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UNIVERSALISM OF THE COMMON


CESARE CASARINO
[Humankind] always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation. Karl Marx 1 Surplus, Value, and the Common One does not know what one writes. This truism of that form of thought which is writing holds all the more true perhaps when the one writing is not an individual but the aleatory product of a wayward conversation, the plural subject of a singular yet common encounter. It is under the sign of this truism that the present essay is born, as I return to the encounter that took place between Antonio Negri and me in a book titled In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics, as I revisit here that encounter in the attempt to understand and, indeed, to know exactly what it is that one wrote there, so as, hopefully, to go beyond it. In particular, it is the titular object of praise that continues to linger and to preoccupy me as the eminently unfinished business of that book: the concept of the common was certainly praised yet not fully given, grasped, defined there. In the essay, Surplus Common, that serves as a preface to that book, I sketched a possible genealogy of the concept of the common by interrelating what I took to constitute its earliest proto-modern intimations in Dante Alighieris De vulgari eloquentia and De monarchia, and its latest postmodern reincarnations in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. (Hardt and Negris subsequent collaborative undertaking, Commonwealth, had not yet been published.) Crucially, I sketched this genealogy by putting Alighieris and Hardt and Negris works in conversation with one another via the intermediary and nodal figures of Aristotle, Karl Marx, and Baruch Spinoza. The aim of such a genealogy, however, was to approach the concept of the common indirectly, transversally, secondarily. I analyzed, interwove, and deployed the various articulations of the common in these thinkers so as to produce another and primarythat is, logically anteriorconcept, which I referred to as surplus common [pluscomune]. In doing so, I hoped in effect to re-elaborate a distinctly Marxian theoretical-methodological maneuver. Much like Marx shows in the Grundrisse that, paradoxically, the creation of surplus value, namely, the immediate result of the process of capitalist circulation, is the presupposition of capital itself [326],1 much like Marx demonstrates, in other words, that surplus value is at
I am very grateful to Timothy Campbell for having invited me to the Commonalities: Theorizing the Common in Contemporary Italian Thought conference at Cornell University in September 2010 where I delivered an earlier version of this essayas well as to all the other conference organizers. I am also very grateful to Jodi Dean, whose remarkable response to my lecture at the conference I fear I may not have done justice to either there or here. 1 See also 32627. diacritics Volume 39.4 (2009) 162176 2012 by the Johns Hopkins University Press

once presupposition and result of capitalist valorization, and much like Negri, therefore, argues in Marx beyond Marx that the theory of value . . . can exist only as a partial and abstract subordinate of the theory of surplus value [82],2 I used my genealogy to show how the common and its forms find their logical, transcendental yet immanent, precondition in a concept of surplus common. In short, I tried to show that surplus common is at once presupposition and result of the common. This homology is methodological, in the sense that I approached the question of the common in the same way in which Marx (and Negri) approached the question of value. This homology, however, is also theoretical, since my aim, in the end, was to show how any adequate theorization of the common in modernity and beyond not only must consider the essential function of the common within the process of extraction of surplus value but also must confront, on the one hand, the actual identity of the common with capital, and, on the other hand, its potential difference from capital, and hence must investigate the complex relations of immanence among surplus, value, and the common. I approached the question of the common in the same way in which Marx approached the question of value not only because I found Marxs method of transcendental critique to be particularly effective but also because I understood these two questions to be intimately related to each other in capitalist modernity and postmodernity. If this genealogical investigation aimed to show a) that surplus common is the condition of possibility of the common in the same way in which surplus value is the condition of possibility of value, and b) that value and the common may be theorized adequately only in relation to each other, that is because such a Marxian genealogy was rooted in a particular ontology, namely, in a particular interpretation of Spinozas ontology as a monist ontology that posits being as surplus in relation to itself. This is an ontology for which being is always already itself and its own surplus, itself and its own immanent cause. In my Spinozian-Marxian investigation, being involves the one and only surplus that may determine and be determined in different ways. In this investigation, thus, surplus value and surplus common name two radically different yet structurally homologous, politically antagonistic yet historically as well as logically co-primeval, ways of materializing the one and only surplus within capitalist modernity and postmodernity.3 This implies also that the problem with surplus value is not surplus but value, that the problem with the production of surplus value, namely, exploitation, does not lie in the production of surplus per se but lies instead specifically in its production in and as value. What is exploitative and nullifying is to materialize surplus in the forms of valueand especially in the form of value par excellence, that is, moneythat anchor property (whether private or public) and its attendant and constitutive forms of subjectivity. What is destructive and self-destructive is to produce surplus and to experience being as valuable rather than as common, to produce and to experience ones own surplus, ones own share in being, precisely as ones to ownand hence as always liable to being captured, being dispossessed of itself, and being (dis)owned by othersrather than producing it and experiencing it instead as that which must not be disowned at any cost and indeed cannot be owned by anyone at all. What is nihilism supreme is to deny or to foreclose altogether that surplus constitutes ones own share in being qua immanent cause (which is to say, that it constitutes selfdetermination) only to the degree to which it is shared in common rather than owned as value. In the end, my investigation returns again and again to Marx and Spinoza because these thinkers dared something that in capitalist modernity is as difficult as it is rare: they
2 3

See also 83. In articulating the complex relations between surplus value and surplus common in the context of that genealogy, I found Kiarina Kordelas theorization of the concept of surplus to be invaluable. She elaborates this theorization in $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan, which I discuss in Surplus Common 25760n39, 26566n71, 272n97, but see also 11 and 248n18.

