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4 prolegomenon to reject politics From Voyous to Becoming-Animal plus d’une démocr atie What deserves to be reiterated, with regard to unveiling and mobilizing the reject in contemporary French thought’s rethinking of friendship, love, community, and religion, is that the affirmation of differences is at stake. One may go further to say that this affirmation is an affirmation of radical differences, if not a radical affirmation of radical differences, without this affirmation ever having the intention to assimilate any of those differences within its discursive space. Indeed, its objective cannot be the neutralizing or the taming of rejects. Put another way, a theory of the reject critiques or disagrees with rejects that express or project their differences at the cost of others. Affirmation here must leave rejects free to remain as rejects or auto-rejects, such as the “friend” who walks away and who might never return to any existing friendship, the lover who puts in suspension or syncope all existing love, or the other-Abraham or animal-messiah that prefers not to respond to any particular religious injunction. This is only how any affirmation is constantly a “dis-closing” [déclosion], constantly undoing all attempts to close the other—regardless if this other is a reject or not—in or within a homogenizing space or thought. In the course of eliciting and affirming rejects or auto-rejects in contemporary French thought, the preceding chapters have also raised several notions that have political import, if not, are already political in themselves . An example is Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic war machine, which was discussed in the chapter on friendship, love, and community. The primary target of the nomadic war machine is typically not so much community , but the State, which has come to embody that which is absolutely Prolegomenon to Reject Politics 13 organized, and from which hardly anyone can deviate or escape. Community comes under attack by the nomadic war machine only when it takes on such State-like striating structure. In that same chapter, love was subjected to a rethinking as well. Love can also have political potential, if we are to follow Hardt and Negri’s argument in Commonwealth, where, according to them, love can be a force that ruptures the appropriating network of global capital. The love that Hardt and Negri speak of is not so much romantic love. Rather, it concerns “solidarity, care for others, creating community, and cooperating in common project,” particularly within the multitude that is deprived of the riches of those who control, manage, and perpetuate the global capital Empire.1 It is through these acts that spring forth a Spinozean joy, that is to say, an “increase of [their] power to act and think,” which potentially “marks a rupture with what exists” and which sees to “the creation of the new.”2 In speaking of “messiancity without messianism” in the chapter on the “postsecular,” one is also no doubt in the proximity of political thought, especially when one refers not only to Derrida’s Foi et savoir but also to his Spectres de Marx. As Derrida argues in Spectres de Marx, “messianicity without messianism” has everything to do with the thought of démocratie à venir or “democracy to come.” One needs to be precise, however, to note that what is critical in the phrase démocratie à venir, as Derrida underscores in an earlier interview with Michael Sprinker, is not so much démocratie but the à venir.3 The à venir, which is undeniably something of the future, is markedly different, however, from the future [le futur] according to Derrida. The future [le futur] for Derrida is something programmed, the arrival of which is most oftentimes already expected or anticipated and is always something of the order of the possible. In the eyes of Derrida, there is nothing of the event of the future, therefore. The promise of the event lies instead with the à venir, since it arrives in complete surprise, or rather in its complete surprise, as Nancy would say with greater precision, since he argues that the event is the surprise itself and vice versa.4 Derrida will go on to explicate that what is at stake in the à venir is the arrival of the other: the other of which we have no, and will not have, knowledge, that is, the other that we were neither expecting nor anticipating. Derrida will also regard this other as anyone. That is to say, it does not matter who...

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