Theory of the Political Subject

Void Universalism II

Sergei Prozorov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135011246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

Theory of the Political Subject continues the project of reconstruction of political universalism begun in Ontology of World Politics. Having redefined world politics in terms of the affirmation of the universal ontological axioms of freedom, equality and community in an infinite multiplicity of particular situations or 'worlds', in this book Prozorov focuses on the way this affirmation is actually practiced, analysing the conditions for the emergence within a world of the subject of its radical transformation. Drawing on the contemporary reassessment of the notion of the subject in continental political thought, particularly the work of Alain Badiou, Prozorov defines the political subject in terms of one's subtraction from the positive order of one's world, the weakening of one's particular identity that makes possible one's participation in the affirmation of the universal. The book proceeds with outlining the path of the political subject within its world, from the point of its inception to its confrontation with ethical, epistemic and other limits to its activity. This account of the subjective aspect of world politics also offers new and stimulating perspectives on such key issues of political theory as the relation of politics to human nature, the role of violence in politics and the conditioning of politics by philosophical or scientific knowledge.

Systematic and accessible, these works will be key reading for all students and scholars of political science and international relations.

1

THE INEXISTENT

Objects and subjects of world politics

The inexistent object

World politics is a practice of the affirmation of the three axioms of the World, freedom, equality and community, in an infinity of positive worlds. Since it does not negate any of the axioms, it is singular among all possible modes of politics in resisting subsumption under the transcendental order of a particular world, i.e. it alone fulfills the promise of universality that is inherent in all politics. While the forms of politics that combine the affirmation of some axioms with the negation of others (e.g. libertarianism, communitarianism, egalitarianism or their partial combinations) necessarily compromise the universality of politics, thereby also weakening the degree of the affirmation of the axiom that they actually uphold, world politics affirms all three axioms to the maximal degree. Its effects must therefore exceed a mere modification of the particular order of the world, e.g. the shift from a libertarian to a communitarian hegemony or a relative downgrading of equality or freedom as the primary governmental rationality of the world in question. If the effects of particularistic forms of politics may be analysed in terms of positive modifications, redistributions and shifts in the transcendental order that leave the basic principle of the ordering of the world intact, world politics affects and transforms this very principle, putting in question the positivity of the entire world – hence its name.

Yet, what does this mean from an intra-worldly perspective? How does the ontological universality of world politics, its maximal forcing of the void of the World into the world, manifest itself in the world in question? What is it that world politics does in the world that differentiates it from the more familiar particularistic modes of politics or from the wholly non-political activity of worldly management? In order to answer this question we must move from the ontological terrain of Ontology and World Politics, in which politics was conceived, as it were, from the standpoint of the World rather than positive worlds, towards the terrain that Badiou terms phenomenological, i.e. the domain of intra-worldly appearance, positively regulated by the transcendental of the world (Badiou, 2009b: 38–39, 118–119). More specifically, we are interested precisely in the articulation of the ontological and phenomenological levels of inquiry, which will permit us to trace the production of ontic, intra-worldly effects of the ontological axioms of the World.

The three axioms assert that all beings in all worlds are free, equal and in common in their being-in-the-World, a mode of appearance of beings in their being, subtracted from all intra-worldly determinations. The affirmation of these axioms in positive worlds, where beings appear in positive identities regulated by the transcendental, evidently manifests the difference between our ontological beingin-the-World, characterized by absolute freedom, equality and community, and our ontic being-in-the-world, in which these very axioms are at best relativized as instruments of the transcendental order and at worst simply negated. This is a form of what Martin Heidegger famously termed the ontological difference, i.e. the difference between Being and beings, or, in Badiou’s terms, between being and appearance. That which ontologically is (the community of free and equal beings) does not appear in our worlds, in the sense that its degree of existence there is minimal, i.e. nil. In Logics of Worlds Badiou terms the element that is but does not appear in the world its inexistent (Badiou, 2009b: 321–324).¹ ‘[The inexistent] is in the world a being whose being is attested but whose existence is not. Or a being who happens “there” as nothingness’ (ibid.: 343). In Badiou’s argument, the inexistent testifies to the contingency of the world as a structure of appearing: if there is, in an object that appears in the world, an element that does not appear, or appears as ‘nothing’, then the entire object might not have appeared: ‘there is a reserve of being which, subtracted from appearance, traces within this appearance the fact that it is always contingent for such a being to appear there’ (ibid.: 322).