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not only understood surplus as being nothing outside its effects or determinations (and hence also as not being anything necessarily, including capitalist); they also ventured to imagine surplus as being produced, materialized, incorporated, and lived not in the forms of value but in the forms of the common. In Marx and Spinoza we may sense a world beyond value and in common.4 I will return to the question of a world at once valueless and common. For the moment, I wish to restate one of the intrinsic limits of my previous genealogical investigation: it produced the concept of surplus common as the cause-effect of any form of the common whatsoever, and hence, for better and for worse, it treated the concept of the common as secondary to, and as a partial and abstract subordinate of, that prior and primary concept. This might be why the yields of that genealogy, such as they are, are also not entirely adequate, and why I feel compelled now to revisit the concept of the common in a way that is less genealogical and indirect, and somewhat more structural and direct. This essay, thus, wishes to complement rather than to abjure or even to rectify that earlier one: the two stand together as companion pieceswhich is why I have appealed to your patience here, as I proceeded to encapsulate some of the earlier arguments that have enabled and necessitated what follows. 2 The Concept of the Common What is the function of a concept? In considering the common as a political-philosophical concept, I find it useful to begin with an answer Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari give to this question in their last collaborative work, What Is Philosophy?: All concepts are connected to problems without which they would have no meaning and which can themselves only be isolated or understood as their solution emerges [16]. The function of a concept becomes intelligible in terms of this triangulation: concept, problem, solution. As articulated by Deleuze and Guattari, this triangulation has several implications. First of all, a simultaneity of problem and solution is being posited here: a problem comes into being and can be formulated as such only to the extent to which its solution is already in process, unfolding, surfacingin short, already present in however indeterminate a form. Secondly, a concept is related essentially and necessarily to this simultaneous double emergence of problem and solution: both its existence and its raison dtre are at stake and never cease to depend on such an emergencewhich is to say that a concept is the effect or by-product of the mutually determining relation between problem and solution. Thirdly, the function of a concept, thus, can only be a double function of coadjutant. Its function, as it were, has two facesone turned toward its problem and the other turned toward its solution: a concept may help at once a) in posing a problem adequately and b) in articulating a solution distinctly. The concept, hence, is crucial in constituting the double emergence of problem and solution. At once cause and effect, the concept reveals that the triangulation of concept, problem, and solution functions according to immanent causality. What is then the function of the concept of the common? Of what exactly is the concept of the common the cause-effect? If a concept is meaningless and lifeless outside of its triangulation, what is the triangulation that appertains and gives life to the concept of the common? The concept of the common finds its proper triangulation in both modernity and postmodernity in relation to the Marxian antagonistic dyad of capital and labor, or,
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I return in more detail to the convergences (and divergences) between Marx and Spinoza in my essay Marx before Spinoza.

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more precisely, of surplus value and labor power. To be sureas my earlier investigation emphasizedthe concept of the common has an ancient history that has its roots deep in the Aristotelian and Scholastic philosophical traditions, that undergoes momentous reformulations in the early modern era (especially in Spinozas thought), and, hence, that well precedes Marx and his theorization of capital-labor relations. The function of a concept, however, may change considerably even as its structure may remain largely unaltered: the same concept may find its proper discursive home in a number of different triangulations over the course of time. In our present historical conjuncture, the cause-effect function of the common consists at once in posing the problem of capitalism as production of surplus value, and in articulating the solution of labor power as distinct yet indiscernible from such a process of production, in philosophically adequate and politically effective manners. Let us begin with the problem. The concept of the common helps us understand clearly the differentia specifica of the contemporary, qualitatively dominant, now fully global and tendentially universal, third phase of the capitalist mode of production. If the first and second phases may be characterized as mercantile capitalism and industrial capitalism respectively, our third phase has been given many useful names, each highlighting one or more of its prominent aspects, such as, among others, late capitalism, flexible capitalism, postmodern capitalism, global capitalism, cognitive capitalism, post-Fordist capitalism, real subsumption of society under capital, biopolitical production or biocapital tout court, and, most recently, even casino capitalism. For my purposes, however, this third phase is best understood and defined as communicative capitalism. All three phases can be called capitalism since they all share in the production of surplus value. Each of these phases, however, produces surplus value in different ways, which is what the attributive qualifiers mercantile, industrial, and communicative signify. (Obviously, these three modalities of capitalism are not necessarily mutually exclusive with one another, are often complementary, and are now fully cumulative.) Communicative capitalism produces surplus value primarily through communication, and especially through the communication of thought, language, and affectand hence also of that assemblage of thought, language, and affect which is knowledgein all of their myriad forms.5 This is to say that in communicative capitalism the initial raw materi5 Arguably, Negri is the first thinker to have theorized explicitly the essential function of communication in the third phase of the capitalist mode of production. Though such a theorization is already evident in his writings of the 1970s (e.g., Dalloperaio massa alloperaio sociale [From Mass Worker to Socialized Worker]), it is articulated most clearly from the mid 1980s onward in a series of arguments that lay the foundations for current investigations regarding the convergence of capitalism and biopolitics across a variety of disciplinary discourses and political projects (including Negri and Hardts own investigations on such a convergence in Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth); see, for example, this passage