FOUR
The Law, Slave to Rights
Modern political science is a science of the state; at the same time it is, inseparably, a science of obedience. The state is the apparatus that irresistibly produces obedience, that irresistibly forces members of society to obey. As I have emphasized, this definition of the state has its underside, what one might call its corresponding “undefinition.” This state, which causes obedience, does not command in the proper sense. At least we know of no principles that would motivate or illuminate its commands or of any positive purposes that it might pursue. More precisely, we do not know what kind of peace it imposes, what internal meaning it gives the external order that it guarantees with an unprecedented effectiveness and completeness. The question then arises: Given that members of society obey, whom or what do they actually obey? The instrumentality of the state confronts us, in a way, with an obedience without command, or an obedience whose link with commanding is in some way essentially indeterminate. Does it still make sense to speak of obedience? I have already mentioned the terms by which Thomas Hobbes provides us, if not with the true name of this obedience, at least with the principle that gives it meaning, that is, authorization: the sovereign’s actions are authorized by those who obey and who are the true authors of these actions. Whatever he who commands me by the instrument of the state may do, I must acknowledge his actions as my own, since I authorized him to do what he would judge best to do as sovereign. As we know, this authorization is not as unlimited as it seems. In effect, although I have no right to disobey, since I regard the actions and decisions of the sovereign as my own, I can nonetheless resist or seek to escape from him if he attempts to take my life or to put me in a situation where I risk losing it: since the desire not to die at another’s hands is the foundation of my obedience, I can without injustice refuse to obey orders that would put my life in danger. The admirable architect’s plan that Hobbes has conceived and outlined is spoiled by some troubling points of fuzziness, even some large ink stains, in the places where the foundations of the edifice are supposed to be.
Thus, in the system of the modern state, one can no more speak properly of commanding than one can speak properly of obeying. How can one say that the subject or the citizen obeys, since in reality he authorizes, just as we do in our representative regimes, if not every day then at least on election days, when the subject or citizen stands at the beginning and at the source of the processes that produce the public organization of our representative regimes—and since, moreover, he can dispense with obeying whenever obedience would risk putting his life in danger, a risk from which we removed ourselves with palpable relief when we abolished conscription, authorizing the sovereign to put the citizen’s life in danger only when the citizen is a volunteer, a “professional soldier”? What a strange system! How can this be understood, how can its mystery be unraveled? If, in this system, no one commands properly speaking and no one obeys properly speaking, this is because commanding has been separated from beginning. The archē1 has been dismembered. This is the heart of the operation of the state.
The “Autonomous” Subject
Before further analyzing this dismemberment of which the modern state is at once the producer and the product, and in order to bring out its crucial significance, I would like to suggest that it has summoned the apparition of a specter that will continue to haunt not only our collective order but our intimate awareness of ourselves, the specter of the subject that commands itself, the specter of the autonomous subject. Recall that this is a notion that has no meaning in the classical understanding of human action and that for this reason was explicitly dismissed as a chimera conceived by the demon of analogy—in the event, by the analogy between the individual agent and the political body.2 It was only owing to a growing incomprehension of the role and of the meaning of the pair of terms “command-obey” in practical life that this notion has had any plausibility; and the graver this obfuscation became, the more the specter grew in scope and authority, until it came to cover the poor agents that we have become with its boundless, albeit vain, pretentions.
