10.13135/2036-542X/8065
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2036-542X
8065
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Travis Holloway
Trópos
A Strategy for a Democratic Future: Constituent or Destituent Power?
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos
12
Monografica
2019-12-01
2023-08-16
2019-12-01
2023-08-16
55-64
1
Travis Holloway
2019/12/01
10.13135/2036-542X/8065
55
Department of Philosophy, SUNY Farmingdale, Farmingdale, NY, USA
2036-542X
1
64
A Strategy for a Democratic Future: Constituent or Destituent Power?
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos/article/download/8065/6780
12
                                                                                    trópos – ISBN 978-88-255-2800-8
                                                             DOI 10.4399/97888255280086 – pag. 55-64 (dicembre 2019)




                               A Strategy for a Democratic Future:
                                 Constituent or Destituent Power?
                                                                                T H*




    Abstract
    This essay presents two strategies for a more democratic future. A debate is under-
    way in continental philosophy between two different types of democratic activity
    or strategy. The first form of democratic activity, constituent power, is widely known
    for its attempts to confront existing government institutions and transform them
    in a variety of ways. A second form of political activity, however, labeled destituent
    power, proposes abandoning the constituent project of reforming government
    institutions in order to explore another form of politics entirely. The concept of
    destituent power arises in part out of a concern that it is increasingly difficult to
    reform governments through protest and assembly and other means, particularly
    in the wake of several military–style defeats of peaceful demonstrations and occu-
    pations around the world. Instead of focusing on reforming these institutions by
    contesting them, destituent power destitutes them by withdrawing from them and
    dispelling the notion that they represent us. Finally, destituent power specifically
    targets a neoliberal way of life and asks how we might live otherwise.
    Keywords: Destituent Power; Constituent Power; Democracy; Agamben; Politics; Philoso-
    phy.

   In the s, neoliberal policies and ideas began to transform elected
governments and daily life around the world. This neoliberal transforma-
tion became the subject of a  lecture course by Michel Foucault and
amounted to what David Harvey called a “revolutionary turning–point in
the world’s social and economic history.” Today we are living in another
potentially historic moment of transition as emerging populisms on both
the left and the right resist the neoliberal policies of the last several decades
     ∗
        Department of Philosophy, SUNY Farmingdale, Farmingdale, NY, USA. hollowtw@farming
dale.edu.
     . This essay expands a section of a larger article on democracy and neoliberalism that appeared
in  in Philosophy Today. The section was extended in light of more recent events and scholarship.
For further reference, see Travis Holloway, “Neoliberalism and the Future of Democracy,” Philosophy
Today ,  (Summer ): –. I would like to thank Peg Birmingham and Philosophy Today
for allowing a portion of the original essay to be expanded and reprinted, as well as Silvia Benso,
Antonio Calcagno, and Nino Chiurazzi for including my work in this issue.
     . David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, ), .


                                                                                                                
      Travis Holloway


and propose very different alternatives to them. This historic moment, ar-
gues Chantal Mouffe in her  book on new populisms, can be accurately
described as “the expression of [democratic and authoritarian] resistances
against the post–democratic condition brought about by thirty years of
neoliberal hegemony,” a hegemony which “has now entered into crisis.”
What remains to be seen is whether a form of resistance to neoliberalism
might emerge that would not be authoritarian or identitarian in nature, but
democratic both in its political policies and in its way of life. This essay
presents two possible strategies for a more democratic future.
    Since at least , a debate has been underway in continental philosophy
between two different types of democratic power or strategy that have
roots in Italian philosophy. The first kind of democratic activity involves
what has traditionally been called constituent power, or a strategy that places
demands upon the state or seeks a change in the policies of the government
at hand through demonstrations in public space. Although many continental
philosophers have developed theories of constituent power throughout the
twentieth century, constituent power has often been associated with the
work of Antonio Negri, who argued in his  book Insurgencies: Constituent
Power and the Modern State that “to speak of constituent power is to speak of
democracy.”
    A second form of power or democratic strategy has emerged in recent
years, however, that describes itself in opposition to constituent forms of
power. This approach, labeled destituent power, was put forward in a public
lecture by Giorgio Agamben in , and by The Invisible Committee in
their recent work To Our Friends (); it also marks a turn in Agamben’s
philosophical work. At the basis of this concept lies a concern that efforts
to reform current governments through constituent power will only end
up strengthening antidemocratic institutions in the end, institutions which
proponents believe can no longer be trusted to be representative of actual
workers, deteriorating ecosystems, and so on. As an alternative strategy,
Agamben and The Invisible Committee have argued for a form of power
that they describe not as something “in opposition to” a state in need of
reform, but as something outside of, detached from, or withdrawn from the
state.
    As it is well known, the first form of democratic power or strategy, con-
stituent power, operates most often through political demonstration against or
in opposition to the state. We can find various iterations of it in theoretical
works by Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, or Hannah Arendt, who once

      . Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (New York: Verso, ), .
      . Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Boscagli (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, ), .
                                                                A Strategy for a Democratic Future               


described a type of power found in the “multitude, appearing [. . . ] in broad
daylight” confronting the powers at hand. The defining characteristic of con-
stituent power, explains Étienne Balibar, is that constituent demonstrations
or insurrections always take place within a dialectic — “the dialectic of ‘con-
stituent power’ and ‘constituted power,’ of insurrection and reconstitution.”
The task of constituent power is therefore to “openly confront the lack of
democracy in existing institutions and transform them,” and the “active citi-
zen is the agent of this transformation”. Thus, for philosophers like Jacques
Rancière, the goal of protests is to “counteract” or “[challenge] government’s
claims”; they are “contestations,” writes Judith Butler; they introduce what
Pierre Rosanvallon calls “counter–democracy” in order to counter the rep-
resentative system at hand in the hopes of reforming it. This strategy might
involve, for example, striking to overturn a specific law or policy, attempting
to reform a political party, or forming a new political party.
    The role of destituent power, by contrast, as Agamben and The Invisi-
ble Committee have defined it, is not to challenge and reconstitute power,
but to destitute it by withdrawing from it and practicing politics elsewhere.
According to Agamben, this concept grew out of a concern that it is in-
creasingly difficult and ineffective to criticize governments through public
assembly and peaceful protest. It is worth noting that he outlines this con-
cept in  in the wake of the defeat of several occupations and participatory
democratic movements around the world, and that it initially emerges in
public lectures to activists in Athens and central France. Agamben suggests
that it is no longer simply the case that the halls of our congresses are
impenetrable and “postdemocratic” because they, the experts, always know
better. Or that there is a real sense that little will change if another candidate
or party is elected. It is that the streets and the squares of our democracies
are militarized zones that make any meaningful democratic action nearly
impossible.
    For a majority of our populations, democratic revolt is inconceivable.
Most cannot imagine how such a thing could ever begin to take place, and
those who have dared to try have found themselves assailed by weapons

      . Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, ), .
      . Étienne Balibar, Citizenship, trans. Thomas Scott–Railton (Cambridge: Polity, ), . See also
Kropotkin, Freedom of the press, criticism of the laws, freedom of meeting and association — all were extorted by
force, by agitations that threatened to become rebellions. It was by establishing trade unions and practicing strike
action despite the edits of Parliament and the hangings of , and by wrecking the factories hardly fifty years
ago, that the English workers won the right to associate and to strike, Peter Kropotkin, from “Representative
Government,” in Words of a Rebel, trans. George Woodcock (Montréal: Black Rose Books, ), –.
      . Balibar, Citizenship, .
      . Jaques Rancière, The Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Concoran (London: Verso Press, ), ;
Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ),
.
      Travis Holloway


of war. Agamben remarks that we are no longer living in a functioning,
democratic society, but a “police state” in which the “police officer [. . . ] acts
so as to speak as a sovereign.” The primary agent in between taxpayers and
their representatives — the police — prohibits peaceful demonstrations and
assemblies, denies protest permits or reroutes them, utilizes military grade
equipment, commits acts of violence against demonstrators, protects fraud-
ulent banks and repossesses homes on their behalf, and surveils citizens.
The role of this modern “police” force, as Jacques Rancière put it elsewhere,
is to hide dissent, to prohibit a meaningful confrontation, to insist, “Move
along! There’s nothing to see here!”
    Agamben focuses his  remarks in Athens on what he says is “perhaps
the most urgent political problem” of “strategy.” For him, this concerns
a departure from the notion of democracy as constituent power and the
consideration of a different strategy: the withdrawal or absence of the dēmos,
or ademy, or what he comes to call destituent power. As Agamben outlines
in his public lecture:

