If All Else Fails

In his recent book, Violence, Slavoj Zizek aims to distinguish between 'subjective' violence - violence as we ordinarily experience it, as a disturbing intrusion into the normal run of things, which only appears against a background of non-violent normality - and two forms of 'objective' violence. These latter forms are invisible, in that they sustain the very appearance of non-violence presupposed by the former.

On the one hand, there is 'symbolic violence', which is not merely that of injurious phrases or expressions, 'hate speech' or 'fighting words', slander or libel, et cetera, but rather, the violence of an imposition of a symbolic order or world of meaning. This involves the disintegration of the existing set of meanings, values, and associations, the traumatic uprooting of subjects from their contextual habituation, as well as the absorbtion of this trauma into the new symbolic order, which renders this violence invisible by depriving evaluation of any standard of measure, any value, that would allow it to register abuse, violation, or injury.

Here we should note that violence, in whatever form, refers to a force that exceeds a threshold of 'abuse', such that the victim has a normally defined range of proper 'use' or 'treatment'. Symbolic violence is invisible precisely insofar as the injury it induces is so severe that it redefines the normal limits of treatment, redistributes the thresholds of abuse, and in the extreme, erases the being that may be treated properly or improperly, replacing it with a new being.

We can see the close relation between 'symbolic violence' and the law-constituting 'mythic violence' of which Benjamin speaks. Whether the realm of meaning or the realm of law, in either case we are dealing with a violence that disposes with the previous order, and in doing so, establishes a new order in its place. This violence cannot coexist with the law thereby established, but must be ejected into an eternally past 'primitivity' or 'mythos'. Within the standards of this new order, it would necessarily appear as the greatest crime, but since this order had not yet come to be, and could only come to be on the condition of this crime, there is no standard of judgement.

Any previous standard of judgement by which we could condemn it is the very casualty of this violence, and this opens a kind of vaccuum between the two orders. Moreover, this vaccuum is not simply an anomic period between two constituted orders, but cleaves the plane of constituted order to/from the groundless, shadowy realm in which constituting power struggles to assert itself, in a time before any constituted time.

The second form of objective violence, according to Zizek, is 'systemic violence', which he defines as the enormously destructive side-effects, the 'collateral damage', of global captialism. Although this system is said to be the epitome of freedom, fairness, democracy, and so on, it nonetheless is sustained by a disavowed underside of orgiastic violence and destitution. Examples of this would be the enormous, and growing, populations living in slums, the emergence of ever-new ethnic civil wars and genocides, the massive death tolls in the Global South attributed to cured or treatable infections that nonetheless go untreated...

The point I would like to make is that there is another form of violence that is not accounted for in Zizek's typology. If the revolutionary aim would be to bring the two forms of objective violence to light, and hence undermine the reactionary form of subjective violence, then the violence of which I speak is the very supression or silencing of this revolutionary activity. This is not as obvious as it may sound. The point is not that there is a systematic effort to discredit or ignore pleas for 'recognition' of objective violence. Rather, as subjects, we are already unable to recognize objective violence; there is no 'enlightened' position one could occupy in this regard. The pained attempts to undermine the constituted order are defeated, failed, in that they must necessarily fail to take place at all.

Every order, of law and language, is born of and sustained by an unaccountable explosition of violence that breaks not only with the previous order, but with power in its 'constituted' form altogether. It is here that we can glimpse the constituting power, which is also revolutionary violence, in that it reveals itself as objective violence. Hence, the revolutionary aim is not simply to denounce such a violence, but to become this violence: both the symbolic violence that dissolves existing law, meaning, and value, and as the product of systemic violence, the collateral damage (the proletariat) of this order turned against the very order that created it. Yet, insofar as this revolutionary break of constituting power becomes a means to the establishment of another constituted order, the revolutionary violence degrades into mythic violence. (Here, we would do well to revisit Deleuze's discussion of the 'eternally New' vs. the 'eternally established' in Difference and Repetition.)

This other kind of violence of which I speak - we might call it 'catastrophic violence' - is hence that which binds constituting power to constituted power, and thereby enlists the revolutionary break in sevice of its own erasure. The radical conclusion here is that this violence is nothing other than revolutionary violence turned back upon itself, ejecting itself into an mythic eternal past. So many attempts to break with the existing order had to fail, that is, failed to happen, in that they ultimately became identical to the establishment and service of this order. The point here would be, not to see what might have happened otherwise, what could have been different, inventing ineffectual 'alternative histories', but rather, to see what had to not happen, what must have failed to occur; to see that which, though impotential, was nonetheless, paradoxically, actual, that which did fail to happen. To make the explosive break of constituting power not an exception to the rule that sustains the rule, but an example of the rule that deactivates the rule - to make visible the inclusion of constituting violence within the realm of law, and insodoing, to step outside that realm - these are imperatives yet to be deciphered.

