Action, Error, Ethos: Political ontology as tragedy or comedy?

Action, Error, Ethos: Political Ontology as Tragedy or Comedy?

This thesis is presented by William Cameron (390702) to the School of Social and Political Sciences in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in the Field of Political & International Studies in the School of Social and Political Sciences Faculty of Arts The University of Melbourne Supervisor: Professor Adrian Little Date: 12th October 2015 Word Count: 14,978 words

Thesis Declaration Form

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Table of Contents

Thesis Declaration Form

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Table of Contents

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Acknowledgments

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Abstract

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Introduction

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Chapter One: Error, Ethos, Ontology

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Chapter Two: Becoming Tragic

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Chapter Three: The Coming Comedy

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Chapter Four: On ‘Not Getting It’ — The Hubris of Missing the Punchline

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Conclusion

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Bibliography

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Acknowledgments I want to express deep gratitude to my supervisor, Adrian Little, who masterfully cultivated the right ethos of inquiry by asking the right questions. Thanks also to Nicholas Avery and Justin Clemens for their unique and valuable insights. Last but not least, I must acknowledge Luara Karlson-Carp, whose emotional and intellectual partnership kept me happily suspended between tragic seer and comic schmuck throughout the project. ***

…And utterance and thought as clear as complicated air and moods that make a city moral, these [man] taught himself. The snowy cold he knows to flee and every human exigency crackles as he plugs it in: every outlet works but one. Death stays dark. Death he cannot doom. Fabrications notwithstanding. Evil, good, laws, gods, honest oath taking notwithstanding. Hilarious in his high city you see him cantering just as he please, the lava up to here. — Anne Carson, Sophocles’ ‘Ode to Man’ in Antigonick (2012)

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Abstract The thesis advances the concept of ethos as an approach to political action that, instead of trying to avoid failure, embraces the generative potential of error. Employing the framework of political ontology, the theories of ethos in the work of William Connolly and Giorgio Agamben are engaged. I argue for the utility of an aesthetic-affective grounding for political action, comparing Connolly’s ethos of tragic care with Agamben’s ethos of comic indifference. Interpreting the generative potential of failure in terms of Oliver Marchart’s post-foundational moment of the political, the thesis concludes with an argument for a ‘tragicomic’ ethos. A ‘tragicomic’ ethos is shown to guide political action towards both the institution of new political forms and the de-institution of old political forms. This is because tragic care is attuned to the first type of action, while comic indifference is attuned to the second type of action. The thesis is an important contribution to emerging political theory scholarship on failure, as well as a path-breaking comparative study in classical dramatic affects as they apply to political action. In taking aesthetic-affective qualities as its object of investigation, the thesis also presents a unique and novel interpretation of Connolly and Agamben — two of the most influential contributors to political thought working today.

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Introduction

Early in September 2015, a photograph of the drowned three-year-old corpse of Alan Kurdi, who tragically died fleeing war-torn Syria, evoked feelings of pity and shame around the world. This affective response compelled European leaders to act on a rapidly worsening refugee crisis. However, by the end of the month, as states began tightening borders and streamlining processing operations, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) was once again criticising the inadequacy of Europe’s response. The European council president rebuked these accusations. He argued that relative to the hypocritical indifference of many others Europe genuinely cared. Even if the solutions under discussion failed to extend human rights protections as far as the UNHCR would have liked, he argued, governments could only do so much.

Despite coming from a caring place, political action frequently fails to achieve desired outcomes. Care gives way to indifference, as the pathos that brought action about in the first place is slowly eroded by the intractability of the problem it sets out to solve. The UNHCR was established in 1951 with a mandate to resettle displaced peoples within three years and then disband. In 2015, the institution celebrates its 64th anniversary. In the same year, the number of those seeking refuge is approaching the post-World War Two levels to which it was founded in emergency response (Ogata, 2000). The unexpected longevity of the UNHCR, as the organisation itself admits, reflects “the international community’s continuing failure to prevent … root causes of conflict and displacement” (Ogata, 2000: x). As popular sentiment is funnelled into actions that are measured against institutional mandates, the response to the current crisis in Europe results in yet another failure by state actors to meet instituted normative prescriptions.

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***

What would it take for the affects aroused by tragedies like the death of Alan Kurdi to be directed not simply towards trying to better implement existing norms, but instead to a recognition of the inherent imperfection of political structures and their inevitable failure? As William Connolly wonders, could tragic affect be politicised toward an acknowledgment of the limits to hegemonic theory and practice (2008: 120)? And could the cultivation of such a mindset embrace the generative potential of failure to create new forms of political action? Or might there be something in comic indifference — following Giorgio Agamben, could “laughing off” the burdens of the old way of doing things hold the key to opening up a new horizon for action (Prozorov, 2014: 10)? Taking seriously the idea that emotion guides action, these questions inform the underlying problematic with which this study grapples:

How does a tragic or comic ethos guide political action towards the creative embrace of failure?

Essentially, I want to rethink the how of failure. This is an urgent problem because of the prevalence of political theories that, in setting prescriptive normative targets for action, define failure as pejorative — something to be avoided (Freeden, 2009b). The UNHCR, doggedly pursuing outcomes founded in liberal human rights theory, has been failing to fulfil its objectives for over half a century. Yet, in every crisis (including the current one), failure is attributed to the inadequacy of actors and not the inherent flaws of social formations. Consequently, failure’s real potential — the institution of new political ideas to replace old ones — is continually overlooked.

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The type of theory equipped to respond to the creative embrace of failure therefore cannot be normative. This is because such theory’s aim — the application of prescriptive goals — means that the “how” of failure is already cast in pejorative terms. This is true whether we ascribe to analytic-type normative theory (a framework aimed at identifying “the content of the rules of morality” (MacDermott, 2008: 16)), or critical theory-type normative theory (an approach which, despite supplementing moral ideas with empirical critique, still posits a moral framework (Habermas, 1994)).

The approaches of William Connolly and Giorgio Agamben, which this study investigates, draw on a theoretical tradition which calls into question the edifice of normative theory. The theoretical tradition they draw upon makes use of the genealogical method. Genealogy aims to expose the contingency of norms — the fact that despite their being so, their being is not necessary. That is, genealogical critique exposes the historicity of normative truths. It is a method that traces the historical development of such truths to illustrate that their emergence was not due to metaphysical necessity (Foucault, 1984). The goal of genealogy is to critically open up new space for action — to expand and advance “the undefined work of freedom” (Foucault, 1984: 40).

In the first chapter of this study, I will show that within the framework of genealogy ‘failure’ can be redefined as ‘error’, a learning experience to be embraced and not avoided. As such, throughout this thesis I primarily refer to ‘error’. When I do refer to ‘failure’, I mean it only insofar as it relates the primary concept of error. The creative potential of error is defined in terms of Marchart’s post-foundational political thought (2007). In the first chapter, I also establish ‘ethos’ as an orientation to action that does not rely on prescriptive goals but instead draws on affective and aesthetic resources.

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Coming to terms with the affects guiding political action in the work of Connolly and Agamben is the focus of the second and third chapters. Each author is shown to devise a non-normative ethos based on a dramatic aesthetic metaphor — tragedy for Connolly and comedy for Agamben. According to Aristotle, drama is the aesthetic imitation of action, involving a foregrounding of character (Greek: ethos), and a plot for which revelations of unexpected consequences — failures — are the most powerful element of emotional interest (Walton, 2015).1 Tragedy and comedy aesthetically represent action, mobilising contrasting affects in their presentation of actions performed by characters that result in failure. In other words, dramatic genres are conceptual tools for aesthetically re-thinking the how of failure. They show us nonpejorative ways to feel about making mistakes.

In the final chapter, I compare the tragic and comic ethê2 of Connolly and Agamben. I draw their insights together to make the claim that a way of failing that fully draws on the creative potential of error must be ‘tragicomic’. Simply put, this is because the tragic ethos is only open to the institution of new forms, while the comic ethos is only open to the de-institution of old forms. In conclusion, I argue that a tragicomic ethos based on the works of Connolly and Agamben can guide political action toward the creative embrace of failure. I also suggest some further directions for research that this study opens up.

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This particular account of drama is based on the Poetics of Aristotle, a systematisation of the poetic forms of Greek culture. Although it is now commonplace amongst literary theorists to refute Aristotle for his narrow-minded interpretation of drama that “downgrade[s] the performance aspects of theatre” (Walton, 2015: 5), it is the one that has most permeated the imagination of political theorists and is therefore most relevant to the interests of this study. Dithyramb and satyr play, two other important Greek dramatic forms, are excluded for the same reasons — neither genre has had as strong an influence as tragedy or comedy on philosophical modernity. 2

Plural of ethos.

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Chapter One: Error, Ethos, Ontology

In his recent article in Political Studies, Adrian Little (2012) has called for political actors to adopt a “different mindset” that, instead of pejoratively defining failure as something to be avoided, embraces the “generative power of unintended consequences”. Arguing from the complexity theory-based recognition of a non-linear relation between action and outcome, and adopting Michel Foucault’s understanding of error as the epistemic foundation of new knowledge, Little shows that when agents accept the impossibility of judging the impact of their actions they are freed from the constraint to succeed and can thus become “attuned to the opportunities that may arise” from failing (2012: 16). Little’s article highlights the constitutive centrality of failure in political action at an epistemological level, as a creative process which makes possible new forms of political theory and practice. I claim that applying this recognition to the subjective experience of actors can further expand creative potential. I wish to argue that this is a necessary step to take because of the gap that Little’s “action-oriented” reading of Foucault opens up. On this reading, “understanding subjective experience”, the “primary philosophical role” that Foucault attributes to error, is downplayed in order to illustrate the need to embrace error at an institutional level as the “main challenge to established rational structures” in policy-making (Little, 2012: 15). This foregrounding of “action rather than actors” allows Little to move beyond subject- and structure-oriented interpretations of Foucault to demonstrate the effects of decision-making in complex societies where the outcomes of decisions are unknowable (2012: 13). However, the separation here of the act from those who undertake it is problematic. If political actors need to be “future-oriented” with regards to failure and “attuned to the opportunities” for innovation and creativity that it affords (Little, 2012: 16), what will this look like in the here-and-now of the process of political struggle? How will political actors orient themselves towards failure when so much of contemporary political orientation is based around chasing the successful achievement of prescriptive !5

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goals?3 Side-stepping the central role that subjective experience plays in Foucault’s philosophy, Little leaves these fundamental questions open.

