When peoples bare themselves <\/em>as such, particularly in demonstrations that unite them, even if only temporarily, must they still be denied the prerogative to \u201cform peoples\u201d?<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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The notion of multitude has been put forward by Antonio Negri as the possible encounter between a foundational concept of Spinoza\u2019s political philosophy and a contemporary situation\u200a\u2014\u200afirst and foremost analyzed by Michel Foucault\u200a\u2014\u200aexemplified in the pressure exerted by \u201cbiopower,\u201d which is the set of powers work\u00ading to ensure that life does not \u201cbelong to us.\u201d In this regard, Foucault\u2019s epistemic modelling is drawn directly from biological fields. Whereas Roberto Esposito and, later, Alain Brossat discuss biopower in terms of immunity<\/em>, Hardt and Negri base their concept of the counterpower of the multitude on the model of the swarm<\/em>. In their view, the swarm possesses a \u201cnew kind of intelligence\u201d: a \u201ccollective intelligence\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200athat is, \u201cfundamentally social.\u201d \u201cThe swarms that we see emerging in the new network political organizations\u2026 are composed of a multitude of different creative agents.\u201d Does this not reunite intelligence and praxis in a kind of communism?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a model of collective intelligence without hierarchy, the swarm offers a model for revolt and, even more importantly, for all types of urban guerrilla warfare: \u201cWhen a distributed network attacks, it swarms its enemy: innumerable independent forces seem to strike from all directions at a particular point and then disappear back into the environment. From an external perspective, the network attack is described as a swarm because it appears formless. Since the network has no centre that dictates order, those who can only think in terms of traditional models may assume it has no organization whatsoever\u200a\u2014\u200athey see mere spontaneity and anarchy. The network attack appears as something like a swarm of birds or insects in a horror film, a multitude of mindless assailants, unknown, uncertain, unseen, and unexpected. If one looks inside a network, however, one can see that it is indeed organized, rational, and creative. It has swarm intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The image is fascinating because it is much more than a simple visual allusion. \u201cFormless\u201d rather than a form, it is first and foremost an aesthetically remarkable formation<\/em>: the beauty in these swarms of bees or clouds of insects that we also call \u201cshowers,\u201d the lyricism in these \u201cdrifts of birds\u201d that articulate extraordinary metamorphoses of trajectories in space. Yet it is also a formidable model of practical efficiency, in which we do not see the \u201cmastermind\u201d or commander-in-chief. This is how social protest movements may be able to gain\u200a\u2014\u200aas if by \u201cpollination\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200areal political weight, as Yann Moulier Boutang suggested in a 2012 issue of Multitudes <\/em>focused on revolts. Yet the reality inherent in this image is much less \u201cindependent,\u201d \u201cunexpected,\u201d or \u201ccreative\u201d than Hardt and Negri would have us understand. For example, there is no swarm of bees without the prior coronation, so to speak, of a new queen: the hierarchy is absolute; everything turns or twirls around the queen, whose subjects are only blind servants. Similarly, there is no cloud of birds without the herd instinct that keeps them \u201cequal\u201d in an unfree sense, because it holds them prisoner in \u201cformation\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200ain the military sense\u200a\u2014\u200awith the predetermined goal of dietary predation. It is no coincidence that \u201cswarm intelligence\u201d is a central theme of logistics for major contemporary industries and of the less \u201canarchistic\u201d strategic notions of the United States military, as can be seen in some of the work done by the National Defense Research Institute.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Lastly, it is difficult to use the ethological model of the swarm to illustrate the political notion of community<\/em> that, from Spinoza to Kant or from Hegel to Marx and beyond, is at play in all processes in which peoples decide to revolt and fight for their emancipation, self-determination, and democratic equality. In their comprehensive treatise Commun<\/em>, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval pay tribute to the work of Hardt and Negri for \u201coffering the first theory of the common, whose historical merit was to shift the thinking from the level of concrete experience of the commons <\/em>(in the plural) to a more abstract and politically more ambitious understanding of the common <\/em>(in the singular).