Making History

What is historicity? We can see it when there happens to be, there emerges or occurs an event that breaks with the chronological chain of presents, distinguishing itself from that which does not distinguish itself from it (Deleuze). In its own wake it becomes unaccountable, inexplicable in terms of chrono-causality, lacking an intelligible or schematizable situation in relation to the rest of history. Yet for this same reason it is, for historicist chronology, indiscernible, invisible, or unproblematic. Regarding itself it cannot explain itself in relation to chronology. Regarded by that very chronology, there is nothing to explain, it does not stand out, or does not even possess a unique and distinguished existence.

Such an event appropriates the whole of history, past and future, to itself, making history its own history. It deciphers history - which is not to say that historicism presumes history as ciphered and opaque. On the contrary, historicism can be minimally defined by the presumption that history is transparent, clear, and already intelligible, in principle if not in fact. Rather, the event of historicity bears witness to a cipher that is itself ciphered, a code itself encoded, hidden in that intellgibility. It reveals the ciphered character of history as such: not the hidden meaning or telos of the past, but only its opacity and hieroglyphic character. What is hidden, ciphered in history, is the very fact that something is hidden or ciphered. The form of the cipher is also its only content.

The event does not endow the whole past, even the most insignificant and 'unhistorical' instants, with a new or hidden significance. Rather, it reduces all of the past: it does not reduce everything to it, to its own omnipotence or determination, but leaves it to a reduction with no significance, separating everything from its significance, so that even the grandest, the seemingly most 'historical' and weighty of things, are reduced to the same stature as the most insignificant. The past is reduced to a collection of monadic punctures that cannot be reduced further, for they are infinitely shirinking or falling from any significance. They are not, for all that, irreducible, for they are nothing in themselves but their reduction, the reduction of reduction, the very insignificance of insignificance, in inessentiality or innecessity or the inessential. The past is reducted to (almost) nothing, to that bare minimum that persists in nothingness.

Historicism would nonetheless consist, or begin anew, in maintaining the very irreducibility of the event - not to chronological history, but to itself. It cannot think the event as reduction itself, the reduction of all of history to a series of bare, meaningless hieroglyphs, marks, or wounds. It makes history reducible to an event, which is in turn reciprically reducible to history, to its historical instances, which is to say, to historical instances themselves, to its own instantiation, as it is history. We should hence distinguish two senses of 'event':

1) The historical or historicist sense, which constitutes a proper history in reducing history to itself and itself to history (what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as bi-univocality), while remaining irreducible to itself, in itself. These are the events of great significance that 'make history' and define a tradition, appropriating everything that exists as past while excluding only what did not exist, what did not happen.

2) The event in its historicity, or the event of historicity, reduces all of history, seeing in all of the happenings of the past - not what did not happen, in the sense of what could have happened otherwise or what could otherwise have happened, but - what must not have happened, thereby reducing the past to the zero level of an exclusion. And it reduces itself to itself - or, as reduction implies the dissolution of what is, its dissolution in something else, we can not say it is reduced to itself, but to its being-in, in-itself and thus not itself, in that it no longer is by virtue of being-in. In itself, reduced to being-in itself, it is other than itself, in-and-not-itself. As in-itself, it differs from what it is in, and hence is not itself. It is what had to not-be in its being, what could not be so that it could be. It is a monad, the navel whose umbilical cord reaches inward, as if the thing itself were its own prosthesis or parasite.

In the event of historicity, all of history is rendered insignificant - both the significance of the significant and the insignificance of the insignificant. Rendered insignificant or meaningless, not in the sense of a meaningless statement, but as a cipher: the cipher does not depend on the significance of what it encodes, but only on its own opacity, impenetrability, the insignificance of the signifier in itself. It is irreducible to the meaning it encodes, but reduces itself to its own insignificance regarding what it encodes, to the necessarily excluded potential to mean anything.

The sense in which the event of historicity appropriates all of history is very different from the corresponding operation on the part of the historical event. The latter institutes a proper history, endowing the past with significance and propriety. The former, itself already reduction and expropriation in itself, is the appropriation or owning over of history to expropriation. History is disowned and abandoned in the sense that it radically identifies with what it had to abandon in constituting itself. Historicity is hence the paradoxical propriety of the improper or expropriated, in which history gives itself over to its own loss, its irreparable abandonment.

