Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 ‘With a level of philosophical sophistication rarely found in the discipline of international relations, Sergei Prozorov’s texts issue challenges that no one interested in politics in general and global politics in particular should ignore.’ Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai’i Manoa, USA

‘Taken together, Ontology and World Politics and Theory of the Political Subject represent the most ambitious re-articulation of the ontological and ethical foundations of universalism to date by one of the most brilliant and provocative scholars of his generation. I can thus warmly recommend these volumes to anyone with an interest in cutting-edge international political theory.’ Jens Bartelson, Professor of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden

‘Drawing on a wide range of sources in political theory and philosophy, Prozorov develops a novel and ambitious defense of universalism. He does so not against, but through approaches that critique global models for their hegemonic and excluding nature. The result is a re-articulation of universalism that seeks to affi rm difference and plurality through concepts of community, equality and freedom.’ Roland Bleiker, Professor of International Relations, School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, Australia Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 ONTOLOGY AND WORLD POLITICS

Together these two companion volumes develop an innovative theory of world politics, grounded in the reinterpretation of the concepts of ‘world’ and ‘politics’ from an ontological perspective. In the discipline of international relations the concept of world politics remains ambivalent, functioning both as a synonym of international relations and its antonym, denoting the aspirations for overcoming interstate pluralism in favour of a universalist politics of the global community or the world state. Rather than distinguish ‘world politics’ from ‘international politics’ by its site, level or issues, Prozorov interprets it as another kind of politics. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s account of world disclosure and Alain Badiou’s phenomenology of worlds, this book posits world politics as a practice of the affi rmation of universal axioms across an infi nite plurality of limited and particular situations or ‘worlds’. Prozorov reinterprets the familiar principles of community, equality and freedom in ontological terms as attributes of pure being, subtracted from all positive determinations, and presents them as axioms of universalist politics valid in any world whatsoever. This approach to world politics serves as the groundwork for a comprehensive reconsideration of Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 the central themes of political and international relations theory. Systematic and accessible, these works will be key reading for all students and scholars of political science and international relations.

Sergei Prozorov is University Lecturer in World Politics at the University of Helsinki and Academy of Finland Research Fellow. He is the author of four books, the most recent being The Ethics of Postcommunism. He has also published numerous articles on political philosophy and international relations in major international journals. Interventions Edited by Jenny Edkins, Aberystwyth University and Nick Vaughan-Williams, University of Warwick

As Michel Foucault has famously stated, ‘knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting’. In this spirit the Edkins–Vaughan-Williams Interventions series solicits cutting edge, critical works that challenge mainstream understandings in international relations. It is the best place to contribute post disciplinary works that think rather than merely recognize and affi rm the world recycled in IR’s traditional geopolitical imaginary. Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai’i at Mãnoa, US

The series aims to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars working within broad critical post-structural and post-colonial traditions have chosen to make their interventions, and to present innovative analyses of important topics. Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology, politics and other disciplines and provide situated historical, empirical and textual studies in international politics.

Critical Theorists and Universality, Ethics and Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 International Relations International Relations Edited by Jenny Edkins and A grammatical reading Nick Vaughan-Williams Véronique Pin-Fat

Ethics as Foreign Policy The Time of the City Britain, the EU and the other Politics, philosophy, and genre Dan Bulley Michael J. Shapiro Governing Sustainable Beyond Biopolitics Development Theory, violence and horror in world Partnership, protest and power at the politics world summit François Debrix and Carl Death Alexander D. Barder

Insuring Security The Politics of Speed Biopolitics, security and risk Capitalism, the state and war in an Luis Lobo-Guerrero accelerating world Simon Glezos Foucault and International Relations Politics and the Art of New critical engagements Commemoration Edited by Nicholas J. Kiersey and Memorials to struggle in Latin America Doug Stokes and Spain Katherine Hite International Relations and Non-Western Thought Indian Foreign Policy Imperialism, colonialism and The politics of postcolonial identity investigations of global modernity Priya Chacko Edited by Robbie Shilliam Politics of the Event Autobiographical International Time, movement, becoming Relations Tom Lundborg I, IR Edited by Naeem Inayatullah Theorising Post-Confl ict Reconciliation War and Rape Agonism, restitution and repair Law, memory and justice Edited by Alexander Keller Hirsch Nicola Henry Europe’s Encounter with Islam Madness in International Relations The secular and the postsecular Psychology, security and the global Luca Mavelli Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 governance of mental health Alison Howell Re-Thinking International Relations Theory via Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Deconstruction Schmitt Badredine Arfi Geographies of the nomos Edited by Stephen Legg The New Violent Cartography Geo-analysis after the aesthetic Politics of Urbanism turn Seeing like a city Edited by Sam Okoth Opondo and Warren Magnusson Michael J. Shapiro Insuring War The Politics of Exile Sovereignty, security and risk Elizabeth Dauphinee Luis Lobo-Guerrero Democratic Futures International Relations, Meaning Revisioning democracy promotion and Mimesis Milja Kurki Necati Polat Postcolonial Theory The Postcolonial Subject A critical introduction Claiming politics/governing others in Edited by Sanjay Seth late modernity Vivienne Jabri More than Just War Narratives of the just war and military life Foucault and the Politics of Hearing Charles A. Jones Lauri Siisiäinen Deleuze & Fascism Volunteer Tourism in the Global Security: war: aesthetics South Edited by Brad Evans and Julian Reid Giving back in neoliberal times Wanda Vrasti Feminist International Relations ‘Exquisite Corpse’ Cosmopolitan Government in Marysia Zalewski Europe Citizens and entrepreneurs in The Persistence of Nationalism postnational politics From imagined communities to urban Owen Parker encounters Angharad Closs Stephens Studies in the Trans-Disciplinary Method Interpretive Approaches to Global After the aesthetic turn Climate Governance Michael J. Shapiro Reconstructing the greenhouse Edited by Chris Methmann, Delf Rothe Alternative Accountabilities in and Benjamin Stephan Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 Global Politics The scars of violence Postcolonial Encounters with Brent J. Steele International Relations The politics of transgression Celebrity Humanitarianism Alina Sajed The ideology of global charity Ilan Kapoor Post-Tsunami Reconstruction in Indonesia Deconstructing International Negotiating normativity through gender Politics mainstreaming initiatives in Aceh Michael Dillon Marjaana Jauhola Leo Strauss and the Invasion of Writing Global Trade Governance Iraq Discourse and the WTO Encountering the Abyss Michael Strange Aggie Hirst Politics of Violence Production of Postcolonial India Militancy, international politics, killing and Pakistan in the name Meanings of partition Charlotte Heath-Kelly Ted Svensson Ontology and World Politics War, Identity and the Liberal Void universalism I State Sergei Prozorov Everyday experiences of the geopolitical in the armed forces Theory of the Political Subject Victoria M. Basham Void universalism II Sergei Prozorov Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 ONTOLOGY AND WORLD POLITICS

Void universalism I

Sergei Prozorov Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016

Routledge Taylor & Francis Croup

LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Sergei Prozorov The right of Sergei Prozorov to be identifi ed as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifi cation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Prozorov, Sergei, author. Ontology and world politics : void universalism I / Sergei Prozorov. pages cm. — (Interventions) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-415-84023-1 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-415-84024-8 (paperback) — ISBN 978-0-203-74574-8 (e-book) 1. Political science—Philosophy. 2. World politics—Philosophy. 3. Ontology—Political aspects. I. Title. JA71.P78 2014 320.01—dc23 2013009589

ISBN: 978-0-415-84023-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-84024-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-74574-8 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo by Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 To my daughter Pauliina: welcome to the world Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 CONTENTS

Preface xv Introduction: the existence of universality xx The question of world politics xx Why there is no theory of world politics xxv Towards an ontology of world politics xxviii From the void to the universal xxxi

PART I The World and worlds 1

1 Three concepts of the world 3 The constitutive ambivalence of world politics 3 The world as everything 8 The world as something 15 The world as nothing 21 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 The universality of the void 27

2 Politics: bringing the World into worlds 36 Politics beyond the (inter)national 36 Nihilism 39 Metapolitics 44 Putting the World back in 47 Schmitt’s concept of the political: the partition of the void 55 Rancière’s concept of politics: equality and the spectre of ontology 60 xiv Contents

PART II What is world politics? 71

3 Three axioms of politics 73 Being-in-the-World: the ontological mood 73 Community, equality, freedom 78 Universality and historicity 87 Community without fraternity 93 For all: universalism beyond anthropocentrism 100

4 The typology of political invariants 110 Politics and its negations 110 Seven forms of politics 118 World politics: libertarianism, egalitarianism, communitarianism 130 The new world: the subsumption of universality 135 The three nothings: void, world, sovereignty 139

Bibliography 148 Index 156 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 PREFACE

Universalism has been suffering from a bad reputation, particularly as a political doctrine. The modern condition that we have come to know as nihilism makes it diffi cult, if not outright impossible, to invoke universal values or principles, be they transcendent or immanent, theological or scientifi c. Since the early twentieth century, universalism has also been under attack from various strands in philosophy and social sciences, which sought to expose the socially or politically constructed, historically contingent, culturally particular character of the allegedly universal concepts and ideals, from human rights to possessive individualism, from constitutionalism to civil society, from state sovereignty to gender equality. Such diverse approaches as social constructivism and neo-Marxism, feminism and post- colonialism, multiculturalism and post-structuralism demonstrate, in different ways, how the things we have been accustomed to consider universal are in fact products of highly particular historical conjunctures, cultural constellations, social class or economic order, and their alleged universality is always a result of a hegemonic operation of universalization that conceals the particular origin or character of what it presents as universal. Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 This universalization is not merely a hypocritical but also at least potentially a violent project that ventures to exclude, dominate or eliminate whatever cannot be subsumed under its hegemonic fi gure of universality. The elevation of a particular object or phenomenon to the status of the universal transforms the pluralistic space of coexistence of particularities into the site of domination of the newly minted universal, paving the way for various forms of imperialism and resistance to it from other particular forces. Universalist politics is thus held to be inherently confl ictual due to its hostility to difference. The mitigation of such confl icts, be they domestic or international, requires the operation that reverses the hegemonic gesture of universalization and restores the particularity of the phenomena or practices in question, making it no longer possible to invoke it as a pretext for dominating other xvi Preface

particularities or limiting pluralism. To the extent that universality is admissible in this critical discourse, it is only as a characteristic of the space between particularities, the space of their pluralistic coexistence. In this account the universal stands precisely for the prohibition of universalization and the imperative of maintaining particularistic pluralism. From the criticism of unilateralism of US foreign policy under George W. Bush to domestic debates about multiculturalism and integration, from the discussion of the foundations of European identity to the calls for a ‘multipolar’ world we observe the problematization of universalism that has itself become almost universal. This problematization is not only familiar but, more importantly, correct. The affi rmation of sovereignty, human rights, private property or any other positive principle as a universal can only come at the price of the effacement of its historical origin and the forgetting of its past or even present use to justify exclusion or domi- nation or advance ulterior interests of particular parties. And, yet, this problemati- zation soon stops being intellectually satisfying for at least two reasons. First, insofar as every concept or ideal can be shown to have a historical origin in a particular situation, universalism proves to be a much too easy target. Nothing is simpler than exposing the particularity of every claim to universality as a hegemonic strategy whose very fervor betrays its illegitimacy. Second, the simplicity of problematiz- ing universalism contrasts unfavourably with the extreme diffi culty of dispensing with it entirely. The only alternative to hegemonic universalization seems to be an equally unpalatable prospect of the valorization of particularism that permanently risks collapsing into relativism or nihilism. In the absence of any universal principles it becomes impossible to adjudicate between particular forms of politics, includ- ing the violent politics of exclusion, domination or extermination that hegemonic universalism was itself accused of. Domestically, the abrogation of universalism reduces political life to ceaseless confl ict between particular forces with particular interests that threatens social atomization, anomie and ultimately a relapse into Hobbes’ war of all against all. Internationally, the renunciation of universalism seems to throw us back to the ‘anarchic’ international system that is conventionally dated back to the Peace of Westphalia, the system, whose propensity to war inspired countless masterpieces of political theory and the birth of the very discipline of international relations. If the reason for dispensing with universalism was its pro- Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 pensity to exclusion, domination and violence, then the rampant valorization of particularism does not seem to fare much better. The tensions between universalism and particularism are evidently intensifi ed in the condition of globalization. On the one hand, globalization is usually approached in quasi-universalist terms as the progressive integration of the world’s economic, cultural or even political (sub)systems that erase the boundaries between particular communities, paving the way for something like a ‘world politics’ to replace ‘international relations’ as we know them – a politics of a world truly becoming one and in common. Yet, we also know that at the same time as it removes obstacles to the free movement of goods and capital, fashion trends and high-tech gadgets, it also introduces or fortifi es obstacles to the free movement of human beings, millions Preface xvii

of whom experience globalization as the intensifi cation of exclusion, inequality and oppression, whereby there is no longer any world that could be meaningfully shared in common. The universalism of globalization is thus exposed as the hegemonic project of universalization, the becoming-global of Western capitalism at the cost of the hierarchical domination of the Second, Third and Fourth Worlds that it subsumes under its logic. The promise of a universalist world politics appears to amount to little more than the global triumph of a particular world. Thus, we end up in an aporetic situation. We can no longer accept the positive claims of universalism yet we cannot give up on it, opting for the valorization of particularistic pluralism. We are all too accustomed to exposing every discourse of world politics as an expression of a hegemonic drive for world domination, yet we also recognize the irreducibility of the world as the horizon of our being- in-common to the international domain as the site of pluralistic coexistence of particular political entities. If universalism certainly proves problematic, particular- ism does not appear to be a solution to its problems: indeed, is not the problem with universalism precisely that the allegedly universal was in fact particular? This book was born out of a series of engagements with this aporia both in theoretical investigations (Prozorov, 2006a, 2009b) and empirical analyses (Prozorov, 2006b, 2009a). It attempts to transform the aporia, i.e. the dead-end into which the critique of universalism has led itself by the exposure of its particularism, into a euporia, literally a ‘happy path’, which resolves the problems of universalism within the frame of universalism itself. Such a transformation begins by granting that the critics of universalism are right about almost everything. It is certainly true that the positive content of every universalist affi rmation necessarily arises out of a particular context, expresses particular interests, excludes or dominates other particular beings or phenomena. Yet, what is criticized here is not universalism but particularism that pretends to accede to universality in the manner that is always illegitimate, fake and ultimately futile. Rather than oppose such pseudo-universalist particularism with the particularism that proudly manifests its own particularity, which would do little to mitigate its violence, exclusion or domination, we ought to pose the question of the possibility of a genuine universalism that does not relapse into a hegemonic universalization of some particular content. Yet, given that modern nihilism has rendered void every conceivable fi gure Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 of the universal by restoring to it its particular origin or character, how is a non-particularistic and non-hegemonic universalism possible? It is evidently only possible as an affi rmation that is not founded on any positive principle, but takes this void itself as its sole point of departure – a void universalism. Where every positive fi gure of the universal is null and void, the only consistent form of universalism would be the one whose ground is the void itself. Such a universalism would by defi nition be immune to the ‘particularizing’ critique that dismantles universals by pointing to the particular origin or character of their content, simply because it does not have any such content or, more precisely, because whatever content it has is derived from the void alone. This universalism would make it possible to resume the discourse about world politics as something that goes beyond the xviii Preface

global expansion of a particular vision or image of the world, since it would approach the world itself as the void, in which an infi nite plurality of particular worlds emerge with no possibility of their totalization. In short, the ambition of this book is to conceptualize the move from the void of universals, which is the situation we fi nd ourselves in today, the proliferation of hegemonic claims to universality and particularistic resistance to them, to void universalism as simultaneously a non-contradictory and a non-trivial form of politics, whose principles are defi ned from the void alone and apply in any positive world whatsoever. It is this politics that we shall term ‘world politics’, no longer using this term to designate the transcendence of the international system of states by a hypothetical world state but rather to refer to the intensity of universalist affi rmation that puts in question the entire order of a particular world in which it intervenes. Thus, the task of this book is to reorient our discussion of universalism and world politics away from the unproductive debates on the possibility of the political unifi cation of the world and the contestation of pseudo-universalist attempts at such unifi cation towards the analysis of world politics as the process of the transformation of an infi nite number of particular worlds on the basis of universal principles whose ground is the void alone. The Void Universalism project is divided into two volumes. The fi rst volume, Ontology and World Politics, deals with the question of world politics from an ontological perspective, reinterpreting the concept of politics on the basis of the idea of the World as void and developing a typology of forms of politics on the basis of what ontological axiom is affi rmed in them. The second volume, Theory of the Political Subject, relocates the question of world politics to the phenomenological, intra-worldly level, posing the question of the conditions of emergence and existence of the political subject and its confrontation with intra-worldly limitations to its activity. The ontological redefi nition of world politics and the phenomenological elaboration of its subjective process evidently do not attempt to exhaust the fi eld of inquiry about world politics, but merely lay the preparatory groundwork for further investigations by addressing the following basic questions. What is the world as a referent object of a politics that would go beyond the familiar dualism of particularistic pluralism of international politics and its utopian transcendence in Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 a unifi ed world state or community? What is politics, if it is defi ned on the basis of the concept of the world alone and logically transcends any particular intra-worldly principle? How can the subject of this politics, which transcends every particular world, nonetheless emerge within such worlds and persist in transforming them? The two volumes will fulfi ll their function if they serve as a background for further theoretical elaboration and empirical analysis of world-political affi rmation in the variety of worlds we dwell in. The research for this book was initiated during my fellowship at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2007–10) and completed during my current employment as Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the Department of Political and Economic Studies at the University of Helsinki. I am thankful to the Preface xix

administrative staff of both institutions for their hospitality and effi ciency that made the work on this book so much easier. Early versions of some of the chapters in this book have been presented as conference papers, guest lectures and talks. I am thankful to my colleagues, whose comments and criticism were of great help in improving the fi nal version: Jens Bartelson, Andreas Behnke, Jenny Edkins, Pertti Joenniemi, Susanna Lindberg, Artem Magun, Vyacheslav Morozov, Sofi a Näsström, Louiza Odysseos, Robert Oprisko, Heikki Patomaki, Simona Rentea, Helena Rytovuori-Apunen, Yevgeni Roshchin, R.B.J. Walker, Alexander Wendt, Andreja Zevnik. I am particularly grateful to Mika Ojakangas, who read the entire manuscript in serial instalments and offered helpful and encouraging comments throughout the writing process. Every scholar has at least once been asked by a non-academic friend, relative or neighbour to describe his or her project ‘in a few words’, preferably those of ordinary language – a request as understandable as it is diffi cult to adequately fulfi ll. Having gone through this ordeal with my previous books, with these volumes I am fi nally ready to indulge this request and proudly present their argument not simply in a few words but with the help of just two symbols of logic: the existential quantifi er ∃, designating ‘there is’, and the universal quantifi er ∀, designating ‘for all’. The argument of the Void Universalism dilogy is that besides and beyond the infi nite plurality of particular worlds that we inhabit there is the immediate and non-totalizable universality of the World as void. World politics is nothing more yet nothing less than the affi rmation of this universality in the form of the axioms of freedom, equality and community, which seeks to transform an infi nity of particular worlds on their basis, overturning the exclusions, hierarchies and restrictions constitutive of intra-worldly orders. The content of world politics is thus entirely contained in the affi rmation that universality exists, that ‘there is’ a ‘for all’. To put it briefl y, ∃ ∀. There you go. Sergei Prozorov Helsinki January 2013 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 INTRODUCTION The existence of universality

The question of world politics Starting from the end of the Cold War, there has been no shortage of books and articles addressing the apparently epochal move ‘from international relations to world politics’ (Walker, 1995), sometimes approached as synonymous with the process of globalization and sometimes viewed as its acceleration and radicali- zation. The decline of the nation-state and the rise of non-state actors from transnational corporations to global social movements, the increasing authority of international regimes in spheres as diverse as environmental protection and human rights, the intensifi cation of economic interdependence between states, technological innovations in communication, travel or warfare, the international convergence of domestic values in the hegemony of liberal-democratic capitalism allegedly marking the end of history, the greater awareness of global environ- mental issues exceeding state jurisdictions or capacities, the dangers of terrorism transcending national boundaries, the global spread of infectious diseases – all these processes supposedly indicate that we have somehow passed ‘beyond’ the narrow

Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 confi nes of the international into the wide expanse of the world, for better or worse. For a student of International Relations (IR) in the late 1980s and the early 1990s all things ‘international’ were hopelessly passé and unspeakably dreary, while the very name of world politics connoted something exciting and new, seductive in its very ambiguity as a source of both new possibilities and new dangers. In the vibrant debates in IR theory in the immediate post-Cold War period the concept of ‘world politics’ exemplifi ed both the expansion of the focus of the discipline beyond interstate relations and the expansion of the theoretical and methodological apparatus of the discipline beyond a rather limited arsenal largely borrowed from the social sciences of the 1960s. Thus, world politics simultaneously stood for things as diverse as feminism and the internet, deconstruction and global governance, Foucault and climate change, social construction and human rights. Introduction xxi

While its popularity arguably peaked in the 1990s, the concept of world politics has a much longer history that is in fact coextensive with the history of the academic discipline of international relations. In 1900, American scholar and diplomat Paul Samuel Reinsch published a book entitled World Politics at the End of the 19th Century (Reinsch, 1900), a treatise on imperialism and colonialism with a particular emphasis on ‘the opening of China’, in which ‘world politics’ was largely synonymous with the colonial politics of Great Powers or, in the parlance of the text, ‘world powers’. In 1922 Herbert Adams Gibbons published An Introduction to World Politics, in which world politics similarly refers to the imperial expansion of the European powers worldwide, ‘the transfers of title in the world outside of Europe’ (Gibbons, 1922: 16, see more generally ibid.: 4–15). In later literature the term acquires a more generic meaning often synonymous with ‘international relations’. The esteemed journal World Politics was founded in 1948, which coincides with the post-Second World War rapid institutionali- zation of the discipline of international relations. A number of titles on world politics appeared during the 1960s and the 1970s, including Joel Larus’s Comparative World Politics (1964), Harold Lasswell’s World Politics and Personal Insecurity (1965), Wolfgang Gaston Friedman’s An Introduction to World Politics (1965), Herbert J. Spiro’s World Politics: A Global System (1966), A.F.K. Organski’s World Politics (1968), Thomas Hulbert Stevenson’s World Politics: A Study in International Relations (1968) and Robert Lieber’s Theory and World Politics (1973). The concept of world politics also features in the (sub)titles of such classical IR texts as Hedley Bull’s Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (1977), Robert Gilpin’s War and Change in World Politics (1981) and James Rosenau’s Turbulence in World Politics (1980). Moreover, Charles Kegley’s bestselling textbook in IR, which at the time of writing has undergone 13 editions since its original publication in 1981, is entitled World Politics: Trend and Transformation (Kegley and Blanton, 2011). Similarly, key critical texts published since the ‘post-positivist debate’ of the 1980s, in which conventional IR theory was challenged by novel orientations such as constructivism, feminism and poststructuralism, invoke the notion of world politics: R.B.J. Walker’s One World, Many Worlds (1988), John Agnew’s Geopolitics: Re-visioning World Politics (1998), David Campbell’s and Michael Shapiro’s Moral Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics (1999), J. Ann Tickner’s Gendering World Politics (2001), Andrew Linklater’s Critical Theory and World Politics: Citizenship, Sovereignty and Humanity (2007) and Roland Bleiker’s Aesthetics and World Politics (2009). The concept has become so popular that almost everything and everyone appears to be related to world politics: be it Oakeshott (Astrov, 2005) or Deleuze (Lenco, 2011), time (Hutchins, 2008) or science fi ction (Weldes, 2003). Yet, while there is a reasonable degree of consensus on the meaning of ‘international’ in International Relations, the meaning of world politics is much more ambivalent. It is easy to notice even from the list of book titles above that world politics may either be a synonym of International Relations, sometimes used to designate the object of the IR discipline, or an antonym of international xxii Introduction

relations, the name of the effect of their hypothetical transcendence (cf. Walker, 2009: 1–2, 20–21):

[On] the one hand, the term international relations can be used as an easy synonym for world politics. Either term can then be used to describe the broadest context within which modern political life has been enabled, the context of the world as such. Shifting from international relations to world politics implies shifting from the obviously local to something more enlightened and cosmopolitan, something vaguely planetary, something both more worldly and more mature. On the other hand, the term ‘international relations’ can be used to describe exactly the opposite of world politics, as the antonym affi rming the absence and even impossibility of any politics that might encompass the entire world as it is known to modern political life. In this sense, the term expresses fragmentation rather than unity, a pluralistic differentiation of a world of modern sovereign states rather than as a commonality of modern states encompassing the world as a whole. (Walker, 2009: 21)

Walker’s diagnosis, to which we shall return frequently in this book, succinctly demonstrates the constitutive ambivalence of world politics in international rela- tions theory. It is certainly not an indication of the disciplinary maturity of a ‘normal science’ that the central concept of the disciplinary discourse frivolously oscillates between being a synonym and an antonym of the discipline’s very name. Indeed, given this oscillation, how are we to understand the alleged transformation of international relations into world politics: is it a matter of a radical transcendence of the international by what is wholly other to it or merely a modest rebranding of the international that leaves its logic perfectly intact? The answer to this question has important implications for interpreting the entire disciplinary history of IR. If we opt for the synonymy of ‘international relations’ and ‘world politics’, we end up with a view of IR as a discourse of globalization avant la lettre, the discipline that from the outset focused on the quasi-universal domain in which relations between particular states unfold, the domain increasingly structured by functional integra- tion, interdependence, regimes, etc., gradually transforming into an ‘international Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 society’ and eventually into a ‘world society’. In contrast, if we interpret the two terms as antonyms, we end up with a rather more tragic image of a discipline, whose constitutive aspiration for a universalist politics in the aftermath of the First World War is perpetually frustrated by the resurgence of the particularistic and confl ictual pluralism of the international. IR is then a discipline doomed to forever refute its own ideals and establishes itself as a science only on the condition of this self-abasement that presumably qualifi es one as a ‘realist’. While the ambivalent relationship between the world and the international is problematic enough, things get worse when we consider the second term in the syntagm ‘world politics’. While ‘international relations’ evidently and relatively unproblematically refers to relations between nation-states in various spheres, what Introduction xxiii

does it mean to speak of a ‘world politics’? Is the world the all-encompassing site of politics, so that the term ends up subsuming not only international but also national (and sub-national, regional, local, etc.) politics, denoting something like ‘all the politics that there is in the world’, an option as plausible as it is useless? Alternatively, is the world the top level at which politics may be practised, so that ‘world politics’ becomes restricted to political practice that somehow involves the whole world, be it in the form of international organizations with universal membership (the United Nations, World Health Organization, World Trade Organization) or in the form of a hypothetical supranational authority (the world government, the world state)? Or is world politics rather defi ned in terms of issues that put at stake the existence of the whole world and are beyond the jurisdiction or effective control by nation-state authorities: nuclear war, global epidemics, world trade, etc.? Finally and most promisingly, if also most problematically, does ‘world politics’ refer to a different kind of politics, a politics distinguished from the plurality of forms of politics unfolding within particular entities (be these states, regions, cities, blocs, international organizations, social movements, etc.) by its universality both in the sense of its content, i.e. principles valid all over the world, and its form, i.e. the application of these principles for the entire world? Unlike this fourth sense that explicitly rejects the synonymy between the world and the international, the three fi rst senses of world politics are in principle compatible with the politics described by ‘international relations’: after all, isn’t the ‘world level’ of global organizations occupied precisely by nation-states that comprise their membership, and are not ‘world issues’ dealt by states precisely in the framework of such organizations, which, along with politics at various lower levels, compose ‘world politics’ in the sense of all the politics in the world? Even if we expand the list of political actors well beyond nation-states, which has been the preoccupation of IR theory since the post-Second World War period, such an expansion does not disturb the basic identity between ‘international’ and ‘world’ politics, unless the notion of politics is also redefi ned on the basis of this expansion. Yet, such a redefi nition has proved exceedingly diffi cult for two reasons. First, as twentieth century political philosophy from Schmitt to Foucault has long recognized, modern political thought is constitutively defi ned by the focus on the state as the locus of the political. This state-centrism need not be accompanied by Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 the valorization of the state – if anything, as Jens Bartelson (2001) demonstrated conclusively, the concept of the state is constitutive of modern political discourse precisely as its privileged target of criticism, which seeks to debunk, unmask, disassemble and dissolve the state, thereby necessarily presupposing the very entity whose reality it contests. Whether the state is expected to wither away or is held to have long withered or to never have existed in the fi rst place, it remains the prime, if not the sole, locus of politics. Thus, the only politics we know of is ‘national’ in the sense of unfolding within the state and ‘international’ in the sense of unfolding between states. The scepticism about world politics in many quarters of IR theory from realism to poststructuralism (Morgenthau, 1948: 308–309, 469; Waltz, 1979: 208; Walker, 2009: 2–9) proceeds precisely from this suture of politics to the state: xxiv Introduction

as long as politics has its locus in the state, the only alternative to (inter)national politics is the subsumption of all politics under the world state (Wendt, 2003), which may then be criticized as either unrealistic or unacceptable, but, as long as it continues to assume the state form, paradoxically remains nothing new. The second reason why it is so different to conceive of world politics as different in kind from (inter)national politics is that this task entails a rethinking of the concept of politics on the basis of nothing other than the concept of the world. Indeed, if world politics is different from international politics, then this difference must have something to do with the world. Yet, what is this world whose politics is different from the familiar (inter)national forms of politics that, after all, are practised within it? What does this ‘whose’ even mean: is the attribute ‘world’ in the phrase ‘world politics’ used in the objective or subjective genitive? In other words, are we speaking of a politics that is exercised on the world as its object (similarly to ‘identity politics’, ‘trade policy’ or ‘IR theory’) or of a politics whose subject is in some sense the world itself, in the form of world government, the world state or the world community. In either case, we must defi ne politics on the basis of something that by defi nition exceeds politics, and indeed exceeds all things since it contains them, i.e. the world itself. Thus, in order to conceive of world politics in any manner not synonymous with ‘international relations’, we do not merely have to redefi ne this politics in the manner that avoids the conventional state-centrism but we must redefi ne it on the basis of what appears to be the most indeterminate concept of all. What is the world? While there are evidently numerous possible answers offered by various disciplinary discourses that speak of ‘their own’, i.e. physical, astronomical, mythological, literary, theological worlds, as soon as we pose the question of the concept of the world proper to political science and IR, we immediately relapse into state-centrism, whereby the world is cast as unproblematically identical to the states’ system or the international society. We thus end up in an ambivalent situation. On the one hand, if we understand the world as the totality of the phenomena already captured by (inter)national politics, the meaning of world politics appears self-evident yet entirely banal, since the most radical transformation that could take place in this setting is the progressive transformation of the plurality of sovereign states into the sovereignty of Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 one alone. On the other hand, if we try to approach world politics as heterogeneous to (inter)national politics, we appear to lack the very concept of the world that would be the ground of such a rethinking and are immediately driven beyond the disciplinary confi nes of IR and political science in the search for the new ground of our discourse. The expansion of the domain of IR theory since the late 1980s, which imported into the discipline orientations and concepts from sociology, history, semiotics, aesthetics, literary theory, psychology, life sciences, etc., is at least in part a result of this search for the foundation of the epochal move from international relations to world politics beyond the domain of political and IR theory ‘proper’. It is as if the condition of possibility of world politics qua ‘another politics’ were ‘another world’ or, rather, another concept of the world that would be Introduction xxv

irreducible to the international realm, a world that IR theory by defi nition would not know. As a result, the idea of world politics oscillates between being an unproblem- atic banality roughly synonymous with ‘international relations’ and an arcane and uncanny ‘otherness’ that eludes theoretical conceptualization since the concepts of political and IR theory are grounded in the very state-centric concept of the world that is to be replaced. At its best, this oscillation produces sophisticated and often brilliant refl ections on the limits of the IR discourse, including its avowedly critical orientations. At its worst, it renders the two extremes indistinct, e.g. in the repro- duction of platitudes about globalization in the guise of radical critique and epochal transformation. Yet, at both its best and its worst, the discourse on world politics appears constitutively incapable of grasping its object, which remains a moving target forever errant in the space between the well-known and the unknowable, the unproblematic presupposition and the utopian ideal, the real and the impossible, the same and the other.

Why there is no theory of world politics This ambivalence concerning world politics provides us with a new perspective on the immanent self-criticism of IR theory that has arguably accompanied it since its very emergence. In order to elucidate both the problems and the promise associated with the idea of world politics let us revisit the canonical example of this self-criticism, Martin Wight’s ‘Why is there no International Theory?’ (1960). In this classic article Wight famously distinguished between ‘domestic’ political theory, whose object was the territorially delimited state, as the theory of ‘good life’ and ‘international’ theory, whose object was the relations between these states with no overarching authority above them, as the theory of ‘mere survival’ (1960: 42–43, 48). For Wight, insofar as progress is barely obtainable in international relations, whose patterns are recurrent and repetitive, it is meaningless to even pose the question of ‘good life’ in this context. This is why, while political theory or political philosophy may boast an illustrious tradition going back to the antiquity, theorizing on international relations has been characterized not only by ‘paucity but also by intellectual and moral poverty’ (ibid.: 38). While this assertive statement Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 continues to stimulate vibrant discussion in IR theory to this day (cf. Nicholson, 1981; Jackson, 1990; Weber, 1998), even giving rise to a journal named International Theory that successfully refutes at least the charge of paucity, what is more important for our purposes is Wight’s constitution of the domain of international theory by the subtraction of all positive content of ‘good life’, reserved for political theory proper, which leaves ‘international theory’ reduced to a theory of mere survival. International theory is thus from the outset conceived in the privative mode as ‘political theory minus’:

Political theory and law are maps of experience or systems of action within the realm of normal relationships and calculable results. They are the theory xxvi Introduction

of the good life. International theory is the theory of survival. What for political theory is the extreme case (as revolution or civil war) is for international theory the regular case. The traditional effort of international lawyers to defi ne the right of devastation and pillage in war; the long diplomatic debate in the nineteenth century about the right of intervention in aid of oppressed nationalities; the Anglo-French argument in the nineteen-twenties about which precedes the other, security or disarmament; the controversy over appeasement; the present debate about the nuclear deterrent – all this is the stuff of international theory, and it is constantly bursting the bounds of the language in which we try to handle it. For it all involves the ultimate experience of life and death, national existence and national extinction. It is tempting to answer the question with which this paper begins by saying that there is no international theory except the kind of rumination about human destiny, to which we give the unsatisfactory name of philosophy of history. (Wight, 1960: 48)

Wight’s dualism of good life and survival echoes the Aristotelian opposition between bios and zoe that is also central to Giorgio Agamben’s (1998: 1–11) infl uential theory of bare life as the product and object of sovereign power. Bare life is not simply zoe in the sense of natural or biological life, but is rather a remnant of ‘good life’, a bios reduced to zoe in an ‘ultimate experience’ of exposure to death, in which one’s very survival is at stake. For this reason, bare life functions as the correlate object of sovereign power, famously defi ned by Carl Schmitt (1985a) as the capacity to decide on the exception or ‘the extreme case’. From this perspective, insofar as it takes these ‘extreme cases’ as ‘regular cases’, international theory is a theory of the state of exception in the most general sense of the suspension of the positive order of ‘good life’ that reduces it to a bare life of survival (Agamben, 1999b: 132–135, 153–157). Yet, precisely because this experience of bare life exposed to death in the state of exception is indeed ‘ultimate’, ‘bursting the bounds of our language’, Wight’s concluding identifi cation of international theory with the ‘philosophy of history’ is somewhat enigmatic. After all, this genre of ‘rumination about human destiny’ Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 deals precisely with the teleological progress towards ‘good life’, even if this progress involves periodic traversal of ‘ultimate experiences’ of the reduction of life to survival. While the genre of philosophy of history is an integral part of the domain of political theory qua theory of bios or ‘good life’, international theory as theory of survival arguably has its own distinct philosophical correlate. In the fi nal pages of Homo Sacer (Agamben, 1998: 182, 188, see also 1999b: 152-153), Agamben draws an analogy between bare life and pure Being in ontology:

[In] the syntagm ‘bare life’, ‘bare’ corresponds to the Greek haplos, the term by which fi rst philosophy defi nes pure Being. The isolation of the sphere of pure Being, which constitutes the fundamental activity of Western metaphysics, Introduction xxvii

is not without analogies with the isolation of bare life in the realm of Western politics. What constitutes man as a thinking animal has its exact counterpart in what constitutes him as a political animal. Precisely these two empty and indeterminate concepts safeguard the keys to the historico- political destiny of the West. And it may be that only if we are able to decipher the political meaning of pure Being will we able to master the bare life that expresses our subjection to political power, just as it may be, inversely, that only if we understand the theoretical implications of bare life will we able to solve the enigma of ontology. (Agamben, 1998: 182)

Just as the notion of pure being is obtained by the subtraction of beings from all positive predicates, so the bare life of survival is constituted by the suspension of the order of good life with all its predicates, whereby life is revealed and exposed as such. If the ultimate experience of survival ‘constantly bursts the bounds of our language’, this is probably because this experience is by defi nition boundless, impossible to subsume under any positive term. Yet, if this analogy is accepted, then international theory as a theory of survival, of a bare life caught up in ‘the extreme case’, is no longer merely an incoherent jumble of legal theorizing, historical interpretations, statesmen’s memoirs and notes on the margins of political theory (cf. Wight, 1960: 36–38). Nor is it reducible to ruminations in the philosophy of history, which inevitably subsumes bare life under the good life that it must posit to make history philosophically intelligible in the fi rst place. Instead, it is, or, rather, could potentially be, the ontology of politics as such, of all politics precisely insofar as it is the extreme politics of survival that sustains the regularity of the order of good life in the same way that the sovereign exception constitutes the norm by escaping from it:

[A]ll politics ultimately is international politics, if we by ‘international’ no longer mean what takes place within a preconstituted realm, but rather the kind of practices that are fundamental to the establishment of such realms – that is, as politics as the quest for the fi rst principles of the political in the absence of fi rst principles. Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 (Bartelson, 1998: 322)

Rather than function in the a priori destitute modality of ‘political theory minus’, the theory of survival now appears to encompass the entire domain of political theory as a ‘special case’ of stabilized orders of good life, temporarily isolated from the ‘ultimate experience’ that makes them possible in the fi rst place. Evidently, the historical development of international theory was entirely at odds with this potentiality of the ontological turn. Yet, to the extent that the aspiration for such a conversion could be registered in the disciplinary discourse of IR, it took the form of the idea of world politics as a hypothetical transcendence of the particularistic pluralism of the international in favour of some kind of universalist xxviii Introduction

politics, whose referent would be the world as such, whatever it is. In its very ambiguity, the notion of world politics indicated the possibility of the redemption of international theory from both its paucity and its poverty, making it something like a ‘political theory plus’, a theory of all politics. Yet, while the equation of ‘world politics’ with ‘all politics’ seems intuitively unproblematic and even self-evident, it is not at all as straightforward as might appear at fi rst glance. Does the equation pertain to the defi nition of the world as the totality of all beings, whereby world politics comes to signify ‘all the politics’ that exists in the world? Or does it rather refer to extreme and ultimate experiences of survival, in which every positive order in the world is suspended and what remains is the bare presence of the world itself as a correlate of the bare life abandoned in it? Does world politics have any content that is universal, i.e. common to all politics, irrespective of its site or level, or does it simply function as an empty universal container for all intra-worldly forms of politics that might have nothing in common? How can a theory, whose object was constituted by the subtraction of ‘good life’ from ‘mere survival’, gain access to the universal dimension, if its domain comprises relations between a plurality of particular entities? Does this universal dimension pertain to ‘good life’ at all or is it wholly contained in the ‘ultimate experience’ of survival universalized as valid for all these entities? These questions indicate both the immensity of problems involved in theorizing world politics and the promise involved in such theorization, the promise of nothing less than a different world grounding a different politics and a different politics producing a different world.

Towards an ontology of world politics As we have seen, the possibility of transforming international theory from a privative mode of ‘political theory minus’ into ‘political theory plus’, a theory of world politics qua ‘all politics’ was conditioned by the analogy between what Wight termed a theory of survival and ontology in the Aristotelian sense of a discourse on being qua being. The task of this book is to chart a pathway towards this transformation on the basis of a more general ontological turn, the central aspect of which is the rethinking of the concept of the world as the ground of all politics and thus as a condition of universality inherent in politics as such. The question of what world Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 politics is will thus be addressed by, fi rst, reconsidering the concept of the world as such, and, second, redefi ning politics on the basis of this revised concept. Insofar as our starting point is the concept of the world, the locus of our inquiry by defi nition exceeds the positive domain of IR theory, whose concept of the world remains reducible to the international. Yet, the search for a new concept of the world would gain little by turning to other positive sciences, each of which is equipped with its own and hence particular concept of the world: physical or artistic worlds, worlds of trade and the psyche, etc. Instead, following the parallel between bare life and pure being, we shall posit the question of the world in ontological terms, subtracting it from all positive predicates and inquiring solely into its being. Introduction xxix

While the ontological problematic might at fi rst glance appear far from the concerns of political and IR theory, we shall argue that it is only by reconstituting the ontological ground of the discourse on world politics that we can overcome its constitutive ambivalence. Moreover, we shall demonstrate that the location of an inquiry on an ontological level does not necessarily involve a retreat into obscure and empty generality, since being, the object of ontology, is simultaneously the most universal and the most singular of all notions, accessible to us in the utmost facticity of our existence.

