ON SILENCE AND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE POLITICAL COMMUNITY

Paolo Palladino and Tiago Moreira

To appear in Theory and Event (2006)

Please do not cite or quote without the authors’ permission

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Jane Bennett, Steve Brown, Mick Dillon, Manabrata Guha, Mike Shapiro, Jeremy

Valentine and an anonymous reader for their comments and criticism of this essay. All remaining

faults are entirely our own. This essay is dedicated to Moses, companion.

07 December 2005: 1

ON SILENCE AND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE POLITICAL COMMUNITY

Speech … serves to indicate what is useful and what is harmful, and so also what is just and what is unjust … The

real difference between man and other animals is that humans alone have perception of good and evil, just and

unjust, etc. It is the sharing of a common view in these matters that makes … a state.

Aristotle, The Politics, 1253a7

Introduction

What place in philosophy for silence, for the absence of words? This is a question of no small

importance since philosophical argument has long been constructed as a public dialogue aiming to

summon into existence the most equitable political community. If this means that the task of such

argument is to identify what form of internal relations will lead to the most agreeable distribution of

rights and responsibilities among the components parts of the political community, it also means that

the justice of the public sphere is predicated on the principle of mathesis, on the calculability of

relations between the component parts. A further, related consequence is that language, insofar as it

alone would seem to enable such calculation, founds the political community. Conversely, silence must

be that which arrests all that might flow from philosophical argument, including the justice of the

public sphere. This said, recent work on the development of biomedicine and its distinctive

configuration of the bio­political subject would seem to call for a more constructive engagement with

silence, for an engagement with silence as something more than a wholly negative disposition toward

life with others.

In a recent, provocative essay, Michel Callon and Vololona Rabeharishoa (2004) ask what is to be done

about Gino, who meets their invitations to contribute his personal experience of muscular dystrophy to

their ethnographic study of genetic medicine with nothing but silence. They argue that this silent

figure must be understood as the site of confrontation between two sets of demands. One the one

hand, there are the demands of the public sphere, for the visibility, articulation and argument over

Gino’s reasons for refusing any engagement with the world of modern biomedicine. On the other hand,

there is the private sphere, with its own distinctive demands for invisibility, non­articulation and

silence. Callon and Rabeharisoa suggest that the latter set of demands is the effect of Gino’s work, of

his work to make himself opaque to others. Gino’s silence, they then conclude, must be understood as

an alternative form of political engagement with the world of modern biomedicine, outside language.

They also acknowledge, however, that Gino’s silence is, at least partly, an effect of their own presence

and interpellation, and that, by making Gino’s work of making himself opaque to others both visible

and transparent, they paradoxically work against the very non­accountability that Gino would appear

to desire most. Thus confronted with the limits of the human sciences, Callon and Rabeharisoa then

call for a critical revision of our understanding of the political community. 1

In this essay, we respond to Callon and Rabeharisoa’s call, but argue that instead of seeking after some

alternativemathesis, thanks to which those who will not or cannot speak might none the less have a

voice in the construction of a more inclusive political community (see Callon, Lascoumes & Barthe,

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2001), it might be more fruitful to consider the role of the incalculability of parts in the constitution of

the political community. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this argument will draw on Jacques Rancière’s thesis

that calculative rationality is the very negation of political engagement because it will always fail to

take into account that most important part of the community, namely the demos as unity of the one

and the many (Rancière, 1999, 2001). We will also maintain, however, that Rancière’s thesis is not free

of problems, chiefly by virtue of tacitly assuming that democratic revindications are self­evident and

transparent. We will therefore revisit the thesis in the light of Michel Serres’ writings on the dynamics

of exchange, especially with respect to Serres’ claims about the fundamental and irreducible

interdependence of clarity and obscurity, the clarity of dialogue and the obscurity that comes from

silence (Serres, 1980, 1991a, 1991b).

Ultimately, what is at stake in our endeavour to engage with silence, with silence as the negation of all

philosophical argument, is the ambition to provide the rudiments of a praxiological account of the

‘absent centre’ of political ontology (Žižek, 1999).

