There is a new cottage industry within the education business that has to be added to the one described by McKenzie Wark in the provocative endnotes to his Hacker Manifesto. Wark sees an industry coalescing “around the name Deleuze, from which he may have to be rescued” (Wark 2004, n.7). Now, after Agamben sent us back to read Carl Schmitt, we can add the industry around various theoretical efforts to interrogate the concept of “the political,” a topos that may need its own rescue team. To name just a few of the most recent meta-examples of this critical trend: Chantal Mouffe’s On the Political, Martin Jay’s The Virtues of Mendacity, and the dossier on “Politics and the Political” in the Fall 2011 issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly dedicated to the question of the so-called “political difference”—all take the concept of “the political” (in French, le politique), and by extension its sister concept, “politics” (la politique), as a fundamental issue in the history of political thought, and one which needs to be re-interrogated in light of the globalized power networks of the 21st century. Michael Hardt, in the introductory matter to this dossier, writes: “Distinguishing ‘the political’ from ‘politics’ has become a foundational conceptual operation for many contemporary political thinkers. The meaning attributed to these two concepts and the value invested in the distinction between them, however, vary widely” (Hardt 2011, 964). In what follows I would like to interrogate a set of such concepts and values imbedded in a collection of post-millennial political texts which, while not foregrounding the terms of this debate as visibly as Mouffe, Jay, or the recent SAQ dossier, do in fact have much to say about thinking the revolutionary valences of the political difference. “Some authors,” Hardt notes, “affirm the political as a strategy for freeing political thought from politics, which is often identified with the daily squabbles of power relations, whether in the halls of government, on the streets, or within university departments” (Hardt 2011, 964). Many observers of the far-Left political scene today would flag Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek as the main exemplars of the ontological realm of “the political,” against a more pedestrian sense of “mere politics.”[1] I want to posit, however, that there is space in their thought for the realm of politics to interact with that of the political; even in these high theoretical discourses exist lines of flight to the valorized street. Those on the other side of the political difference, however, “think politics, as an antagonistic field of struggle and experience, should be given priority over the terrain of the political, which is associated with the centralized structures of states and parties” (Hardt 2011, 964). I will then take up this ontic position and compare it to the first, ontological field of “the political.” I will argue—to anticipate my conclusion—that it is indeed in the work of Hardt himself (in collaboration with Antonio Negri) that we find perhaps the most rewarding example of thinking the relation of politics to the political in the age of Empire.[2]
The Grandeur of the Political or Grand Politics?
We begin with Žižek, the poster boy for the critique of the capitalist world order from the elevated, philosophical perspective of “the political” (his taste for lowbrow jokes and Hollywood trash notwithstanding). A standard critique of Žižek’s position would be one akin to the one leveled by Oliver Marchart in the SAQ dossier. Marchart rails against what he calls Žižek’s fantasy of “grand politics”: “Žižek speaks about ‘the Act’—as opposed to action—which is not a matter of strategic deliberation but of leaping into a strategic vacuum. According to Žižek’s narrative of grand politics, Lenin, by seizing the revolutionary opportunity and intervening in a situation that appeared premature, had thrown himself into the abyss of the revolutionary act” (Marchart 2011, 970). But is Žižek’s stance here so clearly on the side of the insurrectionist Act, a revolutionary “big bang,” as Marchart puts it (970), to the point that the field of “politics” is forever foreclosed, banned from a properly radical procedure of resistance to Empire or proto-Empire?
