On February 17, 2001, the ship East Sea came to shore in the southwest of France. On board were 910 Kurds—including 380 children—seeking political asylum. The affair received a flurry of media attention. Minister of the Interior Daniel Vaillant announced the asylum files would be treated case by case. In spring 2001, this article was published in the journal Singulier-Pluriel, in an issue dedicated to the question: “Include/Exclude?”
The scene is familiar and the attitudes too stereotyped to avoid being boring. There are the tender-hearted who cannot bear to exclude any child of man. There are the serious-minded who mock the tender-hearted and maintain that rational rules of inclusion are necessary, and that to deny this is to lend support to brute and irrational passions of exclusion. There are the cunning ones who ask if a passion for exclusion is not in fact the hidden truth of the rules of inclusion (though they themselves would deny it). There are the even more cunning who make fun of the old-fashioned way of being cunning by noting that, since our lives have been invaded by digital screens, there is no longer any hiding place for truth, any more than there is a dividing line between interior and exterior in this time of universal trade and simulation. We exclude, cannot not exclude, don’t want to exclude, can’t even exclude.
And the cycle starts again, raising the additional suspicion that perhaps we exclude because we can no longer exclude, and that a secret dialectic lurks in the contradictions, feeding the inclusion of the exclusion and the exclusion of the inclusion.
Take for example, the affair of the Kurdish refugees. Beyond its emotional aspect, this could have been an opportunity to expose the theoretical game of hide and seek at the heart of notions of inclusion and exclusion. Our Minister of the Interior delivered a lesson in this in his initial statements, which underlined a fundamental distinction. As a general rule, our country can only accept people as residents if they arrive here with a proven means of earning a living. There is an exception in the case of refugees whom the Republic welcomes into its territory because they have been hounded out of their own territory for political activism. There are thus two rules of inclusion because our country is two things in one. It is the territory of certain vital activities and of ordinary living beings, employers, employed, and unemployed. Inclusion among those living in this territory is subject to balances and limits. It must—and should—be restricted to those who are already included in the first two categories, employers and employed. But our country is also a polis unto itself. It does not allow itself to be broken down into sets and subsets. It does not recognize only one condition of belonging. As an exception to the first rule, those who have been chased from their own countries because they belong to the political can join. However, this belonging to the political does not define political inclusion. It is neither as French citizens nor as political actors in their own countries, but as ordinary living beings that they are accepted. They are exempted from proving their means of subsistence, in exception to the economic rules of admission. Things are thus a bit more complicated than the political philosophers who oppose the economic order of the simple life, and the political order of the good life, would have it. Properties of the political and properties of life intersect here. It is the political which determines that a living being without the means to live can be included in the population—on the condition, of course, that he doesn’t do politics.
But this is only the beginning of the difficulty. A second problem immediately arises. Those who can demonstrate their effective political belonging can be accepted as ordinary living beings on that basis. Common sense and “the police” join hands in this. As our Minister of the Interior reminded us, things must be studied case by case in order to determine who in the mass is political and who isn’t. Contrary to the slander that the police act with crude brutality, it is the essence of police to carry out detailed, case-by-case investigations, to check the classification of each person and each event—that is, to check whether they have the properties that mark their inclusion in a given class. Those who simply suffer from the action of authorities or its impacts cannot be recognized as political refugees. These are cases for humanitarianism, which, as far as possible, provides the means of continuing to live onsite. Humanitarianism helps living beings because they are part of humanity, but it does not include them in any territory. Only those who can prove that they suffered as political subjects merit welcome into a new territory. But for political activity to be visible, there must be a political stage on which it is able to play out. What happens to this proof when there is nothing—over and above the reproduction of ordinary living beings—but participation in a game of domination, or in acts of opposition to this domination seen as delinquency? It is always the same old deplorable affair. The political must exist for someone to be political. There is the property of being counted or the property of belonging to what does not count. “Your misfortune is to not be, and this misfortune has no recourse,” said the progressive patrician to the plebeians in secession on the Aventine, in the apologue of Ballanche.
