interview with Domenico Losurdo on liberalism and marxism

Ross Wolfe: How would you characterize the antinomy of emancipation and de-emancipation in liberal ideology? From where did this logic ultimately stem?

Domenico Losurdo: I believe that this dialectic between emancipation and de-emancipation is the key to understanding the history of liberalism. The class struggle Marx speaks about is a confrontation between these forces. What I stress is that sometimes emancipation and de-emancipation are strongly connected to one another. Of course we can see in the history of liberalism an aspect of emancipation. For instance, Locke polemicizes against the absolute power of the king. He asserts the necessity of defending the liberty of citizens against the absolute power of the monarchy. But on the other hand, Locke is a great champion of slavery. And in this case, he acts as a representative of de-emancipation. In my book, I develop a comparison between Locke on the one hand and Bodin on the other. Bodin was a defender of the absolute monarchy, but was at the same time a critic of slavery and colonialism.

RW: The counter-example of Bodin is interesting. He appealed to the Church and the monarchy, the First and Second Estates, in his defense of the fundamental humanity of the slave against the “arbitrary power of life and death” that Locke asserted the property-owner, the slave-master, could exercise over the slave.

DL: Yes, in Locke we see the contrary. While criticizing the absolute monarchy, Locke is a representative of emancipation, but while celebrating or legitimizing slavery, Locke is of course a representative of de-emancipation. In leading the struggle against the control of the absolute monarchy, Locke affirmed the total power of property-owners over their property, including slaves. In this case we can see very well the entanglement between emancipation and de-emancipation. The property-owner became freer, but this greater freedom meant a worsening of the conditions of slavery in general.

from Platypus.

figure of abandonment – yet another dissertation outline

Introduction The Figure of the Refugee: Abandonment, Mobility and a Coming Politics 

The binding theme of this dissertation is the imagining of a politics beginning with the figure of the refugee, rather than the figure of the citizen, or the worker. Navigating through the past, present, and future, the chapters undertake several projects that are bound together in the figure of the refugee, a binding that will become clear in the ways the refugee actively un-binds all that we usually find stable in the political.

The figure of the refugee is a figure we should be troubled by, as both a figure that is indeed the effect of real-world processes of violence and emergency and a figure that is becoming evermore the de facto foundation of political membership today. However, what this dissertation argues is that this figure of the refugee has indeed been central to the political as it has been conceived and constructed, at least since early modernity and certainly by the era of state-formation inaugurated with the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648. The entire nation-state system is predicated upon an abandonment of particular bodies and subjectivities.

To some extent, the logic of abandonment articulated here is in direct contradiction to Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, which was and is a mode of power predicated upon the securing of territory and its population, and “making them live” and encouraging productivity. But a basic limitation constrains Foucault’s work: due to his use of a particular form of archive and his narrow Francophone focus, he rarely engaged with what we would call today globalization, or truly global phenomena, and certainly not with what we might call a global politics. Foucault inherits a legacy in Western political thought that limits the political to specific bounded spaces and populations. This is not to say that his philosophical and political insights should be rejected out of hand, but it is to say that the conditions of the political have changed drastically since the early 1980s. While I am sure that he witnessed early globalization, he did not really write about it, save his lecture course entitle The Birth of Biopolitics, which was really a course on economic liberalism, rather than ruminations on a global political space, per se. Instead, I argue that if we take the archive to mean not just the physical space of an archive in a library, but also contemporary practices of politics, we can develop a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the political, power relations, and philosophy.

My basic argument in this dissertation is that:

a) We must conceive of political space differently; rather than as a given territory coextensive with police or military control, it is instead various processes and moments of boundedness and unboundedness, or territorialization and deterritorialization, primarily conceived through a concept of non-linear territoriality. Non-linear territoriality lays bare the myth of sovereign political space, and instead privileges the ways sovereignty is always multiple, layered, and contested, as well as the fact of human mobility that often carries territoriality from one space to another without drawing a contiguity in between. Contemporary political theory must deal primarily with the impending death of the nation-state, the effacement of identity, and bare life, and it must do so while avoiding the traditional fantasy of territory.

b) Beginning with a different conception of political space, a global political space, inevitably leads to the undeniable conclusion that the vast majority of the world’s population at any given time is actually far from secure in their livelihoods, and are in fact living precarious lives under conditions of abandonment. There are numerous factors at play here, and abandonment is certainly not experienced homogeneously. (In a way, the abandonment that characterizes global political life is akin to Marx’s understanding of alienation as a social, political, and economic phenomenon.)

c) This characteristic abandonment is both a precondition for and a result of Western political theory and the constitutive exclusions that characterize its conception of the political, from the Greek polis to the nation-state. Given this ontological fact, we must redefine political theory beginning with a figure of abandonment, what I designate here ‘the figure of the refugee.’

