Ato Sekyi-Otu^[1] asks: ‘How do we tell apart an insurgent community of meaning forged by critical interlocutors of the world-system from the innocuous nihilism of composite cultural idioms promiscuously signifying everything and contesting nothing?’ (1996, p. 21) Giorgio Agamben’s existentialist philosophy has come to nest in my mind as exemplary of this ‘innocuous nihilism’. In this paper, I answer Sekyi-Otu’s question by tracing the contours and exposing the political limitations of Agamben’s nihilism. To clarify the terms of partisan universalism as an antidote to ‘innocuous nihilism’, I propose a turn to social reproduction theory.

‘Innocuous nihilism’ as inoperativity

At one point in his intensive analysis of Western philosophy, Agamben finds that ‘what is at stake between [being and praxis] is the idea of freedom’ (2011, p. 59). Across the nine volume Homo Sacer series, Agamben pursues a multipronged dissection of the paradox of unrealizability between being and praxis, wherein one is the vanishing ground of the other. Along the way, he depicts this as a generative split between being and praxis. This split is the realm of non-relation and it is generative in the sense that without relation there is no relativity, and without that qualifying element to delineate worth or value, what is left is pure immediacy as valuelessness. Such is the basis of a fascist ontology: where there is no framework for ascertaining the value of anything, sovereign power practiced in the realm of non-relation can generate extreme violence. If the hallmark of fascism is the valuelessness of life, then the death camps of World War II represent an ‘absolute political space’ where humans, whose lives are devoid of value, become purely political bodies (Agamben 1998, p. 153). In Remnants of Auschwitz, the pure effect of this sovereign extreme is ‘the Being of death’ (Agamben 2002, p. 75), a totalizing praxis that makes possible the non-human (Agamben 2002, p.55).

Agamben in the Homo Sacer series does much to document the fascist bias of non-relation, where sovereign praxis generates ‘the Being of death’. Faced with the deathly realm of non-relation and cognizant of its most violent outcomes, what is to be done? For Agamben, the answer is inoperativity or undecidability. To disturb the absolutism of unrealizability, he advocates resisting ‘the passage from potency to effectiveness’ through an act of stasis (Agamben 2013, p. 128). Agamben explains that the immediacy of the absolute decision as negation must itself be negated (i.e. double negation) and turned into pure undecidability. In other words, he calls for undecidability as a safeguard against the decisionism that immediately equates life and nonvalue—a deactivation of operative immediacy. It is this politics of inoperativity that I view as a solipsistic indulgence awash in that pernicious type of ‘innocuous nihilism’ that Sekyi-Otu indicts.

The perniciousness of ‘innocuous nihilism’ in context

To cast the perniciousness of Agamben’s inoperativity in a more revealing light, I look to an historical case that introduces capitalist relations alongside colonial relations, namely the establishment the Red River Colony (near present-day Winnipeg). In 1811, Lord Selkirk was granted a hulking piece of land from the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), whose proprietary charter from 1670 had already claimed this as ‘Rupert’s Land’ (Gibson 2015, p.5)—note the possessive language. By granting this land mass to Selkirk, the HBC was hoping that this settlement would be able to domesticate the production of certain goods, which would save the expense of shipping everything from London. From his British manor house, Selkirk penned instructions to Miles Macdonell, who he tasked with the onsite establishment and oversight of the Red River Colony. When the long list of directives finally mentioned the local Indigenous populations, Selkirk said that the settler-colonizers should pretend to be just a regular group of company men looking to set-up yet another fur trading post. Once their real intentions are discovered, only then they should enter negotiations for the land with the Indigenous peoples.^[2] Customs dictated gift-giving and presentations as part of the exchange relation, and by this time—still within a few decades of a major outbreak of smallpox that killed enormous numbers of the local population—the HBC had in their position a smallpox vaccine. Selkirk insisted that Macdonell stay quiet about it. He said that the life-saving vaccine should be offered only on the condition that the local Anishinaabeg and Nēhiyawok agreed to cede their lands (Selkirk, p. 178).

Life-saving vaccine in exchange for life-giving land. Selkirk’s genocidal intent is rendered innocuous by the transactional nature of the proposed exchange, where the Indigenous participants appear as equals in the moment of exchange because they are given a choice, but this choice discloses the actual valuelessness of life in the expropriative practices of colonial dispossession.^[3]

This shows that the realm of non-relation is inherent to the ‘false semblance’ of equivalents, which is the basis of the exchange relation in capitalism (Marx. 1977, p. 187). Alienated from self and other, non-beings (as vacuous juridical wills) engage in a compulsive praxis of exchange. It is compulsive because with increased market dependency, life in capitalism becomes dependent on this exchange; as this praxis becomes the vanishing ground of being, and this being makes possible false choice as a praxis, it functionally reifies the ‘semblance’ of equivalents. Consequently, all that can exist in capitalism is the qualified life of the non-being and the condemned praxis of exchange that produces qualified life.