When we look at Žižek’s introduction to Lenin’s writings from 1917, the sharp, mutually exclusive distinctions that Marchart ascribes to Žižek position vis-à-vis the political difference become blurred, if not dissolved altogether. After an obligatory defense of the value of “‘high theory’ for the most concrete political struggle[s] today” (Žižek 2002, 6), he goes on to essentially debunk the very myth that Marchart describes: Lenin as the solitary prodigy throwing himself headlong into the revolutionary abyss, a vision more apropos of the ecstatic poetics of Nietzsche-cum-Bataille than the sober-minded strategizing of V.I. Ulyanov. Marchart seems to have missed passages such as this from Žižek, which could hardly be more insistent on the contribution of la politique to the outcome of October 1917:
Indispensible as Lenin’s personal intervention was, . . . we should not change the story of the October Revolution into the story of the lone genius confronted with the disoriented masses and gradually imposing his vision. Lenin succeeded because his appeal, while bypassing the Party nomenklatura, found an echo in what I am tempted to call revolutionary micropolitics: the incredible explosion of grass-roots democracy, of local committees sprouting up all around Russia’s big cities and, ignoring the authority of the “legitimate” government, taking matters into their own hands. This is the untold story of the October Revolution, the obverse of the myth of the tiny group of dedicated revolutionaries which accomplished a coup d’etat. (Žižek 2002, 6-7)
Clearly, in invoking the figure of “micropolitics” against the story of the lone genius removed from the terrain of everyday contestations, Žižek is implicitly acknowledging the dynamics of “the political difference” at work in 1917. It is precisely this interplay between the grass-roots micropolitics emerging throughout Russian cities and the political will of Lenin—the will of “the political”—that enabled the success of that revolution, and which could, presumably, serve as a model for all subsequent revolutionary movements. Hardly a solitary Act, or a heroic leap into a “strategic vacuum,” the fields of revolution had already been sown by the hard work of politics that was the result of collective action.
When Žižek goes on to describe the “gap” that is evident in Lenin’s writings from this period, the gap the “separates the ‘explicit’ formal contours of the political struggle between the multitudes of parties and other political subjects from its actual social stakes” (Žižek 2002, 7), he could just as well be describing the gap of the political difference. We could map the concept of “the political” neatly onto the “formal contours” of the political struggle, and likewise “politics” describes fittingly the “actual social stakes” that need to be strived for; in the case of the October Revolution: “immediate peace, the distribution of land, and, of course, ‘all power to the soviets,’ that is, the dismantling of the existing state apparatus and its replacement with the new commune-like forms of social management” (Žižek 2002, 7). Just as the first revolutionary strike needed to be negated to make way for the second negation, only to be negated itself, the formal ontology of the political is negated when brought down to the field of politics, which in turn is negated to create a necessary synthesis. Lenin recognized this fact, Žižek tells us, which attests to his “refined dialectical sense” (10).
Does the gap that separates the first revolution from the second not bear the same relation to the one that separates “the political” from “politics”? As Žižek puts it: “This gap is the gap between revolution qua the imaginary explosion of freedom in sublime enthusiasms, the magic moment of universal solidarity when ‘everything seems possible,’ and the hard work of social reconstruction which is to be performed if this enthusiastic explosion is to leave its trace in the inertia of the social edifice itself” (Žižek 2002, 7). The first instantiation is the caricature of Žižek (who, admittedly, leaves himself open to many forms of caricature), but as we have seen, he provides a much more dialectical vision of Lenin and of the prospects for renewed revolutionary action that the one presented by Marchart. The “hard work of social reconstruction” that Žižek alludes to will be the work of politics—“the political” doesn’t seem to have much taste for getting its hands dirty—and if the new form and new content that has been birthed in part by thinking “the political,” as such, is to bear any fruit, it will only be in conjunction with a revalorized politics.
When it comes to the revolutionary potentiality of the present, Žižek (at least in this text) is also far from the hard-party-line monster that he is often painted as. Indeed, instead of being a quasi-reincarnation of Lenin (or even Stalin, as some would have it), he explicitly states that we cannot simply “return to Lenin,” but rather must work to “retrieve the same impulse in today’s constellation”:
The return to Lenin aims neither at nostalgically re-enacting the “good old revolutionary times,” nor at an opportunistic-pragmatic adjustment of the old programme to “new conditions,” but at repeating, in the present worldwide conditions, the Leninist gesture of reinventing the revolutionary project in the conditions of imperialism and colonialism. ... “Lenin” stands for the compelling freedom to suspend the stale existing (post)ideological co-ordinates, the debilitating Denkverbot (prohibition on thinking) in which we live—it simply means that we are allowed to think again. (Žižek 2002, 11)
If the name “Lenin” signifies the renewed capacity of revolutionary thinking in a time of imperial sovereignty, the name “Badiou” has arguably signified the most influential theoretical interventions in this post-millennial moment. Alain Badiou’s invitation to once again make truth a thinkable category in contemporary political and ethical life is one of the signal developments of recent critical theoretical thought—timed crucially to coincide with the “rebirth of history,” to cite the title of a forthcoming Badiou volume dealing with the recent outburst of revolutionary movements throughout the world during the Arab Spring,[3] after its death had been heralded by Francis Fukuyama and other neoconservative “intellectuals.”[4]
Similar criticisms are brought to bear on Badiou as those attending one of his great disciples, Žižek. We read in Marchart’s critique of the “fantasy of grand politics”: “Žižek and Badiou explicitly recommend that as long as one cannot effect the radical break with a given situation one should rather abstain from acting altogether—as every political action will be complicit with capitalo-parliamentarianism” (Marchart 2011, 971). The question of what exactly constitutes a political action will need to be interrogated momentarily, but it is correct as far as it goes to say that Badiou (and Žižek, largely following Badiou) rejects participating in a field of politics that is purely illusory, not real politics. In this sense, his position is indeed a withdrawal from politics into the “higher” plane of “the political.” Marchart goes on to impute to “Badizek” the belief that: “if political acting is deemed impossible—unless the grand revolutionary subject appears out of nowhere—one can only hope for things collapsing by themselves” (Marchart 2011, 971). Here, Marchart would seem to be attributing to Badiou an overly pessimistic belief in the potential for the development of the revolutionary subject. We will need to show how Badiou revalorizes the field of politics by creating the conditions for being a subject to the truth of real politics.
