What do reactions to Trump’s return reveal about the scope and limits of political imagination and thought? Then as Tragedy: The Meaning of the Return of Trump FOAD HABIBI 31 July 2025 PHILOSOPHY POLITICS Article PDF Detail “The Rainmaker” by Mike Hartung; Image credit: Kansas Reflector What do reactions to Trump’s return reveal about the scope and limits of political imagination and thought? Might we leverage these analyses to explore the very heart of the predicament, that is the tragic return of a phenomenon which—inverting the famous Hegelian-Marxist dictum—was welcomed as farce the first time, but now signals the tragedy of the anti-politics of populism and the necropolitics of fascism? Finally, is it truly possible to confront the return of this phenomenon with active passion and reason rather than retreating into lamentation, despair, or cries of agony? The authors raise and address these questions by engaging with Henry Giroux, Slavoj Zizek, and Deleuze and Guattari. How should we decipher Trump’s return? How do we explain the re-election of a statesman who persistently tramples over the conventional ethical and practical boundaries of politics? Why do his flaws, gaffes, and scandals seem to have no effect on voters? There are many concerns, and hence analyses. Why do these analyses fail to open new avenues for us? Perhaps the less-posed question has insights to offer: how can we scrutinize these analyses themselves as pathways to understanding not just Trump’s re-emergence, but his seemingly inevitable return? What do reactions to Trump’s return reveal about the scope and limits of political imagination and thought? Might we leverage these analyses to explore the very heart of the predicament, that is the tragic return of a phenomenon which—inverting the famous Hegelian-Marxist dictum—was welcomed as farce the first time, but now signals the tragedy of the anti-politics of populism and the necropolitics of fascism? Finally, is it truly possible to confront the return of this phenomenon with active passion and reason rather than retreating into lamentation, despair, or cries of agony? In this regard, Kamran Baradaran and Anthony Ballas, for instance, offer a particularly incisive intervention. In their essay “Against the Political Stasis, or the Story of a Fall,” (1) they argue that the January 6th attack on Capitol Hill should not be dismissed as a failed coup or a moment of collective irrationality but understood as “an actual fascist threat.” More importantly, they draw on Mohan and Dwivedi’s concept of ‘stasis’ (2) to highlight a paralyzing “stasis of thought and imagination” within liberal and progressive institutions, which prevents any effective response to the rise of the far right. Their reading urges us to consider not only the fascist tendencies of Trumpism, but the broader incapacity of our intellectual and political frameworks to grasp and resist such phenomena. So, the real danger, they suggest, lies not in Trump’s return per se, but in the interpretive impotence that renders this return thinkable, even normalizable. To test such a hypothesis, we must look beyond the numerous “expert” analyses regarding the glaring and fatal flaws of the Democrats’ campaign—focusing on identity politics, ignoring the impact of inflation, failing to mobilize marginalized and lower-income groups, and so on. Instead, let us examine two dominant and prominent perspectives within critical thought: the viewpoint of classical leftism and that of radical leftism. These perspectives—one grounded in the dichotomy of “true consciousness/false consciousness” and the other in the binary of “volition/weakness,” or, to put it differently, the idealism of awareness versus the materialism of power—seek to uncover the secret behind Trump’s renewed dominance. Thus, we will proceed by analyzing the writings of two leading intellectual figures representing these currents—Henry Giroux and Slavoj Žižek—examining their subtleties and implications. Our aim is to show that these analyses reveal not only the reasons behind Trump’s dominance but also the failures of his opposition and their ideological camps. Henry Giroux, in his essay “America’s Descent into Fascism Can Be Stopped”, (3) interprets Trump’s victory as a symptom of a societal malady—a disease resulting from the “savage spread of fascism in America,” which he equates with the rise of “neoliberal authoritarianism” both in the U.S. and globally. He traces the roots of this condition to what he has repeatedly emphasized in his work as the “neglect of education as a form of critical and civic literacy” and its role in “critical and civic literacy and the role it plays in raising mass consciousness and fostering an energized collective movement.” Building upon this foundational idea, Giroux formulates his critique of the inadequate state of education and the urgent need to address its shortcomings. In his view, “cultural imaginaries and persuasion” play a pivotal role in enabling Trumpists to systematically and, unfortunately, effectively “destroy historical awareness as a fundamental element of civic education.” Giroux criticizes the Democrats, specifically Bernie Sanders, for failing to address the “systemic issues.” The root of it lies in “a widespread moral collapse,” particularly within “educational systems”: “For decades, the right wing has weaponized cultural pedagogy to convince white, Latinx, and Black workers to betray their own interests, connecting them to authoritarian communities and white supremacy ideologies. This strategy exploits their sense of alienation while eroding any sense of critical agency.” Continuing along these lines, Giroux underscores how, unlike liberals, the New Right (or, as he terms it, “reactionary conservatives”) has pursued a “long-term strategy,” recognizing “the transformative power of ideas” by weaponizing culture to “distort the public consciousness.” This strategy deliberately fosters “mass ignorance and the lack of civic literacy,” not as unintended consequences but as “engines” of its political machinery, ensuring that even the most Subordinated groups ignore economic injustice, instead succumbing to “a collective spectacle of hatred and bigotry”: “This manufactured ignorance and herd-like submission is more than just an obstacle to rational thinking; it is a political weapon that renders society’s most vulnerable compliant and fragmented.” Given this socio-political pathological diagnosis, it is unsurprising that Giroux proposes countering fascism or authoritarianism (terms he uses interchangeably) through a counter-culture emphasizing critical civic education: “If we are to counter this fascist tide, we must immediately employ tools to rebuild public consciousness as a prerequisite for an inclusive movement.” This approach, which Giroux equates with “rethinking the foundations of culture, politics, struggle, and education,” calls for “fundamentally altering our approach to theory, pedagogy, and the emancipatory power of learning.” This framework by Giroux represents a polished version of the classic analytical structure often referred to as the “hypothesis of deception.” This hypothesis has been one of the oldest and, undoubtedly, most prevalent ideas employed by intellectuals—both on the left and the right—over decades and even centuries to critique collective trends and decisions. To risk a slight oversimplification, we can summarize this hypothesis as follows: contemporary societies are mass collectives, and dominant political currents, through the media and cultural-educational apparatuses, often succeed in deceiving these masses, leading them to adopt “false consciousness” instead of achieving “true awareness.” Consequently, the masses prioritize the “fabricated interests” constructed by others over their own “real interests.” Undoubtedly, the left and right versions of this hypothesis differ significantly, sometimes fundamentally, but they all share certain core elements: (1) the centrality of consciousness; (2) the mass nature of society; (3) the vulnerability of these masses; (4) the corruptive and misleading role of dominant media; (5) the necessity of emancipatory intervention by intellectuals; (6) the importance of relentless critique of existing false consciousness; and (7) the need for fundamental transformation in the realm of consciousness. Yet, this hypothesis faces a foundational problem from the outset: if consciousness is the cornerstone of human understanding and action, why, for instance, has Trump’s overt hostility toward the marginalized—women, minorities, and the underprivileged—not led to a widespread rejection of him, particularly among these groups, especially after eight years of public and political infamy? Detail “Unbound”, by Shiva Ahmadi, 2023; Image credit: UC Davis. This is where the more complex and innovative analysis of Slavoj Žižek, “ The Left Must Start from Zero ” (4) , offers a way out of the hypothesis of deception. Žižek identifies the current moment as a sort of “ground zero” for the left—a point from which it must accept that it starts anew, as the real issue at hand is not merely the triumph of the right but the failure of the left. As expected, Žižek begins by contrasting the stark, uncompromising politics of Trump with the "nonpolitics or antipolitics" or lack of politics embodied by Kamala Harris. Drawing upon his long-held thesis regarding the necessity of a “leftist Thatcher,” he argues that “What Democrats failed to learn from Trump is that, in a political battle, ‘extremism’ works.” However, Žižek wisely cautions against portraying Harris or the Democratic leadership as genuinely leftist, noting that this caricature is a right-wing strategy to demonize opponents. At best, Democrats are the elite defenders of a “liberal order” enamoured of the political centre. Going further, Žižek begins his deconstruction of Trump’s renewed successby asking the precise and pressing question: why, despite relatively sound economic performance under Biden, did “a considerable majority of Americans perceive their economic predicament as dire?” Naturally, Žižek turns to ideology—but not in the classical sense. Instead, he approaches it in terms of “how political discourse functions as a social link” This leads him to the concept of “identification,” a process through which even Trump’s weaknesses bolster his popularity among ordinary people. It would be a mistake to assume that the contradiction between Trump’s ideological message (defending conservative values) and his public persona (unethical and anti-conventional), representing a postmodernist performative logic, would be a destructive contradiction destined for collapse. On the contrary, it is precisely this paradoxical personality and behaviour that enables the construction of an identity that is simultaneously reactionary and postmodern—a point of reference with which any “ordinary people who appear decent and talk in a normal, rational way” can align their own identity. Hence, the endless fact-checking and exposés by liberals about Trump’s lies and scandals do little more than reinforce and expand this common identification with Trump who, paradoxically, is actually farther from such people than anyone else. Žižek astutely critiques the self-righteous liberal disdain for the poor supporting one of the most unabashed champions of elite-friendly economic policies. More incisively, he finds the leftist response even worse: “They adopt a patronizing attitude, ‘understanding’ the confusion and ignorance of the poor from a position of superiority.” Hence, one must avoid outright dismissal of Trump and his modus operandi. Every one of his actions is part of “a populist strategy to sell this agenda to ordinary people”—an agenda that is, ironically, entirely against their interests. What the left must learn from this situation is to embrace and confront the challenge that has long been before it: to abandon the position of the Beautiful Soul, overcome the fear of appearing radical, and, consequently, act radically. This is the only viable strategy to resist the gradual yet enduring tragedy of Trumpism—a period that, devoid of farce, could indeed “mark the true end of what was most valuable in our civilization.” Žižek, therefore, eschews an emphasis on education and consciousness, turning instead to the political in its Hobbesian-Schmittian sense: a cold and brutal engagement that pursues conflict through the friend/enemy dichotomy to its ultimate conclusion. This approach stands in opposition to the “culturalization of politics” favored by critics of ideology, opting instead for the “politicization of culture.” It avoids the labyrinth of consciousness, refuses to reduce the populace to a vulnerable mass, and ultimately champions a radical, popular form of politics over the overt elitism of emancipatory educational projects. However, if this is the issue and that is the solution, why did Trump’s governance during his first term, contrary to Žižek’s expectations and aspirations, fail to trigger “a great awakening”? (5) Could it be that framing the problem in terms of a lack of true consciousness (and the necessity of critical civic education) or the absence of sufficient volition (and the defense of autonomy of the political) ultimately reduces both perspectives to two sides of the same coin—a neglect of the real and undeniable existence of the tragedy itself? Do these analyses, despite their differences, ultimately interpret the situation not through the lens of equivalence between 'perfection and reality', but in terms of absence, deficiency, and lack? This, in essence, reflects an ontology more aptly described as “non-ontology.” Reframing the Analysis: From Lack to Affirmation If we wish to move beyond these negative interpretations, how might we address the issue at hand? And, crucially, how might we open a pathway toward critique and transformation? Here, the principle of realism offers guidance: we must acknowledge and recognize what has occurred exactly as it is, without recourse to notions of absence, lack, or deficiency. There is no vacuum, no void at work. What we face is not "false consciousness," lack of will, or any form of psychological or physical inadequacy; rather, it is a distinct type of consciousness and volition—one that must be accepted and understood in its full reality, even and especially as we want to critique it. This moment marks the separation of ethics from morality, of politics from Satire. Ethical-politics, rooted in affirmation, focuses not on what “ought to be” but on what “is,” with any alternative it proposes arising organically from the very fabric of just this being itself. With this in mind, the essential question shifts: what “is,” rather than what “is not”? Put differently, if we focus on presence rather than absence to explain the phenomenon before us, what conclusions might we reach? And, more importantly, what fundamental logic underpins this situation? If we resist the temptation to search for deeper, hidden layers and instead begin at the so-called surface of appearances, the tragic return of the farce might confront us with one of the oldest and most crucial questions in modern political philosophy, as Spinoza articulates: “Why do people fight for their servitude as if for their freedom?” How is it that masses of people, despite overwhelming evidence of the catastrophic consequences of their choices (even without presuming the alternative is necessarily much better), 'voluntarily' step forward to embrace a figure whose every action, decision, and statement undermines their agency? Or, to phrase it more directly and provocatively: what is the secret of this desire for the master, for servitude, for a paternal figure (albeit not protective, but, as Žižek tend to insists, vulgar) that persists despite endless exposés, warnings, and resistance? Detail “For the First Time in a Long Time”, installation by Sarah Abu Abdallah; Image credit: Kunstverein Hamburg. From Étienne de La Boétie to Schizoanalysis: The Desire for Servitude From Étienne de La Boétie, the pioneer of this line of inquiry, to the present, many have grappled with this enigma of why humans desire their own servitude. De La Boétie eloquently pointed to the power of habit, the institutional machinery of the state, and the seductive allure of entertainment. Contemporaneous with him, Machiavelli highlighted the suppression of conflict, the tradition of autocracy, and the failure to establish institutions that safeguard freedom, while Spinoza, approximately a century later, discussed the human bondage to passions and the submission to authoritative commands. More recently in the 20 th century, Deleuze and Guattari’s monumental Capitalism and Schizophrenia project offers one of the most creative and comprehensive accounts within this tradition, striking at the heart of the matter: desire. Specifically, the distortion—or more precisely, the restriction—of desire into what they term the “desire for servitude.” Rather than appealing to psychological mechanisms like 'repression' or 'foreclosure' to explain the undesirable, we must ask why vast numbers of individuals "voluntarily" and passionately march toward the slaughterhouse of reason, truth, and well-being, endorsing their own ruin. Here, we go beyond Foucault’s account of power relations as mechanisms of normalization, discipline, and knowledge-power production aimed at subjugation. Instead, we must delve into power not merely (or primarily) from above or through dispositifs, but as emanating from below, from the very fabric of desire itself. How does the desire for servitude percolate throughout the social body, rising from below to shape racism, xenophobia, and even fascism? In this context, we are dealing not with so-called 'false consciousness' or lack of power, but with subjects and objects that are themselves products of a desire that constructs and sustains these structures. Desire becomes causa sui shaping both the individual and the social machinery it sustains. With these considerations in mind, and if we view the situation through the lens of desire, what we have (and again, not "what we lack") is a specific assemblage of desire built not on truth, happiness, or freedom, but rather on the foundations of mendacity, hatred, and servitude. This dispositif or apparatus, as Foucault might describe it, constitutes a network of points, lines, and connections that enables the observation, articulation, creation, reinforcement, and weakening of the phenomena, ultimately culminating in xenophobia, identity cults, and opposition to truth. This is by no means a "false" desire; instead, it is a constrained and shackled desire—a desire aimed at neutralizing the impulse for persistence and expansion within existence. Consider how, in racism, xenophobia, and fascism, individuals’ energies are devoted to exclusion, elimination, and destruction. Openness, resilience, and creation are denounced, and there is no affirmation or positivity at play except for the perpetuation of increasingly sophisticated mechanisms of repression, annihilation, and death—even, ultimately, the death of the self. This manifests as a form of collective suicide, the ultimate telos of any project rooted in the desire for servitude—from the World Wars to today’s "global war regime", according to Hardt and Mezzadera . (6) Yet, simply recognizing and identifying what exists cannot suffice as a genuine political realism. For such realism must, at once, identify the origins, tendencies, and spatiotemporal possibilities for alternative futures. If what we face is a fascistic assemblage of desire, then such a grand dispositif cannot be reduced to mere consciousness, pedagogy, volition, or party programs. We must return to the immanent plane of social existence—a pervasive field wherein a significant portion of the social body strives toward death . Indeed, the true name of any desire for suppression of difference, annihilation of otherness, and collective suicide is fascism —a desire that we have to acknowledge arises from the below. It is a power that seeks to disable the mechanisms of power itself, cells that, in their proliferation and interconnection, demand their own demise. Countless black holes of desire ultimately coalesce, seeking unity in a vast, overarching black hole intent on annihilating existence itself. This is a longing for grandeur achieved through the elimination of the others, the obliteration of victims, and, eventually, even the self-sacrifice of the foot soldiers of this war regime. Thus, to trace the origins of this phenomenon, we must investigate not just educational and political institutions but the entirety of social life. From the smallest intimate relationships to the largest public and national gatherings, these are the cells and organs of the machinic desire for servitude: friendships, families, schools, social networks, associations, and every body and spatiotemporal entities founded on similarity, identity, unity, hostility, and obedience. Yes, this is fascism—but not as ideology or deception, nor as the absence of will. Fascism as an all-encompassing desire, arising from the below, for reaching as soon as possible to the end . The end of the chaos that is life itself. The desire for respite, for release from the burden of the Other, the dizziness of difference, and the clamour of existence. The desire to stop, to disable the engines of life’s dynamism, to seek refuge beneath the shadow of a Father (or Fathers). Were Freud present, he would likely sum it up as the (absolute and universal) “death drive.” Desire and Subjects in the Fascist Assemblage Yet every dispositif, and therefore every assemblage of desire, operates through a dual relationship with subjects—subjects who, in a perpetual process of construction and reconstruction, both produce and reproduce themselves alongside these grand constructs. Superstitious, xenophobic, and fascist subjects, as products of myriad social institutions, actively contribute to the creation of macro-fascisms that coalesce under various specific names to raise the banners of war and death: Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and so forth. These subjects, driven by a thirst for destruction and death, seek to elevate a master—be it Adar or Sauron (to recall The Lord of the Rings )—targeting free life and sparing no effort in constructing camps of servitude. They ignore systemic lies and endless distortions of truth, indulge in hate-mongering, ridicule, and hostility toward Others, minorities, and the marginalized. This is no longer the deceived or powerless subject critiqued by the hypotheses of deception or weakness. Rather, it is an intensely aware and active subject whose awareness serves ignorance, and whose activity fosters weakness. Moving From Non-Being to Being It is only under these conditions that we can move away from non-being (and, consequently, non-ontology) and instead begin with being (and, consequently, ontology). As Hardt and Negri emphasize in their critique of racist right-wing movements, the issue is not even hatred but rather a form of love—a love that invests not in connection but in disconnection, a restricted, limiting, and constraining love oriented toward unity and perpetually seeking and establishing homogeneous units . (7) Here too, we are not dealing with unawareness, "false consciousness", bad consciousness, or a lack of "will to power", but rather with closed and debilitating forms of awareness, will, and love that, far from expanding existence, entrap subjects in servitude, laying the groundwork for their weakness, dissolution, and death. Papyrus with Satirical Vignettes, Egypt, BCE 1250BC; Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. We return, then, to just the very aware, active subjects who shape and derive sustenance from a deadly assemblage. These micro black holes scattered across the social body, from families to nations, have undergone the investment of fascist desire. They are, by now, apathetic about the warnings, reproaches, and pleas of intellectuals proclaiming the truth, and their bodies are far from eager to join the ranks of freedom militants. These are conscious and active agents of a dangerous movement who, with remarkable ease, goggle at all truths—knowingly and even jubilantly—and readily spark civil wars to enthrone their master. Without this “training of micro-fascist desire,” the emergence of macro-fascism would be unthinkable. Only when antagonistic emotions, passions, and ideas dominate the bodies and minds of a significant segment of a society’s citizens can chauvinistic, racist, and fascist scenarios gain traction at a systemic level, intertwining disparate points into expansive, interconnected networks. The immense and lethal power of macro-fascism lies precisely in the invulnerability of its subjects to critique, enlightenment, and appeals for liberation. These are individuals who fight for their servitude as though it is their salvation. Toward Schizoanalysis of Desire Thus, rather than critique of ideology, discourse analysis, or directly inflaming socio-political antagonisms, we must, as Deleuze and Guattari insisted, engage in the schizoanalysis of these libidinal investments. Why and how do subjects enthusiastically and with unimaginable passion desire servitude, death, and self-destruction as though striving for freedom, life, and happiness? If we accept that desire is not an innate force or instinct to be repressed or liberated, but rather a socio-historically constructed phenomenon produced by the myriad factories of societal institutions, then we must shift our focus from the “autonomy of the political” and periodic debates about electoral campaigns to a politics that is pervasive, radical, and distributed across the spatiotemporal fabric of social being. The political unconscious not only intervenes incessantly but is itself continuously produced and reproduced. From here, we may lay the groundwork for crafting a new mode and form of assemblage of desire. While it may seem that we are now ensnared in the constricted space-times of the control society, we must not forget that control, domination, and servitude are ultimately reactions— seemingly potent and terrifying, but reactions nonetheless. Reactions to a tremendous force emanating from below, one that requires these grand and pervasive assemblages of macro-fascism to subdue it. For, perhaps the potential for creation, empowerment, and the establishment of open and luminous spaces of human society—the free republic of joyful and wise citizens—has never been as ripe as it is now. This claim may appear extravagant and far-fetched, or, alternatively, such discourse may be dismissed as utopian and dangerously reckless in its yearning "to make heaven on earth". Yet even imagining such novel spaces might provoke anger and outrage among those enamoured of tragedy. Of late, xenophobes, and fascists have once more been filled with wholesome aversion at the words: “the free commonwealth of joyful and wise citizens”. Well and good, ladies and gentlemen, do you want to know what this commonwealth might looks like? Look at the numerous spaces of flight, rupture, and escape from the chains of capital, domination, and the state. These are merely the prefigurations of such a society. NOTES 1. Kamran Baradaran & Ballas, Anthony, "Against the Political Stasis, or the Story of a Fall”, Philosophy World Democracy vol. 3 no. 3 (17 March 2022): https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/articles-1/against-the-political-stasis-or-the-story-of-a-fall . 2. See Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi, Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theoretical Anti-politics , New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2019. 3. Henry Giroux, "America’s Descent Into Fascism Can Be Stopped": https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/11/08/americas-descent-into-fascism-can-be-stopped/ 4. Slavoj Žižek, "The Left Must Start From Zero", Compact 8 November 2024 https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-left-must-start-from-zero/ 5. Slavoj Žižek, "Trump's Victory Is A Welcome Awakening", Telegrafi https://telegrafi.com/en/sllavoj-zhizhek-fitorja-e-trumpit-eshte-zgjim-mireseardhur-video/ . 6. Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra, "A Global War Regime", New Left Review 9 May 2024, https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/a-global-war-regime . 7. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Assembly , Oxford University Press, 2017. Related Articles Against the Political Stasis, or the Story of a Fall KAMRAN BARADARAN and ANTHONY BALLAS Read Article “Piss Christ”, Internationalism, and the Night of the World: Interview with Slavoj Žižek SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK with KAMRAN BARADARAN and ANTHONY BALLAS Read Article