To reduce the argument to what is essential, I would say something along the following lines. However bound together they may be, to command and to obey are two qualitatively different actions that therefore require different agents who stand differently in relation to the action. Each is complete as an action, and, I might say, each completely occupies the agent whether he is commanding or obeying. The agent who commands has no place in himself for one who obeys; the agent who obeys has no place in himself for one who commands. Let us have a closer look. He who commands begins the action. Once engaged, this action has the qualities included in its character as beginning-commanding. As a command it is a complete action and is assessed as such: has the agent commanded well? As for the action of the one who obeys, its character is that of an action that does not begin but only extends or pursues more or less faithfully: this is a case of a lesser action, an action, one might say, of lesser substance as an action; it is thus a different action, but as an act of obedience it is also a complete action. And it is assessed as such: has the agent obeyed well? Since it is a different action, there is no question of an agent being able to be in the position of commanding and of obeying with respect to the same action, of possessing at the same time and with respect to the same action the commanding and the obeying disposition. Once again, to command and to obey are two essentially different and equally complete actions. From the moment I try seriously to imagine that I am commanding myself or that I am obeying myself, I must imagine that the one who commands and the one who obeys are really two, and thus that I am obeying or commanding not myself, but someone other than myself, that is, another. I can imagine myself autonomous only by producing a heteronomy within myself. In reality the agent as such is neither autonomous nor heteronomous, though he may be commanding or obeying. Autonomy and heteronomy are abstract notions that cover far too much to allow us to analyze the grammar of action with precision, and any plausibility we can accord them resides in their polarity, which translates or betrays abstractly the concrete polarity between commanding and obeying.
The argument that I have just presented in a summary way might well call forth the following objection, one that seems to have some common sense in its favor: Can I not command myself to stop smoking or to overcome my fear of spiders, or even a more fearsome enemy? Are not commands of this type at the origin of the “victories over ourselves”—too rare, alas—that make us “content with ourselves” and win the compliments of those close to us? Here we must beware of a confusion. A person can indeed command himself to stop smoking. This command is also a beginning, and we are indeed dealing here with a full and complete action since it has its reasons, or it is not without reason: one stops smoking for reasons of health (one’s own or that of others who are close); or to save money, since tobacco has become quite expensive; or to be free of an addiction, and so on. Still, although the one who commands indeed appears in this act, this is not the case concerning the one who obeys, since “the one who obeys” is only a part of the one who commands—his body, his passions, or his bad habits. As I said above, to obey is truly an action, that is, a complete action. Now, to make the recalcitrant parts of our being obey in no way opens up the space for such an action. When I exercise this power of commanding, I am the one who commands; I am not the one who obeys, since the one who obeys simply does not exist.
“To stop smoking,” like the other “victories” of this kind, belongs to what the tradition called the power of the soul over the body or simply “self-mastery,” the acquisition of which once made up a principal part of education. The idea of autonomy has practically nothing to do with that of self-mastery. As a matter of fact, the idea of autonomy gained the authority it has today only insofar as the idea of the power of the soul over the body or of self-mastery has lost its own. The two ideas are mutually exclusive; they are opposed in the same way that a natural order, an “order of the soul” that is demonstrated and affirmed in self-mastery, is opposed to one that is anything but natural since it is, on the contrary, supposed to be produced by the subject itself in the operation by which it is supposed to command itself and obey itself. Since it is law that is the source of commanding as well as of obeying, to command, in the order of autonomy, is to produce the law, and to obey is to obey the law thus produced. This is why, as was summed up in the passage from Thomas Aquinas cited above, according to classical moral philosophy, one could speak of autonomy only with reference to a political body, the only possible context for “giving oneself the law.” “To stop smoking” thus belongs to the old order of self-mastery and in no way to the new order of autonomy.3
As I have said, the loss of concrete understanding of the qualitative difference between commanding and obeying and the obfuscation or oblivion of the phenomenon of commanding and thus also of that of obeying result from or prepare the system of the state. Founded on an authorization that is neither command nor obedience but envelops the confusion of the two, the state obliges members of society to live in a social-political world in which neither commanding nor obeying is any longer clearly visible, since they no longer exist in the integrity of their concrete polarity. The apparently, or rather conspicuously, extreme character of obeying as well as commanding in the regime of sovereignty conceived by Hobbes cannot mask the secret evisceration that both undergo. Under cover of this double parody, the great machine of the state shelters a member of society who obeys just as little as the state commands him, or who, more precisely, rather than obeying the state that commands him, adopts more and more a manner of conduct that resembles obeying in order to comply with state rules that look like commands. The member cannot properly obey these commandments from the state that are not commandments, but he fits more and more the mold of the state, this general disposition to let himself be shaped, a disposition that is not really obedience since it never encounters a sincere and complete act of commanding. Having been molded by the state, set up in this opaque condition where mutilated and confused notions of commanding as well as of obeying blend together, the member of society takes on a form by, and takes pride in, seeing himself as one who gives himself commandments, who obeys himself, an illusion or chimera that experience cannot dissipate because the state system protects this member from any actual encounter with either commanding or obeying. The more he is shaped by the state and becomes incapable of commanding as well as obeying, and, moreover, of understanding what it means to command and to obey, the more he sees himself as self-commanding and obeying himself, then the more he situates himself and prides himself on this imaginary condition, that of a subject or an autonomous individual, an unrecognized but faithful product of the unperceived tyranny of the state.
