POLITICS OF THE ONE

About the series

The Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy series stages an ongoing
dialogue between contemporary European philosophy and political theory. Following
Hannah Arendt’s and Leo Strauss’s repeated insistence on the qualitative distinction
between political theory and political philosophy, the series showcases the lessons
each discipline can draw from the other. One of the most significant outcomes
of this dialogue is an innovative integration of 1) the findings of twentieth- and
twenty-first-century phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis,
and deconstruction (to name but a few salient currents) and 2) classical as well as
modern political concepts, such as sovereignty, polity, justice, constitution, statehood,
self-determination, etc.
In many instances, the volumes in the series both re-conceptualize age-old political
categories in light of contemporary philosophical theses and find broader applica-
tions for the ostensibly non- or apolitical aspects of philosophical inquiry. In all cases,
political thought and philosophy are featured as equal partners in an interdisciplinary
conversation, the goal of which is to bring about a greater understanding of today’s
rapidly changing political realities.
The series is edited by Michael Marder, Ikerbasque Research Professor in the
Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz.

Other volumes in the series include:

Deconstructing Zionism by Michael Marder and Santiago Zabala

Heidegger on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right by Marcia Sá Cavalcante
Schuback, Michael Marder and Peter Trawny
The Metaphysics of Terror by Rasmus Ugilt
The Negative Revolution by Artemy Magun
The Voice of Conscience by Mika Ojakangas
 POLITICS OF THE ONE

Concepts of the One and the Many in

Contemporary Thought

Edited by
Artemy Magun

Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy

Michael Marder, Series Editor

N E W YOR K • LON DON • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY

 Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2013

© Artemy Magun, 2013

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ISBN: 978-1-4411-8881-6

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In memory of Professor Alexey Chernyakov (1955–2010)
 Contents

About the authors ix

Introduction xi

Part I  The Other One

1 More than One  Jean-Luc Nancy 3

2 The Fragility of the One  Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback 13

3 Unity and Solitude  Artemy Magun 23

Part II  Event of the One

4 Genesis of the Event in Deleuze: From the Multiple to

the General  Keti Chukhrov 51

5 Truth and Infinity in Badiou and Heidegger  Alexey Chernyakov 63

6 Suspension of the One: Badiou’s Objective Phenomenology and

Politics of the Subject  Vitaly Kosykhin 71

7 Unity in Crisis: Protometaphysical and Postmetaphysical

Decisions  Jussi Backman 87

Part III  The Singular Plural

8 Vegetal Democracy: The Plant that is not One  Michael Marder 115

9 Dividuum and Condividuality  Gerald Raunig 131

Part IV  Unity of the World

10 The One: Composition or Event? For a Politics of

Becoming  Boyan Manchev 147

11 Elemental Nature as the Ultimate Common Ground of the

World Community  Susanna Lindberg 157
viii Contents

Part V  Politics of the One

12 Negative Imperialization  Artemy Magun 177

13 … et unus non solus, sed in pluribus: A Citizen as Eikon  Oleg Kharkhordin 203

14 Drawing Lots in Politics: The One, the Few, and the Many  Yves Sintomer 221

15 More than Two: The One as Singularity in Ambiguity  Gerald Raunig 245

Index of names  253

Index  255
 About the authors

Jussi Backmann, University Lecturer in philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, Professor of Philosophy at Sødertorn University,

Stockholm, Sweden.

Alexey Chernyakov (1955–2010), Professor of Philosophy in the Department of

Liberal Arts and Sciences (Smolny College) at Saint-Petersburg State University,
Russia.

Keti Chukhrov, Associate Professor at the Russian State University for Humanities,
member of the Moscow Art Magazine Editorial Board, Russia.

Oleg Kharkhordin, Professor and Rector, European University at Saint-Petersburg,

Russia.

Vitaly Kosykhin, Professor of Philosophy at Saratov State University, Russia.

Susanna Lindberg, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tampere,

Finland.

Artemy Magun, Professor of Democratic Theory, Chair of the Department of Political

Science and Sociology at the European University at Saint-Petersburg; Associate
Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Smolny College) at Saint-
Petersburg State University, Russia. Member of the group “Chto Delat.”

Boyan Manchev, Associate Professor at the New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria.

Michael Marder, Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of

the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz; Editor of the Continuum series “Political Theory
and Contemporary Philosophy.”

Jean-Luc Nancy, Professor Emeritus, University of Strasbourg, France.

x About the authors

Gerald Raunig, Professor of Aesthetics and Political Philosophy at Zürich University

of the Arts, Switzerland; founding member of the European Institute for Progressive
Cultural Politics (EIPCP), founding member of the e-journal Transversal and of the
review “Kulturrisse.”

Yves Sintomer, Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department, at the
University Paris 8, France. Invited researcher at Neuchâtel University, Switzerland.
 Introduction

“Unum est necessarium.” This advice of Christ to Martha became the very formula
of Western theology and metaphysics (as a result of what was in fact a pun, because
Christ certainly did not speak of “the One” as a principle, but used the word to point
at a distinct thing among many others). This mood of heroic allegiance succeeded the
more ancient analogy between being and monarchy: “The rule of many is not good;
one ruler let there be.”1 In both cases, their difference notwithstanding, the One is an
imperative. Which also means that it is recognition of a lack.
The divergence between the Neoplatonic transcendent One and the Aristotelian
worldly One as an organizing principle, significant as it is, has not prevented theory
and practice from a consensus on the preference for the One over the many. The few
heretics, such as Étienne de la Boétie, author of a political pamphlet “Against the One”,
attest to the general rule.
It is not surprising that, in the twentieth century, the “One” became a target
for philosophical attack, on different levels of sophistication, which include liberal
apologies of pluralism in politics and epistemology (Isaiah Berlin etc.) and the more
metaphysical political ontology of “multitudes.” “A multitude,” say Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri, “is an irreducible multiplicity; the singular social differences that
constitute the multitude must always be expressed and can never be flattened into
sameness, unity, identity, or indifference.”2 They follow an earlier apology of Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in Thousand Plateaus, of a pure “multiplicity” that would
not even be correlated with the One, would allow escaping “the abstract opposition
between the multiple and the one.”3 “Multa sunt necessaria, Martha,” one could
perhaps translate, more in the spirit of contemporary busy life.
The problem with this position of Deleuze and Guattari, which, by the way, is
borrowed from Plato’s Parmenides (hypothesis #8, based on the premise of the
non-being of One) is the assurance that this inversion of the traditional approach
would in fact not be an inversion, but a complete severance of relationship with the
one. But why is it then rhetorically contrasted with the One? Indeed, in the same
book, Deleuze and Guattari say that rhizome, as an instance of a pure multiplicity, is
not derived from the one, the one is not added to it, but it is something “from which
the One is always subtracted”.4 The Lacanian “minus One” is not that far away. Indeed,
maybe the multiplicity is more lively than the One, but it cannot be represented
without first considering one as a “negative magnitude” or a fulcrum. “Follow the
plants,” say Deleuze and Guattari (see on this the chapter by Michael Marder in this
volume), but it is implied that a plant is not just a pure multiplicity (which would go in
all directions at once, would not it?) but has rather to do with an excess, overplenitude
of the One.
xii Introduction

Absolute first principles, such as Being, Unity, Truth, and Good are, if not quite
inverted, then attacked, as transcendent abstractions which are usually usurped by
hypocritical ideologists. In the twentieth century they are often replaced by structural/
procedural or anthropological concepts. But, in the ruling ideologies, the absolutes
remain, albeit in an inverted form: democracy, individuality, freedom of conscience
and of ethical choice partly inherited, in the discourse of human rights, the absolute
authority of monarchy, totality, orthodoxy, and supreme good which they oppose.
Absolute monarchies, religions preaching obedience to authority, social codes
dictating uniform morality (at least to the lower classes), and even nationalist, fascist,
or “totalitarian” democracies that tried constituting a unitary “people,” now appear
as constraining human freedom, offending human dignity, and closing a horizon of
possibilities. Of course, police order, the rule of law, and social conformity largely
remain in place, but they lose their transcendent legitimacy and have to play a double
role of authority and rational technological utility. This does not necessarily make
them less oppressive: sometimes, the opposite is the case. But they cannot speak the
language of the One.

What have been the possible modes of being-one? In philosophy, there are two major
models: the many, gathered, like a choir around a conductor, around the One that is
radically separated from them (thus Plotinus,5 but even Aristotle thinks similarly), or
the many actually forming unity-totality as its parts or members (Spinoza, and almost
the entire Modern democratic/materialist thought).
The former mode very much depends on divine transcendence, although Oleg
Kharkhordin shows in this book how the model of a choir constitutes an actual form
of a collective unity around a leader which is alternative to our representational
models.
The latter, immanent mode of unity poses a further philosophical and practical
problem of integration. Without appeals to the transcendent one as a principle of
hierarchy, the whole hierarchy becomes illegitimate. A well-ordered harmonious
unity may, from a different angle, seem like a system of borders that separate social
groups from one another and antagonize them: this is, for instance, the famous
critique by Marx of bourgeois civil society with its “division of labor.”6 Hence, in
contemporary philosophy, a search for the modes of unifying society that would
go beyond a system of parliamentary representation (which in fact stabilizes socio-
political asymmetries and hierarchies through a procedure of idealization). Badiou’s
concept of the “generic”—a set that systematically avoids any substantive criterion of
inclusion (technically speaking, a subset that is indescribable in the categories of the
original set)—is the most influential attempt to formulate this idea of a true immanent
unity. But there are other less metaphysical inquiries into the same subject, such as
the chapter by Yves Sintomer on non-representative, or at least non-electoral, politics
based on drawing lots, and Gerald Raunig’s reflection (in his second chapter) on
non-representative “concatenations.” Badiou’s “communism” sets forward, in fact, the
task that is analogous to, even if more radical than, the task of rethinking democracy
 Introduction xiii

and republic in the face of the crisis of representation: an aleatoric logic is proposed,
instead of the electoral aristocracy now in place.
One can say that the late medieval and Catholic “representative” logic of presenting
social groups as ideal essences (the Peasant, the Blacksmith, the Knight) and/or
persons, as well as the Modern institutions of the regular mass army, Fordist factory,
and mass political party—extreme instances of the “One”—gradually recede, and
give place to a fragmented society where units are relatively small, isolated from one
another, and constantly run away from each other like galaxies in the Universe. No
more estates, no more classes (say some), no more charismatic national heroes. The
unifying institutions such as elections, newspapers, or national TV channels arguably
lose their significance because of the dissolution of stable public opinion and of
mobilized civic culture. Elections are seen rather as a way to switch among several
“elites” than to represent a “people.” (This is the reason why the more archaic ways of
social integration such as the aleatoric “lots” may be a preferable option.) A network
that is interconnected but not total (like family resemblance, or threads in a rope),
unlike a unitary organization, has become a privileged model of social integration due
to its technological installation through the Internet and cell phones.
But it would be wrong to think that, because of the crisis of traditional modes of
unifying, unity as such would be disappearing, that Modernity would in some sense be
abandoning unity. While this is partly true in what concerns unity as a reflexive idea,
in another more direct sense Modern techno-science and Modern capitalist political
economy succeeded in an unprecedented unification of the globe. The One, as a hidden
spring of numbering, unites the world through monetary exchange and through the
binary language of electronics. This is possible via the negative force of the one that
makes “everything solid melt into the air” and unites humans and countries “by
default.” My chapter on “imperialization” emphasizes a negative and passive character
of this process. Such unity, obvious as it is, cannot satisfy us because it lacks a form of
unity and remains purely nihilistic (see my first chapter, on the proximity between one
and the nothing): in the words of Boyan Manchev (in this volume), this unity lacks
a world in the proper sense of this word. A. Negri and M. Hardt tend to oppose the
organic multitudes to the unifying logic of empire, but it is clear that the “multitudes”
can emerge only as a result of a violent dissolution of borders operated by capital and
technology, and by liberal-democratic propaganda.
But this Modern unifying process has at the same time led to the atomization of
society and dissolution of traditional social links. A subject loses the intermediary
levels of reference, finding itself one to one with the totality of the world. Unity of a
state, and then, of the planet, implied the unitary atoms as its elements. But today it
appears at once as a limitless totality and as an excluded, excepted one-as-singularity.
Therefore, throughout the last two centuries, social thought has been lamenting
the loss of social solidarity, and social practice was searching for artificial ways to
reestablish it. This is particularly a French tradition going from Rousseau to de
Tocqueville and then to Durkheim; de Tocqueville prescribing the spontaneous civic
organizations that we today classify as “civil society.” In post-revolutionary Russia, after
xiv Introduction

a decade of experimenting with actual communes, the party experimented with the
creation of “collectives” based on intense practices of cooperation and public denun-
ciation. As Oleg Kharkhordin argues in his book7 and recalls in the present volume,
this “collective” structure had its precedents in some Orthodox monastic practices. In
the West, psychological training secularizes some of the similar Protestant practices.
Contemporary white-collar corporations borrow many of these community-building
technologies.
Strictly speaking, nothing prevents a fragmented body or network from being
somehow unified. There is no contradiction here. In the simplest case, this unity comes
from outside: the fragmented and disintegrated multitude is in danger of being ruled
by an authoritarian leader (who would profit from the disconnectedness of interests).
This is why Negri and Hardt emphasize that this multitude has a mode of acting
together. To Aristotle, a joint action was also a way to unite the multiple. But Negri
and Hardt—probably following Jean-Luc Nancy—speak of the “common” instead of
the “one”. “The multitude, although it remains multiple and internally different, is able
to act in common and thus rule itself.”8 By this, they apparently mean being-together
without a unitary form, united by a set of relationships rather than a single essence or
attribute. But is not commonality (with its “com”, “with”) also a (divided) unity, even
though of a special kind? “Which With for the Many?” asks Gerald Raunig, in the first
of his two chapters in our volume. And he comes up with the answer of “con-division”:
a mode of collectivity which is no longer composed of units but only exists in a
centrifuge of differentiation and singularization. My own chapter on solitude in this
volume moves (mutatis mutandis) in a similar direction and conceives a unity of the
common as a shared solitude.
Another non-formal condition of unity is an empty space or a stage where multi-
tudes and singularities could actually meet. In our volume, this question is addressed
by Susanna Lindberg and Boyan Manchev, who discuss unity in relation to the
concept of the world. In their view, what is in crisis today is not a unitary form of
collectivity but rather the open space of occurring events: something which plays a
role of non-thematic horizon and not of form, and which is itself formless. The crisis
of extreme unification and extreme dissolution pushes us to constantly go back and
down, to turn to the foundations of foundations. Both Lindberg and Manchev defend
the immanent character of the world thus understood. The former suggests returning
to the ancient natural-philosophical language of “elements”; the latter opposes the
immanent ubiquitous alteration and transformation of things viewed by a fresh eye to
the sublime unity of the event which is privileged by Badiou and, as Keti Chukhrov
argues in her chapter, is even present in Deleuze.

In philosophy, interest in the problem of One and many as such goes beyond the
obvious need to undo (or even invert) the monotheist ideologies of the Old Regime.
In the twentieth century, some thinkers (such as Heidegger) had little interest in
this concept, and some, as mentioned, were mainly interested in subverting and
abandoning it. But there have also been schools that tried to productively renew
 Introduction xv

the very concept of the One. Philosophy of mathematics was one major school of
thought where the One was a central question (Frege, Cantor, etc.). A redefinition
of the One as based in zero was advanced by Frege, while Russell, Gödel, and some
others demonstrated the logical impossibility of one supreme totality. The One is not
one: the existing one is not unitary, and the unitary one does not exist either existen-
tially or logically. This is a powerful critique of the metaphysical and theological
conception of being, which makes the one into an aporetic principle of an infinite
procedure. However, as we know, the danger of this approach is to make a skeptical or
a Neokantian decision and to treat all unity as subjective or formal.
The other line of the twentieth century’s “henology” was the French metaphysical
tradition stemming from Jacques Lacan. It is Lacan, this philosopher-psychoanalyst
who is, strangely, the most eloquent theoretician and apologist of the One in the
“continental” philosophy of the twentieth century. Instead of escaping into “multi-
plicity,” Lacan dialectically reverses the very concept of the One, stating, for instance,
that “The One is a pure difference” or even that “The One as such is the Other.”9 On the
one hand, Lacan emphasizes the negative aspect of the One as a result of subtraction,
separation, and exception. He notices that, in the midst of dogmatic metaphysics,
the One constituted a virus of negativity, and is itself inherently negated. Even our
negative terms, such as the Latin “non” or German “nein,” contain a reference to the
one: the one functions here under subtraction, as “minus one.”10
Lacan uses the concept of One in connection to his structuralist philosophy of
language, and for him the One, and numbers in general, are instances of signs without
a semantic meaning, pure signifiers that lie at the ground of language. The One,
expressed by the minimal, simplest line, “trait unaire,” is a pure, minimal signifier, a
borderline not just of quantity but of meaning and sense, which precede and exceed
the question of existence. Moreover, for Lacan, the negative designation of the “one”
precedes its positive definition: the one emerges in response to a lack.
It is in Lacan’s footsteps that his two great heirs, Deleuze and Derrida, developed,
at the end of 1960s, the theories of difference as preceding and forming identity. The
double, the mimesis, the resemblance, the repetition, are what constituted our notions
of truth and sameness. Unlike Lacan, neither Deleuze nor Derrida tried to use the
concept of One on its own—both preferred to invent new concepts, and held an
acutely polemical relation to traditional metaphysics. Deleuze polemically opposed
the philosophy of the One as a kind of policing gesture, while Derrida emphasized
“dissemination” and (as we are reminded by Nancy’s chapter in the present volume)
the “plus d’un” (more than one) of any phenomenon that he analyzed. The situation
changed with Jean-Luc Nancy who, following some ideas of Derrida, nevertheless
insisted on a more hermeneutical approach of “deconstructing” the classical concepts
and the trivial words of language by giving them a new (or primordial) meaning.
Nancy’s classical work from the 1980s11 was dedicated to the notion of the common
which, he showed, was not an indication to a totalitarian unity, but to an inherently
plural structure of being, of any being thing. This was in fact already an attempt to
“save” political unity from the neoliberal individualism, by reinterpreting it as open
xvi Introduction

and shared. But at that time, the accent was on plurality rather than unity, on the
inherent split and distribution of being. But Being Singular Plural, which developed
the same set of ideas, invoked unity in the aspect of singularity, uniqueness.
In Nancy’s recent works, in which he “deconstructs Christianity,” he has no
reservations to speak of the One as such, although of course this is not a return to
any religious orthodoxy. The continued relevance of monotheism, says Nancy, is its
proximity to atheism: the negative character of the One God that withdraws from the
empirical realm.
[W]hat is lost of the very essence of monotheism in all its [present] forms is
precisely that the “one” of the “god” is not at all Unicity qua substantial present
and united with itself: on the contrary, the unicity and the unity of this “god” (or
the divinity of this “one”) consists precisely in that the One cannot be posited
there, neither presented nor figured as united in itself. Whether it be in exile or in
diaspora, whether it be in the becoming-man or in a threefold-being-in-itself or
whether it be in the infinite recoil of the one who has neither equal nor like (thus
not even unity in any of its forms), this “god” (and in what sense is it divine? how
is it divine? this is what we have to think through) absolutely excludes its own
presentation.12

When God becomes one, Nancy develops, he is displaced by becoming a “principle”

[“the first captured”: the One appears again] rather than a person, but this “principle
or principate [principat] (to appeal to this old word here) can only exempt or make
exception of itself in regard to itself.”13 This is a thought that is familiar to us from
Giorgio Agamben (who quotes Nancy in his turn), but unlike Agamben, Nancy does
not make this observation into an ironic denunciation of sovereignty but uses it to
emphasize the potential of self-criticism and access to the abyssal ground that lies in a
serious fidelity to the one. In his chapter of our volume, unlike Deleuze and Guattari,
Nancy conceives the one as an overflowing excess, not as a stabilizing and “molar”
form imposed on a chaos.
Here we come to Alain Badiou who is in a way the central author for many chapters
of this book because he (well, like Nancy) calls for a creative renewal of traditional
metaphysical and scientific concepts, and because he sees in mathematics a chance to
reunite science with philosophy, and thus the concept of one plays for him a particular
role.
Building on Frege and Lacan, Badiou admits that the “One” is naturally not there,
and that it only emerges as an operation. “Il y a de l’Un.” [“There is something of One.”]
Hence the role of mathematics, which is sufficient to form and structure being, forms
the multiple matter from outside. Badiou is a good Kantian here. Further, like Frege,
he deduces the One from the notion of zero, “empty set,” which is named by “the name
of the void.” Vitaly Kosykhin rightly notes in his chapter the Neoplatonic overtones
of this position. The new unity of “sets” and “numbers” is an imperfect unity, since it
cannot unite, represent itself. Hence, a new dialectical step is needed, which, according
to Badiou, consists in an emergence of the “Ultra-One”14 (a concept to which Nancy’s
 Introduction xvii

concept of “More than one,” developed in this volume, is probably a rejoinder). The
“ultra-one” is the event—a reflexive, impossible set that counts itself: includes its own
name. “The ‘ultra-one’ […] counts the same thing as one: once as a presented multiple,
and one as a multiple included in its own presentation.”15 The “Ultra” means both that
we transcend the one and that we find a new larger unity, like in Cantor’s theory where
there is a hierarchy of inconceivably large “cardinal” numbers.
But one cannot say that unity, in Badiou, takes over the multiple. He insists that
the sets that he studies are “multiples,” even though on the other hand it is clear that
they are just multiples counted-for-one by “ontological” rationality. Moreover, the
ultra-one of the event, a non-set which exceeds a set, is not, in Badiou, the end of
the story: it further leads to the creation of a new peculiar set: the “generic” one. A
generic set is a subset that is not discernible from within the original set, but that “runs
through” all its possible classes and categories. In Being and Event, Badiou emphasizes
that the construction of the generic is an attempt to introduce truth within ontology.
But ontology is a regime of counting something as one! In the first Manifesto, Badiou
emphatically states that the generic is the multiple as such, and that his theory is a
sort of “Platonism of the multiple” which allows for passing between the principles of
the “without-being of the One” and “the limitless authority of the multiple.”16 In other
words, the generic goes beyond the opposition between the one and the multiple and
reconstitutes a multiple in the terrain and in the language of the One itself. Once again,
we have something like a dialectical synthesis of the one and the many.
Badiou as a thinker of the One is preoccupied with the part, not with the whole: an
event, and its generic consequence, are ways to separate and describe the phenomena
that stand apart from a common situation. “One divides into two,” he repeats Mao, not
“two unite into one”: both in philosophy and politics, truth is derived by distinction
and discovery within the existing situation. However, Badiou would agree that “unum
est necessarium”, in the direct sense of the Christian ethics of fidelity which he
secularizes in his Saint-Paul: there is just one thing necessary, and it suspends all other
existing values and rules.
Attractive as are Badiou’s apology of the splinter-like Ultra-One and his dialec-
tical construction of it, they pose several problems. One of them is the complicated
character of Badiou’s theory that basically posits two images of unity: the event and
the generic set, and the relationship between them does not have a clear mathematical
or logical form (Alexey Chernyakov suggests in this volume that the event is a risky
bet on the possibility of a generic set). The second problem of Badiou’s ultra-unity
is his affirmative understanding of event as an advent which makes it ontologically
secondary to the original set (situation), from which the new set is separated but
which it does not annul or destroy. Without the internal negativity of event it is hard
to conceive either historicity (nothing actually disappears here), or the need to keep
a fidelity to the event instead of simply carrying through its agenda (“fidelity” implies
that the cause has somehow been lost, event interrupted, etc.).

If we now try formulating the reason why the One is interesting at all, we can say, in
a short cut, that the One, in the all-familiar language of both words and numbers,
xviii Introduction

is the most basic term. An indefinite article and a unit of counting. To achieve this
“atomic” quality, One had to become a pure name or a pure number: it is the very
operator that allows the subject to pass from an egocentric obsession to the happy play
of reversible signifiers. But, at the point of this suspension of meaning, it turns out
that the One is a highly polysemic name, and that its polysemy reflects the semantic
intricacy of the concept. Like so many ancient names, the “one” means contrary things
at once: uniqueness and equivalence, inclusion and separation, orgiastic collective and
egotistic monad, siege and exile, in the terms of Marcia Cavalcante, who formulates
sharply: “The one names both the most singular and individual—each one as opposed
to another one—and the most universal and general—each one as each one of a
conceptual whole or kind.” This singular is not an element of a totality or an exemplar
of a genus; it is a meaning of the One that resists counting, only to be reaffirmed in a
new turn in an infinite multiplicity of shared solitude.
Being a dialectical, rhythmic (Jean-Luc Nancy), or “heterogeneous” (Jussi Backman)
concept, the One unites and dis-unites the mutually contradicting concepts of totality,
singularity, and identity in an inevitable temporal deployment which requires a
philosophical analysis to discern. A rhythm of affirmation, passage, self-annulment,
and re-settlement at a new terrain: it is hidden in all everyday occurrences where
we start—and immediately stop—counting, stumbling at the edge of something for
which we try to prepare. But this rhythm is infinitely variable, subject to recombina-
tions and reverberations of the meanings of the One. The chapters collected in this
book are so many variations in the same scale that stretches from singularity through
identity to totality, and then, symmetrically, from the multiplicity as the distinction of
singularities through the multiplicity as the anonymous equivalence of hoi polloi, to
the power and awe of enormous multiplicity that animates any totality and exceeds it.
The inventive paths between the one and the many are compressed, in the chapters
of this book, in a series of new (or renewed) promising philosophical concepts:
Fragility, Dividuality, Element, Solitude, Icon, Plant. At the same time, the concept
of the One helps to throw light on more familiar concepts, such as World, Event, and
Representation.

The structure of the book groups its chapters in accordance with the specific angles
taken by them in rethinking the concept of One.
The first, introductory part, entitled “The other One,” contains attempts to conceive
unity, or something like unity that could not any longer be called by this name, beyond
our general stereotypes of totality, numerical unity, or singular uniqueness. This other
angle invariably includes negativity, which makes the one into a moment of rupture,
crisis, split, but also reflexive self-reference. The chapter by Jean-Luc Nancy deploys
the dialectic of One through the seemingly banal logic of quantity and count, and
through exploring the intricacies of the one as signifier. Marcia Cavalcante, inspired
by the theme of Saint Petersburg (the venue of the 2010 Unum conference), describes
the traditional notion of the one as a “besieged” identity and suggests looking for a
new intermediary concept between the one and the other: what Cusanus called the
 Introduction xix

“non-other.” My own chapter in this part develops an existential approach to the

metaphysics of One and suggests that this abstract and sublime notion can be deduced
from the experience of solitude. But then this experience is such that the roof of unity
looks very much unlike the closed, oppressive, prison-like totality.
The second part, “Event of the One”, unites the chapters that take the One, tempo-
rally and existentially, as an eventful encounter rather than a form or substance.
The One is singular in the sense of unexpected, it is a product of intense condensed
experience and a ground of subsequent time span. Such is, as we have seen, the position
of Alain Badiou, and three of the four chapters in this part are dedicated to this great
French thinker. Keti Chukhrov contests, with polemical vigor, the ironic reading by
Badiou of Deleuze and of his philosophy of event. She insists, in fact, on the proximity
of both theories of event, giving a rather unexpected interpretation of Deleuze. Alexey
Chernyakov compares Badiou’s eventful temporality with the structure of time expli-
cated by Heidegger in Sein und Zeit. Vitaly Kosykhin argues, on the contrary, for a
more objectivist reading of Badiou, emphasizing that the being, for him, is subjectless.
Thus seen, Badiou loses some of his glamor as a militant philosopher and appears as
a contemplative metaphysician, somewhat in the spirit of “speculative realism.” Jussi
Backman, in a detailed reading, explains Heidegger’s reading of Parmenides as an
“onset,” presenting the “one” (and “first”) as a name of a permanent crisis.
The third part, “The Singular Plural,” brings together two chapters that problem-
atize multiplicity and explore alternative ways to conceive it. Both Michael Marder and
Gerald Raunig are less “henophilic” than other authors of the book: both try devel-
oping, with the “help” of Deleuze, new ways of conceiving and thinking multiplicity,
being not content with its supposed obscurity. While abandoning the metaphysical
One, Raunig and Marder do not abandon its more immanent versions, such as
singularity and “being-with.” Marder explores the transcendental repercussions of
the concept of “plant,” while Raunig uncovers, in the work of Gilbertus Porretanus, a
theory of “unum dividuum,” a mode of conceiving of a human being without making it
into a self-sufficient unit. Creatively combining Deleuze and Nancy, Raunig describes
a mode of joint being that would consist in “con-division” and not in the “common.”
In spite of their seemingly abstract concerns, both authors are overtly political, in that
they look for a “true” democracy, republic, or community, behind these very concepts/
values that may look trivial or even problematic.
The fourth part is titled “Unity of the World”. Boyan Manchev and Susanna
Lindberg try to find and re-found unity as non-thematic conditions of gathering and
communicating: unity is thus neither a thing nor a transcendent idea, but rather a
ubiquitous environment. Manchev emphasizes constant alteration and transformation
as a condition for a worldly encounter of things, while Lindberg, with environmental
problems in mind, suggests a return to the ancient “elements” as a concept to which
we do not have today an exact analogon.
The final part of the book, which is homonymous with the whole, is more
empirically oriented. It deals with political theory, but its chapters pose the very same
problems of the one, the many, and their transformations. In my chapter on “negative
xx Introduction

imperialization” I apply my concept of negative unity as solitude to the contemporary

political order, showing the force of dissolution hiding behind its apparent imperial
integration. This crisis of the Modern state and the void that it opens, obviously, set
the stage for the invention of alternative forms of political unity.
Oleg Kharkhordin takes a step back from today’s instinct to think of a popular
unity as formed by representation. Attempting to think differently, he shows an
example of a non-representative union that would not necessarily be authoritarian or
anarchic. “Who”, he writes, in restating the perennial political problem of the One’s
non-existence, “can claim that s/he has seen or touched a group in toto or a group
as such, an entity separate from its members?” And, continues Kharkhordin, “[a]n
iconic citizen is characterized by understanding this absence and by a determined
pointedness to this ever-retreating group existence.” Unity is not incarnated in a
center, there is no idea of resemblance, typifying, or copying: instead, something like
a correlation is established among the group and its leader(s). One is reminded again
of Lacan’s “Il y a de l’un.”
Yves Sintomer speaks of the actual forms in which political unity may exist beyond
the standard representation. Democracy, being an organon of social integration,
has a potential of transformation, in the situation where the standard parliamentary
system starts aging, both historically and conceptually. The participatory forms of
government that draw on lot rather than “aristocratic” election help make society into
a more perfect larger unity—or a more perfect multiple, if one prefers.
Finally, in a coda, Gerald Raunig returns to the opening chapter by Nancy and
formulates once more the main problem of the book: to find a way to concentrate,
single out, or intensify the multiple that would not at the same time impose the
identitarian One upon it. Raunig points at the political answers to this question, in the
practices of contemporary art and of militant non-conformist activism.

It must be added that the book may provide an additional interest for the fact that
most of its authors represent the Eastern/Central and Nordic corners of Europe:
Russia, Bulgaria, Finland, and Sweden (plus a Canadian of Russian origin, an Austrian
who is very involved in the intellectual life of Central Europe, and, finally, one (the
one?) from France). This is a region of intellectual semi-periphery whose intellectual
life is relatively separate from the global discussion, not just because of linguistic and
cultural barriers, but also because of the logic of the postcolonial world where those
without access to rich libraries and living outside of the networks of Anglo-American
universities are at a comparative disadvantage. While in Finland and Sweden the state
stimulates academics to publish in English, this has only very recently become the
case in Russia, for instance. Thus, my effort as an editor and conference organizer
was, apart from matters of substance, also to build up and to present a community
of thought from the scholars of the North-East corner, scattered around its intense
island-like intellectual centers, such as Sødertorn in Sweden, European University
and Smolny College in Saint Petersburg, New Bulgarian University in Sofia, and
others. The task was thus to build in this region something like a new philosophical
 Introduction xxi

archipelago (that would not at the same time resemble the Gulag or the besieged
Leningrad). Certainly, the presence of the great European centers of gravitation, such
as Strasbourg, Paris, and Zürich, remain crucial for not closing this contour of generic
energy into an identitarian “one.”
The origin of this book is a joint interest in the notion of One and in the philosophy
of Badiou that in 2006 made me start a joint seminar with Alexey Chernyakov. Not
just age but also the styles of our thinking and the character of our questioning
separated us, but nevertheless there emerged a sort of intellectual resonance, as a result
of which we ran, from 2006 to 2008, a seminar on the One (“Unum-Seminar”), first in
the Saint Petersburg Higher Religious and Philosophical School, later in the Smolny
College of Saint Petersburg State University. From 2008 to 2010, Chernyakov ran his
own seminar, where he provided a detailed exegesis of Badiou’s works. A mathema-
tician and a philosopher of phenomenological orientation, author of a book on
temporality in Heidegger,17 and a long-time professor of the Saint Petersburg Higher
Religious and Philosophical School, Chernyakov quite unexpectedly became inter-
ested in the French Maoist Badiou: apparently he saw in him the continuation of the
early Heidegger’s ethical pathos, but without his stoic and atheist principles of finitude
and death, and without his prejudice towards science and particularly mathematics
which, for Chernyakov as for Badiou, was an obscure, almost illegible, language of
infinity. In this, he followed not just Cantor but the great Russian mathematicians
of the twentieth century who interpreted their own mathematical discoveries in the
sense of “imyaslavie,” a tendency in Orthodox Christianity that emphasized the power
of the name of God and made its pronouncement into a special cult.18 Hence the
strange alliance of an apolitical and theologically oriented phenomenologist with a
leftist political philosopher, out of which this book, in the final analysis, was born.
In April 2010, thanks to a generous grant from the Center of Franco-Russian
Friendship in Moscow, to the French Institute at Saint Petersburg, to the Andrew
Gagarin foundation, to the Smolny College (now the Department of Liberal Arts and
Sciences at Saint Petersburg State University), and to the Center “Res Publica” of the
European University at Saint Petersburg, I organized a large international conference,
“Politics of the One,” which was centered around the issues previously discussed in
our seminars but which involved a broad circle of thinkers from Europe and North
America. The next step was a publication developing the same questions in depth,
and this is now achieved thanks to the energy and intelligence of Michael Marder, the
editor of the series, to the publishers, Continuum and, in particular to its editor, Marie-
Claire Antoine, and to the serious efforts and sharp minds of all the authors of the
book. Special thanks go to the European University at Saint Petersburg for supporting
the translation of Gerald Raunig’s chapters, to Aileen Derieg and Brian Currid, and
to Jonathan Chalier for translating Raunig and Nancy, respectively. Tragically (in the
literal sense of the word), Alexey Chernyakov, who stood at the origin of this project,
did not live to see this book: he died from a stroke during a period of intense heat in
July 2010. We dedicate this book to the memory of the one who was thus singled out
for interruption.
xxii Introduction

Notes
1 Aristotle, Metaphysics (12), 1076а5.
2 M. Hardt and Antonio Negri, The Multitude (Penguin Press, 2004), 105.
3 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (University of Minnesota Press,
1987), 32.
4 Ibid., 21.
5 Plotinus, Ennead, 6, 9.
6 See “On the Jewish Question,” in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (Lawrence
& Wishart, 1975–2005), 146–74.
7 Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
8 The Multitude, 100
9 Jacques Lacan, L’identification, Séminaire IX (unpublished), 1961–2, 15.11.1961, 35.
There are two seminars of Lacan devoted in a large part to the concept of One. They
are separated by an interval of 10 years, the first is #9, 1961–2, the second is #19,
1971–2. The second one returns to the same problem that Lacan posed in 1961–2, but
with new philosophical references such as Frege and Plato.
10 Ibid., 21.02.62, 109.
11 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. P. Connor et al. (University of
Mionnesota Press, 1991).
12 Nancy, Dis-enclosure (Fordham University Press, 2008).
13 Ibid., 23.
14 A. Badiou, Being and Event, 181–2.
15 Ibid.
16 A. Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy (SUNY Press, 1999), 103.
17 Alexey Chernyakov, The Ontology of Time: Being and Time in the Philosophies of
Aristotle, Husserl and Heidegger (Kluwer, 2002).
18 Lauren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor, Naming infinity: a true story of religious
mysticism and mathematical creativity (Harvard University Press, 2009).
 Part I

The Other One

 1

More than One

Jean-Luc Nancy

[W]e shall at one time be descending, tearing apart, like Osiris, the one into many
by a titanic force; and we shall at another time be ascending and gathering into one
the many, like the members of Osiris, by an Apollonian force.
Pico della Mirandola1

[T]he double did not only add itself to the simple. It divided it and supplemented
it. There was immediately a double origin plus its repetition. Three is the first
figure of repetition. The last too, for the abyss of representation always remains
dominated by its rhythm, infinitely. The infinite is doubtless neither one, nor
empty, nor innumerable. It is of ternary essence.2

One, two, and the resumption of this division and this addition. Resumption that
counts for one more, and makes three. Two divides one and supplements it: one has
not taken place; it has only taken place by redoubling [dédoublant] and repeating itself.
The “abyss of representation” is the non-presence that is replayed at each new
proposal of meaning: a sign, as soon as it makes a sign, refers to another sign and their
reference refers to nothing (to nothing as a “thing,” a “presence,” a “given”). Sign, and
sign, and nothing, such is the rhythm.
But nothing—no thing, not any thing, not “one”—we begin to know that it is
“something,” as in French (res, rem, un rien). In order to understand what “thing”
nothing is, if it can be understood, one might consider how reference is there made:
through rhythm. In other words, nihilism consists in contending that no sign refers
to any thing and that signs only carry this nullity on. It therefore contends that “one”
corresponds to “one,” to a “one.” But if the repetition of signs—language, and even
more than language, the significance [signifiance] of all things—is valid as rhythm,
isn’t there a scene change? Rhythm throws in more than one. More than one, more
of one, “neither one, nor nil, nor innumerable” and nothing, the thing, in the form of
infinity. Exit from nihilism. This is what we are here taking care of.

The un- of the unfolding [dédoublement] and the re- of the repetition make “one”
more—one that is not another one added in the indefinite series of units, but one,
4 Politics of the One

the addition of which is also the distance between one and two, the gap that divides
one at the same time as it supplements it, that is to say the gap sustains its place and
role and, in doing this, it adjoins the one to itself, the simple “one” to the split, double
“one.” This adjoining through division, this inflection, this articulation transforms
monotonous addition of one to one into rhythm. The return of the same substitutes
for linear succession—the return with which Nietzsche has opened what one could
call the epoch of “more than one.” The “same” indeed is not the “one”—at least as
identical. It is what, in order to be the same or similar (das Gleiche), must precisely not
be “one.” Or must sweep the one—with its own unity and unicity—in a displacement
the movement of which we begin to feel, while feeling that in reality, since the very
beginning of our history, the “one” displaces itself, in itself or out of itself. We will
have reasons and occasions to go back to this, without claiming to reconstitute—that
would be the task of a vast treatise—the history of the one, this history that, all in all,
is one from Heraclitus to Derrida and to ourselves, but that is one by way of having
from the outset displaced [déplacé], carried off course [déporté], and extended beyond
limits [débordé] its own unity as well as the “one” of which it seemed to be in charge.
(To say no more about this now, it may suffice to take a moment and recall
some flashes of the one in Heraclitus, in Plato, in Aristotle or Plotinus, the unity of
Augustinian Trinity and that of the God of Averroes, of the God of Thomas Aquinas,
without mentioning Ibn Arabi or Eckhart, Leibniz’s monad, the one-for-itself by Hegel
or Stirner’s unique. A few references are not much, of course, within the vast and
proliferating course of the history that could one day be characterized as the history
of the One, the unique history of the One, of its advent and its avatars3—“one day”
when the One is disunited from itself. As a matter of fact, we are already there. This is
precisely what we are talking about.)

“More than one,” this was, later than the text I’ve quoted, one of Derrida’s favorite phrases.
I might say: a fetish phrase. More than one language, more than one session, more
than one law, etc.—and maybe more than one “one”: whether he has taken the risk of
such a turn of phrase or not, it is legitimately prescribed. Prescribed by the logic of the
supplement of origin, to take over his own words, but prescribed to this logic itself since
the most ancient departure (was there one departure, only one?) of philosophy.
More than one philosophy? More than one, philosophy, itself? The unity of
philosophy has not ceased to be for itself an object of litigation. Now there have to be
essentially several philosophies that diverge or confront themselves, now there has to
be one philosophy that continues and reasserts itself unless it comes to pronounce its
own “end” and its opening to an other “thinking.” But philosophy itself presupposes
the putting at a distance of a unique principle of the sophia it talks about. The philein
is a principle of non-unity: it implies the possibility of variations, distances, and
approaches, and on principle then it holds at a distance the unity and unicity that we
would always obstinately tend to assign to a sophia.
It also means that always and constantly, in one way or another, philosophy is
more than philosophy. More than one and more of one. More than itself: this too is
indicated by philein. Hence, necessarily and originally, philosophy would throw in an
 More than One 5

excess over unity: its own unity as well as that of its theme (whether it is called “being”
or as one wishes; here precisely only counts the excess of any meaning [signification]
or significance [signifiance] over one sense [sens] whatever it may be). “One way
only”—that is also one of the main names of our history as a process and as a calling
the process in question.
“More than one”: it obviously means more than one thing (and what is “a thing” in
this remarkably undetermined sense? A signified, a reference, an object, a concept? In
truth, it simply means “one,” any given unit, the fact that we can fulfill the intention
of “meaning” [vouloir dire] through something else than “nothing”—therefore simply
that “one” is not nothing, and that for this reason the minimal question of the “one” is
the question of nihilism: nothing, or something of the one).
“More than one” means first and foremost “more than only one,” more numerous; it
means in this sense the number itself, or numeration. More than one: one, two, three,
four … (non-rhythmic succession). It immediately entails a plurality of “ones”: the
one-one is followed by a second one, then by another. But the plurality of “ones” opens
straightway the question of its nature: is it addition, multiplication or else distinction,
dissimilarity?
If plurality results from addition or multiplication, “more than one” may extend
indefinitely like the series of numbers, of all possible numerations (“natural,” “real,”
“imaginary,” “irrational” numbers, …). The principle is that of numeration or numer-
ality: more than one, which is to say not only some ones but also many. More precisely,
there are never “some ones” without there being “many” at the horizon. Many, the
multitude, i.e. the multiplication of the ones that are not brought back to the juris-
diction of a One, simply because there is neither a jurisdiction nor a “One” with a
capital, but only the enumeration of “ones.” Enumeration is the principle of the crowd,
of the numerous of which the number continually increases. Addition brings always
further the indefinite sum that will never make up a unity.
When humanity counts seven billion individuals—nine billion in 40 years,
according to forecasts—the large number seems to disseminate in itself any alleged
unity of “man,” of “human kind,” which, in fact, turns out much more similar to the
kind of an indefinite multiplication than to the kind of growth of a generic unity.
And that could therefore turn out [s’avérer] to be the kind of no kind, as a blurring of
genre or more precisely of species, since homo sapiens is a species of the genre homo.
A species that does not let itself be grasped as such, that is to say specified or grasped
under an aspect that would be distinctive of it: the aspect that, all in all, is a term akin
to “species.” The species without aspect, or the species characterized by what defines
as a rule the zoological “species,” namely inner fertility. The human species could not
develop any other aspect than its own exponential reproduction accompanied by a
reduction and a destruction of many other living species and by a genetic transfor-
mation of many others, and even of itself thanks to technologies such as cloning. More
than one, yes, up to nine billion, and not one man? Can we imagine that: that a specific
identity deploys itself as pure multiplication of units that tend to be only of worth
as units of account within the interminable counting? The seme or semen of “man”
disseminated in its pure dispersion?
6 Politics of the One

Multiplication also makes the other value of “more than one” appear.
Dissemination—this other word by Derrida—steals the sense [dérobe le sens] (and the
seme, and the semen) from unity and unicity. “More than one” is thus multitude, less
as proliferation than as efflorescence, as overabundance and in the end as excess of
sense [sens].
No doubt the growth of the human population proceeds from the activity of
man who never stops pursuing anything else than the reproduction of its conditions
of life and of its species, always paving the way for unpredicted lives, lives that do
not appear on the table of species, and transcends any novelty that mutations could
introduce among the living. As more than one and more than one species, man is itself
a mutation of the living: it transforms life, which is maintenance, into enterprise—if
one may retain the original meaning of the word, i.e. nothing else than “realization,
fulfillment.”
As long as life maintains itself, it responds to rhythms, to the alternation of sleep
and wake, action and passion, words exchanged, languages and peoples. When it
turns maintenance into enterprise, life breaks the rhythms, creates new ones though,
invents complex cadences, but also carries any cadence along an indefinite speeding-
up. Here is another aspect of the passage to large numbers: population, speed,
dimensions of economic bubbles or measures of the universe, everything receives
the sign of large numbers. Large numbers are both received and produced by this
movement called “globalization” that increases the presumption of unity. But “global”
unity cannot be anything else than a unity itself numerical, numerous, cumulative and
dissociative at the same time, the “more than one” unfolded [déplié] into “one plus
one plus one …”. The “plus,” hence as a sign of addition and not as an indication of
overcoming.
In addition, the unity of the whole is not distinct from the uniformity of additive
operation. And yet the value of “plus” changes completely between “one plus one” and
“more than one.” The former is reduced to arithmetic writing (1) and our linguistic
use distinguishes it from the latter.4
1 In the latter use, “more than one,” the issue is to overcome the unity of one. It is
not only a question of being able to count many “ones” or several times the same
“one”. What is thrown in is neither several, nor a lot, but the status of the “one”
itself. But this throw-in is not opposed to addition and multiplication: Derrida’s
text reads precisely “the double did not only add itself to the simple”. Addition
is not denied; it is animated by another movement: by going from one to two,
therefore from one “one” to two “ones,” I do not place only units side by side—
which are furthermore necessarily supposed to be identical in so far as one can be
added to the other—but I also affect the nature or the state of the “one” (and as a
consequence not only of the first one, but of the second one and any other “one”
to come).

This affection is a division and a supplementation or a substitution: of course there

is a given one, followed by a second one, but as a consequence of this fact the first
 More than One 7

“one” cannot remain immobile in itself. On the one hand, it becomes [passe dans] the
second—as a “one,” precisely—and it is thus divided from itself. On the other hand,
since this division withdraws from the one its propriety of initial unicity, and since in
this way one has not started to count—one has not really counted “one plus one”—
therefore the beginning or origin establishes [avère] its propriety instead of what
should or could have begun, what we tend to represent as making the “one” of the first
step [pas], even though a “step,” by itself, divides itself.
One could say that there are two logics of the “one”: one that posits the one as
immobile, but raises the difficulty to know how to step towards [passer à] more than
one, and the other that receives the one as the step itself, that divides itself by itself and
replaces its own initiality [initialité].
“One” divided is not “one 1 one” but two “ones” resulting from the division of the
first one that has not taken place. Two times, then, and the division itself as initiality of
what has not “begun” and therefore a third time. A ternary rhythm, the metric figure
of which could be the so-called “amphibrachic” meter - , and it does not exclude
˘ ˘
other possible beats, or the possibility to move [passer] to four by splitting and thus
doubling up [dédoublement] the second time. As we know, this is what happens in
Hegelian dialectics, as well as in the Christian Trinity, which could be considered as
the unity of the three with this unity itself called “God” (or, in the human analogy
employed by Augustine, the unity of memory, intelligence, and love with the person
who is only herself in these properties taken together)—without the fourth time
indicating any further “unit” but rather the extension or the inner tension of the
ternary. Hence the Geviert by Heidegger is the figure [figure] of the extension or the
opening of the world, an extension in which existence is possible according to the
Ereignis understood as the event of the one (of each one and/or of the one of “Being”)
and therefore also as its division or partition.5

I do not undertake, obviously, to go through the figures and concepts of the three and
the four in philosophy, theology, mysticism, alchemy: I only want to mention how
this numeration has been significant throughout our history. A numerology and an
arithmosophy has, from time immemorial and well before philosophy, covered and
doubled enumeration. The “one, one …” has always given rise to speculation about
the “one” itself, the “one” that is not enumerated. Beyond any numerology, however,
it matters to hear: because there is a beat [battue], a beating [battement], a pulsation.
Maybe “one” is only possible without this pulsation, which is not numeration and
yet already plays in numeration, already percussive in the simple “one 1 one 1 one
…”. There is no addition without repetition, and no succession without scansion. No
chant of the recitation of tables—“one plus one, two, two plus one, three …”—without
suggesting a song, an incantation. It is no longer the count that is important, but the
resonance: it is the language of calculus referring back to itself, that which exceeds
both calculus and language.
“One,” perhaps, is a matter of rhythm and not of counting, and not of the number
of the rhythm—3, 4, etc.—but of movement, of gait [allure], of drive [allant], and
8 Politics of the One

of pulsation. For a long time, the question of the primacy of the one or being was
disputed—in particular between the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Neo-Platonic tradi-
tions. Pico della Mirandola tried to end this debate by writing his De Ente et Uno. His
solution consists in overcoming the rivalry of the two pretenders by ascribing them
both (along with the good and the true) to God, who cannot be grasped by thinking6
because its unity comes “prior” to that of the one itself. Its unity is actual infinity and
at the same time intimacy with itself such that “true knowledge” of God’s unity is a
“total ignorance.”7
In other words, there is one and one. There is more of one buried at the heart of the
one—and of being. If it is impossible, indeed, that a being be without being one, it is
yet possible, and maybe even necessary, that the one and being come under a different
logic of the One. Distancing oneself from substantive “being”—which indeed readily
submits to numeration—so as to approach “Being,” the verb “to be,” this verb that “is
not” as Heidegger says and that for this reason calls for its crossing out—not a deletion,
but a spacing [écartement] (a quartering [écartèlement] if I may, or a star-shaped crack
[étoilement])—one comes to think of this verb as a transitive verb (Heidegger requires
it sometimes). This non-grammatical transitivity could be rendered thus: Being spaces
being out [être écarte l’être].
Being is thus not “one” being, nor the production of beings one by one. But “Being”
forms the act of spacing [écartement], distinguishing and dividing beings. This act is
one—without being “one being.” It is the unity of the act, the transitive unity that does
not precede the “ones” of beings and that does not take place [survient] but that is
acted or rather acts, that enacts their event [événement] or advent [avènement].
This “one” does not let itself count. It is the one of the upsurge [poussée], of the
pulsation or the drive [pulsion] that makes what is be. A rhythmic one, that is to say
both composed, plural in itself, and one that eludes counting. We are not talking about
counting the times of the rhythm here: we are talking about clapping one’s hands or
beating the drums, and that is something completely different. We talk about dance
and cadence. The apprentice counts his steps, but the dancer does not; the dancer takes
steps or is carried and pushed by them.
“Being” is being pushed outside, that is to say ex-isting. Each existent being is one
existent being—which does not mean that it is one in itself and for itself [en soi et
pour soi], unique and united—but the pulsation that projects all and each falls within
a very different unity. In this sense, the world is indeed “one” but this unity is taken
away [dérobée] from us by number—not the magnitude of number, even though this
magnitude itself seems to indulge in adding itself for the sake of adding itself—but
because of our struggle to understand what unity could be revealed beneath numer-
ation and multitude.
Of course, the world’s unity is not revealed, in the sense we give to this word. It
does not come to light, it does neither let itself be known, nor counted. But it testifies
of itself always and everywhere. Always and everywhere indeed, in the exorbitant
profusion of nature as in the proliferation, or even the swarm [pullulement] of our
machines, our signals and our purposeless purposes [fins sans finalité], always and
everywhere there is a testimony to [s’avère] something like “one” dispatch [envoi]—not
 More than One 9

a project but a je(c)t, an ejection from the world (by us, within us) towards an outside
that is always wider and always more exempt from the certitude of a unity, unity of
intention, of design, of history.
It could indeed be the case that the One prior to any unity be withdrawn not only
from our grasp—it has always been as we have always known—but from itself. This is
said, “God is dead.”
But another aspect of this withdrawal could be that the prior One, the eminent
one or “maxime unum” as Thomas Aquinas puts it,8 withdraws from all unity and all
numeration. By withdrawing itself, and by leaving behind the empty remains of the
“one,” it indicates a higher, incalculable, innumerable unity—therefore also countless
and taking care of the countlessness of large numbers—but “one” in so far as it exceeds
any multiplicity, any diversity, but because of this also any unity that could be countable
within a multiplicity.
One from beyond or before the One. One punctual, without dimensions, not taking
place, without place or time but opening up every possibility of time and place. This
excess has nothing magical or mystical and it is not a hazy metaphysical entity: the
excess is given within the nature of “one.” If “being and one convert into one another”
as in the classical doctrine of transcendentals, and if “Being” is being pushed outside
(outside, ahead, further, elsewhere, as one likes), then “one” provides the energy for
the drive, and it provides it as rhythmic pulsation.
The “maxime unum,” the greatest one, is greater in so far as it is “maxime
indivisum,” as again Thomas puts it. To be supremely indivisible is to be not liable
to any manner of division, neither in parts, nor in substance and accidents, nor in
actuality and potentiality, nor to end up as “something” and the nature, the position,
or the existence of this thing. The exceeding one, the one exceeding itself, prevents
any ascription of this kind and can only be considered as this unity and unicity of the
pulsation, pulse, and impulse [pulsation, pulsion, impulsion]. It is not a “one”; it is only
the absolute simplicity of an upsurge [poussée], of a leap, of a momentum.
Its unicity is absolute, and that is why it is both “one and all” according to the unity
of the whole, a thought attributed to Heraclitus, to whom we also owe the words “the
one adjoins to itself by differing from itself.” The exceeding one “is” all precisely by
differing from itself, by differing itself in the upsurge [poussée] that opens, spaces out
[écarte] and scatters all things. Nevertheless it does not differentiate from itself and
does not resolve itself into differences. It defers itself—that should be understood
according to the logic of différance: this deferring does not happen [survient] to it,
but it is rather this deferring itself. It “is,” if one may say so, it is only but fully the
movement, the upsurge, the drive that carries itself and carries ahead [qui se porte et
porte en avant], that is carried [qui se transporte] and communicated to any existence,
to every existence. One should not overlook the fact that in the famous “one differing
from itself ” of Heraclitus, the verb diapherô has to be also or foremost understood
according to its value of carrying [transport], movement, and shaking that carries
away [qui emporte].
The exceeding one is a carrying away [emportement]. Because there is a world,
or there are worlds, as many as one likes, because there is something. It is the secret
10 Politics of the One

one of this undetermined, anonymous, and discrete “something,” the discretion of

which bursts into indefinite multiplicities of unities and unicities. One might say, thus
following the logic of différance, that this carrying away does not carry anything that
preexists to itself, not even itself.
This one is another “more than one.” It is—as far as it “is”—the “more than one”
that turns into “somewhat more than one” [plus qu’un]: more than “one” but not
more numerous than it, on the contrary, even more one than one; not counting but
carrying, not a unit but a dispatch [envoi], not given but giving. Unique, but not
isolated, replayed [repris] on the contrary and restarted [relancé] in every scansion of
existence, each one being unique. One of absolute simplicity and not of union: it does
not unite anything in itself since it opens up the pass—the passage, the pass band—to
the diverse, the pass itself divided of the division of all things.
As Blanchot writes: “The ‘One’ is what least authorizes union, even with the
infinitely distant; still less does it authorize mystical elevation and fusion.”9 No
confusion, but profusion. The one that is not added—or “not only” added, and trans-
forming the very meaning of “addition”—and that is not reunited in itself, the one
neither additive nor inclusive is not, for all that, withdrawn in itself like a point (such
as the Kantian “I,” for instance): on the contrary, it is this carrying by itself and out of
itself (but it has no inside and no outside), carrying of the point, in a sense, but then
carrying that makes a line, not continuous but rhythmic, the cadence of the always
renewed plurality of all singulars. Each singular is itself “one” in this sense: in so far
as it repeats the initial carrying—the carrying of the initial—being itself in its turn the
opening of other profusions (a life, for instance, every moment, every way [allure],
every up and down of a life, and its death).
If there is a unity of the world, or rather if the “world” can be thought as the
non-numerable unity of Being, of this being understood as rhythmic singularity and
according to the ternary essence of the infinite Derrida was talking about, the world’s
unity has to be of this nature. That is to say of the nature of the profusion of species,
aspects and manners of the existent, the prolific upsurge of living beings and of this
other proliferation, that of our machines, apparatus, devices, and our transplanted,
transorganic, virtual, fiduciary, fictive organs.
This requires that proliferation and profusion be abundance and not accumulation
by addition. Neither addition of a moment in time to another, nor addition of a section
of space to another. We know that the general and most abstract form of this addition
is money or currency: the equivalence and the permutability of cumulative units
(of “specie” we used to say). We also know that it is the exponential development of
money’s techniques (credit, options, banks, etc.) that made possible the deployment of
other techniques and, along with them, of our entry into the era of large numbers—
cosmic, demographic, electronic—of which we do not know whether they count as
swarm, plethora, glut, or else as abundance, generosity, wealth—but in what sense of
wealth?
Wealth, another word for “more than one.” And this clearly shows [expose] the
crossroads: between the accumulation of countable units and a generosity that can
only come from elsewhere and before, from the unity of an infinite rhythm. This might
 More than One 11

be why, since the beginning, our civilization has been so much concerned with the
one: because it knows that it has committed itself between the one that adds to itself
and the one that carries itself away from itself [s’emporte hors de soi].
Between the one and the other: we know today that we have to take over all the
terms of this alternative, interval, contradiction, or complexity. Between the one and
the other one. This immediately entails: between the one and the other. Is the other
the other one or the other of the one? And of which one then? To be continued.

Bibliography
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (CreateSpace, 2009).
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln and
London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995 [1980]).
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, translated, with an introduction and additional
notes, by Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978).
—Dissemination (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983).
Pico della Mirandola, De Ente et Uno [On Being and the One] (1491).
—On the Dignity of Man, translated by Charles Glenn Wallis (Annapolis: The St. John’s
Bookstore, 1940).

Notes
1 On the Dignity of Man, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis, 1940.
2 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans, with an introduction and additional
notes, by Alan Bass (The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 299.
3 The only contemporary writer who has wished to build in proper terms an
“ontology”—Alain Badiou—calls it “ontology of the multiple” and its main proposition
is that “the One is not.” He thus both takes over this history and interrupts it by
opposing the non-being of the event to the not-being of the One. In Derrida, the
(un)folding of the origin opens up event in being or rather in the place left free by the
Heideggerian Destruktion of all ontology. The one does not have to be or not to be if
being itself is not. But it happens, as rhythm. That is to say also it happens to itself, it
befalls—as “more than one.” One may notice an asymptote common to both ways to
proceed: in both cases the one would be its own excess. In a manner analogous to, this
time, on the one hand, Heidegger’s Ereignis (which is “appropriation” of the non-one
of the proper on the background of the “unicity” of being—Einzigkeit des Seyns
appearing in, for instance, Beiträge 12); on the other hand to the “univocity of being”
of Deleuze (which is only made of the different). The kind of network I am working
at in this hasty fashion does not intend to gather all these thoughts—if not, after
all, in the perspective of a question such as: what is an epoch? How is the unity of a
moment, a phase, or a stage decided? There never is a pure heterogeneous disparity
between thoughts of an epoch even though we hardly know what makes it an “epoch”
(and “one”) and even though there are at the same time obvious differences. “An
12 Politics of the One

epoch” is not a consensus but, within the most acute dissensus, a relative possibility to
refer the ones to the others.
4 In French, “1” and “more” are both “plus,” but the final s is only pronounced when
employed as “1”.
5 To move from the ternary to the quaternary, one would have to consider how Derrida
receives the Geviert about which he reminds us that it is formed for Heidegger “out of
an original Unit” (e.g. in Dissemination).
6 Pico quotes Anselm: “Domine, non solum es quo majus cogitari nequit; sed es
quiddam majus quam cogitari possit” [God is not only that than which no greater
can be conceived, but he is that which is infinitely greater than everything that can be
thought] (Proslogion XV).
7 De Ente et Uno [On Being and the One (1491)]
8 Summa Theologica, Ia, qu.11.
9 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster [1980], trans. Ann Smock (University of
Nebraska Press, 1995), 139.
 2

The Fragility of the One

Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback

To Irina Sandomirskaja
And all things are lit by a nacreous glow—
The source of the light is a mystery, though.
Anna Akhmatova, The Summer Garden, 19591

The announcement of the conference reads as a call, the call for thinking the
one beyond its hegemony and beyond its fragmentation. To read a call is in itself
something strange, thus a call is to be heard rather than read, at least when taken
literally. But maybe at stake here is precisely the call for listening when reading, the
call for listening to the call of the one.
How does the call for the one sound? It sounds as the call for listening to the
unheard voice of the one in a world experienced as the gigantism of the too much.
Too much things, too much words, too much products, too much information, too
much conferences, too much calls, too much people; a world of excess with too little
exception. Because today the one faces the too much (to agan) rather than the many
(hoi polloi), modern concepts such as of “mass,” “crowd,” and “multitude” seem insuf-
ficient to describe the sense of the world’s too much. Thus the too much of the world
does not mean simply that this world is inhabited by too many people, products, uses
and abuses, but that the world itself seems to have become too much. At stake in the
too much of the world is not simply the quantitative meaning of the too much but the
fact that the quantitative too much became the only possible quality. The quantitative
too much is the only quality not merely because everything is measured exclusively
by economic parameters but mainly in so far as everything has lost the need for
determination.
The too much of the world that appears when quantity becomes the only quality
implies the indeterminacy of everything. In this indeterminacy, not only men are
redefined as “men without qualities” but things are redefined as “matters without
determination,” in so far as they are nothing but the flexibility to be used in most
various functions, to serve to most different purposes, to act in whatever way to
whatsoever play of forces. Here, everything becomes anything. If the limits between
men and things appear as erased it is because “Being” as such has lost the need for
14 Politics of the One

defining itself from out qualities and determinations. [Being today has no longer
a need for an ontological discourse on to on kata symbebekos.] Global capitalism,
capitalism of global market and medialization, does not expose solely the expansion
of capitalism over the planet but the logic of indeterminacy that over-determines
everything that is. Indetermination over-determines the meaning of everything.
Indetermination over-determines the meaning of “Being.” More complex than
emptiness of the meaning of Being through its total reification, the too much of the
world relies on a strange de-reification of the meaning of Being. De-reification means
here the loss of the determination as thing, as res, in the sense of what has a proper
spatial and temporal delimitation, of what can only be what it is and not something
else. In the too much of the world, everything exists as what has to be something else
and therefore as what cannot be something in itself. This means that capitalism is no
longer defined as a process of reification, in the sense that everything is converted into
a value of thing. Global capitalism means instead the conversion of the determination
of thing (reification) into the value of indeterminacy (de-reification). Heidegger
pointed towards this transformation when he defined technique as the transformation
of the meaning of being as objectification (Gegenstand) into the meaning of being as
resource (Bestand). This explains not only the banal fact that richness today shows
itself more and more in having as little “things” as possible but above all how the
impact of different philosophical critiques of the understanding of being as substance
and subjectivity are easily absorbed and banalized in a rhetoric of “becoming,” of
“forces,” of “potentiality.”
When things lose their determination of thing and are converted into the value
of indeterminacy, the notion of the one becomes even more ambiguous than it has
always been. The notion of the one oscillates between two strong senses. In the first
strong sense, the one is the only one, the one of a whole, the whole as one—hen kai
pan, the very definition of the world. In the second strong sense, the one is each one,
the one in a comparative, serial, exemplary relation to other ones and to the whole.
The relation between both senses of the one confers the condition of possibility for
determinacy. When we say, this is one thing and that another thing, we relate what
something is to its being as “one” thing. In an everyday way of determining things,
the one is understood as “each one” and the “each one” as the one. This has also two
senses: on the one hand, things are determined as “each one” for being this and not
that, and, on the other hand, things are determined as “each one” of a certain kind of
things, of general determination or conceptual whole. The one names both the most
singular and individual—each one as opposed to another one—and the most universal
and general—each one as each one of a conceptual whole or kind. In the ambiguity of
its conceptuality, the one oscillates between the unique and the banal, between what
only belongs to itself and what belongs to everyone. In its ambiguity, the one oscillates
between what is the most inapprehensible because it cannot be subsumed to a general
kind, not even to a name, being ineffabile, and what is only an example of a general
kind. The concept of the one binds together not only the each one and the other one,
but what is the most other in relation to the one—namely every-one. In this sense, if
the concept of the one is what confers the condition of possibility for determinacy,
 The Fragility of the One 15

it is because it touches the limits of determinacy, touching the indeterminability of

each one. It is because it is a Grenzbegriff, the limit of concept in the concept of limit.
Oscillating between what is in itself the most undeterminable, the uniqueness of each
one, and what is the most determinable, the generality of the each one of a universal
kind, the concept of the one points towards the point where the most undeterminable
and the most determinable meet each other. The ambiguity of the concept of the
one shows what Nicolas of Cues called coincidentia oppositorum,2 a coincidence of
opposites, a point where extremes tend one to another, the point where one begins to
become the other or another. Here, the one appears as differentiated with itself, hen
diaféron heautón.3 Because the concept of the one touches both the determinable and
the undeterminable, we could say that it can be considered both as an obsolete effort
to seize our global and globalized world and as capable to seize the indeterminacy of
being, at stake in our global and globalized world.
In order to understand this, we should depart from the way the one appears in our
global and globalized world. It appears in a very ambiguous way. On the one hand, we
experience an increasing disappearing of the “each one”, understood as what is itself
and not another. The each one of nations, of ethnicities, of people, of regions, of sides,
of dimensions, of frontiers, of positions, appears as what can no longer be clearly distin-
guished. It appears as no longer being a clear “one.” The experience is not however of
indistinct oneness but of a mixing of limits, in which the each one appears as no longer
one. In this sense, we talk about fragmentation and “broken hegemonies” (to recall a
title from Reiner Schürmann).4 On the other hand, we experience the most hegemonic
sense of the hegemony of the one as only one, in so far as the global and globalized
world means a world without otherness and transcendence. Global and globalized
world means a world that has no way out of itself, a world that does not know any way
to escape out it. It is a world in besiegement, a world of total immanence, the state of
siege of the world. Hegemony means here the only one as the one without any other.
Each one becoming other: this is a way of defining the global world as a world of global
fragmentation. The one without any other: this is a way of defining the global world as a
world of global hegemony. To the indeterminacy of beings—that is, to the meaning of
being as what can function whenever and wherever as whatsoever—corresponds not
only an ontology of flexibility but above all the inflexibility of a world that does not
admit a transformation of this continuous flexibility. Hegemony does not mean here
primarily the power of one principle or the principle of one power but the no way
out of the global world, a no way out both in space and in time. As much as there is
no space outside the global regime and system of power, there is no time beyond the
timing of the global regime and system of power. The global character of the world
does not rely first on the fact that different places and times can be experienced simul-
taneously, that distances in time and space can be shorter or even deleted, briefly, that
we have to do with another kind of “transcendental aesthetics” and therefore with
other forms of perception and sensibility. The global character of the world relies
rather on this circularity without escape, on this no way out that affirms the world as
besiegement, as immanence that includes everything with the exception of any possi-
bility of self-transcendence. The self-evidence of this no way out of our global world
16 Politics of the One

is so powerful that the dreams of liberation and escape, hopes of transformation and
revolution, and theologico-political discourses on a possible beyond have torn with
all sense of “beyond, ” assuming that, because there is no way out, the only possible
utopian transformation would be a conformation to the global, in a more just and
equal globalism.
The no way out of the global world does not appear, however, simply in the
worldwide admission that there is no way to escape from globalism or global
capitalism. The no way out appears rather in the experience of powerlessness to
change the world. This powerlessness is not due to a suspicion towards rational dreams
of total revolution, of a revolution of principle, in so far as such dreams of reason
create monsters, as Goya once depicted them. The no way out of the global world
appears in the experience that it is the all-power of man over being and life that, in
its too much, discovers itself impotent and powerless to control its own power. Today,
we face a state in which human life became a slave of its own freedom and the human
appears subjected to her own subjectivism, losing her own image when everything
became its own image. The society of control, even when called global society of
knowledge, is the society that, controlling everything, discovers its powerlessness to
control its will to control. In this acceleration and over measure of control, power, and
knowledge, in the too much of the world, where nothing can be lost, not even a loss
(our garbage!), we experience, in different levels of singular and collective existence,
the powerlessness of this incommensurable power, the impotence to control of this
overwhelming control, the not-knowing of this encompassing knowledge. A limit
of power, of control, of knowledge appears in the too much of power, of control, of
knowledge. What appears in the individual and collective experiences is the fragile
point where there is too much power and no power at all, too much control and no
control at all, too much knowledge and no knowing at all meet and touch each other.
This fragile point is the singular.
In a world besieged by the too much—too much power, too much control, too
much security, the singular appears as what has no power over power, no way of
controlling control, no possibility of assuring either the possible or the necessary. In
the world of excess, the singular appears as the most extreme fragility—a little “flower
in the crannied wall” (Tennyson),5 a grass straw in a cement block, a child of the
streets, a single life in massacres of indifference. No power of the singular each one
in the middle of the besieged world of the too much: however, in this no power, the
singular still appears as a point of fragility. How to grasp this point of fragility? How
to grasp the fragility of the singular? How to grasp the fragility of the singular as the
solitary one? We are used to discuss it either from out of the difference between the
singular and the universal or from out of the difference between one and other. We are
used to discuss the singular from out of a clear distinction between measures, the little
and the big, from out of a clear distinction between positions, the self and the other,
etc., without asking from where these oppositions are pronounced and constructed.
In the too much of a world with no way out, where clear distinctions appear blurred,
unclear, and ambiguous, where one is already the other and the little totally absorbed
by the big, how to grasp the fragility of the singular one? It can be described as the
 The Fragility of the One 17

fragility of a point, in the sense in which Kandinsky defined the geometrical point as
“invisible being,” as the first element in a sensibility of the “in-existent,” to follow the
way Alexandre Kojève interpreted Kandinski’s intention of non-representative art.6
The fragility of the point is the fragility of the smallest circle of concision, the incision
of the invisible tension in a form, and therefore the invisible beginning of a form.
Kandinsky describes the point as excentric–concentric tension, a tension that tends
towards a center while tending outwards. The point is, in this sense, most intensive
tension of contraries, at the edge of its own breaking down. The point is a breaking
through in its own breaking down, irruption in its own disruption, disruption in its
own irruption. That is why, for Kandinsky, the point is “the most concise temporal
form”7 and must be described as the beginning of a sound where sound and silence
touch one another. In Kandinsky’s pictorial description, the point is not the force of a
pole against other poles and further against a sum of poles. It is neither what opposes
the line and the surface. It is rather the fragility of the resonating silence of a tensional
coincidence of contraries. As a tensional coincidence of contraries, the fragile point of
singularity is neither a point of oneness nor of otherness but a between one and other.
This between is not to be understood as undecided tension waiting for resolution. It is
also not merely a spatial or temporal interval between positions, the self and the other.
Neither oneness nor otherness, between one and other, the fragile point of singu-
larity can be characterized as a “between,” in the sense proposed by Heidegger. As
care Dasein is a “between”, he says.8 But this is another way to show in the saying
how the “between” one and other of Dasein means an ek-static movement, “ek-static
temporality.” Being as Dasein, as ek-static temporality, means being in itself out and
beyond itself.9 This is not the same as being with the other and others inside oneself,
either in the sense of being alienated (possessed by the “they”) or being altered (to
become another one). Being-in-itself-out-and-beyond-itself is not a “concept of
fragile singularity” but a formal indication of what is concretely experienced, as for
instance in a situation of exile. Exiles are not only extraterritorial exiles. In a besieged
city, in the besieged world of the too much, each one exists in exile. And this is not a
metaphor. Why? Because the existential situation of an exile is one of no longer having
a world in the home-world and never arriving at an alien home, being alien at home
and not at home in the alien. It is a situation of in-betweenness that has nothing to
do with being between places or experiencing an interval between two times. It is, on
the hand, a situation of being without return and without arrival. It is a situation of
continuous being with the others that have been left behind in time and space, alive
or dead, and therefore being without them with them. And it is, on the other hand,
a situation of being without the others that have not yet existed, without the unborn,
without promising births, being with this without, being without others with them.
The fragility of singularity lies on this being in itself out and beyond itself in so far
as singular existence means being at once with and without others, being with and
without past and present, being as a life after the others’ death that is at the same time
a life before the others’ birth. The fragility of the singular lies in its exilic situatedness,
in so far as it is never here and now, thus the fragile here and now is the fragile point
where life after the others’ death and life before the others’ birth coincide. It is an exilic
18 Politics of the One

existence, not only in the sense of not being able to be in one’s other place but in not
being able to be in one or another place, thus it exists in between lost existence and
never acquired existence. Difficult to grasp is, however, not so much that the singular
existence is between past and future, and being itself a present past future, but how this
existence in between, the between of existence itself is in itself out and beyond itself.
Ancient Greek philosophy and especially Aristotle had some thoughts about how
singular life relates to the whole of life, thoughts that we can find rethought in the
philosophical tradition, and not only among the more mystical and romantic thinkers
of nature such as Schelling and Bataille. Aristotle expressed how “marvelous is life”
when describing, in the Part of the Animals, the cyclic change of life and death in
nature.10 The marvelousness of life was for him the strange force of fragile singu-
larity, even if not in these terms. Thus, for him it had to do with the way singular life
appears as a discontinuity in the continuous cycle of nature. Thus the singular life, as
for instance the life of a child, being unique, is at once continuity of the species and
its discontinuity, being what could not be otherwise for the sake of life’s necessity of
being always otherwise. In this view of a cosmos in harmony, a glimpse of vision into
the exilic nature of fragile singularity takes place when Aristotle recognizes singular
life as the coincidence of discontinuity and continuity of the species. Ancient ontology
developed this glimpse of vision about fragile singularity in terms of the relation
between part and whole and reserved the term metexis, participation, to describe how
the sensible takes part in the intelligible, how fragile singularity, even if understood
mainly as an example of a general kind, takes part in the cosmic all. Metexis is one
of the first terms in the vocabulary of ontology to describe fragile existence in the
in-between, a certain sense of exilic existence, something we can read, without too
violent projections, in Plato’s Symposium. The ancient ontology discovers the exilic
in-between as a relation between the singular life of the one and the cosmic life of
the whole, considering the singular one as a part of the whole and thereby as discon-
tinuous continuity of the whole. The ancient ontology admitted singular life as treat,
sustaining a tragic cut between mortal and immortal life, between the human and the
divine within the one of the cosmos, almost as a canvas by Fontana. The medieval
ontology made the first existentialization of this view, describing fragile singularity
in terms of exile and assuming exilic life as the only improper way human existence
can exist, cut from its divine origin and longing for coming back to dissolution in
divine existence. Human exilic existence is understood as a movement from exitus to
reditus, departing from God, suffering in an existence far from God and wanting to
return to unity with God.11 Among different ways of interpreting, in the Middle Ages,
the human exilic existence which faces God as creator, is a more mystical tradition
that follows from Dionysus Pseudo-Areopagite, through Meister Eckart to Nicolas of
Cues. This tradition developed a different view, to a certain extent closer to Ancient
Greek experience and to existentialist philosophers. Nicolas of Cues described the
fragile nature of singular existence, the fragility of finitude as a non-other in relation
to God. Instead of thinking it in a dialectical opposition between self and other,
creator and creature, infinite and finite, omnipotence and impotence, he describes as
non-otherness, the non aliud, the difference within the identity presented by human
 The Fragility of the One 19

existence in divine existence and the identity of this difference revealed by divine
presence.12
Cues’s medieval expression non-aliud, “non-otherness,” shows in its saying how
to understand the between of exilic existence as a relation between continuity and
discontinuity. It points to the necessity of dis-learning the dialectics of one and
otherness in order to grasp the fragility of the singular. Thus, at stake today is not
how to solve or to overcome the One or the Other but to dis-learn oppositional
thought and its reifications. Non-otherness points towards the necessity of thinking
the between one and other from within the in-between, from within exilic experience
and not from one of the poles, that is from an empty formal standpoint. However, it
is only by dis-learning the poles, leaving them behind, that a thought from within
the in-between can appear. Otherwise, the between would be nothing more than
another pole, another harbor. The thought of non-otherness is a paedagogia negativa.
Non-otherness neither negates the opposition of one and other, reducing it to an
empty identity, nor affirms this opposition by negating the experience of their fragile
identity. Non-other is a way of naming what has no name, that is, being at the same
time and at once with and without one and other within ourselves. Non-other names
the white nightly instant in which day appears as the non-other of night and night as
the non-other of day. It names the fragility of the exilic existence of the singular, which
is not merely the fragility of having lost roots and grounds but the fragility of getting
roots in the loss of roots, getting grounds in the loss of grounds.
A lot has been said and debated about the grounds for the successive loss of
grounds and roots that characterizes contemporary history. The global and globalized
world, the world of the too much, affirms itself as a world beyond and after grounds
and roots. It presents itself, however, as a new ground and root, a ground in the
undifferentiated common, a root in global indifference, that is, in what belongs to
everybody in so far as everybody and everything can be anybody and anything. This is
not the same as the fragility of the singular, as what is grounded in the loss of grounds.
This is not the same because the fragility of the singular is the fragility of being without
grounds and reasons, the fragility of being as a little flower in the crannied wall, as a
“source of light” in the poem of Akhmatova quoted in the exergue, as the child’s feet
that Dostoevsky uses to kiss in his dreams of ridiculous man,13 naming the lack of
name for what has no reason and discovers no ground to exist, even less to exist after
the loss of grounds and reasons, after the death of God. Grounded in the fragility of
having lost grounds and roots, the singular names the being-thrown of existence itself,
without laments of guilt, that is, of reasons and grounds and without the anxiety of
projecting new grounds and reasons to a future. The fragility of the singular is sharp
like a pointy peak. It hurts and is silently incisive in so far as it shows in itself that
singular existence is the appearing of the ungrounded and unreasonable fact that there
is still existence. And if, quoting some verses of T. S. Eliot, “the lost word is lost, […]
the spent word is spent, the unheard, unspoken word is unspoken, unheard; still is
the unspoken word, the Word unheard, The world without a word, the Word within
the World and for the world.”14 This “still,” resonating the silence of a fragile point,
shows, when saying, the groundlessness and uprootedness of existence itself. No God,
20 Politics of the One

no state, no nation, no belongings and even no language but the groundlessness and
rootlessness of existing without returns and without arrivals. This is neither living in
one’s ground and root nor in another ground and root, thus it is a ground without
ground, a root without roots. It names therefore both the fragility of grounds and roots
and a grounding and rootedness in fragility. The question to ask then is how to think the
politics of the one when the one is experienced singularly as fragility and collectively
as too much? How to think the politics of the one, beyond fragmentation and beyond
hegemonies, as a political ground in the loss of grounds and roots, as a political
ground in fragility? In this sense, politics of the one does not mean politics understood
as a tekné politiké, a technique of politics, but the fragility of the one as a decisive sense
of the political. If the political is to be defined not as a technique of deeds but as the
way common existence discovers its own grounds and roots, then it would be possible
to admit the fragility of the one as the groundless ground and the rootless root of
common existence. This would mean first of all to recognize that common existence
is not only a being with but a being with-out, in the sense of being at once and at the
same time with and without oneself and the others, being with and without living,
dead and unborn others, with grounds and roots in the without grounds and roots.
In this sense, it comes to say to our dead and unborn others: “I am your non-other, as
you are my non-other.” This expresses a relatedness that experiences, in the common,
the uncommon, and in the uncommon the common. A lot is being discussed today
about the common, beyond the liberal and communitarian views. In these discus-
sions, the force of the singular is being brought into light, and the notion of a plurality
of singulars is aimed at finding political views beyond relativism and universalism,
beyond individualistic and collectivist positions.15 In these current views, the singular
means force and potency. But who is this singular? In the too much of the world, the
singular appears disappearing. It appears as a fragile, invisible, incisive rather than
decisive point in the visible, potent and decided indeterminacy of the too much of
the world. The question is, then, how the fragility of the singular can be assumed as
a “force” in the no way out of the too much of the world? Maybe, the fragility of the
singular does not have to do with force and power to revolutionize the regime and the
system of power, but, in the fragility of the singular it is the powerlessness and limit of
the system of power itself that appears. The fragility of the singular shows, therefore,
another meaning of the whole and of the one, it shows the meaning of the whole in
which the instant all and nothing coincide. It shows another meaning of difference,
thus it shows difference out of the instant of differentiation, the instant in which life
and death coincide. The fragility of the singular is the fragility of a lightning, of an
éclair, reminding us that the human world is not the whole about the whole and the
one, human life and human death is not the whole about life and death and even less
about the human. Still, “all things are lit by a nacreous glow—The source of the light
is a mystery, though”, listening again to the verse of Akhmatova. The fragility of the
singular, the resonance of its silence, can do very little. But it can at least remind us that
still is the fragile existence of life in nature, in history, in the human. The task today is
to think carefully and to care thoughtfully about this fragile “still” of life in our “today”
as a source of political common existence, naming again and again what has no name.
 The Fragility of the One 21

Bibliography
Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, trans. Judith Hemschemeyer
(Boston: Zephyr Press, 2000).
Aristotle, Parts of Animals. Movement of Animals. Progression of Animals (Loeb Classical
Library, 1937). St. Augustin. “De doctrina christiana. De vera religione” in Corpus
Christianorum Series Latina (CCSL 32) (Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 1996).
Nicolaus Cusanus, De Docta Ignorantia. Liber Primus; Die Belehrte Unwissenheit. Paul
Wilpert (ed.) Lateinisch-Deutsch [Philosophische Bibliothek Heft 264a] (Hamburg:
Felix Meiner, 1964).
—De li non aliud, Vom Nichtanderen (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1987).
T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London/Boston: Faber and Faber, 1963).
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986).
Wassily Kandinsky, Point, Ligne, Plan. Pour une grammaire des formes (Paris: Denoël,
Gonthier, 1970).
Alexandre Kojève, Kandinsky (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2005).
Plato, Symposium, trans. B. Jowett, Project Gutenberg, 2008. Available online at http://
www.gutenberg.org/files/1600/1600-h/1600-h.htm (accessed 15 May 2012).
Reiner Schürmann, Des hégémonies brisées (Mauvezin: Trans-Europ-Repress, 1996).
Alfred Tennyson. The works of Alfred Tennyson. Poet Laureate (London: c. Kegan Paul &
Co, 1878).