     Starting with French revolution, the political tradition of modernity has conceived
     of radical changes in the form of a revolutionary process that acts as the pouvoir
     constituant, the “constituent power” of a new institutional order. I think that we
     have to abandon this paradigm and try to think something as a puissance destituante,
     a “purely destituent power,” that cannot be captured in the spiral of security.

   The concept of destituent power immediately appears in a  work
by the anonymous, collective group The Invisible Committee, known for
their  work The Coming Insurrection. In the Committee’s  work
To Our Friends, they reverse their earlier position on constituent power in
The Coming Insurrection, writing: “There’s no such thing as a democratic
insurrection.” “Misdirections of this kind encourage us to reconceive the
idea of revolution as pure destitution instead,” which means “leaving the
paradigm of government” behind. The title of the second chapter of To Our
Friends underscores this idea further: “They Want to Oblige Us to Govern.
We Won’t Yield to That Pressure.”
   To describe the idea of destituent power in the simplest terms, as one

     . Giorgio Agamben, “For a Theory of Destituent Power” (public lecture organized by the
Nicos Poulantzas Institute and SYRIZA Youth, Athens, Greece, november , ), accessible online
at http://www.chronosmag.eu.
    . Jaques Rancière, Ten Theses on Politics, in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steve
Concoran, New York: Continuum, , .
    . Agamben, “For a Theory of Destituent Power.”
    . The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, trans. Robert Hurley (South Pasadena, CA: Semio-
text(e), ), .
    . The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, , .
                                                          A Strategy for a Democratic Future           


person did at a recent  G meeting in Italy, “we think the only solution
is not to expect any more from these governments.” Or as Agamben
puts it in his lecture, if our “revolutions and insurrections correspond to
constituent power” then «[a] power that was only just overthrown [. . . ]
will rise again in another form, in the incessant, inevitable dialectic be-
tween constituent power and constituted power.” In destituent power,
by contrast, constituted power “becomes undone, is rendered inoperative,
liberated and suspended from its ‘economy’” . What is needed for this,
according to Agamben, is the absence or withdrawal of a dēmos rather than
their insurrection; this, he says, “allows us to depose the fiction of a people
that it pretends to represent.” This sort of destitution could be thought of
as a “coming politics,” says Agamben, echoing Derrida’s democracy à venir
or Jean–Luc Nancy’s democracy survenir.
    What is most important about destituent power for Agamben and The
Invisible Committee, however, goes beyond politics and government. For
them, destituent power permits the embodied, philosophical exploration of
alternative forms of life with others. Both are acutely aware of Foucault’s
insight into the neoliberal mutation of modern government, namely, that
neoliberalism, as an extension and transformation of liberalism, ultimately
functions through a way of life, and that our populations are managed
by this way of life. Neoliberal policies oppose all forms of collectivization
and socialization in contrast to the views of philosophers from Aristotle
to Hannah Arendt, who once claimed that being deprived of meaningful
political community would amount to being “deprived of things essential
to a truly human life.” In place of community, neoliberals prescribe a way
of life that is centered around the axioms of competition, individualism, and
self–entrepreneurship. Under neoliberalism, then, our desire for commu-
nity is occluded by the fantasy of amassing our own self–capital. Taking a
phrase directly from Foucault, The Invisible Committee remarks that this
way of life has managed to make us all “entrepreneurs of the self.”
    What Agamben and The Invisible Committee hope for, through with-
drawal rather than insurrection, is for us to abandon neoliberal life for a
    . Marco Rizzo, Interview on Democracy Now, April , , accessed April , , https://
www.democracynow.org.
    . Giorgio Agamben, “What is a Destituent Power?,” trans. Stephanie Wakefield, Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space  (): .
    . Agamben, “What is Destituent Power,”, .
    . Agamben, “What is Destituent Power,”, .
    . Agamben, “What is Destituent Power,” .
    . Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, ),
–, . See Aristotle, Pol., ., .; Eth. Nic. .–.
   . Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, ed. Michel Senellart,
trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), .
         Travis Holloway