The Law against Itself
In the modern natural-right teaching as in the state system, as I was just saying, commanding and obeying tend to lose their meaning and their proper substance. It is of course the fate of commanding that is determinant, while that of obeying is only a consequence. Commanding is in effect the eminent or excellent modality of action, for the very simple reason that action itself, action as such, includes an intrinsic component of commanding or is based or hinges on a pivot-point of commanding. This pivot-point of commanding is the rule or the reason of action—the rule or the reason without which action would not even come to awareness and without which of course there would be no question either of deliberation or of decision. The rule of action is no less “commanding” when the agent disdains to take account of it, dismisses it, or goes against it. Thus there are commands and commanding agents, in this world or in the other, only because action and the human agent are naturally and necessarily under the rule of action. The most brutal and blind tyrant draws the possibility of his being, one can say, from reason’s command, which he ignores, but which is implicit in practical life as such, a command that is concretized in the rules proper to diverse actions or categories of actions.
The error of modern natural right, an irreparable error, even an unpardonable error, because it presupposes a willing blindness, resides in the idea that it is possible to produce the command starting from a condition of noncommand, from a state of nature or of natural freedom, which would know nothing of command. The point is not only that one would seek in vain where the idea of command could possibly come from in a world that knew nothing of it,4 or how to establish it “by convention” without first having the “natural” experience of it. This, to put it more directly, is because the necessity and the legitimacy of commanding are given with the very constitution of the human world as a practical world, a world of action, a world that presupposes in its mere intelligibility that action has reasons that in principle govern it, reasons that the human agent often ignores or distorts, but without which he would be incapable even of choosing his perversity or his dissidence, which would have neither meaning nor appeal. It is the human agent’s clearer and deeper understanding of the reasons of action that allow him to introduce more order and reason in the part of the human world that is within his competence, whether he is a skillful negotiator, an audacious strategist, a wise politician, or a discerning spiritual director; and it is by his personal command that he gives effect to reason’s natural command.
Thus, on the one hand, there is no natural freedom, there is no human condition without command; and on the other hand, the practical world is never given over essentially to the arbitrary commands of gods or of human beings, because along with action come the reasons for action and because the human agent cannot engage in action without entering to some degree into its reasons. There is so much disorder in the world, and the unreason of human beings is so plain to see, only because the human world is essentially albeit potentially ordered, because it is only thinkable or livable by these rules and reasons that give meaning to human actions, however human beings may follow them, which is often quite badly.
It is within such a world, a world essentially albeit potentially ordered, that political law intervenes as the principal ordering authority, the potential cause of the most salutary order as well as of the most devastating disorder. Political law—the law that governs—places itself at the summit of practical life, as does the sovereign state, but with this difference, that political law finds its place within the practical order, without whose resources it would not know what cardinal point to aim at, as inept as the Leviathan that has all power but no idea which way is north. It situates itself within the order of practical life, an order that, as we have emphasized, is governed by the pair “command-obey” according to the indications or orientations given by the rule of action as refracted in the diversity of its domains and modalities, from contract law to medical ethics to penal justice. Precisely because this order of practical life is ordered and animated by all kinds of disparate rules and reasons—there are also rules on how to properly tie one’s necktie, or “to sway the festoon and the hem”5—and because the goods at which our actions aim are of very unequal quality and often incomparable or even incompatible, it is indispensable that this teeming and mobile architecture be held together, united, and crowned by a keystone that is at once weighty, protective, and animating, the political law, the law that governs. This law dominates the practical world—otherwise it could not govern—it is kurios, or kuria,6 but it exists and has meaning only because there is a practical world.
