A Materialist Theory of Justice: The One, the Many, the Not-Yet 1786610442, 9781786610447

Table of contents :
Cover
A Materialist Theoryof Justice
Series Page
A Materialist Theory of Justice: The One, the Many, the Not-Yet
Copyright page
Contents
Acknowledgements
Epigraphs
Introduction
At the Edges of Law
Other Than Law
Overview
Chapter 1
Thresholds
Ancient Intimations
Justice as Material Process and Real Abstraction
Wild Justice
Chapter 2
Whose Justice?
Social Composition and the Problem of Justice
Might, Right, Impartiality
On the Genealogy of Injustice
Chapter 3
Desire Becoming History
Becoming-Other, Becoming-Justice
Facets of Differentiation I (Ideation)
Facets of Differentiation II (Institutionalisation)
Chapter 4
Dialectics of Justice
Can Dialectics Break Bricks?1
Multiplicity and Universality
Order and Freedom
Chapter 5
Savages, Patricians, Plebs
Justice from Above
Justice from Below
Justice In-Between, Justice Incomplete
Epilogue
Of Spectres and Ends
Notes
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

A Materialist Theory of Justice

Experiments/On the Political Series Editors: Iain MacKenzie, University of Kent; Amanda Giorgio, University of Massachusetts, Amherst This series reflects on how interdisciplinary and/or practice-led thought can create the conditions for experimental thinking about politics and the political. What if the domain of the political is not what we usually think it is? Are there ways of thinking about the nature of politics and the political that can take us beyond frameworks of conflict and cooperation? These questions derive from a commitment to the idea that political thought has not yet exhausted its creative potential with regard to what constitutes the political domain. It is also motivated by the desire for political theory to become a genuinely creative discipline, open to collaborative interdisciplinary efforts in innovation. Moreover, if our understanding of the political world is to keep pace with political events then it is important that political theorists do not simply presume that they express one or other of these dominant models of the political; rather they should remain open to the possibility that experiments in politics may be happening ‘on the street’ in ways that require theorists to think differently about what is meant by ‘the political’.

Titles in the Series The Political Space of Art: The Dardenne Brothers, Ai Weiwei, Burial and Arundhati Roy Benoît Dillet and Tara Puri Comedy and Critical Thought: Laughter as Resistance Edited by Iain MacKenzie, Fred Francis and Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone The Politics of Everyday Life Robert Porter The Aesthetics of Necropolitics Edited by Natasha Lushetich A Materialist Theory of Justice: The One, the Many, the Not-Yet George Sotiropoulos

A Materialist Theory of Justice The One, the Many, the Not-Yet

George Sotiropoulos

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd 6 Tinworth Street, London, SE11 5AL, United Kingdom www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2019 George Sotiropoulos Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-7866-1043-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sotiropoulos, George, 1978- author. Title: A materialist theory of justice : the one, the many, the not-yet / George Sotiropoulos. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield International, [2019] | Series: Experiments on the political | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018057614 (print) | LCCN 2019007221 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786610447 (electronic) | ISBN 9781786610430 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Justice (Philosophy) Classification: LCC B105.J87 (ebook) | LCC B105.J87 S64 2019 (print) | DDC 320.01/1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018057614 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgements vii Epigraphs ix Introduction 1 At the Edges of Law 2 Other Than Law 8 Overview 13 1 Thresholds: Beyond State Thought Ancient Intimations Justice as Material Process and Real Abstraction Wild Justice

17 20 25 39

2 Whose Justice? Social Composition and the Problem of Justice Might, Right, Impartiality On the Genealogy of Injustice

51 55 62 71

3 Desire Becoming History Becoming-Other, Becoming-Justice Facets of Differentiation I (Ideation) Facets of Differentiation II (Institutionalisation)

79 85 100 112

4 Dialectics of Justice Can Dialectics Break Bricks? Multiplicity and Universality Order and Freedom

121 122 134 146

v

vi

Contents

5 Savages, Patricians, Plebs Justice from Above Justice from Below Justice In-Between, Justice Incomplete

161 166 181 201

Epilogue 205 Of Spectres and Ends 210 Notes 213 Bibliography 223 Index 245 About the Author

257

Acknowledgements

Beginnings, caught as they are always in the middle, are difficult to trace. This book has been certainly gestating for many years. Naturally, there are also many people to whom I am grateful. First of all, Iain MacKenzie, who honored me with his trust and discussions. Amanda Giorgio has been also very positive with my project from the start. Stefan Rossbach not only provided some thoughtful reflections on crucial aspects of my study but continues to be a model for what makes a good teacher. I also owe a lot to George Nikolakopoulos, whose formative effect on my thought cannot be exaggerated. Benoit Dillet has been an astute commentator, and a supportive friend. Alex Hufford has read the whole manuscript and suggested important corrections. I owe them both a big thank you. Very fruitful have also been my long-standing discussions with Nikos Alexis, Panos Drakos, Mihalis Paparounis and Panos Papadimitropoulos. At different stages of the project I have been helped by the suggestions, conversations and comments of Stelios Panagiotou, Katerina Nasioka, Patty Schoina, Charles Devellennes, Tara Puri, Giannis Helis, Dimitris Moshos, Sjoerd van Tuinen, Tasos Sagris, Yiannis Raouzaios, George Mehrabian, Eleni Apostolou and Romanos Molfetas. And of course, by all the people that I have talked with in the various conferences, presentations and workshops I have attended the previous years. On a more personal level I have received great support from my family, my mother first and foremost, but also my sister, my niece and my father. Constantly present next to me while writing the book has been my cat, Luna. It would be an inadmissible omission not to acknowledge her. The book is dedicated to Tina Karageorgiou, my One my many, and to our little newborn baby.

vii

Epigraphs

O gentlemen, the time of life is short; [ . . . ] And if we live, we live to tread on kings; If die, brave death, when princes die with us. Now, for our consciences, the arms are fair When the intent of bearing them is just. —William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Act V, Scene 2

But through this connected frame runs one universal aim; Towards the Good do all things tend, many paths, but one the end. —Boethius, Consolations of Philosophy, Book IV, Song 6

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Introduction

Injustice is clear, justice is obscure. For whoever endures injustice is its indubitable witness. But who can testify for justice? —Alain Badiou, ‘Truths and Justice’ (2006: 96)

Given the substantial number of theoretical works – not to mention judiciaries, NGO’s, social movements – which indeed ‘testify for justice’, it may seem odd to open a book on the topic with an assertion about the notion’s obscurity. The use of Badiou’s statement certainly does not mean to suggest that the available literature adds up to one big error, with nothing to offer towards a clarification of ‘what’ justice is exactly. The purpose of its use is to set the basis for a critical interrogation that problematises the notion, hence its prevailing perceptions and theorisations. In this context, the adjective given to the theory that is to be sketched in the following chapters has a heuristic aspect: Has not materialism always operated as a critique of idealist conceptions of (social) reality? Putting the stakes at the level of ‘materialism vs. idealism’ serves to warrant the path this inquiry will follow, instead of engaging in extensive commentary on the existing literature, initiating a line of flight and building the necessary distance from ‘mainstream’ idealist theories,1 which will allow the consistent development of a materialist theorisation. Theorising justice in a materialist way does not amount to a dismissal of ideality; it means embedding the concept of justice in the material processes that give rise to it. The systematic unraveling of this key assumption passes through the elaboration of its numerous parameters. It also requires a constructive and synthetic engagement with diverse currents of thought, from Hegelian dialectics, historical materialism and new materialism to Deleuzian nomadology and political theology. 1

2

Introduction

All these add up to a wide-ranging theoretical study, which aspires to offer a fresh rereading of one of the most venerable topics of political theory and philosophy. Towards this end, the first task is to clarify the full range of theoretical, historical and political problems motivating the current inquiry. AT THE EDGES OF LAW In Quentin Tarantino’s film The Hateful Eight, Oswaldo, an outlaw pretending to be a hangman, reflects on the difference between a group of people lynching the person who killed their loved one and a legal execution. Through a lengthy syllogism he concludes that the qualitative difference lies in the Hangman. ‘The man who pulls the lever that breaks your neck will be a dispassionate man. And that dispassion is the very essence of justice. For justice delivered without dispassion, is always in danger of not being justice’. At first glance, the point may seem commonplace; it draws out the difference between justice and revenge. Yet Oswaldo explicitly says that the passionate reaction of the victim’s relatives and loved ones would be a type of justice, ‘frontier justice’. The problem is not how to differentiate justice from what is external to it, but the internal differentiation of the concept, justice with itself. Seen through this problematic, justice poses something of a paradox. If systematic political reflection begins with the foundation of the polis – that is, with the constitution of civic order – justice is arguably a foundational principle, traceable to the oldest texts of the Western political tradition: to Plato, Aristotle and even earlier, to Solon, Hesiod, Homer. The frame of reference can extend to other cultures and systems of political thought, but the substantial point will not change: from the Upanishads and Confucius to the Bible and the Quran, the canonical texts of age-old traditions are informed and guided by determinate conceptions and practices of justice. Based upon this worldwide range, Alain Supiot sensibly infers that ‘the aspiration to justice is [ . . . ] a fundamental anthropological fact’ (2017: viii). However, this hardly ends the discussion. Empirically verifiable as it may be, is not the universality of justice entirely formal, devoid of substantial content? Justice may be valued across the world, but there is no consensus on what it consists of. Worse, different conceptions and practices are antagonistic to each other. If ever there was one, justice is an ‘essentially contested’ concept.2 Concluding thus does not render typological classifications impossible or meaningless. In his introduction to a recent volume that covers Western conceptions of justice from antiquity to modernity, Stelios Virvidakis (2015: 14–15) has offered a helpful summative typology: historically, justice has been conceived as a value attached to actions, institutions and juridical procedures; as a virtue of the character or the soul; finally, as a normative

Introduction

3

principle regulating individual and collective action, usually through institutional mediation. Virvidakis observes that these generic approaches are not incompatible; rather, they lend themselves to different configurations within a variable comprehensive conceptualisation. Then again, such flexibility only adds to the notion’s diversity. It is this paradox of a globally spread and crossculturally valued yet essentially contested concept that leads Raymond Geuss (2008: 72) to complain about the frustrating vagueness of justice, which is practically another way to frame Badiou’s verdict concerning the notion’s obscurity. The suspicion is hard to avoid: if, despite its remarkable diversity, people speak confidently about it, it is because justice is whatever we want it to be. In front of this quandary, there are two broad ways to proceed (allowing for permutations between them): the ‘normative’ and the ‘critical’. The first option, which is arguably the prominent one, requires defending a normative conception of justice over other rival normative conceptions, an operation that necessitates the establishment of certain criteria of validation. This is what John Rawls (1999) has done in his famous study, which continues to frame mainstream discourse, since hardly any work aspiring to take part in the relevant discussion can fail to mention him. Its wild west flair aside, the normative path is the one Oswaldo also follows, when he sets out to defend, over against ‘frontier justice’, the type of justice that the Hangman represents, the justice of Law. To be sure, not many liberals would think that hanging someone is a proper way to deliver justice, and even fewer would concede to lynching the honour of being a type of justice. Accordingly, hardly any liberal theory restricts justice to its retributive dimension. Yet at its core, Oswaldo’s assertion, that justice is dispassionate, echoes two interrelated convictions lying at the heart of the conception of justice embodied in contemporary liberal democracies, which is to say, in the type of state that has established itself as the normative standard for all state forms: first, the actualisation of justice requires (even if it is not reduced to) the mediation of a legal order invested with the power of impartiality; second, such impartiality rests on the distinctly human capacity to overcome passion and think rationally. Which is to say, Oswaldo’s contrast between Frontier Justice and Legal Justice is informed by one of the most fundamental premises of liberal thought: true justice is a child of Reason. This foundational assumption opens a normative space that allows considerable disagreement over the principles of justice that the rule of law sustains. Justice may concern fairness, as Rawls has famously argued. Alternatively, it may concern entitlement and the protection of property, as the no-lessfamous position of Robert Nozick (2013) has been, or, a bit more left wing, it may concern equal opportunity, as Brian Barry (2005) has recently restated. Justice may also be endowed with a more practical edge, as in Amartya Sen’s

4

Introduction

(2010) recent celebrated theory, which argues that justice does not concern a ‘perfect’ order as much as the capacity to rationally mediate concrete problems and improve the world little by little. The identification of justice with impartiality, and thus a constitutional state, can even develop beyond the confines of liberal theory, as with Alexander Kojève’s (2007) ambitious Hegelian teleology of the ‘global homogenous state’. Furthermore, there are recent theorisations of justice which stretch the boundaries of the liberal problematic while still moving in the terrain of liberalism; for instance, Richard Dworkin’s (2013) infusion of legal thought with a substantive theory of value and Michael Sandel’s (2010) Aristotelian recovery of a dimension of virtue to justice. There is, finally, Martha Nussbaum’s (2006) ‘capability’ based approach, which links justice to dignity and the pursuit of a good life, sharpening in the process the notion’s practical and affective edges. These references, brief as they are, testify to the wealth of liberal theories of justice, thus to the unwarranted character of overgeneralisations. Yet despite their diversity or disagreements, all these theorisations converge in – and respectively diverge and leak from – a conception which is arguably the lynchpin of the liberal mainstream: of justice as a normative principle that transcends particularities of culture or social standing and can, thus, be rationally agreed upon and applied on a global scale. This strong theoretical normative stance is coupled by an equally strong sociopolitical normativism, since, in one way or another, all these theories set as the social and institutional matrix of their theory a liberal polity framed by the rule of law and the free market. The latter is the (natural or artificially enhanced) domain where individual autonomy, the lynchpin of liberal ontology, is actualised. The rule of law, which incarnates on the institutional level the capacity of impartiality, is posited as the necessary complement to a society based on market exchange and self-interest. To avoid misconceptions, the point here is not that a free market economy yields automatically a liberal Rechtsstaat. Historically, the development of ‘free markets’ – which is to say, of capitalist economies – has often been associated with authoritarian regimes with little respect for the rule of law. Nonetheless, on the level of its discursive and conceptual constitution, the free market posits the ensemble of interactions composing it in terms of an exchange of equivalent values, a doctrine that finds its material grounding in the (let’s not forget, legally sanctioned) existence of the money-form, the ‘general equivalent’. In this context, the rule of law acts not only as an overseer who ensures that the operational rules of the market are respected; more fundamentally, (the rule of) law is able to do that because it operates itself through a similar logic of equivalence, impartially imputing to individuals what is proportionally deserved by their actions.3 This homology between the free market and the rule of law receives a systematic (normative as much as it is reflective) configuration in liberal thought. That is to say,

Introduction

5

liberalism – more specifically, liberal theories of justice – are normative projects arising in the context of the historical development of the modern capitalist state, articulating the latter’s operational (actual and deontological) coordinates in ideational/theoretical form. And despite the variety of ways that the relation between the market and (the rule of) law can be conceived, my contention is that liberal theories operate upon a conception of justice as a rational idea(l), which must be applied to social reality. To this extent, much as the discussion may have deepened and widened in recent years under pressure coming from the many (social, political, economic, ecological) exigencies of our globalised world, liberal normativism remains at its core idealist. Raising the charge of idealism may seem little more than a polemic based on worn-out classifications. Sen (2010: 114) is certainly right that it is impossible to appreciate a complex thought based on a rigid classificatory thinking. Yet in the same way that ‘conservative’ did convey something essential about Burke’s thought (Sen’s example), idealism is meant as a critical diagnosis of a fundamental aspect of liberal theories of justice. Despite honest efforts to be inclusive, the conception of justice as a normative principle posited by reason ends up being theoretically and politically exclusionary. For sure, liberalism has always been prided for acknowledging and constitutionally enabling disagreement whilst maintaining as its utopian core the prospect of rational consensus over fundamental principles. Likewise, nowadays, being inclusive is the liberal ordre du jour, both on the level of theory and policy. The point here is not to dispel freedom of expression and of speech or the policies of integration that liberal polities claim to establish and promote as charades. It is to note that liberal theories of justice, for all their universalist rhetoric, act in practice as vectors of legitimacy to existing liberal states and their twin pillars: the rule of law and the free market (even if it is argued that the latter must be improved and reformed). Therefore, since these two institutions are the rational embodiments of justice – the social forms through which a just society is realised – whoever breaches or transgresses the rule of law and the free market starts moving out from the orbit of justice and invokes legitimate coercion. Paradigmatic of the preceding point are events of subaltern insurgency, notably the wave of riots which has spread out in recent years throughout the world and whose intensity is such that it has been said to define the current historical period.4 To be sure, there are other options available than to adopt a strict Hobbesian line, which refuses on principle to events of violent insurgency any connection to justice.5 Nevertheless, although liberals may consider insurgent forms of action, from riots to revolutions, to be ‘just’, this essentially means ‘justified’; that is, having good, valid or legitimate reasons. To my knowledge, no liberal commentator has attached justice to riots as one of their immanent qualities. In contrast, the evaluation of popular movements

6

Introduction

and uprisings is proportional to their integration in the order of the liberal state. If they respect private property and abide to the normative framework of the rule of law by formulating ‘sensible’ demands through institutionalised and constitutionally sanctioned circuits of action, protestors are assessed positively; if they transgress the boundaries of the liberal state and start looting and burning, if they posit ‘irrational’ demands, or more scandalously, if they have no demands (as it has happened in many recent uprisings), they tend to exclude themselves from the domain of Right and invoke justified coercion. In this context, no matter how sensitive liberal theories of justice may be to the suffering, angst, plight or even the resistance of the downtrodden, there is one concept that never enters systematically into their purview, other than as the unnamed symptom of an absence or a violation of justice: the class struggle. The essential logic underscoring liberal theorisations of justice is hardly new. A classic version of it can be found in Kant (1999: 123–28) who, while recognising the justified nature of a revolution, refused on principle to regard the revolutionary phenomenon as an instantiation of justice. The reason for this stance was that revolutions mark by definition the violent interruption of law, which founds justice as a rational order of Right. To conceive, thus, revolution as a historical form of justice would be to integrate violence within the latter’s conceptual and historical orbit, hence contradict the very definition of justice. Many things have changed since Kant’s time, when liberalism did not even exist as a coherent system of thought, much less as the dominant ideology of a state form. Yet insofar, substantially, justice concerns the actualisation of individual autonomy and, formally, the latter’s regulative and enabling institutional/legal framework, subaltern violence can only be extrinsic, accidental or worse detrimental to it. In this context, violent outbreaks (like the ones that our era of riots abounds with) will be necessarily represented negatively, as symptoms of a dysfunction and of all sorts of lack: lack of civic culture, lack of integration, lack of institutional mediations, lack of a developed civil society and more. This helps explain why, honest as they are in their attempt to defend riots against conservative criminalisation, all too many liberals tend to treat rioters as a misguided youth who has lost faith in the civil institutions and values of the liberal state. The rioter may be a criminal, a victim or a lost soul, but not a subjective figure (productive) of justice. Instead, the reparation of the unjust social conditions – notably, poverty, exclusion, marginalisation – which are said to cause subaltern insurgency, in other words, the actualisation of justice, requires the intervention of the liberal state, even if the latter bends over the underprivileged as a caring, instead of a punishing, Father.

Introduction

7

The point here is not to offer an apology of violent resistance or a romantic idealisation of subaltern struggles and riots. Nor is it to make a plea for integration expressed at the abstract level of a theory of justice. It is to augment the preceding argument concerning the exclusionary implications of liberal thought. This exclusion of subaltern insurgency from the field of justice is theoretically and politically restrictive as well as class biased, expressing the deep-seated fear of the ‘mob’ that defines liberal thought from its inception. What is more, it tacitly undermines the ontological weight of the body and its affects relative to the actualisation of justice. In this context, nonhuman animals – axiomatically said to lack reason and the capacity to willingly obey legal norms – can be naturally conceived at best as beneficiaries of law, never as active subjects of justice. Ultimately, no matter what is the personal standpoint of liberals in the face of police repression, the normatively charged dichotomies that underpin liberal theories of justice – reason/passion, order/ disorder, mind/body, impartiality/partisanship – end up operating not only as frames of exclusion but also of coercion. Behind liberal pleas for ‘reason and moderation to prevail’, the riot police are never far off. The crux of the problem has been astutely diagnosed by Jacques Ellul, in a book published originally during another time of uprisings, in 1972: ‘There is no resonance anymore between revolts against injustice and a theory of justice’ (2012: 254). In their current historical intensity, riots raise in an urgent tone crucial theoretical issues concerning the nature of justice and its relation to other forces and dynamics determining sociopolitical reproduction and change. As long as justice is conceived as the Solen of reason that reality must adjust to, a theory of justice will not be able to deal with these problems comprehensively, in their material density and violent historical complexity. Thus, theory may be able to pass normative judgements – for instance, that exclusions based on gender or race ought not exist – but it has little to say over the fact that the historical abolition of clauses of exclusion required long, violent struggles, as if all this violence had been redeemed and concerned bygone eras, before justice found its true, rational form in the liberal state. Moreover, in this way, as Duncan Bell adds, mainstream theories ‘continue to argue about the nature of justice, equality and democracy, while ignoring the ways in which many of the ideas and institutions of contemporary politics have been (de)formed or inflected by centuries of Western imperialism’ (2016: 4). Indeed, ‘empire’ – supposedly a thing of the past – is a terra incognita for mainstream theories of justice6 and so are at the end of the day the concepts of ‘revolution’ and ‘civil war’. Inclusive as they attempt to be, liberal theories recycle and revolve around a rather limited number of phenomena and concepts.

8

Introduction

OTHER THAN LAW Against the exclusionary normativism of liberal theories, a more critical option is to argue that no universal notion of justice is available or, more radically, to dismiss the issue altogether. This is indeed what would be usually understood to be the content and task of a theory of justice claiming to be ‘materialist’. As Bruno Latour ascertains, materialism has been traditionally assumed to be endowed with the power to demystify ‘conceptual superstructures’ – of which justice is almost a prototype – and, thus, ‘to shatter the pretensions of those who tried to hide their brutal interests behind notions like morality, culture, religion, politics, or art’ (2007: 138). To be sure, Robert Solomon (1995) has advanced a clearly materialist, and still positive, concept of justice, as an innate passion that is grounded on a complex ensemble of affects, from positive ones, like care, to negative ones, like outrage. In essence, the same path will be followed here. However, Solomon’s study stays within the confines of liberal, contractarian theories and their restrictive political and normative horizon. Consequently, his analysis does not unravel its materialist leanings to the point of a critical theory of society and history, along the lines of historical materialism. By the same token, the notion of the class struggle, hence a survey of phenomena through which it is actualised historically, are all but absent. Solomon’s theory, fertile as it may be, does not pose a radical challenge to liberal legalism. Nor does it offer an alternative to materialist critiques, which recognise that justice is embodied in institutional apparatuses that regulate social relations according to formal principles of right, whilst maintaining that the materialist task is to unmask the forces and interests behind such politico-juridical mechanisms and procedures and, thus, to demystify their normative pretensions. Couched in these terms, the materialist objective in the case of subaltern insurgency is not to justify riots, revolts and uprisings but to reject the very categories that dominant forms of discourse use to frame them. How could indeed ‘the master’s tools dismantle the master’s house’ (Lorde, 2018)? Two anonymous texts written amidst violent uprisings offer a good example of this theoretical stance and elucidate its polemical edges. First, a collective text written during a revolt that had broken out in Athens, characteristically entitled ‘A Bedouin Yes, a Citizen Never’ (Occupied ASOEE, 2008). Whilst defending the revolt against its detractors, the authors declare: ‘The bourgeois with a voice trembling from piety, promise: rights, justice, equality. And the revolted hear: repression, exploitation, looting’. To dispel any impression to the contrary, they subsequently assert that their ‘despise for democracy derives not from some sort of idealism but from a material animosity’. A similar uncompromising attitude is taken by the ‘open letter to those who condemn looting’ (ECW, 2011), written during the riots that swept over

Introduction

9

England after the killing of Mark Duggan. Therein, justice – conceived as the possibility of mediation and perhaps reconciliation – vanishes to the ethers of idealism, to reveal the materiality of exclusion, abandonment and class conflict. Riots, in this context, emerge as a pure anti political negation of the dominant social relations and their material embodiments: of commodities, banks, shops, police stations, even municipal buildings and community centers. Clearly, a huge gap separates the theoretical perspective of the two texts from any remotely liberal theory, which in one way or another finds an essential condition of possibility for justice in the rational capacity to guide, mediate and order human relations. Interestingly however, huge as the differences may be, there is a point of conjunction: they both operate through an exclusion of the passions and actions of subaltern bodies from the definition of justice. In fact, materialist denunciations tend to deny the problem altogether, as if the experience of injustice and the desire for justice mobilising uprisings are expressions of ideological misconception and political immaturity or surface manifestations of an underlying objective social fact – that is, of exploitation, poverty, exclusion – that exists independently from its affective receptions. Ultimately, this type of materialist theorisation concedes to liberal theory that justice is a normative principle and, on these grounds, dismisses it. In this way, however, a fundamental dimension of the struggles that materialist theories supposedly set to defend is muted. Expectedly, theory falls either to a celebration of abstract negativity that tends to be self-indulgent and nihilistic or, as with some versions of communisation theory (e.g., Théorie Communiste, 2014), adopts a dialectical teleology of self-realising negativity morphing into a positive order of being. Admittedly, the latter option has the backing of Marx’s celebrated adage from The German Ideology, about communism being the ‘real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ (2002: 187). Yet powerful as it is, the statement settles nothing, since as Étienne Balibar points out, ‘Subjects can either resist the movement or contribute to it, and they contribute to it only if they desire it, whatever the conditions, material or spiritual, which can facilitate or even produce this subjective orientation’ (2013a: 15). Expectedly, in the absence of such a desire, the recent wave of struggles did not dialectically lead to the immediate production of communism; instead, a communist revolution never entered the agenda. Although materialist theories of negativity like to pose as the cutting edge of critique, another critical option is available than that of negating the theoretical relevance of justice altogether: to anchor the concept’s contested character on the ontological level and analyse justice as an intrinsic aspect of the political constitution of embodied forms of being, without, however, lapsing into reductionism nor to a cultural/epistemological relativism.

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Introduction

This is essentially the standpoint adopted by Badiou (2006: 96–106), who holds that justice is not a static ‘state of affairs’ but must be lived out in the form of militant fidelity to a politics that challenges what Badiou calls the ‘state of the situation’; that is, the established order of things. However, for all its critical force, Badiou’s axiomatic commitment to an ontology based on the mathematical formalism of set theory – where Being is identified with homogeneous multiplicity and politics is said to be initiated by irruptive Events, which are ‘trans-being’ (2005: 97–102) – does not permit him to inscribe justice as an immanent determination of materiality. Instead, justice becomes conditional to the nonanimal qualities of human beings, to what is ‘infinite’. Not accidentally, Badiou (2012) recognises metropolitan riots as qualitative markers of our era but still conceives them mostly in terms of rupture and refusal and evaluates them in proportion to the extent that an Idea has elevated them to the level of History. There are many other theoretical studies that move towards the direction of a critical concept of justice: Nancy Frazer’s (1996) influential attempt to integrate recognition in a theory of justice that is adequate to contemporary struggles. Cynthia Willet’s (2001) holistic theorisation of justice posits as its locus desiring, embodied persons and the social milieus that they are embedded. Loretta Capeheart and Dragan Milovanovic’s (2007) thorough investigation of social justice concludes that justice is to be found not only in thoughts but also in deeds and in collective forms emerging at the grassroots. A recent volume is coedited by Balibar with Sandro Mezzadra and Ranabir Samaddar (2013), and its various essays build upon the recognition of the social embeddedness of justice in order to examine its multiform manifestations extending to practices of social struggle. A distinct note must also be given to the growing field of ‘spatial justice’, which pursues the insight that justice and injustice are mediated by a material configuration and organisation of space – hence, of bodies in space (e.g., Soja, 2010; PhilippopoulosMihalopoulos, 2015). These are only a few suggestive examples of theorisations that have served to widen the scope of a theory of justice by taking systematically into account the latter’s materiality and, thus, its affective, social and political determinations. When placed together, all these studies make up an intelligible trend, which not only locates the generation of justice in movements emanating ‘from below’, it also points towards a generic concept of justice as an immanent quality of affective/desiring bodies. In this way, a crucial insight is affirmed that has been mainly associated with Derrida (2002b), the noncoincidence between justice and law. How far, though, is this noncoincidence to be taken without at the same time suspending justice to an indefinite epoché? This is for one Derrida’s quandary, whose theoretical framework, built around the critique of a metaphysics of presence and the linguistic

Introduction

11

impossibility to capture meaning, is distinctly unequipped for directing a theory of justice towards the path of a theory of material forms.7 Alternatively, the affirmation of an absolute break between law and justice in favour of the latter’s revolutionary realisation, an option critically discussed by Massimo Cacciari (2009), commits a reverse normativism, which is no less exclusionary than the liberal one. Worse, as it will be elaborated later, it tendentially divests justice itself from any positive content. On the other hand, if the more expansive definitions of justice crafted still require nomothetic mediation – that is, if justice acquires positivity only in legal form – subaltern insurgency remains caught in the rubric of the Negative and of Lack. If, against mainstream conceptions, justice can be theorised as a positive marker of riots and other forms of violent insurgency, animal ones included; if (saying the same thing the other way around) the accommodation of insurgent forms of action as positive categories of a theory of justice is a viable theoretical option, to obscure the link is not only to miss something essential about the phenomenon of insurgency, it is also to limit regrettably the scope of justice. But the number of phenomena a concept integrates is not simply a matter of the rigidity or elasticity of an autonomous entity the intellect has fabricated; the scope and content of a concept ultimately concern the way we perceive and relate to the world, which in turn affects not only the content of thought but its very form. That is why, to positively register subaltern struggles and insurgencies in a basic definition of justice, theory cannot rest content with asserting the impossibility of a positive normative theory. For sure, this is an important gesture that releases struggles from the heavy burden placed upon them by the transcendent judgements of normative political philosophy. In the long run, my study will also concur with Balibar (2013b: 11), that it is impossible to reconcile all the different viewpoints on justice or eliminate any of them.8 Yet if theory does not proceed further than that, it will not have problematised enough the schema of ‘truth/diagnosis/transition/ utopia’, which starts from a robust concept of the true and ends with a robust image of its proper realisation, a schema that, as Iain MacKenzie observes, ‘Shapes most of the political debate and discussion that animates modern politics’ (2018: 37). As a result, subaltern struggles will have been left on the level of negativity, as vectors of the impossibility of embodying justice in a positive order of being. Moreover, theory will have failed to grasp the (onto)logical unity and grounding of the different conceptions and practices of justice, thus, to sustain why justice is a pertinent category, other than pointing to its empirical manifestations. At the end of the day, to say that justice is ‘socially embedded’ begs the question of the nature of the social; hence, it poses the issue of embedding a theory of justice to a general theory of society. Moreover, as Eric Voegelin (2000a: 88) has astutely observed, ‘existence in political society is historical existence’, thus, in the same way that ‘a theory

12

Introduction

of politics, if it penetrates to principles, is a theory of history’, an adequate theorisation of justice must entail a theorisation of its temporal unfolding. For all these reasons, the current study contends that along with showing ‘the enduring relevance of the concept of justice’ (Balibar et al., 2013b: 2), it is necessary to pursue systematically the insight into the latter’s embedded nature towards a generic conception that is avowedly materialist. In this way, the concept of justice will be endowed with the critical sting that the processes which it conceptualises possess on the level of life. The theoretical merits of this theorisation are considerable: by being read materialistically, justice will have been established as an analytical and critical concept, rather than merely a normative ideal, that can contribute to the study of history and the attendant issues of sociopolitical order, formation, and change. By following this path, my study wants to uphold the critical vocation of materialism, epitomised in the commitment to embed discursive representations in their material basis: affective and mobile bodies enmeshed into entrenched structures and intensive relations of production and power. In contrast, however, to analyses that take this materialist principle to imply discarding justice on principle, herein the possibility is pursued of maintaining the critical import of a materialist theorisation while abandoning the reductionist attitude associated with it. There is no intrinsic link between materialism and reductionism. If Lenin’s classic definition of materialism is as follows – ‘the recognition of objects in themselves or outside the mind’ (1908) – to recognise as much neither contradicts a political commitment to justice nor does it discard ipso facto the concept’s theoretical pertinence. Even the follow-up argument that material reality has ‘ontological primacy’ is insufficient, since Matter is no less an abstraction than Spirit.9 Unless the properties of materiality are specified, materialism can be as idealist as idealism, substituting one abstract ideality for another. But when it comes to specifying these properties, there has been no single materialist viewpoint, there is instead a proliferation of materialisms. Matter has been depicted as an inert substance that is entirely subject to ‘blind’ physical and biochemical forces. In this type of materialism, which attempts to model physical bodies on the image of automated mechanisms, substantial issues of justice have no place, given that a machine, as far as the technical aspects of its composition and operation are concerned, can be functional/dysfunctional, useful/useless, efficient/inefficient, but not just/ unjust. Yet it has been also possible to theorise matter in more dynamic ways, which allow for creativity and innovation as well as acknowledge the rational, reflective, imaginative, psychic and discursive capacities of human beings. All materialisms begin with actuality, but for a nonreductive materialism, actuality is (inter)active and affective materiality, which encompasses desiring and thinking bodies.

Introduction

13

An uneasy feeling may have started to take shape that my study enters territories which are not the abode of a theory of justice, drifting afar from the latter’s proper domain of operation. Against such a cautionary attitude, Sebastiano Timpanaro (1980: 73–75) has argued that to fulfil its critical vocation a materialist social theory must not remain on the level of social relations and forms; instead, a more robust conceptualisation of material reality is needed. In fact, no conception of justice is free from some ontological assumptions. From antiquity to the present, hierarchical structures, political dualities and inequalities of wealth between appropriators/direct producers and rulers/ruled have always found their ontological grounding in a hierarchical dualism between mind/body, whereby (one way or another) ideas are perceived as the creative principle of (social) reality and bodies as instruments of execution. An effective challenge to such hierarchical dualisms cannot simply rest upon the counter affirmation that justice concerns equality. As long as (the actualisation of) justice is understood essentially as a function of reason, theory remains on the terrain of an idealistic theorisation that is exposed to some type of ideology-critique, whether a traditional Marxist one or a more psychoanalytical version. It follows that against an idealist conception that treats justice as a product of the human mind, it is vital to surpass ontological dualisms and trace the generation of justice in the activity of material bodies. OVERVIEW The conceptualisation of justice as an immanent quality of (social) being pivots around a definition that positively integrates justice to material structures and flows. Such a definition will be fleshed out in the first chapter, in a way that is abstract enough not to determine in advance the concept’s field of actuality. This is not an arbitrary abstraction; it is a method of exposition that starts from what is essential to the numerous instantiations in order for them to be qualified as instances of justice. Thus, clarifying the essence of justice at its most general form opens the path for an exploration of concrete forms of justice. These forms will be shown in the first chapter to reach beyond and before ‘Man’. Along the way my study’s historical lineages with intellectual currents that have appeared as early as ancient Greece will be also delineated. Far from committing a neoarchaic celebration of ‘ancient wisdom’, this retrospective analysis is concerned to show how the development of a nonreductionist materialist theory goes hand in hand with the development of a certain form of thought, which has found in ancient Greece one of its first systematic articulations. Furthermore, it will be shown that another singular instantiation of this generic thought-form is to be found in the contemporary natural sciences and the new materialist philosophies that have sprung in their

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Introduction

wake. In this respect, the analysis marks an attempt to integrate the dynamism of the contemporary scientific image of reality in the architectonic of a theory of justice. It is on the basis of this open, interdisciplinary spirit that it will be further argued that advances in scientific fields like ethology facilitate an identification of the effective presence of justice in animal forms of sociality and activity. To map out its presence in nonhuman systems and yet avoid reductionism, a materialist theory must be able to identify the properly sociopolitical determinations of justice in the differentiating characteristics of human being. The result will be a theorisation of justice as a process that has multiple determinations depending on the segment of reality analysed. Specifically, in human society, justice acquires a twofold character: a political problem that concerns the institutional configuration, (re)production and regulation of social forms and relations; a productive desire that invests and underscores processes of sociopolitical (trans)formation and (de)regulation. These two dimensions, it will be clarified, are not different types of justice; they are dimensions of a singular process: the creaturely pursuit of the good life. The first dimension of justice will be elaborated in the second chapter through a constructive reading of Marx’s historical materialism. Marx had an ambivalent attitude towards justice; nevertheless, it will be shown that his work offers the basis for a critical delineation of the problem-laden and conflict-laden nature of the phenomenon. As for the libidinal/affective dimension of justice, dealt with in the third chapter, my analysis will draw mainly from the work of Gilles Deleuze, especially during his years of collaboration with Felix Guattari. By the end of this theoretical operation, the survey will have also delineated the excessive dynamic that the becoming of justice has. Thus, if the ‘One’ and the ‘many’ constitute the two poles through and in-between which the biopolitical production of justice unfolds, the third figure evoked in the title, the ‘not-yet’ will be said to testify to the phenomenon’s utopian overtones. However, instead of discarding the Hegelian legacy of historical materialism, as other Deleuzian-inspired theories have attempted to do, my study will affirm it by clarifying, in the fourth chapter, the dialectic nuances that the actuality of justice has. There is thus a distinct theoretical claim that grounds the broader claim about the possibility of a nonreductionist materialist theorisation of justice: Deleuze and Hegel – which is to say, a nomadic and a dialectical form of thought – can be complementary to each other without in the least ignoring their tensions and differences. Upholding dialectics also reinforces the insight alluded previously: if justice belongs to the becoming of the world instead of being merely a judgement upon it, it has historicity as a major determination. It follows that a theory of justice is not a departure from historical existence, it is an opening to history. This means in effect that the final chapter – where the main

Introduction

15

historical types of justice are exposed, ‘justice from above’ and ‘justice from below’ – does not constitute the application of a completed theory; it is a move integral to the unfolding of the theoretical analysis. At no time though, even when ideational, linguistic and imaginary mediations are brought into the picture, will my study stop having as its subject matter material bodies and assemblages. This is the ultimate sense that the theory advanced is materialist: it conceives of justice as an immanent determination of desiring bodies as well as a systemic facet of their interaction and coexistence, emerging and unfolding during the conflict-laden and struggle-laden quest for a good life that defines (human) being. Before closing the introduction, it is apposite to offer one final note. The reading of justice advanced claims of its reasonable share of originality. On the other hand, an objective my book sets for itself is to verify the existence of an intellectual tradition that has conceived of justice in materialist terms vis-à-vis dominant idealist conceptions. This tradition does not constitute a school or a unified theory; it is more like what Althusser (2006b) has called an ‘underground current’, composed of multiple streams of thought. Moreover, qua theoretical current, it does not develop in isolation; it is connected to historical movements and political events that have foregrounded the material determinations of justice. In fact, one of the main virtues of the thinkers partaking in this subterranean current is to have brought the link to the level of conceptual clarity. A prominent place here is held by socialism – stretched enough to include the anarchist currents deriving from the First International – as a historical movement arising from within and embracing the real struggles of subaltern classes. Marx is associated with this long period when the reality of proletarian struggles anchored ecumenic justice to material interests, needs, longings and to the material transformation of the world. Deleuze’s thought, or the thought of other theorists playing an important role in my study, like Balibar, Benjamin and Badiou, also developed in close association to the dynamics of the struggles of their time, still waving red and black flags. Although socialism was still in its infancy, this is the case at the end of the day also for Hegel, whose intellectual trajectory can be said to commence the day when he planted the ‘tree of liberty’ in his university to honour the French Revolution (Châtelet, 2006: 69). In brief, the point here is that along with offering the necessary tools for a theoretical clarification of justice, the critical theories that I draw from are also an active part of its history. This is how the current book should also be perceived and appreciated, as a theoretical study of justice arising in a period of crisis and struggle, where the prospect of radical change that revolutionary socialism carried for decades comes gradually back on the agenda. Part of this process concerns efforts to move the discussion of justice out of its mainstream, efforts to which my

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Introduction

study wishes to contribute. At the same time, the materialist theory to unravel in the following pages is an indirect reflection on the promise of universal justice at a period when the panegyrics that have accompanied capitalism’s victorious march are gradually supplanted by widespread visions of catastrophe and punishment. From this prism, as it will be reflected in the epilogue, to theorise justice in a materialist manner is to refrain from prescribing the One form that the world ought to have and instead open thought to the many ends that haunt our past and our future.

Chapter 1

Thresholds Beyond State Thought

But of all the things involved in the debate of educated men, surely nothing is preferable to the plain understanding that we have been born for justice and that right has been established not by opinion but by nature. —Cicero, De Legibus, 1:28 (2014)

Unless noetic activity is reduced to a neurochemical processing of sensory stimuli – along the lines of a reductionism for which, in Bernard Lonergan’s incisive remark, ‘concepts have neither dates nor development and truth is so objective that it gets along without minds’ (1974: 30) – every discursive configuration of reality poses the problem of adequacy. A key insight of the Hegelian dialectic, which Deleuze adopts despite denouncing dialectics as a form of thought, is that this problem does not concern an abstract epistemological investigation into the potency of mental faculties as much as an active process of attunement and molding. Thought must become adequate to its object by embracing and partaking on its movements, rhythm and form. Based on this insight, in the introduction it was argued that to construct a materialist theory which re-cognises justice in embodied flows, ranging from the constitution of formal orders of right (packs, tribes, communes, empires) to intensive movements of deterritorialisation (flight, sabotage, mutiny, insurrection), it is not enough to break with idealism. At the same time, it is necessary to break with what Deleuze has called ‘state-philosophy’ or more generically ‘state-thought’.1 The term denotes much more than the normative contents of a theory; that is, the advocacy of some form of state as the necessary and essential actuality of justice. It refers to a form of thought that operates through ‘limitative distribution’ – ‘the determination of the exclusive set 17

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of properties possessed by each term in contradistinction to the other: logos, law’ – and ‘hierarchical ranking’ – ‘the measurement of the degree of perfection of a term’s self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man, god, or gold: value, morality’.2 The result of these operations is the demarcation of a ‘field of interiority’, whose internal components form one great hierarchical chain of being. It is possible to be critical of state power yet continue moving within the confines of state thought. This becomes patent in the case of liberal theories of justice. Liberalism recognises domains of rationality, value and meaning, notably the free market and civil society, operating horizontally and independently from the state. The free market especially is considered a field where the value of things and men is determined without the intervention of a central power. Moreover, at the core of the free market, serving as its dogmatic foundation, lies the conviction that the latter is an institution wherein everybody receives what is deserved, from the hardworking to the lazy. To be sure, against simplistic ideas of natural reproduction, Foucault (2008) has shown how liberal (and later neoliberal) thought has been concerned with the non-coercive regulation of autonomous (inter)action, giving rise to the fluid and expansive domain of modern governmentality. On the other hand, precisely because techniques of power are involved, liberalism – performing on the conceptual level what the (modern) state does politically – posits the market and civil society as ordered domains of signification that are rationally governed, ranked and regulated according to objective criteria of evaluation and imputation. And while the overall process partly takes place through immanent techniques, the constitution of such an ordered domain requires also that reason mediates and institutes social relations in their symbolic/ material unity, as a rational, rule-bound totality. In this context governmentality is necessarily coupled by a normative rationality pertaining to law; more substantially, reason operates as Law. Justice is precisely the rational principle that mediates the irreducible gap between freedom (the normative core of liberalism) and governmentality and guarantees individual autonomy within a political society (cf. Patton, 2014). To be sure, the degree and nature of legal regulation varies and the debate about the proper limits of state power is at the heart of liberalism’s historical development. Yet while all liberal theories of justice share a skepticism towards the state form as well as a commitment to social mobility, they still yield a statist form of thought, which is homologous to the social formation it serves to justify (in the substantial sense of placing in the orbit of justice): a field of interiority where every-thing has a determinate identity, thus, a proper position and function, and all together are united under a central signifying Logos (Reason/Law: ‘the One’). Expectedly, like all versions of state thought, liberal theories see in class struggle and civil war

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the spectral Other of a just order, the Behemoths that (theoretically as much as politically) must be contained, repressed, exorcised. The analysis points to a certain similarity between the form of state thought and the state qua political form. This structural homology, however, must be grounded historically. From a consistent materialist perspective, it is not (a type of) thought that yields (a type of) political organisation; rather, the emergence of state thought finds its material presupposition in the emergence of the state form. In more technical terms, the st(r)atification of thought follows (not mechanically, as an active component of its formation) the st(r)atification of social being. Does not this correlate that theoretical challenges to state thought must seek their own onto-historical presuppositions in practical challenges to the state provided by anti-statist forms of justice? The latter insight does not mean adopting an anarchist perspective, since breaking with state thought still allows a theoretical conception of the state as a historical form of justice. Conversely, an anarchist conception, which identifies justice with a stateless order of being, can still be an idealist conception not having to break sufficiently with state thought. The last sentence presumes that although state thought and idealism are not synonymous, there is a strong connection between them, logical as well as historical. Idealism designates justice as an autonomous incarnation of Ratio; thus, the positing of an ideal identity – ‘justice is x’ – that Ought to be applied to reality. Yet if justice concerns social ordering through the rational application of a normative idea(l) amenable to a positive definition, it is also re-presentable as a unitary order whose functional components can be positively identified and classified. Moreover, just like the principle of justice is a function of a faculty that is other than the bodies which it passes a judgement upon, a positive order of justice is established and controlled by a rational centre of signification and power that is other than the social reality that it constitutes and regulates. In other words, as long as justice is posited as a rational idea(l) to which reality must conform, what else can its actualisation denote other than a rational order that partitions material bodies in accordance to this idea? When you start with the One you will most likely end up with the One. From this angle, idealism faces a quandary: either it conceives its ideal realisable, hence, attempts to formalise it and tendentially yields to state thought; or, it defers its ideal, remaining on the level of abstract commitment, and thus, in the position of a melancholic spectator of a fallible world. To perform the double break with idealism and state thought, a twofold operation is required. First, to develop a form of thought that does not mold itself as a domain of representation whose interior is filled with substantive identities, each having a specific value, function and place, but instead as a process partaking in wider dynamic processes that envelop mutable relations,

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connections and lines of intensity. Second, to survey and map out the emergence of justice within this intensive field of becoming. Such a theorisation does not discard the identification of essential qualities that determine justice as a re-cognisable phenomenon. It rather presumes a different notion of ‘essence’, like the one Heidegger posited in his essay ‘On the Essence of Truth’ (1993: 111–38): not a static set of properties but the active qualities constituting features of any given phenomenon, the manner that something preserves in its being. A similar notion is to be found in Hegel, developed fully in his Logic (2010) and summarised in the dictum ‘appearance itself is essential to essence’ (1975: 8). Essence, in these terms – in our case, the essence of justice – is immanent to appearances, hence to becoming, not their non-contingent truth. ANCIENT INTIMATIONS Although today it may appear as novel, the conception of justice as an emergent quality of material processes informs one of the oldest theoretical statements that we know of, Anaximander’s famous fragment: ‘The things that are perish into the things from which they come to be, according to necessity, for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice in accordance with the ordering of time’ (12B1).3 At first glance, Anaximander conveys a notion of justice as retribution, which is the quintessence of the lex talionis, famously expressed in the biblical ‘eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot’ (Exodus 21:24).4 Its technical language aside, Anaximander’s understanding of justice looks unimpressively archaic. However, it is precisely in its terminological novelty, in the use of generic categories – that is, of concepts, instead of mythical dramatis personae – that the significance of the sentence can be appreciated. Much more than replicating a standard worldview, Anaximander, as Vasilis Kalfas remarks, adopts ‘the archaic perception of justice as retribution against wrongdoing and transforms it into a principle of cosmic balance and order’ (2015: 43).5 This means that retribution is not the essential issue at stake. The essence of (cosmic) justice is the dynamic equilibrium of differential forces. It is common knowledge that Anaximander belongs to a wider intellectual current, classified under the umbrella term ‘Presocratic philosophy’. To be sure, there is no single worldview that these (proto)philosophers adhere to, nor thus is there a shared theory of justice, in the sense of an elaborate set of propositions forming a unified system of comprehension. Nevertheless, different as the thought of the Presocratics may be in its details, there is a collective desire at work: to overcome traditional representations of the world, as found in narratives that will come to be denounced as ‘myths’. This desire

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is expressed positively in a new form of rationalisation, which, far from being a disinterested knowledge detached from embodied being, concerns a new way of experiencing and figuring reality. And an essential aspect of this new experience is a novel conception of justice. This new conception is also conveyed in another famous surviving fragment, attributed to Heraclitus: ‘It is necessary to know that war is common and justice is strife (eris) and that all things happen in accordance with strife and necessity’ (B80). Herein, retribution has fully receded, and justice concerns dynamic relations, which are explicitly theorised in terms of struggle. In this representation, the cosmos is not a static hierarchy of bodies; it is a dynamic, horizontal plane of forces. This does not preempt crystallisation of hierarchical relations, but hierarchy does not constitute the essential form of justice. Nor is antagonism and conflict for that matter. While Heraclitus’s proposition seems unequivocal – justice is strife – if the statement conveyed an unproblematic identity it would be little more than an informative tautology. Justice is eris but it is also not eris, for otherwise there would be no need for conceptual differentiation. Is justice then actualised through what is not necessarily just? Interestingly, nonidentity is inscribed in the very figure of Eris, who, Hesiod (1988, 1124) tells us in Works and Days, is two – strife and concord. Heraclitus was certainly aware of Hesiod’s distinction, although we should not read too much in the text. In all events, the Ephesian has asserted on other occasions that, apart from war, Logos is also common and ‘all things come to be in accordance’ to it (22B1, B2). The cosmos is not a chaotic field of incessant conflict; it is a community of being and justice is one of its immanent determinations. Accordingly, Heraclitus’s statement is not an ideological vindication of war; it concerns the structure of justice, and this is said to be not a static state where each thing has its fixed place and identity but a becoming of differential powers partaking in a common Logos. Presocratic cosmology has been hailed as the birth of ‘secular’ reason, nay of ‘Reason’ writ large. The idea has been submitted to a convincing critique: save the fact that myths have their own structures of rationalisation, it has also been delineated that the experience of the cosmos articulated in Presocratic thought has religious overtones.6 After all, the idea that justice emerges as a regulative principle of reality through a conflict of cosmic proportions can be found in the myths of more than one ancient civilisation, the Greek included. Nonetheless, reducing the substitution of conceptual for mythical language to a stylistic change that continues in essence to say the same thing does little justice to the experiential shift involved. Despite its anachronism, the notion of ‘secularisation’ does point to the new experience that theoretical discourse articulates. In the mythical cosmologies of ancient Greece – even in the highly reflective form they acquire in Hesiod, whose poetry’s philosophical traits have firmly been identified7 – justice is imposed in the form of an order

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of right, which is at the same time an order of domination subjugating all those forces who do not abide to the new order of things. Otherwise put, in traditional Greek cosmology, justice arrives in a state form, although (unlike liberal idealism) mythical cosmologies do not exclude from their concept of justice the violence entailed in the establishment of the new order of right. Set against mythical justice, in Anaximander’s and Heraclitus’s fragments, justice is present(ed) as an immanent quality of self-organisation. Consequently, justice is not identified with a sovereign Subject, with ‘the One’, but with difference and multiplicity, with ‘the many’. For sure, the cosmos remains a totality, so from a Deleuzian perspective the break with state thought may not seem quite as radical. A break it nonetheless is, for the totality ‘cosmos’ is not unified under an overarching identity, it is the ensemble of differential relations forming an intelligible order that can be conceptualised in a singular manner. Jean-Pierre Vernant (2006: 213–62) has insisted that Ionian cosmology is intimately connected to the sociopolitical formation within which it emerged. Much more that a court proceeding, it is argued, Anaximander effectively projects in the structure of the cosmos the structure of the ancient polis. Arguably, this structuralist homology tends to inscribe to the polis as an abstract structure features that it acquired historically and, in a developed form, only in democracies (Meier, 1986). Nevertheless, Vernant’s point is not to be sweepingly dismissed. As Deleuze has observed, ancient Greece, at the time under consideration, marks one of those instances whereby ‘statements of a new type emerge within assignable temporal arrangements, in several domains’ (2001: 92). Some relation between developments in the respective domains, Deleuze infers, is inevitable. Moreover, whatever the relation between politics and cosmology or other domains of discourse may be, the fact must be taken into consideration that all experience and thought – even when the latter are conceived as a collective enterprise – occurs within identifiable sociopolitical conditions, which constitute (at least some of) its historical determinations. The point here is not simply to delineate the historical context of thought, even less to show the latter’s historical limitations; it is to grasp thought as a historical force that belongs to broader social-historical processes. In ancient civilisations such as those of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China, the mythical representation of the cosmos as a hierarchical order of Right running under the auspices of sovereign Power has developed in tandem to the growth of monarchies and centralised state forms, resulting in an analogical representation of the cosmic and human realms: the latter is supposed to reflect the former while both are constituted through a similar structure of Right.8 Granting Voegelin’s point that the representation of the world involved is not ideological façade but entails a genuine religious experience,

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it is hard to avoid the inference that the identification of justice with a hierarchical order of domination has influenced the consolidation of respective cosmologies, which acted in turn as a necessary ideological pillar of monarchical states. To repeat, it is not that thought mechanically reflects (yet somehow also obscures) reality, it is rather that the historical development of a specific form of thought, ‘state thought’, finds in the actual state its material coordinates. In Greece, the collapse of the Achaean kingdoms, which may or may not have been unified, and the historical inability to recreate the state form at an early stage opened the space for processes of horizontal self-organisation at the level of the polis to acquire a heightened intensity and significance.9 Moreover, as it becomes apparent already in Homer and Hesiod, the space also opened for a new form of thinking, a distinct form of rationalisation breeding a new conception of the world, which was spared the tutelage of a priestly sect, or any other bureaucrat of state thought. That justice emerges as an immanent, dynamic process, within which hierarchical structures are secondary and always local crystallisations, has been testified as a fact of social experience, shaping the way that cosmic order was experienced. Lacking the state apparatus that could impose it, the existence of a sovereign Power becomes redundant, allowing the full disclosure of the immanent play of forces that the spectacle of the cosmos offers. While the influence of Ionian cosmology on the collective imaginary must not be exaggerated, the experience of justice the Presocratics articulated exceeded their limited milieu. This can be seen in Attic Tragedy, which developed in the same period with the consolidation of democracy in Athens, something that is not accidental. In Vernant’s words, ‘Tragedy is not only an art form; it is also a social institution [. . . ] which the city set up along its political and legal institutions’ (1990: 32). While the themes of surviving tragic dramas, with the exception of The Persians, are drawn from the mythical tradition, myths are subjected to a creative re-composition that subverts the mythical code that they are expressed. This is true even for Aeschylus, who is generally regarded the more ‘pious’ among the three great tragic poets. To be sure, granting the effect of theoretical rationalisation in no way means that the mythical and religious elements of Aeschylian (or indeed of all tragic) drama are either relics or formalities imposed by convention. In Tragedy, gods and all the other supernatural forces shaping the course of events have a very real and effective presence, serving to ridicule human aspirations for a fully enlightened world. As Seth Benardete has aptly argued, ‘Hades is the soul of Tragedy’ (2000: 145). What appears as a remnant of a pre-enlightened past may in fact testify to a far more embracive experience than the one underscoring modern mainstream theory, which is worth taking seriously: justice in Tragedy is not simply a function of Reason, embodied in the lawful order established by the Olympian gods; it also encompasses as

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its constitutive components the numinous forces of the underworld. Surely, Aeschylus in the Eumenides announces the integration of the Furies, the archaic forces of vengeance, into the civic order of the polis. Yet tragedy will continue to play on the excessiveness of justice relative to law (and vice versa), accentuating, in Sophocles and Euripides, its critical sting as it tries to reflectively delineate the ontological texture of Athens’s historical failure to embody justice in its legal and institutional forms. To quote again Benardete, ‘Tragedy is not possible if the law is experienced as asserting the full coincidence between Ought and Is’ (2000: 105). From this angle, tragedy anticipates a fundamental insight that my study will attempt to bring to the level of theoretical clarity.10 The non-coincidence between the legal and the just, which informs the tragic vision of reality, is also reflected in the absence of a full-fledged statist conception of justice. To be sure, Aeschylus depicts the actualisation of justice in terms of a civic order where every group and force has its proper place, an attempt that very likely expresses his desire to maintain a distinct role for the aristocratic elite at a period when the democratic regime was getting radicalised.11 However, precisely because democracy posits equality, mutability and revocability as constitutive dimensions of civic order, in the Oresteia trilogy – the play which sets the problem of justice at its heart, whilst offering a foundational representation of the democratic polis – Dike cannot be identified with a preexisting, static order of being; it is to be actualised through horizontal political processes. Similarly, justice cannot come through a sovereign act of volition by an agent who occupies a transcendent position. Just like in The Suppliants, King Pelasgos declares his inability to arbitrate on the conflicting claims to justice he is faced with (1992a, 381–401), in the Eumenides (1992b), Apollo and Athena, the gods called to settle the dispute between Orestes and the Furies, vote in a strikingly one-sided way (734–43), whereas Athena earlier insisted that despite having at her disposal Zeus thunderbolts she cannot impose justice (470–72). Zeus himself, celebrated as the supreme divinity that guarantees the just order of the cosmos, does not behave as a Sovereign, his effective presence (similar to the law of the polis) is attested in the capacity of human beings to abide to the principles he embodies, which are not revealed but figured out through deliberative and contentious processes. True, this suggests a certain secularisation of politics, since ‘every faction will henceforth be thwarted from enlisting the gods under its exclusive banner. The right and the holy will no longer be coextensive’ (Benardete, 2000: 68). There are much more though involved here than the secularisation of the public sphere. Gods are incapable to impose justice not because they lack the might to do it but because it is not clear in advance what is just in a concrete occasion. Justice is not a preexisting identity that only needs to be self-realised; it is a process actualised in a force field that

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embraces in its vortex bodies and passions; which is to say, justice is actualised through desiring bodies. In this context, the recognition of inscrutable forces is not meant as a ‘celebration of the sovereignty of power and fate over human agency’, whose aim is to instill a ‘reverent submission’ that ‘humbles [human beings] before some transcendent truth’ (Eagleton, 2005: 17–18). It rather reinforces the affective (at once passive and active) dimension of justice. In Tragedy, justice is a becoming – becoming-vengeance, becoming-law, becoming-democracy – driven by desire, it is what humans long for but also what haunts them. Not by coincidence, justice also becomes a political problem, assuming an ethical overcharge that it lacks in Ionian cosmology. We will return to all these crucial issues later. The main point for now is that Attic Tragedy testifies to an intellectual and political environment wherein justice was configured as a principle that is immanent to the intensive relations forming ordered-yet-dynamic totalities, be it the cosmos at large or simply a polis. JUSTICE AS MATERIAL PROCESS AND REAL ABSTRACTION Alexander Koyré (1991) has influentially argued that modern science sets off the moment when it excludes from its conceptual system ethical categories, like justice, and leaves behind it the experience of the world as a ‘cosmos’. Even the notion of ‘law’, deployed to grasp regularities between variables, not only lacks any attachment to sovereign Power, as it was already the case in Ionian cosmology or later Stoic philosophy; it is also stripped of any element of ethical prescription, which would attach lawful behaviour to a notion of the Good. Later discoveries and developments, like Einstein’s general theory of relativity or quantum mechanics, have only made the ‘eternal silence of the infinite spaces’ that filled Pascal with dread (1966: 95) all the more deafening. Today, we are not inhabitants of a cosmos; we are specks in a universe, an indeterminate spatiotemporal field comprising local events, measurable processes, recurrent movements and predictable changes, whilst lacking an overarching telos or logos, which would allow its representation as a normative totality. In this context, to argue that justice is a salient theoretical category is most likely to be suspect of regression to outmoded systems of thought. It is not a pristine, ‘ancient truth’ that I wish to unearth. Borrowing Deleuze’s point about Foucault’s respective surveys, the analysis goes ‘all the way back to the Greeks not in order to find once and for all the miracle, the miserable miracle, of reason par excellance, but only in order to diagnose there perhaps the first rough sketch of a process of rationalisation from which many others followed under different conditions and different attitudes’

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(2007a: 158). Contemporary natural sciences certainly have no need for a notion of justice. Then again, they have no need for a notion of beauty, but this does not mean that talking about beauty in the physical world has been made redundant or a symptom of occultism. Moreover, it is crucial to insist that the insights of Ionian cosmology are philosophical, concerned with general relations and dynamics that require conceptualisation (although they do rest on empirical observation and experience, hence their theoretical quality). Understood in these terms, Presocratic thought names the site of appearance of a conception of justice which, as Tragedy verifies, is open to critical uses and creative inflections. In this respect, the task is not to vindicate ancient Greek cosmology relative to the modern natural sciences. Far from it; it is to give to the conception of justice formulated in a theoretical manner by the ancient Greeks a systematic articulation suitable to the intellectual standards of our own age. The contemporary natural sciences are not inimical to such an operation. From physics to biology, forms of theorisation have developed that move beyond the analysis of static things with stable properties operating within closed, linear systems and instead think in terms of open flows, dynamic systems and hybrid processes.12 At its most radical, as proposed for instance by Carlo Rovelli (2016), the conclusion is that reality is essentially a dynamic system of interactions. Admitting as much is not to deny that from the perspective of a body’s conscious directionality towards other material bodies – in technical terms, its ‘intentionality’ – reality has an objective, thing-like status, pertinently conceptualised by Voegelin (2000c) as ‘Thing-reality’. However, the latter is a structure of experience embedded in a world that contemporary natural sciences insist is a ‘world of happenings not things’ (Rovelli, 2016: 31). In this context, to continue talking about ‘matter’ as an inert res extensa upon which (mental, cultural, social) phenomena can be reduced or against which a human spiritual essence can be measured is clearly problematic. In contrast, as De Landa has urged, the ‘insight into matter’s inherent creativity needs to be fully incorporated into our new materialist philosophies’ (2000: 16). To be sure, there is nothing distinctly new in conceiving matter along creative terms. Setting aside its antique heritage, finding an illustrious exponent in Lucretius, it should not be forgotten that a non-mechanistic and non-reductive materialism has been the aim of dialectical materialism, regardless of its subsequent dogmatic fossilisation (cf. Johnston, 2013). Still, in recent years, there has been a marked proliferation of studies that think afresh materiality and by extension social reality along the lines set by the natural sciences. Particularly fertile has been the attempt to apply to matter categories of action and creativity traditionally reserved for ‘Man’, the correlative in the latter restriction being that these categories are properties of a

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creature bestowed with a rational or spiritual dimension that ‘Nature’ lacks. Contrariwise, as Dianna Coole and Samantha Frost stress in their introduction to new materialism, the latter’s orientation is ‘post-humanist in [ . . . ] that it conceives of matter itself as lively or as exhibiting agency’ (2010: 7). Consequently, instead of placing them along a rigid divide between activity/ passivity, subjectivity and objectivity become hybrid categories interlacing in a fluid, immanent process. In these terms, individuated matter, organic and nonorganic, is said to act on humans as the latter act on it, not to be sure through intentional activity, but through other circuits of contact, corporeal and incorporeal affects inscribed, for instance, in experiences of empathy, attraction and repulsion or in disease, therapy, even in disaster. From the perspective of the current study, the conception of matter articulated by the new materialisms provides a conducive theoretical environment for a materialist theory of justice, since it sustains on a level adequate to contemporary scientific knowledge the insight that the emergence, crystallisation and decay of intelligible forms and ordered structures is a creative process without need of an external intervention or direction by a supervening, immaterial Logos (whether the latter is represented as Subject, Substance or Force). The insight does not preclude noetic activity as a differentiated process, nor does it reduce reason to its biochemical facets; it instead helps clarify how the ‘life of the mind’ (Arendt, 1978) is an embodied process embedded in wider material circuits. To the best of my knowledge, the category of justice has not been accommodated in the language of the new materialisms, possibly because for the most part, as Maurizia Boscagli observes, the latter ‘have found their home in the critical discourses of the sciences’ (2014: 3), which have expunged the notion from their domain. Nevertheless, if matter exhibits qualities long reserved for subjective agency; if it is plastic, flexible, creative, even ‘unruly’, why cannot it also be ‘just’? If material forms ‘interact’ and ‘communicate’ in a nontrivial sense, there is no reason to dismiss ipso facto the conceptual pertinence of justice. For, at the most abstract level, what is justice other than a quality attaching to the behaviour, relations and reproduction of embodied forms? The suggestion advanced here is not that political and social theory must replicate the methods and theories of the natural sciences. Far from treating the latter as holy scripture, from which unshakeable truths ought to be derived, it is important to critically grasp the political uses and abuses that scientific knowledge undergoes under the many contemporary guises of scientism. Setting aside its political drift to a crude technocracy, scientism is also not a defensible intellectual operation, regardless how much it is nourished from the huge prestige the natural sciences command in modern societies. To the extent that political theory deals with phenomena that are unique to it – ideological beliefs, markets, empires, assemblies, riots – it cannot just

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copy the concepts and methods of the natural sciences. Sociopolitical phenomena pose distinct problems, which call forth unique responses. Acknowledging, though, that every theory needs concepts adequate to the phenomena which the fields that it surveys and maps out contain does not change that it is unfortunate for political theory to ignore the new insights on the structure of reality offered by the natural sciences. Such an attitude seriously undermines continuities between the human and the nonhuman, assuming (implicitly or explicitly) that there is an ontological rift between the human and the physical world and effectively making the study of the latter expedient for political theory. In terms of a theory of justice, this yields an onto-political dualism that grafts the phenomenon to an immaterial quality, be it Reason, Spirit, Consciousness or Soul. In either case, the body is always a vessel or at best a decoder, not a generative force of justice; that is, it does not produce justice. Consequently, the ideational facets of justice cannot be theorised in a way that sufficiently wards off the critical diagnosis of the concept as a façade of power, a resentful reaction of weakness or as wishful thinking masquerading for (transcendental and universal) reason. It is in the context of this quandary that the possibility of a materialist, nonreductive theory of justice has been proposed, not so much as an answer to worn out questions as much as a line of flight aiming to shift the problematic. To firmly avoid its idealistic reifications – since ideas, as long as they are conceived in a reified form, end up being static things – and, thus, overcome the hierarchical onto-political dualism that theory has so often yielded to, our concept of justice must follow the theoretical paradigm of new materialisms and include into its architectonic the dynamic conception of material reality contemporary science facilitates. How is justice to be thought in a world of happenings, where structure-generating processes unfold along nonlinear lines of acceleration and deceleration of energy-matter? The question, as Hegel knew, includes necessarily the question of emergence: at which level of material complexity and development does justice emerge as an identifiable process? Can it be possibly traced before the appearance of human systems of association? To repeat, pursuing this line of thought in no way preempts differentiating elements, since it is in the latter that the properly political determinations of justice are to be found. Still, to grasp what is singular and unique, without instilling an onto-political dualism, it is necessary to grasp at the same time what is common, which in turn requires that ‘humans, including theorists themselves, be recognised as thoroughly immersed within materiality’s productive contingencies’ (Coole and Frost, 2010: 7). It is in this spirit that Timothy Morton (2017) has made a compelling case for solidarity, extending its scope to forms of interaction and symbiosis beyond human beings. Similarly, my contention is that once the operation is granted on principle as a valid ontological-cum-theoretical option and justice is ‘brought

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down’ (so to speak) in order to be sought as it emerges in the world, the path is opened for crossing rigid boundaries and to start exploring its potential presence in nonhuman systems. Despite its dismissive attitude to ideas of cosmic justice, the mechanistic model of scientific thought prevailing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries allowed (at least resonated with) a formal notion of justice, in the sense that physical and biological systems were conceived as well-structured mechanisms wherein everything was in its rightful place. Is there a similar formal notion that the contemporary scientific world-image allow and resonate with? For one, contemporary physics shares with Presocratic philosophy a substantial insight, that order in the physical world does not come in the form of the field of interiority governed through a fixed chain of power. Rather, in both discursive systems, ‘self-organisation’ and ‘self-regulation’ emerge as key categories. Take, for instance, the following compact summary of current scientific knowledge offered by Rovelli: A handful of types of elementary particles, which vibrate and fluctuate constantly between existence and non-existence and swarm in space even when it seems that there is nothing there, combine together to infinity like the letters of a cosmic alphabet to tell the immense history of galaxies, of the innumerable stars, of sunlight, of mountains, woods and fields of grain, of the smiling faces of the young at parties, and of the night sky studded with stars. (2016: 35–36)

Striking in the sketched image is the statelessness of its diagrammatic form: at its most abstract, the physical world is a multiform, fluid, openended, grassroots process of creation, an abstract machine composed of a billion heterogeneous little machines without a central plan uniting their operation. It is this non-statist diagrammatic model that Deleuze and Guattari radicalise in an ultra-leftist manner.13 To think the world philosophically is not to draw arborescent lines which end up forming a hierarchical Whole, it is to map out a horizontal plane of rhizomes, flows and lines of intensity leaking towards all possible directions without a centre of gravity. To avoid a simplistic presentation of their thought, Deleuze and Guattari expressly recognise that the fluid, dynamic and rhizomatic nature of the Chaosmos does not preclude the formation of structures, provided the latter are not conceived as immobile and static things. It follows (another point, by the way, Hegel would concede to) that ‘structure’ is not the foundation or essence of reality; it is a product of flows and processes, actualised in relative degrees of stabilisation. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, ‘It is an illusion to believe that structure is the earth’s last word’ (2013b: 47). Building upon their suggestions, De Landa has identified two structure-generating processes operating through

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two respective engineering diagrams: ‘strata’, defined by homogenisation and hierarchy; and ‘self-consistent aggregates’ or ‘meshworks’, defined by heterogeneity and self-organisation (2000). Much later, these two abstract diagrams will be deployed in order to show how justice in human societies unfolds and diversifies along their lines. For now, the salient point is that the structure of reality is not only ‘dynamic’,14 there is also no single model of structure-generation composing one great hierarchy of Being. If there is justice in the world, it does not have a state form. That is why, in a differential repetition of ancient Greek modes of theorisation, its conceptualisation requires a non-statist thought. Variable as they may be, processes like crystallisation, sedimentation, stratification, self-stimulation and autocatalysis are immanent in the generation of structures – that is, of ordered forms – which operate in a consistent manner. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, consistency not only ‘pertains even to the most elementary atoms and particles’, rather than ‘only to complex life forms’; it is also a fundamental ‘problem of coexistence and succession’, ‘of how things hold together’ (2013b: 390, 381). Moreover, the constitution of a plane of consistency, in which this problem finds its practical resolution, necessarily implies some regularity in the processes that constitute it, and this irrespective of whether these processes unfold in an arborescent or rhizomatic manner, or if the structure is a stratum or a self-consistent aggregate. A twofold inference emerges: first, the structure of reality cannot be taken as an a priori datum; second, the formation of dynamic structures implicates some determinations which act as necessary conditions. Regularity and consistency stand prominently here, but the closer specific structures are examined other determinations can also be discerned; that is, symmetry and equilibrium. And the fact is that such qualities have traditionally been conceived also as determinations of a just order of being. It is here that physical laws become topical for a theory of justice. For sure, that a juridical notion suggested itself for scientific use has much to do with historical context and a conducive intellectual and political environment. Nevertheless, even if nowadays physical laws cannot be considered universal but local; even if they are to be better understood as ‘customs’ or ‘habits’ than laws strictu sensu, the juridical terminology conveys something more substantial than a suggestive analogy (appearing originally in the framework of a now defunct world-image). For the word law is salient to the extent that it refers to regular, rule-bound relations that enable the reproduction of the physical world, not despite its dynamism but as an immanent plane of forces and flows. From this angle, the notion of a physical law, no less than that of human/civic law, draws its salience by connoting the constitution of ordered form(s). If this is a fundamental formal element of justice in the human world, a ‘lawful order of being’, why should the notion be excluded on principle

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from that of the physical world? Outside the confines of progressivist and evolutionist narratives, for which ‘older’ means ‘simpler’ and ‘less true’, why should the Presocratic experience be dismissed ipso facto? That nowadays it is inappropriate to delimit justice as a principle of equilibrium, since the latter exists in physical systems only as a local and tentative condition not as a universal norm, this changes nothing substantial. Terminology should again be taken seriously: self-regulation and self-organisation are categories referring to a structured interaction of bodies and to a corresponding field of differential powers. On the human plane, all these will be said to compose an order of justice. Is it that incomprehensible to retain the latter notion for the world within which human assemblages participate? The question becomes even more astute if it is accepted with the new materialism that the behaviour of material bodies allows for generalisations that encompass different systems of interaction. The existence of far-from-equilibrium states, dissipative structures, selfregulating systems, and nonlinear bifurcations heightens the significance of contingency, mutability, fissure, even aberrance, not, however, as an antithesis of order, but as pertinent processes (hence, categories) that enlarge our conception of the latter notion. Prigogine and Stengers’s key philosophical point is precisely that disorder is other than chaos; that is, it is not a pure negativity but positively involved in the reproduction of the world, from the macroscopic to the microscopic level. In this context, fluctuation, mutation, multiplicity, hybridity, fluidity, randomness do not discard stability, regularity, consistency, symmetry, community; rather, they all constitute determinations of the same material reality. On this score, Badiou (2005: 68) sensibly observes that it hardly marks a critical breakthrough to substitute a new fetishisation of the first class of qualities for the age-old veneration of the latter. The task is to appreciate them together, as facets of open, multiple processes that offer – disclose – themselves as a world, which (today no less than the time of Aristotle) is generative of the affect of ‘wonder’. For all that, I am aware how controversial it remains to claim that justice is a salient category here; hence, it is important to proceed with caution and outmost clarity. Justice is certainly not the name of an individuated empirical object, of the type that a strong positivist empiricism would consider as the only form to be considered ‘real’ in a substantial sense.15 Qua concept, justice belongs to what Evald Ilyenkov has astutely called ‘the ideal’ (2014), a plane of reflection and representation which is different from any concrete material form, although it is much more than a mental projection of the individual brain. On the other hand, in its ideational status, justice does not signify a transcendent Arche guiding and regulating mundane processes; modern science has made any such idea pretty much redundant. Nor, finally, is justice a purely formal category organising the chaotic data of sense experience.