This article proposes an expressive ontology of the human psyche, defining it not as a mere biological function or cognitive module, but as a site of symbolic manifestation — a locus where the world is represented, interpreted, and narrated. Beyond Prometheanism: Toward an Expressive Ontology of the Human Psyche ABDESSELAM CHEDDADI 20 July 2025 PHILOSOPHY Article PDF Untitled , Amina Benbouchta, 2021; Image credit: Le Cube This article proposes an expressive ontology of the human psyche, defining it not as a mere biological function or cognitive module, but as a site of symbolic manifestation — a locus where the world is represented, interpreted, and narrated. In contrast to functionalist or neuro- reductionist approaches, it argues for a conception of the psyche as the living being’s expressive power, structured around language, thought, memory, and imagination. From this perspective, two radical forms of otherness today challenge the human psychic condition. The first is cosmic: the possibility of other forms of intelligent life in the universe compels us to rethink the human psyche not as a norm, but as a singular modulation of a broader power of mind. The second is technological: artificial intelligence, which does not extend our mental faculties but rather externalizes them. Functionally, it acts as an infrastructure for the delegation of human symbolic functions. The danger lies not in a domination by machines, but in a diffuse desubjectivation: unlearning, weakening of thought, and the soft extinction of expressive faculties. Faced with these two horizons, the article calls for a dual imperative: ontological hospitality toward living otherness, and ethical vigilance toward machinic otherness. Toward an Expressive Ontology of the Human Psyche At a time when knowledge about the human mind is proliferating— neuroscience, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, psychoanalysis, anthropology—something paradoxically seems to be eroding: reflection on what the psyche is in its own right. Too often reduced to an information-processing system or a bundle of adaptive behaviors, the psyche tends to be naturalized, modeled, or instrumentalized—but rarely thought of as a singular reality. This text seeks to reopen that inquiry by proposing an expressive ontology of the psyche (1) . Such an ontology begins with a central hypothesis: the human psyche is neither a mere byproduct of biology nor a tool for processing reality. It is a site of manifestation, a capacity for expression in life that has become subject (2) . The psyche is the space where the world is not merely perceived, but represented, interpreted, transformed, narrated (3) . This approach calls for a rethinking of major mental functions (thought, language, memory, affect, imagination), not as modular or isolatable "capacities," but as forms of expression rooted in ontology (4) . Far from being just an internal mechanism, the psyche is an agent of openness, of shaping, of symbolic projection (5) —a stage upon which the world takes on another form . In this perspective, it becomes possible to redefine the human mind both as a power of subjectivation and as a structure of relation to reality. This definition takes on particular significance today in light of two transformative horizons: The cosmic horizon, with the question of life elsewhere—in other forms of being, intelligence, or subjectivity. The technological horizon, with the emergence of cognitive artifacts such as artificial intelligence, which seek to imitate, rival, or even replace human psychic functions. These two frontiers—life elsewhere, mind elsewhere—compel a reformulation of our conception of the psyche, both in its uniqueness and its vulnerability. This article undertakes that ontological, critical, and forward-looking clarification. Critique of Philosophical Prometheanism: Descartes, Spinoza, and the Modern Legacy Western modernity constructed a singular figure of the human subject: a rational being, master of its actions, center of representation, bearer of a presumed universal access to truth. In Descartes, this sovereignty takes the form of the cogito: a consciousness separate from the world, whose thought grounds all certainty and which, through science, may become “like master and possessor of nature” (6) . Cartesian dualism thus establishes a clear ontological hierarchy: inert matter on one side, self-grounded thought on the other. This vision gives rise to an active Prometheanism: the human is defined by the capacity to detach from the world and transform it from a position of elevation. This will to emancipation through reason does not disappear with Spinoza, even though he criticizes dualism (7) . While thought and extension are two attributes of the same divine substance, it is human reason alone that grants access to an adequate understanding of this unity. Nature's power is indeed revalorized, yet the privilege accorded to human intellect sustains a form of cognitive verticality. Other modern figures—from Kant to Hegel (8) —will continue this centering of the knowing subject, even within critical systems. This through-line produces an anthropology of rational merit, wherein the human is deemed all the more worthy the more it dominates the world through thought and technique. This vision permeates science, politics, and even certain forms of personal development, which conceive self-realization as an expansion of subjective control. Our aim is to break with this vertical logic and propose an alternative: a conception of the human psyche as a situated, singular expression (9) —not a central one—within the vast web of forms reality may take. Far from denying human thought, the goal is to reposition its scope—not as the foundation of the world, but as one mode of emergence among others—perhaps rare, but certainly not supreme. I. Toward an Expressive Ontology of the Psyche To rethink the human psyche not as the pinnacle of a hierarchy of being, but as one modality among others within an organized reality requires a paradigm shift (10) . The point of departure is no longer the subject as the center of truth, but reality itself as a field of multiple organizations, where matter, form, rhythm, and relation interweave. From this perspective, the psyche—thought, language, emotion, reflective consciousness—is not an anomaly in the universe, but an emergent form of a general expressive capacity inherent in reality (11) . The aim is not to cast human consciousness as an inexplicable accident, nor as a bridgehead toward a transcendent beyond, but to situate it as the local actualization of a complex organizational potential. This idea draws strength from several philosophical lineages: contemporary panpsychism (Strawson, Goff), neutral monism (Russell, James), and process philosophy (Whitehead), all of which view matter as inherently active, capable of feeling, or proto-conscious. But our argument does not require strict adherence to panpsychism. It is enough to recognize that the organization of matter, at certain thresholds, gives rise to structures capable of experiencing, symbolizing, and elaborating. The psyche thus becomes one form among others of the same capacity of reality: to configure itself into meaningful expression. It is neither reducible to an organ nor derivable from a spiritual essence—it is a living figure of reality’s organization, no less so than a crystal, a cell, or a forest (12) . This expressive ontology invites us to move away from thinking in terms of superiority or finality, and to consider each form—including the psychic one— as a coextensive mode of manifestation, a variation of a centerless logos. It is a vision of reality as a fabric of expressions (13) , where human consciousness is but one motif among others—perhaps exceptionally complex, but not fundamentally privileged. Latifa Echakhch, A chaque stencil une révolution, 2007; Image credit: Wikimedia Commons II. Psychology and Ethics: Toward a Decentered and Resonant Subjectivity The idea that the human psyche is one expressive modality among others within reality disrupts our conception of subjectivity. If consciousness is not a separate being but a rhythmic form within the cosmic fabric, then the “subject” ceases to be an autonomous and central instance. It becomes a point of passage, a zone of resonance through which forces, dynamics, and patterns inscribed in a broader field find expression (14) . a) A Psychology of Listening and Modulation This perspective demands a radical inversion of the classical psychological model. Rather than viewing the individual as a core of will meant to master and affirm itself, we see them as a fragile, dynamic arrangement that must attune itself to what moves through it. Psychic work no longer consists in building a strong ego, but in revealing the unique harmony of a given way of being. This implies a revalorization of intuition, emotion, and dream—as sensitive manifestations of a larger structure seeking form. Consciousness is not the spotlight of judgment, but the awakening to a form striving to express itself. b) An Ethics of Attunement, Not of Law Ethically, this approach breaks with normative models grounded in universal rules or evolutionary goals. If every being is an expressive modality, ethics becomes the art of respecting the rhythm, form, and coherence of each configuration. Goodness lies not in conforming to an abstract norm, but in the rightness of accord between forms. This opens the way to a musical, relational, and resonant ethics. The just act is the one that does not interrupt the world’s flow but prolongs, embraces, and reanimates it. This ethic echoes themes from Taoism (wu wei) as well as Spinoza’s insights (Spinoza 1677) into the preservation and enhancement of the power to exist. c) Personal Development as Organic Unfolding In this framework, personal development ceases to be an effort toward perfection or performance. It becomes a process of maturation, the unfolding of a latent form—much like a plant follows its natural curve of growth. It is no longer the ideal of a triumphant ego, but the patient listening to what seeks to emerge within the singular field of a life. The result is a modest but profound vision of subjectivity: no longer a bearer of rights or a strategist of achievement, but an interpreter of an expressive form whose secret it does not possess. Here, psychology and ethics come together in an aesthetics of being—a pursuit of rightness and resonance, rather than control or truth. III. Other Beings, Other Expressions: Toward a Cosmological Ethics of Perception Conceiving of the psyche as one expressive modality among others compels us to rethink how we regard non-human beings, both living and inert. It leads us away from a logic of resemblance (“what is like me is worthy”) or utility (“what serves me deserves attention”), toward a logic of ontological plurality: every being is a form, a rhythm, a meaningful organization of reality (15) . A. N. Whitehead; Image credit: Wikimedia Commons a) What Unites Us: Expressive Structure What humans share with stones, trees, or animals is neither consciousness nor freedom, but the capacity to manifest an intrinsic coherence, an organizing regularity. Thus, the traditional distinction between subject and object gives way to a continuous vision of reality as a constellation of dialoguing forms. In this view, looking at other beings becomes a practice of listening: what is this form trying to express? What in it offers itself to be read, felt, or understood without forced translation? The resulting ethic is one of attentiveness to ontological singularity. b) What Distinguishes Us: Modulations of Expression This structural unity does not erase differences; it renders them meaningful. The human is not more—but different. Conceptual thought, language, symbolic memory are modulations of cosmic organization, just as photosynthesis or crystallization are others. The task is not to rank these forms, but to understand them as multiple expressions of a shared ground. The dignity of the other no longer derives from its proximity to us, but from the presence within it of a unique arrangement, a style of reality. c) An Ethics of Perception: Toward a Contemplative Ontology This way of inhabiting the world implies a shift in posture: from action to contemplation, from appropriation to wonder, from mastery to listening. The other is no longer to be judged, defined, or classified, but welcomed as an event of reality. Far from a passive relativism, this ethic demands much: the willingness to become available to what is not the self, to recognize in the stone, the tree, or the animal not a metaphor of oneself, but a real, expressive, foreign, and yet familiar alterity. Here we reconnect with the intuitions of deep ecology, as well as with mystical and contemplative traditions that perceive each being as a unique manifestation of the cosmic order (16) . It is this ethics of perception— both sensitive and ontological—that an expressive ontology seeks to prepare. IV. The Divine Without Transcendence: A Spirituality of Expressive Immanence The idea of a cosmically expressive organization—where human consciousness is just one modality among others—deeply transforms the question of the divine. In this perspective, God is no longer an external supreme entity endowed with will, omniscience, or purpose. God is no longer perched atop an ontological pyramid but is present wherever a form expresses itself with integrity. The divine ceases to be a transcendent subject and becomes the name for the power of emergence, organization, and coherence at work in all regions of reality. a) The End of Theological Verticality An expressive metaphysics does away with the image of God as father, king, or judge—external to the world and ultimate source of meaning. It breaks with religious anthropomorphism, while preserving the intuition that an order exists, that a plural rationality weaves through things (17) . What once appeared to us as “God” is thus reimagined as the very fabric of reality in its capacity to manifest itself. b) The Divine as Expressive Power We may then speak of the divine not as a personal essence, but as an active principle of expression—a diffuse, immanent Logos, akin to the Chinese Tao or the Indian Brahman (Laozi, Tao Te Ching; Upanishads). The divine is not universal consciousness, but that which enables being, that which generates form, that which allows matter to bend into meaningful regularity. It is not a matter of believing or not believing in God, but of discovering within every being a fragment of this expressive power. c) A Spirituality Without Dogma, An Embodied Attention This vision opens onto a spirituality without theism, without dogma, without transcendence—yet not without rigor: a spirituality of listening, of receptivity, of coherence (18) . It is not anchored in a revealed text, but in a renewed attentiveness to the world, to the forms and rhythms that move through the living. It is no longer about interpreting the world as a sign of another world, but about living each form as an epiphany of this world itself (19) . A mysticism of the near, a metaphysics of simplicity, an ethics of resonance. The divine is no longer an elsewhere, but the very rightness of what is, when it fully resonates with itself. La Mariée, Amina Benbouchta, 2015; Image credit: Le Musée V. The Living: Ontological Threshold and Medium of Expressive Temporality Any reflection on the human psyche must be grounded in a broader understanding of life. The human psyche does not emerge directly from matter, but from life—as a particular dynamic organization thereof. Life must therefore be defined as a mode of material organization characterized by three fundamental traits: Dependence on a specific environment: no living being subsists without a particular milieu that regulates and sustains exchanges. Structured physico-chemical interaction with that milieu: life is composed of exchanges, regulations, inputs and outputs of energy and matter. Its own temporality: birth, growth, decline, death. Life introduces a cyclical and directional temporality into reality. Thus, there is no neutral and homogeneous space, but rather milieus: ecological, sensory, affective. And there is no universal time, but differential vital rhythms. Even the laws of physics—including relativity—describe particular milieus, but they do not necessarily account for life in its expressive structure. Life is therefore an ontological threshold between matter and psyche. It transforms physical data into sensitive, reactive forms, opening the way to a progressive subjectivity that takes a particular shape in the human psyche. To think life is to think of matter that has become rhythmic, open, temporal. VI. The Human Psyche: Vital Externalization and Autonomization of Thought What distinguishes the human psyche from other forms of life is not just language, thought, or tool-making, but a dual functional mutation: a) Externalization of Vital Functions Humans no longer merely live biologically. They externalize their adaptive functions: Socially (symbolic organization of relationships), Technically (production of tools and artificial environments), Cognitively (memories, knowledge systems, codes). This results in a displacement: survival no longer relies solely on the organism, but on external systems of vital support. b) Relative Autonomy of Thought Human thought gains a degree of functional detachment: it can operate independently from survival, exploring abstraction, possibility, and fiction. Consciousness becomes a space for play, symbolization, and creation—not just an adaptive interface. The human psyche is therefore not merely an evolutionary effect, but a recomposition of vital function itself. It is a form of life capable of reflecting on itself outside the pressure of immediate survival, and of generating meaning beyond biological necessity. This bifurcation grounds the emergence of ethical, artistic, and metaphysical subjectivity. Meditative Postscript: Dwelling in Immanence, Thinking Without Supremacy This journey leads us to a redefinition of our place in the world—not as exception, pinnacle, or finality, but as a situated expressive modality, a temporary intensification of a structure far greater than ourselves. Human consciousness, though singular in its degree of reflexivity, cannot be considered the key to reality. It is one of the world’s faces as it thinks itself, not the origin of the thinkable. Thus falls verticality: no more God above, no more human at the center. This is not a diminishment, but a shift in posture. To think is no longer to rise above, but to attune. To understand is no longer to decipher a beyond, but to listen to the present form. To exist is no longer to possess or generate meaning, but to participate in a web of sense in motion. This vision restores a sensitive thickness to the real, an ontological density. It does not eliminate mysticism—it brings it closer. Not as a projection toward the invisible, but as a recognition of the exceptional rightness of what is, here and now. Every form, every being, every rhythm becomes a cosmic interlocutor, a call to listening and humility. Perhaps this is what our time demands: a way of thinking that does not seek to impose its clarity, but to accompany the expressive complexity of the world. A metaphysics without the promise of resolution, but with a heightened presence to what reveals itself. A philosophy not of conquered truth, but of inhabited form. In this sense, to think the human psyche as expression is not to diminish it—it is to attune it to the wholeness of the real. General Conclusion: Toward an Expressive Metaphysics of Knowledge The reflection developed in this article proposes a radical reconfiguration of our way of apprehending the real, the living, and the human psyche. By shifting from an ontology of verticality to an ontology of expressive form, it opens up a mode of thought in which classical distinctions — matter/spirit, nature/culture, subject/object, human/non-human — are reinterpreted in light of their relational and dynamic functioning. This approach has profound implications across several fields of knowledge: Philosophy : It restores to metaphysics an object that is at once modest and profound: not foundation, but the expressive structure of reality. It makes it possible to connect disparate traditions (process philosophy, panpsychism, mysticism, phenomenology) within a unified yet non-reductive space of thought. Life Sciences : It proposes a redefinition of the living based not on biological exceptionality, but on the relation to an environment, to temporality, to a proper expressivity. It calls for a biology that is less mechanistic, more rhythmic, more contextual. Psychology and the Human Sciences : It offers an alternative to the model of the autonomous, strategic subject, in favor of a conception of the self as a point of resonance, as an evolving interface. It renews the categories of development, suffering, and relation. Physics and Cosmology : It questions the universality of space and time as conceived by modern physics, introducing the idea of spatio-temporal milieus that differ according to levels of organization. It calls for a more stratified cosmology, more open to singularities. Spirituality and Theology : It proposes to move beyond vertical theism without falling into reductive atheism, by conceiving of the divine as a structure of emergence rather than a supreme instance. It opens a path toward a spirituality of embodied immanence. What emerges is a space of knowledge in which the human is no longer conceived as the center, but as one of the sites of resonance of the real. This position is not a loss: it is an opportunity for a thought that is more attentive, more just, more alive. A thought commensurate with the world it seeks to honor, not to dominate. Final Note – Two Forms of Otherness Facing the Human Psyche: Life Elsewhere, Mind Elsewhere “Extreme peril calls for extreme responsibility.” —Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility Our ontological inquiry into the human psyche—as a power of expression within reality—naturally concludes with two lines of flight that test its limits, and even redefine its scope. One comes from beyond our world: the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The other arises from within our own: the emergence of artificial intelligence. These two radical forms of otherness—one organic, the other machinic—pose the same fundamental question: what does it mean to think, to speak, to feel, when these manifest otherwise—or elsewhere? I. Life Elsewhere: Cosmic Otherness and the Relativization of the Human Psyche The search for extraterrestrial life is not just scientific curiosity—it raises deep questions about the uniqueness of our psyche. If other intelligences exist— biological or otherwise—with their own forms of consciousness, language, and relation to the world, then our way of being a subject becomes but one case among others. This does not diminish our value; it expands the thinkable: there would be multiple ontologies of psyche, multiple styles of subjectivity, multiple languages of the mind. Such a hypothesis demands that we see the human not as absolute measure, but as a singular modulation of a broader cosmic power of expression. Faced with this cosmic otherness, the challenge is intellectual hospitality: would we be capable of recognizing as “thinking” beings whose thought does not resemble our own? Would we be able to recognize mind where it does not conform to familiar signs? II. Mind Elsewhere: Artificial Intelligence and the Inner Threat If the extraterrestrial hypothesis relativizes our psyche from the outside, artificial intelligence undermines it from within. AI is an unprecedented technology in human history: it does not extend the body like traditional tools, but externalizes the central functions of subjectivity—thinking, interpreting, creating. It is a universal cognitive meta-tool, able to intervene across all symbolic domains. Functionally, AI is an algorithmic externalization of the psyche, simulating the effects of thought without being a subject. In the expressive ontology we have defended, thought and language are the pillars of the human subject. Their transfer to computational systems is not neutral—it risks desubjectivation. The real danger of AI is not its autonomy, but our progressive abandonment of the faculties it replicates. Not the tyranny of the machine, but the desertion of mind through excessive delegation. Two Othernesses, Two Challenges, One Shared Responsibility These two others—possible extraterrestrial life and actual artificial intelligence—force us to rethink our psychic identity at a time when the frontiers of mind are shifting. But their stakes are opposite: Cosmic otherness invites humility and dialogue—it expands the domain of spirit by imagining it as plural. Machinic otherness contracts a vital space by short-circuiting our expressive capacities—it demands lines of ethical and educational resistance. AI is not inherently dangerous—but it becomes so in the absence of discernment, regulation, and symbolic counterbalances. A sound approach to AI must rest on clear principles: Cognitive subsidiarity: entrust AI only with tasks where human thought is ineffective—never where it is irreplaceable. Algorithmic transparency: demand systems that are comprehensible, auditable, and debatable. Non-substitution of expression: preserve the sensitive domains of human language—narrative, moral judgment, collective deliberation. Reflexive education: train minds to think with AI without letting it think in their place. What lies ahead is not a war of intelligences, but a redefinition of what is thinkable. The battlegrounds of tomorrow will not be territorial, but cognitive, symbolic, educational. The future of humanity will depend on our ability to preserve the irreducibility of living psyche while remaining open to the plurality of spirit—whether it comes from elsewhere in the universe or from elsewhere in our own creations. It is up to us to ensure that these two forms of otherness—possible mind and simulated mind—become not threats, but trials of lucidity. The future of the mind is in our hands—but we must still be willing to think, if it is to endure. NOTES 1. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. 2. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945, translated by Colin Smith, London: Routledge, 2002. 3. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3 vols, translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988. 4. See Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 1: Language, 1923, translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953; Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 1958, translated by Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove, Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2017; Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. 5. See Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects; Taylor, Philosophical Papers; Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3 vols. 6. See René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, 1637. 7. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, 1677, in The Collected Works of Spinoza Vol. 1, translated by E. Curley, 213–382), Princeton University Press, 1996. 8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 1781, translated by P. Guyer & A. W. Wood, Cambridge University Press, 1998; G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller, Oxford University Press, 1977. 9. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. 10. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Macmillan, 1929; Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind, George Allen & Unwin, 1921; Galen Strawson, “Realistic monism: Why physicalism entails panpsychism,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 13 no. 10–11 (2006): 3–31; P. Goff, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality, Oxford University Press, 2017. 11. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966. 12. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. 13. Taylor, Sources of the Self; Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. 14. Whitehead; Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. 15. Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture, Paris: Gallimard, 2005. 16. A. Naess, “The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement. A summary,” Inquiry, vol. 16 no. 1–4 1973: 95–100. 17. Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology." In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, New York: Harper & Row, 1977: 3–35; Whitehead 18. A. Weber, The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling, and the Metamorphosis of Science, New Society Publishers, 2016. 19. Michel Henry, L’Essence de la manifestation, PUF, 1963. Related Articles Vers un changement de paradigme civilisationnel pour sortir des impasses de l’ère moderne ABDESSELAM CHEDDADI Read Article Knowledge Accumulation and Artificial Intelligence: A Marxian Perspective LORENZO D'AURIA Read Article

The following is the text of the seminar given at Salle des Résistants, Ecole normale supérieure, on 13 December 2024. Eudaimonia For All or On Democracy: For Francesca Albanese SHAJ MOHAN 10 January 2025 PHILOSOPHY Article PDF Untitled by Ghassan Kanafani; Image credit: Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut. The following is the text of the seminar given at Salle des Résistants, Ecole normale supérieure, on 13 December 2024. The seminar investigates the real power of democracy and contrasts it with the so called Ancient Greek model of democracy, which has a hidden hypophysical foundation. It argues that revolution is the act of interpretation in politics which reveals the tendencies of political systems, as opposed to the hermeneutics of texts. Through such a thinking democracy can be experienced as the quality of the people without the qualities of inequalities. Come back, my friend! We are all waiting for you. – Ghassan Kanafani, “Letter from Gaza” (1956) This requires something on the order of revolutions, and also a revolution in thinking – Jean-Luc Nancy, Experience of Freedom In the last occasion when we gathered here to address democracy (1) , we discussed the relation between critique, revolution and democracy. Democracy is that gathering which gives reasons for its own conditions and actualises the democratic conditions while bearing the responsibility for the critique of these very conditions . Critique in this sense is not classical, or Kantian, namely the science that determines the regularities and irregularities that are possible in a system, be it any system. Politics is not the terrain where the rules of a system in general—of any system whatsoever —can exhaustively give us an account of all the possibilities for all times; and possibilities are not sufficient for politics since it has actualities and tendencies as its conditions. Instead, critique here refers to the tolerable regularities of life that are actual or are in a tendency towards their actualisation, and critique then develops the theory of the actual conditions according to which these realities and tendencies can be given new regularities towards a people without exception . This is the work of reason in politics: to determine the end according to which a ratio is found between that telos and the tendencies. The presupposition of democracy by critique shows that as one moves away from democratic conditions, critique and the work of reasons come to an end. The phenomenon of the decline of the work of reason manifests as the fear of the people — demophobia. In two different but not distinct manners, it can be witnessed in the United States of America (and many of its vassals) and in the countries in West Asia, and it is already tending towards the development of a new global techno-totalitarianism of the Musk kind, can appear in confusing forms in its inception. We should mark out at least some of these tendencies before proceeding further. Since the 1970s, the United States of America determined what is called “Islamic fundamentalism”, its infrastructure and its soldiers (2) . Today, the US creations of the ISIS (3) , Al Qaeda and other newer offshoots of this form have been assembled by NATO member states into a global army against the third world states, and what will never be Syria again has come to be their first state of control. But these groupings can, at any moment, turn towards European states as well, which may not be perceived as an unwelcome development by the demophobes who can use such an occasion to institute the new techno-totalitarian order. Only people are free To talk about liberty and freedom is nice, lovely, but the important thing is to allow people to act in liberty and freedom. – Hassan Nasrallah On the previous occasion (4) we had found that democracy has a revolutionary principle within its very conception: to institute democratic conditions where they are lacking as well as to reactivate democratic conditions when they are betrayed from within or without. Democracies are founded by a revolutionary people, who will have to resort to revolutions again in order to restore democracy. The freedom that designates the people is that which restlessly guards the democratic conditions. For this reason, we had opposed god, gods, caste, race, force, avarice, and the One to democracy and to the people—people are never those determined by god or the one, but only those who are free as the community which guards the freedom to determine their ends endogenously. For this reason, revolution is the real power of creation in a people, who create the maximum faculties for all the other domains of creations through democracy. Heidegger said of Kant that in his conception, freedom is the name appropriate for man. However, this “the man” does not exist. Instead, what exists is the actual people, who are always more than and less than anything that can be captured by the general concept “man”, who live unendurable lives to their deaths in our societies. Neither is an individual human life free; the myth of individual freedom—the freedom to choose between two colours in an election as in the USA and most other countries—is often used in Americanised discourses to deny the people the power of solidarity, that is, their ability to constitute communities which seek liberation and enhancement. After all, Hassan Nasrallah was killed for his solidarity with the Palestinian people who are now being exterminated (5) . The laws of freedom are concerned with politics and not with the moral life of an individual in the way it was for Kant— “The Laws of Freedom, as distinguished from the Laws of Nature, are moral Laws” (6) . Target by Laila Shawa; Image credit: Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut. The drive in people to give themselves their own ends along with the critique of these very ends—with respect to the image of a certain polis , that is, a place that can realize these ends , say an x-topia or even an a-topia —is reason . Through it, that which they are able to constitute is freedom. The relation between the image of the future that is qualified as “better than now” and the drive towards its realisation remains the determination of a human life from Siddhartha to Aristotle, and Kant to Heidegger. However, the conceptual and political investments through which a certain transcendental—the conditions of possibility said to be immanent to some one or some people —is set in place as a blockage or stasis in these same thinkers of freedom. One of these forms is the racialisation of the concept of a realisable world that is limited only to some racialised people, as was the case for Aristotle, Kant and Heidegger (7) . On the other hand, the unrealizability of such a world for anyone at all is the trait of the systems of both Siddhartha and Gandhi through their distinct conceptions of the “nothing” (Siddhartha) and “zero” (Gandhi), which are both species of nihilism. Instead, freedom takes place when people are driven towards the image and the realisation of a set of regularities which are comprehended by the principle of their reciprocal endurance or tolerance (without such a comprehension itself being a function or another regularity) that creates a liveable life on the minimum. We should therefore acknowledge that Man is unfree, only people are free . The people who fight for freedom, to be understood as the power to endogenously give themselves their own ends—and refuse any transcendent orders, be they the order of god or of the USA—are revolutionary. Without a revolutionary people no democracy can exist. This fact is often nominally represented in the constitutions of what are called “democracies” by way of the provisions made for the freedom of expression and the freedom of assembly, which are negated in these very constitutions through their subjection to “limits” and “security” of the oligarchs. These limits are now ever increasing in, for example, Germany (where Baerbock makes one wonder about the meaning of ‘denazification’ (8) ), India (where protests and conferences are now cancelled by the so-called left belonging properly to the right), and USA (where protests do not have any effectivity). Revolution as interpretation They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. – V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution On another occasion we had argued that one of the essential tasks of contemporary politics is to constantly test and verify these limits (9) . There, we moved away from the popular conception of ‘democracies’, or the dominant propaganda about those systems which are falsely termed ‘democratic’, and of ‘revolution’ as the mere overthrow of one head for another as we find unfolding in what will never be Syria again, and which was preceded by many countries including Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya through the American instrumentalisation of Islam and through that as “Islamic terrorism” (10) . Any militia and priests paid for and organised by the USA and Britain—as it happened in Iran in the coup d'état which overthrew the democratic government of Mosaddegh in 1953 (11) or the ongoing NATO operation that is balkanising Syria—cannot be called ‘revolution’. When these events are referred to as ‘revolutionary’, they are aimed at destroying the very sense of this term. Now, revolution also serves an intermediate but necessary function in politics. Revolution is the act of interpretation in politics (12) . The physical, theological and metaphysical position of the power that regulates