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  • Resisting the PresentBiopower in the Face of the Event (Some Notes on Monstrous Lives)
  • Thomas Clément Mercier (bio)

What imparts itself in the promise must therefore go beyond all forms of transcendental subjectivity and their politico-economic institutions, it must go beyond capital and the labor which it determines, and from this exceedence it must transform all its figures in advance, transform them by promising them and shifting them into the "trans" of every form. From its very inception, it must be beyond everything posited in any way, a monster at the limit of appearance, of visibility and representability. It must be, however so gently, an ex-positing.

—W. Hamacher (1999, 193)

Writing, like all artificial languages one would wish to fix and remove from the living history of the natural language, participates in the monstrosity.

—J. Derrida (1997, 38) [End Page 99]

the old word vie [le vieux nom de vie] perhaps remains the enigma of the political around which we endlessly turn.

—J. Derrida (2005b, 4)

I hold Francesco Vitale's Biodeconstruction to be a major book on, and of, resistance. Vitale not only thinks of a certain resistance of life—and, as we shall see, of life resisting itself, thus resisting the selfhood of a self, any self—but also allows for rethinking what "resistance" means. Biodeconstruction compels us to reconsider that old name, "resistance"; it brings out the possibility of resisting resistance to think of resistance as what resists itself, in its "own" name, and perhaps beyond any name. As if the name "resistance" were itself the site of an immemorial resistance, a dam erected against another force of resistance, perhaps more potent but also less forgiving: a resistance of life against the "itself" of life, before and beyond the being of life "itself." A resistance that resists naming. Resistance in and against naming. This suggests a resistance before ontology and, in particular, before ontological reductions of life. Résistance sans l'être: resistance without being (it). This is not nothing.1

Through readings of François Jacob's The Logic of Life—always carefully articulated with philosophers, notably Aristotle and Hegel—Vitale shows, in the wake of Derrida's 1975–1976 seminar "La vie la mort," that resistance has traditionally been conceived of as a function of life, of life understood as "self-reproduction" (Vitale 2018, 80–90). This definition of the essence of the living as self-reproduction betrays "the sedimentation of the oldest metaphysical matrix able to determine philosophies and the life sciences over the centuries" (81). Life, the name "life," thus designates "the capacity of reproducing itself" (Derrida, quoted in Vitale 2018, 82). It supposes the teleological essence of life as dynamis and energeia. But if what we call "life" is defined as reproducibility, this definition of the essence of life in fact espouses the definition of "essentiality" itself, of the power of the essence (the concept or idea) to be repeated and reproduced in and through all its alterations or transformations, to reproduce itself without interruption and without remainder: "the dynamics and energy of being, what gives the potentiality and act of being" and "secures from the inside its own production, namely, its re-production" [End Page 100] (Derrida, in Vitale 2018, 82). The circle of life is thus the life of the circle: the logic of the living, or the life of onto-logic. Life is the corpus of a self-sustaining body proper, internally produced and reproduced in its own name. It is also the phantasm of capital.2

In this perspective, the power of life conflates with its own logic—logic—that of self-reproduction. It is "the movement of the phoenix" (Derrida, in Vitale 2018, 38), ipseity as power of the autos: reproduction of the self-same, life itself, purified and immortal despite accidental differences or contingent determinations, natural deaths or local resistances. In this particular sense, life is essentially power, life-power. Life is power of the essence. Can one break the circle and resist "the movement of the phoenix"?3 And would it make sense to call this a "resistance"—perhaps a "political," or "biopolitical," resistance?

In Biodeconstruction, Vitale invokes...

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