The dissertation will take the following form:

Chapter 1 State-Formation, Colonialism, and Abandonment

This chapter grapples with the refugee as a liberal political technology of spatial correction. My hypothesis is that the concept of refugee first takes root in the immediate aftermath of the Treaties of Westphalia, precisely to solve the problem of how to deal with populations that become superfluous after the initiation of processes of nation building.

Somewhat differently than dominant definitions of liberalism – which locates liberalism as an 18^th and 19^th century phenomenon – I posit liberalism as coextensive with the nation-state and the colonial project, primarily because these are the immediate preconditions that make self-conscious liberalism possible. Hobbes, Locke, Montesquiue, Mill, and others in the liberal tradition are expressions of political thought only possible within colonialism and the nation-state. To risk a conceptual slippage at this point is acceptable, because it denies liberalism its self-valorizing narrative and locates it more precisely with the practices that served as the immediate conditions of possibility for notions of ‘the citizen,’ ‘the nation,’ ‘the people,’ and ‘limited government,’ among others, to emerge.

The first goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of the schism of humanity inaugurated by liberal practice and thought, that identifies particular bodies and subjectivities as worthy of political membership, other bodies as worthy of exclusion owing to their membership in other polities, and yet other bodies as completely unworthy of the consideration of political membership at all. This latter category included African slaves, and indigenous populations in the Americas, Australia, Africa, and Asia. The first order of business for this dissertation is to understand the concept of “refugee” in light of this hierarchization of humanity.

The second goal of this chapter is to locate the concept of abandonment as crystalized in particular relationships at this time. Unlike much of the field of cultural studies, or even much political theory, I resist the notion of community or state-formation as involving a constitutive othering, a process Agamben details in Homo Sacer as “the ban.” What I would add to this conversation is that instead of an “inclusive exclusion,” or the inclusion in the political by the legal, formal exclusion of a body from the polity, what we have is the effective abandonment of those not even deemed worthy of the ban in the first instance. This is not simply the splitting of hairs with Agamben on historical fact; it is instead a recognition that the ban is a relation already predicated upon a division of humanity that allows for the sovereign, and law, to exist in the first place.

Chapter 2 (Dis)locating Control: Transmigration and Precarity

This chapter is located entirely in the present, and is an attempt to understand the relationships among territory and borders, state practices of migration control (including refugee movements), and precarious life. While the previous chapter took a historical view on the concept of abandonment, this chapter seeks to understand the way states continue to produce abandoned lives through a set of processes that, in sum, are in fact a system of global apartheid that continuously renders a significant portion, if not a majority, of the global populace absolutely precarious.

Taking up various literatures, from border studies to political science, I argue that contemporary states operate in ways that assume non-linear territoriality, even when they retain discourses of sovereign state space and the strict control of human mobility. States, non-governmental organizations, and supra-national entities (such as the European Union’s Frontex), work together to enforce what is effectively a topographical borderlands that no longer takes the national sovereign bounded space to be its primary “container.” I argue that before 1980 (to set a somewhat arbitrary date) the form of biopolitics envisaged by Foucault could operate discursively, as states were primarily concerned with securing their populations and making them more productive. Due to a variety of factors, the present moment has shifted to being characterized by non-linear territoriality, a topographical policing space of networked and overlapping strategies and technologies, and the abject abandonment of particular bodies and subjectivities. What emerges is something other than liberalism, although clearly related to it, and the impossibility of continuing to define political membership through either the category of ‘citizen’ or ‘worker.’

Chapter 3 Refugee Studies and the Management of Abandonment

This chapter argues that the field of Refugee Studies emerged, largely after 1980, in direct response to the intensification of abandonment in a deliberate attempt to manage its most deleterious effects, yet in ways that would leave the international state system fundamentally unchanged. In short, this chapter details the ways that the field of Refugee Studies is complicit in an ongoing process of legitimation of the nation-state system and the violence that maintains that system. The main argument in this chapter is that ‘the figure of the refugee’ produced by the field of Refugee Studies (including self-assumed Critical Refugee Studies) is in fact a depoliticized figure that is only, and always already, posited as an object of management.

Chapter 4 Securitization and Abandonment: The Governmentality of Abandonment

This chapter builds on the previous chapter to bring in other fields, especially Security Studies, Political Science, and the related, but distinct, academic field of Human Rights Studies to capture a complete picture of what I call the “governmentality of abandonment.”