Philosophically, Agamben’s inoperativity suspends the processes that generate the qualified life of the individual, which opens up the potential for a new ontology of being and praxis. And while we all know that capitalism needs constant movement from accumulation to realization in order for all of its circuits to be fulfilled, it is also clear that Agamben here does not have in mind inoperativity as a mass withdrawal of labour. At base, it leaves intact the conceptual building block of fascist ontology: the non-relation. One of the logical outcomes of his leaving intact the non-relation is his elevation of the witness as the exemplary political subject. Yet the witness, as the in-betweenness of the human and inhuman, is the pure potentiality of ‘enunciation’, and experiences otherness as the threshold experience of the self as non-being (Agamben 2002, pp 139,146). This experience of otherness as a pure self-referent sanctifies the redemptive potentiality of the non-relation. Indeed, if the ontological condition of the possibility of inoperativity is the non-relation, then the politics of inoperativity keeps intact a specifically colonial essence ripe for capitalist expropriation: it comes down to not being seen and not having to see. This is because inoperativity leaves uncontested the otherlessnes, valuelessness, and motivelessness of the generative non-relation. Emancipatory praxis is condemned in this scenario because it violates the condition of non-relation by demanding to be seen.

From this angle, Agamben’s politics of inoperativity can be appreciated as ‘innocuous nihilism’—a politics that ‘contest[s] nothing’, which amounts to an appeal to the status quo. Heed Fanon’s words on this point: ‘today, we are assisting in a stasis of Europe. Let us flee, comrades, this immobile movement where the dialectic, little by little, transforms itself into the logic of the status quo. Revisit the question of man. Revisit the question of intellectual reality, the intellectual mass of all humanity that must multiply its connections, diversify its networks, and rehumanize its messages’ (Fanon 1961, p. 241). Complicity in the stasis of Europe is complicity in the capitalist-colonizer’s logic, that is, the logic of valueless values that is a condition of not having to see the other. Born of his existentialist essentialization of the non-relation of being and praxis, therefore, Agamben’s politics reify ‘this immobile movement’ and leave no pathway towards rehumanization.

This seems a logical outcome of an existentialist philosophy that sneaks into an allegorical narrative of sovereign excess the specific ontological and epistemological coordinates of a universalized Western, bourgeois, unseeing self—importantly, not a substantive, partial, concrete individual, but a shell of a universalized self. Agamben is never forced to answer for an other. There is no ‘social epistemology’, let alone ‘other minds’; no ‘human community’ or ‘responsible agency’.^[4] There is no learning, no knowledge—inoperativity is at best a pre-transactional stasis (which Fanon condemned as ‘motionless motion’) elevated to an ethic. When not made to account for yourself outside of yourself, there is no need for justification, there is no impulse that radically connects your being to human beings, nor that vivifying, impatient desire to learn about the other. There is no partisanship in the realm of the non-relation; there is only being for nothing through retreat. There is nothing particularly democratic about this inoperativity, and relatedly but more urgently, there is not enough in it to thwart a backslide into fascism.

Social reproduction theory and the terms of partisanship

With inoperativity, I think Agamben assumes a normative, rehumanizing imperative that does not exist, but must be fought for, worked towards, and cultivated with. This is the basis of partisanship and the point of an emancipatory project. As Sekyi-Otu describes it, partisan universalism is work, and the idea of ‘cultivation’ is an apt referent for the activity of bringing-to-life (2019, p. 82), the praxis of becoming. It captures what Sekyi-Otu refers to as ‘the willed commitment, solicited by the future, to an ethical ideal and the obligation to work for its realization’ (2019, p. 126). A connection to Fanon’s famous statement that ‘The colonized ‘thing’ becomes man in the process of his liberation’ is likewise evident in Sekyi-Otu’s ‘ethical ideal’ (Fanon 1961, p. 30).

It is at this point that I think it is useful to consider social reproduction theory (SRT). As it pertains to the praxis of life-making (or ‘people-making’) (Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser 2019). SRT gives us a framework by which to understand a specific type of work or ‘cultivation’. Its proponents see in capitalism the labour of social reproduction as filling the capitalist imperative of being for nothing, the compulsive valuelessness of life; yet at the same time, social reproduction theorists trace the limit points of that complicity and cooptation of life, and recognize the expressly social dimensions of the work that it takes to recuperate life.