Notes
1 Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, trans. Judith
Hemschemeyer (Zephyr Press, 2000), 187.
2 Nicolaus Cusanus, De Docta Ignorantia. Liber Primus; Die Belehrte Unwissenheit. Buch
I (1). Paul Wilpert (ed.) Lateinisch-Deutsch [Philosophische Bibliothek Heft 264a]
(Felix Meiner, 1964).
3 Plato, Symposium, 187a.
4 Reiner Schürmann, Des hégémonies brisées (Trans-Europ-Repress, 1996).
5 Alfred Tennyson. The works of Alfred Tennyson, 278. “Flower in the crannied wall/I
pluck you out of the crannies,/Hold you here, root and all, in my hand./Little flower—
but if I could understand/What you are, root and all, and all in all, /I should know
what God and man is”.
6 Alexandre Kojève, Kandinsky (Quodlibet, 2005).
7 Wassily Kandinsky, Point, Ligne, Plan. Pour une grammaire des formes (Denoël,
Gonthier, 1970), 33.
8 M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986), § 72, 374.
9 Ibid., § 65, 329.
10 “In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous,” Aristotle: Parts of
Animals. Movement of Animals. Progression of Animals (Loeb Classical Library, 1937),
Book I, 645a.17
11 St. Augustin, De doctrina christiana. De vera religione, in Corpus Christianorum Series
Latina (CCSL 32) (Brepols Publishers, 1996).
12 Nicolaus Cusanus. De li non aliud, Vom Nichtanderen (Felix Meiner, 1987).
22 Politics of the One

13 Anna Akhmatova, The Summer Garden, in The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova,
trans. Judith Hemschemeyer (Zephyr Press, 2000), 187.
14 T. S. Eliot, “Ash-Wednesday,” in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (Faber and Faber, 1963),
102.
15 See Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford University Press, 2000).
 3

Unity and Solitude

Artemy Magun

“Solitude teaches us the essence of things because their essence is also solitude.”1 This
line of Joseph Brodsky, a twentieth-century Russian poet, points at the ontological
significance of solitude as an existential condition and hints at the paradoxes
pertaining to this condition. It would be quite banal, even though true, to say that
a human being is singular, and via its singularity s/he perceives, or even constitutes,
the singularity of everything else. But there is more: solitude is not just unity but
a longing of the one to go beyond itself. And, indeed, the moment when humans
perceive a thing’s loneliness, both are not lonely anymore. Or, maybe it is because they
meet, qua solitudes, they are truly solitary: together. This lyrical thought will guide us
below through the labyrinthine paradoxes of the fundamental anthropological and
ontological concept.
My article aims to elucidate the negative aspect of the concept of unity, using
historical, logical, and phenomenological perspectives. This is conceived not as yet
another inversion of classical metaphysics but rather as a way to move forward and to
achieve, pushing off from the negative fulcrum, a new synthetic view on the problem
of the one and the many.
The particular importance of One as a concept is threefold. First, it is a metaphysical
correlate of the political sphere. The political is a sphere where the unity of human
subjects stands in question: the unity that is not naturally given but has to be
actively constituted and maintained. Today, this political unity is endangered, because
society is in a state of dissolution (apathetic atomization) and because unity tends
to be naturalized (as a unity of humans as such, or as ethnic or racial unity of all
sorts). Second, unity is a negative ontological concept, one that logically contains
the movement of destruction and reduction. It is therefore the most Modern, and
democratic, philosophical concept—but before late Modernity, this negative aspect
of it had been downplayed. Third, the One is a concept that sutures philosophy with
mathematics. After a period of a split between philosophy and science, and a defensive
posture of “Continental” philosophy against the naturalistic and nihilistic tendencies
of scientific ideology, it is now necessary to reunite philosophy with Modern mathema-
tized science, to supplant the non-formalizable self-critical movement of metaphysics
with the strict and at the same time playful structural logic of the signifier.
24 Politics of the One

All of this is a trend of a certain recent tradition; the task of this chapter is to
return from the logical and metaphysical construction to the experiential constitution
of unity, which would allow bringing the conceptual work down to earth and avoid
its degradation into an idealist art pour l’art. Experiential, phenomenological analysis
requires, however, a support in the cultural tradition of the last two centuries, which I
will further cite (rather than objectively describe).

History

Philosophy
The One is a central concept of Western metaphysics. Starting with Parmenides and
throughout Antiquity, being was understood as inherently one (to hen), and thus the
task of thought was to grasp the internal unity of a thing. Already in the Pythagorean
school, of which we have few surviving fragments, the one was considered an
origin of number and a universal principle.2 But the one did not come first: it was,
to Pythagoreans, a way to limit and frame the original indeterminacy (apeiron), or
perhaps a synthesis between this indeterminacy (characteristic of even numbers) and
the stubborn identity (characteristic of odd ones).3 Pythagoreans started the Greek
philosophical tradition with a beautiful-minded arithmology, but their intuitions lay
in the ground of the first two ontologies: those of Parmenides and Heraclitus, because
both were in dialogue with Pythagoreans, and their ontology was ontology of the One:
but without an explicit regard to numbers.
As Parmenides famously says in his poem: “One way only is left to be spoken of,
that it is […] It was not in the past, nor shall it be, since it is now, all at once, one (hen),
continuous (synekhes); for what creation wilt thou seek for it? how and whence did
it grow?”4 Heraclitus also writes about unity as an ontological principle and a value:
“The wise [or wisdom] is one (hen to sophon).”5 It is wise to hearken, not to me, but
to my Word, and to confess that all things are one (hen panta einai);6 And it is the
law, too, to obey the counsel of one. According to a quote by Plato (now considered
not precise), Heraclitus even said that “the one differs from itself and at the same
time coordinates with itself ” (to hen autoi diapheromenon auto autoi symphereshai).7
This phrase became almost a motto for the young German idealists at the end of
the eighteenth century. Both Parmenides and Heraclitus point at different aspects of
unity. Thus, Parmenides’ “One” is identical with itself, whole, complete. But it is also
held in “shackles” by Justice that prevents it from dying or being born. Mythical as
this account is, it underlines the negativity of unity. Heraclitus is more articulate than
Parmenides on these different meanings, since he speaks of “one” as distinct from “all”:
one is the wise that is “separated” (kekhorismenon) from everything,8 and the all is
what the one “rules.” There is thus already a hint at the exceptional if not transcendent
character of the One as a number and as an ontological principle.
Aristotle says that “in a sense unity means the same as being. […] In ‘one man’
nothing more is predicated than in ‘man’.”9 As Aristotle makes clear, and as it remains
 Unity and Solitude 25

true in today’s language, “one” means several different things at once, particularly “the
naturally continuous and the whole, and the individual and the universal” (the latter
means also: in form, in definition).10 Subsequently, he adds yet another, functional
meaning of the one, that, in a sense, is applicable to all those listed above. This is
measure, which allows knowing other things, in their quantity and in other aspects.
In all these senses, the one coincides with the being and helps us understanding its
complex structure.
But, paradoxically, the “one” is itself not one, and must therefore send back to a
higher theological unity. Aristotle does not just describe the one as a synonym of being
but valorizes and deifies it, likening his ontotheology to politics. He quotes Homer:
“the world refuses to be governed badly. ‘The rule of many is not good; one ruler let
there be.’ ”11
Neoplatonism, while agreeing on the highest value of the One, put it even
higher than being, into the very center of the philosophical worldview. In spite of
its theological dogmatism, Neoplatonism has a critical potential as a teaching that
dissociates being with unity. The trinitarian doctrine, while complicating the simple
deification of the One (and departing from a simplistic monotheism12), preserved
the substantial unity of the three persons. Besides, the idea of trinity thematizes and
problematizes the numerical determination of being, as its key definition, and it is easy
to recognize in the “hypostases” of the trinity the meanings of the notion of “one”:
totality, individuality, and connection.
Later, in the medieval scholastics we see a return to the Aristotelian ontotheology,
where one is subordinated to being, as its “transcendental” definition. “Unum …
convertitur cum ente.”13 However, the scholastic thinkers could not fully escape from
the influence of Neoplatonic mysticism. Thus, in St. Thomas Aquinas, unity, being
a transcendental determination of being, is responsible for the negativity present in
God. From the point of view of his unity, God “is only cognized by us in the mode of
privation and negation (remotio).”14
The Modern scientific philosophy never questions the claim of the transcendental
unity of being. “Ce qui n’est pas véritablement un être n’est pas non plus véritablement
un être,” elegantly says Leibniz,15 while Kant attributes to human reason the task of
uniting the indeterminate manifold into the “transcendental unity of apperception.”16
Notably, all of these authors, with the partial exception of Kant (we do not know much
of Parmenides’ politics), were supporters of political monarchy.
However, unity is a contradictory, complex notion. At the end of the eighteenth
century, European thought turns back to the Neoplatonic dialectic in order to
reconcile scientific knowledge with reason. Hegel, one of those who effectuates this
move, writes about unity in his Science of Logic, in the first volume that is dedicated
to Being. And, to him, the one is a unity of an object with itself that is revealed after
its qualitative determinations have been attributed to its being: a being is one when
it is “for itself.” But what is important for us is that Hegel emphasizes the primarily
negative character of the constitution of the one: being for itself is a “polemical,
negative relating to the limiting other and, through this negation of the other, is being-
reflected-within-itself—even though, side by side with this immanent turning back of
26 Politics of the One

consciousness and the ideality of its object, the reality of this object is also retained,
for the object is at the same time known as an external existence.”17 The one as such
is then “an abstract limit of itself,”18 because its qualitative difference disappears in the
process of delimitation. The next moment of the dialectical movement is the split of
the one into the properly one and the nothing. In the one “there is nothing; and this
nothing […] is [not an immediate but] a posited nothing.” Thus, “The one is the void
as the abstract self-reference of negation.”19 The one is both one and the nothing—the
logical movement that Hegel refers back to the Greek atomists with their ontology of
atoms and void. Finally, in the third move, he shows that the one is so unitary that it
excludes itself from itself, enters a negative relationship to itself. This further leads to
the plurality of “ones” and the duality of forces of repulsion and attraction that act on
them. This process leads, in its turn, to “a limit which is none, a limit which is in being
but is indifferent to it,”20—the definition of quantity, or number, that is many in the
one and one in the many.
This argument of Hegel looks at a unity from outside, from the point of view of its
other. This is why it is constituted negatively, and what is emphasized is neither totality
nor unicity (as in the traditional metaphysics) but the redoubled, reflected negativity
that detaches a thing from the world, separates it from itself, denudes its nothingness
but keeps it permanently at the border of itself as something that does not lose itself
even in infinitely reaching beyond itself.
Hegel’s doctrine of the One attracted interest in the twentieth century, after the
problematization of the number One in arithmetic. Here, I would like to evoke Henry
Horace Williams, an American neo-Hegelian. In the article named “The One and
the Many,” Williams emphasizes, more univocally than Hegel himself, the primarily
negative nature of unity, and the consequences this has for political history:
What is one? Historically one establishes itself by destroying all not itself. “Thou
shalt not have other gods” […] The one is the all-excelling […] When all has been
negated, there remains, what? Alexander, having overcome all others, wept. But
weeping is an effort to overcome.21

This logic of the residual negativity of solitude recalls the logic of melancholia in
revolutions (the negativity turns against revolutionaries themselves when a tyranny is
overthrown) that I analyzed in La révolution négative.22
Williams continues: “The unity is ideal and pure […] It is a lonely one,”23 and ends
his treatise thus:
A state is not the people nor the government, but the unity of people in
government. This unity is its only quality. Therefore wherever there is this unity
there is the one, the state […] The one in itself is infinite and can never be other
than one. And it can apply without limits, the moment of negation being absorbed
[…] From the point of view of the one, any other is to be destroyed. This is
abundantly illustrated in history.24
 Unity and Solitude 27

This idealist interpretation of Hegel turns his theory into that of atomistic militant
states in which a government tends to turn (one would guess) against its own people
after it defeats others.
Interestingly, the Hegelian argument was mirrored in a philosophy that is seemingly
quite distant from his, that is, Gottlob Frege’s. Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic is a
book that is largely dedicated to the concept of One. It describes various attempts to
define the one and comes to the conclusion that it cannot be a property of a thing,
and that its definition contains an internal contradiction between identity and distin-
guishability (of units). To resolve this problem, Frege suggests that a number is a
logical attribute of a concept, and defines the one … through the zero. Frege founds
the system of numbers on zero (an empty set), which is the number that can be
defined logically, as a set of objects non-identical with themselves.25 And the way that
the natural numbers are derived from zero is the following: the one is simply the zero
counted as identical with itself (made into a set), and the subsequent numbers count
the preceding ones. This is literally the same as Hegel’s idea of identity between the
one and the nothing, where one is a “posited” nothing, except that Frege does not
question the idea to ground the arithmetic in the “nought,” but uses it as an argument
against the empiricist tradition, while for Hegel this paradox is a sign of insufficiency
and a reason why the ontology of one falls into an indiscriminate sphere of numerical
quantity. For Hegel, as for most of the philosophical tradition, the one is per se not
a number, while Frege and his followers Miller and Badiou do not make a difference
here.
Frege’s argument was used, in the second half of the twentieth century, by Jacques
Alain Miller, in his article “Suture,” where he likens the emergence of one from zero to
the constitution of the subject, in the Lacanian system, from the point of the indeter-
minate lack, “lack of nothing.”
The counting of the 0 as 1 (whereas the concept of the zero subsumes nothing in
the real but a blank) is the general support of the series of numbers. That which
in the real is pure and simple absence finds itself through the fact of number
(through the instance of truth) noted 0 and counted for 1. Which is why we
say the object is not-identical with itself: invoked-rejected by truth, instituted-
annulled by discourse […] —in a word, sutured.26

Miller points out that the number “one” in the Fregean sense is not just the effect of
the hypothetical position and denial of a counterfactual hypothesis, but also a ground
of passing from one number to another. Zero, this vanishing negativity of the one, is
thus present in every act of addition, in every next number.
Alain Badiou continues the same tradition, showing, in his Being and Event, how the
“ontology” elaborated in the theory of sets builds on the Fregean move that counts the
pre-existing inconsistent multiplicity for the zero of an empty set, only to start counting
and ordering being from this point. Badiou, in his book, points at the nihilist implications
of this move27 and therefore sees a need to supplement the “ontology” with an “ultra-one”
28 Politics of the One

of the event, which counts for one the elements that are systematically ignored by the
ontological unity (which counts them for zero and founds itself on them).
Heidegger, whose thoughts on solitude I will analyze below, does not dwell much
on the problematic of the one. His disciple and our contemporary, Jean-Luc Nancy,
does make this step. His recent short treatise on the concept of one is in this book, but
already, in Being Singular Plural,28 Nancy took Heidegger’s concept of Vereinzelung not
in the banal (Leibnizean) sense in which all beings are unique and self-identical, but
in the sense that, in the world of Dasein, each being is inherently plural by the very act
of being; being present means already being split between what is and its existence,
and from this split, other internal splits of a thing follow. Negativity or difference,
there is something that breaks apart the illusion of a unitary thing. Hence the idea
expressed by Nancy in the present volume, that the one is a principle of addition,
always “more than one”: of excess and of reaching out, and not as much of self-identity
(Nancy agrees with Frege and Miller on this point). Translated into social ontology,
this principle, in Nancy, draws attention to the primary ontological co-belonging of
humans, before any conscious totalization into a social contract or “collective.”
This much for a very schematic history of trying to constitute and understand the
one. But, it is not surprising that the twentieth century, with its liberal–democratic
stance of subverting any dogmatic authority, and with its corresponding philosophical
criticism of metaphysics as a doctrine of pre-given transcendent principles, attempted
to criticize and “unseat” the primacy of the one. The obvious move was to announce
an ontology, and priority, of the many, either in the sense of numerical plurality,
or of an infinite continuum newly discovered by mathematicians. The most radical
statement and elaboration of this ontological “polyarchy” belong to Gilles Deleuze
and his school, while criticism of the One can be found, for instance, in the work of
Reiner Schürmann.29 But previously, similar arguments surfaced in social and political
thought, and already there, they were formulated in a metaphysical language.
As early as in the sixteenth century, witnessing the rise of absolute monarchies,
the young French noble Étienne de la Boétie wrote his “Discourse on Voluntary
Servitude” additionally entitled by his readers “Against the One.”30 His metaphysical
republicanism was half forgotten for a while, but in the twentieth century it was
revived. La Boétie draws on a paradox, that the “one,” usually considered as a higher
principle, is in fact the lowest number. “I should like to understand […] why so many
men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a
single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him.” La Boétie thus
makes a “forbidden” shift from the ontological to the numerical concept of one, to
question the metaphysical foundation of monarchy by Aristotle (which implies a
distinction between the two meanings of the “one”). The one turns out to be small and
powerless—“just one.”31
One should also mention here Eric Peterson, a twentieth-century German
Protestant theologian who argued against C. Schmitt’s “political theology” with an
argument that Christianity was not a monotheism, and thus not a political teaching.32
Peterson mobilizes the old Trinitarian doctrine to struggle against the metaphysic
of the state. Another German thinker, Hannah Arendt, gave a political twist to
 Unity and Solitude 29

Heidegger’s critique of traditional metaphysics and, unlike Heidegger, was highly

interested in the problem of unity and plurality. Her book The Human Condition starts
with a philosophical premise that “men, not Man, live on the Earth and inhabit the
world”33 and thus, humanity and society are not reducible to a single collective subject;
they are rooted in a fundamental “plurality” understood as a network of relationships
and a potential of joint action. One other classic expression of anti-monist political
philosophy is the work of French anthropologist Pierre Clastres. In his book of 1974,
Clastres reconstructs a peculiar metaphysic of savage tribes, where, if we trust him,
the One is associated with evil. In fact, continuing an old French tradition and joining
it with an anarchic mood of 1968, Clastres makes the South American Guarani tribe
into the spontaneous followers of La Boétie:
[…] Guarani thought says that the One is Evil itself. The misfortune of human
existence, the imperfection of the world, a unity seen as a rift inscribed at the
heart of the things that comprise the world: that is what the Guarani reject; that is
what has impelled them from time immemorial to search for another space where
they might know the happiness of an existence healed of its essential wound—an
existence unfolding towards a horizon free of the One. But what is this not-One
so stubbornly desired by the Guarani? Is the perfection of the world to be found in
the Many, according to a dichotomy familiar to Western metaphysics? And do the
Guarani, unlike the ancient Greeks, place the Good there where, spontaneously,
we deny it? While it is true that one finds in the Guarani an active revolt against
the tyranny of the One, and in the Greeks a contemplative nostalgia for the One,
it is not the Many which the former embrace; the Guarani lndians do not discover
the Good, the Perfect, in the mechanical disintegration of the One.34

Instead: “Good is not the many, it is the dual, both the one and its other, the dual that
truthfully designates complete beings.”35 Clastres immediately associates this ideology
with the actual strategy of these tribes that consisted, he says, in blocking the way to
the construction of a state. Moreover, paradoxically as it may seem, he also points at
the solitude (a solitary song of a hunter allowing him “the conversion of an individual
into the subject of his solitude”) as a condition that allows American Indians to protest
and to hide against the regime of the social as such.36 Note how, for Clastres, not just
the dual, but the one itself, understood as a state of suspension and ambiguity, serves
as a weapon against the one, understood as isolation. This is the logic highly charac-
teristic of the political usage of solitude.
All of this is a highly original and historically pertinent proposal to reconsider the
coordinates of the world we live in. However, the question remains, what the alternative
to unity as an organizing principle can be. An apology of plurality sounds simply as an
inversion of the former structure and, as any such inversion, it depends on what it inverts.
A simple dialectical reasoning shows that the multiple, or even dual, as opposed to the
One, is itself the one multiple: the opposition and exclusion suffices to determine and
restrain it. So, in Clastres, for example, the everyday life of the tribes is busy with resisting
potential unification, through internal war and other mechanisms of dissolution.
30 Politics of the One

Alain Badiou, in his book on Deleuze, shows that Deleuze’s multiplicity has a
hidden reference to unity because it depends on the defense of the univocality of
being.37 It is only when we accept that being is a uniform sphere, that it then appears as
an overflowing chaotic multiplicity. Univocality inevitably involves a (transcendental)
delimitation of the being as a region.

Society
If we now turn to socio-political experience, we can see that the appeal to multiplicity
and critique of a unitary subject, while they do reflect actual social processes, in no
way help resisting unity. Yes, unitary states and theological ideologies of submission
do to an extent lose ground in the today’s world. But, the resulting “globalization” is
leading to a unification of the world that had never been achieved before. This unifi-
cation lacks an identitary form, but imposes a unity of measure and mediation. Not a
monarchic authority, but a unitary (monetary) measure of money and, more broadly
speaking, a unifying quantification of differences (where upper, middle, and lower
classes replace, in social self-reflection, the former structural class divisions), are new
principles of unity.
In this sense, we live in a time of an unheard of realization of metaphysics, where
unity, not plurality, is the most adequate slogan of the time. However, the critical side
of today’s moment, and a potential for new forms, lies in rethinking the concept of
one itself. Thus, if anything specifies the current historical moment, it is the sense of
exhaustion of European expansion, and of the extensive growth of the rationalized
world. There are no longer blank spots on the map, and the hope/anxiety of conquering
“space” has so far ended in a disappointment. Media and transportation integrated the
world and contributed to its shrinking, so that neither escape from information nor
free space to realize a utopia (like islands or planets) is immediately available anymore.
In this sense, the realized metaphysics of the One resulted in the reign of just one. The
One is not cancelled, but appears in its negative definition, of a unit excluded from the
rest, but excluded in the way that no possible concept of what is beyond it, is available
at all. It is a privation of nothing in particular, and an incomplete but fully presented
presence. This solitary unity of the “globe” corresponds to the current condition of an
individual who, because of the dissolution of large collectives and firm identities, is
more individual than before: our societies are increasingly atomized, and the emerging
supra-state international entities (such as the EU) fail so far to provide for a sense of
belonging and solidarity. This is not to say that a person became self-sufficient: not at
all, since the Modern world requires constant attention to changes, it fills free time
with information. Rather, s/he exists in the state of a suspended atom with open and
changing valences. David Riesman, in the middle of the century, rightly called this
society a “lonely crowd.”38 Today, with the presence of TV and the Internet, the media
that unite solitaries as such, his analysis is even more adequate.
Not even “singular” is a good word here, because singularity usually implies a
positive factuality. Rather, we may speak of the “solitary” being, one in the absence
 Unity and Solitude 31

of the other, although we have to extrapolate this concept from the purely anthro-
pological to the ontological meaning. The fact that we use it anthropologically is not
arbitrary: human experience of the One is solitude, and we have to retranslate it back
into ontology, because the previous interpretation had been too pacifying. Heidegger
was the first to suggest this operation when he included solitude into the “funda-
mental concepts of metaphysics.”39 But he did not elaborate on solitude in this work:
it is mentioned only in passing, and usually along with the two other fundamental
concepts (world and finitude). Some sporadic comments on solitude from other books
help us better understand what he meant (I will deal with them later).
Heidegger, like most of the social critics of his time, repeatedly spoke of nihilism
as the main historical diagnosis. Let us note the direct relation of alternative between
nihilism and solitude, zero and one, as metaphysical-historical concepts. Nihilism
is clearer, and is negative both logic-wise and value-wise. Heidegger preferred it,
following Nietzsche, Jünger, and some Nazi ideologists of the time.
However, the term “nihilism” (meaning that there is void in the place of God, etc.)
is inadequate to our condition, even in the sense that Heidegger himself analyzed it.
Today, in spite of revolutions and rationalizations, the big concepts of metaphysics
and theology are alive and well, they just lost their grand status of first principles and
turned into the tools and media of bringing the world together. Empirically, religion
is back on the rise, great powers play their chess games—in spite of the fact that they
have to appeal to instrumental rationality and/or to national identity instead of the
real universals. Moreover, it is hard to accuse of emptiness and nothingness a social
form that requires of citizens the increasingly hectic forms of work and offers them
countless goals of private enjoyment. Finally, the gloomy promise of dark catastrophe
and collapse that was implicit in the concept of nothingness seems suspended, because
catastrophes happen each year and will probably continue doing so in the near future.
One, not zero; solitude, not nothingness, appears to be the word of the day.
It may sound strange that, at the time when the power of the dogmatic unity
as unique totality is diminishing, it is solitude and multiplicity that describe our
experience. But, we have a proof of this, as the same authors who try to undermine
the dominance of the One as a principle, at the same time valorize solitude as anthro-
pological experience. Nietzsche, who is often presented, in the school of Deleuze, as
a philosopher of “becoming, multiplicity, and chance”40 who presents, for instance, in
his late aphorisms, the body as an order of many souls that are united only by force,
the same Nietzsche repeatedly writes about the highest value of solitude. For example,
Nietzsche himself makes a similar gesture when, in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” he
finishes his fierce critique of the state as the “coldest of all cold monsters,” with a call
to “Zweisamkeit”—a solitude for two: “Many seats are still empty for the lonesome and
twosome, fanned by the fragrance of silent seas.”41
Or, in a fragment of 1880, Nietzsche writes: “1000 deep solitudes build up the city
of Venice—hence its magic. An image for humans of the future.” 42 Here the motive of
solitude is brought together with a preference for a great number: many solitudes can
coexist and perhaps even communicate.
Hannah Arendt, for whom the plural essence of a human is fundamental, and who
32 Politics of the One

is also a defender of a collective, public life, also gives solitude an important place in
her system. Thus, in the very last pages of the voluminous Origins of Totalitarianism, a
book that describes the advent of a “mass” society composed of lonely individuals and
deprived of genuine public life, Arendt unexpectedly claims that solitude, as opposed
to loneliness, may be a remaining hope (even though totalitarianism threatens it, too).
To prove this, she cites Cicero, Epictetus (for whom a solitary man can be “together
with himself ”), and, again, Nietzsche who, in the “Songs of the Prince Vogelfrei,”
describes solitude as a split unit: “Noon was, when One became Two.”43 Solitude, then,
is paradoxically the very condition of a connection, and of duality. And “Life of the
mind”: “Wherever there is a plurality—of living beings, of things, of ideas—there is
difference (Heidegger’s Differenz), and this difference does not arise from the outside
but is inherent in every entity in the form of duality, from which comes unity as unifi-
cation […] Solitude is that human situation where I keep myself company.”44
The same is found in Pierre Clastres who depicts in his Paraguayan tribes, not just
the prevalence of duality over unity, but equally solitude: thus, songs of the hunters
of a tribe which “resists the One” carry in themselves, says Clastres, the “freedom of
solitude,” because they represent a kind of egocentric speech beyond communication.45
All of these thinkers can hardly be suspected of a naïve escapist and privatizing
gesture, in the face of a political disaster. They mean solitude as a social and political
alternative, at the time of the crisis of the One.
All of these are not properly ontological arguments; they are rather empirical or
ethical comments. Nevertheless, they do refer to logic and even mathematics and,
doing so, they run into an apparent contradiction. The One, banished from the
sky as a unique totality (God, or transcendental subject), returns as a principle of
solitude. Methodologically, it appears to me, following Hegel and Heidegger, that
anthropological experience is a key to problems and transformations in ontology and
logic, because, when such experience reaches enough intensity and clarity to appeal
to an ontological reading, it leads us into the concrete historical substance of which
ontology had originally been an interpretation and without which it could be reduced
to mechanical and trivial deduction. Thus, one may speak here not just of a phenom-
enological, but of a logico-hermeneutic method.
Following this method, I will try to systematize what we know of the experience of
solitude, from writers, historians, sociologists, and psychologists (relying also, inevi-
tably, on personal experience), in the form of irreducible and puzzling polarities.

Polarities of solitude
The void or an inconvenient presence (One and the nothing)
Prima facie, solitude appears as a phenomenon of separation. As such, it is intimately
tied with melancholia: the construction of melancholia by Freud and his school, for
example, derives it from the loss of a beloved object: all melancholia is thus funda-
mentally solitude.
 Unity and Solitude 33

On this understanding, solitude is also related to jealousy. Both Proust and

Benjamin (in his Moscow diary) observe the most intense suffering produced not just
by the absence of a beloved person but by the fact that she currently enjoys herself.
“The feeling of solitude would therefore seem to be basically a reflexive phenomenon
that only strikes us when emitted back to us by people we know, and most often by
people we love, whenever they enjoy themselves socially without us.”46
Somewhat more complicated is the theory of solitude expressed by Emmanuel
Levinas and, more recently, by Nicholas Grimaldi in his Treatise on solitude.47
These authors suggest that solitude is an obverse side of the formation of a human
being as a self-sufficient individual or subject. Identity, autonomy, and responsibility
are, they say, paid by the price of being and feeling enclosed, imprisoned in one’s Ego,
which provokes solipsistic anxieties of being unable to reach out towards other beings.
While these authors rightly pinpoint the ambivalence of solitude, they still consider its
effect as purely negative—limitation or privation. They also somewhat hastily identify
solitude with an individual (on this more below).
More paradoxical is an account of solitude proposed by Melanie Klein. In her essay
“On the sense of loneliness”48 she writes, like Levinas and Grimaldi, that solitude is
the result of the Ego’s integration rather than its destruction. But the problem with
integration is not separation from the world but rather the unwanted presence. A
lonely person, she says, is “alone with what seems to him a bad part of one’s ego.”49 It is
thus what is here, within the “one,” not what is absent, which makes trouble. Levinas,
in spite of his predominant accent on solitude as autonomy of Ego, also associates
solitude with presence rather than absence: “My being doubles with a having; I am
encumbered by myself.”50
Jacques Lacan synthesizes, in a way, the approaches of Freud and Klein. While he
rarely addresses solitude as such, his classical analysis of Antigone in the Seminar
on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis51 presents the tragic Ego as an (abject) object rather
than a subject. The problem lies not in a delimited subjectivity but in the fact that an
individual who transcends his/her own borders turns into a materialized remainder
of a symbolic structure. The negative subtraction of the symbolic leaves one with a
positive presence of oneself as a sheer inanimate “thing.”
On a more affirmative side, we can think here, again, of Arendt’s and Nietzsche’s
apologies of solitude that we evoked earlier. Both value solitude because it puts a
person into his/her own company, thus redoubling the “one” from inside and creating
an elementary community and commonality, which is more fundamental than any
community of the already established selves.

Excursus: Von Trier’s “Melancholia”

To illustrate the “positive” component of solitude, I can refer to a recent movie by Lars
von Trier, “Melancholia” (2011). This film is seemingly the story of a total loss of the
world by the protagonist, Justine (Kirsten Dunst), an advertising specialist who at some
point invents the tagline “nothing.” She lives in an alienated and hypocritical bourgeois
society, with empty inefficient rituals and false feelings, which is subsequently presented
34 Politics of the One

as a physical collapse of the world hit by a vagabond planet: “Melancholia.” The film elabo-
rates the motifs of Dürer’s “Melencholia” (1514), such as the mysterious star seen from a
picturesque seacoast, paralytic immobility of the melancholic woman protagonist, the
abundance of optical instruments used to observe the coming planet, and the derision
of scientific calculations that predict that the planet would miss the Earth (numbers
and calculations are present also in Dürer’s image of the magic square). It also implicitly
quotes Freud, in saying that the planet casts its shadow upon Earth (like the lost object
casts its shadow on the Ego, in Freud’s account of melancholia). Now, all of this looks like
yet another comment on European nihilism and Western depression: clever but banal.
But there is in the movie yet another, less obvious logic. “We are alone,” says Justine
in the central scene of the movie, where she and her sister discuss the existence of life
beyond Earth. She seeks and enjoys a narcissistic solitude, for instance when escaping
her own wedding ceremony and taking a bath, and, later, when lying naked in front of
the approaching planet and caressing herself.
As mentioned, the protagonist has a sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Sisters
are very close. The encounter with the sister and the whole family makes the protag-
onist lose the desire to marry. There are several scenes where sisters embrace and
caress each other. Their mother says to Claire about Justine: “You’re bewitched by
her.” The two symmetrical parts of the movie, one realistic, another fantastic, are titled
by the sisters’ names: “Justine” and “Claire.” At the end, the two sisters remain alone
with the son of the second one, unsuccessfully try to escape (there is no escape from
Earth, the film says) and “hide” in a symbolic shelter at the moment when the apoca-
lyptic planet (which is blue, and shown as identical to Earth viewed from space) finally
hits the Earth and everything is destroyed.52
This seems to be a story not as much about the severing of one’s connection with
an object (Freud’s definition of melancholia), but about overidentification with a sister,
which can bring a person into a crisis because of the homosexual attraction mixed
with the competition of the two for one identity (a preferred theme of Lacan and René
Girard). The melancholia of Justine is caused not by a loss of the world (which she
rather desires) but by a suffocating presence of others with their multiple demands,
and by the traumatic mixture of narcissism and incestuous feelings toward the sister in
whom she sees her own reflection. In the final scene, the two sisters hold each other’s
hands, and at this moment the world collapses, as though in a short circuit.
This story is mirrored by the story of an apocalyptic encounter of the lonely Earth
with its twin, which increasingly casts its shadow upon it. In the scenes where the
characters watch the planet approaching through a self-made device where the image
constantly exceeds its frame, an additional reference is made to the proximity of
objects shown on the huge cinema screen, of art’s ability of rendering close, and even
increasingly closer, the distant, and of the traumatic character of this proximity. Which
is even more traumatic when art aspires to be a mirror of reality and to show to the
public its own image. Telescopes and mirrors as instruments of melancholia in art.
Thus, von Trier presents and explains melancholia (or depression) as solitude. And
this solitude appears as a narcissistic reorientation of one’s libido towards oneself (with
a correlative “reduction” of the rest of the world) which is obstructed by the presence
 Unity and Solitude 35

of one’s own subjectivity in the adored narcissistic image, and by the existence of a
double or twin who is the object of identification and love, at the same time. The one
turns out to be another one, an alter ego, a discovery that reduces both to zero. 1 1 1
5 0. But at the same time, the very strange fact that a planet is called “Melancholia,” as
though by homonymy, gives the loose negativity of depression an object, or discovers
its hidden object—the ego and the alter ego. The very naming of the nothing makes it
into more than a nothing; the name of the zero is one.
The specular structure of the movie, and of the relationship of the two sisters, is a
meta-commentary on the aesthetic form of the movie itself. Art is speculum mundi,
and as such, like Lacan’s famous mirror image of a child, it is a petrified image of
death, and may itself be deadly. Moreover, being a “mere” image, but at the same
time a double, it can switch places with the “real” model and return its gaze (thus,
in Plato, everyday appearances turn out to be copies of fantastic models; thus in
Lacan, the site of the Real is fantasy). Endless assurances in von Trier’s movie, by the
husband of Claire, that the planet will “fly by”, are an allegory of a regular attitude
to art as harmless entertainment. But the planet does exceed the frame and collide
with the spectator: the giant planet fills the screen making one feel its (the screen’s)
size, the wave of fire seems to run out of the screen onto the spectator. “Objects seen
in the mirror are closer than they appear.” As in Greek tragedy, the spectacle leads the
spectator out of his/her alibi, exposes him/her in the very position of the ego that had
seemed to be immaterial. And, as in Greek tragedy, this leads to a paradoxical sense
of joy felt in destruction and suffering: art liberates one from one’s ego, and converts
negativity into being simply by copying and naming it. But this is also why art is
dangerous: inherently sacrificial and sadistic. In most of von Trier’s movies, art kills,
sacrifices women, but in “Melancholia” it does so in the most complete and joyful way,
so that no moral denunciation of art is any longer possible.53
In Hegel’s Introductory Lectures to Aesthetics, he compares art to a boy throwing
stones into water.54 Von Trier would add that sometimes this stone unexpectedly
returns like a boomerang, and smashes you. One is not a thing but an event, some of
my co-authors in this book would say.
But this event is still a collapse. One can say that, in it, there collapse all three
main senses of the word “one”: solitude of an individual; experience of the totality of
the world, in this solitude (located at the front edge of it); and a negative, Heraclitean
energy of dissolution which unites all beings.
Von Trier’s logic here is that of a classical tragedy, and in fact the end, with a trium-
phant, comic (because expected) destruction of the world achieves a catharsis (“Many
have tried, but in vain, to express the most joyful; Here at last, in great sadness, wholly
I find it expressed”55). Only the irresistible, devastating violence of spectacle, thinks
von Trier, opens the subject up to the world and makes him/her fit for a community.

Closure and openness

A solitary person does, as we have seen, at times appear as a self-enclosed monad. S/he
abstains from enjoying worldly goods. But experience presents us with an opposite
36 Politics of the One

phenomenon. Solitude is a condition when one is unusually open, vulnerable to

every minuscule fact. The writings of nineteenth century Romantics, such as Thoreau,
abound in the pictures of solitary people immersed in nature.
But natural beauties are not the only objects attacking a solitary consciousness.
Pascal, who spends much of his Pensées discussing the solitude of a human being,
particularly of a monarch, abandoned by God, in an immense empty universe (even if
rarely calling it by name), says:
The mind of this sovereign judge of the world is not so independent that it is
not liable to be disturbed by the first din about it. The noise of a cannon is not
necessary to hinder its thoughts; it needs only the creaking of a weathercock or
pulley. Do not wonder if at present it does not reason well; a fly is buzzing in its
ears; that is enough to render it incapable of good judgment. If you wish it to be
able to reach the truth, chase away that animal which holds its reason in check
and disturbs that powerful intellect which rules towns and kingdoms. Here is a
comical god! O ridicolosissimo eroe!

And the next aphorism:

The power of flies; they win battles, hinder our soul from acting, eat our body.56

The nothingness of men is matched here only by the nothingness of flies that obsess
them.
A classical eighteenth century account of solitude, that by Johann Georg
Zimmermann, accentuates its capacity to intensify feelings. “Spirit and heart are
magnified, inflamed and strengthened by solitude.”57
Nietzsche, in the nineteenth century, agrees:
One shouldn’t go to solitary places with one’s mother, sister, daughter and other
relatives: the sensations, inflamed by solitude, are so powerful that they can for a
while prevail even over the wisest one.58

Solitude opens us not just to sensations but to the substance of things. Heidegger, who
gave solitude the status of a “fundamental concept of metaphysics” but failed to give a
systematic account of it, nevertheless writes in this book:
This individuation (Vereinzelung) is rather that solitariness in which each human
being first enters into a nearness to what is essential in things, a nearness to
world.59

As we saw in the beginning of the chapter, this thought is later repeated, in a powerful
way, by Joseph Brodsky, in his poem “Lullaby to Cape Cod”: “Solitude teaches the
essence of things because their essence is also solitude.”
Later, Brodsky writes an autobiographical essay entitled “Less than one.”60 The idea
of the piece is that he has never been able to form a stable identity and that in his
memory the characters of the past, and himself, become indistinguishable. The “less
 Unity and Solitude 37

than one” is not a fraction, but a paradox—to be less than an indivisible minimum, but
not to be nothing. The “less than one” is solitude, weakness, and helplessness without
borders, which goes down into the infinitely small. Mathematically you can represent
this as a segment of a straight line, with its ends carved out.
As Brodsky writes in the poem from which I quoted above:
I am writing from an Empire whose ends
descend under the water. Having tasted
two oceans and two continents, I
feel the same that the globe feels.
That is, nec plus ultra. Beyond –
there is a row of stars. And they burn with shine.61

Empire, for Brodsky, is a political condition of unity and solitude (by empires, he
means the USSR and the US). This is why he depicts both great powers where he had
lived as “empires” which are self-enclosed and substantially identical (like Leibniz’s
monads, one could add). This is why both directly push an alienated human being into
empty space, but sensibilize it towards the world.
As a negative (value-wise) counterpart of this experience, and the one that returns
us back to the first “polarity,” one must mention various psychopathologies which are
traditionally associated with solitude. An overly attentive solitary person may become
a victim of a particularly intense sensation and become obsessed with it. A solitary
subject is fascinated by a solitary object: “a unique escapes towards the unique” as
Plotinus once wrote, in an ontological sense.62 A philosophical universalization of this
experience belongs to Max Stirner who attributes to his solitary “Unique” a tendency
to be obsessed with “specters” such as God, State, or Ego.63
The logic of this experience forces us to rethink the One not as a closed totality
or a singularity but as a product of an almost complete destruction of hypostasized
symbolized world, where the only remaining object is a pure border through which
one registers beings.

Solitude as collectivity (One and the many)

It seems obvious that solitude is a condition of an individual. In a way, it even produces
individuals itself. The paradox, however, is that the individual can be not alone in his/
her solitude: it may be shared. This is possible, on the condition that the only thing
that the subjects in question share is … their solitude. As we have seen above, solitude
does not just close, it also opens subjects to the world, through the privation that an
arbitrary limit of Ego produces.
As a phenomenon of unity, solitude precedes a numerically unique individual.
Phenomenologically, it is rather a condition that reframes the whole world, not just
the individual in question.
Donald Winnicott, a British psychoanalyst of the mid-twentieth century, suggested
that a child must learn to be lonely (to sustain physical loneliness) only if for a transi-
tional period his parents let him/her feel alone in their presence.64 This pedagogic
38 Politics of the One

strategy may teach us something about solitude writ large: it may exist in the presence
of the other and implies, except for separation, a will to let another person retreat into
himself.
I have already quoted an aphorism of Nietzsche that projects a utopian society
on the basis of a simile with the island structure of Venice. Martin Heidegger evokes
this message in a letter to Jaspers, as a proof that a communication between solitary
thinkers is somehow possible.65 Earlier, in Being and Time, Heidegger writes:
Even Dasein’s Being-alone is Being-with in the world. The Other can be missing
only in and for a Being-with. Being-alone is a deficient mode of Being-with; its
very possibility is the proof of this […] Being missing and “Being away” [Das
Fehlen und “Fortsein”] are modes of Dasein-with, and are possible only because
Dasein as Being-with lets the Dasein of Others be encountered in its world.66

Here he understands solitude as a peculiar case of sociability, emphasizing its privative

character: we are solitary when we relate to the missing others via this very lack. But
later he speaks even more radically:
The “most solitary solitude” lies before and beyond any distinction of the “I”
from the “you”, and of the I and the you from the “we”, of the individual from
the community. In this most solitary solitude there is nothing of singularization
and separation; it is that singularization (Vereinzelung) that we must conceive as
appropriation, where man comes into his own in his self. The self, authenticity is
not the “I”, it is that Da-sein in which the relation of the I to the you and of the I
to the we and of the we to the you is founded, and from which these relations first
and alone may be mastered and must be mastered if they are to become a force.67

Solitude thus appears as a fundamental Stimmung that precedes and grounds both
the individual Ego and its social relations. In the essay “On the Way to Language,”
Heidegger notes that the German word for solitude, Einsamkeit, used to mean
unity as totality, unio: the true meaning of it, one could add, is thus unity tout court,
understood as a transcendental condition.68 The reinterpretation of it in the language
as solitude has to do with the objective historical shift towards the metaphysics of
subjectivity (and with Protestant mystical individualism). But still, history shows that
its meaning does not have to do with an atomic individual, but rather with a positive
or negative linkage.
Solitude appears, then, for Heidegger, as a Stimmung that conveys an intuition of
Mitsein, and as a unitary root of the principle of unity that explains the internal split
(unity/unicity) of the one itself.
As I mentioned above, Heidegger also wrote a book where solitude is mentioned
thematically, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. The few words that are
dedicated to solitude there make us think that it constitutes the thrownness of Dasein
into the midst, or proximity, of things, is responsible for the opening up of a thing that
the Dasein is, to all others, but this time in a negative connection with them.
 Unity and Solitude 39

As I mentioned above, Nietzsche, in “Thus spoke Zarathustra,” opposes to the cold

totality of the Hobbesian state “Zweisamkeit,” a solitude of two. The figure of “solitude
à deux” is by now a romantic cliché and is normally understood in the sense that
two lovers form together a unitary and lonely unit. But there is also a strange way in
which solitude and collectivity are tied in a dialectical, paradoxical fashion. This logic
is traced, for instance, in the literary work of the great Russian-Soviet prose writer of
the 1920s and 1930s, Andrey Platonov.
Platonov’s large works of the post-revolutionary period are usually stories of
utopian collectives or communes which are extremely poor and try to realize
“communism” here and now, not waiting until it comes in a distant future. These
communes try to build fantastic machines in order to produce food and water. They
usually end up in fratricidal violence or deadly hunger. Platonov’s works are classics
not just because of this utopian content but because of a surrealist and at the same
time bureaucratic language, recalling somewhat Kafka or Queneau (as distant analoga
in the West).
One dominant feature of Platonov’s texts is his constant references to melancholia
(toska) and solitude (odinochestvo).69 But in Platonov, moods of melancholia and
solitude are reflecting not the separation but a communal sharing of his characters.
The best reflection of this is perhaps Platonov’s note from a diary:
The mystery of prostitution: union of bodies implies a unity of souls, but in the
prostitution the unity of souls is so absent, and it is so apparent and terrible, that
there is no love, that from surprise, from the fall, from fear—“unity of souls” starts
to emerge. (1931)70

Figure and background

The one understood as principle is inevitably central, it attracts all attention
(sometimes, like in Levinas, taking it away from the rest of the world). Moreover,
there is, in solitude, the potential of a neurotic or a psychotic obsession. The capacity
of solitude of closing up on things, of bringing one in their “proximity” (which
was mentioned above on page 36) can bring forward, as a possible dysfunction,
the overwhelming of a subject by an object, a fetishistic obsession.71 Pascal, in the
quoted fragment on the power of the flies, makes this very transition from attention
to obsession: but, notably, this is an obsession by the insignificant. A neurosis of this
sort always consists in a conscious or unconscious oscillation between the subjectively
excessive and objectively null significance of a thing in question (Pascal’s flies are here
an allegory of a human being, who is insignificant but appears as super-important).
On the other hand, such an object represses the subject itself, reduces it to nothing,
distributing thus the moments of the concept of one into the absolute one (the object)
and the absolute zero (the subject). Feuerbach and Stirner, in the 1840s, both showed
that religion had this obsessive structure: Feuerbach explained monotheism by the
solitude of the human being and the desire to find a partner, but pointed out that the
monotheistic God, this “idée fixe” as he calls him,72 before Freud, is solitary itself.73
40 Politics of the One

Stirner, on his part, explained religion and most of human culture (state, money …)
as the “possession” of humans by various “specters” (Carl Schmitt later noted the role
of solitude in Stirner’s construction, in his Wisdom of a Prison Cell74). The tenacious
character of these syndromes of solitude makes it hard to pass from them back to the
unstable oscillation between one and zero that characterizes solitude.
Nevertheless, solitude is capable of an opposite, non-fetishistic attitude to things: it
may obsess, but it may unfocus and suspend, too.
Brodsky, in the poem “Lullaby to Cape Cod”, which we have been commenting on
as a great text on solitude, observes, reflecting on the meditative style of his own poem:
“and there is no one who can focus the gaze.”75
Solitude as a mood may provide the subject with a periphery, non-thematic vision
directed at the ground, not the figure.76 This follows from experience: the light of the
public sphere underlines, selects objects, while in solitude, objects stay in a state of
quiet proximity. Heidegger would say that the first ones are vorhanden, and the second
ones, zuhanden.
J.-P. Sartre was an author invariably attentive to the problem of figure and
background. In his famous analysis of the look of the Other in Being and Nothingness,
Sartre notes that this look (gaze) narrows and sharpens our perception, objectifies us
and our world, alienates our possibilities and turns them into facts. Solitude, then, is
mainly the state of non-thetic perception that the intrusion of the Other destroys.77
Here, Sartre thinks of solitude objectively as of an individual condition.
But, dialectically, the introduction of a third one into this play changes the picture—
it un-focuses attention back, by making it oscillate from one to another source. “I
can in fact apprehend the Third not directly but upon the Other, who becomes the
Other looked at. Thus the third transcendence transcends the transcendence which
transcends me and thereby contributes to disarming it.”78
This could be a paradigm of a communist action: acting together, but being each
individually liberated in a large group which is not a “group of fusion.” Alibi (emerging
in a large anonymous crowd) and resoluteness (suspension of all irrelevant choices
and identities), at the same time, are two faces of such freedom.
Here, I return to Platonov. Olga Meerson traced in his work a trope that she
called “non-estrangement.”79 She refers to the famous “estrangement,” a literary
technique that Victor Shklovsky, Platonov’s contemporary and interlocutor, named
and described. “Non-estrangement,” in contrast to estrangement, consists in a casual
mention and description of new surprising events (thus, in Platonov’s Foundation Pit,
there appears a bear who works as a blacksmith: this fact is mentioned in just one
phrase, as though it has been already introduced; no one is surprised about it, and
there is no emphasis on its unusualness). The use of this trope is, I think, tightly linked
to Platonov’s utopia of shared solitude. Communism, at least in the post-revolutionary
imagination of Platonov, is a community of people who are not shocked by one
another but do not ignore each other either. Empirically speaking, Soviet society was
different from the Western one in this sense (and this difference still survives in post-
Soviet societies): there has been no developed culture of public politeness, so that if
one pushes another person on the street, this is not accompanied by any excuses or
 Unity and Solitude 41

comments on either side. People tend to relate to each other as to things (“creatures,”
Benjamin would say) rather than persons, thus ignoring Kant’s famous imperative.
There is no visible respect for the Other in the Lévinasean sense.
But this is not mere savagery: in fact, this is the result of an active historical
movement that could be called “communist” (in spite of the fact that it had never
reached its desired end state). It is a society that is united, not by a shared respect
(Achtung in German is both respect and attention), but by taking the presence of other
humans as a normal, everyday occurrence. The danger of this society is of course mass
butchery, in which human life has no value. But Western society has its own danger
of butchery (as manifested in the Nazi genocides), where some select people (those
precisely who teach about respect of the Other) are taken as so “other” as not to count
among humans at all. The Stalinist terror, on the contrary, was irrationally indiscrim-
inate, and the victims were not de-personified: on the contrary, they had to confess
their “crimes” and to be murdered qua subjects of discourse. Torturing someone and
making him/her into a slave did not contradict the recognition of this person as a
human subject.
The suspension of things and humans into the background may be a sign of an
apocalyptic and/or utopian expectation, a re-orientation at an absent center (Sartre,
in his analysis of searching for Pierre in a café, seems to make this point). Solitude is a
negative connection, which may require an ongoing destruction/disappearance of the
One as figure. But it may as well be fed by the unstable “triangulation” described by
Sartre: the focus on the Other is shattered and decentered by a yet Other.

Conclusion
From the phenomenological analysis above, which was conducted with the help of
some key late Modern cultural texts, it follows that solitude (like melancholia) is
not a unitary mood, and thus its intentionality is not one, but polar, consisting in a
disjunction. However, in this disjunction, one term is, in my analysis, privileged over
another. Solitude as a condition of partial presence, of openness, of collectivity and of
non-thematic perception is one of the “authentic” or “pure” moods that can attune a
human being to a rhythmic and reasoned coordination with other things and with its
own parts. However, it is not theoretically separable from its “Others”: the solitudes
of nihilism, of closure, of atomic individuality and of obsession, are a constant danger
for a solitary person.
This phenomenologically demonstrable duality can be rationally understood
through the logical duality of one and zero. The one as a quantitative expression of
being is analogous to zero, or void, as a quantitative expression of nothingness. Within
the numerical universe, both one and zero play the roles of necessary empty operators:
one plays the same role in multiplication that zero plays in addition. As for the philo-
sophical concept of one, Hegel showed that it does not just use the void as its necessary
other, but is itself identical with the void from a certain point of view, and is therefore
a form of reflexive movement, a border delimiting a thing from itself.
42 Politics of the One

Solitude, as a mood, is closer to this border of oneself than to the one or zero as
posited operators. It is the oscillation between one and zero, a mode of existence “at the
edge of the void” which Badiou attributes to his “evental sites.” If the void is a concept
of absolute negativity, of the total reduction of the world, the concept of one soberly
points at the fact that there is always something remaining from this reduction: at least
the very act of reduction. And it is this failure of destruction that can further serve as
a measure and sign of being. Moreover, the unaccomplished negativity of solitude thus
understood constitutes a minimal partial presence that allows next to conceive of an
inclusive unity as a self-exceeding, sublime totality—precisely because a totality of all
units, or sets, is as inconceivable as the void. It is thus that the force of destruction and
negativity active in Modern society is the only potential of its genuine coming together
in freedom and solidarity. Through Facebook and/or through a revolt.

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 Unity and Solitude 43

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44 Politics of the One

Leonid Zhmud, Pythagoras and early Pythagoreans (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
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Libraire, 1825).

Notes
1 Joseph Brodsky, Lullaby of Cape Cod, in A Part of Speech (Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1980), 107–18, cit. 109.
2 Aristotle, Metaphysics 985b25-986b10. But see Leonid Zhmud contesting the accuracy
of Aristotle’s attribution of this idea to the Pythagoreans: Pythagoras and early
Pythagoreans (Oxford University Press, 2012).
3 On this key problem of the early Greek thought, see Jean-François Marquet,
Singularité et événement (Jérome Millon, 1995), 11–24. The one appears in between
the unlimited even numbers and the limit of the odd. As Marquet writes, very
precisely and beautifully, about the meaning of the “One” in the Pythagoreans and
their distant follower Heraclitus: “It is because he has a reference to the unity of the
common (xynon) that the human, alone among living beings, enjoys this community
with himself which defines a conscious being (xyniemi, Alkmeon)—but the
impossibility to join origin and end of his life condemns him to death. But, as a point
of departure of the flux and as a terminal point of return (1=10 …), the One is not a
pure simplicity but to praton harmosthen (Philolaos), a knot of the same”, 12.
4 Parmenides, Fragment 8 DK, lines 1; 5–6. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic
Philosophers (Cambridge University Press, 1971), 273.
5 Heraclites, Fragment 41 (Diels and Kranz, further cited as DK), in ibid., 204.
6 Heraclites, Fragment 50 (DK), in ibid., 188.
7 DK 33; Plato, Symposium, 187 d. Plato, Symposium, trans. B. Jowett, Project
Gutenberg, 2008. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1600/1600-h/1600-h.htm (accessed 6
June 2012).
8 DK 108. Absent in Kirk and Raven.
9 Aristotle, Metaphysics I. In Aristotle’s Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford
University Press, 1924, [rev. 1958]), 1054a15.
10 Ibid., 1052a15.
11 Ibid., 1076а5.
12 Erik Peterson, citing Nazianzin contra Eusebius. Cf. Carl Schmitt, Théologie politique
II, trans. J.-L. Schlegel (Gallimard, 1988), 173.
13 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part 1, Question 11, Section 2 (CreateSpace,
2009).
14 Ibid., Section 3.
15 G. Leibniz, Correspondance avec Arnaud, 30 April 1687, in Discours de métaphysique
et Correspondance avec Arnaud (Vrin, 1988), 165.
16 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer (Cambridge University Press,
1999), 245–54 (B129–147).
17 G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. G. Giovanni (Cambridge University Press,
2010), 200.
18 Ibid., 132.
 Unity and Solitude 45

19 Ibid., 133.
20 Ibid., 148.
21 Horace Williams, The One and the Many, The Philosophical Review, 32(2), March
1923, 208–11.
22 Artemy Magun, La révolution négative (Harmattan, 2009).
23 Williams, 210.
24 Williams, 211.
25 Gottlob Frege, Foundation of Arithmetic (Harper Torchbook, 1960), par. 75, 88.
26 Jacques-Alain Miller, “Suture.” Trans. Jacqueline Rose. Screen 18, Winter 1978.
Available online at http://www.lacan.com/symptom8_articles/miller8.html (accessed
December 11 2011).
27 All sets are “founded” on something, that is, there is an element that belongs to them
but that does not have common elements with them. Such element is “at the edge
of the void,” and all sets have at least the void that founds them. In this sense, the
nothing, like in Heidegger, is the ground of all things, and any relation of grounding
is construed on the model of the relationship to the nothing. This is the “axiom of
foundation.” And, as Badiou says, it “delimits being by the prohibition of the event.”
Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham (Continuum, 2005), 190. Such is his
implicit critique of Heidegger, for whom the nothing is still, in a way, a ground.
28 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford University Press, 2000).
29 Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy
(Indiana University Press, 1987). Original title: Le principe d’anarchie (Seuil, 1982).
30 Etienne de La Boétie, “The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.” Trans. Harry Curz, in
The Politics of Obedience (Black Rose Books, 1997), 42–86.
31 See a similar usage of the “one” in the twentieth century: in 1956 in the USSR, after
Khruschev’s partial denunciation of Stalin, there was a campaign of explaining to
the public the new version of recent history. One of the notes received by a lecturer
on this issue was preserved in the archives; it reads: “Why does the bourgeoisie have
two and more parties which serve it so far as they can, while the working class of the
Soviet Union has just one?” Available online at http://urokiistorii.ru/history/soc/1367
(accessed January 21 2012). Thanks to Kevin Platt for drawing attention to this note.
32 Erik Peterson, “Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem,” in Theologische Traktate
(Würzburg, 1994), 23–81.
33 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 7.
34 Pierre Clastres, Society against the State, trans. R. Hurley (Zone Books, 1989), 172.
35 Ibid., 173.
36 Ibid., 126.
37 Badiou, The Clamor of Being. Trans. L. Burchill (The University of Minnesota Press,
1999). But see in this volume the polemic of Keti Chukhrov against this argument of
Badiou (51–62), which makes the two authors look much more alike than is usually
accepted.
38 David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the
Changing American Character (Yale University Press, 1950).
39 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude
(Indiana University Press, 2001).
40 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (Continuum, 1983),
190.
46 Politics of the One

41 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans, A. S. del Caro (Cambridge

University Press, 2006), 36.
42 Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe (KGW) vol. V-I, 368. Aph. 4157, early
1880 (De Gruyter, 1967ff.).
43 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1975),
476–7.
44 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1978),
184–5.
45 Clastres, 107.
46 Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, vol. 35 (Winter, 1985), 9–135.
47 Nicolas Grimaldi, Traité des Solitudes (PUF, 2003). See for example 12, where both the
joy and the pain of solitude are derived from the separation from others, and both are
presented as purely “negative.”
48 Melanie Klein, On the sense of loneliness, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works.
(Delacorte, 1975), 300–13.
49 Ibid., 309.
50 Émmanuel Lévinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen (Duquesne University,
1987), 56. On Lévinas’s theory of solitude, and its transformation, see a fine article:
Christophe Perrin, “Levinas et l’autre solitude,” in Philosophie. Summer 2009, 45–62.
51 Jacques Lacan, Seminar 7. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (W. W. Norton and company,
1992), 243–87.
52 The love metaphor between planets is briefly but correctly noted by one reviewer:
Amy Taubin, “A Naught so Sweet,” Art Forum, October 2011, available online at http://
www.artforum.com/inprint/id=29028 (accessed 21 January 2012). “The movie begins
with a vision of cosmic amour fou. Two planets kiss, and all life is consumed in the
fire of their embrace. This prologue, its images revisited in the movie’s apocalyptic
finale, is couched as a prophetic dream and scored to the ‘Liebestod’ section of the
overture to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.”
53 See ibid.: “The anxiety of waiting for the end, and the pity one feels for the characters
facing the extinction of all life, creates a classical catharsis. One has to marvel when
this inexorably grim vision turns release into pure joy.”
54 G. W. F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures in Aesthetics (Penguin, 1994), 36.
55 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Sophocles” (1801), trans. M. Hamburger.
56 Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, trans. W. F. Trotter (P. F. Collier & Son, 1909), # 366–7; 122.
57 Johann Georges Zimmermann, Einsamkeit, tr. fr. La Solitude. Trans. A. J. L. Jourdan
(J. B. Baillere, Libraire, 1825), 57.
58 F. Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. VIII–3, 361, #12671.
59 M. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 6.
60 Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One (Penguin, 1987).
61 Joseph Brodsky, Lullaby of Cape Cod, 112.
62 Plotinus’s six Enneads are available online, in the translation of Stephen McKenna, at
http://oaks.nvg.org/ennl.html#9 (accessed January 21 2012). I am quoting the sixth
Ennead, Treatise # 9, the very last line (in the order of treatises as established by
Proclus, this is the very last line of Plotinus’s work/corpus): “This is the life of gods
and of the godlike and blessed among men, liberation from the alien that besets us
here, a life taking no pleasure in the things of earth, the escape of solitary to solitary.”
(phyge tou monou pros to monon). McKenna translates: “passing of solitary to solitary,”
but this departs from the literal meaning.
 Unity and Solitude 47

63 Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, trans. D. Leopold (Cambridge University Press,
1995).
64 Donald Winnicott, The Capacity to be Alone, International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
39, 1958, 416–20.
65 The Heidegger–Jaspers Correspondence, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (Humanity Books,
2003), 171.
66 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(Harper and Row, 1962), 156.
67 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 2, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. D. F.
Krell (Harper and Row, 1984), 24–5; Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (Neske, 1961),
244.
68 M. Heidegger, Basic Writings (Harperperennial, 2008), 423.
69 There are 69 mentions of this word and its derivatives in Tchevengur, 30 mentions in
Happy Moscow, though only 6 in the Foundation Pit.
70 Andrey Platonov, Zapisnye knizhki (IMLI Ran, 2006), 166. See also Jonathan Flatley,
Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Harvard University
Press, 2008), a book dedicated in part to Platonov. Flatley affirms that melancholia
(toska) is for Platonov a device allowing characters to form a community (including a
homosexual one).
71 Cathérine Audibert, who gives a psychoanalytic theory of solitude and develops
the aforementioned theory of D. Winnicott, interprets solitude, paradoxically, as
an “incapacity of being alone” (Cathérine Audibert, L’incapacité d’être seul (Payot,
2008)). Thus, what we usually call solitude is in fact its opposite: an experience of
its impossibility. (Think here of Frege and his thesis that the one is a number of an
impossible, contradictory concept, a thing not equal with itself.)
  “Behind the absence, there is solitude,” says Audibert (54), thus correcting Freud in
the direction of Klein and Winnicott. She evokes the infantile symbiosis with mother
and defends the “adult” capacity of overcoming it, but in fact is not this adult solitude
a fiction that conceals the essential impossibility of being one, and the problematic
character of the Two? Remaining physically alone, we can neither be unitary nor be
a part of something. Anyway, one can only agree with Audibert when she concludes
that an antidote to the traumatic solitude is learning how to be solitary. This implies,
one could add, that being truly solitary is only possible with others, as a mutual and
reciprocal relation of leaving alone.
  Audibert further argues from experience that the (un-)solitary person develops
addictions (what we here call “obsessions”), in order to compensate for the impossible
solitude that he experiences as a threat of annihilation. One characteristic addiction
is hypochondria (193–200): a hypochondriacal symptom is what is truly one; it
binds the individual to being while expressing his/her solitude in a displaced form.
Philosophers would add that hypochondria is particularly important here because it
is a neurosis of reflexion. The transcendental Ego itself is decentered and “captured”
into this or that bodily organ. Reflexion, which by definition identifies only through
reduplication, suffers quite logically from “the impossibility of being one.”
72 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (Barnes and Noble, 2004), XXIX.
73 Ibid., 69.
74 Carl Schmitt, “Weisheit der Zelle,” in Ex Captivitate Salus (Duncker und Humblot,
2002), 79–92; on Stirner see 80–3.
48 Politics of the One

75 Lullaby of Cape Cod, VII, 114.

76 On the One as essentially ground (background), an “element,” see Chapter 11 by
Susanna Lindberg in the present volume. Solitude is, in a way, an existential and
noetic correlate of the “elemental” taken in this sense.
77 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes (Washington Square Press,
1993), 321–3.
78 Ibid., 416.
79 Olga Meerson, Svobodnaya Vesch. Poetika neostranenia u Andreya Platonova (Nauka,
2001).
 Part II

Event of the One

 4

Genesis of the Event in Deleuze

From the Multiple to the General

Keti Chukhrov

We know the works of Deleuze as an example of the harshest criticism of Universality,

as the rejection of Platonic idealism and of Hegelian dialectics in favor of the
centrifugal politics of multiplicities, repetitions, seriation, and temporal procedures.
This anti-universalist stance was characteristic for the continental philosophy of the
1960s–80s (in the works of Derrida, Deleuze, Lacoue-Labarthe, Lyotard, Foucault)
and was motivated by identifying universalism with stereotypes of which philosophy
intended to rid itself—metaphysics, the history of Westernization, the statist rhetoric
of sovereignty, neocolonialism, and globalization.
The notion of the Universal was censored as the predestination of an ideal, as a concept
representing power, and as the ignoring of the realms of experience, life, activity, etc.
Today, along with further criticism of Universality in post-operaist theory as well as in
post-colonial and de-colonial studies, there appear more and more attempts to reconsider
the notion of the Universal via the dimension of the “general,” or “common” to all (Paolo
Virno1), of the commonwealth (Negri, Hardt), of the generic (Badiou)2 that would question
the political and social hybridization taking place in the frame of globalization policy.
But, even after the general and the universal have been emptied of their imperi-
alistic, authoritarian, and colonial connotations, the question still remains of how to
understand the mode of what is common to all. Should we interpret it as the regime of
communication, distribution, circulation, connection, sharing between groups, places,
individuals? Or as something that is common to all which can be attained through the
event of becoming open towards the general, i.e. generality as some quality which cannot
appear without the act of conversion of consciousness, without some kind of metanoia?3
But let us return to Deleuze. As has already been said, he declines the dimension
of the Universal and brings forth various concepts, describing multiplicities which
have to cancel the necessity of referring to the universal: these are the concepts
of rhizome, molecular semiotics, series, becoming. On the other hand, he invents
other types of concepts—such as repetition, Event, sense, counter-actualization,
double causality—which in some sense contradict the previously enumerated notions,
52 Politics of the One

marking contingent multiplicities. This contradiction was described in detail in

Badiou’s Clamor of Being, where he makes a conclusion that Deleuze, despite his
emphasis on the multiple, was nevertheless a philosopher of the One, of ontology
and being—the dimension which, on the one hand, accepts the clamor and chaosmos
of multiplicities, but, on the other hand, incorporates multiplicities into the mono-
semantic univocity of being.
The question is whether this alternative—Deleuze as either the thinker of pure
contingency and aleatoric microdynamics (in the vein of Lyotard), or the metaphysical
thinker of the One as Badiou presents him—is justified.
The specific discovery of Deleuze in connection with the Multiple is the following.
The concepts that refer to an event—repetition, sense, counter-actualization, double
causality (Logic of Sense)—do not just realize extreme singularity, but combine
singularity with the plane of the “ideal” (the virtual and non-corporeal) or the plane
of the “extra-being” as Deleuze himself puts it. His multiplicities are not coordinated
directly with the One, they are not associations or combinations of singularities. But
singularity, for its part, is an eventual intersection of multiplicities. The multiplicity
of Deleuze is a synonym of dynamism. Also, Deleuze makes a difference among
multiplicities. There are numerical, extended multiplicities—they can be divided; and
durational, qualitative, molecular multiplicities—which are indivisible and should
be taken as qualitative, nomadic metamorphoses, as the indivisibility of variability.
For example, the line of flight or the abstract surface line, as evoked by Deleuze, are
motions, effects of a nomadic shift of punctum, and not geometric forms. Deleuze
believed that such a moving line cannot have a geometrical structure. While Alain
Badiou, in his Clamor of Being, insists that each figure or line, be it a fold, a split
(fissure), or an interval—that is, each indivisible dynamic phenomenon of multi-
plicity—has a scheme in the family of mathematical multiplicities.4 As Badiou puts
it, Deleuze uses the multiplicity of multiplicities (and not mathematical multiplicities
like Badiou). For Deleuze, the mathematical multiplicities of Badiou depended on the
positions of things and references, i.e. were numerical; Deleuze rejects any pre-condi-
tioned idea that could appear as a super-instance of correlations and movements
within multiplicities. On the other hand, although the evolving, for Deleuze, occurs
between the things and the empirical data, it still breaks through the empirical data to
occur on the surface, on a plateau, as a result. In this case, the dimension of event is
neither just unity, nor a pure interrelation of elements, as traditional interpretations of
Deleuze imply (mostly in post-operaism), but is the very surge of being on a plateau
as on a supra-surface. It is a verb or an act, which is genetically conditioned in being
but has its effect as an after-being, or a super-being.5
Badiou insists that all proceedings in the Deleuzean realm are evolving in
immanence, and that hence Being is the only Event in Deleuze, that it is not separable
from the Event.6 At the same time, Badiou himself produces a complete ontological
separation of event from being. He separates the actuality of an event from the virtu-
ality of being. In this case, according to Badiou’s interpretation of Deleuze’s Being, it
appears as a teeming of microelements, while Badiou conceives this multiplicity as
 Genesis of the Event in Deleuze 53

inconceivable, thus in need of an “ontology” that counts the multiple for zero, and, in
a next step, amplifies itself in the event. In other words, Badiou tries to prove that the
event in Deleuze is not a breakthrough of being but is completely homogeneous with
it. As a result, Deleuze—as interpreted by Badiou in his Clamor of Being—happens to
be a semiotic relativist per se.
In his Logics of Worlds, Badiou confirms his criticism of Deleuze for ignoring the
power of separation inherent in the event and making it “coextensive with being and
becoming,” for considering it as a homogenous result of life and identifying its purport
rather with sense than with truth, as Badiou himself does. This, from Badiou’s point of
view, locates event within the immanence of empirical data and does not enable it to
acquire the function of exception.7
Such an approach as suggested by Badiou is often characteristic for the inter-
pretation of Deleuze’s concepts in the vein of predominantly post-modern and
post-structuralist beliefs.
But in fact Deleuze rather happens to be a predecessor of Badiou in drawing the
event from the mixtures and depths of the bodies to the surface as an emancipatory
gesture motivated by an ethical and political conversion. It is true that, for Deleuze,
event is not a complete exception, or separation, but neither does it reside in pure
continuity absorbed by being and becoming. The procedure of becoming does not
contradict the actualization and occurrence of the event, which in relation to being
is defined by Deleuze as counter-actualization. Event is tied to Being genetically but
is at the same time an irreversible and radical transformation, which makes event a
universal singularity among all other appearances. Deleuze often speaks about the
event as of a genesis of the ideal proceeding (actualization).8 This ideal, artistic element
which Deleuze imposes on the event does not allow for dissipating it into the empiri-
cally inevitable goings-on and enables producing an alteration of the empirical regime
through the counter-actualization of repetition. Deleuze just insists on the types of
connection and realization that are not static and that are generated not according
to the principle of affiliation, or of organism and its elements, but according to the
principle of motion—of collisions, divergences, speeds, slowing downs, latitudes and
longitudes, and their effectuations.
Such ethology bears the dimension of transversality as its own super-effect.
Transversality happens to be the convergence of the transcendental dimension,
within the empirical, within the motion of multiplicities. By means of such a detailed
topological description of the multiple, Deleuze not only declares the type of politics
or of social organization, saying that from now on any structure or generation
of a phenomenon should be perceived through micro- or molecular parameters.
Rather, Deleuze’s topological and molecular descriptions reveal the procedures of
causality, reveal the topology of be-coming and evolving and its genetic tie with
the dimension of eventuality. The Event is thus understood artistically, and it is the
artistic dimension that instigates the parameters of the political, of the general, of the
ethical. The immanent procedures of becoming not only proceed, but be-come as a
breach of chronic time, which presupposes the dimension of the “pure” (ideal) time
54 Politics of the One

of the event (Deleuze calls this non-chronic time, the Aeon). (This position of Deleuze
is somewhat overlooked in post-operaist theory as well as in Badiou’s writings on
Deleuze.)
However, it is interesting that, in the Apostle Paul by Badiou, universalism is also
seen as such an excess that breaks through being into a certain non-place. It intersects
and crosses the quotidian differences which compose the material of the world. As
Badiou puts it, it is the singularity of the subject of truth that pierces through this
material.