from the essay Expropriation in Mature Capitalism (written between 1985 and 1986, and first published in 1989), in which Negri points to the expropriation of communication as being instrumental in the shift from Fordism (and its mass worker) to post-Fordism (and its socialized worker): Production consists not only in the production of commodities, but in all the conditions necessary for the existence of productive subjectivities. Just as, for the mass worker, capital generated adequate wage-conditions, so today, for the socialized worker, capital tries to establish the social conditions in which communication is to take place. Communication is to the socialized worker what the wage relation was to the mass worker. . . . The forms of domination and the types of expropriation of communication typical of advanced capitalism thus represent a very high degree of control, domination and dictatorship. But communication is life. In advanced capitalism, therefore, conflict, struggle and diversity are focused on communication, with capital, by means of communication, trying to preconstitute the determinants of life [118; trans. modified]. Similar arguments are found in Twenty Theses on Marx: Interpretation of the Class Situation Today (written around the same time, and first published in 1991), in which Negri identifies communication as the dominant form of value in the moment of real subsumption

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als, the final products, as well as the process of production itselfthat is, beginning, middle, and endare all by definition common: there is no such a thing as a solitary thought, as an individual language, as a personal affect, or as private knowledge (even though we may experience all of the above as that which is most intimate and most unique about ourselves), and hence to express oneself intellectually, linguistically, affectively is to activate and mobilize exquisitely shared, collective, common capacities.6 In communication, everything is common: its potentialities, its actualities, as well as the processes that continuously turn the former into the latter. It is in this sense that the concept of the common helps us pose the problem adequately: the function of the common relative to its problem is that it enables us to understand, define, and name the current mode of production as communicative capitalism. (An aside on the term communicative capitalism is necessary here. This term was coined by Jodi Dean, who deploys it very effectively in her trenchant critiques of the contemporary and celebratory ideology that attributes democratic potentials to networked technologies of communication and their cultures. My general understanding of this term is similar to hers, to the extent to which we both posit it as a diagnostic instrument to identify and explain what we concur constitutes the defining features of contemporary capitalism. The specific uses to which we put it, however, are different in the end: whereas Dean ultimately is concerned with unveiling and traversing the fantasies of communication that sustain communicative capitalism, I am concerned with highlighting and asserting the central functions of the common and its forms both in communication and hence in communicative capitalism as well as in any possible alternative to communicative capitalism and to its reified forms of communication along with their attendant and constitutive fantasies. This means, among other things, thatto put it admittedly in an overly simplistic fashionwhereas for Dean communication is the problem today, for me communication is both the problem and the solution. Though I largely share Deans salutary skepticism with respect to the rampant and mystifying euphoria surrounding the liberatory potentials of networked technologies of communication, as well as her firm conviction that such a euphoria forecloses politics, nonetheless I find the commonnamely, the transcendental precondition of any form of communication, whether reified or notto constitute the crucial reservoir for anti-capitalist and non-capitalist political projects.)7
of society under capital [152]. All theoretical-methodological differences notwithstanding, such remarkable and pioneering insights regarding the crucial role played by communication in contemporary capitalism find their implicit precursors in a series of diverse early-to-mid-twentiethcentury investigations ranging from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimers theorization of the culture industry to Alfred Sohn-Rethels theorization of the relation between intellectual labor and manual labor to Marshall McLuhans theorization of media networks to Guy Debords theorization of the society of the spectacle and beyond. Recently, Paolo Virno has drawn attention to the resonances across the parallel branches of this heterogeneous intellectual genealogy, thereby intertwining and re-elaborating them, so as to formulate the following hypothesis: My hypothesis is that the communication industry (or rather, the spectacle industry, or even yet, the culture industry), on the one hand, is an industry among others, with its specific techniques, its particular procedures, its peculiar profits, etc., and, on the other hand, also plays the role of industry of the means of production. Traditionally, the industry of the means of production is the industry that produces machinery and other instruments to be used in the most varied sectors of production. However, in a situation in which the means of production are not reducible to machines but consist of linguisticcognitive competences inseparable from living labor, it is legitimate to assume that a conspicuous part of the so-called means of production consists of techniques and communicative procedures [Grammar of the Multitude 61; trans. modified]. 6 On this matter, see also Giorgio Agambens essay Form-of-Life 911. 7 For Deans arguments regarding communicative capitalism, see at least Publicitys Secret 114 and especially 34; but see also Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies 1948. Such arguments, on the one hand, resonate significantly with earlier investigations by Negri and others, and,