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The analysis can claim to remain at the register of materialism insofar as the concept of justice reflects and refers to embodied processes. Here, thus, is my tentative argument: justice conceptualises an emergent quality, or more accurately determination, of the world, whose presence in the latter’s reproduction is partly testified and disclosed in the immanent operation of the regularities that the natural sciences call physical laws. That the latter are not universal does not discard the argument; it points instead to the rhizomatic, multiple and local nature of justice, whose universality is real but palpable only on a conceptual level (more on these last points later). At the very least, having as backbone the conception of matter evinced by contemporary natural sciences and developed into its philosophical implications by new materialisms, it has been possible to articulate an abstract definition of justice, which does not preclude nonhuman forms: a determination of dynamic structures and systems of interaction. And yet, using justice as a positive category for encapsulating the regularity and consistency that determine processes of interaction and structured formations does not take the analysis far enough. For it still allows an identification of justice with (lawful) order. This effectively opens the door for a statist form of thought, according to which justice corresponds to an ordered whole that incorporates inconsistency, irregularity, discontinuity, rupture, flight in its field of interiority only negatively, excluding them from a positive conception of justice. In this way, a fundamental insight, which has appeared as early as Heraclitus, refurnished systematically by Hegel, and ratified by current scientific discourse, is occluded: form is the mutable outcome of a becoming; hence, it entails disordering, transformation and deformation not as its accidental and external occurrences but as immanent determinations of its definition. It follows that the concept of justice must be able to include the processes permeating ordered forms of connection and association in a way that disorder and negativity are theorised as a positive moment of forms of being; that is, of the becoming of justice. But is this not to commit a dialectical capture of disorder, which then appears under the guise of the negative? As a matter of fact, the dialectical shades of the theoretical perspective presented are not disavowed. Still, a ‘capture’ would be involved only if finality – the outcome of a process – was entailed in the contradictory relation between positivity/ negativity as its rational telos. This is not the case though, for disordering (stasis, fluctuation, rupture, flight, etc.) is a genuinely creative moment. From this viewpoint, justice is not the philosophical metonymy of physical laws, a position that implies a strong ontological identity. Justice conceptualises the interplay of order/disorder, consistency/inconsistency, continuity/discontinuity, regularity/mutation on the abstract level of a theoretical principle. But the abstraction is real, since the concept corresponds to a determinate process, which encompasses rule following and rule breaking as its two interlaced

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facets. To deploy Morton’s poignant inflection of Hegel, justice is not only part of the phenomenology of the Spirit, it partakes in the ‘phenomenology of the symbiotic real’ (2017: 2). From this angle, just like beauty can be considered a quality of individuation, the way singular forms appear – this sunset, that face – justice can be considered a determination attaching to the dynamic structure and relational form of reality. These propositions must be appreciated in their tentative nature, as invitations for a thought that is not afraid to cross boundaries. Their goal is primarily pedagogical, in that they seek to substantiate the theoretical principle that the limits of a concept must not be decided in advance; thought should rather be ready and willing to experiment with a concept’s scope and breadth as an intrinsic part of its theoretical clarification. Hence, if justice is indeed a notion pertinent only for human society, this cannot be affirmed as an a priori dictum but argued for in a way that resists the lure of idealism and is instead consistent to a materialist theorisation of (social) reality. In all other cases, to borrow Adrian Johnston’s succinct observation, ‘recourse to emergentism risks being merely a fig leaf covering disavowed, non-materialist dualism(s)’ (2013: 107). Point granted, the claim that a map of the physical world can include justice as one of its pertinent qualities – tentatively as it may be posited – may still seem outdated, hence in need of further clarification. First, it is necessary to make clear that the deployment of justice does not intend to instill a religious/theological regime of truth, neither a normative one, which holds that the world is as it Ought to be or (at the very least) the best of all possible worlds. Morton sensibly calls such dictums ‘metaphysical pseudofacts’ (2017: 67). From our perspective, all such claims render justice a transcendent judgement upon the world, at the expense of the former’s contingent and fragile immanence. In which case, of course, the question begs to be addressed: Why use the concept of justice? The question becomes even more urgent because justice will be associated with the problem of ‘right form’. Indeed, stripped of any association with right, hence of a normative dimension, justice becomes an entirely formal category, something that makes in effect the concept devoid of any critical edge. Asserting the presence of justice in the physical world seems then to be contradicting the pivotal premise stated in the introduction regarding the critical vocation of materialism. Appearances notwithstanding, it is not my purpose to neutralise justice. A consistent materialist reading does not have to strip the concept of justice from the normative shades that make it salient and suggestive in the first place. As suggested above, the (re)production and (trans)formation of physical systems testifies to the rule-bound and rule-breaking behaviour of material bodies. On an analytical register, thus, the notion of the ‘normative’ is plausible and heuristic. Moreover, taking seriously the insights that the

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natural sciences offer on the structure and emergence of the world means that a philosophical exposition of material reality must come to terms with the latter’s contingency. The world could just as well not have been, its appearance – to deploy the term in the materialist way Lenin used it for revolution (1973: 153) – is a kind of ‘miracle’. From this angle, it is fair to say that even if the world is neither as it Ought nor the best possible world, it is right enough to be. This is not to play with words, it is to adopt a notion of right similar to the one conveyed in Anaximander’s fragment: not a transcendent judgement and imputation but an immanent configuration that allows the emergence and reproduction of intensive orders of being. No less than in human systems, the reproduction of physical systems requires the behaviour of material bodies (as vectors of energy matter) to adopt a certain rule-bound – that is, normative – code. Accordingly, in a world whose structure is dynamic, material bodies at certain critical junctures behave in manners that are improper to the preservation of the existing order, yet conducive for another order to eventually emerge. In this context, justice is pertinent precisely because it breaks the restrictive matrix of a rigid functionalism and moves beyond the dilemma between determinism/chance by elucidating the qualitative element in the rule-bound and rule-breaking behaviour of material bodies and the orders they form. In other words, borrowing Frédéric Neyrat’s astute formulation, to recognise justice as a real quality of the world is ‘to do justice to the rare forms through which the living express themselves’ (2018: 82). By the same token, it is the presence of justice that partially redeems ‘mortality’, or more broadly perishability, from its scandalously commonplace character: the passing away of beings is more than a ‘fact of life’, it can involve an injustice. Why indeed should we ‘rage against the dying of the light’, as Dylan Thomas (2004) invites us to do, if there is something which is not right in death? At its extreme, the experience of justice as an immanent and dynamic determination of the world may generate not an apologetic theodicy but an existential-cumpolitical revolt against ‘nature’s designs’ (cf. Laboria Cuboniks, 2018). I appreciate the fact that what comes out may seem to be a rather thin notion of justice. There is especially one issue that makes me not want to press the point too much: on the domain of nonliving, and more specifically non-sentient systems of interaction, justice is not differentiated into an affectively charged process of encoding and decoding, lacking thus the ethical texture and density that qualify it as a potent determination of life. Yet it is possible to maintain a formal association of justice with a generic notion of ‘right’ as proper condition/behaviour, which keeps a balance between an empty formalism and a transcendental normativism. From this theoretical angle, the analytical proposition ‘justice is a determination of the world’ must not be confused with the infinite judgement ‘the world is just’. Re-cognising justice as a determinative quality of the world entails the opposite, that there

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is injustice in the world or indeed that there are other determinative qualities that do not pertain to the binary of justice/injustice; that is, randomness. To this extent, the proposition ‘there is justice in the world’ does not convey a full identity. It is rather what Gillian Rose in her brilliant analysis of Hegel has called a ‘speculative proposition’ (2009: 87), which entails the nonidentity of the associated phenomena and, thus, a prospect not yet fulfilled. In other words, the speculative identification of justice in the world grasps the identity/nonidentity between concept and actuality in a dynamic manner; neither the presence of justice in the world nor the discrepancy between justice and the world as it is can be posited in terms of formal, a priori dictums; they must be conceived dynamically, as conditions that are open to change. ‘Justice is a determination of the world’ means – promises? – that there is more justice to come. No matter where the emergence of justice is flagged, the theorisation offered broaches a problem that, as Ilyenkov has forcefully insisted, is at the heart of philosophy: the relation between ‘the ideal’, the reflective rationalisations that (re)present/(re)construct reality in an ideational form, and ‘the material’, the physical world whose forms are (re)presented and (re)constructed (2014: 26). Short of an extended tour in epistemology and ontology, the salient point made is that the concept of justice does not correspond to an empirical object, along the lines of a strong realism, but it is also much more than a mental abstraction projected to material reality, along the lines of a hardline nominalism or psychologism. From the perspective of a participatory ontology, the concept of justice (or other concepts like beauty and solidarity) arises during human being’s participation in the world. As such it concerns much more than a cognitive correspondence; it concerns the way human beings relate to the material reality of which they are active partners. From this angle, justice not only exposes the normative shades of the dynamic structure of reality, it can also have normative effects for the human beings who re-cognise it. First, this re-cognition contributes to a more holistic (yet free of confessional commitments and new-age kitsch) experience of the physical world as a community of being, instead of what Heidegger in his ‘Question Concerning Technology’ (1993: 307–42), has aptly called a ‘standing reserve’, whose essential value is its utility and integrability to abstract systems of exchange. At stake here is not to substitute a true for a false representation of the world. The world is disclosed as a standing reserve during its real constitution as one through technological activity – itself a form of interaction, hence, of participation. But precisely because this is a specific structure of disclosure, to exhaust the form of the world to it is to conceal other dimensions of the latter and thus to enclose human experience. To resist such closure is a vocation of philosophy, whose enduring significance lies in its capacity to widen through its conceptual operations the way reality is

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experienced and perceived, ‘surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013b: 3). The discussion yields the ‘pragmatics of truth’ Deleuze and Guattari have insisted upon. In these terms, the significance in the experience of justice in the world lies not in its descriptive accuracy as much as in that it fosters the ethos of kosmiotita, which can be translated as ‘worldliness’, although it is much richer than what the English term denotes. To be kosmios is to affectively open and connect to the outside of all experience and thought and find there both aspiration and a measure of existence. Tuning to a plane of immanence rather than succumbing to a Transcendens, re-cognising justice in the world ultimately concerns the manner that we live in it – an embodied mode of being. At an era of ecological crisis, wherein questions and debates over ‘environmental justice’ are expected to become more urgent, the recognition of justice as an immanent determination of the physical world may add a perspective in the discussion other than the economic logic of the ‘costs’ of environmental degradation. In this way, it can supplement theoretical and political efforts to think environmental and social justice together, as a singular problem, over against formal divisions reproduced by legal codes, governments, state bureaus and NGOs (cf. Di Chiro, 1995). The problem with these bureau(techno)cratic divisions comes into full view when they are set in their social-historical context, since in this way it becomes possible to grasp their functionality as forms of management that divide and at the same time obscure the totality to which they belong. Capitalism is much more than an infernal machine destroying and depleting natural resources; it draws into its apparatuses of capture and exploitation subjects and objects alike, establishing a field of ‘saturated immanence’ where abstract value becomes the main criterion of differentiation.16 Generalised commodification and proletarianisation are the twin symptoms of a ceaseless process whereby beings, organic no less than inorganic, are as much subjects as they are objects of commodification and capital valorisation. Trying to reassert, along Kantian lines, the uniqueness of human beings as moral agents who are ends and not means will hardly do. At a conjuncture where subjects and objects share something of the same fate, it is apposite to experiment with the possibility that cherished political notions, like justice, can be extended to the nonhuman, in ways other than a lofty moralism or spiritualist occultism. Such an integration of justice to the material-affective processes of interaction and interconnection composing the ‘symbiotic real’ may assist resisting the onto-political conditions imposed by late capitalism. For the more limited case of a theory of justice, the insight into the latter’s ‘worldliness’ has the extra merit of sustaining a participatory ontology that displaces human beings from its conceptual center. Justice may be actualised in unique forms in the human plane of social

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relations, but ‘man’ is not the origin of justice, only an agent in a broader process that human beings participate. Pragmatics are a fundamental aspect of every theorisation, here of justice, but it does not exhaust the question of truth, and thus, the problem concerning the relation between thought and reality, ideality and materiality. Setting aside his broader argument concerning the merits of analogical over univocal ontology, John Milbank’s critical observation makes a solid point: ‘If Deleuze’s philosophy is not merely a creative elaboration of his taste, then it is a gigantic claim to represent reality’ (2005: 419). In order for theory to avoid linguistic idealism yet remain within the critical tradition Kant inaugurated, instead of lapsing to a reductive monism which identifies thought and being, subject and object without any remainder, some notion of truth as adequacy must be maintained. Moreover, moving further than Kant, if theory is to be materialist in a critical sense, truth and the thought processes attaining it cannot refer to a transcendental operation that formulates the conditions which make possible valid knowledge of the other of thought, of the Object. To borrow the succinct expression of George Sagriotis, truth qua active process concerns ‘the recovery of the objectivity of thought in history. Inside the idea the object speaks’ (2003: 11). But it does not speak directly, since the idea necessarily abstracts from the object. What Marx says in Grundrisse about ‘production’ is essentially true for all concepts: ‘Production in general’ is an abstraction, but it is a rational abstraction in so far as it singles out and fixes the common features’ of real historical forms (2002: 381). It follows that, next to its pragmatic effects, the concept of justice has an expository value: as the ideal expression of a real quality; that is, as a ‘real abstraction’,17 it helps comprehend on a theoretical/philosophical level the existence of ordered forms of interaction not despite but through aberrant movement, mutability, contingency and discontinuity. The theorisation offered maintains its materialist credentials without rejecting the active and reflective nature of thought. Conceptualisation is not a passive gesture that merely re-presents the given; it is a creative process, what Ilyenkov (2014: 36) astutely defines as the ‘idealization of the material world’. At the same time, the dialogic dimension of thought, attended to by Arendt (1978: 179–96), is taken seriously but expanded further than the restrictive matrix of an ‘inner dialogue’. To think, specifically to think philosophically, is a creative but not unidirectional activity. Thought is a process infused with all the images, odors, wonders, joys and sufferings of the world. It is this receptive quality of thought, its ‘luminosity’ as Voegelin (2000c: 28) coined it, that allows the creative re-presentation of reality into diverse regimes of discourse: scientific, aesthetic, ethical, religious. Therefore, mapping out justice in the world certainly implies abstracting, not however in the sense of positing a formal principle that allows afterwards the object to

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appear intelligible to the subject of knowledge; it is to grasp at the abstract level of thought and re-presentation a determination registered in the relations and connections that form the material world. In other words, neither projection, nor description, the concept of justice is a creative expression of processes impressing themselves in active reflection rather than in passive contemplation, thought trying to become adequate to its object and thus to re-cognise it in a way that changes its relation to it. The substantial insight here, which allows thinkers as diverse as Voegelin, Deleuze and Ilyenkov to be placed in a complementary fashion, is that thought constitutes an embodied flow that does not proceed in a closed space of interiority but unfolds in the open. Point granted, the necessary next step towards theoretical clarification is to draw a dividing line. In contrast to Voegelin, himself representative of a venerable tradition of Western philosophy, Deleuze seeks to move beyond an understanding of concepts as mental products of consciousness, emerging during man’s noetic participation in the world. This is yet another point where Deleuze converges with a critical Hegelianism, of which Ilyenkov provides s good example. All differences granted, Deleuzian and Hegelian thought share a critical stance towards individualist and spiritualist ideas of unmediated disclosure as well as a commitment to delineate ideality on the collective level of social-historical (which is also social-desiring) production. Arguing against narratives of immediacy (in which ‘truth’ is revealed to the individual gaze in all its shining glory) in no way denies that thought is an activity performed by individuals with a functioning brain and an inquisitive mind. It is to stress that thought is a social event, not an ‘I’ but a ‘we’, attached as such to collective assemblages instead of an individual organ or faculty. In this sense, thought expresses always a social milieu acting in conformity or in defiance to its sociopolitical settings and the dominant regimes of signification. Thus, any conception of the world, like that articulated by the milieu known as ‘Presocratics’, can act apologetically to what already exists or stand critically towards it, even initiating a line of flight to unexplored figures and forms of being. This is a crucial insight that will be further clarified at a later chapter. For the current discussion, the salient point is that the idealisation of justice is integral to the constitution of social being, which contains the ‘plane of relationships between man and nature’ (Ilyenkov, 2014: 76). Ultimately, if the idea of justice is the form that material processes are expressed in (and through) the activity of thought – itself a social activity – the identification of justice as a determination of the physical world cannot be dissociated from its emergence in the human world. To avoid misconceptions, Timpanaro’s (1980: 55) claim stands: the intelligible structure of reality is not to be reduced to human activity, not even a Marxist praxis. Thus, if justice actually conceives material processes that unfold in nonhuman systems, these processes are independent of their noetic recognition. Still, to deploy

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Latour’s (2004) distinction, would justice ever appear as a ‘matter of fact’ if it was not also ‘a matter of concern’? The analysis has reached a threshold. Much as it may enrich its content and widen its scope, the deployment of justice as a notion pertinent for a philosophical conception of the physical world is not decisive for a materialist theory. The crux of the latter is not that justice necessarily determines physical systems, it is that it can be conceived as a positive determination of embodied forms and assemblages. In this way, no matter in which fields of the world justice is operative, theory will be able to grasp it not as the self-realisation of reason by means of application to its Other, to materiality, but as an emergent process immanent to the becoming of material bodies. The form of thought grounding such a materialist theory has been shown to go back to non-statist cosmologies developed in antiquity, but its content does not require resurrecting ancient ideas of cosmic justice, much less pitting them against modern scientific discourse. At the antipode of such a neo-archaic perspective – relatively innocuous to be sure when compared to other neo-archaisms currently in vogue – it has been argued that a materialist theorisation of justice must be consistent to the dynamic conception of the world that contemporary natural sciences advance. If justice not simply ‘is’ but ‘emerges’, there is an ontogenetic process at work that theory must embrace. On principle, the emergence of justice could be restricted to human beings without contradicting a materialist theorisation. The key would be avoid representing this emergence in the order of an ontological rift, which is what Kojève’s (2007) anthropogenic account commits. Nonetheless, a more contentious course is pursued. Following the path opened, it will be argued that it is possible to map justice qua material and affective process on the domain of animal being. To make things clear, no extensive ethological analysis is going to be offered, since my study’s main objective is to provide the theoretical framework that will lead to a survey of the way justice is a potent factor of sociopolitical multiplications. From this angle, the presence of justice on nonhuman animal environments foregrounds some fundamental theoretical themes, which acquire their full potency when justice is actualised as a contentious political idea. That said, the following section is much more than a preamble; it makes a substantial point integral to the theory, a point whose implications are considerable since, along with shifting the limits of justice, it opens the question of political subjectivity. WILD JUSTICE The emergence of justice as a sentient and affective force is not coterminous to the emergence of biological systems. Plants are living organisms, but

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justice is present in systems of flora, if at all, only in the way proposed tentatively before – as an immanent quality of dynamic structures of symbiosis. The point holds even if the social nature of plant association is granted, as the controversial yet intriguing argument of Peter Wohlleben (2016) concerning trees goes. Plants may participate in the affective interplay defining the organic world, but the intensity of affects at the vegetative field of organic life does not attain the level of conatus. Plants, that is, do not desire, hence, justice does not engulf them as a pathos. While the inference can be read in terms of ‘lack’, it can just as legitimately be considered a ‘virtue’. So, at least, says Jesus in Mathew: ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin’ (6:28) and as added in ‘yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these’ (Luke 12:28). At any rate, herein the inference amounts neither to an evaluation nor to a judgement; it is an analytical statement pertaining to theory. A qualitative threshold is crossed when biological systems attain the level of animality. But to speak of the animal is already to speak of the human, since, as Mary Midgley states in her classic study, ‘We are not just rather like animals, we are animals’ (1995: xxxiii). Expectedly, human and nonhuman animals have undergone analogous evolutionary patterns of morphological change under pressure of longue durée processes like domestication (Leach, 2003). If this consubstantiality has all too often been forgotten, it is largely due to the ontological rift that essentialist dualisms have consolidated. It is as a critical corrective to the latter form of thought that Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming must be read. For to the extent that both animal and human being is defined ‘not by its forms, its organs and its functions’, but instead by the ‘affects of which it is capable’ (Deleuze, 1988: 124), there is no ontological chiasm between these two forms of life; there is rather overlap and affinity. If animals populate the individual unconscious and the collective imaginary, if there is a ‘silent call to become-wolf’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013b: 36) – or bird, or horse, or bug – it has less to do with a fascination for the exotic than with the fact that to become (a) human is also to become (an) animal. Adopting this prism is not to argue for an undifferentiated identity, since the emergence of human community designates the passage of a certain threshold, which can be marked only if a boundary is also marked. The point rather is that the latter is neither a natural frontier nor an ontological leap, but a historically determinate and culturally variable production of shifting boundaries. In so-called primitive societies, cultural differentiation – that is, bodily modification – goes part and parcel with an affirmation of human/ animal affinity; for example, in hunting rituals and narratives.18 This affinity starts to be systematically warded off during the transition to ‘high civilization’. Indeed, if Giorgio Agamben (1998) is right to pinpoint the distinction between zoe (biological life) and bios (civic life) as the primal biopolitical

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gesture of sovereign power, its articulation presupposes and embraces the distinction between animality and humanity. As Morton astutely observes (2017: 24), walled cities were surrounded by fields which were in turn surrounded by ‘the wild’, fields in this spatial structuring of the symbiotic real being midway between civilisation and savagery. This prism reveals immobile conceptual binaries between ‘human’ and ‘animal’ as expressions of a regime of signification peculiar to state-thought, which ‘partitions the sensible’19 according to clearly demarcated identities, roles and functions and consolidates a necessarily exclusive field of interiority. Reified subsequently into a dualism that posits thing-like substances – Reason, Soul, Consciousness – as qualifying markers of human being, the boundaries between man (though not necessarily ‘woman’ or ‘savage’) and beast have been drawn in too rigid a fashion, to the detriment of animals and those thought to be closer to the animal than the human condition. Naturally, justice, codified as Right and Law, became a differentiating feature of humanity, one of these unique qualities that distinguishes ‘Man’ from animality. Probably the most classic expression of this conviction is to be found in Aristotle’s Politics: ‘And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state’ (2001, bk. I, 1253a: 10). It should not be difficult to grasp how this conviction on the theoretical level has augmented idealistic conceptualisations. The crucial point is that idealism is much more than a theoretical error; it is grounded on the real political exclusion of animality from the domain of justice. It is thus of no surprise that the exclusion of certain groups of human beings from the same domain draws from this primary exclusion of the nonhuman. No wonder, for instance, that at the era of European imperialism savages were likened to beasts, having like them, and in contrast to civilised men, ‘no law, no king’.20 No accident that blacks in the slave-holding South were also consistently compared to animals as a way to justify their inferior social position.21 Nor was it simply metaphorical (in the ordinary sense of the term) when rioters in the 2005 uprising in France were labeled by politicians and journalists as ‘canailles’. Thankfully, this is only one side of the story. Reaction to the harsh treatment of animals has nowadays acquired a widespread movement-form, from mainstream animal rights groups to radical anti-specist currents. In close contact with such forms of direct action, a rich theoretical discourse has flourished which, not content to morally denounce the violent exploitation of animals, questions the ontological presumptions concerning animal inferiority operating at the background.22 As Aylon Cohen observes, ‘Both philosophers and activists aim to expand the boundaries of the human community to include the question of nonhuman livelihood as a viable political question of

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justice’ (2016: 238). Still, much as it has widened the scope of the debate, it is the integration of animals into human forms and concepts of justice, like that of individual rights, that mainly frames the relevant discussion. To quote again Cohen, Dominant animal rights discourse fails to analyse the boundary of the political community as marked by a historical division between logical animals (humans) and phonic animals (non-humans). In so doing, this discourse merely enables nonhumans to become mute political objects of representation rather than subjects of speech, and thus maintains the exclusion of animals from the political community of speaking subjects. (Ibid.)

Can it be otherwise? Insensitivity to animal suffering may be plausibly viewed as a forewarning of insensitivity to human suffering, a point implied in Heidegger’s notorious (and far-reaching) parallel between the mechanised food industry and the extermination camps.23 But is not the lack of speech that makes an animal unable to express its own point of view over issues like animal testing what also necessarily prevents it from becoming a political agent? Do not even the most radical acts carried out by animal liberation groups ratify the incapacity of animals to be subjects rather than merely objects of justice? Horkheimer and Adorno’s conclusion seems ineluctable: ‘Humans possess reason, which pitilessly follows its path; the animals from which they draw their bloody conclusions have only unreasoning terror, the impulse to take flight on a path which is cut off’ (2002: 204). Indisputable as it may seem, this rather grim inference is not the last word on the issue. Once again, scientific discourse stands as a valuable ally. Ongoing research in scientific domains like ethology and evolutionary biology has provided many data to challenge age-old prejudices concerning animals. Additionally, in the process of substantiating the emotional and cognitive richness of animal life, justice has slowly started finding its place in the ‘animal kingdom’. The latter in fact is an unfortunate choice of words. According to Deleuze and Guattari, in ‘bands of animals, leadership is a complex mechanism that does not act to promote the strongest but rather inhibits the installation of stable powers, in favor of a fabric of immanent relations’ (2013b: 417). Even if a more detailed analysis was to modify their argument, it remains a fact that the world of nonhuman animals, like the physical world to which it belongs, does not have the form of a state, much less one with an individual Sovereign at its apex. Justice emerges and unfolds in the animal world as an affectively rich process actualised mainly in the form of ‘natural right’. The latter notion has in the tradition of Natural Law philosophy a huge pedigree, and its use here is bound to raise various associations. There may indeed appear to exist

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resonances between the claim that moral standards, behaviour and entitlements are not arbitrary conventions, and the claim pursued here, that justice is present in nature. In some versions of Natural Law theory animals have been even said to partake in natural law, for instance in Ulpian, who unequivocally declares that ‘natural law is what the nature of all living beings has taught; for this law is not unique to the human genus but is common to all the beings who are born on the earth, on the sea, even birds’.24 However, the resonance must not be overdrawn, and it certainly does not imply allegiance to any specific natural law tradition. In one way or another the concept of natural law prescribed a set of universal rules and rights which human reason should decode, apply and conform to.25 Therefore, natural law stood as the normative basis upon which a just polity ought to be built. No matter what the degree of approximation was thought to be possible between human society and the moral order natural law prescribed, the ideal of justice concerned the rational application of the latter to the former. In contrast, speaking here of natural right as the form of actualisation of justice in the animal world refers to a local and instinctive code of conduct incorporating structures of recognition, reciprocity, cooperation, sanction, inhibition, competition, struggle, equity, fairness and reward that facilitate the reproduction of a given species as well as an inner-species social balance, what Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce (2009: 126) call ‘social homeostasis’. The latter’s precise form varies, and in some species it is more hierarchical while in others more egalitarian. In fact, it is arguable that the engineering diagrams that will be said to define the historical actualisation of justice in human beings are operative in animal societies, albeit in a significantly lower level of intensity, since herein no institutional and ideational mediations are involved.26 This variety relates to the fact that, as in human groups, animal societies are (to a greater or lesser degree) defined by plurality and difference, by differential powers and capacities whose structuration and codification are an essential aspect of any order of right, be it natural, customary or legal. Justice in this respect plays a double function: it structures and regulates the association of animals in their social environments. That is to say, justice as natural right is immanent and functional to the becoming of animal collective assemblages. To appreciate this argument, it is necessary to move beyond a biological determinism that conceives of instinct as a rigid mechanism that prescribes the social behaviour of animals. As a matter of fact, within ethology it has been for some time now consistently argued that instinctive behaviour in animals may crystallise in patterns and systems that deserve to be called ‘cultural’.27 Admittedly, much more space than what is available would be needed to ratify this argument. At any rate, instinct, as a mode of structuring living being, is a creative and dynamic process; it encodes the velocities and intensities underscoring animal becoming in complex patterns of behaviour

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and rules of conduct. In Deleuzian terms, every animal inhabits a world composed of intensive relations – a world, consequently, which entails issues of community and sociability; for instance, ‘How do individuals enter into composition with one another in order to form a higher individual, ad infinitum? How can a being take another being into its world while respecting and preserving the other’s own relations and world’? (Deleuze, 1988: 125) Deleuze does not make the concept thematic, yet these questions are in their essence facets of a broader problem of justice, which concerns the ‘right form’ of life, not in an absolute, transcendental sense, but relative to the concrete systems that it attaches to. Precisely, in animals, the right form required for their world – hence, their lives – to flourish is resolved in the form of an instinctive code of conduct. It is in this sense that justice in the form of natural right is identified as an immanent determination of the intensive relations forming an animal world. At an abstract level, both natural right and physical laws concern ruleabiding regularities and consistencies as conditions for the reproduction of local systems of interaction. In this respect – a point that extends to human beings and their ideational re-cognition of justice – it is crucial to insist that justice does not teleologically develop from ‘substance’ to ‘subject’ via affectivity, along the lines conceived by a traditional Hegelianism. Strictly speaking, the multiple emergences of justice happen together; thus, they run parallel, for no matter if there are temporal lags between the appearance of different life forms, justice is a shared quality of systems and assemblages to have emerged, from insect societies to ecumenic empires. On the other hand, to the extent that we refer to an embedded quality, justice is determined by the differentiations defining the becoming of the world in its staggering multiplicity, proliferating – like life itself – its determinations relative to a specific field of actuality. In this context, natural right can be related to evolution and specifically to survival, which is the distinct form reproduction assumes in sentient living organisms – it becomes a conatus driving the animal creature to preserve its being. Kojève argues that self-preservation exhausts animal desire (2007: 210). Modern ethology offers a more complex picture, documenting not only the sophistication of survival strategies in animals,28 but also that there is much more to animal life than a drive for self-preservation, even in environments where the latter is an imposing concern; for example, the Antarctic. Becoming-animal is driven and defined by experiences and affects that have their own consistency and integrity and, as such, are irreducible to an overarching evolutionary pattern of the ‘survival of the fittest’ type.29 Observing how animals refine their tastes and behaviour or the multiple ways they interact, from unnecessary aggression or status seeking to care, empathy and playfulness, provides reliable testimony that becoming-animal, at least after a certain threshold has been crossed, is driven by much more than an urge

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‘to be’. There is, rather, a marked desire to live well, a desire for well-being, which in philosophical terms, ever since Aristotle, can be called ‘the good life’ (although, as it will be elaborated later, the identity between good life and well-being does not reach the level of synonymity). In species with a high degree of sociability, the good life is realised in association and community and manifested in a rich cluster of affects: in pleasure, care, empathy, tenderness, competition, compassion, sharing, fairness, joy, sorrow, mourning. In the words of Bekoff and Pierce, ‘Animals form friendships, are caught lying or stealing and lose face in the community, they flirt, their sexual advances are sometimes embraced and sometimes rejected, they fight and make up, they love, and they experience loss’ (2009: 45). Moreover, as attested in identifiable patterns of aversion, animals dislike being demeaned, ridiculed and humiliated. Is it too much to add that they desire to live in dignity? Given the latter term’s significance in human rights discourse, it is necessary to make clear that the notion is not understood here in terms of an ‘inviolable value’. As Samuel Moyn elaborates (2017: 19–34), dignity was originally an aristocratic notion, whose theoretical merits, let alone radicalism, cannot be taken for granted. Like justice, the notion here is deployed by giving it a materialist inflection, as a determinative quality of embodied processes. Specifically, borrowing from Bloch, dignity denotes the capacity to ‘walk upright’ (2015: 7), without being (and against attempts to be) unnecessarily blocked, harmed or humiliated. In these terms, contra Kant, dignity does not ‘mark a break in the great chain of being between the rest of the animals [ . . . ] and human beings’ (Moyn, 2017: 23); it constitutes a quality of animal life in all its diversity and variability. As Deleuze acknowledges (2012) – despite his dislike for cats! – what is more dignified than the way a cat accepts death? Inevitably, all these qualities that define life in sentient beings determine also justice. That is to say, unlike physical systems of interaction – where justice can only be experienced and recognised by human beings, who have attained the necessary degree of noetic differentiation – in animals justice becomes sentient, hence integral to the rich cluster of affects defining animal life. Specifically, within the latter’s affective field justice emerges as a determination of creaturely movement towards well-being. It is important here to be as accurate as possible. Justice concerns the actualisation of the good life, but it is not identical with it. The good life is much more than justice; it is play, pleasure, enjoyment, love, dignity and many other things. Justice also is more than a good life; it is the desire for its actualisation within a given order of association, a desire that becomes actual in affective practices of fairness, equity, solidarity, reciprocity, sanctioning, struggle, leveling. Furthermore, necessarily exceeding its affective dimension, since it is in the context of systems of interaction that it emerges, justice concerns the conditions that

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will enable the good life to be actualised, conditions which then become part of the content of a just form of being. Therefore, while it affects individual being and its self-interest to be – hence, it can also be potentially expressed in the form of individuated desire and activity – justice essentially concerns assemblages and multiplicities. It follows that justice is not ‘subjective’, in the sense of its origin being a (pre)formed Subject, nor does it have to be ‘conscious’, in the technical sense of intentionality. The desire for justice is a facet of the conatus that pervades the becoming of animals. To the extent that acts of fairness, equity, reward, sanction and more are integral to the wellbeing of a multiplicity – for instance, a wolf-pack – justice as a living desire, along with being functional to reproduction, is constitutive of the good life in its collective dimension. This is not to say that the fate of individual beings is a matter of indifference. Such a claim – symptomatic of the fantasy of total homogeneity with a zero degree of differentiation – ignores that justice would not pose an issue in the first place if systems of interaction did not pertain to multiplicity, which entails in its definition difference and individuation. Which is why it was asserted that justice does not attach only to the formal reproduction of an order of interaction but to the becoming of its components. Nevertheless, the interaction of these individual components is not a secondary gesture of beings that could just as well exist without partaking in a system of association; interaction is ontologically primary, thus, in the same way there is politics, because in Arendt’s famous expression ‘men, not man inhabit the world’ (1978: 7), there is justice because the world is made up of assemblages not individuals. To this extent, the idea that ‘life has been unfair’ to an individual must be problematised. To be sure, life can be unfair, in the sense that existence is determined by injustice as much as it is determined by justice. Moreover, all too often, beings are damaged or die out of pure chance, the probabilism of modern physics effectively ratifying the philosophical insight, pronounced among others by Machiavelli (1998: 81–83), about the role of fortuna. From such philosophical perspective, the all too many circumstances (whether they transpire by intention or by chance) whereby an individual being’s development is blocked, or its very existence terminated, testify to the nonidentity of justice with actuality. Accordingly, the reaction of living beings against their fate, the persistent refusal to accept it, fortifies this nonidentity by attesting to the excessiveness of justice. On the other hand, explicable as it may be on an affective/psychic level, the problem with the experience that ‘life has been unfair’ is that it tends to augment the conviction that one axiomatically deserves a good life irrespective of the general conditions shaping a given order of being or whether these conditions can be changed. In turn, this conviction germinates with resentful self-righteousness, which can turn extremely nihilistic and violent, a point presented brilliantly

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on a fictional level in Katsuhiro Otomo’s classic anime Akira, in the figure of Teshuo, whose self-righteous resentment reaches a destructive intensity of world-historical proportions. From this angle, the current theorisation has a critical-cum-therapeutic potency relative to the drive towards such a violent and self-consuming righteousness. Focusing back on animals, the embeddedness of the desire for justice to the instinctive code of conduct structuring, regulating and coordinating animal sociability and community means along with non-intentionality an absence of reflectivity. Yet the two phenomena are not entirely coextensive, so as to legitimate the proposition ‘wild justice is natural right’. There is a nonidentity between (the living desire for) justice and (its actualisation as) right, in the sense that this desire is excessive to its main positive forms of actualisation, and thus, expresses itself in forms of (inter)action which, strictly speaking, are expedient to the reproduction of any type of multiplicity and assemblage in their current shape. In human being, this nonidentity reaches a point of intensity where justice can acquire a political form directed against (a given order of) right. In animals this may not be the case in the same degree of intensity, yet the affective capacity is present, testified notably in collective reactions of ‘gamma males’ to the domineering tendencies of the alpha male. Such reactions expressing the excessiveness of the desire of justice relative to what is established as right may acquire an insurrectional intensity, which challenges a given order of being and its prescribed positions and functions; that is, the role of animals as spectacles and commodities. In such events, through the interplay of an array of affects (revulsion, rage, sorrow, empathy), justice is actualised as a lived sense of wrongdoing and unnecessary harm, that is, as an experience of injustice. Lack of language may prevent animals from articulating this affect ideationally, but it does not mean that their experience of injustice recoils to passive growls. It animates productive (re)actions that seek to avenge the wrongdoer and/or repair the damage and wrong committed. In fact, this is true not only on the level of avenging and repairing a wrong suffered but also as intervention in the face of (another) damaged being.30 Surely, these actions are instinctive, but, as Cohen remarks (2016: 251–52), their targeted and context-specific character indicates that they are much more than knee-jerk reactions; they are responses. Moving beyond the depiction of revolt as pure negativity, it is arguable that some reactions of nonhuman animals not only ‘say something about the place and arrangement of their bodies in slaughterhouses, zoos, and circuses’ (ibid.: 251), but they testify to the effective presence of a positive desire. Thus, the very same moment that their mutiny constitutes nonhumans as political subjects, it also constitutes them as subjects of justice; which is to say, ‘wild justice’ is actualised as resistance and revolt. To this extent, the theoretical delineation of the effective and affective presence of justice in animals

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contributes in overcoming statist conceptions of the phenomenon and in clarifying its actualisation in flows of deterritorialisation and lines of flight. Along with the nonidentity between justice and right (hence, with law) there is another key theoretical point at work here, regarding the dialectical nuances of justice; namely, that the latter is actualised and knows itself by negating what negates it; in simpler words as resistance to a perceived injustice. This is a crucial issue that will receive further attention later. Therein, it will become clear that the dialectical quality of justice is not expressed merely in its opposition to injustice, but in the tension between different forms and conceptions of justice. In this context, organised and systematic injustice will be shown to have a paradoxical character: on the one hand, it is a symptom of the failure of an order of right to live to its concept (and promise) of justice; on the other, it is the produce of the consistent actualisation of concrete historical forms of justice. Presently, it is necessary to tackle a likely reproach, that my analysis commits the ‘anthropomorphic’ error of projecting to other animals categories and sensitivities which are peculiar to humans. ‘Anthropomorphism’ is certainly a historically testified possibility and not just of times bygone, since it is always possible for discourse to get carried away by its own rhetoric and start speaking of animals as if they are humans. And yet, up to a point this is what they are, for if being-human – becoming-human – is also beinganimal – becoming-animal – the proposition can be reversed, in the sense that animals share with humans similar biological, physiological, psychic, mental and emotional structures, thus similar affective capacities, which yield substantially similar patterns of behaviour and reaction. As primatologist Robert Sapolsky remarks, ‘Part of the challenge in understanding the behavior of a species is that they look like us for a reason. That’s not projecting human values. That’s primatizing the generalities that we share with them’.31 Where are the lines drawn? Where is the boundary of what is distinctively human? Offering a list of faculties that are unique to the human species, notably language and reason (the Aristotelian logos), is insufficient, since these are qualities that have evolved and developed from qualities animals share, like intelligence and communicative skills. Which is why I have insisted that the answer does not concern the demarcation of substances that serve as rigid ontological boundaries; it rather involves surveying and discovering thresholds that operate as markers for differentiating lines of intensity and acceleration. And as the 2016 French film Grave (Raw) has shown in a graphic fashion, such thresholds are far from clear-cut, since what may superficially appear as a relapse from civilisation to animality, namely cannibalism, is also the passing of a human threshold, a becoming. If it is posed on principle, rather than as potential error that reflects the real consubstantiality of human and animal becoming, the charge of

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anthropomorphism lacks any critical edge, and it instead dogmatically assumes that humans alone are capable of justice. The problem here is that in this way the concept of justice is trapped into its axioms, committing the same error that Derrida (2002a: 44) has diagnosed for religion: the turning of a problem – what is justice? – into a Faktum, the contents and limits of which we assure ourselves that we positively know before we critically inquire about them. Moreover, before it was suggested that this enclosure of the concept expresses the real, and inevitably violent, foreclosure of ‘the wild’. That is why the theoretical subversion of the conceptual enclosure of justice passes through an elucidation of practical subversions of real enclosures, a critical act of solidarity to ‘animals who kill their captors’.32 The fact that animals cannot idealise their acts does not mean that using words to describe or conceptualise what they do is a human projection. There is a sufficient degree of ontological continuity between human and nonhuman animals to allow an empathetic as well as intellective understanding of animal structures of motivation and behaviour. No more is it a projection to say that animals sense justice than it is to say that they feel hunger. To be sure, if it ‘is by no means obvious that the hunger which was satisfied when Neolithic humans tore apart raw meat with their fingers is the same kind of thing as the hunger that is satisfied by dining in a five-star restaurant’ (Geuss, 2008: 5), equally uncertain is how an animal experiences hunger, let alone justice. Environmental, social, cultural and historical ‘contexts’ are material mediations determining the actuality, hence, experience even of something as seemingly elemental as the need to eat. But are not the differentiating powers of a concept the other side of its identificatory functions? There is no need to reduce the term to a bodily sensation, nor is a full identity required to deploy the term hunger for comprehending the actions that an animal commits, with increasing urgency, after a certain amount of time has passed since its last meal. Similarly, there is no reason to suppose that an animal cannot express and actualise (its desire for) justice through non-discursive circuits. What is more, confining the what of justice – who, how, when, where – exclusively in human association excludes intensive connections between humans and animals, forfeiting the way that human becoming is intertwined with the becoming of animals into singular flows constitutive of singular assemblages. A nomadic horde, to give just one brief example, is not only a type of human grouping that instrumentally uses horses, it is a becoming of humans and horses, a ‘becoming-horde’ that along with circuits of affectionate solidarity forms what is going to be called here a regime of justice, which embraces both species. The inference to be drawn is that in the same way that it will be said to constitute a problem immanent to the intensive relations of human bodies, justice can be conceived as a real problem affecting human/ animal relations. And this not only because humans are ‘moral creatures’

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with enlarged sensitivity and empathy, but also because animals themselves are subjects of justice and, hence, lay a claim to it. From this point of view, the age-old call for a liberation of nonhuman beings from human oppression and exploitation ceases being a moral imperative human reason posits, and becomes instead a political task emerging at the intersections of human and animal affective (inter)action. Justice in the animal world may reach considerable levels of intensity and complexity; for instance, amongst wolves or apes. Yet there is a qualitative threshold that is never passed in the animal world, especially in the absence of human intervention, which by violently uprooting animals short-circuits natural right. Georges Bataille (1989: 19) has likened animal being in the world with that of ‘water in water’. Bataille admits the narrowness of his conceptualisation, which does little justice to the variety, creativity, innovativeness and capacity for refinement that animals have. Yet as a metaphor it remains suggestive, since it highlights in a compact form the non-differentiation of an animal world from its physical surroundings through institutions, culture and technics. Right in animal communities is predicated ‘natural’ precisely insofar as it is not a historically produced construct that needs to justify and legitimise itself. Accordingly, while animals desire more than their preservation, while they can even be said to desire justice, such desire does not acquire a reflective distance, nor is it invested in trajectories and projects that are oriented towards a different form of life than the one lived. In other words, animals react against an experienced injustice, they resist it and produce lines of flight, but they cannot produce alternative institutional forms of justice. That is also why finally, animal resistance does not attain the level of revolution, which (as it will be elaborated in more detail) constitutes the abolition of an existing order of right and the inauguration of a new regime of justice. Rich and diverse as it is, the ‘wild justice’ that permeates, regulates and mobilises animal being, even amongst the more socially advanced animals, never becomes a political problem. A threshold has been reached, where theory must move to human society, the field of reality in which justice attains its more articulate and intense forms. In order, however, for this shift to be accomplished in a way that dualism is not inserted from the back door, the analysis must remain on the plane of immanence that it has surveyed so far: the becoming of material bodies and forms.

Chapter 2

Whose Justice?

‘A servant and a master are hardly distinguishable, except to servants and masters’, said Mr. Keuner, the thinking man. – Bertolt Brecht, ‘Servant or Master’ (2003: 89)

One of the standard reproaches to new materialism has been that its ‘flat’ ontology undermines the political dimension of human being, alluded to at the end of the last chapter.1 Not that the varied thought produced within the ambience of new materialism, object-oriented philosophy, and more is ‘apolitical’ in any homogeneous manner. Far from it. There is a clear leftwing sensitivity in thinkers like Jane Bennet (2005), which in Morton’s case becomes a militant commitment to enlarge the horizon of a modern communist politics. But if it can be conceded that ‘porpoises could join a revolution’, could they also initiate or lead one? Much as the horizon of (radical) politics may widen to incorporate nonhuman being(s), the fact does not change that every organised, political project – let alone one to have acquired the consistency of a world-historical investment, like communism – is constituted as an identifiable phenomenon by human praxis, which, Marxian materialism has insisted, is always already a social activity subject to multiple sociohistorical determinations. The identification of the multiple factors or specifically of the nonhuman forces operating at any given historical event, from a blackout to a humanitarian intervention, is laudable as far as it broaches the embeddedness, thus immanence, of processes like ‘history’, ‘civilisation’ and ‘culture’ to the ‘symbiotic real’. However, it is one thing to stress that historical existence is a symbiotic process, a point Marx himself admits (regardless if he did not follow through on all its ramifications), and a whole other to flatten out 51

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the differentiating qualities or determinations of organic, animal and human existence. Two such determinative qualities have been identified in dignity and justice, both pertaining to the conatus that differentiates a rock from an animal. Neyrat grasps the difference succinctly: ‘The racoon is resolutely not an object; but it objects to that which prevents it from being’ (2018: 7). Continuing along this path, a materialist theory of human being should identify the various determinations operating as ‘conditions of singularization’ (ibid.) of political society in historical existence. The argument that from a radically empirical perspective social forces do not exist or that all distinctions must be dissolved, risks blocking, instead of bolstering, a critical study of social forms and processes – local or multinational enterprises, markets, churches, states, communes, riots, revolutions – since none of these would exist if it was not for the effective presence of identifiable forces, which are distinctively ‘human’: organised interests, ideological convictions, political projects. The argument in no way preempts effective nonhuman agency, even at the microscopic level of microbes; it only upholds the right to make evaluations and qualifications over the relative significance of different phenomena, since evaluating and qualifying are constitutive operations of any theory that likes to call itself critical. Fascinating as it is to survey how dietary habits or climatic factors have affected the outbreak of the world wars and revolutions defining the twentieth century, these events remain (even inadequately) comprehensible without considering such factors. In contrast, they become unintelligible if theory does not systematically consider imperialism, socialism and nationalism. The current study assumes justice to be a basic determination of sociopolitical phenomena such as the aforementioned, which have defined the historical production of human being. The rationale behind this statement may appear to echo Rawls’s famous thesis that ‘justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought’ (1999: 3). The resonance is not facile, in the sense that the theorisation advanced here concurs with Rawls over the formative significance of justice. But Rawls’s theory remains in many respects the epitome of (secular yet) idealist and (liberal yet) statist thought: justice in Rawls is a rational Ought which must be applied to social being so that the latter will acquire its proper (institutional) form. It has been already asserted that it is not my purpose to discard the ideational, normative and ethical facets of justice. What my study does is provide a consistent materialist theorisation of the latter’s emergence as a distinct normative and ethical category, which concerns the way social being is structured and lived out. For without such a systematic analysis of its emergence amidst and through the interplay of multiple material forces, justice, qua determination of human being, will be inevitably ascribed to the effective presence of a nonmaterial, supervening force; that is, to Reason. In this

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way, as said earlier, the doors will remain open for the intrusion of an ontopolitical dualism and the consolidation of state-thought, which conceives the actualisation of justice in terms of a rational partition of the sensible into a hierarchical order of being, where every-body is allocated its rightful place. Excluded, on the other hand, along with, of course, nonhuman animals, are subaltern insurgency, revolt and revolution in its insurrectional valence. It is the great merit of historical materialism to have kept its commitment to a materialist analysis of historical forms without losing sight of their distinctive sociopolitical qualities. In this context, it is impossible to ignore how the political fact of injustice resounds in many passages of the Marxian corpus; for instance, in the analysis of ‘primitive accumulation’ in Capital (Marx, 1995, chapter VIII). Yet in itself this does not warrant the inference that Marx was committed to a positive conception of justice. He was certainly skeptical enough not to engage with the notion extensively, much less making it the first principle of social formations. As Engels points out, If we now say: that is unjust, that ought not to be so, then that has nothing immediately to do with economics. We are merely saying that this economic fact is in contradiction to our sense of morality. Marx, therefore, never based his communist demands upon this, but upon the inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily taking place before our eyes to an ever-growing degree. (1995)

This skeptical attitude stands intact even if Marx is not read deterministically, as Engels does here, but in a more romantic fashion that gives priority to class struggles.2 Moreover, when the question shifts to the historical formations produced by the proletarian revolutions that historical materialism envisaged, Marx has been said to move from critical skepticism to outright dismissal. According to this perspective, the consolidation of communism as a new form of social relations will not ‘fulfil’ justice, it will make the concept redundant. To quote George Brenkert, ‘When Marx [ . . . ] says that only in communism can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety, he means quite literally that principles of justice will be ‘left behind’; they will have become ‘meaningless’’ (1980: 90–91). Following a similar rationale, Allen Wood concludes that from a Marxian perspective ‘justice is not and cannot be a genuinely revolutionary notion’ (1980: 30). It is feasible to provide a coherent reading of Marx that does not require or yield a positive conception of justice. Yet this reading will have in one way or another taken out of its equations – whether by being silent about it or by explaining it away through some distinction between ideology and science – the presence of justice at the heart of the Marxian narrative of redemption and vindication. This narrative, which Marx shares with the socialist

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movement of his time, can hardly be considered a symptom of the romantic immaturity of a young philosopher still contaminated by German idealism, since without it the architectonic of Marx’s thought collapses, leaving a supposedly scientific work whose very production has become a mystery.3 As Frederic Jameson remarks, ‘Without a redemptive vision of the future’ Marxism ‘must necessarily falter, as a political project but also as a field of scientific research’ (2010: 405). What is at stake here is not the discovery of an ‘emotional core’ containing the ‘real’ Marx. Every attempt to remain loyal to the Master’s voice and His one Truth inevitably ends up vindicating one’s own commitments over against other possible interpretations, in endless and futile polemics. Following a different path, the current study takes seriously the suggestion that there are many voices in Marx’s oeuvre, hence, more than one conception of justice. In this context, it is arguable that justice, far from being a nonissue, constitutes a problem at the heart of the Marxian system, whose mutability, as Costas Douzinas and Ronnie Warrington have astutely observed (1996: 271), indicates the latter’s potentials. On the other hand, the current analysis does not want to simply conjure one more ‘spectre’ haunting Marxian thought; it will argue that on the basis of historical materialism a positive elucidation of the problem of justice becomes available. At its basic level, the argument has already had its share of proponents.4 Marx’s occasional polemics notwithstanding, it has been argued that both his vision of communism and critique of capitalism entail a positive notion of justice, albeit one that has not been worked out systematically. For the most part, the argument has been pitched in terms of showing that Marxian thought entails or allows a normative principle and/or ethical ideal of justice and then assessing the latter’s compatibility to respective liberal theories. There is nothing inherently wrong in this attempt, and no damage has ever been done by establishing circuits of meaningful discussion between different intellectual currents. To recall Sen’s point, stereotypical classifications, like ‘bourgeois’, cannot exhaust a rich theoretical work. More substantially, the relevant Marxist trend should be credited for arguing systematically that the transition to a communist mode of production, whatever the precise contents of the latter may be, will not dispense with problems such as the distribution of sociopolitical goods and obligations. Hence, not only will there be a continuous practical need for a concept of justice, but the latter can critically draw feedback from various political currents that have dealt with the problem. On the other hand, Daniel Bensaїd (2009: 122–62) has convincingly shown that there is a price to be paid for the accommodation of Marx to mainstream discourse: the more radical and critical aspects of Marxian thought are undermined and their potential to ground an alternative, critical theory of justice is frustrated. This is true even in cases such as that of Gerald Cohen (2000),

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who enters in the relevant discourse in order to attack the premises of Rawls’s theory and show its inconsistency. Pertinent as his critique may be, it ends up embracing the idealistic language of liberal theories of justice and abandons the materialist language of Marx and its constitutive categories, notably the class struggle. Socialism is in essence a more preferable ideal than that of liberalism, to which all rational people could commit. It is by some maverick figures of the Marxist hemisphere that a more critical path has been pursued, notably Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch. Yet both have mainly offered fertile insights and suggestions, but not a systematic theory of justice, which draws from the distinctly materialist traits of historical materialism. More systematic in this respect is Kojève’s phenomenology, whose frequent recurrence is not coincidental, since there are a few conjunctions between the theoretical perspective pursued here and the one Kojève constructs in his Outline, notably the analytical links drawn between justice, desire, struggle and anthropogenesis. Nonetheless, Kojève’s analysis is far more Hegelian than it is Marxist, hence, his conceptualisation of justice focuses on the latter’s ideational dimension whilst downplaying the productive role of the body. As a result, for Kojève, justice is realised in impartial mediation, whose apex is juridical forms, is not actualised in contentious political forms and social struggles. In fact, given that his version of Hegelianism is infused with an understanding of the political taken over by Carl Schmitt, the historical march of justice towards its ecumenic fulfilment denotes a passing away of politics. Interestingly, Kojève comes close to Marx’s own estimations about a withering away of politics – although in Marx such estimations are less systematic – by forging an idealist and statist conception of justice, which abandons the radical potentials of Marxian materialist philosophy. It is this radical potency that I will explore here: neither apologetic nor revisionist, the case is made for a theory of justice that flows from, as well as enriches, some key insights of historical materialism. Along the way – in the spirit of Pierre Macherey’s (2015) elaboration of Marx’s Foucauldian aspects – I will tease out the Deleuzian elements of Marxian analysis and, thus, enable a smooth passage from the structural facets of justice to the libidinal flows that permeate its becoming. SOCIAL COMPOSITION AND THE PROBLEM OF JUSTICE Unlike the ‘vulgar materialism’ denounced by Marx and Engels,5 historical materialism anchors human life to the processes of the physical world while recognising that there is a dimension of history that differentiates the former from the latter. In François Châtelet’s astute expression,

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[Historical materialism] wants to be a critical science of effective passivity, the land-tax of humanity. Man does not die because he is mortal (no more than he lies because he is dishonest or loves because he is amorous). He dies because he doesn’t eat enough, because he is reduced to the state of a beast, because he is killed.6

To be sure, it has been argued – to the point of acquiring the status of a textbook argument7 – that Marx’s philosophy of history remains within the bounds of German idealism, ‘history’ being the drama of a Subject’s tortuous self-realisation as freedom. That Marx draws from a philosophical heritage which found in freedom the essence of history is not disputed. Nevertheless if, despite sharing this fundamental insight, Marx dubbed his theory ‘materialist’ in conscious opposition to idealist philosophy, it is because he does not ground history in ostensibly immaterial faculties (reason, spirit, consciousness) with which human beings are bestowed. Contrariwise, human historicity finds its differential principle in the immanent dynamic of the productive activity of the body, in labour. As stated programmatically in The German Ideology, Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion, or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life. (Marx, 2002: 177)

There is a crucial insight at work here: human being differentiates from nature by partaking actively in it. In other words, history remains a material process inscribed into man’s metabolic relation to nature; thus, ‘freedom’, the substantial content of human self-realisation, is also an act of participation in the world. Is not this participatory ontology a good starting point for registering justice as a pertinent category of humankind’s symbiosis in the natural world? Admittedly, this has not been a popular route within Marxism, diverse as the latter may be. Following the putative paradigm of Marx and Engels, far more common has been to translate the ontological significance of labour in terms of an ontological primacy of the ‘economy’ over other fields of social activity like politics, jurisprudence and religion. This primacy, furthermore, has been famously represented in terms of a distinction between the ‘basis’ of a social formation and its ‘superstructure’. It is as a derivative of this model that the classification of justice as an idea and an institution belonging to the superstructure of social being comes about, although what this superstructural conception of justice concretely denotes varies. It can range from a complete denunciation of justice as an ‘instrument’ of power or ‘epiphenomenon’ of material relations and forces of production, the position of orthodox

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dialectical materialism,8 to a more refined analysis of justice as a positive form, as actualised Right, that is homologous and functional to other social forms, this being Pashukanis’s (1980) perspective alluded to earlier. Another refined option has been to theorise justice as a necessary ideological misrepresentation, whether attaching to processes through which the state machine turns class violence into Right, to the struggles of the downtrodden or, more inclusively, to conflicting material interests – a line of analysis curved by Althusser (2006a). The more orthodox basis/superstructure distinction, by taking a metaphor that was always problematic in its ramifications at face value, construes a spatial representation of reality that fails entirely to register the constitutive, rather than merely instrumental, role of justice on the domain of social reproduction. The other theoretical options outlined do acknowledge the operational status of justice both in terms of legitimisation as well as in terms of critique. Pashukanis’s perspective specifically, along with critically questioning the identification of justice with class domination, clears the path for a phenomenological analysis of historical forms of justice in their ontological positivity. Yet his hesitation to differentiate systematically justice from right and his complete homology between right and the commodity form, which correlated that justice will disappear along the former, prevented him from surveying further the twofold potency of justice as a problem immanent to social formations as well as a living, formative desire. The same is true for structuralist analyses, which tend to close the discussion before it is even opened, failing in the process to engage systematically with the (difficult to refute) phenomenological datum that all class struggles to have broken out historically are driven by a living sense of (in)justice.9 Ironically, in this way, Marxist theory posits class struggles as its basis only to dismiss afterwards one of their essential determinations. To conceptually locate justice on the ‘basis’ of social being, as a structural problem that concerns the regulation and more fundamentally configuration of conflictual processes of social reproduction, it is apposite to abandon the basis/superstructure schema in favour of a horizontal cartography of the multiple material practices (trans)forming social being (cf. Edwards, 2010). Having said that, to abandon the basis/superstructure schema does not in the least mean ignoring the centrality that economic relations, as the historically variable structuration of labour, have in the inaugurating works of historical materialism. There is simply too much textual evidence to deny that historical materialism gives priority to labour vis-à-vis other types of human activity. Yet there are also occasions where Marx is explicit that labour is constituted as a social-historical activity only in the context of other actions and the relations they form. For instance, in Wage, Labor and Capital: ‘In order to produce, they [men] enter into definite connections and relations with one

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another and only within these social connections and relations does their action on nature, does production, take place’ (Marx and Engels, 1951a: 83). Moreover, here being where Marx’s ‘Deleuzianism’ comes forth, material practices are not intrinsic properties of a social identity that predates them – so as to be ascribed to a ‘class essence’ – they are fluid processes immanent to social (re)production. In this regard, historical materialism understands ‘society’ as a composite notion, something that in turn implies a non-organicist and non-functionalist ontology of coexistence. It follows that the study of social order concerns not the identification of stable properties and substances as much as the mapping out of material flows, forces and processes. It is here that justice can be discerned as a (usually unspoken) problem immanent to the composition of social formations. To elaborate, if for Marx the ‘body’ is a social category and ‘society’ a composite term encompassing the (re)production of (individual and collective) bodies into ordered form(s), theory needs to delineate the determinative factors in processes of social composition and formation. Of course, the concept of ‘productive forces’ looms large here, as ‘the power of the true, able to dissipate the shadows of politics’ (Rancière, 2010: 88). There are other passages than the infamous statement in the ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1951a: 329) that grant a determining role to the productive forces; for instance, Marx’s claim in his ‘Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper’ that ‘steam, electricity and the self-acting mule were revolutionists of a rather more dangerous character than even citizens Barbés, Raspail and Blanqui’ (ibid.: 325). However, as Engels has recognised (1951b: 450), in this way not only Marx’s more political works, like the Eighteenth Brumaire or the Civil War in France, but also his active support and theoretical registering of the struggles of labour unions, syndicates and of the rise of social-democratic parties become inexplicable. For all these struggles, as well as the formation of a militant party, imply that the composition of social formations is a political stake instead of a reflection of objective forces. To be sure, from a Marxist perspective, it may seem far more ‘materialist’ to revert to interests and needs rather than to justice, as the salient determination of social composition and social struggles. Is there indeed anything more material than ‘need’, compelling human and animal bodies (the ancient Greeks would add, even the gods) to behave in determinate ways? And yet, Marx – anticipating Geuss’s point mentioned earlier concerning the historicity of hunger – is clear that needs are social categories, biological needs included, since although a distinction between the latter type and social needs is granted, it turns out that even biological needs are socially mediated. As Agnes Heller explicates, ‘If we state that the structure of need as a whole can only be interpreted in its correlation with the totality of social relations [ . . . ] then it follows that only socially produced needs exist, and ‘natural needs’

