomes resistance and resistance

nourishes new power. When we speak of poverty, it is therefore not a case of bare life but rather of

a power to create the world; this power is constrained, excluded and must re-appear as resistance.

Poverty is entirely redefined due to its existing within the bios, and it stays within the bios because

there is no longer an outside; it remains within the bios because exclusion affects but does not

nullify power. Thus resistance expresses itself as excess and immeasurableness.

E. Biopolitics and Movement

In order to sum up the operation of disarticulation of linear materialist physics that we have carried

out here in the course of our investigation into the elements of subjectivation that enable us to

consider the multitude as a dispositifof decision let us secure the following points:

1. The productive fabric of biopolitics is fundamental whatever the limits and the politics to which it

is subjected. The tempus potentiae that traverses biopolitics is its central characteristic.

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iTranslators note: Negri makes a crucial distinction betweenpotere andpotenza in his The Savage

Anomaly that he derives from Spinozas distinction between potestas andpotentia and that is missed

in the English translations of Spinozas works. I have followed Michael Hardts rendering of these

two terms in his translation of The Savage Anomaly as Power and power respectively. The

distinction is both a political and an ontological one, in that potere (Power) stands for a centralised

transcendent force of command, while potenza (power) denotes rather immanent and local

constitutive forces. For a succinct discussion of this distinction see the introduction to The Savage

Anomaly.

iiTranslators note: I translate the notion ofeccedenza assurplus, although one should always bear

the notion ofexcess in mind. It is not a reference to the notions of surplus labour and/or surplus

value of the classical Marxist tradition but it refers one rather to the notion of immaterial labour

the form of labour that predominates under post-Fordism developed by Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato,

Michael Hardt, et al. Speaking of immaterial labour and of its product, Negri insists that its

fundamental characteristic is that it is not exhausted when consumed, it is not eroded and mutilated

whether in the labour process itself or in the consumption of the product. It does not then disappear

but is always augmented, forming an excess or surplus. It can be consumed endlessly, thereby

producing a new affective range in the subject, and in the extension of its consumption it produces a

broader audience, its affective forces resonating out producing a surplus, a surplus for new creation,

new consumption and new common forces of subject formation.

20030414 Political Ontology

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