As is known, the Deleuzean concept of multiplicities was applied by the post-operaist

thinkers (Hardt, Negri, Virno, Lazzarato) and paraphrased as a “multitude.” They share
Deleuze’s artistic Spinozism, but in many works (e.g. those by Virno or Lazzarato)9
Deleuzean studies of immanence are translated into a sociological dimension, thus
predominantly reducing Deleuze’s philosophical aspirations to the quasi-structures of
immanence. For example, at the “Idea of Communism” conference in Berlin, Antonio
Negri insisted that the event was not “a posteriori” with regard to the political or any
other practice—the position to which, from his point of view, Badiou adheres—but
that the transformative, eventful movement should be placed fully within practice:
“the materialist pragmatic […] this transformative movement is valid only for itself,
it sends back exclusively to its own potential.”10 Struggles take place within the
biopolitical dimension—which means that the rebellion resides within the empirical
realm. Likewise, the event in the writings of Deleuze is interpreted by Negri as an
aleatoric procedure, as a subversive movement in the framework of capitalist institu-
tions. Quite in the vein of criticizing Badiou’s focus on the Event, Saroi Giri, another
speaker at the same conference, suggested declining the metaphysical purport of the
“event” altogether. He quoted David Harvey who suggested that the insistent reference
to the Event “led straight to a self-occupied narcissistic world […] in which the
transcendence takes the upper hand over the true political engagement.”11 In taking
the event for a kind of extra-ontological or extra-empirical leap, one can easily fall into
the trap of idealism. An event would then be envisaged as a miracle unrelated to social
reality or a political situation.
In both interpretations of the event—by Badiou and by Negri—what stays
unnoticed in Deleuze is the duality of his “event”—on the one hand, its genetic tie
with the empirical realm without which the event cannot happen, and, on the other
hand, its aspects of the coup de dès, which is described in the Logic of Sense as a
throw-out from the empirical depths onto the surface, to the plateau. Hence there is
no conceptual contradiction between the event’s transcendental “sterility” and ideal
dimension, and its empirical background. The chaosmos of perturbations fulfills, in
Deleuze, the function of genesis, to find a way out towards the dimension of the event,
with its clarity. But such clarity remains, at the same time, irreversibly and genetically
tied to its empirical and immanent origin.
According to Foucault,12 Deleuze discovers the thought that is formed through
a topological event, the role of which consists in the theatrical production of a
phantasm—in the repetition of a universal event in its utmost point of singularity. This
 Genesis of the Event in Deleuze 55

means that the singularity of the event and its “ideal” parameters include the topological
dimension as well. As has already been mentioned, the molecular dimension is often
claimed in some interpretations of Deleuze and Guattari (post-structuralist and post-
operaist) as an embodiment of abstracted and aleatoric micro-dynamics of sheer
immanence. But in fact the molecular dimension in Deleuze and Guattari does not
enter into contradiction with the dimension of event. Molecularity means not only
access to elemental post-structural concatenations but presupposes the quality and
intensity with which the event is deployed and actualized. The molecular flows and
the multiplicities are not so much the contingent elementary movements, but rather
conditions of the all-embracing dimension of an occurrence, which traverse the body,
the consciousness, the unconscious, and their outer surroundings. In other words,
the molecular dimension is not just about dynamic quantities considered externally,
but also about the procedures and effects of becoming that proceed internally and
intersect with the external levels. This means that becoming (and consequently, the
event) is something that cannot stay away from internal occurrences that imply
consciousness and its change—as is the case with the act of metanoia.
But, probably, the question arises: what renders such acts of metanoia general? In
the case of Deleuze, the political cannot accomplish itself if it does not have a tie with
the evental, with a procedure that is lived through (not only empirically, but ethically).
This means that the common, or the general, is posited not only via technical means
of participation, through the transformation of communication into institutional unit,
or through any other technical tools of organization, but also through the universal
singularity of the situation of addressing the Other (or others), which is imposed not
just institutionally or technically, but also ethically and eventfully. In other words, the
event—the dimension of metanoia—presupposes the intensified rethinking of the
given ties between the subjectivity and the others, between the world and its param-
eters. Non-representational politics as well as production, as understood in the vein
of Deleuzean thought, are meant not as a quasi-avant-garde productionism, in which
technological means of distribution would acquire the significance of the socialized
spheres of a commonwealth. Deleuzean production is production accomplished in an
evental dimension that is not reduced to institutional, methodological, technological,
organizational, or structural social grids, but traverses all of them. Therefore, the
event, in its singular questioning of the true, the evil, the just, the other, and the others,
is a machine that triggers the dimension of the general, where the “general” could
mean the disclosure of the radically anti-narcissistic space of becoming the other, the
non-I. Actually, the event (as well as metanoia and becoming) is never reduced to
what happens to an individual, but is an effect of transcending individual parameters.
It pushes an individual to exceed them in an outward direction, but it also means the
contamination of the self ’s inwardness with the dimension of the non-self, and its
outwardness.
All of this is very important to keep in mind when observing the transformation
that the dimensions of immanence and multiplicities acquire in post-operaist theory.
Here the description of the topology of the dynamics of immanence is applied often
as a formal structure; that is, in the works of post-operaists, the molecular mobility of
56 Politics of the One

multiplicities acquires to a certain extent some territorial, anthropometric character-

istics and is applied sometimes in a positivist or sociological way—the stance that is
impossible to evade in the society of communication and optimization where it is hard
to discover the borders between creativity, cognitive management, and the creative
industry. As a result, the dynamism and the machine of correlations, which constitute
the genetic background of the event, for Deleuze often acquire, in post-operaist
theory, features of communicative efficiency. For example, P. Virno in his Grammar
of the Multitude quite correctly describes the ambivalences of cognitive capitalism,
in which knowledge, language, and creativity constitute the commonwealth of the
multitude and, at the same time, are subjugated by cognitive capital’s production.
Virno describes the situation where surplus value is generated not only by labor time
and commodity, but also by the artistic and creative components of the human being,
by his/her enthusiasm. It is also quite justified that Virno differentiates universalism,
as the embodiment of statism, imperial globalism and sovereignty, and the general as
the case of the common that is not a sum of individuals, or its representation in this or
that man, but is the interconnection and correlation, an intermediate space in the midst
of the many.13 All of this is correct, in my view. But still, it is here that the questions
arise.
Recent political thought, when critically rethinking the notion of universality,
resides in the premise that universality is false in the case that the values of art,
philosophy, and culture cannot be shared by all and any. It is a very important
presumption brought forward by Rancière and Badiou, among others. The utmost
form of such false individualist universalism is mentioned in one of the examples
by S. Žižek, when he asks why the Nazis from the SS who exterminated people were
nevertheless able to perceive and even share the universal, common to all, “humanist”
message of a work of art. Žižek’s answer is the following: it is because any human being
is endowed with the dimension of the universal and the general.14 However, in this
certain case such a dimension remains in the frame of personal and private aesthetic
pleasure, which is the reason why such universality cannot really be general since it
remains just an individual experience of the sublime.
On the other hand, when the general and the common start to be understood only
as a mode of sharing among the many, the eventful motivation for the dimension of the
general is ignored. If the common becomes just a mode and medium of connection,
then it remains unknown what exactly should be shared among the many, what should
be communicated? Is then sharing just about sharing? That is, what remains unclear
is why and in the name of what communication, connectivity and activism take place.
Should there be anything in the name of which to connect and how would this “what”
motivate the connection? In other words, the “commons” should not only have a form
(a form of infrastructure and organization) but also a content.
One more unresolved problem is whether the way the general intellect and creativity
happen to function in post-Fordist society can be considered as “knowledge.” Perhaps
what stands for the general intellect today happens to be predominantly a conglomerate
of competences? If this is so, then can the creative activity that is unable to distinguish
itself from the post-Fordist creative production and economics be considered artistic,
 Genesis of the Event in Deleuze 57

intellectual, or truly cognitive? For Virno, the goal and the problem is in claiming
the exodus of the general intellect that is appropriated by capitalist production but
is interpreted still as a competence—as virtuosity. Meanwhile, the problem today
might be in the fact that what the general intellect is reduced to cannot bear the goals
of the general, of the generic humanist project. In other words, the general intellect
does not attain the dimension of the general, since it only consists in the expansion
of cognitive competences, rather than in an aspiration to the generic dimension of
knowledge. Deprived of its ontological dimension, such “general intellect” evades
the causality that could lead to an event. The unit of such generality is the mobile
individual partaking in the languages, the codes of knowledge. But the question is
whether the generic dimension of the human is limited to this. Can we interpret the
general as the operation of connection, as a network and communicative efficiency, or
should there be some extra-communicative genealogy of knowledge that might make
it general? In other words, the general and the common cannot be just a relational
interactivity between individuals, but should be something that could endow any
individual experience with a dimension of the general, understood as a generic and
non-individual dimension, thus questioning one’s individuality as such.
In Badiou’s Saint Paul the event, its significance on the one hand, and its general-
izing sharing on the other, intersect by means of the act of faith, faith in that which can
unite. Such a uniting instance is the event of resurrection. Talking about Christ’s resur-
rection, Badiou claims that the universality of this event consists not just in piercing
the differentiated matter of the world, but also in being addressed to all. It means that
something can be shared by all only when it breaks through the world’s immanence,
when it pierces being. In other words, generalization, or sharing something together,
is not reduced to distribution (be it economic or intellectual), but proceeds from an
ethology of the event that grasps the consciousness of the many and of each among
the many.15
In the Logic of Sense, Deleuze writes that the event evolves as something imper-
sonal and non-individual, neither collective nor particular or private. He says the same
about sense. Sense is indifferent both to the universal and to the singular; as an event,
it stands beyond the division into the common and the private, into the universal and
the individual. But at the same time, it is the potentiality of the event as a leap that
presupposes, according to Deleuze, “becoming the citizen of the world.”16 All of this
sounds quite aphoristic. But what is meant is the following: Deleuze’s political thought
is not motivated by the question of civil or political regulations. His starting point is
the out of joint, the rupture. Moreover, he describes infrastructures, systematic shifts
and movements, as a causality, procedures of actualization, and not as an organization
or operation based on presumptions of the common good or common sense.17 He
does not, like Nancy, contemplate togetherness or commonality as such, either. In his
case such togetherness goes without saying in the case of the dimension of event. But
it is clear that Deleuze refuses to deal with the systematic labels of civil collectivities
and groups that are so indispensable for sociology.
Nevertheless, the political stance of Deleuzean ontology is the following. He
searches for liberation and for a revolutionary mode not in infrastructure, or in form,
58 Politics of the One

but sees it as an act of conversion on all levels—the empirical, mental, conscious,

unconscious, and spiritual. And what is most important is that his focus on the event
presupposes the potentiality of emancipatory change, the procedure of generating
strength, not only in case of a possible and given situation of struggle and its institu-
tional or administrative framework, but even when there can be no such possibility of
struggle—i.e. in the conditions of utmost social weakness.
Such a starting point for emancipation (through event) is based on the following
premise: before anything can or cannot be shared in society, before any potentiality of
sharing or of political and civil salvation ever emerges, anyone has the potential of a
paradoxical maneuver of breaking through the mixtures and depths of given empirical
conditions. This means that, before any consolidation, the dimension of the general
can already be given as the potentiality of a revolutionary shift, as an open source of
addressing the world and the others. In the event, there are no concepts like “person,”
“individual,” or “collective,”—no names and labels—but rather the singularity of a
procedure as of the overall, all-embracing, and honest involvement in what is being
done. Such singular life is already the intersection of various multiplicities. The
dimension of event enables such singular life to become worldly, or, as Deleuze puts
it, to run over and through everything.18 So, for Deleuze, the general is not just prepo-
sitioned for common use, but is first and foremost the implication that the eventful is
open for anyone as a potentiality to deploy. In other words, without the dimension of
event, any sharing between the multitudes might lead to the automaton of commu-
nication. Since the general, apart from being shared, demands sharing something that
would have had the genealogy of an event. One can share only a message. The possi-
bility of sharing the general is affirmed by an eventful act—the act of artistic, political,
and ethical conversion.19

Bibliography
Alain Badiou, Clamor of Being, trans. by Louise Burchill (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
—Logic of Worlds, trans. by A. Toscano (London and New York: Continuum, 2009).
—Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism, trans. by Ray Brassier (Stanford CA:
Stanford University Press, 2003).
—(ed.) L’idée du communisme, II (Paris: Lignes, 2011).
Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. by Mark Lester (London: The Athlone Press, 1990).
—Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (London and New York: Continuum,
2000).
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press
of Harvard University, 2009).
David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2009).
Maurizio Lazzarato, “Struggle, Event, Media.” Available online at http://eipcp.net/
transversal/1003/lazzarato/en (accessed 17 May 2012).
 Genesis of the Event in Deleuze 59

—“Immaterial Labour.” Available online at http://www.generation-online.org/c/

fcimmateriallabour3.htm (accessed 17 May 2012).
Mimesis, Masochism & Mime. The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French
Thought. Timothy Murray (ed.) (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
Paolo Virno, “The Dismeasure of Art,” interview with Paolo Virno by Pascal Gielen and
Sonja Lavaert, Foundation Art and Public Space. Available online at http://www.skor.
nl/article-4178-nl.html?lang=en (accessed 17 May 2012).
—Grammar of the Multitude (New York: Semiotext, 2004).
—“Virtuosity and Revolution, The Political Theory of Exodus.” Available online at http://
www.makeworlds.org/node/view/34 (accessed 17 May 2012).

Notes
1 Paolo Virno, “The Dismeasure of Art,” interview of Pascal Gielen and Sonja Lavaert
with Paolo Virno, Foundation Art and Public Space. Available online at http://www.
skor.nl/article-4178-nl.html?lang=en (accessed 8 June 2012).
2 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (The Belknap Press of Harvard
University, 2009).
3 Metanoia, in Greek, is the conversion and change of thoughts, the act of
transformation of consciousness, literally remorse, repentance.
4 Alain Badiou, Clamor of Being. Trans. Louise Burchill (University of Minnesota Press,
2000), 43–54.
5 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (Continuum, 2000),
168–221.
6 Alain Badiou, Clamor of Being, 19. The question posed by Deleuze is the question
of Being. From beginning to end, and under the constraint of the innumerable and
fortuitous cases, his work is concerned with thinking thought (its act, its movement)
on the basis of the ontological precomprehension of Being as One.
7 Along with the four axioms mapping event in the works by Deleuze, Badiou
enumerates his own four axioms, according to which:
1. Event is implemented due to the upsurge of the previously in-existent.
2. It is an “atemporal instant which disjoins the previous state and object (site) from
the subsequent state.”
3. “[T]he blow of the eventual One magnetizes multiplicities and constitutes them
into subjectivizable bodies.”
4. Event is not a harmonious resonance as it happens to function in Deleuze, but it
enters into decomposition of the worlds, rather than their composition.
See Alain Badiou, Logic of Worlds. Trans A. Toscano (Continuum, 2009), 381–7.
8 Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester (The Athlone Press, 1990), 7: “For
the Stoics on the other hand, states of affairs and quantities and qualities are no less
being (or bodies) than substance is; they are a part of substance and in this sense they
are contrasted with extra-Being which constitutes an incorporeal as a nonexisting
entity. The highest term therefore is not Being, but Something (aliquid), in so far as
it subsumes being and non-being, existence and inherence. Moreover the Stoics are
the first to reverse Platonism and to bring about a radical inversion. For if bodies
with their states, qualities and quantities, assume all the characteristics of substance
60 Politics of the One

and cause, conversely, the characteristics of the Idea are relegated to the other side,
that is to the impassive extra-Being which is sterile, inefficacious and on the surface
of things: the ideational of the incorporeal can no longer be anything other than an
‘effect’. … Becoming-mad, becoming unlimited is no longer a ground which rumbles.
It climbs to the surface of things and becomes impassive. … These are effects in the
causal sense, but also sonorous, optical or linguistic ‘effects’—and even less, or much
more, since they are no longer corporeal entities, but rather form the entire Idea.
What was eluding the Idea climbed up to the surface, that is, the incorporeal limit,
and represents now all possible ideality.”
9 E.g. Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude (Semiotext, 2004); Virno, “Virtuosity
and Revolution, The Political Theory of Exodus.” Available online at http://www.
makeworlds.org/node/view/34 (accessed 8 June 2012); Maurizio Lazzarato, “Struggle,
Event, Media.” Available online at http://eipcp.net/transversal/1003/lazzarato/en
(accessed 8 June 2012); Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labour.” Available online at http://
www.generation-online.org/c/fcimmateriallabour3.htm (accessed 8 June 2012).
10 The “Idea of Communism” conference was held in Berlin’s Volksbühne Theatre
on 25–7 June 2010. Its proceedings have by now been published. See L’idée du
communisme, II (Lignes, 2011), 210. Negri writes: “L’événement pour Badiou (la
crucifixion du Christ et sa résurrection, la Révolution française, la Révolution
culturelle chinoise, etc.) est toujours aposteriori, il est donc un présupposé et non pas
un produit de l’histoire. … Mais, en l’absence d’une logique interne de production
de l’événement, comment pourra-t-on jamais distinguer l’événement d’un objet de
croyance?”, 208.
11 Ibid, 65. Saroj Giri quoting David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of
Freedom (Columbia University Press, 2009), 281.
12 Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” in Timothy Murray (ed.) Mimesis,
Masochism & Mime. The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought
(University of Michigan Press, 2000), 216–39.
13 Virno, “The Dismeasure of Art.”
14 Zizek gave this example on 5 March 2007 at his public lecture at the Moscow
President Hotel.
15 Alain Badiou, “Saint Paul,” The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier
(Stanford University Press, 2003), 81: The word pistis (faith or conviction)
designates precisely this point: the absence of any gap between subject and
subjectivation. In this absence of the gap, which constantly activates the subject in the
service of truth, forbidding him rest, the One-truth proceeds in the direction of all.
… Theoreme 1. The One is only in so far as it is for all, and follows not from the law,
but from the event. It is in the retroaction of the event that the universality of truth is
constituted.
16 Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (The Athlone Press, 1990), 148: “It
is a question of attaining this will that the event creates in us; of becoming the quasi-
cause of what is produced within us; of producing surfaces and linings in which the
event is reflected, finds itself again as incorporeal and manifests in us the neutral
splendor which it possesses in itself in its impersonal and pre-individual nature,
beyond the collective and the private. It is a question of becoming a citizen of the
world.”
17 Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, ‘The Thirty-third series of Alice’s Adventures’: 238. “On
 Genesis of the Event in Deleuze 61

the contrary, to extract the non-actualizable part of the pure Event from symptoms
(or as Blanchot says, to raise the visible to the invisible), to raise everyday actions and
passions (like eating, shitting, loving, speaking or dying) to the noematic attribute and
their corresponding pure Event, to go from the physical surface on which symptoms
are played out and actualizations decided to the metaphysical surface on which the
pure event stands and is played out, to go from the cause of the symptoms to the
quasi-cause of the oeuvre …”
18 Ibid.
19 Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 149. “We are faced with a volitional intuition and
transmutation. … From this inclination to this longing there is, in a certain respect,
no change except the change of the will, a sort of leaping in place of the whole body
which exchanges its organic will for a spiritual will. It wills now not exactly what
occurs, but something in that which occurs, something yet to come which would be
consistent with what occurs, in accordance with the laws of the obscure, humorous
conformity: the Event. It is in this sense that the Amor fati is one with the struggle of
free men.”
 5

Truth and Infinity in Badiou and Heidegger*

Alexey Chernyakov

I would like to propose from the very outset two observations that seem to be
important for understanding Badiou’s project.
First, in his elaboration of the concept of truth Badiou depends very substantially
on Heidegger. Nevertheless his references to Heidegger’s works, his commentaries,
interpretations, his assent and critique—lean almost exclusively on the late Heidegger,
Heidegger after the so called “turn” (Kehre) at the beginning of the 1930s. To the
contrary, my own intention is to show that the comparison of Badiou’s conceptual
constructions and Heidegger’s elaboration of the “existential analytic of Dasein” are
not less interesting. Or, perhaps, they are even more instructive.
Second, for Badiou as well as for Heidegger the notion of truth is firmly connected
with the ethical self-identification of a human being. Badiou understands his ethics
as the “ethics of truths.” Its categorical imperative is: “enter into the composition of
a subject.”1 Later on we shall clarify the meaning of this enigmatic phrase. It goes
without saying that, de jure, the Heidegger of Being and Time does not deal with
any sort of “moral philosophy.” Nevertheless, he says in section 62 that, understood
ontically, authentic existence is “a factical ideal of Dasein.”2 Let me also underscore
that, for Heidegger, the term “subject” is both foreign and misleading. But Badiou
too in his turn transforms this concept in such a way that all possible allusions to the
Cartesian or Husserlian transcendental subject are eliminated. And it is the latter that
Heidegger tries, with all of his might, not even to deconstruct, but to destroy.
Having said all this, I am proceeding to the main subject of my paper.
A classical definition of truth, the one which we inevitably have to mention, posits
truth in a mimetic way, as adaequatio intellectus et rei.3 Heidegger, in Being and Time,
asks how this adequation is possible. It is clear that, within the context of his “newly
rekindled gigantomachia peri tes ousias,”4 he is looking for an ontological foundation
of truth. I shall omit the long chain of Heidegger’s analytical procedures in Being and
Time, and recall only their result.
To say that an assertion “is true” signifies that it uncovers the entity as it is in
itself. Such an assertion asserts, points out, lets the entity be seen (apophansis) in
its uncoveredness (Entdecktsein). The Being-true (truth) of the assertion must be
understood as Being-uncovering (entdeckend-sein). Thus truth has by no means
64 Politics of the One

the structure of an agreement between knowing and the object in the sense of
likening of a one entity (the subject) and another (the object).5

But it is not an assertion as such that uncovers the entities, but Dasein. Dasein is
the only entity that is capable of encountering another entity and understanding
it in its being. The possibility of understanding an entity in its being belongs,
according to Heidegger, to the very Dasein’s state of Being. This is an existential called
Erschlossenheit—disclosedness.
“In so far as Dasein is its disclosedness essentially […] to this extent it is essentially
‘true.’ Dasein is ‘in the truth’.”6 Truth is therefore a subject of fundamental ontology
in Heidegger’s sense. The truth of an assertion is in its turn a derivative mode of this
fundamental–ontological one.
Badiou refers to Heidegger, stating that, having become a characteristic of a propo-
sition, truth not only shifts beyond its appropriate place but distorts its essence as well.
And he continues:
It should be understood as follows: not only the whole effect of thought’s decline
or, which is the same, Being’s decline, reveals itself in the fact that after Plato
truth is presented as something localizable in an assertion. This localization is at
bottom the loss of truth’s own nature. The access to truth in its authentic aspects is
blocked, if only we accept that the phenomenon of truth is an assertion.7

Thus in Heidegger, as well as in Badiou, truth shifts (or, maybe, returns) from the
logical to the ontological order. Truth is not an adaequatio intellectus et rei, it is not
located in a logical form. “Hegel has shown”—writes Badiou—“that truth is a path.”8
Heidegger thought that truth—in the chain of its historical transformations—forms
the destiny of Europe, a sad destiny, because the primordial truth is forgotten.
Badiou posits in this connection one important distinction, that between truth
(vérité) and veridicity (véridicité).9 Both the true and the veridical are related to a
definite situation. But truth appears or, better, comes up, germinates within a situation
always as something new, I would say—something unheard-of and previously incon-
ceivable. To the contrary, veridicity belongs to the order of knowledge—already
present and fixed within a situation. Knowledge as such gives us only repetition: it
reproduces, transmits itself within the situation, belongs to, so to say, its epistemic
habit. Or, as Badiou phrases it in “Being and Event”, the veridical as a whole forms
the encyclopedia of a particular situation.10 Therein everything is inscribed which
is present within the situation (as in a Medieval verse: in quo totum continetur unde
mundus judicetur).11 The rule of knowledge is always a criterion of exact nomination,
that is discernment and classification.12 The nomina, the titles of the encyclopedia’s
articles, name the entities that are seen from inside the situation. In order to support,
to reproduce, and to amplify the encyclopedia there exist definite epistemic and
institutional technologies. This maintenance of the status quo is, according to Badiou,
simultaneously a concealing of truth. And it is not for nothing that Heidegger distin-
guishes between aletheia as unconcealment, on the one hand, and scientific knowledge
 Truth and Infinity in Badiou and Heidegger 65

and its technical embodiment as concealment, on the other hand. Of course, this
distinction is exaggerated in Heidegger and appears time and again, in a, let me say,
rather paranoiac manner. Hence—“science does not think.” From this also follows the
denial to see in a speech that is structured according to a definite logical discipline
as an expression of a possible truth. Only “the poet always speaks as if the being was
expressed for the first time.”13 Here “the spirit towers above all that which one could
call ‘pure science’, ” and “die unbegreiflich hohen Werke sind herrlich wie am ersten
Tag.”14
But let us come back to Badiou. He asks: “If all truth is something new, what is the
essential philosophic problem pertaining to truth?”15 This is, of course, the problem
of its appearance or its coming-to-be, because truth is comprehended now not as a
logical term but as a process in the real. What is the process of truth?
It is necessary to mention that all the categories Badiou uses to describe this
process are negative: the undecidable, the indiscernible, the untotalizable, finally the
unnamable. We know that to Badiou belongs the statement “ontology is mathematics.”
And thus the philosophy of truth as an ontological theme is also firmly connected with
mathematics. The first two terms (the undecidable, the indiscernible) are borrowed
immediately from corresponding mathematical theory. The untotalizable as a charac-
teristic of the generic is one of the basic facts of this theory. Let me try to clarify,
skipping all technical detail, what Badiou has in mind.
If, within the limits of a definite situation, knowledge is a sort of repetition and
concerned only with what already is, then for truth to affirm its newness there
must be a supplement. A supplement that is connected with an interruption of the
repetition. This interruption Badiou calls “event.” Here are some examples of event:
The appearance, with Aeschylus, of theatrical tragedy. The eruption, with Galileo,
of mathematical physics. An amorous encounter which changes a whole life. Or the
French Revolution of 1792. The question whether an event belongs to a situation (in
this case it is nothing other than a deferred consequence of situational laws) is in fact
undecidable. There is nothing in the “encyclopedia” that allows us to state: “here the
truth begins.” If, using the rules of established knowledge, you can decide that this
sentence is true or false, the event will not be an event. This phrase is only a wager in a
future gamble. And those who decide to participate in the gambling must make their
wagers: “Here an event is occurring named so and so (tragedy, reading of the book of
nature written by God in the language of geometry, love, revolution, etc.).” Because the
question concerning the eventfulness of something that has happened is undecidable,
a subject of truth must reveal itself within the situation, someone who addresses
himself with a sort of illocutionary force: “Something has taken place, which I can
neither calculate nor demonstrate using the epistemic technologies of my situation,
but to which I shall be faithful.” It is important to keep in mind that the subject of
truth need not necessarily “coincide” with a particular human being. For example,
the subject of a revolutionary politics is not an individual militant. To be sure, the
militant enters into the composition of a subject (a Party for example), but the subject
exceeds him or her. The subject of truth must be, so to say, spread diachronically. If a
possible event has been named, it has a chance to live a trace within the situation. The
66 Politics of the One

destiny of truth depends upon the destiny of this trace: either it will be erased or it will
generate the truth’s trajectory.
A subject fixes the trace of an event and involves himself or herself in the infinite
process of the “truth’s verification.” The series of choices accomplished by a historically
extended subject (in the Logics of Worlds Badiou calls it a “sequence” of subjective
points16) creates the trajectory of truth, the trajectory that cannot be regulated by any
concept, or notion, or narrative that is on hand within the situation. In this sense,
every subject is a local agent of truth, because he or she generates and creates a certain
number of subjective points. None of these subjective points can be determined by the
language and the logic of the corresponding situation.
In Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics a proairesis (a rational choice) is defined as an
orexis bouleutike, an aspiration resorting to reasoning, taking council with oneself
or the Other.17 Here to the contrary one has to choose among the indiscernible, for
the difference cannot be expressed in the language of the situation and thus cannot
become an object of reasoning. As Badiou writes, referring to Mallarme: “A subject
is a throw of the dice which does not abolish chance but accomplishes it as a verifi-
cation of the decision which founds it.”18 What has been decided, due to the subject of
truth, regarding the undecidable paves the way exactly through this subjective point,
the point of decision. But another possibility cannot be definitely discerned from the
chosen one within the scope of knowledge before the act of choice, but only through
it.
The Truth must be infinite because everything that is finite belongs to the encyclo-
pedia of a situation as the result of a finite enumeration. In the formal language of
ontology—that is, of mathematics—this should be expressed in the following way:
the truth-procedure should be completed by the formation of an infinite subset of
the situation, and thus its completion is always deferred. This subset must be indis-
cernible within the situation, that is, its characteristic is inexpressible in the language
of the situation. Within the respective mathematical theory, this infinite indiscernible
subset is called generic. Thus, the generic cannot be either constructed through a
finite number of steps or comprehended as an extensional interpretation of a property
defined in situational language, because it would mean that the process of truth had
been governed beforehand by a definite law, which had acted in concealment. It is this
law that was a real subject of the fake truth, and those who have been throwing the
dice, and making wages, were only its blind instruments.
Here, as it seems, I cannot proceed further on without Badiou’s mathematical
technique. I believe that the discussion of truth has a promising continuation, which
is not accomplished yet in the writings of Badiou and his followers.
Now, let us come back to Heidegger. We have seen that, in Being and Time, the
depth dimension of truth is the disclosedness of Dasein, its disclosed and disclosing
Being-in-the-world. For Badiou, a human being, a someone, can, in principle, partic-
ipate in different truth-processes, be involved in different truth-trajectories. But for
Dasein there exists the fundamental or radical truth—the truth concerning Dasein
itself, or its authentic Selfhood (das eigentliche Selbst). Heidegger writes:
 Truth and Infinity in Badiou and Heidegger 67

As something that understands, Dasein can understand itself in terms of the

world and Others or in terms of its ownmost potentiality for being (Seinkönnen).
The possibility just mentioned means that Dasein discloses itself to itself in and
as its ownmost potentiality-for-being. This authentic disclosedness shows the
phenomenon of the most primordial truth in the mode of authenticity. The most
primordial, and indeed the most authentic, disclosedness in which Dasein, as a
potentiality-for-being, can be, is the truth of existence.19

We have seen that the moments, the instances of decisions (what Heidegger calls die
Augenblicke der Entscheidung and connects with the authentic choices of the ownmost
potentiality-for-being), Badiou designates as subjective points. For Heidegger, too, the
primordial truth, the truth of existence, is carried out as a sequence of such points.
A choice (of a mode to exist), the resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) in the situation of
choice—and here lies one of the most significant messages of Being and Time—is not
determined beforehand by any law (a moral law, for example). It can be determined
in fact by public opinion, by a sort of ethics understood literally—as Greek ethos—a
public custom. But this sort of determination takes place only when Dasein has lost
itself, lost its authentic Self, and is absorbed in the “they,” in das Man. The force that
compels Dasein to decide in this or that way—or better, that attests the authenticity
of a choice—Heidegger calls Conscience. Conscience does not cry out a verdict,
when Dasein violates a certain moral law, when it deviates from truth understood
in the Roman sense, as the verum, the correct. Conscience does not sentence to
a punishment in the form of being conscience-striken, to sorrows that cruelly, as
Erinyes, track down those who wrongly shed blood. And all this because the authen-
ticity of existence is something undecidable, it cannot be decided on the basis of a
certain list of criteria, the Tablets of Law, etc. Such criteria can be on hand only within
the public sphere of das Man. Here, there are not the names of events, but only idle
talks (das Gerede). But, in the situation of an authentic decision, das Man cannot come
to the rescue of Dasein and deliver it from making a bet with itself. The fundamental
truth, the truth of existence is, according to Heidegger, a departure from the Public
Encyclopedia. Sometimes Badiou speaks on behalf of the subject. Then he sounds very
much like Heidegger.
A subject needs something to have happened, something that cannot be reduced
to its ordinary inscription in “what there is” demands that something must
happen that cannot be reduced to a simple entering into a multiple being that
already has a place. Let us call this supplement an event […] which compels us to
decide a new way of being.20

But right there, the similarity ends. And I would like now to point to a radical
distinction between Badiou and Heidegger.
For Badiou, the subject is the bearer of a fidelity, the one who bears the process
of truth. This means that s/he cannot pre-exist the process. On the other hand the
68 Politics of the One

subject exceeds a particular human being, a “some-one.” The “some-one” thus caught
up in what attests that s/he belongs to the truth-process as one of its foundation-
points is simultaneously him- or herself […] and in excess of him- or herself, because
a trajectory of fidelity passes through him or her, transfixes the singular body and
inscribes him or her, within time, in an instance of eternity. Sometimes Badiou openly
names this diachronic excess “immortality.”21
Deeply absorbed by his or her inclusion into the composition of a some-one (a
scientist, an artist, a political activist, a lover) the subject becomes absorbed into the
truth which comes up through him or her, though he or she knows nothing for sure,
indeed has no means to know the undecidable. Nevertheless he or she is inscribed,
within time, in an instance of eternity and abides in the “oblivion of the sorrowful
death” (as Mandelstam says22).
And how do matters stand with the authentic existence of Dasein? We must answer:
Quite differently. We know that, for Heidegger, the authenticity of authentic Dasein’s
being is revealed in its most ample form at the intersection of two analytic lines.
Moving along one of them Heidegger discloses that the authentic Being-towards-
death is anticipation (das Vorlaufen), das Vorlaufen in die unbezügliche Möglichkeit des
Todes. On the other hand, Dasein’s authentic potentiality-for-Being in its existential
attestation (which is nothing other than conscience) has been exhibited as resoluteness.
Now the two phenomena come together and we have “anticipatory resoluteness.”
Heidegger writes:
When Dasein is resolute it takes over authentically in its existence, the fact that it
is the null basis of its nullity. Death is not added on to Dasein at its end; but Dasein
as care is the thrown (that is, null) basis for its death. The nullity by which Dasein’s
Being is dominated primordially through and through, is revealed to Dasein itself
in authentic Being-towards-death.23

To be the basis of one’s own nullity means, for Heidegger, to be guilty, and it is exactly
this being-guilty that is attested by conscience.
If the “some-one” enters into the composition of a subject, the ethical problem
he or she confronts is, according to Badiou, the problem of consistency. That is a
paradoxical conjunction of the situational vitality belonging to a human animal,
its conatus, its perseverance in being, a conjunction with something that breaks or
opposes this perseverance. This something is belonging to the process of truth. The
factical Dasein’s ideal which Heidegger sees in its authentic existence, that is, in the
upshot, “anticipatory resoluteness,” requires sui generis humility, but at the same
time, firmness or strength of mind, in the face of existential nullity or, which is the
same, ontologically interpreted guilt. “This distinctive and authentic disclosedness,
which is attested in Dasein itself by its conscience—this reticent self-projection upon
one’s Being-guilty, in which one is ready for anxiety—we call ‘resoluteness’. ”24 Thus,
according to Heidegger, the factical ethical ideal of Dasein is resoluteness for one’s
own finitude, fidelity to finitude. For Badiou—this is the inclusion of the vital finitude
of a human animal into the infinity of a truth-process, a fidelity to infinity.
 Truth and Infinity in Badiou and Heidegger 69

Bibliography
Thomas Aquinas, Questiones disputatae de veritate, trans. Robert W. Mulligan, S.J.
(Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952).
Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward
(London: Verso, 2001).
—Theoretical Writings, trans. R. Brassier and A. Toscano (New York: Continuum, 2004).
—Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham and Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2005).
—Infinite Thought, (New York: Continuum, 2005).
—Logic of Worlds, trans. A. Toscano (New York: Continuum, 2008).
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, Prolog im Himmel. Available online at http://www.
martinschlu.de/kulturgeschichte/klassik/goethe/faust/03.htm (accessed 22 May 2012).
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(London: Harper, 1962).
—Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
Ossip Mandelshtam, Kamen (Leningrad: Nauka, 1990).

Notes
* This is the text of a talk delivered by Alexey Chernyakov at the conference “Politics of
the One” in March 2010, shortly before his death in July of the same year. The text has
been technically edited for grammar and references. It is being published here by the
kind permission of Alexey’s daughter, Ekaterina Chernyakova.
1 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward
(Verso, 2001), 43.
2 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(Harper, 1962), 358.
3 Thomas Aquinas, Questiones disputatae de veritate qu. I, art. I. Trans. Robert
W. Mulligan, S.J. (Henry Regnery Company, 1952). Available online at http://
dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdeVer1.htm (visited January 25, 2012).
4 Being and Time, 21 (2).
5 Ibid., 261 (218).
6 Ibid., 263 (221).
7 Alain Badiou, “Philosophy and Truth,” in Infinite Thought (Continuum, 2005), 44.
8 Ibid., 45.
9 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham and Ray Brassier (Continuum,
2005), 331–4.
10 Ibid., 331.
11 “In which all is contained Whereby the world shall be judged,” from the requiem
hymn Dies Irae.
12 Cf. Badiou, Being and Event, 328.
13 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (Yale University Press, 2000), 154, quoted by
Badiou in “Philosophy and Truth,” 44.
14 “The incredibly high works are majestic like on the first day.” J. W. Goethe, Faust,
Prolog auf Himmel. Available online at http://www.martinschlu.de/kulturgeschichte/
klassik/goethe/faust/03.htm (accessed January 25 2012).
70 Politics of the One

15 “Philosophy and Truth,” 45.

16 Alain Badiou, Logic of Worlds, trans. A. Toscano (Continuum, 2008), 83ff. “A subject
is a sequence involving continuities and discontinuities …”
17 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Book 3, Chapter 2,
1111 b- 1112a25ff, 46–47; Book 6, chapter 2, 1139a20-1139b15, 116-117.
18 Alain Badiou, “On Subtraction,” in Theoretical Writings, trans. R. Brassier and A.
Toscano (Continuum, 2004), 113.
19 Being and Time, 264 (221).
20 Alain Badiou, Ethics (Verso, 2001), 41.
21 See, for instance, Ethics, 15ff.
22 Ossip Mandelshtam, Kamen (Nauka, 1990), “Na bledno-goluboy emali,” 9.
Mandelshtam is speaking of an artist drawing in “the consciousness of a momentary
force.”
23 Being and Time, 354 (306).
24 Ibid., 343 (297).
 6

Suspension of the One

Badiou’s Objective Phenomenology and Politics of

the Subject

Vitaly Kosykhin

The process of parting with Heideggerian thought, which may take different forms,
apparently reveals itself in ontological investigations at the present time. However,
the most concentrated position of rejection of the ontological perspective proposed
by Heidegger (which, first of all, was connected with his demands of overcoming
all of the previous metaphysical tradition through the categorical discernment of
ontological difference and through the subsequent onto-historical re-thinking of the
essence of nihilism) nowadays finds its expression in the recognition of necessity of
the “Platonic gesture” or the new ontological turn proposed by Alain Badiou.1 This
turn means, for Badiou, the encounter of ontology and mathematics, the possibility
of which was ignored or even excluded from Heidegger’s “essentially historical” inter-
pretation of being.
Badiou’s fundamental work, Being and Event, was devoted to the exploration of
the possibilities of such a step. The second volume of Being and Event, which was
published 18 years after the first and entitled Logic of Worlds, is a further development
and concretization of Badiou’s thought, focusing on the problems of the subject and
on the possibilities of a new turn of phenomenology.
Thus, our main task here is to clarify the phenomenological or, to say it more
properly, the post-phenomenological dimension of his “Platonic gesture,” in the
context of the continuation of Badiou’s project in Logic of Worlds. Unlike Plato, Badiou
suspends the question of the One in a certain space of correlative duality between
“what is” (the multiple) and “what is not” (the One). But this, in its turn, makes the
“Platonic gesture” not so radically Platonic, because it never reaches (and it is not
intended to do so) the monistic Platonic position on the essence of phenomenon as
τὸ ἡνωμένον, “combined into one.” We shall try to demonstrate that the new “objective
phenomenology” proposed by Badiou deals with the simultaneous disappearing and
reappearing of the subject. The subject, like the ontological One, disappears in the
phenomenal sphere of the multiple, where we can find no subject himself, but only
72 Politics of the One

his/her reactions to events or, as Badiou exposes, his “post-eventual body.” And thus,
it also means the program of the liberation of the subject that loses its ontological
deployment by losing its traditional abstract character of an essential entity, in the new
forms of political subjectivity.
As Badiou himself notes in the preface to Logic of Worlds: “Logics of Worlds stands
to Being and Event as Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit stands to his Science of Logic,
even though the chronological order is inverted: an immanent grasp of the parameters
of being-there, a local survey of the figures of the true and of the subject, and not a
deductive analytic of the forms of being.”2 This inverted order of thinking, let us call
it a kind of retrospective conversion, is also inherent in the logical and ontological
positions of Badiou, no matter whether it is applied to being, event or the subject.
But let us start, as Badiou himself often does, with dialectics. For example, in the
Logic of Worlds Badiou states on many occasions that his fundamental position is
that of materialist dialectics. The peculiarity of the materialist dialectics of Badiou,
as opposed to a broader context of modern materialism and idealism, consists, as
we believe, primarily in the fact that instead of the Hegelian triadic development
of thought from thesis by anti-thesis to speculative synthesis, Badiou carries out a
dualistic fixation of the opposition between thesis and anti-thesis, which preserves
both in relation only to each other (one–multiple, ontology–philosophy, etc.) without
the possibility of a third synthetic phase. Of course, one can see here a certain
dialectics, especially in the case of the one and the multiple, where, as Badiou asserts,
the multiple is and the one is not, but this is not a Hegelian kind of dialectics, because
it does not allow the transition of opposites into each other. Hegel spoke of the essence,
which was phenomenal, and of the phenomenon that, in its turn, was essential. But
Badiou does not say, for example, that ontology is philosophical, and philosophy
ontological. He always prefers to be more a logical formalist than a dialectician.
A quite different example of positive dialectics can be found in Alexei Losev’s dialec-
tical theory, which is deeply connected with the ancient dialectics of Neo-Platonism.
According to Losev, dialectics should contain in itself both the logical construction
and the eidetic contemplation of being. The constitutive aspect of this dialectics is
precisely the doctrine of the interaction of the part and the whole. Losev poses the
relationship between them as a basis for the whole dialectical methodology. This
means, for him, that the one and the multiple enter a logically necessary contra-
diction, antinomy, because the one cannot be without the multiple, and the other
way around. The whole is the dialectical synthesis of the one and the multiple. We
can see an example of this dialectical attitude in Losev’s exposition of the relation
between the subject and the object. First of all, the subject, for Losev, is something,
and as such it can be perceived and thought. This means that the subject is an object
in the dialectical sense, because we call “an object” the entity which exists and which
can be perceived and thought. In a dialectical relationship, the subject and the object
mutually presuppose each other. In other words, in dialectical contemplation we
constantly change the perspective of our vision, moving from the subjective to the
objective side and returning again to the subject, in the noetic sphere of contem-
plative wholeness.3
 Suspension of the One 73

On the contrary, the fixation of relations between opposites is, in Badiou, more
mathematical than actually dialectical, but it plays the same role that the movement
from the abstract to the concrete plays in classical dialectics. In some way, it resembles
(in terms of the “excluded third”—of the stage of synthesis) Adorno’s project of
negative dialectics, but the difference between Badiou and Adorno consists in three
moments. First, unlike Adorno, Badiou gives no advantage to the negative over the
affirmative. These two sides are, rather, equal and can even be considered as a positive
unity in general. Second, synthetic unity nevertheless remains in Badiou’s ontology,
but as a kind of suspension between two opposites, a kind of only hypothetical being
as it is not present in any of them. Actually, this synthetic unity is absent; it acts like
a horizon of thought, or pure possibility that can never reach its aim or be realized.4
Generally speaking, a dialectical position (Platonic, Hegelian, Losev’s, Marxist, etc.)
presupposes monism (no matter if idealistic or materialistic), i.e. the one that is not
suspended. Badiou is in no case a monist.
Brian Smith, commenting on the well-known position of the ontology of Being
and Event that the one does not belong to being, which is plural, and that it is
therefore more appropriate to speak not about the one, but about the count-as-one as
a structural operation of prescribing oneness to the multiple, rightly observes: “The
One, for Badiou, must remain a process, therefore the one as this operation of the
presentation of the count-as-one is never itself presented; it is only the structure of
presentation. It is how the multiple is presented, not what the multiple is.”5 In fact,
Smith’s note may serve as a good introduction to the problem of the suspension of
the one, which is, as we suppose, fundamentally important for the purpose of better
understanding the phenomenology and ontology of Badiou, and which we’ll discuss
further.
The third moment that distinguishes Badiou from the Adornian tradition, is
certainly related to historicism and subjectivism, under the strong and not always
recognized influence on Badiou of Husserl’s ideas on phenomenology in the period
of Logical Investigations. After all, what else are Badiou’s unchangeable eternal
onto-mathematical truths, than another form of Husserl’s philosophia perennis?
However, the new conception of “objective phenomenology” presented by Badiou
in his Logic of Worlds is significantly different from previous versions of phenom-
enology, whether Hegelian (dialectical), Husserlian (transcendental), or Heideggerian
(onto-hermeneutical).
To understand the place and importance of objective phenomenology in the system
of Badiou’s thought we must first explore the meaning of retrospective phenomeno-
logical conversion conducted by Badiou. This conversion performs the function of
something similar to the procedure of phenomenological reduction in Husserl’s
approach, especially in regard to eliminating the prejudice of historicism. For Husserl,
phenomenological reduction is a condition of access to the analysis of phenomena
and structures of consciousness “as they are” and returns consciousness “to things
themselves,” but for Badiou, the phenomenological return means access to the area of
ontology, and we are told about the things themselves in the language of the ontologi-
cally rethought theory of sets. To make this return possible, phenomenology should
74 Politics of the One

become objective, i.e. it should not be verified by the introspection of the subject,
whether in the form of Husserlian contemplation (Anschauung) or Heideggerian
Dasein. Therefore, the early Husserl’s phenomenological critique of historicism takes,
in the case of Badiou, the form of an ontological critique of historicism needed to
acquire access to genuine ontology, which the set theory is.
Badiou makes a methodological step that we previously called “the retrospective
conversion of phenomenology.” Through this step of Badiou, Heidegger’s under-
standing of phenomenology is converted back to Husserl’s, and, next (due to its
connection with the mathematically conceived objective and universal truth), is objec-
tified in the Platonic mathematical sense, perhaps with a subsequent replacement of
idealism with materialism and of phenomenology with ontological dialectics (part of
which is actually the objective phenomenology). Badiou goes back beyond Heidegger
to Husserl and then intends to go back beyond Husserl towards Plato, but his Platonic
gesture does not (so far) reach Plato (in the way it had previously led him from
Heidegger to Husserl) and suspends itself in the centre of the triangle: early Husserl—
late Heidegger—the unattainable Plato.
In the context of what we have stated above, let us analyze the concept of “objective
phenomenology” in more detail. It begins in the third book of The Logic of Worlds,
where Badiou tells that he is introducing a new concept of the object, arguing that
“The main novelty of this approach is that the notion of object is entirely independent
from that of subject. […] The concept of the object pertains instead to the analytic
of being-there and, like the transcendental, it does not presuppose any subject.”6
Badiou calls such a construction of the object, “as it is,” “subjectless” and associates it
not with subjectivity, but with the one. That brings us to the mathematization of the
ontological status of the object, or, in the language of Being and Event, to the ontology
of pure multiplicity. It is worth mentioning here that Badiou devoted the previous,
second part of his book to the analysis of the subject as the formal set of strata and
sectors, without any reference to the object. In this part of the book Badiou does not
resort to phenomenology, because the latter is radically separated from the subject—
the feature which, in fact, distinguishes it from Hegelian and Husserlian versions of
phenomenology.
Thus, his new understanding of the object leads Badiou to a new understanding of
the phenomenon. It is based on a fundamental difference between the two species, or
planes, of being: being-in-the-world, which is being-multiple (the empirical datum to
be studied within the framework of philosophy) and transcendent being which, not
being given empirically, exists in the form of stable mathematical entities or unities
to be examined by ontology. Based on this distinction, Badiou locates the discourse
of ontology beyond the limits of philosophy and conjugates it with mathematics. He
establishes that the concept of a phenomenon is a result of the indexation or corre-
lation of a being-in-the-world (the object here appears in a variety of differences)
with transcendent being. In this transcendent being, the object is subordinated to
the logical order that makes it into an epistemologically conceivable and ontologi-
cally—which, for Badiou, means also, mathematically—meaningful identity. Here,
the multiple meet with the one in the merging of empirical and ontological horizons.
 Suspension of the One 75

Or, as he indicates, “there is an effective link between the multiple-being and the
transcendental schemata of its appearance—or of its existence.”7 It should be noted
that the very concept of existence in Badiou’s thought is constituted as a consequence
of the presence of unity in a multiplicity. For example, claiming that this chair exists,
we affirm the unity of its existence as an object with many qualities and character-
istics. Simply speaking, the question of the self-identity of an object is the question
of bringing the unity of its essence from the sphere of the transcendental (ontological
and mathematical) into the sphere of the empirical.
Ed Pluth, in his careful analysis of Badiou’s notion of “transcendental,” pays
attention to the central position it takes in objective phenomenology, since “a transcen-
dental contains or consists of a scale of degrees of resemblances and differences among
appearances, and every appearance in a world is going to have a transcendental index-
ation.”8 At the same time, he describes it as a “hybrid” and somewhat “risky” notion on
account of the difficulties associated with its traditional usage, related to the subject
in the case of Kant and Husserl. In his Second Manifesto, Badiou clarifies the notion
of transcendental, defining it in a more simple way as a “logical organization of this
world.”9 The world itself consists of ontological objects or phenomena.
Properly speaking, a phenomenon, for Badiou, is a certain “one-multiple,” an
integral and in some sense dialectical unity, a kind of wholeness that is available for
philosophical and ontological analysis, on the side of the multiple and on the side of
the one respectively. It should be noted that a phenomenon is absolutely objective, in
both possible perspectives, that of its plurality, and that of its unity. Here’s how Badiou
himself describes it: “Basically, indexing is a function which links every difference
immanent to the multiple to its intensity of appearance in the world. With regard to
this point, the formal exposition is as simple and clear as it can be: if x and y are two
elements of a being A, and T is the transcendental of the world in question, indexing
is an identity-function Id(x, y) which measures in T the degree of ‘apparent’ identity
between x and y. In other words, if Id(x, y) 5 p, it means that x and y are ‘identical
to the p degree’ with regard to their power of appearance in the world. The result
of this transcendental evaluation of differences is what we call the phenomenon. It
is noteworthy that within the space of phenomenality, it is possible exhaustively to
examine the question of existence as a question which is entirely distinct from that of
being.”10
The latest addition of Badiou clearly stands in opposition to the onto-hermeneutical
method of questioning being, and it does not look accidental, in the light of Badiou’s
further exposition of the objective of phenomenology in the Logic of worlds, with the
three degrees (intensities) of the object—the maximum, average and minimum. Here,
we are dealing with the construction of the “transcendental functor” of the object, “a
kind of operator, which associates to every degree of the transcendental the set of the
elements of the object whose common characteristic is that their existence is measured
by this degree.”11
In other words, within the framework of objective phenomenology, we can speak
of the completeness of expression of the object’s being-in-the-world from the moment
of its appearance to the peak of its existence and finally to its extinction. This, in
76 Politics of the One

turn, makes possible a more detailed analysis of phenomena as a specific unity of

“one-multiple”.
For a better understanding of Badiou’s new version of phenomenology, it seems
necessary to clarify its relation to Husserl’s phenomenology. This especially concerns
the problem of comparison between two phenomenological (or, rather, post-phenom-
enological) concepts: the logic of worlds of Badiou and the life-world of Husserl.
Badiou’s objective phenomenology is, in our opinion, just a good example of post-
phenomenological thinking.
First of all, we should recognize that post-phenomenological philosophy is
absolutely impossible from a strictly phenomenological point of view, like the science
“of trapezia, or of lions”12 for Husserl in his early period of Logical Investigations. Even
to this day we can periodically hear the repetitions of Heidegger’s phrase that ontology
(in fact, even philosophy) is possible only as phenomenology, evoked as a proof of
the vitality of the phenomenological project. This, of course, could be valid only in
the case of the overcoming of metaphysics (otherwise, the force of the metaphysical
position would be still preserved for any ontology while making doubtful the claim
of phenomenological ontology for exclusive truth). But this still requires, as we think,
a certain attitude to the problem of the relationship between the metaphysical and
phenomenological modes of contemplation.
The specific attitude to contemplation had determined, in our view, the development
of the phenomenological movement as a series of different post-phenomenological
expositions of the initial phenomenological project. This includes not only the
cases of Heidegger or Ingarden, but also the case of Husserl himself in the period
of Lebenswelt. The attitude to contemplation has a fundamental meaning also for
understanding the essence of Badiou’s objective phenomenology. Therefore, as a
preliminary step for understanding the post-phenomenological character of objective
phenomenology and its relation to the phenomenological project as a whole, it is very
important to identify the value of contemplation and of a number of related concepts
for the constitution of Husserl’s post-phenomenological conception of “life-world.”
This means (when we take into account the way the phenomenological movement
had developed), paraphrasing Heidegger, that phenomenology is possible only as its
own post-phenomenological exposition, i.e. that phenomenology can continue itself
through going beyond its limits. All of this is fully present in Husserl’s concept of
life-world.
The problem that interests Husserl, from the very beginning of his exposition of the
problem of “life-world” in §33 of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology, is the question of the nature of interaction between the objective
world of science and the pre-scientific life-world. This world exists and persists in
scientific research, while science, or, as Husserl calls it, “objectivist science,” prefers to
ignore it. However, Husserl, unlike Badiou, poses the question not about the life-world
in itself, but about the alienation from this world in the European paradigm of scien-
tific thinking. Husserl believes that the available objectivist science does not exhaust
scientific knowledge in general, and that the integration of scientific knowledge with
the life-world could work out rules for another, more complete and universal science.
 Suspension of the One 77

And yet, the life-world contains a full range of cognitive acts, whether they are related
to science or not. Moreover, a confirmation of these acts should not be conducted via
a scientific verification procedure, but it should be based on an existential proof of life,
that is, on the initial evidence of the life-world.
Of course, scientific theories cannot directly relate to the life-world, existing in a
particular area of scientific ideality, but, as Husserl writes, “this or any other ideality
does not change in the least the fact that these are human formations, essentially
related to human actualities and potentialities, and thus belong to this concrete unity
of the life-world, whose concreteness thus extends farther than that of ‘things’.”13
Thus the problem of life-world in Husserl’s thought reveals itself as a universal
problem for philosophy. The universality of this problem for Husserl appears as the
question of the relationship between objective scientific thought and contemplation
(Anschauung).14 If we oppose them, then the result is science separated from the life-
world, lifeless knowledge and the life-world separated from knowledge, contemplation
not rising to the heights of scientific theories. But if we could correlate contemplation
with objective-scientific thinking, which then will act as a form of contemplation, in
that case, Husserl says, “as soon as the magnitude and difficulty of this investigation
take on enormous proportions as one seriously penetrates it, there occurs the great
transformation of the ‘theory of knowledge’ and the theory of science whereby, in
the end, science as a problem and as an accomplishment loses its self-sufficiency and
becomes a mere partial problem.”15
In our opinion, proper analysis of the life-world should be based on the five key
concepts contained in the post-phenomenological project of late Husserl. These five
concepts are: contemplation (Anschauung), ideality (Idealität), horizon (Horizont),
positing (Setzung), and creation (Stiftung). All of them constitute the structural matrix
of life-world in the wider post-phenomenological context.
So, if we look from this point of view at the life-world, it is, first of all, the contem-
plative world. Indeed, the verification of its truth does not require chemical tests
or physical experiments, because the very experience of contemplation is a great
experiment or the event of cognitive contact with the truth. Not only does phenom-
enology tell us about this contemplative experience. Contemplation of the universal
intellectual life forms lies in the center of the ontological and epistemological thought
of Neo-Platonists, who regard the very life of the mind on all its levels as a form of
contemplation. The hierarchical structure of the universe in Neo-Platonism is, in fact,
connected to the inner essence of contemplation. According to Plotinus, the soul
contemplates a living world of intellectual forms, which is, in its turn, immersed in the
contemplation of the One.
But what is contemplated in contemplation? Husserl suggests that in answering
this question we must take into account the aspect, which is common to all kind of
contemplations. He reveals that, as far as all contemplations include the sphere of
meaning, they are essentially ideal. So it is ideality that becomes the next key concept
of the life-world.
At this point, we can compare Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world
(which is not just preserved, but even amplified in Badiou’s theory, which gives
78 Politics of the One

to it a somewhat different, but still essentially Heideggerian interpretation) to the

“life-world” of Husserl as an alternative phenomenological project. In fact, it is the
attitude to contemplation that determines the difference in the positions of thinkers
on the question of “things themselves.” Heidegger’s phenomenology, unlike that
of Husserl, puts aside intellectual contemplation in its various forms of ideation,
in favor of a direct presence in being (Dasein). For this, Heidegger relies on an
anti-contemplative and anti–idealistic experience of Nietzschean thought, in order
to overcome idealistic metaphysics in general through a critical destruction of its
“ontical” basis.
A quite different approach characterizes Husserl’s thought: for him, contemplation
is the area of interconnection among science, metaphysics, and life-world. Husserl
does not try to overcome metaphysics, but, in fact, restores contemplative idealistic
metaphysics on a new refined phenomenological level. At the end of his Cartesian
Meditations he reminds us of the continuing importance of “prima philosophia”, which
is paradigmatic for the critique of distorted, or as Husserl calls them, “degenerated”
forms of metaphysics. Jacques Derrida, when analyzing the relationship between
Husserl’s metaphysics and its phenomenological critique, comes to the conclusion
that this critique is metaphysical in itself and, as he also points out, “the unique
and permanent motif of all the mistakes and distortions which Husserl exposes in
‘degenerated’ metaphysics, across a multiplicity of domains, themes, and arguments, is
always a blindness to the authentic mode of ideality.”16 Derrida demonstrates that the
very beginning of metaphysics, for Husserl, is rooted in a particular ideal of the living
present, to which he relates the notion of “transcendental life,” where the language of
metaphysics brings together life and ideality. Here I think a parallel to Badiou’s event
would be pertinent.
Attitude towards ideality requires a certain horizon. The concept of the horizon
intentionality, or phenomenological horizon, was introduced by Husserl as a
refinement of the problem of the adequate evidence of intentions in contemplation,
which had been previously discussed in the Logical Investigations. This horizon inten-
tionality necessarily conveys every single experience of consciousness, providing for
the realization of an intentional act and creating the possibility of moving on to a
following act of consciousness with a different horizon.
Such a horizon, in fact, is a horizon of contemplation, which, as Husserl asserts,
cannot be objectified in its turn, as it is itself a condition of any objectification. We
should recall that it is precisely this quality of the essential openness of horizon that
characterizes the life-world in the latest version of Husserl’s phenomenology.
Roman Ingarden17 insisted on two varieties of Husserl’s idealism even before the
first appearance of the “life-world,” in the text of Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology. The first variety was organized around the intellectual
space of the first volume of Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological
Philosophy (1913). This type of idealism found its concentrated expression in the
concept of “positing” (Setzung), emanating from a hidden recognition of the pre-given
world. The second type appears in the late 1920s, in the Cartesian Meditations and
Formal and Transcendental Logic, where the concept of “positing” shifted to the
 Suspension of the One 79

concept of “creation” (Stiftung) of the world. This movement from Setzung to Stiftung
changes the meaning and the function of every cognitive act. This important point
should be considered concerning to the concept of “life-world,” which is not simply
given as something completed, but is always in the situation of creation.
The situation is different in Badiou’s Logic of Worlds. Badiou presents the conception
of a plurality of worlds-objects, consistently analyzed through the process of transcen-
dental ideation. This totally excludes the unity and contemplative activity of the
subject. The subject’s activity is transferred into the practical plan of militant action,
which makes us reconsider the notion of the subject, as well as the structure of the
subject’s actions.
For Badiou, the subject is an analogon of the One which, as we remember, “is not”
in the sense that it does not appear as something substantially uniform. Already at
the end of the Being and Event, the subject disappears and appears, on a long way to
the truth, in the Mallarméan castle of purity and absence. Supporting the Lacanian
interpretation of the subject, Badiou argues: “What must always be grasped is that
there is no subject, that there are no longer some subjects.”18 Of course, these words of
Badiou aim to describe the disappearance of the subject from the map of ontological
modernity. This critical attitude towards the subject is largely inspired by Heidegger’s
critique of subjectivity—even though Badiou then proceeds to reintroduce the subject,
but this happens, I believe, already at the level of “ontologia specialis,” while, at the
level of “ontologia generalis,” the subject does not exist. Heidegger’s Dasein comes
into existence, where Descartes’s subject is disappearing, and the afore-cited phrase of
Badiou is rather appropriate in the context of the meditations of late Heidegger about
Dasein. For example, in Zollikon Seminars (1965) Heidegger says: “Thus, the analytic
of Da-sein has nothing whatsoever to do with solipsism or subjectivism […] The
all-determining projection of being human as extatic Da-sein is already ontological so
that the idea of the human being as ‘subjectivity of consciousness’ is overcome.”19
The very privileged position of Dasein in the sphere of beings ensures not only
uniqueness of access to the truth of being, but also the “primordial” predisposition
to being-in-the-world as existence in the sphere of shared being with others. This
enables, on the one hand, comprehension of understandable (by Dasein) beings, and,
on the other hand, excludes the opportunity for solipsistic or subjective interpretations
of Dasein. Hereby, the question concerning Dasein and dealing with the primordial
opportunity of understanding, is the question concerning the sense of being as such.
Heidegger characterizes this rooting of Dasein in being as such as a “fundamental
happening” (Grundgeschehen) of “inabiding” (Inständigkeit), to which man owes the
possibility of his very existence as a human being, his capacity of understanding. Just
as the understanding of being in the fundamental ontology aims at overcoming the
subjectivity of modern metaphysics, the analytic of Dasein aims, as Heidegger says, at
overcoming “the idea of the human being as ‘subjectivity of consciousness’.”
In principle, we can even say that Dasein itself is a sort of pre-subjective
consciousness, or rather, the very possibility of all forms of consciousness, including
the subjective consciousness as subject to overcoming, not even for the sake of
destroying subjectivity, but rather for the sake of destroying the prejudice of European
80 Politics of the One

metaphysics concerning the subjectivity of consciousness as the only possible form of

consciousness.
It is in the light of Dasein that it is for the first time possible to authentically clarify
the meaning of subjectivity. Heidegger conceives the overcoming of subjectivity as the
overcoming of anthropologism in understanding the truth of being. His conception
of human existence is opposed to the anthropological one, because Dasein is anti-
anthropological in principle. Heidegger’s point of view is that the precondition for
future anthropology of any kind is contained in the Cartesian interpretation of the
human being as a subject, though anthropology as such has nothing to do with
philosophy. The analytics of Dasein demonstrates that human existence as presence
in being is totally different from the notion of the human being as subjectivity or a
transcendental “ego-consciousness.”
Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein is interesting just for its anti-subjective and anti-
anthropological intention, which enables raising the question of being in a new way,
thereby calling into question the traditional metaphysical understanding of being and
putting on the philosophical agenda the transformation of the very understanding of
being. In the light of such transformation, the human entity that understands being
does not think of itself as a cognitive subject who would be at the center of the classical
metaphysical questioning of the entity’s being and of the being of the inquirer himself.
The main paradox, but at the same time the most logically conclusive point of the
analytic of Dasein, is that an ontologically understood human being has nothing in
common with the subject. Thus, we can see in Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysical
subject a certain prehistory of Badiou’s “there is no subject.”
Badiou’s subject “is” not, in the ontological sense. Its main characteristic is absence
in general being which, of course, is subjectless. Instead of it we can see only the
modes of subjectivity revealing themselves in their political and ethical (but not
ontological) presence in the world. The subject is the myth of (political) philosophy,
but his postevental body has nothing to do with the ontological dimension of being
(the true dimension of what is or is not in the metaphysical sense).
Our analogy between the question of the being of the subject and Badiou’s “the
one is not” also helps to discover its Heideggerian origins. According to Heidegger,
a certain “not-yet” belongs to the present, while it exists, i.e. what it will be. In other
words, there is a permanent lack of this future in the present. Coming to its end
(“death”), Da-sein eliminates this shortage, wherewith it puts itself on a par with
all other kinds of things which are not preoccupied with their own future; though
together with the elimination of this “not-yet” the meaning of Dasein itself as a special
existing entity is gone.
Thus, we can conclude that Dasein’s permanent incompleteness, “unwholeness”
that is completed only with the death of presence itself, is unavoidable. Moreover,
this very incompleteness is Dasein’s peculiarity. As Heidegger indicates in Being and
Time: “The ‘not-yet’ has already been included in the very Being of the fruit, not as
some random characteristic, but as something constitutive. Correspondingly, as long
as any Dasein is, it too is already its ‘not-yet’. That which makes up the ‘lack of totality’
in Dasein, the constant ‘ahead-of-itself ’, is neither something still outstanding in a
 Suspension of the One 81

summative togetherness, nor something which has not yet become accessible. It is a
‘not-yet’ which any Dasein, as the entity which it is, has to be.”20
But let us get back to the additional extension of the subject in Badiou, as compared
to Being and Event, or rather to its new interpretation that arises in Badiou’s Logic of
Worlds and continues in the Second Manifesto. Previously, we called it the Kantian
transcendental motif. Here, it is necessary to clarify that this motif is closely related to
an understanding of the role and character of the transcendental inside the conception
of objective phenomenology proposed by Badiou. Objective phenomenology involves
a complete exclusion (or rather, as always with Badiou, a suspension in the actual
non-presence) of the subject as a kind of unity or substantial entity. However, the
subject does not disappear completely, but is regarded from the perspective of the
formal conditions of the possibilities of his post-evental actions and the forms of
subjectivities connected with them. However, as I suggest, it can be stated that the
subject, while disappearing from the ontological and phenomenological areas, arises
in the areas of ethics and politics which, speaking in terms of late Husserl, essentially
limit his “life-world.”
Thus, Kant’s transcendental motif in Logic of Worlds is manifested primarily in
the formal understanding of the subject. Badiou proposes the following definition of
the subject: “The mode according to which a body enters into a subjective formalism
with regard to the production of a present,”21 stating that by subjective formalism he
means “the different combinations through which a body enters into a relation with a
present (and hence with the postevental stages of truth). These combinations employ
the operations of subordination, negation, erasure and consequence.”22
Three types of subjective formalism—faithfulness, reactivity, and obscurity—
define three types of actors and three types of subjectivities that orient a “postevental
body in the world.”23 They arise as different reactions to events such as revolutions.
These three types are decrypted by Badiou as psychological predispositions which
correspond to political positions: enthusiasm—to the revolutionary one, reactive
indifference—to the conservative one, and hostile obscurantism—to the fascist one.
Of course, these types of reactions can include not only the political dimension, but
other possible areas, such as an area of scientific discovery or politics, love, art, etc.
The most important thing here is that they are post-evental and, therefore, are not
constructive of an event (in the sense of Husserl’s “Stiftung”). They are only reactions
to an event that has already happened, and in this sense they need no contemplation
on their way to the truth of the subject.
Let us make some conclusions. It seems to us that it is possible to ascertain the
presence of a general direction in the movement of contemporary thought, in the
frames of which ontological theories go from the analysis of φαινόμενον, as a separate
entity, to the analysis of τὸ ἡνωμένον24—a complex unity of oneness and multiplicity.
The ontological consideration of τὸ ἡνωμένον may take the form of “singular–plural,”
as, for example, in thinking of J.-L. Nancy who continues, in critically renewed form,
the tradition of Heidegger and Derrida; or it may occur in a mathematical materialist
dialectics of the “one–multiple” of Badiou, the direction of whose thought is somewhat
parallel to Plato’s Parmenides. In this way, phenomenology, as a mode of intellectual
82 Politics of the One

observation and appreciation of that which appears as existing, becomes objective, and
ontology becomes essentially mathematical. The mathema itself, taken in the original
Pythagorean and Platonic sense, is nothing more than rational knowledge (i.e. what
can be calculated and contemplated by our mind) of the relations between being and
truth, in so far as they are not alienated from our living and thinking presence.
The transition from the single and isolated eventual being in its proper uniqueness
(Eigentlichkeit), on which the phenomenologies of early Husserl and Heidegger
focused their attention, though to a different degree, and a corrective criticism of
which is performed by the objective phenomenology of the Logic of Worlds—to
the post-phenomenological forms of unities that are inherent to the metaphysical
tradition—turns ontological thought back to its Platonic sources. As Badiou writes
in his Second Manifesto: “What I’m seeking to uphold is that the authentic life is a life
marked by the Idea, and that Plato’s dialectical construction can, in many respects, be
interpreted along my lines.”25
Ontology as mathematics suggests, since Plato, a dialectical eidetic contemplation
of these forms of unity and implies the impossibility of a consideration of pure being
as separated from being-knowledge. Ignoring this is what constituted a fatal mistake
of Heidegger’s ontological project, which was criticized, but not fully corrected, by
the deconstruction of Derrida. This deconstruction contained in itself, as is clearly
seen today, the criticism of an anti-metaphysical hermeneutical historicism and
the revision of Heidegger’s attitude to metaphysics. Badiou makes the next step in
returning ontology and philosophy to their pre-Heideggerian problems through his
two Platonic gestures as expressed in Being and Event and Logic of Worlds with their
two corresponding Manifestos. Although this return is largely inconsistent and formal,
yet it contains within itself the possibility of further movement to Plato’s, Hegel’s, and
Husserl’s understanding of the subject as a place of forming and of the presence of
knowledge. However, this possibility, though it is visible from the perspective of the
systematic philosophy of Badiou, figures in it only as a sort of unreachable horizon of
thinking which is constantly postponed to the future, because both the subject and the
One settle themselves in the dimension that is inaccessible to contemplative cognition.
Truth, object, subject, and event perform, in the system of Badiou’s thought, the
functions of formal and critical procedures, in the situation where the one exists only
on the condition of its empirical non-existence, in the situation of forcing a conscious
choice of the suspension of the one.
It would be wrong to suppose that the retrospective conversion which is character-
istic for the thought of Badiou overcomes the historicism and nihilistic eschatology of
“the end of metaphysics” by a simple turning of phenomenology or dialectics back to
the doubtless and unchangeable dimension of the truth of being in the sense of Plato’s
or Husserl’s idealism.
Plato’s gestures, in the context of Badiou’s Second Manifesto, do not mean the
restitution of the one; they rather mean to suspend it in a certain space of correlative
duality. This suggests the separation or release of ontology from philosophy (the
project of Being and Event), and of phenomenology from the subject (that of Logic
 Suspension of the One 83

of Worlds). However, Badiou speaks also of the liberation of the subject in the
deployment of a new political subjectivity.
The phenomenon, or the object, in Badiou’s conception, reveals itself as “one–
multiple,” but not as the τὸ ἡνωμένον of Platonism, since it suspends the one,
essentially excluding it from the theory as an instance of contemplation and replacing
it with the instance of praxis. In Badiou’s theory, we can speak about the endless
aspiration of the subject to proceed from multiplicity to unity, and this tendency, in
fact, serves as a guideline for all the possible practical strategies of subjectivity, organ-
izing their diversity around the non-existent limit or the empty center of the subject,
around that which is not.

Bibliography
Alain Badiou, Being and Event (New York: Continuum, 2005).
—Logic of Worlds: Being and Event II (New York: Continuum, 2009).
—Second Manifesto for Philosophy (Malden: Polity Press, 2011).
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs.
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
Andrew Gibson, Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittancy (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006).
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001).
—Zollikon seminars: protocols, conversations, letters (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 2001).
Gert-Jan van der Heiden, The Scintillation of the Event: On Badiou’s Phenomenology, in
Symposium. Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008,
93–109.
Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations (New York: Routledge, 2001).
—The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to
Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
Alexei Fedorovich Losev, The Dialectics of Myth (New York: Routledge, 2003).
Ed Pluth, Badiou: A Philosophy of the New (Malden: Polity Press, 2010).
Brian Anthony Smith, The Limits of the Subject in Badiou’s Being and Event, in The Praxis
of Alain Badiou (Melbourne: re.press, 2006), 71–101.

Notes
1 Badiou reconfirmed his principal disagreement with the ontological historicism of
Heideggerian thought and with any attempt of its continuation, which took place
especially in France, in the Second Manifesto for Philosophy: “As I have already
stated, the philosophical position I combated twenty years ago was principally the
Heideggerian position in its French variants (Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, but
also Lyotard), which consisted in announcing the irremediable end of philosophy
in its metaphysical form” (Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy (Polity
84 Politics of the One

Press, 2011), 117). It is not accidental that Badiou speaks of metaphysics as of a

necessary component of the modern dialectics, because the very idea of destruction or
overcoming of metaphysics in the contemporary post-Heideggerian ontology looks at
the very least doubtful.
2 Alain Badiou, Logic of Worlds: Being and Event II (Continuum, 2009), 8.
3 Alexei Fedorovich Losev, The Dialectics of Myth (Routledge, 2003), 112–13.
4 Or, as Badiou specifies it, “The fact that the one is an operation allows us to say that
the domain of the operation is not one (for the one is not) and that therefore this
domain is multiple: since, within presentation, what is not one is necessarily multiple.
In other words, the count-as-one (the structure) installs the universal pertinence
of the one/multiple couple for any situation.” Alain Badiou, Being and Event
(Continuum, 2005), 24.
5 Brian Anthony Smith, The Limits of the Subject in Badiou’s Being and Event, in The
Praxis of Alain Badiou (re.press, 2006), 74.
6 Alain Badiou, Logic of Worlds, 193.
7 Alain Badiou, Logic of Worlds. 195.
8 Ed Pluth, Badiou: A Philosophy of the New (Polity Press, 2010), 70.
9 Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy. 91.
10 Alain Badiou, Logic of Worlds. 194.
11 Alain Badiou, Logic of Worlds. 278.
12 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations (Routledge, 2001), 12
13 Edmund Husserl,. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.
An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Northwestern University Press,
1970), 130.
14 David Carr, in his English translation of Husserl’s Crisis, translates “Anschauung”
as intuition, quite correctly, but there is another term for intuition in German:
“Intuition.” We suppose that Carr did not take into account that, though in the early
phase of the development of Husserl’s phenomenological thought, Husserl himself had
not discerned between these two notions, later, under the influence of Paul Natorp’s
severe criticism, beginning with Cartesian Meditations, Husserl started to make a
difference between them, using “Anschauung” in the meaning of “contemplation.”
Such phenomenologists as Ingarden and Fink considered this as a crucial step in the
development of late Husserl’s theory. The translation of “Anschauung” as “intuition,”
though possible, presents Husserl’s thought rather in a Bergsonian way and does not
reflect the metaphysical turn of late Husserl which was rightly noticed by Derrida in
his Speech and Phenomena.
15 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 134–5.
16 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs
( Northwestern University Press, 1973), 6.
17 Gesammelte Werke – Band 4: Einführung in die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls,
Osloer Vorlesungen 1967, Haefliger Gregor (ed.) (Max Niemeyer 1992), especially the
last three lectures on the notion of transcendental idealism.
18 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, 434.
19 Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols, Conversations, Letters (Northwestern
University Press, 2001), 116.
20 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 288.
21 Alain Badiou, Logic of Worlds, 594.
22 Ibid., 595.
 Suspension of the One 85

23 Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy, 105.