Political law has two characteristics: on the one hand, it gives the main directives intended to guide this practical whole, this practical operation, constituted by every political community; on the other, it has the right and the power to repress by force all contravention of its commands, which are assumed to be fully legitimate unless challenged before a constitutional tribunal, according to the diversity of institutions that is not our subject here. Political law is thus at once directive and constraining, and the conjunction of these two traits accords it the specificity and the eminence that characterize it. At the same time, all rules of action in the human world possess these two traits to some degree. The deontology of a profession includes both certain directives and certain variable modalities of constraint, which range from censure to professional exclusion, a “bad reputation” being not a minor punishment. Although on the one hand political law or government is the summit of the practical order, albeit only the summit, on the other—that is, at the most modest echelons of the practical order—certain seeds of government are present and active: even the agent who is most detached from all association and dispensed from following the least communal rule—imagine for the moment such a possible case—would nonetheless be “subject to the rule” because he would always have to pose the question What is to be done?—and because this question not only would have no answer but would have no meaning if it could not be illuminated by a rule of action, however difficult to find and still more difficult to apply such a rule might sometimes be. If we examined the practical association from bottom to top and in every direction, without neglecting any corner or hidden stairway, we would not find an individual left to his natural freedom or simply enjoying this freedom and the rights that supposedly go with it. One might be without a country, which is not an enviable condition, or perhaps homeless, but one cannot be without law or rule, because that would mean that one is not an acting being, and thus that one does not belong to humanity.
Thus, as I have emphasized, whereas the practical and political order involves a gradient connected by many ladders none of whose rungs is left practically indeterminate—that is, none is exempt from the rule of action and the polarity commanding-obeying that corresponds to this rule—the statist order is based on the polarity between two kinds of indeterminacy: the indeterminacy of a social life that tends toward ever more freedom, ever more “new rights,” and the indeterminacy borne by a sovereign state that possesses a monopoly on legitimate commands, commands whose indeterminacy we have emphasized. It follows that, while the state extends its empire over our practical and political life, the practical world, the world of rule-bound action, is in the grip of a scheme of ever more ruleless freedom at whose summit there is a sovereign whose principles of action are nevertheless more and more uncertain. The paradoxical status of the law in the modern scheme consists in the fact that it occupies the pole of the supreme rule of action, that it retains this role since a human order cannot subsist without a rule of action, and that at the same time it deploys its superiority and its command over a human world that knows nothing of or wants to ignore the practical order and has no place for any rule of action whatsoever, since it is determined originally and essentially as natural freedom or life without law. The modern state intends to rule a human world that believes itself or wishes itself to be without law or rule.
We have given this enterprise, hopeless but not without consequence, the advantageous appearance of a beneficial redefinition of the law, a redefinition that consists no longer in setting down the best rules or the best regime, but in guaranteeing and promoting the rights in which natural freedom consists. Henceforth the law proposes to give members of society only those commands necessary to lead a life without law. Everything that goes beyond this limit, that might have some positive content or aim at a definite good, a way of life judged to be good, is held in some way to violate human rights and to take us back into the old world of commanding and obeying. We want to replace a practical world consisting in actions regulated by all kinds of rules of varying amplitude, rigor and precision, according to more or less independent and always tangled gradients, with a world of simple polarity in which political law, now confused with state commands, has no meaning other than authorizing and no function other than organizing a life without law—what we call freedom. We have required political law to be something other than and finally contrary to a law; we have required political law to act against its essence as law, an essence from which it cannot, however, rid itself.