Chapter 5 A Politics to Come: The Figure of the Refugee in Political Theory

Finally, in this chapter (or several chapters), I begin to imagine a politics to come based on the figure of the refugee that would essentially be the dialectically opposite figure posited in the governmentality of abandonment. This chapter effectively hinges on the previous chapters; the former chapters attempted to understand the relation between historic and contemporary forms of abandonment, this latter chapter takes the figure of abandonment and reimagines a political theory that takes it and notions of non-linear territoriality as organizing rubrics for a new concept of the political.

Part 1

In the first part of this chapter, I demonstrate the ways that the figure of abandonment, the figure of the refugee, has haunted our various conceptions of the political since the colonial/liberal era (perhaps, simply, modernity) began. The figure of the refugee here operates as a figure that dis-figures, or profanes, those ‘sacred’ categories of the political: the Citizen, Man, Rights, the worker, the nation-state.

Part 2 (perhaps Chapter 6?)

In the second part of this chapter, I dissect the well-established discussion of the concept of ‘community’ that began in the 1980s. Important authors here would include Nancy, Blanchot, Agamben, Esposito, Miranda Joseph, Derrida, and others.

Conclusion

This final chapter will sketch out provisional conclusions taken from the dissertation as a whole.

Galli on politics and space

Modern political space is not, for the most part, a matter of the opposition between barbarians and Greeks, or Christians and infidels; space is rendered meaningful, above all, by the presence or absence of the State-Form. If, in the premodern age, space gives the measure to politics through the Order of Being and the Idea of Justice, in the modern age, it is thus politics that differentiates space through its agent, the State… Politics here determines the space of inclusion and exclusion, and it allows a portion of world space (Europe) to establish itself as a political order, differentiated from natural disorder, but also made possible by it. (Galli 2010, 41)

Galli, C. (2010). Political Spaces and Global War. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

jason read on debt

“In this uncertain future it is possible to glimpse two other things, which function as the basis for a politics of debt. First, is that debt is not just some way of affording a home, an education, a car, without cash, but it is the exploitation of these various needs, a way to make profit off all spheres of life and all relations. Second, debt exposes the idea of a neutral state, dealing with competing interests: it is not just that the state is on the side of the creditors, guaranteeing loans and garnishing wages, it makes their very existence possible. Thus it is possible to argue that as much as debt cuts transversally across the various transindividuations of citizen, student, and worker, it undermines two of the individuations that have forestalled political action: the consumer, too placated by mass marketed desires to act politically, and the citizen, caught up in the fictions of neutrality and equality before the law. Thus, while it is true that it is difficult to articulate the collectivity of debt, a difficulty made possible by its abstraction, it has perhaps cleared away the residue of the past. All that remains is the most persistent and difficult residue to dispense with, that of the responsible and isolated subject. The task of constituting collective refusal will be difficult, crossing the line between the abstractions of debt and concrete repression of the state, but one thing is clear the morality of debt, with its ideas of individual responsibility for a collective condition, must be refused at all cost.”

At Unemployed Negativity.

research statement – the figure of the refugee

I was working on this for a presentation in my department, which has since fallen through. But I thought I would post it here, as I found it to be a pretty useful exercise.

*****

As a scholar, I am primarily interested in the problematics of political transformation, in both actually-existing and ideal forms. My work aims toward understanding politics and political phenomena genealogically and/or archaeologically, using Foucault’s and Agamben’s approaches to understanding concepts, practices, and discourses. In particular, I have been trying to understand the development of borders and bordering practices as an aspect of political sovereignty, and how current developments in the enforcement of human mobility would change that border/sovereignty relation. As a part of this project I have been studying European and American migration histories, popular and political responses to migration, and the laws and policies that enable specific regimes of policing practices. For my dissertation, I am turning toward a study of the figure of the refugee. This study explores the discourses of political membership from the point of view of politics’ excess populations, those deemed surplus to the constitution of a polity and expelled from a territory.

There are (at least) three basic strands to the dissertation. The first strand is to understand the phenomenon of forced displacement throughout history. Understanding, for example, the shift from an order of political exile of individuals to an order of mass displacement can illuminate changing patterns in politics, and lay bare some underexplored workings of the nation-state. I see the figure of the refugee as constituted by the nation-state, a state-effect, countering popular ahistorical assertions in the field of Refugee Studies that refugees have always existed. I also see the figure of the refugee, however, as an autonomous figure, marking the limits of the state and a potential revolutionary subject.