Structuralism, post­structuralism and the logic of exchange

If one is to understand the importance that Michel Callon and Vololona Ranbeharisoa rightfully attach

to their encounter with Gino, it might be useful to explore the history of the project which Gino’s very

silence calls into question. This entails revisting an important tension between structuralist and post­

structuralist approaches to understanding the possibility of living with others without constant

recourse to violence. 2

According to structuralist anthropology, of which Claude Levi­Strauss was one of the principal

architects, all human institutions, all those mediating forms which enable humans to live with others

peaceably, rest on a fundamental operational principle, namely the establishment of some sort of

equivalence between what is given and what is received in the act of exchange. It might then be said

that mathesis lies at the heart of every human institution. From this perspective, it is not at all

surprising that Levi­Strauss should have criticised Marcel Mauss’ famous essay on the gift, in which

Mauss maintained that although the gift established the possibility of human relations, it lay outside

any calculative logic of exchange. Levi­Strauss argued that Mauss had fallen prey to the very

obscurantism from which the anthropological project of the human sciences was to be freed. Mauss

failed to see how every gift always comes back to the donor as another gift, because he confused the

anthropologist’s task of uncovering the logical structure of relationality and natives’ reasoning that

they were giving gifts for the purpose of creating a relationship with the inscrutable gods and those

around them (Levi­Strauss, 1987: 45­50). From Levi­Strauss to Pierre Bourdieu, the clarification of

every obscurity in the organisation of human life with others took on the nature of an empirical

problem arising from failure to appreciate one hidden complication or another, such as the lapse of

time between giving and receiving (see Bourdieu, 1990: 98­111).

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Michel Foucault, on the other hand, paradoxically maintained that the problem confronting Levi­

Strauss was an ontological one, peculiar to the discourse of modernity. In The Order of Things (1966),

his first sustained reflection on the anthropological project of the human sciences, Foucault wrote that:

Man has not been able to describe himself as a configuration in an episteme without thought at the same time

discovering, both in itself and outside itself, at its borders yet also in its very warp and woof, an element of

darkness, an apparently inert density in which it is embedded … (Foucault, 1994: 326).

In other words, every effort to include and render transparent that which was previously obscure

produces some other obscurity, so that, by way of a historical transvaluation, Mauss’ inscrutable gods

remain with us to this day, as the co­constitutive other of structuralist thought: in perfect equipoise,

there is no calculation without obscurity, and vice versa. This, however, did not put an end to the

structuralist debate over the constitution of the political community. Michel de Certeau observed very

astutely that Foucault’s account ultimately was descriptive rather than analytical, and he then called

for a more rigorous analytics of boundaries (Certeau, 1986: 171­198).

Post­structuralist thought provides an altogether different approach to the vexing question of

exchange and the constitution of the political community by maintaining that every system of

signification that would enable exchange is inadequate to itself. Moreover, the failure to obtain an

account of what is given and received that is transparent to calculative reason is to be understood as

the engine that endlessly propels such systems of signification. In trying to clarify this fundamental

insight, especially with respect to language, which arguably is the quintessential medium through

which the equivalence of what is given and received is constructed, Jacques Derrida eventually came

very close to Foucault, by maintaining that the always already deferring structure of systems of

signification is the effect a foundational obscurity, the moment of the ‘decision’ (Derrida, 1992). Michel

Serres, on the other hand, rejects the neo­Kantian foundations of this approach, and draws instead on

Gottfried Leibniz’s metaphysics, his fundamental source of inspiration (see Serres, 1968), to maintain

that systems of signification are endlessly open­ended because every practice of calculation, such as

that which would measure the greater or lesser equivalence of what is given and what is received,

cannot but multiply the very obscurities that the calculation would seek to remove. To appreciate the

difference between Derrida’s and Serres’ seemingly very close understanding of systems of

signification and their productivity, it is useful to return for a moment to Leibniz’s metaphysics. 3

As is well­known, the monad plays a central role in Leibniz’s metaphysics. Leibniz’s insistence that

substantial forms are the only expression of the world directs philosophical analysis towards the

internal relations of events. More specifically, he maintains that the materialisation of substance is not

connected to external relations, but only to a plurality of ‘states … or … relationships’ within the monad

itself (Leibniz, 1998: 269). These internal states and relationships not only lend the monad its self­

sufficiency, but also explain its continual change, for, as Leibniz puts it, ‘all bodies are in a perpetual

flux, like rivers, and parts are constantly coming into them and going out’ (Leibniz, 1998: 278).