Whereas historicism resorts to a concept of history as given, its intelligibility as such thereby presupposed and not accounted for in its genesis, historicity raises the question or is already the question of the conditions under which the historical is constituted. History, what is history, is not taken as self-evident, but must be investigated. History in this sense does not simply refer to a discipline or field, a science or mode of writing, but primarily to the object toward which the are directed, the matter at hand. It is therefore not a question of historiography, of methods employed by the academic discipline of History. It is an ontological question concerning the very being of history, and hence, of time.

For Example

Para-ontology. This is the methodological/epistemological basis of Giorgio Agamben's research, which weaves through fields as diverse as juridical theory, poetics, philosophy, and theology. More than that, it is the orientation of thought regarding itself, the thought of thought or the thought of the power of thought, thought to the second power, it is the meta-thought that thereby, paradoxically, seizes upon the being without thought, outside of thought and without relation to its being-in thought or being-thought. The recent trend in ontology of 'speculative realism' (see the excellent post by Nick of The Accursed Share, "On Contemporary Materialism", and his new collaborative blog devoted to the topic, Speculative Heresy) primarily concerns itself with this paradox - how can thought think that which has no relation to thought, that which cannot be thought, that which must remain outside of thought? I would like to hear how Agamben's para-ontological approach to the problem relates to that of the speculative realism.

To expose this approach, we need only refer to Agamben's definition of paradigm, or example. The lecture "What is a Paradigm?" is available in video on Youtube here, and transcribed by the EGS here. Anyone familiar with Agamben's lauded work on the juridical and politico-theological concept of exception will recognize it as an 'inclusive exclusion', an operation by which the outside of law, that which is excluded from the domain of law - bare life, without political qualification - is nonetheless included in law through this very operation, in which the sovereign declares the very point where the law is suspended, that is, the state of exception. The outside of law becomes part of the law's functioning, the source of its consistency, as it is able to rule over not only its own domain, but also over the operation defining its domain against its outside.

The example or paradigm functions in an opposite way, and hence has the contrary function of 'deactivating' law within itself. "If we define the exception as an inclusive exclusion, in which something is included by means of its exclusion, the example functions as an exclusive inclusion. Something is excluded by means of its very inclusion." What does this mean? An example is a part of a set, one particular member of a general category, or instance of a universal concept. And yet, as an example, it does not obey the law defining its set, it does not function according to this law, but rather, it indicates or exemplifies this law, and in doing so, stands outside of the normal set.

To demonstrate this, Agamben cites the example of performativity. A performative statement, such as "I swear...", is one which does not refer to given state of affairs, but creates a new state of affairs in its very utterance. This statement creates a 'promise' that did not exist before its declaration. Yet it is evident that in this case, as an example, the utterance "I swear..." did not actually perform this function, Agamben did not actually swear or promise anything. Hence, the rule does not apply to this statement as an example, as it would to a normal case of swearing. Yet the utterance must still be included in the category of performatives, it is still a member of the set. As an example, it stands beside the set, steps outside of it, but must still be a member in order to properly function as an example. Quoting Agamben:

What an example shows is its belonging to a class, but for this very reason, it steps out of this class at the very moment in which it exhibits and defines it. Showing its belonging to a class, it steps out from it and is excluded. So, does the rule apply to the example? It’s very difficult to answer. The answer is not easy since the rule applies to the example only as a normal case and not as an example. The example is excluded from the normal case not because it does not belong to it but because it exhibits its own belonging to it.

What the example shows is not the rule or normal function of the rule, but rather, its shows, exhibits, exposes, its very membership in its class, its submission or subjection to a rule, the force of the rule's application without actually applying the rule. It is the force-of-law subtracted from the actual law. And in so exposing this force, it deactivates the law, subtracting itself from law. It would be a fruitful course of research to compare the split between law and its force in the two modalities of exception and example, and how this bears on the debate between Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin, a debate that so often surfaces in Agamben's work.