A concentrated focus on one particular example of Badiou’s rejection of participation in what most would consider a paradigmatic act of politics, voting, will help to bring out Badiou’s position with respect to the political difference. Badiou’s book De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? [What is the Meaning of Sarkozy?] follows closely on the heels of the 2007 French presidential elections, a contest between Nicolas Sarkozy of the center-right Union for a Popular Movement party (whom Badiou characterizes as “a miniscule character in direct communication with the lowest form of opinion polls” [9]), and Ségolène Royal of the Socialist Party (whom Badiou says reminds him of a “painted goat” [6] “in which the lack of anything real is articulated”[12] in favor of “sentimental preaching” [16]). When faced with this ignominious choice, Badiou claims, one would be better off withdrawing from the voting process altogether, a process that is always already incompatible with the procedure of real politics by virtue of its being wholly a tool of what Badiou calls “capitalo-parliamentarianism”—in other words, Empire. This withdrawal is a withdrawal from politics, but only from the point of view of the capitalo-parliamentarians; for Badiou, it is not some nihilist desertion of the duties of a citizen, but rather the most ethical decision one can make when faced with the false choice between two sides of Empire’s coin.
Badiou is not disavowing politics in favor of some Platonic ideal of “the political”; he is instead shifting the perspective on what it would mean to engage on a field of politics that, as it stands, is contaminated by “the rule of the service of wealth” (Badiou 2008, 41). Badiou writes: “Let us assume that politics is what I think it is, which can be summed up in the following definition: organized collective action, following certain principles, and aiming to develop in reality the consequences of a new possibility repressed by the dominant state of affairs. Then we have to conclude that the vote to which we are summoned is an essentially apolitical practice” (Badiou 2008, 11). While Marchart depicts the Badiousian subject as passively waiting for the grand political Event in which the capitalo-parliamentarian system will gloriously collapse upon itself giving rise to the long-sought dream of communism, Badiou is describing principled, collective action working to create new possibilities within Empire that are currently being obstructed, blocking a becoming-real of politics, for, as Badiou says, “[w]hat is lacking in the vote is nothing less than the real” (11). Real politics will only take place away from the sham politics of the state. For the sentimental defenders of the voting process, politics is inextricably bound up with the apparatuses of the state; as Badiou notes, “it is only by assuming that politics and the state are identical that voting can be conceived as a political procedure” (12). Badiou wants to cleave this relationship of identity in order to rescue politics from the fears, prejudices, and repressions of the state. The state deals in illusion; the truth procedure of politics must reject these illusions and engage with real decisions, real choices:
“Reject our illusion” means categorically denying that voting is the operation of a genuine choice. It means identifying organized disorientation, which gives the state personnel a free hand. The whole problem then is to affirmatively reject this illusion, and to find elsewhere the principle of an orientation of thought and existence. To arrive at this, to identify the illusion as an illusion and reject it—which means, among other things, not expecting anything from the vote. (Badiou 2008, 18)
One withdraws from politics, if by politics we mean the ballot box, by making a decision on “the political,” a political decision on the viability of voting for the creation of real politics, but this withdrawal results in finding politics again and orientating the procedure of politics outside of the strictures of the state. “The place for this [orientation] is outside of the state, thus outside of voting. Its role is to construct something unprecedented in the real” (Badiou 2008, 19). Badiou may be known for thinking the grand political Event, but in De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? he is attempting return a sense of grandeur to the everyday interactions of politics; far from a political “big bang,” Badiou speaks of the nobility of small meetings groups, made up of a multiplicity of the people, working together in a process that could bear Žižek’s label of micropolitics. This beautiful passage gives lie to Marchart’s portrait of the Badiousian subject waiting, like Vladimir and Estragon, for the political Event that will never come:
How can we recognize those who overcome their supposed “free individuality,” i.e. who overcome the stereotype in which they are dissolved (and what could be more monotonous, more uniform, than the “free” individuals of commodity society, the civilized petty bourgeois repeating their laughable obsessions like well-fed parrots?) and attain the local steadfastness of a trans-individual truth? Their becoming-subject is attested, for example, in the conviction that to hold a meeting able to reach a conclusion and establish a duration sheltered from the schedules of the state, with four African workers from a hostel, a student, a Chinese textile worker, a postman, two housewives and a few strangers from a housing estate, is infinitely more important, in an infinity itself incommensurable, than to drop the name of an indiscernible politician into the state counting-box. (Badiou 2008, 20)
To withdraw from voting is not a withdrawal from politics, but a becoming-real of new politics which will address the interests of all, including the foreign workers, the sans-papiers, who are the “heart” of the community exiled from the bourgeois world (Badiou 2008, 19), and who will comprise the heart of any newly oriented politics. Badiou succinctly states this orientational politics: “Let us withdraw our interests from the interests that their self-interest wants to make ours” (Badiou 2008, 51).
Sabotage or Exodus?
“There is nothing more to say, everything has to be destroyed” (Invisible Committee [IC] 2009, 86).
“Love is the battlefield for the struggle against evil” (Hardt and Negri [HN] 2009, 198).
How has strategic praxis been thought with and against questions of the political difference? These two epigraphs signal the dichotomy of affect that is at work in two general concepts, two broader strategies for action against Empire—sabotage and exodus—that I will attempt to situation within le politique and la politique in the second half of this essay.
Members of the anonymous French collective known as the Invisible Committee were mostly likely involved in the events of 11 November 2008, which resulted in the arrest of twenty youths in Paris, Rouen and the village of Tarnac. According to Alberto Toscano:
The Tarnac operation involved helicopters, 150 balaclava-clad anti-terrorist policemen, with studiously prearranged media coverage. The youths were accused of having participated in a number of sabotage attacks against high-speed TGV train routes, involving the obstruction of the trains power cables with horseshoe-shaped iron bars, causing a series of delays of some 160 trains. The suspects who remain in custody were soon termed the “Tarnac Nine,” after the village where some of them had purchased a small farmhouse, reorganized the local grocery store as a cooperative, and taken up a number of civil activities from the running of a film club to the delivery of food to the elderly. (Toscano 2009, 2)
If, indeed, members of the Invisible Committee had participated in these coordinated sabotage attacks, they had prefigured them in their text The Coming Insurrection, a handbook for urban guerilla warfare against Empire. The Invisible Committee’s tactical philosophy is perhaps best summarized in the section of the book titled “Get Organized.” Here they describe the most efficient and effective mode of practice which can be leveled against the tentacular power of Empire: “As for methods, let’s adopt the following principle from sabotage: a minimum of risk in taking the action, a minimum of time, and maximum damage” (IC 2009, 111). Discrete and coordinated acts of sabotage are, for the Invisible Committee, the most powerful weapons to combat Empire. It is also in this section that we find the infamous passage that was “repeatedly referred to as incriminating evidence against [Julien] Coupat” (Toscano 2009, 4), one of the Tarnac 9 and a probable member of the Invisible Committee:
The technical infrastructure of the metropolis is vulnerable. Its flows amount to more than the transportation of people and commodities. Information and energy circulate via wire networks, fibers and channel, and these can be attacked. Nowadays sabotaging the social machine with any real effects involves reappropriating and reinventing the ways of interrupting the networks. How can a TGV line or an electrical network be rendered useless? How does one find the weak points in computer networks, or scramble radio waves and fill screens with white noise? (IC 2009, 111-12)
The fact that sabotage attacks on TGV train routes was in fact a part of the 2008 coordinated action seemed to confirm for law enforcement a direct correlation between those arrested in the Tarnac operation and membership in the Invisible Committee.