The second strand is to understand how the nation-state has operated through a process of interiorization, or the production of an interiority through a dual process of conquest and pacification. This is related to the first strand, in that this portion of the study is dedicated to the processes behind and discourses related to state formation itself. How and why is it that the process of state formation produces excess populations? This question is a step back from the preceding strand, from an understanding of the production of the refugee subject to an understanding of the production of the nation-state as the primary institution governing human movement. In other words, a move from the subject to the structural milieu.

The third strand is a consideration of the figure of the refugee as part of a coherent global system of complementary, but distinct, structures of state and capital. I argue that the effect of nation-state formation and continual processes of primitive accumulation is the production of an ever-growing surplus population. Unlike past eras, however, today’s surplus populations have nowhere to go, and therefore exist as an exterior population present in the interior. This phenomenon is what has given rise to a novel regime of contradictory practices of policing, monitoring, and controlling migration flows. The surplus population in past eras were expelled and, generally, only open to primitive accumulation after state formation; now, however, with states encompassing the entire territorial scope of the globe, there is no longer room for state formation, but capital would like to enclose, productivize, and capture surplus populations nonetheless. This means that globalization is not merely the shift to an immaterial or information economy, but is also the making-refugee of the economy. This process is ongoing, and opens up a vast and growing population of peoples to class conflict, but the composition of this “class” must be produced in conjunction with flexible workers in the knowledge economy.

To sum up, the questions posed in the dissertation revolve around a set of interlocking questions:

• What are the mechanisms, technologies, and practices by which states have mobilized to control human mobility? What can we learn about the state, power, and politics from these practices?
• How are states and capital operating in distinct, complementary, and contradictory ways that produce precarious migration flows, and how does this form of precarity articulate with longer-standing forms of labor flexibilization? How can we weaponize this precarity against capital and the state?
• How can political thought be opened into new directions by beginning with the figure of the refugee, rather than, for example, the citizen?

the State as interiority

“We are compelled to say that there has always been a State, quite perfect, quite complete. The more discoveries archaeologists make, the more empires they uncover. The hypothesis of the Urstaat seems to be verified: ‘The State clearly dates back to the most remote ages of humanity.’ It is hard to imagine primitive societies that would not have been in contact with imperial States, at the periphery or in poorly controlled areas. But of greater importance is the inverse hypothesis: that the State itself has always been in a relation with an outside and is inconceivable independent of that relationship. The law of the State is not the law of All or Nothing (State socieites or counter-State societies) but that of interior and exterior. The State is sovereignty. But sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, of appropriating locally. Not only is there no universal State, but the outside of States cannot be reduced to ‘foreign policy,’ that is, to a set of relations among States. The outside appears simultaneously in two directions: huge worldwide machines branched out over the entire ecumenon at a given moment, which enjoy a large measure of autonomy in relation to the States (for example, commercial organization of the ‘multinational’ type, or industrial complexes, or even religious formations like Christianity, Islam, certain prophetic or messianic movements, etc.); but also the local mechanisms of bands, margins, minorities, which continue to affirm the rights of segmentary societies in opposition to the organs of State power… The State-form, as a form of interiority, has a tendency to reproduce itself, remaining identical to itself across its variations and easily recognizable within the limits of its poles, always seeking public recognition (there is no masked State). But the war machine’s form of exteriority is such that it exists only in its own metamorphoses; it exists in an industrial innovation as well as in a technological invention, in a commercial circuit as well as in a religious creation, in all flows and currents that only secondarily allow themselves to be appropriated by the State. It is in terms not of independence, but of coexistence and competition in a perpetual field of interaction, that we must conceive of exteriority and interiority, war machines of metamorphosis and State apparatuses of identity, bands and kingdoms, megamachines and empires. The same field circumscribes its interiority in States, but describes its exteriority in what escapes States or stands against States.”

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 360-361.

politics as a war machine

A consistent problem of Western political theory has been the confusion of politics (the political) with the problem of organization. Historically, to be political has been to be organized. We can see this from the Greeks (the polis) through the Latins (civitas, cive), and into modern liberal politics (social contract, the citizen).

However, these are figures of organization, not politics. It is not to say that these figures cannot become political,  but they should not be confused with politics as such.

Politics, instead, is an absolute exteriority (what Deleuze and Guattari call a war machine). Various forms of organization (including the State apparatus but also the Party, social movements, etc) must seize apparatuses that embody specific power relations that we see as political institutions, political power, sovereignty, the citizen, the partisan, and so on. This ambiguity is what makes genuine politics so dangerous to contemporary forms of organization and why police (n the Ranciereian sense) is preferred to politics.