In any case, as Agamben so often reminds us, his research is not simply confined to the given field of juridical theory, political philosophy, theology, or whatever, but is genuinely ontological, using these cases to expose the being of law, the being of politics, and so on. So let us return to the question of thought and its relation to being, to a being outside of thought. This is the very problem that Kant insists upon as the new ground of a critical philosophy. For a para-ontology, which is concerned with the exemplary being, the being that, in-itself, steps outside itself and deactivates itself, the problem is reoriented. It is no longer, 'how do we think a being which cannot be thought, which is not in-thought, but in-itself?' Rather, the thought of this being must become the example of this being, it must become the stepping-outside-itself of being in-itself. Thought must become no more than the outside of thought, and that most intimate outside, that alterity of a being that, in-itself, is no longer its own, deactivating itself. Thought of a being-outside-of-thought, thought as being-outside-of..., is that of a being in-and-not-itself, exclusively included in itself, that most intimate outside.

(Notes for research: Derrida's intimate Other, Lacan's ex-timacy, spectulative realism, Deleuze and Guattari's 'thinking the unthought' in What is Philosophy?...)

Diminishing Returns

Reduction is a familiar problem in contemporary analytic philosophy, which often concerns itself with the reducibility or irreducibility of mind, thought, consciousness, among other things, to matter, and specifically the material processes of the brain. The philosophical heritage of the concept is in fact quite old, and extends beyond the problems of 'mind', finding its origin in the most fundamental metaphysical concern. We know that at least since Aristotle, the ultimate form of ontological question, "What is?", is subjected to a formula in which Being is already thematized in terms of being-in. We can only approach the question, "What is?", in terms of what is in-itself, or otherwise, what is in-another. The concern is then that of reduction, of reducing everything that is to what it is in, to what holds, contains, or admits it. This concern persists at least until Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel.

The term reduction derives from the Latin dcere, to bring or lead, modified by the prefix re-, thereby, to lead back, bring back, return. Returning has the double sense of returning to a place one has been, and returning something to its proper owner or place. Reduction, then, has the sense of leading beings back, bringing them back, returning them to their proper place, source, origin. It gives the sense in which the reducible has gone astray, is out of place, dislocated, and definitively cut off from its ground or propriety. Yet we must also say that in returning the being to its proper place, we must reveal its being-in, in-another, and hence return it to what it is in, lead it back to where it is. This amounts to showing a being as displaced in its very place.

We should not be so quick to assume that the reducibility of beings in-another is inverted in the irreducibility of being in-itself, as if this being cannot be lead back but is eternally in place, its proper place, that is, itself as identical with its place. There is nothing evident about this, and it is just as easy to say that being in-itself is reducible, as the function of being-in has been shown to be the returning of being to where it is, of revealing the dislocation of being in that it is otherwise than its place. Being in-itself is reducible, just as beings in-another are reducible to that other. This means that Being in-itself is reducible to itself, in that it can be returned to itself, or that it returns itself. Here we can only note the problems of ipseity that are beginning to propigate and restlessly cry out. I will begin to address these problems in a following post on historicity.

We can at least say that, insofar as the being returns to itself, finds itself in-itself, that it is not itself, it is itself what is in-itself but not-itself. Having returned to itself, it is therefore not necessary for itself, but can be lead back to itself, finding itself as having been without - outside of itself and itself without the being that is in-itself. The Being in-itself is at once in-and-not-itself: it is not in-another, but it is what is other in-itself.

Deduction proceeds from the universal concept to the particular case, showing the case to be contained analytically in the concept, the propriety of the particular with respect to the universal. It brings out the particular from the universal. de-dcere: to lead out, lead away from, bring down or carry down, to carry out. As with Moses, who carries the universal Law, the Decalogue, down to the people. Induction proceeds from the particular case, showing the concept to be justifiable and intelligible on behalf of the relations between cases, and hence, the propriety of the universal with respect to the particular. It leads to the universal from the particular. in-dcere: to lead toward, lead into, bring to or bring about.

Reduction proceeds, we can say, from the particular to the particular, as the returning the particular to its place qua particular, yet without reference to the specificity of the universal concept. This is the logic of the example that Aristotle demonstrates in the Analytica Prioria, as Agamben reads it. Yet Aristotle only hints at such a logic, in a brief exposition that last only a few lines. Elsewhere in his work, such a logic is assimilated to traditional deduction, in which the particular properly belongs to the universal. To quote Agamben, "Yet Aristotle’s treatment of the paradigm is in a way inadequate, though he had these beautiful ideas of the paradigm as going from the particular to the particular, he does not seem to develop this point and like Kant still sticks to the idea that the individuals concerned in the example belong to the same genus." If we refuse to subordinate this logic to the former two logics, as is typical in the philosophical tradition, and instead give it priority, it will mean drastic consequences for ontology, as well as politics, as the recurrent theme of 'leading' should forshadow.

