Paper Abstract - Strange Times: Aliens, Ghosts, and the Non-Event

This is my paper proposal for the CFP here, for the conference Affirmation, Negation, and the Politics of Late-Capitalism. Any questions or comments on the project are welcome.

"Strange Times: Aliens, Ghosts, and the Non-Event".

This paper will develop the concept xenoeconomics by way of a theory of temporality. This will proceed in three parts.

First, I will analyze Jacques Derrida's discussion of spectrality in Specters of Marx as a way of conceiving the time of speculative finance capital, which determines value as an infinitely postponed realization or redemption of debt. I will demonstrate the inadequacy of his formulation of the spectral dimension, and the necessity of supplementing it with another mode of spectrality. I will conjure this 'other specter' by way of challenging Derrida's readings of both Marx and Benjamin, and by drawing from their work, as well as that of Quentin Meillassoux.

Second, I will turn a closer eye on Meillassoux, and distinguish this other mode of spectrality, which I will also call ancestrality, from his version of the latter. I will bring up several points in After Finitude, concerning the temporal modality of the ancestral, that will lead me to complicate, if not disagree with, his arguments. I will then attempt to resolve this complication by reference to Giorgio Agamben's concept of operational time in The Time That Remains. This will allow me to present a consistent formulation of ancestral time, as distinct from correlational time, and the political consequences of this distinction.

Finally, I will bring the preceding analyses to bear on certain questions Adrian Johnston has raised concerning Alain Badiou's political ontology, and what he calls a ‘pre-evental discipline of time’. Xenoeconomic temporality, as I formulate it, can help us treat this problem, and the concrete issues of political praxis it entails. I will conclude by proposing a concept of the operational time of intervention, which will form the groundwork for a future critical engagement with Badiou, and for a political praxis indebted to his theory of the event, as well as to speculative realist philosophy.

Notes for the Debate: Alien vs. Specter

I want to briefly sketch out how hauntology, or the particular revision of it I have been working on, not only relates to but is ultimately indispensable for a xenoeconomic approach to capitalism. I am still finishing a more detailed post working this question out in relation to finance capital and speculation, but I feel the need to provide an abstract of my position, so as to build upon the debate that naughtthought has so pertinently outlined.

My point of departure was Rough Theory's critique of Derrida's Specters of Marx, the text in which hauntology was first developed. Derrida's approach here in large part continues his formalization of Benjamin's Marxism, resulting in a 'Messianic without messianism', a messianic promise emptied of every content, every substantial identification of the messiah or messianic time. Yet, following Agamben, I found this hollowed out version of Benjamin thoroughly unsatisfying, and this was only emphasized when Derrida applies the same operation to Marx, claiming that any substantial ontologization of the spectral - be it the proletariat, communism, the commodity-form, et cetera - is self-defeating, leading us to lose the truly subversive core of Marxism, which is the revelation of the spectral inherence/inheritance in and of existence. Derrida claims that any such ontologization is in the service of a conjuration seeking to rid us of the spectral, to lead us back to its real source in material existence.

My claim is that this completely misses the point of both Benjamin and Marx. Whereas Derrida seems completely preoccupied by apparitions, returns, revenants, hauntings, and so on, I claim that what Marx accomplishes with the notion of proletariat is a break with this logic. My thesis develops this in greater detail, but the basic point is that we can find in Marx hints that proletariat names not an existing social group amongst others, but moreover, a spectral inherence in politico-economic reality. The difference between this spectrality and those that Derrida analyzes, however, is that the proletariat is characterized not by incessant apparitions, hauntings, and so on, but rather, by an incessant failure to appear, an inapparation and absence. Unlike other ghosts, the proletariat haunts us by not appearing, not returning, despite our expectations and longing.

It is this spectral absence that is attested to in the whole symptomatology of failed revolutionary attempts and experiments. My point is that the proletariat is the name (or, to borrow a locution from Brassier or Laurelle, the non-conceptual symbol) of that which must remain inexistent, absolutely absented from the capitalist world. Inexistence here does not simply mean not existing as opposed to existing, but rather, something that neither exists nor doesn't exist for capitalism, something that cannot even enter the capitalist frame, something irreparably foreclosed to capital. Because existence or non-existence depends upon determination within a world, and the inexistent can never enter into such a world but is always rejected, left out and dispossessed, inexistence then characterizes something utterly indifferent to existence or non-existence, to any determination of existence.