Expanding on Little’s inquiries into error, this chapter establishes the notion of an error-oriented ethos for political action. Ethos, it will be shown, was becoming a central concept in Foucault’s work at the time when his essay on error was written, and this chapter begins with the suggestion that ethos and error, when taken together, provide fertile ground for thinking about political action. The “return of the subject” in the late Foucault, under a conceptual framework that has variously been called an “aesthetics of existence” or “care of the self”, situates and informs this study of ethos. I then link this idea of ethos as “art of living” to the “ontological turn” in more recent political theory literature, via Foucault’s foregrounding of Martin Heidegger’s notion of thrown-ness. What Oliver Marchart calls the “post-Heideggerian” tradition of political ontology (2007), the study of how our contingent (yet necessary) foundational conceptions of the world as such condition what we take to be the possibilities for political action, develops this idea of an ethos of self-fashioning in an explicitly political direction. I argue that the only way for Little’s epistemologically uncertain mindset to become

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Michael Freeden argues that prescriptive political theorists have “epistemologically and conceptually flawed aspirations”, due to the essentially contestable nature of political concepts and the consequent ambiguity of success and failure (2009b: 161). Freeden forces us to consider that any concept deployed in political thinking is reliant upon the imposition of semantic conclusiveness, and that this is only possible through the enactment of an arbitrary cut-off point ending a logical sequence with the potential to otherwise go on forever (2009a: 156). While this is a fairly banal observation of linguistic reality, it begs spelling out because so much political thinking ignores this fact when it ascribes to the “ultimately doomed objective of finality” (Freeden, 2009b: 2), seeing the arbitrary and contingent conceptual formations of a particular moment as durable solutions. A basic feature belonging to political concepts is their essential contestability, and this expresses itself in their ambiguity, indeterminacy, inconclusiveness and vagueness (Freeden, 2005). For Freeden, this fecundity of meaning plays out in the world of political decision-making, leading necessarily to “infinitely rich combinations of ideas” as the practical needs that impose themselves on a polity fluctuate and develop across time and space (Freeden, 2005: 125). The quest to successfully bring principles of prescriptive theory to practice overlooks the infinite mutations of the conceptual components constituting those principles, or in other words the epistemological fact of a priori contestation of what even constitutes success (Freeden, 2009a:152).

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an orientation amenable to political action is for it be fleshed out into a reimagining of political ethos. This discussion prepares the way for the exploration of the tragic and the comic — specific aesthetic representations of action — as they relate to political ethos, which forms the remainder of the thesis.

I. Foucault, in his late essay ‘Life: Experience and Science’, proposes a shift towards an epistemology “deeply rooted in the ‘errors’ of life” (2000: 477). This shift entails a reformulation of the theory of the subject. Following the historian of science Georges Canguilhem, Foucault critiques the vitalist interpretive frame through which biology and natural history have traditionally been conducted, reaching the conclusion that when the normative commitment to life as a consistent force is subtracted, one can conceive of life itself as “that which is capable of error”, or even as “disturbances in the informational system” (2000: 476). In this way, “the question of anomaly permeates the whole biology” (Ibid). The human, with its untethered conscious mind, is a living being that is never entirely in the right place, and because the mind has no “set point of view” toward the specific exigencies of its environment, it produces concepts that allow for a certain form of life. Concepts are the tools with which the human, an essentially erring entity, confronts the infinite possibility of its situation. For Canguilhem, then, “error is the root of what produces human thought and its history” (in 2000: 477). Truth, and indeed the true/false dichotomy per se, is, as a concept, just one such response to these conditions of essential errancy — one finite invention out of infinite possibilities (Ibid). The implication is that epistemology, instead of being oriented towards the discovery of truth, might instead be understood as the formation of new ways of truth-telling out of the experience of error.

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Crucial to this shift is a renewed understanding of the subject — both the subject of knowledge and the subject of action — as the epistemic relation shifts from ‘grasping’ at objective truths to ‘disclosing’ them subjectively through error. While the operation of power through disciplinary truthful discourses has become a widely accepted insight of Foucault’s oeuvre in much social and political science literature, Milchman and Rosen claim that the theorisation of self-constitution through “subjectification” that emerges in writings from the last years of his life “has thus far elicited little or no mention in the literature” (2007: 55). The recognition of error’s central role in epistemology is instructive in this move. Whereas knowing through objective true discourse involves the acceptance by the subject of a truth whose authority is purportedly beyond all question, experience of error can also be seen as the subjectification of true discourse, or the enunciation of truth arising from the subject’s own practices of freedom (Milchman & Rosen, 2007: 56). This is in line with Foucault’s understanding of his own philosophy not as the world-disclosing quest for propositional statements of truth, but instead as an act of self-disclosure that takes “the displacement and transformation of the limits of thought” as its goal (Milchman & Rosen, 2007: 45). It is an approach to thought that pushes at the boundaries of instituted reason, always looking to problematise truth and therefore interested in the generative possibilities of errancy. In ‘What is Enlightenment?’,4 Foucault elaborates his method as an attitude opposed to the currents of scientific modernity but at the same time committed to furthering the Enlightenment goal of expanding human autonomy. Importantly, modernity is not an historical period, but:

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This essay was written in homage to an essay Immanuel Kant submitted to the Berlinischer Monatsschrift magazine in 1784, in response to the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ In this essay, Kant famously declares the motto of the Enlightenment: “Sapere aude”, “Dare to know!”, as the imperative that people think for themselves and throw off the shackles of intellectual infancy. Foucault, as we will see, draws out this tradition of Enlightenment thought. This is the ‘counter-modern’ tradition, and it is opposed to ‘modernity’ as the hegemonic way of thinking inherited from the Enlightenment (Foucault, 1984).

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“a way of thinking and feeling…, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos.” (Foucault, 1984: 39)

And modernity’s ethos is a “desperate eagerness” to imagine the present moment other than it is, a “grasping” relation to the world that tries to transform it by first subjugating it (Ibid).5 Foucault contrasts this analytical scientific method with another legacy of the Enlightenment: Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy. While the Kantian project of once and for all apprehending the transcendental conditions of human subjectivity falls under the rubric of the modern ethos, Foucault forces us to consider that the limits Kant placed on thought through his familiar deduction of categories are historically contingent (Simons, 2015: 15). So what Kant saw as the necessary limits on human knowledge and freedom, Foucault casts as mere products of a particular anthropological discourse centred around the category ‘Man’. In this way, the revolutionary ethos of the Enlightenment, the furthering “as far and wide as possible the undefined work of freedom” (Foucault, 1984: 46), requires constant interrogation of the objectifying discourses that define what we take to be the possibilities for our existence — what Foucault calls “permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy” (1984: 44). To become a subject of action, then, requires the adoption of an ethos counter to normative discursive knowledge about what one’s place in the world ought to be, an ethos that, crucially, pays attention to error as a disclosive site of possible transgression and, hence, freedom. But how does Foucault determine the norms of his critical ethos when determinate concepts, as doctrines of the “dogmatisms and despotisms” of discursive truth, are the very object he seeks emancipation from? 5

This diagnosis of the dangers of objectification is reflected in contemporary complexity science. As Paul Cilliers points out, the study of complex dynamic systems has uncovered a fundamental flaw in the analytical method which, in ‘cutting up’ a system to examine it and grasp its parts, destroys the intricate relationships those parts had to each other and thus prevents it from being understood (1998: 2).

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By redefining the term ‘autonomy’, Foucault moves from the rational to the aesthetic in order to guide the ethical work of freedom. For Kant, the meaning of autonomy followed closely from its Greek etymology: autos (‘self’) and nomos (‘law’), the authority of one’s own will over one’s own actions (as opposed to their control by some external force). Leaving aside the complexities of Kantian deontology, suffice it to say that the constructions of will and authority in this definition are, on Foucault’s account, internalisations of power apparatuses rather than expressions of some inner kernel of rationality (Simons, 2015: 19). In contrast, and in an effort to pursue the undefined work of freedom, Foucauldian autonomy centres on the subject’s ability to transgress the limits that constituted them as what they are — a self-creation that is not determined by rational precepts but guided by aesthetic criteria of style. This disappearance of a morality based on a set of codes “must correspond”, for Foucault, to “the search for an aesthetics of existence” (in Milchman & Rosen, 2007: 51). Where, then, do the intellectual resources for such an aesthetic ethos come from, and how does it translate into a project of practical critique?

If objectifying discourse and truth regimes are linked to an ethos of disciplining governmentality, the corollary ethos that Foucault advances orients one towards self-government by subjectifying discourse. The work of autonomy calls for care of the self in such a way that the power of the subject can be turned against the power of the apparatuses of governmentality, transgressing disciplinary truth by critiquing and denaturalising phenomena that appear obvious and inevitable (McNay, 1994: 148). This power is aesthetic because it is informed by stylistic criteria not subordinated under any determinate precept. That is, the important question becomes not what one does in order to achieve freedom, but how one does things. Turning to the stoic philosophers of Graeco-Roman antiquity, Foucault emphasises the importance they placed on ethos over logos. That is, the manner in which ethical thought was transmitted and !10

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imagined by the stoics put precedence on the voluntary and rational structure of conduct over the content of specific rules and codes of conduct (Harrer, 2005: 79). In contrast to the modern scientific method, stoic philosophers stressed the need to conduct spiritual exercises to gain access to certain truths, as well as to prepare a link between knowledge and practice such that the subject’s entire being would be transformed in the image of her master’s teaching (Harrer, 2005: 89-91). These exercises are at the root of the ancient concept of ascesis.6 So, in contrast to the contemporary popular understanding of the ascetic as one who tries to access spiritual truth through bodily austerity, ancient asceticism is more a set of “performances within a dominant social environment intended to inaugurate a new subjectivity, different social relations, and an alternate symbolic universe” (Valantsis in Milchman & Rosen, 2007: 59). For the stoics, asceticism was an aesthetic activity, the fashioning of the self into a being who was ready to act in accordance with the truth. Of course, Foucault differs from the stoics in his shift away from the normative truth-telling we explored above. The ascetic exercises he advocates, then, are subordinated not to an aesthetic shaping of ethos based on an objective doctrine of truth, but instead to one aimed at subjective transgression through error. Intentional and voluntary actions thus work to turn the self into a work of art, an oeuvre under incessant creation and renewal. This is a radically creative process in which subjects seek “to change themselves in their singular being” through a constant awareness of discursive limits on their being and a creative fashioning of new ways to overcome them (Foucault in Milchman & Rosen, 2007: 58).

The ethos of care of the self can be seen as a limit activity, opening up the possibility of creating new types of subjective experience in opposition to the insidious deployment of power at the level of mundane everyday experience. As McNay puts it, it is “an ethic of who we are said to be, and what, therefore, it is possible for us to become” (1994: 145). The next part of 6

Literally, “training”, from the Greek askein: “to exercise”.