Like Father Like Son

Some notes following Giorgio Agamben's lecture, "The Power and the Glory".

Economy properly becomes a concern when the activity or actuality of a praxis, which is to say, an effectivity or efficacy, cannot be reconciled with the being to which it 'belongs'. We should be precise: it is not only the fact of an actuality or action, a 'having happened', an effect, but the facticity of efficacy or the ability to be effective, the power or potential to produce a desired or intended effect. Perhaps it is too much to say 'intended'. It is the facticity of efficacy in the effect, of the potential manifest in an actual effect to produce itself as the right one, the desired one, the appropriate, if not intended effect. In other words, we can say that the propriety of an effect does not belong to being to which it is ascribed, to its 'proper' cause, the cause of which it is a property. It rather holds within itself its own propriety as an immanent power.

Economy is already a form of leading or guiding, which is to say, arche. This is also beginning, in the sense of that which comes before us and goes before us, that which must precede us, in time as well as in space, standing before us to lead the way. We only ever follow after a beginning, we do not begin of ourselves but are preceded. Economy is the form in which the arche of the oikos - the pater - relates to his action of leading, in which the leader relates to the action of leading, through the son and the family, and then the possessions and property of the family, as that which follows from him. In the pater the abstract order of leading must relate to the specific instances of following, or rather, the being which leads must relate to its action of leading as itself manifest. The father intends not to keep the son within his propriety and rule, but to lead him to his own propriety, to the self-directed appropriation that he manifests.

In this sense, the son, as the enacting of leading in following, or of being in an actuality, cannot simply be reduced to the ground of the father's arche. The son must become groundless, self-sufficient, independent of his own beginning, he must exceed the boundary of paternal order and go beyond... The leadership of the father is ultimately aimed at leading the son beyond being led, beyond the being that leads, that stands before and is 'in beginning', 'in the beginning', 'at first'.

This of course is intended to reproduce the structure again, with the son assuming the position of the father, the self-grounded effect returning to the place of a cause, the act assuming the being to which it once belonged. This is not our problem. Our problem is within the structure of economy, not in the concrete reproduction of this structure. The problem is thus: the father, as the beginning from which the son comes, which comes before the son, must lead the son to become without beginning, an-arche, groundless and improper, or again, self-grounded and appropriate to itself and not another, beginning only from itself. Yet the father, not within the chain of concrete reproductions, but the very structural function of the father as beginning, leader, archon, must itself be without beginning, not lead by another or preceded by another, and thereby following after.

In the concrete occasion we may say that either the father has become without leadership after maturing, through being his father's son, or - and this is not necessarily incompatible with the former point - by creating the illusion, in the prerogative of the son, that there is nothing before him, that he is lead by no one, by blocking the way and all sight of what lies ahead. This would be a symbolic fiction, an effective illusion, with a certain pedagogical function. Yet this is not what concerns us at the moment. When such concern does arise, however, it would do us well to revisit, in this light, Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of familialism in Anti-Oedipus, which has for too long been cast as a polemical condemnation of psychoanalytic theory, rather than the precise engagement of a structure within that theory that it really is.

What is it, then, to say that the father qua beginning, archon, is without beginning, an-arche? In the structural sense, it amounts to saying that the beginning is without beginning, or without itself, outside of itself and lacking itself, missing itself in itself. This is not the same as saying that the beginning 'comes from nowhere', ex nihilo, but rather that the beginning does not have itself, does not possess itself, is improper to itself. To return to the terms with which we began, the principle of propriety by which an effect, as manifest, has the power to produce itself as proper or desired, that is to say, in its actuality to become what it was to-be; this principle is also present in the beginning, the being or ground of an effect, or it is reflected into this being once economy structures its relation to its actuality. Yet it is present there in an inverted form by which the beginning becomes improper to itself, in actuality becoming what it was not to-be.

This raises a question as relevant from the structural perspective as it is from the concrete perspective: what was before the father, before the beginning, if this beginning cannot have itself as itself, as its own beginning? What was the beginning before it became the beginning? Who was the father before he became a father, and what has now become of him, if he has apparently vanished?

Economy: Inside-Out

Some notes on a paradox, a paradox central to both the modern economic/administrative paradigm we know as bio-politics, and to its relation with the juridical paradigm of sovereignty. First of all, we find power originally abiding in a nexus between two forms of 'rule' or 'lead', two forms or loci. Even 'rule' may yet admit too much. To lead - it is to guide, direct, to show the way by already going along that way before, both chronologically before an other, and standing before another, already in the way. In the way, standing in the way, at once blocking the way and opening it, preventing another from going farther, and allowing that other to go forth after, in following. The archon is not merely setting an example, but constituting what can be exemplified at all.

