Imperium

Structures and Affects of Political Bodies

Frédéric Lordon

• Editorial: Verso
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781786636409
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Political Philosophy

What should we do with the ideals of internationalism, the withering away of state and horizontality? Probably start by thinking seriously about them. That is to say, about their conditions of possibility (or impossibility), rather than sticking to the wishful thinking which believes that for them to happen it is enough to want them. Humanity exists neither as a dust cloud of separate individuals nor as a unified world political community. It exists fragmented into distinct finite wholes, the forms of which have varied considerably throughout history - the nation-state being only one among many, and certainly not the last. What are the forces that produce this fragmentation, engender such groupings and prevent them from being perfectly horizontal, but also lead them to disappear, merge, or change form? It is questions such as these that this book explores, drawing on Spinoza's political philosophy and especially his two central concepts of multitudo and imperium.

PART I
Groupings

1

The Paralogisms of Exemption
(Affiliated to Nothing?)

Analysing political bodies, and hence the notion of affiliation, firstly requires us to disperse the polluting fog which invariably surrounds discussions of affiliation, that locus of very intense and conflicting political affects best circumvented if we are to stand a chance of revisiting these subjects in a more serene frame of mind. It must be said that affiliation does not enjoy a good reputation. This is hardly surprising when one considers how many horrors have been perpetrated in its name. ‘Affiliates’ have often evinced a murderous nature, and indeed critics of affiliation would argue that ‘they are necessarily like that’. This, however, is to commit two errors in a single phrase. The first is a lack of awareness, or an act of denial, since critics of affiliation have their own affiliations, even if they don’t own up to them. However unwillingly, they themselves are implicitly conceding that there exist modes of affiliation which are unthreatening, or at least distinct from the modes which they are criticising, and which they endorse de facto as their own. The second error follows directly from the first: the fact that critics of affiliation have their own affiliations suggests a certain necessity and points to the contradictions inherent in the notion of exemption, that implicit or explicit contention that ‘one is affiliated to nothing’. For this reason, the first task when addressing the question of affiliation should be to suspend certain axiological reflexes in order to examine this element of necessity – not to heap opprobrium on it or to glorify it, but to conceptualise it. Needless to say, we should exercise extreme intellectual vigilance when addressing the topic of affiliations, for it is well known where they can lead. However, such vigilance should not reduce the matter to an axiological debate – an approach rarely conducive to the examination of empirical evidence. It should not be necessary to add, though we will do so nevertheless, that an analysis of the empirical evidence is in no way tantamount to its endorsement, nor its acceptance as a deterministic reality to which we must succumb. On the contrary, appreciating the internal mechanisms of affiliation affords the only means of transforming them or of altering the way they function.

The Paradoxes of ‘Good’ Affiliation

Intuitively sensing the necessity of affiliation and its captive power merely requires us to be sensitive to the ordinary realities of our social lives, even at the smallest scales. Take, for example, the school playground, where somebody says ‘Let’s split into teams’ and teams are chosen to play a game of some kind. The children, although they find themselves in a particular team based on tenuous or indeed arbitrary affinities, nevertheless embrace their group and engage in the contest to the full, displaying a commitment to the cause of the group which is characteristic of affiliation, despite the fact that their affiliation is thoroughly contingent – they would have shown the same commitment had they found themselves on the opposing side. Similarly, one gets the distinct impression that a supporter of such-and-such a football club, who spends his time heaping abuse on another club and even getting into fights with its supporters, could so easily have been one of those rival supporters himself, had circumstances been different. If the fans in the stands at a match between Paris Saint-Germain and Marseille can be seen as kindred souls, it is because what they deep down have in common is the intransitive joy of formal affiliation, which has nothing to do with the contingent nature of its object – it is the sense of belonging itself that brings people alive, and often it matters little to what one actually belongs. If individuals are capable of throwing themselves headlong into chance affiliations, though they might very easily have thrown themselves into contrary ones, this has to be the result of an emotional mechanism whose power we need to understand, making sure we take into account all the different ways in which the social context determines both their tendency to be absorbed into affiliations and how they declare that affiliation (avowed or denied, peacefully or aggressively).