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this chapter will deal with the horizon of ontological thinking that this politicisation of being itself opens onto, showing how a care of the self approach might become a collective activity through engagement with political ontology.7

II. Political ontology is part of a broader movement in political inquiry that Stephen White terms an “ontological turn”, “a growing propensity to interrogate more carefully those ‘entities’ presupposed by our typical ways of seeing and doing in the modern world” (2000: 4). What is meant by this is not a regressive return to attempts to ground political theory in a definitive ontology, but rather a recognition of the very groundlessness that underlies the institution (and destitution8) of society itself. This way of thinking is based on an intellectual lineage that can be traced back to two important German thinkers: Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt.9 The latter makes the key distinction between the concept of politics as the realm of

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I want to introduce a few of the criticisms of the aesthetics of existence approach that characterises Foucault’s ethos, with a view to demonstrating the potential for this study to address them. According to Lois McNay, there are three main areas in which deficiencies arise (1994). The first is the notion that an ethos founded on the “stylisation of daily life” amounts to nothing more than “an amoral project for privileged minorities”, conjuring up the image of an effete, narcissistic aesthete disconnected from the nitty-gritty of political struggle (McNay, 1994: 149). Secondly, Foucault carries over the implicitly masculinist and heroising fantasies of the stoic tradition, resulting in a problematic overestimation of the ability of the sovereign self to control itself through masterful agency and ascetic exercise. Finally, Foucault’s notion of aesthetics is theoretically underdeveloped because of a failure to situate it within “the context of a more sustained analysis of contemporary social relations”, resulting in an ethical moment that is “little more than a fetishised notion of aesthetic practice” (McNay, 1994: 150). The discussion of political ontology which follows flows from the first two of these criticisms, while the subsequent sketch of a dramatic aesthetics of action responds to the third. 8

Marchart employs the term ‘destitution’ in a neologistic fashion, not in reference to poverty but as a verb antonymous to ‘institution’ — shorthand for ‘de-institution’. 9

Pierre Bourdieu (1991) was the first to use the term “political ontology” in relation to Heidegger, however Marchart, whose definition guides this study, follows a different thread that leads him away from Bourdieu’s diagnosis of Heidegger’s philosophical system as belonging to a “conservative revolution”. It is ironic that Heidegger and Schmitt — two of the intellectuals most commonly associated with Nazism — have come to wield such influence on left-wing political thought.

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social institutions such as the state, and the concept of the political as the potentially violent foundation which makes politics possible (Schmitt, 2007). Heidegger (2008: 31), in probing the fundamental questions of being, marks out an “ontological difference” between the ontic categories of metaphysics, and the ontological mode of Being itself that underlies them. Political ontology, then, is a tradition that views the Schmittian notion of the political through the lens of Heidegger’s notion of the ontological difference, allowing for analysis of “political difference” as the contingent site which imperfectly grounds politics (Marchart, 2007: 11). That is, a notion of “political difference” allows us to think the purely negative foundation, or absent ground, as the conceptual realm of the political on which the plural and particular ontic categories of conventional politics are built (Marchart, 2007: 7). Slavoj Žižek (1999) explains the political implications of Heidegger in a way that clarifies the resonances with Foucault’s analysis of error and ethos. The important similarity is a shared focus on “thrown-ness”. To explain: because none of us is the ground of her own existence, we are all “thrown” into the position of having to take responsibility for grounding our being in the world (Dahlstrom, 2013: 212). Put differently, Heidegger suggests as the key to humanity’s “sense of being” the decision to adopt a project by means of which “thrown-ness” is actively assumed into a finite historical situation. In order to exist in the world, our being has to be projected in a particular way. This projection is always a political decision because it is groundless and is therefore grounded in power alone. The political act of grounding decision is therefore located in “the very heart of ontology itself”, as the choice of the historical form of Being consists in “a decision not grounded in any universal ontological structure” (Žižek, 1999: 20). Foucault, in a similar vein, remarks in his essay on error that the concept, and the discursive formation of truth that derives from it, can be conceived of as a “reply to humanity’s thrown-ness” (2000: 476). So, putting Heidegger and Foucault together, we can think of concepts as the ontic projections of an ontological situation that are always decided on in a given socio-historical field.

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Marchart makes clear the ontological implications of what he refers to as post-foundational political thought. If no final ground for society is available, we have to come to terms with the contingent forms of society’s institution/destitution. This need not be a cause for nihilism or anxiety, as awareness of contingency — the absence of grounds — is also known as autonomy (Marchart, 2007: 155-156). This is because the “dissolution of the markers of certainty” remains “the very pre-condition for politicisation and emancipation” (Ibid). If the great chain of being is in a state of constitutive disorder, radically unstable due to the never-ending interplay of difference between ontological being and ontic beings, then ontology itself becomes something that must be decided upon. This decision, in the name of freedom, must be political. It must defy those heteronomous attempts to re-ground being (and hence politics) through already-instituted reason, logic, empiricism, or epistemology. When we accept that Being cannot be accessed through epistemic means — that there is no horizon of truth in ontology — the question of how we make errors becomes more important. Error can open onto “the instituting/destituting ground of a political decision” (Marchart, 2007: 164). That is, error either results in the institution or destitution of a new conceptual grounding. The errant concept is either normalised or pushed into alterity. Thus a politicised relationship to Being is not simply anti-foundational, leading onto a rejecting of all grounds, but instead recognises the necessity of contingent grounds and the political nature of their institution/destitution.

Ethos is important to post-Heideggerian political ontology because of the link between thrown-ness and mood in Heidegger’s thought. It helps to think of ethos in the conventional sense of ‘collective mood’ here. For Heidegger, moods are a pre-subjective “fundamental attunement” to being in the world. That is, moods are not properties of subjectivity, but are more originary than any subject-object or inside-outside distinction (Heidegger, 2008: 176). There is, then, no state of existence outside of mood — we are always-already attuned to a particular mood as part of our collective existence. Michael Flatley points out that mood is !14

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“part and parcel” of political projects of any kind, as it is through the world-disclosure of mood that we can exert agency and engage in collective action at all; in other words, it is impossible to do anything politically if people aren’t “in the mood” (2008: 20). The mood we are collectively in discloses the fact of thrown-ness — it causes either a turning towards or a turning away from it. We can become attuned to the contingency of our being in the world, and hence perhaps re-ground the projection of our collective existence, only when we are in a certain mood. Such a mood or attunement might characterise the self-fashioning of an aesthetically-informed political ethos as the ‘groundless’ ground of collective action oriented toward error. I want to argue that this way of thinking about affect, as an entry point to free engagement with the world, inflects the Foucauldian aesthetics of existence in a collective direction. As a starting point for post-foundational action, I posit the idea that an ethos attuning actors to a ‘free’ response to the political moment could be cultivated collectively. That is, a shared ethos based on a particular affective quality might allow political actors to embrace the potential of moments of error to re-ground contingent social forms in a different ontological direction. We now turn to political theories that engage the specific aesthetic categories of tragedy and comedy to provide the affective attunement necessary for post-foundational action.

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Chapter Two: Becoming Tragic

William Connolly’s pluralist ethos is aesthetically informed by a tragic ontological imaginary which attunes political action to care for the abundance of life. Like that of Foucault, Connolly’s ethos pursues a process of subjectifying disclosure which, in contrast to normative adherence to objectifying discourse, cultivates the continuous embrace of the creative potential inherent in the uncertainty of error (Connolly, 2008: 9; 2013b: 119). Unlike Foucault, however, Connolly formulates his ethos as a political response to an immanent naturalist ontology of becoming. Two important qualities of this ontological figuration are fragility and finitude, and this chapter establishes the aesthetic utility of the tragic genre in expressing an orientation to action grounded in awareness of these twin existential facts. Before this expository task can be fulfilled, however, it will be necessary to introduce the protean forces that constitute Connolly’s materialist ontology. The excess of difference over identity that these forces continually produce, it will be shown, ensures that the concepts with which we attempt to grasp existence are always already both limited and tenuous in their capacity to do so. Tragedy, as the dramatic genre which aestheticises the recognition of these limits to human thought, will then be discussed. As we will see, the unique tragic vision developed by Connolly affords his theory of ethos the affective resources necessary to account for the consequences of his ontology of becoming. In other words, his focus on what I will term tragic “care” for the entanglement of social life in material processes beyond human control informs the core ethical imperatives of his “new pluralism”: critical responsiveness to disturbances in one’s own conceptual system and presumptive generosity to the conceptual systems of others. The collective attunement to error in this tragic ethos, based on a spirit of care for the abundance of life, is finally delineated in contrast to the spirit of existential revenge that Connolly detects in the implicit ethos of many normative theories.

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I. Connolly’s ethos is grounded in an immanent naturalist ontological vision which, recognising that political action derives from a multiplicity of contending forces irreducible to human agency, imagines political actors as participating in a world of becoming replete with tragic possibilities. In this “new materialist” ontology, social and natural processes are reduced to a single immanent plane of existence composed of overlapping force-fields all of which, importantly, incessantly self-organise and dissipate in radically uncertain ways (2013b: 409). For Connolly, a force-field is an “energised pattern in slow or rapid motion periodically displaying a capacity to morph” (2011: 5). Incipience is the defining characteristic of the morphing process of force-fields; the outcome of change was not implicit in the explicit structure of a particular pattern of material force, but instead came about through an unpredictable process of interplay between different patterns (Connolly, 2011: 162). Interpretation of events, then, must recognise causality as emergent rather than efficient — drawing on the insights of complexity science, Connolly ascribes to the idea that time cannot be represented in a linear fashion but instead should be imagined as “a bumpy, twisting flow” (2011: 149). This is not to deny the occurrence of relatively stable temporal periods when the extrapolation of the future based on the past is both possible and necessary; it is simply to emphasise that the predictability of material processes periodically collapses during events of rapid change. Connolly, borrowing from quantum physics, calls such events “periods of phase transition” (2011: 72; 2013a: 406; 2013b: 15). Phase transitions are threshold moments of real, material creativity, when a plurality of processes operate together in uncertain, unpredictable ways. Connolly invokes the biological example of the stem cell on the verge of developing into a definite type of tissue to illustrate the presence of “pluripotential” creativity in non-human processes (2011: 162). Because creative potential is derived from the interaction of overlapping material forces, new things, forms, and concepts always emerge from a horizon of plural possibility that exists !17

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ontologically. That is, just as the stem cell’s future existence is constitutively unpredictable, so too do political developments, and indeed all acts of human creation, lack a teleological grounding. Creative political action, then, is not a product of wilful agents but instead something that emerges through participation in phase transitional periods: on this view, actors must “allow multiple pressures and concerns to reverberate through” themselves, ensuring a readiness for experimental action in an emergent context (Connolly, 2013b: 134-135). An immanent naturalist ontology forces us to consider creativity as the real outcome of overlapping material forces, which humans entangle themselves in during moments of disequilibrium that cannot be logically systematised.