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Such is the problemcommunicative capitalism. What and where is its solution? Among the merits of Deleuze and Guattaris formulation is its non-utopian character: if the problem can be at all conceptualized, that means that its solution is already conceptualizable and actualizable here and now (as Marx emphasizes in the epigraph to this essay). The solution to the problem does not exist in some other, transcendent spatiotemporal realm. As I pointed out earlier, after all, the triangulation of concept, problem, and solution functions according to immanent causality. This means, however, that both solution and problem come into being and share in the same plane of immanence, that they are part and parcel of one another to begin withand hence that it may be very difficult at times to differentiate between them. This is why earlier I also stated that if the first function of a concept is to pose a problem adequately, its second function is to articulate a solution distinctly, namely, to posit a clear distinction between solution and problem as they emerge simultaneously and immanently. The function of the common relative to its solution, thus, is to enable us to distinguish between capital and labor, between surplus value and labor power, within a process of production that is driven by intellectual, linguistic, and affective communication. For this crucial distinction to become at all intelligible, it is necessary to conceptualize the common as having two irreducible yet immanent aspectsa potential and an actual one. If our current phase of the capitalist mode of production is driven by communication of that which is commonthought, language, affect, knowledgethen it follows that there can be no difference of any kind between capitalism and the common. If the common is considered only in its actual aspectsfor example, as actual producers or as actual productsthen capitalism and the common are absolutely indistinguishable from one another: as producing products of the common, today we are capitalism. Matters begin to look different if the common is considered from the standpoint of its potential aspect. Potentiality, on the one hand, is always embedded and incorporated in that which is fully actual and therefore nowadays is always fully within capitalism, and, on the other hand, is not of capitalism and does not belong to capitalism in and of itself. Moreover, potentiality qua potentiality does not belong to anything or anybody, and, in fact, cannot be conceptualized in terms of propertywhether private or public. Potentiality, rather, is common. There is a privileged, essential relation between potentiality and the common, in the sense that if the common partakes both of actuality and potentiality, potentiality can only be shared and in common: potentiality constitutes our common substance. The common in its potential aspect today is nothing other than the assemblage of those capacities that do not belong to anyone and in which we all share: linguistic faculty, intellectual powers, as well as the capability to affect and to be affected. But this is nothing other than labor power itself, which Marx defines famously in Capital as the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being [270]. Labor power is the name Marx gives to human potentiality under capital, and, as I have argued, potentiality is always common. After all, as Marx also shows in Capital, that aggregate of potentialities that is labor power and that is incorporated in a specific human being is itself the product of social cooperation, is itself part and parcel of a collective power of production, in the first place.8 In short, the function of the common relative to its solution is twofold: 1) to make explicit something that had been implicit in Marxs definition all along, namely, that his momentous discovery (i.e., the concept of labor power) makes sense only as a concept of the common, that our capacity to produce and reproduce ourselves and the world we inhabitindeed, our ability to become different from what we areis shared, collective, and common; 2) to
on the other hand, are crucially (and profitably) inflected through a psychoanalytic problematic that is absent in Negri. Regarding these earlier investigations, see note 5 above. 8 Marx goes to great lengths to make this point in detail in chapter 13 of Capital 43954.

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show distinctly that, even though labor power intended as our common transformative capacity is activated by as well as actualized in and as capital, there is nothing inherently and essentially capitalist about such a capacity per se, and that, hence, it may be put to work for and actualized in forms other than the form of value. 3 A Universalism for the Common Human beings have nothing essentially in common. Human beings do not share in essences or identities, however defined. Human beings, however, do share in labor power, that is, in a collective assemblage of common transformative capacitiesnone of which constitute actual essences. Human beings share common potentials, which is why they may also share common projects. It is on these bases and on these bases alone (common potentials and common projects) that it is at all possible to speak of a common humanityand a common humanity is precisely not the human community. (I hope to have made clear that the common has nothing at all to do either with community intended as Gemeinschaft or with society intended as Gesellschaft and has everything to do instead with communication as defined above.) The politics appertaining to the concept of the common demands that we reclaim and reformulate in non-essentialist terms such pernicious, long-discredited, yet still fully operative categories as humanity, human nature, and universalism.9 The politics of the common demands a new theory and a new practice of universal notionsand, indeed, a new type of universalism altogether, a universalism of common potentials and common projects.10 There are plenty of valid reasons, of course, to mistrust universalism, as we have learned by intellectuals of the stature of, say, Samir Amin, just to mention one of the most forceful critics of that universalism that goes by the name of Eurocentrism. Indeed, universalism has constituted and continues to constitute possibly the most effective ideological weapon of that history which has been the hallmark of modernity and postmodernity alike, and about which G. W. F. Hegel could say late in life that it is no more than this slaughter-bench, upon which the happiness of nations, the wisdom of states, and the virtues of individuals were sacrificed [24]. And Hegel is indeed relevant here. The universalism in question, in fact, has manifested itself primarily in two dominant formsa Hegelian one and a Kantian one. Hegelian forms of universalism function according to synthesizable contradictions, and determine the identity of the totality (e.g., Europe) by means of a relative and recuperative negation of all that is perceived as not sharing in the essence of the totality. Hegelian universalisms selectively sublate the different into the identical. Such Hegelian universalisms find their complement in those Kantian universalRecently, Virno has made the concept of human nature the object of a series of sustained and thought-provoking philosophical investigations. See especially Scienze sociali e natura umana and Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, especially part 2, Jokes and Innovative Action. 10 I have commented elsewhere on the recent efforts to reconceptualize universalism for revolutionary political projects (especially in the works of thinkers such as Slavoj iek and Alain Badiou). I have noted also that I still find Deleuze and Guattaris earlier efforts in this direction to be overall more fruitful than current and ongoing debates (e.g., as when, in discussing the question of minorities in A Thousand Plateaus, they argue in effect that the particular is revolutionary to the extent to which it challenges the worldwide axiomaticor, in a different terminology, global capitalismand that it is precisely in its ability to pose such a challenge that the universal aspect of the particular resides). See Casarino, The Southern Answer 682n11.