This is no doubt the deep cause of the specific opacity of modern society, an opacity that the sciences we call precisely “social” address and aim to overcome. Once modern society had taken up the viewpoint and, as it were, the mission of attaining the greatest possible freedom and the most extensive individual rights, and this by the methodical suppression of all commands or rules of action produced and borne by the collectivity, it demanded, in order to grasp itself or rather to grasp itself once again, that there be determinations of a new kind, no longer political or social commands that each person can perceive but “social causes” discernible only by specialized observers. The more the laws that are properly practical and political, laws and rules that command visibly, are weakened, the more difficult we find it to represent to ourselves the practical and political whole of which we are members, and the more we need to bring about a new modality of collective order, henceforth held together in our eyes by laws of another type, the “laws of society.” While the “vertical” and visible commands were being effaced, there arose the “horizontal” sway of a new authority and, as it were, a new substance, the “society” that “commands” us in an unprecedented sense, by causing us to act in a certain way without our being able to escape its influence or even be aware of it without the light of a specific kind of knowledge.
There is no need here further to elaborate the social and intellectual movement that is one with the deployment of sociology along the arc that goes from Montesquieu to Durkheim. What must be noticed, however, is that in the most recent period the need or the hope of setting forth the laws of society, or, more generally, of understanding the social whole in its order and its movements, its statics and its dynamics, has withered or rather dissipated. Sociology, the royal science of society and of the modern world, has now largely renounced the ambition that constituted it. More precisely, rather than seeing in society a whole made up of objective forces incomparably more powerful than the individuals who believe themselves to be free, it now looks on institutions, along with the ideas that support them and give them meaning, as “social constructions” destined to practical and theoretical “deconstruction.” Whereas in its origins sociology saw the individual with his subjective freedom as the product of the objective laws of the social body in its modern form, it now sees a limitless individual freedom coming to light victoriously against social stereotypes. Rather than correcting the illusions of the sovereign freedom of the individual, it delivers up social norms to the individual subjectivity, whose side it takes without reserve. It is as if the progress of freedom—that is, of practical indeterminacy—had discouraged the hope of achieving a theoretical determination of society as a whole rich with power and with meaning, unless this progress had relieved us of the need: established in a life without law, released from commands and rules, seeing in itself and around itself only individual rights to assert, why would the subject be concerned with looking for “laws of society” or for “social causes”—that is, for the sources of collective being—since in its eyes there is no longer a life in common. The social sciences no longer have a “social fact” or a “social movement” to illuminate. Contrary to their raison d’être, today’s social sciences assume the task of highlighting the unreality of society, thus only confirming the spontaneous feeling of dissociated members of society.
Political Law and Modern History
In these very summary remarks I have tried to bring to light the nerve of a political and scientific development of great magnitude, one of long duration and with contradictory manifestations. Focusing here on principles, I cannot give history, either political or intellectual, the place it deserves. I have just mentioned the recent disappearance of sociology as the ambition to understand this new object that was modern society, or simply society as such. The irruption of modern freedom, as I have just recalled, was soon accompanied by the elaboration of a new understanding of the collective order, no longer as commanded but as caused or necessitated. The abyss of political and social indeterminacy that had opened up found its correlate in an immense ambition of knowledge. The quest for theoretical certainty, for Science, responded to the practical vertigo. At the same time, the reconstruction of order was not left to the learned alone. Practical men, politicians and citizens themselves, not all readers of the sociologists, responded to the indeterminacy that had opened up with institutional constructions of great amplitude and ambition. A new political life was breathed into the statist order to which the dying ancien régime seemed to have given its final form. Even though the principles of natural freedom tended to separation, as Marx initially brought out and as we would later observe, it was in their name that the institutions of political liberty were built. By generalizing civil and political rights and by guaranteeing “public liberties,” by organizing and giving life to the representative regime, even though in effect they substituted abstract procedures for concrete social “commands,” the fathers of the republic enlarged the scope of practice and liberated the energy that made it possible to undertake an unprecedented political operation. I would characterize this operation as the pursuit of the rule of common action. What was the modern republic, in effect, in the period that might be called classical, if not a common action in search of its rule? Thus, in the first period of their implementation, the extension and the guarantee of abstract rights contributed to the concretization of a great political action. By disempowering or subverting established social and religious authorities, the democratic movement necessitated an ambitious reassumption and redefinition of the common.