The proletariat is then a peculiar kind of spectrality, that of the ancestral. (I started using this locution before reading Meillassoux, as a reference to the oppressed class of history in Benjamin's theses. Now that I have read After Finitude, my version of this concept has significantly deepened, and I have been working on a critical assessment of his work on the basis of what I'm doing here. So this is the first intersection between hauntology and specualtive realism.) The ancestral as I define it is that which is absolutely anterior to a world, that which must have been left out of a world so that it could have been, something that absolutely must not be (or moreover, that absolutely must not not-be either). The proletariat, as the revolutionary subject position generated by the very antagonistic structure of capitalism, must have been necessarily left out, a-voided, neutralized from the outset. So the question of contemporary Marxism is not, why did the revolution fail to happen, why did the proletariat act against its class interests?; the starting point must be the assertion that the proletariat does not exist.

In other words, the proletariat as ancestral is that which is necessarily foreclosed to capital; capital and its world only exist insofar as the proletariat is absolutely absented. [Here, the concept of foreclosure points toward another interesting intersection, between Laurelle's non-philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The crucial question is that of Lacan's later usage of this term, as it differs from his early work on psychosis, and primarily of the primordial foreclosure constitutive of the symbolic. As I understand it, if psychosis results when something foreclosed from the symbolic returns in the real, the ancestral involves something foreclosed from the real returning in the symbolic, as a non-conceptual symbol or non-signifier.] This brings up the matter of xenoeconomics: my point is that the non-correlational, non-decisional essence of capital is none other than the proletariat qua foreclosed ancestrality.

Capital only becomes capital, that is, it only admits the power to create value, once labor-power has been completely absented and dispossessed, that is, once it 'never existed in the first place', at least not as the original creative capacity to endow things with value. Labor-power is, for capitalism, only capable of investing objects with value insofar as capital first invests labor with this power, rather than the converse. By identifying the speculative Real of capital with the foreclosed proletariat, we are not secretly re-humanizing capital, because the proletariat is the complete loss of man, as Marx famously says. (This is not coincidently the title of my thesis.)

The political problem that arises from this is not one of reclaiming the power to create value from capital, or of becoming or reanimating or avenging the proletariat. It is a matter of redemption, which involves naming the proletariat as irreparably foreclosed to us. It is a matter of enacting the incompletion of capital by forcing into its texture the non-signifier of its foreclosed Real. Or, to be more concrete, it means organizing and reorganizing on the basis of a new social bond, or a shift within the existing social bond. If the capitalist social bond involves the already-accomplished foreclosure of the proletariat, then the bond I am describing simply means taking responsibility for this foreclosure, naming it rather than allowing it to go unspoken. The consequences, and concrete implementation, of this shift are precisely what I am trying to develop by way of a systematic explication of schizoanalytic practice.

So this is where I stand: xenoeconomics cannot do without a hauntology of the ancestral, a rigorous explication of the foreclosed Real of capital, which is to say, a forcing into existence of the inexistence of the proletariat. Perhaps this can lend a new ring to Marx's great task of the Communist party: to organize the proletariat as a class...To make a class of the non-class, so as to undermine class itself.

Schizoanalysis 1: Infancy, Ancestrality, and the Non-Signifier

A child is born into language, and is from the outset a speech-being, a speaking thing. The child is not without language, and does not have to be led to language, taught to acquire language, nor does it have already the innate capacity for language that has only to be activated. The child is already a speaking thing, not by virtue of speaking or being able to speak, but by already being claimed by language and in language, by belonging in language, having a place there for it. The name, but also the very noun - a child, a life - impregnates language with the child, and language will carry it to term, developing it in all of its unique predicability.

The paradox is that the child already belongs to and in language, it is already spoken of and awaited as the absent partner of a conversation. The child does not acquire language, we do not acquire language: language has already acquired us from birth. The trauma of this claim of language on the child is that there is no opportunity, no possibility of the pure incarnation of biological life, an unqualified, bare life; life is qualified from its outset, and biological life is overdetermined from the instant of conception by symbolic life, as its mere occasional cause and support.

Ancestrality, as the dimension of an existence unqualified by givenness in language, unfettered by the trappings of the symbolic, is nonetheless held hostage by its pre-appropriation in language. Yet we can say that the ancestrality of a life is, if not pre-given and auto-donated, certainly taken, taken over by and taken over to language, it is stolen, mis-taken and held inappropriately. It inheres in language as the inappropriate, the inappropriateness of language. Not the inadequateness of a representation to its object, but the fact that language now possesses the ancestral as its property, and yet it is not properly of language, it is wrongly taken by language or taken to be of language.