24 This term, which literally means the “united one” or “combined into one,” had been
used in the Neoplatonic tradition by Proclus and Damascius as a fundamental feature
or intrinsic nature of any being.
25 Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy, 124.
 7

Unity in Crisis

Protometaphysical and Postmetaphysical Decisions

Jussi Backman

The metaphysics of unity: its end and its onset

The notion of an end of metaphysics dominated twentieth-century philosophy. The
roots of the theme trace back to Hume’s skeptical attack on the metaphysics of
substance and Kant’s subsequent critical attempt to redeem the metaphysical mode
of knowledge—the synthetic a priori—in the form of a de-absolutized transcendental
philosophy. The sense of an imminent end of metaphysical modes of thought—the
demise of traditional “cosmological values” such as aim, unity, and being/truth—
becomes explicit in Nietzsche’s declaration that “[…] any comprehensive unity in the
plurality of events is lacking […] the categories ‘aim,’ ‘unity,’ ‘being’ which we used to
insert some value into the world—we pull out again […].”1
In the wake of Nietzsche, both Carnap and Heidegger—logical positivism as well
as hermeneutics and deconstruction, “analytic” as well as “continental” philosophy—
declared the end of metaphysics. For Carnap, this signified the acknowledgment of the
meaninglessness of metaphysical (non-empirical and non-analytic) statements and the
subsequent integration of philosophy into empirical science as a technique of logical
analysis.2 For Heidegger, the end of metaphysics meant the Hegelian completion and
Nietzschean inversion of Platonic–Aristotelian ontological foundationalism (“ontoth-
eology”). The outcome of the demise of metaphysics is the ultramodern age of fulfilled
techno-scientific nihilism in which beings are determined by a technical framework
or “setup” (Gestell) as an inherently meaningless and homogenous “standing reserve”
(Bestand) of material resources, and the human being accordingly becomes a “human
resource,” an “employee” of an impersonal and subjectless “ordering” or “disposing”
(Angestellte des Bestellens).3
The thesis of an end of metaphysics involved the diagnosis of a beginning of
metaphysics, which both Nietzsche and the later Heidegger locate in Plato. Heidegger,
88 Politics of the One

however, extends Nietzsche’s genealogy of Platonism to what can be characterized as

the protometaphysical approach of the pre-Platonic thinkers. It is here that Heidegger
discovers what he designates as “first beginning” (der erste Anfang)—in a determinate,
idiosyncratic sense of the word Anfang, distinguished from a beginning (Beginn)
in the sense of a chronological start—of metaphysical thinking. With regard to
Nietzsche’s description of Platonism as a “disease”4 and to the Heideggerian idiom of
“getting over” (Verwindung) metaphysics,5 it is perhaps appropriate to translate Anfang
as “onset,” in a sense analogous to an “onset of illness.” In his 1942–3 lecture course
Parmenides, Heidegger notes:
With regard to this early thinking in the Occident, among the Greeks, we distin-
guish between beginning [Beginn] and onset [Anfang]. “Beginning” refers to the
coming forth of this thinking at a definite “time.” […] The “onset” is what, in
this early thinking, is to be thought and what is thought. […] The onset is not
something dependent on the favor of these thinkers, something with which they
deal in such and such a way. On the contrary, […] [t]he thinkers are the ones who
are set upon [An-gefangenen] by the on-set [An-fang], overtaken by it and gathered
upon it.6

The onset of philosophy, for Heidegger, is neither a starting point left behind in the
later development of philosophy nor the inaugural act of beginning to philosophize,
but rather the motive and the task faced by the first philosophers. An onset is literally
what “sets on” or “sets about” (fängt an), in the sense of addressing or capturing one’s
attention. It is not an accomplishment of the early philosophers, but rather the initial
philosophical issue that preoccupies them, a fundamental experience that “sets upon”
thinkers and addresses them at the beginning of philosophy, thereby “bringing about”
their thinking. Anfang can thus be understood as a rendering of the Greek archē. The
Greek verb archō, archein means “to begin” and “to initiate” as well as “to govern,” “to
preside over,” and “to rule.” Archē, Anfang, is the onset or outset that is precisely not
left behind in the ensuing development, but rather governs and directs the unfolding
of whatever issues from it. For Aristotle, the archē, the guiding principle of a thing,
is also its peras, its limit, as well as its telos, its end and conclusion.7 Likewise, what
Heidegger means by the Anfang of philosophy is a guiding “mission” or leading “quest”
of Western metaphysics, a principle that delimits and defines, governs and directs,
and thereby unifies the metaphysical tradition, marking the boundary within which
it takes place. The onset delineates and determines, so to speak, the scene upon which
the different episodes of Western philosophy are enacted: while the respective settings
of the different epochs vary, the scene as such remains the same. In this sense, the
Heideggerian Anfang is in many ways parallel to Badiou’s event, the singular temporal
rupture that institutes the possibility of a new “fidelity,” of a new process of delimiting
a new truth in terms of the historical event.8
In this sense, the onset of philosophy is also a crisis, a krisis in the literal Greek
sense of the word: a de-cision or dis-tinction (Ent-scheidung), a de-limitation or
dis-crimination of the proper domain of Western thought.
 Unity in Crisis 89

By “onset” we understand the original decisions [Entscheidungen] that sustain in

advance what is essential in Western history. […] The recollection of the onset of
our history is the awakening of knowing about the decision that, even now, and in
the future, determines Western humanity.9

These initial decisions—the protometaphysical crisis—are situated by Heidegger

in the work of three pre-Platonic thinkers: Anaximander of Miletus, Heraclitus of
Ephesus, and Parmenides of Elea.
Anaximander, Parmenides and Heraclitus are the thinkers of the onset [die
anfänglichen Denker]. They are this, however, not because they inaugurate
Western thought and initiate it. Already before them there “are” thinkers. They are
thinkers of the onset because they think the onset. The onset is what is thought
in their thinking.10

What makes precisely these three protometaphysical philosophers the thinkers of

the first onset? In Heidegger’s reading, they are all, first and foremost, thinkers of
an ultimate unity. The “necessity,” “need,” or “usage” (Brauch, to chreōn) that, in the
single preserved Anaximander fragment, governs the emergence and disappearance of
beings11; the “fate” or “apportioning” (Moira) that preserves the self-identity and self-
sufficiency of being in Parmenides12; the discursive articulation (logos) that constitutes
the fundamental belonging-together of opposites and differences in Heraclitus13—all
these are, for Heidegger, names for a fundamental unity of being as presence.
[…] the essence of being [Seins] is determined as the essence of the unifying One:
Hen. […] the Logos which Heraclitus thinks as the basic feature of presencing
[Anwesens], the Moira which Parmenides thinks as the basic feature of presencing,
the Chreōn which Anaximander thinks as what abides [das Wesende] in presencing,
all name the selfsame [das Selbe]. Each thinker thinks, in his own way, the unity of
the unifying One, the Hen, in the concealed richness of the selfsame.14

Of the three, Parmenides was in many ways the most important for Heidegger. After
completing his influential conversation with Aristotle in the early 1930s, it was first
and foremost to Parmenides that Heidegger turned and kept returning until his last
seminar in 1973.15 In regarding Parmenides as a paradigmatic beginner of metaphysics,
Heidegger follows the guidance of Aristotle and Hegel. In De caelo, Aristotle indicates
that, in addition to the philosophical beginning usually attributed to Thales of Miletus,
there was also another beginning, namely, the thesis of Parmenides and his Eleatic
disciples that being is one, ungenerated, and immutable. For Aristotle, this is the first,
albeit inarticulate and confused, step towards discovering the proper realm of what
he himself calls first philosophy and what later becomes known as metaphysics: the
nonphysical, nonmaterial, and suprasensible sphere of pure intelligibility that neces-
sarily unifies and grounds all intelligible reality.16 Hegel echoes Aristotle in his Lectures
on the History of Philosophy:
90 Politics of the One

[The Eleatics] arrive at this pure, abstract thought that being belongs only to the
One. This is a tremendous advance. With the Eleatic school, thought, properly
speaking, begins to be free for the first time on its own account […] .17
Thought is identical with its being, for there is nothing beside being, this great
affirmation. [...] Since in this an advance into the region of the ideal is observable,
Parmenides began philosophy proper. […] This beginning [Anfang] is certainly
still dim and indefinite, and we cannot say much of what it involves; but to take
up this position certainly is to develop philosophy proper, which has not hitherto
existed.18

As we will see, the beginning of Western metaphysics is characterized by a powerful

discourse of unity, on the one hand, and by a profound crisis, on the other—a crisis in
the literal sense of a sharp distinction, disjunction, or decision. Both of these features
are expressed in the Poem of Parmenides, a central textual site of the first onset of
the metaphysical tradition. A reconsideration and reenactment of this original crisis
lies at the heart of the later Heidegger’s philosophical endeavor and his thesis of the
end of metaphysics. By contrasting Parmenides’ protometaphysical situation with the
Heideggerian postmetaphysical situation, it is possible to trace a genealogy of sorts
of certain themes operative in this end. Moreover, it thereby becomes possible to see
an analogy between the initial crisis of Parmenides and the ongoing “postmodern”
philosophical crisis: both are essentially crises of unity.

The protometaphysical crisis: Parmenides’ decision

Parmenides of Elea, of whom we know next to nothing as a person, lived and worked
in the Greek colonies of Southern Italy around 500 bce. His hexametric poem, known
by the name Peri physeōs (“On Nature”), is one of the earliest extensive, consistent,
and sustained philosophical texts of which parts have come down to us.19 No version
of the entire poem has been preserved, but several of its passages—apparently many
of the most important ones—have been transmitted by later authors in the form of
quotations.
Parmenides’ Poem as we know it does not really constitute a systematic theoretical
account. It is perhaps best characterized as a phenomenological indication of an initial
philosophical experience of being as such (to eon) as the absolute foundation of all
thinking, apart from particular and determinate present things—as pure intelligibility,
as accessibility to awareness or, to use Heidegger’s term, as active presencing, abiding
in presence (Anwesen). To be more precise, the Poem shows how in every possible
intentional awareness of anything, intelligibility itself is co-intended. The distinctive
feature of Parmenidean “phenomenology” is this exclusive concentration on phenom-
enality as such, apart from any particular phenomena. Speaking literally, instead of
phainomena, that which shows itself, Parmenides focuses on their phainesthai, their
self-showing in the widest possible sense. The topic of his Poem is alētheia, “truth,”
 Unity in Crisis 91

but to translate this word with the etymologizing Heideggerian “unconcealment”

(Unverborgenheit) involves an un-Parmenidean reference to a prior concealment. For
Parmenides, as Ernst Heitsch notes, truth as alētheia rather means phenomenal and
intuitive evidence as the ultimate level of manifestness in beings—the source of all
their “acceptability” and “convincing” power as accessible beings.20
Parmenides’ Poem begins with a metaphorical “transcendental reduction.”21 The
introduction or Proem of the text (fragment B 1) is a semi-mythical narrative in which
the narrator-thinker leaves behind the “trodden path of mortals” in a chariot drawn
by divine horses, and enters the domain of an anonymous goddess, “beyond the gate
of the roads of Night and Day,” i.e. beyond the binary oppositions that constitute the
relative, articulated reality of ordinary experience.22 Far from being angered by this
transgression, the goddess welcomes him and proceeds to indicate to him the absolute
truth about all things, exposing the thinker’s task in the following manner:
It is necessary that you learn all things,
the unwavering heart of fully convincing Evidence [Alētheia],
as well as the acceptances [doxai] of mortals, in which there is no
  evident conviction [pistis alēthēs].
Even so, you will come to understand this: how the things that are
  accepted [ta dokounta]
had to be there acceptably [dokimōs einai], throughout, all of them
  precisely as beings [panta per onta].23

To continue borrowing Husserlian terminology, the “path of mortals” can be under-

stood as designating the “natural attitude” in which finite human beings normally live
their ordinary practical lives, dealing with particular, individual things in particular
practical situations. The attainment of a purely “philosophical attitude,” i.e. of a
concentration on pure presence as such apart from its particular determinations and
instances, requires an initial break with everyday and common-sense perceptions,
an epochē, as well as a transition to a “transcendental” (in the sense of “absolutely
universal”) point of view. However, contrary to a reading favored by such classical
commentators as Nietzsche, Eduard Zeller, and John Burnet, such a break clearly
does not mean that the everyday views (doxai) of the mortals should simply be
abandoned or eliminated as false or illusive opinions or semblances.24 The goddess
rather emphasizes that they are to be reconsidered and reinterpreted in terms of an
absolute viewpoint. The word doxa, related to the verb dechomai, “to accept” or “to
receive,” literally means “acceptance,” i.e. the way in which something offers itself and
seems to be, as well as the way in which it is accepted or “taken” to be.25 The doxai
are that which, in the “natural attitude,” is accepted as “being”; they constitute the
relative “mortal” reality or realities. The goddess’s exhortation to the thinker is that this
accepted constitution must be understood in terms of an insight into the absolutely
universal aspect of reality, into being-there in the sense of presence, accessibility, or
acceptability—into the “there is” or givenness inherent in, and presupposed by, every
acceptance of some particular thing as “being there.” This is the basic premise of the
92 Politics of the One

“phenomenological” reading of Parmenides, introduced in modern times by scholars

like Karl Reinhardt and Hans Schwabl.26
However, certain essential differences between Parmenidean “phenomenology”
and modern phenomenological approaches should not be overlooked. Like Husserl,
Parmenides sets outs from the intentional nature of awareness, but whereas modern
transcendental phenomenology makes the reflective move from constituted objects
toward the (inter)subjective structures of their constitution as correlates of an
intentional, intending consciousness, Parmenides’ Poem puts the weight on the
“intendability” of things, their givenness as intelligible to the primarily receptive
human awareness. In Kant’s doctrine of transcendental apperception, every possible
awareness of an object is potentially accompanied by a reflective awareness of the
“I think,” i.e. of a subject of awareness; the unifying element in all individual acts of
awareness is the transcendental I or self, the subject of the act.27 Parmenides’ Poem,
by contrast, shows that every possible awareness of a determinate being is potentially
accompanied by an awareness of the very accessibility of beings to awareness. It is
intelligibility as such that is “transcendental” in the sense of transcending all particular
determinations or instances of presence.
What is distinctive of mortal reality is that it consists of particular things that both
are and are not, in the existential as well as the predicative senses of “to be.” First,
depending on the situation, determinate things either are there or not. For example,
right here and at this moment, there is a cup in my hand, but there is no coffee in
the cup. Moreover, all the things that are or are not there have a merely relative self-
identity. The cup in my hand is itself, i.e. is identical with itself, but it is not coffee, it
is other than coffee. In the “natural attitude” of the mortals, human beings therefore
live in what Parmenides’ goddess calls, literally, an “uncritical” (akrita) state, more
precisely, in a “lack of crisis,” a “lack of decision.” There is a constant internal tension
between relative being-there and relative not-being-there, relative identity and relative
non-identity. This makes the mortals
[…] an undecided [akrita] tribe,
for whom being-there and not-being-there are established as the same
and not-same. For all of them, their path is internally tensional
 [palintropos].28

How is this indecision, this tension between being-there and not-being-there, i.e.
between presence and absence, to be resolved? Here lies Parmenides’ fundamental
discovery. For the pure and simple apprehending of intelligibility as such that inher-
ently belongs to all specific acts of awareness—perceiving, imagining, remembering,
or anticipating something—there is only presence in the widest possible sense. “There
is no coffee in my cup” means that coffee is not present here and now for my senses.
However, in order for me to be able to meaningfully express this absence of coffee
and to attribute not-being-there to coffee, I must be talking about coffee. In other
words, I must refer to coffee, mean coffee, intend coffee. Coffee must, in some sense,
be “there” for me, present to my awareness, although not in its full or “bodily”
presence but in a deficient, only partially fulfilled or empty mode. Yet even the mere
 Unity in Crisis 93

symbolic intending of coffee, mere talk about “coffee” with a minimum of intuitive
content, remains a mode of the presence of coffee. Everything that can be meaningfully
intended is intendable or rather intelligible, and in this sense it is present and accessible
to thinking (noos), which, for Parmenides, means simply intentional awareness in the
widest possible sense, intending or “meaning” anything in any way.29 It is essential to
see that nothing can be intended as completely unintelligible. Even self-contradicting
notions like “round square” are simply impossible combinations of elements (such
as roundness and squareness) that are perfectly intelligible in themselves. While the
embodied and situated senses encounter things as relatively present or absent, as given
to the senses or not given, noos in the sense of meaningful intending encounters only
pure and absolute presence. This is the main outcome of fragment B 4:
Behold, all alike, absent things [apeonta] as firmly present
 [pareonta] to awareness [noos];
for awareness will not cut off the “is there” [to eon] from its
  consistency with the “is there,”
neither as being distributed everywhere and in every way along a
  universal order [kosmos]
nor as being combined.30

When we enter the absolute realm of thinking, the internally differing and tensional
path of the mortals—the way of “there is and there is not”—thus breaks apart,
resulting in a fundamental crisis, a need for decision. From the perspective of situated
sensory perceiving, relative presence and relative absence intertwine inseparably
and presuppose one another. However, since intelligibility as presence-to-thinking
is a simple and absolute form of presence, a thinking inquiry will not tolerate
internal tension or context-specificity. It rather requires the thinker to choose
one of two absolute alternatives: either the absolute “there is” (absolute presence,
absolute intelligibility) or the absolute “there is not” (absolute non-presence, absolute
non-intelligibility). These are the famous “two ways” of Parmenides.
Very well, I will tell you—and do you listen to the account and take good heed—
which ways of inquiry are precisely the only ones that can be grasped by awareness
[noēsai].
Firstly: how there is [estin] and how there is no lack of being-there [mē einai]—
this is the path of Conviction [Peithō], for it follows Evidence [Alētheia].
Secondly: how, in any event, there is not [ouk estin ge] and how it is necessary that
a lack of being-there is there—
this I explicate to you as being a path entirely devoid of conviction [panapeithea].
For you will not come to know that which in any event lacks “is there” [to ge mē
eon]—for it is not accessible [ephikton]—
nor will you explicate it.31

Awareness as such is simply reception or acceptance of intelligible presence, and

being-there is simply the givenness and disclosure of intelligible presence to awareness.
94 Politics of the One

Therefore, awareness and being-there coincide. They are “one and the same” in that
they are two aspects—receptivity and givenness—of intelligibility as a unified whole.
This is what Parmenides’ famous and much-disputed fragment B 3, which has been
preserved without context, seems to state:
For being-aware and being-there are one and the same [to gar auto noein estin te
kai einai].32

Inversely, the opposite or outside of being-there—not-being-there, nothingness,

non-presence, non-accessibility—coincides with the opposite or outside of awareness.
Awareness is defined by being exclusively bound to presence and excluded from
non-presence.
It is necessary to articulate this and to grasp this [to legein, to noein te]: that the “is
there” is there [eon emmenai]. For there is being-there [esti gar einai], and there
is no Nothing [mēden].33

It is obvious that no active “decision,” in the sense of a free choice between two
options, is involved here. The outcome of the Parmenidean decision has always already
been decided; the point is to acknowledge it. Thinking is powerless to do anything
other than choose absolute presence and absolutely exclude absolute non-presence.
Thinking, i.e. the intentional awareness of reality as meaningful and intelligible, and
its rational articulation, can have no dealings with absolute unintelligibility. The
way of “there is not” is a purely negative possibility, the negation of “there is.” The
only function of this absolute “there is not” is to define the domain of thinking, to
demarcate the absolute boundary of thought, precisely by being excluded by thinking.
This, precisely, is Parmenides’ crisis.
The decision [krisis] regarding these matters is this:
either there is [estin] or there is not [ouk estin]. Now, it has already been decided
[kekritai], as is necessary,
that the other is to be left alone as unintelligible [anoēton] and nameless—for it is
not there as an evident
way—and that the other is to prevail and to be there as genuine.34

The crisis between “there is” and “there is not,” between presence and unpresence, has
always already been resolved. It is a movement of exclusion that must be completed in
order to leave behind the path of mortals, the way of “there both is and is not,” and to
embark on the way of thinking, i.e. the way of “there is,” the way of absolute presence.
For at no time will you impose this: that things lacking “is there” [mē eonta] are
there;
no, do divert your awareness [noēma] from this way of inquiry.
[…] Rather, decide, through discursive articulation [krinai logō], the controversial
refutation [elenchon]
 Unity in Crisis 95

that I have articulated. Only one account of a way still

remains: how There is [hōs estin].35

From here, Parmenides’ Poem goes on to unfold absolute presence through a series
of signs or indications (sēmata). This happens in the long fragment B 8, in which the
most important section of the first part of the Poem, known as “Truth” or “Evidence”
(Alētheia), has apparently been entirely preserved. The indications are “signposts” on
the way of “there is.” They do not constitute a deductive or hierarchical system, but
rather point out different perspectives upon a presence that has now been absolutely
cut off from anything other than presence. Presence as such is absolutely identical
with itself and absolutely devoid of any internal or external differentiation. Presence
is not opposed to or differentiated from any other. Presence or being is not even
different from non-presence or non-being, since a difference between them would
already imply a relationship. Moreover, presence has no internal distinctions. It is
absolutely simple and one-dimensional; the temporal and spatial differences between
context-specific situated beings do not apply to being as such. Presence is finished,
self-sufficient, self-contained, self-coincident, homogenous, one-dimensional, and
unique. In a Heideggerian reading, all of these indications are gathered together by the
indication of being-there as constant temporal presence that as such is never specific
to a particular point of time, but rather constitutes the very now-ness of every singular
now:
At no particular time [pot’] there was [ēn] or there will be [estai], since there is now
[nyn estin], all at once,
unitarily-uniquely [hen], constantly [syneches].36

This is the only time that the word hen, “one,” appears in the Parmenides fragments.37
Nevertheless, unity has always been perceived as the key theme of Parmenides’
Poem. Both Plato and Aristotle considered Parmenides’ fundamental doctrine to
be precisely the thesis that being (to on) is one (hen). In his late dialogue named
after the Eleatic master, Plato has Parmenides visit Athens with his associate Zeno
and reluctantly teach the art of dialectic—i.e. the discursive method of accessing the
ultimate unity of discursive meaning—to the Athenians. In spite of his youth, the
Socrates of the Parmenides is well aware of Parmenides’ fundamental doctrine: “I
understand, Parmenides […] In your poetry you maintain that the All [to pan] is one
[hen], providing tokens of this appropriately and well […]”38 And indeed, Parmenides’
masterful dialectical “exercise” in the dialogue is entirely about unity and being. It
seems that the question that puzzles Plato in the Parmenides, as also in the Sophist, is
precisely how Parmenides’ teaching concerning the unity of being should be under-
stood. Aristotle echoes Plato: “Deeming that that which lacks being [to mē on] is
nothing besides being [to on], he [sc. Parmenides] believes that, by necessity, there is
only the one [hen] being and nothing other.”39
In the Poem, the indications of the absolute unity of pure presence are followed
by a return to the doxai, the mortal “acceptances.” The second main part of the
96 Politics of the One

Poem, known as Doxai, apparently consisted of an extensive cosmological study

of physical reality, of which only a few brief fragments remain. However, from
the existing material we can infer that Parmenides’ goddess shows here how the
discursive structure of ordinary human awareness takes apart the unity of presence
by naming, conceptualizing, and thereby distinguishing (krinein) beings from one
another, organizing reality into binary oppositions such as light–dark, warm–cold,
and male–female. Doxai is introduced at the end of fragment B 8 in the following
way:
With this, I cease the convincing articulation [logos] and awareness [noēma] that
I addressed to you
regarding evidence [alētheia]. From here, come to understand mortal acceptances
[doxai],
hearing the universal order [kosmos], prone to deception, that emerges from my
words.
For they [sc. the mortals] established two notions [gnōmai] to name shapes
[morphai];
of these, one cannot be [sc. established without the other]—in this, they are led
into error.
They differentiated [krinein] the structure into opposites and posited indications
[sēmata]
apart from one another […]40

By now, however, the thinker has learned that, in spite of appearances, none of these
differentiations involves a reference to any absolute difference between “there is” and
“there is not.” All oppositional and disjunctive predicates according to which a thing
is A but is not B are ultimately just determinate modifications of the pure and simple
there is. For example, from the mortal perspective, there is darkness and there is light,
and darkness is not light: but the negative fact that darkness is not there as light can be
translated into the positive fact that darkness is there as not-light.
But now that all things are named “light” and “night”
and these names, according to their respective capacities [dynameis], are given to
one thing after another,
everything is at once full of light and invisible night,
equal to one another, for there is nothing [mēden] that belongs to neither side.41

With the Poem of Parmenides, the initial crisis of Western thought has been
resolved through the protometaphysical de-cision, i.e. the separation of presence
from all references to any other-than-presence, and the indication of the absolutely
universal character of pure presence as the proper realm of philosophical thought.
The metaphysical project properly introduced by Plato and Aristotle subsequently
transforms this protometaphysical onset into the full-fledged metaphysics of presence,
into what Heidegger calls the “ontotheology” of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Aristotle’s
 Unity in Crisis 97

study of being qua being starts by acknowledging the “transcendental” character of

being. Being—like unity—is “transcendental” in the Scholastic sense of “absolutely
universal”: it transcends all categories of things but cannot itself be a category, kind,
or genus, since Aristotle’s theory of definition denies the plausibility of a genus that
would comprehend everything.42 In different contexts, “to be” has different senses that
are irreducible to any simple overarching notion.43 There is no common denominator,
no principle or structure common to all instances of “to be.”44 Nevertheless, everything
that is said “to be” does share the structural feature of belonging to a hierarchy of
being-more and being-less: to be something potentially is to be that thing less than to
be it actually45; to be an attribute of a determinate entity is an inferior sense of being in
comparison to being that entity itself, and so on. Ultimately, all beings refer to the top
of this hierarchy of being, to a “standard” sense of “to be”—ousia, “Entity,” the being-
ness of determinate, particular, and actual entities (as opposed to attributes of entities,
or merely potential entities and attributes)46 and in the final instance, to a supreme
entity, which for Aristotle is God (theos) as absolutely self-sufficient self-awareness.47
Ontology, the study of being qua being, thereby assumes the form of theology, the
study of a supreme being, of an absolute entity that would maximally fulfill the criteria
of absolute presence (simplicity, uniqueness, self-sufficiency, permanence, supratem-
porality, etc.) and thus function as a standard for all inferior entities. The unity of
being is no longer guaranteed simply by pure presence as such, but by the supreme
instance of presence.

The postmetaphysical crisis: Heidegger’s decision

After Parmenides, the initial crisis of presence and non-presence recedes as a
crisis. Leibniz’s question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”48—in other
words, “Why is there intelligible presence rather than not?”—is only a faint rever-
beration. Parmenides’ crisis is left behind, but its outcome continues to serve as an
outset of Western metaphysics. In a Heideggerian formulation, the “basic question”
(Grundfrage) of metaphysics—“Why are there beings at all, rather than nothing?”—is
supplanted by Aristotle’s ontological “leading question” (Leitfrage)—“what is being
qua being, what is the beingness of any being whatsoever?”—which subsequently
becomes the ontotheological question, “What is the supreme instance of beingness
that provides an ideal model for all beings?”49
Ontotheology, Heidegger claims, provides the basic framework of Western
metaphysics up to Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, with whom the metaphysical tradition
becomes complete in the sense of being completely developed and exhausted; Marx’s
“overturning” of Hegelian idealism and Nietzsche’s “overturning” of Platonism are
simply the final metaphysical moves before exhaustion.50 Nietzsche’s notions of the
will to power and of the eternal recurrence of the same are the last unused conceptual
resources available for thinking the relationship between the human being and
being within the scope of metaphysics.51 This exhaustion of metaphysics is parallel
98 Politics of the One

to the rise of positive techno-science, which renounces the metaphysical quest for
absolute foundations and concentrates on producing causally explanatory theories
with maximal predictive power from which technological applications ensue. Francis
Bacon’s maxim, “knowledge is power,” captures what Heidegger calls the “cybernetic,”
i.e. inherently technical and manipulative, character of modern scientific inquiry.52
In his work of the 1930s, Heidegger accordingly comes to envision another beginning,
made possible and topical by the end of metaphysics—an “other onset” of thinking
(der andere Anfang) which, he maintains, contemporary Western thought is currently
entering.
With Nietzsche’s metaphysics, philosophy is completed. That means: it has
traversed the sphere of prefigured possibilities. […] But with the end of philosophy,
thinking is not also at its end, but in transition [Übergang] to another onset.53

Unlike Badiou’s purely contingent event, which constitutes a rupture with what
precedes it,54 this new onset, which demands a new philosophical “fidelity,” retains a
certain continuity with the first one: it is “other” precisely to the Parmenidean onset,
in the sense of decisively transgressing its boundaries, yet essentially related to it. It
therefore becomes accessible only by way of a thorough reexamination of the first
onset and of the metaphysical tradition that emerged from it.
We need to reflect here on the onset of Western thinking and on what occurred
in it and did not occur in it, because we stand at the end—at the end of this onset.
That is, we are standing before the decision [Entscheidung] between the end […]
and the other onset [dem anderen Anfang] […].55

The required postmetaphysical reflection on the first onset of Western thinking is

characterized by Heidegger as a decision (Entscheidung)—i.e. as a crisis, a critical
reconsideration and “retrieval” (Wiederholung) of the first onset that would make
its limitations visible and thus allow a discrimination and delimitation of a mode of
thinking that would go beyond those limitations. This also illuminates the methodo-
logical character of his thesis of the end of metaphysics. It is not a prophetical
declaration that there can and will be no more metaphysics in the future. Rather, it is a
specific way of drawing the limits of the heritage of the first onset from the perspective
of the contemporary situation—a historical decision.
Might not the future still be open to metaphysical possibilities of which we suspect
nothing? Surely, we do not stand “above” history […]. The statement concerning
the end of metaphysics is, of course, a historical decision [Entscheidung].56

This postmetaphysical decision, this crisis between the Parmenidean onset and its
other, is a theme that ceaselessly occupies Heidegger in his work of the 1930s, particu-
larly his esoteric “second magnum opus,” Contributions to Philosophy, written in
1936–8 but unpublished until 1989. In the first part of Contributions, Heidegger names
 Unity in Crisis 99

several decisions (Entscheidungen) that philosophy has to face in its contemporary

situation: whether the human being is to be considered as a subject (as in modern,
post-Cartesian metaphysics) or as Da-sein (as in Heidegger); whether truth is to be
understood as correctness and certainty (as in modern, post-Cartesian metaphysics)
or as un-concealment, relative dis-closure (as in Heidegger); and so on.57 What is
ultimately at stake in these decisions is the basic decision between metaphysical
(Cartesian, Kantian, Hegelian, Nietzschean) modernity and a post-metaphysical post-
modernity, in the literal sense of what comes after the modern epoch but is other than
modernity.
Why must decisions be made at all? If so, then they are necessities that belong to
our epoch […]. What is decision here? Its essence is determined by the essence of
the transition [Übergang] from modernity into what is other than modernity. […]
Do the “decisions” come about because there must be another onset?58

In the other onset, the initial crisis that was settled by Parmenides is reopened, but not
in order to simply reverse Parmenides’ decision, not just to decide for non-presence
rather than presence, for the nothing rather than the something. What is essential
is to rethink and re-experience this crisis as such, to decide for a crisis instead of the
uncritical indifference and universal equivalence that, in Heidegger’s analysis, charac-
terizes the ultramodern nihilistic perception of reality as inherently homogeneous and
meaningless.
What is originally at stake in the decision is: either decision or non-decision.
But decision means coming face to face with the either–or. Thus it means that a
decision has already been made […].59
The one and only decision is the decision between […] indecision and readiness
for decision.60

In the contemporary situation, re-experiencing Parmenides’ initial crisis would, of

course, be an essentially different experience. It would be an essentially retrospective
reconsideration, informed by a narrative of the history of metaphysics in which
Parmenides is only the primordial outset: “[...] returning into the first onset is [...]
precisely distancing from it, taking up that distant position which is necessary in
order to experience what set on in and as that onset.”61 As Heidegger puts it in one
of his last seminars, the point is not to “return to Parmenides” but simply to “turn
towards Parmenides” from out of the contemporary situation.62 What would be
essential in such a retrospective reconsideration would be the discovery that the entire
Western tradition relies, to a certain extent, on an initial de-cision and exclusion of
non-presence. It has therefore always been implicitly dependent on, in the sense of
being defined and delimited by, non-presence.
Only because be-ing [Seyn, i.e. the postmetaphysically reconsidered and
“expanded” being] abides in terms of the “not” [nichthaft] does it have non-being
100 Politics of the One

[Nichtsein] as its other. […] But whence comes the utmost confinement [sc. in
the first onset] to the One and the Other and thus to the Either–Or [sc. either
being or non-being]? […] this seemingly most general and emptiest distinction
[Unterscheidung] is the most unique and fullest decision [Entscheidung].63

This discovery, which results from the reawakening of the initial crisis of presence
in the contemporary situation, is what Heidegger basically means by the other onset
of post-metaphysical thinking. In the other onset, the traditional metaphysical indif-
ference to the nothing and the reduction of reality to absolute presence is transformed
into the experience that meaningful presence as such is based on its differing from
non-presence, un-intelligibility, and un-accessibility: “[…] be-ing [Seyn] abides [west]
thoroughly irradiated [durchstrahlt] by the nothing [Nichts].”64
The postmetaphysical experience of the fundamentally relative, differential, and
self-transcending structure of meaningful presence, of its dependency on and corre-
lation with its other, from which it is constantly differentiated—this is the “crisis” that
is to replace reliance on the fundamental absoluteness, unity, and self-referentiality
of presence. One way of describing this experience is as an experience of the radical
contextuality and heterogeneity of presence, of the fact that any humanly accessible
intelligibility is only the focal point of a singular meaningful experience, a focal
point of attention that is irreducibly determined and constituted by a transcending
context or horizon of meaning that is not itself immediately present or accessible
as such but remains in the background, in the margin.65 This context-specificity is
what Heidegger’s work basically attempts to convey in ever-changing forms, starting
with the fundamental ontological project of Being and Time which tried to articulate,
by way of the temporality of Dasein’s understanding of being, how the meaningful
temporal present (Gegenwart) is contextually constituted or “temporalized” in terms of
the relative non-presence of the temporal dimensions of open future possibilities (the
forth-coming, Zukunft) and factical situatedness (having-been-ness, Gewesenheit).66
Heidegger failed, however, to complete the intended ultimate move from this temporal
contextuality of Dasein’s understanding of being (Dasein’s timeliness, Zeitlichkeit) to
the correlative temporal contextuality of being itself (its temporality, Temporalität),
i.e. the sense of being (Sinn von Sein).67 The conceptual impasse and consequent
failure of this approach led Heidegger to undertake a new, deepened reading of the
metaphysical tradition in the early 1930s.
In the most developed version of his approach, Heidegger addressed the contex-
tualizing interaction between the foreground of presence and the background of
non-presence as an event, as “taking-place” (Ereignis). Whereas metaphysics thinks
of presence as an absolutely self-contained and self-sufficient state, an event entails a
difference between the open place or scene in which meaningfulness takes place—the
Da, the “there,” of Da-sein as “being-the-there”—and the latent background context
from out of which it “takes place,” that is, in terms of which it is constituted. This
background is articulated in Heidegger’s 1949 Bremen lecture “The Thing” with the
help of the figure of the fourfold (Geviert) of four dimensions, named “earth,” “sky,”
 Unity in Crisis 101

“mortals,” and “divinities,” which can be tentatively interpreted as standing for the
meaning-dimensions of materiality, articulated appearing and visibility, the finite and
historically situated human community, and the supreme aims or “values” of such
communities.68 In this articulation, a spatiotemporally situated thing is meaningful as
a focal point of a nexus of references to this four-dimensional context. The context is
not static or stable but a dynamic process of contextualization, a “mirror-play” (Spiegel-
Spiel) of reciprocal references in which the four meaning-dimensions constantly
interact and are indirectly present as reflections, traces, or references in their focal
intersection, i.e. in the contextualized thing.69 Since a thing is thus constantly being
recontextualized, it follows that it must be understood, in each instant of its presence,
as a strictly speaking singular instance of presence: “Each thing arrests the fourfold
into a simplicity of the world that, in each instance, is there for a while [je Weiliges].
[…] Only what is compliantly conjoined [gering] from [the fourfold] world becomes
a thing once.”70 Being (be-ing, Seyn) is no longer thought as something instantiated in
singular instances, but as this instantiation and singularization as such. This instan-
taneity or singularity (Einzigkeit, Einmaligkeit) of being is what both the temporal
approach of Being and Time and the later Heidegger’s fourfold approach seek to
convey. Among the postmetaphysical decisions listed in Contributions, we find the
following:
[…] whether beings [das Seiende] take being [Sein] as what is “most common”
to them [sc. as in the metaphysical tradition since Parmenides] and thus hand
being over to ontology and bury it, or whether be-ing [Seyn] in its uniqueness
[Einzigkeit] comes to word and thoroughly attunes beings as singular [Einmaliges;
sc. as in the other onset] […].71

The Parmenidean experience of being as pure accessibility and intelligible presence,

as the absolute evidence (alētheia) that is de-cided, ab-solved from any background
or context, grounded the unity of being in its universality: intelligibility as such is
precisely what is common to all instances of intelligible presence and, as such, it is
absolutely homogeneous and undifferentiated. By virtue of this “indifference,” being is
also absolutely inarticulate, indeterminate, and indefinable. But what happens to this
unity when being is rethought postmetaphysically as the radical contextualization of
beings and their differentiation from a context, as the generation of an intelligibility
that is, in each instance, radically singular and heterogeneous? This is extensively
elaborated by Heidegger in a key passage of the final part of Contributions:
That Greek interpretation of on hē on [sc. being qua being] as hen [one],
that heretofore unclear priority which the One and unity have everywhere
in the thinking of being […]. Seen more profoundly, that unity is merely
the foreground—seen from the vantage point of gathering re-presentation
[sammelnden Vor-stellens] (legein)—of presencing [Anwesung] as such, precisely
the foreground in which a being has already gathered itself in its “what” and “that.”
Presence can be conceived of as gathering [Sammlung] and thus as unity—and
102 Politics of the One

with the priority of logos must be so conceived. But by itself, unity itself is not
an originary and essential determination of the being of beings. However, the
thinkers of the onset necessarily come upon this unity, because […] it is important
that presencing be maintained as what is first and nearest to being’s emergence;
hence hen […].
In terms of the other onset, that unshaken and never inquired determination
of being (unity) can and must nevertheless become questionable; and then
unity points back to “time” […]. But then it becomes clear that with the priority
of presence (the present [Gegenwart]) wherein unity is grounded, something
has been decided, that in this most self-evident [priority] the strangest decision
[Entscheidung] lies hidden, that this decisive character belongs to the abidance
[Wesung] of be-ing and indicates the uniqueness, in each instance, and the most
originary historicity of be-ing itself.72

As Aristotle already clearly realized, the unity of being is not the most fundamental
thesis of Parmenides; it is based on a more fundamental thesis, “the strangest
decision,” namely, that being is and non-being is not.73 As a retrospective experience
of this initial crisis or decision, the Heideggerian other onset addresses presence
as irreducibly contextual and relative, as embedded and situated in a nexus of
background dimensions in terms of which the foreground of presence becomes singu-
larly meaningful as a heterogeneous unity, as a “onefold of four.”74
The first, protometaphysical onset of philosophy says: “There is presence and there
is no non-presence. The crisis of presence is therefore always already resolved and the
unity of being is safeguarded as the pure homogeneity of presence, de-cided from its
other.” Against this, the other, postmetaphysical onset would say: “There is presence
only in terms of relative non-presence; the unity of presence is always situated,
context-specific, singular, and utterly heterogeneous. The crisis of presence, its differ-
entiation from non-presence, cannot be overcome, since it is constitutive of presence.
Thinking is rather compelled to dwell in this crisis.”

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—Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 15: Seminare, Curd Ochwadt (ed.) 2nd edn (Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 2005).
—Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 2008).
—Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 2010).
—Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 35: Der Anfang der abendländischen Philosophie: Auslegung des
Anaximander und Parmenides, Peter Trawny (ed.) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,
2011).
Ernst Heitsch, Parmenides: Die Fragmente (Zürich: Artemis & Winkler, 1974).
Klaus Held, Heraklit, Parmenides und der Anfang von Philosophie und Wissenschaft: Eine
phänomenologische Besinnung (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980).
Uvo Hölscher, Anfängliches Fragen: Studien zur frühen griechischen Philosophie
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968).
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
—Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Jens Timmermann (ed.) (Hamburg: Meiner, 1998).
Simon Karsten, Philosophorum Graecorum veterum operum reliquiae, Vol. 1.2: Parmenidis
Eleatae carminis reliquiae (Amsterdam: Müller, 1835).
Donald B. Kuspit, “Parmenidean Tendencies in the Epoché.” Review of Metaphysics 18,
no. 4 (1965): 739–70.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
Vol. 6, Carl Immanuel Gerhardt (ed.) (Hildesheim: Olm, 1960).
—Philosophical Essays. Ed. and trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett, 1989).
Mitchell Miller, “Parmenides and the Disclosure of Being.” Apeiron 13, no. 1 (1978):
12–35.
Alexander Mourelatos, The Route of Parmenides: A Study of Word, Image, and Argument
in the Fragments (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, 3 vols, Karl Schlechta (ed.) (Munich: Hanser,
1954–6).
—The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage
Books, 1968).
—Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).
—Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Trans. Marianne Cowan (Washington, DC:
Regnery, 1998).
G. E. L. Owen, “Eleatic Questions.” Classical Quarterly 10, no. 1 (1960): 84–102.
Joseph Owens, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian “Metaphysics”: A Study in the
Greek Background of Mediaeval Thought. 2nd edn (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of
Mediaeval Studies, 1963).
Plato. Platonis opera, Vol. 2, John Burnet (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901).
Plutarch. Plutarchi moralia, Vol. 6.2, Max Pohlenz and Rolf Westman (eds) 2nd edn
(Leipzig: Teubner, 1959).
Karl Reinhardt, “The Relation between the Two Parts of Parmenides’ Poem.” Trans.
Matthew R. Cosgrove and Alexander P. D. Mourelatos. In Alexander P. D. Mourelatos
106 Politics of the One

(ed.) The Pre-Socratics: A Collection of Critical Essays, 293–17 (Garden City, NY:
Anchor Press, 1974).
—Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie. 4th edn (Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1985).
Hans Schwabl, “Sein und Doxa bei Parmenides.” Wiener Studien 66 (1953): 50–75.
Leonardo Tarán, Parmenides: A Text with Translation, Commentary, and Critical Essays
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965).
Willem Jacob Verdenius, Parmenides: Some Comments on His Poem (Groningen: J. B.
Wolters’ Uitgevers-Maatschappij, 1942).
Jean Zafiropoulo, L’école éleate: Parménide-Zénon-Mélissos (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1950).
Eduard Zeller, A History of Greek Philosophy from the Earliest Period to the Time of
Socrates, Vol. 1. Trans. Sarah Frances Alleyne (London: Longmans, Green, and Co.,
1881).
—Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung, Vol. 1.1: Allgemeine
Einleitung, Vorsokratische Philosophie, W. Nestle (ed.) 6th edn (Leipzig: Reisland, 1919).

Notes
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Aus dem Nachlaß der Achtzigerjahre” [1884–8], in Karl
Schlechta (ed.) Werke in drei Bänden, Vol. 2, (Hanser, 1956), 678 (Der Wille zur Macht
n. 12); The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage
Books, 1968), 13. (Translation modified.)
2 Rudolf Carnap, “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache,”
in Erkenntnis 2, no. 1 (1931): 237–8; “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical
Analysis of Language.” Trans. Arthur Pap, in A. J. Ayer (ed.) Logical Positivism (Free
Press, 1959), 77.
3 Martin Heidegger, “Überwindung der Metaphysik” [1936–46], in Vorträge und
Aufsätze, 9th edn (Neske, 2000), 76–8 [hereafter, VA]; “Overcoming Metaphysics,” in
The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (University of Chicago Press, 2003),
93–4; “Das Ge-Stell” [1949], in Petra Jaeger (ed.) Gesamtausgabe, vol. 79: Bremer
und Freiburger Vorträge, (Klostermann, 1994), 24–32 [hereafter, GA 79]; “Die Frage
nach der Technik” [1953], in VA, 24; “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The
Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (Garland,
1977), 20.
4 Nietzsche, “Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft”
[1886], in Karl Schlechta (ed.) Werke in drei Bänden, vol. 2 (Hanser, 1955), 566;
Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(Penguin, 1973), 14.
5 Heidegger, “Überwindung der Metaphysik,” in VA, 68–75; “Overcoming
Metaphysics,” 85–91; “Zur Seinsfrage” [1955], in Wegmarken, 3rd edn
(Klostermann, 1996), 416–25 [hereafter, WM]; “On the Question of Being.” Trans.
and (ed.) William McNeill, in Pathmarks (Cambridge University Press, 1998),
314–21.
6 Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 54: Parmenides [1942–3], (ed.) Manfred S. Frings, 2nd
edn (Klostermann, 1992), 9–11 [hereafter, GA 54]; Parmenides. Trans. André Schuwer
 Unity in Crisis 107

and Richard Rojcewicz (Indiana University Press, 1992), 7–8. (Translation

modified.)
7 Aristotle, Metaphysics, vols 1 and 2, (ed.) David Ross (Clarendon Press, 1924),
Δ.17.1022a4–5, 10–12; Θ.8.1050a7–9.
8 Cf. Alain Badiou, L’être et l’évènement (Seuil, 1988), 193–475; Being and Event, trans.
Oliver Feltham (Continuum, 2005), 173–435. On the Badiousian notion of the event,
cf. Keti Chukhrov, “Genesis of the event in Deleuze: from the multiple to the general,”
and Boyan Manchev, “The One: composition or event? For a politics of the becoming,”
Chapters 4 and 10 respectively in this volume.
9 Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 51: Grundbegriffe [1941], (ed.) Petra Jaeger, 2nd edn
(Klostermann, 1991), 15, 21; Basic Concepts, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (Indiana
University Press, 1993), 13, 17. (Translation modified.)
10 Heidegger, GA 54, 10; Parmenides, 7. (Translation modified.)
11 Anaximander 12 B 1, in Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der
Vorsokratiker: Griechisch und deutsch, vol. 1 [1903], 6th edn (Weidmannsche
Buchhandlung, 1951) [hereafter, DK].
12 Parmenides, DK 28 B 8.36–8.
13 Heraclitus, DK 22 B 50.
14 Heidegger, “Der Spruch des Anaximander” [1946], in Holzwege, 8th edn
(Klostermann, 2003), 369, 371 [hereafter, HW]; “Anaximander’s Saying,” in Off
the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 278, 280. (Translation modified.) Cf. Heidegger, Einführung in die
Metaphysik [1935/53], 6th edn (Niemeyer, 1998), 104 [hereafter, EM]; Introduction
to Metaphysics, trans. Richard Polt and Gregory Fried (Yale University Press, 2000),
145.
15 Heidegger’s key texts on Parmenides include Gesamtausgabe, vol. 22: Die
Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie [1926], (ed.) Franz-Karl Blust (Klostermann,
1993), 62–70; Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Indiana
University Press, 2008), 52–8; Gesamtausgabe, vol. 35: Der Anfang der abendländischen
Philosophie: Auslegung des Anaximander und Parmenides [1932], (ed.) Peter Trawny
(Klostermann, 2011); EM; Introduction to Metaphysics; GA 54; Parmenides; Was
heisst Denken? [1951–2], 5th edn (Niemeyer, 1997) [hereafter, WHD]; What Is Called
Thinking? Trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (Harper & Row, 1968); “Moira
(Parmenides VIII, 34–41)” [1952], in VA, 223–48; “Moira (Parmenides VIII, 34–41),”
in Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (Harper &
Row, 1984), 79–101; “Der Satz der Identität” [1957], in Identität und Differenz, 12th
edn (Klett-Cotta, 2002), 9–30; “The Principle of Identity,” in Identity and Difference,
Trans. Joan Stambaugh (University of Chicago Press, 2002), 23–41; “Seminar in
Zähringen 1973,” in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 15: Seminare, (ed.) Curd Ochwadt, 2nd edn
(Klostermann, 2005), 372–407 [hereafter, GA 15]; “Seminar in Zähringen 1973,” in
Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Indiana University Press,
2003), 64–84.
16 Aristotle, De caelo, (ed.) Paul Moraux (Les Belles Lettres, 1965), III.1.298b12–24. Cf.
Metaphysics Α.3.983b20–21.
17 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen: Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte, vol. 7:
Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 2: Griechische Philosophie, 1:
Thales bis Kyniker [1825–6], (ed.) Pierre Garniron and Walter Jaeschke (Meiner, 1989),
108 Politics of the One

52–4; Lectures on the History of Philosophy 1825–6, vol. 2: Greek Philosophy. Trans.
Robert F. Brown (Oxford University Press, 2006), 57–8. (Translation modified.)
18 G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, vol. 14: Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie,
vol. 1, (ed.) Karl Ludwig Michelet (Duncker und Humblot, 1833), 296–7; Lectures
on the History of Philosophy, vol. 1: Greek Philosophy to Plato. Trans. E. S. Haldane
(University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 253, 254. (Translation modified.)
19 The tradition that regards Heraclitus as earlier than Parmenides is without a solid
basis. It is based on the unreliable and conventional biographical dates indicated by
Diogenes Laertius (Vitae philosophorum, vol. 1–2, (ed.) H. S. Long [Oxford University
Press, 1964], IX.1.23) and Plato (Parmenides, in Platonis opera, vol. 2, (ed.) John
Burnet [Oxford University Press, 1901], 127b1–c5). Since neither Heraclitus nor
Parmenides makes an identifiable reference to the other in their preserved fragments,
it is probable that they were roughly contemporaries and unaware of one another.
20 Ernst Heitsch, Parmenides: Die Fragmente (Artemis & Winkler, 1974), 90–8.
21 Cf. Donald B. Kuspit, “Parmenidean Tendencies in the Epoché,” Review of Metaphysics
18(4) (1965): 747: “Not merely is there a parallel between Husserl’s epoché and
Parmenides’ journey, but Parmenides’ journey clarifies the character of the attitude of
epoché. Each shows what happens to the original philosopher on his way to radical
reality in strict science.” It should also be noted that the skeptical tradition of the
Middle Platonic Academy regarded Parmenides as one of the early representatives
of the skeptical methods of suspending judgment (epochē) and refraining from
acceptance (akatalēpsia); see Plutarch, Adversus Colotem, in Plutarchi moralia, vol. 6.2,
2nd edn, Max Pohlenz and Rolf Westman (eds) (Teubner, 1959), 1121F3–A5.
22 Parmenides, DK 28 B 1.1–21.
23 Parmenides, DK 28 B 1.28–32. Even though the reading panta per onta, “all of them
precisely as beings,” is attested in most manuscripts, it was rejected as impossible by
most modern interpreters in favor of the variant panta perōnta, “pervading all things”;
cf. Leonardo Tarán, Parmenides: A Text with Translation, Commentary, and Critical
Essays (Princeton University Press, 1965), 214n. 32. Panta per onta was preferred
by Jean Zafiropoulo (L’École éleate: Parménide-Zénon-Mélissos [Les Belles Lettres,
1950], 295–7), who was followed by G. E. L. Owen (“Eleatic Questions,” Classical
Quarterly 10(1) [1960]: 84–9), W. K. C. Guthrie (A History of Greek Philosophy,
vol. 2: The Presocratic Tradition from Parmenides to Democritus [Cambridge
University Press, 1965], 9), Alexander Mourelatos (The Route of Parmenides: A Study
of Word, Image, and Argument in the Fragments [Yale University Press, 1970], 214–16),
and Rémi Brague (“La vraisemblance du faux (Parménide, fr. I, 31–2),” in Études sur
Parménide, vol. 2: Problèmes d’interprétation, (ed.) Pierre Aubenque [Vrin, 1987],
44–68).
24 Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen”
[1872/73], in Werke in drei Bänden, vol. 3, (ed.) Karl Schlechta (Hanser, 1955),
381–95; Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Regnery,
1998), 69–90; Eduard Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichen
Entwicklung, vol. 1.1: Allgemeine Einleitung, Vorsokratische Philosophie [1844], 6th
edn, (ed.) W. Nestle (Reisland, 1919), 724–5; A History of Greek Philosophy from the
Earliest Period to the Time of Socrates, vol. 1, trans. Sarah Frances Alleyne (Longmans,
Green, and Co., 1881), 605–7; John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy [1892], 4th edn
(Adam & Charles Black, 1946), 182–7.
 Unity in Crisis 109

25 On the doxai as “acceptances,” see Mourelatos, The Route of Parmenides, 194–221;

A. H. Coxon, The Fragments of Parmenides (Van Gorcum, 1986), 170. Cf. Heraclitus,
DK 22 B 28: “Indeed, acceptances [dokeonta] are what even the most reliable
[dokimōtatos] man knows and maintains.”
26 Karl Reinhardt, Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie [1916], 4th
edn (Klostermann, 1985), 18–88; “The Relation between the Two Parts of Parmenides’
Poem.” Trans. Matthew R. Cosgrove and Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, in Alexander P.
D. Mourelatos (ed.) The Pre-Socratics: A Collection of Critical Essays ( Anchor Press,
1974), 293–317; Hans Schwabl, “Sein und Doxa bei Parmenides,” Wiener Studien
66 (1953): 57. Heidegger (Sein und Zeit [1927], 18th edn [Niemeyer, 2001], 223n. 1;
Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh [State University of New York Press, 2010],
214n. 39) credits Reinhardt with having been the first one to grasp the correlation
between Alētheia and Doxai in Parmenides’ poem.
27 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft [1781/87], (ed.) Jens Timmermann
(Meiner, 1998); Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood
(Cambridge University Press, 1998), B 131–32, B 134–35, B 134n. 1.
28 Parmenides, DK 28 B 6.7–9.
29 Cf. Willem Jacob Verdenius, Parmenides: Some Comments on His Poem (J. B. Wolters’
Uitgevers-Maatschappij, 1942), 10: “[…] the original meaning of noos does not imply
any distinction between thinking and perception, and Parmenides does not make
such a distinction here either. He uses the word in a wide and neutral sense which is
best rendered by ‘knowing.’”
30 Parmenides, DK 28 B 4.1–4.
31 Parmenides, DK 28 B 2.1–8. Reading, with Proclus, ouk estin ge, “how, in any event,
there is not,” and ephikton, “accessible,” instead of Simplicius’ ouk estin te and anyston,
“feasible.” I interpret, with Hermann Fränkel (“Parmenidesstudien,” in Nachrichten
von der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen aus dem Jahre 1930: Philologisch-
Historische Klasse [Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1930], 188n. 3), Tarán (Parmenides,
33–6), Mitchell Miller (“Parmenides and the Disclosure of Being,” Apeiron 13(1)
[1978]: 22), Pierre Aubenque (“Syntaxe et sémantique de l’être dans le Poème de
Parménide,” in Études sur Parménide, vol. 2, 110), and others, Parmenides’ unspecified
use of as subjectless and absolute: “(There) is.”
32 Parmenides, DK 28 B 3.
33 Parmenides, DK 28 B 6.1–2. Néstor-Luis Cordero (“Les deux chemins de Parménide
dans les fragments 6 et 7,” Phronesis 24 [1979]: 24n. 1; “L’histoire du texte de
Parménide,” in Études sur Parménide, vol. 2, 19–20) has shown that Diels’s and
Kranz’s version to legein te noein te, “[it is necessary] to articulate and to grasp,” is
mistaken; in fact, the manuscripts have to legein, to noein te, “to articulate this and to
grasp this.”
34 Parmenides, DK 28 B 8.15–18.
35 Parmenides, DK 28 B 7.1–2, 4–6, 8.1–2.
36 Parmenides, DK 28 B 8.5–6. Cf. Heidegger’s comment in GA 22, 67–68; Basic
Concepts of Ancient Philosophy, 56: “The now […] is always constant in every now.
Being is constant presence. The now is the same in every now. Being is, in what is,
constantly without opposition or difference.”
37 The feminine form mia can be found in B 8.54.
38 Plato, Parmenides 128a4, a5–b1.
110 Politics of the One

39 Aristotle, Metaphysics I.5.986b28–30.

40 Parmenides, DK 28 B 8.50–56. This passage is quite ambiguous, but I follow the
reading of Simon Karsten (Philosophorum Graecorum veterum operum reliquiae, vol.
1.2: Parmenidis Eleatae carminis reliquiae [Müller, 1835], 41, 113–14), Uvo Hölscher
(Anfängliches Fragen: Studien zur frühen griechischen Philosophie [Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 1968], 103–7), Klaus Held (Heraklit, Parmenides und der Anfang von
Philosophie und Wissenschaft: Eine phänomenologische Besinnung [de Gruyter, 1980],
552–3), and Coxon (The Fragments of Parmenides, 219–21), according to which the
discursively articulated mortal perspective is irremediably twofold and referential:
“light” cannot be conceived without “night” and vice versa.
41 Parmenides, DK 28 B 9.1–4.
42 Aristotle, Metaphysics Β.3.998b22–27.
43 Aristotle, Metaphysics Γ.2.1003a33–b19, Δ.10.1018a35–36, Ε.2.1026a33–b2,
Κ.3.1060b32–33, Ν.2.1089a7–10.
44 Aristotle, Metaphysics Λ.4.1070a31–5.1071b2.
45 Aristotle, Metaphysics Θ.8.1049b4–1051a33.
46 Aristotle, Metaphysics Γ.2.1003b6–10, Ζ.1.1028a13–b6; Λ.1.1069a19–21. I borrow
the translation of ousia as Entity from Joseph Owens, The Doctrine of Being in the
Aristotelian “Metaphysics”: A Study in the Greek Background of Mediaeval Thought
[1951], 2nd edn (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1963), 137–54.
47 Aristotle, Metaphysics Ε.1.1026a19–32; Λ.6.1071b3–7.1073a13, 9.1074b15–1075a10.
48 G. W. Leibniz, “Principes de la nature et de la grâce fondés en raison” [1714], in Carl
Immanuel Gerhardt (ed.) Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
Vol. 6 (Olm, 1960), 602; “Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason,” in
Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Hackett, 1989), 210.
49 On the distinction between the leading question (Leitfrage) of metaphysics and
the “basic” or “fundamental question” (Grundfrage), see, e.g. Heidegger, EM,
1–39; Introduction to Metaphysics, 1–54; Gesamtausgabe, vol. 65: Beiträge zur
Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) [1936–8], (ed.) Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann
(Klostermann, 1989), 73–7, 171, 232–25 [hereafter, GA 65]; Contributions to
Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Indiana
University Press, 1999), 51–4, 120, 164–6; “Die Wille zur Macht als Kunst” [1936–7],
in Nietzsche, vol. 1, 6th edn (Neske, 1998), 64–6 [hereafter, N I]; “The Will to Power
as Art,” in Nietzsche, vol. 1: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell
(HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 67–9.
50 Heidegger, “Die Wille zur Macht als Kunst,” in N I, 202–13; “The Will to Power as
Art,” 200–11; “Brief über den ‘Humanismus’” [1946], in WM, 335–6; “Letter on
‘Humanism,’” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Pathmarks, 256; “Das Ende der Philosophie
und die Aufgabe des Denkens” [1964], in Zur Sache des Denkens, 4th edn (Niemeyer,
2000], 63 [hereafter, ZSD]; “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in On
Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002),
57.
51 Heidegger, “Die Wille zur Macht als Kunst,” in N I, 1–4; “The Will to Power as Art,”
3–6; “Überwindung der Metaphysik,” in VA, 72, 77–86; “Overcoming Metaphysics,”
89, 93–102; “Die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen” [1937], in N I, 415–23; “The
Eternal Recurrence of the Same,” in Nietzsche, vol. 2: The Eternal Recurrence of
the Same, trans. David Farrell Krell (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 198–208; “Der
Wille zur Macht als Erkenntnis” [1939], in N I, 425–32, 585–94; “The Will to
 Unity in Crisis 111

Power as Knowledge,” in Nietzsche, vol. 3: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as

Metaphysics, trans. Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, and Frank A. Capuzzi
(HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 3–9, 150–8; “Die ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen und der
Wille zur Macht” [1939], in Nietzsche, vol. 2, 6th edn (Neske, 1998), 1–22 [hereafter,
N II]; “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same and the Will to Power,” in Nietzsche,
vol. 3, 159–83; “Der europäische Nihilismus” [1940], in N II, 177–229; “European
Nihilism,” in Nietzsche, vol. 4: Nihilism, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi and David Farrell
Krell (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 147–96; “Nietzsches Metaphysik” [1941–2], in N
II, 231–300; “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics,” in Nietzsche, vol. 3, 185–251; “Nietzsches Wort
‘Gott ist Tot’” [1943], in HW, 209–67; “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead,’” in Off the
Beaten Track, 157–199; “Die seinsgeschichtliche Bestimmung des Nihilismus” [1944–6],
in N II, 361/ “Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being,” in Nietzsche, vol. 4,
197–250; WHD, 35–47, 77; What Is Called Thinking?, 90–110; “Wer ist Nietzsches
Zarathustra?” [1953], in VA, 109–19/ “Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” in Nietzsche,
vol. 2, 222–30.
52 Heidegger, “Das Ende der Philosophie,” in ZSD, 64–5; “The End of Philosophy,” 58.
53 Heidegger, “Überwindung der Metaphysik,” in VA, 79; “Overcoming Metaphysics,”
95–6. (Translation modified.)
54 Alain Badiou, Second manifeste pour la philosophie (Flammarion, 2010), 78; Second
Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Louise Burchill (Polity, 2011), 81.
55 Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 45: Grundfragen der Philosophie: Ausgewählte
“Probleme” der “Logik” [1937–8], (ed.) Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann
(Klostermann, 1984), 45; Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected “Problems” of “Logic”,
trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Indiana University Press, 1994), 108.
(Translation modified.)
56 Heidegger, “Der europäische Nihilismus,” in N II, 179–80; “European Nihilism,” 149.
57 Heidegger, GA 65, 90–1; Contributions to Philosophy, 62–3.
58 Martin Heidegger, GA 65, 92; Contributions to Philosophy, 63–4. (Translation
modified.)
59 Martin Heidegger, GA 65, 102; Contributions to Philosophy, 70. (Translation
modified.)
60 Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 69: Die Geschichte des Seyns [1938–40], (ed.) Peter
Trawny (Klostermann, 1998), 61. (My translation.)
61 Heidegger, GA 65, 185; Contributions to Philosophy, 130. (Translation modified.)
62 Heidegger, GA 15, 394; Four Seminars, 77.
63 Heidegger, GA 65, 267–8; Contributions to Philosophy, 188–9. (Translation modified.)
64 Heidegger, GA 65, 483; Contributions to Philosophy, 340. (Translation modified.)
65 On the elemental as such a background context of beings, cf. Susanna Lindberg,
“Elemental Nature as the Ultimate Common Ground of the World Community,”
Chapter 11 in this volume.
66 Heidegger, SZ, 323–31; Being and Time, 309–16.
67 Heidegger, SZ, 19; Being and Time, 18.
68 Heidegger, “Das Ding” [1949], in GA 79, 11–12, 17–21; “Das Ding” [1950], in VA,
164–6, 170–5; “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter
(Harper & Row, 1975), 172–4, 177–82. On the fourfold, see also “Die Sprache”
[1950], in Unterwegs zur Sprache, 13th edn (Klett-Cotta, 2003), 9–33 [hereafter, US];
“Language,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 187–210; “Bauen Wohnen Denken” [1951],
in VA, 139–56; “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 143–51;
112 Politics of the One

“Das Wesen der Sprache” [1957–8], in US, 157–216; “The Nature of Language,”
in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (Harper & Row, 1982), 57–110;
“Hölderlins Erde und Himmel” [1959], in Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 6th
edn (Klostermann, 1996), 152–68; “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven,” in Elucidations of
Hölderlins Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Humanity Books, 2000), 175–208. For an early
version of the fourfold, see GA 65, 310; Contributions to Philosophy, 218.
69 “Das Ding,” in GA 79, 18–21; “Die Gefahr” [1949], in GA 79, 46–8; “Die Kehre”
[1949], in GA 79, 74; “The Turning,” in The Question Concerning Technology, 45; “Das
Ding,” in VA, 172–3; “The Thing,” 178–9.
70 “Das Ding,” in GA 79, 20, 21; “Das Ding,” in VA, 173, 175; “The Thing,” 181, 182. On
the uniqueness and singularity of being, cf. Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “More than One,”
Chapter 1 in this volume.
71 Heidegger, GA 65, 90–1; Contributions to Philosophy, 63. (Translation modified.)
72 GA 65, 459–60; Contributions to Philosophy, 323–4.
73 Aristotle, Metaphysics Α.5.986b28–30.
74 “Das Ding,” in GA 79, 17–21; “Das Ding,” in VA, 172–3; “The Thing,” 177–8.
 Part III

The Singular Plural

 8

Vegetal Democracy

The Plant that is not One

Michael Marder

We, the other plants

What is “the plant that is not one”? Does it, in keeping with the explicit negation of
its unity and identity (in a word: unicity), still respond or adequately correspond to
the form of the question that begins with “what is …,” ti esti? And what remains of
democracy, when the subject, who or which is no longer human or primarily human,
no longer counts as one, a self-contained unit to be tabulated following a meaningless
decision it occasionally renders?
The plant that is not one: the one (plant) that is not one. Least of all will the labyrin-
thine semantics of this quasi-sentence lead us to the multiplicity of plants belonging
to the same species, or to so-called “biological diversity,” the dizzying variety of plant
species threatened, today more than ever before, by rapid deforestation and by the
prevalence of monocrops that militate against vegetal multiplicity in the name of
agricultural efficiency and market considerations. Looking past systems of botanical
classification and the ecological emphasis on biodiversity, it should still be possible to
discern something of the seed in the plant that is not one, albeit a “something” quite
different from an actualized potentiality: the plurality of the singular, the seed that is
already many, the plant that is already legion.
The plant, qua plant and qua this living growing being, is not one. The pine tree I
am glancing at now from my window is not one but already more or less than one—
an infinity of dispersed growths that do not amount either to the ideal unity of the
concept (the plant as a metaphysical chimera that overrides and subsumes actually
existing vegetal beings) or to a form of life gathered into an organismic totality (a
self-sufficient, independent entity, whose parts are subordinated to the demands of the
whole). The idea, the image, the eidos of the organism, wherein the concept recognizes
itself as though in a living-breathing mirror, and the dialectical philosophy proper,
116 Politics of the One

wherein life is subsumed and idealized, prove to be impotent when confronted with
vegetal life.
That the plant is not one means, above all, that it is not one with itself; though
it may be amenable to certain kinds of learning detectable in “plasticity in growth”
or “adaptively variable growth,”1 it does not in so doing establish a self-identity, nor
relates to itself, nor comes back to itself across the space of external difference. But if
plant’s distance to itself is never completely bridged, if its mode of existence precludes
a circular closure or enclosure in itself typical of animal and of human souls, then
it holds the potential for welcoming everything and everyone the plant is not in the
bio-existential fissure constitutive of its being. To tap this potential, which quietly
underlies the more obvious kinds of energy flowing through plants, is the task of
vegetal democracy, in which we, humans, are also invited to participate as a species of
the plant that is not one.
Of the classical Aristotelian categories, those most pertinent to vegetal ontology,
containing the seeds of the political arrangement in question, are quantity, relation,
and “substantive existence” or being (ousia).2 The many parts comprising what seems
to be a self-contained plant do not behave in the same way as organs subordinated
to the demands of an animal’s body; rather, as miniature plants within an infinitely
divisible plant, they form a multiplicity provisionally held together by a common
nutritive mode and ready, at any moment, to fall apart or to take root elsewhere, in a
different context and configuration. The assemblage of plant parts, indistinguishable
from vegetal wholes, takes the shape of a contingent and external articulation, free
from the ironclad ties of the inner essence. Hence, one might say that the plant as a
single being is not and, moreover, that plants are because the (one) plant is not. What
Aristotle concludes apropos of the human (“human unit […] being one man and not
more than one”3 — a statement silently presupposed by all subsequent democratic
regimes, where every vote counts as neither more nor less than one, at least in
principle) is utterly inapplicable to the plant that is always more than one and that
exists as a community of relatively separate beings.
At the apex of what, to ancient philosophy, will have appeared as chaotic and
anarchic being, an ontology without either principle or order, the plant stands in
violation of the law of non-contradiction, in that, not being one with itself and
missing the essential core of any “self,” it turns out not to be fully itself. “The plant
is not one” comes to signify “X is not X.” In the plant, the so-called kingdoms (the
political overtones of this taxonomic category are yet to be assessed), classes (the
political-economic meaning of this term should not go unremarked) of beings, and,
even, distinctions between natural and artificial things collapse only to produce the
uncanny figure of that which has been produced, brought forth, or grown, sprouted,
and, in any case, engendered, generated. Observe, in this context, that the Greek word
for the plant, phuton, means, more broadly, growing things or creatures and, thus,
encompasses animals and human beings as well.4 Phusis as the totality of growth,
generation, begetting, and passing away grows out of the same root as the plant before
its Latin immobilization and the dilution of its sense in “that which is enchained to a
place,” “that which is driven into the ground,” the planted, plantare. A part of nature
 Vegetal Democracy 117

oversteps its own boundaries and metonymically expresses the entire thrust of phusis,
the movement of growth prior to its gathering in a totality that, dynamically, makes
itself known in an ensemble of the vectors of life or in a harmony of destinations.5
Plants, despite their utter singularity on the hither side of the concept, are generic and
capacious enough to accommodate all other “growing things,” to lend their name to
non-vegetal, or not primarily vegetal, creatures, so much so that in certain Eastern
philosophies they are deemed to be the fifth element, along with the classical elements
of earth, water, etc.6 Rather than follow the—admittedly radicalized—Liberal program
of broadening the scope of participation in society and politics to include all living
creatures, those who take their cues from and are guided by the ontology of plants
(“Follow the plants!” as Deleuze and Guattari recommend7) re-join the community of
growing beings on the terms of the phutoi themselves.
Defying formal logic, the plant that is not one turns out to be not a plant at all,
or not only a plant. The living figures of non-identity and difference (to themselves),
phutoi are growing things, multiple vectors and dispersed destinations of growth,
clashing with each other sometimes even within a particular phuton that temporarily
draws them together. Given that humans, animals, and plants—to mention but a few
such “vectors” rendered static and thing-like in metaphysically inspired biological
systems of classification—are growing beings, the question is not how growth,
identified in its totality with phusis, is differently modulated in dissimilar phutoi. Nor
is it, stricto sensu, appropriate to ask, keeping vegetal democracy in mind, how do
(or can, or should …) humans participate in the movement of growth first stirred in
plants. Instead, we ought to come to terms with the idea that human growth takes
place in the difference of the plant to itself, in the “not one,” in the non-identity of the
plant that invigorates and enlivens the very possibility of radically heterogeneous lives.
If the plant is an instance of alterity so absolute and unprecedented that it exceeds the
relativized opposition between the same and the other, if the plant in itself is the other,
then it includes us, human beings, those other plants Plato once called “heavenly”
(ouranion),8 folding the entire difference between immanence and transcendence into
the figure of vegetation. But—let it be stated already—in the absence of conceptual and
organismic interiority, it includes the human phuton on the outside, in the more or less
superficial proliferations of growth devoid of completion and closure. We are, in other
words, nothing but the difference of the plant to itself, supplements and frivolous
additions to the plant that is not one.
In the tradition of ancient “psycho-politics,” where various strata of psukhē are
aligned with distinct political regimes,9 vegetal democracy is the democracy of
growing beings, of phutoi that or who participate in one of the most basic movements
of the vegetal soul, to threptikon, that made its first appearance on the philosophical
scene in Aristotle’s De Anima. Further explication of vegetal democracy will require
a sustained meditation on the meanings of growth and, especially, on its capacity to
function as a hinge between different growing beings. For now, let us merely recall,
incidentally, that whenever we say that “plants grow” (for example, “an olive tree grows
in my backyard”) we mean to say, in the same breath, that they are physically situated
or rooted in a determinate locale, that they live, increase in extension, and propagate
118 Politics of the One

there. For an olive tree, to grow is to be (not one), to live, to attain new heights, and
to propagate in a certain place; its growth is semantically broader than the meaning of
its being and is, thus, paradoxically, the ontic ground of vegetal ontology. Whether the
same is the case for all other growing beings remains to be seen.
Formally, in Aristotle’s thought, growth is the quantitative principle of movement,
arkhēn kinēseōs, inherent to natural things.10 It proceeds incrementally, by additions
and at the same time substitutions (prosthesei), bringing with itself more of X. The
principle of this principle, we might say, is the wholly affirmative and open-ended
conjunction “and … and … and …,” which is not equivalent to “one plus one plus
one […]” and which Hegel will later dismiss as the linear “bad infinity” that falls
short of the totality. With the emphasis on the unlimited, however, we reach the
outermost edges of Aristotelian philosophy, where “it is impossible that an animal or
a plant [zōon hē phuton] should exceed all limits in greatness or smallness” and where,
moreover, “if the constituents of a thing are unlimited [apeiron] both as to magnitude
and as to kind [kai kata plēthos kai kat’ eidos], we cannot know what that thing is.”11
Taking animal constitution for a model, Aristotle imputes an organic, organismic
relation between the parts and the whole to plant nature, treating the two kinds of
living beings as though they were interchangeable (“an animal or a plant”). A sense
of symmetry and proportion between the whole and its parts overwrites the uniquely
asymmetrical and thoroughly incomplete ontology of plants devoid of unity and
identity. Granted: one may never really know what that thing called phuton is if, in its
infinite proliferation, it eludes all enclosures, definitions, and delimitations. One may,
as a consequence, never be able to narrow down the exact scope of vegetal democracy
that inherits from growing beings their indefiniteness. Yet, what the philosopher
condemns as not-knowing, experienced in the face of the apeiron of plant growth,
is—far from being a symptom of deficiency—symptomatic of the refusal to objectify
this dynamic “principle of movement,” to arrest it in the inquiry into what this thing
is, ti esti. The absence of identity from the plant that is not one entails its non-identifia-
bility—at least in so far as conceptual and formal logical philosophical apparatuses are
concerned—and, therefore, its unobjectifiability and the indefiniteness of its ontology.
Analogously, phusis in its entirety, ontologically and etymologically akin to phuton,
cannot be reduced to an object, as Merleau-Ponty notes: “Nature is an enigmatic
object, an object that is not an object at all; it is not really set out in front of us. It is
our soil [sol]—not what is in front of us, facing us, but rather, that which carries us.”12
The enigma of nature is that, like the plant, it is the figure of non-identity, “an object
that is not an object,” an ensemble of the vectors of growth, a ground without ground,
forever shifting underneath our feet. Our soil, nature is that on which we grow; that
which carries us, it is what steers the movements of our growth; not objectified, not
separated from us, it is everything with which and everyone with whom we grow.
And the same, mutatis mutandis, applies to plants that grow on, toward, and with
others. Growing-on, growing-toward, growing-with: a de-formalization of Aristotle’s
definition of growth into these three moments will disclose, at once, something about
the plant that is not one and the political upshots of its ontology.
 Vegetal Democracy 119

Growing-on
Both the literal ground—the soil—and nature as “that which carries us” are evocative
of that which underlies and supports different kinds of vitality and growth, namely
hupokeimenon, or sub-stance (literally, what lies beneath or stands below) in its
most crude and material signification. It is quite obvious that plants grow in the soil,
though the aerial roots of strawberries and banyan trees, as well as bamboo shoots
and mangroves flourishing in water, are not unheard of. In any event, the material
ground of vegetal life is elemental and the meaning of growing-on is, with respect to
the elements, drawing nourishment from, subsisting on.
But the world of the elements is not the only ground for growth; there is still
another ground that shadows and doubles the first, rendering it abyssal. In the plant
that is not one, plants grow on plants, symbiotically, even when it comes to what passes
for a single vegetal being, for instance, this orchid. (Hegel should be credited with
arriving at this conclusion in his Philosophy of Nature, where he infers that “the whole
plant is rather the basis [Boden, ground] for these individuals [the distinct parts of a
plant] than a subjective unity of members.”13) And they do so without relating either
to themselves or to others, without finding an essential ground in the dispersed body
that supports their growth and that consists of inorganic elements as well as of other
plants. It is, indeed, a matter of utter indifference, from the vegetal standpoint, what
or who the plant grows on, which is why the procedure of grafting, or the implan-
tation of one vegetal tissue onto another, is generally so successful. Growing-on is,
at bottom, at the abyssal “bottom without bottom of things,” as Derrida was fond of
putting it, a growing-with, an infinite chain of additions and substitutions responsible
for the interaction of plants, free of self-reflexivity, with a vast community of organic
and inorganic entities and processes. Thus, the democracy of growing beings, vegetal
democracy does not de facto exclude whatever does not grow—the elemental world as
the first ground for growth—but, on the contrary, equalizes, by positing them on the
same plane, the organic and the inorganic supports for life.
The “ground for growth” can also refer to a foundation, understood as reason,
cause, ratio, fond, Grund for vegetal vitality. Would not this interpretation border
on an absurdity? Doesn’t growth, like existence itself, take place in the absence of
reasons and of a deeper meaning that would underpin the extended, finite, material
sense indistinguishable from the corporeality of growing beings? Growing is ontico-
existential being, being as becoming. It proceeds from the middle, issues from what
already exists, oblivious to the first “because.” Even here, however, it is impossible to
dissociate the groundlessness of a growing thing (which is to say, a multiplicity of
growths that constitute it) from the contingent community wherein it is situated. “It is
not enough to say that ‘the rose grows without reason’,” writes Jean-Luc Nancy. “For if
the rose were alone, its growth without reason would enclose within itself, by itself, all
the reason of the world. But the rose grows without reason [croît sans raison] because
it grows along with [croît avec] the reseda, the eglantine, and the thistle—as well as
with crystals, seahorses, humans, and their inventions. And the whole of being, nature,
120 Politics of the One

and history do not constitute an ensemble the totality of which would or would not be
without reason. The whole of being is its own reason […]”14
The economy of this dense passage from Being Singular Plural is exemplary in its
sensitivity to vegetal democracy, to the conjunction of growths (some of them purely
vegetative, others proceeding by inorganic accretions, still others verging on ideality),
to the non-totalizing view of nature and of being as such. Only as a gentle rejoinder
to the author of these lines should we object that the clause “if the rose were alone”
couldn’t stand because, by itself, the rose is not alone since it is a juncture of multiple
vectors of growth. The rose that is not one would fail to contain the reason of the
whole world and would remain “without reason” thanks to the “with” that it is. The
symmetry of growing-without, croît sans […], and growing-with, croît avec, in Nancy’s
text is revealing, to the extent that the absence of reason in a single being—a plant—is
supplemented with the germination of sense in the articulations of this being with
other beings caught up in the processes of growth. Each growing thing, each phuton,
grows on the community of beings it grows with, such that this whole assemblage
does not amount to a totality invested with, or divested of, reason. The cause, ratio, or
Grund is not merely displaced or projected onto being or nature as a whole; sense is
not prefabricated but grows in between growing beings, in the différance of plants.
The final line of the citation, which I have terminated somewhat abruptly—“The
whole of being is its own reason […]”—may be taken for an endorsement of a certain
Aristotelian idea of auto-teleology, of the highest telos and the most secure ground as
an end-in-itself, striving toward and intending nothing but itself. But this is not at all
what Nancy means, continuing as he does: “[…] it has no other reason, which does not
mean that it is itself its own principle and end, exactly because it is not “itself.”15 The
same goes for the plant that is not one, the plant that, consequently, is also “not ‘itself ’”
and that is not “its own principle and end,” even there where plants grow on plants. To
comprehend the stakes of this ambiguity plaguing the groundlessness of growing-on,
we should resort to another exceptional facet of the Aristotelian theory of causality:
the automaton. It is certainly not by chance (tukhē) that a given plant germinates from
a corresponding seed (e.g. an apple tree grows out of an apple seed), but it is a matter
of pure accident where the seed falls and whether it sprouts or not. The ground of
growth, if there is one, is precisely the automaton, which, as Aristotle notes, derives
from auto to matēn, “in itself for nothing, to no purpose.”16 The plant that is not one
is, indeed, nothing in itself, because it is entirely outside itself, growing in and as the
other. So, too, the multiplicity of vegetal democracy comes together automatically, for
nothing, in the absence of a deeply buried, essential foundation, wherein dispersed
growths would be gathered into a simple unity. Dissemination, dispersion, waste,
throwing the seed for nothing, throwing it away—all these name the conditions of
possibility for the growth of anything whatsoever, conditions of possibility that are
coextensive with growth’s impossibility and untraceable to a single point of origin.
And yet, both the Pythagoreans and much later Hegel have postulated that the
ideal-geometrical basis, on which “things that grow” (phuomena) grow, is the seed seen
as “analogous to the unit and point [to men sperma analogon monadi kai sēmeiō].”17
(Hegel echoes this view, giving it a dialectical twist, in the course of the transition from
 Vegetal Democracy 121

mineral to plant natures in Philosophy of Nature: “Plant-life therefore begins where the
vital principle gathers itself into a point and this point sustains and produces itself,
repels itself, and produces new points.”18) According to these theoretical accounts,
the being-one of the plant hearkens back to its pre-history, so to speak, where “the
vital principle gathers itself into a point,” or into something analogous to a point.
Philosophically conceived, what growing things grow on, in light of this analogy, is
an ideal foundation that has supplanted the groundlessness of vegetal life: the One
of geometry, a simple and indivisible point, self-sufficient and independent (“this
point sustains and produces itself ”). It is only thanks to the point’s negation of itself
that the line (grammē) of the stem dialectically emerges at the commencement of
growth, where we may begin counting up to two. The idealized plant, then, grows on
a geometrico-dialectical foundation—furnished at the threshold and at the close of
metaphysics—which assumes the shape of the simplest spatial representation of the
One, the point of vitality, soon to be transcribed into temporal ideality, the atom of the
pure present, the point of the Now. And so the analogy is extended: growth unfolds on
the basis of what does not grow, i.e. the point that does not overstep the confines of its
unitary identity; time arises on the basis of what is exempt from time; and community
springs up on the basis of original unity, the “monarchy” of a principle gathered into
a single point.
But what of the others of the vegetal other, the other phutoi, namely humans?
One would have to wait for the first yields of post-metaphysical thought to encounter
an inverse analogy, whereby a de-idealized plant would become the ground upon
which human phutoi grow. Hence, Novalis’s intriguing statement in Logological
Fragments, recapturing the ancient proximity between phusis and phuton: “On nature,
as a closed body—as a tree—on which we are the blossom buds [Über die Nature als
einen geschlossenen Körper—als einen Baum—woran wir die Blütenknospen sind].”19
Growing on the “closed body” of nature, humans are plants (more specifically, blossom
buds) growing on a plant (the tree), which, nevertheless, is conceived, in keeping with
the metaphysical view of vegetal life, as “closed” (geschlossen), obscure, withdrawn
from interpretation and understanding but also neither related to itself nor turned
to the exteriority of its other. What is involved in growing on a “closed body,” if not
opening this body up to the outside, as a blossom bud with its fragrance and color
opens the plant to the senses and thus delivers it to the realm of spirit? Imagined in
the form of buds, human beings are still nothing less than the spiritual completion and
crowning achievement of nature, as opposed to radically egalitarian growths placed on
the same footing as the vectors of other phutoi.
While applauding this daring attempt to recover the ancient Greek nexus binding
the plant to nature as a whole, we should remember that what metaphysical thought
represents as the closure of the plant, unrelated to itself or to its other, is the very
openness connoted by “vegetal democracy.” The alterity of the plant is not caught up
in the nets of self-negation, which is indispensable for the dialectical construction of
subjectivity, let alone of a community. Novalis tacitly agrees, in the continuation of the
fragment I have just cited, that nature—or, better yet, natures written in the plural—
operate as though they were infinite proliferations of vegetal life: “Natures [Naturen],
122 Politics of the One

on the one hand, are beings [Wesen]—such that the whole serves the parts—that
the parts are ends in themselves [die Glieder Zwecke an sich sind]—the parts are
independent.”20 The priority of parts over the whole and the dissipation of a coherent
whole in an assemblage of independent parts are the effects of growing beings in
general and of plants in particular. It is thus especially unfortunate that Novalis fails
to sustain his meditation in the same promising key but, instead, introduces into it
a rupture, contrasting the vegetal democracy of “natures” to the human community
(“With persons, on the other hand—the contrary relation obtains.”21) A remarkable
thing happens here: the human buds grow on a plant, to which they are opposed in
the very logic and directionality of their growth. Dissimilar to plants, persons are the
interdependent, thoroughly interrelated parts in a political totality, in the context of
which they can never be “ends in themselves.” By relinquishing their independence
as “natures,” as plants growing on a plant from which they would be easily separable,
the human buds gain a certain measure of independence from nature, that is to say,
from the dispersed tendencies of growth that take place in the difference of the plant
to itself. At best, Novalis implies, the life of plants flashes before our eyes an image
of Kantian ethics, too weak to lay the ground for political organization. For vegetal
democracy, this weakness, precisely, represents a newly gained strength, the promise
of uprooting politics from its foundation in oppositional formations.
If plants grow “without reason” and without a single governing principle or cause,
then the political arrangement that would be consistent with their ontology is not
a democratized monarchy, but an anarchic democracy. Novalis, on the other hand,
obliterates the qualitative difference between monarchy and democracy, detecting
in the latter political regime the same sovereign head, albeit “a head made up of
many minds.”22 An image-concept of multiplicity gathered into the One, the hydra
of democracy remains tethered to a principle, an arkhē, a single head split into many
minds, perhaps schizophrenic but nevertheless majestic in its highest authority.
What this image-concept ignores is precisely the headless, acephalic, unprincipled,
an-archic vegetal democracy (for, whenever one comes across the acephalon, one
already treads on the ground of the phuton), more monstrous than Novalis’s allusion
to the democratic hydra because, in it, in acephalic and anonymous growth, we fail to
recognize ourselves altogether. And, failing to recognize ourselves, we mime the plant
that is not one.

