Katja Diefenbach
De/activating life: On the politics of potentiality in Agamben, Deleuze, and Negri
To Bartleby, the pale scrivener from Melville's curious novel that deals with the anomalous effects generated by the non-accomplishment of things, three political voices have been attributed. In my lecture, I will show how in his name, that of a man without qualities and an anonymous proletarian, incompatible forms of a politics of potentiality have been articulated which result in three different aporias: automatisation (Deleuze), negation (Negri) and mythologisation of politics (Agamben).
For Deleuze, Bartleby leads an insurrection against techniques of biopolitical government, against foresight, responsibility, achievement and intelligibility. His politics is suspension, it devastates systems of reference, it speaks an agrammatical language expressing the force of a formless whatever life beyond subjectivation. An automatic and anorectic communism.
For Agamben, by contrast, the enigma of an ontology-to-come of the potential rests in separating Bartleby's autonomous impotentiality that liberates Being from the primacy of reason, will and presence from the mode by which the sovereign is potential of being impotential. A transhistorical messianism of the things' fulfillment by their deactivation.
For Negri, Bartleby's formula speaks of the great refusal. This formula, however, is of the past replaced by the formula of infinite creation and living labor. A subjective and anthropological communism of doing.
Politics of potentiality come along with an ontologisation founding politics, even if the form of groundless or excessive foundations has been chosen, in first and transhistorical principles. By contrast, in my lecture, I attempt to think politics as revolutionary concatanation of hetergenous practises to which no first principle is immanent and which are exposed to a series of paradoxes, demanding a politics of second order - politicisation and distanciation of the effects of political acts, politics' distanciation of itself.
Dominiek Hoens
The Silence of Bartleby
The aim of Dan McCall’s The Silence of Bartleby (Cornell UP, 1989) lucid, at times sarcastic and devastating commentary on the analyses – Marxist, psychoanalytic, intertextual – Melville’s story provoked, is to return Bartleby’s silence to where it belongs, sc. the story. I will not take issues with this debate on how to read Bartleby and the author’s criticism of projection of meaning or the quest for a story beneath the story, but make use of McCall’s observation that Bartleby is mostly silent. This should indeed refrain us from attributing certain intentions and motives to the character, but at the same time raises the following question: why is his silence enigmatic and unsettling ?
I will relate this silence to another figure notoriously silent, the analyst, and ask how one can talk of an ethics of silence within a praxis that unambiguously inscribes itself within the Enlightenment, although this should imply, it seems, to think and to articulate what one thinks, in brief not to remain silent.
Eric Lecerf
Emancipation and becoming: about a true ontological-political stretch at the announcement of a renouncement
In order to study this confrontation between becoming-major and becoming-minor, a confrontation in which emancipation constitutes less a horizon than anxiety, it seems important to start off from a concrete case and to assess the contradictions that are at work there. Thus, our starting point is the history of the becoming operative of state benefit cashdesks for the unemployed in the second half of the 19th century, which is a key moment in the establishment and especially institutionalisation of the workers’ movement. This will give us insight into how the subject of resistance and the subject of exclusion confront each other. However, it is not our intention to re-tie the strings of a genealogy that is lost in time and of which the becoming-minor would be the last manifestation to date. Rather, it is our aim to testify about stretches, about the difficulties one can encounter when, for instance, one wishes to translate the tradition initiated by Proudhon and used until the Fédération des Bourses du Travail was founded along the critical terms of Marxism as pioneered by Deleuze and Guattari. It is our project to study these stretches, in the first place because it will allow us to better identify this community of the mobile of which the reference to Bergson will provide some clues. It will further allow us to grasp the impensé, this spectre of renouncement that contradicts the idea of power and puts a limit to the action.
Oliver Marchart
On Minimal Politics
The presentation locates the Deleuzian concept of becoming in the context of theories that employ the conceptual difference between politics and the political, based on Heidegger’s ontological difference. It will then be discussed whether or not a politics of becoming minor can be a feasible strategy from the viewpoint of political theories located in the “Machiavellian Moment”, including the theories of Ernesto Laclau, Claude Lefort and Jacques Rancière. A case will be made for the concept of “minimal politics”, as opposed to both “micropolitics” and “macropolitics” (not to mention “great politics” on a world revolutionary scale). It will be argued that, rather than thinking of politics as a process of becoming minor, we should start rehabilitating the smallest and most modest forms of political action. This does not include actions which go under the name of “micropolitics” (which, I would argue, is a misnomer as usually no politics is involved), but as a form of “macropolitics” on a minimal scale. No matter how large a demonstration is, no matter how many people start protesting, go on strike or “act together” (Arendt), we should envisage their acts as political without asking whether they will be effective or not.