In “Get Organized” we also find what we might call the driving affect of the Invisible Committee, the inspirational sentiment that defines their politics. The text reads:
All the incivilities of the streets should become methodical and systematic, converging in a diffuse, effective guerrilla war that restores us to our ungovernability, our primordial unruliness. It’s disconcerting to some that this same lack of discipline figures so prominently among the military virtues of resistance fighters. In fact though, rage and politics should never have been separated. Without the first, the second is lost in discourse; without the second the first exhausts its in howls. (IC 2009, 110-11; my emphasis)
The Invisible Committee’s politics is a politics of rage, an inextricable fusion of rage and politics; and it is a politics, exhibiting a tactically-minded down-to-earthness that would seem to be squarely within the realm of la politique. The field manual quality of The Coming Insurrection attests to the sense that it ought to be used calculatedly on the battlefield of modern urban combat against Empire. But a curious thing happens earlier in the book, an arguably irreconcilable schism within the text which may have more to do with the vicissitudes of a multiplicity of authorship than any politico-ontological aporia that could neutralize it: the Committee speaks directly to the issue of political difference in a way which would seem to put them in favor of acting exclusively at the level of le politique. The text reads:
This whole series of nocturnal vandalisms and anonymous attacks, this wordless destruction, has widened the breach between politics and the political. No one can honestly deny the obvious: this was an assault that made no demands, a threat without a message, and it has nothing to do with “politics.” One would have to be oblivious to the autonomous youth movements of the last 30 years not to see the purely political character of this resolute negation of politics. (IC 2009, 25; my emphasis)
Oliver Marchart sees this trope in the writings of the Invisible Committee as a clear case of “adventurism,” in which “politics is thereby based on the phantasmatic idea of a total break or rupture with a given situation. What results from this is a politics of the political, that is, of a direct and unmediated instantiation of a new ground” (Marchart 2011, 970). The question of the mediation between politics and “the political” is one will we have to approach: does acting at the level of “the political” necessarily imply a “resolute negation of politics”?
The violent rupture out of a given situation shares certain affinities with Badiou’s notion of the Event, and it is clear that members of the Invisible Committee are familiar with certain discourses of academic theory, including Badiou’s writings. For instance, in a section called “We are Building a Civilized Space Here,” the Invisible Committee attack “the imperialism of relativism” in Western culture as “the eye-rolling or the wounded indignation at anyone who’s stupid, primitive, or presumptuous enough to still believe in something, to affirm anything at all” (IC 2009, 92). The Invisible Committee wants to be able to state claims about the world and articulate the political stakes of those claims. Like Badiou, the Invisible Committee wants to be able to speak about truth again with a straight face. It is not hard to see this section as a not-so-veiled critique of the entire tradition of deconstruction, including the endlessly qualified and deferred statements of someone like Jacques Derrida, who, despite what some consider a late “political turn” in his work,[5] would most likely be the prime proponent of the apolitical claim that the Invisible Committee quotes with vampiric irony: “It all depends on your point of view” (IC 2009, 92). Their contempt for this imperial relativism comes through particularly well here:
You can see the dogmatism of constant questioning gives its complicit wink of the eye everywhere in the universities and among the literary intelligentsias. No critique is too radical among postmodernist thinkers, as long as it maintains this total absence of certitude. A century ago, scandal was identified with any particularly unruly and raucous negation, while today it’s found in any affirmation that fails to tremble. (IC 2009, 92)
The Invisible Committee seems to be alluding here to a Badiousian fidelity to a decision, an ethical courage that fails to tremble before Empire. Indeed, Badiou dedicates a chapter in De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? to the importance of having “courage in these circumstances.” For Badiou, “courage is the virtue of endurance in the impossible” (Badiou 2008, 72-73). Courage is that which allows for the decision of the localized singularity to have wide-ranging resonance: “courage orients us locally amid the global disorientation” (76). However, it is the nature of the decision that they are advocating that has disturbed those messengers of Empire, most notably Glenn Beck, who have intercepted this radical transmission:
So we have a corpse on our backs, but we won’t be able to shake it off just like that. Nothing is to be expected from the end of civilization, from its clinical death. Such a thing can only be of interest to historians. It’s a fact, and it must be translated into a decision. Facts can be conjured away, but decision is political. To decide for the death of civilization, then to work out how it will happen: only decision will rid us of the corpse. (IC 2009, 94; emphasis in original)