Growing-toward
It would be fair to conclude that Novalis remains ambivalent with respect to the vegetal
legacy lodged in the political organization he describes. So, in another fragment, he
writes: “The basis of all eternal attachment is an absolute tendency in all directions.
Herein lies the possibility of a universal republic.”23 The “absolute tendency in all direc-
tions,” betraying uncontrollable proliferation, will be readily recognized as a salient
feature of plant life that grows toward the light of the sun as much as the darkness of
the soil, toward the dryness of air as much as nutrient-rich moisture. Growing-toward,
 Vegetal Democracy 123

a tending that expresses phenomenological intentionality at its most embodied and

concrete, typically presupposes a unitary destination, a coherent telos that is fulfilled
so long as this movement reaches its preordained target. A multi-directional tendency,
however, shatters the ideal concept of intentionality; one could even say that the plant
is not one because its destination, destiny, or future is not one, for it does not aim
at a single thing wherein its being would be realized. Novalis’s “universal republic,”
synonymous with vegetal democracy, is thus rooted in the untamable proliferation of
the plant, a tendency that is absolute because absolved from all limits and, ultimately,
free from the particularity of a species, a genus, a kingdom, a nature, a singular vector
of growth, a destination. It conveys the liberty of the plant, free from a self, from its
self, from itself.
In classical metaphysics, too, the destination of the plant is split, divided into
external and internal moments: 1) self-production, the spatial tending of a vegetal
being toward the light of the sun; and 2) reproduction, the temporal striving toward
the telos consummated in fruition, in the seed from which another like it emerges.
(But what exactly is meant by the self-production and self-reproduction of a being
that lacks a unified, self-related, coherent self?) Dialectically viewed, these antithetical
moments are, of course, synthesizable into a higher unity, given that “[i]n the plant,
these processes [of self-production and reproduction] are not so distinguished as
they are in the animal, but coincide; and this precisely is the source of the difficulty in
expounding the nature of the vegetable organism.”24 A single destination, a universal
destiny is predetermined for the vegetal being that will either live up to its proper
“end” or perish, coming to its end in non-germination or non-fruition. The dialectical
unification of the already much impoverished metaphysical re-orientations of vegetal
growth—the ordering and integration of what we may call “vegetal intentionality” into
a coherent whole—is, without a doubt, a violation of the ontology of plants and the
stamp of ideality imprinted onto their vitality.
The anarchic multiplicity of growths, loosely comprising the plant that is not
one, gets suppressed as it is conceptually organized by the one and only destination
of their proliferation: the light of the sun. For it is in the light, Hegel suggests, that
the plant finally becomes itself, becomes one. To be sure, it becomes one only when
it is “drawn out of itself [äußerlichen Selbsthinausgerissen] by the light,”25 when it
physically ceases to be one with itself, is expelled from the material shell of its self
and set on the path toward the ideal Self. “The self does not become for the plant,
but the plant becomes a self only in the light; its lighting-up, its becoming light [ihr
Erleuchten, Lichtwerden] does not mean that the plant itself becomes light, but that it
is only in light [am und im Licht] that it is produced.”26 Growing-toward-the-other is
brought back into the fold of mediated unity, where the plant grows toward its ideal
Self, becoming-light in this process interpreted from the perspective of Spirit. Yet,
even if the idealized destination of vegetal growth were its one and only target, this
goal would have never been reached despite the infinite striving of plants outwards
and toward it. Vegetal growth is infinite, open-ended, and essentially incomplete, not
only because the light of the sun, which is neither a possession nor a finite resource,
cannot be captured once and for all (though for Goethe, Hegel, and Lorenz Oken,
124 Politics of the One

among others, color symbolizes the objective capturing of light in the flower) but
also, and more importantly, because, for the plant to survive, its extension upward
must be supplemented with the root’s burrowing deep into the dark recesses of the
earth, growing in and toward obscurity. The plant as plant is produced in growth that
tends absolutely in all directions—at once as a lighting-up and a dimming-down.
Its “universal republic,” vegetal democracy, is universality without the One, having
broken (with) the unity of ground that characterizes pure idealism, as much as
materialism; and it is a republic, res publica, in the sense that it directs itself toward
the inappropriable (light, vitality as such) and excludes, by virtue of being “not one,”
the very principle of appropriation.27
Returning to Hegel’s text, we witness how, without consciousness but with a clear
unity of purpose, the dispersed multiplicity of growths are organized and channeled
in a single direction, anticipating the political community of those other plants, the
humans, who will join together in a state: “Just as a human being in his relationship to
the State, which is his ethical, substantial nature, his essence and the absolute power
over him, becomes in this very identity independent and for himself, a mature and
substantial being, so too does the plant in its relation with light give itself its particu-
larity, its specific and robust quality.”28 Whatever it is that one grows toward, be it the
light or the State, one—the one—strives toward and finds oneself in the medium of
universality that dispenses to one one’s proper being, substantiality, and particularity.
This is because it is presupposed, without further ado and without explanation, that
what or who grows is the one (plant or human being), which merely attains its more
robust, more fully developed, more mature version in the One toward which one
strives. But even in the context of Hegelian Naturphilosophie such a presupposition
is unjustified, given that the plant lacks subjective unity, self-relationality, or organic
interdependence of parts subservient to the whole. “One grows” elliptically means
“one grows toward oneself,” masking the indomitable “they grow,” the dispersed multi-
plicity of growths devoid of a single destination. This dialectical trick, substituting
“one” for “they,” paves the way for the naturalizing analogy—“so too does the plant
[…]”—that turns the political state into a spiritual given, the essential condition of
possibility for becoming, on a par with, if not higher than, the light. In relation to the
state, we are all, Hegel implies in the best traditions of philosophical heliocentrism,
sunflowers, seeking our orientation from and turning toward this luminous source of
our mature being. As political animals, we still are or remain the other plants, spiritu-
alized and sublimated, on the condition that the plants, too, lose their quality of being
absolutely other and rediscover themselves in the ideal unity of light.
Vegetal democracy, in contrast, exposes itself to darkness as well as to light, uncon-
scious being as well as consciousness, which may, as a whole, turn out to be nothing
but an excrescence, an outgrowth of what I have elsewhere termed “plant-thinking.”
Thus understood, the plant, which does not grow toward one thing but toward
many, does not have one, circumscribed, determined nature, where nature is both
the ground that carries phutoi and a coherent destination of their growth, both their
thrownness and their projection. The most typical and, indeed, prototypical thing of
nature, sharing nature’s root etymologically and otherwise, animated from within by
 Vegetal Democracy 125

the movements of growth, is nothing natural, since it is, as pseudo-Aristotle writes in

De Plantis, “an incomplete thing,” ateles pragma,29 a thing without a telos or a purpose,
though certainly not without use. Far from a deficiency, with which it has been all
too often associated in the history of Western thought, the oversaturation of teloi, the
excess of the destinations of growth pursued by the plant that is not one, denatures
vegetal being that is generic to the extent that its soul, with the capacity (dunamis) for
growth, binds itself to, inhabits, and sets in motion—if not haunts—the bodies of all
living beings.30 Phutoi do not possess one nature and are not limited to a determinate
form of life; growing toward dissimilar things, they a posteriori, i.e. with reference to
the orientations of their growth traced back to the orienting beings as such, escape
inscription in and circumscription to the logic of phusis. Any telos whatsoever may
stand in for the underdetermined (and, at the same time, overdetermined) purpose of
plants. Any telos may function as a supplement, as an addition to and a substitute for
the vacant place of vegetal teleology. The plant that is not one is quodlibet ens, ample
enough in its goodness to offer hospitality to everything that lives (and not only! think
of how it turns itself into a passageway to the mineral and inorganic substances that—
lacking an interiority, be it a stomach or a deeply seated soul—it channels without
appropriating them) because it does not occupy any space and has no proper place
reserved for it on the teleological ladder.
Our enigmatic participation—at once ontological, biological, and political—in
plant vitality, which blurs the difference between the part and the whole (and,
therefore, problematizes the very idea of participation), resembles the dynamics of
democracy in the writings of Claude Lefort, where the lacuna of power left over from
absolute monarchy, rather than being decisively occupied by any one political actor,
group, or party, persists, in the last instance, as undetermined.31 The indeterminacy
of Lefortian democracy is not its purely abstract and formal (because disincarnated)
feature but that which forever defers the double closure of identity and identification
of the body politic. Now, the place of absolute difference is similarly pre-occupied by
the plant that, instead of laying claim to it, extends its hospitality to all other living
beings. The supplementary character of everything and everyone hosted in the fissure
of vegetal non-identity—that, like life itself, cannot be filled once and for all—invali-
dates the hierarchy of ends and the typology of growths. The growing ateles pragma
affects everything that endeavors to complete its missing end with the purposelessness
of plant life. The absurdity of human existence, emphasized in certain strands of
existentialism, is but the trace of vegetal a-teleology.
Vegetal democracy implies the egalitarianism of ends, not to mention the equality
between that which has a determinate telos and that which seems to eschew teleology
altogether. Having no proper end, the plant has no relation to “having” and lives
outside the purview of appropriative subjectivity, which aims to grasp and take a hold
of itself in what would be the first usurpation of “one’s place under the sun.” Exempt
from teleological constraints, it welcomes everything and everyone in the fissure of
identity that it is. Other to itself, it grows toward the other excessively, without moder-
ation, in the absence of an internal limit or measure. So much so that its destiny or its
nature, which is nothing in itself, becomes indistinguishable from that of the other.
126 Politics of the One

Growing-with
The reader will be right to infer that growing-with is the ontico-phytological
transcription of the Heideggerian Mitsein, being-with—a crucial attribute of existence
adopted to the vegetal mode of being. Indeed, the existential sense of nature as
a “liaison” of the destinies and destinations for growths, already apparent in the
Stoic interpretation of phusis,32 shines through this transcription. We will do well
to remember, none the less, that the plant’s bond of sociality is unbound from
itself and that vegetal growing-with happens in the spacing of difference, the
non-privative being-without that underlies the liaison of growths. The plant that is
not one grows with the other only because it does not grow with itself; being with
the other is non-transcendentally possible for a vegetal being that is not, in any case,
with itself. Growing-with is the expression of growing-without, an infinite chain of
supplementations to the absence of vegetal unity and identity. As such, it is to be
rigorously distinguished from growing-together and, especially, from the notion of
co-evolution—e.g. of honeybees and the clover flowers they pollinate—where new
capacities for adaptation are mutually shaped thanks to the ongoing contacts of
distinct species. If growing-with really expresses growing-without, dissemination,
and being-not-one of and at the origin, then the conjunction of growths comprising,
on the one hand, what appears to be a single, discrete being and, on the other, a
community of beings must be understood in terms of its inherent falling apart into
a non-totalizable multiplicity. There is no growing-with without falling apart: such is
the axiom of vegetal democracy.
In discussions of “coexistence in nature”, derivative from the more elemental
phenomenon of growing-with, the temptation to project a particular human socio-
political arrangement onto the nonhuman world is at its strongest. Perhaps one of
the most common projections is informed by the worldview of classical Liberalism,
detectable for example in the text of Georges Canguilhem, “The Living and its Milieu.”
“Vegetation grows in natural ensembles,” Canguilhem writes, “in which different
species limit each other reciprocally and where, in consequence, each contributes to
creating an equilibrium for the others. The ensemble of these plant species ends up
constituting its own milieu.”33 The reciprocal limitation of each individual plant or
species by all the others and the birth of “natural balance” from the sum total of such
limitations are the unmistakable features of liberalism transposed onto the world of
plants. Vegetal equilibrium is achieved thanks to the mutual restrictions that keep
in check the otherwise unlimited capacity for growth, while co-existence becomes
possible only after the imperialism of the individual has been moderated. Although
“the ensemble of plant species” acquires the character of a collective subject, related
to and transforming its own milieu, vegetal sociality does not, on this view, preexist
the species that limit each other’s claims to space. But were Canguilhem to take into
account the non-identity of plants, the independence of their “parts,” etc., would
he still have been able to maintain a strong emphasis on the mutual limitation of
beings that are, in and of themselves, multiple and that do not set themselves apart
from their milieu? And, more pertinently for us, what is the fate of “growing-with”
 Vegetal Democracy 127

in a community—the natural ensemble of species—constituted through the mutual

limitation of its members that, in the first instance, grow against each other?
In this respect, it would be unforgivable to pass in silence Nietzsche’s famous
projection of the will to power onto the world of plants. Avowing the notion of
growth as resistance, as growing-against, he asks in a fragment composed at the end
of the 1880s, “For what do the trees in a jungle fight each other? For ‘happiness’?—For
power!—”34 Accepting and, to some extent, radicalizing Liberal premises, though
not their conclusion, Nietzsche imputes a certain imperialism of the self to plants
(the trees in the jungle) and construes vegetal life, as well, in terms of a struggle.
There is no chance for the establishment of a natural equilibrium in the Nietzschean
universe, so long as it is alive, that is to say, so long as the tension of life prompts living
beings to grow against something or someone else and, therefore, to grow in power.
Growing-with, if at all possible, can only assume the form of growing-with-against: an
allied opposition to another quantum of power, the one against the other. The plant
that is not one—to which Nietzsche is, on occasion, attuned more than anyone else—is
irretrievably lost in the jungle of vegetal beings fighting for power.
A potentially infinite series of articulations within and between phutoi is the
cornerstone of vegetal ontology as much as of the democracy predicated upon
it. Growth without either friction or opposition is the mark of beings that do not
objectify themselves on the way to becoming subjects, do not oppose themselves to
themselves or to their milieu, live in perpetual peace. And it is this principle of pure
affirmation, which at the limits of language can be named only thanks to a multi-
plication of negations and non-dialectical negations of negations, that animates the
political arrangement we might learn from plants. But how to think growing-with free
of oppositionality? Once again, the plant that is not one points toward the outlines of
an answer.35
Only a being that does not oppose itself will, by the same token, not oppose the
other: a being without the unity of consciousness and self-consciousness, a being
whose subjectivity does not exist “as the One that pervades the whole [als die durch-
dringende Eine des Ganzen].”36 In the plant, the subjective One has not yet pierced or
penetrated (durchdringende) the whole, which, consequently, is not one. The whole is
not whole—which is not to say that it is incomplete—because it does not know itself
as one; it grows without knowing it, without knowing itself as the one set up against
the other. The plant grows with the other “because […] the subjective One of the plant
is fused with its very quality and particularization”37; rather than the One pervading
the whole, it is the sensuous, qualitative dimension of vegetation that fuses with the
entire plant, which falls apart, is particularized, practically analyzed into a multiplicity
of growths, such that this analysis is its very life. The unconscious tendency of vegetal
existence is the end product of the plant’s subjective “particularization” but also a
sizeable aspect of animal and human psychic living. In so far as I am unconscious, I
am not one—I, the other plant, grow with the other.
Here, at this very moment, vegetal democracy approximates Derrida’s democracy-
to-come, uncoupled from the sovereignty of the conscious subject who renders
decisions and is highly attentive to the non-totalizable multiplicity of the unconscious:
128 Politics of the One

“What is to be done with what is called the unconscious, and thus with the spaced
divisibility […] it imposes on the sovereign identity? How many voices, how many
votes [voix], to an unconscious? How are they to be counted?”38 If count them we
must, these votes and voices, or non-votes and non-voices (since the plant has no
voice, while the voice of the unconscious is, most often, not heard, not registered by
the ideal subjectivity that hears itself speak) will count for “not-one,” either more or
less than one. The “spaced divisibility” of that part of the psyche which is not in touch
with itself, does not feel itself, and, above all, does not feel itself feel, is the reminder
of its vegetal provenance, of its extended character overwhelming the ideality of the
ego, the intrusion of res extensa into the sphere of subjectivity. The one who votes is,
like a vegetal being, not one. The growing-with (and the growing-up) of democracy
hinges on fostering the capacity to live with the countless voices, and especially with
the dispersed multiplicity of non-voices and non-identities, that target us both from
within and from without: to fall apart in growing-with.

Bibliography
Aristotle, Physics (Harvard University Press, 1987).
Georges Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life. Trans. Stephanos Geroulantos and Daniela
Ginsburg (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne
Brault (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature: Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Part II.
Trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection
of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963).
Claude Lefort, L’Invention Démocratique: Les Limites de la Domination Totalitaire (Paris:
Fayard, 1981).
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
Dalsukh Malvania, Jayendra Soni, and Carl H. Potter (eds) The Encyclopaedia of Indian
Philosophies: Jain Philosophy, Vol. X, Part 2 (New Delhi: Motital Banarsidass, 2007).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France. Trans. Robert
Vallier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003).
Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural. Trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000) 86/109.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale
(New York: Vintage Books, 1968).
Novalis, Philosophical Writings. Ed. and trans. Margaret Mahoney Stoljar (Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 1997).
Plato, Timaeus, in: Plato, Dialogues, IX (Harvard University Press, 1975).
Anthony Trewavas, “Aspects of Plant Intelligence,” Annals of Botany, 92(1), 2003, 1–20.
 Vegetal Democracy 129

Notes
1 Cf. Anthony Trewavas, “Aspects of Plant Intelligence,” Annals of Botany, 92(1), 2003,
1–20.
2 Aristotle, Physics V, 1, 225b.
3 Aristotle, Physics III, 7, 207b.
4 The Russian rasteniye (plant) is similarly derived from the verbs rasti (to grow), rastit’
(to tend to a growing being, whether a plant or a child), and vyraschivat’ (to cultivate;
literally, “to grow out”).
5 On nature as destination, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the
Collège de France, trans. Robert Vallier (Northwestern University Press, 2003), 7.
6 On the plants as the “fifth element” in Jain philosophy, cf. Dalsukh Malvania,
Jayendra Soni, and Carl H. Potter (eds) The Encyclopaedia of Indian Philosophies: Jain
Philosophy, vol. X, part 2 (Motital Banarsidass, 2007), 165.
7 Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
8 Plato, Timeaus, 90a.
9 The case in point of such an alignment is, of course, Plato’s Republic.
10 See, for instance, PhysicsII, 1, 192b.
11 Aristotle, Physics I, 4, 187b.
12 Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 4.
13 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature: Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Part II,
trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford University Press, 2004), 303.
14 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne
(Stanford University Press, 2000), 86, 109.
15 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 86.
16 Aristotle, Physics II, 6, 197b.
17 G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a
Selection of Texts (Cambridge University Press, 1963), 255.
18 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 303.
19 Novalis, Philosophical Writings. Ed. and trans. Margaret Mahoney Stoljar (SUNY
Press, 1997), 80.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 44.
23 Ibid., 36.
24 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 322.
25 Ibid., 336.
26 Ibid., 337.
27 On res publica, see Novalis, Philosophical Writings, 17.
28 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 338.
29 Aristotle, De Plantis [attributed], 316b.
30 Cf. Aristotle, De Anima, 412a.
31 Claude Lefort, L’Invention Démocratique: Les Limites de la Domination Totalitaire
(Fayard, 1981), 286.
32 Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 7.
33 Georges Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, trans. Stephanos Geroulantos and Daniela
Ginsburg (Fordham University Press, 2008), 109.
130 Politics of the One

34 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale
(Vintage Books, 1968), 375.
35 To insist on the non-oppositional character of growth is not to ignore the realities of
invasive plant species, weeds, or parasitic plants, such as ivy, that sometimes hinder
the growth of other plants. Let us just register a simple objection to this objection that
believes to have found a set of empirical counter-examples to the purely affirmative
dimension of vegetal being. The proliferation of certain species at the expense of
others in the vegetal world is far from being a war of all against all, as it is sometimes
presented by means of a perverse anthropomorphic justification. Plants are opposed
to other plants no more than they are opposed to themselves—hence, not at all.
They welcome the other as much as they welcome themselves, others that they are.
Everything Nietzsche has to say on the vegetal form of “the will to power” and the
struggle for the place under the sun in the jungle should be read through the lens of
this quasi-principle.
36 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 350. Non-oppositional growth also announces itself
there where the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas bleeds into the political, in
the section of Totality and Infinity titled “Beyond the Face,” Au-delà du visage. The
centerpiece of this section overflowing the confines of the ethical face-to-face relation,
which itself exceeds the scope of ontology, is fecundity. Borrowed from vegetal life,
where it names one of the most crucial functions of “plant soul,” fecundity proves
that the I is not one, that it breaks free from itself and from the “Eleatic unity” of its
identity. “I am my child … In this ‘I am’ being is no longer Eleatic unity. In existing
itself there is a multiplicity and a transcendence. In this transcendence the I is not
swept away, since the son is not me; and yet I am my son. The fecundity of the I
is its very transcendence” [Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on
Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Duquesne University Press, 1969), 277].
37 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, 306.
38 Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne
Brault (Stanford University Press, 2005), 54.
 9

Dividuum and Condividuality*

Gerald Raunig

Which With for the Many? Which form, which “con-formity” can the concatenation
of singularities assume? How can this kind of “con-formity” be envisioned without
deriving it from the One or merging it into One? Which terminology is appropriate
for a specific form of association that insists on dividing and sharing? How can this
concatenation elude the sad figures of the victim, of guilt and duty? Finally, how do
social and conceptual singularities concatenate without becoming merely a smooth
lubricant for the transformations of capitalist modes of production?
For these questions, which play a central role in current post-operaist, post-Marxist,
and post-structuralist research, there is certainly no perfect and meta-historical
solution. Yet exactly such a solution seems to be promised by terms like those affiliated
with the conceptual family of the Latin communis or the German Gemeinschaft—even
in the form of a “challenged,” “unavowable,” “inoperative,” or “coming community”.
The problems of the terms affiliated with communitas/Gemeinschaft are still before
and beyond their resonance with totalitarian originary and ethnic communities
(Volksgemeinschaften), also before and beyond the problematic dichotomy of
individual and community: on the one hand they cling to uncritical, identitary
forms of composition, on the other they remain bound to the mode of reduction,
subtraction, diminishment. And even where both aspects are dialectically conjoined—
such as in the works of the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito1—they remain on this
side of communion. The entire conceptual line of the commune, the community, the
common, even communism itself, to the extent that dogma and avowal have been and
are practiced in its name, are thus cast in the dubious light of a double genealogy of
identitarianism and reduction.

Dilemmas of the community

In addition to the extensive literature on questions of community in the field of
communitarism theories, in the past thirty years a number of authors from the
leftist spectrum of political philosophy have also become interested in the concept
of community. With some delay in the reception, there has been an increase
132 Politics of the One

in international interest in books with titles containing the terms communauté,

communità, communitas, where these terms are further differentiated with various
adjectives. Jean-Luc Nancy’s (1983, 2001), Maurice Blanchot’s (1983), or Giorgio
Agamben’s (1990) works on the inoperable, the confronted, the unavowable or the
coming community are probably the most well known examples of this tendency.
There is a whole conglomeration of dilemmas here, which I would first like to
describe in the words of Jean-Luc Nancy, the French philosopher who wrote two small
but highly influential texts for this discourse with the “inoperable” and the “confronted
community.” In the second text, published in 2001, Nancy wrote several sentences criti-
cally distancing himself from his first text in 1983—and critically distancing himself
altogether from the use of the term communauté, community—that could hardly be
more clear: “Little by little I have preferred replacing it [the word ‘community’] with
the awkward expressions being-together, being-in-common, and finally being-with.
[…] I could see from all sides the dangers aroused by the use of the word community:
its resonance fully invincible and even bloated with substance and interiority; its
reference inevitably Christian (as in spiritual, fraternal, communal community); or
more broadly religious (as in Jewish community, community of prayers, community
of believers, or umma) as it is used to support an array of so-called ethnicities. All this
could only be a warning. It was clear that the emphasis placed on this necessary but
still insufficiently clarified concept was at least, at this time, on par with the revival of
communitarian trends that could be fascistic.”2 This is the clearly expressed distancing
of one of the authors who are still misunderstood as proponents of the philosophy of
community.
In the tradition of ancient Rome and the etymology of communitas, as well as in
the tradition of Christian community between communion and (early) Christian
community, there are two repeatedly recurring problematic aspects. One is well known
and has often been discussed, essentially summarized in Nancy’s criticism quoted
above: the community as a term for an identitary mode of closure, of protection and of
simultaneous exclusion, basis and ground for a heterosexual, patriarchal gender order
as well.
The other, less illuminated side of communitas relates to the question of the oblig-
atory bond, which binds singularities to the community. The Latin term communitas
is derived from the prefix con- for “with,” “together,” and the noun munus. Munus
generally means a gift. In Roman use, however, there are fewer indications of gifts in
the sense of a voluntary exchange, but rather of the obligation to pay duties, levies. This
“tax obligation” constitutes the community, just as it is the reason for the acceptance
of the individual into the community. For this reason, in her historical, etymological,
and political-theoretical analysis of munus and communitas, Isabell Lorey speaks of
a “logic of tribute, levy (Ab-gabe),” which in Roman law was by no means based on
equality.3
So even from a historical and etymological perspective, it could be said that the
diminishing aspect of the concept of community is an essential component of its
use. In this respect, the community can never be understood as a surplus, as a multi-
plying sharing/dividing, as solidarity and as gain at the same time. Rather, everything
 Dividuum and Condividuality 133

revolves around a logic of obligation and duty, of giving over and sometimes even of
giving oneself up. The munus is a minus. Community implies becoming less, in order
to become more.4
Against this background of two lines of problems, which permeate the entire family
of terms of the common, I would like to more closely examine the dilemmas of current
(leftist) community discourses.
First dilemma: vagueness. Agamben’s Communità che viene (1990),5 “the coming
community,” is a small book that detaches somewhat eclectic fragments from the
history of philosophy and actually concerns itself very little with community. Rather,
it is what is to come that is at the center, what is coming, what should come. The
coming being,6 the coming politics,7, a coming world.8 Specifically in relation to the
latter, Agamben refers to Walter Benjamin’s messianism: In the world to come, as
Agamben quotes Benjamin, “everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our
room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too
it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we
will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.” This is also the
starting point for Agamben, when he speaks of the coming, the small difference, the
“whatever.” Somewhat unexpectedly and breaking with the philosophical ductus of
the book, Agamben describes coming politics as a struggle between the state and the
non-state, or, more precisely, as the “insurmountable disjunction between whatever
singularities and the State organization.” Yet alongside this claim of the messianic-
coming as overcoming the state apparatus of protective identity and obligatory social
bond, the concept of the coming community remains strangely unclear and without
evidence. This also makes it open to all possible romantic-affirmative interpretations
and reinforces the emergence of a much too vague appeal to that which is coming
or should come, without giving that which is to come a conceptually clearer formu-
lation—which is also wholly opposite to the much clearer right-wing attempts to
occupy the concept of the community (I will come back to this later).
Second dilemma: minus. In 1983 Maurice Blanchot,9 in dialogue with Jean-Luc
Nancy, set a critical reflection on the work of his friend Georges Bataille in motion.
Starting from Bataille’s also quite problematical attempts to deploy concrete commu-
nities in the 1940s, Blanchot describes the problem of the community that is absorbed
“in its communion”,10 but also the search for anti-identitarian forms of concatenating
singularities, following the “pell-mell of associated differences.”11 He writes: “They
are side by side, and that contiguity, passing through every form of empty intimacy,
preserves them from playing the comedy of a ‘fusional or communional’ under-
standing.”12 Blanchot thus recognizes the necessity of naming the paradoxical bond of
singularities in their disconnectedness, instead of the suspension of differences into
a higher and universal unity. However—and there is a resonance with the figure of
the munus as minus here—he can only understand this bond as a negative one. This
is why there is so much in his writing about insufficiency, incompleteness, impossi-
bility, absence, unrepresentability, inadequacy, unavowability. The “abandonment,” the
“sacrifice” is needed, which first “founds the community.”13 Traces of the etymological
genealogy of communitas are all too evident here. The community of the munus can
134 Politics of the One

only be understood as levy and surrender, as duty and obligation, as debt and indebt-
edness. These figures of deficiency and diminishment culminate explicitly in Bataille’s
and Blanchot’s undoubtedly elegant formulation of the “negative community” as a
“community of those who have no community.”14
Third dilemma: appropriation. It is not first in Nancy’s later self-criticism, but
already in Blanchot’s writing from 1983 that there is an implicit warning, a distancing,
a response to the uncritical affirmation of the community. However, this warning, this
cautious stance, did not protect Blanchot at all from appropriation by a completely
different concept of community, which in turn ties into the fascist-totalitarian figure
of the “ethnic community,” the “Volksgemeinschaft.” It is not without irony that specifi-
cally Blanchot’s text The Unavowable Community has been transposed into German by
a conservative right-wing radical thinker of the former “New Right.” Gerd Bergfleth,
who translated Blanchot’s text for the Berlin publishing company Matthes & Seitz,15
is infamous for his anti-Semitic and right-wing nationalist rants. Although such
explicitly right-wing tones are not found directly in the translation of Blanchot’s text,
it could be interesting to undertake a closer linguistic examination of the German
text in comparison with the original French. What is glaringly obvious in our context,
however, is the appropriation and turning of Blanchot by his translator in a quite
obvious procedure. Bergfleth appends a roughly 70-page commentary to the 90 pages
of the Blanchot text. This commentary is both a critique and a misappropriation. It is
a misappropriation to the extent that the well-known text by a prominent author is not
only misused as a podium for a new, clearly right-wing connotation of the community
concept, but also in that the personal and theoretical relationship between Blanchot
and Bataille is transformed into a mumbling amalgam of “lonely commonality” and
the “sublime idea of the passion of death.” It is a critique to the extent that Bergfleth
can only grasp Blanchot’s concept of community as a “caricature of community” and
launches a general polemic against deconstruction. In Bergfleth’s terms: “One divests
the community work of all meaning and purpose and continues to operate until the
patient gives up his ghost.”16 In a certain sense, this quotation has the advantage of
clarity. In fact, giving up every “community work” is indeed an effect of the leftist
debates on community, but not one to be regretted, but rather welcomed.

Gilbert de la Porrée and the invention of the dividuum

With the first of my initial questions, I chose a particular allusion. “Which With for the
Many?” is a variation of a theological–philosophical debate which has been relevant
since antiquity and especially became a central debate in the Scholastic discourses of
the Middle Ages. The question of the “With for the many” alludes not only to the con-
in communitas, and also not only to the assumption of the Heideggerian “being-with”
through Jean-Luc Nancy, but also and especially to the old question of the relation
between the one and the many. Naturally there is a difference between the question
of the one for the many and that of the With. The alternative, the question of whether
the many unfolds, multiplies from the one or conversely strives for the one, following
 Dividuum and Condividuality 135

the motto e pluribus unum, can seemingly also be played through with the With and
the many, but as will become implicitly evident in the following, it must undergo
a more fundamental critique. In order to develop this difference more clearly and
finally arrive at a new terminology of the “With for the many,” it will be necessary
in the following to draw a broader arc which leads us deeper into the theological-
philosophical debates of the High Middle Ages.
A terminological invention is found with a very early exponent of the medieval
discussion of the one and the many which is crucial for the conceptualization of my
text. This terminological invention, which has been underestimated for centuries even
up to the present and almost remained undiscovered, is due to an equally underesti-
mated outsider in the theological discourses of the early Scholastic period. Gilbert de
la Porrée (Gilbertus Porretanus, ca. 1080–1155), bishop of Poitiers, was a theologian,
logician and language theorist in the first half of the twelfth century.17 He developed
a specific terminology oriented to the Aristotelian theory of categories, but gained
in conceptual originality in the transfer of Greek philosophy to early Scholastic
theology. Gilbert’s “doctrine” expanded through the influence of his “pupils” around
the mid-twelfth century into a small geography of aftereffects; like most of the theolo-
gians of the early Scholastic era, however, Gilbert and his work were eclipsed by the
dominance of Thomas Aquinas and the writings of high Scholasticism.18
However, Gilbert was also hounded by theological and ecclesiastical conflicts
throughout his life, which also limited his impact. At the urging of Bernard de
Clairvaux, he was accused of heresy before the papal consistory of Paris in 1147 and
a further consistory following the synod of Reims in 1148. Unlike his contemporary
Abelard, however, who was accused by Bernard in 1141 and sentenced to monastery
arrest and lifelong silence, Gilbert managed to escape condemnation throughout his
lifetime.
A substantial reason for this non-condemnation was probably to be found in
Gilbert’s manifold caution. At first, Gilbert’s language was hard to understand even
for the scholars of his day, especially due to the strictly logical ductus of his work
that was unfamiliar to his contemporaries. In addition, Gilbert authored no explicitly
independent writings. He worked primarily in spoken form through sermons and
lectures. In written form he made use of the apparently servile and marginal genre
of the commentary, specifically as a commentator of the Neoplatonist and Aristotle
translator of late antiquity, Boethius, from the early sixth century. The genre of the
commentary allowed Gilbert to make use of the authority of the church father he was
explicating, in order to develop his own theory from this and to go far beyond the text
upon which his commentary was based.
In the early twelfth century, when seemingly purely theological questions were the
issue, such as the unity of the trinity or Christology, these were always very concrete
questions about the legitimation and questioning of relations of dominance. Exactly
these dangerous border areas were also the spaces of operation for Gilbert’s theoretical
work. His differentiation of singularity, individual, and person is only to be under-
stood against the background of the early Scholastic debates about the concept of
the person in the trinity and the traps of the relevant discourses. This game of truth
136 Politics of the One

comprised finely chiseled formulations, which were intended to avoid the abysses of
“dualism” and “pantheism,” to actively distance themselves from heretical genealogies
and the fine categorizations of heretical illusions.
Before proceeding to the terminology that is central to our question of the With
for the many, I must explain several peculiarities of Gilbert’s vocabulary and his early
Scholastic context. To understand his theoretical positions, one of Gilbert’s funda-
mental decisions must first be emphasized, namely the sharp separation of the realms
of two forms of being, which he attributes to different modes of observation: the
methodical distinction of theologicae rationes and naturalium rationes corresponds to
a divine being and a natural being. According to Gilbert, observations of the divine
sphere and of nature are completely separate from one another and cannot be joined
in any way through analogies. Mixing the two rationes, making them communicate,
would be a heretical deception.
Based on this sharp separation, another distinction is significant for Gilbert, namely
that between quo est, “through which something is,” and quod est, “what something is.”
This distinction applies in both the divine and the natural realm, but different terms
follow from it in the respective realms. For the naturalium rationes, Gilbert uses a
term that is new in this meaning: he calls the quo est subsistence (subsistentia),19 the
quod est that which subsists (subsistens). In contrast to the more commonplace pair
in theology, substance and accident, the relation between subsistence and that which
subsists is not hierarchically striated, but is instead a relationship of mutual exchange.
That which subsists does not first evolve from subsistence, but is co-emergent.
Therefore, it emerges neither through concretion out of something abstract, nor as a
multiplication from a One. Although that which subsists is only “through something,”
it is singular at the same time, and “its” subsistence (that through which it is) is also
singular. Every instance of what subsists has its singular subsistence.
In the theologicae rationes, however, Gilbert runs into substantial linguistic and
theological difficulties. Here the quo est is called essence (essentia); for the quod est
Gilbert only once uses the term essens, in analogy to the terms from the natural realm.
Gilbert usually changes over to a different line of terminology, designating the quo
est of the divine essence as divinitas (divinity), the quod est of the trinity as three—
numerically distinguished—persons of the one deus. Here the quo est thus remains
an absolute unity, whereas the quod est assumes an unusual, namely divine form
of multiplicity. Gilbert is experimenting here on shaky ground: the differentiation
between divine essence and God is by itself sufficient grounds for suspicion, because
the divine essence must be thought as a single, simple, unique unity, as unum, simplex,
singulare. According to conventional interpretation, multiplicity belongs in the natural
and creaturely realm. God and the world are parted in the opposition between unity
and multiplicity.
What probably appeared even more suspicious to the guardians of dogma affil-
iated with Bernard de Clairvaux (especially the Augustinian line of interpreting the
trinity) was the fundamental separation between the divine and the natural realms.
For Gilbert there can be no encounter, no mediation between the two realms. He
envisions separation and opposition dialectically and attempts to develop exemplary
 Dividuum and Condividuality 137

derivations in several places—for instance in his creation theory—and thus to avoid

the condemnation of dualism. Nevertheless, the heavy emphasis on the opposition,
the differentness of the realms of being, remains obvious. Since the two realms cannot
be mediated in any way, multiplicity cannot emerge, develop from unity, nor can there
be any correlation or analogy between the two realms.
The radical multiplicity of singular subsistences and that which subsists is grounded
in itself, it needs no divine essence. Gilbert’s world needs neither God nor trinity. What
Bernard found sufficiently suspicious for an accusal provides us with an opportunity
to envision the realm of the natural in a strictly immanent way, multiplicity without
the burden of unity, without God and also without the trinity.
Gilbert’s most consequential invention for the history of philosophy was the differ-
entiation of singularity, individuality, and personality.20 In the development of the
doctrine of the trinity, a threefold step was necessary, which leads from Augustine
through Boethius to Gilbert and which had very different effects on the view of the
natural realm outside theology as well. For Augustine the concept of the personality,
the three personae of the divine essence, was still the sole center. Augustine draws
consequences of the doctrine of the trinity for the natural realm through the analogy
between God and man, thus working into anthropological and psychological realms.
For Boethius individuality comes into play, yet the terms of the singular and the
individual are still used congruently. It is in Gilbert’s commentaries on Boethius
that the term of singularity gains a different and further area of application than that
of individuality. In the full differentiation of the three terms, singularity becomes
the terminological starting point with Gilbert which describes the individual in its
broadest expansion. Gilbert writes in his Boethius commentary:
Let us distinguish: Depending on the point of view, a property of something
is called “singular”, “individual” or “personal”. For although every individual is
singular, and every person is singular and individual, not every singularity is an
individual, and not every singularity or every individual is a person.21

This differentiation results in a distinction along various extensions: the smallest

extension is attributed to the personality, the middle extension to individuality, the
greatest to singularity. Yet this differentiation of extensions does not necessarily corre-
spond to a hierarchization either, nor in any way to relationships of unification or the
unfolding of the one from the other. This is a distinction at the level of terminological
extension: the individual comprises a broader area than the person; singularity in turn
comprises individuality and personality and more than that.
An interesting precondition for Gilbert’s thinking is that none of the three terms
is necessarily related solely to the human being. In his stringently logical method,
Gilbert does not follow Boethius’s extremely influential constriction, according to
which a person is the indivisible substance only of rational nature (natura rationa-
bilis), which applies to God, to the human being, and at most to angels as well. With
his concept of the persona, Gilbert neither separates between humans as rational
beings and animals or things, nor does the term differentiate—as in the meaning from
138 Politics of the One

antiquity—human beings from one another, as those that are persons sui iuris and
others (such as women, children, slaves, who could be categorized as things according
patriarchal Roman law). Without following this specific line of exclusion, Gilbert’s
concept of the person is still much smaller in its extension than that of individuality
or singularity. For Gilbert, persona is quite generally the name of a part of that which
subsists that are individuals. In the natural realm, Gilbert no longer pursues this line of
personality, as important as it is in the divine realm for explaining the trinity; instead
he concentrates on the differentiation of the two further extensions, individuality and
singularity.
Individuality vertically orders all the subsistences found in or on a single thing into
a whole. What is specific about this “individual” mode of ordering singularity is that
all singular substances of a thing are to be united precisely according to the formation
in which it is concretized. At the same time, individuality truncates the connection
with other conforming singularities in other things. The crucial components of
individuality are thus the exclusion of conformity, the truncation of connection, hence
becoming-dissimilar, finally wholeness.
However, there is also another mode of ordering singularity, a horizontal mode,
which collects singular elements without consideration of their belonging to an
individual formation. This form of collecting is not a unification, but traverses the
realms of individual things, collecting all subsistences that belong together according
to their conformity. For this second, horizontal or transversal mode, there is a term
as well, which—as it seems to me—holds an astonishing potential for the further
development of our question about the concatenation of singularities. It is not the
community, society, or another collective term that is contrasted here with the
individual, but rather—linguistically quite obvious—the dividuum.
The dividuum and dividuality describe a non-individual singularity, which is
specifically not distinguished by the properties of individuality, in other words
wholeness and dissimilarity. The Latin word dividuum appears repeatedly in the
meanings “divided, separated, distributed” and “separable, divisible” throughout
Roman antiquity, from Plautus and Cicero to Horace, but only as a rarely used and
weak term. The use of the term in late antiquity and the Middle Ages is similar, so
that the terminologically significant “invention” of the dividuum can certainly be
attributed to Gilbert. In the central relevant passage, Gilbert writes:
In the realm of natural observations, everything that is, exists through something
else than what it is itself. And because that, through which something is
[subsistence], is singular, that through which something is [that which subsists], is
also singular. Numeric multiples can no more be something One without number,
than they can be through a singular. However, numerically distinct singularities
are often conform, in keeping with their subsistences. Therefore, not only the
subsisting, but also conforming subsistences are unum dividuum. And therefore,
no conforming subsistence is an individual. If the dividuum makes up similarity,
it follows then that the individuum makes up dissimilarity.22
 Dividuum and Condividuality 139

These rather difficult statements contain an entire theory of dividuum in a nutshell.

First of all, it can be stated that even if the individual was the starting point for our
considerations of the dividuum, the dividuum logically and ontologically precedes the
individuum. Singularities are primarily dividual, the individual develops as a special,
vertical, totalizing differentiation of singularity. To this extent, the dividuum is to be
understood at least linguistically and logically, if not chronologically, as pre-individual.
Therefore, it probably makes more sense to reverse our path from the person through
the individual to singularity and to consider the dividuum at the level of the broadest
expansion as being parallel, in a certain sense, to the concept of singularity.
What are the conceptual components of the dividuum?
1. Separatedness. Dividuality means literally, first of all, “separatedness,” “being
divided,” or “separability” and “divisibility.” Yet even in this narrower sense of the
word, there is also a connotation of “dispersedness” and “dispersion.” This implies
an extension, a movement, a nomadic distribution moving through various
individual things. This form of distribution, extension, and dispersion is not to be
understood as a generalization. Dividuality is something that is neither individual
nor personal, and yet it is also no universal and no ground. The dividuum does
not stand one-sidedly as the general opposite of the individual, but is one of
Gilbert’s terms that breaks through the dichotomy of the individual and the
general, introducing a new dimension, in which that which something is, and
that through which it is, are placed in relation to one another.
2. Similarity. If the dividuum is determined by separatedness, how can the
non-universal, transversal function of dividuality be understood? In a
specific form of the correlation of these seeming opposites, separatedness and
transversality, and in the relation of similarities and conformities.23 The individual
is a whole, a one, something not arbitrarily composed. It is something of its
own, it has—as Gilbert emphasizes—the property of dissimilitudo, it evinces no
similarity. In contrast, that which literally makes up the dividuum is its second
conceptual component: similarity (similitudo). Whereas individuality, and with
it dissimilarity, emphasizes differentness, being set apart from everything else,
the dividual singularity is always one among others. The dividuum thus has one
component or multiple components, which constitute it as something separable
and connect it at the same time with other dividuals that are similar in their
components. Here it is a matter of similarities, not identities, specifically in
relation to only some components.
3. Con-formity. As the Gilbert quotation describes, singularities (as numerically
distinct) share their forms with other singularities, thus first becoming dividual.
Unum dividuum is then both subsistence and that which subsists: that which
is and that through which what subsists is not only something, but is also
“conform.” Conformity is not to be understood in today’s usage as a moral term
of compliance, but rather as con-formity, as the fact that not only subsistences
but also that which subsists share their form with others. Whereas the concept
140 Politics of the One

of individuality tends toward constructing the self and others as secluded,

dividual singularity emphasizes the plurality and the con-formity of all that is,
thus also openness for intercourse and concatenation. The dividuum traverses
various single things or beings according to their similar properties. Conformitas,
conformity does not imply sameness, not total congruency or compliance, but
rather specific correspondence in form, the sharing of formal components. This
con-formity that is simultaneously multi-formity, constitutes the divisible as
unum dividuum.

Condivision, condividuality, condividuals

The dividual thus means the specific form of the singular many as what is separable
and similar/con-form. This brings us somewhat closer to the question of the With
for the Many, but still not close enough. To put it in a (post-)Marxist way: we still
find ourselves in the terrain of the “technical composition” of the multitude. The
dividual designates an aspect of social reality, but this aspect is not to be understood
as a meta-historical constant. Rather, there are indications that the term developed in
early Scholasticism today in post-Fordist modes of production becomes determinant
for the technical composition, as the thoroughly ambivalent becoming-dividual of
social relations.24 Which perspective of the dangerous proliferations of the dividual
is assumed is a matter of situativity—whether the concept of the dividual is used
to describe the most recent capitalist transformations or as a component of social
struggles that—depending on political and theoretical preferences—precede capitalist
modes of production or wrestle with them hand to hand.
In this ambivalent high of dividualism between new forms of machinic subser-
vience and the search for new weapons, the question of an offensive concatenation and
its terminologies appears all the more urgent. Whereas the components of multitude
and singularity may seem to be sufficiently described by the dividual, despite the
aspect of con-formity, there is still something missing on the side of the “With,” of
concatenation, of political articulation and organization, of the “political composition”
of the multitude.25 It is only when the With is added that a term for the concatenation
of singularities emerges which not only names their exchange, their mutual reference,
their intercourse with one another, but also implements it. The word for this that I
suggest as a neologism is con-division. In con-division, the dividual component, the
separation does not indicate a surrender, a reduction, a sacrifice, but rather the possi-
bility of an addition, a plus. A community does not first have to emerge in order to
achieve the re-composition of previously separated individuals: the concatenation and
the dividuality of singularities are co-emergent as the con-dividuality of condividuals.
 Dividuum and Condividuality 141

Bibliography
Maurice Blanchot, Die uneingestehbare Gemeinschaft (Berlin: Mattes & Seitz, 2007).
Roberto Esposito, Communitas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Harvard University Press, 2009).
Nikolaus M. Häring, The Commentaries on Boethius by Gilbert of Poitiers (Toronto:
Ponitifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1966).
Isabell Lorey, Figuren des Immunen (Zürich/Berlin: Diaphanes, 2011).
Jean-Luc Nancy, Die kommende Gemeinschaft (Berlin: Merve, 2003).
—“The Confronted Community.” In Andrew J. Mitchell and Jason Kemp Winfree (eds)
The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2009).
August Neander, Allgemeine Geschichte der christlichen Religion und Kirche, vol. 10
(Gotha: Perthes, 1845).
Lauge Olaf Nielsen, Theology and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Gilbert
Porreta’s Thinking and the Theological Expositions of the Doctrine of the Incarnation
during the Period 1130–1180 (Leiden: Brill, 1982).
Martin Schmidt, Gottheit und Trinität (Basel: Verlag für Recht und Gesellschaft, 1956).
Dieter Teichert, Personen und Identitäten (Berlin and New York: Gruyter, 2000)

Notes
* This text, translated from German by Aileen Derieg, is based on outlines for a book
on dividuum and condividuality. I am grateful to Nikolaus Linder and Isabell Lorey
for essential remarks and discussions.
1 Cf. especially Roberto Esposito, Communitas (Stanford University Press, 2009).
2 Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Confronted Community,” in Andrew J. Mitchell and
Jason Kemp Winfree (eds) The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and
Communication (State University of New York Press, 2009), 24–5.
3 See the detailed explanations in Isabell Lorey, Figuren des Immunen (Diaphanes,
2011).
4 Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s approaches in Commonwealth (Harvard
University Press, 2009) could be understood as an answer to the problem of the
munus as minus, contrary to the etymological line of the common. As the two
authors write in the introduction, on the one hand the common is the name for “the
common wealth of the material world—the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and
all nature’s bounty—which in classical European political texts is often claimed to be
the inheritance of humanity as a whole.” On the other hand, and this is the aspect
that Hardt and Negri emphasize, the common encompasses “all those results of social
production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as
knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth” (VIII). In this second
view, the common means the practices of interaction, of care, of living together in
a common world. These are practices that do not allow for understanding human
beings as separate from nature, neither in the logic of exploitation nor in that of
protection. This is where a conceptual tie is found to the line of the commons, which
allows for understanding the sharing of the common not as a becoming-less, but
142 Politics of the One

rather as an excess. Nevertheless, I remain skeptical in this case as well: what is still
missing in the common—as in the entire family of concepts of communitas—is the
aspect of the many, of their division and their singularity. The conceptual composition
and connection between common and multitude is needed to express sharing and
division, in order to subvert the identitary and reductive turn of the commune.
5 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
6 Ibid., I.
7 Ibid., XIX.
8 Ibid., XIII.
9 Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community (Station Hill Press, 1988).
10 Ibid., 7.
11 Ibid., 6.
12 Ibid., 49.
13 Ibid., 15.
14 Ibid., 24.
15 Maurice Blanchot, Die uneingestehbare Gemeinschaft (Mattes & Seitz, 2007).
16 Ibid., 172.
17 For Gilbert’s bio-bibliography, cf. Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie
1, 775; Lexikon des Mittelalters IV, 1449f. For a more extensive introduction to
Gilbert’s texts and contexts, cf. Lauge Olaf Nielsen, Theology and Philosophy in the
Twelfth Century: A Study of Gilbert Porreta’s Thinking and the Theological Expositions
of the Doctrine of the Incarnation during the Period 1130–1180 (Brill, 1982), especially
25ff. For a more exact interpretation of Gilbert’s commentaries on Boethius, cf. Martin
Schmidt, Gottheit und Trinität (Verlag für Recht und Gesellschaft, 1956).
18 His controversial positions in ecclesiastical politics and his complex, sometimes
rather dark argumentation gave Gilbert a somewhat objectionable reputation, which
predominated into the nineteenth century (and beyond): the Allgemeine Geschichte
der christlichen Religion und Kirche by August Neander still described him in 1845
as a “man of unclear, confused, abstruse manner of depiction” (August Neander,
Allgemeine Geschichte der christlichen Religion und Kirche, vol. 10 (Perthes, 1845),
899).
19 The term subsistence (late Latin for “something remaining in existence”) is basically
the same as, for instance, in sustainable living: something that is self-sufficient
through and for itself.
20 Cf. Dieter Teichert, Personen und Identitäten (Gruyter, 2000), esp. 117–19.
21 Gilbert of Poitiers, De Trinitate (quoted below as “DTrin”), I,5,22: distinguamus:
scilicet quod alicuius proprietas alia ratione ‘singularis’, alia ‘individua’, alia ‘personalis’
vocatur. Quamvis enim quicquid est individuum, est singulare—et quicquid est persona,
est singulare et individuum—non tamen omne singulare est individuum. Nec omne
singulare vel individuum est persona. I am using the text of Gilbert’s commentary
on Boethius’s De Trinitate as published in Nikolaus M. Häring, The Commentaries
on Boethius by Gilbert of Poitiers (Ponitifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1966),
62–157.
22 DTrin I,5,23-24: In naturalibus enim quicquid est, alio, quam ipsum sit, aliquid est. Et
quoniam id, quo est aliquid, singulare est, id quoque, quod eo est aliquid, singulare est.
Nam plura numero sicut uno singulari non sunt aliquid ita unum aliquid sine numero
esse non possunt. Itaque singularitate eius, quo est, singulare est etiam id quod eo
aliquid est. Sepe autem diversa numero singularia secundum aliqua eorum, quibus sunt,
 Dividuum and Condividuality 143

conformia sunt. Ideoque non modo illa, que sunt, verum etiam illa, quibus conformia
sunt, unum dividuum sunt. Ac per hoc neutrum illorum, quibus conformia sunt illa que
sunt, individuum est. Si enim dividuum facit similitudo, consequens est, ut individuum
faciat dissimilitudo.
23 On this, see also Dtrin I,1,12 on the mutual conditionedness of diversity and
conformity.
24 For a cautious attempt in this direction, cf. the first pages of my text “Dividual Desire”,
http://www.skor.nl/artefact-4825-nl.html (accessed 9 June 2012).
25 In Hardt’s and Negri’s Commonwealth, the concept of the common is also intended
to stand in for this—naturally not simply as one side of the dualism of the natural
development of the multitude and voluntarist Leninism, as some critics of Negri/
Hardt erroneously presume. Alongside the two conventional basic aspects of the
common as explained in the introduction, a third aspect can be recognized in
the course of the book as a whole, which exactly thematizes our question of the
concatenation of singular currents: the common as the self-organization of social
relations (176). Self-organization here does not mean a simple empirical fact nor
a natural automatism, but rather the political project of instituting the common.
This instituting of the common implies on the one hand that the common cannot
be understood as a being-common, but rather only as a becoming-common, as the
production of the common. And it also implies that the common and singularities are
co-emergent, not only compatible, but mutually constitutive (124f.).
 Part IV

Unity of the World

 10

The One: Composition or Event?

For a Politics of Becoming

Boyan Manchev

In the presentation of the conference “Politics of the One” (Saint Petersburg, April 4–5
2010) we could read the following statement:
Unity of the world is in the process of practical realization—and this is why
it reappears as a problem. Some suggest a post-metaphysical abandonment
of the one in favor of the multiple: the fulfillment of unity would lead to the
overcoming of the one. Some, on the contrary, suggest that the true unity requires
an irreducible singularity: the singular one (understood, this time, ontologically
and not as exception) should rise against the one-as-a-form. Some, like Jean-Luc
Nancy, propose a synthesis (“being singular plural”).

My first question then would be: what is the relation between the notions of unity
(“Unity of the world is in the process of practical realization”) and the One? Can it be
conceptually articulated? Are they synonymous?
Second question: What does this mean, unity of the world?
The question of the One could not be other than the question of Being (or, of
course, of the Supreme Being): the formulation of our problem suggests a radical
ontological turn. Therefore one preliminary but fundamental question needs to be
formulated: the question of the relation between the One (or Being) and politics.
Do we need ontological categories (and the first among them, the One) when
trying to remobilize the concept of politics? For the moment, let me only express
my initial intuition: re-establishing the relation between ontology and politics—an
operation radically different from re-affirming the ontopolitical paradigm, stabilized
in Plato’s line—seems to be a burning critical demand for contemporary philosophy.
Articulating in a new way the major categories necessary for thinking politics and
the political subject—singularity, universality, potentiality, praxis, labor, resistance,
struggle, event, transformation, the common, justice, the world—means nothing less
than re-opening their ontological potential.
148 Politics of the One

Politics of the One as politics of being

Thus, the question of the relation between the fundamental ontological concepts of
world and being is inevitably at stake. Let me take a contemporary example. It might
seem surprising that a virulent anti-Heideggerian like Badiou continues to re-enact
today, several decades after Heidegger, the opposition between being and world(s). He
opposes the concept of the One—the concept of Being—to the concept of becoming,
which, generally speaking, would be the concept of the world(s) (Parmenides stands
up once more against Heraclites). Badiou consequently was excluding movement and
change from the region of the One until Logiques des mondes, where he started to
elaborate systematically the connection between the categories of movement, change,
and Event—which makes it possible indeed to identify what Badiou calls “worlds”
as the site of becoming. From this point of view, a politics of transformation would
not be possible in the ontological region of Being. In the Badiousian perspective, a
politics related to the subject would be of the order of the exception of Event, a regime
radically heterogeneous to the regime of Being.
If the Politics of the One equals the Politics of Being, what could we say about
the Politics of the World? Even if the One could be seen as a concept for the world:
the world, is it only a concept? The world—is it only the physical substratum of the
world—the “Earth,” or it is an ideal noetic sphere? Is the idea which moves the world
from inside transcendent to the world? Is the sense of the world always transcendent
to the world?
We could make the following suggestion in order to approach possible answers to
this series of fundamental questions by establishing a parallel between the dichotomy
being/world and a new dichotomy, the dichotomy I introduced in the beginning:
one/unity. If the One is the name of the Being which is Parmenidean—immobile
and univocal, then the world would be the place of unity—dynamic and plurivocal:
according to the same statement of the Saint Petersburg conference, unity is “in the
process of practical realization.” I would suggest radicalizing this thesis by saying: the
unity of the world is only possible through the process of its becoming. The world’s only
“unity” is its becoming, which is to be thought always as the multiple becoming of its
multiple modes. The question of unity is a question of becoming.
And since the One cannot be thought as substance or subject any longer, we have
to face the demand to think of it as either a force (or a sense) of the world, which is
transcendent to the world, or as a force, immanent to the world—as either an Event
or a construction—the One as the becoming-world of the world. In other words, if
we step beyond the Hegelian–Heideggerian duality of Being and its excess, which
is still at stake in Badiou, we can approach the One as the becoming itself. This is
the Heraclitean task before philosophy today, and this conceptual transformation is
political in itself.
 The One 149

Politics of the world as politics of becoming

Of course, Marx is the one who rehabilitated in modernity the idea of becoming
or of transformation as immanent to the world: he is the one who tried to think
becoming without its fulfillment, which is also its excess—without the Hegelian
Absolute Spirit, i.e. the becoming of the world without the radical event which would
interrupt the immanence of the world in order to posit it as a transcendent force
of becoming: becoming without telos, without Ziel. Of course, there are traces of
messianic logic in Marx—but this should be the matter of another discussion. At any
event, Marx’s immanence of the world is not the Spinozist substance anymore. It is a
modern concept, a concept implying the forces of history, that is to say, presuming
Man as a finite mode of the praxis of transformation of the world. It also posits the
immanence of the world—the movement of history—as polemic, thus rediscovering
the Heraclitean concept of the world as the polemical, critical—dividing, judging—
force of fire. Therefore, as a matter of transformationist praxis, since its Modern
origins, the world is a political concept.
Nevertheless, the Modern concept of transformation of the world, and Marx’s
in particular, is not only an emancipatory one. The modern concept of the world as
a site of transformation, as becoming, is ambiguous, is double-sided. If we wish to
find a way out from the dead end of the current situation, the situation which I call
“post-transformationist” and which is paradoxically the situation of the alteration of
“our” world, we urgently need to shed more light on the obscure side of the Modern
concept of world.1 For the deduction of a concept of the world equals its expulsion, its
rejection-as-substratum: the scission of world into the substratum and concept—the
raw mass of the Earth and the “regulative” concept of the world as a directive horizon of
the becoming-world of the world. Thus, the world is originally split into two. Having an
idea of the world means having posited (i.e. excluded—negated) a substratum: having
negated the materiality of the world. But the world is not the expulsed substratum
either: it is not a rejected abject, a formless mass or an idealless void. The world-as-
substratum, the negativity of the world, is fiction itself: it takes place only with the
constitutive split, with the raising of the concept of world. This means that being and
world are not radically heterogeneous categories. It is impossible to make a distinction
between ontological and phenomenal world: they are two sides of the same coin.
Hence the origin of the autonomous concept of the world (the “modern” concept,
including its most influential and radical version, the Marxist one) is ambiguous.
Positing the world as immanent transformation of the world means simultaneously
two things: on the one hand that the world is becoming, i.e. that the world is not
given, that it is not a substance, that it is making itself world; on the other hand, this
also supposes that the concept of the world is a prospective concept, it demands the
transformation of the world-substratum, through which alone the world becomes
a world. This is the idea of a paradoxical poïetic praxis, which Marx borrowed in
order to develop further the route of the Romantics rather than of Hegel. Such is the
modern imperative of the praxis of transformation: the world is only thinkable as a
150 Politics of the One

world in becoming, that is to say as a world-to-be-transformed and in transformation.

Thus becoming-world through the poïetic praxis of man is only possible through the
transformation of the substratum of the world: through the exploitation of nature,
offered “gratis” (according to Joseph Dietzgen’s expression criticized by Benjamin in
his On the concept of history). Thus, liberation of labor, through labor and perhaps at
the end from labor (resulting in Kojevian post-Marxist inoperativity), which equals the
creation of the world, equals also the negation if not the annihilation of nature—of the
world-substratum. The substratum having to be negated, annihilated, is the nihil from
which the world is made: ex nihilo fit ens creatum. Therefore, annihilation of nature
appears as the transcendental structural condition of the becoming-world of the
world: or, to put it in a more radical fashion—of the con-sumption of world (according
to the conceptual insight of Frédéric Neyrat2). Hence consumption 5 con-sommation
of world. The transformation of the world means the becoming-world of the world (or
the creation of the world), but the paradox is that the world becomes (“today”) only in
the form of “the end of the world.” Or, can the “unity of the world” only be understood
in an eschatological way? Is the end of the world—the con-sumption of world—the
ultimate name of the becoming of the world?
In fact, this paradox has a profound structural determination: catastrophic change
corresponds to the messianic eschatology necessary for establishing the double regime
of being—the split of being and its excess, common to the philosophical systems of
Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. The structural matrix of the radical transformation of the
world, i.e. of the radical modern philosophical concept of the event, is the revolu-
tionary event.3 From this point of view, (the philosophy of) the politics of event,
which is still dominant today in radical political philosophy, is profoundly ambiguous:
the radical transformation of the world, the revolutionary event concerns first and
only the prospective dimension of the world but neglects the immanent force of the
world, the force of its becoming. We could suppose that Nietzsche’s will to power or
Bergson’s life were the most influential conceptual attempts to “inject” some active,
“prospective” potential into the immanence of the world—but the risk of the substan-
tialization of these immanent forces immediately made problematic these alternatives
to the Hegelian–Marxist schema of becoming.
Yet, is it possible to avoid the messianic trap of the paradigm of the event? Even
if the echoes of political ontotheologies are still coming to us in the shape of the
fetishization of radical political events, or as the eventful void of the end of history or
politics, we know it today: political ontotheology is over. There is no pro-ject for the
world any longer, or for its transformation. The One is gone, the “One” is not there yet,
and perhaps it will never (be)come. Who/what is the One? No-One? Or every-one?

The end of the world: the post-transformationist condition

The theoretical questions formulated until now have their turn to respond, and
urgently so, to the critical demand of actuality. The condition we live in is that of
 The One 151

a radical transformation—of absorption not only of the potentiality of life but also
of the potential for resistance and transformation of political subjects. The decisive
question in this situation of constitutive transformation appears today in the following
way: how to persist in the totalizing flow, in the biopolitical and techno-esthetical
fluidity, how to resist the absorption of the transformability of life without abolishing
the possibility for emerging of the event-subject? How to liberate the tekhno-aisthetic
matter of world in order to re-open the potentiality for transformation: the force of
the becoming-world of the world?
For the question of the becoming-One as becoming multiple of the world is first
of all a question of struggle: struggle to destitute the power tending to homogeneity
(of course, we all know that the vague and suspicious name of the techno-esthetical
pseudo-“unification,” i.e. homogenization of world, today is globalization). Of course
techno-economic, financial, and political power are far from being homogeneous; but
their common principle is the principle which destroys the common: by establishing a
type of link pretending to universality, it fosters powerful effects of homogenization:
the universality of the equivalence, or simply of the relation, of the “link.” Yet, we
have to insist: it is not the link itself which is responsible for the current post-trans-
formationist situation; this is not its “fault.” Instead, this is the hegemonic taking over
of the place, which is being transformed into a “channel,” into a “network” which
functionalizes the link. The production-consumption of the world is not a becoming
of the world, it is the reduction of its becoming and therefore of its oneness too. The
Universal is not possible without the singularities that compose it. The One is not
totality or globality. It is not an equivalence through connection and exchange but an
equality of singularities that is the only condition of the becoming-world of the world.4
Therefore, the destitution of the homogenizing power of the process of “globali-
zation,” the process of the production of the world, is only possible as a radical shift: as
a transformation of the paradigm of event itself. Each other form of taking over power
would simply be a new reproduction of the hegemonic matrix. The transformation of
the transformation designates, then, a radical materialist praxis, which is taking over
not only the production of the world but also its becoming, which is absorbed today
in the circuit of production-consumption.
To liberate the potential of the world to become world does not only mean to
prevent and resist the attempt to reduce the world by producing it as a world-product,
but also to end with the reduction of becoming to production. And this reduction
is nothing else than the structural condition of the production of the concept of the
world: the split between the concept and its substratum. In other words, the condition
of the production of the world is the production of the substance of the world, of
the substratum of the world. Yet, to liberate the world from “exploitation,” that is
to say from monstrous homogenization through the techno-political-economical
device that aims at the production-consumption of the world, means to liberate its
matter, the matter of the world, from the fiction of the substratum: not to reduce the
potential of the world to a substratum. The matter of the world is the movement of
its becoming, its dynamis, which does not actualize a substance but modalizes itself
152 Politics of the One

through transformation. The production of substance is the necessary condition for

any exploitation; it is the only way to dominate the potential, which is also a potential
for transformation. In this sense, the production of substance is not only the first
bio-political practice but also the first onto-political practice.5
Hence the most important question—and my final question—would be: what is the
matter of world? What are the horizon and the concept of radical transformationist
materialist praxis? What is a non-substantial but also not-producible matter of world?
What matter(s) for the world?

The transformation of transformation, or, the persistence

of the world
Therefore, we are facing, today more urgently than ever, the necessity to think a
politics of the world as the emancipation of the world and as the emancipation of its
transformation: a transformation of its transformation. In other words, the question
of the (no-)One, that is to say the question of becoming, has to be formulated today
as a question of the transformation of the transformation. For doing so, we need new
active forms of thought, new tekhnai, new conceptual tools, new practices.
Yet, this claim risks at the end repeating the exemplary stance of modern
philosophy: the prospective claim of philosophy as a project, an unfinished project for
an unfinished world. Though if the world today appears as “finishable,” consciousness
of this could offer the critical chance not to embrace once more the messianic-escha-
tological paradigm of event but to foster a new paradigm—the paradigm of what I call
persistence: the co-incidence of the event and change. It is possible to avoid, or rather
to break through, the aporia of the One only by reformulating the question of the
One as a question of persistence—that is to say the co-incidence of the com-position
(of singularities), i.e. of the process of the construction of the common (world), and
of the event as of an opening of the world in the form of metamorphosis. This is the
articulation of the event(s) (the irreducible singularities composing the multiple) and
metamorphosis—the potential to open a singularity to another singularity. In this way,
the subject-one is the duration of the event or the agent of the metamorphosis: on the
one hand, it is a metamorphic continuum, a permanent process of becoming; on the
other hand, it is a disruptive force—an event (the event of justice: insurrection). Every
singular affirmation is a just act; all justice is disruptive. In this way, the concept of
persistence severs the political aporia of the (collective) subject (a continuous event),
the aporia of its resistance and of its affirmative action. The concept of persistence
aporetically com-poses the disruptive force of the justice-event—that disruptive
universal—and the persistent continuity of struggle. Therefore, persistence could be
defined as the becoming-multiple of the event, that is to say as the complexity of the
One. The One is not simple.6
 The One 153

Becoming multiple of the event: the One as becoming,

or politics of no-One
What can be said then about the politics of the world, of the politics of becoming?
My hypothesis would be the following: the politics of the one is only possible as an
emancipatory politics of the world7: this is what I call the politics of becoming. Yet, the
question of becoming is the question of becoming multiple, i.e. the question of collective
subjectivization. Therefore the question of the common is the question which follows
by necessity and which has the potential to articulate conceptually the question of
the One. Contrary to the opposition individual—total, where totality appears as
the accumulation-negation of the individuals, the tension singular-common is the
intensity of becoming-common. Singularity is only possible in tension (extension,
intensity) with other singularities. It always operates in a (pre-subjective) field of
(subjective) forces, which is being constantly recomposed through the trajectory
of singularities; the process of re-composition is precisely becoming-common. The
common is only possible as collective subjectivization, that is to say as a co-incidence
or co-appearing (according to the term of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jean-Christophe
Bailly,8 la comparution) of singularities. Collective subjectivization is a process of
a polemic becoming-multiple of the world. Therefore, a new unity, solidarity, or a
collective subject, a new common, is not possible without thinking the world, and
furthermore, without acting through the world as the only regulative horizon of the
act of (its) becoming.
Let me finally resume the series of theoretical hypotheses:
●● The question of unity is the question of becoming.
●● The question of becoming is the question of becoming-multiple, or of a collective
subjectivization: it is the question of the common. The unity, the becoming of the
One, is only possible as collective subjectivization.
●● Collective subjectivization is a process of a polemic becoming-multiple of the
world. The becoming of the One is only possible as a becoming of no-One—of
the multitude of everybody, that is to say, at the end, of every-one.

Persistence: resisting within the metamorphosis

Hence, we have to insist on our answer. To affirm the persistence of the forms of life
through transformation, to affirm the metamorphosis of subject-politics against the
quasi-substantial validity of the new totalizing powers, to re-open and re-mobilize the
transformationist potential of political praxis, not in order to pose again the demand
to transform the world but in order to transform its transformation, to operate a
radical polemic rupture. We will not persist in the event of the becoming of the world
if we do not face it at the level of its proper demand: the demand of the permanent
revolution of metamorphosis, which is not a quasi-messianic interruption but an
154 Politics of the One

anarchic immanence—a transformationist immanence which persists as the force of

an unimaginable, incommensurable justice: the irreducible force of freedom.