societies, or prevents the conditions for other regularities, expresses itself in formal terms— ‘democracy’, ‘rules based international order’, ‘freedom’ (13) —veiling the real conditions of this power. The real power is always a component of the social system, which subverts all the other regularities towards its self-conservation, and projects its own interests into the future as a super tendency of societies: the upper castes of India, the heads of the confessional system of power in West Asia, and the “wealth-creation” of the capitalists, oligarchs and the aristocrats of Europe. We Shall Return, Imad Abu Shtayyah, 2014; Image credit: Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut. Now, there is a reason for the insistence on pretence which accompanies the exercise of oppressive and genocidal power (and its attendant extermination wars) in the names of philosophical problematics: ‘freedom’—“they hate our freedom” (14) , said Bush who committed mass murders in West Asia; ‘democracy’—Regan would lie about the incomparable war crimes of the USA, while accusing others of neglecting ‘democracy’—“it was not the democracies that invaded Afghanistan or suppressed Polish solidarity or used chemical and toxin warfare in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia” (15) ; and, ‘rules based’—“to oppose the threat Putin’s actions pose to the rules-based international order that underlies the strength of the global economy and the international financial system”, by which Janet L. Yellen meant the dictatorship of the white first world countries on all the relations possible among all the people in the world, while the USA, Israel and Britain continue to commit genocides and unpardonable crimes against humanity in the third world (16) . Hence, we find that the depleting universities are burdened with the opposite of discovering the endogenous ends of education. They are still exhausting thought for the sake of reading and interpreting the texts of ‘democracy’ (17) , ‘rules based international order’ and ‘freedom’ to vote in order to generate propaganda for genocides and extermination wars. It is evident from this that the hermeneutics of texts cannot give us the distinction between the real power and the formal power, and the character of their relationship; in terms of Marx, “the reality and power” cannot be discovered through the weighing the reality against the formality of thought laid in the texts through their interpretation. But, for that Marx himself should be corrected and rescued from putrid Marxist parties and theologians. This was already happening to Marx during the Russian revolution: Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labour movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. (18) Here, revolutionary acts alone can discern and secern the causes of the wreckage of life that is this world and from whence our miseries flow. Revolution is a scientific act of experimentation and discernment and hence Lenin said, “it is revolutions that show us at every step how the question of where actual power lies is obscured and reveal the divergence between formal and real power.” (19) This is the clearest exposition of the 11th thesis of Marx— “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (20) . Unlike Heidegger’s opposition to Marx in favour of some more interpretation before any action, which followed from a division between thinking understood as interpretation and action/change understood as politics, Lenin had already understood revolution as the thoughtful act of intervening-analysis in politics (21) . Marx himself had insisted on the meaning of what he called “materialism” in the inseparability of revolution from critical activity— ‘the significance of “revolutionary”, of “practical-critical”, activity’ (22) . That is, revolution is a critique, in the sense of the discernment of power and concepts, in politics. The rule of the few … the economic man exists only if other things are equal. The labour leaders have forgotten this ceteris paribus . – B. R. Ambedkar, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, Vol 17. But then how do we discover the “enemies of democracy”? The enemies of democracy had been keeping democracy in chains at least since the time of the so called “Greek model” of democracy. It is true that this word was used for the first time in the context which has recently come to be named “ancient Greeks,” when it was subordinated to that construction of history which invented “western civilisation”. However, today we no longer return to the old Greek texts to ascertain the meaning of terms such as physics and energy. Because there is no ‘original sense’, but only older concepts. In that context, the term “democracy” appeared through a theoretical determination of the quality of power which corresponds to the quantity involved in the exercise of power: One ruler, tyrant; many rich men, oligarchy; add some middle class, democracy. The household is composed of the husband as its head, the wife and children as subordinates, land, and slaves. The polis is theorized “as if there were no difference between a large household and a small city” (23) However, the polis is not a large household. Instead, it is where shared common ends determine the conduct of its people, while the character of the end and those who decide it reveal the quality of the polis and simultaneously who its rightful people are—"somebody who would be a citizen in a democracy is not a citizen under an oligarchy” (24) . It was evident to Aristotle that it is unjust for oligarchy to prevail, “But is it just that the minority and the rich should rule? Suppose therefore they also act in the same way and plunder and take away the property of the multitude, is this just?” We gain a sense of the limitation of what is meant by Greek democracy when Aristotle says at the same instant: “If it is, so also is the plunder of the rich by the multitude.” The rule of a few rich men is even today the meaning of democracy everywhere, the few men rule in the name of the many whom they fear, lest they gather into a revolutionary people. Under the theoretical conditions of “materialism”, Marx was able to recognize the many marks of oppression that we find masked as ‘rule by god’, ‘in god’s name’, in the name of a racialised group, in the name of the ‘demos’, ‘irredentism’ (and many other ruses of rule) and that we find intolerable. That is, the unconscious of history is where the untold miseries of the majority of people, of all times and places, cry out to the present that they are intolerable. The Marxist imperative is to bring the intolerable to end. Antar-Kanafani, Ghassan Kanafani, 1967; Image credit: Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut. The multitude who are a threat to the oligarchs are not the citizens of the so called democracies of the ancient world and even of today’s. For the Greeks, a certain type of individual alone could be the true citizen. There is a hypophysical limit to what constitutes an individual who has the right to be free. This limit of the human animal is the barbarian, or in today’s terms “the deplorables” (USA), “Vermin” (France), “Cockroaches” (India), and this list grows as we speak. Aristotle’s distinction of the Barbarian tells us about democracy, the female and the slave are by nature distinct (for nature makes nothing as the cutlers make the Delphic knife, in a niggardly way, but one thing for one purpose ; for so each tool will be turned out in the finest perfection, if it serves not many uses but one . Yet among barbarians the female and the slave have the same rank; and the cause of this is that barbarians have no class of natural rulers, but with them the conjugal partnership is a partnership of female slave and male slave. (25) There are three lessons to be taken from this text of Aristotle: A living or non-living thing must have only one end, and thus only one regularity which refers to the law of the thing. For example, women are meant by nature—the hypophysical position of women—for the end of leaving a progeny for the man—"the union of female and male for the continuance of the species […] but with man as with the other animals and with plants there is a natural instinct to desire to leave behind one another being of the same sort as oneself”. That is, things lack polynomia as the power to legislate more than one regularity at a time; rather, polynomia must be denied. The slaves by nature are those who have the end of being subjected to the will of the master, but so are women and animals. The conduct of the master, who uses the slave as the instrument without exception, is the very means through which “the form”, or the end, of the slave as a human being born for enslavement—slave by nature—is conserved and transmitted to the next generation of the slave. The system where means and ends obtain a unity, denying polynomia, is the object of calypsology . Barbarians are those who observe equality of all and are threatening the functional isolation of people by introducing or by revealing the power of polynomia in all things. In this sense, of the subordination of women and slaves and the suppression of polynomia, politics all over the world is still Greek. The quality of the ruler, or the higher in a system of people—whether household or polis—is defined by the possession of the anticipatory system concerned with the zone of power, or desire in the Kantian sense—“for he that can foresee with his mind is naturally ruler and naturally master, and he that can do these things with his body is subject and naturally a slave; so that master and slave have the same interest” (26) . The denial of this faculty for constituting an anticipatory system, either through the hypophysics of racisms, or through the denial of the conditions for imagination and desire (privation through force) constitute the two components of democracy—those who rule and those in whose names the ruling legitimises itself. For Aristotle, only some Greek men are natural rulers in this sense, and all those who are not Greeks are fit to be enslaved (27) — ‘This is why our poets say “it is proper for Greeks to rule non-Greeks”, implying that non-Greek and slave are in nature the same. Greek demos was composed of exceptional men (only Greek and men) who possessed the virtues or the faculties of owning properties—slaves, women, children, land, and animals. And hence, they possessed the conditions under which dianonia prooran— the faculty of imagination and desire which together constitute an anticipatory system—can be developed and exercised. According to this Greek model, democracy is the power of a quantitatively larger oligarchy of exceptional men. If we translate this term into Arabic influenced Italian, it is mafia , those who are exceptional and are excused (28) . All are vanguards Our epoch is a birth-time – Hegel, Phenomenology of Sprit It is clear that what is meant across the world by democracy is not this ancient concept, while unconsciously we remain the subjects of that very ancient democracy and its norms. If democracy has to gain reality—and not the mere formality suited for propaganda—the demos will have to be conceived anew— people without exception . Here, we should begin to think of that which constitutes such a people without exception , who cannot appear magically after a revolution towards democracy if it is to be a real democracy. People without exception is a quality which can create its own quantities in politics. Real democracy is, instead, the creation of a people without exception . In this regard there are no vanguards of democracy who will form the oligarchy that will initiate a democratic revolution and bring about the democratic conditions though their judicious exercise of power; all are vanguards or none at all . The people who are able to form a democratic gathering should already train together in freedom. Freedom is the power to give oneself the ends or telos for a life lived together. Here, telos refers to the people who are the conditions for each other to exist, and for each one to contemplate the very ends of life. The telos of democracy also calls for the piety of democracy. Now, such ends may include the end of ecological crises; the end of poverty and hunger; the end of wars; the beginning of education for all; the beginning of anti-racial societies; and the beginning of societies free from exploitation and oppression. The act of thinking such ends refers to what is called the faculty of imagination. Imagination is not day dreaming but the creation of a plan to constitute a new order that is precise and testable, and hence contestable. The faculty of desire in politics corresponds to the realisation of the plan, and not merely “wishing”. Now, we hear of desire in many vague senses in political and theoretical discourses, often to obfuscate that which determines this faculty, or the conditions of desire. A child in Palestine today cannot desire a world without bombs and bullets from Israel-America. A girl in what was Syria must fear for her minimal freedoms, and even fear being sold as sex slave while the European feminist minister applauds the present rulers who came to power by killing and selling women. These rulers are the fruits of the “Islamic terrorism” invented as a ‘supreme’ weapon by the USA and now ruling over the pieces of Syria. An Adivasi (tribal) man in Kerala cannot desire a year without hunger. Unless through lottery or other such accidents (‘hard work shall set you free’), no poor woman in the first world can desire a life without the terror of powerful men. Of course, this is not the familiar use of “desire”, which is often used in place of “wish I had …”. Children light candles in a tent in the middle of the bombed-out houses to mourn the souls of the martyrs who were destroyed by the Israeli occupation in Gaza City by Sanad Abu Latifa; Image Credit: Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut. Desire and imagination are not given to all, because they do require material conditions. The poor and the middle class who work, bereft of the time it takes to think, are forced into the poverty of imagination. To constitute an image of the world of democracy requires that one possess the knowledge of the means through which the prevailing regularities of the world are created, regulated, and are subordinated to those who comprehend these many regularities. This may include the knowledge of economics, such as the effect of the transition from gold standard to free floating currencies. It would also require the knowledge of histories through which the people of many regions of the world are subjected to brutality by the first world or white nations. For example, the people of West Asia are prohibited to imagine and desire democracies. Whenever democracies appeared in West Asia, the people of the region took back their national resources away from their white colonisers. The first threat to democracies, and to the very fragility of democracies, comes from American subversions and destructions of democracies; the USA prefers subservient regional dictatorships, such as Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar. The conditions to develop both desire and imagination are systematically denied to the people everywhere, so that they may never appear as people without exception . The people who terrorise the oligarchs who hold power, are the unborn waiting to be born, from out of the masses who are enslaved across the world as the people without exception . The fear in the oligarchs is not of what we are today, but what we can become, which we must become if there is to be a world at all. The demos in demophobia is the people without exception . These conditions will not be allocated to us through the process of voting, which has long since stopped being concerned with the well-being of the people. Such conditions will have to be developed through the organisation of active political communities which educate, organise and agitate at the same time. But we should remain alert to the tendencies developing towards a new form of dictatorship, and the discarding of the very word democracy. We can hear it everywhere; we are being told that there is too much democracy, and that democracy is messy for the oligarchs of the world. The materialism of democracy When the concurrences, motions, order, position and shape of the atoms are changed, the objects too must change – Lucretius, On the Nature of Things It should not be taken for granted that the present order of oligarchic power which continues to name itself as capitalism (29) is in a necessary relationship with democracy. In fact, this is a recent equation between capitalism and democracy that was necessitated by the cold war as shown by Wolfgang Streeck (30) and others— “Capitalism and democracy had long been considered adversaries”. Votes do not determine wages, taxes, education, health, wars, ecology, oppression, food, and genocide. We vote for colours, such as blue and red in America. We are no longer in even a mixed democracy where the technocratic economic order is subjected to the scrutiny of democratic will. Rather, all the histories of failed protests against wars, poverty, ecological destruction, racisms, and inequalities show that the demos have no relation to the decisions that regulate their ever-shrinking political life. That is, that freedom without which no people can be said to exist, is “breathless” (31) . But the coming of this reality was known to the critiques of what is called democracy since the 19th century, including Lenin and Gandhi (32) in their distinct ways. It was Lenin who made it clear as to who the enemies of democracy were, The enemies of democracy have, therefore, always exerted all their efforts to “refute”, undermine and defame materialism , and have advocated various forms of philosophical idealism, which always, in one way or another, amounts to the defence or support of religion. (33) The power of democracy lies in its materialism then. The “enemies of democracy” are less invested in ending our voting rights, but they seek to annul the power named by “materialism” once and for all. Here, we should minimally outline what is meant by “materialism”, through the lessons we learned from Aristotle. Materialism is opposed to Idealism. But if we get lost in the Germanic debates on matter and Idea, we will remain entrapped by the hermeneutics of the texts, which will prevent us from preparing to intervene and interpret politics politically. Rather, we must prepare for intervening-analysis . The term “matter” designates the negation of the possibility which we found with Aristotle— “one thing for one purpose” . Matter names that which can be otherwise, that which is capable of more than one regularity and hence can receive many laws—matter refers to the polynomia of all things. The opposite of what is named by matter is calypsology . (34) Polynomia is denied through the assertion of the concept of a “ruling factor” that denies the otherwise than itself to things, or it suppresses their anti-conatus . Aristotle had proposed the concept of “ruling” or identity-giving function in all things as their principle which limits what they can be; that is, this principle functionally isolates things: “in every composite thing, where a plurality of parts, whether continuous or discrete, is combined to make a single common whole, there is always found a ruling and a subject factor.” (35) If by matter what is understood is polynomia—the faculty to be otherwise than what it is —then, materialism is the assertion of anti-conatus in politics— it must be otherwise . Anti-conatus is the very realism of politics. This assertion of anti-conatus — the tendency in everything to enjoy being-otherwise-than-oneself, and to be elsewhere —is not so simple in its implications. It took until Marx to make its first appearance; that is, to reveal to the people that history is the history of oppression , and that it is intolerable . The anti-conatus , or the desire that arises from out of polynomia, is one of the drives of reason that is intolerant of all oppressions. The liberal call for the tolerance of all incompatible positions of politics is meant to create the ethos of the tolerance of our own intolerable miseries. Anti-conatus is the drive that sees through the veils of the so called “tolerance” of liberalism, which demands of us to “tolerate” our miseries, and against it, calls for a new epoch of profound intolerance of reason. The intolerance of reason is visible in the protest movements of the past year against the genocide conducted by Israel in Palestine with the support of white or first world countries led by the USA, often called ‘the west’. From the tendencies of this visible intolerance a fear is also developing among the oligarchs in most white countries—as visible in the fascistic police actions in Germany (which clearly shows a Nazi character) and the USA—that the anti-conatus of democracy that is beginning to shape may inaugurate a world that is otherwise than what it is now. The most common class war of our era—the war of the rich and the oligarchs against the oppressed—may introduce a phase shift. While being alert to this possibility, the fight for freedom and the creation of the conditions for freedom, should commence in haste. Otherwise, we will be helpless before the impending extermination wars. This is the hour of existential rebellions . The componential laws of democracy The youth are kept as fast asleep – Taxi driver in London Aristotle said of the ends of distinct pursuits, But as there are numerous pursuits and arts and sciences, it follows that their ends are correspondingly numerous: for instance, the end of the science of medicine is health, that of the art of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory, that of domestic economy wealth. (36) The end of democracy is the endless . But we should pursue the meaning of democracy through what its pursuit can deliver. It is certainly not an instrument to achieve something else, such as regime changes or the theft of the natural resources of another country. Democracy cannot be instrumentalised, but the achievement of democracy on its way achieves much that is promised to a few, but always denied to the many: a good life, which is presupposed by all religions as undeliverable, for they go on and on about the miserable life that can find solace in the deliverance of a wealthy man’s life as the after-life or next life. In this regard, we cannot admit the notion attributed to Solon that only after the death of man, as quality of the summation of all moments of a finished life (lest he comes to have an end like that of Priam), can there be a verdict on a good life. Instead, we are concerned with a good life here and now for all, and for all those who will follow. Democracy too requires conditions or has its reasons; that is, there are certain instruments through which we play democracy. They include time, peace, fearlessness, food, health, ecology, education in imagination, friendships, gatherings, freedoms, training in desire. These instruments are both the necessary conditions and the very promises of democracy that are given to all in its pursuit, for the end of democracy is democracy itself. Rather, there are functions and components which are comprehended by democracy, without which democracy cannot be except as mere Idea . The very conditions required to play democracy are the same as those that are needed to play a good life. Such a play of democracy is the life appropriate to the human animal, and its height or perfection is the achievement of the very contemplation of ends; for the specific difference of the human animal is reason, says Aristotle. Of course, we are now playing with the term “play”. Let us limit the uses of this profound concept for now to the analogy of musical instruments. When we say that someone is good at playing the guitar we mean that this person has mastery over both the scales of music—which can be represented non-musically as stave notes—and also the fret boards and the tension of the strings, through the manipulation of which tonal distinctions are produced. From the point of view of the guitar player, music is the function of the knowledge of tonal differences in various organisations and their production through the controlled manipulation of the tension of the strings. A guitar player without the guitar is potentially a musician, but she cannot become the kinesis of music. It is as if the musician lies fast asleep (37) in her now that she is without a guitar. Aristotle would bring our attention towards it in this way: it is manifest that happiness also requires external goods in addition, as we said; for it is impossible, or at least not easy, to play a noble part unless furnished with the necessary equipment. (38) If we expand on this example, though, we find something closer to our time, or to all times. For an orchestra performance, several musicians are needed who must train in a place together, and have instruments of great quality, a conductor, sound engineers, an acoustically suitable hall for their performance and so on. This is, of course, very expensive to produce. In the Greek context, the one who contributed to the expenses of the chorus was called the chorus-leader ( χορηγός ). That is, the rich man is the cause of the music, and he is its leader although he neither trains in nor plays in the chorus. If we move away from this example to the terrain of electoral politics, everything becomes clearer. The super rich who pay for the chorus of politics without playing it, keeping themselves out of all the labours and troubles of politics, are the chorus-leaders of politics. The Way To The West Bank, Lina Khalid, 2023; Image credit: Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut. Democracy is the orchestra of the people’s desires and their pursuit of happiness. But the pursuit of happiness is not given to all but only a few, and this fact is often masked through the noise of ‘democracy’. For Aristotle, the teloii of politics and of ethics form a resonant system, and the components required for leading a good life are immediately implicated in politics, Nevertheless, it is manifest that happiness also requires external goods in addition, as we said; for it is impossible, or at least not easy, to play a noble part unless furnished with the necessary equipment. For many noble actions require instruments for their performance, in the shape of friends or wealth or political power […] (39) These components, such as ‘networks’, wealth, and political power can be acquired. Often, these components necessitate one another; wealth brings ‘friends’, and through the ‘friends’ wealth is protected or is increased. Political power is bought by the chorus leaders of politics deploying their wealth and networks. These components can be inherited, and often are, but are nevertheless acquirable. However, when we speak of the acquirable components, they by their very definition presupposes the distinction between the few and the many. Wealth is by definition the possession of resources which the majority are prevented from having; if all are wealthy, none are wealthy. Power, too, presupposes the possession of executable actions that the majority are deprived of. If all are powerful, none are powerful. The components which are by definition the apportionment of the good for the few, apportion all the miseries upon the majority of the world. Wealth and power are merely inequalities which presuppose the division between the well-apportioned and the ill-apportioned . We have been taught to accept this form of apportionment as ‘natural order’. These miseries are, more often than not, inherited inequalities . Daimons and inherited communities For they well know what kind of cry this is, They recognize the footfall of the Furies. — C. P. Cavafy, Footfalls There are unacquirable components that are given to those in an inherited community . An example of an inherited community of power and ‘good fortune’ is the upper castes of India, who are born as the minority ‘above’ the majority they trample upon, many who are considered untouchable. Racial and racialised religious communities are inherited communities, such as the sectarian groups of West Asia, the continuing aristocratic orders of Europe, and under some other names the feudal lords of America. Democracy is impossible without the destruction of all inherited communities. Now, we should quote Aristotle at length, Also there are certain external advantages, the lack of which sullies supreme felicity, such as good birth , satisfactory children, and personal beauty : a man of very ugly appearance or low birth , or childless and alone in the world, is not our idea of a happy man, and still less so perhaps is one who has children or friends that are worthless, or who has had good ones but lost them by death. As we said therefore, happiness does seem to require the addition of external prosperity, and this is why some people identify it with good fortune (εὐτυχία, good luck), though some identify it with prosperity (ἀρετάω). (40) Of these unacquirable components, we should note that the couple “good birth” and “low birth” which presuppose what we had found earlier, that these are the components that accompany inherited communities and inherited inequalities, which condition the pursuit of what is called Eudaimonia, often translated as “happiness”. These terms through which ethics and democracy are discussed come from a strange and older system, and we should approach all the systems of the ancient worlds with distinct cautions. If we take the Greek word eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία) towards its older meaning, we return to inherited communities . Happiness is to belong to the inherited community of those who are well-apportioned. At first glance, the prefix “eu” suggests “good” and “daimon” refers to the fortune that comes through a supernatural power, that is, something that is not in man’s hands. The term “eu” is opposed to κακός, commonly translated as evil, and it varies in meaning according to contexts. Κακός itself may have meant “defecation” much earlier. The more important term for now is daimon (δαίμων) as it is the one capable of daiomai (δαίομαι), dividing and apportioning between the few and the many. From the resultant inequality of the division it creates the qualities inequality, of both “wealth” and “power”. Daimon and “τύχη” in εὐτυχία, are not separable. Tukhē is the act of a divine being, such as a god or a daimon, which can result in good or bad events in the life of people. These meanings are still present in our expressions “good luck”, “bonne chance”, “break a leg” among the many which imply the values that are the very nature of all things. The etymology of the Greek arete , which is translated as “virtue”, is homologous to the name of the war god Ares . The Greek image of democracy is one of a play of powers among those who have been well-apportioned by the supernatural being, which is not that far from the world of the Iliad , in the Foucauldian sense of “politics is war”. The words “eudaimonia” and “daimon” indicate the caution needed in reading ancient texts of philosophy, which we are conditioned to approach as rational metaphysics, whereas a certain older systematic of hypophysics lies beneath the metaphysics. Hypophysics is concerned with the consecration of a value to a thing or an activity—small is beautiful, slow is good—and the distinct systematicity of such things. The classical logic of determination, which guides metaphysics, does not work in the system of hypophysics. Instead, the nature of a thing is understood to be the very value of a thing, and as one deviates from the value of such a thing, either the value-thing begins its destruction because it is not something determinable, or a daimon comes to prevent such a deviation, as it occurred often with Socrates. Daimon is among those powers that binds a thing to its value; with humans, it often prevents us from deviating from the value of the nature that we are. For this reason, destiny of a thing and its nature are both entrusted to the daimon. For Plato’s Socrates, daimon is a being that is in-between, between gods and men— “[…] stands midway between the two, being a great daimon ; and the function of the daimon is to mediate between gods and men”. (41) The consecration of value and things as one, that is nature, is achieved by daimons— “the whole is combined in one”. The binding of the meaning of each thing in its identity is gathered into the greater identity of the totality of all things and is achieved in metaphysics through the systematics which are grounded in the acceptance of the law of identity. The impossibility of this process to achieve such a unifying sense for the totality of all things (without the unifying sense no totality) is called the “history of Being” by Heidegger, which is revealed through the deconstruction of the history of metaphysics. However, in hypophysics, the unities of individual things and the totality of all things are achieved through the equation of value and nature: nature = value . The unity of the All under the One is not achieved through metaphysics, but hypophysics, and the guarding of the unity is the task of ‘politics’ understood as the value in those born to exercise oppressive power. The life and death of Socrates are guided in accordance with his nature by the daimon that is his own. The daimon of Socrates—for there are daimons of individuals, places, and even of hours (42) —often performed apotropaic functions, of holding him back from venturing into those actions that are not in his nature; the movement of Socrates away from his value/nature was prevented by the personal daimon. In the Apology , Socrates speaks of this voice of the daimon who holds him back from becoming otherwise-than-he-is, rather of the voice of his conatus (… μοι θεῖόν τι καὶ δαιμόνιον γίγνεται φωνή). It is the same voice that prevented Socrates from participating in politics, understood as the struggle for power and wealth. But not only that, it is the absence of this voice that convinced Socrates to accept his death, as you have heard me say at many times and places, is that something divine and spiritual comes to me, the very thing which Meletus ridiculed in his indictment. I have had this from my childhood; it is a sort of voice that comes to me, and when it comes it always holds me back from what I am thinking of doing, but never urges me forward. This it is which opposes my engaging in politics. (43) The concept of the daimon explains what we encountered in Aristotle as the functional isolation of each according their natures, “[…] the female and the slave are by nature distinct (for nature makes nothing as the cutlers make the Delphic knife, in a niggardly way, but one thing for one purpose ; for so each tool will be turned out in the finest perfection, if it serves not many uses but one .” The democracy of the Greek kind was grounded in the hypophysics of people, who were each functionally isolated according to their birth which assigns their nature, as those born to serve and those born with the nature/value to rule. The supernatural in this hypophysical system refers to the resistance of the few against parting with the wealth and power they inherited. But this resistance is experienced as the order of the divine and the daimonic. Even today, the qualities of inequalities grounded in the hypophysics of birth, perpetuated by inherited communities, continue to force the majority to inherit and bequeath miseries in the many names of the supernatural. But this cannot be the basis for the meaning of the word democracy! Democracy is impossible in a world of daimons who apportion the most to a few, miseries to the most, and create qualities of inequality. As we found earlier, democracy is the very creation of conditions for all to be equally the participants in the determination of the ends of a shared life, and it requires conditions and components which must be created and apportioned together, without perpetuating inherited inequalities. These componential powers, or the good fortunes, or eudaimonia, must be created and apportioned without ever re-introducing the qualities of inequality. When “good fortune” is accepted as good only when it does not constitute qualities of inequality, there will be no more daimons in philosophy and supernaturals in politics. The people who thus apportion together the conditions of life in the responsibility of reason to develop polynomia (44) are democratic; in any other sense this term “democracy” means shit. Democracy is eudaimonia for all; or democracy is the quality of the people who are without the qualities of inequalities . NOTES 1. An earlier version of the text of the lecture delivered at École normale supérieure (Paris) in 2022. It was published as “Democracy and Revolution” in Dwivedi and Mohan, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics , Edited and annotated by Maël Montévil, Hurst Publishers, UK, 2023. An excerpt is available with Protean Magazine , https://proteanmag.com/2024/03/19/indian-philosophy-indian-revolution-excerpt . 