Article
Commoning the political, politicizing
the common: Community and the political
in Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito
and Giorgio Agamben
Alexandros Kioupkiolis
School of Political Sciences, Faculty of Economics and Political Sciences, Aristotle University,
54124 Thessaloniki, Greece.
alkioup@polsci.auth.gr
Abstract Setting out from the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, this article engages with
post-Heideggerian thought on community, seeking to bring out and to enhance its
political thrust for contemporary democracies. It shows how Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto
Esposito and Giorgio Agamben, ‘common the political’, that is, how they reconsider
politics in light of a fundamental sense of co-existence which clears the ground for
social openness, solidarity, plurality and autonomy. It then responds to a series of
pertinent objections by further politicizing the post-Heideggerian vision of the common.
I set out to translate the ontologies of the common into more concrete political logics by
relating them to actual political practices and by joining them to the political theory of
hegemony and antagonism set out by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Their conjunction of the ‘common’ with the antagonistic politics of hegemony is tension-ridden,
as they draw from conflicting understandings of ‘the political’, pitting plurality and
horizontal relations against division and uneven power. To mitigate that conflict, these
two approaches should be situated at different sites of political action, and the hegemonic framework should be recast so as to bring it more into line with horizontalist
‘common’ politics.
Contemporary Political Theory (2017). doi:10.1057/s41296-017-0156-5
Keywords: common; political; plurality; community; antagonism; hegemony
In recent years, political thought has evinced a renewed interest in thinking and
refiguring community, the commons or, more generically, the ‘common’ (see e.g.
Esposito, 2010, 2011, 2013; Dardot and Laval, 2014; Gilbert, 2014; Hardt and
Negri, 2009, 2012; Nancy, 2000). What drives such inquiries is arguably not a
nostalgia for the ‘lost communities’ of the past, fuelled by resentment and
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Kioupkiolis
insecurity in a globalized world. It is rather the quest for new schemes of common
action and understanding at a time when there are few collective resistances against
the hollowing-out of democracy, when ecological degradation is not effectively
addressed through global coordination, when cultural diversity and migration flows
fan the flames of racism and xenophobia (Dardot and Laval, 2014, pp. 11–16;
Esposito, 2013, p. 43).
Responding to such circumstances, the existentialist philosophies of Jean-Luc
Nancy, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito have theorized ways of tying social
knots which overcome both fragmentation and the exclusions of closed communities. They envision collective convergences which weld together a plurality of
singularities without enclosing them in organic totalities, predefined models and
fixed boundaries – ethnic, cultural, ideological or any other (Nancy, 1991, 2000;
Agamben, 1993; Esposito, 2013). Such relations construct ‘inessential commonalities’, in which differences can act in concert and in solidarity without fusing
together (Agamben, 1993, pp. 86–87).
Promising as they may seem, these endeavours to reconfigure the ‘common’
have come in for a battery of criticisms which castigate them as politically
irrelevant or impotent. Nancy, Esposito and Agamben remain stuck on the abstract
level of a ‘fundamental ontology’ of being-together. They construe the ‘common’
as an ontology of co-existence detached from any actual politics. They do not
wrestle with topical issues of democratic politics, such as the dominant forms of
power and the specific modes of collective action which could uphold democracy in
our times (Marchart, 2012, pp. 173–183; Elliott, 2011; Wagner, 2006; Norris, 2012,
p. 155; Dardot and Laval, 2014, pp. 14–15).
Delving into the work of Nancy and alluding to cognate ideas of Esposito and
Agamben (in The Coming Community), this article engages with post-Heideggerian
thought on community and the common driven by the belief that this carries
valuable insights and directions for democratic politics today. My aim is precisely
to bring out and to enhance its political thrust. As a first step, this article seeks to
show how Nancy along with Esposito and Agamben ‘common the political’, that is,
how they reconsider politics in light of a fundamental sense of co-existence which
clears the ground for social openness, solidarity, plurality and autonomy. At the
same time, this article points out the political limits of this existentialist thought.
Facing up to them, the argument seeks, at a second stage, to further politicize the
post-Heideggerian vision of the common in ways which seek to increase its
political import. This is a process of ‘politicizing the common’ which comes after
an initial commoning of the political and supplements it. Following in the footsteps
of previous similar attempts (Schwarzmantel, 2007; Armstrong, 2009; Vyrgioti,
2015), this article sets out to translate the ontologies of the common into more
concrete political logics by relating them to actual political practices and by joining
them to the political theory of hegemony and antagonism set forth by Laclau and
Mouffe (1985), Mouffe (2000, 2005) and Laclau (2000, 2005). The latter offer a
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Commoning the political, politicizing the common
conception of the political which comes to grips with antagonistic conflicts and
hegemonic systems of power with a view to forging more democratic relations.
The conjunction of the ‘common’ with the antagonistic politics of hegemony is
tension-ridden, to say the least, as they draw from conflicting ontologies and
understandings of ‘the political’, pitting plurality and horizontal relations – the
‘common’ – against division, exclusion and uneven power – hegemony. This article
affirms, however, that their combination can help to advance democracy and that,
in order to do so, the clash between the two logics should be mitigated by way of
certain crucial moves which are initiated here.
Commoning the Political
Jean-Luc Nancy embarked on a rethinking of community and the political in a
historical circumstance of the 1980s which he grasped as ‘the retreat of the
political’ (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1997). From the outset, thus, Nancy’s
philosophy of the community was animated by a concern with the political. The
‘retreat of the political’ implies the dissolution of politics and democracy into a
play of economic and technical forces (Nancy, 1991, pp. xxxviii–xli, 40). It entails
also the eclipse of political theology, i.e. of totalitarian politics and political
programs which aspire to the realization of an essence of community (Nancy, 2000,
p. 37; Nancy, 2010b, pp. 41, 50; 1991, pp. xxxviii–xxxix). These shifts lay bare our
fundamental condition of ‘being-with’, stripping it of any transcendent references
and exposing it as pure space and numbers (Nancy, 1992, p. 373). The retreat
initiates, furthermore, a re-tracing: it raises anew the question of the political
starting out from the question of relation as such, rather than from the categories of
sovereignty, the subject, the state, metaphysical grounds or managerial criteria
(Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1997, pp. 112, 118–134). This questioning begins at
the end of Marxism, and it looks beyond neoliberalism and the new political
conformism (p. 145).
Hence, Nancy’s rethinking of our existence in common was intended to
refigure the political in light of a new ontological reflection on the common. This
has been a fundamental theoretical choice and undertaking, which has motivated
Nancy’s thought on the political but has also invited several critiques that have
taken issue with the very project of elaborating a fundamental ontology, an account
of being in general, in order to establish a broad framework for rethinking
community and politics (Armstrong, 2009, p. 63; Norris, 2012, p. 144).
