Being-in-the-World: the ontological mood
In the previous chapter we defined politics in terms of the universal affirmation of universal axioms derived from the disclosure of the World, showing that politics need not be conceived on the basis of any set of intra-worldly phenomena but is rather contained in the relation between any world whatsoever and the World as the condition of its existence. We are now able to pursue the question of what world politics is without perpetually relapsing into the conceptual space of (inter)-national politics. We also demonstrated that rather than conjure up some radically new and unprecedented political content that contrasts with politics as we know it, this definition is general enough to subsume familiar concepts of politics, yet specific enough to distinguish politics from other affirmative practices that might traverse the World. We are thus now in the possession of an ontological concept of politics that, while founded on the thesis of the World as void, takes us beyond nihilism in the sense of the nullification of this void as politically inconsequential. On the contrary, we argue that there is a politics as a practice that retains its individuality across the different worlds in which it is applied, only because the content of the axioms that politics affirms derives not from any particular, positive and historically specific world, but from the void of the World itself, the immediate and non-totalizable universality that is part of every world. In short, the World is void and politics pertains to the production of the effects of this void within any positive world.
Nonetheless, at this point our definition is merely formal, insofar as we have purposefully bracketed off the content of the axioms that politics affirms, restricting ourselves to the specification of their paradoxical ‘origin’ in the void of the World. We know that politics produces positive effects of the axioms derived from the disclosure of the World within positive worlds, yet we do not yet know either what these axioms are or how we arrive at their formulation. What does it mean to say that the axioms that politics must affirm universally for the world where it unfolds must themselves be universal in content? What universal content can the void possibly prescribe and to whom is this prescription addressed, given that there presumably is no one dwelling in the void? Evidently, we may only speak of axioms arising from the void of the World insofar as they are disclosed to a being within some positive world. The World does not prescribe anything for itself (as void it is not subject to any norm or evaluation), nor does it, strictly speaking, prescribe anything for us (since the existence of human or other beings is of no consequence for the void). It is rather we , as beings appearing in a given world or plurality thereof, who are capable of drawing political prescriptions from the void of the World for ourselves . It is only when the World, which is in every world, also comes to appearance in it, that the inhabitants of this world may access the axioms of the World and affirm them within the world. The World itself remains entirely indifferent both to its appearance in any world and the derivation of axioms that results from it. Thus, whenever we speak of the ‘axioms of the World’, it is important to bear in mind that the genitive here is strictly objective and never subjective.
Thus, our approach to the axioms of politics breaks with the anthropocentrism that remains at work in Heidegger’s account of the relation between Being and (human) beings. Of course, Heidegger famously emphasizes that ‘[being] is not a product of man. Being is essentially broader than all beings because it is the clearing itself’ (Heidegger, 1977: 240). Nonetheless, he maintains that ‘only as long as Dasein is, is there being. When Dasein does not exist, it cannot be said that entities are, nor can it be said that they are not’ (Heidegger, 1962: 212). If there were no Dasein, then being, which would remain there as clearing, would not clear anything , i.e. not let anything be. It is only Dasein that, being endowed with the potentiality for existence in the sense of standing out in the clearing of Being, that may bring being itself to appearance:
The being that exists is the human being. The human being alone exists. Rocks are but they do not exist. Trees are, but they do not exist. Horses are but they do not exist. Angels are but they do not exist. God is but he does not exist. The proposition ‘the human being exists’ means: the human being is that being whose being is distinguished by an open standing that stands in the unconcealedness of being, proceeding from Being, in being.
(Heidegger, 1998: 284)
In Contributions to Philosophy (Heidegger, 2000: 177) Heidegger similarly posits being and human beings in a relation of mutual necessity: ‘being needs humans in order to hold sway and humans belong to being so that they can accomplish their utmost destiny as being there’. Finally, in a discussion of the saying (Sage ) as the voice of Being in his late work on language (Heidegger, 1977: 423), Heidegger insists that this saying, which is irreducible to any particular human language but rather refers to the sheer potentiality of speaking, nonetheless ‘needs to resound in the world’, the world that, as we recall, is only ever disclosed to Dasein.
Heidegger’s exclusive assignment of the world-disclosing function to human beings has been subjected to incisive criticism within the broadly Heideggerian tradition in contemporary Continental thought (Agamben, 2004; Derrida, 2008; Nancy, 1994; Calarco, 2008), which destabilizes his distinction between the world-disclosing Dasein and the animal that is ‘poor in world’, less by endowing animals with the powers of logos or other means of world disclosure than by questioning man’s own capacity for the disclosure of beings as beings, as such, without particular perspective, interest or design (Derrida, 2008: 158–160). Our criticism of Heidegger’s anthropocentrism proceeds in a somewhat different direction. Even if we grant that being needs humans in order to disclose both worldly beings and the World as the clearing in which they appear, it is not clear why being needs to disclose anything at all to ‘hold sway’. Heidegger’s famous invocation of man as the ‘shepherd of being’ (Heidegger, 1977: 234) violates his most famous ontological claim and methodological precept, confusing being and a being by transferring the attribute of the latter to the former in the manner that is justified neither metaphorically nor metonymically: being is neither like a being nor sufficiently proximal to it. Being needs no shepherd, simply because it is not a sheep, or any other being for that matter. The disclosure of beings as beings in the clearing of the World is thus not ontologically necessary and, consequently, neither is the existence of humans, even if we grant them exclusive rights to World disclosure. It is impossible to infer the privileged ontological status of human beings from their allegedly exclusive epistemic access to being qua being.
Nonetheless, while this epistemic access is ontologically inconsequential, it has extremely important ontic consequences for human beings and the worlds they dwell in. Exclusively or not, human beings are endowed with the capacity of ‘standing out in the Nothing’, of disclosing the void of the World within their worlds in fundamental attunements or ‘moods’ akin but not reducible to Heidegger’s boredom or anxiety. 1 Let us term this general mode of disclosure, in which the World comes to appearance within the world the ontological mood . As we have seen in Chapter 1 , this mood is attained as a result of the suspension of both our intra-worldly identities and our relations with other beings of the world, hence no intra-worldly predicate could possibly condition the possibility of this mood befalling any human being whatsoever. While our ‘standing’ in our positive world depends on a myriad of positive qualifications, we are all equally capable of being bored, experiencing anxiety or other ways of standing out in the Nothing.
It is particularly important to distinguish the ontological mood from the enunciative modality of the philosopher, including the philosopher specializing in ontology. The ontological mood that, as we shall argue in this chapter, conditions the access to political axioms, is entirely distinct from a philosophical or theoretical grounding of politics. The ontological mood is not attained by virtue of theoretical knowledge of ontology but in the experience available to any human being whatsoever: boredom, anxiety or any other experience that entails the subtraction from the positive order of one’s world (melancholy, insomnia, amorous encounter, etc.) do not depend on one’s academic (or any other) qualifications but may happen to anyone at all. Both theoretical knowledge of ontology and practical action on the basis of its axioms (i.e. politics) are founded on the experience of subtraction from the transcendental and therefore neither of them could serve as the foundation of the other (see Prozorov, 2014, Chapter 5).
Having established the ontological mood as the condition of the appearance of the void of the World within the world, we are now in the position to refute the nihilist thesis on the inconsequential character of the World for the worlds. The World is not merely the background of nothingness against which the positivities of worlds appear or the inapparent part that is logically included in world without appearing there. The World, which is in every world, may also come to appearance within it, and it is indeed only this appearance, phenomenologically accessible in a variety of ‘ontological moods’ that grants us access to its being. Yet, how does this appearance affect the positive world in which it erupts, besides, as we have already seen, revealing the contingency of its order? As we have seen in the discussion of Heidegger’s description of boredom as a world-disclosing mood, the appearance of the World as void entails a change in the way all beings of Dasein’s world appear to it. In the ontological mood all worldly beings, including ourselves, withdraw from our habitual access and from their function in the relational network of the transcendental, subtracting themselves from every intra-worldly relation, be it hierarchy or subjection, enfolding or exclusion, dependence or difference, to appear as such in their being as inconsistent multiplicities composed of the void. As a result, the transcendental order of the world, which is nothing but the relational network that prescribes the appearance of beings, is rendered inoperative and, as it were, comes undone . Yet, this ‘end of the world’ does not mean that the beings of the world disappear or dissolve, but rather that their appearance is now devoid of positive identity or relational order but rather wholly reduced to their being, in the sense of pure multiplicity regulated solely by the set-theoretical axiom of extensionality, whereby set [a, b, c] is absolutely different from set [a, b] and absolutely identical to set [c, b, a] (Badiou, 2005a: 60–61).
We shall term this mode of appearance of beings ‘being-in-the-World’, in contrast to Heidegger’s positive and relational ‘being-in-the-world’. Since nobody and nothing actually dwells in the void of the World, just as nobody can really ‘stand out in the Nothing’, this expression is evidently a metaphor for the condition that is attained within the positive world by reduction of its complex ordering of beings to the sheer facticity of their being. Nonetheless, this condition itself is patently real and phenomenologically accessible to anyone whatsoever. To speak of ‘being-in-the-World’ is to emphasize that in this mode of appearance worldly beings are reduced to the sheer facticity of their being, which is indeed only disclosed in and composed of the void (Heidegger, 1962: 235–239, cf. Agamben, 1999a: 185–203). A ‘being-in-the-World’ is a being, whose intra-worldly identity has become suspended and which therefore appears in the world only as it is – which is precisely how all beings appear to Dasein in the attunements of anxiety and boredom, when they leave it empty and in limbo. Being-in-the-World thus marks the zero degree of appearance, in which the positive order of the world recedes, every identitarian predicate and every relation to the transcendental are rendered inoperative and all that appears is the being as such, the being in its being . Indeed, if a worldly being is subtracted from every intra-worldly determination, it is no longer possible to establish what it is in positive identitarian terms but only the very fact that it is at all. Since, in Kant’s famous expression, ‘being is not a real predicate’ (Kant, 2008 [1781]: 504; cf. Heidegger, 1998: 337–363; 1962: 127), the subtraction of a being from all real predicates prescribed by the transcendental leaves it with nothing but its being itself. Giorgio Agamben has famously termed this mode of appearance ‘whatever being’ or ‘being-thus’, being that is solely its manner of being, subtracted from any real predicates and wholly exposed in the sheer facticity of its existence:
Exposure, in other words being-such-as, is not any of the real predicates (being red, hot, small, smooth, etc.), but neither is it other than these (otherwise it would be something else added to the concept of a thing and therefore still a real predicate). That you are exposed is not one of your qualities, but neither is it other than them (we could say, in fact, that it is none-other than them).