The two forms of lead, or rather, two loci of leading, are then to lead the way, opening the way, and to stand in the way, blocking the way, or making any other in the way already following, deficient and imitating. These are, respectively, the oikos and the polis. The leader of the oikos will lead forth where the leader of the polis will stand in the way. Or better - the former will block in order to lead forth, the latter, lead forth in order to block. The former, prevent in order to allow, the latter, allow in order to prevent. This, as should be evident, is a drastically sketchy and oversimplified account, but it will do for the moment, as a prop.

Before venturing further, we should dwell for a moment on the sense of 'paradox'. For a term so indispensable for philosophical reflection, it is itself left, all to often, unreflected and taken for granted, dogmatically or doxically held as self-evident. Para-doxa is literally that which is beside, alongside, or bordering on doxa, which is opinion, common sense, shared assumptions or assertions held dogmatically in self-evidence. It lies on the same level, the same ground as the doxa, but cannot be assimilated to it and stands outside it as much as beside. Or we can say that it is not something outside, but the evidence of an outside that is nonetheless coextensive with the inside, it is the intrinsic, necessary possibility of an externality or exclusion that is immanently included in the constitution of the category.

Paradox is what the doxa must admit, must allow for, but which cannot be contained or admissible, it is the violation whose possibility the prohibition necessitates and sustains, the excess of allowance that is already given in the structure of allowance, as the spectre inhabiting the allowed and allowable. Outside, but along-with; beside, or bordering on, but in doing so constituting the border, the definition or limit that is always necessary for the bordered-upon to be at all. In this way, paradox is of the same being, it shares its being with the being of doxa, they are univocally aligned alongside one another and on the same ground, of the same 'kind' or nature. And yet it is that which cannot be held as doxa, cannot be the opinion of anyone, unassimilable to that which it is, is of and is by.

Paradox runs counter to doxa, but it is not one doxa against another - it is counter to doxa itself, turning it against itself, forcing it to admit its own outside or inability to close upon itself: disclosure. Paradox holds the characteristics of doxa, in its common assertability and iterability, and yet the self-evidence of a paradox is that of the impotence of doxa, disclosed as such, in that cannot rely only on itself, but folds in on itself at the point where it must admit its reliance on an opinion that cannot be held by anyone. Not because this opinion is too radical or intense, not because it is too inconsistent with the majority of opinions, but rather, because it is already inconsistent with itself, it is the inconsistency of opinion with itself exemplified.

What we have with the oikos is an inside that is sufficient with itself closed upon itself in maintaining and dealing with the subsistence and reproduction of what already is there, inside the borders of the household. The border, as pointing to an outside, is not primary, and just because economy necessitates commerce and intercourse with an outside does not entail this is primary. The primacy rests with what is thereby bordered, and its perseverance in regards to itself, not in relation to its outside. By contrast, the polis begins with having taken-leave of the household, having passed a border and gone outside of... We already enter the polis as a point of arrival and destination, which entails a primacy not of the location, destination no less than point of departure, but of the crossing of a border, and the relation of a location to its outside, to the dislocation assumed by location. This is evident not only in that we must begin by entering the polis and crossing the border of the oikos, but also in the political relation to its own outside, to other cities and peoples and the threats they may pose.

And yet, if the oikos only establishes limits and borders as a means of relating the located to itself, to its perseverance regarding itself, as in the way and continuing in the way (of life), does this mean that it has within itself its every resource, immanently containing its entire being, including the outside in the instrumentalization of recognizing it as such? Or does not the possibility of an outside already inhabit the immanence of the oikos? We can say, in a similar vein as Levinas, that economy already entails a primary taking-leave-of that undermines the consistency of the location, or being-located. In this sense, the economic being - life itself in relation to itself, persevering in relation to itself - is already caught in a relation to its outside, to a political task of living a Good Life that exceeds life as its own standard, that cleaves life against itself and with itself, into life and the good life.