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(whose mode of satisfaction changes the need itself) also have this socially produced character’ (2018: 31). Building on this insight, Heller (ibid.: 38) moves on to show that Marx conceives need ‘as a category of value’ in a noneconomicist manner, whose horizon is a rich material, emotional and spiritual life. Of course, the notion of ‘nonalienated needs’ that Heller deploys, with its essentialist overtones, seems to contradict the social character of needs Marx has asserted. In either case, from the perspective of the current study, the substantial point is that need is inseparable from the pursuit of a good life, which mobilises the human animal no less than the nonhuman. And since the form of society is neither an a priori given, so that its rules of operation can be deduced in a functionally manner, nor is it instinctively coded as in animal bands, the form of the good life needs to be set right by human activity. In this context, Wadood Hamad (2015) argues that every society, the communist society not being an exception, requires some principles of justice. Without disagreeing with this line of thought, here it is the problematic dimension of the process that is highlighted. Justice refers not to a formally deducible and representable ideal or structure, which society by natural law has or ought to have (regardless if the identification between ideality and reality is absolute or bound to remain incomplete due to human frailty). Nor is it simply functional to a social formation, for this assumes that the latter exists irrespectively of the normative principles that regulate it and give it its distinct shape. Justice emerges as a problem attaching to the dynamic composition of social fields, the problem of right. Clearly, calling it thus implies a deontological dimension, since if something is right it ought to exist. However, from a Marxist perspective, the hypostatisation of duty into a sui generis virtue, to an imperative dictated by a Law emanating from God or Reason, obscures the materiality of the problem of justice. Something is right or wrong not because Law dictates it – that would be a ratification of statethought in its strictest form; it is right relative to the actualisation of the good life, which in its own turn resists a timeless definition and concerns historical forms of being. From this perspective, the problem of right appears intrinsic to the historical production of ‘man’ as a social-cum-ethical-cum-normative being. It follows that justice can be said to operate on the structural level of society. By thus embedding justice to social reproduction, historical materialism offers a frame of intelligibility that throws light on the former’s dense, material texture. Yet this theoretical perspective does not divert enough from mainstream theorisations, since it still allows the resolution of the problem of justice to be identified with impartial mediation. That is to say, justice may be a socially embedded problem, but for the latter to be resolved, reason must be able to elevate from the domain of material interests, needs and rivalries. Against this viewpoint, the crucial element that historical materialism adds is

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to allow the conflict-laden, hence partisan, nature of justice to come forth in a theoretically pertinent manner. As announced in the Communist Manifesto’s famous adage (1951a: 33), the historical flows composing social being have a fundamental dimension of antagonism, but in a much more radical manner than the liberal notion of competition between formally equal individuals. In the place of people seeking to maximise profits, Marx posits the struggle of collective groups standing in a position of structural inequality. Schematically put, some-bodies are deprived of things that some-bodies enjoy as privilege – land, property, wealth, civic rights, political recognition, access to knowledge. For sure, that inequality fosters resentment and breeds violence is an age-old idea, recognised by diverse political tendencies. What differentiates the Marxian prism, along with the insight into the relational and exploitative structure of classes, is the systematic elaboration of the assumption that the class struggle cannot be understood simply in terms of dysfunction or lack. The insight is to be found also in Machiavelli’s discussion of class conflict in Rome (1970, bk.1, 4–6), but historical materialism radicalises it further, extending it from the role of class conflicts in a Republic’s vitality and well-being to a generic principle of social-historical production. That ‘all history is the history of class struggles’ is a theoretical statement denoting that history cannot be understood without reference to the struggles between social groups. In this way – anticipating contemporary discourse over the relevant issue, which ranges from works moving within the orbit of Marxism to more phenomenological analyses deriving from Merleau-Ponty10 – Marx also foregrounds the body as an affective center and creative force that, instead of merely executing preconceived mental forms, is a constitutive dimension of meaningful ways of being. From the perspective of historical materialism, the intellectual reduction of the body to a decoding instrument finds its historical presupposition in the real division of labour and the political reduction of human bodies to productive tools.11 Before being conceived as an organon of the mind, the body has been forced to act as one. To move from this level of abstraction, we may take as an example the practice that Marx placed at the heart of his critique of capitalism and (its) political economy, wage labour. On the one hand, the latter involves ‘the capitalists’ – usually owners of the legal entity in which wage relations are formed, although the term can also refer to high-management exerting effective control – who must determine the duration of productive activity and reduce its cost enough for them to make profit. On the other hand, there are the labourers who must receive enough money in the form of wage to secure a living and have enough free time to enjoy other activities. This schematic image corresponds roughly to the Marxian insight into the structure of capital, which entails (some type of) wage labour not as its opposite but as an

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integral moment of its reproduction and valorisation. The salient point here, demonstrated by Marx himself in his analysis of the ‘working day’ in Capital (1995, part III, chapter 10), is that while the abstract structure of wage labour in a capitalist society is standard, its actual form and content is produced historically within a dynamic force field that brings into play antagonistic needs, interests and expectations. Whereas power obviously looms large here, Foucault’s (Foucault and Chomsky 2006: 51) argument that proletarians fight for power and justice follows as justification, seriously undermines how – save perhaps the derivative ideological fetish of ‘workers-power’ – power is pertinent insofar as it concerns the capacity to define the form of productive activity, which is thus at the core of the relevant struggles. How many hours should a working day last? What is the value of labour? Who decides over such matters? Such questions, pertaining to the right form and content of wage labour, are immanent to its historical production, since the concrete form this material practice assumes manifests the historical (hence, tentative and conditional) resolution of these questions: the Ten Hour Bill – this ‘modest Magna Carta of the legally limited working day’ (ibid.) instituted at Marx’s time; Keynesianism and its postwar elaboration by social democracy; the neoliberal deregulation and precarisation of the labour market. Justice, therefore, is immanent to struggles but not simply as a ‘device’ (Foucault and Chomsky, 2006: 54). In this context, Marx’s observation that the ‘creation of a normal working-day is [ . . . ] the product of a protracted civil war, more or less dissembled, between the capitalist class and the working-class’ (1995), deserves to be taken in its full breadth, rather than as a suggestive metaphor. For is not civil war at its core a conflict for the power to define justice and thus institute Right? The insight to be generalised is that whether the reference points are the multiple practices defining a political society – wage labour, taxation, education, elections – or whether these issues are totalised so that what Rawls (1999) calls the ‘basic structure of society’ becomes a stake; its system of property, its divisions of labour and gender, its political form, and social reproduction inscribes the problem of how to set social formations and its constitutive practices right. Moreover, like all problems, the resolution of this ‘problem of justice’ is not given in advance; it denotes an open field of contention wherein actions and reactions – legal acts, lockouts, strikes, protests – are invested with different conceptions of justice. In this respect, the perspective developed upon the grounds laid by historical materialism can be enriched with a concept drawn from Badiou (e.g., 2005: 97–102, 103–18). The problem of justice rises on the level of political reflectivity on those junctions of social reproduction where an ‘undecidable’ emerges; that is, wherever the available ‘encyclopedic knowledge’ cannot axiomatically settle a contentious issue. Should salaries be proportional to performance

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and output? Should immigrants be given papers? Even when public opinion is overwhelmingly in favour of a specific position, these questions continue to defy a definite answer based on knowledge of empirical data and concern instead a problem which is multiple yet singular in its essence: the problem of justice. From this angle, justice, far from being a superstructure, emerges as a constitutive dimension of politics, or to use the more abstract term that has become popular in previous years, of the political. To be sure, anticipating a theme that will be discussed later, justice is formative of the political and yet excessive to it. For as a desire, justice not only spreads to the full breath of human experience, from the aesthetic to the religious, it can acquire an intensity that directs itself against every form of civic order, indeed against the world in its totality, as is the case with what Max Weber (1991) has called ‘religious rejections of the world’. Nevertheless, is not the form of these rejections, thus, the trajectories of their finality, political themselves? The point thus remains: if the form and content of the material processes composing social being – (re)production, distribution, provision, consumption, allocation – did not pertain to justice, their configuration would require little more than technical skill and expertise. By extension, disagreement would lack this specific political quality and intensity, attaching to the problem of what is just and right. Indeed, the current promotion of technocracy as the only way to resolve social problems aims precisely to depoliticise social reproduction and, thus, to reduce questions pertaining to justice – Should pensions be cut or university fees increase? – to technicalities. Yet its claims notwithstanding, technocracy is a political position responding to the problem of justice, and more specifically a nexus of power/knowledge, which establishes relations deemed to be right, since every-body is considered to be properly situated and receive what it deserves. MIGHT, RIGHT, IMPARTIALITY Having clarified the argument concerning the status of justice as a structural problem of social systems of interaction, the quandary of historical materialism – poignantly expressed in Marx’s adage on civil war – remains. For much as we want to believe that the righteous win, wars are power conflicts; thus, as Bloch infers, while ‘every right is based on struggling wills [ . . . ] the will which occupies the better position and is better equipped tends to always win’ (2015: 272). The question begs itself: If justice is an emergent problem of contentious processes, whereby needs, interests and expectations expressed in antagonistic conceptions of right collide, would not the conclusion have to be that justice lacks substantive content, that, when all is said and done,

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‘might makes right’? This point has been made forcefully by Milbank (2006), who criticises Marx for his inadequate, nay lack of, ontology. Moreover, the critique on Marx is part of a wider attack Milbank has waged on every philosophy and social theory claiming to remain on a level of pure immanence. Unavoidably simplifying, the crux of Milbank’s point is that immanentist theories necessarily establish an ontology of violence with highly pernicious political effects. Positing class interest as a quasi-transcendental category meant to legitimise specific conceptions of justice or policies hardly averts this conclusion. It is enough to look at Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism (2007), written during his time as commissar of the Red Army and at the height of the Russian civil war, to verify how the identification of justice with class power and class antagonism may sanctify state terror, in the revolutionary version of a ‘state of exception’, which in the long run paved the path for Stalinism. Milbank’s theological assertion of transcendence is not the only possible response. Against the Marxist chain of identification between politics, class interest and power, another option has been to deploy Schmitt’s notion of the ‘political’ (1996), in order to elucidate a dimension of human (co)existence that is irreducible to class.12 The attempt is laudable as far as it argues for the noncoincidence between a social fact, like exploitation, and its political articulation. In terms of our topic, this allows for the irreducibility of justice to its social determinations, thus, for an elucidation of its own positive attributes. In other words, if the political has its own consistency, as opposed to being merely an expression of objective magnitudes, or of a subjective essence, then it is also possible to theorise justice in a way that does not reduce it to the social fact of injustice, thus, to a primary violence – for what else is injustice if not a violation inflicting damage upon beings? Unfortunately, the fusion of a theorisation of the political with a theorisation of justice never sets off within left-Schmittianism. Instead, the irreducibility of politics to its social conditions is asserted in a way that tends to ontologise antagonism – even under the refined form of ‘agonism’ – as the essence of the political, if not its sui generis virtue. Analyses that reflectively attend to this assumption – from William Rasch’s (2009) juxtaposition of a left-Schmittian conception of the political against traditional leftist utopianism, to Mark Taylor’s recognition (2011: 67–114) of the asymmetry built into political agonisms and of the weight that is unevenly concentrated on some-bodies – ratify Milbank’s critical point: violence is the unrefined substratum of all political a(nta)gonism. The point here is not to dismiss Schmitt’s conception of the political. One need only look at Aeschylus’ Eumenides, which celebrates the foundation of the polis as a civic order, to verify that the constitution of the political marks the articulation of a space of antagonistic division, as well as that political order is mediated through the friend/enemy distinction. In fact, Aeschylus

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comes to a pragmatic conclusion Schmitt would happily share: domestic strife needs to be externalised. During the jubilant end of the drama the chorus sings: I pray that discord, greedy for evil, may never clamor in this city, and may the dust not drink the black blood of its people and through passion cause ruinous murder for vengeance to the destruction of the state. But may they return joy for joy in a spirit of common love, and may they hate with one mind; for this is the cure of many an evil in the world. (985–88)

For the polis to achieve civic unity, ‘the Trojan war can take place’ (Benardete, 2000: 69). Yet what differentiates the tragic drama from modern theories is that the former does not derive politics from a primary antagonism, since it recognises the political consistency of the collective pursuit of a common good. Contrariwise, by positing antagonism as the ontological ground and matrix of the political, agonistic theories of politics tend to relegate cooperation and mutuality to the realm of the non-political or at best to an organisational virtue. Perhaps, it is in the order of a necessary consequence that in leftSchmittians like Mouffe socialism receded to the background in favour of an agonistic notion of democracy. For socialism posits mutuality and cooperation as constitutive qualities of a social form in which the actualisation of freedom is discovered in the actuality of a common good (and vice versa). Lost also are the ontological depth and critical sting of justice, which in the socialist movement acquired substantial clarity, as a problem that concerns the right way to live in community as well as a desire for its actualisation in the face of prevailing injustice. In the theoretical frame of a Schmitt-inspired conception of politics, justice can be either a function of the political or an independent principle whose actualisation tendentially reduces the space of politics, the latter position advanced systematically by Kojève. For if politics marks an agonistic process and its essence is revealed in contention, justice ends up (explicitly or implicitly) being identified with the mediation of political antagonism and, thus, with judgement and representation. Opposing the drift to an ahistorical ontologising of antagonism, Marx and Engels have been careful to ground the class struggle in history. Consequently, historical materialism never disqualifies per se; it rather foregrounds (even in a rudimentary manner) a broader conception of justice as an emergent problem of the intensive flows that compose social order, irrespectively if these flows assume the form of struggle, competition and hierarchy or of cooperation, mutuality and equality. From this angle, which for Marx and Engels is ratified in the existence of a primitive communist past as well as in the prospect of an advanced communist future, Marxian theory is arguably

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informed by the insight traced earlier in Attic Tragedy – and which in Greece was systematised by Aristotle: ‘political friendship’; that is, the formation of a space of equals committed to the pursuit of the common good and a common concept of justice, is not logically dependent nor less political than the articulation of a zone of enmity and antagonism. In fact, what makes both operations ‘political’ is that they refer to processes of collective power which attain to the level of justice; that is, to the right way of configuring social being. For without this dimension, the formation of systems of interaction would be either a technical issue or a matter of brute force, not a political stake. This theoretical framework makes it possible to maintain the Marxist assumption of the logical possibility of a harmonious ecumenic order not based on geopolitical divisions of enmity, without adopting the idea of a withering away of politics and along with it of justice. On the other hand, even if this potential must be of the order of a utopian vision, the salient theoretical point remains that justice is not derivative of collective antagonisms, the latter instead largely derive their political valence from the emergence of justice as a structural problem of human coexistence. While justice is not coextensive to class, historical materialism pinpoints the crucial shift marked by the historical appearance of classes. I am aware that defining ‘class’ is a notoriously difficult operation. Thankfully, Jameson (2010: 388) offers a way out of endless debates by distinguishing between substantive representations of class and a class analysis. Mindful of this distinction, every attempt to reduce the notion to an objective identity based on sociological determinations, or to an essence from which patterns of behaviour (including forms of struggle) directly derive, is bound to meet irresolvable problems. This, however, is not what Marx did. In contrast, he has attempted to embrace the sociological (pertaining to function and position in what-already-is), the critical (pertaining to the challenging of what-is) and the teleological (pertaining to what-may-be) aspects of class in a comprehensive theory of social-historical formation.13 He may not have been entirely successful, but the theoretical principle – refining an insight promulgated from at least as early as Aristotle – stands: class is a relational category marking a hierarchical division of labour not restricted to the production of goods but covering a much wider domain of material practices, including governance and the production of law and knowledge (cf. Losurdo, 2016). A class society, complex as it may be, is in its essence a social formation structured along lines of spatial hierarchies: an ‘above’ commands and appropriates while a ‘below’ produces and executes. Precisely because this division does not denote a static division but an intensive and necessarily violent structuring of embodied flows, the emergence of class also denotes by definition (the emergence of) ‘domestic strife’, which is how state-thought perceives and names class struggles. Unavoidably, justice – being not a supra-historical

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normative principle but a problem immanent to social reproduction – undergoes the same process of division and assumes a contentious intensity: what is just for one class may only arrive at the expense of another definition of justice held by another class. Acknowledging that justice arises in the form of antagonistic conceptions, Kojève argues for the need of a disinterested third party, through whom justice may be genuinely actualised as Droit. From a different starting point, a similar conclusion is reached by Ricoeur (2000: 133–34). Their critical attitude to liberalism notwithstanding, over this point both thinkers converge with the key liberal idea that justice requires impartiality. To be sure, in liberal democracies nowadays the implementation of justice also stipulates that law privileges specific social categories of people, what in technical terms is called ‘positive discrimination’. Yet the fundamental principle of impartiality is not affected, since policies that positively discriminate in favour of sensitive groups remain secondary to the impartiality of law relative to individual and collective interests. In fact, they are grounded on it since law can discriminate in favour of those in need not in spite of but because of its impartiality. Moreover – in view especially of the increased practical complexity that regulation through formal principles of right faces in modern liberal societies – to avoid legal formalism, impartial mediation can be enriched with a good dose of republican virtue. From this prism, if coercion and violence are to be avoided, mediation presupposes the willingness of competing parties to communicate earnestly within a shared institutional space. To avoid misconceptions, the question is not whether the actualisation of justice occasionally requires impartial mediation, much less is it argued that impartiality is a ‘bourgeois fiction’. Concrete instantiations of the problem of justice, mainly some type of dispute, may necessitate the intervention of a third party – which can be a person or an institution – defined thus precisely because it has no direct stake. Equally important sometimes may be the ability of contending parties to enter deliberation, which implies an acceptance of the latter’s communicational protocols. Nevertheless, these are cases unfolding in an established (i.e., institutionalised) social field, where a minimum agreement over what marks a just society and a good life has been reached; for example, private ownership of the means of production. When questions of an existential-cum-axiological order are concerned, wherein justice reaches its full onto-political intensity as a problem over the right form of being (thus, of how a good life is to be achieved), the option of impartial mediation vanishes. For this option presumes either shared conceptions of justice or that there is a rational form of justice, which is accessible to reason in the form of an idea(l) from which a just society can be deduced. Of course, this is precisely what liberals like Rawls argue, but when the positive content of their conception of justice is looked at it hardly qualifies as ‘impartial’. In

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sharp contrast, it reveals their commitment (critical as it may be) to a liberal state, which their theory serves to legitimise. In the meantime, what is conveniently forgotten – and if Benjamin’s (1996: 239) point about supporters of Parliament is trusted, such amnesia is not a new phenomenon – is that liberal states, like any other state-form, are the historical product of revolutions and/ or wars, not the outcome of the self-realisation of reason. Sorel has formulated the point incisively: ‘A well-coordinated social system is destroyed by a revolution and gives place to another system that one finds just as reasonable; and what was formerly just has become unjust’ (1976: 199). The line of argument advanced does not preclude compromise of worldhistorical scale, like the famous ‘social-democratic consensus’ between labour and capital after World War II. However, not only such compromises are bound to be tentative, also no impartial mediator has decided them. Compromise over fundamental questions of justice are expressive of a configuration of forces and of the failure – which must not be taken as an evaluative judgement as much as a theoretical diagnosis of a historical process – to actualise a radical, alternative form of justice (in the historical example used, a socialist order of right). Reverting to a hypothetical ‘original position’ is entirely untenable, since this gesture disembodies justice, evacuates it from its historical context, and ultimately strips it from everything that make people care for it. Very little changes when ‘communication’ is added as a qualifying predicate of reason. Cultivating a civic culture within which noninstrumental, communicative reason can flourish is certainly necessary for a democratic polity worthy of its title. Yet balancing any type of transcendental abstraction, the critical insight of historical materialism is that communication and the forms of recognition it entails are saturated by the material conditions of being. It took years of struggle and the threat of ‘Bolshevism’ for the organised labour movement to be recognised by capital as a ‘social partner’, just like in the United States it took decades of struggle – from a bloody civil war to the mobilisations and riots of the 1960s – for African Americans to be recognised as equal subjects of civic rights; conversely, in the American ghettos nowadays – or in any other corner of ‘the planet of slums’ Mike Davis has surveyed (2006) – the combined reality of social division and institutionalised racism taints any meaningful communication. Unless history is disregarded, the inference is unavoidable: whether as fact or spectre, violence has been as much a part of the actualisation of justice as rational discussion and deliberation. Therefore, if a reduction of right to might is to be avoided, thought must follow a much harder path than evoke reason’s capacity to elevate above material interests or converse away political conflict. The path opened hides a trap: the instrumentalisation of violence as a ‘tool’ for justice. In due time it will be argued that this conception of violence defines every idealism that aspires to be something more than an

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empty evocation of unrealisable ideas. Marx’s famous metaphor about force acting as ‘a midwife’ of history (1995, Part VIII, Ch. 31) also seems to promote an instrumentalist theorisation of violence. On closer look however, the Marxian schema assumes a stronger bond, which posits violence as an integral moment of social-historical transitions and transformations. To this extent, historical materialism facilitates a more refined analysis of the relation between violence and justice, even if Marx himself did not dwell on the theme sufficiently. If the problem of right form is structural vis-à-vis social composition, the actual forms through which social formations are composed have, as Hamad stresses (2015), their integral principles of justice. It is this insight that informs Marx’s trenchant criticisms of idealist evocations of justice, as in his Critique of the Gotha Program: ‘What is a ‘fair distribution’? Do not the bourgeois assert that present day distribution is fair? And is it not, in fact, the only ‘fair’ distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production’ (Marx and Engels, 1951b: 20)? What Marx denies is not justice per se; it is a timeless definition of it. It follows that justice cannot be regarded simply as an instrument of class violence for it has its own integrity relative to social reproduction. Nor, however, is violence simply a tool of an established order of justice; that is, of Right. Insofar such an order constitutes, mediates, regulates and ultimately justifies class relations of exploitation, violence is integral to systems of justice. Similarly, when it comes to revolutions, violence is recognised by historical materialism as a constitutive part of human emancipation, without however being sanctified or fetishised, since the qualitative marker of revolutions is said to be the creation of a new system of justice, not the collapse of the established order of right (which can occur in many other ways). The Marxian perspective, thus, fosters a critical commitment to a politics that negotiates with the limits and scope of violence (this being what allowed Marx and Engels to entertain the possibility of a parliamentary revolution). Overall, Marx’s political and theoretical trajectory can be viewed as an attempt to think of a revolutionary violence that does not establish a permanent legal order of violence – that is, a state – but rather actualises justice in a non-coercive order of being, a historical, potential actualised ideationally in the idea of communism. Accordingly, Benjamin’s (1996) celebrated critique of violence, with its distinction between ‘divine’ and ‘law-making violence’, as well as Sorel’s (1976) notion of ‘proletarian violence’ as harbinger of revolution, can be legitimately viewed as anarchistic radicalisations of this pivotal idea, which Marx shared with the anarchists of his time. Having said that, it is arguable that Benjamin and Sorel, like most anarchists, miss the dialectical nuances of Marxian thought and fall to a direct opposition between justice and Right. The opposition, for sure, registers the prospect of a justice that is actualised beyond legal systems, a prospect that in Benjamin maintains

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the full messianic strength of Judaic messianism (cf. Löwy, 2017). Moreover, ‘divine violence’ cuts through the historical continuum only by becoming a historical event, ‘revolutionary violence’. Then again, in its bloodless immediacy the latter tends to withdraw from the moment of constitution that has defined revolutions as something more than insurrections. To this extent, the problem is not the putative sanctification of terroristic violence coming from below. In reality, popular outbursts never reach the intensity of state terror, which Benjamin tries to theoretically ward off. Rather, as Sagriotis (2003: 48) points out, the real problem with Benjamin’s ‘infinite chasm’ between justice and right is that it risks becoming equivalent to ‘a passivity that condemns itself and the world to forever await’. It should be repeated that Marx nods to a dialectical critique of the relation between violence and justice but does not elaborate on it. More thus remains to be said. The point for now is that the critical edge of historical materialism is not so much in a castigation of Law as a veil or tool of class violence, but in a theorisation of law and justice as positivities whose historical (re)production bears the imprint of struggle: of imposition and revolt, insurgency and recuperation, subjection and resistance, defiance and compromise, victory and defeat (cf. Tigar, 2000). From the long struggles over debt and political recognition in antiquity to the fierce struggles over the agrarian question and industrial relations in modern times (to name some standard examples), it is impossible to understand properly how the problem of justice, qua practical problem inscribed into the intensive relations of (collective) bodies, has been articulated in any given social formation outside of an examination of its class struggles, of their forms, content and intensity. In brief, the key idea to draw from historical materialism is that in a class society justice is articulated, and thus arrives, through the intensive flows generated by contrastive interests, expectations and needs. Consequently, the actuality of justice lies primarily not in rational mediation but in trajectories of domination and emancipation attached to the class struggle. It is possible therefore to affirm a link between justice, interest and power while also breaking the chain of identification between them that Marxism has forged. On the one hand, the different conceptions of justice involved in class struggles are grounded on identifiable and contentious material interests and needs. In this respect, every conception of justice finds in material interests an important determination, something that necessitates asking the question ‘who benefits’ – satisfying in this way one of the requirements that Geuss (2008: 23) has set for a realist theory of politics. By extension, theory is bestowed with a strategic dimension: the actualisation of justice requires far more than staying true to a given definition; this is, to act justly and righteously, it requires a successful strategy that takes into account existing relations of force. To this extent, justice also implies much more than power

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in the positive, yet abstract, sense of ‘capacity’, it entails imposition. That is why violence cannot be regarded simply a part of (or derailment from) the practical application of ideas of justice – a function of ideality; it is rather immanent to the production of forms of justice – a component of its actuality. On the other hand, justice is not commensurable to the formal generalisation of class interest; it has its own ontological consistency, which refers to the problem of right and the practical forms and principles mediating it in every given social formation. Thus, in the same way that the recognition of interests helps prevent the problematisation of justice from straying to an abstract idealism, the concept of justice plays an equally critical function: by raising the issue of right and wrong, of what is a just and what is an unjust form or way of resolving a problem, it enables a critical evaluation of the divergent material interests involved. Which interests require structures of discrimination, exclusion, exploitation (etc.) for their realisation? Conversely, are there interests with a generalisable dynamic pointing beyond their own satisfaction? Which interests are registered in an ecumenic horizon of domination, and which in an ecumenic horizon of emancipation? Ultimately, it is this nonidentity between justice and interest that foregrounds the historical potentiality, which Marx attempted to put on a solid theoretical footing, that the struggle for the satisfaction of specific class interests may lead to a redemption that is universal in scope. Similarly, it is the nonidentity between justice and power that foregrounds the possibility of communism as a non-coercive form of association, where freedom and equality constitute complementary facets of a collective good. Asserting such a nonidentity does not mean that justice is the Other of power, in the same way that it is not the Other of interest. Along with satisfying the interests of identifiable social groups, any positive resolution of the problem of justice implies a capacity, a power to actualise. On the other hand, because the actualisation of justice denotes the positive and principled resolution of a problem – the articulation of structures of association that are right relative to the (re)production of a good life – (the content of) justice must not be confused with the power to actualise it. Forms and principles of justice may well have to be imposed, but whether they are indeed right – that is, whether justice has been actualised – cannot be deduced from the fact that they could be actualised. This would be a conflation of categories, which confuses the presence of a notion (of power) in the definition of another concept (of justice) with their ontological identification, leading eventually to a tautology – ‘might is right’ – that vindicates the powerful by calling them just simply because they are powerful. That justice has historically morphed into hierarchical orders of domination – a point to be elaborated later – does not cancel the argument, since, even in that case, it is not in domination per se that justice is operative but in the order that the former establishes and maintains, an order which puts

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every-body where they ought to be according to principles integral to the given sociopolitical form. Moreover, precisely because these constitute historical forms of justice, rather than its essence, they are challenged by opposing conceptions and forms. Such an alternative conception – expressing a veritable current of political thought that stretches back to the French Revolution and encompasses Marx’s philosophical mentor, Hegel – informs historical materialism: the positive content of justice is found not in regimented hierarchy and sovereign power but in the historical production of freedom. I do not claim to have fully resolved the crucial issue about the relation between justice, right and violence or the relevant theme concerning the blending of systems of justice and systems of domination (thus, of exploitation, exclusion, discrimination). Hence, it will be necessary to return to these topics in next chapters. At present the point must stand as it is: insofar as historical materialism enables a conception of justice as a problem embedded in the material processes that compose social being, it also embeds justice in the divergent interests and needs these processes entail, without however reducing it to them. Therefore, when studying subaltern struggles and uprisings, from riots to revolutions, justice is to be traced not as an external mediation but in their very midst. In other words, justice must be theoretically grasped as it emerges in the material intensity of social flows, wherein material subjections meet resistant and recalcitrant bodies. In this respect, historical materialism partakes and elevates to the level of theory a tradition of ‘anti-history’ which, as Foucault (2002: 86) has shown, conceives of justice not as the triumphant story of reason-incarnated-in-law but as the history of conflicts, struggles and wars. ON THE GENEALOGY OF INJUSTICE Marx’s insight that capital has its own peculiar modes of fairness is underscored by another crucial insight: the problem with a social system is not simply that it is ‘unjust’; that would reduce critique to ethical judgements and politics to moralist prescriptions (of the type, ‘we must learn to be good and love each other’). The real problem with a social system is in the way its integral forms of justice justify the violent inhibition of a being’s potential to live well (sometimes to live at all). By thus registering the duality of justice without reducing it to a Manichean dichotomy between clear magnitudes (‘the just’ vs. ‘the unjust’), Marx anticipates more recent discussions about the sociopolitical functions of ‘justification’.14 Since it always emerges within an established system of justice, injustice not only tends to become invisible and expelled from the level of discourse (e.g., ‘wage-labor is not exploitative, it is a contract between equals’); no less significantly, it is only within such a

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formal system of justice that injustice can acquire the necessary institutional, ideological and psychological consistency to become itself systematic. For within such a system, injustice becomes justified in the most substantial sense, not simply ‘excused’ but posited as right. On the other hand, the conception of justice as a structural problem and a corresponding system of principles and forms – both aspects operating on a pre-subjective level – carries a certain risk; namely, to undermine the experiences that underscore human agency and, consequently, to relegate them to the status of a subjective epiphenomenon of objective data, or in a more neo-Kantian fashion to the status of phenomena that belong in the domain of subjective value at the other end of facts pertaining to objective validation.15 In this way, the problem of justice is spared the charge of being ‘superstructural’, but the diagrammatic representation of social being in terms of a basis/superstructure dichotomy will not have been surpassed. Justice will have been simply transferred from one side of the binary to the other. Out of purview remains the formative presence of experience in the ‘social fact’. Marx himself was not oblivious to the affective dimension of justice, particularly to the way that demands for justice stemming from below are tied up to a lived experience of injustice. How indeed could he fail to acknowledge the link given that the rise of the labour movement (and from within its ranks of organised socialism and the ‘real movement’ of communism) was defined by pervasive feelings of injustice? To quote the personal testimony of a Greek communist when he was reflecting on the reasons that the poor joined the ranks of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE): ‘Why should the wealthy be able to send his child to High school? Why should an executive be able to go to the hospital whenever he wants, while you are not able to send your wife to give birth in a hospital’?16 Regardless how it is subsequently theorised, this experience needs to be taken into account as an empirical datum, which, to quote Simon Weil’s point on justice, can be ‘known experimentally’, for it ‘is real enough in the hearts of men’ (2002a: 240). On a theoretical level, the reality of injustice has been tackled recently by Douzinas (2010: 87), who goes back to Anaximander in order to sustain an ‘ontological thinking of dike as the response to enduring disorder and conflict (adikia [injustice])’. In this way, Douzinas practically acknowledges that registering perceptions of injustice is by itself of little theoretical consequence, since it is the actuality of such precepts that calls for theoretical explanation. In addition, ontologising injustice as a primordial datum of Being is insufficient, since it still needs to account for the experience of injustice; that is, the passage to the ‘ontic’. Identifying the conditions of possibility of the latter to a moral law and its categorical imperatives, pertaining to (pure or practical) Reason, is of no avail, since the experience is primarily somatic. No less than in animals, there is something instinctive and elemental in human

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resistance. Ideational representations aside, a substantially similar interplay of bodily affects is operative: revulsion, anger, agitation. As Gustav Landauer corroborates: ‘The first step in the struggle of the oppressed and suffering classes, as well as in the awakening of the rebellious individual’s spirit, is always insurgency, outrage, a wild and raging sensation. If this is strong enough, realisations and actions are directly connected to it: both actions of destruction and actions of creation’ (2010: 191). To this extent, a theoretical exegesis of experiences of injustice must have as its locus the body, no matter if rationalisation and discursive representation are key components in the transition from the fact of injustice to the re-cognition of justice; that is, to the actualisation of justice as a political idea. Point granted, the quandary remains: acknowledging the corporeal objectivity of experiences of injustice does not correlate taking them at face value, nor does it validate by default their theorisation as expressions of a positive quality (of justice). Ever since Nietzsche (1999) – himself drawing from ideas circulating already in antiquity – experiences of injustice and related demands for atonement, retribution and repair can be diagnosed as symptoms of resentment (or, in its proper Nietzschean rendering, ‘ressentiment’). From this prism, justice poses a problem among human beings only because there are human types – ‘the slave’, the ‘priest’, the ‘moralist’ – who out of weakness re-act and refuse to come to terms with the fact that life is determined by factors and dynamics defying ethical evaluation, the ‘innocence of becoming’. You utterly fail to understand beasts of prey and men of prey (like Cesare Borgia), you fail to understand ‘nature’ if you are still looking for a ‘disease’ at the heart of these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths, or particularly if you are looking for some innate ‘hell’ in them – as almost all moralists so far have done. Does it seem that moralists harbor a hatred against tropics and primeval forests? And that they need to discredit the ‘tropical man’ at all cost, whether as a disease or degeneration of man, or as his own hell and self-martyrdom? But why? In favor of ‘temperate zones’? In favor of temperate men? Of ‘moralists’? Of the mediocre? – This for the chapter: ‘Morality as Timidity’. (Nietzsche, 2002: 84)

This perspective can (perhaps) even accommodate the existence of a ‘natural right’, provided the latter is stripped of any normative overtones and instead remains a strictly formal principle expressing the relative power of wills, something like a philosophical version of the ‘survival of the fittest’. Now, that experiences of injustice affecting the underprivileged and downtrodden entails a longing to see the privileged pay, nay suffer, is certainly a valid diagnosis. Such resentment can acquire gigantic proportions, as when desire turns apocalyptic, John’s Apocalypse being only a paradigmatic instance amongst others; for instance, Tertullian’s De Spectaculis (XXX),

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which exults in the prospect of monarchs, wise men and governors suffering while the poor are vindicated. Resentment, as Howard Caygill shows (2013: 30), is operative also in Marx, affecting his analyses of concrete political events, like the Paris Commune, and generally the structure of his thought. The examples could proliferate – for example, during the 2011 Aganaktimsenoi (‘Indignant’) movement in Greece, a popular chant sung to politicians in the Parliament was full of resentful longing: ‘One magic day, like it once happened in Argentina, we shall see who will manage to escape with the helicopter’. Mindful of its real presence in subaltern radicalism, it is only natural that the Nietzschean notion of ressentiment would be deployed as a critical tool by conservative thinkers, Max Scheler (1994) being a notable case. However, as Sjoerd van Tuinen has elaborated (2016), in conservative versions ressentiment is reduced to a psychological drive, to resentment, which is supposed to explain (away) the longing for justice that motivates subaltern insurgency. The result is a vicious circle of psychologising, whereby each diagnosis can be diagnosed as a symptom of the same phenomenon. The poor revolt because they are resentful of the comfortable life of the rich while the latter condemn revolts with such passion partly because they are envious of their passionate joy. There is no end to this game, with resentment and envy contaminating the fabric of life. In response, Van Tuinen (ibid.: 79ff.) convincingly argues that this psychological restriction undermines the philosophical use Nietzsche intended. There is much more in ressentiment than an individual failing; it is a collective relation to time, an investment to the future generated in the face of a present weakness. For the current study, this argument has the extra merit of allowing the notion to be deployed without requiring justice to be reduced to one of its symptoms. This path, though, is not one Nietzsche pursued, since his anthropological categories may be more refined than crude empirical descriptions of psychic drives, but they nonetheless end up having reactionary effects: they naturalise relations of inequality, which ground experiences of injustice, and promote an elitist dualism of weakness/strength. Counterarguing that the ‘weak’ and the ‘slave’ in Nietzsche are not meant as sociological descriptors will not do, since even if the terms are incommensurable to their social determinations, their actuality is expressed on a sociopolitical terrain. Nietzsche’s total disdain for the great uprisings of his time, as well as for the socialist and democratic ideas that inspired the revolutionaries, is a safe indicator that his anthropological categories/types are thoroughly political and for that matter deeply elitist and aristocratic.17 Making resentment/ressentiment the psychological/anthropological wellspring of justice bypasses the question whether reactions and resistance to a perceived wrong are justified. More accurately, the question is answered in advance, since it is assumed that the structured totality against whose

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consequences (or, more radically, form) events of resistance break out is either ‘beyond good and evil’ – Nietzsche’s point – or ‘right’ by the grace of natural law – the standpoint of conservatives from Burke to Scheler. In either case, obscured, or worse sanctioned, is the fact of the organised and systematic erection of systems of domination, exploitation, exclusion and discrimination, which violently block the becoming of humans and animals and prevents them from attaining a good life. Furthermore, in this way, the categories which clarify the nature of the problem on an abstract level are treated independently of the material structures they serve to specify. To formulate the principle a la Châtelet, ‘men’ do not fight against ‘Poverty’, in the same way that they do not resist ‘Pollution’, they fight against demeaning salaries, like the ‘Fight for $15’ movement, and resist the destruction of local ecosystems, like the Standing Rock movement. The point here is not that ressentiment is irrelevant for understanding structures of domination and their organic link to orders of Right; it is that the notion tends to exclude the productive and constructive facets of justice, as these become manifest in mobilisation and resistance against (perceived) injustice. Resentful as it may have been, the chant against politicians in Athens was inspired by a real event from the 2001 revolt in Argentina and expressed a genuine potency of the Aganaktismenoi movement, to bring down the government. That is to say, other political responses to injustice can appear and spread (even amongst the same groups and peoples) than resentful fantasies, responses which are also historically testified, like exodus and revolution. It follows that resentment is secondary to (in)justice, not its psychological root cause. From a perspective informed by historical materialism, the experience of injustice is neither a subjective emotion nor an impersonal mechanism ready to be psychologised (away). It is a material event appearing at the conjuncture of interacting bodies, on the surface of the practices that (re)produce social formations. Otherwise put, an experience of injustice is expressive of the sentient-cum-historical actuality of the body: being into an assembly line, being ill fed, being made redundant or superfluous, being deprived of its means of subsistence, being (d)evaluated, ordered, deployed, disciplined; in a nutshell, of its being embedded in concrete relations of domination, oppression and exploitation. Nothing is distinctively ‘human’ here, since the affective power of injustice is operative also in nonhuman animals, who are no less subject to a systematic injustice taking place within established systems of justice. What differentiates human beings – a differentiation historical materialism takes into consideration – is that they can articulate justice as a demand and a project. From this angle, demands for justice, far from being just an imperative of reason or, conversely, a rationalisation belonging to the realm of ideological (mis)representation, mark the refusal of the body to kneel to the conditions destined for it. Put in terms analysed systematically by Caygill (2013), claims

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for justice and against injustice bear witness to the ‘capacity to resist’. In this framework, the elaboration of justice on a conceptual level, instead of being an expression of the body’s incapacity to bring change without the mediation of fetishistic ideations, is an auxiliary process that augments the body’s transformative powers. There is certainly a microphysics involved here, the elaboration of which would enlarge our understanding of the materiality of justice, provided though that it is not assumed to explain (away) anything, in the style of a reductive objectivism. Experiences of injustice are historical phenomena, in the sense that they always concern context-specific events: debt bondage, tax increase, wage cuts, policies of austerity and more. Resentimment answers why the interplay of affects these phenomena generate gives rise to (in)justice as an embodied experience. While the answer is insufficient, the question is legitimate, since high taxation or cut wages may understandably generate frustration and sorrow to those afflicted by them, but these affects do not necessarily correlate ‘injustice’. By the same token, resistance may arise in the ambience of a rich cluster of affects, but no act of resistance can be directly deduced by a specific affect, in the manner of reflexive causation. Anger, sorrow or any other affect may just as easily recoil in impotence and frustration. The essential problem has been expressed poignantly by Wilhelm Reich (2012: 294): the question is not why someone steals but why not everyone steals all the time. The question may look disingenuous, since it is not that a great mystery why people do not steal (or do not rise up): fear of consequences, petty interests, even a sober calculation of adverse circumstances and costs. But this is precisely Reich’s point: some people steal (resist, demonstrate, revolt) in spite of all these preventive factors. It is thus a matter of finding the qualitative determinations that lead some-bodies to resist against an experienced injustice. Hegel has offered a compelling answer: ‘It is not what-is that makes us impetuous and causes us distress, but the fact that it is not as it ought to be’ (1999b: 8). A similar point, drawing from his practical experience as activist, has been made by Edward Chambers: emancipatory politics is permeated by an experiential tension between ‘the world as it is and the world as it should be’ (2018: 9–34). The theoretical point here, touching upon the ontological (rather than simply political) aspects of the issue, is that injustice makes little sense outside of a positive experience of justice. It follows that from the perspective of a materialist theory, comprehending the affective materiality and social determinations of injustice is insufficient. It is the biopolitical positivity of justice that needs to come to the fore. Herein, the twofold dimension of justice is once again broached. From a Marxist perspective, justice would not be desired if it did not constitute an objective problem pertaining to structure. But in a properly dialectical fashion, it is equally the case that justice poses a problem, instead of only

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a ‘technical difficulty’ related to effective regulation, as far as it is also a pathos, an affective and effective force, which ‘is as much of a reality as any other in this universe, neither more nor less of a reality than the trajectory of a planet’ (Weil, 2002a: 241). This pathos of justice lends itself to processes of rationalisation and discursive codification, hence, it acquires a certain reflectivity to itself. Yet it never stops being a vital, embodied force that pertains to sentient corporeality. That is why, similarly to nonhuman animals, justice in human beings partakes in the affective constellation of joy, hope, expectation, sorrow, suffering, angst, despair and more that compose a subject’s economy of desire. Therefore, having elaborated how in the human world justice attains the status of a conscious, conflict-laden problem, the next chapter will clarify this other dimension of desire, so as to firmly ground the ontological primacy of justice – that is, its formative power relative to social order.

Chapter 3

Desire Becoming History

If the present be compared with the remote past, it is easily seen that in all cities and in all peoples, there are the same desires and the same passions as there always were. —Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses (1970, Bk. 1, 39)

There’s nothing groundbreaking in claiming that justice is desired or that such desire has been a driving force of subaltern struggles throughout history. As Axel Honneth argues (2017: 6ff.), it is the great merit of socialism – as well as its distinguishing mark from liberalism – to have embedded normative ideas like justice to the desires and actions of a socially determinate historical figure, the toiling multitudes who at the time were being constituted en masse as a ‘working class’. To this extent, the socialist tradition provides a critical frame of intelligibility for conceiving the desire for justice as a ‘real movement’ of (inter)active bodies, individual and collective. Additionally, within this frame, it is possible to grasp in a theoretically pertinent manner the temporality of justice – that justice not only is but becomes. It is well known that Marx and Engels tried to distinguish their own brand of socialism by calling it ‘scientific’ and pitting it against the ‘utopianism’ of other currents.1 At the time of its articulation, the distinction meant to serve a critical function. Even today, there are aspects of the distinction that retain their critical value, notably the willingness to ground emancipatory politics in a systematic critique of the historical conjuncture – in all its tensions, contradictions, conflicts and multiple tendencies – rather than in moralistic or abstract proclamations about ‘thieves politicians’, ‘greedy bankers’ and ‘other worlds that are possible’. Then again, when the analytic distinction between scientific and utopian socialism assumes the form of a rigid opposition, it becomes theoretically untenable and politically damaging (a position 79

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to be elaborated in a subsequent chapter). Moreover, as Marx started developing (after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions) his mature critique of political economy, he may have successfully abandoned some essentialist aspects of his earlier thought, but he also started ascribing social transformation and the struggles that effectuate it to a theory of structure (Meyer, 2014). True, even in his ‘mature’ writings Marx never stops giving voice to affected and affecting bodies, exposing how desires and expectations push the masses forward as much as rational interests. Nevertheless, on the theoretical level, Marx’s ‘structural’ turn, regardless if it never became a systematic ‘structuralist’ theory, meant that no attempt would be made to systematically engage with the phenomenon of desire nor thus to theorise justice within such a conceptual grid. Later, efforts to merge Freud and Marx, from the Frankfurt School’s inquiries on authority and submission to Reich’s ‘sex-pol’, did make desire topical as well as conceived of its workings in thoroughly political terms. However, these remained marginal intellectual trends within Marxism. More substantially, they theorised desire mainly through the couplet ‘repression/ liberation’ and did not develop a productive reading of desire capable to foreground a positive, systematic theorisation of justice along materialist lines (although elements of such a reading can be found in both Reich and the first generation of the Frankfurt School). All in all, even after ‘Freudo-Marxism’ has been considered, it is still valid to ascertain that Marxist analyses either tend to be silent over the issue of desire or lapse into its dominant identification with lack. Marxists may disagree on numerous things, but they concede that the proletariat desires higher wages, free time, the control of production and more because it does not have them. This also helps explain why many Marxist groups nowadays find it difficult to experiment with new forms of struggle and instead commit themselves to defending what the toiling masses have gained from past struggles. If the desire for justice is essentially a longing for a condition currently lacked, does it not make sense, once substantial modicums of justice have been achieved in the form of labour and civic rights and material gains, to try preserving them against policies and measures that seek to cancel them? Given the real conditions of the labouring masses at the time, it is understandable why Marx along with many other socialists tended to identify the desire for justice with lack. However, as with the socialist tradition in general, there is present in Marxian thought (even inchoately) an alternative conception of desire, as a positive component of the struggles through which human beings change and improve their lives. This conception does not dispel the insight highlighted earlier, that the desire for justice appears as an experienced discrepancy between how things are and how they should be. Acknowledging the centrality of this discrepancy means admitting that

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demands for justice have as their affective substratum an intense sense of dissatisfaction, which may reach the level of physical repulsion. At the same time, however, a differential quality is implied: a libidinal investment on a state of affairs other than the existing one. In Gustav Landauer’s concise wording: ‘The ground we stand on is a ground we want to leave. We desire different forms of human relations’ (2010: 191). Without this differential quality of desire, the experiential tension between ‘is’ and ‘should’ would be consumed in a sterile resentfulness. Much more, thus, than the accurate elucidation of a theoretical object, at stake here is for theory to become adequate to the struggles that have called it into being. This is a plausible way to read critically Kojève’s turn to Hegel. Kojève’s (2007: 233ff.) phenomenology of Droit sets out to show how great socialhistorical struggles, exemplified anthropologically in the master/slave relation, lead to the actualisation of justice, not to be sure through the abolition of the state (as Marx hoped) but in a state form, as Hegel allegedly argued. Moreover, Kojève explicitly grounds the emergence of the idea of justice to the living desire of human beings, to conatus rather than merely to ratio. In fact, to the extent that desire is endowed with an ‘anthropogenic’ power, it is arguable that Kojève (ibid.: 209) also broaches desire’s productivity. On the other hand, in Kojève’s perspective, justice is depicted to stem from the desire for recognition, which marks the ontological boundary between humanity and animality. In this sense, the actualisation of justice, by affirming the distinctly human, is the practical negation of the animal in man. At the same time, since recognition is something that must be gained in order for men to actualise their humanity, in essence the realisation of justice marks out the filling of a void. Which is to say, for Kojève, justice is motivated by lack. This reign of negativity continues even after the animal has been negated, for recognition – Kojève insists in a way that is probably more Schmittian than Hegelian – necessarily passes from violent conflict, whose anthropological prototype is the master/slave struggle for recognition. In effect, the anthropological essentialisation of struggle as the raison d'être of the political implies that justice can positively arrive only through the negation of politics, which Kojève identifies with conflict and sovereignty, and in the form of a global state; that is, of a legal-constitutional order that reconciles conflicting standpoints by giving everyone their due. Overall, Kojève’s theory does not offer a concept of desire and justice adequate to real social struggles; it hollows them out them and then fills them back with negativity. Deleuze and Guattari’s analytics of desire has been precisely geared for moving beyond this conceptual couplet. Their initial move in Anti-Oedipus (2013a: 67ff), the first work they wrote together, is to wage an attack on psychoanalysis for its double gesture of framing desire in terms of lack and reducing it to the familial bond. In this way, psychoanalysis is said to be

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both complicit and a condition for the reproduction of (the rule of) capital, which also operates by molding desire as perpetual lack, satisfied imperfectly through the commodity and money form. It is against this pervasive reign of lack – to which psychoanalysis aspires to give scientific status – that Deleuze’s proceed to argue that desire can ‘be understood only as a category of production’ (2004d: 233). The ramifications of this thesis are numerous, but here we are interested in the core insight. Take, for instance, the popular TV show Game of Thrones, a story about desire if ever there was one: desire for power, for revenge, for titles and for bodies – some claimed to be deserved by right, others desired against prevailing standards of right. Instead of fixing the gaze in the lack of the desideratum that appears to motivate the heroes, Deleuze and Guattari call us to follow desire as it spreads in the narrow corridors and the wide planes where power, revenge, pleasure and love are pursued; in the fantasies that anticipate them, like the compulsive recitation of names that Arya Stark conducted in order not to forget those she wants to avenge; in the activities that produce them, like the long journey of Daenerys Targaryen, where the desire to become queen proves to be much more than the seizure of the Iron Throne, it is actualised before she even sets foot on Westeros: in becoming mother to the dragons, in the liberation of slaves and the execution of the nobles, in gaining the loyalty of Dothraki hordes. In brief, Deleuze and Guattari’s key point is that desire is not a void space, it is a positive power that produces: connections, assemblages, conjunctions, disjunctions, flows, lines of flight. Highlighting the productivity of desire is not equivalent to discarding lack as a pertinent analytical category. Desire certainly invests on things that are currently lacked – to a better wage, to a trip waiting to be taken, to a body not yet seen naked. For the more specific case of justice, the element of lack is clearly suggested in the affective discrepancy between Is and Should; for this seems to unequivocally reveal that to desire justice means investing on a Solen that is currently lacked. This dimension acquires an even greater intensity in the case of groups, sects and movements that want to abolish the chasm between actuality and deontology, by fantasising a (more) just society. Socialism would seem to fall within this category of ‘world-rejection’, where in the present absence of justice a future vindication is projected. Is it then possible that Deleuze and Guattari overstretch the dissociation of desire from lack? Perhaps, but arguing along these lines misses the point, since the crux of their position does not rest on the elimination of every dimension of lack, it rests on the insight that lack is not the essential structure of desire. For even when desire invests into identifiable objects and objectives (to a commodity, a career, an ideal) which are currently lacked, its content lies not in the absence of what it seeks as much as in the anticipation of their presence, in trajectories of actualisation.

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To make, thus, lack the essence of desire is to ontologise what is most of the time a deprivation and, thus, to fail to capture the positivity of desiring flows and investments. Nor does it matter if desire is determined by the active presence of another desiring subject, as René Girard (1966) has argued. Whatever mimetic mechanism may be operative during the process, to claim that mimesis is the key for understanding desire retains lack as the latter’s essence and misses that which determines a desiring body: the movement which produces connections, regardless if some connections are blocked and end abruptly or if desire outpours its object and seeks more connections (which again may not come into a happy fruition). Game of Thrones was used as a poignant example, but it is just as possible to draw from history; for instance, the revolt of Spartacus. The rebellious slaves through their assemblage as a nomadic war machine against the Roman state did not simply fight to attain a freedom that they lacked – although of course they had been deprived of their freedom; they actualised their freedom as an embodied reality, as a praxis which reconfigured and extended the limits of the desire driving it. It is in this sense that Deleuze and Guattari conceive of desire not as a longing but as a becoming. Evidently, the implications of this insight go much further than a critique of psychoanalysis; they concern a general theory of history and society. If desire is a factory of production, society abstractly conceived – yet, a real abstraction – is a desiring machine made up by various machinic components – what Deleuze and Guattari will call ‘assemblages’ – and operating through multiple engineering diagrams. Put in the condensed manner of Deleuze and Guattari, ‘social formations are defined by machinic processes’ (2013b: 206). This machinic model is at odds to any social ontology that posits the rational individual as a normative founding stone of social being. Yet it is neither structuralist nor functionalist in the conventional sense of the terms. The establishment of social order is a historical process based on the codification, territorialisation and segmentation of desiring flows, capturing and modulating the latter, investing and channeling them towards specific directions, objects and objectives. Essentially, this is a composite conception of society, not dissimilar to the conception traced in Marx. Social formations are not organisms whose structure can be formally deduced in advance; they are composed of flows, assemblages and multiplicities. All together the latter configure, and at the same time are organised through, a veritable economy of desire and a politics of truth – economic-libidinal regimes of production and political-epistemic regimes of signification. Social formations can prove durable and maintain themselves as identifiable units in time and space for substantial periods of time. The ‘eternal city’ was certainly a fantasy, but it could not have been entertained without a footing in reality, Rome’s centuries-old existence. And yet, no matter how

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stable the structures and effective the codes – or in the case of capitalism, the ‘axiomatics’ – of a social formation may be, social order is never immobile. To the extent that flows of desire permeate them, social formations are inherently unstable, they ‘leak’. In fact, as Deleuze (2007c: 127) asserts, while from a strict chronological point of view lines of flight may come after social formations have been structured, ontologically ‘a society, a social field, first and foremost leaks. The first things it does is escape in all directions’. That is so because in its productive power desire carries a transformative quality that de-codes and de-territorialises. In Deleuze’s words, ‘Desire is revolutionary because it always wants more connections and assemblages’ (2007b: 81). Mindful that this perspective can be associated to a naïve, hedonistic politics, which conflates revolution with pleasure and justice with spontaneous desire, some clarification is due. Deleuze never says that every investment of desire is revolutionary in a sociopolitical sense; that is, attached to processes of radical institutional change. Part of the problematic developed in AntiOedipus is to critically assess why the masses can desire their repression, as apparently the case has been in the fascist regimes of the interwar period – or to give a more recent example, with the establishment of the Islamic State. A similar problematic, with a focus in late capitalist societies, motivates a recent work by Frédéric Lordon (2014), who shows convincingly how individuals are enmeshed in chains of dependency that make them attach to – that is, desire – their subordinate position. In terms of the current study, there is a significant inference lurking here: the desire for justice emanating and spreading from below does not connote necessarily a desire for freedom, it may just as well connote a desire to be dominated. Beyond the specific case of subjugated groups, there is nothing inherently paradoxical in claiming that desire is productive yet invested in the conservation of existing structures and forms. Not at least if Spinoza’s famous axiom from Ethics is accepted: ‘Everything insofar as it is in itself endeavors to persist in its own being’ (n.d.: 91, prop. VI). From this perspective, the key is whether desire invests in and conforms to the current state of being, seeking thus its conservation. Such conservatism may grow so much that desire assumes extremely reactionary intensity and forms. One need only look at the civil wars that have accompanied great revolutionary upheavals – France 1789, Russia 1917, Spain 1936 – to verify that Reaction can be as passionate as Revolution. To take it further, even genocide is a paranoid machine of desire that multiplies corpses on a mass scale, as a necessary operation for sustaining its delirium, the production of pure identity: an ‘uncontaminated’ nation or Volk.2 The point has been expressed aptly on a theoretical level by Todd May: ‘Even that which represses production, is a product of the desiring process, the process of life as a factory of production’ (1991: 25).

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While Deleuze and Guattari refrain from a romantic idealisation of desire, their key insight remains: even at its most reactionary desire is a vital force generated and operating through the intensive connections and interactions of affective bodies; thus, it cannot be entirely contained within instituted codes, structures and strata. Such a containment presupposes a perfect correspondence between desire and actuality – thus, a condition of total satisfaction – which contradicts the dynamism, diversity and multiplying potency of libidinal flows. Forfeited at the same time would be the historicity of human being, which is determined and at the same time determines the dynamism of desire: looking for a passageway to India → discovering a continent → creating a new world → dreaming a global utopia → establishing a formidable empire → generating myriad resistances. Mutability, development, motion, acceleration – all these intrinsic qualities of matter – acquire in human society their distinctive intensity in relation and in proportion to the excessive valences of human conatus. Not every desire is revolutionary, but there would be no revolutions without the overflowing and de-territorialising potency of desire. To this extent, the latter may be said to belong to the transcendental domain defining the conditions of social/historical change (cf. Diken, 2012). Much more could be said in terms of explication, but a detailed commentary of Deleuzian philosophy is not what my study aims at. The question is whether justice can be integrated in the theoretical framework outlined. Deleuze himself has not proceeded systematically along these lines. In fact, Milbank (2005: 406) has criticised Deleuzian philosophy for not offering a detailed account of the way that (out of the immanent plane of differential powers and multiple lines of intensity) a polis emerges; that is, an order of Right based on a shared experience of justice and oriented towards a collective good. The argument will be shown to have its merits, since one would look in vein to find a theory of justice in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Nevertheless, they have offered some important suggestions, which have carved a theoretical space for such an analysis to be performed. BECOMING-OTHER, BECOMING-JUSTICE Despite his commitment to a univocal ontology, in the tradition of Duns Scotus and Spinoza, Deleuze’s analytics of desire and society is framed around a series of dualities: the molar and the molecular, state and nomadism, territorialisation and deterritorialisation, arborescent and rhizome, macro-politics and micro-politics, majority and minority, all testifying to a tension between the visceral becoming of desire and its social sedimentation and capture (cf. Jameson, 2010: 181–200). More than the mundane tension between desire

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and social order, the Deleuzian schemata suggest nothing less than a tension of cosmic proportions between the stratification of matter into ordered form and an anarchic becoming that exceeds all actuality. [T]he Earth – the Deterritorialized, the Glacial, the giant Molecule – is a body without organs. This body without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles. [ . . . ] Strata Layers, Belts. They consist of giving form to matters, of imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy, of producing upon the body of the earth molecules large and small and organising them into molar aggregates. [ . . . ] The strata are judgments of God; stratification in general is the entire system of the judgment of God (but the earth, the body without organs, constantly eludes that judgment, flees and becomes destratified, decoded, deterritorialised). (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013b: 46)

On the basis of these dualistic schematisations, the suspicion may arise that Deleuze is guilty of an ultra-leftist crypto-normativism, which valorises movement and immediacy whilst stigmatising organisation. A critique along these lines has been waged by Badiou (2004) in his vitriolic review of AntiOedipus, written originally in the aftermath of May 1968, during the heated debates that broke out over the event’s adequate theorisation. Moreover, in the wake of Deleuze’s thought, a certain Deleuzianism has developed, for which ‘organization is the opposite of change, with change as pure process and flow’ (Thanem and Linstead, 2006: 39). Similar to the Marxist binary of basis/superstructure, in this version of Deleuzianism justice can be only understood as a principle whose function is to represent social being in terms of a totality wherein every-body receives its due and is allocated a rightful place and role. Conceived in this way, justice belongs to the order of representation or, to be more precise, it is a function of regimes of signification and processes of stratification that encode social/desiring flows, establish apparatuses of capture and appropriation, and perform a general territorialisation of social being. From this angle, the historical development of justice is intimately bound to the historical emergence of the state and its attendant thought-form; thus, with interiority, hierarchy, repression, prohibition, guilt and castration. In other words, justice is a category peculiar to the st(r)atification of social being, hence, all those who pronounce it, the functionaries of justice and law (the political philosopher, the judge, the priest), are little more than bureaucrats of state-thought. In this case, Deleuze’s philosophy could be plausibly said to endorse Horkheimer and Adorno’s dictum that ‘justice does not originate in freedom’ (2002: 12).

