‘Subverting the Biopolitics of Liberal Governance: Complexity, Circulation and Self-Organisation’
Leonie Ansems de Vries, University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus
Jörg Spieker, Birkbeck College, University of London
Abstract
Taking liberal governance as a regime of power whose object, target, and stake is life itself, this
article explores the ways in which the liberal account of life can be subverted and deployed against
the very power relations it now informs. The article begins with a brief consideration of how a
natural-scientific conception of life in terms of complexity, circulation and self-organisation has
come to shape liberal biopolitics. It then attempts to trace the emergence and development of this
conception of life from its initial articulation in the work of Kant, through its re-articulation in Hayek,
to its more recent appearance in discourses of governance and complexity. It is argued that this
naturalised and depoliticised conception tends to reduce life to the kind of material deemed
conducive to a liberal social and political order. The article then engages Darwin’s notion of
evolution to consider how the liberal reduction of life to its biopolitical form can be contested. This
consideration is guided the following set of questions: Is what is at stake in modern biopolitics not
the politicisation, but the depoliticisation of life? And if this is the case, then do we need to think of
resistance to biopower in terms of the repoliticisation of life? Formulating an affirmative answer to
these questions, this paper suggests that forms of resistance might be developed on the basis of the
very conception of life in terms of complexity that informs and sustains contemporary liberal
governance. It is, we argue, by embracing rather than denouncing as dangerous and domesticating
the difference that lies at the basis of their visions biological and political life that conceptualising
resistance to biopower becomes possible.
1
Introduction
This paper is an exploration of how, and to what effect, liberal political thought and practice has
historically been shaped by certain naturalistic ontological frameworks. It is mainly concerned with
the relationship between liberalism and a particular conception of life in terms of complexity,
circulation and self-organisation. We attempt to trace the emergence and development of this
conception of life from its initial articulation in the work of Kant, through its re-articulation in Hayek,
to its more recent appearance in certain liberal discourses of governance and complexity. It is
argued that, notwithstanding its emancipatory claims, this naturalised and depoliticised conception
tends to reduce life to the kind of material deemed conducive to a liberal social and political order.
We then move on to discuss how the liberal reduction of life to its biopolitical form can be
contested. The argument put forward here is that forms of resistance might be developed on the
basis of the very conception of life in terms of complexity, circulation and self-organisation that
informs and sustains contemporary liberal governance. Having outlined an alternative to the liberal
account of what life is and what it may become, the article concludes with some tentative
suggestions as to how this account might shape critical thought and political agency today.
As will already be apparent, we follow Michel Foucault in taking liberal governance as a regime of
power whose object, target, and stake is life itself. Our analysis emphasises the close relationship
between the “truth” about life and practices of power – the constitutive interdependence in which
biopolitical forms of knowledge and apparatuses of power are linked. As is well known, Foucault
first used the concept of ‘bio-power’ (‘the power over life’) to refer to two distinct but related
mechanisms of power: an ‘anatomo-politics of the human body’ and a ‘bio-politics of the
population’.1 In later writings, he renders this seemingly straightforward concept considerably more
ambiguous by pointing to a number of possible origins and manifestations of the link between
politics and life.2 While recognising that Foucault’s original formulation of the concept is sufficiently
ambiguous to allow for a range of different interpretations, we will adopt and elaborate on an
understanding of the concept that revolves around biology and biological being. Once this biologybased definition of biopower/biopolitics is accepted, it is important to realise that biological being
has not been the same at all times.
1
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin, 1987), 139.
There is, for example, the genealogical link between biopower and the Judeo-Christian tradition of pastoral power. Then
there is the idea that biopower/biopolitics is inextricably linked to the rise of the life sciences. Foucault also indicated that
there is a historically significant relationship between the biopoliticisation of politics and the development of liberal
political economy. Other leads, complementary or alternative, may reasonably be inferred from his comments on the
governance of epidemics or on the discourse of race.
2
2
If we accept that the ‘bio’ in biopolitics is associated with biological being, then we also need to
accept that the genealogy of biopolitics is inseparable from the changing conceptions of life offered
by the life sciences. The life that is at stake in biopower/biopolitics is inseparable from certain lifescientific truth discourses about the nature of biological being. Foucault was concerned with a
biological conception of life that emerged in the eighteenth century, a conception of life in terms of
(self-)organisation. It is this understanding of species being that he first traced archaeologically in
The Order of Things, and that he then tenuously linked to his genealogy of liberal political rationality
in Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics. For Foucault, the appearance of
liberalism in the eighteenth century is inseparable from the ‘the entry of “nature” into the field of
techniques of power’.3 The radical innovation associated with the emergence of a distinctly liberal
political rationality is a conceptualisation of order in terms of nature and self-organisation. He
speaks of a certain naturalism which is inscribed within the logic of liberal rule: the domain to be
governed by liberalism is a natural one in the sense that it is thought to possess an intrinsic logic of
its own. Indeed, what appears in the middle of the eighteenth century, Foucault says, ‘really is a
naturalism much more than a liberalism.’4 In this naturalistic grid of intelligibility, circulation is
conceived as self-organising, self-regulating as well as independent of, and antecedent to, political
order and authority.
The article is structured as follows. First we consider how Foucault’s original account of the nexus
between liberalism and a conception of life in terms of complexity and self-organisation is reflected
in the writings of Kant. It is Kant, we argue, who provides the first more or less coherent liberal
conception of politics and life in terms of (self-)organisation. And it is in Kant’s writings that we can
also understand the depoliticising effects of this biopolitical conception of liberal governance. In
Kant, life is reduced to its biopolitical form and circulation is always already a property of life itself,
rather than a product of power. Then we will focus on the political thought of F.A. Hayek and on
role of notions of complexity, spontaneity and self-organisation therein. We show that Hayek
deploys several concepts and ideas associated with complexity theory, and that his defence of
liberal-capitalism largely relies on the subversive and emancipatory connotations of these ideas.
We then argue that Hayek’s political project relies on a pervasive economy of inclusion and exclusion
through which liberal and non-liberal subjects are constructed and positioned. The systematic
violence that takes place beneath the smooth surface of the open society undermines the
emancipatory pretensions of Hayek’s political project.