(Agamben, 1993: 96)
Appearing to the occupant of the ontological mood as ‘whatever beings’, beings of the world evidently do not discard or destroy their intra-worldly predicates, just as the ecstatic character of the existence of Dasein in Heidegger’s thought consists in ‘exiting’ from itself without ‘abandoning’ itself (Heidegger, 1995: 365). Yet, even though whatever beings retain their positive predicates in the very act of subtraction from them, they are no longer definable through them: being-thus is ‘neither this nor that, neither thus nor thus, but thus , as it is, with all its predicates (all its predicates is not a predicate)’ (Agamben, 1993: 93). In other words, in their subtraction from the transcendental worldly beings undergo neither a deprivation (of the old identity) nor a transformation (into a new one), but solely the exposure, in the domain of appearance, of the fact that they are in the absence of any identification of what they are. What appears in being-in-the-World is the singularity of ‘thusness’ or haecceity , which is subtracted from all empirical determinations without thereby becoming an empty abstraction: being-in-the-World is nothing but a being subtracted from its world and the indefinite article here ‘is the indetermination of the person only because it is determination of the singular’ (Deleuze, 2001: 30). 2
In this manner, the disclosure of the World within positive worlds also transforms the beings to whom it is disclosed, reducing their positive and transcendentally regulated being-in-the-world to the subtractive mode of being-in-the-World, in which all that appears is being itself. Evidently, if there existed a politics of the World that would go beyond the metapolitical affirmation of the contingency of worlds but whose maxims would be irreducible to positive intra-worldly principles, this austere condition would be its sole possible foundation. While the World as void cannot be the source of political maxims, insofar as either nothing or anything at all logically follows from nothing, such maxims may nonetheless be derived from being-in-the-World as the attunement that we as worldly beings must enter for the World to be disclosed to begin with. While nihilism seeks to efface this attunement in its nullification of the World as inconsequential for positive worlds, it can never succeed in this effacement, since being-in-the-World is the mode of appearance that gives us access to the void of the World in the first place and which therefore makes nihilism itself possible. The elucidation of being-in-the-World as the mode of appearance of beings in the disclosure of the World refutes the nihilist thesis on the inconsequentiality of the World for positive worlds: the content of universal axioms of politics is non-void (i.e. it is not nothing) because its source is not the World itself but the being of beings subtracted from the transcendental in the process of its disclosure.
Thus, we have finally identified the source of the universal axioms of politics that takes us beyond the nihilist nullification of the World towards the possibility of an affirmative universalist politics derived from the concept of the World. Whereas our being-in-the-world, i.e. our transcendentally regulated existence, is always and necessarily marked by particularity, being-in-the-World is a manifestly universal condition, insofar as it is constituted by the subtraction from all positive predicates: whatever being is not identifiable by anything particular but only by the fact of its existence, which is most singular and most universal at the same time. Moreover, this universality is no longer of the order of logical presupposition, regulative idea or utopian telos but is rather a real condition, obtained within the world by the subtraction from intra-worldly determinations: there is nothing otherworldly about boredom, anxiety or any other moods that we have termed ontological. It is crucial to highlight the difference of being-in-the-World as an intra-worldly mode of appearance of beings in their being from the World as the void of being itself. Even though being-in-the World contains nothing positive in the sense of worldly identitarian predicates, it is itself a positive mode of appearance that by definition remains intra-worldly even though nothing positive actually appears in it. While the World is nothing and cannot prescribe any axiom, being-in-the-World is evidently not nothing , even though it might appear to be very close to it. The subtraction of beings from the transcendental of their positive world in the ontological mood does not annihilate these beings or otherwise deprive them of being; on the contrary, it brings being itself to appearance, throwing it into stark relief since it is no longer concealed under the plenitude of intra-worldly determinations. While this austere exposure of beings in their being certainly appears to be minimal if not outright impoverished, it actually discloses all there is to know about the content of all politics, i.e. the axioms of being-in-the-World. 3
What axiomatic content of politics may be derived from the reduction of the intra-worldly appearance of the beings of the world to their pure being-thus? It is important to stress that we are at this stage not concerned with the deduction of the consequences of being-in-the-World for any world: this production of consequences is precisely the task of political practice within the world, which takes the form of the affirmation of and the production of the effects of the universal axioms of politics. To be worthy of their name these axioms must be understood as not themselves deduced from anything, i.e. as starting points for any affirmation whose own ground is the void of the World alone. More precisely, the axioms that we shall address in this section are to be grasped as attributes of being-in-the-World, attained in the ontological mood. In other words, the axioms of the World describe what remains when every positive predicate is subtracted from one’s existence, which thereby manifests nothing but pure being. Thus, they are not deduced or inferred from being-in-the-World but are in a strict sense the aspects of this mode of appearance itself.
The first axiom is the most evident. We have argued that in the disclosure of the World the beings of any world appear as a pure multiplicity without any order or relation, since order and relation are the functions of the transcendental that has been suspended in the ontological mood. Yet, in the absence of any order or relation we can nonetheless conclude that the elements of this multiplicity are in common , precisely in their ‘whatever being’ devoid of any positive determination. As long as they are ‘in the World’, i.e. subtracted from the transcendental order of their worlds, all beings are in common, irrespectively of what they are. Since there are no dividing lines of exclusion, hierarchy or restrictions in the void, all beings that are ‘in the World’ may only be there in common, irrespectively of whatever might divide them in the worlds they dwell in. Since the transcendental order of the world recedes and comes undone in the disclosure of the World, there is nothing in the condition of being-in-the-World that could possibly divide the community of beings that appear solely in their being. Thus, the ontological axiom of community states that insofar as a being is , it is in common with every other being (cf. Nancy, 1991; Blanchot, 1988; Agamben, 1993).
This community, to which every being always already belongs by virtue of its being, is inaccessible from within the worlds in which we exist, since, as we have argued in Chapter 1 , these worlds are not totalizable into the figure of the whole. Contrary to various strands of cosmopolitanism, there is no positive community, to which all beings may be argued to belong. Insofar as there is no universal set, we always exist in particular communities or worlds, however open or inclusive they might be. Yet, while we are certainly more accustomed to inhabiting particular communities, endowed with positive identities and determinate conditions of belonging, such communities are highly precarious since they do not have any ontological correlate. As argued with reference to Schmitt in the previous chapter, every particular community is constituted by drawing a line in the void, separating a section of the universal community of all beings into a distinct set grounded in some positive predicate, prescribed by the transcendental of the world in question. Just as the world, in which this community is constituted, does not derive its particular appearance from its being and is therefore utterly contingent, so is every figure of community that is constructed in this world. What compensates for the ultimate fragility of these communities is the transcendental conversion of the ontological community of whatever beings into the positive figure of ‘common being’ (Nancy, 1991: 12–14, 26–35), a phantasmatic substance that the members of the community allegedly share in and sacrifice themselves for. In this manner, community becomes coextensive with the world itself or a region thereof, gaining positivity at the price of the loss of its originary universality. In contrast to this conversion, any ontological affirmation of community as the aspect of being-in-the-World ruptures the boundaries instituted and stabilized by intra-worldly communitarian fictions and throws every particular community in question. The axiom of community evaluates every empirical community according to the formula that no particular community may ever live up to: there is no community to which being X does not belong . Thus, the axiom of community marks the disjunction between the particularity of intra-worldly communities and the universality of the being-in-common of all beings disclosed in the ontological mood.
It is easy to see that this formula differs starkly from the standard cosmopolitan argument that may be formalized as ‘There is a community to which every being belongs’. While this formula suffers from the logical inconsistency of the whole addressed in Chapter 1 , the axiom of community does not make any claim about the existence of a universal community of all beings but rather deprives of ontological status every community that is constituted by exclusion. Our formula of community says nothing about the agglomeration of all beings into the whole but rather asserts that no particular community may deny belonging to any being whatsoever, that whatever community there is in this world, any being that appears in this world (and not all beings of all worlds) always already belongs to it.
The distinction between the two formulae parallels the distinction between phallic and feminine (or, ‘other’) jouissance developed by Jacques Lacan (2000). 4 This distinction is presented by Lacan in terms of two pairs of logical formulae of sexuation (2000: 78–81). Both the masculine and feminine formulae comprise two statements, the first introduced by the universal quantifier ‘for all’ and the second introduced by the existential quantifier ‘there is’. In the case of masculine or phallic jouissance the universal statement proclaims that ‘all beings are subject to the phallic function’, while the existential statement asserts the exception to this: ‘there is (at least one) being that is not subject to the phallic function’. This is precisely the formula of the community of all beings, which can only be sustained by the constitutive exception or transgression that may take the form of the primal father in Freud or the sovereign in Schmitt. In contrast, the formula of feminine sexuation opens with the negative existential statement ‘there is no speaking being that is not subject to the phallic function’. At first glance, in terms of classical logic, this statement should be logically identical to the universal statement ‘all beings are subject to the phallic function’. In this case, feminine sexuation would merely be marked by the intensification of the phallic function to the extent that no exception is possible to it, no primal Mother that could evade castration. However, Lacan conjoins this negative existential statement with the negative universal statement ‘not all speaking being is subject to the phallic function’.
Everything hinges on the interpretation of this ‘not-all’. It evidently does not mean that there are some women who escape this subjection in the manner of the exception or even that there is an identifiable ‘part’ of a woman that evades subjection (Lacan, 2000: 72–73). In fact, it is impossible to extract a positive existential statement out of the negative universal statement and assert that ‘there is a woman not subject to the phallic function’. Instead, the ‘not-all’ refers to the impossibility of totalizing the set in question and speaking of ‘all beings as such’: ‘[There] is no such thing as the Woman, there are only, if I may say, different ones, and in some way they enter one by one’ (Lacan cited in Reinhard, 2005: 58). While the universality constituted by the masculine formula of sexuation is a hegemonic figure sustained by an exception, the universality of feminine jouissance is an open set that is not wholly defined by the phallic function, a set composed of singularities that are all in some sense exceptional since they cannot be subsumed under the general concept of Woman. There is no identifiable exception to the rule here, but the rule itself is not-all. Moreover, since feminine jouissance is localized by Lacan in the ‘realm of the infinite’ (Lacan, 2000: 103, cf. Badiou, 2008a: 217–226), its subjection to the phallic function cannot be totalized: it remains ‘somewhere’ but not ‘everywhere’: while all beings are indeed subjected to the phallic function, it is not all there is to them (Badiou, 2008a: 214–215). Thus, the not-all is not wholly contained in the phallic function without at the same time being the negation of the latter. It is this open set, extending infinitely in a serial manner, ‘one by one’, that is genuinely universal without exception : there is no being X that can be denied belonging to this community, since no identitarian predicate wholly defines this community and can be a possible criterion for exclusion. 5
The second axiom of being-in-the-World affirms the equality of all beings. Since the World as void by definition lacks any sort of hierarchical structure that could justify inequality or even make it conceivable, the elements of the pure multiplicity that appears in the mode of being-in-the-World are all a priori equal. Insofar as the appearance of these beings is subtracted from every positive intra-worldly predicate, it exposes them solely in their being, as pure multiplicities regulated only by the set-theoretical axiom of extensionality, whereby all beings are equal by virtue of being both absolutely different from each other and absolutely the same in kind as multiplicities. Similarly to the axiom of community, the equality we are speaking of here is of the order of presupposition rather than outcome: in their ontological status, the beings of the world are always already equal and, given the subtraction from every transcendental order in the ontological mood, this equality can only be absolute.
On the contrary, in the positive worlds we inhabit we can never attain this absolute equality, since all worlds are transcendentally ordered by regulating degrees of appearance that vary from the minimum (non-appearance or inexistence) to the maximum. Inequality is thus inscribed in the very logic of appearance and may pertain to the beings’ degrees of existence in the world (i.e. their self-identity) or their relation to other beings (Badiou, 2009b: 207–210, 133–134). Whereas ontology only distinguishes beings in terms of their absolute presence or absence in a world, belonging or non-belonging to a situation (ibid.: 118), the phenomenology of worlds deploys an elaborate apparatus of measuring relative differences in appearance through operations of conjunction, enveloping, dependence, reverse, etc., that endow a being with positive appearance by virtue of its place in the relational network of the transcendental (ibid.: 118–139).