Bibliography
Alain Badiou, L’être et l’événement (Paris: Seuil, 1988).
—L’Etre et l’événement, vol. 2, Logiques des mondes (Paris: Seuil, 2006).
Gilles Châtelet, “L’enchantement du virtuel”, in Les Enjeux du mobile: Mathématiques,
physique, philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1993).
Roberto Esposito, Catégories de l’impolitique (Paris: Seuil, 2005).
André Gorz, Métamorphoses du travail (Paris: Galilée, 1988).
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke in 20 banden, bd. 3: Phänomenologie des Geistes
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998).
Artemy Magun, La révolution négative (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009).
Boyan Manchev, L’altération du monde. Pour une esthétique radicale (Paris: Lignes, 2009).
—“Vermögen, Ausbeutung und Wiederstand der Subjekt-Körper. Für eine transversale
Veränderung”, in Isabell Lorey, Roberto Nigro, and Gerald Raunig (eds) Inventionen
(Berlin: Diaphanes, 2011).
Karl Marx, Les Manuscrits de 1844, in Oeuvres/Economie II, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade
(Paris: Gallimard, 1968).
—Grundrisse, in Oeuvres/Economie II, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).
—Werke, XXVI, t. I (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1957–68).
Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London and New York: Verso, 1993).
Jean-Luc Nancy, La vérité de la démocratie (Paris: Galilée, 2008).
Jean-Luc Nancy and Jean-Christophe Bailly, La comparution (Paris: Christian Bourgois,
1991).
Jean-Luc Nancy and Boyan Manchev, “La métamorphose, le monde,” in Rue Descartes
#64:“Le métamorphose,” Boyan Manchev (ed.) (Paris: PUF, 2009).
Antonio Negri, Fabrique de porcelaine (Paris: Stock, 2006).
Frédéric Neyrat, “Heidegger et l’ontologie de la consommation,” in Rue Descartes #49:
“Dernières nouvelles du capital,”Frédéric Neyrat and Jérôme Maucourant (eds) (Paris:
PUF, 2005).
Jacques Rancière, La Mésentente. Politique et Philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1995).
—“Dix thèses sur la politique,” Aux bords du politique (Paris: La Fabrique-Editions, 1998).
Paolo Virno, Grammaire de la multitude (Nimes: Editions de l’éclat; Montreal:
Conjonctures, 2002).

Notes
1 For more detailed presentation of this thesis, see Boyan Manchev, L’altération du
monde (Lignes, 2009), and the conversation of Jean-Luc Nancy and Boyan Manchev,
“La métamorphose, le monde,” in Rue Descartes 64: “Le métamorphose”, (ed.) Boyan
Manchev, 2009.
 The One 155

2 See Frédéric Neyrat, “Heidegger et l’ontologie de la consommation,” in Rue Descartes

49: “Dernières nouvelles du capital,” (ed.) Frédéric Neyrat and Jérôme Maucourant
(PUF, 2005).
3 In this respect, see Artemy Magun’s book La révolution negative. Déconstruction du
sujet politique (L’Harmattan, 2009).
4 See Jean-Luc Nancy’s critique of the notion of équivalence in La vérité de la démocratie
(Galilée, 2008).
5 For more detailed elaboration of this issue, see my article “Vermögen, Ausbeutung
und Wiederstand der Subjekt-Körper. Für eine transversale Veränderung”, in Isabell
Lorey, Roberto Nigro, and Gerald Raunig (eds) Inventionen 1. Gemeinsam. Prekär.
Potentia. Dis-/Konjunktion. Ereignis. Transversalität. Queere Assemblagen (Diaphanes,
2011).
6 This was perhaps the fundamental affirmation in common of the two philosophers
who established the modern conceptual regime of the concept of the One, Leibniz
and Spinoza—the One is complex, it is only possible as unity or composition of
singularities. Spinoza’s substance is far from being a simple homogeneity; it is the
One-as-complexity, as potential for complex becoming.
7 Not eco-logy but world-politics, to the extent that the legitimate eco-logical claims
could easily turn to a conservative stance praising immobilism under the form of
conservation. Thus, on a structural level ecological projects risk maintaining another
form of reduction of the world to substratum and therefore of erasure of its immanent
transformability. In contrast, world-politics would not only mean politics concerning
the world as a whole or even politics-for-the-world, but politics which proceeds
from the question of the world as the political question: the question of movement,
dynamics, and transformation. At this point, parallels could be made between my
thesis and Susanna Lindberg’s proposals in Chapter 11 of this volume.
8 Jean-Luc Nancy and Jean-Christophe Bailly, La comparution (Christian Bourgois,
1991).
 11

Elemental Nature as the Ultimate Common

Ground of the World Community
Susanna Lindberg

I would like to examine with you a hypothesis: the world is no more, the world has
gone out.1 As Derrida says, quoting Celan: die Welt ist fort, the world has gone away.2
By “world” I principally mean the site of the so-called “world community”: there is no
world community of the inhabitants the globe, and there is no “globalization” either,
at least if “globalization” were to mean what its French version “mondialisation” seems
virtually capable of meaning, that is to say, the becoming inhabitable of the entire
Earth for all human beings. The world in all senses, from our intimate worlds to the
cosmopolitan world of all, is crumbling away, decomposing, dispersing. As Marcia
Cavalcante Schuback says in her article “The Fragility of the One,” in the contem-
porary globalized world the singular has become fragile and collectivity is imploding
because of its “too much.” When the world is failing, we are left on the elemental
ground of being itself.
As you may have noted already, my terminology originates in Heidegger. Heidegger
defines the Dasein of the human being as his or her being-in-the-world.3 According
to him, the human being’s being consists of opening a world and of letting the world
“world” (die Welt welten lassen).4 The human being cannot make up his or her world,
but he or she can “build” it5 when his or her speech says the being-world of a world,
although when this takes place, the world prevails already and the human being finds
him- or herself already thrown in it. Saying that “the world is no more” boils down to
doubting the aptness of this conception of being-in-the-world, or at least to wanting
to formulate it otherwise in today’s context.
On the one hand, the human being has changed since the days when Heidegger
defined his or her ownmost existence (or what he calls his or her “authentic” Dasein)
as his or her relation to his or her own death (Sein zum Tode): for a long time now,
the selfness revealed by being-towards-death has appeared as too disembodied and
too estranged to touch the most problematic aspects of our being-in-the-world (its
Un-heimlichkeit is not revelatory but alienated). What characterizes our existence
more intimately today—because it weighs on us more heavily—is our being-with
others (Mitsein) and in particular our ordinary daily togetherness that Heidegger
hardly noticed, that is to say also our material, bodily, impersonal, unconscious and
158 Politics of the One

irresponsible existence.6 Starting from this perspective, many contemporary thinkers

have examined the human being not as the “mortal” but as the “living being,” the
“animality” or “naked life” of which is at stake. (To make a long story short, I name
Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and Agamben, although I do not want to reduce the
problematics only to them, nor to overlook their differences.7)
On the other hand, the world has changed. The world does not open up as the
horizon of a possible sense anymore. In particular, we have lost faith in the possibility
of installing the truth of a world through a work of art (like in Heidegger’s “The Origin
of the Work of Art” or his “Clarifications” of Hölderlin’s poetry8). Of course, Heidegger
did not see an accomplished, readily installed world of truth either, but rather its lack,
which was disclosed by the memory of such a world and the waiting for another.
But nevertheless, he defended the principle of a world of truth against the “lack of
world” (Weltlosigkeit) or “lack of homeland” (Heimatslosigkeit) that characterizes our
careless “world of technique.”9 It seems to me that such a nostalgia does not (seriously)
determine our world anymore.
The idea of a loss of sense as the very horizon of sense has also been accepted for
a long time already. In particular since the beautiful books of Nancy (La communauté
désœuvrée10) and of Blanchot (La communauté inavouable11) it has been possible to
think of community without the assumption of a common sense, as a sharing of
nothing and as the sharing of the nothingness of death—which precisely separates us
definitely from one another: we do not need a common world anymore to think our
togetherness. However, it seems to me that we cannot stop at the thought of death
as the unique experience of nothingness, but that we need to penetrate further on
into the “nothingness” beyond the world and describe in more detail the apparently
deserted space in which living human animals have circulated ever since the disap-
pearance of the mortal Dasein’s world—for no one can live in pure nothingness, and
the dead do not live (but only those who have sur-vived the experience of their death,
as Blanchot and Derrida have written12). I will call this “space” that remains after
the disappearance of the world “elemental nature” or the “elemental background of
being.”13 I will explain below the philosophical sense of the expression in order to
motivate its choice. But I can already say that it is in this constellation that I propose to
think: “our time” abandons us as “simply living beings” directly on “elemental nature.”
In order to close my introduction, I would still like to remark that I keep something
of Heidegger’s original determination of Dasein as being-in-the-world: if Dasein
proper has worn off and if the world has gone away, their relation remains, the “in,” the
being-in, the finding-oneself-in: some kind of a “one” is still in some kind of a “place”
or worldless space, and moreover, somehow he or she opens and produces it. My aim,
in this chapter, is to try to figure out, starting from this being-in, what the human
being and the world have become, connected as they still are by this “in.”

The world is no more, the world does not “world” anymore (die Welt weltet nicht). We
are abandoned directly on the elemental background of being.
What is the concrete background of this experience of the disappearance of the
world and of the appearance of its elemental background? The world has started to
 Elemental Nature as the Ultimate Common Ground 159

disappear when we have lost, in addition to the rational onto-theo-logical foundation

of life, the volatilization of which was well shown by Heidegger, also the finite historical
world that his phenomenology described as the condition of proper existence and as
the horizon of genuine thinking. Our time is definitely what Heidegger called the
“era of technique,” which he also characterized as the era of homelessness. We do not
know how to inhabit the total global space: the space of so-called globalization is like
an illimited transit hall in which nobody can rest, not to speak about living in it. In
this sense, our contemporary existence is without site, our thinking is without horizon
and “disoriented.”14 This is why the contemporary non-world has sometimes been
described by words like desert, devastation, desolation […] to quote another well-made
word by Nancy, the non-world has appeared as the “im-monde.”15
I would nevertheless like to articulate the bottom that we are touching in terms
of discovery and not of loss, in a tone of fascination and not of deception. The first
approximation would be to say that the reverse side of the world is connected to
something like the natural or material ground of the world. The second approxi-
mation (that I will develop elsewhere) will consist in asking how to learn to inhabit
the globalized world. In particular, how to understand our political existence
when no world citizenship comes to mend the erosion of the meaning of national
citizenship: if the entire idea of citizenship becomes hollow, can we rethink our
political being in terms of a right of residence (here, there, everywhere)? This
would be my answer to Boyan Manchev’s question about the possibility of a world-
politics, which cannot be reduced to an eco-logy. In the present article, however, I
limit myself to the question of the “natural” bottom in which we have “fallen”, and
which may be devoid of sense but which is endowed with imposing materiality. In
a sense, I am looking for a new existential or “archi-political” sense of the Earth
understood as the ultimate natural foundation of the world community; as such a
natural fact the Earth itself is not simply a prerequisite of the political community
and therefore it cannot be analyzed, e.g. as the national soil described by Heidegger
in his readings of Hölderlin, or as the wilderness described by Carl Schmitt as an
“empty land” that could be “taken” (Landnahme) in order to establish a territorial
state.16
The Earth has famously been understood as a purely natural foundation of the
political community in Kant’s 1795 treatise of Perpetual peace. The third definitive
article of perpetual peace runs: “The rights of man, as citizens of the world, shall
be limited to the conditions of universal hospitality,” which does not presuppose
any “love of thy neighbor,” close or distant, but simply the right of a “stranger
entering foreign territory to be treated by its owner without hostility.”17 Here I only
draw attention to the justification of the article, which is disarmingly evident—so
evident that its mention would seem naïve if we did not know its violations to be so
frequent: cosmopolitan right is grounded on the “common right of possession of the
surface of the earth on which, as it is a globe, we cannot be infinitely scattered, and
must in the end reconcile ourselves to existence side by side.” The right of universal
hospitality is the consequence of a natural given and of the natural law that aims at
the establishment of world citizenship. Kant had insisted on the natural origin of
160 Politics of the One

the cosmopolitan ideal already in his 1784 essay Idea for a Universal History with a
Cosmopolitan aim, in which he presumed that, although the actions of human beings
and states do not seem to be reasonable at all, nature nevertheless follows a secret plan
aiming at the establishment of reason in the human species (in the form of individual
freedom and perpetual peace 18). According to Kant, the Earth, a spherical body, is the
only truly incontestable ground of the community of all human (and more generally
living) beings. Being a “natural” ground of life, the Earth is much more constraining
than any social or political contract, and it gathers living human beings much more
imperatively than any supposedly universal humanist, religious or scientific principle.
Ever since the general realization of climatic change and the imminent ecological
threats that it triggers, the Earth, understood as the whole of our planet’s nature, has
appeared more and more insistently as the common ground of all. The Summits of
Copenhagen and Cancún are among the latest symptoms of this realization, and their
failure shows (except for the appalling irresponsibility of many instances of power)
also the difficulty of figuring “the Earth” in terms of politics. The general public (or
rather its “representatives” and “decision-makers”) still often regards the Earth as if it
were the same spherical body as in Kant’s time: a scientific object whose laws do not
depend on our desires and which can be contemplated disinterestedly; because of this
indifference it can also appear as a reserve of economic objects that can be possessed
and cultivated. Its parts can become political trophies of the “lord and master of
nature,” but it cannot appear as such at the domain of existence and politics. The
Earth is neither a subject nor an object nor even a place of politics, and this is why it
remains beyond the human “world”, at its other side or at its reverse side. The Earth as
the reverse side of the world is extremely obscure, but it appears nevertheless evident
that it is One, a singular totality.
In reality, however, nature and in particular our perception of it have greatly
changed since Kant’s time. Here I can only list three capital elements of this change.
1. “Nature” is not the “other of culture” anymore. Instead, nature and technique
(which is one of the constituents of “culture”) have merged inextricably, and now
this techno-nature forms the other of the world. The new techno-nature is best
understood in terms of Heidegger’s idea of Ge-stell: it develops as a bunch of
independent quasi-rational processes that can turn against supposedly “savage”
nature (which technique was supposed to supplement and complement) and
against humanity (which thought that it increased nature with the surplus of its
culture). It developed as an analogon both of what used to be called “nature” and
of what used to be called “humanity,” for it functions like a force of nature—but
it follows fundamentally its own course and can also turn against the nature and
humanity that it was supposed to supplement and imitate.
In order to articulate contemporary techno-nature, the sense of Ge-stell
has to be specified in two respects. First, it seems to me that Heidegger does
not recommend a return to a “purer” nature that would be hidden behind the
technological Ge-stell: he is not a spokesman of any “ecology of authenticity”
but on the contrary the thinker of the era of technique.19 Second, although the
 Elemental Nature as the Ultimate Common Ground 161

contemporary world can very well be exposed in terms of Ge-stell, one major
difference remains. Ge-stell is a singular word that evokes a unique technological
system, but contemporary techno-nature is not one totality and it does not
realize a single process. On the contrary, it consists in innumerable “collectives”
(as Bruno Latour would say) that are temporally and locally limited and that
consist in human and non-human elements or “hybrids” (as Donna Haraway
would say).20 Techno-nature is a swirl of multiple, often contradictory processes
that develop (if it can be called a “development”) only by seizing chances and
enduring blows given and inflicted by one another. As Bruno Latour might say,
techno-nature is not the correlate of Science but of multiple, fragmented sciences
that do not pretend to give a unified sense of the totality of nature.21
Techno-nature is the other of the world of sense and of the human community
dependent on it: this is why it appears in the contemporary political community
as the very thing that it is impossible to understand and control.
2. Our scientific view of nature has changed. The ideal of “science” is changing into
“research,” which is rather motivated by a desire to reproduce and to modify
the productive processes of nature than by a desire to discover its fundamental
laws and ideas. Correlatively, the paradigmatic natural sciences today are not
mathematics and theoretical physics anymore but Life and Earth sciences and their
changing applications, like diverse bio-techno-logies and in particular the new
climatology. Their motivations are technological before being theoretical. Their
primary aim is not to construct ideal models of “laws of nature,” but to interpret
living nature also when it overflows the ideal laws, to produce modifications and
to forecast unpredictable events. (Of course the ideal models remain, but they
function as tools and not as unquestionable aims of the new techno-science). In
order to describe the change in sciences with a simple sentence, I would say that
in Kant’s time, nature was the kingdom of eternal laws without events, whereas
today’s “science” does not reject uncertain unpredictable events as meaningless
contingencies but looks for them and aims at the irregular and the modifiable.
Today the nature of events dethrones the nature of laws; natural sciences and not
only humanities look for the event capable of changing the course of the world.
3. Our political perception of nature has changed—both of technically domesticated
and of “savage” nature. “Nature” is no more a simple economic object to be used
nor an environment to be regulated. It also appears as an elemental un/ground
of life that gives the very possibility of life—and can also destroy it (the best
philosophical description of its force and ambiguity is Schelling’s description of
the abysmal unground of nature, best known from his Freedom essay). Today,
we are conscious of the limits of our power over nature: every unusual tempest,
drought and flood—and also every major “bug” of the World Wide Web—
reminds us a bit more clearly of techno-nature’s uncontrollable over-power.
Today, this overpowering force constitutes the panic dimension of existence—
while we had thought that only presumably ignorant and superstitious “primitive
people” fall prey to such panics. We have realized that no human community
162 Politics of the One

can entirely appropriate its own ground, for the ground is by definition a strange
disquieting force outside of the polis that it grounds. The “elemental ground”
is not a firm, subsistent thing but rather a bottomless non-ground (Schelling’s
Ungrund); it is the nothingness that delimits the familiar world, but here the
nothingness is not reassuringly empty (like in the metaphysical sentences on
being and nothingness): it is an active nothingness that can claim, attract, and
threaten us (to frighten us, it does not need to send “monsters” upon us, for
generally it is enough to show that there is an abyss under our feet). This is how,
abandoned in techno-nature, it has turned into our elementary ground which—
by definition—cannot be changed into a political place nor integrated into
political practices and discourses: there is no place for the inhuman in human
affairs. This is why we are politically so lost in front of “nature.”

My initial hypothesis was: the world has gone out, and we are abandoned to the
elemental un/ground of being.
“The elemental” is an old philosophical word that may seem outdated and even
suspicious. I remind you first quickly of its historical origins.
Elemental thinking was born in the Presocratics’ reflection of the phusei of the
world (water, air, earth, fire, etc.) and in the Pythagoreans’ meditation of its mathe-
matical elements, the stoikheia. In his Timaeus, Plato combines this inheritance in
his idea of the khora, which is the receptable (womb or matrix) that gives a place
for the union of the intelligible and the sensible but which is not visible or knowable
itself, although it is somehow imaginable (as Derrida has underlined in his beautiful
commentary22). The ancient idea of the elemental is an intellectual metaphysical
fiction that had been forgotten for a long time, until its principle was rediscovered in
German idealism, which transferred it into the heart of the absolute subject. Fichte,
Schelling, and Hegel, each in their own way, magnified Kant’s idea of the “secret art”
of transcendental imagination by transforming it into an “element of thinking,” which
is a dimension of pure rationality in which the human consciousness finds itself and
by means of which it thinks, but that the human consciousness cannot objectivate or
know immediately: knowledge of the element of thinking can only take place within
the experiences of philosophical reflection or intellectual intuition.
Finally the principle of the phusei reappears in the phenomenological ontology of
the twentieth century when the latter opposed the “invisible, unknowable” reverse
side of the world or its unfathomable negativity, to the ideal otherworld of reason
that is more real than nature. This version of the elemental sketches a new materi-
alist ontology, in which the abstract, general primordial “matter” of the world is
signified either by redefining the ancient phusei (after Heidegger, for instance Eugen
Fink, Kostas Axelos, and Luce Irigaray have proceeded in this way23) or by giving
new names to the elemental being, for instance the muffled hurly-burly of the il y a
(Emmanuel Lévinas24) or the nocturnal obscurity of the “flesh of the world” (Maurice
Merleau-Ponty25); analogically, in this volume, Michael Marder refers vegetal life to an
ambiguous elemental ground. Nevertheless, in contemporary philosophy elemental
thinking remains marginal: it is difficult to justify it in front of the natural sciences,
 Elemental Nature as the Ultimate Common Ground 163

because it describes a nature that cannot be observed and a “science” which has the
tendency of diminishing into a mythology. And one might as well say in passing that
it is evident that we cannot solve our problematic relation to nature by returning to
a pre-Socratic cosmology; moreover, appealing to some obscure forces of the Earth
would undoubtedly be politically harmful. Against such temptations, I would like
to remind that even in ancient Greece, the elemental forces of Chaos, Night, Sleep,
Death, Kronos, etc. were not among the political gods of the Olympus that maintained
the order of the city: they were the Titans who preceded the venerable gods and were
not worshipped in specific public cults.
How should we, then, approach the elemental reverse side of the world, in which
we would be abandoned? In the tradition of elemental thinking sketched above, the
elemental is not another domain of reality behind the visible and intelligible world. It
is not the cause of its being but only the dimension that makes possible the articulation,
configuration and figuration of a sense of a world. Saying that the world has gone
away means that the world of sense has gone out and its departure has left us directly
on the reverse side of the world. But this “reverse side” is nothing, it is nowhere and
actually it is not, and although we may be “aware” of the elemental depth of the world,
we can neither see nor comprehend it. We do not see its sense in the place of the sense
of the world; instead, we bathe in multiple possibilities of configuring the world but
we cannot stop and fix any one of them. We have not discovered the proper element
of our world, the mythology of which we could tell (it would be ridiculous to fancy
being the children of the earth, of the sky, of the fire—or of the gene, of the quark,
or of the bit). At the uttermost depth of our world and of ourselves there is not a
single determined element enforcing its sense, but the elemental itself, which we do
not see or understand but whose force we nevertheless feel. To put it in other words,
the elemental depth does not hide a particular image or archetype of this world, but
the imagination itself as a capacity of producing and destroying images and types.
My aim is simply to disclose a little bit this dimension of being and this modality of
thinking.

Here I can only sketch this task. I do it by presenting three propositions concerning
finiteness, the world and thinking.
1. Within finite thinking, the elemental adds the question of the origin and the
becoming of the forms of beings to the question of the origin of their being, which is
generally articulated through “nothingness.”

Although the elemental is an unlimited dimension of being, it belongs to finite

thinking. It thinks the infinite as a lack of finitude (and of its “end”); and it thinks the
unlimited as a lack of limit; and this is how it designates an infinity without positivity,
without substantiality, without subjectivity, and without reason.
Thinking is capable of finite thinking when it takes the limit of the thing for
its origin and not for its end. When the thing is seen from its limit, its form is not
defined “positively” by an intelligible form, but “negatively” by a quasi-unthinkable
164 Politics of the One

nothingness: this is how negativity allows the determination of the thing, death reveals
the Dasein in the human being, and the heart of the work of art is formless and unpre-
sentable. When the thing is determined in function of a limit, it is not self-sufficient.
On the contrary, finite thinking always exceeds and transgresses its limits, refers
outside of itself, even when it sees on the other side of the limit only nothingness,
nonbeing and non-sense.
Heidegger is no doubt the first to have elaborated a thoroughly finite thinking.
First he demarcated his thinking from all forms of infinite thinking, which he under-
stood as a thinking of an ontotheological reason settling down as the firm and clear
fundament of the totality of being. Trying to formulate a finite thinking that does not
ground itself on a logos, he started by defining being in relation to nothingness and
human existence in relation to death. But such a thinking of “nothingness” is danger-
ously close to the vertiginous slopes of “nihilism”—for a consequent thinking of the
nothingness of being leads to silence and the end of thinking. There is nothing to be
thought in this “nothing,” except precisely the impossibility of thinking it. Besides,
the thinking of nothingness remains at the shadow of the onto-theology that it had
challenged. It has dethroned the god of creation, but it continues to echo its dilemma
of ex nihilo by describing the coming to presence of being as if being was “created ex
nihilo” (in quotation marks) by a “god” (in quotation marks)—by the “god without
being” that haunts contemporary phenomenology.26
In order to avoid the void of nothingness, many thinkers27 have tried to explore
what is beyond the limit as the outside of the thing (le dehors). Outside of the thing
is not only its “nothingness” but also everything that precedes and overflows it:
its context, its world, its background. It can be understood in two ways: either as
the whole (or more precisely the ensemble) of everything, or as the place in which
everything is. In the first case, one thinks that if the thing is not self-sufficient, that
is because it is neither alone nor unique: it is its relation to other things outside of
itself—which may be more intimate to it than itself. Being is the “singular plural being”
finely conceived by Nancy,28 and the plurality is “realized” as a kind of an “interaction”
required by the ecstatic and unaccomplished character of the singulars. It is impossible
to define the singulars entirely by following their interactions: either these are only
generalizations, or it is impossible to understand (or even notice) all the tiny inter/
actions that form a singular thing. This is why finally the infinitely multiple, complex,
and often insignificant “interaction” of singulars is melted in a general “background,”
in which beings are hardly distinguished from the obscure background of their “life.”
The background opens up as the question of the essence of this “life”: how does the
“background” produce the form and the being of things?
This is a passage from a dialectical to a phenomenological look on the world.
Beings, once they are emancipated from their transcendental foundation, are not
determined only in relation to one another, but their interactions melt together and
form a “world,” against which singular beings are distinguished, but in which they
nevertheless remain. After “nothingness” and “others,” “the world” is the third form of
“outside” indicated by the limit.
 Elemental Nature as the Ultimate Common Ground 165

2. The world contains the sense, the elemental background contains its sketch and
defeat.

But the elemental ground is neither a horizon nor a world. At least in Heidegger’s
thinking, a “world” is a familiar region of being in which we can “dwell” and which
we can also “build” and “think.” The elemental background of the world is the
reverse side of such a “world,” or its outside. Following another current image that
fascinated Blanchot and more recently Pascal Quignard, it is the “night” “preceding”
and “surrounding” the luminous place or the Lichtung of a world. In other words, a
finite world is always already a preliminary articulation, within which it is possible
to configure a sense. The limits of a thing are the limits of its world. But outside of
the limits of the thing-world, there is a background without depth, which is like an
unlimited background out of which it is possible to cut a limited thing. It is never
familiar; on the contrary, it appears when the familiar world breaks down and we
cannot grasp the principle of its configurations anymore. It is nothing, it is not possible
to know anything about it, and yet we are in it. Nevertheless the world is. Although
nothingness is not a resource, it is productive. The elemental is the positive, productive
aspect of negativity.
Maybe you remember Bataille’s indignation before the idea of a “productive
negativity,” against which he wanted to conceive an “unemployed negativity.” Let us
note that this is a correct observation in the Hegelian context, but let us add that the
elemental ground of being does not produce being or reason, which aroused Bataille’s
suspicions. It is closer to Schelling’s way of thinking being as “gravity” which is of
course the origin of the “light” of reason, but which can never be entirely converted
into “light”, because it is defined as containing an irretrievable nocturnal “remainder.”
As we saw, the elemental background of the singular existent does not produce
its being. Furthermore, it contributes to the formation of the singular but does not
determine its form. In this sense, it is the very contrary of the ideal background
which determines the object’s form in classical metaphysics and science, for instance
Platonism’s “heaven of ideas,” or its avatars, like the Newtonian conception of nature
as the realm of unchanging natural laws, or its metaphysical counterpart, the infinite
functioning of ideal relations described in Hegel’s Science of Logic. In such models,
the rational background of beings—the “element of thinking,” as Hegel puts it—is
either a domain of archetypes or a set of rational relations, but in any case an order
of transcendent models of finite beings—which can be more or less perfect imitations
of their ideal models (and if they are very imperfect, they are regarded as “deviations”
and “monsters”).
On the contrary, finite thinking discovers, instead of an ideal superstructure, just
an elemental background of beings. It is the domain created by the factual interaction
between singular existents, in which their forms gradually develop (and in this context
one cannot really justify a discourse differentiating between models and monsters, and
hybrid is the rule).
166 Politics of the One

The elemental background of singular beings, containing no models of the

singulars or of their relations, is quite simply the field of differentiation created by the
singulars’ activity. It appears to us as a field of differentiation in which things can be
distinguished (or remain indistinct). In this way, it draws a preliminary sketch of the
world against which the thing can appear as a phenomenon (or not). Let us be precise:
the elemental background of beings is a force of figuration and defiguration which
allows an infinite number of distinctions, and also the very figuration of the thing:
not according to a model but according to the singulars’ individual histories. But the
background in itself does not stop in any precise configuration, and this is why it is
not a world of a horizon. A world fixes a determinate configuration of intelligibility,
the elemental ground makes us pass from one configuration to another infinitely.
To put it in other words: because the elemental ground does not fix a model or
a theory, it does not produce a repetition of a given form, either, like in the classical
science of nature. It fits a more modern conception of nature, for it can as well
maintain the known as produce the unknown. The elemental ground of nature is a
power of event; its surprises can be good or bad, but they never lead towards a general
end or a general sense of the world. No doubt, the best contemporary illustration of
such a nothingness that engenders surprises is the new climatology, which forecasts
future weather while declaring its uncertainty, and this is how it foretells that there are
unforeseeable events in the future.
In order to give a better idea of the elemental background of singular beings, a
classical metaphor may be helpful. If the elemental background does not resemble
the heaven of ideas, it rather resembles the night filled with dream images that are so
easily constituted and dissipated. Why so? Because it is not a question of truth in the
glorious, absolute, classical sense of the word, but only of the possibility of articulating
and organizing perceptual experience or particular fields of knowledge. Contrary to
the element of thinking of traditional metaphysics and science, with its ideal models
and regular laws, the elemental background presents images instead of models, provi-
sional constellations instead of regular laws, and this is why its figurations resemble
what classical philosophy called myths and fictions, rather than scientific truths. In the
last instance, however, the elemental background of beings cannot be submitted to the
classical opposition between truth and fiction. On the contrary, it seems to me that
contemporary sciences function precisely in this way: there is no definitive Science,
there are multiple, fairly irreconcilable sciences, many of which are hardly anything
more than technologies, which emerge, change, and disappear ever more quickly
(think of the histories of phrenology, cybernetics, and nanoscience). Outside of pure
mathematics, nobody presents definitive truth claims anymore; even the truth claims
of sciences have become regional and not absolute. In this sense, the general field of
sciences is rather a swirl of disparate images than a heaven of rational ideas. But this
does not prevent it from functioning very efficiently. But of course, this also means
that sciences and technologies, too, lay on an abysmal, uncertain ground. As such, the
elemental background does not contain any definitive images or laws: it is nothing else
but the very power of imagining, pure imagination in act.
 Elemental Nature as the Ultimate Common Ground 167

3. I originally formulated my third proposition in French: la pensée élémentaire est

un effort pour dé-penser le monde connu.

What I cannot translate in one word is the word dé-penser, which is of course
constructed with a clin-d’œil to Derrida’s word dé-construction. As penser means
“thinking,” dé-penser is meant to suggest a turning-away from thinking, a thinking-
away, an un-thinking. Of course, the idea is not to pass from reason to the idiocy of
a lack of reason, but on the contrary to criticize the known modes of thinking by
using them in an unlimited and maybe even unreasonable way. Such an unreasonable
use of reason is inscribed in the proper sense of the word dépenser: to spend and to
waste. This is why my third proposition means at the same time: Elemental thinking is
an effort of turning against the familiar ways of thinking, and elemental thinking is an
effort of using, spending and even wasting all the known figures of thought of the world.
In this way, elemental thinking would start as an effort to abandon oneself to the very
element of thinking.
These considerations arise from the question: what kind of an elemental thinking
permits us to approach the elemental ground of being? It goes without saying that the
task of thinking about the elemental requires a particular approach.
As the elemental is not an entity but a dimension, it cannot be objectivized:
things appear as objects when they are distinguished against a background, but the
background itself is generally figured as the formlessness out of which things are cut.
Obviously the elemental does not address us like a subject, either. At most, in some
cases, the elemental can appear as an indistinct affective atmosphere: however, it is
not the Stimmung or “affective tonality” in general that determines the world in which
the Dasein is thrown in Heidegger’s Being and Time, but rather a breakdown of a
habitual Stimmung, like a panic mood that suddenly gets hold of us and spreads over
a reassuring world.
Neither an object nor a subject, the elemental is a kind of nothingness. In
nothingness, there is nothing to be thought, except, precisely, an end of thinking itself,
a catastrophe of reason, a benumbing of senses. Such an end of thought is the paradox
that a number of important thinkers of the twentieth century have confronted: how
to think the end of thought, how to follow thinking to its end while still thinking, what
kind of a detour is required in order to approach something that disappears as soon
as one addresses it directly. An effort to think a “positive nothingness” instead of an
empty one is motivated by a desire to refuse such an apocalyptic end of thinking—
because, after all, the end of thinking has not taken place but rather functions as a limit
condition of thinking. This is why I look for eventual detours, by exploring, using,
spending, and wasting traditional figures of thinking—like that of the “abyss of the
elemental night.”
In contemporary thought, the elemental is mainly a phenomenological concept.
It has been used as a name for a general background of things and events. Things
are visible because they are distinguished from their element, but the element itself
is invisible. In a phenomenological experience, the elemental is like a space in which
168 Politics of the One

things appear as superficial or profound, but which does not have a proper depth—
except, maybe, a general feeling of sinking that it can arouse. This is also why the
elemental is not a horizon: we can still “see” our horizon, it determines the contours
of our world: the elemental is the night behind the horizon that we cannot see. The
elemental is more distant than the horizon, and nevertheless it is everywhere around
us, close and intimate. Almost paradoxically our elemental background is everywhere
around us like the air that we breathe, and yet it flees our thinking and appears always
further. We bathe in it, we are in it, but we cannot “see” the “in” of this being-in. This
is why the elemental background of existence must be thought of in the same way
as time—which is similarly never present and cannot be objectivized, but must be
thought of as a “transport” between the two absences of past and future.
How do we know that the elemental ground is there and takes place around us?
Quite like Heidegger’s “world,” it actually is not but only appears affectively. This is why
it can very well not show itself nor disturb us at all. But when it shows itself, rejoicing,
oppressing or terrifying us, we are called to confront it in thought.
Modern versions of elemental thinking—from the intellectual intuition and the
ecstasy of thinking imagined by Schelling through the letting-be of later Heidegger—are
always thoughts of a kind of receptivity that corresponds to the “affective” way of being
of the element that is being thought of. The element appears as a “fiction of reason”
or a “dictation of being,” which cannot be criticized according to the truth and falsity
of its propositions but which must be judged according to its capacity of orienting the
thinking subject in its situation. Like in these ways of thinking, also in our world it is
impossible to invent an elemental fiction: it rises by itself and is already “there” when
we pay attention to it. To put it very briefly, it seems to me that the elemental ground
of our world develops in particular as the omnipresent techno-nature in which we
live. This ground wants to be thought in us, and our task as philosophers is to think its
figures (cultivate and exploit them) and also to think against it (resist their becoming-
myth). Refusing its mythologies, wastefully spending its figures and deconstructing
them (il s’agit de dé-penser ses figures), and learning to live with them.

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Press, 2008).
Eugen Fink, Spiel als Weltsymbol (Freiburg/München: Verlag Karl Alber, 2010).
Michel Foucault, La pensée du dehors (Paris: fata morgana, 1986).
Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, or the Infinite Task. A Study of Philosophical Concept (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
Michel Haar, The Song of the Earth: Heidegger and the Grounds of Historical Being
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993).
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism
in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81.
Annette Hilt and Anselm Böhmer, Das Elementale. An der Schwelle zur Phänomenalität
(Königshausen: Orbis Phaenomenologicum, 2008).
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: State University of
New York Press, 2010).
—Basic Writings, David Farrell Krell (ed.) (New York: Harper and Collins, 1977).
—The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Trans. William
Mac Neill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2001).
—Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row,
1971).
—The Question of Being. Trans. Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback (New Haven: College
and University Press Services, 1958).
—The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt (New
York: Harper Torchbooks, 1982).
—Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. Trans. Keith Holler (New York: Humanity Books,
2000).
—Einblick in das was ist, Bermer und Freiburger Vorträge, GA 79 (Frankfurt-am-Main:
Vittorio Klostermann, 2005).
Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. Trans. Gillian B. Gill (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991).
—Elemental Passions. Trans. Joanne Collie and Judith Still (New York: Routledge, 1992).
—The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger. Trans. Mary Beth Mader (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1999).
Dominique Janicaud, Jean-François Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, and
Jean-Luc Marion, Phenomenology and the theological: A French Debate (New York:
Fordham University Press 2001).
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life. Towards a Philosophical Biology (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2001).
170 Politics of the One

Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan aim, in A. Oksenberg
Rorty and J. Schmidt (eds) Essays on Kant’s ‘Idea for a Universal History with a
Cosmopolitan aim’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
—Perpetual Peace, a philosophical essay (New York: Cosimo, 2010).
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Fidélités”, in Marie-Louise Mallet (ed.) Animal
autobiographique, autour de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 1999).
Bruno Latour, “To modernize or to Ecologize, That is the Question”, in N. Castree and B.
Willems-Braun (eds) Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millenium (London and New
York: Routledge, 1998), 221–42.
—Politics of Nature. How to Bring Sciences into Democracy. Trans. Catherine Porter
(Boston: Harward University Press, 2004).
Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents. Trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 2001).
Susanna Lindberg, “Stepping over the World. Technique after Heidegger”, in Sara
Heinämaa, Mirja Hartimo and Timo Miettinen (eds) Phenomenology and the
Transcendental, forthcoming.
Susanna Lindberg and Gisèle Berkman (eds) La limite et l’illimité, questions au présent,
forthcoming.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman. Reflections on Time. Trans. Rachel Bowlby and
Geoffrey Bennington (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1969).
Jean-Luc Nancy, Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
—Corpus. Trans. Richard E. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
—Being Singular Plural. Trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000).
John Sallis, Chorology. On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1999).
—Force and imagination. The Sense of the Elemental (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 2000).
Frank Schalow, The Incarnality of Being. The Earth, Animals and the Body in Heidegger’s
Thought (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006).
Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum
Europaeum. Trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003).
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and time 2, Disorientation. Trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
Lazló Tengelyi and Hans-Dieter Gondek, Neue Phänomenoloogie in Frankreich (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 2011).

Notes
1 An earlier, French version of this text, “Du fond élémentaire,” is forthcoming in
Susanna Lindberg and Gisèle Berkman (eds) La limite et l’illimité, questions au présent
(Les Éditions Nouvelles Cécile Defaut, Paris, forthcoming in 2012).
2 The theme of the absence of the world was coined beautifully by Jacques Derrida
in his reading of Paul Celan’s verse “Die Welt is fort / ich muß dich tragen” (Jacques
 Elemental Nature as the Ultimate Common Ground 171

Derrida, Rams, Uninterrupted Dialogue. Between Two Infinities, the Poem, in Thomas
Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (eds) Derrida, Sovereignities in Question. The Poetics of Paul
Celan (Fordham University Press, 2005). In this text, Derrida refers to Heidegger’s
motif of “wordlessness,” that he develops further in Rogues. Two Essays on Reason,
trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford University Press, 2005), 155.
Derrida’s notions of “world” and “worldlessness” are exposed brilliantly by Rodolphe
Gasché in Europe, or the Infinite Task. A Study of Philosophical Concept (Stanford
University Press, 2009), Ch. 11: “De-closing the horizon.”
3 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (State University of New
York Press, 2010), §12.
4 The world worlds is a translation of die Welt weltet (Martin Heidegger, “The Origin
of the Work of Art”, trans. Albert Hofstadter, Poetry, Language, Thought (Harper
and Row, 1971), 44–5. It is possible to translate the English globalization and the
German Globalisierung into French by “mondialisation”; and as Derrida observes,
“mondialisation” maintains “a reference to the world—monde, Welt, mundus—which
is neither the globe nor the cosmos. (Derrida, “The University Without Condition,” in
Derrida, Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford University Press, 2000) 203,
223). In French, die Welt weltet has also been translated by le monde se mondialise;
Catherine Malabou once noted that this could also be translated by the world globalises
itself, “Hegel and Freud of the process of mourning”, in Radical Philosophy, March-
April 2001.
5 The human being is “world-builder,” “Weltbildend” (Heidegger, The Fundamental
Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William Mac Neill and
Nicholas Walker (Indiana University Press, 2001), §42, §64 s.q.q.); the human being
can “build, dwell and think” (“Building, Dwelling, Thinking”, trans. Albert Hofstaeter,
Poetry, Language, Thought (op. cit.).
6 The necessity of rethinking fundamental ontology from the point of view of
being-with (Mitsein), that is to say from the point of view of the singular plural of
origins, has been put forward most forcefully by Jean-Luc Nancy in Being Singular
Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne (Stanford University Press, 2000).
7 See for instance Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), in
particular the planes 10 and 11; Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am,
transl. David Wills (Fordham University Press, 2008); Giorgio Agamben, The Open.
Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford University Press, 2002).
8 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (op. cit.), and Heidegger, Elucidations of
Höderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Holler (Humanity Books, 2000).
9 See Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William
Lovitt (Harper Torchbooks, 1982); Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”, in David Farrell
Krell (ed.) Basic Writings ( Harper and Collins, 1977); Heidegger, The Question of Being,
trans. Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback (College and University Press Services, 1958);
Heidegger, Einblick in das was ist, Bermer und Freiburger Vorträge, GA 79 (Vittorio
Klostermann, 2005), 51, 66. Hannah Arendt writes in the chapter “The Decline of the
Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man” of The Origins of Totalitarianism (George
Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1967; 267–302) that the word die Heimatslosen also described the
stateless people (apatrides) that were created in Europe by the Peace Treaties of the First
World War— Jews especially found themselves in such a situation, but also millions of
Slovakians, Hungarians, Germans, and so forth.
172 Politics of the One

10 Jean-Luc Nancy, Inoperative Community (University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

11 Maurice Blanchot, The Unawovable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Station Hill Press,
2006).
12 See Jacques Derrida, “To Survive,” in Parages (Cultural memory of the present), trans.
Tom Conley and James Hulbert (Stanford University Press, 2010); Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe, “Fidélités,” in Marie-Louise Mallet (ed.) Animal autobiographique, autour de
Jacques Derrida (Galilée, 1999), 215–30.
13 I say “background” to make a difference with the notion of “ground”; in French one
would say “fond” instead of “fondement.”
14 The phenomenon of disorientation has been investigated in particular by Bernard
Stiegler, Technics and time 2, Disorientation, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford
University Press, 2008).
15 Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard E. Rand (Fordham University Press, 2008).
16 Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth of the International Law of the Jus Publicum
Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Telos Press, 2003).
17 Immanuel Kant, “The third definite article of the project for Perpetual peace,” in
Perpetual Peace, a philosophical essay (Cosimo, 2010), 17–18.
18 Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan aim, in A. Oksenberg Rorty
and J. Schmidt (eds) Essays on Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan
aim” (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
19 While for instance Frank Schalow looks for a sketch of a new ecology in Heidegger’s
thought (see his The Incarnality of Being. The Earth, Animals and the Body in
Heidegger’s Thought [State University of New York Press, 2006]), Hans Jonas
and Michel Haar claim on the contrary that Heidegger ignores the question of
non-human, non-historical nature (Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life. Towards a
Philosophical Biology [Northwestern University Press, 2001]; Michel Haar, The Song
of the Earth: Heidegger and the Grounds of Historical Being [Indiana University Press,
1993]).
20 Bruno Latour, “To modernize or to Ecologize, That is the Question,” in N. Castree
and B. Willems-Braun (eds) Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millenium (Routledge,
1998), 221–42. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and
Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women:
The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991), 149–81. See also Jean-François Lyotard,
The Inhuman. Reflections on Time, trans. Rachel Bowlby and Geoffrey Bennington
(Polity Press, 1991). I explain in more detail the posterity of Heidegger’s thinking of
the technique (e.g. in Stiegler, Foucault and Eldred) in my “Stepping over the World.
Technique after Heidegger,” in Sara Heinämaa, Mirja Hartimo and Timo Miettinen
(eds) Phenomenology and the transcendental, forthcoming.
21 Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature. How to Bring Sciences into Democracy, trans.
Catherine Porter (Harward University Press 2004).
22 J. Derrida, “Khôra,” in T. Dutoit On the Name (Stanford University Press, 1995). See
also John Sallis, Chorology. On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Indiana University Press,
1999), and John Sallis, Force and imagination. The Sense of the Elemental (Indiana
University Press, 2000).
23 See Eugen Fink, Spiel als Weltsymbol (Verlag Karl Alber, 2010); Kostas Axelos,
Vers la pensée planétaire (Minuit, 1960); Axelos, Le jeu du monde (Minuit, 1969);
Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian B. Gill (Columbia
University Press, 1991); Irigaray, Elemental Passions, trans. Joanne Collie and Judith
 Elemental Nature as the Ultimate Common Ground 173

Still (Routledge, 1992); The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, trans. Mary Beth
Mader (University of Texas Press, 1999). In the 1940s, Gaston Bachelard had used the
theme of the elementary, but for him the elements are only principles of articulation
of the human spirit, a kind of collective inconscience, whereas the other thinkers
mentioned above develop phenomenological ontologies of the elemental.
24 Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Duquesne
University Press, 2001).
25 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis
(Northwestern University Press, 1969). For a contemporary perspective on a
phenomenology of the elemental, see Annette Hilt and Anselm Böhmer, Das
Elementale. An der Schwelle zur Phänomenalität (Orbis Phaenomenologicum, 2008).
26 For a general overview of the debate see Dominique Janicaud et al., Phenomenology
and the theological: A French Debate (Fordham University Press, 2001). A
wider context is presented by Lazló Tengelyi and Hans-Dieter Gondek, Neue
Phänomenologie in Frankreich (Suhrkamp, 2011).
27 See in particular Foucault’s text on Blanchot, La pensée du dehors (fata morgana,
1986).
28 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne
(Stanford University Press, 2000).
 Part V

Politics of the One

 12

Negative Imperialization
Artemy Magun

The concept of empire today

While we usually tend to think of a state as the privileged form of political unity in
Modernity, today, from many sides, we hear that the state model is in crisis. Some,
on the liberal side, speak in this context of “globalization” and of other processes that
weaken state sovereignty for the benefit of international organizations. Some, whether
more critically or more realistically minded, point at empire as the alternative political
form of Modernity. The question then arises of what this concept actually means now,
beyond its clear ideological meaning, whether anti- or pro-imperialist.
Unlike the state, empire means not just the unity of an integrated unit, but a unity
of the world. In the late Middle Ages, when the Modern states came to existence, they
did so in competition with the universalist emperor, so that many maintained by way
of compromise that, in the words of Sebastian de Covarrubias, “Omnis Rex imperator
in regno suo.”1 The absolutist aspirations of Modern monarchies for the “sovereignty”
of their power were from the start paradoxical, because territorial limitation rendered
any sovereignty limited. And indeed, throughout Modern era, territorial, dynastic,
and nation states kept aspiring to foreign territories and conquering the world, while
at the same time moving towards national integration. There is, in the supreme unity
of the Modern state, a trace of suppressed imperial ambition: if it is a monarchy, or the
rule of a united people, then why is its unity not universal? And this imperial ambition
keeps resurfacing today. Do we deal here, as Negri and Hardt for instance suggest, with
the desire of monist metaphysics to subsume the whole world, with the totalitarianism
of a closed repressive totality? Or perhaps the current “imperialization” of politics is a
consequence of a deeper negative henosis, of a crisis of the Modern state-subject-unit,
which discovers its own ecstatic solitude, in the sense elaborated in my chapter on
solitude (Chapter 3)?
Today, from many sides at once, we hear the word “empire” returning to the
foreground of political discussion. Those dissatisfied with the politics of US admin-
istration accuse it of imperialism.2 At the same time, some distant but benevolent
178 Politics of the One

observers of American politics use empire (namely, the British Empire) as a positive
example.3 The integration of the European Union also reminds some of empire: thus,
Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande use this term positively and propose a plan for organ-
izing the European supra-state into a “cosmopolitan empire,” with loose expanding
borders and primarily non-representative forms of democratic participation.4 Beck
and Grande also inquire into the sociological conditions of the new “imperial” politics
and find them in the emerging “risk society” where threats are no longer possible to fix
or even locate, and thus, subjectively, the world becomes more and more insecure.5
Beck and Grande directly maintain that the perception of risks contributes to the
need for “cosmopolitan empire” which would have a larger scope of control, and at the
same time would be more flexible and mobile than current bureaucratic representative
institutions. They see the need for European empire derived from the existence of the
weak “risk states” that poses a threat to the European security.6
In Russia, which domestic public opinion considers to be a “loser” of interna-
tional politics, where internationalist liberalism has lately become unpopular and a
power-based view of the world dominant, “empire” is conjured both by right-wing
revanchists and by aggressive pro-Western liberals.7
In what is perhaps the most innovative usage of the term, Negri and Hardt, in their
recent two-volume work [Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004)], speak, paradoxically,
of the single, non-localized global Empire which is run not exclusively by the US, but
by a network of international organizations and capitalist corporations, for whom the
US plays only the role of a forceful executive. Empire, to them, coincides with the very
process of globalization. They treat it as a return to the pure non-anthropomorphic
immanence of the world, that is, to the Spinozist all-encompassing “substance,” which
“empire” helps to reunite and to reveal, but which has finally to abandon empire and
to leave the world to the “multitude.”
Blandine Kriegel (2002) also attacks imperial tendencies in thought and practice,
but does this from a fundamentally conservative point of view, which rejects the whole
Modern revolutionary tradition (including Negri’s thought) as the origin of Modern
empire and imperialism. For her, “empire,” along with “revolution,” is a fruit of the
Modern metaphysics of the sovereign subject, while the “rule of law” in a Modern
republican state would follow the logic of substance which is that of natural law. It
is easy to see how the arguments of Negri and Hardt, and of Kriegel, cross over the
Hegelian opposition between subject and substance.
Today, at the moment when the idea of the world unity almost achieved, encounters
violent resistance, and the establishment of such unity increasingly involves violence;
when, to some, the ongoing unification of the world is marked by the hegemony of
the USA or of the Western world in general, by the imposition of their particular
traits under the disguise of the Universal, the discourse of empire acquires a negative
sounding.
Now, do we have to take this discourse seriously, or are we dealing with an “archaic”
notion that does not do justice to the qualitatively new political reality marked by
the spontaneous consolidation of the world through the forces of a postindustrial
economy and consumer society, as well through the values of liberal democracy?
 Negative Imperialization 179

Some8 have been ready to see empire and imperialism as an actual but nevertheless
archaic rudiment of the past, and others9 insist that today’s technological and economic
situation renders impossible the forceful maintenance of world-scale imperial power
from one center.
However, there are indeed reasons to think that the discourse of empire might not
be completely irrelevant to the contemporary situation.
To start with, this discourse has not at all been alien to the discourse of Modernity,
and did not always play an archaic, retrospective role in Modern history. On the
contrary, the imperial reality and/or discourse have been closely interwoven with the
very phenomena that we consider as Modern, and of which we see ourselves, and our
liberal democratic, capitalist world, as successors.

Empire: a short history

In fact, the European empires were at their largest and strongest in the Modern
age, although they have not always used this concept. Modernity started with the
conquest of the New World, and with the formation of huge universal monarchies.10
This movement of expansion was directly linked to the prior consolidation of terri-
torial states under newly absolute monarchs—which is particularly salient in the case
of the Spanish Conquista which directly followed the “Reconquista” (in fact, also a
conquest) of the Iberian Peninsula by northern Christian royalties.11 However, while
these worldwide monarchies were often informally called empires,12 they were not
officially recognized as such. Even the huge, and messianically disposed, Holy Roman
Empire under Charles V, upon which “the sun never set,” was only called an empire in
relation to its European territories. The fact that the kingdoms did not want to speak
of colonies as empires had precisely to do with their non-willingness to compete with
the only Holy Roman Empire, or to share its problems with a Pope who aspired to
superiority over the Emperor. Also, the status of newly acquired colonies was seen as
so heterogeneous that they would not even qualify for the role of imperial provinces.
Thus, empire as a word was suppressed, censored, and overseas colonies became
an enormous state of exception (slavery, ruthless wars, politics of extermination).
Nothing, really, came to replace the word “empire”: in a sense, the failure of the
colonial empires was partly a consequence of their failure to find an adequate univer-
salist concept that would legitimize them. It is because of this conceptual failure, James
Muldoon argues, that Spanish rulers proved unable to build a workable model of local
governance of their colonies, with a reasonable measure of autonomy and delegated
power.13 Interestingly, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the destiny of the
word “revolution” was the same: its political meaning, which had existed earlier, was
censored by conservative ideologists.14 Both suppressed names were to return later
in a spectacular fashion. But that these words were suppressed is due to some special
qualities of empires and revolutions. As we will see further, they both deal with the
negative— empty space and unstructured time—and, as such, they tend to escape
180 Politics of the One

attention. Why do we need to give special attention to revolution, if it only fixes

age-old injustice? Why speak of empire, if we actually have universality, globalization,
and whoever rebels against it takes us completely by surprise? We generally tend not
to notice our negative acts but to emphasize the positive target they are directed at,
and the positive state of affairs they are meant to protect. Thus, empire, like revolution,
is often “unconscious”. This was particularly true, for instance, of early Rome, so that
Paul Veyne speaks, in its regard, of “unconscious imperialism.”15 In fact, the very word
“empire” is a euphemism, because it calls a monarchy by a republican legal term, and
this is true both of Rome and of Napoleon’s France. Thus, “empire,” like “revolution”
(according to Claude Lefort16) and the Modern democracy that stems from it, bears
the mark of illegitimacy. This also means that we deal, in the case both of revolution
and of empire, with something that resists conceptualization.
Actually, Rome did not have a “positive” conception of its empire during the most
intense phases of its expansion. Thus, Paul Veyne notes that Rome, unlike Athens
with its Greek “Arkhe,” had a very archaic, egocentric notion of international relations,
viewing itself as the only real city in a world which was surrounded by barbarians and
in need both of securing itself and of gaining land for its ever growing population.
Its imperialism started therefore as an “archaic isolationism.”17 In the context of
the present volume, we could speak here of the collective solitude of an imperialist
republic. Later, in the second century b.c., after Rome had defeated Carthage, it
started increasing its mostly indirect control over the rest of the Mediterranean world,
filling adjacent countries with its merchants and “capitalists.” When these merchants
and capitalists were increasingly threatened by local powers, Rome started to annex
the countries in question. Guiglielmo Ferrero, telling this story in his “The Greatness
and Decline of Rome” (1902–7),18 draws obvious parallels with the conquest of the
world by European countries in the nineteenth century. He calls, for instance, the
war of Mithridates against Rome (starting in 88 b.c.), “not a mere struggle between
an Eastern and a Western Power but an organized and widespread revolution against
capitalist domination. Mithridates was posing, not simply as the hero of Hellenism,
but as the scourge of the cosmopolitan plutocracy under the patronage of Rome.”19 At
that time, Rome never called itself an empire because it considered its actions as simply
protective of the interests of its citizens. Romans started to speak of the “imperium”
of Roman people only in the middle of the first century b.c., when conquests led to
the establishment of dictatorship, and then monarchy, inside Rome itself. It is in this
very period that Cicero wrote his book “On the Republic,” which would later become
a classic plea for a republican constitution. The book is mostly dedicated to various
public institutions, but its conclusion is striking: it is “Scipio’s dream” where the ghost
of Scipio the African reminds his posterity of the futility and vanity of the republic,
and of its empire, from the perspective of an inhuman universe:
I perceive that you are still employed in contemplating the seat and residence of
mankind. But it appears to you so small, as in fact it really is, despise its vanities,
and fix your attention for ever on these heavenly objects. Is it possible that you
should attain any human applause or glory that is worth contending for? The
 Negative Imperialization 181

earth, you see, is peopled but in a very few places, and those too of small extent;
and they appear like so many little spots of green scattered through vast unculti-
vated deserts. And those who inhabit the earth are not only so remote from each
other as to be cut off from all mutual correspondence, but their situation being in
oblique or contrary parts of the globe, or perhaps in those diametrically opposite
to yours, all expectation of universal fame must fall to the ground.20

This image of collective solitude in space, which sounds so Modern, is clearly a

metaphoric commentary on the imperial transformation of the Roman city-state,
where global considerations undermine republican institutions and mores—unity of
the world against the unity of a subject. By making a full circle, the Roman republic
passed from solitary egocentrism to solitary universalism.
I will not expand here on the history of empire in Medieval Europe: this conceptual
history has been largely documented. Generally speaking, the concept was widely used
with regard to the two attempted “remakes” of the empire, the one by Charlemagne
and the other by Otto I. In both, the “empire” stood not just for statehood and for the
right of succession to the Romans, but for universality, proclaimed but never realized.
“Empire” had an overtone of usurpation in it, as well as a melancholic-nostalgic spirit.
Nevertheless, this was a strong claim to legitimacy and to unitary sovereign statehood,
and indeed the Holy Roman Empire of the Hohenstauffens was one of the cradles
of the Modern centralized bureaucratic state,21 so that in the independent sovereign
states that were forming in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was suggested, as I
already evoked, that a king was emperor of his domain. Due to these multiple claims
on universality, the concept of empire was temporarily abandoned and supplanted by
the concept of the state—even if the practice of “imperial” expansion was precisely at
its peak.
In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “empire”—the main model
of which was the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation—was considered
“monstrous,”22 in comparison with the rapidly developing model of a sovereign,
administrative state (compare the insistence of Negri and Hardt on the “monsters”
that form the multitude inhabiting the empire of today23). The Holy Roman Empire,
with its local self-government of Electors and estates conventions, was too decen-
tralized, in a sense too “democratic,” for the standards of the Modern state of that
time. In the baroque epoch (the seventeenth century), the state was seen as an avant-
garde innovation suited to the new chaotic world (such was the view of Machiavelli
and Hobbes). In the eighteenth century the state was perceived as a classical orderly
institution in contrast with heterogeneous, porous, and federative empire. In addition,
“empire” was believed to be subject to the historical cycles of “rise and fall,” while the
state was supposed to withstand all those. Thus, for a long period of time, “empire”
became a word for political weakness and moral corruption, not of the military force
originally inherent in the meaning of the term.
Importantly, the seventeenth and, more so, the eighteenth centuries, far from
being solely focused on atomic states, were preoccupied with the construction of a
182 Politics of the One

common political space within Europe (where such states could exist and interact).
This common space of the Ius Publicum Europaeum (alias Res Publica Christiana),
was, however, never framed as a federation or empire. Carl Schmitt suggests that this
could only be possible on the condition that the essential struggle for world hegemony
was transferred into non-European space, the space of the war for colonies.24
After this period of disfavor, “empire” comes back into the foreground of European
politics with Napoleon, to be abandoned only after the Second World War. For
Napoleon, empire was primarily a part of the general drive of the resurrection of
Roman antiquity that had been started by the American and French Revolutions.
(American revolutionaries, Hamilton and Jefferson, were not afraid of this word
either.) Bonaparte did not wish to be named a king, but, instead, chose a word that
was new for France, and which recalled the succession from republic to monarchy in
ancient Rome. In 1804, he was crowned by the Pope as Emperor of the French. Due
to his military victories, Napoleon’s empire ousted the medieval Holy Roman Empire
of the German Nation in 1806. Here, “empire” is clearly not an archaic, but an avant-
garde, future-oriented notion.25 Even in spite of the many conservative tendencies of
Napoleon’s politics, precisely the “imperial” side of it—that is, its foreign policy—was
mostly not conservative. Napoleon modernized old feudal institutions by introducing
new French institutions in many of the countries he conquered. The use of the concept
went back to the revolutionary legitimacy of the regime, and the universalism that it
implied consisted in the expansion of the French model of the post-revolutionary state
(empire did not oust the state, but in fact fully developed it, as though in the folds of
its spacious gown—as had happened before in the epoch of the Hohenstaufens). One
even remembers Napoleon’s talk of returning to the Carolingian empire and the role
of the Pope in his crowning ceremony; this talk is not simply archaic either, because it
announces a project of returning to the early medieval unity of Europe, in contrast to
its feudal, then dynastic, and only then national fragmentation.
The French Revolution brought about the utopian drive of universality (liberty,
equality, and fraternity), as well as the sense of war as civil, mass-driven, and
limitless: Napoleon, long before the wars of the twentieth century, was famous for
not observing the rules of war, such as invading the territories of neutral countries
without announcement. It is also not by chance that it is during his wars we encounter,
in Spain, the first Modern partisan campaign. In this sense, revolution and empire
in France were anti-classical, barbaric, monstrous, in the sense of the eighteenth
century. But it is this non-classical sense that became, at that time, future-oriented and
avant-garde.
After the fall of Napoleon, there came an interlude during which the state, armed
with dynastic legitimacy, became the dominant political form again—Napoleon’s
administrative and legal reforms became a model—but in their statist, not imperial
aspect.26 However, at this time, the second wave of colonialism was going on in
Europe. England had already started it with its conquest of India in the eighteenth
century, but now, after the example of conquest shown by Napoleon, more and
more European countries started to conquer overseas territories. The second wave
of conquest, unlike the first, was driven by ideas of progress, of gradually civilizing
 Negative Imperialization 183

non-European peoples and then setting them free. But, even more so than in the first
colonization of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European countries abstained
from including colonial territories in their sovereign territory and, this time, usually
abstained even from sending permanent settlers there. Imperialist policy was tightly
linked with liberal political ideology in the metropolis and even with the continuation
of the revolution. Thus, when France, in the 1830s, ventured to conquer Algeria, Alexis
de Tocqueville supported this war because he thought that it would help reinvig-
orate the French people—like many of his contemporaries, at least since the French
Revolution, he saw the essence of politics in public activity, and was worried that the
people, under monarchy, were becoming too passive.27
After 1848, the empire came spectacularly back in Europe itself. First, Napoleon’s
nephew was able to repeat his adventurous career and become Emperor of France.
Second, the great European powers launched the second wave of colonization—now
for the purely exploitive purposes of acquiring resources and sales markets. This
time, in the aftermath of the two Napoleons, few were ashamed to call themselves
“empires.” This title even helped the old legitimate monarchs to present themselves in
a new, more Modern form. The politics of force was rehabilitated, and the commercial
bourgeoisie showed its other, militarist face. Like the revolutionary career-makers,
the growing entrepreneur class was enjoying the growing sense of force, without
being able to conceive a direct political despotism of their own within the country
(they depended on a free labor force and on its unpopular exploitation, and they
were competing among each other and thus unable to act in concert)—or at least the
government was able to stop this ambition and redirect it into colonies. Twenty years
after Napoleon III came to power, his Prussian neighbors, who had learned all the
indispensable lessons and reunited the German states under their hegemony, defeated
Louis Napoleon on the battlefield and proclaimed themselves an empire (Reich).
At the same time (since the 1850s) some authors—such as Constantin Frantz and
Bruno Bauer—began criticizing and analyzing “imperialism.”28 They perceived the
growing disposition of European countries towards conquest, for both economic
and political purposes, as the continuation of Napoleon’s epoch. Thus, it was not
surprising that this conquest brought not only capitalist development and the exploi-
tation of colonies but also tendencies toward charismatic autocracy (such as the
rule of Napoleon III in France, and Disraeli in Britain). Later, in the early twentieth
century, when “empire” had already become an accepted term both for its critics
and for its proponents, there appeared theories of imperialism that were even more
considerate of its economic aspects. The first book on imperialism was written in
1902 by John Hobson; then there followed the Marxist theories of imperialism:
Rudolf Hilferding, Rosa Luxembourg, Vladimir Lenin, and Nikolai Bukharin.29 All
of these authors associated imperialism with capitalism, particularly with the need
to invest capital once it is accumulated. After the First World War, which was widely
seen as a clash of imperialist interests, an attempt was made to return to the logic of
sovereign states and their cosmopolitan cooperation. But post-revolutionary Russia
ended up preserving the empire de facto when it encountered the external limita-
tions of its potentially universal project. When the German extreme right took power
184 Politics of the One

in 1933, they proclaimed Germany the third Reich (the first was the Holy Roman
Empire, and the second the Reich proclaimed by Prussia in 1871). The idea of the
Nazis was the Grossraum, “large space,” controlled by Germany: by that time, it was
clear that the colonial empires were about to dissolve, but Germany was not content
to be satisfied with the “natural borders” of its nation: instead, it aspired to the large
sphere of imperial rule, recalling that of Napoleon, but under the principle of the
German nation. Alexander Kojève, a French Russian philosopher who was later to
become one of the architects of the European Union, criticized the Nazis in 1945 for
their illegitimate confusion of empire with nation, but nevertheless considered the
institution of empire as an indispensable intermediate step upon the road from the
nation-state to world unity.30 Kojève proposed to form a “Latin” empire of “kindred
nations” where France would have not a monopoly on power, but a solid hegemony.
Kojève was not alone in his project of the partial reunion of Europe—but at that time,
decolonization made the word “empire” into an insult, and both sides of the Cold
War used it to caricature their adversary (US propaganda portrayed the USSR as an
autocratic empire, and US President Reagan finally called it an “evil empire,” while the
Soviets traditionally accused the Americans of “imperialism”). In fact, both sides did
pursue policies that are hard to qualify other than as imperial or imperialist, but, like
the Early Modern colonial empires, they never formalized this relationship.31 During
the Cold War, these “empires” were commonly allegorized in science fiction, which,
apart from referring to the USSR and the US, reflected the growing unification and
domestication of a world that was torn between the two legitimate enemies. At that
moment, the imagination of conquests in outer space reflected a growing sense of
collective solitude and exhaustion: imperial ambitions on Earth as a counterpart to
the anxiety of humans in the face of the immense world, and their sense of alienation
from it. Thus, “empires” became associated with something non-anthropomorphic,
strange and alien. The “post-modern” philosophy that appeared at the same time, in
the 1960s, also attempted to build an estranged and non-anthropomorphic picture
of the world. The 1960s’ disappointment with the liberal state and economy found
expression in non-anthropomorphic genres, but at that moment it could not offer any
positive model of a non-liberal and non-classical polity.
Now, after the fall of the Soviet bloc, the global situation has lost its traditional
coordinates. The proliferation of local conflicts, the rapid expansion of Western-
style political institutions and ways of life was accompanied by growing military and
economic asymmetry between the US and the rest of the world. Many voices in the
European Union want it to further unification, to become a counter-power to the US.
The forces of the US unilaterally, or sometimes of the US and Europe together, exercise
“humanitarian” operations across the world, to quench and stall the aforementioned
local conflicts. In these circumstances, the concept of “empire” is back, and, for the
first time in 50 years, it is even used by many in the positive sense. Still, it has not been
accepted by any country as an official title.
In sum, the new phenomenon of imperialism, and the discourse of empire, can
be explained in two main ways: as failed universality and as an overly successful
universalization. Each time “empire” appears on the table, this means that a universal
 Negative Imperialization 185

project has failed. Napoleon’s empire meant that the French Revolution was over, and
that one had to master the chaos it had opened up by purely military means. Similarly,
the German Reich meant disappointment in the colonial empires. Today, even though
Negri and Hardt use the word in the sense of world dominance already achieved,
“empire” means the failure of the Soviet emancipatory project, and the growing
opposition that economic and cultural globalization encounters throughout the world,
so that it has to be backed by force.
Today’s Western society is obsessed with security. This society, where crime is
comparatively low and which is equipped with the most advanced means of control,
imagines itself as being the society of the unlocalized and unpredictable “risk,”
“precarity,” etc. The decenterment and chaos that are brought about by globalization
increase social anxiety, both on the part of elites, who are obsessed with security, and
on the part of immigrant populations which feel powerless and turn to terror. This is a
kind of war of position, which at times shows signs of turning into a war of maneuver
thanks to unbalanced impatient decisions of the stronger party.

Universalism positive and negative

The empire’s universalism (whether it is limited or excessive) can, in its turn, be
understood differently: positively or negatively. Anthony Pagden, in his book The
Lords of all the World, argues that the imperial universalist project was first Roman
and civilizational, and then, in the Middle Ages, Christian. This Romano-Christian
universalism, according to him, provided for the conquest of overseas colonies, and
later became imprinted in the Enlightenment, and in the present-day messianism of
liberal democracy in the United States. Pagden’s account is persuasive, but it tells a
continuous story and does not allow for any breaks in the narrative. Also, after having
discussed in detail the history of the concept of “empire,” Pagden includes in his
narrative those periods and countries that did not consider themselves as empires,
or did not apply the word “empire” to what Pagden treats as such. Finally, because
of the continuous character of the story and of the way he links the present to the
future, Pagden presents imperialism as a rudiment of political theology from which, as
becomes clear from his conclusion, he would like the world to be free. However, since
empire, even in his own account, is so intertwined with the most important achieve-
ments of Modernity, one should be very careful in seeking what opposes it.
According to Negri and Hardt, the contemporary Empire is the fruit of a long
revolutionary process, which has globalized, unified the world and made it entirely
immanent, self-enclosed. At the same time, in this immanent world, Empire represents
a reactionary force that still bears the imprint of now-extinct transcendence, because it
subjects immanence to the forces of mediation and representation, which are exterior
to the truly immanent process of production. The other force in today’s world, which
is opposed to “empire,” is the “multitude”—the heterogeneous mass of people who
actually live and produce, and do not really need any mediating mechanism imposed
upon them. Negri and Hardt compare this multitude to the Church and the way it
186 Politics of the One

lived, on the move, in Augustine’s “City of Earth.” Empire, for Negri and Hardt, is no
longer a particular power that aspires to universality: it is in fact a universal power of
the actually unified world. But its domination is not necessary for the world to remain
one. Negri and Hardt assume that the unification of the world is already complete,
which gives them a productive universalist point of view, but this assumption fails to
explain actual political struggles: proliferating local conflicts, growing terrorist activity
and the military interventions of the US and its allies that lead many to speak of the
imperialist turn in its policy.
Now, in both of these accounts empire and the situation in which it emerges appear
as positive, substantial forces. For Pagden, and for Negri and Hardt, empire represents
a theology or metaphysics that imposes itself over the world. In what follows, I will
argue that the logic of empire follows not only the positive and messianic principle,
but also the negative and inertial one.
As we saw above, both Negri and Hardt, for their part,32 and Kriegel, for her part,33
consider the concepts and phenomena of revolution and empire to be closely related,
and opposed to the more “classic” concept and phenomenon of the state. For Negri and
Hardt, empire usurps the achievements of revolution, imposing on them from outside,
and for Kriegel, revolution and empire equally build upon the notion (pernicious in her
view) of the decision-making sovereign subject. Both Negri and Hardt and Kriegel see the
emergence of revolution and empire as a singular modern phenomenon, and neither of
them develops upon the precise logic through which revolution gives way to empire.
First of all, we need to have in mind the devastating destructive effect of the French
Revolution. Many theorists of the French Revolution, such as Jules Michelet, Georg
Hegel, and, in our days, Claude Lefort, see the main meaning of this event as negative:
the destruction of the theologico-political principle and the creation of a “void” in the
place of the sovereign: the void that is frightening, sterile, but also characteristic of a
democratic culture.34
The Revolution, by destroying the internal structure of French society, also trans-
formed the system of international relations among the European powers. When, in
1792, France, by what it thought was a preemptive strike, started a war against the
Austrian empire, the new war was immediately overdetermined ideologically, even if
the elites of the European powers mistakenly thought that ideological difference would
be a pretext for them to simply weaken France and annex some of its territories.
Austria and Prussia feared the threat that the principle of popular sovereignty
posed to the previously accepted criteria of legitimacy. Thus, the rights of German
nobles in Alsace and the rights of the Pope in Avignon, which were violated with
reference to the sovereignty of people, were major pretexts to the 1792 war. The
widespread opinion that France was weakened by its revolutionary events contributed
to the carelessness of hostile rhetoric on the part of Austria and made Prussia hope
for territorial acquisitions from France. However, both countries were not that eager
to go to war, which finally erupted due to an escalation of mutual suspicions and
misperceptions.
Interestingly, the universalist aspects of the revolutionary ideology did not origi-
nally privilege the “export” of revolution. The role of revolutionary France was rather
 Negative Imperialization 187

that of a magnet for the radicals of other countries who were the first to speak in
universalist terms (thus, a German immigrant to France, Anacharsis Cloots, spoke
in 1790 of the Revolution as “a trumpet that has reached to the four corners of the
globe”35) and to push France to go to war. France was also a point of attraction of
sympathies among the enlightened circles of all European countries. Only when the
war started in 1792 did French leaders largely turn from nationalist to universalist
rhetoric (“war of the people against kings,” “crusade for universal liberty,”36 etc.).
Because of the opposition between the revolutionary and monarchic principles of
legitimacy, France found itself alone in the face of other European countries (nine
of them, including Austria, Prussia, England, and Spain, opposed France in 1793).
Its revolutionary government knew that losing the war would mean the end of the
Revolution and the Restoration (a change of regime which would not at all be on the
agenda in the case of a “normal” European war). This created an anxious state of alert,
of exception, of which the Terror—the anxious search for internal enemies—was one
of the consequences. At the same time, in this extreme solitary situation, France soon
found itself militarily superior to its enemy, because of the new, popular character of
its armies and the new strategies of its generals that went against the “regular” war of
the eighteenth century. The old monarchies, with their regular professional armies,
started to crumble under the blows of French troops—already in 1792 the French
invade Belgium, where they are, originally, warmly greeted. In this situation, the
French, still feeling themselves alone against the whole world, saw a desert around
them and no reason not to conquer enemy territories.
Thus, revolutionary France promptly turned from defense to conquest. One of
the dominating ideas during the Directory period was the old doctrine of “natural
borders.” However, even this doctrine was left behind when Napoleon Bonaparte
was charged with the expedition into Italy. During the Italian campaign, French
troops constantly crossed the borders of neutral countries (such as Genoa), and their
Austrian enemies did the same. At the end of this operation, when negotiating peace
with Austria, Napoleon agreed to offer a large part of Venice in exchange for recog-
nition of French conquest in Italy and Germany. To fulfill this promise, Napoleon
promptly conquered Venice (which was neutral in the war and did not give any pretext
for the conflict).
The story shows that the French Revolution transformed the whole security
structure of the continent, by exploding the borders among sovereign states and
turning the whole of Europe into a continuous theater of war, where France, alone
against all adjacent countries, attempted to rally supporters of its cause from within
the European states. The borders, the lines of division remained, but they were now
indeterminate, fluid—a situation homologous to the state of revolutionary society
within France. In a sense, France gradually drew the rest of Europe into a funnel of
indeterminacy and illegitimacy.
Steven Walt, in his book Revolution and War, argues that post-revolutionary
wars start not because of the immediate desire of revolutionaries for expansion or
because of their ideological hostility to other powers but because of the new indeter-
minate situation where each side radically misperceives the intentions of the other,
188 Politics of the One

and the revolutionary state seems weak to others and threatened to itself. Two of the
major factors that drive states to war in a revolutionary situation are, according to
Walt, “the window of opportunity” and “the spiral of suspicion.” Perceived weakness
creates the seductive empty spaces to be conquered, and at the same time cherishes
fear and draws the other side to hostile action. Both processes further undermine
international structures of legitimacy and enhance the sense of fragility and oppor-
tunity that invites to adventure.
Long before Walt (and probably without his knowledge), a similar account was
advanced, in relation to the Napoleonic wars, by Guiglielmo Ferrero, a well-known
(but now mostly forgotten) Italian historian of the early twentieth century whom
I have already mentioned with regard to the history of Ancient Rome. Ferrero
was not just an historian but a political theorist and a public figure of a liberal/
conservative orientation. Already during the First World War (which he calls a
“destructive revolution”), he criticizes the “quantitative” civilization of capitalism
and democracy that threatens the world with the “madness of the unlimited” (folie
de l’illimité).37 The same line of thought is continued in the dark period before and
during the Second World War, when Ferrero composed two books on the era of
Napoleon I, “The Gamble. Bonaparte in Italy” (1936/1961) and “Reconstruction.
Talleyrand in Vienna.” (1941). In these books, Ferrero, who is highly critical of
Bonaparte, describes the whole story, from the start of the French Revolution in 1789
to the final fall of Napoleon in 1815, as the story of fear. Ferrero links together the
phenomenon of “Great Fear”—the mass panic in the French provinces in the summer
of 1789,38 the Terror of 1793–4, and the “panic” provoked among the European
powers in the 1800s by Napoleon’s victory. European monarchies might have been
stronger than Napoleon militarily, but they were mortally afraid of him. Moreover,
the behavior of Napoleon himself, in particular his adventurous marches and surprise
strikes, were also a sign of fear rather than courage: of disorientation and blindness.
Ferrero agrees with some French historians39 who show that most of Napoleon’s wars,
at least until 1806 inclusively, were in fact defensive wars: legitimate borders once
transgressed, and legitimate government overthrown, Bonaparte had every reason
to see dangers all over the new borders. Even though Napoleon, in the Memorial of
Saint-Helena,40 gives a “positive” version of his policy, driven, according to him, by
the desire to establish a lasting peace in Europe, the fundamental condition of his
wars was the fact that, for France, there were no more “external” countries, and the
continent was united by war, the extreme fragility of old armies, and competing claims
of illegitimacy. Napoleon’s bulletins and proclamations written during his rule all
blame the war on the adversary, mainly on England.41 Appeals to peace are constant,
but they are precisely used not as a positive goal of policy but as a status quo ruined
by the aggressor. Of course, this is a standard rhetoric of legitimation but, given
our knowledge of the circumstances, for instance the fact that Napoleon preserved
the sovereignty of the great European powers he conquered, we have to take it into
account.
As Ferrero writes:
 Negative Imperialization 189

The Republic was a precarious creation, inconsistent, unstable; it could only

maintain itself if France was strong in Italy. […] In 1805 Bonaparte decided to
conquer Italy by defeating Austria […] After the peace of Pressburg, Napoleon
lived in terror of the immense conquest he had made […] To make sure of what it
had acquired in Italy, the Revolution stepped out of its natural frontiers a second
time, this time on the German side, and provoked a general war.42

One of Napoleon’s main strategic principles was always (even in an unfavorable

situation) to attack first, which means to use the offensive as a defensive tool.43 One
also has to mention that the ultimate decision of Napoleon to consolidate the whole
of Europe under French rule was taken in the frame of his “continental blockade” of
England. This blockade, however, was an attempt at a symmetrical response to the
more traditional sea blockade of France exercised by England. Thus, applying the logic
that Carl Schmitt, as cited earlier, develops in relation to the overseas empires of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one can say that Napoleon’s European empire was
born as the internalization of the limitless law of the sea displaced onto the continent.
According to Ferrero, the whole epoch of the French Revolution and Empire
was one of a continuous “Great Fear” which was caused by the destruction of the
principle of legitimacy. “The Revolution abused force because it was afraid: afraid of
France, afraid of Europe, afraid of itself.”44 This principle, after the fall of Napoleon,
was “courageously” reconstructed by Talleyrand at the Congress of Vienna. Thus,
in Ferrero’s account, the Revolution appears as a destructive whirl, and Napoleon’s
Empire, which seemingly stalls and masters it, in fact only moves within the unlimited
space that is left open by it.
This account is clearly inspired by the experience of the fatal panic that drew
Europe into world war in the summer of 1914. Projecting this event, retrospectively,
upon earlier history, Ferrero seeks to turn common opinions upside down: to see
inertia and reactivity in Napoleon’s action which had usually been seen as an example
of utmost activity and initiative. Respectively, Talleyrand, with his accepted reputation
as a corrupt, treacherous man, turns out to be truly active and constructive. While
the general argument of Ferrero, which undermines the military genius of Napoleon
and his independent initiative during the Italian campaign, has been many times
contested, his general historiosophic interpretation of the Napoleonic wars is well
founded on the facts and remains influential.
Now, if we see empire, at least the Modern empire, in a negative rather than a
positive light, then we may obtain a new perspective on the current global security
crisis. The founding event of this crisis was the democratic revolution45 that happened
in the Eastern bloc at the end of 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, started from
“above” by the Soviet leadership and then continued from below. The content of this
revolution was predominantly negative, destructive: it did not give way to any new
ideas, it did not bring forward a lasting mobilization, and, in most countries, it did
not have a strong ideological avant-garde that would then massively come to power.
However, this event should be considered as revolutionary, judging by the profound
190 Politics of the One

changes that it made in society, and by the emancipatory, secularizing thrust that
was directed against the ideocratic and authoritarian rule of the Communist party.
Anthropologically, the post-communist revolution was accompanied by widespread
melancholia and apathy—but the same processes were under way during the French
Revolution, as Michelet persuasively shows. These processes, as I have tried to show
elsewhere, have to be considered not as arguments against the revolutionary character
of the event, but as its symptoms, symptoms that the revolution, having destroyed the
outer oppressor, applied to itself. By the year 2000 and the election of Vladimir Putin
as Russian president, the regime started showing clear “Bonapartist” features (as it is
now common in Russia to characterize it)—the leader is a charismatic autocrat who
maneuvers among several powerful groups, none of which is able to monopolize
power. The lamentations and self-humiliation characteristic of the 1990s gave place to
defensively aggressive nationalism and consumerist rage.
While inside society, the fall of socialist regimes broke the sharp border that
divided society from the party-state and put society, for a while, into a suspended
and even stagnant state, on the international level this event also led to the collapse
of a fixed, external border (the Iron Curtain), and respectively to the internalization
of the world. The unification and internalization of the world, which many baptized
as “globalization,” did not, however, contribute to the solution of local conflicts, but
instead led to their proliferation, on the one hand, and their suspension (failure of
finding a determinate–durable lack of ultimate solution)—on the other. Because, in
the new situation, any conflict is an internal one, its solution can only be a “policing”
or “peace-keeping” operation on the part of a hegemonic power. But such operations
cannot solve conflict, they can only suspend it. The very principle of sovereignty
was—like in the 1790s—put into question, partly because of the growing power of
the non-state actors, partly because the large friend–enemy divisions that had earlier
given meaning to state sovereignty collapsed and gave way to indeterminate and
fluid groupings. The central political figure becomes that of a stranger (immigrant,
suspected terrorist), an internal alien. The same was true by the end of 1790s and in
the 1800s, but then the fascination with the foreigner was fearful but admiring, while
today it is closer to fearful repulsion. Negri and Hardt, however, speak enthusiasti-
cally of the “monsters” and “pilgrims” who constitute, in their view, the “multitude” of
today’s empire.
In the newly reunited world, there were many new zones and political subjects
that emerged as neutral and in need of “development.” This led to the new wave
of expansion by Western states, capital, and culture. But, to the extent that this
expansion transformed the sovereignty of the concerned zones, it was immediately
seen as a threat by subjects where globalization had not gone that far but which were
not inherently hostile to the West or to the particular Western countries responsible
for expansion. Thus, the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe in 1999 and 2004
was not motivated by any immediate security reasons but rather by the political and
military vacuum that appeared after the fall of the Warsaw Pact.46 This expansion
might be beneficial for Eastern European countries, but it largely contributed (along
with the bombardment of Serbia in 1998) to anti-Western sentiment among Russian
 Negative Imperialization 191

elites and in Russian public opinion, which further led to the growth of authoritari-
anism in Russia. Seemingly, the withdrawal of the USSR from the Middle East was
immediately followed by the Gulf War and the subsequent increase in US military
and economic presence in the region, which in turn led to growing anti-American
sentiment across the Muslim world.
Steven Walt, in his 1996 book, recognizes the events of 1989–91 in Eastern Europe
as revolutions, and takes time to explain why, contrary to his argument, they did not
lead to a large-scale war. He explains this in terms of a relatively peaceful international
situation at the moment and fears escalation only within the former USSR.47 However,
subsequent events have shown that there were things to fear throughout the world,
primarily in the relations between the West and the Middle East. I suggest that the
present international situation is directly linked to the dissolution of the Yalta system
of legitimacy as a result of anti-communist revolutions. The post-revolutionary crisis
that internalized global conflicts only gradually led to imbalance, which happened
far from its epicenter. Therefore, this crisis appears to us today in the shape of empire
rather than of revolution. My task here is to show that the two are inherently linked,
and that the indeterminate expansion of empire(s) is made possible by the collapse of
authority or legitimacy that precedes it.