This conception of being as becoming — as an openly creative multiplicity of entangled material systems constantly shifting between equilibrium and disequilibrium — requires a ‘tragic’ understanding of human action that foregrounds fragility and finitude while warding off the temptation to hubris. Connolly draws on ancient Athenian tragedy in a way that emphasises the “uncanny resemblance” between the dramatic tradition and an ethos committed to living in a contemporary world of becoming (2008: 120). Aware of the problematic extrapolation into the present of a practice situated in a temporally remote society, Connolly explicitly poses the question: “Can a tragic vision illuminate life beyond Greek culture?” (2008: 123). For Connolly, Friedrich Nietzsche is the main “modern prophet of the tragic” (2008: 134). The latter’s tragic vision goes into constituting what White usefully terms a “post-Nietzschean sensibility” in Connolly, an influence most apparent in the vitalism imbuing his immanent naturalist ontology (2000: 113-114). Nietzsche’s opposition to the duty-derived moralism of Judaeo-Christian ethics, and development of an alternative approach to ethical life rooted in an immanentist attachment to this world inspired by the ancient Greeks, exerts significant influence on Connolly’s political theory and its reading of tragedy. It is a tragic vision acknowledging the fundamental fact that, due to the ontological conditions outlined above, ineradica!18

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ble dimensions of conflict are “rooted in the human condition itself” (Connolly, 1991: 191). An ontology of becoming, in other words, ensures the impossibility of ever being able to fully grasp the world and the political-theoretical implication that, even in the good society, existential suffering would continue to appear as unforeseen material processes continually throw up different challenges for political organisation. The core goal of Connolly’s agonism is to ensure recognition of the ontologically unavoidable excess of difference over the ontic institution of identity.10 He thus interprets the ontological difference of Heidegger as a call “to relax the drives to mastery and integration by giving more room to elements in the self and the world that deviate from them” (1991: 33). Heidegger, then, is viewed through the frame of post-Nietzschean vitalism, where life as a force of affective intensity and abundant excess is something to be affirmed in the face of identities and institutions that deny their contingency (1993: 373). Connolly also admits to “filling out” his understanding of Foucauldian genealogy and care of the self with a dose of Nietzsche,11 describing them as approaches to the “fugitive, deniable, and contestable experience, always resistant to articulation,” of being (1993: 374). While both put forward the notion that being is not reducible to logical categorisation, and are thus strongly opposed to Kantian transcendentalism, Connolly supplements the genealogical method with a speculative realism opposed to Foucault’s social constructionism (1993: 374).12 Following Nietzsche, Connolly’s ontology of becoming translates to a tragic political theory

10

From the Greek agon, meaning “struggle” or “contest”. Agonism insists on the ontological primacy of difference, with the implication that vibrant democracy requires an institutionalised dimension of conflict rather than the consensus-seeking models of liberal or deliberative democratic theory (see Mouffe, 1999). For a more detailed account of how the term ‘agonism’ is deployed in contemporary radical democratic theories like Connolly’s, see Wenman, 2013. 11

Foucault, while heavily indebted to Nietzsche in both developing his genealogical method and devising an “aesthetics of existence” approach, nonetheless made some substantial changes to the latter’s approach. For more on this, see Milchman & Rosen, 2007. 12

Connolly’s immanent naturalist ontology is decidedly speculative: he describes it as one particular “positive-ontobelief” among many (see, for example, 2013a: 141), never having recourse to proof through definitive transcendental argument and hence always open to refutation by competing claims. As will become clear, this is a crucial performative element of the critical responsiveness and agonistic respect which constitute the core values of his pluralist ethos.

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which affirms the impossibility and undesirability of normatively theorising away conflict in a world of fragility and finitude. Before we can see how this translates to an error-attuned ethos, the way in which these existential themes find expression in tragic drama must be considered.

II. Tragedy, in depicting the entanglement of prominent individuals in greater forces that lead to dire consequences, aestheticises the limits of action and the fragility of identities and institutions. It evokes an affective response of pity at the recognition that mortals are fated to commit errors, the consequences of which can cause unintended suffering and destruction. Peter Euben (1990) argues that democracy in classical Athens was significantly shaped by tragic drama, and that the origins of Western political philosophy itself must be recognised as emerging from this tradition. The political influence of tragedy on the demos of the Athenian polis derived from its public presentation of “the need for distance from one’s own” — a dual vision which, in momentarily suspending the web of relations that constituted the political community, provided the opportunity to articulate the experience of politics from a spectator’s vantage point (Euben, 1990: x). Aeschylus’ Persae, a tragedy depicting Persia’s defeat by Athens from the point of view of the foreigners, displays precisely this institutionalised “political philosophical moment”: the ritual of dramatic spectacle afforded the Athenian demos an opportunity to experience the complexity of political action from another perspective. In this way, “a wisdom borne of suffering and loss” complements the exultation of victory, and the polis always maintains an awareness of the fragility and finitude of its own institutions and identities by contemplating the plight of the vanquished other (Euben, 1990: xi-xii). The “Ode to Man” from Sophocles’ Antigone (a contemporary rendering of which is found at the opening of this thesis), is something of a touchstone in philosophical modernity’s appraisal of tragedy. Euben provides a summary of the Ode that resonates with post-foundational political !20

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thought. For Euben, tragic drama is a simultaneous validation and problematisation of established cultural boundaries, above all a reminder that the settled categories informing our actions are contingent constructs that, while indispensable, can lead us to disastrous consequences “when excesses transform wisdom into delusions” (1990: 35). Those excesses, tragic hubris, are often the result of the hero’s attachment to particular concepts and consequent ignorance of the ontological defect that these concepts cover over. Hamartia, originally identified by Aristotle as the inciting incident in the drama which sets off the chain of tragic events, must not be essentialised as a “fatal flaw” in the protagonist’s character, as is often done (Jones, 1980: 15).13 Instead, it is an error brought on by conditions over which the hero cannot possibly have any control.14 The emotions of fear and pity, believed by Aristotle to be evoked by tragedy, might therefore derive from what Kalliopi Nikolopoulou calls its “profoundest realism and ethical importance” (2013: xx): the realisation by the audience that the tragic hero’s suffering is ontologically universal, that unintended consequences can follow from actions no matter their supposed rightness. Tragedy chastens our belief in both individuals’ capacity for mastery over their actions, as well as the notion that the world is in any way guided by providence, inculcating a wisdom borne of care for human finitude and existential fragility.

The appropriation of tragedy in Connolly’s ethos emphasises a grateful, rather than a vengeful, response to existential imperfection which ensures that care for the abundance of life in this world overrides attempts to control it. As we shall see, this mood of tragic care informs

13

The desire to impute the occurrence of hamartia to personal moral failing (particularly strong in nineteenth-century literary criticism) arose in part due to the use of the term in Greek New Testament sources, where it became entrenched in the Christian imagination as synonymous with sin. For more on this, see Jones, 1980. 14

The goddess Artemis makes plain this distinction in Euripides’ Hippolytus. In the play, Theseus takes vengeance on the eponymous character, his son, for believed wrong-doings. After his son is killed, Artemis tragically informs Theseus that his son was in fact innocent all along, but at the same time comforts him by declaring: “His death was not your will; men may well commit hamartia when the gods so ordain.” (Euripides in Sackey, 2010: 89).

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the values of critical responsiveness and presumptive generosity that define Connolly’s agonistic pluralism.15 Emphasising the affinities between Greek cosmology’s “multiple gods who do not place human welfare high on their list” and immanent naturalism’s “multiple, open force-fields of numerous types”, a tragic vision incites political actors to be more like the wise seer who respects greater forces and less like the tragic hero who is ignorant of them (Connolly, 2011: 155). For Connolly, the “most important lesson” that the seer imparts is the need to cultivate attachment to a world of becoming, rather than coming to resent it (2011: 169). Tiresias, the blind seer in Sophocles’ Antigone, reads omens through affective attachment to nonhuman processes that others would pay little attention to, such as the flight paths of birds. This attachment lets him see what Creon, king and agent of the law, cannot: the “razor’s edge of fate” on which all are poised, the real disastrous incipience that the king’s commitment to established legal categories ironically contributes to as he becomes entangled in greater forces outside his control. Connolly interprets this omen-reading attunement to the world beyond simple agency as a “fund of positive energy” in excess of being which must be “grounded in a protean care for this world” (Connolly, 2013b: 132). Tragic vision, then, lets political actors experience periods of phase transition as pluripotential events. Importantly, in his recent work 15

This foregrounding of an affectively generous ethos is what stands out in Connolly’s tragic vision when it is compared to other radical democratic theorists who have had recourse to the Greek tragic tradition. Cornelius Castoriadis, for example, while sharing Connolly’s interest in the fragility and finitude that tragic drama forces us to confront, puts the classical virtues of friendship and pity forward as tragedy’s two corollary democratic affects (Klimis, 2014). The tragic experience of catharsis is no less than the realisation that our political institutions are contingent, evoking a love for the collective fate of humankind grounded in feelings of pity and compassion (Klimis, 2014: 213). Such feelings — post-foundationally — encourage citizens to create and institute their own ways of being through the mutual exercise of wisdom. But the ethical position that emerges from such a sensibility strays very close to authorising the tyranny of the majority — as Agnes Heller attests, for Castoriadis democratic despotism is impossible as the autonomous will of the majority is always just (Heller, 1989: 179). Connolly’s idiosyncratic appropriation of tragedy, in contrast to Castoriadis’ more contextual approach, could be criticised for anachronism on the grounds of his reading a modern “world of becoming” into an ancient cultural practice, but such a move is integral to what Mark Wenman has identified as his “Madisonian republicanism” (2013: 116). Despite the radical departures he has made from American republican pluralism, the fundamental ethico-political goal of that tradition remains pre-eminent in Connolly’s project: namely, providing “an antidote to the prospective tyranny of intensive minorities” through the enactment of an agonistic democratic politics (Wenman, 2013: 100).

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Connolly emphasises the capacity of minor figures in the plays to reflexively ponder the events unfolding around them. Creon’s son Haemon, for example, warns his father to check his hubris and acknowledge that leadership requires a capacity for engagement with alternative perspectives (2013: 139). The lesson of the seer is thus something that all of us should cultivate, as we all must face the two dictates that constitute Connolly’s “problematic of political action in a world of becoming”: the limits of individual agency as it interacts in multiple agential force-fields indifferent to it, and the human tendency to hubris that can make us forget the fragility and contingency of identities and institutions (2011: 7). This means that presumptive generosity to the beliefs and identities of others is required so that our critical responsiveness to incipient emergences takes into account the different terms on which others may interpret things.