Being is most universal, encountered in every being, and is therefore most common; it has lost every distinction, or never possessed any. At the same time, being is the most singular, whose uniqueness cannot be attained by any being whatever. (Heidegger, 1991: 192, see also Heidegger, 1962: 22–24)

When we abandon the terrain of the positive sciences of (inter)national politics we do not veer far beyond the everyday into the otherworldly, but, on the contrary, disclose this very everydayness in ‘this world here’ as the site of a different politics, transcending the particularistic pluralism of the international. We shall therefore disarm ourselves from the outset before the popular charge of ‘ontologization’, routinely advanced against e.g. post-Heideggerian theories of Agamben or Nancy, Zizek’s Lacanian Hegelianism, Badiou’s philosophy of the event or post-Schmittian conceptions of the political (see Bosteels, 2011b: 42–74, see more generally contributions to Strathausen and Connolly, 2010). While it is easy to understand the criticism of ontologization in the contemporary theoretical context, dominated by various versions of historical nominalism, this criticism is at best misdirected and at worst complicit in the very depoliticization it decries. While the critics of ontologization tend to emphasize the irreducibility of the historical fl ux of political praxis to fundamental ontological theorizing (see Sharpe, 2009: 13–15), it is precisely the post-Heideggerian ontology, which is one of the main inspirations for this study, that, by equating essence with the sheer facticity of existence (Heidegger, 1962: 345, 67–68; Nancy, 2007: 71; 2000: 29; Agamben, Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 1993: 89–101), arguably comes closest to the dimension of praxis. To address politics ontologically is not to withdraw from political praxis into the depths of transcendental reasoning but rather to inquire into this praxis in the most singular and yet most universal aspect of its very existence. Ontology is not a separate, allegedly more fundamental dimension that is extraneous to praxis, including political praxis: its object is nothing but this praxis itself and the beings involved in it, taken up solely in the aspect of their being as such. It is precisely in its interest in the being of beings as what is most singular yet also most universal about them that ontology, and more specifi cally the ontology of politics, connects with the problematic of universalism, central to any discourse xxx Introduction

on world politics. Since the 1990s we may observe a gradual shift in Continental political thought from a preoccupation with difference, understood very differently by different thinkers, towards a new engagement with the allegedly discredited idea of universality, including attempts at rethinking political community as universal. In the work of such philosophers as Maurice Blanchot (1988), Jacques Derrida (1996) and Jean-Luc Nancy (1991, 2000), the concept of community, held suspect in the second half of the twentieth century due to its association with the horrors of Nazism, was theorized in the weakest possible sense as an ‘inoperative’ or ‘unavowable’ community of ‘solitary singularities’, subtracted from all positive determination. And yet, it is precisely this weak or minimal community, whose members share nothing but being in common as such, which is genuinely universal, devoid of any condition of belonging that could ever authorize exclusion. It is this community of ‘whatever singularities’ (Agamben, 1993) or ‘being singular plural’ (Nancy, 2000) that emerges as the site of a ‘coming politics’, whose universality does not consist in a hegemonic subsumption of differences under a privileged identity but rather in the deactivation of every identity in the exposure of beings to their being-in-common. Thus, while hegemonic forms of universalism suppress difference in the name of a dominant identity and various forms of identity politics valorize difference in the name of the plurality of identities it enables, this new form of universalism both radicalizes difference by insisting on the singularity of each being and deactivates its exclusionary potential by insisting on the irreducibly common exposure of these singularities that remains in excess of any particularistic fi gure of community. In Alain Badiou’s terms (2005a: 367–370), such a universal–singular community is a ‘generic’ subset of any situation, which remains indiscernible in its positive terms and disturbs its internal order, but nonetheless functions as the ‘truth’ of the situation that restores to it its ontological character of inconsistent multiplicity in excess of any order. The same logic characterizes Jacques Rancière’s understanding of the political subject (1999) as the ‘part of those who have no part’ in the positive order, are excluded from its internal distribution of identities and thus lack any positive criterion of differentiation, and precisely for this reason appropriate for themselves the name of the ‘people’ as a whole. Despite numerous differences and passionate polemics between these authors, they all share commitment to the rethinking of universality in ontological terms as always already characterizing the Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 being of beings. Thus, the universal is not something to be constructed through the political acts of negation, subsumption or effacement of particularity; on the contrary, politics must itself be rethought on the basis of this ontological universality that it either affi rms or negates. This ontological–universalist turn serves as the point of departure for our theory of world politics in this volume. Insofar as our starting point is the re-engagement with the concept of the world as the ontological ground of politics, the two primary sources of inspiration for this project are Martin Heidegger, who arguably made the greatest contribution among modern philosophers to thinking the notion of the world other than as the totality of the cosmos, and Alain Badiou, whose combination of set-theoretical ontology and objective phenomenology of worlds both develops Introduction xxxi

and transforms Heidegger’s project. Despite evident divergences between the two thinkers in almost every respect, both Heidegger and Badiou distinguish between two senses of the ‘world’: the world as a positively ordered limited totality and the world as the clearing of being, the void in which such positive and particular worlds come to appearance. Ironically, while one could plausibly argue that Heidegger and Badiou agree on almost nothing, what they actually do agree about is the Nothing itself, the ontological status of the void as the condition of possibility of positive worlds. It is precisely the relation between the void that we shall term World and the plurality of these worlds that will in our argument defi ne world politics as an affi rmation of the World within any given world. Besides Heidegger and Badiou, in this book we shall also critically engage with numerous other authors who have conceived of politics from an ontological perspective: Schmitt and Rancière, whose concepts of politics we shall juxtapose as special cases of our ontological defi nition, Derrida and Nancy, whose debate on fraternity and community will be central to our deduction of the content of what we shall term the axioms of world politics, Agamben, Benjamin and Esposito, whose approaches to sovereign power and the state of exception we shall rely on in tracing the constitution of the positive orders of worlds. Yet, the task of this book does not consist in the exegesis of these or other authors’ concepts of the world, politics or universality. While we have ventured such an exegesis in a number of earlier studies (Prozorov, 2007b, 2009b, 2009c, 2010), in this book we rather seek to mobilize the insights from a highly diverse group of philosophers to outline a systematic theory of world politics, which in our argument can only be written as an ontology of politics as such, which in turn directs us towards the ontological question of the world. Rather than develop a ‘Heideggerian’ or ‘Badiouan’ approach to world politics as an already constituted and intelligible domain, we rely on these and other authors in an attempt to reconstitute and make intelligible this domain as such.

From the void to the universal This book is organized around two sets of questions. First, what is the ‘world’ as a referent of politics? What concept of the world could ground a discourse on Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 world politics that would go beyond the familiar forms of hegemonic universalism and its equally familiar unmasking by counter-hegemonic particularism? Is it the whole world, rhetorically invoked in today’s discussion of globalization, or this world here of my immediate concerns and occupations, or, perhaps, another world, the hypothetical world to come? Second, what is politics insofar as its site is the world as such? What is it about politics that makes it not merely one among many activities in the world but a practice that involves the world as such? What is the difference between world politics and the forms of politics within the world which we are more familiar with? These sets of questions determine the structure of the book. Part I ‘The World and worlds’ is devoted to the elaboration of the concept of the world and the xxxii Introduction

redefi nition of politics on its basis. In Chapter 1 we take our point of departure from the ambivalent status of world politics in international relations theory and address three logically possible answers to the question of what the world is: the world as everything (universal totality), something (limited totality) and nothing (the void). Drawing on Badiou’s set-theoretical ontology, we shall demonstrate the logical inconsistency of the fi rst approach, which remains at work in both affi rmative and critical approaches to world politics. The second approach, which affi rms the existence of an infi nite number of infi nite worlds, overcomes this contradiction at the price of rendering universality as such unthinkable: if there are only particular worlds regulated by immanent ordering principles, there is no passage from this particularistic pluralism towards any meaningful universality. It is thus only the third approach to the world as the void or clearing, in which particular worlds come to appearance and from which they derive their being, that permits us to conceive of a logically consistent universality of the world. Drawing on Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology and Badiou’s objective phenomenology of worlds, we address the relation between the World as void and the infi nity of positive worlds, arguing that while the World is the ontological condition of a possibility of worlds, it has no relation to their positive order, which remains entirely contingent and unfounded. It is this contingency of all positive world orders that makes politics possible. In Chapter 2 we provide a redefi nition of politics from the perspective of the World as void. Rethinking politics on the basis of the universality of the World as irreducible to particular intra-worldly orders permits us to overcome from within the condition of nihilism, which we approach as the assertion of the inconsequentiality of the void of the World for positive worlds. To overcome nihilism is to affi rm the possibility of drawing political prescriptions from the void of the World that would be valid in any world whatsoever. We shall then defi ne politics as the practice of the affi rmation of universal axioms, derived from the World, universally for the world in question. Having addressed in detail each of the components of this defi nition, we proceed to argue for its general applicability by demonstrating the way two widely known and outright incommensurable defi nitions of politics in the work of Carl Schmitt and Jacques Rancière may be subsumed under our defi nition, which also avoids the risks of depoliticization that remain at work in both authors. Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 Part II, ‘What is world politics?’ is devoted to the reinterpretation of world politics on the basis of our rethinking of the concepts of the world and politics. Chapter 3 addresses the question of what universal content politics could possibly derive from the void of the World. Contrary to the philosophical orientation that we shall term ‘metapolitical’, the political signifi cance of the World is not exhausted by the illumination of contingency of positive worlds but rather consists in the access to universal principles that guide their transformation. Returning to Heidegger’s analysis of world disclosure, we shall argue that the effect of the disclosure of the World in any given world is the appearance of all its beings in the mode subtracted from the world’s positive order. It is this mode of appearance of the beings of the world solely in their being that we shall term ‘being-in-the-World’ and posit as Introduction xxxiii

the source of the universal axioms affi rmed in political practice. While no such axioms may by defi nition be prescribed by the void as such, they may be derived from being-in-the-World as the attunement in which the World as void is disclosed within our worlds in the fi rst place. We shall argue that there are only three universal axioms that serve as attributes of being-in-the-World: community, equality and freedom, understood in the absolute and indeterminate sense as attributes of the being of beings. In the remainder of the chapter we address the ostensibly ahistorical character of these axioms, the relation between their ontological universality and their status in the Western political tradition and, fi nally, the question of the logically necessary extension of these axioms to all the beings of every possible world. In Chapter 4 we outline a typology of possible forms of politics on the basis of what axioms of the World are affi rmed in them and how the non-affi rmed axioms are negated. Drawing on Badiou’s distinction between faithful, reactive and obscure forms of subjectivity, we shall argue that the alternative to the faithful affi rmation of the axioms is necessarily their negation, which takes the form of either the reactive denial of their effectivity in the world or the obscure destruction of their actual effects. We thus end up with seven political invariants, constituted by the affi rmed axiom(s), six of which are further subdivided on the basis of the mode of the negation of the other axiom(s). Insofar as they involve the negation of at least one universal axiom, these six forms of politics necessarily compromise their universalist orientation, ending up subsumed under the particular order of the world they unfold in. Moreover, we shall demonstrate that the three axioms are interdependent, the negation of one of them necessarily weakening the degree of the affi rmation of the others. Thus, any form of politics that involves negation is converted into a particularistic project of constructing and governing a positive world, which it protects against its own negativity by the institution of the locus of sovereign power. Only the seventh invariant, which we shall term ‘world politics’, affi rms all three axioms simultaneously and is therefore the mode of politics most adequate to its concept as an affi rmative practice. We shall therefore posit world politics not as a hypothetical alternative to politics as we know it, be it (inter)- national, local or regional, but as the only mode of politics that is faithful to the promise of universality inherent in the very idea of politics. Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 PART I The World and worlds Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 1 THREE CONCEPTS OF THE WORLD

The constitutive ambivalence of world politics The contemporary discourse on world politics in IR theory oscillates between the two extremes of unproblematic presupposition and sceptical denial. On the one hand, the studies of global governance, norms, regimes and institutions take as a point of departure the existence of a worldwide dimension of politics, which is then specifi ed in various ways. According to this logic, which is at work in e.g. idealist, liberal and constructivist theories, the referent domain of world politics exceeds the state-centric realm of ‘international relations’ and permits to incorporate into the discipline such formerly ignored problematics as gender, culture or identity as well as such formerly ignored actors as social movements, indigenous peoples and other minorities. In this manner, politics moves from the narrow confi nes of the international society of states to the widest possible, presumably universal domain of the world as a whole (see Lipschutz, 1992; Linklater, 1998; Albert, 1999; Wendt, 2003). On the other hand, realist approaches as well as critical orientations, from neo-Marxism to post-structuralism, maintain their scepticism about the

Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 very possibility of attaining such a universal dimension of politics or remain wary of the hegemonic aspirations at work in any attempt to practice politics on a ‘world’ level (Calhoun, 2002; Rasch, 2003; Odysseos and Petito, 2007; Mouffe, 2009; Dillon, 1995; Edkins, 2000; Edkins and Pin-Fat, 2005; Vaughan-Williams, 2009). While the debate between these two orientations has taken a myriad of forms throughout the history of the discipline (see Walker, 1993; Thies, 2002), what interests us is the status of the very idea of world politics, which oscillates between a presupposition that is so self-evident as not to merit a conceptual explication and a problematic phantasm, only accessible to thought in the form of a hegemonic pretension (cf. Walker, 2009: 20–28). We either do not need to know what world politics means, since it is ‘common knowledge’, or we cannot know it, since such knowledge is inaccessible, inconsistent or plain false. In this chapter we shall argue 4 The World and worlds

that this undecidable oscillation is due to the inconsistent concept of the world at work in the discourse on world politics in IR. We shall analyse three possibilities of conceptualizing the world and present the concept of the world as the void, which alone provides an ontological ground for overcoming the ambivalence of world politics in political and IR theory. This constitutive ambivalence of world politics may be illustrated with the help of two infl uential monographs on the subject, Jens Bartelson’s Visions of World Community (2009) and R.B.J. Walker’s After the Globe, Before the World (2009). Both of these works offer highly sophisticated meta-theoretical interventions into the discourse on world politics that nonetheless persist in the oscillation between presupposing and denying its very existence. For Bartelson, the problematic status of the concept of the world community in the disciplinary discourse has to do with the differential logic of identity that has been constitutive of the discipline (Bartelson, 2009: 9–10). According to this logic, every identity is constituted by distinction from an ‘other’. Since a world community would lack such an other by defi nition, it is henceforth held to be impossible other than as a hegemonic imposture that claims for itself the universality it can never attain.

[As] long as we remain committed to this particularistic ontology, we will have a hard time making theoretical sense of any kind of human community over and above the plurality of particular communities presently embodied in the states system. As long as we regard the logic of identity as a predominant source of human belonging and identifi cation, the formation of a community of all mankind will look highly unlikely because there are no human Others left that could provide it with a sense of sameness. (ibid.: 42–43)

In his historical analysis of the visions of world community, from Dante to Kant, Bartelson demonstrates that this logic of identity is a relatively recent invention and can therefore be overcome by a return to an earlier understanding of world community as a wider cosmological context, in which a plurality of human communities are always already embedded.

Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 [It] is not meaningful to distinguish categorically between communities of different scope, since all human communities derive from the same under- lying and species-wide capacities. Human beings as well as the communities to which they happen to belong, are essentially embedded within a wider community of all mankind, within which the totality of human relations unfolds across time and space. (ibid.: 11)

This emphasis on embeddedness directs Bartelson’s attention to the cosmological visions, within which the ideas of world politics and world community have been articulated since the Middle Ages. These visions escape the differential logic of Three concepts of the world 5

identity by ‘positing a larger social whole within which all human communities are embedded as well as a vantage point over and above the plurality of individual communities, from which this larger social whole can be understood’ (ibid.: 20). Simply put, in order to break out of the pluralistic and particularistic logic of identity, it is suffi cient to posit the world ‘as a universal and boundless phenomenon’ (ibid.: 43), within which all other communities as well as their individual members coexist. As a result of this move, the pluralistic logic of identity is brought back to its proper place within the overarching universality of the world community. Bartelson brilliantly demonstrates the way this logic of identity emerged as a result of a series of conceptual appropriations that he calls ‘nationalizations’, performed on the Medieval understanding of the world community as always already there, a ‘larger whole’ immanent to human existence as such (ibid.: 86–113, 167–170). While this appropriation has been remarkably successful both in theory and practice, it is possible to ‘restore the default settings of political thought’ (ibid.: 175) and reaffi rm the world community no longer as an obscure telos of international politics, but as its very condition of possibility, something that is already here in the form of the presupposition, as long as human beings inhabit the same planet and share a common destiny. Yet, this reaffi rmation ‘depends on its coherence and persuasiveness on the existence of a cosmological vantage point situated over and above the plurality of human communities and the multitude of individual human beings’ (ibid.: 181). In order to inspire resistance to all ‘forms of authority that keep mankind divided’ (ibid.: 181), the idea of the world community must be grounded in a cosmological concept of the world. Moreover, according to Bartelson, the relationship of grounding here is mutual:

[The] relationship between cosmological beliefs and conceptions of human community is contextual in character, insofar as knowledge of the former helps us make sense of the latter and vice versa. One of the challenges posed by the idea of world community is that of constructing a cosmology common to all mankind, so that all human beings will eventually come to inhabit the same conceptual world. (ibid.: 12)

Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 In other words, our cosmologies of the world contextualize our conceptions of community and the other way round. Given the sheer diversity of cosmological visions of the worlds that Bartelson considers in his study, this argument cannot but appear paradoxical. If it is only in the context of a particular cosmology of the world that the concept of the world community can arise in the fi rst place, it must logically be particular as well. We are thus back to the logic of identity, which, for all its historical contingency, ends up working even in the historical contexts where it was presumably absent. Having linked the concept of world community to the cosmological vision of the world, Bartelson must admit the historical plurality of ‘cosmological vantage points’ and is thus left with a myriad of particular fi gures of the ‘greater whole’, some of which admit of a world community more 6 The World and worlds

readily than others. While Bartelson does not identify with any particular historical cosmology and defers the question of the world community into the future when the ‘challenge of constructing a cosmology common to all mankind’ is successfully overcome, this deferral evidently does not resolve the question of what, if anything, could render this future cosmology more genuinely universal than its historical antecedents that, after all, also constructed worlds ‘common to all mankind’, which did not prevent the articulation of particularistic communities within them. According to R.B.J. Walker’s After the Globe, Before the World, this is merely one of the aporias that await any discourse on world politics and make any invocation of a universal politics of the world highly dubious. Walker addresses the ways in which numerous attempts to move from international relations to world politics remain caught up in what they try to transcend, i.e. the ontopolitical tradition of modernity, which is itself already an attempt at resolving the antinomies, whose resolution we now associate with the idea of world politics (e.g. universalism/ particularism, nature/culture, individual/community, etc.) (Walker, 2009: 54–94). The ‘seduction’ and ‘temptation’ of world politics belong to the very tradition of the ‘international’ as its inherent transgression, something simultaneously desired and held impossible, or perhaps desired precisely and only as impossible (ibid.: 24, 83). For Walker, the question of world politics is always more diffi cult than it seems and the task of critical discourse is, in full accordance with Kant’s critical project, to guard its object against the illegitimate application of the powers of reason to it. Thus, any inquiry directed by Walker’s approach is only bound to take us further away from the knowledge of what world politics is, while enhancing our knowl- edge of why this knowledge is impossible. Wherever we are, we are always ‘before’ the world, facing it as distant and inappropriable. Universalist claims are always ‘[enabled] within a particular array of boundaries, borders and limits’ and a ‘politics of the world’ that promises to do away with those remains ‘necessarily beyond reach’ (ibid.: 257–258). Thus, ‘anyone seeking to reimagine the possibilities of political life under contemporary conditions would be wise to resist ambitions expressed as a move from a politics of the international to a politics of the world, and to pay far greater attention to what goes on at the boundaries, borders and limits of a politics orchestrated within the international’ (ibid.: 2–3, see also 184–257). While there are numerous possibilities for political experimentation at these liminal sites, Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 we would do well to remember that this experimentation always takes place on this side of the borderline. Thus, while Bartelson seeks to ‘deproblematize’ the ques- tion of world community, trying to rid it of logical paradoxes by enfolding the problematic of community into an explicitly cosmological context and thus making the world the a priori site of any community whatsoever, Walker hypertrophies this question, making it practically impossible to exit the condition of the inter- national at all. World politics thereby appears to be endlessly oscillating between being presupposed as self-evident and unmasked as impossible. It is easy to see that this perpetual debate cannot be restricted to the domain of ‘IR theory proper’, since it pertains to the conditions of possibility of the very disciplinary discourse of IR that necessarily remain inaccessible to this discourse Three concepts of the world 7

(Foucault, 1989: 146–147). Nor may this debate be resolved within the domain of political science understood as the study of ‘domestic politics’, delimited from the international realm. As Bartelson (1995) has demonstrated, the disciplinary dis- courses of political science and international relations are constituted by the mutual exclusion of each other’s objects, whereby the positive delineation of political science is made possible by the delimitation of politics from the fi eld of the inter- national and its confi nement inside the state, while the constitution of the discipline of international relations is enabled by bracketing off the conditions of possibility of the very objects, whose relations this discipline investigates. Thus, the two domains of knowledge are ‘united in a symmetrical relationship to each other: each dis- course takes for granted exactly that which the other takes to be problematic’, the internal and external aspects of state sovereignty (Bartelson, 1995: 47). IR theory accords ontological priority to the state, which implies the givenness of internal sovereignty as the defi ning property of the antecedently present entity. Conversely, political science has external sovereignty as its unproblematic foundation, whereby the origins of the state are explained away with reference to exogenous dynamics of the ‘international’, the state emerging in the course of consolidation of power through perpetual warfare. As long as the domains of political and IR theory remain constituted by what remains outside them, they can at best illuminate their own limits by pointing to each other’s blind spots. The overcoming of these limits requires a move to the level that precedes the very delimitation between inside and outside, external and internal, domestic and international, political science and IR. The question of world politics must be posed anew, no longer as the question of the possibility of the ‘domestication of the international’ in the form of the world state or the ‘internationalization of the domestic’ in the form of globalization, but rather as the question of a politics that precedes and exceeds this very distinction and has its locus and the source of its contents in the world as such. This question must therefore be relocated from the positive fi elds of knowledge, constituted by the prior division of the world into the domestic and the international, towards the ontological terrain, in which the being of the world as a domain of a possible politics may fi rst be questioned. The move beyond the positive sciences of (inter)national politics entails that world politics may no longer be conceived in terms of the expansion of an already Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 constituted domain of politics to a new, higher level or in terms of the articulation of new political content in the already constituted domain of the world. Both politics and the world must be problematized and redefi ned if the question of world politics is not to relapse into the familiar setting of (inter)national politics. The question of world politics is not merely a question of a possible passage ‘beyond’ the international that necessarily presupposes it as a point of departure but abandons the international even as a presupposition, its only legitimate starting point being the world itself. Thus, the ontological inquiry into world politics must proceed in three steps. First, we must elaborate the ontological concept of the world that may be a logically consistent ground of any possible politics. Second, we must defi ne the notion of politics in general on the basis of this concept of the world as 8 The World and worlds

opposed to any distinctions drawn within this world. Only then, third, may we pose the question of world politics as a mode of politics that fully corresponds to its own concept. In the remainder of this chapter we shall take the fi rst step by focusing on three possible concepts of the world.

The world as everything Despite their diverging conclusions about the possibility of world politics and the world community, Bartelson and Walker appear to converge in the basic assumption about the sense of the ‘world’ in world politics. Bartelson’s world, which is already ‘behind’ us as an all-encompassing whole, within which we are embedded, and Walker’s world, which stands ‘before’ us as an unattainable universality, are indeed one and the same world, understood in the sense of the Whole, a cosmos, universe or totality, in short, everything. It is precisely this understanding of the world as the whole that accompanies the discourse on world politics from the very emer- gence of the IR discipline (see e.g. Morgenthau, 1948: Chapters 29, 30; Carr, 1981; Schmitt, 1976; Burton, 1972; Boulding, 1985). Whether or not one approaches world politics as already present or radically impossible, desirable or threatening, the world remains thought as the whole, the sum of all there is. Yet, what could possibly be wrong with this understanding of the world as the universal totality, which, after all, seems perfectly in accordance with common sense? Let us posit the world as the whole, the sum of all beings. Such a totality must by defi nition count itself among its members, otherwise it would not be the sum of all beings, since it would remain outside itself. The world as the whole is thus endowed with a property of self-belonging. It should then be possible to divide it into two parts: the parts of the world that belong to themselves, such as the world itself, and the parts that do not, such as e.g. a set of fi ve apples, which is not itself an apple. Let us then assemble the latter parts into a group of all parts that do not belong to themselves – a perfectly legitimate and even banal grouping, given that most multiplicities that we can think of are precisely not self-belonging. Yet, despite the banality of the predicate, this grouping turns out to be problematic as soon as we pose the question of whether it belongs to itself. If it does, it must count itself among its elements, which are defi ned by the property of not belonging to them- Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 selves. Yet, if it does not belong to itself, it must also count itself among its elements, which, after all, compose all the parts that do not belong to themselves. Whatever answer we choose, we end up with inconsistency, hence we must revise our original assumption and affi rm that the world as the sum of all beings does not exist. It is easy to recognize in this example a reformulation of Russell’s paradox, which has been foundational for the formulation of axiomatic set theory in the early twentieth century. Yet, how is set-theoretical logic relevant to the grand debates on world politics? After all, as twentieth century Continental thought from Heidegger to Foucault demonstrated, the universalist claims of logic and mathematics are highly problematic, both of these discourses being particular ‘regimes of truth’ among others. Yet, while the mode of thought inaugurated by set-theoretical logic Three concepts of the world 9

might be particular, what is at stake in adjudicating its applicability to world politics is precisely what this particularity actually consists of. In Alain Badiou’s famous argument, set theory is in fact nothing other than ontology pure and simple, since it deals with being qua being and not any particular classes of beings, let alone their properties: being as such is nothing but pure multiplicity that can be adequately grasped by set-theoretical axioms precisely insofar as they subtract being from the positive properties of beings (Badiou, 2005a: 4–16). Indeed, as long as we conceive of ontology in the rigorous Aristotelian sense as the study of being qua being rather than, in the currently widespread manner, as a fundamental worldview, social theory or even ideology (cf. Bosteels, 2010: 242), set theory offers the best paradigm of a theory of being as such as opposed to theories of particular beings or realms thereof. Sets are not a particular class of beings alongside others, e.g. human beings or social kinds, but rather the mode of presentation of all beings solely in their being (Badiou, 2005a: 23–30). For this reason, the axioms of set theory necessarily pertain to everything that is, including the entities of the international domain and the world as the result of their hypothetical totalization. To exclude these entities (be they states or persons, organizations or movements, etc.) from the fi eld of application of set-theoretical axioms is simply to deprive them of being and reduce them to the status of simulacra, phenomenal apparitions without any ontological status. Yet, even if we were, if only for the sake of the argument, to assign the international domain to the status of a simu- lacrum, this would not help in removing the concept of the world from the zone of application of set-theoretical axioms. If the world is the whole, it must include not only the simulacra that are not but also all that there is, i.e. all entities to which set theory does apply. In short, as soon as we pose the problem of the world in ontologi- cal terms, the set-theoretical argument on the inexistence of the whole appears not merely applicable to the discourse on world politics but of direct and paramount relevance to it. We may therefore conclude that concept of the world, understood in terms of cosmos, universe or totality, is ontologically inconsistent: the Whole has no being (Badiou, 2005a: 40–42; 2009b: 109–111). We must emphasize that this claim does not merely concern the antiquated pre-Galilean conceptions of the closed totality of the cosmic order, whose crisis was addressed by Alexandre Koyre (1957) in his Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 seminal work From the Closed World to the Infi nite Universe. Our argument works as much for the ‘closed world’ as for the ‘infi nite universe’. The inexistence of the whole is an ontological principle that is irreducible to any particular cosmology and rather throws into disarray the entire cosmological enterprise. While Bartelson (2009: 10–13) equates cosmological accounts of world community with what he terms ‘social ontology’, in our argument ontology rather serves as a stumbling block for any cosmology whatsoever. The consequence of Russell’s paradox is the impossibility of totalizing being as such, not the being of any particular world, including our physical universe: ‘The question of the limits of the visible universe is but a secondary aspect of the inexistence of the Whole’ (Badiou, 2009b: 111). Thus, any cosmology is ontologically inconsistent, lacking any foundation in being. 10 The World and worlds

Every multiple being enters into the composition of other multiples without this plural (the others) ever being able to fold back upon a singular (the Other). For if all multiples were elements of one Other, that would be the Whole. But since the concept of Universe inconsists, as vast as the multiple in which a singular multiple is inscribed may be, there exist others, not enveloped by the fi rst, in which this multiple is also inscribed. In the end, there is no possible uniformity among the derivations of the thinkability of multiples, nor a place of the Other in which they could all be situated. The identifi cations and relations of multiples are always local. (ibid.: 112)

As Jean-Luc Nancy has argued in his Sense of the World (1997), the only plausible cosmology can therefore only be strictly acosmic: ‘[T]here is no longer any world: no longer a mundus, a cosmos, a composed and complete order, from within which one might fi nd a place, a dwelling and the elements of an orientation’ (ibid.: 4). And yet, this acosmism is not a matter of the defi ciency of the contemporary or any other world but rather pertains to its very ‘worldhood’:

That there is not everything (or not the whole) does not defi ne a lack or an ablation, since there was not any whole before the not-the-whole. It means rather that all that is (since there is really all there is) does not totalize itself, even though it is all there is. (Nancy cited in Morin, 2012: 45)

For Nancy, the exhaustion of the myths of cosmos and mundus as universal totalities calls for the understanding of the world that does not presuppose the representation of its totality by the subject of cosmological reason:

We do not yet have a cosmology adequate to this noncosmos, which, moreover, is also not a chaos, for a chaos succeeds on or precedes a cosmos, while our acosmos is neither preceded nor followed by anything: on its own, it traces – all the way to the confi nes – the contour of the unlimited, the contour of the absolute limit that nothing else delimits. But it is a cosmology of this sort that Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 we need, an acosmic cosmology that would no longer be caught by the look of the kosmotheoros, of that panoptic subject of the knowledge of the world, whose fi gure shed, in Kant’s work, for one last time, its last brief rays. (Nancy, 1997: 48; see also 2007: 47)

Moreover, contrary to the contemporary cosmologies of the ‘infi nite universe’ we must not confuse infi nity with universality. In fact, the key philosophical accomplish- ment of set theory is precisely its ‘desublimation’ of the question of infi nity, which is approached as a property of a ‘local’ set and not of beings ‘as a whole’ (Badiou, 2008a: 100, 106–112). According to Badiou (2005a: 142–143), classical metaphysics combined the Greek understanding of the fi nitude of being with the monotheistic Three concepts of the world 11

affi rmation of divine infi nity. The infi nite thus pertained not to being-qua-being but to that being that was beyond being (God). In contrast, set theory does not merely argue for the infi nity of being or ‘nature’, which could easily be recomposed into the totalized fi gure of the infi nite universe, but also ‘[proposes] the vertigo of an infi nity of infi nities distinguishable within their common opposition to the fi nite’ (Badiou, 2005a: 146). Set theory affi rms an infi nite proliferation of different infi nite quantities, making it possible to distinguish between ‘larger’ and ‘smaller’ infi nities.

Three features – the infi nite’s indifferentiation, its post-Cantorian treatment as a simple number and the pluralization of its concept (there are an infi nity of different infi nities) have all combined to render the infi nite banal, to terminate the pregnancy of fi nitude and to make possible the assumption that every situation (ourselves included) is infi nite. (Badiou, 2008a: 100, emphasis in original)1

Thus, the insistence on the infi nity of the world has nothing to do with the con- ception of the world as the whole. Moreover, it is precisely because the world is infi nite that it cannot be totalized into any fi gure of the whole without violating Georg Cantor’s theorem, foundational for set theory (see Badiou, 2005a: 142–160, 265–280). For any set whatsoever, it is possible to construct a set, whose elements are all the subsets of the original set, a so-called ‘power set’. We may easily intuit that this set would be quantitatively greater than the original set: e.g. the number of possible combinations of any three letters a, b and c is eight (a, b, c, ab, bc, ac, abc and fi nally the void set Ø, which is included as a ‘universal part’ of any set and which we shall discuss in detail below). Cantor’s theorem demonstrates that for infi nite sets the size (or, in technical terms, cardinality) of this power set is also greater than that of the original set, and, moreover, it is inaccessibly greater. It is impossible to measure the excess of the set of parts over the original set, which remains open to choice – it is possible to posit any infi nite cardinal greater than that of the original set as the ‘size’ of its power set (ibid.: 277–280).

[We] know, since Cantor, that infi nities are multiple, that is to say, are of different cardinalities – more or less ‘large’ like the discrete and continuous Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 infi nities – and, above all, that these infi nities constitute a multiplicity it is impossible to foreclose, since a set of all sets cannot be supposed without con- tradiction. It is possible to demonstrate that, whatever infi nity is considered, an infi nity of superior cardinality necessarily exists. One need only construct (something that is always possible) the set of the parts of this infi nity. From this perspective, it becomes impossible to think a last infi nity that no other could exceed. (Meillassoux, 2011: 229)

The consequences of this theorem for any cosmological conception of the world are staggering. As soon as we posit the existence of the world as the whole, it is 12 The World and worlds

possible to construct a power set of this world, which will be immeasurably greater than it, leaving an excess that cannot be incorporated into it. The same procedure can then be applied to this power set and so on to infi nity. There is thus no such thing as ‘the absolutely infi nite Infi nity, the infi nity of all intrinsically thinkable infi nities’ (Badiou, 2005a: 277, cf. 283–284). The world as the whole is never all there is: there always remains an excess that cannot be subsumed under this totality, which is thus forever resigned to being limited, partial and particular, irrespective of how it is defi ned. The challenge that any possible universalism must necessarily face and come to terms with is quite simply the inexistence of the universe (cf. Brassier and Toscano, 2003: 279). This challenge is also valid and highly pertinent for the contemporary rethinking of the concept of the world in terms of the infi nite fl ux of becoming, complex autopoiesis, self-differentiation, etc. A good example of the persistence of the theme of the whole in this discourse is provided by William Connolly’s brilliant World of Becoming (2011), which brings together the philosophies of Nietzsche, Whitehead, Bergson and Deleuze, as well as recent trends in complexity theory and neuroscience, to argue for an ‘immanent realist’ vision of the world, lacking in divine transcendence yet irreducible to mechanical materialism. While Connolly’s conception of the world of becoming resonates with a number of themes that we shall address in this book, what makes it problematic from the outset is the construction of this world as the whole, an infi nitely complex and ever-changing whole but a totality nonetheless:

[Do] you know what the world is to me? A colossus of diverse energies, without beginning or end, with each fl owing over, through and around others, generating new currents and eddies. A play of waves, forces, and perceptions on different scales of complexity, endurance and time, with some swelling as others subside, with perhaps long cycles of repetition but none that simply repeats those preceding. And those bursts of laughter, bouts of sensual heat, workers’ movements, consumption habits, hurricanes, geological formations, climate patterns, contending gods, electrical fi elds, spiritual upheavals, civilizational times, species change and planetary rotations – they, too, participate in this veritable monster of energies, making a difference Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 before melting down, to be drawn again into new currents, and again. And the monster itself? It never completes itself, always rolling out and rolling in, with no outside or end-times, like a Möbius strip or Möbius current, never simply repeating, eternally evolving, and dissipating. A monster that feeds on its own excretions, that knows no joy, existential resentment, weariness, or horror, even as it houses all these, and more. (Connolly, 2011: 176–177)

For all its extreme diversity and pluralism, invoked throughout Connolly’s text (2011: 29–32, 74–75, 83–84, 135–136), his world is manifestly one, a ‘colossus’ or a ‘monster’, which ‘houses’ these diverse beings without being reducible to or Three concepts of the world 13

‘knowing’ any of them. Yet, if we understand this monstrous world as the whole, what does it mean for it to ‘never complete itself’? If the world is forever incom- plete, then it could not be the whole and the inconsistency could be avoided simply by perpetually deferring its completion. Nonetheless, incompleteness here refers only to the lack of teleological fulfi llment and the lack of telos as such (see ibid.: 17–21): the world as becoming never attains a fi nal fi gure. Yet, this infi nite fl ux does not entail the abandonment of the idea of the whole: after all, if the world has no ‘outside’, then it must ‘house’ not only the diverse beings listed by Connolly but all beings, since otherwise these ‘non-housed’ beings would form its outside. The colossus of becoming is precisely the Badiouan ‘Other’ into which all beings are folded. Yet, as we have argued, this Other is inconsistent, insofar as it is always possible to recombine its elements into a set of all its subsets that would be infi nitely greater than the original set. In other words, there is always a colossus even more colossal, a monster infi nitely more monstrous than the one posited by Connolly. The world of becoming thus ends up incomplete not only in the temporal or teleological sense, but also in the sense of its particularity, due to the ever-present excess that cannot be housed by this ‘monster’. Even the world of infi nite fl ux and becoming, which rolls in and out of itself, is not all there is. Thus, the problem with cosmological accounts of world politics is the very notion of the world as cosmos. The reason why theories of world politics inevitably reach an impasse in their quest for the world community, society or state is that they persist in approaching world politics in terms of aggregation, agglomeration or totalization: the world must be the entire ensemble of beings or world politics means nothing or, more exactly, becomes a mere synonym for international rela- tions. In short, political universalism is envisioned in terms of the formation of a universal set, whose best example in contemporary IR theory is Alexander Wendt’s world state, envisioned as a global political totality, founded on the Weberian monopoly of legitimate violence and the Hegelian universal recognition (Wendt, 2003: 504–513). While Wendt posits the emergence of this totality as teleologically inevitable, set-theoretical ontology renders its very fi gure inconsistent: whatever set we posit as the universal, there will always be a power set that will exceed it, i.e. would not belong to this world state, thus making the latter always less than the whole. The world state must from the outset renounce its universality and be forced Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 into coexistence with the excess of its own power set that, ironically, also receives the name of the ‘state’ (of the situation) in Badiou’s ontology: as soon as there is a world state, there are in fact two, the ‘world state’ as the whole and another state that is (infi nitely) greater than it. The thesis on the inexistence of the whole permits us to reconstruct the disciplinary history of IR, conventionally presented as a perennial debate between realism and idealism. Notwithstanding their internal theoretical and methodo- logical diversity, these two paradigms may be grasped as two distinct solutions to the problem of the inconsistency of the totalizing concept of the world. On the one hand, insofar as the world as the whole is never all there is, we must approach every empirical claim to world politics or a world community as a hegemonic 14 The World and worlds

gesture of universalization that can never attain the universality that it attests to but is always haunted by the excess that cannot be subsumed under the whole and must be eradicated in acts of symbolic or physical violence. In other words, behind every invocation of world politics we fi nd the reality of hegemony, domi- nation and subjugation. This suspicion of universalism and the designs for world unity are constitutive of various forms of political realism, from Carl Schmitt’s (1976) assault on liberal depoliticization to E.H. Carr’s (1981) critique of utopianism, and continue to animate the contemporary sceptical discourse on world politics in critical or post-structuralist orientations. In this manner, the inexistence of the world as the whole is held to demonstrate the impossibility of world politics as such, leaving us with a critical task of exposing the falsity of all claims to universality and the consequent affi rmation of the pluralistic space of the international as the only real domain of political action. On the other hand, it is possible to respond to the inconsistency of the world as the whole by renouncing every empirical claim to world politics in order to secure the preservation of its ideal, which then becomes a presupposition whose ontological status is indeterminate. This strategy is unsurprisingly pursued by various strands of idealist approaches. If the world as the whole lacks being, it can only be maintained in discourse by being idealized as beyond or otherwise than being. Thus, the impossibility of the totalization of being leads to the relocation of the totality of the world beyond being, where everything can exist, but only as unreal. Thus, it becomes possible to posit the world community as that in which all particular communities are embedded, as Bartelson does, yet the actual manifestation of that in which we are all embedded must remain foreclosed, so as not to reveal its ‘non-whole’ status: as soon as the world community is no longer the background in which we are embedded, but comes to the foreground as the political subject, it will necessarily reveal its own particular and hegemonic status. In this manner, the notion of world politics ends up diffracted into idealist and realist positions that derive incommensurable conclusions from the inconsistency of the whole, resigning IR theory to a never-ending debate that could never be resolved, since neither of the sides is actually incorrect. While idealism makes of the world as the whole an ontological presupposition that may never attain a Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 phenomenal status, realism moves from unraveling every phenomenal invocation of world politics as a simulacrum to the assertion of its ontological non-being. Whereas idealism makes of the world an inapparent being (a spirit), realism transforms it into an existence without being (a phantom). Either way, world politics appears lacking either ontologically or ontically, which does not preclude a discourse about it but rather makes this discourse plethoric and interminable, just as the non-being of the unicorn does not prevent its frequent appearance in artistic, literary, medical, mythical or heraldic discourses. Thus, as long as we are committed to the concept of the world as the whole, the discourse on world politics, either in the mode of realist unmasking or idealist valorization, remains a discourse on something that does not exist. Three concepts of the world 15

The world as something Having demonstrated that the world cannot be consistently posited as the whole, let us now consider an alternative possibility. Accepting the argument of political realism that every universal set is merely the effect of the hegemonic universalization of the particular, we may drop universality as the criterion of the defi nition of the world and defi ne the world as a limited totality with no pretence to universality, a something rather than everything. Indeed, such a non-cosmological, ‘local’ concept of the world was domi- nant in the twentieth century phenomenology, particularly the early work of Martin Heidegger. In the fi rst division of Being and Time (Heidegger, 1962: 92–93) Heidegger begins his analysis of being-in-the-world as the basic state of Dasein with the outline of four possible concepts of the world. The fi rst concept is ontic and refers to the totality of beings objectively present-at-hand. The second concept is ontological and refers to the being of these entities, interpreted as the nature of ‘things in general’. Third, the world is understood in another ontic sense as the world of Dasein, ‘that “wherein” a factical Dasein as such can be said to “live”’, be it a public or a private or even domestic world (ibid.: 92). Finally, the world may be grasped ontologically and existentially in terms of ‘worldhood in general’. Heidegger dismisses the fi rst two ‘objective’ concepts as derivative and epiphenomenal, and focuses his inquiry on the second couple, the ontic world of Dasein and its ontologico-existential worldhood. The world is thus approached as that ‘wherein’ Dasein lives, the environment in which it encounters other beings not as objectively present-at-hand but as ‘ready-to-hand’ (zuhanden) for one’s dealings in the world. Heidegger proceeds to elaborate this concept of the world in terms of a referential totality of Dasein’s ‘involvements’ with other beings, where Dasein is absorbed in all kinds of assignments that involve various kinds of ‘equipment’ (Heidegger, 1962: 95–107). In its world, Dasein encounters other beings, which are disclosed to it in terms of practical functions that can be assigned to them and for which they are available. The paradigm of Heidegger’s world is thus the workshop, characterized by a ‘circumspective absorption in references and assign- ments constitutive for the readiness-to-hand of a totality of equipment’ (ibid.: 107,

Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 cf. Harman, 2002: 15–48; Malpas, 2006: 182–189). Thus, the world is always already there for Dasein as the referential totality of its involvements and the discovery of any concrete entity in the world is only possible on the basis of our pre-understanding of the world, in which we always already fi nd ourselves. Similarly, before the world can be ‘known’ ontically in terms of the beings within it and ontologically in terms of the being of those beings, Dasein must fi rst under- stand, however tentatively and indefi nitely, its factical being-in-the-world as its basic or essential state, which grounds any possible knowledge of the world’s beings as present-at-hand (ibid.: 106). In this act of understanding is disclosed the structure of relations that defi ne assignments and involvements of Dasein’s practical activity, which Heidegger terms the signifi cance of the world (ibid.: 120). 16 The World and worlds

The ‘wherein’ of an act of understanding, which assigns or refers itself, is that for which one lets entities be encountered in the kind of Being that belongs to involvements, and this wherein is the phenomenon of the world. And the structure of that to which Dasein assigns itself is what makes up the worldhood of the world. (ibid.: 119, emphasis omitted)

Thus, Heidegger’s concept of the world in Being and Time is that of a limited relational totality, an ordered environment in which Dasein orients itself, sets itself tasks and acts on them. To this ontic concept of the world corresponds the ontological concept of worldhood ‘as such’, defi ned as the relational structure of signifi cance, within which Dasein always already fi nds itself. Alain Badiou’s phenomenology, presented in his Logics of Worlds (Badiou, 2009b) offers a similar concept of the world as a limited totality. Nonetheless, in contrast to Heidegger (1962: 121), for whom the world is necessarily disclosed to Dasein and to Dasein alone, Badiou’s phenomenology is avowedly ‘objective’, neutral- izing any intentional or ‘lived’ dimension of the worlds he analyses, making the existence of worlds entirely independent from human existence (Badiou, 2009a: 38–39, 118–119). This accounts for a different relationship between ontology and phenomenology in Badiou’s work. For Heidegger ontology was itself necessarily phenomenological in its method, since its condition of possibility was Dasein’s pre- understanding of being, on whose basis the meaning of being is to be interpreted (Heidegger, 1962: 29–35, 49–63). In contrast, Badiou posits a rigorous disjunction between ontology and phenomenology while making both entirely independent of the existential analytic of Dasein, which is of little interest to him (Badiou, 2009b: 118). While ontology deals with being in the set-theoretical sense of pure or incon- sistent multiplicity, the phenomenology of Logics of Worlds focuses on the localiza- tion of being as ‘being-there’, appearance in a determinate and ordered situation. It is this situation, structured as a network of identities and differences, that Badiou terms the world. In more technical terms, the world is defi ned as a set that contains a transcendental and the transcendental indexing of all its elements (ibid.: 598). The transcendental refers to the order-structure that assigns the beings of the world Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 various degrees of intensity of appearance. Contrary to the more familiar concept of the transcendental in Kant’s philosophy, Badiou’s transcendental organization of the world is a strictly immanent and objective process that accounts for the logical cohesion of appearance, which is not determined by the ontological composition of the situation – a key point we shall return to below (ibid.: 101, 121–122, 241–242). For this reason, there may be as many transcendentals as there are worlds. As an order-structure, the transcendental is a subset of the situation that performs logical operations of assigning the minimum of appearance in the world, the possibility of conjoining the degrees of appearance of any two values and the possibility of synthesizing the values of appearance of any number of elements in an ‘envelope’ (ibid.: 102–103, 159–165). These operations permit the assignment Three concepts of the world 17

of identity-functions to the beings that appear in the world or the ‘indexing’ of them on the transcendental. Transcendental indexing is a function that makes a transcendental degree of appearance (from the minimum to the maximum) correspond to a pair of elements of the set that appears in the world. For instance, if the identity-function of two elements a and b is the maximum, this means that they appear in the world in question to the same degree. On the basis of these operations Badiou builds up an elaborate phenomenology, in which any situation whatsoever, from a protest demonstration to a country house on an autumn evening, can be analysed as a world, structured by a particular transcendental order. It is crucial to emphasize that Badiou’s notion of phenomenology is entirely distinct from, if not diametrically opposite to, the phenomenological tradition of the twentieth century in its various versions. As an objective phenomenology, the description of worlds must neutralize not their ‘real existence’ but precisely the intentional or lived dimension that, from Husserl onwards, has been the focus of the phenomenological method. ‘In doing so, we grasp the equivalence between appearing and logic through a pure description, a description without a subject’ (ibid.: 38). While this understanding of phenomenology at fi rst glance appears scandalous from any conventional perspective, it is at the very least legitimate by the classic defi nition of phenomenology developed by Heidegger (1962: 49–62; 1988: 15–22): the apophantic disclosure of phenomena in the logos, ‘letting that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way that it shows itself from itself’ (Heidegger, 1962: 58). Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology and Badiou’s objective phenomenology both disclose phenomena, i.e. beings that appear in worlds. What divides them is only the logos that they rely on in this disclosure, i.e. the hermeneutic discourse of the existential analytic of Dasein for Heidegger and the logical discourse of category and topos theory for Badiou. While it is certainly possible to debate which mode of logos is better at its apophantic task, what is important for our purposes is simply to establish the possibility of an objective phenomenology of worlds that has dispensed with the transcendental subject in favour of the idea of the transcendental as the immanent organization of the world. Badiou’s conception of the world yields two important consequences. First, on the basis of the principle of the inexistence of the whole, we may conclude that there is always more than one world (Badiou, 2009b: 114–115). Moreover, the number of Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 worlds can only be infi nite: if there were a fi nite number of worlds, they could easily be agglomerated into the whole. Second, every one of these worlds is itself infi nite. It is impossible to delimit a world either from below through the dissemination of its elements or from above through their totalization (ibid.: 306–310, 331–335). In the fi rst case, the result of the dissemination of the elements of the world into ever- smaller elements would still be a component of the world in question: the world does not have anything ‘beneath’ it in the sense of a primal matter that escapes appearance. ‘If you disseminate an ontological component of a world by examining the elements of its elements, the result of this dissemination is still a component of the same world’ (ibid.: 307). In the second case, the totalization of all the pos- sible subsets of the world into its power-set remains an entity of the same world. 18 The World and worlds

Since according to the theorem of the point of excess this power-set will be more numerous than the original set,2 it is impossible to prescribe a maximal number of elements in the world, which logically forbids the fi nitude of the world (ibid.: 309).