We know how his reactionary colleagues made use of this nonbeing. It would be crazy, they said, to believe that one can make promises to the plebeians when they do not speak—when only a vague grumble comes out of their mouths, a sign not of intelligence but need. To not be is to be nothing but a living being occupied with the reproduction of life. Bare life determines only belonging to itself. That is, it determines a lack of belonging to anything other than itself. And of course the only ones who can recognize the difference are those who fit the exception, who belong to something other than bare life, life’s symbolic order of name, achievement, tradition, and religion.
There is only one logical solution to the nonexistence of those who don’t exist because they do nothing but exist: the assertion of a class of beings and actions that exist precisely because they are nothing. This class of beings and actions is called “demos.” As a whole, it is constituted by those who are nothing, who have no entitlement to the exercise of government, and who exist in surplus of any way of counting the parts of society. It is this class that ensures an occasional eruption of the political in exception to everyday domination. This takes place through singular operations that express the truly inconsistent properties of the collective subject.
Such is the hard reasoning imposed on any Minister of the Interior. The political belonging he must judge case by case, based on a file and according to fixed criteria, can only be determined between two inconsistent properties—between two nonexistences. First is the fact of being nothing because one is nothing. We can call this “the police tautology of impropriety.” This always precedes the observation of properties by which everyone is assigned a place suiting his properties. And, given this, one may also be everything exactly because one is nothing, the political paradox of impropriety. The reason for a Minister of the Interior to exist is to judge according to criteria of belonging and property. But the reason for this reason to exist is that everything a Minister of the Interior has to judge by is determined by the relationship of two improprieties, two nonexistences.
Before being counted into a certain class by virtue of one’s properties, one must first be countable. If one is not counted, it is not because one has properties to qualify for a different count. Rather, it is because one does not have the property of being counted at all. And conversely, one is counted—or rather one counts as uncounted—by demonstrating through one’s conduct the property of speech of those who do not speak, the public actions of those who belong to the ordinary simple life, and the collective subject of those who are nothing more than another life. Case-by-case accounts will never amount to more than a necessary an arbitration between these two ways of counting the uncounted.
This misfortune affects not only the Ministers, but philosophers and philosophy. It would be pleasing if things to be judged could be sensibly divided into two regimes: those relating to the determination of concepts and those relying on reflection to place a case within the rule that will decide it. Unfortunately this division fails to cover several things of importance. For example, the entire activity of the political is to prove the inclusion of cases, objects, and subjects. However, it is not a matter of knowledge that determines the rules, nor a matter of judgment according to those rules, but rather one of singular instances of the inclusion of what is not included. The misfortune is original. Philosophy became aware of this in the classical period, when it believed that it had secured the bedrock of judgment on inclusion and exclusion. At this moment of triumph over the old monsters of poetry and the new sophistic monster of the simple equality of a being to itself, philosophy was confronted by an even more formidable scandal: the political paradox of the equality of being and nothingness, and of the identification of the nonclass—men without qualities—with the whole community. Plato argued that it was impossible to have natural endowments other than those given by nature, and impossible to be in two places at once—at work and in the public arena—when neither work nor public affairs can wait. This is the impossibility of exercising what one does not belong to. We know that Aristotle conversely proposed the advantage of transforming the rule of exclusion into a rule of inclusion, giving priority in political belonging to those who do not have the time and are not in the right place to exercise it. To the rosy thinking of our contemporaries, this is an opposition between the open liberal city and the closed totalitarian city. The exclusions life enacts and the inclusions it renders unworkable are supposed to resolve the interminable conflict between the paradox of political impropriety and the tautology of the impropriety of the police. The system of these incompatibilities is called political philosophy.