3
4
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, Note 4, p. 75.
Ibid., p. 62.
3
Finally, the paper engages Darwin to develop a politics of complexity that challenges the bio-political
foreclosure of which Hayek’s notion of the open society is ultimately productive. By producing a
perspective of evolution that prioritises difference over reproduction, Darwin’s account can be
invoked to challenge the depoliticisation inherent in and the war waged at the heart of Hayek's open
society. It is, we argue, by embracing rather than denouncing as dangerous and domesticating the
difference that lies at the basis of biological and political life that conceptualising resistance to
biopower becomes possible.
Kant: politics, life and (self-)organisation
Kant sought to develop a general philosophy of nature based on Newtonian physics. In Universal
Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, he presents a mechanical explanation of the origin and
organisation of the cosmos. Kant sets out to reconcile his account of Newtonian physics with the
existence of an omnipotent and omniscient god and thereby with a teleological account of a
harmonious nature.5
Nature’s purposive striving towards order, harmony and perfection
demonstrates, Kant argues, supernatural design.
Matter must necessarily produce ‘beautiful
connections’ for it does not possess the freedom to stray from ‘the plan of perfection’.6 Due to the
animate qualities ascribed to matter and nature, there is no distinction between the living and the
non-living. In opposition to the inert matter of Newtonian mechanics, for the pre-critical Kant all
matter is active. Kant ascribes to elements, themselves sources of life, vital forces [‘wesentliche
Kräfte’] to set one another in motion. In opposition to Newton, Kant endows matter itself with
force: all matter abides by the same fundamental – and mechanical – law of nature, i.e. its selforganisation and self-ordering towards perfection.
By the time of writing the Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant has reversed his view on the activity of
matter as well as on the applicability of the mechanical law of nature to all matter. Indeed, Kant has
been credited with playing a key role in effecting the shift from mechanics to organicism and the rise
of biology by introducing the distinction between mechanisms and organisms.7 He distinguishes
between the living and the non-living on account of the capacity of self-organisation, which was to
become the defining feature of life from the nineteenth century onwards. He establishes the
5
Martin Schönfeld, The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp.
98, 105.
6 Immanuel Kant, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, transl. Stanley L. Jaki (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic
Press, 1981), p. 86.
7 Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
2003), pp. 84-5.
4
distinction between inert matter and living organisms on the basis of purpose and organisation,
which, in his theory, are intrinsically and self-evidently linked. A thing constitutes a physical end only
if it is both cause and effect of itself, which is to say if the parts (organ) and the whole (organism)
reciprocally produce one another – ‘only under these conditions and upon these terms can such a
product be an organized and a self-organized being, and, as such, be called a physical end’.8 Only
organisms abide by these conditions: ‘an organized natural product is one in which every part is
reciprocally both end and means. In such a product nothing is in vain, without an end, or to be
ascribed to a blind mechanism of nature’.9 In a significant reversal of his pre-Critical thought, the
living, as opposed to the non-living, is characterised by Kant in terms of an interactive and mutually
constitutive movement of (self-) organisation between organ and organism. In addition to selforganisation – and in close relation to it – what sets the organism apart from the non-living is its
capacity of reproduction. For Kant, ‘…an organized being possesses inherent formative power […] a
self-propagating formative power, which cannot be explained by the capacity of movement alone,
that is to say, by mechanism’.10 These characteristics of self-organisation and self-generation imply,
furthermore, a capacity for and tendency of self-preservation. As will be elaborated upon below, in
Kant’s philosophy of nature – pre-Critical as well as Critical – perturbation and movements of
disorder(ing) are intrinsic to the processes of (self-)organisation and self-preservation.
Whilst the explanation of organic form and organisation would become the chief occupation of the
emerging discipline of biology in the nineteenth century, Kant is an eighteenth-century thinker to
the extent that he believes that life cannot be explained. He stresses that ‘the organization of
nature has nothing analogous to any causality known to us’.11 Remarkably, despite reiterating that
any analogy falters in the effort to conceptualise life, Kant suggests that one such analogy can
nevertheless be drawn:
‘We may, on the other hand, make use of an analogy to the above mentioned
immediate physical ends to throw light on a certain union, which, however, is to be
found more often in idea than in fact. Thus in the case of a complete transformation,
recently undertaken, of a great people into a state, the word organization has
frequently, and with much propriety, been used for the constitution of the legal
8
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, transl. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 22.
Ibid., pp. 24-25.
10 Ibid., pp. 22.
11 Ibid., pp. 23.
9
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authorities and even of the entire body politic. For in a whole of this kind certainly no
member should be a mere means, but should also be an end, and, seeing that he
contributes to the possibility of the entire body, should have his position and function in
turn defined by the idea of the whole.’12
Kant establishes the identity between the individual body and the body politic on the basis of
organisation. Given Kant’s definitions of life and organisation, and the intimate connection between
the two, this analogy suggests that not only the individual organism, but also the body politic is an
end in itself and its purpose self-preservation. This would evidently be a peculiar conclusion,
reminiscent of a logic commonly attributed to Hobbes, and not to the liberal Kant of Perpetual
Peace. The difference, as will become apparent later, lies in this: the Hobbesian body politic is an
end in itself because it is artificial (albeit not without natural elements), whilst Kantian political
organisation constitutes its own end because it is not artificial – i.e. an organism. It is on this basis
that political order(ing) is naturalised and universalised in the modern liberal image.
The notion of self-organisation is common to the Allgemeine Naturgeschichte and the Kritik der
Urteilskraft. In both works Kant not only argues that nature organises itself – whether via the
animated force of matter according to mechanical laws, or through an organic force that is beyond
(mechanical) explanation – but also elaborates how this process operates. As discussed above, in
Allgemeine Naturgeschichte Kant rebuts Newton’s account of nature’s entropic propensity if left to
its own devices. Rather, Kant contends, nature strives towards harmony and perfection. Despite
this teleological vision of harmony and order, the process itself is one of disorder(ing). At a certain
stage in her movement towards perfection, entropic tendencies emerge which bring about the
disintegration of organised structures.13 Yet, if nature possesses the capacity to move from chaos to
regular order, Kant asks, would she not be capable of restoring herself from the new chaos
consequent upon the slowing down and eventual standstill of her motions, spurring a new
development from chaos towards order? Indeed, he affirms, planetary systems can fall into decay
and re-develop into an orderly system, in a ‘play [that] has more than once repeated itself’.14 Kant’s
conception of nature according to the laws of mechanics produces a ‘phoenix of nature, which burns
itself out only to revive from its ashes rejuvenated, across all infinity of times and spaces…’.15 He
12
Ibid.