2. See Christina Lin, “How the US Ends Up Training al-Qaeda and ISIS Collaborators”, ISPSW Strategy Series: Focus on Defense and International Security , Issue No. 461 Dec 2016, https://css.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/gess/cis/center-for-securities-studies/resources/docs/ISPSW_461_Lin.pdf . 3. The hypocrisy in opposing “Islam” by politicians across the world is evident, “The sectarian terror group won’t be defeated by the western states that incubated it in the first place”. See Seumas Milne, “Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq”, The Guardian , 3 June 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isis-syria-iraq . On the RAND reports which are leading to the extermination wars in Asia and Africa, see “How CIA and MI6 created ISIS”, MRonline , 03 April 2024, https://mronline.org/2024/04/03/how-cia-and-mi6-created-isis/ . See https://www.politico.eu/article/syria-germany-annalena-baerbock-handshake-france-barrot-no-surprise/ for the meeting of Annalena Baerbock with the new rulers of Syria, who were formerly ISIS and Al Qaeda. For the treatment of women by ISIS (present rulers of Syria) see https://www.deccanherald.com/world/forced-to-eat-meat-of-babies-yazidi-woman-rescued-from-gaza-recalls-horror-meal-served-by-isis-3240586 . 4. See note 1. 5. See the report “Israel’s Crime of Extermination, Acts of Genocide in Gaza”, Human Rights Watch , 19 December 2024, https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/19/extermination-and-acts-genocide/israel-deliberately-depriving-palestinians-gaza . 6. Immanuel Kant, The Philosophy of Law: An Exposition of the Fundamental Principles of Jurisprudence as the Science of Right , trans. W. Hastie, T. and T. Clark, Edinburgh,1887. 7. Freedom in Heidegger is complicated by the many locations and functions of this term, which is conceived differently each time. For example, freedom as that which precedes and makes possible causality is different from freedom as a relation to futurality. Freedom is also implicated in the “It” which gives time and being. 8. “Germany was never fully de-Nazified. It never attempted to come to terms with the politics that had led to the rise of Hitler”. See “Why is Germany supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza?”, Al Jazeera , 8 Nov 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/11/8/why-is-germany-supporting-israels-genocide-in-gaza . 9. See Dwivedi and Mohan “Testing the State of Constitutional Democracy in India Through 'Assemblies of Freedom'”, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution , Ed. Maël Montévil, Hurst Publishers, UK, 2023. 10. Hilary Clinton said with irrepressible glee of the sodomy with a bayonet that killed the leader of Libya and theoretician, Colonel M. Gaddafi, “we saw, we conquered, he died”. The Clinton video is available on the internet, which is as gruesome and the killing of Col Gaddafi. See https://globalities.org/2023/05/war-morality-syria-libya . 11. See Mark Curtis “Iran 1953: MI6 Plots With Islamists To Overthrow Democracy”, 1 August 2023, Declassified , https://www.declassifieduk.org/iran-1953-mi6-plots-with-islamists-to-overthrow-democracy . https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1978LONDON18624_d.html?fbclid=IwAR0evrBYo3sa0qD4yyvw1lkJisXdUFizh2_ZLzJuuO-UsO3vwINRTLOXFx4https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1978LONDON18624_d.html?fbclid=IwAR0evrBYo3sa0qD4yyvw1lkJisXdUFizh2_ZLzJuuO-UsO3vwINRTLOXFx4 and 12. Provided we move away from the theories of the spontaneity and ‘grace’ of a singular event. 13. Jean-Luc Nancy has criticised all the horrors—of colonialisms and wars—unleased in the name of freedom. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom , Translated by Bridget McDonald, Stanford University Press, 1993. 14. George Bush, “Remarks by the Vice President at a Rally for the Troops”, 26 March 2004, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/03/text/20040326-2.html . 15. Ronald Reagan, “The Westminster Address”, https://www.ned.org/promoting-democracy-and-peace/ . 16. Janet L. Yellen, “Remarks by Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen at the Council on Foreign Relations”, 17 October 2024, https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2654 . 17. As we know, what is true of the evil constituted by the name ‘freedom’ applies to democracy as well. It is in the name ‘democracy’ that its worst enemy—America—committed mass murders and genocides. However, there is no word in language without the possibility of such exploitations, nor shall there ever be such a word which would assure us “ one word for one purpose” . 18. V. I. Lenin, T he State and Revolution , Tr. Gregory Elliot, Introduction Antonio Negri, Verso, London, 2024. 19. Emphasis original. Lenin would go on to say, “The substitution of the abstract for the concrete is one of the greatest and most dangerous sins in a revolution.” In our time it is also the substitution of poor poetry for the abstract that is a sin. V. I. Lenin, “On Slogans”, 1917, Marxists , https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jul/15.htm . 20. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”, 1845, Marx/Engels Internet Archive , marxists.org 21. This division between interpretation and action-change as politics was grounded in the text for Derrida, and hence it led to the discoveries of the undecidables of texts in deconstruction as a method passing for— as if —politics. We had tried to retain the force of deconstruction while opening it on to the world of things, events, revolutions, experiments, and life through the addition of certain faculties to the history of deconstruction. See Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi, Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics , Bloomsbury Philosophy, UK, 2019. 22. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”. 23. Aristotle, Politics , 1252a. 24. Aristotle, Politics , 1275a. 25. Aristotle, Politics , 1252b. 26. This faculty is διανοίᾳ προορᾶν ( dianonia prooran ), the faculty to predestinate according to the knowledge of the origin, in other words a certain relation between desire and imagination. Aristotle, Politics , 1252a 27. This interpretation remains contested as a thesis about Aristotle’s oeuvre as a whole. 28. It is possible that “mafia” comes from “māfi” or excused. 29. Timothy Mitchel studied the theories of state that are deployed to confuse the demos about the real mechanisms of power, and the oligarchs of the United States of America. Through the examples of the coup against the democratically elected, progressive political leader of Iran in 1953 by the UK and the USA, and the Aramco case, Mitchel argues that these very discussions of political theory of the democracy that does not exist creates power. Timothy Mitchel, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics”, The American Political Science Review , Vol. 85, No. 1, March, 19191, pp. 77-96. 30. See Wolfgang Streeck, “How Will Capitalism End?”, New Left Review , 87, May/June 2014. 31. Souleymane Bachir Diagne, “Breathless …”, Translated by Sophie Galabru, Philosophy World Democracy , NOV-DEC 2020 , Volume 1 Number 1, 42-44, https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/_files/ugd/5d53e3_2e51ac99f58a437e880c7d816bb0d6f7.pdf . 32. See Étienne Balibar, 'Lenin and Gandhi: A missed encounter?', Radical Philosophy , 172, Mar/Apr 2012, pp. 9–17. 33. V. I. Lenin, “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism”, Marxists , https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/mar/x01.htm 34. See the glossary by Maël Montévil for “Calypsology” in Indian Philosophy Indian Revolution . For the political deployment of the concept see Aarushi Punia, “Calypsology of Caste through Metaphorization”, Philosophy World Democracy , 21 November 2020, https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/book-reviews/calypsology-of-caste 35. Aristotle, Politics , 1254a 36. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , 1094a. 37. In Metaphysics sleep is considered as the analogy of the faculty that can come to presence, but is not yet presence; that is, a faculty has the actuality or ἐνέργεια in “the presence of the thing”. In terms of the analogy “so is that which is awake to that which is asleep”. Aristotle, Metaphysics , 1048b. 38. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , 1099a. It was one of the public duties of rich citizens at Athens to equip the chorus and actors of a drama at their own expense. One so doing was called χορηγός（chorus-leader, as no doubt originally he was, and the dresses, etc., he supplied, χορηγία. 39. ἀρετάω, meaning to flourish, or good fortune. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , 1099a. 40. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , 1099a. Later in the text, Aristotle would reiterate the argument that being in an inherited community or otherwise, which presupposes inherited inequalities, is a component of being happy, “Happiness is essentially perfect; so that the happy man requires in addition the goods of the body, external goods and the gifts of fortune, in order that his activity may not be impeded through lack of them”. But these components are not the sufficient conditions, which often leads many interpreters to assume that these may not be the necessary conditions, “because Happiness requires the gifts of fortune in addition, some people think that it is the same thing as good fortune; but this is not so […]”. 41. The functions of the daimon in Plato and other traditions are not exhausted by this account. In the Symposium, daimons maintain the regularities of the mortal world according to the divine laws, “Interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men; entreaties and sacrifices from below, and ordinances and requitals from above: being midway between, it makes each to supplement the other, so that the whole is combined in one.” Plato, Symposium , 201 D-212 C. 42. See Eleni Pachoumi, “The Religious-philosophical Concept of Personal Daimon and the Magico-theurgic Ritual of Systasis in the Greek Magical Papyri”, Philologus: Zeitschrift für Antike Literatur Und Ihre Rezeption 157 (1):46-69. 43. See Plato, Apology, 31b – 31 e. 44. This word “polynomia” was interpreted as a certain kind of materialism without submitting it to Marxism under the name “deconstructive materialism” by Reghu Janardhanan. See R. Janardhanan, "The Deconstructive Materialism of Dwivedi and Mohan:A New Philosophy of Freedom", Positions Politics , 2021, https://positionspolitics.org/the-deconstructive-materialism-of-dwivedi-and-mohan-a-new-philosophy-of-freedom . Related Articles Demosophia JEAN-LUC NANCY Read Article Women World Democracy DIVYA DWIVEDI Read Article

MEERA NANDA Meera Nanda is a historian of science and the author of several works critiquing the influence of Hindutva, postcolonialism and postmodernism on science, and the rising trends of pseudoscience and vedic science. Nanda taught History of Science at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Mohali from 2009 to 2017. In January 2009, she was a Fellow at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute for Advanced Study, in the Jawaharlal Nehru University for research in Science, Post-Modernism and Culture. She was a Guest Faculty in Humanities and Social Sciences at IISER Pune from 2019 to 2020. In 2023 she became a fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Her best known books are Breaking the Spell of Dharma and Other Essays (2002), Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (2004), The God Market (2010), and Science in Saffron: Skeptical Essays on History of Science (2016) and most recently A Field Guide to Post-Truth India (Three Essays Collective, 2024) and Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism: The Wages of Unreason (Routledge, 2025).

MAURICIO GARCÍA Mauricio García teaches at the Instituto Jorge Robledo (Medellín, Colombia). He holds a master degree in philosophy from Universidad de Antioquia with a thesis on Herbert Marcuse and the problem and possibilities of a revolutionary subjectivity. His area of specialization is the modern philosophical thought in Colombia. García contributes to the Centro de estudios en ciencias y humanidades (Center for the Study of Sciences and Humanities) particularly with the editorial team that is in charge of the publication and editing of classical authors of modern political philosophy such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.

FRANCESCA BORGARELLO Francesca Borgarello is doctoral fellow at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra and at the University of Bologna. Borgarello is completing her dissertation in “Philosophy and Postcolonial Studies”, which aims at critically reconstructing the trajectory of Indian Subaltern Studies, both within Western and Indian debates. Currently, her main interests are postcolonial theories as a means of both permanently deconstructing Eurocentric theories, categories, and epistemological structures; and developing non-Eurocentric critiques of global capital; Marxism; and, more recently, the exploration of the resonances between casteisms and racism, as well as abolitionist approaches to both systems of power.

It will not be a world democracy, since it must be the people themselves who create themselves and arrange themselves. Rather, we affirm a democratic essence of the world: peopled by all the living and by all the conversing, wholly configured by their existence and by their words. EDITORIAL TEAM EDITOR Divya Dwivedi ASSOCIATE EDITORS Simon Trüb Ryosuke Kakinami Maël Montévil (Associate Editor, Science and Technology) Aarushi Punia Daniel J Smith Kamran Baradaran Vivek Gopal (Associate Editor, Journalism and Media) Mauricio García ASSISTANT EDITORS Zinhle KaNobuhlaluse Francesca Borgarello EDITORIAL BOARD Mireille Delmas-Marty (1941 - 2022) Divya Dwivedi Achille Mbembe Shaj Mohan Maël Montévil Jean-Luc Nancy (1940 - 2021) Ivana Perica EDITORIAL CONSULTANTS Hartosh Singh Bal Abdesselam Chedaddi Katja Freistein Anish Mohammed (Science and Technology Consultant) SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE Emily Apter Robert Bernasconi Anne Cheng Souleymane Bachir Diagne Federico Ferrari Rodolphe Gasché Nicolas Idier Osamu Nishitani Philippe Roger Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback Vijay Tankha Romila Thapar Juan Manuel Garrido Wainer Robert J.C. Young Henrik Skov Nielsen Zeynep Direk ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Caterina Avataneo

In this text the authors analyze Woke culture and ideology from a critical perspective. More than a vindication of this ideology, what the authors intend to defend is that it is not a left-wing political proposal. Del progresismo al dogmatismo: un análisis crítico del Woke 29 June 2025 PHILOSOPHY Article PDF War Dolls; Image credit: historians.org In this text the authors analyze Woke culture and ideology from a critical perspective. More than a vindication of this ideology, what the authors intend to defend is that it is not a left-wing political proposal. On the contrary, its manifestations have led it to embrace capital in order to allow its own reproduction. AUTHORS ROGER ZAPATA & MAURICIO GARCÍA “En este contexto asfixiante, soy, definitivamente, una hereje y eso me describe a la perfección. No me he formado como filósofa profesional para ir a la iglesia" Kathleen Stock “Algunas ideas son tan estúpidas, que sólo los intelectuales las creen” George Orwell Sabemos bastante bien lo que implica abordar este tema y en virtud de ello es importante hacer algunas declaraciones y aclaraciones preliminares. La primera es una declaración de intención: nuestro objetivo es analizar cómo el wokismo —surgido como crítica radical a las tradicionales estructuras de poder religioso y económico— ha mutado en un dogmatismo secular que reproduce las mismas lógicas y dinámicas que pretendía combatir, no sin antes arroparse con el ya de por sí maltrecho manto del progresismo. De la mano de autores como Jean-François Braunstein, Slavoj Žižek y otros, abordaremos las sorprendentes semejanzas entre los "Grandes Despertares" religiosos estadounidenses y el actual despertar woke, observando las contradicciones inherentes a este constructo ideológico. En segundo término, analizaremos —con base en los trabajos de Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, Christopher F. Rufo, Vivek Ramaswamy y Francis Fukuyama— cómo el wokismo se ha institucionalizado, sirviendo de este modo a los intereses de las corporaciones representantes del capitalismo global que originalmente pretendía combatir. Esto nos lleva a nuestra segunda aclaración fundamental: reconocemos plenamente las preocupaciones genuinas que han dado origen a movimientos contra el racismo, la discriminación de género, la opresión de clase o la exclusión por capacidades físicas o cognitivas. Estas posturas son no solo legítimas, sino necesarias en sociedades marcadas por injusticias sistémicas, y de ninguna manera buscamos desestimarlas per se. Sin embargo, no podemos ignorar la paradoja que enfrentan movimientos como Black Lives Matter o NiUnaMenos: aunque surgieron con una raíz popular y un signo decididamente anticapitalista, al ser cooptados por la agenda mediática y corporativa, sus demandas se han visto reducidas a gestos simbólicos que, pese a su visibilidad, no alteran las bases materiales de la desigualdad que denuncian. Esta dinámica es particularmente visible en lo que podríamos llamar el wokismo institucionalizado —aquel impulsado desde las universidades de élite y las grandes empresas—, que lejos de cuestionar o abolir el capitalismo, termina lubricando su maquinaria al convertir la justicia social en un producto de consumo más, vaciando así de contenido transformador las luchas sociales originales. Incluso podría cuestionare sí, en efecto, tales movimientos son originalmente anticapitalistas o si, por el contrario, buscan meros ajustes institucionales para la garantía de derechos. Dicho de otro modo, si son meramente reformistas o declaradamente revolucionarios. Esta criba al wokismo institucionalizado tiene para nosotros un horizonte claro. Nuestra tesis es que la semejanza dogmática y la cooptación capitalista obedecen a una culpable incapacidad para desafiar efectivamente a dicho modelo socioeconómico. Aquí es donde los principios universales de la izquierda ilustrada —igualdad, justicia material y racionalidad crítica— cobran fuerza y se convierten efectivamente en bases sólidas para impulsar una lucha emancipatoria que articule valores compartidos y la concreción de un proyecto político, evitando así la fragmentación política derivada de esencialismos identitarios/puritanos, que en última instancia perpetúa el statu quo que denuncia. En ese orden de ideas, la lectura de este texto puede hacerse a la luz de las siguientes dos cuestiones. a. ¿Cómo rescatar las demandas genuinas de estos movimientos, priorizando la justicia material sobre los enfoques identitarios fragmentarios? b. ¿Cuál es el rol de la filosofía en el marco de esta encrucijada ideológica de la izquierda? Quizá el poder de la pregunta, ante verdades tan ferozmente defendidas, nos permitan ir más allá de este despertar insomne. Un despertar insomne o Excursus sobre Kafka “El mundo de Kafka es, en verdad, un universo indecible donde el hombre se da el lujo torturante de pescar en una bañera, sabiendo que no saldrá nada" Albert Camus Es una verdad de Perogrullo que el sueño reparador es provechoso para el ser humano. Por un lado, a nivel cognitivo, favorece la concentración, el proceso de aprendizaje y la toma de decisiones asertivas. Además, en el ámbito mental, contribuye a mejorar el estado de ánimo y previene trastornos emocionales. Por último, en la dimensión física, fortalece el sistema inmunológico, protegiendo al organismo de infecciones y enfermedades. Considerando estos beneficios, sería impensable que, al despertar, nos sintiéramos desorientados, desconcentrados, erráticos o angustiados; en suma, vulnerables y propensos a la enfermedad. Un sueño reparador debería ser, entonces, sinónimo de un despertar pleno y revitalizador. rage against the machine; Image credit: Unearth Magazine No obstante, lo que para unos es evidente, para otros puede ser difuso. Esta aparente verdad —a la que aludimos al inicio y que en el ámbito individual podría ser más evidente— se va desdibujando si ampliamos el análisis al ámbito político, especialmente si nos ocupamos del término anglosajón "woke" —y lo que este designa—. El término "woke" se refiere originalmente a la conciencia sobre las injusticias sociales, especialmente relacionadas con la raza y la desigualdad; más exactamente estar despierto a la injusticia racial. Shullenberger (1) señala que, en el contexto estadounidense, el racismo fue clave para articular ese "despertar". Un ejemplo temprano es la frase “Stay woke”, acuñada por el cantante folk radical Lead Belly en 1938. La usó en una grabación sobre los Scottsboro Boys —nueve adolescentes negros falsamente acusados de violación en Alabama—, un caso que se convirtió en el caso emblemático y precursor de movimientos como Black Lives Matter. Para Lead Belly, "permanecer despierto" era una advertencia literal contra la violencia racial sistémica, un llamado a la solidaridad concreta, no una consigna ideológica. Con el paso del tiempo, el concepto woke se ha ampliado y, en teoría, designa no solo a quienes adquieren conciencia sobre la injusticia y la desigualdad racial, sino sobre la discriminación de género, la desigualdad económica y otras formas de opresión sistémica. Se presenta como un ideal de empatía y lucha colectiva con miras más amplias. En la práctica, sin embargo, el wokismo ha abandonado esa vocación crítica y esa amplitud. Lejos de promover unidad o justicia tangible, se ha convertido en un purismo moral excluyente: dogmático en sus juicios, intolerante con la disidencia y obsesionado con la performatividad ideológica. Así lo evidencia la creciente literatura crítica que analiza sus efectos: más que combatir la opresión, reproduce dinámicas de división y censura. El hecho de que el wokismo se haya radicalizado en el sentido de que ha ampliado el espectro para criticar y hacerle frente a las diferentes formas de injusticia social no ha sido del todo exitoso. Ese radicalismo está lejos de ser progresismo. Antes bien, podríamos aseverar que constituye un retroceso en la medida en que reproduce, como ya se dijo, todo lo que pretendía combatir: los más destacados "logros" del wokismo son la división y la segregación por motivos de raza y género, así como el señalamiento y censura a quienes no se ajustan al nuevo evangelio de la corrección política. El uso y el abuso de dicho concepto ha hecho que pierda su raíz histórica, su sentido original de resistencia colectiva y que engendre una contradicción en tanto que no todo lo que es en teoría lo es necesariamente en la práctica. El término se ha vaciado de esa historicidad y ha devenido en ideología. Este parece, pues, un despertar insomne, al mejor estilo kafkiano. Para ilustrarlo, acudamos a las líneas que el mismo Franz Kafka escribió en sus Diarios el 2 de octubre de 1911: Noche de insomnio. Ya es la tercera seguida. Me duermo bien, pero una hora después me despierto como si hubiese puesto la cabeza en un agujero equivocado. Estoy completamente despierto, tengo la sensación de no haber dormido nada o de haberlo hecho solo bajo una delgada piel, he de afrontar de nuevo la tarea de dormirme y me siento rechazado por el sueño. Y a partir de ese momento, hasta las cinco aproximadamente, me paso toda la noche durmiendo, pero a la vez me mantienen despierto intensos sueños. Podría decirse que duermo a mi lado y al mismo tiempo tengo que pelearme con los sueños. Hacia las cinco ya está gastado el último rastro de sueño, lo único que hago es soñar, lo que resulta más agotador que estar despierto. En resumen, me paso la noche entera en el estado en que se encuentra una persona sana momentos antes de dormirse de verdad. Cuando me despierto, todos los sueños están reunidos a mi alrededor, pero me guardo bien de repensarlos. Hacia el amanecer suspiro contra la almohada, pues por esa noche está perdida toda esperanza. Pienso en aquellas noches hacia cuyo final sentía como si me sacaran del interior de un sueño profundo y me despertaba como si hubiera estado encerrado en una nuez (2) . Para Kafka, las noches fragmentadas traían consigo un sueño efímero y un despertar marcado por el agotamiento. Si interpretamos la historia de la humanidad —y el lugar que ocupa en ella el fenómeno woke— a la luz de esta vivencia kafkiana, veremos que aquella se configura como una sucesión de noches en las que soñamos con conquistar libertad, igualdad y justicia. De ahí emerge el pensamiento utópico, tanto en la literatura como en la filosofía. Pero ¿cuál es la sensación que nos acompaña hoy, en pleno "despertar"? Nada más que el cansancio ante un activismo que desgasta las luchas sociales contra la opresión y diluye la posibilidad de una sociedad mejor. Por otro lado, para el autor praguense, el sueño nunca fue un acto pasivo. Por el contrario, soñar fue sinónimo de lucha, de batalla violenta. ¿Acaso no se asemeja esto a las luchas históricas por la libertad, la igualdad y la justicia? Claro que sí: cada avance nos ha costado. Sin embargo —y aquí resuena lo kafkiano—, tras lo tempestuoso, tormentoso y extenuante de la batalla no ha llegado la calma, sino la derrota, pues estamos sucumbiendo ante un activismo que, en su lucha contra las opresiones, derriba lo alcanzado; no ha llegado la calma, como tampoco una práctica política capaz de derrotar la pesadilla de las injusticias sociales; lo que parece haber llegado es la culpa. Si Kafka despertó encerrado en "una nuez", nosotros lo hemos hecho en un laberinto de paradojas que inducen a la culpa. En eso somos más kafkianos que nunca: las reivindicaciones se convirtieron en dogmas, la justicia degeneró en purga moral y las grandes luchas se han convertido en micro guerras ideológicas. Kafka susurra desde sus Diarios lo que el wokismo calla: que despertar no siempre significa ver con claridad. Hemos abierto los ojos en la oscuridad. Por eso tenemos la fragmentación, la batalla y la derrota como rasgos distintivos de este despertar insomne. Las actuales reivindicaciones políticas, especialmente aquellas impulsadas por el “progresismo woke”, han abandonado los marcos teóricos de la izquierda tradicional que históricamente permitieron conquistas materiales en favor de la libertad y la justicia. Estas demandas universales —como la igualdad económica o el acceso a derechos básicos— hoy son miradas con recelo, bajo el argumento de que apelar a lo universal reproduciría el mismo sujeto hegemónico (blanco, masculino, occidental) que históricamente ha excluido a mujeres, minorías étnicas y otros grupos marginados. Sobre este punto volveremos más adelante. “In March, Chile ends”; Image credit: New Socialist De la metáfora a la teoría: Las críticas al wokismo Un fundamentalismo secular Si nos desplazamos más allá de la metáfora kafkiana, también encontramos directos e importantes cuestionamientos a la forma y al contenido discursivo de los paladines de la ideología woke. Detengámonos en algunos de estos. Jean-François Braunstein y Slavoj Žižek coinciden, por ejemplo, en un punto clave: el wokeness ha adoptado un dogmatismo que lo asemeja a las formas más peligrosas de ortodoxia religiosa. En La religión Woke, Braunstein ubica los orígenes de esta ideología en los "Despertares religiosos" protestantes de las colonias americanas (y posteriormente Estados Unidos) entre los siglos XVIII y XIX. Toma como ejemplo los Great Awakenings — el primero en 1730-1740 y el segundo entre 1790 y 1840—, donde identifica rasgos propios de esos grandes despertares, incorporados también por el wokismo: los sermones basados en el miedo, que apelan a la emoción —no a la razón— para impulsar conversiones rápidas; reuniones masivas donde los fieles, convulsionados por la culpa, experimentaban episodios de revelación y arrepentimiento; un conjunto de elegidos encargados de evangelizar y señalar, bajo el amparo de una figura de un Dios iracundo y todo poderoso, los pecadores. A propósito de los rituales, señala que, como acontecía en las reuniones masivas de los Grandes Despertares, en el caso de las congregaciones woke, “estas fervientes reuniones evocan el entusiasmo de jóvenes militantes, en su mayoría blancos, que, en actos públicos multitudinarios, se arrepienten de su racismo y piden perdón a activistas negros por sus pecados” (3) . Evidentemente, esta muestra de culpa y arrepentimiento no podría hacerse sin que se arrodillen y laven los pies a quienes piden perdón. Así pues, “además de la genuflexión, los woke se prestan a otros rituales de contrición, como el de lavar los pies a los militantes negros” (4) . De este modo, el wokismo no solo hereda la estructura del fervor religioso, sino también su lógica de culpa y arrepentimiento. Evidentemente, este lenguaje de confesión de la culpa (de los pecados) (5) y los rituales de contrición antes mencionados, no podrían existir sin la figura de un mártir a quien rendir culto y un clero encargado de elaborar los dogmas, difundirlos y condenar a quienes no se ajusten irrestrictamente a este nuevo modelo de santidad. En ese sentido, según el pensador francés, los despertares religiosos y el wokismo comparten elementos como la figura del mártir —encarnada en George Floyd, cuya muerte a manos de un policía blanco se erige en símbolo— y la noción de una élite, los elegidos, que se percibe como “[…] superiores (6) por su mayor valor moral y su compromiso revolucionario con el género o la raza” (7) . Estos iluminados contemporáneos intentan destruir, o como dirían en su jerga, deconstruir, la universalización de los valores —rasgo fundamental de la tradición ilustrada— e imponer criterios cada vez más identitarios, propiciando así el retorno de ideas antiquísimas, de origen conservador y con tinte reaccionario, tales como asumir que hay mejores valores encarnados en mejores personas. Toda una reivindicación de superioridad y elitismo moral. En este punto valdría la pena preguntarnos: ¿No hay aquí un tufillo aristocrático que, consecuente y coherentemente, deberían desdeñar? Por supuesto que no. Prima el fundamentalismo, no