Consequently, the event, such as the Derridean moment of decision, will need to be understood as the

process through which potential becomes actualised in continuously differing ways. To put the matter

07 December 2005: 4

still more simply, in his commentary on the baroque and Leibniz’s monadology, Gilles Deleuze

identifies the internal states and relationships as enabling the production of novelty from what already

exists within. This said, Deleuze also distinguishes between this monadology and his own neo­

monadology. For Leibniz, in the moment of the event, the multiple components are brought together,

the eternal and the ephemeral, the local and the universal, the temporal and the spatial, the subjective

and the objective, to express the fundamental unity of the world. As Deleuze puts it, ‘the event is a

vibration, with an infinity of harmonics and sub­multiples’ (Deleuze, 1992: 105). If the Leibnizian

event is generated by the combination of different potentialities within the conditions of

compossibility of the best world possible, however, on the neo­monadological perspective, the event

unveils the process through which the universe creates and actualises differences. As Deleuze once

again puts it, ‘the bifurcations, the divergences, the incompossibilities, the disagreements belong to the

same incongruent world’ (Deleuze, 1992: 111). While Deleuze thus echoes Alfred North Whitehead and

Gabriel Tarde, we add Serres to this list of authors, insofar as, for Serres, the proliferation of entities is

a multiplication of worlds that relies upon simplifications, which, in turn, obscure relations.

Importantly, in The Parasite (1980), Serres attempts to rethink the nature of exchange by arguing that

it is logically and practically preceded by unidirectional, asymmetric transactions. In this vein, he

observes firstly that exchanges between the constitutive parts of a system always leads to the

cancellation of the interrelation between these parts because the flows of materials within network of

exchanges will tend towards equilibrium and hence the cessation of all activity. The continuing activity

of systems must then depend on external inputs. This situation, Serres maintains secondly, requires a

reformulation of the relationship between system and environment, the latter conventionally being the

external source of activation. For Serres, ‘system theorists’ proceed by distinguishing between a

particular system and its environment, evacuating the latter of all distinctiveness and specificity to

thus distil the essence of the system. In doing so, however, these system theorists fail to understand

how the system in which they are interested and its environment only exist thanks to their endlessly

disruptive, but none the less co­constitutive, relationship: neither is intelligible without the other.

Serres summarises this claim in the following terms:

The philosophies of which I speak come into play in an imaginary world where there is but one system, a world

in which this system is constructed upon just one rule or single principle. In actual fact, all systems are very

complex. In actual fact, there is a multiplicity of systems. These philosophies come into play in an ideal world of

light and dark, in which there is but one inside and one outside, only one obscurity and only one light. This

imaginary world is on the moon. Without any atmosphere, where a screen divides space into white and black,

furnace and glacier, blinding light and dark night, no one can see a thing. The atmosphere, the air, or the

medium diffuse the light so that it outlines obstacles, illuminates the other side of walls, producing haphazard

patterns. To have light and clarity alone, one would have to inhabit the very source of light, or, I don’t know,

remove the medium and thus create a void. As soon as the medium intervenes, the ray of light energetically and

haphazardly seeks its fortune. One sees because one sees badly. It works because it works badly. Every system is

an assembly of messages, and to perceive the message alone, one would have to become identical with the sender

(Serres, 1980: 127­128).

Serres then adds about his own method of inquiry into the constitution of systems that,

07 December 2005: 5

It was a capricious perambulation … through a space prejudged as transcendental in which systems are

immersed. The systems themselves, however, are not so different from this space. The environment is no more

than the extension of one particular system. The transcendental is no more than the extension in the conditional

of a particular system of singularities. One can apply to the transcendental this analysis of the space of

immersion. The conditional space is not so very different to the space of the system. And it is equally as relative

(Serres, 1980: 129).

In sum, Serres argues that systems are multiple, and that, in differentiating between a system and its

environment, the latter being the space of possibility for the system, system theorists and all those

interested in a transparent account of complex systems of exchange purge the very disturbances and

obscurities that make the analysis of intra­systemic relations possible in the first place. It is at this

point that Serres introduces the figure of the ‘parasite’.

More a conceptual character than a concept, in the manner of Plato’s Socrates or Friedrich Nietzsche’s

Dionysius, the figure of the parasite enables Serres to foreground the critical importance of

disturbances and obscurities to the constitution of any system of exchange. The parasite is that which

eats alongside, uninvited, and does not offer anything in exchange. It eats alongside and is not

interested in wherefrom the food came. It eats, and because it was not invited, it has no obligations to

either the guest or their host. At the same time, the parasite is that which enables intra­systemic

relations insofar as it continuously creates a default in the mutuality of the relations between host and

guest, and, as such, is the source of innovation, movement and change. From this perspective, the

parasite is both relation and non­relation, because it does not establish a relation with any element of

the system and yet enables intra­systemic relations. To remain both in relation and non­relation,

however, the parasite has to remain at the boundary of the system of exchanges, always outside to be

inside. If it is included, it is enrolled into the system of exchanges and the thus enlarged system will

then tend toward equilibrium and eventual cessation of systemic activity. If it is excluded, it will cease

to generate difference within the system, so that the flows within the system of exchange will again

tend towards equilibrium and eventual cessation of systemic activity. The importance of the parasite

thus is that, because it cannot but remain something unaccountable, it creates the very opening for the

logic of exchange and calculation, formathesis.

