Abstract
In this text, I will argue that thinking against neoliberalism demands that we abandon the individual and seek for an imaginary which would open itself towards political tropes of non-sovereign dispossession. When homo oeconomicus triumphs as the exhaustive figure of the human amidst the patently unequal distribution of precarity and vulnerability produced through and by the exclusionary operations of power, the individual should not be at the centre stage of a political imaginary that still seeks to be invented.
A longer version of this article has been published in Croatian under the title “Protiv individue. Deindividualizirani politički subjekt” in Filozofska istraživanja 151 (3): 651–666.
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Notes
- 1.
For a detailed elaboration of these points, see Zaharijević (2014).
- 2.
Only a few sentences later, Mill introduces a potent contradiction concerning the notion of ‘any one’: ‘Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one’ (Mill 2001, p. 14). Losurdo defines this benevolent despotism for ‘the savage’ on the right path to progress—destined to disappear in the distant, indeterminate future—as Mill’s ‘pedagogical dictatorship’ (Losurdo 2011, p. 7), standing side by side with his claims for universalist sovereignty.
- 3.
The individual is the one who can publicize his voice, being thus the maker of the public sphere. In the Age of Capital, Eric Hobsbawm writes: ‘The individual bourgeois who felt called upon to comment on public matters knew that a letter to The Times or Neue Freie Presse would not merely reach a large part of his class and the decision makers, but, what was more important, that it would be printed on the strength of standing as an individual’ (Hobsbawm 1995, p. 287). What is this standing, according to Hobsbawm? To be an individual one had to belong to the bourgeoisie as a class, a body of persons who were ‘someones’, each of whom ‘counted as an individual, because of his wealth, his capacity to command other men, or otherwise to influence them’ (Ibid., p. 286).
- 4.
Being cared for was a disqualification, much as it is today. Being cared for—by the state, or by the ‘baron’ or the civilizing missionary—in the nineteenth century implied dependence, which was a proof of one’s incapacity for self-actualization and self-government. Those who were in various ways cared for, those who were dependent or potentially dependable, were normatively framed as ontologically barred creatures who would never attain the proper status of the invulnerable sovereign self-governing individual, almost despite the idea of perfectibility of all. In fact, to become ‘more perfect’, to be able to perfect oneself, was a quality belonging to the ones who were in possession of their own self-actualization, which produced a vast number of those assumed to be inherently dispossessed of such a quality. The politics of identity, which was developed in the second half of the twentieth century, owes much less to the historical wounds of these marginalized groups than to the normative framing of their dependence versus the independence of the individual (anyone, and no one in particular).
- 5.
The question of what constituted the demos in the wake of the individual is also an interesting one. Were the individuals part of the ‘common people’, and what did ‘the people’ (vulgus) really refer to? James Mill introduced a slight but significant division into the notion of the people to mark the difference between the respectable middling sorts and the classes below them. Lord Brougham, a Benthamite in the House of Lords, scornfully reminded the opponents of middle class enfranchisement in 1831 that there is a mob, but there is the people too, and ‘by the people, I repeat, I mean the middle classes, the wealth and intelligence of the country, the glory of the British name’ (in Dicey 1917, p. 101). Brougham’s ‘depositaries of sober, rational, intelligent and honest English feeling’ were very different from the gentry—the smallest number—but they were also not common in the sense in which the lower orders, or the multitude, the ‘mob’ (shortened from mobile vulgus), had been defined. In a country generally revulsive towards revolutions or the indiscriminate application of the rights of man, it was important to frame the people as those who improve through conserving, and not as the raging rabble. London mayor William Beckford’s address to the Parliament in 1761 attests to this: ‘[by the people] I don’t mean the mob; neither top not the bottom … I mean the middling people of England, the manufacturer, the yeoman, the merchant, the country gentlemen’ (in Rudé 1970, p. 293).
- 6.
Marx’s solution is well known, but it bears repeating: It is only when ‘man has recognized and organized his forces propres as social powers, so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation have been completed’ (Marx 1992, p. 234). Perhaps a complete human emancipation implies forms of de-individualization, of willingly ‘becoming dependent’?
- 7.
Invoking Freud’s concept of Hilflosigkeit in his O circuito dos affetos, Safatle calls for a different circuit of affects which would produce a transformative politics, without an individual as its central figure. Defining helplessness as a specific mode of vulnerability, he claims that a political experience constituted by the exposure to helplessness and its social circulation provides a novel way to think politics. Such experience produces neither ‘the people’, as in the populist strategies, nor autonomous individuals characterized by their particular systems of interests. Rather, it opens up the possibility for the emergence of political subjects, homo politicus , for whom politics becomes a ‘practice that allows helplessness to appear as the foundation of productivity of new social forms, in so far as it prevents their conversion into social fears and opens us to events that we do not yet know how to experience’ (Safatle 2015, p. 50).
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Zaharijević, A. (2021). Independent and Invulnerable: Politics of an Individual. In: Rodríguez Lopez, B., Sánchez Madrid, N., Zaharijević, A. (eds) Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60519-3_5
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