Indeed, Nancy construes community in terms of a basic ontology of existence,
which is primarily a ‘being-in-common’ with others. The originary plurality of
beings in the world is at the foundation of Being (Nancy, 2000, p. 12; emphasis in
original). Nancy’s quest for a fundamental ontology takes its bearings from
Heidegger’s philosophy and its claim that being-with – Mitsein – is essential to
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existence itself – Dasein. Nancy reconsiders thus the very meaning of politics
through the prism of an originary condition of ‘being-many-together’ which
precedes and exceeds any particular ‘society’ and ‘individuals’ (pp. xv, 25–26, 93,
41; Nancy, 1992, p. 377).
Nancy’s ontology is anti-essentialist as it divests individuals and societies of
definite and permanent essence(s). Community is a mode of contiguity and contact
between multiple singularities (Nancy, 2000, pp. 5–7; 1991, pp. xxxvii–xxxviii;
emphasis in original). Singularities are ‘infraindividual. It is never the case that I
have met Pierre or Marie per se, but I have met him or her in such and such a
‘‘form’’, in such and such a ‘‘state’’, in such and such a ‘‘mood’’, and so on’
(Nancy, 2000, p. 8).
Community is thus devoid of a proper substance of common Being – of the
people, the nation or generic humanity. It cannot be reduced to a unified totality, an
Idea, a Subject or a Concept (pp. 47, 54–55, 59–60, 146; Nancy, 1991, pp. xxxviii–
xl). Community is just a relation among a plurality of singularities (pp. 4, 6).
Community happens, it is an act of association which sets up a space of coappearance and relations. It is a mélange, a dialogue of plural voices, encounters,
reciprocal action open to diversity and change, a praxis of sharing, a network of
singularities which touch each other without melting together. Hence, what we
share in community is essentially a lack of identity (‘finitude’), and the variable
limits that render us singular carving out a space between us. By contrast, the
fusion of atoms in a collective is the political project of totalitarianism, which
brings about the death of community as relations of singularities (pp. 12, 35).
It is evident that Nancy’s take on community gestures beyond mainstream ideas
of organic community and modern society. An intimate, organic community (the
first Christian communities, the Athenian polis, etc.) would be made up of tight and
harmonious ties after the model of family and love, while society is typically
identified with ‘a simple association and division of forces and needs’ (pp. 9, 76).
Nancy’s ‘being-singular-plural’ breaks both with the nostalgia of a lost community
(in Rousseau, Hegel and other modern philosophers) and with a figure of ‘society’
whose emergence supposedly dissolved communitarian intimacy into an aggregation of separate atoms. Hence, Nancy’s rethinking of the ‘common’ could help to
envision a politics of solidarity and coalescence amidst plurality and openness. On
the other hand, its ontological framing is bound, indeed, to raise serious doubts
under the late modern pluralism of ‘comprehensive views’ and an increased
scepticism over the possibility of objective universal knowledge.
A contemporary interpretation of being should reflectively recognize its
partiality, its weak grounding and its contestability (White, 2000; Marchart,
2007, pp. 82–83; Dardot and Laval, 2014, pp. 281–282). This recognition and any
ensuing attempt to come to grips with the lack of strong foundations are lacking in
Nancy. Hence, his vision of a new politics of the common is fully exposed to
reasonable objections bearing on the derivation of this politics from a controversial
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ontological dogma. Furthermore, advancing propositions about being-in-common
which would hold true in any time and place seems to contradict head-on the antiessentialist tenor of Nancy, who claims to dispense with permanent essences.
Finally, an intellectual labour which operates primarily at the highest level of
‘ontological’ abstraction and does not immerse itself in particular contexts will,
most likely, fail to reckon with the specific constraints and possibilities of the latter,
hence the numerous charges against the post-Heideggerian ontologies of community, which take them to task for their abstract philosophism, their failure to
connect ontology with concrete politics of the common (Dardot and Laval, 2014,
pp. 276–283; Marchart, 2007, pp. 80–81; Fynsk, 1991, pp. x–xi; Norris, 2012,
p. 155; Elliott, 2011; Wagner, 2006, pp. 93–94).
These critiques are pertinent, but they should be partly qualified, and they should
not entail a complete dismissal of Nancy’s idea of politics, which can be
appropriately revised and supplemented. This reworking is what we will undertake
after outlining Nancy’s thought on the political in some detail.
Giving the lie to any facile charges of complete apoliticism, Nancy calls for the
pursuit of another politics in view of his ontology of being-with. He strives to move
beyond the two poles between which modern politics has oscillated: politics as
police, the order of power, calculations and relations of force, and the politics of the
common subject-substance (Nancy, 1992, pp. 389–390; 1991, pp. xxxvii–xli, 40;
Nancy, 2000, p. 25). He does not ignore the political in the guise of power relations,
class struggles or the formal abstraction of law, management, the rule of capital and
technocratic administration (Nancy, 2000, p. 47). Nor does he deduce directly a
model of political organization from his account of plural co-existence. Nancy
seeks rather to outline another vision of the political as ‘the place where community
as such is brought into play’ (1991, pp. xxxvii), sketching a horizon within which
politics should be rethought and remade (Nancy, 2000, pp. 47–55).
The community of plural singularities is not only an ontology, but it is also ‘an
ethos and a praxis’ (p. 65; emphasis in original). Being-with sets thus limits to
legitimate politics, demanding a politics that opens community to the ongoing
sharing of multiplicity, the interweaving of singularities who resist completion and
fixity (Nancy, 1991, pp. 80–81). It is true that Nancy does not spell out the specific
forms which a politics beyond sovereignty, technocracy and common essence could
possibly assume. His aim is rather to provide a fundamental background and a
norm through which other modes of politics, beyond power and identity, could be
figured out in greater detail (pp. xl, 80–81).
From this standpoint, ‘the political’ pertains generally to a type of social
interaction in which singularities undergo consciously the experience of nonorganic community (p. 40). Thus understood, the political implies primarily
openness, plurality, variation, creativity, freedom, equality, infinite justice and
struggle. The political turns against atomization and totality, homogenization,
fusion, sovereignty, the sacrifice to a cause, the realization of a fixed identity of
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soil, blood, community or self (Nancy, 1997, pp. 89–91, 103–107, 122). This is the
nub of Nancy’s endeavour to ‘common the political’, that is, to refashion politics in
accord with his ontology of being-with a plurality of singularities. Let us unpack it.