Actor­network theory and Gino’s silence

Actor­network theory can be understood as drawing on the above Serresian neo­monadology to then

return to the structuralist understanding of exchange and the foundation of human institutions,

including the political community (see Serres and Latour, 1995).

The original proponents of actor­network theory, principally Michel Callon (1987) and Bruno Latour

(1987), noted how, despite the common recognition that material artefacts are what enable exchange,

and hence the organisation of human institutions, these artefacts are not granted any agency

comparable to that of human actors, language supposedly being the necessary prerequisite for the

attribution of political agency. This, in their view, was simply nonsensical, given the obvious, intimate

interdependence between social and technical change: one cannot have the one without the other.

07 December 2005: 6

Courting accusations of hylozoism (Schaffer, 1991), Callon and Latour called instead for a symmetric

account of the roles played by all actors involved in any exchange, each understood in terms of their

intrinsic relationality. The insistence on this intrinsic relationality was so uncompromising that

inquiry into the roles of different actors in any particular situation could not but be a radically

empiricist endeavour. From this perspective, all essence was an effect of a particular assemblage, or

‘collective’, which also meant that essence was multiple, or, in neo­monadological terms, that the

ontology of any entity was variable. Actor­network theory thus seemed to respond to the structuralist

impasse over the gift by questioning the very divide between ‘cultures’ upon which Claude Levi­

Strauss’ critique of Marcel Mauss was based: while the obscurity of gift­giving was not to be denied,

such obscurity was to be understood as the effect of a particular form of practice and configuration of

the collective (Latour, 1991: 100­101). This said, one trenchant criticism of actor­network theory has

been that its interest in heterogeneity has been confined to the empirically determinable limits of the

collective, so that the radical alterity of anything like the inscrutable Maussian gods was in fact

excluded a priori (see Lee & Brown, 1994). In Deleuzian, if not also Serresian, terms, the collective

posited by actor­network theory thus shared in the stasis of Foucauldian governmental systems (see

Deleuze, 1988: 124­132). Callon then sought to move beyond the static, governmental composite to a

more dynamic, political composite, by seeking to engage with alterity as that which is outside the

collective. It is this interest that led Callon to Gino.

As we have already noted, in their account of the encounter with Gino, Callon and Vololona

Rabeharisoa posit a subject who works toward the production of silence and obscurity, so that Gino’s

silence should be understood as a political gesture. Noting the importance that philosophers such as

Hannah Arendt have attached to language, their aim is to thus draw attention to the inevitable violence

of the claim that language founds the political community. We are not persuaded, however, that Callon

and Rabeharisoa’s proposed alternative overcomes the difficulties raised by the demand for clarity and

transparency which ultimately underlies the importance that Arendt attached to language. On the one

hand, it should go without saying that, if language is the necessary precondition for the establishment

of a truly just political community, Gino must be excluded. Yet, as Callon and Rabeharisoa cleverly

note, this troubling conclusion rests on an asymmetric account of the clarity delivered by language and

the obscurity that results from silence. They then observe how, on Arendt’s own account of political

life, the clarity of the public sphere is obtained by disentanglement from particular modes of life with

others, chiefly domestic life and its own distinctive demands. By then shifting attention from language

to work, work that can deliver either silence, through disentanglement from relations with particular

others, or dialogue, through entanglement with particular others, Gino’s silence is rendered as a

significant political gesture. Callon and Rabeharisoa not only conclude therefore that work rather than

language should be the foundation for access to the public sphere, but, in keeping with Serres, also

advance the public compossibility of obscure, local moral contexts and universal clarity and

accountability (see also Callon, 2002). On the other hand, while the possibility of multipliying the

spaces of politics and the forms of political exchange is attractive, it also rests on a contradiction,

insofar as obscurity is rendered as the effect of a strategic subject’s calculating practices, so that clear

and distinct ideas once again are the foundation of political being, even if, in this case, they

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paradoxically are clear and distinct ideas about the ways of creating obscurity. In other words, in

rendering obscurity as the effect of a strategic subject’s calculating practices, to thus cast the light of

day in those corners of life with others that once were obscure and so rescue the anthropological

project of the human sciences, Callon and Rabeharisoa ultimately contradict the Serresian­Leibnizian

insight into the irreducible interdependence of clarity and obscurity. 4

We suggest, therefore, that instead of seeking some alternative mathesis, in which those who will not

or cannot speak might have a voice in the construction of a more inclusive political community, it

might be more fruitful to confront the role of the incalculability of parts in the constitution of the

political community. To this end, Jacques Rancière’s writings on the structure of political engagement

are critically important.