It is precisely this inexistent element that is the object of world politics: what world politics does in the world is raise the inexistent object to maximal intra-worldly existence, which thus becomes a positive intra-worldly effect of the axioms derived from the void of the World. While particularistic forms of politics are only capable of making some worldly beings exist more or less (i.e. shifting from a non-minimal degree to the maximum), world politics grants maximal worldly existence to what is entirely lacking this existence to begin with. World politics affirms that whatever is denied existence in the world nonetheless possesses being and ventures to grant this being maximal appearance in the world in question. The political imperative thus consists in levelling the ontological difference: what is must also be brought to appearance in the world and, moreover, it must appear maximally. In accordance with the famous line from the Internationale, what was nothing (in the world) will become everything (Badiou, 2005b: 115; 2011c: 61).

We may approach the inexistent object as the ontic correlate of the World: after all, what is in every world as a universal part, yet is proscribed from appearance by the world’s transcendental is the void of the World as such: what is nothing in the world is, first of all, the Nothing itself. This is why in his Ethics, written prior to the detailed elaboration of the notion of the inexistent, Badiou refers to this object as the ‘situated void’ of the situation, which is only brought to appearance as a consequence of the event:

At the heart of every situation, as the foundation of its being, there is a ‘situated’ void, around which is organized the plenitude (of the stable multiples) of the situation in question. Thus, at the heart of the baroque style as its virtuoso saturation lay the absence of a genuine conception of musical architectonics. [Similarly], the proletariat – being entirely dispossessed and absent from the political stage – is that around which is organized the complacent plenitude established by the rule of those who possess capital. The fundamental ontological characteristic of an event is to inscribe, to name, the situated void of that for which it is an event.

(Badiou, 2001a: 68–69)

It is evident that this situated void is produced by the intra-worldly negation of the axioms of the World, which, as we have argued in Ontology and World Politics (Prozorov, 2014, Chapter 4), is constitutive of the world’s very positivity. Since it does not exist in the world, this object is logically excluded from being in common with those worldly beings, whose degree of existence is non-minimal. Since its degree of appearance is by definition less than that of any other being (i.e. it is equal to nothing), it is unequal to every being of the world. Finally, since an inexistent element does not appear in the world, the question of its freedom there cannot even arise: it is not even there, where it could be free or otherwise. Since existence in the world is a status assigned by the transcendental indexing of an element (Badiou, 2009b: 246–247), something can only inexist as a result of a transcendental negation that excludes a being from appearance while maintaining it in its being.

The relationship between the inexistent object and the transcendental order thus parallels the relationship between the sovereign, defined in the Schmittian terms of the subject of the decision on the exception, and Giorgio Agamben’s famous figure of the homo sacer, the being that is exposed to arbitrary sovereign violence. Indeed, the sovereign and the inexistent appear almost symmetrical: both are ontologically in the world yet phenomenally outside it, the former in the mode of majestic pseudo-transcendence and the latter in the form of abject, zero-degree immanence: ‘the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns’ (Agamben, 1998: 83). In more general terms, we may define the sovereign as the one who can make any being of the world inexistent, while the inexistent is the object of anyone’s sovereignty, i.e. that in relation to which even the lowliest figure of the world perceives itself as all-powerful.

And yet, if inexistence is never inherent in a being, but is rather a result of its indexing by the transcendental, then this status is always contingent, just as every transcendental order and every sovereign decision have no ontological correlates. This means that the inexistent can be brought to existence by the transformation of the transcendental, which is precisely the task of world politics. The ascent of the inexistent to existence in the world is only possible through a radical relativization of the transcendental that authorized this inexistence in the first place. By affirming the three axioms to the maximal degree world-political practice convokes, within the positivity of the ordered world, the void of the World, illuminates the contingency and inconsistency of the existing order and disqualifies the transcendental negation of the inexistent element. As a result of political practice, the aspects of the transcendental that conflict with the three axioms, e.g. exclusionary legislation, norms prescribing servitude or hierarchies of access and influence, are themselves to be relegated to inexistence.