Observable on a very wide range of social scales, affiliation only assumes its full polemical value when it becomes a national affiliation, which is the situation where collective identities have demonstrated most appallingly their capacities for discrimination and, indeed, for slaughter. Once again, there is much to recommend the position which defines itself as ‘post-national’, both in its desire to avoid rigid categories and pigeonholing individuals and in its historical consciousness of the contingency of collective geographies, in particular the idea that current nations, which are after all only a recent development, are unlikely to be history’s final word. But granting all these points does not mean that we also have to accept all the paralogisms and non sequiturs, generally laden with value judgements, which are usually brought to bear on a subject which instead requires an empirical approach (the subject is often, in fact, dismissed before it has even been addressed).

Alain Badiou is typical of this tendency when he writes that ‘ “people + national adjective” is not of much value’,¹ which is a curious affirmation in itself, given that the ‘value’ invoked is of uncertain status and in fact manifestly polemical, and also given that one could at the very least grant the phenomenon an empirical status, which is to say something to be elucidated, potentially with a view to altering the forms it takes. Badiou, moreover, admits that the phenomenon can have value, but only under quite specific conditions: ‘people + national adjective’ once again becomes ‘interesting’ when it is a case of throwing off colonial oppression in order to achieve self-determination, which of course is national in character. Another example would be overthrowing a dictatorship through an act of revolution, though always on the proviso that this value evaporates as soon as self-determination or the overthrow of the regime is achieved and that ‘people + national adjective’ is instantly demoted again to insignificance through an abrupt rupture (the mechanism of which remains obscure).

In truth, it is evident enough that this affirmation of non-value is closer to a performative contradiction than it is to an empirical analysis, for, after repeating in traditional vein that ‘the proletariat has no homeland’ and observing that the proletariat of today are immigrants from the world over, Badiou then proceeds to ask: ‘To which people + national adjective do they therefore belong?’² This is a rhetorical question to which the answer is supposed to be obvious, but the evidence for it nevertheless needs to be tested, and this can be done straightforwardly enough by, say, posing the question directly to those concerned and seeing how they respond. Alternatively, one could challenge the assumption through a thought experiment whereby a match is held in France between, let us say, the national teams of Mali and Senegal and we imagine how the Malian and Senegalese proletarians in the stadium would behave. Such an experiment would permit us to observe whether today’s proletarians do indeed have no homeland, or as tenuous a homeland as the proletarians of the early twentieth century did in the eyes of the Marxists of the time, who were then staggered to see these same people waging savage ‘patriotic’ war on each other.

Leaving aside thought experiments and turning to real situations, the ‘proletarians who have no homeland’ cooped up in the ignominious conditions of the Calais Jungle fought each other along the lines of national groupings: Sudanese against Eritreans, Eritreans against Syrians, etc. It would appear, therefore, that they had retained some sense of homeland, in this case for the worse. Where intellectuals seem eager to discern a new international proletariat, there is, in fact, a collection of uprooted national proletarians, which is not quite the same thing. One might be tempted to object that Marx defines the proletariat as having no specific attribute and as a class without specific interests, automatically meaning that they are destined for universal status in a classless society which does not have specific attributes. If one defines them like that, however, one is forced to conclude that the proletariat does not exist.