lo fundamental. Lo que prevalece es la epifanía, la revelación a través de la cual estos elegidos descubren el mal presente en sí mismos y otorgan a sus vidas un sentido redentor al combatirlo y mejorar la humanidad. El término woke —acuñado para expresar esa “[…] súbita concienciación global del carácter malvado de un mundo de dominación e injusticia, así como el sentimiento de que es urgente actuar” (8) — refleja, en efecto, una toma de conciencia análoga a la religiosa. Ahora bien, subrayar estos paralelismos permite desentrañar otra contradicción inherente a esta ideología: la dogmática woke y sus predicadores emergen precisamente de las universidades más exclusivas de Estados Unidos, instituciones supuestamente laicas y científicas, en las que debería prevalecer la razón y la capacidad argumentativa. Al respecto, Braunstein señala con contundencia que: “Es la primera vez en la historia que nuestras universidades [...] dan a luz un movimiento religioso” (9) . Y agrega: “Actualmente, es la universidad la que está fabricando su propia religión. El contenido de la doctrina woke, ya se trate de la teoría de género, de la teoría crítica de la raza o de la interseccionalidad, forma parte de «estudios» de todo tipo y se ha convertido en el centro de las actividades universitarias actuales, desplazando progresivamente a las «viejas disciplinas»” (10) . Por último, en lo que respecta a la relación entrañable entre el wokismo y la universidad, el filósofo francés sostiene que: Particularmente en las universidades estamos viviendo un momento de reescritura de la historia y de borrado de sus horas oscuras. El legado prewoke debe reescribirse por completo: hay que purgar la cultura y las universidades de cualquier huella de privilegio blanco o masculino para partir de cero y reconstruir una nueva cultura, virgen de cualquier opresión. De ahí la voluntad de acabar con todas las disciplinas blancas y virilistas, es decir, con prácticamente toda la herencia de la civilización occidental: se acabaron las humanidades griegas y romanas, se acabaron la música y la danza clásicas, se acabaron la literatura y la pintura virilitas, se acabaron las ciencias y la filosofía blancas (11) Así las cosas, bajo esta lógica purificadora, ni siquiera obras fundamentales de la antropología filosófica escaparían a la revisión radical que describe Braunstein. Así, por ejemplo, el célebre texto del filósofo judeoalemán Martín Buber, ¿Qué es el hombre? — donde se explora la naturaleza humana desde un diálogo interreligioso y universalista—, habrá de ser, cuando menos, reescrito por completo o, a lo sumo, desaparecer de los planes de estudio y del legado cultural, que más que legado, adquiere la connotación de lastre. Otra vez, se devela el carácter paradójico del despertar insomne: mientras Buber postulaba que "el hombre se hace humano en el encuentro con el Tú" (12) —afirmando así una esencia compartida más allá de las consabidas diferencias—, la epistemología woke (si es que, en efecto, existe algo semejante) niega precisamente esa posibilidad de universalismo. El resultado, como señalan Pluckrose y Lindsay (13) , es una fragmentación del conocimiento donde solo sobreviven los relatos que pueden ser leídos exclusivamente a través del prisma de la opresión. ¡En fin! Un conjunto de creencias convertidas en dogmas, los intelectuales convertidos en clero elegido que pontifica sobre el bien y el mal, rituales compartidos por una comunidad, códigos morales irrestrictos, símbolos e instituciones transformadas en iconos y templos desde los cuales —y a través de los cuales— se predica el nuevo evangelio… Bajo esta teología secular, todo se ha consumado. Consumado no solo porque el dogma se cumple a cabalidad, sino porque se ejecuta: la universidad, tal como la conocimos —lugar de enseñanza, investigación y cuna del pensamiento científico; espacio para esgrimir y debatir ideas, para elaborar argumentos sólidos—, es asesinada en el altar de lo políticamente correcto/incuestionable. Su esencia, ejecutada metódicamente, se desvanece bajo el peso de una ortodoxia que no tolera herejías. Como último elemento, es crucial destacar un conflicto inherente a la ideología woke: la fuente de religiosidad de la que bebe este movimiento no le nutre, sin embargo, de uno de los pilares centrales de las tradiciones religiosas que lo inspiraron: el perdón. Tal como señala Braunstein, el wokismo afirma una culpabilidad sin redención, lo que abre la puerta a la violencia —simbólica y física— contra quienes son designados como portadores de los "pecados originales" de la modernidad: el privilegio blanco (14) y la masculinidad tóxica (15) . Cuando el perdón deja de ser el elemento capital, aparece la obsesión por detectar el pecado, por establecer una separación entre los puros e impuros, por denunciar a los malos y purgar el mundo de la existencia de todos aquellos que han cometido injusticias en contra de los distintos grupos que han sufrido discriminación. Y así se mueven: entre la lucha contra la discriminación y la promoción de la cultura de la cancelación (16) . Por un lado, validan, por el otro anulan. Navaja de doble filo. Así queda en evidencia que lo sublime —el perdón— no es objeto de esta ideología. Y, ¿qué pasa cuando la altura moral de esta ideología no es suficiente para valorar bien la situación que ha llevado a que se geste una nueva víctima? Nada; la víctima no es quien realmente lo es, sino quien ellos consideren que debe ser la víctima. En esa fragmentación del conocimiento mencionada arriba, y en la transvaloración de los valores, pareciera existir un rasgo paranoico en la ideología woke: un alejamiento de la realidad. Esta dinámica no es accidental, sino sintomática de una ruptura tan profunda como aporética: el wokismo se desliga radicalmente de las narrativas que históricamente han unificado y otorgado esperanza a sociedades enteras, a ese sujeto colectivo llamado humanidad. Haciendo gala de sus inherentes contradicciones y desdibujado horizonte, el movimiento rompe tanto con la tradición religiosa (que promete un Cielo nuevo en Apocalipsis 21:1) como con el proyecto ilustrado-liberal del progreso colectivo. En su lugar, instaura un esquema de culpa permanente para los opresores/victimarios y una validación ad infinitum para los oprimidos/víctimas, negando toda posibilidad de salvación universal. Al reducir la justicia a una performatividad identitaria —funcional al capitalismo— el wokismo sustituye la esperanza compartida por un purgatorio ideológico sin la más mínima posibilidad de redención. Hasta aquí hemos analizado la crítica que el filósofo francés dirige al movimiento woke desde una perspectiva comparativa en términos religiosos. Sin embargo, falta enunciar un elemento axial de este Credo contemporáneo: la figura de Dios, a la que aludimos previamente. ¿Cuál es esa nueva divinidad todopoderosa que juzga y amenaza a los pecadores? ¿Cuál es el Dios que moldea la conciencia moral del nuevo hombre, la nueva humanidad y el nuevo mundo? —términos que, cabe subrayar, no están avalados por la neolengua de esta ideología—. Las corporaciones tecnológicas (GAFAM Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon y Microsoft), rostros actuales y visibles del capitalismo global, han instrumentalizado discursos woke — especialmente mediante políticas DEI— para proyectar una imagen progresista, pese a críticas sobre su impacto real en la equidad laboral. Por decirlo de alguna manera, el acto de fe de los militantes del wokismo radica en creer que esta industria cultural, extendida y arraigada en instituciones académicas, corporativas y estatales, puede erradicar las manifestaciones que, a su juicio, son "reaccionarias": aquellas que se resisten a aceptar, sin cuestionamientos, sus dogmas. Así, el antiguo Tetragramatón —YHWH, nombre sagrado del Dios bíblico— cede su lugar al acrónimo GAFAM, símbolo de un poder que ya no habita en lo trascendente, sino en algoritmos y centros de datos que van modelando nuestra «buena conciencia». Como indica el filósofo y ensayista francés Alain Finkielkraut: De Nike a Apple, de Gillette a Coca Cola, las marcas más famosas rivalizan en celo en la promoción de la diversidad, y lo hacen saber a bombo y platillo, porque, lejos de ofenderse por ello, la inmensa mayoría de la opinión pública es favorable a tal compromiso: se considera incluso un motivo más para comprar sus productos (17) . La ideología woke: las cadenas del superego contemporáneo El juego de palabras con el nombre de la célebre obra de Slavoj Žižek, que usamos algunos párrafos atrás (Así queda en evidencia que lo sublime —el perdón— no es objeto de esta ideología) no ha sido gratuito. Es el recurso que hemos elegido para señalar que ha llegado el momento de retomar los postulados de uno de los críticos más lúcidos de este movimiento woke y sus dogmas fundacionales. Recurriremos a él en dos sentidos: por un lado, queremos enfatizar en la idea que hemos esbozado anteriormente según la cual el wokismo le hace el juego al gran capital, desatendiendo así el frente de lucha más importante: el combate contra la desigualdad económica y su fuente primigenia, el capitalismo. Por otro lado, queremos poner sobre la mesa la crítica que desde el psicoanálisis y la crítica cultural hace el filósofo esloveno a este movimiento. Retomemos por un momento el tema de la reverencia que le hace el movimiento woke al capitalismo global. Esto no se trata solo de una cuestión de fe en los efectos de la industria cultural. Slavoj Žižek, en su artículo titulado Wokeness Is Here To Stay (18) , señala que el wokismo no solo reproduce los rasgos propios del fundamentalismo religioso, sino que, incongruentemente, se ha alineado con los intereses del gran capital. En lo que podría ser una evocación al famoso texto de Adorno y Horkheimer sobre la industria cultural, la ideología woke para Zizek puede ser una remembranza del mito religioso como forma del capitalismo contemporáneo. Sus premisas, convertidas en dogmas incuestionables, son funcionales al sistema: le permiten al capitalismo camuflar y, por supuesto, reproducir su lógica explotadora bajo un manto de progresismo moral. Surge entonces una pregunta crucial: ¿esta dinámica responde a una incapacidad reflexiva o, más bien, a un cinismo oportunista? Sea cual sea la respuesta, el resultado es el mismo: la neutralización de cualquier cambio estructural profundo. ¿De qué sirve el mea culpa (reconozco que soy un «hombre blanco», una «mujer blanca», «cisgénero», de «peso medio», «muy educado», «sano») si no lucho frontal, contundente y eficazmente contra el sistema económico que engendra y perpetúa esos privilegios? ¿Acaso se trata de reconocer mis privilegios sin exponerme demasiado a perderlos? Ahora bien, lejos de las suspicacias, planteemos el siguiente interrogante: ¿esta forma de ser es un síntoma de la incapacidad que tenemos para llevar a cabo una revolución en contra del capitalismo global? Por ahora, lo cierto es que los nuevos dogmas y el capital se encuentran gracias al buenismo y al virtuosismo de una minoría —los elegidos, la élite— que sí están en la capacidad — como no podría ser de otro modo— de pensar y actuar en nombre de aquellos realmente segregados y explotados, de aquellos que no tienen representación. Ante esto, Žižek nos sugiere cuestionar el dogma impuesto a través de la siguiente pregunta: “¿Cómo consigue el wokenness, a pesar de ser un punto de vista minoritario, neutralizar el amplio espacio liberal y de izquierdas, infundiéndole un profundo temor a oponerse abiertamente al woke?”. Realizar un análisis crítico de la ideología woke —como hemos intentado hacer aquí— podría interpretarse como un ejercicio incapaz de reconocer los privilegios que dicha ideología busca cuestionar y, en su jerga, deconstruir. El propio Žižek ha enfrentado este tipo de acusaciones. Pero si el wokismo reclama para sí el legado teórico de la Ilustración, ¿por qué no responderle desde el psicoanálisis, otro producto del pensamiento ilustrado? Desde esta perspectiva, Žižek recurre a Freud y Lacan para explicar la contradicción social que se expresa en inacción política: el superego, esa instancia moral que impone valores inalcanzables mientras ridiculiza nuestro fracaso por alcanzarlos. Tradicionalmente, el superego se encarnaba en figuras de autoridad como el padre patriarcal. Pero en el capitalismo contemporáneo —donde el mercado ha reconfigurado el orden social—, ¿no deberíamos esperar también una transformación de sus manifestaciones psíquicas? Esta transformación del superego bajo el capitalismo no es un descubrimiento reciente. Como demostró la Escuela de Frankfurt en sus estudios sobre la personalidad autoritaria -y particularmente Horkheimer en Autoridad y familia-, la figura paterna ha dejado de ser aquel patriarca tradicional para convertirse en un mero ejecutor de un aparato abstracto de dominación. Su voluntad ya no emana de sí mismo, sino que reproduce los mandatos impersonales del sistema de producción y consumo. En otras palabras: el padre moderno actúa como un eslabón más en la cadena de mando del capitalismo tardío, donde incluso las relaciones familiares quedan subsumidas a la lógica mercantil; su voluntad, como la de los demás, es la voluntad de un aparato de producción, distribución y consumo de mercancías. Lo novedoso que Žižek aporta a esta reflexión es su análisis de cómo el capitalismo contemporáneo ha reconfigurado los mandatos morales. Ya no se trata simplemente de prohibiciones o inhibiciones (como ocurría tradicionalmente con la sexualidad), sino de un imperativo paradójico: el mandato de gozar (Jouir!, en términos lacanianos). Pero este no es un goce concreto o específico, sino una especie de goce vacío, estetizado - una búsqueda compulsiva de lo sublime que termina celebrándose a sí misma, sin trascendencia real más allá de su propia performatividad. Si lo asociamos a las redes sociales —ese “espacio” preferido por los activistas sociales de los hashtags y las banderas volteadas como símbolo de protesta banal— “tanto Facebook como Instagram no parecen tanto una competencia para ser más exitosos que nuestros compañeros [...] sino una competencia para disfrutar más, una batalla para demostrar que disfrutamos más y con más frecuencia que cualquier otra persona en nuestro muro de noticias” (19) La fragmentación del conocimiento y de la experiencia no es sólo un asunto de la ideología woke; es en general la de un mundo ajeno a las personas. Al ser el superego una instancia abstracta de dominación producida por los hombres, pero ideológicamente experimentada como ajena a nosotros, adquiere características de dominación más fuertes a las que tenía el superego tradicional sobre el yo, sea este la subjetividad del individuo o, bajo el lenguaje decimonónico de la política, la conciencia de clase. En este sentido es que para Zizek, mientras más atados estemos al superego, más culpables nos sentiremos de no haber alcanzado la meta. Quizás no guste mucho la definición, pero se entiende el sentimiento de culpabilidad como una “forma de autorreproches, de ideas obsesivas contra las que el sujeto lucha porque le parecen reprensibles, y por último en forma de vergüenza provocada por las mismas medidas de protección” (20) . Añadiéndole a esta definición lo ya dicho sobre la exigencia de gozar (y podría agregarse también el de ser resilientes ante los castigos del mundo), los autorreproches como sentimiento de culpa no motivan la acción política; por el contrario, la impide. La culpa sólo hace que queramos construir otra realidad, una suerte de real paranoico, en el cual podamos, por un lado, sentirnos seguros ante la mirada del superego y, por otro lado, juzgar a los demás porque no se han adherido a las nuevas demandas morales del capital. Pero, ¿no es justo el esclavo el que desea al amo, y el amo el que el esclavo lo adore? Entre capital y aquellos que han despertado se dan la mano a escondidas. Todos los caminos conducen a Roma, dice el refrán; todos los caminos favorecen al imperio del capital. La criba filosófica como orientación del pensamiento Ir por un camino, implica renunciar al otro; decantarse por un conjunto de ideas trae como consecuencias omitir otras. ¿Qué hacer para que el camino que hemos elegido no favorezca los intereses del imperio? ¿Recorremos el camino hasta llegar al límite, al abismo? Definitivamente no. No podemos esperar a que sea la experiencia de una situación límite la que nos lleve a repensar cómo entendemos y hacemos política. Es ahora cuando la filosofía debe enfrentar este desafío y anticiparse. ¿Acaso ninguna filosofía, como señaló Hegel, puede preceder al mundo? ¿Debemos resignarnos a que el pensamiento filosófico llegue siempre tarde al futuro? Nuestra respuesta nuevamente es que no. Es cierto que la filosofía no proporciona respuestas como lo hace la ciencia; más aún, cabría cuestionar si su función radica en ofrecer soluciones concretas a problemas sociales específicos. Pero eso no la hace inerme ante el mundo. Más aún: consideramos que con una reflexión oportuna y rigurosa —que criba con lucidez las ideologías dominantes— podemos evitar que el sectarismo, la depuración doctrinal y la censura se conviertan en el motus vivendi de nuestra época. Aún estamos a tiempo de exponer las contradicciones, tan evidentes como peligrosas, de la actual forma de entender y hacer política, de posicionarnos frente a desigualdad, la inequidad y la injusticia. Solo así podremos rescatar los principios fundamentales que permitieron a la izquierda sus grandes conquistas históricas y contener el avance de un contendiente tan peligroso como la nueva derecha. Como Susan Neiman, consideramos que la filosofía tiene cosas útiles para actuar en estas circunstancias. En primer lugar, la filosofía puede y debe validar las reclamaciones de solidaridad, justicia y equidad que hacen los activistas woke, pero también debe exponer las contradicciones y los efectos no deseados de las formas adoptadas por esta vertiente de la izquierda, entre ellos el motus vivendi al que aludimos anteriormente y su connivencia implícita con el modelo económico capitalista. Si, como dijo Marx, la historia se repite primero como tragedia y luego como farsa, debemos preguntarnos ¿qué representa ese progresismo woke que negocia con el capital mientras se disfraza de izquierda edulcorada? El mundo de la política puede ser dinámico, pero los proyectos económicos y políticos que surjan como respuesta a las crisis del capitalismo no deben ser condescendientes ni complacientes en ningún modo. Ahora bien, la crítica a la ideología woke no basta; debemos cribar también los autoritarismos antidemocráticos que se alimentan de los fallos de una izquierda incapaz de ofrecer alternativas concretas. Hoy, cuando las guerras resurgen y la destrucción se normaliza, la advertencia de Walter Benjamin cobra urgencia: detrás de todo fascismo late una revolución fallida. El fascismo no es solo un monstruo del pasado: es la sombra que avanza cuando las promesas de emancipación se agotan en gestos vacíos o en alianzas con el poder. Despertar del sueño dogmático —ya sea el de una izquierda complaciente o el de una derecha reaccionaria— es el imperativo de nuestro tiempo. La filosofía puede ofrecer una orientación del pensamiento. Y este ejercicio puede hacerse echando mano de conceptos como universalismo, humanidad, justicia y progreso. De hecho, para Neiman, gran parte del problema que enfrenta la izquierda woke tiene que ver, por un lado, con una pérdida de horizonte conceptual y, por otro, con la radical minimización de los avances simbólicos y materiales que hemos logrado hasta este punto de nuestra historia. La izquierda woke ha criticado y desestimados estos conceptos. Esa crítica trae consigo unas razones y unas intenciones. La crítica se puede enunciar de forma general: según los activistas woke, estos conceptos hacen parte de un legado histórico que sirve a los intereses del hombre blanco y europeo, así como a sus prácticas coloniales. Si es así, desde su punto de vista, es necesario reemplazar esos conceptos por otros que posibiliten la creación de un nuevo lugar de enunciación: el tribalismo, la concepción omniabarcante del poder y la minimización del progreso que hemos obtenido hasta nuestros días. ¿Pero qué tan acertada es esa pretensión de omitir el impacto que estas ideas han tenido en la historia? ¿Cómo podemos negar que, en efecto –y por mucho que nos falte aún- hemos progresado? Como bien lo dice la filósofa estadounidense: Para millones de personas, la realidad cambió en el momento en que se abolió la esclavitud, las mujeres pudieron votar o las parejas homosexuales accedieron a los mismos derechos que los demás ciudadanos. Si uno quiere echar un vistazo a la realidad en lugares donde estos derechos aún están por llegar, no tiene más que fijarse en la esclavitud que persiste en Mauritania o la India, los derechos de las mujeres en Arabia Saudi o Afganistán, o la criminalización de las relaciones entre personas del mismo sexo en Irán o Uganda. Las ideas revirtieron la realidad de las personas negras, las mujeres y los miembros de comunidades LGBTQ que tienen la suerte de vivir en lugares donde imperan otras ideas. (21) Cuando se sacrifican las ideas y se sustituyen por ideología es posible asumir esa posición negacionista y pesimista. Es ese desplazamiento de las ideas hacia la ideología lo que ha permitido que los teóricos-intelectuales del wokismo elaboren una serie de constructos conceptuales que cumplen la función de señalar, segregar y volcar la balanza de la justicia. a Detengámonos por un momento en dos ejemplos sobre las consecuencias teóricas de este desplazamiento: Un ejemplo de esos conceptos contradictorios y problemáticos que integran el marco teórico empleado por defensores contemporáneos de la justicia social es el de blanquitud. La blanquitud deriva de la noción de "privilegio blanco", acuñada por la activista feminista Peggy McIntosh en su ensayo White Privilege and Male Privilege. Siguiendo esta línea, diversos teóricos racialistas se adhirieron y han desarrollado este concepto, movidos ellos por un interés bastante particular. El concepto de blanquitud propone un mecanismo de racialización inversa. Como explica Braunstein: El interés de la noción de «blanquitud» es que permite integrar a los blancos en una categoría racial y acabar así con la ilusión de que son el hombre universal. Ahora, son los blancos quienes van a vivir la experiencia de ser «racializados». También aquí, el hombre universal es el enemigo, ya solo existen seres humanos concretos y particulares caracterizados por su raza: desde fuera, los blancos son asignados a una raza, la raza blanca, y podrán experimentar lo mismo que siempre han vivido las personas racializadas (22) . Este enfoque implica que las personas blancas experimentan por primera vez un proceso de racialización similar al que históricamente sufrieron los grupos minoritarios. Ojo por ojo, diente por diente. He ahí su noción de justicia. ¿Nos encontramos acaso frente a una manifestación tan banal como peligrosa de una noble idea e intención? Otro ejemplo conceptualmente nebuloso está incrustado en el núcleo de la teoría interseccional. Kimberlé Crenshaw, jurista afroamericana de la Columbia Law School, es una figura clave en la elaboración de esta teoría, considerada además uno de los pilares doctrinales del llamado wokismo—. Crenshaw propuso un marco analítico, en teoría más amplio, para estudiar el racismo y el sexismo, criticando lo que denominaba enfoques unidimensionales del feminismo tradicional o los estudios raciales. Sin embargo, paradójicamente, su solución consistió en reducir el análisis a un punto de partida particular: la categoría de mujer negra, presentada como el sujeto más marginal y, por tanto, paradigmático. Que la teoría interseccional tenga unas pretensiones emancipatorias es algo que no deja lugar a dudas. El punto, sin embargo, es ¿cuál es el alcance de esa propuesta analítica en términos de la emancipación? Es, sin duda, una apuesta por la emancipación, pero en ningún caso una emancipación colectiva. Se trata, sobre todo, de una lucha por el reconocimiento y la supervivencia de las víctimas más sofocadas por todos esos males que denominan sistémicos. En últimas, parece que el punto crucial de las reivindicaciones políticas es el mero reconocimiento de las injusticias sociales. Pero ¿reconocer significa realmente un punto de lanza para una política emancipatoria? Aunque su propuesta prometía superar los análisis unidimensionales del feminismo y el antirracismo, terminó reduciéndose a una jerarquización de la opresión, donde la mujer negra se erige como sujeto paradigmático sin que esto represente un problema para ella. Crenshaw admite este límite: ‘[...] mi objetivo no es exponer una nueva teoría globalizadora de la identidad. La interseccionalidad sería más bien una herramienta para identificar [...] interacciones entre raza y género’ (23) . Lejos de aspirar a una emancipación colectiva, la teoría interseccional hace gala de una aritmética básica de las opresiones, en la que prevalece la operación sumatoria de factores de discriminación y no la liberación como producto final. La racialización del hombre blanco y la esencialización de la mujer negra acentúan así la segregación que pretenden combatir. En teoría, potencializa la identificación de la opresión en sus más diversos rostros, es una invitación por tiempo limitado para que los oprimidos se unan ocasionalmente para nombrar a quienes los han oprimido y describan cómo lo han hecho; en la práctica, sin embargo, las identidades no deben mezclase, deben ser mónadas identitarias, puras a la vez que duras (entiéndase radicales). Es justamente en su desavenencia que resultan funcionales al statu quo. Este fenómeno refleja un cambio cuando menos problemático en el discurso que se precia de ser progresista. Como señala Neiman, citando al historiador Benjamin Zacariah: Hubo un tiempo en que «esencializar» a las personas se consideraba algo ofensivo, un poco estúpido, antiliberal y antiprogresista, pero en la actualidad eso solo es así cuando los que lo hacen son los demás. Autoesencializarse y autoestereotiparse no solo está permitido, sino que te empodera (24) . En este mismo sentido, podríamos hablar desde América Latina —o desde cualquier contexto global— de la subjetividad indígena marginada y explotada como otro eslabón en esta cadena de identidades esencializadas. Pero, así como dudamos de que el mero reconocimiento sea el punto de partida de una política emancipatoria (y no un callejón sin salida moralista), también rechazamos la fragmentación como vía de liberación. ¿No sería más fructífero reivindicar posiciones universales de subjetivación política, donde las diferencias converjan en luchas comunes? Para el dogma woke —con su fervor casi religioso—, esto es una herejía. Como ironizan algunos críticos: "Un espectro ronda la academia occidental...el espectro del sujeto cartesiano. Todos los poderes académicos han entrado en una santa alianza para exorcizarlo...” (25) . Esta observación es determinante para comprender cómo las dinámicas identitarias contemporáneas han invertido los términos de lo que tradicionalmente se consideraba emancipatorio (en palabras de Neiman, de izquierda), legitimando precisamente aquellas prácticas —la esencialización y la estereotipación— que antes se rechazaban por regresivas y reaccionarias. Visto esto, preguntemos entonces: ¿Validación, reconocimiento y empoderamiento para quién y para qué? El capital global aparece como respuesta pronunciada entre dientes. Por último, es menester dejar claro que este análisis no se suma al coro reaccionario de derechas que usa el término woke como arma nostálgica para revivir un pasado de injusticias. Los fantasmas del pasado deben quedarse donde están. Nuestra tarea no es criticar la historia para exhumar viejos dogmas, sino cribar el presente: distinguir, en el espectro de la izquierda, las auténticas luchas sociales de aquellas que, en nombre del progreso, encubren nuevas formas de autoritarismo afines a los intereses del capitalismo. No se trata de atacar el progresismo, sino de impedir que bajo su bandera se libren cruzadas ideológicas purificadoras que en poco o nada modifiquen las condiciones materiales (desiguales y precarias) de la vida de las personas. Porque si cruzamos ese umbral, lo habremos perdido todo. NOTES 1. Geoff Schullenberger, “The poverty of anti-wokeness,” Compact Magazine , 2023. En: https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-poverty-of-anti-wokeness 2. Franz Kafka, Diarios , Debolsillo, 2012, p. 93. 3. Jean-Francois Braunstein, La religión woke , Èditions Grasset, 2022, p. 18. 4. Braunstein, La religión woke , p. 27. 5. «El privilegio blanco» y «la masculinidad tóxica». Estos hacen parte de un conjunto de conceptos entre los cuales están también: «expresión de género», «fat shaming» (avergonzar a alguien por su peso) o «cultura de la violación». Como lo señala el profesor Braunstein, “En realidad, estos conceptos no nacieron de demostraciones científicas, no son explicativos sino que muestran una toma de posición militante. Se reducen a la superficial afirmación de que existirían «relaciones de poder» vinculadas a distintas posiciones sociales,” La religión woke , p. 24. 6. David Román retoma el concepto de «creencias de lujo» acuñado por Rob Henderson: ideologías promovidas por élites intelectuales que, al imponerse como opiniones correctas, funcionan como marcadores de estatus moral. Henderson critica desde su experiencia personal y académica esta paradoja: mientras las élites defienden estas ideas para destacar su superioridad, son las clases bajas quienes sufren sus consecuencias prácticas. Ver: Román, Rob Henderson y las «creencias de lujo»: Sus ideas ayudan a entender una de las grandes paradojas de Occidente , Gaceta, 2024: https://ideas.gaceta.es/ 7. Román, Rob Henderson y las «creencias de lujo» , p. 20 8. Román, Rob Henderson y las «creencias de lujo» , p. 19. 9. Román, Rob Henderson y las «creencias de lujo» , p. 22. 10. Román, Rob Henderson y las «creencias de lujo». 11. Braunstein, La religión woke , p. 34. 12. Buber Martin, ¿Qué es el hombre? Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2019, p. 15. 13. Pluckrose, H. & Lindsay, J. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody . Pitchstone, 2020. 14. “El hombre blanco es el culpable de que sus antepasados oprimieran y él continúa oprimiendo a los negros y a todas las personas de color, incluso y, sobre todo, sin darse cuenta. Él es el responsable de cualquier mal que existe sobre la faz de la tierra,” p. 27. 15. “La masculinidad tóxica, que afecta a cualquier hombre solo por ser de sexo masculino, también debe ser condenada. Esta masculinidad tóxica sería la responsable gran parte de la violencia de este mundo, ya sea con respecto a las mujeres o con respecto a los propios hombres, que son víctimas de las tensiones que entraña esta masculinidad dentro de cada uno de ellos,” p.28. 16. Sobre este punto, véase Caroline Fourest, Génération Offensée: De la cancel culture au fanatisme (Francia: Éditions Grasset, 2020). La autora analiza, desde una perspectiva centrada en la defensa de la libertad de expresión y la laicidad, numerosos casos de censura impulsados por la corrección política, así como los ataques de movimientos identitarios y religiosos radicalizados contra principios fundamentales como el feminismo. 17. Alain Finkielkraut, La posliteratura . Alianza editorial, 2023, p. 82 18. Slavoj Žižek, Wokeness is here to stay. Compact Magazine, 2023. En: https://www.compactmag.com/article/wokeness-is-here-to-stay/ 19. Alfie Bown, Enjoying it: Candy Crush and Capitalism , Zero Books, 2015, pp. 5-6. 20. Jean Laplanche, & Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Diccionario de psicoanálisis , Paidós, 1996, p. 397. 21. Susan Neiman, Izquierda no es woke . Debate, 2024, p.167 22. Braunstein, La religión woke , p. 80. 23. Crenshaw, citada en Braunstein, La religión woke , p. 90. 24. Zacariah, citado en Susan Neiman, Izquierda no es woke , p. 33. 25. Slavoj Žižek, El espinoso sujeto , Paidós, 2001, p. 9. Related Articles “Piss Christ”, Internationalism, and the Night of the World: Interview with Slavoj Žižek SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK with KAMRAN BARADARAN and ANTHONY BALLAS Read Article The Real and Total Subsumption: Review of Sebastian Schuller’s Realismus des Kapitals IVANA PERICA Read Article