Advocating the death of civilization is an extreme measure by any standard, but we can productively track how the Invisible Committee arrived at this radical position. The Committee is rumored to include some of the same members as an earlier anonymous collective in France, Tiqqun. Texts jointly authored by the members of Tiqqun such as “Introduction to Civil War,” “How is it to be Done?,” “Raw Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl,” and “Theory of Bloom,” while no less indignant at the state of a world suffering under the yoke of Empire, nonetheless have a rather different stylistic and strategic tenor from The Coming Insurrection. Alberto Toscano notes the change in registers from Tiqqun to the Invisible Committee: “L’insurrection is a more measured and plain-spoken text, whose politics are rooted more in anti-urbanist libertarian anarchism than in the metaphysical auguries carried by Agambenian figures such as the ‘young girl’ or the ‘Bloom’ (after Joyce)” (Toscano 2009, 5). There is nothing so cypto-metaphysical in The Coming Insurrection as the figure of “form-of-life,” for example, which we find in Tiqqun’s “Introduction to Civil War,” and while Tiqqun speaks in poetic aphorisms (“‘My’ form-of-life relates not to what I am, but to how I am what I am” [Tiqqun 2010, 22]), the Invisible Committee speaks in the pissed-off vernacular of the perpetually excluded (“Excuse us if we don’t give a fuck” [IC 2009, 44]).
The riots of 2005 in the French banlieues would seem to be a formative event in the evolution of Tiqqun into the Invisible Committee. The pre-2005 Tiqqun texts exhibit a rather different character of strategic praxis from The Coming Insurrection; as Toscano notes:
[A]s we move through L’insurrection it becomes clear that, despite the nod to Agamben in the title, his brand of messianic reversibility[6]—a left interpretation of the Hölderlinian adage that “where danger is, grows the saving power also”—is overtaken by an anarchist blueprint for the secession from the metropolitan capitalism and the reorganization of everyday life in communes that will serves as bases for a diffuse and “horizontal” overturning of the reigning system of misery. (Toscano 2009, 5)
The Agambenian sense of “messianic reversibility” is still evident in the Tiqqun texts, perhaps most explicitly in the notion of the biopolitical désoeuvrement that Tiqqun calls the “human strike.” The conditions of life created under Empire—especially the biopolitization of labor and “life itself”—are the very tools that will be used as forms of resistance:
Empire is when the means of production have become the means of control and the means of control the means of production. Empire signifies that henceforth the political moment dominates the economic moment. And the general strike is powerless against it. What must be opposed to Empire is the human strike. Which never attacks the relations of production without attacking at the same time the affective relations that sustain it. Which undermines the unavowable libidinal economy, restores the ethical element—the how—repressed in every contact between neutralized bodies. (Tiqqun 2010, 220-21)
Here, how resistance is to be achieved on the field of politics is brought into contact with various fields; if Lenin’s “What is to be Done?” is the paradigmatic question of “the political”—the formal ontology of the what—the shift to Tiqqun’s question “How is it to be Done?” is the collapsing of ontic politics, “the political,” and the ethical in one courageous gesture. Tiqqun emphasizes the creation of singularities and affective connections between forms-of-life, against the kind of confrontational ethos of the Invisible Committee: “How is it to be done? means that military confrontation with Empire must be subordinated to the intensification of relations within our party. That the political is only a certain degree of intensity amidst the ethical element. That revolutionary war should no longer be confused with its representation: the raw moment of combat” (Tiqqun 2010, 211). Tiqqun wants to keep all socio-philosophical modalities jointly operational, while the Invisible Committee revels in the widening of the breach.
Toscano, while comparing the project of the Invisible Committee to other recent attempts to theorize resistance to Empire, mentions such efforts as the “ultra-modernist idea that accelerating moral and material decomposition is the key to the transvaluation of the world” (as in the work of Nick Land, for example[7]); he also notes that with The Coming Insurrection we are “not dealing with a post-workerist exodus immanent to the resources of immaterial labor or cognitive capitalism. Rather L’insurrection advocates a comparatively sober practice of defection and sabotage, which aims to turn the machines of subjection against themselves” (Toscano 2009, 5-6). The reference to a “post-workerist exodus” is almost certainly a nod to the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, especially their “Empire Trilogy,” which has provided an articulation and re-articulation of what exodus would look like under the biopolitical conditions of Empire. It is through the concept of exodus that the most territorialized stakes of the resistance are most cogently expressed.