The idea of the inexistent permits us to appreciate the difference of world politics from the other six political invariants. Insofar as at least one axiom is affirmed in it, a practice is political and thus takes an inexistent of the world as an object, i.e. it ventures to overcome the deprivation of some beings of the world of freedom, equality or community. Yet, insofar as at least one axiom is negated, this negation itself produces an inexistent object in the world, be it an individual or group that is denied freedom, treated unequally or excluded from the community. Moreover, as long as not all three axioms are affirmed at once, the intensity of the affirmed axiom is less than maximal, hence the inexistent object does not rise to maximal existence in the world and its degree of existence either remains minimal, in which case, nothing happens but a mere ‘fact’ of affirmation (see Badiou, 2009b: 374), or is elevated to a non-maximal status, in which case the political practice remains what Badiou calls a ‘weak singularity’ (ibid.).² Thus, only world politics is capable of fulfilling the imperative of granting maximal existence to the inexistent and thus genuinely changing the world, in which it is exercised.

Given this singular capacity, world politics might appear to follow a strictly uniform logic, in which all three axioms are affirmed with equal intensity irrespectively of the positive features of the world, in which they are affirmed. Of course, insofar as world politics takes as its object the inexistent of a positive world, it must always begin by engaging with the concrete actuality of this world and determining what its inexistent is. Nonetheless, the answer to this ‘what’ question cannot possibly consist in the positive predicates of the inexistent object: insofar as this object does not appear in the world, it has no such predicates, hence all we have to go on is the sheer facticity of its being. Since all inexistent beings appear in the world to a minimal degree that is non-decomposable, ‘transcendentally without parts’ (ibid.: 323), they are strictly speaking the same from the perspective of the world.

As we shall argue in more detail throughout this book, the logic of world politics is entirely different from the valorization of subjugated or marginalized identities. What world politics seeks to overcome is not the inexistence of this or that particular object, on the grounds that it deserves a greater degree of existence due to its particularity, but rather the transcendental function of assigning inexistence as such, irrespectively of what particular objects are subjected to it. Thus, when we pose the question of what the inexistent of the world is, we do not inquire about the attributes of particular beings who happen to inexist in this world but rather about what axioms this world negates, thereby relegating a multiplicity of beings to inexistence: is the inexistent object of the world constituted by the deprivation of freedom, the denial of equality, the exclusion from community or any combination thereof? Prior to the political maximization of its existence, all we can know about the inexistent of the world is its status of being unfree, unequal and excluded from community.

By our definition, world politics must maximally affirm all three axioms at the same time. Nonetheless, insofar as political practice unfolds not in a totally apolitical world but in a world constituted by prior political sequences, the effect of world-political affirmation will evidently vary, depending on whether it affirms what is already affirmed in the world (e.g. community), however partially, what is denied in a reactive manner (e.g. freedom) or what is violently destroyed (e.g. equality).³ In this example, the affirmation of equality passes from absolute inexistence in the world to maximal presence, while the affirmation of community travels a shorter distance from a non-maximal affirmation, whose degree is only weakened because the other axioms are negated, to maximal presence. We shall term the axiom, whose degree of affirmation moves from minimal to maximal existence in the world the principal of world politics in the sense that its affirmation entails the greatest degree of transformation. The principal of world politics is the axiom, whose minimal degree of appearance in the world accounts for the non-maximal appearance of the other axioms and which is therefore the key to any transformation whatsoever. As long as this principal remains negated, it is impossible to raise the degree of affirmation of the other axioms: libertarian interventions maximizing e.g. the freedom of expression are of limited use in a society founded on slavery, just as egalitarian initiatives only go so far in a concentration camp.