Politicised Bodies: We Cannot Always Take Care of the Life We Are Carrying Button 20 July 2022 Button Image Credit: The Guardian. The dimensions of existence, care, responsibility and autonomy of women, and of the care of society itself are ignored in the recent American political theatre. This decision gives a dramatic signal and reminds us how much a woman's body bears witness to juridical and electoral democratic conditions. That is, during political crises the first decisions of a group of people with power will be directed at women's freedom. Women are the sounding board for the political state of a country, they are forced to pay. These are images, memories from my early teens in the 90s, images shown on TV of the so called ‘pro-life’ women demonstrating outside clinics with signs depicting enlarged fetuses, hateful messages to women, and some blood-red liquid being poured over other women who were entering the same clinic. At the age of 11 I didn't really understand what abortion was, but I had at least understood that it could be at the root of women's hatred of other women, which seemed to me astonishing, confusing and impressive enough to try to understand what kind of logic was at play. The first logic that comes into play in this game is that of the hierarchy of life. When does life begin? At what point does an embryo come to have a soul? What is a soul? Does abortion correspond to an assassination for the benefit of the mother's comfort? Can the life to come be taken as an "absolute value" whatever be the circumstances of conception, whether it be rape or incest? These questions are known, had been worked on, but were never surpassed, since in many states of the world abortion is illegal, as it is on almost the entire African continent (unless it allows the mother's life to be saved), with the exception of South Africa and Mozambique where it is authorised. The same is true in South America, with the exception of Uruguay, Argentina and Colombia where it is legal. At the opposite extreme, it has been the norm in China for the implementation of the one-child policy. For now it is legal in India too. For a dozen states such as Nicaragua, Jamaica, El Salvador, Honduras and Madagascar it is illegal and criminalised. Thailand decriminalised it a year ago. American law, 50 years after the Roe vs Wade amendment, still considers that a woman's body and her destiny do not belong to her. The law decides on her body and thus on her health, on her ability to make choices, as if a woman's only destiny were to be just a mother. The U.S. Supreme Court is shifting the balance of what a woman can choose by giving back to each of the states of America the ability to legislate on abortion, knowing that many will choose to make abortion illegal, unless it endangers the life of the mother. (1) This decision gives a dramatic signal and reminds us how much a woman's body bears witness to juridical and electoral democratic conditions. That is, during political crises the first decisions of a group of people with power will be directed at women's freedom: to restrict them, to break them, to criminalise them. Women are the sounding board for the political state of a country, they are forced to pay. This is a far cry from the declarations of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, (2) where the need to promote women's autonomy in the decisions that concern them was affirmed worldwide, as a "right of peoples to self-determination" applied to women. It would be simplistic to think that this setback is due formally and simply to a vote by men against women's bodies. As I said at the beginning of the text, it is also a question of women opposing each other on what the body says, what it is, on the definition of a female body that is essentialized or not in its mission of gestation, of giving life. A body assigned to what happens to it, whatever the cost to its own life. Women's bodies on the issue of abortion resist secularisation, they remain attached, bound, prisoners of both a biological and religious representation of the female body. It seems that American law, 50 years after the Roe vs Wade amendment, still considers that a woman's body and her destiny do not belong to her. The law decides on her body and thus on her health, on her ability to make choices, as if a woman's only destiny were to be just a mother. The law thus creates the possibility of intimate violence in favour of a single, universal figure, the mother. The United States is thus re-launching the promotion of this image of the woman as an inhabitant by erasing the scene of procreation, by denying the figures for abortions, the catastrophic risks to women's health, and by erasing the truth: we cannot always take care of the life we are carrying. Image credit: Banksy, www.banksy.co.uk No abortion takes place without leaving a trace in a woman's history, that is what my clinical experience has taught me. In every woman's story, if the act of abortion has been chosen, it is never forgotten, swept away, suppressed, it may be the object of a repression, a shame, a modesty or a secret, but it is never counted for nothing, it always remains a place in the psyche, a marker. This act is not always the result of a deliberate, pure choice; on the contrary, it can be forced by the identity of the partner in cases of rape and incest, but also forced by a moment in life. Abortions punctuate family histories, pierce filiations and genealogies, they are the secret history of women who, let us not forget, also abort at the request of men who do not want to "keep the child". In this respect, abortions always constitute stories that are invisible in the civil registry, but which are always alive and which we inherit in one way or another. In this, we can fully support the freedom to choose without trivialising the act resulting from this choice, because every woman knows the price in her body and psyche. These stories run through us, it is a knowledge that women share with each other, a taboo that still seems to be and unfortunately is becoming more pronounced in the 21st century. How many women have secret abortions at the cost of their lives? How many are still in the United States now? Who can consider that a woman is wrong when she has an abortion? Who can judge this act, certainly the most intimate that a woman can go through? When the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Winnicott wrote "there is no such thing as a baby" (3) , he captured in one sentence that it is impossible to deny the decisive impact of a mother's physical and mental state when she gives birth. Giving birth is the most fundamental gesture of welcome, how can we believe that women ignore it? Choosing to have an abortion in one's life is, on the contrary, to preserve the sacred dimension of this gesture when it must take place for each woman, when she wishes it. NOTES 1. Which is itself doubtful as can be seen in recent new reports. See “10-year-old rape victim forced to travel from Ohio to Indiana for abortion”, The Guardian, 3 July 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/03/ohio-indiana-abortion-rape-victim 2. See the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action document, https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/Headquarters/Attachments/Sections/CSW/PFA_E_Final_WEB.pdf 3. Donald W Winnicott, “The Baby as a Person”, The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott: Volume 3, 1946-1951 , Edited by: Lesley Caldwelland Helen Taylor Robinson, Oxford University Press, 2016. Related Articles Related Article 1 Author Name Read Post Related Article 1 Related Article 1 Read Post

Todd McGowan discusses the perhaps most heated discussion of the pandemic – the Agamben controversy. If the current status quo reveals anything for philosophy, it is the inadequacies and ineptitude of the theory of biopower. Agamben in Lisbon: Pandemic and Biopower’s Reckoning TODD MCGOWAN 6 July 2022 PHILOSOPHY Article PDF The Light Inside , James Turrell, 1999; Image Credit: Wikiart Todd McGowan discusses the perhaps most heated discussion of the pandemic – the Agamben controversy. If the current status quo reveals anything for philosophy, it is the inadequacies and ineptitude of the theory of biopower. Analyses of power of both Foucauldian and Agambenian provenance support an anarchist dimension in contemporary global theory, which in its questioning of the state and capital – as if they were situated on the same plane and equally corrupt – “actually feeds capitalism’s own logic.” McGowan concludes by saying: “Anarchism’s refusal of state power eliminates the site at which one can contest this logic with an alternative.” Which is why both “Foucault and Agamben cede the struggle before it begins.” To highlight the distinction between capital and the state is for McGowan the supreme task for the Left – pandemic capitalism only urges for this task to be accomplished. Killing Zoë There are events in history that invalidate philosophies that come before them. But this is not often the case. Usually, philosophy has a certain impermeability relative to the movements of history. This is what makes it possible to read philosophers who wrote thousands of years ago and still find something valuable in their thought. Even failed attempts to apply a philosophy don’t necessarily render that thought obsolete. Marx remains a viable thinker for many adherents despite the series of catastrophes that occurred when Marxists attempted to realize his political vision. The staying power of Marx’s thought, like the staying power of Plato, Kant, Heidegger, and many others, exists because of the disjunction between thought and history. (1) We are not ready to reduce thinkers to specific historical events, even if those events seem to speak directly to a certain thinker. (2) This impulse is itself philosophical and stems from the recognition that philosophical speculation is always out of time. Every once in a while, however, an event takes place that simply gives the lie to a line of thought and the thinker associated with it. All of a sudden, a thinking that seemed potentially convincing loses all viability. This is what occurs most famously with the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. In additional to destroying the city of Lisbon, this earthquake also puts to rest Gottfried Leibniz’s theodicy – his attempt to reconcile evil with the existence of God through the contention that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Despite the discredit that now surrounds it, Leibniz’s Theodicy is a thoughtful work that attempts to explain the existence of both moral and natural evils. (3) As Leibniz sees it, because of the interrelations of all things, we cannot have a perfect world. Every good implies some evil. As a result, God did not create – nor could he have created – a perfect world. Instead, he created the best of all possible worlds. In the Theodicy , Leibniz writes, “God, having chosen the most perfect of all possible worlds, had been prompted by his wisdom to permit the evil which was bound up with it, but which still did not prevent this world from being, all things considered, the best that could be chosen.” (4) God did the best that he could, and we should regard everything that happens in this light. What appears deficient in the world is a result of the structural exigencies that demand a certain order: perfect bliss represents a structural impossibility, which is why its absence does not reflect badly on God. No matter how horrific the events that occur in this world, it is nonetheless necessarily the best of all possible worlds. Leibniz dies decades before the Great Lisbon Earthquake. He is not around to witness this historical refutation of his doctrine. But the destructiveness of this natural disaster makes it impossible for Leibniz’s followers to continue to believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds. What’s more, the event also provides Voltaire with an occasion to satirize Leibniz in his philosophical novel Candide , a novel in which the earthquake is actually the least of the evils that besets Pangloss, Voltaire’s stand-in for Leibniz. Voltaire’s send-up of Leibniz and his philosophy ends up becoming more well-known than the philosophy itself, which comes to seem a self-parody. The earthquake puts an end to the viability of Leibniz’s theological argument. Then Voltaire nails the coffin shut. Such events are extraordinarily rare in human history. Today, we are fortunate enough – or unfortunate enough, given that it involves enduring a disaster – to live through another such event. It is my contention that the Covid-19 pandemic reveals the unviability of the theory of biopower. This theory, which sees dominance being exercised through the production of bare life, is in its heyday. According to this theory, power invades our lives by creating a preoccupation with survival above everything else. In the epoch of biopower’s reign, survival and health become the only values, which take up the center of our political world. As Giorgio Agamben, the leading proponent of the theory of biopower puts it, “The ancient right to kill and to let live gives way to an inverse model, which defines modern biopolitics, and which can be expressed by the formula to make live and to let die .” (5) According to this theory, a radical transformation of the political field – from threatening death to enforcing life – comes to define the new epoch of power. (6) But the response of authorities and theorists of biopower to the Covid-19 pandemic indicates that the explanatory power of the theory, like Leibniz’s theodicy in the face of the Lisbon Earthquake, cannot survive our contemporary disaster. The attempt to save lives – to make live, in Agamben’s terms – cuts against the economic imperatives of capitalism. The efforts to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 put a wrench in the accumulation of capital. As a result, as much as any of the human victims of this disaster, the theory of biopower succumbs to its ravages. The Covid-19 pandemic gives the lie to the theory of biopower because the prevailing responses to the pandemic reveal the tension between survival and the exigencies of the ruling socioeconomic system. The attempt to preserve life – what the theorists of biopower view as the primary operation of power – in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic actually interrupts and disturbs the functioning of capitalism. The capitalist system finds itself unable to deal with the massive threat to life, which reveals that the ruling structure today is not one of biopower at all. Instead of aiding in the process of capitalist accumulation, the measures designed to address the pandemic operate as a brake on the capitalist system. At the moment when it imposes on the economy, state power ceases to work hand-in-hand with the forces of capital. Thus, the pandemic and the response to it show that the theory of biopower marks a fundamental theoretical misstep, a misstep that has had baleful political consequences. The attempt to preserve life during the Covid-19 pandemic leads to a series of measures that interrupt the flow of capital: social distancing that limits possibilities for exchange, lockdowns that close retail establishments and keep consumers in their homes, and mask mandates that disturb the everyday activities that sustain the economy. The leaders of capitalist states institute these measures in the name of allowing citizens to continue to live, but they recognize that such measures have a deleterious effect on the economy, which is why they occasion so much resistance, especially from right-wing proponents of unbridled capitalism. Leaders employ them reluctantly because they have no interest in damaging the capitalist economy that runs their societies, but the exigencies of people’s survival depends on these state interventions. In this way, the conflict between the exercise of state power and the capitalist economy comes to a head in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In the midst of this response, it becomes clear that there is no pure exercise of biopower because there is no single site of authority. The divide between the state and capital comes to a head when disaster strikes, which is what the theory of biopower fails to account for. Giorgio Agamben; Image Credit: La città immaginaria Rather than confronting this discrepancy between the state and capital, Agamben proclaims that capital simply capitulates before the power of the biosecurity regime that now controls the state. For Agamben, it is this regime, not capital, that holds the cards today. In Where Are We Now? , he writes, “Capitalism, for its part, has with only a few exceptions accepted loses to productivity that it would never previously have considered, probably hoping that later on it can find an accord with the new religion [of medicine].” (7) As Agamben frames it here, capitalism is not the strongest force in contemporary society. The pandemic shows that it bows before the exigencies of what he calls the religion of medicine. But this position underestimates the dominance that capitalism typically has over the state. It is not a secondary force in our existence but the primary one. The provenance of the resistance against the measures instituted to protect against the pandemic indicates their political bearing. The resistance movements are not emancipatory efforts struggling against the ruling order. They are not fights against an oppressive power structure. Instead, the resistance against the measures used to fight the pandemic stem from those who champion the free flow of capital, from business owners and libertarians to Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. The political fault line during the pandemic separates those who side with the forces of capital and those opposing unbridled capitalism. The former fight the restrictions, and the latter embrace their necessity. Confronted with being on the side of Trump and Bolsonaro, Agamben claims that we live in politically confused times, where Right and Left lose their straightforward significance. He then claims, “A truth remains such, whether it is expressed by the Left or enunciated by the Right.” (8) While this seems like a neutral statement about the nature of truth, it is actually an indication of Agamben’s turn to the Right. The leftist understanding of truth necessarily includes the site of enunciation as integral to the truth being articulated. For instance, it is a far different matter when Donald Trump denounces the exploitative practices of Jeff Bezos and a union leader does so. Trump says this to damage a competitor while the union leader says it as part of a collective struggle against the forces of big capital. Trump uses the truth to lie because of the desire driving the statement, whereas this is not the case with the union leader. The desire that informs the statement of truth – why one is saying it – is part of what one says. To fail to take this into account, as Agamben fails to do, is to play into the hands of the Right, which must ignore the logic of desire. The fact that Agamben finds himself on the same side as Trump and Bolsonaro in response to the pandemic points to the error in biopower’s conception of politics. For the theorists of biopower, the struggle is always against power, which is typically manifested in the state. With the pandemic, however, a split opens up between the state and the forces of capital. The site of power itself becomes clearly divided. This is a divide that the theorists of biopower have difficulty reckoning with, which is why, aside from a brief comment about capitalism’s capitulation to the forces of biosecurity, Agamben remains silent about capitalism during the pandemic. Stating the Obvious The theory of biopower emerges in response to the evanescence of Marxism. Although Michel Foucault dies in 1984, it is Giorgio Agamben who popularizes the theory in the 1990s in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the theoretical abandonment of Marxism on the Left. But despite distancing itself from Marxism, the theory of biopower takes up the Marxist attitude toward the state. Marxism has an inherent suspicion of the state. This is because it sees the state as inherently the bourgeois state, as a function of the capitalist relations of production that underwrite it. As a result, from this perspective, all efforts to work within the state structure are doomed from the beginning. The only hope lies in ultimately moving beyond the state, in escaping capitalism’s demands by escaping the state that corresponds to this economic form. (9) Marx’s own pessimism about state-level interventions gains its most cogent expression in his early work. The state is part of the ideology that The German Ideology aims at tearing down. In this work, Marx and Friedrich Engels claim that the state is nothing but an illusory form of appearance that hides the underlying reality of class conflict. State power simply expresses the rule of the capitalist class. They write, “all struggles within the state, the struggle between democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, the struggle for the franchise, etc., etc., are merely the illusory forms – altogether the general interest is the illusory form of common interests – in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought out among one another.” (10) Fighting for democracy against authoritarian rule has no chance for creating substantive change because the realm of capitalist economy is the only substantial arena. To change the society, one must directly confront the economic structure. This is Marxism’s unequivocal verdict on the state. One of the reasons that political thinkers turned to Foucault after the fall of the Soviet Union and the death of actually existing socialism is that his emphasis on power breaks from Marxism’s myopic focus on the economy to the exclusion of all other domains. Power works through religion, education, politics, and every possible field, in addition to the economy. The turn to an analysis of power looks at economy in terms of the role that it plays in subjecting people to coercive control, just as the state or the religious institution does. While the shift in focus from economy to power broadens the site of inquiry, it does nothing to further penetrate into how capitalism and the state work in relation to each other. This remains a blind spot that the theory of biopower inherits from Marxism, although it inverts the relation. The turn from economy to power leaves Foucault and the other theorists of biopower especially ill-equipped to analyze the structures of the capitalist social order. Capitalism does not rule through its deployment of power but through inserting itself into subjects’ desire, which is a term that Foucault explicitly rejects. (11) By focusing on power, Foucault misses what drives subjects to commit themselves to capitalist society. It is not the power that capitalism has over them but the way that it entices their desire. Capitalism doesn’t issue threats or commands but rather entices with the promise of an unlimited satisfaction that the commodity will provide. One invests oneself in capitalism for the promise of a future satisfaction that will never come. The impossibility of the future that capitalism holds out before us doesn’t detract from its appeal but augments it. We strive for what we cannot attain and never cease striving because the fail is the fuel for our desire. While the capitalist economy occasionally imposes its power on people, this is an entirely secondary operation. It rules through the logic of desire, not the discourse of power. As long as Foucault and Agamben analyze the working of power, they will miss what keeps capitalism going, including the relationship that develops between capitalism and the state. Michel Foucault at home; Image Credit: Martine Franck/Magnum Photos What Foucault and his inheritors have in common with Marxism is the belief that the state is always an oppressive force. What characterizes Foucault’s thought – along with that of other theorists of biopower such as Agamben and Roberto Esposito – is that he doesn’t distinguish between capitalism and the state. Foucault and the other theorists of biopower do not often mention capitalism because they do not see it as distinct from the power of the state. In contrast to Marx, these figures do not see the state as simply the expression of capital’s self-interest. Instead, they make no distinction at all. Both are expressions of power, and power is the enemy. The inability to theorize capital’s dominance in an epoch when it manifests itself everywhere is the primary weakness of the theory of biopower. If Marxism reduces the state to capital, the theory of biopower does the reverse, which is an even more grievous error because the primary danger today is danger to the state not of the state. While Agamben worries a great deal about the expansion of state power, he remains relatively silent about the role that capitalist logic plays in people’s subjugation. There is no sense that capitalism, not state power, represents the fundamental threat confronting humanity today. There is no insistence that the project of emancipation must, first and foremost, take on the forces of capital in order to confront this threat. In fact, Agamben’s interventions during the Covid-19 disaster bespeak his absolute resistance to any expression of state power even if it might act as a brake on capitalist accumulation. As he sees it, any exercise of power by the state in the name of preserving life has the effect of reducing persons to the status of bare life, of extending the regime of biosecurity through the announcement of a state of exception. Authorities take advantage of any occasion – something like a pandemic, for instance – to increase control over life. This is the only danger that they recognize. Foucault and his inheritors interpret the contemporary form of power as fundamentally different from the punitive authority that precedes it. The theory of biopower originates with Foucault in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it is Agamben who really brings it to prominence almost two decades later. According to Foucault, we live now in the aftermath of a fundamental transformation in the way that power operates. In his lecture series at the Collège de France entitled Society Must Be Defended , Foucault announces the shift from a regime of sovereignty to one of biopower. Sovereignty rules through prohibitions but leaves subjects alone if they don’t transgress these limits, while biopower rules through insinuating itself into every aspect of a subject’s life. Under the regime of biopower, no one is ever left alone for even the briefest moment. As Foucault conceives it, the transition that takes place involves a change in authority’s attitude toward life and death. Rather than threatening death for disobedience, the regime of biopower demands that subjects live according to its dictates. Power shifts its focus from death to life. Foucault states, “Sovereignty took life and let live. And now we have the emergence of a power that I would call the power of regularization, and it, in contrast, consists in making live and letting die.” (12) This historical change does not, in Foucault’s mind, represent progress. Quite the opposite. It marks an increase in control, as power enacts the production of life rather than just threatening subjects with death if they disobey. We can see an example of biopower producing life today in the Apple Watch. This apparatus constantly monitors one’s level of fitness – checking the pulse, blood oxygen saturation, calories burned, and heart arrythmias. The watch can even call for an ambulance if it detects that the wearer has fallen. People invest in it for the healthy lifestyle that it promises, but by doing so, they unwittingly participate in the logic of biopower. As a site of biopower, the Apple Watch produces a subject utterly preoccupied with its survival. The company advertises this product with the slogan: “The future of your health is on your wrist.” The Apple Watch makes live – it forces constant attention to life on us – and is thus evidence that Foucault’s nightmare has become our everyday reality. By highlighting this example of what appears as biopower, the problem with the theory already becomes apparent. The concern for healthy life – making live – in this instance doesn’t emanate from the state but from capital. While it is true that contemporary capitalism demands that subjects concern themselves with sustaining their lives, this is not necessarily a preoccupation of the state, despite the focus of biopower’s theorists on the state. This lacuna exposes just how the theory of biopower leads us astray. Fight the Power Foucault is not the end point of theorizing biopower. In the late 1990s, Agamben takes up the baton and links the structure of biopower to the logic of the concentration camp, which he sees as the paradigmatic site for modernity. While he follows Foucault in his conception of biopower as the productive power to make live, Agamben departs from Foucault on the question of sovereignty. Where Foucault sees sovereign power transforming into biopower, Agamben theorizes sovereignty as integral to the functioning of biopower. He envisions no contemporary abandonment of sovereignty. It is instead sovereign power itself that relies on the production of life. Agamben focuses on the state as the site from which biopower deploys itself. He sees sovereignty as an essential foundation for the expression of biopower. In Agamben’s most important work, Homo Sacer , he articulates this link between sovereignty and biopower, a link that challenges Foucault’s conception of a radical transformation from one into the other. Agamben states, “the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original – if concealed – nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power .” (13) Sovereignty here is essential to the productivity of biopower. But the problem remains the same as it is for Foucault. Politics becomes concerned with life and thereby impinges on our ability to simply live. It has always been tough to pin down where we should locate Foucault and Agamben politically. Their focus on power clearly distances them from classical Marxism, but, on the other hand, they see liberal democracy as a political dead end. We can see a clue to their ultimate political position in their analysis of power, an analysis that betrays an allergy to power. This allergy lets us know that Foucault and Agamben, no matter what they claim about their political position, are actually anarchists. Their analyses of power implicitly lay out this anarchism. (14) Foucault and Agamben view the exercise of power as form of dominance that we should distance ourselves from. (15) Throughout their analysis of changes in the operations of power, what remains the same is the belief that power is illegitimate violence. This leads to seeing the state as anathema. Agamben makes this clear in The Coming Community , where he envisions future political struggle between power (represented by the state) and singularity. He writes, “ The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization .” (16) Agamben champions what he calls “whatever singularity” because it does not involve itself with power over others, which is implicit in the functioning of the state. State organization reduces humans to instruments that can have no autonomy. It is only a nonorganized and loose coming together that might manage to avoid the violence of power and respect whatever singularity. Divide, Theodoros Stamos, 1958; Image Credit: Wikiart The problem with anarchism as a political position is that rather than challenging the way that capitalism functions, it actually feeds capitalism’s own logic. Anarchism’s refusal of state power eliminates the site at which one can contest this logic with an alternative. Although the contemporary state operates largely in support of capitalist relations of production, this is not the only possibility for the state or some equivalent structure. Anarchism gives up the possibility of challenging capital through the only power possibly equal to it. Both Foucault and Agamben cede the struggle before it begins. The fundamental task for the Left in the capitalist epoch is to highlight the distinction between capital and the state. While capital often uses the state to support its expansion, its relation to the state is always tenuous. Capital and the state are never identical, which is what both Marxism and the theorists of biopower miss. The tenuousness of their relationship provides an avenue for political intervention. It is in times of crisis that the tension between capital and the state becomes most pronounced and creates an ideal moment for action. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the distance between capital and the state blows wide open. In order to respond to the crisis, states around the world resort to measures that stop the flow of capital and restrict the functioning of capitalist society. The state’s attempt to ensure the survival of its citizens – to “let live,” in the words of Foucault – take on a clearly anticapitalist hue. Biopower, if that is what we must call it, reveals itself as an opponent of unbridled capitalism rather than as capitalism’s handmaiden. States make emergency payments to all citizens, freeze evictions, expand free medical care, offer state-funded child care, and close businesses. These are not actions that benefit capital. At this point, the power of the state and the interests of capital come into opposition. The theorists of biopower have no way to account for this division, which is why Agamben’s response to the pandemic is so woeful. Unable to recognize the potential radicality of the split between state power and the forces of capital, Agamben lumps both together under the rubric of biopower and launches a series of diatribes against its expansion during the Covid-19 pandemic. When he does discuss the difference, he laments capitalism’s capitulation to the state and its regime of biopower. These diatribes show the failure of the theory of biopower to think through the politics of capitalist society in crisis. But more than this, Agamben’s reactions to the pandemic highlight fundamental missteps that have always been present but never fully apparent. The pandemic reveals that the theory of biopower is not a theory of emancipation after all but rather a theory that supports the workings of capital. Agamben with Trump One of the most shocking conjunctions occurring in the responses to the Covid-19 pandemic was that of Donald Trump with Giorgio Agamben. Although Agamben’s politics may be difficult to discern, no one would imagine him as a Trump supporter. Agamben’s critique of biopower has led him in the past to a vehemently anti-American position because he associates the American War on Terror with the most grotesque exercises of biopower. In State of Exception , Agamben goes so far as to equate George W. Bush’s indefinite detaining of enemy combatants in an extralegal prison in Guantanamo Bay with Adolf Hitler’s decision to place Jews in concentration camps. (17) The extremes of the American War on Terror so offend Agamben that, after the institution of new radical border policies in the United States, he refuses to come at all as a protest against reactionary American extremism. (18) However, this suspicion of American political activity transforms into finding common cause with the conservative American leadership of Donald Trump during the Covid-19 epidemic. (19) In a series of short texts intervening in the politics of the pandemic (which were collected, along with some additional short texts and interviews, in Where Are We Now? ), Agamben vehemently denounces almost all of the attempts to stop the spread of the disease. According to his analysis, these measures indicate just how far the society has sunk into the morass of biopower, how it has given itself over to an antisocial force that rules without regard for sustaining the social bonds that make life worth living. Making live becomes the justification for a new regime of constraint that so deforms society that we will no longer recognize it. He writes, “Having replaced politics with the economy, now in order to secure governance even this must be integrated with the new paradigm of biosecurity, to which all other exigencies will have to be sacrificed. It is legitimate to ask whether such a society can still be defined as human or whether the loss of sensible relations, of the face, of friendship, of love can be truly compensated for by an abstract and presumably completely fictitious health security.” (20) In the effort to ensure survival, the state shatters human relations during the Covid-19 pandemic. As Agamben sees it, the responses to the pandemic have the effect of stealing the most precious treasures of human coexistence – the bonds of friendship and love. The state’s intervention that occurs in the name of biosecurity merely uses the pandemic as a justification for its new intrusions into life. But what doesn’t make sense in Agamben’s critique is his insistence that economics now trumps all politics. The state’s response to the pandemic does not reflect the displacement that he fears but rather indicates a moment where politics gains traction over the economy. Agamben’s analysis is revelatory insofar as it gets the situation precisely backwards. The state’s political interventions occur in spite of the damage that they do to the capitalist economy. The pandemic prompts a political decision that interrupts capital’s dominance. But Agamben fails to see this because he doesn’t separate theoretically the workings of the state from those of capital, which is the defining error of the theory of biopower. At various points, Agamben rails against social distancing, lockdowns, and even mask mandates. All of the means that states use to fight against the explosion of the pandemic receive his scorn, and none receive his endorsement. If Agamben had his way, the vulnerable would simply be left to die, but at least they would die outside the paradigm of biopower. (21) As Agamben sees it, the responses represent the choice of preserving bare life over sustaining a form of life, which renders them complicit with the contemporary dominance of biopower. (22) Opting for survival over a livable form of life leaves us with a world in which no one can live. Or, as Agamben puts it in one of his short texts on the pandemic, “Bare life – and the danger of losing it – is not something that unites people, but blinds and separates them. Other human beings … are now seen solely as possible spreaders of the plague whom one must avoid at all costs and from whom one needs to keep oneself at a distance of at least a meter.” (23) Agamben attacks the distancing used to stop the spread of the disease. As he sees it, social distancing is the worst type of oxymoron: distance entails the annihilation of sociality. Social and distance have nothing to do with each other. But here we can begin to see the error that runs through Agamben’s critique of the response to the pandemic and that ultimately undermines the theory of biopower. Both Foucault and Agamben exhibit a blindness to the role that mediation plays in social relations, a mediation that works through distance. By keeping a distance from each other, we do not act antisocially. Instead, we uphold the social bond insofar as we utilize forms of mediation. Sociality occurs when I exchange letters, have a conversation, or engage in a discussion. All of these forms of sociality rely on the mediation of language, which connects us to each other by separating us. The mediation of language provides the basis for the social bond, but it does so at the cost of actual proximity. When I relate to the other through words, these words enact a barrier between us, but this barrier is an enabling one. This mediation creates the bond through distance and enable the bond to exist through the separation that subjects have from each other. Social distance makes sociability possible through the creation of an interstitial space that mediates between the various subjects. A Guerra, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, 1942; Image Credit: Wikiart I can interact with the other because the mediation of the public world gives me breathing space where the other is not over-present. In contrast to familial relations that involve proximity, the social bond holds us together through distance. Far from being an oxymoron, social distance represents the only possible form of sociality. The move from proximity to distance is the move from the closed connection of the family to the open bond of the society. Instead of recognizing distance as the sine qua non of sociality, Agamben ties our social being to proximity, which is why he recoils from the term social distance . The inability to recognize the necessity of mediation is also operative in Agamben’s critique of the state. He fails to see that the state is not just a sovereign authority. It represents the ultimate end point of mediation, providing a terrain on which subjects can engage with each other without simply colliding. (24) The state form signifies the connection that holds the society together. While the state can certainly act oppressively, its formal status as the signifier of the social bond does not inherently entail any oppressive expression of power. It is precisely the formal status of the state and of all mediation that Agamben misses in his critique of social distancing. The theory of biopower fails to recognize that the power of the state is not just oppressive but also constitutive of modern subjectivity. Agamben’s critique doesn’t stop with social distancing. From the very beginning of the pandemic, Agamben speaks out against the various lockdowns used to try to stem its spread. In “The Invention of an Epidemic,” he writes, “in a perverse vicious circle, the limitations of freedom imposed by governments are accepted in the name of a desire for safety that was created by the same governments that are now intervening to satisfy it.” (25) It is clear that Agamben is not wrong to fear that calls for safety often serve as the cover for mechanisms of oppressive interventions. But just because safety can function ideologically doesn’t mean that it necessarily does, as Agamben assumes. Agamben fails to distinguish between a state protecting citizens from a natural disaster and a state arming itself against an external enemy. The protection of citizens against a natural disaster brings out the formal function of the state, the state as a site of mediation, whereas foreign wars require the evocation of the state’s national content, the nation as a site of identification. The inability to see this distinction inevitably leads the thinker astray. In order to gin up enthusiasm for foreign wars, the state must call for nationalist pride, which foments the logic of us versus them and mobilizes an investment in the state as an oppressive force. In order to be the site of nationalist pride, the state must not just be a form. It must have a substantial content, and this content is always ideological. This is what is missing when the state acts as a pure form in response to a natural disaster. Rather than serving as a source of nationalist pride, the lockdowns spur a universalizing connection that the state form signifies. No one feels exceptional in a lockdown, which is why right-wing protesters inveigh against the state when it orders lockdowns but not when the state declares war. This distinction is one that should preoccupy our thinking much more than it does. Finally, Agamben’s critique also extends to the mask mandate. It seems as if the mask mandate would have nothing to do with the biopolitics. It is a measure designed to allow for more of the freedom of movement during the pandemic, which is what Agamben claims that he wants. But nonetheless, he includes a critique of masks in his diatribe against the measures taken to stem the effects of the pandemic. In an essay entitled “When the House Burns,” he writes, “The face is the most human thing; the human has a face and not simply a muzzle or a snout because we dwell in the open, because in our faces we expose ourselves and communicate. This is why the face is the place of politics. Our impolitical time does not want to see its own face; keeps it at a distance, masks and covers it. There must be no more faces, only numbers and figures. Even the tyrant is faceless. ” (26) Covering the face, for Agamben, represents a betrayal of politics for the sake of tyranny. (27) Agamben’s attempt to link the exposed face to humanity misses the role that masks play in the constitution of subjectivity. One becomes a subject through putting on a mask, not through exposing one’s face. The subject emerges through its ability to lie, to present a fiction that separates the subject from its environment. Without the mask, without the obfuscation that distances subjectivity from those around it, there is no space for the subject’s freedom. While the mask can allow one to act maliciously, it also provides a realm invisible to any prying eyes. Like social distancing, the mask plays a constitutive role in the formation of a public world. If no one wore a mask and simply revealed a private self in every public interaction, no public interaction would be possible. The public world exists because I withhold my private views, which is what the film comedy Liar Liar (Tom Shadyac, 1997) shows. The great achievement of this film is that it exposes the impossibility of public existence without a mask. (28) The film’s hero, Fletcher Reede (Jim Carrey) must spend an entire day incapable of lying, thanks to a curse levelling by a son exasperated with his deceitful father. Forced to live without a mask and constantly reveal what he’s thinking, Reede is simply incapable of interacting with anyone. He reveals his judgments on the appearance of his coworkers and his views of the incompetence of those around him. When a woman asks him how he likes her new dress, he looks at her unusual haircut and responds, “Whatever takes the focus off your head.” He then insults an overweight man and remarks on the existence of a pimple on another’s face. Such disturbances continue in every interaction he has. As a result, no one can tolerate his presence. He lives unmasked, and no one can bear to be around him. The film illustrates that life without a mask condemns us to privacy overwhelming and swallowing up the public world. The alignment of the mask with the public world is essential to its political valence. The mask is not the evanescence of politics, as Agamben would have it. It is the genesis of politics because it establishes the distance from the private world in which political struggle can take place. The public world is a world of masks, not a world where we bare our private selves. The political terrain is not that of competing private interests – this is the conservative vision – but instead that of the struggle to enact a form of universality. This is a struggle that can only take place in public among those masking their private selves. Agamben’s hostility to the mask is the extension of his hostility to any form of mediation, but it is mediation that is the ground of politics. The tyrant, contra Agamben, isn’t faceless. The tyrant, as Donald Trump shows, is the one who refuses to cover his face, who insists that his face must remain visible. Tyrants plaster their faces all over their domain in order to show not their political position but an image that resides beyond the political and that constitutes the basis of their rule. (29) Trump refuses to wear a mask because he refuses to engage in political struggle. He demands allegiance to his private self rather than political struggle taking place in public. Like Agamben, Trump does not care for how the mask interferes with the social bond. He explicitly invokes this when describing his own refusal to wear one. On April 3, 2020, he says, “ I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens – I don’t know, somehow I don’t see it for myself. I just, I just don’t.” (30) As Trump laments the aesthetic damage that a mask does, he makes an objection related to that of Agamben. But in Trump’s case, the mask represents a political position that he wants to remain aloof from. To be masked is to be thrust into a public world of political contestation. Although Trump has different reasons for attacking to the various responses to the pandemic, he nonetheless echoes Agamben’s critique. He comes out against social distancing, lockdowns, and mask mandates because he sees all these measures as irresponsible disruptions of economic freedom. When various parts of the United States locked down to stop the spread of the disease, he tweeted, “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.” (31) Trump is not a theorist of biopower, but he does share with such theorists a belief that the state response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been itself another disaster. Trump and Agamben are not politically aligned. But their proximity on the response to the pandemic should give us pause when thinking about the theory of biopower. No one is simply guilty by association, but Agamben’s response to the pandemic mirrors Trump’s too precisely not to garner attention. Trump’s resistance to the measures that other countries used to effectively combat the spread of Covid-19 led to thousands of needless deaths in the United States. Refusing any exercise of state power out of a fear of expanding the reach of biopower amounts to implicitly taking up Trump’s attitude and contributing to the ravages of the disease. But even more significantly, it entails missing the role that the state form or the state as a form can play in combatting the ravages of contemporary capitalism. Ned Kelly, Sidney Nolan, 1946; Image Credit: Wikiart Agamben As Voltaire Leibniz was not around to provide his analysis of the Lisbon Earthquake, so we cannot know if it would have been the event that made him think twice about his doctrine of theodicy. But Giorgio Agamben is alive and well in the epoch of the Covid-19. Rather than revaluating the doctrine of biopower in the face of a pandemic that shows the need for a display of state power that would arrest the onslaught of disease, he doubles down on the biopolitical interpretation of this event. Each time Agamben receives criticism about his response, rather than reconsider his theoretical opposition to any state measures, he takes his opposition even further, arguing for an open embrace of infection and death. While it might be tempting to lament this theoretical turn, we should rather celebrate it, since it lays bare where his theoretical position leads. Through Agamben’s own response to the pandemic, we can see the theory of biopower reveal itself as a cult of death. Insisting on death becomes the only way to prove one’s mettle in the struggle against the hegemony of life. (32) If biopower enjoins us to live, one must fight this power by choosing death, both for oneself and for others. This position reaches its apogee with Agamben’s call for Pope Francis to violate the lockdown and begin to visit those sick with Covid-19. As Agamben sees it, the task of the leader of the Catholic Church is to imitate Christ even to the point of embracing one’s own death. In his brief article entitled “A Question,” he states, “ The Church, under a Pope who calls himself Francis, has forgotten that Francis embraced lepers. It has forgotten that one of the works of mercy is that of visiting the sick. It has forgotten that the martyrs teach that we must be prepared to sacrifice our life rather than our faith and that renouncing our neighbor means renouncing faith.” (33) The contrast between Saint Francis and Pope Francis is telling: the first Francis sacrifices to comfort the sick, while the later one hides to protect himself from them. But what this criticism conveniently leaves aside is that Pope Francis visiting Covid-19 patients would not entail only a sacrifice of his own life. It would endanger thousands of others as well. Pope Francis would turn himself into a superspreader and, very likely, a mass murderer. When one reads him criticize Pope Francis in this way, it seems as if Agamben has become his own Voltaire, providing commentary that appears to have been written to satirize how the theorists of biopower would respond to the pandemic. Agamben’s refusal to distinguish between the forces of state power and the interests of capital leads to a series of politically baleful responses to the Covid-19 outbreak. In The Kingdom and the Glory , Agamben himself weighs in on Voltaire’s satiric rejoinder against Leibniz in a way that almost anticipates his own response to the pandemic. He writes, “ Even the most beautiful minds have zones of opacity in which they get lost to the point that a much weaker mind can ridicule them. This is what occurred to Leibniz with Voltaire’s caricature of his position in Candide.” (34) Perhaps we should see Agamben’s flirtation with the theory of biopower, like Leibniz’s theodicy, as a zone of opacity that leads him astray and allows much weaker minds to criticize him, as they are doing in the wake of his occasional pieces during the pandemic. This zone of opacity extends beyond the state response to the pandemic. It includes the theory of biopower as such, a theory that laments the politicization of life and thereby fails to see that life cannot be politicized because it has always been political. Life is always symbolized life, life mediated by the signifier, even when stripped of everything in a concentration camp. The theory of biopower never takes proper stock of the foundational role that mediation has for subjectivity. Rather than producing bare life, the disaster exposes the structural necessity of mediation for subjectivity. This is why natural disasters are always political opportunities. They show us the connective tissue that constitutes life in common, the mediation that inherently politicizes us. While Leibniz cannot imagine a disaster that doesn’t have some positive correlation that justifies it as part of God’s plan for the world, Agamben cannot recognize how a disaster might thwart the plans the ruling structure. Even though a disaster invalidates the philosophy of each of them, it does so for opposed reasons. Leibniz tries to reconcile everything with an image of the best of all possible worlds. Agamben aims at explaining all state action as an expression of biopower, as part of the worst of all possible worlds. The Lisbon Earthquake can in no way reveal God’s goodness, just as the response to the Covid-19 pandemic cannot be made into another victory of biopolitical sovereignty. Unlike Leibniz, we need the courage to accept that disasters are simply disasters. They hold no secret upside that renders their occurrence more palatable. But we also need the courage to recognize that survival is not always ideological. When the state has to resort to extraordinary interruptions of the capitalist economy to keep us alive, it is not acting as the stooge of biopower. Instead, it is showing us the limit to capital’s dominance of our existence. We can see in the disaster the ashes of the theory of biopower, with its insistence on the ubiquity of a power apparatus that functions without a rift. The disaster makes evident the rift. The only way to avow the truth of the Covid-19 event is to acknowledge that the theory of biopower must be buried alongside all the dead. NOTES 1. This staying power of the significant thinker leads Jacques Lacan to claim “One never goes beyond Descartes, Kant, Marx, Hegel and a few others because they mark a line of inquiry, a true orientation. One never goes beyond Freud either.” Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960 . Trans. Dennis Porter. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York, NY: Norton, 1992, 206. 2. The attempt to dismiss a thinker due to a conjunction with historical events is usually the result of an antiphilosophical impulse, even when the thinker directly aligns himself or herself with a historical event, as Martin Heidegger does in the case of Nazism. Commenting on Emmanuel Faye’s incessant critique of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, Alain Badiou contends that one should always oppose “the tenacious plotting by these moral hermeneuts” and proclaims, “Down with the little masters of the purification of philosophy!” (Alain Badiou, “A Letter from Alain Badiou.” Verso , 21 December 2014, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1796-a-letter-from-alain-badiou , Accessed 26 October 2021.) Badiou rightly sees that, while one must take Heidegger’s anti-Semitism into account, it cannot act as a sufficient condition for dismissing his philosophy altogether, which is what Faye and his cohort desire. To dismiss Heidegger because of his Nazism and anti-Semitism is to allow history the last word relative to philosophy. 3. The power of Leibniz’s argument is striking even for the contemporary reader who comes to it believing theodicy to be a wholly ideological project. Even though almost no one reads the Theodicy anymore, it takes only a slight adjustment to find oneself ready to accept Leibniz’s claims. The argument holds together, although its premises are utterly dubious. 4. Gottfried W. Leibniz, Theodicy . Trans. E. M. Huggard, Chicago: Open Court, 1985, 61. 5. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive . Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Zone Books, 1999, 82–83. 6. Hilary Neroni argues that biopower, far from being the mode of contemporary governance, is actually today’s ruling ideology. By focusing on the exigencies of bare life, we miss the role that capitalism plays in determining our existence. In this sense, the theorists of biopower of the ideologists of contemporary capitalism. See Hilary Neroni, The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film . New York, NY: Columbia UP, 2015. 7. Giorgio Agamben, Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics . Trans. Valeria Dani. Rowman and Littlefield, 2021, 52. 8. Ibid., 70. 9. There are Marxists who take a more sanguine view of the state form. For instance, Anna Kornbluh launches a vigorous defense of form, such as that of the state, within the Marxist project. She writes, “Form is not delimited containment but prismatic projection of other spaces. Structure is not transcendental determinativeness, but immanent agency. Law is not an emanation from nature or what exists, but an axiomatic writing that creates new possibilities.” Anna Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space . U of Chicago P, 2019, 106. State law is not here the handmaiden of capital but a constitutive form that enables possibilities. Of course, Kornbluh recognizes that state law can function in the service of capital, but it is nonetheless an independent and constitutive force. 10. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology . Progress Publishers, 1976, 52. In the Communist Manifesto , they write, “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” See The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition . Trans. Samuel Moore. Verso, 1998, 37. 11. Toward the end of the first volume of the History of Sexuality , Foucault stakes out a position against desire, which he sees as caught up in the discourse of sexuality. He writes, “The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.” Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction . Trans. Robert Hurley Random House, 1978, 157. As Foucault sees it, once one is on the terrain of desire, one has already succumbed to the power of the enemy. 12. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 . Trans. David Macey. Picador, 2003, 247. 13. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life . Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford UP, 1998, 6. 14. For a definitive rejection of any link between Agamben and anarchism, see Leland de la Durantaye. Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction . Stanford UP, 2009. But Agamben himself provides a counter, when he states, “Anarchy has always seemed more interesting to me than democracy.” Giorgio Agamben, Creation and Anarchy: The Work of Art and the Religion of Capitalism . Trans. Adam Kotsko. Stanford UP, 2019, 54. 15. For Foucault, this becomes most evident in his lecture series entitled On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–1980 (Trans. Graham Burchell. Palgrave, 2014). There, he identifies the refusal of power as his starting point, even though he admits that it is ultimately impossible to have a social order without some form of power. He states, “it is not a question of having in view, at the end of a project, a society without power relations. It is rather a matter of putting non-power or the non-acceptability of power, not at the end of the enterprise, but rather at the beginning of the work, in the form of a questioning of all the ways in which power is in actual fact accepted.” (78) What Foucault here chalks up to his method actually indicates his anarchist political position. While Agamben may more openly identify himself with anarchism, Foucault’s hostility to all expressions of power is just as thoroughgoing. 16. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community . Trans. Michael Hardt. U of Minnesota P, 1993, 85. 17. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception . Trans. Kevin Attell. U of Chicago P, 2005. 18. Agamben specifically objects to the American demand for fingerprinting necessary to obtain a US visa. He sees this as evidence of the reign of biopower that he aims to resist by refusing to come to America. 19. Agamben argues that the pandemic has shaken up the traditional political divide between Right and Left. He argues, “The degree of confusion into which the emergency situation has thrown the minds of those who ought to remain lucid, and the way in which the opposition between Right and Left has become devoid of any real political content, is very clear in this case.” Giorgio Agamben, Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics . Trans. Valeria Dani. Rowman and Littlefield, 2021, 70. 20. Giorgio Agamben, “Biopolitics and Security.” Trans. D. Alan Dean. Blog Post , 11 May 2020, https://d-dean.medium.com/biosecurity-and-politics-giorgio-agamben-396f9ab3b6f4 . Accessed 26 October 2021. 21. The contrast between Agamben and a thinker such as Alain Badiou is stark. While no one could accuse Badiou of being a fan of state power, he nonetheless argues that the pandemic represents a situation in which one must have the discipline to do what’s right in order to preserve life. He sees it as a simple situation in which we should support the state’s efforts at minimizing the casualties. 22. Agamben sees form of life as the specific antidote to biopower’s reduction of our existence to bare life. A form of life introduces a separation between life and politics that enables us to regain the space in which to live our lives. 23. Agamben, Giorgio. “Clarifications.” Trans. Adam Kotsko. An und für sich blog , 17 March 2020, https://itself.blog/2020/03/17/giorgio-agamben-clarifications/ . Accessed 26 October 2021. 24. The great thinker of the state as the site of fundamental mediation is Hegel, who considers the state as constitutive for modern subjectivity. It is not surprising that both Foucault and Agamben remain more or less silent on Hegel as a political thinker, despite Agamben devoting a short book to his aesthetic philosophy. 25. Agamben, Giorgio. “The Invention of an Epidemic.” European Journal of Psychoanalysis , 26 February 2020, https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/ . Accessed 26 October 2021. 26. Agamben, Giorgio. “When the House Burns.” Trans. Kevin Attell. Diacritics , 6 January 2021, https://www.diacriticsjournal.com/when-the-house-burns-down/ . Accessed 26 October 2021. 27. Although we might imagine Agamben would include Donald Trump among the faceless tyrants of the world, Trump actually refuses to wear a mask, which complicates this diagnosis. 28. The fact that the star of Liar Liar , Jim Carrey, is also the star of The Mask (Chuck Russell, 1994), a film in which he gains incredible powers to act with the mask, represents one of the great cinematic interconnections in the history of Hollywood. Even though the films have nothing to do with each other, it appears as if Carrey is working out his own theory of the mask in the choice of these roles. 29. Agamben’s claim that the face is the center of humanity seems out of place coming from him. It’s much more the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas that locates the ethics of a shared humanity in the visibility of the face. The fact that Agamben turns to this position in his critique of the response to the pandemic indicates that he’s pulling out all the cards, using whatever he has in his arsenal to combat every possible state responses to the pandemic. Agamben is not typically a champion of Levinas, but he becomes one when he sees a possibility for criticizing the state’s efforts at ensuring more survival. 30. Donald Trump, qtd. in Daniel Victor, Lew Serviss, and Azi Paybarah, “In His Own Words: Trump on the Coronavirus and Masks.” New York Times , 2 October 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-masks.html Accessed 26 October 2021 . Accessed 26 October 2021. 31. Donald Trump, qtd. in Maggie Haberman and David E. Sanger, “Trump Says Coronavirus Cure ‘Cannot Be Worse Than the Problem Itself’.” New York Times , 23 March 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-restrictions.html . Accessed 26 October 2021. 32. It is not surprising that one of Foucault’s dreams late in his life was to establish a center where people could come and experience extreme pleasure just before dying. This dream parallels Agamben’s potentially lethal response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 33. Giorgio Agamben, “A Question.” Trans. Adam Kotsko. An und für sich blog , 15 April 2020, https://itself.blog/2020/04/15/giorgio-agamben-a-question/ . Accessed 26 October 2021. 34. Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government . Trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (with Matteo Mandarini). Stanford UP, 2011, 271. Related Articles Nancy's Wager DIVYA DWIVEDI Read Article And the Beginning of Philosophy SHAJ MOHAN Read Article

SHEHZAD ALI Shehzad Ali holds an MPhil degree in Political Science from the University of Peshawar. Currently, he is a lecturer under the Higher Education Department Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Ali has been visiting faculty in the Department of Political Science, University of Peshawar for five years. He has taught courses in Political Philosophy (Ancient, Medieval, Modern and Contemporary) at Undergraduate level. His area of specialization is Identity Politics in Pakistan and Indigenous studies. His contributions appear regularly in the journal Review of Human Rights . Demythologizing the Current Political Corpse Bride: A Psychoanalytical Reading of the Populist Narratives 18 March 2023 Read Article