Of course, the transcendental of a given world may also employ the principle of equality as an intra-worldly ordering principle, e.g. by legislating and enforcing the equality of men and women, citizens and foreign residents, adults and children in various positive aspects of the world’s existence, e.g. legal, economic, cultural, etc. Yet, similarly to the conversion of the ontological community into a particular ‘common being’, the deployment of equality as an instrument of the intra-worldly positive order transforms the very sense of this axiom. As we have noted in our discussion of Rancière in the previous chapter, while ontologically the equality of all beings is a basic presupposition of any human relation at all, the transcendental ‘positivization’ of equality transforms it into a programmatic telos, something to be attained through the management of the world in question (cf. Rancière, 1999: 33–42). For this reason, it always functions in the modality of deferral, as yet another ‘project’ that would transform the future into the present by negating the present into the past, as opposed to the ontological condition that is already there prior to any project. In contrast, the political affirmation of the axiom of equality and the production of its effects within the world renders its transcendental inoperative, since no relational network of order may be sustained on the basis of radical equality of all beings. The axiom of equality evaluates every world according to a devastating formula: there is no being X that is not equal to being Y . Thus, the axiom of equality marks the disjunction between the egalitarian nature of being and the hierarchical character of existence.
The third axiom of being-in-the-World is freedom . Insofar as they appear in subtraction from any intra-worldly determination, worldly beings are not constrained by anything whatsoever, even by the membership in the multiplicity of being-in-the-World, since the latter is inconsistent and lacks even the minimal form of order. Since, as we have seen, being-in-the-World is characterized by absolute equality, no being that enters this mode of appearance could possibly depend on any other being that might belong to the same multiplicity. Yet, besides being free from other beings, the beings that appear ‘in the World’ are also free from themselves , in the sense of lacking any identity that would specify what they are and thus form the basis of their actions and behaviours. Every identity is a positive construct of the transcendental and is deactivated in the condition of being-in-the-World, in which the transcendental itself recedes and becomes inoperative.
Nonetheless, the axiom of freedom is not reducible to this absence of constraint that Isaiah Berlin famously termed ‘negative liberty’ (Berlin, 2002; cf. Prozorov, 2007b, Chapter 4 ). The freedom of being-in-the-World is also the freedom to create an infinity of positive worlds. To say that a being is free is to say that it may belong to any set and may thus enter into the ontological composition of any world whatsoever. Indeed, the ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ aspects of freedom appear indissociable from an ontological perspective: the void that removes any possible constraint is the same void that makes possible the constitution of the infinity of positive worlds. It is easy to see that this freedom can only be conceived as absolute, insofar as there is nothing to limit it in the condition constituted by the withdrawal of every positive determination.
On the contrary, in our positive words beings never attain such freedom, since the transcendental order imposes positive identities and degrees of existence on all worldly beings and specifies possible relations between them, thus limiting both the freedom from an identity and the freedom to form new worlds. Our worlds contain our freedom both in the sense of housing it (thus giving it concrete positive sense) and confining it (by reducing its absolute value to a relative intra-worldly degree). Just as community and equality may be converted into intra-worldly instruments of transcendental regulation, freedom is easily recast as an instrument of governmental practices, as e.g. Foucault’s and post-Foucauldian studies in liberal governmentality (Foucault, 1991, 2007, 2008; Rose, 1999; Dean, 1999; Cruikshank, 1999) succinctly demonstrate. Yet, such recasting transforms the very sense of freedom by ascribing it to an ontic, intra-worldly identity, from which every being is ontologically free. In contrast to this depoliticizing conversion of freedom into a principle of intra-worldly governance, its political affirmation as an axiom of being-in-the-World posits it as an excess to any transcendental identity, be it the identity of the other or the identity of the self. Its formula may therefore be presented as follows: there is no being Y from which being X is not free , even if X and Y are identical. In this manner, the axiom of freedom marks the disjunction between the world as a realm of positive identities, whose relational order constrains and confines freedom, and being-in-the-World, in which freedom is always already given as absolute.
We thus end up with three political axioms that name three aspects of being-in-the-World, the mode of appearance of beings at the moment of the disclosure of the World in the world. Insofar as they pertain to this singular mode of the appearance of beings solely in their being, i.e. subtracted from all positive intra-worldly properties, these axioms are universal in the sense of being valid for all beings irrespectively of the worlds they appear in: whatever a being X is, insofar as it is at all, it is free, equal and in common . In a quasi-Heideggerian formula, the existence of universality is wholly contained in the universality of existence itself. What the axioms of the World apply to is the sheer facticity of existence subtracted from all positive determinations. This is why there exists the universal (‘there is’ a ‘for all’, Ǝ ∀ ) as long as there exists anything whatsoever .
If the axioms affirm the community, equality and freedom of anything that exists, why are our formulae of these axioms expressed in the cumbersome form of double negation and not in the straightforward affirmative mode of ‘all beings are in common, equal and free’? The reason for this is that the axioms describe the condition of being-in-the-World that is obtained by the subtraction of worldly beings from the transcendental of their world. Being-in-the-World as the zero degree of appearance does not give us access to ‘all beings’ as such – if it did, it would be a positive world in its own right – but only to beings (some beings, whatever beings) insofar as they are ‘in the World’, i.e. exposed solely in their being. Thus, in a strict sense, the axioms apply to a specific mode of appearance and state what does not appear in it, namely exclusion, hierarchy and domination. Thus, the axioms negate the negative statements that are self-evident for any world whatsoever: within a positive world, there most certainly exist a community to which X does not belong, a being to whom X is not equal and a being from which X is not free. By negating these statements, the axioms of being-in-the-World demonstrate the contingency of the transcendental orders of these worlds, whose ordering modes of exclusion, hierarchy and domination have no correlate in pure being.
In this manner, by demonstrating that what exists phenomenally does not even appear in being-in-the-World, the axioms make it possible to affirm the freedom, equality and community of all beings in any world whatsoever. Thus, the form of double negation is intended to highlight the genealogical derivation of the axioms in the subtraction from the transcendental of the world and does not contradict their radically affirmative character. While being-in-the-World as the appearance of being itself is ontologically primary to any positive appearance and its aspects of freedom, equality and community are evidently primary to any intra-worldly exclusions, hierarchies and subjections, we can only ever access being by moving ‘from appearance back towards being’ (Badiou, 2009b: 114), from the worlds, in which the axioms of being-in-the-World are always already negated, through a subtraction from this negation, towards their political affirmation.
Let us now address the relation of these universal axioms to the particular worlds in which they are to be affirmed as the contents of political praxis. Since these axioms are derived from the subtraction from every intra-worldly determination and are indifferent to all the positive predicates of worldly beings, they may be considered transcendent in relation to all positive worlds. From this perspective, politics as an affirmative practice that unfolds inside the world derives its universal content from what transcends this and every other positive world. Yet, given that the World as void is the universal part of any world whatsoever, these axioms may also be approached as immanent to the world, since they derive from what ontologically is in every world even though it does not necessarily appear in it.
Thus, the axioms of the World cannot be located on either side of the boundary between transcendence and immanence. Since they are not simply transcendent in the sense of divine command or otherworldly principle, politics is not founded on any supreme being beyond this world but on the void of being itself, which is a part of any world whatsoever. Yet, since the axioms are not simply immanent either, they are not reducible to any positive features of the world in which they are affirmed, be it natural law or economic infrastructure, cultural attributes or managerial rationality. Politics consists neither in the rupture of immanent systems by radical otherworldly transcendence nor in the deployment of immanent principles to prop up the order of the world. Instead, it consists in the restoration to the immanence of the world of its own constitutive transcendence, in making the World appear in the world, in which it already is . The transcendence that erupts in the world when the axioms of the World are affirmed in it is not beyond the world, but the world’s own , immanent transcendence: it is the world itself , understood in its pure being. In his Sense of the World Jean-Luc Nancy termed this complex interplay of immanence and transcendence transimmanence , the transcendence of immanence in the sense of surpassing the closure of a world into self-immanence and the immanence of transcendence in the sense of its coming from within the world itself:
[As] soon as the appearance of a beyond of the world has been dissipated, the out-of-place instance of sense opens itself up within the world. Sense belongs to the structure of the world, hollows out therein what it would be necessary to name better than by calling it the ‘transcendence’ of its ‘immanence’ – its transimmanence, or, more simply and strongly, its existence and exposition. The out-of-place term of sense can thus be determined neither as a property brought from elsewhere into relation with the world, nor as a supplementary predicate, nor as an evanescent character ‘floating somewhere’, but as the constitutive ‘signifyingness’ or ‘significance’ of the world itself. That is, as the constitutive sense of the fact that there is world.
(Nancy, 1997: 55)
The three axioms of the World constitute precisely the opening in the world of its own sense, understood as the sheer facticity of its being, its exposure to the void from which it derives but from which it closes itself off in the very process of its positive constitution. It is from this perspective that Nancy rethinks transcendence as radically devoid of anything otherworldly: it is nothing other than ‘resistance to immanence’ that, moreover, cannot come from anywhere else than the space of immanence itself (Nancy, 1991: 35). Thus, politics may be grasped as the revolt of the world against its own immanence, i.e. the confrontation of the beings of the world with the world’s immanent transcendental on the basis of the axioms that transcend this or any other world and yet arise from within it, from the void that is the universal part of every world.
To define the axioms of the World as transimmanent is to insist on their consequential character for the worlds, in which they are affirmed. If the axioms were purely transcendent, they could be argued to be of no ontic consequence for any positive world. In a passive-nihilist argument, if the axioms of the World transcend this world, they cannot be valid within it. Thus, the immanent order of the world is left intact, while the axioms are relegated to the status of the object of theological or other form of meditation or marvel at the otherworldly. In contrast, ‘transimmanence’ designates precisely that the rupture of transcendence arises from and takes place within the immanence of the world and thus opens the possibility for the transformation of the world. Since the World is already within the world, the axioms that are derived from its disclosure cannot be inconsequential for the world in question and, insofar as they are indifferent to all intra-worldly determinations, they actually have universal validity for the world in question. It is impossible to restrict the operation of the axioms to some beings as opposed to others since they apply to whatever is in the world and are only intelligible as long as their object is being-in-the-World as whatever being.
Is the triad of community, equality and freedom exhaustive of the axioms of the World? It would be easy to demand additions to this list: what about e.g. justice or tolerance? Nonetheless, it is important to distinguish the axioms of the World from the values that we might hold as inhabitants of particular worlds. Something can only be assigned a value within the context of a certain economy and every economy is by definition part of the intra-worldly transcendental order, hence values are always derivative from the positivity of the world rather than the World as its condition of possibility. While values might be articulated with the axioms of the World, this connection is in no way necessary and may in principle be absent. Let us take the example of justice. The transcendental order of every world establishes immanent criteria of what is just, which may well conflict with the axioms of the World: nothing is easier than justifying inequality, subjugation or exclusion by appealing to the particular culture, tradition or norm of the world. In these cases justice evidently has nothing to do with politics and rather stands in the service of perpetual depoliticization as an intra-worldly norm that enables the reproduction of the transcendental.
On the other hand, it would be difficult to posit justice as an attribute of being-in-the-World, homologous to community, equality and freedom. That all beings are in common as free and equal is in itself neither just nor unjust, it simply is so from the ontological perspective and usually does not appear so from the phenomenological perspective of a particular world. There is no reason why the inappearance of ontological freedom, equality and community in a positive world should appear unjust, unless these axioms have already been affirmed politically within this world, in which case justice is simply another name for the fidelity to this affirmation. For instance, a patriarchal order may be evaluated as unjust on the basis of our commitment to freedom (according to which e.g. any restriction of the freedom of women is unjust), equality (according to which the deprivation of women of the rights accorded to men is unjust) and community (according to which the restriction of certain modes of being-in-common to men is unjust). In this case, justice becomes an imperative of political praxis in a given world, yet it is not itself an axiom of the World but is rather an intra-worldly value conditioned by them or, rather, a mode of the evaluation of the world in their terms that we discuss in detail in Theory of the Political Subject (Prozorov, 2014: Chapter 2 ). It is precisely due to this conditioning that the concept of justice is essentially contested – after all, its meaning may only be established on the basis of a prior commitment to one or more of the axioms. Thus, we always find ourselves with a plurality of concepts of justice: e.g. a liberal notion of justice formulated by John Rawls, the revolutionary egalitarian justice of Maoism, the communitarian justice of various forms of nationalism, etc. It might be objected that there are just as many possible contextual variants of freedom, equality and community. This is certainly true, yet unlike justice and other positive values, community, equality and freedom are also thinkable in a decontextualized and, as we shall argue in detail in the following section, non-historical manner as strictly factical attributes of being-in-the-World.