For its part, the political is the exercise of the relationship between these two improprieties. This relationship is in no way written into the nature of things. What is written is the tautology of the impropriety of men without property entering into the logic of property and class, function and place. This supplementary account—arguing for all who are nothing—must always force its way in. The dialectic of human rights and the rights of the citizen is exemplary here. The liberal and Marxist theses of which the citizen is the mask or the tool, which in different ways make man the last truth, equally fail to understand the political meaning of this duality. It blurs the play of belonging. It allows man to exercise the rights of the citizen, and the citizen those of the human, by applying the principle of civic equality in spheres where domination is exercised. Thus it answers the tautology of the impropriety which sets what is self-evident in life against political fictions by crossing the principles of inclusion, by extrapolating the properties of the citizen into the realm of the ordinary living being, and by laying claim to human attributes for the purpose of citizen activity. The interplay of the two identities allows for the manifestation of political subjects and forms of inclusion distinct from forms of belonging. There is something ironic about this double play that grants permission to live here on the condition that one was formerly a citizen there. It acknowledges the disjuncture of these belongings that the political weaves together to work its own inclusions. It acknowledges a situation in which human rights are only human rights; they are the rights of those who do not have the political capacity to exchange them for civil rights. They are human rights insofar as they belong to simple humanity, in the end nothing more than the bare fact of simple life, the tautology of which excludes belonging to anything except itself. The human who includes everyone is, in the end, the living being possessing the right simply to be helped where he is, to the exclusion of all other rights. In sum, this is the right to be nothing, unless one is able to demonstrate a political belonging that allows one to be a simple living being in another place. The unfortunate twist, of course, is that one only officially belongs to politics for as long as one participates in the transformation of nothing.
Naturally, the relationship to the external is always simultaneously a tendency of the internal. The status of this humanity, which only includes or confers rights through the impropriety of bare life, and the paradox of those who must show they belonged to politics elsewhere in order to win inclusion here as a simple living being, translate into a certain system of inclusion, a state of conflict between improprieties. In the consensual state, this conflict is forgotten in the identity that tends to be established between the properties of living beings occupied with the reproduction of life and the properties of subjects participating in public life. The state says that it is eroded by a nasty secret called exclusion. But the exclusion referred to here is nothing other than the logic of the imperceptibility of principles of inclusion. From the time belonging to the “simple life” was taken as proof of an incapacity to exercise public life, political subjects have been created to contradict this incapacity, to demonstrate that simple living beings are more than simple living beings, that they are humans or citizens, that they have a mouth to speak and a mind to discuss common concerns because they experience common concerns. Where the barrier between included and excluded appeared, it was open right there to deterioration through its exposure. Where the barrier disappeared in the simple identity of citizens and ordinary living beings—an identity in which all people are included as activists in their own lives—exclusion was no longer subjectified. It no longer constitutes more than an individual incapacity. In the end, the excluded is an ill-adapted living being, who doesn’t know how to bring his way of life in line with today’s means of earning a living. The apparent reason for this is that he lacks the motivation to constitute himself as an effective activist in his own life, and thus to participate in the common vitality. The identification of vitality with politicality soon meets its natural limit in identification with life itself, which in the end is condemned for lack of both politicality and vitality. Life is too vibrant, said the sociologists of Durkheim’s time, fearful of the danger democratic passions posed for the social bond. Contemporary revisionists, on the contrary, suggest that life is not sufficiently vibrant for this same bond. Passions are always too many or too few. The relationship between inclusion among living beings and inclusion among citizens cannot be resolved through identification, any more than by the pious separation of life from the good life. The relationship only works well, perhaps, when it is contradictory in principle and conflictual in practice.