We find a contradiction which is formally rather similar (though taken to a more explicit level) in the otherwise fascinating book by Guillaume le Blanc devoted to ‘the foreign condition’.³ While the intent of this work is to call into question national forms of affiliation in the light of the (wretched) fate which they reserve for the foreigner (the ‘outside’ necessarily being constituted by the withdrawal into itself of the national ‘inside’), the dynamic of his own argument leads him to encounter affiliation once again, but this time from the ‘other point of view’, namely that of the migrant, and affiliation is now perceived as the nostalgia of exile – it is no longer discriminatory arrogance but something which has been painfully lost. Exile, as Edward Said confirms, is a loss: ‘the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home’ (my emphasis).⁴ Le Blanc himself makes the same observation: ‘There is an experience of exile which equates to a loss (of national qualities).’⁵ We thus find a remarkable interplay of opposing currents of affiliation: in the country of destination (‘The Homeland’ inhabited by ‘The Native’, with totalitarian capital letters),⁶ affiliation is infinitely problematic and repulsive; but when the point of reference is the country left behind, it becomes a legitimate sentiment of having roots followed by the painful experience of being uprooted, to which one readily applies words which would sound shocking if uttered by ‘The Native’, such as ‘native country’ and ‘true home’.

In other words, national affiliation is only a good thing when it has been lost and may only be exalted in nostalgic mode. Just as with Badiou, for whom ‘people + national adjective’ becomes something detestable once the act of revolution has occurred, so this approbation of national affiliation paradoxically rests on notions of abandonment and departure. Affiliation is only a good thing when one is torn away from it. The incontestable sense which migrants have of being uprooted clearly flies in the face of a domestic discourse which rejects the notion of national affiliation, for does not talk of being uprooted imply that there is indeed such a thing as roots? Migrants do indeed suffer, and, more precisely, they suffer from a lost affiliation. Logically speaking, then, this value should be transmitted across all the links of the chain of argument: if the painful experience of migrants is deemed legitimate (and how could it not be?), this legitimacy must extend to the causal object of their suffering, which is affiliation; lost affiliation it may be, but ‘lost’ here is a secondary predicate and one cannot assign to a secondary predicate – loss or possession (of affiliation) – the job of making an axiological distinction in relation to affiliation itself. The discourse that seeks both to reject domestic affiliation and, quite rightly, to recognise the tragic condition in which immigrants find themselves (not merely as a minority when they arrive but also when they are forced to depart), is doomed to veer arbitrarily between emphasising (lost) affiliation and rejecting (possessed) affiliation.

This type of vacillation prompts one not so much to embrace one or other of these poles, but rather to distance oneself altogether from the perspective which gives rise to such hesitations, namely an axiological perspective which seeks to distinguish good from bad but which, in this instance, finds itself in the embarrassing situation of deeming something to be simultaneously good and bad. If affiliation turns out to be problematic when it is possessed but also when it is lost, then perhaps it is necessary, at least for the time being, to sidestep the automatic and premature tendency to frame the problem axiologically and instead to begin empirically conceptualising its workings and its connective power.

Post-Nation or Extended Nation?

Firstly, however, we need to complete our tour of the paralogisms associated with disaffiliation and post-nationalism. The crudest of these is surely the failure to appreciate that the post-national scenario so vehemently being advocated merely serves, in most cases, to pave the way for the super-national, which ultimately will possess the same characteristics – only in a worse form – as the despised nation. This is especially true of the ‘Europeanist’ variant of the post-national argument, which claims that current nations will be superseded and demoted in the process of constructing ‘Europe’. But what could ‘Europe’ be, other than the redeployment of the nation-state principle itself, but on an amplified scale: a political community that declares itself sovereign and endows itself with parliamentary institutions to express that sovereignty, within borders that are admittedly extended and yet just as finite? In other words, it would remain a specific entity which is simply larger, and very far from fulfilling the conditions of cosmopolitan universality.