To begin with, Nancy’s favoured politics undertakes to tie social knots through a
dialogue among plural voices which persist in their irreducible plurality and escape
any unitary truth (Nancy, 1991, p. 76; 1997, pp. 90–93). This politics incessantly
weaves a network of links among singularities without conforming to a predefined
model. Its sole end is the singular, each time, interlacing of singularities (pp.
111–114).
Accordingly, politics should not order the ends of the community; it should not
be responsible for the identity and the destiny of the common (Nancy, 2010a,
p. 41). Politics should rather provide access to other, not properly political, spheres,
which craft meanings and forms of life in common, seeking indefinite ends-inthemselves: arts, language, thought, science, love. A non-totalizing politics should
only enable an indefinite multiplicity of creative activities in common, without
subsuming their diversity to an all-encompassing figure or an overarching end (p.
26). In Nancy’s view, then, politics is only the process that opens up or sustains the
possibility of infinite ends and forms made in common. Democratic politics,
however, engages in an ongoing reflection on the limits of politics and the other
spheres (2009, pp. 83, 91–94; Nancy, 2010a, p. 33).
Furthermore, Nancy’s politics draws the ‘combined lesson of war, law, and
‘‘technological civilization’’… sovereignty is nothing’ (2000, p. 141). In the wake
of this insight, the multiplicity of peoples may seek to avoid both the hegemony of
a single people and the desire for a sovereign separation of everyone, opting instead
for the political articulation of a world federation. In it, each people would give up
the modern claim to full sovereignty (p. 141). Nancy concedes that all this is an
inconceivable task to be assumed (p. 141).
Finally, politics should seek to regulate power according to an ‘incommensurable
justice’ of equal freedom (Nancy, 2010a, pp. 50–51; 1993, pp. 71–72). This affirms
the incomparable value of any singular being among everyone: ‘Each one…is
unique by virtue of a unicity or singularity that obligates infinitely…But, at the
same time, strict equality is the regime where these incommensurable(s) are shared
(out)’ (Nancy, 2010a, pp. 24–25; emphasis in original). The politics of justice
respects the real equality of each unique singularity and the equal sharing of
incommensurable freedom (Nancy, 1997, p. 114; 1993, pp. 71–72). Freedom, for
Nancy, is primarily the creation of the new and freedom from every established
framework. This is ‘the task of politics as the liberation of freedom, as the
(re)opening of the space of its inaugural sharing’ (p. 79). Hence, freedom and
justice call on politics to configure itself as a space and a practice of contest which
allow for the questioning of any given arrangement and any measure of justice.
Justice must be done to the singular, and this escapes any prevailing just measure
(pp. 75–77).
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On an endnote, Nancy has occasionally rehearsed the term ‘communism’. But
this refers to nothing else but the ontology of being-with, which comes before
politics and forces on politics two exigencies: to open the common space to the
common itself and to provide for the needs of common life (Nancy, 2010b,
pp. 148–151). Nancy states, moreover, that it is necessary to question the ‘ism’ of
communism which implies a certain ideologization (p. 149). Hence, Nancy’s
ontology of the common and the ‘inoperative community’ turn out to be a
questioning and reformulation of historical communism from the standpoint of a
post-Heideggerian ontology of Mitsein (see also Nancy, 1991, pp. 43–81).
It is apparent, now, that Nancy does articulate a vision of pluralist and open
politics which is committed to ‘incommensurable’ freedom and equality beyond
both atomization and totalization. However, this idea of politics is, indeed, deeply
controversial on account of its ontological framing. Crucially, it is also clear that it
remains on a high level of abstraction, and it can be political debilitating in some
respects. To begin with, Nancy’s thought dwells largely on a philosophical
conception of ‘being singular plural’ without fleshing out the particular figures of
political action and organization that could enact it in practice (Marchart, 2012,
pp. 178–181). Nancy admits explicitly that his lofty politics, which lives the world
as a system of plural singularities beyond sovereignty, ‘does not let itself be
conceived of easily’ (Nancy, 2000, p. 141) Translating his ontology into a
pragmatic politics remains ‘an unheard-of, inconceivable task’ that we must
assume (Nancy, 2000, p. 141).
Moreover, he fails to adequately grapple with ‘the political’ in the sense of
power relations, divisions, antagonism and the making of collective subjects.
Nancy (2000, p. 47) does acknowledge that politics involves also power and
struggle. Moreover, at the latest stage of his work, he endorses a notion of politics
which regulates force (Nancy, 2010a, pp. 50–51). What is missing, however, is any
in-depth engagement with the questions of power, hegemony, antagonism,
institutions and the forging of links among differences in order to construct
collective subjects (Marchart, 2007, pp. 81–82; Marchart, 2012; Wagner, 2006,
pp. 100–101). Accordingly, Nancy’s take on the common and the political seems to
be an instance of those pluralist theories castigated by Chantal Mouffe on the
grounds that they ‘envisage a pluralism without antagonism….pluralism as a mere
valorization of multiplicity, thereby eluding the constitutive role of conflict and
antagonism’ (Mouffe, 2013, pp. 14–15).
Lastly, Nancy’s recurrent injunction to distance politics from any collective
project, end or work (Nancy, 2010a, pp. 26, 41; 1997, pp. 111–116; Elliott, 2011,
p. 268; Wagner, 2006, pp. 93–94) seems to install a self-defeating ban on the
political determination of collective ends and the pursuit of political projects
through collective action. Nancy (1997, p. 89) identifies such politics with
totalitarianism and the sacrifice to a cause. But it is not clear why a body politic
which undertakes common projects cannot also make room for other ends and
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activities carried out by particular groups or individuals. Moreover, what is left for
politics, beyond technocratic administration and management, if it should refrain
from collective choices and works? In a display of self-contradiction, the very kind
of politics championed by Nancy – a politics which affords access to multiple
spheres of common activity by regulating force according to ‘incommensurable
justice’ – must set itself the aim to do so.
Despite their divergences from Nancy, the cognate conceptualizations of
community put forth by Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben in The Coming
Community (1993) do not effectively remedy the defects of his take on politics.
These authors share a similar, post-Heideggerian point of departure. And, like
Nancy, Esposito – to begin with – has set out to imagine another politics in light of
his rethinking of community. The vacuum of ideas brought about by the collapse of
communism, the erection of walls around closed communities, the bodies of
starving people and refugees urge us to reactivate thought on community (Esposito,
2013, pp. 43–44, 78). Drawing his bearings from Martin Heidegger and George
Bataille, Esposito (2013) grasps again community as an originary opening to the
others and an escape from the self (pp. 25, 44). Community is a transcendental
condition of our existence which calls on us to preserve it by opposing the collapse
of community into its opposite: closure to otherness, identity and fusion (pp. 14, 29,
36). As in Nancy, community is a pure relation that joins multiple subjects without
forming a subject or an entity and without tying bonds of belonging around
language, soil and ethnicity (pp. 29, 38, 48, 53; Esposito, 2010, pp. 15–16,
135–138).