\u201d Yet not only will they seek to \u201creroot<\/em> the concept of the common at the \u2018root of the matter,\u2019 the foundation of law and political economy,\u201d but also to reroot the notion of practices of revolt organized as communes, <\/em>such as the \u201cTaksim commune\u201d established in Istanbul in the spring of 2013. Dardot and Laval ultimately envisage that such a \u201ccommunity\u201d would take shape through a \u201cself-institution of society\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aa key concept in Cornelius Castoriadis\u2019s philosophy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, life belongs to us if we succeed in constituting or, rather, \u201cself-instituting\u201d the we<\/em> as such: as a relationship between subjects that is founded on a freely chosen with<\/em>. This is why the human community<\/em>, structurally speaking, has very little to do with a swarm formation, which is, all things considered, only one form among others in the struggle for life. Counter to the Empire and its \u201cglobalization\u201d of power, Jean-Luc Nancy proposes that \u201ca world,\u201d \u201cworlds,\u201d or \u201cthe world\u201d itself be ceaselessly created: \u201cTo create the world<\/em> means: immediately, without delay, reopening each possible struggle for a world, that is, for what must form the contrary of a global injustice against the background of general equivalence.\u201d Each possible struggle? That is to say, all possible forms of struggle, all possible formations<\/em>, including anarchist ones such as \u201cpanic\u201d movements in which the perpetual ebb and flow of politics plays out, as Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe showed in a 1979 essay titled \u201cLa panique politique.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In closed ranks or dispersed flanks, in single slogans or formless \u201cm\u00eal\u00e9es\u201d (extolled by Nancy), in plural \u201ctroops\u201d (also extolled by Nancy through an exegesis of the word trop<\/em> [excessive], often indicative of revolts), or in singular outbursts, the struggle to \u201ccreate a world,\u201d if not \u201cthe world,\u201d takes all possible forms so that a we<\/em> happens and a community recognizes itself as such. Very early on, Nancy was concerned with the mysterious relationship that connects each of us<\/em> to us<\/em>. In 1982, in \u201cSharing Voices,\u201dhe called for \u201ca new task with regards to the community: neither its reunion, not its division, neither its assumption, nor its dispersion, but its sharing.<\/em>\u201d In 1986, even before having to confront the political thought of Georges Bataille, he opened La Communaut\u00e9 d\u00e9s\u0153uvr\u00e9e<\/em> [The Inoperative Community] with a quotation excerpted from H\u00f6lderlin\u2019s famous poem \u201cBread and Wine,\u201d in which \u201ceach one\u2019s allotted part\u201d was conceived according to the measure \u201ccommon to us all\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“… always a measure exists,
Common to all, through his own to each one is also allotted,
Each of us makes for the place, reaches the place that he can.”<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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It is not enough to understand that each <\/em>individual draws her or his own life from a with<\/em> and, as a result, forms the community of a we<\/em>. An entire phenomenology exists between each<\/em> and we<\/em>, which Hegel\u200a\u2014\u200abeyond Kant\u2019s Perpetual Peace<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200aoutlined in his famous model of desire and confrontation, domination and gratitude. And now? Now, after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the wars of decolonization and the student movements of the 1960s, the fall of communist states and the establishment of the neo-capitalist empire? Nancy does not forget that between the each<\/em> and the we<\/em>, the we<\/em> and the they<\/em>, there is first great anger<\/em> in the face of the intolerable: \u201cAnger is the political sentiment par excellence. It brings out the qualities of the inadmissible, the intolerable. It is a refusal and a resistance that with one step goes beyond all that can be accomplished reasonably\u200a\u2014\u200ain order to open possible paths for a new negotiation of the reasonable but also paths of an uncompromising vigilance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We must therefore speak of compearance<\/em> insofar as any \u201ccommunity of existence,\u201d as Nancy calls it, implies that each individual would appear to the other and both would be recognized in their difference. This ontology of coexistence was elaborated in 1996 in a commendable book, Being Singular Plural<\/em>.Yet compearance itself takes on an infinite plurality of forms or rhythms, given the fact that far from being a \u201cbeing-together\u201d by simply assembling, the community must confront its own internal conflicts: Confronted Community, <\/em>therefore. Yet also a community able to \u201cconstitute\u201d itself, to emerge from the rhythm in which the each<\/em> pulses with the we<\/em>:\u201cthat which creates the \u2018common\u2019 as such, the impetus and event in which it is born. [For] nothing is given, whether at the beginning or end, as the substantial unity of a community but \u2018community\u2019 names the fact of incessant sharing that does not share out anything previously given but becomes the condition of being-exposed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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