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isms which function instead according to dynamic and non-synthesizable antinomies, and which determine the identity of the totality by means of a relative yet non-recuperative negation of all that is perceived as not sharing in the essence of the totality. Kantian universalisms selectively excise the different from the identical. If the most dangerous political manifestations of the former amount to total assimilation, integration, and domestication, the most dangerous political manifestations of the latter amount to complete ostracism and extermination. Both, therefore, lead to the same endthe erasure of difference. This, of course, is a well-known story. My point here is, above all, that both types of universalismwhether dialectical and co-optive or antinomial and obliterativedestroy difference twice over: in order either to sublate it into identity or to excise it from identity, they need to posit difference as secondary, relational, and relative rather than as primary, non-relational, and absolute; that is, they must conceive of the different as different from something (or even as different from itself) rather than as different per sein short, rather than as singularity. These two universalisms and their variants turn the absolutely singular into the relatively different so as to destroy the latter by opposing it to the identical either dialectically or antinomically. To put it another way: both universalisms destroy singularity at once by relativizing it as difference and by negating the latter through identity. This is to say that the real target of such universalisms is not difference but absolute difference, that is, singularity. And it is the casethough it would take me further afield to substantiate herethat singularity constitutes such a target because it has a privileged and essential relation to the common, that the dialectical binary of identity and difference obscures precisely the complementary dyad of the singular and the common.11 It is in this sense that capitalism needs to be understood as a universalism in its own right, as the universalism of value. Capitalism owes much of its success to the fact that it has effected an ambitious integration of the two aforementioned, distinct yet related, forms of universalism, thereby producing a complex ideological war machine that is all the more effective for being absolutely self-contradictory. Many of the political attempts to counter such a Janus-headed war machine have perceived and hence attacked only one of its aspectsthereby falling prey all the more easily to the other aspect and hence failing in the end. Some of the most recurrent among these failed (or, at best, very limited) attempts consist of the various political impasses reached when re-deploying binaries such as identity and difference, or the private and the publicbinaries whose foundation has been an idealist and universalist concept of human essence all along, and whose function has been at once to exploit and to foreclose all that is neither private nor public, neither identical nor different, namely, the common itself. Put differently, one cannot fight the universalism of value effectively by brandishing either side of these binaries or even both sides at once, because such binaries function according to the relativizing logic of equivalence, according to the law of value. If we have any hope to defeat such lethal universalisms based on shared essences, on shared identities, and on value, we need to steep the politics of the common in a universalism based on common potentials and common projects. It is precisely because today capitalism shows more than ever its true universalist colors that we need to respond in kind with universalist aspirations of our own. If we are to oppose and to change a system

11 In Marx before Spinoza, I have argued that the concepts of the singular and of the common constitute a complementary dyad in Spinoza. For a similar argument (though with respect to Duns Scotus and to Gilbert Simondon), see Virnos excellent essay Angels and the General Intellect: Individuation in Duns Scotus and Gilbert Simondon. On the relation between the singular and the common, see also Hardt and Negri, Multitude 12527, 198, 204, 34849.