moment and consider a different form of life. “What is at stake [in destitu-
tion] is living itself,” writes Agamben; destitution “coincides completely
and constitutively with . . . living a life.” Because life under neoliberalism
entails “the obligation to maximize one’s one market value as the ultimate
aim in life,” adds Judith Butler in a recent book on public assembly, new
political movements must explore a life worth living. Agamben writes
in an earlier essay, “The Friend,” that such a life must be shared among
friends, and that what must be shared among friends is the bare fact that
we are alive, that we exist. In To Our Friends, The Invisible Committee
elaborates upon this idea further by suggesting that recent democratic
movements ought to be interpreted precisely in this way — as not primar-
ily attempting to reform their current governments through constituent
power, but as freely exploring another form of life with others. They
write:

     The true content of Occupy Wall Street was not the demand [. . . ] for better wages,
     decent housing, or a more generous social security, but disgust with the life we’re
     forced to live. Disgust with a life in which we’re all alone, alone facing the necessity
     for each one to make a living, house oneself, feed oneself, realize one’s potential,
     and attend to one’s health, by oneself. [. . . ] the life in common that was attempted in
     Zuccotti Park, in tents, in the cold, in the rain, surrounded by police in the dreariest
     of Manhattan’s squares was definitely not a full rollout of the vita nova — it was just
     the point where the sadness of metropolitan existence began to be flagrant. At last
     it was possible to grasp our shared condition together, our equal reduction to the
     status of entrepreneurs of the self.

    “The stake in all neoliberal analysis,” Foucault summarized, is “a homo
oeconomicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital,
being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of his
earnings.” Instead of being “by nature a political animal,” one is taught
to become, eidetically, a self–entrepreneur who builds their own capital
by garnering likes on social media, for instance, or amassing a substantial
following on Twitter, or competing on a reality TV show that reconstructs
a life in which one’s friends are, in fact, competitors. Of course, in the end,
the human being has no polis to enter — only the shell of a state that is
“under the supervision of the market.”
    By contrast, Agamben likens destituent power to a feast or holiday (la festa),

     .   Agamben, “What is a Destituent Power?,” , .
     .   Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, .
     .   The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, .
     .   Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, .
     .   Aristotle, Pol., ., .; Eth. Nic., . –; Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, .
     .   Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, .
                                                       A Strategy for a Democratic Future        


“which, on the model of the Hebrew Shabbat, has been conceived essentially
as a temporary suspension of productive activity, of melacha.” The holiday or
festa, of course, is not only marked by the pause of commerce and exchange; it
is defined by friendship and community, or that which is greater than oneself.
There is something about the holiday, as Pier Paolo Pasolini once wrote in his
poem Chiusa la festa (“The Holiday Over”), which allows us to experience life
itself; it allows us, in Pasolini’s words, to reach the limit of the “flimsy crust of
our world” and expose “the naked universe.”
    Agamben and The Invisible Committee are not the first, of course, to ar-
gue for this kind of strategy. It could be said that considerations of destituent
power are found in  in the late two chapters on the state in Deleuze and
Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, in Deleuze’s unpublished – lecture
course on the state, and in debates on alternative political communities
throughout the s and early s, such as Jean–Luc Nancy’s The Inoper-
ative Community (). One might add to this list Clastres’s Society Against
the State (), Spivak’s In Other Worlds (), or Derrida’s Specters of Marx
() and Politics of Friendship () as works that explore destituent power.
We could also add texts like Jean–Luc Nancy’s The Possibility of a World ()
or What’s These Worlds Coming To? (), which consider the creation or
“struction” of alternative political communities. In his recent work, En quel
temps vivons–nous? (), Jacques Rancière mentions Paolo Virno’s political
theory of “exodus” as a way of thinking about destituent power.
    In addition to these philosophical works, one of the earliest examples of
this kind of destituent withdrawal as a response to neoliberal government
in particular can be found in the mostly rural, agrarian, indigenous and non–
indigenous community in Chiapas, Mexico, which withdrew from Mexico,
organized itself horizontally, and held the “First International Encuentro for
Humanity and against Neoliberalism.” After Paul Volcker’s neoliberal strategy
or the “Volcker Shock” drove Mexico into default from  to , Mexico
could no longer pay back its debt due to the forced rise in interest rates on
Wall Street–backed loans to the Mexican government. As a result, the Mexican
government was forced to implement austerity and privatization programs

