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Subverting The Biopolitics of Liberal Governance Final
Subverting The Biopolitics of Liberal Governance Final
Subverting The Biopolitics of Liberal Governance Final
Abstract
Taking liberal governance as a regime of power whose object, target, and stake is
life itself, this article explores the ways in which the liberal account of life can be
subverted and deployed against the very power relations it now informs. The
article begins with a brief consideration of how a natural-scientific conception of
life in terms of complexity, circulation and self-organisation has come to shape
liberal biopolitics. It then attempts to trace the emergence and development of
this conception of life from its initial articulation in the work of Kant, through its
re-articulation in Hayek, to its more recent appearance in discourses of
governance and complexity. It is argued that this naturalised and depoliticised
conception tends to reduce life to the kind of material deemed conducive to a
liberal social and political order.
evolution to consider how the liberal reduction of life to its biopolitical form can
be contested. This consideration is guided the following set of questions: Is what
is at stake in modern biopolitics not the politicisation, but the depoliticisation of
life? And if this is the case, then do we need to think of resistance to biopower in
terms of the repoliticisation of life? Formulating an affirmative answer to these
questions, this paper suggests that forms of resistance might be developed on
the basis of the very conception of life in terms of complexity that informs and
sustains contemporary liberal governance. It is, we argue, by embracing rather
than denouncing as dangerous and domesticating the difference that lies at the
basis of their visions biological and political life that conceptualising resistance to
biopower becomes possible.
Introduction
This paper is an exploration of how, and to what effect, liberal political thought
and practice has historically been shaped by certain naturalistic ontological
frameworks. It is mainly concerned with the relationship between liberalism and
a particular conception of life in terms of complexity, circulation and selforganisation.
conception of life from its initial articulation in the work of Kant, through its rearticulation in Hayek, to its more recent appearance in certain liberal discourses
of
governance
and complexity.
As is well known,
Foucault first used the concept of bio-power (the power over life) to refer to
two distinct but related mechanisms of power: an anatomo-politics of the human
body and a bio-politics of the population.1
1 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin,
1987), 139.
life.2
and
biological
being.
Once
this
biology-based
definition
of
inscribed within the logic of liberal rule: the domain to be governed by liberalism
is a natural one in the sense that it is thought to possess an intrinsic logic of its
own. Indeed, what appears in the middle of the eighteenth century, Foucault
says, really is a naturalism much more than a liberalism. 4 In this naturalistic grid
of intelligibility, circulation is conceived as self-organising, self-regulating as well
as independent of, and antecedent to, political order and authority.
The article is structured as follows.
always already a property of life itself, rather than a product of power. Then we
will focus on the political thought of F.A. Hayek and on role of notions of
complexity, spontaneity and self-organisation therein.
deploys several concepts and ideas associated with complexity theory, and that
his
defence
of
liberal-capitalism
largely
relies
on
the
subversive
and
Matter must
5 Martin Schnfeld, The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), pp. 98, 105.
necessarily produce beautiful connections for it does not possess the freedom
to stray from the plan of perfection. 6 Due to the animate qualities ascribed to
matter and nature, there is no distinction between the living and the non-living.
In opposition to the inert matter of Newtonian mechanics, for the pre-critical Kant
all matter is active. Kant ascribes to elements, themselves sources of life, vital
forces [wesentliche Krfte] to set one another in motion.
In opposition to
Newton, Kant endows matter itself with force: all matter abides by the same
fundamental and mechanical law of nature, i.e. its self-organisation and selfordering towards perfection.
By the time of writing the Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant has reversed his
view on the activity of matter as well as on the applicability of the mechanical
law of nature to all matter. Indeed, Kant has been credited with playing a key
role in effecting the shift from mechanics to organicism and the rise of biology by
introducing
the
distinction
between
mechanisms
and
organisms. 7
He
distinguishes between the living and the non-living on account of the capacity of
self-organisation, which was to become the defining feature of life from the
nineteenth century onwards. He establishes the distinction between inert matter
and living organisms on the basis of purpose and organisation, which, in his
theory, are intrinsically and self-evidently linked. A thing constitutes a physical
end only if it is both cause and effect of itself, which is to say if the parts (organ)
and the whole (organism) reciprocally produce one another only under these
conditions and upon these terms can such a product be an organized and a selforganized being, and, as such, be called a physical end. 8 Only organisms abide
by these conditions: an organized natural product is one in which every part is
reciprocally both end and means. In such a product nothing is in vain, without an
end, or to be ascribed to a blind mechanism of nature. 9 In a significant reversal
of his pre-Critical thought, the living, as opposed to the non-living, is
characterised by Kant in terms of an interactive and mutually constitutive
6 Immanuel Kant, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, transl. Stanley L. Jaki
(Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981), p. 86.