It is difficult to determine the exact point of inflection at which the extension of rights, rather than giving the institution force and energy, and sometimes its very existence, began to strip it of its substance or to dilute this substance, and all the more difficult because this point of inflection did not appear at the same time in all the domains of collective life. We would not be too far from the truth, however, in situating this point or these points of inflection in the 1960s, or perhaps in a “1968 moment.” In any case, beginning then, all the great institutions in succession, first the Catholic Church, then the university, and finally the nation, had to confront a radical contestation of their proper legitimacy and their internal meaning.
It was not only that their members manifested a more and more intense desire to loosen and eventually to eliminate the rules of these institutions. The movement came also from the outside, or rather it aimed to efface the boundary between the inside and the outside, between the church and the “world,” between the university and society, between the nation and humanity. The unlimited sovereignty of individual rights became an unanswerable argument for anyone who wanted to prevail against the rules and the meaning of any institution whatsoever. In this way French legislators and judges, by rejecting the principle of selection in university admissions, tended to deprive what is doubtless the most useful and most just or the most noble institution produced or refounded by modern politics of its meaning and its substance. In this way, in the name of the principle of human rights, we want to prevent nations from passing laws that they might judge useful or necessary in order to preserve or encourage the common life and education that give each its physiognomy and its raison d’être. It is no longer up to political communities to determine who will be a citizen and under what conditions, since now each person is supposed to have the right to become a citizen of the state he or she chooses. Whatever the institution, one can say, every individual has the unconditional right to become a member—unconditional, that is, without having to be subject to the specific rules, to the “law” that governs the life of that institution, or by subjecting themselves only in the most approximative and, as it were, disdainful manner. Whether the question concerns the nation, the family, or the university, the institution is unable to oppose its rule to the individual who invokes his desire or his right, the two now being hard to distinguish. As I noted in the previous chapter, under the exclusive legitimacy of the principle of human rights, all aspects of the human world are delivered up to a jus omnium in omnia. Let us be clear here that this “right” is understood in a more and more extensive way, indeed in a way that is properly unlimited: not only as the right to “have it all” but, more troubling still, as the right to be everything that we are or want to be. How can this be?
The Right to Be All That We Want to Be
In order to be effectively recognized and guaranteed, this right must be determined by law, since law alone effectively organizes collective life. But how can we determine a right to be all that we are or want to be? How can it be given form or content? How can we determine, identify, verify, or merely guess what we are or want to be? The question for each individual is of course infinite. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the right to be has been declared and legalized before there has been any response to the question, or even any serious concern with responding to the question. Here it is much more important to have a right than to know what one has a right to. The decisive point to be noticed is that what we are or want to be is not what we do or want to do. What we do or want to do puts us immediately under the law, or under the rule of action, even when, as is the case today, the very idea of a law or a rule has been much weakened. We may well protest that our desire knows neither law nor rule, but once we carry out an action or undertake something practical, we are dealing with a rule. As a matter of fact, if we are doing or wish to do something, that presupposes that we could do or want to do something else. We cannot give an account of the choice we make, even in our own eyes, without reference to a rule, or rather in general to certain rules of diverse kinds and belonging to diverse registers. Every action and every plan of action confronts us with the question of the rule of the action and exposes us to the judgment of those close to us, of fellow citizens, or of our conscience: Is our action, or will our action be, courageous, just, prudent, moderate? To find ourselves under the law and exposed to judgment is what we refuse above all when we intend not only to have our rights respected but to define ourselves by our rights, rights whose whole meaning resides in the authorization that they demand and promise. The authorization of action does not include the rule of action, but it does not dispense us from seeking this rule. The authorization to do something, as extensive as it may be, does not deliver us from the law. In our frantic flight from law, in our principled refusal of law, we covet an authorization that would suffice unto itself, that would not require the complement of a personal search for the rule, however lazy or random our search might be. This is the point at which the right to be all that we are or want to be intervenes.