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that brings us together only to the extent to which it tears us apart, it is necessary that we posit and affirm a universalism of the common.12 4 Communism as Universalism of the Common If I conclude this essay by saying that such a universalism of the common bears the name of communism, you may think that I have been treating the common as no more than a Trojan horse, whose secret content can now finally come out, reveal itself, and wage war. You may think that the common and its universalism have been here no more than a pretext for re-exhuming communism yet again, for bringing it back to life in a different guise. And if that is what you think, you may well be rightbut only in part. In calling the universalism of the common communism, in fact, I mean to suggest above all that communism needs to be thought in terms of the common and of its universalism, and hence that communism needs to be rethought as a universalism of common potentials and common projects. I am sure I do not need to point out, after all, that only too often communism has not constituted such a universalism, that only too often communism has been conceptualized and put into practice instead as a variation on that universalism of value which separates the common from itself and from its formssee, most emblematically, that staggering betrayal of communism that was the Soviet experiment, which Vladimir Ilyich Lenin himself approvingly called State Capitalism [13], which has haunted all coming communism, and which has weighed like a nightmare on the brain of the living. Blame the Soviet nightmare for the following (somewhat personal) excursus. It is, of course, because of the obstinate persistence of such a nightmarish weight well into our present that so many who consider themselves to be on the left deem communism (as a term and as a concept) to be irredeemable and unpronounceable, or, at any rate, unserviceable, or, at the very least, impossible to invoke without the (by now only too predictable and hence all the more exhausting) ideological abjurations, conceptual convolutions, lexical contortions, and so on. It is a testament to the inevitable difficulties involved whenever trying merely to wrap ones lips around the word communism that even a philosopher of the caliber of tienne Balibarfor whom I have profound respectis not exempt from having to perform linguistic-conceptual somersaults when it comes to this matter: in a recent exchange with Negri, Balibar maintains that, due to its disastrous twentieth-century history, communism today must be formulated not as an alternative to capitalism but in terms of an alternative to the alternative as it was historically realized [Balibar and Negri 321]. Though a tad cumbersome (stylistically and otherwise), this statement is certainly warranted and endorsable. And yet I must add that there are those for whomdue to generational or other reasonscommunism never was historically realized, that is, never had anything to do with historical actualizations of the state form such as the USSR or Maoist China or even with semi-actualizations such as the PCI and the other various communist parties in the so-called West (regardless of whether or not they came to espouse The Historical Compromise, The Third Way, Eurocommunism, or other such social-democratic chimeras). This is not to deny either the existence of such actualizations and semi-actualizations or the importance of understanding them and their renditions of communisman importance that Balibar underscores
The importance of thinking the common in terms of universalismor, rather, universalityhas been emphasized also by Balibar in ways that are different from, though not mutually exclusive with, my own. See Balibar and Negri 32021.
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and articulates compellingly in the aforementioned exchange. This is simply to say that there are those for whom communism constituted a signifier whose immense, irresistible power was directly proportional to its emptiness, a signifier that never corresponded to any actual, historical signified. There are those for whom communism was that floating signifier of which Claude Lvi-Strauss writes that it is the servitude of all finite thought, but also the promise of all art, all poetry, all mythic and aesthetic inventionand which, as Deleuze adds, is also the promise of all revolutions [Deleuze 49].13 (I know I am not alone when I say that, growing up in the intensely politicized Italy of the 1970s, I started calling myself communist with the nave stubbornness, and with the quasi-animalistic mistrust toward adult projects and institutions, of which only an eleven-year-old may be capable. I called myself communist with fierce defiance yet without knowing exactly what I meant by it, and so I read The Communist Manifesto in order to find out. I called myself communist even more defiantly after reading The Communist Manifesto precisely because, as I saw it, not only had nothing I read in that intoxicating book come to pass anywhere, but nobody seemed to have any sincere interest in making it come to pass in the first place, including the many adult card-carrying members of the communist party I knew so well. My reasoning was simple enough: the family had not been destroyed, property still existed, exploitation was alive and well, class struggle raged unabated . . . therefore I called myself communist.) In short, there are those for whom communism was politically determining and constituting precisely because it was perceived, rightly or wrongly, as never having been instituted: our constitution as political beings occurred in the very act of calling ourselves communists in the absence of any type of communist project or institution with which we could possibly identify or even sympathize. For those, then, communism named the void of the historical situationhistory degree zeroand it is upon such a void that new forms of life may be built, it is across such a void that desire unfolds and unravels most intensely. For those, then, communism could only elicit an unapologetic desire to experiment radically with life, that is, with its available historical forms and with the void they inevitably encompass and jealously guard (which, for many, meant first of all to struggle with, within, and against that form of property relation which is the family). Jacques Rancires words thus strike a deep chord when he writes: The only communist legacy that is worth examining is the multiplicity of forms of experimentation of the capacity of anybody, yesterday and today. The only possible form of communist intelligence is the collective intelligence constructed in those experimentations [176]. This implies, among other things, that communism has an ancient historyone that certainly underwent specific redeterminations under the capitalist mode of production, and that predates, and has not always overlapped with, the history of Marxism.14 And here the excursusif not the nightmarecomes to an end. Still, why communism today? Does the common really need communism at this point in history? Lately, we have been hearing these questions with increasing frequency from a variety of quarters, as a significant number of thinkers once again have been formulating as well as answering them (though it should be noted that some of these thinkers had never stopped asking about and after communism).15 The reasons for what constitutes nothing short of a communist revival are complex, and they certainly include the current
See also Deleuze 4851. I have made a similar argument in more detail elsewhere; see Makdisi, Casarino, and Karl. 15 I am referring to recent works such as, among others, Hardt and Negris important Commonwealth, which returns to a discourse of communism that Multitude had cast aside; Ali, The Idea of Communism; Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy and The Communist Hypothesis; as well as the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities 2009 conference, On the Idea of Communism, along with the subsequent volume edited by Douzinas and iek; and the special issue of Rethinking Marxism, The Common and the Forms of the Commune, edited by Anna Curcio andCeren zseluk.