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There are certainly passages in Deleuze’s oeuvre that grant such a conclusion. In fact, at stake here is not to discard the critical conception of justice outlined above; it is to argue that it captures only an aspect of the phenomenon, more specifically one of its historical modalities of actualisation. To substantiate this assertion, it is necessary to move beyond a dualist reading of Deleuze’s analytics of desire and society, which reduces the latter’s relation to a contrastive opposition. Deleuze and Guattari do not axiomatically stigmatise stratification, nor do they fetishise deterritorialisation. Characteristically, in the extensive passage quoted above they are careful to stress that the formation of strata may have ‘unfortunate sides’ but also has beneficial aspects, since it is doubtful that there can be a world without any stratification. In this context, the two thinkers explicitly speak against a rigid dualism between ‘desiring’ and ‘social production’ – as well as between the molecular and the molar – wherein desire would be a pure expressivity to which the social stands as external constraint. Rather, even if desiring production is never exhausted to existing molar aggregates, it permeates, transverses, invests and thus co-extends to social production. Deleuze and Guattari allow no shade of doubt: ‘all production is at once desiring-production and social production’ (2013a: 337). Desire, in other words, invests in a social-historical field and in the forms that constitute it: wage-labour, bureaucracy or any other social form (be it ‘mainstream’, ‘revolutionary’, ‘alternative’), they are all permeated and fueled by desire. Naturally, the intensity of desire varies; libidinal flows in a governmental bureau, or in a supermarket at a middle-class residential area, pale in comparison to the respective flows pervading the truly paranoid machine of a stock market. Yet – just like in individuals the decrease of libidinal energy to low levels of intensity would be a manifestation of depression, even if the latter does not become pathological – if a given social form cannot maintain the flows of desire that invest it at a satisfactory degree of intensity, it will start malfunctioning and sooner or later enter a serious (though not necessarily terminal) crisis. Would great chains of supermarkets have been formed if only ‘biological needs’ circulated in their corridors, rather than also desires? How efficiently will in the long run a civil servant work if the only reason to go to office is need and habit? How soon before this little desiring machine crushes under the burden of its routine? In this conception of social being as a dynamic field of flows of intensity, justice may not be reduced to a transcendent principle sanctioning hierarchy and capturing desire in a repressive order of signification. This possibility is verified most clearly in Deleuze and Guattari’s book on Kafka (1986: 43–52), where it is explicitly argued that justice is a process immanent to social production, which is at the same time a desiring production. The actualisation of justice, in this sense, is not reduced to lawmaking and the partition of social

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being in accordance to a general regime of signification, it spreads throughout the social body, wherever things are taking place: ‘in the hallways of the congress, behind the scenes of the meeting, where people confront the real, immanent, problems of desire and power, the real problem of justice’ (ibid.: 50). Moreover, since being involved in ‘the problems of desire and power’ is not the prerogative of a social identity or a specific function (with its unique career options); since desire and power are intrinsic features of social formations which affect ever-body; the problem of justice also affects everyone and, thus, ‘everyone is an auxiliary of justice’ (ibid.: 51). This insight helps develop the point suggested earlier: that which is an emergent problem immanent to social production is at the same time a pathos fueling desiringproduction. In other words, what from a structural perspective pertaining to the molar level is a problem, from the perspective of molecular, intensive flows is a desire: to set the world right. Which is to say, justice is a determination of desire as it spreads out to the world. Thus, whether it is a matter of production, distribution, recognition, governance, consumption, sexuality, education (etc.) in their singularity or in their connectivity as dimensions of an organised manner of being, the biopolitical processes constituting social forms are invested and permeated by a desire for justice. From this prism, the latter is as much a determination of social production as are biological needs, material interests and techno-economic forces. In other words, as important it is for a critical comprehension of social-historical formations – of primitive tribes, nomadic hordes, ancient city-states, empires, feudal kingdoms, liberal democracies – to survey their class and/or technical composition, equally important is to analyse the effective presence of the desire for justice in their lines of regulation and lines of flight. Of course, from the perspective of a critical theory of society, it is not enough to place the desire for justice next to other determinations of social composition. It is also necessary to grasp their interconnection and interaction. Deleuze himself occasionally compares the workings of desire, operating on an unconscious level, to those of interest, operating at a preconscious level.3 In this way, Deleuzian social ontology challenges conceptions of social order that overstress the role of cost/benefit calculation, from ‘rational choice theory’ to certain types of Marxism, which believe to have found in class interest the objective measure for partitioning social being into clear, opposing camps. There is no need, however, to turn the juxtaposition of interest and desire into a rigid dichotomy, whereby one notion pertains to reflective reason while the other to unconscious urge. Desire and interest are intrinsically connected phenomena, co-implicated in unconscious mechanisms that underscore subjective and/or collective dispositions as well as in processes of rationalisation, which can achieve a considerable degree of reflectivity. In this context, interest as much determines the direction of libidinal investments

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as conversely desire determines interests; it follows that a prioritisation of one over the other can be at most an analytical choice of perspective, not an ontological axiom. Specifically, without hindering the universal scope of interest as an analytical category,4 it is simply impossible to draw a direct correspondence between material interests and social identities without also taking into consideration the economy of desire permeating subjectivation. Being a peasant equals an interest in having a secure piece of land? For sure, but why not collectivising lands? The moment this desire acquires actuality, the whole structure of interests is displaced. It may thus happen for interests and desires to interlace harmoniously, making people content with their standing in life. Without any depreciatory tone – although their numbers do tend to fluctuate along with the economy – there is the proverbial ‘honest, hard-working’ individual, who knows his interests and votes accordingly. The coincidence between desire and interest may even open a line of flight, as was the case in all those instances, from the occupied factories in Italy during the Biennio Rosso (1919–1920) to the occupied factories in France during May 1968, when the material interests of workers became registered into radical flows, intensifying alongside desire in order to open the possibility of revolutionary change. Then again, there are as many occasions when desire makes one’s social standing suffocating, leading people not simply to compromise their class interests but act against them or just disregard them. In the first season of the TV series American Crime, upon being asked why he attempted to commit suicide and then abandoned everything to become a drug addict, one of the main characters replies: ‘I was so middle-class’ – a statement that carries explanatory weight only in the context of an affective economy of desire. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, ‘Desire is present wherever something flows and runs, carrying along it interested subjects – but also drunken or slumbering subjects – toward lethal destinations’ (2013a: 127). Nothing changes when desire acquires the specific determination of justice. Interests, or more specifically class interests, can function as objective points of contact that enable informed discussion, rational disagreement, and possibly compromise. Yet the interests involved in any given situation, thus, whether they can be harmonised, cannot be detached from the form of justice desired. If the bourgeois have an objective interest in reducing costs, this is inseparable from a conception of (which at the same time is an affective attachment to) profit as an ‘inalienable right’. Conversely, if workers have an objective interest in high salaries, less working hours, and a labour-friendly regulation of working conditions, these are inseparable from their desire for dignity and from an experience of desert that is independent from market performance. Moreover, the very moment when desire leaks from the current order of things in sufficient degree of intensity, a ‘fair wage’ may stop being

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experienced as a primary interest and be replaced by other objectives – the abolition of the wage-form. Conceptions of justice, far from merely reflecting objective interests soberly calculated by Ratio, are also expressive of a psychosomatic disposition and its intensive modality of desire. There are those who desire a radical transformation, and there are those sufficiently attached to the current order of things to invest in its gradual improvement or conservation. To posit a rational, objective interest irrespective of these intensive dispositions is an abstraction, perhaps real but hardly capable of defining a universal principle of justice. Not accidentally, the interests that prevail in a situation, as well as the way of attaining them – for example, legally mediated dialogue or wildcat strike? – reflect the balance of forces between the relevant modalities of desire: the revolutionary, the reformist, the conservative, the reactionary. What better example here than the Parliament: putatively epitomes of rational mediation and deliberation, parliaments actually embody and function by consolidating a proportional balance between dispositions that spread to the Left/Right spectrum, while excluding the most radical tendencies that parliamentarism cannot contain. In brief, insofar as it is embedded in social reproduction justice is intimately related to the satisfaction of material interests. At the same time, however, the desire for justice can lead people to abandon their (personal or class) interests and enter a nomadic machine of revolt; it can lead them to compromise their self-interest for a collective good; it can even lead them to sacrifice, along with their interests, their lives. The rioter, the partisan, the party militant, the (urban) guerilla, the jihadist – these are all figures where the desire for justice has reached such intensity that material interests cease being the main determinants of agency. In contrast – a process, as we will soon see, in which ideation plays a significant part – justice becomes itself the main objective and value, developing its own momentum. In this sense, all aforementioned figures bear witness to the irreducibility of justice to interest; that is, to the ontological autonomy and integrity of the desire for justice. To sustain this argument, it is crucial to prevent the severance of justice from desire, which would render the former an object that is lacked and towards which desire moves, a summum bonum existing independently of desire but which desire may someday encounter or attain. For, as with all conatus, to conceive the desire for justice purely in such terms is to ontologise what is a political deprivation and, thus, fail to grasp the positivity of justice relative to the material processes (trans)forming social being. To posit this line of thought on the level of theoretical principle is to give effectively primacy to the fact of injustice over the desire for justice, which could then be easily identified with resentment or some other reactive drive. Ultimately, the identification of the desire for justice with lack foregrounds the identification of movements investing on radical change – whether these are mainly

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political, like the socialist movement, or mainly religious, like the Christ movement – with the perilous fantasy of fullness. Against this trail of thought, it is counterargued that the desire for justice does not attach to trajectories of social formation, from processes of segmentation and molarisation to lines of flight and emancipation, simply as an end waiting to be reached; it constitutes one of their immanent determinations. This is true even when desiring justice acquires eschatological overtones, as with Christian apocalypticism.5 Even in such cases, the desire for justice concerns trajectories of production and anticipation: forming a collective assemblage that lives out the end of days, withdrawing from the world, becoming-austere, becoming-equal, becomingsect; in one word, becoming-justice. Thus conceived, the conception of justice as a becoming does not adopt the ostensibly Hegelian theme of self-realisation, moving from ‘in-itself’ to ‘for-itself’. Instead, a more Deleuzian approach is followed.6 Justice has a rhizomatic character, since (ontologically speaking) there is no point of origin wherefrom it grows along arborescent lines. Accordingly, having no single, identifiable beginning nor a determinate end, justice also does not evolve from lower to superior form, although singular forms of justice develop, augment, become complex, fossilise, decline, collapse. Regardless of the singular determinations and historical fortunes of actualised forms, to theorise justice as a product of social/desiring flows – as a becoming – is to conceive it in terms of a differential movement that unfolds in a plane of immanence and brings together heterogeneous elements. This insight adds substance to the Marxian-inspired insistence that justice is not the realisation of a preexisting ideal but a real movement by adding that the latter concerns a desire which morphs into differential biopolitical forms. In these terms, becoming-justice involves two. Which is to say, justice marks a passage from one form to an-other, having as such a constitutive dimension of exteriority through which it is referred to and directed towards an outside, to what it is not. A minor historical incident that Engels notes in passing in his ‘History of the Communist League’ (Marx and Engels 1951b: 306–23) – and which has been recently resurfaced in Raoul Peck’s film on the young Marx (Le jeune Karl Marx) – offers a good illustration of the insight under discussion. The incident concerns the substitution of the name ‘Communist League’ for the original ‘League of the Just’. The latter name epitomises idealist thought, by presuming that justice concerns an identity that comes to its own through a process of self-realisation. Of course, Marx and Engel’s materialist insistence to change the name can be seen as a dismissal of the concept of justice per se. But it can equally plausibly be approached from an alternative viewpoint, from which the substitution elucidates that justice concerns a becoming-communist; that is, becoming-other: wage-labourers becoming a working class and party militants, subaltern groups becoming a proletarian mass, capitalist

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processes of valorisation becoming sites of communist desire. Becomingcommunist, becoming-revolt; justice is a becoming, immanent to processes of biopolitical production. Now, becoming-justice may morph into forms that, once installed, seek to reproduce their established identity or even spread it out as the ‘Nomos of the Earth’.7 Conversely, there is a becoming-justice that commits to its minoritarian status, accelerating its velocity through lines of flight so that it will not form a majority, as is the case, for instance, with ‘queer politics’ (e.g., Mary Nardini Gang, 2014). From the perspective of A Thousand Plateaus only the latter instances qualify as ‘a becoming’ in account of their molecular quality. To be clear, it is not a matter of size; the distinctive quality of the molecular is not ‘the smallness of its elements but [ . . . ] the nature of its mass – the quantum flow as opposed to the molar segmented line’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013b: 254). The molar consolidation of a state form marks a deceleration, a blockage, a capture of becoming-justice within a regimented field of interiority. Hereafter, justice is absorbed in a self-reproducing regime of signification/representation with allotted identities, functions, values, rewards. Then again, as re-cognised in Anti-Oedipus (256–57), the state is also a social expression of desire, thus, a becoming that has two basic aspects: ‘internalisation’ – framing differential flows into a physical system of embodied relations – and ‘spiritualisation’ – overcoding flows into a metaphysical system of ideal categories. From this prism, state building is also a becoming-justice, which turns heterogeneous territories into a unitary legal order (becoming-law) and forms out of manifold power centres a unitary centre of power capable to delimit an integral and exclusive field of jurisdiction (becoming-sovereignty). Moreover, as an integral moment in the constitution of this normative field of interiority, numerous other transmutations take place, which reach to a molecular level: (producing) peasants becoming (productive, exploited, taxed, indebted) subjects or low-rank bureaucrats; young nobles becoming modern army officers or high-rank civil servants. Even when at a molar level justice appears to have frozen into a static serenity that lasts for centuries, at this molecular level the desire for justice never stops becoming, no matter how miniscule its flows may be. A key implication of the proposed theorisation is to allow for the ontohistorical continuum of justice to be grasped in a way that does not collapse differences between forms of justice by ushering thought to Hegel’s proverbial night of the Absolute, ‘where all cows are black’ (1979: 8). Nor, however, does it consolidate ontological dualities which end up operating as frames of exclusion or as all too many versions of the good/evil binary. As a productive desire, justice has degrees of intensity and different modalities of articulation. There are forms of becoming-justice that restore, conserve or defend, and there are forms of becoming-justice that destroy, reform or

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transform. As Deleuze says of truth (2004b: 135), we have the justice that we deserve. Asserting as much may look like opting for an all-out voluntarism, which posits forms of justice as expressions of the relative gradation of power that singular wills have. In that sort of inverted Nietzscheanism, theory – even when it purports to ground processes of revolutionary transformation – drifts to an inescapably elitist binary between strong/weak wills, which has been criticised earlier both in terms of its theoretical arbitrariness and its sociopolitical ramifications. The actuality of justice entails power; consequently, to a non-negligible extent historical forms of justice testify to the power of will, the Jacobin and Bolshevik Terror being paradigmatic instances of a generic phenomenon. Yet to reduce such forms of justice to anthropological will types is to confuse an onto-historical association for an ontological identity, in a sophisticated version of ‘might makes right’. Against such a voluntarist drift, it is necessary to insist that ‘intensity’ means much more than ‘stronger’ or ‘more passionate’ desire; intensities, as Deleuze clarifies, ‘are about modes of life’ (2007b: 179). This in turn ratifies the pertinence of historical materialism’s insight on the social-historical determinations of (human) being. Deleuze himself picks up this point: desire may have an overflowing potency, which makes it leak from its dominant codifications, yet desiring flows always and already unfold within definite (material, cultural and imaginary) milieus, which affect them even when these flows register into lines of flight, practices of resistance and events of revolt. Simply put, as a constructive, biopolitical force, instead of a pure expressivity, desire belongs to (hence, it can be considered an expression of) a historical conjuncture: a time of crisis, of war, of stability, of economic growth. Along with bearing witness to a present time, desire carries the weight of the past, as the latter registers in the form of individual and collective memory. For sure, the weight of memory is ambivalent. On the one hand, as Marx has pointed out, memory can act as a burden upon the living, hindering the appearance of new trajectories and collective forms. On the other hand, memory can act as a fuel of desire, by keeping alive the loose ends and outstanding bonds that the past has bequeathed to the present. It is this aspect of memory that Benjamin astutely stresses when he points out that to ‘articulate the past historically [ . . . ] means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’ (1992: 247). Not by accident, the regression of revolutionary desire in previous decades has been accompanied by widespread forgetfulness of past struggles. Nor, conversely, is it by coincidence that movements against a current injustice, as they unfold and escalate, tend to reopen the historical archive and connect to similar struggles of the past. In brief, in its very heterogeneity, desiring production expresses, even as it escapes and deterritorialises, a sociohistorical totality; that is, a past and a

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present weaved together in singular cultural and/or political forms. The way the autocratic culture of Imperial Russia affected the revolutionary becoming of the Bolsheviks; the way the culture of autonomy offered a fertile ground for anarchism in Spain; the way the division between skilled and unskilled labourers materially affected divisions within the labour movement in terms of radicalism; the way masculine culture affects the becoming of radical groups today; these are just some telling examples testifying to the historicity of desire and more specifically the desire for justice. The point here does not concern the truism that the becoming of justice is constrained by the material and historical conditions within which it appears as a singular production; it is to grasp becoming-justice in its historicity, as a process where desiring bodies negotiate with the objectivity of their present and their past, which far from being external to their subjective being engulfs it and constitutes it. During the revolt of Spartacus, it is said that the nomadic assemblage of slaves, outlaws and proletarii reached outside the gates of Rome. How many historical limits had been crossed, how many proved at that moment to be unsurmountable? Andre Prudhommeaux (1981: 167) has insightfully suggested that the military defeat of the ancient Spartacists has been presaged by a double political failure: to shift from the ethics of the warrior to that of the producer and to imagine an alternative principle of society to that of the Roman Imperium. Additionally, he suggests that the related failure to attain a programmatic condemnation of the institution of slavery makes intelligible the rebels’ choice to return to the place that they have begun, since being unable to fly forward desire drifted back, investing to a repetition of what had already proved to be successful. From a historical point of view, all these shortcomings may express objective limitations, but the latter can be recognised in such terms, as limits, only because the becoming-justice – becoming-rebel, becoming-fugitive, becoming-free – of the Spartacist revolt fleetingly pointed beyond them. Whether or not the critique of slavery practiced by this becoming-justice could have attained a programmatic status, the Spartacus revolt in its historical actuality – with all its impasses, failings, shortcomings – constitutes a passionate condemnation of the imposed condition of being a slave, hence, an anticipation and an evocation of a time and a place where such a condition will have ceased to exist. Not simply re-action to a present injustice but an experience of (i.e., passage to) another justice. Is it then plausible to also maintain that there is a utopian dimension in the becoming of justice, irrespectively whether the threshold of systematic articulation and ideological re-cognition is passed? Utopia – a point agreed upon by renowned analyses of the phenomenon like Ricoeur’s (1988) and Jameson’s (2010) – has a representational aspect, configuring images of another form of existence. This is certainly its key feature as a term peculiar to a literary genre. On the other hand, we cannot ignore the creative mutations of the

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concept, starting with Bloch’s classic study (2000), which have extended it from a literary trope to a quality of emancipatory politics, nay of human being.8 Admittedly, there is always the danger to overstretch a concept; if everything has a utopian dimension and utopia is to be found everywhere, the critical potency of explicitly utopian forms is lost. Nevertheless – and while a more detailed analysis is to be reserved for another study – ‘utopia’ may be plausibly considered a determination of practices and processes – the Spartacist revolt was mentioned as a paradigmatic instance – that have the singular quality of pointing beyond the present, even if only in a fragmentary manner. Accordingly, this utopian valence may be said to intensify when such practices and processes explicitly prefigure another form of being, as with the ‘Global Justice movement’, whose declaration ‘of another possible world’ is fleshed out in concrete proposals that are expendable and in practical efforts that embody its orientating values of democracy, solidarity and more (Löwy, 2016). Once again, we are not dealing with a solid property that either ‘is’ or ‘is not’, but with intensities. In these terms, the notion of utopia enriches, by adding a further quality to it, the excessiveness of justice. As such, utopia also offers a measure for assessing the intensity of justice in its singular instantiations. Not, however, as a transcendent and exogenous judgement, since there is no normative obligation for a becoming-justice to prefigure or prescribe utopian projects. To register the excessive potency of the desire for justice is primarily to broach an irreducible difference, the impossibility of locking justice to a single normative definition. Surprisingly (?), this Deleuzian line of thought intersects here with a key insight of Weil: ‘Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there [ . . . ]. Or, rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different than what we read in him’ (2002b: 134–35). To Weil’s conclusion that ‘every being cries out silently to be read differently’, Deleuze adds a positive twist: every being can become different, a different man, a different woman, a different justice. To this extent, the Deleuzian theoretical schemata positively mark the fundamental non-coincidence between the becoming of justice and its actuality. For like every becoming invested by desire, becoming-justice unfolds not only on the plane of history – of the actual – it operates also on the domain of the virtual (Deleuze, 2004b). In this sense, every historical actualisation of justice is accompanied by potentialities that do not stem from it as derivative possibilities but stand as its virtual yet real alternatives. Clearly, to make justice a fundamental determination of historical becoming is to register to social/desiring production a normative dimension pertaining to form as much as to content and expression (after all, every content and every expression carries its own form). Deleuze and Guattari, like Marx in his own way, are slightly ambivalent on this issue. They insist that

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desiring-production operates principally on an unconscious level that lacks any normative facets; it is instead purely functional. This seems to connect justice and desire only negatively, in the manner stated earlier: desire being the raw power that deterritorialises existing orders of right and justice, conversely, designating forms of (re)territorialisation that capture, restrict and control desire. Against this conclusion, it has been argued that desire must not be understood in terms of pure expression, making in this way liberation from social encodings the major or sole political stake; it needs to be conceptualised as a process that coextends to the flows and assemblages that actualise it as a historical force. In Deleuze and Guattari’s apt wording, Desire is never separable from complex assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from micro-formation already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions, expectations, semiotic systems etc. Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions. (2013b: 251)

There is no need for this ‘biopolitical constructivism’9 to be couched in purely anti-normative and anti-ethical terms. What Deleuze and Guattari stand critical to is a notion of justice as transcendent representation and command, not as an immanent process that unfolds and is played out during social (re)production. It is precisely such an immanent and materialist conception that is expressed in the insight that ‘justice is the continuum of desire, with shifting limits that are always displaced’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 51). While this clearly means, contra Rawls and other liberals, that there is no single, normative definition of justice available for theory, it also allows for the presence of a normative/ethical valence in desiring (hence, social) production, since, otherwise, the use of the notion of justice would be superfluous. Thus, if as Ricoeur remarks ‘human life [ . . . ] lends itself to a basic discrimination between what it is approved as the better and what is disapproved as the worse’ (2000: 147), justice must be viewed as the social-desiring process that gives to such discriminations their tangible and thoroughly political (thus, contentious) forms. Deleuze’s hostility to dialectics notwithstanding, his insight into the immanent status that (the desire for) justice has relative to social being augments a crucial point, which we saw in Marx and can be traced further back in Hegel’s (1999b) notion of Sittlichkeit: society is an ethical category; that is, its constitutive forms have the ‘good’ and the ‘right’ as their immanent determinations.10 There are no social facts, not at least of any political weight, which are not ethically charged by the desire and problem of justice and the manifold phenomena the latter relates to: of freedom, authority, equality, hierarchy, legitimacy, dignity, the common good, rights, duties and more.

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The principle promulgated in the first chapter applies also here: the key is to read the statement ‘justice is an immanent determination of social being’ not in terms of an unproblematic identity between justice and society, legitimising in effect the ordinary proposition ‘society is just’. That justice determines social being means that it is also different – other than what is actual – and this difference constitutes a positive power of historical change. The Hegelian notion of ‘determination’ (Bestimung) is precisely geared to grasp how something operates as a defining quality as well as a telos not yet realised. In these terms, the effective presence of justice as an operative determination of a society’s Sittlichkeit refers to actuality, to the norms, customs and laws defining a social formation, but at the same time to potentiality, to a prospect and a project that opens history to the not-yet. Deleuzians may protest that, despite claims to the contrary, desire ends up being identified with external agency – justice, the Holy Grail of political thought. I insist that this is not the case. As it is generated and unfolds within a world that affects it and which it affects, desiring-production loses its purely functional character to become intentional movement, projecting and aiming towards, anticipating, struggling for. In the process, desire also acquires social and historical determinations: desire can be invested in the accumulation of wealth, becoming (desire for) profit; it can be invested in radical change, becoming (desire for) revolution; it can be invested in expansion and conquest, becoming (desire for) domination. Similarly, when desire invests in the right form (of social and political structures, of intersubjective relations, of individual behaviour), it becomes (a desire for) justice. Furthermore, by crossing the threshold of the human (of language, reflectivity, conviction, projection), desire morphs into volition, it becomes (a collective or individual) will, for justice, for power, for wealth. Nevertheless, power, justice, domination, continue to be determinations immanent to desire, covering productive trajectories rather than simply terminal points. Moreover, given that we are dealing with dynamic flows, such determinations constitute variations of a singular yet multiple social-desiring production, maintaining, preserving, augmenting, enhancing, improving or changing life not as a biological fact but as social existence; that is, a way of being. A ‘zone of indeterminacy’11 opens here – called thus because of its signifying surplus, not a lack of determinations – in which univocal significations become difficult: becoming-just, becoming-entrepreneur, becoming-conqueror, becoming-revolutionary, becoming-woman, becoming-man; all these are lines of social-desiring production that can intermingle in singular, intensive flows. Thus, what is an order of coercion, the state, can be at the same time an order of Right, just like what is an act of artistic creation can be also an act of resistance, as with much of street art. Naturally, state thought tries to capture becoming into a strict regime of signification in order to form a

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hierarchical partition of the sensible, based on clear identities and functions: the manager, the worker, the artist, the judge, the politician, the financier, the wife. In contrast, events of deterritorialisation, by accelerating libidinal flows, tend to intensify the zone of indiscernibility between different determinations of social/desiring production. Especially insurrections manifest a certain poetics of the street which reconfigure social space in a way that simultaneously challenges the prevailing regime of justice and defamiliarises the urban landscape, generating in the process both an alternative experience of justice and a new aesthetic dispensation. As a graffito in Athens has nicely put it, ‘You are beautiful like a burning bank’. But cannot riots be also as ugly as a lynching mob? While the insight under discussion allows justice to blend in the sublime heights of human creativity, at the same time it allows it to be traced in the basest and darkest corridors of the human psyche. An astute portrayal of the latter case has been offered by Aldous Huxley (1971) in his narrative of mass-induced paranoia in Loudun, where a group of Ursulines came to believe that they were possessed under the spell of Urbain Grandier, who was eventually burned at the stake. Huxley shows how the exorcism performed by Barré, the priest sent to the task, fused a passionate commitment to set things right with sadistic, sexual pleasure: God’s justice delivered in the form of ‘forcible colonic irrigation’, in what was the ‘equivalent, more or less, of rape in a public lavatory’ (ibid.: 134). The implications of this perspective are certainly unsettling, but they must not distract the key analytical point: a theory of justice should not suspend history to construct its own ideal form – as if justice only needs a mirror to reflect its concept to itself – it must seek justice as a productive desire becoming in mutable and hybrid historical forms. A zone of indiscernibility is not an undifferentiated mesh where distinctions dissolve, since even at high levels of intensity the multiple determinations of desire can on principle be analytically identified. Justice, specifically, may be said to operate as a determinative quality whenever desire invests in setting something right. But if justice means essentially ‘giving life its right form’, it exceeds a reduction to deontology. Herein, the analysis returns to the bond between justice and the good life. That there is such a bond has been argued by (political) philosophy from at least as early as Plato, who conceives of justice as participation in the Agathon. In fact, Plato’s participatory ontology is considerably more complex than its traditional labeling as arch-idealism suggests. Nevertheless, there is clearly a tendency to render the ‘good’ a transcendens, setting the tone for a statist conception of justice as an ordered form – whether of the polis or of the soul – whose order submits to a higher, immaterial source. By contrast, committed to a materialist theorisation, my analysis stays on a plane of immanence and conceives of the good as ‘a life’ – an embodied way of being, hence, always in connection to

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material well-being. To be sure, in human society the good life is culturally mediated. Hence, the ‘good’ can be detached from material well-being to the point that it comes to signify and demand the negation of all earthly pleasures, as with forms of religious asceticism and political militancy. While though the polyvalence of the good in humankind cannot but be acknowledged as an empirical datum, its re-cognition does not necessarily yield ethical relativism. Rather, to uphold a materialist perspective is to adopt a critical notion of material well-being, which offers some criteria for evaluating forms of the good (life). The good life may be more than well-being, yet it finds in the latter its material basis, texture and coordinates. Justice in this context operates as a key mediator between the two notions, in the sense that the desire for justice is one of the determinative qualities that make material well-being not only a biological condition but an aspect of a good life. Which is to say, whatever its concrete sphere – whether it concerns recognition, production or distribution; whatever its concrete form and content – whether it is actualised as fairness, reciprocity, equality or hierarchy; whatever its historical expression – whether it unravels as jurisprudence, resistance or flight, the desire for justice is a dimension of the movement towards a good life, which pushes human beings to develop, augment, improve, flee, transgress, enjoy, walk upright. Specifically, justice emerges as a determination of desire on account of the fact that bodies do not grow in isolation but connect, interact and assemble. As such, to desire justice is to (want to) produce those conditions that will enable the good life in a specific social context or secondarily will repair a wrong suffered. Arguing as much means that procedural and deontological conceptions of justice are severely limiting (cf. Ricoeur, 2000: 36–57). For sure, it may happen that ‘the right (form)’ is invested with such significance that justice ends up being identified with a moral law and the duty to follow it. However, as Hegel (1999b) has already stressed, to detach deontology from teleology and posit right as its own end is to fall to a formalism that strips justice of any substance and subsumes life to an abstract rule. To set the right form or do the right thing is always connected with a way of life, shaped through some experience of the good – regardless of the different nuances the latter notion may acquire (enjoyable, rich, pious, ascetic, committed, dutiful, dignified). As Ricoeur corroborates, ‘The question what I ought to do? is secondary in relation to the more elementary question how I wish to live my life’ (2000: 148). In fact, as hinted in the first chapter, since its effective presence determines the actuality of the good life, (becoming-) justice is not just a condition of the former, it is one of its active components. That is why ultimately, in Benjamin’s apt expression, ‘justice is not a virtue like other virtues (humility, neighborly love, loyalty, courage), but rather constitutes a new ethical category’, which encapsulates the ‘striving to turn the world into the highest

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good’ (1916). No longer an alienating experience, by becoming-justice the world is turned into a hospitable place where it is a joy to be. To be sure, against this assertion stands the famous dictum fiat Justitia et pereat mundus, ‘let justice be done and the world perish’. Following Bloch (2015), one should indeed cross the conventional, proverbial use of this phrase to reach its apocalyptic edges: let the world perish so that justice is done. The contradiction between this experience and the conception that Benjamin’s formula articulates is real, but it does not oblige us to dispel one or the other. Rather, the proverb attests to the autonomous integrity of justice, in the sense that the latter may be connected to worldly forms of the good, but as a desire, as a problem and thus as an ethical category – in brief, as a determination of embodied being – it has its own consistency, without being identified a priori to a specific material form. Equally crucially, the proverb – especially in its apocalyptic inflection – indicates the excessiveness of desire, which may reach a point of absolute deterritorialisation. Therein, justice not only abolishes all civic order but also dissipates every spatiotemporal coordinate: the world can be good only in the moment of its perishing. For sure, another, more just, world may be in store afterwards, as with Christian apocalypticism. Still, the heart of the matter does not alter: while as a productive desire – as a becoming – justice is directed towards giving the world its right form, turning it thus into the ‘highest good’, it may also accelerate to the point that not only it disembeds from material being, but it negates the latter entirely. In this context, to insist on the materiality of justice has, along with a critical potency, a therapeutic dimension, helping to prevent the severance of justice from the world. But theory can do that only because, even when it reaches the intensity of world-rejection, justice remains a desire permeating embodied being. Which is to say, qua material process actualised in and through the interaction, connection and assemblage of desiring bodies, justice is ‘a thing of this world’.12 FACETS OF DIFFERENTIATION I (IDEATION) A key inference to be drawn from the preceding analysis is that justice is not an ideology representing how the world should be, effectively legitimising and/or mystifying structures of power and class dominance (although both are historical functions of an order of Right). Justice concerns embodied assemblages and multiplicities and their trajectories of association, flight and contention. On the other hand, the indexing of justice as a distinct ethical category clearly implies a conceptual demarcation; that is, its idealisation. In this sense, without retreating to idealism, to map out the actualisation of justice in human society is to sketch the crossing of a threshold, marked by the development of the idea of justice.

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Asserting that the acquisition of ideational form(s) is a differentiating marker of human, as opposed to ‘wild’, justice may seem odd in a study that draws heavily from Deleuze and Guattari, known to have bluntly stated that ‘there is no ideology and never has been’ (2013b: 3). Whatever the precise context of this statement, it would be unwise to claim to have discovered in a single sentence, with all the rhetorical inflections that it may carry, the definitive truth of a complex thought. Even less tenable is to identify Deleuze’s vitalistic materialism – or for that matter Marx’s historical materialism – with a reductionism that explains away all thought through its identification with neurochemical processes. According to Deleuze and Guattari, assemblages comprise, along with a ‘machinic assemblage of bodies’, also a ‘collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies’ (ibid., 102). Arguably, even assemblages composed of animal bodies – for example, a wolf pack – have this dimension, since a howling is much more than an inarticulate noise, it is an event of enunciation with incorporeal effects – attracting females, scaring off intruders and more. Having said that, the important difference remains that, in animals, enunciations do not assume the form of statements and discourse. Obviously, that human assemblages of enunciation contain a discursive dimension has much to do with language; which is to say, to cross the threshold of the human is to cross the threshold of language. The implications of this insight have preoccupied philosophy from the very moment that it was theoretically registered (by Aristotle if not earlier), until it acquired tormenting proportions through philosophy’s so-called linguistic turn in the twentieth century. While aspects of this long discussion will appear – similar to the way key epistemological issues were touched upon in the first chapter – the scope of this section is more modest. That language ‘communicates’ is a truism. Yet as Deleuze and Guattari (ibid.: 88ff.) insist, the process of differentiation that the development of language marks does not have to do only with a more refined capacity for communication, it concerns the consolidation of semiotic systems able to perform a general signification of social being. In other words, language is not merely or primarily a vector of communication and information; language orders, it orders even when it does not command, since questions, prescriptions and promises are also ‘order-words’, which link concrete speech acts and enunciations to a social structure and, thus, to a social obligation – ‘is it not time to start looking for a job?’, ‘Failure to repay debts generates a moral hazard’, ‘I promise to take care of you for the rest of my life’. In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari’s point does not concern the power of language to give form to formless matter, it concerns its embeddedness in social/desiring machines and material assemblages. As they put it, ‘“Behind” statements and semioticisations are only machines, assemblages, and movements of

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deterritorialization’; wherefrom the conclusion that ‘pragmatics is not a complement to logic, syntax, or semantics; on the contrary, it is the fundamental element upon which all the rest depend’ (ibid.: 172). Based on this rationale, justice may be designated as an ‘order-word’, whose enunciation and articulation in statements constitute speech acts attached to material assemblages: structuring, sanctioning, criticising, passing a judgement upon them. ‘No justice, no peace’, ‘Right is on the side of those who revolt, not on those who submit’, ‘Increasing university fees is unfair’, ‘The debt is odious’, ‘Contractual relations are not exploitative’, ‘Private companies have a right to fire employees’, ‘The burdens of the crisis should be distributed fairly’. On a more structural level, justice constitutes and operates as a symbolic/semiotic condensation within a general regime of signs that configures and partitions social being. That is to say, the concept of justice belongs and partakes to the formalisation of expression that defines the appearance of social formations as political units in history. Specifically, justice functions as the generic – that is, conceptual – expression of an order of Right, which (unlike natural right forming and regulating animal interaction) is configured and mediated by a semiotic/linguistic set of commands, sanctions, imputations and prescriptions, regardless if the latter operate on a customary level or have acquired a legal form. Moreover, in accordance to the principle posited above, justice remains an order word even when it signifies a Solen to which reality falls short from or even when its prescriptive potency attaches to revolutionary events. ‘All power to the Soviets’ is as much an order statement – an enunciation – that concerns the right form and structure of society, as is the equally famous sentence from Romans (13:1): ‘Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God’. More things will be said about the bifurcation of justice into authoritarian/ hierarchical and horizontal/egalitarian assemblages in the final chapter. Currently, attention is directed to the transformative and prefigurative potency of language. Deleuze and Guattari (2013b: 128) further draw out this potency by noting that beneath order words there are ‘pass-words’, acting as ‘components of passage’. The salient point here is that language not only ties bodies to ‘organized, stratified compositions’ (ibid.), it also effects ruptures and operates as a line of flight, calling forth problems and opening potentialities that dominant, ‘public’ discourse and opinion block or exclude. For instance, instead of answering ‘What is the optimal way to repay public debt’, positing the question ‘Who should own the means of production’? Transgressing questions of form, which attach to communication and its conditions of operation, language – like thought, to which it constitutes a prerequisite – can be equivalent to the ‘throwing of a stone by a war machine’ (Deleuze, 1987: 31).

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It should be clear by now that justice also acts as a ‘pass-word’, which expresses the disordering of worlds; that is, processes and flows of decoding and deterritorialisation. This is a key insight, since it serves to destabilise every normative definition of justice, be it ‘justice is order’, ‘justice is fairness’, ‘justice is equality’ and more. Yet as far as it still conceives ideas of justice in terms of what they express, that is, as far as ideas are conceived as direct expressions of materiality, even this assertion is insufficient. For, as Deleuze and Guattari affirm, rather than only expressing a form, expression has its own form(s). Riots express social grievances and ideologies express social interests, yet they both have their own formal consistency that needs to be theorised in its own terms. By the same token, it does not suffice to assert that the idea of justice expresses material assemblages and flows, sharing in their differential qualities (as many forms of justice, so many ideas); it is necessary to make a distinct analysis of justice in its ideational form. Interestingly, following a Deleuzian path has brought us to a Hegelian insight: the idea of justice is not simply an expression of real (existing, virtual, potential) assemblages, it is also a sui generis actualisation. As a result, the idea of justice has its distinct (though not independent) ‘conceptual history’, of the type that Reinhart Koselleck (2002) has suggested. Just like with the relation between desiring and social production, the crucial task for a theory of justice is to avoid a contrastive opposition between desire and language. To enter the domain of language is not to abandon the plane of immanence where desire unfolds. Rather, in human beings, along with somatic activity, desire is actualised as logos, investing, permeating and animating processes of rationalisation and discursive articulation, from theory and philosophy to myth, fiction, poetry. Writing State and Revolution, the Second Treatise on Government, A Season in Hell, Wasteland, is as much a libidinal investment as is storming the winter palaces, investing in the slave trade, joining the barricades of the Paris Commune, entering the Society of King Charles the Martyr. Moreover, in the same way that praxis extends the horizons of the desire that produces it, reason and thought also act productively on desire by endowing it with a reflective valence that allows its re-cognition on an abstract/generic level. Deleuze (2004b: 95) has observed that ‘the discovery of the idea’ was inseparable from a question which sought to uncover the essence of any given phenomenon and differentiate it from its accidental properties. In this context the notion of the Idea became loaded with idealist overtones, signifying immaterial forms which are said to be more stable, hence, in a sense ‘more real’ than their material counterparts, whose transience casts doubt upon their reality – ‘Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?’, as Poe (2008) beautifully ponders. In addition, and as a result, ideas have tended to instill the figure of a Transcendens, by representing thought as a process of

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ascension to a realm that lies ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ the sensible world. Conversely, materialism has all too often taken to imply the negation of ideas on principle and their reduction to empirical processes or objects; ‘the being of spirit is a bone’, to recall Hegel’s (1979: 208) dictum. Deleuze (2004b: 96) suggests an alternative road, which does not dismiss ideas per se but reads them in a way that they belong to ‘the inessential’, partaking as such in the multiplicity of becoming and its ‘spatiotemporal coordinates’. In a similar vein, Badiou (2011) has recently provided a conceptualisation of ideas as products of a movement of thought that does not ascend to a transcendent realm to find Truth but unfolds as an intrinsic component of immanent truth-processes. Following this line of theorisation, ideas are here taken to designate generalisable abstractions that crystallise a phenomenon, or class of phenomena, to the spheres of noesis (conceptual thought) and imagination. In these terms, an idea – ‘order’, ‘liberty’, ‘equality’, ‘beauty’ – can function both as a concept, a generality that enables theorisation, as well as an ideal, a valued principle capable of orientating and/or regulating action. Along with acknowledging the immanence of the thought-processes that give rise to ideas, Badiou acknowledges their dialectical quality, though he prefers to place his analysis within a Platonic rather than Hegelian register (unique as Badiou’s ‘Platonism’ may be and despite his critical attitude to Hegel being far less severe than Deleuze’s polemical anti-Hegelianism). The alleged totalising tendency of Hegelian dialectics, accused of succumbing difference and multiplicity to the Whole, will preoccupy us in the next chapter. As far as the current analysis is concerned, it avowedly admits its dialectical facets, in the sense that the emergence of ideas is seen along lines drawn by Hegel, as a creative actualisation that moves from the level of immediacy to that of determinate and conceptual reflectivity, while remaining on a plane of immanent becoming. To be sure, Marx has set a veritable trend of materialist critique by claiming that Hegel remained within an idealist register, wherein ideas are conceived as products of a Geist realising itself through the tortuous passage from its Negative, material reality.13 Against this (gnostic) idealism, Marx (1995) has famously claimed in Capital to have retained the ‘rational kernel’ of the dialectic by turning it ‘right side up again’. Read in its context, this statement does not amount to a substitution of Matter for Spirit; that is, for another self-realising identity. Marx’s critical gesture is to have made the starting point of the dialectic embodied being in its multiplicity, fluidity and potency for transformation. But in attempting to do this, was not Marx realising young Hegel’s programmatic declaration that philosophy’s task is to ‘think life’?14 For what is life if not multiplicity, motion and change? In that case, the Hegelian dialectic already has a materialist potency. Interestingly, if dialectics makes thought an index of the world’s active movement, so that both (thought and its object) may be said to have a

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dialectical quality, Marx’s explicatory statement that ‘the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind and translated into forms of thought’ (1995) is missing something of the dynamic openness of dialectical thought. The movement of ideational abstraction – that is, the production of ideas – is ‘dialectical’ insofar as it is not an (accurate or inaccurate) re-presentation of the immediately given in abstract form, but rather an actualisation that simultaneously widens the horizons of thought and reality. Admittedly, Hegel calls the whole process dialectical because it implies the negation of immediacy, a point that constitutes a major target of Deleuze’s attacks. But, as Badiou (2005: 221–232) acknowledges, the moment of negation in the process does not amount to an (an)nihilation; it is integrated to a re-cognition that grasps immediate ‘being-there’ on the abstract level of its concept, as a mediated idealisation that is ‘non-immediacy’ as well as ‘otherthan-immediacy’ – negation and alterity. It follows that the identity between thought and being, which the Hegelian dialectic notoriously posits, also marks at the same moment a difference, since to think and to conceptualise reality is to re-present it in a creative way, which can thus grasp along with ‘what-is-here’ – actuality – the ‘not-yet’ – potentiality. In other words, if the dialectic marks ‘the logic of living action’,15 the identity of thought and being does not register the subsumption of actuality to ideality but the speculative opening of a space of critique and change. The term justice is precisely an idea that in its twofold dimension as concept and ideal has such a creative and transformative potency. To grasp justice abstractly as a real determination of social/desiring production is to move from the immediate actuality of justice to its reflective re-cognition. In this way, justice not only inhabits the space of collective imaginaries – by becoming a symbol, a goddess, a spectre, a promise – but comes to know itself as a multiple process, which has actuality yet is also other than the historically actual. Noetic actualisation thus, the formation of an idea of justice, shares the contentious propensity that justice has as practical activity: on the one hand, as a real abstraction referring to the actual it can serve as the latter’s apology; on the other hand, in its abstract, ideational dimension it can also be formally contrasted to actuality, hence function as a critique. In this respect, the idea(l) of justice is a movement immanent to the desire for justice, augmenting rather than only stifling the latter’s productive and transformative valence. Under this prism, idealist thought appears as a temptation immanent to the idealisation of justice, to the extent that, by being actualised as an idea(l) other than the actual, justice can be posited as a transcendent principle, a summum bonum. I say ‘temptation’ because idealism may actually appear to heighten the critical force of justice, since it accentuates its contrast with the suffering and violence defining material reality. Even more, it is possible

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to adopt a strong apophatic standpoint, which denies on principle the possibility of the realisation of justice in the mundane world or at best allows for a diluted actuality, wherein justice is an echo of what cannot be present in its fullness – Karl Barth (2003), Simon Weil, even (I contend) Adorno and Derrida, provide versions of this type of critical idealism. Admittedly, in this version idealist thought offers a powerful critique of all attempts to implement the idea of justice through violent means. Unfortunately, the cost is surrendering all hope for historical change. For without such a prospect, by forfeiting the not-yet as a practical figure of justice, critique ends up being an abstract, infinite judgement upon the world, balancing between melancholy and resentment over an injustice which is weak to fight against and repair. There is also a more moderate version of idealist thought, diversely embodied in figures like Voegelin and more recently Cacciari (2018). This version provides the resources for a sobering pragmatism, which strives to withhold both the identification of a legal order with justice and the revolutionary zeal for the latter’s realisation in a brotherhood of spirit. Yet Cacciari’s prescriptive claims to the contrary notwithstanding, the loyalties of such moderate idealism lie with the state, as the necessary instrument to curb excess and allow the implementation of justice in the frail world. Not by coincidence, even in such a critical frame as that provided by Paul, Augustine and later Spinoza, idealist theorisations of this type are happy to apologise for some state violence while engulfed by horror and aversion in front of the rebellious mob. The salient point here is not that every idealism’s (not so) secret mission is to justify state violence and hence the powers-that-be. It is rather to highlight a paradox of idealism, hinted earlier; namely, that it instrumentalises what it disavows. As Balibar (2002a: 130) has observed, every idealism – whether it appeals to law, communication, reason, the individual – posits as an antidote to violence what is seemingly its opposite: justice, right, respect, love. However, for the ideal to be realized, violence will prove necessary since there are all those who are unmoved by the virtues that would lead justice to triumph – the ‘jihadist’ standing today as an almost willingly enacted stereotype of this sinister Other. There is thus an instrumental bond between violence and justice that idealism forges through its logic of application. For as long as justice designates a substantive ideal preceding social being, the actualisation of ideality necessarily is posited in terms of application to a world bent to resist it. Sooner or later, the need for violence, whether in the form of imposition or sacrifice, appears; and like Christian priests in the Crusades, every idealist preacher is called to sanctify arms as an instrument of justice, arms which can very well be bombs instead of swords (cf. Buc, 2015). For sure, there is also the possibility of a principled negation of violence, of the type that Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. have become exemplar figures. Yet the doctrine of nonviolence, noble as its intentions may be, does not avoid the instrumentalisation of violence; it

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is rather ready to become its victim. Insofar justice is conceived idealistically, violence is always a tool external to justice, which one may be ready or unwilling to use. In this context, violence, martyrdom and sacrifice are inherent possibilities of idealism and its logic of application. Thus, the more intense the desire animating idealism, more violence will be bred, more martyrs will be called upon. Jihadism, from this angle, is a desiring machine to have reached the state of a delirious idealism (cf. Bhatt, 2014). It may seem that my analysis joins the orchestra that for many years has been waxing lyrical against grand causes and utopian projects. Such is not the case though, for idealism as a theoretical/philosophical stance is different from being orientated by political idea(l)s, it is an immanent yet derivative outcome of a process that primarily concerns the actualisation of justice into ideational form. Admittedly, arguing thus does not dispense with the problem of violence, far from it. Yet the theoretical principle stands: to conceive justice ideationally, thus, to think (about) justice, is not to posit a preexisting form that Ought to be implemented, it is to re-cognise the potency and potentiality of the world to be transformed and become the ‘highest good’. The dialectic integration of logos and noesis to processes of desiring/ social production not only stays within the materialist register that Deleuze and Badiou stipulate, it also upholds historical materialism’s pivotal insight – which both philosophers adopt – into the historicity of noetic/discursive processes. Every idea of justice, either bred in bondage or in freedom, whether rallying for order or for revolt, emerges in history and has identifiable spatiotemporal coordinates; which is to say, every idea (of justice) testifies to a practical, lived experience (of justice). Additionally, insofar as reason and language are understood as historical processes embedded into material assemblages and flows, some analytical primacy must be accorded to practical activity over its rationalisations and encodings. Simply put, it is highly unlikely that any determinate idea of ‘communism’ would have appeared without collective practices of mutuality, egalitarianism, donation and more, all testifying to the practical possibility of communist forms of association and, thus, communist forms of justice. Likewise, there would be no notion of ‘popular justice’ if its practical forms have not been actualised throughout history; for example, in public acts of humiliation practiced by Chinese peasants, from which the communist regime drew inspiration. The point has been eloquently articulated on the level of a general principle by Kristin Ross in her study of the Paris Commune: ‘Actions produce dreams and ideas, not the other way around’ (2015: 7). This insight augments the central point advanced about the material presuppositions of a critical theory of justice: if the idea of justice can become a critical weapon, it is because there is a living desire for justice actualised in practical action, sometimes carrying real weapons.

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Important as the issue of analytical or ontological primacy is, the theoretical point at hand exceeds it. From a materialist perspective, which sets off from the actual in its material density, justice cannot merely be posited, either as an idea(l) or even as the substantive content of processes of sociopolitical change. It must be affirmed as a historical production, that is, as actuality. To this extent, the idea of justice can only be attested in the objectivity of its practical actualisations, so that (saying the same thing backwards) the activities that are productive of justice also bear witness to it.16 Ultimately, it is this historically testified actuality that prevents ideas of (popular) justice from being identified with a vacuous idealism or with a resentful fantasy of fulness in face of a reality of lack. It is hardly an accident that those who do reduce (popular) ideas and desires for justice to ressentiment/resentment, from Nietzsche and Scheler to the numerous intellectuals crusading nowadays against the revolutionary legacy of the past and the subaltern insurgencies of the present, tend to keep silent over the former’s productive and creative aspects, of its practical becoming(s), which start from the molecular field of everyday interaction to reach the level of institutional (trans)formation. No doubt, the Marxist base/superstructure schema intends to convey the analytical primacy of material practices over ideational forms. However, it does so by forging an ontological duality between action and thought. Thus, although Marx and Engels admit that ideas can influence material structures of being, in the context of the conceptual binary between material base and ideological superstructure ideas acquire an irrevocably fetishistic character, logged to the domain of representation. That noetic constructs, like ideas, play a re-presentative function may be true, but to place representation on an onto-political sphere that is secondary to social production means forfeiting the productivity of ideas. It is this productive element that Badiou stresses in his recent work. Ideas allow the inscription of particular/local practices and singular political sequences to the level of history and, thus, generate the constitution of an ecumenic political horizon – that of communism – which can encompass such diverse sequences of action. In his own terms, ‘ideation’ is ‘the representation of the universal power of something whose immediate particularity is very often perilous, unstable and a source of anguish’ (2011: 111). To be sure, herein the lingering ‘Leninist’ tendency highlighted in the introduction resurfaces, exiling subaltern insurgency to the realm of negativity. As a leverage to it, it is apposite to reaffirm the Deleuzian stress on the immanent positivity of insurgent flows, which become-justice without necessarily forming a clear concept of it. The anarchist corroborates: insurgency in its raging pathos ‘is not opposed to knowledge and contemplation. However, it is no science, and it does not provide clear, extensive declarations of what we want’ (Landauer, 2010: 191). Under this prism, ideas of justice constitute an affirmation of what is already affirmative, not a sublimation and/

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or redemption of, nor an elevation from, immediate negativity. In this way, theory escapes the double bind of Negation and Lack without abandoning Badiou’s key assumption that the transformative dynamic of subaltern uprisings is boosted through ideation. We are thus back to the insight that the deployment of Hegelian terminology has helped to foreground. To conceptualise flows of becoming through the idea of justice – for justice to move from the level of immediate actualisation to that of concept and ideal – is not only to grasp abstractly an essential quality of these desiring flows, it is to re-cognise them under a more comprehensive light. Like the related ideas of freedom and equality, the idea of justice in its different systematic articulations – Christian, Islamic, socialist, liberal – do not simply reflect desire and its practical actualisations; ideas of justice are themselves actualisations of the desire for justice, having as such an evocative and creative power that, in Deleuze’s words, ‘is full of political and critical force’ (1995: 32). To elaborate, the idea of justice designates singular historical processes – for example, the Gordon riots, the ten-hour bill, collectivisation, the welfare state, market de-regulation – without being exclusive to any of them, since it constitutes their shared determination. In this respect, all these events can be exposed as actualisations of a singular phenomenon that thought has grasped ideationally. Ideation, thus, opens a noetic/conceptual space that makes identification, differentiation, classification and critical evaluation possible. To establish, for instance, that the Russian Revolution was a becoming-justice is to assert the irreducibility of the event to its historical conditions of possibility – to war – and draw out a generalisable quality, which helps understand why the event inspired millions. At the same time, it offers an anchoring point for the development of an immanent critique. For the idea of justice opens to a becoming-justice the problem of how to conform to its concept, a problem that sounds abstract but is thoroughly practical, hence, resolved only historically. Admittedly, here is one of the loopholes from which idealism may emerge, positing an abstract concept as the solution to the problem of justice. To repeat though, this is only a possibility, not the inevitable result of ideation. In contrast, the idea of justice can properly actualise justice as a generic determination of being – which is always (a) becoming – because it lacks a determinate, pre-existing form other than its historical actualisations. Being thus relinquished from idealist definitions that claim to capture its content in advance, becoming-justice is elucidated as a productive tension between actuality and ideality with an eminently experimental dimension. To actualise justice is not to conform to an existing ideal form, it is to experiment with collective ways of being. In this respect, a materialist theorisation of ideation helps secure on the conceptual level the practical experimentalism with which history abounds.

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By the same token, on the basis of the nonidentity between actuality and ideality, the idea of justice can express not only the given, it testifies to other actualities or potentialities, to different assemblages, forms and practices. By being actualised ideationally, justice can exert a power of multiplication over singular flows and types of becoming, enabling their spread, acceleration, development and growth beyond their original site of appearance. There is thus a surplus that is proper to ideality, a certain excess of the idea of justice relative to any historical actuality. In this sense, ideational actualisation accentuates the excessiveness of the desire for justice, by rendering the subject of a becoming-justice – which is none other than the social/desiring flows composing the latter – to an object of commitment that is yet to come. There is here for sure the danger of idealist reification, which may stifle the creativity of becoming-justice by trying to fit it into a conceptual norm. Moreover, excess must not be attached exclusively to the idea of justice, a linguistic idealism that Derrida does not entirely avoid. Excessiveness is primarily attested on the level of materiality, determined as it does by a desire that, in its rhizomatic and productive valence, is never exhausted to actuality, for it carries and opens a virtual spectrum of difference. The idea of justice, in this sense, comprehends along with the actual also the virtual space where desire unfolds (cf. Deleuze, 2004b, 99ff.). Otherwise put, the idea of justice points to the unexhausted potentialities of the (human) world. An idea of justice does not have to attain theoretical reflectivity, it can remain fluid, inconsistent, practical and customary. Nevertheless, if its utopian propensity is to acquire historical form, some systematisation is in order. When the latter transpires, an idea, like justice, may be said to have crossed the threshold of ideology. Of course, I am aware how loaded the latter notion is, to such a degree indeed that I am sympathetic to attempts at developing alternative notions, notably ‘noology’.17 However, given the present technical use of ‘ideas’, using ‘ideology’ as a term for denoting the former’s actualisation into systematic discourse is commendable. Moreover, the association of the term with the political doctrines and practices that shaped modern history, with ‘political ideologies’, has firmly established the connotation my study wishes to maintain. For the term is not used here to designate a generic phenomenon of consciousness, whether its function is said to be mystification, as the traditional Marxist position was, social integration, as Althusser (2001) and Ricoeur (1988) have in their own way argued, or even if the notion stretches to denote a (quasi-compulsory, quasi-desired) way of life, as Žižek (2008) has maintained. Ideology denotes the development of a more or less coherent vision of the good life and of the social forms that are proper to it. By thus opening to desire unexplored horizons as well as integrating it to projects with a universal élan, ideology – its doctrinaire aspects notwithstanding – is not primarily an operation of capture. Rather through the mediation

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of ideologies the intensity of a becoming-justice increases to world-historical proportions. From this angle, ideologies may be said to be intrinsic to (the history of) justice. While systematisation implies theoretical labour, it concerns much more than the elaboration of a theory. The growth of ideas of justice into ideological form also involves the development of narratives which, as Ricoeur (1984) has shown, creatively frame human experience into a temporally coherent form. To re-cognise justice ideationally is to tell a story, which encompasses the past, the present and the future, about the actuality and potentiality of a just life and a just world. In fact, theories of justice not only have themselves a narrative dimension, they can also partake to wider ‘grand narratives’, from the liberal evolutionary progression towards cosmopolitan peace to the socialist revolutionary gospel about the vindication of the toiling masses.18 On the level of desiring/social production this corresponds to, and mediates, the constitution of collective assemblages and, furthermore, their growth into movement form. Movements can be initiated from the grassroot level of social being, ‘from below’, or they may originate from the ruling classes, ‘from above’ (Cox and Nilsen, 2004); in either case, the principle is the same: from ancient, medieval and early modern religious movements, to the great ideological movements that have defined late modernity, up to the recent expansion of neoliberalism and jihadism, the actualisation of justice at the level of ideological systematisation corresponds to the social/desiring mobilisation of a sociopolitical milieu. Acquiring an ideological form clearly affects the relevant idea of justice that a given milieu embodies and promotes, since the contents of this idea are stabilised, criteria of adequacy are set, forms of actualisation are sanctioned and more. At the end of this process stands Orthodoxy, the sedimentation of a Canon acting as frame of normalisation, inclusion, exclusion, stratification and hierarchy. Panagiotis Kondylis (2002: 201–14) has argued that this is the fate of all radical movements. The thesis certainly has substantial historical support, yet the appearance of ideology must still not be axiomatically identified with the establishment of a power centre wherefrom Truth emits. The acquisition of ideological form is an immanent process of composition which accompanies the historical development of the assemblages and milieus within which ideas operate and unfold, a development that no centre controls entirely. To deploy Deleuze and Guattari’s apt expression, ideological doctrines are a ‘combined formation, constructed from bits and pieces, various intermingled codes and flux, partials and derivatives that constitute its very life or its becoming’ (2013a: 141). In this context, ideologies can operate as vectors of critique, not only as circuits of legitimacy, regulation and normalisation. In becoming an ideology, therefore, justice does not necessarily turn into a dogma apologising for the present figure of the world, it may become

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a project, which seeks to bridge the present with the future by altering the former’s shape and form. Mindful of historical examples like that of Marxism and Christianity, is it possible that the vitality of an ideology, its capacity to constitute a productive vector of the desire for justice, is conditional on its capacity to remain on a horizontal plane and resist hierarchical regimentation? In either case, just like the consolidation of the state form can never fully put the becoming of justice to rest, ideology – even when it gets st(r) atified and transposes the idea(l) of justice to the level of a transcendent sign – remains an operational component in the (re)production and (trans)formation of collective assemblages unfolding on a plane of immanence. Crucial as its sociopolitical functions may be, the ideation of justice exceeds regulation, apology, even critique and subversion. As analysed in the first chapter, the actualisation of justice on the ideational/conceptual level helps establish a circuit of connectivity to the symbiotic real. For by exposing justice on the level of a concept, human beings may find that one of the most fundamental determinations of their own life is also a determination of the reality they partake, a conatus that pervades nonhuman animal being and, even more, a quality immanent to the dynamic (re-, de-, and trans-) formations and interactions that is the world. In other words, in the idea of justice, humankind may find that its essence is not a severed space of interiority, but its kosmiotita, its being-part-of-a-world. From this angle, through the production of (ideologically mediated) biopolitical forms of justice, in becomingjustice, humankind is not merely actualising and asserting its own powers and differential capacities, it also ‘praises creation’ (Miller, 1962: 75). And don’t we find in such a participatory ontology an immanent criterion of human forms of justice? FACETS OF DIFFERENTIATION II (INSTITUTIONALISATION) To sum up some of the key insights drawn, human communities, like other forms of animal association, are hardwired, along with ensuring their smooth reproduction, to establish the right conditions for their well-being. In other animal worlds, however, ‘right’ is mainly actualised as an instinctive code (although even here a disparity has been highlighted between justice and its coded forms of actualisation). In human society, on the other hand, the material practices that constitute forms of association are not structured by an instinctive code productive of social homeostasis; that is, by natural right. Thus, the good life becomes problematic, a problem of justice. It is within this intensive field that the idea(l) of justice is also borne out. Moreover, ideality must be conceived not as the product of an abstract ‘human mind’, much

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less as the self-manifestation of a hypostatic Geist; it must be conceived as a sociocultural process. Up to a point, the analysis adopts an anthropological perspective, for which the differentiating element marking the passage to the human is ‘culture’, a nexus of practices, rituals, symbols, beliefs and ideas that configure human interaction and mediate the desire for a good life (cf. Sahlins, 1964). Then again, it was pointed out earlier that modern ethology challenges this restrictive use of culture and it would certainly be unwise to mark the latter as an absolute, immobile border. In fact, not unlike language and reason (which culture presupposes, but also gives historical form), the notion of culture can be reified and end up functioning as an instrument of classification and discrimination. This age-old phenomenon of a ‘culturalisation’ of difference – with all its imperialist and orientalist overtones – has been recently manifested in essentialist dichotomies between western tolerance and the intolerant Others, especially Muslims, who have been forced to a position to have to state publicly the obvious, that they are not all fanatics (Brown, 2006). To avoid this theoretical-cum-political pitfall, it is necessary to stress two points, which relate to the fluid, ultimately political, boundaries between the human and the animal. First, the appearance of culture marks not an ontological rift from the physical world, since even if it differentiates human beings it continues to unfold on the same plane of immanence; culture satisfies and expands biological needs at the very same time that it registers ‘nature’ on symbolic/imaginary landscapes. Secondly, culture itself becomes, which is to say, it constitutes a multiple, fluid and mutable process of codification immanent to the totalisation of human assemblages into singular historical forms. In Deleuzian terms, culture is immanent to the actualisation of the social abstract machine into a historical society and a historical people. In this sense, justice is much more than a ‘cultural construct’, with culture providing a sufficient explanation for its unique actualisation in human social systems. The desire for and problem of justice is an integral component of cultural production, and culture mediates justice, in the sense that all historical forms of justice bear a cultural imprint, but it is not its source. In a more materialist vein, that follows Marx’s suggestions, the problematic, hence ideational, overtones that justice acquires in human society can be linked to the production of surpluses, what Bataille (1988) in a graphic fashion conceptualised as the ‘accursed share’. Regardless of the merits of the concept, the management of surplus productivity transcending biological needs and economic expediency poses indeed a first-order problem, with serious political ramifications – given especially how it determines class divisions, hatreds and violence. Accordingly, it is a problem that is closely tied to the problem of justice, providing a substantial part of its material content, pertaining to production, distribution, provision and consumption. Still, to

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make this line of thought fertile for a theory of justice, it is necessary to avoid a direct correspondence as well as a simplistic isomorphism between surplus production and forms of justice. For in that case, what would disappear is the mediating activity that stands as the salient facet of differentiation, namely, institutionalisation. As Deleuze has argued in his own terms, social formations, along with a surplus of material goods, produce symbolic, linguistic and libidinal surpluses. Indeed, far from being two clearly demarcated processes running parallel, these two forms of surplus feed and augment each other: a world of abundant goods will excite the libido, but it would have hardly been produced without the latter’s effective presence. In such a condition of overflows (of goods, libidinal investments, codes), desire never fully coincides with its actuality. In this respect, excessiveness is an immanent quality of desire rather than a function of surplus material production. By the same token, the problem of justice is embedded in the material (re)production of social being but has its own consistency, marked by an intensification of libidinal flows investing in the ‘right’ and the ‘good’. Provided therefore that the notion of surplus is properly extended, it is arguable that the problem of justice can be viewed as a problem of surpluses. Which is to say, ‘surplus’ is a category that can assist in the exposition of a differential quality of human justice, without essentialising the boundaries between man and animal. For if justice assumes a singular intensity in human forms of association, it is not because ‘Man’ has something that animals lack, it is because human beings have the same qualities in amplitude. Consequently, instinct does not suffice as an organisational modality of right; instead, human forms of life develop their own distinct modalities, institutions. The difference is aptly conveyed by Deleuze: On the one hand an organism reacts instinctively to external stimuli, extracting from the external world the elements which will satisfy its tendencies and needs; these elements comprise worlds that are specific to different animals. On the other hand, the subject institutes an original world between its tendencies and the external milieu, developing artificial means of satisfaction. (2004a: 19)

To appreciate the argument advanced about institutionalisation as a threshold marking the passage to human being, it is necessary to dissociate it from a reduction of institutional forms to a control – even a sublimating one – of biological/libidinal drives. Towards this end, Deleuze’s distinction between law and institutions is apposite. While law is ‘a limitation of action’, institution is ‘a positive model of action’ (ibid.). This definition does not preclude the appearance of institutional apparatuses of control, discipline, coercion and oppression. Yet even in such cases, institutions have a fundamental positivity

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vis-à-vis the articulation of social forms of being and, thus (Foucault would add), of knowledge and subjectivity. In other words, regardless of their specific function, which may well be coercive, institutions are productive of savoir, they embody and transmit cultural codes, structure human coexistence and enable its consistent reproduction. Thus, although institutions imply consistency and segmentation, hence, certain rules of conduct, they must not be identified with a capture of desire, even less with the appearance of the state form, which is to say, of a transcendent rationality that orders the unruly flows of life. To be sure, in order to be consistent, functional and viable, institutions require an organisational and practical rationality that (cor)responds to the pragmatics of being. In the process, routine, formalism, proceduralism can drain desire from the life of an institution. Likewise, the institutionalisation of practices can tendentially transform them from an event of deterritorialisation to a conformist and conservative ritual of integration, Christian rituals being a poignant example. In the case especially of complex institutional apparatuses, organisational rationalisation carries the seeds of bureaucratisation, which tends to turn institutions from vehicles of emancipation to instruments of domination and control, the fate of the Soviets being a classic case in point (Ferro, 1999). Nevertheless, even if formalism and bureaucratisation are taken, a la Robert Michels (1962), as ‘iron laws’, it still does not change that institutionalisation, as a dimension immanent to the historical production of social being, is not the Other of desire, it is permeated by libidinal flows and investments. Thus, until their time of decay comes, and while they may never comprehend social/desiring production in its entirety, institutions have a positive role relative to desire: they provide outlets for its circulation, augment it, empower it, multiply it. As an emergent process of social/desiring production, justice also develops an institutional, hence systematic, form. In Deleuzian terms, the process corresponds to the transition from the molecular level of rhizomatic, informal or quasi-formal, flows of becoming-justice to the molar level, in which flows of desire are formalised through protocols and rules of conduct. The latter can develop to a general order of Right with ecumenic aspirations (or pretentions) or remain local in scope; institutions can be hierarchical, consolidating top-down chains of recognition, distribution and command, or they can be egalitarian, augmenting horizontal flows of association, connectivity and interaction. Whatever the specific case may be, the point is that the institutionalisation of justice denotes the production of a ‘system’ or ‘regime of justice’; that is, structured forms of recognition, exchange, distribution, decision-making, production (etc.) which are supposed to give a system of interaction its proper (rightful and good) form. To avoid misconceptions, I am not suggesting that justice is the singular cause behind social formation, stratification, division of labour and more. These phenomena are determined by

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numerous factors, such as technical innovations – for instance, the invention of digital computers – and longue durée socioecological shifts – for instance, the development of agriculture or industrialisation. The key insight is that justice operates as an immanent force within such wider sociohistorical processes. From this angle, the historical constitution of social formations marks also a becoming-justice that has attained institutional form. This process concerns the erection of institutions that entail justice as their central signifier or declared goal, like courts, labour unions, popular assemblies. However, a regime of justice must not be conceived as a series of isolated institutions operating on a molar level. A regime of justice permeates all the institutions composing a social formation, from markets to government bureaus, as one of their determinative qualities. Moreover, it spreads out on the molecular level of everyday life: the manner that people connect and interact – whether they recognise and call each other as comrade or as sir/madam – whether they are disposed to compete or cooperate, share or accumulate, testifies to the formative influence of a certain regime of justice. Insofar as a social formation has a dominant way of life, there is also a dominant regime of justice, which will influence even subcultures trying to develop their unique codes of association and conduct. On the other hand, as it is especially true of social formations that have undergone stratification and urbanisation, counter-regimes of justice tend to grow as an integral part of countercultures that (seek to) challenge the dominant lifestyle. The formalisation of a regime of justice denotes a degree of rationalisation that may reach considerable levels of elaboration and sophistication, as in ecclesiastical institutions from late antiquity onwards. This is in fact true not only for centralised, hierarchical apparatuses, it applies also to grassroot institutions, like popular assemblies and social centres. For even in the latter cases, the realisation of the relevant principles and qualities determining their becoming-justice – equal capacity, horizontality, accountability – implies a considerable level of organisational rationality and the deployment and cultivation of the necessary social skills. Nevertheless, in all these social-historical forms, the actualisation of justice never departs from the immanent plane of desiring and affective bodies. Joy, pleasure, suffering, vengefulness, yearning, care – all these affects that connect human beings (as well as human with nonhuman beings) and constitute community are defining the emergence and actualisation of justice even at the institutional level; in turn, institutional forms of justice integrate and configure such affects in ways that allows individuals to tackle and make sense of them. Churches, unions, parties, communes – all these institutional forms of justice are determined by, and at the same time configure, a specific economy of desire and affects. Inside their institutional space suffering becomes meaningful and is offered a promise of redemption; the joy

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of association and belonging becomes class pride and the living cell of a new way of being; passion is turned to piety and guilt or takes the forms of struggle and hope. The configuration of affects varies, yet all such historical instantiations are manifestations of a becoming-justice that has attained institutional form. The preceding reflections clearly suggest that a regime of justice concerns the systematic reproduction of everyday interactions, whose temporal domain is the present, the ‘Now’. Then again, given that the present is the everfleeting gasp between past and future, it is necessarily constituted in relation to them. And the key claim advanced here is that justice is an intrinsic aspect of the way a collective assemblage configures its temporality. To elaborate, saying that the desire for justice is an intrinsic part of the flux of human life, determining the various flows composing it, is effectively to state that it partakes on its temporality, exceeding what-is by extending to what-was and what-will-be. In this context, the institutionalisation of the desire for justice into regime form necessarily entails a codification of the way a social formation constitutes and experiences itself in relation to the past and the future. As far as consolidated sociopolitical formations are concerned, the most common codification of temporality is the one that vindicates the present by deriving it from the past whilst projecting the future into its own image. In this framework, a social formation appears rightful not simply because it corresponds to an ideal form, it is also rightful by virtue of History. Liberal progressivism is only one instantiation of this experience, which extends as far back as the first imperial states. To conceptualise it, a technical term Voegelin (2000c: 108–67) coined will be provisionally used, historiogenesis: representing social order as the rightful, thus optimal, offspring of history. The phenomenon is indeed so widespread that it can be viewed as a structural component of the mechanisms of justification social forms institute. From our perspective, the key is not to miss the effective presence of desire. When the desire to see life and the world acquire their proper form is attached to society in its current shape, that is, when the desire for justice conforms to the present, it will also seek to justify the latter relative to what has preceded it. Naturally, the future will be also configured in the image of society’s current identity, as an extension of the same. However, other experiences are possible, which express a different modality of desire. The present may be experienced in its contingency and transience or as fundamentally wrong, which is to say under the light of its transformation. The desire for justice here invests in the potential or imperative of change – in varying degrees of intensity, from reformist to revolutionary. When this potential attains the promise of redemption one may speak of a messianic experience of time, opposed to the ‘historiogenetic’ experience. It is this opposition that Benjamin emphasises in his famous ‘angel of history’ thesis:

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Where we perceive a chain of events he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (1992: 249)

There can be less radical forms of messianism, Derrida’s late thought being a case in point, just like there can be experiences that lean more heavily towards the utopian facets of justice than to the messianic, directed as such towards a future beauty instead of the horrors of past and present.19 In either case, a regime of justice embraces the past and the future and, thus, operates as a potent factor in the social constitution of human temporality. Which is to say, justice affects life in its current form by framing how the past was or should have been and how the future should and may be. The biopolitical conceptualisation advanced has the added merit of enabling theory to conjoin institutionalisation with subjectification as the twin facets of a singular process. On the one hand, establishing a regime of justice requires of individuals to develop the social and learning skills necessary for performing and adapting to the operational protocols of their surrounding institutions. It follows, institutionalising justice has an eminently pedagogical dimension that affects the development of the human being into an ethical subject. Of course, the idea that justice affects the formation of the subject has a very long pedigree, going back to ancient Greece (and I am pretty sure that it can be traced also in other cultures). As Balibar (2013b: 20) has pointed out, its prototypical theoretical articulation is in the Republic. Much more than an abstract Idea tranquilly floating in the ethers of pure Forms, justice, according to Plato, operates on the affective level of embodied being, ‘inseparable from a process of subjectivation that forms an intrinsic part and a condition for the realization of justice itself’ (ibid.). Still, as pointed out earlier, in Plato this insight is not developed in a materialist direction, since justice is conceptually fixed as a state of the soul, working in analogy to a political state: hierarchical and centralised in its diagrammatic coordinates, with a ruling Logos at its top. Whether, in this context, Plato really intended to map out how an ideal community ought to be is interesting but secondary. Justice in the Platonic schemata may have to be mediated by material forms, both on the individual and the polis level, yet it remains conditional to the capacity of human reason to guide passions and the body. In this way, Plato canonises a statist theorisation of justice, for what is the state other than a hierarchical body where each organ performs its special functions under the guidance of a rational, ordering Power?