Schönfeld, The Philosophy of the Young Kant, Note 24, p. 124.
14 Kant, Universal Natural History, Note 25, p. 160.
15 Ibid.
13
6
argues that, despite the conflict and collision of elements in nature’s process towards order,
eventually all particles with settle in a state of the smallest reciprocal action, whereby all resistance
disappears and elements continue in ‘free circular motion’.16 Not only does Kant here articulate a
conviction in the final defeat of (forces of) disorder(ing), he furthermore appears oblivious to the
existence or implications of resistance. This is precisely one of the ways in which the political is
foreclosed in the modern liberal image.
In Kant’s vision, order must eventually prevail, whilst forces of resistance inherent in the process are
to be disguised through their recycling into movements that sustain rather than undermine order.
Kant seeks to disguise the existence of perturbing forces as soon as political order has been
instituted in order to account for the prohibition of resistance. He accordingly endeavours to sustain
his portrayal of peaceful order by warning against questioning the origins of order: ‘…the subject
ought not to indulge in speculations about its [political order’s] origins with a view to acting upon
them, as if its right to be obeyed were open to doubt’.17 Investigations into the actual historical
origins of the state are both futile and objectionable. Anyone who, having unearthed its ultimate
origin, offers resistance to the state may with complete justice be ‘punished, eliminated, or banished
as an outlaw’.18 By demarcating the political domain of justice, order, morality and rationality thus,
Kant restricts the potentialities of politics and life to certain modes of (inter)action. In Kant, the
universality and naturalness of the liberal image are founded on a particular production of nature,
order and life; an understanding premised upon life’s requirement and capacity for securitisation
within a particular domain of governance and order. Kant’s conceptualisation of nature entails the
demarcation of what life may be and become politically, which is captured in organisational terms.
Those forces moving outside the circulation of self-organising reproduction must be eradicated: life
may be and become merely within the bounds of a particular (re)production of circulation. Forces
that cannot be made to work productively for the production and sustenance of this domain of
security and freedom, e.g. resistance, rebellion and other rogue forces, must be destroyed.
For Kant, life itself is inherently amenable to liberal governance – he reduces life to the kind of
material deemed conducive to a liberal social and political order. What follows from this is that the
only politics possible is the one that is already inherent in life. Although his vision of political order is
founded on antagonism and war, this force is swiftly delegitimized through the construction of a
natural surface of order, harmony and peace. Social order thus becomes spontaneous, selforganising, self-regulating as well as independent of, and antecedent to, political authority. What
16
Kant, The Critique of Judgement, Note 27, p. 116.
Kant, The Critique of Judgement, Note 27, p. 143.
18 Ibid.
17
7
we can find in Kant is the idea that liberal social and political organisation is inherent in, and in a
sense dictated by, life and nature.
In portraying the development of political order and political
relations in terms of natural development, or as a tendency towards order inherent in life, Kant
naturalises and depoliticises political order and power relations.
Thus, a particular order is
separated from the power relations on which it depends, and made to appear as if it corresponds to
an intrinsic design of nature itself.
Hayek and the order of the open society
In this section, we consider the role of notions of complexity, spontaneity and self-organisation in
Hayek’s liberal political philosophy.
How does Hayek use these notions in developing his
conceptions of life and political order? First, we show that Hayek deploys several concepts and ideas
associated with complexity theory, and that his defence of liberal-capitalism largely relies on the
subversive and emancipatory connotations of these ideas.
Then, we examine this ostensibly
emancipatory political project for the ways it mirrors the structures and configurations of power
which it claims to oppose. We argue that Hayek’s project of the open society relies on a pervasive
economy of inclusion and exclusion through which liberal and non-liberal subjects are constructed
and positioned. The systematic violence that takes place beneath the smooth surface of Hayek’s
open society undermines the emancipatory pretensions of his political project. In Hayek, the notions
of complexity, spontaneity and self-organisation remain tied to a rather narrow conception of what
life and politics are and what they may become. Rather than drawing on insights from complexity
theory to embrace the political potentials of the becoming of life qua movements and relations,
Hayek merely uses certain concepts to naturalise and universalise liberal order.
Some believe that the emergence of the complexity sciences in the latter half of the twentieth
century amounts to a period of general scientific re-conceptualisation, or indeed to ‘a new dialogue
of man with nature.’19 One of its most influential exponents has described the emergence of
complexity science in terms of a shift of metaphors: rather than relying on the Newtonian metaphor
of clockwork predictability and linearity, which has governed scientific endeavour for more than
three centuries, complexity is associated with metaphors more closely akin to the growth of a
plant.20 Political philosophy, too, relies on metaphors and the affinity between Hayek’s political
thought and the discourse of complexity is given preliminary expression by the following statement:
‘The attitude of the liberal towards society is like that of the gardener who tends a plant and in order
to create the conditions most favourable to its growth must know as much as possible about its
19
20
Nicolis & Prigogine, Exploring Complexity, 1989, p. 3.
Brian Arthur cited in Waldorp, M., Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, p. 329.
8
structure and the way it functions.’21 The shared metaphor is indicative of what is otherwise well
documented by Hayek’s references to the work of scientists such as Ilya Prigogine or Donald
Campbell whose contributions to complexity theory he draws on for the formulation of his
understanding of spontaneous order.22
The relationship between Hayek’s thought and complexity theory remains subject to debate, and
one of the questions that have been raised is whether, or to what extent, Hayek’s work can be seen
as a precursor to complexity theory.23 This has also raised wider questions about the relations
between what we now know as complexity theory and the field of economics, and the subfield of
Austrian economics in particular. There can be little doubt that the ideas of complexity theorists and
Austrian economists seem to have much in common, not least their rejection of the presuppositions
of neoclassical mainstream economic theory. Hayek wrote several essays on complex phenomena in
the later 1960s, emphasising their spontaneous or self-organising character. In the context of
complex phenomena, such as life, mind and society, order is the result of regularities of the
behaviour of its constitutive elements – in this sense, these phenomena are to be understood as
self-regulating or self-organising systems. The notion of spontaneous, or self-organising, order can
be traced back to the founder of the Austrian School, Carl Menger, who developed a theory of the
spontaneous emergence of money for transaction purposes in primitive economies.24
Complexity theory gains its subversive connotation from its opposition to “classical” or “Newtonian”
science and the mechanistic world view that is said to have dominated Western science for too long.