While it is impossible to evaluate justice in the absence of any transcendental measure of value, it is precisely the absence of such a measure that makes it possible to conceive of community, freedom and equality as transcending any particular intra-worldly deployment but rather applying to all beings in all worlds absolutely . Indeed, the very term ‘absolute’ is etymologically related precisely to the moment of subtraction that is constitutive of being-in-the-World, insofar as it derives from the Latin absolvere , to separate, detach or disengage. It is precisely because being-in-the-World is ‘absolved’ from every transcendental determination that its attributes of community, equality and freedom are absolute. In contrast to intra-worldly principles, whose degree of existence varies from the minimum to the maximum (Badiou, 2009b: 137–139), the axioms of the World are only conceivable as maxims that do not lend themselves to the variations in the degree of existence, much as the axiom of extensionality only allows for absolute differences between sets. What is at stake here is not a quantitative difference between minimal and maximal freedoms, greater or lesser equality, stronger or weaker community, but rather a qualitative difference between an ontological presupposition and an ontic measure . In other words, community, equality and freedom always already apply to ‘being-in-the-World’ to the maximum degree, while their affirmation in positive worlds necessarily finds itself limited by their transcendental orders, which, as we have argued, may deploy homonymous positive principles as instruments of order and management. This homonymy that we shall return to throughout the book explains why political struggles rarely consist of a straightforward confrontation between freedom and oppression, equality and inequality, community and exclusion, but rather involve a confrontation of freedom with freedom (e.g. political vs. economic freedoms), equality with equality (e.g. social equality vs. political equality) and community with community (international solidarity vs. the nation state). In every case, it is a question of the affirmation of the ontological excess of the political axioms over the particular worlds in which they are converted into governmental principles, the affirmation of the immeasurable absolute against the measure, however generous, granted to community, equality and freedom within any given world.
Insofar as the axioms of the World are derived by the subtraction of worldly beings from every positive intra-worldly determination, our method of their treatment in the remainder of this book will be different from the more familiar approaches of conceptual history or philosophical hermeneutics. It is crucial that we keep the concepts of community, equality and freedom defined as minimally as possible, retaining their excess over any intra-worldly semantics. Thus, our contribution to the interminable debate about the meaning, status or definition of these three concepts consists in relocating them away from the rich historical contexts of their emergence and development in various worlds to the austere ontology of the World as void, where they literally mean as little as possible, yet this minimal meaning lends itself to universal affirmation. This approach is certainly not unique and has been practised in twentieth-century Continental philosophy precisely in the rethinking of community (Blanchot, 1988; Nancy, 1991; Agamben, 1993), equality (Badiou, 2005b; Rancière, 1999) and freedom (Nancy, 1994; Foucault, 1977; Agamben, 1999a: 177–184, 243–274). While none of these authors, with the partial exception of Badiou, explicitly linked their simultaneously minimalist and absolutist definition of these concepts to the void of the World, they all sought to isolate the ontological sense of community, equality and freedom from the historical functioning of these concepts in specific worlds and particular discourses on politics.
In order to understand the necessity of such isolation, let us address the question of history in terms of our distinction between the World and worlds. It is quite evident that positive worlds are historical in the sense of having an immanent mode of temporalization inscribed in their transcendental order. What makes these worlds discernible in the first place is precisely the historical specificity of their transcendental orders. Yet, given the infinite number of worlds differentiated by their transcendental, it logically follows that there are as many histories as there are worlds . Just as these worlds may interpenetrate or nest within each other, so may their histories, yet what is entirely foreclosed by the principle of the inexistence of the whole is anything like a history of all worlds, an all-encompassing history that would transcend a particular world or a combination thereof.
Neither is there anything like a history of the World , since, there being nothing in the World, no history could possibly unfold there. It is from this perspective that we must elaborate and qualify Badiou’s striking and oft-repeated maxim: ‘History doesn’t exist’ (Badiou, 2009c: 92; 2005a: 176; 2009b: 561; 2010a: 241). Since ‘existence’ for Badiou refers to intra-worldly self-identity, it follows that there only exist plural histories of particular worlds, but not the History of the World, which is foreclosed from positive appearance. This means that positive histories of worlds exist ontically without having any ontological consistency – in a strictly logical sense, history is therefore a simulacrum, a phenomenal apparition without being. Thus, while the History of the World as such neither is nor appears , an infinite plurality of histories of positive worlds exists without being.
Yet, what is the relation between the non-historical World and historical worlds? As we have seen, the World is the ontological condition of a possibility of worlds, whose being is derived from the void alone. The World is thus also the condition of a possibility of intra-worldly histories, but it does not itself appear in them, remaining the non-historical origin of all history. Evidently, the origin at stake here is not a determinate point in time or the hypothetical beginning of time as such: it is impossible to trace back the moment of the descent of any particular world from the void of the World. Moreover, as we have argued, we may only access the axioms of the World from within a positive world, when the World comes to appearance in it: there is no place outside the world, in which the being of beings would be accessible in its ‘pre-worldly’ state. Instead, the World is what Giorgio Agamben has termed the ‘transcendental origin’, which has been a key concept in Agamben’s methodology since the 1978 book Infancy and History (2007a) and found its most sustained treatment in the 2009(b) essay ‘Philosophical Archaeology’.
What we must renounce is merely a concept of origin cast in a mould already abandoned by the natural sciences themselves, one which locates it in a chronology, a primary cause that separates in time a before and an after. Such a concept of origins is useless to the human sciences whenever what is at issue is not an ‘object’ presupposing the human already behind it, but is instead itself constitutive of the human. The origin of a ‘being’ of this kind cannot be historicized because it is itself historicizing , and itself founds the possibility of there being any history.
(Agamben, 2007a: 56, emphasis in original)
Instead of the chronological concept of the origin Agamben affirms the dimension of ‘transcendental history’ as the zone of indistinction between the diachronic and the synchronic, whereby the origin is not something that has occurred once in the past but rather that which keeps occurring in the present and through this permanent coming to presence renders intelligible that of which it is the origin (see Agamben, 2009a: 8–12). Agamben’s favourite example of the transcendental origin is the Indo-European root, ‘[reinstated] through philological comparison of the historical languages, a historically unattested state of the language, yet still real’ (ibid.: 57, see also Agamben, 2009b: 109–110). It is this immanent origin that 30 years later Agamben posits as the arkhe in his method of archaeology, ‘an a priori condition that is inscribed within a history and that can only constitute itself a posteriori with respect to that history’ (Agamben, 2009b: 94, see also ibid.: 105–106). This arkhe only exists in the temporality of the ‘future anterior’, as something that will have been there ‘at the origin’ only when the archaeological inquiry is completed (ibid.: 106). The archaeologist traverses the course of history backwards in order to identify the moment of arising or emergence that continues to be operative within history even when concealed by tradition or the positivity of chronological history:
[L]ike the Indo-European words expressing a system of connections between historically accessible languages, or the child of psychoanalysis exerting an active force within the psychic life of the adult, or the big bang which is supposed to have given rise to the universe but continues to send toward us its fossil radiation.
(ibid.)
When the origin is rethought in this archaeological mode, the axioms of the World may indeed be posited as originary for every positive historical world. As attributes of being-in-the-World, obtained by subtraction from all intra-worldly determinations, the axioms of freedom, equality and community are valid in any world whatsoever as soon as this world comes to existence (i.e. as soon as anything at all appears in it) and retain their validity as long as it exists, yet they only find their intra-worldly expression as a result of political practice that produces their positive effects within the world. The axioms thus both condition history insofar as they describe the being of what must be there for any history to be possible and transform history insofar as their positive effects may intervene into, change and even end the history of a particular world. In both of these functions the axioms are historicizing without themselves being historical .
In contrast to the axioms of the World whose affirmation in the world exceeds and disrupts the intra-worldly historical context (cf. Benjamin, 1968: 147–154; Agamben, 2005b: 139–145), positive concepts of community, equality and freedom are only intelligible from within the historical context of particular worlds in which they are articulated. Moreover, precisely insofar as these concepts are characterized by substantive content, they no longer function in the axiomatic modality as universally valid in every world but rather in the programmatic modality as values or norms guiding the management and reproduction of a particular world. Since the number of these worlds is infinite and their totalization into the whole is logically impossible, intra-worldly concepts of community, equality and freedom are evidently subject to a potentially infinite homonymy , whereby they may refer to different things in different worlds with no possibility to subsume these meanings under any universal concept. Thus, it is precisely the non-historical yet historicizing character of the axioms of the World that makes universalism possible.
If these three axioms of the World are so singular in their very universality, there arises the question of whether a politics defined on their basis has ever been practised within any world. It will suffice to reverse our order of the presentation of the axioms earlier in the chapter to observe their resemblance to the familiar motto of the French Revolution, which was indeed a world-political event not only in the sense of its worldwide significance in the conventional sense but rather in its radically universalist content, which, alas, was soon to be betrayed in the violently particularistic adaptation of the revolutionary ideals in the Napoleonic Empire. Yet, does not this example of a concrete historical sequence of a politics based on three non-historical axioms create more problems than it solves? Even if we arrived at the axioms through an ontological inquiry rather than through a historical analysis, is not there an implicit Eurocentrism in positing what are widely known to be historically specific principles of the French Revolution as the universal axioms of the World? Does not our attempt at a universalist politics relapse into a hegemonic particularism that we tried to twist loose from in Chapter 1 or the imperfect nihilism that we claimed to leave behind in Chapter 2 ? Isn’t our concept of politics defined on the basis of the void of the World simply an unwarranted ontologization of a particular political sequence in European history, determined by a complex combination of economic, cultural, demographic, geographical and a host of other factors that belie the universality of its slogans? The universality of the axioms would then be as fake as that of numerous hegemonic projects of domination and the concept of the World as void would appear to be as incapable of grounding a world politics as the inconsistent concept of the world as the Whole.
This is not the case for two reasons. First, while the French Revolution certainly made those axioms famous, it certainly did not invent them. Indeed, the radical affirmation of freedom, equality and community in excess of any positive order could easily be observed in the slave revolts of antiquity and the peasant revolts of the Middle Ages. In his analysis of communism, Badiou speaks of a ‘communist invariant’ (Badiou, 2008b: 100, see also Badiou, 2010a: 229–260), a radical affirmation of equality without preconditions that persists throughout history, taking on specific intra-worldly forms yet resisting subsumption under the transcendental of any historical world, let alone any particular identity: ‘A real politics knows nothing of identities, even the identity – so tenuous, so variable – of communists’ (Badiou, 2010a: 8). As an axiomatic affirmation of equality, the communist invariant is the generic and indiscernible ‘truth’ of every world, the truth that Badiou explicitly presents as eternal and immortal even as it manifests itself in the plurality of historically specific worlds (Badiou, 2009b: 9–10, 505–513). As we shall demonstrate below, our understanding of politics is wider than Badiou’s and includes the communist invariant alongside others. We shall thus develop his idea of a political invariant further and present a typology of political invariants that affirm at least one of the three axioms. Thus, we shall argue for the existence of a limited variety of non-historical invariants of political practice that are subject to actualization in an infinite variety of historically existing worlds. The slogans of the French Revolution as well as other historical slogans that invoke one or more of the axioms are thus to be approached as intra-worldly actualizations of political invariants that may either remain faithful to them or convert universal axioms into particularistic homonyms that fortify the transcendental order of the world in which they resound.