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It should be clear that adopting a critical distance from conceptualisations that attach justice to the rule of reason does not mean advancing a romantic defense of natural passions against the corrosive effects of civilisation, with justice being identified as a liberation of desire or a return to a fictive primitive innocence. Natural right is a sophisticated form of encoding, which contains complex patterns of inhibition, sanction and constraint. Secondly, rationalisation, thus a molding of libidinal flows, is intrinsic to every historical actualisation of justice, starting with the most ‘archaic’ and ‘primitive’. The idea that primitive societies were ruled by caprice still finds sophisticated expositions (e.g., Enriquez, 2005); nonetheless, it fails to register theoretically the elaborate forms of recognition, distribution, commutation, division of labour, exchange – in a nutshell, the regimes of justice – that determine primitive societies, regimes that (like all similar encodings of human, but also human and nonhuman interaction) aspire to give social existence its rightful form and, by implication, to every-body its due (cf. Nader and Sursock, 1986). ‘Primitive’ justice will be analysed at a later stage of the study. The salient point here is that, qua social/desiring process, justice is neither simply about the liberation nor about the containment or sublimation of unruly passions; it concerns the formation of subjectivity. This insight resonates also with historical materialism, since a key idea of Marx – unfortunately, underestimated subsequently by orthodox Marxism – is that, in producing social reality, human beings produce themselves; hence, a change on the level of social formations corresponds to a transformation of human subjectivity. It also follows that, in evaluating a given social formation and the historically determined form of the good life that it strives to attain, an intrinsic aspect of the critical process must be the effects on human subjectivity; that is, what type of personality a social formation fosters and empowers, what skills and forms of socialisation it cultivates (cf. Lebowitz, 2010). It is not of primary significance whether Marx formulated the problem in the terms deployed in the current study. The question concerning the effects of institutions on human subjectivity or the question concerning which type of subject is ‘suitable’ to a given social formation are intimately connected to (nay, expressions of) the problem of justice, since to posit these questions is to raise the problem of which forms facilitate and are proper to a good life. In brief, insofar each social formation corresponds to an anthropological type, an intrinsic part of the problem of justice is how to cultivate the latter as a subjective ethos (cf. Cohen, 2000). The formative dimension of justice on the level of subjectivity has another implication, also highlighted by Plato, albeit in a way that corresponds to his hierarchical vision. On a different register, the relevant inference has been pressed upon by studies focusing on the effects of exploitation, oppression,

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discrimination and exclusion – in brief, of injustice as an institutionalised phenomenon, hence, a lived reality – on the psychosomatic health of subjects, as expressed in psychosocial pathologies like depression, alienation, diminished self-respect.20 In this context, becoming-justice – the affects that permeate it and that it generates, the struggles, lines of flight, counter-institutions that actualise it – has a therapeutic potency, since it restores to subjugated and humiliated subjects their deprived dignity. In simple words, in fighting for justice and in producing justice, in becoming-justice, human beings, along with changing the world that they inhabit, heal their traumatised psyches and damaged bodies. At a time when psychosocial pathologies have reached alarming levels and desire is entangled in the labyrinths of mass depression and mass anxiety, with diversions like consumerism, hedonism, technofetishism and drug-use ending up as addictions that exacerbate the problem, this is certainly an insight to take in store. On an analytical level, the insight comes across the path opened by Foucault’s studies on the ‘care of the self’ (1986), since, from the biopolitical perspective constructed here, the poetics of justice and the poetics of the self are interlaced facets of a singular desiring/social process, the poetics of a good life. On the other hand, a quandary appears, relating to the insight that history is not a Manichean conflict between justice and injustice but a tragic struggle between forms of justice. For what is a therapeutic process to some – colonised subjects and rioters – is harmful to others – colonisers and shop owners. Justice is a pharmakon, cure and poison at the same time. Should this double aspect be read in Derridean terms, as a symptom of the inherent ambivalence of language that invites a deconstruction of justice, or can it be treated as an invitation to dialectics? Without dismissing the first option, it is the second path that the current analysis will pursue.

Chapter 4

Dialectics of Justice

If it had been possible, people would have put might into the hands of right, but we cannot handle might as we like, since it is a palpable quality, whereas right is a spiritual quality which we manipulate at will, and so right has been put into the hands of might. Thus, the name of right goes to the dictates of might. Hence the right of the sword, because the sword confers a genuine right. Otherwise, we should see violence on the one side and justice on the other. —Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1966, §85)

The preceding chapter elaborated on the pivotal assumption that a theoretical engagement with justice cannot be reduced to a normative discussion concerning principles, embellished with a blueprint of the appropriate institutional setting. It must entail a critical analysis of multiplicities and assemblages – of becomings – spreading out, constituting, transgressing, upsetting history. From this angle, the desire permeating and investing these forms – even when it appears to be destructive and reactive – must be read in positive terms, as an affirmation, not as a symptom, of negativity and lack. Furthermore, affirmation does not amount to pure expression, either of an existing identity or of a subject in the making; it rather concerns a construction of biopolitical forms, or at least their defense and preservation. Given that justice is a constructive process – which denotes the emergence of new, not already existing forms: (becoming) Union, (becoming) Commune, (becoming) revolt – the insight into the positive and productive character of (the desire for) justice further implies that the latter’s singular actualisations are irreducible to their historical conditions of possibility. Not that they lack such conditions. It has already been clarified that forms of justice arise within concrete social milieus and under the pressure and influence of identifiable 121

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forces. It is clear, for instance, that it was World War I and the subsequent collapse of the czarist state that cleared the path for the February revolution in Russia, including the staggering multiplication of self-organising energies actualised in new institutional forms: soviets, factory committees, red militias, urban communes. Nevertheless, all these institutional forms of justice that appeared in 1917 cannot be deduced directly from war and the collapse of statehood, since the connection becomes manifest only after their production – after they have ‘become’. Qua forms of justice, they are historical yet do not belong entirely in their historical setting, since they are experimentations permeated by a libidinal surplus, which mobilises bodies to flight and seek new connections. This ontological noncoincidence between becoming and history, stressed insistently by Deleuze (e.g., 1995: 170), denotes that becoming-justice, along with what-happened, extends to a virtual space of potentiality not necessarily actualised. True, in this way theory may seem to be yielding to an uncontrolled multiplication of counterfactual hypotheses, which obstructs from a rational explanation of why things turned one way instead of others. While indeed problematic, this is an avoidable degeneration of a theoretical principle whose merits outstrip its risks. Re-cognising the hiatus between becoming and history serves not to collapse the latter into wishful thinking, it prevents it from becoming theodicy, whether the latter wears the garments of theology proper or, alternatively, of a crude biologist determinism, of a more sophisticated historicism or, finally, of dialectical teleology. CAN DIALECTICS BREAK BRICKS?1 For Deleuze, dialectics, as systematised by Hegel, is particularly sinister, since it is the more philosophically advanced type of theodicy. Dialectics has even managed to frame philosophy into its own image; as Vincent Descombes (1980: 75) has observed for French philosophy in the 1950s – the intellectual and historical background of Deleuze’s intellectual development – being ‘anti-dialectic’ was castigated as a cardinal sin of thought, while thinking ‘dialectically’ was nothing less than a pathway to the ‘promised land’. Against the dogmatism that such faith unavoidably generated, one option – taken up by thinkers ranging from Ilyenkov and Lefevre to Jameson and Žižek – has been to stay in a dialectical path while trying to awake dialectics from its ‘dogmatic slumber’. Others, Deleuze being an illustrious case, would follow a more radical path and take up the task of releasing philosophy from (what they perceived to be) its dialectical prison house. In this context, it was expectable that any possible similarities would be downplayed. The similarity noted earlier, the common assumption that

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thought must partake on the dynamic form of reality, relates to another substantial similarity. Hegel and Deleuze share a commitment to place at the centre of philosophical inquiry ‘becoming’, the ‘ontological space deserted by the poor logic of understanding’ (Neyrat, 2018: 55). And to achieve this task, ‘it is necessary to think becoming as a transgression of the principle of the excluded middle’ (ibid.). At work here is a substantial assumption on which Hegelian dialectics and Deleuzian nomadism concur: the unfolding of (human) being does not obey the laws of formal logic, bent as the latter is to establish identities and fix an ordered domain of intelligibility; becoming is differential movement. This key insight, which pervades Deleuze’s thought throughout its various stages, also informs Hegel’s methodological choice – which has lost nothing of its radicalism – to study the development of Geist in the succession of historically produced sociocultural forms. Even the Logic (an abstract study if ever there was one) aspires to do something similar on the level of pure abstraction: to grasp conceptually the differential becoming of thought. On the other hand, emphasising similarities makes differences all the more patent. To quote again Neyrat, ‘Ultimately, it is the principle of noncontradiction that Hegel wants to overcome [ . . . ] where Deleuze and Guattari want to affirm difference as such’ (ibid.). This splitting of the roads also serves to clarify the terms of the polemic. According to Deleuze, Hegelian dialectics can only register difference as the negative of a totality, as non-being. Hence, as Foucault (1998a: 358) summarises in his review of Anti-Oedipus, difference is ‘recaptured’ and ‘allowed to exist’ only under ‘the dialectical sovereignty of the Same’. From this point of view, the fact that Hegel’s mature philosophy of Right ends up sanctifying the state form is the equivalent, as well as necessary conclusion, on the level of a theory of justice of the ontological suppression of differential movement, hence, of any genuine notion of becoming. Against Deleuze’s critique, it has been counterargued that dialectics has ‘nothing in common’ with the ‘thematics of the eradication of difference’ (Brown and Szemán, 2009: 50). I am sympathetic to the argument as far as it tries to relinquish long-held assumptions about Hegelian dialectics, as a necessary step for unleashing its critical élan. Yet to treat such assumptions as little more than misconceptions is to lose sight of the multiple dynamics that a complex thought unleashes. At a period when difference was proliferating as a political force against social formations that treated ‘being different’ in terms of deviation and abnormality; at a time also when ‘totality’ denoted submissive consensus to national unity, assimilation to an ethnic corpus, a social peace that reeked of placid conformism and at its extreme ‘totalitarianism’, Deleuze’s insistence on the undialectical positivity of difference was a philosophy that the struggles of the period evoked.

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Moreover, apart from its historical resonance, Deleuze’s critique points to a real tendency of dialectics: to render totality an overarching category that neutralises differences with a view to their reconciliation. In this context, difference comes to occupy, politically and philosophically, the position of the negative of (a) totality. Additionally, the negative itself, both as a theoretical category and a historical act, becomes a fading moment in a rational process of totalisation, whose telos is the elimination of the conditions fostering negativity, which is to say difference. This totalising dynamic, much more than in Hegel’s Prussianism – still ‘bourgeois’ enough not to dismiss difference altogether – unleashed its full force in the dialectics’ Marxist inflection. Therein, not only the self-realisation of the working class – its transition from an sich to für sich – was mediated by a form of party militancy that all too often curtailed the plurality composing the proletarian experience (cf. Rancière, 2012); furthermore, in the classless realm of communism, human beings would be reconciled and united in their identity as producers. True, in its radical version, present in Marx, this implied the abolition of social categories – ‘the worker’ included – as limiting markers of life, thus a horizontal proliferation of the free play of difference, not the suppression of individuality. However, in subsequent historical actualisations (in varying degrees) the twin thematic of reconciliation and totalisation informed an active political program of uniformity, territories where ‘people are one’ as Dead Kennedys caustically sang in ‘Holiday in Cambodia’. I am not saying that Pol Pot is the secret truth of Marxism; yet by performing a homologous capture of difference on the philosophical plane, dialectics (in its dogmatic Diamat version) served to give philosophical support to authoritarian processes of mass social engineering, which occasionally reached a truly delirious stage (cf. Priestland, 2009). Then again, the last point can serve, from a Marxist point of view, as a pivot to countercriticise poststructuralist thought for ignoring that totality is an actualised state of affairs, not a category of the intellect (e.g., Postone, 2014). This is no trifling matter, since if totalisation is a real tendency of social being it is necessary to develop a thought able to think totality on the theoretical level. But as far as Deleuzian philosophy is concerned, the critique misses something of its critical intent. Deleuze duly acknowledges that the molarisation of social being delivers also a certain totalisation. However, because totalisation is a real historical/political tendency, he attacks dialectics for sanctifying totality on a philosophical level, granting it consequently a status that it lacks on life’s plane of immanence. As a complement to its practical subversions, totality must thus be resisted on the level of thought by critically showing its leaks and loopholes. To this extent, thought can be itself an act of resistance, initiating a line of flight that may potentially encounter other such lines.2

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In terms of a theory of justice, this connotes that no totality, regardless how total(itarian) its aspirations, can capture justice in its order of representation without remainder. First of all, the magma of social/desiring production flowing on the molecular level of social being tends to leak; thus, for every bureaucratic labour union, for every commercialised Gay Pride, there is a minoritarian becoming-worker and becoming-queer – which are also a becoming-justice that challenges, subverts, escapes prevailing structures of allocation, distribution, recognition and more. Secondly, every actualisation of justice contains unactualised, virtual potentialities, which live a spectral existence in the form of memories that, forgotten as they may be, can reawaken in new struggles: Kronstadt, the Spartakist uprising, May 68 – these names condense much more than landmark events in the actual history of justice, they are sites of virtual openings escaping the grip of any total history. By the same token, events of insurgency and resistance are not to be primarily measured by the extent that they form a new totality, especially a new legal order; they must be evaluated in their own terms, as vectors of productive desire, as becoming-justice, no matter how ephemeral their duration or local their scope. In this sense, the Deleuzian critique forms an integral element of a materialist theory of justice that – set against the banishment of a wide range of historical phenomena, like riots, revolt, civil war, to the realm of the Negative – elucidates the affirmative character of subaltern insurgency in all its affective and violent intensity. This critical stance towards totality can be viewed as a defense of the expressive singularity of biopolitical production against the logic of representation that dialectics institutes (Negri, 2017: 41). Yet contra Negri’s historicist dictum about a postmodern multitude that cannot be represented, is there ever a social milieu, or a becoming-justice, with no representation of itself? Addressing the question of representation in all its ontological and political facets would drift the study far off its subject matter; herein, the issue is posited in order to delineate the critical edge of the notion of totality, which Deleuze’s biopolitical constructivism underestimates. To substantiate this claim, we can look briefly at the international ‘squares-movement’ of 2011.3 The analysis offered here corroborates Negri and Hardt’s (2012) assertion that the occupied squares where a ‘a great factory for the production of social and democratic affects’. Even more, the theorisation offered enriches this perspective, by adding justice as a determination of the (bio)politics of the squares: the ‘becoming-occupation’ and ‘becoming-democracy’ produced and spreading out from Tahrir, Puerta del Sol, Syntagma, Zuccotti – to name the cases attracting most media attention – were also a diverse in its intensity becoming-justice. In this context, the movement clearly adopted a critical stance towards the logic of representation that party politics embodied, a stance that practically questioned the identification of justice with a statist

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order of representation. Citizenship was rather configured in terms of a militant subjectivity that enacted justice as it was expressing itself. At the same time, however, the self-presentation of the various instantiations of the movement, expressed in their declarations, contained a representative valence, evoking a political subject not directly present, as well as a form, ‘real (or, in the case of Greece, ‘direct’) democracy’, which exceeded the spatiotemporal limits of the squares. To quote the declaration composed in Syntagma square, Athens: For a long time now, decisions are made for us, without us. We are workers, unemployed, pensioners, youth who came to Syntagma to struggle for our lives and our futures. We are here because we know that the solutions to our problems can come only from us. We call all the residents of Athens, workers, unemployed and youth to come to Syntagma Square, and all of society to fill the public squares and to take life into its own hands. In these public squares we will shape our claims and our demands together. We call on all workers who are going on strike in the coming days to show up and remain in Syntagma Square. We will not leave the squares until those who compelled us to come here go away: Governments, Troika (EU, ECB and IMF), Banks, IMF Memoranda, and everyone that exploits us. We send them the message that the debt is not ours. DIRECT DEMOCRACY NOW! EQUALITY - JUSTICE - DIGNITY!4

In this sense, at its most radical, the squares movement not only performed different forms of justice (pertaining mainly to recognition, provision and decision-making), which found in ‘real democracy’ their organising principle and material content; it also became representative of an alternative regime of justice than the prevailing one (a point, by the way, that enables a critical assessment of the movement based on its own protocols of appearance). We are thus led to Brown and Szemán’s (2009: 49) point: there is a difference that ‘refuses to be seen as merely different’, it rather desires to transform the world as a whole. This means in turn that ‘the whole’ can be conceptually represented in a singular fashion, as a totality, which is not harmonious, but contradictory, tensional, unstable, porous to alterity, and open to change. In these terms, totality, as the theoretical exposition of a whole, does not have to lead to a state (-thought), as Deleuze feared, but to its revolutionary challenge, as Marx hoped. In other words, totality can be thought in a way that does not stifle the differential qualities of justice but unleashes its transformative, utopian potency. Granting its authoritarian configurations, dialectics has worked towards such a conception of totality, which Lucien Goldmann (2011) traces already in Kant. For sure, there are inherent dangers in processes of totalisation, much more so when they reach the world-historical intensity of the great, modern revolutions. However, the disavowal of these dangers on the level of principle amounts to a disavowal of revolution as a

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form of actualisation and horizon of justice. Politically, this is not necessarily a conservative gesture; it may be thought as the only way to salvage radical politics from its totalitarian perversion.5 In either case, theoretically it falls short from its object, (the desire for) justice, whose intensity does reach historically the degree of revolutionary totalisation. The key, instead of denouncing the concept of totality, is to handle it properly by re-cognising how processes of totalisation contain an excessive dynamic that unsettles and leaks from any representation of the whole. In this sense, totality is neither the first nor the last word of justice; it is a contingent moment of its becoming. At the same time, thinking justice as a totality is to grasp the phenomenon conceptually in a manner that encompasses its singular actualisations in the form of a comprehensive history: the history of justice. In this way, it also becomes possible to create a comparative frame of evaluation between specific forms of becoming justice via an immanent critique of intensity, rather than a transcendent judgement. Riots, in such a framework, are not to be reproached for failing to be revolutions, neither small states denigrated for failing to become empires; yet since they can all be re-presented as expressions of a singular history of justice, their respective qualitative features may be determined. Discussing totality in its dialectical framing leads necessarily to the issue of negativity. Attractive as the Nietzschean revaluation of values – realised as sheer affirmation rather than resentful reaction – may be, it remains expressive of an elitist mentality, which finds a hospitable habitat in social figures (like a nineteenth-century middle-class intellectual) who are not involved directly in material relations of production and who can consequently nourish the noble idea of creation without negation. However, artistic creation aside – and it is hardly a coincidence that Nietzsche or thinkers adopting his perspective tend not only to valorise art but also to aestheticise politics – the fact of the matter is that there is hardly ever a ‘yes’ which is not at the same time a ‘no’. Deleuze is not oblivious to this point; he developed notions like ‘deterritorialisation’ and ‘decoding’, which pay tribute to it and can even allow a dialectical play with their pairings (cf. Jameson, 2010: 181ff.). The question is how to tackle the effective presence of negativity in a theoretically systematic and consistent way. The fact that justice always becomes within and in response to concrete situations reaffirms the bond between justice and injustice. Registering this bond is not to reduce the positivity of the desire of justice to the perceived injustice that it reacts against, a move that Deleuzian analytics wards off. It is to re-cognise theoretically an idea expressed powerfully by Benjamin’s theological idiom: ‘The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist’ (1992: 247). To unpack this insight, Balibar’s (2002b: 166) suggestion, that to every positive political idea (e.g., freedom and equality) corresponds a negative definition, is apposite. The positive definitions

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of justice amassed – ‘giving being its rightful form’, ‘making the world the highest good’ – imply the absence, curbing or eradication of that which damages or wrongs being(s); in a word, injustice. The point becomes even more astute when we move to more substantive definitions of justice, which inevitably incorporate other categories, like freedom, equality, hierarchy, fairness, desert. For if justice is order, as Plato and many more others have maintained, then its actuality implies curbing disorder; if justice is freedom, as most modern ideologies programmatically asserted, its actuality implies non-coercion. In brief, the actualisation of justice entails in its definition the negation of that which negates it: the negation of the negation. True, from the Deleuzian perspective adopted, negativity is part of a positive trajectory, of a becoming-justice. In Neyrat’s Deleuzian formulation, categories of negativity, such as ‘untethering, disidentification, de-subjectivation, are only the desirable moments of transition to a new form of life’ (2018: 81). But for this very reason, it is all the more necessary to theoretically come to terms with their negative valence. In producing new connections and assemblages, the desire for justice, along with affirming difference (what-may-be), necessarily negates existing social forms (what-is). Arguably, Deleuze, in his commitment to depict desire and becoming in entirely positive terms, undermines the labour of the negative in processes of social/desiring production. It is not enough, however, to assert that justice implies its opposite, injustice; for this assertion can still be read in the ordinary way of formal logic, as a direct opposition. The dialectic’s value lies in grasping the contradictory unity of the two. Injustice is not simply the opposite of justice; it is a condition/process/event wherein justice is testified negatively in its absence or violation. To be affected by injustice foregrounds the presence of a positivity that gives to the experience its determinate texture and content; that is, an in-justice. At the same time, (the desire for) justice knows itself as something other than ‘what is established’ (Pascal, 1966: 239) – other than the actualised forms of justice – through its negative, in the experience of injustice. For through the latter’s passageway the desire for justice intensifies to the level of differentiated political intentionality, not simply a determination of the conatus that permeates social reproduction but the subject of a contentious trajectory, of a struggle for. But there is more. Returning to Marx’s insight, if injustice systematically develops in the form of historical systems of justice, this is in effect to say that justice has been historically actualised in forms that negate it by fostering injustice. A poignant example of the point is provided by the contract form. Considered by Roman Law to be a formal codification of equal exchange and a necessary component of a lawful order guided by justice, the contract in liberalism – expressing the rise of a ‘bourgeois’ polity – is elevated to an ontological ground of social life.6 Consequently, being an essential mark of individual freedom, the contract comes to be also

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considered an essential form of justice: a just order of being is a society of contracting individuals and at the same time a polity whose state upholds the contract upon which collective life rests. Here is the conundrum: by ratifying the autonomous and equal status of individual agency, contracts have sanctioned various forms of exploitation, from the ‘gunboat diplomacy’ of imperialist Powers to recent sex-rent contracts. To say that these contracts are not genuine because they involve coercion misses the point; more precisely, this is the point: being historical forms of justice, contracts have served to justify coercive relations, which enable one contracting party to exploit the other. Herein, the dialectic nuances of the ‘negation of the negation’ notion come fully to the fore. To acquire historical actuality, justice – as it becomes – is mediated by forms that constitute its historical negations: force, violence, coercion, imposition. Thus, the contradiction: justice is actualised through what it is not, indeed, through its other. The proposition may seem abstract, but it has tangible historical marks. Take, for instance, equality, which a long tradition of thought has associated with justice on the level of a generic definition, with one idea yielding the other.7 This theoretical association, even in the critical form that Plato and Aristotle inaugurated, corresponds to a practical link: becoming-justice has entailed active processes of equalisation; that is, a becoming-equal. And as Walter Scheidel (2017) has laboriously shown, the latter in its own turn has been closely linked to a violent collapse of order. To be sure, Scheidel offers his book as a warning rather than an occasion to theoretically reflect on justice. Moreover, it is arguable that his understanding of equality is constricted, as he tends to reduce it to a quantifiable magnitude, losing sight of the notion’s variable content, notably the equal capacity that democratic politics instills. Nonetheless, his wide-ranging study certainly provides ample empirical support to the argument that egalitarian forms of justice find in violence a major mediation. Using this as evidence to argue against the bond between justice and equality will not do, since hierarchical and unequal sociopolitical relations, against which egalitarian forms of justice usually emerge, rest on violence no less. The empirical relation between justice and violence testifies to their dialectical unity, which can be grasped in its true proportions only on the level of theory: justice, both in its formative and de-formative valence – as encoding, ordering, territorialisation as well as decoding, disordering, deterritorialisation – entails some type and degree of violence. Of course, the exact type or degree are all-important, but as Balibar concludes, there is no ‘zero-degree’, ‘no such thing as non-violence’ (2002b: 145). The proposed schema, following the path of historical materialism, effectively surpasses an instrumentalisation of violence and force, since it grasps the way the latter are intrinsic moments in the becoming of justice, but does it in a dialectical manner that disallows their sanctification. Justice is mediated

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by power, which cannot be happily identified with a positive ‘capacity to’, for it frequently morphs into relations of domination, imposition, oppression. Conversely, justice cannot be identified with force in a definitional manner, since this would collapse one category to the other – ‘might is right’ – and thus pervert the positivity of justice as an enabling condition and marker of the good life. Further down it will be suggested that there is an astute historical form of this perversion, fascism (especially its Nazi variation). But the relation between violence/force and justice is historically present in numerous other forms of actualisation, whether these derive from ‘above’, as in legally imposed punishment, or from ‘below’, as in riots. Some implications of this point have surprisingly (?) been delivered in the third installment of the Thor movies (Ragnarok), in the story of Hela, Odin’s daughter who (having been exiled from Asgard after leading its violent consolidation) returns to claim her due. A poignant scene is when Hela brings down the fresco of the palace’s main room, which shows an august image of order and harmony, revealing the fresco that existed before and which commemorated Asgard’s wars of conquest. Orders of Right always cover or embellish the memory of violence that they carry as birthmark, but while violence may be forgotten, the fact that it happened cannot vanish; thus, it may come back with a vengeance. This is not to be carried away by resentful dreams of judgement day; to recall Horkheimer’s cautionary remark to Benjamin, ‘Past injustice has occurred and is completed. The slain are really slain’.8 The point is that every positive form (thus, definition) of justice is subverted and destabilised by the negativity its becoming contains. The dialectic of affirmation/negation defining the becoming of justice points towards the latter’s contradictory overtones. This contradictory character becomes also manifest in the twofold dimension that justice has in human systems. Between justice as a productive desire that is excessive to history and justice as a systemic problem that belongs to the pragmatics of history, there is a very real contradiction, expressed historically in the tension between utopian expectation and political pragmatism. To be sure, this is not to ascertain that contradiction can singlehandedly account for historical shifts from one regime of justice to another. As Deleuze and Guattari poignantly remark, ‘No one has ever died of their contradictions’ (2013a: 177). On the other hand, without a notion of contradiction, two equally unsatisfactory options open. One, the positive and the negative facets of justice are disjointed – as in anarchist visions of revolutionary change, which either valorise violence as the content of justice (the more nihilist/terroristic version) or harbour the fantasy of a clear-cut separation between the violent destruction of the old world and the creation of the new. Second, one facet is subsumed to the other, yielding either an ontology of unmediated presence, which stumbles upon the determinate character of all actuality – that is, to history – or to an

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instrumentalisation of negativity. The dialectic may tendentially yield the latter option, but it also allows for an alternative path, the unity of the positive and the negative, which neither collapses the one into the other nor juxtaposes them as autonomous magnitudes. Rather, it coarticulates affirmation/negation as contradictory dimensions of the same dynamic process. From this point of view, the labour of the negative, instead of being conceived as a process that subsumes difference to identity, can be theorised as an immanent facet of the desire that produces different forms of being and their corresponding forms of justice. In a non-theoretical manner, this insight has been intimated by ancient Greek Tragedy, which incorporates the forces of the underworld as an integral moment and facet of justice. Because of that, the tragic poets may have had less problem than liberals acknowledging the presence of a positive desire for justice in the vengeful and destructive passions of rioters. To be sure, in the Oresteia, the vicious circle of violence that the retributive justice of the Furies perpetuates is resolved through the mediation of the new civic order of Athens. It thus seems that negativity is firmly captured under the rule of identity. However, as pointed out in the first chapter, the conflict is mediated by the contentious procedures of a democratic politics, which integrates law as an immanent, negotiable and mutable signpost of a process that legal forms cannot fully contain. Therefore, while violence in the form of stasis is avoided, the forces of negativity remain in the city in a kindred form (as Eumenides not Erinyes) but without guarantees – only hope – that they will not morph back. Their presence is necessary to the good functioning of civic order, but it is also the ever-present spectre of the latter’s decomposition. Overall, far from a mediation of the Same (of Nomos), which harnesses violence into its rightful instrument, there is a becoming-justice that produces difference, a passage to the new. In Diken’s words, ‘Orestes never returns from exile (to the ‘old’ social order), [ . . . ] a new order of justice emerges’ (2012: 52). And this new regime of justice that the polis-totality establishes is not grounded in the subsumption of difference and negativity, it is founded on their democratic recognition and institutionalisation. Read in this way, it is arguable that the Eumenides also points towards a dialectical conception of mediation, along the lines suggested by Jameson (2010: 279). True, this is another concept that sits uncomfortably within a Deleuzian perspective. Not only that, mediation is a highly unpopular concept in virtually every current of libertarian, anarchist and ultra-leftist politics. Now, given how mediation has been identified with a logic of transcendence and a hierarchical diagram of political space, at the expense of the creative and transformative powers of immanence, this is understandable. Yet it does not make it less unfortunate, since the notion has the potential to augment a biopolitical concept of justice which prevents the equation between

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expression and construction from ending up in an absorption of the latter by the former. In this way, theory is protected from the allure of immediacy to which radical leftism has so often succumbed. As mentioned before, to say that there is no expression which is not at the same time a construction is to maintain that every act – for example, the formation of a self-organised cooperative, along with expressing what exists (unemployment, lack of jobs, material needs, a desire for dignity) – constructs at the same time something that did not exist: a new type of social enterprise, new relations of mutuality and equality, new patterns of recognition and distribution. It is this creative surplus that grounds the mediational dimension of human activity, since mediation can be called thus precisely because it is irreducible to the elements that it mediates. In other words, because there is no automatic and complete correspondence between an activity and all that which the latter expresses – objective conditions, interests, needs, affects, desires – it is human action in its sheer immanence that constitutes a mediation. In Hegelian terms, since ‘existence [i.e., determinate being] proceeds from becoming [ . . . ] it has the form of an immediate. Its mediation, the becoming, lies behind it; it has sublated itself, and existence appears as a first from which the forward move is made’ (2010: 83. [My italics]). Thus, every being-here in its very immediacy is mediated being. It also follows that the intervention of a third party constitutes only a historical form of mediation, not its essential structure. As Jameson concludes, ‘Mediation is, thus, not some strange and fluid event in the world: it characterises the way our spectatorship and our praxis alike construct portions of the world with a view towards changing them’ (ibid.: 290). The salient point here is that if becoming-justice is a creative process, it is not only because of the productive power of desire, standing in excess to existing social forms; it is also because the becoming of justice in its active and practical valence mediates desire and, thus, opens to it original vistas and paths. Desire, thus, assumes another quality along with productivity, namely, reflectivity. For what is reflection other than a form of mediation, the capacity to open a space of thought between desire and the act that embodies it? Within this space, a reflective distance is built which enables human beings to think as they are acting, disagree on how they are acting, and be held responsible for acting. Furthermore, far from being an individual quality bestowed on ‘Man’ by virtue of his Reason (though of course reason has something to do with it), the reflectivity of desire endorses the irreducibly political valence of justice, its being a problem pertaining to collective processes of deliberation, contention, cooperation, conflict. For if to act is a mediation, rather than pure expression, it follows that there is an ontological hiatus between a social fact and its actualisation, the space of the political, where the problem of justice is being played out.

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I am not pretending here to have revealed the ‘true’ meaning of Hegel’s dialectic. My analysis has deployed a possible reading of Hegelian dialectics, which is pertinent for grasping justice in its embodied and dynamic valence. This reading can still accept Horkheimer’s ‘note’ that ‘in dialectics, all opposites go back to a single, fundamental contradiction [ . . . ] between truth and fulfillment’ (1978: 123). Justice, in this sense, is a category mediating between the two, truth and fulfilment, making their contradiction an active historical project instead of a static antinomy, which leaves no other options but for a melancholic wisdom on the unredeemable nature of creation or for its violent consummation.9 In this context, however, there is no need to posit a final (re)solution, the synthesis which will dissipate all antitheses because every contradiction will have been reconciled in an overarching totality. Refuting this prospect as an undialectical discarding of the dynamic logic of dialectics, the latter is conceived as an open process defined by dynamic contradictions and creative mediations. Additionally, this reading does not require starting from an ideal substance – Justice – realising itself through a drama of alienation, during which it is lost in an alien world until it crystalises, and knows itself, as absolute Idea. It remains within the context of the immanent becoming of desiring-bodies, of the Many, and turns totality into a critical concept inscribed to utopian projects of radical change, of the Not-Yet. Read in this way, the Hegelian dialectic conjuncts with Deleuzian nomadism, not in order to produce a grand philosophic synthesis as much as to frame and give substance to the key insight of the current investigation: the theoretical study of justice is the study of its becoming(s). This insight stands somewhere between a philosophical system claiming to have uncovered the meaning/telos of History and a celebration of desire that forfeits the historicity of justice and the intelligible lines of meaning it generates. In theoretically elaborating the study’s starting assertion, that justice is a fundamental determination of humankind in its temporal unfolding, we were always already in history, indicating one of the latter’s defining qualities as well as the impossibility of grasping it in a total manner, as a rational necessity. But we will also never depart from theory, since the historical actuality of justice continues to require for its exposition an unravelling of the conception of justice as a desire and a problem inscribed in humankind’s pursuit of a good life. Specifically, the next sections will attend to a series of categorical dualities that define (the becoming of) justice as a thing of this world (as desire, as problem, as idea, as institution). To clarify them theoretically will substantiate that the ‘history of justice’ is marked by a dialectical opposition between social forms in which justice finds its actuality. In technical terms, this is to further bring out the dialectical overtones of justice in a way that, instead of leading to a final synthesis and hence a singular substantive

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definition, will allow for an irreducible political tension between two types of justice to emerge. MULTIPLICITY AND UNIVERSALITY The first opposition to be tackled is suggested in the ambiguity of a generic phenomenon with multiform actualisations. To the extent that justice concerns a desire and a problem that emerges rhizomatically at specific sites – in tribes, gangs, markets, farms, factories – it follows that there is no ideal form of Justice to which historical forms constitute incomplete approximations. Plurality is intrinsic to justice, that is why every becoming-justice is a singular occurrence. To be sure, singularity does not exclude the possibility of classifications and typologies, since that would practically mean the elimination of theory. It only means that each becoming-justice does not express an original identity from which bifurcations follow because of external circumstances. Multiplicity is of the essence of justice. It is on the basis of this insight that it becomes possible to assert that the One and the Many are both figures of justice. As Daniel Barber puts it, ‘Whereas the multiple is opposed to the one, multiplicity is simultaneously the one as it is constituted by the many and the many as they are constituted by the one’ (2015: 43). That is why, furthermore, the desire for justice concerns neither the adjustment of reality to its true form nor the self-realisation of an ideal substance; it primarily concerns the production of difference – constituting a new social formation, deterritorialising segmented strata of being, inventing and experimenting with novel forms of collective life. The idea that justice is at its core multiplicity, hence difference, seems to affirm an anti-universalist posture in tandem to what has been perceived to be the mantra of post-structuralism. Agreeable or not, the point is clear enough: it concerns the debate between a universalist ontology/epistemology/politics and an ontology/epistemology/politics of difference, with my study – despite its Marxist leanings – siding with the latter. Yet precisely because there is a Marxist (indeed Hegelian) strain in the theory, the attentive reader may wonder whether my study, by affirming justice to be in its essence multiplicity, openly contradicts its own prior assertion that justice is actualised as an Idea that is not identical to any of its historical actualisations. For is that not to assert that justice after all is (a) universal? The division between particularity and universality can be framed in stark terms, which call forth a partisan stance in favour of one or the other. The theoretical prism advanced here certainly does not concur with the axiomatic preference for ‘moderate’ over against ‘extreme’ positions, since if there is something that the political history of recent decades forewarns about is the

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‘extremity of the center’ (Ali, 2015). More to the point, my study argues for an inescapably partisan dimension in justice. Nevertheless, for the case at hand, to follow the path of a clear-cut division is to misread, or worse ignore, the theoretical currents growing inside critical theory and the rich debates generated there. Hence, whatever its specific preference may turn out to be ‘pro-universal’ or ‘anti-universal’, the theory would be working upon a pre-critical notion of universality and indeed of particularity, difference and multiplicity. As an alternative to this pre-critical stance, it is possible to adopt a critical notion of universality that passes through and embraces critiques of the universal. Such a theoretical standpoint becomes even more necessary due to a practical (and eminently political) reason, attended systematically by Balibar (2002b) and recently reinstated by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (2016): the universal has been actualised today in an unprecedented degree through the actualisation of capital in the form of a global(ised) market. The point – verifying their great astuteness in pinpointing dynamics that had not yet revealed their full force – has not escaped the attention of Deleuze and Guattari. In their own words, ‘If the universal comes at the end [ . . . ] under the conditions determined by an apparently victorious capitalism, where do we find enough innocence for generating universal history’ (2013a: 163)? Taking up this problematic, the real question is not to ask whether justice is universal or particular, it is to ponder what type of universal it is. Based on the preceding analysis, it should be clear that justice is not to be considered as ‘a universal’ along the lines of a scholastic ultra-realism: a subsistent entity that assumes a total identity between a being and its concept.10 Yet equally clear it must be that understanding the concept of justice as a ‘real abstraction’ is at odds to a doctrinaire nominalism, which reduces universal categories to empty words (flatus voci) lacking any ontological positivity or identity. Tracing the medieval origins of the philosophical debate concerning the relation of thought to reality is instructive in more than one respect, and certainly not without its fascination. Equally instructive on the current occasion, though, is to highlight the specific form that the discussion assumed amongst scholastic philosophers, including its political context and connotations. Save some heterodox currents maintaining the apocalyptic fervor of Christian spirituality, which destabilises any positive ontology, the debate in scholastic philosophy – taking place under the shadow of Orthodoxy, thus, always in danger to slip into heresy – was steeped into an ontology of identity that aspired to determine whether universals actually exist. The universal actuality of justice was not a political stake that concerned the transformation of the world. Rather, the dominant view as far as mundane justice was concerned revolved around a justification – sometimes critical, pushing for reform – of what was actual through its incorporation into a cosmic hierarchical order fixed upon transcendence.11 To be sure, as long as an eschatological

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consummation was confessed and expected, justice retained its messianic excess. Medieval Christendom is defined by a contradiction between two experiences of justice: one radical/egalitarian, embodied in messianism, the other retributive/distributive, embodied in a hierarchical cosmology that also encompassed political society (Bloch, 2015: 81ff.). Still, having uprooted the messianic promise from mundane processes, justice-qua-redemption was elevated – and at the same time reduced – to a transcendent Judgement upon embodied being. Thus, the contradiction between messianic and retributive justice, while generating tensions which occasionally took the form of social outbursts, was manageable and even functional to the reproduction of the Christian world. No doubt, every remotely liberal theory of justice would be uncomfortable with, nay hostile to, the theological overtones of scholasticism. Liberalism secularises justice by rendering it a principle that is posited by the human Ratio as it confronts individual association in its mundane status. At the same time, the form of justice qua actualised structure ceases being identified with a hierarchy of being that corresponds to a social world of legally sanctioned estates; that is, with inequality; it designates, instead, the actualisation of individual freedom, predicated on a natural-formal equality that acquires and requires legal sanction; that is, the Rule of Law. From this onto-political commitment to the individual, who is always ‘many’, liberalism derives its normative commitment to political pluralism, social mobility, tolerance and respect of difference. Nonetheless, despite their huge differences, liberal theories of justice share with scholastic realism a strong, substantive universalism. This becomes clearly manifest in Rawls, who avows for a normative definition of justice that is universal in scope, regardless if he oscillated between a definition that is applicable to all social systems or, alternatively, peculiar to the social, political and economic environment of a liberal polity. The difference is that in the latter case – the one that Rawls eventually opted for – a strong, theoretical normativism is coupled and modified by a strong political normativism: justice can be actualised truly only through the liberal institutions of the rule of law, civil society and the free market, to which Rawls (2001: 135ff.) gave a specific configuration in the model of a ‘property-owning democracy’. Nevertheless, this specification does not alter the form of Rawls’s theorisation: deducing the proper form of society through a rational idea of justice. Like every idealism, liberal thought conceives of the universality of justice substantially, by formally abstracting a universal, normative ideal of justice to which social reality must conform in order to find its proper form. Consequently, liberal universalism ends up identifying justice with a rational order of being, truly global in scope, where every-body receives what it rightfully deserves. Which is to say, the conception of political society as a contractual

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association of individuals, defined by self-interest, plurality and tolerance, still yields an identification of justice with the One. This is true even for liberal utilitarianism, since, utilitarian philosophers, despite their pragmatism and critique of the abstract universalism of natural rights, posit justice as a rational principle that is deducible from the (equally abstract) principle of utility.12 Inevitably, the realisation of the rational form that society Ought to have morphs into a matter of application; in this context, utilitarianism not only sanctifies violence but, through its pragmatic axiom of the ‘greatest number possible’, steeps justice into a sacrificial logic (Ricoeur, 2000: 39). Without doubt, its strong normative universalism gave to liberal thought a critical power vis-à-vis the aristocratic/feudal order and the hierarchical vision of justice it embodied. This is a critical power liberalism still retains in face of the historical fact that there are more than one regime around the world which modernise not by abolishing as much as by configuring traditionalist forms of right and the modalities of privilege they justify. On the other hand, no less of a fact is that the social forms which liberal ideas of justice advocate and rest upon, the rule of law, the free market, civil society, human rights – in one word, a liberal state – have been actualised as normative standards legitimising political aggression, from imperialist expansion to military interventions coming in the order of preemptive police action.13 Without denying its critical facets, liberal theories of justice contain an eminently conservative and apologetic (verging occasionally to reactionary) tone, for they justify what has been already justified by the sheer fact of its actuality. Hence also the repressive and exclusionary facets of liberal universalism, which recognises and tolerates individuals (their behaviour and convictions) and groups (their practices and ideas) – in a nutshell, singular forms of being – only by classifying them relative to the rational norm(s) a liberal order embodies: as reasonable, deserving, normal, exemplary, compatible, digressive, transgressive, subversive, dangerous. Arguing against such substantive universalism in favor of another conception of universality carries with it the temptation to frame the discussion in terms of a juxtaposition between ‘authentic’ versus ‘counterfeit’ universalism. This is the path Badiou follows (2003), as he sets out to recover a concept of militant universality against the twin ills of hermeneutic particularism and formal, ‘bourgeois’ universalism. Badiou is to be credited for giving universality the radical sting of a subjective commitment. What would be the imprint of universal justice in history if some-bodies – a Saint Paul, a Lenin (to give Badiou’s favourite examples) – had not (trans)formed their lives in response to it? Furthermore, Badiou’s insistence that universality is not a formal entitlement and that, hence, the subject does not precede its own practical response avoids the tendency towards narcissistic victimisation or conservative attachment that human rights discourse frequently yields

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(cf. Brown, 1995). Moreover, Badiou perceptively notes that Pauline universality can be reduced neither to a formal doctrine of equal value in front of God nor to a formal belief in future Judgement. In Paul everything hinges on the Christ-event, which stands as a genuine rupture to the order of the world. As the apostle famously exclaimed: Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:23–28)

In this way, Badiou sustains the singularity of universalism, attaching to concrete historical sequences and becoming actual by a (collective no less than individual) thought that re-cognises in such sequences a non-identitarian truth. On the other hand, Badiou’s dismissal of any ontological grounding to universality keeps him in a Kantian register, which posits a thinking subject that is other than the embodied subjects and their finite passions (a move, of course, that excludes animal being from a positive definition of justice). In this context, it is no accident that Badiou takes Paul out of the vibrant reality of early Christian communities, reproducing in this way the traditional fable of Apostle Paul singlehandedly creating Christianity out of a Jewish sect. Interestingly – and largely in resonance with Badiou’s understanding of subjectivation – the constitution of the Christian community, both as participation in Christ and as an anticipation of his Parousia, is not the realisation of a preexisting essence or identity, it marks the actualisation of a new form of association, thus, a new regime of justice.14 In this context, Helmut Koester argues that the constitution of community equals in significance eschatological anticipation (2002: 166). In no way, however, should the latter aspect be underestimated: the early ecclesiae live and unfold in ‘the time that remains’, expressing and testifying to the messianic structure of being as a process of transfiguration (cf. Agamben, 2005b). By being attached to this radical messianism and its dynamic ontology of the not-yet, attaining here the intensity of a creaturely yearning for redemption, justice becomes truly explosive, nay anomic. From this angle, Paul’s universalism is less of a battle cry against particularism than against an actualised form of universality which is to be superseded, the Law – the Jewish Law for sure, but no less importantly the Law of the Roman Imperium or even the natural law that philosophers talked about.15 Farfetched as it sounds, Pauline political theology reinstates a

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tragic vision of history as a conflict between forms of justice, albeit a conflict that (unlike Tragedy) is perceived from the viewpoint of its eschatological resolution in the vindication of the Parousia. Contrariwise, Badiou’s normative distinction between true and false universality yields the typical idealist dichotomy between justice/injustice, falling short before a re-cognition of the properly tragic fabric of history. ‘It is not our place in history to say what is pseudo and what is not’ (Taubes, 2004: 9). Adopting this cautionary maxim, my analysis will follow the analytically more fertile path opened by Balibar (2002b) and try to highlight different types of universality, which are all ‘real’. Accordingly, like Balibar, three types of universality are distinguished, though the categories to be used will be different. Specifically, inferring from what has been elaborated in previous chapters, I distinguish between ‘ontological’, ‘ideational’ and ‘historical universalism’. The conception of universality this analytical typology yields, namely, universality as a determinative quality of becoming-justice, far from contradicting the latter’s multiple essence, presupposes it and ratifies it. Ontological universality refers to the inscription of justice in material being. There may not be a single form of Justice, but there are forms actualising a desire and a problem which are universal not despite but in their multiplicity. It follows that to conceptualise all these singular desires and problems through the notion of justice, much more than a nominalist operation serves to grasp what defines them and at the same time what differentiates them. In other words, it is to bring a real determination of social/desiring production to conceptual clarity. Therefore, conceptual generality is grounded in ontological consistency: if such and such problems, such and such desires – those ‘becomings’ to have appeared as well as those that will or may appear – can be comprehended by the concept of justice, it is because the latter exposes a quality that determines them in their materiality and singularity. On this basis, in the first chapter it was argued that the universality of justice qua real determination may extend beyond human systems of interaction, to animal bands and behaviour or even the becoming of worlds. The preceding principle can be also read the other way around: the ontological constancy of justice becomes transparent to itself, and hence reaches the status of reflectivity, through ideational actualisation. Therein, the actuality of justice, its qualitative presence in social relations and forms of being is re-cognised in its inter-historical valence, as a universal Idea, which is abstract yet real. In this way, the nonidentity between the historical forms and the desire which they express is grasped reflectively in thought; as the generic determination of a problem and a desire – as a real abstraction – justice names singular historical processes without being any of them. The revolt of Spartacus and the Roman Empire are a becoming justice, but none is

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justice, which is why the idea of justice can serve a critical function towards them. In effect, this is to broach the creative valence of ideation analysed earlier: justice as a universal idea has its own consistency qua modality of actualisation vis-à-vis the problem and the desire that animates it and which it reflectively conceives. Framed in these terms, the affirmation of ideational universality is consistent to the theory’s materialist protocols. Justice is not a trans-historical Absolute that gets to know itself in a teleological process of fulfilment. Regardless if this is Hegel’s own idealism or a misreading, that would mean lapsing to an originary identity realising itself. Justice is an interhistorical force operating on a double register, as historical actuality and as virtual potentiality. And the idea of justice is the re-cognition in thought of both registers, justice knowing itself as a universal quality and stake; that is, as a distinct ethical category determining – (de)forming, (de)regulating, (dis) orienting – singular flows of becoming. The current analysis concurs with a Laclaudian analysis of universality, which still holds sway among political discourses and practices seeking to overcome the allegedly narrow horizons of contemporary social movements and forms of resistance, defined as they are by what Srnicek and Williams has dubbed a ‘folk politics’ (2016: 5). According to this perspective, the idea of justice, in its universal valence, is not a subsistent entity to be represented more or less appropriately – figuratively, analogically, apophatically – it is a contested notion inviting different practices of hegemony and counterhegemony. A good illustration of the point can be found in the recent attempt of parties like Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece (or indeed in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn and in Bernie Sanders’s run for the Democratic Party’s leadership) to offer a counterhegemonic idea of justice, revolving around notions and forms of popular participation and plebeian right, against the hegemonic neoliberal discourse of indebtedness and austerity.16 Its structurally contested nature endorses also the strategic dimension of justice, another point that Laclaudian conceptions of universality must be credited for emphasising. On the other hand, my analysis insists in not following Laclau (2006) and his conception of universals as ‘empty signifiers’ or, as Srnicek and Williams reformulated the point recently, ‘empty placeholders’ (2016: 77). This theoretical gesture tends to hollow out justice from its material content and density, hence, to obscure the ontological primacy of materiality vis-à-vis ideation. Before becoming a contested universal idea, justice operates as a productive desire and structural problem that is no less universal in scope. That is why, the idea of justice, qua universal, is always already filled with material practices, performed by desiring bodies and assemblages. The third type of universality is thus reached, historical universalism. This corresponds to the actualisation of a universal concept of justice in concrete social-historical form. In Balibar’s words, the universal needs to be instituted

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‘within the framework and modality of a community’, thus, ‘the series of “historical” (or, as we should say today, “cultural”) figures which this work reconstructs constitute so many attempts to actualize this possibility’ (2017: 162). In this schema, ideational universals have an effectivity that exceeds the reflection or masking of material forms, an argument that idealist thought has always waged against the reductive claims of materialist social theories. The problem, however, with idealist theorisations is not in their claim that idea(l)s have concrete historical effects and the materialist perspective advanced here has no problem accepting Balibar’s argument (2013b: 19) that every commitment to justice – precisely by having reached the libidinal intensity of political militancy – is idealist (hence, Platonist), in the sense that it advocates a consistent form of justice which is presented ideationally; for example, communism. True however to its materialist ethos, the current theory adds that every such idea(l) of justice is the reflective-cum-creative actualisation of what is already actual and potential on the level of embodied being. In other words, the idea of justice receives its content and becomes a concrete universal by expressing historically actualised forms of universality, which it further fertilises and extends. That is why the very same moment a normative definition of ‘universal justice’ is offered, partisan commitment to a concrete social-historical form and project has also commenced. In Balibar’s words, ‘The history of universality is in fact only made of singularities’ (2007). That is why finally, in its historical valence, justice has an ‘intensive’ and an ‘extensive’ dimension, the first referring to the (trans)formation of social/individual being and the second to the spatial expansion of a given form of justice (ibid.). The very real violence entailed in the latter process has informed attempts to ‘decolonise’ or ‘provincialise’ universalism, developed mainly by thinkers working under the aegis of postcolonial thought.17 To the extent that they highlight the spatial origins, hence particularity, of universalist projects and the ideas of justice that inform them, these works add substantially to a materialist theory. On the other hand, the crucial political problem whether the ‘provincialisation’ and/or ‘decolonisation’ of thought can counter the actualised universality of Capital, points to a wider theoretical quandary. The abandonment of notions of universal justice, along with performing an inverse orientalism that locks non-Western subjects to their cultural uniqueness, obscures historically actualised plebeian forms of universalism, which derive not from ‘above’ but from ‘below’ and, thus, operate under a different logic of extension than that of colonial expansion.18 To the extent that universality is a determination of historical forms of justice, it unavoidably has an extensive dimension. Thus, as Balibar (2007) acknowledges, the crucial issue is not about a disjunction of opposites, but which type of extensive universality justice assumes, that of revolution or empire.

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Two important inferences follow. First, the insight concerning the tragic texture of history is illumined in its full proportions. No matter how triumphant a form of historical universalism may (seem to) be, like Capital arguably has been for the last couple of decades, the structure of history does not correspond to a linear evolution of universal justice out of cultural/political parochialism, it is defined by what Balibar calls ‘a conflict of universalities’ (2017: 166). Second, qua historical actuality, universal justice needs to be produced and institutionalised. On the one hand, ‘this requires actual power, not just an ideality’ (ibid.: 158), a point that raises again the issue of imposition and violence, thus, of negativity. On the other hand, the historical production of a universal form of justice cannot concern merely a formal institution, since this would ignore the intensive universalism that accompanies extensive forms of universality. As revolutionaries from Robespierre to Che Guevara knew theoretically and were eventually called to deal with practically, instituting universal justice in the form of a concrete community implicates the cultivation of a proper form of subjectivity. The process certainly has a homogenising aspect, the articulation of community – of a We. On the other hand, given that there is no identity which does not differentiate, the historical production of universal forms of justice does not pass merely from the surpassing of difference but by its positive articulation. Christian subjectivity, whose universality Paul discursively enunciates, is universal not only because there is ‘no slave, nor free, no male nor female’ in front of the Lord, but because real differences are highlighted (men, women, freemen, slaves) which are integrated in the Christian identity and receive their concrete role/status. Men and women are all equal in front of the Lord, but Paul is keen to assert in 1 Corinthians the subordinate role of women in the ecclesiae (this being only one of the many inner-community tensions revealed in the Pauline letter).19 There is, thus, a repressive aspect in the production of universality, which has been analysed by many thinkers, from Foucault and Butler to the various scholars composing ‘subaltern studies’. As Balibar succinctly summarises, ‘Universalism cannot be materially separated from institutional forms that display the foreign body, define it and control it’ (2017: 298). The great merit of Balibar’s thought, however, from whom this section draws extensively, is to have shown the emancipatory potential that ‘foreign bodies’ contain not simply in the form of resistance to universality and as affirmation of an irreducible difference, which tendentially yields the narcissistic attachments that much of identity politics has fostered, but from the point of view of an augmentation of universalism or even the articulation of alternative historical forms of universal justice. Anthropological differences like race and gender are sites of repression and exclusion, but they also become sites of struggle, which widen and reproduce universal justice as a

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historical actuality. Paul would have hardly felt the need to put women in their place if female members have not challenged the boundaries and content of what is proper and rightful within the ecclesiae (cf. Castelli, 2004). From this viewpoint, the particularity of singular forms of justice – while conceptually opposed to universalism – is not simply the historical antithesis of universality and of the ‘grand narratives’ through which the latter has been expressed. Herein the analysis returns to the earlier discussion of how in Marx universality is historically produced by struggles driven by partial class interests, themselves expressive of concrete social-historical conditions. The salient point of historical materialism is that ‘universal justice’, more than a matter of fact that can be verified empirically by an impartial reason rising above the partiality of embodied being, is a project whose practical possibility – although not deduced from an objective social identity – is grounded in the material conditions of subaltern bodies and mediated by the struggles the latter are engaged in. This comes about also in Marx’s early analysis of the proletariat, in his ‘Introduction’ to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (2002: 81). There is here, to be sure, the essentialist thematic of ‘selfrealisation’, which Marx inherits from German idealism (Finelli, 2016). But there is also another line of thought, standing independently and critically to such essentialism. Marx’s point that the proletariat is a victim of ‘absolute injustice’, if it is to be consistent to a non-vulgar materialism (as Marx intended), does not suggest an abstract judgement based upon an ideal conception of justice. Rather it denotes that injustice is a material condition that defines the proletariat so intensely that it becomes one of its main ontological determinations: to be a proletariat is to be multiply deprived, thus, wronged. It follows that abolishing the proletarian condition – which is to the interest of every person embodying it – entails the abolition of all these material deprivations; that is, of the (institutionalised) injustice, that define the proletarian condition. Positively, what this denotes is the historical actualisation of a universal form of justice against the forms of justice that sanction class divisions. Advances towards this reality therefore – the establishment of universal suffrage, access to collective knowledge or goods – are tied up to a determinate desire for emancipation, reparation and improvement; that is, to a singular desire for justice. Thus, the particularity of the proletariat, which negates the universalism of the bourgeois rule of law, breeds another form of universal justice, that of communism. That is why, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, in the proletariat the ‘power of minority’ finds its ‘universal consciousness’ (2013b: 472). To sum up, if as Hegel has grasped, being is always a historically determined ‘we’, the latter is always already actualised justice, since theory has no access to social-historical being other than through constituted orders of Right. In this respect, the idea of justice, formally as much as substantially, is

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a universal category referring to actualised forms of being; in Pascal’s terms, ‘to what is established’. However, Hegel also knew that what is established can be neither the starting point nor the endpoint of thought since it is itself (product of) a becoming and, thus, desire. Furthermore, desire, as Deleuze has elaborated, is a productive power that augments and multiplies existing forms and assemblages – more power, more money, more security, more freedom, more equality – but also deterritorialises existing orders of Right – no more austerity, no more devaluation of labour power, no more discrimination. On the ideational level, therefore, justice emerges not only as an idea that expresses the given, it is a category that has yet to find its proper historical actuality, which is to say, a prospect –whether of expansion, shaping more territories in the image of an existing form, or of transformation, creating peoples and worlds that do not yet exist. One way or another, justice attains the intensity of a historical project with a universal scope. Yet what thought conceptually grasps in its universality, the quest for justice, remains historically a multiple plane of singular and contentious actualisations. That is why the idea of justice names not only a normative ideal or principle that Ought to become coextensive to a pragmatic ecumene, it names a critical concept with an analytical and synthetic power vis-à-vis historically actualised forms of justice. There is no nodal point in history where universal justice enters, whether in the form of law or of alienation (or both). Justice is a multiple, embodied process that transverses human historicity, constituting a point of contact between singular flows of becoming; that is, between the Spartacus revolt and the Spartakusbund, between ancient Athenian democracy and the occupation of Syntagma square in 2011 (explicitly evoking the former), or between the Roman and the all too many empires styling themselves as ‘new’ or ‘Third Rome’. Consequently, the re-cognition of justice as a common determination of singular flows facilitates the experience of community spreading though space and time, whether a community of struggle and resistance or of order and domination. This theoretical re-cognition of an inter-historical universal quality avoids historicism, which as Benjamin has noted inescapably vindicates the victor (1992: 248) while leaving intact historicity. For the fact that justice constitutes an ontological constant neither relieves from the task of studying its concrete onto-historical forms, which are the only actuality justice has, nor from the task of its historical production. Moreover, since the historical universality of justice is manifest in and as multiplicity, the systematic articulation of the idea of justice through the development of a relevant theory yields not a philosophy of history but a theory of social-historical formation. What emerges from the preceding paragraph is history, or more technically historicity, as the mediating category that fleshes out the dialectical unity of the opposition between multiplicity and universality. That said, it has already

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been sustained that the accompanying re-cognition of the objective limitations imposed on a becoming-justice by the historical context within which it emerges and unfolds does not cancel the productive and formative power that the desire for justice has relative to the appearance, consolidation, abolition and transformation of sociohistorical forms. For what stands as a historical context – an established form of being with all its structural-systemic coercions and constrains, for instance, the need to industrialise that almost every revolution of the twentieth century faced – is at the same time a historical product that finds in the desire for justice a decisive determination (there is no ‘industrialisation’ other than that shaped by multiple and conflicting libidinal investments, from entrepreneurs, commissariats, workers, inventors, bureaucrats). The preceding discussion adds up to provide a round-up response to the theological challenge posed by Milbank. There is no need to ‘outsource’ justice to a transcendent Ground in order to avoid falling to an ontology of violence, which necessarily frustrates human aspirations for a just society. The primary, hence ontologically universal, status of justice relative to temporal being can be maintained on the level of immanence, by conceiving it as a structural problem and a desire that is intrinsic to the intensive relations and assemblages which form the (human) world. In other words, instead of making it dependent on the existence of a divine Being, justice is a potentiality, and at the same time a (political) stake, immanent to the historical production of human being. In ontological terms, this means moving past the dilemma between an ontology of peace and an ontology of violence by adding a third option, which Milbank fails to consider, an ontology of creativity (cf. Barber, 2015: 77–109). Such an ontology is operative in Marx, and it permeates the thought of Deleuze, from his early work to the period of collaboration with Guattari. In the framework of this ontology of creativity, justice may be closely linked to power, with a capacity to do and to affect, but such capacity does not primarily concern self-assertion – which can be achieved only over something (even one’s own self, as the neoliberal mantra insists in agreement to good old Christian catechism) – but the production/construction of (new) forms. At the same time, the ideational re-cognition of the ontological constancy of justice, thus, the integration of the dialectics of universality and multiplicity in the idea of justice, clarifies that such forms do not pertain to ‘pure difference’ but repeat in a differential manner a universal desire (and problem). In Adorno’s eloquent terms: ‘Only he who recognizes that the new is the same old thing will be of service to whatever is different’ (2003b: 96). It has already been suggested that this theoretical perspective critically relieves struggles for recognition from narcissistic victimisation and enjoyment, within which contemporary identity politics has often been enclosed. Reading justice in terms of a differential ontology of creativity that has

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multiplicity and universality as two of its constitutive determinations also complicates political processes and structures of representation without adopting the position of an impossible immediacy, which posits substantive universality as an objective index of being that only needs to acquire selfconsciousness. Who or what is represented as a subject of right – whether of legitimate domination or of a world-historical redemption/vindication – has first to be historically produced in a process that is never unidirectional and univocal; it bifurcates in multiple lines of intensity: lines of segmentation and molarisation, which establish hegemonic forms of representation, as well as counterhegemonic lines – minoritarian forms and codes of association, recognition, communication, struggle, resistance. Representation, thus, is always tentative and fragile, subject to flows of subjectivation and deterritorialisation, which are also flows of becoming-justice. Accordingly, there is no immediate link nor any direct, royal path from the desire for justice qua anthropological fact to a historically effective political form of universality. This insight certainly lends itself to a teleological narrative a la Kojève, at whose end stands a universal order of Right, the global homogeneous state. Even if it is unlikely, the prospect cannot be excluded on a purely logical level. However, that such a political order’s viability would rest on its capacity to effectively contain any existing or emerging centrifugal forces indicates that the idea of the global homogeneous state as the true form of universal justice can work theoretically – and in the long run politically – only by suppressing a series of other categorical-cum-historical determinations, which mediate the ‘multiplicity/universality’ opposition. These determinations, it will be shown, add up to, and at the same time mediate, another key opposition, which Kojève’s global state (like Hegel’s constitutional state of Prussia, but on a larger scale) is supposed to resolve. ORDER AND FREEDOM Taken in isolation, as abstract categories, freedom and order perform an operation similar to universality and multiplicity: they grasp two conceptions of justice, or else, two modalities of actualisation, which – while different – follow on the level of conceptual analysis from the formal definition of justice offered. On the one hand, if justice concerns the right form of being and the latter (even when it assumes the figure of the One) is composed of multiple components (containing ‘the many’ as its intrinsic figure), then the actualisation of justice implies an ordering, thus, the sedimentation and regulation of social relations and interactions. The link may reach the point of identity: ‘justice is order’. This is indeed the essence of one of the most fundamental conceptions

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of justice available, existing in many variations but saying practically a similar thing; from Rawls’s definition of justice as fairness back to the classic formula of the Digest, suum cuique tribuere, justice means ‘rendering what is due’. In this sense, ‘right form’ – justice actualised – denotes structures of distribution, allocation, recognition, sanction, imputation, provision, commutation and prohibition that ensure every-body is in its rightful place; earlier, this was referred to as a ‘regime of justice’, a notion that clearly contains order as one of its main connotations. On the other hand, from the perspective of matter’s inherent dynamism, ‘right form’ cannot denote a static arrangement of bodies, since this practically means blocking one of the latter’s essential qualities, their potential to develop, mutate, change; in such a framework, ‘right form’ can only be grasped dynamically, as (a condition of) movement and development. Negatively, this implies absence of constraints; positively, the capacity to develop whatever potentialities exist.20 The notion that traditionally has encompassed both senses is of course ‘freedom’, which on the level of living (more specifically human) forms comes to qualify a good life. From this angle, justice appears to concern the conditions that enable the growth of freedom, whether institutional (justice as a set of procedures) or subjective (justice as ethos). This is indeed a key aspect, but the relation between freedom and justice is even more intimate than the one being a condition to the other. For freedom as a positive determination of being may be empowered or inhibited by external regulations, but it does not arise by virtue of them. The essential precondition of freedom is freedom itself, which is to say, freedom emerges as a positive quality only by being enacted. This is what gives to freedom its singularity and materiality, without which it would be little more than an unverifiable feeling or abstraction. As Arundhati Roy (2013: 49) remarked for the tribal peoples of Central India who have lived for decades under the yoke of the state, freedom could be ‘tasted’ and ‘touched’, for it was the hard-won independence from the Forest Department, the Bureau responsible for their territories. Point granted, freedom, as Agamben (1999) has stressed, may also mean a refusal to act, like Bartleby’s ‘I would prefer not to’ – a refusal not to be confused with inaction. In either case, justice cannot simply refer to enabling conditions, for it itself actualised as a palpable quality – even an ephemeral one in the order of an event; for example, killing a tyrant, refusing to shoot an assembled crowd – through the (non) act of freedom. Which is to say, freedom (the capacity to move, act, develop, stand still, do nothing) is a substantive content of justice, so that a world which has become the ‘highest good’ can only be a ‘free world’. The association may be again conceived in terms of an essential identity: ‘justice is freedom’. It is such an identity that is conveyed in the final verse of Belgrado Pedrini’s poem Schiavi, which is known mainly in its song version, Il Galeone (1967): ‘Give an oath to justice!

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either freedom or death’ (Guriam, guriam giustizia! o libertà o morte!’). Freedom and justice here are not external to each other; to take an oath to justice, to commit to justice, is to opt for a life in freedom at the risk (and possibly price) of death. Now, if freedom is the philosophical name for the capacity to act in unnecessary ways and create contingent forms of being, whereas order is the philosophical name for an organised, rule-bound structuring of the sensible, there is an irreducible tension between the two, which grounds their oppositional pairing. Moreover, as will be elaborated further down, the tensional processes of formation and transformation exposed conceptually through this opposition attain in human being the intensity of competing forms of justice. Nevertheless, the conceptual pairing of order and freedom does not amount to a pure antithesis, whereby the one straightforwardly negates the other. As hinted, freedom qua historical activity emerges within ordered settings, which safeguard it, even foster it. Similarly, order qua dynamic form presupposes (the potential of) reformation, deformation and transformation as its positive moments. In human society this potential attains a dimension of freedom that does not exist in animal communities: the political capacity to institute historically original forms of being. There is, thus, a positive correlation between freedom and order, to such a degree in fact that, perhaps, each notion can respectively illumine the desirable form of the other. Nevertheless, the contradiction between the two notions remains, displacing every attempt at an identification. Justice cannot merely be order because it also encompasses the disordering of worlds. Similarly, justice cannot be formally identified with freedom since, being a quality of multiplicities, thus, of structured formations, it necessarily signifies rules, norms, limitations. That is why justice can have a critical function relative to freedom and order: Which types of order fail to stand up to their claim to facilitate a good life and instead institutionalise coercion, exploitation, exclusion for whole categories of living beings? Similarly, which acts and practices of freedom, instead of setting things right, unnecessarily damage other beings for their own benefit or pleasure? These questions require some immanent criteria of evaluation that do not rest on an abstract definition, which establishes an originary identity (of the ‘justice is fairness’ type). Moreover, recalling Marx’s insight that the most systematic forms of injustice arrive in the form of justice, to address these questions also implies the need to distinguish between forms of justice, which is to say, justice from itself. Freedom and order are salient categories for executing this task, but they must be thought through together in their dialectical unity, mediating each other while remaining oppositional. This assumption opens a critical line of theorisation, but in itself it remains too formal. Without any concrete determinations, like those intimated in the case of the Naxalite struggle in India

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– independence won from a central state – is not Jameson (2016: 32) right to insist that freedom is a metaphysical notion empty of content, this mysterious gift humans are supposed to be endowed with and yet fail to keep? Does not something similar apply to the notion of order, which can be abstracted to such heights that it encompasses everything? To prevent this drift to an empty formalism, the analysis will introduce a series of other oppositions and show how they provide the material content of the dialectics between freedom and order. In this way, the restrictive logic of contrastive binaries will have been challenged by a dialectical theorisation, which exposes the interplay of multiple oppositions determining justice historically and conceptually. Even if it is conceived as a totality that is irreducible to its individual components, or as a hierarchical arrangement whose diagrammatic coordinates cannot change, in dynamic systems ‘order’ concerns structured relations. In terms of justice, understood as a determination of order and conversely as what is actualised through order, this means that suum cuique tribuere is not a one-off act but a continuous operation. In this context, two forms of actuality stand out: retribution and reciprocity. The first activity attaches to the fact that the right form of being can be breached, calling for an act that will repair the wrong or damage done by offering a deserved punishment. Moreover, inability to deliver justice can generate a powerful affective complex, combining affects ranging from despair to rage, through which retribution attains the intensity of resentful fantasy, as with religious visions of Judgement Day. Reciprocity, on the other hand, pertains to exchange. Deleuze and Guattari (2013a: 163) – in agreement with anthropological studies critical of the earlier theories of Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, like those of Clastres (1989) and David Graeber (2011) – may be correct in neither considering exchange as the primary fact of social life nor categorising every transference of goods under its banner. Nonetheless – and the more networks of social interaction open and expand the more practices of exchange tend to multiply – some degree of structured, regularised and calculated give-and-take between individuals is a globalwide phenomenon. In this context, reciprocity expresses the desire for justice as an expectation to receive what is rightful and, thus, deserved in a process where all partners are supposed to receive a fair share. Of course, the latter depends on the wider regime of justice and its structures of recognition and distribution, something that has led anthropology to distinguish three subtypes of reciprocity: ‘generalised’, ‘balanced’, and ‘negative’ (Eller, 2009: 169–70). One way or another though, a ‘just order’ entails some type and degree of reciprocal relations. Moreover, an insight neatly elaborated by Ricoeur (1995: 293–302, 315–30), reciprocity and retribution converge in the principle that shapes their operation; namely, equivalence: justice is actualised by giving to somebody something (be it a commodity or a penalty) that is proportionally of equal value to what they have given or done.