Classical science tended to rely on the machine model of reality and a mechanistic image of the
universe. The scientific enterprise, in its classical form, was concerned with closed systems and
linear relationships; its focus was on order, stability, equilibrium and uniformity. Complexity theory
challenges and undermines many of the basic assumptions on which this Newtonian model of
science rests. One of the definitive claims associated with complexity theory is that our world is
fundamentally non-linear – linearity is the exception, not the rule. Rather than focusing on the
order, stability, and uniformity of closed systems, complexity science focuses on the disorder,
instability, and diversity of open systems. Crucially, this shift of focus also implies that the classical
21
Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London and New York: Routledge, 1944), p. 18.
See: Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty (London and New York: Routledge, 1982), Vol. 3, p. 158.
23 Kilpatrick Jr., Henry E. (2001) ‘Complexity, Spontaneous Order and Friedrich Hayek: Are spontaneous order and
complexity essentially the same thing?’, Complexity, Vol. 6, No. 3; Wible, James (2000) ‘What is Complexity?’, in D.
Colander (ed.) Complexity and the History of Economic Thought (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 15-31.
24 Apparently, the theme of spontaneous order and self-organisation had played an important role in the Austrian school of
economics ever since it was first developed by Carl Menger.
22
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assumptions of omniscience, predictability and full control have to be abandoned or at least severely
qualified. The idea that the world is complex often goes hand in hand with the insistence on the
imperfection of knowledge and the unpredictability of things. Complexity theory is often defined in
terms of a series of oppositions: control versus flexibility, hierarchy versus autonomy, reductionism
versus pluralism, centralisation versus decentralisation, etc. Complexity replaces stable taxonomy
and mechanical predictability with the rationalities and problematic of the composite sciences of
contingent and emergent being-in-formation.25
Central to Hayek’s liberalism is his conception of society in terms of ‘spontaneous order’. He makes
a general distinction between orders that are made (taxis in Greek) and orders that grow (kosmos in
Greek). In the realm of social life, made orders would include families, plants, corporations as well
as the institutions of government. What these orders have in common is that they rely for their
formation on prior collective agreement, and that they tend to require centralised direction for their
maintenance. Made orders are the artificial product of concerted action and they tend to be
created with a specific purpose in mind. Grown or spontaneous orders, by contrast, emerge
endogenously – they are ‘self-generating’ or ‘self-organising’.26 Spontaneous orders tend to be
complex in the sense that they involve a large number of elements and the interaction between
them; they comprise ‘more particular facts than any brain could ascertain or manipulate’.27 Hayek
insists that the concept of spontaneous order is particularly important for understanding the
complex phenomena we encounter in the realms of life, mind and society: ‘Here we have to deal
with ‘grown’ structures with a degree of complexity which they have assumed and could assume
only because they were produced by spontaneous ordering forces.’28
Complex spontaneous orders can also be distinguished from made orders on the basis of their
abstract character: they consist of ‘a system of abstract relations between elements which are also
defined only by abstract properties’.29 The abstract character of spontaneous orders is determined
by the abstract nature of the rules which govern the action of its constitutive elements. The
formation of a complex spontaneous order, such as society, depends on individual elements acting
in accordance with a set of abstract rules of conduct. For Hayek, society is the order that forms
when individuals follow such rules of conduct in responding to their immediate circumstances. It is
Hayek’s contention that society is an order which is not the product of conscious control or rational
25
Dillon, M. and Reid, J., The Liberal Way of War (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 73.
Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 1, p. 37.
27 Ibid., p. 38.
28 Ibid., p. 41.
29 Ibid., p. 39.
26
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design, but the result of the unintended and unforeseen spontaneous coordination of a multiplicity
of actions by self-interested individuals. In social life order emerges of itself as the unintended
consequence of independent individual actions. While each individual pursues his own ends on the
basis of his own knowledge of his circumstances, their actions are guided by certain rules. The
spontaneous order we find in certain fields of human activity, such as religion, morals, language and
the market, is in principle no different from that we can observe in biological organisms, crystals or
galaxies. All of the above are complex phenomena which form spontaneously on the basis of certain
abstract rules or regularities of behaviour.
Hayek’s theory of spontaneous order is must be seen in relation to his theory of mind and
knowledge. For Hayek, not only human social life but the life of the mind itself is governed by
unspecifiable tacit rules. At least some of the rules that govern human action and perception are
meta-conscious, that is, beyond our capacities of identification and articulation.30 The knowledge
upon which social life depends cannot be concentrated in a single brain because it is embodied in
habits and dispositions and governs our conduct via inarticulate rules.31 The complexity of modern
society extends well beyond our mental capacities. Knowledge is dispersed, temporary and tacit in
nature, and only in a spontaneous social order can this knowledge be utilised efficiently. Hayek’s
theory of knowledge emphasises the cognitive limits of human reason. And it is on the basis of this
conception of knowledge that Hayek develops his critique of the hubris inherent in socialist and
collectivist thought.
It has been suggested that Hayek’s scepticism vis-à-vis both individual
knowledge and centralised authority or decision-making embodies a certain ‘epistemological
modesty’.32 Hayek repeatedly warns that we should always bear in mind ‘the necessary and
irremediable ignorance on everyone’s part of most of the particular facts which determine the
actions of all the several members of human society.’ In Hayek, spontaneous order is a ‘solution to
the epistemic problem of the fragmented, temporary and tacit nature of human knowledge.’33 His
whole defence of markets and private property rests on his epistemological scepticism and his
conception of order in terms of complexity, spontaneity and self-organisation.