The second reason why the universalism of the axioms is not compromised by their central status in the European or Western political tradition is that it is not possible to exercise ‘property rights’ with regard to these axioms without entering into a fatal contradiction. Even if the triad freedom–equality–community were the invention of the French Revolution, which it is not, the ontological argument for its universality would not be compromised by its local origin. As Badiou demonstrates in great technical detail (2005a: 372–389), the universality of a truth easily coexists with its necessarily particular origin in the event that erupted in a specific situation: after all, nothing can possibly erupt in the void itself. Since there is no such thing as the world of all worlds, the universal must always appear locally within a particular world, yet its universality consists precisely in its functioning in excess of the transcendental of this or any other world. The universality of a political axiom is not compromised by its origin in a particular world, since it is contained in the transcendence of this particular world from within.
Of course, these axioms may also end up subsumed under the particular transcendental and function as principles of intra-worldly management, in which case their relation to the universal becomes homonymous. This intra-worldly redeployment of freedom, equality and community may certainly produce violent effects of domination that we usually associate with hegemonic and imperialistic forms of pseudo-universalism. Yet, these effects exemplify not the consequence of universalist affirmation but rather its betrayal, perversion or abandonment. Thus, the perversion of the universalist heritage of the French Revolution, whereby it became associated more with nationalist particularism and imperialism than with any genuine universalism (cf. Bartelson, 2009: 151–167) testifies to the possibility of political praxis always going wrong, betraying its own presuppositions and breaking its own promises. Yet, every instance of such a failure also indicates the permanent possibility of resurrecting universalist politics that restores to freedom, equality and community their axiomatic ontological sense (cf. Badiou, 2009b: 62–67). The very fact that we still remember the motto of the French Revolution while having largely forgotten its historical twists and turns, its positive policies and institutional designs proves that the axioms, which describe the mode of appearance attained in the disclosure of the immanent transcendence of the World within worlds, themselves transcend the positive historical worlds, in which they are affirmed, becoming available for affirmation in any world whatsoever.
Yet, even if we are granted the possibility for the universal axioms of freedom, equality and community to transcend all intra-worldly historical contexts, is not the price for such transcendence the utter impoverishment of their content, which becomes so thin as to appear either hyperbolic and extreme in its absolutism or harmless and naïve in its idealism? While it would take us the remainder of this book to counter such objections, at this point we shall merely suggest that rather than being prohibitively high, the price in question seems to be a rather good bargain, as long as the actual deal is fully understood. While the concepts of freedom, equality and community do indeed lose their historically specific positive content in their deployment as axioms of the World, what we gain in this process are the very universal principles, whose former inaccessibility resigned us to nihilism in its three forms of hegemonic pseudo-universalism, passive accommodation to particularism and active destruction of every world as inauthentic. It also permits us to go beyond the metapolitical affirmation of the contingency of every world and the inconsistency of its closure into self-immanent objectivity towards the actual transformation of these worlds. The void at the heart of every positive world is no longer a paradox to marvel at but the condition of real change.
Moreover, the axioms of the World are universal not in the sense of regulative ideas forever barred from actualization or utopian ideals whose realization must remain perpetually deferred. The universality of being-in-the-World, of which freedom, equality and community are three aspects, is not an article of faith but a fact . The three axioms simply describe the facticity of existence subtracted from all intra-worldly determinations and are by definition valid in any world whatsoever as long as the void of the World is disclosed in this world. The universality of the axioms is not something to be attained in the infinite journey through the particular but is rather immediately accessible to us in the moods that subtract us from the particularity of our worlds in the disclosure of the World within them. The nihilist claim for the impossibility of universal principles of politics is thus refuted on the basis of the very concept of the World as void that constituted nihilism in the first place. It is precisely because the World is void, i.e. neither something nor everything positive, that its disclosure in positive worlds entails the withdrawal of the orders of these worlds and the appearance of the world’s beings in their pure being, which is characterized by freedom, equality and community in their most minimal yet also most absolute sense. While in the following chapter we shall demonstrate the way these axioms, which are indeed devoid of positive content, nonetheless yield positive effects in the worlds in which they are affirmed, at this point it appears that as long as we are interested in overcoming nihilism and establishing the possibility of a universalist politics derived from the concept of the World, the loss of positive, historical or intra-worldly substance of the concepts of freedom, equality and community is an acceptable price to pay.
We have now complemented our formal definition of politics as a practice of universal affirmation of the universal axioms of the World in positive worlds with the identification of three axioms of freedom, equality and community. Our next step will be to develop an exhaustive typology of political invariants on the basis of what axioms are affirmed or negated in them. Yet, prior to delving into this task in Chapter 4 , we must first address two problems that arise from our presentation of the axioms of the World. First, given our use of the example of the French Revolution to demonstrate both the historical functioning of the universal axioms in a political sequence and their conversion into intra-worldly homonyms, how is it possible to tell, and, even more importantly, to keep the two apart? More specifically, to what extent does our axiom of ‘community’ remain distinct from the idea of fraternity whose universality appears definitely compromised in its very concept? Second, given our insistence that politics affirms its axioms universally for the world in question, how far does this universality extend? What does it mean to affirm the community, equality and freedom of all beings in the world without any criterion of exclusion? These questions are addressed in the remaining two sections of this chapter with reference to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, who arguably has gone farthest among contemporary philosophers in rethinking freedom, equality and community as ontological axioms.
The axioms that describe the three aspects of being-in-the-World are instantly familiar even to the readers least interested in the ontology of politics. Yet, while this familiarity might stand in favourable contrast to abstruse conceptual innovations frequently offered in the name of and as names of an ‘alternative politics’, it also presents us with the challenge of homonymy: while we all presumably know what freedom, equality and community are, how can we be sure that we are even talking about the same things? As we have argued, the three axioms have historically lent themselves to the subsumption under the transcendental of the world, whereby their universal character was effaced and their axiomatic status replaced by the programmatic rationality of the management of the world in question. How are we to distinguish these intra-worldly homonyms from the universal axioms of the World and is there any sense in retaining this homonymy: should not the overused and discredited concepts of freedom, equality and community simply be ‘abandoned to the enemy’? (cf. Zizek, 2001: 123) Writing from a similar perspective, in his reconstruction of the concept of freedom, Jean-Luc Nancy expressed the discomfort of continuing to rely on the triad ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’, given its particularistic perversion into the motto of a state: ‘The motto “liberty, equality, fraternity” seems to us somewhat ridiculous and difficult to introduce into philosophical discourse, because in France it remains official (a lie of the State)’ (Nancy, 1994: 168).
Nonetheless, despite this reservation Nancy ultimately reaffirms this triad through the idea of sharing that is central to his overall philosophical approach (see Nancy, 1991, 1994, Chapter 7, 2000). First, freedom is revealed as indissociable from, if not outright identical to, equality, insofar as it consists neither in self-consciousness nor in self-mastery but rather in the ecstatic movement beside oneself , whereby the subject is thrown into ‘the space of the sharing of being’, the sharing that is equal without any positive measure of equality:
As this logos of sharing, freedom is immediately linked to equality, or, better still, it is immediately equal to equality . Equality does not consist in a commensurability of subjects in relation to some unit or measure. It is the equality of singularities in the incommensurable of freedom. [This] incommensurability means that freedom measures itself against nothing: it ‘measures’ itself against existence’s transcending in nothing and ‘for nothing’. Freedom: to measure oneself against the nothing.
(Nancy, 1994: 71)
Second, this very excess of egalitarian freedom is always shared in common , hence Nancy’s identification of freedom-equality with ‘fraternity’, albeit a fraternity understood in the absence of both any ‘sentimental connotations’ and any familial principle:
[This] excess of freedom, as the very measure of existence, is common. The community shares freedom’s excess. Thus, it has a common measure, but not in the sense of a given measure to which everything is referred: it is common in the sense that it is the excess of the sharing of existence. It is the essence of equality and relation. It is also fraternity, if fraternity, it must be said, aside from every sentimental connotation, is not the relation of those who unify a common family, but the relation of those whose Parent , or common substance, has disappeared, delivering them to their freedom and equality. Such as, in Freud, the sons of the inhuman Father of the horde: becoming brothers in the sharing of his dismembered body. Fraternity is equality in the sharing of the incommensurable. What we have as our own, each one of ‘us’ is what we have in common: we share being.
(ibid.: 72, emphasis in original)
While the linkage between freedom and equality has been remarked on frequently in political philosophy and even given rise to Etienne Balibar’s composite concept of egaliberte (Balibar, 1993, 2002; cf. Nancy, 1997: 189, 2000: 202), the affirmation of fraternity in this context appears to throw us right back to the ‘ridicule’ of a philosophical use of the French state motto and ‘gives one even more to smile about’ (Nancy, 1994: 168) or perhaps leaves one with nothing to smile about, given the associations of the idea of fraternity with the horrendous experiences of twentieth-century politics. This is why in his reading of Freud’s theory of community in Moses and Monotheism (1939) Nancy insists that the fraternity in question should not be envisioned in terms of any common familial substance shared by the brothers in the aftermath of the murder of the primal father. 6 Instead, fraternity consists in sharing nothing other than the disappearance, death or dismemberment of anything like a familial substance. Nonetheless, this death of the primal father is a solution that only exacerbates the problem. As Roberto Esposito (2010) argued in his reading of Freud’s argument, the community constituted in the sharing of the father’s death is founded on the fear of the return of the father that leads to the self-negation of this community in a doubly sacrificial logic. After the patricide, the brothers are not immediately thrown into the blissful sharing of equality and freedom, but must first ensure that no single one of them would ever ascend to the status of the father.
[It] is reasonable to surmise that after the killing of the father a time followed when the brothers quarrelled among themselves for the succession, which each of them wanted to obtain for himself. They came to see that these fights were as dangerous as they were futile. This hard-won understanding – as well as the memory of the deed of liberation they had achieved together – led at last to a union among them, a kind of social contract.
(Freud, 1939: 103–104)
Thus, the sacrifice of the father is followed by the sacrifice of the brothers’ own freedom insofar as they must renounce the desire to assume the role of the father, which takes the form of incest prohibition:
[First], the sacrifice of the Father and later the sacrifice of the same brothers to the sacrificed father. A double sacrifice, sacrifice squared. Blood, but also inhibition; the interiorization of the prohibition in the form of a conscious self-imposition. What the brothers voluntarily surrender is not only women and power but, more than that (and prior to that), their own identity in favour of an identification with someone who is no longer but who is still able to pull them down into the void. Making themselves brothers in guilt, they lose once and for all their own political subjectivity and commit themselves to deliver their subjectivity to what remains of the ancient father. Identifying themselves with him who is dead, they must deliver themselves over to that death that they gave and ate and that now, in turn, eats them.
(Esposito, 2010: 39)
Thus, for Esposito, the post-patricidal community, constituted around the disappearance and dismemberment of the father, is not a community of free and equal sharing of being, but is rather founded on the incorporation of the dead father into the brothers’ own existence, which makes death the organizing principle of the community itself, be it Hobbes’ Leviathan or Nancy’s own figure of ‘communion’, in which free and equal being-in-common is transformed into a project of securing a phantasmatic ‘common being’, which is only accessible through death ‘in the name’ of that very common being (Nancy, 1991: 13–16). Thus, in a postface to the Experience of Freedom , Nancy ultimately dissociates his affirmation of fraternity from this interpretation of the figure of the fraternal and more generally from any relation to the dead father:
Should [fraternity] be suspected of coming from a relation to murdering the Father and therefore of remaining prisoner as much of the sharing of hatred as of a communion with an identical substance/essence? This interpretation of the community as fraternal must indeed be carefully dismantled. But it is possible to interpret it otherwise as a sharing of a maternal thing which precisely would not be substance, but sharing – to infinity. We must think of fraternity in abandonment, of abandonment.