7 Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 84-5.
8 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, transl. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986), p. 22.
In addition to
self-organisation and in close relation to it what sets the organism apart from
the non-living is its capacity of reproduction.
Whilst the explanation of organic form and organisation would become the chief
occupation of the emerging discipline of biology in the nineteenth century, Kant
is an eighteenth-century thinker to the extent that he believes that life cannot be
explained. He stresses that the organization of nature has nothing analogous to
any causality known to us.11 Remarkably, despite reiterating that any analogy
falters in the effort to conceptualise life, Kant suggests that one such analogy
can nevertheless be drawn:
Kant establishes the identity between the individual body and the body politic on
the basis of organisation. Given Kants definitions of life and organisation, and
the intimate connection between the two, this analogy suggests that not only the
individual organism, but also the body politic is an end in itself and its purpose
self-preservation. This would evidently be a peculiar conclusion, reminiscent of a
logic commonly attributed to Hobbes, and not to the liberal Kant of Perpetual
Peace. The difference, as will become apparent later, lies in this: the Hobbesian
body politic is an end in itself because it is artificial (albeit not without natural
elements), whilst Kantian political organisation constitutes its own end because it
is not artificial i.e. an organism. It is on this basis that political order(ing) is
naturalised and universalised in the modern liberal image.
As discussed
At a certain stage
mechanics produces a phoenix of nature, which burns itself out only to revive
from its ashes rejuvenated, across all infinity of times and spaces. 15 He argues
that, despite the conflict and collision of elements in natures process towards
13 Schnfeld, The Philosophy of the Young Kant, Note 24, p. 124.
14 Kant, Universal Natural History, Note 25, p. 160.
15 Ibid.
7
order, eventually all particles with settle in a state of the smallest reciprocal
action, whereby all resistance disappears and elements continue in free circular
motion.16 Not only does Kant here articulate a conviction in the final defeat of
(forces of) disorder(ing), he furthermore appears oblivious to the existence or
implications of resistance. This is precisely one of the ways in which the political
is foreclosed in the modern liberal image.
In Kants vision, order must eventually prevail, whilst forces of resistance
inherent in the process are to be disguised through their recycling into
movements that sustain rather than undermine order. Kant seeks to disguise the
existence of perturbing forces as soon as political order has been instituted in
order to account for the prohibition of resistance. He accordingly endeavours to
sustain his portrayal of peaceful order by warning against questioning the origins
of order: the subject ought not to indulge in speculations about its [political
orders] origins with a view to acting upon them, as if its right to be obeyed were
open to doubt.17 Investigations into the actual historical origins of the state are
both futile and objectionable. Anyone who, having unearthed its ultimate origin,
offers resistance to the state may with complete justice be punished, eliminated,
or banished as an outlaw. 18 By demarcating the political domain of justice, order,
morality and rationality thus, Kant restricts the potentialities of politics and life to
certain modes of (inter)action. In Kant, the universality and naturalness of the
liberal image are founded on a particular production of nature, order and life; an
understanding premised upon lifes requirement and capacity for securitisation
within a particular domain of governance and order. Kants conceptualisation of
nature entails the demarcation of what life may be and become politically, which
is captured in organisational terms. Those forces moving outside the circulation
of self-organising reproduction must be eradicated: life may be and become
merely within the bounds of a particular (re)production of circulation. Forces that
cannot be made to work productively for the production and sustenance of this
domain of security and freedom, e.g. resistance, rebellion and other rogue
forces, must be destroyed.
For Kant, life itself is inherently amenable to liberal governance he reduces life
to the kind of material deemed conducive to a liberal social and political order.