Community exposes everyone to an irreducible alterity. The common does not
pertain thus to an authentic and proper self, but to the improper; what is general,
anonymous, undetermined by any essence, race or sex (Esposito, 2013, pp. 29–30,
45–46). The aspiration to a community which embodies a unified totality marks the
logic of totalitarianism, which leads to the death of community as a primary
aperture and relation (pp. 15, 17, 29–30).
Esposito breaks new conceptual ground by associating community with an
original ‘munus’ and with processes of immunization. Esposito (2013) posits, in
effect, a fundamental, conflictual conjunction of communitas and immunitas (pp.
48–49; Esposito, 2011, pp. 5–6, 9). The Latin etymology of community derives the
common from munus, which means obligation and gift (communitas: cum + munus). What binds us together is a reciprocal gift and a duty which obligate us to the
others, inducing us to care for them in a non-invasive way (Esposito, 2013, pp. 14,
18, 25–26, 48–49; 2010, pp. 2–6, 97). Community destabilizes thus the boundaries
of the person, exposing them to contagion by others. This exposure engenders risks
and fears, and it stimulates thus counter-processes of immunization. ‘Whereas
communitas opens, exposes, and turns individuals inside out, freeing them to their
exteriority, immunitas returns individuals to themselves, encloses them once again
in their own skin’ (Esposito, 2013, p. 49). Through immunity, individual or
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collective entities close in upon themselves and seek to relieve themselves of
obligations towards others, conserving their ‘essence’ as owners of their selves
(Esposito, 2013, pp. 38–43, 48–49; 2010, p. 13; 2011, pp. 2–5, 44, 154–155).
Immunization in its diverse manifestations defines the historical moment we live
(Esposito, 2013, p. 58).
The logic of immunity fuels political fundamentalism, nationalism, racism and
fascism. Hence, according to Esposito (2013, pp. 55–6), the challenge for politics
today is to counteract this logic and to foster instead community and freedom.
Against the dynamics of immunization, we should embrace then a singular and
plural logic in which differences are affirmed as the bond that holds the world
together, living and enacting the global system of differences (pp. 65, 71–74).
Esposito’s ‘affirmative biopolitics’ would connect a diversity of impersonal
singularities rather than individuals caught up in exclusionary identities. Singularities are internally multiple, impure, and they liaise with external multiplicities.
Impersonal singularity breaks through static barriers and identities, constituting a
unique being which is both singular and plural (Esposito, 2012, pp. 145, 150–151).
Esposito (2013) admits that ‘transforming this philosophical formula into actual
practice, into a political logic, isn’t easy. And yet we have to find a way…’ (p. 65;
see also p. 78). The problem of philosophic abstraction from concrete political
practices and orientation besets thus again Esposito’s theorization of community
and the political.
The political irrelevance of this current of thought is only compounded by the
very fact that Nancy and Esposito locate their ontological framing of politics, i.e.
their construal of being-in-common, on the plane of an originary and fundamental
condition. By definition, this condition is given from the outset. It is not something
to be produced or instituted. Hence, it is not the object of a politics (Fynsk, 1991,
pp. x–xi). In their defence, Nancy and Esposito could remind us that, on their view,
the fundamental situation of being singular plural can be, and has been, distorted by
totalizing politics or atomization. They suggest, thus, that their ontology of beingin-common should orient politics as a limit and a condition to uphold (Nancy, 2000,
pp. 47–65, 141; 1991, pp. 80–81; 2010a; Esposito, 2013, pp. 65, 71–74). Yet, even
with this qualification, they can always foment political quietism insofar as they
assert that plurality, openness and relations free of fixed identities are the
ontological ground of our existence, rather than contingent objectives and
precarious forms which should be politically constructed and striven for (Elliott,
2011).
Finally, in his Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben, too, takes up the themes
of the singular and the common in order to outline the politics of improper
singularity in a community-to-come. Singularities appear and act in common
without holding on to any determinate identity or bonds of belonging (Agamben,
1993, pp. 86–7, 105). Pure singularities that communicate with each other but are
shorn of any common property are ‘the exemplars of the coming community’ (p.
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11). Such singularities are ‘whatever’; they appear and they act in particular
manners. But their manners are indeterminate and variable, open to new
possibilities (pp. 2, 19, 29, 44, 57).
If ‘humans were to succeed in belonging to impropriety as such… a singularity
without identity…only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they
would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without
subjects’ (p. 65). According to Agamben, this is the political task of our times: to
select the features that will enable contemporary human beings to survive as
singularities who are only the faces and the modes of being that they expose each
time, and who communicate only this variable exteriority, rather than any internal
essence or abiding predicate (pp. 65, 93–94).
A community of singularities features an ‘inessential commonality, a solidarity
that in no way concerns an essence’ (p. 18; emphasis in original). It is what takes
place among them, their communication, which does not unite them in an identity
but scatters them in existence (p. 19). The common place of singularities is a space
of ‘ease’, an empty place in which they can move freely and approximate each
other at an opportune time (p. 25). The politics of whatever singularity is thus
devoid of determinate content. It is a common appearance, action and pure cobelonging that refuse to vindicate any identity which can be represented in the
State. Hence, the ‘novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a
struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but….an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization’ (p. 85).
It would seem that, as distinct from Nancy and Esposito, Agamben envisions
primarily a coming politics of singularity and community, rather than a
fundamental condition of co-existence which is already there. Yet, this discrepancy
should not be overstated (as in Vyrgioti, 2015). In a later Postface to the 2001
Italian edition, Agamben intimates that ‘the coming does not mean the future’ and
that the condition of ‘whatever singularity’ is becoming a reality in the present time
which ‘comes after the last day’ (Agamben, 2001, p. 91; emphasis in original). On
the other hand, both Nancy and Esposito also call for ‘a politics to come’, a politics
of plural singularities in common who resist the contemporary disfiguration of
community and the power politics of modernity (see e.g. Nancy, 2000, pp. 47–65;
Esposito, 2013, pp. 65, 71–74).
The crux is, however, that just like Nancy’s and Esposito’s, Agamben’s politics
of a ‘community to come’ (in the homonymous essay) remains vague and elusive.