III. Connolly’s pluralist ethos calls for a mood of tragic care that affords political actors the resources to respond to error in a manner attuned to creative disclosure rather than impositional grasping. Error in Connolly’s immanent naturalist ontology is a sign of phase transition, and the proper response is careful attunement to an emergent context through an approach to life marked by gratitude for its abundance and not a vengeful insistence on human mastery or divine providence. This existential gratitude is Connolly’s approach to care of the self: the idea is that a self which works on appreciating the gift of being overflows with positive affect, causing it to care about the world and its other participants (1991: 157). In a similar vein to Foucault’s critique of the ethos of modernity, Connolly conducts a genealogical critique of what could be called the “hubristic” ethos rooted in impositional laws by contrasting a tragic vision of becoming with Kantian transcendental postulates to show up the contingency of the latter (2013b: Ch. 3). While a tragic ethos ensures that we think politics from problematic starting points marked by radical uncertainty, leaving us open to creative political action that !23

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exceeds whatever identity we bring to it, Kantian morality seeks instead to delineate apodictic, certain a priori. Such categories, including notions of free will and moral responsibility, are shown to derive from a contingent set of assumptions inherited by Kant from the Christian tradition and Newtownian physics, which project “impositional laws” onto nature and cause ethical experience to be mediated through a rubric of obedience to such intrinsic laws (Connolly, 2013b: 123). Where the categorical imperatives of Kantian practical reason might thus perceive errors as punishable offences against universal moral laws that inhere transcendentally for all human agents, the tragic ontology of becoming fosters the nourishment of a practical wisdom in which focus shifts to “emergent”, rather than “impositional” laws (Connolly, 2013b: 123). In this way, Connolly draws sustenance from the tragic tradition to re-orient us away from any lingering sense of necessity associated with Kantianism. The contingency of the latter tradition must be revealed because, for Connolly, its blindness to fragility and finitude — to tragedy — means that its followers are more likely to act from a spirit of existential revenge (2013b). For Connolly, contemporary theories of democracy indebted to Kantian transcendental argument (Rawlsian political liberalism and Habermasian deliberative democracy) are thus in danger of responding to periods of disequilibrium in a hubristic manner that ignores the potential for creative participation in emergent ways of thinking. In other words, their ethos fosters a ‘turning away from’ thrown-ness, and a pejorative interpretation of error that ignores both its inevitability and its value.

A tragic vision imparts Connolly’s political ethos with an existential gratitude rooted in a sensibility of care for life in an immanentist ontology of becoming. Tragedy reminds political actors of the force-fields which both limit their agency and threaten strong identities; this does not weaken actors but actually strengthens them by encouraging responses to error that are capable of recognising emergent concepts and formations, instead of imposing transcendental categories onto them. In the final chapter of this thesis, the limitations of a tragic ethos de!24

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rived from an immanent naturalist ontology in fully realising error’s potential will be explored through comparison with the different approach to political ontology and care of the self that lead Agamben to his comic ethos.

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Chapter Three: The Coming Comedy

Comic attunement is an indispensable element in Giorgio Agamben’s transformative postfoundational project. After recognising that deep-rooted impasses in metaphysical thought foreclose radical action, Agamben seeks to mobilise the comic affect of indifference to open up a joyful political ethos in which actors have a freer relation to normative thought. Indifference is a comic attitude because, for Agamben, it functions as the means to overcome a ‘seriousness’ in the ontological tenor of Western politics ensuring the perpetuation of traditional concepts at the cost of the emergence of new ones.16 This chapter turns, then, on Henri Bergson’s classic hypothesis that indifference to seriousness is the “natural environment” of the comic and a condition of laughter itself (2003: 11). Thus before we can begin to analyse how Agamben’s comic ethos could provide a platform for approaching errant action, an account of precisely what might be meant by seriousness in his thought is required. Our discussion will begin, then, by expositing the ontological arguments that inform Agamben’s methodology and cause him to order it around an idea of the facticity of concepts. It will become clear that Agamben is trying to suspend the serious mood in which concepts are known — the ‘shame’ of being a subject in language. A discussion of Agamben’s own theory of comedy, as it relates to this suspension of shame, reveals that comedy opens onto an ethos of ‘innocence’ and playfulness from which actors can approach concepts in a freer, more creative manner.17

16

I apply Bergson’s term to Agamben’s philosophy in order to communicate it in explicitly comic terms. As will be shown later in the chapter, Agamben uses theological terminology relating to ‘glory’ to designate what, essentially, is historically inscribed as ‘serious’. 17

This chapter deals almost exclusively with the abstract system developed by Agamben. Chapter Four below, in which Agamben’s political theory is compared and contrasted with that of Connolly, concretises and clarifies some of the abstractions in this chapter.

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I. In basic terms, the main purpose of Agamben’s philosophy is to find a way of relating to being itself that avoids putting our existence to work in any particular direction.18 While his writings defy any attempt at classification and cover many topics, they are remarkably consistent in method — Justin Clemens indicates that his “net is wide, but he catches the same fish time after time” (2008: 55). The erudition and diffusion of his works can make it extremely difficult to discern just what Agamben is trying to achieve, and a range of terms show up in secondary sources to describe his core goal. For example, when Sergei Prozorov talks about inoperosita (in-operativity) (2014: 30), Catherine Mills refers to “completion” (2008: 128), and Matthew Abbott highlights “the abolition of the present metaphysical scheme of things” (2014: 28), they are all designating the same objective that presents itself again and again across dozens of works. Because we are trying to illustrate the distinctly comic dimension of this method, the term “indifference” will be deployed throughout this discussion as a short-hand for all of these. Happily, the term has a couple of layers of meaning that link comedy to Agamben’s broader project: while being “indifferent”, as we saw, was identified by Bergson as a basic requirement for laughter, William Watkin asserts that “rendering indifferent the metaphysics of dialectical difference… is the aim of every work Agamben has written since, at least, 1978” (2014b, xii). The first part of this chapter aims at unpacking this rather obscure citation.

What, then, is a “metaphysics of dialectical difference”, and how do we “render” it indifferent? It should be obvious that the first part of this question is to do with foundations, and 18

It needs to be stressed from the outset that, in trying under spatial constraint to unify a complex system of thought that defies brief explanation, this chapter presents a highly schematic reading of Agamben’s critical philosophy. For a detailed yet accessible discussion that is most relevant to the questions of comedy engaged in this thesis, see Prozorov, 2014. For a detailed account of ‘indifference’ in Agamben, see Watkin, 2014b. It could be said that the interpretation of Agamben advanced in this chapter is primarily a combination of the perspectives of Prozorov and Watkin.

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Agamben’s theory is that all Western concepts are “bifurcated” into a “common”, founding part and a “proper”, actuating part; the innovative logic here is that contrary to expectations, the proper seems to “construct” the common as its foundation “retrospectively and retroactively” (Watkin, 2014a: xii). So, Agamben is using a philosophy of concepts that does not view metaphysical foundation as some distant origin that happened already in a remote past. Instead, it acknowledges that the so-called ‘common’ origin keeps occurring always in the present and thereby renders intelligible the ‘proper’ particular of which it is the origin (Prozorov, 2014: 70). The complicated thing about this method, dubbed by him “philosophical archaeology”, is its basis in a logic that is “historically impossible”: it is a crossing of diachrony and synchrony that aims to “make the inquirer’s present intelligible as much as the past of his/her project” (Agamben, 2009b: 32).19 This has to be done, Agamben claims, because origins are not “diachronically pushed into the past” but “synchronically operationalised, working to ensure the comprehensibility and coherence of the system” (2009b: 92). In other words, dialectical difference, between the founding origin and the actuating proper, exists as a consistent, foundational metaphysical identity of its own that is kept constant across discursive time (both diachronic and synchronic) in a mutually-constitutive condition (Watkin, 2014b: xiv). Agamben, in other words, is coming to terms with an historically contingent, quasi-transcendental field that exists in the blindspot of our conceptual systems, outside the binary logic of identity/difference.

This blindspot is important because, despite its invisibility, it structures the imagination of the knowing subject in all its inquiries. The efficacy of thought itself cannot be taken for granted,

19

Agamben’s method is inspired by Foucault’s genealogical method. The reason why he calls it ‘archaeology’ is that it seeks to delimit and suspend archē, or origins, as they limit the potentiality of contemporary thought. He thereby transcends the mere tracing of the contingency of truths and goes on to gesture toward their inoperativity or indifference. Because I am focusing this discussion on the comic qualities of Agamben’s method, I have not been able to explain the links between genealogy and archaeology here. For the clearest exposition of this method to date, see Agamben, 2009b.

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but instead has to be attributed to this “field of bipolar historical currents” (Agamben, 2009b: 110). Agamben uses the word “signature” to designate the currents in this field that keep our ways of knowing constant. Signatures are the regulatory practices determining the efficacy, use and interpretation of signs through hidden “rules, practices and precepts” (Agamben, 2009b: 66). Again, it is categorically impossible to attribute any properties to the signature because it is structuring our discursive thought from the outside, making it “the sheer fact that a certain being — language — has taken place” (2009b: 65).20 The signature is the sheer fact that a sign exists at all. Agamben, therefore, in delineating his approach to the metaphysics of dialectic difference, is conducting an “ontology of knowledge” which, to clarify further the singular consistency of his method, Watkin emphasises as “the main purpose of […his] work as a whole” (2014a: 151). The ontological insight that thinking about signatures affords is that the being of signs imprints itself on all knowledge.

In what Prozorov dubs a “crescendo effect” (2014: 6), the implications of the semiotic theory in Agamben’s ontology of knowledge spiral upwards into the realm of political ontology. Signatures, by placing limits on the types of knowledge and actions available to subjects, structure the ontic possibilities of human collectivities by restricting human potentiality. Potentiality is key to understanding Agamben’s work because a fundamental aspect of his thought is the post-foundational insistence that there is no conceivable activity that defines or determines what it means to be human (Prozorov, 2014: 31). The problem with signatures, then, is that they curb originary freedom, and Agamben has a detailed theoretical edifice to describe how this process plays out. In politics, a signature expresses its operation as an “apparatus” of power. This key term is defined thus:

20

As Kant pointed out, existence is not a real predicate (more precisely, it is not “a predicate which is added to the concept of a subject and enlarges it”, because the fact of existing applies equally to all concepts) (A600/B628, 2007).

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“I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings” (2009a: 14).