There is always a law. There is always the law. In order for the law to relieve us of the law, it is necessary and it suffices that, rather than guiding our action, it comes to concern or recognize our passion or our passivity. Once rights have reached the limit of their extension; once they have established their exclusive legitimacy by victoriously opposing all collective rule; once the law, slave to rights, has, as it were, no more “practical matter” to rule, it comes to seek out each person in his or her subjective suffering or enjoyment—politically these come to the same thing, for in both cases the individual is convoked in his passivity—and it brings this suffering or enjoying “I” into the public light, commanding all to recognize this suffering or enjoying—to “recognize,” that is, to grant it a value that can be opposed to any law or rule whatsoever. Under this law of “recognition” (for the law still rules under the abolition of all rule), the human being ceases to be a political animal, a definition, as we have seen, that carries with it a whole swarm of eminently practical questions, of which the most penetrating inquire into the city’s best regime or the just political order. The law of rights has no place for these questions. Under its power, the human being also ceases to be a rational animal confronted with the challenge of acting well, since reason is the commanding and legislating authority par excellence and the point of the law of rights is to strip all legitimacy from reason as commanding. Henceforth the human being, if he is still susceptible to definition, is a sentient or sensitive animal, an “I” qualified by the way he “feels” his life, or is “affected” by it, a closed circle of self-adhesion, a tautology of self-feeling from which no question proceeds and which can hear no question: the living-individual without either city or reason, ceaselessly busy reducing its being to what it feels of it and at the same time to gaining recognition for his being as he feels it.
Thus, by assuming as its unique mission the guarantee and assertion of the rights of the sentient and sensitive “I,” the new law engages in the strange enterprise of bringing into the public light and establishing in the public light what naturally escapes or spontaneously flees this light. We have rejected with disgust or disdain the old law, the practical and commanding law, the law that claimed to rule the visible action of members of society in the various fields in which action was deployed; for us the old law is barbarism and tyranny. Henceforth the new law calls the secret feeling of the “I” to come into the daylight and to remain there under its protection—in brief, to perform its “coming out,” the gesture that earns one celebration as a hero, as is appropriate since, by reversing the relationship of the private and the public, it signals and consecrates the power of the new law. As we see, the right declared and guaranteed by the new law does not concern the “part” or the “contribution” of each person to what is in common, but each individual’s relationship to himself, divorced from all participation in the common life, or even deprived of all significance for the common life. The new law as protector of new rights by predilection reaches and illuminates a part of being that does not belong to the public domain, however this may be understood. The old law might well have “aimed at” this intimate part of the human being as it formulated its prohibitions, but, in repressing or reproving homosexuality, for example, it left it in the intimate domain where enjoyment naturally escapes the law. This is not to contest the unpleasantness, humiliations, and wounds involved in the old order. Nor do we contest that fact that the new law “improves the condition” of the concerned persons. Still it is notable that these new freedoms and new rights imply certain new constraints—first of all, for the persons concerned, whom the new laws paradoxically put once again under the law—under a law of authorization, to be sure, but an authorization that involves, if not the obligation, then at least an incentive to come out of the secret zone proper to private life. Is it not the case that to remain in secret, or merely discreet, is unjustly to disavow the law that cares for your rights? Next, there are constraints for the fellow citizens of the persons concerned, that is, for those who are obliged to know without the least ambiguity something they are not necessarily keen to know, as the new law summons them to prove that they find nothing to remark in what they are forced to notice. Thus the new law, a law of freedom and authorization, forces some to publish and others to take notice of and, as it were, to validate what the first would sometimes prefer to leave, if not in secret, at least in the penumbra that is natural to the passions, especially to those passions that the old law reproved, and that in no way are limited to homosexual passions.