It is Hayek’s contention that the rules of human conduct that make the spontaneous order of society
possible are themselves spontaneous formations inasmuch as they have emerged in a process of
cultural evolution. By cultural evolution, Hayek means the evolution of sets of rules, norms and
30
Gray, J., Hayek on Liberty (London and New York: Routledge, 1984), p. 23.
Ibid., p. 25.
32 Kacenelenborgen, E., ‘Epistemological Modesty Within Contemporary Political Thought: A Link between Hayek’s
Neoliberalism and Pettit’s Republicanism’, European Journal of Political Theory, Vol. 8, No. 4, 2009.
33 Petsoulas, C., Hayek’s Liberalism and its Origins (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 2.
31
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practices, ‘especially those dealing with several property, honesty, contract, exchange, trade,
competition, gain, and privacy.’34 The theory of cultural evolution is the conceptual framework
through which Hayek attempts to explain the origins of the liberal-capitalist order – it explains how
the open society has emerged and why it must prevail. In order to grasp Hayek’s account of cultural
evolution it is useful to begin with his understanding of the relationship between cultural and
biological evolution. First of all, biological and cultural evolution are analogous in the sense that
‘both rely on the same principle of selection: survival or reproductive advantage.’35
Hayek
emphasises that cultural evolution works through the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection.
Reproduction and survival are mediated by economic productivity, and natural selection will favour
those forms of life whose cultural formations create the condition for high productivity. It is Hayek’s
contention, then, that the open society has prevailed because of its superior capacity to ensure
survival and increase of population. There are important differences between the way in which
selection operates in the transmission of acquired cultural properties, and the way in which it works
on biological properties and their transmission.36 Inasmuch as cultural evolution works through the
transmission of acquired rather than genetic properties, it is more in line with a Lamarckian than a
Darwinian explanation. Moreover, cultural evolution operates mainly through group selection and
not through the selection of individuals: ‘selection will operate as between societies of different
types, that is, be guided by the properties of their respective orders.’37
It is important to recognise that, for Hayek, culture is ultimately grounded in our biological
endowments – it is thus not, strictly speaking, cultural but bio-cultural evolution that he has in mind.
Hayek contends that man’s instincts were initially made not for the open society but for closed
societies, or, for a life in ‘small roving bands or troops’.38 Genetically inherited instincts, such as
solidarity, altruism as well as an instinctual aggressiveness towards outsiders, served cooperation
within a type of order in which human activity was guided by concrete and commonly perceived
aims, dangers and opportunities.39 These ‘innate natural longings’ for common ends and purposes
enabled the tribal way of life ‘in which the human race and its immediate ancestors evolved during
the few million years while the biological constitution of homo sapiens was being formed’.40 Our
instincts are largely collectivist and enabled human coexistence in the small and closed societies that
man relied upon before he came to develop those rules of conduct that made possible the
34
Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, p. 12.
Ibid., p. 25.
36 Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 1, p. 23.
37 Ibid., p. 44.
38 Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, p. 11.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
35
12
emergence of the open society. According to Hayek, the process through which present civilization
has emerged is that of a ‘gradual replacement of innate responses by learnt rules’.41 But how were
men able to learn in the first place? Hayek answers this question by pointing to what he regards as
the single most important biological endowment of man _ the capacity to learn. For Hayek, this
particular genetic endowment was ‘the last decisive step determined by biological evolution’ which
has enabled other instinctual modes to be partly displaced.42 In other words, the growing capacity
for learning is an innate characteristic which helped to displace other, tribal instincts, such as those
of solidarity and altruism. The capacity to learn, Hayek asserts, is ‘one of the prime benefits
conferred during our long instinctual development’; it is ‘perhaps the most important capacity with
which the human individual is genetically endowed’.43 Through this capacity, the process of cultural
or social evolution was set in motion and the move from the near animal state to civilization became
possible.
In Hayek’s view, civilization, as it has developed during the last ten or twenty thousand years, is a
product of our capacity to learn. This aspect of Hayek’s evolutionary framework is of crucial
importance in the present context, for what it shows is that his defence of liberalism is ultimately
grounded in a biological distinction between two forms of life. What we find in Hayek, then, is a bioontological account of the human condition which features a fundamental conflict between two
biological properties and their respective cultural expressions. For Hayek, human evolution is
explicable on the basis of this distinction or conflict between our collectivist instincts and the tribal
way of life, on the one hand, and our capacity to learn and the liberal way of life, on the other hand.
What is at stake in this conflict, as we shall see below, is nothing less than life itself. It is Hayek’s
contention that the open society has prevailed because of its superior capacity to ensure survival
and increase of population.
What Hayek argues, then, is that the whole framework of legal, moral and economic rules of
conduct, including, above all, the institution of private property, has been conferred upon man by
cultural evolution through natural selection. According to Hayek, the open society is the condition
of possibility of the life and wealth of the vast majority of the human population. There is but one
way of life or one culture – the culture of capitalism – that provides the institutional properties
necessary for the biological and economic sustainability of the global population. This also implies
that any departure from the economic, legal and moral rules and institutions associated with this
41
Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, p. 16.
Ibid.
43 Ibid., p. 26.
42
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culture must represent a biopolitical threat – that is, a threat to the life of the global population.
What we find beneath the deceptively smooth surface of order that Hayek calls the open society is a
fundamental struggle between two biocultural forms of life.
The relationship of struggle/war between adaptive life and tribal life that emerges from Hayek’s
evolutionary ontology is inscribed into the order of the open society. It is our contention that this
aspect of Hayek’s theory is important insofar as it undermines, or at least strongly qualifies, the
emancipatory pretensions of his liberalism. We can only grasp the systematic violence that Hayek’s
political project entails if we focus on his (bio-)political ontology, for it is here that liberal self and
other are defined and positioned. In Hayek, tribalism haunts the interior life of every individual:
there is a constant conflict between our tribal instincts and emotions, on the one hand, and the
norms and conventions of the open society, on the other hand. Hayek stresses the necessity of
restraining those natural instincts that ‘do not fit into the order of the open society’.44 And it is
through ‘discipline’ that these tribal instincts, which are to be understood as ‘animal’ rather than as
‘characteristically human or good instincts’, are to be restrained.45
When Hayek speaks of
‘discipline’, he refers to a set of constraints through which we suppress our dangerous tribal instincts
and emotions, such as the demand for social justice or any other collectivist proposal for social and
political change. Hayekian discipline is a silent war against tribalism which is waged on the terrain of
the individual body and against certain human instincts, desires and emotions, such as solidarity and
altruism. In Hayek, the liberal subject is the product of a successful struggle against its tribal self.