The spatial relationship of exodus to the site of exploitative production is historicized by Hardt and Negri in Empire, where they write:
Although exploitation and domination are still experiences concretely, on the flesh of the multitude, they are nonetheless amorphous in such a way that it seems there is no place left to hide. If there is no longer a place that can be recognized as outside, we must be against in every place. This being-against becomes the essential key to every active political position in the world, every desire that is effective—perhaps of democracy itself. The first anti-fascist partisans in Europe, armed deserters confronting their traitorous governments, were aptly called “against-men.” Today the generalized being-against of the multitude must recognize imperial sovereignty as the enemy and discover the adequate means to subvert its power. (HN 2000, 211-12)
Because there is no longer an “outside,” because we are surrounded with no way out, we must be against every place. In earlier historical periods it was easier to face the enemy—be it economical or political—but the enemy can no longer be met face-to-face in such a way; we can no longer just jam our sabots into the gears of the machine. This is the key difference that Hardt and Negri point to in describing evolving strategies of resistance:
Whereas in the disciplinary era sabotage was the fundamental notion of resistance, in the era of imperial control it may be desertion. Whereas being-against in modernity often meant a direct and/or dialectical opposition of forces, in postmodernity being-against might well be more effective in an oblique or diagonal stance. Battles against Empire might be won through subtraction and defection. This desertion does not have a place; it is the evacuation of the places of power. (HN 2000, 212)
(Hardt and Negri use both “desertion” and “exodus” in Empire to describe this postmodern form of diagonal resistance but seem to have dropped “desertion” in favor of “exodus” in Multitude and Commonwealth.) This strategy is developed further in Multitude with reference to historical examples of exodus from sovereignty, especially the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, from which we learn: “Exodus has never been and never will be irenic, that is, absolutely pacific and conciliatory. . . . Every exodus requires an active resistance, a rearguard war against the pursuing powers of sovereignty. ‘Flee,’ as Gilles Deleuze says, ‘but while fleeing grab a weapon’” (HN 2004, 342). But Hardt and Negri also want to insist that exodus is not merely a reactive form of resistant; it holds the potential for the active production of new subjectivities, new communities: “Not only must the multitude configure its exodus as resistance, it must also transform that resistance into a form of constituent power, creating the social relations and institutions of a new society” (HN 2004, 348). It is precisely this sense of exodus-as-social-factory productive of a coming politics that they will go on to develop at length in Commonwealth.
The form of the exodus today would not be a movement outward, but rather movement within—within the city, within ourselves. As Hardt and Negri put it, “This exodus does not necessarily mean going elsewhere. We can pursue a line of flight while staying right here, by transforming the relations of production and mode of social organization under which we live” (HN 2009, 152-53). This would be a further reversal of the biopolitical machine: singularities have been grouped together into metropolises, the new social factories, and like the industrial factories of old, the contacts and associations created with the city allows for the flourishing of forms of rebellion and resistance attendant to the current modes of production in which the command of the capitalist is increasingly removed from the site of production itself, allowing the multitude to promote “joyful encounters” (HN 2009, 255). For, unlike the rage that fueled the sabotage of the Invisible Committee, the exodus of Hardt and Negri is predicated on love and all of its productive capacities. “When we engage in the production of subjectivity that is love,” they write, “we are not merely creating new objects or even new subjects in the world. Instead we are producing a new world, a new social life. . . . Love is an ontological event in that it marks a rupture with what exists and the creation of the new” (HN 2009, 180-81). The exodus is the revolutionary gesture in which incommensurable realms—politics and the ethical—are brought in closest concert. Love, for Badiou, is a powerful political force as well:
Love is violent, irresponsible and creative. Its duration is irreducible to that of private satisfactions. It creates a new thought, whose unified content bears on disjunction and its consequences. To hold on to the point of love is educational as to the mutilation that the supposed sovereignty of the individual imposes on human existence. Love teaches in fact that the individual as such is something vacuous and insignificant. Already by itself, this teaching demands love be considered a noble and difficult cause in contemporary times. (Badiou 2008, 49)
Hardt and Negri would want to emphasize the creative aspects of love, to be sure, but also insist on the joint production of both new individuals, new singularities, and the creation of the common; and while the postmodern exodus may not entail actually moving out of the city, the production of new selfhoods will entail a becoming-foreign of the native territory. This is the most productive form of analogical love, an aleatory encounter with the alterity of the other:
Let foreigners teach us at least to become foreign to ourselves, to project ourselves sufficiently out of ourselves to no longer be captive to this long Western and white history that has come to an end, and from which nothing more can be expected than sterility and war. Against this catastrophic and nihilistic expectation of a security state, let us greet the foreignness of tomorrow. (Badiou 2008, 70)
This is a “real” choice: to desert or not? Will we have the courage to become foreign to ourselves? What both Badiou and Hardt & Negri show is that any future politics of the common worthy of the name will need to be based on collapsing the political difference through projects which engage in everyday actions, informed by philosophical reflection, striving toward ethical goals. As Badiou puts it, “through a combination of construction of thought, which is always global or universal, and political experiments, which are local or singular but can be transmitted universally, we can assure the new existence of the communist hypothesis, both in consciousness and in concrete situations” (Badiou 2008, 117).