Agamben sees some elements of a political realization in the Tiananmen
demonstrations, only to end on an impasse: ‘Wherever these singularities
peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a Tiananmen, and,
sooner or later, the tanks will appear’ (1993, p. 87).
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Politicizing the Common
These valid criticisms notwithstanding, we will make now the case that postHeideggerian thought on community can be re-politicized, or more fully
politicized, in ways which rescue its political value for the contemporary world.
The work of repoliticization or deeper politicization will involve several different
gestures.
Coming to grips with hegemonic structures of power, antagonisms, the making
of political ties and alternative institutions is necessary, indeed, in order to
effectively challenge and change the ruling regime of neoliberal power by welding
together broad alliances out of dispersed differences. It is necessary in order to
advance precisely the kind of open pluralist and egalitarian commons cherished by
post-Heideggerian philosophers. Otherwise, we are left indeed in a political
vacuum of ethical injunctions and abstract philosophizing.
Such objections are to the point, but they should not entail a dismissal of
Nancy’s, Esposito’s and Agamben’s notions of the common and the political.
Openness to the others, plurality, sharing and solidarity beyond differences,
variation, creativity, singularity and equality, infinite justice, resistance to
homogenization, totality and atomization, opposition to closed identities of soil,
blood, community or self: all these are cardinal values of a politics which aspires to
equal freedom and justice in a globalized, diverse, fragmented and dramatically
unequal world. The critiques should trigger, rather, efforts to politicize the
ontologies of being singular plural, turning them into political orientations and
bringing them closer to the rough ground of actual politics.
A first move in this direction should set out to politicize ontology. Every politics
is informed by a particular sense of being – of the way human actors, society and
nature are (see White, 2000). Ontological reflection contributes thus to clarity, selfunderstanding, critique and change. But there is no place today for an objective
fundamental ontology that would lay claim to universal validity. Every account of
how ‘things are’ is partial, in conflict with other understandings of the real and
inflected by political values and choices. Hence, any ontology of being singular
plural should be recast as political: an interpretation of social being which rests on
reasonable arguments and evidence but does not grasp the whole, it is imbued with
value choices and it remains subject to question.
Moreover, solidarity beyond specific identities (national, ideological, racial,
etc.), and being-in-common beyond atomization and homogenization are not a
fundamental fact of the world but partial moments, and values to be actively
pursued. Therefore, political ontology should be further transcribed into a political
logic, a political orientation that guides collective action, rather than posing as an
already existing reality and foundation.
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This transcription already signals a third gesture of politicization. Political
action, particularly when it seeks to overturn prevailing systems of power, should
not condemn itself to a subsidiary role, subservient to ends which are determined in
established social fields. Hence, political praxis cannot forswear the determination
of collective ends and projects. Nancy is right to oppose a totalizing politics which
intends to pre-empt the ends of all social activities and to demand a sacrifice to
ultimate causes. But there is no reason why political activity which engages in
common enterprises could not forgo such totalizing aspirations and make also room
for undertakings which are not designed by the body politic. Democratic politics is
about the collective and deliberate determination of common ends. But it needs not,
and should not, be totalizing. Nancy seems to pose a false alternative between
totalitarian politics or politics that sets itself no ends and projects. In any case,
politics is effectively located in any field of action where collective choices are
made – through struggle, relations of power or egalitarian decision-making in
common.
A fourth major step in the work of politicization should link the idea of
community sketched out by Nancy, Esposito and Agamben with contemporary
political activities which partly instantiate it. Such an empirical grounding can
demonstrate the actual pertinence of the philosophy of plural being in common. It
also helps to develop a middle level of theorizing, which is situated beyond
abstract, general philosophizing and the detailed description of particular cases. In
effect, since the turn of the century, a vast literature on social movements has
shown that a wide array of collective mobilizations are marked by the precise
features that single out ‘inessential community’ in Nancy, Esposito and Agamben’s
thought.
A variety of organizations, resistances and collective initiatives which have
surged forth over the last decades in Latin America, across Europe and in various
other sites configure open and horizontal associations which manage directly their
affairs through consensus and decentralized decision-making. They build loose
network coalitions, but they are pluralist and they do not adhere to a master plan of
social restructuring, nor do they strive to forcibly implement their models (see Day,
2005, pp. 25–45, 186–197; Dixon, 2014; Arditi, 2007; Beasley-Murray, 2010;
Holloway, 2005). Such communities exceed thus the logic of state politics,
sovereign power, definite political programs, fixed models, common substances and
closed identities.
More recently, the Indignados and Occupy mobilizations in 2011–2012
embodied likewise communities of action rather than of a common ethnic,
religious, etc. substance. They performed openness, plurality and solidarity beyond
particular identities, dismissing ideological closures, state sovereignty and hegemonic structures (see e.g. Sitrin and Azzellini, 2014; Taylor et al, 2011; Dhaliwal,
2012; Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos, 2011).
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To begin with, they crafted open communities of political participation. The
movements were organized in public squares where they set up popular assemblies,
creating thus spaces of free and plural action in concert. The very choice of public
squares and streets to establish assemblies, in its contrast to decision-making
behind closed doors, makes evident the will to open up political activity to any and
all (Nez, 2012, p. 131) Their processes of collective decision-making opened
political power to common citizens, striking down informal and institutional
barriers to participation (Dhaliwal, 2012, pp. 265–266). Occupied squares were
redesigned as ‘spaces to do politics without politicians’ (Dhaliwal, 2012, p. 263)
available to ordinary citizens, poor, non-experts and socially marginalized people
(see also Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos, 2011, pp. 43–54, 221). As a result, the
squares became ‘a magnetic furnace where strangers that once walked anywhere
alone meet, mix’, performing Agamben’s community as a space of ease in which
people can move freely and approximate each other as they wish (Dhaliwal, 2012,
p. 259; Agamben, 1993, p. 25).
Second, openness went hand in hand with plurality and diversity. The Indignados
and Occupy rose up against material inequalities, debt, foreclosures and the
economic system that engenders them in complicity with states. But they were
‘movement[s] with people of many … political persuasions’ (Harcourt, 2011).
They actively promoted diversity by foreswearing ideological closures and strict
programmatic definitions and by articulating, through their assemblies, a spacious
discourse hospitable to many different people (Dhaliwal, 2012, pp. 263–265; see
also Stavrides, 2012; Nez, 2012; Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos, 2011, pp. 43–54,
221). Moreover, Occupy and the Indignados helped diverse singularities to
converge by knitting horizontal, decentralized networks which enable collaboration
without suppressing the freedom of singularities (Castells, 2012; Tejerina and
Perugorria, 2012).