The event of politics

In Ten Theses on Politics (2001), Jacques Rancière returns to the foundational texts of political

philosophy that are Plato’s Laws and Aristotle’s Politics, to draw a fundamental distinction between

politics and philosophy. The latter defines political argument as the practice of debating what division

of rights and responsibilities will best ensure the justice of the community. Rancière rejects this

reduction of politics tomathesis because, contra all contractual theories of government from Thomas

Hobbes onward, ‘politics cannot be deduced from the necessity of gathering people into communities’,

and he argues that political engagement should instead be understood as the ‘exception to the

principles according to which this gathering operates’ (Rancière, 2001: para. 6).

The exceptional situation from which Rancière starts his analysis of the political community and its

constitution obtains whenever entitlement to rule is not based on some founding myth and archontic

principle, on the arkhē, but on the drawing of lots. To put the claim another way, politics obtains only

when the right to partake in ruling and being ruled is predicated on one qualification alone, the

absence of any qualification to rule. Only under these conditions is the famous unity of the one and the

many in the demos truly realised. At the same time, Rancière notes how the opponents of democracy,

and none more perceptively than Plato and Aristotle themselves, recognised a fundamental

impropriety of popular objections to the rule of the wealthy (oligoï) and the virtuous (aristoï). Here,

Plato and Aristotle noted, is a part of the community that demands to be counted in the distribution of

rights and responsibilities, on the basis of a qualification that is in fact not properly its own, namely

the freedom (eleutheria) shared by all citizens of the polis alike. Worse, such misappropriation leads

this property­less part to arrogate to itself the right to speak for the community as a whole, for the

demos. If this part can still be said to bring anything properly its own to the debates over the best

division of rights and responsibilities, Plato observed disdainfully, it is dissent alone. More charitably,

this part must either not count at all, or stand for the whole, each exercise in counting being the source

of dissent, raising as it does irresolvable questions about the constitution of the demos. Rancière

concludes on these very grounds that political engagement cannot be reduced to the work of balancing

the rights and responsibilities of different parts of the community, which he labels as work of ‘policing’,

because it must always fail to count that part which can have no place in the ‘partition of the sensible’,

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namely the demos (Rancière, 2001: para. 7). Politics proper is instead the work of disagreeing with the

very terms of the debate over the best organisation of the parts of the community, by calling into

question the identification of particular parts and distinctive qualifications to rule or be ruled, an

identification that must always fail to yield the equation of the one and the many. In other words, there

is politics only when the part that cannot properly be brought into account interrupts the always

already inadequate mathesis on which the constitution of the just community is supposedly

predicated, and it must necessarily be a noisy interruption because the right to speak, on all

contractual theories of government, resides only with those who bring to the community something

recognisably their own. As such, the project of political philosophy, which was inaugurated by Plato

and Aristotle, is always already undone, insofar as it is impossible to reduce the political community to

the figure of the body, both metaphorically, as the Hobbesian figure of the ‘body politick’, and

practically, so as to be able deduce politics ‘from the necessity of gathering people into communities’. It

is on these grounds that, in Dis­Agreement (1999), Rancière speaks of politics as something of a

‘scandal’ to all those who would seek a clear and distinct account thereof (Rancière, 1999: xii).

Rancière’s understanding of the constitution of politics as fundamentally dependent on a part that has

no place in the ‘partition of the sensible’ powerfully resonates with Michel Serres’ understanding that

the vitality of any system depends equally fundamentally on the figure of the ‘parasite’, that which is

outside systems of exchange and yet constitutes these systems. It would thus seem to offer the grounds

for an alternative approach to the problem confronting Michel Callon and Vololona Rabeharisoa. As