The particular form adopted by the institutions makes no difference in either of the two possible scenarios: either the European edifice remains incapable of crossing the critical threshold of political integration, or it does indeed cross it. In the first case, the ‘Union’ does not live up to the concept underlying it, because it remains at the stage of a simple grouping of nation states. The political irony here is that this downgrading of the European aspiration is presently championed by a whole neo-Kantian tendency,⁷ previously known for its propensity for universalism and the sheer scope of its cosmopolitan ambitions. Now reduced to a pragmatic level of basic prudence, it abandoned the idea of a ‘European state’ after realising that it would lack the resources historically available to nation states for their own construction. Under these circumstances, the Union would not be a union and would hardly amount to more than what it currently is: an assemblage of nation states linked by treaties, whose constituent parts enjoy primacy because the whole has not crossed the threshold of cohesion, making it impossible to proclaim the advent of a post-national era.

In the second scenario, this threshold is indeed crossed. It is not extravagant to suppose that the resulting integrated political entity would be more likely to assume a federal rather than a unitary form, and one would have to have lost all sense of categories not to realise that a state, even a federal one, remains a state. There is little doubt that the French mind is particularly prone to this kind of distortion, having only ever associated the concept of state with its unitary and centralised form – the federal form being such an alien notion that it is taken to supersede the very principle of state. Resisting the charms of exoticism – though in truth, there is nothing specifically French about this kind of error; do not we find the same thing, indeed in more egregious form, in the writings of Ulrich Beck and Jürgen Habermas?⁸ – we need to signal certain elementary truths, such as the fact that in order to be a federal republic, Germany has to be a nation state, as does the United States of America and the Russian Federation. We can therein appreciate more clearly the nature of this category error which, locked into the perspective of the constituent parts, entails imagining that the new whole of the future will be something ‘quite different’ and will represent a radical break in continuity. Once nation states integrate with one another to form ‘something’ unprecedented, the assumption is that this will necessarily be something radically different and ‘therefore’ not a nation state at all: here, in all its splendour, is the paralogism of the Europeanist post-national vision. It is incapable of conceiving the fact that a European federal state would invent nothing new and supersede nothing, but, instead, merely reproduce itself on a bigger scale – rather as if the Prussians, Bavarians and Rhinelanders at the end of the nineteenth century had proudly announced that they were superseding nations by forming Germany.

It is, moreover, in this increase in size, or, rather, in the misunderstanding of its effects, that the deepest illusion of the proponents of Europeanist post-nationalism lies – their belief that, in advancing the cause of federalism (even though it does not in fact represent an advance), they are ridding themselves of all the defects imputed to the principle of the nation state that they wish to disown, namely the aggressive manoeuvrings of sovereignty and the ‘nationalist’ pathologies of identity. The examples just cited – the United States, Russia and Germany – should suffice to banish this futile hope and encourage a more reasoned assessment of the logic of power. For the reality is that a taste for power irresistibly assails large political ensembles, their very size conferring on them a new-found degree of geopolitical influence which is proportional to their degree of integration and the extent to which this can be converted into a unit of action. This is why we should not doubt for a second that, were its project to succeed,⁹ friendly old Europe – which is only judged to be so now because its cohesion remains, for the time being, a pipe dream – would rapidly embrace completely different ambitions, more in keeping with its new-found potential. This follows from the simple fact that power tends spontaneously to exercise itself once it becomes aware of itself. As a result, once its original constituent parts had been ‘metabolised’ and its integration consolidated, it is more than likely that the new European whole would develop all the attributes of a sovereign entity: an essentialist notion of its identity in keeping with its finite borders, plus assertive behaviour and the projection of its power onto the international stage. In other words, it would develop all the characteristics of the nation state, doubtless much to the disappointment of those who believed that a change of scale would equate to a ‘superseding’ of what had gone before. Since the same causes lead to the same effects, the result would be reminiscent of the United States, of which the United States of Europe woul...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword: Passions of State
• Preface: A Reminder of What the State Can Do (Aide-Mémoire)
• Introduction
• Part I: Groupings
• Part II: The Elementary Structures of Politics
• Part III: The Horizon of Horizontality
• Conclusion: The Unresolved and Unending
• Notes
• Index