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and ongoing global financial crisis that started, most immediately, in 2008.16 To these highly welcome debates, I wish to add one simple point. The point here is not only to rescue and to reclaim communismas a term, as a philosophical concept, and as a political projectfrom disgrace, oblivion, or both (though such a rescue would already constitute an important achievement, if only from the standpoint of historical record and historical memory). The point is that myriad different and apparently unrelated political struggles around the world today find their common denominator in the common. These are not only struggles to resist and to reverse the current and ongoing rampant expropriation and privatization of the common in all of its forms at the not-so-invisible hand of neoliberal globalization; these are also struggles to experiment with new forms of the common and, as Gigi Roggero has argued, to institute the common, to create institutions of the common [36570].17 Othersmost recently, Hardt and Negri in Commonwealth as well as in their forthcoming Declarationhave elaborated incisive and detailed accounts of such worldwide struggles, to which I refer you.18 My point here is that communism owes its renewed and urgent relevance to the presence of such struggles rather than the other way around: it is for this reason above allnamely, because of such strugglesthat it is legitimate and indispensable to talk about communism today.19 This means also that communism is an uncompromisingly non-utopian project that is rooted in (an analysis of) the here and now: these are actually existing struggles and this is actually existing communismtruly quotidian, ordinary, common communism. From Marx onward, the argument has been made too many times already that capitalism is its own gravedigger, that it produces the conditions for its own destruction, that it paves the way to communism, and so onand this is an argument that may elevate itself from the level of clich only in those rare cases in which it is reformulated in strictly non-teleological terms. Given how well capitalism learns from and thrives on its own intrinsic and structural contradictions, after all, I see no reason to rejoice in such contradictions. Given the multitude of past and present struggles in which what is at stake is above all the common, however, I see no reason to surrender, to concede defeat, and to resign ourselves either. In any case, it is prudent here to follow Spinoza in believing that both despair and hope must be counted among the sad passions, which are to be discouraged, neutralized, and inverted at all cost. Neither hopeful nor despairing, the communism of which I speak is born out of an obstinate realism, out of a heretical empiricism, and is ultimately descriptive of a tendency rather than prescriptive of a predetermined telos. At the very least, communism may serve as a heuristic device for mapping, concatenating, and even integrating such ongoing struggles, that is, it may stand as the name of a constellation of struggles of the common: stars precede a constellation, of course, but it is the name that brings the constellation into visibility and into being. Some things have not changed: yesterday as much as today, communism names a struggle against property, beyond value, and for the common; it names a desire, at once ancient and modern, for the materialization and incorporation of surplus not in the forms of value but in the forms of the common, a desire for a world valueless and common. I believe it is such a desire and such a world that Kordela invites us to imagine when she writes: Given that . . . capitalism is not an ontological necessity, . . . the only other alternative for Marxians, therefore, is to rethink communism as an economic, political, and cultural system that includes the surplus on all levels [108].
16 This crisis, for example, constitutes the springboard for Hardts compelling reflections on the relation between communism as articulated in Marxs early writings and communism today in The Common in Communism 131. 17 On the question of the institutions of the common, see also Negri, Communism 16263. 18 See especially 15078, 23460, 32575. On such struggles, see also The Edu-factory Collective, Toward a Global Autonomous University; Dyer-Witherford, Commonism; Surin, Freedom Not Yet; as well as Gibson-Graham, A Post-Capitalist Politics. 19 iek makes a similar point in How to Begin From the Beginning 213.

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Ultimately, neither names nor concepts are enough to give form to such a desire and hence to such a world. The name of communism and the concept of the common constitute at best common notions. As Spinoza argues, knowledge based on common notions (namely, reason) is intrinsically adequate yet too general and is surpassed by another and higher type of knowledge: the latter always includes and builds on reason, always involves understanding the world and ourselves in it from the standpoint of synchronicity rather than diachrony alone, also involves, thus, an experience of eternity within the finite spatio-temporal limits of our modal existence, and, most importantly, gives rise to what he calls intellectual love of God. Elsewhere, I have argued that such a type of knowledge and such a love of God constitute nothing other than love of surplus, love of potentiality, love degree zero: in short, love of that which cannot be measured, owned, or valued by anyone, love of that which everybody shares in commona love that is indeed as difficult as it is rare.20 Here, I will point out simply that the politics of the common is nothing at all without such knowledge and such love. This politics does need good names and effective conceptsthat is, knowledge founded on common notions, knowledge of the common, reasonyet cannot limit itself to them: it must also include and address itself to a realm of knowledge, and to an experience of communication of the common in which we share, which cannot be understood or known within the limits of reason alone. One could do worse, then, than heed these words that come from a past at once recent yet impossibly distant, and that still resonate with unrealized potential to this day. This is Maurice Blanchot, around the beginning of the Cold War, circa 1953: Communication, such as it reveals itself in . . . human relations and such as it withdraws itself in the works that we still call works of art, perhaps does not indicate to us the horizon of a world free of deceptive relations but helps us to challenge the authority that founds these relations, forcing us to reach a position from which it would be possible to have no part in values.. . . The poetic work, the artistic work, if it speaks to us of something, speaks to us of what is outside any value or what rejects all valuation, proclaims the exigency of the beginning (again) that loses and obscures itself as soon as it is satisfied in value. Nietzsche wanted to transmute all values, but this transvaluation . . . seemed to leave the notion of value intact. It is undoubtedly the task of our age to move toward an affirmation that is entirely other. A difficult task, essentially risky. It is to this task that communism recalls us with a rigor that it itself often shirks, and it is also to this task that artistic experience recalls us in the realm that is proper to it. A remarkable coincidence. [9697] And a remarkable political praxis is the one that produces, loves, and lives the common not as the subject-object of value but as a work of poiesis, as a work of art, as a difficult and even painful task in which everything is at risk and at stakea politics that constitutes an ars amandi of the common.21

I have made this argument in Marx before Spinoza. Such a loving task, such an ars amandi, is indeed difficult and even painful: as Ida Dominijanni reminds us in the powerful essay included in this issue, there is no common that is not born out of, and built on, wounds. Indeed, I would add that if ethics means anything at all, it means to live up to and make something of ones own wounds, to build the common on such wounds. On the complex relations between wounds, ethics, and revolution, see also some of the most stunning pages Deleuze ever wrote: The Logic of Sense 14853.