[Cantor] secularized the infi nite by means of a literalization whose boldness – an unheard-of transfi xion of the religious veil of meaning – orients us within a thinking still to come that can be encapsulated in a single phrase: insofar as a number is its real, every situation is essentially infi nite. (Badiou, 2008a: 225)3

Thus, we have moved from the assumption of one world as the whole to the infi n- ity of particular worlds that are themselves infi nite. It is thus possible to analyse any situation whatsoever as a world, endowed with a particular transcendental. Instead of Connolly’s image of one ‘monstrous’ world of infi nite fl ux and complexity, we end up with an image of an infi nity of infi nite worlds, which nonetheless need not be a priori posited as extremely complex or in perpetual fl ux. A world of presi- dential elections in a given country is certainly infi nite, yet its transcendental order is relatively simple and stable, there being nothing particularly monstrous about it, aside, perhaps, from individual candidates. As soon as we abandon the identifi cation of the world with the whole, Connolly’s dramatization of fl ux and becoming loses its urgency: evidently, some worlds are more complex and dynamic than others. Of course, this does not mean that these worlds all exist in isolation from each other. For example, the world of a protest demonstration or a refugee camp possesses a specifi c transcendental order and may be analysed as a world in its own right but also belongs to the wider worlds of e.g. municipal elections or immigration policy, which in turn both belong to a still wider world of regional politics and so on. Every world may belong to other worlds – the only world that it cannot belong to is the whole, which does not exist. Moreover, every world must belong to some other world, since the only thing that does not belong to anything else must be the whole, to which everything in turn would belong (Badiou, 2005: 45; 2009b: 112). Every world is a world of worlds but there is no such thing as the world of all worlds.

[The] unity of a world is nothing other than its diversity, and its diversity is, in Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 turn, a diversity of worlds. A world is a multiplicity of worlds and its unity is the sharing out and the mutual exposure in this world of all its worlds. (Nancy, 2007: 109)

This particularistic concept of the world can be fruitfully applied in political science and IR in the study of such limited totalities as the ‘worlds’ of local elec- tions, G8 summits, universities, global trade, development aid, border policing or refugee camps. Each of those worlds is characterized by a specifi c transcendental order that can be reconstituted through a Heideggerian, Badiouan or other phe- nomenology but is at the same time part of a wider world and decomposable into smaller worlds that are also liable to phenomenological analysis. The politics of Three concepts of the world 19

these worlds would then be derived from the transcendental, by which the world in question is governed. The study of politics in different worlds may then take the form of a Foucauldian ‘analytics of government’, the immanent reconstitution of positive dispositifs of governmental rationalities in such distinct worlds as diplo- macy, humanitarian aid, counter-intelligence, which may overlap with, feed into or remain separate from one another, but never constitute anything like the whole (Foucault, 1991, 2008, 2007; Dean, 1999; Larner and Walters, 2004; Walters, 2006; Li, 2007; de Larrinaga and Doucet, 2010; Parker, 2012).4 Yet, this understanding of the world and its politics cannot but be disappointing for any attempt to rethink world politics in its more familiar universalist sense, since ‘world politics’ here would simply mean a politics that unfolds within a particular world and what counts for politics in different worlds need not be the same thing. The very question of political universality appears to be foreclosed by the plural- ity of worlds with particular orders above or between which no authority exists. There is only an infi nity of particular worlds with particular regimes of politics – an image that immediately brings to mind the pluralistic realm of the international. Is not world politics then strictly synonymous to international relations and the world simply identical to the international domain that it was intended to transcend (Walker, 2009: 21–22)? This is indeed the position of the diverse group of the critics of cosmopolitan universalism who affi rm the pluralism of the international as the sole possible universal (see e.g. Jackson, 2003; Connolly, 1995; Mouffe, 2009), whereby the world is nothing but a plurality of worlds and world politics consists in maintaining this plurality against any hegemonic totalization. Nonetheless, the universalization of the international as the ‘world of all worlds’ merely throws us back into logical inconsistency. Since, as we have seen, the domain of the international cannot be the whole, it must be a particular world among others. The international does not lose any of this particularity by virtue of being a huge world that envelops the entire planet, especially as it does so in a specifi c and selective manner, including some entities while excluding others (non-state communities, postcolonial populations, global social movements, the environment, etc). We do not even need recourse to set-theoretical reasoning to demonstrate that the international is not the whole, since empirical examples of exclusion from this realm abound. Nonetheless, the focus on these empirical examples may ultimately Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 be misleading, since it would orient the critical discourse on world politics towards advocating a politics of inclusion as the pathway from particularistic international politics to a genuine world politics. Yet, it is precisely this desire to include everything that leads us back to the inconsistent fi gure of the universal set and the problem of the hegemonic universalization of the particular: even if we were to concede the utterly utopian possibility of the transformation of the international that would overcome every exclusion, what this whole could never include is the excess of the set of its parts over its original elements. While the idea of this excessive ‘power-set’ might appear too abstract, it is in fact of supreme relevance for the problem of the world. In Badiou’s ontology the operation of inclusion (grouping into subsets) is constitutive of what he terms 20 The World and worlds

the state of the situation, its ‘metastructure’ that re-presents its elements by, literally, counting them once more as parts (2005a: 81–111). Badiou’s use of the term ‘state’ to designate this operation accentuates its analogy with the political order, which is maintained by ordering the pure multiplicity of elements into distinct groups characterized by particular identities. Indeed, the simplest way to grasp the operation of the meta-structure is to conceive of it as the bureaucratic apparatus of the state, which is not concerned with individuals per se as pure elements but only as representatives of groups, be they grouped by class, gender, race, professional occupation, sexual preference or what not. ‘This [statist] coercion consists in not being held to be someone who belongs to society but as someone who is included within society. The State is fundamentally indifferent to belonging yet it is constantly concerned with inclusion’ (Badiou, 2005a: 107–108). Thus, while the originary structure of the situation is constituted by the pure belonging of its individual and disconnected elements, the state of the situation is constituted by ordering the possible combinations between these elements: ‘The State is not founded upon the social bond, which it would express, but rather upon un-binding which it prohibits’ (ibid.: 109). And yet, although the operation of metastructural representation is meant to protect the situation from its unbinding, it actually threatens this very unbinding by introducing into the situation the excess of parts over elements. According to the theorem of the point of excess, there always exists at least one ‘excrescent’ element of the power-set that does not belong to the original set. It is easy to see that one such excrescent element is the state of the situation itself, which did not belong to the original situation, just as the bureaucratic apparatus of the state is structurally separate from the society and ‘represents’ nothing within it. Thus, in the case of the hypothetical universalization of the international there would be at least one element that would escape this universalization, while at the same time making it possible, i.e. the world state itself as a meta-structure of representation, which by defi nition exceeds the whole that it brings into being. Yet, we must also recall that with respect to worlds as infi nite sets the Cohen-Easton theorem establishes that the excess of the power-set is strictly immeasurable and errant, capable of taking any (infi nite) value. Thus, the universalization of the international into a hypothetical whole would not merely result in the paradoxical exteriority of the Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 resultant world state to the totality that comprises it but in the literally limitless proliferation of excessive recombinations of elements that immeasurably exceed their originally infi nite number. The inclusive politics of the universalization of the international opens up Pandora’s box, out of which come all kinds of monstrous combinations that cannot be subsumed under the inclusive order and mock its every claim to universality. Thus, not only is the international not identical to the universal; as a particular world it is also not universalizable. The idea of the international as an actual or potential world of all worlds arises out of an illusory identifi cation of totality and infi nity. Since every world is a world of worlds, the international world may of course contain an infi nite multiplicity of worlds, but the only thing that this or any Three concepts of the world 21

other world cannot contain is everything. For this reason, the ethico-political drive for the greater inclusiveness of the international, advanced in various ways by feminist, postcolonial or poststructuralist theories, may certainly make the international a ‘better place’ but will not attain world politics. As Walker demonstrates admirably, one will never reach the universality of the world if one begins from the international (Walker, 2009: 26–31). There is no passage from any particular world, however diverse and inclusive, towards universality. Yet, while this claim leads Walker to a profound scepticism about world politics as such, the impossibility of passing from the international to the world is only a problem as long as we continue to envision the universality of world politics as necessarily mediated by particularity. If the world of the international is a particular world among others and, as Walker argues at length, its particular transcendental is historically contingent, the impossibility of arriving at the universality of world politics from the particularism of the international simply entails the need for another starting point for conceptualizing the universality of world politics. Since presupposing the world as the whole leads us to inconsistency and starting from particular worlds leads us nowhere, this new starting point is obtained by abandoning every totalizing conception of the world and asserting its universality without recourse to any mediation by the particular. It is this solution that we address in the following section.

The world as nothing While at fi rst glance the particularistic conception of worlds merely confi rms the impasse of the discourse of world politics due to the inaccessibility of the universal, it actually guides us towards a solution to our problem by raising the question of the conditions of the appearance of this infi nity of worlds. Simply put, where are all these worlds? Just as we commonly speak of all the birds, books, athletes or mountains in the world, we may speak of the infi nity of worlds as existing ‘in the world’. But what is this world in which the infi nity of positive, transcendentally regulated worlds comes to appearance? If this ‘world of all worlds’ were itself a positive world, it would have to be a self-belonging universal set, which we have dismissed as logically inconsistent. And yet, it is barely possible to give up on the existence of such a world. Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 The problem is well illustrated by the ambiguity of Badiou’s own political maxim that prescribes resistance to all forms of exclusion, inequality and domina- tion: ‘There is only one world!’ (Badiou, 2008b: 53–70). Since this statement so patently contradicts the claims in the Logics of Worlds about the infi nity of worlds, misunderstandings may easily arise. Might Badiou mean that among the infi nite number of worlds there is something like a ‘political world’, which is indeed ‘one’? This solution would evidently contradict Badiou’s preference for describing highly circumscribed and concrete worlds, including political ones, e.g. the world of a protest demonstration (Badiou, 2009b: 199–216), of a battle (ibid.: 277–288) or of revolutionary struggle (ibid.: 493–503). Of course, since every world is a world of worlds, it might be possible to isolate something like a world of ‘politics as such’ 22 The World and worlds

that would envelop the more specifi c worlds above, yet the result would be a trivial agglomeration whose advantages remain elusive. Thus, Badiou’s ‘one world’ cannot refer to any positive world, however general and loosely structured, but only to that in which an infi nity of worlds comes to appear. Yet, what could this ‘in which’ possibly be? From ancient Greek atomism onwards, this problem has been resolved by assert- ing that whatever exists positively does so in the empty space, vacuum or void, in short – Nothing (see Gregory, 1981; Badiou, 2009c: 56–64). Indeed, this answer appears to be the last remaining logical possibility: if we have excluded the pos- sibility of the world being everything and we are not satisfi ed with a particularistic understanding of the world as something, then the world can only be nothing. Yet, everything depends on how we understand this ‘nothing’. As we shall argue in more detail in Chapter 2, as long as it is understood in the merely negative sense of priva- tion, lack or absence, we remain within the political ontology of the international, for which there are only particular worlds and nothing beyond them. Bartelson invokes this negative sense of the void in his criticism of contemporary cosmo- politanism, which lacks a positive vision of world community and only exhibits an ‘ontological void’ (Bartelson, 2009: 28). However, it is also possible to understand the claim about the nothingness of the world as a pure affi rmation: there is a world, in which an infi nity of infi nite worlds appears, and this World, which we shall henceforth capitalize to distinguish it from worlds as limited particularistic totalities, is nothing but the void. Let us elucidate this concept of the World by revisiting Heidegger’s work after Being and Time, in which there is a gradual shift away from the understanding of the world as a practical context of Dasein’s activity towards an ontological concept of the world as the clearing of being (cf. Malpas, 2006: 186–189). In his 1929–30 course of lectures, The Fundamental Concepts on Metaphysics, Heidegger defi nes the world as the ‘manifestness of beings as such as a whole’ (Heidegger, 1995: 284). What is at stake in this defi nition is not the whole of beings (the impossible uni- versal set) but rather the disclosure of beings as beings (ibid.: 274–275, 279–280). The phenomenology of particular worlds in Being and Time as well as the analysis of the concept of the world in the history of philosophy in On the Essence of Ground (Heidegger, 1998: 97–134) are now reinscribed within a wider and more ambitious Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 inquiry into the sense of the world that proceeds through the comparison between humanity and animality, between the ‘world-forming’ (weltbildend) character of Dasein and the ‘poor in the world’ (weltarm) status of the animal. While ‘world-formation’ belongs to the essence of Dasein, in its everyday prac- tices human beings inevitably fail to distinguish the world from the beings within it. For Heidegger, ‘[ordinary] understanding cannot see the world for beings. In relation to the individual trees and the way they are gathered together the forest is something else. It is that out of which the many trees belong to a forest’ (Heidegger, 1995: 347). The World is thus neither a being nor an aggregation of all beings but rather the opening or ‘projection’ (ibid.: 362), in which beings (and positive worlds as ordered realms of beings) become disclosed in the fi rst place: Three concepts of the world 23

In the occurrence of projection world is formed, i.e. in projecting something erupts and irrupts towards possibilities, thereby irrupting into what is actual as such, so as to experience itself as having irrupted as an actual being in the midst of what can now be manifest as beings. It is a being of a properly primordial kind, which has irrupted to that way of being that we call Dasein, and to that being which we say exists, i.e. ex-sists, is an exiting from itself in the essence of its being, yet without abandoning itself (ibid.: 365).

Thus, the world is formed as an opening, which tears Dasein away from its actual preoccupations and throws it into the potentiality of existence, whereby the being of the beings around Dasein may be disclosed for the fi rst time. Particular worlds of the kind analysed in Being and Time, which provide a practical context of Dasein’s everyday activity, are thus conditioned by the prior opening of the World, which tears Dasein away from its absorption in everydayness. This argument recalls Heidegger’s earlier claim in Being and Time about the withdrawal of the being of entities that are ready-to-hand (zuhanden) from our access: these beings that Heidegger unites under the rubric of ‘equipment’, determined by their references and assignments, only become accessible as ‘present-at-hand’ (vorhanden) when they break down, are lost, missing or standing in the way of our concerns (Heidegger, 1962: 102–107). It is precisely in this breakdown in the referential contexts that defi ne a particular world that this world is ‘lit up’ or ‘announces itself’ as such (ibid.: 105). This ‘announcement of the world’ is in the later works presented not merely as a result of conspicuous, obtrusive and obstinate presence of broken tools but as an effect of a ‘fundamental attunement’ or mood (Stimmung), which in Being and Time has been addressed in terms of anxiety (Heidegger, 1962: 228–234). In the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics this world-disclosing mood is described as profound boredom and is addressed in the fi rst 200 pages of the text, preceding the more specifi c engagement with the question of the world. In his phenomenology of boredom Heidegger moves progressively from the most familiar form of boredom as being-bored-by-something (a determinate object or situation) through the more general being-bored-with- something that arises from within Dasein and has no determinate object to the most ‘profound’ boredom, which is precisely the attunement through which the world Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 is disclosed (Heidegger, 1995: 82–88, 113–125, 136–143). This profound form of boredom is characterized by the intensifi cation of the two ‘structural moments’ that defi ne boredom as such: being left empty and being held in limbo. The fi rst moment refers to Dasein’s ‘being delivered to beings’ telling refusal of themselves as a whole’ (ibid.: 137), whereby it fi nds itself in a state of indiffer- ence that envelops all beings, including Dasein itself. In this state beings around us evidently do not disappear but rather manifest themselves as such precisely in their indifference. The things we do in order to pass the time when bored, the diversions with which we try to entertain or amuse ourselves, fail to engage us, leaving us suspended in the withdrawal of beings. The second moment, being held in limbo, is closely related to this suspension. The beings that refuse 24 The World and worlds

themselves are nothing other than possibilities of Dasein’s existence that are left unexploited (ibid.: 141). What refuses itself to Dasein are the things it could have done, experienced or used, which now stand before it as wholly inaccessi- ble. However, this withdrawal of concrete or specifi c possibilities impels Dasein towards a more extreme and originary possibility, the originary ‘making pos- sible’ (ibid.: 143–144). In other words, the suspension of particular possibilities reveals what makes these possibilities possible in the fi rst place and thus makes Dasein itself possible as the being whose essence is contained in its potentiality for being. Dasein is simultaneously entranced by the emptiness of the beings’ total indifference and impelled towards what Heidegger calls the ‘moment of vision’ (ibid.: 151–152, cf. Heidegger, 1962: 371–380), a resolute grasp of the authentic possibility of existence. It is thus the combination of the disclosure of the expanse of beings that refuse themselves and the experience of the extreme possibility of Dasein itself that constitutes the fundamental attunement in which the world formation takes place. Yet, what exactly is revealed in this disclosure? As Giorgio Agamben (2004: 39–74) has argued in an incisive critique of this lecture course, Heidegger’s description of the world-disclosing attunement of Dasein is uncannily close to the phenomenology of animal life that Heidegger terms ‘poor-in-world’ (weltarm). In Heidegger’s analysis, the animal is defi ned by captivation, its incapacity to suspend or deactivate its relation with its ‘disinhibiting ring’, i.e. its immediate environment that is never disclosed to the animal as such (Heidegger, 1995: 240–253). This con- dition of being delivered over to something that refuses itself is exactly the same as the fi rst structural moment of ‘being left empty’. ‘In becoming bored, Dasein is delivered over to something that refuses itself, exactly as the animal, in its captiva- tion, is exposed in something unrevealed’ (Agamben, 2004: 65). The sole difference between humanity and animality pertains to the second structural moment. While both animal and man can be left empty by beings that refuse themselves, no animal can ever be held in limbo. ‘What the animal is unable to do is suspend and deacti- vate its relationship with the ring of its specifi c disinhibitors. The animal environ- ment is constituted in such a way that something like a pure possibility can never become manifest within it’ (Agamben, 2004: 68). In contrast, Dasein fi nds in this very manifestation the moment of its authentic existence as ‘world-forming’: ‘of Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 all beings only the human being, called upon by the voice of being, experiences the wonder of all wonders: that beings are’ (Heidegger, 1998: 234). It is this difference that leads Agamben to a striking conclusion that remains only implicit in Heidegger’s text, since it runs contrary to the privilege his thought grants to Dasein. The passage from the world-poor animal to the world-forming man

does not open onto a further, wider and brighter space, achieved beyond the limits of the animal environment and unrelated to it; on the contrary, it is opened only by means of a suspension and a deactivation of the animal relation with the disinhibitor. (Agamben, 2004: 68) Three concepts of the world 25

Just as the ‘voice of being’ is essentially silent (Heidegger, 1998: 236), ‘the jewel set at the centre of the human world and its Lichtung (clearing) is nothing but animal captivation’ (Agamben, 2004: 68). The opening of the World that is disclosed to Dasein does not mark a liberation from captivation but a deliverance to captivation: ‘whoever looks in the open sees only a closing, only a not-seeing’ (ibid.; see also Heidegger, 1977: 169–180). If the animal is open to a closedness that it could never access ‘as such’, the human being is able to do precisely that when it suspends its relation with the beings of the world – it is able to grasp the inaccessible as inaccessible: ‘Dasein is simply an animal that has learned to become bored. This awakening of the living being to its own being-captivated, this anxious and resolute opening to a not-open, is the human’ (ibid.: 70). Yet, this opening obviously does not amount to much or, in fact, to anything at all. The opening of the World as a result of the subtraction of the human being from its particular world in the mood of boredom opens Dasein to nothingness pure and simple:

From the beginning, being is traversed by the nothing: the Lichtung is also originarily Nichtung, because the world has become open for man only through the interruption and nihilation of the living being’s relationship with its disinhibitor. Being appears in the ‘clear night of the nothing’ only because man, in the experience of profound boredom, has risked himself in the suspension of his relationship with his environment as a living being. (ibid.: 70)

In this manner, Heidegger’s explorations of the relation between humanity and animality in the 1929–30 course connect with his theorization of the metaphysical problem of the nothing in the lecture ‘What is Metaphysics?’, delivered during the same year.5 In this lecture, Dasein is explicitly defi ned as ‘being held out into the nothing’ (Heidegger, 1977: 108) and this nothing is posited as the paradoxical ‘ground’, in which all beings come to appear: Ex nihilo omne ens qua ens fi t [from the nothing all beings as beings come to be] (ibid.). While traditionally metaphysics tended to approach the nothing as the ‘counter-concept of being’, its pure and simple opposite, Heidegger demonstrates the way in which nothing, which is indeed not a being, nonetheless discloses the being of beings as such: Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016

For human existence, the nothing makes possible the openedness of be- ings as such. The nothing does not merely serve as the counter-concept of beings; rather, it originally belongs to their essential unfolding as such. In the Being of beings the nihilation of the nothing occurs. (ibid.: 104)

The nothing discloses the difference of all beings with respect to itself:

[The nothing] discloses these beings in their full but heretofore concealed strangeness as what is radically other – with respect to the nothing. In the 26 The World and worlds

clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings – and not nothing. Only on the ground of the original revelation of the nothing can human existence approach and penetrate beings. (ibid.: 103. Cf. Harman, 2002: 90–95)

The nothing is not a being, yet it nonetheless ‘prevails as being’, which ‘gives every being the warrant to be’ (Heidegger, 1998: 233).

As that which is altogether other than all beings, being is that which is not. But this nothing essentially prevails as being. We too quickly abdicate thinking when, in a facile explanation, we pass off the nothing as a mere nullity and equate it with the unreal. [Instead], we must experience in the nothing the pervasive expanse of that which gives every being the warrant to be. That is being itself. Without being, whose abyssal but yet to be unfolded essence dispenses the nothing to us in essential anxiety, all beings would remain in an absence of being. (ibid.: 233)

In its everyday comportment Dasein usually loses itself among the beings ‘ready- to-hand’ in its particular world, much as the animal that is captivated inside its disinhibiting ring (see Heidegger, 1962: 203–224). For the inhabitant of a particular world, there are only the beings of this world and ‘beyond them there is nothing’, in the negative sense of mere absence (Heidegger, 1977: 85). Yet, in contrast to the animal, Dasein is capable of rising above the ‘superfi cies of existence’ in a fundamental attunement such as boredom in the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics or anxiety in Being and Time and What is Metaphysics? (ibid.: 104). However, this ‘rise above’ does not take us to another place, characterized by the rich diversity of beings and the plenitude of possibilities, but, on the contrary, entails our subtraction from all these beings and possibilities in our ‘world’, inhabiting our world as nothing, so that Dasein stands alone in the clearing of being as the ‘lieutenant of the Nothing’ (ibid.: 106). This theme of the world as void culminates in Heidegger’s 1947 Letter Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 on Humanism, in which he reinterprets the human as a ‘worldly’ being. Against the contrast between ‘worldly’ and ‘spiritual’ in everyday language, Heidegger understands Dasein’s worldliness in terms of its transcendence of any particular being or realm of being (i.e. a positive world) through being ‘placed freely into the clearing of Being, which alone is “world”’:

[For] us ‘world’ does not at all signify beings or any realm of beings but the open- ness of Being. Man stands out into the openness of Being. ‘World’ is the clear- ing of Being into which man stands out on the basis of his thrown essence. World is in a certain sense precisely ‘the beyond’ within existence and for it. (ibid.: 252) Three concepts of the world 27

Thus, Heidegger’s conception of the world moves from the phenomenology of particular worlds as immanent practical contexts of Dasein’s activity to the affi rmation of the World as the void or clearing, in which such worlds are disclosed to Dasein. It is important to emphasize that since the World as void is not a being, to posit the World as a clearing ‘beyond’ existence is not to engage in a quasi- theological move of positing a Supreme Being that transcends this world. The World does not designate a being, supreme or otherwise, but solely the opening, in which an infi nity of infi nite worlds may appear. The void is therefore the condition of possibility of any positive world whatsoever: it is that in which these worlds appear, but, in contrast to the two concepts of the world addressed above, it neither totalizes these worlds into the whole nor is mediated by them. Nonetheless, while avoiding the problems of these two concepts, the Heideggerian concept of the World raises other questions, particularly concerning the relation between the World as void and the positive worlds of the kind addressed in the previous section, e.g. the worlds of factory production, diplomacy, elections, development, migration or war. If these worlds simply come to appearance against the background of the void as ‘not nothing’, the World appears to be little more than a logical condition that can hardly ground any politics, reduced as it is to a neutral support of the infi nite proliferation of positive worlds coexisting in the vacuum. In this manner, in an ironic reversal of Heidegger’s own intention, politics would be ‘deontologized’ and reduced to the positive principles governing autonomous worlds, between which no adjudication is possible, since what is beyond these positivities is purely and simply nothing (cf. Mandarini, 2009). Instead of universalism, we would end up with nihilism and relativism once again. In order to recover the universalist potential of the concept of the World as void we must elaborate its relation to the worlds it discloses. In other words, we must reassert the difference between the phenomenology of worlds and the ontology of the World in order to specify the way the latter affects the former. In the following section we shall pursue this question in an analysis of Alain Badiou’s ontology of the void.

The universality of the void While Badiou restricts the term ‘world’ to the positive totalities regulated by a Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 transcendental order, the void is the most important concept in his ontology and functions in the manner resonant with Heidegger’s clearing, yet also radicalizing his ontological insight. Ironically, while in ‘What is Metaphysics?’ Heidegger famously accused mathematics and other exact sciences of being incapable of treating the nothing (Heidegger, 1977: 94–95), Badiou’s use of the set-theoretical category of the void set to ground ontology demonstrates precisely the kind of engagement with the nothing that Heidegger sought. In Logics of Worlds, Badiou departs from the void as the fi rst determinable set. Since in a set-theoretical ontology one can only posit a set if one can determine its composition, it is possible to immediately determine a set that has no elements, i.e. the void set Ø. The thinkability of all other sets depends on their belonging to 28 The World and worlds

specifi c worlds. Yet, since the void set has no elements, it logically appears in any world whatsoever:

Since the void is the only immediate being, it follows that it fi gures in any world whatsoever. In its absence, no operation can have a starting point in being, that is to say, no operation can operate. Without the void, there is no world, if by ‘world’ we understand the closed place of an operation. Conversely, where something operates – that is, where there is world – the void can be attested. (Badiou, 2009b: 114)

While for Heidegger every particular world must be disclosed in the void, for Badiou it is the void itself that appears in every positive world. Moreover, in contrast to Heidegger, for Badiou the void is not merely the clearing of being but literally its building block, so that whatever appears in the world ultimately depends on the void for its being. To recall, what appears in Heidegger’s clearing, i.e. beings and worlds as ‘realms of beings’, is not itself composed of the clearing but is disclosed against the background of the Nothing as precisely not nothing. The genitive in the phrase ‘clearing of being’ is both subjective and objective: the clearing both belongs to being (it is being’s own clearing) and what being itself is (it is being that is cleared), which is why Heidegger’s ultimate answer to the question of what being is is ‘nothing’ (1998: 233). However, it does not follow from this that beings are also nothing, but rather that being as nothing ‘distinguishes itself from all beings’ (ibid.). In contrast, for Badiou beings are indeed ‘woven out of the void’ (Badiou, 2005a: 57, cf. Badiou, 2009b: 112–113). This certainly does not mean that everything is in fact made of nothing, but merely that in order to be grasped in the aspect of their being, beings must be subtracted from all positive predicates they are endowed with in particular worlds, just like Dasein is in the mood of profound boredom:

What ontology theorizes is the inconsistent multiple of any situation, that is, the multiple subtracted from any particular law, from any count-as- one, the a-structured multiple. The proper mode in which inconsistency Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 wanders within the whole of a situation is the nothing, and the mode in which it unpresents itself is that of subtraction from the count, the non-one, the void. (Badiou, 2005a: 58)

Insofar as the entirety of beings in any given world is subject to a transcenden- tal ordering that makes it consistent, that which remains inconsistent can only be nothing. For this reason, ontology is equivalent to a theory of the void and, moreover, can only be a theory of the void, since if it asserted the existence of any other beings, it would reduce itself to phenomenology, i.e. the descrip- tion of the transcendental orders of particular worlds. Ontology must therefore Three concepts of the world 29

begin and end with the void, all of its terms being derived from the void alone (Badiou, 2005a: 57).

[The] absolutely primary theme of ontology is therefore the void – the Greek atomists, Democritus and his successors, clearly understood this – but it is also its fi nal theme because in the last resort, all inconsistency is unpresentable, thus void. If there are ‘atoms’, they are not, as the materialists of antiquity believed, a second principle of being, the one after the void, but compositions of the void itself, ruled by the ideal laws of the multiple whose axiom system is laid out by ontology. Ontology, therefore, can only count the void as existent. (ibid.: 58)

All the beings of every world are, in their being, compositions of the void. With the help of the axioms of set theory, it is possible to generate an infi nite number of sets from the void alone, starting from the two, a coupling of the name of the void Ø and its singleton (a set whose only element is the void): [Ø, {Ø}], and so on to infi nity. Thus, the World as void is not merely the ‘nothing’ against whose background beings emerge but rather the ontological condition of possibility of all the beings, which appear in all positive worlds. Insofar as the void fi gures in any world whatsoever, it is a ‘universal part’ (ibid.: 86–88), underlying the constitution and structuration of every particular world. It is easy to see that the universality of this ‘part’ satisfi es the criteria of immediacy and non-totalizability that are necessary to avoid logical inconsistency: insofar as the World is nothing, it is the very opposite of the Whole, and insofar as it is the ground of all being, it is always already there, immediately, in any world whatsoever. Thus, the World is the universal that precedes and exceeds the constitution of anything particular, making possible the proliferation of the infi nite number of worlds while proscribing their aggregation into the whole. While the World is in every world, it is important to emphasize that there is no necessary relation between the World as void and the positivity of worlds – it would be absurd to suggest that the void of being could somehow prescribe positive forms of appearance (Badiou, 2009b: 118). If one could infer appearance from being, there would only be one positive world whose transcendental order would somehow ‘correspond’ to the void – that world would have to be the Whole and is Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 therefore impossible. The positivity of worlds as regulated structures of appearance is thus not determined by the void of the World, which only conditions the being of the being of these worlds. It is nonetheless possible to make the opposite move of inferring being from appearance that would establish ‘an ontological halting point’ (ibid.: 195) to the infi nite proliferation of intra-worldly appearances. In Badiou’s postulate of materialism, ‘every atom of appearance is real’ (ibid.: 218–220), so that whatever appears in the world must have an ontological correlate, a multiplicity composed of the void. This postulate excludes the possibility that appearance in any given world would be grounded in something virtual or that something that exists in the world would lack any being (ibid.: 219). Yet, while this postulate excludes the existence of purely virtual or chimerical beings, the transcendental of the world 30 The World and worlds

remains without any foundation in being and hence precisely virtual and chimerical. In Badiou’s own account (2011: 75), the transcendental ‘does not exist’, at least not in the same way as the beings that it orders. As a set of degrees of appearance, the transcendental is certainly as real as any other set, yet its operation on the beings of the world that endows the world with a positive order has no foundation in being. It is precisely this lack of being that accounts for the contingency of the order of every world: ontologically, no world is necessary, even if all that appears in it is real. Thus, we end up with the tripartite scheme, in which the abyss between an infi nity of positive worlds and the void of the World is bridged by the set- theoretical ontology of pure multiplicity: the World as void of being – beings composed of the void – beings positively ordered in worlds. What the World makes possible is, strictly speaking, not this or that world in particular but rather the proliferation of being as inconsistent multiplicity, which is then ordered in accordance with the transcendental of a given world, which itself has no foundation in being. In other words, the World as void brings forth the ontological material for the construction of worlds that ensures that whatever appears is real without prescribing how it should appear. Thus, while whatever appears in the world is necessarily grounded in real being, the mode of its appearance is absolutely contingent, having no ontological correlate. There is no ontological reason why any world should be what it is and even why any particular world should exist at all. This scheme permits us to reappraise the theme of becoming that we have addressed above with respect to Connolly’s (2011) concept of the world. The idea of becoming may now be conceived on two distinct levels. On the one hand, becoming pertains to the emergence of the being of worlds out of the void of the World. While the World as void does not become, since there is nothing in it that could possibly change, all worlds are becoming from the World but only in the aspect of their sheer being: the World grants worlds their being but not their appearance. We may term this ‘ontological becoming’ or ‘becoming-being’. Contrary to Connolly’s idea of becoming as monstrous autopoietic fl ux, this mode of becoming is in fact quite ordinary and even tedious, since it consists in the infi nite proliferation of infi nite sets, distinguished solely by their extensionality: [a, b], [a, b, c], [b, c, d] and so on. On the other hand, becoming may pertain to the Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 process of intra-worldly ordering and transformation, in which beings of the world are endowed with positive identities. We may term this ‘phenomenological becoming’ or ‘becoming-appearance’. Contrary to Connolly’s exultation of becoming as an ontogenetic force, this mode of becoming has no relation to ontology whatsoever, since the World does not prescribe even that there should be this or that world, let alone what positive form it would take. Thus, instead of defi ning the world in terms of becoming, we end up with the World which does not become by defi nition and an infi nity of worlds whose becoming is ontologically grounded in the void yet remains ontically or phenomenally contingent. Thus, the World and particular worlds remain disjointed and irreducible to each other in the manner of Heidegger’s ontological difference. The insistence Three concepts of the world 31

on the difference between the World and worlds distinguishes our approach from the infl uential rethinking of the Heideggerian concept of the world by Jean-Luc Nancy. In the Sense of the World and the Creation of the World (1997, 2007), Nancy operates with two notions of the world that resonate with our concepts of the world as a particular ordered totality and as the void of being. On the one hand, Nancy defi nes the world in the early Heideggerian and late Badiouan manner as a limited ‘totality of meaning’, giving such examples as ‘Debussy’s world’, ‘the hospital world’ or ‘the fourth world’ (Nancy, 2007: 41). On the other hand, Nancy also claims that the world is ‘in a sense, nothing’ (Nancy, 1997: 159) or ‘the growth of/ from nothing’ (Nancy, 2007: 51), the ‘opening in which fi nite singularities dispose themselves’ (ibid.: 72). This world as void is the condition of possibility of the infi nity of positive worlds, but is so neither as a foundation or an origin but simply by ‘weaving the co-appearance of existences’ (ibid.: 70). However, Nancy then makes a striking move of identifying these two fi gures and thereby annulling the very idea of ontological difference: ‘the ontological difference is null. Being is: that the being exists’ (ibid.: 71). In other words, ‘the being is nothing more than being itself’ (Nancy, 2011: 59). Thus, the closed totality of the world ends up somehow identical to the opening of the World that makes it possible, so that ‘the sense of the world is this world here as the place of existence’ (Nancy, 1997: 56). With a clear allusion to Badiou’s Being and Event, Nancy claims that ‘there is neither being nor event, just existences with their comings and goings’ (Nancy, 2007: 73). In his attempt to purge Heidegger’s philosophy of every trace of heroism and decisionism, Nancy opts for the utter trivialization of the theme of transcendence: Dasein is indeed ‘held out in the nothing’, yet this nothing is not ‘beyond existence’ but rather the everyday dwelling place of any Dasein whatsoever, which itself is now entirely indistinct from the ‘inauthentic’ beings that Heidegger disparagingly referred to as the ‘They’ (das Man) (Heidegger, 1962: 163–168; cf. Nancy, 2003: 50–52). The World is this world here and nothing else.6 Nancy develops the theme of this identity in his reinterpretation of the idea of the creatio ex nihilo:

[The] world is created from nothing: this does not mean fabricated with nothing by a particularly ingenious producer. It means instead that it is not fabricated, produced by no producer and not even coming out of nothing Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 (like a miraculous apparition), but in a quite strict manner and more chal- lenging for thought: the nothing itself. In creation, a growth grows from nothing and this nothing takes care of itself, cultivates its growth. The ex nihilo is the genuine formulation of a radical materialism, that is to say, precisely, without roots. (Nancy, 2007: 51)

Thus, creatio ex nihilo means that the world is ‘all there’, that there is no other world or otherworldly supreme being behind it or, more precisely, what is behind it is the void from and of which the world grows (ibid.: 71–73). This world here as the positive totality of ‘something’ is nothing but the growth from and of nothing 32 The World and worlds

itself, while this nothing is in turn nothing but the opening of and for this growth of something. Since for Nancy the ontological difference is null, the positivity of the world and the void of the World ultimately merge into a single fi gure of creatio ex nihilo, which may be approached either as the positivity of the created world or the facticity of the process of creation from/of nothing. ‘This opening as nothing, which neither presents nor gives itself, is opened right at the same level of the fi nite singularities as their being together or their being-with and constitutes the disposition of the world’ (Nancy, 2007: 73). Since, contrary to Badiou, Nancy does not draw a distinction between being and appearance, the World (the being of something as nothing) and the world (the appearance of nothing as something) must remain indistinct. Nancy is certainly correct in emphasizing that the World as void is nothing ‘otherworldly’ in the mythical or theological sense and can only be accessed in ‘this world here’ as the condition of its very emergence, the ‘universal part’ that is ontologically always already there in any world whatsoever. This is the reason why in this book we shall retain the term World for the void at the risk of terminological confusion: to assert that there are worlds and there is the World is to emphasize that we are talking almost about the same thing, with the caveat that the World is precisely not a thing, not a being or a realm of beings and for this reason can never coincide with what it makes possible, remaining in excess of every positive world, transcending it from within as its ‘universal part’. It is this caveat that Nancy’s identifi cation of the world and World obscures but which will be crucial for understanding the political signifi cance of the concept of the World. As we shall demonstrate in detail in the following chapter, the possibility of world politics is conditioned by the disclosure of the World within positive worlds, which manifests the contingency of their transcendental orders and thereby opens these worlds to the possibility of transformation. It is evident that for this disclosure to be possible, the World and ‘this world here’ must be distinct. Moreover, the insistence on the identity of a given positive world and the World makes it diffi cult, if not outright impossible, to conceive of the possibility of the transformation of this world, the possibility that we conventionally associate with politics. If the World were simply this world here, without remainder or excess, how could one possibly confront what Nancy himself terms the ‘unworld’ (immonde) of contemporary Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 politics, the ‘global’ agglomeration of worlds into a ‘glomus’, a tumorous growth of inequality, injustice and domination, which is closed off from the void that makes it possible into a suffocating self-immanence (Nancy, 2007: 33–34)? If the ‘unworld’ can be transformed into a better world, this is only because it is non-identical with the World and this non-identity may be brought to appearance within the ‘unworld’ itself, illuminating its contingency and hence the potentiality of its transformation. It is only because the World is not this world here (or any other positive world) that this world here is not all there is and, as the famous slogan goes, ‘another world is possible’. The World is that which, ontologically belonging to but not necessarily appearing in every positive world, conditions the possibility of every world’s becoming-otherwise. Three concepts of the world 33

Let us now summarize the fi ndings of this chapter and their implications for rethinking world politics. We began with the demonstration of the logical inconsistency of the understanding of the world as the whole, which is at work in much of the contemporary discourse of world politics, both affi rmative and critical. We then proceeded to the particularistic conception of the world, in which the world is understood as a limited totality regulated by a transcendental order. Finally, we have presented the concept of the World as the void, in which an infi nite number of infi nite worlds are disclosed. Rather than attempt to attain the universal on the basis of the particular, we have posited the void as the immediate and non-totalizable universal that makes possible an infi nite multiplicity of particular worlds without prescribing their positive ontic order. While the concept of the world as the Whole reduced world politics to hegemony and imperialism and the idea of the infi nity of worlds as limited totalities resigned us to relativism and nihilism, the concept of the World as void at fi rst glance appears to make the very concept of world politics a logical impossibility. It is clear that any politics derived from the World cannot affi rm any principle or value that would derive from the positive order of any particular world, be it tradition or law, identity or culture. No particular being or realm of beings could be the source of such principles, whose only ground must be being itself, understood as the void of its own clearing. Yet, how can the void, i.e. literally nothing, found a politics and what content could such a politics possibly affi rm? Our analysis of the three concepts of the world leaves us with three possible responses to this question. First, it is possible to dismiss the concept of the World as void as nonsensical, abstruse or irrelevant and return to the familiar ritual of the affi rmation of the world as the Whole and its denial in the particularistic pluralism of the international, whereby world politics continues to function as the impossible object, perpetually juggled by idealist and realist discourses without ever being grasped by either of them. Second, we may accept the concept of the World as the sole logically consistent construction of universality yet proceed to infer its irrelevance to politics due to its incapacity to ground any positive content. This solution, which we shall address in the following chapter in terms of nihilism, accepts the concept of the World and then denies the possibility of world politics precisely on the basis of this acceptance: since the World is void, world politics is impossible and there are only particular Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 modes of politics in particular worlds. Finally, the third response consists in taking up the challenge of rethinking world politics on the basis of the concept of the World as void and ventures to derive universal principles of such politics from the disclosure of the World in particular worlds. As we have argued in the Introduction, what is at stake here is more than simply the relocation of the familiar concept of politics to a different level or domain, but rather the redefi nition of politics as such on the basis of the World, which alone prevents the inquiry into world politics from a relapse into the aporias of (inter)national politics. Thus, in the following chapter we shall develop the formal concept of politics articulated on the basis of the relation between the World and worlds, while in Part II we shall address the universal principles, derived from the disclosure of the World, that form the content 34 The World and worlds

of politics and present a typology of forms of politics developed on the basis of these principles.