(Nancy, 1994: 168)
Despite this qualification and the generally cautious tone of Nancy’s affirmation of fraternity, it has been subjected to a severe, if always friendly, criticism by Jacques Derrida. In a chapter from Rogues , tellingly entitled ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or How not to Speak in Mottos’, Derrida, whose own criticism of the notion of fraternity finds its most detailed treatment in Politics of Friendship (1996: 46–47, 138–170, 227–270), questions Nancy’s decision to retain the term despite its evident exclusionary connotations:
[In] fraternalism or brotherhoods, in the confraternal or fraternizing community, what is privileged is at once the masculine authority of the brother (who is also a son, a husband, a father), genealogy, family, birth, autochthony and the nation. And any time the literality of those implications has been denied, for example, by claiming that one was speaking not of the natural and biological family or that the figure of the brother was merely a symbolic and spiritual figure, it was never explained why one wished to hold on to and privilege this figure rather than that of the sister, the female cousin, the daughter, the wife or the stranger, or the figure of anyone or whoever. One has to ask oneself, one has to ask Nancy, why he is so keen on keeping the word ‘fraternity’ in order to say ‘equality in the sharing of the incommensurable’.
(Derrida, 2005b: 58)
The same criticism is repeated in a footnote that follows a long citation from Nancy’s text about ‘dismantling’ the Freudian interpretation of fraternity and thinking fraternity as ‘abandonment’:
But then why not simply abandon the word ‘fraternity’ as well , now that it has been stripped of all its recognizable attributes? What does fraternity still name when it has no relationship to birth, death, the father, the mother, son and brothers?
(ibid.: 167) 7
This criticism illustrates a wider disagreement between Derrida and Nancy concerning the political significance of friendship and love. While in his later work Derrida ventures to ground politics in the idea of friendship, divorced from exclusive and homogenizing connotations of fraternity, Nancy rather opts for grounding political praxis in love (Secomb, 2006: 449–460), understood in the sense of a radical exposure of singularities to each other that throws its subjects outside themselves, rendering any relationship of inter-subjectivity between the lovers impossible from the outset (Nancy, 1991: 83–109, cf. Agamben, 1993: 2; 1995: 61). While Derrida’s ‘politics of friendship’ emphasises responsibility to otherness, conceived in a hyperbolic manner as an unconditional gift, hospitality, forgiveness, etc., Nancy’s ethico-political stance problematizes the very figure of the other (as well as the self) in its emphasis on reciprocal exposure, opening, touch between singularities that does not permit a self–other distinction to be constituted, let alone stabilized.
Derrida rejects love in favour of friendship and community in favour of democracy, inadvertently perhaps reinstating reason and order rather than exposing sociality to the collective, to the emotive and volatile and even to the feminine attributes that haunt the erotic body politic. Nancy, however, risks the problematics posed by love and community, adventuring beyond the relative security and conventionality of democratic friendship.
(Secomb, 2006: 458; see also Watkin, 2002)
Nancy’s persistence in affirming fraternity, even when stripped of all its positive features, must be understood in the context of this risky strategy. He is not content with simply deconstructing the received notions of love, community or fraternity, deactivating their particularistic and exclusionary force but also seeks to put these deactivated and inoperative concepts to a new, different use (cf. Agamben, 2007b: 73–92). Just as ‘divine places’ from which the gods have departed become available for our dwelling, sharing and exposure to each other and are in this sense still (or, perhaps, for the first time) ‘divine’ (Nancy, 1991: 110–149), so love, community or fraternity may redeem their promise precisely by becoming devoid of their particular content, be it fusion, communion or filiation.
Thus, in response to Derrida, Nancy simultaneously accepts his criticism (Nancy, 2000: 25; 2008: 176–177) and reaffirms his use of the concept of fraternity as harbouring a promise of the advent of something new: fraternity might be an illusion but ‘perhaps it indicates something still unsuspected’ (Nancy, 2006: 34). Philip Armstrong (2009: 191) has argued that Nancy resorts to a ‘paleonymic’ strategy that mobilizes the revolutionary potential of such concepts as fraternity (but also freedom and equality) against their own tendency towards a closure into self-immanence, self-grounding or self-sufficiency. A good example of this strategy, which clearly complies with Derrida’s imperative of a thorough evacuation of the filial-congenital theme, is a return to the problematic of fraternity in a later book, Sense of the World (1997), which explicitly argues for the need to supplement any politics that affirms freedom, equality and justice, by another element, which consists in the ‘power to constitute a oneness’:
What is at stake [is] is something completely different from an equal distribution of rights and freedoms: it consists, indeed, in the real equality of what, beyond ‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’, constitutes the unique and incommensurable emergence of a singularity, an absolute, singular sense that is not measurable in terms of any signification. That all of what can constitute a oneness should have the real power to do so. This politics thus requires an additional element, beyond justice, liberty and equality. One could perhaps call this additional element ‘fraternity’, if it were possible to conceive of fraternity without father or mother, anterior rather than posterior to all law and common substance. Or if it were possible to conceive of fraternity as Law and as Substance: incommensurable, nonderivable. And if it is necessary to put it in these terms: without ‘Father’ (or ‘Mother’), yet not at the sacrificial price of a ‘murder of the Father’, but, rather, in the dissolution of the figure of the Father-already-Dead and his Thanatocracy.
(Nancy, 1997: 114–115)
This formulation, explicitly evoking the earlier treatment of the Freudian fraternity in the Experience of Freedom , simultaneously marks Nancy’s strongest reservation about the concept and his strongest insistence on its maintenance. There must be something besides freedom and equality, precisely so that freedom and equality would attain the real power of the constitution of a singularity, an incommensurable or nonderivable oneness. This power is sought in a strange fraternity without law or substance, whereby incommensurability and non-derivability would be the only law that this singularity would answer to and the only substance it would consist of. This is the power of being-in-common that indeed does not require a reference to the father, either alive or dead. This is evidently not to say that the father, the mother or the sisters and the daughters are excluded from it – the point is precisely that this ‘fraternity’ becomes a fraternity of ‘anyone or whoever’ (cf. Derrida, 2005b: 58). Recalling Esposito’s description of the tragic fate of the Freudian post-patricidal community, a fraternity only avoids its self-sacrifice to the dead father, if it becomes a non-fraternal fraternity, a fraternity without brothers (and therefore also sisters, mothers, etc.).
This paleonymic philological strategy is hardly unique to Nancy – indeed, Derrida’s own use of the concept of democracy in his later work (1994, 1996, 2005b) is so heterogeneous to the contemporary use of the term that a different name could certainly have been chosen and the reason why it was not chosen is presumably Derrida’s desire to tease out ‘something unsuspected’ from it rather than merely abandon it ‘to the enemy’. Nonetheless, even though this philosophical catachresis is in itself fully legitimate, it remains problematic in the context of our discussion of being-in-the-World and the axioms that describe it. While our objections to Nancy’s recourse to the deconstructed concept of fraternity resonate with those of Derrida’s, they arise from a somewhat different perspective: even when devoid of all genealogical content, the very idea of fraternity necessarily remains linked to the positivity of the world, from which being-in-the-World is subtracted in the ontological mood. However empty the fraternal link is in Nancy’s approach, it complements the invocation of pure and inconsistent multiplicity with the specification of the relation between its members. Yet, any relation, however minimal, has no ontological status and is always a function of the transcendental order, from which being-in-the-World is subtracted (Badiou, 2009b: 303–312).
In contrast, the appearance of worldly beings in the mode of ‘being-in-the-World’ does not specify any connections that defines the belonging of these beings together: they simply are all ‘in the World’ without constituting any ‘oneness’ to which one could assign the predicate of fraternity, even if this predicate is all but empty. Indeed, these beings do not even belong together in any relational sense, they just are together for no reason whatsoever. Maybe these are the same brothers who have killed the father, but have completely forgotten him, the killing and their own brotherhood. Perhaps there never even was a killing, though there must have been a father, of some sort. Maybe he is alive and well, here together with the brothers, who might not be brothers after all. In the mode of appearance attained by the subtraction from the transcendental of the world the question of relation is completely meaningless. Once worldly beings have subtracted themselves from their identities in the disclosure of the World, we just cannot tell whether they are brothers, mothers, fathers or sisters – all we know is that they are but never what they are. All that being-in-the-World can register are not the genealogical circumstances of our birth, but its sheer facticity – a distinction that Derrida does not attend to in his critique of Nancy (Nancy, 1994: 66; cf. Derrida, 2005b: 62). What is born is never someone’s brother (sister, daughter, etc.) but simply a singularity in common with other singularities and while these singularities do form a community in the inoperative, unavowable and ‘whatever’ sense developed by Nancy, Blanchot and Agamben, this community precedes and exceeds any possible fraternal link, even the hypothetical ‘fraternity without brothers’. Insofar as being-in-common is purely factical, any specification of this facticity in terms of relation illegitimately adds an intra-worldly predicate to that which by definition is subtracted from all such predicates.
For this reason, we shall substitute ‘community’ for ‘fraternity’ as a name for the axiom of the World that describes the facticity of being-in-common that is entirely exhausted by its being-thus , in which the anaphora ‘thus’ does not refer to any particular predicate but rather exposes the existent as such (Agamben, 1993: 93). Community is not an identity posterior to the facticity of the inconsistent multiplicity of beings, but simply a name for this facticity: appearing as being-in-the-World, beings of the world are in common without constituting a relation, fraternal or otherwise. While collective agents of political practice in any given world may (or may not) form literal or metaphorical fraternities and sororities, the axiom that this politics affirms can only be communitarian in the sense that excludes any consideration of filiation, genealogy and even relation as such, but solely affirms being in common without any criterion or any qualification. Yet, this is where a new and even more complicated question arises. If this community is devoid of both conditions of belonging and the specification of relations between its members, then it cannot by definition be limited to human beings but must extend to literally all the beings in the world. This is the question we address in the final section of this chapter.
For all: universalism beyond anthropocentrism
Let us recall our formulae for the axioms of the World: there is no community to which being X does not belong; there is no being X that is not equal to being Y; there is no being X from which being Y is not free . What are these beings X and Y? We may have proceeded under the implicit assumption that these are human beings, whose freedom, equality and community we habitually affirm or deny, desire or doubt, aspire to or lament the loss of. Yet, insofar as we understand these three axioms ontologically, i.e. as attributes of being-in-the-World, it is immediately evident that in this mode of appearance, constituted by the subtraction from all intra-worldly predicates, the beings in question are also subtracted from the predicate ‘human’ (or ‘animal’, ‘plant’, etc). Since being-in-the-World is utterly indifferent to the positive attributes that beings are endowed with in their worlds, axioms of the World must necessarily apply to all beings purely and simply, without any qualification.