Openness and plurality in such communities of action were further nurtured by a
political culture which cultivates critical respect for differences, civility, generosity, a relaxed atmosphere of debate, and an affective politics which sustains
relations of care among diverse people (see Dixon, 2014, pp. 90, 228–229). Hence,
the 2011 ‘square movements’ broke with the homogeneous unity of the people or
the masses and made open plurality the very foundation of their cohesion, pitting a
variety of forces, ideas and actions against a common enemy.
Finally, the movements in question opposed the politics of representation, state
sovereignty and hegemony, championing instead horizontality and political
equality. They refused to make demands on the state, and the deliberately sought
to enforce the equal rule of all against the hegemony of leaders and sovereign
representatives by working out new practices of self-governance through an
egalitarian and consensual deliberation that is accessible to all. The 2011
democratic movements implemented, thus, binding mandates and alternation in
the posts of spokespersons, discussion moderators and special working-groups.
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They set strict time limits and used rotation and lot to allocate the opportunity to
speak in the assembly. They recognized only individuals, and no groups, as equal
participants in the procedures of political deliberation. (Dhaliwal, 2012,
pp. 262–263; Stavrides, 2012; Nez, 2012, pp. 132–134; Giovanopoulos and
Mitropoulos, 2011, pp. 52–66, 113, 333; Lorey, 2014, pp. 50–55; Graeber, 2012;
Sitrin and Azzellini, 2014; Taylor et al, 2011).
In all these respects, the recent ‘square movements’ and other contemporary
figures of collective action exemplify the idea of community put forth by Nancy,
Esposito and Agamben: community as an open relation among a plurality of
singularities, a happening, an act of association, a dialogue of plural voices,
reciprocal action exposed to diversity and change, a practice of sharing which is
never complete, a network of singular differences, a space of free convergence,
politics beyond sovereignty and the state.
A fifth and last politicizing intervention should combine being in common as
construed by Nancy and Esposito with a political conception that thinks through
two key political dimensions which are left unaddressed in their philosophy:
antagonism in the sense of division and conflict between irreconcilable positions,
and hegemony as the relations of force underlying the dominant order of society
and the effective process of building new political communities. The work of
Laclau and Mouffe (1985), Laclau (1990, 2005) and Mouffe (2000, 2005, 2013) is
particularly suited to this task. It is a major contribution to the contemporary
rethinking of both hegemony and antagonism, which is intended to promote plural
and egalitarian democracy.
However, the conjunction of the plural, open and horizontal common with
hegemonic politics is a controversial idea and a daunting task since they embody
antagonistic political logics and practices. As a political logic, hegemony entails
the drawing of political frontiers, exclusions and processes of concentration of
power, convergence on common identities and representation, which set limits to
plurality, the affirmation of singularity, openness, horizontality and sharing
(Laclau, 2000, pp. 207–212). In the thought of Mouffe and Laclau, hegemony is
informed by an ontology of ‘the political’ which sees it ‘as a space of power,
conflict and antagonism’ (Mouffe, 2005, p. 9; ‘the moment of negativity (radical
investment, opaqueness of representation, division of the object) is irreducible…It
is around a constitutive lack that the social is organized’ (Laclau, 2005, pp. 239,
244).
For Nancy, what is primary is community as the ongoing sharing of multiplicity,
‘the interweaving of singularities’, and ‘the political’ is reconsidered in light of this
idea. By contrast, Laclau and Mouffe accord primacy to division, antagonism, lack
and hegemony as unequal power relations. Although for both post-Heideggerians
and Laclau-and-Mouffe ‘plurality’ is constitutive of community and the political,
the latter oppose head-on any conception of plurality as a pure multiplicity which
does not entail intrinsically division, lack of unity and the need for hegemonic
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constructions; they contradict, that is, precisely the notion of plurality found in the
work of Nancy, Esposito and Agamben (in The Coming Community). For Laclau
and Mouffe, plurality implies essentially antagonism and failed unity, which call
intrinsically for ‘hegemony’ and ‘articulation’ in order to construct partial and
precarious social formations (Mouffe, 2013, pp. 14–15; Laclau, 2005, pp. 223–224;
Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, pp. 93–148).
These deeper ontological and theoretical collisions between the theory of Laclau
and Mouffe and post-Heideggerian views of the political as the common translate
also into more specific political oppositions, which I will discuss in detail later on.
The remainder of the paper will carry on with the last step of ‘politicizing the
common’ by facing up to challenge of welding together the contradictory logics of
the plural common and hegemony. I will put forward three relevant claims, among
others.
First, any attempt at joining together the two logics should remain fully alert to
their conflict so as to be able to partly control and to mitigate it. Second, hegemony
and the plural common could be brought together mainly as political strategies and
orientations (‘logics’), not as fundamental general ontologies whose claim to
universality would rule out antagonistic alternatives. Third, a constructive
conjunction which serves the politics of plural, open and egalitarian communities
should activate the two logics at different levels and sides. The logic of the
common should inform primarily the internal workings of democratic communities
of action and struggle, while the logic of hegemony and antagonism should apply
mainly to the confrontation with the enemies of plurality, openness, equality and
sharing. Last, to limit the effects of their mutual subversion, particularly the
destruction of the open common by the centralizing and homogenizing grip of
hegemony, the latter should be critically recast so as to become more congruent
with plurality, horizontality, egalitarianism and openness. The following, final
section initiates the attempt to reconfigure hegemonic politics in the spirit of the
common.
Hegemony and the Common
From the standpoint of Laclau and Mouffe, hegemony is necessary in order to
transform contemporary societies in the direction of open and plural communities.
A randomly dispersed plurality of movements, fights and alternative practices of
the ‘common’ is unlikely to bring about broader social change as it is likely to
founder on incoherence, conflicts among heterogeneous courses of action and the
weakness of fragmented, isolated forces which are confronted with vested interests.
To achieve a minimum of convergence among diverse struggles and to amass
enough force to challenge the status quo, we need to engage in the politics of
hegemony which articulates wider political communities through chains of
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equivalence, defines an enemy, draws frontiers between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and instils
into different actors a modicum of collective identity (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985,
pp. 140–141, 178–184; Mouffe, 1991, p. 70; 2013, pp. 73–74).
Hegemony is, more specifically, the political practice which constructs a new
social order starting out from an antagonistic confrontation between rival social
sectors. Diverse demands and groups can become equivalent by means of their
common opposition to an enemy. They forge thus a ‘chain of equivalence’ that
unites them beyond their particularities. This chain will coalesce into a collective
subject if a particular force within it rises to become the general representative of
all equivalent struggles and claims, functioning as a centre of cohesion. To this end,
the identity of a particular actor must be partly divested of its particular contents so
as to serve as a wider symbol that represents and brings together the entire
community of differences (Laclau, 2005, pp. 93, 2000, pp. 207–212).