Notes 1 For a more detailed discussion of the set-theoretical notion of infi nity, particularly in comparison with the Hegelian treatment of this theme, see Badiou (2008a: 106–112; 2005b: 161–170). 2 This theorem (see Badiou, 2005a: 84–86) demonstrates that there always exists at least one element of the power-set that is not an element of the initial set, i.e. there are more parts than there are elements. Its demonstration invokes Russell’s paradox of self- belonging: a set y of all elements of a that do not belong to themselves is shown to belong to the power-set of a, but not to a itself, since the latter option would then invite the paradox of self-belonging that contradicts our initial defi nition of y. This theorem fi nds further elaboration in Cantor’s theorem that demonstrates that the cardinality of the power-set always exceeds the cardinality of the original set and the Cohen-Easton theorem that demonstrates that for infi nite sets, which primarily concern us here, this excess is immeasurable. 3 It is important to distinguish this logical argument about the infi nity of worlds from the ontological argument about the infi nity of sets. While all worlds are infi nite, it is obvious that not all sets are infi nite and that numerous fi nite multiplicities exist (the void set, singletons, etc.). In a transitional period between Being and Event and Logics of Worlds Badiou defi nes his assertion of the infi nity of situations as a ‘modern axiom’, a ‘conviction’ rather than a ‘deduction’, that seeks to transcend the discourse of fi nitude dominant in twentieth-century philosophy (Badiou, 2005c: 182–183). Nonetheless, as long as the necessary infi nity of situations is proclaimed on the ontological level, it remains problematic due to the abundance of evidence to the contrary. After the publication of Logics of Worlds it is possible to separate this ‘axiom’ from ontological arguments as a phenomenological deduction of the necessary infi nity of worlds that says nothing about the infi nity of sets. See more generally Hallward (2003: 66–71). 4 In a somewhat unkind endnote in Logics of Worlds, Badiou addresses the proximity be- tween his phenomenology of worlds and Foucault’s archaeological analyses of epistemes and genealogical analyses of dispositifs only to argue, with a reference to an unpub- lished thesis by Cecile Winter, that ‘in Foucault there is no formal theory of the tran- scendental [and thus] empiricism prevails’ (Badiou, 2009b: 527). Notwithstanding this criticism, there is clearly a resonance between the objective phenomenology of worlds and Foucault’s analytics of government, insofar as both seek to reconstitute immanent ordering structures that condition the emergence of objects and subjects in a given world. What Foucault’s approach really lacks, in stark contrast with Badiou, is not so much a formal theory of the transcendental (Archaeology of Knowledge [Foucault, 1989] Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 seems to contain at least prolegomena to such a theory) but an explicit ontology that would be a correlate to phenomenological analysis. 5 While the theme of the nothing becomes particularly prominent in Heidegger’s writings after Being and Time, it is certainly not absent from his magnum opus. We need only recall the discussion of conscience as the mode in which Dasein’s authentic potentiality for being is attested (1962: 312–347). Not only does the call of conscience say nothing, expressing itself ‘in the mode of keeping silent’ (ibid.: 318), but Dasein itself in the role of the ‘caller’ of conscience, ‘is defi nable in a “worldly” way by nothing at all, [as] the bare “that-it-is” in the “nothing” of the world, [the Self] thrown into the nothing’ (ibid.: 321–322). Moreover, in the discussion of Dasein’s guilt Heidegger invokes the double nothingness or nullity of Dasein. First, as a ‘thrown’ being Dasein always already fi nds itself delivered over to a certain fi eld of possibilities that it has no power over; it exists as (and from) its own basis but this basis is itself negative and serves as a burden for Dasein. On the other hand, as a potential being that exists in the mode of projection Three concepts of the world 35

Dasein chooses among these possibilities but in choosing one of them necessarily negates all the others. Thus, ‘[Dasein’s] being means, as thrown projection, being-the- basis of a nullity (and this being-the-basis is itself null)’ (ibid.: 331). Thus, Dasein is the ‘null basis for its null projection, standing in the possibility of its being’ (ibid.: 333). This theme of double nullity evidently resonates with the two structural moments of boredom in the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, being left empty (the nullity of thrownness) and being held in limbo (the nullity of projection) that defi ne the disclosure of the World. 6 In this reduction of the World to the world, Nancy arguably performs the inversion of the approach of Gilles Deleuze, which consists in the sublimation of ‘this world here’ (or any given world) to the status of the World or, in Deleuze’s terms, the virtual. Any particular created world, endowed with an immanent positive order, may be restored to the dynamic status of the process of creation through what Peter Hallward calls ‘despecifi cation’ (Hallward, 2006: 161), the emptying out of its positive properties. The world is thus only perceived as the actual(ized) instance of the Virtual as the perpetual event of creation. Thus, while Nancy treats the World as our world, Deleuze treats our worlds as instances of the World. See more generally Badiou (2000: 43–53) and Hallward (2006: 27–53). Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 2 POLITICS Bringing the World into worlds

Politics beyond the (inter)national The concept of the World as void presented in the previous chapter resolves the problems of logical inconsistency that have plagued the discourse on world politics, but appears to create numerous problems of its own as soon as we attempt to conceive of world politics on its basis. It is perhaps possible to accept that the World is nothing, in and of which an infi nity of positive and particular worlds emerges, but what could a politics whose ground is the void possibly be? Isn’t the price for a logically consistent concept of the world the ultimate unintelligibility of world politics or, worse, its relapse into something like nihilism: after all, what else can a politics of nothing be? In this chapter we shall confront this challenge of nihilism in an attempt to redefi ne politics on the basis of the relation between positive worlds and the void of the World. As we shall argue, the ‘nihilist’ thesis about the World as void yields a variety of possible responses, including the pathway out of nihilism towards the positive transformation of worlds, which is precisely the understanding of world

Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 politics that we shall advance in this book. Yet, prior to the discussion of nihilism let us fi rst recapitulate the consequences of our concept of the World for the re- consideration of the ontological status of positive worlds as sites of politics as we know it, i.e. as (inter)national politics. In the previous chapter we have argued that the void of the World does not pre- scribe the appearance of beings in particular worlds, but solely conditions the being of these entities, ensuring that whatever appears in a given world has an ontological correlate. Everything, that is, except for the transcendental order of the world: ‘the transcendental, strictly speaking, does not exist. It is the measure of all existence, without any manifestation being necessary on its part as such’ (Badiou, 2011: 75). While various apparatuses that may participate in the governance of the world, be it Politics 37

the presidency, the police, the Ministry of Education, the parliament or a publishing house, are indeed sustained by worldly beings, whose ontological correlate is guar- anteed by Badiou’s postulate of materialism, the transcendental itself, as an ordering structure of appearance, has its entire existence in its ordering effects, the identities and relations it prescribes for the beings of the world while itself lacking being as such. While the effect of transcendental ordering consists in conferring positive appearance upon worldly beings, the transcendental order itself is pure appearance with no correlate in being. The key implication of the concept of the World as void is the absence of any ‘other world’, a beyond-the-world, a supreme other- worldly being that would ground and give meaning to the transcendental order of any given world. Grounded in the sheer nothingness of the World, the order of every world is entirely without foundation and hence without any (ontological) reason (cf. Nancy, 2007: 50–55). The order of the world is entirely immanent to the world itself and is always an intra-worldly ‘construct’.1 Thus, any positive order whatsoever is a strictly intra-worldly phenomenon not conditioned by the void of the World that only gives being to the world’s beings. Intra-worldly order is an effect of the transcendental operation of govern- ing the world in accordance with immanent principles that defi ne the identities of the world’s entities and the relations between them. Since the very positivity of the world is defi ned by its transcendental order, order as such is the mode of the existence of any world whatsoever: there is no world of chaos, unless of course ‘chaos’ is perceived as a mode of order in its own right. While this order may be minimal, fragile, incomprehensible or subject to periodic disruptions, it is never simply absent: if there is a world at all, it is always already ordered in some way. On the contrary, the World as void knows no order as such, which is not to say that it is in a Bergsonian or Deleuzian fl ux of perpetual becoming. There is nothing in the World that could become, chaotically or otherwise. The World is the void, from which particular world orders arise. These worlds might be transcendentally ordered in a strict and static manner, so that nothing could possibly become in them, or they might be ordered by the fl ux of becoming itself, which may at times even appear as rather chaotic, yet the very fact of their appearance would point to their transcendentally ordered character. Neither chaos nor order is primordial or originary, since both only exist as positive states of the world, lacking a foundation in the void of the World. Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 What are the immediate implications of this contingency for our understanding of politics? If every form of positive order is a contingent intra-worldly phenom- enon without an ontological correlate, it follows that neither the ‘domestic’ order of the state nor the international order, which are the two primary sites of politics as we know it, have any connection to the void of being that we have termed the World. This conclusion offers us a simple solution to the vexing problem of political theory: what is the ontological status of the state and, by extension, the international, qua inter-state, order? There isn’t any. The state (and, by extension, every other historical mode of constituted power, e.g. empire, polis, the European Union, etc.) is a strictly intra-worldly phenomenon. As an ordering structure that regulates appearance, it has no being apart from the sheer multiplicity of beings 38 The World and worlds

that compose and sustain it, the multiplicity that is part of the wider society that the state governs. Ontologically, state and society are entirely indistinct and form a pure inconsistent multiplicity. It is only in the transcendental of the world that their difference is inscribed, which makes it utterly contingent and subject to change. While every world is by defi nition endowed with some kind of a transcendental order, the state is merely a historically specifi c form that this order might take and there is nothing necessary about its existence. Paradoxically at fi rst glance, Carl Schmitt, whose thought is often errone- ously associated with the valorization of the state form, formulated this point most succinctly: ‘The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political’ (Schmitt, 1976: 19), not the other way round. Schmitt’s political ontology clearly precedes any appearance of the state: for Schmitt, what is, prior to the state and even the political itself, is pure multiplicity and difference, from which he famously infers the ‘most extreme possibility’ of violent death (cf. Ojakangas, 2006, Chapters 1, 2; Prozorov, 2006a; 2007a; 2009b). It is this possibility that grounds Schmitt’s concept of the political as the friend–enemy distinction, which we shall address in more detail at the end of this chapter. The state enters the picture only ontically as a historically specifi c solution to the ontological problem of difference and the political problem of enmity that consists in the formation of a particu- lar transcendental order of the European nomos, which divided the political space between sovereign entities that monopolized the political within and pluralized it between themselves. While Schmitt certainly valorized this solution both in the Weimar-era writings and in post-Second World War work (1976, 1993, 2003, 2008), this valorization is certainly not his last word on the subject. In fact, the fundamen- tal attunement of Schmitt’s political thought is the contemplation of the decline of the statist solution that Julia Hell aptly called ‘ruin-gazing’ (cf. Hell, 2009). In Schmitt’s reading, the perpetual political instability of the Weimar republic was an expression of the failure of the modern state to meet the challenge of extreme social movements of the left and the right (Schmitt, 1985b, 1996). The triumph of the latter in the victory of Nazism marked the demise of the modern state–society distinction in the triad of state–movement–people, hence Schmitt’s famous remark that on the day of the Nazi revolution ‘Hegel died’ (Schmitt, 2001: 35). Finally, the dissolution of the Westphalian nomos of the Earth after the Second World War Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 marked the defi nitive end of the modern phenomenon of the state and the gradual emergence of a new transcendental order, whose contours Schmitt could describe only vaguely and tentatively (see Schmitt, 2003, 2007). While Schmitt’s post-war theory of the nomos (2003) appeared to isolate a level more fundamental than the historically contingent phenomenality of the state, the very same contingency characterizes the nomos of the Earth itself. There is not and cannot ever be anything like a nomos of the World. Only particular worlds can have a nomos in the sense of the unity of order and orientation that precedes juridical codifi cation. Insofar as we understand Schmitt’s ‘Earth’ as a particular, if planetary, world, its nomos was merely a particularistic hegemonic order that could never attain the universality it attested to: rather than speak of the Westphalian nomos Politics 39

of the Earth, it would be more correct to speak of the planetary domination of the interstate nomos of Europe (see Teschke, 2011 and more generally Odysseos and Petito, 2007). Schmitt’s own attempt to posit the primacy of the nomos is an effect and a defect of his post-Weimar ‘concrete order thinking’ period, which is, by its very name, completely closed off from the void of the World that precedes and conditions every concrete order, be it domestic or international. Yet, if the familiar sites of (inter)national politics are devoid of ontological status, we now fi nd ourselves in a paradoxical position. If both the state and the international are intra-worldly phenomena lacking an ontological status, then both political science and international relations are ipso facto strictly phenomenological disciplines that are founded on the exclusion of ontological inquiry from their purview. As soon as we make either the state or the international the presupposition of politics, we fi nd ourselves within the particular transcendental, stuck inside a particular world, whose phenomenology we may describe but whose ontological condition of possibility we cannot access. This is so even if our presuppositions of the state and the international become negative, i.e. if we presuppose them, only to argue, as idealist, Marxist and various forms of critical theory have done, that the state or the interstate system must be done away with. Thus, while the contingency of the worlds of (inter)national politics opens the possibility of phenomenological analysis of politics within an infi nity of particular worlds, it appears to leave the discourse on world politics without any conceptual tools at its disposal aside from the concept of the void. All that we conventionally associate with politics has no relation whatsoever to the World, which seems to confi rm the worst suspicions: world politics qua politics of the void is perfectly vacuous. There is only an infi nite plurality of particularistic politics, unfolding within particular worlds and regulated by their transcendental orders. There is only intra-worldly politics and nothing besides it. With this formulation we have fi nally arrived at the problem of nihilism.

Nihilism The contingency of the intra-worldly order means that all theories of politics grounded in the state or the international order are only capable of producing Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 intra-worldly phenomenologies that have no relation to the void of the World. Since we are interested in establishing the possibility of a politics of the World, we cannot rely on any of these accounts but must rather defi ne politics on the basis of the ontological structure of the World as such. In other words, we must develop a concept of politics without any recourse to the state, the international or any other particular transcendental order, which are themselves to be rethought as derivative from and epiphenomenal to politics. By the same token, politics cannot be defi ned on the basis of any institutions conventionally held to exemplify and embody it, be they elections, parliaments, parties, referenda, etc., since all of these institutions are positivities constituted within particular transcendental orders. We must emphasize that this separation of politics from all intra-worldly positivities 40 The World and worlds

does not mean that politics unfolds in the World as such: there is nothing in the World, so no politics could conceivably take place there. Any politics can only take place within positive worlds, yet in order not to be reducible to particularistic transcendental regulation it cannot be defi ned by them. To defi ne politics on the basis of the World is thus to establish some kind of a relation between the void of the World and the positivity of worlds. Yet, the problem is precisely that there does not appear to be any such relation, insofar as the void of being does not prescribe the manner of appearance but only endows with being that which appears. Thus, if we pose the question of the consequences of the concept of the World as void for any intra-worldly order, we immediately arrive at two logically possible answers. First, insofar as the World is void, it prescribes nothing, in accordance with the logical principle of ex nihilo nihil fi t: there is no politics of the World beyond particularistic politics within worlds. Second, insofar as the World is void, it may prescribe anything, by analogy with the logical principle of ex falso quodlibet: anything at all follows from nothing. Any intra-worldly political order is ‘grounded’ in the void, insofar as it is, in Heidegger’s terms, not nothing. Whatever politics is practised in a particular world, it is (un)founded by the void to an equal degree to any other politics. Both of these stances accept the ontological principle of the World as void but reject any possibility of inferring a politics from this void. It is this rejection that defi nes the general formula of nihilism. Of course, in a certain sense we fi nd ourselves in the condition of nihilism as soon as we posit the concept of the World as void, whereby nothingness is both the clearing of being and its building block. Yet, the sheer recognition of the World as nothing does not translate into a determinate nihilistic stance, since very different and even mutually exclusive conclusions could be drawn from this nothingness. While the term ‘nihilism’ is used in a dazzling variety of senses, when not simply functioning as an instrument of verbal abuse, what we shall term nihilism in this book is a set of positions that do not merely attest that the World is void, a thesis that can only be denied at the price of logical inconsistency, but subject this void to yet another negation or nullifi cation. Recalling Heidegger’s analysis of the treatment of the ‘nothing’ by modern science, we may grasp nihilism as a nullifi cation of the World, which wants to ‘know nothing of the nothing’, reducing it to a mere ‘nullity’ (Heidegger, 1977: 96). This nullifi cation is equivalent to the negation of Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 the very possibility of a universalist politics that would transcend particular worlds with their contingent positive orders. If the void of the World is reduced to the neutral nothingness as the background for the appearance of positive worlds, no universality is conceivable, since the infi nite plurality of positive orders is all there is. In his Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger defi ned nihilism in terms of ‘chasing after beings’ in the ‘oblivion of being itself’, which we may now rephrase in terms of the valorization of worlds in the oblivion of the World:

[But] where is the real nihilism at work? Where one clings to current beings and believes it is enough to take beings, as before, just as the beings that they are. But with this, one rejects the question of being and treats being as Politics 41

a nothing (nihil ), which in a certain way it even ‘is’, insofar as it essentially unfolds. Merely to chase after beings in the midst of the oblivion of being – that is nihilism. In contrast, to go expressly up to the limit of nothing in the question about being, and to take nothing into the question of being – this is the fi rst and only fruitful step toward the true overcoming (Uberwindung) of nihilism. (Heidegger, 1961: 217)

The formula of nihilism thus goes as follows: ‘there are only positive worlds and nothing besides them’ (cf. Heidegger, 1977: 95–96). This formula may be specifi ed in terms of three varieties of nihilism originally addressed by Nietzsche (1968: 9–39). First, the nullifi cation of the World may take the form of ‘incomplete’ or ‘imperfect’ nihilism (Nietzsche, 1968: 19, see also Deleuze, 1983: 162) that we may also term pseudo-universalism. As every nihilism, this approach recognizes the void of the World as the ontological condition of possibility of positive worlds but attempts to fi l l it with positive content, hence its ‘incompleteness’ and ‘imperfection’. Incomplete nihilism perceives any manifestation of the void of the World in a given world as a merely negative rupture, a hole or gap in the transcendental order that must be fi lled with new positive foundations, even if the artifi ciality of these foundations is evident to everyone. In terms of our World–worlds distinction it seeks to elevate a particular world (e.g. the Christian world, the ‘socialist world’ of the Cold War or the ‘free world’ of today’s liberal–democratic capitalism) to the status of the World as such, whereby the void is fi lled by a particular transcendental, which thereby loses its contingency and acquires an ontological privilege over the infi nity of other intra-worldly orders. Thus, in this disposition world politics takes the form of the universalization of the transcendental order of a particular world. Since, as we have seen, no positive world may ever be universalized as the world of all worlds, such a universalization is only thinkable as a hegemonic project, which necessarily involves the violent subsumption of other particular worlds under the false universal or, in case of resistance to this subsumption, the destruction of these worlds as such. While it has not been addressed in IR theory under this name, the imperfect-nihilist disposition has in fact been the focus of critical attention from the very emergence Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 of the discipline in the realist critique of ‘utopianism’ (Carr, 1981) and ‘idealism’ (Morgenthau, 1948) and is today the object of diverse contemporary critiques of Western hegemony, neo-imperialism and neocolonialism (Odysseos and Petito, 2007; Rasch, 2003; Calhoun, 2002; Mouffe, 2009). While the tendency of this disposition to universalize and ontologize what is manifestly particular and contingent has often led to its subsumption under the rubrics ‘essentialism’ or ‘foundationalism’ as attempts, however fl awed or unsuccessful, to ward off nihilism, it is important to grasp hegemonic universalism as itself a form of nihilism. The very attempt to fi l l the void must presuppose that this void is there to begin with and, furthermore, that it is, ontologically, all there is, otherwise there would be little need to ontologize and universalize that which is contingent and particular. Of 42 The World and worlds

course, the elevation of a particular intra-worldly transcendental to the ontological principle of the World as such does not succeed in overcoming nihilism but merely makes one’s nihilism literally ‘imperfect’, i.e. spurious and hypocritical. Second, the nullifi cation of the World may lead to the disposition of passive nihilism, ‘the weary nihilism that no longer attacks’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 17–18). If there are only positive worlds and nothing besides them, then politics can only be an intra-worldly activity, which is regulated immanently by the transcendental of the world. The only world politics is intra-worldly politics, be this world domestic or international. It is impossible to practise or even conceive of a politics transcending the particular transcendental that endows the world’s beings with positive identities. After all, all that transcends any positive world is nothing but the void and no political prescription can be derived from it. Thus, passive nihilism recognizes the ontological thesis on the World as void but immediately dismisses it as utterly inconsequential for every aspect of intra-worldly existence, including politics. In contrast to imperfect nihilism, it does not attempt to fi ll the void with positive content to be universalized as the ontological foundation of all worlds. Instead, it simply renounces the search for the universal as such and remains content with the particular positivity that it inhabits, which now appears wholly autonomous from the void of the World, which is in turn reduced to a neutral and inconsequential background of the infi nity of positive worlds. The void makes possible an infi nity of worlds, governed by particular political rationalities, without itself being in any way rational: ‘There is no ratio to be sought in the world – all we have is a proliferation of rationalities, of language games, of ideological structures irreducible one to another, that are circumscribed by a nothingness’ (Mandarini, 2009: 60). In this disposition, politics is necessarily reduced to ‘working the system’: the immanent order of the world can be utilized, manipu- lated, appropriated and even modifi ed but there is no possibility of transcending it (see Badiou, 2009b: 369–371).2 The passive-nihilist renunciation of ontologi- cal foundations therefore amounts to the negation of politics as such in favour of intra-worldly management, technocracy, relativism and cynical opportunism, whereby political activity ends up synonymous with one’s integration into the transcendental order of the world and the ability to manipulate it to one’s advantage. Finally, let us consider the disposition that Nietzsche termed active nihilism. Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 If it is impossible to derive positive political prescriptions from the void of the World, then the only possible way to go about politics is to decide on it in the absence of foundations, ‘to posit for oneself, productively, a goal, a why, a faith’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 18). Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty is thus the perfect expression of active nihilism: the sovereign decision, which positively constitutes the intra-worldly transcendental order, famously ‘emanates from nothingness’ (Schmitt, 1985a: 12). Insofar as there is an irreducible plurality of worlds, constituted in this unfounded manner, politics is doomed to remain a potentially antagonistic confl ict between particularisms (Prozorov, 2009b). Yet, to a Schmittian active nihilist this dangerous pluriversality of politics is preferable to both the imperfect-nihilist universalization of a particular world, which can only come about at the cost of a hypocritical or Politics 43

even violent domination of others, and the passive-nihilist depoliticized existence within the immanence of economic management and cultural relativism. There is nonetheless an ambivalent oscillation in active nihilism between the acceptance of antagonistic pluralism as the ‘lesser evil’ that protects us from the violence of hegemonic universalism or the degradation of depoliticization, and the valorization of antagonism as such, which alone reaches the ontological dimension of the void, from which positive worlds are insulated by their transcen- dental order. While this insulation makes security within the world possible, it also resigns every positive world to non-authenticity. It is only the destruction of the order of the world that gives one access to the ‘real’ whence it originated. ‘In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition’ (Schmitt, 1985a: 15). Faced with an inauthentic world, whose disorderly condition of possibility cannot be subsumed under it, the active nihilist wills destructive antagonism that would manifest the very nothingness from which the transcendental of the positive world shields its beings. Thus, similarly to imperfect and passive forms of nihilism, active nihilism nullifi es the World in the sense of rejecting the possibility of any positive consequences of the void of the World for the world in question. Yet, in contrast to these forms, it then proceeds to affi rm the void itself as an alternative to the world’s positivity, resented as inauthentic and for this reason consigned to ‘the violent force of destruction’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 18). The hegemonic universalization of a particular world order, the resignation to and cynical manipulation of the ways of the world, the destructive resentment of the world and the affi rmation of the nothingness from which it emanates – these are the forms of nihilistic anti-politics that we are stuck with as long as the void of the World is reduced to mere nothingness, which cannot prescribe any political content. In this book we shall outline a fourth possibility that shares with imperfect, passive and active nihilisms the point of departure in the understanding of the World as void, but refrains from the second move of the nullifi cation of this void. Instead, we shall proceed from the ontological claim about the nothingness of the World to the affi rmation of political universalism, whose principles are derived from the disclosure of the World within positive worlds. Against the three forms of nihilism, we shall argue that despite the impossibility of drawing any positive prescription Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 directly from the void of the World, its disclosure within worlds provides us with political principles that are valid for any world whatsoever. There is a facile aversion in contemporary critical theory to any invocation of ‘essences’ and ‘foundations’, particularly with respect to politics, which is theorized and valorized as a free praxis that lays its own foundations or produces its own essence. At fi rst glance, our understanding of the World as void concurs with this anti-essentialist and anti-foundationalist pathos of contemporary critique. If the World does not prescribe the intra-worldly appearance of beings, then politics, whose subjects and objects are, after all, worldly beings, seems to be devoid of any transcendent foundation that would endow politics with any trans-worldly essence. Yet, to posit the essence of the World and the foundation of politics in terms of 44 The World and worlds

nothing is not to argue, as all three forms of nihilism do, for the absence of essence or foundation. To recall Heidegger, nihilism reduces the nothing of the World to a mere nullity and thereby effaces the originary character of the nothing with respect to beings: nothing is not the absence or negation of beings but rather the condition of their appearance in the fi rst place (Heidegger, 1977: 107–109). That the essence of the World is the void does not mean that the World has no essence and therefore does not exist or exists as a mere simulacrum. The World whose essence is void is not devoid of essence in the sense of being reducible to the pure phenomenality of appearance – if anything, what the World lacks is precisely appearance in the positive world. By the same token, to say that the void of the World is the ontological founda- tion of world politics does not mean that this politics does not have a foundation beyond the transcendental of the world and is therefore entirely intra-worldly and phenomenal. To insist on the void of the World as a paradoxical (non-)essence or (non-)foundation of politics is simply to make politics irreducible to the reproduc- tion of the positive order of the world, which is precisely devoid of any such essence or foundation. While a thoroughgoing anti-essentialism or anti-foundationalism must assert that the positive order of the world is all there is, our approach affi rms politics as always in excess of this positive order due to its relation to the void of the World. In order to go beyond the three forms of nihilist anti-politics it is neces- sary to rethink the void foundation of world politics as more than merely abstract and indeterminate negativity that is inconsequential for positive worlds. This entails overcoming the nullifi cation of the World that transforms it into the condition of impossibility of world politics and instead affi rming it as the starting point for the derivation of universal political principles. Thus, in our defi nition of politics on the basis of the void of the World, we shall seek to go beyond nihilism, yet not by hurriedly fi lling the void of the World with spurious essences and foundations but rather by fully traversing this barren terrain in search of the universalist maxims of world politics. While any attempt to overcome the nothingness of the World by its nullifi cation or negation merely plunges us deeper into nihilism, this traversal follows the Heideggerian logic of the Uberwindung of nihilism by ‘[going] expressly up to the limit of the nothing, taking the nothing into the question of being’ (Heidegger, 1961: 34). Thus, for us Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 nihilism is not an obstacle to world politics, but rather, recalling Walter Benjamin’s cryptic formulation, its ‘method’ in the original Greek sense of the path of pursuit (Benjamin, 1978b: 313): world politics may only be accessed through the engagement with the ontology of the World as void.

Metapolitics The fi rst step out of nihilism consists in the inversion of the nullifi cation of the World that characterizes all three forms of nihilism considered above. This entails the elucidation of the intra-worldly implications of the ontology of the World as void. As we have argued in the previous chapter, the appearance of the World Politics 45

within a world manifests the contingency of this world’s order, which is devoid of ontological foundation. To say that something is contingent is to claim that it is not necessary and could be otherwise, i.e. to insist on the permanent possibility of the transformation of every world. This demonstration of the contingency of all worlds should not be underestimated since it takes the fi rst step in overcoming nihilism from within by offering us the fi rst genuinely universal statement, which transcends every particular world order: all worlds are contingent. This is no longer a passive- nihilist gesture of renouncing universalism in the name of immanent managerialism or cultural relativism. The contingency of all worlds is a matter of ontological necessity for any world whatsoever (cf. Meillassoux, 2008: 50–80). Yet, as long as we maintain that no political prescription may be derived from the void, the possibility of transformation that this statement affi rms could never be specifi ed in positive terms and remains a strictly logical potentiality for every world to be otherwise. The affi rmation of contingency of worlds thus leaves political prescription up to these worlds themselves, ending up with a radical pluralism that grants no ontological privilege to any particular world and is thus incapable of adjudicating between the politics within different worlds. Thus, the affi rmation of contingency is in a strict sense metapolitical, since it merely maintains the possibility of political transformation without articulating any universal principles that would prescribe its direction. The fi rst step out of nihilism therefore does not leave nihilism very far behind. It is this metapolitical orientation that arguably defi nes the dominant trends in critical political thought today. As Bruno Bosteels has demonstrated, despite their evident differences, contemporary post-Lacanian and post-Heideggerian political theories share a point of departure in the affi rmation of what Bosteels variably refers to as the ‘absent’ or ‘vanishing’ cause, which conditions the possibility of the social order by withdrawing from it and thus precluding its full consistency, immanence and objectivity. This ‘doctrine of structural causality’ (Bosteels, 2011b: 55–61, 80–88), which one can observe in various guises in Althusser and Zizek, Derrida and Nancy, Deleuze and Laclau, asserts that the social order is sustained by a structural void that cannot be subsumed under its positivity, which entails both that every positive order is contingent and could be otherwise and that its claims to completion, closure and self-immanence are inconsistent. In its ontological claims this doctrine accords with our concept of the World as void, which is the condition Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 of possibility of positive worlds, which cannot be subsumed under their positivity and whose disclosure in these worlds demonstrates their contingency in the sense of the lack of ontological correlate of their ontic orders and their inconsistency in the sense of their dependence on the void for their very being. Yet, in Bosteels’ incisive reading, the theories that share this doctrine limit its implications to the strictly meta-political prescription of the affi rmation of the void (in the modali- ties of the Lacanian real, the Deleuzian virtual, the Heideggerian event, etc.) as the constitutive outside of every positive world. What follows from this prescription is the imperative of openness (of every system to its own constitutive outside), pluralism (of contingent worlds) and incompleteness (of worldly orders) against the ‘totalitarian’ closure of these worlds into self-immanence. 46 The World and worlds

These imperatives remain metapolitical in that they are restricted to the recognition of all positive worlds as contingent and inconsistent without proceed- ing to their positive transformation, which contingency and inconsistency should presumably enable. Indeed, various approaches within this orientation, particularly those infl uenced by Heidegger and Lacan, the philosophers hardly known for their affi rmation of social change, tend to be highly sceptical about the very desire for such transformation. Insofar as contingency and inconsistency are not ontic features of particular worlds but ontological features of worldhood as such, of the very existence of a world qua world, every world is founded by the ‘absent cause’ of the World in the same manner and hence no project of transformation could ever overcome them. In the logic of this approach the very desire for positive transformation is thus immediately suspect as an instance of the will to power, the hysterical quest for a new Master, the phantasmatic pursuit of a self-present community, the intolerance of contingency, etc. Citing the evidence of the ‘totalitarian’ catastrophes of the twentieth century as irrefutable proof of the necessary inversion of every radical politics into mass terror, the metapolitical approach remains content with perpetually referring every world to the void that makes it possible.3 If the metapolitical approach exhausted the implications of the ontology of the World for positive worlds, this book would have to end right about now, since there would be nothing more to be said about world politics. Yet, while we share the metapolitical thesis that the World makes possible an infi nity of necessarily contingent worlds, we argue that it also makes possible the transformation of these worlds on the basis of the principles that transcend any particular intra-worldly order and are thus valid in any world whatsoever. Only if the existence of such principles can be demonstrated, may we speak meaningfully of a politics of the World as distinct from the pluralistic coexistence of intra-worldly orders, whose claims to necessity and consistency are disrupted by metapolitical criticism with varying degrees of success. By defi nition, this would be a politics that is entirely indifferent to the particular transcendental of any given world but fi nds its suffi cient reason in the void of the World. The task of the remainder of this book is to demonstrate both the possibility of such a politics and its real existence in the worlds we inhabit. Thus, we shall take one step beyond the metapolitical affi rmation of the void of the World as the guarantee of its contingency Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 and inconsistency by arguing that it is also possible to derive from the disclosure of the World within worlds the principles for the positive transformation of worlds that would be valid for every world whatsoever. Evidently, these principles may not contradict the metapolitical thesis on the contingency of worlds in proclaiming the necessity and consistency of some positive world but must follow strictly from this contingency as its logical consequences. Yet, we must tread very carefully here. Since we always inhabit concrete, particular, delimited worlds, no existence of a politics of the World can simply be presupposed from the outset. What exists in the strict sense of phenomenal appearance within a given world are always ‘bodies and languages’, ‘individuals and communities’ (Badiou, 2009b: 1–9), for whom the worlds they dwell in are Politics 47

all there is. Despite being illusory from an ontological perspective, the insulation of worlds from the World may well be an empirical fact for any given world, making any claim for the existence of a politics transcending the positive order of the world problematic, if not outright nonsensical. What is this politics, which is to be practised within the world and yet transcends it, which subtracts itself from all transcendental ordering but claims for itself a foundation in nothingness? One may be forgiven to suspect that this ‘politics of the World’ would be nothing more than an otherworldly phantasm dreamed up by critical intellectuals to conceal their utter irrelevance to ‘real world’ politics, an arcane and verbose condemnation of the way things are, whose very unintelligibility ensures that things would stay that way – in short, a perfectly safe exercise in radical chic. Nonetheless, our task in this book is not to invent some new, hitherto unseen politics that is all the more true to its notion the less practicable it is. In our redefi nition of politics on the basis of the concept of the World as void we do not seek to introduce any radically novel political content but rather attempt to elucidate the formal structure of politics as it has been practised throughout history. The politics of the World as void that we shall address in this book is not a ‘coming politics’ in either Derridean or Agambenian sense, but a politics that has been there historically, albeit not as a permanent feature of the transcendental orders of various worlds but as a periodic and relatively rare irruption within them. The mode of politics that we shall term ‘world politics’ is thus not advanced as an alternative to politics ‘as we know it’ but is rather developed on the basis of rethinking politics as such in ontological terms. This means that our task in this book is more ambitious than a theoretical design for a new politics, whose actualization lies entirely in the future. Instead, we seek to provide an ontological account of all politics, including its most familiar forms. Thus, we shall fi rst defi ne politics as such on the basis of the relation between the World and worlds, establish a typology of forms of politics on this basis and only then proceed to inquire into the form of politics that is most adequate to its concept. While, as we shall see, there is nothing that is really new about this form of politics, it has indeed been historically rare, precarious and subject to reversals and catastrophic defeats and it is the reasons for this rarity, precarity and failure that it is our task to explicate. Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 Putting the World back in Without further ado, let us defi ne politics as a practice of the affi rmation of principles or ‘axioms’, derived from the void of the World, universally for a given world. In other words, politics is a practice of bringing the World into the world by producing its positive intra-worldly effects. The importance of the term ‘effects’ cannot be stressed enough. Insofar as it goes beyond the metapolitical affi rmation of the contingency of all worlds, politics could never be reduced to mere marveling at the void of the World as a transcendent instance of the Real that must be affi rmed against intra- worldly objectivity but should nonetheless not be approached too closely so as not to extinguish or dissolve both the subject and its world. In contrast to the 48 The World and worlds

metapolitical distancing from the positivity of the world revealed as contingent and inconsistent, politics intervenes into this very positivity. On the other hand, the task of politics is evidently not to transform the positive world into the World as void – such nihilistic destruction only entails the disappearance of the world that is the only site of politics and hence the impossibility of politics itself. While we may speak of politics as bringing or even forcing the World into the world, this forcing takes the positive form of the production of intra-worldly effects of the principles that are derived from the disclosure of the World within worlds. These effects, be they material, discursive, ideational or institutional, transform the transcendental of the world in accordance with these principles, introducing into the world what originally did not exist in it and deciding some of its aspects out of existence. Before delving into the question of the content of these principles in Chapter 3, in the remainder of this chapter we shall elucidate the formal structure of politics by disentangling this defi nition into fi ve components. First and least controversially, politics is a practice. It is not a system, order, regime and it is certainly not a state in either sense of the word: neither a constituted state of affairs nor a constituted authority regulating it. Politics exists only insofar and as long as it is practised. This is why it would be a mistake to confuse politics with various intra-worldly sites, in which it might unfold, and defi ne politics in terms of its institutions, be they elections or parliaments, parties or presidents, public opinion or mass media. While politics might be practised in any of these sites, as well as in sites usually not considered political, e.g. family, gym or rock concert, these sites themselves are neither political nor apolitical in themselves but are rather objects of a possible and always contingent politicization. There is no reason whatsoever why politics must be practised through parties and in parliaments as opposed to social movements and factories. Any intra-worldly institution may become a site of political practice without itself being in any way inherently ‘political’. By the same token, it is perfectly possible that politics would be completely absent from any given world at a certain point in time. Moreover, insofar as politics is entirely contained in its practice, which is entirely contingent, it is in principle possible, if not very likely, that there will never be any more politics anywhere. On the other hand, it is certain that politics has been, since we are able to isolate its past sequences and the positive effects they have produced in Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 various worlds. Second, politics is based on the relation between the World and worlds. In other words, it is never merely intra-worldly. This is a stronger and more controversial claim, which takes us out of the domain of nihilism. If, as passive nihilism argues, politics had no relation to the World, it would be meaningless to inquire into the concept of politics in the singular. As a strictly intra-worldly practice, politics could mean anything whatsoever, since the only criteria for defi ning it would be prescribed by the particular transcendentals of an infi nite number of worlds. If, to recall Badiou, there were only ‘bodies and languages’, then politics would belong to the intra-worldly language insofar as it is used to regulate bodies inside the world. There would be no other way of posing the question of politics than historical Politics 49

nominalism: politics is simply whatever is called politics at a given time in a given world. ‘To every world its own concept of politics!’ is the slogan of the passive nihilist. Yet, like all other nihilist slogans, this one is patently meaningless, insofar as the existence of the infi nite number of worlds leads to the infi nite proliferation of the meanings of politics that may be completely incommensurable with each other. We would thus end up with a homonymy so extreme as to make any inquiry into politics across different worlds unthinkable. On the contrary, if politics is not exhausted by the transcendental of the world in which it is practised (i.e. if it relates to the World as well as the world), then it is possible to defi ne its meaning for any world whatsoever. It is only the connection between the World and the world that provides politics with universal content irreducible to the particularity of the intra-worldly order, its patterns of social stratifi cation or the historical weight of tradition, the tendencies of economic development or the innovations in popular culture. While every political practice unfolds within the world and is necessarily immersed in these and other intra- worldly contexts, it is not reducible to them and possesses its own content and logic that does not depend on the particular order of the world. Third, politics is a practice of affi rmation. In order to understand the signifi cance of affi rmation in political practice let us recall the canonical distinction between locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary aspects of speech acts in J.L. Austin’s classical theory (Austin, 1976: 100–102). We may then approach politics as a practice, whose locutionary dimension consists in its axiomatic content, which we shall address in detail in Chapter 3, and whose perlocutionary effect consists in its success or failure to transform the world in accordance with this content, which is evidently contingent on actual political practices and thus lies beyond the scope of our study. Now, the illocutionary or performative force of politics consists precisely in bringing this content into the world through acts that judge certain worldly states of affairs (verdictives in Austin’s classifi cation), command certain actions (exercitives), make pledges and promises (commissives), respond to actions and behaviours of others (behabitives) and expound opinions (expositives) (see ibid.: 152–164). It is in this illocutionary aspect that we may individualize political practice in terms of the affi rmation of some content related to or derived from the void of the World. As we shall see below, other types of illocutionary acts are possible with the same Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 locutionary content, e.g. explicit or implicit negation, philosophical commentary, ironic resignifi cation, artistic subversion, etc. What makes a practice political is that it takes up its content at least partly in the modality of affi rmation. This is defi nitely not to suggest that politics is exclusively or even primarily discursive. In fact, it is pointless to attempt to prescribe the form of politics in advance: the affi rmation of universal principles may just as well take the form of a dinner-party conversation as a parliamentary debate and the intensity of the former may in fact be higher than that of the latter. It is impossible to stipulate from the outset and from the outside the most intensive or effective way to act politically in any given world, since the number of such worlds is infi nite, as are these worlds themselves. Any activity, e.g. writing or burning leafl ets, building or toppling statues, making or 50 The World and worlds

dismantling bombs, may be retroactively qualifi ed as having the illocutionary force of affi rmation in relation to the locutionary content of politics. The task of political praxis is precisely to decide on the most adequate form of affi rmation, each time anew and with no guarantee of success. By specifying political practice in terms of the illocutionary force of affi rmation we intend to challenge the widespread contemporary understanding of the illocutionary force of politics in the purely negative terms of resistance and critique. First, the discourse on politics as resistance renders its practice purely reactive, as if its subject is always a priori dominated, confi ned or repressed, transcendentally consigned to the enunciative modality of the victim. The a priori orientation of politics towards resistance displaces the concept of politics from that in the name of which the subject resists its subjection to the sheer facticity of this resistance itself. In this manner the discourse on politics perpetually recycles what Foucault (1990: 15–49) termed the ‘repressive hypothesis’, a Manichean dualism of the demonic apparatus of power, be it statist or capitalist, and the angelic subject of resistance, be it the plebs or the multitude (Bosteels, 2011a: 132–169). The dominant mode of this ‘politics of resistance’ today is particularistic ‘identity politics’, in which grievances against and demands on power arise from the positive predicates of one’s particular identity, which power is always already guilty of repressing, subjugating or simply not recognizing. Nor should politics be understood in terms of critique, either in the moral sense of denouncing the evils of the world or in the analytic sense of keeping the powers of the world within the limits of reason. While a critique of politics is perfectly admissible as a genre of philosophy, literature or journalism, it does not itself form part of politics. This is certainly not to absolutize the disjunction between political affi rmation and the acts of resistance or critique but simply to indicate their heterogeneity to the performative force of political practice. While resistance might be a practical necessity that befalls politics in adverse circumstances, critique might be something that benefi ts politics by weakening the commitment of the beings of the world to the intra-worldly order. Nonetheless, neither resistance nor critique yields any political effects unless supplemented by the illocutionary force of affi rmation. Fourth, politics is a practice of the affi rmation of universal principles that in this Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 book we shall term axioms. Contrary to the widespread understanding of politics in terms of negotiation and contestation of rules or norms, be they legal, moral or conventional, we approach any rule or norm as a phenomenon of the transcendental order of the world that politics by our defi nition exceeds. Our understanding of politics as a practice of bringing the World within the world is indifferent to the particular identities populating the world as well to the positive norms regulating their coexistence, but instead affi rms its own content, which, insofar as it is derived from the void of the World and transcends every particular world, is valid for all beings in all worlds, irrespectively of their intra-worldly identities. Thus, while political practice might certainly involve the establishment or abolition of laws, rules or norms, it cannot be defi ned by them. Politics 51