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It is this fundamental precept that the ‘golden rule’ (in its many variations) expresses: ‘do unto others as you would wish them do to you’. To this extent, the actualisation of a just order is mediated by the establishment of patterns of equivalence, which thus stands out as another determination of justice. The frequency and significance of retribution and reciprocity – certainly in Western culture, but I presume the point to be further generalisable – has often led them to be identified with justice per se (Johnston, 2013). Without adopting Kojève’s (2007: 251–62) anthropological typology, my study concedes that such a restriction of justice to equivalence excludes other experiences of justice and hence yields a regrettably narrow conception of the notion. To the analysis already offered, another aspect will be added here: justice is actualised in three forms that oppose retribution, reciprocity and their logic of equivalence; namely, in forgiveness, insurrection and donation. That to forgive is to displace retribution from the centre of justice has been of course declared in the most uncompromising way in the ministry of Jesus, as narrated in the gospels that retained his memory in the communities of his followers. Given indeed the notion’s Christian overtones, it may seem strange to deploy it in a materialist theory as a positive determination of justice. Is not Arendt (1978: 77) right, herself picking up Machiavelli’s critique, to argue that practicing Jesus’s prescriptions would leave the wicked unpunished, ensuring as a result that injustice will prevail? At stake here, though, is not the practicality or desirability of ‘Christian ethics’ (whatever this notion denotes). Forgiveness has certainly been bolstered within the theological matrix of Christianity, but the affective ground of forgiveness is not faith in God, it is love (cf. Ricoeur, 1995: 315–21). Of course, this is yet another controversial and ambiguous notion, equally associated with the Christian tradition. Moreover, Ricoeur (ibid.) astutely traces a disproportionality between love and justice, the latter understood in terms of an order where everybody receives its due. But may not this disproportionality with ‘justice-order’ testify to another experience of justice? Like forgiveness, love has nothing inherently religious, although the Christian tradition must be credited for bringing out the notion’s rich (and potentially radical) sociopolitical implications (e.g., Metz, 1999). In lieu of a lengthier analysis, love can be conceived as an immanent facet of desire’s movement in-between beings, generating as well as resting on the affective recognition of the symbiotic structure of life, thus, of community, interdependence, alterity. Love in this sense leads (with the full force of a dictate) the affected being to embrace its object of love, who is not necessarily one but many, not only humans but living beings, not only living beings but objects, not only individual objects but the world, in all their potentiality, fragility, imperfection.21 This in turn not only nourishes the desire to see justice extended to the other, or indeed the desire to actualise justice and live well in common; it also offers an alternative to retribution: that

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justice is not actualised through punishment but in forgiveness. To be sure, the latter is not necessarily preferable than retribution; in fact, it is highly questionable whether the dilemma can be decided on a formal level. What can be said is that forgiveness pursues a difficult path, healing the wounds that injustice inflicted by restoring the broken bond of community.22 There is another alternative to retribution, whose main affective component is not love but rage in face of injustice. This is when the desire for justice morphs into insurrection. The latter, unlike forgiveness, may still be driven by the furies of vengeance; however, it effectively breaks with the proportional logic of equivalence – an eye for an eye – by attacking (sometimes indiscriminately) the social and political apparatus standing at the background of the concrete event of injustice: not one cop for one youth, but burn as many police departments as possible. Insurrection is excessive, something that does not make it irrational; it rather endows it with a dynamic which is both creative and destructive. To be sure, clear-cut oppositions should again be avoided. The transgressive élan of insurrection does not necessarily cancel the principle of equivalence per se; as Heinrich von Kleist’s story of Michael Kohlhaas paradigmatically shows, insurrection may suspend the equivalence of Right only to serve it and ratify it. Yet if Kohlhaas does not want more than what he deserves according to the dictates of equivalence, some of his comrades in arms – at least in the film version of the story, directed by Arnaud des Pallières – refuse to go back, they want something else (even if what this is remains unclear or turns out to be a recipe of doom). To this extent, Kohlhaas’s uprising testifies to the transformative potency of insurrectional events. Thus, if forgiveness can be said to restore community, insurrection opens the potential for another community, hence, another justice. In its own way, donation is also a ‘surplus activity’, which can generate obligation without involving the expectation that a magnitude of equal value will be returned.23 To be sure, in anthropology, giving and not expecting something in return is regarded a subtype of reciprocity, ‘generalised reciprocity’. Without denying the analytical value of the latter notion, Ricoeur is right to suggest that the excessive logic of a gift economy, by displacing the logic of equivalent evaluation, tends to suspend reciprocity per se. How far this is possible of course is another question. Derrida (1992) for one has attempted to demonstrate how difficult it is for the act of gift to break the logic of exchange, reciprocity, equivalence and ultimately indebtedness. Still, Derrida does not argue that donation is a logical impossibility, he rather highlights the excessiveness of the gift, filled with aporiae but also permeated by a promise: of social forms without any other indebtedness than the one given freely. Here is the crux: all three practices – donation, forgiveness, insurrection – are defined by what Ricoeur (1995: 328) calls ‘a logic of superabundance’ vis-à-vis the ‘logic of equivalence’ guiding retribution and

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reciprocity. Later, it will be argued that this superabundant logic partakes of a tendency to eviscerate justice entirely in the name of immediate relations of fraternity and freedom. Still, for the most part, donation, insurrection and forgiveness do not cancel justice, they actualise it in another mode than that of an ordered totality where every-body gets its due, as an act of freedom permeated by a different economy of desire. In fact, it is arguable that the latter has an ‘uneconomic’ core, since it tends to displace the constitutive forms of any organised ‘economy’: equivalence, utility, measurement, cost/ profit calculation. While this modality of actualisation, ‘justice-as-freedom’, has the potency to dissolve ordered states of being, it is not ‘chaotic’ in terms of the vision of justice that it fosters. Herein, the danger is to fall back to an undialectical antithesis between freedom and order, where justice is actualised exclusively in one or the other mode. Although retribution, reciprocity and their logic of equivalence are mainly concerned with the preservation of order, they still presuppose freedom; more than that, they can value freedom and aspire to protect it. By the same token, donation, forgiveness, insurrection may lean more towards freedom, since properly speaking they cannot be compelled without at the same time their essence being perverted, but they can still point to ordered forms of being. The justice of this order, however, does not so much impute to each being its due but rather ‘renders to everyone their own, recognises the essential significance of every individual and which draws close to each through love’ (Cacciari, 2018: 81). Such a new order – is not communism a name for it? – can become a project that unifies and orientates the three practices under discussion. Therefore, if the dilemma is not choosing between freedom and order but what type of freedom and what type order deserve to be called ‘just’, to effectively surpass contrastive binaries, it is necessary to elucidate the mediating link between these two modes of actualisation. Retribution and reciprocity do not necessarily need to be overseen by a higher authority, but they do become socially sanctioned activities only through their incorporation in a social form that formalises their protocols of operation and ensures that these are kept. This generic social form is none other than Right (Droit), whose link with justice is present in the very definition of the latter as order.24 To state that justice is actualised as order is to say that it crystallises in a coherent system of rules, norms, prescriptions and injunctions, which fix lines of conduct and, thus (claim to) set and preserve being in its proper form. Thus, much more than a rational limit to human passions, Right is one of the main forms that the desire for justice morphs into (Kohlhaas in this respect is a paradigmatic figure of the way the passion for justice underscoring Right can break loose once the latter is breached or suspended). In fact, while not ‘natural’ in the sense of

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an instinctive code, and pace Maine’s (1954: 5) outdated assumption that ‘ancient society’ was ruled by caprice, there is no social system without a form of right. Specifically, there are two generic forms of right to have emerged in history, Custom and Law. To be sure, both forms connect to other social forms and practices – for example, to ritual and contract – and, thus, have too many variations for any detailed typology to be attempted. Nonetheless, as Supiot observes, all these permutations share a fundamental anthropological function: ‘they ensure an existing order within which people can act, even if their actions call this order into question’ (2017: 7). Moreover, to ensure and preserve such an order, a form of right must also guarantee that internal frictions stay at a non-threatening level of intensity. Which is to say, insofar every form of right is necessarily embedded in a territory, whose proper form it is supposed to maintain, law and custom have social peace as their intrinsic, long-term aim.25 Point granted, what was said earlier about nonhuman systems of interaction applies here as well: it is one thing to say that behaviour must be rulebound for order to exist and another to claim that such an ordering of relations positively actualises justice. Especially as far as law is concerned, there is a diverse but identifiable current of critical thought which (rising against a venerable, age-old tradition that has been waxing lyrical about the positive role law plays in the constitution and preservation of a just order of being) has tried to severe the bond between law and justice. Adopting Deleuze’s periodisation, a key moment has been the dissociation of law from the Good, which allowed the former’s study as a pure form (1991: 81–90). In this context, law could still maintain a positive relation to justice, by being regarded the formal expression of reason’s capacity to order the sensible in a proper way – ‘the grammar of right’.26 To this extent, despite their secular rationalism, modern advocates of law from Kant to Dworkin could still countersign the principle that Samuel Maitland attributed to the Middle Ages: ‘Law is the meeting point of Reason and Life’.27 Still, once law was cut off from its transcendent referents and could be studied solely in terms of its formal functions, it became possible to identify it with power and violence. History came to the service of this perspective by revealing how initially law was wedded to (the imperatives of) a despotic Power and was not ‘what it becomes or will seek to become later: a guarantee against despotism, an immanent principle that unites the parts into the whole, that makes of this whole the object of a general knowledge and will whose sanctions are merely derivative, of a judgment and an application directed at the rebellious parts’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013a: 245). In this framework, even later developments could be torn from their progressive mantle – like the one Maine puts into ‘contract law’ vis-à-vis ‘imperative law’ (1954: 179–215). Thus, instead of being considered political, moral or intellectual breakthroughs, they were integrated into

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a genealogy that depicts them unadorned, as expressions of conflicts between existing/rising and defensive/invasive assemblages or blocks of power.28 I do not dispute the critical force of this line of thought (which let it not be forgotten has frequently put in its banners the emblem of materialism). As Bloch has observed, that law stores a preferential treatment for the rich and powerful is a commonplace among the poor and the downtrodden, deriving from painful experience (2015: 271). In this respect, theoretical critiques of law have the merit of showing that such preference cannot be explained in terms of ‘misuse’ (without denying the huge corruption that may infect legal systems). As Supiot recognises Lex, ‘always expresses an imperative, a power imposed on people’ (2017: 42). For sure, law’s power is distinguished by adding the prefix ‘legitimate’ as opposed to ‘arbitrary’, a difference that is ill advised to sweepingly denounce. Nevertheless, whatever its distinguishing qualities, power, hence, force and imposition, remain of the essence of law, determining the manner it perseveres as an identifiable phenomenon (cf. Derrida, 2002b). A powerless justice can be theoretically sustained, for something does not have to be actual or implemented in order to be (experienced) right; a powerless law, which cannot punish those that breach it or cannot establish nor maintain a peaceful, well-ordered territory, along with being historically defunct, is a logical oxymoron. The point can be further endorsed by attending to the fact – intimated in the concluding sentence of the previous paragraph – that the ‘force of law’ is not a homogeneous power, it is expressed in two different types of power. First, law denotes a power that has been constituted in fixed form and derives its legitimacy from a higher source (a state, a constitution, a king, a Lawgiver). This is the ‘constituted power’, analysed systematically by Negri (1999), which at its core concerns the sedimentation and preservation of a form of being, hence of the relations, privileges and hierarchies defining the latter. In this respect, against the credo that ‘law is the refuge of the weak’, the preferential treatment that the power of law shows to the powerful is structural. As for the second type, to the extent that law prescribes and sanctions roles, rights and duties within a territory whose normative boundaries it defines, the power of law is also sovereign, finding its highest manifestation in the capacity to command death (from war to capital punishment) as a legitimate event. This is the sovereign power of law Pindar talks about in his famous fragment (169), which plays a key role in the architectonic of Agamben’s relevant analysis (1998: 30). The nomos, sovereign of all, Of mortals and immortals, Leads with the strongest hand,

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Justifying the most violent. I judge this from the work of Hercules.

As Agamben (ibid.) notes, unlike Solon and Hesiod – whose normative conception of law as legitimate violence fusing justice and force set a basis for the modern concept of the rule of law – Pindar approaches the convergence of violence and justice that law in its sovereign potency performs under the light of their indistinction. Thus, if the constituted power of law enforces inequality and privilege by turning them into a legitimate right, the sovereign power of law shows violence to be at the very heart of the norm and the legal order of Right founded upon it. Between the constituted and sovereign dimensions of legal power there is a tension that can be resolved in different ways, depending on the specific type of legal order. In either case, the key point is that both types of power reveal violence, imposition and force to be of the essence of law. Then again, the way that both types of power necessarily posit violence in a certain relation to (an order of) right intimates that law cannot be reduced to its functions of control or domination. Consequently, they also help make apparent why ‘it is futile to explain it [law] without reference to the idea of justice’ (Supiot, 2017: xix). According to Supiot, what all such attempts end up obscuring is the ‘normative institution of the human’ (ibid.: 4), or as it has been defined here (drawing from Hegel’s notion of Sittlichkeit), the ethical structure of social being. Earlier, a materialist reading of this notion has been offered, which refrained from a deontology that is vulnerable to the charge of classbiased rationalism. If ‘society partakes both of being and ought-to-be’ (ibid.: xx), it is because right form – ‘ought-to-be’ – is integral in the affective movement towards a good life, a movement that is determinant of living beings and which in the historical becoming of humankind attains the status of an institutional-cum-political problem. In this context, all judgements and imputations law passes are necessarily evaluations: private property is protected because it is deemed a necessary basis for a good life or it is outlawed because it is deemed the basis of exploitation; abortion is legal because selfdetermination of the body is a fundamental right or conversely it is illegal because life is sacred and terminating it arbitrarily commits injustice to the fetus. In brief, whatever the functions of law may be, every legal order of Right at its core formalises a certain vision of justice, which is geared to give life its proper form. It is this bond between law, justice and the good that Solon elucidates in a normative and prescriptive manner in one of his poems: This is what my heart bids to teach the Athenians [ . . . ] Lawfulness (eunomia) reveals all that is orderly and fitting and often places fetters around the unjust. She makes the rough smooth, puts a stop to excess, dries up the blooming

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flowers of ruin, straightness out crooked judgments, tames deeds to pride, and puts an end to acts of sedition and to the anger of grievous strife. Under her all things among men are fitting and rational. (fr.4, 30–39)29

Asserting as much hardly means that all laws are just; it rather means that assessing whether a law is just can be done from two angles: either from the perspective of an existing regime of justice or by posing the more radical question of whether the regime of justice that a legal order formalises stands to its name. It is on this basis that law and custom are conceived as historical forms that mediate the desire and problem of justice. In contrast, however, to liberal thought – itself a variation of state-thought – law is not taken as the essential form of justice, nor even one of the two essential forms (next to contract), a gesture that necessarily excludes a whole array of activities. Law is one possible historical form, which relates to order as a basic modality of actualisation of justice; that is, to the fact that justice denotes structured relations and interactions. Apart from maintaining social peace, the other key function of law – and the same, mutatis mutandis, holds true of custom – is to crystallise into dogmatic form some foundational principles; for instance, that a national people are sovereign or that property is inviolable. In this way, such principles are extracted from the immanent plane of social/desiring production and operate as its regulative and normative guidelines. To this extent, every formal order of Right – justice qua codified order – may be said to have a heteronomous quality. That is why from the perspective of freedom, Right is always a constraint. To be sure, Supiot’s insight into the anthropological function of law expresses a long-held insight, articulated systematically already by Kant and Hegel (not to mention its ancient and medieval versions): by recognising subjects as responsible beings that deserve to be punished, law ratifies freedom. Is not the same true of custom? That Agamemnon is ready in the Iliad (XIX, 78–144) to customarily compensate Achilles for wronging him sustains de facto that, even though rage was infused in his soul by the gods, his actions were his own responsibility, indexed as such with a dimension of freedom that cannot be explained away by external factors. For sure, the question of agency in Homer is considerably more complex, broaching the various parameters the phenomenon entails.30 Precisely, the key insight here is that the institutionaljuridical matrix that an order of right erects guarantees a space of human freedom even when a strong metaphysical or psychological idea of ‘free will’ is unavailable. As Supiot notes, law fixes a stable order that ‘pre-exists’ subjects and ‘guarantees their identity over time, while also providing them with the opportunity to transform the world and leave their mark on it’ (2017: 37). And yet, it does that only by placing at the same time constraints that

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must be respected, that is to say, by policing freedom.31 Once again, the same principle applies to custom. Against conventional ideas that customary right relies on strong uniformity typical of small communities, anthropological studies, from as early as Max Gluckman’s (1956) ethnography of African societies, have shown how custom orders a social world not only by uniting its components but by dividing them, in a complex, conflict-laden process. Nevertheless, while customary right invites critique (even rebellion), it can perform its key functions of preservation and cohesion insofar as its norms and prescriptions have the character of a sanction-laden imperative, of a Solen that enables by fixing limits. Naturally, in this context freedom denotes a space where right does not intrude, and human beings act in whatever ways they deem proper. Thus, what emerges as a key determination of freedom, and by implication of a just order of being, is autonomy, conceived in terms of unhindered selfrealisation. Superficially, such a negative conception of freedom may seem to be most fitting to the current materialist theorisation, since it does not commit to a specific conception of the good life. Yet as stated earlier, given that the good life is a dynamic process which frustrates static definitions, freedom – much more than an empty space of non-interference – is one of its positive markers. It follows that an entirely negative conception of freedom is not only partial, it is self-defeating. For either it surrenders the power to determine the space of its operation to an external power, to law, thus grounding freedom to a heteronomous structure, or it must admit that a legal order guaranteeing freedom must have been positively instituted by (an act of) freedom; which is to say, it must re-cognise freedom as a positive energy and a collective event instituting justice. A more substantial conception of autonomy is therefore required, which conceives it in terms of a positive capacity to posit the rules and norms that determine a way of life. Even from this perspective, it is not necessary to discard law as a mediation of justice; freedom can rather be posited as willing submission to a law in whose dictates human beings recognise a universal imperative of (their) Reason. Compelling as it sounds, this notion of autonomy, as Hegel has argued (1999b: 119ff.), remains too formal, since the categorical/legal imperative is posited in an a priori manner. Instead, thus, of realising freedom as a lived collective experience, it practically spells the real subsumption of human beings to a Right that they cannot shape, much less abolish. Thus, an idea of individual freedom is realised formally, as law, despite and at the expense of the unfreedom of the many. Granting liberalism’s pragmatic focus on the dangers of power and the constitutional limits that need to be placed upon it, it is arguable that liberal conceptions of freedom, like respective conceptions of justice, fail to grasp the notion’s material determinations in their full breadth. No wonder that liberals connect justice

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and freedom in a formalistic way, with the former providing the formal conditions for the exercise of the latter. Against such an abstract formalism, which dissociates the form of justice (law) from its content (freedom), the young Hegel’s radical conclusion, picked up and radicalised by various thinkers, notably Cornelius Castoriadis (1991), is that autonomy, to be actual, requires that law, or more broadly Right, is integrated to the life of the community and its collective processes of deliberation and arbitration. In effect, a radical form of democracy arises as the institutional framework of a just order, and more substantially, as the historical actuality of justice; that is, as its material content and telos. Such autonomy presupposes and evokes a different type of power than the constituted power of law, a ‘constituent power’, which Negri (1999) has defined as a ‘mechanism’ of radical creativity, the capacity of the multitude, of the ‘the many’, to bring forth what is-not-yet and disclose unexplored horizons. In opposition to constituted power, which operates within a transcendent field of representation, constituent power unfolds in a rhizomatic plane of immanence, embodying and ratifying the radical autonomy of (human) being; that is, the lack of a transcendent ground for the principles and norms through which life in its sheer multiplicity acquires ordered form. Agamben has argued that constituent power, in its capacity to institute new forms of being, cannot be separated from sovereign power, the capacity to define who deserves to partake of this new form (1998: 43). The history of revolutions certainly ratifies this point, in the sense that its shows how at moments of high intensity a zone of indeterminacy is generated wherein maximum freedom tends to verge with dictatorial stringency. Yet this does not mean that every analytical distinction between these two types of power collapses, no less than the distinction between might and right or coercion and freedom. Unlike the sovereign type, constituent power is not realised in a violent-packed imposition of boundaries and/or judgement upon life; it is a productive force manifesting the political surplus of desire. Arguably, from this angle, constituent power is a determination of justice qua productive desire, present in every becoming. On the other hand, to truly unravel its radical potency, constituent power requires that the desire for justice is not regimented into a static order but breaks open into uncharted territories and lines of flight; which it to say, it requires that justice is actualised as freedom. Although more radical than what a Kantian notion of autonomy allows, this perspective still does not necessitate the negation of law per se. But is it possible to fully integrate (legal or customary) Right to autonomous processes of social/desiring production without canceling it? Does not the notion of ‘order’ connote ipso facto a power that has been constituted? Even in the most radical democracy, where every mass assembly can on principle revise or abolish a law, existing laws retain their imputative power and must on

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principle be obeyed even by those who did not vote for them; otherwise, they would quite clearly not be laws in any meaningful sense. Something similar is true of customary principles, rules and norms, which can be called thus only insofar they have the power to provide guidelines which have an axiomatic force. A collective assemblage seeking to actualise freedom as its practical reality can on principle criticise and question all its customary and/or legal codes of conduct, yet without any such shared codes, without a regime of justice, it would lack the cohesion necessary for its reproduction as an identifiable singularity. Consequently, abolishing all customary/legal codes would amount to abolishing the assemblage itself. At stake here is the dogmatic basis of social order. That authoritarian, hierarchical and/or centralised orders of being rest on dogmatic foundations is a rather uncontroversial claim. More interesting is that even committed libertarian grassroot groups posit certain principles, notably, anti-sexism and anti-racism, as a dogmatic basis of their formation and operation, hence, as a necessary qualification for entry. From this viewpoint, a heteronomous residue subsists in every order of right, even the most autonomous. That is why, conversely, the radical unfolding of justice as freedom has an anomic potency, pointing beyond every formal codification, beyond autonomy, to a point of absolute deterritorialisation. We will return to this point in the next chapter. At present, at the other end of this deterritorialising movement, in the consolidation of orders of right, justice finds another immanent point of excess, the sacred. Of course, the term is anything but straightforward, much more so given its connection to religious experience and discourse. Nevertheless, from Mircea Eliade’s (1959) phenomenology to Agamben’s (1998: 71–86) historico-political analysis, and even in its more everyday, prosaic usages, the ‘sacred’ keeps one essential connotation: that which is sacred contains a surplus value that cannot/should not be destroyed or tainted. In this basic sense, the notion has for the current purposes a heuristic value, for it enables to conceptually identify nodes of significance generated by processes of social/desiring production, which condense and attract libidinal flows and exceed the profanity of critique. A principle, an object, a hero, a martyr; has there ever been any collective assemblage that has not known at least one of these figures of the sacred? To sum up, without abandoning the nomadic and rhizomatic qualities that the Deleuzian framework ascribed to it, it was shown that the becoming of justice is defined by a threefold dialectical play of affirmation/negation, universality/multiplicity and freedom/order. Unraveling this line of thought, the inference arrived at is that the dialectics of freedom and order determining the historical actuality of justice has as its material content a tension between equivalence/superabundance, autonomy/heteronomy and constituent/constitutive power. Within this theoretical frame, it is not a matter of passing an

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abstract judgement upon orders of Right based on an indeterminate notion of justice, a gesture that radical as it appears remains an act of withdrawal from history. It is a question of mapping out the shifting positionality of right within the immanent production of ordered forms of being, typifying in the process the different regimes of justice, which institute and reproduce such an order. In other words, it is a question of the diagrammatic articulation of justice; that is, of sketching the spatially determinate lines and operations through which justice becomes.

Chapter 5

Savages, Patricians, Plebs

Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they throw them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts. —Maximilien Robespierre, ‘On the Trial of the King’ (2007: 59)

We live in a world of states, where peoples who have not been constituted in state-form, like the Palestinians and the Kurds, associate their historical vindication; that is, the coming of justice, with statehood.1 This hard-to-dispute fact takes us back to the materialist principle posited early on: if state-thought dominates contemporary conceptions of justice, it is because states have come to dominate the world scene. In the process, statist legal orders have arrogated themselves to pinnacles of justice, to the point that absence of the state form came to be equated with lack of justice. Given the resultant hegemony of state-thought, it should be of little surprise that mainstream, state-orientated theories of justice have ignored ‘those without a state’ (Staid, 2016). Having been classified to an evolutionary backwards stage of sociocultural ‘primitivity’ and ‘savagery’, the implication, as Deleuze and Guattari have pointed out, was that ‘primitive people “don’t understand” so complex an apparatus’ as a state (2013b: 416). Moreover, refusal to be integrated into a state became the political mark of ‘barbarians’ who, in the Chinese state formula, ‘had not entered the map’.2 The ‘wildings’ in Game of Thrones, as represented by the ‘civilised’ peoples ‘this side’ of the Wall, pay tribute to this barbarian figure bereft of law, order and justice, who has haunted state-moulded imaginaries. A scandal and an anomaly to the eyes of state-thought, savages and barbarians have repeatedly faced the bitter taste of civilised justice. 161

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For all that, there is a stubborn fact begging to be theoretically tackled: for millennia, non-state peoples, most of them leading nomadic lives, outnumbered those who out of choice or by force lived inside state borders. In Scott’s words, ‘Beyond the horizon [of early states] were a variety of what might be called non-appropriable subsistence practices, the most important of which were hunting and gathering, maritime fishing and collecting, horticulture, shifting cultivation and specialised pastoralism’ (2017: 135). The problem with the various progressivist narratives that state-thought has fostered is that they fail to appreciate non-state societies in their own terms, despite their impressive longevity. In a substantial sense, my study has been working out this issue in the abstract terms of a theory of justice. The legal order called state, in its sovereign and constituted potency, is a historical form embodying a singular type of becoming-justice. In this type, the dialectical interplay between the various determinations of justice – multiplicity and universality, freedom and order, superabundance and equivalence, autonomy and heteronomy, constituent and constituted power – receive and unfold through a specific engineering diagram, whose unique features need to be clarified. To do that in a way that the spell of state-thought is broken, it is necessary to integrate the relevant analysis into a wider theoretical exposition of the historical actuality of justice, elucidating in the process other engineering diagrams, composing different types of (becoming-) justice. In lieu of a more extended investigation, the key point framing the analysis of pre-statist (‘savage’, ‘primitive’, ‘tribal’) forms of justice can be drawn from Deleuze’s and Guattari’s respective analysis: ‘savage justice’ is a vital component of the ‘primitive territorial machine’ that ‘codes flows, invests organs, and marks bodies’ (2013a: 168). In the same way that the use of the term machine is not metaphorical, the savage literally becomes (a subject of) justice through a customary and ritualistic codification of his and hers body, which parallel to the inscription of collective identity and memory marks limits, rules and norms. The body, from the angle of this materialist theorisation, is not a docile matter upon whose surface right is imprinted. As in Kafka’s Penal Colony, social codes are inscribed upon the savage body through methods that verge on torture.3 Nevertheless, the body is not passive and inert, executing an externally imposed code; along with pain it actively absorbs codes and mediates the social inscriptions that rituals perform. In other words, the body is the affective and active epicentre in ritualised (thus, institutionalised) processes of subjectivation and ‘customisation’ (cf. Bell, 1992). The gender distinction noted above is not dictated by current norms of academic correctness; it is analytically crucial since it points to a differentiation within the primitive regimes of justice. As Clastres (1989: 101–28) has discovered in his field studies of the Amerindian tribes of the Guarani and Guyaki, a strict division of labour existed between the males and females of

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the community, a division represented in the binary between ‘the bow and the basket’: men hunted while women gathered. According to Staid (2016: 35ff.), a similar division of labour can be traced in the Iroquois of North America and many other primitive communities where ethnographies have been conducted. References to biological data are of limited help, since even if some elements of natural right (in the sense defined earlier) are operative, they acquire their consistency within a sociocultural framing of masculinity/ femininity. Does then this division of labour point to an institutionalised inequality within the tribal body, to a regime of justice where Man is rightfully positioned above Woman? Clastres insists that there is no organised coercion in the primitive societies he has studied (2015: 18–27). Supporting his position, other studies have suggested that the gendered division of labour operates along egalitarian lines, the ‘basket’ and the ‘bow’ having the same symbolic value that gathering and hunting have as practical activities (Lewellen, 2003: 131–58). On the other hand, does not the institutionalised division of labour along gendered lines point to a certain regimentation and segmentation of being that captures and blocks becoming, especially becoming-woman (but in its own way also becoming-man) within a restrictive code? Simply put, that women cannot be hunters is a limitation that the tribal order imposes upon them, a limitation sanctified (or, more substantially, justified) by custom. If not a full-fledged patriarchy, the seeds of a patriarchal order of right are there. Moreover, insofar customary right serves to justify this facet of social organisation, or any other rule, norm, code and hierarchy in a way that they become immune to critique and transcend political deliberation, it is plausible to ascertain that savage (regimes of) justice contains a heteronomous dimension. To be sure, primitive communities must not to be conceived as immobile genera living in an identical way from prehistory to the present; they have their own historical rhythms, which are subject to external environmental pressures and internal dynamics. Along the way, their regimes of justice may also mutate, while still not ‘evolving’ towards dominant, statist forms of justice.4 Point granted, one cannot also fail to note the resilience of the codes and customs defining the primitive socius, a resilience that at least partly can be attributed to the heteronomous quality with which they are enshrined and bolstered. Granting the heteronomous aspects in the relative regimes, the image of ‘savage justice’ as dominated by ‘prelogical’ heteronomy and lacking entirely in ‘enlightened’ autonomy remains regrettably monolithic. The distribution of roles embodied in the gendered division of labour is not formally separated from the immanent reproduction of the primitive socius, in the form of a transcendentally constituted Authority and Law. While not foreign to privileges and rank, primitive societies essentially unfold in a horizontal plane. This is an insight anthropology corroborates to the point that a

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theoretical generalisation is plausible: ‘savage justice’ is not constituted as an order or imputation coming from an institutionally demarcated centre of power figured to stand above the social body. In contrast, it has horizontality as its fundamental spatial determination, which is to say, it is structured in a manner that roles, functions and positions operate on a flat (but not frictionless) sociopolitical space. Moreover, given that to constitute such a horizontal space of social/desiring flows and interactions is to institute a field of interaction and connectivity whereby differences are not regimented into a vertical order that structurally subjugates and disenfranchises whole classes of individuals, equality emerges as another determinative quality of savage justice. Participating and contributing in subsistence or sanctioning practices; sharing obligations and food; enjoying free access to goods considered to be common; controlling and donating surpluses; recognising each other as equal through ritualistic recital of songs and origin myths: becoming-justice in savage communities is a becoming-equal that produces the primitive socius as a horizontal field of association.5 What comes out of the preceding paragraphs is the existence of different lines of actualisation, moving towards opposite directions. An egalitarian society is not a society lacking in status distinctions or wealth disparities. Moreover, to the extent that ‘hierarchy is a function of group living’ (Scheidel, 2017: 26), based on differences of skill and power, it will inevitably find institutional form and eventually come to qualify the relevant regime of justice (the institutions of chiefdom and shamanism being here pertinent). In this context, the heteronomous dimension of the customary order of Right defining primitive communities could allow these niches of hierarchy to be augmented to the point of infusing them with an aura of sacredness.6 However, the dynamics of such asymmetries and hierarchies, potentially leading political power and justice to be cut off from the social body and elevated ‘above’ it, did not go unnoticed. While the process could not be conceptualised in terms of ‘state-making’, separation of power and regimentation of hierarchy were coded as dangers to the right order of things. In this context, the customary obligations and constraints placed upon the leader analysed by Clastres (1989: 27–48) are an instance of a wider phenomenon noticed by modern anthropology: the regimes of justice defining primitive societies entail practices of leveling and equalisation, which are geared to ‘remove the possibility of society’s degeneration into a society of hierarchy and domination’ (Staid, 2016: 20).7 From this angle, the anthropological recognition of nonstate peoples acquires greater depth. In Clastres’s succinct formula, primitive societies – and I add their (regimes of) justice – are not simply ‘without a state’, an absence that could be easily deplored as lack; they are against the state. Therein, the desire for justice morphs into a desire to maintain autonomy, horizontality and equality, not as abstract ideals enshrined in

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a legal document, but as operational markers and embodied qualities of the primitive machine: moving, collecting, hunting, assembling, without being contained, recorded, monitored, taxed. Accordingly, autonomy requires and yields heterogeneity, since an assemblage can be called ‘autonomous’ in terms of its internal structure only when the many are recognised as such; therefore, even if the community is conceived as a singular body, in the primitive socius the desire for justice is actualised also as an affirmation of multiplicity. In Clastres’s words, ‘Primitive societies are societies of the multiple’ (2015: 15). Lest it not be thought that my analysis succumbs to a romantic representation of savages; quite a few practices of equalisation entail violence. From relatively benign forms, like public ridicule, to stricter sanctions, like forcible exile, up to severe physical punishments, there is a wide gamut of practices exercising a ‘preemptive neutralization of authority’ (Scheidel, 2017: 29). Accordingly, as hinted earlier, even on the level of subjectivation equality is impressed through violent rites of passage. To quote Clastres, ‘The initiatory ritual is a pedagogy that passes from the group to the individual, from the tribe to the young people. [ . . . ] To what do the young people consent? They consent to accept themselves for what they are from that time forward: full members of the community. Nothing more, nothing less’ (1989: 185). In this respect, equalisation can be said to partake in the ‘system of cruelty’ that, according to Deleuze and Guattari, consists of that ‘movement of culture that is realised in bodies and inscribed on them’ (2013a: 169). Additionally, Clastres (2010) has also shown how war with other tribes is one of the main ways that the desire for autonomy is actualised and multiplicity is violently affirmed. This point certainly resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s proposition that the war machine is exterior to the state (2013b: 409). Paradoxically though, war – being that special time when the leader could assert his authority in authoritarian relations of command/obedience, as well as the event whereby victory may generate an affective complex of superiority/inferiority and facilitate the domination and exploitation of the defeated – can be considered a phenomenon intrinsic to the emergence of the state form.8 To this extent, the dialectic exposed theoretically earlier gains more historical substance: violence is immanent to the actuality of justice, yet it contains a negative potency relative to it, facilitating the subversion and possibly the collapse of positive, historically actualised, forms of justice.9 The analysis offered in the chapter so far has mapped out the effective presence of justice in forms of social organisation preceding the state. Moreover, it was shown that already at the ‘primitive’ level, becoming-justice is defined by the dialectics of multiplicity/universality, freedom/order, and affirmation/negation. Finally, it was indicated that the ‘dialectics of justice’ channel into two distinguishable lines of articulation, one hierarchical, indexed on

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structures of inequality and authoritarianism, the other horizontal, indexed on the proliferation of egalitarian flows and connections. On the other hand, largely because of their low level of population concentration, surplus productivity, social differentiation and technical composition, in primitive societies, the degree of differentiation between these two engineering diagrams is of a low intensity. It would take the mediation of a key historical event in order for them to fully differentiate into spatially distinct types of justice. The political dimension of this event has been suggested throughout the section; it is the appearance of the state form. JUSTICE FROM ABOVE Although in the previous chapters the state loomed large, its representation remained abstract, reduced – along the lines set by Deleuze and Guattari – to its diagrammatic skeleton. Given the more historically focused character of the current chapter, it is apposite to flesh out the state’s institutional body. Indeed, self-evident as the existence of states may nowadays be, the question remains worth to ask: What are the institutional organs peculiar to a state qua political form? In his study of the earliest states, Scott (2017: 23) identifies the following features: ‘A king, specialized administrative stuff, social hierarchy, a monumental center, city walls, and tax collection and distribution’. These phenomena can be transposed to a more generalised form, reaching a definition of the state in agreement to definitions offered by specialist scholarship: a territorially circumscribed unit with a political, symbolic and geographical centre of power, administrative organs (at a minimum army, police and bureaucracy), legally sanctioned social divisions and modes of surplus appropriation.10 Given the various institutional attributes defining states and the different degrees of intensity and complexity they allow, Scott sensibly remarks that the state is not ‘an either/or’ (2017: 23); nor, thus, does it simply abolish the social forms preceding it. If the state, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, ‘overcodes’ encoded social/desiring flows (2013a: 223ff), the latter, by the time states appear, have passed beyond the primitive socius. Between the primitive territorial machine and the state ‘mega-machine’ lie a wide historical expanse, explicated by categories such as ‘domestication’, ‘urbanisation’ ‘sedimentation’.11 The process is anything but linear and homogeneous. Accordingly, none of the previous categories explicates the state in terms of a direct, logical deduction. This is notably true for domestication and the growth of agriculture, once thought to be virtually synonymous to the emergence of states. As Scheidel informs, archaeological studies in Mesopotamia, China and Latin America have shown that ‘fairly egalitarian models of land ownership were

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once common in many of the regions that came to host later large empires’ (2017: 53). Similarly, Mumford has argued for the archaic village that ‘every member of the community had access to the entire cultural heritage [ . . . ] and there was no order of authority, no hierarchy of precedence, except the natural one of age’ (1967: 159). Allowing for an idyllic element, his depiction corroborates the assumption that egalitarianism and horizontality have not been eclipsed by domestication. Neither is urbanisation a metonym of hierarchical stratification. The creation of cities could certainly involve planning, increasingly so (once states emerged) under central direction; nonetheless, urbanisation remained to a substantial degree a spontaneous, non-centrally controlled process composed of horizontal social/desiring flows.12 More historically accurate, thus, is to say that there is a long period that witnesses the development of those ecological, social, affective, ideological conditions that enable the consolidation of the state form; for example, farming of cereal grains, increase of surplus production, growth of wealth disparities, concentration of power, coerced labour, accentuation of status and rank distinctions, insecurity, stress, religious doctrines of celestial despotism.13 An immanent part of this process are changes pertaining to the becoming of justice, in its double dimension as a formative desire and a structural problem, changes that precipitated and accompanied the state as a new order of Right. Two changes are worth highlighting: first, hierarchy starts to be invested and venerated as a rightful form and condition, a social/desiring process enshrined in the religious origins and etymology of the term ιερή αρχή (sacred rule).14 Secondly, the consolidation of sedentary communities was accompanied by the escalation of a concrete experience of injustice: being raided (thus, looted, killed, raped, enslaved). In this highly precarious social-affective situation, the desire for security would become a major condition and determination of a good life, thus, a necessary facet of a just order of being, making in effect (some) people ready and willing to ‘submit to authoritarian leadership and endure inequality’ (Scheidel, 2017: 44).15 The overall result is summarised by Mumford as the rise of an ‘authoritarian social organization’, ‘dedicated not just to the enhancement of life, but to the expansion of collective power’ (1967: 164). In theorising the emergence of the state in terms of a historically determinate process, my study takes some distance from Deleuze and Guattari’s maxim that ‘there has always been a state, quite perfect, quite complete’ (2013b: 419). At least on the empirical level, their proposal is unfounded and contradicts available evidence. Notwithstanding, the appearance of the state still needs to be conceived as a turning point in history and specifically in the history of justice; which is to say, it must be conceived as an event. Henceforth, the state – and the same pattern spreads throughout the great river valleys where states arose – will claim to be the long-awaited resolution to the

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problem of justice. On the libidinal level, this political axiom corresponds to a process whereby the desire for justice starts investing on the consolidation and reproduction of this constituted, sovereign order, which by setting things right becomes the essential form of a world where good has prevailed. More fundamentally, order is invested with the highest significance; it becomes the essence of justice rather than just one of its formal determinations. Not that order was underestimated as a quality of a good life in non-state communities, whether nomadic or sedentary. Nonetheless, in the context of a political form that introduces stratification, accentuates sedentism, standardisation and hierarchy, order becomes not only functionally necessary to the reproduction of social control and state power, it becomes, as Scott remarks, an ‘obsession’, the object of libidinal investments, and thus, the material content of justice. From this angle, Scott (2017: 139–49) astutely sees in the extensive records that early states bequeathed something more than a functional necessity or a new rationality with its power/knowledge apparatus; alongside, there is a genuinely utopian valence, which like all utopias may not have corresponded fully to the actuality of early states. In his words, ‘What the records can tell us [ . . . ] is something about the utopian, Linnaean order in statecraft that is implicit in the logic of record-keeping, its categories, its units of measurement, and above all, in the things it pays attention to’ (ibid.: 142). The justice of the Urstaat is always already the pacified, hierarchical body-with-organs, where every organ executes an allotted role and occupies its deserved place. In this limited sense, the current analysis supports Deleuze and Guattari’s argument that the state ‘appears fully armed, a master stroke executed all at once’, and that behind subsequent historical forms of state (including the modern capitalist and/or socialist states) it is possible to detect the despotic Urstaat, ‘the eternal model of everything the State wants to be and desires’ (2013a: 251). To this extent, despite the more historicist approach adopted, it is also possible to accept (in a considerably qualified way) Deleuze and Guattari’s baffling claim that the state always existed. Historically speaking, the state is a latecomer; yet, as an abstract diagrammatic form (of justice no less than of power), it is intrinsic to order qua structured multiplicity. For in this context, which is none other than the world(s) that material beings inhabit and unfold, order denotes a field of interiority wherein difference is gradated, classified, functionalised, distributed. From this angle, the state is the everpresent (virtual yet real) potentiality – haunting nonstate forms of order in a manner similar to capital’s spectral presence in pre-capitalist social formations (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013a: 163ff.) – of a capture of multiplicity in a regime of signification structured around a central, master signifier (Reason, God, Law, the Monarch – the One). The libidinal valorisation of order that the emergence of the state as a historical form of justice expresses attains on the ideational/conceptual level

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the status of the identity highlighted before: justice is order. That said, it is necessary to remind the dynamic and speculative character of this identity: ‘justice is order’ also means that more order is necessary, that a social formation, perhaps the world at large, is not ordered, hence, not just, enough. There are two pertinent aspects to the correlative process of actualisation of ‘justiceorder’, again intimated earlier: one extensive, one intensive. The extensive aspect finds its maximum expression in the phenomenon of empire. Obviously, there is no space here for a detailed theorisation of the imperial form, which would need to include the process of imperial formation.16 The phenomenon is looked at from the narrower perspective of (a theory of) justice. From this angle, what needs to be isolated from a generic definition of empire – a legal order of domination and right whose rule extends over a wide, polyethnic, territory – is its dynamism. To be sure, to the extent that we speak of structures of power, all states are dynamic, which is why state making has been defined as a becoming-justice. What pertains more uniquely to empire is not only expansion to foreign territories but that the latter process is incorporated to the conception of justice. In other words, if the state form names a field of interiority wherein justice is identified with sovereign/constituted rule and a hierarchical partition of the sensible, empire takes up the logic of the state and invests it to a variable and expanding order of domination. In this way, the transition from a territorially circumscribed state to an empire with shifting borders marks also the explosion of the libidinal dimension of justice and its integration to a zone of indiscernibility in which it blends with the most heterogeneous modalities of desire, from the libido-dominandi to sheer adventurism. Thus, if the state form captures the desire for justice into a static order of representation, by becoming-empire desire starts pouring into proliferating flows whose horizon is ecumenic and only limits the reach of their power. If Alexander the Great was saddened to see that he had not reached the end of the world and the British Crown prided that in its domain the sun never set, it is because – unlike a non-imperial state, which invests on a demarcated territory (even if irredentism is involved) – the rightful boundaries of empires are on principle limitless. That is why, furthermore, empires are forward looking and do not justify their sovereign power mainly by claims of historical right bequeathed from the past. In Negri and Hardt’s terms, ‘Empire presents its rule not as a transitory moment in the movement of history, but as a regime with no temporal boundaries and in this sense outside of history or at the end of history’ (2001: xiv–xv). The analysis here certainly makes a historical-genetic point. However, it does not want simply to assert that authoritarian/hierarchical justice extends when a state (endowed with the relevant historical potency) seeks to become an empire. The argument is that this extension is intrinsic to the state as the form which gives to justice-from-above its most potent articulation and, thus,

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unleashes its utopian dynamism. For when the desire for justice invests into the state form, identifying the latter as the proper answer to the problem of right, then the only way for justice to extend throughout the world is through a globalwide state. To be sure, the latter may be conceived along democratic lines a la Kojève; additionally, there is the possibility of some type of voluntary organisation of states a la the United Nations. However, no matter the merits of these alternatives – and I admit finding their historical record unimpressive – they are (pragmatic or principled) modifications of hierarchical/authoritarian justice, hybrid visions that incorporate facets of another diagrammatic model of justice (to be analysed soon). From the perspective of a phenomenon’s immanent logic, whose exposition is contained in its definitional components, the extension of hierarchical/authoritarian justice to the status of a historical universal yields an imperial form. From this angle, apologists of empire, from Dante to Mill or other (classic and modern) liberals, are consistent to their original premises concerning justice and the state form – whatever contradictions they may otherwise need to deflect in order to support their political position.17 In this context, the desire for justice morphs into the idea, nay fantasy, of a harmonious identity between right and domination; that is, the utopia of an imperial Urstaat. ‘The dreams of men, the seeds of commonwealths, the germs of Empires’ (Conrad, 1981: 6). Moving to the second aspect, there is no extensive actualisation of justicefrom-above without at the same moment an intensive st(r)atification of social being: a multilayered process in which the hierarchical order of the state becomes stabilised on the institutional level whilst engulfing desire by becoming a subjective disposition, a habitus. If empire implies an extensive molarisation of hierarchical/authoritarian flows, on the intensive level hierarchy, qua juridico-customary structure of right, spreads out, pierces and modulates social being on its molecular level: from spatial organisation and architecture, like the pyramidal structure of archaic capitals and the monumental buildings commemorating despotic Power, to everyday practices and rituals, like the ancient meals fostering relations of dependency and ratifying elite power. Taken together, all these not only naturalise hierarchy, they affirm that this is rightly so. At the endpoint, the state is consolidated as the essential form and mediator of justice – generating structures of mediation, dependence and supplication with which we are all too familiar nowadays; meanwhile, the patriarchic and hierarchical type of justice that the state form embodies permeates the libidinal, psychic, imaginary and cultural landscape: the well-ordered utopia of the Urstaat capturing the minds and bodies of its subjects. Interestingly, in this specific modality of actualisation, the dynamic dimension that the desire for justice has may reach a point of intensity where justice evaporates as a distinct category and determination of desire, consumed

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entirely by the desire for order, which thus becomes a fetish. Earlier it was hinted that Nazism can be seen as the perverse, paranoid climax of this fetishisation. Like all statist forms of justice, the racial state of the Third Reich constituted a legal order where every-body was supposed to get its due, even if what some-bodies deserved was the gas chambers. Precisely though, inside the institutional space where the extermination of ‘unworthy lives’ was being executed – that is, the camps – considerations of justice were suspended almost entirely.18 While it is an exaggeration to depict the extermination camps as paradigmatic of Nazi Germany, let alone of modernity, the biopolitical extremity of Nazism, which posited extermination as a hygienic issue to be executed in an industrial-technical manner,19 does point to a broader feature of the Nazi regime: justice is denied any autonomy as it is captured by the state’s prerogatives. Julius Binder, legal theorist and apologist of the Third Reich, leaves little doubt: after he has stressed that for the individual person ‘the demand for justice can only mean what is in agreement to positive law’, he eventually clarifies that ‘justice has no place in the authoritarian state framework’.20 On the other hand, the well-recorded fact that the extermination camps were extreme versions of a modern institution, the concentration camp, is an indication that, for all the perverse intensity of Nazism, many of its ideas and practices have a generic scope, this being also the case for their fetishisation of order at the expense of justice. A condensed expression of the latter phenomenon can be found in an interview of J. Edgar Hoover, infamous director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where (after the assassination of some Black Panther members) he states that ‘it’s not a matter of justice, it’s a matter of law’.21 More broadly, this fetishisation lies dormant in the ‘wild zone of power’ lying at the core of all modern states, where the existence of the state as a legal order preponderates over the law and justice which it is supposed to embody.22 Of course, the full absorption of justice by order is bound to remain a fantasy (nay one that is horrifyingly real in its effects). Even the Nazi regime did not realise entirely the ‘prerogative state’ at the expense of the ‘normative state’.23 In fact, this very trend, through the resistance it provoked, ratifies the nonidentity between justice and ‘law and order’, thus, the ontological integrity of the desire for justice. Moreover, although it is a potentiality immanent to the actualisation of ‘justice as order’, it must not be taken as the latter’s secret truth, in a kind of negative dialectics. As Bloch has observed (2015: 105), the intensive stratification of justice generally remains within the bounds of a more traditional fantasy for a crystalised, transparent hierarchical body where every organ wilfully and efficiently plays its part or, if not, pays a just penalty for it. The (gradual) preponderance of the state form, along with shifting the weight towards a valorisation of order vis-à-vis freedom, affects the actualisation of justice in another key way. Justice is not only identified with the

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constituted order of the state, where every-body has its rightful place, it is also identified with the Power that establishes, maintains and rules over this ordered domain. In fact, it is not a matter of either/or, since the encapsulation of justice into the state form signals also its double capture or, a bit less dramatically, its distribution over the two heads of political sovereignty who found the state as a unified order: ‘the magician-king and the jurist-priest. Rex and flamen, raj and Brahman, Romulus and Numa, Varuna and Mitra, the despot and the legislator, the binder and the organizer’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013b: 410). Regardless what transmutations the state form may have undergone, political sovereignty maintains these two facets, a power that rules/ executes/governs and a power that imputes/judges/allocates. Up to an extent, this ‘Two-in-One’ of state power corresponds to the distinction between sovereign and constituted power, the one positing the norm, the other sanctioning it. Thus, it is worth repeating that there is room for permutations, to the point that one type may absorb or claim priority over the other. For instance, in the early despotic states, as Deleuze and Guattari astutely observe, law is ‘not a feigned guarantee against despotism, it is the invention of the despot himself’ (2013a: 246). The implication of this intimate bond is that justice itself is fused to royal power. The opening sentence of the famous code of Hammurabi, as recorded by Rudolf Rocker (1933: 22), states unequivocally: When Anu, the exalted, the king of the Anunnaki, and Bel, the lord of heaven and earth, who carries the destiny of the world in his hand, partitioned the masses of mankind to Marduk, the firstborn of Ea, the divine lord of the law, they made him great among the Igigi. In Babylon they proclaimed his exalted name, which is praised in all lands which they have destined to him for his kingdom, and which is eternal as are heaven and earth. Afterwards Anu and Bel made glad the body of mankind when they called upon me, the glorious ruler and godfearing Hammurabi, that I may establish justice upon earth, destroy the wicked and the ruthless, ward off the strong and succor the weak, reign like the sun god over the destiny of blackhaired men and illumine the land.

Similar dictums can be found wherever the monarhic mega-machine made its appearance. For example, a verse in Homer’s Odyssey reminiscent of Achaean despotism declares: a king who ‘ruling as lord over many powerful people, upholds the way of good [or just] government (ευδικία), and the black earth yields him barley and wheat, his trees are heavy with fruit, his sheep flocks continue to bear young, the sea gives him fish, because of his good leadership, and his people prosper under him’ (1967, XIX: 109–14). Naturally, through its fusion with despotic power justice acquires an eminently justificatory role, to the point – as argued for instance by Rocker – that it could be viewed purely in terms of ideology, albeit with a structural role.

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One does not have to look further than our Western leaders’ selective use of notions like ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ to verify that those in power willingly manipulate words and ideas. In the famous phrase of Lewis Carroll: ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less’. ‘The question is’, said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things’. ‘The question is’, said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all’. (1960: 364)

Clastres’s (1989: 151–56) and Deleuze and Guattari’s (2013a: 231ff) respective analyses endorse this point further. In primitive societies, the leader enjoys a privileged use of logos; it is a skill, a gift but also an obligation he is expected to exercise for the benefit of the community; for example, by mediating tensions. As long as he does it in a proper way, respectful of custom, he enjoys a well-deserved prestige. However, the chief does not have the power to define what is Right, to signify justice. His use of logos enmeshes him to the customary order and the immanent ‘system of connotations’ which encode into intelligible format the world of the primitive socius. With the rise of the despotic machine, a fundamental change takes place. The despot appropriates language, which, thus, becomes a prerogative that allows him to subordinate peoples into his judgement and power.24 As a result, justice from then onwards will be said to arrive in the order of sovereign command, emitting from the centre of power the despot occupies; even more, the latter defines its meaning and content, becoming the (master) signifier in the established order of signification, which is also an order of subordination. To paraphrase John (1:1): In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with the Sovereign and the Word was Sovereign. Naturally, as Deleuze and Guattari observe, the problem of interpreting the signs of Power also emerges (or at least increases in intensity): ‘The emperor, the god – what did he mean’ (2013a: 238)? In spite all that, the problem with the reduction of justice to a façade of domination remains: it fails to make theoretical sense of the ontological consistency and primacy of the desire and problem of justice relative to social being; saying the same thing differently, it obscures the immanence of justice in social/desiring production. To recall Tacitus’s famous phrase from Agricola, why did the Romans feel compelled to call the ‘desolation’ that they were creating ‘peace’ (2010, 30:1)? Establishing structures of control is one thing, charging them with a normative/ethical valence – rendering them Right – is another. There is of course a functional aspect involved; as Cacciari argues, ‘the libido-dominandi’, driving imperial expansion, ‘would turn to selfdestructive anarchy were it not able to contain itself’ (2018: 20). However,

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the functionality of right can ground a strong theoretical functionalism only upon condition that ‘society’ is taken as an a priori structure, forfeiting the dynamic, composite nature of social being. Without reference to the affective, libidinal basis of human (always and already collective) existence, any theoretical perspective is regrettably incomplete. For there would simply be no necessity for justification (ideological or otherwise) if collective existence was not driven to be(come) rightful and good, a libidinal/affective movement fleshed out in an identifiable desire for justice. This is further manifested in the difference between plunder and state appropriation, present even when the limits between them blur (as admittedly they frequently do): the state qua legal order of right is determined by the establishment of certain standards guiding the extraction of surpluses. Moreover, the self-interpretation of the Imperium as an awaited order of Right acts upon the economic and political relations between centre and periphery, since the latter is supposed to be benefited by its integration to the imperial orbit.25 To be sure, an empire’s ‘gifts’ are always steeped with paternalism, and every Imperium is ready to violently assert its rule in case of disobedience and rebellion. Nor did the Romans or any other empire fail to use their power to plunder whatever valuable resources were available. Still, short of an ultra-radicalism that has no time for distinctions, it needs to be re-cognised that the Pax Romana was something more than organised plunder; it was a hierarchical order overcoding multiple flows and affects into an organised economy of desire with its attendant normative structures (of recognition, exchange, commutation, distribution, production). It is this material apparatus which is distilled into the idea that, according to Marlow in Heart of Darkness, redeems the ‘conquest of the earth’; the Idea of empire, an ecumenic order of right, ‘something that you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to’ (Conrad 1981: 9). One may well disagree politically with this conclusion yet accept its analytical merits. Every functionalisation of justice to power simplifies and, thus, offers a very impoverished image of a complex phenomenon taking place on a libidinal, social and political level. Rather than a skillful ploy, the fusion of justice with despotic power testifies to the zone of indeterminacy that desire unfolds, which makes justice subject to the despot’s imperatives but, at the same moment, compels the latter to acquire some form of proportionality and reciprocity. At the end of the day, having the power to define the meaning of words does not mean that the worlds to which words refer are reduced to the capricious power of logos and, thus, of the subject of enunciation. Is it not a sign of paranoia, like Kurtz’s monologues, to integrate every outside in such a manner that one’s own delirium can be sustained? Ιf more space was available, it would be worth exploring how, once being fused to despotic power, the desire for justice acquires something of the latter’s paranoiac intensity,

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as analysed by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (2013a, 223–56). What can be said with confidence is that becoming-justice, in the cases under discussion, blends with the libido dominandi to attain the intensity of a worldhistorical investment, in the form of a self-aggrandising monologue seeking to internalise every exteriority. This metamorphosis of the desire for justice can be glimpsed in a letter of Kuyuk Khan to Pope Innocent IV, written in the order of a reply to official Christian complaints for the Mongols’ westward expansion. You have sent me these words, ‘You have taken all the realms of the Magyars and the Christians altogether; I am surprised at that, tell us what has been the fault of these?’ These your words we did not understand them. (In order to avoid, however, any appearance that we pass over this point in silence, we speak in answer to you thus): The Order of God, both Genghis Khan and the Kha Khan have sent it to make it known, But the Order of God they did not believe. [ . . . ] By the virtue of God, From the rising of the sun to its setting, All realms have been granted to us. Without the Order of God How could anyone do anything? Now, you ought to say from a sincere heart: ‘We shall be your subjects; We shall give unto you our strength’. You in person, at the head of the kings, all together, without exception, Come and offer us service and homage; Then shall we recognize your submission. And if you do not observe the Order of God, And disobey our orders, We shall know you to be our enemies. That is what we make known to you. If you disobey, What shall we know then? God will know it.26

Lest it be thought a symptom of ‘oriental barbarism’, a similar experience – loaded with even more self-justificatory violence – can be vividly seen in the ‘civilising’ crusades of Western imperialism, from the colonisation of non-European territories to the racial empire that the Nazis sought to build in East Europe.27 Whether of course it is possible for a state to annul exteriority

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is a different issue. The state-form, qua domain of interiority, is constituted in relation to what is exterior to it, from ‘local mechanisms’ – bands, gangs, small radical cells – to ‘worldwide machines’ – ecumenic religions, international capital, political ideologies.28 In fact, none of these assemblages is a pure exteriority, since they transverse the state, forming with it complex relations of reciprocal constitution. Gangs live at the fringes of states, multinational companies acquire legal form through states; at the same time, they organise (human and monetary) flows exceeding or abandoned by states, but upon which the latter still depend – whether systemically, as with finance, or in a more ad hoc basis, as with the deployment of gangs in parastate operations. From a dialectical viewpoint, a contradiction can be highlighted, which has become increasingly astute in the decades following the end of the Cold War, from the halcyon days of the US-driven neoliberal empire of globalised capital to its current crisis. States try to integrate, contain, tame, mobilise dynamic flows within the field of interiority they institute and its order of Right. However, even the most powerful empire cannot entirely control such flows, which have their own immanent logic of operation, hence their own forms of justice, which may stand in tension to a state’s order of Right. On the other hand, in order for worldwide machines to be effective they must be encoded in circumscribed forms operating in specific territories; and in many cases, like those of capital and jihadism, such territorialisation implies the mediation of a state form (even a patently neo-archaic one of the Khalifate type). For Kojève’s brand of Hegelianism, the resolution to this contradiction is the global state, justice actualised in a homogeneous (non-imperial) order of Right that covers the human ecumene. My study has adopted a more Deleuzian viewpoint: the contradiction lends itself to no final resolution or reconciliation; it rather sets the terrain for a whole array of tensions, competitions, movements, lines of flight and lines of recuperation. Is not our world of aberrant geopolitical competition, terrorism, uprisings, immigrant flows and social movements much closer to this image than that of a global state? Be that as it may, the key point to condense is that the emergence of the state designates the consolidation of a distinct engineering diagram of justice, one that is hierarchical and authoritarian. ‘Justice from above’, this is the (onto)historical type of justice that the state embodies and brings into being. None of the determinations defining this type of justice is new in an absolute sense. Hierarchy, heteronomy, inequality, ranking, gradation, equivalence, constituted power – they can all be traced in early nonstate regimes of justice; even sovereign power may exist prior of the state in modicum forms, notably in the powers vested on the chief during wartime. However, the institution of the state entails a scaling up of all these determining qualities, a scaling up intense enough to cross a qualitative threshold and reach the point of a novel configuration. Hereafter, justice becomes a principle emanating from outside

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the (social) body and being actualised in an order that is defined by structural hierarchies and inequalities; much more than a disparity of wealth, status, power and/or prestige, inequality and hierarchy become regimented, systemic relations indexed on a homogenising structure of domination. In Bloch’s succinct formulation, this is a ‘juridically- class- and hierarchy-based justice in which patriarchy triumphs, endorsed by a social architectonic’ (2015: 102). Bloch’s formula also reinforces the insight alluded at the end of the previous section: a society with a state is simultaneously and necessarily a class society. The key for grasping this historical connection analytically is the unequal relationality defining class societies. The latter, to use De Landa’s apt definition, are stratified fields which have ‘a variety of differentiated roles to which individuals are denied equal access’ and in which ‘a subset of those roles (to which a ruling elite has access) involves a control of key energy and material resources’ (2000: 61). While recognising the bond under discussion, a predominantly functionalist Marxism has tended to depict the state as the historical product and political handmaiden of socioeconomic processes. Deleuze and Guattari counterargue (2013b: 418) that socioeconomic processes used to explain the state, and particularly the development of productive forces, are as much a product of the latter as its underlying conditions. Cannot a similar thing be said of social classes? At stake is not to reverse an otherwise straightforward causal chain. Archaeological evidence suggest that relations of domination and exploitation existed before the state, notably in the form of forced labour.29 Additionally, against the defunct idea of a stage of purely capricious power, such structures of domination must have been in one way or another justified; that is, placed in the orbit of justice. Class formation in this sense belongs to the Urstaat’s genealogy. On the other hand, it is unlikely, nay impossible, that classes could become ‘an autonomous dimension of social organization’ and acquire the consistency of durable relations of appropriation outside the framework of a state (De Landa, 2000: 61). As Scott remarks for the specific case of slavery, early states ‘did not invent the institution [ . . . ] but they did codify and organize it as a state project’ (2017: 30). What we are dealing with here is a homology verging to structural identity: the state marks the formal constitution of ‘an above’ and ‘a below’; that is, of a formal division which on the social level marks a class division between a ruling/exploiting class that appropriates surpluses and a ruled/ exploited class whose surplus productivity is appropriated; conversely, thus, class relations of exploitation fully consolidate only in the presence of a state form, something that gives them an irreducible political element (a point that Marx was aware of). The key insight added here is that this unitary process of state making and class division entails justice, in the form of right, as an essential moment. The point is corroborated by De Landa’s relevant analysis. Building on his definition of social strata quoted before, he stresses that

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For social classes or castes to become a separate entity, beyond the mere sorting of people into ranks: the informal sorting criteria need to be given a theological interpretation and a legal definition, and the elites need to become the guardians and bearers of the newly institutionalized tradition, that is, the legitimizers of change and delineators of the limits of innovation. In short, to transform a loose ranked accumulation of traditional roles (and criteria of access to those roles) into a social class, the latter needs to become consolidated via theological and legal codification’. (2000: 61–62)

De Landa must be credited for grasping the functionality of right without reducing it to an ideological superstructure; instead, it is the immanence of right to class formations that comes forth, an immanence though that does not deny the autonomy of legal codes vis-à-vis individual class interests. To this extent, De Landa’s analysis serves to ratify the insight that the state is an event in the history of justice. Not because the latter ‘causes’ the state in a unidirectional fashion, it is rather a potent, immanent force affecting the complex processes leading to a historically singular form: the state, a legal order of right and at the same time of domination. The unity of these two facets of the state serves to prevent the subordination of the one to the other, which either functionalises justice into an (ideological) tool of domination or idealises domination into a (holy) instrument of justice. Navigating between these Cyanean Rocks, the current analysis enables a theoretical exposition of the class determinations that justice acquires when it attains a state form. In becoming-state, (becoming)-justice is embedded and at the same time sanctions social formations in which (to use an earlier formula) some-bodies enjoy as privilege what other bodies are denied based on the former’s capacity to appropriate the surplus labour of the latter (as part of a more generalised control of matter-energy). In homage to the paradigmatic class relation of Western political history, this historical type of justice will be called ‘patrician’. To avoid confusion, ‘patrician’ and ‘authoritarian/hierarchical’ are not synonyms referring to identical types of justice. Authoritarianism and hierarchy are spatial structures defining a general engineering diagram of justice, operative in numerous collective assemblages at various degrees of intensity and formalisation: from tribal societies and anarchist groups to multinational corporations and armies. Patrician, on the other hand, is used as a technical term for typifying regimes of justice (and their attendant Droit) peculiar to a class society; that is, structures of recognition, commutation, distribution, exchange, desert and more, conducive to the reproduction of class rule and the relevant mode of production. Simply put, social (thus, intrinsically relational) categories such as that of noble/serf, landlord/peasant, boss/worker, rich and poor could not stand if they were not perceived to be right, most certainly by those being at the top but to some degree also by those at the bottom of the social pyramid.