Philosophy of passive agency

If we now want to understand the situation in terms of the fundamental philosophy
of history, we need to turn to another thinker who reflected on the negative character
of the French Revolution and attempted to conceive its aftermath. This thinker is
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. We need to pay particular attention to his early
Phenomenology of Spirit—the work completed on the day Napoleon defeated Prussian
forces at Jena and that contained a severe analysis of revolution as an advent of
empty negativity and, in a more or less veiled form, praise of Napoleon as the
figure completing and overcoming (“sublating”) the Revolution. Alexandre Kojève,
the famous interpreter of Hegel whom I have already mentioned, insists on the
“Bonapartist” subtext of the Phenomenology that, according to him, celebrated the
Napoleonic state as the end of history. This may not be exactly true, but it is never-
theless clear that Hegel does see his time as the triumph of the absolute that had passed
through the negativity of revolution but overcame and absorbed it into a positive
political and ethical order. However, Hegel’s view of history can be used to derive some
other, less optimistic conclusions about the post-revolutionary situation in Europe.
The central concept of this work of Hegel is “negativity,” to which corresponds
the empirical phenomenon of death. Both are involved in dialectical movement,
which means that they are treated ambiguously. On the one hand, negativity is a
condition of historical movement, due to which the spirit (Geist) rises above material
“substance” or nature, demonstrates its independence from it and transforms it by
gradually turning itself into nature, and nature into spirit. However, on the other
192 Politics of the One

hand, negativity, together with death as its phenomenon, constantly threatens spirit
itself with its “inactuality,” “void,” and inertia. But it is only by facing and absorbing
this danger, says Hegel, that the spirit can hope to elevate itself above nature and to
actualize itself in it. To quote the most famous passage from this book of Hegel:
Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most
dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength […] but the
life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by
devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. […] Spirit
is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it.48

The whole narrative of the Phenomenology is penetrated by the interplay between

these two sides of negativity, as a principle of movement and action, and as a principle
of paralysis and passivity.49
To understand this logic better, let us consider three narratives where it is
most clearly developed by Hegel. The first is the famous dialectic of “lordship and
bondage”50 which, nominally, is supposed to describe the spiritual movement of
the ancient world of slaveholders but in fact has important connotations in the
time contemporary to Hegel, since it is the time where bourgeoisie rose above the
aristocracy and finally came to claim its privileges. Here, as the story goes, the “lord”
is the one who risks his life and thus establishes his superiority over the “bondsman.”
The lord does not die, because, if both sides actually die, we would be dealing with a
“lifeless unity which is split into lifeless, merely immediate, unopposed extremes,”51
and the dialectic would stop. So, the bondsman accepts his defeat without mortal
combat, and the lord appropriates his death without dying. But, in the same way that
death was actual to him only for a fleeting moment, the negativity of his relationship
to nature is fleeting, too. He can only consume, “enjoy” the thing, perform its “sheer
negation,”52 leaving its transformation to the bondsman. The bondsman, ultimately,
enjoys a lasting relationship with death that he fears as his “absolute master”—and,
ultimately, it is the bondsman who achieves a higher degree of self-consciousness.
Thus, negativity and death fall into two moments: sheer unproductive negation and
the perpetual active transformation of nature. The aristocrat, who openly and boldly
acts (while the bondsman works) remains, in fact, static, unproductive—one can say,
passive—in his very activity.
Now, let us pass to another great dramatization of Hegel—the one that describes
the “ethical order” and that is largely based on a philosophical interpretation of
Sophocles’ “Antigone.” Again, we deal with the clash of two opposite principles: human
and divine law, or, the state and the family (as embodied in Creon and Antigone).
The “passage” that mediates between the two sides is, again, that of death: the state
needs war to reinvigorate the civic spirit,53 but when a civic hero (Antigone’s brother
Polynices) is dead, he returns to the sphere of the family which deals with his sheer
being, life or death, not with his civic identity. The interesting thing here is that the
family—personified in Antigone—transforms the sheer materiality and inertia of
death into a spiritual act.
 Negative Imperialization 193

The dead individual, by having liberated his being from his action or his negative
unity, is an empty singular, merely a passive being-for-another, at the mercy of
every lower irrational individuality and the forces of abstract material elements,
all of which are now more powerful than himself […] The Family keeps away from
the dead this dishonouring of him by unconscious appetites and abstract entities
and puts its own action in their place, and weds the blood-relation to the bosom
of the earth. […]”54

Thus, Antigone actively takes on the essentially inert and passive work of nature,
substance. Because the collision of the passive substantiality of family with the active
spirit of the state takes an active, dramatic form, it is ultimately sublated and super-
seded, in Hegel’s account. Thus, if in the case of the lord and the bondsman the activity
of the latter was fundamentally passive, in the case of Antigone, on the contrary,
passivity itself is acted out. In the first case, the threatening emptiness of negation
consisted in its fleeting, inactual character. In the second case, however, the danger of
death appeared as the inertness of a corpse, sheer materiality abandoned by spirit. In
both cases, death appears with its non-sublime, depotentializing side.
Let us finally consider Hegel’s analysis of the French Revolution in the subsection
entitled “Absolute freedom and terror.”55 Here, after the Old Regime has collapsed
(as a result of the process of Enlightenment, which had “permeated all its moments”
by negativity), the vacuum is filled by the reign of the purely universal principle,
embodied in Rousseau’s general will. The problem is that the actualization of it in a
particular, individual being becomes impossible—an individual form of this univer-
sality would constitute its betrayal. Thus, this “universal freedom […] can produce
neither a positive work nor a deed; there is left for it only negative action; it is merely
the fury of destruction.”56 “The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore
death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the
empty point of the absolute self. It is thus the coolest and meanest of all deaths, with
no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of
water.”57
Thus, Hegel states what Michelet will later develop: the boring and uninspiring
character of the Revolution, which is negative in the bad sense of the word. Moreover,
the “fury of destruction,” which is a negative but a sublimated, dignified image, and
certainly an active one, ends with the loss of meaning and in the automatic compulsion
of cutting off heads at the guillotine. The situation is similar to the dialectic of the lord
and the bondsman: the bold, self-disclosing activity of the lord puts him ultimately
in an essentially static, passive condition. But in the case of (any) revolution, in fact
both are the negative revolutionary drive that cannot be incorporated or actualized,
and the sheer dead corpses it leaves after itself. We can extrapolate this picture to any
revolution, noting that, in its process, revolutionary negativity, on the one hand, is
by definition fleeting and incorporeal, and increasingly turning against itself, while,
on the other hand, the material elements of the old society that it leaves behind are
deprived of their ideological legitimation, becoming thus a source of boredom and/or
of playful amusement.
194 Politics of the One

Such, generally speaking, is the work of revolution: the fierce activity of emanci-
pation that ends, after the collapse of the Old Regime, with self-negation and paralysis.
But what happens next? For Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the situation is
resolved, once again, with the fear of death as “absolute master” and the return to
the organic subdivisions of society, but now with the full consciousness of everyone’s
moral freedom and even sovereignty. Kojève even thinks that Napoleon appears
precisely at this juncture. However, if we look at these events from our time, keeping
in mind the historical parallels, we can suspect that the imperial situation, which
comes to replace the revolutionary one, inverts the latter in the way of a chiasmus.
Revolution was a bold, destructive activity that had the inertia of sheer death and
social apathy as its product. We can say that revolutionary negativity, being active,
gradually takes the form of passivity (under which we should still be able to discern
it). In the imperial situation, we have hectic activity in the foreground, and inertial
passivity in the background: passivity in the form of activity. Such, in the accounts
of Michelet and Ferrero, was the situation of Napoleon, and we can extrapolate it
to any political actor who suddenly finds himself in solitude, in the midst of empty,
homogeneous, and threatening political space. (The recent international activity of the
US vividly provokes such conclusions.) The revolutionary society discovers the void,
so to speak, in its midst, in its center of power, and it finds in its temporal suspension
the miraculous historical festival produced by revolution. The collapse of international
borders is then egocentrically viewed by this society as the reorientation of the whole
world towards its ideals and/or its sufferings. In the imperial situation, the center
is displaced, and the void is perceived as spatial rather than temporal, and external
rather than internal: if, earlier, the revolutionary society looked at itself with the eyes
of the whole world, now, it rather looks outside into the world emptied by its own
work, and is passively “sucked” into this void by fear and will to power.

Conclusion
The current movement of globalization does indeed have affinities with the “imperial”
politics of the early nineteenth century—the time when this concept returned into
the foreground of political discourse after long disregard. In both cases, we deal with
the post-revolutionary world, where the internalization and suspension of conflicts
endangers sovereignty and legitimacy, both externally and domestically. The implosion
of sovereign borders leaves the subject alone in the face of an indeterminate totality,
and “empire” names the point of view of this negative totality upon the stateless and
therefore powerless multitude.
Today, the post-Cold War world is also a world inheriting the revolutionary fall of
the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. In the same way that, in Russia, after the long
revolutionary suspense of the 1990s, there is now a recognizable Bonapartist regime,
the overall structure of international relations now shows the signs of US hegemony,
the legitimacy of the US being increasingly built on its military and financial force.58
 Negative Imperialization 195

Thus, the reason to introduce the notion of empire today is not simply the fact
that apparent globalization is led in the interest of one hegemonic power (the US) or
the Western powers taken together, and not the bureaucratic, authoritarian mode of
global governance (as Negri and Hardt would have it), but the situation of a global
crisis, where abundant lacunae, suspensions, and indeterminate conflicts make it easy
for the great powers to expand peacefully their sphere of control as well as of economic
and cultural hegemony, but where, in the second turn, the same lacunae, suspensions,
and indeterminate conflicts can draw the world into a panic and escalation, precisely
because of their indeterminacy. Beck and Grande thus follow a good tradition when
they derive the need for European empire out of indeterminate and unpredictable
“risk” (or the fearful exaggeration thereof) as a social and political condition. In other
words, we can speak of the process of imperialization, which shows itself in a growing
political anxiety, or sense of security. Barry Buzan, Ole Waever, and Jaap de Wilde
recently suggested, with great success, the notion of securitization (Buzan, Waever,
de Wilde, 1998)—and it is not by chance that it is at this historical moment that
“securitization,” or the discursive construction of an issue as existentially threatening,
became so salient as to obtain a name. At the same time, we can give Ulrich Beck, with
his theory of risk, the credit to have noticed this process much earlier, in 1986, but
recently to have emphasized its link to the return of imperial and imperialist politics.
“Empire” signifies a world that aspires to universality but stops short of it and
encounters limits it cannot surpass. At the same time, this imperial world lives its
limited universality as a closed totality, which produces the images of “aliens” or
“barbarians” to appear and the empty space to conquer. It seems that this internal
limitation is produced by the clash of the two contradictory political principles of
late modernity: the principle of subject and the principle of substance: the idea of a
sovereign individual and the sovereign state, on the one side, and of free, impersonal,
global exchange and communication, on the other. Thus, it is not accidental that
Negri and Hardt, on their part, and Blandine Kriegel, on hers, associate the contem-
porary empire, respectively, with the substance and the subject: empire lies precisely
at the moment where the two clash. Will there follow a new synthesis of substance
and subject, or will the contradiction lead to the further escalation of the crisis and,
ultimately, to further destruction and dissolution—this, at this historical juncture,
remains in suspension. However, it is clear that this situation requires not just the
classical conceptual apparatus of the sovereign legal state, but also the non-classical
Modern political concepts of revolution and empire.

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196 Politics of the One

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Notes
1 Tesoro de la lengua castella o española, cited in Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the world
(Yale University Press, 1995), 43.
2 In fact, the accusations of “imperial” presidency have been heard already during the
Clinton era, because of his tendency to decide military questions independently of
Congress and the Senate. See, for instance, William Banks and Jeffrey Strausmann, “A
New Imperial Presidency? Insights from U.S. involvement in Bosnia,” Political Science
Quarterly, 114(2), 1999.
3 See Niall Ferguson, Empire. The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the
Lessons for Global Power (Basic Books, 2003).
4 Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, Cosmopolitan Europe (Polity Press, 2007), 50–93.
5 The theory of risk society—the society concerned above all with risks, that is, with
security, rather than with various needs or goods—was developed by Ulrich Beck
198 Politics of the One

earlier, in his Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (Sage
Publications, 1992).
6 Cosmopolitan Europe, 212–14.
7 Anatoly Tchubais, Speech at the Saint-Petersburg State University of Engineering and
Economics, 09.25.2003. Available (in Russian) online at http://www.prpc.ru/library/
civ_09/01.shtml (accessed 10 June 2012).
8 For example, Philip Pomper, “The History and Theory of Empires,” in History and
Theory, 44, (2005), 1–27. Pomper predicts that empire “has joined the other forms of
power receding into evolutionary past” (27) and that its current popularity is due to
the reaction of men against the growing influence of women in politics (9). One of
the ironies that Pomper does not perceive is that the current interventions of Western
countries into the Middle East are in part legitimated precisely by the ambition to
liberate Islamic women from male domination.
9 See James Rosenau, “Illusions of Power and Empire,” History and Theory, 44,
2005, 73–87. In today’s world, Rosenau writes, “[p]eople are too skillful and wise,
organizations are too plentiful, and global structures are too disaggregated for power
to be concentrated in the way that empires require” (81). The whole enterprise of
Negri and Hardt is meant to combat this view, and show that decentralization does
not prevent the exercise of global power. Furthermore, one may add, the skill of the
citizens and the quantity of groupings may increase, and not decrease, the capacity of
control: these new possibilities of power in Modern societies are something that Louis
Althusser and Michel Foucault demonstrated already in 1960s and 1970s.
10 Cf. James Muldoon, Empire and Order. The Concept of Empire, 800-1800 (St. Martin’s
Press, 1999).
11 See Antony Pagden, Lords of all the world, Ideologies of empire in Spain, Britain, and
France c. 1500–c.1800 (Yale University Press, 1995).
12 For example Hernan Cortes, the famous conquistador, wrote that the size and scope of
his conquests in Mexico were “so many and of such a kind that one might call oneself
the emperor of this kingdom with no less glory than of Germany,” cited in Muldoon,
Empire and Order, 116.
13 Ibid., 127.
14 Ilan Rachum, Revolution. The entrance of a new word into Western political discourse
(University Press of America, 1999).
15 Paul Veyne, Le pain et le cirque (Seuil, 1976), 384.
16 Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Polity Press in association with Basil
Blackwell, 1988), 89–114.
17 Paul Veyne, “L’empire romain”, in Maurice Duverger (ed.) Le Concept d’Empire (PUF,
1980), 120–35, referring to 122–3; Paul Veyne, L’Empire gréco-romain (Seuil, 2005),
175–6.
18 Guiglielmo Ferrero, The Greatness and Decline of Rome (Heinemann, 1907), chapters
II–IV, 18–86; see particularly 18–20.
19 Ibid., 84.
20 The Political Works of Marcus Tullius Cicero: Comprising his Treatise on the
Commonwealth; and his Treatise on the Laws, trans. Francis Barham (Edmund
Spettigue, 1841–2), vol. 1, book 6, section 19. Available online at http://oll.libertyfund.
org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=546&chapter=83314&layout=
html&Itemid=27 (accessed February 11 2012).
21 See Ernst Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second, 1194–1250 (F. Ungar, 1957).
 Negative Imperialization 199

22 S. Pufendorf, The Present state of Germany (Liberty Fund, 2007), 6, 9, 176–7. “There
is nothing left for us to say but that Germany is an irregular body, and like some
mis-shapen monster if, at least, it be measured by the common rules of politics and
civil prudence, and that nothing similar to it, in my opinion, exists anywhere on the
whole globe. […] From a regular kingdom it has sunk and degenerated to that degree,
that it is not now so much as a limited kingdom […] nor is it a body or system of
many sovereign states and princes […] but something that fluctuates between the two
[…] Germany […] can never be reformed or reduced to the laws of a just and regular
kingdom, but it tends naturally to the state of a confederate system. It is a conclusion
of the long argument (6) explaining why emperor is no sovereign, estates are no
aristocratic, regime is not mixed in the Aristotelian sense, etc.”
23 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004), Multitude (Penguin Press, 2004), 194–6.
24 Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde. (Duncker und Humblot, 1997 [1950]), 54–68.
25 Reinhart Koselleck, in his book Futures Past (2004), as well as elsewhere, speaks of
the “Sattelzeit” of the late eighteenth – early nineteenth century where many historical
concepts changed their temporal orientation and acquired a new, future-oriented,
markedly Modern sense. “Empire,” which Koselleck does not name in this context, is
one such notion.
26 We can compare this situation with the post-Second World War interlude where, as a
result of decolonization, the notion of empire retreated for a while.
27 Cf. Jennifer Pitts, “Empire and Democracy: Tocqueville and the Algeria question,” in
Journal of Political Philosophy, 8(3), 2000, 295–319.
28 See Jörg Fisch, “Imperialismus,” in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart
Koselleck (eds) Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 3 (Klett-Cotta, 1972), 171–5; Bruno
Bauer, Disraelis romantischer und Bismarcks sozialistischer Imperialismus (Scientia
Verlag, 1969 [1882]).
29 John A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (James Pott and Co, 1902); Rudolf Hilferding,
Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development (Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1981); Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (Monthly
Review Press, 1968); Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
(International Publishers, 1939); Nikolai Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy
(International Publishers, 1929).
30 Alexander Kojève, “Esquisse d’une doctrine de la politique française,” in La Règle du
jeu, no. 1, 1990 [1945], Paris.
31 Compare Alexander Wendt and Daniel Friedheim, “Hierarchy Under Anarchy:
Informal Empire and the East German State,” in International Organization, 49(4),
1995.
32 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000).
33 Blandine Kriegel, Etat de droit ou l’empire (Bayard, 2002), 195–234.
34 See Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Polity Press in association with
Basil Blackwell, 1988).
35 A. Cloots, cited in Steven Walt, Revolution and War (Cornell University Press, 1996),
57.
36 G. Brissot and M. Isnard, cited in Walt, Revolution and War, 67.
37 Guiglielmo Ferrero, “La folie de l’illimité: le grand problème du monde moderne,” in
Revue de Paris, 15 May 1917, 234, cited in: Bernard Biancotto, La pensée politique de
Guglielmo Ferrero (Presses universitaires d’Aix-Marseille, 1994), 59.
38 See George Lefebvre, La grande peur de 1789 (Armand Colin, 1970).
200 Politics of the One

39 Cf., for example, Arnaud Teyssier, Le Ier Empire, 1804–1815, De Napoléon Ier à Louis
XVIII (Pygmalion, 2000). Of course, one can argue that the “defensive” picture of
Napoleon’s wars is simply a cunning justification of what in fact was a striving for
world domination. But, curiously, Napoleon uses very little of this rhetoric: he prefers
the “imperialist” legitimization because it appeals to the French. Both the “positive”
and the “negative” aspects of expansion can serve as justifications, or as thoroughly
concealed motives.
40 Comte de las Cases, Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hèlène (Flammarion, 1983), vol. 2, 233
passim. Some authors today see Napoleon as consciously seeking to establish the
eternal peace in Europe, in the manner of Abbé Saint-Pierre or Rousseau. See, for
instance, Annie Jourdan, L’empire de Napoléon (Flammarion, 2000).
41 See Napoléon Bonaparte, Oeuvres littéraires et oeuvres militaires, vol. 3 (Bibliothèque
des introuvables, 2001). See, for instance, 69–70, 271–2 etc.
42 Guiglielmo Ferrero, The Gamble. Bonaparte in Italy, 1796–1797 (G. Bell & Sons, 1961
[1936]), 294.
43 See already his early “Supper in Beaucaire.” “In the art of war, it is an axiom that
whoever remains in his trenches, will be defeated: experience and theory agree on
this”: Napoleon Bonaparte, “Supper in Beaucaire,” in Christopher Frayling, Napoleon
Wrote Fiction (Saint Martin’s Press, 1972), 117–35 (reference to 132).
44 Ferrero, The Gamble, 296.
45 On the revolutionary essence of post-communism in Russia, see Artémy Magun, La
révolution négative (Harmattan, 2009); Vladimir Mau and Irina Starodubrovskaya,
The Challenge of Revolution. Contemporary Russia in Historical Perspective (Oxford
University Press, 2001).
46 For criticism of the decision to expand NATO, on the grounds of “organizational
inertia,” among others, see for instance Bruce Russett and Allam C. Stam, “Courting
Disaster: An Expanded NATO vs. Russia and China,” Political Science Quarterly,
113(3), 1998, 361–85. The fact that the expansion of NATO was the result of the
insistent requests of the Eastern European conuntries themselves only supports my
point: the countries that find themselves “in the void” are even more threatened, and
thus even more likely to play by the imperial logic, than the metropolies. We can
think here of Serbia during the First World War, for example.
47 Walt (1996), 344–9.
48 Georg Wolf Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford
University Press, 1977 [1807]), 19.
49 A very similar interplay is at work in Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
and Ecce Homo (Vintage Books, 1989), where the dialectic opens up between “action”
and “reaction,” so that for priests, for instance, the reaction, in a qui pro quo, takes the
role of creative action. The “slaves,” in their “ressentiment,” have always to start with
something external, for the slave morality, “action is fundamentally reaction” (On
the Genealogy of Morals, 1.10, 37). Nietzsche’s point, however, is to show that today’s
unfortunate situation of apathy, where “we are weary of man” (On the Genealogy of
Morals, 1.12, 44) is originally produced by the active spirit, which was intercepted by
the “priests” and turned for the reactive purposes, but still actively used to denigrate,
humiliate, and torture life. Ascetic men even direct the active energy against
themselves, and against their own activity. Reaction is a displacement of action, or
rather a modification of it. In the beginning, there was action. In the priest and ascetic
man, one can say, action results in reactivity (see, for instance, 3.11, 118, where force
 Negative Imperialization 201

is empoyed by the ascetic man “to block up the wells of force”). But in the figure
of “will to nothingness” which is preferable to not willing at all (On the Genealogy
of Morals: 3.1, 97; 3.28, 163), it is the form of action that conceals the profoundly
reactive and ascetic purposes. The same can be said of the Chiristian love that has the
affirmative appearance but serves the purposes of resentment (op cit., 1.8, 34–5).
  That human activity is often passively conditioned, is often passive in its essence,
was also an important point made by Jean-Paul Sartre in his Critique of Dialectical
Reason (NLB, 1976). In this late book, Sartre designated the whole sphere of human
activity, the one that is dedicated to the satisfaction of needs and the competition
for resources and is therefore mediated by material instruments, as “practico-inert.”
According to Sartre, only the higher forms of human activity, those pertaining to the
self-organization and self-rule of a group, are truly, actively active.
50 The Phenomenology of Spirit, B IV A, 111–19.
51 Ibid., 114.
52 Ibid., 116.
53 Ibid., 289.
54 Ibid., 271.
55 Ibid., BB VI, B III, 355–64.
56 Ibid., 359.
57 Ibid., 360.
58 On the parallels between today’s international structure and a domestic political
regime (namely, what they call a “mixed regime”), see Hardt and Negri, Empire, 3–21.
These authors see the possibilities of the “constitutionalization” of the present world
order.
 13

… et unus non solus, sed in pluribus

A Citizen as Eikon*

Oleg Kharkhordin

The topic of this essay was suggested by a usual parallel between political and artistic
representation. Since early modernity raised the issue of whom and how legislatures
and elected representatives represent, an answer very frequently given by politicians
and political theorists alike has been that a representative or a legislature should
mirror his/her or its constituency as a painting mirrors life—i.e. be a true copy of
the represented. For example, as John Adams held in his defense of the new US
Constitution, in representative assembly, as in art, “the perfection of the portrait
consists in its likeness.”1
But if representative art frequently serves as a model for representative politics,
why cannot non-representative art serve as a model for non-representative politics?
This article will consider one of the implications of such a question. I will ignore many
strands on non-figurative art of the twentieth century (others are welcome to consider
this possibility), and will go back to Christian icons, which are a classic example of
non-representative images. Cannot they offer us an analogy, if not a model for what
has been frequently called non-representative, direct or participatory democracy—e.g.
for the politics of classical republics, Hannah Arendt’s emphasis on briefly existing,
but self-organizing and non-bureaucratized Soviets, experiments with self-governing
communities after the 1960s, etc.?

Icons as non-representative images

For many Russian thinkers of the twentieth century, attention to icon painting, one
of characteristic traits of Russian culture, is nothing new. Let me briefly restate the
most frequently occurring interpretations, which popularized the idea that an icon
is essentially a piece of non-representative art. Of course, rich theological argumen-
tation was initially offered in central works by Florensky (1922/1996), Trubetskoi
(1922/1973), Bulgakov (1931/1996), and Ouspensky (1960/1978),2 but their secular
204 Politics of the One

followers in art history and criticism would mostly stress the following points. First,
according to a conception of “inverted” or “reverse perspective,” the Byzantians
knew the law of perspective, perfected and refined later by Renaissance painters like
Brunelleschi and Dürer, but intentionally subverted it, making flat, two-dimensional
paintings. The idea was to give access to God, rather than depict him, or—even—make
God look at the spectator as if from the icon, rather than make the spectator look at
divinity. Thus the imaginary rays do not all come from one point in the spectator’s eye
(forcing a Renaissance painter to depict things that are far away as smaller objects in a
painting); rather, these rays all emanate from God’s eye behind the icon. It is as if the
existing world is being perceived by God, rather than vice versa. A different version
of a (phenomenological) defense of the efficiency and veracity of this iconic depiction
technique would hold that it shows things as they appear to us in the field of our most
proximate vision—where only faces matter, and we ignore the background of the
figures in the foreground. Such technique allows for depicting the phenomena most
proximate and dear to us.
However, many interpretations insist that what is important is not this or that
technique of painting, but the anagogic and commemorative experience offered to an
icon viewer. Icons remind us of something higher, set us on the road to this higher
phenomenon, give us access to this higher realm and perhaps make the observer
partake in the sacred act, rather than just see a depiction of it. In the words of a
familiar rock song, an icon is a stairway to heaven. Venerating an icon, kissing it or
falling in prostration in front of it, a believer is set on this road to a higher realm.
Contemporary mundane analogies to what a religious icon does would of course
include screen icons as part of computer programs: they do not so much depict or
represent a program, but rather are a way of getting access to it, or of setting it into
motion: by clicking on it, we get the program going. The same might be argued about
a sacred image—by a correct “double-clicking” on a church icon a believer gets access
to a realm where Christ sets Himself into motion. Other mundane things which
have icon-like anagogic properties are, for example, a wedding ring or a Communist
party card during the Soviet days. They are not so much a representation of marriage
or party membership, but something that is part of the game called marriage or
membership, which makes the possessor of these a participant in this game. Imagine
the consequences of losing a wedding ring or read the descriptions of many people
fired from the party for not keeping their card well enough. Such a ring and such a
card are not just innocent representations, which thus could be easily replaced; rather,
they are part of this phenomenon of special significance, and they are a means of
setting it into motion and keeping the process going.
Let us map this argument now onto participatory democracy. If, following
Durkheim, we replace God with an overpowering reality of society or a group of
people, then we see that iconic politics might be first and foremost about such partici-
pation in a higher reality. A member is in the same relationship with the group or a
whole society as an icon is with Christ. It does not represent; rather it partakes in the
superior existence of the prototype.
As a corollary, we then find the following. First, because each icon offers equally
 … et unus non solus, sed in pluribus 205

relevant access to God, then each member of the group, conceived on the model of
non-representative iconic politics, is well-suited for the role of a primus inter pares of
this group, if only for a moment. The icons could be said to be equi-glorious, iso-doxic,
venerating the prototype with the same force and basically in the same way. This
isodoxic experience should apply to citizens conceived on the model of icons as well.
Second, such iconic mechanisms eliminate concerns with the adequacy of repre-
sentation: it does not matter whether an iconic citizen resembles the group it is part
of (as the representative should) or whether s/he does not—because it is only through
him or her (who does not represent, but maintains an iconic relationship with the
group) that the group is able to exist at all. Access to Christ is given to us through
icons; access to the higher reality of a group is given to us through an iconic perfor-
mance of one of its members. Destroy this iconic performance and the group becomes
inaccessible.

Mondzain’s contribution
Bernard Manin’s summary3 of the history of classical republics shows that they offered
an effective possibility of more or less equal direct access to the main positions in the
legislative, executive and judicial powers, but actual participation of all citizens in
governance, given the size even of these city-states, was not what mattered most. Thus,
let us also eliminate the stress on taking part in the reality of the group (in its religious
version—on partaking in Christ) from our consideration of iconic mechanisms, and
concentrate on other aspects of icon-like performance in finer detail. Here, Marie-José
Mondzain’s brilliant interpretation4 of the defense of icons during the iconoclast age
will help us a lot in the examination of non-representative mechanisms, both in
painting and in politics.
Discourses on the icon, relevant to our consideration, had been spelled out by
three Christian authors of the eighth and ninth centuries ad—St. John of Damascus,
Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople, and St. Theodore the Studite (of Studium).
Stated briefly and in an oversimplified way, the last two held the position that icons
do not represent or embody God; the divine prototype and its image are linked
in the same way as correlated categories (in Greek: pros ti) in Aristotle, Categories
6a35–6b2, 7b15.5 Thus Theodore wrote: “the prototype and the image [eikon] belong
to the category of related things [ton pros ti estin], like the double and the half ”.6 For
Aristotle, something is related as when we say that master and slave, half and double,
more and less imply one another—for the most part, such a related pair comes into
existence together, and one part of the pair is impossible without its correlated another
part. One cannot say what is the double of something, unless one knows what is half of
this double. However, the phenomena designated by these pairs should not be of the
same substance, consubstantial.
This reliance on Aristotle helped the Church Fathers to escape the accusation,
coming from iconoclasts, that they implied a presence of the divine nature of God in
206 Politics of the One

the fallen material of an icon. An icon does not embody, circumscribe by its contour
line, or represent God; it is just correlated with its existence. The presence of an icon
just implies that God exists.
One can single out in Mondzain’s exposition, who relied more on the arguments
of St. Nicephorus than on his other saintly contemporaries, an attention to the three
principal Greek terms that capture the most important aspects of an icon. First, it is
graphe, an inscription, a trace. We should understand that this is a trace of someone
who is not there. Icons do not partake in Christ; He always retreats from the space to
which the icon points. In French, the tracing function of the icon is revealed in the
following phrase: le trait est un retrait. A sign, a trace is always a sign of the retreat of
something which is not there.7 Christ is always absent from the icon: if He were there,
the icon would risk circumscribing the infinite and the icon would be consubstantial
with God, which is impossible. Even though an image (eikon) and its prototype
(Christ) are linked like Aristotelian correlates, one does not even touch the other. That
is why the Aristotelian category of the related is important for this originary theology
of the icon.
This Aristotelian category of the correlated is different from a modern notion of
relation, since in Greek pros ti means “pointed towards something,” as the double
is pointed towards a half, or a perception is always pointed towards what it is a
perception of.8 For modern understanding, this vision of relatedness is strange,
because it is not reciprocal, but it allows our authors of the theology of the icon to
stress this pointedness. An icon points to an ever-retreating Christ, to a void, where he
is not: L’icone est vers le Christ qui ne cesse pas de s’en retirer.9 For Christ to incarnate
Himself in an icon was not to materialize in some thing or object, but rather to set up a
relation of pointedness between an observer and His ever retreating self. In this sense,
an icon is not an incarnation, a carnal embodiment of Christ, but it is an en-image-
ination. One should not think of the relation icon/prototype on the Platonic model of
body/soul, because the invisibility of Christ is a type of invisibility different from that
of the soul. It is the invisibility of God’s Word, access to which is established through
the Aristotelian mechanics of pointedness.
Second, there is a Greek term perigraphe—a circumscription or a contour. If the
prototype and the eikon are not identical or consubstantial, they nevertheless maintain
a relationship of sending the observer in the direction of divine existence. The contour
of the iconic image does not encircle or enclose (perigraphé) divinity; rather it is an
engraved trace, which is filled with the burst (in French, l’éclat) of divine light. In
other words, apart from the usual dogmatic insistence on the non-circumscribed
character of the divine, we should also mark in the notion of perigraphé a whole field
of encircling light. That is why the icon painters use so much gold and try to eliminate
the background: an observer, whose natural perception is blinded by this light, is
supposed to be given access to divine existence through this experience. The icon does
not supply to us an unskillfully drawn anthropomorphic figure, but gives access to the
absent prototype, whose modus of existence is an eidos revealed in the icon’s shining
and blossoming. Mondzain notes that the Greek word anthe (“brightness, brilliancy,
as of gold or bright colors in general”) comes from anthos, which means “flower” and
 … et unus non solus, sed in pluribus 207

“flourishing,” “being in full bloom.”10 To blind with light and overwhelm with flour-
ishing and blossom is the second function of an icon; this is radically distant from
what we mean by the verb “represent” in our modern perception of the term.
Third, there is an epigraphe—the name on the icon. It is not a contingent desig-
nation, not just a word added to the picture, contrary to what we may think now.
Given the schematic profiles of saints with no resemblance to actual historic figures,
one could hardly guess to whom the icon was sending an observer, if the epigraphe
did not say it explicitly. In an episode in 1438, some members of the Orthodox
delegation to discuss the Florentine Union with the Catholic Church could not pray
in the churches of Florence because they could not see or read the inscriptions. But
even more important is the fact that the epigraphe is needed to set up the mechanism
of homonymy in action. The eikon and its prototype are in a homonymic relationship:
that is, they bear the same name, even though they have completely different essences.
This statement comes, once again, from the Aristotelian tradition and its definition
of homonymy: a man and an image of a man bear the same name, even though their
essences are different. A commonplace in iconographic treatises applied the same
judgment to the king and the image of the king, or Christ and the icon of Christ. One
should stress that homonymy is different from metonymy or metaphor: an icon is not
part of something (thus it does not represent something metonymically) and it does
not substitute for something (thus it is not a metaphor of something else). In other
words, an icon is neither about participation (being part of something), nor about
representation.

Applying this theory of the icon to non-representative politics

Pierre Bourdieu once noted that the real mystery of political representation lies not
in the mechanism of a metaphor (when one person, a delegate, substitutes for the
group and starts speaking and acting for it), but in metonymy—when the words and
actions of a part, i.e. of a delegate, are taken to be words and actions of the whole, i.e.
of a group.11 But if a citizen relates to a group not in a metonymic or metaphoric way,
but in a non-representative way—as an icon relates to a prototype—then an eikon-like
citizen displays the following qualities.
First, such a citizen cannot claim to be part of the group, even though s/he sets
into motion a mechanism of access to the existence of this group. The reality of group
existence is ever-retreating, in a way similar to how Christ retreats from the graphic
grip of an icon, as we remember. Sociologists like Bourdieu or Latour, of course, have
long claimed that groups do not exist in some eternal ether, they have to be constantly
formed by the actions of their delegates or performed, like a dance: no continuation,
no group. A representative can claim that s/he represents a group, but except for the
photos from yesterday’s rally or bureau meeting that serve as props to persuade us that
it exists, who can claim that s/he has seen or touched a group in toto or a group as such,
an entity separate from its members? An iconic citizen is characterized by under-
standing this absence and by a determined pointedness to this ever-retreating group
208 Politics of the One

existence. Even a magistrate chosen by lot—as in many classical republics—cannot be

said to embody a group or represent it. S/he has access only to the space of absence, a
void or emptiness which the group establishes while retreating from the magistrate’s
claims to be part of it or to act on its behalf. This magistrate has never touched or
physically sensed the group that s/he allegedly sets into motion—s/he has seen just
separate individuals who are allegedly part of it—yet, it is there somehow, although
always retracting from his or her grasp. But an eikon-like magistrate helps this group
to appear as a group with the help of him- or herself, i.e. its correlate—otherwise we
would not be sure of the existence of the group at all.
Furthermore, an icon-like citizen points, like an arrow towards a target, to a group,
but their link is co-relational in the sense of the Aristotelian category of pros ti. That
is, this term—“relation”—should not be taken lightly, as a seemingly non-problematic
sociological concept, as if “relation” was always the most generic term to designate
links between people or their way of living together. This is not true even if one looks
at the time of Elizabethan England and the final lines of “Othello,” in which Lodovico
promises to “to the [Venetian] state this heavy act with heavy heart relate.” Relazione
were one-way dispatches from the ambassadors and warriors of Venice, not reciprocal
“relationships” the way we see them now in sociology. Re-latio is thus about moving
something from one place to another, about sending—and this activity is different, for
example, from trans-latio (another seemingly generic term for social processes that
has become fashionable after the sociology of translation of Latour and Callon). Only
by understanding the character of this sending (do I hear Derrida12 here?) can we hope
to gain access to iconic, non-represented communities.
If we draw parallels with the second, perigraphe, feature of iconic mechanisms
further, we can see that an iconic sending to or into group existence overwhelms a
viewer—if it is skillfully executed—by a burst of something bigger, by an overflow, by
access to something that cannot be circumscribed by a contour or expressed in a word,
but can command allegiance like some higher reality. This sending thus exacts neither
forced obedience nor consent, as happens in authoritarian or liberal politics, but
rather what the icon treatise writers called proskynesis, prostration. This prostration
in front of something bigger should not hide the void that it effectively hails. Walter
Benjamin once described a central cathedral in Marseilles as a railway station, a grand
hub on a way to heaven. But in contrast to this elevator to heaven, an iconic citizen is
sent to what s/he can never hope to reach: the higher existence always retracts.
Third, an iconic citizen is homonymic with the group. If s/he is a magistrate, s/
he bears the same name as the group, but is not linked with the group by relations of
political delegation à la Bourdieu, of the metaphorical or metonymical kind. Thus, a
homonymic primus inter pares is not a metonymic leader, a part of the group monopo-
lizing a mystical power to speak and decide for the whole. An iconic citizen and the
group have different essences but the same name, and s/he is not part of the ever-
retreating group. And since all icons are equal in their veneration of Christ, all citizens
(conceived on the model of an icon) have equal access to this ever-retreating reality
of group existence. Hence equal access to a claim to put the group into existence:
the iso-doxia of equi-glorious icons becomes here the iso-nymy of iconic citizens,
 … et unus non solus, sed in pluribus 209

an equal claim for the right to bear the name and for the power of naming itself.
However, in contrast with icon-painting, the name does not predate and preexist the
image. Naming with proper names is what brings an iconically-conceived group into
existence. The first successful namer sets the game of homonymy into action; his or
her actions are thus essential for the creation of such groups.
Not many are successful, though. For example: the phrase “we are all oppressed
women!” changed the face of politics at the end of the twentieth century, but hardly
ever resulted in a proper name for that group, even though there were many failed
attempts to occupy the equi-glorious position of a namer. Instead many just tried
to point towards an essence, a generic name of how a woman should be defined. By
contrast, what changed politics at the beginning of the twentieth century resulted in
a new proper name—”Soviet,” giving the world a new entity called the Soviet people
and its horrible organizational form—a Soviet state.
Of course, some would claim that during the first year or so of its existence this
name was not a misnomer and presupposed democratic self-governing mecha-
nisms. By contrast, others would say that iconic politics is not inherently benign,
and attempts at its implementation, given the absence of emphasis on checks and
balances, individual rights and separation of powers, should be undertaken with
utmost caution. Whether the first view or the second is correct, it is clear that in iconic
citizenship one enters a realm of the politics of naming. Being homonymic with a
group, an eikon-like citizen, trying to challenge it into existence, should find a proper
name for it. I can hardly elaborate more here, given the shortage of space, on what type
of speech acts should be studied in this search for the politics of iconic nomination or
non-representative naming. Perhaps this is very close to the naming in proper names
that Walter Benjamin explored in his early essay On Language as Such and on the
Language of Man.13

Icon defenders on communities

Now I would like to consider how the authors of iconographic doctrines themselves
treated non-representative politics rather than art, notably to explore briefly their
views of monastic communities. In this respect St. Theodore the Studite is better than
St. Nicephorus. Theodore is usually credited with a reform in coenobitic life, because
he had made decisive innovations in the typical routines of a Byzantine monastery.
He thus perfected the existing monastic rules of St. Basil the Great and the Desert
Fathers. Also, the resulting Studite Typikon or statute of monastery life became the
main statute in ancient Rus’, after it had been accepted by the first Russian monas-
teries. Thus, one may suspect that medieval Russians held him in high esteem for
his reform of the monastery rather than for his defense of icons. When St. Joseph
Volotsky (early sixteenth century) introduced his new coenobitic monastery statute—
an almost universal model for Russian cloisters thereafter—he cited St. Theodore the
Studite and his sources, primarily St. Basil the Great.14 The major innovation, however,
210 Politics of the One

which Joseph’s writings introduced into Russian coenobitic life was ubiquitous
horizontal discipline enforced by “council” or “preeminent” or “bigger” brothers—an
inversion or diversion of Foucault’s Panopticon—which finds striking parallels with
Stalinist mutual surveillance techniques.15 Another innovation—for Russia, not for
Byzantium—was the demand to elect a new bishop, substituting for the deceased one,
by a decision of the bigger brothers.16
Let us take a look at Theodore’s injunctions before their interpretation by his Russian
followers. First, some grounds for a future imposition of ubiquitous surveillance
were there, since Theodore introduced several monks/overlookers in his monastery,
making them subordinate to his deputy—otherwise, how could he control behavior in
a body of monks numbering over a thousand?17 Second, on his deathbed he allegedly
advised the election of future bishops by a council opinion. Thus: “elect someone by a
common vote in a godly fashion and in the manner which the fathers have established,
for my desire is to support whomever the community finds suitable”18 (ipsi communi
calculo divinitus, paterno consilio praeeunte). Third, his vision of the monastic
community is characterized by iso-doxia, equi-gloriousness, which we have already
found in his approach to icons, even though monks in a cloister, by contrast to icons,
have functional specializations like the diverse parts of a human body. Thus he writes
in his Grand Cathechism, ch. CXVII: “If I am a hand [of a given body—O.Kh.], I am
not deprived of the glory of an eye; if I am a leg, I am nevertheless not excluded from
the glory destined for the mouth. Because I am in all of them, and share the common
glory and the common shame.”19 And as he says in The Short Cathechism, following
St. Basil the Great, a monastery is “an equi-glorious body of Christ and a common
harbor of salvation.20 Finally, the main rite of the monastery is the Eucharist, because
“this sacrament is a summation of all the oikonomia, and in its main part it by synec-
doche signifies all”: totius eius dispensationis summa quaedam est hoc mysterium; ex
praecipua parta totum per synecdochen significans.21
Perhaps the writings of St. Basil the Great, whom Theodore frequently cites, will
help us understand this vision. The oikonomia in Greek, or dispensatio in Latin,
mentioned in the last quote from Theodore, is the subject of the whole first part of the
book by Mondzain. It is not mundane household governance, the term we find in the
famous pagan book by Xenophon; rather, the Church Fathers used the term oikonomia
frequently, but for other significations. First, for them it is the plan of salvation,
predestined to us by God, that is, he governs the oikos that befits him, the whole world.
Second, since primordial sin has broken the initial unity of nature, oikonomia is a
visible structure of this disjointed world, the way this world runs.
Thus, Basil writes in Ascetical Constitutions: “The most important in the Savior’s
oikonomia in flesh is to bring the human nature in a singular union with itself and
the Savior, and, having eliminated the cunning dissection into parts, restore the
primordial unity.”22 Basil frequently used the metaphor of a doctor who mends or
restores a unified body, torn asunder, and the term oikonomia was also used by early
Christian authors to designate the structure of such a torn body, its bones, ligaments,
and intestines, opened to a startled external gaze.23 Oikonomia is thus understood here
 … et unus non solus, sed in pluribus 211

as the disjointed body of Christ, an initial unity of the world and the church broken
into many warring factions and contradictory pieces.
Restoring this body happens from time to time in the central sacrament of the
Eucharist, when Christians partake in the flesh and blood of Christ, but in everyday
life it can also happen when austere and ascetic monks live together without quarrels
over property or over the interpretation of God’s words: the humankind and nature
that had been dissipated into a thousand parts is gathered by them into a union, as
much as they can. In Basil’s words:
I call that communion of life most perfect (perfectissimam vitae societatem), from
which property of goods is excluded (possessia propria), the contradiction of
dispositions is chased away, from which strife, factions, and quarrels have been
torn out with their roots, and everything is common—souls and dispositions,
bodily forces and what we need for alimentation and support of the body, in
which there is one common God, one common pool of piety, common salvation,
common feats, common labors, common crowns, in which many constitute one,
and each is not alone, but with others (ubi multi unus, et unus non solus, sed in
pluribus).24

This is a view not only of an ideal life, of course, but a description of a direction,
where a good monastery is going. One difference, of course, between a monastic life
and what will be achieved in the future divine reconciliation is that in a monastery
there is a temporal head, an abbot. If we hold on to a parallel between treatises on
iconography and monastic community-building (i.e. communo-graphy, so to say), the
problem with an abbot is that he can be seen by many observers as not exactly equi-
glorious with the other brethren: it is as if one icon had a more privileged link to Christ
in comparison with others.25 Here a metaphor of the human body helps the argument
again. A good, cohesive monastery is like a body, the recognized head of which is an
abbot. This statement, of course, recalls apostolic teaching in its Orthodox Christian
version: the Church is the body of the Christ, the head of which is Christ himself. So
there is paramount equality between brethren, on the one hand, and one accepted sort
of inequality, between brothers and an abbot, but this is the natural inequality which
the members of the body have in relation to the head of the body, which guides all
the members. The monks are thus in such a relation with the abbot as the Apostles
were with Christ. As Basil the Great says in the 18th chapter of Ascetical Constitutions,
“as the Savior, having assembled the choir of the disciples [choros in Greek, coacto
discipulorum in Latin], has made even Himself common to them all, so the monks,
being obedient to their leader [Greek—kathegoumeno], finely following the rule of life
together, are exactly imitating the life of the Apostles and the Lord.”26
In Russian translations this theory of monastic community found some sort of
overlap with a theory of iconic mechanisms. For example, when St. Joseph Volotsky
was grappling with difficult passages on this oikonomia of Church-building from
Theodore the Studite, or with his source, St. Basil the Great, he was looking at the
212 Politics of the One

quotes which I have already mentioned above. Thus, as he writes, echoing in the
second sentence the just-quoted instance from Patrologia Graeca 31: 1384: “Basil the
Great says: if the abbot [in Russian—nastoiatel’] carries our God’s legislation with
precision, he is nothing less than someone with the persona [in Russian—litse, a
Russian term for a face and a person] of our Lord, while preeminent brothers under
him carefully imitate the life of the Apostles and the Lord. And as He assembled the
chorus [lik, Russian word for Greek choros] of 12 disciples, 12 preeminent and senior
brothers have been selected so that they carefully imitated the life of the Apostles and
the Lord. In the place of Lord Christ, they have the persona [litse] of the abbot, and in
the place of the 12 Apostles they have chosen 12 brothers preeminent in worthiness
and intelligence.”27 There are two links with the iconic mechanisms discussed in the
previous section of this article. First, we have a sudden burst of homonymy in the
midst of Joseph’s argumentation. Indeed, he implies that Christ has made Himself into
a lik (Greek—choros, a choir) of disciples, and when after His death they constituted
His Church, it became the body, the face or persona of which (litse or lik in the sense of
Greek prosopon) was Christ himself. Every virtuous monastery can try repeating this
feat. Now, what is baffling here is neither the intricacies of the dogmatic ecclesiology,
nor the oikonomia of the visible Church, but the fact that the same Russian word,
lik, might translate both prosopon and choros almost in one sentence. Contemporary
Russian linguists vehemently assert: these two instances of lik are clear cases of
homonymy, since the meanings are so radically distant, and dictionaries register that
the word lik in the sense of litse (face, person) appeared only after the fourteenth
century, while lik as “chorus” or “dance” has existed since the eleventh.
But is homonymy between these words just a strange coincidence? So far, I have
stressed only the Aristotelian homonymy between a man and his image, or the icon-
defenders’ homonymy between a prototype (Christ) and an icon. Here, it seems, we
have a case of radically dissimilar phenomena called by the same word. But are they
so dissimilar? To what extent are the persona and the face of the Church, on the one
hand, and its body, which is a choir or another form of a venerating assemblage of true
believers like monks or apostles, on the other, radically dissimilar and non-related?
Cannot we start thinking of their homonymy on the model of the icon, but applied
to a group: the body of a group and the face/persona of a group have the same name,
but do not partake in one another, and this face/persona always points to an ever
retreating or disappearing reality of the group body?
The second link with iconic mechanisms is a clear demonstration of how Joseph
kills the idea of the iso-doxia, the equi-gloriousness of the brethren. As I already
mentioned, his statute of monastery life, which became dominant in Russia from the
sixteenth century, had a decisive innovation in that it demanded the establishment in
the cloister of the novel positions of “bigger” or “preeminent brothers,” who would
help the abbot in the constant and ubiquitous discipline of the brethren. These bigger
brothers in their very name sound painfully familiar to a modern-day reader; they
were supposed to be the most decisive pillars of mutual surveillance that would prop
up the saintly cohesion of the monastery. Joseph had to stretch the lines of the statutes
of St. Theodore and St. Athanasius to claim that they also demanded the existence
 … et unus non solus, sed in pluribus 213

of at least 12 bigger brothers; to fortify his novel argument he had to appeal to the
12 Apostles as an analogy, in the example I quoted above; and then, fearing a rebuke
for such innovations, he went into a lengthy polemic with an imaginary enemy who
would claim “There is no need for so many council brothers.”28
Unleashing the picky and minute terror of small righteous bosses was one of the
secrets of the Russian Revolution, which resembles Joseph’s injunctions, as I have tried
to argue elsewhere.29 Not one Big Brother, but a zillion smaller, but still “preeminent,”
“council,” or “bigger” (all of these terms Joseph used as synonyms) brothers were
responsible for turning a dream into a nightmare. Nevertheless, Joseph’s innovation,
which had such horrible success in Russian history, is based on a willful reading of
bigger brothers into the texts of St. Theodore and St. Basil the Great. For example, take
a look again at the quote from Basil: one can see that all the monks are imitating the
Apostles, and not only the 12 carefully selected bigger brothers. By contrast, when the
abbot starts relying on privileged helpers in mutual surveillance to enforce piety, the
iconic mechanisms of the equi-distance and equi-gloriousness of monks disappear.
Rotation is thwarted; the prevalence of proto-bureaucracy and small oligarchic
councils is rampant.
St. Joseph not only stressed the role of preeminent or bigger brothers, which we
do not find in St. Basil and St. Theodore without the risk of distorting their texts, but
he also limited the conception of the abbot to governance and control, as if he were
just the head of a cloister and nothing else. However, even the lines of St. Basil that
Joseph was quoting offer other conceptualizations of this role. For example, chapter
22 of Basil’s Ascetical Constitutions says about the role of an abbot that he “is nothing
else than the one in whom the person of the Savior is contained [o tou Sotêros epekhon
prosopon in Greek, personam Servatores sustinet in Latin], who has become a mediator
between God and people, and who does holy deeds [in Greek—hieroergon] in front
of God for the salvation of those who are obedient to Him.”30 The end of this quote
presents an element ignored by Joseph—the mediation that an abbot (or, for our
purposes, another type of a non-representative delegate of a group) performs in front
of divinity, facing it and shielding the group, i.e. substituting for the group, but acting
for its good and salvation. In the final section let us consider this early Christian
conception further. Perhaps it could clarify for us the role of an iconic citizen when s/
he acts for the group.

Standing in front of, rather than sitting in front of or

presiding over a group
The relevant term for the abbot in the citation just quoted is kathegoumenos in Greek.
Other terms for the bishop or abbot who is the head of the cloister, which we find
in St. Basil, Theodore the Studite, and other early Christian authors are episkopos
(which later developed into the English word “bishop”) and proistamenos. The last
term is still the official title of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. In Russian
214 Politics of the One

it sounds as predstoiatel’, which distinguishes it from the mere head of a monastery—

nastoiatel’, with both terms produced by adding different prefixes to the same Russian
root verb stoiat’, “to stand.” Given the differences in prefixes, the contrast between
the two could be rendered for an English-speaking reader as the difference between
a “pre-stander” and an “over-stander.” But instead of analyzing these unreliable and
perhaps misleading terms, let us closely consider the important differences between
the original Greek words.
First, both hegoumenos and proistamenos are sometimes translated in Patristic
literature as “leaders,” i.e. those who lead the crowd and who are first on the way. But
the first term is derived from the Greek verb hegeomai, meaning “to lead the way,”31
while the second comes from the verb proistemi, “to set before or in front” or “to put
oneself before or in front.” Standing in front is not necessarily linked to leading, so
proistamenos is more of a front-stander than a leader. Second, the verb proistemi is
frequently used also in a derivative sense of “to stand over,” which leads to an interpre-
tation of proistamenos as a governor, the head of a congregation, similar to episkopos,
coming from epi- and –skopos, and meaning “an overlooker” or “an overseer.”
Here, however, one should stress an important difference between these last two
Greek terms. Proistamenos as a term, similar in its structure to the term prostates
(coming from the same root and also meaning “standing in front”—we find this
word frequently used in Aristotle’s Athenaion Politeia, for example, for leaders of the
demos) can be contrasted with epistates, the term also sometimes used to designate
the head of an assembly or a household. The prefix epi- in this last term is the same
as in epi-skopos, thus they both are above and over, overseeing and controlling, rather
than next to and in front of a group. In the dictionaries one learns that only epistates is
used with inanimate objects (in the genitive clause): in contrast to prostates, who deals
with the people, epistates deals with goods and property also. And John Chrysostom
even claims that a man is an epistates of a woman.32 Thus, proistamenos, in contrast
to episkopos, is next to the people, in front of them, and not over them or overtly
concerned with controlling them and governing goods and property.33
Why does he stand in front? Two immediate interpretations come to mind. He
is in front because of a higher social status, and thus here prostates-proistamenos
recalls proedros, “the one sitting in front,” from which the concepts of presiding and
president later developed. Proedria refers to some privileged places, i.e. seats in the
front rows during public games or in a Greek theater; but the root verb is “to sit,”
rather than “to stand.” Both terms thus reflect a privileged status, but the first one is
about pre-standing or standing in front, so to speak, while the second one is about
pre-sitting or sitting in front.34 The second interpretation, however, would describe the
position “in front” as the position of a mediator, an intercessor, and thus a defender
or an advocate—rather than a superior. A proistamenos could thus be a defender or
caretaker of the group. In some cases it could be its replacement, offering him/herself
instead of the group in front of a powerful menace.
Most Biblical commentary, of course, interprets proistamenos as “a ruler” or “a
leader,” relying on the Apostle Paul’s use of the term in Rom. 12.8, as well as on I
Thess. 5.12–13 and I Tim. 3.1, 5. This interpretation was supported by standard
 … et unus non solus, sed in pluribus 215

translations of the Bible into vernacular languages (see, e.g. the King James and the
Louis Segond versions) and was, perhaps, reinforced by Calvin’s defense of presbyte-
rianism (the recommended rule of a congregation by the elders, not by a priest) in his
Institutes of Christian Religion IV, xx: 4, when he stressed his view of Rom. 12.8 thus:
“This is clearly taught by Paul, when he enumerates governments (o proistamenos)
among the gifts of God, which […] ought to be employed by the servants of Christ
[…] He is properly speaking of the council of the elders who were appointed in the
primitive church to preside over the regulation of the public discipline.”35 We can
find an equation of proistamenos with the task of government not only in Western
Christianity, but in Orthodox theology as well, e.g. in Schmemann,36 who interprets
this Greek term as equivalent to kyberneseis, found in I Cor. 12.28, i.e. “governing.”
However, there are numerous authors who stress the need to translate proista-
menos, the present-medio-passive participle of the verb proistemi, in relation with the
noun prostates, and thus see in proistamenos a caretaker and a “patron”, in the sense
of the one who protects the interests of the socially vulnerable.37 The most astute
commentators on the historical context of Pauline theology point to the fact that the
“welfare service” of the early church included three ministries—distributing food and
clothing, giving financial aid, and “championing the cause of those who had no one
to speak and act for them,” with proistamenos being the name of this third ministry,
to which Paul allegedly referred in Rom. 12.8.38 Such a defender, advocate, caretaker
does not stand over, but stands in front, to submit petitions or articulate demands
and give a voice to the heretofore silent group. At the least, such an interpretation
would explain the need for a separate word proistamenos to be kept as the title of a key
Church office (in Russian—predstoiatel’), in contrast to nastoiatel’ (Greek epi-skopos,
meaning “overseer”, thus “bishop”) and predsedatel’ (Greek proedros, meaning “the one
who presides,” “president,” “chairman”).
We can now notice that this notion of proistamenos as a front-standing intercessor
fits the role of the leader of a cloister or congregation that was articulated in the last
quote from St. Basil we have been considering: “a mediator between God and people,
[…] who does holy deeds in front of God for the salvation of those who are obedient
to Him.” Could it be, then, that a leader is a front-stander, interceding between the
overwhelming power of God and a group, rather than an over-looker or an over-seer?
Could it be that a leader is thus a front-stander to take the first blow and God’s wrath,
if it happens, and not a front-sitter, to get the best views from a privileged seat?
Given this hypothesis, let us get back to the three features of an iconic citizen,
formulated above, in the light of what happens to these features when an iconic citizen
takes the role of a proistamenos, a temporary intercessor and mediator for the group,
offering him/herself first for the incoming blow.
First, an iconic front-stander still points to an ever-retreating reality of the group,
but s/he has to have more courage than other members of the group, access to which
s/he allegedly sets into motion. S/he stands in for the group, s/he takes the place of
the group, but the problem is that this group is not there. Thus s/he can be crushed
for nothing, it would seem to many, since s/he does not stand for any real group, this
group being impossible to touch or to hold upon with other senses.
216 Politics of the One

Second, an iconic front-stander starts to intercede for a group, offering him/herself

as a shield, an agent that should first receive an external blow instead of the group,
suffer for their sins or fulfill their duties, but may end up as a mediator between two
overwhelming forces—the one of external power, in front of which s/he intercedes on
behalf of an ever-retreating group, and another one—the power of the group itself. In
other words, if the iconic front-stander is artful enough to invoke in observers a sense
of the overflowing power of the empirically non-observed and non-observable group,
this higher experience that demands prostration and awe moves these observers to
make wonders. If s/he fails, s/he gets crushed or proclaimed insane or inept; if s/
he succeeds—a very rare event indeed—then you have one overwhelming power
suddenly facing another.
Third, an iconic front-stander is homonymic with the group on behalf of which
s/he intercedes in the face of an overwhelming external power. Here, however, lies
the real mystery of proper naming. Only a proper, not a generic, name, will make
a group proper to itself, will make its proper existence evident and obvious, even
if non-sensory. I have already called for a study of the politics of naming by proper
names. But perhaps here political theory ends, and art begins.

Bibliography
Efrain Agosto, “Paul and Commendation”, in J. Paul Sampley (ed.) Paul in the Greco-
Roman World: A Handbook (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2003).
Vladimir Baranov, The Theology of Byzantine Iconoclasm (726–843): A Study in
Theological Method, Unpublished PhD Dissertation (Budapest: Central European
University, Medieval Studies Department, 2002).
—“The Second Commandment and ‘True Worship’ in the Iconoclastic Controversy,”
in Andre Lemaire (ed.) Supplements to Vetus Testamentum, 133): Congress Volume
Ljubljana 2007 (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
Walter, Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in One-Way
Street, and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1979).
Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1991).
Sergei Bulgakov, Ikona i ikonopochitanie [An Icon and the Veneration of Icons] (Moscow:
Russkii put’, 1996 [first published in Russian in Paris, 1931]).
Jacques Derrida, “Sending: On Representation,” Social Research, Summer 1982.
James Dunn, D. G., Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998).
Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996 [first
published in Russian, 1922]).
David M. Goldfrank (ed.) The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian
Publications, 2000).
Irina Gorbunova-Lomax, Ikona: pravda i vymysly [The Icon: Truth and Fantasies] (St.
Petersburg: Statis, 2007).
Daniel J. Harrington, The Church According to the New Testament. What the Wisdom and
Witness of Early Christianity Teach Us Today (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2001).
 … et unus non solus, sed in pluribus 217

Alexander Kazhdan, “Vizantiiskii monastyr’ XI-XII v. kak sotsialnaia gruppa [A

Byzantian Monastery of the XI-XII Centuries as a Social Group],” Vizantiiskii
vremennik [Byzantian Chronicle, Moscow, USSR Academy of Sciences], vol. 31. 1971.
Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
V. M. Lurie, Istoria vizantiiskoi filosofii. Formativnyi period [History of Byzantian
Philosophy: The Formative Period] (St. Petersburg: Axioma, 2006). A chapter on the
iconoclastic controversy was co-written with Vladimir Baranov.
Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).
J.-P. Migne (ed.) “Sanctus Basilicus Magnus,” Patrologia Graeca, vol. 31 (Imprimerie
Catholique, Paris, 1857).
—“Joannis Damasceni Opera Omnia,” Patrologia Graeca, vol. 96 (Imprimerie Catholique,
Paris, 1864).
—“S. Theodorus Studita,” Patrologia Graeca, vol. 99 (Imprimerie Catholique, Paris, 1903).
Marie-José Mondzain, Image, icône, économie: Les Sources byzantines de l’imaginaire
contemporain (Paris: Seuil, 1996).
Leonid Ouspensky, Theology of the Icon (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press
1978, [first published in French, 1960]).
Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1967).
David Rankin, Tertullian and the Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Alexander Schmemann, Church, World, Mission. Reflections on Orthodoxy in the West
(Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979).
Miguel Tamen, Friends of Interpretable Objects (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2001).
Theodore the Studite, Tvoreniia otsa nashego i ispovednika Feodora Studita [Works of the
Our Father and Confessor Theodore the Studite], vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1907).
—“Testament,” in J. Thomas and A. C. Hero (eds) Byzantine Monastic Foundation
Documents, vol. I (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2000).
Eugene N. Trubetskoi, Icons: Theology in Color (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, 1973; first published in Russian in 1921).
Vassily Velikii [Basil the Great], Tvoreniia [Operae], vol. 5: O podvizhnichestve [On
Ascetics] (Sergiev Posad, 1892).
Eric Voegelin, Religion and the Rise of Modernity (The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin),
vol. 23 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1998).
Joseph Volotsky, “Dukhovnaya gramota prepodobnogo Iosifa [A Spiritual Testament of St.
Joseph], Velikie minei chetii [Grand Church Reading Books, Assembled by Metropolitan
Makarius], 1–13 sentiabria (Imperial Academy of Science, St. Petersburg, 1868).
Ben Witherington, 1 and 2 Thessalonians: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 2006).

Notes
* A first draft of this text was first presented at a seminar of Groupe de sociologie
politique et morale at EHESS, Paris, on January 13, 2005. I should like to thank Luc
218 Politics of the One

Boltanski, Laurent Thevenot, Marie-José Mondzain, and Cyril Lemieux for a most
productive discussion there. But it was exchanges with Alexei Chernyakov, Artem
Magun, and Dmitrii Vilensky during the UNUM conference that made me want to
perfect and finish this piece—I am grateful to them all. I should thank Boris Maslov
in particular for his help in the study of Patristic terminology. The last sections were
written against the background of the December 2011 rallies in Russia, hence they
should be eventually rewritten in calmer times, perhaps.
1 Quoted in Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (University of
California Press, 1967), 61. Of course, Pitkin stresses that this is only one of the key
aspects of representing as “standing for,” another being the fact the representation
substitutes for something absent. Thus a symbol, not resembling the original at all,
could serve as a representation in certain situations. She calls this second aspect
“symbolic represenation” in contrast to the first, “descriptive representation.” The
other two dominant views on political representation treat it as an activity, but either
formalistically (a representative is a formally authorized agent) or substantially, as
“acting for the represented” in their true interests. Edmund Burke offers a good
example of this mandate/independence controversy as Pitkin calls it: a representative
should not only “stand for” his constituency, but also “act for” it. This argument
implies that a delegate should act in the interests of the electorate even if the electorate
does not understand its own interests—hence a representative is more than just a
mirror image. (Pitkin, Chapters 2–7).
2 This “Paris School” of Russian emigré theology of the icon has become subject
recently to a very interesting criticism coming from practicing Russian icon painters,
who assiduously enumerate its mistakes and stretchings. See Irina Gorbunova-Lomax,
Ikona: pravda i vymysly [The Icon: Truth and Fantasies] (Statis, 2007).
3 Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge University
Press. 1997), Chapters 1–2
4 Marie-José Mondzain, Image, icône, économie: Les Sources byzantines de l’imaginaires
contemporain (Seuil, 1996). A translation of this book into English was done by
Stanford University Press in 2005, but relevant sections of it were unavailable at
Google Books at the time of writing this text, hence I quote from the original French
edition.
5 The ultimate Russian authority writing now on the theology of the Iconoclasts and
the Iconodules, Vladimir Baranov, though agreeing with the centrality of pros ti
argument, would disagree with Mondzain’s emphasis on the complete non-presence of
Christ in the icon. For example, in his letters (esp. 528), the Studite claims that Christ’s
hypostasis is present in the icon (V. M. Lurie, Istoria vizantiiskoi filosofii. Formativnyi
period [History of Byzantian Philosophy: The Formative Period] (Axioma, 2006),
484), while the word “character” that the Iconodules used after the first treatises of
John of Damascus to describe which features of Christ entered the icon, was coming
from the Greek verb meaning “to engrave,” “to make a mark,” and reflected the
common understanding: icons are receptacles of divine energeia (Lurie, 431, 435).
Also see Vladimir Baranov, The Theology of Byzantine Iconoclasm (726–843): A Study
in Theological Method, unpublished PhD dissertation (Central European University,
Medieval Studies Department, 2002); Vladimir Baranov, “The Second Commandment
and ‘True Worship’ in the Iconoclastic Controversy,” in Andre Lemaire (ed.)
Supplements to Vetus Testamentum, vol. 133: Congress Volume, Ljubljana, 2007 (Brill,
2010).
 … et unus non solus, sed in pluribus 219

6 Quoted in Miguel Tamen, Friends of Interpretable Objects (Harvard University Press,

2001), 43
7 Mondzain, 123.
8 In the translation of Aristotle 6a36–6b2 by Edghill we read: “Those things are called
relative, which, being either said to be of something else or related to something else,
are explained by reference to that other thing.”
9 Mondzain, 117.
10 Mondzain, 126.
11 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Harvard University Press 1991),
206.
12 Jacques Derrida, “Sending: On Representation,” Social Research, Summer 1982.
13 Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Benjamin,
One-Way Street, and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New Left Books, 1979).
14 David M. Goldfrank (ed.) The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky (Cistercian Publications,
2000), 62–3, 66; his other main influences were the Jerusalem statute, introduced in
Russia in late fourteenth century and originating from the monastery of St. Sabas, and
two typica (statutes), of St. Athanasius of Mt. Athos and from the Pandects of Nikon of
the Black Mountain, a Syrian monk, who is little known outside of Russia.
15 Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices
(University of California Press, 1999), 117–22.
16 Goldfrank, The Monastic Rule of Iosif Volotsky, 79. Some Byzantine monasteries
elected bishops by drawing lots (Alexander Kazhdan, “Vizantiiskii monastyr’ XI–XII
v. kak sotsialnaia gruppa [A Byzantian Monastery of the XI–XII Centuries as a Social
Group],” Vizantiiskii vremennik [Byzantian Chronicle, Moscow, USSR Academy of
Sciences], vol. 31. 1971, 66–7, and fn. 146).
17 See Theodore’s vita in Theodore the Studite, Tvoreniia otsa nashego i ispovednika
Feodora Studita [Works of the Our Father and Confessor Theodore the Studite] (St.
Petersburg, 1907), vol. 1., 20; PG 99: 1486.
18 Theodore the Studite, “Testament.” in J. Thomas and A. C. Hero (eds) Byzantine
Monastic Foundation Documents (Dumbarton Oaks, 2000), vol. I. 77, PG 99: 1818.
19 Theodore 1907, 951.
20 Theodore 1907, LXXXVIII, 458.
21 Theodore 1907, 126, PG 99: 340.
22 Vassily Velikii [Basil the Great], Tvoreniia [Operae], vol. 5: O podvizhnichestve [On
Ascetics]. (Sergiev Posad. 1892), 391; PG 31: 1386A.
23 Thus, John of Damascus writes of St. Artemius, the martyr who was crushed with
huge bolders: “the human form has vanished. He is naked, his bones are crushed, his
members disjointed. One could see in bare daylight the economy of his human nature
[Greek—ton oikonomian tis andropinis physeos]” (trans. in Tamen, 26; original—S.
Artemii Passio, PG 96: 1309A).
24 Vassily 1892, 391; PG 31: 1386A.
25 Indeed, as we remember from Theodore’s exposition, each monk has a distinct
function—one is an ear, another an eye, etc., but all are equi-glorious with each other
(similar to icons in their access to an ever retreating God, if we invoke Mondzain once
again).
26 Vassily 1892, 390; PG 31: 1384 B-C.
27 Joseph Volotsky, “Dukhovnaia gramota prepodobnogo Iosifa” [A Spiritual Testament
of St. Joseph], Velikie minei chetii [Grand Church Reading Books, Assembled
220 Politics of the One

by Metropolitan Makarius], 1–13 sentiabria (St. Petersburg, 1868), column 583;

Goldfrank, 266, translation slightly changed.
28 Goldfrank, 265–7.
29 Kharkhordin, op. cit.
30 Vassily 1892: 410; PG 31, 1408D-1409A.
31 The Greek word hegemonia also comes from the same root verb.
32 John Chrysostom, Orations 30.5.
33 The exposition in this section would have been impossible without the invaluable help
of Boris Maslov, who had first pointed me to many of the relevant contrasts between
the Greek terms. Possible mistakes in conclusions or in accurately rendering the
details of these contrasts are all mine, of course.
34 Tertullian adapted these two terms to Latin, rendering proistamenos as praepositus
and using the verb praesidere for its counterpart term, relying here on the root “sit”
rather than “stand.” The second term after him could apply to translate the Greek
term for an abbot—hegoumenos—as well, but it came straight from the language of
Roman provincial government and was not used to describe church offices heretofore.
Some commentators thus see praepositus as an essentially ecclesiastical term, opposed
to secular praesidens, “president” or “chairman” (David Rankin, Tertullian and the
Church (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 154–5).
35 Quoted in Eric Voegelin, Religion and the Rise of Modernity (The Collected Works of
Eric Voegelin, vol. 23) (University of Missouri Press. 1998), 48.
36 Alexander Schmemann, Church, World, Mission. Reflections on Orthodoxy in the West
(St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979), 168.
37 See, e.g. Efrain Agosto, “Paul and Commendation”, in J. Paul Sampley (ed.) Paul in
the Greco-Roman World: A Handbook (Trinity Press, 2003), 112–13, 131; Daniel
J. Harrington, The Church According to the New Testament. What the Wisdom and
Witness of Early Christianity Teach Us Today (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 63; Ben
Witherington, 1 and 2 Thessalonians: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Eerdmans,
2006), 160.
38 James Dunn, D. G., Theology of Paul the Apostle (Eerdmans, 1998), 555.
 14

Drawing Lots in Politics

The One, the Few, and the Many

Yves Sintomer

In 1439, the humanist Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444), Chancellor of the Florentine

Republic and doubtless the most celebrated European intellectual of his time, published
a short treatise in Greek: On the Florentine Constitution.1 Florence was at the height of
its splendor and power: during this period, it had seen the invention of perspective in
art; it had also witnessed the development of new techniques in textile manufacturing
and banking and, most important for our purpose, the rise of civic humanism. In this
essay, Bruni positively valued Florence, in an Aristotelian vein, as a mixed constitution.
The social composition of its citizenry, he claims, results from two exclusion principles:
noble families (the magnates) are excluded from the most important offices (this is the
anti-aristocratic principle), and manual workers are excluded from political life (this is the
anti-democratic principle). Three other main elements sustain the democratic dimension:
the ideal of liberty (vivere libero, vivere civile, vivere politico) is at the core of its institutions
and political system; offices are held for short-term periods, usually two to four months,
including the most important of them, the Signoria; those who hold the offices are chosen
through random selection (tratta). The executive, the legislative councils, and part of the
judiciary are chosen in this manner.2
On December 11, in 2004, after nearly 12 months of deliberation, a Citizen
Assembly, selected by lot from the citizens of British Columbia in Canada, presented
its Final Report on Electoral Change to the B.C. Legislature. It proposed to change
the electoral system by introducing more proportionality (replacing the existing
electoral system, the so-called First-Past-the-Post, with a new Single-Transferable
Vote system).3 This recommendation was then put to the electorate-at-large in a
referendum held concurrently with the 2005 provincial election. Gordon Gibson, the
creator of British Columbia’s Citizen Assembly and councilor of the Prime Minister,
justified the initiative in the following manner:
We are […] adding new elements to both representative and direct democracy.
These new elements differ in detail but all share one thing in common. They add to
222 Politics of the One

the mix a new set of representatives, different from those we elect. As things stand
now, both streams of decision-making are highly influenced—almost captured—
by experts and special interests. The idea of deliberative democracy is essentially
to import the public interest, as represented by random panels, as a muscular third
force. The traditional representatives we elect are chosen by majority consensus,
for an extended period, as professionals, with unlimited jurisdiction to act in
our name. The new kinds we are talking about are chosen at random, for a short
period, as ordinary citizens for specified and limited purposes.4

The decision seems only to have been the prelude to a larger wave of similar exper-
iments. Ontario, the most populous Canadian state, followed British Columbia’s
example in 2005. More recently, Iceland has begun a process that aims at adopting
a new constitution. After the financial collapse of the country following the
banking crisis, huge social movements pushed the right-wing government to
resign and elections brought a new Social-Democrat and Green government in
April 2009. In November 2009, the social movement organized a first Citizen
Assembly in order to discuss the values on which the country could be rebuilt.
One year later, with the official support of the left-wing government, a second
Citizen Assembly discussed the axes that the new constitution should follow.
An election of a special kind was organized to elect a constituent committee: a
non-electoral campaign was permitted, so that no politician could be a candidate,
and 25 “ordinary” citizens were elected in November 2010. They wrote the new
constitution project, in a process where citizens could make proposals online, and
gave it to the Parliament in July 2011. The project is to be put to the electorate-
at-large in a referendum in 2012. It is surprising to see how many different
participatory and deliberative devices where random selection plays a role have
been created in the last two decades, in very different contexts.5
It would be ridiculous to strictly compare Early Renaissance Florence and British
Columbia or Iceland: their contexts, institutions, and political cultures are completely
different. Nevertheless, two important questions arise. Can we claim that the recent
interest in random selection marks the resurgence of a democratic tradition that was
invented in Athens during the classical period and reinvented in the Italian city-states?
What does this parallel teach us about deliberation, participation, and representation?
And to what extent are these experiments ways of combining the one, the few, and
the many? In what follows, I will proceed in two steps. First I will briefly describe
the republican self-government based on random selection that characterized the
Florentine Republic, explore the ambiguous role that deliberation played in it, and
analyze the peculiar combination of the one, the few, and the many it represented.
I will then contrast this polity with current experiments in deliberative democracy
based on randomly selected mini-publics and will discuss what this reveals about
deliberation, participation, and decision-making, together with the balance between
the one, the few, and the many.
 Drawing Lots in Politics 223

Random selection and republican self-government in

Early Renaissance Florence
As we know from the seminal works of Baron,6 Pocock,7 Skinner,8 and Hankins,9 the
Florentine notion of libertas has been decisive in the formation of modern political
thought. Nicolai Rubinstein10 has shown that that the ideal of the vivere libero included
not only independence from foreign powers, the rule of law, political equality among
citizens (or at least among those who were full citizens), and the right to take an active
part in public affairs, but also the right to participate directly in the government of the
Republic.