What does it mean to say that the content of political affi rmation is axiomatic? Since it transcends every particular transcendental, politics cannot make recourse to any intra-worldly grounds or foundations and the sole possible ground of its principles is the void itself in its intra-worldly disclosure. The principles of politics thus do not logically follow from anything and their affi rmation always comes as a result of a decision. While we shall discuss the content of these principles in Chapter 3, let us now consider the form of their axiomatic deployment in political practice. Political affi rmation begins with the decision that declares the universal validity of a certain principle for the world in question and proceeds through the intra-worldly treatment of the consequences of this decision. In Badiou’s Being and Event (2005a: 201–239) these two processes are termed respectively intervention and fi delity and correspond to his earlier distinction between ‘subjectivization’ and the ‘subjective process’ in the Theory of the Subject (Badiou, 2009c: 248–274). Subjectivation or intervention refer to the momentary act of affi rmation that, as we argue in detail in Theory of the Political Subject (Prozorov, 2014), uproots one from one’s place in the world and interrupts the very operation of the transcendental logic that assigns every being of the world its positive identity. The subjective process of fi delity consists in the sequence of actions that reaffi rm the original decision in various worldly contexts and in this manner endow the subject with a durable consistency. While the two modes of political practice differ with regard to their temporality (momentary vs. durable) and the orientation towards the order of the world (destruction vs. recomposition), they both are axiomatic in the sense of presupposing no grounds for themselves. Of course, the subjective process of fi delity is in some sense ‘founded’ on the original intervention, but since this intervention is itself unfounded, it remains a repetition of the axiomatic intervention and precisely in this sense remains faithful to it. At fi rst glance, this ‘decisionist’ understanding of politics separates it from various approaches that valorize ‘discussion’ (communicative action, deliberation, etc.) as the quintessential mode of political action (see Habermas, 1997; Dryzek, 2010; cf. Schmitt, 1985a; Mouffe, 2000, 2005). However, this contrast between decision and discussion, Schmitt and Habermas, is entirely epiphenomenal. As we have argued, the form that political practice takes is secondary to its content: nothing precludes political affi rmation from taking the form of deliberative discourse. Yet, what would Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 make this discourse political is not the ‘ethics’ that regulates its process but rather the fact that some content arising from the disclosure of the World is affi rmed in it, the content that has no ground or foundation in the positive order of the world, yet is valid in any world whatsoever by virtue of arising from the ‘universal part’ of every world. Irrespectively of the way it is ‘ethically’ regulated, any process of communication may either be political, if it affi rms such axiomatic universal content, or unpolitical, if all that is affi rmed in it are expressions of particular identities and interests. To speak about the axiomatic nature of politics is not to say that all political action must always take the form of a quasi-sovereign decision, but to emphasize that the content of politics must always transcend the positive order of the world 52 The World and worlds

in which it is practised. That politics is axiomatic means that it affi rms something that cannot be derived from the positive order of the world and that the world therefore does not recognize as existent. From the intra-worldly perspective, the axioms that politics affi rms are based on nothing, i.e. groundless or unfounded. From an ontological perspective, however, they are grounded precisely in the void of the World, which is the condition of possibility for every positive world, and hence are valid for any world whatsoever. Thus, what the ontic perspective of the intra-worldly observer dismisses as frivolous groundlessness is from an ontological perspective recognized as precisely the abyssal ground of a universalist politics, the void of the World whose disclosure does not merely illuminate the contingency of worlds but also prescribes the mode of their transformation. Finally, politics does not merely affi rm universal axioms, derived from the void of the World, but affi rms them universally for the world in question. While we shall address the universal content of political affi rmation in Chapter 3, what is at stake at this point is rather the formal universality of the process of affi rmation: whatever the locutionary content of politics is, it must be affi rmed for all the beings of the world in question. These two senses of universality evidently need not coincide: it is possible both to uphold a particularistic principle universally and to affi rm a universal principle in a particularistic way. On the one hand, an injunction to wear white trousers on Sundays is highly particular in its content but may in principle be extended to all the beings of any given world. On the other hand, it is possible to restrict the application of a universal principle to a particular group in the manner, immortalized by Squealer’s slogan in Orwell’s Animal Farm, of ‘all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’. This formal universality distinguishes politics from various non-political modes of affi rmation, which might well uphold their axioms in a manifestly particularistic fashion, as valid solely for the subject of affi rmation or a specifi c group of beings of the world. Any politics affi rms something for the entire world. Politics is not about the expression or pursuit of any kind of particular interests, be they individual or collective. While the exclusion of the former category is rather unproblematic, the latter appears to contradict the conventional understanding of politics in terms of ‘collective action’. In our argument, whether collective action is political depends both on the structure of the collective and the character of its action. The demand Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 for the recognition of particular claims of ethnic, gender, professional or other groups is not political, unless the affi rmation of these claims or interests takes the form of the axiom that is universal for the world at large. There is an abundance of historical examples of such a universalization of particular or singular claims. For instance, the struggle for women’s voting rights derived its political force from its explicit self-description in terms of the struggle for universal suffrage, not the particular interests of a particular group. Similarly, historical struggles against racial discrimination or anti-Semitism, homophobia or imperialism were political, only insofar as they sought to universally affi rm certain principles that were either wholly missing in the world in question (e.g. race or gender equality) or restricted to some groups within it (voting rights, freedom of assembly). Thus, these struggles Politics 53

did not merely assert particular privileges of a group defi ned by certain identitarian predicates but rather sought to transform the entire world on the basis of the principles that they axiomatically (i.e. without any intra-worldly foundation) held to be valid for all beings of this world. Yet, this universal affi rmation might not take place in ‘identity–political’ struggles for recognition, in which case they remain on the level of non-political negotiation or confrontation with the transcendental order over the terms of one’s inclusion in the world. The problem of many of the contemporary theories and practices of identity politics is that they mistake a contingent association of identity claims with political affi rmation for the essence of politics as such, which leads to the propagation of depoliticization in the guise of radical political praxis. The valorization of positive predicates of any particular identity, particularly when combined with exclusivist assertions that only those belonging to this identity may truly ‘understand’ it, merely serves to objectify this identity for the transcendental regulation of the world, while weakening the solidarity between the beings of the world essential for any confrontation with the apparatuses of this regulation (Badiou, 2001b: 12). When it lacks a dimension of universality, identity politics contributes to the maintenance of the transcendental order precisely by challenging it on its own particularist terrain, the terrain where the transcendental, be it the state or any other agency of government, always wins. In the argument of Giorgio Agamben, the transcendental order of the state is only sustained and stabilized by the affi rmation of positive identities. What disturbs and destabilizes the state is rather the possibility of a community that would not be reducible to any identity and which would not demand recognition of any particular predicate:

[In] the fi nal instance, the State can recognize any claim for identity – even that of a State identity within the State. What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affi rming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging. For the State, therefore, what is important is never the singularity as such, but only its inclusion in some identity, whatever identity. A being radically devoid of any representable identity would be absolutely irrelevant to the State. Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 (Agamben, 1993: 86–87)

Politics never consists in the mere affi rmation of any particular identity but must establish a relation between this affi rmation and the transcendental order of the entire world. Racial, ethnic, sexual or any other form of discrimination is not ‘bad’ because it offends a particular race, ethnicity or sexual orientation, but because it negates the principle of equality that a political practice axiomatically holds to be valid for the entire world. Indeed, if no such principle were affi rmed at least implicitly, it would be utterly impossible to confront any form of discrimination within the boundaries of the world in question. The transcendental of the world might very well authorize exclusion or suppression of particular identities without 54 The World and worlds

violating any of its own immanent rules, be they legal, traditional, cultural or religious. If these rules were held to be all there is to politics, i.e. if nothing followed from the void of the World, there would be no position inside the world, from which this discrimination could be pronounced illegitimate. Thus, while politics certainly affects the status of particular identities in the world, it does so only as an outcome of an affi rmation of a certain axiom universally for the world in question. Thus, even prior to inquiring into the content of its axioms we may rigorously defi ne politics as a practice of a universal affi rmation of axioms arising from the disclosure of the World in a given world. Since in Chapter 1 we have already defi ned the World in terms of immediate and non-totalizable universality, we may restate this defi nition in a compressed form as ‘universal affi rmation of a universal axiom’, i.e. the affi rmation of the axiom, derived from the universality of the World, for all the beings of the world, in which it is affi rmed. It is this ‘double universality’ that distinguishes politics from other activities that may also involve or invoke the void of the World. In Badiou’s theory of truths (2005a: 328–343; 2008a: 3–22), politics is one of four ‘truth procedures’ alongside art, science and love, which all produce generic statements that are universal for the situation in question.4 While love is a procedure that is particularistic both in terms of its composition and in terms of its effects that are of interest only to the lovers themselves, art and science are particularistic in terms of their composition, insofar as works and discoveries are produced individually or in particular groups, but universal in terms of their effects that are of relevance for the entire world. Only politics is universal both in its effects and in its composition, insofar as its subject is an open and non-exclusive community without any criterion of belonging other than the fi delity to the event that inaugurates the truth procedure (Badiou, 2005a: 372–379). Similarly, our approach emphasizes that politics is not merely universal in the content of its axioms, a feature it may share with love, art and science, but also in terms of the application of these axioms to all the beings of the world in question. While various affi rmative practices traverse the universality of the World, it is only politics that produces effects of this universality universally. We have thus defi ned politics as a practice that produces effects of the World within positive worlds by affi rming axiomatic content derived from it. This defi ni- tion succeeds in making politics intelligible without any recourse to intra-worldly Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 structures or phenomena, which is the precondition of posing the question of world politics in universalist terms irreducible to any particular world. Yet, to what extent does our defi nition of politics as a doubly universal practice of affi rmation itself avoid particularism and even idiosyncrasy that place it at a distance from the more conventional defi nitions? Isn’t the sole result of our understanding of politics in terms of the production of the effects of the World in the world a concept of politics that is barely recognizable in the worlds we inhabit? What about politics ‘as we know it’, that thing that goes on in parliaments, cabinet meetings and inter- national summits, is voted on in elections, judged in opinion polls and discussed by mass media? The purpose of our redefi nition of politics is obviously not to separate it from these or any other intra-worldly structures and institutions where Politics 55

politics might indeed take place, but solely to argue that political practice remains irreducible to them but rather consists in the relation established between the latter and the void of the World. It is of course possible that the universal affi rmation of universal axioms takes the form of an election or referendum, takes place in a parliament or the UN General Assembly, is practised by parties, mayors, monarchs or diplomats. Yet, none of these intra-worldly institutions themselves defi ne politics and may well continue to exist and operate in its absence as instruments of intra- worldly governance. Conversely, any intra-worldly structure may become a site of political affi rmation, either momentarily in the rupture of the political interven- tion amidst the regularity of the transcendental order (Bastille, Tahrir Square) or in a more durable manner in the process of fi delity to this intervention (parliaments, parties). While political practice may appropriate any intra-worldly site, it retains its autonomous consistency only due to the relation it establishes with the void of the World that transcends every positive world. Thus, our defi nition of politics does not seek to endow it with any new or alternative forms, sites or structures but rather asserts that any such forms, sites or structures are ultimately epiphenomenal and secondary to politics, which is rather individualized by the singular relation it establishes with the void of the World, whereby the universal axioms arising from the World are affi rmed universally for the positive world in question. Thus, we maintain that our defi nition of politics is both suffi ciently specifi c to isolate politics from other practices involving the void of the World and suffi ciently general to be irreducible to any intra-worldly transcendental order. In order to demonstrate both this specifi city and this generality, in the remainder of this chapter we shall consider two infl uential and at fi rst glance diametrically opposed defi nitions of politics and demonstrate their grounding by the World–worlds relation that we have posited as the essence of politics. We shall fi rst address what is arguably the most famous concept of the political in twentieth century philosophy, Carl Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction (1976), and then proceed to Jacques Rancière’s understanding of politics (1999), which is one of the most infl uential attempts to overcome the Schmittian concept in contemporary Continental thought. Despite evident differences, these two concepts are both articulated on the basis of the primacy of politics to any constituted order in which it unfolds, or, in our terms, the irreducibility of politics to any positive world. While neither Schmitt nor Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 Rancière explicitly theorize the World as void, we shall demonstrate the central role that the fi gure of the void plays in both theories.

Schmitt’s concept of the political: the partition of the void Schmitt’s concept of the political is central not merely to whatever we conceive of as a ‘Schmittian’ orientation in political thought, which is in fact a much wider community than is generally assumed (cf. Cristi, 1998; Scheuerman, 1999; McCormick, 1997). It also characterizes orientations that are explicitly anti- Schmittian, indeed so anti-Schmittian that they cannot help to appear Schmittian precisely in their opposition to Schmitt (see e.g. Zizek, 1999; cf. Chandler, 2008; 56 The World and worlds

Teschke, 2011). The uncanny attraction of Schmitt’s concept consists precisely in its formal character that permits one to reconstruct any substantive notion of politics in terms of the antagonism between friend and enemy: whatever positive understanding of politics one advances, it is always possible to rephrase it as the antagonism between this positive understanding and what it necessarily excludes. In this sense, one simply cannot help being a Schmittian, since it is impossible to make a positive statement without simultaneously negating, if only logically, that which is other to it. Nonetheless, we shall argue that the main problem with Schmitt’s concept is not its excessive formality or generality, but, on the contrary, its excessively specifi c character that introduces into the affi rmative concept of the political the depoliticizing moment of negation. What does Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction actually consist in? The fi rst thing to note is that it is not a division between substantial identities of friend and enemy that exist prior to the act of their distinction. Contrary to frequent misreadings even by sympathetic critics, neither the friend nor the enemy pre-exist the act of their distinction, which therefore has nothing to ground itself in and, as a true sovereign decision, ‘emanates from nothingness’ (Schmitt, 1985a: 32), i.e. from the void of the World (see Mouffe, 1999b; Derrida, 1996; Rasch, 2000; Ojakangas, 2006; Prozorov, 2005). Nor is this act of distinction endowed with any kind of differen- tiating criterion: the distinction between friend and enemy is not homologous to the economic distinction between profi table and unprofi table, the ethical distinc- tion between good and evil or the aesthetic distinction between ugly and beautiful (see Schmitt, 1976: 37–39). Instead, as Schmitt contends, all of these particular, functionally differentiated dualisms can be politicized by being subjected to the political distinction, which itself has no particular function in the overall social system, but solely consists in the intensity of association and separation (ibid.: 38). Thus, similarly to our defi nition, Schmitt’s approach conceives of politics as an axiomatic practice of affi rmation, which brings into the world something (the friend–enemy distinction) that arises from the void and hence transcends the positivity of this world. It therefore fully satisfi es the fi rst four of our components of the defi nition of politics. Yet, what about the fi fth one? Is this affi rmation of the axiom arising from the void universal? Schmitt is conventionally and plausibly read as the enemy of universalism, though, as we have argued at length elsewhere Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 (Prozorov, 2007a, 2009b), the proper target of Schmitt’s critique is not universalism per se, but the paradox of hegemonic universalization of particular content, which we have discussed above in terms of imperfect nihilism. Nonetheless, there is a dimension of universality in the friend–enemy distinction that is often obscured by its evidently particularistic content. We must recall that Schmitt conceived of the enemy in terms of the ‘public enemy’ (hostis) as opposed to the private enemy (inimicus) (see Prozorov, 2006a; Heller-Roazen, 2009; Sims, 2005). Unlike the latter, the former fi gure need not be hated, despised or mocked but rather must only be perceived as ‘existentially something different and alien’ (Schmitt, 1976: 27). However problematic Schmitt’s use of the concept of hostis and whatever its link to the more contemporary fi gure of ‘public enemy’ (as the enemy of humanity Politics 57

as such) that Schmitt was so wary of (see e.g. Derrida, 1995: 103–104; 1996: 106), the consequence of this distinction between hostis and inimicus is evident. For Schmitt, the friend–enemy distinction must function universally in the world, in which it is deployed, just like in our defi nition political axioms must be affi rmed universally for the world in question. The enemy can never just be someone’s enemy, defi ned so for any number of particular reasons. Insofar as a political act is undertaken in the world, its effect must be a wholesale reconfi guration of this world in accordance with the new friend–enemy distinction, or else it makes no difference whatsoever. The transcendental order of a world may feature numerous criteria for identifying and rules for dealing with one’s ‘private enemies’, from economic competitors to the practitioners of a different culture, but these fi gures do not become political, unless the distinction carries universal validity for all the beings of the world. The minimal universality of Schmitt’s politics consists precisely in the paradoxical requirement that the distinction, which divides a given world, must be valid for the world in its entirety. It is not a question here of the friend–enemy distinction producing two worlds, one of friends and one of enemies, by a simple exclusion of the latter: if the enemy does not appear in the world, then neither does the friend as its negation. Rather more ominously, the political distinction produces one world, in which the existential difference of the enemy is positively inscribed in the transcendental as part of the order of the world in its entirety. The enemy continues to exist in the world, in which it is ‘different and alien’. In Giorgio Agamben’s famous terms (1998: 8), it is included into the world in the very mode of its exclusion from it. In other words, the enemy is not simply the enemy for the community of friends that is constituted by excluding and negating it. Insofar as the enemy continues to belong to the world, in which enmity must function universally, it must also be the enemy for itself.5 Nonetheless, even this paradoxical and uncanny universality is ultimately not sustained in Schmitt’s argument due to his specifi cation of the content of the axiom ‘emanating from nothingness’ in terms of the friend–enemy distinction. Why must a practice of the affi rmation of an axiom of the World within a world necessarily take the form of the division of the world between friends and enemies? For Schmitt, the friend–enemy distinction assumes this privileged position because it is constitutive of the only community that may merit the attribute ‘political’, the Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 community of friends. This community is by defi nition particularistic, since it is constituted by a division from a simultaneously constituted community of enemies. Yet, insofar as the political relation is devoid of substance and consists solely in the intensity of association and dissociation, the division is not grounded in any intra-worldly substance. Since the sovereign decision that distinguishes between friends and enemies ‘emanates from nothingness’, what is divided therein is strictly speaking nothing, the originary void of the World itself (cf. Esposito, 2010: 135–149). The positive community is constituted by separating nothingness from itself, drawing a line in the void. This problem could have been avoided if Schmitt introduced some kind of substantive criterion for the friend–enemy distinction, which is precisely what 58 The World and worlds

critical misreadings of Schmitt try to do for him by attributing to him the very ‘essentialism’ that his concept of the political manifestly avoids. Yet, Schmitt was well aware that grounding the political in the immanent order of the world would ultimately bring in the same aporia that he uncovered in legal positivism, i.e. the problem of the immanent self-grounding of the political system (1985a: 16–34). Since any immanentism was inadmissible for him (cf. Ojakangas, 2006; Prozorov, 2005), he opted for the much less comfortable solution of fi nding the constitutive moment of transcendence in the scission made within the void of originary nothingness. Yet, all that a scission in the void can produce is evidently also nothingness – a fact that is testifi ed to by the extremely impoverished notion of friendship in Schmitt’s work (cf. Derrida, 1996: 246–249). Schmitt’s friendship is ultimately reducible to a mere negation of enmity, which itself also lacks any positive or affi rmative content, since it is constituted simultaneously with friendship as a result of the initial division of the void. The community of friends and, more generally, any particularistic or intra-worldly community can only be a negative community, constituted by the negation of the negativity that is itself produced by the scission in the void that makes both friends and enemies possible in the fi rst place. Nonetheless, the very fact that a particularistic community is only constituted in the movement of double negation suggests that what it negates fi rst, prior to the very constitution of the enemy, is precisely an alternative possibility of community. The only reason why the Schmittian sovereign subject has to go through the process of partitioning the void is that in order for the particularistic understanding of politics to take effect one must fi rst efface the immediate and non-totalizable universality of the World, which, as we shall argue in detail in Chapter 3, makes possible a similarly immediate and non-totalizable community, one not grounded in identitarian predicates and hence not constituted by the exclusion of the other. While in our approach it is the affi rmation of precisely this community that constitutes politics, Schmitt’s approach to the political rather begins with its negation. Thus, Schmitt’s concept of the political accords with our defi nition of politics as the affi rmation of an axiom arising from the World, yet is unable to sustain fi delity to the void of the World itself, effacing its universality in the particularistic construction of the negative community of friends. Contrary to the caricaturized Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 image of Schmitt as the ‘anti-Hobbes’ (see Strauss, 1976), a warmonger eager to politicize everything and thus subject human life to the brute conditions of violent antagonism, in our reading Schmitt’s concept of the political is simply not political enough. The friend–enemy distinction does not politicize the world but rather depoliticizes it by closing it off from the World through the reinscription of its originary nothingness as the ‘negated otherness’ (Schmitt, 1976: 63) of the enemy. The relation between the community of friends and the alterity it casts as an enemy is therefore not an originary political relation but rather a depoliticizing effacement of another, ontologically prior relation, between the void of the World and the positive world that it makes possible and in which friends and enemies may be distinguished. Politics 59

Indeed, the World as void only appears in Schmitt’s theory for an instant of the decision on the friend–enemy distinction (i.e. on the exception in its etymological sense of ‘taking outside’, cf. Agamben, 1998: 26–27), to be immediately effaced by two related processes of depoliticization. First, within the community of friends the negation of the political takes the form of the state monopoly on political action, the limitation of social heterogeneity, the restraint of ‘indirect powers’ of civil society, etc. (Schmitt, 1976, 1985b, 1996). Second, in the relations between those communities this negation takes the form of the rationalizing and humanizing ‘bracketing’ (Hegung) of war in the European nomos, which immunizes statist communities against the violence inherent in their own constitution (Schmitt, 2003). Thus, within the politically constituted community of the state the political fi nds itself suppressed, while in the relations between states sharing the European nomos the political is neutralized and stifl ed by nomological rules that are not themselves political. It is only when we go beyond the ‘amity lines’ of this nomos into the free space of colonial appropriation (see ibid.: 92–99) that we may hope to fi nally observe the political in its full force, but even this hope quickly dissipates, since beyond the European nomos there is only a zone of ‘free and ruthless’ use of force in the absence of ‘any common presupposition and authority’, in which the very categories that defi ne the political, e.g. public vs. private, hostis vs. inimicus, become indistinct, and politics collapses into unregulated violence in which only the immanent ‘rule of the stronger’ applies (ibid.: 94). Thus, the political only attains phenomenal appearance in the mode of its own negation: suppression inside the state, neutralization in relations between European states and, fi nally, its self-consuming intensifi cation beyond the European nomos, either in the colonial New World or in the free space of the sea (ibid.: 94–95). While Schmitt is routinely criticized as the advocate of extreme politicization, his thought rather seeks to ensure that the political remains inaccessible. In fact, the positive manifestation of the political is such a rarity in Schmitt’s theory that during his lifetime it was perhaps observable only in the failed communist movement in post-First World War Europe and the fascist reaction against it, i.e. precisely in the situations when the very existence of the constituted order of the worlds in question was at stake. Thus, in full accordance with Heidegger’s account of the ‘ready-to-hand’ mode of being, the political becomes phenomenally Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 accessible only when its ordering force fails and the community of friends dissolves into stasis. It is arguably this proximity of the political to the condition of civil war that attracted the post-Marxist European Left to Schmitt and thus permitted the most fruitful and critical reception of his work.6 What attracts the thinkers of the left to Schmitt is less the proverbial proximity between the far left and the far right, but rather the realization that despite his depoliticizing intentions, Schmitt did not fully succeed in effacing the void of the World, which manifests itself in the world at the critical moments of its existence. Indeed, the only condition for a genuine ‘repoliticization of the political’ is the abandonment of Schmitt’s scission within the void that constitutes particularistic communities and positive worlds by effacing the universality of the World. In this manner, the political could be reaffi rmed as 60 The World and worlds

the decision that ‘emanates from nothingness’, yet does not shield the world from this nothingness but rather affi rms the axioms derived from it and produces their positive effects within the world. This concept of the political would still consist in the axiomatic and perhaps also antagonistic affi rmation of a distinction in a given world, yet this would no longer be a distinction between friends and enemies but rather between this world and the World, between the particularity of the intra-worldly order and the universality of the void.

Rancière’s concept of politics: equality and the spectre of ontology Having demonstrated that Schmitt’s concept of the political is a special case of our defi nition of politics that runs into problems as a result of its infi delity to the impli- cations of this defi nition, let us now consider a concept of politics that is as distant as possible from Schmitt, both politically and ontologically.7 In a series of works from the early 1980s onwards (Rancière 1991, 1995, 1999, 2010b), Jacques Rancière has developed an increasingly infl uential understanding of politics as a mode of the ‘partition of the sensible’ that introduces dissensus, a fundamental disagreement, into the social order. As a rupture of the regime of the sensible, politics is diametrically opposed to the principle that Rancière calls police, a mode of ordering the sensible through the precise allocation of places for different identities and functions, and specifying possible relations between them. It is important to note that Rancière’s police is not identical to a repressive or law-enforcing apparatus even in the broad sense of ‘police science’ analysed by Foucault in his genealogy of modern govern- mentality (1991, 2007, 2008). In Rancière’s idiosyncratic usage, police refers to any mode of structuring social reality that excludes ‘the void or supplement: society here is made up of groups tied to specifi c modes of doing, to places, in which these occupations are exercised, and to modes of being corresponding to these occupa- tions and these places. In this matching of functions, places and ways of being, there is no place for any void’ (Rancière, 1999: 36). Rancière terms the product of the police management of the world consensus:

Its essence lies in the annulment of dissensus as separation of the sensible from Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 itself, in the nullifi cation of surplus subjects, in the reduction of the people to the sum of the parts of the social body and of the political community to the relations between the interests and aspirations of these different parts. (ibid.: 42)

This concept of the police evidently resonates with Badiou’s notion of the transcen- dental order of positive worlds. According to Badiou, Rancière actually developed his concept of the police on the basis of the set-theoretical ontology of Being and Event (2005b: 119–120; see also Badiou, 2010b). Indeed, the understanding of the police in terms of the exclusion of the void clearly resonates with Badiou’s concept of the ‘state of the situation’ as the meta-structural ordering of pure belonging Politics 61

through the operation of inclusion, the grouping of the elements of the situation into subsets that seeks to protect it from the irruption of the void within it (cf. Rancière, 1999: 21–42; Badiou, 2005a: 104–111). In contrast, politics consists in the disruption of the police order through the introduction of a supplement to it. This supplement is what Rancière calls a ‘part of those who have no part’ (1999: 9), the beings that are left out of the police operation of tying identities to places and functions and thus assigning everyone a part in the society. This supplementary collective constitutes itself as a political subject, when it converts its lack of a part in the society into an extreme plenitude that permits it to stand for the society as such. In this manner the demos of the Greek polis, those who were defi ned by no positive trait other than being born in the city where slavery was abolished, used this purely formal freedom to affi rm equality with all those whose claim to rule is based on positive privileges or specifi cations:

The people who make up the people are in fact simply free like the rest. Now it is this simple identity with those who are otherwise superior to them in all things that gives them a special qualifi cation. The demos attributes to itself as its proper lot the equality that belongs to all citizens. In so doing, this party that is not one identifi es its improper property with the exclusive principle of community and identifi es its name – the name of the indistinct mass of men of no position – with the name of the community itself. (Rancière, 1999: 8–9)

This intervention of the people into the police order introduces a dissensus that goes beyond the disagreement between confl icting values, identities or interests, but rather manifests the rift in the sensible itself, whereby an ordered world is sud- denly revealed as split in two: ‘[politics] is the construction of a paradoxical world that puts together two separate worlds’ (ibid.: 39). The well-policed world is shown to contain a supernumerary world, in which the part of those without a part comes to appearance. In contrast to Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction, in which the enemy is included into the newly constituted world in the mode of its exclusion, the political intervention that constitutes the people operates with the inverse logic of exclusive inclusion (cf. Agamben, 1998: 8–9): those excluded from any positive Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 identifi cation in the policed world come to include themselves within it in the form of a supernumerary world that is fully coextensive with the latter yet utterly heterogeneous to it. Whereas Schmitt’s world is ordered and stabilized by the inclu- sive exclusion of the enemy from it, Rancière’s world is ruptured by the exclusive inclusion of the people into it, which nullifi es the system of subtle distinctions that constitutes its transcendental order. Yet, what do the people affi rm in this dissensual intervention? In order for popular action to be properly political as opposed to a mere replacement of one police order by another, it must affi rm the principle that is heterogeneous to any police order whatsoever, which for Rancière is the principle of equality. Rancière’s concept of equality differs radically from its more conventional understanding in 62 The World and worlds

political science as an outcome of governmental policies, something demanded by the society as owed to it by the government. Equality, be it of race or gender, opportunity or outcome, is then something to be instituted by the government in the form of law or statute, something of the order of a political programme to be implemented. In contrast, Rancière’s equality is declarative rather than programmatic. It is an affi rmation of the always already present condition rather than of an ideal to be attained in the future. ‘Equality is not a given that politics then presses into service, an essence embodied in the law or a goal politics sets itself the task of attaining’ (Rancière, 1999: 33). Rancière’s politics does not seek to achieve equality but rather begins by presupposing it as an axiom and proceeds to verify it, not in the sense of logical proofs but through the sheer manifestation of an actually existing collective of equals (see May, 2009; Rancière, 1995: 47–49). It is easy to see that Rancière’s understanding of politics as the production of dissensual situations in consensual worlds conforms to our basic defi nition. Politics is a practice of axiomatic affi rmation of equality that is universal for the given world. The only question concerns the content of this affi rmation, which in our defi nition is the axiom arising from the disclosure of the void of the World in a given world. As we shall argue in Chapter 3, equality is indeed one such axiom, though, crucially, not the only one. Yet, what is the ontological status of equality in Rancière’s work? His aversion to political ontology (or political philosophy more generally) is well- known (1999: 61–93; cf. Badiou, 2005b: 115–116)8 and is well-illustrated by his unwillingness to posit equality as an ontological principle:

[Equality] is what I have called a presupposition. It is not, let it be understood, a founding ontological principle but a condition that only functions when it is put into action. Consequently, politics is not based on equality in the sense that others try to base it on some general human predisposition such as language or fear. Secondly, equality only generates politics when it is implemented in the specifi c form of the particular case of dissensus. (Rancière, 2006: 52)

Thus, equality is both a presupposition of politics and its effect and it is precisely insofar as it is simultaneously transcendental and empirical that it is held to be Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 different from an ‘ontological principle’. In Rancière’s Disagreement, the ontological status of equality is similarly split between the empirical and the transcendental. On the one hand, Rancière provides a historical account of the emergence of egalitarian politics in the Athenian polis as a contingent effect of Solon’s reforms that prohibited enslavement for debt (Rancière, 1999: 6–9). In this manner, the poor, who have nothing and are in debt, nonetheless retain something in common with the other members of the polis, who are in turn defi ned by some positive properties, i.e. their property or wealth. What they share is freedom, which alone makes them equal to those other members entirely different from them in terms of positive criteria. Yet, they are the only part of the community that is defi ned by freedom alone, which makes it possible for them to convert their ‘no-part’ status in Politics 63

the world into the appropriation of the name of the entire people for themselves. In this account, the origin of equality is historically contingent. If there did not appear in Athens a singular possibility to be both poor and free, equality would remain unthinkable. However, the second account of the origin of equality that Rancière provides is clearly non-empirical and non-historical: equality arises as the condition of possibility of any unequal relation or, in fact, of any relation as such, since police regulation that assigns a being of the world to its place must presuppose that its order would be understood and, second, that it must be understood that this order must be obeyed (ibid.: 44–50). Thus, any affi rmation of inequality, insofar as it is addressed to a being endowed with a linguistic capacity, must simultaneously affi rm the basic equality of the intelligence of all speaking beings. This condition is evidently not an empirical contingency, but belongs clearly to the transcen- dental conditions of possibility of linguistic communication as such. Nonetheless, Rancière refuses to present this equality as an ontological principle, purposefully and playfully reducing its status to that of a mere ‘opinion’ (Rancière, 1991: 45–51). The reason for this refusal is Rancière’s persistent opposition to any attempt to make equality the principle of a social order:

[Equality] turns into its opposite the moment it aspires to a place in the social or state organization. The two processes must remain absolutely alien to each other, constituting two radically different communities even if composed of the same individuals, the community of equal minds and that of social bodies lumped together by the fi ction of inequality. (1999: 34–35; see also Rancière, 2010a: 168–170)

This paradox of equality is addressed in greater detail in Rancière’s masterpiece The Ignorant Schoolmaster. The method of intellectual emancipation, developed by Joseph Jacotot in the early nineteenth century, makes it possible to emancipate any individual by teaching them what one does not know oneself, by interrogating and verifying the work of the pupil on the basis of the presupposition of the absolute equality of intelligence of any speaking beings whatsoever. While it is possible to use this presupposition as a point of departure in the practices of emancipation Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 of concrete individuals, it is impossible to deploy it as a principle of the social order, which ultimately accounts for the eventual perversion of Jacotot’s method in the practices of education reformers in France and its subsequent oblivion. For Rancière, the social order is constitutively ‘irrational’, founded on the denial of the equality that conditions the very possibility of order as such (Rancière, 1991: 81–83). Against every reformist or revolutionary hope for the possibility of a better society, Rancière somewhat glumly declares that ‘there is no such thing as a possible society. There is only the society that exists’ (ibid.: 81). This does not mean that all forms of social order are the same (there is, after all, a ‘better and worse police’, see Rancière, 1999: 29–31), but that, irrespective of all possible differences, any society that actually exists is necessarily structured 64 The World and worlds

in the police manner and hence impossible to govern by the idea of equality. An egalitarian society can only be attained by the effacement of the actual equality of the individuals that compose it in the fi ctitious transfer of equality to the society itself (cf. Rancière, 2010a: 170). ‘One must choose between making an unequal society out of equal men and making an equal society out of unequal men’ (Rancière, 1991: 133). Thus, equality is a process or practice that can never yield stable social effects that would modify the overall order: ‘anybody can be emancipated and emancipate other persons so that the whole of mankind be made of emancipated individuals. But a society can never be emancipated’ (Rancière, 2010a: 169). Equality consists solely in momentary and fl eeting subversions of the transcendental order that simultaneously illuminate the contingency of its ordering principles and allow a glimpse of the alternative mode of being in common that is nonetheless unrealizable in any positive world. Thus, equality is simultaneously a presupposition, whose ontological status is reduced to a mere ‘opinion’, and an effect, whose consequence is reduced to a momentary disruption. In its very evanescence equality begins to resemble Badiou’s concept of the event:

[Everything] here is process, occurrence, a lightning bolt of meaning. The declaration of equality is, for Rancière, the event itself, the event insofar as it provides a space to an indelible trace. In my vision of political matters, the egalitarian declaration is made possible by an event and is not to be confounded with it. (Badiou, 2010b: 43)

Indeed, while Badiou builds up an elaborate ontological and phenomenological machinery that addresses the production of the consequences of the event within the positivity of the world, Rancière’s equality event is not supported by any post- evental mechanisms of sustenance and appears to be instantly vanishing, its effects incapable of any stabilization in the world. While for Badiou equality is a ‘truth’ affi rmed as a consequence of the event, which is nothing other than convocation of the originary void of every situation, the void from which its being is woven (Badiou, 2005a: 183–190), for Rancière the declaration of equality is the event itself, whose Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 ontological status is elusive and whose empirical consequences evanescent. Thus, whereas Badiou’s set-theoretical ontology in Being and Event and the transcendental algebra of Logics of Worlds demonstrate painstakingly why the event, which itself has nothing to do with equality, must yield egalitarian effects, Rancière’s equality-event simply erupts within the world as a historical accident: ‘its existence is by no means necessary, it occurs as an always provisional accident within the history of forms of domination’ (Rancière, 2010b: 25). Politics is always an exception to the consensual order of the world and nothing guarantees its continuing existence: ‘Politics in its specifi city is rare. It is always local and occasional. Its actual eclipse is perfectly real and no political science exists that could map its future any more than a political ethics that would make its existence the object solely of will’ (Rancière, 1999: 139). Politics 65

While our defi nition of politics also posits it as an exception to the transcendental order of the world, which, as we shall argue below, does not yield a stable world- form of its own, what remains crucial is the ontological status of this exception. Once more, a comparison with Badiou is instructive: ‘For Rancière, there is no exception other than epochal or historic. For me, there is no exception other than the eternal’ (Badiou, 2010b: 50). For Rancière, the irruption of politics is a historical accident, exemplifi ed e.g. by Athenian democracy, the French revolution, May 1968, etc., that temporarily disrupts the police order, whose basic logic is understood as homogeneous throughout history. For Badiou, in contrast, the exception of the post-evental politics consists in disrupting the infi nite diversity and heterogeneity of historical worlds by the ‘ascent from appearance towards being’ (Badiou, 2003: 199), i.e. from the historical–epochal dimension of transcendental orders to the eternal dimension of generic axioms arising from the disclosure of the void of the World. It is precisely in the ascent from intra-worldly appearance to pure being that we shall identify the logic of politics as such and specifi cally world politics as the affi rmation of axioms of the World in an infi nity of worlds. Yet, the very concept of a world politics would be unacceptable for Rancière, who rather operates with the concept of the world as an infi nitely expanding pseudo-universal totality. Insofar as his concept of the world refers to the logically inconsistent totality of positive worlds, Rancière is perfectly correct in claiming:

[T]here is a world police and it can sometimes achieve some good. But there is no world politics. The ‘world’ can get bigger. The universal of politics does not get any bigger. There remains the universality of the singular construction of disputes which has no more to hope for from the newfound essence of a globalization more essentially worldwide than simple identifi cation of the universal with the rule of law. (Rancière, 1999: 139, emphasis added)

This is certainly true, yet, as we have argued, it is neither necessary nor possible to reduce the notion of the world to the totality of the ‘worldwide’ or the ‘global’, whereby the universal is posited in naïve quantitative terms. The question of world politics is entirely distinct from the problematic of globalization, since whatever Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 we mean by the ‘global’ is nothing more than a particular positive world alongside the infi nity of others. The question of world politics is not about politics ‘getting bigger’ but rather of grasping what politics is on the basis of the ontology of the World or, in Rancière’s terms, what makes the ‘singular construction of disputes’ universal. We certainly do not disagree with Rancière’s emphasis on politics as an activity that is both spatially local and temporally rare: indeed, politics only exists insofar as it is practised, and it is always practised in a particular world at a particular time. Yet, this locality and rarity merely pertain to the contingency of what Rancière calls ‘demonstration’ or ‘verifi cation’ of politics, not to the logic of political praxis itself. In order to be distinct from a particular regime of intra-worldly police, this logic must transcend the particular transcendental of the world and 66 The World and worlds

refer to something beyond it, a something which is at same time nothing, the void of pure being, in which alone it is possible to invoke the equality of all beings despite the ample empirical evidence of their inequality in any social order whatsoever. If, as Rancière argues, equality cannot be the foundation of any social order, then it must transcend every particular world and in this sense fi nd its sole possible ground in the void that we term World. Since opinions are by defi nition particular, belonging to a worldly ‘body’ and expressed in a particular worldly ‘language’, equality cannot be a mere opinion but is rather an ontological axiom derived from the disclosure of the World within a world, however rare and momentary this event might be. Indeed, Rancière seems to imply something similar when he states that ‘politics is the name of nothing’ (ibid.: 35), the name of the nothing that is introduced into the world in political practices that dis-identify the beings of the world, disrupt the functioning of its transcendental order and construct, or perhaps only conjure a community of equal beings that no transcendental can ever subsume without per- verting. Moreover, when Rancière goes beyond the understanding of equality as a historical accident and addresses it in quasi-transcendental terms as a condition of possibility of any relation, this claim is only intelligible from a position transcend- ing any positive world whatsoever. From an intra-worldly perspective, it is not diffi cult to construct a plausible argument about various degrees of understanding corresponding to the levels of a social hierarchy, so that understanding an order and the need to obey it do not necessarily entail equal intelligence (cf. ibid.: 49). It is certainly possible to teach the slave only as much of the owner’s language as is necessary for the fulfi lment of his duties. Rancière’s claim only makes sense if it is taken further: what is at stake is not an equal capacity for understanding this or that language or order, but rather an equal capacity for language as such, which dissociates the problem of understanding from the multiplicity of languages, language games, norms, cultures, etc. Similarly to Badiou’s refutation of ‘demo- cratic materialism’, according to which there are only bodies and languages that may be incommensurable with each other, Rancière divorces the problematic of politics from both a discourse ethics that presupposes a common language (or, more generally, a common symbolic framework) and the tragic pathos of difference and incommunicability between different languages.

Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 The problem is not for people speaking ‘different languages’, literally or fi guratively, to understand each other, any more than it is for ‘linguistic breakdowns’ to be overcome by the invention of new languages. The problem is knowing whether the subjects who count in the interlocution ‘are’ or ‘are not’, whether they are speaking or just making a noise. (ibid.: 50)

Political praxis does not seek to attain understanding either on the basis of a common language or through mediation between different languages. Instead, it ruptures the linguistic–transcendental order of any given world by introducing within it the part of those who have no part, speaking beings that were previously Politics 67

not counted as speaking beings but who now affi rm their faculties of speech and understanding:

[Politics] exists because those who have no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account, setting up the contradiction of two worlds in a single world: the world where they are and the world where they are not. (ibid.: 27)

Thus, Rancière is able to defi ne politics without any recourse to the notion of power that was part of its defi nition from Plato to Foucault: ‘politics is not made up of power relationships; it is made up of relationships between worlds’ (ibid.: 42). Now, this is exactly our defi nition as well – the only thing that remains to be decided is what kind of worlds enter this relationship. It would be absurd to defi ne politics as a relationship between any two worlds whatsoever, say, between the world of the anthill and the world of atonal music, the world of international business travellers and the world of Siberian shamans. Not that there is necessarily no connection between them, but this connection has nothing political about it, insofar as it merely links two positive, consensually structured police worlds. The political relation is rather the relation between any given positive, transcendentally regulated world and the World as the universal part of every world, from which it is possible to derive axioms that are valid in any world whatsoever. It is precisely because of this universal validity that these axioms are never mere opinions – if anything, what can be reduced to an opinion is the transcendental order of the world as such, insofar as it has no foundation in being. It is only because these axioms are ontologically grounded in the World that politics, while always ‘local and occasional’, is nonetheless always possible as long as at least one world exists, since the conditions of possibility of politics are the same as the conditions of possibility of the policed consensus that it disrupts. This is why, pace Rancière, there is world politics: in fact, there is politics at all only because there is the World, from whose disclosure in our worlds we may derive axioms that may be affi rmed universally for any world whatsoever. Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 Notes 1 Insofar as its positive order has no foundation in the void of the World, every world is by defi nition an immanent construct. Yet, since, as we have discussed in Chapter 1, Badiou’s worlds do not depend on being inhabited by or disclosed to human beings, this construct is not necessarily a human construct, either individual or social. An anthill or a heap of rocks is also a world, defi ned by a transcendental order, which consists in a certain immanent arrangement of its beings. While this immanent construct may be discursively reconstituted by human beings in various ways (e.g. as a standing reserve of raw materials, an object of aesthetic enjoyment, a source of economic gain, etc.), it does not depend on humans for its very existence. In this approach to the world Badiou clearly diverges from Heidegger’s phenomenology, for whom the world, even a natural world such as an anthill, may only ever be disclosed to Dasein. And yet, the divergence 68 The World and worlds

might not be as signifi cant as it appears at fi rst glance. After all, Badiou’s worlds are also disclosed as ‘worlds’ in the specifi c sense that Badiou establishes, only to human beings, and, moreover, only those human beings who happen to have read Badiou’s opus. On the other hand, while Dasein is necessary for the disclosure of worlds for Heidegger, it is hardly necessary for their existence as such. Just as animals are characterized by Heidegger as ‘poor-in-world’ (weltarm), because the world they inhabit does not appear to them as a world, the world without Dasein would remain as such inapparent, but it would be there nonetheless. Moreover, as Agamben (2004) argues in his critical reading of Heidegger, perhaps this inapparent world that is itself ‘poor in world’ is precisely the paradigm of the ‘saved world’ that follows messianic redemption, the world, in which Dasein’s work of disclosure is suspended, effacing the difference between humanity and animality. We shall address this difference between Heidegger and Badiou in more detail in Chapter 3. 2 Modifi cation is here used as a technical term developed by Badiou in his typology of four forms of change and refers to ‘the simple becoming of the objects of a world under the rule of the intensities prescribed for that world by its transcendental’ (Badiou, 2009b: 369). It is therefore the least substantial and least consequential form of change, wholly anticipated by and controllable by the transcendental of the world. This notion attunes us to the political ambivalence of the discourse of becoming, which we have addressed critically above. There is nothing particularly revolutionary in affi rming the perpetual becoming of beings: everything changes all the time, yet most of these changes take place within the constraints of the transcendental order and serve to uphold rather than transform it. It is only the kind of change that Badiou terms ‘event’, which we consider in detail below that may transform the order of the world itself. 3 In his discussion of historical and contemporary versions of ‘political realism’ Simon Critchley (2012: 109–117) subsumes the orientation that we have termed ‘metapolitical’ under passive nihilism as a disposition characterized by the contemplative detachment from the world revealed to be meaningless, fi nding solace in particularistic pursuits and pastimes from yoga to gardening. In our argument, despite possible empirical coincidence and overlap, there is a fundamental difference between passive nihilism and metapolitics. While passive nihilism nullifi es the void of the World, metapolitics affi rms this very void as the foundation of every world that renders all positive worlds contingent. This is a universal statement inaccessible to passive (or any other) nihilism. The problem with metapolitics is that rather than derive positive intra-worldly consequences of this statement, i.e. the possibilities of producing effects of universality in particular worlds, it limits itself to its ceaseless contemplation. 4 While the formal structure of the political process that we shall analyse in this book resonates with Badiou’s notion of the truth procedure, we shall refrain from the identifi cation of politics with truth. This is not due to any substantive disagreement with Badiou’s notion of truth, but rather due to the fact that Badiou’s ‘truth’ is a highly idiosyncratic technical term that frequently causes unnecessary confusion. Badiou’s meta-ontological theory of truth has nothing to do with the more familiar epistemological Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 theories, be those of correspondence, coherence or consensus. Truth is defi ned as an indiscernible subset of the situation, whose elements are positively connected to the event. In other words, truth is the effect of the procedure of fi delity to the event (the concept of which we shall discuss in detail in Chapter 4): what is true is whatever is true to the event. Badiou’s truth procedures are thus furthest away from any attempt to discover the truth of the situation but consist solely in its production by gathering together the consequences of the event (Badiou, 2005a: 328–343). Insofar as the event convokes in the situation the void constitutive of it (ibid.: 178–190), its consequences similarly pertain to the affi rmation within the ordered situation (i.e. a world) of its ontological status as inconsistent multiplicity whose ground is the void (i.e. the World). Thus, Badiou’s notion of politics as a truth procedure is structurally similar to our understanding of politics as the affi rmation of the effects of the World within a world. We shall discuss our differences from Badiou regarding the content of universal axioms and the ontological status of the event in Chapters 3 and 4. Politics 69

5 The phenomenon of totalitarianism may be understood in terms of the fulfi lment of this paradoxical requirement through a purposeful policy of maximal degradation and desubjectivation of the enemy that would make it complicit in its own destruction. While Nazism practised this desubjectivation through the reduction of Jews to ‘bare life’, whose most extreme manifestation is the camp fi gure of the Muselmann (see Agamben, 1999b), Stalinism operated through a forced extraction of public confessions from the victims of the purges. While the Nazi strategy was primarily bio- or physiological and the Soviet one more discursive, the outcome was the same: the enemy was not merely excluded as the ‘other’ of the simultaneously constituted community of friends, but was included within it in a desubjectivated and degraded manner through physical and/or moral destitution. 6 See Agamben, 1998, 2005a; Galli, 2010; Mouffe, 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2005 and more generally the contributions to Hardt, 2006; Chiesa and Toscano, 2009. For contemporary re-engagements with Schmitt’s thought see also Ojakangas, 2006; Behnke, 2004; Prozorov, 2006a; Odysseos and Petito, 2007; Rasch, 2003. While it is certainly possible to dispute the success of this ‘leftist’ adaptation of Schmitt (cf. Chandler, 2008; Teschke, 2011), its originality consists precisely in dismantling the depoliticizing apparatus that Schmitt built up to diminish the impact of his own notion of the political. The contribution of these diverse approaches thus consists less in the mitigation of the force of the political than in its proper amplifi cation. 7 In a strict formal sense, Schmitt and Rancière actually operate with different concepts, the former with ‘the political’ and the latter with ‘politics’. The distinction between politics and the political, originally thematized by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean- Luc Nancy (1997) and Claude Lefort (1988), enjoyed brief popularity in political theory during the 1990s, partly in the context of the revival of interest in Schmitt, but is resorted to less frequently today. This distinction, which is modelled on Heidegger’s notion of the ontological difference between being and beings, assigns ‘politics’ to the ontic domain, where it becomes defi ned by the particular social order (i.e. the transcendental, in Badiou’s terms) that is sustained, reproduced or contested in political practices, while elevating ‘the political’ to the status of the constitutive principles that give rise to this order without being reducible to it, be these historico-epochal ‘sendings’ in Heidegger or sovereign decisions in Schmitt. It is easy to see why this distinction has been subjected to criticism (see Badiou, 2005b; Bosteels, 2011a: 42–74; Sharpe, 2009; Norris, 2011): the isolation of the quasi-ontological dimension of the political permits the philosophers to continue to engage in familiar fi rst-philosophical discourses without getting their hands dirty in the minutea of real-world ‘politics’, while still retaining the aura of being somehow ‘political’. Whether or not this criticism is justifi ed or not, it is evident that, similarly to Heidegger’s ontological difference, the articulation of the two terms is at least as important as their difference: the political is only political (and not merely philosophical or ontological) by virtue of constituting politics, while politics presumably retains its difference from management or governance precisely by its link to the political, whose Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 severance would transform it into a purely immanent ordering praxis. Our defi nition of politics emphasizes precisely this ontico-ontological articulation, whereby politics establishes a relation between the World and worlds, Being and beings. Both Schmitt and Rancière arguably operate with similar concepts in which ontic and ontological dimensions are always already fused, Schmitt’s ‘political’ producing painfully real intra- worldly effects (state of exception, the decision on the enemy) and Rancière’s ‘politics’ asserting the contingency of every ontic order in its every instance. In the remainder of this book we shall therefore not make recourse to the difference between politics and the political, instead defi ning politics as the process in which these two dimensions fi nd their point of articulation. 8 For the most extreme formulation of the anti-ontological, if not a more generally anti-theoretical disposition, see Rancière’s third-person account of his method. ‘He never intended to produce a theory of politics, aesthetics, literature, cinema or anything else. He thinks that there is already a good deal of them and he loves trees enough to 70 The World and worlds

avoid destroying them to add one more theory to all those available on the market’ (Rancière, 2009: 114). Rather than write theories of something, Rancière claims to offer ‘polemical interventions’ that dispose with the foundations in ‘general ontology’ or ‘theory of the subject’: ‘Rancière argues that he cannot make any deduction from a theory of being as being to the understanding of politics, art or literature. The reason, he says, is that he knows nothing about what being as being may be. That’s why he had to manage with his own resources which are not that much’ (ibid.: 117). While this anti-theoreticism may be understandable as a polemical move in a given theoretical context, it is ultimately unsustainable: for all his dismissal of foundations and grounds throughout this note on method, Rancière cannot help evoking ‘the ground fi ction’, ‘the ground paradox of politics’ and ‘the ground of politics as such’ (ibid.: 120), the latter phrase in particular being as ontological as they come. If Rancière’s dismissal of ontology were to be taken seriously, it would have to be refuted as self-contradictory. However, in our reading it need not be taken seriously and may rather be read as a stylistic device that downgrades the ontological dimensions of the argument so as to make it more effective as an ontic intervention. From this perspective, Rancière certainly knows a lot about ‘what being as being may be’ but leaves the process of the deduction of his claims about politics, art or literature from ontology for his more persistent readers to reconstitute. See Deranty, 2003 for a good example of such a reconstitution. Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 PART II What is world politics? Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 3 THREE AXIOMS OF POLITICS

Being-in-the-World: the ontological mood In the previous chapter we defi ned politics in terms of the universal affi rmation 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 defi nition is general enough to subsume familiar concepts of politics, yet specifi c enough to distinguish politics from other affi rmative 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 nullifi cation of this void as politically inconsequential. On the contrary, we argue that there is a politics as a practice that retains its

Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 individuality across the different worlds in which it is applied, only because the content of the axioms that politics affi rms derives not from any particular, positive and historically specifi c 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 defi nition is merely formal, insofar as we have purposefully bracketed off the content of the axioms that politics affi rms, restrict- ing ourselves to the specifi cation 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 74 What is world politics?

what these axioms are or how we arrive at their formulation. What does it mean to say that the axioms that politics must affi rm 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 affi rm 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 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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 Three axioms of politics 75

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 par- ticular 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 justifi ed neither metaphorically nor metonymically: being is neither like a being nor suffi ciently 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 exist- ence 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 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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 qualifi cations, 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 enuncia- tive 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 theoreti- cal knowledge of ontology but in the experience available to any human being whatsoever: boredom, anxiety or any other experience that entails the subtraction 76 What is world politics?

from the positive order of one’s world (melancholy, insomnia, amorous encounter, etc.) do not depend on one’s academic (or any other) qualifi cations 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 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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 Three axioms of politics 77

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 defi nable 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 identifi cation 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 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 an empty abstraction: being-in-the-World is nothing but a being subtracted from its world and the indefi nite 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 affi rmation 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 78 What is world politics?

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 nullifi cation 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 fi rst 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 fi nally identifi ed the source of the universal axioms of politics that takes us beyond the nihilist nullifi cation of the World towards the possibility of an affi rmative 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 identifi able 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 defi nition 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, Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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

Community, equality, freedom 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 Three axioms of politics 79

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 affi rmation 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 affi rmation 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 fi rst 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 fi gure 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, Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 we always exist in particular communities or worlds, however open or inclusive they might be. Yet, while we are certainly more accustomed to inhabiting particu- lar 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 ques- tion. 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 fi gure of community that is constructed in this world. What compensates for the 80 What is world politics?

ultimate fragility of these communities is the transcendental conversion of the ontological community of whatever beings into the positive fi gure of ‘common being’ (Nancy, 1991: 12–14, 26–35), a phantasmatic substance that the members of the community allegedly share in and sacrifi ce 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 affi rmation of community as the aspect of being- in-the-World ruptures the boundaries instituted and stabilized by intra-worldly communitarian fi ctions 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 disjunc- tion 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 onto- logical 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 fi rst introduced by the universal quantifi er ‘for all’ and the second introduced by the existential quantifi er ‘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 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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 fi rst 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 intensifi cation 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’. Three axioms of politics 81

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 identifi able ‘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 fi gure sustained by an exception, the universality of feminine jouissance is an open set that is not wholly defi ned 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 identifi able 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 infi nite’ (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 infi nitely 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 defi nes this community and can be a possible criterion for exclusion.5 The second axiom of being-in-the-World affi rms the equality of all beings. Since the World as void by defi nition 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 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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 82 What is world politics?

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 affi rmation 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 con- strained 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 abso- lute 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 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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 infi nity 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 Three axioms of politics 83

indissociable from an ontological perspective: the void that removes any possible constraint is the same void that makes possible the constitution of the infi nity 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 specifi es 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 confi ning 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 affi rmation 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 confi nes 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 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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’, ∃ ∀) as long as there exists anything whatsoever. If the axioms affi rm 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 affi rmative 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 84 What is world politics?

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 specifi c 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 affi rm 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 affi rmative 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 affi rmation. Let us now address the relation of these universal axioms to the particular worlds in which they are to be affi rmed 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 affi rmative 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 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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 affi rmed, 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 Three axioms of politics 85

the axioms of the World are affi rmed 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 ‘fl oating somewhere’, but as the constitutive ‘signifyingness’ or ‘signifi cance’ 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 defi ne the axioms of the World as transimmanent is to insist on their consequential character for the worlds, in which they are affi rmed. If the axioms were purely transcendent, they could be argued to be of no ontic consequence Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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 86 What is world politics?

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 defi nition 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 confl ict 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 diffi cult 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 affi rmed politically within this world, in which case justice is simply another name for the fi delity to this affi rmation. 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 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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 fi nd 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 Three axioms of politics 87

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 transcenden- tal 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 con- ceivable 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 affi rmation in positive worlds necessarily fi nds 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 confron- tation between freedom and oppression, equality and inequality, community and exclusion, but rather involve a confrontation of freedom with freedom (e.g. politi- cal 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 affi rmation of the ontological excess of the political axioms over the particular worlds in which they are converted into governmental principles, the affi rmation of the immeasurable absolute against the measure, however generous, granted to community, equality and freedom within any given world. Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016

Universality and historicity 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 defi ned as minimally as possible, retaining their excess over any intra-worldly semantics. Thus, our contribution to the interminable debate about the meaning, status or defi nition of these three concepts consists in relocating them away from the rich historical contexts of their 88 What is world politics?

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 affi rmation. 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 defi nition 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 specifi c 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 fi rst place is precisely the historical specifi city of their transcendental orders. Yet, given the infi nite 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 infi nite Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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 Three axioms of politics 89

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 affi rms 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: Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016

[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 90 What is world politics?

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 fi nd 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 affi rmation 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 infi nite and their totalization into the whole is logically impossible, intra-worldly concepts of community, equality and freedom are evidently subject to a potentially infi nite 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 defi ned on their basis has ever been practised within any world. It will suffi ce 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 signifi cance 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 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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 specifi c 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 defi ned 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 Three axioms of politics 91

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 affi rmation 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 affi rmation of equality without preconditions that persists throughout history, taking on specifi c 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 affi rmation 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 specifi c 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 affi rm 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 infi nite 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 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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 specifi c 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 92 What is world politics?

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 affi rmation but rather its betrayal, perversion or abandonment. Thus, the perversion of the universalist heritage of the French Revolution, whereby it became associ- ated more with nationalist particularism and imperialism than with any genuine universalism (cf. Bartelson, 2009: 151–167) testifi es 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 affi rmed, becoming available for affi rmation 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 absolut- ism 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 specifi c 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 affi rmation 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 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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 defi nition 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 infi nite journey through the particular but is rather immediately accessible to us in the moods that subtract us Three axioms of politics 93

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 fi rst 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 affi rmed, 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 defi nition of politics as a practice of universal affi rmation of the universal axioms of the World in positive worlds with the identifi cation 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 affi rmed or negated in them. Yet, prior to delving into this task in Chapter 4, we must fi rst 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 specifi cally, to what extent does our axiom of ‘community’ remain distinct from the idea of fraternity whose universality appears defi nitely compromised in its very concept? Second, given our insistence that politics affi rms its axioms universally for the world in question, how far does this universality extend? What does it mean to affi rm 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. Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016

Community without fraternity 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 innova- tions 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 histori- cally lent themselves to the subsumption under the transcendental of the world, 94 What is world politics?

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 perspec- tive, 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, equal- ity, fraternity” seems to us somewhat ridiculous and diffi cult to introduce into philosophical discourse, because in France it remains offi cial (a lie of the State)’ (Nancy, 1994: 168). Nonetheless, despite this reservation Nancy ultimately reaffi rms 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 identifi cation of freedom-equality with ‘fraternity’, albeit a frater- nity understood in the absence of both any ‘sentimental connotations’ and any familial principle: Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016

[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 Three axioms of politics 95

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 affi rmation 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 sacrifi cial logic. After the patricide, the brothers are not immediately thrown into the blissful sharing of equality and freedom, but must fi rst 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 fi ghts 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 sacrifi ce of the father is followed by the sacrifi ce of the brothers’ own Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 freedom insofar as they must renounce the desire to assume the role of the father, which takes the form of incest prohibition:

[First], the sacrifi ce of the Father and later the sacrifi ce of the same brothers to the sacrifi ced father. A double sacrifi ce, sacrifi ce 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 identifi cation 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 96 What is world politics?

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 disap- pearance 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 fi gure of ‘communion’, in which free and equal being-in-common is transformed into a project of secur- ing 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 affi rmation of fraternity from this interpretation of the fi gure 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 infi nity. We must think of fraternity in abandonment, of abandonment. (Nancy, 1994: 168)

Despite this qualifi cation and the generally cautious tone of Nancy’s affi rmation 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 fi nds 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: Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016

[In] fraternalism or brotherhoods, in the confraternal or fraternizing com- munity, 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 fi gure of the brother was merely a symbolic and spiritual fi gure, it was never explained why one wished to hold on to and privilege this fi gure rather than that of the sister, the female cousin, the daughter, the wife or the stranger, or the fi gure of anyone or whoever. One has to ask oneself, one has to ask Nancy, why he is so keen on Three axioms of politics 97

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 signifi cance 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 fi gure 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, Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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 affi rming 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, 98 What is world politics?

perhaps, for the fi rst 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 fi liation. Thus, in response to Derrida, Nancy simultaneously accepts his criticism (Nancy, 2000: 25; 2008: 176–177) and reaffi rms 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-suffi ciency. A good example of this strategy, which clearly complies with Derrida’s imperative of a thorough evacuation of the fi lial-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 affi rms 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 distribu- tion 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 signifi cation. 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 sacrifi cial price of a ‘murder of the Father’, but, rather, in the dissolution of the fi gure of the Father-already- Dead and his Thanatocracy. (Nancy, 1997: 114–115)

Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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 incommensur- able 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 Three axioms of politics 99

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-sacrifi ce 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 specifi cation 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 defi nes 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 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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 100 What is world politics?

purely factical, any specifi cation of this facticity in terms of relation illegitimately adds an intra-worldly predicate to that which by defi nition 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 affi rms can only be communitarian in the sense that excludes any consideration of fi liation, genealogy and even relation as such, but solely affi rms being in common without any criterion or any qualifi cation. Yet, this is where a new and even more complicated question arises. If this community is devoid of both conditions of belonging and the specifi cation of relations between its members, then it cannot by defi nition be limited to human beings but must extend to literally all the beings in the world. This is the question we address in the fi nal 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 affi rm 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 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 attributes that beings are endowed with in their worlds, axioms of the World must necessarily apply to all beings purely and simply, without any qualifi cation. 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 contempo- rary political theory and takes many forms, from the ontological reaffi rmation 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 Three axioms of politics 101

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 fi rst 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 fi nd 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 anthropo- centrism, 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, Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 of a sensibility, of a life, that overfl ows 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 102 What is world politics?

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 fi les is not to disseminate or transfer humanity to these beings, but to affi rm that the axioms prescribing politics have nothing to do with human (or other species-specifi c or identitarian) characteristics but derive from being itself in its ‘emptiest’ sense of sheer ‘whatever’ facticity. The axioms of the World are thus not fi rst 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 fi les, rainbow trout, Hamlet, the keyboard used for typing these words and, fi nally, these words themselves in their inscribed materiality. While this claim appears irrefutable, since it follows logically from the defi nition 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 affi rmative practice. What does it mean to affi rm the equality of humans and plants in any given world? Can a plant affi rm 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 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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 fi nds 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 Three axioms of politics 103

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 affi rm, 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 modifi ed). Insofar as the existence of Dasein does not fl oat 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 fi nal 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 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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 fi nite existent whose fi nitude 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 104 What is world politics?

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 fi rst 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 diffi culty 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 fi rst 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 defi nition 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 fi rst 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 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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 posi- tive world but to the World, which in our reading is the void of being, out of Three axioms of politics 105

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 onto- logical difference entails the nullifi cation of this conditioning, whereby it is trans- formed 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 nullifi cation of the ontological difference makes it diffi cult to move from the empirical observation of the lack of freedom in a particular world to its ontological affi rmation. 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 fl attening 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 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 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 fi rst 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 affi rmed within the world only because the being of the world’s beings is composed of 106 What is world politics?

the void of the World. In other words, politics affi rms 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 affi rms 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 affi rm 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 defi nition of politics does not require one’s understanding of the meaning of the axioms, let alone the specifi cation of this meaning with regard to any particular class of beings, but simply consists in the affi rmation 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 affi rmation), the political subject affi rms them without necessarily knowing them (see Prozorov, 2014, Chapter 2). The affi rmation of the axioms does Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 not depend on the explication of their meaning. While at fi rst glance it might appear ridiculous to affi rm 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 Three axioms of politics 107

problem that is entirely distinct from their affi rmation 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 diffi culty 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 diffi cult to grasp, it remains irrefutable and any attempt to limit its validity to human or any other class of beings would explicitly contradict the defi nition 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 affi rmation 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 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 of humanism, vitalism or any other particularism.9 Yet, in all its diffi culty this task is probably no more intimidating than the affi rmation 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. 108 What is world politics?

2 The notion of being-in-the-World resonates with the idea of the ‘pure immanence’ of ‘a life’ developed in Deleuze’s fi nal 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’, defi ned 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 indefi nite 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 refl ects 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 fi nal 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. Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 5 As an infi nite set that cannot be defi ned by any positive predicate, the fi gure 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 fl esh 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 fl esh, usually exemplifi ed 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 Three axioms of politics 109

citizen’s body is double and also liable to the return of the fl esh. 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 signifi cance 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 affi rmation 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 (specifi cally 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-fi tted, it would be more productive to venture to become more responsive to the beings with whom we share our worlds and which appear so baffl ing to us not because of their difference, which contains nothing surprising, but because in spite of this very difference Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 we turn out to share with them what we once thought to defi ne us as specifi cally human. 4 THE TYPOLOGY OF POLITICAL INVARIANTS

Politics and its negations In the previous chapter we argued that content of politics consists in the three axioms that characterize being-in-the-World as the mode of appearance of beings in their being in the process of the disclosure of the World in positive worlds. The affi rmation of the axioms of freedom, equality and community universally for the world in question constitutes political practice as the process of the transformation of transcendental orders of particular worlds on the basis of universal principles that are transimmanent in relation to them. Yet, are these axioms always to be affi rmed together or is politics necessarily pluralistic, existing in a fi nite number of forms depending on what axiom or combination thereof is applied? The simplest solution would be to assert that any political practice worthy of the name must affi rm all three axioms and any practice that falls short of this is ‘unpolitical’. This approach would resonate with Badiou’s account of politics as a truth procedure, which isolates politics as a singular and rare occurrence in the immanent order of the world: ‘there are few subjects and rarely any politics’

Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 (Badiou, 2009c: 28, see more generally Badiou, 2005a: 340–342; 2008a: 151–153; 2009c: 241–273). In our case, such an approach would restrict proper politics to the affi rmation of the triad of freedom–equality–community, in which every term is affi rmed to the maximal degree. As we shall argue in this chapter, such a ‘wholesale’ affi rmation is indeed the only form of politics that is fully adequate to the universality of the axioms of the World. However, it would be far too simplistic to take an ‘all or nothing’ approach to politics, reducing its historical unfolding within worlds to the confl ict between one true politics and a plethora of forms of anti-politics. Moreover, an a priori prescription that the three axioms must be applied to- gether serves to occlude the question of the relations between these axioms and The typology of political invariants 111

the sheer possibility of their separate affi rmation or of their combination. In his theory of politics as a truth procedure Badiou evades this question by ultimately reducing ‘true politics’ to the affi rmation of only one axiom, i.e. the ‘communist hypothesis’ of radical equality (Badiou, 2010a: 229–259; 2008b: 97–104). Badiou explicitly refers to the French-revolutionary triad in his analysis of the political truth procedure (2008a: 171–173), yet proceeds to demote both freedom and fraternity or community from the axiomatic (or, in his terms, ‘generic’) status so that equality ends up ‘the only maxim that has any universal value’ (ibid.: 264). First:

[The] concept of freedom contains no immediate value for seizing [by the philosophical category of Truth] because it is ensnared in liberalism, in the doctrine of parliamentary and commercial freedoms. The word has been thoroughly besieged by opinions. A free use of the word ‘freedom’ requires its subordination to other words. (Badiou, 2008a: 173)

With respect to community, Badiou offers three reasons for abandoning this concept. First, community is held to consist in the representation of intra-worldly ‘natural’ sense as opposed to the evental truth that is rather defi ned as ‘making holes’ in sense (ibid.: 165, 172). Second, the concept has been appropriated by ‘reactionary forms of politics’, ‘by which the parliamentary state seeks to divide and delimit popular zones from their inconsistency’ (ibid.). Finally, while politics as a truth procedure is by defi nition oriented towards infi nity (as the infi nite procedure of fi delity, unfolding in an infi nite number of infi nite worlds), the discourse of community is, according to Badiou, constitutively structured ‘under the embrace of fi nitude’, as a collective of mortals, even when its phantasmatic fi ction promises immortality to the community itself at the expense of the death of its members (ibid.: 172). While all these objections are perfectly plausible, it is easy to see that Badiou removes freedom and community from the list of political ‘truths’ due to their liability to intra-worldly subsumption and conversion into positive ordering principles of a particular world: freedom appropriated by parliamentarism as the right to a particular opinion and community transformed into a delimited realm Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 of beings by being subjected to sense and fi nitude and valorized as an expression of cultural difference. Yet, as we have argued, the homonymic appropriation of the axioms by the transcendental is always possible for all three axioms, including equality. Indeed, Badiou recognizes this in his explicit demand to subtract the concept of equality from every positive specifi cation, of which ‘economism’ is the most problematic.

[The] word ‘equality’ must be secured in the absence of any economic connotations (equality of objective conditions, of status, of opportunity). Its subjective trenchancy must be restored: equality is something that opens onto a strict logic of the Same. Its advantage, then, lies in its abstraction. 112 What is world politics?

Equality neither presumes closure, nor qualifi es the terms it embraces, nor prescribes a territory for its exercise. This word would not include within it the theme of the social, or of redistribution, and less still that of solidarity, of State solicitude for differences. Equality here is a purely philosophical name. It is unhitched from every programme. [It means] that no lone singularity can have an entitlement that would render it unequal to any other. This can also be said: the essence of a truth is generic, that is, is without any differential trait that would allow it to be placed in a hierarchy on the basis of a predicate. (Badiou, 2008a: 174)

The only problem with this brilliant defi nition of equality as subtracted from any positive intra-worldly measure is that exactly the same subtraction may be easily performed for the axioms of freedom and community. Just as Badiou affi rms equal- ity only on the condition that it loses its social, economic and statist connotations and becomes ‘immediately prescriptive’ rather than ‘programmatic’ (ibid.: 173), so it is possible to subtract freedom from its depoliticization as the freedom of economic enterprise or moral opinion and community from its subjection to cul- tural difference. In short, each of the three axioms may be redefi ned in generic terms indiscernible in terms of any particular intra-worldly predicate. In our formula of community ‘there is no community to which being X does not belong’, commu- nity is not defi ned on the basis of any predicate and is therefore no longer subjected to either sense or fi nitude; on the contrary, this formula ruptures any intra-worldly sense and is coextensive with the infi nity of the world itself. Similarly, the under- standing of freedom as irreducible to any intra-worldly identity or activity, site or mode of exercise has the same ‘advantage of abstraction’ as Badiou’s equality. Thus, we may conclude that it is impossible to discriminate between the three axioms on the basis of their relation to the transcendental of a particular world: all three axioms may either be subsumed under it or subtracted from it. Yet, this signifi cantly complicates the analysis of politics, which is no longer governed by one but by three axioms that are all equal in their ontological status. It is thus impossible to endow politics with one privileged axiom, as Badiou does, and relegate everything else to the status of the a priori non- or anti-political. Instead, there Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 arise diffi cult questions about different forms of politics based on different axioms and the relations between these forms. Do these axioms contradict each other, as in the perennial confl ict between e.g. freedom and equality in liberal political theory or freedom and community in various forms of communitarianism? Or is it possible to defi ne each of these axioms in terms of the other, whereby they appear to be almost identical: freedom is the common sharing of equality, equality is the common sharing of freedom, while community is nothing but equality in freedom (Nancy, 1994: 66–80)? In this chapter we shall address these questions in detail by presenting a typology of political invariants. We shall set as the minimal criterion of a political practice the affi rmation of at least one axiom and then analyse all possible combinations of these axioms. Any contradictions and tensions between The typology of political invariants 113

the axioms would then be immanent to politics, which is thus constitutively deprived of the purity that Badiou endows it with by privileging the axiom of equality. The admission of plural forms of politics requires supplementing our defi nition of politics in terms of the affi rmation of axioms with the consideration of the mode of their negation. If a political practice affi rms only one of the axioms of the World, what is its relation to the other two axioms? What does it mean for a political practice not to affi rm an axiom? Drawing on Badiou’s transcendental logic, we suggest that political affi rmation is measurable by the degree of its appearance in the world, which varies from the maximum to the minimum, the latter equivalent to the absence of any affi rmation of the axiom in the world in question (Badiou, 2009b: 159–160, 169–172). In other words, the minimal affi rmation of an axiom is equivalent to its negation: to refrain from upholding equality in a given world is to negate equality for this world. However, negation may take two forms, the difference between which is important for the unfolding of the political process in the world. In Logics of Worlds, Badiou goes beyond his earlier defi nition of the subject solely in terms of the fi delity to the event (2005a: 391–409) and probes the subjective dimension of infi delity, introducing two additional ‘subjective formalisms’ that pertain to the negation of the event (Badiou, 2009b: 62–77). Prior to addressing these two fi gures, we must specify what Badiou’s notion of the event means in the context of our World–worlds distinction. In Being and Event, the event is defi ned as the rupture of the order of the situation in the emergence of something new that should not belong to this situation. This proscription of belonging is mathematically formalized in the formula of the event as a ‘self-belonging’ set, whose possibility is excluded by the axioms of set theory (Badiou, 2005a: 184–189). The event always erupts at an evental site, a singular set, none of whose elements are presented in the situation and which is therefore ‘on the edge of the void’ (ibid.: 175). The occurrence of the event, which is composed of itself and the unpresented elements of the site, ‘forces the situation itself to confess its own void, and to thereby let forth, from inconsistent being and the interrupted count, the incandescent non-being of an existence’ (ibid.: 183). Thus, the event ruptures the order of the situation, manifesting its originary character as inconsistent multiplicity made up of the void. As something that axiomatically does Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 not belong to being qua being, it exposes the situation to its own inconsistency, which it sought to ward off by means of a structural count of elements and a meta- structural count of subsets (ibid.: 81–103). Thus, contrary to numerous misreadings that accuse Badiou of establishing a rigid opposition between being and event, the event is ultimately nothing other than the advent of the inconsistency of being itself, which disrupts its order and opens the possibility of the transformation of the situation in accordance with the generic truths produced in fi delity to this advent (see Bosteels, 2011b: 2–17; Hallward, 2003: 107–151). While in Being and Event Badiou’s exposition of the event was restricted to the ontological situation and did not address its operation in phenomenal worlds, in his later work, culminating in Logics of Worlds, he relocates the event to the borderline 114 What is world politics?

between being and appearance, ontology and phenomenology, whereby the event is the ‘move from appearance (the plurality of worlds, logical construction) back to being (the pure multiple, universality)’ (Badiou, 2009b: 114). This is evidently not a move back to any ordered structure of being (i.e. the state of the situation) but to the inconsistency of being as such, founded on the void alone. Since it is a move back to being, the event no longer erupts in the ontological situation but rather takes place in a concrete world. This is the reason for a number of conceptual modifi cations that Badiou introduces in this book. The self-belonging set he previously termed ‘event’ is now renamed ‘site’, while the concept of evental site is simply dropped. The site is a vanishing term in the world, yet its momentary fl ash of appearance produces lasting consequences in the form of what Badiou calls the ‘evental trace’:

[Why] do we need to say ‘it [site] happens’? Because this is not something that could be. In what concerns its exposition to the thinkable, the pure multiple obeys the axioms of set theory. Now, the axiom of foundation prohibits self- belonging. It is thus a law of being that no multiple may enter into its own composition. A site is therefore the sudden lifting of an axiomatic prohibition, through which the possibility of the impossible comes to be. Yet, the laws of being immediately close up again on what tries to except itself from them. Self-belonging annuls itself as soon as it is forced, as soon as it happens. A site is a vanishing term: it appears only in order to disappear. The problem is to register its consequences in appearing. (Badiou, 2009b: 391)

The event is now rethought in terms of these consequences, i.e. it is a type of a site whose eruption transforms whatever was inexistent in the world into maximal existence. In other words, the event effects ‘the existential absolutization of the inexistent’ (ibid.: 394), which logically necessitates a radical restructuration of the world’s transcendental (see also Prozorov, 2014, Chapter 1). Yet, while the event is now concretized in terms of the transcendental of the world that is to be transformed, the event itself retains the same logical structure in every world it erupts in. The event is a self-belonging object of a world, whose evanescent appearance Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 transforms the transcendental by granting maximal existence to whatever inexists in it. While the occurrence of the event is undecidable and unpredictable, insofar as it does occur, it always occurs in the same way, because it is always the event or advent of the same thing, namely the void. That the event convokes the void of being in the situation is explicitly posited in Being and Event (Badiou, 2005a: 180–182), but it is also a necessary presupposition of Logics of Worlds, not merely because the event must engage the ‘inexistent’ of the world in question, i.e. an element whose degree of appearance in the world is minimal, i.e. nil. This latter nullity has no ontological status, since it tells us solely about the nil appearance of an element and nothing about its being (Badiou, 2009b: 124). Instead, the void of the World enters the world via the site, which effects ‘the subversion of appearance The typology of political invariants 115

by being’ (ibid.: 363) by momentarily rendering the two indistinct: the site ‘is the instantaneous revelation of the void that haunts multiplicities’ (ibid.: 369), of an ‘ineluctable dose of nothingness’, from which the being of the world is composed (ibid.: 368). Irrespectively of its specifi c intra-worldly site, any event in the world is always marked by the manifestation of the void of the World in it. Thus, while Badiou’s long-standing criticism of the concept of the event in Deleuze’s philosophy (Badiou, 2000: 74–77; 2009b: 381–387) focused precisely on Deleuze’s alleged reduction of the singular spark of the event to the monotony of the infi nite process of becoming, so that it is always the same event that takes place forever, Badiou’s own concept is not as far from Deleuze as he suggests. His four objections to Deleuze’s understanding of the event are certainly clear and rigorous: the event is not the process of unlimited becoming, but rather a cut or interruption in such becoming; it is not a synthesis of past and future, but an instantly evanescent present; it is not an immanent consequence of the unfolding of life but rather the source of truths that break with actions and passions of living bodies; fi nally, there is no such thing as a unique and eternal event but only multiple events in multiple worlds (Badiou, 2009b: 383–386). And yet, despite these important differences, Badiou’s own event functions in exactly the same manner in the infi nity of the worlds where it erupts. It is indeed a cut in the intra-worldly process of becoming but always the same kind of cut, which exposes the world to the inconsistency of its being by convoking the ontological void of the World that makes it possible. Whatever the specifi c character of the site and the inexistent that is brought to maximal existence, the logic of the event is identical in all worlds and consists in the coming to the appearance in the world of its own being, i.e. the void. The event is always the event of being and in this sense it may indeed be viewed in the Deleuzian manner as unique and eternal, insofar as the void is such by defi nition. However, the truly ‘eventful’ thing about this event is indeed its contingent and unpredictable eruption in the positively ordered and historically specifi c world, whereby the transcendental of this world is ruptured and its internal fi gure of the ‘inexistent’ comes to maximal appearance. The specifi c form that this rupture takes evidently depends on the particular features of the world in question. Thus, in the terms of our distinction between the World and worlds the event consists in the disclosure of the World in the world. Insofar as we have defi ned Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 politics in terms of the production of the effects of the World in world, it is evident that the event of the World is the condition of the possibility of politics, which nonetheless should not be identifi ed with it. Politics is merely one of the affi rmative practices made possible by the event, which may also include such other procedures as art, science and love that are also conditioned by the convocation of the void at the heart of the world. As we have argued in Chapter 2, politics differs from these and other procedures by virtue of its ‘double universality’ that pertains both to its effects and the composition of its subject. Politics is a practice that produces the effects of the universality of the World universally for the world in question, affi rming the axioms of the World as valid for all beings in any world whatsoever. 116 What is world politics?