On the surface, this turn to SRT dodges Sekyi-Otu’s search for a normative foundation for partisan universalism. It may look like another appeal to history, the logic being that if we can just marshal enough of the right kind of historical evidence of valuelessness, we can depend on the reader to do the work of inferencing a justification for change. This concern is evident in Sekyi-Otu’s criticism of the ‘obstetrical metaphor’ in Marx’s account of the unfolding of history and the promise of the socialist future—the notion that socialism will just come to pass ‘in due time’ and no justification is necessary (2019, p. 143). Setting aside the importance of challenging the notion that women are passive, mystified conjurers of future life, the most important takeaway is the fact that Sekyi-Otu’s criticism shares a core frustration with SRT: that labour/life/socialism just suddenly appear as though by miracle. In a certain respect, therefore, by bringing SRT into view, we can better understand partisan universalism not just as work, but the work of partisanship as an ‘ethical commitment’ (2019, p. 150) which stands in stark contrast to Agamben’s appeal to principled stasis.

Considered ‘non-productive’, the work of social reproduction is, in capitalist terms, valueless: ‘capitalist society accords no value to this work, even while depending on it’ (Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser 2019). Social reproduction theorists demand that we not just recognize but rethink the construction of the valuelessness of this work and make us aware of the intellectual complicities that continue to render this work invisible, and by extension, render invisible the naturalizing tendencies of essentializing thought. SRT also makes a mockery of the notion of inoperativity, plainly because ceasing to socially reproduce is not an option. In SRT, the aim is not just to attach more value (be it moral value or exchange value) to the work always already condemned in capitalism as valueless, but rather to explore the possibility of a rehumanizing understanding of work as such.

Agamben’s inoperativity ignores difference and elevates what Sekyi-Otu calls ‘unconnectedness’ as a politics (2019, p. 98); in response, I propose a shift away from the condemned realm of non-relation. By reconstituting being and praxis in the context of social reproduction, valuelessness is deconsecrated and properly revealed as complicit in the loss of the self and the ignorance of the other. I see in SRT a framework that can be entrusted with helping to cultivate partisanship and universalism alike. Tithi Bhattacharya, for instance, insists on understanding the racialized and gendered realities as ‘neither accidental nor complete’, that it is important to comprehend these different realities as contingent but connected (2017, p. 15). On this point, Susan Ferguson notes that this perspective can effectively speak to an ‘interplay of subjective and objective processes’ (2008, p. 45). With Himani Bannerji’s criticism of early social reproduction feminism in mind, Ferguson also notes that experience matters not ‘as a repository of truth’ (2008, p.47), but as the basis for the development of consciousness. SRT reminds us that not everything is dictated (in an absolute sense) by the mandates of capitalist production, and that there is space for individual agency, but also ‘that we live and reproduce ourselves within communities’ (Bannerji 2008, p. 51). In aspects of SRT, therefore, there is an elaboration of the dialectical materialist method shot through with Sekyi-Otu’s vision of a more overt ‘ethical commitment’. Rather like Fanon’s thought, SRT helps us reject the complicity that coddles ignorance and emphasizes that the historical context of valuelessness matters. It is this repulsion to complicity (through a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’) that can inoculate SRT against a ‘messianism of the particular’ (2019, pp. 168, 124), making it useful in resisting ‘innocuous nihilism’ and thinking through the terms of partisan universalism.

References

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Agamben, G. 2002. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Vol. III and 9 vols. Homo Sacer. New York: Zone Books.

Agamben, G. 2011. The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. Translated by Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandarini. Vol. II, 4 and 9 vols. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Agamben, G. 2013. Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Vol. II, 5 and 9 vols. Homo Sacer. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Arruzza, C., Bhattacharya, T., and Fraser, N. 2019. Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto. London: Brooklyn, Verso.

Bannerji, H. 2008. Always Towards: Development and Nationalism in Rabindranath Tagore. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies.

Bhattacharya, T. 2017. ‘Introduction: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory.’ In Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, edited by Bhattacharya, T., 1–20. London: Pluto Press.

Brophy, S. D. 2018. ‘The Explanatory Value of the Theory of Uneven and Combined Development.’ Blog post. Historical Materialist Blog. http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/explanatory-value-theory-uneven-and-combined-development.

Brophy, S. D. 2019. ‘Reciprocity as Dispossession: A Dialectical Materialist Analysis of the Fur Trade.’ Settler Colonial Studies 9 (3): 301–319. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2018.1432011.

Fanon, F. 1961. Les Damnés de La Terre. Paris: François Maspero.

Ferguson, S. 2008. ‘Canadian Contributions to Social Reproduction Feminism, Race and Embodied Labor.’ Race, Gender & Class 15 (1–2): 42–57.

Gibson, D. 2015. Law, Life, and Government at Red River, Volume 1: Settlement and Governance, 1812–1872. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press.

Marx, K. 1977. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books.

Sekyi-Otu, A. 1996. Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Sekyi-Otu, A. 2019. Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays. 1st ed. New York: Routledge.

Selkirk, T. D. 1811. ‘Instructions to Miles McDonell,’ Library and Archives of Canada – Selkirk Collection.
http://heritage.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.lac_reel_c1.