Random selection of public office holders

In fact, most magistrates were randomly selected and held their offices for only a
few months. This feature has been well documented by historians11 and has recently
garnered interest in political theory.12 From 1282 onwards, the Signoria, which was
similar to what we would now call an executive, was the most important power in the
city. Its members represented the various corporations (the arti) through a complex
system of quotas. It was in charge of foreign policy, controlled the administrative
bodies, and had the right to initiate the laws of the Republic. Up to 1494, when a
Major Council was created following the Venetian model, the Signoria decided when
the two legislative councils had to meet. Even though this institutional system was
continually evolving, its basic features remained the same until the end of the fifteenth
century. During this period, some of the most important political debates in the city
concerned the repartition of political and administrative positions among the various
corporations and the role of sortition in that process. From 1328 onwards the majority
of official positions were attributed by lot (called la tratta). The candidate names were
put in pouches (borse) and sortition provided the way of selecting those who would be
in charge for a certain period. The members of the Signoria were selected by lot, and,
during the republican period, most political and administrative offices were attributed
according to a similar process.
The selection process actually took four steps.13
1. In the first step, selection committees in each neighborhood had to choose those
citizens who were considered suitable to hold the office, according to strict
personal and political criteria.
2. During the second phase the list of those who had succeeded (the so-called
nominati) was scrutinized by a city commission composed of preeminent citizens,
the arroti. The names of those who achieved a qualified majority (two thirds of
the ballots, in a process called squittino) were put in leather pouches (imborsati).
For those offices that were attributed through quotas, there were different
pouches for the major and the minor guilds.
224 Politics of the One

3. Sortition itself only took place in the third step when the names were drawn
from the pouches. Ad hoc officials, the accopiatori, were in charge at this crucial
moment. The names of those who had not been selected were left in the pouches
for the next sortition. After an unusual or important political event (such as a
revolution or a drastic change within the regime) had taken place a new squittino
would be organized before the old pouches were empty.
4. The last step consisted in eliminating the names of those who had been selected
but who did not fit the necessary criteria for office (the so-called procedure of the
divieti.) If any of those chosen still owed taxes, had served in a similar capacity in
the recent past, had been sentenced in respect of certain crimes, had a parent in
a similar position, or already held an important office, they would not be allowed
to take up their posts.

Sortition and deliberation

What was the relation between sortition, election, and deliberation in the Florentine
Republic? It was very peculiar and very different from both how it operated in
Athens and how it is used in our modern democracies. In the Attic city-state, offices
were allocated either by random selection or, for the 10 percent most important, by
election.14 In the Florentine system, election and sortition were combined. In addition,
we have to be aware of the different political values denoted by the term “election” in
different historical periods and political cultures. Modern readers see elections as a
process by which the grassroots select those who will then speak and act for them.
Ancient Athenians would have had a similar understanding. Conversely, elections
were a top-down process in Florence, a kind of co-option of worthy citizens by the
political elite or “inner circle” where the political power of the state was concentrated.
This only changed with the formation of the Major Council in 1494.
The meaning of the word “deliberation” also varies in respect to the language and
context in which it is used. In English, it usually implies a careful discussion of all
sides of a question. It is with reference to this meaning that the concept of “deliberative
democracy” was created, and it is only in specific contexts that deliberation necessarily
leads to a decision—most notably with trial juries. In Early Renaissance Italy, the word
had quite a different meaning. It implied the decision of a collective body, but not
necessarily a collective discussion.15 Francesco Guicciardini, a famous intellectual and
politician who was Machiavelli’s contemporary and one of the first theoreticians of
representative government, wrote for example in 1512: “I easily accept that laws could
be decided in the [Great] council (che la deliberazione ne sia in consiglio), because they
are something quite universal and concern every city member; but I like the fact that
it is impossible to discuss them publicly, or only following the orders of the Signoria
and in favor of what it proposes—because if anybody were allowed the freedom to
persuade or dissuade others, this would lead to great confusion.”16
Discussions on public matters were very lively and quite important for the
decision-making process in the Florentine Commune. Where did they take place?
 Drawing Lots in Politics 225

There were political discussions in non-public places, for example in the big palazzi
belonging to the most important families in the city. Such discussions also took place
in intermediate spaces between the private and the public arenas: public meetings of a
kind were regularly organized on the banks which existed at the bottom of the palazzi,
and in the open shops and loggie in front of them. In this respect the Florentine inner
city was in some way similar to the Athenian agora or the Roman forum. The general
assembly of the people, called the parlamento, never had the role it had played in
Athens. It had no regular meetings, was not an institution in which one could delib-
erate, and usually had a plebiscitary function. A lot of discussions took place in the
guilds, the arti, which were a basic feature of the medieval communal system. The
arti could make decisions for themselves, had specific institutions, and could partly
designate candidates for offices. Their meetings were only open to members. With
the Early Renaissance, their importance strongly decreased and they gave place to a
more unified political body. Discussions leading to decisions also took place in the
numerous electoral commissions that selected those whose names were to be put in
the pouches. These were not open public affairs, as previously noted, except during
the short period at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth
when the Major Council (consiglio maggiore) was in place. Most offices—including
the most important, the Signoria—were collegial. This meant that although discussion
took place, again it was not in public. Executive decisions were taken in these offices.
The two legislative councils, selected by lot within much larger lists than the one used
for the Signoria, had the power to pass or refuse the bills proposed by the executive;
but they could not propose any bill by themselves and it was forbidden to criticize the
proposals.17 The only speeches allowed were in favor of the measure in hand and it is
this arrangement that Guicciardini advocated in the above quotation. In addition, the
sessions of the legislative councils were not public, i.e. open to all citizens. A much
deeper discussion took place in advisory bodies called pratiche, which the Signoria
could call at will and which were selected by the most important political leaders. The
quality of discussion was high in these bodies, they served to enlighten the public
mind and forge a majority consensus, but they took no decisions and were not open
to the public.18 Their role was a crucial factor in the progressive loss of republican
substance from Florentine institutions at the time of the early Renaissance for they
heralded the emergence of a political class that was dedicated to politics on a full-time
basis, that was hegemonic in the electoral commissions, and whose members could
regularly pass from one public office to another.

Republican self-government: the one, the few, and the many

In this complex system, deliberation, in the sense of public discussion that is used in
most theories of deliberative democracy, was an essential dimension. Even though
none were democracies, it is for this reason that we can claim that the Florentine
Republic along with the other Italian communes that developed similar systems
226 Politics of the One

“reinvented politics.” As Moses I. Finley,19 Cornelius Castoriadis,20 and Christian

Meier21 suggest, politics is something very peculiar and has not existed in all societies
and at all times; it implies not just the struggle for state power, which takes place
in every state society, but also the existence of a public sphere.22 The articulation of
deliberation and decision-making in Florence was nevertheless very peculiar, and
very different from what we find in modern democracies.23 The decision-making
bodies were not open to the public; the deliberative institutions that were most open
to the public did not take any decisions. The randomly selected legislature could take
decisions but could not discuss the bills in question; the general assembly of the people
could decide but not deliberate; and the body in which discussion was most lively, the
pratiche, was co-opted by the inner circle and was neither open to the wider public
nor entitled to take decisions.24 Sortition in this context had therefore an ambiguous
relation to deliberation.
In fact, its main function was to ensure an impartial resolution of conflicts between
the different factions that deeply divided the Republic.25 However, this was not its only
value, for it also played a crucial role in establishing citizen self-government. Due to
random selection and the rapid rotation of offices (usually from two to six months),
nearly all those who had full citizenship were able, in theory, to have regular access to
public office. Citizenship was essentially defined through membership in one of the 21
officially recognized guilds. At the beginning of the fourteenth century this included
between 7,000 and 8,000 persons from a population of about 90,000. In 1343, three
quarters of the citizenry were nominated to take part in the squittino for the Signoria;
around 800 passed the test and became imborsati—and were thus destined to hold
one of the major offices in the years following the vote. In 1411, at the time of the
birth of civic humanism, more than 5,000 citizens were nominati and more than 1,000
imborsati. The Major Council created in 1494 had around 3,000 members. Apart from
the highest executive positions, there were plenty of other offices that used sortition
as a means of selection during this period. The rule was clear: the more important the
office, the harder the competition.26
Florentine citizenship was clearly restricted to a minority of the population. The
ratio of full citizens to population was larger than that of Venice during the same
period,27 smaller than that of classical Athens,28 and comparable with the proportion
of full citizens to the population of Great Britain at the end of the eighteenth century.29
Florence was not a democracy in the meaning we presently give to the term. It was not
self-government by all and, as we have seen previously, a large part of the power tended
to be de facto in the hands of the inner circle during much of this period. Despite this, it
was more self-government than representative government. The discrepancy between
constitutional ideal and political practice in this matter, moreover, was probably no
greater than in a modern democracy. The ideal of the vivere libero, which was at least
partly embedded in the real life of the Republic of Florence, included the equal partici-
pation of the full citizen in public life and an equal—and real—opportunity to hold
public office. This ideal was realized through random selection and the rapid rotation
of offices—techniques that were used in order to avoid or limit any division between
state power and the citizenry. This polity was thus very different from the absolutist
 Drawing Lots in Politics 227

regimes that were emerging in the European countries at the same time, but also very
different from the representative democracies that appeared two or three centuries
later.
It was not a democracy but it was a mixed constitution, as Leonardo Bruni rightly
concluded. It was at that time that this concept of mixed constitution, imported from
Aristotle and Polybius, became a tool for understanding the Florentine common-
wealth. The debate between the “democratic” and the “aristocratic” dimensions was
explicit, and we find it both in the archives and in a large number of contemporary
analytical works from the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. The old Aristotelian
opposition between elections, considered as basically aristocratic, and sortition, which
was seen as a democratic tool, seemed to revive in Florentine politics,30 and was well
synthesized in a dialogue that was resuming the debates in the Great Council after
1494 by Francesco Guicciardini.31 The lower guilds’ spokesman argued that elections
distinguish a special group of men, those who had chances in life because born in
rich families. Those are the few who dominate society. If offices were only selected by
elections, they would also take all political positions. That was why a mix of election
and sortition should be used, so that everybody could have a chance to take part in
the benefits and the prestige of the state. Sortition was a necessary component of the
government of the many (governo largo) and, compared to other regimes of its time,
Florence did embody this ideal. The upper guilds’ spokesman gave one of the first
historical conceptualizations of representative government: the wiser shall govern,
but they must be freely elected among all citizens (concretely, in Florence at that
time, among the members of the Great Council). In this way, the government of the
few (governo stretto) would be more efficient than the government of the many, but
it would also be legitimated by the people. The regime would still be popular, and in
such a regime, “it is the people, not chance, who shall be the ruler, and it is the people,
and not Fortune, who shall confer public honors32”. In the short term, the lower guilds
could impose their views and sortition remained used for the designation of offices.
But at the beginning of the sixteenth century, another element was introduced: with
the election of the president of the state (the Gonfaloniere) for a life mandate, the
power of the many was balanced by the power of the one. And in 1530 the Medici
succeeded in imposing their rule and abolished the republican regime.

Randomly selected mini-publics and deliberative democracy

However, the Florentine Republican experiment, which at that time was frequently
compared to Athens or Rome, and its mixed constitution have played an important
role in the development of the modern republican tradition.33 Our analysis of its
political system provides a valuable viewpoint from which to understand the specific
features of modern deliberative democracy and the challenges it might have to face.
According to most supporters of participatory instruments based on random selection,
the return of this technique in politics, after centuries of eclipse, implies that some of
228 Politics of the One

the ideals of ancient democracies are coming back. A good example of this can be
found in the writings of Lyn Carson and Brian Martin, two of the most coherent
advocates of random selection. They write:
The assumption behind random selection in politics is that just about anyone who
wishes to be involved in decision making is capable of making a useful contri-
bution, and that the fairest way to ensure that everyone has such an opportunity is
to give them an equal chance to be involved. Random selection worked in ancient
Athens. It works today to select juries and has proved, through many practical
experiments, that it can work well to deal with policy issues […] For democracy
[…] to be strong, it must contain the essential element of citizen participation,
not just by a self-selected few but by ordinary people who rightly can determine
their own futures. Given the difficulty of involving everyone in such a deliberative
process, we argue that random selection is an ideal means by which a cross section
of the population can be involved.34

For sure, there are evident and huge differences in the social, political, economic, and
institutional contexts of modern democracies on the one hand, and of Athenian or
Florentine Republics on the other. Nevertheless, can we speak of a partial resurgence
of the ideal of self-government taking place in the contemporary experiments in delib-
erative democracy? These experiments might well be signs of a new democratic trend
in the early twenty-first century, which could develop further or could remain trapped
in a niche. The experiments themselves embody a larger critique of those paternalist
traditions that tend to reduce democracy to representative government and the de
facto rule of the few. Their supporters consider that civic participation of the many is
crucial for the good health of our political system. They claim the political equality of
all citizens in public discussion and, in some cases, in decision-making. They think
that democratic legitimacy is closely linked to the expansion of deliberation in the
sense of public debate: the more a decision comes from a lively and well organized
public debate, the more it will be legitimate, both normatively and empirically.35 This
line of thought is clearly a response to growing distrust of the political system by the
citizenry, which is a current and significant trend, at least in Europe. In the deliberative
democracy corpus, sortition has a visible space.36
Nevertheless, it is important to stress the obvious differences between Florence
and experiments like British Columbia’s or Iceland’s Citizen Assemblies. In these
countries, nearly all adults are full citizens. The technique of random selection is not
a routine, nor part of the normal constitutional device; it is only used at particular
moments, when a public authority freely decides to organize a citizen assembly, a
citizen jury, a consensus conference or another kind of deliberative device. Up to
2010, no law has made sortition mandatory beyond the judicial domain. The political
experiments based upon sortition usually operate on the margins of politics, and the
British Columbia experiment is the exception rather than the norm.
 Drawing Lots in Politics 229

Representative sample and descriptive representation

A further, less evident but crucial difference concerns the meaning of random
selection. In Florence, as in Athens, sortition and rapid rotation of offices enabled
citizens to govern and be governed in turn. This is why, at least to a certain extent, one
can speak of self-government of the many, and this is why, in classical political thought
from Aristotle to Guicciardini, random selection had been associated with democracy
and elections with aristocracy.37 The contemporary use of random selection is quite
different. The real chance of being selected in the British Columbia Citizen Assembly
or in any other device of this type is very low. The idea, clearly expressed by Lyn
Carson and Brian Martin, is to use sortition in order to select a microcosm of the
citizenry, a group that has the same features and the same diversity as the citizenry, but
on a smaller scale. This would form a “minipopulus,” as Robert A. Dahl38 first said, or
a “mini-public,” which is now the most common term. This possibility is statistically
plausible when one takes a representative sample of the citizenry. A fair cross-section
of the people tends, at a small scale, to be similar to the population at large.
The notion of a representative sample is familiar to the twenty-first century reader
based on decades of its intensive use in statistics and opinion polls. This is why it
seems “quite rational to see lotteries as a means to the end of descriptive represen-
tation.”39 However, the representative sample is a late nineteenth-century invention.
There could be no relation between random selection and descriptive representation
in Athens or Florence, where the idea that random selection statistically leads to a
cross section of the population was not scientifically available. At that time, chance
had not yet been “tamed” in the political sphere.40
The “microcosmic” reasoning that implied that political representatives had to be
the social or cultural mirror of the people became important during the age of the
French and North American Revolutions. For example, John Adams could write that
the legislature “should be an exact portrait, in miniature, of the people at large.”41 But
because it was impossible to rely on the notion of a representative sample, its promoters
ignored sortition and put forward other technical solutions.42 The Anti-Federalists
proposed small constituencies in order to favor the lower middle-class—a proposal
that was not particularly convincing and that was successfully criticized by the
Federalists.43 Another solution suggested the separate representation of different social
groups through corporatist methods44—a proposal that was too closely identified with
the Old Regime to convince radical democrats. In the nineteenth century, the higher
class’s de facto hegemony among representatives regularly led to the idea of the specific
representation of subordinate groups, and particularly of the working class.45 The
representative sample was first introduced in politics with opinion polls in the middle
of the twentieth century46 and it only became the instrument for selecting trial juries
and various political juries and committees at the end of the 1960s and in the 1970s.47
Bernard Manin48 was the first to ask why selection by lot disappeared from the
political scene with modern revolutions. He gave an answer based on two elements.
230 Politics of the One

On the one hand, the founding fathers of the modern republics wanted an elective
aristocracy, a government of the few in a popular commonwealth, rather than a
democracy, and so it was logical that they should reject random selection. On the
other hand, the theory of consent, deeply rooted in modern conceptions of natural
law, had gained so much ground that it seemed difficult to legitimate a political
authority not formally approved by the citizens of the state. These two arguments are
important, but they cannot tell the whole story. In particular, they fail to explain why
radical minority currents did not demand the use of selection by lot in politics, even
though they campaigned for a mirror-like representation in which the representative
body would resemble the people in its entirety. To understand these developments,
one has to point to a number of other factors.49 We have to abandon the realm of
“pure” political ideas and look at the way in which they take material shape through
techniques of rule and various tools and mechanisms. (In this respect, the history of
political ideas would gain much from the lessons of science studies—STS—as they
have developed in the last few decades.) The lack of a statistical concept of represent-
ative sampling at the time of the French and American Revolutions, when probability
calculus was already well developed, is a decisive reason why political selection by lot
seemed doomed in modern democracies with their large populations—and why those
who upheld a descriptive conception of representation inevitably had to choose other
tools for the advance of their ideals.
Conversely, the question of the present comeback of random selection in a
growing number of experiences also appears open to an answer largely centered
on representative sampling. Random selection as it is practiced in politics today
is inseparably bound up with that concept. In modern democracy, the delib-
eration of a cross section of the people is not the same as the self-government of
the people. It gives everybody the same chance to be selected; but because this
chance is very small, it does not allow all citizens to hold public office in turn.
It leads instead to a mini-public counterfactual opinion that is representative of
what the larger public opinion could be. John Adams could write that the micro-
cosmic representation he was advocating “should think, feel, reason, and act” like
the people. For the contemporary politics of presence,50 the statistical similarity
between “descriptive” representatives and the people is only a starting point. The
mini-public has to deliberate, and in this process, it changes its mind. It begins to
think somehow differently, and this is precisely the added value of deliberation.
This is quite clear when we read James Fishkin, who invented the deliberative poll,
one of the techniques of deliberative democracy that uses random selection:
Take a national random sample of the electorate and transport those people from
all over the country to a single place. Immerse the sample in the issues, with
carefully balanced briefing materials, with intensive discussions in small groups,
and with the chance to question competing experts and politicians. At the end of
several days of working through the issues face to face, poll the participants in
detail. The resulting survey offers a representation of the considered judgments
of the public.51
 Drawing Lots in Politics 231

Where traditional polls consist only in a “statistical aggregation of vague impressions

formed mostly in ignorance of sharply competing arguments,” deliberative polls allow
us to know “what the public would think, had it a better opportunity to consider the
questions at issue.”52

Challenges of deliberative mini-publics

Another difference between the Florentine Republic and contemporary randomly
selected bodies is the relation between deliberation and decision-making. The modern
schemes based on random selection tend to reveal a larger dynamic of deliberative
democracy. In this paper I will not discuss deliberative bodies such as supreme courts
or administrative committees such as the Food and Drug Administration. I will focus
instead on deliberative mini-publics. Schemes of this type offer a number of promises,
such as to limit the distance between the political class and the citizenry and to
promote better communication between them. At the same time, however, they are
confronted with three sets of challenges.
The first one is that the counterfactual opinion can differ from the real opinion of
the people. When the proposal of British Columbia’s Citizen Assembly was put to the
electorate-at-large in a referendum in 2005, it failed to pass the test. Because it was
considered a constitutional matter, the referendum required approval by 60 percent
of voters and simple majorities in 60 percent of the districts in order to pass. Final
results indicate that the referendum failed with only 57.7 percent of the votes in favor,
although it did have majority support in 77 of the 79 electoral districts. When the
proposal was put again in a referendum in May 2009, the gap was even larger: only
38.7 percent of valid votes and 7 of 85 electoral districts were in favor of the proposal.
In Ontario, the Citizen Assembly proposal convinced only a minority of voters and
there will be no second chance.
The tension between the counterfactual deliberation of the mini-public and the
public debate at large seems to be inherent to deliberative democracy, as far as it
takes an institutional form. It has not been widely addressed in political theory.53 This
tension appears in several dimensions:
Learning process. The more the members of a representative sample learn in
a Citizen Assembly, the more their knowledge and opinion will differ from
the public opinion at large. The most interesting schemes, which lead to a real
empowerment of the participants, tend to differ more from the average public
opinion than the bad ones.
Publicity. Jon Elster54 and others have shown that publicity of the debates does
not necessarily lead to a better discussion. In some contexts at least, a discussion
behind closed doors will be of a better quality. Most citizen juries discuss without
any audience. In this context, it is more difficult to involve the wider public and to
increase its understanding of the case in question. Thus the meetings tend to be
schools of democracy for the few, not for the many.
232 Politics of the One

Learning through discussion or through action. The deliberative devices are

conceived in order to foster and improve political education. However, they
usually allow participants to meet only “for a short period, as ordinary citizens for
specified and limited purposes,” as Gordon Gibson55 puts it. In social movements
or in NGOs, the deliberative quality is probably lower but the intensity and
emotional commitment of the participants is much higher. In some cases personal
ambition, rather than a desire for democratic progress, could even become the
main motivating factor.
Numbers. When the number of participants grows, the deliberative quality of the
discussions tends to decrease. This is why deliberative democrats often prefer the
democratic deliberation of the few—the few being ordinary citizens selected by
lot—to the deliberative democracy of the many.56
Deliberative democracy also has to face another set of challenges. Because it
focuses on the (deliberative) rule of the game, it often tends to forget or at least to
underestimate power relations and the relationship between deliberative schemes
and the broader democratic transformation of society at large. Those participatory
devices that select individuals by lot, without any ties between them, constitute an
instrument that is not embedded in actual social relations. It therefore makes it
difficult for these mechanisms to change existing power structures. This induces
serious difficulties:
Power in the deliberation itself. One of the most discussed problems is the influence
of power on the deliberative process itself. A formally equal procedure can lead
to unequal outputs if it remains blind to the differences in social, economic, or
cultural capital that strongly influence the input side of the process. This has been
widely discussed, and techniques have arisen in order to reduce social inequalities
in deliberation, such as the succession of plenary sessions and discussions in small
groups.
Top-down and bottom-up. In addition, most deliberative mini-publics are
top-down processes. It is therefore not very probable that radical changes will
take place in which the power of those who have set up these instruments would
be truly challenged.
Individual versus organized citizens. Many deliberative designs, especially those
that employ random selection, valorize individual citizens. They consider
organized interests, including NGOs and community organizations, with some
diffidence because they are supposed to defend particular interests. These deliber-
ative instruments can even be used against organized civil society, without which
any progressive civic change is hardly conceivable.
Consensus and dissent. In consensus conferences, citizen juries and many other
devices (although not in deliberative polling), deliberative democracy is supposed
to lead to a consensus. But do real changes usually come through consensual
arguments? Historically, the progress of justice and democracy has been imposed
 Drawing Lots in Politics 233

through huge social struggles, not through reasonable consensual discussions.

Deliberative devices often tend to be inhospitable to politicization.
Argumentation and passions. As suggested by Jürgen Habermas,57 a good delib-
eration is usually considered to favor the force of the better argument. However,
in order to make real transformations in a world in which structural resistances
are huge, passions seem necessary; such transformations are hardly the product
of mere rational argumentation. Rhetoric and emotions are crucial. In order to be
strong enough to regulate the world markets, politics has to make people dream of
another world. In this process arguing can only be one dimension among others.
Deliberative democracy and social justice. The relation between deliberative
democracy and social justice remains unclear. Most of the instruments that delib-
erative theory has analyzed are linked with movements of emancipation of the
subordinate classes or of outsider groups. Experiments based on random selection
barely address the critique of the new forms of inequality that are produced
by contemporary capitalism. This has mostly been done in other participatory
instruments such as the participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre.58
Enlightened decision-making versus counter-power. Finally, to summarize these
points, deliberative democracy based upon mini-publics often tends to be a
way of producing more enlightened decision-making and a more enlightened
consent. This is important but hardly enough—and if it does not contribute to the
development of counter-powers,59 interest in deliberative democracy will start to
decline.

The legitimacy of random selection

There is an apparent trade-off between deliberation in the English meaning (good
discussion) and deliberation in the meaning found in Latin languages (decision of
a collective body). The deliberative bodies open to ordinary citizens are not usually
entitled to make decisions. Among the collective bodies that theorists tend to present
as good examples of deliberative democracy, those that are entitled to take decisions,
or whose advice is directly integrated with decision-making bodies, are mostly
expert commissions such as supreme courts, ethics committees or neo-corporatist
bodies. Among those open to “ordinary” citizens, most are only consultative or
advisory boards: they are only “weak publics.”60 Why is this? Is it only a contingent
phenomenon? Can we expect the situation to change in the near future?
The classical Athenian and Florentine Republics relied on a principle of self-
government (combined with the rule of law). Representative democracy relies on
another principle, the consent of the people expressed through elections (articulated
within the rule of law and human rights). Both strongly rely on the legitimacy of
number, and especially on the majority principle. However, an important feature of our
political regimes is that many decisions are taken by expert committees. In some cases
234 Politics of the One

these committees apply the majority principle; in others they function by consensus.
Their legitimacy has a strong epistemic dimension: it relies on expert knowledge and
on well-designed procedures that favor good (non-public) deliberation.
Mini-publics made up of ordinary citizens selected at random cannot rely on the
legitimacy of number nor on the legitimacy of expert knowledge. This is why they
are not usually entitled to take decisions. Nevertheless, they have their own kind of
legitimacy. First of all, contemporary participatory devices are most often employed in
order to enable an enlightened discussion to take place. One of their basic assumptions
is that a careful deliberation will lead to reasonable results. This is why the counter-
factual opinion tends to be more reasonable than the wider public debate. In fact, the
epistemic quality of deliberative devices based on random selection is important.
In addition, deliberative participatory devices may have some epistemic advantages
compared to representative government or expert committees. Most deliberative
democrats rely on a negative argument, well expressed by John Dewey: “A class of
experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with
private interests and private knowledge, which in social matters is not knowledge at
all.”61 This statement can be extended to the political class. Deliberative democrats also
propose more positive arguments. One of the most common is that good deliberation
needs to include various points of view, so that the range of arguments can be enlarged,
and reasons better balanced. In this line of thought, randomly selected mini-publics
tend to be better than participatory devices based on voluntary involvement or on
organized civil society because they rest on a cross-section of the people and maximize
the epistemic diversity of their deliberation. This is why they can bring something
valuable to what is, in fact, a context of increasing complexity.
A third argument for participatory deliberative devices is political. Their promise
comes from the fact that discontent is growing against the actual functioning of repre-
sentative democracies. There is a perceived need to counter the tendency to reduce
politics to rhetorical shows, to limit the autonomy of the political class and to make
it more accountable to the citizenry. Participatory deliberative devices are instruments
that promote better communication between the political class and the citizenry. Those
based on a representative sample of the population enable political communication to
take place among ordinary people and not merely between “professional citizens.”
The fourth argument is also political, but is more radical than the third. Democratic
theoreticians of representative government (as opposed to its elitist advocates)
often concede that the best democratic system would be self-government, but add
that, because self-government is impossible in the large communities typical of
modern democracy, the second-best solution is representative government. One could
however argue that: since the best democratic system is self-government; and because
self-government is impossible in the large communities typical of modern democracy,
the second-best solution is actually to give a voice to counterfactual mini-publics
selected by lot. In this way at least it offers citizens an equal chance to participate in
decision-making.
The fifth argument for participatory devices based on a representative sample of
the population is impartiality. Elected representatives, experts, and organized interests
 Drawing Lots in Politics 235

tend to be moved by particular interests rather than by the notion of the common
good. In contrast, random selection ensures that the large majority (or even nearly
everybody, due to the possibility of recusal as in a trial jury) will judge according to
what they consider best for all without taking a partisan stance in any controversy.
This advantage of impartiality may be strengthened when the advice or decision has
to be taken by a qualified majority or reached through consensus.

Advising, controlling, judging, deciding

Taking into account these five types of legitimacy that participatory devices based on
random selection can claim, what can be said about the potential of these contem-
porary experiments?
When the imperative of impartiality is high in respect to a particular topic, random
selection offers a worthwhile method by which to select those who will deliberate. An
important distinction has to be made, however. It is interesting to note how Hegel
defends the institution of the trial jury composed of laypersons. Their participation is
justified, he writes, in so far, and only in so far, as what is at stake is not the universal,
the right, or the law, but a concrete and subjective judgment about a particular case.62
One can be less strict, but one has to recognize that it is not the same thing to delib-
erate on concrete particular cases and to enact a law. In particular cases, participatory
instruments based on random selection have enough legitimacy to advise, but also, at
least in some contexts, to control,63 to judge, as in trial juries,64 or even to decide—this
has been the case in the Berlin citizen juries that, in 17 neighborhoods, have decided
the attribution of half a million Euros each to sustain local projects in the frame of the
urban renewal policy.65 This could be developed much further.
On the other hand, in cases where impartiality is crucial but where a law is at stake,
as in British Columbia, it would seems promising to couple a proposal made by a
Citizen Assembly with a referendum, as was done in the Canadian provinces—that is,
to articulate the mini-public with the people at large.
It is undeniable that expert committees have an important role to play in cases
that rest on highly technical questions. To ensure impartiality, however, it would be
necessary to include laypersons in the decision-making, for example at particular
moments in the proceedings, such as in the consensus conference on scientific issues
invented in Denmark.
In cases where general political issues are at stake, participatory devices based on
random selection do not have enough legitimacy to make a decision: the counter-
factual opinion is not the same as actual self-government. Two options could be
considered. The first is to give these devices a mere consultative function and then let
elected representatives decide. The idea is to produce a more enlightened consent and
a more enlightened government. This is the mainstream option, and we will probably
see many experiences of this kind proposed and adopted in the next decades. An
alternative would be to combine mini-publics with larger participatory processes.
236 Politics of the One

This would be a movement in the direction of participatory democracy. It would

combine representative government and deliberative democracy with forms of direct
democracy. It could be worth making some steps forward in this direction. For who
could claim that the status quo is satisfactory?

Deliberation, the few and the many

The idea of deliberative democracy is an important contribution to the renewal
of politics and could improve the efficiency and legitimacy of public policies. It is
precisely because we live in a complex world that the need for public deliberation
increases. Deliberative democracy is a good counter-tendency to populist tendencies,
and to the domination of charismatic leaders.
However, deliberative democracy, in order not to be reduced to a peculiar
government of the few, has to be combined with participatory democracy, which
is different and which has something to do with the principle of republican self-
government of Early Renaissance Florence. Participatory democracy implies the
actual participation of a large proportion of the citizenry in politics, and in particular
the involvement of dominated groups. It relies not only on institutional devices, but
also on social movements. The good deliberation of a few ordinary citizens selected
by lot has to be linked with a better debate of the many in the larger public sphere.
The British Columbia scheme, which couples a Citizen Assembly with a referendum,
indicates a path we could follow if we were to go in this direction.
Deliberative democracy and participatory democracy, even taken together, cannot
stand alone. They are part of a broader evolution that modifies the meaning of political
representation, and they are dimensions—until now, secondary dimensions—in the
development of multilevel governance. However, in the global balance between the
one, the few, and the many, they bring something new and modify the equilibrium.
While this makes the situation more complex, and a good equilibrium is not easy to
find, this is a promising path.
Random selection has a role to play in this process. Coupled with the rapid
rotation of offices, it was crucial in Early Renaissance Florence, where it enabled a
limited but real self-government of the many to emerge. Contemporary schemes
based on random selection rely on the notion of a representative sample, which was
unavailable before the end of the nineteenth century. These mini-publics embody the
counterfactual opinion of a few “ordinary” citizens—what the many could think if
they could truly deliberate. They are therefore closely linked to the ideal of deliberative
democracy, which is something very different from the Florentine vivere libero. They
offer sources of legitimacy that have to be combined with, rather than opposed to, the
legitimacy of either representative or direct democracy.
 Drawing Lots in Politics 237

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Notes
1 Previous versions of this article have been published with the titles: “Random
Selection, Republican Self-Government, and Deliberative Democracy,” Constellations,
17(3), 2010, 472–87, and “Random Selection and Deliberative Democracy. Note for
an Historical Comparison,” in Gil Delannoi and Oliver Dowlen (eds) Sortition. Theory
and Practice (Imprint Academic, 2010), 31–51. A special thank to Oliver Dowlen, who
has edited a previous version of this chapter.
2 Leonardo Bruni, “Costituzione politica di Firenze”, in P. Viti (ed.) Opere (Torino, 1996).
3 R. B. Herath, Real Power to the People. A Novel Approach to Electoral Reform in
British Columbia (University Press of America, 2007); Mark E. Waren and Hillary
Pearse, Designing Deliberative Democracy. The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly
(Cambridge University Press, 2008).
4 Gordon Gibson, “Deliberative Democracy and the B.C. Citizens’ Assembly,” Citizens
Centre for Freedom and Democracy, 02/23/2007, available online at http://www.ccfd.
ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=409&Itemid=284 (accessed 10
June 2012).
5 Lyn Carson and Brian Martin, Random Selection in Politics (Praeger Publishers, 1999);
Anja Röcke, Losverfahren und Demokratie. Historische und demokratietheoretische
Perspektiven (LIT, 2005); Yves Sintomer, Le pouvoir au peuple. Jurys citoyens, tirage
240 Politics of the One

au sort et démocratie participative (La Découverte, 2007); Hubertus Buchstein,

Demokratie und Lotterie. Das Los als politisches Entscheidungsinstrument
von der Antike bis zur EU (Campus, 2009); Yves Sintomer, Petite histoire de
l’expérimentation démocratique. Tirage au sort et politique d’Athènes à nos jours (La
Découverte, 2011).
6 Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton University Press,
1966); In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism (Princeton University Press 1988); Loïc
Blondiaux, La fabrique de l’opinion. Une histoire sociale des sondages (Le Seuil, 1998).
7 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the
Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2003).
8 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols, (Cambridge
University Press, 1978).
9 James Hankins (ed.) Renaissance Civic Humanism (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
10 Nicolai Rubinstein, “Florentine Constitutionalism and Medici Ascendancy in the
Fifteenth Century,” in Nicolai Rubinstein (ed.) Florentine Studies. Politics and Society
in Renaissance Florence (Northwestern University Press, 1968); “Florentina libertas,”
Rinascimento, Second series, vol. XXVI (Leo S. Olschki, 1986).
11 Gene A. Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton University
Press, 1977); Brucker, Florence. The Golden Age, 1138–1737 (University of California
Press, 1990); Giorgio Cadoni, “Genesi e implicazioni dello scontro tra i fautori della
‘tratta’ e i fautori delle ‘più fave’. 1495–1499,” Lotte politiche e riforme istituzionali a
Firenze tra il 1494 e il 1502 (Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, Fonti per la
storia dell’Italia medevale, Subsidia 7, 1999), 19–100; Guidubaldo Guidi, Il governo
della città-repubblica di Firenze del primo quattrocento (Leo S. Olschki, 1981); John
Najemy, Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 1280–1400 (The
University of North Carolina Press, 1982); A History of Florence 1200–1575 (Blackwell,
2008).
12 Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge University
Press, 1997); Oliver Dowlen, The Political Potential of Sortition. A Study of the Random
Selection of Citizens for Public Office (Imprint Academic, 2008); Buchstein, Demokratie
und Lotterie; J. McCormick, “Contain the Wealthy and Patrol the Magistrates,”
American Political Science Review 100(2), 2006, 147–63; Sintomer, Petite histoire de
l’expérimentation démocratique.
13 Najemy, Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 169ff.
14 Moses I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World (Cambridge University Press, 1983);
Mogens H. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure,
Principles, and Ideology (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997).
15 This meaning globally remains the same in contemporary Italian and Portuguese.
French and Spanish are somewhere in between. In German, conversely, deliberation
excludes decision and a “deliberative Stimme” (a deliberative voice) is only
consultative.
16 Francesco Guicciardini, “Del modo di ordinare il governo popolare” [so-called
Discorso di Logrogno, 1512], Dialogo e discorsi del reggimento di Firenze, Roberto
Palmarocchi (ed.) (Laterza, 1932): 218–59, 230–1.
17 Along with the exclusion from citizenship of the working class, one of the most
important aristocratic features that Leonardo Bruni (“Costituzione politica di
 Drawing Lots in Politics 241

Firenze”) mentioned was precisely this point: that the legislative councils could not
really discuss nor modify the bills proposed by the Signoria, but only approve or reject
them. According to him, the other non-democratic elements were that the councils
could not decide their own schedule, and that there was no more conscription but a
professional mercenary army.
18 Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence.
19 Finley, Politics in the Ancient World.
20 Cornelius Castoriadis, Domaines de l’homme (Seuil, 1986).
21 Christian Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics (Harvard University Press, 1990).
22 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into
a Category of Bourgeois Society (MIT Press, 1991).
23 This explains the mixed feelings of familiarity and strangeness that we get when
reading Machiavelli’s Istorie Fiorentine (see Niccolo Machiavelli, Florentine Histories
(Princeton University Press, 1988)).
24 Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence, 251.
25 Manin, The Principles of Representative Government; Dowlen, The Political Potential
of Sortition; Buchstein, Demokratie und Lotterie; Sintomer, Petite histoire de
l’expérimentation démocratique.
26 Guidi, Il governo della città-repubblica di Firenze del primo quattrocento, vol. 2,
43–4; Najemy, Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 177, 275;
Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence; Brucker, Florence. The Golden
Age, 253.
27 Venetian citizenship was basically restricted to the Great Council members: around
1,100 persons for a population of 90,000 at the beginning of the fourteenth century,
and 2,600 for a population of 250,000 before the 1575 plague (F. C. Lane, Storia di
Venezia (Einaudi, 1978), 120, 295–7, 372).
28 Between 30,000 and 50,000 citizens, for a population of 250,000 to 300,000 people.
In both cities, women were excluded from citizenship, but in addition, in Florence,
manual workers (the popolo minuto) had only access to citizenship during the revolt
of the Ciompi in 1378, when for a few months 13,000 new persons got access to
citizenship through the creation of three new guilds. Peasants from the neighborhood
(the contado) remained totally excluded, together with the people living in territories
under Florentine domination (the dominio).
29 338,000 persons out of 8.5 million people. Patrice Gueniffey, Le Nombre et la Raison
(EHESS, 1993), 97. See also J. H. Plumb, “The Growth of the Electorate in England
from 1600 to 1715,” Past and Present 45 (1969).
30 Cadoni, “Genesi e implicazioni dello scontro tra i fautori della ‘tratta’ e i fautori delle
‘più fave’ 1495–1499.”
31 Guicciardini, “Del modo di eleggere gli uffici nel consiglio grande,” in Dialogo e
discorsi del reggimento di Firenze, Roberto Palmarocchi (ed.) (Laterza, 1932): 175–95.
32 Guicciardini, “Del modo di eleggere gli uffici nel consiglio grande.”
33 Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance; Search of Florentine Civic
Humanism; Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment; Skinner, The Foundations of Modern
Political Thought.
34 Carson and Martin, Random Selection in Politics, 2, 13–14. The “fair cross section
of the community” is the notion that the U.S. Supreme Court referred to when it
imposed the reform of trial juries at the end of the 1960s in order to select them by
242 Politics of the One

lot among the all citizenship and not only among a particular group of it (“The Jury
Selection and Service Act,” 28 U.S.C., secs 1861–9, quoted in Jeffrey Abramson, We
the Jury. The Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2003),
100).
35 Manin, The Principles of Representative Government; Habermas, Between Facts and
Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (MIT Press,
1996); Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; John S. Dryzek,
Discursive Democracy. Politics, Policy and Political Science (Cambridge University
Press, 1990); Jon Elster, Arguing and Bargaining in the Federal Convention and the
Assemblée Constituante, Working Paper, 4, The University of Chicago, Center for
the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe, 1991; Jon Elster (ed.) Deliberative
Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
36 James Fishkin, The Voice of the People. Public Opinion and Democracy (Yale University
Press, 1996); Peter Dienel, Die Planungszelle (Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997); Waren and
Pearse, Designing Deliberative Democracy; among many others.
37 Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy (Verso, 2007).
38 Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and its Critics (Yale University Press, 1989), 340.
39 Peter Stone, “The Logic of Random Selection,” Political Theory 37 (2009), 375–97,
390.
40 Yan Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
41 John Adams, “Letter to John Penn,” The Works of John Adams (Little, Brown and Co.,
1851), 4, 205.
42 Sintomer, Petite histoire de l’expérimentation démocratique.
43 Manin, The Principles of Representative Government.
44 See, among others, Comte de Mirabeau, “Discours devant les états de Provence,”
January 30, 1789, Œuvres de Mirabeau, Paris 1825, t. VII, 7, quoted in P. Rosanvallon,
Le peuple introuvable. Histoire de la représentation démocratique en France (Gallimard,
1998).
45 See, among others, the “Manifeste des Soixante,” L’Opinion nationale, February 17,
1764, quoted in Rosanvallon, Le peuple introuvable.
46 L. Blondiaux and Y. Sintomer (eds) “Démocratie et déliberation,” Politix 15(57)
(Hermès, 2002).
47 The “fair cross section of the community” is an approximation of the representative
sample when the group is too small to be truly representative.
48 Manin, The Principles of Representative Government.
49 Sintomer, Petite histoire de l’expérimentation démocratique.
50 Anne Phillips, The Politics of Presence (Clarendon Press, 1995).
51 Fishkin, The Voice of the People, 162.
52 Ibid.
53 Robert E. Goodin and John Dryzeck, “Deliberative Impacts: The Macro-Political
Uptake of Mini-Publics,” Politics and Society 34 (2006), 219–44; Archon Fung,
“Minipublics. Deliberative designs and their consequences,” in Shawn W. Rosenberg
(ed.) Deliberation, Participation and Democracy. Can the People Govern? (Palgrave,
2008); Simone Chambers, “Rhetoric and the Public Sphere: Has Deliberative
Democracy Abandoned Mass Democracy?” Political Theory, 37(3), June 2009,
323–50.
54 Elster, Arguing and Bargaining in the Federal Convention and the Assemblée
Constituante.
 Drawing Lots in Politics 243

55 Gibson, “Deliberative Democracy and the B.C. Citizens’ Assembly.”

56 Chambers, “Rhetoric and the Public Sphere: Has Deliberative Democracy Abandoned
Mass Democracy?”
57 Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; Between Facts and Norms.
58 Rebecca Abers, Inventing Local Democracy: Grassroots Politics in Brazil (Lynne
Reiner Publishers, 2000); Leonardo Avritzer, Democracy and the Public Space in Latin
America (Princeton University Press, 2002); Y. Sintomer, The Porto Alegre Experiment:
Learning Lessons for a Better Democracy (Zed Books, 2004); Gianfranco Baiocchi,
Militants and Citizens. The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre
(Stanford University Press, 2005).
59 Archon Fung and Erick O. Wright (eds) Deepening Democracy. Institutional
Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance (Verso, 2001).
60 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” Justice Interruptus. Critical Reflexion on
the “Postsocialist” Condition (Routledge, 1997).
61 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Swallow Press and Ohio University Press
Books, 1954 [1927]), 207.
62 Georg W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge University Press,
1991): §227–8).
63 McCormick, “Contain the Wealthy and Patrol the Magistrates.”
64 J. Abramson, We the Jury. The Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy.
65 A. Röcke and Y. Sintomer, “Les jurys de citoyens berlinois et le tirage au sort:
un nouveau modèle de démocratie participative?” in M. H. Bacqué, H. Rey, and
Y. Sintomer (eds) Gestion de proximité et démocratie participative: les nouveaux
paradigmes de l’action publique? (La Découverte, 2005), 139–60.
 15

More than Two

The One as Singularity in Ambiguity*

Gerald Raunig

A very different One

At the “Politics of the One” conference held in St. Petersburg in April 2010, Jean-Luc
Nancy presented a talk entitled “Plus d’un,” or “More Than One.” Now that talk
has become the chapter that opens the present volume. In a statement that initially
seems rather cryptic, Nancy argued that “more than one” refers to the difference
between fundamentally different meanings of the one. “More than one,” he writes, “in
truth, it simply means ‘one,’ any given unit.” What does Nancy mean by this appar-
ently paradoxical turn of phrase that “more than one” is “any given unit,” any given
one-ness, simply one? He is implicitly referring to a philosophical distinction whereby
the whole is at issue—or perhaps precisely not the whole.
On the one hand, being one in the sense of a wholeness, an identity, a full, a
complete and perfect unity: nothing can be added to this unity. “More than one”
would here be a contradiction. Addition is impossible: the possible techniques that
presuppose a whole, full, unified identity are division, distinction, subtraction.
At the same time, a very different one in the sense of particularity, uniqueness,
singularity: the second meaning of oneness in the sense of a singularity is what Nancy
is referring to when he speaks of “more than one.”
More than one, more than two, several; being more, becoming more, multipli-
cation; not a majority, for it is not about the domination of a majority over minorities,
a universal as well as standard measure over accidentals, a constant central issue over
fleeting coincidences. Instead of distinguishing and establishing a majority and a
minority, at issue is multiplicity, multiplication, addition.
In his lecture, Nancy emphasized the distinction between multiplication and
distinction. “But the plurality of ‘ones’ opens straight away the question of its nature:
is it addition, multiplication or else distinction, dissimilarity?” Translated into my
246 Politics of the One

own terms, the question is: Do the many as singularities stand in a relationship and
exchange with a mass-one, a multitude, a molecular manifoldness—or do they subject
themselves as identitarian differences to an all-one, an identity, a universal unity?
To quote Nancy more extensively:
If plurality results from addition or multiplication, “more than one” may extend
indefinitely like the series of numbers, of all possible numerations […] The
principle is that of numeration or numerality: more than one, which is to say
not only some ones but also many. More precisely, there are never “some ones”
without there being “many” at the horizon. Many, the multitude, i.e. the multipli-
cation of the ones that are not brought back to the jurisdiction of a One, simply
because there is neither a jurisdiction nor a “One” with a capital, but only the
enumeration of “ones.” Enumeration is the principle of the crowd, the numerous,
the number of which continually increases. Addition brings always further the
indefinite sum that will never make up a unity.1

The more refers to the horizon of the many. Being more than one always already
means more than two, more than several. It indicates a plurality, a multi-plication of
the numerous, it signifies a concatenation of ones, a specific concatenation that does
not seek to dominate or even to sublate them, that does not place the singular under
the command of a whole, a full one One.

“They Don’t Represent Us!”

By the twentieth century, at the latest, ambiguity and ambivalence had become
ubiquitous: Verena Krieger makes this point in her introduction to Ambiguität in der
Kunst, a collection of essays she co-edited with Rachel Mader. This ubiquity is true not
only of art, but of many discourses, but none the less—and I think this is decisive—it
takes on a different valence in various realms. In the following, I would like to relate
the philosophical problematic discussed above to two different social realms—that
of activism and that of art—suggesting different, even contrary interpretations of the
relationship between ambiguity and disambiguity, the many and the one.
My first example comes from the realm of social movements. Here—first in 1968,
then in the 1990s around the Zapatist movement, and finally increasingly in the first
decade of the new century with the anti-globalization movement, the social fora,
queer/feminist activisms, and the Euro Mayday movement of the precarious—multiple
practices have developed against the unification of struggles, against representation by
state apparatuses such as parties and unions, against subjection under identitarian
positions. In the conflict and concatenation of social machines with the Foucauldian
and Deleuzian currents of the 1970s, later with new feminist theories around and
after Judith Butler, then with the popular linkage of Marxism and post-structuralism
in the international bestsellers by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, molecularity,
ambiguity, and multitude found their expression in social movements as well.
 More than Two 247

But counter to trends, in recent years there has been an identitarian opposing
wind. The one One is returning, and, with it, a jurisdiction of the one. The molecular
struggles, movements, and discourses are—in a returning simplification—accused of
culturalization, an anti-materialist attitude, and depoliticization: the Anti-Germans
try out an anti-fascist, negative identity politics, feminist identitarianisms surface
against the queer movement, German-speaking representatives of critical-whiteness
studies tend towards an anti-racist identitarianism.
I am rather skeptical of those in the art context who exercise a fundamental critique
of political activisms, who undertake an aesthetic critique of political posters at art
history conferences instead of intervening at the activist meetings and work groups
in the process of aesthetic political production. It is partially for this reason that my
example is explicitly not intended as a critique of identitarianism, but as an affirmation
of a renewed movement against disambiguation, identity politics, and the domination
of the one One.
Radical inclusion and representational critique are two outstanding components
of the new occupy movements, especially the Spanish 15-M movement—founded
around the demonstrations on May 15 2011—and the Occupy! movement since
September 2011: No nos representan!, “They don’t represent us!,” is one of the most
important slogans of these movements. This not only means that “they,” the politi-
cians, are doing something wrong or that they are the wrong politicians, but rather
something more fundamental: that the politics of representative democracy do not
work or no longer function, that its hegemonic model of organic representation is
necessarily based on the logic of the one One, the identity. I would like to discuss
something from the recent past in more detail, for in my view the specific genealogy
of the occupations of 2011 can be directly linked to the university occupations of 2008
and 2009.
Not unlike the re-appropriation of smooth, deterritorialized spaces in the centers
of Arab, Spanish, Israeli, and US cities, the movement of reterritorialization that took
place in years prior at the universities of Europe could be seen as similarly paradoxical.
Already in the fall of 2008, the Italian onda anomala triggered a wave of protests,
strikes, blockades, and demonstrations that here and there spilled across the borders as
well, emerging in different forms in France, Greece, and Spain. In April 2009, however,
something new emerged. The protests over education policy turned into an occupy
movement. Zagreb students did not just occupy a lecture hall, but took over the entire
division of the humanities and the social sciences. It remained under student control
for 35 days, and the occupation then expanded to other cities in Croatia. Especially
interesting when it came to subsequent developments was the trend toward the broad
introduction of representational critique and non-representationist practices. What
was alluded to in the social movements of the 1990s and 2000s already on a smaller
scale now expanded and became a central focus of sociality and organization.
In Zagreb, this could be seen first in the constitution of the plenary assemblies
themselves. The plenum was fundamentally open, even to those who were not
students, staff, or members of the faculty, and it was the only location where decisions
were made. The plenum was neither a territory nor a community, but a temporary
248 Politics of the One

assembly that only existed as long as the assembly lasted. There were accordingly no
members, but just the act of assembly, discussion, and decision, without any identifi-
cation or organic representation.
The other complex of representational critique at the Zagreb occupation consisted in
the occupiers’ media strategy. Quite consciously, they avoided the media trap of being
identified and instrumentalized as a protest movement that was young, naïve, and
politically somewhat confused. This image is routinely introduced in the mainstream
media to describe new protest movements: in the first weeks quite affirmatively (the
young should protest, after all!) decorated with “human” features of the activists, and
then, after some time—and always according to the same patterns—turning into the
opposite: the occupiers are irresponsible, because there are no constant faces or names
representing them, they have no plan, because they present no concrete demands, and
ultimately they are “ready for violence.”
The Zagreb occupiers subvert this mass media logic by defining their represen-
tation themselves: above all, by way of depersonalization and permanently rotating
spokespersons. As a rule, each spokesperson only appeared before the press once. The
exact articulation of the movement was secured primarily by the press releases written
daily, making it possible to keep the representation of the occupation’s goals under the
control of the collective.
While the Zagreb students occupied the division of arts and social sciences, at
Vienna’s Kunstakademie an initially small number of students and young faculty
members began holding discussions with members of the transnational platform
Edu-Factory, critical of university education, and smaller actions directed against
the imminent implementation of the Bologna reform. In October 2009, four months
after the end of the Zagreb occupation, the main lecture hall at Vienna’s Akademie
der bildenden Künste was occupied, and two days later so was the largest lecture hall
in all of Austria, the Audimax at Universität Wien. This occupation lasted for two
months, longer than any other in the history of Austria. Using the slogan #unibrennt,
the movement organized its own teaching, meals, and secured places to live and sleep
at the occupied university. After five days, the occupation movement spread to other
Austrian cities, and by early November there was an unbelievable chain of Audimax
occupations all across Germany, Switzerland, and in other European countries, and in
California as well.
The Audimax occupiers in Vienna acted from the very start on the basis of radical
inclusion, representational critique, and promoting individual voices, declaring the
plenum to be the central location of decision making and establishing a large number
of working groups. While in Zagreb the central achievements were clarity and unity
of speech, the primacy of the collective, and anonymity of statements, the Audimax
occupiers went a step further. The singular quality of the many ones of the many was
not hidden behind the collective and anonymity, but took the multiplicity of positions
within the plenum and even differences over forms of organization or approaches to
sexist or racist practice toward the outside in more or less clear ways. Exemplary for
this work of multiplication of positions was the discussion held already during the
 More than Two 249

first weeks about the necessity of establishing a queer/feminist space as the result of
incidents of sexual harassment.
And there is yet another difference between the spring and fall of 2009, between
Zagreb and Vienna: while the Zagreb occupiers only allowed small parts of the plenum
to be filmed or photographed, the Vienna occupiers radically opened themselves up
to the public. The permanent live-streams from the Audimax not only allowed people
outside Vienna to follow the occupation and its self-administration, but also allowed
local protagonists to add additional layers to the aspect of direct communication.
Social machines and technological machines operated together: being plugged into
electronic devices this time did not have the character of dependence, and the techno-
logical procedures of tweets, live-streams, and social media created a certain degree of
independence from the spectacular currents of the mainstream media.
In recent struggles, the promotion of singular voices and their multiplication can
be recognized. The relationship between ambiguity and disambiguity takes the form
of a struggle against political unities, against the unidimensional programs of repre-
sentative democracy, against central contradictions of all kinds. The multitude does
not represent the singularities. The multitude, that is the multiplication of the ones,
cannot be “brought back to the jurisdiction of a One.”2
The ambivalence intended here is not meant in the sense of a juxtaposition resistant
to concatenation or even a hierarchical differentiation, but rather as the always already
new attempt to concatenate singularities without an identitarian claim.

What Would It Mean to Win?

In her introduction to Ambiguität in der Kunst, Verena Krieger discusses in extremely
clear terms how ambiguity in the field of art has become a quasi-natural, stereotypical,
ultimately “normative” category. Whether as an “aesthetic paradigm” of modernism,
as a “postmodern metanarrative,” ambivalence becomes a “program,”3 the “absolute
criterion for judging the actual art character of each work,”4 an “all-encompassing
principle,”5 finally a fetish.6 Alongside earlier positions, Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetic
theory, with its focus on the artwork as a riddle, as a question mark, is above all taken
as a main point of reference for the different variants of an ambiguity that is declared
to be a norm.
In comparison to the recurrent political attempts at disambiguation or unification
that the variety of social movements is repeatedly subject to, in the realm of art the
situation is almost the inverse. In the discourse of the bourgeois art world, ambiguity
seems to be the norm, and disambiguity seems to be something of a criterion of
exclusion. The question mark becomes imperative. With the “assertion of a tolerance
of ambiguity,” as Tom Holert describes this tendency in his contribution to Ambiguität
in der Kunst,7 Adorno’s elitist-authoritarian gesture becomes a hegemonic perspective
in the field of art, a normativity, sometimes gently concealed, sometimes aggressive,
that for its part causes closure.8 In an extreme case, this closure leads to denunciatory
250 Politics of the One

evaluations of non-ambiguous art practices as “bad art” or “non-art.” Particularly

when ambiguity and the manifold have become a ubiquitous norm in the art field (and
at the same time an object of post-Fordist value creation), it is a good idea to explore
the one as a singularity, as a manifold uniqueness that triggers multitude, to reinvent
a singularity on the non-foundation of ambiguity, that does not oppose the many as a
one, subjecting it, but emerges from it and will collapse into it. Here, several positions
from the historical avant-garde would apply, above all the post-revolutionary practices
and theories of Tretjakov, Arvatov, and Eisenstein, but also the epic theater and above
all Bert Brecht’s “learning plays.” I would like to conclude with a more recent example,
a film collaboration between the Australian artist Zanny Begg and the Austrian artist
and filmmaker Oliver Ressler.
Begg and Ressler first presented their film about the Anti-G8 protests at Germany’s
Heiligendamm in the summer of 2007, soon after the protests, and in so doing inter-
vened in debates within the social movement. The title of their work ends in a question
mark, but not in Adorno’s sense. What Would It Mean to Win? But in the work itself,
there’s also an implicit exclamation mark, a singular imperative, a disambiguity.
A core statement of the film is that “winning,” in the figure of a unified revolu-
tionary subject taking over state power, has no great future. Instead, the multitude of
the activists of Heiligendamm that pose this question of the significance of winning
takes the form of a question, the form of an undefined movement, a stumbling and
perhaps stuttering, like the music used for the animation fragments in Begg and
Ressler’s film that complement the actions and theoretical commentaries. Just as
this fragmented, molecular multitude refuses all definition and all organic represen-
tation, it also makes sense that Begg and Ressler, instead of exploring the spectacular
riots in Rostock at the start of the summit or Greenpeace’s actions on the shores of
Heiligendamm, immediately immerse themselves in the depths of the micropolitical
assemblages in the fields and camps around the G8 summit. The images and sounds
that both artists captured from the actions and social forms of organization around
Heiligendamm poetically summon the blockades and the attempts to break though
the police lines in the hinterland of Heiligendamm, above all the effectiveness of the
“five finger” tactic in the broad fields along the Baltic, the strategy of the repeated
division of larger groups upon making contact with police lines, until their gaps
ultimately led to a breakthrough.
The exclamation point that stands against the non-foundation of the question
mark emerges as the affirmation of a new political practice in the event, not as
dogmatic jurisdiction. The film adds something to this practice. It is a piece of
counter-information, and to that extent an exclamation point. It reports on a practice
that did not surface in the media’s reporting at the time. It affirms the little actions,
the organizational forms, the aesthetics and the debates among the activists around
Heiligendamm.
These distractions, bifurcations, multiplications correspond to the film’s demand,
borrowed from Zapatism, that life need not mean the same film each day, but rather
that each day should be a new film. Instead of affirming the one world of machinic
capitalism, but also without just being satisfied that another world is possible, at issue
 More than Two 251

is inventing many different worlds. This implies on the one hand the multiplication
of the one other world in a multiplicity of other worlds, but at the same time the
concrete actualization of possibilities in the here and now, as a singular exclamation
point. Herein lies the power of the work of Begg and Ressler in comparison to other
examples of visual representation of the anti-globalization movement: it furthers
aspects of counter-information and counter-propaganda, but also integrates several
layers of reflection that avoid suggesting and taking an all too simple solution to
questions of the “we,” of “power,” of the nature of winning.
At issue here is not dismissing disambiguity in favor of the ambiguity and ambiva-
lence that is promoted by the art world, but disambiguous singularities emerging in
the event that seek their explosive power on the non-foundation of the multitude.
The disambiguity, the clarity at issue here does not promote identity and the all-one.
It emerges as a risky singularity that sets something at stake, adding something to
the multiplicity. It explodes the all-one. The exclamation point is here not a scolding
finger, but a singular imperative, a plea for concatenation and contagion that does not
devour the many question marks, but actualizes them. Disambiguity, oneness not as
identity, but as a singularity that is more than one.

Bibliography
Verena Krieger and Rachel Mader (eds) Ambiguität in der Kunst: Typen und Funktionen
eines ästhetischen Paradigmas (Vienna: Böhlau, 2010).
Jean-Luc Nancy, “More than One,” in Politics of the One (London: Continuum, 2013).

Notes
* Translated from German by Brian Currid. The first version of this text was written
as a lecture for the conference Radikal Ambivalent, held by Rachel Mader and the
Institute for Contemporary Art, at Zurich Art Academy, 1–2 December 2011.
1 See 5 of this volume.
2 Ibid.
3 Verena Krieger, ‘‘‘At War with the Obvious’: Kulturen der Ambiguität,” in Verena
Krieger and Rachel Mader (eds) Ambiguität in der Kunst: Typen und Funktionen eines
ästhetischen Paradigmas (Böhlau, 2010), 13–49; Quot. 30.
4 Ibid., 36.
5 Ibid., 41.
6 Ibid., 48.
7 Tom Holert, “Resonanzen, Streifen, Scherenschnitte. Formen und Funktionen von
Ambiguität seit 1960,” in Ambiguität in der Kunst, 241–59; Quot. 243.
8 In recent decades, these closures can also and primarily be seen as components of
economic developments. The imperative towards ambiguity takes on a structural
analogy to contemporary forms of production. Ambivalence and ambiguity are here
by no means to be understood as weapons of the bourgeoisie in the sense of the old
252 Politics of the One

and rather static Bourdieuian mechanism of distinction between classes and social
strata, but as a variously hierarchized differentiation. In recent years, this complicated
analogy has been made clear by queer/feminist positions such as that of Antke Angel
and Brigitte Bargetz: if today post-Fordist economics operates as a capitalism of
difference, differences of all kinds are substantialized and hierarchized. In this settting,
the flows between the singularities, their exchange, their being placed in relation to
one another are converted into value.
 Index of Names
Adams, John 203, 229, 230, 237, 242
Agamben, Giorgio xvi, 132, 133, 142, 168,
171
Akhmatova, Anna 13, 19–22
Aquinas, Thomas 4, 9, 11, 25, 42, 135
Arendt, Hannah ii, 28, 31, 32, 33, 42, 45,
171, 203
Aristotle xii, xiv, xxii, 4, 18, 21, 24, 25, 28,
42, 66, 70, 88–9, 95–7, 102, 107,
110, 116–18, 120, 125, 128–9, 135,
205, 214, 217, 219, 227, 229
Audibert, Cathérine 42, 47
Augustine, Aurelius 7, 137, 186
Averroes 4
Badiou, Alain xii, xiv, xvi–xvii, xix, xxi,
11, 27, 30 42, 45, 51–85, 88, 98,
102, 107, 148
Basil the Great, St 209–17
Bataille, George 18, 133–4, 141, 165
Begg, Zanny 250–1
Benjamin, Walter 33, 41, 133, 150, 208–9
Blanchot, Maurice 10–12, 61, 132–4, 158,
165, 173
Boethius, Manlius Severinus 135, 137,
141, 142
Bourdieu, Pierre 207, 208, 252
Bruni, Leonardo 221, 227, 240
Bulgakov, Sergey 203
Carson, Lyn 228, 229, 241
Castoriadis, Cornelius 226
Clastres, Pierre 29, 32
Cues, Nicolas von 15, 18–19
Dahl, Robert 229
Deleuze, Gilles xi, xiv–xvi, xix, 11, 28,
30–1, 51–61, 117, 158, 171
Derrida, Jacques xv, 4, 6, 11, 51, 78, 81–2,
84, 119, 127, 157, 158, 162, 167,
170–2, 208, 219
Dewey, John 234
Eckhart, Meister 18
Eliot, T. S. 19
Elster, Jon 201, 242
Epictetus 32
Esposito, Roberto 131, 141, 154
Finley, Moses 226, 240
Foucault, Michel 51, 54, 60, 158, 172, 173,
198, 210
Frege, Gottlob xv, xvi, xxii, 27, 28, 47
Gibson, Gordon 221, 232
Guiccardini, Francesco 224–5, 227, 229,
240
Habermas, Jurgen 233, 242–3
Haraway, Donna 161, 172
Hardt, Michael 54, 59, 141, 143, 177–8,
181, 185–6, 190, 195, 198–201, 246
Hegel, Georg 4, 7, 25–7, 35, 41–2, 44, 51,
64, 72–4, 82, 87, 89, 97, 99, 107–8,
118–20, 124, 129, 130, 149–50, 164,
171, 178, 186, 191–4, 200, 235, 243
Heidegger, Martin xiv, xix, xxi, 7, 8, 11,
12, 14, 28–9, 31–2, 36, 40, 63–70,
71–84, 87–90, 97–112, 126, 124,
148, 154–5, 157–60, 164–5, 167–8,
169–73
Heraclitus 4, 9, 24, 44, 89, 108–9
Holert, Tom 249, 251
Hume, David 87
Husserl, Edmund 63, 73–84, 91–2, 108
Ingarden, Roman 76, 78, 84
Kandinsky, Vasiliy 17, 21
Kant, Immanuel 25, 41, 43, 44, 75, 81, 87,
92, 159–62, 172
Kantorowicz, Ernst 199
254 Index of Names
Klein, Melanie 33, 46–7
Krieger, Verena 246, 249, 251
La Boétie, Étienne xi, 29, 42
Lacan, Jacques xi, xv, xvi, xx, xxii, 27,
33–5, 79
Latour, Bruno 161, 170–2, 207–8
Lazzarato, Maurizio 54, 8, 60
Lefort, Claude 125, 129, 180, 186, 196, 198
Leibniz, Gottfried 4, 25, 28, 37, 97, 110,
155
Levinas, Emmanuel 33, 39, 41, 46, 128,
130, 162, 173
Losev, Alexey 72–3, 84
Lyotard, Jean-François 51–2, 83, 172
Machiavelli, Niccolo 181, 224, 239–41
Manin, Bernard 205, 218, 229, 240–2
Martin, Brian 228–9, 239
Marx, Karl 12, 97, 149–50
Merleau-Ponty 118, 129, 162, 173
Miller, Jacques Alain 27–8, 43
della Mirandola, Pico 3, 8
Mondzain, Marie-José 205–6, 210, 218–19
Nancy, Jean-Luc xv–xxii, 3–12, 57, 81,
83, 112, 119, 129–34, 141, 153–5,
158–9, 164, 245–6, 251
Negri, Antonio xi, xiii, xiv, xxii, 54, 59–60,
141, 143, 177–8, 181, 185–6, 190,
195, 198–201, 246
Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 31–9, 78, 87–8,
91, 96–8, 107–8, 110–11, 127, 130,
150, 200
Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg)
121–3, 128–9
Ouspensky, Leonid 203, 217
Parmenides xi, xix, 24–5, 81, 88–99, 102,
106–10, 148
Peterson, Eric 28, 44–5
Plato xi, xxii, 14, 18, 21, 24, 35, 64, 71–4,
77, 82–3, 87–8, 95, 117, 129, 147,
162, 165, 206
Platonov, Andrey 39–40, 44, 47–8
Plotinus xii, xxii, 4, 37, 46, 77
Porretanus, Gilbert xix, 134–42
Proust, Marcel 33
Quignard, Pascal 165
Ressler, Oliver 250–1
Rubinstein, Nicolay 223, 239–40
Sartre, Jean-Paul 40–1, 43, 48, 197–201
Schelling, Friedrich 18, 161–2, 165, 168
Schmitt, Carl 28, 40, 44, 47, 159, 172, 182,
189, 199
Schürmann, Rainer 15, 21, 28, 43, 45
Smith, Brian 73, 84
Stirner, Max 4, 37, 39–40, 47
The Studite, Theodore 205, 209, 211, 213,
217–19
Tennyson, Alfred 16, 21
von Trier, Lars 33–5
Trubetskoy, Evgeny 203, 217
Virno, Paolo 51, 54, 56, 59–60, 154
Volotsky, St Joseph 209, 211, 216–19
Williams, Henry Horace 26, 45
Winnicott, Donald 37, 47
Žižek, Slavoj 56, 60
 Index
ambiguity, disambiguity 14–15, 31, 120,
245–51
being xi, xiv–xvi, xix, 3–12, 14–20, 24–8,
42, 52–3, 59, 64, 72–5, 79–82, 94–5,
97–102, 116, 130, 136, 147–50, 57,
164–5
ontology xi, 11, 17, 23–8, 32, 52, 63–8,
71–83, 97, 116, 118, 130, 139,
147–9, 162, 171, 173
Cold War 184, 194
democracy xii, xix–xx, 115–30, 178, 180,
185, 188, 203–4, 221–36, 247
dividuality 138–40
element 157–73
empire, imperialism xiii, 37, 126,
177–96
event xiv, xvii–xix, 7–8, 11, 28, 35, 40, 42,
45, 51–61, 65–7, 72, 81–2, 88, 98,
100, 147–55, 161, 166, 186,
189–91
exile xvi, xviii, 17–19
finitude xxi, 18, 31, 68, 163
fragility xviii, 13–22, 157, 188
globalization, anti-globalization 6, 30, 51,
151, 157, 159, 171, 177–8, 180, 185,
190, 194–5, 246, 251
growth 30, 115–30
icon xviii, 203, 220
individual, individualism xii, xv, 5, 14, 20,
25, 29–48, 55–60, 119–26, 131–43,
153, 193, 195, 208, 217, 232, 248
infinity xv, xviii, 3, 8, 10, 12, 18, 26, 28, 37,
65–70, 115–16, 118–19, 121, 123,
126–7, 163–6, 206
lots xii–xiii, 219, 221–43
melancholia 26, 32–5, 39, 41, 47, 190
metaphor 17, 91, 207–11
metonymy 207–8
monotheism xvi, 25, 28, 39
Multiplicity, The Many xi, xiv–xx, 9–11,
27, 29–31, 51–61, 71–6, 81–4,
115–30, 131–43, 148, 151–2, 164,
245–51
nature 8, 10, 18–20, 118–30, 157–73,
191–3
negativity xv–xviii, 24–8, 35, 42, 149, 162,
164–5, 192–4
neoplatonism 11, 16, 25, 85, 135
nihilism 3,5, 31, 34, 41, 71, 87, 104, 111,
164
number, the numeric xvii–xviii, 5–10, 14,
24, 27–8, 31, 44, 47, 66, 7, 131, 138,
166, 232–4, 246, 248
Occupy Movement 247
other, aliud xv, 17–19, 38, 40–1, 55, 100,
125
phenomenology ii, 71–84, 90, 92, 159,
164, 173
plants xi, 115–30
representation xii, xiii, xviii, xx, 3, 55–6,
121, 185, 203, 205, 207, 216, 218,
222, 229–30, 246–8, 251
republic, republicanism xiii, xix, 28, 122,
124, 178, 180–2, 189, 203, 205, 208,
221–40
revolution xiii, 16, 20, 26, 31, 39–40, 57–8,
60, 65, 81, 150, 153, 178–95, 224,
229–30, 250
Rome, Ancient 132, 138, 180–1, 185, 220,
225
256 Index
singularity xiv, xvi, xix, 10, 14, 16–20, 23,
30, 37–8, 57–8, 68, 81, 101–2, 115,
117, 120, 123, 133–43, 147, 151–3,
160, 164–6, 245–52
solitude xiv, xviii, xx, 23, 48, 177, 180,
184, 194
tragedy 35, 65
Trinity 4, 7, 25, 135–8
truth xii, xv, xvii, 53–4, 60, 63–9, 73–82,
87–8, 91, 95, 99, 135, 158, 166,
168