As we have argued in Chapter 2, political affi rmation proceeds in two steps. First, the act of intervention declares the occurrence of the event through the intra- worldly affi rmation of one or more of the axioms of the World, which describe the way worldly beings appear in the event of the World. This inaugural affi rma- tion begins the process of production of the effects of the affi rmed axiom(s) in the world, which marks the fi delity to the event of the World within it. The political subject ventures to stabilize the consequences of the fl eeting occurrence of the event by producing positive intra-worldly effects of the axioms it affi rms. While the intervention has no positive content and only asserts that the positivity of the world is not all there is, i.e. that there is the World, fi delity produces the effects that are positive despite being in excess of the world’s own positivity. Taking its point of departure from the absolute status of freedom, equality and community as onto- logical axioms, the political subject enacts its fi delity to them within the worlds, characterized by, at best, the relativization of these axioms as intra-worldly instru- ments of governance and, at worst, their explicit negation. The effects of political practice include the evaluation of the transcendental of the world in terms of the axioms and the operations on the transcendental, which render inoperative the exclusions, hierarchies and restrictions that negate the axioms in this world. These operations defi ne the faithful subject of politics.1 In contrast, the reactive subject (Badiou, 2009b: 54–58) seeks to negate the very occurrence of the event by effacing its trace, i.e. the maximal existence of the formerly inexistent. Contrary to the faithful subject’s orientation towards the production of positive effects of the event, it seeks to reduce these effects to strictly intra-worldly modifi cations of the transcendental with no relation to the void of the World. The goal of the reactive subject is to present the event as never having taken place and to subsume its effects under the ‘way of the world’. In Badiou’s examples of reactive subjectivity in the works of the revisionist historians of the French Revolution and the post-1968 ‘new philosophers’, the negation of the event consists in the claim that whatever novelty the event has introduced (e.g. newfound freedoms, egalitarian measures or a sense of community), it might have been attained in its absence, by the ‘evolutionary’ operation of the intra- worldly ordering mechanisms. Insofar as the eruption of the event is at all admitted, it is reduced to a momentary ‘time of troubles’, incapable of yielding any positive Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 consequences for the world. Thus, with regard to the axioms of the World, the reactive subject refuses to affi rm them in the present and ventures to erase the traces of their affi rmation in the past and block their affi rmation in the future. As we have already argued, this negation need not entail an explicit being ‘against’ freedom, equality and community. On the contrary, the reactive subject might well uphold them as positive ‘intra-worldly’ values deprived of their ontologically universal and absolute character: ‘[O]f course, our world must certainly allow a measure of freedom, it is just a matter of attaining the right balance between freedom and security, order, etc.’. As soon as the axioms of the World are relativized as transcendentally prescribed measures, we observe the reactive negation of politics (cf. Badiou, 2009b: 55). In terms of the three other truth procedures isolated by The typology of political invariants 117

Badiou, reactive subjectivity takes the form of academicism in arts, conjugality in love and pedagogism in science (ibid.: 78). In all these cases we also observe the reduction of evental novelty to the reproduction of the transcendental, the subsumption of the radical universality of being-in-the-World under the regulative prescriptions of the positive world. While the reactive subject seeks to preserve the existing order against the disruptive effects of political affi rmation by subsuming them under the transcendental of the world, the obscure subject ventures to destroy the effects of political affi rmation as such, occulting the ‘new present’ that post-evental practices produce (ibid.: 59–61). This occultation proceeds by the construction of the phantasmatic fi gure of a pure, transcendent social body devoid of political divisions of the kind introduced by the faithful subjects of politics. It is in the name of this phantasmatic body that the material or bodily effects of politics must be destroyed. Whereas reactive subjects seek to negate the traces of the event without destroying (but merely devaluing) the present already produced in fi delity to it, the obscure subject targets precisely the post-evental reality of the world, whose destruction paves the way for the phantasmatic assertion of the fusion of the world into a transcendent body. The obscure formalism of the subject takes the form of iconoclasm in arts, fusion in love, and obscurantism in science. In the case of the political truth procedure Badiou uses the concept of fascism as a generic term for the obscure subject, irreducible to the experience of the twentieth century European fascism (ibid.: 72–74). While the link between the historical experience of fascism and the formal construct of obscure subjectivity is evident, the two concepts are far from identical and, as we shall argue in the following section, the obscure subject can be observed in political practices of socialist or liberal orientations that are quite distant from any conventional understanding of fascism. Thus, we end up with three formal types of relation that can be established to the event of the World in the world. Political axioms of the World may be affi rmed by a faithful subject, denied by a reactive subject or occulted by an obscure subject.2 We may now isolate three degrees of affi rmation of the axioms that we shall rely on in our typology of political invariants. First, the maximal degree of affi rmation goes beyond any measure prescribed by the transcendental and thus always exceeds whatever value freedom, equality and community have as intra-worldly measures. Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 The non-maximal degree affi rms the axiom to some extent, but remains less than or equal to the intra-worldly measure of the axiomatic principles, hence this affi rmation is inconsequential for the world in question: while the axiom is indeed affi rmed, nothing happens as a result of this affi rmation. Finally, the minimal degree negates the axioms in the reactive or obscure fashion, making freedom, equality and community inexistent in the world other than as artful homonyms. The practice that affi rms all three maxims to a minimal degree is the only one that really merits the name ‘anti-political’. Negating freedom, equality and community altogether, this practice produces a nihilistic (un)world, in which any access to universality is completely foreclosed and all that remains is the particularistic management of bodies and languages. 118 What is world politics?

Seven forms of politics We are now prepared to outline a typology of political invariants. Types of politics are individualized, fi rst, on the basis of the axiom or combination thereof that they affi rm and, second, on the basis of the way they negate the remaining axioms, i.e. whether they do so in the reactive or obscure mode. Since a practice that negates all three axioms is non-political, our typology features seven political invariants, six of which are then specifi ed further on the basis of the mode of negation that they employ. We must emphasize that the names we give to these invariants are technical terms and should not be confused with conventional descriptions and self-descriptions of various political orientations, ideologies, movements or parties. While the affi nities between them should be self-evident, what we are interested in is not generalization from concrete historical cases, but rather a logical deduction of all possible modes of politics from the axioms of the World. In other words, when we speak of libertarianism, egalitarianism and communitarianism, these terms are simple lexical derivations from the names of the three axioms of freedom, equality and community and their resemblance to the proper names of historical or contemporary politics may well be coincidental. Moreover, the logically derived invariants that we shall address below have taken different forms in different worlds at different points in time: a libertarian politics of the eighteenth century would certainly appear very different from contemporary actualizations of this invariant, just as contemporary forms of egalitarianism in Western Europe and the Middle East may differ dramatically. Since the form that politics takes in a given world is conditioned by the transcendental of the world in question and the number of these worlds is infi nite, it logically follows that the number of these forms is also infi nite. Nonetheless, for all their diversity these forms may actualize only seven possible invariants of axiomatic content.

Libertarianism The fi rst three invariants that we shall consider affi rm only one of the axioms of the World and negate the other two. The fi rst of these we shall term libertarianism and formalize as [F, -E, -C], where F stands for the affi rmed axiom of freedom

Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 and E and C for the negated (-) axioms of equality and community. A libertarian politics ventures a maximal affi rmation of freedom in the world in question, yet negates the axioms of equality and community. Its affi rmation of freedom is thus combined with the justifi cation of hierarchies and exclusions, whereby freedom is neither shared equally or by all the beings of the world in common. When this politics is deployed in any given world, it seeks to render inoperative those aspects of the transcendental order that limit the existential potentialities of the beings of the world, e.g. the possibilities of expression, exchange, circulation, etc., but does not confront the hierarchical and exclusionary aspects of the transcendental and may even fortify them precisely in the name of the defence of freedom against excessive egalitarian and communitarian claims. The paradigmatic example of such The typology of political invariants 119

a politics is of course the classical liberal affi rmation of markets as ensuring the maximal freedom of all beings, which is thereby separated from any consideration of substantive equality and any conception of community that is ‘thicker’ than the minimal community of free agents in the market. This ‘economic’ paradigm is easily transferred to other domains of the world in question, be it government, morality, art or sexuality – something we observe in the contemporary universalization of economic rationality as the paradigm of human behaviour in various strands of the neoliberal governmentality (see Dean, 1999; Barry et al., 1996; Rose, 1999; Lemke, 2001; Du Gay, 2002). It is important to note that in order to satisfy the universalist criterion inscribed in our defi nition of politics, libertarian practice must indeed affi rm the axiom of freedom for all the beings of the world, as opposed to any particular set of beings. However problematic the affi rmation of freedom without equality and community may appear (and we shall address its necessarily problematic character below), it is not identical to the particularistic restriction of freedom to specifi c beings only. On the contrary, libertarianism attests to its universality by rendering itself indifferent or blind to inequalities and exclusions that characterize the world in question, positing freedom ‘for all’ without any consideration of the hierarchical or exclusive structure of this ‘all’. The elaboration of the libertarian invariant requires a consideration of the secondary criterion, i.e. its relation to the axioms of equality and community. If both equality and community are reactively negated, libertarian politics produces a world whose transcendental order is oriented towards ensuring the unobstructed operation of the mechanisms of free circulation and exchange in the world in ques- tion. While it may intervene in the transcendental in order to remove the limits to this freedom, these interventions simultaneously prop up the transcendental against any claims for substantive equality and an inclusive community. These claims are rejected because equality and community are not viewed as ontological axioms, but as epiphenomena derivative from the axiom of freedom that alone is granted onto- logical status. Thus, egalitarian and communitarian claims are posited as something that can be attained on the basis of freedom itself, whereby equality is reinscribed as ‘equality of opportunity’ and community reconstructed as a quasi-market site for interaction of free agents. Any affi rmation of these axioms as autonomous from and equiprimordial to freedom is then dismissed as either naively utopian or Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 potentially violent and totalitarian. It is easy to recognize in this description the neoliberal consensus of the 1980s that continues to characterize the contemporary Western politics of the centre-right. If both equality and community are obscurely negated, libertarian politics no longer remains indifferent to the claims for equality and community, but actively seeks to destroy any effects produced in the world by the affi rmation of these axioms. Its advocation of freedom is thus combined with an extreme hostility to all egalitarian communities or movements within the world and their suppression in the name of the ‘proper’ intra-worldly measure of equality and community, defi ned on the basis of and in terms of the axiom of freedom. In this manner, obscure libertarianism constructs a fi ctitious fi gure of a ‘free world’ or ‘free society’, which 120 What is world politics?

is cast as perpetually threatened by egalitarian or communitarian perversions and hence in need of a perpetual purge of these ‘alien’ elements from the world in question. We may observe this type of politics in the right-wing populism of an individualist type, exemplifi ed e.g. by the Tea Party movement in the US or, more generally, in the critique of ‘big government’ in the American right-wing discourse. This type of obscurantism must be rigorously distinguished from the fascist forms of communitarianism that we shall address below precisely due to its valorization of individual freedom to be protected against the equalizing or community- building interventions of the government dominated by the ubiquitous ‘socialists’ from Roosevelt to Obama. While it would take an easy exercise in the critique of ideology to demonstrate how this extreme valorization of freedom against ‘big government’ actually serves to sustain clearly non-emancipatory and even outright oppressive practices (from patriarchal family values to racist violence), what we are dealing with here is not the occultation of freedom as such, practised e.g. in the European fascisms of the 1930s, but its hypertrophied valorization and defence against fi ctitious threats that ultimately make it a homonym of itself. Finally, we have two intermediate variants. If libertarianism is reactive on equality and obscure on community, we fi nd ourselves in a world governed by a demobilizing and anti-participatory transcendental logic, which may deploy limited egalitarian measures to preserve the unhindered operation of the rational- ity of economic freedom against communitarian challenges, insofar as the latter (be they nationalist or ethno-religious) are perceived as a threat to free circulation and exchange. Such a politics may be observed in the more technocratic, expert- governed forms of contemporary liberal governance. On the contrary, if liber- tarianism produces a reactive denial of community and an obscure occultation of equality, it is capable of minor communitarian compromises, be it in the form of fl irtation with nationalism or religion, in order to disarm and destroy any egalitarian challenges to its rule from labour unions to social movements. This type of politics may be observed in a number of post-Soviet states in the 1990s, where neoliberal market reforms were accompanied by carefully dosed affi rmations of nationalist communitarianism, never strong enough to challenge the integration of these states in the global capitalist order. Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 Egalitarianism Let us now consider the second invariant, constituted by the affi rmation of equality and formalized as [–F, E, -C]. This invariant that we shall term egalitarianism affi rms the ontological equality of all beings in the world while negating their freedom and community. When this politics is deployed in the world, it seeks to render inoperative all types of hierarchical relationships, while remaining indifferent to whether equalized beings are free or constitute a community. Moreover, this politics may force equality into the world precisely in the mode of the dissolution of community perceived as hierarchical or the deprivation of freedom perceived as a particular privilege. At the same time, as long as egalitarianism remains political, The typology of political invariants 121

these dissolutions and deprivations do not entail that its universalist affi rmation of equality is a mere sham, whereby some are proverbially ‘more equal than others’. Equality is indeed affi rmed for all the beings of the world, yet without regard for their freedom or community. The exemplary case of egalitarian politics is the experience of ‘real socialism’ of the Soviet type, emulated to different degrees by Soviet satellite states and autonomous socialist states, from China to Albania. Historically, this experience has been extremely diverse and we can account for this diversity by considering the typology of egalitarian invariants on the basis of the modality of their negation of the axioms of freedom and community. If both the axioms of freedom and community are reactively denied, the socialist project is reduced to the forcing of equality within the world, while its emancipatory orientation (evident e.g. in the explosion of social and artistic creativity and experimentation in Soviet Russia in the immediate post-revolutionary period) and communitarian promise (evident in the focus of this experimentation on inventing new ways of being-in-common, socialist ‘forms of life’) are sidelined. In the post-Civil War USSR prior to the Stalinist Great Break socialism was rethought along precisely these lines as an egalitarian project, undertaken by the party state in a top-down manner through the disqualifi cation of pre-revolutionary class hierarchies (see Priestland, 2007; Fitzpatrick, 2002). The negation of freedom through censorship and of community through the elimination of all automonous associations were shrugged off as the inconsequential abolition of useless ‘formal’ freedoms and petty particularistic communities that was more than compensated for by the rise of the new egalitarian society. When both freedom and community are obscurely negated, egalitarian politics goes beyond mere indifference to these axioms towards the destruction of the actual effects of their affi rmation in the world. This occultation of freedom and commu- nity took its most extreme form in the Great Terror of 1936–8, which brought the Soviet world to the brink of self-destruction in the blind terror that, aside from a number of ‘targeted operations’ against particular diasporas and social groups, struck everyone equally (Getty and Naumov, 2010; Priestland, 2007; Goldman, 2007). This form of egalitarianism forced equality into the world by destroying every trace of revolutionary emancipation and autonomous community. In their place the Soviet regime produced phantasmatic fi gures of the ‘new Soviet man’, infi nitely freer than Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 its bourgeois counterpart, and the ‘new type of community – the Soviet people’, defi ned as a higher form of being-in-common. While these phantasmatic fi gures were produced in ‘socialist realist’ art, which represented the Soviet forms of life ‘in the process of becoming’, i.e. as what they would eventually be when the project of socialist construction was completed (Groys, 2011; Dobrenko, 2007), the obverse of this production was the destruction of actual forms of life that bore the traces of the free communities of the revolutionary and the pre-revolutionary period, the destruction that perversely assumed the egalitarian character that the regime promoted. The Stalinist labour camps of the Gulag are a hyperbolic example of this terrorist egalitarianism, which equalizes the beings of the world solely as Agamben’s homini sacri, i.e. beings exposed to death that is neither homicidal nor sacrifi cial. 122 What is world politics?

We shall fi nally consider the two intermediate forms of egalitarianism. If the axiom of freedom is obscured, while the axiom of community is reactively denied, the transcendental order of the world admits a limited degree of communitarian- ism precisely in order to pursue the destruction of the traces of freedom in the world. This form is exemplifi ed by the mid-1930s’ mutation of Stalinism into an ideology of ‘socialist patriotism’, whereby the regime moderated its stance on pre- revolutionary Russian history and traditional culture and itself embraced some features of the pre-revolutionary regime, through e.g. the restoration of author- itarian methods in education, pro-natalist family policies or the reinforcement of discipline at work (Fitzpatrick, 2002; Hoffman, 2003). It is crucial to emphasize that contrary to some readings of Stalinism as from the outset ‘nationalistic’ (Tucker, 1992, cf. Van Ree, 2002), this initial concession of the Soviet regime to communitarianism was, in contrast to the post-Second World War period addressed below, relatively restrained and clearly instrumental, using these aspects to prop up the regime’s stability and to escape the threat of social disintegration in the aftermath of the cataclysms of collectivization and industrialization in the early 1930s. The reason why the regime appeared to give in a little on the question of community was precisely to avoid giving in at all on the question of freedom: the ‘rehabilitation’ of traditional Russian forms of life was itself the tool of the repression of leftist tendencies in art, education and social life at large during the mid-1930s. Finally, if egalitarian politics reactively denies freedom and obscures community, the logic of compromise is reversed. We observe this form of politics in the post- Stalinist ‘stagnation era’ in Soviet politics, when the regime all but exhausted its mobilizing potential yet retained suffi cient resources to defend itself against frontal opposition. In this period (1964–85), the regime tolerated a variety of private freedoms, regarding e.g. consumption, style or sexuality, as long as these remained strictly private, i.e. disavowed in the offi cial discourse and not conspicuously displayed by their practitioners. Whenever the use of these freedoms gave rise to collective practices and the formation of autonomous societies or organizations, the regime intervened with a familiar, if gradually diminishing, brutality in order to prevent any upsurge of communitarian practices, be those of dissident circles, disaffected students of Marxism, romantic ecologists or the fans of Black Sabbath. All of the above was tolerated only as an individual practice that remained publicly Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 invisible: even Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago could be read as long as one read it discreetly under the covers.

Communitarianism Let us now proceed to the third invariant of politics, namely communitarianism, formalized as [-F, -E, C]. This type of politics affi rms the being-in-common of all the beings of the world in question without regard for the freedom and equality of these beings. For this reason the community affi rmed by this ‘pure’ form of communitarianism may be characterized by domination and inequality, while retaining the universal character of affi rmation that makes this axiom political in The typology of political invariants 123

the fi rst place. Of all the axioms of the World, community is the most paradoxical and problematic in its translation into political praxis within a concrete world. In the ontological sense this axiom is the simplest of all and is indeed the fi rst to occur to us when we consider beings solely in the aspect of their being, in subtraction from the transcendental order that regulates their appearance. In their sheer inconsistent multiplicity, these beings are purely and simply in common, there being no structure or relation that would separate them, hence our formula: there is no community that being X does not belong to, whatever this being X is. Yet, what does this being in common mean when it is affi rmed ontically in a positive world, which has always already taken this togetherness into account by the transcendental indexing of the beings of the world and yet, given that this world cannot embrace all beings, is necessarily constituted by exclusion? It is here that we must recall our description of the axiom of community in terms of the Lacanian logic of the not-all. Any community of all beings, i.e. the whole, can only appear in the world in the form of hegemonic universality sustained by an excess that it cannot subsume, be it the state that exceeds the social totality it assembles or the abject forms of life included into this totality solely in the mode of their exclusion and abandonment. In contrast to this chimerical universality, the ontological axiom of community only affi rms the existence in this world of a community to which any being of this world belongs by virtue of its sheer appearance in this world. Similarly to the other axioms, to remain political communitarianism must affi rm this axiom universally for the world in question. It therefore renders inoperative those aspects of the transcendental of the world that divide its beings into mutually exclusive groups with distinct identities. Whatever these identities are (ethnic, racial, religious, political, cultural, economic, professional, etc.), communitarian politics devalues them as secondary and derivative from a more fundamental community derived solely from appearing in the same world. Whatever appears in the world is in common with all its beings, for better or worse. Indeed, while this inclusive orientation overcomes divisions between various communities within the world, it is important to remember that the community under which all these divisions are subsumed is, in the ‘pure’ form of communitarianism, characterized by the negation of freedom and equality and therefore inevitably installs new subjections and hierarchies. While pure communitarianism does indeed affi rm that all the beings in Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 the world are in common, its negation of the other two axioms entails that some of these beings belong to this community only in the mode of extreme oppression or inequality. To recall our analysis of Schmitt’s concept of the political in Chapter 2, it is even possible to belong to a community as its enemy. Let us now specify the forms of communitarian politics on the basis of their mode of negation of the other two axioms. If communitarianism reactively denies both freedom and equality, it ventures to stabilize the existing order of the world by deploying as a foundation of community the intra-worldly ‘tradition’ that grounds the being-in-common of all the beings of the world. In this manner, it seeks to resist emancipatory and egalitarian demands by casting them as from the outset alien and hostile to the community, in whose ‘organic unity’ alone freedom and 124 What is world politics?

equality may be realized ‘properly’. We may observe this type of communitarianism in various traditionalist forms of nationalism, from the late nineteenth-century doctrine of ‘offi cial nationality’ in the Russian Empire, which sought to resist both liberal and left-nationalist demands for reforms, democracy and autonomy, to the post-Soviet states of Central Asia, which supplanted the discredited com- munist ideology with a traditionalist mode of legitimation of repressive and highly inegalitarian regimes. When communitarianism subjects both liberty and equality to an obscure nega- tion, it ventures to destroy the effects of the affi rmation of these axioms in the world, enacting community as a hierarchically ordered structure of domination. The occultation of freedom and equality takes the form of the phantasmatic assig- nation of these ontological characteristics of the beings of the world to the ontic fi gure of the community itself, which is recast as free in its sovereign power of destruction that equalizes its members as abandoned to this power. The experi- ence of European fascism, particularly German Nazism, illustrates this hyperbolic valorization of community that destroys every trace of freedom and equality, ultimately leading to the self-destruction of the community itself, as exemplifi ed by Hitler’s 1945 Demolition Order that stipulated the destruction of the living conditions of the German nation due to its defeat in the war. From this perspective, the frequent understanding of Nazism in terms of exclusion, e.g. the murderous exclusion of Jews from the German community, must be qualifi ed. Obscure communitarianism is never a matter of a simple exclusion, which denies a certain group of beings membership in the community. The reason why Nazi anti-Semitism never drew a line at the disenfranchisement and the deportation of Jews was that it was not guided by the imperative of exclusion in the fi rst place. On the contrary, the Jews were included in the Nazi fi gure of the community, but included solely in the mode of their exposure to lethal violence, as homini sacri, whose killing was the mode in which the Nazi community enacted itself as sovereign. Yet, that which is to be exterminated must fi rst be included in the world from which it will subsequently be purged. As long as the affi rmation of community coexists with the negation of freedom and equality, inclusion into the community may well take the form of violence, oppression and ultimately annihilation, which must not be understood as a facile negation of community but Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 rather as the paroxysm of its affi rmation against both freedom and equality. Finally, let us consider the two intermediate forms of communitarianism. If communitarian politics reactively denies freedom and obscures equality, we fi nd ourselves in a more conservative, ‘demobilizing’ form of fascism, observable, e.g. in Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal particularly after the Second World War. This type of politics persists in the violent suppression of all egalitarian demands, yet is capable of compromises on individual private freedoms as long as these do not disturb the offi cial self-description of the community as an organic unity. Similarly to the above-discussed example of the Soviet ‘stagnation era’, this type of politics is characteristic of the worlds in which the force of the dominant ideology is weakened and the charisma of the rulers is exhausted. The regime is still capable The typology of political invariants 125

of maintaining its communitarian self-description against a frontal oppositional challenge but gradually gives up any ambition to positively regulate the existence of its subjects. On the other hand, if the communitarian world is structured by the reactive denial of equality and the obscure occultation of freedom, its politics may pay formal lip service to equality as already attained in the communitarian substance, while persisting in the destruction of the effects of freedom in the world. This type of communitarianism could be observed in the early stages of Italian fascism and German Nazism, when the pseudo-egalitarian rhetoric that accompanied the rise of these regimes to power was not yet wholly extinguished but rather subsumed under the phantasmatic fi gure of the national community. While clearly distinct from any version of egalitarianism in its privilege granted to the quasi-organic hierarchically ordered community, this type of politics nonetheless maintains a reference to equality, however minor and ritualistic, deploying it as a corrective to the deleterious effects of freedom, particularly when understood in its economic sense, on the communal substance.

Egalitarian–libertarian politics We have covered three invariants of politics that each affi rm a single political axiom and negate the other two. We shall now proceed to the three invariants that are characterized by the affi rmation of two axioms. These synthetic types of politics are egalitarian-libertarian [F, E, -C], communitarian-libertarian [F, -E, C] and egalitarian-communitarian [-F, E, C]. The fi rst synthetic type affi rms the axioms of liberty and equality while negating the axiom of community. It is thus oriented towards the transformation of the transcendental of the world simultaneously in emancipatory and equalizing directions. It defi nes freedom and equality as each other’s conditions of possibility: it is only free beings that can be rendered equal and it is only beings that are equal before the transcendental order that can enjoy freedom in any meaningful sense. The removal of the limits on free circulation and free exchange must therefore be accompanied by the destruction of hierarchies, in which these circulation and exchange take place. Thus, libertarian–egalitarian politics seeks to produce in Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 the transcendental order of the world concrete effects of freedom and equality that characterize the beings of the world in their ontological status. Yet, in this process these beings are not approached as constituting a community in the same ontologically originary sense. Instead, they are formed into an intra-worldly fi gure of community that is defi ned by the transcendental order that emancipates and equalizes them, a community that is consciously and purposefully artifi cial and devoid of any ontological status. A good example of this type of politics is the post-Second World War European welfare-statism in its social–democratic or social–liberal forms. Complementing the classical–liberal endowment of all the beings of the world with formal political freedoms by a wide range of redistributive socioeconomic programmes that aimed 126 What is world politics?

at substantive equality, various forms of welfarism redefi ned the very idea of citizenship in ‘social’ terms. In this manner, they navigated a middle course between a narrowly formal understanding of the community of citizens in terms of free universal suffrage and economic liberty and the fracture of this community in the communist discourse of class struggle, which described the world as always already split between antagonistic classes. However, this middle course of maintaining the appearance of community by articulating freedom and equality remains dependent on the intra-worldly apparatus of the welfare state, i.e. the bureaucratic agency that does not itself belong to the community it makes possible. The negation of community in libertarian–egalitarian politics takes two forms. In a reactive denial, the welfare state itself stands in for the absent fi gure of community as, in the terms of its critics, a ‘nanny state’ that takes care of its subjects ‘from cradle to grave’. The liberal–egalitarian community is then nothing other than the collective of beings that the state constitutionally recognizes as free and equal, and ensures their freedom and equality through a combination of legal and economic interventions. In other words, this community only exists empirically as the object of the welfare state’s actions, while also being posited transcendentally as its sole foundation, insofar as this state has no legitimacy apart from the collective of free and equal beings that it itself produces. While this arrangement has historically been criticized both from the left and the right as bureaucratic interventionism that disturbs the immanent functioning of society for the purposes of enhancing control and stifl ing resistance, the self-justifi cation of this mode of politics actually consists in successfully producing effects of community without the dangers of the ‘totalitarian’ excess allegedly inherent in the communitarian axiom. Insofar as its genealogy is linked with the trauma of European fascism, libertarian egalitarianism points to the violent excesses of the affi rmation of community that are destructive for both freedom and equality and claims that the simulacrum of community produced as an effect of its bureaucratic practices permits to retain the positive aspects of community while getting rid of the risks involved in its affi rmation, be those directed inward or outward. The former risks consist in the intensifi cation of the communitarian link in organic or fusional terms that render meaningless both freedom and equality: in a community understood as the expression of a single substance, it is this phantasmatic substance alone that is free and equal Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 to itself in its self-identity. The latter risks consist in the hostility and violence projected outside the community as a result of its hypertrophied affi rmation within the world. In contrast, the objectifi ed community underlying the reactive libertarian–egalitarian order will never implode on itself or explode into other worlds simply because it does not exist apart from the regulative apparatus that acts in its name. The obscure negation of community in libertarian egalitarianism does not stop at this attempt to extinguish the traces of communitarian affi rmation by the formation of the bureaucratic simulacrum but rather targets the already existing communitarian effects (subjects, movements, organizations) that are impossible to subsume under the governmental rationality of the welfare state. To legitimize The typology of political invariants 127

this occultation, this type of politics presents the bureaucratic simulacrum of community (which in a reactive mode is justifi ed precisely as a simulacrum, a ‘useful fi ction’) as the real and authentic expression of the totality of this world’s beings. The purely formal arrangement of relations between the governors and the governed is reinscribed as a substantive ‘way of life’, which is allegedly threatened by various autonomous communities, be they nationalist, leftist or fundamentalist. Since it is diffi cult to legitimize destruction from a universal libertarian–egalitarian perspective, for which all beings are after all free and equal, the obscure occultation of community presents the subjects of this community as essentially self-destructive, i.e. destroying the very way of life that defi nes them as worldly beings in the fi rst place. It is in order to prevent this self-destruction that the transcendental of the world deploys various instruments of policing the world in order to identify, contain and control whatever community that does not lend itself to the subsumption under the existing order. This type of politics may be observed in the responses of European welfare states to the left-wing radicalism of the 1970s as well as various strategies of policing domestic societies in the contemporary global ‘war on terror’ (Heng and McDonagh, 2009; de Larrinaga and Doucet, 2010; Newman, Levine and Cox, 2009).

Communitarian–libertarian politics Let us now consider the second synthetic mode of politics, constituted by the affi rmation of communitarian and libertarian axioms. Similarly to the previous example, this mode of politics approaches the axioms of freedom and community as conditions of each other’s possibility: only free beings can constitute a community worthy of the name and only in a community is freedom realizable. What the members of the community share is thus fi rst of all freedom itself. Thus, this type of politics seeks to transform the transcendental of the world in the manner that removes the limits to the freedom of its beings and indexes these beings onto the transcendental as no longer a simple extensional set of multiplicities but as a composite object of community (cf. Badiou, 2009b: 220–229). By virtue of the dual affi rmation of the axioms, this community does not limit or expropriate the freedom of the beings of the world, but rather literally consists in it. At the same Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 time, this community negates the axiom of equality and may therefore be organized hierarchically or in an otherwise inegalitarian manner. While in the previous case the absence of community was compensated for by the bureaucratic structure that produced emancipatory and egalitarian effects in the world, in this case it is precisely the existence of the community of freedom that serves as the bulwark from excessive bureaucratic intervention for egalitarian purposes. The neoliberal critique of the welfare state since the late 1970s is to be understood along these lines: egalitarian interventions are denied legitimacy not simply because of their alleged economic ineffi ciency (the distortion of the logic of the market) or moral defi ciency (discouraging the entrepreneurial behaviour of welfare recipients) (cf. Dean, 1999; Rose, 1996; Cruikshank, 1999 and more 128 What is world politics?

generally Foucault, 2008) but because they ultimately destroy this community of freedom, making its members no longer free (since they are subjected to the tutelage of the welfare state) or ‘in common’ (since egalitarian redistributive measures pit one part of the community against the other). The negation of equality takes place through its recasting as antagonistic to both freedom and community. Let us now consider the two modalities of this negation. If equality is denied reactively, the libertarian–communitarian politics posits that its positive effects may be attained in the absence of properly egalitarian interventions that are associated with ‘revolutionary’ or ‘socialist’ politics. Equality is thus recast as the epiphenomenal effect of the continuous economic progress maintained by the community of freedom, in which one is always already equal with regard to opportunity for the ‘pursuit of happiness’. This minimum of equality that follows logically from freedom, whereby all members of the community are to an equal measure free to pursue their goals, irrespectively of their different capacities, social standings, privileges, etc., is the only one admissible in this invariant. Any further equalization destroys both community and freedom through fostering the intra- worldly antagonism of ‘class struggle’ and, ultimately, revolutionary terror that has historically been shown to eventually engulf the equalizers themselves. In the post-Cold War period such a libertarian–communitarian politics accompanied its assault on the welfare state by the general denigration of egalitarianism as inherently ‘totalitarian’ and hence terroristic. The experience of Soviet state socialism was held to teach a valuable lesson: any radical affi rmation of equality necessarily leads to the formation of a dictatorial regime, which limits freedom and community in the name of equality but ends up destroying equality itself in the violent project of social atomization, only producing equality of slavery, impoverishment and terror. For this reason, it is best to abandon equality as a potentially violent ‘big idea’ and concentrate on maximizing one’s standing in the ‘community of freedom’, using the opportunities its members have presumably equal access to. If the axiom of equality is negated in an obscure fashion, the transcendental order of the world focuses on the destruction of actual effects of egalitarian affi rmation in the world. While the reactive mode devalues equality, ridiculing every project of revolutionary egalitarianism as a gigantic fl op, the obscure mode of libertarian–communitarian politics approaches every instance of its affi rmation Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 as a subversive act, justifying the exclusion of its subjects from the ‘community of freedom’ and whatever sanctions the order of the world stipulates in the case of such exclusion. A good example of such obscure occultation is offered by McCarthyist anticommunist witch-hunts in the US of the 1950s, in which the affi rmation of the egalitarian axiom led to the transcendental indexing of its subjects as ‘un-American’, i.e. literally ‘out of this (American) world’. It is no longer a matter of claiming that a certain degree of equality may be attained on the basis of the other two axioms, but rather of deploying the world’s resources of destruction against the subjects of egalitarian affi rmation in order to defend the community of freedom, whose universality thereby becomes fi ctitious as more and more beings are excluded from it. The typology of political invariants 129

Communitarian–egalitarian politics Finally, let us consider the third synthetic mode of politics, which affi rms communitarian and egalitarian axioms while negating the axiom of freedom. This politics seeks to transform the transcendental of the world in the manner that destroys all its immanent hierarchies and indexes all the beings of the world as a composite object. The community thus formed is a community of equals, which is by defi nition devoid of hierarchies of status, access or practice. At the same time, since this politics negates the axiom of freedom, this community is indifferent to whether the members of this community of equals are wholly or partially subjected to or dominated by any intra-worldly locus of authority. Thus, a community of equals may be a community of domination and even repression, yet whatever form the deprivation of freedom takes, it must be deployed in a ‘horizontal’ manner, by equals to equals. While it might appear paradoxical at fi rst glance, this mode of negation of freedom has been characteristic of the socialist systems of the twentieth century at certain points in their development. As we have seen, during the period of Stalinist Great Purges both freedom and community fell victim to the terroristic drive of forcing equality into the Soviet world. Yet, this dual negation was not always the case in Soviet politics. While the reactive or obscure negation of freedom arguably defi ned the Soviet world as such, the early post-revolutionary period was marked by a strong affi rmation of egalitarian community of various types at various levels, variably defi ned in terms of the proletariat, workers and ‘toiling peasants’, revolutionaries, Old Bolsheviks, etc. It is this community that gradually authorized the negation of freedom within itself, be it by means of the proscription of factionalism in the Bolshevik Party during 1918–21 (Halfi n, 2007) or the consent to censorship and self-censorship in the leftist literary circles from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s (Fitzpatrick, 1992). Prior to the formation of Stalin’s personal autocracy after 1934, in which the community of ‘Old Bolsheviks’ (pre-revolutionary party members) became the primary target of terror, anti-libertarian measures were applied by the community to itself, in a genuinely ‘comradely’ fashion (see Kharkhordin, 1999; Halfi n, 2007; Getty and Naumov, 2010). In this period the axiom of freedom was negated in a reactive manner. Since

Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 its emergence Bolshevism devalued the ‘liberal’ or ‘bourgeois’ valorization of freedom as purely formal and ultimately hypocritical: the assertion of the univer- sality of political freedom in a society characterized by socioeconomic inequality was held to be a hegemonic act that sought to conceal and deactivate class antagonism. In contrast, the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism institutes a community of equals, whose members are empowered to actually participate in (self-) government, thus going far beyond the merely formal invocations of political rights. As Lenin famously remarked, the dictatorship of the proletariat is ‘a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy’ (Lenin, 1975: 471). The effects associated with freedom may therefore be produced on the basis of the dual affi rmation of equality and community, rendering freedom epiphenomenal 130 What is world politics?

and its transcendental guarantees dispensable. Precisely because the community is no longer hierarchical, the deprivation of freedom becomes tolerable since it no longer signifi es subjection to a master and could be construed as self-limitation for the purpose of strengthening the community, be it the party, the working class, the international proletarian movement, etc. Indeed, the fact that the form of ‘comradely courts’, internal party trials, survived the pre-revolutionary period of the underground activity of the party and was redeployed, in a grotesquely per- verted form, under Stalinism, testifi es to the force of communitarian egalitarianism within the party and the Soviet society at large. Moreover, as long as this depriva- tion of freedom was held legitimate in the more narrow and restricted community of the ruling party, its extension into the wider Soviet society was a logical correlate of the expansion of the community of equals in the course of the ‘construction’ of a socialist society. When the axiom of freedom is negated in an obscure fashion, egalitarian– communitarian politics is driven to the destruction of the actual emancipatory effects produced in the world in the name of the preservation of the community of equals. While in the former case freedom was held to be secondary and dispensable, its effects attainable within the newly formed egalitarian community, in the obscure mode any practice of freedom becomes a threat to this community and must hence be destroyed. This mode of politics was characteristic of post- Second World War Stalinism, in which the terrorist drive of egalitarianism was tempered by an increasingly forceful affi rmation of community in the form of Soviet patriotism (focused on the socioeconomic achievements of the Soviet state) and Great Russian nationalism (focused on the pre-revolutionary cultural heritage and imperial history). In this constellation, any affi rmation of freedom, not merely political, but also cultural or individual, serves as a ground for the exclusion from the community of equals. Since this community is posited as universal and hence does not authorize exclusion, the latter takes place through the designation of the excluded themselves as a particularistic community that opposes itself to the universal and hence, in a sense, excludes itself. In the case of postwar Stalinism, this ‘counter-community’ was exemplifi ed by the Jewish professional and cultural intelligentsia, the object of Stalin’s fi nal, abortive purge. A similar mode of politics could be observed in the so-called ‘re-Stalinization’ phase in the late-Soviet period Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 (the late 1960s to mid-1970s), in which the regime’s crackdown on the dissident movement was legitimized in terms of the need to retain the stability of the existing egalitarian community against the minor counter-community of the ‘pro-Western’ intelligentsia, whose demands for freedom threatened the egalitarian gains and the unity of the Soviet society.