Hegemony is based on an unequal distribution of power within the oppositional
front, since a particular actor must accede to a position of leadership, and against
the enemy who must be excluded and eventually overwhelmed in order to found a
new hegemonic order (Laclau, 2000, pp. 207–208). Hegemonic politics is also a
politics of representation, insofar as a particular force pursues common ends and
projects in the name of an entire bloc of forces (Laclau, 1996, pp. 98–100).
Laclau and Mouffe have championed a particular idea of radical democratic
community drawing on a conception of ‘the political’ which is elided with
hegemony and antagonism (Mouffe, 2005, pp. 8–9, 17; 2000, pp. 22, 130; Laclau
and Mouffe, pp. 134–145). Antagonism consists in an unbridgeable division
between ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’, whereby the presence of the other
negates my identity (Mouffe, 2005, pp. 15–18; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985,
pp. 111–114, 125–130). Antagonism is an always present possibility of social
relations, because plurality generates radical disagreement in the realm of politics
and justice. Hence, for Laclau and Mouffe, ‘the political’ pertains to ‘a choice
between conflicting alternatives’. And when they are taken amidst dissent, political
decisions settle on one or the other alternative according to the prevalent relations
of force (Mouffe, 2000, p. 130; 2000, p. 105; Laclau, 1991, p. 90). Every social
order is thus hegemonic in that it rests upon a particular configuration of forces and
a set of political exclusions (Mouffe, 2005, pp. 17–18; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985,
pp. 134–145).
The hegemonic conception the plural common converges partly with the
contemporary existentialist ways. For Laclau and Mouffe, what holds together a
radical and plural democratic community, which is hegemonically established, is
not a substantive notion of the common good, but a collective identification with
the political principles of freedom and equality and a shared commitment to their
expansion (Mouffe, 1991, pp. 76–82; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, pp. 176–186).
Hence, as in the thought of Nancy, Esposito and Agamben, the common of radical
democracy is plural and open. It escapes the dichotomy between a modern society
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diluted into an aggregate of atoms and a premodern community organized around a
specific idea of the good (Mouffe, 1991, p. 75). In Laclau and Mouffe’s radical
democratic common, the mutual recognition of certain ethico-political values
respects individual liberty and allows for a diversity of more specific allegiances.
The political community lacks thus a fully fixed identity or a final unity. It is
subject to ongoing re-enactment and it does not make up a unitary subject. The
common consists, rather, in the precarious and provisional articulation of a
multiplicity of spaces, social relations, movements, forms of identification and
democratic practices which retain their partial autonomy (Mouffe, 1991, pp. 77,
79–80; Laclau, 1991, pp. 95–96; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, pp. 176–193).
However, a sea of distance still separates Laclau and Mouffe’s hegemonic
conception of a plural common from Nancy, Esposito and Agamben’s being-incommon. For the latter, the common exceeds and negates boundaries, exclusions,
fixed demarcations, sovereignty, top-down rule and the state (Nancy, 1991, pp.
xxxvii–xli, 40, 80–81; 1997, pp. 89–91, 103–107, 122; 2010a, p. 26; 1993, p. 79;
Esposito, 2013, pp. 14, 25, 29, 36, 49; Agamben, 1993, pp. 19, 25, 85–7, 105). In
sharp contrast, the politics of hegemony dictates the concentration of force, a
measure of substantive collective identity, political frontiers and exclusions, an
involvement with the state.
For Mouffe (2013, pp. 75–78, 84, 124), division, delimitation from others,
partially fixed collective identities, the state and political representation are key
constituents of her radical and plural democracy, hence Mouffe’s uneasiness with
contemporary movements such as Occupy and Indignados. Their aspiration to
plurality and openness without boundaries, their opposition to institutional
representation, their commitment to consensus, horizontality and decentralization,
their quest for the ‘common’ outside the state are denounced as an inadequate
strategy for democratic transformation, which is rooted in a flawed conception of
‘the political’ (pp. 109–127). According to her, ‘15 M [the ‘Indignados’ in Spain]
would have come to nothing without Podemos’, i.e. without political representation
and engagement with state institutions (Mouffe in Mouffe and Errejón, 2016,
pp. 70, 76). Commenting on the 2011 ‘anti-institutional’ mobilizations, Laclau
(2014, p. 9) has also affirmed unequivocally that ‘the horizontal dimension of
autonomy will be incapable, left to itself, of bringing about long-term historical
change if it is not complemented by the vertical dimension of ‘‘hegemony’’ – that
is, a radical transformation of the state’.
It seems thus that the post-Marxist, hegemonic approach to the making of plural
democratic commons clashes head-on with the fully inclusionary, wildly diverse,
horizontal, consensual, decentralized, caring, non-sovereign, non-statist and nonrepresentative spirit of the common which animates both post-Heideggerian
thought and contemporary mobilizations. The two, accordingly, appear impossible
to combine so as to enable horizontal communities to come to grips with
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antagonisms, power structures and the need to craft broader political communities
of struggle and change.
Yet, both Laclau and Mouffe have called for such an alliance between the logic
of hegemony and the plural logic of autonomy, even in most recent years. ‘Instead
of opposing extra-parliamentary to parliamentary struggle, thereby eschewing the
possibility of common action, the objective should be to jointly launch a counterhegemonic offensive against neo-liberalism’. ‘It’s clear that the democratic
demands that exist in our societies cannot find an expression solely through the
vertical form, that they also need horizontal forms of expression’ (Mouffe, 2013,
p. 127; Mouffe in Mouffe and Errejón, 2016, p.125). For Laclau (2014, p. 9), the
Indignados, Occupy Wall Street and the piqueteros in Argentina, among others,
incarnate the horizontal dimension of ‘‘autonomy’’: ‘To advance both in the
direction of autonomy and hegemony is the real challenge to those who aim for a
democratic future’.
In the work of Laclau and Mouffe, however, the awareness of a conflictual bind
between hegemony and autonomy has not given rise to any systematic endeavour to
work through the tension with a view to reducing the risk of destruction, mainly of
autonomous plural politics by hegemonic forces. Such an undertaking is vital for
any contemporary politics that seeks to bring together the two logics so as to
canvass an adequate strategy for the expansion of open, diverse and self-organized
commons. It should be stressed, however, that the combination of the two political
logics could only be partial, risky and tension-ridden as they move in different
directions (horizontality vs verticality, openness and diversity vs frontiers and
exclusions, etc.).