It is important to emphasize that what is at stake here is not the question of extending the application of the notions of freedom, equality and community from the human sphere to other living beings as a result of the destabilization of the ontological distinction between humans and other animals. The deconstruction of the opposition between humans and animals has been central to contemporary political theory and takes many forms, from the ontological reaffirmation of vitalism to the reinvention of the idea of ethico-political responsibility (Derrida, 2008; Agamben, 2004; Bennett, 2010; Wolfe, 2009; Latour, 2004; Calarco, 2008; Connolly, 2010). Yet, for all its diversity this problematic remains too narrow for our concerns, insofar as it remains focused on a particular attribute of living beings and strives to rethink, redraw or delete the boundaries drawn within this category. Of course, it is also possible to seek to extend the application of the axioms further, beyond the category of the living beings, to vegetative life (Marder, 2011) or even to inorganic matter (Bennett, 2010; Harman, 2011: 20–50), yet such an extension comes at the price of an increasingly implausible anthropomorphism. While recourse to anthropomorphism has been legitimized in recent discussions as, somewhat paradoxically, a solution to anthropocentrism (Bennett, 2010: 119–120), this solution is evidently inoperative in the context of being-in-the-World and its axioms. It is no longer a matter of overcoming ‘exclusive humanism’ (Taylor, 2007: 19) by disturbing the divisions between humans and other kinds of beings and endowing the latter with the rights and privileges restricted to the former. Similarly to the impossible passage from particular worlds to the universal totality addressed in Chapter 1 , the process of the gradual extension of the human world and the principles of its transcendental order to non-human beings will never attain the universality it attests to, simply because there cannot be a positive world to which all beings would belong. Moreover, as soon as the problem is framed in terms of the extension of human freedom, equality and community to non-humans, these axioms immediately become subsumed under the transcendental of a particular, human world and lose the very universality that presumably made their extension to non-humans legitimate and desirable in the first place.
Thus, we must be wary of the attempts to overcome anthropocentrism through anthropomorphism that deposes the human from the centre, which was at least a delimited, if privileged location, only to find it everywhere . Quentin Meillassoux offered a lucid critique of the ‘anti-idealist’ vitalism that he terms subjectalism , which consists in knocking down a certain type of human subjectivity (consciousness, reason, freedom) only to valorize other traits of human subjectivity (will, life, perception) and universalize them to such a degree that they apply to reality as such:
[It] is a question of breaking (so we are told) with the derisory anthropocentrism, in which man believes himself the sole depository of the subjective faculty that one intends to absolutize; of showing that man is but one particular representative, misguided by the prejudices of his consciousness, of a sensibility, of a life, that overflows him in every direction. But this refusal of anthropocentrism in fact leads only to an anthropomorphism that consists in the illusion of seeing in every reality (even inorganic reality) subjective traits the experience of which is in fact entirely human. To free oneself of man, in this strange humanism-in-denial, was simply to disseminate oneself everywhere, even into rocks and particles, and according to a whole scale of intensities.
(Meillassoux, 2012: 5)
Our notion of being-in-the-World permits us to go beyond the problems involved in this logic of extension, since the validity of the axioms of the World does not depend on the expansion of any positive world, human or otherwise, but arises precisely out of the suspension of its transcendental with all the rights or privileges it allocates to some of the world’s beings. Despite their conventional attribution to human beings, freedom, equality and community have no necessary anthropological content but may be reduced to logical formulae describing the being of beings. In our account they function as technical terms describing the condition of being-in-the-World, from which every anthropological or any other species-particular content has been subtracted. To speak of the freedom of animals, equality with rocks or community with MP3 files is not to disseminate or transfer humanity to these beings, but to affirm that the axioms prescribing politics have nothing to do with human (or other species-specific or identitarian) characteristics but derive from being itself in its ‘emptiest’ sense of sheer ‘whatever’ facticity. The axioms of the World are thus not first derived from a particular world and then progressively universalized by extension to other worlds, but rather immediately apply to any being whatsoever.
This statement must be understood in the strictly literal sense. Freedom, equality and community apply to all beings insofar as they are and entirely irrespectively of what they are: humans, dandelions, MP3 files, rainbow trout, Hamlet, the keyboard used for typing these words and, finally, these words themselves in their inscribed materiality. While this claim appears irrefutable, since it follows logically from the definition of being-in-the-World as the mode of appearance of beings solely in their being, it is nonetheless so staggering as to make thought momentarily stop in its tracks, simply because we do not seem to know what this universality could possibly mean in the context of politics as an affirmative practice. What does it mean to affirm the equality of humans and plants in any given world? Can a plant affirm its own freedom? How may we conceive of a community of living beings and rocks? It is not simply the resolution of these questions but even their very formulation that seems to lie entirely in the future. And yet, prior to proceeding in our typology of the invariants of politics based on the axioms of the World, it is important to insist upon this radical universality of the axioms, even if at this point the full implications of this insistence elude us. Indeed, we must insist on it prior to any understanding of it as a condition for any such understanding in the future: in order to prevent the particularistic conversion of the axioms into the foundational principles of a rehashed humanism, we must permanently remind ourselves of the perplexing and uncanny, indeed outright weird character of their universality. 8
This insistence finds its most rigorous formulation in Nancy’s Experience of Freedom , which despite its primary focus on freedom, pertains more generally to the mode of appearance that we have termed being-in-the-World. In a note to Chapter 7 Nancy suggests that ‘we should attempt to grasp not only the other – the other existent – but every other being – thing, animal, or instrument – from the starting point of freedom’ (Nancy, 1994: 192). Nancy ventures to go beyond Heidegger’s restriction of the potentiality for existence (as ecstatic, transcendent and free) to Dasein, whereby, as we recall, the world-forming facticity of Dasein is strictly distinct from the facticity of a stone as ‘worldless’ and of the animal as ‘poor in world’ (Heidegger, 1995: 176–178, 196–200, 1962: 166, 1998: 283–285). Fully realizing the stakes involved in overcoming this distinction, Nancy nonetheless makes a claim, both impassioned and desperate, for the freedom of all beings, even as he admits to this claim being beyond our present capacity of understanding.
[Will] I say that all things are free? Yes, if I knew how to understand this. But at least I know that it would have to be understood. We cannot content ourselves with sharing the world between Dasein and beings that are Vorhanden and Zuhanden – not only because these categories do not permit or permit poorly, making space and allowance for the animal and vegetal, other modes that are also undeniably modes of ‘ex-istence’, though in a way that remains obscure to our understanding. But also, and above all, because one must be able to affirm, for every thing, the withdrawal of the cause in it. In the thing without causality (neither caused nor causing) there is beingness as the positing of the thing, existence as what makes the being-thrown, not only in the world but of the world.
(Nancy, 1994: 158, emphasis in original)
Nancy attempts to overcome Heidegger’s exclusive assignment of existence to Dasein by arguing that ‘being-thrown into the world’ or facticity that characterizes Dasein, also characterizes other beings and indeed the world itself, which is also thrown and thus in some sense existent and free: ‘Facticity as facticity is also the facticity of the stone, the mineral, as well as that of the vegetal, animal, cosmic, and rational. Presence, impenetrability, there without “ek-stasy” also form the material-transcendental condition of a Dasein’ (ibid.: 158, translation modified). Insofar as the existence of Dasein does not float above the world and its beings but always unfolds in the world, into which Dasein is thrown along with other beings, this facticity of being in common with other beings also entails the sharing of its ecstatic and free existence with other beings.
Always, and in the final analysis, it is existence as such that puts at stake freedom and the openness in which beings present themselves. However, in this coming into presence, beings themselves in general also exist in a certain way, and singularly. We could say: because existence is in the world , the world as such also exists – it exists because of the proper existence of existence, which is outside of itself: this tree exists in its singularity and in the free space where it singularly grows and branches out. It is not a question of subjectivism, the tree does not appear to me thus, it is a question of the material reality of the being-in-the-world of the finite existent whose finitude comports the effective existence of the world as the singularity of existence itself.
(ibid.: 192, emphasis in original)
Thus, for Nancy it is existence itself that frees an opening or opens a free space both for Dasein, whose existence is its own essence, and for other beings, to whose essence existence does not belong (rocks, trees, horses, angels, God) but which nonetheless ‘exist in a certain way’ by virtue of being in the open space that existence first opened up. As soon as existence opens a free space in the world, this space is shared by all the other beings and the world itself. Thus, insofar as Dasein exists in it, the world itself must come to existence and thus, in Nancy’s reading, to freedom, since freedom and existence are interchangeable, existence being precisely the mode in which freedom exists. Insofar as the existence of Dasein, in which alone the beings of the world are disclosed, only exists in the world, the world itself is endowed with existence and thus with freedom.
Thus, even if we concede to Heidegger the irreducible difference between the modes of being of the stone, the animal and Dasein with respect to the access to the clearing of Being, the sheer facticity of beings in the world (including worldless and world-poor beings) opens up the dimension of freedom, which is no longer exclusively the freedom of Dasein but the freedom of the world itself as existent.
Whatever the extreme difficulty and strangeness of the problem, if the being of beings is the being of beings , and not a kind of hidden daimon telling its secrets to Dasein, we cannot avoid detouring through the freedom of the world in order to come to our own freedom.
(ibid.: 160)
Let us address this notion of the ‘freedom of the world’ in the context of our distinction between the World and worlds. Which of the two does freedom refer to in this phrase? At first glance, since it is a matter of establishing the freedom of worldly beings, it must refer to positive worlds, in which these beings come to appearance. Yet, as we have argued, whatever freedom there is in such a world, it is always subsumed under the transcendental of the world and is therefore by definition non-absolute. What this freedom refers to, then, is not the positive order of the world and the identities it prescribes for the beings that appear in it, but rather the conditions of possibility of this world itself. As Nancy argues, for the world to be disclosed in the first place, Dasein must exist in a thrown, factical manner, yet the disclosure of the world in Dasein’s existence immediately discloses the facticity of other beings of the world who share with Dasein this ‘material-transcendental condition’. Existence, initially restricted to Dasein’s being in the world, thus spills over into the world and begins to characterize the being of the world itself. Thus, the freedom of the world only becomes accessible through existence. Yet, existence is nothing other than the withdrawal of the essence of being, the dissemination of being in the world and thus the freedom of being itself, ‘the absolute freedom of being whose essence essentially withdraws’ (Nancy, 1994: 83). Thus, it is being itself and not the beings of any particular world that is free: ‘Being just begins to clarify itself when we consider that “freedom” gives it, or that being is in freedom’ (ibid.: 166).
From this perspective, the freedom of the world no longer refers to the positive world but to the World, which in our reading is the void of being, out of which the being of every being is woven. It is then the World itself qua void that is free and it is this freedom that spills over into any positive world, whenever existence erupts in it in the disclosure of the void of the World. The freedom of any being in the world is then conditioned by the freedom of the World. However, as we have argued in Chapter 1 , Nancy’s insistence on the nullity of the ontological difference entails the nullification of this conditioning, whereby it is transformed into a simple identity: ‘identity of being and beings: existence. Or more precisely: freedom’ (ibid.: 167). Thus, the freedom of being is nothing other than the freedom of every being in every world and, moreover, the only point of access to the freedom of being is through the freedom of a worldly being. Wary of elevating the idea of freedom above the everyday into the abstruse realm of ontology, Nancy performs the opposite gesture of drowning ontology itself in the banal and the quotidian. The sense of the world, as Nancy remarks, ‘is this world here as the place of existence’ (Nancy, 1997: 56).
The problem with this levelling of the distinction between the World and worlds is that the nullification of the ontological difference makes it difficult to move from the empirical observation of the lack of freedom in a particular world to its ontological affirmation. Why should there be freedom in ‘this world here’, where it is currently nonexistent, if the world is all here , all there is? Yet, if we insist on this difference between World and worlds, what becomes of Nancy’s proof of the universality of the axioms? While the flattening of the difference between World and worlds permits freedom to be assigned to both by virtue of oscillating from one to another (the World is free by virtue of existence only existing in the world’s beings, while the world is free by virtue of the spillover of the freedom of the World into existence in the world), in our approach this oscillation becomes highly problematic. A positive world is not free because of the transcendental ordering that constitutes it in its positivity, but the World is not free either, because there is nothing there that could be free.