Language is the most ancient apparatus, in which the first primate was “inadvertently captured” millennia ago. The logic here is one of division: as a conscious subject of language, the living being is divided and separated from itself. At this point, immediacy with its environment, its awareness of its own thrown-ness, is foreclosed. That is, a vital part of the living being is secured in the apparatus, which then orients and determines the activity of the living being. So the “specific power” of the apparatus is the “capture and subjectification in a separate sphere” of the “all too human desire for happiness” (2009a: 17). In other words, apparatuses produce political subjects out of living beings by orienting their desires towards a determined sphere of objects that the apparatuses themselves set up. In The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben engages theological concepts to demonstrate how this sphere functions (2010: 97-103). One of the problems encountered by medieval theologians was the status of vegetative and procreative organs on the “glorious body” of resurrected Christ. If the glorious body’s stomach and penis, for example, no longer served a function, then the Church doctrine that the resurrected body was the perfection of nature would be contradicted as that very body would be shown to possess redundant attributes. The solution was for these organs to take on a purely symbolic existence, in which their very uselessness on the glorious body became an exhibition of the virtue associated with that organ (Prozorov, 2014: 39). The sphere of objects captured by the apparatuses is marked by a similar logic of glory. The ontological fact of the pure potentiality of the living (human) being is intercepted, a part of that potentiality is captured, and the potential function of that part of the living being is secured in a determinate form by the seriousness of its glorification. !30

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II. Turning to the second part of our earlier question of how to render indifferent the metaphysics of difference that signatures (in their quasi-transcendental historical contingency) impart on thought, it should now make sense to say that indifference in Agamben’s method refers to an orientation that restores the full potentiality foreclosed by the signature’s operation. Indifference is a disclosive mood. Apparatuses, as the ontic political manifestation of hidden ontological signatures, are the entities with which Agamben wants to wage “hand-tohand combat” to achieve this disclosure (2009a: 17). The site where this combat must take place, then, is in the reclamation of our potentiality from that glorified sphere where apparatuses work to capture and confine it. Our subjectivity itself, however, is produced by these apparatuses, and thus we always exist in relation to them. The glory of their capturing of our potential being, then, is proportionate to the shame we experience as subjects of language. Shame is what Agamben calls the hidden “emotive tonality” of linguistic subjectivity (Mills, 2008: 91): it is the affective modality through which we experience the separation of our living being from the immediacy of itself and its environment. In other words, the subject cannot but feel ashamed when the operation of the language in which it exists is constituted by the foreclosure of part of its being, whose glory the subject is then subordinated to. The implication of this hidden tonal structure of language is that the living being, to reach the freedom of its full potential, must become indifferent to its constitutive shame even while it becomes indifferent to the glory of the apparatus. As the next section of this chapter will show, Agamben’s theory of comedy gives an account of this transformation. Comedy, relying on the disclosive mood of indifference to seriousness, is the key to reclaiming foreclosed human potentiality. It can achieve the suspension of the groundless seriousness that gives the apparatuses of government their power by granting the living being innocence over the shame of its subjection. !31

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Comedy, for Agamben, reminds us of the excess of living being beyond apparatuses and the forms of subjectivity they produce, and that a comic ending to their tragic operation therefore remains possible (Prozorov, 2014: 24). Agamben uses Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy as the departure point for the construction of his own comic paradigm, seeking to understand what makes this epic on the afterlife ‘comic’ (1999a: 22). This involves tracing the development of modern “personhood” from the classical theatrical models. Invoking the etymology of “person” itself is instructive: the Latin persona from which our word is derived originally refers exclusively to the mask worn by an actor in a play, indicating that the mask, not the actor, is the place where the character is represented. Building on this important distinction between mask (person) and actor, Agamben goes on to outline the contrasting conventions associated with tragic and comic genres. The “‘comic’ conception of the human creature” is that it is split, “divided into innocent nature [actor] and guilty person [mask]” (Agamben, 1999a: 21 — emphases my own). This splitting opens the space for Dante’s novel theory of shame and radical attitude to the law. The hero, in tragedy, experiences subjection to law as a subjection of his guilty human nature to destiny that, for all his moral innocence, he cannot overcome because his mask is fused to his (natural) face. The hero in comedy, on the other hand, is able to use the law as “the instrument of personal salvation” because his person (mask) is something that is freely assumed and hence can be freely “abandon[ed] to the hands of the law” (Agamben, 1999a: 20-21). So, on the threshold of Eden (the earthly paradise of pure natural innocence), Dante the sinner registers “of necessity” his personal name — his mask — and with it purifies himself of personal guilt. Virgil, the ancient poet who has hitherto guided Dante through the afterlife, disappears at this point — a pagan without recourse to God’s grace, his nature is still tragically identical to his guilty person. In this way, what in tragedy represents the greatest possible burden for the hero, his personal guilt, in comedy ends up providing the

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very way out of that same burden because that creaturely part of the hero out of law’s reach can simply abandon its doomed mask and keep, as it were, rolling along.

III. Returning to Agamben’s discussion of apparatuses from the vantage point of his reading of Dante’s comedy, the contemporary exigency in response to which he devised the former should take on a clear dramatic significance. For Agamben, a proliferation of apparatuses in post-industrial society is leading to the dissemination of tragic subjectification, “push[ing] to the extreme the masquerade that has always accompanied every personal identity” (2009a: 15). For Agamben, the moral person-subject of modern culture can be understood as an extrapolation of the “tragic attitude of the actor, who fully identifies with his own ‘mask’” (Agamben, 1999a: 20). In contrast, a mood emerges on the comic stage that is capable of maintaining a creaturely space of natural innocence untainted by personal guilt. Dante’s “comic choice” signifies a “renunciation of the tragic claim to innocence” and the doomed identification with moral personhood, paving the way to a different kind of ethical happiness founded on “acceptance of the comic fracture between nature and person” (Agamben, 1999a: 16). Under a comic paradigm, then, the removal of the burdensome mask corresponds to a resumption of our proper relationship to being itself. Not only is the actor no longer prohibited from disrupting the sequence of events with extemporised bodily gestures, but his ‘clowning around’ now constitutes the central aspect of the performance itself, the space through which meaning shines through. The gesture, thus understood, “opens the sphere of ethos as the proper sphere of that which is human” for Agamben (2006: 56).

In comedy, gestures are those actions which remind us of the actor behind the representational mask. As we have seen, the mask of subjectivity is the product of the troubled relationship !33

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between the ontological living being and the ontic apparatuses of power. The kind of action that Agamben seeks, then, cannot be conducted by the willing subject but must instead issue from the excess of being that remains excluded from her. Gestures are not actions in the traditional sense of the term, but instead can be thought of as a “taking place without conventional criteria”, that is, “before, without, or beyond convention” (Clemens, 2008: 49). The requirement of the gesture, in other words, is indifference to the metaphysics of dialectical difference, and part of this requirement is that the gesture exists outside of the temporal-spatial logic that metaphysics institutes. Clemens’ ambiguous phrasing here illustrates this point well: the gesture cannot be made sense of in the chronological flow of time, but comes from a place in being that is at once subtracted from, in a different time to, and surpassing any metaphysical frame. It is thus working in the same field as the signature, a point which is made by Agamben when he describes his method of philosophical archaeology as a gesture “carried out at the threshold of the indifference of memory and forgetting” (2009b: 106). It is in this space, where actors are indifferent to the seriousness of historically inscribed apparatuses, that the comic “happy ending” is achieved: there is no fulfilment of a determined end, but instead the neutralisation of an actualising force that frees up the infinite powers of imagination (Prozorov, 2014: 30). An ethos that is free from the governmentality of apparatuses, emanating from beneath the representational mask, neutralising the force of quasi-transcendental signatures, is one that recognises that political action must not be guided by instrumental logic (Agamben, 2006: 156). The task of this politics is not the voluntarist proffering of a better world, but a venture to “restore to potentiality all that has that has not been actualised, the possible worlds that have been willed out of existence and demand to be restored to their possibility” (Prozorov, 2014: 52).

For Agamben, a comic (or ‘gestural’) approach to political ethos means embracing the radical notion that the only true political actions are, in fact, errors. This point becomes clear when, in !34

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Notes on Gesture, Agamben states that the gesture is always a gag, in both the proper meaning of putting something in someone’s mouth to hinder speech, but more significantly in the sense of an actor’s improvisation to compensate the loss of memory or the inability to speak (2006: 155). Proper political action, by which one suspects Agamben is talking about a radical generative act that brings something new into the world, is “the communication of a potential to be communicated”, and this can only be achieved via a “non-making sense of language” (2006: 156). This ethos is post-foundational, exposing the lack of an original or final source in spheres of ‘human being’ and using this experience of groundlessness as the starting point of action (Levitt, 2008: 205). It is founded on an indifference to the need to make sense in conventional terms, and even more basically the need to subordinate action to any ends whatsoever. As Barbara Formis puts it, alluding to Agamben’s appropriation of Foucault’s care of the self approach, “it is not the goal reached but the route traversed in doing so that allows the emergence, and not the production, of gesture” (2008: 187 — emphases my own). This ethos is not oriented to producing action in the face of error, grasping its form, but is instead open to the emergence of ulterior powers, the disclosure of foreclosed possibilities. The flip-side of Agamben’s gestural politics, therefore, is that it has “nothing to fall back on but its affirmation of its possibility, which is by definition also a possibility for it not to be actualised” (Prozorov, 2014: 9). But, as we have seen, that is the whole point of the project. A comic political ethos of indifference is all about opening up the potentiality for action and thought, freeing it from the ‘serious’ apparatuses and leaving it there to be reclaimed in the name of living beings. Reclaimed, not so it can be put to any particular use, but just so that it isn’t constantly being used in the same way. Agamben is clear in visualising what such a comic ethos opens onto:

“one day humanity will play with the law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use, but to free them from it for good” (2005: 64). !35

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Chapter Four: On ‘Not Getting It’ — The Hubris of Missing the Punchline

In the preceding two chapters we have explored how, in the work of Connolly and Agamben, tragic and comic moods inform an aesthetics of the self. We have also seen how this practice is oriented towards the cultivation of a political ethos poised to embrace error as a source for ontological re-founding. This final chapter proposes a rapprochement between tragedy and comedy. I advance the claim that a post-foundational attunement to the possibilities of error ought to avail itself of the complementarity of the affects intrinsic to both dramatic genres. I begin by rehearsing Connolly’s criticisms of Agamben, in particular the former’s detection of a “will to system” in the latter’s analysis of biopower and sovereignty. I contend that Connolly, not situating himself in the broader Agambenian project, doesn’t quite ‘get it’ — he makes the mistake of ‘taking seriously’ the hyperbolic arguments Agamben employs which are, according to Abbott, simply what happens when the political ontological method being pursued “bleeds into the ontic” (2014: 20). Indeed, contrasting Agamben’s political ontology with the ‘onto-politics’ advanced by Connolly reveals shortcomings in the latter’s immanent naturalism. Connolly’s attachment to tragic finitude means that the genealogical method with which he brings transcendent sureties onto a plane of immanence is blind to the contingency of the very object on which it founds its (quasi-)necessity: life. Tragic care for the abundance of life is blind to Agamben’s suggestion that life itself is “the cultural object par excellence” (Levitt, 2008: 208). Building on the themes of Chapter Three, it will be shown that comic indifference allows Agamben’s political ontology to go where Connolly’s cannot. I thus submit the vitalist ground upon which the latter author relies to archaeological scrutiny. This demonstrates (as all good comedy should) the compromised nature of our own tragic limits. I argue that care and indifference can function as complementary affects in a ‘tragicomic’ ethos oriented towards error, respectively guiding pluralist possibilities of instituting action and singular impossibilities of destituting action. !36

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I. In his reading of Agamben’s critique of sovereignty, Connolly communicates a failure to grasp the quasi-transcendental field on which the critique operates. Connolly thus interprets Agamben’s Homo Sacer to be infused with existential revenge. Ironically, in his blindness to the comic spirit infusing Agamben’s work, Connolly attributes to him the very tragic hubris against which both authors are contending. In doing this he misses not only the post-foundational affinities between both their projects but also their shared debt to a Foucauldian aesthetics of existence. So that we are clear exactly what Connolly takes issue with in Agamben, it is worth providing a cursory summary of the logic of sovereignty as it is presented in the Homo Sacer series. In line with Agamben’s understanding of the bifurcated nature of concepts in Western thought introduced in Chapter Three, we might say that he sees sovereignty as a signature whose operation splits the thought of life into two distinct modes: the common (founding) nutritive life (zoe), which humans share with other non-sentient beings, and the proper (particular) political life (bios), which the human capacity for language ensures is ours alone (Agamben, 1998). As long as sovereignty remains operative as a signature in thought, the apparatuses devised by human communities will continue to produce political structures according to that signature. This means that politics will reflect the impossibility of the dialectic of difference sovereignty imposes between a part of the life form that is included in the polis and a part of the life form that is excluded from the polis. In other words, the signature of sovereign power operates on both zoe and bios, ensuring that the part of the human animal which is fictively excluded from the polis is brought back under the domain of sovereign power as “bare life” — “life exposed to death”, neither properly animal nor properly human (Agamben, 1998: 88). Sovereignty can be thought of as an “anthropological machine” violently produc-

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ing the dialectical difference between human and animal (Mills, 2008: 113),21 and bare life is what happens to the liminal fragments of being that cannot be put into either category. Agamben indicates that until sovereign power becomes inoperative as a signature (until we right now become indifferent to it and stop the anthropological machine), all beings remain in danger of exposure to the absolute violence of being reduced to bare life.