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This seemingly simple perception is mediated by all these structures (of recognition, distribution etc.) pertaining to a regime of justice, which – given precisely its role in the consolidation of class relations – can be fittingly called ‘patrician’. At the same time, the affective and experiential aspect remains crucial. Adopting Martin Breaugh’s (2013: xv) insightful suggestion for the other pole of the class division, the plebs, ‘patrician justice’ is never merely the coat of arms of an objective apparatus, it designates an experience relating to an active historical trajectory: the affirmation of class divisions as a necessary facet of the right order of things. Then again, given that class divisions by definition denote hierarchy and authoritarianism, it is obvious that we are not dealing with two independent phenomena, referring to forms that happen to meet or coalesce. Patrician justice is a justice ‘from above’, referring specifically to authoritarian/hierarchical forms of justice that have attained a sufficient degree of intensity to consolidate class rule. Moreover, since an entrenched justice from above is a justice that has become-state, ‘patrician justice’ in essence conceptualises statist forms of justice from the perspective of their class determinations. Not incidentally, one of the most paradigmatic affirmations of justice from above is to be found in what is at the same time the definitive expression of the ‘patrician principle’; that is, of the principle of justified class divisions and rule: the famous parable that Livy (2006, 2:32) reports Menenius Agrippa to have told the plebs in order to convince them to end their secession and return to Rome. Therein, the patricians are expressly likened to the belly and its vital position and role for a body which, because it is well nourished, is rightfully structured. Sanctioning and providing the material content of a body with organs, patrician justice is the epitome of the latter’s hierarchical/authoritarian diagrammatic articulation. Perhaps, the whole lexicon may seem tedious and austere. Yet the critical significance of the analytical operation must not be underestimated, for it serves to clarify that ‘justice from above’ designates much more than an abstract structure; it is determined by the existence of identifiable ruling groups, structurally geared to defend their interests and privileges (something that neither denies a relative autonomy to specific institutions of justice nor makes statist forms of justice a façade). Moreover, the analysis serves to dispel the idea that classes exist as objective agents personifying economic structures, or (in reality a different version of the same principle) as pure sociological categories reflecting an objective position in the social organism. Not that classes lack objectivity, which is precisely that of the role and position they hold in a society’s material reproduction. But this objectivity exists only by virtue of concrete politico-juridical processes; that is, in tandem to the consolidation of a regime of justice mediating the tensional relations of appropriation grounding class divisions.

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Through this prism a whole analytical matrix opens that allows for further typologies. If in terms of the (political) relations of power it sanctions and depends upon justice-from-above is essentially oligarchic, in terms of its class determinations further subtypes can be produced, allowing for more refined distinctions based on the nature of class rule. Can we, for instance, speak of ‘aristocratic justice’ when the ruling class is a landed nobility or more abstractly when the ground and principle of class rule is birth (a value objectified in the form of earth-bound filiation)? Or of ‘timocratic justice’, when the ruling class is an entrepreneurial elite or more abstractly when the ground and principle of class rule is financialised wealth (value objectified in the money form)? Further analysis than what can be offered would be needed to check the merits of these conceptual differentiations. In any case, all subtypes of patrician justice are expected to have three essential determinations: domination – sanctioned power of command and control over some-bodies, which allows the modulation and appropriation of productive activity; limitative desert – sanctioned patterns of ranking, gradation and reciprocity, which distribute merits in proportion to the possession of and/or approximation to an objective criterion/principle (filiation, birth, property, wealth); privilege – sanctioned structures of unequal access to offices, honors and goods. Altogether, these determinations express and augment the hierarchical/authoritarian nature of patrician justice. Maintaining that the state is a form of justice that contends for historical universality – both in the extensive form of empire as well as an intensive normative model – whilst stressing at the same time how its emergence led to an aggravation of human misery may recall Benjamin’s famous aphorism that ‘there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ (1992: 248). The parallelism is not off the mark. Which is why a clarification-cum-reminder is opportune. In every assertion such as Benjamin’s lurks the danger of a reduction of history, in our case the history of justice, to a narrative of decline. Benjamin himself avoids this pitfall by adopting a dialectically nuanced viewpoint: barbarism is conceived to be integral to civilisation without consuming it, a nonidentity which allows the possibility of a civilisational form redeemed of barbarity. Following a similar logic, it needs to be reinstated that the state is not an evil befalling a serene and august humankind, an assumption that gives to the state form the aura of a theological mystery. On the other hand, it is theoretically inadmissible to neglect the stark accentuation of inequality, exploitation and oppression that the emergence of states has brought for millions. Mitigating this historical datum under some version of progressivism or cost/benefit calculus is to effectively undermine, nay silence, on the level of theory the voices that bespeak of it, whether in open revolt against it, like Spartacus, or protesting it in more indirect ways, like popular myths, or simply mourning for it.30

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Through their intimate connection to systematically organised misery, the legitimising and apologetic functions of justice acquire a truly sinister potency, expressed in the latter’s blending with discriminatory systems of classification or, in simpler terms, with the justification of (what is sometimes generically called) ‘racism’. The assertion may seem sweeping; nonetheless it is defensible both logically and historically. For ultimately, structures of domination, exploitation, exclusion or oppression can be recognised as inequality-ridden processes and still be justified, only if a line of discrimination is drawn that stigmatises their victims as being(s) of lesser value and/or ability.31 Voegelin has somewhere pointed out that in hieroglyphic inscriptions the same symbol used for ‘Egyptian’ is used for ‘human’, the implication being that (non-Egyptian) slaves are not only politically but ontically inferior, less than Egyptians/humans. Whether or not racism can be used as a generic term for such types of discrimination, it is certainly the most systematic, hence vicious, form. What the theorisation offered here elucidates is that every systematic discrimination does not simply deploy right as its ready-athand tool, it is anchored in a conception of justice, which will have itself been systematised and regimented. Nazism again stands out as the paroxysmal instantiation – wherein biologism tends to eviscerate any notion of justice, while still implying it (since for the Nazis’ the Jews deserved their fate) – of a more generic phenomenon testified in many other historical instances, notably the racist discourses justifying chattel slavery in the American South (Roediger, 2017: 101–56). Respectful of the historical specificities of modern racism, is it still possible to build upon a suggestion made by Foucault (2002: 320–24) and argue that the state qua form of justice tends to breed some type of racism or at any rate systematic discrimination? (Proto)racist or not, the crux of the matter is that the very form through which justice has been heralded to make its grand entry on earth is structurally associated to huge doses of misery and violence. To be appreciated in its right proportions, this fact requires the dialectical perspective articulated earlier: the proliferation of injustice is structurally connected to an event that belongs to the history of justice. Is it not expectable that this ‘moving contradiction’ would generate its active negations, expressed in forms of resistance that challenged the Urstaat’s claim to constitute the embodiment of justice? And who would produce such forms if not those who came under the state’s patrician yoke? JUSTICE FROM BELOW The analysis of the primitive socius was meant to ratify that forms of justice emerging from the grassroots of a social formation, even after the latter has

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been constituted in state form, are neither derivative nor simply reactive to the (dominant) type of justice coming ‘from above’. In contrast, the predicate ‘from below’ conceptualises an alternative engineering diagram of (becoming-) justice, with its own consistency and determinations. The two main determinations have been already delineated: horizontality and equality. Therefore, next to a ‘hierarchical/authoritarian’ a ‘horizontal/egalitarian’ justice is posited, in which the dialectics of freedom/order and universality/ multiplicity undergo a different articulation. To be sure, as with the other type sketched before, there are variable configurations determining the singular instantiations of a generic, abstract diagram. This is not to say, however, that generalisations are unwarranted. In the same way that hierarchical/authoritarian justice has been shown to valorise order and, thus, foster heteronomy and the constituted power of law, horizontal/egalitarian justice can be said to foster autonomy and the constituent power of the many. Thus, while justice from above tends to homogenise heterogeneity in a stratified order of being, placing multiplicity under the rule of the One and its universalising imperatives, horizontal/egalitarian justice actualises (in variable degrees of intensity) and sanctions the free play of multiplicity. The latter point would seem to imply that ‘justice from below’ and the ‘subaltern experience’ it expresses resist universalisation, operating instead on a domain of pure multiplicity and difference. However, in the previous chapter it was clarified that what is rather at stake is the production of a different type of universality, with its own intensive and extensive potency. Soon, it will be substantiated that the maximal point of intensity and extensity arrives through the event of a revolution. However, much as revolutions may have the likeness of a ‘miracle’ (to recall Lenin’s adage), they do not arrive in the form of an inexplicable rupture; they intensify and extend existing forms of horizontal/egalitarian justice, which thus deserve to be conceived as integral moments in the becoming of a revolution. Becoming-justice, becomingrevolution: a singular social/desiring process whose exposition calls forth a discontinuous but not disconnected political genealogy. From the perspective of the theorisation of justice constructed, the crucial task is to be able to grasp conceptually the lines of intensity and meaning configuring revolutionary outbreaks, while still appreciating nonrevolutionary forms of egalitarian/ horizontal justice in their singularity. Towards this end, another key point to have been established in previous chapters is that forms of grassroots justice – for all their de-territorialising valence – do not mark a liberation of desire from the yoke of normatively encoded behavior; they are biopolitical constructs operating through unique patterns of recognition, distribution and more. In brief, they develop their own peculiar regimes of justice. Moreover, in the same way that authoritarianism and hierarchy entail discipline, obedience and other suchlike

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phenomena, horizontality and equality imply the mediation of qualities, like self-organisation, self-government, mutuality, solidarity and cooperation. In this respect, no less than hierarchy, equality permeates social bodies as part of a propaedeutic of horizontal/egalitarian justice. Recognising the other as a peer, sharing instead of accumulating, assembling and deliberating instead of commanding, these are some qualities that are cultivated as determinations of a subjective and collective ethos on the molecular level; for instance, in communal meals like those organised in the early Christian movement or nowadays in squats and social centres.32 This molecular process coextends and interconnects with the formalisation of codes of conduct, the sanctioning and regularisation of enunciations, rhetorical schemata, prescriptions and practices (including punitive ones that contain various forms of violence; e.g., ostracism), altogether forming the cultural and institutional habitat of horizontal/egalitarian justice. For instance, the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) motto ‘never, never do for others, what they can do for themselves’,33 along with being an organisational formula, is an order statement – able to act also as a password – pertaining to justice: it affirms on principle an equal capacity and denotes a horizontal space of interaction, since a hierarchical order of Power/Right (to speak in a Foucauldian manner) by definition empowers and sanctions acting for and upon others. It thus becomes apparent how justice (far from being an extrinsic term playing an ornamental role) throws light on an engineering diagram composed of operations that are libidinally invested to set the world right. Unlike though its rival diagrammatic type, the right form, and thus the good life, do not emanate from above, in the order of a sovereign command and a hierarchically constituted order of being. They emerge and unfold horizontally as a collective praxis of equals, cooperating, assembling, associating, experimenting, deliberating, but also contesting, colliding, fractioning. In the words of Euripides (reproducing a sanctioned trope of democratic politics in Athens), ‘Freedom’s mark is also seen in this: “Who has a good counsel that benefits the polis and wants to reveal to everybody”? Thus, whoever speaks gains renown, while he who has no such wish remains silent. Which greater equality can there be in a polis’ (1992: 437–36)?34 The evocation of the experience of democratic Athens is not fortuitous. As intimated through notions of ‘self-organisation’ and ‘self-government’, that is, in the effective presence of collectively generated and organised flows of power, or through the recognition of a tension between diagrammatic models, egalitarian/horizontal justice necessarily operates on a political register; not, however, by simply occupying a ready-made position in an entrenched domain of opposition – ‘the political’ – but by acting on it and shaping it through its own protocols of appearance. To be more specific, politically, justice from below entails a non-hierarchical and nonauthoritarian distribution

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of power or more positively a field of connection and interaction where power circulates horizontally, enabling, as Aristotle puts it in his Politics, ‘participation in judgment and office’ (III.1.1275a-23). ‘Democracy’ is precisely the name developed in ancient Greece for such a politically constituted egalitarianism, a name whose local origins did not prevent it from acquiring a staggering universal expanse, too well documented on the level of empirical actuality to be ignored. For sure, the expansion of the political lexicon of ancient Greece may be related to the political and cultural hegemony the West has exercised, itself a contingent event. Etymology cannot explain by default a term’s historical fortunes, nor is Athenian democracy a prototype of the abstract model of justice analysed in the current section. There have been forms of justice from below that developed under different discursive matrices, without need to evoke ‘democracy’ either descriptively or prescriptively. Such is the case, for instance, with the development of horizontal/egalitarian forms in the early Christian ecclesiae, nicely captured by Elizabeth Fiorenza (2000) in the notion of a ‘praxis of coequal discipleship’. Nonetheless, demokratia, with its unmistakable connotations of popular power, equality and freedom, resonated enough with social-desiring flows (be)coming from below to be able to express their essential determinations – expectations and hopes included – on an ideational/symbolic and political/institutional register. The historical extension of the term has then provided the basis for critical theorisations which, despite a tendency to essentialise and de-historicise the term, have brought forth the determinate qualities that provide democracy’s historical depth.35 The key point here is that (after the necessary precautions have been taken) it is legitimate to deploy the predicate ‘democratic’ for conceptualising a generic determination of justice from below, which operates at multiple domains, from workplaces to neighbourhoods, without having necessarily to attain the form of a politically constituted regime. To say that justice from below has a democratic quality is to designate in a technical manner the identification of justice, both as a lived reality and as a prospect, with equality and freedom or, to take up Balibar’s (1994: 39–60) insightful coupling of the two terms, with equaliberty. The latter notion not only outlines the active trajectory needed for the actualisation of justice – that is, equal participation in the production of right – it also provides justice with its normative content. In Kontantinos Papageorgiou’s (2015: 477) apt formula, ‘democracy promises that whatever has value’ – in our terms that which marks a good life – ‘will eventually reach everyone’, and rightly so. In these very terms, however, as the promise of a vindication to be equally and freely enjoyed by every-body, democracy points beyond itself, to forms that it connects with but does not logically denote. There is a negative aspect to this point, which relates to the highly ambiguous history of democracy,

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specifically the regimentation of political forms that have been operating internally through clauses of exclusion and externally through lines of conquest (justified in fact through ‘democracy’).36 Not much is gained by reverting here to an essentialist definition, happily concluding that such regimes are pseudo-democracies. Not because democratic forms lack essential determinations, which have been subject historically to considerable corruption. Essentialism is problematic because it takes these determinative qualities out of history, thus simplifying the historical dynamics of democracy and obscuring that a critical conception of the latter must re-cognise the nonunitary and nonlinear articulation of its historical forms. In this context, what needs to be theoretically attended is the growth of exclusionary and repressive democratic regimes, of a ‘Master-race Democracy’ (Losurdo, 2011: 107). One way to deal with this problem is to use a more universalist structure of recognition as the normative ground for democratic regimes, with human rights standing out as the main notion entrusted with this role in recent decades. Pointing out the historicity of rights that are putatively endowed in the moment of birth is important but does not in itself clarify their practical significance or political merits. Perhaps, a compelling argument can be made that (insofar as justice is embedded in social formations that are politically constituted) some notion of universal, non-territorially bound rights is necessary for freedom – thus, justice as freedom – to maintain its actuality. This is a line of thought certainly worth pursuing further (cf. Rancière, 2010: 62–75). On the other hand, such an extensive analysis would also have to critically tackle the formalism of human rights as entitlements addressed towards and granted by a state. While the experience of dictatorial regimes may show the significance of human rights, if there is something that the history of the latter attests to is the need of ‘a right to have rights’,37 a right which is politically constituted and hence can only be gained by a collective act of freedom. And since rights acquire historical universality only insofar as they constitute practical realities with ever-expanding extensive and intensive dimensions, to actualise a right to these rights denotes a becoming-justice operating along horizontal/egalitarian lines (even if the latter eventually pour into a state form, whose authoritarian and hierarchical traits are inevitably modified/compromised). Whatever their merits may otherwise be, human rights cannot be deployed as a normative arch-category that in one stroke redeems democracy and resolves the problem of justice. It is a combative notion partaking to the historical unfolding of justice in its twofold diagrammatic structure. Not even close to a conclusive analysis, the main purpose of this brief sojourn to human rights was to support the claim that democracy cannot conceptually exhaust the content and form of horizontal/egalitarian justice, since the latter is mediated by more encompassing forms of recognition (as well as, conversely, exclusionary forms, such as nationality). There is another

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important reason, which pertains to the fact that horizontal/egalitarian justice is not restricted to a narrowly conceived political domain but embraces material (re)production. For sure, democracy may also embrace this extension of horizontality and equality, with labour unions, syndicates and workers councils being astute historical-institutional instantiations. Nevertheless, even though ‘equaliberty’ is arguably still at stake, it does not operate only as a determination of how production is structured and who takes decisions about distribution, provision and more; it also feeds into what and how much a society produces and consumes as well as how the value of some-thing or some-body is determined and access to them is granted. Additionally, another related facet concerns the nature of the use-objects produced – are they commodities, private assets, public goods, a gift (of nature or God)? – and of the non-human resources involved in the process, an issue that evokes the problem of the right forms of appropriation and symbiosis to be established. Altogether, these facets compose a complex, affective field of association, which exceeds the scope of its democratic form, much as the latter term is stretched. The concept most commonly associated nowadays with the topic under discussion is probably that of ‘social justice’.38 Without disputing its prescriptive and evocative merits or the way it successfully integrates into the analysis of justice aspects of life excluded from more restrictive conceptions, it remains too general to be adopted as a critical concept for identifying and differentiating forms of horizontal/egalitarian justice. After all, even highly authoritarian states may develop their own schemes of social justice; did not the forced collectivisation from above performed by the Stalinist regime have such a dimension? Perhaps, another more suitable candidate is that of ‘moral economy’, developed by E. P. Thompson (1993: 185–351), for conceptualising the fluid array of customary practices and rights, social norms and obligations determining the (economic) activity of popular classes. Despite the critiques to which it has been subjected, the notion has proved its fecundity by informing many insightful analyses of subaltern communities – past and present.39 As far as my study is concerned, the concept certainly resonates, since by charging practices of subsistence with a normative and ethical valence, it illuminates how economic reproduction pertains to justice as much as to survival. From this angle, the codes, practices and norms the term means to designate can be plausibly conceived as historical forms of justice from below, which have attained some degree of formalisation and consistency in terms of their protocols of operation. Nevertheless, as a generic determination of this historical type of justice the term is insufficient, the reason being exactly that it is too generic in its connotations to be used in a more exclusive manner (cf. Götz, 2015). Consequently, if ‘moral economy’ is applied only to specific socioeconomic forms, it allows the impression that other forms which the

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notion does not encapsulate are ‘immoral’. For sure, as Marx re-cognised, it is true that a capitalist economy – the great Other of moral economies, accused to have gradually eroded them – relegates ethical considerations of substantive value by positing profit, growth and accumulation as driving motors of human activity. Yet – even if it is further admitted that capitalism yields on a mass scale immoral effects and behaviours (destitution, destruction, greed, egoism) – the operation of capitalist economic systems has its own normative/ethical codes and embedded precepts of desert, fairness, reward; in brief, its own regime of justice, geared to ensure the flourishing of (what is experienced as) a good life.40 Ultimately, from a more analytical point of view, all regimes of justice connect in a manner of mutual constitution to some type of ‘moral economy’. The concept sought here must be able to identify in a more circumscribed way the differentiating qualities of justice from below. Along with an egalitarian distribution of power and its attendant affirmation of an equal capacity, ‘equaliberty’ denotes a horizontal domain of free and equal access and provision, constituted through (more or less formal and regular) flows of cooperation, mutual sharing, donation and balanced reciprocity. A key determination in all these operations is their commonality; what, who, in what ways, how much is produced, distributed and consumed may vary, but they all resolve and take place in community: produced in common, decided in common, enjoyed in common. Even humankind’s metabolism with nature is affected through the formative experience of a community of Being, which is such precisely insofar no being is ontologically ‘above’ others; instead, the experience expresses a horizontal field of interaction (not to be confused with an idyllic Arcadia of frictionless harmony). Understandably, the idea of ‘the commons’ has emerged to grasp such horizontal and egalitarian modes of production and use, drawing from customary practices before the onslaught of enclosure and privatisation the capitalist infernal machine generated.41 Yet there is another prodigious term, which despite or indeed because of its heavy historical load is deemed more pertinent: communism. As Hardt has pointed out, although the historical corruption that terms like communism and democracy have undergone makes their abandonment possible, this means ‘we leave behind too the long history of struggles, dreams, and aspirations that are tied to them’ (2010: 346). From this point of view – and not unlike what Marx did – it is more fertile to pursue the path that has been followed also with democracy and develop a critical concept of communism, nourished from the history of the communist idea and movement, yet also capable to throw critical light upon it. The rough guidelines for such a critical conception, as far as justice is concerned, have been sketched in the third chapter. Communism, before attaining the form of a ‘hypothesis’ holding a promise of universal vindication and redemption, is a biopolitical movement that embraces historically actualised

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forms of association and (inter)action. Such forms, aptly called by Graeber (2011: 98) ‘baseline communism’, operate on the molecular level and are impregnated with an identifiable ethos; that is, a lived experience of justice, no matter if a relevant idea of justice has been actualised. A clear instantiation of baseline communism, which also elucidates further the affective dimension of justice, can be found in Alexander Berkman’s memoir of Soviet Russia. During his journey back from the United States, the Russian émigré, along with his fellow travellers, demanded and received warm clothes. Thereupon, A large pile of the collected apparel — suits, hats, shoes, winter underwear, hosiery, etc. — lies in the center of our cabin, and the committee is distributing the things. There is much shouting, laughing, and joking. It’s our first attempt at practical communism. The crowd surrounding the committee passes upon the claims of each applicant and immediately acts upon its verdict. A vital sense of social justice is manifested. (1925: 9)

It is such molecular flows that provide the necessary material basis for any consistent idea and project of communism, like the one Aristophanes makes Praxagara programmatically declare in Ecclesiazusae: ‘This is what I was going to say: I shall begin by making land, money, everything that is private property, common to all. Then we shall live on this common wealth, which we shall take care to administer with wise thrift’ (1938, 598–600). The fact that Aristophanes parodies this prospect should make us alert to the actual circulation of such ideas in Athens as well as to concrete experiences from which they drew inspiration. Based upon this enlarged conceptualisation, communism may be designated not only as a historical form of justice from below but more broadly as a generic determination of its actuality: becoming-egalitarian/horizontal justice is a becoming-communism. That said, the point about democracy applies here as well: justice from below does not require a full-fledged communist mode of production, neither being communist on the level of ideological/political commitment. In fact, as De Landa (2000: 31ff.) demonstrates, historical forms of self-consistent aggregates (or ‘meshworks’) have emerged which enable and sanction individual accumulation of wealth, hence, some level of economic disparity, without forfeiting their horizontality. De Landa’s main example is the market form developed in peasant and town communities: nonhierarchical, noncentrally planned spaces of exchange (of opinions, ideas, goods), in which bodies assemble and communities of interests and needs are generated.42 Such pre-capitalist markets (nowadays we could include alternative networks of exchange and perhaps some online crypto-markets) are not ‘communist’, yet they are permeated and reproduce regimes of justice that operate from below. A lengthier analysis could explore the extent that such

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forms have provided a basis for the other great plebeian utopia of modernity, not simply ‘next to’ but set against communism: the democracy of property owners embodied in the American Dream. Then again, the dynamics of inequality that the latter carries – explored nowadays in numerous products of popular culture, like the celebrated films Hell or High Water (2016), American Honey (2016) and The Florida Project (2017) – indicates how difficult it is to establish sustainable social formations operating via lines of equality and horizontality if they lack a communist ethos entirely. The speculative logic of dialectics gives to this insight a utopian edge: becoming-justice-from-below entails becoming-communism – that is, communisation – as the unfulfilled prospect of a world that has become hospitable for every-body. Could then communism, to paraphrase Marx (2002: 97), be ‘the solution to the riddle’ of an egalitarian/horizontal justice? Intriguing as the proposition sounds, it must not subsume the communist flows that can be mapped throughout history under a constricted teleology. For all these rhizomatic molecular flows of communisation do not add up to make one great molar formation, a communist world-system, which retrospectively makes them meaningful. They may attest to the possibility of a communist politics or indeed nourish it, but they have their own integrity. So far, the analysis focused on the positivity of justice from below, to ratify its non-derivative status. However, what has been said about the historicity of justice must be enough to ward off any idea that the historical permutations of the horizontal/egalitarian diagrammatic model unfold independently or in isolation from wider historical dynamics. Since justice from above is consolidated through the state as a constituted, legal order that attempts to monopolise (the dispensation of) justice, it would be sensible to assume that ‘justice-from-below’ retreats and is pushed to the margins. Indeed, from the perspective of the state, unmediated flows of justice pose a scandal, even though the vigilante – who ratifies Law when the latter seems powerless – is apperceived more sympathetically that the rebel – who rises up against the legal order. On the other hand, as Deleuze and Guattari note (in a way that is I believe more dialectical than they would be willing to admit), the consolidation of the state serves to unleash flows that on the primitive socius remained coded; even more, the state ‘gives rise to new flows that escape from it’ (2013b: 522). In this context, egalitarian/horizontal justice enlarges its scope and refines its lines of operation. One pertinent aspect of this process concerns structures of self-organisation and self-management operating parallel and at a distance from the state (without necessarily being free from its yoke or incapable of entering a dialectical relation with it). As Scheidel observes for early states, within their territories ‘communities were largely self-governing, loosely held in check by a relatively small and often distant centralized authority’ (2017: 47). Similar horizontal/egalitarian forms can

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be traced throughout history and across the continents, in relative degrees of intensity; for instance, in Britain after the dissolution of the Roman Empire, there are good indications for the blooming of an ‘Anglo-Saxon Democracy’ (Dyer, 2010). Even the advent of the modern state has not dissipated entirely such self-organised structures and flows; in fact, closer examination would reveal how in numerous cases, from the early ‘bourgeois’ states passing through revolution to the more recent example of ‘left populism’ in Latin America, the historical development of the modern (democratic) state drew from the energies of grassroots institutional forms (even perhaps at the cost of the latter’s autonomy and eventually vitality).43 There is another pertinent aspect to the issue, intimated again by Deleuze and Guattari when they probe the historical fortunes of the war machine: ‘Could it be that at the moment the war machine ceases to exist, conquered by the state, that it displays to the utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into thinking, dying, or creating machines that have at their disposal vital or revolutionary powers capable of challenging the conquering state’ (2013b: 415)? In terms of the current study the salient point is that once the state is firmly in place, justice from below, along with developing its institutional outlook, intensifies its subversive élan. Thus, if justice from above unites heterogeneous components within a field of interiority (whose pacification then becomes a major concern and value), justice from below divides. ‘Peace in the huts! War in the palaces’.44 Expectedly, Deleuze and Guattari highlight the positive and productive dimension of this multiple process. Acknowledging that the subversion of the state form is an affirmative act, the perspective constructed here also attends to the negative dimension of such forms of justice. The decoding and deterritorialisation of the dominant order of right imposed from above is truly a ‘negation of a negation’. To return to the first Plebeian secession (the revolt of Spartacus has been mentioned earlier to the same effect): in seceding from Rome, organised yet without a leader, the plebs have produced a horizontal/ egalitarian line of flight; in doing that though, they negated in practice the hierarchical order of the Roman state. It is this dialectic of affirmation/negation defining the becoming of justice from below that has been consistently identified here in events of insurgency (in riot, mutiny, secession, revolt), integrating the latter as positive moments in the historical actualisation of justice, without however theoretically downplaying their negativity. From a Deleuzian point of view, the transgressive, subversive and transformative potency that egalitarian/horizontal justice develops cannot be logically deduced from an objective social identity and its material interests, be it that of the plebs, the proletariat, the worker, the poor. It is rather connected to the dynamics of social-desiring production, to the nonconformity of desire. On the other hand, to truly appreciate the subversive and transformative force

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that justice from below breeds, its class-determinations must come to the fore. For in the same way that in a stratified society ‘justice from above’ consolidates its spatiality by attaching to an identifiable ruling elite, justice from below is embedded into – mediated as well as mediating – a subaltern reality. Yet although possible, we will not speak here of a ‘subaltern justice’. Rather, in homology to the conceptualisation already deployed, this determination that justice from below acquires in class societies will be called ‘plebeian’. The choice does not have to do simply with conceptual consistency, but with the fact that using the prefix ‘plebeian’ avoids a reduction of justice to a function of economic agency. ‘Plebeian justice’ refers to forms – (institutionalised) practices, norms, sanctions, codes of conduct – that are immanent to the protection and augmentation of the interests, needs and well-being of those damaged by a double clause of social inequality and political exclusion, the ‘part of those that have no part’ (Rancière, 2010). Equally crucially, precisely because it does not merely reflect objective structures, plebeian justice refers to an active, lived experience, which can be defined as ‘the rejection of domination and the attempt to set up, by means of concerted action, an alternative power’ (Breaugh, 2013: 4); more compactly, as the passage to political freedom. Given how Breaugh links this experience to ‘achieving human dignity’ (ibid.: xv), he would probably have no qualms with me adding that the desire for freedom enacted in the plebeian experience is also a desire for justice or, more intrinsically, that freedom is the modality of actualisation of (the desire for) justice. He would only insist on political freedom being the distinct quality of the plebian experience vis-à-vis socioeconomic grievances and demands. Now that the act of freedom – realised in the collective praxis of the plebs – is much more than an expression of economic agency, that it has its own consistency and integrity, is a pertinent point. Significantly, it helps make theoretical sense why freedom can emerge within the most unequal conditions, worse than what the plebs suffered in Rome – after all, they were Romans – notably, the inequality slaves like Spartacus experienced. Conversely, the irreducibility of freedom to social or economic structures throws critical light on dogmatic ideals of egalitarian justice, like that of Étienne Cabet’s communism, which he sought to apply in Icaria (cf. Rancière, 2007: 74–80). What the latter instantiation shares with other egalitarian projects of much wider scope is the suppression of freedom in favour of a centrally planned order, which despite its egalitarian aspirations ends up asserting new hierarchies and privileges. Any socioeconomic movement towards an egalitarian direction, to sustain its egalitarian and horizontal élan – to be justice-from-below, needs to be nourished in freedom, for equality coming ‘from above’ is quite clearly not ‘equal’. But is it not also true that inequality delimits freedom into privilege?45 How can horizontality and equality flourish as institutional qualities, instead of fleeting moments appearing in the

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chasms of sociopolitical reproduction, if material production is structured in a hierarchical and unequal manner? Do not plebeian movements, along with asserting equal capacity and political freedom, always invest in the improvement of material conditions of being? For one, history indicates beyond doubt that plebeian generated ‘democratisation’ has been inextricably connected to concrete and determinate socioeconomic measures: from erasure of debt and redistribution of land, to collective employment contracts, welfare schemes and equalisation of wages. This insight connects to and augments the insight about the limitations of democracy, whose promise feeds into a grander vision: the egalitarian utopia of plebeian vindication. More to the point, it is suggestive of the analytical merits of Balibar’s insistence that freedom and equality must be conceived together, as equaliberty. In this context, justice acts as a mediating category, the key determination embracing political freedom and socioeconomic equality while allowing for their individual integrity, hence non-identity. The affirmation of equaliberty as the constitutive marker of a good life marks the defining experience of plebeian forms of justice, operating on the grassroots level along horizontal lines. Furthermore, and no less significantly, justice elucidates the common element between the two opposing desires that the plebeian and patrician experiences embody. The passage to equaliberty is a becoming-justice in the substantial sense that it marks a passage from one form of justice to another. Being an animal labourans – as a resistance to which the plebeian experience emerges – is not being forced to stay in a biological state of animality; it is a biopolitical condition established and sanctioned through juridico-political operations pertaining to a certain regime of justice. It is upon these grounds that the tragic overtones of justice and of the history (or histories) to which it partakes rest. Much more than a domain where the perennial fight between Good and Evil take place, the social-historical finds one of its driving motors in a dialectical conflict between forms of justice, each with its own unique determinations, problems and threatening dynamics. Thus, while a tragic conception of history cannot (nor is it meant to) explain why in a given conflict one side prevails (since numerous variables are involved, from power relations to sheer lack), it offers a frame of intelligibility for critically following the development of conflict-laden historical forms. Patrician forms of justice, apart from being hierarchical and authoritarian, were said to be qualified by three main determinations: domination, limitative desert and privilege. Similarly, based on the preceding analysis it can be asserted that plebeian forms of justice actualise their horizontal/ egalitarian quality through the mediation of three other determinations. Justice from below in its class-determined forms is actualised as resistance – refusal to accept an adverse situation or policy and their discursive justifications; insurrection – rising up against conditions perceived to be unjust;

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counter-institution – creation of collective forms of reproduction operating through different protocols that the ones of the dominant regime of justice. Whilst their intensity in each individual case varies, these determinations usually intermingle. For instance, plebeian ‘moral economies’ in early modernity entailed counter-institutions, like local markets and customary practices of exchange, but they also deployed as immanent aspects of their operation insurrectionary violence, notably riots, which were geared to press for suitable food provision and ensure fair prices.46 Moreover, even the day-by-day reproduction of the plebs has elements of resistance, which does not attain the intensity of open revolt but rather operates through what Scott (1990) has called ‘hidden transcripts’. Accordingly, there are moments when resistance acquires visibility and turns public, while remaining integrated to existing social formations. We owe to Mikhail Bakhtin (2009) what is probably the most famous analysis of such a form of justice from below, the medieval and renaissance carnivals which suspended temporarily social roles and challenged the established hierarchical order without attempting to overthrow it. Conversely, revolt may be a historical form that accentuates the insurrectionary aspect of justice from below, but its affirmation of new values is not abstract or purely virtual, it is actualised in counter-institutions, nay informal and temporary ones, like the assemblies taking place in occupied universities and other public buildings during the 2008 revolt in Greece.47 For sure, some historical forms may seem to lack one of the three determinations discussed. This is Badiou’s verdict on ‘immediate riots’ (2012: 16–26), sporadic outbursts of insurrectionary violence coming from marginalised groups that do not develop any institutional forms. The impression is not facile; there are indeed events of insurgency – the Rodney King riots of 1992 or the 2011 riots in the United Kingdom are cases to point – where insurrectionary rage consumes itself in destructive negation. Nonetheless, on closer look, even in these ‘immediate riots’, informal patterns of appropriation, distribution, provision and more develop which can be legitimately viewed as the inchoate basis for potential counter-institutions (cf. Clover, 2016: 175–92). Altogether, thus, it is arguable that the three qualities mentioned determine every plebeian form of justice, even if only as latent potentialities. The overall analysis adds substance to the earlier theoretical discussion concerning historicity and becoming. Plebeian forms of justice may have determinations which deserve to be called ‘essential’, since they constitute the phenomenon’s identifiable presence in time and space; nevertheless, the specific content, configuration and intensity of these determinative qualities always has a historical index. Which is to say, the actuality of riots, revolts, (counter) forms of reproduction and more is that of historically singular instantiations, whose proper theorisation requires an understanding of the historical conjuncture they express. On the other hand, to reduce these forms to

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their historical conjuncture is to gain an impoverished insight on their becoming. The Gordon riots of 1780 and the London riots of 2011 are not approximations of an abstract model, the Riot, just happening to be separated by a few centuries. They express different historical moments and, hence, have differential content and dynamics. Still, they both find their point of inflation in an experience of injustice, and they are positively orientated by a willingness to see justice triumph, even if only in the limited form of fair prices or as a self-consuming vengeance. To this extent, justice is a constitutive facet of rioting in its historical singularity. Which is to say, analyses of subaltern strategies of survival and forms of insurgency that do not attend to justice, as a productive desire and structural problem, may do a great job illuminating a historical moment, but they will still have missed something essential about the phenomena in their very historicity. Another inference to be drawn is that plebeian forms of justice tend to be mobile assemblages. For sure, this is in a sense true of all forms of justice, since even authoritarian states – despite a tendency to occlude their moment of historical formation and to represent themselves in terms of a fixed order – never stop moving within a wider context of geopolitical flows. That is why it is possible to speak also of ‘movements from above’ aiming to restructure the dominant order of Right. Nevertheless, hierarchy and authority work more efficiently by fixing their lines of operation in a stable manner (‘stability’ becoming a buzzword and a value that all authoritarian/hierarchical forms commit to). Qua engineering diagram, justice from above is positively prone to regimentation, even when it is has acquired the dynamism of an expansionist empire. In this context, the desire for justice tends to morph into self-gratifying pleasure for those who are at the top – indulging their rightful power and privileges – and to an imperative of perpetual frugality – sometimes mixed with patronising promises or resentful expectations of future pleasures – for those who are at the bottom. Contrariwise, in order for equality and horizontality to maintain their distinct diagrammatic lines of articulation, they need to remain mobile and resist any sedimentation of functions and operations, which may then lead to the consolidation of fixed points of hierarchy. Whether or not a full prevention of hierarchy and authority is possible in the long run – Breaugh astutely identifies an opposing tendency within plebeian politics in his discussion of the leader and the generation of a desire to be dominated (2013: 43–53) – it provides a critical frame of intelligibility for theorising movements from below. The latter most certainly have their own affective dimension of joy and pleasure. Nor is it necessary to evoke orientalist images of the Cultural Revolution to maintain that plebeian forms of justice, like ritualised public humiliation, are affected by self-righteous enjoyment. Nonetheless, their distinct quality as horizontal and egalitarian forms resisting structures of imposition from above is not to recoil

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to a jouissance of what exists, and instead maintain the horizons of the desire for justice open. Arguably thus, movements from below remain vibrant for as long as they unfold through egalitarian/horizontal lines of transformation, while they start to decline when their position in the state of the situation is fixed, something that leads in effect to a solidification of whatever hierarchies have in the meantime developed. This line of thought yields another interesting homology: if justice from above tendentially valorises order to the point that the latter consumes justice entirely, justice from below follows the opposite direction, of flows of deterritorialisation that accelerate to the point where, along with order and law, justice consumes itself in the name of unrestrained movement; that is, of ‘total freedom’. Along with a few anarchist trends, certain Marxist currents, notably some theories of communisation, articulate this anomic tendency in their conception of communism. Thus, in his explication of communisation, understood as the ‘direct production of communism’, Leon de Mattis ascertains that ‘communization will be chaotic. [ . . . ] Communizing measures will not be taken by any organ, any form of representation of anyone, or any mediating structure. [ . . . ] There is no organ to decide on disputed matters. It is the situation that will decide; and it is history that will know, post festum, who was right’ (2011: 27–28). There is no need to adopt diagnoses of modern political movements as ersatz religions to acknowledge that, on the experiential level, conceptions of communism such as that condensed in Mattis’s statement bear structural similarities to the type of religious rejections of the world performed by ‘apocalyptic eschatology’.48 They both posit an absolute rupture and an absolute difference; that is, a ‘new world’ which has none of the features of the previous social order, especially none of its political features which are deemed (either explicitly or implicitly) to be symptoms of fallen being. Not coincidentally, both types of apocalypticism tend to find a fertile soil among the more sectarian currents of movements, who resolutely refuse any pragmatic compromise with the ‘old world’. Likewise, the instances that ground historically the prospect of an anomic actualisation of freedom are liminal situations of intense mobilisation, militancy and fraternity; for example, when a revolt or civil war are at their climax or when the end-times is experienced to have arrived. Perhaps, these critical remarks may be unfairly sweeping, hence, amenable to modifications through a lengthier investigation. Still, regardless how instantiations of the anomic fetishisation of freedom and equality are to be evaluated, the crux of the matter is that they are neither paradigmatic nor the hidden truth of egalitarian/horizontal justice. Nor do I agree with Bloch (2015: 297–98) that the annulment of justice is the necessary and logical consequence of the desire for justice coming from below. By making this claim, Bloch identifies justice as a positive magnitude with the hierarchical/

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authoritarian type and its qualitative determinations (domination, limitative desert, privilege). Bloch supports his position by arguing that the dictum ‘from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs’, which he takes to be the answer to subaltern aspirations for a good life, does not pertain to justice. Contrariwise, picking up Graeber’s (2011: 94) suggestion, this maxim is taken here to constitute the benchmark of a communist justice. True, the prescription under discussion is informed by a logic of superabundance that challenges the centrality of equivalence and even more of justice as a well-structured, lawful order, and instead points to a generalised economy of the gift and its affective complex of love, care, solidarity and empathy. Nonetheless, insofar as production, distribution, provision, exchange and consumption remain intrinsic and finite processes of social being, it is sensible to assume that communist social formations would not simply abolish equivalence, reciprocity, reward, desert and proportionality but configure them in a radical manner, through egalitarian/horizontal patterns of production, management, recognition, distribution, provision, exchange; in brief, through a different, communist (as well as democratic) regime of justice. No matter how much in the latter freedom and equality are identified as the marks of a good life, the actualisation of both (of the ‘good’ and of equaliberty as its material content) is still mediated by an ordered mode of being, set right through various institutional means; for example, self-organisation, voluntary collectivisation, equalisation of rewards, regularised donation of surpluses, sanctions to individual accumulation. Another important insight to have been posited is that the multiple, rhizomatic actualisations of egalitarian/horizontal forms of justice must not be judged by a revolutionary yardstick, making in effect revolution an absolute transcendental measure, hence, a historical telos. On the other hand, it has also been argued that the extension of such forms of justice necessarily passes through their intensification. Revolution is precisely the event – but at the same time the social/desiring process extending before and after the ‘evental’ site of revolutionary rupture – wherein justice from below attains its maximum point of intensity (cf. Diken, 2012: 67–130). Expectedly, this intensification brought by becoming-revolution embraces all the qualitative determinations of justice, accentuating in the process their dialectical interplay. Revolutions are impregnated with negativity: not only do they mark a short-circuit of dominant mechanisms of reproduction, hence, an aggravation of affects that nourish an intolerable sense of injustice; at the same time, such affects (rage, disappointment, hate, revulsion) are channeled into an active (and violent in varying degrees) ‘negation of the negation’. Moreover, revolutionary desire in its insurrectionary valance is driven by – leading it to new heights – the logic of superabundance mentioned earlier, interrupting in this

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way the instituted forms of equivalence, from economic exchange to legal imputations. ‘Who deserves what’, either for their previous wrongdoings or for their current stance, tends to be overcome by a torrent of revolutionary violence. To borrow Bataille’s (1997: 172) term, the destruction brought by revolution carries the mark of unlimited ‘social expenditure’. Naturally, resentful vengefulness appears and along with it comes self-gratifying jouissance. However, the affective cluster of negativity permeating revolutionary upheavals does not recoil in resentment, it meshes with the affirmation of a new sociopolitical order. In fact, the latter is not simply the goal of the revolution, it is its form and content as a becoming-justice. Connected to this last point, a revolution unleashes the constituent power germinating at the social basis through the proliferation of noncentrally directed assemblages (rioting machines, committees, assemblies, militias) in which justice assumes the figure of multiplicity, of ‘the many’. At the same time, revolutions are distinguished from revolts by the constitution of a new general system of justice (thus, order of Right), whose intensification and extension have a universal scope; socialism, communism, democracy, along with expressing its material forms and content, actualise this new order on the level of a universal Idea. Finally, in revolutions freedom acquires the form of a tangible autonomy that places all existing laws, norms and customs within the reach of collective deliberation and critique. More than any other event, revolutions generate the collective experience that life is now in one’s hands, not at the mercy of inscrutable laws and categorical imperatives. It is this facet of the revolutionary phenomenon, coupled with the proliferation of constituent power, which has nourished the grand narrative that socialism has posited against liberal legalism and constitutionalism; that is, the prospect of a revolutionary fulfilment of justice. On the other hand, revolutions carry their own dogmatic protocols and values – for example, gender equality and workers’ power – which by necessity must be imposed to those who abhor them; for example, committed defenders of patriarchy and bosses, opening in effect the space of civil war (hence, of a violence that may reach the intensity of revolutionary Terror). Even more, given that revolutions are events that strictly speaking no organ decides upon their commencement; since peoples do revolutions only insofar revolutions signal a time – this peculiar structure of temporality that the Greek notion of Kairos signifies49 – that engulfs peoples and carries them along, it is arguable that the revolutionary event has a heteronomous facet, which discloses the radical heterogeneity of desire. All the points made have many parameters and invite much more unpacking. The key insight, however, has been delivered: in becoming-revolution, becoming-justice unravels all its insurrectionary (decoding, deterritorialising) and institutionary (encoding, re-territorialising) potency. It follows that the

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distinctive diagrammatic lines of justice from below are also drawn in the clearest possible manner. Revolutions bring down existing hierarchies and multiply horizontal connections whilst clauses and structures of inequality are abolished in favour of a radical affirmation of equality, both as a capacity to participate in the production of the new order as well as a tangible quality stretching from economic activity to the organisation of space. We owe to George Orwell one of the clearest images of egalitarian/horizontal justice in action: It was the first time that I have ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. [ . . . ] Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Senor’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’ and said ‘Salud’ instead of ‘Buenos Dias’. [ . . . ] Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town, where people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. (1981: 236)

Orwell’s depiction is also indicative of how in a revolution the plebeian experience – the passage to equaliberty – transgresses the threshold of political recognition within an already institutionalised order. In fact, flooding existing identities with the torrent of the revolutionary mass, revolutions tend also to transcend the affirmation of the class identity of their protagonists. To be sure, the closer one looks the more complicated the story gets, since there have been revolutions, the great socialist revolutions of the twentieth century being a case in point, where the vindication of the downtrodden took the form of class affirmation, hence of class-based exclusions from the new order of Right. Still, on principle, a revolutionary event opens the space where class identities become fluid. In this context, not only violence and hatred but also love explodes beyond the confines of existing attachments. A paradigmatic instantiation of this phenomenon has been spotted by Marc Ferro in the Russian Revolution of 1917: ‘“What have you done, why are you here?”, a warder demanded of a prisoner on the eve of a revolution. “I am here so that you may be no longer struck or humiliated” was the prisoner’s reply. And in February 1917 the prisoner freed the warder from his infamous task’ (1990: 213). In revolutions, even temporarily, justice balances between and encompasses the strongest class hatreds with the noblest generosity. It can be reasonably countered that revolutions have historically led to the establishment of new states, thus, new hierarchies and inequalities. In fact, the greater the utopian intensity of the revolution the greater the hierarchy,

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inequality and authoritarianism to result from it. This is no trifling matter, and it requires more space than what is currently available. Nevertheless, granting that the usual arsenal of answers revolutionary ideologies marshal as explanations – verging around notions of class-consciousness and/or betrayal – is insufficient, even less satisfactory is the diagnosis of ‘totalitarian domination’ as the unavowed truth of revolutionary equaliberty.50 This idea hollows out the relevant historical process from its political stakes and the contingent events that decided them. In fact, the more consistent the rejection of revolution, the more it becomes a principled denunciation of justice from below. Telling more about the critique than its object, we are not far from the ‘hatred for democracy’ that Rancière (2006) has astutely diagnosed. Towards a more elaborate analysis, unavoidably reserved for a future study, it is important to recall that the desire for justice always verges in a zone of indeterminacy, where it can and does blend with other modalities of desire. Put more properly, it has been already clarified that we are not dealing with isolated objects but with determinations differentiating and qualifying the libidinal investments that charge and mobilise living beings. Expectedly, in an event like revolution, where flows of desire attain high intensity, the zone of indeterminacy also enlarges and engulfs the different determinations of desire. While there is a creative side to the process, blending, for instance, justice and artistic creation in a singular becoming-revolution, there is also a less candid side. Under the influence of various factors, from ideological conviction to adverse historical circumstances, the desire for justice may also fuse with a desire to dominate or indeed to be dominated, up to the point of establishing an authoritarian regime where the leader is worshipped as messiah. To complicate things further, the consolidation of a state – which fuses justice and domination in the form of sovereign power/law – may not simply be a corruption of the desire for justice from below, it may also have the dimension of a pragmatic moderation of the libido’s utopian overcharge and the spectre of absolute deterritorialisation it breeds. In this way of course, one spectre is exorcised only for another spectre to appear, that of the revolution losing its direction, and thus going back to a right that is yielded by sovereign might. What is sketched here is a certain dialectic: in the same way that empires are arguably haunted – a ghost that they have served to make real by uniting the ecumene under their Nomos – by a revolutionary deterritorialisation of global proportions (Christianity and communism being cases in point), revolutions – depending on their dynamic as well as the territory where they erupt – may end up yielding new imperial forms, communism being again paradigmatic. The substantial point to be retained is not that it is the fate of justice from below, while climaxing, to morph into justice from above. It is that, since becoming-justice does not unfold in univocal directions but

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blends and bifurcates, their engineering diagrams cannot be sealed from each other, even more so if the dialectical interplay of common determinations is taken into consideration. In this intensive context, hybrid forms are expectable and frequent. For instance, in Florence during the heydays of the Republic, the valorisation of civic freedom as a key quality of justice – itself adorned as the founding stone of a good polity – was fused with a valorisation of imperial expansion (Hörnqvist, 2014). Lest the phenomenon be attributed to the oligarchic traits of the Florentine Republic (or of Rome, from which the former drew inspiration), a similar fusion characterised ancient Athens, the ‘cradle of democracy’ (Canfora, 2006: 21–34). And is not the modern democratic state a hybrid between the two rival engineering diagrams of justice? The inference to be drawn is that there is nothing outlandish in the fact that revolutions begin as intensive processes of justice from below yet may eventually morph into a rigid justice from above. On the other hand, theoretical exegesis must not to be taken for political justification. Nor the re-cognition of fusion and development must be confused with a full identification. Justice from below can lead to the formation of states – to justice from above – but by that time its distinctive qualities will have been faded, marginalised or lost; which is to say, it will not be ‘justice from below’ anymore. Accordingly, as long as the plebs have no bearing on the relevant processes, a state – even if it has grown out of a revolutionary event – will not reproduce plebeian forms of justice, regardless if some measures and policies benefit the lower classes. For in the absence of an activity stemming from below, it is dependency and hierarchy that will inevitably be asserted and consolidated. The passage from a pious petition towards the ruler to a violent attack against the state apparatus may be provoked by little more than an unceremonious act of police violence. Nevertheless, these two practices embody and testify to two different diagrammatic models of justice. It also follows that the conventional notion of a ‘revolution from above’ is theoretically unwarranted, since revolutionary events may be fermented or even initiated by elite elements – disenfranchised intellectuals not being one of these – but such actions have a real historical effectivity only if they mesh into a revolutionary becoming, which necessarily unfolds at the grassroots, where the mass of desiring bodies (inter) acts, suffers, resists, organises, transgresses, hopes and dreams. Revolutionary change – hence, revolutionary justice – cannot simply be decreed from above and maintain its revolutionary quality. A revolution can only become. That this justice-becoming-revolution is dialectical, hence ‘impure’, blending affirmation and negation, (acts of) freedom with (acts of) imposition, sometimes fused into a single act – like the first decrees the Soviets passed in Russia – does not alter the point, it only makes it more complex theoretically and more demanding politically.

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JUSTICE IN-BETWEEN, JUSTICE INCOMPLETE To sum up, two types of justice have been conceptualised, corresponding to two distinct engineering diagrams: hierarchical/authoritarian (‘justice from above’) and horizontal/egalitarian (‘justice from below’). These two types of justice are not ideologies whose spatial designations work metaphorically, although they do involve discursive construction (cf. Ferguson and Gupta, 2005). They are embedded into two structure-generating processes, hierarchies and meshworks, whose diagrammatic coordinates they share, not by passively adopting them, but as active elements in their emergence, constitution, reproduction and transformation. The embeddedness of justice in wider material processes clearly ratifies the materialist credentials of the theory. Moreover, it clarifies that the historical actualisation of justice does not concern the (even dialectical) realisation of a unitary substance. Neither is one type of justice derivative of the other in an evolutionary ladder of progress and decline. The dialectics of affirmation/negation, multiplicity/universality, freedom/order (thus, autonomy/heteronomy, constituent power/constituted power, superabundance/equivalence) that determine the becoming of justice splits into two different and opposing directions. ‘Another justice, another movement, another space-time’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013b: 412). ‘Another justice’, Deleuze and Guattari warn, is not axiomatically a ‘better justice’. A similar warning is made by De Landa (2000: 69) about hierarchies and meshworks: highlighting the merits of the latter serves as a leverage to the historical hegemony of the former but does not warrant ascribing to self-consistent aggregates a transcendental superiority, effectively positing horizontality as an intrinsically preferable structure, always and already right. Against this one-sided normativism, the current theorisation has maintained that justice from below and justice from above have their own peculiar dynamics, merits, risks and problems. The one generates the fetish of a total territorialisation while the other can accelerate to the point that it fantasises an absolute deterritorialisation. Accordingly, not dealing with a Manichean opposition between absolute good versus absolute evil, the possibility of hybrid forms was asserted as a frequent phenomenon, manifested in some prodigious historical forms. Justice, from this point of view, unfolds from above, unfolds from below, but it may also unfold ‘in-between’. Then again, in the same way a re-cognition of the possibility of hybrid forms does not annul the historically distinct diagrammatic lines of operation that the two types of justice follow, a theoretical insight into the existence of different forms of justice does not also require the posture of neutrality, much less does it make it impossible to evaluate different forms of justice. The crucial point lies exactly in the theoretical consciousness that this critical operation concerns an evaluation of forms of justice, not an infinite judgement

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over the One Justice and its all too many pseudo-forms nor a ‘value-free’ materialist critique that weakens its own critical import by asserting that there is really nothing to judge. Criteria for such topical, focused and immanent evaluation have been intimated throughout the study. One of them revolves around the distinction between desire and pleasure. Some forms of justice tend to degenerate desire into a jouissance that stops producing and instead recoils and consumes the given. In this way, justice is tendentially enclosed to the dominant forms of being and reduced to mechanisms of justification (ranging from the crude to the sophisticated), at the expense of its transformative and utopian valence. An interesting question arises that is worth pondering in more detail on another occasion: Is it coincidental that the period when the problem of justice was announced to have ended is also the time that capitalism unleashed in full force its axiomatic of ‘surplus-pleasure’? Be that as it may, the point here is not to look for pure forms, in which the desire for justice will be free from enjoyment. Even less is to promote an ascetic model of desire; after all, an argument can be made that the desire animating asceticism has a potent dimension of self-assertive pleasure (cf. Cioran, 1996). In fact, taking away all enjoyment from desire is not far off from subtracting justice ‘from the continuum of desire’ and enclosing it to legal rules and codes, the end-point being a class-biased identification of justice with reason and impartiality. Having these points in mind, the analytical distinction between desire and pleasure still provides a critical compass for evaluating between forms of justice, based on whether they foster self-justificatory conformism and indulgence, which mute the problem of justice, or trajectories of renewal, improvement and change, which regenerate the experimental valence of a becoming-justice. While important, the degeneration of the desire for justice into self-righteous jouissance is not the only criterion available. Equally important is to study the effects of regimes and forms of justice. Specifically, a crucial criterion is the extent that a form or regime of justice serves to justify phenomena like oppression, exploitation, exclusion and discrimination; in one word, injustice. Not shying away from the ethical and normative aspects of this line of thought, all these phenomena are to be conceived as forms of damage, blockage and capture, afflicting and preventing beings from developing their potentialities and pursuing a good life. From the viewpoint of a materialist theorisation of justice, this is the essence of all injustice, a wrong committed against the precious and rare fact of existing. Without confusing justice with injustice yet being able to understand how injustice always grows and attains systemic status within established forms of justice, the theoretical perspective advanced denotes that there are always political lines of separation and, hence, sides to be taken.

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Crucially though, theory can contribute in making political commitment reflective of its contingency. Without such a reflective distance, even the most revolutionary desire for justice can end up enjoying its own righteousness so much that it will enter the vicious circle of a self-assertive jouissance. Inside this circle, the sincerest fraternity of militants – which at times of social peace upholds the minoritarian prospect of a revolutionary justice from below – may turn into a potential new despot, dispensing justice in a sovereign manner, from above. In front of this inherent danger, the solid moment of truth of idealism ever since Plato is to try to secure the reflective distance between desire and justice. The current theorisation has attempted to take up this task in a materialist manner, which does not render justice a hypostatic transcendens, but instead highlights its immanent surplus. Ultimately, the preceding analysis of different types of justice endorses the insight that no historical form, whether ‘from above’ or ‘from below’, hierarchical or horizontal, authoritarian or egalitarian, can embody justice without residue. Does then the idea of justice, by virtue of its excessiveness to every form of life, testify to a ‘highest good’ that is unrepresentable? To be sure, the social embeddedness of justice ratifies Horkheimer’s point that ‘absolute justice is as unthinkable as absolute truth’ (1978: 32). But ‘the absolute’ is not an adjective attached to justice, it is its immanent point of excess, approachable only noumenally. In that case – and probing on these matters is an invitation for theory to accelerate its conceptual movement – it becomes even more necessary to maintain the distance between salvation and justice. Agamben has insightfully attended to this distinction, claiming that ‘the world, in its fallenness, does not want salvation but justice. And it wants it precisely because it is not asking to be saved’ (2015: 45). Philosophically a solid point, my study has also highlighted a common affective ground, thus, the possibility of conflation between the two notions and hence, the insistence on the importance of distinguishing them. Salvation denotes being redeemed from the burden of transience that all becoming is marked with; thus, it also signals the entrance to a definite, unchangeable state of being. Justice, by contrast, is a multiple becoming, an affective force of composition and decomposition and a concept that can never fully conform to its definition, for as long as there are desiring bodies in restless worlds.

Epilogue

As it is said, medicine knows health, but knows not disease, and yet disease is recognized by the art of medicine. —Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, I:6 (2007)

The materialist theory of justice developed in the previous chapters should be seen – borrowing Breaugh’s succinct formulation, himself picking a notion from Arendt – as ‘an exercise in political thought’, which aimed to ‘show in actu that political thought need not to be inescapably reduced to a necessary history of ideas and doctrines, but with its categories and concepts, can provide a space where the social-historical can be interpreted and be made intelligible’ (2013: xxii). In addition, my study reached out to the open field of organic and nonorganic processes that make up the physical world and experimented with the scope of the concept of justice, retracing theorisations that progressivist narratives have expelled into the historical archives. Before drawing some brief but substantive conclusions, a summary is apposite. Taking up the problematic of new materialist philosophies – which have challenged the use of categories pertaining to agency as ontological barriers of ‘Man’ – it was asserted that a materialist theory should be able to provide a definition of justice operating at the abstract level of ‘materiality’, regardless if the phenomenon operates in all domains of the physical world or it emerges in complex biological forms or even only in human social formations. Thus, justice has been defined as a determination of material systems of interaction, not in the sense of a guiding Arche, but of an immanent quality, which theory can bring to the level of (thus, disclose as) a real abstraction. Specifically, justice is the determinative and determinate quality that concerns the proper set up and operation of collective assemblages. While this definition affirms its connection to norms of behaviour, justice, it has been also argued, cannot be 205

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identified with normative rules and laws, whether physical or manmade. For this would mean excluding a fundamental aspect of the dynamic structure of reality, the passage to form, which entails ruptures, lines of flight, decompositions, deterritorialisations, transformations. From this inclusive perspective, justice, qua emergent and material process, encompasses a play of rule setting and rule breaking. In effect, this is to expose a nonidentity between actuality and justice; in other words, the latter’s surplus, which the idea of justice serves to grasp conceptually. This nonidentity was then shown to require the speculative perspective of dialectics so as to be grasped in its proper dimensions: to state that the ‘real is just’ – that is, that it has justice as an active determination – is to speculate on the promise of even more justice, thus, on the openness and nonfinality of present forms. The conception of justice summarised germinates with the various themes that my book has dealt with. Nevertheless, the abstract definition offered cannot be a terminal point, since it fails to appreciate difference and the multiplicity of justice. As a determination of systems of interaction, justice is itself determined by the differentiating features of the specific fields of reality in which it is embedded. Having this insight as a backbone, the threshold of living beings was crossed in order to map out the positive presence of justice in animal worlds. Animals are not reproductive automata, they are desiring machines, which after a point of biosocial complexity strive to live well. In this context, justice can be more positively identified in the conditions that facilitate well-being, as a differentiated instinctive code of behaviour forming (what with a certain sense of provocation was designated as) a ‘natural Right’. At the same time, the intense affectivity of animal bodies makes the noncoincidence between right – what is established – and justice – what should be established – a sentient datum, hence, a reality desired to be made actual. This emergent desire for justice is actively expressed in the rifts and gaps of natural right: in activities that negotiate and challenge the order of animal groups and, even more astutely, in acts of resistance, which occasionally attain the intensity of open insurgency. This point in turn endorses the key assumption posited before: theory must incorporate in its definition of justice the latter’s negative valence, hence, the phenomena through which the latter is expressed. The human animal partakes on the interplay of affects that renders justice a desire powerful enough to attain the quality of a lived experience; that is, of a passage from one condition or state of being to an-other. Unlike new materialisms, though, and closer to historical materialism, it was argued that human being in its social-historical dimension marks another qualitative threshold. To be sure, this threshold is not a rift. As in animal communities, justice in the human world is a generic category that refers to a (more or less) coherent system of rules and norms, geared to preserve social beings in its rightful

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form. In this sense, the actualisation of justice as Right (in all social groups, from animal packs to polyethnic empires) denotes a passage through which desire positively morphs into – becomes – a set of enforceable prescriptions, injunctions and sanctions that mold the interaction of bodies and encode behaviour (not in an atomistic sense of reflex, but as a social category pointing to a collective form of being). On the other hand, human beings (thus, the good life) is institutionally and ideationally mediated, something that allows for unique patterns of aggregation and stratification. Institutions and ideas moreover imply language, and in becoming-language justice is formalised as an ‘order-word’ – as prescription, imputation, command. Law is precisely one of the historical forms of justice-becoming-right and thus language. Perhaps it is the best form (though this cannot be posited axiomatically), and it certainly incites systematic reflection on a series of crucial topics, notably on the relation between violence, right and justice. However, other forms of right are possible, also pertaining to justice. While not beyond critique, in the style of relativistic empiricism that Badiou justifiably takes issue with, these forms of justice deserve to be taken (and theorised) for what they are. The fact that justice is mediated in original institutional/ideational forms, and not actualised as instinct, yields a further differentiation and (saying the same thing otherwise) adds another dimension to the phenomenon. In human societies, the forms that are to set life right and thus make it good are open to dispute and negotiation in a systemic manner that is far more intense than any conflictual process in animal bands. Which is to say, in human societies justice acquires consciousness of itself as a political problem, rather than a quasi-transcendental issue whose problematic character is recognised postfestum by human noesis (as the ‘problem of consistency’, that Deleuze highlights, arguably is). One of the persistent merits of historical materialism is its systematic attendance to the structural divisions that the problem of justice is embedded in and hence to its conflict-laden character. In this context, another key insight to be drawn from Marx is that the class struggle – the insight can easily broaden to refer more generically to social struggles – is not simply a symptom of malfunction; it is a productive trajectory positively determining the actuality of justice. Unlike many Marxists, however, who have reduced this process to economic agency or structure, the political integrity of the problem of justice was brought to the fore, while offering at the same time a wider definition of the political than that derived from Schmitt. Moving on, Marx was quite aware that the multiform struggles of the subaltern classes involve an experience of injustice. However – effectively bypassing a binary ethical schema, which most theories of justice stuck into – Marx highlights that injustice arises within systems of right that sanction and justify the forms that actualise its concrete figures (exploitation, oppression, discrimination, etc.): from blood rights to the private ownership of the

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means of production. In this sense, Marx may be said to have adopted Hegel’s insight into the ethical structure of social being, to then lay open in an even more radical way than Hegel ever did the systemic embeddedness of injustice into a society’s Sittlichkeit. Moreover, in a dialectical fashion, he posited the prospect of a justice that will no longer breed its opposite. Endowed with utopian elements, this prospect is not the arbitrary fancy of theory. It is a potential historically testified by the real struggles of those who fight for justice against the many faces of injustice. Herein the analysis required to fold back, since no less than animal re-actions, the struggles of human beings are permeated by libidinal investments of variable intensity. Although Marxist thought points towards this dimension of justice, its systematic elaboration required the analytics of desire worked out by Deleuze, in collaboration with Guattari. Based on some of their key insights, it was extensively analysed that the desire for justice concerns neither the search for a lacking object nor for a fantasized fullness and the filling out of a void. For sure, this desire may emerge in the affective gap between how things are and how they should be, but in essence it is a trajectory productive of, and actualised in, the biopolitical (re)construction (thus, deconstruction) of social-historical modes of being. Therefore, by attending to the differentiating features of human being, the analysis arrived at a theoretical definition of justice which entails the original, abstract definition while fleshing it with concrete determinations: in human beings, justice has a twofold dimension, it is a structural problem and a productive desire embedded and actualised in the composition, decomposition and re-composition of social-historical forms. The latter conception also helps to theoretically expose that justice marks unexplored paths to be traversed, a becoming of differential forms: becoming-right, becoming-law, becoming-empire, but also becoming-resistance, becoming-revolt, becoming-revolution. As an integral part of this problematic, the experimental overtones of the process were stressed: justice is not a form to be discovered by Reason and applied to the world; it must be experimented in (and with) the world. Accordingly, building on the theme of ideation, it was shown that a becoming-justice can inspire and be incorporated to ideological projects of world-historic proportions, wherein the universal idea of justice attains historical and political actuality. On the other hand, like every other becoming permeated by desire, justice carries a surplus relative to its historical actuality and political forms, a virtual array of potentialities that the concept of justice must incorporate. The task of a materialist theory then is to balance between historicity, understanding why things transpired as they did, and becoming, allowing for its heterogeneity, aberrance and virtuality. The unraveling of this insight led also to an elaboration of the dialectical nuances of justice. This is an ‘open dialectic’, suggested by some significant trends in Hegelian scholarship. I am not sure how happy Deleuze would be

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even with this type. More certain is that such a dialectic can be critically deployed against Hegel, since if the becoming of justice is expressed in the historical actualisation of freedom, there is no real or logical need to stop in the Prussian state, or to any constitutional state for that matter, not even a global homogeneous one. As historical materialism (close here to the anarchist tendencies within the revolutionary tradition) sought to establish theoretically, the process can assume an anarchic intensity pointing beyond the state-form. Without ever becoming united, nomadic and dialectical thought can be drawn closer, the one serving to critically correct the other. Just like Hegelian dialectics can somber a Dionysian intoxication with the positivity of desire, which downplays the labour of the negative, as well as the role of contradiction and mediation, Deleuzian nomadism can block the dialectic’s drift to statism and to a teleology of reconciliation. In the ambience of this disjunctive synthesis, a materialist theory of justice arises that is not afraid to identify rational structures in history, which do not warrant an ultimate meaning as much as a survey of immanent lines unfolding in a rhizomatic fashion. Within the latter, a struggle between forms of justice is played out, underscored by a dialectic of multiple, opposing determinations. Much more than an application of theoretical maxims to history, the anatomy of the relevant historical forms unfolded as an integral dimension of the theoretical exposition, mediated by a typology of the two abstract engineering diagrams through which justice is actualised and operates: ‘justice from above’, in essence hierarchical and authoritarian, and ‘justice from below’, in essence horizontal and egalitarian. These are the two basic diagrammatic models of justice, bifurcating, colliding, fusing into various historical permutations. In this context, class divisions and the struggles they yield have been conceptualised as a determination as well as an effect of the historical production of these two different types of justice. Taken together, all these points foreground a series of important insights that add substantially to the relevant theoretical discourse, but also generate points of contact with important currents of critical theory: from the systematic registration of categories of rupture, struggle, resistance, insurrection, revolt and revolution as positive indexes of justice; to the accommodation of material bodies as active carriers of justice; to the comprehension of diverse, even opposing, forms and processes through a common ontological matrix and conceptual framework. Moreover, in this way, my study has effectively challenged the monopolisation of justice by institutional and legal forms ‘from above’, without falling to a romantic valorisation of struggles deriving ‘from below’. There is indeed a salient point to be made about struggles, past, present and future: their intensity of rupture cannot be reduced to the level of violence – in itself always too little to bring change, especially when it appears to be too much – but is proportional to the degree that the experience of (in)justice permeating them morphs into a positive project.