And of course, this is only one aspect of the paradoxes of inclusion and exclusion that face us today. Here we could raise another concern around which the serious-minded, the exclusion/inclusion enthusiasts, and the more-than-cunning—all analysts of generalized blurring—are eagerly congregating these days: the concern that an overabundance of images kills the image and that art will be put to death both because it is everywhere in the environment of our lives and because museum halls are replacing distinct works of art with objects and images culled from everyday life. We generally attribute this blurring effect to two opposite causations. According to some, it is due to art’s break with the celebration of the visible common world and the pleasure of ordinary people, correlated with its desire for autonomy, which has pulled it into a spiral of self-assertion that achieves its logical limit in the possibility of baptizing any object in the world as art. According to others, conversely, the invasion of spaces for art by shop displays and advertising images is due to a prior renunciation of art’s autonomy. It is the market-worthy petty change of the great Communist dream to identify forms of art with forms of life. Two opposing reasons are given for the death of art: the closure of autonomy and the transgression of this closure. That the same effect can be ascribed to two contrary causes should lead one to think that something about the cause is missing. Maybe the distinction used to recognize which items belong in an art class is not separate from the indistinctness of those items from forms of life and objects of the world.
Those who call on us to rediscover a lost sense of aesthetic pleasure and judgment doubtlessly forget that Kant twice tied this sense to something other than art—once to the nightingale’s song, which gives pleasure exactly because it is not art, and in which our pleasure evaporates if we discover that it is only a mechanical imitation; and once to this communication of ideas between the cultivated and uncultured classes, which allows for the “constitution of a people in a sustainable, common body.” More radically, Schiller identified aesthetic suspense with an exceptional type of sensory experience existing outside normal forms—that is, outside forms of domination based on the opposition between men of bare life and men of symbolized life. Aesthetic experience was autonomous, in that it overturned the established distribution of spheres of experience. And it did so in two ways, as a suspension of the forms of exclusive life, and also as a process of life’s self-formulation. In other words, aesthetic experience was autonomous only insofar as it was not. The same thing goes for autonomous art. It is art, in that it is equally something other than art; in that its forms are always simultaneously the forms of a life freed from former distributions; and in that nothing belongs to art, since everything in the world carries the power of art within itself. Not since the farce of pop art, Duchamp, and the Dada movement has everything become an object of art, but rather since the word “art” became a singular noun and aesthetics imposed its law. This is not, as is read in various places, a law of speculative delirium issuing from a few German thinkers during an era when the heads of kings were being chopped off, but rather the small music in which, little by little, everything in the world—the herbalist’s leaves, the mineralogist’s stones, painted fruit in painted bowls, anonymous faces in the gaze of photographic objectivity, decrepit walls, threadbare suits, empty words under the pen of a novelist—is made to speak and is set to work before metro tickets and bicycle wheels, folded newspapers and peeling posters are given their turn. Everything speaks and brings to light the meaning written on its physicality—the meaning of a life in formation beyond all classification. It is a demonstration of the egalitarian splendor of mute things indifferent to domination. Everything outside the customary is thus capable of becoming a Kantian nightingale and of tuning our ear to the music of an anonymous splendor. This is the beauty of death, said Michel de Certeau. It is the power of the inhuman, according Gilles Deleuze and others. Between life, which include too much not to exclude, and the political, which through specific operations turns nothing into everything and exclusion into inclusion, is inserted the declassifying power of death or the inhuman, which includes all bodies in aesthetic equality, in their promises and simulations. It has been two centuries since the effects of this aesthetic inclusion began to mingle with those of political inclusion, supporting the latter in revoking established distributions and in equalizing the high and low by countering them with an excess of equality. Let’s leave the tender-hearted to fight social fracture through art. Let’s leave the critical-minded to denounce the hard social reality that maintains aesthetic distinction. We can also leave the serious-minded and cunning ones to deplore the fatal collusion of artistic absolutes with political totalitarianism, or of aesthetics with the indifference of the market. The blurring effects of aesthetic declassification unfold. The conflictual complicity of men-who-are-nothing’s political subjectification and things-that-are-nothing’s aesthetic consecration play out, at a much deeper level. The conflict over inclusion and exclusion is not ready to be brought to a line in the sand.