In his review of Agamben’s work, Connolly presents what he considers to be a more nuanced reading of sovereign logic by highlighting its ambiguities and uncertainties. For Connolly, Agamben is guilty of “the hubris of academic intellectualism”, and, through a “political drive to authority”, exhibits the fatal flaw of ignoring the “illogicalness” that inheres in the materiality of biocultural life (2007: 30). Thus, Agamben’s study on the paradoxes of sovereignty cannot be distinguished from the teleological mastery and existential resentment of Kant’s transcendental idealism — beneath the façade of translating Kantian antinomy into paradox “beats the heart of another scholar who reduces cultural life to logic” (Ibid). Pointing out Agamben’s identification of the “camp” as the underlying law of modern politics, and his invocation of Auschwitz as the paradigmatic instantiation of this guiding logic, Connolly brings up the role that “a change in ethos” might have played in altering the course of sovereignty. Connolly argues that the complex resonances between fascist attitudes at different levels of society, rather than the inexorable unfolding of an inherent sovereign logic, produced the outcome of the Holocaust (2007: 35). Rather than overcoming sovereignty altogether, then, Connolly sees the aim of a radical political project as the cultivation of a generous and positive pluralism that might “help to alter the ethos of sovereignty and capital alike, without transforming capitalism into a new world order” (2007: 41). Predictably, he counters Agamben by invoking care for life as the way to stop sovereign excess. Connolly emphatically rejects 21

The concept of the anthropological machine is a continuation of Foucault’s critique of post-Kantian anthropocentrism’s reliance on the normative category “Man” — the post-humanist critique of philosophical anthropology.

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Agamben’s political project; he sees it as antithetical to his tragic formula that difference exceeds identity.

The presentation of Agamben in the preceding chapter suggests that Connolly’s assessment is missing something — specifically, the ontological site on which the former is doing battle. If we recall that philosophical archaeology seeks to render inoperative identity/difference signatures on a quasi-transcendental historical field, Connolly’s reading of Homo Sacer betrays an ignorance of Agamben’s unique archaeological method by thinking that it applies to the ontic level of political struggle.22 While he is not incorrect about the inapplicability of Agamben’s method to the complex and diverse empirical structures of contemporary globalised politics, I follow Prozorov in contending that Connolly’s immersion in tragic finitude “obscures the affirmative attunement that grants this critique both its meaning and its power” (2014: 3). Indeed, where Connolly sees only “logic” in Agamben’s thought, and counters with his own pluralist tragic ethos as a means of resistance and transformation, his critique entirely glosses over the sphere of comic ethos Homo Sacer opens up. Getting where Agamben’s ethos is coming from, then, requires familiarity with his political ontology, or rather the type of political ontology he deploys. Interestingly, Marchart, whose delineation of post-foundational thought we explored in Chapter One, joins Connolly in condemning Agamben’s “theoretical extremism”, claiming that his “radically pessimist philosophy of history” gives away the insights of an ontological problematisation of politics by subordinating Being to conceptual rigidity (2007: 238). In what follows, I employ Abbott’s revised definition of political ontology as not just insisting on the contingency of ontological concepts, nor merely thinking of new ones to open up new ontic possibilities, but above all attempting “to think the political

22

Ernesto Laclau, in the same volume, makes a similar mistake, condemning the “naive teleologism” and the lack of sensitivity to structural diversity in his Agamben’s method (2007: 12-22).

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through the exigency of the ontological question” (2014: 15). Agamben’s ethos of comic indifference does precisely this.

II. Coming to grips with the exigency of the ontological question, and how Agamben’s politicisation thereof is comic, means reintroducing Heidegger’s ontological difference. On Abbott’s “resolutely ontological reading”, Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty and bare life “has to be understood as beginning from a transposition of Heidegger’s ontological difference” (2014: 19). Thus, zoe as common nutritive life corresponds to Being as such, and bios as political linguistic life corresponds to particular ontic beings. The sovereign signature’s exclusion of animal life from the official “working” of the polis leads to the re-inclusion of the human animal as “bare life”, sovereignty’s unthinkable negative ground. Analogously, traditional metaphysical thought designates the category “Being as such” as the “archi-signator” of every signature, and the attempt to think metaphysically about Being itself (that is, to think ontically about the ontological) is no less than a flight from the un-grounding force of properly owning up to the pure gratuity of existence (Agamben, 2009a: 66). Recalling the Heideggerian idea of thrown-ness should clarify the stakes here: Agamben is drawing an equivalence between the unthought “fact” of living in political thought and the sheer sense of groundless contingency that metaphysical thought turns away from. So, “bare life” is the reappearance of this existential fact in a system grounded on its exclusion; “the figure of the return of a repressed metaphysical … fantasy that haunts our politics” (Abbott, 2014: 21). It is a piece of the groundless potentiality of being that the apparatuses of sovereignty capture and secure. This is why Agamben employs the Roman legal category of homo sacer as a paradigmatic case for bare life. He who is sacrificed by the state, subject to an unconditional death, is

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glorified as a ‘sacred man’. As such, the homo sacer elucidates the unthought consequences inherent to the fantasy of a distinction between organic and political life (Agamben, 1998). The signature of sovereignty captures, through divers apparatuses, the originary fact of living (our sense of being thrown into the world) and glorifies it in much the same way that medieval theologians glorified Christ’s functionless penis. Glory prevents us from properly owning up to the un-grounding force of the ontological question, from recognising the miraculousness of our existence and accepting the world in its absolute contingency. According to Abbott, the kind of political ontology that Agamben deploys is aimed at becoming indifferent to metaphysical signatures, turning toward thrown-ness and embracing the irreducible glory of life itself (2014: 28).

Agamben’s political ontology is trying to render indifferent the signature of sovereignty that separates life from itself, based on the wager that a properly post-foundational politics can only be conducted from an ethos of attunement to the absolute singularity of life. Comparing Agamben’s appropriation of Heidegger’s ontological difference with Connolly’s is instructive of the divergent directions in which the two authors take political ontology. As we saw in Chapter Two, Connolly construes the difference between Being and beings as “similar to Nietzsche’s elusive presentations of life”; for Connolly, awareness of ontological difference provides a method of experiencing the bumpy processes of a world of becoming (1993: 385). This post-Nietzschean position contrasts with Agamben’s which, as we saw, demonstrates that Nietszchean vitality and the dangerous forces of biopower are both contingent on the signature of sovereignty. Abbott helpfully characterises the difference between, on the one hand, Agamben’s attempt to render the “anthropological machine” that produces bare life inoperative, and on the other, Nietzsche’s striving to bring vitalism back into a way of living made anaemic by juridical morality. Agamben forces us to consider that simply reconciling the nature-culture dualism, as Connolly’s post-Nietzschean immanent naturalism does, is insuffi!41

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cient. Becoming more attuned to the diversity of life overflowing identity and moral code, while admirable, still leaves in place the very idea that there is some a priori life force available for our cultivation in resistance against resonance machines of existential revenge, ignoring the insight that the notion of an underlying life force itself is “a product of the machine, and not something that pre-exists it” (Abbott, 2014: 138). Where Connolly wants to draw on attachment to life to fuel the development of a positive resonance machine (2005), Agamben conducts a “genealogical inquiry into the term life” itself in an attempt to bring the anthropological machine to a halt (1999b: 239). But, contrary to Connolly’s attitude, I claim that the negative direction of Agamben’s ethos means that a rapprochement between the two can be achieved.

III. Reflecting on the contrasting yet complementary nature of tragic and comic drama points to this reconciliation. Agamben himself has said that “every tragedy … projects a comic shadow” (1999a: 132). Indeed, the complementarity of both classical genres is recognised as far back as Plato’s Symposium, when Socrates says that all good tragedians should also be able to write good comedies (Nikolopoulou, 2013: xxix). The implication is that comedy and tragedy both impart important lessons, providing different affective qualities that can attune us to different potentialities. An emerging trend in political theory, of which Connolly is a part, is to remind us that “we cannot escape the tragic dimension of our lives” (Moon, 2004: 25). It is wise to appreciate “the limits of theory”, and an absence of this methodological imperative leads to the “unjust or harmful exclusions and forms of repression” that characterise modernity’s litany of political failures (Ibid).

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But this ignores the lessons of comedy — as the other face of tragedy, it shows us that our finitude is itself ungraspable. Alenka Zupančič puts it well when she observes that tragic finitude has emerged as our “contemporary grand narrative”, a chastening reminder of limits merely filling the empty transcendent space where the metaphysics of infinity used to be (2009: 48). Comedy is a reminder that “not only are we not infinite, we are not even finite” (Zupančič, 2009: 53); it opens a window onto tragedy by reminding us that the finite conditions of existence presented in the latter are not even fully knowable. Zupančič points out that the tragic attitude of being satisfied with pointing out an endless process of differentiation fails to see the impasses and contradictions that inhere in this very process. That is, “fascination with everything that is coarse and dense can be a way of avoiding a crucial lesson” (Zupančič, 2009: 47); the foregoing discussion has shown us that this observation could well apply to Connolly himself. Simon Critchley drives home a similar point, claiming that laughter is “an affirmation that finitude cannot be affirmed because it cannot be grasped” (1999: 119 — emphasis my own). The tragic paradigm confronts finitude by calling on the individual to act out their destiny within the limited constraints of necessity, pursuing action in full knowledge that life’s strictures doom us to failure. The problem with this approach is that it “disfigures finitude” by assuming that it is possible and desirable to pursue affirmation of life in the face of the certainty of failure and death (Critchley, 1999: 110). Comedy, by contrast, insists on the impossibility of this relation; laughter comes from a recognition of “the limited condition of our own finitude” (Critchley, 1999: 120). Whereas tragic heroes are larger-than-life representations of finitude, demonstrating the futility of fighting against the confines of our mortal existence, comic anti-heroes are infinitesimal reminders of our ordinary feebleness whose impotent subversion of all glorified identities can make us laugh at anything. As Agnes Heller observes, comedy needs seriousness to advance; our laughter is based on a change in regard to the conditions of our existence as we “notice from a distance something which we may have been too immersed in to see, our own follies includ!43

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ed”, and then make fun of it (2005: 210). The “suspension of direct experiences” in the comic moment leads us to see anew our involvement in processes in a way that no other art genre does (Heller, 2005: 212). In comedy, laughter’s disruption of the processes of finitude’s perpetual play of difference takes us to a place of singular indifference where our positive involvement is suspended and our constitutive inability to grasp the limits of finitude itself comes into view.

