Inventing New Lines

Gerald Raunig's Dividuum confronts any reviewer with numerous challenges, not least of which is how to begin. Raunig (and his co-authors, for 'the authorship of any book is divided' (p11)) offers us at least four different beginnings through which to slip into our navigation of this complex and ambitious text. Further, the book's inclusion of nine ritornellos scattered throughout - bursts of poetic philosophy which function simultaneously as experimental explorations of dividuum which obey their own narrative distinct from the other chapters in the text (and which are a homage to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of la ritournelle in A Thousand Plateaus) - divides the book even further. As such, Dividuum never really 'begins', but rather, its beginnings are split, distributed, or divided.

Despite this, any reviewer must still select certain components to create an impression of the text. We will discuss two here: Raunig's genealogy of the concept of dividuum; and his associated attempts to spur the 'invention and multiplication of revolutionary practices and narratives' (p184).

Any conceptual genealogy must pass through a genealogy of use, extracting how certain concepts become embedded in economic, political, and social practices. Here, Raunig extracts the usage of the Latin dividuum from Roman Comedy, used in reference to the division of property: division as that which governs exchange. Raunig positions dividuum as bound up with socio-political division and economic distribution, specifically, with money, goods (p26), slavery, and patriarchy (p33). Dividuum, in other words, is associated with the partition, division, and exchange of money, goods, slaves, and women. However, Raunig also emphasises the struggle for freedom of those subject to such partition (p35): their strategies of 'incompliant subversion' (p36), invention of new lines of flight, and the carving out of new existential territories beyond extant hegemonic modes of division and exchange.

Raunig situates the emergence of dividuum in philosophy (with Cicero's translation of Plato's Timaeus (p45)) in opposition to individuum in the context of a discussion of divisible and indivisible matter (p47). The relationship between dividuum and individuum will become crucial; and although Raunig situates individuum, etymologically, as a negation of dividuum (p39), the former has nonetheless tended to assume priority in philosophy (in debates on the indivisibility of the 'atom', 'soul', or 'being'; the Christian God's primary in-divisibility in conjunction with, or in spite of, its divisibility in the Trinity (as in Boethius (pp52-54)); or on the nature of the individual person). Raunig traces a treatment of dividuum in the history of philosophy (undoubtedly indebted to Deleuze's Difference and Repetition) which subordinates it as a derivative or corruption of individuum. A 'subordination of the divisible under the indivisible' (p48), whereby in-dividuum is placed 'equiprimordially alongside dividuum as a quasi absolute word, resulting in the suppression of its positive' (p39).

The most substantive conceptual development of dividuum Raunig tracks is in his Talmudic reading of the work of Gilbert de la Porrée (1070/1080 -1154), bishop of Poitiers (p55). Not only does Raunig find in Gilbert a thinker of dividuality, but also a thinker of immanence who does not subordinate dividuum to individuum, and is concerned instead with the 'singularity, concretion and immanence of all that "subsists"' (p55) in the secular realm, itself totally independent from the divine realm. Gilbert's work opens up a rich conceptual space - Raunig's reading of Gilbert constitutes one of the key successes of Dividuum - through which his notion of immanent ontological dividuality flows into discussions of singularity, connectedness, non-universalism, non-essentialism, connection, and conjunction: 'Whereas the concept of individuality tends towards constructing closure, dividual singularity emphasizes similarity in diverse single things, and thus also the potentiality of connecting, appending, concatenating' (p67). In this exploration of ontological dividuality, Raunig passes inevitably through the question of the individual subject, drawing on Nietzsche's critique of Western-Christian moral subjection and pastoral power as a process of 'self-division' through which subjects become divided internally within themselves (p87; pp92-94). It is through this question of...