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WORKS CITED Agamben, Giorgio. Form-of-Life. Means without End: Notes on Politics. By Agamben. Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. 312. Print. Ali, Tariq. The Idea of Communism. New York: Seagull, 2009. Print. Badiou, Alain. The Communist Hypothesis. New York: Verso, 2010. Print. . The Meaning of Sarkozy. New York: Verso, 2008. Print. Balibar, tienne, and Antonio Negri. Interview by Anna Curcio and Ceren zseluk. On the Common, Universality, and Communism: A Conversation between tienne Balibar and Antonio Negri. Rethinking Marxism 22.3 (2010): 31228. Print. Blanchot, Maurice. On One Approach to Communism. Friendship. By Blanchot. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997. 9397. Print. Casarino, Cesare. Marx before Spinoza: Notes toward an Investigation. Spinoza Now. Ed. Dimitris Vardoulakis. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. 179234. Print. . The Southern Answer: Pasolini, Universalism, Decolonization. Critical Inquiry 36.4 (2010): 67396. Print. . Surplus Common: A Preface. Casarino and Negri 139. Casarino, Cesare, and Antonio Negri. In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Print. Curcio, Anna, and Ceren zseluk, eds. The Common and the Forms of the Commune. Spec. issue of Rethinking Marxism 23.3 (2011). Print. Dean, Jodi. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 2009. Print. . Publicitys Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002. Print. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Print. Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Signature Event Context. Trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Limited Inc. By Derrida. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988. 123. Print. Douzinas, Costas, and Slavoj iek, eds. The Idea of Communism. New York: Verso, 2010. Print. Dyer-Witherford, Nick. Commonism. Turbulence 1 (2007): 8187. Print. The Edu-factory Collective, ed. Toward a Global Autonomous University. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2009. Print. Gibson-Graham, J. K. A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006. Print. Hardt, Michael. The Common in Communism. Douzinas and iek 13144. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009. Print. . Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2004. Print. Hegel, G. W. F. Introduction to the Philosophy of History, with an Appendix from The Philosophy of Right. Trans. Leo Rauch. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988. Print. Kordela, A. Kiarina. $urplus: Spinoza, Lacan. Albany: State U of New York P, 2007. Print. Lenin, N. [Vladimir Ilyich]. The Meaning of the Agricultural Tax. The New Policies of Soviet Russia. By N. Lenin, N. Bucharin, and S. J. Rutgers. Chicago: Kerr, 1921. 940. Print.

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Makdisi, Saree, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl. Marxism, Communism, and History: A Reintroduction. Introduction. Marxism beyond Marxism. Ed. Makdisi, Casarino, and Karl. New York: Routledge, 1996. 113. Print. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage, 1976. Print. . Grundrisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin, 1993. Print. Negri, Antonio. Communism: Some Thoughts on the Concept and Practice. Trans. Arianna Bove. Douzinas and iek 15565. . Expropriation in Mature Capitalism. The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century. By Negri. Trans. James Newell. Cambridge: Polity, 1989. 11526. Print. . Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. Trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano. New York: Autonomedia, 1991. Print. .Twenty Theses on Marx: Interpretation of the Class Situation Today. Trans. Michael Hardt. Marxism beyond Marxism. Ed. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl. New York: Routledge, 1996. 14980. Print. Rancire, Jacques. Communists without Communism? Douzinas and iek 16777. Roggero, Gigi. Five Theses on the Common. Rethinking Marxism 22.3 (2010): 35773. Print. Surin, Kenneth. Freedom Not Yet: Liberation and the Next World Order. Durham: Duke UP, 2009. Print. Virno, Paolo. Angels and the General Intellect: Individuation in Duns Scotus and Gilbert Simondon. Parrhesia 7 (2009): 5867. Web. 5 Apr. 2012. . A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson. Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 2004. Print. . Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation. Trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008. Print. . Scienze sociali e natura umana: Facolt di linguaggio, invariante biologico, rapporti di produzione. Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 2002. Print. iek, Slavoj. How to Begin from the Beginning. Douzinas and iek 20926.

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