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Along with offering a critical concept of justice, the overall analysis provides a critical perspective on history. And since history flows into the present, in however a plural, contingent and discontinuous way, the critical study of the past meshes with the critical study of the current historical conjuncture. OF SPECTRES AND ENDS Instead of being restricted to a question on the optimal form existing social formations ought to have or to a narrow set of practical questions, justice must be located as an emergent process – a problem and a desire – at the heart of capitalism’s ongoing restructuring and, thus, of the corresponding cycles of struggle. What forms of justice are embedded in late neoliberal capitalism, from its economic to cultural dimensions? What forms of capture, submission, exploitation, oppression, exclusion but also empowerment do they elicit and sanction? How have they been operative in the administration of the ongoing crisis? What critical points of negotiation and/or resistance do they allow? Are they essentially patrician, or are they open to a plebeian takeover? Is the rise of nationalism and far-right populism a reaction to these dominant forms of justice or one of their expressions? Accordingly, what forms of justice from below have contemporary subaltern struggles and social movements produced, experimented with and promoted? Why has not their becoming-justice advanced to the point of an ecumenic vision of egalitarian/ horizontal justice (at least until now)? Are there any visible signs that the prospect of a revolutionary justice from below will arise as a response to the systemic crisis of the hierarchical/authoritarian regime of justice through which the capitalist world-system operates? In brief, what the materialist theory broaches is the question of the historical production of justice today. The theoretical trajectory outlined will have to build upon the critique waged against the conviction (historically actualised in all too many social formations, capitalist ones included) that there is One form of justice, hence life, proper to individuals, peoples or humankind at large. Against such ‘regimes of oneness’, theory needs to bear witness – and thus do justice – to the figures of the many and the not-yet. Thus, posing a critical challenge to the fettering-yet-lingering credo that the quest for justice has ended, theory (on its own domain of operation) can express, bolster, enrich and ally with the practical challenges unfolding on the domain of social struggles. There is a twofold dimension in the relevant process. One, to evoke and speculate on positive forms, on new worlds and new peoples. But given what has been said about the passage to form this also involves, as a Parisian graffito nicely put it, imagining ‘other ends of the world’. And in this way, along with evoking positive forms of justice, theory also conjures the latter’s spectres.

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Derrida (2006) deserves to be credited for indicating that there is a hauntology at the core of every ontology of justice, the latter notion understood in terms of a positive identification of a presence that determines creaturely being. This hauntology reinforces the radical openness of material reality, the excessiveness of its becoming relative to its being. Further analysis towards this direction can draw more from Derrida or other works moving along this direction (e.g., Taylor, 2011). But it will also have to break with the latent idealism of this line of thought, along the materialist lines carved here. The spectres haunting justice concern real potentialities, of the past – pouring into the present as an unfinished project – as well as of the present itself – pouring into the future as unexplored potentialities. Some of these past and present potentials will never even be imagined, but this does not deny their spectral reality; how many of the ghosts that haunt our lives don’t remain oblique to us? There are many spectres: spectres of revolt, catastrophe and punishment, like those haunting the collective imaginary nowadays. There are also spectres of redemption nourished from the past. Even the latter do not necessarily make for a candid story. History offers ample testimony to the horror (the horror!) that the becoming of justice has been linked with. Spectres also generate melancholy for what has been lost, an affect that is not necessarily sterile, since it may yield a fertile appreciation of the stakes once posed and thus of the measure of our defeat (cf. Traverso, 2017). Finally, spectres foster nostalgia, for what once was, but more importantly for the justice that we have not (yet) seen. As Paco Ignacio Taibo II has beautifully remarked: ‘That’s the only kind of real nostalgia there is’ (2014: 325).

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Since this is a term that will recur, it should be stressed that the ‘mainstream’ does not constitute an empirically demarcated domain. It is a heuristic notion that allows the identification of various works that converse with each other and together set the terms that frame the discussion about justice in scholarly and political forums. Τhe ‘mainstream’ is really the main stream of a broad theoretical current and, as such, it always already leaks. 2. For concepts as ‘essentially contested’ phenomena, see MacKenzie, 2005. 3. This homology between market and law has been critically developed to a general theory of law by Evgeny Pashukanis (1980). My study will return to his study later on. 4. The notion of an ‘era of riots’ has been proposed independently by Badiou (2012) and Blaumachen (Woland, 2014), a group that belonged to the current of communisation. See also Clover, 2016. 5. For Hobbes’s conception of justice, which is less idealist and more willing to follow through on its implications than other liberal theories, see Olsthoorn, 2015. 6. To give a characteristic example, Sen (2010: 36–37) praises the secular tolerance of Akbar, the Mughal emperor of India, while failing to even mention the fact that he ruled over an empire; that is, an order of domination created through conquest. 7. I have elaborated on the idealist character of Derrida’s conception of justice in Sotiropoulos, 2013. 8. See also Renault, 2013. 9. For two competent elaborations of this insight, see Colleti, 1972: 5; Espagnat, 2006: 265–68.

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CHAPTER 1 1. Deleuze has critically engaged statism as a form of thought from as early as Difference and Repetition (1994). Later, ‘state-philosophy’ comes to constitute one of the main targets of A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013b). 2. The quotation is from Brian Massumi (‘Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy’) in Deleuze and Guattari, 2013b: xi. 3. All translations from the Presocratics are taken from Curd, 2011. 4. All citations from the Bible follow the English Standard Version, available online in Bible Gateway. 5. Note on translation: unless otherwise noted all translations from Greek have been made by me. 6. See Jaeger, 1967; Vlastos, 1952. 7. See Voegelin, 2000b: 195–293; Benardete, 2000: 3–14. 8. See Mumford, 1967; Voegelin, 2001. 9. For the political significance of this critical phase of Greek history, see Vernant, 1982; Meier, 1990. 10. A similar insight informs Tragedy’s alter ego, Comedy. In Wasps (2007), for instance, Aristophanes mocks the legalism of late Athens. I am grateful to Alex Hufford for this point. 11. Meier 1990: 82–139; also, Griffith, 1995. 12. A classic reflection on these developments is Prigogine and Stengers, 2018; also, De Landa, 2000. 13. The use of ‘ultra-leftism’ is not meant derogatorily. Insofar as the ‘ultra-left’ is distinguished by its critique of the state and (at its most radical) of identity, the notion has a heuristic use and a critical potential. In fact, a possible way to conceive of the relation between the two thinkers is that the encounter with Guattari gave an ultra-left boost to Deleuze’s philosophy of difference and nomadism. 14. The notion of the ‘dynamic structure of reality’ is taken by Xavier Zubiri (2003), a thinker who deserves more attention by contemporary critical theory. 15. For a thorough critique of the traditional understanding of concepts as entities, which, like the current study, yields a more dynamic reading of concepts as processes, see Blunden, 2012. 16. The quoted notion occupies a key position in Neyrat, 2018. What I would add to the vision of undifferentiated flux the concept advances – which, according to Neyrat, immunises being from change – is the differentiation that capital effectuates as an immanent and intrinsic moment of its self-valorisation. 17. The notion of a ‘real abstraction’ derives from Marx, although the latter did not deploy the concept in a technical way (Toscano, 2008). That concepts are real abstractions, hence, active mediations between subject and object has been developed by Adorno (e.g., 2003a) in his two-front critique of nominalism and immediatism. Along a similar line also moves the analysis of Ilynekov (2009). My use of the term here acknowledges the validity of the problematic motivating these works but does not necessarily imply acceptance of (all) their conclusions.

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18. These insights are drawn mainly from Clastres, 1989; 2015. Admittedly they are slightly impressionistic, yet I believe they point to the right direction. 19. The quoted term is taken from Ranciere (2010: 36) and denotes a structuring of social space, which simultaneously ‘identifies’, ‘separates’, ‘excludes’ and ‘allows participation’. 20. The quotation is from a report of the first European explorers of Brazil referring to the Tupinamba Indians. Cited in Clastres, 1989: 15. 21. This example is drawn from Roediger, 2017. 22. For two popular cases, see Singer, 2009; Regan, 2004. 23. Heidegger made this point in ‘Enframing’, the text that later becomes, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’. In the English translation of the latter, the relevant sentence (1993: 320) has omitted the comparison. The controversial parallel with extermination camps has been recently developed more systematically by Patterson, 2002. 24. Cited in Bloch, 2015: 76. 25. Apart from Bloch’s encyclopedic analysis, Leo Strauss’s (1965) classic study on Natural Law remains instructive. 26. For an extensive documentation of the intensive interplay of equality and hierarchy in animals, see Boehm, 2001. 27. See, for instance, Mundinger, 1980; van Schaik, 2012. 28. Although its full immersion in the evolutionary paradigm blocks the issue of justice from appearing, the great wealth of survival strategies in the animal world is amply illustrated in Gadagkar, 2001. 29. Perhaps dated in some of its arguments, Pëtr Kropotkin’s (1902) pioneering study on mutual aid must be credited for widening the horizon of a theoretical and scientific appreciation of animal sociality. 30. This set of points is elaborated and supported with evidence by Bekoff and Pierce, 2009: 127ff. Also, Cohen, 2016: 247ff. 31. Cited in Bekoff and Pierce, 2009: 42. 32. The quoted term comes from the original title of Cohen’s article, which he takes from a banner in a protest in Oakland.

CHAPTER 2 1. For instance, Hornborg, 2014; Rekret, 2016. 2. This heuristic distinction is turned into a tool of historical analysis in Priestland, 2009. 3. Although he may overstretch the parallel with Dante, William Roberts (2016) does a good job unearthing this redemptive narrative in Capital, the work marked by structuralist Marxists (amongst others) as the epitome of Marxist science. 4. For instance, Geras, 1985; Shandro, 1989; Diquattro, 1998; Hamad, 2015. 5. See, for instance, Engels’s Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy in Marx and Engels, 1951b: 324–64.

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6. Cited in Deleuze, 2007a: 156. 7. For instance, in Roger Scruton’s chapter on ‘Continental Philosophy’ in Kenny, 1994: 211. 8. For a good presentation of this perspective, see Replogle, 1990. 9. Apart from Althusser’s own work, another very interesting instantiation of a structuralist, but more dialectically prone, Marxism is the theory of communisation articulated by Théorie Communiste (2014). 10. See for instance, Federici, 2004; Coole, 2005. 11. This theoretical principle has become the basis for a systematic social history of intellectual forms by Ellen Meiksins Wood, 2008 and 2012. 12. Perhaps the most well-known deployment of Schmitt’s category from a leftwing perspective is Mouffe, 2005. 13. On this point, see Bensaid, 2009; Calhoun, 1982. 14. See, for instance, Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006; Badaan et al., 2018. 15. Interestingly, Rose (2009: 1–51) traces neo-Kantian elements not only in ‘bourgeois’ sociology but also in much of Marxism. 16. Cited in Voglis, 2016: 64. 17. Cf. Milbank, 2006: 278ff; Losurdo, 2002.

CHAPTER 3 1. This distinction, expressed in the Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels, 1951a: 51) is given its most systematic exposition in Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Marx and Engels, 1951b: 86–142). 2. The insight into the paranoid dynamic of genocide does not contradict its systematic and instrumental dimension, nor thus its industrial manner of execution. Long before the genocides of the twentieth century, Marquis De Sade has graphically shown that meticulousness and rational planning are intrinsic components of a delirium’s actuality (cf. Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002). 3. See, for instance, Deleuze and Guattari, 2013a: 126ff. 4. The analytical universality of interest has been competently defended by Chibber, 2013. 5. For a comprehensive analysis of the multiform and creative facets of apocalypticism in early Christianity, see the relevant chapters in Collins, 2006. Also, Daly, 2009. 6. See especially Deleuze and Guattari, 2013b: 271–360. 7. The quoted term is of course borrowed from Schmitt’s homonymous book, without implying an acceptance of Schmitt’s broader analysis. The notion is deployed as a succinct conceptualisation of an international – indeed worldwide – territorialisation of a legal order of right-cum-power-cum-domination. 8. For two comprehensive volumes that cover classic and more recent elaborations, adaptations and critiques of utopia, see Manuel, 1973; Chrostowska and Ingram, 2016. 9. The notion is borrowed from Alliez, 2006.

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10. For this insight I owe greatly to Rose’s relevant analysis in Hegel Contra Sociology. 11. The concept is developed in Deleuze and Guattari, 2013b: 118ff. 12. The quoted phrase is borrowed from Foucault (2000: 131), in his case referring to truth. 13. For a classic but still precious for its clarity formulation of this critique, see Lefebvre, 1968. 14. Cited in Châtelet, 2006: 72. 15. The quoted sentence if from Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. Cited in Laing and Cooper, 1971. 16. On this point, the theory of justice proposed here encounters theories, like that of Ricoeur (1992), which have conceptualised action as ‘testification’ and truth as ‘attestation’. Deleuze would be probably sceptical of the notion of ‘bearing witness’ because of its religious heritage and, thus, its tendency to frame desire in terms of external agency. Arguably though, his own theory allows for such a dimension, since desiring/affective action for Deleuze is not an endogenous mechanism but a process that testifies to the presence and power of an ‘outside’. 17. Introduced by Deleuze, the notion has been recently worked out in Dillet, 2016. 18. On this point instructive is Jakub S. Beneš’s (2017: 18–52) analysis of Social Democracy in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where he shows how the canonical works of socialist theory were part of a torrent of publications (novels, magazines, almanacs), which altogether formed the grand narrative that socialism told. 19. As part of the so-called theoretical turn to religion – that is, the engagement with religious motifs in the context of contemporary political problematics – the notion of ‘the messianic’ has grown to become an important theme in critical theory. For a recent volume that offers a comprehensive panorama of the discussion, see Glazova and North, 2014. 20. This line of analysis has defined studies of colonialism, starting with the classic work of Franz Fanon (2001). The problematic has also been taken up by wider studies of contemporary capitalist societies; for example, Berardi, 2009.

CHAPTER 4 1. The title of this section is borrowed from the homonymous situationist film of 1972, directed by René Viénet. 2. I develop this theme in Sotiropoulos, 2013. 3. Here I am drawing from my more extensive analysis in Sotiropoulos, 2017. 4. Cited in Rocomadur, 2011: 79. 5. For a good example of this standpoint, see Gilman-Opalsky, 2014. 6. For a good critical discussion of the contract form, see Supiot, 2017: 78ff. Henry Maine’s classic treatise on Ancient Law (1917, first publication 1867) retains its significance as a scholarly work but also as a historical document. Maine criticises the ahistorical aspects of ‘social contract’ theories while retaining their two essential

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ideas: a free and just society is based on (the proliferation of) contracts; the growth of such a society expresses the progressive march of history. 7. Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics (Book V, 3–5) is probably the most classic expression. The basic idea, however, is anything but peculiar to Aristotle. Instead, the fact that even those who were critical of democracy felt compelled to advocate a type of equality more suitable for a non-democratic regime is a measure of how widespread the link between equality and justice – affecting politics, cosmology, even medicine – has been in the ancient Greek world. See Vernant, 1982; Vlastos, 1947. 8. Cited in Wolin, 2006: 41. 9. For the distinction between contradiction and antinomy, see Jameson, 2010: 49–50. 10. For the problem of universals as it developed in early scholastic philosophy, see Copleston, 1962: 157–76. 11. Needless to say, this is a very basic, thus unavoidably simplistic, presentation. For two good expositions coming from different theoretical perspectives, see Black, 2000; Wood, 2008. 12. A classic exposition of this perspective is given by Mill, 2001. 13. For imperialist expansion, see Bell, 2016: 19ff. For humanitarian interventions Moyn, 2017: 137ff. 14. Out of a substantial literature, highly informative on this issue is Horsley, 2002. 15. This aspect of Pauline (political) theology is emphasised in Taubes, 2004. See also Georgi, 2002; Koester, 2002; Elliott, 2002. 16. While the results of this attempt are not an issue here, it is worth noting in passing how the submission of Syriza to the policies of austerity and devaluation that have been promoted in Greece since 2010 is a good example of how justice is an inherently contentious process that cannot embrace all different interests, even when it acquires the status of a historical universal. Syriza’s liberal logic of consensus through rational negotiation inevitably foundered, the climax being the referendum of 2015, which led afterwards to capitulation. What other (if any) realistic options of course were available at that historical conjuncture is yet another question. I discuss more extensively these issues in Sotiropoulos, 2019. See also Badiou, 2017. 17. See, for instance, Chakrabarty, 2007; Ciccariello-Maher, 2017. 18. Both aspects are analysed extensively in Chibber, 2013. 19. On the contentious politics of the Corinthian ecclesia, see Horsley, 1998; Picket, 2005. 20. The double definition of freedom as positive and negative has been of course proposed on a technical level by Isaiah Berlin (1969). Regardless how Berlin’s own evaluation of the two types is assessed, the distinction is without doubt analytically fruitful. 21. Such acceptance does not necessarily imply that people may not wish their loved ones to improve or change, it only means that the attempt to push them in this direction is done lovingly. Of course, the whole process is complicated by the fact that love is blended and tainted by other affects and emotions, like frustration and possessiveness.

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22. This prospect shows also that forgiveness is not uniquely Christian since similar practical experiences can be found in other cultural milieus; for example, in Native American systems of justice. See Melton, 2005. 23. Ricoeur’s analysis on the gift (1995, 296–302, 324ff.) is corroborated in its basic insight regarding donation and equivalence by the relevant analysis of Graeber (2011). 24. In Greek the connection is apparent also in their common etymology: ‘δικαιο σύνη’ (justice) και ‘Δίκαιο’ (Right). 25. Along with Supiot, this point is made specifically for Law by Ricoeur, 2000: 127ff. 26. The quoted phrase is from Dworkin, cited in Douzinas and Warrington, 1996: 111. 27. Cited in Black, 2000: 34. 28. One of the clearest articulations of this genealogical perspective is Foucault’s (1998b) renowned article on Nietzsche. 29. I use here the prose translation of D. E. Derber’s ‘Appendix’ in Blok and Lardinois, 2006: 457. 30. For Homeric agency Snell (1953) remains a classic. More recently, Gill, 1998. 31. The term policing is taken in the broad sense that Rancière (2010) has elaborated: a general partition of the sensible, establishing, and operating through, a demarcation of boundaries.

CHAPTER 5 1. It is worth noting in passing that the Kurdish struggle appears to have been slowly moving beyond the confines of traditional national liberation movements, experimenting instead with a libertarian confederalism in Rojava. For all its contradictions, inner tensions and possible impasses – are there struggles without any? – the ongoing Kurdish struggle in North Syria is a good example of how justice becomes through flows of social-desiring production, which can accelerate and intensify to such a degree that differential biopolitical forms emerge. Cf. Knapp, Flach and Ayboga, 2016. More critically, Schmidinger, 2018. 2. Cited in Scott, 2017: 33. 3. This ‘cruel’ aspect of primitive ritual is analysed in detail by Clastres, 1989: 177–88. Also, Deleuze and Guattari, 2013a: 168ff. 4. On the last point, see Melton, 2005. 5. For a comprehensive analysis of primitive egalitarianism, see Staid, 2016: 13–45. Cf. Scheidel, 2017: 22–32. For a more detailed analysis of ‘economic’ equality, see Sahlins (1972). For ‘ideological’ equality, Clastres, 1989: 129–50, 157–88. 6. To be sure, Clastres insists that shamans are not ‘sacred’ figures (2015: 27). The term, however, is used in the technical way suggested earlier, as a ‘surplus value’ attached upon objects, persons or institutions, which may not withdraw them entirely from the profane order but immunises them from critique. Again, it is a matter of

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intensity: preventing the shaman or the chief to become sacred in a transcendent sense is a necessary aspect of withholding their power. 7. The same phenomenon is analysed by Scheidel, 2017: 29. Deleuze and Guattari (2013b: 417) also recognise the phenomenon and highlight its presence in others forms of collective assemblages, like gangs and bands. 8. Clastres suggests this possibility (1989: 75) although he seems to abandon it as an explanatory model. See also Scott (2017: 150–82). The positive contribution of war in state formation is attested also in the case of modern states. See Tilly, 1992. 9. The point is verified also by looking how war has destroyed states and facilitated the emergence of more egalitarian forms of justice. See, for instance, Scheidel, 2017: 113–210. 10. Cf. Scheidel, 2017: 43; Tilly, 1992: 1–15. 11. Over this issue Scott (2017) is highly informative. Cf. Scheidel, 2017: 25–112. Mumford (1967: 126–62) is perhaps dated but still contains plenty of fruitful insights. 12. This aspect of urbanisation is competently analysed by De Landa, 2000: 25ff. Mumford’s classic study (1989), despite associating the development of the ancient city with centralisation and the growth of kingship, recognises that urbanisation was a complex process that involved the mobilisation of human energy from below, and that, hence, cities cannot be identified with concentration of power. 13. Apart from Scott’s (2017) and Scheidel’s (2017) relevant accounts, a similar longue durée perspective is adopted by Goldstone and Haldon, 2009. 14. For a more detailed account of the term’s origins, see Verdier, 2005. 15. Of course, (in)security, along with being a distinct affect, constitutes a technique of power, which systematises the affective conditions that called it into being. This is a crucial point, since it indicates that the state not only does not resolve the conditions that make it seem necessary, it tends to generalise them as endemic features of its own field of interiority. Cf. Loery, 2015. 16. Originally published in 1963, Eisenstadt’s (1993) study remains a classic. For a more recent account, see Münkler, 2007. Scheidel (2009) adds the crucial aspect of libidinal and affective motivation, although he does not attend to the desire for justice as a relevant factor. 17. For Dante, see Cacciari, 2018: 85–90. For nineteenth-century liberalism, see Mehta (2014), Mantena (2014) and Bell (2016). For a critical analysis of contemporary liberal defenses of empire, see Morefield, 2014. 18. The suspension of justice in the extermination camps, analysed theoretically by Agamben (1998: 166–80), is portrayed in a horrifying way in László Nemes’s celebrated 2015 film Saul fia (Son of Saul). In the procedural nightmare of the camps that the film reconstructs, even the formal differentiations amongst the inmates, with their relevant patterns of reward and desert, obey no other consideration than that of industrial efficiency. 19. For Nazi biopolitics, see Esposito, 2013: 79–87. For the industrial organisation of the extermination camps, see Traverso, 2003: 35–40. 20. Cited in Bloch, 2015: 105. 21. The interview is shown in Stanley Nelson’s Jr. 2015 documentary, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.

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22. See Buck-Morss, 2002: 2–7. This issue has been treated also extensively by Agamben (2005a) through the notion of the ‘state of exception’. 23. For this conceptual binary and its persistence in Nazi Germany, see Paxton, 2004: 119; 127. 24. Let it be clear that the discussion concerns the institution of kingship. Every position of power, so much so one of the status of the archaic Despot, places a burden on the individual occupying it, a burden that takes its toll. An excellent dramaturgical presentation of this point, narrating the rise of the despotic machine in China, is Chen Kaige’s 1998 film The Emperor and the Assassin. 25. Münkler (2007: 80–107) does a good job detailing this aspect of imperial rule, although his analysis reproduces the latter’s paternalism and undermines the multidimensional injustice of imperial subjugation, brought to the fore by post-colonial studies. 26. Cited in Voegelin, 2000a: 133. Voegelin has dealt theoretically with Mongolian political theology also in his essay ‘The Order of God’ (2002: 224–79). 27. For western colonialism, see Losurdo, 2011. For the deep historical roots of this sanctification of violence in the West, see Buc, 2015, esp. 67–111. 28. Here I draw from Deleuze and Guattari’s brilliant analysis in A Thousand Plateaus (415–20). 29. See Scott, 2017: 155–57; Scheidel, 2017: 33–61. 30. For a comprehensive presentation of the various forms of protest coming from the victims of class domination in Greco-Roman antiquity, see Ste. Croix, 1998: 441–52. 31. The alternative is to obscure the very fact of inequality by claiming that there is no exploitation at all. This is the method of justification advanced by capitalist political economy, which operates under the banner of the formal equality that law and contracts ratify. It is one of the many merits of Marx to have offered tools for a theoretical critique of this discourse, which does justice to the practical critique expressed in collective resistance. Of course, there are some cases where exploitation is rather hard to deny, as in the numerous sweatshops existing in the capitalist peripheries. Therein a usual tactic is to argue that living and working conditions may be bad, but they are ‘better than before’. Save the fact that the criteria used to make this judgement are regrettably unreflective, there is an implicit assumption at work: that the hapless millions working and living in the (post)industrial wastelands of today cannot really hope at present for a better life, either because this is how things are – in which case we have a crude theodicy posing for realism – or because this is their real (market-dictated) value –in which case, we have a discrimination of the type suggested in the main text. 32. Of course, communal meals among early Christians and contemporary leftists operate within radically different registers; yet, they do share this fundamental quality, egalitarianism in actu. For communal shared meals in early Christianity and how they differentiated from patronal meals (referred to earlier), see Crossan, 1998: 423–44. 33. Cited as an epigram in Chambers, 2018.

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34. For the translation of this verse I have been helped by the translation of E. P. Coleridge, available online in the Classics Archive. 35. Out of a vast literature see, for instance, Rancière, 1999, 2007; Nancy, 2010; Abensour, 2011. 36. These critical points are laboriously documented by Luciano Canfora (2006) and Domenico Losurdo (2011). 37. This notion, coined by Arendt, has been recently developed in its critical potential in DeGooyer et al., 2018. 38. See Capeheart and Milovanovic (2007). 39. See, for instance, Scott, 1976; Horsley, 2008. 40. This insight is elaborated competently, under a partially different lexicon, in Turpin, 2011. 41. The literature on the commons has grown to be substantial and diverse. For a comprehensive volume, see Bollier and Helfrich, 2012. 42. It needs to be noted that De Landa excludes from this framework the capitalist market. And for good reasons. Without eclipsing horizontality and equality from its operations, the capitalist market is actualised in a highly stratified order structured around vertical chains of command (up to global geopolitical relations of domination and dependency) and hierarchical nodes (institutions ranging from states to international organisations like IMF, the World Bank, the EU, multinational corporations, hedge funds, Credit Ranging Agencies etc.). To depict the global capitalist market as a form of ‘justice from below’ excludes from purview so many structures operating ‘from above’ that it ends up being plain silly. 43. For the first wave of democratic revolutions, see Bookchin, 1996. For Latin America, see Linera, 2013. 44. The quoted phrase is a German slogan: ‘Frieden den Hutten! Krieg den Palasten’. It was proclaimed in 1834, by Georg Büchner and Friedrich Ludwig Weidig, in a radical brochure entitled Der Hessische Landbote (The Messenger of Hesse). Cited in Bloch, 2015: 255. 45. On this point, apart from Balibar’s relevant reflections, Zygmunt Bauman’s (1989) study remains suggestive. 46. See Thompson, 1993: 185–258; Clover, 2016: 49–60; Bohstedt, 2010. 47. For a more extensive analysis of the 2008 events in Greece, see Vradis and Dalakoglou, 2011. 48. The notion of ‘apocalyptic eschatology’ is taken by Crossan (1998: 257–72). The term is of analytical value insofar as it points to an experience where the eschaton will come through a catastrophic rupture. Other forms of eschatology, like the ‘end of history’ that Fukuyama pronounced, exist, which lack such an apocalyptic element. 49. This notion has received considerable attention in critical theory. For a brief reflection, see Diken, 2012: 36–40. More elaborately Negri, 2003. 50. A favourite theme of right-wing revisionism, this idea has received a thorough and refined treatment by Voegelin, 1982.

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Index

abstract machine, 29, 113 accursed share, the, 113 actuality, 12-14, 17, 35, 44, 46, 49, 64, 69-75, 82, 85, 86, 89, 93-95, 97, 99, 105, 106, 108-111, 114, 128-130, 133, 135, 137, 139, 140, 142-144, 149, 158, 159, 162, 165, 168, 184, 185, 188, 193, 206-208, 216n2 actualisation, 146, 152, 156 Adorno, Theodor, 106, 145, 214n17. See also Horkheimer and Adorno Aeschylus, 23, 24, 63; Eumenides, 24, 63, 131; The Suppliants, 24; Oresteia, 24, 131; The Persians, 23 affects, 7, 8, 11, 27, 40, 44-47, 73, 76, 88, 94, 97, 111, 116-118, 120, 125, 132, 149, 171, 174, 196, 206, 218n21; affective 4, 9, 10, 12, 14, 25, 34, 36, 39, 40, 45-48, 50, 60, 72, 75-77, 81, 82, 85, 89, 116, 118, 125, 149-151, 155, 162, 165, 167, 174, 179, 186, 188, 194, 196, 197, 203, 208, 217n16, 220n15, 16 affirmation, 11, 13, 40, 108, 121, 127, 130, 131, 140, 142, 159, 165, 179, 187, 190, 192, 193, 197, 198, 200, 201 Agamben, Giorgio, 40, 138, 147, 154, 155, 158, 159, 203, 220n18, 221n22

Aganaktismenoi (Indignant) movement, 74, 75 Agathon, 98. See ‘the good’ Althusser, Louis, 15, 57, 110, 216n9 American Crime, 89 Anaximander, 20, 22, 34, 72 ancient Greece, 13, 21, 22, 118, 184 animal rights, 41, 42 anthropogenesis, 55 anti-racism, 159. See also racism Apocalypse, 73 apocalyptic, 73, 100, 135, 222n48; apocalyptic eschatology, 195, 222n48 apocalypticism, 91, 100, 195, 216n5 arborescent, 29, 30, 85, 91 Arendt, Hannah, 27, 37, 46, 150, 205, 222n37 Aristophanes, 188, 214n10 Aristotle, 2, 31, 41, 45, 65, 101, 129, 184, 218n7 assemblage(s), 15, 31, 38, 39, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49, 82-84, 91, 94, 96, 100103, 107, 110-113, 117, 121, 128, 140, 144, 145, 154, 159, 165, 176, 178, 194, 197, 205, 220n7 Athens, 8, 23, 24, 75, 98, 126, 131, 183, 188, 200, 214n10 Augustine, 106, 202 245

246

Index

austerity, 76, 140, 144, 218n16 authoritarian/hierarchical justice, 169, 170, 182. See also horizontal/ egalitarian justice authoritarianism, 166, 178, 179, 182, 199 autonomy 4, 6, 16, 18, 90, 94, 157-159, 162, 163, 165, 171, 178, 179, 182, 190, 197, 201 Balibar, Étienne, 9-12, 15, 106, 118, 127, 129, 135, 139-142, 184, 192, 222n45 barbarism, 175, 189 Barry, Brian, 3 Bartleby, 147 basic structure of society, 61 basis/superstructure, 57, 72, 86 Bataille, George, 50, 113, 197 beauty, 26, 33, 35, 104, 118 becoming, 14, 21, 25, 32, 39, 42-44, 46, 48-50, 55, 69, 73, 82, 83, 85, 86, 91, 92, 94, 95, 97, 98, 103, 104, 105, 108, 109-112, 115-117, 120, 121-123, 125, 127-134, 138-140, 144, 155, 158, 159, 163, 167, 170, 173, 182, 189, 193, 194, 200, 203, 208, 209, 211; animal, 44, 48; austere, 91; commune, 122; communist, 91, 92, 188, 189, 102, 107, 199; conqueror, 97; democracy, 25, 125; empire, 170, 208; entrepreneur, 97; equal, 91, 129, 164; free, 94; fugitive, 94; horde, 50; human, 48; justice, 91, 92, 94, 95, 97, 99, 100, 109-12, 122, 127, 129, 131-134, 139, 145-146, 162, 164, 165, 169, 175, 178, 182, 185, 188, 189, 202, 208, 209; language, 207; law, 25, 92, 208; man, 97, 163; occupation, 125; queer, 125; rebel, 94; resistance, 208; revolt, 91, 122, 208; revolution, 182, 196, 197, 199, 200, 208; revolutionary, 97; right, 207, 208; sect, 91; sovereignty, 92; 94; state, 178; Union, 122;

vengeance, 25; woman, 97, 163; worker, 125 Bekoff and Pierce, 45, 215n30 Bell, Duncan, 7 Benardete, Seth, 23, 24, 64 Berkman, Alexander, 188 Bestimung, 97. See also determination biopolitical, 41, 76, 88, 91, 93, 118, 120, 121, 131, 171, 182, 187, 192, 208, 229n1 constructivism, 96, 125; production, 14, 92, 125 Biennio Rosso, 89 Binder, Julius, 171 Bloch, Ernst, 45, 55, 62, 95, 100, 136, 154, 171, 177, 195-196 body, with organs, 168, 179; without organs, 86 Breaugh, Martin, 179, 191, 194, 205 Brecht, Berthold, 51 Brown, Nicholas and Imre Szemán, 123, 126 Cabet, Étienne, 191 Cacciari, Massimo, 11, 106, 152, 173 Capeheart, Loretta and Dragan Milovanovic, 10 capital, 36, 53, 57, 60, 61, 67, 71, 82, 104, 135, 141, 142, 154, 168, 170, 176, 214n16; capitalism 4, 16, 36, 54, 60, 84, 135, 187, 202, 210 care, 8, 44, 45, 116, 196; of the self, 120 Caroll, Lewis, 173 Caygil, Howard, 74, 75 Chambers, Edwards, 76 Châtelet, François, 15, 55, 75 Che, Guevara, 142 Cicero, 17 civic culture, 6, 67 civic order, 2, 24, 62-63, 100, 131 civic rights, 60, 67, 80, civil society 6, 18, 136, 137 civil war, 7, 18, 58, 61-63, 67, 84, 125, 195, 197. See also stasis class 7, 58, 60-61, 63, 65-66, 73, 87, 88, 111, 155, 164, 177, 178, 186, 198, 200, 207; class analysis, 65

Index

class struggle 6, 7, 18, 53, 55, 57, 60, 64, 69, 207 class conflict 8, 60 class-consciousness, 199; divisions, 113, 143, 177-179, 209; identity, 198 class domination, 57, 100, 221n30 class interests, 63, 70, 88, 89, 143, 178; society, 65, 69, 177, 178, 191 class power, 63 class pride, 11; relations, 68, 177, 179; class rule, 178-180 class violence 57, 68, 69 Clastres, Pierre, 149, 162, 163-165, 173, 215n18, 219n6 Clover, Joshua, 193 codification, 43, 77, 83, 93, 113, 117, 128, 159, 162, 178. See also encoding Cohen, Aylon, 41, 42, 47 Cohen, Gerald, 54, 119 conatus 40, 44, 46, 52, 81, 85, 90, 112, 128. See also desire Conrad, Joseph 170, 174; Heart of Darkness, 174 consistency, 30-32, 44, 51, 63, 64, 70, 72, 100, 103, 114, 115, 139, 140, 163, 173, 177, 182, 186, 191; plane of, 30; problem of, 207 constituted power, 154, 155, 158, 159, 162, 176, 201. See also sovereign power constituent power, 158, 159, 162, 182, 197, 201 contract, 71, 128, 129, 153, 156, 192, 217n6, 221n31 contradiction, 53, 79, 100, 123, 129, 130, 133, 136, 176, 181, 209, 218n9, 219n1 common good, the 64, 65, 96 commons, the, 187 communisation, 9, 189, 195, 213n4, 216n9 communism 9, 51, 53, 54, 63, 68, 70, 72, 107, 108, 124, 141, 143, 152, 187-189, 191, 195, 197, 199; baseline communism, 187, 188

247

commutation, 119, 147, 174, 178 competition, 43, 45, 60, 64, 176 composition 12, 33, 44, 58-59, 88, 102, 111; social, 58, 68, 88; technical, 166, 203, 208. See also decomposition Coole, Dianna and Samantha Frost, 27, 28 cooperation, 43, 64, 132, 183, 187 cosmic order, 23; cosmos, 21-25 counterinstitution, 193 counter-regimes of justice, 113 critical theory, 8, 54, 88, 107, 135, 209, 214n14, 217n19, 222n48 culture, 2, 4, 8, 50, 51, 94, 113, 118, 150, 165, 189 custom, 30, 97, 153, 156, 157, 163, 173, 197 customisation, 162 customary right, 157, 158 De Landa, Manuel, 26, 29, 177, 178, 188, 201, 220n12, 222n42 Dead Kennedys (‘Holiday in Cambodia’), 124 debt, 69, 76, 101, 102, 126, 192; indebtedness, 140, 151 decomposition, 131, 203, 206, 208 deformation, 32, 148 Deleuze, Gilles 14, 15, 17, 22, 25, 3738, 44, 45, 85-114, 122-128, 144, 145, 153, 207, 208, 214n1, 217n16n17; and Felix Guattari, 29-36, 40, 42, 81-100, 101-120, 130, 135, 143, 149, 153, 161-177, 189, 190, 200, 201, 214n13 democracy, 7, 8, 23, 24, 64, 95, 144, 173, 184-189, 192, 197, 199, 200; Anglo-Saxon, 190; direct, 126; Master-Race, 185; property-owning, 136; radical, 158; real, 126; social, 61, 217n18 deontology, 82, 88, 89, 155; deontological, 55, 59, 99 Derrida, Jacque, 10, 49, 106, 110, 118, 151, 154, 211, 213n7

248

Index

Descombes, Vincent, 122 desire, 9, 14, 20, 24, 25, 40-47, 50, 55, 57, 62, 64, 73, 76, 77-100, 103, 107114, 125, 126, 130-158, 165-190, 196, 197, 202-210, 217n16; economy of, 83, 89; for justice, 9, 47, 49, 79, 80, 84, 88, 90-92, 94, 97, 99, 105, 107, 112, 117, 121, 127, 128, 131, 134, 143, 145, 149, 151, 152, 156, 158, 164, 165, 168-171, 173-175, 191, 194, 195, 199, 202-203, 206, 208, 220n16 desiring bodies 10, 15, 95, 100, 133, 140, 200, 203 desiring machine, 83, 87, 101, 107, 206 de-subjectivation, 128. See also, subjectivation despotic power, 153, 170, 172, 174 determination, 10, 14, 15, 17, 21, 22, 28, 31-39, 44, 45, 51, 52, 57, 58, 63, 65, 69, 74, 76, 78, 88, 89, 91, 93, 96100, 105, 109, 112, 125, 128, 133, 139, 141, 143-150, 157, 158, 162, 164, 167, 168, 170, 176-180 184188, 191-193, 196, 199, 200, 205, 206, 208, 209 determinism, 34, 43, 122 deterritorialisation, 17, 48, 85, 87, 98, 100, 102, 103, 115, 127, 129, 146, 159, 190, 195, 199, 201, 206. See also territorialisation devaluation, 144, 218n16 diagrammatic model, 29, 183, 189; of justice, 170, 200, 209 dialectics, 14, 17, 96, 104, 120, 122126, 133, 145, 149, 159, 182, 189, 201, 206; Hegelian, 1, 104, 123, 133, 209; of justice, 165; negative, 171 difference, 2, 9, 22, 43, 95, 104, 105, 110, 123, 124, 126, 128, 131, 134136, 142, 145, 154, 168, 182, 195, 206, 214n13; culturalisation of, 113 dignity 4, 45, 52, 89, 96, 120, 126, 132, 191 discontinuity, 32, 37

discrimination, 66, 70, 71, 75, 96, 113, 120, 144, 181, 202, 207, 221n31 disorder, 7, 31, 72, 128; disordering, 32, 103, 129, 148. See also order, ordering dissipative structures, 31 distribution, 54, 62, 68, 88, 99, 113, 115, 119, 125, 132, 147, 149, 163, 166, 172, 174, 178, 179, 182, 186, 193, 196; egalitarian, 197; limitative, 17; nonauthoritarian, 183 domestic strife, 64, 65. See also class struggle domestication, 40, 166, 167 domination, 70, 97, 115, 165, 178, 180, 191, 192, 196, 199, 216n7, 222n42; order of, 22, 23, 70, 169, 170, 173, 213n6; relations of, 75, 130, 144, 146, 155, 164, 177; structures of, 75, 177, 181; systems of, 71, 75; trajectories of, 69. See also libidodominandi donation, 107, 150, 151, 152, 187, 196, 219n23. See also gift economy Douzinas, Costas, 72; Ronnie Warrington, 54 Droit, 66, 81, 152, 178. See also Right dualism, 13, 28, 33, 40, 41, 50, 53, 74, 87 Dworkin, Richard, 4, 153, 219n26 dynamic structure of reality, 35, 206, 214n14 Dylan, Thomas 34 egalitarianism, 107, 167, 184, 219n5, 221n32. See also equality Eliade, Mircea, 159 Ellul, Jacques, 7 emancipation, 68, 70, 91, 115, 143; trajectories of, 69 emancipatory politics, 76, 79, 95 empathy, 27, 44, 45, 47, 50, 196 empire, 7, 17, 27, 44, 85, 88, 127, 141, 144, 167, 169-170, 174-176, 180, 194, 199, 207, 213n5, 220n17

Index

engineering diagram, 30, 43, 83, 162, 166, 176, 183, 194, 200, 201, 209; of justice, 178, 182, 200 equaliberty, 184, 186, 187, 192, 196, 198, 199 equality, 7, 8, 13, 24, 64, 70, 96, 99, 103, 104, 109, 126-129, 132, 136, 144, 164, 165, 183, 184, 186, 191, 192, 194-198, 215n26, 218n7, 222n42 equilibrium, 20, 30, 31 equivalence, 4, 149, 150-152, 159, 162, 176, 196, 197, 201, 219n23 Euripides, 24, 183 excessiveness, 24, 46, 47, 95, 100, 110, 112, 151, 203, 211 exchange, 4, 35, 115, 119, 128, 149, 151, 174, 178, 188, 193, 196, 197 exclusion, 6, 7, 9, 41, 42, 70, 71, 75, 92, 111, 120, 142, 148, 181, 185, 191, 198, 202, 210 exodus, 20, 75 exploitation, 8, 9. 36, 41, 50, 63, 68, 70, 71, 75, 119, 121, 148, 155, 165, 177, 180, 181, 202, 207, 210, 221n31 fairness, 3, 43, 45, 46, 71, 99, 103, 128, 147, 148, 187 fascism, 130 Ferro, Marc, 115, 198 fiat Justicia et pereat mundus, 100 field of interiority, 18, 29, 32, 41, 92, 168, 169, 176, 190, 220n15 forces of production, 56 forgiveness, 150-152, 219n22 formalism, 10, 34, 66, 99, 115, 149, 158, 185 Foucault, Michel, 18, 25, 61, 71, 115, 120, 123, 142, 181 Frazer, Nancy, 10 free market, 4, 5, 18, 136, 137 freedom, 5, 18, 56, 64, 70, 71, 83-84, 86, 96, 107, 109, 127, 128, 136, 144, 146-149, 152, 156-159, 162, 165, 171, 173,

249

183-185, 191, 192, 195-197, 200, 201, 209, 218n20 Freudo-Marxism, 80 friend/enemy, 63 frontier justice, 2, 3 Game of Thrones, 82, 83, 161 gift economy, 151, 196 Girard, René, 83 global homogeneous state, 146 golden rule, the 150 good, the, 25, 98-100, 114, 153, 155, 168, 196; highest, the, 100, 107, 128, 147, 203 good life, the 4, 14, 15, 45, 46, 59, 66, 70, 75, 98, 99, 110, 112, 113, 119, 130, 133, 147, 148, 155, 157, 167, 168, 183, 184, 187, 192, 196, 202, 207 Gordon riots, the, 194 governmentality, 18 Geuss, Raymond, 3, 49, 58, 69, Goldmann, Lucien, 126 grassroots, 10, 29, 181, 182, 190, 192, 200 Grave (Raw), 48 Hammurabi, code of, 172 Hardt, Michael, 187. See also Negri and Hardt hauntology, 211 Hegel, 14, 15, 20, 28, 29, 32, 35, 71, 76, 81, 92, 96, 99, 104, 105, 122, 123, 134, 140, 143, 144, 146, 155-158, 208, 209 Heidegger, Martin, 20, 35, 42, 215n23 Heller, Agnes, 58, 59 Heraclitus, 21, 22, 32 Hesiod, 2, 21, 23, 155; Works and Days, 21 heteronomy, 159, 162, 163, 176, 182, 201 hidden transcripts, 193 hierarchy, 21, 30, 64, 71, 86, 87, 96, 99, 111, 128, 136, 163, 164, 166-168,

250

Index

170, 176-179, 182, 183, 194, 198, 200, 215n26 historicity, 14, 56, 58, 85, 94, 107, 133, 144, 185, 189, 193, 194, 208 historiogenesis, 117 Homer, 2, 23, 156, 172; Iliad, 156; Odyssey, 172 homogenization, 30 Honneth, Axel, 79 horizontal/egalitarian justice, 182, 183, 185-186, 188, 190, 195, 210 horizontality, 116, 164, 165, 167, 182, 183, 186, 188, 189, 191, 194, 201, 222n42 Horkheimer, Max 130, 133, 203; and Adorno, 42, 86 human rights, 45, 137, 185 humankind, 56, 99, 112, 133, 155, 180, 187, 210 Huxley, Aldous, 98 idealism, 1, 5, 8, 9, 12, 17, 19, 22, 33, 37, 41, 67, 70, 98, 100, 104-110, 136, 140, 203, 211; German idealism 54, 56, 143 ideality, 1, 12, 37, 38, 59, 70, 105, 106, 109, 110, 112, 142 idealisation 7, 38, 85, 100, 105 ideation, 76, 90, 100, 108, 109, 112, 140, 208; ideational, 5, 15, 28, 31, 35, 43, 44, 52, 55, 73, 101, 103, 105, 107, 110, 112, 113, 139, 141, 144, 145, 168, 184, 207 ideology, 6, 9, 53, 56, 100, 101, 101121, 172; ideology-critique 13 Ilyenkov, Evald, 31, 35, 37, 38, 122 immanence, 33, 51, 63, 104, 131, 132, 145, 173, 178; plane of, 36, 50, 91, 98, 103, 112, 113, 124, 158 impartiality, 3, 4, 7, 62, 66, 202 imperialism, 7, 41, 52, 175 Imperium, 94, 138, 174. See also empire inconsistency, 32, 55 identity politics, 142, 145 Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), 183

inequality, 60, 74, 136, 155, 163, 166, 167, 176, 177, 180, 181, 180, 191, 198, 199, 221n31 inhibition, 43, 71, 119 injustice, 1, 7, 9, 10, 20, 34, 35, 46-48, 50, 63, 64, 71-76, 93, 94, 106, 120, 127, 128, 130, 139, 143, 148, 150, 151, 155, 167, 181, 194, 196, 202, 207, 208. See also justice instinct 43, 114, 207 instinctive code 59, 112, 153; of conduct 43, 44, 47; of behavior, 206 institutionalisation, 114, 115, 117, 118, 131 insurgency, 5, 6, 8, 11, 53, 69, 73, 74, 108, 125, 190, 193, 194, 206 insurrection, 17, 47, 53, 69, 98, 150152, 192, 193, 196, 197, 209 integration, 5-7, 24, 36, 42, 107, 110, 115, 145, 169, 174 intensity, 5, 7, 23, 40, 43, 47, 50, 62, 66, 69, 71, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 98, 100, 111, 114, 117, 125-127, 138, 141, 144, 148, 149, 153, 158, 166, 170, 171, 173-175, 178, 179, 182, 190, 193, 196-199, 208, 209, 220n6; lines of, 20, 29, 48, 146; flows of, 29, 87, intentionality, 26, 46, 47, 128 interests, 8, 15, 52, 57-59, 61, 62, 66, 67, 69-71, 76, 80, 88-90, 103, 132, 143, 178, 179, 188, 190, 191, 218n16 Ionian cosmology, 22, 23, 25, 26. See also Presocratic cosmology Jameson, Frederic, 54, 65, 85, 94, 122, 127, 131, 32, 149 jihadism, 107, 111, 176 Johnston, Adrian, 33 jouissance, 195, 197, 202, 203. See also pleasure judgement, 7, 11, 14, 19, 33, 34, 40, 64, 67, 71, 86, 95, 106, 121, 127, 130, 136, 138, 143, 153, 155, 156,

Index

158, 160, 173, 184, 201, 221n31; Judgement Day, 149 justice, actualization of, 3, 6, 7, 13, 24, 43, 53, 66, 67, 69, 70, 73, 81, 87, 95, 100, 111, 112, 116, 119, 125, 128, 146, 150, 169-171, 184, 190, 191, 201, 207; conception of, 3, 13, 20, 21, 24, 26, 32, 53-56, 64, 66, 69, 71, 72, 87, 91, 98, 133, 143, 169, 181, 216, 213n5, 213n7; forms of, 13, 19, 48, 50, 57, 70, 71, 91-93, 103, 107, 112-114, 116, 120-122, 126, 128, 129, 131, 139, 141-144, 148, 162, 163, 165, 171, 176, 179. 181. 184, 186, 190, 192-194, 196, 200-202, 207, 209, 210, 222n9; from above, 15, 169, 176, 179, 180, 182, 189, 190, 191, 194, 195, 199, 200, 201, 209; from below, 15, 182-184, 186193, 195, 196, 198-203, 210, 220, 222n42; order of, 19, 31, 68, 131; problem of, 24, 44, 54, 59, 61, 62, 66, 69, 70, 72, 88, 96, 109, 112-114, 132, 156, 168, 173, 185, 202, 207; regime(s) of, 49, 50, 98, 115, 116118, 119, 126, 130, 131, 138, 147, 149, 156, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164, 176, 178, 179, 182, 187, 188, 192, 193, 202, 206, 210; theory of, 7-14, 20, 27, 28, 30, 36, 54, 55, 85, 98, 103, 107, 114, 123, 125, 136, 162, 169, 205, 209, 217n16 justification, 61, 71, 117, 135, 174, 181, 192, 200, 202, 221n31 Kafka, Franz, 87, 162 Kalfas, Vasilis, 20 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 37, 45, 72, 126, 153, 156 Kleist, Heinrich von; See Kohlhaas Koester, Helmut, 138 Kohlhaas, Michael, 151, 152 Kojève, Alexander, 4, 39, 44, 55, 64, 66, 81, 146, 150, 170, 176 Kondylis, Panagiotis, 111

251

kosmiotita, 36, 112. See also worldliness Kronstadt, 125 Laboria Cuboniks, 34 Landauer, Gustav, 73, 81, 108 language, 21, 47, 48, 97, 101-103, 107, 113, 120, 173, 207 law, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 18, 24, 25, 30, 32, 41, 42, 43, 48, 59, 65, 66, 69, 71, 72, 75, 86, 87, 99, 106, 114, 115, 123, 128, 138, 144, 153-159, 161, 163, 168, 171, 172, 182, 189, 195, 197, 199, 206, 207, 213, 215n25, 221n31; rule of, 3-6, 136, 137, 143; force of, 154 Legal Justice, 3 Lenin, 12, 34, 137, 182 lex talionis, 20 liberalism, 4, 5, 6, 18, 55, 66, 79, 128, 136, 137, 157, 220n17 libidinal flows, 55, 85, 87, 98, 114, 115, 119, 159 libidinal investment, 81, 88, 103, 114, 145, 168, 199, 208 line(s) of flight, 1, 48, 28, 38, 50, 82, 84, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 102, 120, 124, 158, 176, 190, 206 logos, 18, 21, 25, 27, 48, 103, 107, 118, 173, 174 London riots, 194 Lordon, Frédéric, 84 Losurdo, Domenico, 65, 185 love, 45, 64, 82, 99, 106, 150-152, 196, 198, 218n21 Lucretius, 26 luminosity, 37 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 46, 60, 79, 150 Maitland, Samuel 153 many, the, 14, 22, 133, 134, 146, 158, 165, 182, 197, 208, 210 Marx, Karl, 9, 14, 15, 37, 51, 53-58, 61-65, 68-74, 80, 81, 83, 93, 95, 96, 101, 104, 105, 108, 113, 119, 124, 126, 128, 143, 148, 177, 187,

252

Index

189, 207, 208, 214n17, 221n31; and Engels, 55, 68, 79, 91, 108 Marxism, 54, 56, 60, 69, 80, 88, 112, 119, 124, 177, 216n9-n15 May 1968, 86, 89, 125 material practice(s), 57, 58, 61, 65, 108, 112, 140 materialism, 1, 8, 12, 26, 32, 33, 104, 143, 154; dialectical, 26, 57; historical 8, 14, 53-71, 75, 93, 101, 107, 119, 129, 143, 206, 209; new, 27, 31, 32, 51, 206; vitalistic, 101; vulgar, 55 materiality, 9, 10, 12, 26, 28, 37, 39, 59, 76, 100, 103, 110, 139, 140, 147 matter, 12, 26, 27, 32, 85, 86, 101, 104, 147, 162; energy, 28, 34, 178 mediation, 3, 6, 9, 11, 15, 43, 49, 55, 59, 64, 66, 69, 71, 76, 90, 110, 129 131-133, 157, 166, 170, 176, 183, 192, 209, 214n17 meshworks, 30, 188, 201 messianic, the, 69, 118, 136, 138, 217n19; messianic experience of time, 117 messianism, 69, 118, 136, 138 ‘might makes right’, 63, 93 Milbank, John, 37, 63, 85, 145 molar, 85-88, 92, 115, 116, 180; molarisation, 91, 124, 146, 170 molecular, 85, 87, 88, 92, 96, 108, 115, 116, 125, 170, 183, 188, 189 moral economy, 186, 187 Morton, Timothy, 28, 33, 41, 51 Mouffe, Chantal, 64, 216n12 Moyn, Samuel, 45 multiplicity/multiplicities, 10, 22, 31, 44, 46, 47, 83, 100, 104, 121, 134, 135, 139, 144-146, 148, 158, 159, 162, 165, 168, 182, 197, 201, 206 natural law, 42, 43, 59, 75, 138, 215n25 natural right, 42-44, 47, 50, 73, 102, 112, 119, 137, 163, 206 natural sciences, 13, 26-28, 32, 34, 39

Naxalites, 148 Nazism, 171, 181 needs, 15, 58, 59, 61, 62, 69, 71, 114, 132, 140, 188, 191, 196; biological; 58, 87, 88, 113, nonalienated, 59; social 58 negation, 9, 81, 99, 104-106, 109, 127, 128-131, 158, 159, 165, 181, 190, 193 negation of the negation, 128, 129, 190, 196, 200, 201 negativity, 9, 11, 31, 32, 47, 81, 108, 109 121, 124, 127-131, 142, 190, 196, 197 Negri, Antonio, 125, 154, 158; and Hardt, 125, 169 Neyrat, Frédéric, 34, 52, 123, 128, 214n16 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 73-75, 108, 127, 219n28 noesis; 104, 107, 207 nomadism, 85, 123, 133, 209, 214n13 nomadology, 1 nominalism, 35, 135, 214 Nomos of the Earth, 92 nonhuman animals, 7, 40, 42, 47, 49, 53, 75, 77 normativism, 4, 5, 8, 11, 34, 86, 136, 201, not-yet, the 14, 97, 105, 106, 133, 138, 158, 210 Nozick, Robert, 3 Nussbaum, Martha, 4 One, the 14, 16, 18, 19, 22, 134, 137, 146, 168, 182, 202 ontology, 4, 10, 35-37, 51, 58. 63, 83, 85, 88, 134, 138, 145, 211; participatory, 35, 36, 56, 98, 112; order, 4, 7, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 29, 31, 32, 34, 43, 65, 81, 92, 98, 103, 104, 106, 107, 125, 128, 129, 130, 135, 137, 138, 144, 146-160, 161-165, 168-171, 177, 182, 190, 191, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 201, 206; ordering, 20, 118, 129, 146, 153

Index

original position, 67 Otomo, Katsuhiro (Akira), 47 Papageorgiou, Konstantinos, 184 Paris Commune, 74, 103, 107 partition, 19, 87, 88, 102, 172; of the sensible, 41, 53, 98, 169, 219n31 Pascal, Blaise, 25, 121, 128, 144 Pashukanis, Eugeny, 57, 213n3 passion, 3, 7, 8, 9, 25, 64, 74, 79, 117-119, 131, 138, 152 pathos, 40, 77, 78, 108 patrician justice 178-180, 192, 210 patrician principle, 179 patrician experience, 192 Pax Romana, 174 Paul, saint, 106, 137, 138, 142, 143 Peck, Raoul (Le jeune Karl Marx), 91 Pedrini, Belgrado (Il Galeone), 147 physical laws, 30, 32, 44 physical world, 26, 28-31, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 42, 55, 113, 205 physical systems, 31, 33, 34, 39, 45 Pindar, 154, 155 Plato, 2, 98, 118, 119, 128, 129, 203 Platonism, 104 pleasure, 45, 82, 84, 98, 99, 116, 148, 194, 202; surplus-pleasure 202 plebeian, 140, 141, 189, 190, 192, 194, 210 plebeian justice, 191-194, 200 plebeian experience, 191, 192, 198 poetics, of the good life 120; of justice, 120, of the self, 120; of the street, 98 political, the, 62-64, 81, 132, 183, 207 political economy, 58, 60, 80, 221n31 political theology, 1, 138, 218n15, 221n26 politics of truth, 83 power, 12, 18, 19, 28, 56, 61, 62, 63, 69, 70, 82, 88, 93, 97, 102, 118, 130, 144, 145, 153, 157, 164, 167, 172174, 180, 183, 184, 187, 194; wild zone of, 171

253

pragmatics 37, 102, 115, 130; of truth, 36 praxis, 38, 51, 83, 103, 132, 183, 191; of coequal discipleship, 184 Presocratics, 20, 23, 38 Presocratic, cosmology, 21; experience, 11; philosophy, 20, 29; thought, 21, 26; Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers, 31, 214n12 proletariat, 80, 143, 190 provision, 62, 113, 126, 147, 186, 187, 193, 196 Prudhommeaux, Andre, 94 racism, 67, 181 Rancière, Jacque, 58, 124, 185, 191, 199, 215n19, 219n31 Ratio, 19. See also reason Rawls, John 3, 52, 55, 61, 66, 96, 136, 147 real abstraction, 37, 83, 105, 135, 139, 205, 214n17 reason, 3, 5-7, 13, 18, 21, 23, 25, 27-29, 31, 42, 43, 18, 50, 52, 56, 59, 66, 67, 71, 72, 75, 88, 103, 106, 107, 113, 118, 119, 132, 135, 143, 153, 157, 168, 202, 208 Rechtsstaat, 4. See also rule of law reciprocity, 43, 45, 99, 149-152, 174, 180, 196; balanced, 149, 187; generalized, 149, 151, negative, 149 recognition, 10, 12, 25, 36, 38, 43, 60, 63, 67, 69, 70, 81, 88, 99, 115, 119, 125, 126, 131, 132, 145-147, 149, 150, 164, 174, 178, 179, 182, 183, 185, 196, 198 reconciliation, 9, 124, 176, 209 redemption, 53, 70, 109, 116, 117, 136, 138, 146. 187, 211 redistribution, 192 reductionism, 9, 12, 14, 17, 101 regimentation, 112, 163, 164, 185, 194 Reich, Wilhelm, 76, 80 relativism, 9, 99

254

Index

religious rejections of the world, 62, 195 representation, 12, 22, 25, 31, 35, 42, 57, 64, 72, 92, 96, 108, 125-127, 146, 158, 165, 166, 195; order of, 86, 125, 169 resentment, 47, 60, 73-75, 90, 106, 108, 197; ressentiment, 73-75, 108 resistance, 6, 7, 47, 48, 50, 69, 73-76, 85, 93, 97, 99, 124, 125, 140, 124, 144, 146, 171, 181, 192, 193, 206, 209, 210, 221n31 retribution, 20, 21, 73, 150-152 revenge, 2, 82. See also vengeance revolt, 7, 8, 34, 47, 53, 69, 74, 76, 83, 80, 9395, 102, 107, 121, 105, 139, 144, 180, 190, 193, 195, 197, 209, 211 revolution, 5-7, 9, 15, 34, 50-53, 67-69, 71, 75, 80, 84, 94, 97, 103, 109, 122, 126, 127, 141, 145, 158, 182, 190, 196-200, 209 rhizomatic, 29, 30, 32, 91, 110, 115, 134, 158, 159, 189, 196, 209 Ricoeur, Paul, 66, 94, 99, 110, 111, 137, 149-151, 217n16, 219n23, 219n25 right, problem of, 59; 68, 70, 170 Right, 6, 41, 50, 57, 59, 61, 65, 66, 68, 71, 102, 106, 123, 146, 151, 156, 157, 158, 173, 183, 207, 219n24 order of, 6, 17, 21, 22, 43, 47, 50, 53, 58, 63, 67, 68, 85, 97, 100, 102, 115, 146, 155, 156, 159, 163, 164, 167, 174, 176, 178, 190, 194, 197, 198, 216n7 right form, 33, 44, 47, 61, 66, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 146, 147, 149, 155, 183, 186 riots, 5-10, 52, 67, 71, 98, 103, 109, 125, 127, 130, 193, 194; era of, 6, 213n4 Robespierre, 141, 161 Rocker, Rudolf, 172 Rodney King riots, 193 Rome, 60, 83, 94, 144, 179, 190, 191, 200; Roman empire, 139, 190

Rose, Gillian, 35, 216n15 Ross, Kristin, 107 Rovelli, Carlo, 26, 29 Roy, Arundhati, 147 rupture, 10, 32, 102, 138, 182, 195, 196, 206, 209, 222n48 sacred, the, 159 ‘sacred rule’. See hierarchy Sagriotis, George, 37, 69 salvation, 203 Sandel, Michael, 4 saturated immanence, 36 savage justice, 162-164 Scheler, Max, 74, 75, 108 Schmitt, Carl, 55, 63, 64, 207, 216n12; left-Schmittianism, 63 Scott, James, 162, 166, 168, 177, 193 sedimentation, 30, 85, 111, 146, 154, 166, 194 segmentation, 83, 91, 115146, 163 self-consistent aggregates, 30, 188, 201. See meshworks self-determination, 155 self-government, 183 self-organisation, 22, 23, 29, 30, 31, 183, 189, 196 self-realisation, 39, 56, 67, 91, 124, 134 self-regulation, 29, 31 self-righteousness, 46 Sen, Amartya, 3, 213n6 sentient corporeality, 77 signification, 18, 19, 101; order of, 4, 87; regimes of, 38, 41, 83, 86, 88, 92, 97, 168 singularity, 88, 125, 134, 138, 139, 147, 159, 182, 194; conditions of singularization, 52 Sittlichkeit, 96, 97, 155, 208 Srnicek, Nick and Alex Williams, 135, 140 social homeostasis, 43, 112 social justice, 10, 36, 186, 188

Index

social order, 58, 64, 77, 83, 84, 86, 88, 117, 131, 159, 195; social ordering, 19 social reproduction, 57, 59, 61, 62, 66, 68, 90, 128 social-desiring production, 38, 95, 97, 98, 105, 115, 125, 128, 139, 156, 158, 159, 173, 190, 219n1 socialism, 15, 52, 55, 64, 72, 82, 197, 217n18.; scientific and utopian, 79 Solen (Ought), 7, 82, 102, 157 solidarity, 28, 35, 45, 49, 95, 183, 196 Solon, 2, 155 Sophocles, 24 Sorel, George, 67, 68 Sovereign power, 23, 25, 41, 71, 154, 155, 169, 176, 182, 199 Spartacus, 83, 94, 139, 144, 180, 190, 191 spatial justice, 10 spectres, 210, 211 Spinoza, Baruch, 84, 85, 106 Spirit, 12, 28, 33, 104 squares-movement, the 125 state of exception, 63, 221n22 state-form; 67, 161, 176, 209; philosophy, 17, 214n1; thought, 17, 41, 53, 65, 156, 161. See also Urstaat, the strata, 30, 85, 86, 87, 134, 177; stratification, 30, 86, 87, 111, 115, 116, 167, 168, 171, 207 structure-generation, 30 subaltern, bodies, 9, 153; classes, 15, 207; experience, 182; insurgency, 5, 8, 11, 53, 74, 108, 125; struggles 7, 11, 15, 71, 79, 210; uprisings, 109 subaltern studies, 142 subjectivation, 89, 118, 138, 146, 162, 165 superabundance, 151, 159, 162, 196, 201 superstructure, 8, 56, 62, 108, 178; See also basis/superstructure Supiot, Alain, 2, 153, 154-156, 219n25

255

surplus, 97, 114, 122, 132, 158, 164, 174, 177, 196, 203, 206, 208; activity, 151; labour, 178; productivity, 97, 114, 166, 167, 177; value, 159, 219n20 suum cuique tribuere (Digest), 147 symbiotic real, the, 33, 36, 41, 51, 112 Tacitus, 173 Tarantino, Quentin (The Hateful Eight), 2 Taubes, Jacob, 139, 218n15 Taylor, Mark, 63, 211 teleology, 4, 9, 99, 122, 189, 209 territorialisation, 83, 85, 86, 96, 129, 176, 201, 216n7 Terror, 93, 197; state, 63, 69 Tertullian, 73 theories of justice, 111, 207; liberal, 4-6, 18, 55, 136, 137; mainstream, 7; state-orientated, 161 Thompson E. P., 186 Thor (Ragnarok), 130 Timpanaro, Sebastiano 13, 38 totality, 18, 22, 25, 36, 58, 62, 74, 86, 93, 123-125, 127, 131, 133, 149, 152 Tragedy, 23-26, 65, 131, 139, 214n10 transformation 15, 32, 68, 80, 90, 93, 101, 104, 117, 119, 135, 144, 145, 148, 195, 201, 206 Tuinen, Sjoerd van, 74 Ulpian, 43 ultra-leftism, 29, 86, 131, 214n13 undecidable, the, 61 universal justice, 16, 137, 141-144, 146 universality, 2, 32, 134-146, 162, 165, 182, 201; historical, 139, 144, 180, 185; ideational 139, 140; ontological, 139; utopia, 5, 11, 14, 65, 85, 94, 95, 107, 110, 118, 126, 130, 133, 168, 170, 189, 192, 198, 199, 202, 208, 216n8 urbanisation, 116, 166, 167, 220n12 Urstaat, the 168, 170, 177, 181

256

Index

utilitarianism, 137 utopianism, 63, 79

Voegelin, Eric, 11, 22, 26, 37, 38, 106, 117, 181, 221n26

vengeance, 24, 64, 130, 151, 194 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 22, 23 violence, 6, 7, 22, 57, 60, 63, 66-69, 71, 105-107, 113, 118, 121, 129-131, 137, 141, 142, 145, 153, 155, 165, 175, 181, 183, 193, 197, 198, 200, 207, 209, 221n27; divine, 69; intrumentalisation of, 67, 106, 129; law-making, 68, proletarian, 68; state, 106; subaltern, 6 virtual, the, 95, 110; virtuality, 208 Virvidakis, Stelios, 2, 3

wage labour, 60, 61, 91 war machine, 83, 102, 165, 190 Weil, Simon, 72, 77, 95, 106 well-being, 45, 60, 99, 112, 191, 206 wild justice, 47, 50, 101 Willet, Cynthia, 10 working class, 61, 79, 91, 124, 198 worldliness, 36 zone of indeterminacy, 97, 158, 174, 199

About the Author

George Sotiropoulos holds a PhD in Political Theory and is currently teaching History and Theory of Knowledge at the International School of Athens. His research and publications cover a wide range of themes, from political philosophy to contemporary movements. His most recent publications include two articles on recent social movements and struggles in Greece: ‘The (Not) Coming-Democracy and the Anti-Memorandum Movement’ in Beyond the Crisis, eds. J. Holloway, P. Doulos and K. Nasioka (2019) and ‘Staging Democracy: The Aganaktismenoi of Greece and the Squares-Movement(s)’, Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest, Special Issue: Creative Resistances/Resistant Acts 5:1 (Spring 2017); and also, a booklength study on the theory and history of revolutions, published in Greek: Thirsting for Justice: On the Theory and History of Revolution (2017).

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