This is not an argument for the autonomy of the political in the sense of Schmitt or various phenomenological understandings of politics (see Arendt). It is instead an acknowledgement that politics is a force of exteriority that serves to force apart milieus of interiority formed through the double articulation of conquest-pacification, which is the State apparatus.

Politics, then, is not an operation of consensus, it is a differentiation machine, constantly interrupting the process of consensus production/maintenance.

clastres’ autonomism

In the opening essay of Society Against the State, “Copernicus and the Savages,” Clastres does two things. First, he demonstrates how ethnology has been captured by a kind of ethnocentrism that has made it possible to speak about societies without political power, a kind of evolutionary trajectory wherein there are ‘underdeveloped’ societies and ‘developed’ ones based on their proximity to the Euro-American norm of the State-form. Second, he convincingly demonstrates the importance of “the decision to take seriously, at last, the men and women who live in primitive societies…” (20). He concludes by stating that, 1) “Societies cannot be divided into two groups: societies with power and societies without power…” instead, “political power is universal, immanent to social reality…and that it manifests itself in two primary modes: coercive power, and non-coercive power” (22), 2) coercive political power is merely one kind of power, “a particular case, a concrete realization of political power in some cultures…” (22), 3) the political is present in societies even where political institutions are absent” (22-23).

He lays out the task of a general political anthropology, which is to be split into two lines of inquiry: 1) “What is political power? That is: what is society?”, 2) “What explains the transition from non-coercive political power to coercive political power, and how does the transition come about? That is: what is history?” (24) This is directly a challenge to a Marxist conception of social development. As Clastres notes, citing Lapierre, “the truth of Marxism is that there would be no political power if there had not been conflicts between social forces.” But Clastres answers with a question: “what of societies without conflict, those in which ‘primitive communism’ obtains” (25)? He does not argue that some societies have their political bases in conflict, by which I understand him to mean “historical” conflict in a Marxist sense: class conflict, or the dialectical opposition of the ruling class (the State) versus the laboring class (the proletariat).

What Clastres does in this essay is make the case for understanding the political autonomously from the State-form, and power autonomously from coercion. It is not that these things must always remain separate, but instead that when they come together we should not take these as natural conditions, but rather as conjunctural ones.

bakunin on the state

From “The Immortality of the State“

“The state… is the most flagrant negation, the most cynical and complete negation of humanity. It rends apart the universal solidarity of all men upon earth, and it unites some of them only in order to destroy, conquer, and enslave all the rest. It takes under its protection only its own citizens, and it recognizes human right, humanity and civilization only within the confines of its own boundaries… it has not duty but to itself…”

courtesy of redmolotov.com via google image search

how to organize competition – lenin

I’ve forgotten just how powerful Lenin’s rhetoric is:

“Bourgeois authors have been filling mountains of paper with praises of competition, private enterprise, and all the other magnificent virtues and blessings of the capitalists and of the capitalist system. Socialists have been accused of refusing to understand the importance of these virtues, and of ignoring ‘human nature.’ As a matter of fact, however, capitalism long ago replaced small, independent commodity production, under which competition could develop enterprise, energy and bold initiative to any considerable extent, with large and very large-scale factory production, joint stock companies, syndicates and other monopolies. Under such capitalism, competition means the incredibly brutal suppression of the enterprise, energy and bold initiative of the masses of the population, of its overwhelming majority, of ninety-nine out of every hundred toilers; it also means that competition is replaced by financial fraud, despotism, servility on the upper rungs of the social ladder.

Far from extinguishing competition, socialism, on the contrary, for the first time creates the opportunity for employing it on a really wide and on a really mass scale, for actually drawing the majority of toilers into an arena of such labor in which they can display their abilities, develop their capacities, reveal their talents, of which there is an untapped spring among the people, and which capitalism crushed, suppressed and strangled in thousands and millions.

Now that a socialist government is in power our task is to organize competition.

The hangers-on and spongers on the bourgeoisie described socialism as a uniform, routine, monotonous and drab barrack system. The lackeys of the moneybags, the lickspittles of the exploiters – Messieurs the bourgeois intellectuals – used socialism as a bogey to ‘frighten’ the people, who, precisely under capitalism, were doomed to penal servitude and the barracks, to arduous, monotonous toil, to a life of dire poverty and semi-starvation. The first step towards the emancipation of the people from this penal servitude is the confiscation of the landed estates, the introduction of workers’ control and the nationalisation of the factories and works, the compulsory organization of the whole population in consumers’ cooperative societies, which are at the same time societies for the sale of products, and the state monopoly of the trade in grain and other necessities.”

“How to Organise Competition” in Tucker, The Lenin Anthology, 426-427.