   . Agamben, “What is a destituent power?,” .
   . Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roman Poems, trans. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Francesca Valente (San
Francisco: City Lights, ), –.
   . See, for example, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), : “The no-
mads invented a war machine in opposition to the State apparatus. History has never comprehended
nomadism, the book has never comprehended the outside. [. . . ] the war machine’s relation to an
outside is not another ‘model’; it is an assemblage that makes thought itself nomadic.” Deleuze and
Guattari later remark at length on the difference between the State apparatus and the war machine,
which is “anonymous, collective, or third person” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, ).
   . Jaques Rancière, En quel temps vivons–nous? (Paris: La fabrique éditions, ), .
     Travis Holloway


or “debt restructuring” schemes that transformed it into a neoliberal state.
What made matters especially difficult in the s for Mexican workers and
farmers was compounded by the passage of the North American Free Trade
Agreement, when crops like corn, for instance, were no longer worth much in
Mexico. The Zapatistas were formed in the midst of the Mexican debt crisis in
, went public on the same day as the passage of NAFTA in , and held
the “First International Encuentro for Humanity and against Neoliberalism”
in . Their deliberate strategy of withdrawal from the neoliberal Mexican
government and the formation of an alternative, democratic community is
suggestive of a kind of destituent power in the wake of neoliberal government.
However, recent movements in public squares or even destituent approaches
to money and finance show us that the Zapatista community is far from being
the only model of destituent power.


Conclusion

The basic question of this essay is this: In our attempt to find and employ a cur-
rent strategy for a democratic future, should we theorize and organize around
a constituent or destituent form of power? Should we seek to reform govern-
ment through constituent demonstrations and activities or explore destituent
alternatives in spaces where political life is still possible? Should we mobilize
around popular protests and elections, or withdraw and dissolve the state’s
legitimacy through lack — namely, the lack of a people who is said to constitute
and legitimize it? In withdrawing and assembling elsewhere, could a number
of people perhaps begin to imagine something beyond a form of life defined
by competition, self–entrepreneurship, and isolation? Could they conceive of
a form of politics that is not prescribed by “the market” or distant political
representatives? Could another world, even in this limited sense, be possible?
    As we have seen in this essay, advocates of destituent power describe
themselves in opposition to constituent power. But perhaps destituent
power and constituent power are not as mutually exclusive as they suggest.
As Jacques Rancière suggested in an interview in , voting to avoid the
worst “is the kind of dilemma you can deal with in five minutes.” Likewise,
in their  book Assembly, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri seek to
combine recent destituent movements with constituent power, writing: “To
this destituent endeavor needs to be added a constituent project” (elsewhere,
Roberto Esposito has proposed adding an “instituent” power, or the power

   . Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, .
   . Jaques Rancière and Éric Aeschimann, “Mais pourquoi se disent–ils tous ‘anti–système?’
Entretien avec Jacques Rancière,” Interview published in L’Obs, March , .
                                                        A Strategy for a Democratic Future         