What follows from this is that the only politics possible is the one that is already
inherent in life. Although his vision of political order is founded on antagonism
and war, this force is swiftly delegitimized through the construction of a natural
surface of order, harmony and peace. Social order thus becomes spontaneous,
self-organising, self-regulating as well as independent of, and antecedent to,
political authority. What we can find in Kant is the idea that liberal social and
political organisation is inherent in, and in a sense dictated by, life and nature.
In portraying the development of political order and political relations in terms of
natural development, or as a tendency towards order inherent in life, Kant
naturalises and depoliticises political order and power relations.
Thus, a
particular order is separated from the power relations on which it depends, and
made to appear as if it corresponds to an intrinsic design of nature itself.
these notions in developing his conceptions of life and political order? First, we
show that Hayek deploys several concepts and ideas associated with complexity
theory, and that his defence of liberal-capitalism largely relies on the subversive
and emancipatory connotations of these ideas. Then, we examine this ostensibly
emancipatory political project for the ways it mirrors the structures and
configurations of power which it claims to oppose.
organisation remain tied to a rather narrow conception of what life and politics
are and what they may become.
complexity theory to embrace the political potentials of the becoming of life qua
movements and relations, Hayek merely uses certain concepts to naturalise and
universalise liberal order.
Some believe that the emergence of the complexity sciences in the latter half of
the
twentieth
century
amounts
to
period
of
general
scientific
re-
metaphors and the affinity between Hayeks political thought and the discourse
of complexity is given preliminary expression by the following statement: The
attitude of the liberal towards society is like that of the gardener who tends a
plant and in order to create the conditions most favourable to its growth must
know as much as possible about its structure and the way it functions. 21 The
shared metaphor is indicative of what is otherwise well documented by Hayeks
references to the work of scientists such as Ilya Prigogine or Donald Campbell
whose contributions to complexity theory he draws on for the formulation of his
understanding of spontaneous order.22
The relationship between Hayeks thought and complexity theory remains
subject to debate, and one of the questions that have been raised is whether, or
to what extent, Hayeks work can be seen as a precursor to complexity theory. 23
This has also raised wider questions about the relations between what we now
know as complexity theory and the field of economics, and the subfield of
Austrian economics in particular.
21 Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London and New York: Routledge, 1944), p. 18.
22 See: Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty (London and New York: Routledge, 1982), Vol. 3, p.
158.
23 Kilpatrick Jr., Henry E. (2001) Complexity, Spontaneous Order and Friedrich Hayek: Are
spontaneous order and complexity essentially the same thing?, Complexity, Vol. 6, No. 3; Wible,
James (2000) What is Complexity?, in D. Colander (ed.) Complexity and the History of Economic
Thought (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 15-31.
10
autonomy,
decentralisation, etc.
reductionism
versus
pluralism,
centralisation
versus
24 Apparently, the theme of spontaneous order and self-organisation had played an important role
in the Austrian school of economics ever since it was first developed by Carl Menger.
25 Dillon, M. and Reid, J., The Liberal Way of War (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 73.
11
made (taxis in Greek) and orders that grow (kosmos in Greek). In the realm of
social life, made orders would include families, plants, corporations as well as the
institutions of government. What these orders have in common is that they rely
for their formation on prior collective agreement, and that they tend to require
centralised direction for their maintenance.
product of concerted action and they tend to be created with a specific purpose
in mind. Grown or spontaneous orders, by contrast, emerge endogenously they
are self-generating or self-organising. 26
complex in the sense that they involve a large number of elements and the
interaction between them; they comprise more particular facts than any brain
could ascertain or manipulate.27 Hayek insists that the concept of spontaneous
order is particularly important for understanding the complex phenomena we
encounter in the realms of life, mind and society: Here we have to deal with
grown structures with a degree of complexity which they have assumed and
could assume only because they were produced by spontaneous ordering
forces.28
Complex spontaneous orders can also be distinguished from made orders on the
basis of their abstract character: they consist of a system of abstract relations
between elements which are also defined only by abstract properties. 29
The
result of
the
unintended
and
unforeseen
spontaneous
Hayeks
30 Gray, J., Hayek on Liberty (London and New York: Routledge, 1984), p. 23.
31 Ibid., p. 25.
32 Kacenelenborgen, E., Epistemological Modesty Within Contemporary Political Thought: A Link
between Hayeks Neoliberalism and Pettits Republicanism, European Journal of Political Theory,
Vol. 8, No. 4, 2009.