Michael Dillon (2003) has noted, however, Rancière advances a structuralist account, in which the

disruptive incommensurability between politics and debates over the best organisation of the

community, marked by the two, inseparable but irreconcilable meanings of demos, is not the marker of

the historical event when the smoothness of chronological time is suddenly interrupted. It is instead

the mechanism on which the entire history of changing political institutions is predicated: there will

always be a miscount of parts. Moreover, following Jacques Derrida, Dillon notes that Rancière thus

evacuates politics of all the violence of that fateful moment in which the miscount becomes evident

and discontent is transformed into political action. Basically, on Rancière’s account, every historically

specific, democratic movement is capable of calculating and recognising the miscount, so that, strictly

speaking, its revindication is never ungrounded and therefore never violent, at least on a Derridean

definition of the term. 5 Jane Bennett, who is engaged in a similar project to our own, insofar as she is

interested in linking Rancière’s writings and the ambitions of actor­network theory to expand

entitlement to political agency beyond the presently agreed boundaries, directs us to the fuller

implications of such a constitution of political engagement when she notes how Rancière restricts

participation in the demos to those ‘beings engaged in a collective destiny through words’ (Rancière,

quoted in Bennett, 2005: 141). Again basically, Rancière’s account of politics entails a closed system,

outside history. As Serres might put it, more forcefully, the exceptional space in which the right to

partake in ruling and being ruled is predicated on one qualification alone, the absence of any

qualification to rule, approximates a system at equilibrium, devoid of any vitality. From this

perspective, there is something of the Freudian ‘death drive’ to Rancière’s construction of politics, and

the task is to reconsider what alternative meaning might be attached to Rancière’s otherwise

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promising notion of the part which injects life into the political community and yet has that has no

place in the ‘partition of the sensible’. Arguably, Serres’ Rome (1983) offers an opportunity for such

reconsideration. Incidentally, Rome, to Serres, is far more interesting than the Athenian polis that

exercises the imagination of political philosophy because Rome was uniquely capable of incorporating

the other, albeit at a bloody price.

Among many episodes recounted in Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, which Serres revisits in Rome, there is

that of Romulus and Remus, the mythical twin brothers who were suckled by a wolf and became the

founders of Rome. At some point, a conflict breaks out over the site of the city each of the brothers

wishes to build, and, in the ensuing brawl between Romulus, Remus and their respective followers,

Remus dies. It is unclear who is at fault, accusations of murder and complaints of victimisation voiced

in turn by everyone involved, but the crowd ultimately turns on Romulus, foreshadowing yet another

death. A group of elders intervenes, however, by hailing Romulus a god, and, because gods may not be

killed, peace is restored and Rome founded. Later, Romulus, the demigod and king, stands before

some of his assembled people, just as a storm breaks. The people temporarily run for cover, and, when

they return, Romulus is nowhere to be found. Another chaotic scene ensues, accusations of murder

being renewed, and, once again, Romulus is hailed a god, now ascended to his rightful place among the

other gods. Serres then notes that a rumour eventually begins to circulate, to the effect that,

[Romulus] has been torn to pieces by the fathers, with their own hands. Every one of them, the story goes, hid a

piece of him in the folds of their robes, and carried it away. Division of power, division of the corpse (Serres,

1991a: 89).

There are a number of aspects about this re­reading of Livy that are worth noting. Firstly, order

repeatedly emerges from bloody chaos. Secondly, Romulus’ identity is indeterminate since he is, at one

time or another, a thief, a murderer, a victim and a god, depending on his situation in a chain of

asymmetric transactions. Thirdly, those who will count in the collective inaugurated by the bloody act

that halts the violent chain are those who hold something thanks to this last act, namely a piece of

Romulus’ corpse. While Serres would thus seem to rehearse René Girard’s thesis that the political

community is constituted by the shame consequent upon an initial act of violence (Girard, 1986), it is

important to note both the manner in which such constitution depends on the circulation of the pieces,

maintained by individual desire not to be the one who is caught with the evidence of the murder, and

that these pieces, these ‘quasi­objects’, together can never add up to the figures of the collective,

Romulus and Rome.As Serres puts it:

The origin of empire is, in my opinion, the death of King Romulus himself. I hazard a tentative hypothesis. The

whole story demonstrates it and leads to it. Empire is the part – imperium is the pars – indeed, the formidable,

hidden division into parts. The operation of breaking up, of cutting up into disparate fragments, and its

impossibility, its interdiction, its secrecy, its simultaneously unthinkable and impracticable nature. The empire

denies being broken into pieces, or it covers its pieces. The empire is broken up; it is not broken up. Empire tells

in one word the entire apotheosis of the god dismembered in the dark night of the storm, the entire flight of the

crowd and its recalling. Empire says, in theory, through its parts and their negation, that the addition of parts,

their presence or their co­presence, is not enough to make an empire. The empire thus is not divided, and if it

07 December 2005: 10

were apportioned, no one would know anymore where or what its portions were. Empire, in one word, speaks of

the unintegrable multiple. Romulus cannot be remade from his separated limbs (Serres, 1991a: 99).