Fitness for the open society depends on the prior domestication of one’s ‘animal instincts’ through
obligations of self-restraint. The form of subjectivity suitable to liberal society – the self-interested,
rational and entrepreneurial individual – is a product of(self-)discipline.
Hayek’s conception of the internal other who undermines the open society from within by allowing
her tribal instincts to find political expression in thought and action. According to Hayek, the greatest
threat to society comes from those who, driven by their savage desires, seek political change in the
form either of a return to older forms of social and political order or the construction of new ones.
Hayek sees great danger in the dissemination and circulation of certain ideas which appeal to our
tribal instincts and generate demand for political change. As part of the internal struggle against
tribalism, the open society must be purged of the ideas which potentially undermine it, especially
theories of repression, alienation and domination. While Hayek does not explicitly advocate
censorship he clearly states that education poses a threat to society if it disseminates ‘false’ political
44
45
Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 3, p. 160.
Ibid.
14
knowledge. Liberal principles, Hayek explains, can be consistently applied only to those who obey
liberal principles.46 He fails to discuss in detail the methods and practices through which the liberty
of disobedient subjects might be restricted. Our interpretation of Hayek emphasizes the structural
and systematic violence engendered by the order he envisioned. By focusing on this aspect of Hayek,
this paper puts into question Hayek’s emancipatory claims.
Darwin and the difference of life
Hayek thus undermines the emancipatory potential of his vision of the open society by drawing a
clear line between forms of life to be fostered and forms of life considered a threat to the open
society. The similarities between Hayek and Kant’s bio-politics are striking in this context. Hayek, like
Kant before him, produces an onto-politics of freedom based on security – freedom is produced
through and operates on the basis of an economy of inclusion and exclusion, which naturalises and
universalises liberal order. Both Hayek and Kant develop a bio-politics, which captures both politics
and life in terms of self-organisation. Despite Hayek’s adoption of complexity the open society
assumes the same operative principle as Kant’s vision of political life: the capacity to adapt to liberal
society constitutes the basis of an economy of inclusion and exclusion.
This section enages Darwin to develop a politics of complexity that challenges the bio-political
foreclosure of which Hayek’s notion of the open society is ultimately productive. It thereby draws
upon and produces a different perspective of evolutionary thought. By prioritising difference rather
than reproduction, this section seeks to develop a perspective that challenges the depoliticisation
inherent in and the war waged at the heart of Hayek's open society.
It is interesting to note that Darwin himself acknowledges a form of complexity in the natural world:
…in several parts of the world, insects determine the existence of cattle. Perhaps Paraguay
offers the most curious instance for this; for here neither cattle nor horses nor dogs have
ever run wild, though they swarm southward and northward in a feral state;…this is caused
by the greater number in Paraguay of a certain fly, which lays its eggs in the navels of these
animals when first born. The increase of these flies…must be habitually checked by some
means, probably birds. Hence, if certain insectivorous birds (whose numbers are probably
regulated by hawks or beasts of prey) were to increase in Paraguay, the flies would
46
Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 3, p. 56.
15
decrease – then cattle and horses would become feral, and this would certainly greatly
alter…the vegetation: this again would largely affect the insects; and this…the insectivorous
birds, and so onwards in ever-increasing circles of complexity.47
Moreover, Darwin’s theory of evolution of species via natural selection introduces into the analysis
of the development of life over time the aspects of struggle, excess and contingency, in distinction to
Kant and Lamarck’s accounts of nature, in which harmony and teleology are firmly linked. The
difference between the latter two lies in the complete exclusion of crisis and struggle in the relation
between organism and environment by Lamarck, whereas Kant accords antagonism and war a
productive capacity in nature’s progression towards fulfilment, that is to say harmony.
Thus, whereas Lamarck and Kant conceive of the order and development of nature teleologically
according to the principle of harmony, Darwin, after lenghty and thorough study and observation of
plants and animals, discovers that species evolve gradually over time in a struggle for survival.
Rejecting both harmony and teleology, Darwin instead posits the contingency of nature and the
primacy of struggle. No preconceived plan, purpose or inevitability can be drawn upon to explain
variation. Darwin does believe in the overall harmony of the system, nevertheless, natural selection
– its regulatory element – operates through contingency and struggle as well as excess and
destruction. Hence contingency is furthermore opposes to Lamarck’s belief in the usefulness of
variations, which appears to have been adopted by Hayek.
Darwin stresses the ineffectiveness and wastefulness of nature, e.g. although millions of germ cells
are produced only the exceptional one can play its role.48 Or in the case of bees:
[w]e need not marvel at the sting of the bee causing the bee’s own death; at dron
es being produced in such vast numbers for one single act, with the great majority
slaughtered by their sterile sisters; at the astonishing waste of pollen by our fir-trees; at
the instinctive hatred of the queen bee for her own fertile daughters; at ichneumonidae
feeding with live bodies of caterpillars; and at other such cases.49
Individual cases of destruction and/or excess are of little concern for Darwin who, in a fundamental
shift in biological thinking, focuses attention on populations rather than individual organisms. The
population becomes in fact the mediating element through which the milieu acts on the organism.
47
Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 58.
Jacob, The Logic of Life, pp. 167 &175; Grosz, Nick of Time, pp. 49 & 90.
49 Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 347.
48
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As Foucault puts it: ‘the medium between the milieu and the organism, with all the specific effects of
population: mutations, eliminations, and so forth.’50 Contra Lamarck, for whom the environment
acts directly on the organism, Darwin argues that only on occasion does the milieu cause variations
in species; in general its effects are limited to favouring the reproduction of some species at the
expense of others.51 In Darwin’s theory of evolution the milieu influences the organism only via the
mediating elements of the population and reproduction.