The problem here is, which is originary and pure? Life in itself, bare and unconditioned, or the Good Life as qualified and adorned, but in its 'proper' fashion? There are too many consequences of this problem to even begin here. But we should note the fashion in which this paradox presents itself: the economic being cannot be cleanly distinguished from the political being, having already been contaminated by a taking-leave and relation to the outside. Is there a life that can be its own and only measure, standard, and principle? Or does the political cleavage originally inhabit life? At least we can say that economic life cannot simply and cleanly instrumentalize its outside to its own ends, to life in its way, persevering in its way, as this outside is already and necessarily admitted as a possibility, if not an actual end. The point is that life, in its own way or on the way to another, is already leaving behind what life was to-be before it became what it is - alive, living, the living.

The Heir To Be(ing)

Inheriting -- being. The inheriting being, the heir whom receives or responds to the call of a gift, also is the inheritor of this being: the inheritance is being. To give - a giving that sends forth and relinquishes, cedes and abandons, but also abandons over to..., to an abandon that is also no more than the named, the called upon and responsible and surely unwitting heir. To give, to bequeath, in this way is to give everything, to leave everything, to let go of everything one is, to one's own being. Proper being: and this is even not enough, because a cleavage holds being in relief, before itself unfamiliar to its own reflection (and it is not accidental to read that, rather than a reflection or mirror-image that is not recognized by its original, the model or source, the represented and real reflected visibility; it is rather a reflection, a mirror-image or representation that does not recognize what is represented, that mistakes its own origin for a poor semblance or even a stranger, and altogether-other and unrelated opacity, an unrecognizable stain. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.)

Held in relief, being before itself - in representation. It cannot be said, if it is the representative representing the represented, or if the representation itself constitutes a presence as represented, thereby representing that which cannot be represented as such. In representation, the being as immediate presence, accessible and sensible, given and accepted, givable and acceptable - is this even proper? Is this not already given up, acceded, sent away and dissented over? Acceded over to a sovereign arbitration - to the indifferent and impartial rendering of a decision, which is also an arbitrary decision, and also a rendering arbitrary of that which is decided upon - in that the arbitrator is impartial, that is, uninvolved, indifferent, and without the capacity to decide. The sovereign decision, as inside and outside of law at once, must be the ignorance of the law regarding that which it rules upon, that is, an indifference to a real content, an undecidability in reference to a real situation. The sovereign is the life of a moment at which the criteria and capacity for decision become totally abstracted from their content, the matter of decision, rendering a decision on that which cannot be decided upon, while also rendering the undecidable as such - opaque to the judging eye. Law can only come into its own in disowning that which it can no longer speak to, or find in itself: that which, in itself, is not itself, is manifest in a becoming-otherwise of what (it) is, leaving it in the dust, abandoned by its own identity. If the law is purely an effect of concrete social relation, and not a being unto itself, a real force in the world but only an alienated force left over, a remainder or unincorporable by-product of being-in-the-world, a 'reification' as they say...it moreover and nonetheless reduces and leaves the original immediate force to a by-product of its own by-product, an instrument of its own task (man as the reproductive organ of machines; the puppeteer as manipulated by its own puppet;...).

The immediacy of presence to the being-present, of the self to itself, of the inheritance to the heir or the given to the subject: this is already suspect when its representation claims to posit it in presupposing it, or when the law ruling upon it and over it claims to rule it in, to order it to be so, to be the case... When the being becomes identical to its being-thus, this way, its being-given in this way, its being present to this account or inherited by this heir. A this-ness, such-ness, an haecceity, takes the place of the what-ness of the thing-in-question, the thing called upon, made responsible (before the law); it takes the place of, and is the place of the replaced, the mere structural or symbolic place thereby positing itself as holding itself, of holding itself in relief in holding forth the thing into space and spacing, into an allotting and allowing for, a sharing of the thing and of space with and for the thing. In other words - the thing is relieved of itself in other words, words that do not belong to the thing but that it nevertheless shares, imparts, gives up, and that give up the thing, both giving it over and giving up upon it, handing it over in cowardly dissociation and washing ones hands of it. In other words - the thing is given in words and gives words that are not its own, but that rather are only given when the thing is given up and disowned.

Proper being: does this expropriation and impropriety characteristic of presence as represented, as the actor is characterized by a performance (which is also the performance of a character, the acting and giving in acting of a character that causes - in the sense of 'giving a cause to' and being the cause to which one is devoted - the actor, that which acts and enacts) - does this leave a certain potential propriety to the heir, to the executor of the will and character of the actor, to the 'manner' of its being? Or is it already the case - and we have already seen it was the case - that the the word taken for the thing, that our 'taking its word for it', our counting on and investing in the word of the thing; the word taken to be so, to be the case - that the word already was the case, in that the thing is in other words, that is, given in words that are not properly its own, as if there are words that are its own, that could be its own and to which it owns up and is owned over? The principle is that the thing already belongs to words that will not accept it, that the heir does not cannot recognize what it inherits, and also that any heir cannot properly be such, as the gift is given by one (the departed) not present to give to a recipient. And yet this also can (and will, but let's not get ahead of ourselves) mean that the one who gives, in giving, has given over and given up on his own being, let go of being, and thereby has constituted the recipient as to-be, but never present there for it, that is, for being.