Here is the entirety of Rancière’s argument, except that politics is always police and mathesis, the

latter two always already being undone precisely because every practice of calculation multiplies the

very obscurities that calculation would seek to remove. Importantly, in his own analysis of Rancière’s

writings, Jeremy Valentine (2005) has drawn a very useful distinction between ‘relational’ theories of

politics, such as that which Rancière offers, and ‘foundational’ theories of politics, which must evoke

an original, founding division because there supposedly is no way of deriving conflict from a structural

account of relations between parts. 6 From this perspective, Serres would seem to advocate a

foundational theory, insofar as politics would seem to begin with the sacrifice of the sovereign body.

Strikingly, however, there in fact is nothing sovereign about Romulus, except by retroactively turning a

sometimes thief, murderer and victim into a god and thus setting the scene for tragedy, the favoured

trope of philosophy ever since Plato (Serres, 1991a: 279­282; see also Dillon, 2003). Paraphrasing

Valentine, Romulus is an invention without inventory, because the very act of inventorying keeps

producing more obscurities to be somehow inventoried: posing the question concerning the

foundation of Rome, as Livy does, produces something new and equally obscure, the Empire. Finally,

on this account, parasitism, the exploitative, asymmetric transaction, is the immanent and

unaccountable principle of life itself, so that there is production of ‘difference’, but no Derridean

‘différance’. If this account would appear to legitimate ‘evil’, Serres shares with Rancière the

understanding that evil or injustice resides not in the parasites’ exploitation of existing relations.

Instead, recalling the deathly dimension of a system at equilibrium, evil or injustice lies with the

understanding of politics as the debates between different parts of the community over the distribution

of powers that will equitably divide the community into those who should rule and who should be

ruled, thus guaranteeing everyone’s freedom (see also Assad, 2000).

Conclusion

Michel Callon and Vololona Rabeharisoa’s account of their encounter with Gino, he who meets their

invitation to share his experience of muscular dystrophy and thus help to build a more inclusive bio­

political community with nothing but silence, can be read as a reflection on how to constitute a

community in which agency is not the prerogative any particular actor. Jacques Rancière might speak

of this endeavour as the search for a space in which the right to partake in ruling and being ruled is

predicated on one qualification alone, the absence of any qualification to rule. This is the space of the

demos, insofar as it is only here that the unity of the one and the many, the ultimate aspiration of all

properly democratic revindications, truly obtains. Rancière also notes, however, that the common

construction of politics as an argument over the form of internal relations that will lead to the most

agreeable distribution of rights and responsibilities among the components parts of the political

community is incompatible with any ambition to realising this unity of the one and the many.

Significantly, this is the very construction of politics that Callon and Rabeharisoa endorse as they call

for the displacement of language in favour of work, so that Gino might no longer be excluded from the

political community, from the community of political agents. True politics, Rancière argues, consists

instead in contesting any reduction of political life to the exercise of the rights and responsibilities

07 December 2005: 11

proper to each part of the community, because the calculations on which such distribution of rights

and responsibilities rest cannot but fail to take into proper account the part that has no place in the

‘partition of the sensible’, the demos. Simply put, a truly political engagement is wholly

incommensurable with philosophical reflection on the best distribution of rights of responsibilities,

hence the scandal of politics. We have then suggested that instead of seeking some system of

equivalence that might incorporate Gino into the political community, despite his silence on the

matter, it may be more productive to recognise how the very calculative reason on which distributive

notions of justice rest depends in turn on the silence and obscurity of figures such as Gino. Gino, we

maintain, should be understood as a figure of the radically inhuman, the sacred, which raises

questions, but does not answer them, and, as such, keeps the calculating machine in self­transforming

motion. This said, we also noted how Rancière’s alternative construction of politics actually rests on

calculation as a regulative principle, despite Rancière’s claim that such principle is incompatible with

any properly political engagement, for questions about the part that has no place in ‘the partition of

the sensible’ in the calculation of the proper distribution of rights and responsibilities will themselves

require some form of counting. In other words, Rancière would seem to assume the self­evidence and

transparency of democratic revindications. From this perspective, not only does the part that has no

place in the ‘division of the sensible’ take on the characteristics of the ‘excluded middle’, the

ontologically prior condition of possibility for the exercise of politics, but the distance between what