As a dimension not attributable to a relation to language, but that dimension existing absolutely independently of such relation, radically indifferent to such a relation, foreclosed to language, radically left out of and even inexistent for language, it would seem contradictory to call it a 'property' of language, even if this is an illegitimate propriety, a theft. Yet this means precisely that the foreclosure of the ancestral necessary for langauge nonetheless inheres negatively in language, as a hole in the very fabric of the symbolic (differential relations between signifiers). The ancestral inheres in language, but this inherence must be enacted through the circulation of some non-signifier, a symbol deprived of any possible signfying relation (direction toward a concept - signified - even if it be indeterminate or displaced), purely embodying the hole in this fabric, not only 'standing in for it' but enacting it. The hole is not something that cannot be signified by any signifier, but rather, a signifier that cannot signify anything, nor even appear to signify anything. The non-signifier simply explicates this hole of the foreclosure that is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition of the symbolic, radically psychoticizing the symbolic itself. It is the signifier of the fact that it is not a signifier, a kind of symbolic ouroboros.

The ancestral dimension of life, when seized upon by the symbolic, interpellated by it, decided upon by it, devolves into creaturely life (Santner), that life held in exception in law, subject to the force-of-law but unqualified by law. This is, we might say, the ancestral as such, distinct from the ancestral itself (Brassier, Laurelle). What law/language cannot speak to is the indistinction itself, it cannot think the creature/ancestor without its distinction and separation from the legible/legitimate. In other words, the ancestral itself is posited as unthinkable, only thinkable as such, that is, as distinct from the symbolic. It cannot think the radical expropiation undergone here: the ancestral no longer has a proper owner, being stolen and now owned inappropriately by language. We directly posit this necessary expropriation, this foreclosure of propriety to language. This is not to say that there is a proper being of the ancestral apart from language - this is the very decisional operation of language. Rather, what we are saying is that propriety itself is dependent upon determination by langauge, and at the same time the ancestral is necessarily determined in langauage by expropriation, determined as inappropriate.

This expropriation or foreclosure to language of the ancestral is enacted in language through the circulation of non-signifiers, or a-signifying signs that are not signifiers of a loss, even of something that exists qua signified/signifiable only as lost (the signified lost-object is the ancestral itself, the signifier of loss the ancestral as such); rather, the (non)-signifier is directly the loss itself, it embodies the foreclosure of the ancestral, and the hole this leaves in the symbolic, or rather, it enacts them, it brings them into (linguistic) being. This enacting of foreclosure, refusing to forget/overlook it and retaining it as unforgotten, repeating the founding decision of a linguistic social bond and recovering it from abandonment in an eternal past - this is the elementary task of schizoanalysis as an applied non-philosophy. Schizoanalysis accomplishes this task through the proliferation and circulation of non-signifiers or a-signifying signs.

We should see how, in the infant's appropriation by language, we nonetheless can identify a dimension of ancestral time, the time of an absolute anteriority, a time foreclosed to thought. We can take here as our model what Giorgio Agamben calls, in The Time that Remains, operational time. If we only ever experience time as schematized and organized into a past, present, and future, operational time is precisely the time it takes to apply this schema to intuition and hence experience time as such. Because this time is necessarily anterior to schematic time, it is foreclosed to schematic time, but nonetheless inheres negatively within it. The infant, who exists only as already symbolized, nonetheless is submitted to the operation of symbolization, and hence embodies a residual anteriority to the symbolic schematism. This is not pre-symbolic any more than operational time is pre-temporal. It is rather the symbolic itself as separated-without-separation from the symbolic schematized as such, which is to say, in thought.

Here we have, directly embodied in the infant (though negatively embodied), the ancestral dimension of language - the hieroglyph. This is a sign that acts a cipher, a code, but which obscures not some hidden content, but the very fact that nothing is hidden. It is a cipher of a cipher, a sign that disguises the very fact that it is a sign, or disguises the fact that it says anything (or nothing). This is a ruin of language, an artifact, a language without any connection to its ability to communicate. This hieroglyphic character is the original character of infant-speech, which only secondarily gives way to communication. Rather, the infant says language itself, as a pure impartibility without object. It is this character that we seek to recover through the use of the non-signifier, or the transfiguration of signifiers into non-signifiers.

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.