33 Petsoulas, C., Hayeks Liberalism and its Origins (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 2.
13
markets and private property rests on his epistemological scepticism and his
conception of order in terms of complexity, spontaneity and self-organisation.
It is Hayeks contention that the rules of human conduct that make the
spontaneous order of society possible are themselves spontaneous formations
inasmuch as they have emerged in a process of cultural evolution. By cultural
evolution, Hayek means the evolution of sets of rules, norms and practices,
especially those dealing with several property, honesty, contract, exchange,
trade, competition, gain, and privacy. 34 The theory of cultural evolution is the
conceptual framework through which Hayek attempts to explain the origins of
the liberal-capitalist order it explains how the open society has emerged and
why it must prevail. In order to grasp Hayeks account of cultural evolution it is
useful to begin with his understanding of the relationship between cultural and
biological evolution. First of all, biological and cultural evolution are analogous in
the sense that both rely on the same principle of selection: survival or
reproductive advantage.35
Reproduction and
survival are mediated by economic productivity, and natural selection will favour
those forms of life whose cultural formations create the condition for high
productivity. It is Hayeks contention, then, that the open society has prevailed
because of its superior capacity to ensure survival and increase of population.
There are important differences between the way in which selection operates in
the transmission of acquired cultural properties, and the way in which it works on
biological properties and their transmission. 36
cultural or social evolution was set in motion and the move from the near animal
state to civilization became possible.
In Hayeks view, civilization, as it has developed during the last ten or twenty
thousand years, is a product of our capacity to learn. This aspect of Hayeks
evolutionary framework is of crucial importance in the present context, for what
it shows is that his defence of liberalism is ultimately grounded in a biological
distinction between two forms of life. What we find in Hayek, then, is a bioontological account of the human condition which features a fundamental
conflict
between
two
biological
properties
and
their
respective
cultural
conventions of the open society, on the other hand. Hayek stresses the necessity
of restraining those natural instincts that do not fit into the order of the open
society.44 And it is through discipline that these tribal instincts, which are to be
understood as animal rather than as characteristically human or good
instincts, are to be restrained. 45 When Hayek speaks of discipline, he refers to
a set of constraints through which we suppress our dangerous tribal instincts and
emotions, such as the demand for social justice or any other collectivist proposal
for social and political change.
tribalism which is waged on the terrain of the individual body and against certain
human instincts, desires and emotions, such as solidarity and altruism. In Hayek,
the liberal subject is the product of a successful struggle against its tribal self.
Fitness for the open society depends on the prior domestication of ones animal
instincts through obligations of self-restraint. The form of subjectivity suitable to
liberal society the self-interested, rational and entrepreneurial individual is a
product of(self-)discipline.
Hayeks conception of the internal other who undermines the open society from
within by allowing her tribal instincts to find political expression in thought and
action. According to Hayek, the greatest threat to society comes from those who,
driven by their savage desires, seek political change in the form either of a
return to older forms of social and political order or the construction of new ones.
Hayek sees great danger in the dissemination and circulation of certain ideas
which appeal to our tribal instincts and generate demand for political change. As
part of the internal struggle against tribalism, the open society must be purged
of the ideas which potentially undermine it, especially theories of repression,
alienation and domination. While Hayek does not explicitly advocate censorship
he clearly states that education poses a threat to society if it disseminates false
political knowledge. Liberal principles, Hayek explains, can be consistently
applied only to those who obey liberal principles. 46 He fails to discuss in detail the
methods and practices through which the liberty of disobedient subjects might
be restricted. Our interpretation of Hayek emphasizes the structural and
20
end progression towards perfection for in the struggle for survival only those
fittest or best adapted will survive. The idea that life develops instrumentally
towards a certain end implies a future projection. As Grosz explains, however,
Darwins endeavour is to record how life may have evolved historically. His
theory is retrospective and does not make future predictions because life cannot
be predicted.57 The Origin of Species develops an idea of natural selection that is
non-teleological; life is contingent and evolves through difference. Albeit on the
basis of reproduction, the idea of evolution as the production of difference is
asserted by Darwin himself. The reproduction of organisms, he explains, ensures
the stability of the species and the individual organism in future generations.