World politics: libertarianism, egalitarianism, communitarianism We have now addressed six political invariants, characterized by the coexis- tence of affi rmative and negative approaches to the axioms of the World. We shall now consider the fi nal invariant, in which all three axioms are affi rmed: The typology of political invariants 131

libertarian–egalitarian–communitarian politics [F, E, C]. At fi rst glance, this mode of politics should be the simplest one to describe: since no negation is involved in it, it does not admit of reactive or obscure variations and presumably consists in pure affi rmation. Yet, as we shall see below, it is precisely this pure affi rmation that is very diffi cult to conceive of, since we are more accustomed to viewing politics in terms of antagonism, arising out of the negation of one or more of the axioms. While it is easy to fi nd concrete examples of the historical unfolding of the six political invariants addressed above, which yielded relatively stable worldly orders, a simultaneous affi rmation of libertarian, egalitarian and communitarian axioms appears to be exemplifi ed only by rare and fl eeting sequences of emancipatory movements, revolts and revolutions that inevitably fail to yield stable intra- worldly orders or, more often, end up betrayed by the construction of those very orders in particularistic terms. In order to understand the heterogeneity of this form of politics to the positivity of all intra-worldly orders, we shall at this stage eschew the consideration of concrete examples in favour of a logical analysis of its structure that will elucidate what makes this mode of politics unique among the political invariants. Yet, the fi rst thing that we ought to do about this invariant is to decide on its name. While all politics produces various effects of the axioms of World within the world, it is only the libertarian–egalitarian–communitarian politics that does so without negating a single axiom and for this reason it alone merits the name of the ‘politics of the World’ in the sense of the maximal affi rmation of the axioms of the World. Of course, this name would be somewhat misleading, insofar as there is no politics in the World, since it is void. Nor does this politics seek to transform the world into the World, which is, after all, nothing. In a strict sense, the World or, better, being-in-the-World provides the content of this politics, while its site remains the positive world. Thus, the politics of the World may also be termed world politics. In contrast to ‘intra-worldly politics’, which refers back to the particular transcendental of the world, ‘world politics’ connotes that what is at stake in this politics is not the maintenance or modifi cation of any aspect of the transcendental but rather the worldhood of the world as such, the being of the world. All forms of politics except for [F, E, C] presuppose the world as already preconstituted and delimited in its positivity, even when they venture to transform this positivity Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 through the affi rmation of one or two axioms. Only world politics, which negates none of the axioms and therefore, as we shall see below, does not institute any transcendental order, politicizes and thus relativizes the very existence of the entire world in which it is affi rmed. World politics is the politics that by affi rming all three axioms of the World puts in question the whole world in which it is applied. Thus, contrary to the familiar discourses of world politics that defi ne it in terms of the integration, agglomeration or unifi cation of the world, be it under the aegis of a world state or in the immanent form of a world society, we approach world politics as a practice that maximally affi rms the axioms of the World in whatever world it is applied. It is easy to note that the criterion of maximality is the only thing that differentiates the notion of world politics from our defi nition of politics 132 What is world politics?

as such. This is precisely because world politics is not an alternative to politics as we know it, not the transcendence of statist or international politics in the name of something radically new, but rather the maximal fulfi llment of the promise of every politics, insofar as every politics consists in the production of the effects of the World within a world. It is therefore an invariant of politics that is most adequate to its very concept. Like every other politics, world politics affi rms the axioms of the World in the worlds where it is practised, producing positive ontic effects of the ontological attributes of being-in-the-World, yet, unlike any other invariant of politics, it does so to a maximal degree, without negating any of the axioms. Moreover, as we shall now demonstrate, libertarian–egalitarian–communitarian politics is alone capable of the maximal affi rmation of any of the axioms precisely by virtue of affi rming all of them at once. In the preceding discussion of the six invariants of politics we bracketed off the relation between the affi rmation of one axiom and the negation of another. Yet, it is easy to see that in all the cases addressed above the negation of an axiom has effects not merely on the latter but also on the one(s) actually affi rmed. A pure libertarianism fails to attain maximal emancipation due to its retention of hierarchies and exclusions. A pure egalitarianism fails to attain maximal equality because of its disregard of the difference between free and unfree beings that are rendered equal. Finally, a pure communitarianism only attains a mockery of community when it retains intra-worldly hierarchies and forms of domination. We must therefore conclude that the negation of one axiom necessarily weakens the degree of the affi rmation of the other axiom(s) and hence only a form of politics that contains no negation at all, i.e. world politics, is capable of maximal affi rmation of any one of the axioms. Let us now address this relation between the axioms in more detail. The relations between freedom and equality, community and freedom, equality and community have preoccupied political thinkers from the antiquity onwards. Rather than rehearse numerous debates on these questions, we shall merely address the implications of our understanding of politics for rethinking the relations between these axioms. As we have argued above, the axioms of politics pertain to ‘being-in-the-World’, a mode of appearance obtained by the subtraction of beings from the transcendental of the world and the positive identities it prescribes. If, in our being-in-the-World, we are absolutely free, this can only mean that we Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 are absolutely equal in our freedom, since any inequality would entail that freedom is not absolute but rather relative to one’s place in a hierarchical relation. Since being-in-the-World is constituted precisely by the subtraction from all such relations, absolute equality follows logically from absolute freedom. Conversely, any diminution of freedom can only take place by means of the establishment of a hierarchical relation of inequality, hence the absolute character of equality is necessarily compromised by the existence of a single unfree being. Whereas this connection between freedom and equality has long been asserted in political theory while still remaining controversial, the link between these two axioms and community appears at fi rst glance to be more tenuous. Can we not have a limited particularistic community of free and equal members, who do not share The typology of political invariants 133

this freedom and equality with those outside the community in question? This seems to be a perfectly ordinary phenomenon, manifested e.g. in contemporary European welfare states, whose internal affi rmation of freedom and equality does not extend to numerous outsiders, including potential immigrants who might be keen to join in this affi rmation. In a more extreme sense, such a closed community of members, whose freedom and equality is conditioned by restrictions on access and complex initiation rites, is exemplifi ed by the phenomenon of the sect, religious or otherwise. Yet, the very notion of a sect suggests that this community is an effect of a prior act of section or division, a cut within a more originary, always already given community, which is simply a name for the co-belonging of free and equal beings in the absence of any predicate that would condition this belonging. It is precisely this cut, which we have discussed in Chapter 2 with reference to Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction, that from the outset undermines the freedom and equality within the community constituted through it. Through this operation the outsiders are excluded from the community but not entirely effaced from it. In fact, even their exclusion is always an inclusive one: they are ‘in’ precisely as being ‘out’. There is no such thing as absolute exclusion and no sect can ever efface the originally given community from whose dis-section it arises. Traces of dissection remain in the form of empirical outsiders, with which the sect is always somehow involved (in the form of their subjugation, domination, discrimination, but also by becoming the object of their resentment, mockery or vengeful acts of terror). This is why any diminution of the degree of the affi rmation of community renders problematic both the freedom and the equality we enjoy in these communities, which can no longer be enjoyed as absolute, and for this reason cannot be enjoyed as such, becoming instead a property, the fear of whose loss or theft makes one sleepless, edgy and ultimately possessed by the object of one’s possession. This connection between the three axioms logically entails that the maximal affi rmation of any one of them is only possible if the two others are also affi rmed maximally. Conversely, the negation of one of the axioms leads to the weakening of the degree of affi rmation of the other two. Let us consider three examples of this interdependence. In the Soviet politics of the late- and post-Stalinist period that we have addressed in terms of communitarian egalitarianism both the regime’s affi rmation of equality and its appeal to the Soviet multinational society as a Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 community rang increasingly hollow, ultimately leading to the gradual erosion of the regime’s legitimacy in the wake of Stalin’s death. The egalitarian commitments of the Soviet regime were strongly weakened by the increase in the privileges of the party nomenklatura, while the communitarian self-presentation of the USSR as a non-exclusive multinational community belied the imperialist turn in Soviet politics after the Second World War, manifested not only in the evidently hierarchical character of the newly emergent Warsaw Pact, but also the growing resort of the regime to Russian nationalism and anti-Semitism as the obscene underside of its offi cial internationalist ideology. However, the criticism of the regime for falling short of its proclamations of equality and community would easily miss the point, if it were advanced solely in the name of egalitarianism and communitarianism that 134 What is world politics?

the regime allegedly betrayed. The problem is that the Soviet regime could not be more egalitarian and communitarian than it actually was, because its affi rmation of these axioms went along with the obscure occultation of the third axiom of freedom. It was precisely this negation that constituted the party nomenklatura as a privileged ruling class and transformed the free union of socialist republics into a quasi- imperial structure. The decline of equality and community in the Soviet Union are the effect of the negation of freedom that was constitutive of the post-revolutionary regime as such. Whenever the Soviet regime sought to improve its egalitarian and communitarian credentials, e.g. during Khrushchev’s Thaw or Gorbachev’s Perestroika, these attempts immediately raised the question of liberalization. In the 1960s the very emergence of this question entailed the removal of the entire reform project from the agenda with the nomenklatura coup against Khrushchev, while in the 1980s the beginning of liberalization under Gorbachev entailed the ultimate self-destruction of the Soviet system, subverting the transcendental order of the Soviet world without being able to transform it positively on the basis of the affi rmation of all three axioms. In other words, despite the evident shortcomings of the post-Second World War USSR on equality and community, we may conclude that it actually affi rmed these axioms to the maximal extent possible under the condition of the obscure negation of the third axiom of freedom. Let us take another example. In contemporary Western democracies of a libertarian–communitarian type, it is not uncommon to complain about the ultimately formal, shallow or hypocritical character of both the idea of freedom and the sense of community. Freedom is perceived to be preconditioned by ideological or biopolitical regulation that rigorously specifi es the modes of its practice, while community is reduced either to the instantly dissolving fi gure of the electorate or to the phantasmatic community of ‘values’ appealed to in order to exclude immigrants, anti-capitalist protesters and ultimately whoever is not successfully regulated by ‘government through freedom’ (Dean, 2002; Hindess, 2001; Cruikshank, 1999; Rose, 1999). While this critical diagnosis is plausible, it would nonetheless be incorrect to proclaim that Western governments are merely cynically using both freedom and community as facades for the policies governed by the opposite ideals. It is rather that both of these axioms are affi rmed to the maximal extent possible as long as the third axiom of equality remains negated. As long as equality is reactively posited as Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 inessential or obscured as harmful for freedom itself, freedom is necessarily limited to the formal possibilities of choice within the existing social hierarchy, which in turn is the only possible structure of community. To demand more freedom than contemporary liberal democracies allow or to strive for a more open and inclusive community necessarily entails focusing on equality as the condition of the current reduction of the degree of libertarian and communitarian affi rmation. To continue to ignore equality in the demand for greater freedom and community is literally to demand more of the same. Finally, let us consider the example of the egalitarian–libertarian welfare states of the Cold War period, criticized both on the right and on the left as stifl ing personal freedoms of choice, identity or self-realization and supplanting substantive equality The typology of political invariants 135

with bureaucratic interventionism. What these critical observations targeted was the specifi c manner in which freedom and equality were deployed in this world, i.e. as regulative principles of the bureaucratic apparatus that constituted free and equal individuals as objects of its redistributive interventions. The non-maximal degree of affi rmation of these axioms is thus directly owing to the negation of the axiom of community in the welfarist mode of politics and the consequent subjection of social life to the regulative governmentality of social policy. To affi rm greater freedom and equality in the worlds that are already among the most advanced in these aspects one must focus on the negation of community that weakens the affi rmation of freedom and equality in these worlds. In short, whenever we are faced with forms of politics that fail to live up to their own affi rmed axioms, this failure is not easily overcome by demanding greater commitment to one’s own principles. Instead, it is the minimally affi rmed axiom that accounts for the weakening of the degree of affi rmation of the others and thus holds the key to the transformation of the world as such. The interdependence of the three axioms provides us with a critical perspective on the perennial attempts in political philosophy to found the three axioms on each other: equality on liberty (political liberalism), liberty on community (communitarianism), community on equality (communism), etc. In this manner, only one of the axioms retains its ontological status as an attribute of being-in-the- World, while the others are reduced to epiphenomenal status, which corresponds to their reactive negation. We may now conclude that all these attempts are in vain, since the three axioms are in a strict sense equiprimordial, i.e. of equally originary ontological status. One cannot found freedom on equality or community (and conversely) because all the axioms are themselves founded solely on the facticity of being-in-the-World as the subtractive mode of appearance of worldly beings in the moment of the disclosure of the World. Neither of the axioms may serve as the arche for the two others, nor is there any telos of their eventual fusion into a single fi gure. As numerous contemporary philosophers have argued in distinct ways, freedom (Foucault, 1977; Nancy, 1994), equality (Badiou, 2005b; Rancière, 1991, 1999) and community (Blanchot, 1988; Agamben, 1993; Derrida, 1996; Esposito, 2010) are founded on nothing, which, as we have seen, is not the same as being unfounded or lacking foundations. The three axioms are founded on the appearance Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 of the beings of any world in the facticity of their being, i.e. as an inconsistent multiplicity composed of the void. It is the disclosure of the void of the World that makes freedom, equality and community possible in any world whatsoever, precisely because they are not founded on anything worldly or positive, not even on each other. From the void of the World there immediately follow three axioms that remain interdependent without being reducible to each other.

The new world: the subsumption of universality We have seen that only the mode that we have termed ‘world politics’ is capable of attaining maximal degrees of the affi rmation of its axioms. We may now infer the 136 What is world politics?

second key characteristic of this political invariant: any combination of the axioms aside from world politics ends up subsumed under the transcendental of a particular world and thus reneges on the universality that defi nes political affi rmation. In other words, only world politics refrains from producing or maintaining a particular order of the world. Let us recall that in our argument universalism no longer refers to the agglomer- ation of all beings under a single locus of authority, either immanent or transcendent. The universality of politics rather consists in the affi rmation of the universal axioms of being-in-the-World universally for the infi nite number of positive worlds. This means that there is no such thing as a ‘universal world’ that could be constructed as a positive correlate of being-in-the-World. None of the political invariants, including world politics, are capable of circumventing the ontological principle of the inexistence of the whole. Thus, when we speak of the non-universal character of all political invariants except world politics, we do not refer to their failure to encompass all beings or all worlds, which is an ontologically necessary failure, but rather to their failure to transform the transcendental of the particular world in which they are deployed, be it an international organization, a nation state, a small town or a family, in accordance with the three axioms. Such modes of politics may indeed transform one particular transcendental (e.g. a libertarian one) into another particular transcendental (an egalitarian one), but this transformation unfolds squarely within the domain of transcendental regulation and remains closed off from the universality of the World. Such modes of politics can give rise to particular worlds that may well be stable, prosperous and even attractive for those outside them. Yet, as long as the affi rmation of all three axioms is non-maximal, they inevitably end up converted into their intra-worldly homonyms, i.e. positive rules, laws or norms of the transcendental that serve as instruments of the immanent governmentality of the world in question. We may illustrate this logic of subsumption by addressing the status of the three axioms in contemporary liberal democracies, which at fi rst glance may be expected to exemplify precisely the maximal affi rmation of liberty, equality and community. Yet, while all three notions are certainly at work in the transcendental order of these worlds and are central to their political discourses, the mode of their functioning is positively specifi ed in terms of the various sectors of the transcendental. The Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 affi rmation of freedom is increasingly presented in the terms derived from the sphere of the economy, where it is valorized as the exercise of rational choice by an enterprising agent (see Salecl, 2010). This reduction of freedom to the enterprise of the self, the maximization of ‘human capital’ (Foucault, 2008: 215–165; Rose, 1999; Cruikshank, 1999; Lemke, 2001) serves to ‘privatize’ the very space of public activity of political affi rmation, whereby the universal affi rmation of freedom is converted into the individual right to the pursuit of particular private pleasures. Similarly, the affi rmation of equality is restricted to the sphere of the law, before which all subjects presumably stand as equals. However, in relations between the subjects inequality continues to reign and its limitation is delegitimized as violating the very freedom that is cast in entrepreneurial terms: there can be no equality between The typology of political invariants 137

the subjects engaged in the competitive maximization of their human capital, since any substantive egalitarian interventions distort and ultimately eliminate the competition itself. Finally, the affi rmation of community is restricted to the sphere of culture, in which all kinds of communities are welcomed or at least tolerated, but only as particular communities alongside others. A cultural community is the only one available to unequal subjects engaged in self-enterprise who are encouraged to pursue their quest for belonging in a free choice between a plurality of particular forms of being-in-common. Thus, contemporary liberal–democratic worlds certainly affi rm freedom, but only as economic, equality, but only as legal, and community, but only as cultural. What is lost in this subsumption of universal axioms under particular segments of the transcendental of the world is precisely their political character, which makes possible the transformation of the world as such rather than its transcendentally regulated modifi cation. The subsumption of the axiom under the transcendental of the world is equivalent to its depoliticization, i.e. the loss of its universal power and its conversion into a particular principle governing the world in question. We may elaborate the logic of this particularizing subsumption with the help of a simple parable. Let us imagine a group of beings who leave their particular worlds to start a new life overseas in what they optimistically name the New World, a life to be led on the basis of universal freedom, equality and community. In contrast to the empty and hypocritical invocation of these words in the cynical and dreary ‘old worlds’ they have left behind, the settlers now intend to affi rm them to the maximal degree. Yet, on their arrival to their destination, they immediately face a problem. The New World turns out to be not a desert island, a clean slate on which life could be started anew, but is rather populated by natives, who seem surprised and circumspect about the new arrivals. Nonetheless, in contrast to prior visitors from the ‘old world’, our newcomers do not wish to subjugate these natives, turning them into their slaves or serfs. On the contrary, their refl exive and self-critical disposition entails their sincere respect for the particularity of the natives’ form of life, even as it increasingly appears distant from the axioms of freedom, equality and community and rather features complex modes of subjection, hierarchy and restriction. Yet, just as long as the natives do not threaten the emerging universality of the New World, it is best to let them dwell in the Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 particularity of their exotic forms of life and not try to impose the universal axioms on them in the hegemonic manner befi tting the old worlds the travellers have left behind. However, it soon appears to the more perceptive of the newcomers that the natives seem to be confused about where the boundaries of their particular world lie and interfere negatively with the construction of the New World, confusing and corrupting the younger generation of the newcomers with their promiscuous ways wholly at odds with the serious task of building a world of freedom, equality and community. Thus, in order to secure their New World against these and other possible inconveniences from the natives, the newcomers establish a clear dividing line between their world and that of the natives and organize a modest yet armed 138 What is world politics?

force to police this borderline. In this manner, their affi rmation of community loses its maximal value and is reinscribed in a particularistic way as a transcendental index of their limited group, contrasted with the non-belonging mass of the natives. Yet, this elementary division is not enough to attain the security of the New World. Indeed, the negation of community only goes so far, since it establishes a line of exclusion (non-membership) without removing the presence of the excluded from the world itself: the natives remain there, free, equal but no longer in common with the inhabitants of the New World. The problem of security is thus not solved by drawing the line but only exacerbated: how does one manage relations with what one has just designated as the Other? This problem becomes even more acute, since not all the members of the New World abide by the dividing line and continue to engage in various common activities with the natives, from commercial transactions to romantic relationships. In order to prevent these less security-conscious members of the group from mingling with the natives and inadvertently risking the safety of the entire community, the group introduces a hierarchical structure of authority, subjecting the younger and the less educated members to the older ones, whose benefi t of experience justifi es the restriction of decision-making powers in the community to them. This governing body of the elders regulates access to the outside of the New World, making the right of contact with the natives conditional on various identity predicates: age, gender, family status, wealth, knowledge, etc. Only those members of the New World who have the necessary expertise of dealing with the Other are permitted diplomatic and trade contacts with the natives. In this manner, the axiom of equality hitherto affi rmed in the New World ends up negated. Crucially, the only reason for this negation is the need to secure the boundary of the particularistic community, itself emergent as a result of the negation of the respective axiom. The only thing that is initially shared unequally is access to the outside. Yet, gradually it is precisely this initial measure of inequality that becomes the foundation for other intra-worldly hierarchies, as those endowed with the privilege of contact with the outside begin to claim additional intra-worldly privileges, whose list may well be infi nite. Nonetheless, even the negation of equality does not resolve the problem of securing the New World. A number of its inhabitants refuse to abide by the new Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 hierarchy and break the prohibition on interacting with the natives, devising various stratagems for transgressing the world’s boundaries and even daring to bring the natives into the New World as friends and lovers. In order to prevent this transgression from spreading, the elders of the newly hierarchical community have no other choice but to lock up the violators of the rules in newly created zones of confi nement, which gradually come to bear an uncanny resemblance to the prisons and camps of the ‘old worlds’ the settlers have left behind. Gradually, these zones begin to fi ll up, as even minor transgressions, from playful emulations of the natives’ rituals to the humble expression of doubt in the wisdom of the world’s elders, are punished by ever longer periods of confi nement. In this manner, the axiom of freedom is negated and this negation is the logical consequence of the The typology of political invariants 139

need to uphold the hierarchy of authority, which in turn fi nds its entire justifi cation in the need to police the boundary separating the community of New World from its outside. Thus, as a result of a simple dividing line between the newcomers and the natives, which negated the axiom of community, the two remaining axioms ended up negated as well. It is important to note that what takes place in this progressive negation of community, equality and freedom is nothing other than the construction of the transcendental of the New World: its external borders, internal hierarchy and modes of domination. The axioms arising from the disclosure of the World thus become reinscribed as ordering functions of the transcendental of the newly constituted positive world. While the quest for the New World originally sought a form of life qualitatively different from the ‘old world’, in which references to freedom, equality and community were reduced to vacuous slogans, the difference is now merely quantitative and not necessarily in the New World’s favour. To be sure, the slogans of freedom, equality and community still adorn the banners of the New World and fi gure in the increasingly long-winded speeches of the elders. Yet, these banners now reek of mould and the younger audience of the speeches no longer understands what these words mean and soundly suspects that the elders have gone senile.

The three nothings: void, world, sovereignty The parable of the New World demonstrates that any politics that does not maxi- mally affi rm all three axioms inevitably subsumes the contents of its affi rmation under the transcendental of a particular world that it constructs in the process of the negation of at least one axiom. Non-maximal affi rmation necessarily relativizes the absolute axioms of the World, converting them into homonymous instruments of intra-worldly governance. This is why it is impossible to infer the intra-worldly existence of politics, let alone world politics, from the mere appearance of the terms ‘freedom’, ‘equality’ and ‘community’ in any intra-worldly discourse. The transcen- dental of any given world may (and usually does) deploy some or all of these terms in legitimizing its governance of the world, yet what is their relation to the axioms of the World? We have previously called these terms the homonyms of the axioms, Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 sharing with them only the phonetic and/or graphic form of the signifi er. Thus, no relation between the signifi eds of the two terms can be presupposed a priori and may in principle be absent altogether, as in the case of such pure homonyms as ‘skate’ as a fi sh and ‘skate’ as the activity of gliding on ice. However, our parable demonstrates that homonymy may also be the result of an intra-worldly semantic conversion or, rather, perversion, of the meaning of the axiom, whereby the homo- nyms are no longer unrelated. These polysemous homonyms derive from the same source through a historical semantic shift that might be metaphoric or metonymic, e.g. the ‘face’ of a person and the ‘face’ of a clock. In the case of the New World, the words ‘freedom’, ‘equality’ and ‘community’, inscribed on its mouldy banners, are genealogically related to the originally maximal political affi rmation of these 140 What is world politics?

axioms in the exodus from the ‘old world’, which, however, went horribly wrong and produced an uglier replica of the latter. The saddest thing about this parable is its familiarity. Do not all the best designs for a political community founded on freedom and equality end up producing their opposites, be it the Terror or the Thermidor, the paroxysmal destruction of the very beings to be emancipated or the no less violent restoration of order? Every attempt at a New World, from the United States of America to Soviet Russia, appears doomed from the outset to degenerate into a version of the old world, sometimes even a worse one. The stronger the affi rmation of universal axioms in the revolutionary phase of the overturning of the old world, the greater their betrayal in the new worlds. It thus appears that homonymy is the inevitable destiny of the axioms of the World in any intra-worldly deployment. Nonetheless, the conversion of the axioms of the World into particularistic polysemes is neither a logical nor an existential necessity that could be construed as an inevitable ‘tragedy’ of politics that begins with universal affi rmation but always ends up with particularistic outcomes.3 In terms of our notion of world politics, such a tragic approach is a paradigm of a metapolitical orientation, which recognizes the void of the World as an ontological principle but limits its intra-worldly implications to the demonstration of the contingency of all worlds and the inconsistency of their closure into objectivity. Insofar as it pertains not to any particular order of the world but to its worldhood as such, this demonstration intends to prove the impossibility of a radical transformation of the world: as long as the world remains a world, it is going to be defi ned by a particular transcendental order, which has no ontological correlate and forecloses the appearance of the void that is the part of every world. Every positive world is constituted by the scission of the void, the negation of the originary nothingness of the World. However, it does not necessarily follow from this that the maximal affi rmation of the axioms of the World is impossible, but only that any project of the construction of a ‘new world’ necessarily reproduces the ontological structure of worldhood as such, i.e. its transcendental ordering. As our parable demonstrates, there was nothing necessary about this conversion of universal affi rmation into particularistic ordering and the eventual replication in the New World of the patterns of transcendental order the expats dared to leave behind. As we have seen, this replication was rather Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 entailed by the drive of the newcomers to secure their world from the possible threat from the natives. It is the drive for security that leads to the construction of positive ordering structures to protect the world from the negativity that appears in the form of a ‘threat’. What was this negativity in the case of the New World and what was its source? As we have seen, the threat to the newly constituted world allegedly came from the natives. Yet, such a threat is only conceivable on the basis of the prior negation of the axiom of community, which excluded the natives from the New World that they so inconveniently happened to already dwell in. Hence, negativity entered the world prior to any empirical threat from the natives, which perhaps never existed. In order to grasp the meaning of this negativity, let us trace its emergence from the void of the World. The typology of political invariants 141

As we have argued, politics consists in producing the effects of the void of the World in positive worlds. This is a paradoxical operation, in which the originary nothingness of the World is converted into practices of pure affi rmation: political practice does not seek to bring into its world the nothingness of the World but rather the positive effects of being-in-the-World as free, equal and in common, devoid of all negativity. In contrast, partial or particularistic political practices that involve reactive or obscure negation of one or more of the axioms bring into the world a different kind of nothingness, i.e. the active power of negation. This secondary negativity, which we have discussed in Chapter 2 in the context of Carl Schmitt’s defi nition of the political, enters the world as an attempt to hinder the emergence of the positive effects of the originary nothingness of the World or to destroy its effects that are already there. In both cases, the world becomes separated from the void of the World in its sheer positivity but only at the price of the appearance in its midst of negativity, which remains a constitutive principle of the world in question. It is precisely this negativity and not the originary void of the World that brings forth the problem of security. The world must be secured not against the nothingness of the World or against the positive effects of the axioms of politics that arise from it, but against the negativity that results from the negation of these axioms. The problem of security is how to contain this immanent negativity that enters the world once a political axiom is negated, the negativity of violated freedoms, denied equality, split communities. As long as the negation of an axiom persists, it is logically impossible to eliminate this attendant negativity, which becomes constitutive of the transcendental of the world and hence the condition of its positivity. All that the intra-worldly logic of security can attain is the containment of this negativity in the separate and privileged sphere, the sphere of sovereign power, which thus becomes a negative foundation of a positive world. This paradox of sovereign power, whereby it conditions that which it necessarily exceeds, has been central to Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty as the constitutive power of exception (1985a) and the many attempts of Schmitt’s critics, from Walter Benjamin (1978a, 2003) to Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2005a), to deconstruct this logic of constitutive alterity. And yet, while the paradox of sovereignty has become familiar, its origin is somewhat more obscure. Roberto Esposito’s reading Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 of Hobbes in Communitas (2010) arguably goes furthest in the investigation of the origin of sovereignty as a negative foundation and a brief consideration of his argument will help us understand the relation between sovereign power and world politics. For Esposito, Hobbes’ political philosophy is marked by a radical negation of community, understood in ontological terms as the originary absence of subjectivity, identity or property that characterizes being-in-common (Esposito, 2010: 3–18). Community is defi ned by the expropriation of any identity or property in one’s exposure to what is outside oneself. Thus, similar to our deduction of the axiom of community from the disclosure of the void of the World, ‘nothing’ or ‘no-thing’ is precisely the mode of being of Esposito’s community, which is constitutively 142 What is world politics?

proscribed from taking on any substantial fi gure of ‘common being’ or ‘common essence’:

Community isn’t an entity, nor is it a collective subject, nor a totality of subjects, but rather it is the relation that makes them no longer individual subjects because it closes them off from their identity with a line, which, traversing them, alters them: it is the ‘with’, the ‘between’ and the threshold where they meet in a point of contact that brings them into relation with others to the degree to which it separates them from themselves. (Esposito, 2010: 139)

Community is not merely founded on nothing, i.e. on no common presupposition or identity predicate, but is entirely contained in the exposure of its members to the nothing that they have in common:

[I]t is utterly incapable of producing effects of commonality, of association, and of communion. It doesn’t keep us warm and it doesn’t protect us; on the contrary, it exposes us to the most extreme of risks: that of losing, along with our individuality, the borders that guarantee its inviolability with respect to the other, of suddenly falling into the nothingness of the thing. (ibid.: 140)

This is where nihilism comes in, not as an attribute of this community but rather of its negation:

[Nihilism] is not the expression but the suppression of the nothing-in-common. Certainly nihilism has to do with the nothing but precisely in the guise of its annihilation. It is a nothing squared: the nothing multiplied and simultaneously swallowed up by nothing. (ibid., emphasis added)

While in the case of community nothing referred to being as relation as opposed to an entity, in the case of nihilism we may speak of the dissolution of the relation Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 itself, the nullifi cation of nothing. It is this destruction of the relation that Esposito traces in Hobbes:

The fact that Hobbes inaugurates modern political nihilism should not be simply understood in the sense that he ‘discovers’ the nothingness of the substance of a world freed from the metaphysical constraint of any tran- scendental veritas; Hobbes rather ‘covers’ this nothingness of substance again with another, more powerful nothingness, which is precisely the function of annihilating the potentially dissolutive effects of the fi rst. (ibid.) The typology of political invariants 143

In Esposito’s interpretation, Hobbes’ attempt to found and legitimize sovereign power is conditioned by the prior conversion of the originary nothingness of community into the secondary, artifi cial nothingness that he constructs in terms of the state of nature as ‘state of war’. ‘Hobbes’s solution is derived from an altogether negative and even catastrophic interpretation of the principle of condivision, the initial sharing of being. It is precisely this negativity attributed to the original community that justifi es the sovereign order’ (ibid.: 141). The condition of exposure to the other that expropriates one’s identity is converted into an ‘unstoppable series of potential crimes’ (ibid.). It is only when community in the sense of the originary sharing of nothing in a reciprocal exposure and expropriation is negated, so that an infi nite multiplicity of boundaries is drawn between the members of the community, that we observe the familiar image of the state of nature as war. This negation introduces into the world a negativity that in Hobbes’ theory takes the form of equal capacity to kill – the sole link that now binds individuals together, since everything else is divided between particular identities (ibid.: 25–26). This construction of the state of nature leads Hobbes to a logical conclusion:

[If] the relation between men is in itself destructive, the only route of escape from this unbearable state of affairs is the destruction of the relation itself. Men now are associated in the modality of reciprocal dissociation, unifi ed in the elimination of every interest that is not purely individual, artifi cially united in their subtraction from community. (ibid.: 27)

If every relation is defective and dangerous, then security must be attained by abolishing every relation in having everyone relate only to a third, i.e. the sovereign. The sovereign thus becomes the universal mediator in the newly constructed world of the commonwealth, which, despite its name, is not a community at all, but a paradoxical ‘union’ wholly contained in dissociation: ‘the state is the desocialization of the communitarian bond’ (ibid.: 28). The secondary negation of the nothingness of community in the construction of every relation as dangerous is thus itself negated by the institution of sovereign authority which neutralizes the negativity of the world by, as it were, absorbing it Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 entirely in its own fi gure. Hobbes ventures to overcome the originary nothingness of being-in-common by converting it into the secondary nothingness of the state of nature as war, which in turn calls for the tertiary negation in the form of the ‘immunitary’ project of sovereignty as the negative protection against this secondary nothingness (see Esposito, 2011). The negativity of the state of nature cannot be eradicated from the world, since it is constitutive of it, but it can be restricted to the sovereign alone, which thereby becomes the paradoxical limit fi gure, both inside and outside of the world it reigns in:

[T]he state of nature is not overcome once and for all by the civil, but resurfaces again in the same fi gure of the sovereign, because it is the only 144 What is world politics?

one to have preserved natural right in a context in which all the others have given it up. (Esposito, 2010: 30, see also Esposito, 2011: 86–87. Cf. Agamben, 1998: 105–106)

Ironically, the only ‘natural’ being left in the commonwealth is the artifi cial ‘mortal god’ itself. This preservation of natural right is best exemplifi ed by the ‘right to punish’ which in Hobbes’ own argument is only conceivable as the right retained by the sovereign from the state of nature:

[It] is manifest that the Right which the Common-wealth (that is, he or they that represent it) have to Punish, is not grounded on any concession or gift of the Subjects. For the Subjects did not give the Soveraign that right; but onely in laying down their, strengthened him to use his own, as he should think fi t, for the preservation of them all: so that it was not given, but left to him, and to him onely; and (excepting the limits set him by naturall Law) as entire, as in the condition of meer Nature, and of warre of every one against his neighbour. (Hobbes, 1985 [1651]: 354, emphasis added)

In this manner, as a result of the negation of community, the axioms of equality and freedom end up negated as well. The very institution of sovereignty negates equality by elevating the sovereign above the other members of the commonwealth and placing it outside its transcendental jurisdiction. This position of the sovereign ultimately negates the freedom of the subjects of the Commonwealth, whose authorization of the sovereign implies unconditional obedience on their part, which, moreover, is to be enforced by the sovereign right to punish that is generalized into the absolute power of sacrifi ce (Esposito, 2010: 31–33; 2011: 114–115; see also Agamben, 1991: 99–106; 1998: 75–86). The negation of community ultimately results in the subjection of its members to an overwhelming negative force that protects one’s life only by a perpetual threat of infl icting death:

[L]ife can be subtracted from death only by entrusting it to the one who has Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 the right to take it away based on the terrible conjunction that gives him the power ‘of life and death’. It is as if life were saved only because it belongs to death, acting in death’s name and on death’s behalf. (Esposito, 2010: 32, see more generally Esposito, 2011: 80–111)

Thus, the negation of the originary nothingness of community ultimately threatens that which it was meant to protect, i.e. individual life itself:

[Set] in motion by the demand of protecting the thing from the nothing that seems to threaten it, Hobbes winds up destroying the thing itself with The typology of political invariants 145

nothing. Modern nihilism did not want or know how to excavate any deeper into the nothing of the relation, and so fi nds itself consigned to the nothing of the absolute, of absolute nothing. (Esposito, 2010: 142)

While it may sound uncanny and esoteric, this consignment to absolute nothing actually describes our everyday existence in a wide variety of worlds regulated by particularistic transcendentals that are constituted by the negation of at least one axiom of the World. The absolutist and sacrifi cial politics of Hobbesian nihilism does not descend from the originary evil of human beings universally or of any human being in particular, however we construe this evil. The origin of nihilism is rather the negation of at least one of the axioms of the World (community in Hobbes’ case), which introduces negativity into the world, which is in turn negated by the institution of sovereignty that assumes this negativity as its own power, leading to the negation of the remaining axioms. The logic of sovereign power consists in the protection of the world from its constituent negativity at the price of the obliteration of the world’s relation to the primary nothingness of the World. The world secured by sovereign power ends up closed off from its ontological foundation and instead endowed with a wholly fi ctitious ‘political ontology’, which takes as the origin of the world the secondary negativity that is now reinscribed in more edifying terms of the ‘state of nature’. These political ontologies may veer into different directions from this starting point, e.g. the eradication of the state of nature or its valorization, the transcendence of nature through culture or the naturalization of culture itself. Yet, as long as politics is viewed in terms of immunization and security, it remains stuck in nihilism and loses the very relation to the World that makes politics possible in the fi rst place. Thus, any politics short of world politics ultimately destines itself to nihilism, since it necessarily introduces negation along with whatever affi rmation it ven- tures. In order to manage this secondary negativity, the transcendental of the world deploys the logic of sovereignty that secures the positivity of the world, while itself remaining outside this positivity as a transcendent power that absorbs the constituent negativity of the world within itself. Yet, as we have seen, this tran- scendence is always necessarily fake, since it arises squarely from within the world. Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 In Walter Benjamin’s famous expression (2003: 85), the sovereign ‘lord of creatures’ itself ‘remains a creature’ and can never transcend the worldly immanence that it elevates itself above. What is properly transcendent in relation to the world (and yet simultaneously immanent to it) are the axioms of the World, which are what every sovereign power must by defi nition negate and, moreover, embody this negation in itself. Insofar as it is exclusively the sovereign that escapes subsumption under the world’s transcendental order, all three axioms of the World are negated in the very process of its institution: the sovereign is infi nitely freer than any intra-worldly subject, it is unequal to all the subjects of the world and it is not in common with any of them by virtue of its pseudo-transcendent status. Yet, if the sovereign, which 146 What is world politics?

is after all an intra-worldly object, negates all three axioms, this means that not a single axiom is any longer affi rmed maximally in this world. Even if the world, whose positivity is secured by sovereign power, continues to invoke any of the three axioms, it can only do so to a non-maximal degree, whereby they end up subsumed under the transcendental and lose their relation to the universality of the World. Thus, the logic of sovereignty enables the homonymic invocation of freedom, equality and community as intra-worldly instruments of governance at the price of the effacement of their universality. Despite the originary universality of the axioms, their partial affi rmation ultimately leads only to the emergence of particular worlds. As long as it continues to take the positive form of a transcendentally regulated world, secured by sovereign power, every New World will always bear a disappointing resemblance to the old one. The only politics that does not result in such a particularistic conversion is the politics that affi rms all three axioms simultaneously to the maximal degree and thus avoids both the eruption of secondary negativity in the world and its tertiary negation by sovereign power. This does not contradict our earlier claim that all the seven invariants that we have discussed are in fact political. The six particularistic invariants do indeed affi rm one or two political axioms universally for the given world, but fail to sustain this universality due to their negation of one or two remaining axioms. Due to the interdependence of the axioms, which all describe the same condition of being-in-the-World, the affi rmed axiom is weakened in its degree of appearance as a result of this negation and the effect of its affi rmation ends up non-maximal and subsumed under the transcendental of the world or producing this transcendental in the fi rst place. The world in question may be positively transformed as a result of such a politics (e.g. from a classical–liberal into a welfarist world), but only in the sense of the transformation from one particularity into another. Moreover, this transformation does not affect the transcendental locus of sovereignty in the world, even though it might certainly entail the change of its empirical occupants – as long as at least one axiom is negated, the formation of the locus of sovereignty that absorbs this negativity is inescapable. The difference of world politics from the six particularistic invariants consists in its capacity to sustain the universality of its affi rmation. Insofar as it does not bring secondary negativity into the world, world politics is utterly indifferent to the Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 problem of security, which makes it radically heterogeneous to the political ontolo- gies preoccupied with saving the world from the negativity that is constitutive of it. Consequently, world politics has no need for the tertiary negation of sovereignty and is for this reason capable of effectively confronting the logic of sovereignty as such rather than merely try to seize its locus. By avoiding both the secondary and tertiary negations of the World, world politics is able to maximally affi rm its axioms within the world. Thus, the difference of world politics from the other six invariants is that it alone attains the universality that all forms of politics attest to. This singularity of world politics does not mean that it takes place on some level above or beyond particular worlds. World politics is not global in the sense of embracing the infi nity of worlds in a movement of perpetual inclusion, The typology of political invariants 147

whose logical inconsistency we have addressed at length. There is no ‘world level’ above that of particular worlds; there is only the infi nite and non-totalizable multiplicity of worlds. It is only in these particular worlds, in which we always already fi nd ourselves and which alone are accessible to us, that world poli- tics can affi rm and try to sustain its universality. This is to say that it is only in ‘these worlds here’ and not in a chimera of the ‘whole world’, only in these here refugee camps and hospitals, city squares and army barracks, shanty towns and offshore zones, factories and universities, printing presses and prisons, that the universality of the axioms of freedom, equality and community can be realized. The being-in-common of free and equal beings, a form of life without exclusion, hierarchy and subjection, is to be attained in the worlds we inhabit, not beyond or above them.

Notes 1 We must emphasize that at this stage we are only dealing with what Badiou termed ‘subjective formalisms’, i.e. formal variants of the relationship that a worldly being can establish to the event (Badiou, 2009b: 45–49), bracketing off the questions of the subject’s intra-worldly constitution and its access to the ontological dimension. We address these questions from a phenomenological perspective in Prozorov, 2014. See also Badiou, 2001a, 2009a. 2 In addition to these three types Badiou offers a fourth fi gure of the resurrected subject, which reactivates the fi delity procedure after the apparent erasure or occultation of the event. Yet, insofar as the formal character of the event is the same for all worlds, every faithful subject in a given world is in a certain sense the resurrection of all past events in this world. For this reason, we shall not make a categorical distinction between the faithful and the resurrected subject (cf. Badiou, 2009b: 63–66). 3 This ‘tragic’ reading of politics as always failing to attain the universality it attests to is increasingly prevalent in political theory, characterizing, in different ways, Derrida’s ‘democracy to come’ that never achieves actualization, Laclau’s ‘hegemony’ whose universality is always partial and hence fake, the neo-Schmittian valorization of the political, etc. Particularly in the post-Cold War period, this tragic understanding of politics has been accompanied and reinforced by a melancholic interpretation of revolutionary politics as necessarily harbouring its own failure, its own reversal into reaction or terror and usually both (cf. Magun, 2008). For a critique of this melancholic disposition see Zizek, 2008; Badiou, 2010a. In contrast to this disposition, our approach asserts that there is no necessary reason why universal political affi rmation is bound to fail, while

Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 explaining why it so frequently does. We address particular pathways towards this failure in Prozorov, 2014, Chapters 3, 4. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Agamben, Giorgio xxvi–xxvii, 24–5, 47, 53, World community 4–6, 9, 13–14 57, 59, 61, 68, 77, 89, 100, 121, 141 in Carl Schmitt’s philosophy 57–9 Anthropocentrism 74–5, 100–2 Complexity, of worlds 12–13, 18 Anthropomorphism 101 Connolly, William 12–13, 18, 30 Atomism 22, 29 Contingency xxxii, 30, 32, 39, 45–6, 52, 64, Austin, John L. 49 92, 140 Axioms of the World xxxiii, 9, 50–4, Cosmology 5–6, 9–10 78–87 relation between 110–12, 130–5 Deleuze, Gilles 12, 35, 41, 77, 108, 115 and historicity 87–93 Derrida, Jacques 45, 56, 75, 96–100, 109 Dissensus 60–2 Badiou, Alain xxix–xxxiii, 9–13, 16–22, 27–30, 51–4, 60–7, 76, 88, 91, 110–17 Egalitarianism 120–2 Balibar, Etienne 95 Egalitarian libertarianism 125–7 Bare life xxvi–xxviii, 69 Enemy, Schmitt’s concept of 38, 55–60 Bartelson, Jens xxiii, xxvii, 4–6, 8, 22 Equality xxxiii, 60–7, 81–2, 94–7, 111–2, Becoming 12–13, 18, 30, 37, 115 120–2, 125–7, 129–130 Being-in-the-World xxxii–xxxiii, 76–80, Esposito, Roberto 55, 95–6, 99, 109, 141–5 92, 99–102, 107 Essence xxix, 22–23, 43–4, 103 Benjamin, Walter xxxi, 44, 90, 141, 145 Eurocentrism 90–91 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 Blanchot, Maurice xxx, 79, 88, 99, 109 Event, Badiou’s concept of 64–5, 68, 91, Boredom 23–6, 75–6 113–15, 147

Cantor, Georg 11, 18, 34 Facticity xxix, 32, 50, 76–7, 83, 85, 92, Clearing of being xxxi, 22, 25–8, 40, 74–5, 99–100, 102–4 104 Fidelity, Badiou’s concept of 51, 91, 116–17, Communitarianism 80, 86, 100, 118–120, 147 122–5 Foucault, Michel xxi, xxiii, 8, 19, 34, 50, 60, Communitarian egalitarianism 129–130 67, 83 Communitarian libertarianism 127–8 Fraternity, debate between Derrida and Community xxx–xxxiii, 61–62, 79–81, Nancy on 93–100 93–100, 111–12, 122–5, 127–130, Freedom xxxiii, 62, 82–84, 94, 103–5, 132–3, 140–4 118–120, 125–8, 134 Index 157

Freud, Sigmund 80, 94–9 active nihilism 43–4 Friendship 58, 97–8 passive nihilism 42, 68, 90 imperfect nihilism 41, 56, 90, 107 Globalization xvi–xvii, xx, xxii, xxvi, xxxi, Nothing, the xxxi, 34, 40, 44 7, 65 in Heidegger 24–7, 31, 75–8 Groys, Boris 121 ‘Not-all’, concept of 80–1, 123

Harman, Graham 15, 101 Ontology 16–17, 105, 145 Heidegger, Martin xxix–xxxii, 15–17, 22–8, and politics xxvi–xxxi, 46–7, 60–4 31, 34, 40–1, 44, 67, 74–7, 102–4 and set theory 9–11, 27–9 Hegemonic universalism xv–xviii, ontological mood 75–7, 106 xxx–xxxi, 3–4, 13, 19, 38, 41–3, 81, 90–2 Phenomenology History Badiou’s concept of 16–17, 28, 34, 82, and axioms of the World 87–93 114 Transcendental history 89–90 Heidegger’s concept of 23–4, 27, 67 Hobbes, Thomas 58, 91, 141–4 Police, Ranciere’s concept of 60–64 Homonymy, and axioms of the World 40, Politics 87, 90, 93–4, 139–140 defi nition of 48–55 as a practice 48 Identity politics 28, 50, 53 and affi rmation 49–50 Immunization, Esposito’s concept of 59, and the political 69 143, 145 tragic conception of 140, 147 Inexistence of the whole 9, 12–14, 88 typology of 118–129 Infi nity, of worlds 10–12, 17–18, 20–2, 29–30, 46, 49, 88 Rancière, Jacques xxx–xxxii, 55, 60–7, Intervention, Badiou’s concept of 51, 61, 69–70, 82, 135 70, 116 Rasch, William 3, 41, 56 Resistance 50 Justice 86–7, 98 Russell, Bertrand 8–9, 34

Kant, Immanuel 6, 10, 16, 77 Santner, Eric 108–9 Koyre, Alexandre 9 Schmitt, Carl xxvi, xxxi–xxxii, 14, 38–9, 42–3, 69, 133 Lacan, Jacques 45, 80–1, 123 concept of the political 55–60, 89, 123, Lenin, Vladimir 129 141 Libertarianism 118–120 Security 43, 116, 141–6 Set theory 8–11, 16, 19, 76, 81, 113–4 Materialism 12, 29, 31, 37, 66 Sovereignty xxiv, 7, 42, 108–9, 141–6 Meillassoux, Quentin 11, 45, 101 Subject, the 50–52, 113–117, 147 Metapolitics 45–7, 68, 77, 92, 140 faithful subject 115–6 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016 Mouffe, Chantal 3, 19, 41, 51 obscure subject 116 reactive subject 117 Nancy, Jean-Luc xxviii, 10, 18, 31–2, 35, 37, 45, 69, 80, 85, 88, 93–100, 103–7, 112 Taylor, Charles 101 Negation 56–9, 81–4 Totalitarianism 45, 69, 126, 128 of the axioms of the World xxxiii, Transcendental, the 16–17, 19, 28–30, 34, 110–12, 116–17, 131–2 36–7, 41, 52–3, 57, 62, 76–9, 139–145 and world formation 141–7 Truth, Badiou’s concept of xxx, 54, 64, 68, Nietzsche, Friedrich 12, 41–3 91, 108–111, 116 Nihilism xv–xvii, xxxii, 33, 39–40 Transimmanence 85, 110 and world politics 40–4, 78, 142, 145 in Nietzsche 41–4 Universalism in Heidegger 40, 44 criticism of xv–xvi, xxi–xxiv 158 Index

hegemonic form of xxx, 3–4, 13, 19, 38, as something 15–20 41, 56, 90, 92 as the void 21–34 particularistic conversion of xv–xvi, World disclosure 49,87, 91–3 Heidegger’s concept of 22–7 without the universe 8–12 and being-in-the-World 75–8 World politics, the concept of Walker, R.B.J. xix–xxiii, 3–4, 6–7, 21 in International Relations theory Wendt, Alexander xxiv, 3, 13 xx–xxviii, 3–8 Whatever being 77–80, 84, 109 ontological redefi nition of 36–9, 47–54, Wight, Martin xxv–xxviii 130–5 World, concept of as the Whole 8–14 Zizek, Slavoj xxix, 45, 55, 94, 147 Downloaded by [University of Defence] at 01:54 24 May 2016