We may thus envision various types of world politics defined by their principal that correspond to the six particularistic versions of politics outlined above but, in contrast to those invariants, do not compromise their universality, since they do not negate a single axiom. Whenever we speak of a libertarian, egalitarian or communitarian world politics, we merely mark that which exists least in the world in question and thus calls for the greatest degree of transformation. Thus, the world-political operation on the inexistent object does not follow a uniform logic irrespective of the particular features of the world but rather takes as its principal that which the world negates to the greatest degree. In this manner it seeks to effect the intra-worldly change from the minimum to the maximum that Badiou aptly terms ‘the existential absolutization of the inexistent’ (Badiou, 2009b: 394).

Inexistence and the absolute

Yet, what is the meaning of the absolute in the context of world politics? Contemporary political thought, both in its liberal and its critical forms, is generally hostile to the very idea of the absolute in politics as, at best, transforming politics into a site of antagonism between rigid dogmatic positions, each claiming access to the absolute, and, at worst, dispensing with politics altogether in a totalitarian order that pretends to embody the said absolute and hence no longer needs political praxis. Instead of continuing to talk about absolutes, we are offered more modest visions of politics as regulated competition for scant resources, permanent discussion in the quest for rational consensus, agonistic confrontation between mutually recognized adversaries, the struggle for recognition of particular identities, etc. All these forms of politics are marked by the explicit renunciation of any absolute ends in politics, becoming content with ‘relative gains’ in the process that is oriented simply towards its own perpetuation. If anything is absolutized in these approaches, it is the political procedure itself, be it formal democracy in liberal theory or the process of deliberation or agonistic contestation in critical discourses. Nonetheless, the obverse of this reduction of politics to a procedure is the increasing perception of the vacuity of its content, lamented by both the conservative critics of the excesses of democracy and the partisans of greater and more substantial democratization (cf. Henri-Levy, 2009; Rancière, 2007, 2011; Badiou, 2011b: 6–15; Zizek, 2001: 100–119). If politics becomes the infinite process of competitive or agonistic negotiation between existing identities in particularistic worlds that are becoming ever more complex, it loses its transformative capacity, becoming wholly subsumed under the transcendental of the world as little more than an accompaniment to intra-worldly rationalities of governance.

In contrast, our understanding of politics as a procedure that brings the World into worlds by producing positive effects of the three universal axioms places politics at a distance from the transcendental order as always potentially disruptive of it. While intra-worldly rationalities of governance tend to emphasize the extreme complexity of the world, which allegedly disqualifies ‘absolute positions’, ‘easy answers’, ‘quick solutions’, ‘utopian visions’, etc., in our argument politics is rather characterized by a radical simplicity. While, as we shall argue in the following chapters, it is sometimes very difficult to decide whether to act politically in a concrete situation, the content of political praxis is quite simple and consists in the evaluation and transformation of the world in terms of freedom, equality and community. This inherent orientation of politics towards simplification of worlds is demonstrated with admirable clarity in Badiou’s notion of the ‘treatment of points’, which consists in the superimposition onto the infinite complexity of the world of the simplest possible binary transcendental T (0, 1), evaluating the world in terms of a simple ‘yes or no’. ‘The notion of point filters the nuances of the transcendental (the possible infinity of degrees) through the decisional and declaratory brutality of the “either this or that” represented by the simple pair of the zero and the one’ (Badiou, 2009b: 591). This filtering disrupts the existing order, introducing a binary either-or situation in place of its infinite complexity: ‘The point enacts a kind of abstract regrouping of the multiplicities that appear in the world. Their complex composition is subsumed under a binary simplification, which is also something like an existential densification’ (ibid.: 404). This existential densification is a result of the reduction of the infinity of degrees of appearance from the minimum to the maximum to the stark binary choice between the extremes: the minimum or the maximum. In terms of our idea of political affirmation, the treatment of the point in terms of the three axioms reduces the complexity of the intra-worldly order to the binary evaluation: does this aspect of the transcendental affirm or negate freedom, eq...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The inexistent: objects and subjects of world politics
• 2 The idea of the wrong
• 3 Politics and evil
• 4 Politics and violence
• 5 Politics and knowledge
• 6 Why not everything is political
• Bibliography
• Index