IV. The mutuality of tragedy and comedy suggests a reciprocity between the affective qualities of care in Connolly’s ethos and indifference in Agamben’s ethos. I argue that a properly postfoundational approach, one that can fully take advantage of error by remaining open to the contingency of all concepts, must conduct an aesthetics of existence informed by both dramatic genres. What’s more, I claim that it is possible to do this by bringing together the theoretical systems of both authors presented in this study without tearing apart their respective internal logics. Agamben would not deny that his comic ethos needs a tragic ontological conception to advance. That is, for the comic gesture of ‘showing up’ the limits of finitude to work, we saw in Chapter Three that a ‘serious’ belief in that finitude has to exist in the first place. Connolly, meanwhile, is very forthcoming in admitting that his ethos employs a particular ‘onto-faith’ (that is, a weak ontological system). Seeking to illustrate that his own theory cannot escape tragic finitude, he inserts a clause of essential contestability into the formulation of his ethos in accordance with the pluralist virtue of critical responsiveness. Self-reflexivity, the willingness to acknowledge incompleteness and tensions in whatever beliefs one follows, is crucial for Connolly (2013b: 139). Thus where the utility of Connolly’s tragic ethos ends, Agamben’s begins — there need not be any conflict between the two.

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My interest in proposing a ‘tragicomic’ ethos, then, is to give equal weight to the affective qualities of both dramatic genres, and to suggest how they might inflect an ethos oriented towards embracing the generative potential of error. Tragedy, emphasising our immersion in the play of difference, corrects for the inability of Agamben’s political theory to account for the differentiated and embodied effects of power apparatuses on categories such as race and gender (Mills, 2008: 135-136). While his comic ethos holds forth the possibility of a singular transformation to come, it must be supplemented by a tragic attunement which gives difference ontological primacy. This is so as not to relegate political action combating the likes of racial and gendered oppression to the ‘merely ontic’. Although accommodating such identity/ difference categories is precisely not what Agamben is trying to achieve (he wants to suspend the forms of thinking that make racial and gendered oppression possible in the first place), I argue that, in line with comedy’s reliance on tragedy, an ethos of care for difference over identity is a necessary precursor to the singularity of a comic attunement to life. In contemporary conditions of pluralism, the process of political struggle must account for difference if the grounding moment of political ontological decision-making is to be an emancipatory one (which, as Marchart showed us, is the point of left-Heideggerian post-foundationalism). If the institution of new forms is to accommodate a plurality of voices, then the projection of the social that the political moment engenders ought to emanate, a la Connolly, from an attentiveness to the plurality and complexity of life. Thus I emphasise the tragic as the first element in a tragicomic ethos.

Leaving open the possibility of the comic, on the other hand — which is all Agamben ever asked us to do — would in turn correct for the tragic entrapment in contingent institutions that Connolly’s over-attachment to a finite conception of life consigns him to. I follow Mark Wenman’s criticism that, under the agonistic democratic model Connolly advances, “the !45

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strictly revolutionary moment is inconceivable” (2013: 14). Connolly’s reply to Agamben, which we saw earlier in this chapter, clearly illustrates what Wenman is talking about: the emphasis is on the task of infusing global constituencies with “more flexibility, inclusivity, and plurality” to help foster more creative modes of political action within existing institutional frameworks (2007: 41). For Connolly, faith in a tragic ethos is a sufficient condition for the manifestations of new political forms — there is no need to negate or rupture, just to be attuned to new possibilities. On Little’s view, Connolly is in danger of bemoaning the “bastardisation of contemporary democracy” by the forces of existential revenge without contemplating the seeds of inevitable failure harboured within hegemonic democratic institutions themselves (2010). This leads to what Little, following Walter Benjamin, refers to as “democratic melancholy” — melancholy here being “a term of opprobrium for those more beholden to certain long-held sentiments and objects than to the possibilities of political transformation in the present” (Benjamin in Little, 2010: 976). In light of the ontological commitments of Connolly’s work, I would go further than Little in suggesting that perhaps the object of his melancholia is not just democracy but, as the foundation of his ontology, a tragic vision of finite ‘life’. Agamben’s critique of biopower demonstrates the aporia this leads to. A political imaginary drawing sustenance from pre-rational ‘pluripotentiality’ as an opposing force to repressive normative thought can only go so far. At the point where Connolly’s care for life and hope in its deliverance of something new reaches its peak, then, Agamben tells us that our proper task, if we are interested in the generative power of unintended consequences, would be to become indifferent.

A tragicomic ethos can account for both movements of Marchart’s post-foundational moment: if institution and destitution are the two outcomes of political ontological decisions, then tragedy attunes actors to the former (grounding) action, while comedy attunes actors to the latter (un-grounding) action. In other words, error might disclose a moment of grounding, or it !46

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might disclose a moment of un-grounding — political actors guided by a tragic ethos can only be attuned to the first modality of the political moment, whilst those guided by a comic ethos can only be attuned to the second. The grounding of new institutions and identities requires the kind of careful attentiveness to the nitty-gritty horizon of pluripotential incipient processes that Connolly promotes. Nevertheless, un-grounding, the destituting movement, or on my reading liberation from what Watkin calls “the economic control of our held-in-common signatures”, requires that we take a step back from immersion in process to “allow us to stop knowing [things] always in the same way” (2014b: xvi). This insight of Agamben’s political ontology (which, as we saw, is an ontology of epistemology) is committed to the idea that the how of our knowledge is founded on the exclusionary negation of a zone of impossibility. The comic ethos, then, entails becoming indifferent to the signatures of existent knowledge such that the ‘singularity’ of that which was impossible — that which the oppositional distinctions of knowledge signatures had foreclosed in their operation — emerges as immanent potentiality. Thus, when actors employ a positive affective fund to draw creative energy from the ontological uncertainty of a new situation, pace Connolly, a negative suspension of affect might also be necessary to disclose the full potentiality of what that creative energy would be able to enact. As we have seen, the positivity of Connolly’s tragic ethos relies on a conception of life that Agamben’s method exposes as complicit in the reproduction of a contingent and destructive metaphysical system — eventually, a time will come when we have to laugh it off.

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Conclusion

In this study I have tried to develop a way of feeling about failure that, instead of pejoratively defining it as something to be avoided, guides political action towards its creative embrace. I have constructed novel readings of aspects of both William Connolly and Giorgio Agamben to provide a sketch of how the dramatic affects of tragic care and comic indifference might achieve this. Ultimately, I have argued for a ‘tragicomic’ political ethos. This is because, in moments of failure, it provides the affective attunement necessary for the equally important tasks of both grounding new ways of doing things and un-grounding the old ways.

I began by establishing ethos as an approach to political action that dispensed with trying to successfully achieve prescriptive goals. Ethos conducts an aesthetics of existence, informed by a disclosive mood, that turns towards the potential of ontological institution/destitution in moments of error. This is to say, ethos gives political actors a different ‘way in’ to action that recasts failure as an experience to be embraced for its creative potential. Connolly’s ontological vision leads him to tragedy. His ethos is an attempt to avoid hubris by caring for the tragic fragility and finitude of a world of becoming. This affective stance allows actors to creatively embrace error, through attentive attunement to new ontic political forms as they arise ontologically. Agamben’s ontology of epistemology establishes the idea that concepts limit human potential through the serious mood of their existence. The comic ethos, for him, seeks to suspend this mood through the affect of indifference, opening up a space for the full potential of error to be realised. These two contrasting interpretations of ontology lead to different methods of political ontology. Tragedy foregrounds possibilities for the institution of new political arrangements that are responsive to difference. Comedy, rather, is indifferent to the thought structures that produce identity/difference; it is concerned with opening up those potentialities that are foreclosed by conventional thought. I argue that both tragedy and comedy are neces!48

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sary elements in an ethos that guides political action towards the creative embrace of failure. Taken together, the two categories unlock the potential for both grounding and un-grounding decisions in the moment of the political.

The limited scope of this thesis means that its conclusions are largely exploratory, calling for deeper engagement with the relevant theoretical literature to further draw out its findings. In many ways, this is little more than a preliminary roadmap for future research. That said, and whilst only two authors have been studied here in detail, I think it is undoubtedly the case that the application of dramatic metaphor to the study of other approaches to political theory is a worthwhile endeavour. Of course, the level of engagement with both authors has been necessarily schematic. As such, the philosophical task before us is to more thoroughly unpack the intellectual legacy that runs from Nietzsche, through Foucault, to both Connolly and Agamben. The hostility with which theorists such as Connolly have received Agamben’s project suggests that more detailed studies than this, which demonstrate the latter’s compatibility with political theories of finitude, are required in order to advance scholarship on post-foundational political thought.

***

Recorded in a recent New York Times article (Rawlence, 2015), the words of a man living in North-East Kenya shed a different light on the refugee crisis with which this thesis opened. “I belong nowhere. My country is the Republic of Refugee,” he says, looking out over Dadaab, the UNHCR-operated camp where he was born and has lived his entire life. Dadaab was established in 1991 as a temporary refuge for 90,000 people fleeing conflict in Somalia; today, it is home to 500,000. Around the world, there are 14 million stateless people living in !49

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what the UNHCR terms ‘protracted situations’, not just in the Global South but also in developed countries like Australia. Tragically, this way of doing things is not working.

Caring about this tragedy means extending one’s political identification beyond the borders of the nation-state. Recognising the fragility and finitude of territorial sovereignty, we recognise that rights are derived from an attachment to life itself — by acting from this ethos, the failures of the ‘protracted situation’ can engender the formation of an international citizenry. Those with state protection recognise their own fragility and through this identify with the refugee. Connolly, following Foucault, sees such an ethos as a way for the will of individuals to inscribe itself in a political reality dominated by the state, producing creative extra-statist and cross-nationalist forms of action (1993). Camps could be re-conceptualised as open cities, international zones empowering residents to move and trade within the normal international visa regime. Agamben thinks that indifference to citizenship itself, though, is the lesson to be learnt from the refugee; as a border-concept in the logic of sovereignty, the refugee helps clear the field for a renewal of categories (1994). The real refugee crisis, therefore, will not be resolved until those with state protection go beyond caring about the stateless’ lack of formal citizenship and instead find the power to laugh at their own status as citizens. When we all recognise ourselves as belonging to the ‘Republic of Refugee’, all our cities can become international zones once more, happily free from the serious signature of the nation state.

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