Eduardo Pellejero
The strategy of involution. Becoming-minor in political philosophy
The “minor” understood as a line of flight or a war machine does not establish the basis of a revolutionary political program. It actually develops in the very opposite direction, that of the organizational logics of traditional political movements.
Nevertheless, an idea of militant praxis is not that strange to Deleuze, who proposes an ahistorical sense of struggle, passing from REVOLUTION as the end of history, to revolution as a line of transformation, that is, to the affirmation of resistance as minor politics, at the expense of revolution conceived as the radical and irreversible advent of a society finally totalized, not divided but reconciled.
From this point of view, perhaps we will never come of age, as Kant wished (philosophy has declined the possession of power (by right) as the (factual) property of knowledge). But that does not mean that philosophy gives up the political field.
We intend to explore a sense of politics that, even renouncing to be everything for everyone, still aspires to become something for someone (the “part of no part”).
Diogo Sardinha
Dandyism and its aftermath. Sartre, Bataille, Foucault and
Deleuze on emancipation
For Kant, emancipation takes the shape of an emergence of the human being from minority into adulthood. As he writes in An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?: “Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority.” Kant also adds that, “for this enlightenment,... nothing is required but freedom...”. Reading this text, Foucault concedes that he doesn’t know if we will ever become major, without denying the importance of the effort to become it. He also thinks that freedom (more than mere resistance to power) is indispensable for this effort, but an ethical work on oneself is also needed. From his point of view, politics and ethics cannot be separated.
Then a problem arises. Ethics principally concerns minorities, since the majority (i.e. most of the people) doesn’t seem to care about developing an ethical relation to their selves. Would the path to emancipation then, which is a way of becoming major (or adult), imply that one must at the same time become minor (i.e. pertain to the minority)? Those who choose to act ethically transform their way of being and thereby they move away from the numerical majority. On the other hand, the members of this majority stay dependent on the external structures of knowledge and power which continue to shape them. The situation becomes more complex as soon as the attitude of ethical minorities becomes the butt of criticism from the voices of the majority. This is for example what Sartre does to Baudelaire, when he accuses him of behaving like a child, i.e. like an adult who refuses to become major. As Bataille puts it, Sartre “minorises” Baudelaire. But then a tension appears between the emancipation of minorities and the censure made by the majority’s voice. Such a tension is actually a battle in which are involved the multiple senses of becoming-major and becoming-minor.
René Schérer
The Majority of the Minor
Man is born immature. A maximal degree of pliability, physical as well as spiritual, defines man’s early childhood. This is pre-eminently the time of that kind of education in which J-J. Rousseau saw a new birth. When does this come to an end? What moment can we fix for a maturity that is without end and suspension? To be adult is a convention and complies with a set of social norms. L’entrée dans la vie (Coming into Existence), the great seminal book by Georges Lapassade, has clearly established this. Childhood, more than a natural state of being, is an institution. It belongs to that part of life that the “majors”, the “ones of age”, keep in their dominion by assigning to it a place of insignificance, of “minority”, that changes over the years, but always overcomes the limits of a period of powerlessness and incapacity that any human being recognizes.
Our problem, when establishing a form of emancipation for childhood, is twofold:
1. To bring this historical movement to a conclusion, a movement that has successively done away with the dominion, the mancipium that has weighed on the social categories devoid of the rights of the majority, slaves and women. To affirm their civil and political position, in the way that Proudhon affirmed the position of the “working classes”;
2. What is more important, however, and ties in with this, is to assert this emancipation for and in the name of childhood, with its special characteristics of being “minor” that allow it to escape the adult standardization of the “majority”. Emancipating childhood by starting off from intrinsic possibilities, this opening to experience, these possibilities, this passionate and attractive excitement that Charles Fourier, amongst others, recognize, as well as Gilles Deleuze with his concept of “becoming-child”.