Key to standard readings of Darwin’s thought is the notion of natural selection as a process of
filiative reproduction, productive of change qua evolution. Whereas these accounts focus on filiation
and struggle – the survival of the fittest –, this article follows Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari by
prioritising the element of evolution in terms of becoming. Deleuze and Guattari’s encounter with
Darwin in A Thousand Plateaus centres on the significance of the role accorded to contingency and
the population without discussing natural selection as such. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari credit
Darwin with effecting two key changes which imply a movement in the direction of a science of
multiplicities and away from filiative models: first, the substitution of populations for types and,
secondly, the substitution of rates of differential relations for degrees. Whereas in the natural
history tradition types of forms function as the ordering element in the study of nature, with Darwin
these come to be conceptualised increasingly in terms of populations, packs, colonies, collectivities
or multiplicities. In short, the population will be understood as a multiplicity. The second change for
which Deleuze and Guattari credit Darwin is the understanding of degrees of development in terms
of speeds, rates, coefficients and differential relations.52
According to Deleuze and Guattari, Darwin’s double move implies that forms do not pre-exist the
population but are its statistical result:
The more a population assumes divergent forms, the more its multiplicity divides into
multiplicities of different nature, the more its elements form distinct compounds or matters
– the more efficiently it distributes itself in the milieu, or divides up the milieu.53
‘Species are the result of geographic and ecological processes and not the stages of them.’54 The
second implication is that
50
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 78.
Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, p. 105; Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 102; Jacob, Logic of Life, p. 158.
52 Ibid., pp. 53-54. See also Darwin, Origin of Species, pp. 43ff. For another conceptualisation of Darwin as thinker of
difference, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s reading, see: Grosz, The Nick of Time, especially chapters I-III.
53 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 53-54
51
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the degrees are not degrees of pre-existent development or perfection but are instead
global and relative equilibriums: they enter into play as a function of the advantage they
give particular elements, then a particular multiplicity in the milieu, and as a function of a
particular variation in the milieu.55
Hence Deleuze and Guattari credit Darwin with a reversal that is key to their philosophical thought:
movements and relations precede and are productive of forms and degrees as well as of populations
and not the other way around. This reversal functions to set up an opposition between natural
philosophy and Darwinian biology; and a reversal characteristic also of the movement from
Newtonian science to complexity theory.56
Deleuze and Guattari’s ascription of a theory of multiplicities to Darwin starkly diverges from the
prevailing teleological reading of Darwinian evolution. Standard, neo-Darwinian interpretations
explain evolution in terms of a means-end progression towards perfection for in the struggle for
survival only those fittest or best adapted will survive. The idea that life develops instrumentally
towards a certain end implies a future projection. As Grosz explains, however, Darwin’s endeavour
is to record how life may have evolved historically. His theory is retrospective and does not make
future predictions because life cannot be predicted.57 The Origin of Species develops an idea of
natural selection that is non-teleological; life is contingent and evolves through difference. Albeit on
the basis of reproduction, the idea of evolution as the production of difference is asserted by Darwin
himself. The reproduction of organisms, he explains, ensures the stability of the species and the
individual organism in future generations. Reproduction constitutes the link between individual and
species life as well as between its preservation and adaptation. This is because transformation and
error are intrinsic to the process of reproduction and hence to the preservation of the species.
Darwin demonstrates that evolution does not and cannot occur without producing difference.
Although emphasising the slowness of the process of selection, there is, according to Darwin, no
limit to the change it may produce:
54
Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, p. 165.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 54.
56 Dillon and Reid, Liberal Way of War, p. 74.
57 Grosz, Nick of Time, pp. 8-9.
55
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I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions
of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature’s power of selection.58
Deleuze and Guattari’s intervention bends the notion of reproduction by centralising the idea that
deterritorialisation precedes territory – e.g. the species is a result, an outcome rather than a starting
point.59 Secondly, they introduce a theory of becoming, a rhizomatics which moves beyond filiative
reproduction altogether. ‘The Universe does not function by filiation,’ they write.60 Rather than
dependent on lines of filiative descent, life is transformed and (dis)ordered more productively and
creatively through different processes of relationality that involve heterogeneous elements, i.e.
‘unnatural participations’ and ‘side-communications’. Life’s evolution – or ‘involution’ – is complex,
non-linear and unpredictable.
Deleuze and Guattari thus highlight the monstrous nature of life’s becoming. Darwin himself
suggests that monstrosity is inherent to the process of evolution when he remarks that it is ‘an
almost universal law of nature that the higher organic beings require an occasional cross with
another individual.’61 Life mutates and transforms, is in continuous movement and produces
difference. Whereas, for Darwin, this process remains subject to the pressures of selection, Deleuze
and Guattari’s radical creativity consists in its release from notions of selection, heredity and
filiation. Where standard Darwinian interpretations focus on the replication of the species on
account of the invariant structure of DNA, Deleuze and Guattari point out that reproduction is
dependent on primary processes of deterritorialisation and decoding.62 Indissolubly entangled with
movements of productive disordering, evolution is not the straightforward or linear reproduction of
the species as such. Rather than the translation of code, that is the passage of one pre-established
form into another, code is inseparable from intrinsic movements of decoding. ‘There is no genetics
without “genetic drift.”’63 Every code, they write, has a margin of decoding due to supplements and
surplus values, which enable ‘side-communication’. Through viruses fragments of code may, for
58
Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 84.
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze credits Darwin with ‘inaugurating the thought of individual difference.’ According
to Deleuze, the ‘leitmotiv’ of The Origin of Species is that ‘we do not know what individual difference is capable of!’ See:
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 310.
60 Deleuze and Guattari, ATP, p. 267.
61 Darwin, Charles, The Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilized by Insects. Elibron Classics, 2005, p. 1.
62 It is to be noted that Deleuze and Guattari’s thought is also influenced by Weismannian neo-Darwinism, e.g. with respect
to population thinking and the focus on the vitality of non-organic life – i.e. the demoting of the organism –, however, they
refute the idea of evolution as the simple reproduction of DNA, focusing instead on the primacy of decoding and nonfiliative becoming. See: Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, pp. 4-6, 8 & 145.
63 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 59. See also: Ansell Pearson, ‘Viroid Life’, p. 189.
59
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instance, be transmitted from the cells of one species to another.64 Rather than simply being
transmitted genetically, from generation to generation, code is subject to primary processes of deand trans-coding, that is to say side-communications and monstrous couplings as movements of
transformation beyond filiative reproduction.