Reproduction constitutes the link between individual and species life as well as
between its preservation and adaptation. This is because transformation and
error are intrinsic to the process of reproduction and hence to the preservation of
the species. Darwin demonstrates that evolution does not and cannot occur
without producing difference. Although emphasising the slowness of the process
of selection, there is, according to Darwin, no limit to the change it may produce:
I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite
complexity of the co-adaptations between all organic beings, one with
another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected
in the long course of time by natures power of selection. 58
Deleuze and Guattaris intervention bends the notion of reproduction by
centralising the idea that deterritorialisation precedes territory e.g. the species
is a result, an outcome rather than a starting point. 59 Secondly, they introduce a
theory of becoming, a rhizomatics which moves beyond filiative reproduction
altogether. The Universe does not function by filiation, they write. 60 Rather than
dependent on lines of filiative descent, life is transformed and (dis)ordered more
productively and creatively through different processes of relationality that
involve heterogeneous elements, i.e. unnatural participations and side57 Grosz, Nick of Time, pp. 8-9.
58 Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 84.
59 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze credits Darwin with inaugurating the thought of
individual difference. According to Deleuze, the leitmotiv of The Origin of Species is that we do
not know what individual difference is capable of! See: Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 310.
Deleuze and Guattari thus highlight the monstrous nature of lifes becoming.
Darwin himself suggests that monstrosity is inherent to the process of evolution
when he remarks that it is an almost universal law of nature that the higher
organic beings require an occasional cross with another individual. 61 Life
mutates and transforms, is in continuous movement and produces difference.
Whereas, for Darwin, this process remains subject to the pressures of selection,
Deleuze and Guattaris radical creativity consists in its release from notions of
selection, heredity and filiation. Where standard Darwinian interpretations focus
on the replication of the species on account of the invariant structure of DNA,
Deleuze and Guattari point out that reproduction is dependent on primary
processes of deterritorialisation and decoding. 62 Indissolubly entangled with
movements of productive disordering, evolution is not the straightforward or
linear reproduction of the species as such. Rather than the translation of code,
that is the passage of one pre-established form into another, code is inseparable
from intrinsic movements of decoding. There is no genetics without genetic
drift.63 Every code, they write, has a margin of decoding due to supplements
and surplus values, which enable side-communication. Through viruses
fragments of code may, for instance, be transmitted from the cells of one species
to another.64 Rather than simply being transmitted genetically, from generation
to generation, code is subject to primary processes of de- and trans-coding, that
is to say side-communications and monstrous couplings as movements of
transformation beyond filiative reproduction.
61 Darwin, Charles, The Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilized by Insects. Elibron
Classics, 2005, p. 1.
62 It is to be noted that Deleuze and Guattaris thought is also influenced by Weismannian neoDarwinism, e.g. with respect to population thinking and the focus on the vitality of non-organic life
i.e. the demoting of the organism , however, they refute the idea of evolution as the simple
reproduction of DNA, focusing instead on the primacy of decoding and non-filiative becoming. See:
Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, pp. 4-6, 8 & 145.
63 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 59. See also: Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life, p. 189.
64 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 59.
23
The rhizomatics into which Deleuze and Guattari transform Darwins theory of
evolution is a far cry from standard Darwinian theory with its perfectionist and
progressive values65. Understood as becoming involution is not the reproduction
of pre-established forms of life; it is characterised by processes of decoding,
genetic drift, monstrous couplings, etc. Life is characterised by its perturbation
more than by its preservation; and by becoming more than by reproduction. One
of the implications of the way in which Deleuze and Guattari make this move is
that chance, error and resistance become not merely immanent to life processes;
their force is anterior. Only via perturbations such as genetic drift and transversal
modes of communication does life become and do forms of life emerge.