Thus, there is neither a freedom of the World nor a freedom of the world. What, then, do the axioms of freedom, equality and community refer to? At the end of Chapter 1 we presented the relation between the World and worlds in terms of a tripartite scheme: the World as the void of being – the being of beings composed of the void – worlds of ordered beings. The locus of freedom, equality and community is precisely between the World and worlds, in the proliferation of inconsistent multiplicity that is the being of all beings, which is accessible within positive worlds in the disclosure of the World. While Nancy’s term ‘freedom of the world’ is inapplicable for our purposes, the idea of the ‘freedom of being’ designates precisely the location of freedom and the other axioms between the void of the World, which cannot be free but which gives freedom by giving being in the first place, and the positivity of the world, which as an ordered and limited totality cannot be free but whose beings may become free in their intra-worldly existence precisely because they always already are free in their being. The axioms of equality and community function according to exactly the same logic: they may be affirmed within the world only because the being of the world’s beings is composed of the void of the World. In other words, politics affirms the freedom, equality and community of being in the realm of transcendentally ordered beings .
It is for this reason that the three axioms of the World are universal, i.e. apply to any being of any world whatsoever. Insofar as they pertain to the being of beings, i.e. it is being as such that is free, equal and in common, the axioms are utterly indifferent to the kinds of beings to which they apply. This indifference to difference should be rigorously distinguished from its effacement or subsumption under some hegemonic identity. Politics affirms the freedom, equality and community of all beings as they are , along with all their predicates, but without letting any predicate, be it religion, ethnicity, colour, humanity, life or what not, determine or condition freedom, equality and community. If the referent of the axioms is being-in-the-World as the appearance of the inconsistent multiplicity of being between the World and worlds, between nothing and something, then it applies to the being as soon as it is , prior to the constitution of this being as a positive object of the world. For this reason, it is never a matter of extending the validity of the axioms from humanity or animality to a wider domain, since this validity precedes the emergence of any such domains. Instead, insofar as the axioms of freedom, equality and community have a foundation in being (and are not merely contingent intra-worldly principles), we share this foundation with all other beings entirely irrespectively of what they are.
And yet, while we now understand why the axioms of the World must apply to literally any being in any world, we have hardly progressed in our understanding of what this applicability means. The universal validity of the axioms is impossible to deny yet also appears impossible to act on: how does one affirm in practice the freedom of a pencil, one’s equality with a rock or one’s community with radio waves? While these are all daunting questions indeed, it is important to recall that our definition of politics does not require one’s understanding of the meaning of the axioms, let alone the specification of this meaning with regard to any particular class of beings, but simply consists in the affirmation of these axioms. While both the philosopher and the political subject must traverse the ontological mood, in which the axioms of the World become accessible, their mode of access to them differs: while for the philosopher they function as explicit objects of knowledge but not necessarily of affirmation), the political subject affirms them without necessarily knowing them (see Prozorov, 2014, Chapter 2 ). The affirmation of the axioms does not depend on the explication of their meaning.
While at first glance it might appear ridiculous to affirm something that we do not fully understand, this is in fact something we repeatedly engage in on a daily basis in the innumerable worlds we appear in: few of us really know how and why mobile phones, airplanes, the World Trade Organization, the IPod or our kidneys function but we do not question their existence or their function on this basis. Thus, politics may act on the axioms while bracketing off the knowledge of their meaning, which ceases to be a condition for political action and becomes the task of philosophy, where, unlike in politics, the apparent insolubility of a problem is no cause for despair but perhaps the best indicator of its genuine character. The meaning of universal freedom, equality and community thus becomes an epistemic problem that is entirely distinct from their affirmation as ontological axioms in political practice. Just as the epistemic privilege of world disclosure does not grant human beings any ontological privileges over other beings, whose being is disclosed by Dasein’s standing out in the nothing, so our epistemic difficulty in understanding the application of the axioms of the World to non-human beings does not in any way refute their validity.
While we may, if only due to the current limitations of our positive knowledge of other beings, retain the exclusive assignment of the epistemic capacity for the disclosure of the World to human beings, the content that is disclosed in this process, i.e. the appearance of beings in their being as free, equal and in common, is manifestly not restricted to humans or any other class of beings since it pertains to being itself. The axioms of the World pertain to the being of all beings in its brute facticity, which is the only thing that is disclosed in being-in-the-World. They do not pertain to the beings’ relation to being, i.e. their understanding or pre-understanding of being, their varying degrees of access to being (world formation, poverty in world, absence of world) or to any aspect of having being as opposed to being as such (cf. Garrido, 2012: 56–57). One is in the World entirely irrespectively of whether or what one knows of it, of whether one recognizes it or not. Thus, freedom, equality and community are valid for all that is , insofar as it is , and not insofar as this being happens to raise the question of its being in philosophical discourse. While human beings may be alone in their capacity to know the World as void, this very knowledge reveals to them their utter indistinction from other beings in the mode of appearance of being-in-the-World.
While the fact of this indistinction is indeed uncanny and its implications difficult to grasp, it remains irrefutable and any attempt to limit its validity to human or any other class of beings would explicitly contradict the definition of being-in-the-World, thus undermining our own freedom, equality and community, which only exist as its aspects. Thus, any limitation of the universality of the axioms is not merely hubristic in its conversion of epistemic capacity into ontological privilege, but ultimately inconsistent. Thus, while recognizing that the elaboration of concrete consequences of the affirmation of the freedom, equality and community of all beings is an intimidating task, it remains unavoidable as long as we want our universalism to be more than a recycling of imperfect nihilism in the mode of humanism, vitalism or any other particularism. 9 Yet, in all its difficulty this task is probably no more intimidating than the affirmation of the validity axioms of freedom, equality and community for non-male and non-white members of humanity was less than a century ago. With this in mind, we shall conclude this chapter by paraphrasing Nancy: ‘Will I say that all things are free, equal and in common? Yes, even if I do not yet know how to understand this’.
Notes
1 See e.g. Agamben (1999a: 185–203) for the discussion of love and hate as fundamental attunements in Heidegger.
2 The notion of being-in-the-World resonates with the idea of the ‘pure immanence’ of ‘a life’ developed in Deleuze’s final essay, a life understood as absolute immanence that is no longer immanent to something else but is ‘immanence in itself’ (2001: 26–27). The contrast Deleuze draws between this life and ‘individual life’, defined by various empirical determinations, is strictly analogous to our construction of being-in-the-World as subtracted from the transcendental of the world:
[The] life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens. It is a haeccity no longer of individuation but of singularization.
(ibid.: 28–29)
While Deleuze chooses as an example of this life the character of Dickens’ novel Our Mutual Friend , Roger ‘Rogue’ Riderhood, at the moment of his near-death experience, he also crucially emphasizes:
[W]e should not enclose life in the single moment when individual life confronts universal death. A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through and that are measured by given lived objects: an immanent life varying with it the events or singularities that are merely actualized in subjects and objects.
(ibid.: 29)
Similarly, we have argued that world-disclosing attunements in which being-in-the-World is manifested need not be restricted to empirical encounters with death or even the authentic existential comportment of being-towards-death but rather consist in various forms of the subtraction of beings from the actuality of ‘subjects and objects’, positively constituted by the order of the world. Our sole difference from Deleuze pertains to whether the term ‘life’, even ‘with the indefinite article as the index of the transcendental’ (ibid.: 28) is an appropriate name for this mode of appearance of being itself. While Deleuze’s choice of term reflects his widely known and much-discussed vitalism, our notion of being-in-the-World does not distinguish between living and non-living (organic and inorganic) beings but pertains simply to whatever is . For a more detailed discussion of this theme see the final section of this chapter.
3 For the sake of simplicity we shall henceforth refer to these axioms as ‘axioms of the World’ as opposed to ‘axioms of being-in-the-World’, which is a more correct expression since in a strict sense the axioms pertain not to the World itself but to the mode of appearance of worldly beings at the moment of its disclosure. Nonetheless, insofar as the moment of the disclosure of the World is primary here, it is legitimate to speak of the axioms of the World in the objective sense of the genitive as the attributes of the process of its disclosure.
4 For the further discussion of this distinction see Badiou, 2008a: 211–227; Reinhard, 2005; Santner, 2006; Salecl, 2000.
5 As an infinite set that cannot be defined by any positive predicate, the figure of the ‘not-all’ is similar to Badiou’s notion of the indiscernible or generic subset of the situation, in which its truth consists: it is hardly a coincidence that in Being and Event he inscribes the generic set with the female symbol ♀ (Badiou, 2005a: 356–357).
6 For a provocative rethinking of what this familial substance actually is see Santner, 2011. In his synthesis of political theology and the post-Foucauldian theory of biopolitics Santner posits the idea of the flesh as the zone of indistinction between the natural and the symbolic, the effect of the degradation of the symbolic and the historical back into nature or the rupture of nature within history. In Santner’s reading of Kantorowicz’s theory of the King’s two bodies, the flesh, usually exemplified by a sick or mutilated, decrepit or degraded body or part thereof, is the manifestation of the crisis of the symbolic royal body in the domain of natural bodies. Santner then proceeds to deploy this logic in the context of the modern democratization of sovereignty, in which every citizen’s body is double and also liable to the return of the flesh. Thus, the manifestation of various forms of bare or, in Santner’s expression, ‘creaturely life’ (2006: 16–25) in the proliferating states of exception is interpreted as the symptom of the survival of the paradoxical logic of sovereignty under the conditions of its democratic dispersion into the immanence of society. In this logic, the substance of any particularistic fraternal community is the ‘undead’ corpse of the primal father.
7 Derrida returned to this criticism on a number of other occasions. See e.g. Derrida, 2005a: 22–23. He was also critical of the reappropriation of the notion of the community by Nancy and Blanchot. See Derrida, 1996: 304: ‘Why could I never have written that, nor subscribed to it, whereas, relying on other criteria, this declaration would be easier for me to subscribe than several others? In the same vein, I was wondering why the word “community” (avowable or unavowable, inoperative or not), why I have never been able to write it, on my own initiative, and in my name, as it were’.
8 Since the radical universality of the axioms remains weird, if also irrefutable, for us, most of the discussion of form of politics in Chapter 4 will address examples from human politics that is the only one we can conceive of at present. Nonetheless, it is important to bear in mind that none of the invariants of politics introduced in the following chapter and elaborated in the Theory of the Political Subject (Prozorov, 2014) are in any way restricted to human beings and rather pertain to any beings of the world in their ‘whatever being’. In order to remind the reader of this throughout the rest of the book we have opted to designate the subject of politics by the undoubtedly irritating third-person neuter pronoun ‘it’. This is not merely to maintain gender neutrality but to emphasize the more radically impersonal character of political subjectivity which need not be restricted to human, living or any other kind of beings. For the discussion of the political significance of the idea of the impersonal see Esposito, 2012.
9 While the elaboration of the consequences of this radical universalism is beyond the scope of this book, it is important to clarify what such a project is not in order to avoid making it even more daunting than it is. The affirmation of the universal freedom, equality and community of all beings of all worlds does not entail the assumption by human beings of responsibility for all beings in order to endow them with freedom and equality (as understood by humans) and include them into their (specifically human) community. To frame this problem in terms of responsibility would be precisely to negate the ontic applicability of the three axioms to some beings that are construed as lacking in the capacity to enjoy what belongs to them ontologically, i.e. is derived solely from their being as such. We would thus be thrown back to Heidegger’s hierarchy of beings and the assertion of the ontological privilege of Dasein, cast in the more benevolent terms of the responsibility for those somehow lacking in being. Rather than hurriedly assume responsibility, which has not really been solicited and for which we may well be ill-fitted, it would be more productive to venture to become more responsive to the beings with whom we share our worlds and which appear so baffling to us not because of their difference, which contains nothing surprising, but because in spite of this very difference we turn out to share with them what we once thought to define us as specifically human.