Jeremy Valentine has called ‘relational’ and ‘foundational’ theories of politics is also substantially

diminished. Drawing on Michel Serres’ understanding of the co­constitutive relationship between

clarity and obscurity, we suggest instead that figures such as Gino, or concepts such as the part that

has no place in the ‘division of the sensible’, should be understood as the Serresian ‘third instructed’

(Serres, 1991b), that is, the produced obscurities that are external, but none the less enable the

continuing vitality of the political collective: every exercise in counting the parts of the political

community will produce yet more parts, novel parts, simultaneously outside and inside the

community. As Serres reminds us in Rome, significantly subtitled The Book of Foundations,

A good theory of knowledge subtly negotiates its associated misunderstanding; a good theory of science knows

what it can know, it knows the workings of the secret and strict limits at which knowledge turns back into the

unknown. Livy is sharper, more subtle and subtle in the epistemology that his story implies than a philosophy or

theory that plays at clear ideas. He shows us simultaneously the thing and its shadow: the origin, the murder and

its re­covering (Serres, 1991a: 233; emphasis added).

In sum, Rancière’s part that has no place in the ‘division of the sensible’, that which undermines any

equation of politics and philosophy, is not ‘always already’, but the inevitable effect of questioning any

present order. Finally, if this answer to the question ‘Who is Gino?’ seems unsatisfactory, it has to do

with the greatest parasite of them all, the authorial voice which would seek to bring to presence the

manifold complexity of the world. As Serres puts it in The Third Instructed (1991b):

I am sure, absolutely beyond any hope that it might be otherwise, that there is a gap, a bizarre trifle in this dense

and inescapable pantheism, a strange exception and source of all anguish. In this divine concert traversed by

noise, it is that me and me alone, that am not of God. Only this empty trifle is not of God. This is the new, sharply

defined, inflection of the old atheist adage: Here, there is no God. Here, and here alone, God absents himself, but

07 December 2005: 12

this locus of atheism is an integral aspect of fate. Everything is God except he who loosens the pen amid tears, to

write these words (Serres, 1991b: 230­231).

In seeking to describe the parasite and all that it enables, Serres is all too aware of being caught in the

same contradiction as Callon and Rabeharisoa are, when confronted with Gino. 7 Bearing in mind the

philosophical aspirations to the commutability of the transcendental self and the self­enclosed political

community, each transparent to itself, Gino, he who meets interpellation with silence, is the very

concrete embodiment of the ‘absent centre’ of political ontology, not always already haunting politics,

but constantly produced and reproduced by the search for the foundations of politics.

07 December 2005: 13

Notes

1 To avoid any confusion, in this essay, we follow Foucault (1994: 344­387), collapsing historical

differences between the ‘social’ and ‘human’ sciences into a single enterprise, concerned with

providing an objective account of the human subject and its constitution in relation to others.

2 For a more extensive discussion of the intellectual cartography on which this section is based, see

McDonald (2004).

3 For alternative reflections on the intellectual proximity of Derrida and Serres, see Boyne (1998) and

Brown (2002).

4 Admittedly, in his re­reading of Plato’s Gorgias, Latour (1999) draws a categorical distinction

between metis and mathesis, offering the famous opposition between Callicles’ use of rhetoric and

Socrates’ use of reason as examples of the two forms of work, one strategic and the other not. While

this would seem to invalidate our criticism, it is important to note that, for Aristotle, rhetoric was no

less transparent than the use of reason, so thatmetis and mathesis are in fact but two different forms

of calculative practice. We are grateful to Jeff Kochan for sharing with us his own, much more detailed,

unpublished analysis of Latour’s reading of the Gorgias.

5 Importantly, while offering a very important critical reading of Rancière’s account of politics, Dillon’s

evocation of the tragic dimension of the fundamentally ungrounded historical decision to act, suffers

from melancholia for an always already unobtainable original plenitude. Admittedly, on a Derridean

interpretation, Dillon’s argument could be understood in terms of mourning rather than melancholia.

If however the ‘work of mourning’ is as structured by deferral as any other work, then the Freudian

distinction between mourning and melancholia, on which the latter obtains whenever the subject

cannot objectify loss and so becomes mired in itself, and the former whenever the loss is objectified so

at to effect a distance from this loss, is untenable. Mourning might then be said to be inescapably

tinged by melancholia (see also Derrida, 1994).

6 Significantly, Valentine also traces an intellectual lineage of ‘foundational’ theories of politics, linking

political philosophers as different as Arendt and Slavoj Žižek. We would also locate Derrida, and Dillon

as well, in this intellectual lineage.

7 For an alternative reading of this passage, see Assad (2001).

07 December 2005: 14

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