To Place Oneself Within a 'We'

Like that of many of the other French thinkers who question the late modern principium individuationis, Foucault's thought has proven over the decades to be particularly prone to divergent interpretations of how it might be put to political use. Ranging, for instance, from the "post-Marxism" of Ernesto Laclau, to the "radical liberalism" of William Connolly, to the "post-anarchism" of Todd May, it has been repeatedly claimed as the basis for quite distinct ends. And yet, in classic Nietzschean fashion, he himself argued explicitly against the reduction of critical thought as such to the "we" of any exclusive, pre-formed ideologico-political orientation.ⁱ Instead, Foucault's more Dionysian, transversally-oriented disposition lead him to proclaim that "the [real] problem is, precisely, to decide if it is actually suitable to place oneself within a 'we' in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts; or if it is not, rather, necessary to make the future formation of a 'we' possible by elaborating the question. Because it seems to me that the 'we' must not be previous to the question; it can only be the result - and the necessarily temporary result - of the question as it is posed in the new terms in which one formulates it".ⁱⁱ Like many of his post-Nietzschean contemporaries in the Francophone world who were also more interested in "self-overcoming" than in staticizing political identities, Foucault distrusted categorically-driven polemics because of the Manichean reifications and instrumentalizations of thought that they tended to inspire. By defining a constitutive outside he seemed to suggest, one often sets up an arbitrarily-defined political symptomatology, in which "symptoms are named, renamed and grouped in various ways",ⁱⁱⁱ and which thereby tend to disenable an ethos of agonistic respect. And yet, if the purpose of critical political thinking today is, in the terms employed by Gilles Deleuze, "contributing to the invention of a people"^iv (rather than "representing" one that already is) then instrumentalizations of a thinker's work are unavoidable, including those motivated by an anti-systemic sensibility.

Within the Anglophone milieu of critical political thought, Nietzsche's heterodox philosophico-aesthetic sensibility has contributed greatly to the many becomings of the political 'we' that Foucault invokes as emerging out of specific events. Nevertheless, while the modern period gave birth to a plethora of political ideologies that could be rendered amenable to his thought, anarchism remains the most quickly dismissed of them. Oddly, this obduracy is not only engaged by those who, in a particularly selective reading of Nietzsche's thought, seek to defend our own Faubourg Saint Germain, but also by many of those who seek to bring his anti-humanist legacy to bear on their own necessarily modern, humanist-indebted polemics. And yet, as it has with Marxism and liberalism, Nietzsche's anti-humanism has also been used to think "with and against" the polemics that gave birth to anarchism. While this should have greatly reduced the ideological rifts dividing these camps, or at least rendered their irreconcilable components resonant in the virtual sense, it is only recently that this has begun to occur. Indeed, over the past decade, the emergent political 'we' became as a somewhat altered composite, particularly through the works of Todd May', Saul Newman, and Lewis Call. Together, these authors developed a theoretical basis which allows for an alternate comprehension of the largely anarchist-inflected (but similarly heterodox) "antiglobalization movement," amongst other events. For this reason, many critical academics who have been moved by such developments have found themselves pulled in multiple interpretive directions, with sometimes confusing results. My argument here is that rather than acquiescing to the temptation to choose one or the other of them, it is the question itself that should be given primacy, so that the "we" can emerge as the specifics of the situation at hand require.

John Moore and Spencer Sunshine's collection I Am Not a Man, I Am...