It will be noted that Foucault underlines the fundamentality of error, too. At lifes
most basic level, Foucault argues following Canguilhem, the play of code and
decoding leaves room for chance, which, before being disease, deficit or
monstrosity, is something like perturbation in the information system, something
like a mistake.66 As Foucault defines it, [i]n the extreme, life is what is capable
of error.67 Most characteristic of life are chance, contingency and difference. That
is to say that life is irreducible and undecidable and cannot be laid out in
advance. Thus, if Deleuze and Guattaris reading of Darwin uncovers the
centrality and immanence of perturbation, chance and disorder(ing) and hence
the superfluity and excess characteristic of life Kant and Hayek seek to render
invisible and neutralise these aspect through an image political life that operates
via (the reproduction of) circulation.
requirements and capacities are bound up with governance and the nexus
security-freedom.
The notion of excess does, however, not merely feature in an involutionary
reading
of
Darwin
himself
broaches the
67 Ibid., p. 22.
24
of the females; the result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor but few or
no offspring.68 Grosz suggests that sexual selection is characterised merely by
courtship and pleasure as opposed to those qualities that facilitate survival. Yet,
Darwin himself describes sexual selection in terms of an advantage of males in
terms of their weapons, means of defence or charms. 69 In most species, he
remarks, struggle constitutes a primary feature of sexual selection. Groszs
analysis is nevertheless valuable insofar as it elucidates that, according to
Darwin, there is something more to (the reproduction of) life than a struggle for
survival pure and simple: the process of selection features in addition a play of
sexual taste, appeal and pleasure.70 As Darwin himself notes in relation to birds,
in which the contest is generally more peaceful,
Conclusion
How does a conception of evolution qua difference and complexity help us move
beyond the systematic violence that takes place beneath the smooth surface of
Kant and Hayeks visions of society?
the difference that lies at the basis of their visions biological and political life that
conceptualising resistance to biopower becomes possible.
Present in all three accounts in Kant, Hayek and Darwin is an economy of
inclusion and exclusion, which functions as an economy of life or, perhaps, an
economy of life and death. For Kant, both life and politics are to be understood
on the basis of (self-)organisation and circulation. This conceptualisation
produces a distinction between life that circulates on the basis of its understood
nature and rogue or rebellious forces endangering liberal society. The erection of
a boundary between relations and forms of life understood to be productive, and
to be fostered, and those that must be eradicated is bluntly articulated by Kant,
who asserts in Perpetual Peace that [t]he saying let justice reign even if all the
rogues in the world must perish is true; it is a sound principle of right. 73
Moreover, the prohibition of resistance is absolute:
all the incitements of the subjects to violent expressions of discontent, all
defiance which breaks out into rebellion, is the greatest and most
punishable crime in the commonwealth, for it destroys its very
foundations. This prohibition is absolute.74
Hayek, too, produces an onto-politics of freedom based on security. That is to
say, a notion of freedom produced through and operating on the basis of an
economy of inclusion and exclusion tribal life versus adaptive life which
naturalises and universalises liberal order.
complexity the open society assumes the same operative principle as Kants
vision of political life, according to which only a specific form of life is considered
worthy.
The economy of life characteristic of standard neo-Darwinism renders this
mechanism more explicit: adapt or die. This paper has, however, provided a
different reading of Darwin in which movement and relations gain primacy over
instituted forms. Sexual selection, which Darwin elaborates in addition to natural
selection, goes beyond instrumentality and the prioritisation of the struggle of
73 Kant, Perpetual Peace, p. 123.
74 Kant, Perpetual Peace, p. 81. See also: Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 143 & 162.
26
life and death in which the best adapted triumph. Instead, sexual selection, as a
play of sexual appeal and pleasure, operates on the basis of excess and
becoming. Secondly, engaging Darwin in terms of becoming beyond filiative
reproduction, life is characterised by its perturbation more than by its
preservation for chance, error and resistance are both immanent and anterior to
forms of (self-)organisation. Hence it is our suggestion that a starting point for
the repoliticisation of life is a different approach to the question of what political
life is and may become, an approach that starts with and embraces forces of
difference and becoming rather centralising the self-interested individual and
neutralising the forces of war and resistance at the heart of a so-called open
society.
27