Coda
I would be remiss if I did not mention, in closing, the really-existing exoduses that are happening all around the world today in the form of occupations of areas of major metropolises, small towns, schools, new commons and old. In a prescient passage in Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri struggle to articulate the tangible forms that diagonal lines of flight will take:
The exodus of the multitude from the republic of property, from hierarchies of command over production, and from all other social hierarchies is perhaps the most significant example of a common decision. How is that decision to be made? Is there a vote? We are not yet in a position to describe the structures and function of such a democracy, but we can see clearly now, at least, that constructing it is necessary to treat the ills of capital and foster the expansion of biopolitical production. (HN 2009, 306)
We may very well be drawing up a blueprint for the production of that new life in common.
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Badiou, Alain. 2008. The Meaning of Sarkozy. Trans. David Fernbach. London and New York: Verso.
Hardt, Michael. 2011. Note from the Editor. South Atlantic Quarterly 110: 4 (Fall): 964.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin.
———. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
The Invisible Committee. 2009. The Coming Insurrection. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Marchart, Oliver. 2011. Democracy and Minimal Politics: The Political Difference and Its Consequences. South Atlantic Quarterly 110: 4 (Fall): 965-973.
Tiqqun. 2010. Introduction to Civil War. Trans. Alexander R. Galloway and Jason E. Smith. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Toscano, Alberto. 2009. The war against pre-terrorism: The Tarnac 9 and The Coming Insurrection. Radical Philosophy 154 (March/April): 2-7.
Wark. McKenzie. 2004. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 2011. How to Occupy an Abstraction. Verso http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/ 728 (accessed December 9, 2011).
Žižek, Slavoj, ed. 2002. Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917. London and New York: Verso.
[1] Indeed, McKenzie Wark has even coined the pejorative neologism “Badizek” to signify their well-nigh Cronenbergian hybridity as one imbricated intellectual monstrosity (Wark 2011).
[2] I will, following the Invisible Committee and Tiqqun, take for granted the existence of this new Leviathan called Empire. As Hardt and Negri describe it in their text of the same name: “Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule—in short, a new form of sovereignty. Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world. . . . Our basic hypothesis is that sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire” (Hardt and Negri 2000, xi-xii).
[3] Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London and New York: Verso, 2012).
[4] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
[5] One would cite here, for example, Derrida’s Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994); Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London and New York: Verso, 1997); Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). For recent scholarship on this “turn”, see Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac, eds., Derrida and the Time of the Political (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). It is interesting to note that Derrida’s work is situated in the time of le politique, while Bruno Bosteels recent major work couples Badiou with la politique, a decision that Bosteels is very conscious of. See Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), especially the section “Whose Politics?,” 17-33.
[6] Toscano is referring to Agamben’s The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), and to passages such as this: “The extreme form of this expropriation of the Common is the spectacle, that is, the politics we live in. But this also means that in the spectacle our own linguistic nature comes back to us inverted. This is why (precisely because what is being expropriated is the very possibility of a common good) the violence of the spectacle is so destructive; but for that same reason the spectacle retains something like a positive possibility that can be used against it” (80).
[7] Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (New York: Sequence, 2011). See also Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 2010).