The rhizomatics into which Deleuze and Guattari transform Darwin’s theory of evolution is a far cry
from standard Darwinian theory with its ‘perfectionist and progressive values’65. Understood as
becoming involution is not the reproduction of pre-established forms of life; it is characterised by
processes of decoding, genetic drift, monstrous couplings, etc. Life is characterised by its
perturbation more than by its preservation; and by becoming more than by reproduction. One of the
implications of the way in which Deleuze and Guattari make this move is that chance, error and
resistance become not merely immanent to life processes; their force is anterior. Only via
perturbations such as genetic drift and transversal modes of communication does life become and
do forms of life emerge.
It will be noted that Foucault underlines the fundamentality of error, too. At life’s most basic level,
Foucault argues following Canguilhem, ‘the play of code and decoding leaves room for chance,
which, before being disease, deficit or monstrosity, is something like perturbation in the information
system, something like a “mistake”.’66 As Foucault defines it, ‘[i]n the extreme, life is what is capable
of error.’67 Most characteristic of life are chance, contingency and difference. That is to say that life
is irreducible and undecidable and cannot be laid out in advance. Thus, if Deleuze and Guattari’s
reading of Darwin uncovers the centrality and immanence of perturbation, chance and disorder(ing)
– and hence the superfluity and excess characteristic of life – Kant and Hayek seek to render invisible
and neutralise these aspect through an image political life that operates via (the reproduction of)
circulation. In the latter image, life’s political requirements and capacities are bound up with
governance and the nexus security-freedom.
The notion of excess does, however, not merely feature in an involutionary reading of Darwin’s
evolutionary thought. Darwin himself broaches the importance of excess in terms of encounters and
forms of interaction that cannot be rationalised according to the survival of the fittest. In addition to
natural selection, Darwin introduces the notion of sexual selection, which depends ‘not on a struggle
64
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 59.
Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, p. 151.
66 Foucault, Michel, ‘Introduction’ in Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, Carolyn R. Fawcett (transl.).
New York: Zone Books, 1989, pp. 22-23.
67 Ibid., p. 22.
65
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for existence, but on a struggle between the males for possession of the females; the result is not
death to the unsuccessful competitor but few or no offspring.’68 Grosz suggests that sexual selection
is characterised merely by courtship and pleasure as opposed to those qualities that facilitate
survival. Yet, Darwin himself describes sexual selection in terms of an advantage of males in terms of
‘their weapons, means of defence or charms’.69 In most species, he remarks, struggle constitutes a
primary feature of sexual selection. Grosz’s analysis is nevertheless valuable insofar as it elucidates
that, according to Darwin, there is something more to (the reproduction of) life than a struggle for
survival pure and simple: the process of selection features in addition a play of sexual taste, appeal
and pleasure.70 As Darwin himself notes in relation to birds, in which the contest is generally more
peaceful,
…there is the severest rivalry between the males of many species to attract by singing the
females. The rock-thrush of Guiana, birds of Paradise, and some others, congregate; and
successive males display their gorgeous plumage and perform strange antics before the
females, which, standing by as spectators, at last choose the most attractive partner.71
Reproduction contains a non-instrumental aspect, in which transformations are not necessarily
useful or beneficial, yet always creative of a difference that cannot be predicted in advance – i.e.
becoming.
Conclusion
How does a conception of evolution qua difference and complexity help us move beyond the
systematic violence that takes place beneath the smooth surface of Kant and Hayek’s visions of
society? This ‘silent war’72 undermines the emancipatory pretensions of, and depoliticises, their
political projects. It is, we argue, by embracing rather than denouncing as dangerous and
domesticating the difference that lies at the basis of their visions biological and political life that
conceptualising resistance to biopower becomes possible.
Present in all three accounts – in Kant, Hayek and Darwin – is an economy of inclusion and exclusion,
which functions as an economy of life or, perhaps, an economy of life and death. For Kant, both life
68
Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 68.
Ibid., p. 70.
70 Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art, p. 33.
71 Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 69.
72 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 16.
69
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and politics are to be understood on the basis of (self-)organisation and circulation. This
conceptualisation produces a distinction between life that circulates on the basis of its understood
nature and rogue or rebellious forces endangering liberal society. The erection of a boundary
between relations and forms of life understood to be productive, and to be fostered, and those that
must be eradicated is bluntly articulated by Kant, who asserts in ‘Perpetual Peace’ that ‘[t]he saying
let justice reign even if all the rogues in the world must perish is true; it is a sound principle of
right.’73 Moreover, the prohibition of resistance is absolute:
all the incitements of the subjects to violent expressions of discontent, all defiance which
breaks out into rebellion, is the greatest and most punishable crime in the commonwealth,
for it destroys its very foundations. This prohibition is absolute.74
Hayek, too, produces an onto-politics of freedom based on security. That is to say, a notion of
freedom produced through and operating on the basis of an economy of inclusion and exclusion –
tribal life versus adaptive life – which naturalises and universalises liberal order. Despite Hayek’s
adoption of complexity the open society assumes the same operative principle as Kant’s vision of
political life, according to which only a specific form of life is considered worthy.
The economy of life characteristic of standard neo-Darwinism renders this mechanism more explicit:
adapt or die. This paper has, however, provided a different reading of Darwin in which movement
and relations gain primacy over instituted forms. Sexual selection, which Darwin elaborates in
addition to natural selection, goes beyond instrumentality and the prioritisation of the struggle of
life and death in which the best adapted triumph. Instead, sexual selection, as a play of sexual
appeal and pleasure, operates on the basis of excess and becoming. Secondly, engaging Darwin in
terms of becoming beyond filiative reproduction, life is characterised by its perturbation more than
by its preservation for chance, error and resistance are both immanent and anterior to forms of
(self-)organisation. Hence it is our suggestion that a starting point for the repoliticisation of life is a
different approach to the question of what political life is and may become, an approach that starts
with and embraces forces of difference and becoming rather centralising the self-interested
individual and neutralising the forces of war and resistance at the heart of a so-called open society.
73
74
Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 123.
Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, p. 81. See also: Kant, ‘Metaphysics of Morals’, pp. 143 & 162.
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