The inheriting being - the heir - inherits itself, its being, its being as such, as conditioned by what it receives and accepts; and - and this does not amount to the same thing - the heir is its inheritance, it is the very way of accepting its being, or the way of being its way-of-being, its being its own being-such. And its own: this is proper to it, and yet the property is not the received being as it is immediately received, nor is it the being as accepted and given by the place given to it, amounting to no more than its valence and potency in being there, in its place, that is, in the place of that which is given and disclosed, or placed or emplaced. It is not the thing owned, nor is it the ownership of thing as the proper form of a thing cleaved to its content and cleaving its content - we can abbreviate: the form as cleavage, as cleavage of the thing from itself and to itself.

The proper inheritance is the disappearance, and at once also the persistence, the perseverance of, the progenitor or forebear, which is not to say father - it is rather the father as already dead to himself, in that, to become father, he must already be an ancestor, and thus not yet a father, but a fore-father, an antecedent and thus completely dependent upon its own offspring. Proletariat: those whose only wealth is their offspring, whose only property is their own expropriation into an eternally past precedence or antecedence. If the commodity-form is a ghost (and es spuk is not only a haunting or spooking, but we should say, or hear Derrida say: a ghosting or apparitioning, an action of the ghost that is the only existence of the ghost, and yet this act which posits its own actor is not only a fallacy of grammar, but also a temporal backflip, positing that which it produces as having always been there, invisible or departed, and waiting to reappear, to return. The ghost always comes in returning, it is a revenant, and its is always a coming-back, not of a once living, now dead being, but of itself, its own indefinite inhabitance, haunting, or possession), it is not merely a false and misleading distortion of the living truth, a disturbance of the normal and proper running of things: the ghost is not merely the impropriety of the representative form of exchange-value, its inappropriateness to the immediate density of use-value; no more than it is the impropriety of a purely-posited use-value, which has no material density of its own, but is merely the presupposition of a subjective utility function which already represents the world to the subject, in a quantitative weighing that precedes market value, but which is nonetheless the evidence of an exchangeability and replaceablity. No. The ghost is the very form of relation of (exchange)-value to itself as use-value, which is to say, the form of representability as the proper being of given, or, we should say, the exchanged.

This amounts to the paradoxical affirmation that the very expropriation of the immediate being of the thing is its proper being - not that the word which expropriates the thing is its proper being, but that the thing is only its expropriation. Not a communication, representation, or signification of the thing, but its communicability, giveability. It is bequeathed, it is given up, abandoned, and thereby given over to an offspring, to abandonment as its offspring, to an offspring that comes to-be with it, with which it comes to-be. Rather than 'inheriting being' or 'the inheritance is being', we should say that the inheritance is to-be, it is to-be, in order to be, it is in order to be not being, it is being in order to be not being. Or rather, we can say that Marxism calls for more than a substantiated and 'justified' messianism of the revolutionary proletariat, at once redeemer and redeemed, on the one (Eastern) hand, and a dry, desert-like messianism without content, of an altogether other and unforeseeable redemption to-come that will shirk any figure of a redeemer, and of an already lost and unidentifiable ghost, the ghost of all fallen figure that cannot be recognized. The redeemer, the messiah, is thereby not an inappropriate ontologization of an insistent and unimpeachable spectrality, nor are those in need of redemption reduced to the expropriated victims of a founding crime, to law as the founding crime that must exclude or ex-cept that which is nothing to it. Rather, the two figures are drawn together and cleave in the form of the proletariat - not a positive sociontological category, but a form of social (though non-intersubjective) being, a manner or structure of being-there - which is anyone who is exploited, in the sense of giving over to market exchange that to which, as given or bequeathed, they are already dead, departed and no longer, lost and irreparable. It is the form in which one is oneself only in having already surrendered oneself, abandoned oneself, bequeathed oneself - in which one is only worth one's offspring, and is nothing in himself, but only the condition of an offspring which must already be without its own conditioning generation.