A first step towards moderating the conflict would dispense with essentialist
hegemonic definitions which identify ‘the political’ solely with antagonism,
exclusions and power relations, ruling out consensus, maximum inclusion and an
equal distribution of power. ‘The political’ as the active determination of social
relations and collective ends manifests itself in various guises, which display both
strife and dialogue, both antagonism and attempts at a mutually acceptable agreement, both power struggles and solidarity, both preservation of the status-quo and
creative transformations.
A complementary step is to pass from the level of ontological speculation to the
level of political practices and orientations – from political ontology to political
logic(s), which imply different modes of organizing political action and of
governing political associations. This gesture parallels and supplements the same
transition we commended above for the ontological thought of Nancy, Esposito and
Agamben. If we remain on the plane of ontology, the two contending approaches
are impossible to combine. Their ontologies claim to offer a comprehensive and
fundamental account of the real, and their respective pictures are at odds with each
other and could not coexist in the same world. For Nancy, for example, what is
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together’. For Laclau and Mouffe, it is ‘being-many-against’: division, antagonism,
lack of unity.
Furthermore, to avert the absorption of grassroots horizontal communities by the
bureaucratic institutions of the state or the market, the conjunction between
horizontalism and verticalism should be disjunctive, sustaining thus the mutual
agonistic contest and the independence of each political practice. An enhanced
awareness of the tensions between the different aspects of counter-hegemonic
politics and a committed effort to keep them apart will be necessary in order to
effectively uphold the different qualities of political agency in its various
directions.
Moreover, the politics of hegemony and the politics of open and plural commons
should be performed with different strengths at different sides and levels of sociopolitical activity. The drawing of antagonistic frontiers, the making of collective
identities, the banding of forces, the exclusion of particular politics and social
forms, the struggle to overpower the opponent should be undertaken primarily
outwards – against the advocates and the beneficiaries of unjust, oppressive,
exclusionary, homogenizing and unequal relations. The drive to create inclusionary, free, egalitarian and diverse commons should inform mostly the ties and
interactions within the multiple movements which coalesce against common
adversaries: the political forces which defend old or new enclosures, hierarchies
and injustices. In other words, the politics of hegemony should be turned against its
upholders with a view to minimizing structures of domination, expulsion and
closed identity across all social fields.
Finally, a series of particular attitudes, ethics, arts and strategies can help to
successfully negotiate the tension between the two logics in favour of the open and
plural common. The hegemonic leg of the pair is typically more powerful and
imperious as it is better resourced, better organized, relatively isolated from direct
collective influence and, most often, power-mongering. Therefore, effective steps
need to be taken in order to tilt the balance of force between vertical hegemony and
the plural autonomy of the common in favour of the latter.
First, any higher-level concentration of power in representative institutions,
spoke councils, etc. should emanate from the bottom, and grassroots communities
should be configured in ways which promote openness, diversity and the
decentralization of decision-making. Second, any residues of hegemonic politics
– of unification, leadership and representation – that are still accepted within
horizontal communities on the grounds of political efficacy should be radically
transfigured in ways which foster egalitarianism, autonomy and a spacious
diversity. Among others, a regular rotation in roles of responsibility and leadership,
such as those of co-ordinator or spokesperson, can contribute to a wide sharing of
knowledge and power, the acquisition of skills and the empowerment of large
numbers of people. Moreover, full transparency, accountability and revocability of
councilpersons, delegates and representatives enable the collective grassroots to
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retain control over leadership functions (Dixon, 2014, pp. 186–188, 190–196; della
Porta and Rucht, 2015, pp. 222–131).
Besides, in order to safeguard the plurality and openness of the common,
different modes of unification and community-building are in order, opposing
drives towards homogeneity and closure. Hence, diversity, inclusion and a shared
opposition to forces which impose uniform models could become the very
foundation of convergence and community. This has been indeed the case with
various recent democratic movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, which stood up
in common against the ‘1%’ but celebrated the diversity of perspectives, intentions
and desires which they encompassed (Harcourt, 2011).
Conclusion
Ours is a time of pervasive social diversity, tighter global interconnections, social
fragmentation, disillusionment with democracy, growing oligarchic tendencies,
steepening inequalities and rising xenophobia. It is urgent, thus, to rethink the
social bond and collective action. And this rethinking should be conducted in terms
of an irreducible plurivocity and a political praxis that knits an open network of
links among singularities without conforming to pre-established models or
substantial closed identities, hence the importance of Nancy, Esposito and
Agamben’s thought on ‘inessential’ commonality.
To put flesh on the bones of this idea of the common and to make it politically
relevant, contemporary philosophy needs to politicize its abstract ontological
discourse, while preserving its cutting edges and its broader remit. A key step in
this direction is to regain contact with real politics on the ground. Recent
mobilizations such as the Indignados and Occupy Wall Street have formed
communities of action which are open, consensual and self-organized. They
embrace diversity, they empower ordinary people on a footing of equality and they
oppose fixed hierarchies and closed ideologies. In all these respects, they have
staged specific enactments of the open, plural, free and ‘inessential’ common
envisioned by Nancy, Esposito and Agamben. Hence, they indicate how an elusive
theorizing about ‘being singular plural’ and ‘the coming community’ could be
transcribed into more specific political action.
A second major gesture would be to join the philosophy of the plural common to
political thought and practice which give due recognition to what the former leaves
unaddressed: power structures, fundamental antagonisms, the construction of
collective identities and the organization of collective action. Laclau and Mouffe’s
‘theory of hegemony’ and agonistic democracy contains valuable intellectual
resources on this front. But their conception, and any other ‘realistic’ take on power
politics, should be radically revised in order to minimize repression, exclusion and
inequality in the new commons of democratic struggles. This can help to strike a
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productive balance between political efficacy and the actual cultivation of another
ethos of the common.
About the Author
Alexandros Kioupkiolis is assistant professor in contemporary political theory at
the School of Political Sciences, Aristotle University, in Thessaloniki, Greece. His
research interests lie in modern philosophies of freedom, theories of democracy and
the commons, critical theories of power. He has published four books and
numerous articles on these topics. Recent publications include the edited volume
Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today (Ashgate/Routledge, 2014);
the monographs Freedom after the Critique of Foundations: Marx, Liberalism and
Agonistic Autonomy (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2012), The Commons of Freedom (in
Greek, Exarchia Editions, 2014); and the articles ‘Common Democracy. Political
Representation beyond Representative Democracy’, Democratic Theory (2017),
4.1, pp. 35–58, and ‘Acts, events and the Creation of the New’, Constellations
(2017), 24.1, pp. 27–39.
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