While the law of prohibition—including under this term all that pushed homosexuality underground—repressed or held back the visible conduct of homosexuals, the law of authorization, by incentivizing them to make themselves visible, claims to rule over the feelings and judgments of their fellow citizens. The law of authorization is surely “milder” than the law of prohibition, but by taking on an unattainable objective—that is, to secure in a verifiable way the disappearance of feelings and judgments that are unfavorable or reserved with respect to homosexuality—this law is vulnerable to the inquisitorial drift that we have seen in our countries, in which every person is summoned to manifest in all possible ways that he has no “prejudices.” We are forbidden to express, or even to let slip, the least reservation concerning the law of authorization, a law that carries offenses of opinion and crimes of heresy in its wake.
One’s relation to oneself, the life of feelings, the orientation of desire, however one regards and judges these matters, are of no concern to the common life, in any case to political life. The sexual orientation of the agent, whether he is considered as a citizen or as a worker, does not affect his activity as a citizen or a worker; or, if it does affect it, this is in a way that interests only himself and that is of no concern to those who participate with him in a common action or enterprise. This separation of the intimate and the private from the common or the public is hindered when the relation to oneself, in its different modalities, is set up in public view, when it is, as it were, forced to occupy the public space. From this point on, in effect, the public space is less and less open to or available for the action and the institution that are as such indifferent to the subjects’ “feeling of self.” Action and institution hardly find support anymore in a social atmosphere saturated by the subjective claim of those who demand recognition not for what they do but for what they are. Social energy, rather than being spent mainly on “going beyond oneself,” on entering into shared activities and participating in common life, is increasingly diverted to the assertion of the feeling, however incommunicable, of the living-individual, the sensate and sensitive “I.”
The Right to a Universal Income
Let us consider the idea of a universal guaranteed income in the light of this discussion. The popularity, durable although variable, of this idea is revelatory of a profound tendency of our social sensibility. Such an income would be entirely independent of all work, all activity, initiative, or contribution by the rights bearer, who has never better deserved the name than in this context. This income would be attached unconditionally to the fact of being alive, in order to make the continuation of life possible and to render it sufficiently pleasant. The immemorial torment, the deep pain of humanity exposed to the pressure of need and the burden of work, would come to an end; this ever-so-painful knot would finally be untied, since the collective order would give each person the possibility along with the authorization to live without working. Delivered from the necessity of work, life would be delivered from necessity itself.
The invincible need to persevere in being provided the foundation and the motivating force of modern natural rights, the idea of a power right—the power right of the conatus—that is valid and active independently of all law and all common concern. A universal income would liberate the right of the living-individual from his dependency in relation to the support of our animal nature, to the needs bound up with the life of the body. It would cut the root of human dependency in relation to an objective order of things. Thus humanity would, as it were, receive life from its own hand, devoting its last effort to establishing itself in the terminal passivity of a life not needing to be earned, a life that could be received without gratitude since everyone would receive only what they had a right to.
With the institution of a universal income, the modern state would achieve the limit of its extension by taking over its condition of possibility and mastering it. This immense edifice rested on the need of the living-individual. It drew its power and its authority from the urgent and imperious or irresistible character of the need of the living-individual, proposing itself as this individual’s docile and omnipotent instrument. By distributing a universal income, the state delivers the living-individual from need. Thus arises the question, What basis and motive can henceforth support and animate the state?, since, by eliminating the principled dignity of work along with its necessity, the state deprives both itself and the life that it shelters of their foundation. Of course the universal income will not be established, and necessity will not be abolished. Still, by moving in this direction, by making a universal income the last frontier of what is desirable, we deprive humanity of its last serious reason, and of the specifically modern reason, for acting.