of institutions). But while these two forms of democratic activity may not
necessarily be mutually exclusive, it is at least important to recognize why
proponents of destituent power maintain that their strategy is distinct from
constituent power. Perhaps it is helpful to draw out this problematic in
terms of what destituent power “can” and “cannot” do.
     Destituent power cannot run a campaign that repoliticizes a country and
wins an election, like the recent presidential campaign in Mexico. It cannot
reform parties in the sense that Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders’ supporters
hope to do. It refuses to create new political parties like Syriza in Greece or
Podemos in Spain. It does not protest government in the hope that things will
change. Nor does it propose a general strike with the idea that work will stop
until demands are met or policies change. Destituent power cannot nationalize
a bank or precious resources, for instance. It cannot pass laws that might reform
the prison system or end the corrupt financing of elections. What destitution
power can do, however, and what many recent philosophical reflections have
focused on, has to do with something else, namely the era of homo oeconomicus,
or the financialized and depoliticized subject under neoliberalism.
     Destituent power knows that neoliberalism ultimately functions through
everyday habits of self–entrepreneurship and competition, and that the popu-
lation of the state is managed by this way of life. The renewed philosophical
interest in destituent power therefore attempts to take flight from this way of
life. It asks: Is there a “we” for whom a life of self–entrepreneurship, competi-
tion, and spectatorship could be replaced with a culture of sharing and political
participation? It asks, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari: Would it be possi-
ble to flee the “chess game of the State” through “an anonymous, collective, or
third–person function?.” The work of The Invisible Committee is especially
interesting in this regard. In a neoliberal culture of self–entrepreneurship, they
write anonymous, collective, and third–person texts. Their latest attempt to
withdraw and write to our friends is an invitation to live differently with others.
Despite having once called for protests against the state in an attempt to reform
it, their text, To Our Friends, signals a new plan entirely. It refuses to govern a
failed system and calls for a destituent politics of friendship. The book begins,
tellingly, with the following epigraph: “There is no other world. There’s just
another way to live.”
     Another example of destituent power in action was when people began
sharing free meals together within days of the birth of Occupy Wall Street
in New York. This took place, remarkably, in a setting between Wall Street

    . Hardt and Negri, Assembly, .
    . Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, . In many ways, A Thousand Plateaus is already a
destituent response to Foucault’s lectures on the state.
    . The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, .
       Travis Holloway


and World Trade. Sharing food in this way became revolutionary. Eating
together rather than alone, eating for free and without financial transaction, all
of this became a way of seeing past the form of life into which we have been
conditioned without knowing it. Having a coke with you, as Frank O’Hara
might put it, became as if “in the warm New York  o’clock light we [were]
drifting back and forth / between each other like a tree breathing through its
spectacles // and the portrait show seem[ed] to have no faces in it at all.”
Participants abandoned the neoliberal project of accumulating capital into
their proper names; they shared time and goods as gifts, often anonymously.
    Destituent power allows us not just to imagine that another world is
possible. It offers us an experience of what this world might look like — not
in the easy and distant realm of reason, but as something real, as something
we can taste. It is, ultimately, a shared aisthēsis (synaisthēsis) among friends.
What is shared is the bare fact that we exist, that we are alive. And that the
way we are being forced to live is an aberration that has prevented life itself.
As destituent power explores a life outside of homo oeconomicus, it must be
said that such a life would be distinct from Romantic solitude or the civil
disobedience of Libertarians. Destituent power is not internal, but collective
and exposed. It takes place when we gather for a holiday, participate in a
festival, or pause for a meal with others. At least, the hope is that these
experiences would help us to know a place of well–being and see the
limits of a life of self–entrepreneurship and competition. Recent destituent
movements have had a profound influence on electoral campaigns and
young voters in particular. They have begun what some have called a new
era of protest. In some places, they have made it possible for mainstream
political candidates to speak about economic inequality and class struggle
again. But this was never their intent. Destituent movements no longer
expect any meaningful change from these governments or believe that they
represent them. They are a search for a political future that begins with
“knowing what a desirable form of life would be.” Because what is needed
today, writes The Invisible Committee, is “a different idea of life.”




    . Frank O’Hara, “Having a Coke with You,” in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald
Allen, with an introduction by John Ashbery, Berkeley (University of California Press, ), .
    . See Aristotle’s discussion of friendship as synaisthēsis or shared aesthetics at Aristotle, Eth. Nic.
a–Ib. See Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of this passage in Giorgio Agamben, “The Friend,”
in What is an Apparatus?, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
), –.
    . The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, , .
    . The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, .