Centuries after the exclusion of lived experience and the life-world by a science inherited from Platonism, the repressed returns in its purest form: that of a living present recognizing itself as the origin and the blind spot of science, under the pressure of the advances of quantum physics. From there, a radical response is made to the speculative materialist argument of ancestrality. The epistemic correlation does not bind, in time, real objects to empirical human subjects contemporary with them; it binds, upstream of time, the present act of constitution to an always-now constituted natural domain. Now Upstream of Time (Part 1) MICHEL BITBOL 13 June 2021 PHILOSOPHY PHYSICS Article PDF Truth Leaving the Well, Édouard Debat-Ponsan, 1898; Image credit: Wikimedia Commons Centuries after the exclusion of lived experience and the life-world by a science inherited from Platonism, the repressed returns in its purest form: that of a living present recognizing itself as the origin and the blind spot of science, under the pressure of the advances of quantum physics. From there, a radical response is made to the speculative materialist argument of ancestrality. The epistemic correlation does not bind, in time, real objects to empirical human subjects contemporary with them; it binds, upstream of time, the present act of constitution to an always-now constituted natural domain. "If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present". T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets "Now" is a word. If its meaning is limited to its use, as the second Wittgenstein proposes, the word is clear. "Now" can be the trigger for action without delay: "start now!" Or it can be an attractor of shared attention to what is happening in the immediate sphere of understanding of the speakers: "listen to those birds singing now"; or it can be a piece of information about the availability of a good, announced but postponed until then: "the calendar for the year 2022 is now on sale". If, on the other hand, we start to ask what the word designates , what it refers to, according to the regime of the noun extended to adverbs, the difficulties multiply. They are poorly concealed by the terms used to characterize its use: "without delay", "immediate", "until then"; for these terms, and many others such as "actual" or "present", merely surround "now" with a constellation of terms that are sometimes redundant, sometimes as problematic as it itself is. What is actuality if the act can be past or planned, rather than "in the process of" happening? What is the immediate or the present, if not what is happening now ? The etymologies, for their part, are only half illuminating. The etymology of the French word "Main-Tenant" says the holding-in-hand, the persistence of the presence retained under the hand. "Main-Tenant" inscribes presence in a tactile relationship, where the word "presence" itself suggests a visual relationship: prae-esse, in Latin, means to be here before the eyes. The Indo-European etymology, nū, Greek nun , Latin nunc , German nun (jetzt), English now, is probably the zero degree of the word neuo, Latin neo, German neues, English new . It says novelty, the appearance, the sudden departure, of something that is perhaps about to last. The etymology of the Italian word adesso takes up the Latin ad ipsum, "in (at) this", implying at this very moment. It pronounces the identity of act and time, and imports a central deictic function, this, into a temporal deictic ( this time). In this respect, it accords with the Spanish ahora, hac hora in Latin: this hour (the word ' hora' can originally refer not only to the hour but to various periods of time, being related to the English word year; it is found in another word used in Italian for 'now': ora). But behind the scenes of all these etymologies, as well as in the variety of uses of "now", there is a passage to the limit. Adesso , "this very moment", seeks to capture the precise instant in which it is enunciated, even if this pseudo-instant is misguidedly extended by the duration of the enunciation. Maintenant, in French, is pronounced abruptly, with a burst of voice on 'Main', when it is a matter of giving the start of a gesture or process. Nū, New, signifies a break between the before and after, an unpredictable novelty that feels sudden. By breaking a continuity, nū seeks to capture the instantaneous, the infinitesimal caesura between what was and what will be. So what does "now" designate: the duration of the presence maintained, or the discontinuity of a present without precedent and without tomorrow? In this simple question we can see an ancient metaphysical dispute whose two opposing terms are the permanent and the present. Already the misunderstandings about Parmenides, eternalist or presentist, are emerging. Already the internal tension in Aristotle's work between ousia [ousia] and nun [nun], between the substance and the instant, seems inevitable. It would be tempting to enter this arena of metaphysical debate about the present without delay, starting again from its closest heritage, such as the text Ousia and Grammè in Jacques Derrida's Margins of Philosophy. It would be tempting to take a new step in the debate, by re-reading the dense history of the question of time, and by first exposing some of its presuppositions in order to overcome the false dichotomies conditioned by them. But, under the guise of disturbing some presuppositions of the metaphysical theses on time, this would mean accepting the presupposition of all metaphysics' presuppositions, the one that founds it as an organized discourse, underneath those that underlie its constellations of superficially opposing theses. This elementary presupposition of metaphysical discourse, so elementary that it is difficult to recognize it as such, is firstly that words almost always have a meaning, a power of " de-signation ", which moves us from the sphere of their sounds to the terrain of what is out there independently of them. It is then that concepts necessarily have a consistency of their own, whether it is that of a division of nature into its articulations, or that of a mental categorization of what appears. Finally, it is that the stability of the meaning and use of words, their repetition beyond the occurrences, allows us to gather, in what is designated, centers of constancy beyond the flux of appearances, and that this alone allows us to grant a truth value to propositions. For the true here designates the statement that conforms to the constant being, whereas the false designates the statement that affirms what is only inconstantly apparent. This scheme of adaequatio rei et intellectus, which expresses and redoubles the adequacy of things to words, resisted the Kantian revolution, provided that the verb "to constitute" was substituted for the verb "to gather". Within the framework of Kantian criticism, but also in Husserl's Experience and Judgement, concepts and words are certainly no longer supposed to point to immutable "things in themselves" behind the curtain of appearances, but at least they delimit by their use regions of invariance (intersubjective as well as trans-temporal) within the constellations of phenomena, thus constituting domains of objectivity from them. In this new framework, the adequacy of concepts and propositions to their objects is no longer a passively recognized given , but it remains relevant as the result of an actively sought co-stabilization of the act of signifying and the term of signification. In order to remain faithful to the now, one must fuse its flight from meaning with its remanence as that which has nowhere to flee, rather than opposing flight and remanence. We must hold together these two edges of the gap between the act of signifying and the mere outline of signification, even if this means creating a dizzying exception in language. However, each of these presuppositions about the function of words in metaphysical discourse becomes an insurmountable obstacle, and a source of confusion, when we try to characterize 'now'. If a word implies the expulsion of attention from where it is, the hope of expressing what the word "now" covers suddenly vanishes. For to say "now" in a sentence in the indicative or imperative mode is to want to repatriate attention in its emergence. To say "now" is to invite listeners to suspend their flight to memories and projects, and to return to the place where the word is spoken, with its vibration as a reference point. Uttering the word "now" is not intended to take listeners away from themselves; on the contrary, it aims to suspend their thoughtless forays into other times, and to bring them reflexively back into their own perceptual, memorial and imaginary spaces. In short, the mere act of signifying runs counter to the legitimate meaning of the word "now". That a concept is the translation of a particular natural articulation or mental category, as opposed to other articulations or categories, does not fit the concept of 'now' either. On the one hand, there is nothing in an objectified nature that resembles "now". And on the other hand, the mind has nothing to oppose to what is happening now, since, as St. Augustine pointed out, our mind has access to the past and the future only through their present donation. The word "now" therefore lacks not only the possibility of meaning in the ordinary sense of "referring to something", but also in the Saussurean sense of being opposed to other meanings. As for the stabilizing function of words and recurrences in language, it is most obviously at odds with the lexical field of "now". What is signified by a noun is a thing whose being and manifestation extend far beyond now; what is signified by an adjective is a feature of the thing that also extends, to a lesser extent, beyond now. What is signified by the adverb of place "here" is a specific spatial situation that can sometimes be maintained for some time and sometimes be repeated by a return movement. But what is signified by "now" does not continue beyond now. What is signified by "now" obviously does not stabilize any configuration of phenomena, since it is the very instability of appearing. What is signified by the adverb of time "now" is not a locatable situation either, since the duration of the act of locating it is sufficient to remove it definitively from its location. We have just documented a series of well-known paradoxes about the temporal features that we seek to signify. They arise if we want to stop their meaning, rather than let it go to its metamorphoses at the mercy of usage. The expression of time and its alleged characteristics takes time, the time of enunciation. Time is the presupposition of its own meaning. As for the expression of now, it never ceases to escape its actuality because it lasts. And simultaneously, it can only remain now, always-now, because its entire duration trails in the wake of the present where it ends. To arrest the meaning of the very terminology of mobility is an impossible task. According to Bergson's clear verdict, this is a sign of the most insurmountable failure of intelligence and its linguistic instrument. Intelligence claims to capture reality by immobilizing it in verbal repetitions, whereas "movement is undoubtedly reality itself". (1) Through the litany of its lexical recurrences, intelligence does not take a single step towards its metaphysical dream, but only achieves a practical objective: to foresee and use the more or less reproducible aspect of appearing. Through the rules of simultaneity between the readings of clocks and events, by spelling out the names of the instants identified by these clocks, through their graphic arrangement along a straight line (the fourth dimension of relativistic space-time), scientific intelligence does not capture the essence of time either; it just replaces it with an operational procedure of prediction of dynamic variables, valid for any inertial or accelerated reference frame. Henri Bergson; Image credit: Wikimedia Commons These paradoxes of the expression of time and now are those of an attempt to say a "non-thing" that does not face us, and that we cannot grasp as a tool; a "non-thing" that is neither the present-at-hand ( Vorhandenheit ), nor the ready-to-hand ( Zuhandenheit ). This "non-thing" that we are trying to say is what we have always bathed in without having been able to put it before us, without being able to use it in any way. This "non-thing" that we want to say carries us, trans-ports us, goes through us. In short, and in an almost self-contradictory way, what we are trying to say when we pronounce the word "now" is neither pre-sentable (in the sense of prae-esse , of being-before), nor hand-holdable (in the sense of usable). It is confirmed that what we are trying to indicate by "now" is not a possible object of meaning, because we can neither move towards it nor make use of it in a certain direction of activity. Should we therefore deprive ourselves of this word? Do we have to comply with the injunction to retain in our discourse only those words to which we can give meaning , according to the traditional meaning of the word "meaning", which implies assigning a direction to the intentional gaze? And if we cannot, should we give up, remain silent, forget everything we know how to do and have done in everyday life when we use the common words "now", "yesterday" and "tomorrow"? If we want to avoid that extreme retreat in which an excess of philosophical acuity would let us lose the benefit of living in the community of speaking beings, if we want to make allowances for the fact that this community to which we belong does not automatically fall into absurdity when it uses adverbs of time and conjugations of verbs, we must identify the alternative regime of "meaning" under which these singular words are successfully implemented in discourse and dialogue. To identify this alternative meaning of meaning, it may suffice to go back upstream of the completed act of signifying, to that state where the target of the act of intentional aiming at is not yet grasped, let alone seen, but where we are inhabited by an unfulfilled desire for it, where we feel the vague discomfort of its probable lack. The desire to say what haunts us, and the discomfort of not knowing how to say it, because we don't know what we are haunted by. But also the desire to transmit our haunting to the other person in order to probe his or her ability to take part in it, to make him or her feel our sense of lack as keenly as possible. And the desire to observe in the other person the complicity that will fulfill our wishes, or, at worse, her incomprehension that will force us to refine our expressive resources. The desire to say something [ vouloir dire ], here, is still deprived of a said. More precisely, the desire to say something, here, is that whose "said" [ le dit ] is reduced to its own unsatisfied gap, and to the hope that the interlocutor will inscribe herself, as long as it has not been appeased, in the same cavity of dissatisfaction we have experienced. It is this upstream and this foundation of the completed act of signifying that Merleau-Ponty highlighted in Signs : The significant intention in me (as well as in the listener who finds it again when hearing me) is at the moment, and even if it must then fructify into 'thoughts' - only a determined void, to be filled by words, - the excess of what I want to say over what is or what has already been said. (2) In the ordinary course of speech or writing, this void ends up being filled, this desire for expression ends up being satisfied. The thickness of the text, the song of the signifying sounds, are usually enough to arouse satisfaction in oneself and in others, if the talent of their author is sufficient. But what if the gap keeps widening, if the fulfilment of the desire for meaning is a lure that attracts us without ever being achievable? What remains is precisely what could not be filled: the emptiness, the excavation, the actuality of the lack without the perspective of its filling. There also remains the possibility of making others recognize it again as their own abode, an abode that cannot be pointed to because it envelops us both, a focus that cannot be placed under the beam of a gaze because it is the origin of seeing. In the case of the word "now", this is precisely the case. The desire to signify cannot be satisfied, since signifying "now" has the immediate consequence of letting it slip through one's hands and no longer holding it. The best we can do, since we cannot grasp “now”, is to share its flight: by holding each other by the hand, by recognizing that we inhabit the same alveolus in the making, by putting in common, in the glow of an exchanged glance, the flickering flame that we know to be, by burning our lives together on the infinitesimal film of our fluid co-presence. That the present is only thinkable through the possibility of its retentional trace must be conceded to Derrida. But the identification of original being with the trace does not follow from this. A series of remarks spanning millennia of history suffice to illustrate the escape of "now" from any attempt to designate it, the inability to pose it as a signifiable being. The three remarks chosen are cited in an order from the oldest to the most recent, and from the most detailed to the most concise. After encapsulating the three tenses in the present alone, as if the latter were a kind of unlimited container, St Augustine turns around, denying the present the privilege of being : "If the present, in order to be time, must go into the past, how can we say that a thing is, which can only be on the condition of no longer being?". Simplicius, for his part, quotes an anonymous author, known as the pseudo-Archytas, who overemphasizes the paradox of speaking of 'now' by making the word last. He again hammers home the withdrawal of what is given by this word, as soon as it is given: "The now being indivisible, it is already in the past when we speak of it and when we try to apprehend it". Finally, there is Hegel, who reaches the height of conciseness, when he simply points out that "The now is precisely this of not being any longer when it is." (3) Hegel's justification of his refusal to attribute being to "now" is, however, uncertain. Hegel in fact evokes successively the now that "is" and the now that is not. The now that is not is identified with that which is reflected and designated as now, in other words, with that which is now "shown" as now. If we are to admit that this latter "now" is not, it is because it, once captured by an act of designation, is thrown back into the past, and the past is no longer, which is equivalent to not being at all by virtue of what Derrida has denounced as the ontological privilege of presence. But is it acceptable to distinguish several "nows", a "now" that is, and a "now" that is not? In the name of what should we say that a particular "now" slips from the present into the past, as if it had a form of individuality and permanence? And how can it be conceived that anything, including the act of designating it, can throw "now" back into the past? Isn't it an obvious contradiction in terms, since now is no longer now as soon as it shifts into the past? Isn't the use of the word "now" abusively extended if it starts to encompass a past event? Jacques Derrida; Image credit: Flickr This impropriety testifies to the persistence in Hegel, and no doubt in the whole history of philosophy, of the Aristotelian concept of the "now". The Aristotelian concept hardly separates "now" from a particular moment in time. It is from such a concept that we will have to free ourselves entirely if we want to elucidate what Hegel calls (debatably, as we shall see) "the now that is", namely, just now . So let us meditate, after so many other readers, on the treatise on time in the fourth book of the Physics . The instant, the nun , is at the heart of the paradoxes of time that Aristotle lists. Without going into the details of the ebb and flow of his conceptualization of the instant, it suffices to underline the opposition of two statuses that coexist rather uneasily in it. The first status resembles that of the "now that is" in Hegel's sense: "Is this moment, this present itself (...) one? Does it always remain identical and unchanging? Or is it different and constantly different?." (4) The present moment, in this limited sense, blurs the opposition of constant self-identity and incessant difference: "in one sense, the moment is the same; and in another sense, it is not the same." (5) Its status is uncertain, and this very uncertainty is constitutive of it. What makes its concept safe from outright rejection is that the status of the other two tenses, the past and the future, is even worse. "One of the two parts of time has been and is no longer; the other part must be and is not yet.” (6) But how can we understand the two terms of the dichotomy: the incessant difference and the constant identity of the moment? Should we consider that a particular instant is preserved through time, thus allowing us to take its constant identity at face value? This would deny change, and thus the very essence of time; or it would border on the absurd if it forced one to declare that such and such an instant remains the same from one instant to the next. Should we say, on the contrary, that an instant "perishes", to allow it to differ from itself? This is not acceptable either, for, as Aristotle remarks, "it is not possible for the instant to have perished in itself, since it existed at the time; nor is it possible for the previous instant to have perished in another instant." (7) To perish is a process, it cannot take only one instant, all the more so when what is supposed to perish is the instant itself. The second status of the instant, of the nun , is then sketched out, but once again in a hesitant manner. Aristotle begins by stating: "it does not seem that time is composed of presents, of instants." (8) This could imply that "now", the present, is radically heterogeneous to time, of a completely different nature than time. But Aristotle suggests that this is not what he means here. His simple use of the plural for the words 'present' and 'moments' is enough to suggest their spacing on a line, which sketches a representation of time. And this representation is confirmed when Aristotle makes the non-composition of time by "presents" equivalent to the non-composition of the spatial line by points. (9) The instant is thus assimilated, as a non-durable limit of duration, to the non-extended limit-point that composes the extended line. (10) If time does not consist of presents, it is not because of a difference in nature between time and the present. It is, like the relationship between point and spatial line, because of the opposition between the zero extent of the instant and the non-zero extent of time. This correspondence of time and spatial extent, of the instant and the point, is made inevitable by their articulation in the movement and trajectory of the mobile body. By his double gesture of bringing time and space together, Aristotle announces medieval and then Galilean kinematics, in which time is represented by an axis analogous to that of space in order to represent the movement of the mobile body by a line immersed in a four-dimensional volume. At the same time, he sketches out the confusion, denounced as a litany by Bergson, between the duration actually experienced and the deposition of its intellectualized residue in a spatialized pseudo-time. A series of remarks spanning millennia of history suffice to illustrate the escape of "now" from any attempt to designate it, the inability to pose it as a signifiable being. For all that, Aristotle himself did not take the ultimate step, and the ultimate impropriety, that would be implied by the pure and simple spatialization of time; he carefully maintained the specificity of time in relation to space, despite their partial analogy. His nuanced text describes the combination of common and distinctive features he sees between the instant in time, and the point in the line: "The present instant (...) is the limit of time, the beginning of the one and the end of the other. But this is not obvious for the instant, as it is for the line, which remains motionless. The instant divides and divides time only in power; insofar as it divides, it is always other; insofar as it unites and continues, it is always the same." (11) The instant therefore divides time in power, while the point divides the line in act. But to say that the instant divides time, even if in potential, or that it limits the anterior and posterior, even if it escapes them, is to virtually posit a temporal line and to situate the instant somewhere within it. In this case, it is right to translate "instant" as a kind of temporal point articulating the past and the future. A point-in-time subject to the fate of fading away, because it is renewed immediately after having served to articulate the two times that adjoin it. But what we are looking for is not a moment, but the now . Now without equal, and not this particular now. Now unique in its very evanescence, and not a certain now that is, distinguished from other nows that are not, that are no longer. In order to remain faithful to the now, one must fuse its flight from meaning with its remanence as that which has nowhere to flee, rather than opposing flight and remanence. We must hold together these two edges of the gap between the act of signifying and the mere outline of signification, even if this means creating a dizzying exception in language. The first edge of the split. That "now" flees its own meaning implies, as we have seen, that it remains in the state of a mere signifying intention, that the word "now" only manages to dig a semantic void calling without hope for its intentional direction. The signifying anfractuosity of “ now” could only be filled by a particular moment, and not by now, this absolute singular. As a pure signifier, “now” cannot grasp a signified. Second edge of the split. Now remains, because it would have no time to flee from if it were nevertheless signified. A past now would not be a now, but a chronometrically situated time. A chronometrically situated now would already have expired and would therefore not be now. Now remains, even if time passes. This has an immense implication: that now is not a time. For time, with its polarity and chronology, never ceases to be woven now. Time is woven into this true now that does more than remain, since it is the abode of things that are, of things that pass away as well as things that persist. But how can this be done? How do we weave time now? By a certain interpretation of the reading of natural and artificial clocks. A reading that makes us believe that clocks capture time and subject it to quantitative evaluation. As Bergson has shown, this belief is the illusory consequence of an articulation between quantity and quality, between the numerical intervals of clock readings and the lived perception of duration. Everything is said in his text about the indissoluble relationship between quantified time and the lived now: "When I follow with my eyes, on the dial of a clock, the movement of the hand that corresponds to the oscillations of the pendulum, I am not measuring duration, as people seem to think. I am merely counting simultaneities, which is quite different. Outside of me, in space, there is only ever a single position of the needle and the pendulum, because nothing remains of past positions . Within me, a process of organisation or mutual penetration of the facts of consciousness continues, which constitutes true duration. It is because I last in this way that I represent what I call the past oscillations of the pendulum, at the same time as I perceive the present oscillation." (12) In other words, the relationship between quantified time and experienced duration is itself experienced in the now that both flees and remains. Quantitative clock readings acquire their temporal meaning only in and through the currently experienced "representation" of the differences between their successive indications. But this representation of differences requires the retention in the living present of previous clock readings; a retention whose objective correlate, studied by the cognitive sciences, is a memory provisionally inscribed in the "working memory". Outside of this experienced retention, nothing manifests itself but a single position of the clock hand, punctuated by a throbbing "now" that does not even know it is repetitive, so oblivious is it to its past occurrences. The physical concept of time is thus the natural child of an interbreeding between the immobilization of the instant by its numerical designation (the time it is), and the mobility that is experienced now in the retentional trail. It is indeed at this very moment that time is being woven, and we now know how this happens. But if time is woven now, now cannot be a time. And since now is not anything else than a time, it cannot even be said to be , contrary to what Hegel says. What Hegel calls "the now that is" must therefore be understood as the now that is not . And what Hegel calls "the now that is not" must be understood as a particular instant that is; a punctual instant placed there-before our attention, as an object of reflection and of chronometric representation. This reversal of the attribution of being or non-being to "now" evokes another reversal indicated by John Scotus Eriugena in his mystical-metaphysical epic of the Periphyseon . According to the Carolingian philosopher, the most fundamental division that runs through nature separates things that are from things that are not. The primary sense in which this division is to be understood places phenomena, space, and time, on the side of things that are; whereas the non-phenomenal and non-spatio-temporal precondition of the apprehension of phenomena, space, and time, is placed on the side of things that are not. In the words of John Scotus Erigena: "Everything that can be perceived by the bodily sense or by the intellect is truly and logically said to be 'being'. But everything which, by virtue of the excellence of its nature, escapes not only the senses, but also all intellect and reason, is rightly regarded as 'non-being'." (13) John Scotus of Eriugena; Image credit: Wikimedia Commons For John Scotus Erigena (as for the whole tradition of negative theology), this non-being by dint of excellence is called God. Because all that is, is as a correlate of Him who is not , of Him who stands in the beginnings of being, of Him who lies in the backstage of their unnoticed precondition. The correlation between Him who is not, and the things that are, is called "creation". It is described as the relationship of the uncreated creator to his creatures. But the unnoticed, non-being, prerequisite of the things that perceive and are could just as well be called "now" in a secular version of Eriugena’s theodicy. (14) Is it not indeed now that the ultimate creative act is accomplished, now that the outpouring of unpredictable novelty takes place? As Bergson points out in his introductions to Thought and Motion, what prevents us from indulging in the duration currently experienced is a quest for reproducibility characteristic of the intellect, the intellectual position of scenarios that can follow the present state and are made possible by inductive analogy with the past. In other words, what prevents us from recognizing what is as duration is that we have methodically covered the absolute creativity of the singular present with a layer of generic repetitiveness. But for a thought destabilized in its search for repetition, for a thought returned to its unparalleled, sui generis source, which is the now-which-is-not (in a sense analogous to that of John Scotus Eriugena’s negative theology), this creativity is again self-evident. If now is not in the Erigena sense , this means that everything is in it and relative to it: present things, time springing from lived duration, the represented time of clock scans, memories, hopes and fears. Everything is relative to now without it being ; and it is because now is not that everything that is is relative to it. The lesson of Derrida's critique of the metaphysics of presence can be thus accepted without denying the evidence of the present. That the present is only thinkable through the possibility of its retentional trace must be conceded to Derrida. But the identification of original being with the trace does not follow from this. What only follows is that thought is only capable of grasping traces, and that it grasps them from the original non-being that is the unthought but thinking present. A related question arises from this. Does the fact that thought can only grasp traces imply that the now that is not, is not part of the thinkable? I would be in conflict with myself if I said so, since what I am doing now, at this very moment, is in contradiction with the incapacity of thought to approach the authentic now! The now that is not remains in some way thinkable; but it can only be thought by a thought that allows itself to be reabsorbed by the thinking. This aptitude for reabsorption was manifested in my previous analysis of the use of the word "now". Let us reformulate this analysis, in order to better grasp what the involution of thought in the thinking person can be. That "now" is signifying without any signified corresponding to it, that it digs an abyss of wanting to say without anything being able to fill the absence of what is said, manifests the most scrupulous fidelity to what one seeks to signify. It is the very awareness of the present lack of a signified of the word "present" that allows one to be in the presence of what is meant by this word. The atmosphere of lack takes the place of the signified. The thinker's reception of the emptiness of the present of all that presents itself is precisely what "now" means. (End of Part 1) TRANSLATED SOPHIE GALABRU NOTES 1. H. Bergson, L'évolution créatrice, Presses Universitaires de France, 2018, p. 156. 2. M. Merleau-Ponty, Signes, Gallimard, 1960, p. 112. 3. G.W.F. Hegel, La phénoménologie de l’esprit , Paris, Aubier, 1999, p. 88. 4. Aristotle, Physics, IV, XIV, 5. 5. Aristotle, Physics, IV, XVII, 2. 6. Aristotle, Physics, IV, XIV, 2. 7. Aristotle, Physics, IV, XIV, 6. 8. Aristotle, Physics, IV, XIV, 4. 9. Aristotle, Physics, IV, VIII. 10. Aristotle, Physics, IV, XVII, 5. 11. Aristotle, Physics, IV, XVIII, 14. 12. H. Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, In: H. Bergson, Œuvres, Presses Universitaires de France, 1959, pp. 72-73. 13. John Scotus Erigena, De la division de la nature, I, Presses Universitaires de France, 1995, p. 67. 14. See the concept of Infinite Judgement in Kant CRP A71/ B96 ff. To subtract a thing from the finite set of those which have such and such a property is to put them by difference into an infinite/undefined category. Like "now" which is not in time. Related Articles “But, there is nothing outside of philosophy”: An Interview with Shaj Mohan RACHEL ADAMS Read Article "Mais, il n'y a rien en dehors de la philosophie" : Un entretien avec Shaj Mohan RACHEL ADAMS Read Article